So, rip rip rip, and 14 hours of work later, I had a giant list of bumps along the story road. How giant? Twenty pages of things that are broken in the story. Four pages listing all the times the characters’ hair color/height/name changes, their actions don’t match their motivations, and random new characters pop up without introduction or plan. Two pages listing things I like (!). And nine pages listing setting, history, and other facts I need to look up. Again, the most-common note was “add emotion”; this time second-most was “where ARE they?” There are a number of scenes that could be set in outer space for as much detail as I put in.

Next up, a week of research and setting up a story timeline that makes sense. And next weekend, another readthrough, this time looking for things promised (i.e. “gun on the wall in the first act”) that I didn’t follow through on.

This method (the numbered lists) is based on Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel online course.

How does school work, brain-wise? Do children teach themselves or is it something about the instruction that gets their brains firing and wiring faster? Last fall, a few hundred neuroscientists, teachers, and curriculum-makers met for a weekend to hash out what we know about learning and how we could use it to help every child succeed at school. One early answer: Play. 

The Aspen Brain Forum was sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, which has posted an extensive summary of the event as well as slides and audio from eighteen of the sessions. For an introductory taste of the event, though, try the 18-min podcast (which we sponsored). Science and the City’s Nadja Popovich talked with three of the presenters, who sketch the growing field and describe a few surprising results.  

Many of these results are connected to the cognitive properties of executive function, especially attention: inhibiting distraction, focusing on the correct aspect of a task, and maintaining focus. For example, Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia describes the “red-pencil technique” for children who are writing their letters or numbers the wrong way (mirrored). Asking them to remind themselves to stop before they have to write a “6″ and switch from their regular pencil to another one to write that number slows them down enough that they write the number correctly, a change that seems to last. Diamond also points out that learning programs that include social, emotional, and physical components (such as play) “are better for academic achievement and executive function” than those that focus solely on academics. “Addressing only the cognitive seems to be less beneficial,” she says.

On the subject of play, Daphne Bavalier of the University of Rochester offers tantalizing research into the benefits of often-denigrated video games. Studies done on undergraduate non-gamers who played games for the first time for a few dozen hours seem to show they have improved vision acuity and speed as well as attention. How might programmers tweak games to foster improvements that could last?

Bruce McCandliss of Vanderbilt University describes research that suggests that differences in learning abilities and styles may have a grounding in attention, too—or rather, what we focus our attention on. Brain scans of young people focusing on the beginnings and endings of spoken words differ in predictable ways from the scans of those who focus on the melody of the sentences, for example. Might “poor” readers be focusing on a less-helpful aspect of the language, perhaps enjoying the music of the language and missing its meaning? “Different learning styles may rely on different styles of attention,” he says, and might benefit from different methods of instruction.

Like most of neuroscience, questions are more plentiful than answers. We do know some things work better than others, though; Diamond cites the Montessori, Tools of the Mind, and Path curriculums; Jump Math also seems to be making mathematicians of entire classrooms, not just a lucky few, according to John Mighton (who was not on the podcast but did attend the meeting).

The main take-away? Everyone learns a little differently, so relax about it. As Diamond says, “stress impairs executive function.”

–Nicky Penttila

• write every day
• spend 2 hours or more every week marketing my work
• travel to Spain for research
• finish another print-worthy novel
• have something I wrote for sale (or bought) by November
• volunteer to judge or coordinate 3 writing contests
• continue to volunteer as WRW membership goddess
• buy a copy of all my friends’ debut books this year (3-D copies preferred)
• read 50 books
• keep a list of books I read this year (see right).

And you?

• spent more than 300 hours writing (not web-surfing or sitting, but writing)
• spent more than 120 hours doing volunteer work
• finished 1 print-worthy book (!)
• submitted my work to agents and editors, and got good critiques and notes
• wrote 1 good short story and started 2 others
• won NaNoWriMo!
• volunteered as a judge for 3 writing contests and coordinator for one
• volunteered as WRW membership goddess, including developing and implementing a new web-based registration method
• attended WRW’s retreat, the RT conference (first time), and RWA’s conference
• arranged to have my story edited by a really good editor
• read 54 books (see right) across many genres.

And you?

First: WOW. I’d been to quite a few lectures in the LoC before, but always come in the back entrance, so I’d never seen the entry hall. Gorgeous! Here’s Virginia in the hall shining a light on the two figures bookending an entry arch: A young reader and an old reader, showing that learning is a life-long pursuit.

The entry has staircases on two sides, and along the railings are putti dressed as different sorts of artisans. Here is one (left) dressed as an 18th century printer.

I was especially interested in the imagery of printing, as that’s a topic I write about in my stories. In the hall through the double-readers doorway are a series of paintings showing the progress of text, from stone through papyrus, and on to the printing press, below. Also in this small area are display cases for two Bibles: one hand-calligraphy and one printed by Gutenberg around the same time, marking the moment everything changed for book-readers.

The entry hall has a second-floor gallery, where the printer’s marks from various famous print-shops decorate the ornamental work between the stretched-canvas paintings. Along one wing of the gallery are images depicting the different forms of literature, including (top) romance and (bottom) erotica (“Love Poetry,” according to the catalog). Erotica!

We peeked into the reading room and heard how to request a book (fill out a form, wait between a half-hour and an entire day). Now I want to find something to request.
(LOC has clearer images of Romance and Erotica)

It really fires up around the :25 mark, but watching the whole thing reminds me how much we move around when we are “sleeping quietly.” The video credit on videosift is “by Perky,” on YouTube it’s “derrobsi.” Here’s where I found it: http://videosift.com/video/Time-lapse-man-sleeping-with-cat

I wandered across it because I was looking for a poster of a famous time-lapse photo of a man sleeping with his cat that is part of J. Allan Hobson’s Dreamstage Sleep and Brain Science Museum in Vermont. I have wanted to go, but rarely (never?) get to Vermont, but now the museum has launched a virtual tour on its site, with lots of slides and audio of Hobson describing the various exhibits and the science of sleep and dreaming.

Last year at this time, I had an excellent outline, character workups, conflict cards, and the whole shebang, and now I have the third draft of a kick-ass story. But I just finished said third-draft not an hour ago (woo-hoo!), thus the no-prep NaNo this year. This month is all about the non-judging, just getting the words on the page, though, so here we go.

What about you?

For example, I must have been wearing my “capitalist blinders” when I set up the town’s managing committee, because I included businessmen on it (or maybe my “American blinders”?). In fact, at that time, men of business were not the mighty lords of the world, the actual lords were. And so the committee was made up of clergymen and gentry. Oops.

Good thing I could do this tour, and come over to Manchester itself. I may still get stuff wrong, but seeing and hearing it will help me get a greater percentage right.

On scene 50 of 98. “Finished for now” pages are on the top shelf of the stacked shelves, finished scene notecards below and cut-up pages of old manuscript under that. I am the queen of cut-and-tape this revision. Pages not yet started on are on the bottom, with the remaining scene cards above them (look, part of the shelf is empty!). “Blank” pages are in the center. I’ve gone through 257 of the 417 first-draft pages; the final scenes are shorter than the early scenes, but there’s also a lot of new writing coming up.

(p.s. comment if you want to see the whole, gory work area!)

Below is the current work-table. “Finished for now” pages are on the top shelf of the stacked shelves; pages not yet started on are on the bottom , scrap paper, notebook paper, and cards fill the rest. Today’s count: 21 finished, 390 not finished, scene 4 in progress.

In the foothills of the mountain, looking up, up, up. Wish me luck!