JK Rowling, The Cuckoo's Calling, and Regression to the Mean

You've probably heard by now that JK Rowling published a crime novel in April 2013 under the secret pen name Robert Galbraith. There's been a huge amount of buzz about the novel, titled The Cuckoo’s Calling, since the news was broken. The press has focused mainly on two details. First, the novel came out to a very good critical reception, including a starred review from Publisher's Weekly. And second, the book sold quite poorly in its first three months -- 1500 copies in Britain. (Since Galbraith’s real identity was revealed, of course, the book has rocketed up the bestseller charts.)  (Edit:  Shad has pointed out a source saying that the book sold  comparably to similar debuts, and sales numbers were actually similar to Harry Potter in its first few months.  So "poorly" might be too strong of a word.)

I was really excited to hear the news. I loved the Harry Potter series. Though I didn't read The Casual Vacancy since it seemed too literary for my tastes, The Cuckoo’s Calling is definitely something I'll be adding to my to-read list.

I've also enjoyed reading online reactions as the news broke. In some ways, they’ve been a litmus test of peoples’ underlying views on the publishing industry. Some people, like author Nathan Bransford, have written about how the book's poor sales illustrate the fleeting nature of publishing success. Others commentators took this as more evidence that publishers no longer have anything to offer writers.

And what’s my reaction to the Rowling story? It’s to recall a statistical principle known as regression to the mean.

The Psychology of Attraction: The Intertwining of Sex and Aggression

"His gaze flickered to my lips. I got that. He was once again furious with me and once again perfectly ready to have sex with me. The conundrum that was Barrons. Apparently it was impossible for him to feel anything as far as I was concerned without getting angry about it. Did anger make them want to have sex with me? Or was it that he always wanted to have sex with me that made him so angry?"

--Shadowfever, by Karen Marie Moning


So I’m looking back over the "Psychology of Attraction" series, and so far we have fear, uncertainty, and now aggression. Which makes me think I should clarify some things before y'all stage an intervention. This series is not meant to be a picture of how healthy relationships work, or even how the majority of relationships work. They’re interesting tidbits that might be useful for a novelist. As often is the case, the healthy cases don’t always make interesting stories.

Actually, that's an interesting thought -- that the pathological makes for more gripping stories. Is it true? Is it desirable? Which dovetails nicely into today's post.

When I was researching the article on fear, I ran across some old studies exploring the relationship between aggression and sexuality. The basic idea was that the experimenters made test participants angry and then tested them for sexual arousal.

The Psychology of Attraction: Uncertainty

A while back, I was reading a romance. In the story, the girl meets a charming, handsome guy, and things are proceeding as usual. But then, out of the blue, a boy she’d hated for years suddenly kisses her and runs away. ZOMG! I was mildly interested in guy number one, but when guy number two showed up, I really took notice.

Jump cut to another story, where a girl meets an old flame. He's distant, but sometimes shows flashes of interest. As the shared moments continue, I’m avidly turning the pages. Soon, he's actively courting her -- bringing her lunch and supporting her through emotional trauma, and . . . I lose interest.

In both cases, the guy who might have been attracted to the girl was more interesting to me than the guy who  definitely was attracted to the girl. Which got me to thinking. What is it about uncertainty and attraction?

The Psychology of Attraction: Fear

Happy Labor Day! If you haven't looked at the comments in my critique styles post, take a look. People have left quite a few amusing comments. Also, I forgot to mention  that the five profiles I posted are actually caricatures of the five members of my critique group. Can you guess which one is me?

I've been reading some articles on the psychology of attraction and thought it'd be interesting to write about ways to attract the opposite sex. As writers, our interest in this is of course strictly academic -- we want to write more realistic romances (right? :-P).

Imagine that you're a young man crossing a rickety suspension bridge. It's not exactly sturdy. It sways and twists in the wind, and there's only a low wire handrail to protect you from the rocks 230 feet below. As you cross, you're approached by an attractive young psychology student. She asks you to fill out a survey and write a short story. After you finish, she tells you that she'd be happy to talk further about the experiment, and then she hands you her phone number.

Yes, Reading About Edward Cullen Will Make You Sparkle

Every once in a while I present some tools in the writer’s arsenal for taking over the world. We've talked about writers as brain manipulators, and storytelling as Vulcan mind meld. Today, I will show you how Stephanie Meyer and JK Rowling are actually Borg queens, assimilating all unsuspecting readers in their path.

Reading assimilation is a common experience. Perhaps you're walking to work after reading Harry Potter and find yourself wishing for a broomstick. Or you step into the sun after reading Twilight and half-expect your skin to sparkle. Psychologists Shira Gabriel and Ariana Young have coined the term narrative-collective assimilation for the idea that reading a story will cause the reader to assimilate into the “collective”, or people-groups, described in the narrative. And now they have experimental evidence.

KATniss and KATsa... a coincidence?

Regular readers will know that I write in what I jokingly call the "kickass girl genre" -- action adventure with female protagonists that could beat you up. I often look to The Hunger Games and Graceling, two popular books with similar heroines, for inspiration and guidance. After spending some time with the books, you start noticing things.

For example, has anyone ever noticed that the main characters both have names starting with the syllable "Kat"? (Katniss and Katsa). Could be a coincidence, but I also wonder if there's something about the explosive sound of the letters "K" and "T" that conjure up an impression of forcefulness. Funny enough, my main character (conceived before I read either book) also has a "K" name -- Kyra.

Sound to meaning mapping in language has its supporters and detractors, but there have been some thought provoking results. Check out this interesting article from New Scientist for some more examples.

Improving Creativity: The Connect Brainset

Today we are diving back into our series on improving creativity for writers, based on Shelley Carson's book Your Creative Brain. If you are just joining us, check out the first two installments: the Absorb brainset and the Envision brainset.

Today's brainset is the Connect brain set.


The Connect brain set is the closest to our usual idea of creativity. It involves the ability to generate a large number of unique and out-of-the-box ideas. Instead of settling on obvious solutions, a person who’s comfortable in Connect brainset imagines all kinds of off-the-wall possibilities. To a Connecter, a glass isn't merely a vessel for holding water. It's a paperweight, cookie-cutter, bug trapping tool, weapon, rolling pin, musical instrument, and more.

This brainset is also characterized by the ability to make unusual associations. For example, someone less comfortable with the Connect brain set might associate the word ‘cake’ with birthdays, flour, candles, etc. But someone strong in the Connect brainset might think about mud, the computer game Portal (The cake is a lie!), cabaret girls jumping out at parties, pie, cakewalks, etc.

How to strengthen the connect brainset:

Improving Creativity: The Envision Brainset

We're in the second installment of our series based on psychologist Shelley Carson's book Your Creative Brain. In each installment, we discuss one of Carson’s six categories of creativity (aka “brainsets"). As I mentioned last time, these should not be viewed as ironclad descriptions of the way things are, but rather a helpful model for thinking about creativity.

Last time, we discussed the Absorb brainset. Today's brainset is the Envision brainset. 

The Envision brainset is your brain's scratchpad or mental palette -- your ability to form images of things that do not exist. It could involve attempting to see your living room with a different furniture arrangement, or remembering the smell of your favorite lamb stew.

Improving Creativity: The Absorb Brainset

Harvard University creativity researcher Shelley Carson recently published Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life. She was kind enough to mail me a review copy.

Carson divides creativity into seven distinct categories, or “brain sets.” Each brain set is a different flavor of creativity, and different people will naturally have some brain sets that come more naturally to them. In her book, Carson describes each brain set and provides exercises for strengthening it, and I thought it would be fun to talk about these brainsets as they apply to writers.

Carson emphasizes that these are not scientifically proven fact, but a model inspired by current neuroscience research. I wouldn't view these as an ironclad description of the way things are, but rather as springboards to develop your own creativity.

The first brainset is the Absorb brainset. This brainset is all about being observant -- noticing the world around you, and paying attention to random thoughts that pop up from your subconscious.

In Which I Wax Philosophical on Narrative Distance, POV, and Voice

Note: Congratulations to Hektor for winning the signed copy of Bamboo People. I will be contacting you for your information.

A while back, Douglas Morrison was kind enough to interview me on his blog . An excerpt is below, and you can see the entire interview here.



Talk about how the mind interprets Point of View and narrative distance.

We are social animals, so our brains are wired to interact with other people. We are equipped with many tools to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. Some of these tools include facial expressions, body language, our understanding of the situation, etc. As writers then, our job is to replicate these cues so the reader knows what the characters are thinking and feeling. It's an interesting way to look at the “show don't tell” rule -- you could frame it instead as saying that a writer should use natural emotion cues rather than just telling the reader that little Johnny is sad.



One particularly challenging social task is figuring out what someone else is thinking when it's different from what you are thinking. For example, if someone stole your friend’s lunch while he wasn't looking, you know that the lunch is no longer in his lunch box, but your friend doesn't. Somehow, your brain has to keep those two ideas separate. It seems very easy now, but actually, children have a hard time with this type of task. And as a writer, I sometimes have trouble with more subtle variations on this. For example, if I'm not careful, my main character will start reacting to situations in ways that are more characteristic of my personality than hers.

In a number of my literary agent interviews, each has pointed to an increasing importance of a strong narrative voice. Any thoughts on narrative voice as it pertains to your field of expertise?


Livia: I took an introductory linguistics class during my early years as a grad student, and one interesting thing we learned was how everyone has their own unique dialect. We usually think about dialects as something shared by people of a certain region, but each individual person also has his own way of speaking, his preferred phrases and grammatical structures. On top of that, add a worldview, a past, and how that affects the way you see the world. Put it all together, and you have a strong narrative voice. Piece of cake, right?

Your Memory For Construction Workers Is Worse Than You Think (Unless You Are One)

I recently read Bamboo People by Mitali Perkins, an eye-opening novel about child soldiers in modern-day Burma. It tells the story of two boys from different ethnic groups: Chiko, a Burmese boy forced into the Army, and Tu Reh, a Karenni boy whose family is driven from their home by Burmese soldiers. When chance events throw the two together, Chiko and Tu Reh get to know each other not as faceless enemies, but as people.

There's quite a bit of social psychology research on group identity, in-groups, and out-groups, but this story actually brought to mind some vision science experiments on a phenomenon called change blindness. The basic idea is that we notice a lot less than we think we do. For example, watch this video from psychologist Dan Simons.

An Experimental Psychologist's Take on Beta Reading Part III: Data Collection

So far in this series we've talked about selecting beta readers, recruiting them, and getting them to read. Now is the part we’ve all be waiting for: getting feedback.

There are two challenges to soliciting feedback (especially if the beta readers are not writers themselves). First, readers might not have much to say beyond “It was okay.” Second, even if they do say something,  they might just be telling you what you want to hear*. I tried to minimize these problems by doing the following:

The Common Thread Between Heroes and Villains

"Mythology, science fiction and comic books are chock full of stories of heroes and their battles against the ills of society—the eternal struggle between good and evil. We are meant to view these two main characters—the Hero and the Villain—as opposites on the spectrum of ethics and morality. But are they really so different when you look at their individual traits and behaviors?


Contrary to popular belief, right and wrong, moral and immoral, ethical and unethical—are not always on opposite ends of the spectrum of good and evil. In addition, the people who fight for the cause on either side may not always look or act like the one you would expect. Science may finally give some support to the old saying: There is a fine line between good and evil."


Read the rest of this fascinating article by Andrea Kuszewski at Scientific American.

An Experimental Psychologist's Take on Beta Reading Part II: Recruiting Betas and Getting Them To Read

This is part two of the series An Experimental Psychologist’s Take on Beta Reading. Read Part I (Subject Pools) here.  Again, I'm not claiming that these methods are the best for everyone, but hopefully everyone can find some useful tidbits.

Way back in the day, there was very little oversight for experiments involving human subjects. That era gave us classic studies like the Milgram Shock Experiments and the Stanford Prison Study. These studies revealed new insights about human nature but left many participants emotionally traumatized.

In these more enlightened times, human subject research is closely regulated to ensure that participants are treated fairly and ethically. One of the most important concepts involving human research is that of informed consent. In every study, we make sure the participant understands the risks and benefits involved in the experiment, and we emphasize that the participant may stop the experiment at any time.

Informed consent is extremely important for ethical research, but on a day to day level, it creates a bit of a balancing act for experimenters. We don't want participants to feel forced into something that makes them uncomfortable. But if we word things the wrong way, we sometimes give the false impression that our experiment is just a side thing that they can to join or drop at their convenience. There’s nothing quite like waiting around at lab, 8pm on a weeknight, having booked the scanner for a nonrefundable $1000 slot, and hearing that your test subject won’t be showing up because he decided to go drinking with his buddies.

Recruiting beta readers reminded me of this tightrope walk. On one hand, people have lives and are doing you a favor by reading your novel. On the other, many manuscripts die a lonely death in the depths of a beta reader's email inbox. So how do we maintain a balance between respecting our beta readers’ time and getting feedback in a timely manner?

An Experimental Psychologist's Take on Beta Reading Part I: Subject Pools

I didn't plan on running my novel critiques like a psych experiment. I just wanted some folks to read the manuscript and recruited/blackmailed some friends accordingly.

A week into the process, I noticed that I was using principles from experimental psychology to ensure better data from my beta readers. Another week after that, I realized that it wasn’t normal to use words like "data" when talking about beta feedback. Then I began emailing my writing group with phrases like "I'm starting to notice clear trends emerging in the responses," and it was all downhill from there.

By now, I’ve embraced the “beta reading as psych experiment” analogy. But nerdy or not, I kinda like the way things turned out. Some writer friends requested that I post about my experience in more detail, and that was the inspiration for this next series: An Experimental Psychologist’s Approach to Beta Reading.

The Drawer

Note: Today's post is by Kathy Crowley, who blogs at Beyond the Margins

“Thus, we notice after exercising our muscles or our brain in a new way, that we can do so no longer at that time; but after a day or two of rest, when we resume the discipline, our increase in skill not seldom surprises us. I have often noticed this in learning a tune; and it has led a German author to say that we learn to swim during the winter, and to skate during the summer.”

- William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course

A long time ago I worked in a neurobiology lab. I was a few years out of college and trying to support myself while I completed my medical school requirements (having frittered away my college years on things like literature, and writing, and philosophy, and Comparative Slave Societies… I was very liberal with my liberal arts.)

Why Justin Timberlake Should Avoid Transitive Verbs

As writers, we're always trying to find words that perfectly capture our meaning.  "I broke the cookie jar" has a different feel than "The cookie jar broke." But does it really matter? Would the average reader really notice the difference? A recent study suggests that subtle wording changes can have real psychological effects.

Psychologist from Stanford University were interested in the distinction between agentive (a.k.a. transitive) or nonagentive (a.k.a. nontransitive) verbs. For example, in the example above, my role in the cookie jar mishap is emphasized in the agentive version ("I broke the cookie jar") while it is completely ignored in the nonagentive ("The cookie jar broke") version. So how much does wording matter?

Foils: Two Characters For the Price of One

A while back, I read a blog entry by psychologist Mark Changizi arguing that patients should wear skin-colored hospital gowns.

The logic is simple. Skin tone often changes due to illness, but those changes are hard to see against a green or white hospital gown. Because green and white are so drastically different from our skin tone, healthy skin and slightly greenish/reddish/yellowish skin end up looking the same. However, if patients wore gowns that matched the color of their skin, it would be much easier for nurses to see when there is a change. A slightly greenish hue is much easier to detect when it's up against a flesh colored gown.

To see a dramatic demonstration of this, take a look at Mark’s original blog post. He has some flesh colored patches that look similar to each other when placed against a green background, but look completely different when placed against a flesh colored background.

It's a trick of our brains. We are better at seeing subtle differences if we have an immediate point of comparison. So what does this have to do with character development? Well, I’m glad you asked. [Completely forced and utterly unscientific analogy ahead.]

Men Prefer Reading About Men, and So Do Women

Note: Congratulations to J. J. Brown for winning a copy of The Forest For the Trees. I will be contacting you for your mailing address. Also, I'm doing a Goodreads question and answer session  on reading, writing, neuroscience, and psychology. If you're a Goodreads member, come on by. And finally, remember to submit entries for the guest post contest.

Would The Hunger Games have made it big if Katniss had been a boy?  If Pride and Prejudice had been about five Bennett brothers and the proud (and wealthy) Miss Darcy, would readers still swoon? Keith from On Fiction recently covered a study that speaks to these questions.

The authors of the study wondered whether a protagonist’s gender affects the reading experience. They took passages from popular novels and presented them to readers either in the original form or with the protagonist’s gender switched. The researchers then had male and female readers read the text and answer questions evaluating the passage.

Psychology as Inspiration For The Writer’s Muse

Note from Livia:  A huge thank you to everyone for your support during the From Words to Brain promotion!  I'll have more to say about that next week.  For this week though, we have a guest post from Joanna Penn, author of Pentecost: A Thriller Novel.

The understanding of the human mind and behavior fascinates us and it’s why we are drawn back to fiction repeatedly. The lives of characters can inspire, warn or teach us about ourselves, so it’s inevitable that aspects of psychology will pervade literature. The discipline is often centred around case studies, detailed explorations into the life of an individual affected by some kind of psychological or neurological issue. These case studies can be a rich source of inspiration for the writer’s muse.

For this reason I love psychology and my bookshelves are full of fascinating tomes I delve into for inspiration. I studied psychology at college and in another lifetime I would have been a psychologist so when I decided to write a thriller, my heroine just had to be one! It gave me an excuse to revisit the subjects that have intrigued me for years. As writers, we need to feed our creative wells with information and experiences that merge together to form new ideas, and psychology is a rich source.

Here are some of my favorite examples that might also inspire your writing.