Adrien Brody: Edwardian drunkard?

The picture on the left comes from this piece in the Daily Mail, which is mostly a bunch of pictures of “habitual drunkards” the police took in 1904.

Creative inhibition.

The Frontal Cortex recently noted an interesting paper about creativity and inhibition:

In their recent paper, “Child’s play: Facilitating the originality of creative output by a priming manipulation,” [Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson] took a large group of undergraduates and randomly assigned them to two different groups. The first group was given the following instructions:

“You are 7 years old. School is canceled, and you have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?”

The second group was given the exact same instructions, except the first sentence was deleted. As a result, these students didn’t imagine themselves as 7 year olds. [...]

After writing for ten minutes, the subjects were then given various tests of creativity, such as trying to invent alternative uses for an old car tire, or completing incomplete sketches. (These are sample tasks from the Torrance test of creativity.) Interestingly, the students who imagined themselves as little kids scored far higher on the creative tasks, coming up with more ideas that were also more original. The effect was especially pronounced among “introverts,” who exert more mental energy suppressing their “spontaneous associations”.

I think that, probably, when it is suggested that writers need to “turn off their inner critic” while writing a first draft, what is really meant is something closer to “don’t allow yourself to be creatively inhibited.” Take risks, don’t stifle interesting thoughts or turns of phrase in order to be safe: don’t be afraid.

It’s fear, I think, more than anything else, that kills creativity. One doesn’t want to do something stupid, to be mocked. Kids haven’t yet been shamed into normal adult behavior and normal adult thinking patterns.

When I was seven or eight and my family was visiting my grandparents in Orange, California, I came across a dictionary that had a hole eaten through it by a hamster. Apparently the cage door broke off, so my grandfather put a dictionary in front of the opening so the hamster wouldn’t get out, but it ate a round hole about halfway through the 1500 page book.

I asked my grandmother and my mom (who were chatting about something or other) what had done it, and my mom said, “What do you think did it?” And without pausing, my blurted reaction was, “Book worm.”

I had heard the phrase and presented with a book with a hole eaten through it, and not knowing a book worm was someone who liked to read, put two and two together.

As we get older we stop making those kinds of associations. We stop inventing book worms. Instead we say, “I don’t know.” But it’s probably just those kinds of leaps that can result in two disparate ideas coming together to form something new and interesting.

Think of the frog.

Writers are often told that if they’re to make it as professionals they need to develop thick skin, so criticism will simply bounce off them. Google writers “thick skin” and you get over 82,000 results. I’ve always thought this was kind of sketchy as a metaphor (though, admittedly, far less clunky than the one I’m about to lay down).

I know plenty of unpublished — and unpublishable — writers with thick skin, and it’s that thick skin that’s keeping them from being published. Their skin is so thick legitimate criticism bounces right off them when it would be far better if their skin was permeable enough to actually absorb it. They blissfully ignore intelligent critiques with a shrug and a “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

This, of course, would help one avoid embarrassing moments like these:

Alice Hoffman read a somewhat negative review written by author Roberta Silman of Hoffman’s new book, The Story Sisters. Hoffman then took to her Twitter account and over the course of 27 livid tweets, Hoffman called Silman a “moron” and published Silman’s phone number and email address, encouraging her fans to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.” She has since released a tepid apology and taken down her Twitter account.

Now, author Alain de Botton has leveled some pretty harsh words against Caleb Crain, the author who gave a negative review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. De Botton left this comment on Crain’s blog in response: “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

On the other hand, I doubt most writers will get to the point where they’re publishable without being able to internalize a certain amount of criticism, and I’m not sure one can do that without simply accepting that it’s sometimes going to hurt to hear the things — even the true things, especially the true things – people say about your writing. And that’s okay.

The frog drinks very little water. Instead it has permeable skin through which it absorbs it. The writer, I think, should be something like that. The writer should have permeable skin through which he or she can absorb and internalize legitimate criticism, but it needs to be selectively permeable. One of the down sides of permeable skin for the frog is that contaminants in the water seep right in. This is one of the reasons frog populations are dropping.

Negative reviews and harsh critiques can feel like contaminants, like poison.

But certain frogs have skin that evolved in such a way that it doesn’t allow molecules of a certain shape through. This helps to keep toxins out while the water gets in.

This is the kind of skin I think writers need to develop. Not thick, but selectively permeable. Too permeable, and any poison can get in, and you end up floating dead in contaminated waters. Not permeable enough and you don’t absorb what you need to.

Non-mistakes in Grammarland.

Geoffrey K. Pullum, over at Language Log, has a piece on eleven alleged grammar mistakes that aren’t mistakes at all, or else have nothing to do with grammar – mostly the kind of stuff pedants like to put a [sic] behind when quoting opinions with which they disagree in order to prove their superiority to and discredit the person being quoted without having to make an argument against the quoted text itself. The eleven alleged grammar mistakes come from a piece on another site, The Apple, “where teachers meet and learn.” Pullum:

The page presenting the first alleged mistake is headed “Constipated Clauses“, and the advice is that you should never use “it goes without saying” or the adverb “obviously”. This has nothing to do with grammar; it is about trying to direct people in the matter of what they should say, not of what form of words is permissible for saying it.

The second is headed “Comma Vomit“, and recommends against certain uses of commas. In fact it recommends against the comma use in my previous sentence, and against the comma in this one. There’s a lot of variation of choice in comma use among expert users of Standard English, and it certainly cannot be claimed that “Commas should only precede and, but, for, or, nor, so, or yet when they introduce an independent clause”. Do not trust this page.

The third is headed “The Death of Adverbs“, and says that adjectives modify nouns and adverbs modify verbs. As it happens, a new paper (by John Payne, Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, forthcoming in the journal Word Structure) shows this is actually not always true. But never mind the wider picture: what the page is telling you is that I can do that easy is wrong and should be corrected to I can do that easily. This is a style difference. Most American speakers will say they can do it easy when speaking in relaxed and casual mode, and most will agree that “do it easily” sounds more careful and formal. As an observation about formality levels, this might be worth making; but it doesn’t amount to an error in syntax.

The fourth is headed “Less vs. Fewer“, and warns against substituting less for fewer. It is claimed that the latter “describes finite, listable items”. Strictly that would imply that it’s ungrammatical to say There are fewer rational numbers than reals, because neither the rationals nor the reals are finite in number, and the reals are not even listable. But never mind the math. The page recommends saying “fewer brains”, as in “He has fewer brains than I thought”, which is ludicrous (how many more does he need, if he has one?). It’s an old, old usage quibble, and here it’s very badly presented and described.

The other seven are deconstructed at the first link above. I don’t want to steal the whole damn piece.

Personal news.

I saw it on Book Brunch, so I guess I’m free to announce that Penguin bought U.S. rights to my debut novel Act of Violence from Pan Macmillan. It’s looking like a summer 2011 release, and it will almost certainly have a different title. I’m pretty sure we’ve settled on the new title, in fact, but I hesitate to mention it this early – just in case.

Anyway, it’s very exciting, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing a book of mine on store shelves in my home country.

But first: on 2 July this year my second novel Low Life will be coming out in the UK, simultaneous with the paperback of Acts of Violence. And I think the German edition of Acts of Violence might be coming out toward the end of this year, as well. I’m very much looking forward to seeing something I wrote in a language I can’t really read.