Monthly Archives: March 2012

Left brain, Write brain

20 Tuesday Mar 2012

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As I write this, heavy, wet flakes fall from a sullen sky outside the frosted panes of my studio window. A faint whiff of wood smoke, a heady combination of charred birch bark, sweet cedar, and pungent pine creeps under my closed door, escaped as Janet, bundled like an Inuit walrus hunter, condensation rising from her parka like steam escaping a New York subway vent, throws another log into the wood stove glowing candy apple red in the room beyond.

Author Waid Woodruff sent me a fascinating link today, an article in the New York Times by Annie Murphy Paul titled Your Brain on Fiction. Turns out some things I’ve always suspected to be true about writing and reading are… true.

Paul points out that brain scans have begun to reveal what happens upstairs when we crack open a novel and encounter a colorful metaphor, or come upon a lively exchange between fictional characters.

Researchers and the brainier among you have long been aware of the brain’s language areas (regions known as Broca’s and Wernicke’s), and their role in determining how we interpret written words. Recent work however indicates that narrative actually activates other parts of our brains, too, which explains why we experience a well-written passage as something akin to “real life.” For example, Paul points out that “words like ‘lavender,’ ‘cinnamon,’ and ‘soap,’ elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.”
The implications for writers are obvious. I’ve been urging authors for years  to pay more attention to all the senses in their writing. Don’t simply tell us “it was a hot day in July.” Tell us what the day smelled like, how the sun felt on the characters’ skin, what sounds cut through the shimmering clouds of heat. To the extent an author does this, his/her readers are going to experience the narrative on multiple levels.
And that is a good thing.
Paul cites a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, in which Spanish researchers “asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean ‘chair’ and ‘key,’ this region remained dark.”
This brain effect apparently extends to one of my personal favorites, the metaphor, as well. Here Paul reports that a team from Emory University recently published a study in Brain & Language, in which “subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like ‘The singer had a velvet voice’ and ‘he had leathery hands’ roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like ‘The singer had a pleasing voice’ and ‘He had strong hands,’ did not.

The brain: every writer's best friend. Evocative language: every brain's best buddy

Perhaps most excitingly, it seems our brains make little distinction between reading about something and actually experiencing it — in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. A fact which underscores the tremendous power every author wields when writing a passage. Use your powers wisely, grasshopper!

Speaking of power, Paul concludes her piece by citing two studies that seem to indicate that people who read fiction are better at understanding others, are more empathetic, and are better able to see the world as others view it.

Obviously we should force anyone running for public office to read fiction on a daily basis. Running for city council? Read Kafka short stories, or go away. Running for president? Read Tolstoy, or go home.

So for those of you reading this who are writers, take heart: you are very, very important people. The world would, quite literally, be a far less colorful, moving, funny, inspiring place without you.

Bu then one doesn’t have to be a brain surgeon to know that.

Round and round…

18 Sunday Mar 2012

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Let a thousand creative blossoms bloom

I never cease to be amazed by how many writers remain stuck in a rut. They work hard. They write every day. They carefully follow Elements of Style or the Chicago Manual. But their writing doesn’t seem to progress.

It’s sort of like the two folks going in circles in this video…

My advice? Lighten up. Be open to new approaches and techniques. Don’t cling so tenaciously to what you’ve learned so far — especially if your work just doesn’t seem to be advancing as you’d like it. Just because you believe a certain approach or technique to be “true” or correct doesn’t necessarily make it so. Beliefs are always learned behaviors, which means they can be unlearned, to be replaced by something new.

Be bold, take some risks. Switch from first to third person. Experiment with dialogue. Stop worrying about what your mom/spouse/friends might think, go ahead and include that racy passage. Read works in progress aloud to non-writers, and actually take to heart their reactions and feedback. Be curious, pay attention to what’s going on around you (never hurts), especially to all the exciting changes happening in areas that matter to writers (like the rapid demise of the traditional publishing paradigm, and the ascendance of ebooks).

Let yourself have some fun as you write. Unscrew the bolts on that creative rocket ship you’re piloting, and allow yourself to break free of the restrictive gravitational bonds of all those previously-learned notions about what makes for “good writing.” I suspect you’ll be glad you did.

To infinity — and beyond!

Farewell Britannica (and good riddance!)

15 Thursday Mar 2012

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After 244 years in print, the Britannica says farewell

The Britannica‘s gone. And I say, “good riddance!”

If ever there was a poster child for the changes being wrought by the web specifically, and digital technologies generally, the Britannica was it. Its final edition, published in 2010, includes 32 volumes and sells for around $1,400. It will of course, never, ever be updated — although it must be said, it always took a long, long time for any of the previous editions to be updated, so never doesn’t seem much of a stretch.

Meanwhile it took only a couple of hours after the announcement was made at Britannica‘s Chicago HQ for word of the antiquated info-porkster’s demise to be reported and duly documented on Wikipedia. If the shoe had been on the other technological/editorial foot, we would have learned about the free, web-based “universal encyclopedia”‘s end in the pages of Britannica by, oh, say around 2020.

Some things cease to exist simply because they're, well, stupid!

There have already been plenty of commentaries on the end of this venerable publication. The hippest amongst them point out (rightly, I think) that the Britannica‘s model — that of providing one voice (often, but certainly not always considered a leading expert) explaining The Truth, just doesn’t cut it. Knowledge, fed by research, vetted by peer review and the merciless crucible of the Real World, constantly changes. Making the approach taken by Wikipedia far better suited to keeping those who simply must know, properly up to speed at all time.

I would add another angle. For me, Britannica always represented a sort of upper middle class snootiness — if you didn’t have a set, it said something not very flattering about you and your family’s socio-economic position.

The company’s business model was ruthless, a classic example of aggressive, guilt-inducing, bottom-feeding capitalism of the worst kind.  I’m old enough to remember waves of merciless door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen sweeping regularly through our neighborhood, barging in and shaming countless working class families into shelling out what was for them a not-so-small fortune (“no problem, simply avail yourselves of our easy, monthly payment plan!”), desperate that their children have every chance to carve out a better life for themselves.

Of course, for most of us whose families did manage to acquire this Holy Grail of home reference works, once obtained, we scarcely cracked a cover, outside the occasional furtive search for articles on heady topics like Sexual Intercourse, the Kinsey Report, and Hitler’s Bunker.

In a world where it costs almost as much to send a book to someone as the book’s cover price, it’s little surprise the Britannica has gone where cowboys who smoke went before.

Adios, Marlboro Man. Vaya con Dios, Britannica

But let’s remember amidst all the inevitable nostalgia for “a simpler, less troubled time” (tell that to folks still alive who lived through Auschwitz or Pol Pot, or get on the ol’ sat phone and have a quick chat between mortar shell bursts and machine gun fire with anyone still alive in Homs), that Britannica never actually democratized knowledge. It merely provided those who owned it with the facade, the appearance they knew something those who didn’t have it didn’t know. It was a smug, dust-gathering reminder on the sagging bookshelf of one’s inherent superiority, a several-hundred-pound trophy that said to all who gazed upon its long row of gold-embossed spines, “these people have got it.” Literally.

Those who didn’t, or those who sported cheaper, less prestigious alternatives (mine was, sad to say, a World Book household), didn’t. Losers.

So after almost two-and-a-half centuries, no more print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Good riddance. The Britannica is dead. Love live Wikipedia!

 

Authorcloud — a great notion!

13 Tuesday Mar 2012

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Ken Kesey’s favorite work was… a bus. Seriously.

Ken Kesey once said his psychedelic bus, Further, was his greatest work. Easy for him to say, with books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion under his belt.

Most writers I know are not yet ready to move on to auto art. They have a ways to go yet, creatively and commercially, before they feel they have the luxury to cash a royalty check and invite some pals to hop aboard and go cavorting down the West Coast, dispensing wisdom and hallucinogens to an unsuspecting public.

In fact, for most authors, their own personal Magical Mystery Tours have little to do with Peace, Love, and LSD, and a lot to do with effective writing, decent design, and trying to figure out how to reach an audience in the 21st century.

Which is why I’ve decided to create a new Authorcloud — a web-based dispenser of author services for discerning, self-publishing authors. Authorcloud will provide professional editorial and design support, as well as advice, coaching, mentoring, news, opinion, and links, all tailored to help writers create works they will be proud of.

IN A HURRY? SKIP THE REST, CLICK HERE, AND WATCH THIS!

In short, the new Authorcloud is intended to become the place on the web for self-publishing authors who really care about the quality of their work, would like some advice, support, and tips from a seasoned publishers, and enjoy sharing experiences, suggestions, and encouragement with other writers.

So big functionality is on the way. In the meantime, if you have a manuscript kicking around and would love quick (FREE!) professional feedback, send it to us. We’ll take a look and give you some brief, unvarnished feedback from publishing industry pros (led by me — I’ve been working with authors & publishing books for 35 years). Just send it to: info@authorcloud.com. I mean, why not?!

And for those of you who already know you need some professional help (no, no, not that kind of help — I’m thinking of editing and/or design assistance here), again, just drop us an email at the same address. We’re open for business during our site construction project — in fact I’ll tell you about some of the terrific editorial and design projects we’ve recently done or are currently working on in upcoming posts — it’s always inspirational to hear stories about people who just do it!

R.G. Morse is the founder of Authorcloud, and the author of six books. His latest, MAN UP IN TEN LESSONS, is available as an ebook, for Kindle users, Barnes & Noble NOOK users, KOBO users, and in the Apple iBooks section of iTunes.