The other day, I happened upon an interesting question on someone’s private blog: how important is plot to your enjoyment of a book, and how much does it spoil the fun if the plot is flawed? My response quickly grew beyond sensible comment size :-)

Logical consistency

I don’t like things happening that actively contradict the previous logic of the book, leaving me as a reader with “But wait a minute…”.

One glaring example that sticks in my mind, though it’s actually from a film and not a book, is the end of the film Dune where it suddenly starts raining for some unexplained magical reason!

In the book, the unlocking of the planet’s water was a gradual ecological transformation, over years and years. But when they made the film, oh no, that wasn’t good enough – an instantaneous result was required for dramatic purposes even though it made no sense.

I still recall seeing it in the cinema one day many years ago, when the film first came out. As the rain began to fall, and young Alia said in wondering tones “He is the Kwisatz Haderach”, my response was the actual words “Oh, leave it out” ::haha::

This also has something to do with why (a) I don’t watch many films and (b) I almost never watch any film of which I’ve enjoyed the book :-)

Character realness

But getting back to actual books and their plots:

One thing I’ve noticed more about my reading habits since starting the BookTrail microblog is how often my enjoyment of a book is mainly about the vividness of the world and especially the characters.

So probably the worst kind of plot weakness for me is when one of the characters is written to do something that they “just wouldn’t do”.

I can’t remember which book it was (and I didn’t bother putting it on BookTrail), but there was a novel I read a while back which was all from the point of view of this bloke. Well, in order to make the plotline for him go a certain way, this woman he was involved with had to do certain things. And what she did was utterly implausible to me. It just didn’t make sense in terms of what she would’ve had to have been thinking at the time.

After I got to the end, I had this fantasy of challenging its author to write the same story again from her point of view. Not that I actually thought he could have – I don’t think the gaping holes in her motivation could ever have been reconciled into a plausible shape – but if he’d accepted the challenge, the struggle to attempt it would have been fitting reward for writing such a tokenistic puppet of a character!

The same thing arises in smaller ways sometimes: “But why did they suddenly say that then?” “But people don’t talk like that.” “Why didn’t A just ask B, like any sensible person would?”

Cleverness in plot

I do appreciate it as a work of art if an author manages to set up a genuinely unexpected twist. But for me that’s not essential.

I remember discussing the Narnia books a while ago and someone suggesting to me that Voyage of the Dawn Treader doesn’t really have much of a plot. That thought had literally never occurred to me before. There’s nothing twisty in it, but there’s the redemption of Eustace, and the destiny of Reepicheep, and lots of shorter adventures. That’s good enough for me!

Domestic and practical

Likewise, I don’t have any requirement for the scale to be momentous. And even if the scale is momentous, I like it when practical, domestic details form part of the narrative.

There’s a bit in Prince Caspian, where they’re travelling through woodland and a bear comes after them and they kill it – actually I’m going to find this and quote it:

Raw meat is not a nice thing to fill one’s pockets with, but they folded it up in fresh leaves and made the best of it. They were all experienced enough to know that they would feel quite differently about these squashy and unpleasant parcels when they had walked long enough to be really hungry.

Isn’t that just 100% true about how food seems different depending on whether you’re hungry? I always think when I read that bit “That was written by someone who’d been out hiking”. (Which i.i.r.c. is true actually – C S Lewis did like to go and spend time walking outside. I think he lived near some hills, can’t remember exactly now.)

I’m thinking now too of the way the magic items in Elidor, when brought into this world, interfere with the TV reception. Magic and ordinariness mixed is much more satisfactory to me than magic by itself. And I always like it if the protagonists’ challenge is partly formed by logically consistent tricky side effects or limitations of the magic.

The domestic/practical side is also part of what I enjoy about Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple: she has a great line in domestic detail :-)

Gradual revelations

Part of what I like about detective stories is that at the beginning there’s lots of stuff you don’t know, and then you gradually find it out throughout the book. When well done, I find that very enjoyable. A lot of non-detective novels feature that puzzle/solution trajectory too; it doesn’t have to be officially “A Mystery”.

Sometimes it’s learning something about the characters’ past; sometimes it’s learning something they don’t know themselves. In Dune-the-book, the “what you don’t know at the start” includes all kinds of details of the planet’s culture and ecology, and the gradual discovery of all that is a lot of the plot. I think for me that’s the main reason why none of the Dune sequels could live up to the first in the series: it would’ve been really difficult to generate an amount of new unknown-ness in that same universe comparable to what’s kept from the reader at the start of the first one.

Characters and what they’re dealing with

The Narnia books also provide good examples of possibly my major fiction-enjoyment criterion: that the characters are rewarding to spend time with in terms of their inner life and how they respond to the challenges life puts in their way. I want to glean something from their fictional learning and thinking that has some relevance to my own life, or at least enjoy their company.

One of my favourite Narnia episodes is in Prince Caspian when Lucy sees Aslan and the others don’t believe her. That’s such a beautiful metaphor for the challenge of following your own intuition.

Likewise with the Dorothy L Sayers stories. I like detective stories anyway, but Gaudy Night is especially rich because of the way Harriet thinks, and the questions of integrity and ethics she’s grappling with. It’s a pleasure to hang out with her.

So yeah, for me the plot has to have a shape consistent with itself and the people in it. But I think what most often brings me back to books again and again as favourites is the people.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2012. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

I did write something about this before, from my own thinking: the “Gearing up” metaphor, and a follow-up article giving examples. But this article is about ideas I’ve liked from other people, on similar territory.

Here we have

Motivational surface tension

I already microblogged about The Procrastination Equation:

Not great fave, but liked evolution bits & metaphor of breaking “motivational surface tension”.

(In case anyone’s not familiar with the original thing that he’s drawing the metaphor from, here’s Wikipedia on the literal meaning of surface tension, i.e. about how liquids behave.)

In fact there’s more than one metaphor in the text – a little constellation of them, all about difficulty changing state & getting into the new thing:

… many find that the hard outer shell of a chore, the first few minutes, remains the initial obstacle. How many times have you put off a task only to realise it wasn’t so bad once you got started? Cleaning, exercising, and even writing are often difficult at first.

It is a bit like swimming in the lake by my in-laws’ cabin, just north-east of Winnipeg (the coldest city in the world with a population greater than 600,000). The water is deliciously invigorating but, for most, the initial temperature shock is an effective barrier against reapling the subsequent reward. By focusing solely on the initial jump off the dock, I can plunge in and, after a few intense seconds, enjoy myself.

An extremely short-term or mini-goal, then, is excellent for busting through such motivational surface tension. Ten-minute goals are an application of this technique, such as the ten-minute clean-up around the house.

Consequently, if you have trouble writing, just sit down and type a few words. If you don’t want to exercise, at least get your workout clothes on and drive to the gym. Once you have completed your mini-goal, re-evaluate how you feel and see if you are willing to immediately commit to a longer stretch.

Having broken through that motivational surface tension and immersed yourself in the project, you, like most, will opt to continue.

This is definitely relevant to me.

The Now Habit

And here’s my micro-blog summary of The Now Habit:

Good ideas. One to re-read. “I can take one small step.” “When can I start?” “I must take time to play.”

These were my three favourite angles from a set of five in “How to talk to yourself”, which is itself part of a whole system. I recommend the whole book! but wanted to share these little gems in particular, and keep them handy as a reminder to me.

Note: I’ve added some paragraph breaks into the book quotes, just to make them easier to read on screen.

When can I start?

Telling yourself “I must finish” keeps you focused on the completed product somewhere in the future, without ever telling you where to start. “Finishing” is in the vague distance, a long way from where you may be now in terms of skills, confidence, and perspective. This focus will make the task seem even more overwhelming, almost impossible. …

Replace “I must finish” with “When can I start?”

“When can I start?” … works like a feedback device that pushes any wavering focus back to the starting point of the project.

And when it is impossible to start now, “When is the next time I can start?” works to preprogram you for a directed and easy start-up in the near future, with a clear picture of when, where, and on what you will be starting.

I must take time to play

Replace “I don’t have time to play” with “I must take time to play.”

Actually, Neil F’s reasoning for this statement and my reasoning for it are different. Here are some extracts from his:

Statements such as “I’ve got to work all weekend,” “I’m sorry I can’t join you, I have to finish this project,” “I’m busy tonight, I’m working under a deadline” will make you feel the resentment toward your work that comes from long periods of deprivation and isolation. Repeating these statements creates the feeling of having a life of obligation and demands that cause you to miss the things other people enjoy in life. …

Insisting on your regular time for exercise, for dinners with friends, for frequent breaks throughout the day, and for frequent vacations throughout your year increases the feelings of inner worth and respect for yourself that are at the heart of unlearning the need for procrastination. Knowing that you have something to look forward to in the near future – a firm commitment to recreation and time with friends – lessens the dread of difficult work.

Well, most of my work, I don’t resent at all – I enjoy it once I get going! (And “deserving” isn’t a meme that I hang out with much at all.) If I fail to take breaks, it’s quite likely just to be a failure to switch states – as described by the surface tension metaphor – quite similar to my failures to get going on work.

But, for different reasons, I still completely agree that planning breaks from “work” is a good idea. For me, it’s about refreshment and variety.

If I take an hour out to go swimming, I can pretty much guarantee that I’ll have some good ideas while I’m swimming, as well as feeling emotionally more contented afterwards. If I have a long chat with a friend, I’m very likely to come out of it feeling “unloaded”, and with a clearer picture of what’s going on in my life. Even going off to help a friend reorganise – which is often physically demanding – is a change of scene that can raise my energy.

Perhaps I should add a bit into Neil F’s catchphrase:

Replace “I don’t have time to play” and “I get stuck into something and I forget to take a break” with “I must take time to play.”

Havi

While discussing destuckification, it would be remiss of me not to refer you to the genius who is Havi Brooks! (And her duck Selma.)

Here are some of Havi’s wise thoughts right here right now, and you don’t even have to go to the library for them:

Doing just one thing.

Destuckification 101

Avoidance! Oh, and getting out of it.

Feel free to comment with your best unsticking tips :-)

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2011. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

I find it hilarious that I’m posting a recipe! my interest in cooking having historically been almost nul :-)

But it is of course a recipe of such extreme simplicity that the “cooking” aspect is also almost nul ::haha::

The recipe

That’s it :-)

The soup can either be home-made from a previous meal, or from a can. I find Heinz Lentil Wholesoup works well. The veg can be pretty much anything – I often have carrots, cauliflower and/or broccoli, or brussel sprouts when they’re in season. If the left-over veg supply is puny, you can supplement it with a few frozen peas.

Bread and butter or toast and butter goes well with this. Sometimes I’ll also have a few olives.

Things I like about this soup

The name

I’d been making this for a while without it having a name, but the memory of a quote had begun to hang around in my thoughts, and eventually I named it “officially”.

The quote is from Dorothy L Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, in which our hero Lord Peter Wimsey goes undercover in an advertising agency, working as a copywriter.

Bredon (a.k.a. Wimsey):

“… I’ve been trying to get out a name for Twentyman’s shilling tea. As far as I can make Hankin out, it has no qualities except cheapness to recommend it, and is chiefly made of odds and ends of other teas. The name must suggest solid worth and respectability.”

Ingleby, a fellow copywriter, suggests in response:

“Why not call it ‘Domestic Blend’? Nothing could sound more reliable and obviously nothing could suggest so much dreary economy.”

This soup is of course a meal “chiefly made of odds and ends of other meals” :-)

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2011. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

I ran out of light reading just before Christmas, due to forgetting what time the local library would close on Christmas Eve. Oops!

Vron kindly let me peruse her bookshelves, and one of the things I spotted was Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose: What do I do when I want to do everything? I had read that before, but it was a long time ago and I’d been meaning to re-read it. And oh yes, it is a lovely book.

Beads, cycles and other metaphors

My closest fit to the profiles in this book, I think, is as a “cyclical scanner”. Most “scanners”, as Barbara describes them, are continually getting interested in completely new things. But cyclical ones come back to the same things again as inspiration shifts.

OK, I do have what you might call “underlying themes” to what I do. But I don’t have one big project or genre occupying my whole creative life. I don’t write about the same things all the time, and I’ve got more than one music project and more than one source of income, and I like coding and d.i.y. as well as writing and music.

I was thinking about that a while ago and I came up with the metaphor of a series of beads of different colours. The necklace as a whole is my creative life; the beads don’t have to match.

“Cycles” too is “one of my metaphors”. For a long time now, I’ve used the expression “work cycles” to describe the way I’ll be immersed in something for a few days, then come to a natural end of that burst of inspiration and move to something else.

Or at least, that’s how it works when I’m on a roll – though a lot of the time I accidentally fall out of that mode, e.g. discombobulated by the looming presence of some conscience-driven task for which I feel no inspiration :-/

As it happens I don’t really identify with the term “scanner”, as a word. Metaphorically, I think that fits better to the people who are less cyclical and more on a continual quest for completely new stuff. But the label hasn’t got in the way of me finding lots in the book that’s useful and validating to me.

Here are a couple of book extracts which I most want to remember for the new year:

Random Acts of Passion Life Design Model

Every Scanner knows what it’s like to be suddenly taken with a desire to stop what he’s doing and pick up something else that calls to him. … If that’s something you do, I advise you to just give in. Pick up any project that calls you and give it an hour, a day, or a week, however long it keeps you fascinated, and then put it away and get back to what you were doing.

This arrangement is called the Random Acts of Passion Life Design Model – and it might be just right for how your creativity operates.

So true!

(One of these days I should really write up my “Timed seed and herb dispenser” model of inspiration. And my concept of “Pingalation”.)

Avocation Stations

I used to wish that I had a huge, empty room with rows of long tables against the walls and, on each table, everything I needed for one of my projects. Then I could leave everything out in the open on its own table and walk over to it and start working whenever the mood took me.

I don’t have a room that large and I bet you don’t, either, but the fantasy gave me the idea of Avocation Stations, and I started wondering what kind of arrangement could replace all those tables and take up less space. …

Then, last month in a home furnishings catalog, I saw a little rolling stand with drawers and a couple of fun gadgets like a desk space that opened, a slot for large pages, a shelf for books. It was called a bill paying center, as I recall, but to me it was a dead ringer for an Avocation Station. …

If you’re a Scanner with lots of projects going on at the same time, you should have some variation of those little pices of furniture. You can make your own to suit yourself … and keep a whole bunch of them ready to go.

In an ideal world I’d have an ENORMOUS wooden multi-cupboard thing, taking up say one whole wall of my workroom, which incorporated lots of different sizes of drawer and cupboard, so that everything half done had a perfectly suited storage space and was easy to get out and put back.

I don’t think I’d actually want everything out at once. In fact, I imagine I’d probably dislike that. When something’s not hot, I’d probably rather it was out of my space, to leave the space clearer for the few things that are. For me, what appeals about the “Avocation Station” idea is the easy getting out and putting back, plus the “all relevant bits together ready to go” – not the idea of everything at once being literally visible.

And it’s not that I don’t do something like that already – I do. I have shelves and boxes and drawers, and some of them are designated for particular projects.

But I think the principle of “ready to go” could be optimised further, and I think that would be a good thing. So that’s why I wanted to remember that bit of the book.

Barbara’s blogs

And then, poking around on the net, I discovered that Barbara has several blogs, a Twitter account and a web site! I don’t know why it never occurred to me before to look for these.

Here are two of the blogs, which seem to be the most current:

And here is a funny and insightful video about different people loving different things:

Barbara Sher: “Design, Execute, Maintain”, on YouTube

Happy creative New Year, everyone.

Here, have an index…
Top of article
Beads, cycles and other metaphors
Random Acts of Passion Life Design Model
Avocation Stations
Barbara’s blogs

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

Went to a “Readers’ Day” on Saturday at Nottingham City Council House.

What sold me on the event originally was seeing that Armistead Maupin would be there – he of the groundbreaking and very readable Tales of the City and, my favourite of his, Maybe the Moon.

But after booking for the day, I thought in order to make the most of it, I’d go looking for some books by some of the other guest authors. That led me to David Nicholls‘ One Day, which I turned out to like as well.

So there I was in a somewhat chilly ballroom in Nottingham’s Council House on Saturday morning, after the first snowfall here of the winter.

(As an aside, I’ll add that to the best of my recollection, this is the first time I’ve ever been into the Council House, despite living in Nottingham on & off since 1982! I quite liked the architecture of it.)

Armistead Maupin

Armistead Maupin was interviewed by Greg Woods,

then read from his latest book Mary Ann In Autumn and took questions.

Lovely bloke and very entertaining. He describes himself as a storyteller, and it’s true. If he comes to speak anywhere near you, I’d say go if you can.

I’m not sure if he put it in exactly these words, but I had a real sense of how much his art is also activism. In answering questions, he alluded to the countless people over the years who’ve told him how his writing made a difference to them. A simple example he mentioned was of a teenager who was encouraged to come out to his parents by knowing that the parents enjoyed AM’s books. AM also mentioned that the death of Tales of the City character Jon was the first ever death from AIDS in fiction – I hadn’t known that.

I especially appreciated hearing him talk about his feisty, charismatic friend Tammy, the inspiration for Maybe The Moon. She knew he was writing it, and came to stay with him for a few days so that they could talk about her life. But she didn’t live to see the book finished.

Another bit I was pondering afterwards was when someone asked AM if he might one day write about his time in the Navy. He said that’d be unlikely, and explained how he likes to write of the present time as he lives it: expressing things he’s thinking about & feeling at that time, with his books intentionally “dated” to the era when they were written. There was a funny story about his editor warning him that a particular musician he’d named was “kind of last year” and AM replying along the lines of “Yes, that’s because the book is set last year!”

Book swopping

At lunchtime there was a “Book Swop”. I’d forgotten to bring a book for that, but discovered we’d each been given one (different ones) in the bags we were given on arrival, along with timetable and feedback form. I didn’t especially fancy my freebie, so handed that in and had a rummage.

I was just thinking maybe there wasn’t anything I wanted, when I suddenly happened upon a copy of David Almond’s Skellig. I’d heard on the grapevine recently that one of the characters in Skellig is a non-schooling young person and (amazingly enough) not a lonely deprived cliché wrapped in cotton-wool. So I’d been curious about that book and thinking I must read it soon. Could have got it from the library, but if it lives up to the description I read, it’s one I’ll be happy to have on hand for lending out. So that felt like a lucky moment.

Audiobooks

After lunch I went to the session on “Making books talk”: “Clipper Audio’s Andrew Treppass and Gordon Griffin, actor and narrator of over 500 novels, talk about the world of the spoken word and reveal how a first-class audiobook is created.”

I never usually listen to audiobooks; just occasionally I might hear part of one, if someone puts a children’s one on in their car while I’m getting a lift. Myself I love reading from real actual books, and I just don’t think audiobooks would be as good, for me. For one thing, I suspect I’d start to feel impatient at the much slower pace.

On the other hand, more and more lately I’ve been listening to podcasts and spoken word MP3s of other kinds, and thinking about perhaps at some point creating some. So I was intrigued about the mechanics and process of making audiobooks and thought I might learn something. In fact, I mostly learned that it works rather similarly to how I imagined, which was reassuring, if not exciting.

Gordon G did a few readings as part of this presentation, including a moving extract from Billy Elliott (he narrated the Dad’s chapters in the audiobook of that) which brought a tear to my eye.

And I got some mending done while listening – bonus :-)

David Nicholls

Next up was David Nicholls, confessing rather charmingly to being nervous at the large audience. Perhaps because of initial nerves, the bit he read from the book was rather on the fast side, “killing the laughs” as comedians say. But come the chat, he seemed to relax into it.

I micro-blogged about One Day already. It’s a food-for-thought-y book which anyone might appreciate, but for me what stood out about it is its depiction of a time and culture I lived through myself. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book which felt so much as if it might have been written by someone I knew. (Not at all to my surprise, it turns out DN is similar in age both to me and to his characters in the book.)

[I'll also mention here that one of my favourite bits of that book is the tiny bit about the "cigarette girl"'s life when she's not being a cigarette girl. I wouldn't say it was irrelevant to the main narrative: the reader was thereby given a telling contrast to the more major character's perception of her. But fictional women in menial &/or sexualised roles often remain clichés or tokens throughout a book however big a role they play in the plot, and her plot role was pretty tiny. So that momentary sidelight into her background (entirely believable to me) was an unexpected and pleasing extra dimension.]

DN wrote and edited screenplays before he wrote a book, and he’s written the screenplay for One Day (filmed this year, editing yet to come). He said some interesting stuff about turning books into films.

Someone asked him about the differences between books & screenplays, and he said one of them is that in a book you can just write “It was raining” and not give it another thought. If you write that in a screenplay, you have to hire a rain machine, and actual people have to stand around getting wet, and it costs twenty thousand pounds! Funny but true. He also talked about the collaborative nature of film: potentially frustrating, yet can also be enlivening and sparky if you’ve got the right people around you to bounce off. I’ve read various people on the frustrations of that situation, and an appreciation of its collaborative nature doesn’t seem to be so common.

Interestingly, DN was a bit self-deprecating about his tendency to throw in cultural references (like the Nelson Mandela postcard in the extract he read), and he said the original draft had many more of them than the final book. I think he said he thought of it as a sort of shortcut, and indicative of laziness of himself as a writer – or something like that.

I was pondering this on the way home, and wondering where he’d draw the line, and wondering whether that overlaps into the sense of time and place that was part of what I liked about the book. OK, there’s a difference between “indicating time & place by multifarious ways both subtle and obvious” and just namechecking something. And obviously some of the cultural context I enjoyed was the former and not what he was expressing doubts about. (Theatre In Education and Alternative Cabaret both feature in a small way in the plot, and for me they’re both rather “Proustian Madeleine”-esque themes* – “Hello Late 1980s!”) But namechecks do contribute to the ambiance. I wonder if DN was in the room when AM was talking about the “writing done in & of a particular era” thing? I’m intrigued by comparing the different things they said around that.

* Disclaimer: I have not read yer actual original Proust :-)

Thanks

Thanks to the contributors, and to the Nottingham library people who set up this rewarding day. It lived up to my expectations… though I may consider bringing a hot water bottle next time :-)

Here, have an index…
Top of page
Armistead Maupin
Book swopping
Audiobooks
David Nicholls
Thanks

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

It’s actually a Twitter account, but I’m not planning to use it for, as they say, “ambient intimacy”. I just thought Twitter would be a handy platform for it. (You don’t have to be on Twitter to see it. You can even subscribe via RSS, if you wanted to have new posts brought to your attention but didn’t want to bother getting a Twitter account.)

You see I like to read. A lot. And sometimes I like to recommend books.

I was actually writing a books post for here only the other week. But it’s not finished, and I kept reading more books and thinking “Oh, I should mention this one too”!

And then I remembered I’d had this idea a while back of a microblog just for books I’d read. So this is what I set up the other day.

First I took a photo of some of my favourite books and made it into an icon, and seeded the blog by documenting the ones in the pic. And then I did the recent backlog, inc things to go back to the library which I’d hung onto thinking I’d write about them first. So there are already quite a few good things up there if you want to go and look. But it’ll be slower from now on, because the idea of it is to be more or less real-time – any time I finish a book that I think was worth mentioning/remembering, I’ll note it there.

This blog has a Books category too. And one of the first pages I set up on Uncharted Worlds was the old “bookshelf” page. I don’t plan to resurrect the Bookshelf page (which hasn’t been updated since 2004) – that’s probably going to stay as archive for now. But I’ll keep the blog category and the microblog in parallel. The Books category here will be for when I want to write or quote more than 140 characters, whereas the microblog will make it less likely that I never get around to mentioning something at all.

I did already deviate a tiny bit from the original idea, this evening, and used the microblog to mention an article I’d read, which wasn’t a book. If I start doing lots of those then maybe I’ll make another one, and have one for online articles and one for the books. Don’t know yet. I think the BookTrail ought to stay as mostly books, though.

At some point I might also get around to setting up a WordPress widget to have the BookTrail posts visible somewhere on the blog front page here. Or maybe on the Books category page. But that’s not a high priority for now.

So, anyway, you’re all invited! to follow my BookTrail if you’re interested.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

Lovely article from Havi this week, one of my favourites ever from her:

Some useful guiding principles for the Book of You.

People vary.

That’s why it’s the Book of You and not the Book of Humanity In General That Is Also Known As The Book of All Things For All People At All Time.

All the biggified people on the internet shouting about how you have to write in the morning and you can’t have more than three projects and how you always have to do X to get Y?

They’re not talking about you. They’re talking about themselves. They are sharing some of the information from that big Book of Them.

In fact, lots of things vary.

Just because something is true for you right now doesn’t mean it’s always going to be true for you.

The Book of You isn’t about absolutes. It’s about taking various factors into consideration, and figuring out what you can extrapolate from what you know. And then testing.

I was especially tickled at the “That’s why it’s the Book of You and not the Book of Humanity In General That Is Also Known As The Book of All Things For All People At All Time.” Hahahaha!

Received wisdom that isn’t very wise

This has been a major theme of my explorations for the last ten years or so: disentangling what actually works for me from what I once nicknamed “Received wisdom that isn’t very wise”.

It seems to me that a lot of people don’t realise what Havi so succinctly points out. They talk, and write articles and books, as though everyone is much more similar to them than is actually the case. Sometimes they get so evangelical about their wonderful methods, you could accidentally start to wonder if you’re wrong for not being able to succeed along that route.

So then as a listener/reader, you have to do your own filtering. Does this fit? Does that fit? Does this method help, or am I in fact hindering myself by trying to do things that way when I’m not wired like that person is?

Books

A few books which I’ve found useful on the quest:

All recommended by me :-)

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

Big thanks to Ciaran for telling me about it, and making it sound so intriguing that I went straight online to see if the library had it :-)

First of all I must say: if any of this interests you, and certainly if you’re in the habit of following news via any mainstream media, then time spent reading this book will not be wasted. It’s readily available; I got a copy from the library. It’s pretty gripping in places, with lots of real life stories.

Nick Davies is a journalist himself: “a Guardian man”, he says. The book focuses primarily on print media in the UK, but includes enough on TV, radio and other countries to show that similar patterns repeat there.

I’m going to start by quoting some largish chunks from the book, to lay out some relevant territory. (Bold bits added by me.) And then after that, I’ll say a few things I’ve been thinking about after reading it.

Then and now

Historically, the clearest threats to press freedom (i.e. the freedom to tell the truth) have come from outside of newsrooms; and they have tended to bring pressure to bear at the point of publication. The state did this through formal censorship, reinforced by secrecy, legal restraint and physical intimidation. Media owners, as we have seen, did this through direct and sustained interference. Both threats remain, albeit in more subtle form than in the past.

But now we are deep into a third age of falsehood and distortion, in which the primary obstacles to truth-telling lie inside the newsrooms, with the internal mechanics of an industry which has been deeply damaged. The problem now is not merely at the point of publication but also at the earlier and even more important stage of gathering and testing raw information. (p22-23.)

To put things in perspective, the author estimates a percentage of problems which nowadays come from owners’ and advertisers’ interference:

Journalists with whom I have discussed this agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference. (p22.)

So what’s the big problem nowadays, if not deliberate interference?

It’s time, and behind that, money.

More stories, less time

In preparing the book, the author commissioned some research from a team at Cardiff University. They estimate that since 1985, staffing levels on the national papers have slightly fallen, whereas the amount of editorial space they’re filling has trebled. (p63.)

At the same time, local papers and local news agencies were going out of business, depriving the national papers of the network of local journalists who in past times would have been feeding stories in.

… the Cardiff researchers surveyed national news reporters. Two-thirds of them said they were now producing more stories; and two-thirds of them said they were now doing less checking. … One told them: ‘Newspapers have turned into copy factories. This leaves less time for real investigations, or meeting and developing contacts. The arrival of online editions has also increased demand for quick copy, reducing the time available for checking facts.’

Another, from a different paper, said: ‘I think the time available to be thorough has decreased … The main consequence of that is that if things require lots of work, they are less likely to be embarked on.’ … And another: ‘I insist on making at least two check calls on every story, but this is becoming increasingly difficult to do, because of time constraints.’ (p64.)

The health editor of the Times, Nigel Hawkes, captured the view of many: ‘We are churning stories today, not writing them. Almost everything is recycled from another source … Actually knowing enough to identify the stories is no longer important. The work has been deskilled. (p59.)

The author asked a young graduate to write a diary of “one week in his working life on a regional daily tabloid”. At the end of the week, the young reporter counts up:

Number of stories: 48 (9.6 per day)
People spoken to: 26
People seen face to face: 4 out of 26
Total hours out of office: 3 out of 45.5 (p59.)

The author comments:

This is life in a news factory. No reporter who is turning out nearly ten stories every shift can possibly do his or her job properly. No reporter who spends only three hours out of the office in an entire working week can possibily develop enough good leads or build enough good contacts. No reporter who speaks to only twenty-six people in researching forty-eight stories can possibly be checking their truth. (p59.)

Recycled stories

The researchers also chose two random weeks and analysed all the stories in the Times, Independent, Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, to find out how many were original.

At the end of this unique investigation, they came up with a striking finding – that the most respected media outlets in the country are routinely recycling unchecked second-hand material. … this tends to come from two primary sources; wire agencies like the Press Association, and public-relations activity which is promoting some commercial or political interest.

…

… only 1% of wire stories which were carried by Fleet Street papers admitted the source. Most carried misleading bylines, ‘by a staff reporter’ or even by a named reporter who had rewritten the agency copy. The denial of PR input is at least as thorough… ‘We found many stories apparently written by one of the newspaper’s own reporters that seem to have been cut and pasted from elsewhere.’ (p52-53.)

Many weren’t properly checked before being recycled:

The researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with a staggering 70% of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12% of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked. (p53.)

And these percentages left out the tabloids and various other sources of even lower quality:

These were simply the stories that were being presented by the best daily newspapers in the UK as an account of the most important or interesting events in the country over the preceding twenty-four hours. (p53.)

Relying on agencies

One common practice is to use something “off the wire”, i.e. from an agency such as Reuters or the Press Association (PA).

As one national newspaper correspondent told the Cardiff researchers: ‘Checking information has decreased, and what is worse, it is not expected by the news desk. I cannot tell you the number of times I am told to “take it off the wires and knock it into shape“, which is just terrible.’ … A section editor on a national daily told them: ‘We’ve always been reliant on wire copy, but we use it a hell of a lot more these days. It’s quite common for us to cut and paste a story off PA, renose it a bit to mask where it’s come from and then put it out there as our own.’ (p75.)

But the agency may not have checked it, either:

PA reporters told me they routinely start the day by writing stories from press releases and other newspapers and, since they may do this at six or seven in the morning, they cannot possibly find anybody to check them with. One of their senior editors agreed that this happens. He had previously worked for a regional newspaper and told me ‘We used to take what we were given from PA and accept it as fact but once I went to work there, I realised that we couldn’t.’

…

Another agency man told [the Cardiff researchers]: ‘My father was a journalist for Reuters for twenty-five years, and the working conditions were completely different. Stories would take much longer to put together, but when they were, they were more likely to be accurate and close to the truth.’ (p82.)

The author sums up in a line:

Journalism without checking is like a human body without an immune system. (p51.)

Truth and truth

And when you’re using agency sources, there’s another vital missing link: Reporting accurately what someone says is not the same as reporting the truth.

PA is a news agency, not a newspaper. It is not attempting, nor does it claim to be attempting, to tell people the truth about the world. As its editor, Jonathan Grun, put it to us: ‘What we do is report what people say and accurately.’ The PA reporter goes to the press conference with the intention of captruring an accurate record of what is said. Whether what is said is itself a truthful account of the world is simply not their business. … Sleuthing, Grun told us, is not PA’s role. ‘Our role is attributable journalism – what someone has got to say. What is important is in quote marks.’ If the Prime Minister says there are chemical weapons in Iraq, that is what the good news agency will report. (p83.)

No-one was watching

Moreover, the agencies don’t have enough journalists any more to properly cover the whole country, so important stories get missed entirely – e.g. from local governments, courts and even Parliament. No-one’s watching!

When I looked into this in the late 1990s, I found a criminal trial which had been running for three months at Leicester Crown Court, without a word of national coverage, even though it had unearthed Scotland Yard’s involvement in unlawfully importing Yardie gangsters from Jamaica who were used as informants and effectively given a licence to commint crime in London. (p78.)

As to Government:

Chris Moncrieff, who has covered Parliament for PA since 1962, told us … that PA now covers far fewer political meetings and speeches than it used to and relies far more on government press releases. ‘They’ve won’, he said. ‘If they put out in advance a copy of the speech, then we will not go. We now print what they want us to print. We go to far fewer meetings or not at all.’ (p80.)

And more…

I must say I finished the book thinking “What’s the point of reading a newspaper ever again? Most of what’s in it can’t be trusted anyway”.

There’s a lot more to it, which I haven’t cited here: the dynamics of which stories are likely to be chosen for print and which ignored; the money poured into public relations companies nowadays, and what they do; the success of organisations like Greenpeace in shaping stories; and a series of fascinating “case study”-type chapters, looking at different newspapers, different stories etc.

(Some of the stories are covered in even more depth at the web site connected with the book, www.flatearthnews.net.)

But what I found particularly illuminating was that whole scenario I’ve been describing via the quotes above: less and less time to research, understand or check the facts.

My own little case study

As I was reading, I kept thinking of that story in the Guardian back in October, reproducing some of the dodgy stats from Graham Badman’s work.

Now doesn’t that look like a perfect case study of the kind of thing Nick Davies talks about in the book?

So, given all that…

To sum up: the story shows no sign of having been written for the purpose of telling the truth.

It did forward the Government’s agenda and fill up some space in the paper, though. :-/

I wonder… if Jessica Shepherd even worked on the story at all – or if someone else stuck her name on it.

I wonder… who put which words of the article together at which points. Maybe it was based on a Govt press release, plus an Education Otherwise press release for Fiona’s quote? Maybe it was cobbled together at the Guardian, or maybe before that at the Press Association or Reuters?

Implications and possibly opportunities

I think this territory is important for activists to know and understand.

For one thing, it’ll give us a more realistic perspective on what we can expect from the Press.

Nick Davies again:

Most of the time, most journalists do not know what they are talking about. Their stories may be right, or they may be wrong: they don’t know. … They [now] work in structures which positively prevent them from discovering the truth. (p28.)

But also, there are opportunities here.

It’s not that I want journalism to be compromised like it is. In the case of the Children, Schools & Families Bill, and the plan to interfere with non-school education, I think we’d be infinitely better off with a Press which had time to find out and understand what was really happening.

(Or, failing that, at least we could do with something like the Center for Public Integrity, an independently funded organisation for investigative journalism in the States – also mentioned in the book.)

And the same is true for the world in general: truth is just generally helpful in doing good in the world, and lies generally are not.

But as long as the media does work that way, we should be learning how to take advantage of it like the other “players” do. Why shouldn’t it be our press releases that find their way in?

(Well, OK, one answer to that is it’s more risky for the Press to print things which go against current “received wisdom” – that’s another thing that the author talks about – but still, there are things we could say that wouldn’t hit that filter.)

Here’s another quote from that young journalist’s diary, from the book. Remember, this is about working on a regional daily paper:

Come in at eight to find the desk asking for a lead story, two 60-line basements [for the foot of a page] and 100 lines of nibs [news in briefs]. And they have no leads. I usually find some stories on my weekend off, but I’ve had a horrible cold. They tell me to check progress with a building being knocked down in the centre of town. They like stories with pictures, because they fill more space. I phone the developer and the council and turn it into a story. I take my first ever lunch break, wander the streets, copying down details of posters advertising car-boot sales, meditation evenings, whatever. Back in the office, I start turning them into stories. The desk panic because they still have no front-page lead. They steal an old story off the sports desk …

…

Then they tell me to do the Smilies: every day, on page seven, we run three happy, smiling stories, to make the readers feel good, complete with pics. No leads. I call my mum, who lives nearby, and she reads out bits from another local paper. I turn them into Smilies.

…

A real story walks in the front door: a young woman who has had her children taken into care because they say she has learning disabilities so can’t make a decent mum. She is desperate, been standing in the rain waiting for the doors to open. I tell her I’ll call her. I know I won’t; the desk aren’t interested. … No leads at all. I recycle some old stuff from my notebook and download a few upcoming events off the council website. (p56-57.)

Papers like that probably aren’t going to be interested in the politics we’d like them to report. But a couple of phrases stick in my mind.

They like stories with pictures, because they fill more space.

happy, smiling stories, to make the readers feel good, complete with pics.

Does anyone else see an opportunity here for some awareness-raising of non-school education? I can’t help wondering whether we could be in our local papers almost as often as we like, with very little effort, just by making a point of taking a few good-quality pix whenever we do anything interesting.

OK, not every child will want to have their photo in the paper, and not every family is prepared to risk bringing the attention of the Local Authority upon them in these times of prejudice and ultra vires practice. But still… remember the picnics with the bubble-blowing?

As for queer activism, I imagine local papers may not be quite as open to that, what with homophobia/biphobia and all; but still I’m pondering the use of photos in helping to get more bi news into Gay Times, Diva or the Pink, or any queer activism into the mainstream papers. Remember BiCon 2002 and the pix in Diva? or BiCon 2003 and the pix in the Big Issue?

And a last word

yeah, so I recommend reading this book :-)

Linky index…
Top of document
Then and now
More stories, less time
Recycled stories
Relying on agencies
Truth and truth
No-one was watching
And more…
My own little case study
Implications and possibly opportunities
And a last word

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

I thought I’d celebrate it by telling you about a favourite book and a favourite blog.

Time to Think

The book is Nancy Kline’s Time to Think. It’s been hugely influential in my life ever since I discovered it in December 1998. (Funnily enough, the copyright year inside it is actually 1999, but it got into at least one bookshop just before the turn of the year, and that’s where I found it. I’d already read and liked a previous book of hers.)

NK’s writing immediately rang true to me. I recognised the Thinking Environment as a description of a listening space that was missing in my life, which I’d been intuitively trying for a long time to elicit from friends without having a clear idea of exactly what to ask for. So the book was doubly useful: one, it clarified for me what I was looking for; and two, in future, all I needed to do to explain the idea was to give people the book!

Then, early in 1999, I started rather experimentally having Thinking Sessions with a friend. I remember in one of the earliest ones where it was my turn (maybe the very first), my theme was about how doing my business accounts could be less of a nightmare every year.

One new idea I had in that session was getting my computer to open an accounts spreadsheet on start-up, so I could input right then whatever had happened that day or the previous day, while it was still fresh in memory. Another was designating a container for receipts near where I took my coat off, so I could empty my pockets into it when I got in, and not have to search the house for bus tickets every year. It took several years after that for the doing-the-accounts nightmare to diminish to a reasonable size, but that Thinking Session was the start.

I’ve kept on with Thinking Sessions ever since – not with the same friend all that time, but with different people over the years. A lot of mine are about how I’m using my time and energy, including a sort of “Review of what’s currently happening”. But sometimes I’ll zoom in on some particular area.

Here’s an article I wrote back in 2000, with a bit more about how the process works. Currently I have three regular Thinking Partners, and we take turns to do an hour every couple of weeks. We call them Thinks – “Your turn to Think” is a familiar phrase in my life :-)

The Fluent Self

The blog I want to celebrate is Havi Brooks’ The Fluent Self. I think it must have been some time in 2008 that I discovered this, and it quickly became a favourite of mine – it’s now at the top of the list in my feed reader.

Havi writes with a lovely mix of compassion, humour and creativity. The blog subtitle is “When you need some destuckification.”

Some of the running jokes I can sort of “take or leave”, but the central core of what she writes is right up my street: metaphors, internal conversations, working “with yourself” rather than trying to turn yourself into someone you’re not.

Havi identifies as an introvert, and she has an interesting perspective on balancing (a) a strong need for time alone with (b) a purpose which involves being “out in the world”. I don’t think I’ve seen that written about anywhere else, and I find it really useful.

By way of further intro, some ideas/posts I liked:

Happy reading!

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.