Through The Sandglass

Suna

 
The calligraphy above translates from the Japanese as “sand sand sand sand.” Why my sudden interest in suna, as the Japanese word is transcribed? Simply because I very much appreciate that the first (and, so far, only) foreign translation of the book has now been published, and, being back in London, I now have the pleasure of holding a copy in my hands. And what a strange experience that is – something so intimately familiar, yet so inaccessibly alien:

 
It is a beautifully produced hardback publication (translated by Yumiko Hayashi and published by Tsukiji-Shokan), more compact than the US or UK editions. And it has what is now the third different cover graphic, and a separate wrap-around:

It, of course, starts from what is, for us, the back, a flip through the pages yielding only the occasional glimpse of familiarity – the illustrations:

And, having flipped for the first time, a sudden sense of alarm arose – where are the plates? A second flip revealed that they are indeed there, but all bound in at the very beginning (the back), before anything else.

So there it is, a fascinating symbol, an elegant example of Japanese script with its calligraphic variations. This instantly reminded me of one of the many personal discoveries made during the research for Sand, the strange, often surreal, yet compelling book by Kono Abe and film by Hiroshi Teshigahara, Suna no onna, “Woman of the Dunes.” Sometimes translated as “Woman in the Dunes,” the original title is, more accurately, simply “Sand Woman.”  

Here’s what I briefly wrote in Chapter 5:

Woman in the Dunes, the 1964 film by Hiroshi Teshigahara, won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and was nominated for two Oscars. Based on the novel by Kobo Abe, the setting is the sweeping wilderness of sand dunes along the Japanese coast at Tottori. An amateur insect collector finds himself abducted and consigned to cohabit with a woman whose crumbling house lies at the bottom of a deep depression in the dunes; she exists “only for the purpose of clearing away the sand.” The sand constantly threatens the house, an outpost on the edge of a village, “already corroded by the sand,” whose way of life is defined by fighting the dunes and selling the salt-tainted sand—illegally—to construction companies. In both the book and the film, sand is the enemy but also the central character. The meticulous cinematography and Abe’s writing beautifully document sand grains and their movement: liquid avalanches descending on the house, windblown grains, and the forms of shifting dunes. The book is a lesson in the behaviors of granular materials. And, inevitably, the sand is a powerful metaphor for time: “Monotonous weeks of sand and night had gone by.”

Looking at various original film posters and book covers, there it is, in yet further variations, the symbol that I have now become quite fascinated by:

So, my thanks to the Japanese publishers – and their readers – for their interest and my novel experience. And, if any readers of this blog could provide me with a translation of what, in particular, the wrap-around says, I would be most interested!

A book I look forward to reading

I have referred several times in the past to Orrin H. Pilkey, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Geology at Duke University. Now, together with colleagues from the US and Northern Ireland, he has published what promises to be an informative, entertaining, and provocative read - The World's Beaches: A Global Guide to the Science of the Shoreline. 

I haven't, of course, got my hands on a copy yet, but a review in the New York Times simply confirms that anything by Pilkey is required reading. The review is titled "Shorelines, Sandy or Otherwise, That May Not Last." The conclusion echoes the issue that I posted on a couple of months ago:

But, the authors conclude, unless society chooses beaches over buildings the result will be a world in which parks like the National Seashores retain natural beaches, but beach resorts elsewhere are “heavily walled and beachless.” Rising seas will make sand-pumping operations “untenable,” they predict, and tourists will amuse themselves by “promenading on top of a seawall” — already the principal activity in too many coastal resorts.

If they are right, by then the beaches this book describes will be a nostalgic memory.

The book is published by the University of California Press, to whom I will ever be grateful for publishing mine, and the New York Times review is by Cornelia Dean, whose own book, "Against the Tide: the Battle for America's Beaches," also falls into the required reading category.

It's a sandpile world

 
One of the – many – entertaining research themes for my book was the role that sand plays in the imagery of our imaginations. Large numbers, very small things, ephemerality and change, time and eternity – and unpredictability. The icon of this blog, the sandglass, is an immediately accessible laboratory for thinking about many of these things – I always take along one from my collection when I’m giving a talk, a deceptively simple illustration of complex things. The most interesting part of a sandglass is, of course, the lower chamber, the growing pile of sand, the tumbling of a single grain, the sudden avalanches. Sandpiles provided, both literally and figuratively, the basis for the extraordinary book by the physicist, Per Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality; in an earlier post, I wrote a little about this book and the idea that our brains operate in the realm of self-organized criticality, cascades of neuronal activity behaving like avalanches down a pile of sand. And so, when I saw an article from the Seed Magazine website titled “On adapting to sandpiles,” I was naturally intrigued.

The article is, I discovered, an interview with Joshua Cooper Ramo, discussing the thesis of his book, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It (2009). Ramo is a widely respected “strategic thinker” about the state of the world; he was Foreign Editor at Time Magazine before taking up his current role as Managing Director of Kissinger Associates, one of those global business/politics/strategy advisory organisations, founded by the eponymous Henry, whose day-to-day activities and clients are distinctly inscrutable (the only website I could find for “Kissinger Associates” is for a software company in Pennsylvania, owned by Darrell K.). The cast of characters at the New York consulting Kissinger Associates is lengthy and illustrious and their activities the subject of some discussion, but that’s not my point here. As the editorial review on Amazon states, Ramo’s book (which I will readily admit I haven’t read) addresses the idea that:

The traditional physics of power has been replaced by something radically different. In The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo puts forth a revelatory new model for understanding our dangerously unpredictable world. Drawing upon history, economics, complexity theory, psychology, immunology, and the science of networks, he describes a new landscape of inherent unpredictability--and remarkable, wonderful possibility.

The introduction to the Seed interview runs as follows:

Joshua Cooper Ramo, managing director of Kissinger Associates, believes that we live in a “revolutionary age” defined by problems whose complexity, unpredictability, and interconnectedness increasingly defy our efforts at control. Global threats such as terrorism, pandemics, financial meltdown, and climate change, according to Ramo, demand a systems perspective that draws upon chaos science, complexity theory, and the theory of disruptive innovation. In his 2009 book, The Age of the Unthinkable, he calls for nothing less than a “complete reinvention of our ideas of security,” even the reversal of a “couple of millennia of Western intellectual habits.”

My immediate reaction to this is “fine, but ever since the popularisation of the strict science of chaos theory, far too much has been made of its potential applicability to almost everything, particularly by endless business gurus.” The imagery is seductive, but fidelity to the science is questionable at best.

But then imagery is an immensely potent stimulator of thinking and a powerful means of generating alternative ways of doing it. And, naturally, I’m all for sand imagery, so where is Ramo going with this? Here’s the relevant section from the interview:

You’ve often invoked a pile of sand as a metaphor for today’s complex world. What do you mean by that?
Think of a pile of sand, with additional grains being added every second or so. Scientists say such a pile is “organized into criticality,” since at any moment it can have a little avalanche as the sides get steeper. But the system is so complex that it can’t be modeled completely and—this is important—it’s nonlinear in that it can suffer a change in state under both big blows and tiny hits, like the addition of a single new grain of sand. That’s our world: Every second it gets more complex, like a sandpile. New financial instruments, terror groups, viruses, and innovations are ceaselessly falling onto our pile, making it really complex to model and basically impossible to predict. Small things—home mortgages—can have huge impacts. Usually by surprise. One thing I learned from writing the book and hanging out with people ranging from Hizb’allah terrorists to the guys who started Google is that it is possible to use this sort of cascading power to make tremendous changes. And since this kind of dynamic is inevitable, the challenge is to make positive avalanches.

Small things having huge impacts – the infamous flap of the butterfly’s wings. This imagery has always been compelling (and has always had at least some basis in the science – we do, after all, live in a world of power laws, long tails, and black swans). Watch the pile of sand in the sandglass and there is no way of predicting when the fall of one grain will precipitate a major avalanche.

And, although the book was published a couple of years ago, I can’t help but wonder if Seed’s publishing the interview now is a reflection of recent events in North Africa that were simply unimagined but a few weeks ago – a tragic, but nevertheless small, event in Tunisia triggering huge and profound change. The header for the piece reads “ In an era defined by instability, society must remain imminently flexible and turn disruption into a force for good” – an aspiration that must be applauded. 

So does Ramo have any suggestions as to how this might be accomplished? Well, here’s his response to the question “How should global leaders adapt to a sandpile world? Where do you see our major weaknesses today?”:

There are two key adaptations we need to make. The first is understanding that the very things we want and need to be modern—biotech, communications networks, more efficient financial markets—make the world more dangerous and expose us all to risk. Which means that sandpile events—things like 9/11 or the collapse of Lehman Brothers and its implications—are now inevitable. So we need to accept that we will constantly be hit by the manifestations of an unstable world and focus less on trying to prevent them and more on boosting our own resilience. Second, we need to change how we make policy. Right now we make big decisions as if we were pulling a lever. But decision making has to be a persistent project: We need to constantly update and revise our thinking as if we were making software or iPods. Today we do “health care reform” or “Afghanistan policy” and then move on. That’s lethal. Policy has to be flexible and constantly adapted to fit a changing environment.

This is, I think, serious food for thought. But this is not a geopolitical blog – it’s just interesting to see yet another example of the stimulating properties of sand.

Mark Twain the geologist

 

Mark Twain died one hundred years ago today

“The Old Oolitic Silurian” – my father used to periodically quote this to me to illustrate his familiarity with geological terminology and to remind me of the connections between his own field, American Literature, and my own. Twain was one of my Dad’s favourite writers, and he worked extensively on Twain’s reception in Europe (enthusiastic – Charles Darwin, for example, was a great fan), and his relationships with his English publishers. This led me to appreciate how often, amongst his prolific and highly entertaining observations, Twain wrote about geology – and yes, sand. My Dad’s quotation comes from Life on the Mississippi and ends with one his classic comments:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Twain seemed to have a particular fondness for the Old Red Sandstone, the gigantic piles of sand and other sediments that poured off the growing mountain chains of Europe and North America 400 million years ago. These are the rocks that contain the testaments to the remarkable evolution of fishes and the first footprints of life on the land. Twain wrote the following, in his 1903 essay “Was the World Made for Man?”:

So the Old Silurian seas were opened up to breed the fish in, and at the same time the great work of building Old Red Sandstone mountains eighty thousand feet high to cold-storage their fossils in was begun. This latter was quite indispensable, for there would be no end of failures again, no end of extinctions—millions of them—and it would be cheaper and less trouble to can them in the rocks than to keep tally of them in a book.

Elsewhere, he wrote of “that poor, decrepit, bald-headed, played-out, antediluvian Old Red Sandstone formation which they call the Smithsonian Institute.”

 

Unfortunately, here Twain got his geology wrong – the original Smithsonian building was constructed from the New Red Sandstone, the sediments that filled the rift valleys as Europe and North America began drifting apart 200 million years ago.

Twain also wrote of desert sandstorms and the commercial possibilities of sand. In Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom, Huck Finn, and Jim take off on a Jules Verne–like voyage in “the boat,” a science-fiction hot air balloon. Sailing over the Sahara, they watch a camel caravan plodding over the dunes below them:

Pretty soon we see something coming that stood up like an amazing wide wall, and reached from the Desert up into the sky and hid the sun, and it was coming like the nation, too. Then a little faint breeze struck us, and then it come harder, and grains of sand begun to sift against our faces and sting like fire, and Tom sung out:

“It’s a sand-storm—turn your backs to it!”

We done it; and in another minute it was blowing a gale, and the sand beat against us by the shovelful, and the air was so thick with it we couldn’t see a thing. In five minutes the boat was level full, and we was setting on the lockers buried up to the chin in sand, and only our heads out and could hardly breathe.

Then the storm thinned, and we see that monstrous wall go a-sailing off across the desert, awful to look at, I tell you. We dug ourselves out and looked down, and where the caravan was before there wasn’t anything but just the sand ocean now, and all still and quiet. All them people and camels was smothered and dead and buried—buried under ten foot of sand, we reckoned, and Tom allowed it might be years before the wind uncovered them, and all that time their friends wouldn’t ever know what become of that caravan.

Realizing that “the boat” (apparently defying the laws of physics) contains several tons of “genuwyne sand from the genuwyne desert of the Sahara,” they consider the commercial potential of putting it into vials and selling it back home (presumably to early arenophiles), “because it’s over four million square miles of sand at ten cents a vial.” But the scale of the operation—and that of the duties they would have to pay—leads them to abandon the idea.

When Twain was 17 or 18 years old, he worked as a part-time typesetter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, still the city’s primary newspaper. Still being marooned in Philadelphia, the Inquirer is my daily paper, and it was their article that drew my attention to the centenary of Twain’s death. He wrote to his brother that “Unlike New York, I like this Philadelphia amazingly, and the people in it.” On the whole, I agree with him – but I do love New York. Reading the newspaper article, I came across a comment that leads to me concluding this with a political viewpoint (something that I generally try to avoid on this blog). The article included the following comment:

Twain is a strange figure to hold up as a national hero. No writer ever sang this country so well – but none ever lanced the boils of its hypocrisy with such needlepoint precision, either.

Isn’t that exactly the kind of national hero every country needs, someone who is equally skilled and perceptive at singing its praises and  lancing its boils?

[Smithsonian image from http://www.american-architecture.info/USA/USA-Washington/DC-019.htm; header photo of the piles of Old Red Sandstone in Greenland courtesy of Dr. Peter Friend] 

An alarming announcement at Barnes and Noble

I have a habit, more often than not masochistic, of dropping into book stores to see whether my efforts are on the shelves. Wandering around the upper Westside of New York a couple of days ago, I spotted a reasonably large Barnes and Noble store and indulged my habit. I was delighted to find two copies of the book on the shelf (the bottom one - the continuing penalty of having a name at the end of the alphabet), but I was also alarmed to find that, next to my book, was a message: "NATURE ENDS HERE."

I recalled the controversial work of Francis Fukuyama from some twenty years ago declaring the end of history, but this seemed far more disastrous. Do Barnes and Noble know something that the rest of us don't? Is this a metaphysical statement placed there by some member of staff embroiled in the angst of a philosophy course at nearby Columbia University? Would there be further clues glued to other shelves in the store? Could it possibly be that some supernatural being uses this communication method instead of tablets and revelations? Is the rapture upon us - but, if so, why would it commence in a New York book store?

I fled in terror but your explanations will be much appreciated.

Thoughts on writing a popular science book (3): the tedious but important stuff

 Let's face it, the research and writing are the fun parts of producing a book, and then there's the other stuff that is much less enjoyable but vital. Here are a few thoughts:

1. Editing. I've mentioned a writer's "darlings" in a previous post, and in some ways the whole book is the author's darling - it's your idea and you have slaved over the stories, the translation of science into an accessible and exciting form, and you've crafted the words, the phrases, the paragraphs. You have probably (hopefully) tried out your translations on friends, family and others (ideally those that have some kind of vested interest in the thing's success); you accept the comments along the lines of "this is not easy to understand - why don't you try something along the lines of...." But suggestions that whole sections don't work, don't belong where they are, or don't belong in the book at all, are tough. I was lucky - my wife is a devoted and critical reader (and used to teach English), and I was blessed with a great editor from the publishers. I can only think of a couple of isolated instances, one or two darlings that I was determined to hold on to as a matter of principle as much as anything (the silver bullet principle), where I ended up not doing what they suggested - but the rest went and the book was profoundly improved as a result. So listen, sleep on it, and, in the cold light of day, do what these people say - you, after all, can't approach the book from the perspective of a reader. And cut. Cut the adverbs, the metaphors, the fascinating but irrelevant meanderings. I know that my wife will laugh when she reads such advice coming from me, since I have a natural tendency to meander and to construct long and convoluted sentences - but, in the end, I followed this advice (mostly).

2. Proofreading. This is a very distinct exercise from editing: it's the administration of the mechanics of the writing. Every publisher will have a particular manual of style that they want followed; for UCP it was the Chicago Manual of Style, a dry and weighty tome that is also available online (as a subscription). This is stuff that I readily admit I have little patience with, a bad attitude compounded by having divided my life between the UK and the US and having no working recollection of the differences in punctuation etc. But I had help, a taskmistress: as I wrote in the acknowledgments, "I am under instructions to say little about the role of my wife, Carol, but little is precisely what this book would have been without her. Researcher, contributor, proofreader, and interrogator of the Chicago Manual of Style, she took on all the tasks that allowed me to write the book, including, with not quite perfect consistency, having a Job-like level of patience." (There were a couple of memorable occasions on which "the f...ing book" was referred to with vigour  - and justification).

Then, as the production process got underway, the publishers provided the services of a professional proofreader (a job that, to me, seems like another definition of hell). And was she ever professional and rigorous. However thoroughly you or your partner think that they have proofread the manuscript, there will always be things you missed. And, even after the professional treatment, little demons slip through: "depradation" appeared in both hardback editions until it was noted by a friend (to the immense irritation of my wife), and finally corrected for the paperback.

Then the page proofs arrive: pay as close attention to them as you can bear - they're your last chance. Because your readers are intelligent and critical folk - put yourself in their shoes and remember how a poorly edited and proofread book detracts substantially from its credibility.

3. References/further reading. Again, put yourself in the reader's shoes - how many times do you come across a topic in a book that is dealt with briefly but that you would like to explore further? This section is important (and several readers and reviewers of my book have said that they appreciate it). Of course, for a popular science book, it doesn't have to be as rigorous and comprehensive as an academic text, and there's certainly no point in including papers from academic journals that will be difficult for the reader to find. And one other note: in today's world, websites are important sources to list, but make sure that only those that are reputable and therefore likely to endure are included. The "page cannot be found" notice is frustrating for me and I worked on the principle that it would be equally frustrating for a reader.

4. The index. I automatically dislike a book with no index, or a poor index, but I know from friends who have tried to do it themselves that it's a soul-destroying task. Most publishers will provide the services of a professional indexer - but you will pay for it. It cost me $1450 (and needed improvement) and this cost came straight out of the first (and so far, only) royalty payment. After this, the subtraction of the advance, and the agent's percentage, there was enough for a not particularly gastronomic dinner out. But remember: you're not in this for the money.

5. Permissions. I was astonished to find that these were entirely my responsibility - and, along with the responsibility comes the legal liability. So I became somewhat paranoid and compulsive about this. The experience was very variable. For illustrations that I could not provide myself, it was generally the case that the copyright owners were only too pleased to provide the image for free, or, for institutions, a modest fee that would cover all future print editions (take care in all this to read the terms carefully - they often apply only to a particular edition and have to be done again for a paperback or a different publisher, and they rarely apply to electronic editions). For quotations, the experience was more difficult (and expensive). I liked to include epigraphs at the top of each chapter, and some of these, along with quotations in the text, were from illustrious writers and musicians. The pleasure of putting a few words from Jimi Hendrix against a quote from an ancient Greek philosopher, was somewhat undermined by what it cost me (Hendrix, not Heraclitus). I had toyed with great quotes from Dylan and others, but could never have afforded them. Using those eleven words from Hendrix has, so far, and after negotiation, cost me $700 - I keep reminding myself that I'm not in this for the money.

Most publishers' contracts will include a provision for some reimbursement of permissions costs, but chances are you'll still be out of pocket - avoid musicians!

Oh, and then there's the concept (at least in the US) of "fair use." Limited quotations can be used without needing to seek permission, and it's tempting to resort to this as a way of saving time (and money). But the concept is unfathomable and risky when you look at it in detail - the US Copyright Office website declares that "The distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission." Helpful, huh?

6. The subtitle. I'll finish here with an amusement. The subtitle for a book is important - it should give the potential reader an idea of what the book's about, or at least provide a "hook." There was a long debate that used up considerable time and creative energy (but also generated much humour), around what followed the obvious, "Sand." We settled on "the never-ending story" because it suggested that it was a story, hinted at the durability of sand as a planetary materials, and reflected the symbolism of a single grain of sand that was important in Michael Ende's book (and the film) of that name. So far, so good. Until I came across the online writing of a New York Times reviewer. She expressed her irritation with a single-subject-titled book (I won't name it) on a particularly obscure and, in her opinion, uninteresting subject, and proceeded to bemoan the genre of such titles. Unfortunately, my book seems to have landed simultaneously on her desk; rather than just ignoring it, she cited it (self-respect requires me to assume that it remained unopened) as another tedious example - "Sand: the Never-Ending Story," she wrote, "I'll say!"

Oh, how I laughed. Well, at least I do now.

This interpretation had never occurred to me - or to anyone else involved. As you might have noticed, Oxford University Press changed the subtitle to "A Journey Through Science and the Imagination" - more pedestrian, but less susceptible to wit.

Thoughts on writing a popular science book (2): Writing and structure

 
Every individual, thank heavens, is different, with different habits, behaviours, and ways of thinking - that's what makes the human world such an interesting place. This is as true of writers as anyone else, and so what works for one writer is useless for another. So if I set out some thoughts on how I figured out my book and set about writing it, they are, of course, personal and idiosyncratic - but bits and pieces might be of interest to someone.

The basic principle of story telling and narrative has been mentioned several times during this discussion, and is critical whether writing fiction or non-fiction - the reader must be lured in and carried along. But it's not easy, particularly perhaps for science writing. That said, however, a writer must have a high level of enthusiasm and passion for the subject, and so sees the drama in it, the surprises, the revelations, the mysteries, and all these components make for a good story. Or series of good stories within an overall narrative. And that's the challenge - or at least it was for me. I had put together a diversity of topics that ended up astonishing even me - but how to structure them into a book that captured the reader's attention and kept it going? I had long discussions with my agent, and, ultimately, my editor (who, as I have said, was wonderful). To cut a long story short, I eventually caught a glimpse of my topic as being about scale and realised that that approach allowed a natural momentum for the structure of the book, from individual grains to landscapes, returning to the human scale and then accelerating off into the future and the universe as the finale. And once I had this view, then the "anthropological" approach was obvious - look at individuals, then families, tribes, and societies. I was very wary of overdoing the anthropomorphic element, but a little of that resonates and provides a narrative - together with some of that vital story telling ingredient, tension. This whole structure was something I could visualise, and so, being a graphically-oriented person, I drafted up an image that I eventually translated into Microsoft graphics and provided to my editor:

 

There were still some problems, however. Chapters on sand and our imaginations - very small things and very large numbers, art, writing and so on - had to be included in the momentum of the material on the natural world. I had come across, reading various sources on writing, that the idea of a narrative break is not only acceptable, but often useful, and so I decided that these two sections would make good narrative breaks, letting the reader digest what had come before, but at the same time continuing the all-important element of surprise. And then, within this whole structure, was the controversial Chapter 9 - sand in our daily lives. The amazing diversity of examples was such that I struggled heroically to construct a single narrative out of all these different topics - and gave up. I resorted to the "A to Z" structure - still, I hope, entertainingly. There was a viewpoint that suggested that this should go in as an appendix, but I resisted it - it is, after all, one of the key and provocative ideas of the book, that, if the wicked fairy waved her magic wand and removed from our lives everything that was derived from sand, then we'd be in a very bad way. So there it is, the infamous Chapter 9 - reactions have been completely polarised, some people love it, others hate it .....

One aside - about text boxes. In early drafts of a couple of chapters, I had included what I thought was "supplementary material" in the classic boxes - something that I thought gave the reader the option of pursuing or not (for example, specifics on how radiometric dating works). But my agent disliked this, and she was right. First of all, it makes the book look like a textbook, and secondly, I realised that either the boxed material was important - in which case, find a way of including it in the narrative - or it wasn't, in which case, leave it out.

The whole challenge of structure in writing a book is fractal, scale-free. From the form of the whole thing, down to the flow of an individual sentence and the choice of words, it's always there (with respect to word choice, keep a thesaurus handy - it can be not only useful but stimulating). Even having settled on the structure of the book, the way in which all the material for a given chapter could best be put together requires work and imagination. My own approach, personal and idiosyncratic, was to use the biggest piece of paper to hand (generally an A1 size) and put together a mind map. I've been using this "technique" for years, and find it very effective in either taking notes or planning a talk or an article - or, in this case, planning a chapter. The value lies in being able to jot down different topics, quotes, reminders, numbers, and so on in a way that allows me to look for connections and thus flow and, eventually, narrative. A mind map is the opposite of a list, and far more graphic and flexible. But the way of using the mind mapping approach is entirely up to the individual - there are all kinds of software and instructions out there - have a look, if you're not familiar with it, but then ignore all of it and find out what works best for you. Here's what I did in the process of thinking about the first chapter (together with some material that I came to appreciate worked better in the second) - it looks like a mess (and for anyone other than me certainly is), but there's a huge amount of not only information there, but the connections - and all on one sheet of paper (no flipping back and forth between sheets of lists, and no overlooking anything):

 

So there I would sit, at my laptop, for hour after hour, day after day, with my huge mind map and surrounded by piles of papers and articles (be prepared for the printer ink budget), dozens of tabs open on Firefox, and put one word after another. Everyone has different ways of writing, and so details of my own habits are largely irrelevant - but I did set myself a daily target of 2000 words. A couple of general observations:

• "darlings." Any writer will have ideas and passages of word-smithing of which they are particularly fond - these are your "darlings." They are often obvious to  a reader, and some of them work, many of them don't. Be prepared to defend your darlings, but accept that, if your partner or editor says no, they're probably right.
• humour (or humor). This is a tricky thing - a little of it can help the narrative along, but just a little more can be far too much. Take a long hard (and cold) look at it - and employ the default position of cutting it. What was the point of my writing "humour (or humor)"? To demonstrate my trans-Atlantic awareness? To suggest to my American friends that they can't spell? Cut it out.

Enough for now - there are obviously many aspects of this strange process that I haven't addressed - David, Brian, and I look forward to any questions or ideas.

Thoughts on writing a popular science book (1): making it interesting, finding a publisher

I'll start off with some general thoughts and thefts - and a warning that this turned into a bit of an epic, reflecting the saga of getting a book published. Perhaps I should have applied some strict self-discipline in terms of editing and cutting, but then again, perhaps somewhere in the following are some bits and pieces of interest - and the bases for further conversation. 

Your book, by definition, has never been written before - why not? You must think your idea, your topic, is interesting and exciting and that there are readers out there who will find it so. I recently came across a comment (the source, for the moment entirely escapes me) to the effect that, if you think of a book that you'd like to read, but hasn't been published, then write it. That seems to me as good a motivational starting point as any. The Guardian, the UK newspaper, last month published a piece titled "Ten Rules for Writers," a highly entertaining and provocative series of observations by the likes of Margaret Atwood, David Hare, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Zadie Smith, and other illustrious writers - yes, primarily about writing fiction, but writing is writing. I enjoyed the piece and would have appreciated it before I set out to write - there's good advice in it and, as of the time of writing this, it's available online. Among the things I liked was Hilary Mantel's echo of the comment I just mentioned - "Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready." And then Joyce Carol Oates - "Don't try to anticipate an "ideal reader" – there may be one, but he/she is reading someone else." And if there was a recurring piece of advice, it was to read like mad, or, as PD James said, "Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious." I enjoy reading good popular science writing, but figuring out why it's good is not always easy - particularly if it's really good. A while ago, I read Richard Dawkins' compilation, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, and, while I complained about the lack of geology, it was a fascinating selection of the genre's diversity. Dawkins selected only science writing by scientists, which ignores some superb writing - there are scientists and non-scientists who are great writers - and vice-versa and everything in between; I was surprised at the challenge I had with accessing Peter Medawar's writing and deeply disappointed in Natalie Angier's The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science - but I learned from both experiences. A one-star Amazon review, by Bruce Hilpert, of Angier's book echoed my reaction and is instructive:

As another adherent of what I refer to as "gonzo non-fiction," Angier insists on injecting her own ego into the work at the expense of her subject and her readers. Almost every other sentence has a pun, word play or personal aside that distracts from her explanations. She can be clever, but how can she think that a sentence such as this brings clarity to her subject: "The vast splintered vale of our universe, as far as we know, is stocked with two basic offerings, two categorical insults to His Lowly Holiness of Absolute Nothingness that might otherwise have held sway: matter and energy."?

Angier seems to have lost track of the basic goal of expository writing - to explain things in a way that brings greater understanding to the reader. If she had cut out the unnecessary, distracting prose, the book would have been 1/3 as long and ten times more effective.
Please do not get the impression that I thrive on dry, textbook prose. Non-fiction should be compelling and "clever" is okay. Bill Bryson, in "A Short History of Nearly Everything," uses his sense of humor appropriately and effectively to enhance his discussion of science. Angier, however, seems to think that her audience bought her book not to learn about science, but to learn just how clever she is.

So I guess that thinking about writing in a way that avoids that kind of review is a good approach!

But to the meat of the question: "How do you take a technical or obscure subject and make it interesting to publishers and the public without losing accuracy?" First of all, the assumption must be that the writer finds the subject interesting - in fact, not just interesting, but fascinating, exciting, compelling, and surprising. That the "compelling" includes the writer's compulsion to write about it, and the "surprising" includes an element of the writer's own surprise at just how exciting it is. Think about exactly why this is. I certainly surprised myself when I began the process of setting out all the places that sand can take you, all the stories it can tell. So I would suggest that the element of surprise is critical - the subject matter may, at first, seem technical or obscure (or even, like sand, mundane and uninteresting), but if you can surprise your reader with how wrong that assumption is, then you've accomplished what you set out to do.

A big part of accomplishing that is figuring out why the topic enthuses you and then figuring out how to convey that enthusiasm in a way that will immediately surprise the reader - assuming that they have at least taken the book off the shelf in the store and then opened it. I was amazed and delighted, in doing the research for my book, by how many creation myths from widely different cultures around the world have sand as the basic primeval material, and so I decided to start the book with one - the first words of Chapter 1 (after quotes from Victor Hugo and Ralph Waldo Emerson) are "It was love at first sight" - I like to think of a potential reader seeing that and being surprised, if not hooked.

If you're enthusiastic about a subject, it's because of its intrinsic character, not because of the jargon that may surround it. Jargon and terminology in the scientific world are simply shorthand and carry no information beyond that (although they can also be used as a smokescreen or something to hide behind). The natural world, even as it appears in the laboratory or an equation, comes with no jargon attached to it, and its phenomena are simply things we try to describe as we observe them. So that's the way to try to write about them, and doing so requires no loss of accuracy. It's a challenge, but an intellectually enjoyable one and makes you really think about the phenomenon rather than its jargon. Whether it's saltation or the reason for plotting sand grain sizes logarithmically, or phase changes in the mantle, or the basis for optical luminescence dating, it is possible to describe it in everyday language: try it, try it out on yourself and then on friends and family. Analogies are great (for some reason or another, the kitchen is an effective environment for illustrating geological processes). For numerical measures, come up with something familiar and easily visualised - I had to deal with cubic meters and metric tons of sand carried by rivers or shifted in a sandstorm, and came up with the image of a parade of dump trucks trundling by; this required some research on dump truck specifications on the internet, but I derived a sort of standard truck size and its contents of sand by weight and volume. And here's one more thought - spend some time on the things we don't know, the mysteries, because, after all, it's those things that keep science exciting and they can do the same thing for a book.

So, the proposal. I don't know of a uniquely effective or standard way of putting one together, but here are the elements of what (after any number of experiments) I came up with:

1. Intro or the up front sales pitch, trying to capture the excitement and uniqueness of the book. I spent some time drafting what I thought would be a good "blurb" on the back of the book, and this helped focus on the key points. A couple of provocative images can be good. 
2. "About the author" - a brief bio with emphasis (modestly, of course) on why you are qualified to write the book better than anyone else.
3. "Core audience and appeal" -  find some comparable books that have achieved success and describe why the people that bought those will buy yours. If, as is likely, the book will be illustrated, explain the attractiveness and information content of the illustrations (together with a comment on what proportion of them the author can provide).
4. Table of contents and chapter synopses. The chapter summaries should be a couple of paragraphs.

Have a couple of sample chapters written and ready to accompany the proposal - but, unless you have infinite time on your hands and no need for a day job, don't write the whole book first. Looking back on the proposal that I ended up with, the eventual book structure became something quite different, but the material is more or less all there in the proposal.   

Then what to do with the proposal? I put quite a bit of effort into trying to market the thing directly to publishers (via, for example, the massive London Book Fair - an experience in itself), but this is a soul-destroying task. In my experience, few publishers these days will accept unsolicited proposals ("are you agented ?" was the standard question, and, since at the time I wasn't, there was no further discussion to be had). You could get lucky (I nearly did - close, but no cigar). So, unless self-publishing is the route of choice (I can't really comment on this, but I didn't find it at all attractive), you need an agent - your next soul-destroying task.

Here, the internet is a great resource and in the UK there's an annual publication, The Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, that lists, among many different resources, agents and their specialities (there must be something similar in the US). I looked for agents who specifically listed science among their specialisations, and then checked that they were willing to accept unsolicited proposals (a lot of them explicitly state that they are not). This is where I really did get lucky - after several failures, I found an agent who, for some reason or another, liked the idea and was willing to take me on. One of her first questions was "You're not doing this with the idea of making significant money, I hope?" I explained that I was realistic and that satisfaction was the primary motivation, and everything went well from there. She was tenacious - she needed to be. It took essentially a year for her to land the University of California Press, but boy, was I thrilled! I signed their contract (another learning curve in itself) at the end of 2006.

In terms of the advantages and disadvantages of different kinds of publishers, I'm really no expert on anything other than academic presses (both in the UK and the US), but some thoughts specifically on my experience:

Advantages:

• Reputation. University presses are prestigious and respected publishers.
• Production standards. Books published by academic publishers are generally produced to a high standard and with thoughtful and innovative design.
• Help. I don't know if this is universally true, but, in my case it certainly was. I knew I needed and editor - I wanted an editor, and was dismayed to hear that such a person is largely a thing of the past, at least in terms of active involvement. But I was lucky. The University of California Press assigned me a truly wonderful editor, without whom the book would have been distinctly inferior to how it turned out. She wrote that she “tried not to still the occasional meanderings, but simply to free up the larger eddies that threaten to impede forward motion.” She has become a good friend, one of the great pleasures of this roller-coaster saga. And everyone that I've been involved with at both presses has always been responsive and helpful. 
• I also have to thank the press for suggesting that authors set up a blog to accompany and continue the book - without this encouragement, I wouldn't be writing this now.

Disadvantage - here I'll have to be honest and blunt (anyone from OUP or UCP reading this, please don't take offense!). Popular science books are "trade books" and, for academic presses, aggressive marketing to the general public is not their strength. They have certainly done a good job with my book, and I don't pretend that it could qualify for bookstore attention in the same way that Harry Potter does, but I just suspect that a commercial publisher has a higher aggression level, and, possibly, budget (although the publishing business everywhere these days is facing difficult challenges).

So, more than enough for now - I look forward to comparing notes with David and Brian, and, particularly, to hearing from anyone with the tenacity to have read all this!

Stories written in sand and stone - thoughts on writing a popular science book

What to expect on the journey from an idea for a book to actually holding it in your hands? Three of us who have taken this interesting trip, Brian Switek at Laelaps (whose book, Written in Stone, will be published later this year), David Williams at Stories in Stone whose book of the same title came out last year, and I, thought it would be not only fun for us to compare notes on the process and our experiences, but that such thoughts might be of interest and use to any readers who are contemplating embarkation on the journey. So, over the next week or so, we'll be reflecting on some of what we found to be the key issues and questions, but what we really would like is that this develops into a broader conversation. So we very much look forward to questions/ideas/comments/corrections - none of us pretends to have the answers to all the aspects of the process, but at least it's something that we've experienced and that experience is something we can share.

The first episode will be around how to make a technical (and possibly seemingly obscure) topic accessible, exciting, and of interest to a publisher (not to mention potential readers), together with a look at the different kinds of publishers, putting together a proposal, and related thoughts. We'll each of us post our ruminations and Brian will collate the links on his blog. We all hope that this will be of interest and look forward to hearing from you!

"Writing in the Sand" - the Brits at the beach

 

Historically, the Brits have "done the beach" in a quintessentially idiosyncratic and eccentric way. Socks with sandals. A handkerchief knotted at each corner and worn on the head. Flasks of tea. Diverse contraptions to combat the weather (which is, after all, some excuse for eccentricity). Punch and Judy shows. Donkeys. Burying members of your family in the sand. Cunning inventions to allow, with considerable contortions, changing on the beach. And huts - the rows of gaudily painted but weather-beaten, salt-water-saturated wooden boxes with roofs, rentable for the summer holiday and now, at least in the most desirable spots, purchasable at some considerable cost. The seaside. Oh, and the saucy postcards, the most famous exponent of which was Donald McGill around the 1930s; the genre routinely featured large ladies.

It is, of course partly the weather, but the Brits have always also had a reluctance to disrobe at the beach. This postcard shows apparently bright blue skies and a balmy beach scene - but notice that the majority of people are fully clothed, at least one apparently wearing a tie. This is, I fear, not unusual - at least in the not-too-distant past. Note also the huts in this scene.  

 

I have just come into possession of a book of photographs of the British seaside, mainly from the 1970s and 1980s, and it is an extraordinarily affectionate work documenting a social environment that is all too easy to mock. You laugh with the subjects, not at them. The cover of Writing in the Sand is at the head of this post; it's by a Finnish photographer, Sirrka-Liisa Konttinen, who has lived in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the northeast coast of England since the late 1960s. The image below is of where many of the photographs were taken, Whitley (pronounced "wittly") Bay, once a popular holiday destination, now rather past its prime. Wikipedia declares that it "boasts a fine stretch of beach of golden sand" but that it is "now widely seen as a dormitory town for Newcastle." 

 

Now oddly, I have a connection with Whitley Bay which is another reason for my delight with this volume, although the photographs are several decades on from my own times there. I had a second cousin - probably still have, but we have lost touch - named Delny, and, as a very young lad my family would holiday at Whitley Bay with her and her family. I remember her fondly. The photograph below is, I believe, of yours truly at Whitley Bay, sporting some dashing swim-wear on the golden sands.

For the rest, I will simply reproduce some of Konttinen's images since they speak for themselves - there are some stunning photographs of sand, but the majority are evocative studies of people. All are clearly copyright of the photographer, but I hope that she will forgive me for using them to bring her work, I hope, to more people's attention. My favourite image I save for the last.