May, 2012

Don’t Take that Tone with Me!

It’s one thing when you’re communicating face-to-face. When someone’s “taking a tone” with you, it’s usually pretty obvious. Take the conversation to the realm of the written word, though, and suddenly there’s more than enough room for interpretation.

As a novelist, it’s tricky enough to make sure a character’s tone matches the intention. I remember I once had a reader of one of my early manuscripts say, “Man, he’s being a little harsh.” I looked at the line of dialogue, mystified. Then I realized my reader (a teenager) was assuming a sarcastic tone for the brief statement. Not at all what I intended.

Did I tell her she was wrong and skip happily on my way? Nope. I adjusted the line and the information surrounding it so the intended tone came across more clearly.

Real-time conversations by text can be so much worse if we’re not careful. That’s why emoticons were invented, right? To give an extra cue of whether we’re teasing or annoyed or uncertain? (I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds good, and it’s why I use them.)

What if one of our online compadres says, “Hey, on that post over there, you’re coming across kind of (insert undesirable trait)”? Do we say, “That’s not what I meant at all,” and continue on without changing? Hopefully not. The fact I know what I meant is irrelevant. How it’s taken by those reading is more important.

I may need to adjust my approach in the future, make sure my tone is more clear without the benefit of facial expression, vocal tone, body language, and all the other cues we use in real life. If I learn how to do that, who knows? Maybe it’ll make me a better writer in general.

Have you had any experiences with misunderstanding tone or having your own misunderstood? Any tips or tricks for making tone clear in writing?

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Chances Are, We Don’t Understand Chances

Personally, I think probability is one of the most fun math concepts to teach. Break out the dice, the coins, the different-colored marbles, and the spinners. Do a bunch of trials to see how the experimental compares to the theoretical.

Despite the fun, I see a lot of students get all the way to high school without a solid understanding of what probabilities really mean. Take, for example, these two questions:

People often think these are asking the same thing. Our gut instinct for #1 is that if we’ve already gotten an uncommon five heads in a row, surely the chance of getting heads again isn’t that good. But the coin doesn’t know what it landed on before. The situation only has two choices: heads or tails. For that single sixth flip, it has a 50% chance of landing heads just like every other time.

The situation in #2 is completely different. You’re taking all six flips as one situation, so there are a lot more “choices” for the results. All heads, all tails, one tail and five heads (with six different configurations for this one alone), and so on. There is only a 1/64, or a little more than 1.5% chance, of this happening.

The difference in the two is that in #1, the five heads in a row have already happened, and cannot influence the sixth flip.

It’s also good to talk about what makes a game fair or unfair, and why gambling isn’t such a great idea.

The thing about probabilities is that they often make an assumption about all else being equal. The coin or dice being evenly weighted. Every individual outcome (like heads or tails) having an equal chance.

In life, we can’t always make that assumption. That’s where people sometimes confuse “probability” with “statistics.” For example, say we collect some data and find that 2% of writers querying a novel this year will secure representation with an agent. Does that mean any given querying writer this year has a 2% chance of getting an agent?

Not remotely.

Within that pool of querying writers, we can’t say “all things being equal,” because they aren’t. Some of the writers don’t have a clue what they’re doing. (You’ve seen Slushpile Hell, right?) Some aren’t making such egregious mistakes, but just aren’t ready yet. Some just don’t have the right timing with market trends. Some aren’t querying that aggressively, only sending out a few here and there. And then some are at the top of their game, do their homework, and go at it. The percentage of that last group getting representation is probably quite different.

So, strange as it is for a math teacher to say, don’t get caught up in the numbers when it comes to these subjective, highly variable, real life scenarios. Save thoughts of probability for when you’re deciding whether to walk into a casino, or figuring out whether you should take an umbrella when you leave for work.

When it comes to situations where all things aren’t equal, work to make sure you belong to the group that successes draw from. That’s the way to up your chances.

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Hazards of the Blame Game

This is kind of an extension of my prior post on accepting responsibility. Blaming others is probably built into our genetic code. Little kids certainly pick up the skill quickly. They don’t even have to be talking yet—they can just point at their sibling.

I teach teenagers, so I see it plenty. A student’s grade is slipping, they’re not doing what they’re supposed to in class, and there are a thousand reasons for it. None of them acknowledging that maybe they bear some responsibility and control for their own academic fate.

Actually, since I’ve taught a lot of the same kids over several years, I’ve been able to see them grow and mature. I’ve seen them go through this transition to understanding, “Yeah, there are some factors I can’t control, but my own decisions have the biggest impact on my life.” It’s very cool to see that change.

Not everyone gets there, though, even in adulthood.

A number of people I know are currently pregnant. I admit, #blamethefetus tweets are frequently amusing, so I’m not saying any hint of “blaming” someone/something is going to make my head explode. Even less humorous blaming can be okay once in a while. Sometimes you need to blow off steam. Sometimes something really is someone else’s fault.

The not one but TWO traffic jams I had to get through on Wednesday after school, for instance. Definitely someone else’s fault, definitely preventable, and definitely annoyed me. A lot.

But … when we’re looking at something that’s not going right, trying to figure out why, and we look at everyone except ourselves, we have a problem. If we’re the ones to blame (even partially), we’ll be blind to it, and we’ll likely miss opportunities to FIX IT.

I mean, hey, who doesn’t want their life to go better?

Not getting the promotion we want at work? Maybe there’s discrimination or favoritism going on. Or maybe we aren’t working as hard or as well as some others.

Not getting requests with our queries, or not getting anywhere with submissions? Maybe trends in the market aren’t lining up. Or maybe we can improve the story and writing in some way.

Do you catch yourself blaming others when you shouldn’t? Has it gotten you in trouble? Do particular iterations of the Blame Game annoy you more than others?

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Crushing the Contest Curse

Some of you know I haven’t had the greatest history with contests. I’d only entered two—well, the same one, two years in a row. I got through the initial slush round both times. When it came to the agent judging/voting round, however … silence.

Ouch.

All the things people say about subjectivity, not the right mix of agents for you, etc. are true. Someone thought my work was good enough to put me through the slush.

Those true words don’t stop the hurt. The feeling that readers and other writers may appreciate aspects of my writing, but to the “people who matter,” I’ll never be good enough. The conviction that I’m doing something wrong and no one can tell me what.

Or maybe someone could tell me. They just don’t.

I kept writing, kept revising, kept querying. With each story, I’ve gotten better. I know that. But I figured contests weren’t for me. The sting of public silence was too much.

Then a couple of friends talked me into trying one more contest. (Okay, they didn’t have to try that hard. Mostly it kept coming up in conversation and they said, “Yeah, you should.”)

Maybe I’m just a masochist at heart.

I got picked by a coach, thus getting through the slush again.

Monday was agent voting day. One or two votes meant partial requests. Three or more meant full requests.

Would I suffer silence again?

No. Not this time. Five votes. Five full requests.

Nothing is guaranteed. An agent still has to love the whole manuscript enough to offer representation, and that’s a whole different hurdle. The point for now is that when I was put up next to lots of really stellar work, I still caught some eyes. That feels really good.

But I still remember how the silence felt.

If you’ve suffered the silence, it’s okay that it hurts. I’m a big believer in letting yourself wallow for a day or so, but only if you definitively cut off that wallowing before it does some damage. Keep working on the story you’ve got, or start working on a new one. Tweak your query or opening pages. Do some research on which agents are most likely to love your story.

Hope that you hit the right agent at the right time with the right story, because it takes a little luck. I’m not one to say we will make it if we keep working, because no one knows that. The only thing I know is that if we stop writing and stop trying, failure is guaranteed.

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Mistakes vs. Incompetence

As some of you know, I’m entering a transition in the day job. This involves a lot of interviews, some where I’m the interviewee and some where I’m on the panel of interviewers. It makes for an interesting dual perspective.

My current school includes something extra in the interview process—candidates have to teach a brief mock-lesson. For me, that’s the make-or-break portion of the interview. I can forgive a few weak answers on the standard interview questions, but if the math teaching isn’t up to snuff, I’m not recommending.

Since we’re nearing the end of the school year, I’m also leading my classes through reviews to prepare for their final exams. This includes going through problems we haven’t discussed in-depth since last fall. Most of the time, it’s fine. But a couple of times last week (in calculus, naturally), I had some ridiculous cerebral failures.

That’s fine, too. I make a point of emphasizing to my students early on that I can make mistakes, and if they catch me at it, good for them. Seeing me make mistakes without falling apart seems to help them be more willing to take risks even though they might be wrong.

I got to thinking about the two situations. Where’s the line between “Oops, the teacher’s human and makes mistakes” and, “No, this interviewee doesn’t have what it takes”?

My guess is that the line is in awareness. When I screwed up in calculus, I either knew right away or within moments. I immediately ‘fessed up to the students and set about figuring out what I’d done wrong. With interviewees who aren’t cutting it, they generally seem to think what they’re doing is fine. Top interviewees often have more to criticize about themselves. There’s a question in the interview about what they think they need to work on most. It’s always interesting to correlate their answer to this question with their performance in the mock-lesson.

So, everyone, let’s aspire to make mistakes. Own them, learn from them. But never let it cross into incompetence. If we are incompetent in an area, let’s be aware of it, and work to correct it.

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Write What You Know, Pt 2: Diversity Edition

Last month, I posted about writing what you know, or more specifically, knowing vs. experiencing and the necessary levels of each. With the situation I had in mind at the time, I have to believe it’s possible to write authentically without experiencing firsthand. (If not, I’ve got problems.)

Today, I’m thinking about a different situation. In this case, I still think it’s possible to write it well without firsthand experience, but the closer you can get to the source in your “research,” the better.

The situation is writing from an ethnic or cultural perspective that is not your own.

Clearly it can’t be necessary for us to share backgrounds with our protagonists. If it were, women could only write female protagonists. No one could write from the POV of anyone older than they were. Way too limiting, to the point of being ridiculous.

But how do we do the research to make sure our characters are culturally authentic?

As I mentioned in the other post, two of my novels have deaf characters. In the first, it’s not the POV character, but the almost-as-important sister. Honestly, I didn’t dare attempt a deaf POV at that point. I’d been teaching at a deaf school for three years at the time, but I didn’t feel ready. (It turned out that I think my POV choice was the right one regardless, just with who the characters are and where the story needed to go, but that’s another matter.)

For the second novel (which followers of the blog may notice has finally shown up among the tabs at the top), I got brave. My MC is hard-of-hearing, and there are a variety of deaf supporting characters. I felt like I was ready to take it on.

I’m not “in” Deaf culture, but I’ve been pretty well immersed in it for several years now. I’ve seen a lot of viewpoints within it, some of them completely contradictory to each other. I think witnessing and acknowledging the contradictions was the key.

No culture is homogenous any more than a society is homogenous. You can’t say, “All Deaf people are like this,” any more than you can say, “All Chinese people are like that.”

That doesn’t mean you can have a character say and do anything and have it be authentic, though.

Am I talking in circles yet? Feels like it.

Cultures are tricky things. Group history, personalities, individual experiences, family tradition, education … all those things feed into the culture and influence how each person inside experiences it. Individual, unique, yet within certain bounds that offer sameness, that allow a person to say, “Yes, I belong.”

Can you find that in a Google search?

Will you even know to look?

Be honest. How many of you are looking at me funny for capitalizing “Deaf” in some places? How many of you are getting question-mark-face at the way I’m discussing a physical disability alongside cultures like they’re the same thing?

Surely anyone can write a deaf character. Just cut out the sound and add in sign language, right? I might have thought the same before I became acquainted with people on the inside, and learned that Deaf and deaf are two different things.

Do we fall into the same trap with other cultural identities? Do we assume we can write a character from a particular background, when really we haven’t dug deep enough yet to see the nuance and variety within that culture? The push and pull that come from being part of a smaller culture (or more than one) within the larger culture of a particular society?

This is definitely a post where I don’t have answers—just questions. And it’s gone on long enough. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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