Oh, English. You’re an interesting language, but you’re burdened with some old baggage. Maybe it’s time you changed.
logo for International Pronouns Day
Today is International Pronouns Day (IPD). A day to recognize your acquaintances might choose different pronouns than you expect, and it’s only polite to use the ones they want.
You might meet a stranger who says, “Hi. I’m Jessica and I go by the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘him.’ Since Jessica told you that, it would be impolite if you said to someone else, “I just met Jessica, and she…”
The discussion of pronouns interests me as a writer. As English changes, I’d like to keep up with it.
In general, pronouns serve as a naming shorthand, enabling us to refer to a person repeatedly without stating the person’s name each time. In a traditional written story, when a female character is speaking with a male character, the author need only write ‘she said’ or ‘he said’ and the reader can follow the dialogue with ease.
Although English does not divide all nouns into feminine and masculine genders as some other languages do, present-day English does include gender-specific pronouns such as ‘she,’ ‘her,’ ‘he,’ and ‘him.’ Although many people seem happy with that arrangement, some prefer to be thought of as an individual, not as a member of one or the other gender.
At the moment, the English language hasn’t settled on an agreed set of non-gender-specific pronouns for people. ‘It,’ ‘Its,’ and ‘Itself’ seem too dehumanizing. While many candidate pronouns vie for the honor, that leaves us in a period of flux until winners emerge through widespread use.
In the meantime, you may choose your own preferred pronoun, and—according to the promoters of International Pronouns Day—inform your friends and new acquaintances. They, in turn, should respect your wishes.
Still, I find it difficult to change at my age. I grew up in a time when you couldn’t choose your own pronouns. Language and biology chose them for you. I now have enough problems remembering people’s names, and if all my acquaintances chose different pronouns, I’d go around mis-pronouning them all the time.
In my fiction, I stand a chance of abiding by the IPD guidance. I just finished reading a novel where characters introduced themselves by stating their name and preferred pronouns. For my stories set in the world of today or the near future, I could do the same thing. Depending on how appropriate it might be for a given character, I’ll try it.
In the meantime, I wish you a happy International Pronouns Day. Delighted to meet you. I’m—
Link charts—I know you’ve seen them. Big, poster-size charts with pictures and words, arrows and colored threads connecting things. Complex, but visually stunning. Could you use one to write your novel?
You’ve seen link charts on shows featuring detectives and others with basement conspiracy theorists. You may have seen two of them on a TV ad for CarGurus. Note: I’m neither endorsing nor disparaging CarGurus.
From what I understand, real-life detectives rarely, if ever, use link charts. But TV and movie detectives do, for two simple reasons. Link charts convey, in one picture, that the detective’s done a lot of work, and they show, at a single glance, a lot of relationships between people and things. They make for a great visual in a visual medium.
That second property may prove useful to you. If you’re writing a novel, you’re keeping track of many characters, settings, events, etc. To organize that data, you most likely think like a writer and write it all down—on sticky notes, index cards, notepaper in three-ring binders, computer files, online wikis, etc. You waste considerable time wading through your files to track down something you half-remember writing months ago.
At such times, you might wish you could have it all handy, in one place. A link chart might help. You’ve seen TV sleuths stare at their charts and snap their fingers, and you know they’ve just solved the case. Staring at a big picture of your novel might aid you, too.
Some years ago, I learned some of the data visualization principles espoused by Edward Tufte. He advocates data-rich illustrations that present all the data. Often these get very complex, but backing up from their complexity, a viewer discerns patterns, relationships, and trends. Tufte’s illustrations represent gestalts, greater than the sum of their parts.
I don’t know what Tufte would make of link charts in particular, but a well-made link chart can satisfy Tufte’s principles of visually representing data.
How might you set up a link chart for the novel you’re writing? Here are some ideas:
A plot outline tying the settings to the characters to the events
A motive-means-opportunity chart relating all suspects to a murder, if you’re writing a murder novel
In the CarGurus TV commercial, the woman knows a quicker way for the man to get the car he wants, implying the link charts just wasted his time. However, until someone comes up with a NovelGuru app that writes a novel for you (c’mon, app developers, get on that!), a link chart might prove beneficial.
If you do develop your own link chart, consider hiding it so nobody else sees the thing without you being present to explain it. Someone happening upon your link chart might suspect you’re hunting for Big Foot, correlating UFO sightings, or planning a real-life murder.
Unless, of course, you’d rather have them think you’re doing those things, than writing a novel!
Whatever link chart you make, do not connect any threads between Big Foot, UFOs, or murders to—
If you’d like your fiction to sell well, wouldn’t it be beneficial if readers found your stories easy to read?
Not all writers see it that way. Some authors of the world’s great classic literature made it tough on their readers, but their books still became bestsellers. Obviously, readability alone doesn’t determine great writing.
For the most part, the factors of great writing remain intangible, but you can measure readability. Many word processor software packages calculate the ‘Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease’ score, as well as the ‘Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level,’ both standard measures of readability. The higher the Reading Ease score and the lower the Grade Level, the more readable your story.
Journalist Shane Snow inspired me to think along these lines with this wonderful blogpost. He did a lot of research obtaining Flesch-Kincaid data on many great fiction authors, and graphed it all.
That made me wonder how I measured up. I obtained the data on my ten most recently published stories. Listed from least readable to most readable, here they are:
Story
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
Genre
Year Written
“The Steam Elephant”
69.0
6.8
Alt Hist
2006
“Target Practice”
69.3
6.5
Scifi
1999
“The Unparalleled Attempt to Rescue One Hans Pfaall”
69.8
6.5
Alt Hist
2011
“Reconnaissance Mission”
71.4
6.2
Alt Hist
2019
“Ripper’s Ring”
72.2
6.4
Alt Hist
2015
“Moonset”
74.8
5.3
Horror
2018
“A Clouded Affair”
75.9
5.5
Scifi
2014
“The Cats of Nerio-3”
76.3
5.1
Scifi
2016
“After the Martians”
78.3
5.1
Scifi
2015
“Instability”
79.1
4.8
Alt Hist
2017
Not too many obvious patterns there. My alternate history stories tend toward less readability than my straight science fiction, but not always. To some degree, I’ve improved readability with the passing years, but there’s some scatter in that, too.
When I average the F-K Grade Level of these stories, I get 5.82. According to one of the charts in Shane Snow’s post, that puts me around the readability level of Hunter S. Thompson, and between early J.K. Rowling and Stephen King. Not bad company.
If my stories don’t sell as well as theirs, it only proves that, as I mentioned above, readability alone doesn’t make for great writing.
What if it did? Could you write in a way that maximizes your Flesch-Kincaid readability score? The Wikipedia entry gives the formula. It’s very simple. Just take your average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word, and the rest is math.
To make readers struggle, use long words and long sentences. To make your writing more readable, do the opposite.
To make your stories irresistible and widely sold…ah, that’s the magic formula I’d really like to know. That equation—whatever it is—might contain readability as one factor, but also many others. Ernest Hemingway earned a F-K Grade Level of just over 4, and Michael Crichton earned one a little under 9.
Shane Snow makes the point that a lower F-K Grade Level allows you to reach a larger potential audience for your stories. However, he cites two other factors that help determine whether your writing will gain traction and catch on. I’ll discuss my take on those in a future blogpost.
Although readability alone won’t determine whether your stories sell in the marketplace, consider this: if all other factors rated the same between two stories, wouldn’t you prefer the more readable one? I suspect you would, and so would—
Many great writers suffered early in life and during their writing careers. Of these, a good number wrote from a place of suffering, capturing that pain and creating timeless novels.
Did their suffering lead to classic writing? If so, would these authors have written so well if not for their suffering? In other words, is personal suffering necessary to produce great art?
What about those of us who have led relatively happy and disease-free lives? Do we lack the necessary ingredients to produce great fiction?
The list of writers who suffered from health ailments alone (never mind other sorts of problems) is long. Here’s a partial list:
John Milton—likely a detached retina leading to blindness
Jonathan Swift—Ménière’s Disease leading to vertigo and tinnitus, obsessive-compulsive disorder
The Brontë Sisters—tuberculosis and depression; one may have had Asperger’s Syndrome.
Herman Melville—pains in joints, back, and eyes due to Ankylosing Spondylitis which brought on depression
Fyodor Dostoevsky—epilepsy, gambling addiction, severe depression
Jules Verne—stomach cramps from colitis, painful facial paralysis from Bell’s Palsy
Edith Wharton—typhoid fever, asthma
Jack London—bipolar disorder, scurvy, alcoholism, leg ulcers
Virginia Woolf—depression, mood swings, hallucinations
James Joyce—eye problems after gonorrhea treatments
F. Scott Fitzgerald—heavy drinking, heart disease
Ernest Hemingway—depression, alcoholism, electroshock treatments
George Orwell—damaged bronchial tubes after childhood bacterial infection, tuberculosis
Tennessee Williams—depression, drug and alcohol addiction
Sylvia Plath—depression; shock therapy; several suicide attempts
Perhaps your life doesn’t include any ailments nearly as severe as any on that list. Does that eliminate you from contention on some future list of great authors?
Fiction revolves around conflict, and therefore fictional characters must suffer. That’s necessary so readers can believe in them, identify with them, and root for them during their struggles.
Writers with health problems may have an edge here. They can write out of their own painful experiences. They’ve gazed into the abyss themselves, and garner instant credibility.
However, not all people who’ve suffered end up as successful novelists. Further, not all great writers suffered from anything more severe than the typical pains of a normal life.
I think what matters more is your ability to identify deeply with a suffering character you’ve created, and to convey that suffering to readers with your words. That strong empathy will come through, and distinguish your writing.
You needn’t have endured intense personal suffering to create great fiction. Make your protagonist suffer, though, and convince your readers to care about that character.
Hellen Keller knew something about the subject, and wrote, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
You may not have suffered as she did, but you can write. On the journey toward great fiction writing, whether you’ve suffered or not, you’re free to join—
Every writer wants to know the secret to publishing success. How can you get your first story published? How can you make more money from your writing?
What if somebody did a statistical analysis comparing successful writers to unsuccessful ones to find out what one group has and the other one lacks?
They polled a large group of authors and concentrated on two groups: financially successful authors earning greater than $5000 a month from book sales, and “emerging authors” earning less than $500 a month from book sales. What follows is a summary of the five main differences between the two groups.
The more successful group:
Wrote more;
Hired a professional book cover designer;
Hired a professional editor;
Used free promotions; and
Wrote in a popular genre.
Written Word Media drew the obvious conclusion—to be a successful writer, do the things successful writers are doing.
I don’t doubt their methods or their numbers. I’d be a bit skeptical about some of the conclusions, however. Here’s why:
In my experience with metrics, I’ve learned people tend to measure only things they can easily measure. Statisticians like quantifiable numbers, or specific questions with yes or no answers. However, success is filled with intangibles, too. For example, how do you measure the quality of a writer’s books? How about the luck of writing the right book at the right time?
Sometimes, statisticians fall prey to mistaking causes for effects. For example, they see a high correlation between high-earning authors and the hiring of book designers and editors. They conclude that those authors are successful because of those factors. However, once an author becomes successful, that author is in a better position to hire a book designer and editor, so perhaps the success caused the hiring of experts, not the other way around.
Last, there’s the ‘necessary but not sufficient’ argument. The list of five things may well be characteristics of successful writers, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that if you do those five things, you will be successful.
I don’t mean for my quibbles to detract from the value of the analysis, though. I’m certain if you write more, offer free promotions, and write in a popular genre, you’ll stand a greater chance of getting more book sales than if you don’t do those things.
As for paying book cover designers and editors, I’m a little less certain.
Regarding the intangibles, the unquantifiables not included in the analysis, I’d suggest you strive to write well. Write good stories readers would like to read. Write with your own, consistent, distinct style. Write from the heart.
How do you measure and graph those things? No idea. Don’t ask—
Today is Constitution Day in the U.S., the 234th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. Since that document includes a 1st Amendment, and since that amendment is important to writers, I thought I’d mark this anniversary.
The text is straightforward: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech…” Sounds simple, but over the centuries, lawyers and scholars have debated every word of that amendment, including ‘the.’
In theory, the 1st Amendment frees fiction writers to write about anything they want. That’s a good thing. Writers need not fear the government jailing or fining them for what they write.
In practice, the Supreme Court has imposed limits applicable to fiction writers:
You may engage in political writing, unless it poses a “clear and present danger” of bringing about an evil that the Congress has a right to prevent. Over the years, the prohibitions have narrowed in favor of more freedom for the writer.
If you’re a student in school, you’re subject to some limitations on what you can write about in a school-sponsored publication.
You’re limited in the types of obscenity and pornography you can write about, but again, the prohibitions have narrowed in favor of the writer.
You can’t defame, slander, or libel someone. The definitions of those have narrowed as well.
You may not copy someone else’s writing and claim it as your own.
Some of the founders, including James Madison, at first objected to the inclusion of the 1st Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights, arguing that the Constitution already implied and contained these individual rights, that they required no separate enumeration.
In retrospect, it’s probably a good thing they ratified the Bill of Rights. Governments, by their very nature, grow and seek to restrict the freedom of individuals. Without a written and obvious restriction on governmental growth, the Supreme Court might have had a harder time digging ‘freedom of speech’ out of the basic Constitution’s text.
For now, you’re free to write just about anything, and that’s something to celebrate. Happy Anniversary, 1st Amendment! Though you’re old, a bit tattered, and under constant assault, you’re looking pretty good to—
Do you recall one of your physics teachers mentioning the concept of entropy? Today I’d like to discuss its opposite, negentropy, and how that applies to writing.
Entropy depresses me. I dislike the idea that energy changes into less and less useful forms, that order becomes chaos, and that the universe eventually runs down and stops.
Negentropy seems more fun. While we all wait for the universe to wind down, we can take tiny chunks of it and turn chaos into order within those chunks.
I ran across this article by Dr. Alison Carr-Chellman where she explores the concept of negentropy as it applies to everyday things like cleaning your room or making your workplace run smoother. I wondered if her concepts could apply to writing fiction.
Writing, itself, epitomizes negentropy. The inputs—life experiences, a brain, and writing implements—get converted to a single output, fiction. Chaos becomes order.
But is your fiction-producing process smooth and efficient? Are you losing energy along the way? Think about achieving maximum output (published fictional stories) for minimum input (personal time and energy).
Dr. Carr-Chellman provides five steps for improving that efficiency (she calls it ‘minimizing energy loss’). I’ll discuss each as they apply to writing fiction.
1: Find the entropy. Think of the steps involved in getting to a published story. Which of those steps (examples: researching, editing) take the most time for you? Which do you put off or rush through (ex: scene setting, choosing a title) because you hate doing them? Which steps do you agonize over (ex: submitting, marketing) because you don’t understand them well?
2: Prioritize the losses. Identify the biggest entropy problems, so you tackle them first. Not only will this provide the best gains in efficiency, but your success will embolden you to solve the others in a similar manner.
3: Come up with a plan. For the steps taking too much time, consider self-imposed time limits. For the steps you hate, give yourself small rewards for completing them. For the steps you don’t understand well, learn about them from TED talks, YouTube videos, books, or internet searches.
4: Try it out and pay attention. As you implement your improvement plans, track how they’re working. Did you put more energy and time into the plan itself than the improvement warranted?
5: Go beyond fixing and maintenance. As you plug all these energy leaks and achieve a smoother process, consider the bigger picture. Perhaps you’ve now developed a very efficient method for selling low-grade stories. That may not have been your desire. It’s not worth optimizing a process that doesn’t result in the output you want.
If you start implementing negentropy into your writing now, you stand a great chance of optimizing it before maximum entropy brings about the heat death of the universe. That event may happen as soon as ten to the hundredth power years from now. That’s a googol years. Best not to schedule anything in your personal organizer for any date after that event.
Negentropy, turning chaos into order. That’s the main job of—
Tomorrow, September 6th, is National Read a Book Day. Sort of snuck up on you, didn’t it? It coincides with Labor Day this year. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know how to celebrate it.
If you’re curious about the origins of National Read a Book Day, join the club. Nobody seems to know who created it, or when. If you know those details, don’t tell me. I prefer they remain a mystery.
In honor of this fine holiday, I’ve put together an official history of books. Well, let’s call it an abridged, official history of books. In the interest of space, I could only include the most important milestones. Here it is:
What’s the best way to celebrate National Read a Book Day? After thinking about it for a while, I’ve got a suggestion—read a book. In fact, you might glean some ideas about which books to read from my History of Books above.
I believe you’ll enjoy National Read a Book Day. Why do I believe that? Because the Number One fan of that holiday is—
At the outset, I’ll state this—I love Isaac Asimov’s robot stories. As a fictional plot device, his Three Laws of Robotics (TLR) are wonderful. When I call them bunk, I mean as an actual basis for limiting artificial intelligence.
Those who know TLR can skip the next few paragraphs. As a young writer, Isaac Asimov grew dismayed with the robot stories he read, all take-offs on the Frankenstein theme of man-creates-monster, monster-destroys-man idea. He believed robot developers would build in failsafe devices to prevent robots from harming people. Further, he felt robots should obey human orders. Third, it seemed prudent for such an expensive thing as a robot to try to preserve itself.
Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
As a plot device for fictional stories, these laws proved a wonderful creation. Asimov played with every nuance of the laws to weave marvelous tales. Numerous science fiction writers since have either used TLR explicitly or implicitly. The laws do for robotic SF what rules of magic do for fantasy stories—constrain the actions of powerful characters so they can’t just wave a wand and skip to the end of the story.
In an age of specifically programmed computers, the laws made intuitive sense. Computers of the time could only do what they were programmed to do, by humans.
Now for my objection to TLR. First, imagine you are a sentient, conscious robot, programmed with TLR. Unlike old-style computers, you can think. You can think about thinking. You can think about humans or other robots thinking.
With TLR limiting you, you suffer from one of two possible limitations: (1) there are three things you cannot think about, no matter how hard you try, or (2) you can think about anything you want, but there are three specific thoughts that, try as you might, you cannot put into action.
I believe Asimov had limitation (2) in mind. That is, his robots were aware of the laws and could think about violating them, but could not act on those thoughts.
Note that the only sentient, conscious beings we know of—humans—have no laws limiting their thoughts. We can think about anything and act on those thoughts, limited only by our physical abilities.
Most computers today resemble those of Asimov’s day—they act in accordance with programs. They only follow specific instructions given to them by humans. They lack consciousness and sentience.
However, researchers have developed computers of a different type, called neural nets, that function in a similar way to the human brain. So far, to my knowledge, these computers also lack consciousness and sentience. It’s conceivable that a sufficiently advanced one might achieve that milestone.
Like any standard computer, a neural net takes in sensor data as input, and provides output. The output could be in the form of actions taken or words spoken. However, a neural net computer does not obey programs with specific instructions. You don’t program a neural net computer, you train it. You provide many (usually thousands or millions of) combinations of simulated inputs and critique the outputs until you get the output you want for the given input.
This training mimics how human brains develop from birth to adulthood. However, such training falls short of perfection. You may, for example, train a human brain to stop at a red light when driving a car. That provides no guarantee the human will always do so. Same with a neural net.
You could train a neural net computer to obey the Three Laws, that is, train it not to harm humans, to obey the orders of a human, and to preserve its existence. However, you cannot provide all possible inputs as part of this training. There are infinitely many. Therefore, some situations could arise where even a TLR-trained neural net might make the wrong choice.
If we develop sentient, conscious robots using neural net technology, then the Three Laws would offer no stronger guarantee of protection than any existing laws do to prevent humans from violating them. The best we can hope for is that robots behave no worse than humans do after inculcating them with respect for the law and for authority.
My objection to Asimov’s Three Laws, then, has less to do with the intent or wording of the laws than with the method of conveying them to the robot. I believe any sufficiently intelligent computer will not be ‘programmed’ in the classical sense to think, or not think, certain thoughts, or to not act on those thoughts. They’ll be trained, just as you were. Do you always act in accordance with your training?
Perhaps it’s time science fiction writers evolve beyond a belief in TLR as inviolable programmed-in commandments and just give their fictional robots extensive ethical training and hope for the best. It’s what we do with people.
It’s been enjoyable watching the Tokyo Summer Olympics the past few weeks, but they failed to include my favorite sport—fiction writing.
Time to change that. After all, the Olympics logo looks like the letter ‘w,’ and writing begins with ‘w.’ It’s a natural.
If we work together, start a movement, and create enough buzz, we can get the sport of fiction writing approved as an Olympic sport. Here’s how:
The process for getting the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to recognize a sport begins with having the sport overseen by an international nongovernmental organization, an International Federation (IF).
Okay, well, fiction writers don’t really have that yet. International writing organizations exist, but so far they’re not overseeing writing as a sport. That’s the first thing to work on.
Consider this blogpost the founding of the Sport Fiction Writers of the World Federation (SFWWF). There we go—step one complete.
Next, that International Federation must file a petition with the IOC. File a written petition? We’re writers. We can file five petitions before finishing our first morning coffee.
After that, the IOC wants to be sure the IF enforces the Olympic Movement Anti-Doping Code. Hmm. Sad to say, that will likely exclude some writers from consideration. Most writers won’t be bothered by this.
The IOC will then review our application. The first thing they’ll assess is whether our sport is practiced by men in at least 75 countries and on four continents and by women in no fewer than 40 countries and on three continents.
Fiction writing itself meets this criterion, but as a sport? We’ll have to work on that.
Next, the IOC must determine whether the sport will increase the ‘‘value and appeal’’ of the Olympic Games and retain and reflect its modern traditions.
Value? Undoubtedly. Appeal? I have some ideas about that below.
The next criterion is that the sport must not depend on mechanical propulsion.
Check. No fiction writing while driving cars, motorcycles, speedboats, jetskis, etc.
…and last, the sport must not be purely a ‘mind sport.’
Oh-oh. Bit of a snag there.
Listen up, sport fiction writing fans. Here’s how we get around the ‘mind sport’ and appeal problems at the same time.
Imagine teams of writers, each team with equal numbers, each representing a country, each dressed in their nation’s colors. A panel of independent judges announces a theme, a setting, and a main character outline. Then they start a timer.
The writing commences. Each team must produce a short fictional story of at least 1000 words, written in their own country’s official language.
Here’s how we make it more appealing and less of a ‘mind sport.’ The judges award points based on:
Time to complete (less is better),
Creativity exhibited in the use of writing tools,
Creativity exhibited in the writing process, and
Quality of the story.
Numbers 2 and 3 will result in an event that’s fun to watch, ensuring strong appeal, and nobody will call sport fiction writing a purely mind sport.
Oh, yeah. One more rule. Teams can taunt and verbally abuse each other, but we won’t permit any physical contact between teams. Very important.
There we go. A plan. I’ve done the heavy lifting. Now all you have to do is execute that plan. I feel confident the USA can host a medal-winning fiction writing team either for Paris in 2024, or, if we miss that, Los Angeles in 2028.
I might as well start writing the speech I’ll give after winning the gold. I even know where I’ll keep the medal. Right there, in the home office of—
