Here's my interview with UK book blogger Morgen Bailey. It also includes an excerpt from the book and a synopsis, so send it to a friend who is wondering if she/he will like the novel! http://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/2013/11/23/author-interview-no-694-with-multi-genre-writer-benjamin-gorman/
One cliché bit of advice doled out to writers (and actors, artists, politicians, and various other people who elect professions where they face a lot of criticism) is that they should grow a thick skin. Like rhinos, perhaps. 
Or crustaceans of some kind. The assumption is that this will make us more successful. That might be true. Perhaps due to our society’s conflation of financial success and happiness, there’s also an underlying implication that this thick skin will lead to happiness. Or to better art.
I am unpersuaded.
This week, I hung out with a friend who had a particular verbal tick. In the midst of conversation, he'd say, "I don't care about that." This struck me as a harsh way to segue from one subject to another, or to make a point. This tick can be partly explained by the fact that English is his third language; a native speaker, learning English as a child with less strongly formed opinions, might have learned some gentler way to say, “I disagree,” or “Well, I’m not sure that’s relevant to the point at hand.” This friend simply and boldly asserted that he didn’t care. He even doubled-down, voicing his admiration for a particular writer who had achieved great success by promoting unpopular theories due to his complete disregard for the opinions of critics or academics who disagreed with him.
I shared my current dilemma. My novel comes out in a little over a month, and I can’t help but hope that readers enjoy it. I attributed this to a personality flaw. “I’m a people-pleaser,” I told my friend, as though making a confession to a habit of cannibalism or necrophilia. My confessor encouraged me to go and sin no more, to grow a thick skin, to not give a -well, he didn’t use the word “care” that time- let’s just say he advised me not to donate any carnal acts to critics.
On the surface, this seems like good advice. Why should a writer allow himself/herself to be cut to the core by the rantings of some Greenwich Village hipster he’ll never meet, the invective of a mommy-blogger who was too distracted by her children to read the book carefully, the ad hominem insults of a sixteen-year-old who likes to post nasty reviews on Amazon just to see if he can get a reaction?
Why? Because those three people are readers! The guy from the village walks down to Washington Square Park, finds an empty bench, and he reads!
The stay-at-home mom carves out the few precious minutes when both her kids are napping, and she reads! The kid on Amazon… okay, he’s really a 35 year-old troll who lives in his mom’s basement, and he doesn’t really read novels, but his life is sad and he deserves some sympathy. Though the writer may never meet them, the guy in Washington Square Park and the woman sitting on her toilet next to the baby monitor… They are the reason he writes. Their opinions matter, not just because they are human beings with intrinsic worth, but because they read the book. If the writer doesn’t care about that, he should stick to journaling.
But this is an over-simplification as well. I never want to achieve “universal acclaim.” First of all, if everyone knows that a book is good, they file it away as a “classic,” a book everyone has heard of and no one is excited to read. Second, if the world of literary criticism ever becomes so homogeneous in its thinking that there are no contrarian voices, the whole pursuit becomes something I’d prefer to avoid. I hope for some bad reviews. By all the gods, I’d love to have a few high profile bad reviews. But only because they would drive more people to the book. I want the majority of readers to enjoy it. At least 51%. There. I’ve confessed. I want it to be (gasp) popular.
Having a thin skin may actually help in that department. Thin skin may be fragile, but it’s also sensitive. It feels effectively. Absorbing that information allows the writer to more accurately predict what might be pleasing to the reader. Consider, who would you rather curl up next to on a thick rug in front of a roaring fire, a beautiful woman/man with very sensitive skin, or the aforementioned rhinoceros? I would hypothesize 
that the human is more likely to be able to satisfy your sexual desires, but I don’t know what you’re into.
Still, despite Stephen King’s assertion, writing isn’t seduction. A desire to be sensitive to reader’s tastes can lead to trend-chasing, a bad habit that has bred a thousand Twilight knock-offs which should have stayed hidden away in fan-fiction forums. Trend-chasers are about as seductive as the kid in middle school who asked every single girl to the dance and found out they were all planning on washing their hair that night. A writer has to have some small measure of self-respect.
After writing a handful of novels, I finally decided this was the one to publish not just because I’d honed my craft to a point I could be proud of, but because this book was my bravest one yet. I was able to put the disapproval of my grandmother out of my mind on some previous projects, but this time I was finally able to risk the disapproval of my parents, my dearest friends, even my wife, because I was nine-and-a-half months pregnant with a story that just had to come out. As I wrote it, I caught myself thinking, “Oh, that line is going to piss-off Christians,” and “Oooo, Muslims won’t like this chapter very much,” and “Some atheists won’t appreciate that crack,” and “Dammit. There go the Orthodox Jews.” I didn’t set off to offend religious people. Most of my favorite people are adherents of one religion or another. The book will only offend the kind of believers who lack a sense of humor. Luckily for me, they aren’t known for their habit of searching out opinions that disagree with their own. 
But they are the scariest kind of believers! Their bad reviews sometimes take the form of bullets. I was aware of that. I couldn’t let it stop me, though. I was processing the loss of my own faith, and I had to turn that pain into something positive, even fun, for myself. Then I discovered that the story I needed to tell myself was a good one, one that others might enjoy.
I couldn’t back down from the story, but I couldn’t ignore my audience either. If I was going to make it available for them, it had to be more than a story for my own benefit. I had to revise and edit. Those phases are the least popular among writers precisely because they exist to serve the reader’s needs, not the writer’s pleasure. I can’t overstate their importance, though. Not only did a willingness to revise, to truly “see again,” deepen my own experience of the story, it made the novel into something I’m far more proud of. And editing? Editing doesn’t build pride; it prevents shame. Now I’m neck deep in online writer’s groups where we share marketing ideas, and I am constantly amazed by the number of writers who post ungrammatical, misspelled, incorrectly punctuated comments online. Sure, these might be informal forums, but we’re writers, for Valhalla’s sake! Every typo is an offense to potential readers. I paid good money to hire an editor to save me from any of those mistakes in my book. You can bet I’m going to try to communicate that level of quality to potential readers in every online post.
So, if this novel is any kind of model, writing should have some measure of swagger. It should be hard at its core but soft on the outside. It should be confident but also sensitive. On second thought, I guess Stephen King was right about seduction.
In my life, my need to please others has led to my most embarrassing moments (made all the more excruciating by the fact that I’m so sensitive to embarrassment), my most ill-conceived blunders (desperate, impulsive attempts to win favor), and my most shameful acts (failed efforts to make people like me at the expense of others). However, the same impulse has led to my greatest successes. When I wanted the approval of the right people and went about acquiring it in the right way, I not only found my greatest joys but brought the most joy to others. Furthermore, my need to please demands that I look for the good in people, give them the benefit of the doubt at every turn, and though this has burned me quite a few times, it’s also proven to be a good bet; most people, it turns out, are worth pleasing.
My paper-thin skin may be sliced to ribbons shortly after the book hits shelves. I certainly won’t participate in a public melt down like some have. I plan to take the best advice I’ve heard about book reviews: Say Nothing. If it’s bad, Say Nothing. Maybe have a good cry or a stiff drink. If it’s good, Tweet it, Facebook it, send everyone to it, but on the page itself, Say Nothing. Here’s what I’d like to say to a reviewer, though: “Thank you for reading the book. If you didn’t like it, I’m sorry I failed you. Truly sorry. If you liked it, that makes the whole process of revision and editing and publishing worthwhile. But, either way, I care about you, and I’m grateful for you.”
So here’s my current advice for writer, such as it is: Don’t grow thicker skin. Instead, change your clothes.
1) First, put on your best suit of armor. 
Climb into an M-1 Abrams Tank. Drive it into a nuclear submarine. Write like you are invincible. (Warning: People in suits of armor in tanks in submarines are lonely. And cold.)
2) Change into your shortest skirt. Revise for the reader. But remember
what you learned from the movie Pretty Woman: Don’t kiss on the mouth. Some things are off limits.
3) Put on a tuxedo. Adjust your cufflinks. Button the top button. Check your fly. Straighten your bow tie. Edit to protect yourself from shame.
4) Strip down to a swami’s loincloth and sit cross-legged under a tree for 
a while. Publish after a great deal of consideration.
5) Then, acknowledge that you’re basically naked. Run as fast as you can toward a garden of sweet, juicy blackberries and long thorns. Be willing to hurt.
That willingness to suffer shows more courage and more respect for the 
reader than any runway high-fashion name-brand rhino-skin apathy.
(Shhhh. I'm just going to quietly post this here on a Friday night, then share it on Wednesday. Don't tell anybody.)
In case you don't get the joke or just want your Wednesday to be that much better:
Hump Day!
My friend Scott (who blogs here) sent me this question the other day: "I had an idea recently and I was wondering what your thoughts were. This is in regards to school reform, and I’m not a teacher; I’m guessing you’d have a very different perspective."
Okay, right away I'm hooked. Not only am I teacher, but I'm a teacher who loves to speak for all teachers. Other teachers might not appreciate that, but it's just how I roll. Also, I love to talk about school reform, partly because our schools do need to be reformed, but mostly because they do not need to be reformed for the reasons or in the ways that the professional school reformers want them to be reformed, and, as a teacher, I believe I have an obligation to speak out in defense of great public schools. So when Scott starts this way, I immediately start to gird my loins and prepare for a fight. But...
"I wa
s recently listening to a book called The Generals, regarding the changes in command structure of the US army from WWI to Iraq II. One of the reforms he talks about having been introduced in the interim between Vietnam and Iraq I was that they ceased to have “X number of hours” requirements for training and replaced it with “demonstrated proficiency”-based training. That is, once you pass a test, you move on to the next point. This meant that officers were no longer forced to spend time in a mind-numbing course that they already comprehended, and those not learning had a greater incentive to learn."
Hold on! He's talking about the movement toward proficiency grading, a move I support!
"Now there have been a number of suggestions that schools actually pay students money to do things like show up and do homework and such. I’m guessing I’m not alone in thinking this is a terrible idea. There’s also the idea of incentive pay for teachers, which likewise is a terrible idea (it punishes or rewards teachers based in large part on the active role that the student’s parent plays, over which the teacher has no control, favoring the teachers with the easiest students). However, I think that incentives might be made better. Namely, students could be rewarded with time and autonomy for good behavior."
Paying students to learn is a bad idea: Agreed. Incentive pay for teachers is a bad idea: Agreed. Students can earn time and autonomy for good behavior: ...almost. A big part of proficiency grading is the recognition that behavior is not enough. Good behavior should lead to the acquisition of skills, and it's the acquisition of skills that should be rewarded. But I'm interrupting.
"I imagine something vaguely of this nature: students have to be at school from X:00 AM to X:00 PM, regardless of progress; this would not change. But let’s imagine that each school year were divided into quarters that last, say, 13 weeks (with the “4th quarter” being summer vacation, slightly shorter than the others due to vacations or holidays or staff development days, etc., during the course of the normal 3 quarter school year). The regular course of the semester would be to have instruction complete in 9 weeks with a final exam **or** final report/presentation/etc. (I don’t care about the specific metric; this is not about increasing the testing frenzy, but a student should be able to establish proficiency in whatever subject by a standard deemed appropriate by that instructor for the course at hand). If you pass that final exam, your next four weeks are given to you to do as you will with high flexibility and autonomy. If you like art, take art classes. Take extra time in shop, or in science lab, or just read or write in the library, should you choose. Enroll in some online college courses (audit or credit, it’s up to you). Enroll in local community college courses for free (this was actually available in San Diego for anyone with a free period, but I didn’t know it). Learn to program computers. Parents would also be free to take their kids out of school during those three weeks for vacations, should they be so inclined, without missing any important school work, provided the kids passed all of their classes prior to that.
"In addition to incentivizing the students to actually master the material at the end of 9 weeks, it would have the added (potential) that the teachers would be able to focus additional time for those students that most need it in those final 4 weeks. Students not passing at the end of the 13th week would need to use an elective period in the following quarter to meet the demands not met by the class not passed.
"My basic assumption is that *most* students have at least some subjects that they could meet proficiency in very rapidly if they had an incentive of (relatively) free time. This might serve to help align the goals of the students and the teachers. Yes, it would require more funding, but the truth is that Americans really aren’t that squeamish in general about spending money on education; in general, we spend way, way more than the rest of the developed world, and the few exceptions are small wealthy populations (like Norway and Luxembourg) which, though they compete with national averages favorably, still don’t spend as much as small subsections of the US like Boston or NYC. The problem is that administrators and bureaucrats take a large cut off the top (leaving less for teachers), and the results don’t track the increases in spending. Largely this is because parents today have bifurcated into two large camps of the over-involved and the under-involved, and the progress of a given student seems to reflect primarily their parental involvement. As such, motivating the students themselves seem imperative. What insights can you offer as a teacher?"
Oh, I have opinions galore. As to whether or not they are insightful, I'll let you judge, Scott.
We’re instituting something very much like this right now. It’s both daunting and exciting.
First, the exiting part (for a philosophy-major theory-head geek like me): The theory. The idea is that we’ve been grading all wrong, and the flawed grading has led to bad instruction. Grades should describe precisely what a student is capable of doing in relation to the goals of the course. Unfortunately, we’ve been messing that up in a number of ways. A student moves on to the next level of a course with a B, and the next teacher doesn’t know if that B means the student is capable of doing all the tasks required in the last class, or if she did a bunch of extra credit, or if she worked really hard and earned the teacher’s pity, or if she was super-capable but was punished for being lazy, or for cheating, or skipping school occasionally (because she was bored), or for a myriad of other reasons she might have that B. Instead, the grade should describe only her performance. Ideally, she shouldn’t even get a letter grade. She should get a list of specific tasks and simple scores on those (Meets, Exceeds, Does Not Meet, Did Not Attempt), so the next teacher knows precisely what she can and cannot do. If the grades were done this way, the instruction would be designed to lead up to these specific performance tasks. She could take a pre-assessment to determine if she already knows how to do whatever is about to be taught. If so, don’t waste her time teaching her that! If not, teach her how to do it. When she shows she can, move on. If she still can’t, don’t just pass her on to the next teacher. Take the time to focus on that skill she lacks. And don’t muck up her scores with anything but explicit descriptions of her academic ability: Bad behavior gets handled by administrators and her parents and is unrelated to her grade. Extra credit doesn’t exist. And effort only matters if it results in being able to perform the tasks; she’ll learn that it matters a whole lot, but not because she’s working for a letter.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. It can, too. Some people are doing this already and doing it well. It doesn’t even necessarily have to cost a lot more. Rural one-room schoolhouses with great teachers are perfect for this kind of thing. Really good home-schoolers can even pull it off (though too often home-school teachers can turn out to be un-schoolers or grossly unqualified to teach every subject at every level. I know I would be. Plus there’s the whole issue of socialization which requires a lot of work by home-school teachers who don’t want to produce students who can pass every test but are socially dysfunctional). Small class sizes are an important part of the mix here. No one can effectively keep track of 200 kids all going at their own pace, or at least no one I know, and I’ve worked with some of the best teachers in the country.
But it takes more than small class sizes to make this work. Teachers need lots of time and support to rewrite curriculum so that it targets specific tasks and measures them each effectively. There’s an understandable temptation to go out and buy a canned curriculum that will do all that work for teachers. That impulse must be avoided at all costs. For one thing, canned curricula tend to suck. Just because a huge corporation made something doesn’t mean it’s any better than something your local school teacher can produce, and it might mean it’s a whole lot worse. The corporations designing curricula have different motives than producing something that’s been tested and shown to be effective: They want to produce something that’s flashy and will make them lots of money. Sometimes the profit motive can lead to high quality products for reasonable prices (see: Toyota or Volvo)
and sometimes it leads to things that look a lot better than they really are (see: the early Miata)
or are priced to sell but not to last (see: the Ford Pinto). 
Also, when teachers are given a canned curriculum they do not have the investment in its creation, so they are less likely to know the material inside and out and are more likely to resent the material (sometimes garbage) being handed down from on high. So, in order to do proficiency grading properly, teachers need the time and support to create dozens, sometimes hundreds, of pre-tests, connected lessons, and post-tests. And since our hypothetical student needs to have many opportunities to try again when she doesn’t master a skill the first time, more post-tests and more post-tests.
The other temptation is to plunk our poor girl down in front of a computer and make her take as much of her schooling as possible through computer-based classes. Now, teaching through the computer can work, but only if it’s done in a very specific way. Linguists learned a long time ago that programs on the radio, broadcast by Radio Free America, didn’t effectively teach people English. Why not? They could listen to them for hours upon hours, but they didn’t absorb the language. Was something wrong with them? Nope. It was the nature of the instruction. When people learn, they need to be able to demand feedback and receive unrequested correction. If you can’t ask a question and get an answer, you don’t learn well, and if you are doing something wrong and no one corrects you, you just keep on doing it wrong. Computer courses, too often, are designed to provide learners with an onslaught of information they are simply supposed to absorb before taking a test which provides them with very little feedback or correction. Someday we’ll design computer programs that can evaluate a student’s performance, provide them with the appropriate feedback needed to improve, and answer their questions (correctly and appropriately for their level) when they ask. Then I will be
out of a job. Luckily, we’re not there yet, and the people trying to sell computer-based learning are more concerned with saving schools money (and making their own) then providing students with the best instruction. (But the day will come when students taught by computers do better than students taught by humans. I think that’s as inevitable as, say, universal healthcare. Yes, teachers should be as worried as the folks who file health insurance claims. We will have to learn to do something else.)
Another challenge for a true proficiency system, which you already alluded to, is what to do with the kids who are done too fast, and what to do with the kids who aren’t done fast enough. Our traditional model says that they should all go at the same rate, and we do it that way not because we believe it’s true, but because we can’t quite figure out what to do about the fact that we know it’s false. In small degrees, it’s bearable. If our hypothetical student finishes her math faster than her history, maybe we can provide a space where she can work on the history she needs to catch up on while the rest of her math class reviews something she already knows how to do. But what happens when she’s ahead of her class at everything? Free time to learn about things she’s interested in would be great, but according to a proficiency model, we should be moving her on to the next grade’s material. That poses a number of problems, though. Do we want a really bright 7th grade girl hanging out in the same halls as our 16 year old guys? And what if she’s not a really bright girl? Do we warehouse her in a class of capable 7th graders when she’s 16? What will that do to her, socially?
Oh, and remember how I mentioned that behavior problems will be taken care of by teachers and administrators and parents working together? That part is essential. And rare.
And those are just the obvious problems. What about the kid with a learning disability who is never going to be able to perform certain tasks? Do we say he’s a 10th grader forever? And what about the kid who just moved to this country and doesn’t speak a lick of English? And what if he is also the kid with the learning disability? Our traditional model allowed that kid to stumble along with straight Ds, get a high school diploma that completely deceived employers about his ability level, and then he could get a low-level service sector job and maybe be okay. But those jobs no longer pay a living wage and the world wants high school diplomas to mean something specific.
Which brings us to another major issue: The world has not adjusted for the proficiency based model. Parents still want to know what the letter grade is because that’s how they were taught to evaluate their own performance when they were in school. Colleges are warming to proficiency grades because they will give them a better sense of who can succeed within their walls than the meaningless high school diploma did, but scholarship committees still want a GPA, so even a kid who wants to go to a progressive school that recognizes his list of skills instead of his GPA might not be able to pay for it. Businesses want to know that the kid will show up on time and obey his boss, something the list of tasks might not include. It’s going to take time for schools to be able to show that students focused on building skills still learn a work ethic without the fear of punishment through punitive grading, and in the meantime they may be punished for the system’s uneven, hodgepodge switch.
And then there’s the problem of the timeline. This wholesale reboot of both the grading and the delivery of instruction will take a while. We could just start with Kindergartners and roll it out over 13 years. That would allow folks to get more comfortable with it, but if we really know it’s better for kids, can we justify not doing it for the kids in high school right now? Conversely, is it fair to change course midstream for the high school seniors who are in line to be valedictorians and suddenly find that A) they have been earning those As through hard work and extra credit but can’t earn better than a B on skills alone, B) their colleges of choice still care about GPA more than skills, and C) the valedictorian award is suddenly getting the ax (which it should have received long ago)? All the theory might say proficiency is what is best for these kids, but it still feels unfair to me. And it will seem plenty unfair to their parents. Oh, and they would be right to point out that the teachers don’t even know how to do proficiency right yet.
And herein lies the biggest threat to proficiency-based teaching and learning: If the rollout is done poorly, despite all the research and theory behind it, we will abandon it like we have so many other education fads that were underfunded and hastily implemented. We’re already seeing that here in Oregon. The state produced a law that said, simply, that schools had to produce an annual letter to parents which described their child’s proficiency separate from that child’s behavior. Some schools dove in years ago, preparing for this, and they’re getting good at it. Others, like mine, are diving in at the last minute, but we’re going all-in, leading to massive stress levels and a very uneven implementation. Others are saying, “Let’s wait and see if the state will really enforce this law, because this sounds like a lot of work, and they’re not paying for it.” In the midst of this, parents start screaming (rightfully), and the politicians are running away from it, declaring that schools that are attempting to measure proficiency all year are going way beyond the law since they only required an annual report (as though anyone could produce an accurate report on the fly in April without keeping track all year), and that local districts get to define behavior. They went so far as to wash their hands of any definition of behavior, saying schools could include or exclude homework, missed work, cheating, absences, extra credit, you name it. Now, I’m all for local control when it makes sense, but if the state wants to pass a law that uses words, they can’t turn around and say each locality gets to individually decide what each word means. That’s not a law. That’s not even a meaningful suggestion. But this is what could undo your great idea, Scott. We either have to push through the resistance any new system will necessarily generate and provide the resources to allow that new system to produce results, or we will starve it of resources and buckle under the pressure to remain status quo.
And here’s what my experience as a teacher has really taught me: When people are pissed off about the crappy roll-out, they will blame the teachers. When the roll-out is starved of the necessary resources, they will blame the teachers. And if succeeds, the way public schools succeed right now in educating a broader swath of our population to achieve at higher levels than they ever have before, someone will point out that our kids are not doing as well as the kids in a country where kids are culturally homogeneous, all speak the same language, have a strong enough social safety net that all of them are fed and have healthcare, have vastly less income inequality, aren’t traumatized by our levels of crime, and go to school six days a week and throughout the summer, and they will blame the teachers.
And the people blaming the teachers will call themselves school reformers, make millions peddling the next fix, and send their own kids to private schools.
But I’m not at all bitter about that.
Admittedly, this took a bit of a dark turn at the end. Sorry about that. I try to stay positive because I really do love my job, but the further I get from theory, the more cynical I become. Now I have to go write a hundred new scoring rubrics while organizing my local union to strike because, in the middle of all this radical change, our school district, newly flush with state cash, thinks we should be paid less than we made last year.
Lately I've been more than a bit frustrated with the complete tone-deafness of America's political leaders when it comes to the issue of growing income inequality. Democrats, it seems, are so beholden to their big donors and/or so afraid of being called communists by right-wing talk radio that they only mention income inequality in hushed tones and don't dare to do anything substantive about it. Republicans, on the other hand, either want to use rising poverty rates as a club to beat up on the President, or they want to cut programs to assist the poor as a means to punish them into not being poor anymore. As John Oliver pointed out on this week's The Bugle, this attempt to address the problem of poverty is a bit like a doctor trying to awaken someone from a coma by repeatedly hitting the patient in the head with a wooden plank; it's unlikely to work, and if it does, the guy is going to be pretty pissed off when he wakes up.
I could rage about this for a few hours, but it's more constructive to try to think about solutions. Since the problem, as I see it, doesn't come from an inability to address the issue of poverty (we've done it before, quite successfully, with some of the very programs people are trying to cut now). It's caused by a lack of political will. So, tackling poverty should start with addressing Congress. Electric cattle prods might be a popular solution, but I'm pretty sure that's illegal, and if it's not, they have the power to make it so. Instead, here's an idea:
What if Congressional salaries were legally pegged to the median of U.S. incomes?
First of all, it shouldn't be the mean income ($55k), because Congress could skew that number upwards and enrich themselves by creating more policies that enrich a few people at the top. Instead, it should be the median. That's not an easy number to find, it turns out, but if I'm reading this correctly (click here, then, under the Table H-1. Income Limits for Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent, click on the "All Races" and note the top of the second quintile) it's probably right around $40k. Or, according to data from the Social Security Administration, the median per capita worker income is $26k. Like I said, it's not easy to find, but I'll bet it would get a lot more attention if the salaries of everyone in Congress were pegged to it. Oh, and the median would have to be calculated based on the income people actually pay tax on. In other words, if Congress continued to allow people to pay a different rate of tax on investment income, that income would not be included in the calculation of their own incomes. You can bet they would quite suddenly have a come-to-Jesus moment about investment income being taxable as income.
Anyway, that would have to be all these politicians were allowed to live on. Anything they owned previously would be put in a trust until after they were out of office. They would have to live in some pretty crummy neighborhoods in D.C., and that could open their eyes a bit. The President's salary should be exactly the same, but with the added perk of a really nice house. To make sure that all these politicians couldn't just live in near-poverty for a couple years and then cash in as consultants for the companies that were promising them lucrative future salaries in exchange for bad bills, the politicians would have to live with the mode for an additional ten years after leaving office, but with any difference between the current year's mode and the mode of the year they left office doubled. In other words, if the median went up by 1% the next year, they'd get a 2% raise. If it went up by 5%, they'd get a 10% raise. Conversely, if they padded the stats by creating economic bubbles while in office, and then those bubbles burst and the median went down by 2%, their income would go down by 4%. Consequently, they would be motivated to enact policies that would lead to longer term growth.
I think this idea would be a huge improvement. At the very least, it might prevent a few jerks in Congress from telling people without shoes to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. At best, it could lead to a very different way of regulating the economy. And it can't be accused of being communist, since flattening incomes towards the middle wouldn't change the median at all. This would make politicians try to raise the bottom and the top, but it would make them focus on the quantity of people at the bottom, not just the average per capita income.
What do folks think of this idea? Silver bullet or total dud? And if you think it's a dud just because the people in Congress would never vote for it, ask yourself why you would vote for anyone who wouldn't.
[Note: When I posted this originally, I kept writing "mode" instead of "median" and "median" instead of "mean." Luckily, I have friends who are smarter than I am who quickly pointed out the error. Fixed!]
Update: September 24th
My friend Scott, who blogs here and generally engages me in great debates because we come at problems from very different ideological angles, has a wonderful pair of ideas I want to share:
"[T]ax inheritance by the beneficiary rather than by the deceased; several small inheritances from one large estate should be taxed lower than the whole going to one or a few single individuals. The concern should be less about how much the deceased had acquired and more about how much any single recipient is getting; after some baseline (which should likely be pegged to a median home price, or should account a primary residence of the deceased as separate from normal liquid assets), the rest ought to be treated as regular income."
This is a great idea because it would encourage billionaires to give their inheritances to a broader number of people or put more of it in the public coffers. That's a winner.
Scott's second idea is more complicated, but I like it, too:
"[T]ax brackets should be pegged to median incomes. The executives with the highest salaries and thus highest tax brackets would be far better incentivized to raise wages and salaries beneath them and they have far more control over this. And it would need to be clear that this is the median of all filers, rather than just the employed.
"...an illustration.
"Let’s take the Ike tax brackets that are so widely discussed. He had a really high rate (something like 90%), but that marginal rate was only on incomes over $400,000 at a time when the median income was about $6,000. This is very different to today, where the highest bracket can hit a middle class person in a boom year that may not be representative of their overall wealth, opportunity costs, risks, future earnings, etc. So the idea would be something like this. Let’s take that ratio that Ike had and say that the top rates kick in at 50X and 100X the median salary. That is to say the top rate goes back down to 35% for whatever that bracket is today ($400,000, the same nominal value as in Ike’s time but drastically less in buying power). The next bracket jumps up to 70% on incomes over 50X the median, while incomes over 100X the median are taxed at 90%.
"Now let’s look at this in practice. The median household income in 2010 was $51,017, and it dropped to $50,054 in 2011. These numbers could not practicably be applied for anything but a two-year lag, so the rates generated would apply in 2012 and 2013, respectively (enough time to have the data compiled and have the rates known publicly by Jan 1st). In 2012, the rates would kick in at $2.551 million and $5.102 million, while in 2013 they’d drop to $2.507 million and $5.005 million, meaning that for any person making more than $5.2 million, $48,150 more would be exposed to 70% rather than 35% taxation, and $96,300 more would be exposed to 90% taxation rather than 70% taxation. Thus a person ends up paying a little more than an additional $36,000 in taxes because the median income dropped.
"That might seem somewhat small by comparison to the salaries, but let’s look at it in a different light. If the median income jumps $10,000 from $50,054 to $60,054 (assuming we’re talking several years, here) then the tax burden for that person making more than $5.2 million drops $375,000. That’s a huge incentive to business leaders to raise their employee’s salaries, and gives them a direct stake in raising wages and reducing inequality.
"This is a quick-and-dirty illustration to make the point, but theoretically the entire set of marginal rates could likewise be set. That $400,000 bracket could be changed to 8X the median. If the median increases, you lower your tax burden for a given nominal income.
"Currently, brackets rise with inflation. This means that as inflation goes up, tax burdens go down in order to account for the fact that $100k means a very different thing in 1990 vs. 2010. That makes some sense. To a degree, my plan accomplishes the same sort of thing, because inflation generally rises with average incomes. But the difference is that it only remains fixed to inflation alone when inequality remains constant. If inequality rises, however, the tax code becomes more progressive, and if inequality falls, the tax code becomes flatter.
"Ideally, a mechanism ought to be incorporated to look not only at the median, but some metric that assesses the 20th and 80th percentiles as well. The reason for this is that Wal-Mart raising wages across the board is unlikely to bump the 50th percentile directly, and the connection between wages/salaries and progressivity would be slightly less direct than is desirable. But I think it would be a good start."
See what I meant about having smart friends?
...it's for my work as the president of my teacher's union.
"Central School District classified staff settles, another side eyes deal" by Aaron Newton
One of my friends and colleagues said I should have put in a plug for the novel. I wish I could have figured out a way to do that. Maybe something like,
"Gorman, a novelist with a new book coming out in November, said that he is as hopeful for the success of the next bargaining session as he is for the sales of his book. However, in both cases, he is trying to maintain realistic expectations."
Yeah, that wouldn't have been at all weird.
Speaking of weird, the picture made me look like a goblin of some kind.
I have a sinking suspicion that's not Mr. Newton's fault.
My wife and I love Grumpy Cat.
If Grumpy Cat is my wife's spirit animal, I think I just found mine:
So, does my novel fall into the category "Religious Fiction"?
Yes. Religious Fiction, Skeptical Hippo-style.
“For readers with a high tolerance for irreverence and the hope that humanity will be able to make our own way in the universe, The Sum of Our Gods is a thoughtful and entertaining read.” – Karen Eisenbrey, author of "Hat" in the anthology Heathers coming soon from Pankhearst.
“It is brave, imaginative, original, humorous, irreverent, well-written and well-paced. I thoroughly enjoyed it. …God-spotting has never been such fun.” –Mark Fleming, author of The Call of the Siren. (Read Mark Fleming's complete review here.)
"This was hysterical. ...Such irreverence. I could get behind gods like these. ...Verily, you made me laugh. All hail Ixtab. (You can't be too careful, right?)" -Cass McMain, author of Sunflower, blogging at http://cassmcmain.com/
“My first feeling from the diametrical perspective was the ease in which the writing must have flowed, but it soon became clear that a lot of thought and effort went into it. …A full metal jacket of stars.” -Daniel Manning, author
I’m still looking for reviewers who are interested in reading a free copy, so if you write reviews of indie-books for a blog, a newspaper, or a periodical, drop me a line at writergorman@gmail.com
[originally published at amwriting.org, here, in June of 2011]
Here’s a secret writers need to learn in order to master their craft: Writers need to learn to read. They don’t need to consume all the books on the New York Times best sellers list just to see which kind of monster is producing the most sales. Writers need to learn to read differently from readers. Writers need to understand that reading is part of practicing.
Part of my job as a high school English teacher consists of teaching students to become better readers by teaching them to identify the purpose of their reading. Are they reading for pleasure? Are they seeking information? Are they analyzing an argument in order to be persuaded or to refute the author’s position? Good readers can do these things. And that’s enough.
But it’s not enough for writers. Writers are artists, and artists need to be able to examine the works of their peers and betters in a different way.
Consider, as an analogy, film. When one of my sixteen-year-old students goes to see the newest big Hollywood blockbuster at the Cineplex this summer, he is satisfied by the experience. As a viewer, he was looking for entertainment, and the movie delivered. Done and done. Now, the cinephile goes to the movie theater and watches the same film (not anything high-brow, but something competently-made) and is also entertained. But she thinks about the structure of the story, the characters, the setting, the themes: She is, in short, a reader of film as text, and because she can do all the things we try to teach good readers to do when they pick up a novel, she gets a lot more out of the movie. She does not, however, come out of the theater talking about the tracking and handy-cam shots, diegetic and non-diegetic sound, side lighting and back lighting, fast cuts and slow fades. These were the techniques that gave the movie its punch and made it satisfying, but they aren’t her business.
These techniques are the business of the movie critic. The critic studied film back in college. She can not only tell you that The Conversation is her favorite Francis Ford Coppola movie, but she can explain why in great detail. She watches movies for a purpose, but it’s not to be entertained or to be informed or to be persuaded. At least, those aren’t enough. She watches movies because it’s her business, her livelihood, to evaluate them based on her vast knowledge of the way they are made, as well as what they make her think and how they make her feel.
And then there’s the film director. He watches movies differently than the casual viewer, the cinephile, and the critic. He watches to learn. For him, watching movies is part of his artistic education. It’s practice.
Writers need to do the same thing. When we pick up a novel, we can remember why we fell in love with books when we were young. We can enjoy being transported to new places, getting to know new people, and absorbing new ideas. We can even evaluate the works in the same way critics do. But we cannot afford to stop there. We need to read differently. For us, every choice of simple or complex vocabulary, every choice about following the basic rules or breaking them, every choice about revealing the minutia about a character or hiding it serves as a lesson which will make us better writers. This is because we recognize all these things for what they are: Choices. Choices made by writers. Writers just like us, only better. Admitting that last part is absolutely essential to becoming better writers ourselves. As long as we hold fast to the same choices we’ve always made, believing we are God’s gift to our readers, then not only is our writing a waste of time, but our reading is, too. Arrogant writers aren’t just obnoxious; they’re missing out on vital time to practice.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, talks about a group of psychologists who studied violin students in Germany. They divided the students up into three groups based on ability as determined by their teachers, then tried to figure out what made the great ones great and the mediocre ones mediocre. What they found was that the great ones practiced more. Not just a little bit. A lot more. In fact, they found a magic number necessary to become a virtuoso: 10,000 hours of practice. At a good clip, that takes ten years. They also didn’t find too much deviation from that. None of the virtuosos got by with very little practice, and none of the mediocre violinists practiced for 10,000 hours and remained mediocre.
Then, the psychologist began looking into other fields, and they found that the same magic number held up in every endeavor they examined. 10,000 hours. Athletes. Computer programmers. Ballerinas. Composers. And yes, writers.
The quality of those hours matters as much as the quantity, and that’s why writers need to change the way they read; it’s the difference between 10,000 hours of entertainment versus 10,000 hours of practice. One of Gladwell’s examples of 10,000 hours is the early Beatles before the British Invasion, when they were just a struggling rock band trying to find gigs. They worked in strip clubs in Hamburg, Germany and would often play for eight hours straight to non-English speaking audiences and compete for attention with the strippers. Not only did this give them a chance to compose songs that are probably on your iPod right now, but they also had to learn dozens, probably hundreds of covers, and not just of rock and roll songs but of Jazz standards and other genres. What Gladwell doesn’t discuss is the influence of the music Lennon and McCartney were listening to, both before the Beatles formed and during this time. I would bet good money that these guys were not only reading the crowds to see what was working, but they were also listening carefully to the music on the radio and on the albums they bought, and listening in a different way than you or me. They were reading the music to become better musicians.
My preferred example (as a die-hard NBA fan), would be a basketball player. If a basketball player practices his shot for 10,000 hours, he will get to the point where he can sink his free-throws a very high percentage of the time, he’ll know where he can hit the highest percentage of three-pointers, and he’ll make some very tricky moves under the hoop on a drive. And he will lose. Why? Because he didn’t spend some of that time reading the scouting report about, and watching tape of, his prospective opponents. His 10,000 hours were spent becoming an oddity, a guy who could mop the floor with you at HORSE, and in its own way that is becoming a virtuoso. But he won’t be a great basketball player, because he didn’t learn to read his opponents.
Sure, the analogy is imperfect. Writing is at once less collaborative (despite great writing communities like #amwriting, we do our work in isolation), and less competitive (we don’t go head-to head with another author or team of authors. It’s not a zero sum game. More good books can generate more readers.) Maybe we’re less like players watching tapes of their opponents to learn to beat them and more like players watching the greats to learn from them.
So pick up a copy of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games and learn from her choice to write the book not only in first person, but in the present tense. Crack open Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and learn from his choice to eschew dialogue tags and conventional punctuation, then follow up with All the Pretty Horses or No Country for Old Men to reassure yourself that it’s not a fluke that just happens to work brilliantly but a conscious and careful choice he’s not always bound by. Read Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and learn how a premise that seems doomed to be saccharine and trite becomes beautiful and powerful because of careful choices of characterization and intentional withholding.
Then go grab that guilty pleasure book on your nightstand. You know you have one. This is the huge hit by that debut novelist that fills you with rage when you read about the sales figures, and you grouse about it so publicly and with such vehemence that you can’t possibly admit how much you enjoyed the book yourself. Now, when you are flying through that weak prose, that thin characterization, or that awful adverb-filled dialogue attribution that makes you want to throw the book at the wall, stop and figure out why you don’t. Sure, it’s fine to identify the things you don’t like about the book. Note those choices so you will make different ones. But also acknowledge that there’s a reason that book is in your hands, and other copies are in a lot of other hands at the same time.
If you’re willing to do that, to learn from your betters (and yes, that hack on the New York Times best sellers list is your better, at least in some way) , then reading becomes part of your practice time, part of the 10,000 hours you need to rack up in order to become a true master of the art. Writing is practicing your shot. Reading is watching tape. You must do both to be great.
[originally published here in February of 2011] I have always been a fan of Murphy's Law. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Murphy's Law states that "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."
There's a whole taxonomy of corollaries that can be extrapolated from Murphy's Law. I used to have a page-a-day calendar of them. My favorite did not come from the calendar, but from one of my professors in college, Vic Bobb, who once said, "If there are two drops of rain falling from the sky, they will both fall on your glasses, one on each lens."
Tonight I discovered my own, which shall henceforth be known as Gorman's Pizza Corollary: "If you have three pizza boxes in your refrigerator, regardless of your presumption of their order, the one you want will always be the third you open."
