Authors Electric

When we write novels, we often imagine an ideal reader, someone smart, curious, and eager to dive into our worlds. But there’s an important fact many authors overlook: the  average  American adult reads at about a seventh to eighth grade level. And more than half of U.S. adults read below a sixth grade level. That doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy complex stories, but it does mean that overly dense prose or elaborate sentence structures can make a book harder to access. If you use Microsoft Word, the built-in Editor can give you a readability score based on the  Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level . This tells you the U.S. school grade needed to understand your text on first read. A score of “8” means the average eighth grader could easily follow it. You can turn this feature on in  File → Options → Proofing → Show Readability Statistics  after running a spelling and grammar check. Another measure you may hear about is the  Lexile Framework for Reading . The Lexile scor...

Every winter in the Netherlands there is a chance of an Elfstedentocht (Eleven city tour). It’s an ice-skating tour that passes eleven cities in Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands. It’s about 200 km long, and can only be done when it’s very, very cold. Not just your average frost, when people flock to the canals and town ponds to skate around for a while. No, it has to be a prolonged hard frost, for the ice has to have a certain depth and hardness to it. Believe it or not, an Elfstedentocht is very popular, so tonnes of people will want to take part. Fancy getting up in the middle of the night to make a five o’clock start with temperatures of about -20C? The last one was in 1997, and I remember sitting in the neighbour’s living room watching it. The king, then crown prince, even took part, in disguise. It’s gruelling, and frostbite is a real danger. It’s a race or a tour, depending on what you sign up for, but either way, to get to the end is incredible. The whole country watch...

  In the Netherlands, the rule is that up till the 15th of January, you can still wish people a Happy New Year. You can see people shaking hands, or waving at friends from their bikes, calling out, “Best Wishes for the New Year !” It also means people are still serving guests from their carefully stored stack of oliebollen: dough balls with raisins, cooked in very hot oil. They’re made on New Year’s Eve, the smell in your kitchen reminding you for many days afterwards. Some are better organised, and they bake them in their shed or garage. Now, you might wonder what oliebollen have to do with writing, apart from providing sustenance. But it suddenly occurred to me, as friends sent me pictures of golden brown balls, usually covered in icing sugar. (You buy special shaker tubs of icing sugar in the Netherlands, to sprinkle liberally over strawberries, mini pancakes called poffertjes as well as oliebollen). There are quite a few unwritten rules about oliebollen, especially when ...