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Not since I read Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation have I been so excited about periods, commas, and colons. In an era when many people take the easy road to punctuation (i.e. Really, I have to actually use one of those stupid “symbols”? Can’t people, like, get what I’m saying???! – and, no, using three question marks does not make your question any better or worse. One will suffice. Furthermore, using an exclamation mark/point will not make your question any more poignant. It’s a question. Leave it at that.), we have to remember that punctuation is still important.

Click here to get the scoop from the BBC on how to deal with things as sexy as punctus elevatus and subdistinctio.

No need to mention names, but this was a recent post from a PUBLISHED AUTHOR on a forum I take part in on LinkedIn:

I have two issues I am dealing with and need advise.

My publisher sais I do not help enough with marketing for my first book and she is right, because I know very little regarding the internet and I don’t like interviews, so is there another way to assist in marketing a book without doing this things? Also I was told because of my insecurities in writing that it would be good to find two people who can review my stories and give me feedback but I don’t know how to find this people, does anyone have any suggestions for this?

Hmm. Let’s examine your quixotic quandary in more detail, Ms. PUBLISHED AUTHOR. You didn’t have anybody look over your work before publishing a novel; your spelling is slightly rustic; your full-flavoured punctuation could be more robust; you’re not familiar with this brand-new invention called the interweb; you aren’t comfortable promoting your book in public; and – last but certainly not least – you have no confidence in your ability to write.

Does that about cover all the bases?

Although it’s possible you have a long and fruitful career awaiting you in the literary arts, you might want to consider taking some time away. You know, to collect your thoughts and all. Perhaps take stock of what is good in your life and consider a transition to another field.

The lesson we can all take away from this person is that absolutely ANYONE can get published today, which I suppose is encouraging for aspiring writers everywhere. Not literate? Not a problem. Unable to string together a proper sentence? No biggie! Have you lost the plot before you even get to the plot? Not a hot issue.

However, if you can hit random keys on a keyboard and press SEND on your email, you’re good to go! The world is your oyster! Light it up and take no prisoners! Your first novel is definitely within reach, and that’s the best advise I can give.

Ah, yes. The art of writing good! I saw this picture on Facebook and felt compelled to post it on my site. We are all guilty of making these errors, some more than others, some more often than not.

My brother, editor extraordinaire and part-time literary philanthropist, burns me on No. 1 and No. 10 all the time. Although he is a bit of a sadist when it comes to my writing (and a very cruel person most other times), he’s right 98.34% of the time.

If I could add my two loonies’ worth of advice when it comes to writing goodly and sharp, I’d say:

11. Keep it simple, stupid – less is more

12. Capitalization is cool – uppercase characters are very upper class.

13. Shortened, truncated, apostrophe-less words are for boors – if u think yer kool wrtng like this, u should head strate to yer nearest hospital and get an mri (DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200)

14. Good spelling is like good hygiene – if you spell poorly, you most definitely smell bad

15. Please, for all that is good and just in this world, reread what you’ve written at least once before showing it to anyone – you’ll always catch something the second time through a sentence or paragraph

“Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.”

The author Vera Nazarian wrote that and I like it. Conversely, when you read no book at all, the world becomes a little darker, the heart more benumbed.

I feel ashamed to say I have fallen into the latter category recently and it has killed tiny little pieces of me. There’s always an excuse not to read. Ergo, there’s no excuse not to read, says I.

And it hurts.

It hurts in that way every reader knows – it’s lightless, vapid, and cold.

What is it about the reading experience that so many of us identify with and cling to as if sustenance, I wonder. They are, after all, just words. I like what Alberto Manguel said about this subject:

I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.

Oh, if only translating a language were as easy as hitting a computer key! (Sorry, Babelfish and Google Translate. You guys only serve as evidence that professional translators have nothing to worry about with job security for a long, long time.)

In an article posted on the World Economic Forum’s website entitled “How the language you speak changes your view of the world,” Panos Athanasopoulos, a professor of linguistics and English language at Lancaster University, provides empirical proof of how bilinguals are way cooler than monolinguals. Or something along those lines.

Although the article Mr. Athanasopoulos penned highlighted tests carried out on UK and German citizens who spoke one or both of each other’s native languages (with a brief mention of Hebrew and Arabic speakers), the lessons derived from the results – in my humble opinion  – can be transferred to other language speakers around the world.

Let me begin with the conclusion of the article: “So the language you speak in really can affect the way you think.”

Okay. Obviously not rocket science.

He goes on to cite what to non-grammarians might see as pedantic observations, such as  structural differences in grammar construction (the use of present continuous for English speakers and the simple present tense in German speakers). However, the more interesting remark came in what he refers to as “worldviews,” native English speakers being more action-oriented (“a man is cycling”) and Germans being more “holistic” and goal-focused (“the man cycles towards the supermarket”).

Mr. Athanasopoulos goes on to add:

When judging risk, bilinguals also tend to make more rational economic decisions in a second language. In contrast to one’s first language, it tends to lack the deep-seated, misleading affective biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived. So the language you speak in really can affect the way you think.

It was this next part, however, which caught my attention:

People self-report that they feel like a different person when using their different languages and that expressing certain emotions carries different emotional resonance depending on the language they are using.

I first wrote about this idea in a short story (NOTE: falling rocks and shameless self-promotion ahead) called “The Language of Love,” in which the protagonist, a native English-speaking Canadian, struggles to say “I love you” in English to his girlfriend of many years even though he’s comfortable using the Japanese equivalent, daisuki.

True, I tend to think about language a lot in my free time , but these days I’ve been thinking a great deal about the word “love” in particular. When I first learned the word sarang (“love”) in Korean, I naively used it EXACTLY like I would in English. Yet more often than not, I found Koreans wincing (i.e. not laughing or seeming confused) when I said things like “I love kimchi!” or “I love books!” or “I love singing at singing rooms with my amazing singing voice!”

Koreans would inevitably tell me how you can’t use sarang with those objects or situations. Fair enough, I thought; I’ll use it exclusively with human beings. But then I started doing corporate translation work and inevitably companies would say things to stakeholders like “Thank you for LOVING! our company this past year” and “Your L-O-V-E of and interest in our company is sincerely appreciated.”

It made no sense, and in many ways still doesn’t to me. And therein lies the mysterious allure of languages. As with love, they will remain a riddle locked inside an enigma and shrouded by nebulous clouds of wickedly complex wickedness – and, of course, failure and frustration.

At the same time, I like love to think that language acquisition and the pursuit of love share something else in common: a new and renewed sense of wonder, hope and passion. Or, as Mr. Athanasopoulos points out:

 Going back and forth between languages appears to be a kind of brain training, pushing your brain to be flexible.  This mental flexibility pays big dividends especially later in life: the typical signs of cognitive ageing occur later in bilinguals – and the onset of age-related degenerative disorders such as dementia or Alzheimer’s are delayed in bilinguals by up to five years.

Thus, the conclusion we can draw here is clear: If you speak more than one language and you love fiercely, you will live forever.

Amen.

We need to talk about Kevin. Let me explain.

This morning, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina opened its doors to worshippers once again after last Wednesday’s shooting in which nine people were murdered. From the frustration of President Obama…

“We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”

…to the sobering words of Jon Stewart…

“I honestly have nothing other than just sadness once again that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend doesn’t exist.”

…many notable people have spoken out about the mass killing that has touched people around the world.

Who would do such a horrible thing? Apparently an ignorant, malevolent racist. What’s his name? I don’t care. What does he look like? Irrelevant. Why would this 21-year-old “kid” do such a thing? Now that’s a question I’m more curious about. And that’s where Kevin comes in.

As journalists, politicians and pundits struggle with questions about America’s racial divide and whether citizens should have the right to keep and bear arms, I turn to Lionel Shriver and her brilliant novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin. In the award-winning book, Shriver delves into one of the most fundamental questions of the human condition: nature vs. nurture. Was the character of 15-year-old Kevin Khatchadourian born a malicious, sadistic killer, or was it the fault of his mom, who “never really wanted to be a mother,” and his father, who mollycoddled and turned a blind eye to his son’s questionable behaviour?

In my humble opinion, Shriver does a masterful job of letting the reader decide the answer to this ambitious question. There are a number of famous novels that have also featured this theme (Lord of the Flies, A Clockwork Orange,  and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone are works often mentioned in this same vein),  but it was We Need to Talk About Kevin that inspired me to revisit this daunting question more than any other story in recent memory.

And now, as countless people come together to pray for and remember the victims in South Carolina today, let us also cling to the belief that we are – and will remain  – “unconquered” as we move forward, just like William Ernest Henley so eloquently wrote in this 1875 poem:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

In a piece for The New Yorker titled “Can Reading Make You Happier?” Ceridwen Dovey opined that “Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself.” Dovey then goes on to write about bibliotherapy, a term coined in 1916, but a concept going as far back as the Ancient Greeks, who, above one library in Thebes, had a very simple yet elegant inscription which read “A healing place for the soul.”

Reading is good for you. Anyone who consumes the written word knows this intrinsic maxim. But now science has weighed in on the subject. As Dovey put it:

Since the discovery, in the mid-nineties, of “mirror neurons”—neurons that fire in our brains both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see an action performed by someone else—the neuroscience of empathy has become clearer. A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology, based on analysis of fMRI brain scans of participants, showed that, when people read about an experience, they display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves. We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings.

However, does what we read matter as much as the fact that we are reading at all? Dovey goes on to add:

Other studies published in 2006 and 2009 showed something similar—that people who read a lot of fiction tend to be better at empathizing with others (even after the researchers had accounted for the potential bias that people with greater empathetic tendencies may prefer to read novels). And, in 2013, an influential study published in Science found that reading literary fiction (rather than popular fiction or literary nonfiction) improved participants’ results on tests that measured social perception and empathy, which are crucial to “theory of mind”: the ability to guess with accuracy what another human being might be thinking or feeling, a skill humans only start to develop around the age of four.

Virginia Woolf, a well-known bibliophile, was perhaps one of the earliest novelists in the English language to understand and reflect this empathy with respect to the psychological impact of war on the individual when she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, providing readers with an unflinching view of the trauma so many young men were going through upon returning home from World War I. As Woolf once put it, a book “splits us into two parts as we read…the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego [and a] perpetual union [with another mind].”

Personally, I think Dovey summed up this whole fiction/bibliotherapy analysis in her article quite nicely when she wrote, “So even if you don’t agree that reading fiction makes us treat others better, it is a way of treating ourselves better.”

Author of Drunk Mom and fellow Torontonian Jowita Bydlowska had another article appear in the Toronto Star on mental illness, specifically the happy personas that cover up a depressing reality through social media venues like Facebook. It’s a well-written piece and an eye-opening look into that elephant in the room which, even today, goes largely unspoken about, unnoticed and/or unacknowledged. More worrisome is that in an age when the stigma is slowly — ever-so-slowly — lifting, many of us still put on the façade that all is okay when in reality this could not be further from the truth. So why do we still hide behind a veneer of “happiness” and “unbridled joy,” especially in public forums, where I’m-so-happy-I-could-smile-through-your-freaking-screen-right-now selfies abound like fallen leaves on a late-autumn morning?

This got me thinking about the issue of mental health and how it’s been addressed in literature over the years. Novels which spring to mind include Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Bell Jar. It also reminded me of a powerful story (now memoir) of an otherwise sane person mentally breaking down I once read in Harper’s Magazine by Eleanor Cooney called Death in Slow Motion: A Descent into Alzheimer’s, in which she wrote (no surprise that Amazon readers who were moved by Cooney’s memoir also loved Still Alice) a line that still haunts me to this day (paraphrased): I now understand how people can wear an overcoat all day and drink whiskey for breakfast.

Fortunately, many societies are now finally recognizing that mental illness is exactly that: an illness. It’s not something to be made fun of or looked down upon. Although people from the time of Sophocles more than two millennia ago have been writing about mental anguish/illness, it seems we still have a ways to go in understanding that even those among us who may appear strong could in fact be reaching out the only way they know how, not through self-reflective writing or counselling, but through happy-go-lucky mediums like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

A: Only if it sucks.

Since when did people (including editors, publishers and agents) get so uppity about high-page-count novels? Last time I checked, A Suitable Boy (1,488 pages) is still a classic in the English-language literary canon. War and Peace (1,440 pages) is considered a half-decent book by two or three people. For others, Les Misérables (1,500 pages), Atlas Shrugged (1,088), and Infinite Jest (1,104 pages) represent some of their favourite stories.

“But those titles are too old, crusty and dense,” I hear readers saying as they glaze over these words with goldfish-like eyes.

Q2: So why, then, have 700-, 800- and even 900-page novels gone on to achieve such commercial and critical success in the last year, including two Pulitzer Prize-winners (The Goldfinch and The Luminaries)?

A: Because they don’t suck.

As per an article on Vulture.com, “When Did Books Get So Freaking Enormous? The Year of the Very Long Novel,” it would seem that very, very, very long books can do well, even in today’s hyper-uber-fast society of eight-second attention spans. And yet I still hear people complain about “tomes” and “paper (stack) weights” and “literary dumbbells” when they are handed a book longer than The Prophet.

The reasons cited are various and compelling:

1) “I’m busy.” Really? You must have bad time management skills.

2) “I have kids.” Interesting. So do a few billion other people on this planet.

3) “I can’t look at a page without getting sleepy./I don’t know how to read./Words are smaller these days than in the past./Save the trees!” Buy the audio book.

4) “I’m too tired to…and, you know, what with my foot fungus…so that the eggs are flipped facing the sun, with an orange glass of juice and a pair of toasts…and the peacocks running around my house are so distracting!” (Silence…then crickets…then thunder.)

Celebrate bigness. Wrap your arms around big word counts. Don’t be scared to have the same book on your nightstand for months on end. Reading’s not a race. It’s a journey, a (usually) solitary experience that enriches the soul, broadens the mind and fills the human spirit with a sense of wonder unlike any other artistic medium.

Not convinced yet? Then remember this mantra: Books are sexy. Reading is cool. Therefore, as such, and as a result, reading thick-ass books makes you sexy mild.

Congratulations to my friend Danielle Younge-Ullman and the publication of her second book, Lola Carlyle’s 12-Step Romance. I had the honour of being at her first book launch in New York City a few years ago, and will now have the honour of hosting her at my book club next month, where she will read excerpts from my her book to Curling Was Full.

If you want to meet the YA sensation in person, she’ll be signing copies of her book at Toronto’s Yorkdale Indigo on Saturday, June 13 from 1-4 p.m.