How not to apply for a grant

I'm not usually in a position to say that I have more experience, knowledge and know-how than Ben Bernanke, but he really should've talked to somebody like me before heading to Capitol Hill yesterday to help Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson present a three-page memo asking for $700,000,000,000 of the public's money.

Three pages. Seriously:

Under questioning by the Senate banking committee, treasury secretary Henry Paulson clashed repeatedly with congressmen as he admitted that he had only a rough idea of how his department would price and purchase toxic mortgage-backed securities. ...

Legislators pointed out that they initially received only a three-page summary of how the government's intervention will work.

That description of a "three-page summary" isn't quite accurate. Calling it a "summary" implies that there exists some longer document offering a more detailed and documented proposal. No such longer document exists. The three pages isn't a "summary," it's the entire plan.

And Paulson didn't present that plan as a "summary." He presented it as a piece of legislation he wanted Congress to introduce, and pass, and turn into law, in a day or two. Here's the entire document.

A bit of experience in the nonprofit world would have helped Paulson and Bernanke here. It would have helped them to realize that when you're asking for money, you have to do your homework.

I spent a decade working for a broke nonprofit -- basement offices, salvage-yard furniture, etc. The kind of place where the founder/president/executive director spent evenings stuffing envelopes along with the rest of the staff.

Maybe you've worked, or volunteered, in an office like that too. If so, then you know that stuffing envelopes is never enough to pay the bills -- you also need grant money. That means writing grant applications or, as the lingo goes, "writing grants." Lots of grants -- big grants, little grants, national grants, local grants, targeted grants from niche donors and those invaluable and elusive elastic grants for the operating budget. Grants for programs, grants for interns, grants for travel, grants for computers, grants for grant-writing.

The point here being that we wrote a lot of grants.

And the thing is that every one of those grants was longer, more detailed and better documented than the sorry excuse for a memo that Paulson threw together to request $700 billion from the public coffers.

A three-page memo with no details means your grant application gets turned down. It means your $15,000 grant application gets turned down. Why? Because $15,000 is a lot of money, and if you're going to ask someone to hand over that kind of cash, then you're going to have to do your homework. You're going to have to explain, in detail, what the money is for, where and when it's going to be spent. You're going to have to explain how you intend to report back, with detailed documentation, after the money is spent. And you're probably going to have to describe a detailed plan ensuring that you won't need to come back six months later to ask for another $15,000 for exactly the same thing.

Fail to provide that kind of documentation and detail and your grant application will be rejected. Not only that, but you'll be lucky if you're ever allowed to come back and re-apply with the same foundation. Why? Because $15,000 is a lot of money, and when you ask someone to give you $15,000 without the courtesy of telling them what precisely it's for, they tend to take offense. And the failure to do your homework and put together a decent, detailed application is viewed as evidence that you're not responsible enough to handle the money wisely. "We're lazy and disorganized -- give us money" is not considered a winning grant-writing strategy.

Paulson, of course, was applying for a bit more than $15,000. He was asking for 47 million times that. He was asking for $700,000,000,000.

So, yeah, a three-page memo ain't gonna cut it.

By way of contrast, consider that on the same day that Paulson was offering his half-baked grant application for $7 x 10^11, Congress was also working on an omnibus spending bill for FY2009. That bill includes the entire budget for the Department of Homeland Security, everything the government is budgeting for veterans programs, for military base construction and, oh yes, an all-time record high request from the Pentagon for the Department of Defense. The total pricetag? $630 billion.

That omnibus spending bill weighs in at 357 pages, plus 752 additional pages of notes, explanations, pork, etc. More than 1,100 pages in all. That's for a request for $70 billion less of the public's money that what Paulson was requesting with his slapdash, cocktail-napkin memo.

Heck, even Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's request for FY2009 earmarks -- a paltry $197 million or so -- comes with 70 pages of documentation painstakingly compiled with help from Sen. Ted Stevens (link to a .pdf can be found here). Sure, a lot of that is for parochial boondoggles and thinly veiled plunder, but the Palin/Stevens pork-barrel wish-list was assembled with far more care and attention to detail than Paulson bothered to put into his three-page non-summary.

I'm guessing that none of you will ever be in a position to have to apply for a $700,000,000,000 or a $630,000,000,000 or even a $197,000,000 grant. But someday you might be serving on a board of directors for some nonprofit and you might have to write one of those $15,000 grants to fix the leaky roof.

If you should find yourself in that situation, try to be as thorough and detailed as possible. A three-page memo just won't do.

Why? Because $15,000 is a lot of money.

Comments

[Robbie Taylor]

Amen, Fred. When I wrote a grant proposal to finance a movie for the state of Texas, I sent in a 12-page financial breakdown and the script for the show. And that was for just $12,000.

In fairness, Paulson is probably used to delegating the actual work of figuring out how to make his ideas take reality to someone well below his pay grade. You don't get to be a multi-multi-millionaire by getting all obsessed about writing...

[Geds]

When I was still taking education courses in college one of my profs assigned a grant writing project based on the theory that we may well need that skill later on in life. The practice grant required five different sections with an explanation of the program, required staffing, budget breakdown, and a defense of why it was a useful or necessary program.

Totally off topic, but I picked a Chicago school at random. About a week ago the school that I'd picked was on the news for something or other (it was good, not a shooting). It amused me.

You don't get to be a multi-multi-millionaire by getting all obsessed about writing...

Try telling that to LaHaye and Jenkins. Or Tom Clancy...

[Robb]

No exaggeration: I wrote better business proposals in high school economics. Granted (hehe: "granted" - get it?), these proposals were entirely fiction, and were for such ridiculous things as an underwater submarine port/research facility (complete with hot tub, of course), but yeah: way more thorough than that document.

I think it will be a while before I stop smiling at the sound of Chris Dodd verbally assaulting Paulson & Bernanke.

[Robb]

You don't get to be a multi-multi-millionaire by getting all obsessed about writing...

Try telling that to LaHaye and Jenkins.

I would hardly call Jenkin's writing "obsessed: over in any way. Hell, most of us wouldn't dare call it "writing".

[Bernhard]

*falls over laughing* OK, that is a quite literally priceless document. It is asking the US taxpayer for a cheque without any plan on what to do with the dough. Now in fairness, there wasn't much time to write much and think much.

[Geds]

I would hardly call Jenkin's writing "obsessed: over in any way. Hell, most of us wouldn't dare call it "writing".

True. His "writing" does tend to show obsessions. It's just that they're mostly about telephones and not, y'know, writing...

[Cowboy Diva]

Bernhard,
in this article you will find this quote

Fratto insisted that the plan was not slapped together and had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials. He acknowledged lawmakers were getting only days to peruse it, but he said this should be enough.

The chutzpah is breathtaking. They actually spent time on this, and all Congress gets is a lousy 3 pages? Even better, how much less than $700 billion would have been needed even 3 months ago given the weirdness of the mutual fund money market racket after the FM/FM takeover and the federalization of AIG (I know, not really, but I can dream)? Or instead should SecTreas be requesting more funding as that initial number is months out of date?

[cjmr]

The major part of my mother's job is reviewing grant proposals from the professors and grad students at [medium-sized medical school] and making sure they go out with all the correct documentation, forms, and that every 't' is crossed, and 'i' dotted, proper grammar used, numbers all adding up etc. The university employs three full-time people just to do the 'checking over' part of grant proposals coming out of the med. school, and I don't know how many for the professors in other departments.

Yeah--you need lots more than three pages.

[Ian]

Robb's Captain Nemo Memorial Undersea Research Facility would have cost much less than $700,000,000,000.00, even with the need for anti-kraken defenses.

Man, just typing all those zeros made me sick.

So, yeah, a three-page memo ain't gonna cut it.

Sadly, it very likely will cut it. I don't have a congressman to write to, but for those of us who do...

[Geds]

Well, the (ahem) good news is that the Street seems to be behaving as if the whole two days worth of Congressional questioning is a sign that the bail out won't be happening, certainly not to the tune of $700,000,000,000. Also, I think it behooves everyone to write it out as $700,000,000,000 every time, just for the sheer, mind-boggling number of zeros.

[Geds]

I don't have a congressman to write to, but for those of us who do...

I keep trying to email my Senator, but I've been getting an Out of Office Auto Reply for the last year and a half.

Do we really need two year long Presidential election cycles? Shouldn't our elected officials be, I don't know, running the country?

[damnedyankee]

Personally, I think this is the work of King of Belgium Secretary of the Treasury, give me all the money!"

But seriously, the WHOLE PLAN is "throw gobs and scads of money at it until it goes away" and has been for months?! Even the Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight put more thought into his plans than that!

[damnedyankee]

Sorry folks. Lost control of the touchpad and hit "Post" by mistake instead of "Preview".

[damnedyankee]

OK, trying it again, since it came up gibberish:

Personally, I think this is the work of Octo-Paganini:
"I am the King of Belgium Secretary of the Treasury! Give me all the money!"

But seriously, the WHOLE PLAN is "throw gobs and scads of money at it until it goes away" and has been for months?! Even the Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight put more thought into his plans than that!

Joke's completely ruined now, so put this one down to pride.

[Tonio]

Midnight Bomber - wasn't that an Allman Brothers song? ;)

[Froborr]

As far as the actual topic of the post is concerned, I am quite limited in what I can say by the thrice-accursed Hatch Act. I will, however, say that I hope this puts the final nail in Reaganomics' coffin, even as I know it won't.

Any competent mainstream economist can tell you (but won't, because competent economists are not allowed in TV studios; only the lunatic fringe are allowed near cameras) that government has three major economic functions: to send price signals (i.e., using subsidies, tax incentives, tax disincentives, and fines to make acting in the public interest more profitable than acting against it), to break up undesirable Nash equilibria (e.g., anti-trust actions, regulation of natural monopolies such as utilities and mass transit, progressive taxes, inheritance tax), and to regulate banks and fiscal markets.

Liberal, conservative, and even libertarian economists (as opposed to libertarians you meet on the Internet, who are almost always insane) agree that these three functions of government are absolutely necessary to a healthy economy and cannot be accomplished by market forces alone. They may disagree on how governments can best accomplish these functions, particularly in how actively involved the government needs to be in order to do it, but they agree on those three basic functions.

The U.S. government consistently fails at all three. The blame for failure in the first two is shared by both parties. Some attempts to send price signals and break up Nash equilibria have been blocked by politicians (usually on one side) concerned about the short-term loss of profits; others have been caused by politicians (usually on the other side) concerned about the short-term loss of jobs. The result has been long-term weakening of our economic foundations, environmental degradation, an atrophy of innovation in many industries, and has now finally begun causing long-term loss of profits and jobs, not to mention homes.

But the last item? That failure is not really shared. Replacing bad regulations with good ones is always desirable. But deregulation entails not only stripping out bad regulations but also refusing to add needed good ones and refusing to enforce the existing good ones. To support deregulation of banks and financial markets is, in effect, to say that the government shouldn't perform one of its fundamental, essential functions. It is colossally, monumentally stupid, and it will always, without fail, lead to disaster.

Should we be surprised that the deregulators were caught with their pants down by its failure?

---------

Or Tom Clancy...

Hey now, Hunt for Red October was pretty good. Then Clancy succumbed to the two most dreaded plagues of literature, the Brain Worm and Bestseller Syndrome.

The Brain Worm is when a writer gets so obsessed with a technological, philosophical, or political idea that they become incapable of writing about anything else. Character, plot, theme, even basic narrative logic -- all are bulldozed under by this idea, which seems glorious and wonderful to the writer and kind of silly to everyone else. This is not to be confused with idea-driven fiction (fiction written to illustrate a particular philosophy or simply to express the joy of intellectual play; see any fiction by Sartre, O. Henry, or Asimov) -- in the Brain Worm, the idea doesn't drive anything; it brings everything to a screeching halt while the author sings paeans to it. Some of Left Behind's flaws can be explained by LaJenkins' massive End Times Brain Worm (though most of the explanation is just that they suck).

Bestseller Syndrome is when an author ceases to be "Bob Smith," or even "Bob Smith, author of the bestselling Book About Stuff," and becomes instead "bestselling author Bob Smith." Editors become afraid to anger him, for fear he'll go to another publisher and take the magical book-selling power of his name with him. They let him get away with more and more in his writing, and he begins to demand more and more. Soon, they can no longer cut a single word of his deathless prose for fear of losing him. His books become increasingly bloated and needlessly complicated. Self-indulgent, rambling asides or lengthy sequences that add nothing become commonplace. The Harry Potter series is an excellent example, because you can actually see Bestseller Syndrome go from nothing to a full-blown case in its advanced stages between the third and fourth books.

[Vermic]

But even J.K. Rowling doesn't pull in $233,333,333,333.33 per page. And remembering the tricks I learned in college, they were probably double-spaced with 2" margins.

Seriously, this memo is barely more sophisticated than "Darling fascist bully-boy: Give me some more money, you bastard. May the seed of your loin be fruitful in the belly of your woman." I've sat through PowerPoint presentations that had more concrete detail, for heaven's sake. This is embarassing.

[damnedyankee]

No, "embarrassing" will come when the Congress passes it as is.

[Geds]

Self-indulgent, rambling asides or lengthy sequences that add nothing become commonplace.

Oddly enough, I used to do a lot of that in my own writing and I'm far from being a best-selling author. I'm, uh, I'm not exactly a "selling" author at the moment.

I spent a lot of my time writing as a historian, which tends to require the lengthy sequences and asides, as they usually build up to a larger argument and you need to put most every detail in. One of the tricks I had to learn before I could advance as a writer of fiction was to stop writing like a historian. That, too, informed me on the importance of avoiding the self-indulgent asides. They tend to be staples of emails that I send, but those are usually individually tailored to specific people I know will appreciate them. In writing to a large audience, however, that's an annoyance if used much at all.

[hapax]

*sigh* Y'see, Geds, I love fiction that reads like it was written by a historian -- at least one who can write gracefully, like Julian Norwich. Asides and parenthetical rambles are often my favorite bits.

I'll agree with you, it doesn't sell -- not quite like that. But if you can sneak it in under world-building... After all, look at J.K. Rowling. A lot of people weren't reading for the storyline (derivative) or the character-building (shallow stereotypes), but for the nifty tidbits like the Chocolate Frog trading cards, the arcane monetary system, the history of Quidditch, and so forth.

And everybody knows the best part of Pratchett is the footnotes.

[PurpleGirl]

I work in the fundraising department of medium sized education non-profit. There are times when we do indeed send out short letters (3 to 5 pages long), however those are usually going to family/individual foundations where the trustees know us or one of our board members. And even then we send budgets (for the organization as a whole and for the project if for a specific program) and other materials. Something that size might be used as a letter of inquiry, to find out if a foundation might be interested in seeing a longer, detailed proposal. But Fred's right... this memo wouldn't get the funding and shouldn't. And foundations/grantors want some idea of your financial worthiness -- they don't like funding deficits (unless you can explain it and how you're getting out of it).

[J. Spencer]

The bit that really got me was this:

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

In other words, 'Not only are we not going to provide you with any details about this so-called plan now, but you won't be able to get them later either, or do anything if you don't like how we handle it.'

[Froborr]

Geds: Bestseller Syndrome is a sufficient condition to cause rambling asides, not a necessary one. Being a historian may well be another. My managing editor when I ran the college newspaper, Chris, was a history/religious studies dual-major. He wrote a lot of analysis articles and opinion pieces for us (as well as being our main music reviewer, but that was more of a hobby), and as far as content was concerned, his work was always excellent -- balanced, well-researched, and thorough. From a stylistic perspective, it was a nightmare. He wrote looooong sentences, full of sub-clauses and semicolons and paranthetical comments, where a newspaper desperately needs short, punchyy sentences so that the shape of the article (I mean its actual physical shape on the page -- square, rectangular, L-shaped, and so on) can be easily changed.

hapax: I haven't read as much Pratchett as I'd like to, but I've gotten the impression that over the years he's gotten slowly better at Heinleining*, and mostly dropped the Kuttnering** footnotes.
-------
*The supremely difficult art of subtly working world-building into the story in such a way that the reader never says, "Aha, this paragraph is here for world-building," yet still fully understands the nuances of the world.

**The nearly as difficult, or possibly even more difficult, art of presenting the world-building in big chunks of expository text (also known derogitorily as "infodumps"), but making those infodumps so entertaining in their own right that the reader doesn't care.

[Geds]

But if you can sneak it in under world-building... After all, look at J.K. Rowling.

Ah, but you see, in my mind that's different than a rambling aside or a self-indulgent descriptor. Sometimes that's necessary. The trick is to know which is which.

When I say "writing as a historian," I mean "obsessively citing my sources and explaining laboriously how I got from Point A to Point D with important discoveries at Point B and C and a side-trip to Point E." That bogs the story down in unnecessary levels of detail.

The world building and side stories are sometimes the best. But the thing I've learned is that sometimes the best stories are the ones that aren't told, but instead only hinted at.

[Froborr]

But the thing I've learned is that sometimes the best stories are the ones that aren't told, but instead only hinted at.

This would be why most people prefer The Lord of the Rings to The Silmarillion. I don't, but I'm an (extremely) amateur folklorist, so my opinion should be taken as an outlier.

[Froborr]

What I was thinking of in J.K. Rowling was Quidditch, actually. Quidditch was mildly annoying (especially when I realized it is entirely possible for a team to win the Hogwarts Quidditch league without ever winning a single match) and boring from the start, but I accepted it as a generic convention (it would not be a British schoolboy story without a bizarre and byzantine school sport at which the hero excels).

Then the fourth book spent the first couple of hundred pages on an interminable Quidditch tournament, focusing enormous attention on our heroes' travel logistics and accomodations at the tournament (LaJenkins would be proud), without a drop of character development, and the only plot significance of the whole thing was that the VIP seat had an empty box and Harry mislaid his wand for a few minutes.

ANY good editor would feel a burning need to hack that bloated monstrosity down to one chapter, but you can't just go around chopping a hundred pages out of J.K. "Fastest Seller Ever" Rowling...

[Geds]

I don't, but I'm an (extremely) amateur folklorist, so my opinion should be taken as an outlier.

I'm one, too, but I look at it from the perspective of a storyteller, which has helped my writing immensely.

My favorite explanation of this is a storyteller I saw over Labor Day weekend. He'd be telling these stories about growing up in rural Illinois and setting the scene. Every scene setter would include a reference to a bicycle path that paralleled the railroad tracks where [I forget the name] got sucked under the train, "But that's a story for another time."

The second or third time he said it I was standing next to one of the tellers from my guild who said, "I want to hear the story about the train!"

I replied, "I'll bet there actually isn't one."

[cjmr]

Let's see, the part of the book surrounding the Quidditch World Cup:

--established how port keys worked
--introduced Winky the house elf
--established that Barty Crouch, Sr. had a fierce work ethic, but was somewhat eccentric, and didn't think that much of Percy
--established that Ludo Bagman was not too bright and easily bought off
--established that families believed to have Voldmortian pasts/connections were currently very influential in the Ministry
--established that there were a large number of adherents to Voldemortian beliefs/practices, who were also afraid to actually admit to it or meet Voldemort himself
--introduced the concept of there being other wizard schools/governments/etc.
--introduced the concept that wands 'stored' spells that had been previously cast by them.

I'm sure there's more, that's just off the top of my head. I agree that that section was probably longer than it needed to be.

[Ursula L]

-- introduced Cedric Diggory
-- introduced Viktor Krumm
-- introduced the concept of veela (indirectly introducing Fleur)
-- established that the magic world uses sports as a vehicle for international diplomacy
-- introduced the "Dark Mark" as a sign of Voldemortian activity
-- began to introduce elements of Voldemortian political policy, beyond Voldemort's individual aspirations (pseudo-Nazi street terror, anti-Muggle activity beyond the general magical prejudice)

Plus general worldbuilding, giving a glimpse of the magical world outside of the confines of the school and a few places seen in support of the school (the town by the school, shopping for school materials) which was important for beginning to establish the larger setting of the story arc as part of the "adult" world and politics, more than just a series of school-stories.

[Robb]

couple of hundred pages on an interminable Quidditch tournament, focusing enormous attention on our heroes' travel logistics and accomodations at the tournament (LaJenkins would be proud), without a drop of character development

In fairness to Rowling - there were a number of very significant character & plot developments that went down in the aforementioned section, not to mention a number of important characters introduced via the mechanism of the travel/game. Then there's the fact that Rowling would constantly drop subtle hints & factoids in one book that would later turn out to be actually significant in the overall plot. Comparing her to LaJenkins is a grave insult.

Likewise, Clancy is far better a historian & prognosticator than many give him credit for - the very end of Debt of Honor and it's eerie premonition of 9/11 not withstanding. I've not read his most recent books (and I've only read one of the many that were "co-authored" by some hack into cheap technothrillers), but his first half dozen or so have a lot of good analysis of the factors that drive world tension. Islamic fundamentalism turned into violence toward the West, for example - Clancy was on that long before the US cared about it in any great amount. Ok, so perhaps Iran & Iraq fusing into a super Islamic nation that uses engineered plague to attack the US hasn't happened, but to say he's focused on technology more than geopolitical factors is an exaggeration.

*****
"I want to hear the story about the train!"

I replied, "I'll bet there actually isn't one."

This has been expressed before, I'm reminded of Bill Watterson's many references to "The Noodle Incident" - in the 10th anniversary Calvin & Hobbes book, Watterson explained that only oblique references to something that's never shown or even described make it that much better in the mind of the reader. Which also reminds me of something in the Silmarillion, and how the farther off mountain range always leaves some element of mystery to it all. Or maybe that's not in the Silmarillion - I need to read that again...

*****

I'm an (extremely) amateur folklorist

My Character class is "Failed 'Next Great American Writer'" - so I roll +5 on Folklore, despite not being a Folklorist.

[Robb]

Bah - cmjr & Ursula beat me to it. Now I'm a failed amateur literary scholar too!

[LL]

Eh, our government is used to paying lip service to the idea of accountability. They don't have to tell us how they're spending our money because... they don't wanna.

[EarBucket]

From Forbes today:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday.

"We just wanted to choose a really large number."

[pharoute]

Welcome to the "openly plunder the treasury before running off to Paraguay" phase of our own private third world dictatorship.

[Karen]

Asides: My favorite part, at least one of them, of Praline's delightful book is the completely irrelevant-to-the-plot paragraph or so about how countries make arrangements with their troops to avoid invasions on full moon nights, since countries to the east will transform first, and therefore won't have soldiers stationed at the borders. IIRC, this is covered in treaties. Yeah, it's a technical foul of the "show don't tell" rule, but since the book has a first-person narrator it reads like part of an ordinary conversation. It also makes that world a lot more real; at least for me it answered a question I had formulated.

Same thing for "Harry Potter" when the characters mention some odd bit of wizarding, like when Harry sees the toddler floating on a toy broom. This became important in the last book, when Snape sees Lily floating off of the swing, and when we learn that Dumbledore's sister was attacked by Muggles as a small child for doing some kind of magic. That one little scene, two or three sentences at most, established something about wizard kids that foreshadowed the later scenes in an important way.

Also, Geds, I too like historical asides and such. Of course, I'm sort of weird in that it's really difficult for a book to be too detailed for me. I find that too many authors err on the side of omitting the vital information.

[grenadine]

As a grantwriter (or, more fairly, a writer of grants), I am appalled, angry, and not at all surpised that this heap of shite somehow counts as a legit request. The one lesson I learned while working in philanthropy is this: it's ALL about who you know. NOTHING else matters.

Paulson, he knows people. And these people will, eventually legitimize this hack of a grant app.

[goes off to vomit]

[Dahne]

From the proposal:

Sec. 2. Purchases of Mortgage-Related Assets.

(a) Authority to Purchase.--The Secretary is authorized to purchase, and to make and fund commitments to purchase, on such terms and conditions as determined by the Secretary, mortgage-related assets from any financial institution having its headquarters in the United States.

I wouldn't eat something that has "cheese-related food" in it.

[Karen]

I just read at Open Left that Congress is going to cave and give Wall Street the $700,000,000,000. (The only time I've ever written numbers like that is in astronomy class 25 years ago.) What do we have to do to STOP this?

[thnidu]

Robb wrote: "Which also reminds me of something in the Silmarillion, and how the farther off mountain range always leaves some element of mystery to it all. Or maybe that's not in the Silmarillion - I need to read that again..."

You may be thinking of JRRT's essay "On Fairy Stories".

[Nenya]

I just read the document, and holy cow. The sheer, breathtaking ARROGANCE. "You will give us this money, and you won't ask us how we spent it, and we promise we'll stop in two years, unless we don't." Good God.

The bits about hiring anybody they want to oversee the handling of the mortgages, and selling them to whoever they want at whatever price, really make me worry, too. Details, people. Details.

[Bronwyn]

I just read through the memo, and I wouldn't give this man a quarter to call home with. The "plan" consists of buying bad loans and doing something unknown with them but which definitely involves hiring employees, buying services from financial institutions (the same ones as need bailing out? if so why?), and obscene levels of unregulated unsupervised power. Blatant highway robbery with rape thrown in!

They shouldn't just be questioning him about this before deciding whether or not to give him the money. They should be charging him with the equivalent of contempt of court and firing him for not being able to spend even a paragraph lucidly defining the problem, explaining what he intended to do about it, why those actions would help, and when/how-to-tell-when the problem was solved and he could give up these amazing financial superpowers!

[Dahne]

My favorite way of alluding to all the other things going on in the world, like what happens to the hero's invisibility belt after he throws it into a bush, is Michael Ende's in The Neverending Story - "But that is another story, and shall be told another time."

Man, but that was a great and strange book. (Let's not talk about the movie. Ever.)

I found the worldbuilding parts of Benighted fascinating, too. All those little things that show somebody really sat down and thought, "Okay, if we put this unreal situation together with real people, how would it *work*?"

[Praline]

My favorite part, at least one of them, of Praline's delightful book is the completely irrelevant-to-the-plot paragraph or so about how countries make arrangements with their troops to avoid invasions on full moon nights, since countries to the east will transform first, and therefore won't have soldiers stationed at the borders. IIRC, this is covered in treaties. Yeah, it's a technical foul of the "show don't tell" rule, but since the book has a first-person narrator it reads like part of an ordinary conversation. It also makes that world a lot more real; at least for me it answered a question I had formulated.

That's interesting. (And thank you!) Something from an insider's perspective: you're always trying to balance the tastes of different readers, and also the needs of your own plot.

Create a scenario in which the world is, shall we say, not quite itself, and you can wind up with fractal worldbuilding. (Hm, I think I shall build a blog post on that phrase later.) The ramifications of whatever changes you've made can be more or less infinite, and every reader will have different questions about what it affects. Some of those questions the writer will anticipate themselves, and some they won't, because nobody's brain is infinite and the kinds of questions that occur to people depend a lot of what a given person's existing interests are.

So some worldbuilding questions the author foresees; others are raised at the editorial stage; others are raised by readers once they book is published and it's too late to do anything about them, and you can only hope that you've given a sufficiently complete impression that the readers can, if they wish, inferr an answer for themselves based on the portait you've provided. With the questions raised by editors, you face a choice: either you address them with small changes here and there, or you decide to let them go by, as you can't address them without disrupting the flow of the story.

The question is basically, what's worse, leaving a question unanswered or breaking off the narrative to answer it? My favourite example of an unanswered question with Bareback was a complaint published in a (mostly positive) review: that I hadn't written about how nomadic societies deal with full moon nights. Very true, it hadn't occurred to me - but if somebody had raised it, I might well have decided to let the question alone, because to answer it would involve going too far outside the preoccupations of the narrator, and that way lies awkard info-dumping. Recently I put out a request for questions on my latest work (and many lovely people from this thread weighed in), and found myself facing the exact same issue: many questions I'd already asked myself, and the answers were woven deep into the narrative; some I hadn't thought of, and needed to work in; and some I hadn't thought of and had to ignore, because answering them properly would involve taking the action far away from where it was located in place, time and character perspective - that latter is an important one; a narrative that takes too much interest in issues that would bore the protagonists will feel uneven. You have to weigh the needs of the work as a whole against the needs of specific issues.

It can also be a bit of a strain, because, at least in my experience, the kind of readers likely to come up with very specific questions are also the kind of readers least likely to forgive you if you don't answer them. You have detail people and big picture people - and big picture people are generally more tolerant. The more detail-minded someone is, the less reason they need to reject the book as a whole: you can have people write off the entire novel because it lacked a hundred words' worth of explanation. (Especially as the human brain seems wired to get particularly attached to its own ideas; if someone comes up with a question, it can seem to them far more important to the central premise than it seems to the writer, who came up with all the other ideas.) These are the readers that I most fear, at least.

'Rambling' asides, I'd speculate, may not necessarily be self-indulgent; they may be reader-indulgent: an attempt to appease those detail-minded readers, or more positively, to give them something to enjoy. I'd be prepared to bet that Rowling has a lot of readers like that, and probably a lot of them write to her and ask questions. In such cases, you have to make a judgement call about how much time you're going to spend answering them, and your final decision may not be to everybody's taste. It's all the more likely to happen to a successful writer than an aspiring one because the more successful you are, the wider an audience reads your work and the vaster the multitude of individual questions you get exposed to. I'd speculate another factor, too: if an author is very successful, readers tend to assume they're invulnerable and throw angry comments around freely, which can get you scared of your readers and make you less comfortable trusting your own judgement. (Seriously, Froborr, 'bloated monstrosity' is just unkind, and it's both unfair and unsupported to assume an author who's turned in a book that doesn't please you must have got it past the editors by throwing their weight around. You don't have any evidence for that, it's just presuming ill of someone.)

In short: the impact of reader feedback should not be underestimated when it comes to the number of asides a writer includes. Writers aim to please, after all, and on bad days it can feel like readers have you coming and going: either you don't answer all their questions, in which case you're sloppy, or you do, in which case you're rambling. You just have to do what you can, try to distinguish listening to your better judgement from listening to your anxieties, and hope for the best.

[MikhailBorg]

For the record, I enjoyed the Quidditch World Cup far more than I enjoyed the next book's depiction of Harry hitting his (admittedly justifiable) angsty phase. Or, indeed, any page that had Dolores Uxbridge on it.

[Amaryllis]

While I can't say I exactly enjoyed Harry in his angry, "angsty" phase, I found it a pretty realistic depiction of a teenager whose depression is expressed as anger. I'm going to cite Praline's blog here: for an interesting discussion of Harry as an example of adolescent depression, read Depression and children's fiction.

[hapax]

Praline, thank you for that detailed little peek into an author's mind.

If you ever feel that you toss this stuff out and nobody's listening, rest assured. I not only read them and think about them, I print them out and take them to meetings of my writers group for discussion.

[Ursula L]

Also, as far as "travel logistics and accommodations" goes, in the Quiddich cup, that was used as an essential part of the larger world-building. Travel and accommodation are different in Rowling's world, and establishing that difference establishes elements of the world which would continue to be used both in that volume and in subsequent ones.

By contrast, L&J obsess about travel and logistics that are essentially identical to those in our world. And they remain identical, even when they should be different, in the wake of a disaster that paralyzed air, rail and road systems. Where they do differ, (such as Buck's ridiculously long and expensive trip from Chicago to NYC), the differ in the wrong ways, such as Buck being able to charter a private plane from the service desk of a commercial airline at an airport shut down by numerous plane crashes, but not thinking to pool resources with fellow travelers to rent a car and share driving and costs while taking the back-roads.

Discussion of travel and accommodation can be a problem, but it can also be a useful thing, a way of showing how the fictional world differs from the real one in ordinary matters of daily life. Rowling gets it mostly right (although I think there would be more interesting reasons than a sports event, but then, I don't like sports), L&J get it wrong.

[Praline]

Ooh, thanks, Hapax! (blush) And thanks for the link, too, Amaryllis. Everyone's so nice...

[MikhailBorg]

Oh, I agree with you, Amaryllis. Realistic? Yes. Appropriate for the character, given his position and previous situations? Yes. An important part of his development, as he learns that even the Authorities he trusts don't always know best? Yes.

Fun to read? Errr... no.