I have been playing a lot of a quirky and silly little title for the Wii called Little King’s Story lately, and it has been giving me monarchic thoughts. (Give me a game where I am a King with a castle and such, and all my latent control freak fantasies come out. )

And, seeing as the many worlds theory of quantum physics states, in part, that all things which are possible are, in fact, happening somewhere in some alternate universe, then I can safely assume that, no matter how massively improbable it is, some day, there will exist a future in which I have become king of the entire world, free to remake the entire of humanity’s sole home as I see fit and turn this globe of ours into my vision of paradise on Earth.

And if that is the case, some things are definitely going to change around here, people.

Here, then, is a partial list of the sorts of things I will change… in that future where I am king!

1. Actual Grammar Police. I’m not kidding. If I am king, language standards are definitely going to improve. People are getting away with a lot of abuse of the English Language these days, and if I am Large and In Charge, that’s got to end. There would be an actual police force comprised of tough-minded grammarians whose sole duty is to strongly encourage the proper use of the English language in all public arenas. But being a gentle king who knows this is pretty much his own petty obsession rather than a real actual Global Issue or anything, these police would be given only one weapon to use in their endless with against grammar crime : sarcasm. They would roam the streets and ruthlessly mock all bad signage and other public errors, and document it all on video, naming namings and laying blames. They would have no power to issue anything more than a non-binding citation, yet their powers of sarcasm would make them feared all over the world, and this fear alone would be enough to get people to stop using quotes for emphasis, make friends with the proper use of the apostrophe, and otherwise respect this wonderful language we speak by using it in a proper and logically consistent manner. A Public Fact Checking Bureau There would be an official government bureau in charge of establishing the truth about legitimately verifiable things. It would be fantastically conservative in what it was willing to declare true and have no other function that to provide both my government and the public a place to get reliable and objective information about things. It would be like factcheck.org combined with Wikipedia, but with a lot more funding and an official government mandate. It would not be in the enforcement business at all. People could still say and think whatever the hell they wanted without fear of consequences or reprisals. There would simply be one publicly accessible encyclopedic database which would be run by the most reliable, dutiful, serious, and above all boring people I could find which would contain the Official Truth, as best as it is possible to establish it through objective research and diligent fact gathering. And over time, hopefully, this public encyclopedia bureau would gain in reputation for objectivity, fairness, and trustworthyness, and thus truly fulfill its function as a repository of fact for such things for which objective truth can be derived.
2. Rock star scientists. My administration would be enthusiastically and wholeheartedly pro-science. I truly believe that science is capable of solving a lot of our problems, including the ones science itself caused (*cough* *global climate change* *cough cough*), and I would quite quickly organize concentrated scientific efforts to solve problems like world hunger and rising energy demand that would make the Manhattan Project look like a lazy brunch meeting of first year science students. The stakes are high and we cannot afford to put anything less than our full effort into these problems. And luckily, as king, I would be able to put these things into action without having to listen to or placate the dozens of well-funded industry special interest groups who hold sway over modern politicians. Do it because I say so, and I don’t give the tiniest and most diarrhetic of shits what it does to your profits. I don’t care if it puts you out of business. I’ll hire your staff, pay them better, and put them to work on something that helps humanity for a change. I get the feeling they might well thank me for it.
   

Those are just some of the many ideas I will implement in that heady future somewhere in the skein of reality where I become king of the world.

It won’t happen here, but it will happen somewhere! Quantum physics says so, honest!

Being a thoughtful and creative person, I have spent a lot of time thinking about creativity. What makes one person more creative than another? Why is it that creative people have so many emotional problems? Why is it that creative people seem to have a lot of characteristics in common?

First off, I think it boils down to a tension between two extremes, the creative mindset, and the ordering mindset. And the difference between these two mindsets, on a cognitive level, lies in how they treat barriers.

The ordering mindset is optimized towards separations and distinctions. It seeks out the differences between things and seeks to put all things in categories, structures, systems, and orders. It is a mindset supremely capable of dealing with a great deal of disparate information and sorting and comprehending it in an orderly and systematic way. It is drawn to clear lines, sharp distinctions, known procedures, established facts, and “a place for everything and everything in its place”. It is repelled by ambiguity, judgment calls, blurred boundaries, uncharted territory, and things which defy categorization. It is most comfortable in small mental spaces and feels anxious and unsafe without a great deal of predictability and order surrounding it.

Above all, it is a mind built for order.

The creative mindset, on the other hand, is optimized towards making connections. Hence, the creative mind wants their to be as few barriers and distinctions in its contents possible. Walls only impede the discovery of connections between things that is the heart of creativity. The creative mind is always seeking to break down barriers, find connections between things which seem unconnected, and seeks wide open mental spaces in which to experiment with large ideas and find those elusive connections. It is attracted to ambiguity, mystery, inconsistency, and things which defy categorization. It avoids sharp distinctions, restrictions, ordered systems, strict definitions, and limited possibilities. The creative mind feels anxious and trapped in the sort of ordered and defined space that the ordering mind finds comforting. The creative mind finds safety not in order but in its own maneuverability, like an animal that relies on its speed and adaptability to survive, and thus avoids anything that smells like a cage or a trap.

This are, of course, two polar opposites, and the bell curve of life dictates that most people will be some mix of these two extremes. Nobody is entirely ordered or completely creative (except perhaps autistics and schizophrenics, respectively) and I am not trying to pigeonhole people under labels and definitions.

As a creative person, that would be anathema to me.

I am simply pointing out an interesting axis which I think yields fruitful results when applied to the examintion of the human psyche.

Most people, as I have said, will be a mixture of the two poles, but most people will be more on one side of the spectrum than the other. I’ve already said that I am a creative person. Rules, restrictions, and definitions tend to bore, depress, and/or frighten me. It would be easy, therefore, for me to look down on the orderly types as dull and colorless and us creatives types as being ever so much better.

But I also know my own weaknesses too well to permit such provincialism. I know that, for one thing, my creative mind makes it difficult to make decisions sometimes. The ability to see a myriad of possibilities in every situation comes at the cost of having those many possibilities to choose from when a course of action is needed. Ordered minds rarely face such indecision. They see a clear route through every maze and are only stopped when they encounter something so ambiguous or unknown that their existing tools of ordering and categorization can’t conquer it. Then, ironically, they need someone like me.

So clearly, both mindsets have their strengths and weaknesses, and the world simply could not keep turning without both of them. We need the ordered minds to keep things straight, to create order out of chaos, to deal with situations which required a strong sense of order and regularity, and to keep everything together. We need creative minds to chart new territories, to push the boundaries, to test the known facts for weaknesses and hence improve the strength of the system as a whole.

To conclude, I think that, in the spirit of greater human harmony and understand, it would be a great boon to humanity if we creative types strove to understand the ordering types and accept that they have their value and their role as well, and for them to do the same for us.

It’s how we create greater order in the world!

Just one story on the FSR this week, because this one’s a lulu.

Now here is two words I bet you never thought you would here together again, ever : cold fusion.

Yes, amazingly, it’s back in the news. Those of us who were around back when those two words first came together in the public imagination will likely remember those heady few days between the first news story concerning this amazing scientific breakthrough which was going to change the world and finally solve all our energy problems forever, and the inevitable realization that it was all a bunch of crap and the whole thing was a big sad cruel joke created by overenthusiastic scientists and an ever more overenthusiastic media.

Well, hang on to your hats, because apparently it’s 1988 against and we’re getting on this ride just one more time for old times’ sake.

This time, it’s a pair of Italian scientists named Rossi and Focardi who are claiming to have invented a phenomenal new process that will yield tons of free energy via a room-temperature reaction that produces neither carbon emissions nor radioactive waste, and produces eight times the energy you put into it or possibly a lot more.

Now, as an open minded rugged skeptic who prides himself on being both open to anything and fooled by nothing, the first challenge this sort of story presents is as simple as it is profound : not immediately dismissing the whole thing with a derisive, mocking laugh out of leftover bitterness from the first time around.

It’s very tempting, and would be both easy and very satisfying. It would be the simplest thing in the world to just say “Hah! We’re not falling for that again, you sad, sad losers! Find a new scam!”

It felt good just typing it. But as easy and fun as that would be, it’s not logical or right. Just because in one rather famous case, the effect turned out to be bogus and the media looked foolish for getting us all excited over what turned out to be nothing does not mean the cold fusion is impossible and that anything bearing that label must, perforce, be a completely and total fraud. These guys could truly be onto something, and it would be a global shame if we dismissed a revolutionary technology that could lead to many wonderful things simply because the field it’s in is somewhat disreputable because of something that happened 23 years ago.

That said, Rossi and Focardi are making a lot of very bold claims, and not providing a lot of the crucial details needed to let other scientists judge said claims for themselves, and so the possibility that they, too, are entirely wrong, or worse, frauds, still remains.

Interestingly, they claim they do not understand how their reaction works. That is, in and of itself, quite damning in many people’s eyes. It is always tempting to jump to the conclusion that if you can’t explain how something works, it doesn’t work. But that’s letting intellectual hubris get in the way of real science. Science does not require an explanation of how something works, it merely requires a demonstration that it works. The explanations can come later.

After all, humanity used fire for thousands of years without having the slightest idea of why it did what it did. They knew that it worked, and how it worked, and what you could do with it. Theories about combustion, oxidation, and chemical energy didn’t come along till quite recently, and it didn’t get in the way of us using fire to found civilization at all.

So have they demonstrated that their process works? Sadly, that’s where things get muddy. They certainly seem to think they have, and they definitely demonstrated something at a big press conference last week. Some other scientists were there and claimed that they verified that it was not a chemical reaction, but the real meat of the thing, the explanation of how it all works and, most tellingly, the means to independantly verify their results via repeating their experiments, remain undisclosed.

This quote from the letter telling them that their patent had been rejected sums it up nicely :

As the invention seems, at least at first, to offend against the generally accepted laws of physics and established theories, the disclosure should be detailed enough to prove to a skilled person conversant with mainstream science and technology that the invention is indeed feasible. … In the present case, the invention does not provide experimental evidence (nor any firm theoretical basis) which would enable the skilled person to assess the viability of the invention. The description is essentially based on general statement and speculations which are not apt to provide a clear and exhaustive technical teaching

In other words, if you are going to make this kind of claim, which would seem to deny the laws of physics, you had better be able to offer more than vague statements and extraordinary boasts.

Their defenders might well claim that Rossi and Focardi are just doing what they have to do to keep others from stealing their brilliant idea and claiming it for their own. But that might be how business works, but it’s certainly not how science works. In science, you do not claim what you cannot prove, and more importantly, what you cannot allow other scientists to prove.

So is their claim real? Are they truly the revolutionary, world-changing scientists they claim to be, or just some of the boldest fraudsters the world has ever known?

I don’t claim to know. I am not qualified to understand their theoretical arguments, and if the world’s top scientists can’t figure out if they are lying, neither can I. It all sounds very fishy, but there is no “fishy soundingness principle” in science. There is just proof or disproof, and if their claims are legit, Rossi and Focardi are doing themselves no favours by playing this so close to the vest.

But who knows? Maybe we’ll all be using one of their reactors in our homes come 2020.

Well, do you? Because I sure do. They’re not totally gone yet, but they are clearly on their way out, and I figured that I would write down a few words about them before go the way of the record store.

To the young people of today, actually going to a brick and mortar store and looking over their selection and then renting something you have to return by hand must seem kind of old-fashioned and clumsy. They probably roll their eyes as their Generation X parents (people my age, in other words) drag them to Blockbuster excitedly and try to get them interested in the whole movie selection process, saying “I used to love coming to the video store when I was your age!”, like that made it any less lame. And even worse, parents my age telling them how getting stuff in the mail from Netflix is just “not the same”.

You’re right, Dad. It’s not the same. It’s better.

And it is better. That’s the thing. Heck, even old school Netflix is looking pretty old in the tooth now that you have things like Netflix Instant, which stream hundreds of thousands of titles to homes without a physical disc being involved in the slightest. No stupid “Netflix queue”, no waiting, no finding a mailbox, no not knowing what you will get, just instant access to the world of video content.

It’s so efficient it hurts. But it’s a good kind of hurt.

Well, don’t worry, kids. I am not going to try to convince you that the Good Old Days were somehow better for being slower, more complicated, more expensive, and all around stupider. I am not, by nature, that nostalgic. I know that life is ever unfolding and that to ask the world to stop just because I am growing older and it is getting harder and harder to adjust to change would be both sad and wrong. Everything I love in the world was born at the expense of something my parents’ generation loved, and what they loved replaced something their parents loved, and so on back through time. There’s nothing so special about my generation’s toys that makes them any different.

But I do want to think on video stores a while, simply because they are something that did not exist when I was born, came into existence well after I entered school, and are now fading with the sunset. They are, therefore, the first major cultural institution that I can think of that will have come and gone during my lifetime (first of many, I am sure) and so, for that alone, the video store deserves some recognition in the pages of my life.

And I was no casual bystander in the video store years. I was a very eager participant. In fact, I was on the front lines, or at the least, had relatives there.

You see, my grandfather, Clifford Gaudet, had C. J. Gaudet’s TV and Stereo Sales and Service, the small town electronics store that brought pretty much everything to my home town. He founded it way back in the days when radio was king, and each successive new thing (black and white TV, long playing records, color TV, stereo sound, the first VCRs, quadraphonic sound, and so on and so forth), so when the video revolution came along in the 80’s, my grandfather’s store was the only place to buy a VCR, and the only place to rent the videos as well.

And because my mother was my grandfather’s daughter, we always got good deals on the Latest Thing, and therefore we had a VCR, and rented videos, a little before others.

Of course, other video stores soon sprang up, and they became a frequent haunt of mine, replacing the video game arcades that I formerly inhabited. Now, instead of hanging around in arcades to get my video game fix, I just rented cartridges for my NES.

The drug was the same, but the dose per dollar was much, much higher.

In fact, for me, the video store was overwhelmingly the video game store. I rented movies now and then, but with limited allowance funds to invest, it just made a whole lot more sense to rent a video game that would give me dozens of hours of entertainment over a movie that would give, at most, two.

Besides, cable television provided all the passive viewing action I could ever have wanted. Muchmusic (Canadian for “MTV”) alone kept me busy a lot of the time.

Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time at the video stores in my area. They just seemed to be where things happened, and best of all, they were the place where I could, if I was lucky, talk to other people about the movies and video games I loved.

Back then, as now, good conversation was one of my primary needs. So hanging out at the video store had many benefits for me, even if I got chastised now and then for “pestering” people. Heck, I was used to it from my days as an arcade brat anyhow.

But then the Internet came along and suddenly, getting my video game fix at home was just a little piracy away. So the trips to the video game store petered out over time, and I would have to say that my days of going to video game stores ended at almost exactly the same time as the end of the SNES.

Video stores and I had a great time together, and I will always look back on those times fondly. They were islands of mental stimulation and color in my sleepy little town. I felt almost at home in them.

That said, I don’t really miss them. How sad can I be about them passing when it has not even occurred to me to go to one in at least six years? And I have one quite close to me. I could go any time I wanted. It’s not even a block away. I just have no use for them any more.

So farewell, video stores. I won’t be there when you finally go, but I was there at the beginning and I am glad for all the fun times we had together.

If there is one aspect of the manifold manifestations of the mind that seems to directly fly in the face of all logic and sense to the average person, it is the existence of masochism.

It would seem that the most basic rule of behaviour in all creatures, from humans all the way down to the lowly amoeba, is that we avoid pain and seek pleasure. Even plants, in their slow and simple way, react to some stimuli by trying to avoid it. So what on Earth went wrong to make some people seek what most people would clearly understand to be painful stimuli?

There are a lot of potential answers to that question, and for different human subjects the answer might vary quite wildly, but on a purely physiological level, it makes more sense than you might think.

In order to reach the answer, however, we first need to understand the nature of physical pain as it is experienced by the human body.

Any painful stimulus causes your body to release some fairly potent internally generated chemicals called endorphins. They are powerful painkillers, and your body is assuming that the pain your are feeling is as a result of real damage being done to the body by a danger which might very well be happening and you can’t afford to be debilitated by pain, so it sends these painkillers into action to delay the pain and let you deal with the danger before the pain gets to you.

And your body is not too fussy about the dosage. It pretty much dumps whatever endorphins it has on hand in only vaguely proportionate amounts relative to the pain, and tends to assume “better too much than too little”. And as many an addict can tell you, if the amount of painkiller exceeds the amount of pain, the result is a very unique and powerful kind of pleasure.

This system works quite well for the rest of the animal kingdom, and for the most part, works quite well for us human beings as well. Even masochists mostly avoid pain and seek pleasure. It is just that the pleasure they seek is that wonderful endorphin rush mentioned above.

This is aided by a simple fact of physiology : pain is a product of nerve trauma, and hence, it gets to our brain immediately via our lightning fast nervous system. And if the stimulus is brief, so is the sensation of pain. But the endorphin response is a product of our much slower and less finely tuned endocrine system, which is chemical and not electrical, and hence comes sufficiently after the pain for our minds to separate the two sensations and treat them differently.

Add to that the fact that we tend to remember the last part of an experience more strongly than the first, and the masochistic pattern begins to emerge. If the pain is brief and first, and the pleasure is long and second, it is quite possible for the human mind to fixate on that pleasure and develop a preference for what seems, on the surface, to be a painful stimuli.

The stimuli is indeed painful, otherwise the endorphins would not be released. But the response is pleasure. It’s all a matter of how your particular brain sorts and interprets the sensation.

And with repeated painful stimuli that are briefer than the pleasure of the endorphin response, the excess builds in the bloodstream and creates a state of mind almost exactly like the haze created by the abuse of various narcotics, and all from one’s own perfectly natural body chemicals. Legal too!

This neatly, if subtly, dodges the logical absurdity inherent in the idea of someone who “likes pain”. In a common sense manner, that just makes no sense. If you like it, it’s not pain, right?

Well, yes and no. The masochist does indeed seek painful stimuli, which seems entirely illogical. But it is not the pain that they like. It’s the pleasure that the pain releases.

In fact, in theory, if the painful stimuli was extremely brief but extremely strong, it would come and go so fast that your conscious mind would barely register it, yet you would still reap the substantial endorphin rewards. All the pleasure with (almost) none of the pain.

In summation, while masochism seems to fly in the face of the most basic rule of animal behaviour – seek pleasure and avoid pain – it is really entirely consistent with it.

It’s just that the pleasure sought is initiated by pain.

[Note : For the purposes of this article, a ‘writer’ is someone whose artistic expression takes the form of stringing together words, and an ‘artist’ is someone in whom it takes the form of manipulating various media in an attempt to create a specific visual image. ]

As a writer, for a long time, I have envied artists. From my admittedly biased and self-centred point of view, it has always seemed to me that they have it a lot easier than us poor scribblers.

The biggest advantage they have is in convincing someone to experience their work. They can just point at their painting or sculpture and say “Hey, look at this!” and the moment people do, bam, they have experienced the art. They might love it or hate it, they might understand it or completely miss the point, they might ‘get you’ or totally misunderstand you, but damn it, they have experienced your work, so you have at least cleared that hurdle with relatively little effort.

We writers don’t have that luxury. Even the most succinct of us, the poets, have trouble convincing anyone to read our work. Reading something is just way more of a commitment than just looking at something. Looking at someone’s carefully constructed image takes a moment. Reading your friend’s poem… that takes time. Minutes! Maybe even a whole bunch of them!

Plus, the levels of involvement and intimacy are, in general, radically different between art and writing. Love it or hate it, the experience of looking at someone’s painting or sculpture will be a brief and fairly undemanding experience. It’s over fast, and for the most part, does not penetrate deeply.

But with writing, you are going to be spending time with the piece. You have to accept it into your mind fairly deeply in order to make sense of it at all, and that means that not only are you asking people for their time, but asking for access to their brain in a way that artists do not need to worry about.

And that’s a heck of a lot to ask of a person, even if they are your friend.

In our society, people are saturated with images. They are quite used to the visual medium, as it is all around them at all times, and so one more thing does not seem like much to ask of them.

But, as hard as it is to imagine for a lifelong reader like me, a lot of people barely read at all. A lot of people, in fact, consider reading anything more than a road sign to be a onerous and despicable chore to be avoided with the fervor and zeal a child uses in avoiding eating their vegetables… and largely for the same reason. At some critical age, they were forced to read, and it put them off it forever.

So not only are you dealing with asking someone to spend a fair amount of time with your writing and let you into their brain to boot, you are also facing the possibility that someone is not only not someone who reads for pleasure, but who actively avoids reading in all forms and considers it a good day when they didn’t have to read so much as a sign on a rest room door.

Obviously, you can’t spend a day without looking at things. Not if your eyes work.

Now I know that these observations are only part of the story, and there’s a lot of down sides to working in the visual medium that writers do not, in general, face.

For one, the visual medium takes a great deal of technical skill that does not come standard with a modern education. Nearly everyone in the modern democratic world gets a firm and early education in the basic skill of writing. It’s called literacy. Most people are literate. But most people can’t draw more than a stick figure.

Also, the ubiquity of the visual medium often causes people to completely devalue it. No matter how much work and talent and sheer artistic hell went into the making of an image, a lot of people will just shrug and say “So? It’s just a picture. What’s the big deal?”

The written word, on the other hand, is more valued because people can more easily see the effort involved. They might not grasp just how hard it was to get that specific shade of blue out of watercolors, but they can at least understand that writing something 1000 words long took a certain amount of time.

Still, with the provincialism of all specialists, I can’t help but envy the visual artists for the ease with which they get people to experience their craft.

And I really want to thank you all for letting me into your brain by reading this entire article!

Logic. It gets brought up a lot but few people really grasp its nature or how it works. People misconstrue it as something cold and emotionless, misapply it during open debate, and misunderstand its basic simplicity and think it is something fit only for Vulcans, nerds, and computers that lose to Doctor Who.

In other words, logic gets a bad rep when it’s really something people already know and understand already, otherwise they would be incapable of functioning in the world at all. Because logic is not some abstruse and remote discipline, it’s the basic rules of how things work and what makes sense, and that is something anybody can use in their life.

So this article is my first attempt at giving the reading public a quick and uncluttered lesson in the basics of logic so that they, themselves, can apply the power and enlightenment of clear logic to their lives.

Logic is your friend! Trust me. Now let’s begin.

One of the major misunderstandings that plagues discussions is either ignorance of, or incomplete knowledge of, the concept of “necessary but not sufficient”. People bring it up and try to apply it, but either don’t really get it, or use it dishonestly as an intellectual smokescreen to try to intimidate their opponents into not questioning their arguments because they don’t know what the term means, exactly.

It sounds impressive, but it’s really quite simple. All “necessary but not sufficient” means is that sometimes, more than one thing is necessary in order for something to be true.

Take your basic ice cream float. It has two ingredients : root beer and ice cream. If you have both of those, you can make yourself a nice frosty treat. If you are missing either of them, you can’t.

Simple, right? Anyone can understand that. And if you understand that, you already have “necessary but not sufficient” in the bag.

When you want to make an ice cream float, both ice cream and root beer are “necessary but not sufficient” conditions to your success. You can’t make an ice cream float without ice cream. You can’t make an ice cream float without root beer. Both parts are necessary, but neither is enough by itself to get the job done.

They are both necessary, but not sufficient, for the task of making an ice cream float. Easy, right?

But in the heat of debate, people get themselves all mixed up and confused because they don’t really get this simple concept, and too much either/or type thinking makes them get lost in a completely pointless and unhelpful side argument about which of two or more things is the MOST necessary.

Think about our ice cream float. Which is more important, the ice cream or the root beer? The answer, of course, is “neither”. You can’t have an ice cream float if you have both. No matter how good the ice cream is, without the root beer, you have no float. No matter how much root beer you have, you still need ice cream or the cool and refreshing treat you crave simply will not happen. Both are equally necessary. Trying to compare the two is meaningless.

Yet in arguments and discussions, people will get entirely sidetracked with “ice cream versus root beer” arguments. The problem is that once the question is framed that way, it’s hard for people to realize the trap they are in and get out.

People are used to true or false questions, this or that questions, A versus B questions. It takes a certain amount of imagination and will to answer “Neither, and the question itself is stupid. ”

And then stick to it. Even people who get that it’s a trap can be baited into falling for by the person who simply ignores their objection and says “Whatever, which one is better?”. The secret is to simply refuse to answer inane questions, and if the person persists, ignore them.

Some games are rigged, and the only way to win is to refuse to play in the first place.

So the next time you are debating with someone, and they keep insisting that two things can’t be equally necessary to something and that you have to choose one or the other as the one that is the REALLY important one, feel free to show them this article and try to get them to read it.

And if that works, offer to make them a root beer float.

it really is that simple, folks!

Being a writer myself (hey, if after a million words, I’m not a writer, nobody is), I’ve perused a lot of the literature online and in print about how to be a good writer, a better writer, a published writer, a writer with a better standard of living than a Calcutta street beggar, and so on.

And there is a lot of highly valuable advice out there about how to put together a professional looking manuscript, how to tighten up your writing to make it more succinct, how to convince editors that you are literate (I should use good grammar? Really? Wow!), how to come up with ideas, how to write convincing dialogue, and even some idea about how to write something worth reading.

And that is all very important stuff, but it’s really only half of the equation. And the problem is that because so much of the advice in the world about writing covers only or primarily that half, it can give a young writer the false impression that writing is all about rules, technique, precision, and a lot of other details which, to a certain mindset, can be extremely off-putting. It makes it seem like writing is an art form for accountants, lawyers, and other highly detail-oriented people only, and if you are one of those kinds of people, you might as well just not bother typing a single word.

And that is just not true. Sure, all those things count for a lot. But none of those things, by themselves, make you a good writer. It is the difference between writing as a skill and writing as a talent, between the little details and the big picture, between something you don’t particularly mind reading and something you actually enjoy reading.

This is an obvious truth, when you stop to consider it. None of the great writers who are universally admired today won their immortality and respect by having the fewest typos in their manuscript or by having the fewest split infinitives, the least number of unnecessary adverbs and adjectives, or the most “according to Hoyle” paragraph structure. If it was that easy, there would be a lot of people tied for first place.

Obviously, there must be something more to writing that precision of execution and the ability to follow the rules, and it’s that portion of the endeavour that is the subject of this article, and that I refer to when I speak of “the other half of writing”.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the other half of writing is much harder to learn and ever harder to teach than the half you usually see in writing manuals and advice columns. It’s a lot easier to educate people in writing cover letters and finding markets than it is to somehow teach imagination, insight, understanding, empathy, wit, and that sine qua non of je ne sais pas of writing, having something interesting to say.

Those are all highly subjective and ephemeral qualities that cannot be learned by rote or mastered through intensive study, and only a fool would claim to be do more than just point you in the right general direction or give you some potential fruitful food for thought.

Nobody and nothing can truly teach these things to a person, and so the books and websites stick to what can be taught, and thus unintentionally give the impression that writing is that, and nothing more.

Every writing manual, every helpful blog entry, every “how to get published” guide, and every writer’s group nugget of advice should begin with “This assumes that you have a good story to tell, a beautiful dream to share, or something interesting to say. ”

And of course, many do. A lot of these manuals do include something along these lines in their introduction. But the way it’s phrased is often quite harsh and negative, taking things from the “fuck you if you can’t write” end of the stick, as though to crush as many people’s dreams as possible.

My point, and I do have one, is that the real message for potential writers is not “you probably suck and don’t even bother”, but “if all these rules and regulations seem too much for you, if it seems like you have to be a detail-obsessed nitpicker to even stand a chance of getting noticed, relax. If you are good enough at the other half of writing, editors will forgive the occasional imperfection in your technique. ”

After all, that’s why editors exist. One of the little secrets that writing manuals won’t tell you is that a lot of very famous and important writers made a lot of work for their editors. They have (or had) poor spelling, grammar, typing, you name it. On the writer manual scorecard, they scored very poorly.

But once all the surface imperfections were fixed, once the grime and dirt and dust were wiped away and the nature of what was underneath was revealed, what the editors found was solid gold.

That doesn’t mean you should just type any old thing in any old way and fire it off without even proofreading it and expect the editors to line up at your door to kiss your ring. You still have to make it as good as you can before sending it off or showing it around, if for no other reason than to show the editor that you respect them enough to do as much of their work for them as you can before dumping something on your desk, and thus, give you word a chance to appeal to them.

But if the best you can do is still a lot less than perfect, do not despair. That doesn’t mean that you completely suck at writing and shouldn’t even bother trying.

After all, you might be very good at the other, more important half of writing.

And if you are, the rest of it will not matter nearly as much as you think it will.