Brian Clegg's Blog, page 22

Hugely impressed by Janice Hallett's The Appeal , I had to buy her second novel, The Twyford Code and was equally pleased, though for slightly different reasons.

Once again, what we have here is an ingenious mystery novel, constructed in an unusual fashion - where The Appeal was primarily made up of emails, the bulk of The Twyford Code comprises 200 voice notes, left by one-time career criminal Steve Smith. Transcriptions of these (supposedly made by software, and so containing a series of transcription errors) have been sent by a police inspector to a professor to ask if he can throw any light on them.

At the heart of the story are a series of books by a variant of Enid Blyton called Edith Twyford. The equivalent to the Famous Five is the Secret Six, and a Secret Six book that Smith encounters while at school seems to both contain mysterious coded messages and to be linked to the disappearance of his school teacher, an event that still haunts him from many years in the past. Smith ends up meeting up with some old school friends who act as sort of anti-Secret Six in trying to work out the mystery.

Incidentally, I have no idea why the tagline says 'It's time to solve the murder of the century' - there is a murder in the story, but it isn't really what the story is about at all... and it certainly isn't the murder of the century in any identifiable sense.

As was the case with The Appeal, what makes this book work so well is the multi-layered mechanism of the the medium - in this case those voice messages, with occasional recorded conversations. Hallett incorporates all kinds of deception, some of which you might be able to predict if you've read the previous novel, but most of which take the reader by surprise. In the final section of the book, the professor uncovers what really happened - it's all there to see, but pretty well impossible to predict.

One of the quotes on the back says this is 'even better than The Appeal' - I don't think this is true. Because the storytelling here is mostly a monologue, rather than a series of interactions between different characters, it didn't engage me as much as The Appeal did (though it was certainly still un-put-down-able). However, it makes up for that by setting a far more complex puzzle, with a wonderfully convoluted relationship between what you read and what it's actually about. It's rather like one of those beautiful, jewel-like Japanese puzzle boxes: it's so intricate and beautifully constructed. Even though I did spot one of the coded messages that eventually would give everything away, I didn't interpret what it meant correctly at the time. The plot is, admittedly, far-fetched - but this genuinely doesn't matter.

Overall another brilliant triumph for Hallett. Can't wait to read book number three.

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If I am honest, I'm not a great fan of books with a disaster, 'end of civilisation as we know it' scenario. In my teens I hoovered up vast quantities of these from War of the Worlds to Day of the Triffids, and absolutely loved them in my typical teen enjoyment of misery, but as I've grown older I have become increasingly fond of it all ending happily ever after. I think my problem with disaster books (and films) is the cavalier way that millions are slaughtered by the author. We are expected to feel connected to the main character, who usually miraculously survived, but I am always kept at a cold distance, because I am so sad for everyone else, the bit part players who are killed off for the sake of the scenario.

This meant I was a little nervous coming to Kate Kelly's young adult novel Red Rock, as this is 'cli fi' - fiction based on the world being transformed by climate change, and on the whole that's a pretty disaster-laden scenario. I needn't have worried - although the backdrop is of civilisation crumbling in the face of climate change, the storyline is pure action thriller with plenty of mystery and suspense, which soon distracted me from any concern about the fate of the world.

The main character, Danni, is beset by a host of problems, left on her own (or at least with a stranger) in an attempt to escape capture and understand more about the mysterious object given to her by her dying aunt. The tension rarely gives up for long - this is one of those excellent stories where the reader accompanies the MC on a race against time and the odds.

If I have any complaint it's an unusual one for me - there is not quite enough description. I felt this particularly when Danni visits both Oxford and Cambridge, cities I am very familiar with, yet I was never given enough to know where she was. Particularly irritating was the way she had to find the library of a Cambridge college, but we aren't told which. But any frustration from this is washed away as the action pounds on.

Particularly good for a young adult novel is the way that there is a 'bad' character who turns out to not be all bad. For those familiar with that soon-to-return epic of Australian art, Neighbours (what can I say? my children made me watch it), I was always rather impressed by the character Paul Robinson, who despite being a long-running baddy was at the same time very caring for those who are close to him, and had moments of genuine thoughtfulness to season the self-centred, grasping ruthlessness. Similarly, Red Rock has a character (I won't give it away by saying who) who betrays a friend but then more than makes up for it.

The other surprise was that I rather liked the climate change backdrop. It is never heavily laid on, but both the sad remains of Cambridge, under water when the tide is in, and the casual decay of coastal towns is beautifully handled. It is never trowelled on, but really gives a feel for the depressing reality of a future where climate change continues unchecked.

Overall, a book that works both as a good, page-turning YA thriller and one that makes you think.

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I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game, backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess).

Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense of suspense.

Chess is wonderfully cerebral, but it lacks any parallel with real life, where luck always plays a significant part. By mixing strategy and luck, backgammon is far more visceral. And this aspect is made even stronger by backgammon’s other strength - it has a gambling element. 

This doesn't mean that backgammon has to be about money (and of course you can bet on a game of chess just as much as you can backgammon) - it’s the incorporation of a type of gamble into the play itself. Backgammon has the concept of doubling. At any point, a player can challenge their opponent to make a better forecast on the outcome of the game, gambling on that by accepting a double. If the opponent accepts, the value of the game is doubled, but if the opponent refuses, they immediately lose. If you play backgammon without doubling, you miss a major part of its gameplay attraction.

The originator of game theory, John von Neumann, famously told British mathematician Jacob Bronowski 'Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now real games are not like that. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do.' While I think von Neumann was a little hard on chess, and I personally extend the definition of games to include it, for me the combination of a random element and the forecast challenge of doubling makes backgammon the superior game.

Image by Figist and Co from Unsplash

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As I mentioned recently, not everyone is a writer - but plenty of people would like to write a book. I've had over 50 books commercially published, so thought it might be useful to do a short series on the essentials of writing a non-fiction book and getting it published. See the end of this post for a summary of the series.

In the first part of this series I looked at deciding whether your idea was really a book - to do this I recommended listing around 10 headings that would set out your basic structure. Now we're going to flesh those out. What we'll get is the biggest part of a book proposal - the document you send to a publisher to sell your idea. It's also extremely valuable once you starting writing the book. What you will do next is, for each heading, fill in some detail.

I'm going to show you two ways to do this - but before I do, I ought to warn you that putting together the outline is the hardest part of writing a book. It can be agony. If you do it properly, it should take you between half a day and a day, which doesn't sound like a lot of effort. But the thing is, what I'm asking you to do is put together all the key topics covered under each heading, at a time you probably won't have fully researched the contents. This really stretches your imagination to the limits. Also - like every forecast or budget - it will be wrong. Some things you list here won't end up in the final book. Some will need to be added as you go along. But it's still an essential part of putting a book proposal (or plan for self-publishing) together.

I'm going to give you two examples of (part of) an outline. In both cases, these are books that use a particular style of having an introductory chapter, then a step back chapter giving some background, then diving in for some more detail. Of course, your book may not be structured like this, but it is one effective way to draw readers in. 

The first example is a bullet point approach. Here we provide a series of subheadings (you could include sub-subheadings too, if it helps) - short phrases that take us through the main points that will be covered. It can be quite useful to have a summary couple of words, then a little more text rounding out the description as you will see here. This is the first three chapters of the original outline for my book on Gravitational Waves.

14 September 2015

·      The first hint – whispers of a detected event on the LIGO team network

·      Engineering runs – this version of LIGO was not live yet. They were still testing

·      Blind injections – even if there was a detection, it could have been a fake

·      Realisation – the reality hits the team: a gravitational wave has been detected

Waves?

·      On the beach – waves at their most familiar

·      Modelling the universe – how we make use of models, like waves to explain the unknown

·      Light fantastic – the wave theory of light and its current status

·      Ripples in the cosmos – other waves, leading to the possibility of gravitational waves

 

Einstein’s baby

·      Newtonian wobbles – how gravitational waves could exist even in Newton’s version

·      Einstein goes relativistic – the introduction of relativity

·      The general theory – Einstein takes on gravity

·      Warps and wefts – the implications of having warped spacetime and its ability to wave

·      Shaking it all about – Einstein’s prediction – but remembering he also said he expected they would be impossible to detect

In the second example, rather than use bullet points, I've written a couple of paragraphs describing the chapter. This can work better with a longer book, where the chapters can benefit from a more readable description. The text below is from the original outline for my book What Do You Think You Are? - note the way that each chapter summary ends with a sentence tying it to the next chapter, which makes it flow better for the reader. This is particularly useful if you are using the outline to sell to a publisher, as it's particularly important then that your text reads well.

1. A Complex Web

Genealogy has never been more popular. Yet TV shows such as the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? and genealogy websites can only scratch the surface. This approach may give small insights into where we came from as individuals, yet the components that make you distinctively you form a complex web stretching into the far past that consists of so much more than the skeletal parental lines of genealogy

This introductory chapter prepares us for a dive into the different aspects and pathways of our individual pasts that make us the people that we are.

We can’t ignore genealogy though. It is embedded in our consciousness. However, what we uncover rarely does more than scratch the surface. As we shall discover, though, we can say that the reader is indubitably descended from royalty.

2. Your Ancestors Were Royal

Some of us delight in genealogy, others treat is as family trainspotting – but whatever your view, it has severe limitations. This chapter starts with the idea of a very simple family tree that ignores siblings and works backwards. Each generation, the number of people goes up exponentially: 1, 3, 7, 15… for n generations, it’s 2n-1. It has been estimated that around 107 billion people have ever lived. This is less than 237. Yet 37 generations takes us back fewer than 1,000 years of the circa 200,000 humans have existed. And that’s just one person’s family tree out of 7 billion plus. There’s something very wrong here.

The flaw is in thinking that your real family tree is a neat branching structure – but in reality it’s entangled and intertwined. Whether it’s the intense inbreeding of historical royal families (and the medical problems that brought) or the historically limited gene pool from lack of mobility, such is the entanglement that show mathematically that you are related to everyone in the region you were born in alive 1,000 years ago or earlier (who has living descendants). That includes all the royalty. Just like Danny Dyer, you have royal blood.

This chapter goes on both to include the history of genealogy and the remarkable story of mitochondrial Eve – the result of using mitochondrial DNA, passed down through the female line, to trace back to the most recent common ancestor of all living humans. Going deeper we look at how using the complete genome goes back far further to LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all organisms now living, 3.5 to 3.8 billion years in the past. This, though, is as nothing to your true origin story – the origin of the atoms that makes you up.

3. Stardust Memories
On a physical level, you are a collection of atoms – and they have far more history than any other aspect of what comes together to make you up. In this chapter we trace back the history of a number of atoms in your body to see how they’ve previously been in plants and mountains, movie stars and dinosaurs. But that’s only the beginning. 
Long before the first sparks of life on Earth – before the formation of the solar system around 5 billion years ago – almost every atom that is now in your body already existed. (We’ll also track down those odd ones that didn’t.) We see how the heavier atoms were forged in stars which then exploded to send their stardust across the galaxy. But even that isn’t the beginning. The components of those atoms existed before those exploding stars themselves were formed – as did all the many billions of hydrogen atoms in your body. We see how those came into existence over 13 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 400,000 years old. We can even go back further to understand how the energy those atoms were produced from originated with the universe itself.
Atoms are a very reductionist way to see what we’re made up of. But there’s a higher-level pathway to follow too. Food, water, oxygen – there’s a whole mess of inputs required to power your body, grow it and keep it healthy. 

To finish, here's an outline of the topics this series of posts will cover.

Is my idea a book? OutliningOther parts of a proposalThe pitch letterFinding a publisherThe contractSelf-publishing

Image by Corinne Kutz from Unsplash

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Some subscribe to the view that creativity is only about the arts - but this is to misunderstand the nature of creativity. There is a huge amount of creativity in the sciences, yet we rarely seen any guidance on improving it. (Creativity is also important to business, but that has a solid literature.)

How to be Creative does what it says on the cover - unlike some books on creativity, it’s a practical guide, easy to read and apply. The authors start with a brief introduction to the nature of creativity and the reality of engaging creativity on demand. They then look at the basic structure of a creativity session, particularly one that's team oriented (the quick version is 'don't do anything they do on The Apprentice when attempting brainstorming’). We then get a good chapter expanding on possible creativity techniques. 

So far, the topics covered have been general purpose problem solving and idea generation techniques, but the most novel content is the next chapter which is specifically about mathematical creativity (with a touch of physical science thrown in). Finally we return to the general for a chapter on workshops and one on evaluation of ideas. The whole thing is a compact 100 pages. It's practical, easy to read and effective.

If you are involved in STEM work, this book is really worth a look - it might change your view on the relevance of creativity to you career. My only real criticism is that it's priced more like a textbook than a general purpose title - but hopefully it’s one that your organisation might purchase.

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here You can order How to be Creative from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org.
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As I mentioned recently, not everyone is a writer - but plenty of people would like to write a book. I've had over 50 books commercially published, so thought it might be useful to do a short series on the essentials of writing a non-fiction book and getting it published. See the end of this post for a summary of the series.

The good thing about writing non-fiction is that, if successful, you sell the book to a publisher before you write it. By contrast, fiction has to be written first, and in most cases has to be presented to publishers via an agent. But even if you intend to self-publish (more on this later), it's still crucial to establish whether or not you have an idea for a book before putting too much effort into it.

The chances are, the topic is something you are enthusiastic about - and that's great. When an author loves their topic, it can come through very effectively to the reader. However, this doesn't mean that there is a readership out there that will be equally fascinated. Your readers are not you. Just because you've been engrossed, say, watching the birds in your back garden, does not mean a book about them would be a natural bestseller. (I'm not ruling that out as a topic - but it needs thinking about.)

Broadly there are three things to consider - is there enough material for a book, have you something new and interesting to add, and who will buy it.

My former agent's first question was always whether an idea was a book or a magazine article. A topic can make for an absolutely riveting article but may not be worth giving, say, 75,000 to 100,000 words to discussing it. A great way to explore this a bit more, which will be useful for the second step of the process too, is to break down your topic into a series of headings. You can do this as a list, or, if you prefer, with some kind of visual structure, such as a mind map. Say you have around ten of these headings. Could you write 7,000 to 10,000 words on each (around five magazine articles), or would you struggle to put together more than a few of pages?

If there isn't enough to go on, this doesn't mean you have to abandon the idea - though in some cases that would make sense - but rather to think more widely about your overall topic. If, for example, this is a biography, but not enough is known about the individual, you could bring in headings covering various contexts. This might be about some major historical event they were part of, or something more on the specialty area that makes this person worth writing about... context is key here.

The second point was whether you have something new to add. This means doing some research. What's already out there? What other books might overlap with yours on the topic? If yours is about a very personal subject, the overlap might be in the type of story involved. For example, if the key to your book involved your grandparents' unusual upbringing, look for other memoirs that have this kind of subject.  If you are writing about something more general, then others could have already written a book on the topic.

Note that there being other books out there doesn't mean that you can't write one too - but you need to find your unique selling point. What is it about you and your take on the subject that is truly different? It might be there is new information to add, or a topic is particularly timely because of an anniversary. It could be that you have new stories to tell, or can approach the same topic in a totally different way. It may be that your personal experience gives you a unique insight. Each or all of these could apply. Remember, though, that it is not enough just to be different from the rest. You need to be different and appeal to your audience.

That leads us neatly on to the third question - who will buy your book? When we get onto a proposal - the document you need to put together for a publisher, but that is also worthwhile as a guide if self-publishing, you will need to identify exactly who your audience will be. It's not enough to say 'Everyone would want to read this.' Not only is that extremely unlikely, it doesn't help at all. Give some serious thought to the kind of person you will be aiming your book at, and whether such people will be willing to pay the cover price to get hold of a copy.

One final consideration at this stage and throughout - the importance of narrative. I've mentioned the 's' word (story) a couple of times already. You may be thinking 'But I want to write non-fiction - why is he wittering on about stories? Surely non-fiction is about facts?' A collection of facts is not a book in the sense I'm trying to help with, it's a list. It might be a useful list. It may even be one you can sell in book form (think, for example, of something like the Guinness Book of World Records). But it isn't what we normally think of as a non-fiction book - it's a reference, a gift book or a novelty title. If you are to write a successful general non-fiction book, its success will depend on your ability to draw the reader in and get them interested. And that means telling stories. More on that in the next part of this series.

To finish, here's an outline of the topics this series of posts will cover.

Is my idea a book?OutliningOther parts of a proposalThe pitch letterFinding a publisherThe contractSelf-publishing

Image by Nick Morrison from Unsplash

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Writers are more prone than most to search for themselves on Google, if only to keep an eye out for reviews. For many years I've had a friendly rivalry with Brian Clegg art supplies as to who comes out on top in those searches - but now, I'm sad to learn that the company has gone into receivership. 

The firm dates back to 1973, and for years has been a leading supplier of art materials to British primary schools and beyond. What's more, it was established in the town where I lived for my first 22 years, Rochdale in Lancashire - a town that has suffered more than most in a post-industrial world, and will be hit hard by the redundancies.

Inevitably we sometimes get confused with each other. I occasionally get emails about paint, and an old work colleague just the other day emailed to say he was impressed to see my paint-based sideline. I might have sometimes moaned in the past when they beat me to that top spot (when I looked just now they were still there)... but it's really sad to see them go.

If you're interested in railways - and it's hard to imagine why you would buy this book if you're not - this is a fascinating exploration of the rise and fall of British Railways/British Rail from nationalisation in 1948 through to privatisation in the mid-1990s.

Along the way, we take in the phasing out of steam (and why, unlike many other countries we mostly converted to diesel), the infamous Beeching cuts of the network in the 1960s, successes such as the 125 mile per hour High Speed Train with the InterCity brand and more. What comes across most strongly is the way that interference from government has time and again messed things up. It's not that the railway management itself was without faults - particularly in the way that the old regions, reflecting the four private companies that were taken over, tried to still do things their own way. And Christian Wolmar is no fan of the many restrictive practices that had to be gradually removed in the face of resistance from staff. Similarly, the London-centric management never properly handled what was dismissively referred to as the 'Provincial' region. But time and again, the government got it wrong.

Whether it was Beeching's total mishandling of the necessary pruning of some of the oddities and low usage branch lines left over from Victorian railway expansion, removing many valuable connections and stations, the inability to properly account for the need to subsidise some lines for the public good, or a lack of recognition of good management practice where it was brought into play, successive governments, both Conservative and Labour, have proved totally incapable of understanding the country's rail needs - while the Treasury has resisted every sensible investment to improve the railways from day one. And, of course, the story ends with the disastrous privatisation, just when BR was getting its act together, that has resulted in far more public subsidy than was previously the case - plus terrible services in some areas. Wolmar holds up some hope for the planned formation of Great British Railways, an oversight body taking in most of Britain's railways - but since the book was written, that too seems to be suffering from government mishandling.

From the point of view of a railway enthusiast dating back to peak diesel, the book's biggest fault is an over-concentration on politics and details of management structures. Of course this is important, but it is given too much detail sometimes, where some of the niceties of the experience of being a rail traveller in the BR period could have had more coverage. The favourites of late 60s/early 70s trainspotters, the Deltics, do get a couple of mentions - but no real details. The beautiful, if flaky, diesel hydraulic Western class aren't even named - they get lumped in with a general criticism of the Western Region's attempt to do it their way. And I would have liked to have seen more detail, for example, of the seating, food provided in the dining cars and suchlike.

However, I can't deny that the politics, management and strategy (or lack of it) that are explored here are central to understanding what happened to British Rail, why it got better - and why it wasn't far better still. A must for UK rail fans.

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This is what they call a high concept book - you don't need many details to get the point, as what it sells is a clear, simple concept. In this case it's retracing Bill Bryson's journey from his 1995 book Notes from a Small Island, as much as possible staying and eating in the same places, seeing the same sights and having the same experiences. This book just jumped at me off the bookshelf - I love travel books that are humorous (the serious ones generally come across as far too worthy) and am a big fan of Bryson, even when he had the temerity to amble into popular science.

As a result, I was a little unnerved when I read in Ben Aitken's introduction 'I mention this (the book being an irreverent homage, rather than a pious and gushing one) to give the more zealous members of Bryson's fan club a chance to back out now... Nor am I funny. If I ever seem funny, or write things that seem funny, it is almost always by accident.' So, it's arguable this introductory statement pretty much entirely counters my reason for buying the book in the first place (and probably quite a few buyers). Perhaps it should be mentioned on the back cover (interestingly, it is in the online equivalent of a blurb). Luckily, though, Aitken's comments turn out to be more self-deprecatory than entirely factual.

There's no doubt that there are dollops of humour in here, some of which work really well - though the style of book doesn't sit awfully well with Aitken's regular thoughts on social justice and inequality. It's not that I disagree with him about the impact of inequality, particularly in the North and the South West - I'm all in favour of levelling up and such - it's just that this content does not fit well with Bryson and would be more apposite if Aitken had decided to take the same approach to an Orwell or J. B. Priestley book. In fact both get several mentions, and probably the biggest thing I've got out of reading Aitken is putting Priestley's English Journey on my 'to read' list.

Aitken's writing comes alive when he recounts conversations, from the delightful to the downright scary, when encountering a character who quite clearly could resort to violence at any moment. And some of his descriptions of places are effective. But at times he follows Bryson in such a half-hearted way that it's hard to get much out of the travel writing. So, for instance, he tells us that Bryson thinks that Blackpool's illuminations were tacky and inadequate. But he doesn't bother to actually look at them himself, relying on a one line comment from a local to give his response.

In the end - and Aitken effectively admits this - any attempt to be critical of Bryson's travel writing is breaking a butterfly on the wheel. The original book was not about in-depth analysis, or even deep reaction to the surroundings. It's as much about Bryson's character and the feel he gets of the place as it is 'real' travel writing. That being the case, it was never going to be an easy job to try to follow Bryson and update us on how things have  changed, because Bryson was not offering biting social commentary or exquisite architectural observation. There is, in the end, very little in Notes from a Small Island that can sensibly be updated, unless it were done by Bryson himself - and frankly, his attempt in the 2015 The Road to Little Dribbling wasn't up to the original. So, to some extent, this was a project that was likely to fail right from the start.

Despite this, at risk of damning with faint praise, I never felt like I wanted to give up on Aitken. There was always enough to interest me to keep me going. But it's certainly not a book from which to get the same kind of enjoyment as the original.

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I saw on Twitter the other day (via someone I know answering it), the question 'What's the best writing advice you would give to someone who wants to become a writer?' My knee-jerk response was 'Don't do it, because you aren't one.'

What I mean by this is that - at least in my personal experience - you don't become a writer. Either you are one, or you aren't. There's plenty of advice to be had on how to become a better writer, or how to become a published writer... but certainly my case I always was one - certainly as soon as I started reading books. 

While I was at school, I made comics. I wrote stories.  My first novel was written in my teens (thankfully now lost). I had a first career that wasn't about being a writer, but I still wrote in my spare time, sending articles off to magazines and writing a handful of novels. And eventually writing took over entirely.

If you are a writer, you can't help yourself. You just do it. I'm writing this when I should be doing something else. I rarely go a day without writing something (and I don't just mean a shopping list). It's a compulsion. It is part of what I am.

So, if you really need to ask, don't bother. See above re being a better/more effective/published/successful/etc writer. But don't expect help to become one if you aren't already.

And that's my best writing advice...

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