One Space After a Period.

 

For several years writers have had heated debates about whether it's "correct" to put two spaces after a period or just one. Farhad Manjoo recently fanned the flames with a column for Slate advocating vociferously for one space.  As of today there are 2,245 comments on his post.

If the issue is news to you, I'm guessing that you're using two spaces instead of one, and that your typing teacher taught you to do it that way. Mine did. Her name was Faynelle Haehn, which I'll never forget because she forced us to type it over and over again every day as she sang out the letters in rhythmic eighth-note counts: "F-A! Y-N! E-L! L-E! Space-H! A-E! H-N!"

Now, spaces are merely a style question and not worth getting hot under the collar about, as my second-favorite grammar girl politely explains. And the truth is, if you're bound and determined to keep hitting two spaces after a period, no one will stop you because it's a free country. Or at least it was, before Obamacare and airport security scanners.

But there are plenty of little reasons to change to one space if you're hitting two, and that's what I'm here to argue.

1. You never know which editors might be even mildly annoyed by two spaces, and some are. Alvina Ling recently tweeted that it's a pet peeve of hers, for instance. And you're already trying so hard to please Alvina you've considered sending cupcakes with your submissions; why hold on to this one style point?
2. As a follow-up to #1, plenty of editors routinely strip out the double spaces using a cleanup macro before they start reading a manuscript (I learned this from my first-favorite grammar girl). Even though it's quick and easy for them, don't you feel awkward making them do it? 
3. If your editor or agent forwards a document straight to her e-reader, those extra spaces will stay there, along with the snaggletooth gaps they create in paragraphs. Ditto if she happens to read a printout before anyone has cleaned the electronic file.
4. You're a writer for children and/or young adults. You strive to stay current and young in your outlook — to be flexible and open-minded, with an ear tuned to popular culture. Well, guess what? Your readers are growing up with single spaces after periods.

So what do you do if you're willing to change over to one space but you fear you won't be able to, or you're working on an important manuscript and you don't think you have the time? There's really no need to procrastinate. Try this: clean the document you're working on of extra spaces (this is easy in Word, using Find All [two spaces] and Replace With [one space]). Then, as you continue to add to the document, backspace every time you hit two spaces (you usually notice about mid-sentence), and replace the two spaces with  a single space. That's all: no special exercises, no headache-inducing concentration; just correct yourself each time. Within a few days I guarantee one space will become automatic for your thumb.

If it doesn't work, you can always send cupcakes.

My Kindle Smells Better Than Your Book

I have an old dog. A dog who recently had a serious bout with vestibulitis, and who now considers relaxation to be a competitive sport. Angie was my devoted running partner for more than a decade (replaced in the last few years by my gazelle-like teens), but lately her daily excursions amount to a six-block walk that takes an incomprehensible thirty-five minutes to complete. I was beginning to dread these infernally slow sniffing strolls, especially in the twenty-degree weather of January in Chicago, until I remembered that I own a Kindle.

That's when I discovered yet another thing my Kindle can do that your book can't: I can trudge through my neighborhood with a dog leash in one hand, wearing Inuit-style mittens, and still read a book. Turning pages requires only the press of my fat thumb. I don't need two hands to hold the book, and the wind can't flap the pages. Boom, baby! I won back thirty-five minutes of reading time that our Family Movie Tournament had stolen from my evenings.

I'm also a small person, and reading a book in bed hurt my poor little hands. Holding a book open with one hand while lying on my side required me to insert my stumpy fingers into the V-shaped opening of the book, like a plate stand, which caused near-instant muscle cramps. And, oh, the dilemma of having to take the other hand out from under warm covers to turn the page. With the Kindle, every bit of me but my eyes and nose and one hand remains under the covers: an incubating, literary fetus.

If you have a book-shaped Kindle cover, you get the best of both worlds: you can prop the cover open on your belly when sitting in a chair; you can prevent the person next to you from reading over your shoulder; you can fake that it's a physical book and ignore the airline captain's request to turn off all electronic devices.

The Kindle is light enough and handy enough that you bring it wherever you go, and you always have a book with you. Before you leave the house you don't have to hunt around asking yourself, "What book shall I carry with me?" Which would you rather do, use your stupid smart phone to post an update on facebook about waiting in line at Walgreens, or let Paolo Bacigalupi take you on a ten-minute adventure?

Don't bother commenting that you like the way your book feels and smells. Do you also miss putting a potted plant on top of your cathode-ray-tube television? Do you miss using white correction tape on your typewriter? Do you reminisce about going to the bank and writing a check to withdraw cash? I can't help you. I want more Kindle and I want it now: color, a bigger screen-to-device ratio so that I can see illustrations well, and every book released electronically on the same day as its hardcover counterpart.

Have I mentioned that since I became presbyopic I've gone up a font size on my Kindle? Yeah, changing the setting took two whole seconds.

Why Bad Reviews are Good

A recent, cheerful (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) blog post written by Marianna Baer exhorts readers to write only positive reviews of books:

Resolve to make 2011 the year of positivity in the literary world! Eliminate all negative critical discussion of books! Put down your scalpels and pick up your pom-poms!....Give 5 stars to all books you rate on Goodreads!

It's a philosophy that many people subscribe to, especially in the land of kids' lit: the only field I know where colleagues spend so much of their energy complimenting and supporting one another. It's as if, because the product is designed for kids, the creators should be treated with kid gloves. Or perhaps because the profession boasts so many amateurs (meaning unpaid and unpublished, not incompetent), there is a perception of fragility.

In October of 2010, a positive-review-only blog was born with the tagline, "Where everyone from casual readers to bestselling authors gush [emphasis in original] about their favorite books." It goes on to explain, "We're not a bunch of literary pushovers, we just see no point in telling you about a book if we didn't like it." It turns out a lot of bloggers follow this review policy, not wanting to waste time and space reviewing books they didn't enjoy. (Of course, professional reviewers don't have this option when writing for a review journal.)

When did dissection of an artistic work and expression of strong opinions become politically incorrect? How did compliment inflation seep into our writing culture? Academic researchers at the University of Chicago, my alma mater, believe that a seminar presentation to colleagues that results in no criticism is a waste of time. For them, polite clapping is a more damning commentary than spirited critique and questioning.

Somehow, in all this slipshod, sugary, female thinking, we're losing sight of the beauty of the negative review. Negative reviews inform. Negative reviews also entertain, whereas positive reviews almost never do (unless you're the author of the book being positively reviewed).

Here's a useful tool I've discovered when looking for the next book to read: I survey the two-star reviews on Goodreads. This is why it works:

1. The reviews on Amazon and Barnes and Noble are undependable. There's no apparent rhyme or reason to which customers choose to post. And who are those Vine Voices reviewers anyway? Goodreads, on the other hand, is made up mostly of users who love to read.
2. That said, Goodreads reviewers who give a book one star typically couldn't finish the book. Their written opinion is irrelevant to me, although it's important to include their one star in the book's average star rating.
3. Three-star reviews are so wishy-washy they're of no help.
4. Goodreads reviewers who give a book four or five stars gush about the book almost exclusively. They also tend to summarize the plot in gory detail before they begin editorializing.
5. Two-star reviews, on the other hand, are written by people who love to read, who finished the book, and who often have something interesting to say about what went wrong (and sometimes about what went right). Their reviews don't necessarily deter me from reading the book, they just tell me in a concise and sometimes comically snarky way what went wrong for them.

So let's make 2011 the year of critical thinking. Let's analyze the hell out of each other's work, in both reviews and critique groups, and hone our writing skills — and our senses of humor — in the process.

[Note: on 12/4/2012 I turned off comments on this post because it was getting a lot of spam. Sorry for the inconvenience!]

What to Expect When You're...On Submission

merci a sebastienlaban-photographe.com

When your agent tells you the names of the editors on your submission list, it’s a little like learning that you’re pregnant. Male authors should be sure to wallow in the experience, because it’s the closest they’ll come to understanding the personal bouleversement of that other state of “expecting.”

As soon as you hear the exciting news, you do what every expectant mother does: you go online and research the hell out of your condition. You read interviews of each editor, you look at their recent publications, and finally you ditch all decorum and stalk them on facebook.
 

And then you wait.

Forever.

Or so it seems. In fact, it’s such a small portion of your life that in Ordinary Time you would have blinked and wondered where those weeks went.

But when you’re pregnant you feel that baby inside you every moment of every day. The expectation weighs so constantly, you start to exhibit early signs of dementia. Where did you put your keys? What was the end of that sentence you just started? Why are nouns suddenly elusive? This causes impatience on the part of your loved ones. They spend approximately no time imagining what the baby looks like, calculating how much it weighs, and wondering whether it will arrive early. The baby amuses them, in small doses. If you talk about it once too often in a given day you will annoy the crap out of them.

Meanwhile, there are internal flips and amniotic hiccups and actual, distinguishable tiny feet pressed against your abdomen that heighten your anticipation to distraction. These are the bits of information that you cajole out of your agent: an editor met her at a cocktail party and loves it so far; another is sharing it with a colleague; it was slated for an editorial meeting, but they didn’t get to it in time. You try hard not to burn the dinner again, and you fail.

Eventually you hear that it has passed its first acquisitions meeting. Panic mixes with joy: this baby is happening to you. But your agent is in charge, and all you can do is work on a different manuscript, eat right, and elevate your legs when they swell.

The sale itself is dizzying: a mystical, euphoric agony that ends like Dorothy’s house thudding in Oz. Your husband pops open the champagne, your writing partners abuse exclamation points, your mother forgives you for ignoring her, and you, who anticipated this the most, are suddenly flummoxed.

In a few weeks the novelty and well-wishers are gone. Your baby is whole and miraculous, but also a little troll-like, you admit. Not to worry; you nurture it until the umbilical stump has fallen off and the facial acne has healed and it’s truly beautiful. This, after all, is your natural sphere: surrendering yourself to your work. You are far better at this than you are at waiting.

(I wrote this essay for Sara Crowe's blog, Crowe's Nest, December 13, 2010.)

You May Never Get Published. And That's OK.

For years I thought a transformation would occur if I published a book: I would finally become a Children’s Book Writer – undeniably, officially...nay, legally. And so I put more emotional energy into getting published than into learning, and I was less of a writer for it.  

Now that I’ve had a publication, I wish I could go back and talk to the unpublished me, the writer who desperately wanted to appear in print. I’d tell myself that I was missing the point entirely. I’d say, Don’t be in a hurry to do anything but learn. Keep writing, go to conferences, read, and worry less about being published.   

The unpublished me would have been thoroughly annoyed.

There was something about creating that first manuscript 13 years ago – a board book dummy with die-cut holes on every other page, animals, and a character named Sally – that made me think, I ought to get this published. To this day I marvel that it took me nearly a decade to think instead, I want to learn how to do this well. Would I buy a hunk of marble and a chisel, carve a single sculpture, and expect to sell it? No, even I am not that naïve. I would probably just sculpt, enjoy the process of learning, and happily chat with friends and acquaintances about how I had taken up a new hobby. If I intended to make a career of it, I would expect to study for years.  

But I knew sculpting was difficult, whereas writing fiction seemed not to be. Meaningful prose seems so attainable when you read something by, say, Katherine Paterson. How simple is a slim, sweet story in the hands of Kate DiCamillo? Tying loose ends in a complicated plot must be effortless, judging by Louis Sachar. Besides, I was highly educated. I had written creative essays in school, hadn’t I?  I brimmed with earnest desire and ideas. What more could editors want? Why was it taking so long for them to discover me?   

Then I gradually learned what Jane Yolen might call a Secret of the World: after years of writing, reading, and attending SCBWI meetings, my publishing chances were growing independently of my anxiety about them. They were growing because I was practicing, finding things to say, and meeting people. I was becoming more professional without knowing it; I was becoming more interested in writing than in being published. 

I began to think of myself as an apprentice, rather than as an unpublished author. This focus on learning freed me to absorb some essentials: to show, rather than to tell; to cut unnecessary prose; to realize that plot is not what happens to the characters, but what happens inside of them; to understand Richard Peck’s mantra that the first chapter is the last chapter in disguise. This focus on learning continues to free me from the stagnating notion that I have “made it,” now that I have had a book published: even as I learn, I don’t know enough; I absolutely don’t read enough; I am still lacking formal writing instruction. Each day I get inches closer, but I fall miles from my goal – to write something that children will carry with them as they grow and experience the world.

          Lately, I call myself a children’s book writer. But it’s not because of a publication. Rather, it’s because I’ve truly accepted the lifelong apprenticeship: to write, to read, and to learn from others.

(This is a guest column I wrote for The Prairie Wind, the newsletter of SCBWI-IL, in September, 2002.)