Stories as a Survival Strategy

A project at John Hopkins University explores how stories enhance learning and memory:

How the Brain Processes Stories

They've even set up a writing contest for flash fiction works to be used in the study. (Open only to Baltimore residents, however.)

According to Janice Chen, one of the professors involved, “Understanding stories is part of the fundamental anatomy of the brain.” Liife consists of "a series of events," and our brains process events into stories.

As a familiar example goes, "The king died, and the queen died" isn't a story; "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is. This processing function is one reason why it doesn't bother me that the four gospels disagree among themselves about the details of some incidents. Of course different people, retelling the same events, often recall them differently. Each person's mind creates a narrative meaningful to him or her. That doesn't prove the event never happened at all.

Arranging facts into a narrative structure makes them easier to remember, and accurate memory is necessary for survival. Chen notes that "stories across all formats are equally useful at transforming fleeting events into permanent memories." Moreover, narrative helps us learn about cause and effect. We are "programmed to crave" stories for the same reason our brains motivate us to seek food and sex -- for survival.

This study reminds me of discoveries about "mirror neurons," which enable animals as well as humans to empathize with others of their kind and learn by watching someone else perform an action:

New Light on Mirror Neurons

Thus we can also grow empathy, learning to perceive the world through the minds and senses of others, by "witnessing" their actions in stories whether oral, written, acted, or filmed.

As C. S. Lewis says in AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM, "But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see."

Just a few ways in which fiction and its creators are vitally important to the human species!

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Learning Without Brains

Can creatures without brains think? Many of them can learn, so are they thinking? This article highlights several brainless life forms capable of learning:

Organisms Without Brains

Of course, this premise depends on what we mean by learning. If we think of that activity as a process that requires consciousness, a brain is probably essential. However, the article defines learning as "any change in behaviour as a result of experience." By that definition, creatures such as jellyfish, some plants, and even slime molds can learn, remember, and modify their reactions to the environment accordingly. For example, the beadlet anemone as a rule "violently opposes any encroachment on its territory by other anemones," yet it doesn't show aggression toward its genetically identical clones. Slime molds remember routes to food and use those experiences to guide future foraging. The Venus flytrap also acts as if it has a memory. Another article explores the potential "intelligence" of plants in more detail, discussing how chemical and electrical signals in their transport systems may carry information.

Can Plants Think?

I've probably mentioned in the past a story in which one character asks another, "With what does a plant think, in the absence of a brain?" The skeptical second character who scoffs at the idea of plant cognition might be wrong after all.

The concept of brainless organisms capable of remembering and learning raises the question, again, of how we could be sure of recognizing an intelligent alien if we met one. Suppose they have modes of intelligence that, unlike ours, don't need anything that seems analogous to a brain? How easily could we realize they are actually thinking?

If "learning" means "any change in behaviour as a result of experience," considering what we watch and read in the daily news, we might well doubt whether some Earth-humans with allegedly functional brains have the ability to learn!

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

AI Learning

The June issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN included an article on "Making AI More Human," which discussed improving the way artificial intelligences learn. Can they be designed to learn more like human children? Computers excel at tasks hard or impossible for human beings, such as high-speed calculations and handling massive amounts of data; yet they can't do many things easy for a human five-year-old. Developing human brains receive information about the environment from the "stream of photons and air vibrations" that reaches our eyes and ears. Computers get the equivalent information through digital files that represent the world we experience. Both "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches to learning have advantages. In top-down learning, the mind reasons from high-level, general, abstract hypotheses about the environment to specific instances and facts. Bottom-down learning involves gathering and analyzing huge accumulations of data to search for patterns. This Wikipedia page further explains the differences:

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Design

And here's a brief overview, which suggests, "A bottom-up approch would be the most ideal way to create human-like intelligence as we ourselves are part of a bottom-up design process (which occured in the form of evolution)."

Top-Down Vs. Bottom-Up

I'm intrigued by this page's mention of "child machines with a willingness to learn." According to the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN article, real children apply the best features of both top-down and bottom-up processes and even venture beyond them to make original inferences.

How similarly to a human child would an artificial intelligence need to grow and learn before we'd have to accept it as, in some sense, human? Would it have to possess free will in order to qualify as a fellow sentient being? That question would require defining free will—a feature that classic behaviorists and some other determinists don't even think WE have.

The SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN article concludes, "We should recall the still mysterious powers of the human mind when we hear claims that AI is an existential threat."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

States of Insecurity

The president of the Modern Language Association writes in their fall newsletter about this year's presidential theme for the organization, "States of Insecurity." She ponders "what strategies...the humanities offer for navigating our current crises." After listing some recent threats to education, at all levels, she notes that the academic community known for the postmodern position that "reality is complex and anything but natural and transparent" suddenly finds itself on the opposite side of the argument. Now we have to defend the existence of objective reality by "maintaining the primacy of facts." She naturally mentions the importance of defending "freedom of expression." She also reminds us that the present state of "insecurity" belongs to "a category of similar events—neither the first nor the last in a long series."

We liberal arts majors (proverbial career path—"want fries with that?") often face the challenge of explaining what "use" our subject areas serve. Many potential employers, we might point out, welcome humanities majors because of the flexibility and critical habits of thought they've acquired in their studies. But that's a secondary issue. The liberal arts, of course, were originally so named because they're the studies appropriate to a "free" person, the fields of inquiry that precisely do NOT exist mainly to enable the student to earn a living. I've been rereading the Rabbi Small mysteries by Harry Kemelman, in which the rabbi mentions more than once that the Talmud declares learning should not be used as "a spade to dig with"—a means of making a living—but pursued for its own sake.

The Phi Beta Kappa society also frequently speaks out for the value of liberal arts and humanities studies as a good thing in their own right. Sadly, though, how many young people these days can afford to spend four years in college solely for the joy of learning? Nevertheless, it could be argued that this principle becomes especially vital in "states of insecurity," particularly when some public figures seem to take pride in ignorance.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Acquiring New Techniques Part 2 - The Almighty Paragraph by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Acquiring New Techniques
Part 2
The Almighty Paragraph
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

To find examples of current news Headlines you can rip for your next novel, you may want to follow my magazines on Flipboard:
https://flipboard.com/profile/jacquelinelhmqg

Part 1 of this series on acquiring new techniques is about how I dared to attempt the writing of a joke using a pun. 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/06/acquiring-new-techniques-part-1-pun.html

Nobody can "teach" you to write.  It's a craft.  You don't learn it, you train in it.  It's an apprenticeship process.  The part of your mind that masters all this is the subconscious.

So any methodology that you've developed over your lifetime that works to train yourself in a new process will work just fine for most writing craft skills.

And this one - the structure of the paragraph - is no exception. 

Teaching yourself to write and self-edit, to rewrite and improve each draft is not a random undertaking.

There is a system to teaching yourself, and to training yourself.  Your system may differ, but the essential elements will be the same. 

Once you've figured out exactly what market you want to sell into, here's a system for studying that market and getting the hang of producing your own, personalized and quirky, stories to be gobbled up by that market.

I wrote the following in response to a question that someone asked on Google+ --

---quote-------
Are there any good tools that could help me edit? My paragraphs feel choppy...
---end quote-------

And here's what I answered.

For the rule of thumb you need, find some books from the publishing company you are aiming at, in the genre you are writing in, and preferably edited by the editor you want to sell to (sometimes an author includes a thank you to their editor or agent which gives you this clue).  FIND TWO OF THOSE BOOKS.  Read them BACKWARDS (so you aren't influenced by story or content).  LOG (on a piece of paper or some people love spreadsheets) the length of paragraphs in lines, in words, and in sentences.

Analyze those paragraphs for structure.  Look at subordinate clauses, at dialogue included, at the shift within a sentence from description, narrative, dialogue, exposition (in Kindle you can highlight with different colors each of these 4 essential components).

Now that you have the PATTERN you need to master in your head, sit down with a book you REALLY LOVE and can't stop re-reading (hopefully from the genre and editor you want to sell to) and COPY-TYPE THE ENTIRE NOVEL.  (It's not stealing.  You just discard the copy you make.)

This will train your mind on a level no amount of mere thinking can ever reach.  It is training, not learning.  Turn your mind off and just let your fingers TYPE.  Don't worry about this ruining your 'style' or 'voice' -- it actually sharpens and focuses your personal art.

Now go back to your manuscript and RETYPE IT FROM SCRATCH -- copy type it making a new copy, but letting your new rhythm make changes in the words, parts of speech, dialogue, and especially transitions from exposition to narrative to dialogue to description.  Be sure to include all 4 components in each sentence, mostly by deleting words that don't say anything and finding words that convey exactly what you mean.

---

Given that "the paragraph" is a quirky thing in itself, that differs from genre to genre, there's almost no way to teach it.

If you took Literature in college, you read a lot of books with paragraphs as long as a page.

If you paid attention in High School, you learned that a paragraph is a complete thought, but of course nobody ever defined what that is. 

The world of commercial fiction writing is totally different from Academe.

In publishing, a paragraph and a page is a visual, artistic LAYOUT problem, not a grammatical one.

So your aim is to keep your reader glued to the page using every bit of artistic LAYOUT talent, skill, ability, and Rules that you can grab.

The best way to internalize such rules is just what I said above, learn by analyzing with the mind, then DOING by copying.

Since we focus on this blog on Science Fiction Romance and Fantasy Romance, Paranormal Romance, and Action Romance, the rules for ROMANCE (longer paragraphs, wandering internal ruminations, speculation about what the other characters think or feel, self-criticism about emotional responses) have to blend into and modify the rules for Science Fiction or Action-Adventure.

And then that resulting blend has to be reconfigured for today's impatient readership that skims or page-flips.  This is the era of lack of concentration, so page layout tricks have to carry the impatient reader through the necessary story development.

Here's a place to start as you rewrite your manuscript.  Remember, you can change what you drafted into this pattern, then go over it again and change it to something else.  It is a multi-step process, not something you just do -- at least until you've practiced this a lot.

Set your page layout for a 60-character line, 25 lines per page.

Break up every paragraph that runs more than 7 lines (even if there's a one-word fragment on line 8, put a paragraph break in the middle.)

Read it over and see what you need to change to make it a literary paragraph (complete thought) rather than a graphic paragraph (something a reader might actually finish before answering the phone.)

Check the page for paragraphs that are more than 3 sentences long.

Any important (critical to understanding the plot) information must go in LINE 1 of a paragraph, or in the last line.

Skim readers are taught to SKIP THE MIDDLE SENTENCE OF A PARAGRAPH.

So if you're working up a sneaky mystery plot, a suspense line, or foreshadowing a twist due later, bury that in the middle-sentence of a 3 sentence paragraph.

You want to use graphic layout to control the eye-movements of the reader, just as an artist drawing a picture does.

Now look over the page you've rewritten to break up paragraphs.  No three paragraphs in a row can be three sentences long.

In between the long, 3 sentence, 7-line paragraphs, you intersperse with 1 line dialogue.  (not 7 line dialogue speeches).

Last week in Dialogue Part 7 we did a bit of dialogue rewriting on some excellent published dialogue.  Re-read that and do some of that kind of rewriting.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/05/dialogue-part-7-gigolo-and-lounge.html

Now you've got your page looking "right" -- you have to make one last pass through.

Because you broke paragraphs and rearranged, no doubt changing some words, and weren't reading the page as a whole, errors have crept in that you would never have made on first draft.

So re-impose the rule that no two paragraphs in a row can start with the same word, preferably not with the same LETTER.

Delete any "And" or "But" at the beginning of a sentence, especially at the beginning of a paragraph. 

Delete all the adjectives and adverbs.  ALL of them. (don't fret; you get to restore some)

Re-read the page -- this is the polish re-read, so check for spelling, homonyms confused, malapropisms not intended, etc.  Check for rhythm, for clarity of thought, for organization, for pacing. 

On this last re-read, find the VERBS and NOUNS that had modifiers and check to see if they convey what you intended without the modifier.  If not, spend some time looking for the exact VERB or NOUN that should be there.  If such a word does not exist (actually it does, but you haven't found it), then insert the modifier. 

Only use adverbs and adjectives where the word they modify requires it because the word does not mean what you want to say.

That's your PAGE SETUP draft.  Do that process with all your pages.  Don't worry if it takes a long time to do this editing pass -- on your next first-draft you will have acquired most of these habits on an unconscious level.

NEXT - as you are editing, check the LENGTH OF YOUR SCENES.

No scene should be more than 700 words without a character entering or exiting (the "scene" definition is enter, exit, change location).  A scene with entrances and exits within it should run no more than 7 pages (25 line pages as above).

If your scenes are too long, go back to structure and check each scene's structure for how it advances the plot, advances the story, and changes the Situation.

If that gives you a problem, read these two blog entries:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html

One of the biggest problems I'm seeing in self-published Romance novels these days is SCENE STRUCTURE.

I can't emphasize enough how vital scene structure is in novels. 

Here's the scene structure trick that will affect your paragraph structure.

Long, wandering paragraphs seem to pour out of a writer when nothing is happening in the story or plot.

When you see you have produced long paragraphs, consider deleting that entire section.

The error beginning writers fall into is knowing what the characters do, and just following the characters through everything they do.  That's not a story, and it is not a plot.

The technique you can look up in writing books is not called Scene Structure.  It's called Transitions. 

Smooth transitions are a result of tight scene structure -- they happen because the story springboard is properly wound up.

The index to the series on Story Springboards is here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/01/index-to-story-springboards-series-by.html

In brief, cut all the paragraphs that chronicle the movement of characters between scenes, all the journeying, the traveling.

Cut the part where the character wakes up, brushes teeth, gets dressed, gropes for coffee -- and then the phone rings with a shocker.

CUT from the end of the previous scene (before the falling into bed exhausted) directly to the PHONE RINGING -- or even into the middle of that shocker-phone-call. 

CUT the stuff BETWEEN SCENES.  Every beginner writes thousands of words of what happens or is done between scenes and fails to cut that material before submission, then wonders why they are rejected without even a rejection notice.

LONG PARAGRAPHS of characters moving between scenes are the hallmark of the unprofessional writer who can not take editorial direction.

If your character is TRAVELING (driving, riding the subway, walking through the woods -- when nothing is changing the SITUATION, when the CONFLICT is not advancing toward RESOLUTION --) then CUT ALL THAT.

I can hear you screaming right now, "BUT BUT BUT that's when he thinks of this brilliant idea, or when I tell the reader all about what the character knows."

Aha, that's why I said learn to do this by deleting all your precious adverbs and adjectives.  That deleting and restoring of adjectives and adverbs trains your subconscious to trust your judgement so when you do this harder exercise, your subconscious won't balk.

When you delete the material (usually identifiable as it comes in long, chunky paragraphs) between scenes, there will be some vitally important items that get deleted.

Those items have to be moved INTO SCENES.

In fact, you may have to insert a scene to convey that material properly, but the inserted scene has to be well structured.

Scene structure and placement is like the percussion-section of a symphony orchestra, it sets the BEAT, the pacing.  A scene is like a 'measure' in music, it has an internal structure set by the "Key" or genre.

So delete all the material between scenes throughout the manuscript, collect the items that must be conveyed to the reader, ponder where in the structure those REVEALS have to be placed, and insert a well-crafted scene to convey just the barest hint of the information as SHOW DON'T TELL.

That's what scenes are for - to SHOW rather than TELL that information that you told the reader in the between-scene segments where the characters are traveling from scene to scene but nothing is happening. 

In a scene, SOMETHING has to happen that changes the SITUATION of the main character.  The plot must advance -- i.e. someone has to do something.  The story has to advance - i.e. someone has to learn something, feel an emotion that causes them to do something. 

To figure out what to keep and what to toss, keep going back to your one-line explanation of what this story is.  "This is the story of Ralph's downfall." 

On your final draft, you'll throw out anything that's left that does not explicate the theme.  "Great Fame can crack any character's integrity." 

All of these techniques are based on the redefining of "The Paragraph" from a literary thought-block to a graphic attention-grabber.

Master the Paragraph, and you'll master The Scene, as well as pacing and style.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com