Have To vs. Want To

Hi! It's Jaleta Clegg, your alternating Tuesday guest poster.

I've been fighting a struggle I think most writers fight. The Have-To list vs. the Want-To list. I would love to get up every morning and only have to worry about two things - what to eat for breakfast and which story to write. But life isn't that simple. I have children to get out the door to school, I have meals to plan, bills to pay, a house to clean, and a day job to help pay said bills. Writing gets squeezed into the cracks in my schedule. The things that have to be done take precedence over the things I want to do. It's part of being an adult, taking care of the things you don't want to do that need done.

So what does this have to do with writing? Most authors make peanuts with their writing. The only way to really make a living at it is to either write whatever people want you to write whether you care about it or not or figure out how to write a breakout book like "Twilight." Real life interferes with writing all the time, because bills have to be paid and work has to be done. If you're passionate about writing, you will find a way to write in those corners of your life. As an art teacher said to our class once, "If you give up going to the bathroom, you could gain and hour or two a day for drawing!" Not a route I'd recommend, but writing is another matter. With advances in technology, you could take your laptop into the bathroom with you. Wait, probably not a great idea—water and electronics are not a good combination. But a creative author will find a way.

I spent the day yesterday cleaning and organizing parts of my house that have been neglected far too long. It's easier to shut the door and say, "I'll figure out how to stack all those storage items tomorrow." Tomorrow rarely comes. My house reached the point I couldn't ignore it any longer. But I also spent those hours working out stories in my head, preparing for those precious minutes that I can just write.

So thank goodness for chore charts for the kids, online bill pay, and crockpots for dinner. Otherwise, my house would be a complete disaster, the bills would never get paid, and my family would starve; because I'm a writer.

The End of Infinity (Infinity of Fun Part III)

by David Siegel Bernstein, PhD

To conclude my series on infinity, I will now attempt to answer the question: does size does matter? Answer: maybe (at least for infinity . . . which is what I am talking about).

According to the mathematician Georg Cantor there is an infinite number of infinities including "little bits" of infinity. Meaning, not all infinities are created equal. No fair! Or is it? Who knows? Remember infinity is an idea not a number.

Consider the -- artfully designed -- Venn diagram below. It represents infinite sized sets nestled inside other infinite sets. The inner most set represents the universe of whole (counting) numbers, but as shown this is only a subset of integers (whole + negative numbers) which is a subset of rational numbers (whole + negative + fractions/decimals), which is a subset of real numbers (all the above + irrational numbers).

Cantor demonstrated that these sets cannot be completely matched up; what he called a lack of 1-1 correspondence. Simply put, if you were to keep using a whole number to cancel out an integer number, once you've exhausted the your stash of whole numbers you would still have integers left over after -- even though you had an infinite number of whole numbers!

By the way, there are sets that lay beyond real numbers called transfinite numbers. Good luck thinking about those! If anyone is interested in learning more about them, let me knew and I'll cover it in a future post.

See you next month in time and space with a new topic.

Infinity of Fun, Part II

By David Siegel Bernstein, PhD

Welcome back to Part II of our discussion on infinity.

Drum Roll. Now as promised last month, I'm going to take a bullet in the name of math. My arch nemesis, who oddly enough volunteered for this job, aims her rifle at me and fires. According to math, do I get hit? (And yes, she is a good shot.)

If we believe Zeno of Elea (living during the 400s BC), I'm safe. Of course he didn't know about rifles, but he did like to devise devious paradoxes similar to this situation. The bullet flying toward me passes half way across the room, then half the remaining distance, then half again, and so on. I've divided its journey into infinite number of shorter and shorter segments. So in this case, Zeno would have argued that motion is an illusion.

The idea is (sort of) consistent with math because any line segment can be divided into infinite number of points. In the sad story of my shooting, the bullet must pass through an infinite number of points making me infinitely far away from the bullet. It's always getting closer and closer to me but never hitting me.

Math has saved me . . . well, except for when it doesn't. You see according to physics, and my foe's true aim, I'm going to get hit. Why?

I'll give you Aristotle's (384 BC – 322 BC) answer. Like Zeno, he didn't know about rifles, but he was aware of the halving paradox. He would have considered how long it took the bullet to reach me. Let's assume it's a very slow bullet, taking a full second to reach me and I'm slow to react. He'd argue that each interval of the series (all the halves) have a corresponding time. Assuming a constant bullet speed, as the distance gets shorter so does the time until impact. So I'm running out of time. All the time intervals added together can not exceed a second. Therefore it can not take an infinite amount of time to reach me.

So there is a limit (Do you recall limits from Part I? No? You could give it a re-read. I won't tell . . . I swear.) and it isn't infinity. If it took a half of a second to reach the halfway mark, then it can not be the case that the total time it takes to hit me to be greater than a second. You can't pass an INFINITE number of points in FINITE time.

So I've been shot (damn you physics). But don't worry it was only a glancing wound, I'll survive to write more.

Bad, Bad Habits to Avoid When Writing Fiction

As an author of fiction, it poses thrilling and tantalizing possibilities since your work is an open slate before you. However, there are a few bad habits that you must steer clear of if you want to excel in your next writing project:

1. Cut out generic nouns and verbs: There are so many words in the alphabet that you truly want to paint a picture in your writing. Instead of using vague descriptive words, bring detail to any sentence that you write by choosing words that are off of the beaten path. Have others read your work, and if you find yourself using the same words over and over again, begin to substitute synonyms to add color to your fiction.

2. Create compelling dialogue: Dialog should mimic an actual conversation so that you are drawn into the text. It can become quite disruptive if the author continues to use "he said, she said". Instead, create the dialogue in a way that the conversation is easy to follow without tagging which characters said what over and over again.


3. Edit your use of adverbs: To qualify point number one, you still must edit your use of adverbs so that the fictional text does not become too wordy and difficult to read. Often times, less is more, so cut out one or more adverbs and adjectives if you find yourself overdoing it in your fictional writing. Another issue is contradictions, like the phrase "very unique". Something will or will not be unique, so saying "very unique" is actually redundant.

4. Be realistic: If your dialogue in the story does not sound the way that people actually would talk, it will be difficult for your reader to believe your fiction. Instead, add in slang and pauses so that it sounds more similar to an actual conversation.

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