Category: Writing

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Math Problems are Writer Problems

Pavowski9 Comments

Okay, this is a blarg about writing (mostly), how the fargo did math come into it?

Like this. My wife and I were reading a Buzzfeed article today (yeah, I know) about a dad who sent in a check using Common Core mathematics to send his own sort of indignant statement about his feelings on the Common Core. And yeah, it’s funny. But I also take an interest in this because I’m a teacher and Common Core, like it or not, is kinda my business these days.

Also, I’m a dad whose son is going to be headed off to the hallowed halls of learning soon, so Common Core is doubly my jam. Apparently, lots of parents in my generation struggle with the way they’re teaching math now, and that’s a problem, because math is hard enough for kids without coming home and seeing that their parents can’t do it either. Which is not a situation that I want my kids to be in. So I did a quick search to see if I could get a handle on this “new math” thing.

And you know what? It wasn’t that bad. For clarity, here’s what I read:

Lifted from Business Insider:

First, Carney explains the old way subtraction was taught:

Take this: 474-195.

Old way: Try 4-5. Nope. So cross out 7, carry the 1. Add 1 to 4. Now subtract 6 5 from 5. Write down 0.

Wait. That’s wrong. It’s not add 1+4. It’s 10+4. So cross out my 1. 10+4=14. Minus 5. Write down 9.

Next subtract 9 from 7. Carrying again. But remember it’s 9 from 6. Dammit. Cross out 4. Add a one … wait, a 10 to 7 … err, rather 6. 16 minus 9 is 7.

The four is crossed out. So it’s a three. Minus one

My answer is: 279.

To get that I had to add and subtract a lot. You can actually count the operations.

(1) 4-5.
(2) 7-1
(3) 10+4
(4) 14-5
=9
(5) 6-9
(6) 4-1
(7) 10+6
(8) 16-9
=7

(9) 3-1
=2

= 279.

Notice how many occasions for error and how much switching between addition and subtraction is required. This is a system built to fail.

Now here’s Carney explaining the new way subtraction is taught:

They key to (new way) is realizing this subtraction problem is asking you to measure the distance between 474 and 195. You do that, in turn, by measuring the distance between landmarks (easy, round numbers). It’s turning math into a road map.

So 474-195.

Starting point is 195. How do we get to 474? Well, first we’ll drive to 200.

(1) 200 is 5 from 195
(2) 400 is 200 from 200
(3) 474 is 74 from 400
(5) 74+200 = 274.
(6) 274 + 5 = 279.

Not only are there fewer steps, the steps are far less complex. You aren’t carrying, or worrying about adding 10 then subtracting the other thing, then remembering to subtract one from the other column. It’s much straighter.

Now, if you’re like me, you probably read that and experienced a bit of skepticism. The way we learned it is simple; why complicate it by bringing in addition?

Except that the way we learned it isn’t simple. It isn’t any simpler than any other way. It’s only simple to us because that’s how we learned it, and we have, god, I dunno, maybe about ten thousand repetitions of it throughout our educational careers reinforcing that way of doing it? Of course our way is simple and this looks like gibberish.

But our way of doing math is no more intuitive for a child than this “new” way is. One way or another, kids have to be taught subtraction, and whether they do it this way or our way or some completely different way entirely (let’s come back around to this discussion in twenty years or so), the important thing is whether they get the right answer or not.

Come to think of it…

I seem to recall there being some argument about the way math was being taught around the time I was being taught math. Lots of parents couldn’t wrap their heads around it. Tom Lehrer even had a song about it:

Which is great for making you feel very, very confused if you never learned how to do math in base 8. (What, you didn’t learn how to do math in base 8? That’s okay, NOBODY knows how to do math in base 8.)

Back to my point: there’s pushback on the current state of affairs in math classrooms. So the fargo what? There is always controversy about what’s going on in classrooms. Like it or not, our kids are in those classrooms, and no small measure of their success in life depends upon their success in their classrooms. So, to my way of thinking, digging in your heels and saying “No, this new math is stupid, I don’t get it, and I don’t see why my kid has to learn it” is a little bit like a dinosaur shouting at the oncoming meteor that if it’s all just the same, he’d like to get on munching on these palm fronds.

Boom.

This iteration of mathematical thinking is here. It’s time to get on the train, whether it makes sense to you or not. Guess what? If you’re a parent, it’s your job to make sure you understand at least some part of what your kid is learning in school. And I’d much rather take a little time to learn something myself so that, when my kid comes home with a math problem he doesn’t understand, we can work through it together, than the alternatives: he flunks out since he sees dad doesn’t care enough about math to learn it, or we hire a tutor because dad can’t be bothered.

If you struggle with the way they do math, I’m not judging you.

But if you are sitting here insisting that Common Core math is bad and needs to be repealed because you don’t understand it, then I am judging you.

I’m not saying it’s perfect. Common Core in all disciplines has no shortage of flaws, but holy cheese doodles, at least educators are trying new things to fix our abysmal test scores. Point is, for the moment, this is the only train running. You can either hop on or walk.

Now.

This is a writing blog, as I said before, so — is there a tie-in here to writing?

You betcha.

Because the person who can’t — or won’t — wrap his or her mind about the “new math” is in a rut. They’re stuck in a routine that’s comfortable, that they see no reason to change. Which is all fine and well as long as they stay insulated in their own particular corner of the world.

But, short of living out your life on a mountainside, draping yourself in the skins of the animals you slay for food, the world has a funny way of not allowing you to remain insulated. You have to interact with other minds, which means interacting with other ways of thinking.

The good writer will embrace this inevitability. He’ll adapt his craft based on new things he learns, he’ll absorb and experiment with ideas from the world outside his bubble. He’ll continue to craft stories and characters and worlds that reflect the changes going on in the world around him rather than rowing his boat backwards against the current. The good writer — hell, the good human — will see something that challenges his way of thinking and examine it, poke at it, see what makes it tick, rather than casting it aside as a foolish diversion.

To do otherwise is to live in the past.

To do otherwise is the antithesis of growth.

To do otherwise is the root of so much conflict in our world it absolutely makes my head spin.

Give the new stuff a try. Just because it’s strange to you at first doesn’t make it wrong. It just means you haven’t tried it yet.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Video Game Endings and the Writer

Pavowski6 Comments

Writing the end of a novel is something like the last stage of a video game.

A really long video game, that you’re playing through for the first time. And you find yourself in the last level — the final dungeon, the Temple that Houses the Big Bad — and all of a sudden, there’s that rush. It’s all been building up to this. There’s that moment of doubt: did I collect enough ammunition? Are all my magic spells charged? Did I re-forge my +9 sword of nerditude in preparation for this? But before you know it, the monster is upon you, and you’re in a fight for your life.

He looks familiar — he’s been hinted at throughout the whole game to this point, after all — but he’s got some entirely unexpected tricks up his sleeve, too, and within a few moments, you’re in the fight of your life. With reckless abandon, you reach again and again into the bag of goodies you’ve been collecting all along: plasma grenades, portable portals, chicken legs that somehow restore your health, hypodermic needles full of spirit energy. One after another, you deploy your best gambits, and one after another, they seem to have a tiny effect but they keep coming up short.

And, ultimately, you probably screw it up. Screw it up badly. You probably don’t do much more than leave a bloody stain on the boss’s knuckles after he beats you down; leave a greasy smear of your DNA on the walls of the temple.

So it is with writing.

You’ve laid the groundwork, you’ve brought your hero(es) to some grand, lofty conclusion, ready to face off with the demons (literal or figurative) that have hounded their every step. They’ve learned some things along the way. The story has built in a certain direction. And the ending you envision is right there, just at the end of the next few days’ worth of writing.

And holy crap, do you screw it up. The resolution to the conflict comes flying out of left field like a meteor, solving the problems but opening up all new ones. Or you realize that the conflict you’ve been building to all along is the wrong one. Or that the conflict is right, but your hero has changed along the way and no longer wants the ending you thought she wanted all the way through.

Luckily, the video game, just like writing, has a reset button. When you get to the end and find that you didn’t pack nearly enough rockets, well, you can just reset to an earlier level, stock up on rockets, and come around to the boss temple again, better equipped to deal with the monster awaiting you. With writing, you can re-write the story as many times as you need to to get it right. No judgment, no shame; you just go back and recreate your story, from the ground up, if necessary.

Point is, I know I’ve felt, at the end of my first novel and again at the end of this one, that I somehow had to stick the landing on the first try. That the ending I wrote would be somehow etched in stone, unchangeable. But nothing is unchangeable. That’s why writing is even better than video games. In the game, there’s only one path to the boss, one ending to shoot for. In writing, the end is whatever you want it to be.

The first time I made it to the last level in Bioshock, I spent nearly five minutes just running from the boss, trying to figure out how I could even find a window in his attacks to do something as simple as aim a gun in his direction. I didn’t want to screw it up, so I simply dropped into survival mode and ran for it. Then I remembered it doesn’t matter if you die in a game, and I turned and threw myself at him with everything I had. And yeah, I died a few times, but I learned the patterns and soon I was able to handle him without even taking a spot of damage.

So here, I find myself in the closing chapters of novel #2, and I’m feeling that same pressure: the ending has to be perfect, I can’t screw it up, I’ll ruin everything if it isn’t all rainbows and dancing unicorns. But to quote Marty McFly, “I’ve got a time machine, I’ve got all the time I want!” Which is doubly relevant, since my story features a time machine rather prominently. So, enough doubting, enough stressing, enough worrying. Time to go screw up this ending so that I can reset and fix it.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Last 10,000

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The novel is down to the last ten thousand words.

It’s a bizarre feeling. If my first novel was written in a flurry of inspiration, stolen minutes and creeping inevitability, this novel has been written via a series of well-placed skull strikes against the keyboard. Or maybe not so well-placed. The narrative of this one hasn’t flowed as well as the first. The path was never so clear. The words more reluctant. The voice, nonexistent.

Still, I’m almost there, and the proverbial light is shining at the proverbial end of the proverbial tunnel. It ain’t far off now, which means I’m too close to even think about packing it all in. I should be done within the month, which is startlingly enough true to the (unofficial) deadline I set for myself back in … whenever the fargo I began writing it. It seems so long ago now as to be hardly worth pondering, but I want to say it was maybe February? March?

It’s taken longer than the first novel, pushing out this newest squalling bundle of joy, but that’s because I realized that the breakneck pace I set back then (1200 words a day was my goal) was a bit too much for other areas of my life to bear. I backed the daily requirement back to 600 (though I really do aim for 900 most days), which has of course made the project stretch out, but has also given me more time to assess as I go.

And I’m not sure if that’s been a good thing or not. With the first novel I plowed ahead full force, writing the story as it occurred to me, hardly pausing for breath or to check my bearings at all as I scrambled for the finish. With this project, I’m constantly evaluating how things are going, second-guessing my decisions, agonizing over each new turn. As a result, the thing has been reshaped so many times along the way it’s as if I started off building a replica of the Iron Throne and ended up with a misshapen ashtray made from discarded banana peels. And then sat on it. Eww slimy.

It’s gonna require major rewrites. Months of work. And I can’t help wondering if by taking my time a little bit more I hamstrung myself by allowing things to settle. If instead of spinning the whole tale out like a blown glass bottle, the thing is hardening and solidifying fit to break when I start to apply pressure to it.

But those are concerns for future me.

Now that I can see the end, I can feel that restless energy seeping in, that urge to push for the finish.

For the moment, it’s time to focus on those last 10,000 words, and the feeling over the last few days is that they’re going to go fast. I can feel the frenetic pacing from my first novel creeping in. I can feel myself reaching for Chekhov’s Guns that weren’t written yet, weapons that materialize under my fingers as the story demands them. The time will come when I can go back and invent the methods of their inception. Right now, the story is full steam ahead, and if a character needs a robotic limb in order to break out of their holographic jail cell, then by god, that character has what she needs. The details will come later, for now it’s time to find an ending for this thing, even if that means steering its smoldering wreckage into the side of a mountain.

So.

Deep breath.

Head down.

Time to write.

A Plague of Excuses

Pavowski5 Comments

Usually I like to use the SOCS prompt to write about my writing process, but given that the prompt for the week is “four-letter words”, there’s only really one thing I can think about.

Plague.

No, wait. Disease.

No, sorry. Too fancy.

Sick.

We’re all sick. Everybody in my the house. Sprout the first is sniffling and snuffling and coughing his brains out. Sprout the second has a perpetual river of snot running down her face. Poor wife has been snagged by the grasping claws of the sore throat that I shook off a couple of days ago, and I’ve got the stuffy-headed feeling of a skull stuffed full of mucus. So, we’re all a little bit miserable.

And maybe that’s why this week seemed to stretch out for eternity, as my wife and I both agreed it did. In addition to the regular tribulations of the day, we had to come home to runny noses and coughing fits and the general bad humor of little kids suffering from sickness. Which is enough to take the wind out of anybody’s sails.

And as much as I like to find an inspirational or motivational spin to put on any hurdle to writing, it’s hard to think of much that’s positive to say about this one. There’s no positive to mopping snot off faces and having millions of germs coughed into your face holes by kids who haven’t got the motor control or consideration to even conceive of covering their mouths.

So writing on the project has been at a bare minimum this week. Posts here on the blarg have been next to non-existent. The plague going around the house has taken the mustard right out of my sails. And for all I write about powering through the crap days, writing even when you don’t feel like it, and embracing the work for its own sake for its therapeutic and uplifting properties, even I recognize that there are some days when that just isn’t the case. When you’re sick — really afflicted with something nasty, something physical or chemical that’s keeping you from firing on any of your cylinders, let alone all of them — the only thing to do is to hunker down, chug back a bottle of Nyquil or Pepto or whatever, and wait for the storm to pass.

Luckily, it feels like the storm might be breaking. I feel much better today than in the past couple of days, Sprout the Second’s face is not nearly so crusty this morning, and Sprout the First… well, he’s still coughing fit to serve as the percussion backbeat to a dubstep track.

Guess you can’t win ’em all.

Luckily, for that, they have Dayquil.

Writer Moments: The Hero is not the Hero

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Funny things happen when you’re writing.

Writing isn’t building a parking deck, with schematics on file at the city office describing exactly how many steel girders go where, how many tons of concrete, how close to paint the lines, how exactly to best get that fresh pee smell in the elevators. Writing is more like surfing. You practice the mechanics, the balance, the paddling and the positioning, but it all means nothing until the right wave hits. But then, when the wave hits, all the preparation goes out the window and you ride what the ocean gives you. (And if that’s not what surfing is like, I apologize. I know as much about surfing as I do about effective lawn maintenance, which is to say, I know it’s a thing that some people who are not me are capable of doing, and I imagine there is some skill involved.)

I’ve learned a lot from writing my current novel, much more than I learned writing the first. The current story has changed so many times that the disassembled cadaver on my table looks more like the bodies of six or seven different deep-sea monstrosities whacked together with crazy glue and culinary twine. It’s either missing a head or it has two heads too many, depending on what angle the light strikes it at. And it’s still not finished. Soon, but not there yet.

And by finished, of course, I mean only the first draft; there is a long period of re-writing ahead of this one, considering all the narrative surgery to be conducted on those half-formed fish-beast parts.

But I am always learning new things about my writing, and a thing I learned today was that this story is about the entirely wrong things.

The chain of events is good. Maybe even exciting. But there was something wrong with my protagonist. I felt a niggling seed of doubt a month or so ago when I axed one of the major supporting characters who just wasn’t doing much. But I’ve been feeling a much fainter, though much more impossible to ignore, sensation at the same time; sort of like how, on a cruise ship, you can get used to the motion of the ocean and forget for a time that you’re bobbing around like a cork, but then a storm hits and you realize, with your entire life at a thirty degree angle, that things are a bit more off-kilter than you realized. And that sensation is that the protagonist of my story isn’t actually the protagonist of the story.

To be clear, this character belongs in the story. She’s even, maybe, integral to it. But far too often, things happen to her rather than the other way around. Kind of like how, in Twilight (and I apologize already for using a Twilight comparison), Bella watches events unfold for three freaking books before she actually does something (and even then, she’s only a small part of what the rest of the world, basically, is already doing without her), whereas Harry Potter grabs his wand and wizard hat (okay, wizards in HP don’t have pointy hats as a rule, but they should) and goes bumblingly about the business of saving the world. Things happen to Bella, whereas Harry Potter goes out and happens to things.

In my story? The character I thought was the protagonist gets plucked out of her own time and wants desperately to get back. And … that’s pretty much it. There are more capable and knowledgeable parties on all sides of her making things happen, and she’s just along for the ride. She helps out here and there, but she never leads the charge. She’s not dead weight, but she’s not slugging above her weight class either.

On the other hand, I’ve got another character who is also plucked out of her own time and also wants desperately to get back, but she fights like a demon against the people trying to help her because she doesn’t believe they’re actually out to help her. She befriends the evil gatekeepers because she doesn’t know well enough not to. Her worldview gets mucked about with more than that bowl full of stale pretzels at the hotel bar, and every time somebody dips their fingers in her sensibilities she fights back and goes in an entirely new direction.

She is, in short, much more interesting than the character I thought was the protagonist. Which means, like a second-string running back when the superstar goes down with an ACL injury, it’s time for her to step up into the bright lights. And sure, this will mean some pretty serious rewriting, but LOLOL I’m going to be rewriting this one for months after the fact already.

And it’s work worth doing, because the story will be better with her at the helm. It’ll be easier for an audience to care about this girl. She doesn’t simply accept the world as it is, she believes it to be better than it is. And when she learns that the world actually isn’t better, she will fight to make it better.

That’s what we want in stories. That’s why Twilight left me feeling empty when I read it. We want a protagonist who does things. We want a protagonist who takes the car out for a spin and yeah, maybe, wrecks it, rather than the salesperson who gets thrown out the window when the whole thing rolls over. We want the guy who grabs the gun and wades into the fray rather than the politician that voted to send him there.

My hero was the wrong hero.

But the real hero has revealed herself.

I can’t be the only one who writes this way. Surely your stories (the ones you’re writing, or the ones you’re living) have surprised you in the same way. Right?

(He shouted into the featureless void.)