27/11/202326/11/2023 by Cila Warncke

On World Building with Rosanna Leo

Welcome to ‘Between the Lines’ – interviews with teachers, writers and writing teachers on aspects of their craft. This week, a conversation with lauded paranormal and contemporary romance writer Rosanna Leo that explores the intricacies of world building.

In magical realms

It is Sunday afternoon. Outside Rosanna Leo’s home (not far from Toronto, Ontario) the leaves have turned. “Just a couple of weeks till the beginning of winter,” she remarks. “It’s long here: cold, snowy.”

Perfect weather, that is, for staying indoors with a good book: perhaps a volume or two of Leo’s Darke Paranormal Investigations or Handyman trilogies; or her Vegas Sins series.

Leo writes to transport her readers into magical realms. As a child, she whiled away hours daydreaming in her bedroom. “I thought I could get to Narnia through the back of the wardrobe,” she chuckles.

Although no longer so literal-minded about the power of fiction, Leo still believes a story can and should be transcendent.

“As a kid, I reread the Chronicles of Narnia every year, which entrenched my love of mythological figures and fantastical creatures. Classic ghost stories were my bedtime stories. Once I started exploring the world of romance — Robyn Carr, Erin McCarthy, Kathy Love — something clicked: romance, that’s where I wanted to be.”

The path to writing

Bookworm though she was, Leo had only a brief brush with writing in her school days. On a teacher’s prompting, she entered a Royal Legion contest with a story about her veteran grandfather’s post-traumatic stress disorder: “The family would say, ‘he’s having his nightmares’.”

She won.

“I was the only person in my family, up till now, who has ever shown any interest in writing,” she muses. Which may account for the Royal Legion story being the “first — and for quite a few years the last” time she wrote with intent.

Leo earned a BA in English literature, but another art form won her over. After her undergraduate degree, she completed a three-year diploma in a classical singing and spent several years performing with a chamber ensemble, in addition to her day job.

It was while on maternity leave with her first child that Leo began to write again. “My son was a good napper, so I started scribbling, then, after plugging away for a while, I had a novel in front of me. It was terrible,” she laughs. “This sprawling, epic story with ghosts, demons, the kitchen sink.

“I sent the manuscript to Harlequin then waited many, many months for the form rejection letter to come in the mail. It was good to get. It was important to know I could move on from there.”

After a few years of working and re-working, Leo submitted another manuscript. This one was accepted. “It was the biggest high I’ve ever experienced.

Since then, she has combined her full time job as an acquisitions assistant at a local library with writing award-winning romance novels. “It’s the stories that keep me going. I love coming up with characters. I love creating worlds.”

On world building

What is world building?

You are creating the backdrop to your story. You might think of the Game of Thrones series, with different countries and mythologies. But world building can be simpler than that; it doesn’t have to have a fantastical element.

I often write about places I know and historical moments. I think of world building even if I’m writing something with no paranormal or fantasy aspects. It’s what brings that book to life.

What is essential for creating a coherent world?

When you’re creating a new world, even the tiny details have to be vivid. You don’t have to go on for pages talking about what the curtains look like, but you need details to put the reader in that world. Also, if there is anything about the people who inhabit the world, especially in the case of fantasy, you have to break that down. What do animals look like? How do people speak?

What tools do you use to plan?

Research is vital. The basis of the Darke stories’ worlds is: what moments had repercussions that lasted into the future? They are based on historical incidents, so I’m researching those periods, what happened, what impact things had on the current time-frame and modern characters.

How do you research?

It’s handy I work in the library and have a lot of resources at my fingertips. Inter-library loan is my best friend. You can find materials from other systems, things that are very specific. There is [also] a lot of great stuff via Google. For me, researching Canadian historical moments, there are great archives online.

To maintain consistency across your novels?

At the beginning of a series, I determine who the characters are going to be, write thorough character sketches and carry them from book to book. If I mention something about a character, I make sure I can access it throughout the story. Readers are savvy. They will remember [errors] and call you out! You need to get it right.

How does world-building interact with characterization?

It’s huge. There will be things a character can or can’t do, depending on the world they live in. Even in realistic worlds, you have to think about what will make sense.

What are common mistakes authors make in world building?

As we talked about, not keeping track of certain types of information – changing things down the road could be jarring for the reader.

Are writers over- or under-ambitious?

There is a fine line between providing the right amount of detail and too much. If I open up a book and the author goes on for 12 pages about the curtains, I’ll get out.

Who are a couple of writers who world build well?

Scarlett Peckham, who writes historical romance. Catherine Stein: great steam-punk/sci-fi/paranormal. Paulette Kennedy and Hester Fox – both Gothic writers – do world building really well: great attention to detail, very immersive.

Leo recommends

The piece of writing that changed your life before age 18?

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. When I was 12 I thought it was very romantic. I don’t look at it through the same lens any longer, but it started my love of romance.

The piece of writing that changed your life as an adult?

The Tenant by Katrina Jackson. It’s a wonderful ghost story with all the creepy elements, a gothic feel, but she also talks about racism in an effective and moving way. It’s a short novel, but she packs so much in. Everyone should read her work.

A book about writing every aspiring writer should read?

On Writing by Stephen King was very helpful. Leigh Michaels’ Writing the Romance Novel – I keep a copy in my basement and have reread it many, many times.

A living writer you’d love to hang out with?

Anise Eden. We’ve been friends online for years, but we’ve never been able to meet up. Her books are fantastic. We became mutual fans before we got to know each other. Now, I’m honoured to say she’s my friend.

Your perfect writing space?

I like silence. I won’t go to a coffeeshop, don’t like a playlist in the background. Just a room in my house where I can get into mischief in my head.

What non-writing pursuits feed your writing?

My husband and I like to explore the small towns around us. I love walking around an old cemetery trying to figure out, who were these people? That starts a lot of stories in my mind. For writers, it is easy to be solitary, to retreat, but it’s important for me to get out there, experience life, ask questions.

What’s next?

My series Darke Paranormal Investigations – which is set here in Ontario. It stars three sisters who are all paranormal investigators; the first two [novels] are out and have been really well received. The third book is out in March 2024.

Connect

Web: Rosanna Leo Author
Newsletter: Sign up
Instagram: rleoauthor
Threads: rleoauthor
BookBub: rosanna-leo

24/10/2023 by Cila Warncke

On Writing Towards Progress

The upcoming release of Lee, Kate Winslet’s film about photographer Lee Miller, got me thinking about how much has changed for women in the past century. And how little.

Lee Miller was one of four women photojournalists accredited by the United States armed forces in World War II. Among the many striking images she created, Miller photographed the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau: indelible evidence of Nazi atrocities.

She was one of four women allowed to shoot the war.

The issue of Vogue with Winslet on the cover, promoting Lee, also featured a profile of Karine Jean-Pierre, the first Black person and first openly gay person to hold the post of US Press Secretary.

Why, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, are we still tallying firsts?

Progress, such as it is, is non-linear, unpredictable and subject to reversal.

In 1997, I started my BA at University of Pennsylvania.

It was only the 64th year in the university’s 257-year history that women were allowed access to a full-time, four-year undergraduate degree program.

In 1998, I became a Daily Pennsylvanian reporter. The first woman permitted to join the illustrious school newspaper did so in 1962. Her name was Sharon Lee Ribner. Ms Ribner (later Mrs Schlagel) had a long, successful career in journalism. She passed away in 2022.

It boggles my mind that my opportunity to become a journalist hung on the balance of 35 years. And that the pioneering female journalist at Penn and I shared a lifetime.

Photo by Michael Rosner-Hyman on Unsplash

Scan any newspaper. It’s plain to see the world is not on an orderly march towards a better future.

This fact affects groups and individuals differently. The more recent one’s rights and privileges, the more parlous.

Women, LGBTQ+ individuals, people of color, immigrants, the poor, the disabled are always the most vulnerable.

In times of economic or social crisis, it is too often their well-being that is considered dispensable.

Progress is parlous because power is not.

When threatened, power does whatever it takes to protect itself. Progress is rarely on that agenda.

As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, the best defense against external chaos is internal order. By identifying and pursuing what matters most, people can craft rich, rewarding lives in suboptimal circumstances.

Education is the essential ingredient, here. An untrained mind is a disorderly mind. A mind unaccustomed to effort is a aimless and ineffective.

While education is not a panacea, or substitute for social justice, it is a vital tool for individuals waiting for the moral arc of the universe to budge.

One of the many reasons I’m passionate about teaching writing is that it is yoga for the brain (no Lycra required). Writing hones logic, burnishes imagination and creates structure. And you can do it anywhere.

Structural inequalities are huge barriers to success. We need to dismantle those barriers. We also need to equip individuals to work around them. Writing is a skill that promotes individual success and provides a means to tackle unjust systems.

For more on writing towards success, check out my new Substack newsletter

17/10/202315/10/2023 by Cila Warncke

7 Fun Play-Anywhere Writing Games

Grab a pen and paper and hone your word skills through play!

Native English speakers only need to learn around 9,000 words to read proficiently (Nation, 2014; Qian & Lin, 2019). This, out of a lexis of over 170,00 words (and growing!)

Hence most of us walk, eat and talk on a daily basis rather than shuffle, feast or murmur.

We’re creatures of habit. The words we use frequently become top-of-mind, and therefore likely to be used again. Our routine vocabulary shrinks like a puddle in the sun.

One way to prevent, indeed, reverse, this trend is to play with words.

Reading, crossword puzzling, etc., can build our word banks but having a fine working vocabulary means being able to summon novel words and express ourselves in new ways. Like play piano, or basketball, this skill requires practice.

The following drills are designed to be pen-and-paper; no reference to outside sources required. Use the back of an envelope, a napkin, scribble on your hand like a teenager, draw in sand on the shoreline.

The goal is to tap your linguistic aquafer. If you feel inspired to augment your vocabulary through reading or dictionary browsing, all to the good, but no pressure.

Grab your quill and parchment and let’s away.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Pre-root-ixes: Prefixes, root words and suffixes

Straightforward: choose a prefix, root word or suffix and list as many words containing it as you can.

Prefix suggestions: ex, dis, im, dis, pre, un
Root suggestions: auto, corp, derm, lum, tele
Suffix suggestions: ism, ity, ment, ness, tion/sion

Word transformation

This is a game I designed to improve upper-level ESL students awareness of parts of speech (POS) and the flexibility of English vocabulary. It’s simple, take a noun or verb, then come up with all the permutations of it you can, including words that contain it, collocations or sayings.

It works best when you think systematically about POS. Let’s use like as an example.

Verbs: to like, to dislike
Nouns: like, likelihood, liking, dislike
Adjectives: like, likeable, likely
Adverbs: like, likely, unlikely
Preposition: like
Conjunction: like
Collocations/sayings: eat like a horse, go over like a lead balloon, off like a shot, like water off a ducks back, look like a million dollars, etc.

CAS – colloquialisms, aphorisms and sayings

Here, the goal is to list informal language terms that either

contain a particular word (as in the example above)
relate to a particular subject (e.g., work, money, travel)

Take ‘time’ as an example. The first category might include

time and tide way for no man
a stitch in time saves nine
once upon a time
time is (not) on their side
time out of mind

The second

to take a rain check
down to the wire
from here to eternity
jump the gun
Rome wasn’t built in a day

Single-word prompts

This drill was the result of being bored of my journal. Left to itself, my squirrelly brain chews over the same topics like its storing fat for winter. So I wrote a random word at the top of each page then, each day, wrote something inspired by it.

Try this for five, seven, 10, 14 days. See what fun your mind has.

Alphabets

Another fast, fun list drill. Jot the alphabet vertically on a sheet of paper then fill it in with words from a given category: adverbs, cities, animals, desserts, compound nouns.

Warm up with a big category like plants or household objects then get esoteric: can you complete the alphabet with shades of blue, pre-20th century literary heroines or 80s song titles?

What do you see?

Prior to writing my novel Ibiza Noir, I wrote 700 words of pure description a day for 30 days. No attempt at narrative, simply drew the most vivid word-pictures possible.

Set a time or word-count goal, e.g., write for 10 minutes without stopping, or write 500 words.
Choose an object of reasonable complexity, a flower, or your living room, and describe it in as much detail as you can muster. Imagine you are describing it to an artist; you want their rendering to be as close to reality as possible.
Challenge yourself to apply this descriptive writing practice to real-world scenes. Go sit in the park, or on a bench at the mall, and write your allotted words. But remember, no narrative, just images.

Daily ledes

This drill is perfect for pre-bedtime journaling.

Choose three events/moments from your day.
Jot down the 5Ws: when, where, who, what and why.
Write a lede (the first sentence or paragraph of a news article) that contains all 5Ws.

Example:

You went to the dentist and got your teeth cleaned.
When: 11:30AM, where: dentist office (43 Main Street), who: hygienist David, what: tooth cleaning, why: six months since last appointment
Lede: At 11:30 this morning, dental hygienist David Smith faced off with a six-month old plaque formation on Patient X’s right rear molar, a struggle that resounded through the office at 43 Main Street.

Bonus game! #semanticfieldgoals

Yes, I just wanted to write #semanticfieldgoals.

It’s also a good game.

A semantic field is a set of words related by meaning, for example colors, plants, foods, senses, etc. For the sake of this drill, any category will do.

Choose a category

List all the words you can think of related to that category.
Choose one of those words as the starter for a new list.
Repeat as often as you like.

Let’s try chemistry:

Chemistry: periodic table, ion, Madam Curie, Nobel Prize, beaker, lab, Bunsen burner, ion, orbital, atom, atomic weight, electron, proton, neutron, bond, reaction, element, carbon, organic
Atom: ancient Greece, Democritus, particle, bomb, Oppenheimer,
Ancient Greece: philosophy, alphabet, city-states, wine, Homer, Sparta, etc.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Play a round or two of one of the games and post your results in the comments!

10/10/202308/10/2023 by Cila Warncke

On Generous Writing

Life never ceases to be difficult, to paraphrase Rilke. Amidst its slings and arrows, there is often little to comfort and guide.

Without generous writers, there would be almost nothing.

Among recent difficulties faced by myself, or someone I love: bereavement, major surgery, significant medical diagnoses, divorce, conflict with parents, conflict with children, unemployment.

These are not remarkable events, statistically. Yet, to the individual, they are as life-altering as Krakatoa. If anything, the cognitive dissonance of knowing the event to be universal versus the all-consuming personal experience of trauma makes it harder to cope.

We need wise friends to walk these dark halls. But unless we’re lucky, and our friends unlucky, we are not likely to find the necessary wisdom in our immediate social circle. Shared experience can as easily drive a wedge as forge a bond.

Into this gap step writers whose words offer perspective without judgment, comfort without reciprocity and infinite patience. They sit at our bedside in the small hours, walk with us, accompany us raging, glum, drunk, frustrated or frightened.

Their generosity lies in a willingness to delve into the most difficult parts of their lives and, through grit and creativity, distill their thumb-screwed wisdom into something readers can use.

Imagine being lost at sea on a leaky boat. Most of us would consider feel heroic merely staying alive. But a writer would be thinking: how can I help the next person who finds themselves out here?

They would be jotting notes about tides and winds, describing how to make a fishing line out of dental floss, giving tips on bailing and load-balancing.

Although this sense of purpose may be sustaining, it does not mean the work is easy. The generosity of writers lies in their willingness to labor during their most difficult experiences to give hope to those caught in similar currents.

The following are seven books that exemplify this generosity: all by women, whose emotional work is routinely undervalued, on the page and elsewhere.

Seven Generous Books

The Elements by Kat Lister

Most couples in their 30s are settling into their first homes, thinking about kids; Kat Lister and her husband, Pat Long, did those against the ticking clock of his brain tumor, which was discovered before their wedding. They lived the few years they had together with uplifting, illuminating grace. When he died, Lister was left to navigate the anachronisms of young widowhood, a trial by water she recounts here with bold, Didion-esque honesty.

Buy

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Generosity is not constrained by genre. While we may assume that memoir has the most to teach, the ruthless craft required of good fiction offers equal — or even greater — opportunities. This novel, which begs to be described by its titular adjective, unpicks grief, addiction, survivor’s guilt, and the complicated strands of rejection, assimilation, belonging and othering woven into immigration, racism and religion.

Buy

A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas

Perhaps the only thing more appalling than the death of a partner is losing a partner in mind, not body. Thomas’s memoir invites the reader into the Kafka-couldn’t-dream it surreality of life following her husband’s traumatic brain injury (TBI). Along with grief, come care decisions, guilt, frustration, and no one to share the challenges.

Buy

Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Read this with its fictional counterpart, Winterson’s debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, to fully appreciate her generosity and courage. By the time she wrote this memoir, Winterson was a revered literary figure and bona fide success story. To admit, from that height, to the haunting power of childhood trauma could have seemed an admission of weakness. Her vulnerability is potent and empowering.

Buy

Nomadland: Surviving American in the 21st Century by Jessica Bruder

Please read the book; the film (brilliance of Frances McDormand notwithstanding) does it no justice. Nomadland exhibits another form of authorial generosity: the willingness to put one’s life aside to bear witness to the lives of others that would otherwise go unrecorded. The crushing, mechanistic cruelty of late capitalism comes to vivid life through Bruder’s painstakingly reported account of life on the dusty, bald-tire fringes of the so-called American dream.

Buy

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

Every time I pick up A Manual, I wind up reading it all the way through. Berlin’s autofiction is enthralling, terrifying, devastating on multiple levels. The writing is almost too sharp and bright to look at (forget window pane, this is prose as emergency flare) which is necessary magic given the gut-punch tales it tells. Stuff that in lesser hands, or played straight, would be unendurable, is transmuted into stories that soar and hover on the thermals of your mind.

Buy

Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage by Heather Havrilesky

It is one of life’s slipperiest tricks that the things we’re taught to crave and cherish are (surprise!) headaches too. Marriage, at least happy marriage, is perhaps the quintessential sacred cow; the immutable good thing one should pursue without question. Thank goddess, then, for Havrilesky who seems to operate from the position that sacred cows are best served medium-rare. Her brave assertion of the inconvenient truth that true love and explosive exasperation are not mutually exclusive is a pinpoint of light in what might otherwise be a suffocating dimness.

Buy

What are your life-boat books? Share in the comments!

03/10/2023 by Cila Warncke

Write To Success

As a professional writer for over 20 years, and a full-time educator for seven, I’ve witnessed the transformative power of writing — and the barriers many students face to accessing this power.

Every individual has the right to success. Education should empower young people to pursue their dreams and achieve their goals. Unfortunately, learning is often reduced to a time-consuming rote exercise where students’ main goal is to get through it. This is a disservice to them, and their futures.

There is a better way: a way that prioritizes goal-oriented learning, intrinsic motivation and long-term success: a way that turns writing from a chore to a tool.

Write To Success will offer unique, modular college and university-prep writing courses that empower teens to write their own success stories.

Stay tuned…

26/09/202308/10/2023 by Cila Warncke

On AI: Artificial Ignorance

Artificial intelligence promises to augment our collective processing capacity. But on an individual level it is a neurotoxin that promises learners only artificial ignorance.

We are all familiar with the fact that unused muscles weaken, then atrophy. If one were to permit a developmentally normal, able-bodied child to rely on mobility scooter for transport they would, over time, develop physical incapacity where none had existed: an induced disability.

Thus, it shouldn’t be difficult to grasp that permitting children to rely on artificial intelligence ‘assistance’ such as ChatGPT will weaken, then atrophy, their intellectual capacity: an induced disability.

Writing a better brain

Writing is not just the product of thought. It has a unique ability to generate thought.

‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking’ ~Joan Didion, journalist.
‘With each of the new [ancient] writing systems, with their different and increasingly sophisticated demands, the brain’s circuitry rearranged itself, causing our repertoire of intellectual capacities to grow and change in great, wonderful leaps of thought.‘ ~Maryanne Wolf, Director of the UCLA Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice.

As Wolf explains in her 2007 book Proust and the Squid (from which the above quote is taken) there is neither gene nor discrete neurological structure that enables humans to read and write. Literacy relies on complex, non-axiomatic collaborations between a variety of perceptual and cognitive systems.

Put another way: preliterate and literate brains are structured the same. What changed human history was not a novel biological development but the recruitment of extant neurological capabilities to perform a novel task.

Does that bend your mind a little?

It should.

Writing is not just a means of expression, like speech. It is a process and practice that improves cognitive function; it rewires the brain.

Put another way: it isn’t that smart people are better writers, it’s that writing makes people smarter.

All of us who care about children’s long-term well-being, whether they are our students or offspring, should be anxious to help them develop their fullest intellectual capacity.

We are on a hot rock spinning towards oblivion. Life for kids who are in today’s classrooms will be complex beyond the wildest imaginings of us scions of the analogue order. The will need to be wily, resilient and resourceful AF.

Being laissez-faire about kids substituting artificial intelligence for study makes as much sense as being laissez-faire about children playing with live hand grenades: cool, if you don’t mind the maiming.

There are three key reasons I won’t use generative AI and emphatically discourage its use by students.

Neural stunting

A well-used brain grows, according to Pauwels et al. (2018):

“Practice leads to improvement in and refinement of performance… and this dynamic behavioral process is associated with altered brain activity…. Besides functional brain changes, practice also induces structural changes, such as alterations in regional brain grey and white matter structures.”

A brain that does not practice complex skills fails to grow, just as the disused muscle slumbers undeveloped. The brain becomes stunted compared to what it could have been, could be, with training.

A less-developed brain with fewer neural connections and reduced processing efficiency does not just affect reading or writing skills. If affects a person’s ability to learn, communicate and adapt.

Every time a student outsources their thinking to AI, they are sabotaging their long-term mental flexibility.

Educators and parents bear responsibility for this, insofar as we perpetuate a results-based learning environment. When we prioritize the ‘right answer’, kids get the message that process doesn’t matter. It makes sense for them to use any means necessary to get the answer that gets the desired grade.

We grown-ups need to rewire our thinking and explicitly focus on the learning process. This is not going to be easy, given the baggage of 150-odd years of rote education, but we have to begin. This might be as simple as grading the steps of an essay instead of the final draft, or doing away with grades altogether in favor of a feedback system. (For more ideas: Ungrading with Anthony Lince)

Concentration of intellectual capital

Late-capitalism has succeeded in concentrating financial capital into the hands of a vanishingly small number of individuals. The grotesqueries of this are felt every time an ordinary US citizen needs insulin or an EpiPen, or wants to go to college. There are felt a thousandfold-moreso by the 650 million people living in extreme poverty around the globe.

This concentration accelerated wildly during the Covid-19 pandemic: ‘Billionaires’ wealth has risen more in the first 24 months of COVID-19 than in 23 years combined,’ Oxfam reported. ‘The total wealth of the world’s billionaires is now equivalent to 13.9 percent of global GDP.’

Put another way: those of us not born to oligarchy face ever-slimmer chances of rising to the top. Financially, anyway.

Until now, those not to the manor born could at least, to paraphrase Britpop’s finest cynic, Jarvis Cocker, use the one thing we’ve got more of: our minds.

Unless we allow kids to consign their thinking skills to artificial intelligence.

To be clear, I don’t believe there is a conspiracy among Musk, Zuckerberg, et al. to make the rest of the population dumber so they can rule in full-blown, unchecked Bond-villainesque splendor (mwah haha).

But there is a real danger of that dystopia becoming a reality through lack of vigilance on the part of educators, parents and politicians.

Big tech does not care about us. Does not exist to serve us. Is not our toy.

In the same way wealth-accumulation takes on a life of its own, with money begetting money, intellectual capital accretes to the intellectually adept. Students who read, write and think critically enhance the neural circuits for these skills, gaining efficiency, automaticity and self-confidence.

This enables them to tackle bigger challenges, be more creative, rise to the top. The better they get at learning, the more dauntless they will be; the more quickly they will evolve to meet new demands.

Students who let AI think for them will cultivate artificial ignorance, sap their innate learning abilities and dull themselves into ever-shrinking spirals of incompetence and self-doubt.

They will be victims, not victors, in the knowledge economy.

Diminishing returns

Generative AI is trained on scads of data.

Perhaps one of the reasons it shines is that current tools were trained on the laborious output of human brains. Right now, the machine is well-nourished.

Like any other extractive technology, AI’s potential is limited by the quantity of quality raw material available. As AI is increasingly used to generate blog posts, articles, images, etc., it will, perforce, eat itself. Like a hideous, post-post-modern game of telephone, machine learning will digest its own output to spew forth content that is increasingly bland, distorted and derivative: a garbled self-parody that will further diminish culture and conversation.

This is not an abstract concern. There are AI tools I recommend to students on a limited basis, such as Grammarly, for English-learners or novice writers who need grammatical training wheels. I discourage competent writers from using it because it flattens good writing.

Neither it, nor any AI tool, can distinguish a truly beautiful sentence nor appreciate the work of (to borrow from Salinger) an experienced literary stunt-pilot. Creative word usage, neologisms, daring sentence structures all fall foul; the machine brain cannot cope with linguistic audacity.

This is the chief weakness and biggest threat of artificial intelligence: it prefers the commonplace to the extraordinary and the predictable to the audacious.

Our world needs bold solutions and novel ideas, which it will not get from a conservative technology.

There are plenty of things to outsource to AI: reviewing medical data, tracking undersea tremors, preventing fraud. But not education.

The children whom we want to see thrive need every iota of intellectual capacity and creativity that dedicated teaching and rigorous practice can bestow. Otherwise, we doom them to artificial ignorance.

What are your views on AI in the classroom? Share in the comments?

19/09/2023 by Cila Warncke

On Cultural Cross-Pollination

One of the things that has been (is) vital to my success as a writer and educator is the fact that, from a freakishly young age, I’ve read everything.

Nutritional information. Ancient magazines in waiting rooms. Bumper stickers. Barbara Tuchman. The Lord of the Rings. Gossip magazines. Feminist blogs. Not-so-feminist blogs. James Baldwin. Germaine Greer. Cormac McCarthy. Joan Didion (again and again and again). Orwell. Eliot. Hardy. All the Brontes. Shakespeare. Jack Gilbert. The Bible. The Odyssey. Ulysses. Greek myths. Native American myths. Books on veganism, endurance running, Arctic exploration, gardening, history, booze, the Spanish civil war.

The more I read, the more visible the threads that twitch through the living fabric of literature: allusion, image, theme; the homage, the salute, the nod, the whisper from dead to living to the spirits.

Reading like a starving person at a buffet cultivates a literary meta-perception I cannot imagine arriving at any other way. It leads along skewed yet sound philosophical paths, such as the one that follows.

***

Q: What’s the difference between Charlie Brooker and a Buddhist nun?

A: Not much, it turns out.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, Charlie Brooker is a British writer, satirist (tough job these days), and broadcaster. He dislikes most things and swears a lot. The nun I have in mind is Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist teacher and author.

How did I arrive at this improbable conclusion that these unlike people are very much alike? It started with binge-reading Pema Chodron. Sometimes books, like people, appear in your life and you wonder how you lived without them. They bring a fundamental shift of energy and wisdom that kicks down a door in your brain, shines light into a black room and blows away the dust.

One of Chodron’s books cropped up on the shelf of an Airbnb in rural Arkansas. Stealing it seemed like bad karma, so I went to Amazon for When Things Fall Apart and The Wisdom of No Escape. I was reading the latter on a flight to London, trying to jog myself out of a weird funk. The world felt like it was shrinking around me. Telltale clumsiness had emerged: dropping things, taking wrong turns, sending idiotic emails, all the usual signs of a swerve into depression. I needed to hear something good.

Chodron writes things like:

Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn’t do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness.

Don’t you feel better, saner, more worthy, just reading that?

How about:

Loving-kindness — maitri — towards ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Mediation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.

That’s how she thinks, speaks, writes. Chodron exudes calm. Her philosophy is that people are basically good and need only to wake up that inner goodness.

Charlie Brooker begs to differ. “I don’t get people,” he writes. “What’s their appeal, precisely? They waddle around with their haircuts on, cluttering the pavement like gormless, farting skittles. They’re awful.”

That’s from Dawn of the Dumb, a collection of his “Screen Burn” columns for the Guardian from October 2004 to June 2007. The dates are significant because that was the pinnacle of my London music journalist/gadabout phase. It spanned my final year at Q, another year on a now defunct music magazine, and a stint as a promotions coordinator for a megalomaniac.

Good years, spent in a delicious, mindless haze of 9-to-5, city breaks, cohabiting, cult TV, and the Saturday Guardian: a newspaper that was the lynch-pin of a way of life, shorthand for everything that was important at the time: London, media, “culture”, aspirational cooking, self-conscious irony.

We didn’t watch loads of TV, but what we did was almost exactly what Charlie Brooker was writing about in “Screen Burn” (with the exception of The Apprentice, which I could never stomach). It wasn’t a matter of seeking out the shows he reviewed, more that he unerringly targeted the excruciating and gawp-worthy. Which we happened to watch for those precise reasons.

Finding Dawn of the Dumb amidst the pile of discarded holiday reads in the foyer of our building was like discovering a time capsule from that slice of my life. It took me back to an innocent time when the prospect of David Cameron as prime minister was just a horrible fantasy, and Big Brother still launched careers (if you can call them that). To my surprise, I still remember most of the BB contestants he skewers, a decade later, not to mention various X-Factor one-hit wonders.

Brooker makes it worth revisiting. He can make almost anything funnier and more vivid than real life. Take his description of Glastonbury music festival:

Once you’re in, the sheer scale of it is initially overwhelming. Imagine forcing the cast of Emmerdale to hurriedly construct Las Vegas at gunpoint in the rain. Then do it again. And once more for luck. That’s Glastonbury: a cross between a medieval refugee camp and a recently detonated circus.

As a veteran Glasto-goer, I promise that is the best description of it you will ever read.

I also watched the pilot of Prison Break, which he summarises thus:

Prison Break is possibly the dumbest story ever told. It makes 24 look like cinéma vérité. It’s as realistic as a cotton-wool tiger riding a tractor through a teardrop. I’ve played abstract Japanese platform games with more convincing storylines.

Brooker writes like a butcher dismembering a cow and most of the time his (metaphorical) knife is hacking at a hapless reality show contestant or D-list presenter. Not, you might think, of a piece with Chodron’s all-embracing gentleness.

Yet through them both runs a thread of intense compassion. Brooker’s rage isn’t at individuals, per se, it’s at the cruelty, greed or stupidity they manifest on TV. His purest vitriol is aimed at psychics that prey on the “grieving and desperate”. No matter how artfully furious, his columns boil down to one message repeated over and over: The world’s a mess, people are a mess, we need to be better and nicer to each other if we’re going to get through.

Charlie Brooker may disagree with this characterisation of his intent, but read the books: it’s there. Like Pema Chodron, he believes people can be better if they just wake up. His method is bucket of ice over the head accompanied by a swift kick to the kidneys versus her cultivate mindfulness and be friendly to yourself but they point the same direction.

This proves Chodron’s point about brilliance/craziness. There is no single right way to do things. You can sit in meditation and learn to love each out-breath. You can also sit, shrieking, in front of crap TV. It’s not just what you do — it is the intent and spirit in which it is done.

The corollary to that is you can learn from all sorts of things. Laughing till I cried over Dawn of the Dumb was as mind-altering as mulling The Wisdom of No Escape. Don’t shut things down, they both counsel. Keep your eyes and mind wide open, and try to laugh.

What is a culture-clash that inspired you? Share in the comments!

12/09/2023 by Cila Warncke

On Suede (band, not shoes)

Writing is integral to my teaching process and practice. When I publish, it is a privilege to share.

Pennyblackmusic.co.uk runs a regular feature called Discography Hagiography. In which, as the name suggests, music nerds get to publicly worship bands they love.

Imagine my delight when editor John Clarkson gave me the nod to write about Suede on the occasion of the band’s 30th anniversary and mind-bendingly good LP, Autofiction.

Writing this brought me joy. May reading it bring you joy.

(Below, an excerpt. Full article here. Photos are illustrative, not of Suede.)

Suede: Discography Hagiography

In 1998, I walked into a record shop on Philadelphia’s South Street to return a damaged Bush Sixteen Stone CD.

No refunds, the proprietor said, pick something in exchange.

Crouched on the wooden floor, I scanned the bottom shelf. The London Suede rang a bell. I studied the androgynous/ambiguous nude puddled in ghastly underwater green. On the back, the name ‘New Generation’ popped (it was on a mix CD from my brother). Sold.

This was the start of a semi-obsessive love affair, a fact I offer as an excuse for my inability to present a concise career appraisal of Britpop’s most reckless proponents. This will be a true hagiography, with the irrationality and ellipses that veneration of a saint implies.

Suede shook my foundations the same way some people have: not love at first sight, exactly, but recognition – an undefinable, undeniable, life-altering entrance into the presence of one who is known and knows in return.

Brett Anderson was the first person I heard pronounce ‘mascara’ mass-kah-rah; I had no idea what a pebble-dash grave might be nor, for that matter, an estate car. But Suede stirred my emotions and imagination long before any first-hand experience of strobe-lit nightclubs, ecstasy-blown pupils or the grey lassitude of Home Counties Sunday mornings.

It is hard for me to see beyond the moments of delicious chaos to which Suede was the soundtrack to consider its oeuvre. Nevertheless, stepping back so the wheat field emerges from the golden streaks, yields an equal reward. Suede’s motifs are plainer at arm’s length; Brett Anderson’s lyrical fixations and vocal affections more obvious; but they are the beloved particularities of an old friend.

Listening to the albums chronologically, it is striking how well Suede wire walks between internal consistency and rote predictability. The Suedeness rarely drifts into play-by-numbers or self-parody. While contemporaries like Blur and Oasis lean on nostalgia or WWF-style public spats to generate attention, Suede stormed into its 30th anniversary year with the irresistible Autofiction and a tour that had the oft-contrarian music press singing from the same hymn sheet:

“Brett Anderson is absolutely mesmerising. You can’t take your eyes off him” (Taylor, The Mancunion).
“If this really were an unknown new band with no reputation to trade on… you’d tell your friends they’ll go far” (Lynskey, Guardian).
“Perhaps it’s possible to will a transcendent experience into existence, but this Suede concert fulfilled 25 years of dreaming” (Harris, Spectrum Culture).

Suede (Nude) 1993

That Suede managed to live up to the hype preceding its eponymous debut is impressive; as is the fact that the curse of the Mercury Music Prize has yet to catch the band, three decades on.

Suede invited its audience into a claustrophobic, chemical-laced neverland built on the post-Thatcherian ashes of Britain’s social contract. There is no overt politicking; the lyrical bleakness speaks for itself: ‘in your council home/he jumped on your bones’ (‘Animal Nitrate’) to ‘in the car he couldn’t afford/they found his made-up name/on her ankle chain’ (She’s Not Dead’).

Brett Anderson embodied a sleazy-sexy interface of frustration and hedonism, offering a Wildean aestheticisation of ennui, deprivation and dead-ends that is as hypnotic – and apropos – in the 2020s as it was in the early ‘90s. ‘The Drowners’ is an apt term for the generation coming of age to Brexit, Covid and Toryism. As a debut single, ‘The Drowners’ is also an effervescent blast of indie power-pop that, for its four-minute duration, erases everything except what matters: sex and music.

Like Wilde, Anderson intuited that power aligns against truth, beauty and self-expression. Defiance ain’t much, but sometimes it’s all you’ve got. Hence the avant-garde sexual ambiguity, charity shop-chic shrunken white shirts and midriff-baring pleather and gilt pirate hoops framing diamond-cutter cheekbones. Live performances from 1993 (check out ‘My Insatiable One’ from the Casino de Paris; ‘Animal Nitrate’ from Brixton, London) are fresh and daring. (It is hard to imagine that The 1975’s Matty Healy doesn’t owe at least some of his hyper-emotional, dissolute, sexually fluid stage persona to Anderson.)

Track after track, Suede rings true, powered by Bernard Butler’s starry guitar, bassist Mat Osman, drummer Simon Gilbert and keyboardist Neil Codling. From the wistful ‘Breakdown’ (‘if you were the one/would I even notice, now my mind is gone?’) to the menacing glam stomp of ‘Metal Mickey’ – a song that deserves to be danced to in gold DeHavillands if ever one did – it retains a zest and urgency that belies its age.

Dog Man Star (Nude) 1994

This was my gateway Suede album; ‘New Generation’ on repeat, chasing the dopamine rush of its glittering opening riff (cherish those riffs – this was Butler’s last proper album with Suede; nobody did it better). ‘New Generation’ is the highlight of a record that suits melancholic adolescence but, to my adult ears, could do with rigorous editing. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate (fairer) to say that the range of situations in which Dog Man Star’s emotional tenor feels relevant and urgent has narrowed with age.

The excellent ‘Heroine’ is more than a track, it’s an atmosphere. Anderson’s drug use has been chronicled ad nauseam, so I shan’t bother, but chaos and indulgence cast distorting shadows over tracks like ‘Daddy’s Speeding’, ‘This Hollywood Life’ and ‘Asphalt World’ – the latter a sublime four-minute ballad that meanders for more than nine minutes. (Nick Duerden called the album, ‘the most pompous, overblown British rock record of the decade.)

When restraint is exercised, the results are timeless: the raw snarl of ‘Introducing the Band’, whose Winterland reference introduced me to a seminal moment in punk history; ‘The Wild Ones’, a downbeat beauty that sound-tracked a number of my heartbreaks; and the hauntingly sweet piano lament ‘The 2 of Us’, which makes you want a broken heart, just to enjoy it properly.

Considering it appeared just 18 months after Suede’s debut, Dog Man Star attests to the raw brilliance of a band that was driving with both feet on the accelerator and only the occasional hand on the wheel.

…

Autofiction (BMG) 2022

The image of a nude with back turned to the viewer is a throwback to Dog Man Star but there are important differences: the lens is closer so the body fills the frame; the lines of muscle and bone are clear and vigorous; instead of awkwardly bent, the arms hug the torso in a gesture of comfort or reassurance. Instead of disaffection and despair, the black-and-white shot evokes vulnerability tempered with strength; containment rather than dissolution.

Suede’s ninth studio album delivers on the implicit promise of its striking cover: intimate, strong, self-contained, vulnerable, bold. Opener and first single ‘She Still Leads Me On’ took a few listens to worm into my neurons; it is now embedded there and generates the same dopaminergic kick as vintage favourites like ‘New Generation’ or ‘Killing of a Flash Boy.’

True to form, the next two tracks keep the intensity at a killing pitch: ‘Personality Disorder’ is a cocky, raucous snarl that pulls off the not-easy feat of wedding spoken-word verses with an arena-sized chorus. Then Anderson snaps into ‘15 Again’ with the whip-crack lyric: ‘Nothing is as bad as the time we kill/ sitting in the bathroom in kitten heels’.

Praise be. The band is back, as and how and when we need it most: dripping sweat, spitting defiance, yielding and pushing, feeling with us how it feels ‘on the black ice with no headlights/ with our hands off the wheel’ (‘Black Ice’).

From the soaring ‘Shadow Self’ to the full-throated stomper ‘That Boy on the Stage’ to the pensive ‘Drive Myself Home’ the album flows between moods and moments with cohesion and conviction. If the first act of adulthood is renouncing childish ways, the second is realising that the kid inside never goes away; maturity is integrating all the aspects of self without apology.

Anderson and co. have done so and created a truly mature album, buoyant with the shimmer and swagger of youth yet sober with the wisdom of years. ‘I’m not the kind of person who never feels uncertain/ so many ways to do what I do wrong’, Anderson muses (‘The Only Way I Can Love You…’) but – however many ways there are to do what he does wrong – he does none of them here. Autofiction is, quite simply, a triumph.

After spending several weeks immersed in Suede, two things remain to say: 1) if Autofiction were the last album, it would be the pièce de résistance of a luminous career; 2) I’m pretty sure it won’t be. And that is good news.

What’s the band that changed your life? Share in the comments!

05/09/2023 by Cila Warncke

Six Course Planning Essentials

Over the summer, I took two online courses: they were instructive in unexpected ways.

Both were premium-priced ($500+), both were heavily marketed, both were on topics I was keen to learn.

By the second session of Course 1, I was wandering the house, headphones draped around my neck, miming boredom to my husband.

By the second session of Course 2, I immersed in brainstorming, motivated, energized.

The difference was not the quality, kindness or expertise of the teachers (let that be a lesson). The difference was all in the planning.

After completing the two courses, I broke them down and identified six things Course 2 did that Course 1 did not. Here are the six course planning essentials this experience revealed.

Set concrete learning goals

The second course was super-specific about what participants could and should achieve by the end. The goals were concrete: do this, plan this, complete this. There was no vague aspirations like ‘get better at…’ or ‘learn more about…’ — those are worthwhile goals, but not tangible enough to drive action.

In contrast, the first course didn’t set goals. The idea was to just participate and… gain something. This lack of clarity was discouraging. Without a shared agenda, the shared time felt aimless.

Deliver brief lessons

Timing of instruction is something that doesn’t get talked about enough. Usually, class lengths reflect what is convenient for the person(s) scheduling, not what is best for the learners. Course 1 included weekly three-hour sessions (which felt much, much longer). Course 2 sessions were 45-55 minutes plus an optional Q&A. The shorter sessions were more approachable, manageable and beneficial, as I was actually able to pay attention.

Structure assignments

Everyone benefits from structure. Especially creative learners. Especially learners who are super-bright. Especially learners who want to excel. Structure is not a straitjacket, it is scaffolding that lets learners build the mind-palace of their dreams. Course 2 included sequenced assignments, graphic organizers and other forms of structure that made it easy to concentrate on ideas, rather than worrying about what document format I should be using.

Minimize distractions from other learners

Without fail, the first five to fifteen minutes of Course 1 was various participants discussing their dogs/children/medical appointments, etc. Without fail, someone would leave their mic on so we could hear their family chatting in the background, or the road noise outside. For someone with as little patience as I have, this was (is) maddening. It completely derailed my concentration and desire to be there. In blessed contrast, Course 2 was text-interaction only; the only person on camera was the teacher. No voices, no visual disruption, no distractions.

Reinforce key information

Once a course establishes learning goals and provides structured assignments, it is possible to quickly, painlessly reinforce key information. This can be through verbal reminders, chat prompts, post-session email summaries, etc. Regular reminders of what’s important, and why, anchor information in the learner’s mind and allow them to identify what they missed or want to revisit.

Answer questions

Course 2 featured a question-and-answer session at the end of each class. Participants could type questions in a dedicated chat during the session, so no worries about forgetting what I wanted to ask; attendance was optional, which made it feel more like a bonus and less like an obligation; finally, the Q&A was recorded, meaning the extra information was accessible at the my convenience.

What is a course feature you’ve loved (or would love to see)? Share in the comments!

29/08/2023 by Cila Warncke

Writing from Newsroom to Classroom

creativity, education, journalism, teaching
Cila Warncke, critical thinking, education, journalism, teaching, writers, writing
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Things students have said to me:

‘I asked my teacher how long the essay needed to be and he said, “how long is a piece of string?”‘
‘Wait! You can start a sentence with ‘but’?’
‘What is the process for answering an essay question?’

These students attend good schools. They are above-average smart and capable. Yet somehow, despite towers of assignments and torrents of instruction, they lack basic writing skills and confidence.

Reflecting on my own experience and writing practice, this isn’t a huge surprise. The only explicit writing instruction that stuck with me was my seventh-grade teacher’s spiel on five-paragraph essays and, several years later, the guidance of creative non-fiction professor, Paul Hendrickson.

In between times, I was blundering much like my current students: writing without a clue.

In the end, I learned to write in the newsroom, not the classroom. Not because the student editors of the Daily Pennsylvanian were literary geniuses (though some likely grew into such) but because they worshipped at the altar of structure.

Head.

Subhead.

Lede.

Byline.

Pyramid.

The discipline of x-point headers and y-column inches taught me that writing is 95% organization.

However brilliant or clever or downright earth-shattering ones ideas, they are meaningless until organized and presented in a way that makes sense to a reader.

Put another way: to write well, one needs an audience, a reason to address them and strategy for delivering the message.

Based on my students’ comments, what they are getting, instead of practical, actionable teaching, is either prescriptive nonsense (‘don’t start a sentence with “but” or “and”‘ — er, why not?) or no meaningful guidance at all.

This leads to problematic assumptions, such as ‘you’re either good at writing, or you’re not’ or ‘it doesn’t matter if I write well because nobody is going to read it’ or, worse, ‘I’ll just ask ChatGPT.’

Problematic because students who do not learn to write all too often do not learn to think.

What students ask, day in day out, class after class, are not sophisticated technical questions about writing, but questions answerable with basic reasoning and critical thinking.

How do I find evidence in the text?
How do I know what a character is like?
How can I write more about this topic?
How do I explain this example?
How do I know what the theme is?

What students need are blueprints and tools: structure.

In the newsroom, there is a basic means of getting information: the interview.

There are then standard, structured ways to render that information into articles.

Neophyte reporters were drilled in whowhatwhywherewhen. We learned our opinions were unwelcome without hard evidence behind them. We were taught attribution and verification; how to search archives and read microfiche. To my mortification, we were taught to go back and ask the same questions again, and if we got yelled at or told ‘no comment’ to write it down, because that was evidence too.

With due respect to my graduate school writing professors and peers, I learned a hundred times more in the newsroom than in the classroom. And it is no coincidence my most significant writing teacher was, yup, a journalist.

Not all students want to spend time in a newsroom, which is fine.

But every student deserves a classroom that gives them an equally fine set of tools.

‘[Language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish,’ George Orwell argued, ‘but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.’

To reverse the process requires a more structured, disciplined, logical approach to teaching writing.

It is a process in which the good writing produced is one-tenth of the iceberg; the crucial nine-tenths is intangible critical and creative thinking skills.

As an educator, I am committed to continuously developing more effective, engaging, efficient ways to teach students to think and write. Their future success — and the health of our societies — depends on it.

What thinking and writing skills are most important in your classroom? Share in the comments!