When we find a great teacher, we prize them not only because what we learn improves our lives but also because good learning can be one of the most exhilirating things we experience. Unfortunately, a lot of teaching stinks. It’s boring, rambling, forgettable.

I’ve made a study of teaching. I’ve had to. For almost 20 years I’ve taught and designed courses in the private sector. And for many of those years my work has been in a revenue generating department. What that means is that if my classes are ineffective and dull, nobody signs up, revenue falls, and a lot of folks will stand around and wonder if it might not be better to just replace me with a potted plant. At least a plant would be something pleasant to look at, plus it would also clean the air.

Now not everything I do is stellar (I wish that were so). Sometimes in the quality, cost, speed triangle, quality is the thing that takes the hit. But the point is I have to be alert and try to miminize the schlock. But how do you do that? How do you develop and deliver effective and interesting education?

Luckily, the field of instructional technology (I’m not talking about computers, but principles of instruction) has come a long way in identifying what works and what doesn’t. This is important because teaching theories of the past (many of which are still used today) often relied on rules of thumb and anecdotal evidence. Their precriptions were often ineffective and sometimes counterproductive. What’s exciting is that in the last few decades researchers in this area have put techniques and principles to the test. We know better now than ever before how to structure learning that is effective and interesting. And I have yet to find a better explanation of the proven techniques and principles than Ruth Colvin Clark’s Building Expertise: Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvement, 3rd Edition.  

Don’t let the “training” part fool you. We often associate “training” with learning procedures and simple tasks (which is what leads to the “we want to provide sex education, not sex training” obfuscation). But Clark isn’t using the term that way. Training here includes all types of learning.

What Clark does is not only share the techniques that build expertise, but also the psychological reasons and research-based evidence for those techniques. This isn’t nonsense based on personality or political correctness. It’s practical and proven.

Among other things, you’ll learn:

• Why working memory is key to instruction and how to overcome its limits
• How to motivate learners
• How to structure learning
• When to use lecture and when to put learners into action
• What methods work best

You’ll learn when taking notes can actually be counterproductive and what you can do about it. Or how making your delivery more personable (and what that means) can actually improve attention. You’ll see why lots of practice isn’t always the best answer–sometimes your child will learn more if you do half of their homework questions for them.

You’ll find that there “Is no Yellow Brick road” in teaching. Instead, you’ll see that the effectiveness of any method depends on whether it’s suited to the specific situation. And Clark will explain what the key factors in any situation are so you know which methods to apply and the trade-offs you’ll make when you do.

If you’re a teacher in any setting–family, job, church, school, or recreation–or if you’re trying to teach yourself, this book (specifically the 3rd edition) will be a goldmine for you. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Mark your calendars!!

The free, 2009 Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium at BYU will run Thursday – Saturday, February 19 – 21.

The speical guests are Tracy & Laura Hickman (Dragonlance authors) and James C. Christensen (yes, the amazing fantasy artist). But there will be more than a dozen other authors there, including: L.E. Modesitt, Brandon Mull, James Dashner, Brandon Sanderson, David Farland, Mette Ivie Harrison, Eric James Stone, Howard Tayler, and a number of others.
 
Here’s what I’ll be doing:

1. Panel: The Principles of Suspense. Fri, Feb 20, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
2. Workshop: The 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories. Fri, Feb 20, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
3. Panel: Myth and Mythology in SF&F. Sat, Feb 21, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
4. Reading: from the forthcoming novel and a few of my other published works, Sat, Feb 21, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

If you want to write fiction, you’ll want to attend the workshop. And if you’ve attended the workshop before, know that I’ve made some significant updates to the workshop content for 2009. I’m always learning, and so each time I teach this I’m able to provide more insight.

You’ll also want to carefully review the whole schedule. There are tons of panels with professional authors on them that are going to be both useful and interesting to writers.

My workshop focuses on three incredibly important things.  In the beginning, I didn’t know these key things, and that ignorance stymied all my writing efforts for years. Once I learned them, the way was opened. There was still a lot of work involved. But these principles increased my output of quality material 1000% (literally). The principles allowed me to write the story that got me my current three-book contract from Tor.

I’ve taught it now more than a dozen times to all sorts of fiction writers and they’re telling me they’re finding it very useful. You’re going to love this stuff, and I always enjoy sharing what I’ve learned with other writers. The three things are:

1. What a story really is. We’re not talking narrative taxonomy, although that’s included. It’s focused on the story effect upon the reader. And why this is one of the most important things you need to understand when writing fiction.
2. Parts & principles. Key principles of character, problem, plot, setting, and text as they relate to #1.
3. The creative process. The simple but powerful principles of how to get ideas. How to develop them into story. Why writer’s block is a gift and how to use it to produce MORE. Plus a number of other creative principles I wished I’d known.

It’s a highly interactive workshop. Again, the whole symposium, including the workshop, is free. I don’t know another place where you can learn from so many professionals for such a great price.

Hope to see you there!!

I love listening to writing excuses because I get to hear three smart and funny authors discuss interesting topics that get me thinking. This week’s writing excuse was on building non-humans in SF&F.

Here’s my take.

An alien race, if done right, can be a huge draw to a story. For example, Brandon Sanderson’s Kandra point of view in HERO OF AGES is one of the most enjoyable parts of that book.

However, I want to suggest that aliens (in fantasy or sf) create that draw only IF they’re kept sufficiently strange or mysterious. The minute they become common or too human, they lose their power to enchant.

That’s one thing I like about how Tolkien did the elves and orcs–we never got the National Geographic on them. They never became common. And so I always wanted to know more. Easterlings, ents, balrogs, the orders of wizards, dragons, etc. were the same. There were tons of tales Tolkien hinted at, curioisties raised, but those desires were never sated. This is part of what drove me to other fantasy books.

It’s the same thing that made me love mammoths and dinosaurs, bats and giant squid, and far-off places. However, once these things became common and explained, their magic departed. The curiosity generated by the wonder of things new is one of the key things science fiction and fantasy offer its readers. But I think authors can only keep it alive if they approach it in the same way a fan dancer approaches her work.

This leads me to another point. It’s true that focusing our world building on the conflicts and story touch points can keep us on track. And we do need to produce. However, I think if we strictly limit our alien development to the central story conflicts, we might miss many opportunities for that wonder. Some of what we develop might end up complicating the plot while other parts might only enrich the experience. And I don’t think that’s bad.

For example, one of the most poignant parts of the LOTR, of which there were many, was the tale of the ents and the entwives and Treebeard’s poem. Tolkien could have eliminated that and the story never would have been affected. But, O, how much richer the story was for that little side trail that still beckons. Or you might think of the ring Bilbo found. When Tolkien first wrote THE HOBBIT, it wasn’t THE ring of power. It was merely a ring that Gollum used. Only later, when he began to work on LOTR and was trying to figure out the main problem of the story did he work that detail into it becoming THE ring of power.

Why I didn’t read Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography long ago is a mystery. I owned the book when I was a teen (and stupidly gave it away in my 20′s). But maybe the long wait was inevitable. Back then I wanted more hobbits and sweeping saga, not biography. Luckily, that’s not the case today. 

Folks, this is a marvelous read. I’m sure part of the reason I have not read a biography with more interest is because I love The Lord of the Rings so much. But I think there much more to it than that.

Tolkien had a story life as a child and young man. Not story as in wonderful and easy, but as in hard. He was orphaned early, forbidden to see his love when he found her. So Tolkien’s life is compelling on its own, not just because he’s famous.

Furthermore, Carpenter writes, not a dry list of facts,  but a narrative full of particular and interesting details, transporting you back to the very times and places Tolkien lived in. He also transports you, if only lightly, into the mind of the man and some of his opinions. You’ll learn why Mordor is not Nazi Germany. How the batmen of WW1 found their way into his work. And that Frodo was originally named Bingo (can you imagine?). Carpenter also attempts to point out cause and effect as he sees it, to sum up key factors in Tolkien’s life, but without being glib. Carpenter writes all this with such clarity and grace I found myself carried along.

If you’re a fan of Tolkien’s work, don’t miss this book. Get a copy. Find a favorite tree, if you can. And then read.

This just in from Ken Scholes.

“In his debut novel, Servant of a Dark God, John Brown adds his voice to epic fantasy with a world I can see and smell and taste and believe in…and characters I can cheer for, travel with, and want to see again.”

–Ken Scholes, author of Lamentation

There are two answers to this question.

1. The story answer by Orson Scott Card, best-selling author

As long as the story needs, but 75k-100k is when it starts to “feel” like a novel.

2. The selling it to editors answer by Jenny Rappaport, literary agent

“Aim for 80k minimum and 120k maximum. Try to hit as close to 100k as possible, but not go over. There are exceptions made for fat fantasies and longer novels.”

“For YA: 50k minimum. Try not to go over 75k. You can nudge it to 90k if it’s a fantasy. YA is a little more flexible.”

3. What happened to one author, Brandon Sanderson, when he tried to write to “the market”

As in stories less than 200,000 words…

BTW, Brandon is now New York Times best-selling author.

This week’s Writing Excuses was an interesting topic. I’ve had similar questions from folks as I give my workshop on writing fiction. Here are some additions to the excellent comments made by our fearless Three.

Can you plan for a single draft?

In my experience and those of other published writers I know, wanting to start to draft only when you’re ready to begin writing THE draft that will take you clear to the end is only going to land you into a bog of dither.

Here’s why. It’s almost impossible to know if this attempt at the hill is going to work until you make the attempt at the hill. Much of the story creation, even for those who do a lot of the creation in summary/outline form first, still takes place in the drafting. And you never know if something you create while drafting is going to throw a monkey wrench into the whole thing.

Nobody I know who does a lot of development in the outline/summary form (and I’m one of those) has ever written a satisfactory novel without having to continually modify the original outline or abandon it altogether. David Farland tells a story of getting to the ending of one novel, the ENDING, and only then seeing a new ending that was going to be so much better than the one he planned. Which meant he needed a different beginning. Which meant a rewrite. And so he started the whole freaking story over.

Writing is like blazing a trail

Writing a novel is like seeing a far off destination that you’ve never been to before and to which there are no roads. You’ve got to make a trail to that destination. So when you set out you may be able to see a path for a mile or so, you may even have tried to get an overview of the terrain, but you must reconcile yourself to the fact that you are going to run into an impassable bog, or a cliff, or killer bees–you’re going to have dead-ends and backtracks.

No matter what you do, it’s gonna happen. It’s just part of the nature of blazing trails. Even if you scout out possible routes, some of those routes are just not going to work when the wagon train finally gets there.

This isn’t to say we must all become draft-only writers. There is HUGE value to some of us in having a starting line-up or knowing the ending or having the bare bones of the plot or having done a good deal of world building. For myself, I’ve learned I never get very far down any path if I don’t have a number of strong ideas for all the parts of story–character, setting, problem, and plot. But I only learned that by setting off time and time again and each time immediately having to stop. And new writers will never learn what they need, as was said, until they just start.

So if the reality is that every author is going to have hiccups and course changes along the way, then it’s far more important and useful and efficient, not to wait for the perfect moment to draft, and draft the story only once, but to just start drafting.

But how much pre-draft work is too much?

Okay, for those of you who want a specific number, let me help you. A new writer recently posted a question wondering if she migh have world-builders disease. Here was my response.

—

Ms. X, one way to approach your diagnosis is to determine how many books per year you want to write. Because world-builders disease is only a malady in certain circumstances.

If you don’t care about output and simply enjoy building worlds, then maybe you’re like Tolkien. He started The Book of Lost Tales in 1917 and didn’t finish THE HOBBIT until 1937 (20 years). He didn’t finish LOTR until 1949 (another 12 years). In this is your situation, then you are hale and hearty and have many years of enjoyment ahead of you.

If you DO care about output and want to write one book per year, then I’d suggest you get some drafting treatment immediately. Here’s why: you now have only 26 weeks to finish.

But wait: take out 4 weeks for vacation, sickness, relatives, and mosquito infestations. You now have 22 weeks.

Assume you get 2 good hours of writing 6 days a week for 12 hours a week. Assume further that you can get a conservative 500 words of finished product per hour, or 1,000 words in 2 hours. (Sure you may be able to write faster than that in any given session, but when you go back and fiddle with it the next day and the next, you have to accout for that.)

At this rate it will take you 17 weeks to finish a 100,000 word novel. And that’s only if you keep your story furnace hot with consistent hours each day.

But wait: that’s only a FIRST draft. You now need to let it sit a bit. Reread it. Send it out to readers. Then REVISE. You only have 5 weeks to do that!

Of course, your inputs to the equation might differ. But if your goal is a book a year, you need to get cracking. Most of your development will come as you write. It’s exciting and lovely. Don’t miss it. Get your starting line up written out in the next three days and then take the plunge.

I agree that the ability to develop and finish a story is more important, and rare, than coming up with or capturing random ideas, especially since “ideas” can be something as small as a two word sentence from your daughter or the colors on some weird bug that you found hiding out in a teacup in your cupboard. Finding one of those is like finding one brick for a 50,000 brick house. Big whoop.

I also agree that ideas captured in a journal or file of some sort is NOT the only way to start developing a story. Getting a prompt or story parameters, writing to specifications, is obviously a perfect spot to begin as well (e.g. get me a SF story no longer than 6,000 words by Dec 15th that includes a bug). It is, if you think about it, just another type of starter idea. Going from image to story parameters or from parameters to story images–I don’t think the order matters. They’re both aspects of the story that need to be eventually developed. And we all know that stories can start from seeds of all types–character, image, line, issue, setting, problem, technology, AND parameters. What makes a prompt for a real gig powerful is that it pushes you farther down the path from one brick to house. It does this because a huge part of getting a story written depends on making decisions, getting specific. And on getting the motivation to buckle down and finish the thing.

I’m also going to bet that for all writers MOST of the elements (dialog, plot, character, setting) of any story are generated during the pre-draft planning (including research) and drafting–during the actual writing. Not by continually ransacking idea files like some people do their closets, trying to find pants, shirts, and shoes that will make an outfit. Like most anything else, we generate things (ideas in this case) only when they’re needed.

It’s true we have to care about and believe in what we’re writing. But I don’t think how any story gets started is significant. Partially because no matter how big the initial idea, it’s still small compared to everything else that must be generated. But more importantly because I think just starting is the key, whether that’s motivated by shot of zing or a deadline or whatever. I say this because I’ve found that zing strikes me more when I’m on the move working.

So if the vast majority of captured ideas are never used, why observe and capture at all?

Here are my personal reasons.

1) Because when I fail to consume new sights, people, ideas, and experiences, I tend to keep using the same things over and over in stories–lines, descriptions, plot turns, etc. Doing this actually helps me see new possibilities and go beyond my current ken.

2) While I forget most of what goes into the file, I don’t forget everything. When I’m working, the context of the story often evokes memories of some of these things I’ve captured.

3) Because when I’m on the lookout, I tend to see more. And current idea captures are a great source for random juxtaposition for the current project. I’m writing a story, go on a walk, and see in the snow a raccoon splayed out spead eagle on the side of the road like it’s been sacrificed, its belly torn open, the cavity completely hollow, four thin, almost translucent, ribs rising to the sky. There is some blood, but not much, and where it has fallen the snow is Valentine pink. There’s nothing else around the animal but a multitude of bird tracks and a few dark strings of disconnected and frozen gut. Because this signals story idea to me, I stop and pause to get more details. I write them up, look a bit closer, sketch it. And the impossible to imagine random detail goes into the current story to work its magic.

4) Because being on the lookout just brings more zest to my life. The universe offers up a small wonder or dread to me, and if I’m trying to be alert, I’m more apt to see it, cherish it, if only for a moment, and go my way rejoicing.

Here are some thoughts from the man who brought you Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog and Serenity about the future of movies. I’m suspecting a lot of time-lengths and form that weren’t possible given the constraints of TV and theaters will start to rise.

Note sent, the next school day, with the 1st grader…

Dear Ms. Williams,

That’s not a dance pole on a stage in a strip joint! I work at Home Depot. That’s me selling a shovel.

Cathy’s mother,
Mrs. Smith

(thanks to my wonderful wife for passing that one on.)