Tag: creative writing

My ReaderCon 2018 Experience (Part 1)

I went for three days without seeing the sun.

Not best practice in terms of health, but it tells you something about how busy I was at ReaderCon this past weekend.

Quick disclaimer: This is going to be a long post, as will be the part 2 follow-up. I’m trying to paint a clear picture of my experience to help others unfamiliar with ReaderCon decide whether or not to give it a try next year. That will take more than a few quick words.

What, you ask, is ReaderCon? Until last summer, I’d never heard of it. Then, one of my instructors in my MFA program suggested I attend. “It’s about the best Con in New England, and it’s local for you.”

So, I looked into it.

To quote from ReaderCon’s homepage:

“Readercon is the only small convention regularly attended by such giants of imaginative literature as Gene Wolfe, Samuel R. Delany, John Crowley, Barry N. Malzberg, Kit Reed, and Jonathan Lethem.

The program consists of two tracks each of panel discussions, author readings, and solo talks or discussion groups, plus kaffeeklatsches (intimate gatherings with an author) and autograph signings.

There is a large bookshop full of new, used, and rare and collectible books and magazines (and yet more great conversation; if a Readercon attendee is not at a program item, they’re probably here).”

This convention is all about the people!

I met many authors (both established and aspiring) as well as avid readers, all of whom were open and friendly and willing to chat with me. You might remember from my post about Boskone that I sometimes have trouble engaging with folks in new and unfamiliar settings. That was not a problem this time around. That said, I did rig the game of talking to people slightly in my favor with judicious use of name tag add-ons.

Without further ado, here’s what my four-day, three-night romp at ReaderCon looked like.

Thursday:

I checked into my hotel room at the Boston Marriott in Quincy at around 6:30 PM. First impressions of the hotel itself? Meh. I doubt folks are attending because of the fantastic rooms. The carpets were difficult to look at, the closets seemed designed to dissuade anyone from actually using them, and (oddly) the bathrooms lack any towel hooks. For whatever reason, that last detail really bothered me. Why, Marriott, do you have zero places for me to hang up a towel in the bathroom? Why?! That is, however, the limit of my complaints. The rest is all glowing praise.

Thursday night’s program kicked off at 8 PM with panel discussions that were free and open to the public. Despite that, attendance was sparse. Probably because it was a Thursday. The two panels I attended were:

1) Writers Who Edit, Editors Who Write

Author and funny man, Scott Edelman

The panel consisted of Sabrina Vourvoulias, John Lawson, Scott Edelman, Mimi Mondal, and Mike Allen.

For an hour, these folks talked about the tricky task of balancing being an editor of others’ work and writing your own stuff.

“There’s a long history of writers who became editors and then stopped writing their own work.” – Scott Edelman

“My rule to keep me working on my owns stuff is this. Add three sentences to your own story every day no matter what.” – Mike Allen

“When we edit, we’re reshaping the bones of a story. When we write, we’re creating the bones from scratch.” – Sabrina Vourvoulis

“I’ve had people tell me to stop writing and just be an editor because I was so good at editing.” – Mimi Mondal

“As a writer, I feel inspired by the submissions that come across my desk. I learn a lot from both the good and bad pieces that I edit.” – John Lawson.

The advice that stuck with me most came from Scott Edelman, however. He said, “Learn how to say no!” His comment was in reference to taking on editing projects, but I think it’s useful to writers who don’t edit, too, because there is always going to be someone asking you to do something for them.

2) Fabric Goods in Fantasy Settings

The panel consisted of Victoria Janssen, Natalie Luhrs, Sarah Smith, Tom Greene, and Elaine Isaak.

The discussion centered around the economics of producing the clothes that characters wear in fantasy and science fiction stories. Consensus? Few authors drop any references into their worlds of the supply chains involved or the various professions involved (other than, perhaps, tailors and blacksmiths). What’s missing? Where are all the animals providing the leather? Where are the fields of cotton or flax? Where are the silkworm farms? And, where are the people who tend the animals, tan the leather, gather the cotton, process the flax into linen, harvest the silken threads, or dye the woven cloth? (I’m looking at you George R. R. Martin, famous describer of every single character’s outfit to the last button).

By the time 10 PM rolled around, I was happy but tired, so instead of hitting up the BarCon — a term I became familiar with this weekend –, I went to bed. It was the earliest I would manage for the rest of the convention.

Friday:

I popped out of bed bright and early at 6:30, showered, dressed, then loaded up on breakfast in the hotel restaurant. As a chronically light eater, I opted not to go for the buffet. Given the price, I would have had to be a bottomless pit to make it financially feasible, so I ordered from the regular menu. It must be noted that the hotel restaurant is quite expensive, but there was a hotel shuttle ferrying folks to and from the redline T-stop every half hour. If I’d wanted to, I could have headed into Boston and found better food for less money. But it was my first time at ReaderCon, and I didn’t know how it worked. I didn’t want to risk missing out on anything significant, so I stayed inside the hotel (hence the three days without actual sunlight touching my skin).

First Name Drop:

On my way out from breakfast, I stopped at the Starbucks at the hotel bar to grab some caffeine. A man was waiting to be seated who looked familiar to me.

He’s an author, I thought. I’ve seen him before. I should talk to him!

Ken Schneyer, a master storyteller!

Boskone is the only other place I could have seen this gent, so I asked him if he’d been on any of the panels. Why, yes, he had. I offered a hand to shake and introduced myself. Imagine my surprise and delight to find myself shaking hands with Mr. Kenneth Schneyer, prestigious and prolific author of many excellent speculative and science fiction short stories (and a few novels). Turns outs, he’s not just a great writer but also a great human being. It came out in the quick exchange that I was pretty new to writing conferences. Ken went out of his way for the rest of ReaderCon to smile and say hello and talk to me whenever he saw me. He wasn’t the only one, either. I’m telling you, ReaderCon was terrific!!

Getting Registered:

I wandered back to the registration table and queued up to officially register and get my name badge. There were two options for how one could wear the plastic badge–either clipped to your clothing or dangling from a thin black lanyard around your neck.

Interlude: A Rant about Placement of Name Badges

Take this piece of advice to heart. Do NOT go for the lanyard option, and here’s why. Someone sees you from across the way. You look like an interesting person. They would like to meet you, say hello, learn your name, chat you up, hear your thoughts on books and writing and life. They swallow their nerves and approach you. The natural instinct is to check your name badge, but oops–to do that, they have to break polite eye contact and allow their gaze to drift down your torso to your midriff where your name badge is dangling. Awkward. Worse, there’s a 50/50 chance that the plastic card is flipped around backward and they have raked their eyes up and down your body for no reason at all. Twice as awkward!!

Please, use the clip option, and affix your name high up near your shoulder. Easy peasy fresh and breezy and no awkward body-gazing needed. End of interlude.

ReaderCon had an ingenious name badge add-on option available. You could write anything (within reason) you wanted on fabric tags that could then be securely adhered to the bottom of your badge. I saw lots of folks using them as a chance to clarify preferred gender pronouns (thank you so much to folks who did that, by the way).

I chose to use my add-ons as a way to invite people to talk to me, and to give them a conversation starter as an “in.” It worked quite well.

Kaffeeklatsches!

At the sage advice of a volunteer manning the registration table Thursday night, I wandered over to where the Kaffeeklatsch sign-up book lay at around 9:45 AM, fifteen minutes before sign-up officially opened. Good thing I did, too. There was already a line of folks forming, and people were already filling up the slots with their names.

If you don’t know what a kaffeeklatsch is, fear not. I didn’t know either until Boskone when I missed all of them because I didn’t realize you had to sign up for them in advance. Hence my 9:45 AM appearance at the sign-up table. A kaffeeklatsch is a small, intimate affair in which an author (or editor, or agent) sits down with ten to fifteen folks and spends an hour shooting the breeze, talking about whatever people want to talk about.

I thought I would sit quietly at the tables and let others ask their questions and share their thoughts. After all, this was my first time attending these things. Best to sit back, watch, and learn. That didn’t happen. The authors were too friendly, too engaging. So were all the other folks at the table. The conversations were lively, and I quickly found myself sucked in, laughing and chatting away with everyone else. So great!

Here’s the list of folks who I got to meet and talk with via the Kaffeeklatsches at ReaderCon:

1) Nicholas Kauffman

Horror writer extraordinaire and a super nice guy. I pre-ordered his upcoming new book “100 Fathoms Below” within 20 minutes of his klatsch ending. The pitch that sold it for me? Disabled American submarine in Soviet waters with a vampire on board. Yup. That’s for me. Thank you!

2) James Morrow

Okay, I signed up but didn’t attend. One of the problems I had at ReaderCon was having no free time to feed myself. By the time this klatsch was starting up, my hands were starting to shake, and I was feeling panicky from hunger. I had to eat. Sorry, Mr. Morrow. I’ll try to catch you next time. Your book, The Asylum of Dr. Caligari, is fantastic, by the way.

3) Ken Liu and Anatoly Belilovsky

The conference room in which the kaffeeklatsches happened accommodated two groups at a time, divided by a mobile wall. Ken and Anatoly’s klatsches were scheduled for the same time slot. Because they knew each other and did similar stuff regarding translating Chinese (in Ken’s case) and Russian (in Anatoly’s case) fiction to English, they opted to break down the dividing wall and combine their klatsches. I found the ensuing conversations about balancing their own writing with the job of translating others’ works to be fascinating. I also enjoyed listening to Ken and Anatoly discuss the many nuanced elements that go into translating literature from one language to another.

My mind kept returning to the two versions of Ovid’s Metamorphosis that I and my beloved own. It’s the same story, but the two translations (we sat and read the story of Apollo and Daphne back and forth to each other one morning) created different tones and different points of thematic emphasis.

4) Max Gladstone

I love, love, LOVE Max’s Craft Sequence books, and so I was very excited to sit in a room with this man and bask in his presence. That’s all I wanted to do. However, Max’s klatsch happened immediately after the “Bureaucracy in Fantasy” panel. More than half of us in Max’s klatsch (including Max) had attended the panel, and Max had asked the last question fielded before the man with the bright red “STOP!” sign ended things. So, Max’s kaffeeklatsch turned into an extended discussion of bureaucratic systems both in the real work (in China, specifically) and in fantasy settings. It was great!

5) Victoria Janssen

Why, you might be asking yourself, would I sign up for this kaffeeklatsch? After all, I’m a self-proclaimed YA and MG writer. Victoria writes adult erotica! Well, the YA novel I’m working on at the moment takes place in a secondary world in which women are the unapologetically dominant gender. That means my characters have never experienced male-induced body-shaming or sexual-stigmatization. They are fully realized and fully confident sexual beings. Sex is not shied away from in this world I’ve created. It is openly discussed, and even more openly practiced. Yet, as I pointed out, it’s a YA novel. I’m walking a narrow and tricky line here. How do I write sex scenes that are 1) well-done and 2) strike the right balance of on-page/off-page references so that this manuscript doesn’t get kicked back to me with a “thanks but a little too edgy” comment in the rejection email I get from every YA agent I sub it to? This was my chance to sit down with a woman who knows how to write sex scenes in their many iterations and ask my questions. The conversation was, as you might guess, both stimulating and enlightening. I’m so glad to have met Victoria and to have had a chance to benefit from her experience and insights.

6) Navah Wolfe

A chance to sit down with the senior editor at Saga Press?! Yes, please. Let me sit and be showered with insider tips and suggestions for the SFF publishing industry. Which, by the way, is exactly what happened. Plus, I received an impromptu education into the joys of Eurovision. Didn’t even know that was a thing!

Navah talked faster than an auctioneer after her third espresso, and her energy and enthusiasm was infectious. I don’t know how old Navah is, but she looked too young to be a senior editor. After spending an hour with her, however, I realized that she’s got the advantage of youth on her side because her job (and her clear love of and commitment to it) sounds exhausting.

That’s it for the kaffeeklatsches. I spent the rest of my time at ReaderCon attending panel discussions, chatting with friendly folks at the bar and at the after-parties up on the eighth floor of the hotel.

Friday Panels:

Every time slot was quadruple-booked with interesting panel discussions. If only I had Hermione’s time turner, I could have gone to every panel that sounded interesting (all of them). Alas, I had to pick and choose. Here are the one’s I sat in on.

On Dislike – Between Meh and Rage

The panel consisted of KJ Kabza, Lauren Roy, Graham Sleight, J.R. Dawson, and Auston Habershaw.

Take-away from this discussion? Life is short. If a book isn’t hooking you for good or ill, dump it and move on.

The Bureaucracy of Fantasy

The panel consisted of Victoria Sandbrook, Ken Schneyer, Phenderson Djèlí Clark, John Wiswell, and Alex Jablokow.

Of course, the Ministry of Magic was brought up and discussed at length. I get it. Harry Potter is practically universal; most of us who are fans of fantasy and science fiction have read it. But… there are so many other interesting examples that could have been mentioned. I still can’t believe no one brought up the movie Brazil!!

Feminist Socialism in Fantastika

The panel consisted of Veronica Schanoes, Tamara Vardomskaya, and Marissa Lingen.

Wow. In the best possible way, wow. These three women knew so much about the topics of socialism in literature, feminism in literature, and the combination of the two in literature. I was blown away. Humbled, really. I added about ten books and authors to my TBR list.

Friday Night Fun

The final events of Friday were purely social in nature. At 9:00 PM ReaderCon hosted a “Meet the Prose Party” in which participating panelists printed witty one-offs from one of their published works on sticky mailing labels and walked around a big ballroom with them in hand. The idea? Folks like me could walk up to someone carrying printed labels and ask for one. It gave us shy people a way to engage with authors when we might otherwise not.

Also, there was a bar at the back of the ballroom. I do not often partake of the alcoholic beverages, but a beer gave my hands something to hold onto, and the ethanol settled my nerves. Win-win.

The mailing label thing worked like a charm, too. By the end of it, I had both sleeves of my shirt lined with snippets from over twenty published authors, and each time I requested one, I read it and asked the giver to tell me more about the work from which it came. Hooray for socializing!!

At 10:30 PM, music started playing, and the 80’s/90’s themed dance began. I had my 80’s outfit ready to go up in my hotel room but never went up to put it on. Too much fun being had to pause for a costume change. By 11:30 PM, most folks had either called it a night or headed off for other, smaller parties elsewhere. A natural night owl I am not, so I climbed into bed at 11:45 PM, read for about two minutes and crashed.

I still had all of Saturday and the half-day schedule on Sunday ahead of me, but by the end of Friday I’d gotten my money’s worth from ReaderCon. You can check out the rest of my adventure in My ReaderCon 2018 Experience–Part 2 (coming soon). You’ll want to read all about my second name-dropping moment, which also happened in the hotel restaurant over breakfast (involving Samuel Delaney). In the meantime, you can check out my Instagram for pic’s from this year’s ReaderCon29.

Are you a writing convention enthusiast? Which Cons have you attended? Any you’d like to recommend to the rest of us newbies? Do share in the comments!

Thanks for dropping by and as always, happy writing to you.

July 18, 2018
Neuroscience Hack #2-Writing That Hooks Readers

In my previous post, Writing that Hooks Readers-Neuroscience Hack #1, I discussed how elements of change affect our brains as we read. As promised, I”m back with the next installment of this multi-part exploration of the neuroscience behind writing that grabs our attention and pulls us in.

If you’ve ever watched an Olympic sporting event like the floor routine in gymnastics, you might have seen shots of athletes preparing to compete. They stand to the side, eyes closed, twisting their bodies around in odd ways. You know what they’re doing. They’re envisioning their routine, imagining the jumps, the turns, the tucks. The term for it is pre-visualization, and there’s plenty of data in the field of neuroscience to show that it improves performance in the live competition. The same things happening to those athlete’s brains occur inside readers’ minds when they read. Provided, that is, an author uses a few key tricks when they write.

Brain Hack #2: “Monkey See, Monkey Do” is a Truer Statement Than You Think

In 1996, a team of Italian scientists inserted electric probes into the premotor cortices of monkeys. They tracked neuron (nerve cell) activation in the animal’s brains when they reached for a toy or grasped a piece of food or brought a cup of water to their mouth to drink. Each time a monkey did something, the scientists noted which neurons fired during each activity.

Interestingly, they discovered that when a scientist reached for a toy or grasped a piece of food, the neurons in a watching monkey’s brain would fire in the same way as if the animal were the one performing the actions. The lead scientist said, “…we realized that the pattern of neuron activity associated with the observed action was a true representation in the brain of the act itself, regardless of who was performing it.” (G, Rizzolatti, et al. “Mirrors in the Mind.” Scientific American, 2006. pp. 54–61. Print.)

What does that mean? From a neuroscience, it means our brains simulate what we observe others do and experience. In the book The Storytelling Animal, author Johnathan Gottschall suggested that this phenomenon offers us a “safe” way to learn new skills. It also lets us assess possible consequences of specific actions without endangering ourselves.

To better understand this idea, you have to know about a couple of specific types of neurons.

Motor Neurons

These are the nerve cells that stimulate our muscles when we kick, jump, or swing a bat. They originate in a region in our brain called the motor cortex and end in our muscles.

Mirror Neurons

These are the neurons our Italian scientist friends saw firing in their monkeys. The science is far from conclusive on why these cells exist. However, many folks believe mirror neurons help us understand the intent of other people’s actions. They also help us learn new skills by imitation.

Whereas motor neurons fire when we kick, jump or swing a bat, mirror neurons fire when we watch (or read) someone else kick, jump, or swing a bat. If a person is hooked up to a fMRI brain scanner while watching a film of an X-games freestyle skier launching off a half-pipe doing some crazy, twisty, flip thingy, the mirror neurons in their motor cortex light up brightly. Inside their brains, it looks like they’re the ones coming off the half-pipe. Even if they’ve never been skiing!

Writers Can Use Mirror Neurons to Deepen Reader Engagement

Include strong action verbs that reference specific body parts in your writing to stimulate your readers’ mirror neurons. The key to this brain hack working, however, is the specificity of your descriptions.

“He did a flip off the diving board.”

– this sentence uses an auxiliary verb (did) versus an action verb (flipped). Flip, in this sentence is a noun, a thing, not an action than can be mirrored in our minds.

“He flipped himself backward off the diving board.”

– in this sentence, flipped is an action verb, which is a stronger choice. Reading about an action, at least in theory, can stimulate mirror neurons. Also, we know something about the direction of the action (backward) and a rudimentary setting (the diving board). However, the verb flip refers to the whole body rather than specific body parts, so it doesn’t stimulate mirror neurons all that much.

“Pumping his arms like pistons, he heaved his weight downward against the edge of the diving board, then rode its recoil high into the air, tucking his knees tight to his chest as he spun, and craned his neck back as he sought to find the water.”

– I went a bit over-the-top with this one, but I wanted to make a clear point. This sentence contains multiple action verbs (pumping, heaved, rode, tucked, spun, craned, sought, and find). Many of the verbs reference specific parts of the body (arms, knees, and neck). The last element embedded into this sentence that is absent in the prior two examples is a clear goal. The individual is seeking the water. It’s the most engaging of the three because it does the best job of stimulating your motor cortex via mirror neuron activation.

So there you have it! Neuroscience hack #2: Mirror Neurons. Next time you sit down to write a scene, or edit a scene for that matter, pay attention to your use of verbs. Your readers will be pulled in and feel as if they’re living the story.

More posts about a neuroscience hacks writers can use to make their writing more engaging will be coming soon, so stay tuned.

Thanks for stopping by, and as always, happy writing to you!

July 11, 2018
The Value of a Creative Writing MFA – A (sort of) IWSG post

My first semester at a glance

In the very first post for this project way back in July of 2017, my entrance into an MFA graduate program of studies spurred the creation of this site. I’d been studying creative writing at Lesley University for just over a year at that point. Someone–I don’t remember who–suggested I start a blog.

So, I did. I called it a project rather than a blog, though, because I don’t really understand what a blog is. Is this site a blog? It’s irrelevant, I supposed. The point was to document my journey through my MFA program.

Which brings me to the main point for today’s entry.

I GRADUATED!!

Holy shoot! I’m done. It’s over. No more assigned books to read, reflective papers to write, deadlines to meet. No more feedback letters to read, mentors to pester with longwinded emails that are 90% anxiety dumps and 10% legitimate questions, no more residency classes to prep for. As of this past Saturday, I am Katherine Karch, MFA.

Thoughts are bouncing around in my noggin about the experience. Fresh, virgin, unanalyzed ideas. And they might be important, so I’m writing them here before I forget them. No doubt, I’ll be processing my MFA experience for years to come, but right now, one thought is burning brightly in my mind:

What did I get out of this crazy, two-year-long journey?

There are a few possible answers. The literal education, for one thing, was outstanding. I am definitely a more skilled writer now than when I entered the program. The daily discipline I developed over these past two years will serve me forever as I pursue a career in writing. But I think the community I got plugged into via this program might be the most important thing I gained.

The community? I can practically hear doubters rolling their eyes (that’s how hard they’re rolling them). You want a community? Babe, that’s what Facebook groups are for. You didn’t need to pony up X dollars for a masters program to get a community.

Firstly, don’t call me babe. Secondly, Facebook is a false community. So are all the thousands of other online communities that exist for writers, several of which I am a member and enjoy. The Insecure Writer’s Support Group is one. And since this is technically (although not completely) an IWSG post for the month of July, let me pause for a moment and plug that particular group. As far as online communities for writers go, it’s one of the best. Thanks to this month’s hosts: Nicki Elson,Juneta Key,Tamara Narayan,andPatricia Lynne!The question for this month was: What are your ultimate writing goals, and how have they changed over time (if at all)? I’ll be partly answering that question later on in this post.

NaNoWriMo and CampNaNoWriMo are two branches of another online resource. The Hatrack River Writer’s Workshop is yet another. They’re all great, but none of them is an actual community in so far as I’ve never met any of the other members in real life. The camaraderie and support I can garner from these groups is inherently limited.

I cannot speak to other MFA in Creative Writing programs, and I cannot speak to other people’s experience in the MFA program from which I just graduated. I can only tell you that, for me, the price tag worth it. The education I received at Lesley was outstanding, but the friendships I made might be even more important to my long-term success.

Contrary to the age-old cliché, writing is not a solitary process. Not if you want to be successful. A writer needs support from other folks, real folks they know in real life. People they can call, or have dinner with, or go to conferences with. People with whom they can stay up late talking about ridiculous things. That’s probably been true since the beginning, to be honest.

I entered graduate school two years ago not knowing any other writers. Today, as I sit and write this overly wordy blog post, I am thinking of a long list of writers both new and established whom I can now call “friend.” A select and small group of them might be (if I’m exceedingly lucky) my friends for life. And, now that I’m no longer their student, I am going to try on the descriptor of “friend” when referencing the mentors with whom I worked–Tracey Baptiste, Mikki Knudsen, Susan Goodman, Chris Lynch, and Jason Reynolds. It feels audacious of me, but be bold, I say. They were/are amazing people, and I hope to stay in touch with them (professionally, even, if everything goes according to my evil plan, mwah-ah-ah-ah).

A very well established and successful author who shall remain nameless told me just two nights ago that success in this industry (publishing) is as much about who you know as it is about what you know. That probably sounds very cynical, but I suspect it’s also true. Having navigated this program all the way through to the end, I am delighted to say that I am on stable ground on both fronts. My writing is better, and I know a lot more people. In knowing more people, I am significantly better positioned to achieve my ultimate goal as a writer, which is to support myself and my family by writing books. I have networking connections within the traditional publishing industry, and I have a community of people whom I know and like and trust. Folks who care about me and want to support me. Likewise, I care about them and want to support them. That’s going to make the road to success far less jarring and far more enjoyable.

I did it. I graduated. I am a creative writing “master,” which is a little weird to write. The title “novice” would probably be more accurate. But, two days out from having received my handshake and diploma (not really, just a certificate. The diploma will arrive in the mail a month from now), I am feeling most grateful for the people I met and the relationships I forged. If anyone ever questions my choice to pay for a masters in creative writing, citing the fact that I could have learned “all that stuff” from craft books and YouTube, I will simply smile at them and give them a pacifying nod. I will never regret my choice to do this because if I hadn’t attended Lesley, I would probably never have met and become close friends with the people I did. And isn’t that what life is all about? The people we meet? The relationships we form? The communities we build? It is for me.

How important are your friends for your long-term success in achieving your goals?

July 4, 2018
Writing That Hooks Readers – Neuroscience Hack #1
The final requirement for my Masters in Creative Writing program at Lesley University is to teach a graduate student seminar, and I’ve chosen a topic that merges my two great passions in life: biology and writing. More specifically, neuroscience and literature. I’m going to drop a little science on my fellow writers next week by teaching them three inescapable brain hacks they can employ to suck readers into their stories.

It occurred to me that these neuroscience hacks would make some cool blog posts. Today’s neuroscience hack is subtle but incredibly useful.

Brain Hack #1: The human brain evolved to monitor the immediate environment for signs of change.

It’s true! From an evolutionary standpoint, the brain is an organ with a singular purpose. To keep us alive. An essential part of “not dying” is noticing any kind of change to the current situation.

Change grabs our attention as we assess whether it is positive or negative. The brain then forms a “survival goal” based on the conclusion and takes steps to achieve that goal. It could be as simple as putting on a sweater when the temperature drops. Or eating food when blood glucose levels fall. Or running for cover when a strange shadow shifts position in the tall grasses of the African savannah.

Changes such as a hulking figure with a knife stepping from a shadowy alley come with potentially extreme consequences. Experiencing that situation firsthand could mean death. Thankfully, our brains developed workarounds that let us gain knowledge and experience safely.

We have the somewhat unique ability to learn by watching others deal with problems.

Forget it, babe. You’re hooked!

Whether the observed individual lives or dies, we gain knowledge that might keep us alive should we encounter a similar problem.

When we read fictional stories, we get to practice identifying changes and assessing their potential positives or negatives.

In 2007, researchers found that when people read stories, there is a significant increase in brain activity during narrative moments containing changes in characters, scene locations, or changes in characters’ goals.

Changes that Really Light Brains Up:
- Words that suggest the passage of time, such as later, soon, shortly, or immediately.
- Descriptions of spacial changes, such as characters moving from one room to another, or even moving from one side of a room to another.
- Descriptions of characters changing their interaction with objects (picking up or putting down objects, or opening or closing things like doors or windows).
- Showing characters starting a new, goal-oriented action with a clear intent. For example, initiating a conversation, preparing to jump over a puddle, or thrusting a sword during a fight.
Consider the following excerpt from Cressida Cowell’s middle grade novel How to Train Your Dragon:

The Dragon had crawled down into the depths of the ocean and gone into a Sleep Coma. Dragons can stay in this suspended state for eternity, half-dead, half-alive, buried under fathom after fathom of icy-cold seawater. Not a muscle of this particular Dragon had moved for six or seven centuries.

But the previous week, a Killer Whale who had chased some seals unexpectedly deep was surprised to notice a slight movement in the upper eyelid of the dragon’s right eye. An ancestral memory stirred in the whale’s brain and he swam away from there as fast as his fins could carry him. And, a week later, the sea around the Dragon Mountain—which had previously been teeming with crabs and lobsters and shoals and shoals of fish—was a great, underwater desert. Not a mollusk stirred, not a scallop shimmied.

Admit it, that’s some engaging writing. One of the reasons why it pulls you in so fast is because it contains so much change. Your brain locks onto the text as it tries to figure out whether those changes are good or bad. Cowell employs another interesting neuroscience hack in this excerpt, too, but that’s a topic for another post.

Regardless of the quality of the actual story being told (Twilight? The Da Vince Code? Fifty Shades of Gray?), certain tricks can grab readers by the brain and engage them. Change is one of them. Take a look at your writing and see if adding a few elements of change livens things up a bit.

Have you ever gotten so into a book you were reading that you lost track of time and literally forgot about the real world? What was the book, and what was it that sucked you in so effectively?

Thanks for stopping by, and as always, happy writing to you!
June 21, 2018
ReaderCon29, Here I Come!

As John Arnold said in Jurassic Park right before everything went south, “Hold onto your butts.”

I just booked my hotel room for ReaderCon29. Who’s excited? Meeeee!

ReaderCon29 will be the second writing conference I’ve ever attended, and my very first conference–Boskone–was fun but underutilized. I spent most of my time star-struck, tongue glued to the roof of my mouth, unable to approach authors and talk to them. So many missed opportunities. You can read all about my (mis)adventures at Boskone here.

For example, while I managed to get a copy of Ghost Talkers signed by Mary Robinette Kowal, I could not bring myself to join the circle of fans surrounding her at the art show and tell her how much I enjoyed her writing (not to mention her commentary and sass on the writing podcast “Writing Excuses.”)

Then there was Marshall Ryan Maresca and E. J. Stevens, both of whom (if they noticed me) probably got utterly skeeved out by the weird blonde woman stalking them from a distance all weekend long. Sorry about that, by the way, if either of them by some slim chance ever read this post. Didn’t mean to be a creeper. I just got so fetching shy! It wasn’t just you two. I couldn’t talk to anyone!

Not this time, I am telling myself without much confidence. This time, I will have done it once before. I won’t be a complete newb. I will be able to approach and interact with other people at the conference because I will remember that it is a writing conference. Everyone in attendance will have a love of books and writing in common with me. I will smile, just like last time, but then I will make my feet move, and I will approach people, and I will say “hello” and other normal things. I will not go mute and resort to hiding behind giant plants in lobbies and watching authors from great distances.

Jeffrey Ford is going to be there, though, so I might. The man is an incredible writer. Have you read his short story collection, A Natural History of Hell? Sooooo good!

Anyway, ReaderCon has been on my radar since last summer, when my Fantasy & Science Fiction professor, Mark Edwards, suggested I attend. He described it as the most prominent annual writing convention in Massachusetts. A “not to be missed” event.

I missed it.

But, I vowed to get there this summer. Registered way back in February, even. I mean, I have no excuses to miss it a second time. The cost to attend is incredibly affordable, and it takes place in Quincy, Massachusetts. That’s an hour and a half from where I live, for Thor’s sake. This morning, I went all in on the experience and ponied up the funds to secure a hotel room. Now getting to and from each day won’t be an issue.

I am ready to rock this conference. Okay, not really. I definitely need some pointers, guidance, encouragement, etc.

Here’s my plea:

If you’re also going to ReaderCon, help me overcome the paralytic shyness that grabbed me by the throat at Boskone55 and say hello. Connect with me over on Twitter and Instagram, so that by the time July rolls around, I will (at least in a theoretical, social media sort of way) already know a few folks. How awesome would that be?!

If you’re a seasoned writing conference attendee, what tips do you have for me that will help me make the most of ReaderCon29?

As always, thanks for stopping by, and happy writing to you.

June 11, 2018
Book Titles and Character Names: An IWSG Post

This month’s IWSG Question: What’s harder for you to come up with, book titles or character names?

Before I get talking about book titles and character names, allow me a moment to give a shout out to this month’s most excellent hosts: Beverly Stowe McClure, Tyrean Martinson, and Ellen @ The Cynical Sailor. Thank you all for hosting this month’s IWSG blog hop. And if you haven’t heard of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, you should take a moment jump over to their website and check them out. In addition to being a fantastic community of writer’s focused on supporting each other, the IWSG website has compiled a tremendous library of resources (articles, websites, opportunities).

Shout out finished, let’s get back to the question at hand.

Okay, confession, I don’t put a lot of thought into either of these two processes. I know, I know. That’s terrible of me. I agree with you.

A Rose By Any Other Name

A book’s title is critically important. It’s on the cover. Part of the “hook.” It helps a potential reader make that all-important snap-judgment decision to investigate further or pass over a book on the shelf for something better. I know that. But, I also recognize that an agent and/or an editor will be far more skilled at coming up with a title than I ever will be. If I pick a stinker of a title for a great story, and that story gets scooped up by an agent and sold to a publishing house with editors and marketers and publicists, someone, somewhere is going to notice the terrible title. Someone (with far more skill and expertise that I) will almost certainly come up with a knock-my-socks-off dazzling replacement that I would never have thought of.

And, I’m fine with that. Better than fine. I feel relieved in my certainty of it. The pressure is off for me. Heck, I might as well title everything “This title is temporary,” because if the story is good enough, someone will help me come up with something better.

Culture and History

I’ve read countless articles about the importance of picking the right name for characters in a story. In my first semester of grad school, I used an online name generator to name my characters. Then, my mentor at the time– Tracy Baptiste–sat me down and gave me a heart to heart on how careful I needed to be when naming my characters. Unfortunately, many of the names I’d chosen carried various Judeo-Christian legacies and meanings of which I was unaware. Oops. I was writing a secondary world fantasy in which the Abrahamic religions weren’t even a thing. Yet, I’d populated it with people bearing Abrahamic names like Jordan and Goodman. Didn’t work so well, even if the names sounded “nice.”

So, that’s a thing to consider. Does a particular name have historical meaning, context? Is it the product of a culture with distinct identifiers? Maybe that’s something you can use. A shortcut strategy for characterization. Is your MC a self-entitled rich snot? Well, you could do what Mackenzie Lee did in The Gentlemen’s Guide to Vice and Virtue and name him Montague. Gail Carriger gives her high society ladies names like Sephronia and Primrose and Prudence. If you’re going for irony, you might call the shrinking violet in your story Maxwell Steele (a power name if ever I’ve heard one). Maybe you want your readers to sense the strength and moral conviction at the root of your leading heroine’s personality, so you name her Joan (as in Joan of Arc?).

There’s a danger in being too overt with this technique, though. Stephen King got a raft of criticism for naming his main character in The Green Mile John Coffey because the initials were J.C. ( as in Jesus Christ) and John Coffey was kind of a sacrificial Christ-like figure in the book. Now, King is huge. He’s well established in his career, so he basically told his critics to stop taking everything so seriously. One day, I hope to be in a similar position, but that might take a while.

Sounds like…

Sibilance is also an important consideration when choosing a name for a character. Lyricism can’t be underestimated. It’s what I tend to focus most on. Does the name have a pleasing sound? The flow of consonants and vowels, soft or hard stops embedded within a name, which syllable carries the emphasis all affect the emotional centers of the brain.

I’ll give you an example. Consider these two names: Daphne, and Korinn. Physically, who is the taller, more athletic character? Who is more emotionally sensitive? Can you tell what gender the two characters are? With Daphne, that’s a classically female name, but what about Korinn? I made it up. It’s gender ambiguous but carries psychologically masculine overtones because of the hard “K” sound, and the long (powerful) ō, which also carries the syllabic emphasis, that rolls into that “r” sound. R’s sound animalistic. The sounds of the two names are already impacting your pre-conceived ideas about the characters.

Persons as Places or Things

Nothing subtle happening here.

Truth? This technique tends to rub me the wrong way if it isn’t done in an ironic or comedic capacity. Naming characters after actual places, objects, professions, or locations is just… in-artful. Judge, Everest, Nile (which, by the way, is my middle name, so I’m allowed to throw stones here). Neveah? [Rolls eyes]. I was SO disappointed when that one took off and became popular.

So, yeah, people do it. They’re usually trying to evoke emotion or invoke some spiritual quality inherent in the place or object. I know I’m making an assumption, but I don’t think parents name their daughters Rose or Lily or Summer because they want them to grow up to be hard-core, kick-ass, rule-breaking feminist. Nor do I think parents choose to call their son Hank or Don or President because they’re hoping the boy ends up with a high EQ score and decides to become a stay-at-home dad. More likely, they’re trying to invoke a legacy of athleticism and authority and traditionally masculine power and social status. If that’s all you’re trying to do when you name your characters after things or places or professions, your readers may get annoyed by the blunt force trauma of such a clunky and transparent technique. If, however, you’re doing it to characterize the people in the story who gave the character that name, or to showcase the the character is all the things their name might suggest they are not, then I think you’ve made an interesting and nuanced choice.

Do Your Homework, Then Trust Your Instincts

I guess I put more thought into my character’s names than I first realized. It isn’t a conscious effort, though. It’s instinctive. Which, before going through a Creative Writing MFA program, maybe wasn’t the best approach. Now, however, I have a better understanding of the underlying principles behind why names have such impact on readers.

Thanks to the advice I got in my first semester at Lesley University, I make up names (mostly) from scratch whenever I write fantasy stories, just to make sure I’m not accidentally tapping into any cultural or historical baggage.

If I someday choose to write a story that takes place in this world, with all the factual human history that comes with it, I’ll probably research geography and culture before settling on names. I mean, Ashika is a beautiful, feminine name. The sound if it is lovely. But it’s of Sanskrit origin and is a typical girl’s name in India. Maybe not what I’d go with for a female character of Irish descent living in Canada unless I had a specific and legitimate reason for it that was clearly conveyed in the narrative.

And, of course, if a name I pick doesn’t ring true or has some hidden meaning of which I’m unaware? Well… that’s what editors are for, right?

How do you select names for your characters? How do you settle on a title for your stories? Do you research intensively, or do you let your instincts guide you?

June 6, 2018
Refilling the Creative Well – A Must for All Artists

If you hadn’t yet realized, I’m a big fan of Julie Cameron’s book (and 12-week, self-guided course) The Artist’s Way. I took it as an interdisciplinary course my first semester in Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. It changed the way I thought about myself, about my creativity, and about the creative life in general. And one of the biggest lessons I learned in taking the class was this: creative individuals need to nurture their creative spirit by “refilling the creative well.”

The Act of Creation is Tiring

It is a common misconception among non-creatives and casual creatives that artists don’t “work” at what they do. From an outsider’s perspective, creation looks like play, and to some degree it is, but it is anything but casual play. It is active, and focused, and intentional, and draining.

That last point is essential to understand. Tapping into your creative mind is tiring, though many of us don’t notice that we’re fatiguing until we’re lying face down like a stick of butter that’s been left out on the counter in August. Letting ourselves reach that point is damaging and dangerous and difficult to recover from, so how we avoid it?

Try scheduling activities into your life that will nurture your creative spirit. Not use it, mind you. These are moments in which, as an artist, you receive rather than produce. Julie Cameron calls them “artist dates.” She advocates one per week. I agree, though I fall far from accomplishing that once-a-week schedule myself.

An artist date is anything that lets you to take in and enjoy the external world. Go out to eat at a nice restaurant. Go for a walk in the woods. Visit the beach. See an art installation at a local museum. Attend a concert. These should be private moments when you can be alone. For me, that’s difficult because my beloved is a visual artist. We tend to bundle our artist dates, which is fine but not ideal. Doing anything with anyone else necessarily involves moments of compromise, small or large. Artist dates are supposed to be 100% about you, so my co-dates aren’t ideal, but they’re certainly better than nothing.

Investing in Yourself as an Artist

The purpose of giving yourself an Artist Date is to “refill your creative well.”

Whether you’re a composer, a painter, a poet, or a novelist the act of creation uses energy. Literally. It also uses neurotransmitters. If you’re continually working on your art, you’re activating and reactivating the same neural networks in your brain again and again. The cells of those neural networks talk to each other via chemicals that are manufactured at night while you sleep. Over time, you can deplete your store of neurotransmitter by using them faster than you can make them.

That’s the fatigue that sets it. The lethargy, the creative block, the depression, the doubt. You’ve been working so hard creating beautiful art that you’ve exhausted the parts of your brain involved in the process. Athletes know this as “overtraining.” They avoid it by building “off days” into their training programs. Creative folks would be wise to follow suit.

I’m a writer, but I love the visual arts. Photographs, sculpture, painting. When I feel like my creative energies are waning, I hit up the Boston Museum of Fine Art or look for a local photography exhibit to attend. It gives me a chance to witness, take in, and be emotionally touched by what others have created without activating the pathways I use when I’m writing. Ideas enter from the outside world, not from the inside world. They get in there, bounce around in my subconscious, and mingle with my own ideas like colors swirling on the surface of a bubble.

The creative well begins to fill once more. When I’m ready to sit back down and start producing again, all kinds of new and exciting things might emerge from having experienced the products of other artists’ creative acts.

Art Festivals are Your Friend

When is the last time you attended a local art festival? Summer is upon us, folks. It’s the high season for art associations to exhibit their members’ works. I can’t recommend them enough as a place to go to be recharged and reinvigorated as a creative spirit.

This past weekend, my beloved and I walked into downtown Salem and got to see some fabulous art at the Salem Artist Festival. We also listened to talented musicians perform and sparkling dancers dance. The square crackled with creative energy and positivity. I soaked it up like a sponge and found myself breathing deeper and smiling more widely on the walk home. Life was, is, good. My creative well is brimming. Check out the photos I took along the way, and if you’re local try to get down there this weekend and check it out. You won’t be disappointed.

On my walk into town

Sometimes Salem reminds me of Copenhagen

Themes of mortality displayed in a gallery I passed by.

Arrived at the Old Town Hall, site of the art show

A great turnout at the artist reception and show

This wall was all oceanic, including the epic paper sea dragon!

Best artistic representation of cows I’ve ever seen

Look at the marvelous synergy between these two pieces

Hauntingly beautiful

Cycles of the feminine creative spirit captured in a repurposed clock

Mixed media painting of a paper mill. Note the paper mixed into the paint.

Outdoor dancing in the square

These women were amazing performers!

Festivities continued into the evening with live music.

Lovely evening shot of the harbor on my walk home.

When’s the last time you did anything to refill your creative well? What did you do? How did you feel afterward?

Thanks for stopping by, and happy writing to you!

June 4, 2018
Surviving the Creative Wilderness—Attitude is Everything

How Not to Die in The Woods

I own a book called “Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Wilderness Survival.” It’s a great book. It doesn’t teach you how to read a map or use a compass. It doesn’t explain what gear is essential for an extended wilderness trek. It does explain how to keep yourself alive in the wilderness if you have absolutely nothing with you but the clothes on your back. And for creative folks navigating this life, isn’t that a great analogy for how we must exist? We’ve got nothing but the clothes on our back. Metaphorically only, I hope.

Tom Brown’s book is divided into four parts, arranged in order of importance from the perspective of not dying. Parts two, three, four, and five are (in this order): Shelter, Water, Fire, Food. If you stop and think about it, that order makes perfect sense. You could die of exposure in the first few hours without shelter from the elements. You could die in three days without water, give or take. You can go for a long time without food, but most of it will kill you if you don’t cook it first, so fire comes before food.

The first part of the book, and therefore the most important in terms of not dying when lost in the woods, is Attitude. It’s all about psychology. About the inner voice that gets louder and louder as things get tougher and tougher, whispering, stating, screaming that the situation is hopeless and we’re stupid, that we deserve to die out here. Tom Brown argues that most people who get lost in the wilderness and die do so because they give in to a creeping attitude of defeat.

Why, you might ask, am I writing about a wilderness survival guide? Because I’m a creative writer. I’m a creative person. I spend a lot of time wandering around in the wilderness of my psyche. And, like all creative artists, I find myself, from time to time, lost in those woods. Tom Brown is right. Whether the forest is real or psychological, attitude is the first and most important determiner of whether we’re going to make it out alive or not.

The Creative Life is a Hostile Wilderness

Between January 8^th and May 7^th, I wrote and revised 51,000+ words of a YA fantasy novel for my MFA thesis project at Lesley University. My goal was to finish an entire first draft of the novel by April. That, I’m sad to say, did not happen.

The writing process for grad school is interesting, especially during the thesis semester. Most students enter their final semester with a first draft of their thesis already written. They’ll spend four months revising it before submitting it. They’re traveling a well-worn path by that point.

I didn’t do that. I started from scratch. I took the road less traveled.

Let me tell you, the less-traveled path is not easy-going. It’s grown in and full of brambles and twisting roots to trip on. It’s hot and buggy, and most of it is uphill on a treacherous slope. There are many places where the trail just peters out and vanishes. And there’s quicksand. No one tells you about the quicksand!

My most excellent mentor!

For this final semester, I found myself wandering, slightly lost in the forest, losing the path and then stumbling upon it again. And as someone who does not plot well, I rarely knew in which direction I was traveling. But, I did manage to write 51,000+ words of a story that, with the help of my incredible mentor—Chris Lynch—was of graduate-level quality. I’d bushwhacked my way through some pretty dense, unforgiving territory.

I formatted everything according to spec, typed up the synopsis for the rest of the story as I imagined it, the path I thought lay before me, and I sent it off. I was out of the woods!

Losing the Way

And then I stopped writing.

Which wasn’t supposed to happen.

See, in my head, I’d have the rest of the novel written by June 1^st. It was going to be excellent. But, my brain was experiencing a level of fatigue I wasn’t prepared for. I just… couldn’t do it. Couldn’t even write a blog post. I looked around, and realized that I wasn’t out of the woods quite yet, as I’d thought.

A week went by. Okay, I thought, Time to get back to it.

Nope.

Two weeks. Surely, now. Two weeks must be enough time to recover from the mad dash I’d just been through, but no. In fact, something new had snuck into my brain to replace my mental exhaustion. As I stood looking around and what now seemed frighteningly unfamiliar territory, something snaked its coils around my chest and started to squeeze.

Fear.

Each time I thought about sitting down to work out the details of the next chapter of my story, my pulse quickened, and not with excitement. I started shying away from the story out of fear, though fear of what I didn’t know. Heck, I didn’t even know what was happening at the time, only that it had suddenly become very important that I not work on my writing. My writing was stalking me like some unseen creature in the underbrush.

As the days continued to slip by, a horrible pressing guilt settled on my shoulders. I should be writing, I chided myself, but I’m not. I’m failing. This is me, failing. I’m awful. I’m a loser. A joke. I’m never going to succeed at this because I’m supposed to be writing and I can’t even muster the simple will power needed to do touch my fingertips to a keyboard. It became a nasty feedback loop. Each day I didn’t sit down and write made it that much harder for me to get back to the chair, sit down, and write. I started hating myself. I stopped trying to get my bearings. I sat down on the cold, wet ground and started to let the ruinous forest of my blackest doubts leech from me my will to continue.

Odin help me, I was lost! Lost in a hostile forest, with the shadows of fear, doubt, and self-hate blinding me so that I couldn’t see a path forward, couldn’t even remember how I’d gotten there. I was becoming more and more certain that my journey was at an end. It was awful, and it felt inevitable.

The thing is, getting lost is a hazard of living a creative life. In some ways, getting lost really is inevitable, because the creative path is not well-travelled. I’d argue that if you’re doing things right as an artist, you’re blazing a new trail through the deepest, darkest woods of your own psyche. There are no paths here, children. Only shadows, and stones, and giant trees that might eat you if you get too close, and creatures too beautiful and terrible to look at directly. And, wait, haven’t I gotten snagged in this same bramble patch before? Oh, Thor! I’m going in circles! I’m lost, and it’s cold, and the sun’s getting low, the night creatures are coming, and I’ll never find my way out of this forest. Why did I think this was a good idea? I’m an idiot. I’m going to die in these woods, and no one will mourn my demise.

Countless talented artists wander into the creative forest with good intentions and never make it out again. They get lost, hit that moment of doubt and despair, give up, and die. Metaphorically.

For me, May has certainly felt like a slow death in a wild and inhospitable landscape.

Finding My Way Back

But then I received my feedback letter from my thesis reader—Jason Reynolds.

That’s him, the self-professed hater of fantasy stories. And the guy who got me moving again!

Quick back story. At the residency program back in January, Jason sat in a classroom with a bunch of us from the Writing for Young People concentration, and went off on a (gentle) tirade about how irritating he found the fantasy genre. Details are not important here. Suffice it to say, the man is not a fan. As he spoke, I sat with a polite smile cemented to my face and did my best not to freak out. You see, by that point, I already knew I was going to be writing a YA fantasy story for my thesis, and I’d already requested him as my thesis reader. A guy who hates fantasy is going to put final eyes on my fantasy thesis. Fantastic.

Anyway, four months later, I’m slipping into creative hypothermia, curling up in the fetal position, and making peace with my end, when I open his feedback letter and read it.

I was expecting lukewarm but professional feedback on my prose, my character development, my pacing, scene structure, etc. You can hate a story, after all, and still give constructive feedback on the writing, right? Lukewarm but professional feedback was not what I got.

For almost three weeks at that point, I’d been lost in the shadowy part of my self-made forest, under thick canopy, feeling the slow creep of horror setting in as I realized that the trees were endless and I was a hopeless, pathetic fool. Jason’s feedback was like discovering a high-powered flashlight in my back pocket, switching it on, and finding out that I’d been following a path the whole time without realizing it.

I can see again. Maybe I don’t have to die out here all alone in the cold, unforgiving forest of my mind. The book I’m writing is my destination once again. Chris Lynch had been my shelter. A few close writing-friends I’ve connected with through the program had been my water, my spouse is my fire, and all the fine books I’d been reading this semester have been my food.

So, with the help of Jason Reynold’s incredibly generous and encouraging words, I’m standing up, brushing the duff off my backside, and moving forward again. Sun’s up. The canopy is starting to thin out again, and I’m pretty sure this trail is not leading to pit trap filled with poison-tipped spikes. If it is, I know I can find a way to disarm it. I’ve shifted my attitude. I’m getting out of this alive.

Have you ever gotten lost in the darker parts of your creative forest? How long did you wander before finding your way out?

May 29, 2018
The Pros and Cons of Grammarly.com

There are a gazillion writing apps and programs out there in the digital world, some that cost money and some that are free. Of them all, I’ve tried a handful. However, after two years in grad school, chasing the dream of getting an MFA in creative writing, I’ve come to rely heavily on one in particular: Grammarly. Just to be clear, I’m not affiliated with Grammarly. I’m not getting paid to push the app. It’s definitely not perfect, but I like it enough to write a post about it.

What is Grammarly?

Grammarly.com is an online writing program with a free version and a premium version. The Chrome extension is free, or you can pay a monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription fee to upgrade. As you probably guessed, the cheapest per month price comes with the annual subscription and works out to about $12/month.

I tried the free version when I was putting together my application materials for Lesley University’s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program. Everything I wrote (cover letter, personal essay, and my creative piece) got fed through the program and analyzed. The day I got the news that I’d been accepted into the program, I bought the yearly subscription because I knew I’d be using it often for the next two years.

What Does Grammarly Do?

In a nutshell, it makes your writing better. It is, for all intents and purposes, an editing algorithm. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s a pretty darned good one, too.

See that fancy infographic I screenshotted off their homepage up above? Well, after two years of using the software I can say with confidences that it does all of that.

You can either type directly in the program, or you can upload a file (google doc, word doc). I tend to cut and paste in my material.

The above claim sounds a little hoaky. I mean, if you write enough stuff, your writing skills are going to improve no matter what. It’s inevitable. That said, the detailed explanations that pop up when you hover over a flagged item is a mighty great feature. I like not having to dive out to dictionaries and thesauruses and my copy of The Everyday Writer to check whether a word is appropriate or a grammatical construct is valid. In that way, Grammarly will probably improve your skills faster than they otherwise would.

Free Versus Premium:

The free version of Grammarly is legitimately decent. Heck, I used it to clean up my application materials (successfully). I only upgraded from the free version to catch stuff I’m apparently blind to: spelling mistakes, homophone errors, repetitious used of certain crutch words, etc. I can read through a written piece ten times, and the thing will still look like it was written at 3AM by a sleep-deprived college kid.

For me, all the extra bells and whistles were worth the money. On one of my earliest submissions in my grad school program, I was up against a deadline and in my stressed-out frame of mind, I forgot to run my submission through Grammarly. I’d read it over multiple times, tweaking, correcting awkward sentence structure, finding typos, and punctuation errors, etc.

My professor sent the submission back to me. She wouldn’t read a piece with more than two mistakes per page. I was mortified. Since then, I’ve never forgotten to use Grammarly to check my work before sending it out to anyone.

When you start a new document in Grammarly, you can select which features are or aren’t active. You can also help the algorithm edit to your needs by telling it what type of document it’s analyzing.

I’ve let the program run an analysis of a document in its “General (default)” setting, made note of the number of “critical” and “Advanced” issues, and then selected “Novel” format and let it re-analyze the document. The number of “critical” issues rarely changes. The number of “advanced” issues almost always decreases in novel format. I guess that means the algorithm knows that creative writers play it a little fast and loose with grammar rules.

Professional Proofreading Services

Premium memberships give you access to a feature I have never used. Supposedly, a real person will read your document and give you feedback on it. I’m skeptical. I don’t know who’s putting eyes on my stuff on the other end. It could be someone with legit editing skills, or it could be someone for whom English is not their first language. For all I know, it could be a well-trained monkey. Maybe one day, I’ll submit a document for professional proofreading, just to see what happens. I probably should. I’m paying for the feature, after all.

Drawbacks and Downsides?

Of course there are drawbacks and downsides.

First, it costs money. That said, it rubs me the wrong way when folks gripe about having to pay for things they want. As if they’re entitled to get everything they want in life for free. Sorry, but someone took the time to write a pretty massive program and debug the thing. They deserve to get paid for their work.

Second, it misses errors. After two years of using the program, I’d estimate that Grammarly misses between 30% and 50% of all the errors that exist in a piece of writing. For some folks, that’s a deal breaker. Not for me. Why? Because the program gets me 50% to 70% of the way toward a mistake free document. That saves me time, and my time is valuable. Now, maybe utilizing that nifty professional proofreading feature would catch the rest of the errors. I don’t know. The point here is, expecting an algorithm to be perfect is dumb. Especially considering the fact that most of us humans can’t match Grammarly’s imperfect error-catch rate.

Third (and the biggest downside), Grammarly undoes certain formatting features in uploaded documents. When you import a piece of writing into the program, all your special fonts, italics, and bold-faced type get converted to plain text. When you export it back to Google Docs or MS Word or Scrivener or whatever, you’ll have to paw through the piece looking for the lost formatting and fix it. I find that step incredibly irritating. Invariably, I’ll miss multiple words or sentences that need to be re-italicized. Grrr.

So yeah, Grammarly is far from perfect, but it’s still pretty darned great for anyone doing a lot of writing.

Do you use Grammarly? What do you think of the program?

March 14, 2018
IWSG February Post – Why Write for Kids?

This month’s IWSG post asks the question:

What do you love about the genre you write in most often?

Well, what’s not to love about children’s literature? I love writing for young audiences. For teens in particular, but the idea of writing for children of any age thrills me.

Before I continue, however, allow me a moment to give a shout out to this month’s most excellent hosts: Stephen Tremp, Pat Garcia, Angela Wooldridge, Victoria Marie Lees, and Madeline Mora-Summontel. Thank you all for hosting this month’s IWSG blog hop.

Shout out finished, I’ll get on with it.

I am currently in my fourth and final semester of a low residency MFA program in creative writing at Lesley University. The program offers six concentrations: General Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, Writing for Stage and Screen, Graphic Novels, and Writing for Young People. That last one is my focus.

I adore writing fiction for kids, specifically for teens, but broadly I just love writing for kids.

Why Write for Kids?

I suppose it started with my own kids.

[Disclaimer: I don’t like sharing too many personal details about my family members on this blog. This is, after all, my blog, not theirs. They have a right to privacy, especially my children. Who knows what they’ll grow up to become? I’ve no right to start generating their digital footprint and shaping what the online algorithms think of them.]

For this post, however, I will share the couched detail that one of my kids got off to a very rocky start with regard to learning to read, and because of a number of factors I won’t delve into, they were on the cusp of loathing reading by the time their sixth birthday rolled around.

Can you imagine how terrifying that was for me to watch? Me, who fell in love with reading long before I had the skill to do it on my own. Me, who used books to get through difficult periods in my life. Me, who loved fictional worlds and the characters that lived in them so much that I began creating my own when I was still in elementary school. Me? Have a child who hated reading?

There was only one thing to do. I ignored the advice of my child’s well-meaning but MCAS-driven and test-score-fearing teachers, and I did not sit my child down daily and force them to slog through the most awful, boring, black-and-white photocopied and stapled together early reader’s imaginable, struggling through tear-blurred vision to sound out the next word.

Instead, I read to them.

Every night. Sometimes, for hours. Until my voice grew hoarse and my throat began to burn.

My child loved this map, just as I did the first time I saw it!

I sat in my one-time nursing chair at the foot of their bed and worked through The Hobbit, then the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, then all seven of the Harry Potter books, then two-and-a-half of the Inheritance Cycle books, then the Inkspell books.

A funny thing happened during those years. Yes, it took us years to get through reading those books a bit at a time each night. My child grew older, their brain matured, their teachers worked with them during the day on the concrete skills of reading, and my child learned to love books and to love reading them.

They’re off and running on their own now, I’m pleased to say. They read voraciously, thank Thor.

Books for adults are all well and good. I read my fair share of them every year. Not so many since starting my MFA program, as you might imagine.

It’s just that books for children are, and I know I’m going to ruffle a few feathers with this sweeping declaration, far more important than books for adults. I mean, it’s kind of obvious when you stop and think about it. When did you fall in love with reading? When you were a kid, probably. Some book touched your soul, gave you the big time feels, sent shivers down your spine, and woke you up for life.

That’s why I love writing for young people.

What was that first book that marked your soul, by the way? (For me, it was Bridge to Terabithia.)

February 7, 2018