The Writer magazine gave me my first exposure to professional writing skills and expectations years and years ago. Now, the latest issue (April 2012) includes my article “Instant Writing Motivation,” my first contribution to the magazine.

My friend Alethea Kontis, author of the novel Enchanted (coming out in May), recently got an enthusiastic review from Tamora Pierce, a writer whose work she’s loved since childhood. In a quieter way, my having something meaningful to contribute to the pages of The Writer means the same kind of thing to me that Ms. Pierce’s compliments mean to Alethea. In both cases, we’d love to be able to tell our younger selves about what we’ve accomplished so far.

In any case, I commend The Writer to you, not only for this one article, but for a wide variety of useful material on fiction and non-fiction writing, the writing life, business matters, and more. If you’re already a subscriber, I hope you enjoy the article and am very much interested in your thoughts on it.

One of my favorite Web comics (and I only follow a few) recently ran a Kickstarter project hoping to raise $57,750 to reprint some collections of the comic. The Order of the Stick author/artist/genius Rich Burlew did a little better than that: the final total was $1.25 million dollars, the third biggest Kickstarter ever. You can read about it here on Publishers Weekly, among other places. Note that the majority of the money will probably go to getting the premiums printed and shipped.

I’m sure this will energize a lot of people to try Kickstarter for their own project, but I doubt any of them will have the huge and motivated fan base Burlew has. His series, which is about a set of Dungeons and Dragons characters on a quest to save the universe from an evil undead wizard, has adventure, surprises, good characterization, and a ton of humor. I don’t know if it would be of any interest to a person who’s never played D&D, as I did when I was young. You can read the series here: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0001.html .

I think the lesson to take away here is not so much that it’s time to rush to Kickstarter, or that successful Kickstarter projects have to be managed as masterfully as Burlew managed his (the charts showing progress each day were OOTS comics, for instance, and he kept adding new premiums every time a new goal was hit), but that the key to success as a creator of stories is to find a sweet spot where your storytelling turns a lot of people on (in the non-kinky way) (unless you write erotica, in which case knock yourself out) (not literally) (except who am I to tell you what to write in your erotica)?

Burlew champions the approach of building an audience through offering free material: “if you give it away first, people will form their opinion of you and your work before you ask them for money. And readers are a lot more likely to spend money on things they know they like than things they hope they will like. People want to own what they love, so rather than selling access to the content, sell the permanent incarnation of it – be that a book or an ebook or a DVD or whatever. The best thing about giving away your content first is that when it comes time to sell the final product, you’re going to have almost 100% customer satisfaction. No one is going to complain that they didn’t like the story they bought, because every one of your customers knew they liked it before paying.”

There’s a list of media mentions of Burlew’s feat on his site. It was covered by Publisher’s Weekly, Forbes, The Guardian, etc.

There are stories that are just not well-conceived, stories that, unless they are completely altered, will never be successful. A story like this might have characters that don’t appeal, events that don’t satisfy, ideas that don’t engage, or they may just never connect emotionally with the reader.

Other stories are rough in early drafts, but with a limited number of changes become very effective. How do you tell the difference? Unfortunately, it’s not easy, and for the most part it’s a problem that’s similar to judging your work in the first place, with similar solutions (see “Your Opinion and Twenty-Five Cents: Judging Your Own Writing“).

Sometimes, though, it can be very hard to have faith that revision can make a big difference. As an example to demonstrate how it can, consider this account from Writers of the Future and Nebula winner Eric James Stone, originally mentioned on the Codex writing group and quoted with permission.

To understand the context, note that we regularly run writing contests on Codex in order to push ourselves, generate new work, and learn from the competition. Weekend Warrior is a yearly event there in which each participant writes a story of 750 words or less from prompts over a 60-hour period.

For 2009 Weekend Warrior, Round 2, I wrote a story I thought it was powerful and might do well in the contest, but I was wrong: 5.35 average [on a scale of 1-10 — Luc], 8th out of 17, closer to the bottom score of the round (4.06) than the top (7.47). It was my lowest point total of the five weeks, so it didn’t even count in my overall score for the contest. That was my biggest flop ever in WW. (I’ve had lower-scoring stories, but I didn’t think they were going to do well in the contest.)

I put it aside for over a year, then deleted three sentences, added ten, and edited seven. That lengthened the story by about 25% and allowed the powerful story that was in my head to come out more clearly. I sent it out and it sold to the first place I sent it [a major pro market — Luc], where it became one of the most-liked stories of all time (at least on their Facebook page): “Buy You a Mockingbird.”

Now, I’m not saying the contest score was wrong — I had not successfully conveyed what I wanted to convey, and I needed to edit the story later in order to make it work. What I’m saying is that sometimes a flop can be turned into a hit.

If you’re interested in Stone’s work, you may want to check out his story collection Rejiggering the Thingamajig.

Writers are often invited to include a sentence, paragraph, or page of information about themselves when their works are published, and the same thing often applies to speakers, new employees, or anyone else who is in the spotlight for a moment or two. But what do we say? Do we give our basic statistics–age, occupation, education, hometown? Do we trumpet our successes, wax enthusiastic about our interests, or just try to sound clever?

The answer depends on what you want the bio to do. If you just want to get out of the spotlight as soon as possible, a boring bio is ideal. No point mentioning you’re a ballroom dance champion if you don’t want people to come talk to you about it, or to look you up when they need to learn a few moves for their sister’s wedding.

For writers, though, staying out of the spotlight is a bad idea. Like actors and public speakers, we are usually our own brand. The ideal for many of us would be for the focus to always be on our work, and biographies can be used for this purpose. However, personal details can often do more to help build a relationship with readers–and a long-term relationship with lots of readers is what most of us are after, at least those of us who want a writing career.

I’m not sure that I’m a master at writer bios, but I certainly have some suggestions on the subject. My point of view is that ideally a bio does one or more of the following:

1) Helps the reader become more interested in the writer
2) Makes the writer more memorable
3) Offers somewhere to go right now to read more from or connect with the writer

The reason these three things are useful, it seems to me, is that #1 makes it more likely a one-time reader will become someone who looks for the writer’s work; #2 makes it more likely the reader will recognize the writer’s name at next exposure, wherever that may be; and #3 offers the possibility of developing a further relationship with the reader right now, whether or not an immediate sale results. Note that #s 1 and 2 tend to encourage readers to follow up on #3.

I’m not a fan of cute bios or of bios that make the person sound like Generic Writer Number 1433 (e.g., “John P. Smith loves Science Fiction, especially the works of Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, has a degree in chemical engineering, and lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, kids, and three cats, whose shenanigans keep him in stiches from dawn ’til dusk.”). Wildly-varied-list-of-jobs-I-have-had bios also do very little for me.

In theory, bios that don’t really tell you anything about the writer seem like they can work if they’re examples of really entertaining writing, since that addresses point #1.

I tend to write specialized versions of my bio for each venue or context. My bio for my article coming out in the April issue of The Writer emphasizes my writing-related background and my focus relating to the article content, plugs my current top-priority publication, and invites the readers to my blog (which is closely related to the article content–no accident, as I was pitching articles related to my blog to build on the things I know and help attract more readers).

Luc Reid is a Writers of the Future winner, the founder of the Codex online writing group, and an author of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novel Family Skulls. He blogs on writing and the psychology of habits at lucreid.com.

For a recent sale of my flash fiction story “Tornado on Fire” to the Escape Pod podcast, I used some of the same material, but mentioned Taekwondo (I should probably have used the phrase “black belt,” which to me has always been a coolness-booster), didn’t plug the novel (as there was a more closely-related book I got to plug along with the bio), and mentioned my current work-in-progress, which could attract interest to the blog, since it’s closely connected.

This piece first appeared in my column “Brain Hacks for Writers” over at the online publication Futurismic. I’ll be republishing each of my BHfW columns here over the next few weeks.

I don’t know, personally, whether it’s merely difficult or actually impossible for writers to judge our own writing well. You write a story that you’re convinced is the finest thing you’ve ever written and send it out to the world, and it’s only 18 months and ten rejection slips later that you decide it really wasn’t so good after all. Or you scribble something up in a rush that you think is unremarkable, and everyone who reads it tells you it’s great.

This stuff is frustrating. If we don’t know how well we’re doing, how can we do better? And how can we ever have any confidence in our own work? If we can’t really judge the quality of our own writing, even something that sells can feel like a fluke, a bad call on the part of an editor. A few thousand adoring fans can be an effective cure for this, but they are hard to come by in those numbers.

It does make sense, though, that we can’t be perfect judges of our own writing. If we could, we’d immediately see and fix all of the flaws, never suffer any doubt as to changes we might need to make, and never be upset by a rejection. Further, being able to judge the written work would mean completely ignoring all of the imagined things that went into that work, not allowing them to influence the reading at all–yet we have to be intimately involved with those imaginings in order to write the piece in the first place.

It seems to me that it’s important to recognize this blindness, this inability of any one person–especially the author–to make any kind of final judgment about a piece of writing. If we don’t come to terms with this limitation, we’re doomed to crash repeatedly into the jagged rocks of reader and editor opinion, to be amazed and horrified at the difference between our beliefs about our own work and everyone else’s. Some writers (you may have met them) do exactly this, assuming that if they write work they deem brilliant and readers don’t agree, then the readers are deficient. That way lies madness–and also failure and a really annoying personality.

But though we can never be perfect judges of our own work, there are steps we can take to be better at judging it. Here are specific techniques we writers can use to get a new perspective on what we write:

• Get someone else to read it. This can be a critique group, a friend, a relative, a teacher, etc., although all of these kinds of readers are problematic in one way or another. Teachers and other writers have ideas about how things should be written that don’t necessarily have to do with how well something reads, and friends and relatives tend to be biased. The ideal feedback would come from a group of people in the target audience who don’t have a connection to the writer and don’t write, though that’s not an easy group to recruit.
• Let time pass. I don’t know about you, but for me it’s very difficult to let a piece sit when I’m excited about it. I want to send it out right away and get some kind of excited response in return. Yet if I let a piece sit for weeks or months (or at least a few days), then when I come back to it my experience is much closer to that of a normal reader than it was immediately after I wrote it, when I still had all the supporting ideas and images swirling in my head.
• Read it aloud. Some people have no use for this approach, others swear by it, and yet others (like me) might like it if they tried it but never seem to get around to trying it. If you’re in that last group, consider having a computer, Kindle, or other device read it to you. (I’ll be giving this a whirl myself.) You can even use headphones.
• Look for specifics. Another way to get perspective on your work is to analyze it instead of reading it to experience it. You can go through the piece checking for voice, plot, sensory detail, character, or practically anything else. One friend of mine goes through printouts of his work and highlights things like action, moments that show character motivation, and themes in different colors to check the balance and pacing. You might like to use a checklist: I have one I’ve compiled of the best ideas I’ve come across, “The Virtuoso Writer’s Cheat Sheet,” which I use to try to remind myself of all of the ways I could improve a given story.

I’ve been thinking about the question of what makes a good fictional character, and the result is this list of ways characters can draw readers’ interests, which I hope you’ll find useful.

There seem to be some basic requirements for characters that aren’t as much about drawing readers to them as about the character being workable at all, things like having flaws, actively pursuing goals, being vulnerable in some way, and being believable (at least in the context of the story). My list below is not so much about these things, which we might consider the character basics, but about the more difficult and touchy job of creating a character that pops off the page or that readers love.

With that said, my fictional success isn’t yet to the point where I can claim that all of my characters do this, so certainly you can take this list with a grain of salt.

So what I came up with when I dug into this question was five categories of things that get and keep readers interested in a character. They aren’t entirely exclusive of one another, but they seem to be helpful categories. They are:

1. sympathy (we like the character)
2. attention (we want to see what the character will do next)
3. entertainment (we enjoy seeing the character in action)
4. admiration (we aspire to be like the character), and
5. identification (we feel like the character reflects ourselves)

It’s likely that there are some other methods or even an entire category or two I’ve missed, but this list should be useful at least as a starting point.

By the way, I give a character for each of the below as an example of that item, but I’m not suggesting that the item in question is the only or even necessarily the primary thing that’s interesting about that particular character, just that the character is an example of that item in action.

SYMPATHY
* Suffering through something undeserved (Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone)
* Makes a sacrifice for someone else’s good (Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities)
* Consistently kind to others even when mistreated (Little Orphan Annie in the Little Orphan Annie comic, etc.)
* Extremely loyal (Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings)
* Highly principled (Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird)
* Not consistently nice, but sometimes willing to put real effort into being kind or friendly (Greg House in the TV series House)

ATTENTION
* Mysterious (Lestat in Interview with the Vampire)
* Trying really hard to accomplish something difficult (Hazel in Watership Down)
* Extremely resourceful, whether well-intentioned or not (Tom Sawyer in Tom Sawyer)
* Unique, fascinating, or exotic (Iorek Byrnison, the armored bear in The Golden Compass)
* Very powerful, whether in politics, money, physical prowess, etc. (Darth Vader in Star Wars)

ENTERTAINMENT
* Eccentric, unpredictable, fun to watch (Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Carribean)
* Willing to say things most people would only think (Sherlock Holmes in the modern movie and TV adaptations–I can’t comment on the originals, not having read them for a long time)
* Witty or intentionally entertaining (Bartimaeus in The Amulet of Samarkand)
* Strongly identifiable and partly–but not entirely–predictable (Homer Simpson in the TV series The Simpsons)

ADMIRATION
* Great at something (Zorro in various movies)
* Wise or knowledgeable (Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings)
* Unflappable; impossible to keep down (Lyra in The Golden Compass)

IDENTIFICATION
* Struggling with issues we can identify with, whether successful or not (Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye)
* Feels like a stand-in for the reader (Bella Swan in Twilight)

Of course, many of the best characters hit multiple points above.

As an exercise, it can be useful to think of a character you love from a book, movie, or television show, consider whether one or more of the above applies strongly to that character, and decide for yourself whether or not that has much to do with why you like the character. Recently I’ve been watching the excellent BBC series Masterpiece: Downton Abbey, and I was interested to realize that as I made this list, various characters from that show popped into my head without me even trying.

A more potent exercise: take a piece of your writing–or even someone else’s writing–in which there’s a character who doesn’t really stand out, and go through this list to find one or two of the above items that you can use to punch the character up. What are your results?

I’d appreciate your comments, additions, protests, and so on.

I’m wrapping up my series “Brain Hacks for Writers” at Futurismic (at least for now) with “Better Writing Through Writing About Writing,” an article on some techniques I’ve learned and tested for getting past motivational problems with writing, getting better focus, making writing-related decisions, and so on. I present five written tools writers can use to improve things and some ideas on how best to use them.

The process of writing has changed enormously in the past 50 years. Word processors transformed writing from something you have to redo every time you want to make changes to something that can include any number of changes with no extra effort beyond the edits themselves. The Web has elevated research from a limited, time-consuming, and sometimes expensive process into a few minutes communing with Google. Laptops and similar devices have taken these improvements out on the road. Print on demand and especially eBooks have opened an entirely separate career path for some independent writers.

In comparison to these game-changing tools and resources, what difference does Scrivener make? Well, if you’re like about 80% of writers, the answer used to be “none at all,” because Scrivener was originally a Mac-only program. Unless you’ve been beta testing the Windows version, all that changed yesterday when Scrivener 1.0 for Windows was introduced.

What’s so great about Scrivener?
I originally posted about Scrivener in an article called “How Tools and Environment Make Work Into Play, Part I: The Example of Scrivener.” My main point in that article was that for long or complex writing projects–novels, screenplays, stage plays, non-fiction books, articles with lots of information, or even short stories with especially detailed worlds or plots–Scrivener takes the heavy lifting out of organizing a lot of thoughts, resources, research, ideas, plot points, facts, scenes, or other details into a living outline that naturally evolves into your actual book.

For example, when I wrote my short book The Writing Engine: A Practical Guide to Writing Motivation (available in PDF form for free on this site, or for 99 cents on Amazon for the Kindle), I had an enormous number of tips, tricks, insights gleaned from scientific research, anecdotes, and whole articles to organize into a well-structured book. Using Scrivener, I dumped everything in without worrying about the order and then was easily able to organize it all into a structure that I could write and rewrite my way through until I had a clean final draft. While organizing, I was able to focus on just a few elements at a time, which took away that crazy, overwhelmed feeling of worrying that I’d forget some important piece of information. Once I began my actual writing, it also allowed me to focus singlemindedly on what I was writing.

How does Scrivener work?
The basic idea behind Scrivener is very simple: it conceives of a piece of writing as a bunch of pieces of text, each of which might be a paragraph, a scene, a chapter, an illustration, some research material, notes for your reference, etc. These pieces are organized into two general categories: Draft (for the writing itself) and Research (for supporting material that’s not intended to wind up in the actual book).

All of these pieces can be organized into an outline. For instance, I might start with these ideas for an evil bathtub story:

Note that in this picture I’m just showing the “binder,” the section on the left where I come up with the pieces I want to organize. I typed the names of my pieces right into there. I also could have started with some material I’d already written, which would go into the text area on the right that appears as I click on each item.

As you can see, I’m starting with some ideas about characters, a few plot points, some incidents, and some research. I’m not sure what happens when yet: all I have is glimpses of what’s happening in a short story about an evil bathtub.

(It’s ironic to me that I had forgotten, in putting together this example, that in college I actually wrote a story in college about a cursed bathtub. I guess this is a thing with me. I think the title was “Miriam Pzicsky and the Handyman from Hell.” I’m pleased to say that I have improved as a writer somewhat since college.)

In the next picture, you’ll see what I did with those pieces of information: I chose to impose three-act structure (something I don’t have to do and generally don’t do explicitly) and then dragged the items around into something resembling an order for the story. One of the great things about Scrivener is that in doing this, I automatically begin to see where there are holes in the story, where it might get repetitive, and what kind of structure I’m dealing with. Just seeing the story as an outline helps me improve the story.

click to enlarge

Once I’m done adding or changing elements in my outline, I’ll just start clicking on items in it and writing those items one by one. I can add, delete, and move around pieces as I write (which is why I refer to this as a “living outline”), and the click-and-write experience makes it easy to focus on one part of the piece at a time.

Scrivener has many, many more useful features. This glimpse is only meant to show what I think is the key useful concept behind the program. Fortunately, it’s more than a concept: the software has been developed with a lot of appropriate, productive, and easy-to-use features.

While Scrivener is useful, it’s also fun, at least for me. When I use Scrivener, I use less of my attention to keep track of details and more of it to write. This makes me a happier writer.

When is Scrivener not useful?
Scrivener isn’t for everyone. If you like to start writing a piece from the beginning and then go right through to the end, or if you tend to make a traditional outline just to get a grip on what you’re doing and then don’t do much with that outline except consult it as you write, I’m not sure Scrivener would be especially helpful for you. If you write off the cuff, without research or planning, there won’t be much Scrivener can help you organize. Personally, I love Scrivener’s organizational features, but I rarely use it for short stories: I find it much more useful for outlined novels and non-fiction projects.

Even if you write by the seat of your pants, though, you may find Scrivener invaluable. You can start writing a novel by typing “Chapter 1” and plunging ahead with only the most general sense of where you’re going, but even in that kind of situation you will probably start coming up with scenes you want to include later, plot developments that need to occur, bits to insert into what you’ve already written, research materials, and more things to be organized. Scrivener doesn’t care whether you organize before, during, or after writing: it just helps you get everything into a usable structure.

If I’ve piqued your interest
The fine folks at Literature and Latte offer a free, 30-day trial which is in fact far better than most 30-day trials in that it doesn’t count calendar days, but instead days you use Scrivener. If you use it twice a week, your 30-day trial will last you 15 weeks. You also don’t have to create an account, sign up for anything, or even supply an e-mail address to get the trial. You can download it here: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php .

If you do opt to buy, the price is $40, but there’s a 20% discount you can find at http://www.literatureandlatte.com/nanowrimo.php . A 50% discount is available for people who “win” NaNoWriMo, completing at least 50,000 words of a novel project in the month of November. (For more info on NaNoWriMo, go to http://www.nanowrimo.org/ .)

Writers of the Future winner and successful science fiction short story author (Analog, Intergalactic Medicine Show, etc.) Brad Torgersen recently brought up a useful question in a writers’ group: what use is a blog to a writer of fiction? Even if you manage to attract a lot of readers, are they people who are likely to be interested in your stories or novels? Is the payoff worth the effort? My response from my experience with the two blogs (ReidWrite and The Willpower Engine) that I merged together into LucReid.com some time back turned out to be fairly long and potentially of interest to some readers, so here, with a little cleanup, is that response.

An experiment in blog as marketing
Several years back I began two blogs, one for writers and the other on the psychology of habits. I started the writing blog because I often found I had things to say about writing that I was drawing from my experiences and from discussions with a large number of other new and successful writers. The psychology of habits blog was designed to build up a reputation and readership for me on the subject: in publishing-speak, to establish my platform. I was writing  a book on the subject of psychological finds about self-motivation and had concluded that I wouldn’t be able to sell it without a good platform, which is really the case for most nonfiction books these days. If you don’t have credentials or a lot of people who associate you with the topic–and preferably both–then you’re probably out of luck.

For quite some time I worked on the psychology of habits blog, posting first three times a week on a regular schedule, then every weekday. I worked up a brand, promoted it around the Web, commented on other people’s sites, and in general did everything I read I was supposed to in order to build my readership. Over the course of a year, my blog grew (slowly) to the level of readership I thought was minimal for helping me sell the book I’d been working on, so after that year was up, I started contacting agents about the book.

Nobody was interested.

The main reason I couldn’t sell the book seemed to be that I had no credentials–no advanced degree in psychology, especially–and that a blog with a thousand reads a week (this was about 18 months ago) wasn’t substantial enough for anyone in publishing to really care.

So despite a load of work, the blog-as-marketing approach ultimately failed for me. Still, I continued the blog. The topic has never failed to keep me interested.

Is your blog a pleasure or an obligation?
Posting regularly felt like a huge obligation and time drain, even when I cut back down to three posts a week. It was only when I decided to combine my two blogs, to rebrand the site to just use my name, and to post only when I had something I really wanted to share that things changed and it stopped feeling oppressive.

I now blog when I have something to say, although I do prod myself if it’s been a week and I haven’t posted anything. The blog does a lot of good in helping me structure research and integration of new ideas, and from the occasional communications I get it’s sometimes meaningfully helpful in other people’s lives. However, though it’s continued to grow in readership, it has never become a base for community: it’s more of an information outlet. It’s a good place to find out how to get motivated quickly, how to figure out if someone’s romantically interested in you, or how to stop feeling hungry, but I talk very little about my personal life or even about my adventures in writing, and try to stick to facts or extrapolate from facts, tending to qualify my statements (like this one), so I’m neither very personally engaging nor very inflammatory. It shows up in my comment counts: more often than not, I don’t get any, and yet a goodly number of people are reading what I’m putting out. I’m informative, but I’m not building community here.

By contrast, I’ve been extremely successful building a community of talented, improvement-oriented writers at Codexwriters.com, but rather than trying to do that based on the impact of my personality, I’ve done it by pulling together groups of writers who are dedicated to their craft and want to share ideas with and learn from other writers who are similarly dedicated. All you have to do to throw a good party is to get great people to come.

Who should have a blog?
My belief about blogs is that they should generally be expressions of things that the blogger really wants to share. Sure, there may be a cost-benefit calculation to determine whether or not to spend time on a particular post or on having a blog at all, but I’m not enthusiastic or optimistic about blogs that are put up primarily as marketing vehicles. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that ethically; it’s just it’s a lot of work to plow into something that’s unlikely to pay off proportionately.

I agree too with those who say that the golden age of blog-starting is over. With the literally millions of blogs out there, there’s too much noise to really stand out in the vast majority of cases. Like writing fiction in the first place, there’s not much point in doing it unless it’s something you love doing for its own sake.

On Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social computing world
For the record, I don’t think that social computing is an effective marketing strategy either. I see people rushing to socially compute with people who are already successful: they’ll seek out Twitter feeds and Facebook pages of authors they already like, while lesser-known writers who are scrambling for attention may get a lot of personal contacts, but won’t be building their readership. I admit, though, that I’m working from personal experience and impressions of other people’s experiences, not from any carefully-gathered body of information. It’s possible that using social networking as an author can be a great marketing strategy for some people: I’ve just never seen (or heard of) it working.

As for blogs, I think the bottom line is that they are more writing that will take time away from writing fiction, and so they are worth doing only if they’re something you really want to do or would be doing in some form anyway. It’s enthusiasm for the ideas I write about and interest in spreading those ideas that keeps me writing on this blog. What keeps you writing yours?

Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Twilight, even A Wrinkle In Time … technically, these books were never meant for those of us over the age of 18 or so. As Young Adult (or in the case of Harry Potter, Middle Grade) fiction, they were intended for the younger generation, and yet adults–by which I mean possibly you and definitely me–are still reading them by the bookmobileful. I think we’re supposed to be reading more serious stuff–maybe The Grapes of Wrath, or Moby Dick … War and Peace is probably good. I always tell people I’m reading War and Peace, and I’m at that part right near the end. This helps make sure they’ll change the subject quickly so that I don’t have to prove I don’t know what it’s about. Except, you know, obviously war, and also peace. Probably there’s something there about Russia invading … I don’t know, somebody. Maybe Russia invading Russia. Russia is pretty big: they could probably get away with that.

Anyway, my point is that it’s not always impressive and mature-sounding to say “Oh, I just read this great book written for 12-year-olds …” Here, as a public service, are some excuses writers and readers can use to cover for an addiction to young adult fiction.

• I have a teen at home, so I have to know what they’re reading to be a good parent.
• I work with teens, so I have to know what they’re reading to do my job.
• I know my kid is only four, but I have to be up to speed by the time she hits middle school.
• While I don’t have or work with kids now, I might someday, and it’s better to be safe than sorry.
• I mistook it for the latest long, boring novel about the grim reflections of an emotionally deprived settlement camp volunteer. That’s what I really meant to read.
• I’m a writer, and that market’s hot right now.
• I’m a writer, and I just want to make sure that I know what’s Young Adult so that I don’t write some by mistake.
• Actually, I’m pretty sure Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is classified as a technothriller.
• What, that? That’s not mine.
• Well you know, it’s interesting: it turns out that there are moral and ethical threads to the subtext that really delineate an entirely separate and more cerebral story not immediately evident if you don’t really dig in, but that with energetic literary analysis really emerges with a characteristic–wait, come back! Don’t you want to hear about the affective parallelism?
• Young adult fiction is where all the really steamy stuff is these days. Who wants to read about two old people doing it?
• Oh, I just have that because I’m translating it into Serbo-Croatian.
• That’s just one of the fake covers I use to hide my D.H. Lawrence books.
• That’s from when I was a kid. I only read eBooks now.
• Yes, I’m reading young adult fiction. When’s the last time you read a book you couldn’t put down?