You're Not as Good a Reader as you Think

There are a few assumptions about being a good reader of fiction. The first is grade level reading. The assumption being that the more difficult a book you can read, the better you are. This is useful if you’re testing children for comprehension, but I am interested in making someone a great reader not adequate to pass forth grade.

The next assumption is that of speed. That by reading more quickly you are better at reading. This is, in some minor way true, but again it is unnecessary to be a fast reader to be a great reader just as a master artist need not make his work quickly for it to be great. Though it is impressive.

Next is the question of what you have read. This comes in two connected ideas. The first is that of breadth of reading. That having read many books makes you a better reader. This person will talk about having read fifty books this year, or having read every book on the top lists of all time. Connected to that is the depth of reading. This is the assumption that having read Crime and Punishment and Moby-Dick makes you a better reader that someone else. Reading important books and widely can, I believe, make you a better person, but I am not convinced it makes you a better reader.

Finally, is the most toxic of the ideas. That being able to find the flaws, plot holes and weaknesses in a book makes you a great reader. It works from the assumption that a book is a story told to you by an author, and it is the sole job of the author to create a world that the reader can step into without effort. This is not true, and any attempt to make that world in fiction would create an entirely unreadable book.

I suspect some of you now are thinking of books that have done just that. But what they did was a magic trick. They made you think the author had created an entire world that you stepped into, when in fact, you made most of the world yourself. Because if there is a secret to being a great reader, then that is it. That reading a book is not a passive act. A reader must collaborate with the writer to create the world.

Consider for now a moment a simple brief description from The Hound of the Baskervilles “A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen.” If you are like me you have a good idea what that hound looks like. But think back to all the assumptions made in the description. It assumes first that you know what a hound is and looks like. It also assumes you understand what coal-black is. So far these are simple, but then it moves on to say it was not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. This bit is where the magic trick really happens. It doesn’t tell you much, but yet you fill it in. Perhaps you add glowing eyes or an aura of danger. Perhaps it becomes something from a half-remembered nightmare or a movie you watched as a child that scared you. Arthur created a hound, you created the rest.

Now that you understand that you can practice becoming a better reader. I suggest you start with something to train yourself that is generally considered good. H. P. Lovecraft is a master at this particular type of magic, and learning to appreciate the horror of not knowing is excellent practice. But it is also good practice because while Howard is a talented writer (we will for the sake of brevity leave his personality out of this), he wasn’t always that and some of his, well say less impressive work leads to the next step in being a good reader.

A great reader is one who can elevate that which he reads. Most people can read a masterpiece and find something of value in it. It is what makes it a masterpiece. And anyone who tries hard enough can find the flaw in those masterpieces this may be a skill, but it is not one that is worth learning. They are there and sometimes even fun to find. But a great reader can pick up something mediocre or even bad and still find a way to enjoy it.

It is perhaps easier to explain with movies. Anyone who has spent time on the internet has seen the questions, usually as jokes, of why they didn’t ride the eagles to Mt. Doom. Finding this funny isn’t a problem, but if you allow it to make watching the movie less enjoyable, then you are bad at watching movies. Not just because there are simple explanations, but because you’re being a bad collaborator. In improve terms you’re saying no instead of yes, and.

The counter of this is people who watch terrible movies and love them. Enjoying something like Battlefield Earth or The Room requires something of the person watching it. They need to understand what makes a wonderful movie to find the humor in that being done wrong. They are good collaborators because they fill in the flaws of the movie and elevate it above what it was meant to be. A great reader can do the same.

The question of how you do this is more tricky. But at its heart is the desire to enjoy a book rather than find flaws in it and practice at doing this. It doesn’t mean that a book can’t bore you or put you can’t put a book down that is bad. It means that if you choose to read a book; you focus on the good. You question your assumptions of its flaw and try to find answers rather than criticizing it. It means that you spend a few seconds thinking about what the author probably meant by that awkwardly written sentence before you assume it isn’t important. It means that you work with the author not against the author to enjoy yourself because at its heart reading fiction is meant to be enjoyable.

Note: None of this is true if you are a beta reader, editor, or even entirely when writing a review. This is advice for reading a book, not for any of those things. Though it is worth considering when listening to a review. Because taking advice from a bad reader on what to read will get you poor results.

The Dangers of Hedge Words in your Writing.

A bit of humility is a good thing in real life. When writing it is far less valuable. It is vital for the writer to sound confident. This means doing something I don't generally like to do and speak in absolutes. But it's OK. If you're writing fiction you are the absolute authority so what you say is true. One of the things this requires is to remove hedge words because nothing drains the away the power of your story like hedge words.

I'll start with a list of hedge words that I find myself using often in first drafts. They include: probably, mostly, hopefully, perhaps, maybe, might, sometimes and almost. There are of course more, but you get the idea. These are words that hedge what you are saying. I'll give a couple of quick examples, "he was probably the best in the world" is far weaker than "he was the best in the world." Or how about "Perhaps she was" rather than "she was."

But while both of those examples are made far stronger by removing the hedge word that doesn't mean that hedge words are bad. First, if you are describing what a character sees or thinks they may be less confident than the writer. This isn't typically a good trait in a character but it can be an important one.

More importantly, hedge words can be useful when describing something. "He was nearly beautiful" is different than " he was beautiful" and gives a far better idea of what he looks like, leading to a great leaping off point to describe what limited his beauty. But this is the exception. Most of the time when I use those words it's because I'm unsure of my writing and need to both remove them and if possible discover why they were there.

For me this most often happens when I'm not confident about the direction of my story. Perhaps there is a plot twist I'm not sure will work or a potential solution I'm ignoring. Whatever it is that hedge words are also a signal to the reader and they'll begin to feel less confident in the story as well. That will lead them to look for plot holes and mistakes and if you're looking you'll find them. Imagine this situation, you're about to do something dangerous and your cohort says, "the plan should work." You're not going to say great let's go, you're going to ask what he means by saying should. On the other hand, say "the plan was foolproof," and the reader might take you at your word.

Hedge words are difficult, if not impossible to remove entirely from your writing. The seep into first drafts like weeds. But the good news is that they are also one of the easiest things to remove from your writing. In most cases they can be plucked out without much thought because they weren't doing anything but signaling a lack of confidence in the first place. That isn't your job as a writer. You're job is to be powerful and confident. You are the creator. Your word is law, don't make it a wishy-washy law that no one cares about.

Creating a Lovecraftian Creature

Whether you are writing horror, science fiction or even fantasy one of the most frequently under-used tools is the use of Lovecraftian creatures. They are sometimes ignored because they are believed to be horror monsters or because writing about them breaks many of the basic rules writers have been taught or because they are unusual. But with some effort creating a Lovecraftian creature can add a lot to your story.

To start lets, look at what a Lovecraftian monster is, and isn’t. A Lovecraftian monster is at its core something that is so alien to the human experience that both the reader and the protagonist is incapable of true comprehension.  It may be from a different world, a different dimension, created by different gods or have no understandable origin. What it doesn’t have to be is huge, singular, powerful or even entirely central to your story. Though they can and typically have been all of those things. Imagine a race of primitive creatures on an alien planet. They are so unlike anything on Earth that humans are on the planet for months before they even realize they are alive and even once they know they can’t find any common ground to interact. While not what one would typically think of as a Lovecraftian monster they fit most of the definition.

The primary problem with trying to write a Lovecraftian monster is that by definition they can not be understood. This does limit how they can be used in a story.  First, while you my not be technically breaking the rule that every villain is the hero of their own story, since you have no idea what that creature wants is it doesn’t matter. You also can’t ask what the motivation of the creature is, or even have it act directly against the protagonist. But that doesn’t mean that a Lovecraftian monster can’t be a compelling and interesting antagonist. 

One of the first things you want to do is keep the Lovecraftian creature at a distance from the reader. This is the classic Jaws scenario. The more you see the monster the less scary it is.  Once you realize that it’s a badly working plastic shark head the magic is gone. This is even more important for the Lovecraftian monster. You can understand Dracula and still find him scary. Many human monsters are scary because of that innate understanding.  But the moment you understand a Lovecraftian monster they are no longer Lovecratian. There are a few tricks used for this. One Lovecraft himself used was to tell the story through a character narrator. This could be a retelling of what happened by someone in Arkham for insanity, a journal found in the severed hand of a long dead explorer or any other way that makes it clear that you’re hearing someone's interpretation of what happened.

Once you come into contact with the monster you will need some description of the creature, but a straightforward description simply isn’t going to work. In the case of a Lovecraftian monster the magic happens in the reader’s mind more than one the page. Lovecraft often used words like unspeakable, unimaginable and cyclopean to force the reader to fill in the gaps with the worst things in his or her imagination.  Another way to do this is vague specificity. You describe something specific about the creature which gives the reader’s imagination a place to start while not giving them much more than the unimaginable description. One of my favorite examples is “its eyes had teeth.” I’m honestly not sure what that means or how it would be of any use to anything, but it paints a picture of far more than the eye and it’s creepy.

Another way to explore how difficult it is to convey information about the creature is to use contradictions. If you describe the creature using two terms together that contradict each other it can create something that doesn’t work in the mind putting the reader into the same dazed and confused state as the protagonist. Something that is both dry and slimy, or large and small. You can also put something to human into an alien form. Creating a creature with slimy blue skin, twisted knots of pulsing flesh and a single, sad looking, human eye will stick with the reader. The most important thing is to subvert the expectations. 

Intelligence is also vital to the Lovecraftian Monster. You can have a Lovecraftian animal but usually you want the creature be both intelligent and inhuman in its thoughts. A Lovecraftian monster isn’t a human in a monster suit. It doesn’t want to rule people or even kill them. Those are far too mundane. They fail to portray the hopelessness of creating a connection to this creature. But because its actions are often random to human interpretation making a Lovecraftian monster seem intelligent can be a trick.  Having them speak won’t work as it makes them to human. So think about your creature. How did it get to your story? An alien must have come in a ship.  A creature from hell must have escaped and if it has always been here it had to avoid being discovered.

The final and perhaps the most important key to writing a Lovecraftian monster is the reaction of those who see it. In a Lovecraft story a common reaction is often fainting, but it can be fear, revulsion or babbling incoherence and random actions. What matters is the strength of the reaction. It will also help if you’ve built up your character first. A hardened soldier who has fought battles across half the world who runs away in panic at the first glimpse of your monster will have more impact than some random person doing the same. It is also important to remember that seeing the unspeakable horror of something truly Lovecraftian will leave a permanent impact. The character doesn’t have to become a gibbering idiot, but they shouldn’t want to go back in that room. 

Another way to show the effect it has on humans is to give human followers. In Lovecraft the monsters are often connected to cults. These may be doomsday cults trying to awaken an ancient monster that will destroy the world or perhaps they have a powerful leader who thinks he can control it. This serves two purposes. First it shows the range of reactions to the creature. Some people break and run away while others break and worship it. It also gives your protagonist something he or she can fight. Stopping a cult from waking the monster or even just sacrificing themselves to it will let him interact indirectly with the abomination.

What makes a Lovecraftian creature so interesting is that it doesn’t fit into normal conventions of human understanding or storytelling. This can be used to great effect, but it takes time and practice to do right. Because more than in any other writing the creation of a Lovecraftian monster has to be a collaboration between writer and reader.  

THe meaning of life

be devoured by an alien squid monster

Convincing People to Read

I like to read and I'm always a bit surprised when people say that they don't like to read. On the other hand I totally understand, especially when I think about my experience in high school English class. I already liked reading by the time that I reached High School, but if I hadn't I honestly think that it might have convinced me that I didn't like to read.

High School for me was quite a while ago and perhaps it has changed, but there are a few ideas that I still see from time to time. The first of these is that we all need to stop looking down on books. I don't care whether it's Twilight, Harry Potter, Fifty Shades of Grey or the most recent Stephen King novel they are popular for a reason. Some of those are clearly not written for me and if I read them I'd either be annoyed or bored. On the other hand I know plenty of people who would find the Martian Chronicles, The Foundation Trilogy, 1984 and Ender's Game boring. I can even imagine a person who wouldn't enjoy the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (Though I'm not sure I can explain that.)

All of these have something in common with every other book that has ever been written. They are finite in length and they were influenced by other books. Did you like the Twilight books because of the romance, perhaps you should try a Jane Austin novel. Were you intrigued by the vampires, Bram Stoker's Dracula is considerably more interesting than you might think (And Mina Harker is a way more interesting female character than any in Twilight though that's just my opinion.) Know a kid who has read Harry Potter 4 times, ask some questions and find out which of the many great books fit what they liked. Whether it is The Hobbit, The Once and Future King, The Dresden files, The Hunger games or any of a dozen other ideas you have one huge advantage. They are already interested in reading. You just have to find books that meet them where they are at.

And that's the problem I had in my High School English class. I had an excellent teacher, a good school and I was interested in the subject but I had no connection to Shakespeare, Beowulf or most of the other required reading. And while I completely understand the desire to get people to read important books, those books are important because they connected to the people at the time. Shakespeare is still remembered because he made plays that people wanted to watch, Beowulf was a popular story and the Canterbury Tales has significant amounts of toilet humor.

Here is the secret, if you want kids, or adults, to read you have to understand why people read. People read because they enjoy it. People read because they form connections to books, because a book, better than any other type of media can grab you and say that someone else understands how you feel, that there are people that feel the same way. Remember that confusion and anger in high school, so does Holden Caulfield. Do you feel the weight of the world on you, like everyone is counting on you. Harry Potter certainly understands that. Are you exhausted and just want to give up. Sam and Frodo certainly could relate. I don't know perhaps if you're a teenage girl trying to deal with romance Bella might actually make you feel better. The point is if you are going through anything there is a book character that can step up beside you and say, "I understand and other people go through this too." And while that may not solve the problem it certainly helps. But it requires the right book at the right time, not just the important book.

I believe that if you can get the right book into the hands of anyone and get them to read enough to understand that it is speaking to them that they will enjoy it and even if they don't make the time to read more books they are going to at least understand the value and perhaps the next time they need a book they will seek it out but at least they might have some positive memories of that book.

Tracking Story Submissions

I was looking for some ideas on the best way to track story submissions and was surprised on how little I found. I'm sure there are plenty of good article on keeping records of your stories but since I was thinking about it I thought other people might be wondering or have some ideas on how to do it better.

The first thing is what you need to keep track of with a story. At the bare minimum you need to know where you submitted your story and when. This is the bare minimum because you need to know when to check on the progress of a submission and when to give up on hearing back without risk of offending. That length of time is subjective and it isn't the point of this article but it's best to simply go by the length of time they say. If they say they will get back to you in sixty days, don't write asking for updates until it has been sixty days even if that seems a long time.

Of course there are other things you'll want to keep track of as well. One of the vital ones is everyplace that the story has been submitted to before. There is simply no value in wasting your time and the time of a publisher by sending them something they have already rejected. This will also help you keep track of how many times the story has been submitted.

Beyond that you have things that are nice to know. If you get any type of personal response with a rejection not only is it worth noting what it said, but who said it. This isn't just useful but it can also be surprisingly encouraging. I remember way back when I was starting I got a rejection letter for a story I sent to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. The note on it was short and something to the effect of not what we're looking for at the moment. I felt the same pang everyone does when they get a rejection letter. Then I looked at it a bit more carefully, and specifically the signature. It was signed by Gardner Dozois.

There aren't a lot of editors I know by name but Gardner Dozios is one of them. I don't really understand what an editor does well enough to comment on his skill, but I know that I've loved a lot of things with his name on it and the idea that he had actually read something I wrote was excited. I also know enough to be fairly confident that he hadn't been the only one to read it. I would bet money that there was at least one person who read it first and believed it was good enough to show to him, and it's likely, from what I know of how many submissions they get, that there was another person involved before he saw it as well.

Another note I got back was a bit more frustrating but also enlightening. It pointed out a typo on the seventh page of the story and the need to edit better. I agree with anyone who says that I need to edit better because everyone everywhere can stand more editing, but there's a lot more information imbedded in than that you might think. First, she made it to the seventh page of a nine page story. Secondly, if I had been successful with telling the story she either wouldn't have noticed or wouldn't have cared about the typo and third, I knew considerably more about that editor and how to make her happy.

It can also be useful to keep copies of anything you send with a story. This is going to be primarily cover letters and summaries. Sometimes you will keep those the same for multiple submissions and sometimes they will changed each time, but either way knowing what you sent to someone can help you figure out the response you get.

I'm not a terribly organized person so how to keep track of all of that is probably presented best by someone else but I'll tell you how I used to do it and how I do it now. I used to have a physical file folder. I would print a copy of the story and put it in the folder, along with a paper that had a list of submissions. When I got a rejection I would add that to the folder as well as writing down the information. This kept everything in one place and made it very easy to make certain I didn't accidentally submit a story that I had already sent to someone else.

The weakness, besides the destruction of trees, was that I didn't have a good way to see stories that had been gone a long time without a response. This didn't come up often as most people are fairly good at responding but it did happen. I tried to fix this by moving the folder to the front of the cabinet every time I sent it out and that helped some but I still had to look at the back to double check and that tended to take a while.

In the last decade things have been more centered around the computer since everyone accepts electronic submissions. (Or at least I haven't found anyone who doesn't.) But the problem is largely the same. Keeping a folder for every story isn't a terrible idea and I may start doing that. But there are some software solutions.

For this I'll largely have to trust other people as I haven't used any enough to really suggest them. Writer's Write's article http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/apr98/tracking-your-submissions-4987 , which is by far the best I found on the subject suggests The Working Writer  http://dolphinsoftware.bc.ca/,  and while it seems a bit dated it would likely work. There is also a story tracker app for the iPad/iPhone that has generally good reviews. I also found Submission Tracker http://www.submissiontrackerapp.com/ and while it has nothing to do with writing since it's for tracking submission is Mixed Martial Arts I found it way to entertaining to leave out.

Perhaps the easiest and best way to do this though is with something may have heard of called spreadsheet. I am completely out of my depth with suggesting how to do this, but for making a list like this I know it works well and other people have suggested that. http://theadventurouswriter.com/blogwriting/how-freelance-writers-track-article-pitches-submissions/

Now to the real point of this article. If you are a writer or someone who is simply good at this type of thing I am pleading with you to share anything you know about how to do this better. I have described a number of processes I have used and I can keep track of things using them, but I'm not a fan of anything I've done and I'm sure someone out there has found a far better solution. Please share that solution with the rest of us.

Writing Excuse: I'm Too Busy

There is no more universal excuse in the modern world than I don’t have time. There are a hundred ways to say it, but it comes down to the simply I’m to busy excuse. And in all but the most extreme cases it’s simply not true. People have time for their priorities. What they really mean is that I have other things I would rather be doing. That perfectly fine in many cases, but if you want to be a writer then you have to find a way to make time because while I’ll defend anyone who puts words to paper in some format or another as a writer if you don’t actually type something you’re not a writer you just like the idea of being a writer.

I can already hear people saying that I really don’t have time. If you’re in a military boot camp, in a doctoral residence that keeps you working 18 hours a day or some similarly demanding situation then you can excuse yourself for the moment, but even then in most cases it’s a short term determent and if you’ve been using the excuse for more than a few weeks you’re lying to yourself. You can make the time if you want to.  

Step one is to understand that your writing is important because you’re important. It is acceptable and important for you to take time for yourself. Your kids, spouse and friends will understand that, but only if you do. Treat your writing as unimportant and so will they. That means scheduling time to work and treating it like work. Enjoyable work, but still work.

Next you need to understand that you don’t need a lot of time. Pick up a notebook or get a word processor for your phone and begin to take notes when you have downtime during the day or take the write your novel on your phone in those down times.

It has been done.

And you do have those down times. The odds are no one will notice if you write a few things down during the long office meeting, your kid won’t see you taking notes during halftime at his basketball game and no one is going to see you in the bathroom. There are plenty of other times as well. Stuck on hold, it’s the perfect time to grab your notebook and write. This is after all important to you so do it.

You’ll still need some time at the computer in most cases and you’re too busy for that, right? No. You have a priorities issue. You get time off work every year right? How about instead of visiting the beach you find someplace quite and lock yourself away. Plenty of writers do this including a number of well known authors. They lock themselves away for a week and write the first draft of their novel. And since you’ve been taking notes and working out the story in the spare minutes you can do that. 

The other option is to do a very small amount every day. Writing just 100 words a day will let you write 36000 words in a year and you can even take off Christmas, Thanksgiving, your birthday and two other random days. And once you’re used to that you’ll discover 100 words won’t take you anytime at all. It’s only one or two paragraphs and once you’ve decided to do it and really focus it shouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes a day. Though in most cases I think you’ll find you spend more time doing it once you make the decision even though you didn’t have the time before.

We all have busy lives but writers make time for writing. Stephen King wrote Carrie while teaching English, J.K. Rowling is a single mother who wrote in cafes because taking her baby for a walk helped her fall asleep.  Countless other less well known authors have kept jobs long after being published and continue to put out more work. The question isn’t whether you’re busy it’s what your priorities are. If you care about something you’ll make time for it and if you don’t care it’s better to admit it and move on. 

Reading is an Act of Trust

I was thinking about writing as an art and how it differs from other forms of art and I recognized something that I had never really articulated to myself before. I think writing is one of the only forms of art that people pay for before they know if it’s good. Even other forms of story media generally give clues to the quality before you pay.

 It’s hard to imagine any way it would work with any other form of art. I have a painting here, no, you can’t remove the curtain before you buy it. My music is great, so please buy it before you listen to it. And so on. A movie is a bit closer but they give us previews that are the best parts and with a comic book you can know if you’ll like the art before you give anything for the story.

It’s not just money though. I give away a fair amount of writing and most books have preview chapters. But there is still far more cost in time and effort before you have any idea if what I wrote is good. Sure the back cover might make you chuckle or the first line is great, but buying or even deciding to read a novel is agreeing to spend the next ten hours with someone. Sure you can always leave, but you don’t want to have to.

This dichotomy is most clear to me at comic book conventions. I have two novels which I bring and sell. They sit next to posters, comics and the offer for hand drawn sketches and the reaction to them are very different than any of the other art. There are naturally the people who just don’t read books, but even the people who do have a much different reaction to a novel than a comic book. They ask what it’s about something they almost never do with a comic book. They’ll turn it in their hand and flip through the pages without reading anything and rarely will they read the back. A tiny summery text that attempts to represent a two hundred page story in two paragraphs of writing that has a different tone and style than anything inside the book and rarely they’ll decide the premise is interesting enough and buy my book.

But in the end it comes down to trust. They know almost nothing about my book. They are simply trusting me with their time and possibly their money with no real evidence that I’m a good writer besides two paragraphs on the back cover of a book. And beyond that they are trusting that I’m someone who they want to spend many hours listening to tell a story. They trust that the painting is good before the curtain is pulled back, that the music is good before play button is pushed. Of course if they have already seen my work then that trust is easier. If someone who does music I love has a Kickstarter I’ll give them money before I hear the song and the same is true of a book from an author I love, but in the case of the author there was still a first time when I had to give them a chance.

In the end I give people that chance for the same reason anyone does. Fiction or Nonfiction, short or long, happy or sad, A good book allows me to see the world in a different way. I step into the mind of someone else and understand them a bit better. I learn to care about kids making rockets in their back yard, about hobbits and wizards, about living statues and alien creatures. It is art and for me at least it is the art that reaches in the deepest and changes me the most. So I’ll keep looking for the people I can trust. The writer I can enjoy a long evening with. The ones who help me to see a bit more clearly, to think a bit more deeply and to care a little more and I will continue to endeavor to create stories that will do the same for someone else.

Banned:I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

I regularly see articles on the Internet about school libraries or public libraries banning books. There are lists of banned books that include lists of libraries that have “banned” books by not putting them on their shelves. I want as many people to have access to as many books as possible, but in virtually every case that I have seen either the people writing the article don’t know the meaning of the word ban or they are deliberately misleading someone in order to get attention.

What these articles almost always mean is that a library has removed a book from circulation or in some even worse cases, chosen not to buy the buy and put it on the shelf. Now I’m not a librarian but I know something about libraries and one of the things I know is that not every library has every book ever written. So, in the second case the article should really read, “Library chooses not to buy a book I think they should have.”  More importantly in those cases it really is basically calling people names because they made a decision you didn’t agree with. Should Huckleberry Fin be in a school library. I think so, but there are plenty of other books that should be too and in most cases the libraries are very small and they have to pick very carefully, so why put books on the shelf that are going to be controversial.

But the real question is about people taking books off the shelves because of complaints. To be clear, this is not by any stretch of the word banning a book. Banning has a very simple definition. The one relevant here reads “To prohibit (an action) or forbid the use of (something), especially by official decree.”

You’ll probably see the problem. First, the library doesn’t make decrees and secondly no one is prohibiting the reading of the book. It’s like saying that the government is banning the use of Pepsi because they aren’t giving it to people for free.

Now I’m not saying that librarians should remove books from shelves because someone complains. I’m saying that when you say they banned the book you’re being at best disingenuous in order to get attention. If what you’re saying is important you should be able to tell people without having to be dishonest in the way you present your argument.

But it isn’t just that people misuse the word ban, though that really does bother me, but they don’t present the whole case. One good example is that there were a number of articles about dictionaries being banned from a school classroom because it had words that some parents had complained about in it. (I honestly don’t remember what the words were.) What the articles that were trying to get people worked up didn’t say was that they were removed temporarily while someone looked at them to decide if they were inappropriate or not and then returned. It simply said that evil people had banned dictionaries from a classroom.

I think that people in general, and children especially, should read books that challenge them and sometimes that means pushing the limits of good taste. I also do not believe that it is the job of the government to ban books or limit access to any information beyond that which is very dangerous. (Feel free to limit the books on how to refine uranium if you feel that’s important.) But no matter how much you might dislike it if they remove The Catcher in the Rye from a high school library it hasn’t been banned. It’s just been made marginally more difficult to find and when you misrepresent that you’re crying wolf and when there really is a problem people are going to assume it the same old cries for attention and ignore you.

How Long Does it Take to Write a Book?

I was looking around Amazon and I saw a book title that, to its credit, caught my attention. Since it might seem that I’m being a bit critical of the book I don’t want to call it out directly. It might be a great book. All I really know is the title which is basically, how to write a book in four days. I’m not going to say it’s impossible, but I will say that it’s probably a bad idea.

Now I understand the point. Writing doesn’t have to be scary. National novel writing month (NaNoWriMo) is a great idea. But it’s also a month long, not four days. And beyond that most people who have done it haven’t edited their book yet.

Let’s examine the most basic problem. If you type a hundred words a minute and if you write a novel just 40,000 words long (which isn’t long) it will take 6.6 hours of just typing to write a first draft of your novel. And 40,000 is basically the minimum length to call a book a novel. Any less and it is considered a novella in the publishing world. Still, assuming the very basic to write a book you’re looking at 7 hours of typing.

But of course it’s not just typing. Whether it’s a novel, which requires you to focus on a story or a work of nonfiction that requires you to be factually correct it’s going to be a lot more work than just typing. Beyond that, while I can type a hundred words a minute, that is largely because I’ve been writing every day for ten years. The average typing speed is actually around 33 words a minute. That’s going to make that 7 hours of tying into something more like 21 hours. If you’re working 8 hours a day you’re into your third day just typing. But I’m going to be generous and assume that you’re working much longer than that. After all this is a passion project. Still, assuming you sleep and eat 15 hours a day means you’ve used up a day and a half with nothing but typing.

Of course that’s assuming you’ve got something to type. If you want your book to be anything more than rambling you’re probably going to want to have a plan for what you want to write. So let’s assume that each chapter of your book is 2500 words, that is 16 chapters. A fairly standard number of chapters for a short book. For each of those you’re going to want to have some type of a plan. To be generous, you could probably write a very basic outline for each chapter in 15 minutes. Any less than that and you’re going to have to think about what you’re writing while you’re writing and that’s going to slow you down anyway. That’s four more hours and you’re up to two days.

Now each page of a book you should expect to be about 250 words.  That means your novel is going to be about 160 pages long. Now the average person can read about 50 pages an hour, give or take. This is important because you haven’t edited your book yet.  Assuming you’re going to do a second and final draft (which is the absolute minimum) it’s going to take you about six hours if you can edit at the same speed you can read. Editing should take longer. For a professional editor it’s generally considered fast to do 20 pages an hour of just proofreading. Your first draft is going to require more than proofreading.  But let’s be generous and assume you are excellent at grammar on your first pass and don’t need any major rewrites on anything. It’s going to take you eight hours for the second draft and another four for the third. And again, that is absurdly fast.

That’s your third day gone. So you’ve written and edited your book assuming you’re able to type quickly while writing, edit at speeds faster than the professionals and don’t spend any time doing anything else besides sleeping and the occasional bathroom break. You even have another whole day left so you could have spread out your work more.

Now of I’m really not trying to call out someone for a catchy book title. I really do understand why the book exists. There are a ton of people who want to write a novel. But there is something about the idea that you can just bang out a novel in a couple of days, or even a couple of weeks does bother me just a bit. Not just because trying to do that is going to result in something that is, most likely, unreadable, but because it propagates the idea that anyone can write a book. Technically it’s true of course. If you can read you can write a book and I don’t want to discourage anyone who wants to write a book from doing it. I just want to discourage the idea that it’s easy or doesn’t require skills beyond that of being able spell words correctly and use grammar. It’s an art and trying to publish a book when you haven’t put in the hours isn’t all that different from picking up a paint brush and expecting someone to buy what you make.

But even if you have the skill writing isn’t easy. In traditional publishing, it is generally accepted that you should put out one book a year. There are writers who are faster than that of course. That’s why Stephen King used a pen name for years to publish more books. On the other hand, George R. R. Martin, who many people say is a good author writes at a slightly slower pace. His first book was published in 1996. A Clash of Kings came out in 1998. The next book was clearly a rush as a storm of swords was published in 2000.  Of course he couldn’t keep up that pace and the next book was 2005 and (much to the dismay of many of his readers), his next book was published in 2011. He’s written other things of course, but my point is that speed is not the mark of a good writer and neither is writing slowly.

So how long should a novel take to write? I have no idea. My calculation of taking 21 hours to type a novel isn’t entirely wrong. I often type first drafts very quickly to avoid editing and can write the first draft in a couple of weeks assuming the story is working and if you’re focused on a first draft of a reasonable length NaNoWriMo is actually a fairly good measure. If you simply sit down and write 1500 words every day for a month you could have about 45,000 words written in a month and if you’re anything like me you’re going to feel far better about that than the 40,000 words that you wrote over a long weekend by doing almost nothing but typing.  

Internal Consistency-- the unbreakable rule in science fiction and fantasy

I like to find ways to circumvent the rules of storytelling and often enjoy it when others do so as well. The rules of writing keep things consistant, but another word for consistent is predictable. But while most rules can and should be broken  from time to time when it makes a story better there is one type of rule that can never be broken in a good story. That rule is the one that you create for the story.

Internal consistency is important in all fiction, but it becomes doubly important when you are dealing with speculitive fiction with internal rules that often break the rules of the world as we know it. But while it is important in worlds of high magic and fantasy they are important in all stories. You can't write a romance set in the 18th century and then have one of the characters call for help on a cell phone.

An example of a movie that fails in its internal consistency, at least in my eyes is "Next". The main character can see two minutes into the future, except when it is directly connected to a specific woman then he can see farther. But as the movie nears it's conclusion the rules are stretched and then ignored. And while the writers were aware of the problem for me they weren't successful.

For science fiction I often find a problem that I like to call collective amnesia syndrome. There is sometechnology, superpower, or other element that is in the show. Perhaps a time machine, or a character who can heal people with her blood, but while they may use that ability occationally if i isn't useful to the plot they ignore it entirely. I mean how can you find a time machine in one episode of a show and he next week not point out that it could easily solve the problem they are facing. I understand you can't expect the writers to always remember everything, and some story elements are so powerful they become a problem, but good writing will explain why it doesn’t work rather than simply pretending it doesn’t exist?

When writing you can trust that a reader will in general accept any stretch of logic so long as it is written into the basic premise, but nothing will turn off readers and viewers of a show faster than the writers ignoring the rules of the universe they created. So while the other rules of writing can be ignored, the rules you create for your story have to be sacrosanct.