This post is the third in a series of ten about my experiences at Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2008. I’ll talk about the first week of the workshop, when Paul Park instructed. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. I ended Part 2 by saying that at the mysterious space station in geosynchronous orbit above Seattle, where the workshop is held, I started the first week proper by thinking about characterization.
Seattle, far below the space station
Because characterization is what Paul Park began by talking about.
Paul, a tall, fit guy, struck me and others as confident and intense. Among other books, he’s written the Roumania Quartet novels and the short story collection If Lions Could Speak. He seemed very much a ‘thinker’, and that partly explains why I could easily relate to him and what he had to say. Since it was only the first week of the workshop, no one had turned any stories in; so, instead of the Milford story-critiquing method that drove the workshop through weeks 2 to 6, Paul lectured — mostly in a Socratic way. Sometimes he used exercises he asked us to hand in as the basis for his lectures.
Paul Park, standing left, Clarionites in the foreground
Paul said that on the whole, our Clarion submission stories, while packed with whizbang ideas, didn’t make him invest in the characters strongly enough. So throughout the week he gave us a bunch of tips about characterization and other aspects of fiction-writing. I can tell you without looking at my notes what tips Paul gave that stuck with me the most. Bear in mind I’m paraphrasing.
Story events happen because of the way people (the characters) are; writers shouldn’t just construct plots and then shoehorn characters in.
Compressing the timespan of a short story can often give it more ‘kinetic energy.’ Classical unities and whatnot.
Too frequently, writers use point-of-view characters’ physiological reactions as a shortcut attempt to convey emotion. For example — and this my example, not Paul’s — all too often writers trying to evoke, say, fear, strew sentences such as “Her scalp tingled” and “Her scalp prickled” and “Her scalp tightened” across even just a single short story. The physiological reactions become unintentionally comical (or annoying) tics. You start to wonder if the scalp-y character simply needs a different type of shampoo. The best book I ever read about representing emotion in fiction without resorting to cliches, by the way, was Ann Hood‘s Creating Character Emotions. I have no idea why that book doesn’t get more attention. Most fiction-writing books are nearly useless; Ann Hood’s isn’t.
Many writers, trying to convey what secondary characters feel, rely far too much on simply reporting the characters’ facial expressions. Sometimes that’s necessary, but conveying what secondary characters feel is (often) a lot more effective when the characters simply do things. Example — and again this is my example, not Paul’s — instead of “her eyes were ablaze with anger” why not “she picked up the baseball bat and pointed its business end at me as though the bat were a sword”? To me, fictional facial expressions are the most obnoxious when writers use eyes to relay to readers what secondary characters feel. How many times have you read “Her eyes were ablaze with anger” in your favorite airport novel?
Sometimes in real life people do communicate startling things exclusively with their eyes, and it’s such an intense experience that cliche sentences don’t do it justice. Oh, and check this out, the study of eye contact is called oculesics. I gotta learn more about them thar oculesics, but I can’t find much written on the subject, can’t find any sort of expert oculesics-ist (or whatever). So for now I simply stare at people and ask them what we’re feeling. People don’t take it too kindly.
The collection of fiction-writing tips I come home from the space station with wasn’t at all the point. The entire workshop process improved my writing and me in ways a list of tips can’t convey. The whole process seemed a sort of artsy group therapy, centered around words and storytelling, both of which have a great deal to do with how people mature and generate meaning. Somewhere therein lies the key to what Clarion West meant. At the time, though, I was far too busy to ask myself what the heck Clarion West was adding up to — the Apollo astronauts generally say the same thing about when they went to outer space: ‘We were too busy picking up rocks and setting down experiment packages to write poems about our feelings.’
Clarionites, taking a break from critiquing stories, go out for beer
A Visionary from the early 20th century — none other than the forgotten strongman and “Respiratory Specialist” Paul von Boeckmann — wishes to save you from “the terrible effects of oxygen starvation” with his “Pneumauxetor”: “a Gymnasium for the Internal Body” used by “Over 23,000” and “Guaranteed to Develop Strong, Healthy Lungs.” Lest you worry about the durability of the Pneumauxetor, please be advised, it’s “Mechanically Perfect.”
The Pneumauxetor
I’m not quite sure how one uses a — excuse me, the — Pneumauxetor, because in order to find out, one has to enroll in von Boeckmann’s “system of correspondence instruction,” which, he assures us, is “perfect.” No wonder: he has taught, he says, “over 23,000 persons by correspondence and [he has] long ago overcome all obstacles that might make [his] instructions less comprehensive, and less effective.” By his method, “you obtain permanent strength, permanent wind, permanent endurance.” He guarantees “a gain of not less than 30 cubic inches [in lung capacity for] anyone, young or old, in three months, or [he will give a] refund.” What a bargain!
Paul von Boeckmann, dressed snappily
I purchased von Boeckmann’s pamphlet for but $1.00 at an antique shop in Glen Rose, Texas. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to telephone 532 Bryant in New York, or how to otherwise contact Paul von Boeckmann, who, the pamphlet says, resides at 500 Fifth Avenue in New York.
There are many things one can learn for von Boeckmann’s pamphlet. To list but a few direct quotes:
We all know air is life.
Exercise does not develop lung power.
Such knowledge [of breathing gymnastics] can be gained only through experience, and not through theory.
Always breathe through the nose […] In nose breathing, the air is purified before it reaches the lungs. In mouth breathing, dust and poisonous germs are breathed directly into the delicate lung tissue.
A woman is as old as she looks, and if she feels old, then she is twice as old as she really is.
"A piece torn out of a full package of playing cards by Paul von Boeckmann, a performance that eclipses all other card tearing feats."
Von Boeckmann was a confident man:
It is needless to say that the medical profession as a whole, fully endorses my system. […] Failure is due principally to lack of stick-to-it-iveness. […] As references I might give two banks with which I transact business, and scores of business houses, and well-known physicians. Testimonials I have by the thousands, many of which I have the permission to publish. But I never present testimonials. I am the only one in my profession who has adopted this rule. I object to advertising my business at the expense of my pupils. I object to prospective pupils annoying a grateful patient by a visit, or perhaps a request to permit him to “try the Pneumauxetor.” Furthermore, I cannot believe that at the present day, an intelligent man or woman can be influenced by testimonials.
Lest you infer von Boeckmann was an arrogant man, take into consideration his confession of nervous problems:
My system is especially adapted to persons of a mental or nervous temperament, or, in other words, to those whose brain and nervous system is very large as compared to the capacity of the vital organs. A starved nervous system and a starved body go hand in hand. By strengthening the digestive and assimilative powers, through proper breathing, this abnormal condition can be remedied easily. I stand as an example of what my system can do for one of a nervous temperament. By nature I am as restless as a wolf. My greatest enemy is Hurry. To develop muscle and to retain normal weight under such conditions is usually impossible. Nevertheless, I have succeeded. I am to-day the strongest man of a nervous temperament, all other strong men being either of the motive or the vital temperament. In special feats of strength requiring a powerful grip I am the strongest person, regardless of temperament. I have not learned to control the Nervous System, but I have learned to feed it.
Paul von Boeckmann, dressed for a night out, perhaps?
Elsewhere and at another elsewhere I have learned this Visionary has penned other pamphlets, such as Nerve Force. And he isn’t remiss in giving us his physical measurements:
You can witness all the pages of the pamphlet at my flickr site. As best as I can make out, the pamphlet — which is undated — was printed in the late 1910’s. Does anyone have further information on this mysterious Visionary, his mysterious pamphlet and mysterious correspondence course, and above all, does anyone have access to a — excuse me, the — Pneumauxetor?
July 20th, 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the day when the only life we so far know to exist, having left its home planet and having focused for a moment into the form of a human being named Neil Armstrong, first strode across the soil of another celestial body. When life stepped off the ladder of the frail little Apollo 11 spacecraft called the Eagle and onto the surface of the Earth’s Moon. The 55-second video clip embedded below replays Armstrong’s first step and first lunar words as at least 600 million people on Earth experienced them televised live in 1969.
If you’ve been frantically calculating the angular momentum and the who’s torquing whom of current-events soundbyte spin — take a break. You can return to the various expectorations about the empathy of a “wise Latina” later, you can compare her empathy to the peculiar sentiments of Joe the Plumber later. But right now — do yourself a favor. Quest for no-spun reality by decoding a message which instead points toward the widest horizon, where empathy springs not just from considering gender and race, but from reverencing all life, reverencing all the universe.
Hubble Deep Field: Wherein magnification of just 0000000.7th of the sky above you reveals 10,000 galaxies, 123 quintillion stars
[W]hat can you say when you step off of something? Well, something about a step. [The line] just sort of evolved during the [roughly six-hour] period [after landing on the Moon] that I was doing the procedures of the practice takeoff [as if to return to the command module orbiting above] and the [Extra-vehicular Activity] prep and all the other activities that were on our flight schedule at that time. [… It] wasn’t much of a jump to say what you could compare [a step] with.
Wherein the 2009 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed the base of the Eagle spacecraft still sitting on the Moon (center of photograph, with horizontal shadow)
The morning after the moon landing, The New York Times reported Armstrong’s famous line as “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” According to the Times, then, and also according to many other ears, Armstrong left out the ‘a’ in ‘for a man.’ Which would render his line equivalent to “That’s one small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.” A frustrating contradiction. Armstrong might have thrown up his hands a few years ago when he told biographer Hansen:
For people who have listened to me for hours on the radio communication tapes, they know I left a lot of syllables out. It was not unusual for me to do that. I’m not particularly articulate. Perhaps [the ‘a’ in ‘for a man’] was a suppressed sound that didn’t get picked up by the voice mike. As I have listened to it, it doesn’t sound like there was time for the word to be there. On the other hand, I think that reasonable people will realize that I didn’t intentionally make an inane statement, and that certainly the ‘a’ was intended, because that’s the only way the statement makes any sense. So I would hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended, even if it wasn’t said — although it actually might have been. [… Historians] can put it in parentheses.
Today you get all kinds nudging you with their elbows and half-whispering, “Do you know what Neil Armstrong really said?” A setup for their gloating found-feet-of-clay punch: “He flubbed his line!!! He really said — ” and on and on.
Pale Blue Dot: Wherein from a distance of 3.7 billion miles, sunlight scattered off the Voyager 1 probe puts the Earth and you into the universe
But in 2006, after his decoding of the Apollo 11 recording with GoldWave software, a computer programmer named Peter Shann Ford reignited the discussion over what Armstrong said. The Houston Chronicle reported that “According to Ford, Armstrong spoke, ‘One small step for a man …’ with the ‘a’ lasting a total of 35 milliseconds, 10 times too quickly to be heard.” One person who stepped into the debate was Wina Sturgeon, who in 1969 was married to Theodore Sturgeon, author of the glorious 1953 novel More Than Human, the underlooked 1986 novel Godbody, the 1953 short story collection E Pluribus Unicorn, and many other works. In 2007 Wina Sturgeon discussed her memory of Armstrong’s words for ABC 4:
Neil Armstrong’s alleged first words on the moon are now deciphered by modern technology as grammatically correct […] My husband was a science fiction writer. The moon landing was as important to him as [our unborn] child […] was to me; but then, in some mysterious way, the two became connected in my mind; the child that would come out of me and the astronauts that would come out of the ship and walk on the moon.
In 2006, with a great deal of attendant media attention, journalist/entrepreneur Peter Shann Ford claimed to have located the ‘a’ in the waveform of Neil’s transmission. Subsequently, more rigorous analyses of the transmission were undertaken by a number of people, including some with professional experience with audio waveforms and, most importantly, audio spectrograms. As of October 2006, none of these analyses support Ford’s conclusion.
My take? The embedded 7-second audio clip below plays my 88% slow-down of Neil Armstrong’s “for a man” phrase as well as the phrase spoken at regular speed. If you listen very closely — and listen to it loud — and listen again, maybe believing a little, you can hear Armstrong automatically transform, with his northwestern Ohio boy accent, “for a man” to “furuh man.”
If you must pat yourself on the back and straitjacket Apollo 11 into the context of jingoism and the Cold War and the military machine, go ahead; if you must quarrel about Armstrong saying ‘mankind’ and not ‘humankind’ or ‘life,’ go ahead; however accurate you might be, you are right now spinning away, too accelerated to pause for the perspective of the universe as braved in 1969. As you exit, let me send you with a note explaining that in less than a billion years, as the sun burns more and more fiercely, the Earth (unless we move it!) will be hotter than boiling water and will have no atmosphere; in 7.6 billion, the sun, by then a red giant, will swallow the Earth. Those of us who have taken the perspective of the universe care not just about the present but also about the farthest future. Where will life go?
Asking such a question, listening closely, we have herein slowed spin sufficiently to decode Armstrong’s message. We know Armstrong’s intention, at the very least. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
What might it mean?
It’s not symptomatic of some ultimate white flight. I say Armstrong’s combination of the provincial and the cosmopolitan, the timely and the universal, points us toward the deepest empathy. Wherein we know ourselves, and without losing our individual identity — a northwestern Ohio accent or another accent adding to the great universal jam session — we blesh with the identities of others, especially those we dislike, working to understand, to reverence all things.
Just like these folk in Holland 1979, jamming out to the universe:
Blesh? The neologism comes from Theodore Sturgeon’s novel More Than Human. If you, like The New York Times, still need to ask if someone can “write about spaceships and monsters and alien civilizations and still be a great American writer?”, then pay especial attention.
Wherein you benefit immensely
To “blesh,” Sturgeon writes, means “everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. […] Lone said maybe it was a mixture of ‘blending’ and ‘meshing,’ but I don’t think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that.” As Crawdaddy! creator, rock journalist, science-fiction chronicler Paul Williams writes in his online essay Theodore Sturgeon, Storyteller:
Crosby, like most mid-Sixties’ rock musicians (and underground press editors, political activists, dope impresarios, etc.), was an avid reader of science fiction in general and Sturgeon in particular; and he realized early that the Byrds and other rock groups were living examples of Sturgeon’s idea that a group of humans could function as more than the sum of the individuals involved … not just more, but mystically more, so that the group took on its own personality and created things that none of its individual members could even have imagined. Chester Anderson wrote in the San Francisco Oracle in 1966, in a widely reprinted analysis of the new rock or “head” music, “Rock is evolving Sturgeonesque homo gestalt configurations…..” The Merry Pranksters were another example of the same phenomenon, as were all the nameless groups that came together to organize political or cultural events and then disbanded and vanished when the work was done.
[…] Sturgeon, in More than Human and throughout his work, is a moralist as well as a visionary. Not the kind of moralist who knows what’s right and what’s wrong and tells you in so many words, but the kind who is searching for the answers and shares his search with his readers. […] Sturgeon’s answer is awkward and incomplete, but, for our generation, much more appropriate than Nietzsche’s.
(Paul Williams now requires full-time medical care; his website asks for donations.)
And as to the “wise Latina”? For all the Congressional insistence that a judge not be “activist,” for all the expectorations asserting that “the” law must be mechanistically applied by “impartial” judges, Edward H. Levi makes clear in An Introduction to Legal Reasoning that legal reasoning is necessarily activist, and imperfect, which is why it works so well. What we want on the Supreme Court bench and elsewhere in the universe is the broadest, deepest empathy. Even the George W. Bush-appointed Justice Sam Alito said “in immigration and naturalization cases” he “can’t help but think” of his “own immigrant ancestors,” and he said “When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.”
Good science fiction — or, given Apollo, science fact — sends out a message calling for empathy. Life moves forward toward the perspective of the universe. Signing off this message with a description of that perspective from More Than Human:
[This] ethos will give you a code for survival too. But it is a greater survival than your own, or my species, or yours. What it is really is a reverence for your sources and your posterity. It is a study of the main current which created you, and in which you will create still a greater thing when the time comes. […]
And when their morals no longer suit their species, you or another ethical being will create new ones that vault still farther up the main stream, reverencing you, reverencing those who bore you and the ones who bore them, back and back to the first wild creature who was different because his heart leapt when he saw a star.
The most impressive Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora) in Dallas-Fort Worth lives at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. The picture above shows a view of it from near one of the Garden roads (along with a few tiny, other trees). Many magnolias in Fort Worth are impressively tall — for example, the one pictured below, which grows next to the library of my alma mater, TCU — but the one at the Botanic Gardens is the best!
A TCU Library Magnolia
From some angles, the Garden’s huge magnolia can at first look like many trees, not one. That’s why I never(!) truly noticed it; I mistakenly saw a big stand of multiple trees, not a single special individual. This past May, however, Kate — a special individual herself — showed me one of the “secret entrances” to the “cave” made by the magnolia’s drooping branches.
A Secret Entrance to the Big Magnolia Cave
Once you go through the secret entrance (no password necessary), you’ll see a scene like something out of Lord of the Rings or a King Arthur tale. This cave hides in plain sight near University Drive, one of the busiest streets in the city! Here’s a shot of it. The branches go all the way around, 360 degrees.
Fruit: Cylindrical aggregate of follicles (“seed pod”). Green changing to red. Matures Oct-Nov.
Twig: Stout. It gives off a citrus scent if broken.
Bark: Brown to gray, thin, smooth when young, but plating or scaling later in life.
The Southern Magnolia is sometimes called an Evergreen Magnolia, or a Bull-bay.
I took four pictures of the tree’s flowers, each illustrating a different stage of the flower life cycle. You can learn much more about the magnolia flower life cycle, and see pictures of it, at this website.
The Flower Before Blooming
The Flower Begins to Bloom
The Flower Has Bloomed
Once the petals fall off, the center of the flower remains — the fruit or seed pod:
The Fruit; Flower Petals Have Fallen
In the last year I’ve taken to learning about trees via field-guiding. While field-guiding is certainly enjoyable in itself, I started mostly because I wanted to improve my ability to see, both during observation and with my mind’s inner eye. Routine close observation of details — samaras, leafstalks, whatever — definitely has lead to improvement in both areas. For example, a mechanic showed me some small parts of a Civic brake system a few months back. My eyes would have simply glazed over a year ago. But as a result of field-guiding, I could see just what he was talking about. As to the inner eye: I’ve always had difficulty visualizing in my mind. Many people are startled when I confess that while I can close my eyes and picture a stop sign, I can’t mentally change its color. Still can’t. But the more I scrutinize small visual details, the better my mind’s eye becomes. A specific instance of this is what I think of as “stabilizing” my mental imagery. Before field-guiding, if I closed my eyes and visualized the sycamore fruit I have sitting on my shelf, the image would sort of wobble and vanish after only a second or two. Now I can more or less keep it in my inner eye for as long as I can concentrate.
This post is the second in a series of ten about my experiences at Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2008. I’ll talk about the weekend I spent there just before the workshop began in earnest; it was the weekend of the 2008 Locus Awards and the 2008 Science Fiction Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony. Part 1 of this series is here. I ended Part 1 with my blast-off to the mysterious space station in geosynchronous orbit above Seattle, where the workshop is held.
As American Airlines rocketed me out of Earth’s atmosphere, I read Peter Straub’s 1977 novel If You Could See Me Now — until I discovered the paperback was missing a page. Which wasn’t at all unnerving. Everything else was packed perfectly, and I had a journal in hand. Everything, I was convinced, would turn out right. The places I’d go!
The space station’s docking bay looked exactly like Sea-Tac Airport. Pamela Rentz, a fellow Clarionite (that is, Clarion student), waited patiently outside the airport to pick me up. I found her, and she drove herself and me to the workshop dormitory. The entire trip, we pretended not to be nervous..
At the dorm, the fantastic Neile Graham, one of the two administrators (the other is the equally fantastic Les Howle), welcomed us. Neile gave us the basic what’s-up, then left us to pick our rooms. I quickly nabbed the largest one (which was on the top floor); I like a lot of space for my busy mind to stretch out. There was indeed a lot of space: two large closets, nine chests-of-drawers, no joke! The only disadvantage was the heat pouring in through the long many-windowed wall. I figured, though, that the room couldn’t get any hotter than my home state, Texas. Also I realized I’d be on the side of our dorm nearest the rowdy frat neighbors, but as it turned out, their late-night drunken war-whoops never bothered me. I like zoology.
Next I explored the dorm. A Lovecraftian maze. Passages winding around, staircases leading nowhere … I exaggerate, but just slightly. Once Clarionite An Owomoyela arrived, she stuck Post-It notes — such as the one pictured here — on several of the doors in order to signal which room was which. The notes remained in place all six weeks, thank God, because they helped me see my destination through the gauze-of-exhaustion vision that Clarion inflicts.
After my reconnaissance, I made haste to seize as many items from the administrators’ stash as could possibly help me. First and foremost: fans. The majority of Seattleites are air-conditioning atheists, a belief system quite unfamiliar to me. Some nights my room would become so sticky and sweltering with heat that I’d wake up sweating. We have muscular heat ourselves in Texas — most of us just don’t prefer to sleep in it. The fans helped, some; I had my family ship me two small Honeywells to add to my fan fleet.
That brings up a point. My family shipped me the fans because I had little free time. Which was great: I was there to work. But some of my friends never grasped the workload Clarionites experience. (“Why didn’t you see such-and-such in Seattle?” they still ask.) Weekdays we’d closely critique about 15,000 words of stories — about 50 pages of a trade paperback — at the same time as we wrote our own stuff. That doesn’t count class, the optional lectures, the once-a-weekend parties, the all-important middle-of-the-night discussions in the hallway about Faulkner (hi, Jim!) or Theodore Sturgeon (hi, Owen!) or Ray Bradbury (hi, Pritpaul!) … Some found time to goof off — watching Flight of the Conchords was quite popular, for some reason unbeknowst to my all-too-serious mind — but for the most part, I didn’t get much goofing done. I worked harder at Clarion than I did earning my BA (and I earned rather good grades in college).
One thing I grabbed from the administrators’ stash was a personal printer. We emailed copies of our stories to Kinko’s for mass printing, and the dorm had a functional network printer I could have used if I really needed to, but for psychological comfort, I wanted a printer in my own room. I tend to print my writing a lot, to make notes and corrections by hand. Future Clarionites of similar psychological persuasion: when you get there, grab a printer from the stash, quick!
That Friday, the Clarionites who’d already arrived went to The Ave — a shop-lined street in Seattle’s University District. Ah, Seattle, now my favorite city; of course, I view it with extremely favorable bias. I’m not sure how to adequately synopsize the effect that living somewhere other than my familiar Texas had on me. Travel does not give you the same experience. Living in Seattle I learned firsthand how many other possibilities there are in the world, and how people elsewhere take different things seriously — and aren’t necessarily ostracized for it. Even the small things: in Fort Worth, I carry a book with me, and strangers at best ask if I’m in school; in Seattle, it’s not uncommon to see others carrying books (the picture below shows the fiction magazine section at a small shop — I remember they had, for example, Cemetery Dance). Six weeks living in Seattle aged me mentally six million years for the better.
On The Ave, at whichever restaurant it was that we chose, we made nervous conversation (well, at least I felt nervous). I suggest to any future Clarionites, get to know everyone in your group! De jure and ex cathedra: you’re all a bunch of lovable weirdos. =)
If I remember correctly, it was later in the day that Locus held their 2008 Awards ceremony at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel, and most of us Clarionites attended, wearing, like most everyone else, the event’s traditional embarassing Hawaiian shirts. Then, we went to the University of Washington campus, where Nancy Pearl interviewed William Gibson, an event well-blogged by Brenda Cooper here. After that, a Clarion West reception. There David G. Hartwell told me a tidbit about Theodore Sturgeon teaching at Clarion East in, I believe, 1970: according to Hartwell, Sturgeon said a good way to start characterizing fictitious characters is to think about their professions and how they spend their typical days.
Which is exactly what I started thinking about as Clarion West 2008 began.
This weekend I’m attending the 8th ConDFW Science Fiction Convention, in Dallas, at the Crowne Plaza near the intersection of I-75 and LBJ. Blogging from my hotel room now, actually.
It’s my first science fiction convention. There’s panels about writing, writers giving readings, signings, art shows, charity book swaps, a Spelling Bee, a computer gaming room — you name it. Pretty nerdy, ‘smatter fact. Definitely interesting.
I don’t know anyone here (yet), although an intense man from The Luna Project told me about his (local) organization’s goal of leaving for the moon by 31 July 2012. I hope they make it.
Thus far I have sat through three panels: “Big or Small: Novel vs. Short Story Writing”; “Selling Yourself for Fun and Profit”; and, “The Aspiring Writers Panel.”
Here’s a picture I snapped at “The Aspiring Writers Panel.” From left: Jim Butcher, Paul Black, Patrice Sarath, and David Weber. The eternal debate about art vs. commerce arose, floated around loftily, and crash-landed somewhere in the parking lot back behind the hotel. Enjoyable to watch, that one.
Mostly I heard stuff I’ve heard before, but it’s nice to be reminded of good advice from time to time. At one panel Teresa Patterson suggested a strategy for writing a short story (and I paraphrase mightily): find the climactic moment, figure out who’s present, and then work backward from there. Sounds like one good way to construct a tribal lay, as Kipling might say. The best line from all three panels: It’s true, a panelist said, “I committed space opera.”
In mid-December I embarked on a one-man “science” experiment: I decided to drink nothing but water in order to find out what changes I’d experience in terms of energy level, mood, weight loss, etc. Along the way, I became curious about all issues H2O. This post — the first in a series on drinking water — will address how much water a person should drink and what you might gain from drinking more water. Later posts will take on issues such as tap water vs. bottled water, filters, and more. Trying to figure all this out, you can start sweating, a lot, and therefore need to drink more water. But don’t worry: I’m here to help, even though I’m by no means a doctor or an expert. If you’re really worried (or thirsty), go get yourself one of those.
The standard maxim: 8 glasses of water a day
You might know the standard maxim: drink 8 glasses of water (64 ounces) per day. Many say no one really knows where this recommendation comes from. But a 2/13/94 Chicago Tribune article by Bob Condor quoted an expert who claimed the maxim originated in the 1945 US RDAs, which said: “A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 liters (83 ounces) daily in most instances” — somehow 83 ounces eventually morphed to 64 — and “An ordinary standard for diverse people is 1 milliliter [0.03 ounce] per calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.” (Emphasis added by me.)
I don’t believe the 1945 US RDAs are the source of the maxim, given the 83/64 ounce confusion (although, how many ounces did “a glass” mean in 1945?). So we’re back at “no one really knows.”
Anyway, if the 1945 RDAs are correct, we shouldn’t try to take in 8 glasses of pure water a day — just 8 glasses’ worth of water counting all the beverages and foods we have. The water automagically contained in a grape or an apple (or indeed, a grapple) would count toward your total. Americans at large erroneously thought the recommendation called for 8 glasses of pure water because, a National Academy of Sciences expert said in the Tribune article, the emphasized sentence in the quotation nefariously escaped the notice of newsmakers and historians fairly effectively.
Institute of Health’s 2004 take on the standard maxim
In 2004 the Institute of Health issued a report resurrecting the lost sentence’s point and adding two more. (Soon after the report’s release, Jane E. Brody at the New York Times gave her more or less approving take on it.) A section of an Institute of Health summary of the report says:
The vast majority of healthy people adequately meet their hydration needs by letting thirst be their guide. The report did not specify the exact requirements for water, but set general recommendations for women at approximately 2.7 liters (91 ounces) of total water — from all beverages and foods — each day, and men an average of approximately 3.7 liters (125 ounces) of total water. The panel did not set an upper limit on water.
I’ll focus on three of the Institute of Health’s claims: 1) food should count toward your total water intake; 2) evil caffeinated beveragesshould count toward your 91/125 ounces (…what happened to 83 ounces? or 64 ounces?); 3) the vast majority does just fine letting thirst guide their water-partaking.
Should food count toward your total water intake?
No. Internet-spear-famed natural bodybuilder Tom Venuto argues in his e-book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle (which I’ve found helpful in general) that you should “always err on the side of too much water rather than too little” and thus follow the about-1-mL-per-kilocalorie guideline (from the 1945 RDAs and elsewhere) without counting the water in your food toward your total water intake goal. Well, natural not-a-bodybuilder Douglas Lucas can’t give you such a sophisticated argument, but can only rely on his own experimentation. (Actually, regarding water, Venuto’s probably in the same boat — groan. I goof on him only because he has bigger muscles than I.)
Here’s what I learned experimenting, generally drinking around 64 ounces of pure water a day (i.e. not counting the water in my food). If I manage to drink that amount, and especially if I drink some water right when I wake and right before sleep, I don’t have trouble with headaches. The dehydration headaches were only a vague problem before my experiment; such minor headaches, I assumed, might be normal — perhaps the result of not sleeping enough. Or something. Nope. Drink enough water, they don’t occur. ‘least for me. Personally, I haven’t noticed any of the other reported physical and psychological benefits of drinking enough water — improved skin, digestion, mood stability, weight loss, whatever — but then again, I’m not yet the most observant person. My energy level has only increased in the sense that without headaches, I feel more enthusiastic in general.
But if I simply assume the water in my food is enough, and stop drinking as much water, the minor headaches return.
Should evil caffeinated beverages count toward your total water intake?
Well, I don’t know the true extent of caffeine’s diuretic effect — that is, its effect of increasing urination and thus worsening dehydration — but I do know, with tautologically certainty, that evil caffeinated beverages are evil. So I say: don’t drink or eat caffeine in the first place! =)
Is thirst a reliable indicator of your hydration level?
Though this 2008 NPR article disagrees, I will stomp my foot down definitively and shout: “Thirst is not a reliable indicator of one’s hydration level.” There’s a phenomenon F.M. Alexander called “faulty sensory appreciation” (and sometimes, much more excitingly, “debauched sensory appreciation”). Just because you sense something — such as the apparently hydrated state of your mouth — doesn’t mean your sensations are telling you what you think they are. I’ve learned that if I’m (relatively) dehydrated for a long enough period of time, my ability to perceive my hydration level well will fall into disrepair, disrepute, dishonesty … it will become … debauched! But once I resume drinking enough water, my ability to accurately register my hydration level improves. Try this yourself if you don’t believe me (if you’re like most people, currently you’re dehydrated). Incidentally, the whole phenomenon of faulty (debauched!) sensory appreciation fascinates me.
After the release of the 2004 report, Bob Condor reprised his role at the Chicago Tribune of giving his watery take, and pointed out the American College of Sports Medicine said: Not so fast there, Institute of Health. According to Condor, the ACSM argued prolonged physical activity and/or heat exposure — e.g., switching climates — can “confuse” the body’s thirst response. Condor also mentioned some researchers theorize the pineal gland (formerly Descartes’ seat of the soul!), which controls thirst, works less and less well as we age. I say it’s all about debauched(!) sensory appreciation. People just don’t know they’re thirsty, because their thirst response has become rusty from disuse.
In conclusion!
Obviously the game changes while you’re exercising or otherwise sweating a lot; I’m not sure how just yet. In general, though, in my experience, the 1 mL-per-kilocalorie guideline — which for me points to the standard maxim of 8 glasses a day — is best, so long as you do not take into account the water contained in food (which you shouldn’t), and so long as you do avoid caffeine (which you should). And don’t trust your thirst … it’s probably debauched. =)
This post is the first in a series of ten about my experiences at Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2008. Clarion West is an intense six-week writers’ workshop held at a mysterious space station in geosynchronous orbit above Seattle. Writers live in the station over the course of the workshop.
My year Paul Park, Mary Rosenblum, Cory Doctorow, Connie Willis, Sheree R. Thomas, and Chuck Palahniuk instructed. I’ll post two entries (counting this post) for just before Clarion West, one for each of the six weeks I spent there, and two for just after what turned out to be the best experience of my life (so far!).
During my final semester at my alma mater, TCU, one of my profs, Neil Easterbrook, handed me a flier for Clarion West. He knew I’d taken creative writing classes and that I enjoyed speculative fiction (a vague umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc. — whatever those labels mean). I’d heard of the Clarion West Writers Workshops — there’s three: East (San Diego), West (Seattle), and South (Brisbane) — from the Web and from Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. Card writes that a Clarion workshop:
isn’t for fragile people. It’s a tough experience […] If you’re just starting out and completely uncertain of your identity as a writer, Clarion can be the end, not the beginning. But if you know you’re a writer, […] apply to Clarion.
Well, I knew I was a writer, but I was also timid. I’d written fiction for only two years, and only completed about ten short stories! How the heck could I complete a short story every week for six weeks? And possibly more, depending on the instructors? Not to mention I was unaccustomed to travel. How could I manage six weeks in a space station with writers undoubtedly more talented than I?
Neil encouraged me, as did Cynthia Shearer. (Which goes to show the importance of surrounding yourself with good, positive people.) So I carved a 29-page short story out of novel-in-progress; application manuscripts couldn’t go over 30 pages. I don’t believe I slept the last 48 hours before the deadline. Revising, revising, revising. I emailed my application off at the last minute.
For future applicants’ reference: my application story had no speculative elements. During our workshop, a few people did write some non-speculative stories.
What do you know: in March I received The Call — Clarion West notifies successful applicants by phone. At first I figured The Call was actually A Prank Call. Once I realized it wasn’t, I calmly explained I’d jump up and down after shock wore off. =p
Over the next three months, my nerves popped away. My biggest anxiety: six-plus stories, six weeks, how?! The info packet said we couldn’t bring trunk stories. Rightfully so. For one, the no-trunk-stories policy makes everyone equally anxious! =p
So what jottings could I take with me without taking a “trunk story”? The info packet suggested we bring “images, titles, notes” (something like that). After much unnecessary consternation, I decided a few rough paragraphs counted as “notes.” I needed a security blanket, and I made one out of words — about 1000 of them, not many of which went into my final Clarion West word count, which was something like 25,000.
I made a wise decision (for me) before I left. In the “advice from former students” section of the packet, some blessed soul said (something like) “Don’t feel pressured to do the six-stories-in-six-weeks thing if it’s not for you.” I knew I couldn’t write a coherent short story in a week (at that stage in my life), so I didn’t. Not counting Paul Park’s exercises, I wrote a total of three stories, each spaced out by two weeks. And by the time the workshop was through, each instructor had read at least one of my works. My plan worked out fine. Future Clarionites, feel free to follow it if it serves ye well.
With my writing worries sorted out, I then packed a bajillion suitcases with the help of my now-girlfriend, and blasted off to the space station.
I eliminated all caffeine from my diet last month. The month or so before, I drank it regularly in the morning — usually via a caffeinated smoothie and an energy drink — and throughout the day. I’d have the occasional caffeinated soft drink and the occasional caffeinated whatnot. Caffeinated caffeinated caffeinated. My world depended on it, subtly but surely. Now I preach the evangel of quitting caffeine to you.
After giving up caffeine, I no longer have to worry so much about wiping out grogginess or appeasing headaches. No more rushing to the refrigerator or Starbucks or a gas station. I have much more energy. I get by fairly well on 6-7 hours of sleep a night instead of slogging through the day on 8-9. My mood stays more consistent, too.
Since caffeine is addictive, quitting it sucks. Temporary symptoms of caffeine withdrawal can include the infamous headache, irritability, nausea, sleeping a lot (your body finally catching up), and becoming just plain stupid (impairment in various cognitive skills, such as fuzzified concentration). I experienced all of these except nausea and stupidity — I am never stupid, because like Wile E. Coyote, I am a Super Genius.
I found caffeine withdrawal slightly difficult, but manageable. John Hopkins University maintains a fact-filled page on caffeine dependence. They say withdrawal takes 12-24 hours to set in — and it can set in even if you drink only a cup of coffee a day. Happened to me after about 16 hours. According to the page, symptoms peak 20-48 hours after abstinence. My symptoms peaked around day two and three. Caffeine withdrawal lasts a total of two days to one week or more, the page reports; for me, withdrawal lasted nine days. Your mileage may vary.
In the interest of complete transparency, I must admit that one day I forgot — really! — that chocolate contains caffeine, and ate a tiny bit; the effect was negligible, so I discount the incident entirely. (I guess for a split second I wasn’t a Super Genius.) You really have to pay attention to everything you consume (a good idea anyway), because just about everything has caffeine in it, including mate, guarana, and decaf coffee. If you drink a pot of decaf, there’s enough caffeine in there for you to notice.
Why should you quit caffeine? After all, some studies link caffeine to certain health benefits. For me, it’s about the energy boost: imagine spending more time enjoying what you want to do instead of feeling miserable and dependent on lugging around your latte or Diet Coke or whatever particular poison. What are you going to do if you go on a camping trip? Pop NoDoz?
Poison, ayup, and not that fun of one. Caffeine interferes with sleep by reducing total sleep time, making it harder to fall asleep, and decreasing sleep quality. To be fair, a sleep researcher named Dr. Dement — the coolest name for a scientist — argues in The Promise of Sleep a bit of coffee before noon won’t affect a night bedtime. Still, Mark Adams at New York Magazine writes (early 2008):
The United States Centers for Disease Control reports that sleep disorders are more pervasive than ever. Americans, on average, are getting 6.7 hours of sleep per night, the lowest amount since records have been kept, and are racking up an hour or more of sleep deficit per day. Sales of Ambien, Lunesta, and other prescription sleep aids have more than doubled in the past few years. “You have people drinking caffeine all day and taking sleeping pills at night,” [Laura] Juliano says[, American University psych professor and coffee researcher].
Sleep loss causes its own problems, Adams continues:
Sleep loss is increasingly seen as a major factor in the obesity epidemic. The sleep-deprived are more susceptible to depression and tend to have less control over their emotions. Sleep loss also weakens problem-solving and decision-making skills and, naturally, leaves a sufferer exhausted—all of which are conditions that caffeine is called upon to solve. “If we drink coffee all day long, it’s harder to sleep at night, and we need more coffee to get up and go to work the next morning,” says Lane. “The cycle repeats itself.”
Juliano and Roland Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, argue caffeine’s alleged benefits might be illusory. Quoting Adams again:
The escape from the clutches of withdrawal is a big part of what makes the day’s first cup of coffee so wonderful. “Feeding that dependence feels really good,” Juliano says. The implication: The positive feelings we associate with drinking coffee don’t represent a net gain in energy or alertness; they’re really the result of withdrawal maintenance.
When Griffiths and Juliano teamed up to review 170 years of caffeine research, much of which confirmed the drug’s reputation as a brain booster, they noticed a pattern: Most studies had been done on caffeine users who, in the interest of scientific rigor, were deprived of the stimulant overnight. Because caffeine withdrawal can commence in just twelve hours, by the time each study’s jonesing test subjects were given either caffeine or a placebo, they had begun to suffer headaches and fatigue. For the half that received the stimulant—poof!—their withdrawal symptoms vanished. The other half remained uncaffeinated, crabby, and logy, and guess which group scored higher on cognitive tests time after time? The boost the test subjects who got the caffeine felt may have simply been a function of having been deprived of the drug.
And a neat formulation from Adams’s article by James Lane at Duke: while caffeine can keep us awake, “it doesn’t make the brain any less tired.”
Clearly many of us are hooked on caffeine, so it makes sense for companies to add it to products to addict us. If you want to increase your dependence on caffeine, you can always absorb it through your skin first thing out of bed with Shower Shock: The Original Caffeinated Soap or Spazzstick: The World’s First Caffeinated Lip Balm. If that’s still not enough, wear caffeine-laced panty hose (link is to a .pdf with a description; no pic, unfortunately). I’m not making these up.
I still plan on increasing my energy level in other ways. For this month’s science experiment, I’ll drink only water: no alcohol, no Gatorade, and sadly, no orange juice. I don’t really expect much of a benefit in terms of increased energy — just in terms of fat loss — although some, such as Rob of formerfatguy.com, sings water’s praises for doing everything from increasing energy to aiding digestion. Others say toting around water bottles isn’t necessary. We’ll see.
If you want to quit caffeine, wean yourself off, or be bold and quit cold turkey. Improve your discipline! Establish a healthy habit! Check out Steve Pavlina’s how to quit caffeine for advice.
If you don’t want to quit, at least be festive about your coffee, like these folks on YouTube, who sing and dance JS Bach’s “Coffee Cantata” (BMV 211), a comic cantata composed in 1734. (Incidentally, JS Bach is one of my favorite composers.) One line from the piece: “If I can’t drink my bowl of coffee three times daily, then in my torment I will shrivel up like a piece of roast goat.” Be braver than that person! ;-)
Once — perhaps on Day 5; can’t really remember — I completely forgot what I was doing and had aminiscule amount of chocolate. I don’t plan on repeating my mistake, but regardless, that minor intake of caffeine doesn’t seem to have made any impact on my results. I feel at liberty to completely discount it. =)
So, my results? I totally have more energy now. Enough so others have noticed. Not enough for my liking, however; I need to exercise more consistently and such for that. Overall, though, the energy increase easily has been worth the 7-or-so days of miserable caffeine withdrawal. Also: I fall asleep faster now. Within 10 minutes. That probably has more to do with a consistent bedtime than with cutting out caffeine.
I don’t find avoiding caffeine difficult in any emotional way — especially after enjoying the energy increase. I’d prefer being able to eat chocolate, but, eh, ’tis better for me not to anyway! The only real difficulty I’ve found is that it’s easy to accidently consume something that does contain caffeine. Seems every drink and piece of candy has some. Grr. I suppose the only solution is to be incredibly conscious of everything you eat or drink.
If you’re considering cutting out caffeine, I highly recommend it.
I'm a Seattle-based freelance writer/journalist originally from Texas. I'm also a substitute teacher in public education. I write about anything and everything, but usually philosophy tied to current events, liberatory mental health, science fiction and fantasy, investigative journalism, technology, justice, and more.
Email: DAL@RISEUP.NET (ask for pgp key or check keyservers if you want encryption)
Snailmail (United States Postal Service only): Douglas Lucas / PO Box 75656 / Seattle WA 98175 / United States
Snailmail (Private carriers such as UPS, Fedex, DHL, Amazon): Douglas Lucas / 11036 8th Ave NE #75656 / Seattle WA 98125 / United States
Note the single-character change in ZIP codes, between the address for USPS (98175) and the address for private carriers (98125), is not a typo.
This post is the third in a series of ten about my experiences at Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2008. I’ll talk about the first week of the workshop, when Paul Park instructed. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. I ended Part 2 by saying that at the mysterious space station in geosynchronous orbit above Seattle, where the workshop is held, I started the first week proper by thinking about characterization.
Twitter:
Join the conversation