Writing’s 3 Essential Skills

I’ve written on this topic before and even given classes in it, as well as talks, but this is a slightly different approach. Basically, I’m looking at the fundamental skills one has to acquire or develop in order to write fiction, as opposed to non-fiction. In a nutshell, they are the ability to create character, the ability to create emotions and the ability to create narrative tension. None of these are required for ordinary writing but they are all requisite skills for fiction. I’ll address them in reverse order.

Some people may prefer the term ‘narrative drive’ to ‘narrative tension’ but the word tension is more appropriate in my view. Tension is antithetical to resolution and has a comparable role in music which is less obvious. Narrative tension can be manifest in many forms, but it’s essential to fiction because it’s what motivates the reader to turn the page. A novel without narrative tension won’t be read. You can have tension between characters, in many forms: sexual, familial, or between colleagues or between protagonist and antagonist. Tension can be created by jeopardy, which is suspense, or by anticipation or by knowledge semi-revealed. In a word, this is called drama. And, of course, all these forms can be combined to occur in parallel or in series, and have different spans over the duration of the story. Tension requires resolution and the resolution is no less important a skill than the tension itself. Ideally, you want tension in some form on every page.

Emotion is what art is all about, and the greatest exemplar is music. Music is arguably the purest art form because music is the most emotive of art forms. No where is this more apparent than in cinema, where it is employed so successfully that the audience, for the most part, is unaware of its presence, yet it manipulates you emotionally as much as anything on the screen. In novels, the writer doesn’t have access to this medium, yet he or she is equally adept at manipulating emotions. And, once again, this is an essential skill, otherwise the reader will find the story lifeless. Novels can make you laugh, make you cry, make you horny, make you scared and make you excited, sometimes all in the same book.

Normally, I start any discussion on writing with character, because it is the most essential skill of all. I can’t tell you how to create characters – it’s one of those skills that comes with practice – I only know that I do it without thinking about it too much. For me, when I’m writing, the characters take on a life of their own, and if they don’t, I know I’m wasting my time. But there is one thing I’ll say about characters, based on other reading I’ve done, and that is if I’m not sympathetic to the protagonist(s) I find the story an ordeal. If the protagonist is depressed, I get depressed; if the protagonist is an angry young man, I find myself avoiding his company; if the protagonist is a pretentious prat, I find myself wishing they’d have an accident. It’s a very skilled writer who can engage you with uninviting characters, and I’m not one of them.

There is a link between character and emotion, because the character is the channel through which you feel emotion. A story is told through its characters, including description and exposition. If you want to describe something or explain something do it through the characters' senses and introspection.

Finally, why is crime the most popular form of fiction? Because crime often involves a mystery or a puzzle and invariably involves suspense, which is a guaranteed form of narrative tension. The best crime fiction (for example, Scandinavian) involves psychologically authentic characters, and that will always separate good fiction from mediocre. We like complex drawn characters, because they feel like people we know, and their evolvement is one of the reasons we return to the page.

Malala Day

A 16 year old girl, shot by the Taliban for going to school, stands defiant and delivers an impassioned and inspirational speech to the United Nations General Assembly. This girl not only represents the face of feminism in Islam but represents the future of women all over the world. Education is the key to humanity's future and, as the Dalai Lama once said, ignorance is one of the major poisons of the mind. Ignorance is the enemy of the 21st Century. May this day go down in history as the representation of a young girl's courage and determination to forge her own future in a society where the idea is condemned.

Fruits of Corporate Greed

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about global feudalism, but it’s much worse than I thought.

This eye-opening programme is shameful. As Kerry O’Brien says at the end: out of sight, out of mind. This is the so-called level playing field in action. Jobs going overseas because the labour is cheaper. Actually it’s jobs going overseas because it’s virtually slave labour - I’m talking literally not figuratively.

But more revelatory than anything else is that there is no code of ethics for these companies unless it is forced upon them. They really don’t care if the workers, who actually create the products they sell, die or are injured or are abused. When things go wrong they do their best to avoid accountability, and, like all criminals, only own up when incontrovertible evidence is produced.

Algebra - the language of mathematics

I know I’m doing things back-to-front – arse-about - as we say in Oz (and possibly elsewhere) but, considering all the esoteric mathematics I produce on this blog, I thought I should try and explain some basics.

As I mentioned earlier this year in a post on ‘analogy’, mathematics is a cumulative endeavour and you can’t understand calculus, for example, if you don’t know algebra. I’ve come across more than a few highly intelligent people, of both sexes, who struggle with maths (or math as Americans call it) and the sight of an equation stops them in their tracks.

Mathematics is one of those topics where the gap, between what you are expected to know and what you actually learn, can grow as you progress through school, mainly because you were stumped by algebra. You know: the day you were suddenly faced with numbers being replaced by letters; and things like counting, adding, subtracting, dividing, multiplying, fractions and even decimals suddenly seemed irrelevant. In other words, everything you’d learned about mathematics, which was firmly grounded in numbers – something you’d learned almost as soon as you could talk – suddenly seemed useless. Even Carl Jung, according to his autobiography, stopped understanding maths the day he had to deal with ‘x’. In fact, his wife, Emma, had a better understanding of physics than Jung did.

But for those who jump this hurdle, seemingly effortlessly, ‘x’ is a liberator in the same way that the imaginary number i is perceived by those who appreciate its multi-purposefulness. In both cases, we can do a lot more than we could before, and that is why algebra is a stepping-stone to higher mathematics.

Fundamentally, mathematics is not so much about numbers as the relationship between numbers, and algebra allows us to see the relationships without the numbers, and that’s the conceptual hurdle one has to overcome.

I’ll give a very simple example that everyone should know: Pythagoras’s triangle.

I don’t even have to draw it, I only have to state it: a² + b² = c²; and you should know what I’m talking about. But a picture is worth innumerable words.

The point is that we can use actual integers, called Pythagorean triples, that obey this relationship; the smallest being 5² = 4² + 3². Do the math as you Americans like to say.

But the truth is that this relationship applies to all Pythagorean triangles, irrespective of their size, length of sides and units of measurement. The only criteria being that the triangle is ‘flat’, or Euclidean (is not on a curved surface) and contains one right angle (90^o).

By using letters, we have stated a mathematical truth, a universal law that applies right across the universe. Pythagoras’s triangle was discovered well before Pythagoras (circa 500BC) by the Egyptians, Babylonians and the Chinese, and possibly other cultures as well.

Most of the mathematics, that I do, involves the manipulation of algebraic equations, including a lot of the stuff I describe on this blog. If you know how to manipulate equations, you can do a lot of mathematics, but if you don’t, you can’t do any.

A lot of people are taught BIDMAS, which gives the priority of working out an equation: Brackets, Indices, Division, Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction. To be honest, I’ve never come across a mathematician who uses it.

On the other hand, a lot of maths books talk about the commutative law, the associative law and the distributive law as the fundaments of algebra.

There is a commutative law for addition and a commutative law for multiplication, which are both simple and basic.

A + B = B + A  and  A x B = B x A (that’s it)

Obviously there is no commutative law for subtraction or division.

A – B ≠ B – A  and  A/B ≠ B/A (pretty obvious)

There are some areas of mathematics where this rule doesn’t apply, like matrices, but we won’t go there.

The associative law also applies to addition and multiplication.

So A + (B + C) = (A + B) + C  and  A x (B x C) = (A x B) x C

It effectively says that it doesn’t matter what order you perform these operations you’ll get the same result, and, obviously, you can extend this to any length of numbers, because any addition or multiplication creates a new number that can then be added or multiplied to any other number or string of numbers.

But the most important rule to understand is the distributive law because it combines addition and multiplication and can be extended to include subtraction and division (if you know what you're doing). The distributive law lies at the heart of algebra.

A(B + C) = AB + AC  and  A(B + C) ≠ AB + C (where AB = A x B)

And this is where brackets come in under BIDMAS. In other words, if you do what’s in the brackets first you’ll be okay. But you can also eliminate the brackets and get the same answer if you follow the distributive rule.

But we can extend this: 1/A(B - C) = B/A - C/A (where B/A = B ÷ A)

And  -A(B – C) = CA – BA  because (-1)² = 1, so a minus times a minus equals a plus.

If 1/A(B + C) = B/A + C/A then (B + C)/A = B/A + C/A

And  A/C + B/D = (DA + BC)/DC

To appreciate this do the converse:

(DA + BC)/DC = DA/DC + BC/DC = A/C + B/D

But the most important technique one can learn is how to change the subject of an equation. If we go back to Pythagoras’s equation:

a² + b² = c²  what’s b = ?

The very simple rule is that whatever you do to one side of an equation you must do to the other side. So if you take something away from one side you must take it away from the other side and if you multiply or divide one side by something you must do the same on the other side.

So, given the above example, the first thing we want to do is isolate b². Which means we take a² from the LHS and also the RHS (left hand side and right hand side).

So b² = c² – a²

And to get b from b² we take the square root of b², which means we take the square root of the RHS.

So b = √(c² – a²)

Note b ≠ c – a  because √(c² – a²) ≠ √c² - √a²

In the same way that (a + b)² ≠ a² + b²

In fact (a + b)² = (a + b)(a + b)

And applying the distributive law: (a + b)(a + b) = a(a + b) + b(a + b)

Which expands to  a² + ab + ba + b² = a² + 2ab + b²

But (a + b)(a – b) = a² – b²  (work it out for yourself)

An equation by definition (and by name) means that something equals something. To maintain the equality whatever you do on one side must be done on the other side, and that’s basically the most important rule of all. So if you take the square root or a logarithm or whatever of a single quantity on one side you must take the square root or logarithm or whatever of everything on the other side. Which means you put brackets around everything first and apply the distributive law if possible, and, if not, leave it in brackets like I did with the example of Pythagoras’s equation.

Final Example:  A/B = C + D    What’s B = ?

Invert both sides:  B/A = 1/(C + D)

Multiply both sides by A:   B = A/(C + D)   (Easy)

Note: A/(C + D) ≠ A/C + A/D

Time again to talk about time

Last week’s New Scientist’s cover declared SPACE versus TIME; one has to go. But which? (15 June 2013). This served as a rhetorical introduction to physics' most famous conundrum: the irreconcilability of its 2 most successful theories - quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity - both conceived at the dawn of the so-called golden age of physics in the early 20^th Century.

The feature article (pp. 35-7) cites a number of theoretical physicists including Joe Polchinski (University of California, Santa Barbara), Sean Carroll (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena), Nathan Seiberg (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Abhay Ashtekar (Pennsylvania University), Juan Malcadena (no institute cited) and Steve Giddings (also University of California).

Most scientists and science commentators seem to be banking on String Theory to resolve the problem, though both its proponents and critics acknowledge there’s no evidence to separate it from alternative theories like loop quantum gravity (LQG), plus it predicts 10 spatial dimensions and 10⁵⁰⁰ universes. However, physicists are used to theories not gelling with common sense and it’s possible that both the extra dimensions and the multiverse could exist without us knowing about them.

Personally, I was intrigued by Ashtekar’s collaboration with Lee Smolin (a strong proponent of LQG) and Carlo Rovelli where ‘Chunks of space [at the Planck scale] appear first in the theory, while time pops up only later…’ In a much earlier publication of New Scientist on ‘Time’ Rovelli is quoted as claiming that time disappears mathematically: “For me, the solution to the problem is that at the fundamental level of nature, there is no time at all.” Which I discussed in a post on this very subject in Oct. 2011.

In a more recent post (May 2013) I quoted Paul Davies from The Goldilocks Enigma: ‘[The] vanishing of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description.’ And in the very article I’m discussing now, the author, Anil Ananthaswamy, explains how the wave function of Schrodinger’s equation, whilst it evolves in time, ‘…time is itself not part of the Hilbert space where everything else physical sits, but somehow exists outside of it.’ (Hilbert space is the ‘abstract’ space that Schrodinger’s wave function inhabits.) ‘When we measure the evolution of a quantum state, it is to the beat of an external timepiece of unknown provenance.’

Back in May 2011, I wrote my most popular post ever: an exposition on Schrodinger’s equation, where I deconstructed the famous time dependent equation with a bit of sleight-of-hand. The sleight-of-hand was to introduce the quantum expression for momentum (p_x = -i h d/dx) without explaining where it came from (the truth is I didn’t know at the time). However, I recently found a YouTube video that remedies that, because the anonymous author of the video derives Schrodinger’s equation in 2 stages with the time independent version first (effectively the RHS of the time dependent equation). The fundamental difference is that he derives the expression for p_x = i h d/dx, which I now demonstrate below.

Basically the wave function, which exploits Euler’s famous equation, using complex algebra (imaginary numbers) is expressed thus:  Ψ = Ae ^i(kx−ωt)

If one differentiates this equation wrt x we get ik(Ae ^i(kx−ωt)), which is ikΨ. If we differentiate it again we get d²Ψ/dx² = (ik)²Ψ.

Now k is related to wavelength (λ) by 2π such that k = 2π/λ.

And from Planck’s equation (E = hf) and the fact that (for light) c = f λ we can get a relationship between momentum (p) and λ. If p = mc and E = mc², then p = E/c. Therefore p = hf/f λ which gives p = h/λ effectively the momentum version of Planck’s equation. Note that p is related to wavelength (space) and E is related to frequency (time).

This then is the quantum equation for momentum based on h (Planck’s constant) and λ. And, of course, according to Louis de Broglie, particles as well as light can have wavelengths.

And if we substitute 2π/k for λ we get p = hk/2π which can be reformulated as

k = p/h where h = h/2π.

And substituting this in (ik)² we get –(p/h)²  { i² = -1}

So Ψ d²/dx² = -(p_x/h)²Ψ

Making p the subject of the equation we get p_x² = - h² d²/dx² (Ψ cancels out on both sides) and I used this expression in my previous post on this topic.

And if I take the square root of p_x² I get p_x = i h d/dx, the quantum term for momentum.

So the quantum version of momentum is a consequence of Schrodinger’s equation and not an input as I previously implied. Note that √-1 can be i or –i so p_x can be negative or positive. It makes no difference when it’s used in Schrodinger’s equation because we use p_x².

If you didn’t follow that, don’t worry, I’m just correcting something I wrote a couple of years ago that’s always bothered me. It’s probably easier to follow on the video where I found the solution.

But the relevance to this discussion is that this is probably the way Schrodinger derived it. In other words, he derived the term for momentum first (RHS), then the time dependent factor (LHS), which is the version we always see and is the one inscribed on his grave’s headstone.

This has been a lengthy and esoteric detour but it highlights the complementary roles of space and time (implicit in a wave function) that we find in quantum mechanics.

Going back to the New Scientist article, the author also provides arguments from theorists that support the idea that time is more fundamental than space and others who believe that neither is more fundamental than the other.

But reading the article, I couldn’t help but think that gravity plays a pivotal role regarding time and we already know that time is affected by gravity. The article keeps returning to black holes because that’s where the 2 theories (quantum mechanics and general relativity) collide. From the outside, at the event horizon, time becomes frozen but from the inside time would become infinite (everything would happen at once) (refer Addendum below). Few people seem to consider the possibility that going from quantum mechanics to classical physics is like a phase change in the same way that we have phase changes from ice to water. And in that phase change time itself may be altered.
 

Referring to one of the quotes I cited earlier, it occurs to me that the ‘external timepiece of unknown provenance’ could be a direct consequence of gravity, which determines the rate of time for all objects in free fall.

Addendum: Many accounts of the event horizon, including descriptions in a recent special issue of Scientific American; Extreme Physics (Summer 2013), claim that one can cross an event horizon without even knowing it. However, if time is stopped for 'you' according to observers outside the event horizon, then their time must surely appear infinite to ‘you’, to be consistent. Kiwi, Roy Kerr, who solved Einstein's field equations for a rotating black hole (the most likely scenario), claims that there are 2 event horizons, and after crossing the first one, time becomes space-like and space becomes time-like. This infers, to me, that time becomes static and infinite and space becomes dynamic. Of course, no one really knows, and no one is ever going to cross an event horizon and come back to tell us.

Judi Moylan – a very rare and endangered species of politician

Judi Moylan is that very rare entity: a politician who puts principles before ego and ambition. It’s worth listening to the short audio imbedded in this link.

To me, this is very sad, because Moylan is too empathetic and not ruthless enough to make it to the front bench – she is one of the last of her kind in her party – yet Federal politics needs more people like her and less like our leaders and leaders-in-waiting.

No one in a position of power or influence in Australian politics has the guts to stand up to the paranoid element in our society. In fact, they do the exact opposite, knowing that by pandering to xenophobia and insecurity they can win the next election. Australian electioneering is governed by the politics of fear, when we have the most buoyant economy in the Western world. What does that say about us as a people?