Category: education

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Celebrate Banned Books Week 2021

banned and challenged books

by David Kubicek

Recently I saw a meme on Facebook that said: “A good library has something in it to offend everyone.” That is why (I believe) Banned Books Week was started–to celebrate those books that have offended certain groups of people throughout the years.  Celebrate  Banned Books Week 2021, which runs from September 26 through October 2, by reading a banned or challenged book. If you don’t know of any, here’s the American Library Association’s (ALA) list of the most banned and challenge books from 2010 to 2019 [fun fact: The Holy Bible is on this list].

There are lots of great books on this list (Looking for Alaska) and some not so great, or even good, ones (Fifty Shades of Grey). But many of them are “must reads” because they shine a light on ugly periods of our past or present and encourage us or warn us to do better (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale). You may notice that some of the books in my montage above aren’t on the ALA’s list, but I assure you that all of them were banned or challenged at one time or another.

Being the decadent reprobate that I am, I’ve read many of the books that have at various times in our country’s history been challenged or banned. I even had my own brush, as an author, with a challenged book. Actually, I was the ghost writer (hired by the publisher), but it has been over 30 years so I doubt that the world will end if I reveal this secret now. The book was A Need To Kill, authored by Mark Pettit, who was a reporter for a local TV station and the only journalist (at least at that time) to have interviewed the serial child killer John Joubert (the subject of the book) in prison. The main problem with Mark’s manuscript was that he wrote it the same way he wrote news stories to be delivered in 30 seconds–just the facts. I added color and beefed up his original manuscript, even doing some of my own research (for instance, I researched the weather at the time of the murders so I could evoke the setting). Mark even gave me a shoutout in the introduction.

Some local group got upset and challenged A Need To Kill. I don’t know if that helped sales, but the first hardcover printing by Lincoln, Nebraska-based Media Publishing sold out in three days and Ballantine snapped up the paperback rights, publishing a mass market paperback edition later that year.

Challenging or banning books always creates interest and sells copies–something the book banners of the world never seem to understand. Someday I hope to have one of my own books, published under my own name, challenged or banned. For any of you writers out there, I hope you have the same luck.

But do celebrate Banned Books Week, which comes around every year in the last week of September, and celebrate the authors. You know you must have touched a nerve when certain people want to prevent others from reading what you have written.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

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Writing by Ear: Learn the Rules First, Then Break the Rules

by David Kubicek

writing by earWhen writing fiction you may sometimes you can break the rules of grammar, but first you must learn the rules. It is a process I call writing by ear.

Several years ago there was a game show, hosted by Jeff Foxworthy, called Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?  in which adult contestants tried to answer questions from first through fifth grade textbooks. The questions got harder as the contestants’ winnings grew.

My wife, Cheryl, kept pestering me to apply to be a contestant. I resisted mainly because I would have to fly out to LA on my own dime to be interviewed. I’d been to LA a couple of times so combining what was basically a temp job interview with a vacation in sunny southern California was not that enticing.

Cheryl thought I would be good at this game because all of my life I’d read a lot on a variety of subjects and my head was, in her words, “full of useless information.”

On the show, the contestants chose from several categories like grammar, math, astronomy, history, etc. When I told Cheryl the first categories I’d choose would be history and astronomy, she was surprised. She was sure that I, being a writer, would ace the grammar questions. Her amazement deepened when I told her that grammar was my weakest area.

In elementary school I learned proper names for phrases and parts of sentences and what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do in composition. But I forgot most of the technical terms years and years and years ago.

What I did learn, before I forgot the grammar proper names and rules, was how to use the language to create an effect. As I learned to write, some things remained as ghosts of my early grammar lessons. I know what nouns and verbs are, of course, because they are a crucial part of a coherent sentence. I know what adjectives are, and I use them sparingly so they won’t detract from the effects I’m trying to create. And I try to avoid splitting infinitives, but sometimes the prose sounds more natural if I split the bloody thing.

I write by ear, which means putting the words down in an order that will sound best, or read best, to help create a desired effect in the reader’s mind. And sometimes that means not going strictly by the grammar rule book–but I learned the rules before I forgot them.

So quiz me on science, history, or even math, but I would fail miserably at grammar.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

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The eBook Revolution: The Future of Reading Will Be Digital

by David Kubicek

Will We Still Have Paper Books in the Year 2119?

I believe that an eBook revolution is coming, that the future of reading will be digital. Citizens of that world 100 years from now will know what a paper book is. Convenience and cost for publishers and readers will eventually make digital books rule and physical books obsolete, relics to be found only in antique shops.

But all modern books by then will be digital–that is, if books haven’t morphed into some totally alien form of communication that we can’t possibly envision today [science fiction writers in the 1950s and ’60s completely missed the digital revolution].

This isn’t a popular idea. When I suggested it in a blog post several years ago, I got some comments from readers who proclaimed that physical books would never disappear. Just this week the issue was the subject of a  Twitter thread where the initiating writer didn’t believe that digital would ever replace paper.

There is a saying that only two things in life are certain: death and taxes. I would add a third thing: change. As technology evolves, so does society.

Cost and Convenience Drive Change

Here are two examples.

Cost: In the early Twentieth Century no one thought motorcars would ever amount to more than playthings for the wealthy because of their cost. Then Henry Ford adapted the assembly line to auto production, which reduced the cost to a point where the working class could afford automobiles. Convenience: You can go farther and faster in a car than in a stage coach, and you don’t have to change to a fresh car every 20 miles.

Convenience: The general store where the clerk would collect the items on your list evolved into the self-service grocery store which evolved into the big box one-stop store where you can buy groceries, shoes, clothing, linens, household appliances, get your hair styled, do the banking, get an eye exam and even have your car serviced while you shop.

Why I Believe Digital Books Will Replace Paper

Convenience: You can carry around an entire library of digital books in a thin device the size of a trade paperback book.

Convenience: Digital books will not wear out–their bindings won’t crack, and their pages won’t get yellow and brittle with age.

Cost: Publishers won’t  have to spend money on paper, printing, warehousing and shipping.

Cost and Convenience: Publishers will be able to keep titles with modest sales in circulation longer because no longer will they take up valuable warehouse space–this will be a boon to both authors and publishers–and they won’t have to compete for shelf space in bookstores (which likely will have gone exclusively to a digital book model).

The eBook Revolution

The Kindle reader was released in 2007, and within 10 years e-books made up 17% of the market, while paperbacks accounted for 34.3% and hardcovers for 35.7%. When you look at the chart showing book sales over the past decade it may seem as if the e-book market is shrinking, but Brady Dale explains why it may only appear that way. 

The bottom line is, I believe convenience and cost for publishers and readers will eventually make digital books king and physical books obsolete, and the reading experience 100 years from now will be quite different than it is today.

What do you think?

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

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My Strangest Writing Job

by David Kubicek

My strangest writing job didn’t have characters and a story. It had numbers and equations.

At one time in my career I was doing lots of writing and photography contract work. I wrote brochures and newsletters for businesses and took photos for a Nebraska Department on Aging brochure. One guy hired me to write a letter of complaint to one authority or another–I forget what he was complaining about. During the 1990s I copy-edited and inserted codes (for boldface, italics, etc.) into many CliffsNotes manuscripts and even wrote a Notes on Willa Cather’s My Antonia.

The Notes editor, Gary Carey (who told me he had a brother named Harry), asked if I was interested in doing a project that was out of my wheelhouse. I would be working with another editor because this was out of Gary’s wheelhouse, too. It was an entirely different division in the company. The project would be to write the mathematics section for CliffsNotes software to help people study for their General Educational Development (GED) exam.

I met with the other editor about the project and agreed to take it on. At that time, I still had a fairly good grasp of my high school math. I’d been rather good at math (except for polynomials) and had taken it every year although it wasn’t required for my senior year. The computer people at Cliffs would create the software–all I had to do was write the questions with four or five possible answers that sounded plausible, with one of them, of course, being the correct answer.

It was actually a fun break from working with words all the time. The only part I was weak at was the polynomial section. I had almost flunked polynomials in high school algebra because I could never understand them. To this day I don’t understand them. So I asked my brother John for help. John was a math whiz, and he got me through it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t offer to share my byline with him, mainly because I don’t think I got a byline. I haven’t seen bylines on too many multiple-choice exams.

In fact, I never saw the finished product. I turned in my work, and the editor was satisfied (it has been so long, and I only worked with this fellow that one time, so I don’t remember his name), and Cliffs paid me, so I assume that my work was used for the software. And although the company was sold a few years later, the software may still be helping students prepare for their GED’s today just as my Notes on My Antonia is still out there.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

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Education is a Life Long Commitment

by David Kubicek

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” – Ray Bradbury

Contrary to popular belief, having a college degree does not mean you’re educated. A degree is only the beginning of your education, the first tiny step. Education is a lifelong commitment. This is true for everyone but is especially true for writers.

Fortunately, I discovered this when I was in college. About midway through my course of study I took a good look at what I was learning. I was reading lots of books, writing lots of papers, and taking lots of tests. But what I really wanted to learn was how to analyze data and reach conclusions. I wanted to learning how to think. And the curriculum wasn’t helping me accomplish that goal.

I enrolled in the honors program, and under the supervision of a professor in the English Department, I undertook a research project which culminated in a thesis entitled Ray Bradbury: Space Age Visionary. I re-read all of Bradbury’s early work, analyzed it, and drew my own conclusions about it. The project was a good exercise in thinking for myself.

But even the thesis is only a beginning. I consciously made the decision not to pursue a graduate degree because I believed it would hamper my learning. Getting a degree is fine if you want to go into a particular line of work, like teaching, engineering, or business, etc. But you don’t need a degree to be a writer – the subject of my thesis, Ray Bradbury, only graduated from high school.

To be a writer you need a curiosity about everything, a hunger to learn how the world works, and a drive to understand people and why they do the things they do. You satiate this hunger by absorbing everything you can, soaking up information like a sponge. Read on a variety of topics, listen to a variety of music, watch films and TV, have new experiences, meet a variety of people, get out of your comfort zone once in a while.

There is an old Chinese parable about obtaining enlightenment – Imagine a palace with a beautiful courtyard. A young man peers through a tiny hole in the door, but he can’t see the whole courtyard at once. In middle-age he looks out on the courtyard through a small window; although he can see more, his view is still hampered. But as an old man he has thrown open the door and stands on the balcony where he can see the entire courtyard and beyond.

This illustrates the learning process throughout our lives; as we expand our horizons, the view becomes more clear.

To paraphrase Bradbury, stuff yourself with everything. The key is to continue to grow for the rest of your life by doing all the things I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago. Don’t become stuck in time; continue to evolve. For writers, you can’t write about life thoroughly unless you strive to understand it – you never will understand it completely, but the important thing is that you continue to expand your world. For everyone else, the non-writers, you need to keep expanding your world or your world will become a cramped, cold place.

To understand our world and to change it for the better we must remember that a formal institution of learning cannot give us an education. Teachers and mentors can point the way, but ultimately we are all responsible for what we learn, and our education is a life-long commitment.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.