Wordcraft – This New Year, resolve to review

Resolutions have a way of sneaking up on us. I slid past last New Year’s Day without making any, only to realize a month later that a blog post about a friend’s books was really a book review. As much as I love to write, book reviews had always seemed reminiscent of the essays we all dreaded writing in school. Writing is fun, even when it’s hard. Essays are work. But a blog post once written—how easy is that, with maybe minor tweaking—to copy and paste to Goodreads, then to Amazon?

I tried the same thing with a few other posts from my Adventure classics series. Then the Dallas Mayor’s Summer Reading program, usually for kids, had a section this year for adults. Only we grownup readers had to submit a (gasp!) review of each book we read to qualify for the yummy prizes. After a summer of book reviews (duly posted also to Goodreads and Amazon), I figured I had the reviewing thing down. Sometimes readers even found them helpful.

And I thought: reviewing, it’s not that hard. The fact that, unlike in school, I wasn’t actually graded on it removed a lot of the pressure. And it’s a service to other writers and other readers, a way of giving back to the literary community.

It wasn’t until rather late this year that I started to wonder if there were actually any guidelines on how to write book reviews, other than the essay format we learned in school: tell people what you’re going to say, say it, then tell people what you said. With this additional caution for reviews: don’t tell them how the book ends.

Turns out, there’s quite a bit of information online about how to write a book review.

Mostly the advice turned out to be variations on the three-part method I learned in school, with some fine tuning, like this from the Writing Center at University of North Carolina’s College of Arts and Sciences:

1. Introduction (including the name of the author, title of book and main theme)

2. Summary of content

3. Analysis and evaluation of the book

4. Conclusion, which is the old restatement issue

A few additional suggestions from UNC that I found helpful were: Review the book in front of you, not the book you wish the author had written. Be precise. (In other words, reviews such as one I read, that said, “it wasn’t what I expected,” aren’t precise. Or helpful to readers.) Never hesitate to challenge an assumption, but cite specific examples to back up your assertions. Finally, try to present a balanced argument about the value of the book for its audience.

The site Writing-World.com repeated the caution to review the actual book, not the one you wished had been written. I hope I don’t need to add that you actually need to have read the book before reviewing it? Or that you should check to be sure statements you attribute to the book are accurate? A review my book group looked at immediately lost credibility when the writer used the wrong names for the characters.

There’s also an entire cottage industry on the Internet about how to write reviews specifically for Amazon, including information from Amazon itself. (Note that Amazon’s guidelines apply to all product reviews, whether they’re for books or hula hoops.) And although you must have at some point used an Amazon account to buy a product or service in order to post a review, and the product (in this case, the book) has to be available on Amazon, you don’t have to buy the actual book you’re reviewing from Amazon. Presumably Amazon considers even non-buyer reviews a service to its customers.

Other Amazon tips are: Include the “why”: the best reviews include not only whether you liked or disliked a product (book) but also why. Be specific. Don’t make a review too long or too short. Suggested lengths are between 75 to 500 words. Minimum length is 20 words, maximum 5,000. And finally, give an honest opinion, even if it’s critical.

Happy New Year and get those reviews out there!

Adventure classics – What’s love got to do with it?

The Symposium, by Plato

commentary from Plato at the Googleplex, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

***

It’s Socrates’ turn at last to speak on the agreed topic, the nature of love, at what would be the world’s most famous party, as Plato describes in his Symposium. (Will knowing that “symposium” was originally simply a term for a drinking party make any of us look forward more to events labeled with this title at conferences?)

The speaker immediately before Socrates, the poet Agathon, who was also the party’s host, fears his speech will seem ridiculous once a thinker as great as Socrates speaks. But Socrates remains true to his often-stated premise that he is the most ignorant of human beings and modestly (or ironically) puts the authorship of his story on a woman, the priestess Diotima. She was, he says, “my instructress in the art of love.”

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, in her Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, notes that there is no evidence outside of The Symposium for any female religious authority named Diotima, although some writers have speculated that she may be based on the historical figure of Aspasia, a brilliant prostitute who participated in the intellectual circles of Athens.

With this possibility in mind, are the other guests preparing themselves for something racy from Socrates? In fact, in a version of The Symposium from Xenophon, another of Socrates’ disciples, the old philosopher does come across as rather naughty.

In Plato’s version, however, the surprise is the way Diotima upends Socrates’ ideas about the nature of love as neatly as he has done to the claims of the previous speakers. Love, she says, is not a god at all, but a spirit who mediates between gods and mortals, “spanning the chasm which divides them.”

Sexual intercourse and procreation are divinely ordained aspects of love, Diotima tells Socrates. This form of love leads to the desire to possess an individual beloved and to generate beautiful children. But the lover who progresses in knowledge will realize “that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the outward form…(until) drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts.”

It was the version of love that Plato plainly saw for himself. But even that was not to be the last word on the subject.

Socrates has barely finished speaking when “suddenly there was a great knocking at the door of the house, as of revelers” When the door is answered, in bursts the baddest of Athenian bad boys, the beautiful, brilliant, rich, well-born and charismatic young man Alcibiades, who would go on to betray Athens to its enemy Sparta, then Sparta to Athens, then both city states to their archenemies, the Persians, before dying in exile at the hands of assassins.

It was this horrific behavior of a man who had been one of Socrates’ followers that helped inspire the charges of “corruption of the young” against him and lead to his execution. In effect, Goldberger writes, “Alcibiades’ love for Socrates was sterile. Nothing creative or beautiful ever came of it.” Instead, Plato formed himself into the “thought” child of Socrates. “To love Socrates (as Plato did) is to have been impregnated with his intuitions.”

But even Plato, claiming the crown of favorite child for himself, can’t resist the erotic energy Alcibiades brings with him when he bursts into Agathon’s house (or rather staggers, as in the illustration to this post). Although uninvited, the other partygoers beg him to join them. And although the drinking had been moderate up to this point, Alcibiades drunkenly insists on having the others drink deep to his transient, tragic Dionysian splendor.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins a January of true adventures with Agatha Christie’s memoir of her life in archeology, Come Tell Me How You Live.)

Wordcraft – A soldier’s journey through war and beyond

Steel Will

by Shilo Harris, with Robin Overby Cox

***

Shortly after Saving Private Ryan appeared in movie theaters, I was aghast to hear that one of my co-workers had taken her then-teenage son to see it. She did it, she said, to keep him from getting any ideas that war was glamorous. But that was the ‘90’s. Then came 9/11, and wars when both civilians and soldiers die—or sometimes worse, live−without any thought of glamour, under circumstances of almost unimaginable, unremitting horror. Those are the kinds of wars Shilo Harris writes about in his memoir, Steel Will.

“This generation of soldiers grew up on video games and TV shows that glamorize violence,” he writes. “We don’t speak of pink mist with you; it represents the vapor that once was a whole soldier. Or it might be the remains of the enemy after taking a 25mm high-explosive round…Either way, a human being becomes annihilated into pink mist.”

The book’s subtitle, My Journey through Hell to Become the Man I was Meant to Be, is Harris’s theme. It’s the inside story of what his life was like after an IED explosion while on patrol in Iraq left him burned over 30 percent of his body, with broken bones, fingers lost, and almost faceless. And how, although living with still unremitting pain, with PTSD, with occasions when he comes close to suicide, he learns to find new meaning in life.

I met Harris last summer at the DFW Writers Conference. Now retired from his military career, he works as an inspirational speaker. Some conference organizer booked him, probably hoping his story would put our writerly whining about agents into a broader perspective. It did.

Once we recovered from the shock of Harris’s appearance which children at his daughter’s school likened to a Halloween costume his charm (he admits to being the class clown of his high school in tiny Coleman, Texas) and self-deprecating humor, including stories about his “Spock” artificial ears, won us over. Still, I was reluctant to crack open his memoir until recently. Would Harris’s story be too much to take? Instead, his book turned out to be one of those can’t put it down reads.

It’s full of no holds barred talk about what it’s like to have your Kevlar and ceramic plate body armor melt into your burning skin, to see the horror of your ruined face and body reflected in a comrade’s eyes, even to wake, after your supposed recovery, to your beloved wife's finding you with a half-emptied bottle of vodka between your knees (because your hands are too ruined to hold it). But beyond all, there’s the acknowledgement that grace and love and meaning still exist.

If readers find the religious faith Harris achieved through his agony too much to take, they need to get over it. His life speaks for itself. A self-admitted wild child before his marriage, fathering three children out of wedlock, he says not that he found God, but that God found him in his agony and convinced him that his life still had purpose despite all his losses.

Those losses have since included a divorce from the woman he credits with the courage to stand by him in circumstances beyond anything they imagined when they promised “for better or for worse.” He doesn’t blame her. “It’s called compassion fatigue. It happens when caregivers who give and give and give get to the bottom of their buckets.” Estimates of divorce rates in families of injured military members can run as high as 90 percent. It’s part of the price.

Harris’s book includes a glossary of military terms as well as extensive lists of resources for veterans, their families, and those willing to help them; a reading list; and brief biographies of the three comrades in Harris’s Humvee who didn’t survive the IED explosion that injured him. It’s widely available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Adventure classics – The party's topic was love, sweet love

The Symposium
by Plato

***

Last Friday’s post about the world-famous drinking party Plato re-created in The Symposium left readers in doubt about the actual drinking going on. Although accounts differ, however, initially the guests decide to drink lightly, in consequence of several of them still being hung over from the previous night’s partying. So here we are at an all-male party and with little wine and no women, even the flute girl having been dismissed for the meantime. How will the guests entertain themselves? If you guessed, turn on ESPN for the latest sports, sorry, wrong era. In 4^th century BCE Greece, however, instead of watching football, the guests vote to tell stories. And the topic for the evening is love.

As I’ve mentioned before, Plato wasn’t the only ancient Greek writing memoirs about his mentor, the fourth century BCE philosopher Socrates. His contemporary Xenophon also wrote a Symposium, in a somewhat naughtier vein. Plato’s, you might suppose, would be more serious. And it is. Except when he puts comedy playwright Aristophanes onstage with the strangest story about the origins of love ever imagined and makes me wonder whether it might have been Plato who actually wrote the fantastic story he put into Aristophanes’ mouth.

(Not that Aristophanes needs much help writing stories. His Lysistrata is still inspirational after more than 2,000 years, as witness its newest incarnation in Spike Lee’s current Chi-Raq satire.)

As each guest’s turn at storytelling goes round the table, Aristophanes’ turn comes early. But he begs off, claiming to be incapacitated by a bout of hiccoughs. Maybe he really is hiccoughing badly. Or perhaps, given the ancient Greek reliance on physical comedy, Plato is caricaturing the playwright as Aristophanes had caricatured the chief guest, Socrates, in his plays. Or since Socrates was among the guests still waiting to speak, perhaps Aristophanes just wanted time to think of an extra special story to tell.

After a few more guests have had their say, Aristophanes declares himself cured of his hiccoughs and begins to treat of, as he says, the original nature of man, when “The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two…(this) primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways…and the remainder to correspond.”

These original beings could move by walking upright, but they also had the ability to roll when they wanted to move especially fast. And they were very strong, so strong that they attacked the gods.

At first the gods wanted to destroy them, but realized that would leave no one to sacrifice to them. Instead, they settled on cutting each human into two pieces, to weaken them. The result was that each half-person spent his (or her) life seeking its other half.

“And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself,” Aristophanes says, “the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy…and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love…And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo, like the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments.”

And perhaps Socrates, who has yet to speak, says to himself, wow, how am I going to top that one?

Which leaves Adventure classics waiting until next Friday to finish this December of spirited adventures with Socrates’ story and what came after. And wondering at the camaraderie between the playwright and the philosopher he could caricature so viciously in his plays. One of Socrates’ friends, a guest who has yet to enter, will make just that point. And others, even Plato among them, will lay some of the blame for Socrates’ execution at the playwright’s feet.

Wordcraft – A memoir of a life well-lived in music

Shoot the Conductor: Too Close to Monteux, Szell, and Ormandy

by Anshel Brusilow & Robin Underdahl

***

In a world awash in angst-ridden, dirt-flinging memoirs, make room for the gentler tale of a life well-lived in music. In Shoot the Conductor, co-written with Robin Underdahl and available through the University of North Texas Press, Anton Brusilow reminisces with self-deprecating candor about his long career as a musician. From childhood violin lessons in a third-floor Philadelphia walkup to concert master under legendary conductor Eugene Ormandy to conductor for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, his numerous falls from grace and his amazing comebacks, Brusilow gives readers an inside look at a life among the great figures of 20^th century classical music in America.

Along his musical journey, Brusilow would work with legendary names in 20^th century classical music: Ormandy, Robert Shaw, Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Fiedler, Leopold Stokowski, Itzhak Perlman, Van Cliburn, and more. And with the pop musicians he would share with audiences: Lou Rawls, Doc Severinsen, Sonny and Cher and a host of others. And although far from a celebrity tell-all, Brusilow’s memoir dishes out plenty of (in most cases) mannerly but humorous tidbits about the famous and near-famous.

He was born in Philadelphia in 1928, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, both talented amateur musicians. Unable to find work in the United States because of their lack of classical training, they poured their passion for music into their sons, Anshel and his older brother Nathan.

Brusilow would later praise the dedicated mothers of students, mothers like his own. “I wasn’t allowed not to practice,” he reports. Although he originally trained as a violinist, he was smitten early with the affliction “known as conductoritis …For me to learn (other instruments’) parts, to see symphonies from a non-violin perspective, was rich. It was like a completely new repertoire for me to learn and control, even though the symphonies were familiar to me.”

It was this conductoritis that would to a break with his greatest mentor, Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Eugene Ormandy. Even while Brusilow was serving as concert master (first violinist) under Ormandy’s baton in the 1960’s, he was starting a parallel career as a conductor at a chamber orchestra in the same city.

Selling his beloved violin, Brusilow went to work as an orchestra conductor. And then, in 1970, came Dallas.

“Where to begin about the Dallas Symphony Orchestra?” Brusilow asks. “In my life, I was fired only once.” Was it because of the pops concerts he conducted, he wonders. Or the factions in the symphony’s board of directors? “Or was it the critic?” John Ardoin, also relatively new then to the entertainment staff of the Dallas Morning News, who had backed another candidate for conductor and proclaimed the orchestra’s playing under Brusilow “rough,” “matter of fact” and “fail(ing) to build”. Coming on top of the orchestra’s failure to transform the money made from its pops concerts into tickets for its classical performances, the DSO’s board voted not to renew Brusilow’s contract after its expiration in 1973.

“At times like that, you just do the next thing, live from today to tomorrow,” Brusilow writes. One of those “next things” would be the beginning of his third act, life as a professor at the nearby North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas). Already with a prestigious jazz program, the university wanted to elevate its classical music program as well. And Brusilow was close at hand to do that, taking joy in “being counted among the mentors of conductors, players, and teachers of music all over the world.”

After his retirement from UNT, he would continue teaching at Dallas’ Southern Methodist University and take a final turn at conducting the neighboring North Texas Richardson Symphony, leaving us in the end a fascinating picture of both a nation’s and a city’s cultural history.

(Next Tuesday, Wordcraft continues a December of book reviews with Shilo Harris’s Steel Will.)

Adventure classics – The unseen guest at the party

The Symposium, by Plato

With commentary from Plato at the Googleplex, by Rebecca Goldstein

***

Considering that Socrates never wrote down a word about his life’s work as a philosopher, I have to wonder how he would have made of the virtual genre that writing about him would become after his death. Among other scribblers, two of his greatest students, Plato and the soldier-historian Xenophon, would each write an account of the famous party that is the subject of The Symposium. Although Xenophon, like Plato, would have been far too young to have attended such a stag drinking party in circa 422 BCE, Xenophon wrote himself into his version of the event. Plato did not. And yet, if not for Plato's re-creation of the event, readers might never have heard of it. He was the unseen, unguessed-at guest at the world’s most famous party.

So who was Plato? For a thinker and writer whose works laid the foundation for the discipline of philosophy, still being read nearly 2,400 after his death, strangely little is known about his life. He actually expressed reluctance even to write, worrying that writing things down would take the place of actual learning.

Even his name has been in doubt, with one biographer asserting that the philosopher had actually been named Aristocles and that Plato, meaning “broad” was a nickname bestowed either because of his muscular physique (he had apparently considered becoming a professional wrestler in his youth) or from other physical or intellectual qualities.

Still another biographer wrote that Plato originally hoped for a career as a playwright. (For this biographical information, I am indebted to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s very accessible discussion in Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away.)

All biographers agree, however, that any thought of careers either in athletics or drama flew out the window once Plato, as a young man, fell under the influence of Socrates. The older man’s execution by Athenians in agony over their city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian Wars forever scarred Plato.

As Goldstein writes, “Socrates’ fate at the hands of the democracy – his death sentence, like the guilty verdict, was the result of popular vote – might have had as much to do with (Plato’s) dim view of humanity as it did with his turning to philosophy in the first place. . . Because there had been such a man as Socrates, Plato could convince himself that human life was worth caring about. But I suspect that for him it did take convincing.”

It was through the dramatic structure of Plato’s dialogues, in which Socrates or at least his understanding of Socrates, played a part, that he wrestled intellectually and emotionally with the conflict between the good and evil in human beings, and in all of creation.

And because Socrates had loved to converse with people in all walks of life, Plato’s dialogues are for the most part taken from scenes of daily life and often peopled with historical characters. Instead of writing plays about gods and ancient heroes, Plato would, effectively, write plays in dialogue between real people set in their everyday world.

To illustrate the effect Plato’s settings, mundane for their time, Goldstein alternates his discussion of Plato’s place in philosophy with Platonically-influenced dialogues set in our time, such as “Plato at the 92^nd Street Y,” Plato as an advice columnist’s consultant, as a guest on a cable news network and, yes, on a book tour at Google Inc.’s corporate headquarters. It’s a visit that afterward still gives “media escort” Cheryl fits as she relates her experience with this very strange author Plato and with the questions his questions raised, to her friend over a few Long Island Iced Teas.

(And speaking of iced teas, last Friday’s discussion of The Symposium broke off as the guests at that long-ago party were discussing their alcoholic intake. Next Friday, Adventure classics will return to the party to hear the rest of the discussion, including an inspiredly goofy allegory of love by one of its guests.)

Wordcraft – A book for the deadly serious reader (or writer)

100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation

by Clint Emerson, Navy SEAL, Ret.

***

It’s that time of the year—when people start asking what you want for Christmas, or Hanukkah, or your birthday. Whatever the season, there’s always some gift giving occasion at hand. In the past I’ve used these pages to suggest a variety of gift suggestions. Why not books? So I’ll be posting short reviews this month, featuring books with Texas authors.

I already have some recipients in mind for 100 Deadly Skills by Frisco, Texas, resident and former Navy SEAL Clint Emerson. Despite the title, many of the skills in this illustrated guide are highly compatible with life and often applicable to civilians. These include instructions for avoiding such holiday (and year-round) annoyances as car thefts, carjackings, home invasions and burglaries. The best hint: never leave your keys in your car. We all know this, but when the advice comes from somebody who can also tell you how to steal a car, maybe it will sink in. And that valet key some car dealers put in your owner’s manual? Repeat after me: it’s a key. Put it in a safe place that’s not in your car.

For travelers over the holidays, Emerson offers such tips on hotel safety as asking for a room midway between elevators and stairways. And why you probably don’t want a room on the ground floor.

Every skill (usually discussed on a single page) is broken down into its critical parts, has a bottom line takeaway, and is illustrated with clear line drawings by storyboard artist Ted Slampyak.

I had hoped not to have to deal with the discussion of active shooters (Skill #073) or other armed aggressors, but recent events in Paris and San Bernardino, California, make these pertinent. Those of us who aren’t hero wannabes will be relieved to know that people finding themselves in such dire situations can often be saved by following Emerson’s commonsense tips that don’t require the response of blazing guns, at least not from civilians.

In fact, his first recommendation for evading danger is to run. His second recommendation is to hide. Fighting is always the last option.

When running, remember it’s harder for a shooter to hit a moving target, so run in a zigzag pattern or from cover to cover. If running is not an option, hide out of the shooter’s view, silence digital devices and follow Emerson’s additional suggestions for preferred cover objects and improvised ballistic armor.

Fighting unarmed against a gunman? Emerson says it can be done successfully, but I’ll leave readers to check out his tips for themselves.

Aside from practical skills, the book has enough juicy material on SEAL and other covert operations tactics to make it a must-read for any writers in the mystery and thriller genres on your holiday list. Everybody’s favorite groaner is the rectal concealment device. Consider making your own to give to the naughtiest acquaintances on your naughty list. Or if they continue to annoy you, see Emerson’s discussion of body disposal, including the tips for burial at sea which, I assume, were followed in disposing of the body of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Want more of Emerson’s suggestions? Follow him on Twitter. 100 Deadly Skills is available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

***

How do I go about reviewing books? I don’t get paid to write reviews, either at this site or on Amazon  or Goodreads. This means you’ll seldom see a review from me with fewer than three stars. I once reviewed a novel I could only give two stars to because, despite the author's awkwardness as a fiction writer, her knowledgeability about her subject and her book's premise were intriguing. But in general, if a book doesn’t grab me, I’d rather stop reading than slog through for the dubious privilege of posting a low-starred review.  And I assign star ratings to books based on how well they do what their authors intend them to do. Giving a how-to book five stars doesn’t mean it’s classic literature. It just means it’s a really good how-to book.

For more about tips about reviewing books, I found the discussions at Writing-World.com and The Writing Center helpful.

Adventure classics: A famous party & its very odd guest

The Symposium

by Plato

***

It was the world’s most famous drinking party but the guest of honor almost didn’t show up. Then, after religious ceremonies perhaps intended to placate whichever gods were in charge of hangover remedies, the guests decide after all that they were still feeling the effects of the previous night’s heavy drinking. They vote to send the hired musician home and decide to do more talking than drinking. Even so, some of them manage to pass out and have to sleep it off at their host’s home. Years afterward, a friend of the tardy guest decides to write a play about the whole thing, employing a great deal of his very active imagination.

For somebody like me, whose public school knowledge of Socrates was of a wise old man bravely facing his tragic death, the notion of Socrates as self-deprecatingly funny was a startling revelation.

Socrates’ death had in fact had a profound effect on his young friend and student Plato, who was in his twenties at the time, nearly 50 years Socrates’ junior. And yes, it was Plato who wrote the most moving account of his friend’s death which turned him away forever from the political career his family dreamed of for him. And yet, the Socrates Plato brought back to life in The Symposium radiates the joy of living.

Set in approximately 422 BC (when Plato himself was only a small child), The Symposium opens with a pair of friends chatting about the party one of them attended years before at which the guests spend the night talking about love. In a friend of a friend frame the narrator states that the one he heard the story from, Aristodemus, claimed to have met Socrates one day freshly bathed and actually wearing shoes (or at any rate, sandals), which particularly caught his attention because the philosopher more commonly went around barefoot.

The reason for being so dressed up, Socrates tells him, is that he is on his way to a party at the home of a rich friend. And by the way, Aristodemus, how about coming along too?

Slightly nonplussed by the thought of showing up to a party uninvited, Aristodemus at first demurs. But at Socrates’ insistence, he decides to put the burden of explaining his presence on Socrates himself: “I shall say that I was bidden of you, and you will have to make an excuse.”

However, when Aristodemus arrives at the house of the party’s host, Agathon, he finds that Socrates has been struck by some philosophic thought and has dropped behind out of sight.

A search ensues, Socrates is discovered in the portico of a neighboring house and refuses to stir. “Let him alone,” Aristodemus says. “He has a way of stopping anywhere and losing himself without any reason.”

Halfway through supper, Socrates reappears. His friends are only too well acquainted with his idiosyncrasies, and have decided to begin eating without him. And although Agathon might have grounds to be offended by his guest’s behavior, he only teases him gently to share the “wise thought which came into your mind. . . and is now in your possession."

But first, of course, there is the important matter of drinking to consider.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a December of spiritual adventures with Plato’s Symposium. That the illustration for today’s post is taken from Anselm Feuerbach’s 1869 painting of the scene, whose significance philosophy professor J.H. Lesher explains.)

Wordcraft: The end of NaNoWriMo and a new beginning

There, it’s over. NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month (of November) has ended, with a whole lot more words than when it began. The official goal for the month is 50,000 words per writer. Most of us don’t make that many. I signed off for the last time early yesterday afternoon, with a little more than 25,000 for the month. As a wiser writer at one of the group write-ins for my Dallas-Fort Worth region said, every word written is one more than you had before you started.

Despite the name, a holdover from the organization’s original starting point, NaNoWriMo is now worldwide, with participants on six continents.

My region’s 2,000 plus active participants churned out more than 33 million words during the month of November. Yes, that’s not a type. Yes, it really is millions of words. Our average word count in the Dallas-Fort Worth was about 16,000, so maybe I wasn’t doing too badly, although some of my writing buddies whizzed past that 50,000 mark like thermometers busting in a Texas heat wave.

Worldwide, NaNoWriMo participation may well total millions of writers and billions of words. Going through the alphabetical list of regions, I counted more than 100,000 writers before getting past the letter “C”. That’s a lot of people with a lot of things to say.

Still, despite the few famously traditionally-published novels that come out of NaNoWriMo, most of our annual harvests of words will never see print. So why bother to write?

Some NaNoWriMo participants, of course, actually are professional writers. They spend each November getting first drafts of their next bestseller down, to be revised during the following year. Others just can’t help ourselves. We’d be carrying our portable devices, even our pads of paper and pencils with us even if NaNoWriMo never existed. We’ll be furiously pursuing the stories in our heads, jotting impressions of our fellow commuters on the train, our work group, our jury panel until our fingers drop off. And some participants just want to see if they can string together a whole lot of words.

However, for those willing to keep pushing themselves past November, the NaNoWriMo organization offers much, much more help.

Starting in January, those who joined NaNoWriMo can make a new pledge: to revise those newly written first drafts. Periodically during the year, the organization offers online writing camps, tips on the craft of writing, and planning for the coming writing marathon. It’s also amassed blog after blog of reference material. You can even buy books on writing through NaNoWriMo. Sales of books and other merchandise help fund this nonprofit organization, including its Young Writers Program with free workbooks, curricula and classroom materials for teachers.

***

Until January, here are some more statistics for anybody who’s as hardcore on numbers as on words:

Germany as a geographic region took the prize for the highest average word count. Its writers averaged more than 26,000 words each for a total of more than 83 million words.

The literary genre that drew the most words from writers was fantasy, with approximately 800 million words worldwide, and an average of more than 20,000 words per writer working in this genre. The genres of erotic literature and religious/spiritual literature were both at the bottom of total word counts. Writers of erotica chugged out more than 26 million words worldwide. Writers of religious/spiritual literature produced more than 22 million total words. (Writers self-specified their genres.)