Participation Trophies Aren't The Problem Here

Albert Burneko of Deadspin wrote a column in response to former NFL linebacker James Harrison making his kids give up participation trophies because he believed they didn't deserve trophies just for showing up. Burneko goes on to remind people how innocent kids are to begin with and concludes that the real problem is the trophy they give to the kids who win.

He has a point, actually. It's true you don't get a bonus in your paycheck just for showing up to work, but that's because you've reached an age at which point you shouldn't expect that. In Harrison's case, we are talking about kids who were eight and six years old, who are at an age in which the overwhelming majority of them may not like to lose, but get more pleasure in just running around with the ball, smiling and giggling, as adults try to encourage them while reminding them about the rules of the game.

As they get older, those trinkets just don't come for them any longer -- or at least in theory, they do. But if you think about, rewards for just showing up are still a part of life. In high school, they call them participation certificates and year-end banquets. Oh, but wait, they aren't trophies, so they don't count? Actually, they do, because anything presented you just for participating is the same: You stuck it out for the year, so here's your reward!

More to the point, though, is that for every parent who coddles their child too much and tries to protect them from every little thing that might get the child upset, there is a parent who drills the idea of "look out for number one" into a child's mind at such an early age that the child wants nothing to do with anything the parent wants because the child is scared to death of being shamed for not winning.

Whether or not Harrison is one of the latter parents is not for me to judge, but his argument is misdirected. It's not giving out participation awards to six-year-old kids that contributes to our "entitlement" society, but the combination of people who go overboard in protecting a child's self-esteem and the people who pound into a child's head the idea that if you don't win, you're a failure. Both instances lead to kids who don't know how to handle a situation that doesn't go their way.

Nobody likes to lose and nobody likes to be rejected, but it's part of life. But giving participation trophies is not something that causes a child to not learn how to handle the downside of life. People who can't stand to lose, whether because they are too competitive for their own good or too worried about failure, are the problem.

Meanwhile, we need to remember that six-year-olds and eight-year-olds are still learning a lot about life and, while they love to win and don't like to lose just like any other person, they're more concerned about whether or not they had fun. If a parent is more concerned with winning or a child's feelings, the child sure isn't going to have fun.

That's really the "entitlement" Harrison should be concerned about -- the "entitlement" for parents to insist everything go their way.

How Learning Really Happens

As I continue exploring the writing world and proceed with my first attempt at a novel, I find myself learning a lot of things I need to do. I'm also reminded about what education is really all about.

We worry about education so much in the United States, but we go about it the wrong way. I'm not talking about what we expect our kids to learn; I'm talking about how we go about it. Most of the time, we focus our education concerns on how well kids test. We spend time comparing test results to other nations, we worry that we aren't number one and we decide the best option is to test more frequently to make sure nobody is falling behind.

Meanwhile, we are losing sight on what learning is supposed to be all about: Allowing a person to explore something on his or her own, experiment with what he or she has researched, then have somebody who understands the subject examine what that person has done and critique it, pointing out what was done correctly, what is incorrect, what the person did well and where the person needs improvement.

As I have started novel writing, I've had to learn plenty of things, even though I write for a living. Newspaper writing and novel writing are not the same, so I have plenty to learn. And the only way I'm going to learn is to sit down and experiment, then get feedback.

Sure, we could figure out which authors and writers are the best based on how well they remember all the writing advice they got and test them on their grammatical skills. But that does not mean the authors and writers who get the best test scores are going to be the best at the craft. In fact, I suspect most authors and writers would strongly object to the idea that test scores should be the standard by which authors and writers are judged.

So if we believe it's a bad idea to judge authors and writers based on how much they remember to pass a test, then why do we insist that's the best way to educate our kids? I realize that not every child starts kindergarten knowing how to read or do simple math problems, but why must we test the child so many times to see what they are doing? Wouldn't a better method be to let the child sit down, demonstrate what reading or math skills they have, then let the teacher examine them, explain to the child what he or she got right or wrong, and what the child did well or needs improvement?

There are ways to do this without it sounding like you are putting a child down. Even at a young age, if you start out by telling them what they did well, then follow it with what they didn't do well, and explain what they can do to get it right, that's more likely to encourage a child than to slap a test down in front of them and judge them based on whether they pass it or not.

That doesn't mean testing should be scrapped entirely. What it means is we need to focus more on how a child really learns, and that's by experimenting, figuring out how to get better or how to get the correct answer, and then sharing it with others to find out what worked and what didn't. It's no different from how authors and writers get better at their craft: Experiment, figure out what works and what doesn't, and get feedback.

We can debate about what teaching methods are the best and whether or not there needs to be national standards in place. But every time I hear a teacher complain about teaching kids these days, the words I hear most often are "we test too much."

That should tell us something about how we are going the wrong way with learning -- and that we authors and writers should look back at our own writing experiences and know what was the real way we learned.

Newspapers Still A Promotional Avenue If You Understand Local Ties

I've written for newspapers for more than 20 years. Mostly small-town publications, but still, they are part of an industry that some would say is dying, and others would say is still trying to figure out how adapt to today's environment, where technology rules.

Regardless of what you think, it's true what has been said for aspiring authors that it's tougher to get exposure through printed publications. When it comes to newspapers, most of them are no longer doing book reviews. True, there are thousands of websites and blogs that will review books and do author profiles, but a more detailed story about an author and his or her book is still something that can make a writer feel good, particularly when the writer of the article can give it a personal touch that the book writer wants to give to his or her own work!

As someone who has written for small-town newspapers for so long, I can tell you that what really drives newspapers these days, and draws the attention of their writers, is local news. That's particularly true about the smaller communities where I have lived, in which few people from larger outlets will regularly cover what's important to them.

So such publications sound like a good opportunity for writers to promote their work. But keep in mind that, because these newspapers focus on local information, you need to remember how to tie your book in with the local community.

I'll go back to my days when I worked in Raton, N.M. I cannot tell you how many times I got press releases e-mailed about events taking place in Albuquerque or Santa Fe, or telling me about people with local ties, when those people lived in those cities. The problem was, neither city qualified as local, because Raton was 200 miles away! Then there were people who saw that I was a sports editor and sent queries, asking if I would want to review a book or talk to an author. The only problem: Most of these authors had no ties to Raton. They may have written about topics that I had explored in an occasional column, but if I was going to do stories about books or interviews with authors for the paper, I wanted a local tie.

That brings me to the time when an author brought by a copy of his book called Ghost Town Basketball. It was about basketball programs at schools that no longer existed, because the towns had dried up. Many of those teams had been near Raton and other communities the newspaper covered. The author had visited the Raton Museum and talked to several people in the area to do his research.

Now we are getting somewhere! We have a topic that will interest some local readers, the topic covers communities that local readers would be familiar with, and the people who the author interviewed were known to those readers. That's a book a local newspaper will want to write about, and that's exactly what I did.

So now that you understand a little more about the importance of local ties to most newspapers, here are those ties that will tell you whether or not you want to promote a book to a newspaper.

1. Does the author have strong ties in the city, town or county the newspaper in located? There are three strong ties that matter: The author lives there, the author was born and grew up there, or the author lived in that area for a long period of time (at least 10 years). People know who the author is and will be interested to learn about a book the author has written. Keep in mind, though, that "local" doesn't mean "same state."

2. Does the author's book prominently talk about the city, town or county, or about a major attraction there? Going back to Raton, a work of fiction set in Raton will hold interest, because people will be interested to know why the author chose Raton for the setting. If it's a nonfiction work about, for example, the Philmont Scout Ranch, a popular Boy Scout camp located near Raton, that's a book the local media will likely want to feature because people know the importance of the camp to the local area.

3. Does the book feature a topic that holds strong interest to the local residents? This is where you really need to do your research to know how much interest the book will hold to readers. Sticking with Raton, I can tell you the local baseball team draws much interest. But that doesn't mean your book about high school baseball will necessarily draw attention, especially if you wrote about a team hundreds of miles away. On the other hand, Raton once had a horse racing track called La Mesa Park and the residents still hope for horse racing to return. So there might be interest in a book about the history of horse racing, particularly if La Mesa Park is mentioned frequently. Remember, the stronger the local tie, the better.

Newspapers can still be an avenue for an author, agent or publisher to promote material. Just make sure you understand the importance of local ties before you start contacting those outlets.

The Fantastic Four Problem: It's The Writing

Any comic book geek out there is likely aware of all the negative reviews surrounding the newest Fantastic Four film, and I've read plenty of remarks about how Fox needs to quit trying to reboot the film and let Marvel Studios get more control so that studio can figure out how to make it work.

While it's true that Fox doesn't want to give up the distribution rights to Fantastic Four films, that really isn't the problem with poor films about the superhero team. Switching full control to Marvel and Disney isn't going to solve the problem by itself. All one has to do is look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has it shares of weak films. Incredible Hulk is forgettable, Iron Man 2 was a mess and Thor 2 was not good at all -- and in each case, you had a different company who held distribution rights at the time the film was released. Fact is, any studio can distribute a bad film.

And while it may be true that Sony's unwillingness to cede distribution rights for Spider-Man led to a reboot coming too soon, there's no guarantee Sony turning everything back to Marvel and Disney would have solved anything (and nothing is guaranteed now that Spidey will be part of the MCU). Besides, the second Amazing Spider-Man film suffered from the same problem the three weak MCU films had, and the Fantastic Four films have: Subpar writing.

Let's stick with Fantastic Four. The problem with the first film released to theaters was that it had the right idea of being a lighthearted film with a dark undertone, but it had the wrong execution with lightheartedness. Rather than letting the characters drop one-liners here and there and drop a humorous note when the time was right, it went for too many visual gags and put the characters in embarrassing situations. I never saw the second film, but the latest reboot decided to make everything with a dark tone, and that makes movie goers weary when every single superhero flick has that tone.

Furthermore, the first film did a poor job executing the relationship between Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm. The former is supposed to be enamored with his superpowers and be reckless and impulsive, in contrast to Grimm, who is not happy with his superpowers but mostly does things by the book. In the first film, Storm is turned into a jerk who picks on Grimm just because he can. Additionally, the first film didn't effectively portray the relationship between Reed Richards and Sue Storm, in that the two really like each other, but Richards wraps himself up too much in his research that Sue wonders if he really pays attention to her. They instead did a love triangle with Victor Von Doom and it didn't hit the same notes.

Speaking of which, Doctor Doom is the other issue with the Fantastic Four films. It's understandable that you aren't going to make Doom's origin what it was in the comics (a mysterious dictator of an Eastern European nation, which dates back to the Cold War), but in the first film, they made him a greedy, egotistical businessman who was a bigger jerk than Johnny, but failed to make him sympathetic to a degree. The first Iron Man did a better job of taking an egotistical businessman (Obadiah Stane) and making him a little sympathetic, because you can sense he wanted to run Stark Industries after Tony Stark's father Howard passed away, only for Tony to take over. It's a trait that people can relate to (I'm better qualified than the person who got the promotion or who runs the show) as opposed to a general stereotype that the common person can't really identify with (businessmen are greedy because they are).

If Fantastic Four is ever going to succeed as a film franchise, it simply needs writers who understand how to write a lighthearted film with dark undertones and how to make the personalities play off each other, while keeping the superheroes likeable. Trying to reinvent Dr. Doom is a tougher challenge, though, and that may be the biggest hurdle to getting Fantastic Four to work in film.

But while I've wondered whether or not Fox will come to a deal to get Fantastic Four tied into the MCU, that has more to do with what Sony's thinking may be (tying Spidey into MCU will get people interested again) and less to do with it improving the quality of the film. And if Fox decides to tie it to the X-Men, it does need to keep in mind that the Fantastic Four should be a contrast to the X-Men (many of them are supposed to be brooding, although some to a lesser degree than others), not just another group who finds nothing but despair.

To the point, though: Fantastic Four needs to be done in the vein of Guardians of the Galaxy if it's going to work. GotG got it right with doing a lighthearted film with dark undertones. Fantastic Four needs that, and it starts with the writing, not with the studio distributing it.

Book Review: Rain of the Ghosts

I previously wrote about how Greg Weisman influenced my writing and ideas, and as a fan of his work, I was intrigued by his first novel Rain of the Ghosts.

A brief background before I get to the novel: Rain of the Ghosts was originally envisioned as a TV show but the project fell through. Weisman later rewrote the show as a novel but couldn't find anyone interested. After he had finished work on the series Young Justice, he went back to the novel, did a rewrite and found an interested publisher. (See, other writers can relate to Weisman with the tale of writing a novel, not finding interest and having to revisit and rewrite it later.)

As for the novel itself, it focuses on the adventures of Rain Cacique, who lives with her family in the Prospero Keys, a chain of islands on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle. Her grandfather Sebastian passes away while she is out with her best friend Charlie Dauphin and a girl the two met the day before, Miranda. Prior to his death, Sebastian gave Rain a gold band with two intertwined gold snakes. After his death, Rain realizes she can see ghosts and the band allows her to communicate with them, notably her own grandfather. From there, it leads to an adventure in which Rain must solve a mystery dating back to World War II.

The novel's biggest strength is Weisman understanding how teenagers think, particularly at a young age, and he does a good job bringing Rain and Charlie to life. I empathized with Rain and her relationship with her grandfather, and you understand Charlie enough to know he's conflicted between how long he's known Rain and what he thinks about Miranda upon first meeting her.

Another strength is how Weisman takes the concept of magical characters but keeps it grounded in the real world. He does a good job describing the Prospero Keys environment and I can tell he thoroughly researched what the area was like.

The novel is written from the omniscient viewpoint, which may not appeal to some readers. I've had discussions with others about the danger of "head hopping" before, but the counterpoint is many novels do a good job with that viewpoint. In Weisman's case, I think his portrayal of younger characters and his world building make up for the challenge with omniscient narration.

Rain of the Ghosts is the first in a series of nine planned novels. The second novel, Spirits of Ash and Foam, has also been released, and a third novel is on the way. After reading the first two (and yes, a review of the second novel is forthcoming), I am intrigued to see what twists and turns Weisman will take next.

You can order Rain of the Ghosts on Amazon or check your local bookstore.

Don't Be Afraid To Take A Day Off

As we authors plug away at our manuscripts and set goals for how many words we want to write in a day, we sometimes forget it's OK to take a break in the middle of a manuscript.

My job sometimes forces me to take a day off from writing my book, but it's more than just ensuring your commitments outside of writing. Sometimes, it can be beneficial to step away from your writing and get some focus back.

When I first thought of ideas for my book, it usually took place when I was taking a walk, mowing the lawn or shopping for groceries. Taking time to do those things, and not just sitting in front of your notepad or laptop, can be a good way to generate some ideas.

It's good to set goals for how much writing you want to get in a day, especially as you are getting further into your rewrites and edits. But get too caught up in your writing and you might lose sight on certain ideas that can make your story flow better.

Briefly touching upon my book, I have a chapter that will include some scenes that will be written differently from what I originally had in mind. Tonight, when I go out to mow the lawn, I'll have the chance to think about what I want to write, and continue to think about those things when I go out to run errands in the morning. Then, I hope to sit down and write out some of that material.

And, yes, I found it does help to step away from your completed draft for a while, to see if things are really coming together as you want them. But it can help just as much to do it when a draft is underway.

So don't be afraid to take a day off from writing. It might mean one day lost toward how soon you complete your draft, but it could result in greater gain for how strong your draft turns out.

Sometimes You Have To Cut Something Out

So the fifth draft of my book is at more than 15,000 words, six-and-a-half chapters and about 43 pages. As I've gone through edits and revisions, I've made the hard choice that other writers often make: cutting some stuff out.

As the first book is part of a planned trilogy, I had a lot of characters I wanted to introduce along the way. However, I had one character I planned to introduce in the first book, but have decided to push back that character to the second book. He's not entirely out of the picture, but he is out of the first book. The reason I eliminated him was because I decided that some of his involvement wasn't going anywhere, but he becomes more important as the trilogy continues.

There is another character I had wanted to involve a lot in the first book, but now his role will be significantly reduced. This is because I decided that his involvement was repeating material that was covered by another character. So it was better to use him as a fairly insignificant character who only plays importance to a scene or two. This allowed me to put the focus on other characters who carry greater importance in the trilogy.

Finally, there were certain plot points I wanted to address, but I determined they dragged down the story too much. So a lot of them will be pushed back in the later installments of the trilogy.

As I have read what others have wrote, and talked to other people, I now understand why sometimes you have to get rid of certain characters, elements and concepts in order to sharpen the focus of your story.

With this said, it's fine when you are completing initial drafts of a story to throw out whatever you want. That's because it's the only way you will figure out what works and what doesn't work. You might find a character who you thought would be insignificant, instead be a compelling character who demands greater involvement in the story.

Even if you don't, you'll learn what can be removed to allow you to focus on more important details. And if you plan sequels, you can always introduce certain elements you eliminated, if you believe they can still build the world or plots you want to develop.

Cutting is never an easy task, but I've learned why it's essential to writing a good novel.

(Note: Yes, I'm being cryptic about the details, because I'm not ready to reveal them yet. Once I have a draft I'm ready to submit to agents, I may share more details, perhaps even a preview of the first chapter. In the meantime, I hope to have a book review up for you by the weekend.)