By Jenna HartePart of The How They Do It SeriesJH: Readers skim when they read, especially if nothing is really going on in the story. Jenna Harte shares tips on keeping readers engaged in your novel.Jenna Harte is a die-hard romantic writing about characters who are passionate about and committed to each other, and frequently…
Tips on Writing “The Boring Stuff” Readers Tend to Skip — Fiction University
By Bonnie RandallPart of The How They Do It Series JH: Wonderfully rich characters typically leads to a wonderfully rich novel. Bonnie Randall shares tips on how to reveal the depth and richness of your characters. A character is infinitely more than just who the author says they are. Like their living, breathing counterparts, fictional characters often…
How to Write Rich Characterization: A Cheat-Sheet — Fiction University
This area, which is part of Washington County, Oregon, represents the first suburb to the west of the Portland metropolitan area. Portland mainly makes the news when there is some form of protest or other confrontation, or in listings of places with good food and drink. Just as Everett and Tacoma are not Seattle, Portland’s burbs are not Portland. They just share a border.
Important note: Beaverton is an actual city with its own government. Aloha (pronounced uh-LO-ah) is simply the name of a region of unincorporated Washington County between Beaverton and Hillsboro (the county seat). In combination they house maybe 150,000 people. The only practical distinction is which police respond to emergency calls (city police vs. county deputies) and whether one is misgoverned and overtaxed by city or county officials. I have come to designate this area as Aloverton, and to go by the local chuckles, I might just be one of the first to assign it. Anyway…
Pros of living in Aloverton:
Cons of living in Aloverton:
I note that I can find eleven strong pros and nine solid cons about Aloverton. I guess that fits my view, which is: While big cities just fundamentally do not appeal to me, if I have to live in or near one, this will work.
Life has taught me that quite a few of those who have appointed themselves editors and proofreaders are competent to do neither. If you could see the number of posts in editors’ forums full of bad English, requests like “I want 2 become an editor can u point me to any sites where I can learn grammer?” you might despair. If you can see them, you despair daily.
All right. Let’s do something about it. Knowing what I know now, but assuming I were not actually an editor, how would I do it? Imagine I wanted to be a published author and sought editing help. Assume that no matter my proficiency with the language, I’m sensible enough to realize one set of eyes isn’t enough. I also realize that volunteer first readers might be reluctant to be blunt with me.
In addition to continuing to write every day, even if it were only fifty words, even if all I said was “writing sucks today because…” I would start with short stories. The goal would be to get them published sooner rather than later, firing up the income stream. I’d give away the first few for free, hoping to build a following. But before I published any, I’d be confronting the hiring of editing services. Thus:
It’s not smart to hire people when one doesn’t know what they do. Rather than be foolhardy, I would read up on the different editing modes, so that I didn’t sound completely clueless when time came to have the conversation. When I did that, I would probably conclude that I needed a developmental edit. Even if I weren’t sure, I would desire such an edit in order to see my blind spots. I might later evolve my writing to a point where I ceased to need these, but I’d be planning to wait for an editor to tell me that.
I would not go to any of the sites that purport to help one hire editing services from a pool. Know what I’d do? I’d get on one of the writers’ groups on Faceplant, like Writers Helping Writers or Writers Unite. While some of the requests from purported writers might quease me out, this would provide me two benefits. One, it would show me the truly wretched quality of English on display for most of the likely competition, thus making me feel much better about my own. Two, it would let me see which editors participated in attempts to help these poor lost souls. I’d watch how they conducted themselves. I’d grade them for honesty, knowledge, and helpfulness. I’d make a list of the top five and order it according to how much each provider appealed to me.
Then, one by one, I’d contact my top five. I would not contact several at once. I would not waste others’ time or try to get them all to compete with each other; this isn’t buying a new car. I’d look the first one up, contact her, and see what her process was like. I would not ask her about costs until the very end of the discussion. I’d ask her for a sample developmental edit, presuming she did those, on just one to two pages of short story. I’d be very up front that I was starting with short stories to improve my writing, build a name, and work into the process.
The quality of guidance in her sample dev edit would be an enormous factor. If it was cold, that would be all right provided it was intelligent and honest. I’d make sure that the sample included some passive voice, ellipses, italic emphasis, and some other bad habits, just so that I could get her take on them. I could live with her telling me it was complete garbage, provided she told me specifics about why. If I didn’t get a good vibe and feel from this process, I would thank her for her time and let her know I needed to keep searching for a better fit.
If I did get a good vibe, I’d do some innocent cyber research. I’d see what kind of reputation she had, look into her testimonials. If her website offered a list of her credits, I might buy one of those books just to see how her handiwork might have come out. If I decided she was The One, I would not send her an NDA to sign (the only one of those I ever signed was for a tech editing project that involved being privy to the hiring party’s clients’ confidential information). If she sent me a contract to sign, I’d read it and decide how I felt about its provisions. If she wanted money up front, I’d examine that and decide whether I was comfortable with it. Also, to be frank, if she charged by the hour I’d assume she was more likely to be capable than if she charged a flat fee. There’s complicated thinking behind that, and it’s by no means perfect or universal, but it is my considered observation and experience.
Once I hired her, I would carefully consider everything she said. At times I would challenge her in ways, especially by asking her to explain the reasoning. If she had a process, I would follow it, soaking up everything I could. I would pay her promptly when the time came. I would not try to piggyback free work. At the end of the first project, I would decide whether her participation had improved my skills and the project. If it had, I would seriously consider hiring her again.
Any questions?
Being one of the only people who liked all of Herbert’s Dune books, it was natural to try his kid’s prequel series with Kevin J. Anderson.
Of course, we didn’t expect it to be Frank Herbert. To his credit, the son did not try to pretend to be the father. There’s only one problem: the writing now is…very flawed. The story is okay, and I’ll read it to finish the story just because I’m nine books in, but seriously, these guys need help. A couple of examples, quoted for fair use review purposes:
—From p. 10, paperback version—
Looking down, breathing heavily, she said, “Back at the Swordmaster School of Ginaz, I slew hundreds of these things. The school still has a standing order for functional combat meks, so trainees can practice destroying them.”
The very thought soured Manford’s mood. “Ginaz has too many functional meks, in my opinion–it makes me uneasy. Thinking machines should not be kept as pets. There is no useful purpose for any sophisticated machine.”
Anari was hurt that he had criticized her fond recollection. Her voice was small. “It’s how we learned to fight them, sir.”
—
So what’s wrong with this picture? The red part (color added). Do not ever, please, tell me the feelings. Show them through action. This is lazy writing. It was too much work to make her sound wistful when she said the first part. It was too much work to put her second part in a hurt tone. Instead, we were simply told. This is what mediocre writing looks like. This should be shorter, more fluid and subtler. It should not insult the reader’s intelligence. It should let the reader infer and gather emotions through skillful word use in dialogue and narrative.
Here’s another ‘how to do it wrong’:
—From pp. 29-30, paperback version—
“You are going to tell me where those captives are being taken,” Vor said.
The man groaned again and gurgled something that sounded like a curse. Vor didn’t consider it an acceptable answer. He glanced up, saw the fire spreading along the roofs of the houses. “You don’t have much time to answer.”
Receiving no cooperation from the man, Vor knew what he would have to do next, and he wasn’t proud of it, but this slaver was far down on the last of people for whom he felt sympathy. He drew his long skinning knife. “You are going to tell me.”
—
Like it wasn’t already obvious that a gurgled curse wasn’t the answer Vor wanted. Why tell us that, as if we are stupid? And obviously, anything but an answer was continued non-cooperation. No one is so slow in the uptake that this needs to be spelled out so. Wasted words, the kind that push the covers of a book too far apart. I guess it’s easier than writing…
Okay, that was waspish, but I dislike this immensely. It is lazy, it radiates ‘phoning it in.’ If you are trying to improve your writing, this is one of the best and most important lessons you can absorb. Where humanly possible, show rather than tell. It will read smoother, cleaner and your reader will not be jarred, nor have her intelligence insulted. ‘Like your reader’ includes ‘respect your reader.’ This means that you write clean stuff that doesn’t waste her time or treat her like she isn’t smart enough to figure out a cue.
Anyone who considers him or herself in the intermediate phases of developing writing skill is welcome to rewrite either passage in comments, and I’ll be glad to make some observations. Show me how it should have been done.
Let us begin 2013 on the ‘Lancer with something joyous and uplifting. [This text is superceded in mood by the final para, but let it stand as set for what it meant while Willis was with us.]
It has been a quarter century since I last saw him in person, he has since retired; and still when I see a friend post about Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, I think of Willis Konick.
To call him ‘Professor’ was unthinkable, as Willis would advise the entire class on the first day. An alumnus of and longtime professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, his entire life was bound up with the Russian language, Russian literature and UW. He taught Comparative Literature and Russian Literature there for so long it became hard to imagine UW without him. If I were to call him ‘Professor Konick’ in this blog post, someone would find out about it, and one of two things might happen. That person might call me out in comments as a complete fake, because anyone who ever actually attended a Willis lecture knew good and well that no one used his last name. Or that person might send the blog link to Willis, who would not only recognize my name and remember me, but who would write to me asking how I was doing, suggesting we have coffee any time I was in Seattle, and politely reminding me that his name was ‘Willis.’
I am not making any of this up, nor am I exaggerating. Willis did his best to have coffee with as many of his students as possible, and had an amazing memory for faces and names.
Willis’s class was the one no one skipped. It was always in a lecture hall with at least 200 seats, usually more like 300, purely because of demand. Yes. A literature professor so entertaining and appealing that the school was forced to schedule his classes in large lecture halls. People scrambled to get into a literature class. Whole decades of UW undergrads filled up their humanities distribution requirements with English 111 plus whatever Willis classes they could squeeze into. Except for a few hundred math and tech wonks from other countries who spoke such minimal English that a literature class was out of the question, at UW all 35,000 students learned of ‘Willis’ in the first week on campus.
While an excellent lecturer and student of the genre (he speaks and reads fluent Russian, and each year would read War & Peace or Anna Karenina, alternating), neither that nor his obvious love of everything about teaching accounted for all of his popularity. Much of that stemmed from his famous impromptu in-class skits to dramatize a character or concept. Willis would reach into the mass of 250 students, and without error, pick out the perfect individual as his foil. Didn’t matter whether it was a nervous young lady in a sorority sweatshirt, a blowhard, a future engineer, or one of his groupies. No one ever refused, even when he chose someone deliberately for shyness. He was known to dump buckets of water on his head on stage, strip to his underwear, open his shirt and claw at his pale chest, and so much more.
I too had my day, and the best way to convey Willis is to tell the story.
I can’t even remember whether it was a Comp Lit or Russian Lit class, not that the distinction ever made a difference with Willis. De facto always outshone de jure. He was teaching Anna, and as I recall, the class was in Gowen Hall on the Quad. Willis was explaining the nuances of Vronsky, and then his bespectacled eyes got that wild look which told us something was coming. He scanned the classroom like a confident quarterback whose pocket is just barely holding, quick head movements and a smile repressed only by force of professional will. The eyes achieved lock-on when they hit me. “JOHN! YES, YOU! JOHN! COME DOWN HERE, PLEASE, I’D LIKE A WORD WITH YOU!”
You know you are about to be had, but you go anyway. You know you are going to be embarrassed, but you also know you’ll remember it when you are twice as old as the day it happens. As I made my way to the aisle and descended the steps, I saw Willis do as he so often did, turning toward the stage and bounding onto it. Anything to do with acting or performance subtracted decades from his sixtyish physical age. He awaited me with sparkling eyes but as solemn a countenance as he could enforce. There was a sturdy wooden table up there, for some reason, and he encouraged me to have a seat.
“So, John, you were in my class last quarter,” began Willis.
“Yes, Willis, I was.”
“And you turned in your final paper.”
“Yep.”
“How do you feel about it?
Something in his tone cued me. I can’t explain it any other way. He had given me 4.0, and still I gave the right answer. “Not too good, Willis,” I responded glumly.
“No,” he answered gravely, making sure to pitch his voice so they could hear him in the back rows (he had an effect like Epidaurus that way). “I hate to say this, John, but that was the worst paper of the quarter.”
I waited, doing the despondent face as best I could.
“In fact, your paper was so terrible, it was the worst paper of the year. I’m confident that nothing that will come will be worse. Your paper was so awful, I have given you a 0.0 for the quarter. I trust you understand.”
Still I sat in mock glumness.
“Sadly, John, your paper was such a disgrace that I felt compelled to bring it to the attention of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He agreed with me that it was the worst paper he too had ever seen. It was so disappointing that, harsh as it may seem, you are being expelled from the University.”
I looked miserable.
“You know how Reagan calls the astronauts to congratulate them? President Reagan is calling your parents to chastise them for your paper!”
I heard the first giggles from the audience, but I held back my own.
His tone went almost sympathetic. “Now, John, it’s obvious you can’t stay here. You must go, as you must leave the University. But is there anything you’d like to say before you depart in complete disgrace? What would you like to say to the class, and to me? Would you like, for example, to ask for another chance?”
“Doesn’t seem right, Willis. It was a pretty poor effort.”
“Yes, it was,” he answered sternly. “Nor would you receive one. Would you like to plead that you tried your best?”
“That’d be lying. I didn’t try at all.”
“That much was obvious,” he said, voice mournful. “Would you like to tell them that in spite of all of this, you’re still a nice guy?”
He’d thrown a switch. Nothing in his tone signaled anything; it was all in the genius of his having chosen me for this specific skit. For the first time since he’d initially addressed me, my head snapped around to him. “YES!” I said, raising my voice a tad in indignation.
Willis smiled, stood up in his most professorial stance, actor’s posture discarded faster than you could think. He raised a finger. “I MAY BE A COMPLETE SCREW-UP, BUT AT LEAST I’M STILL A NICE GUY. And that is what Vronsky is trying to tell us here. John, thank you,” he added. I made my way back to my seat, as I had seen so many other students do. None of it had been rehearsed or planned. In a few seconds he could read precisely the type of person he needed, to react in the precise ways necessary to demonstrate his point, picking him or her out of nearly three hundred people.
Fifteen years later, when I was authoring my (as yet unpublished) Irish travel narrative, my wife encouraged me to write to Willis and ask him to author an introduction. I thought she was nuts, but I did it. He asked me to send him the ms, in print, and I did. He pointed out what was missing from it, and encouraged me to read a couple of other travel books that would demonstrate the qualities my ms needed in order to become publishable. You always take all personal career counseling given you by your most admired figures, or you’re an idiot. When I’d finished the rewrite, I sent him the portion he wanted to see. He praised my remedying of the flaws and agreed to write an introduction if I wished. While no one ended up publishing the book–which I still may do on my own–one more time, I learned a lot from Willis about writing.
He retired in 2007, aged 77. And if you think anything you just read is far-fetched at all, I have the Seattle Times to back me up.
Thanks, Willis, for everything on every level. Oh, and I’m re-reading Brothers. Maybe this time I’ll get at least half of it.
P.S., December 16, 2016: Willis passed away November 30, 2016. I feel so fortunate to have known him.
Back in the years of the XT, AT and early 386 clones, I used to sell computers. Sales had its moments. I was never a big star in sales, but I did it well enough that when I left after two years, it was of my own choosing. Remember the Microsoft/IBM wars? I was a foot soldier in the trenches of those, five miles from the M$ campus. One of these days I’ll write about just how tremendously out of touch IBM was with dealers and clients. For now, I’m going to make fun of myself instead.
One of my best clients was an underwriting firm south of Seattle, run by two brothers named Doug and Dick Rodruck. Great guys, steady customers, the sort of people a commissioned salesperson could make a living by helping. I looked forward to all their calls.
The sales floor could be chaotic at times, with people needing help on the floor, calls announced for you while you were helping them, stressed-out receptionists desperately seeking someone to help the biggest salesman’s clients (with zero hope of profit or appreciation from him), and warehouse staff moving forty boxes in for storage wherever space could be found. One could lose one’s focus. Sometimes real badly.
Of course, I knew most of my customers by voice. When I wasn’t going in six different directions, I picked up on who I was talking to. At the same time, I had a lot of customers, very loyal ones, amazed that I could ‘remember’ what they bought a year and a half back. (I wrote it all on rolodex cards. I cheated.) So when I heard the page “Dick is on line 1 for Jonathan,” I didn’t think. I took the call and said hello.
“Hello, Jonathan, it’s Dick. [Here followed a bunch of specifications for new hardware they wanted to buy.]” I listened and started working up pricing, but after a time it occurred to me: I do not know who this is. I can’t place him. Well, I’ll eventually pinpoint him.
Which I did. Unfortunately, that was before I learned in life that not everything on one’s mind needs to be blurted out at random, especially stuff like evidence that you had no idea who was on the phone. I watched my mother do it all growing up, so in addition to the blurt genetics, I had an unhelpful example. I was still learning how to shut the hell up rather than spit out my latest revelation.
Thus, when Dick finished describing whatever computer need he was describing, and asked me a question, it was blurtin’ time: “Oh. Dick Rodruck! You’ll have to excuse me. There are a lot of Dicks out there.”
A very awkward silence. I realized what I’d just said.
Now what? The silence was mine to break. Or, at least, it had better be me.
“I do hope and trust you realize, Dick, that in no way did I intend that the way it came out. I apologize profusely.”
How you can know that Dick Rodruck was such a great guy? He forgave me. He said not to worry about it, and continued with the substance of the discussion. The bullet of a ruined relationship whistled past me.
I’m fairly sure I’m at the right asymptote of ‘willingness to go through headaches and try new things in order to thwart people’s data gathering just because.’ The tools for this are in a state of constant change, so this might be a time for an update.
My basic browser is Firefox 16.0.2, not because I want to be on that version, but because I was forced by sunsetting to upgrade from a previous version. FF has heavy memory leaks, and has become clunky, but a) it has the most add-ins, b) I hated Safari, c) there is no way I’m going to let Chrome have its way with me, and d) these days, if you use Internet Explorer to do anything but download a real browser, your friends will stage an intervention. “Jonathan, we’ve all come here because we care about you. Your use of IE has affected my life negatively in the following ways…” For all FF’s flaws, it has the most dynamic privacy tool authoring community, and that’s what matters most to me.
It begins with Adblock Plus, which hides just about all the advertising, everywhere. There is a certain irony in all the efforts I exert in order to ruin Facebook’s data mining, when I don’t in fact see their consequent advertising. ABP is low maintenance. It has the added benefit of allowing me spot removal of any image I happen to find offensive and just don’t need to see again.
NoScript is a very helpful package that doesn’t let JavaScripts run unless I say so. It probably also accounts for most of the headaches and tweaks I go through, because it goes by site, and some pages have scripts from fourteen different sources (some of which you only learn of after unblocking this other one). Which one is the one needed in order to do what I came to the page to do? At times I have to turn it off temporarily, but I usually just enable scripts one at a time for the session.
FlashBlock is easier than NoScript because it shows a ‘play’ button on the screen where the Flash content is. Usually it’s a video. Do videos automatically play when you go to a page? Not for me, they don’t, and that’s how I want it.
TACO is wonderful, because it does the best job on cookies. For example, I can accept Facebook cookies on Facebook and on the one game that I play, while blocking them everywhere else. I have to do that one page at a time, but once you do it for the pages you visit most, it’s less necessary every day. That also lets me blow away Google’s ubiquitous cookie-mongering. There is no reason either of those sites needs to set a cookie on my browser just because I visited, say, CNN. That visit, and what I did there, is neither Google’s nor Facebook’s business. While TACO also blocks most web trackers, it doesn’t do it as well as…
Ghostery. In addition to cookies, many sites use beacons/web trackers to keep tabs on what you do. Ghostery blocks nearly all of them by default. If it finds one unblocked, you can choose to add it to the list. Very easy to use, and very satisfying.
GoogleSharing partly convinces Google that I’m somewhere else. Currently, Google News thinks I’m in Austin, TX. Once in a while, I believe when GS resets to a new ‘location,’ my GN shows up in a foreign edition and I have to change it. Although if it’s a language I understand, sometimes I’ll do a bit of reading first. GS says that it anonymizes my search results in some way; sounds good to me.
TrackMeNot spams Google with spurious searches on mundane things. The effect of this is to bury my actual Google searches in a sea of irrelevant crap. Slight downside is that sometimes it gets a little zealous, and Google makes me do Captcha in order to search, announcing that it has detected a lot of traffic from my IP address. This is rare.
WebOfTrust assigns reliability/safety icons to links, especially in Google searches. This mainly keeps one from blundering into sites that attempt to emplace spyware or viruses on your machine. Foolproof it’s not; helpful it is. Part of the problem is that the color of the icon could mean anything from ‘naughty pictures’ to ‘unsafe due to spyware,’ and you have to hover the mouse in order to find out. Part of the problem is that the safety rating of a page comes mainly from user input, so it’s possible that a given page was given adverse ratings simply because a bunch of people wanted to hurt the page’s owner. Use it with some discernment, and it’s helpful.
What are the downsides?
The biggest one is the need to selectively enable JavaScripts until a page works. I admit that sometimes I just punt and use another, unshielded browser. Since I don’t go from place to place with other browsers much, the dossier they compile from them is a tiny fraction of my web surfing. It’s also pretty much impossible to know which script unlocked what I wanted, unless I do it one at a time, which is often more futzing that I desire.
Second biggest is needing to go into TACO each time I go to a new page and block/delete all its cookies. You’d be amazed how many sites stick you with Firefox or Google cookies; WordPress and Yahoo are also frequent offenders.
Third would be the inability to save Google search settings because I won’t take Google cookies on their search page. At times, the non-evil folks at Google break Google search for people who do this–I’m convinced it’s to teach us a lesson.
Fourth would be that you have to use Firefox, which isn’t a very efficient or robust browser compared to others. For games, I use Sleipnir, Opera and/or Maxthon. Sleipnir and Maxthon are very robust. Opera is lousy, but it’s good to have some backup without resorting to IE. Maxthon’s update nags are very annoying; haven’t found out how to get them out of the system tray. At least I can ignore Opera and FF’s update nags.
Anyway, if you want to try browsing my way, there are all the links. Enjoy.
I had to stop by our local B of A branch today. While B of A is pretty odious, so are most of the realistic options. (It’s not about the local employees. The branch manager is a complete sweetheart and her employees reflect her influence.) Outside was a security guard, playing with his doodad phone.
This was new, so while I waited in line, and the bank employee was trying to handle some of the transactions with people in line, I asked him: why the security? His tone was sanctimonious. “It’s because of Occupy. Two of our tellers were assaulted in Texas by four of them; one woman had a broken leg. This is to assure the safety of our female tellers.” It was in that kind of tone that says ‘You cannot dispute me unless you want it to mean you favor beating up women.’ I expressed skepticism, and that if that had happened, it was probably done by provocateurs–perhaps even police infiltrators. He asserted that they were in jail. I’d never seen this guy here before at the branch, so one suspects that he was sent to ‘message’ this to clients.
This being Bank of America, I knew it was entirely credible that they would simply invent a story. When I got home, I did some research. Two tellers beaten up badly by those ultra-violent Occupy maniacs (who seem to be most famous for being roughed up, pepper-sprayed and assaulted by police, not the other way around) would seem a pretty big deal. No one thinks it’s okay to beat up on bank tellers just doing their work, or coming or going from it. I searched the google string “bank of america tellers assaulted by occupy,” no quotes, to have the greatest possible chance to learn about this breaking story.
Nothing about any such assault. I found some about bank robbers assaulting tellers, but Occupy protestors are not bank robbers. Same terms into a news aggregator; nothing. I found nothing to corroborate this story.
Unless I find something to corroborate it (and if I do, I will update this, of course), I have to assume that the employee was telling patrons a bald-faced lie. Sounds to me like a slick anti-Occupy propaganda trick, depending mainly upon people being too lazy to fact-check. In most cases, that’s probably a safe assumption. If there really was no such attack, it would say a lot about B of A’s opinion of the public. It would also say a lot about the corporate values–not that most observant people would bet heavily on those, at this stage of the game.
It was the phrase that defined the middle to later Roman Republic as much as any other: the statement made at the end of orations by M. Porcius Cato (“the Elder”). Delenda est Carthago. Three wars, one semi-conclusive and two more to the knife. Some of the great figures of an ancient world: Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal Barca, Q. Fabius Maximus (“the great”) Verrocosus (“having a mole/wart”) Cunctator (“the delayer”), P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus, and others. Phoenician culture vs. Roman culture. Trade and naval power vs. agrarianism and land power, mercenaries vs. citizen soldiers. War elephants vs. pila and gladii.
I’m not even nearly finished with it, but I’m enjoying Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles. Any attempt to understand Carthage suffers from a problem that is the first thing Miles points out: most of our information comes from non-Carthaginian sources, most of whom had serious biases against this non-Roman, non-Greek nation. We don’t really have extant Carthaginian sources from the ancient world; most were obliterated. We thus are faced with the historian’s challenge of evaluating sources, piecing together information said to be taken from them, examining the archaeological record’s findings, and forming a composite and credible image with as little incorporated bias as we can.
This is why I love ancient history, why I majored in it, why I continue to study it. We are challenged to use our minds to deduce and discover all that we may in spite of evidence that can be minimal, fragmentary, contradictory and elusive. We are further challenged not to conclude too much when we cannot, but to suppose or conjecture based on the most reasonable or probable reality in light of what we do know. Antiquarianism is demanding, never complete, and (like all historical study) benefits from understanding of all disciplines and sciences on some level.
What I like most so far about Miles is the rigorous level of critical thought on display. He doesn’t seem to have come to glorify or vilify Carthage, but to assemble honest understanding. I dislike works that seem to have begun with a conclusion and then focused on the evidence that supported it. Miles seems free of this flaw from what I can discern, as far as I’ve gotten. He could later disappoint me, but I’m not expecting that. I am anticipating a fair, nuanced, common-sense portrait of a poorly understood society that stood as an embodiment of all that many ancient writers scorned. They bequeathed that bias to Western historical tradition, and I relish seeing how Miles will assess the evidence to see where that tradition deserves challenge.
The Editorial Maverick 