Tag Archives: Books

Favorite Things

On Going Home Again

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You can’t really go home. It’s not a very happy or comfortable truth, but it is definitely a truth, and many people have recognized it as such. Once you leave what was home for you as a child or young person, you can come back to where you were and live there again, even permanently, but it isn’t the same.

Seanan McGuire gives this idea a unique perspective in her book “Every heart a doorway”. The book is fairly short and a quick read, but an engaging and thought-provoking one. The setting is a boarding school for those children who went “away” and then came back again – that is, children who went to places like Narnia, Oz, Wonderland, and so on, all the various alternative realities. But now they’ve come back, and found that home really isn’t home anymore, and they want to go back.

The story is poignant without being sentimental; the school councilors point out that the children went to their various alternate realities because here, at home, parents, teachers, friends and siblings didn’t really understand them, there was something inside that was hidden, suppressed, and calling out to be free. It was that hidden part that brought the door to the other world, or brought the child to the door, to let them go to a world where they were truly understood, and could truly be free.

And that’s the point of imaginary worlds, isn’t it? They are a refuge for those of us who feel misunderstood, or not entirely free to be ourselves. McGuire seems to understand this instinctively, and likely from first hand experience.

The book is definitely on my list of books I’m glad I read this year, it was a new perspective and a very old one, skilfully wrapped up together. I recommend it.

Things I've Learned

Move your life and your narrative forward: Always get to Therefore

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Over the last few months my youngest daughter has become a little obsessed with the show Whose Line is it Anyway. She’s watched almost all of the huge number of clips of the show (some of them she’s watched a few times over) available on YouTube, and has insisted that I watch some of her favorites. The improv artists on the show are pretty amazing – they start from a prompt (often a weird, funny or suggestive line) and build these funny and weird scenes that often get fairly raunchy. Sometimes they flame out, and the moderator tells them to quit, other times the scene finishes brilliantly, leaving the audience roaring with laughter.

Improv is one of the best training grounds for any artist, whether actor, musician, writer, or any other kind of art where improvisation is possible. One of the things I remember most clearly about reading one of Lawrence Block’s books on writing, Telling Lies for Fun and Profit was him recounting how, in his early days as a writer, he would get together on a regular basis with a group of other writers. Most of them would sit together downstairs, drinking, smoking and playing poker, but one would go upstairs to a typewriter and pound out a few pages of a story. Then that guy would come back downstairs, and the next guy would go up, sit at the typewriter, and pick up the story where the last one left off. And of course each writer would do his best to leave the next guy in a strange or sticky situation. According to Block, the stories they came up with that way were in general pretty horrible and completely unpublishable, but they were some of the best training he got as a writer.

It all seems to come down to “Yes, and…”. That is, you take what someone else has put forward, accept it and build on it. Always accept and build. Daniel Pink talks about this in his recent book To Sell is Human, in which he talks about this improv approach of “yes, and…” as a key to persuading and influencing people; good sales people, like good improv artists, don’t argue or contradict, but accept and build. Like on “Whose Line”, sometimes you’ll flame out and not manage to persuade, but sometimes you’ll build something brilliant, create a relationship, gain a sale.

In contrast is the South Park Rule of Replacing, also known as the ABT (And, But, Therefore) Framework for narrative. This idea, as first articulated by the creators of the show South Park, is that you should, in writing and speaking, change “and” to “but” or “therefore”, because “and” is agreement, whereas “but” is contradiction, conflict, all those things which make for a more interesting narrative thread.

In a very interesting three-part blog post by Randy Olson, he talks about text analysis of the ratio between “but” versus “and” in various speeches and written works in American history. (http://www.scienceneedsstory.com/blog/the-narrative-index/) His point is that speakers or writers who deliver a (seemingly) unending series of “and…and…and…” are quite boring to listen to (or read), because it doesn’t engage or challenge the audience, and perhaps most tellingly, doesn’t tap into the narrative structure that is deeply embedded in the human psyche, and naturally grabs our attention. (Olson also makes a distinction between narrative and story telling – a good story always has a good narrative at it’s heart, but it’s also about the people and emotions surrounding the narrative. A narrative, therefore, when stripped of the people and emotions, isn’t a story).

This underlying structure, is, according to Olson, why Donald Trump was able to gain such a huge amount of free media time, and take the Republican Convention by storm, before the current crashing and burning; Trump has an instinctive feel for narrative, and uses it like a master, in every speech and press conference. Clinton, by contrast, tends much more towards the “and…and…and..” part of the spectrum (Bernie Sanders had consistently stronger narrative structure to his speeches, too, apparently), so even though Clinton has things of far better depth and substance (and sanity) to say, Trump got more attention, because he’s a master of the ABT narrative structure.

It’s taken some time and a great deal of thinking for me to reconcile these two points of view; narrative by agreement and building, versus narrative by And-But-Therefore, a more conflict and contradiction centered approach. The current conclusion I have come to (it isn’t necessarily my final conclusion, though) is that I disagree with Olson’s model that looks exclusively at the ratio of the use of ‘and’ to the use of ‘but’ – I think it is the ‘therefore’ and other linguistic equivalents that is the really important part, here.

Because it is the ‘therefore’ that moves the narrative forward. Conflict, contradiction and controversy is all well and good, and certainly an important and necessary part of storytelling, but any story that doesn’t have conclusions – including interim conclusions – just goes around and around without every getting anywhere. In other words, an ‘and…and…and’ structure is just piling on facts without movement, but an ‘and…but…and…but…’ structure is just going around in circles of statement and contradiction, going nowhere just as fast. Some sort of concluding statement, a ‘therefore’ statement, is what is needed to move a narrative forward and maintain interest from your audience.

So what is my concluding statement? For any given statement, whether you are writing your own speech, sales copy or talking to someone you want to persuade, use AND to build, AND validate the other person’s statements, AND deepen your argument, then use BUT to add complexity, to introduce counter-arguments, BUT never, ever forget to move on to THEREFORE. Because the THEREFORE is the foundation for the next statement, and the next cycle.

This isn’t just a discussion of rhetoric (though it is that, too). These same structures hold for how we talk to ourselves, as well as how we judge politicians, talk-show hosts and improv artists. If you are stuck in ‘and…and…and…’, you are likely either bored or overwhelmed, accumulating research, or adding things to do without a consistent pattern or plan, and not moving forward. If you are stuck in ‘and…but…and…but…’ you are likely going around in circles, thinking of reasons to do something or make a commitment, and then immediately thinking about the reasons not to do it, and going around and around without ever actually making a decision.

If, however, you get to ‘therefore’, you are able to get to the next step and move forward. You can go through AND (build and explore) to BUT (double check, look at counterarguments) and then to THEREFORE – the conclusion, the decision, the basis to move forward.

THEREFORE, move forward.

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Things I've Learned

Via Negativa

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As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve been reading Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s a fascinating book, and one I recommend reading, though with the warning that his writing style is a bit on the abrasive style, and the contents are far from light reading.

One of the things he talks about in the book that has really struck me is what he calls Via Negativa, by which he means, the default action should be to not do something or stop doing something, rather than the approach of always adding something. By this he means, for example, that if you have a chronic disease such as diabetes, you should probably stop doing things like eating refined sugar and stop doing things that really stress you out, rather than adding medication. (He’s not against medication per se, just the massive, flagrant use of medication as an additive approach, while ignoring all the things we should be stopping) Or as another example, good parenting should not be about continually finding more things for your child to do and participate in, but instead a parent should find ways for there to be less demands on your child, so that she can find her own interests.

In other words, adding more medications, more activities, more rules, more vitamins, more tactics, more of anything, even if it does provide some benefit, isn’t going to help much until you stop doing all the things that are harming you, and preventing you from getting where you want to be. Stopping the bad is more powerful than adding the good.

I’ve talked previously about the confirmation bias, how we tend to only pay attention to things that confirm what we already think is the case. Scientific inquiry tries to get around this by using disconfirmation; a scientist’s job is to disconfirm their hypotheses, so that they aren’t caught in the trap of seeing only what they want to see in their results. It was Taleb’s discussion that made the connection for me that this powerful approach of disconfirmation is much more broadly applicable; most hypotheses can’t ever be fully and completely proven to be the case, we can just compile a huge amount of data that doesn’t disprove it. And yet, even if you have a hundred data points that seem to indicate that a hypothesis is correct – or at least doesn’t disprove it – as soon as you have a single data point that clearly shows the hypothesis is false, you must conclude that the hypothesis is false.

So again, removing things to see whether that improves the situation, is better than adding things, to see whether that improves it.

The other thing this connected to for me was wisdom from about 2500 years ago. Those of you who know me personally may know that I’ve been studying Taoism for the last fifteen years or so, and there was a passage in the Tao te Ching that always puzzled me (actually there are still many passages in the Tao te Ching that puzzle me, but this is the only one that’s relevant to this discussion).

It goes: “To pursue the academic, add to it daily.

To pursue the Tao, subtract from it daily.

Subtract and subtract again

To arrive at nonaction.

Through nonaction, nothing is left undone.” (Translation by R.L. Wing)

Suddenly, this made a whole lot more sense to me. What Lao Tse is saying here is that when we are learning something, that is, pursuing the academic, we add to our knowledge every day as we study. This is a good and necessary thing, but academic study doesn’t teach you how to live your best life, how to be the best and most effective you possible. To do that, we need to look carefully at our actions, habits, and assumptions, taking each one and asking: What if this were not true? Is this truly helpful? And so, unless there is strong evidence to say that the action or habit or assumption is definitely true or helpful, stop doing it, stop believing it, and see what happens.

It’s kind of like Kondo’s book The life-changing magic of tidying up, where every possession is looked at carefully to see whether it is needed or loved, and if it doesn’t fall into either of those categories, it’s gotten rid of. Except in this case, you’re doing it with thoughts and actions, instead of physical items.

So go see what you can stop doing, stop assuming. Ask yourself why you are doing things, thinking things, believing things, and stop if you can’t come up with a better answer than “Someone told me to.” I have a list I’m going to be working on, myself.

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Favorite Things

Planetfall

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I recently finished the book “Planetfall” by Emma Newman. She’s a British writer, who I discovered while she was writing her blog and modern fantasy stories a number of years ago. This is her first science fiction book, though she says on her blog that science fiction was her first love, and though she enjoyed writing the modern fiction, she likes being back where she started. I can really relate to that, actually, because that’s much the same trajectory my writing seems to be going on.

I enjoyed Planetfall, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys science fiction and fantasy. It’s not a very “science-y” type of science fiction, in that the focus is on the characters and their interactions rather than the science, but it explores the psychology of keeping terrible secrets, meeting non-human intelligences, and the dynamics of small, isolated groups.

Newman keeps the story moving along nicely, and her characters are relatable, interesting, likable and flawed. It’s one of the books I’ve really enjoyed this year.

Favorite Things

Some good books

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One of my favorite series of fiction books that I’ve read in the last few years has been The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey – which is actually the pen name of two collaborating writers, Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank.

The series can be justifiably classified as Space Opera – there’s space ships and space stations and social unrest and political machinations and a group of people who get thrown into great adventures. So yes, space opera, but good space opera. Those of you reading this may have seen the TV series on Syfy based on these books; the series is one of the very few that I’ve encountered where the TV version is as good as the books. So I guess I’m recommending the TV series along with the books.

There are six novels, so far – read them in chronological order, or the story will confuse you – starting with Leviathan Wakes. The story is set in the only-a-little-distant future, when humans have spread out through our solar system, and have colonized some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, as well as a couple of large asteroids which have been hollowed out and spun to create artificial gravity.

I found that the plot was on the long, complex and convoluted side, but the characters are interesting and complex (in a good way), and Corey does a very good job of very vividly conveying not just the setting but the political tensions and changed social norms from what we know today.

I’m far from the first or only person to be recommending this series, as various books have been nominated for Hugo, Locus and Goodreads Choice awards, but here I’m adding my voice to the chorus – it’s a good series, I recommend you read it.

Philosophizing, Ranting

The ongoing information wars

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We are currently in an information war, it’s going on all around us, whether you are aware of it, or not. The war is between two diametrically opposed philosophies, world views, and assumptions about how things work and how things should be.

On the one hand are the forces of the Closed view. They are all about centralization and monopolies in the interest of efficiency, and about hard rules regarding what you may or may not do with your information, with your technology, and your creations. They are about gatekeepers and censors in the name of safety and bringing the consumer only the “best” of what’s created. These forces are epitomized by companies like AT&T and Apple, and by the people pushing TPP, SOPA, ACTA and other legislative clones.

On the other hand are the forces of the Open view. They strongly encourage freeware and sharing, open source and crowdsourcing. They believe in being able to run whatever software you like on whatever hardware you have. They are about allowing everyone to share whatever they wish, on the assumption that though there will be stupidity and asshats, in the long run the asshats will be shamed, the stupid will be ignored, and the best will float to the surface. These forces are epitomized by companies like Google and Etsy, and by the people supporting Creative Commons and a DRM-free world wide web.

It’s very easy to think this war doesn’t mean anything to you, especially for people who aren’t especially technically minded, who simply use their technology and don’t really pay attention to it unless it doesn’t work. But if you are a creator of any kind, this war IS important, and it DOES affect you.

It is and it does because one of the core parts of these conflicting views is about creation, consumerism and gatekeepers. The proponents of the Closed view would ultimately like all of us to sit down, shut up and be good little consumers. No creation, no dialogue, and especially no sampling or remixing of cultural products. They are still thinking in terms of their ‘golden age’ of media fifty plus years ago, when no one published books except the handful of big publishing companies, no one made television programs except the handful of big networks, and no one made movies except the handful of big movie production companies.

What that meant was that each of those handfuls made huge amounts of money on their products because of the limited competition, and those gatekeepers decided what was seen, what was heard, what was read; all of the cultural conversation. That meant that if the women were too uppity, if the characters were too brown, or too gay, or too revolutionary, the product could be quickly and easily squashed, and the creator told that the work wasn’t “good”.

So if you are a creator, I urge you to actively be part of those fighting for the Open view, even if it is just in some small way, because the ones pushing for the Closed view have a great deal of money, a great deal of political influence, and a long history of getting their way in the end. But for all the problems with the Open view – the people who use the opportunity to create and converse to be obnoxious and hateful, among other things – the problems of gatekeepers and closed creation is even worse. I would rather give obnoxious people the chance to show the world how obnoxious they can be than shut up everyone, including the weird and marginalized people. I really, really hope that there are enough people in the world who also think that way, and are willing to stand up for it, to give the Open view a chance in the long run.

(this post was inspired by The Master Switch by Tim Wu. I recommend that book, for anyone who is interested in reading more about the larger patterns of monopoly and openness in information industries.)

Favorite Things, Philosophizing

The importance of speculative fiction

I’ve been a fan of Neil Gaiman for some time, I really like his poetic style, his keen insight into people, and the sheer weirdness of his imagination. Plus all his kind words and encouragement for new and aspiring writers – his gives good advice, as well as general encouragement. What made me like him even more was an article I came across today on BrainPickings.org, discussing Gaiman’s recent non-fiction book The View from the Cheap Seats.

In particular, I liked his taxonomy of the three questions or phrases of speculative fiction (which includes both science fiction and fantasy, as well as other types of speculative fiction). The questions are: What if…?, If only… and If this goes on…

It’s those three that frame speculative fiction’s musings about possibilities. And that, as Gaiman points out, is what it so important about speculative fiction; it opens up thought and discussion and questions about other possibilities, and how things might be, other than how they are now.

Though I know I’m not in Gaiman’s league (at least not yet…) but this article made me think “Yes! That’s why I write speculative fiction!” and made me proud to think of myself in at least the same category as Gaiman, as a fellow speculative fiction writer. Gaiman’s book was on my list of books I was planning to read, but now I think it’s gone to the top of the list.

(If you want to read the Brain Pickings article, you can find it here)

Creativity, Things I've Learned

Prodigy or late-bloomer; which type of creative are you?

I’ve not yet finished reading Originals: How non-conformists move the world by Adam Grant, but I’m finding it very interesting, so far.

The thing that has intrigued me the most so far is the distinction he writes about, a distinction first described by economist David Galenson, between conceptual innovators and experimental innovators. Conceptual innovators formulate a big idea, and are often helped by their lack of knowledge in an area, because they think past and around the rules and assumptions that limit the thinking of the experts in an area. As a result, conceptual innovators do their best, most ground-breaking work early in their careers, and often achieve nothing particularly notable in the second half of their working life. Some notable examples of conceptual innovators are Albert Einstein, James Watson (one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA) and the filmmaker Orson Welles.

In contrast, experimental innovators solve problems through trial and error, and evolve their approach over time. This means that they need quite a bit of time and expertise to do their best work, and thus are late bloomers, doing their best, most ground-breaking work late in their careers. Experimental innovators include William Shakespeare, Roger Sperry (who identified the different specializations of the two brain hemispheres) and filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock.

I find this very interesting, because not only does it explain a recurring pattern seen among creatives, it can give creative people better perspective on their work. Experimental innovators need time to develop their expertise and develop new ways of doing things, this tends to be a long term and fairly sustainable source of creativity and innovation. Conceptual innovators tend to get less creative over time, as they become more entrenched in the conventional thinking of their area. Which means that conceptual innovators, if they want to keep being creative and innovative, should move to a different area or subject or medium on a regular basis.

So the question for every creative person is, which type are you? Are you a late blooming experimental innovator who needs time and space to develop expertise and new ways of doing things, or are you a conceptual innovator who needs to be a novice at something to re-think the area, and then needs to move on to something else?

This has significantly altered how I look at creativity and creative people. Which is what a good theory should do. But being an experimental innovator myself, I’ll have to think about this, and tinker with it to see how it fits in with all the other stuff I’ve learned about people, psychology and being creative.

I do recommend Grant’s book, for anyone who’s interested. Besides his discussion of experimental versus conceptual innovators, he also talks about why Nobel Prize winners are more likely to be artists of some sort, and why we’re terrible judges of our own work, among several other very interesting ideas.

Favorite Things

In thanks for Charles de Lint

Charles de Lint has been one of my favorite authors for quite some time now. He’s one of Fantasy’s godfathers, in that he was writing modern urban fantasy before it was even considered a thing.

Some of the reasons why I love his work are his very poetic, lyrical writing style (which probably comes from being a musician, as well as a writer), but also his fantastic blend of mythical and magical elements right in with mundane, modern settings is done more deftly and seamlessly than any other author (Neil Gaiman comes close, but as much as I love Gaiman’s work, I think de Lint edges him out in this respect).

De Lint’s stories also have a deep, profound belief in the power of love and in human goodness. He doesn’t flinch from including and exploring terrible events and circumstances, and many of his characters are deeply wounded or broken by awful things that have happened to them, but most have his stories have a strong theme of healing and moving on, even if the moving forward isn’t in the way or form that the character wanted or expected. He includes this fundamentally positive outlook without ever getting preachy or sappy about it, which makes it all the more effective.

I haven’t read all of de Lint’s books, but I have read many; my favorite one for the moment (though it’s been my favorite for years, now) is Tapping the Dream Tree, a collection of short stories that take place in his fictional New England town of Bedford. The book includes stories about a musician meeting the devil at the crossroads, a war between ginseng men and bees, and a werewolf going on a blind date. I find them all pretty fantastic stories.

Though I consider Tapping the Dream Tree to be my favorite book of his, I will always have a special place in my heart for his novel Svaha. I read it a number of years ago when things had not been going well for me for quite some time, and I could almost see a great, black whirlpool of despair and depression opening beneath my feet. I picked up that book to find some escapism; it’s set in a post-apocalyptic Earth, so it might not seem to be a good choice in that respect. Except that the deep, fundamental hope and optimism that runs through so many of his stories, and is especially strong in this novel, is what saved me.

I might have fallen into the whirlpool. I might have ended up caught in there for a very long time. But I was able to step away from the edge because of that book, in my hands at the right moment.

So I’m very thankful for Charles de Lint, and his writing. And I hope I can do as well in my own writing, some day.

Favorite Things, Philosophizing

Conscious choice is awesome

I’m right in the middle of reading the WWW series by Robert Sawyer (that’s a trilogy with the book names Wake, Watch and Wonder). Sawyer has been a favorite author of mine for a while now because he thinks hard about science (gets his science right, too!!) and integrates some fascinating ideas, speculations and philosophy while still telling an interesting and well-paced story.

This series is no exception. The thing I found most interesting, though, is his speculations on the nature of consciousness. He discusses (mostly in the second book) how there must be an evolutionary advantage of consciousness over non-consciousness – that is, sentience or self-awareness. He then goes on to speculate that the evolutionary purpose of consciousness is to allow conscious beings to overcome their basic, biological programming.

The example he gives is that our selfish genes have given us a biological programming to be biased towards those with which we share genetics, that is, so that we’ll always favor our kin-group. This has a sound evolutionary reason, since this gives the best chance of survival and propagation for our own genes. With consciousness, however, we can make the choice to value all lives equally, and more importantly, the choice to cooperate and collaborate with people who are very different from ourselves, instead of competing with them, or trying to violently dispose of them.

I would also offer the example that when our biological programming is telling us that anything we don’t understand is a threat, when we are constantly being told by people in authority that we are surrounded by threats, using fear as a political tool, we can consciously choose to examine those fears and decide what is appropriate. We can move beyond those fears and refuse to be manipulated by them.

In a time and place where so many other indications are that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, this has given me hope.

So thank you, Robert Sawyer. You’ve given me something to aspire to in my own fiction, I hope I can do it half as well as you.