For an idea of why I push so hard on this, though, take a look at this graph of how popular my books have been over time (a graph compiled by myself looking at data from various sources). It may not be readily apparent, but every time a new book is released, all my books spike in popularity, then slowly decline. The graph starts at the release of BLOOD ROCK, and the big gap between that and LIQUID FIRE - working on stories for anthologies - really caused things to fade away. If I want to write all the time, I need people to buy my books, so I need to produce books, to get back on track with novels coming out on a regular basis.
Well, shoot. Camp Nano not going well so far. Blast ye, taxes. Is the date right? Should I make Dakota worry about her taxes too, just to be mean? Checking The Grid … no, dangit, her taxes wouldn’t be due until the next book. Sigh.
Oh, while I’m here I should also extend my thanks to Michael Peña, Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and the rest of the fine cast and crew that made it possible. But that which pops most to my mind is Matt Damon directed by Ridley Scott to say Andy Weir’s lines, with Harry Gregson-Williams’ music in the background. Thank you.
Back to the novel (and the book launch, and the deep learning, and the taxes). That is all.
Back at work on Dakota Frost #5, PHANTOM SILVER, for Camp Nanowrimo. I’m at 50,000+ words already and hope to get it to 100,000 words the month of April, then finish the book off in Camp Nanowrimo in July. My summary from the Camp Nano page:
Dakota Frost --- Skindancer, magical tattooist, chair of the Magical Security Council, and harried mother of a teen weretiger and a teen half-elf --- still has to pay the bills. Fortunately that involves something awesome, being a headliner on the supernatural debunking show The Exposers billed as the Skeptical Witch.
Too bad their latest adventure turns up a very real ghost, which latches onto Dakota to help dispel its ancient family curse. Add to that a reawakened fae curse, an invasion from the land of the dead - and an annoying older brother - and you have a recipe for disaster.
and an excerpt of yesterday’s writing:
“Alright, your turn,” I said.
“Mo—uh, my Lady Frost, I do not think—” Benjamin began.
“What did you say?” the sphinx said, claws scraping against granite.
“You asked me a riddle, now I ask you a riddle back, correct?” I said.
“You wish to duel me?” the sphinx said. “I accept!”
“Wait,” I said, befuddled, “weren’t we dueling already?”
“It was a riddle challenge,” Benjamin said. “Trolls ask one, sphinxes three—”
“The riddle game is from The Hobbit, Mom,” Cinnamon said, tugging at my arm.
“The riddle game is an ancient and honorable mode of dueling and I accept,” the sphinx roared, stamping one paw, so that all three of us cringed back. “I accept! We must answer three riddles each before we pass by; at the first slip … the winner takes the loser as the prize.”
Oh dear! Sounds like Dakota and her brood are in trouble!
Now to brew up more of it. Back to work.
-the Centaur
P. S. Planning it out, it looks like the next three Dakota Frost books will dovetail nicely with the first three Cinnamon Frost books, so I have a loose hexalogy on my hands. I had to look that one up, God help me. (And I pray He does.)
Also on the note of resurrections, the latest version of JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE is winging its way back to the publisher. Apropos, that I sent this back at Easter: this book has been through so many drafts that I’m starting to feel dizzy. I expect there will be at least one more, though, so I’m prepared.
Lots more work to do. For now, though, back to SPECTRAL IRON.
Imitating Scalzi’s inimitable style (at least when he’s too busy to blog): “Has the novel been sent back to the editor? NO.”
But Debra did like the new first couple of chapters for THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, and her guidance gives me a clear path forward to cleaning them up, and the changes to the rest of the novel are minor … if I could Just. Get. More. Time. Friends from grade school are crossing the country to visit me, and friendly mathematicians are dropping by my coffeehouse table to school me on Clifford algebras and deep learning, to the point at which I finally had to turn down an impromptu lunch meeting today with someone who really wanted to know more about my team, just because I had no more time.
So, having no more time, just now I wanted to throw up a quick blogpost, other than the half dozen half-finished longer blogposts I can’t get done and still get to my own work. So I tried imitating John Scalzi’s quick posts when he’s backed up. Normally a sentence, and a photo. That’s it. But today, Google Photos and AT&T’s network and my phone and SPACE GREMLINS have conspired to make it impossible for me to upload photos in a timely fashion, I mean, dammit, how hard is it to write a sentence and post a photo?
THIS is why Scalzi is paid the megabucks.
I am no John Scalzi, so, here, you get a picture of the structure of the first 72 positions in tic-tac-toe, because I can’t not do the foundational work on a problem once I’ve thought of it, or I’ll never get back to it. This is important, it will mean something, I promise. But later.
Back to the novel.
-the Centaur
P.S. Yes I know my Mathematica could be simplified via NestList or something like that, don’t bother me, don’t bother me.
SO, why's an urban fantasy author digging into the guts of Mathematica trying to reverse-engineer how Stephen Wolfram drew the diagrams of cellular automata in his book A New Kind of Science? Well, one of my favorite characters to write about is the precocious teenage weretiger Cinnamon Frost, who at first glance was a dirty little street cat until she blossomed into a mathematical genius when watered with just the right amount of motherly love. My training as a writer was in hard science fiction, so even if I'm writing about implausible fictions like teenage weretigers, I want the things that are real - like the mathematics she develops - to be right. So I'm working on a new kind of math behind the discoveries of my little fictional genius, but I'm not the youngest winner of the Hilbert Prize, so I need tools to help simulate her thought process.
And my thought process relies on visualizations, so I thought, hey, why don't I build on whatever Stephen Wolfram did in his groundbreaking tome A New Kind of Science, which is filled to its horse-choking brim with handsome diagrams of cellular automata, their rules, and the pictures generated by their evolution? After all, it only took him something like ten years to write the book ... how hard could it be?
Deconstructing the Code from A New Kind of Science, Chapter 2
Fortunately Stephen Wolfram provides at least some of the code that he used for creating the diagrams in A New Kind of Science. He's got the code available for download on the book's website, wolframscience.com, but a large subset is in the extensive endnotes for his book (which, densely printed and almost 350 pages long, could probably constitute a book in their own right). I'm going to reproduce that code here, as I assume it's short enough to fall under fair use, and for the half-dozen functions we've got here any attempt to reverse-engineer it would end up just recreating essentially the same functions with slightly different names.
Cellular automata are systems that take patterns and evolve them according to simple rules. The most basic cellular automata operate on lists of bits - strings of cells which can be "on" or "off" or alternately "live" or "dead," "true" and "false," or just "1" and "0" - and it's easiest to show off how they behave if you start with a long string of cells which are "off" with the very center cell being "on," so you can easily see how a single live cell evolves. And Wolfram's first function gives us just that, a list filled with dead cells represented by 0 with a live cell represented by 1 in its very center:
One could imagine a cellular automata which updated each cell just based on its contents, but that would be really boring as each cell would be effectively independent. So Wolfram looks at what he calls "elementary automata" which update each cell based on their neighbors. Counting the cell itself, that's a row of three cells, and there are eight possible combinations of live and dead neighbors of three elements - and only two possible values that can be set for each new element, live or dead. Wolfram had a brain flash to list the eight possible combinations the same each way every time, so all you have are that list of eight values of "live" or "dead" - or 1's and 0's, and since a list of 1's and 0's is just a binary number, that enabled Wolfram to represent each elementary automata rule as a number:
Once you have that number, building code to apply the rule is easy. The input data is already a string of 1's and 0's, so Wolfram's rule for updating a list of cells basically involves shifting ("rotating") the list left and right, adding up the values of these three neighbors according to base 2 notation, and then looking up the value in the rule. Wolfram created Mathematica in part to help him research cellular automata, so the code to do this is deceptively simple…
... a “RotateLeft” and a “RotateRight” with some addition and multiplication to get the base 2 index into the rule. The code to apply this again and again to a list to get the history of a cellular automata over time is also simple:
Now we're ready to create the graphics for the evolution of Wolfram's "rule 30," the very simple rule which shows highly complex and irregular behavior, a discovery which Wolfram calls "the single most surprising scientific discovery [he has] ever made." Wow. Let's spin it up for a whirl and see what we get!
Uh - oh. The "Raster" code that Wolfram provides is the code to create the large images of cellular automata, not the sexy graphics that show the detailed evolution of the rules. And reading between the lines of Wolfram's end notes, he started his work in FrameMaker before Mathematica was ready to be his full publishing platform, with a complex build process producing the output - so there's no guarantee that clean simple Mathematica code even exists for some of those early diagrams.
Guess we'll have to create our own.
Visualizing Cellular Automata in the Small
The cellular automata diagrams that Wolfram uses have boxes with thin lines, rather than just a raster image with 1's and 0's represented by borderless boxes. They're particularly appealing because the lines are white between black boxes and black between white boxes, which makes the structures very easy to see. After some digging, I found that, naturally, a Mathematica function to create those box diagrams does exist, and it's called ArrayPlot, with the Mesh option set to True:
While we could just use ArrayPlot, it' s important when developing software to encapsulate our knowledge as much as possible, so we'll create a function CAGridGraphics (following the way Wolfram named his functions) that encapsulates the knowledge of turning the Mesh option to True. If later we decide there's a better representation, we can just update CAMeshGraphics, rather than hunting down every use of ArrayPlot. This function gives us this:
Now, Wolfram has these great diagrams to help visualize cellular automata rules which show the neighbors up top and the output value at bottom, with a space between them. The GraphicsGrid does what we want here, except it by its nature resizes all the graphics to fill each available box. I'm sure there's a clever way to do this, but I don't know Mathematica well enough to find it, so I'm going to go back on what I just said earlier, break out the options on ArrayPlot, and tell the boxes to be the size I want:
Now we need the pattern of digits that Wolfram uses to represent his neighbor patterns. Looking at the diagrams and sfter some digging in the code, it seems like these digits are simply listed in reverse counting order - that is, for 3 cells, we count down from 2^3 - 1 to 0, represented as binary digits.
Stay with me - that only gets us the first row of the CATransitionGraphics; to get the next row, we need to apply a rule to that pattern and take the center cell:
What does that look like? Well, we once again take our CAEvolveList function from before, but rather than formatting it with Raster, we format it with our CAMeshGraphics:
And now we' ve got all the parts of the graphics which appear in the initial diagram of this page. Just to work it out a bit further, let’s write a single function to put all the graphics together, and try it out on rule 110, the rule which Wolfram discovered could effectively simulate any possible program, making it effectively a universal computer:
It doesn' t come out quite the way it did in Photoshop, but we' re getting close. Further learning of the rules of Mathematica graphics will probably help me, but that's neither here nor there. We've got a set of tools for displaying diagrams, which we can craft into what we need.
Which happens to be a non-standard number system unfolding itself into hyperbolic space, God help me.
Wish me luck.
-the Centaur
P.S. While I' m going to do a standard blogpost on this, I' m also going to try creating a Mathematica Computable Document Format (.cdf) for your perusal. Wish me luck again - it's my first one of these things.
P.P.S. I think it' s worthwhile to point out that while the tools I just built help visualize the application of a rule in the small …
In[24]:= CAApplicationGraphics[105, 53]
Out[24]=
... the tools Wolfram built help visualize rules in the very, very large:
So, as you may or may not know, I’m trying to blog every day this year, and just now, taking a brief respite after my red-eye flight, I decided to extend my tracking spreadsheet from just January to cover February. And when I did so … my tracking graphic suddenly turned into … I don’t know … an origami Pac-Man?
I’m not even sure how this particular chart type could make the above graphic, so I’m not sure how to fix it. This probably should get filed under “if you break the assumptions of a piece of software’s inputs, it will break your assumptions about its outputs.” Best thing to do is probably start over with a new graphic.
So I’ve got enough data now - two months - and it shows my productivity in non-Nano months is about one third of the Nano goal. Because December and January are 31 day months, by now I should have produced a notch over 100,000 words if this was National Novel Writing Month … but instead I’ve produced a notch under 30,000.
The picture is a bit muddled since my productivity in successful Nano months is slightly higher than 50,000 words, and my productivity this month is slightly higher since I’m not counting some writing (some edits to stories, plus all the nonfiction writing I do at work). But it shows the social effect.
Welp, closing in on my first month of the “blog every day” challenge, and while I didn’t build that backlog I wanted, I have (with a few lapses) kept more or less on top of it.
I’m at one of my favorite restaurants, Aqui, hacking away on five different projects, trying to finish up them all in the next few minutes before the next thing on my list. I could have gone to one of the two Aqui directly on the drive home, but I headed to downtown Campbell, hoping to have time to walk by a bookstore before it closes (I won’t).
And so maybe it would have saved time to have gone to someplace more convenient.
But there’s something wonderful about going to a new (or at least different from routine place), and something serendipitious about studying how opinions change in human social networks while two tables around me, loudly gossiping and socializing, showed in full-blooded life what my colleagues in the scientific community are trying to understand with math.
Ah, the human mind, the human condition. What a wonderful environment for such a glorious machine.
The small press I’m associated with, Thinking Ink Press, has just announced its first anthology, 30 DAYS LATER, edited by A.J. Sikes, B.J. Sikes, and Dover Whitecliff of the Treehouse Writers’ Group! Check out the Thinking Ink Press announcement for more details, but it should be coming out around the time of the Clockwork Alchemy conference this May.
(Self-deprecating note: this blogpost is a rough draft of an essay that I’m later planning to refine for the Write to the End site, but I’ve been asked to share it, so I finished it up and am sharing it as is. When the full article is cleaned up, I’ll link to it … but in the meantime, enjoy, and try not to wince too much).
So for way of introduction to the Write to the End group, I’ve been asked by a lot of people recently “How can I become a better writer?” — a question for which I’ve generated a bit of stock advice I frequently sum up as, “Just Write!” But, when I dug a little deeper, I found almost half of the people asking me that question were really asking the question, “How can I overcome Writer’s Block?” Well, I have some theories. And I’m going to tell you about them. But more importantly, I’ve got some techniques which I’m going to share with you, and even better, I’m using one of them right now: if you sit down to write and get writer’s block, then write down very explicitly why you sat down to write, and what kind of writing you hope to have produced when you get up again. If you don’t know why you want to write, and you don’t know what you hope to produce before you get up again, congratulations! You’re done. Get up from the page and go have a soda, something really nice, not diet, like with Italian flavoring or an ice cream float. If you do know what you want to write, or what you want to have written, congratulations! Actually writing that down can get you … um … on the order of 227 words, according to Scrivener’s count, probably 300 by the time you’re done. The hope is that getting yourself writing ANYTHING will get your pen moving, and saying what you want to write will get you rolling in the right direction; however, if you finish saying what you want to write and remain stuck, then be really explicit about what you want to say next and what you feel is your barrier to writing more. That’s the big thing I want to leave with you: if you have writer’s block trying to write something, you can overcome it by either describing what you want to write, or why you want to write it, and springboarding off that with more questions and answers, until, in the end, you’re just writing.
Huh. A notch over 350 words. I underestimated.
Now, I know some of the people who are reading this are technical writers, and so I want to warn you up front that there’s a problem with my approach that doesn’t apply to fiction writers: describing what you want to write is not a substitute for the thought that needs to go into the technical meat of whatever it is you’re writing. For example, if you’re trying to, say, write a design doc for your teammates, you may think that outlining the project, its goals, its problems, and its possible solutions is enough to make a design doc—but it’s not. That’s what a fiction writer calls an outline. While there are fiction stories that are essentially nothing but outlines, and even more that are outlines in narrative, fiction generally isn’t an outline, but is instead people in places, talking and doing things, told in a particular way — or what we technically call character and setting, dialogue and action, and scene and narration wrapped in that stylistic veneer we call voice. But technical writers, we can get tricked by outlines of technical items into thinking we’ve said something about a problem — so it is really critical that after you get a rough outline down that you go back over it, extract the important ideas, to think about they fit together, and to identify the key ideas that are not obvious about the problem — and those key ideas are what should go into your design doc or project proposal or product requirements document or launch announcement or marketing communication or scientific paper or anything else. The value of your document is not the structure of the problem, which is often well known, but the original thought that you bring to the table.
And that brings us to the primary reason for writer’s block, at least for experienced writers, that is: not having thought clearly enough about what comes next.
But wait! Because I’m writing this extemporaneously — a big-ass word for saying I’m pulling this out of my orifice — I’ve forgotten to tell you about the other kinds of writer’s block, which is somewhat important in case you’re possibly getting bored and want a quick way to figure whether slogging on through the desert of this essay in search of water that will quench your particular search is a vain hope or not, but which is actually far more important because some of those kinds of writer’s block can KILL YOU. Well, actually, no, that’s not very likely, but they can get you to kill your story and end up back at stage one.
So how can you get blocked? Let’s tick a few of these off so we can hold your interest while I drag out the big red warning sign. First, sometimes writer’s block is caused because you just don’t want to write — Ayn Rand used to call this “white sneakers disease” because she knew a writer who’d’ve rather cleaned their sneakers than write. Ayn Rand thought that, technically speaking, this wasn’t a block, but nevermind, since people have developed a good technique for resolving “white sneaker’s disease,” and that technique is called BIC — Butt In Chair. If you think you want to write, and you are not writing, then stop whatever you are doing, go put your butt in chair in front of a pen, piece of paper and writing surface, and sit there until you get bored enough to write something, or find that you cannot and AHA NOW this is writer’s block, congratulations, move on to the techniques for tackling writer’s block proper.
Second, as I said earlier, experienced writers can have writer’s block because they haven’t thought through what comes next. Third, inexperienced writers can have writer’s block because they’re cognitively overwhelmed — which is the real point of this essay, and which is why I started the essay off with one paragraph specifically tackling this problem in case that was all that you read, but, don’t fear, if “inexperienced writer staring at a blank page feeling just that, a blank” describes you, then hang in there, I’m writing this essay specifically for you and will come back to this in detail.
But the fourth kind is the real dangerous kind of writer’s block, a particular kind of voluntary writer’s block which can hit writers of any stripe, both unmotivated and motivated, inexperienced and experienced; in fact, it almost hit me writing the second section of this essay, and if I’d given into it, I never would have written the words you’re reading right now — because I would have spent the same time editing the first section of this essay, and that right there is Writer’s Block of the Fourth Kind: editing while you write.
Trying to edit while you write is particularly dangerous for reasons I’ll get back to when I explain Why Novices Feel Fear At The Dreaded Blank Page, but the more immediate reason is that you can spend arbitrary amounts of time editing without adding to your draft. Now, there are some writers who edit while they write all the time — especially poets, who may spend as much time working over ten words as it takes me to write a thousand words —but right there that shows you that if you’re trying to cough up a ten thousand word story, it doesn’t behoove you to drill down on a perfect first sentence. There’s a reason we call our writing group Write to the End: it’s because we believe you should finish what you start before you try to edit it, or you will never finish anything at all.
Okay, that’s a first pass at why Writer’s Block of the Fourth Kind is dangerous: it can stall you out, and worse, trick you into thinking you’re actually writing. But what if you don’t have anything to edit? What if you’re suffering from Writer’s Block of the Third Kind, the Dreaded Fear of the Blank Page? This feeling of blankness is the feeling you get when you’re cognitively overwhelmed, and to understand the reasons I separate it out from Writer’s Block of the Second Kind, AKA Not Thinking Through Your Shit, we need to talk a little bit about cognitive psychology — specifically, working memory and cognitive skill acquisition.
You see, when a writer sits down at the page, we may imagine we’re creating worlds — but we’re not gods, and can hold only a finite amount of information in our heads at one time. Our working memories can only manipulate a handful of chunks of discrete information at a time — famously estimated in cognitive psychology as a short term memory holding roughly seven plus or minus two items. Of course, it ain’t that simple when you dig into the details, but as a rough rule of thumb, it holds — and that explains both writer’s block for experienced writers and the Dreaded Fear of the Blank Page for inexperienced ones.
When faced with a blank page, you can easily see how you could get blocked not knowing why you want to write, or what you want to write about, or what’s the meat behind the structure of the idea — there’s just nothing in your short term memory to put on the page. But why do so many inexperienced writers who know the answers to all these questions nevertheless come to me complaining that they feel a blank when sitting down at the page? Well, that’s easy: I’m a psychic magnet for those kinds of problems — just kidding. The real reason is that inexperienced writers have, by definition, a set of skills which are not fully developed — and we don’t actually have short term memories that hold information, we have working memories which are both the product of and are used by our skills.
Yes, that’s right — I tricked you! I started talking about working memory, then smoothly slipped to talking about short term memory in the same sentence, because for a long time cognitive psychologists made the same mistake. We imagined that humans had a short term memory like a buffer that passively held information, like a briefcase, but when you carry through the implications that model breaks down, and that’s not really how the cortex of the brain is organized anyway. It’s better to think of the brain’s fixed storage capacity as less a passive buffer and more of an active internal dashboard reporting the state all the brain’s cognitive systems. Now, there are no photogenic cartoon characters monitoring that dashboard like in Inside Out—in part because of licensing issues with Pixar, but mostly because it would involve an infinite regress—if there’s a little character monitoring your internal dashboard, who’s monitoring their internal dashboards? Cognitive psychologists call that homunculus fallacy, and so a better image of the mental stage of the mind is an empty spherical cockpit filled with instruments projecting their findings to each other. Your consciousness is just the part of your mind that is easily accessible to other parts of your mind. For example, you can recognize a person’s face, but unless there are really obvious features, like Salvador Dali’s mustache that points all the way up to your eyeballs, you can’t describe a face in sufficient detail for someone else to recognize it, because the details of your facial recognition system aren’t accessible to conscious awareness.
In most animals, the instruments of the cockpit are fixed by the design of the system, like the gas gauge on your car, which reports the status of your fuel tank, or the flashing light on the fast return switch of your TARDIS, which shows that the Ship is trying to return to its previous destination.What distinguishes humans is that many of its screens are programmable, the same way your car’s GPS can update itself when the manufacturer pushes an update, or the way your TARDIS reconfigures its controls to match your personality every time you regenerate. Over time, the systems of the cockpit collect information, slowly improving over time with respect to the problems for which they were designed, like a GPS picking up new roads. But the human mind isn’t a car, with an army of of engineers designing updates that get pushed to it over a wireless network, or a TARDIS, with a billion years of engineering designed into its architectural reconfiguration system to help it adapt. No, the human mind has to update itself from scratch, often adapting to skills for which it has no evolutionary precedent — like, for example, writing.
You’ve got dials on your dashboard for hunger, sound, even speech, but writing is something humans made up from whole cloth. And when you’ve got to learn a skill for which you’ve got no precedent, no inbuilt system that can just pick up new roads, your mind has to fall back on more powerful general problem solving techniques. These techniques involve representing the information we know about a problem explicitly, collecting the implications of that knowledge from our long term memory, and putting all that data together into new conclusions. Once again, the components of your dashboard notice these leaps from information to conclusion, storing it to make it available to solve new problems. This process is called automatization, and it’s called that because it’s transforming explicit information that you’re representing in your conscious dashboard into skilled knowledge you can use automatically without conscious awareness.
You’d think that automatization wouldn’t help you, since you’re trying to store new information, but all you have are existing systems - but one of the fundamental tricks of computing is that any sufficiently powerful process can simulate just about any other process, and the cockpit of your glorious machine—in which all the systems you’ve accumulated over a billion years of evolution can talk to each other—certainly qualifies as a very powerful process that can simulate almost anything. SO, if you keep learning basic facts about a new skill, and keep storing them in whatever systems you have that are even remotely compatible, over time, your overall cognitive system will learn a new, automatic skill—but hang on. To represent the information about a problem, to dredge up its implications, and draw conclusions, your mind needs scratchspace—temporary storage to hold this information so your general problem solving processes can work it over, and that information must be accessible your conscious awareness. Learning a new cognitive skill needs your dashboard. It needs your highly limited working memory.
But wait! Weren’t we using that to hold what we wanted to write about?
Exactly. Now you’re starting to see the problem.
As a novice writer, you may know how to physically write—how to generate words on the page in response to prompts, like writing down items for a grocery list for your spouse in response to spoken requests, or writing down the contents of a shipment from the Queen of Sheba as it comes off the boat—but when you’re writing an article or story, what you’re actually doing is the separate and more complex task of composition — the task of creating new sequences of words. Take a simple example, composing your Captain’s Log. You can’t just hit a button on the Captain’s Chair and start jabbering about what happened on the planet: the task involves creating a specific set of words in a specific sequence which is stereotyped. You start with “Captain’s Log”, followed by the stardate, followed by a sentence reporting the location or situation, followed by one or two more sentences discussing the key questions of the mission and whatever red-shirted disposable crewmembers were eaten by the monster of the week. That structure itself is information, information which you need to call to mind, somehow, in order to organize the words that you speak, and if you’ve been rattled by a bunch of red-shirted disposable crewmembers being eaten by the monster of the week, you might have trouble gathering your thoughts. An experienced Starfleet captain like Picard or Kirk, however, will have no trouble—because for them, the structure of the log is automatic.
The way that cognitive skill learning works is through the transformation of declarative knowledge to procedural knowledge: that is, the process of automatization takes information you express explicitly and turns it into information that’s the output of a skill. That means if you are skilled at a task, you don’t need to pay attention to it: the actions of the task will happen, well, automatically; but that also means that if you are not skilled at a task, you’re relying on your general purpose processing power to perform it—and that the information you need to perform the task will compete with what you know about the task.
The problem is even worse because the act of writing relies on many sources of knowledge. Let’s review for a moment what some of those are, and I’ll throw in some you may have not thought of yet:
Purpose: Why you’re writing (for creative expression, because your boss asked you)
Goal: What you want your writing to do (to be fun, to help your teammates, etc)
Content: What you want to write about (the specific information you contribute)
Form: What kind of thing you’re writing (a story, an article, a blogpost)
Style: What tone of voice you want to use (lighthearted, formal, quirky)
Each of these is better thought of as a skill for generating answers to questions, rather than a source for information—and if you’re not practiced at the skill, you’ll have to store information about it in working memory, competing—but wait a minute, let’s go back to content for a moment. Think about it. To answer the question about what you want to write, you need to generate several pieces of information:
Content: What you want to write about
Structure: What topics do you need to cover?
Questions: What questions should your piece answer?
Ideas: What do you think about the questions?
Answers: How does that translate into answers?
I’m not trying to be pedantic here—I’m making an important point, or I think I am. What you want to say involves several kinds of information: the general topic of your piece, the specific issues you want to address, whatever thoughts you have, and how to express them—but each of these types of information is, itself, a skill, which, if it is not practiced, will compete with whatever it is you have to say.
This is why inexperienced writers dread The Blank Page: because they’re actually drawing on half a dozen skills, none of which are practiced, and those are driving their ideas straight out of their head. This is why my wife, who’s a great artist but not an experienced writer, a woman who’s put a great deal of thought into eco-friendly art, who knows why she wants to write, what she wants to accomplish, and can easily spend forty-five minutes talking to me about her ideas, can nonetheless get totally stymied when she sits down to write, staring at the blank page. And this is why I separate the Writer’s Block of the Third Kind—the inexperienced author’s Dread of the Blank Page—from the simpler Writer’s Block of the Second Kind—the experienced author’s Lack of Shit Together—because if an experienced author is willing to sit down and think hard about their problem, once they get their ideas, their skills will take straight over—but if an inexperienced author tries the same thing, their very skills may drive their ideas right out their heads.
That’s why inexperienced writers may need different tools to write other than “Just Write” or “Butt in Chair” or “Stop and Think”. In cognitive skills acquisition, one way you can teach a complicated skill is to teach it in parts—we call this scaffolding. Rather than try to become a great basketball player all at once, you instead practice dribbling, taking shots, holding the ball, playing one-on-one, then pickup games—slowly building up a body of skills that eventually become the foundation for real mastery. Writing is the same way; if you’re having trouble getting started, focusing on sub-skills and developing them can give you the scaffolding you need to get started.
One scaffolding technique I’ve recommended to people is morning pages—a technique recommended in The Artist’s Way to write three pages longhand the first thing in the morning. There are a lot of reasons to do this beyond scaffolding, but it gets you past the problem of composition by giving you a safe environment to write, and it can also help you express your ideas. If even this is too hard, you may be blocked on the simple act of writing, and I recommend you try writing “bla bla bla” until you get bored with it. This doesn’t work for everyone, but you could also try the “Finding Forrester” technique of taking an existing story and typing it in until you get tired of their words and start writing your own.
Another scaffolding technique is what I call the inventory method. I hinted at this at the start of the article: ask yourself explicitly the questions you need to perform the task of composition:
Why do you want to write?
What do you want your writing to accomplish?
What should people learn or feel after reading your article or story?
What is the most important specific idea that you contribute to this topic?
And so on, and so on, with the whole list of questions that I had earlier.
If even this is too hard, there’s another method I call the one page assessment. Get a piece of lined composition paper—and I mean this literally, this is for totally blocked people, so I want you to literally do these steps physically—and draw a line down its center so it has two columns. On the left, write out, one per line, the numbers one through ten, and then the words “Who what when where why how;” on the right, write out the days of the week and the months of the year. Now, for the numbers one through ten, write the top ten most important thing about your project—these can be single words or sentences, but rack your brain until you can get ten single words—and then write brief answers to each of the “Who what why …” questions below. When you’re done with that, for each day of the week or month of the year, write something significant about your project—either in the story you’re telling, or about when you as a person can work on it, or whatever (you can also do this with other breakdowns, like states or countries or oceans or planets—whatever categories work for you). When you’ve filled the sheet, pick the five things most important from the page, flip it over, write down these five as your headings, and try to write at least one sentence about each of the five things you picked.
The purpose of this exercise is to take away the need to do composition AND the need to generate questions, just focusing you in a very general, nonthreatening way on properties that affect your problem. If you make it through the page, consider doing it again, with your own headings this time. Process repeats, until you’re generating full outlines.
On the note of outlines, the technique I used for my first novel was what I called a recursive hierarchical outline. I knew I wanted to write a novel about a genetically engineered centaur, so I wrote that sentence down in a Microsoft Word document. Then I copied that sentence, italicized it, and wrote a paragraph about that sentence detailing the plot. Then I copied that paragraph, italicized it, broke it into sentences as new headings, and expanded each of those sentences into a paragraph. I repeated the process until I had a good outline; then I expanded it further until I had sections and finally paragraphs—at which point, I just started writing.
Another way to get at this information that’s locked in your head is the interview method—having a trusted friend ask you questions, and either writing down your answers or recording it for transcription later.
Finally, Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, recommends the template method—if you want to write an article on a topic, find a similar article to use as a template, and use that to help establish your questions and find the rough structure of your outline. Since he built a whole career around basically doing that to C by turning it into C++, and since he’s done it with several books and articles since then to great effect, I guess this approach has worked well for him.
The point of giving all these potential scaffolding techniques is that each writer is different, and no technique is guaranteed to work for you. We can see why this is—everyone has a slightly different set of internal equipment, and even for equipment that’s the same, everyone has a different history of learning and a different set of skills that work with facility, or not, on any given problem.
So, to sum up, the ways of tackling writer’s block are:
Writer’s Block of the First Kind: What We Have Here is a Failure to Motivate. Solution: Butt In Chair
Writer’s Block of the Second Kind: Not Thinking Through Your Shit. Solution: Stop and Think
Writer’s Block of the Third Kind: The Dreaded Blank Page. Solution: Cognitive Scaffolding
Writer’s Block of the Fourth Kind: Editing While You Write. Solution: Write to the End, then Edit
So now you see why I sum up my writing advice as “Just write—bla bla bla if you have to so your pen’s moving—because the more you write, the easier it gets, and the better you get; but if you sit down to write and get writer’s block, then write down very explicitly why you sat down to write, and what kind of writing you hope to have produced when you get up again, and then you’ll know how to proceed.” This sums up all of the problems in one Butt in Chair, provides a Cognitive Scaffold, incorporates Stop and Think—in fact, it tackles just about everything except the editing bit, which might be summed up as “Don’t critique yourself, finish your damn story!” And as for that bit …
That’s why I go to a writing group called Write to the End.
Recently, someone asked me if I had any advice for young writers. I just had a minute, so I could only give them one sentence - and I so wanted to say “Just write!”
But that’s not fair. Writer’s block is the biggest problem people have when they ask me how to be a better writer - and so it’s not enough to say “Just write!”
So the sentence I gave was: “Just write - start with ‘bla bla bla’ if you have to, just to get your pen moving - because the more you write, the easier it gets, and the better you get!”
And that sums up what I think about writing - literally the most important things I think you need, in a single sentence. But if you gave me just two words, I’d say: “Just write!”
One of the things they tell you in the writing community is “Good, nice, professional: you need to be at least two of the three.”
What this means is, the writing community is filled good writers, nice people, and competent workers, but it’s also filled with crappy writers, genuine assholes, and flakey losers. You can get away with being one of the bad things: you can be a so-so writer, but be nice to people and turn things in on time, or you can be an asshole but produce great work in a timely fashion, or you can be good and nice but fail to deliver, and people will forgive most of those things and you will proceed, and succeed.
Douglas Adams is perhaps the best known "flakey, but good and nice” guy. The world’s oldest angry young man, the hardworking Harlan Ellison, was known as “asshole, but good and professional” until he gaffed the Last Dangerous Visions anthology project. I won’t disparage another writer’s work, but as a publisher and anthology editor, I can tell you that I’m much more likely to accommodate an author who I know will deliver than an awesome one I can’t count on - and I can tell you that I’ve heard the same from other publishers of anthologies.
This came up because I just had to essentially back out of a project. You need to roll with the punches on an editor’s comments, but what I just received was a request for a spec rewrite more than four months after the article had been approved, and that after a fairly intensive editorial round. That made me mad - but in a broader sense, I understand how it happened: the editor got feedback on another project and wanted to forestall that happening to my article. But I’d moved on from the project, and am neck deep in edits in THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, which was supposed to be out last year.
I swallowed my anger, thought carefully about the overall problem, and realized that despite what I perceived as an irregularity of process the editor is just trying to do the best job they can the best way they know how. I further realized the primary reason I couldn’t respond was simply my lack of time. If the request had landed in a dead zone, I’d have gladly have given it a shot.
So I wrote the editor what I hoped was a polite but firm note, emphasizing the problem was essentially my other committments. The editor got back to me promptly and was accommodating. I also discussed the problem with one of my fellow authors, who stepped up with suggestions, and we may bring him on board as a co-author so he can take this article the rest of the way.
I’m always angry, and I easily could have blown my stack and really ticked the editor off. But being nice, and being professional, I helped solve a problem, rather than creating a new one. As to whether my article was good … eh, if it ever gets released, be it authored, co-authored, or just salsa on this blog if rejected ... I’ll let you be the judge.
SO, my primary job is working for this big software conglomerate and I want to make sure that I’m doing a good job so a frequent thing that I do is work later on some evenings “just a little bit harder than I want to” but I’ve found that if you do that too long you can burn out and so — GASP --- you need a way to stop yourself from doing too much.
My preferred technique, in recent years, is the OpenTable reservation. Later in the day, when I have SOME idea of when I might leave, I log in to OpenTable, set a reservation for one of my favorite restaurants, or a new restaurant, just late enough in the evening to still hit a coffeehouse and get some writing done. I know a few places which are open to 11, so if I can eat by 7:45, I can still get a couple hours of writing in. At worst, even at 8:30, I can get an hour of focus at a coffeehouse — assuming, of course, since I use that dinnertime to do my print reading, an hour for dinner.
Assuming an hour.
So tonight, I tried a new restaurant, Bird Dog in Palo Alto, and showed up 15 minutes early for my 8pm reservation (since I’d not been there before, and wanted a little buffer, and I’d finished my work anyway). They weren’t ready for me, so I sat in the bar, had a daiquiri, and read a chapter out of Peter Higgins’ NUMBERS: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION while listening to a very entertaining conversation between some very, very uppercrust ladies who just might have been minor celebrities. At a little after 8:10, the maître d’ came by to tell me a table would be ready soon. I finished the chapter, then pulled out THE EMOTION THESAURUS and started reading it.
At 8:30, I suddenly realized I’d been there three quarters of an hour and had not yet even been seated.
Shoot. Well, that happens. I packed my books up and asked the bartender for the check. He offered to comp me the drink, but I declined (since I was already running way late and thought I could probably get a quick slice at Pizza My Heart to get back on schedule). The waiter asked me to hang on a bit so he could check in at the host stand, and in moments, the maître d’ had arrived to show me to my table.
They comped my drink. They brought me roasted avocado and flatbread, pictured above. And all of the staff came by and apologized. But neither the comping, nor the apologies, were really needed, or were the deciding factor: when a problem was detected, they fixed it. Now, basically they gave me free appetizers and drinks, but I still had an expensive meal, and I’m likely to come back at least once, or to recommend it, or perhaps even blog about it --- how meta — so they’ll make their money back.
But what strikes me is that property of noticing a problem and expending a small amount of personal and financial capital to right it had far greater payoffs. They didn’t ignore the problem, or just toss stuff at me to paper it over; they fixed it, they acted sincere, and they delivered the rest of their normal service at high quality. I tried to be super nice in response, and I hope we all had a great meal. Their efforts to provide great customer service changed my attitude about the problem, and built a bond.
Later at Coupa Cafe, one of my favorite coffeehouses, I struck up a conversation with one of the staff, and they recommended a new drink I could try. When I got it, the spectacular presentation of my personally recommended drink again reminded how great customer service doesn’t just have immediate benefits for the business; it creates relationships and attachments which are a perennial source of not just profit to the business --- which it does — but of connection in human lives.
And that’s what really makes it all worthwhile. That, and time to work on your books.
Busy catching up on writing today, trying to get Chapter 1 of the rewrite of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE done, plus various small press tasks, plus writing documentation at work, plus getting new tires for my car … aaaa! So here’s a picture of a cat. Also, apropos, of a tire … but that made me think. I used to take a lot of notes - I still do, but I used to too - but a lot of the time a quick snapshot of something with your cell phone can do you one better.
I took a few pictures of tires and of the label on the inside of my door without having to write down any numbers. I then went back to my desk, found some highly rated tires on a web site, found a local tire store online, found the models they had in stock, looked up the old tires I bought for the car to confirm the numbers made sense, and made an appointment. Bam. No paper involved.
It’s amazing to me what can be done with storing information in the cloud, as much as I am a skeptic about it. (And even my complaints about how hard it is to take notes on computers are getting addressed - a fellow author just got a Windows 10 book and claims he now prefers its tablet mode for editing because he can use it like real paper).
But it amazes me even more that when I showed up early for my tire appointment, they fit me in so quickly I had my car and was on my way to work at essentially the time I would have normally have gotten in. As a colleague said, "how many times does THAT happen?" My answer? “ONCE. Just today.” America’s Tire, Mountain View, California. Go check them out.
