For the past several months, I’ve been reading nothing but YA novels, partly because I want to become more fluent in the genre and partly because I’m a YA judge for this year’s Whitney Awards. But I’m getting a little burned out, due in large part to reading one dystopian the other day that elicited a violent and angry reaction, and I think it’s time I read something else for a while.  In particular, I’m craving some really good non-fiction.

I don't like biographies.

I put out the call on Twitter and Facebook yesterday and got a lot of great suggestions, and I also got a lot of suggestions that sound painfully boring (I’m looking at you, biographies!)  So, I thought I’d get the discussion going over here, so all you David McCullough fanatics can proselytize and I can ignore you more formally. I also thought I’d list some of my favorite genres of non-fiction, and see if I can get some ideas in those directions. (And yes, I want other ideas too. I’m not as close-minded as I’m making myself sound.) (But MAN, I hate biographies.)

Books About Human Behavior

There are a million terrible business books out there, and while I was getting my MBA I had to read a lot of them. Some are useful but dull, like Good To Great, while others are ridiculously overhyped, like The World is Flat. (I imagine that this book was a revelation to the baby boom generation, but I can’t remember a single one of my internet-addicted, iPhone-using peers who did not find every paragraph in this book maddeningly obvious.)

But, there are business books I adore, and generally they’re in the realm of behavioral psychology, consumer behavior, or the like. (This is probably why I’m in marketing, not finance.)  For example, I love Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. Ariely is a behavioral economist, who, rather than creating logical, mathematical models of how humans should act (as is done in traditional economics) he analyzes the way people actually do act. As the title suggests, a great deal of our buying habits are irrational: we’re almost incapable of determining the value of a product; we have a crazed fixation with the concept of “free”; we’re hugely influenced by external experiences; the list goes on and on.

In that same vein, I love Click, by Bill Tancer. Tancer digs through enormous databases of internet tracking data to uncover secrets about how we behave online. Similarly, Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy has a couple decades worth of observation data he can draw upon: he started a company that employs secret shoppers to follow consumers around malls and supermarkets and record everything those people do: What do they look at and what do they ignore? Which signs do they read and which don’t get a second glance?

One question I always get when I interview for jobs is: why does an author want to work in marketing? The answer is simply that I’m fascinated by human behavior. Writing is all about understanding a character’s motivations so deeply that you can plausibly extrapolate their actions. Marketing is almost exactly the same thing.

Books That Look At History in a New Way

I got a minor in history, and I’ve always enjoyed it, but rather than read a simple history of a subject (though I do that too) I’m fascinated by books that shed new light.

I love 1491: New Revelations About America Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. So much of American history has become obscured with myth that it’s hard to tell what really happened. This book is full of fascinating historical and archaeological finds, some humorous (you know how you’ve always heard that Squanto taught the pilgrims to plant a fish with their seeds as fertilizer? He probably learned that while touring Europe a few years earlier), and some heartbreaking (in 1540 Hernando De Soto trekked from Florida to Arkansas, finding hundreds of Native American settlements, coming across two or three villages every day. When the area was revisited 50 years later, explorers would go weeks without seeing a soul, as everyone had died of European disease.)

On this same subject, everyone recommends Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which, I agree, is a great book, but I love his lesser known Collapse even more. In this one, he explains the collapse of a dozen civilizations (including the Mayans, Easter Island, the Anasazi, and others), particularly showing how misuse of their own resources led to their demise. (I know that sounds a bit like a hippie environmentalist book, but it’s not really.)

While we’re talking about the Anasazi, there’s a travel log I adore: In Search of the Old Ones, by David Roberts. Unlike the others I’ve mentioned, this one isn’t by a historian, but simply a travel writer. He talks about his own experiences trekking through the southwest for the last twenty years, mingling recent archaeological research into his personal stories. I’ve read this one probably eight times, to the point where its binding is falling apart.

Other Stuff I Like to Read

This blog is already too long, so I’ll wrap it up.

I’m a sucker for World War Two history (though, for some reason, I’ve never really enjoyed Stephen Ambrose). I enjoy behind-the-scenes looks at modern events, such as books on the CIA or the Supreme Court. Being the nerd I am, I even read like to read travel guides (a habit I got into because of trying to write about places I’ve never been).

What I Don’t Like:

On the other hand, I’ve never read a biography I’ve loved. I’ve read a few that were decent, but nothing I’d ever want to read again, and nothing I feel like recommending. I don’t doubt that there are some good ones out there, but they just seem so completely narrow in scope that I don’t see the point. I like John Adams, but do I like him enough to read 500 pages, devoting many hours and days of my life to him? Not really. I don’t doubt he’s interesting, but . . . I just don’t get it.  Feel free to try to convince me otherwise.

I’d love to hear any suggestions you have, either in my preferred genres or out of them.

The Writing Excuses podcast (run by my friends Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler and Dan Wells) recently had an episode that has really stuck with me for the last week. The concept was that they were going back in time and got to give writing advice to their teenage selves. Their advice ranged from the very specific (Dan told his teenage self to stop playing video games) to the abstract (Howard’s advice was to quit waiting for things you can’t control).

I was listening to this podcast while driving through the barren wilderness of northern Nevada, and it gave me a lot of time to ponder: what would I tell myself? As a teenager, I was in a different situation than Dan and Brandon—I had no idea I wanted to be a writer. At the time I thought I’d be a visual artist. I didn’t spend my spare time conjuring up stories; I spent my time painting and drawing. So, any advice I gave my teenage self would be along more abstract lines: quit being lazy, practice harder, don’t assume you know everything, etc.

But if we’re talking about advice I would give myself in my early writing days, there are several things I can think of. The first would be the same as my advice above: quit being lazy. Early on, I didn’t like revising at all. Even my first published book was very rough, and it got published because of a miracle rather than because of literary quality. It wasn’t until my third book that I really learned the benefit of rewrites and revision. It was a painful lesson to learn. One major rewrite was caused by a hard drive failure, the other was at the request of my publisher. It was horrible at the time, but I learned how much better writing can be if you work at it again and again.

By the same token, I think I’d give myself the advice to work from an outline. I’ve always been a hybrid of discovery writer and outliner, but it was only relatively recently that I realized how helpful it is to know the structure of the story—especially how it’s going to end. I spent two and a half years muddling through a YA novel—one that had a fantastic premise—that had no end. I didn’t know the end, so I didn’t know the scope, and I type a hundred thousand words that just couldn’t go anywhere. On the other hand, every time I’ve outlined something from the very beginning—even if I go back and change the outline later—the books have gone much better.

All of that said, I wonder if giving myself writing advice back then would have helped anything.  To a large extent, I think that the best way to learn about writing is simply to write, to screw up, to write some more, to revise, to get feedback, and to keep at it.

I recently read through The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes. I’d read it before, back when I was first starting to write, and I remember thinking how stupid the book was. The advice was dumb, and it was obviously written by someone who didn’t know what they were talking about. Now, when I read through it again, I found myself nodding my head on almost every page, thinking about how correct the advice was. There’s a lot you can learn through How-To books, but I don’t think you really understand any of it until you write and write and write.

So, I guess my main advice to my younger self would simply be: Write. By amazing coincidence, that was the very first advice that anyone gave me when I started down this path. As I’ve mentioned before, eleven years ago my brother Dan told me “Everybody says they want to be a writer. Everybody says that one day they’re going to sit down and write The Great American Novel. The difference between a writer and everybody else is that they actually do it.”

So, what writing advice would you give younger self? Do you think it would even be helpful, or do you need to learn from experience?

I wanted to fill you in on a couple of awesome Variant news items. My agent and HarperTeen’s foreign rights department have been busily working away, making me a very happy little author.

I’m positively giddy to make the following announcements. (I’ve mentioned a few of these things before, but here are more details.)

Foreign Rights:

Germany

Publisher: S. FISCHER VERLAG GMBH

Release Date: Fall 2012

France:

Publisher: J C Lattès – Editions du Masque

Release Date: Undecided (probably Fall 2012)

Norway

Publisher: CappelenDamm

Release Date: Undecided (probably Summer/Fall 2012)

Film Rights:

We have an option with a production company, though I can’t give the name of the company yet. For those who don’t know, a film option basically means that the company has the right to use my book to make a movie. It doesn’t mean that it will ever happen. (I’ve heard the stat that only 1 in 100 options ever turn into movies. I don’t know how accurate that is, but it’s definitely true that odds are against you.) (Even so: WOOT!)

Wednesday morning, I got into a bit of a kerfuffle on the Twitters .

I had complained that I had a bad migraine (65% of my tweets complain about my migraines), and my sister, @Akeyata, a fellow migraineur, replied saying I should try cutting wheat out of my diet. She and I had talked about this before: a friend had suggested that @Akeyata might have a wheat allergy. So, she stopped eating wheat and she reports that things have improved in the migraine department.

I replied thusly:

After that, my brother, @johncleaver, chimed in, and soon others did as well. While it never got heated—it was a pleasant little discussion—I thought that I ought to clarify what I meant. I love Twitter, but 140 character snippets are not ideal for nuanced discussion.

After everything was said and done, and no one agreed with me, @johncleaver posted the following:

He’s absolutely correct: I was wrong to call a food allergy alternative medicine. I was referring to something more broad. For lack of a better word, I’ll call it non-evidence-based medicine. Food allergies are real medical conditions, absolutely. But diagnosing yourself with one with absolutely no evidence that you have it? That doesn’t make any sense to me.

@Akeyata’s reasoning (as far as she explained to me) was that wheat allergies have been known to cause headaches, so she ought to try cutting wheat to see what happens. That’s fine, I guess. But why wheat? Almost any food allergy can cause headaches, so why pick wheat instead of walnuts or crawfish or peanut butter or soy beans? Obviously, it’s a shot in the dark. There’s nothing wrong with a shot in the dark, I guess, if you have the time to run trial-and-error through hundreds of foods. But I wouldn’t.

Food allergies, as diagnosed by an allergist after he’s performed tests = evidence-based medicine. Food allergies, as diagnosed by yourself = non-evidence-based medicine.

Disclaimer: I’m not trying to talk anyone out of using non-evidence-based medicine. I’m merely trying to explain why I’m not interested.

A little history: I started getting migraines about twelve or thirteen years ago. I first consulted the usual doctors—general practitioners and neurologists—but they couldn’t find anything that really helped the situation. So, because money was tight (meaning: non-existent), and because I had some good friends who offered help, I tried several alternative medicine therapies. I visited a massage therapist, I visited a chiropractor (who tried some weird emotion-based therapy that I can’t remember the name of), and I visited a reflexologist. I had cranial sacral therapy, and took some herbal supplements and many other things.

My general impression, upon leaving these treatments, is that they’re all performed by well-meaning, sincere individuals, but that they’re almost entirely guesswork, using untested treatments and without the benefit of long-term education, continuing education, and literature and studies with which to consult.

@johncleaver and his wife are believers in (or, at least, users of) an alternative therapy called NAET (who even he refers to as “the witchdoctor”). In our Twitter discussion, @johncleaver disparaged general practitioners, quoting a line from House, that their work could be done by “a monkey with a bottle of Motrin”, and @johncleaver went on to say that “random hypothesizing is the reason I haven’t been to a non-specialist doctor in two years.”

I’ll come back to the “monkey with a bottle of Motrin” in a minute, but I want to address the second statement first, because I hear the same thing whenever alternative medicine (or non-evidence-based medicine) comes up: doctors are guessing just as much as the astrologist/iridologist/homeopath/etc is guessing.

I don’t have much response to that other than: I think it’s completely disingenuous. Sure, a doctor might not be able to diagnose you immediately, but at least they know how the body works. They know chemistry and anatomy and physiology, and they’ve studied and been tested extensively. There’s a difference between a guess and an educated guess.

Case in point: in 2007 I had a severe cough, severe enough that I would cough until I threw up, almost every day. I went to the doctor, and he ran some tests and they couldn’t figure it out. They thought it was asthma, and were treating it as asthma, and I wasn’t getting better. So, I blogged about it, and, as often happens when I blog about my health problems, I get commenters who suggest alternative treatments. The one that seems to fit this current situation clearly is: someone very adamantly suggested I might be allergic to corn.  A few days later, while looking for a blood clot in my lungs, the doctors found that I had a hard-to-detect form of pneumonia.

This is what makes me crazy about alternative medicine: there was a very real, tangible cause of my health problems, and that cause would have never been found and treated if I’d instead tried the trial-and-error, self-diagnosis method of food allergies—if I had, as the commenter strongly encouraged, cut all corn from my diet.

But back to the House quote. @johncleaver was wildly misinterpreting it. If you read the full quote, House was not saying that general practitioners are nothing better than monkeys with bottles of Motrin. He was saying that most patients who go to see a general practitioner require nothing more than a monkey with a bottle of Motrin. House was complaining about the patients, not the doctors:

House: [speaking to a clinic full of waiting patients]: But not to worry, because for most of you, this job could be done by a monkey with a bottle of Motrin.

Here’s a second case from my own recent life: I spent about seven months with severe chest pain, starting in the fall of 2009. Upon the first flare, we went to the ER expecting it to be a heart attack, but all the tests were fine. My general practitioner suggested a few more treatments and tests, and at long last, I was very conclusively diagnosed with Tietze Syndrome, an inflammation in the cartilage of the chest. After a series of cortisone shots, I am 100% pain free, and the doctors foresee no need for any treatment (even the cortisone) in the future.

Compare that to the endless list of alternative treatments that were suggested with absolutely no evidence to back them up: cutting out aspartame, cutting out MSG, going to @johncleaver’s witchdoctor, cutting out all processed food, cutting out white flour, and on and on. It turns out that I had a very real, tangible health problem, and I can only imagine that trying a trial-and-error alternative treatment, instead of consulting medical doctors, would have wasted an awful lot of time.

All of that said, I’m not claiming that cutting out MSG wouldn’t have worked.

As mentioned above, my complaint with non-evidence-based medicine is solely one of guessing vs. educated guessing. Every single person who has suggested alternative treatments to me has done so because it worked for them, or for their loved ones. (And, it’s very important to note, the fact that they’re suggesting it to me is because they’re very kind, good people who care about my welfare.) I’m not saying that alternative therapies can’t work, I’m simply saying that I see no evidence that spurs me to try them.

I was talking to @johncleaver’s wife, and even her witchdoctor admits that the biggest flaw with his business is that he’s never performed large-scale clinical trials and had the results published in reputable peer-reviewed journals. If such was the case, and the results were conclusive, then I wouldn’t have any trouble diving right in. It’s not the specifics of the treatment that bother me—it’s the fact that all the evidence is anecdotal and unscientific.

I don’t doubt that some of these treatments are legitimate, and that, given funding, they could move from alternative medicine to mainstream medicine. Not only that, but I don’t doubt that some treatments that are purely hokum can actually produce good results. (In one famous study of acupuncture, it was found that it didn’t matter at all where the needles were placed—the specifics of acupuncture are pure baloney—but the frequent one-on-one interaction from a caring therapist actually, scientifically and provably, made patients feel better.)

So ultimately, my position is this: I have a very wide field of options in front of me. There are a ton of doctors and therapists out there, and each has a broad selection of treatments at his or her disposal. So, with this huge choice in front of me, I will ALWAYS pick the educated guess over the random guess. I will always pick controlled, peer-reviewed trials over anecdotal, non-tested theories. And I honestly don’t understand how anyone could possibly choose otherwise, if they have the option (though I very much realize doctors can be expensive).

I guess this means I’m blogging again? Yes, it does.