Writing from the Heart

Every budding writer gets told to "write about what you know". We all know something about affairs of the heart so the rest should be easy.  But it doesn't work like that.  Theory and practice are always two different things.  Authors who set their stories in the past or in a future world are writing about what they can imagine.  Imagination is another word for creativity in my book. As long as you don't have heroines in their pretty crinolines taking a taxi to a neighbour's dinner party you are on the way to being credible. In fact, writers of historical novels have to do a great deal of research. The same goes for novels set in the future. They have more than a basis in current scientific developments.

Do you always need to do a bit of research before you write a novel? When I wrote Spate of Violence I was writing from my experience gained in the community I lived in at that time. None of the characters in it are based on people I knew. But I did know a lot about the darker side of urban crime.  For a few years I worked as a volunteer for an organisation which helped the victims of crime. This brought me into contact with many different people and their problems. As in all my novels, Spate of Violence is based on the "what if".  What if some outraged citizens decide to form themselves into vigilantes? It is not a moral judgement on society it is just a story from a few different points of view. I hope my readers enjoy it.


 Link to Amazon.com if you want to have a look.
Available from all Amazon sites as a Kindle e-book.

The Selfish Herd Theory

We take so many things for granted, don't we?  Mother knows best, swallows fly south before winter sets in, the cuckoo comes to our shores in early spring, the fox is a sly animal, red sky at night shepherds delight.  That kind of stuff, based on decades of observation which is passed down to us, we believe it or most of it and feel a certain sense of security.

I was a little taken aback by a new study which says there are two simple rules to explain sheepdog behaviour. Now, I have always understood that a sheepdog rounds up the sheep for his master because that's his job, and the sheep are duly grateful to him because if the wolf knocks at the door of the fold, the dog will protect them.  But maybe I got that idea from one of the many fairy tales I was told as a child, a sort of mixture of Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. 
Be that as it may, research published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface and remarked upon by several learned publications see link to Science Daily for example, tells us that they have found the key to the sheepdogs' behaviour.  I, for one, am totally disillusioned and not for the first time in my life.  It seems to me that you just can't believe anything any more or if you do, some one (usually a scientist) will come along and explain the whys and wherefores of it and ruin the magic.  But I digress. 
Here is the substance of the study:
GPS devices were strapped to sheep in order to track their movements and a GPS device was also strapped to the dog (I bet that was a hard morning's work but no reports of anyone falling asleep as they counted how many sheep they'd GPS'd).  Researchers claim that this procedure helps to explain why one shepherd and a single dog can herd an unruly flock of more than 100 sheep.  It doesn't say they put a GPS device on the shepherd but maybe they simply forgot or he got lucky, who knows? 
To continue: The first rule (remember there are two rules according to the scientists) is the sheepdog learns how to make sheep come together in a flock.  The second rule:  whenever the sheep are in a tightly knit group the dog pushes them forwards.
Does that all make sense to you?  I mean, supposing the sheep are near a cliff and the dog "keeps pushing them forward"? 

The scientists remarked that one thing sheep are good at is responding to a threat by working with their neighbours.  (NATO please take note).  This behaviour is known as the selfish herd theory:  put something between the threat and you.
I, for one, will never be able to watch the English sheepdog trials with the same amount of pleasure I have in the past.  And all because a couple of scientists couldn't leave it alone and let me believe that sheepdogs are highly intelligent and it is their nature to look after sheep - you don't see a poodle rounding up a herd of sheep, now do you?  (No, I have nothing against poodles, I love all animals.)
So there it is.  Another illusion gone belly up. 

Birds and Brains

I recently read the results of a scientific study led by Dr. Christian Schloegl from the University of Vienna and published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B : Biological Sciences which found that African grey parrots were cleverer than two-year-olds in a test of intelligent reasoning.  During a series of experiments the parrots were asked to choose between two closed boxes, one of which held a piece of walnut and rattled when shaken.  The other container was empty and could be shaken without making a noise.  Not only did  these clever parrots know how to detect hidden food rattling in a shaken box they also deduced that if a box made no noise when shaken then the piece of walnut was in the other box.  Clever little boys, eh?
The article maintains that human children achieve this standard by the age of three.  I wonder if these eminent scientists ever tried to hide the TV remote before a visit from a two-year-old?  I suspect not. It never fails to amaze me how quickly a toddler can find all the things you thought you'd hidden safely away. I'm pretty sure that most of the two-year-olds I know would have found that piece of walnut pretty quickly - they would most likely have discovered the grown-ups putting it in the box.  Such are the acute sensitivities of toddlers, in my experience.
That being said, I checked into the website to see what other gems they have available and found entries on such diverse subjects as the influence brain parasites have on human cultures (ugh!), first-ever observations of a live giant squid and an even more intriguing subject Cooperation and the Evolution of Intelligence. Admittedly I didn't read any of those reports, I just couldn't get enthusiastic about brain parasites or giant squids. I have enough trouble understanding the weather forecast.
To me the most fascinating thing about the research is that it was carried out at all.  It is certainly very interesting if you are a fan of African grey parrots - or of two-year-olds - and I daresay the world of biology is richer for knowing the results. Does it mean that when boasting to other mums you excuse your toddler's inadequacies by saying "Well of course little Timmy isn't quite as clever as Polly the Parrot."?