Sarah Kanning

Drat! I was all ready to sing the praises of The Greenwood Press Daily Life Through History Series as a useful tool for writers, having read the volume on life in Chaucer’s England by Forgeng and McLean (quite readable but detailed), but the books on Elizabethan England and the Vikings (yes, that’s two separate books) don’t seem nearly as detailed or thorough, especially the Viking one. Maybe I’m expecting too much.

Well, they are reasonable places to start, but I think I’d have to supplement my reading quite a bit about the Vikings in particular, beyond what I’ve found here, before I’d feel ready to write a story set during that time.

Every Friday, I read the front page articles of the Kansas City Star into a little headset that records them into a phone system that people who are visually disabled can call to hear the stories read back to them. It’s a great program (Audio Reader), and the perfect volunteer opportunity for people who are introverted and have really clear speaking voices.

Anyway, today’s front page story was all about Barack Obama’s speech last night, and included long excerpts from it. I hadn’t caught the speech last night, so this was my first impression. The parts I read of it seemed good, and were likely very inspiring, but what struck me was how long the sentences were — I kept running out of breath before I got to the ends of sentences and would have to re-record so I didn’t gasp like a guppy in the recording — but everything was still extraordinarily clear and understandable. Typical newspaper article sentences are really short by comparsion. Maybe all those dramatic pauses speechmakers make are really just chances for them to catch their breath.

I was reminded of something I’d heard about Allen Ginsberg. I’m pretty sure it was Alicia Ostriker,who said it in a talk she gave. She’d met Ginsberg and they were talking about breathing and the line of the poem, and the unusually long lines in his poem, “Howl.” He indirectly compared practicing his breathing for that poem to the kind of Lamaze-style breathing one learns for childbirth. Breathing for swimming and singing (especially singing) would seem a natural fit for this, too.

Just picked up a copy of Kate Wilhelm’s book, Storyteller, and I really like it. It’s a sort of memoir/writing guide that recounts the history of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and provides a lot of useful writing advice.

I especially liked her description of what she calls Silent Partner (SP for short), which is what I’ve always referred to as “the gremlins that live in the back of my head.” If you were a Jungian, you might call SP your unconscious, the nonverbal, mysterious part of you that you can’t access with logic or reason that is nevertheless essential for writing stories (and really, anything except business reports or technical specifications). She spends a few pages on how to cultivate your relationship to SP, its care and feeding, and so on. (If you have the book handy, it’s on page 137.)

Her description of the semi-controlled chaos of the early years reminds me of residencies at Bennington Writing Seminars, which are ten-day exercises in sleep deprivation, with nonstop conversation poured around about ten hours a day of scheduled workshops, readings, and lectures. I always felt like an overstimulated toddler on the verge of a meltdown by about day 8, but it was worth it.

So I picked up this book at the library, Elemental mind: human consciousness and the new physics, by Nick Herbert, and it’s pretty interesting. It’s about how studies of quantum mechanics and human consciousness might fruitfully intersect, and Herbert uses as a literary device the story of a sentient robot named Claire who strives to become conscious. (The robots in “Sex with Ghosts” aren’t conscious, either, but could probably pass a Turing test.)

This book is fun and got me thinking, but it was published back in 1993, so I started poking around to see what’s new on the topic lately. (Have I mentioned that I love working in an academic library?) Seems a fairly hot topic still in journals like Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, Minds & Machines, and the Journal of Consciousness, so now I have some more reading to dig into. If I dig up anything interesting, I’ll report back.

I’m so excited. My first fiction sale, and it’s available online now at

www.strangehorizons.com/2008/20080818/sexghosts-f.shtml

It’s going to ruin my wholesome midwesterner reputation completely, but I’m very happy with it. I mean, a robot sex worker quoting Yeats while she makes tea? It was a lot of fun to write, anyway, and I hope others will like reading it.

For those interested in the origins of stories, this one came about because I read a brief article about a guy who wrote a whole book about how people will sooner or later be having intimate relations with sentient robots (Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships by David Levy). Since the porn market seems to be at the cutting edge of every technological trend, I thought, sex bot brothel: what would that be like? And here ya go…

I have now officially re-purposed this blog. Look here for interesting things I’m reading or have stumbled across recently, opinions (never a shortage there), and updates on what I’m working on of late.

Whew, that was a relief. Now I can do whatever I want with this thing!

This just in from the business section of the New York Times:

“Society is obsessed with the idea of talent and genius and people who are ‘naturals’ with innate ability,” says Ms. Dweck, who is known for research that crosses the boundaries of personal, social and developmental psychology.

“People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.” (emphasis added)

The quote is from Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. The article focuses on success in business, but I’ve been reading The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin (and will be reviewing that here soon), and he says something similar about creative pursuits.

It seems to come down to the way people think about learning and developing skills. If they tend to think they are good at things because they are smart and talented, then when they inevitably screw up, it must be because they are stupid hacks. On the other hand, people who think they are good at things because they have worked hard and focused a lot of time, energy, and attention on developing those skills, when they inevitably screw up, they decide it’s because they need to do some more work, try harder, try a different angle, revise their approach, et cetera. (Those are my words; Waitzkin talks about brittleness versus resiliency in the two approaches to performance.)

The NYTimes article puts it this way:

People with a growth mind-set tend to demonstrate the kind of perseverance and resilience required to convert life’s setbacks into future successes. That ability to learn from experience was cited as the No. 1 ingredient for creative achievement in a poll of 143 creativity researchers cited in “Handbook of Creativity” in 1999.

As soon as I chose the domain name (theproductivewriter.com), I started second-guessing myself.

Productive? Is that my primary goal? I mean, what about “daring” or “dangerous” or “exuberant” or any number of other funky adjectives (I’m a writer, I know adjectives).

And if I’m not churning out 1500 words a day (or 500, or 200, or whatever I’ve predefined as “productive”), am I an unproductive writer? My answer: sometimes. But not always.

In short, the name of the blog has been somewhat at odds with the spirit I’ve been bringing to it. Therefore, in the spirit of truth in labeling, I’m looking around at some other ideas: I’m considering the Unstuck Writer, for instance, or just going with my own name on the blog, which will simplify things.

More soon…

A few months back, I ran across a huge controversy about The Stolen Word, a short story by Lisa Mantchev, which was published in Fantasy Magazine and immediately came under criticism for its portrayal of “peddlers,” which many readers took to be thinly disguised Roma (aka Gypsies) or Tinkers (a distinct racial group in Ireland that I hadn’t known anything about prior to all this). You can read the story and the continuing conversation yourself, and I also recommend Kelley Eskridge’s thoughtful essay on privilege and the need for writers to become conscious of their own biases.

What struck me is that the story’s author tried to disguise the fact that the “peddlers” were inspired by the Roma people (it comes out in the comments) — changing names, accents, appearance, et cetera, but didn’t seem to think about overturning the stereotype itself. I believe this would be possible to do with a minimum of disruption to the story, while still doing all the things artistically and creatively that the author seemed to want to do in it.

The story proper begins, “It was the right sort of day to sell a child to the peddlers.” The mother of a truly horrible child finds some peddlers and trades the kid for various goods. The story continues with the wicked child doing horrible things to the peddler and his wife, until they leave her hanging in a bush to trouble the next person to come along.

But what if the peddler didn’t just simply agree to buy the child? What if the peddler had sorta-kinda gone along with the suggestion, then gone back to his wife and said, “Holy sh-t! This lady wants to SELL us her kid! Where do these landspeople get this stupid idea?” They discuss the matter and decide a woman who would sell her child is surely not a fit mother, and it would be best to go along with the scheme and raise the child as their own.

Suddenly this fictional story takes place in a world where one group has a bias against another group that perhaps doesn’t match reality, thus calling into question the stereotype. Without this tweak, it’s assumed that yes, it’s perfectly sane to expect to be able to sell a child to a peddler, so the stereotype stands as reality.

The best stories, the ones I aspire to read and write, can really mess with our heads in wonderful ways, undermining our stereotypes and assumptions and generally rearranging our mental furniture (with or without our leave). This can happen for the writer as well as the reader - if the writer is paying attention as she writes.

My favorite example of this is Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, in which the barbaric people have light-colored skin, hair and eyes, and the civilized, sophisticated people are the people of the Archipelago, who have dark skin and kinky-curly hair. Reading it as a kid, I didn’t quite realize what was going on until a few dozen pages in, at which point I had an A Ha! moment. In that moment, I realized that I had a (previously) unconscious bias: I had assumed the main character and his people were like me, and they were, they were fully realized characters with hopes and dreams and flaws and messy lives - but they also weren’t. They looked different from me. They weren’t white.

That was a powerful moment for me, and it has kept me on the lookout for my own unconscious bias since then. Sometimes I fail, and sometimes I manage to bring my bias to light, where I can examine it critically and maybe chip away at it for next time. I hope not to fail publicly, but that’s part of the risk of publishing your writing - you can neither bury your mistakes like a doctor or plant trees and shrubs around them like an architect, you just have to hope they go out of print.

Just read an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education which was about librarianship and jobs in libraries, but it contained this paragraph:

I know of one job seeker who has a Ph.D. in English, publications including a scholarly monograph, many years of college teaching experience, a recent MLIS, and substantial preprofessional library experience. She sent out nearly 200 applications over an 18-month period before being offered a professional job as a reference and instruction librarian. (my emphasis)

That’s an average of 3 applications a week for a year and a half, folks. Having gone through the process of applying for several jobs in academia, I can tell you that doing that many applications in that period of time actually decreases the likelihood that you will be called for an interview and get the job.

Why? Because to be successful, you need to tailor your materials to the job you are applying for. Each job will require a slightly different CV, and probably a fairly different cover letter, different teaching materials, etc. If you don’t do that preparatory work, you will not get the job; you will probably not even get an interview.

This is an interesting phenomenon with carryover to the writing submissions process. Submitting work is partly, but not only, a numbers game. Writers need to send out work, probably to many places, in order to find a home for it, but we also need to do our best to find the venues where that work fits. In other words, it’s also a matchmaking game - and it’s very difficult to be a matchmaker for your own work. (This is why literary agents exist; unfortunately, you have to do your own matchmaking to find an agent, and to get your work published in magazines and journals.

So who will be more successful:

• a writer who sends out 200 submissions to journals all over the country (some of which she may even have read),
• a writer who sends out 20 submissions to magazines that seem like they’d be a good match based on what’s on their web sites, or
• a writer who sends out six submissions to journals she has read (all the way through, multiple issues)?

I know where I’m betting my time and energy.