This is Your Brain on Mental Illness

Okay, I don't think of myself as actually mentally ill. It's a handy term to explain to total strangers why I don't necessarily always operate exactly the way everybody else does, but mostly, it's just an inconvenient quirk in how my brain works.

But before I found out what the heck was going on, it made me feel like screaming when I couldn't do at all something I did brilliantly last week, or when I went practically overnight from doing heavy landscaping 12 to 16 hours/day for months to being so tired I got weak and shaky from a trip to the mailbox.

Then one day, my sister told me that her psychologist told her that I was bipolar.

Turns out she was giving a family history and described my erratic energy swings. That's a roundabout way to find out why--for example--I could write seven novels (that's about 800,000 words) in six months and then be unable to finish more than two during the next ten years. And don't think that didn't make me frantic. And I look back now and realize the stuff I did manage to do during that period is as flat and dull as I felt at the time.

So anyway, I went to MY psychologist and told her what my sister's psychologist told HER, and my psychologist asked me a few questions and shrugged and said, "What the hell; let's try some drugs."
I know the popular feeling regarding prescription pharmaceuticals. I used to have the same opinion: "I don't need no stinkin' drugs; I'll do it by brute force with diet and exercise and meditation and obsessive-compulsive behavior!"

But eventually, you reach your thirties, and you just wear down, and you give in, and you realize, "I don't have to keep pushing this darn boulder up this hill only to get squashed when it rolls back down."

Science to the rescue!

So now I am a drug fiend! Well, not the kind of drugs you get from the really mellow guy with the Birkenstocks who lives in a yurt (although that's now legal in my state--the "herbs" not the yurt; the yurt was always legal), or the jittery guy in the next office but one in your building.

I like the ones you get from the doctor that lift up the downs, and smooth out the "explosion-in-a-fun-factory," and now I can WRITE again. Which means a lot when you live for writing (also for building fences out of twigs and spit, but I get to do that too).

I don't mean to encourage everyone to run out and load up on prescription psychotropics. Most people get along just fine on their caffeine and their alcohol and their nicotine. And some pot. Lots of people treat their bipolar disorder with pot. Call me crazy (ha ha), I like knowing my drugs are doctor supervised and FDA regulated. Plus I hate the smell of pot.

My point is that I feel a need to explain why there is such a long (heh heh) gap between my early novels and my latest (blush), which is actually a rewrite of one of those earlier novels that I mostly wrote while in a down-swing (Warning: do not read anything that is not shown here on this blog site!)

While none of these stories is about mental illness per se, many of them contain characters whose brains don't operate the way everybody else's do. The Lady Fred series (fluffy Regency romance) is the best example. Freddy can do all sorts of remarkable things like sightreading piano music better upside-down than right-side-up and thinking around corners, but she doesn't get the social niceties and is a butt of jokes among her social set.

In Strangers (science-fiction, ebook available, but temporarily unavailable in print, and why are you still reading in print anyway), three of the characters have neurological glitches that give them some intellectual advantages but handicap them in social situations. Their stories are about finding the place where their particular strengths fit and finding the people who aren't frightened or offended by their oddities.

I guess that's what I would wish for everybody with "interesting" brains--that we all find where we fit and the people who think we're fine pretty much the way we are--although possibly with meds.

When Am I Gonna Be a Celebrity?

I am reliably informed that, being a published author, I am obliged to blog. “

Blog?” I said. “Isn't the internet clogged with blogs? Won't it seem vulgar or pushy?”

It was explained to me that people like to feel connected to celebrities.

I explained that I am not a celebrity.

“That,” I was informed, “is why you have to blog.”

Thus hoisted upon my own petard, I am now blogging so that you can feel connected to me and I can become a celebrity and sell many, many books. Which would be a good idea, by the way, if you were to buy a book. That's one book sold; I can buy lunch! Some ramen; maybe a vegetable. Some fruit to ward off scurvy.

You probably figured out already that this becoming-a-celebrity thing doesn't come naturally. You would never hear Julia Roberts begging for lunch money. She looks like she has class.

But that's what we stoop to, we artisty types. I once told John Ratzenberger (you remember him, right? Cliff Claven from Cheers?) that he should buy the biggest cappuccino-maker in the store because I needed the commission to feed my cats. How tacky. But he did buy the cappuccino maker.

We all like to feel connected to famous people.

On another occasion, Mr. Ratzenberger came into the roastery where I worked. An older couple in the store saw John (I call him John because we're such close friends—unless he's present in which case I call him Mr. Ratzenberger because he's not actually aware of our friendship). Anyway, they huddled together and whispered urgently, then the husband approached Mr. Ratzenberger.

“Mr. Ratzenberger,” he said. “I'm George Dobbs, and this is my wife Barbara. We've seen you at the country-club, but we haven't had the opportunity to introduce ourselves.” There was some more of the same sort of thing with Mr. Dobbs acting all cool and serious and Mr. Ratzenberger getting in a word or two before he found an excuse to flee the store without buying anything.

Mr. and Mrs. Dobbs brought their beans to the counter. “That was John Ratzenberger,” they explained.

Sympathetic to their star-struck condition, I said, “Every time he comes in, I want to fling myself at his feet screaming, 'Cliff! Cliff!'”

Mr. Dobbs looked down his nose. “John hates that.”

'Cause we all like to feel connected to celebrity.

I believe this is the point where I am supposed to bring the conversation back around to Symbiont, my recently published science-fiction novel—which is, incidentally, about an actress who loses her career when she is implanted with a symbiotic skin. The gengineered organism saves her life after a studio accident but forces her to reshape (sometimes literally) her sense of self (plus many adventures and perils and some romance with the hunky...well you know the drill).

The story probably came out of my introvert's aversion to exposure. The trouble with being all reserved and introverty is that I really, really want you to read this story (assuming you like science-fiction and whatnot, otherwise don't torture yourself) because you don't write stories for yourself (mostly). You write stories you want other people to enjoy, and when you do that, they wind up knowing something about you, and then you're connected. So I might as well get used to it. Wouldn't it be a giggle if someday John Ratzenberger is bragging to his friends that he met me back when I worked in a coffee roastery on Vashon Island? Because we all like to feel connected to celebrity.

What's Audience Got to do With It?

Now that you've started writing and are feeling good about your new book, let's take some time to consider who you are writing for. Who's your audience?

If you've never given this much thought before, it may seem like a stupid question. Geez, the "audience" is the guy who wants to know what I have to say!

Fair enough, but I'm guessing you have a lot to say about your favorite subject. Say you're writing a book about electrical engineering. Yes, you could write everything anybody ever wanted to know about electrical engineering but was too bored to ask, but if you ever finish writing, your book is going to weigh thirty pounds and cost $650 per copy. Even as a textbook, that puppy's going to be hard to sell.

And who exactly is going to read it? The raw beginner who has never so much as replaced an outlet, is going to be intimidated. The experienced professional doesn't want to waste his time slogging through the beginner-level stuff to find out what he needs.

So narrow it down a bit. What do you really REALLY want to say about your subject, and who really REALLY needs to hear it?

Are you writing this book to inspire high-school shop students to become electrical engineers? Or to inspire the Home Ec students? Or is your reader already considering a career in EE? Has he started an apprenticeship and needs to know the basics? Or is he an experienced professional, and you have a new technique or technology to introduce? What does that reader already know about your subject?  Don't waste his time with a lot of stuff he already knows and don't confuse him with a lot of stuff he won't be able to understand.

Save your time and energy for the readers you really want to reach. When you finish your first book, there will be time enough to move on to a new audience.

If you're writing fiction, your audience may be obvious. Children's book?  Children. Use a less sophisticated vocabulary and shorter sentences to give young readers a chance to take in the story. Young adult story? Young adults, obviously. They can handle a more sophisticated vocabulary. Expand their horizons by dropping in some fancy words. Depending on age, they may need a shorter length than an adult reader. Science-fiction opus? Adults who love science-fiction and have a good long attention span. Piece of cake.

Here's a fun one: adult readers learning English as a second language. They need practice reading and using English, and they don't want to read children's stories, but their vocabulary may be limited to a few hundred words. Tricky? Have fun.

Now that you have a sharper idea of who you are writing for, keep that in mind as you start that next chapter.

The Final Draft!

At last! The final draft of scene one! How exciting.

Today, take your rough draft from yesterday with all the suggestions you and your Responsive Reader have made and rewrite it using all the new information you now have. Need more expanded details? Stick 'em in there. Did your reader get confused? Explain what you meant. Did you do a bit of extra research to answer a reader's question? Slip that in. Maybe you realized you need to move some paragraphs around to make better sense.

That's it! That's all there is to it!

Well, not really. The truth is, you are going to come back to this bit of your book and all the others over and over as you learn more and get a better sense of where your book needs to go and what it needs to do.

But for now, you can set this first bit of your final draft aside, pat yourself on the back and start all over again with Lesson One.

This time, to get ideas for your free write, you may go back to your original list of ideas or scenes for your book, or you might want to sit down with part one and make out a list of questions or ideas that arise out of that first section.

Pick the most interesting of those ideas and go back to Monday's lesson: The Free Write.

There's more to writing a book than just free-writing and expanded details. In my next post, I'll talk about choosing and understanding your audience.

Constructive Criticism

Okay, aspiring writers, you've all written your rough drafts. Is your rough draft a perfect, shining gem of the English Language? Gosh I hope so, but more likely, it has some flaws. Probably, you can already see some of those flaws and are itching to fix them. Good for you!

On the other hand, it's not easy to be totally objective about your own writing. You think you have said exactly what you meant. Your examples seem persuasive to you, but you don't yet see your work as others will see it.

So you've got to find somebody to read your rough draft and give you a "Reader Response" which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Somebody reads your rough draft and tells you what he or she thinks in as much detail as possible.

In order for this to work, you need to find someone who will tell you the truth. A reader who says, "It's perfect, don't change a word!" is wonderful for your ego, but he or she is no use to you as a writer. Look for somebody who can say, "Wow, I'm impressed by how hard you worked."

On the other hand, there's no point in choosing a reader who will tell you to give up; your writing is terrible; you will never write a book. If he or she can't suggest how you could make your rough draft better, then he or she probably isn't any better at writing than you are.

This is where we get into Constructive Criticism.

Constructive Criticism is about helping a writer to CONSTRUCT a better book.

Let's say someone asked you to offer constructive criticism on a piece of writing. How do you help that person improve her work?

Well, first you read carefully all the way through the piece.

Then you read through it again. This time, you underline, circle or highlight everything that catches your attention either good or...well...not quite so good.

Every time you note something you think works well, put a check-mark (or a smiley face or a plus-sign or a star) by that line and make a note of why you think it works or what you like about it.

Whenever you come across something that doesn't make sense or isn't clear or you're not sure if the author's point is correct etc., make a check mark (or a minus sign or a frowny face or cross it out with a fat red pen) and explain why it didn't work for you.

It is important when noting problems that you don't use emotional words like stupid, careless, bad, etc. Use "I" statements. "I didn't understand this." "I'm confused by this." "I wondered if this was true. Do you have support for this statement?"

You can find critical readers in writing groups, workshops and classrooms. You tend to get more thoughtful readers there because they aren't so afraid of hurting your feelings. Family members can help as long as you make sure they understand what you need. You might find a friend or a co-worker who is interested in the topic of your book and enjoys helping out a "real writer." Or another writer who has time to give you feedback in exchange for your opinion on his own writing.

If you don't have a critical reader yet, no need to panic. Set your rough draft aside overnight and come back to it in the morning. Or even set it aside for a week and get to work on the next section of your book. When you come back to it, you will see it more objectively. Then read your own work as a critical reader and make the same kind of notes you would if it had been written by someone else.

Once you've made your editing notes, you'll be ready to write the final draft of this tiny piece of your book.

First Draft

Whew! Sorry for my prolonged absence. I had the flu. My dog peed on my homework. The traffic was jammed on the information superhighway, I was pursued by saber-tooth tigers etc.

But I promised you a rough-draft, so here I am.

The rough draft is your very first attempt to throw together a scene or section of your book. It doesn't have to be perfect or even pretty. It's your first, vague outline of what that scene or section will look like.

The rough draft differs from a free-write in that in the rough draft, you will spend more time thinking and making decisions about what you are writing. You will stop and start, re-examine your details, think about what it is you want to say.

As you write, you will be trying to figure out how you will pack in all the information you have written in your journal. There just may not be room. What is the most important information to keep? If you're falling short of 500 words, can you add more expanded details? Do you have an anecdote that would support your point, or make your character more real?

Now start writing this little bitty piece of your book.

Make it at least 500 words long but it's probably best not to go beyond 750 yet. 500-750 words usually adds up to 3 or 4 double-spaced pages. This should take you an hour more or less, but don't worry if it's a lot more-or-less. Maybe you were extra-inspired, or it was hard to get the words rolling. You will get better with practice.

You get started. I'll go empty my dishwasher and come back when you're done.
(about an hour later)

Okay, fed my chickens, refreshed my coffee. Are you done writing yet? Wonderful.

You're not done for the day, though. (actually, that's up to you: If you're completely exhausted, go ahead and save this next bit until tomorrow).

Your next step is to get feedback. Because Feedback is important and I want to say several things about getting the best feedback possible, I'm going to start a new post on:

Constructive Criticism

Facts and Figures

Okey-dokey,today, we take a look at Facts and Figures (development and support).

Now, facts and figures will mean different things in fiction than in non-fiction, so bear with me.

In non-fiction, facts and figures are the objective details you can bring in from reputable sources to support your premise (the basic idea of your scene/chapter). So, say you are pointing out to your readers the value of hiring an accountant to do their taxes. You might want to tell your readers how many people each year use tax accountants instead doing their own taxes. Has that number increased or decreased over the last decade? More importantly, is there a difference between the two groups in the amount of taxes paid (or refunded)? How about audits? Which group is more likely to be audited? Which group, once audited, is more likely to be fined for under-payment?

Where would you go to get that information? The IRS? Maybe they have a web page that would give you that information. Publications written for the accounting community? Accountants like reading about their infinitely fascinating field. Professional organizations? An accountant of your acquaintance? (The accountant might also be a great resource for humorous accounting anecdotes you can put in a sidebar to amuse your readers). How about just mentioning your own background and training. If, say, you happen to be an accountant, you can tell the reader how many hours of continuing education you have to do each year to keep your license.

Now you have given your reader concrete examples to demonstrate how they would benefit from hiring a tax accountant. Just as important, you have given the reader reasons to believe that you know what you are talking about. You are a trustworthy person who has done research and taken care to make sure your facts are correct.

Your mission today is to take your first topic from way back on Monday and write down...oh, say three to five questions you think your readers might have about that idea. Are they going to wonder how many different kinds of widgets an engineer can design in a week? Will they wonder why the heck they should listen to you--a perfect stranger (that's one of the first questions any reader asks, by the way)? Now take, say, the three questions you think are most important, and write down some places you might go to find CONCRETE ANSWERS to those questions. Books, articles, studies, professional organizations etc.

And now, You guessed it! Find the answers to those questions!

Now, Fictioneers! You've either been bored off your gourds for the last few minutes, or you have intelligently skipped down to this section and left the non-fiction type persons to their own devices.

Your job here is different (Contrast!). Your story needs facts and figures, too. These facts fall generally into two categories. Real-world facts and fiction-world facts. Let's start with the real-world facts. Say your story is set in...oh...Seattle. Real-world Seattle as opposed, for example, to a small part of Seattle that I made up for the purposes of a horror novel.

You are going to need some concrete information about Seattle including size, neighborhoods, streets, population, population distribution in terms of race, locations of important buildings and institutions, what the space-needle looks like and where it is located etc.

This is much easier if you have visited the city with a good map and guidebook. You will definitely need to get the FEEL of the city, the smell of the city at night, the temperature, the sound. If your character is going to be hanging around in the underground parts of Old Seattle, you will need to get that experience as well. Take a tour. Find a map of the underground. Read non-fiction accounts of Seattle history and present-day features. Or just live nearby for thirty years and visit it a lot. (Also Google. You can get a LOT of this information on Google)

On the other hand, you don't need to demonstrate your OWN knowledge of the city. You have to demonstrate YOUR CHARACTER's knowledge of the city. When he walks through the Pike Place Market, does he rap his knuckles on the back of the big bronze pig for luck? (I was pretty sure it was bronze, but I double-checked with a quick Google). Does he take a minute to watch the fish-mongers tossing salmon and steelhead back and forth to each other?

Or say your hero is a tax accountant and amateur sleuth. You don't have to add footnotes to prove you have researched accounting. Your hero talks knowledgeably about how line twelve on Schedule E proves that the murderer was... Or, if he is a world-renowned tax accountant, the dangerous blonde walks through his front door and says she has come to him because he won the Nobel Prize for Accounting, and she is desperate to find out what happened to her late husband's estate.


There are, on occasion, "facts" that you can make up. Save yourself some tedious research by planting your story in a fictional town, country or planet.

(PS, it's only tedious if you aren't INTERESTED in, say, Seattle or Minneapolis or fly fishing or accounting or whatever details your audience needs for a sense of reality in the story, and why on Earth are you writing about something that doesn't interest you?).

However, the readers will still be asking questions: What does this town smell, feel, look like? What exactly is involved in the hero's career as a norb-herder or cross-dimensional shuttle pilot? What plants grow in her garden? What is that weird-lookin' animal that almost ate her foot? How did the hero get here? In short, they will be asking all the some questions they would ask about real-world Seattle, it's just that you get to make up many of the answers.

So, your assignment for today is to look at the first scene you have written. What questions will your reader be asking about the character's knowledge and background, the reality and concreteness of the setting, whether the action is plausible? List at least three, or even better, five. What do you need to know in order to provide those answers?

Tomorrow, The first draft!