GET SPECIFIC!!

A note to my students this week:

A common thing I’m seeing this week as I read your Thinking About Thinking essays is that, in many case, you hint at something that supports your thesis, but you don’t go into enough detail to really help me, as a reader, understand how your experience applies to your thesis.

For example (and this is an example I’ve created myself, not pulled from any class papers):

Being an educated person means listening to others who would have influence over you and learning to filter significant voices from noise.

My father, an immigrant to the United States from the Netherlands, was a man of few words, but he often said things that caused me to think about my own current situation and where I wanted my education to take me in the future. I have also had experiences where the Holy Ghost spoke to me, helping me see where decisions I make now can influence my future, for either good or ill.

At this point, I could go on to quote any of the writers we read for this assignment to further illustrate my thesis of listening to others and learning to filter what they say, but I’m sure most of you are thinking to yourselves something along these lines:

What did his Dad say to him to make him think about his education?

What did the Holy Ghost say to him, and what were the circumstances that led to him hearing the Holy Ghost’s voice?

This is always a difficult subject to broach, especially in the week we hear about Ophelia and Alexander Calandra’s student, but I am saying as a writer that when you pause long enough to add specific details to your writing, you become a more powerful writer.

Maybe this will convince you:

Being an educated person means listening to others who would have influence over you and learning to filter significant voices from noise.

My father, an immigrant to the United States from the Netherlands, was a man of few words, but he often said things that caused me to think about my own current situation and where I wanted my education to take me in the future.

Dad was a bricklayer and I worked many years as a hod carrier – a bricklayer’s assistant – for him. There came many days when the weather was foul and where I had to slog through rain, snow, mud, and cold to make sure he had enough supplies to work. When I got to grumbling too much, he’d say something like “Boy, at least you’re not at the Russian Front.” I knew enough about World War II to know what he was talking about – thousands of soldiers perished on that front due to cold, bad weather, and other calamities. I had to suffer only a few hours a day, while they had no surcease from the cold. The old Russian Front line got me to thinking: I know I’m earning money for school now, and eventually I’ll get a job that won’t require me to be out in the cold and rain all day long. Yeah, this stinks. But I’ll mean a future far from the Russian Front.

I have also had experiences where the Holy Ghost spoke to me, helping me see where decisions I make now can influence my future, for either good or ill.. . .

Adding that little bit of detail helps draw you into what I’m saying. I (hopefully) helps convince you that my desire to listen to other voices and listen to the significance of their words is a boon to my own education. Maybe you’d get the hint from my first attempt, but I hope the detail I offer in the second sticks with you a bit more.

This is the kind of thing I want to see you experimenting with in your writing. Dig deeper into your experiences – you are all wise people with interesting experiences to share. Share them.

Ammon, Do A Bond for Fiber Optics

It’s time the city of Ammon floated a bond to expand its fiber optics network into a true public internet utility.

I don’t care if it’s competition for private broadband internet providers in the area. We’ve been customers of two of them – CenturyLink and now Cable One. They need competition, because you’re either paying more for mediocre service or slightly less for service that craps out every evening.

The city has a plan right now – but it’s not nearly ambitious enough.

The plan is to offer the service for an installation cost of $3,000 (per household, if enough people in your neighborhood agree to sign up). The cost could be amortized at $15 a month for 20 years. But then there’s the ISP fees. And the fact that after the 20 years is up, you’d still be paying the city $15 a month for providing fiber. (At least that’s what a local news report said. The city itself is being catty about costs, saying only to move from concept to reality, “we need to know who is interested and where they live. Only then can we begin to define the project and calculate the costs.”

I’m glad to see the city taking this step. But let’s take it a step further.

Just do a bond. Yeah, there are people who won’t want fiber optic service from the city and won’t want to pay for it. Tell them to suck it up. The school district does. The cemetery and ambulance districts do. I’m not able to opt out of school taxes or ambulance taxes or whatever other taxes there are out there. But I recognize schools and ambulances and cemeteries and such are there for the public good, even if that good is limited only to keeping dead people in their place. So I pay them.

And private companies complaining about public competition can pound sand. Or they could, you know, stop plastering their names all over sports complexes or sponsoring sports teams and invest that money into their infrastructure so their service is actually worth the cost.

Liquid Water? On Mars? Yeah, NASA, Figured as Much

I’m sorry I’ve got to say this, but NASA’s announcement Monday that they’ve confirmed evidence of water running on the surface of Mars was  . . . underwhelming.

Yes, I get that this is confirming water is actually occasionally running on the surface of a planet in our solar system other than Earth – but was any of this unexpected or surprising or as “mysterious” as NASA’s pre-press conference buildup warranted?

Nope.

We’ve seen the evidence for more than 50 years, through channels carved in Mars’ surface first recognized in the 1960s to the ice uncovered by rockets from the most current Mars rovers: Ice abounds on the Red Planet, which is not surprising considering how wet our solar system is. Water vapor, it's everywhere, man. Times past, there was water flowing on its surface, flowing from highlands likely into a global ocean. Given the absolute dampness of Earth, it’s hard to believe that its nearer neighbors would be devoid of any watery features (Venus is baking its water, while Mars is freezing its).

I’m glad NASA’s confirmed running water on the planet. I don't mean to belittle the discovery. But I am in no way surprised.

There is Hope After All . . .

“I’m becoming intrigued.”

Those three words from a beta reader are both wildly encouraging and – because they came at Chapter 29 – sobering.

Sobering. Because if it’s taken this long for the story to get intriguing, the work I’ve done to speed up the story at the beginning of the book isn’t yet done.

But at least there’s something there to attract attention and interest. And that’s what a writer hopes, for right? ATTENTION.

And the same thing readers want: A good, diverting story.

Or, as Sally Brown puts it so elegantly, restitution:

The reader wants restitution for putting in the time to read. And the writer certainly wants restitution for the time spent writing and editing.

Go. Go and See.

Go.

Go and see.

I went to see the redwoods.

I saw them before, of course, as a boy. In photographs, and on the television. Ancient men standing at the foot of an even more ancient tree, the men ten abreast and still not able to span the tree’s diameter.

And then I went.

And I took pictures, but they are wasted. My memories of the trees – their vastness, their quiet; the banana slugs hanging like poo on the brush at their feet – fades. I will look at the pictures I took and know that I was once there, standing at their feet.

Photos do not do them justice.

I had to see them with my eyes. Feel their bark and stand in their shadows and stare up at them as the sun filtered through the thin smoke from nearby wildfires. Perhaps they, too, would burn and I, explorer by right of presence there with eyes to see, would be the last to see them alive.

And yet.

A month after the visit, a grand cataclysm. Fire brought by drought, and many of the trees I saw died.

So I came to Iapetus.

I was a lad when Pluto went from a point of light in patient Clyde Tombaugh’s photographs to a worldlet filled with glaciers and mountains and canyons and cliffs and dunes and drifting atmospheres of nitrogen.

I saw the photographs and knew I could not appreciate Pluto unless I visited.

Iapetus, perhaps, a stop on the outward-bound journey, to test my mettle. And the Carcassonne Montes are as appealing as the Cthulhu Regio in its blackness on the verge of Pluto’s white heart.

Go. Go and see.

If I were to be remembered by any words, it would be those four.

Sally is riding in her little green car.

Dick is following Sally in his red wagon.

Jane is following Sally and Dick on her tricycle.

Where will they go? What will they see?

An ancestor, a Dutch farmer, traveled in an automobile for the first time, shortly after the end of World War II. He went a mere twenty miles from home and declared “I never knew the world was so big.”

And I understand him.

The trees thrust from the earth and anchor to it as they seem to wish to reach the stars blazing above and to stretch taller in order to see what lies beyond the horizon. Some trees cast branches, themselves even, to the ground and the waves take them into the ocean and they bleach and lose their leaves and bark but they explore the ocean and wash up on some distant beach to collect with the other driftwood where crabs clamber and dogs sniff and chase after the dead-playing seagulls. And children from the mountains frolic in the waves and collect rocks that were once on the cliff-side or the bottom of the sea and, too, have come exploring.

Even the jellyfish, washed up on the shore to be buried in the sand, with their dying twitches exclaim “I have left the water and touched dry land!”