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Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

learning

Yup, you can learn to be helpless

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Opportunity: learn from failure

However, you can also learn to help yourself and learn you are capable of improving. Let yourself fail; let others fail. Then give yourself and others the opportunity to learn from that failure.

I read this great article about how people learn to be helpless through experience and environment. The piece was tweeted by Cash Nickerson (@cashnickerson). The article “Don’t Give Learned Helplessness a Chance” was written by Patrick Willer who first explains how the process occurs in animals and then relates it to human behavior.

Why did I connect so quickly to this article? I have been battling this phenomenon in my students for nearly 20 years now. I hear “I don’t know (IDK)” and the ever popular condition of “I’m bad at that.” They have become convinced that they are helpless. Willer’s article though brief offers great insight into how this behavioral response can become embedded rather quickly.

Willard brings up a common example that I have found students to feel: ” A classic example is that of a child failing a test at school. The child
may think he or she is dumb, which is not necessarily the case.” A true assessment or not, the belief can set the child into a pattern of failure through actions that prove the belief correct.

Freedom to fail and learn from the experience without recrimination is important. Freedom to ask questions and be given answers that validate the concern or confusion open up opportunity for change and the belief that things can be changed. Knowing that others are finding this to be true is just as important, so interpersonal engagement must be encouraged.

Willard was applying “learned helplessness” to the business world, but it certainly fit the start of each year in my classroom and the push to giving my students the opportunity to change their negative perceptions of themselves both individually and as a group through their own actions and how I received them.

But it’s more useful knowledge than that, though increasing confidence in employees and students is worthy enough. It applies just as well to writers working on character development. I have two characters who have been effected by the feeling of not being able to change what has been a major part of their lives. The opportunity to challenge the belief helped them both change over time and take control over their lives and their perceptions of self. Choices that destroyed their friendship held two characters back from rebuilding it until both had the motivation to break out of their past and the belief that it was possible.

excerpt from The Sharded Boy

   Jahl tried to imagine how he would work on the type of items
the Marsons tended to do. It would mean Jahl would have to take a stone in most
cases to their shop which would either take away time that he could be earning
from proper clientele or he would have to rent a stone an additional day if he
was taking it for the evening.

   Rouen hung his head. “I’m sorry for never sticking up
for you. I should have. We were best friends and I did nothing.”

   Jahl hadn’t wanted to think back to those days. The two boys
had been best friends. But it had been more than that. Until Jahl was nine he
had been friends with all the children. And then one day a new kid in town had
pointed out Jahl’s crippled leg and his slowness in play. Crimlo had made fun
of him until the children were rolling on the ground giggling, gleeful over the
creativity of the barbs Crimlo had flung. No day after was ever like the days
before that child had come to town. Rouen and Jahl never spoke again.

   Anger from the treatment had long since been overshadowed by
the general pain of living. Jahl didn’t know what to say. But he knew he wanted
the work. “Why can’t anyone know?”

   Rouen’s face looked relieved that Jahl had not wanted to
talk about their days as children. But his answer to Jahl’s questions
pained him. “What if my father never returns to work? People will stop
coming to us. We’ll lose our livelihood. Please Jahl, do this for us. I wasn’t
the best friend I should have been, but you have always been a good person. We
know we can trust you not to tell anyone. Say you’ll do it. I have a week’s
worth of work backed up. I’ll never get it done. And new work is coming in
every day. I’ve not turned anyone away.”
 

   Often those who most seem to be out to help us, intentionally or accidentally encourage these negative beliefs.

excerpt from The Sharded Boy

   “I have always looked forward to seeing you at the
mercantile. When I didn’t spy you out front as usual, I worried. What happened?
A couple of day’s illness wouldn’t do this.” He gestured at Jahl’s thinness.

   “I tripped on the stairs and was knocked unconscious. Rouen
found me. By then I had caught a chest cold and been without food a couple of
days, and then I couldn’t eat what with being sick. Today is my first really
good day.” Jahl wondered if he had laid that on a bit thick and if perhaps
Bragg had seen him answer the door earlier. But that would have been okay. Mom
wasn’t here being a mother hen yet. “Actually, Mom is just being a bit
overzealous. I was moving about the house earlier. But she doesn’t believe me.”

  “Loving mothers are like that.”

   Jahl caught the sourness again in Bragg’s tone and wondered
if the man had been aware of his mom’s rough mothering. “I suppose.” Jahl
attempted to put the same degree of dissatisfaction in his voice. Over the big
man’s shoulder, he saw his mother wince.

   “Overzealous or not, it is best not to overdo.” He surveyed
the room again. “Take it slow getting this old house together. You have time.”
He grinned. “But I, though willing to come to your rescue, which I am happy to
see is not needed, am rather short of time. Ona is home preparing supper and
wondering where I am, so I’ll be off.” Bragg laid his hand on Jahl’s shoulder
and squeezed the thinness. “Mahre, feed this boy. Get some meat on his bones
before he shrivels away. And, young man, conserve your strength. You’ve not
been strong, and overexerting yourself will only pull you down further.”

   “I’ll take things easier.”

   Bragg pointed to the closed door of the workroom. “Perhaps
you should turn one of these rooms into a bedroom so you don’t have to go
upstairs at all. Your room at home was downstairs, wasn’t.”

   “True, but I won’t get stronger if I don’t push myself.”

   “But you have limitations that can’t be altered.” Bragg
turned to address Jahl’s mother in the hall. “Right, Mahre, he shouldn’t go
beyond what his body can take, should he?”
Allow yourself to fail, allow others to fail, allow your characters to fail, but also give yourself and others the opportunity to rise out of that failure. 
#writing
#learning
#failing

20 Ways Writers are Active Learners

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Just let me learn

Writers learn all the time. We want not just our facts as close to accurate as possible, poetic license not withstanding, but we are always looking for inspiration. So we cannot help but be active learners. And we do it like this.

  1. We go looking for what kind of pine trees are located near Devil’s Lake in Oregon and get all caught up in the fertilization process of the Ponderosa Pine. Okay, not necessarily “we,” that was me.
  2. But many of us want to learn how to make a book trailer and end up chatting with several authors who have done this and several others who have not but want to and a few that feel they could use one but know they will never do it because it just looks like too much work. Somewhere in the process, we feel inspired to begin mapping out the trailer we were contemplating and then check on the software recommended by the experienced writers, and…we learn something.
  3. We are inspired. We look for things to inspire us.  We want to learn because learning inspires us.
  4. When we drive to the grocery store (usually out of guilt because while we have been writing all day, someone else in the family has been cleaning house, mowing the lawn, or doing the laundry), we see people, I mean really see them. For example, we might look at the mother with the three little girls, two which look like they may be fraternal twins, but we’re not sure and we don’t want to ask, but they sure look the same size. We consider that maybe they’re cousins or playmates and that could explain why they are the same size. Or maybe they really are twins, or the older same size girl is just smaller because she takes after the mother’s side of the family while the actual younger one takes after the father….. Now we get to thinking about our own family and when we get home, instead of writing, we get on Ancestry.com and look up our family roots or call Grandma and ask about the first friend she remembers having and whether they were the same size or not. No matter what, we spend our days learning.
  5. Did you know that cartographers put in fake towns on their maps so they can catch plagiarizing map makers? And did you know that Rand McNally was accused of plagiarizing someone else’s map and the company (Rand McNally) was able to prove they hadn’t plagiarized because people began going to that fake town and ultimately put in a few businesses and built a couple houses and called the place by the fake name that the map said was there. I learned this when I was looking for inspiration and watched a TED talks given by John Green about how nerds learn everything online. I dare you to go there and learn something.
  6. We writers are dependent upon our computers for a variety of purposes that support or directly involve our writing, so to combat the various ways a computer can mess with us, we find ourselves in need of learning it’s many secrets, i.e., how to save on at least three different back up systems or how to extricate a disk from a drive refusing to pop out the side of our laptop upon command or find out if we should start crying because our screen has gone completely black except for the little white arrowed cursor that we can still move. I learned a lot dealing with that unexpected computer moment.
  7. This does not even take into consideration how often we are reading books about writers, written by writers for writers to improve writing or even books for writers but not by writers (a definite paradox in that one).
  8. And what about when we watch those around us surreptitiously? We are paying attention not because we are nosy, but because we wish to catch the nuances of verbal vs physical communication between people who like each other, between people who don’t like each other, between a person who likes the other who does not like him/her. We are not being nosy, we are learning the trade.
  9. We look at how other authors organize their blogs, advertise their books, tweet, google+, etc., because we want to learn their secrets.
  10. We read the posts that Mark Coker writes because they are about writing and the market and how we are doing as a subgroup. And we hope to learn something vital from his examination of our accumulated activities. We do this on purpose.
  11. We give ourselves limits on how long we can research. And then we break the rule we created to avoid using valuable time we could use for writing because learning about the new colossal Stonehenge believed to be not more than three miles from the currently famous and provably present Stonehenge is just too interesting and we might, maybe, someday use that information, sort of.
  12. You know when the company decides to replace the thingamajig you’ve been using very well the last three years and you have to figure out how you are going to accomplish the same things using this new thingamajig? This happens. Routinely. This year it was change all the students’ laptop computers to Google Chromes. Now I could have pulled out my hair, ran round my room in circles cursing administration for yet again not asking me how this would affect putting out a school paper. But I didn’t because I might find it useful knowing all the ins and outs of this particular thingamajig. Took a principal, a technology director and me about two hours to put all the fingers in the dike before all my newsprint dripped off the pages of the yet to be published first issue. But we did it. Now my students are experts and sending documents compatible with our layout program is old hat. Nobody is crying in the corner. We all learned something. 
  13. Have you noticed how often the things we do routinely teach us something new almost every time? I teach literature, and of course, I have favorite pieces I have my students look at each year. Even after reading “Of Studies” by Bacon numerous times, I still gain from the examination. This year it was the list of intake: taste, chew, swallow, digest. The depth at which we take in information equals the depth at which it influences and changes us. Read widely and deeply. 
  14. Are you one of those people who read labels? I don’t mean when you go shopping, but that too is good. I mean whatever is sitting in front of you that has words gets read. I do that and it never fails to boot me off into interesting thoughts and ideas. Yeah, reading Mrs. Dash seasonings can make me creative. Who’d of thunk?
  15. Art work. Art work is amazing, inspiring and it makes me want to tell the story that continued of after the image was capture. I learn about these new characters and sometimes they stay with me long enough to become masters of their own stories. Other times they come in as bit parts for stories current in the works and sometimes, strangely enough, they offer a new viewpoint that changes the direction of something I’m writing. Without that trade of ideas, I wouldn’t have realized some off point in my idea, some not so ringing true interaction. We learn even from our imaginative selves.

It is likely you noticed there are not actually 20 ways of learning for writers written here. The reason my post-reading friend is I expect you to come up with a few to add to my list. Surely by now you have thought of your own active learning adventure that you would like to share.

#learning
#writers

Learning from the masters series: Connie Willis drags you into the deep end

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Reading a Connie Willis novel is like drowning.  Her very first paragraph is a rip tide that lets you get a breath just often enough not to drown you.  You spend a lot of time treading water, but the liquid feels so lovely against your skin, a blood warm suspension, and you pray for breath and continued immersion in the same bubble rising to the surface.  No ground beneath your feet, but somewhere along the line you learn to stay above water, gain a sense of where land is and strike out in an Australian crawl that you didn’t know you could do.  At about the time the book ends, your toes feel the roughness of sand and sea shells and you wade to shore.  Welcome to Willis style writing.   What will you do, probably what I did.  Go dive into another Connie Willis book.

What in heck does she do?  The problem is you can’t just sit down and read one of her novels to learn something.  Two tiptoes in and you’re out of your depth in story.  So I am grabbing a bucketful from All Clear you can’t possibly fall into, but you can shove your head in and peer about.

Bucketful — take a deep breath and kick:  By noon Michael and Merope still hadn’t returned from Stepney, and Polly was beginning to get really worried.  Stepney was less than an hour away by train.  There was no way it could take Merope and Michael–correction, Eileen and Mike; she had to remember to call them by their cover names–no way it could take them six hours to go fetch Eileen’s belongings from Mrs. Willett’s and come back to Oxford Street. What if there’d been a raid and something had happened to them?  The East End was the most dangerous part of London.


There weren’t any daytime raids on the twenty-sixth, she thought.  But there weren’t supposed to have been five fatalities at Padgett’s either.  If Mike was right, and he had altered events by saving the soldier Hardy at Dunkirk, anything was possible.  The space-time continuum was a chaotic system, in which even a minuscule action could have an enormous effect.

Dry off your head.  Now think about what she did.  First she threw a bunch of names and places at you.  Then she set up a problem; where are Eileen and Mike who apparently go by other names, real names?  They have been gone too long.  Five people dead?  London and Dunkirk on the same page and practically the same breath.  Why is the East End the most dangerous part of London?  Raids?! Altering time?  Space-time continuum?  Well, if you like time travel that last bit wasn’t so hard to swallow.  But there is so  much to wonder about that you have to keep swimming just to find out what is going on.  And then it is too late to get out of the water.  You are in for the duration.

With all that tossing of names, places and events, you would think you’d feel over run with information to process. But that is not the case. There is the intimate connection you have formed with Polly who is worried about her friends and their safety in time which does not appear to be playing by the rules.  All that in two paragraphs.  Better read it again.  You only had a couple chances to get a gulp or two of air and probably missed something.

Ready again?  Six hours, they’ve been gone.  What has Polly been doing while they were gone?  Padgett’s? (Those with experience in London know, but the rest of us need more information.)  Hey, that’s only an hour away by train, wouldn’t she know by now if there had been a raid?  When is this anyway?  How did she know so precisely that there were no daytime raids on the twenty-sixth?  Clearly you must read for a while before you get the answers you need.  Better pack a life vest.

That’s Connie Willis.  She dives in and never lets the water grow smooth.  There will be a break or two, but the waves are still coming, though you can float on your back for a bit until things get rough again and they will. Gotta love a writer who knows how to throw the reader in and make them love the drenching.