April, 2012

From the Department of Made-Up Statistics

I admit it—I’m a data geek. (Shocking, right?) Give me some data, and I can’t help but analyze it at least a little. I’ve even made graphs to analyze my writing.

I’ve often heard people claim you can make statistics say anything you want. That’s not entirely true, but you can usually frame them in a way that leans in a certain direction, even if that direction is misleading. Some easy ways to do this are asking your question in a particular way, choosing a biased sample, and setting up a graph with an inappropriate axis. (All of these will get you labeled a bad statistician, though.)

Sometimes, it’s easier just to skip all the technical steps and just make up results. So here are some claims that are entirely made up based only on my gut instinct. If anyone finds hard data on any of them, feel free to let me know.

• 47% of cancer survivors will (attempt to) write a memoir on the topic.
• 72% of drivers don’t know how to merge properly.
• 96% of literate Americans don’t know how to use a semicolon.
• 83% of teenagers declare something boring a minimum of twice every school day.
• Chocolate makes everything better 99.9% of the time.
• I remember 74% of the useless minutiae I come across, but only 51% of the information I actually need.
• 2% of the people who protest that a given book should be banned have actually read the book.

Go ahead and make up some of your own statistics, or let me know if you think my percentages are off on any of the above. It’s fun and makes you sound knowledgeable. 😉

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Dream Casting: Hiddles for Giggles

My sister is slightly (just a little) obsessed with the actor Tom Hiddleston, and if you don’t recognize him in his headshot, visualize him with darker, longer, straighter hair (Loki in Thor and The Avengers) or wearing an English WWI military uniform (a brief but memorable role in War Horse), or you might have seen him in a few other places.

This blog post is largely for her, and just having a little fun.

I know a lot of writers do it—come up with their dream cast for “if they made my novel a movie.” Or at least digging up photos of celebrities (or athletes, or models, or whatever else they can find online) who are a decent fit for their mental picture of various characters.

In this case, instead of casting a full novel, I’m going to find spots for Mr. Hiddleston in each of my completed manuscripts. It’ll be a little tricky, because he’s 31 years old, and I write YA. I refuse to ‘90210’ him and cast him as a teenager, so no lead roles for him. (Sorry, sis.) But let’s see what I can come up with.

Crossing the Helix trilogy (Fingerprints, Echoes, & Catalysts)
I have too many options for this one. Mr. Z, the very cool physics teacher in the regular world, or Wreiden, one of the Flecks in the alternate world. Either way, he’d be super-smart.

Or, if I want to make my sister really happy … Tayn, the twins’ father. He could pull off the flashbacks as he is now, and a little minor makeup work could age him up 5-10 years for later.

Fireweaver
Let’s just jump straight to him being at least in his late thirties by this point. Is he more Reagan (my MC’s uncle who raised her) or more Dexter (the teacher of her favorite subject)? I’m thinking more Reagan. (Hmm … now I’m wondering, who out there is more Dexter?)

Significantly Other
Ooh, this is a tough one. There aren’t a lot of options. I think he’d probably be best as the colonel who pulls my MC back into the military role she was created for.

Matters of Life and Deaf
How ambitious are you, Mr. Hiddleston? Ambitious enough to learn sign language and play a deaf person? Yes? Then Vince, the ASL specialist. No? Then I’ll change the name of the jerk pre-calculus teacher.

Stitching Snow
Again, we’ll say he’s a touch older, late thirties or early forties. Definitely Kip. But I can’t say anything about who that character is to the story just now. (Or wait, maybe Thad, at the age he is now! But I can’t say anything much about him, either.)

Like I said, all of this is just fun. But it also made me think about my characters, which of their attributes (ethnicity, age, etc.) are truly integral to the character, and which are less important and could easily be adjusted if I wanted to.

‘Fess up. Have you ever dream-cast the movie of your novel? What does the exercise do for you?

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Accepting When You’re the Buck-Stopper

You know the saying—the buck stops here. A simple phrase, easily understood. It means recognizing when the responsibility for something lands squarely on ourselves.

In the realm of the aspiring writer, rejection is the norm. We’ll all experience more rejection than acceptance (although hopefully, the magnitude of the acceptance makes up for the sheer number of rejections). There are also a lot of possible reasons for the rejections. Some are within our control. Some aren’t.

When we’re not getting any nibbles, we need to consider all the possible reasons. Here are some that we may like telling ourselves to feel better, and they may even be true.

It’s all subjective. Yes, it is, to a large degree. What one person loves, another may hate. (Just ask my sister.) Maybe the agents you’ve tried so far just aren’t into your premise, but if you keep trying, you’ll find one who feels that resonance.

The agent’s not really looking for new clients. Well, maybe. Kind of. Personally, I think most agents who are open to queries really are hoping to find new clients. BUT … a modified version of this may apply if the agent already has a manuscript to shop that’s in a similar vein to yours.

The agent was in a bad mood when going through hundreds of queries. Possible, I suppose. Call me an optimist, but I like to think most agents are professional enough to keep moods out of it. But they’re human, they’re not perfect, so it could happen. Perhaps more likely is unfortunate timing. If an agent is seeing several queries in a row with similar premises—most of them badly done—and then comes across your similarly-themed query, they might be too burned out on the concept to recognize your fresh take.

All those reasons shift the responsibility away from us. That’s kind of appealing, right? “It’s not MY fault I’m not getting nibbles.” Appealing, but dangerous, because here’s the thing:

The Buck Stops HERE.

Let’s face it. It’s WAY more likely that the reason we’re not getting nibbles is our fault in some way. Here are a few candidates to consider:

The query sucks. This is even more basic than not finding that magical, evasive, perfect query. Glaring errors. Weak writing. Newbie mistakes. Do your homework, get your rear-end kicked by knowledgeable people (such as those over at AgentQuery Connect), and get the basics right.

The premise is stale. Maybe the actual premise isn’t stale, but in the query, it might come across as a tired old rehash of something that’s been done. The query needs to highlight what’s fresh and awesome in your story.

The un-sucky query isn’t doing its job. Getting a well-written query that follows the rules is only the baseline. A query’s job is to COMPEL. It must compel the recipient to read more. That’s probably what I see lacking most often in queries I critique. The writing and set-up are okay, but it leaves me flat. It doesn’t grab me and say, “You must read this!”

The sample pages are letting you down. This is a tricky one, because it can overlap with the idea of subjectivity a LOT. But this is where it all has to come together. Your voice, your technique, your style, your plotting choices, your characters … they all need to sing in gorgeous harmony. One piece off-key can mean a quick rejection.

That last one can be the hardest. It’s easy to say queries are hard. Figuring them out is a whole new learning curve from writing a novel. But it can come down to something as simple and frightening as this:

It might be the writing.

Maybe we’re not ready. Maybe our skills need a touch more development.

We have to be open to this. If we’re not, we won’t take the next step—working harder to improve.

Maybe it’s one of the other reasons—the reasons that are out of our control. Personally, I choose to assume I need to make my work better, because in the end, that attitude will do my writing the most good.

Speak up:

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Blowing Students’ Minds

This is one of my favorite parts of teaching—that moment when you tell kids something, and they give you that look.

“Seriously? No way!”

I teach such a wide range of kids, those jaw-dropping moments can come in a variety of ways, especially during the years when I’ve taught physics. Here are a few examples.

• When it’s three o’clock Thursday afternoon for us, it’s eight o’clock Friday morning in Australia.
• How dirt-simple derivatives in calculus can be with shortcuts like the Power Rule, yet still give the same information as the long limit-definition way.
• What happens when you shoot a laser pointer through a piece of diffraction grating (or a prism, or a lens).
• What happens when you look through a piece of diffraction grating at a prism while outside in the sun. (This was accidental, and very cool. We had fun in our color and optics unit.)
• The whole idea of traveling close to the speed of light and all the crazy things that go along with it, like the Twin Paradox.
• The crazy things that just plain sound waves do to cornstarch and water.

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It’s Spring (Maybe?) and I Need a Break

After work today, Spring Break begins for my school. Not a moment too soon.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been through state testing, a last-gasp-of-winter snowstorm, a leaky classroom ceiling (still!), and the staff restrooms (adjacent to my classroom) requiring a massive toilet-removing plumbing-exploring procedure to return flushability to our lives. Oh, and other than the state testing, that was all in a matter of two days.

My nose needs a vacation more than anything.

My trusty laptop also croaked after over four years of working hard—fortunately not so badly that I couldn’t get all my files off, and everything important was backed up. (In honor of my five novel protagonists, the replacement laptop has been named Nezra.)

Despite all this, I’m actually in a pretty good mood. I finished the draft of my seventh novel Wednesday night. (Uh, that sounds like a lot. Three are a trilogy. One is last year’s NaNo.) My students handled the chaos in the classroom pretty well. We’re down to T-minus-three-weeks until Mindy McGinnis invades the southwest. And like I said, vacation starts tomorrow afternoon.

So, my plans for the break? As usual, head up to my folks’ place for a week. Do some editing. Critique Mindy’s sure-to-be-mega-awesome revision. Prepare for the aforementioned invasion.

And pray that my classroom isn’t soaked to the core when I get back.

But it occurs to me that I haven’t been on a vacation in so long, I have no idea what the last one was. Maybe the time in grad school I spent Easter weekend with a classmate’s family on the other side of New York state?

When Mindy and I get together, I suspect there will be some plotting about a future invasion, heading farther west … and involving another certain critique partner.

Anyone else have Spring Break coming up? Any exciting plans? Or are you looking ahead to summer?

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Write What You Know … Or Don’t … But Only Sometimes?

We’ve all heard that tired piece of so-called advice: Write what you know. If you go traipsing about the writerly corners of the blogosphere, you’ll find a lot of posts about why that’s ridiculous.

And it is, especially when taken literally. If my novels were strictly based on things I know (i.e., have experienced), my family should be very worried about me. (Alternate dimensions? Human-alien hybrids? Uh, yeah.)

In some senses, though, I do write what I know, because I use my knowledge in lots of different ways as I write. I have deaf characters in two different projects. Yeah, that’s something I know a thing or two about. If I didn’t, I don’t think I would dare attempt to write them. But there are other ways to gain that knowledge than by day-to-day living it.

I think we all know that we need to do our homework when writing, researching and educating ourselves about various topics that weave their way into the story. In that sense, we will write what we know, only we didn’t know it until we needed to write it. (And as a friend recently noted, our search-engine histories can look really … um … interesting.)

There’s knowledge, and then there’s experience. Obviously we write about things we haven’t experienced, and in many cases, we never could experience. (Again, crossing dimensions? Or, say, what some catastrophic injury feels like? Or what it’s like to murder someone?)

But here’s a thought: Are there some things, probably less out of the ordinary than the examples I mentioned, that you really must experience yourself?

A fellow writer recently posited that there are—that certain things will never be written well by a person who hasn’t experienced them firsthand. I’m not going to go into it, because I don’t want to color the responses.

Can you think of anything? Any at all? Or is the idea a load of hooey?

Make your case, for or against. I’m really curious to see what the general consensus is.

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