Author: John Brown

  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

    ByJohn Brown

    I had business in Vegas and decided it was time to take the family to Zion’s National Park. We could drive down from the northern tip of Utah (Laketown) to the southern tip (St. George) together. Then I’d take a rental to Vegas, do my business, and hook up again with the fam to hike the canyons for two-days. (Hiking Kolob, folks, was incredible, but that’s another post.)

    So I ask Nellie what she’s got to read to me as we drive down. She pulls out Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney and says all the kids in her classes said she had to read it. 

    I think, hey, it’s got pictures. Any book with pictures gets one shot at the very least.

    I’m happy to say I can’t tell you how many times she had to wait so I could stop laughing. We almost wrecked only once. And if I’m going to wreck I’d rather do it while laughing than asleep. Kenny has written and illustrated a wonderful, fun book. And now we have a new word in the family vocabulary–“Fregley.”

    What is that? You’ll have to read to find out.

  • SODG Story Edits Finished

    ByJohn Brown

    Click to see edits

    Wahooooooo!

    I just turned in my final story edits to Stacy and David. The due date was November 1. The 3rd actually. The book clocks in around 177,000 words.

    Wow. This last set of story edits led to some great changes. Not huge ones, but nice touches. I had to rewrite part of this battle scene, and man, oh, man I’m totally geeking out about it. We’ll see how it plays with readers.

    What’s been interesting is seeing the types of things Stacy and David have commented on in the text. It’s as if they went through asking simple logic questions. Did they have enough time actually to do this? It makes no sense that person y wasn’t there. This thing isn’t fully explained.

    And sure enough, the logic gaps were there.

    So it wasn’t the interest level of the story they seemed to be editing for as much as the details that lead to clarity and belief. Of course, that those two things must be present for the interest to come. And this is not to say they didn’t focus on parts where interest flagged. There was one comment that forced me to cut my favorite dawg scene, a whole chapter’s worth. But the bulk of the comments were focused on the “logic” of the story.

    Anyway, as of next Monday I think I’m officially into production. And back to book 2, which I’m 25,000 words into.

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    What Separates the Gifted from the Schlubs and How Praise Can Backfire

    ByJohn Brown

    What makes someone gifted?

    Raw talent?

    Sure. An apptitutde for something always helps. But it appears it’s not enough. True expertise takes work. And those trying to help (i.e. parents, teachers, coaches) can hinder if they give the wrong kind of praise.

    I wanted to share three articles reporting the results of a number of interesing studies on expertise which often appears as a skill level that seems unobtainable by normal, motivated individuals.

    The Meadow Mount School of Music

    This music school in the Adirondacks has “trained such luminaries as Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Lynn Harrell, and Yo-Yo Ma.” A number of researchers wanted to see what the difference was between the students who seemed most skilled and those who weren’t. They divided students “into three skill levels, including one the faculty had identified as having the best chance of becoming world-class soloists.” Then they looked at the differences.

    According to the report, “the results were clear-cut, with little room for any sort of inscrutable God-given talent. The elite musicians had simply practiced far more than the others…Psychologists found a second attribute in elite players that is less obvious than sheer hours of practice. While most of us think of practice as the repetition of tough spots (and this is how many young people do practice), elite musicians, they found, took a different approach.”  Read full article.

    The majority of childhood prodigies never fulfill their early promise

    Why? According to these researchers it’s because so many early-bloomers get warped by their experience and fail to develop perseverance. More here.

    Praise that Undermines Achievement

    It appears that how we praise achievement affects performance. Sometimes in large and startling ways.

    You may think that it’s good to praise your child for being “smart” or “good” in some subject. But there’s growing evidence that giving kids such labels doesn’t improve or motivate performance, but actually reduces it.

    Psychologist Carol Dweck and her team have studied the effect of praise on students in a variety of settings. “Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.” So what type of praise actually works? Read here.

    When does genius bloom?

    We often think genius must be tied to being precocity. After all, Motzart was doing musical flips when he was still a kid.  For writers, however, it appears this isn’t the case. More here.

  • Bees Sniff Out Land Mines

    ByJohn Brown

    The bee. We slather its delicious vomit on bread and muffins. We send colonies out to pollinate our crops. Now Colin Henderson and his University of Montana colleagues have partnered up with bees to “locate buried land mines” and do it more quickly and thorougly than any dog.

    “We can survey in one day what takes more than a week with dogs,” he says, “and humans stand 300 yards away.”

    Bees can find not only land mines, but also drugs and decomposing bodies. Oh, and they are smart enough to recognize a sugar daddy when they see one.

    Here’s the full article. Read it. Enjoy. Things like this are part of the wonderfulness of life.