How to use this Page

by Deren Hansen

Complexity in fiction is … well, a complex topic.

Clearly you don’t want to write something so complex that it leaves readers perplexed and frustrated. At the other extreme, readers are quickly bored by a story that’s too simple.

Complexity, which is best understood as the degree to which there is variation in the results each time you sample something, is important in fiction only because the world in which we live is complex. Romance is a simple example of the complexities with which we deal: each time we interact with that certain someone we come away with a collection of indirect evidence that we’re rising or falling in his or her esteem but rarely anything definitive. Compared to the simplicity of species that go into heat or spawn at the same time each year, it’s a wonder we ever managed to reproduce.

In terms of plot, complexity is what makes books necessary: you don’t have a novel if you don’t need several hundred pages to fully understand what’s going on.

The art of the storyteller is to take what looks like a complex mess of unrelated threads and weave them into a tapestry that, when fully revealed, shows the reader how to make sense of it all.

It’s a topic to which I’ve devoted enough thought that I’m giving a presentation tomorrow (7:00 pm on Thursday, January 17, 2013) at the Pleasant Grove Public Library (Pleasant Grove, Utah) as part of their Professional Writers Series, titled, “Weaving a Complex Narrative: How to Write Like J.R.R. Tolkien in Three Easy Steps.” I’ve also made the presentation available online at http://prezi.com/gzcbq80jptly for those of you who may be interested but unable to attend.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

Display Comments Add a Comment

By Donald J. Peurach

Education reform is among the great American pastimes. This is activity that plays out continuously in public discourse everywhere from corner bars to capitol buildings, as well as in the day-to-day work of government agencies, university-based project teams, and private organizations. Current wrangling over the reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Act will surely throw fuel on the fire.

However, despite decades of education reform, many schools continue to struggle to support high levels of student achievement — especially schools serving large populations of poor and disadvantaged students. This decades-long struggle for deep, lasting, large-scale education reform stands as evidence of the complex problems to be solved and of the complex work of solving them. Yet seeing and confronting that complexity is, itself, no simple matter.

Rather than having a single, root cause, chronically low student achievement is often the product of systems of compounding problems in schools: for example, low expectations for student performance, weak instructional and leadership practice, centuries-old tensions between teachers and school leaders, weak coordination among instructional and non-instructional services for students, and many more.

These systems of interdependent problems require systems of interdependent solutions, implemented over time and improved with experience: simultaneous, coordinated improvements in roles, structures, cultures, technologies, and practices. Indeed, over the past twenty years, some of the most remarkable instances of large-scale school improvement in the U.S. have come from reformers pursing exactly that strategy: for example, Success for All and America’s Choice, two non-governmental organizations that have demonstrated success establishing state-sized networks of schools that use school-wide designs to improve practice and achievement.

The problem, then, is that many in the U.S. are unable to see education reform as complicated. This is, in part, because sorting out and making sense of complexity is very hard, and something that very few people have much preparation or experience in doing.

But it is also because Americans have very little patience with complexity. Our is a black-and-white, red-and-blue, PowerPoint-and-sound bite world in which politicians, the media, and even reformers advance silver bullet solutions to public education’s most complex problems — both because they believe in such solutions and because so many in the general population are open to them. These silver bullet solutions run the gamut: improved curricula, new instructional models, smaller schools and classes, professional learning communities, teacher leadership, value-added teacher evaluations, and many more.

Yet when silver bullet solutions are overwhelmed by systemic dysfunction, many are much quicker to deride the system of U.S. public education for not conforming to their methods of solving its problems than they are to adapt their problem solving methods to its complexity.

We have seen instances of reformers bucking this trend.  For example, in current debates over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, the U.S. senate is considering “whole school reform” and the “restart” strategies for the nation’s lowest performing schools.  In contrast to targeted interventions, both would support partnerships between schools, districts, and external providers with a record of success either re-engineering existing schools or creating new schools.  However, political support for such initiatives has often been short lived, in part because policy expectations for rapid success are at odds with the time needed for such partnerships to emerge and mature.

Until more people are willing and able to see and confront complexity in public education, then we will continue to struggle to do the work of large-scale education reform any better than we have in the

Add a Comment

Importance of Sentence Variety

My niece was here this weekend and we talked about her college writing experience. She said they try to change her habitual writing of high school into something more sophisticated. For example, they eschew the five-paragraph essay, rightly so. Instead, they look for more sophisticated structures.

But when I teach writing, I focus on not just on structures, but on the craft of writing itself. It begins with sentences, especially with sentence variety: long, short, simple, complex, convoluted, straight forward, building with a series, stopping abruptly, or continuing forward to complete a thought.

One of the most helpful things I ever did was work through The Art of Styling Sentences: 20 Patterns for Success. It forces you to look at sentences in all their simplicity, complexity and glory.

For example, do you know how–it’s really easy–to interrupt a sentence with another sentence and correctly punctuate it? The patterns encourage writers to gain control of their language and punctuation, to throw fear of commas and semi-colons and colons out the window, and start writing what they want to write.

Summer Challenge

Summer is a challenging time for some writers because kids are home. So here’s a perfect challenge for you, a challenge that will improve your writing with very little effort!

Are you holding back because you don’t know how to punctuate something? Try this summer challenge with a partner: each week choose a new sentence pattern and use it somewhere at least five times. Have your partner check up and make sure it was used correctly. The first few patterns are simple, but the book builds in complexity. You’ll come out of the summer with a stronger control of the language you use in any context, but it will particularly help your fiction. Really. (Isn’t THAT a great sentence fragment, used correctly? You need to control even those rogues.)

After you’ve worked through the patterns in this book, there are two a final challenges.

• Write at least a 100 word sentence, correctly punctuated.
• Correctly use a sentence fragment. Really.

NonFiction BookBlast Sunday, June 26, 2011. 8-10 am. ALA Conference in NOLA.

Add a Comment

Tweet

Congratulations to Melanie Mitchell, who received the 2010 ΦBK Science Book Award for her book Complexity: A Guided Tour! In honor of this, Michelle and Lauren talk with Mitchell about ants, robots, the economy, and more.

Melanie Mitchell is Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University and External Professor and Member of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning and complex systems.

Subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes!

From the Phi Beta Kappa Society:

Amazing feats of collective intelligence, such as the colony of army ants that link themselves together to cross daunting precipices, are having an unconventional effect on the future of science. The “complexity” of these naturally occurring events cannot be explained by the traditional method of breaking science down into its most basic parts, in this case, the individual army ants. Instead, the study of complex systems, those made up of simple components with limited capacity for communication, provide a much broader illustration of the science of self-organization and adaptation.

In Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press, 2009), Melanie Mitchell draws on her background as a computer scientist and her work with the Santa Fe Institute to study the complex systems that have evolved in nature and how they may contribute to the future of computer programming, specifically with regards to artificial intelligence. Mitchell also looks at the human brain’s ability to create consciousness from a complex network of electrically charged neurons, axons, and dendrites, as well as the immune system’s unique collection of cells, which work together in an effective and efficient way without any central control.

The song featured in this podcast is “In the Middle” from the album Can’t You See by The Ben Daniels Band. Get it here.

Add a Comment

Tweet

By Robin Le Poidevin

Do we really need agnosticism nowadays? The inventor of the name ‘agnosticism’, the Victorian evolutionist Thomas Henry Huxley, certainly found it useful to have a word describing his lack of certainty when he was surrounded by those who seemed to have no such doubt. But then he lived in a period of transition. Science, and in particular biology, appeared to undermine old certainties. On the one hand, churchmen were promoting the importance of unshakeable faith. On the other, there were philosophers advocating a materialist and anti-religious outlook. Huxley felt he couldn’t identify with either side. If the Gnostics were those who claimed to have access to a special route to religious knowledge, then Huxley would be an a-gnostic, one who does not profess to know. But perhaps agnosticism served only as a temporary stopping point en route to a more satisfactory position, a stepping stone from faith to atheism.

For Richard Dawkins, a scientist, writer and today’s perhaps most vocal atheist, we have already crossed that river. It was perhaps reasonable to be an agnostic in Huxley’s time, when it was not yet clear how science could answer some of the awkward questions posed by believers: How, if there is no divine designer, could intelligence have developed? What is the source of our moral conscience? Why was the universe so congenial to the emergence of life? Now we have some detailed answers, the idea of God is de trop. And so too is agnosticism, apparently.

What is Dawkins’ thinking here? First, the agnostic’s point that we can’t know whether or not God does not exist, is not a very interesting one. There are lots of things we don’t know for sure. We don’t know that Mars isn’t populated by fairies. Of course, we are not remotely inclined to believe that it is, but still we don’t have conclusive proof. Nevertheless, we don’t describe ourselves as agnostics about Martian fairies. Similarly, atheists can admit that they don’t have conclusive proof of God’s non-existence.

Second, not having conclusive proof does not make God’s existence just as probable as his non-existence. Moving from ‘not certain’ to ‘50/50 chance either way’ is what we might call the agnostic fallacy.

Third, a necessary feature of God makes his existence highly improbable, namely his complexity. Of course, the world itself is complex – unimaginably so – but then science has an explanation of this complexity in terms of a series of gradual evolutionary steps from simpler states. In contrast there is no evolutionary account of God’s complexity: his nature is supposed to be eternal. And that there should just exist such complexity, with no explanation, is highly improbable.

That’s a very plausible line of thought. The conclusion is that, unless you think you have overwhelming evidence for God, the rational thing is to be an atheist. But it rests on a questionable assumption. There is still room for an interesting form of agnosticism. Take a look at the third point above: that God must be complex, and so improbable. It is a part of traditional theology that God is in fact simple. Dawkins finds this incredible: how can something responsible for the creation of the world, and who has perfect knowledge of it, be less complex than that creation? There are, however, different kinds of complexity. A language is complex in one sense, in that it contains a virtually limitless range of possible expressions. But those expressions are generated from a finite number of letters, and a finite number of rules concerning the construction of sentences. A language may be complex in its variety but (relatively) simple with respect to the components and principles that give rise to that complexity. When the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz opined that God had created ‘the best of all possible worlds’, his

Add a Comment