Somewhere, someone is looking at this right now. Wave to them.
I got a little note from WordPress yesterday that I’ve been blogging with them for two years. Two whole years! It doesn’t seem that long since I was idly musing to the better half that I was thinking of starting a blog, and yet here we are, two entire trips round the sun later. Strictly speaking this is not my first blog – there were two antecedents that have long since vanished from the face of the net, and good riddance to them. (The second one actually didn’t have any posts on it, if I recall correctly.) So, two years then; seven hundred and thirty days of wondering what to write about, failing to write anything, figuring it out and writing it, being afraid to hit the publish button once written, worrying that nobody will click on it, getting mad that no one clicks on it, squirming a bit when a copious amount of people are clicking on it and sharing it far and wide.
Have I any insights to share about the experience? Well, a few, take ‘em or leave ‘em. First and foremost it’s made me a better writer (though your opinion may vary). As others have pointed out, writing is a muscle like any other and the more exercise it gets the stronger it becomes. I’ve been able to sharpen my voice and deliver my arguments in a more cogent, more impactful manner. I’ve learned also that an audience is a ravenous beast, and that you cannot drop off the radar after one well-received post and expect people to keep coming back in search of your brilliance. To that end, regular updates on a predictable schedule are a must. This past week has been quite productive and I’m not certain I’ll be able to keep up that pace, but I’m damned well going to try. The only reason not to post is laziness. There are always things to write about, and inspiration can come from the most unlikely corners. I’m finding a lot of it lately in my interactions on Twitter – conversations there can swing into unexpected and wildly amusing detours, providing more than enough fodder for posting more formally later on. Because this is ultimately a form of conversation, I’ve realized that it isn’t enough to post and forget and wait for acclaim to roll in. You need to get out there and talk to other people proactively, follow their blogs, comment when you feel you can contribute (as opposed to just saying “Great post. Check out my blog!”) and be a member of a community.
Above all else, the most important thing I’ve learned is to BE POSITIVE. Even when you’re writing about something that enrages you to the deepest core of your being, you must find it within you to locate the silver lining (and it is there, believe me). There may be a market out there for endless cynicism, for paragraphs of disgust flung at worthy targets like so many buckets of monkey feces, but Jesus, do you really want to be that guy? The nihilist who sees nothing good in or about life and spreads his gloom one kilobyte at a time, determined to twist smiles into frowns wherever he finds them? Yes, a lot of our world is unfair, unjust, even horrifying, and it does us no good to stand in ignorance of that. But the people who have managed to effect positive change have done so from a place of hope and faith in the potential good. An unshakeable trust in the nobility that can arise from the human soul. They have reached out their hands and helped lift others into greatness.
I’m not so naïve to think that I’m changing hearts and minds on a vast scale here. But sometimes I look at that stats map above and it gives me tremendous pause. Each part that is colored represents a different country where someone (and in the cases of the darker colors, quite a few someones) has lent me a few moments of their time to look over what I’ve written. Yeah, maybe some of them are accidental hits while looking for something else. But perhaps one or two of them stayed for a while and poked around a little and came away thinking they’d found something of value. The most wonderful thing about blogging is the ability we now have to touch a truly global audience – to reach out with our hands and lift someone else up, someone we may never meet or even be aware of. How is that not motivation to keep going, to keep pounding out the words, to fight through the self-doubt, the creeping ennui and cynicism and fear?
The right words can change the world. So let’s write a few more of them. Here’s to the next two years.
Who is this man? What is he doing? I am intrigued. I must know more.
A disclaimer before we start today: I know nothing, Jon Snow. I am offering the following merely as the opinion of a layperson who has not, for the record, published a single book – not as a treatise of indisputable fact. So it’s entirely possible that the words lying in wait below may be a complete and utter waste of the precious time I’ve requested of you. But please try to give them some consideration before you sit down to your next draft. Trust me, I have been there and done that and I want to try to steer you away from the rocky shores I know lie in wait. Put simply, you need to stop opening your stories with massive information dumps.
Across the Interwebs lies a plethora of sites where authors both experienced and perenially aspiring have posted excerpts of their books – usually the first chapter – for ongoing perusal and feedback. As a veteran lurker I’ve thumbed through a copious number of them, and as my own interest is in writing fantasy (at least for the time being; I’m not limiting the scope of future projects) those tend to be the ones I zero in on. And it pains me to point out that a great many fall victim to the curse of the information dump. The following is my own pastiche, but let me know if any of it rings familiar:
CHAPTER ONE
Prince Xakhar Tazeros, half-dragon Ninth Regent of the Grobulan Confederacy of United Independent Feudal Kingdoms, was seventeenth in line to the throne of Erador. Erador was one of three countries fighting for dominance of the island of Makteros, the only source of the prized mineral hermulite, which was needed to forge the precious Lion Scimitars that were wielded by the ancient warrior race of Qobari. The Qobari Order, descended from the first colonists of Zathan, were the finest combatants that had ever walked beneath the twin suns and possessed the secret martial art of sha’Kaj, which allowed them to possess the forms of trees and plants and turn them against their enemies. One of their most formidable foes was Duchess Zalana, Prince Xakhar’s blood-sister and a sorceress of considerable power, who had long held a grudge against the Qobari and sought to wipe them out. Zalana drew her magic from the Goddess Ia, matron of darkness and one of the Six Gods of Grobular, along with Gatharsa, Yelene, Mq’mal, Rappan and X’gi. The Six Gods were worshipped on every continent except the sub-lands of Serkana, whose belief system operated on a belief in the divinity of blades of grass. Xakhar and Zalana were descendants of the last King of Shocen, who had died in a battle against the Qobari twenty-nine semicycles ago…
Are you still awake? Hope so, but if you’re not, I’m not surprised. Granted, this was a bit over the top, but this is the feeling I sometimes get in reading some of these manuscripts-in-progress. I am in awe – SHEER JAW-DROPPED AWE, I tell you, of the imaginations that can craft these complex worlds that are at once both familiar and alien. I can’t do it. I just come up with silly names like Grobular. But what usually happens is that the writers get so caught up in spilling out these intricate details that they forget to tell a story. Go back and read that paragraph again and note that nothing happens. It’s just fact after fact laid out for you with excruciating precision and at no point does the story start moving. Theoretically, everything I wrote there was important to the telling of the story that is to follow, but rather than introduce this stuff organically, I threw it at you like a bucketload of baseballs. And there’s nothing there to keep you reading unless you really want to know how the last King of Shocen died (fell off his six-legged zorse into a pit of hungry hoopdehars).
Let’s try this again.
CHAPTER ONE (revised)
Xakhar removed his blood-soaked Lion Scimitar from the face of the dead Makterosian soldier, thinking that while his headache of this morning had not eased, it was certainly preferable to that which his opponent had just suffered. Xakhar slid the blade back into his scabbard and cast his gaze upward to the angry, swirling clouds which blotted most of the light from the twin suns, the storm the result of the spell cast by his blood-sister. When they were small they fought over toys or the last slice of dessert; it bemused Xakhar to note that while the scale of their battles had escalated considerably to include thousands of innocent casualties, the stakes had more or less remain unchanged. Zalana still wanted his toys – the kingdom-shaped ones, naturally – and she was not above using her magic to wipe out anyone who stood between her and the prize she sought. As he looked skyward, he could see her evil smile in the curve of the clouds, hear her mocking laughter in the thunder, and feel the might of her anger in each crash of lightning. “Going to be one of those days,” Xakhar said to himself. He glanced down at the soldier’s bisected face. “You got off easy.”
Okay, while this is still not the most magnificent prose ever crafted, at least we have some sense of Xakhar as a character, the world he occupies, and the conflict that is likely to form the spine of the story. We’ve hacked out most of the unnecessary exposition and placed a character in the middle of a tense situation. And while the setting is still alien, the situation is more understandable on a human level. Troubled dude with a jealous, possibly insane sister who won’t leave him alone. This has potential. It still needs to go through the rewrite oven a few times, but we can work with this.
If you’re writing a detective novel, you can usually get away with the most minimal of introductions to your world. “It was raining in San Francisco that Thursday afternoon.” Everyone grasps the setting almost immediately. Unfortunately, a fantasy or SF author has no such privilege. The world and the rules must be established early to provide a point of reference that the reader can latch onto. How do you do that? Well, less is more. And this is where 007 can be of assistance.
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone on the planet who hasn’t seen at least one James Bond movie. So I’m guessing that most of you reading this are familiar with the basic Bond structure and the pre-titles teaser sequence, which is usually a huge action setpiece that may or may not relate to the main story. You can even argue that it takes its inspiration from William Shakespeare, who almost always begins his plays with a scene involving minor characters before getting on with business. This stylistic invention was, like many things, a creation born of practical necessity – audiences in Elizabethan England would take forever to settle down and pay attention to the stage, so Shakespeare put a bit of fluff at the start to give the rowdy masses a chance to cool it without really missing anything important. The Bond teaser is meant to grab the audience by the metaphorical balls and reintroduce them to their favorite hero in smashing, not drawn-out, polysyllabic style, and much in the same way as the Bard, doesn’t start laying out the important plot until after the main titles. So it’s okay if you’re still distracted a bit when things first start up. After the explosions and the power ballad is when the real story will begin.
My modest suggestion, then, is to “steal from the best” and open with a scene that will introduce a strong character – preferably your protagonist – in a situation where they are forced to do something active instead of idling and recounting the tales of twenty-eight generations of their ancestry. (Think about it – how realistic is this? Do we go to work each morning thinking in exacting detail about the sheer scope of our family bloodline?) The other thing too is that the more of this stuff you hold back in the beginning, the more mystery there will be around your character, the more tantalizing secrets to reveal. When I was first drafting my novel, I fell into this trap. I had the heroine tell you in the first chapter exactly who she was, where she came from and why she could do the things that she could. When I realized as noted above that no one goes around thinking these things about themselves on an average day, I started hacking those parts out, and finding that my leading lady was consequently a lot more interesting – because now you wanted to read on to find the answers.
When you’re world-building, don’t throw it all at us at once, in a blizzard of arcane references and unpronounceable names. Focus on movement, wants, and action, and sprinkle in details where they are relevant. Or, to use a cooking metaphor, use them like spices and not the main ingredient. Come into the story in medias res (in the middle of things, for the non-Latin speakers/non-English majors among us). And if you can open with a Bond-esque, rip-roaring cracker of a scene, with peril and tension and stuff blowing up, more power to you. The aim is to hook us, not give us a history lecture.
Verdict, ladies and gentlemen? Am I on to something here or merely blowing smoke?
Graham (G2): Meh, pretty tired. The cat decided to wake us up at three in the morning again.
G1: That sucks. Frickin’ felines.
G2: Yeah.
G1: So I saw on Twitter last night you said you thought you might write a post about dialogue today.
G2: You must have been up late.
G1: I was.
G2: Couldn’t sleep either?
G1: What “either”? You and I are the same person.
G2: True enough.
G1: I’m just choosing not to be snippy and cranky about it this morning.
G2: “Snippy” and “cranky”? What are you, channeling our grandmother now?
G1: Do you think we could get on with this, Mr. Snarkypants?
G2: Fine. Where do you want to start?
G1: Well, it occurred to me that there is a lot of contradictory advice about dialogue floating around out there.
G2: I’ve noticed that too. Some people think too much dialogue is a bad thing.
G1: I don’t get that. I mean, obviously a novel is not a play and you need to create a balance of description and dialogue, but come on. I think that’s an excuse invented by people who can’t write dialogue well.
G2: And you accused me of being snarky.
G1: Well, if I didn’t think I was a good writer of dialogue, I would pare it back as much as I could. But do you remember when we were watching There Will Be Blood, how pretentious it seemed that there was no dialogue at all in the first half hour? Characters were going out of their way to not talk. It was forced and artificial. Real people are insatiable chatterboxes.
G2: Our son would certainly agree with you there.
G1: He’s kind of the singular example.
G2: Yeah. But you wouldn’t write a character like him, would you?
G1: No. Because a lot of what he says is just random stuff that pops into his head – half-remembered lines from TV shows, updates on the video game he’s playing, stuff he did at school that day. It doesn’t have a lot of coherence to it, or readability if you were to type it out word for word.
G2: Naturally. He’s twelve, and he’s a real person, not a character in a novel. We’re not expecting erudition and fully formed sentences with multiple clauses.
G1: No, no one would believe that, even in a novel. Unless you were portraying him as the most preternatural, linguistically-gifted twelve-year-old in the history of the human race.
G2: We love him very much, but no, that’s not who he is.
G1: Nope. So there’s a balance between the accurate portrayal of a twelve-year-old’s mentality and the need to establish a readable character, one who serves the narrative. People just don’t talk how writers need to write them. We yammer on about everything but what’s actually on our mind – we tell silly jokes, we blather about the weather. In a story you have to get to the point.
G2: That’s what you mean about serving the narrative.
G1: Yeah. Every conversation needs to push some aspect of the story, if only the slightest of nudges. The relationships between the characters need to develop, or the characters have to get closer to their goal. If your guys are going to stop for a five minute exegesis on hamburgers, there had better be some payoff to it.
G1: You know me so well. That’s a really good example. That whole conversation between Jules and Vincent has nothing to do with the plot, but it helps establish their relationship, and shows us that these guys are interesting, endearing people we’re going to dig spending time with. Even though they are on their way to commit a series of murders. Would we have liked them if they’d devoted the conversation to the methodology of how they were going to kill the guys once they got to the apartment, or worse, said nothing at all?
G2: That would have been the insufferable arthouse version.
G1: So, I come back to this idea of balance. You can go too far the other way, where characters become plot explainers. I’ve seen this in fantasy a lot, where two people who have no real reason to talk to each other do an information dump about where they are in their quest, what happened over the last couple of days, and what has to happen next. There’s no nuance to the conversation – the characters just agree with each other for pages on end as they lay out the story so far. It’s the “As you know, Bob” problem. Or Basil Exposition, depending on your preferences. If the sole purpose of your dialogue is to tell your audience things they could learn another way, You’re Doing It Wrong.
G2: My eyelids sag at the mere thought. Of course, you and I are basically just agreeing with each other here. What did you mean by nuance?
G1: Characters should never talk about what they’re actually talking about. Concepts and pellets of information should be implied, not blatant.
G2: Oh, so we would talk about mochacinos in the guise of discussing dialogue?
G1: I like to approach conversations from oblique angles. Like yeah, maybe I would compose a scene of two writers (or two halves of the same mind, as it were) discussing dialogue and set it in line at a Starbucks while they wait for their lattés.
G2: Yeah, because you’d never find a writer at a Starbucks. Real original.
G1: You get my point, though?
G2: Not really. Please explain it to me with statistics and visual aids.
G1: You cribbed that line. You really need to get more sleep.
G2: I really need a lot of things and sleep gets in the way of them.
G1: Suit yourself. Picture it this way. When you’re building dialogue, you have a couple of elements to consider. You have the setting. You have the goal – the piece of information that you need to convey. Maybe it’s a simple fact, maybe it’s a clue to the mystery, maybe it’s the next step in a relationship. That’s where you’re heading, but you don’t start with it. You start in the wilderness and build towards it. Imagine a scene of a couple eating in a restaurant. The husband has to tell the wife that he’s lost his job, but he doesn’t know how to break the news. His first line, then, is not going to be “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I lost my job.” Is it?
G2: I guess it could be, but that seems a waste of a lot of potential dramatic tension.
G1: Exactly. Instead, you might start with them talking about the food they’re eating, other restaurants they’ve been in, you know, casual, everyday, innocent stuff. They might recall fond memories of when they were first dating. The husband will realize that losing his job means they won’t be able to have nights like this anymore. That will start to creep into what he’s saying to his wife. She’ll notice something’s wrong and she’ll ask him about it. He’ll deny it. She’ll ask again. He’ll deny it again, until he breaks down and confesses – or maybe doesn’t at all. You see how 95% of the conversation won’t be about the main piece of information that comes at the very end, right? Instead, you find your way in from the edges. Organically. The characters will lead you there on their own.
G2: Like the scene in our novel where the two leads talk about their respective parents. It begins with the heroine humming a stupid old folk song, and the guy noting that he recognizes it.
G1: Or the scene later on where a conversation about the role of women in the world begins with a chat about sandwiches.
G2: Pick the oddest thing and work your way back from it.
G1: You are learning, young padawan. The other thing to keep in mind too is that unless you’re writing a 1920’s silent movie, characters don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves. Nor do most people. Subtlety and understatement are the way to go. A solemn declaration of undying love shouldn’t sound like it was scripted for daytime TV. In fact, avoid solemn declarations of undying love altogether.
G2: Something just occurred to me. We’re unpublished – where do we get off flinging rules around like so much confetti?
G1: There are no rules, only our interpretation of our own truth. There is every possibility that this exercise has been one in utter nonsense. We can only pass along what works for us in the hope that someone else might find it useful. And this is a rich topic that could go on for thousands upon thousands of words, but eventually, folks will want to tell us to shut up.
G2: Are there some resources we could point people towards?
G1: I think you just have to read a lot of books, watch a lot of movies written by great writers, listen to a lot of different kinds of people talking and process it all in the mind’s blender. And then try and fail a few times on your own before you figure it out.
G2: You were going to mention Aaron Sorkin, weren’t you.
G1: We both know he’s a big influence on us, it goes without saying. Look at him, look at people like David Mamet, Richard Curtis, and David Seidler, who wrote The King’s Speech, to name but a very few. Listen to their rhythms, listen to how someone like Mamet deconstructs patterns of speech to convey character. Glengarry Glen Ross is a terrific example of this. The scene between Moss and Aaronow “talking about” versus “speaking about” is fantastic.
G2: You haven’t mentioned any actual novelists.
G1: Well, funny you should bring that up, because we’re reading a book right now, Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, which has an interesting approach to dialogue. It’s a western, set in 1851 California, but everyone speaks in very elegant, grammatically precise phrases that are probably not an accurate reflection of how people in 1851 California really spoke. Not the artistic choice I was expecting, but refreshing after plodding through Ian Fleming’s clumsy attempts at American slang which felt as artificial as nobody talking in the first act of There Will Be Blood did.
G2: Way to bring it full circle, dude.
G1: I know what you like. Anyway, how to portray dialect, how to vary word choices to denote different speakers, the value of repetition, talking it out to make sure it sounds right – like I said, a rich palette and worth discussing further at a later time.
G2: If you can persuade me to do this again. I feel like I didn’t get to say very much. You were doing all the talking.
G1: You’re tired. The cat, remember? Just looking out for you.
Tired of your own voice? Try writing as someone else! When one is blocked, feeling intimidated by the overwhelming talent of others or otherwise discouraged about the state of one’s literary pursuits, one potential solution is to come at things from a different angle. If your ego is tripping you up, just set it aside. Become a different person. Shapeshift (or as my malaprop-prone son sometimes says, ship-shafe’t). It’s incredibly liberating. You feel so much less pressure to live up to the standards that you’ve placed upon yourself, because what you’re producing isn’t really you. It’s pastiche, it’s fun, and I’ve done it before, here and here. So you can probably guess where I’m heading with this. I’ve decided to take one of the simplest, most enduring stories, Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham, and speculate what it might have sounded like had Aaron Sorkin banged it out. Enjoy it. Or don’t, it’s entirely up to you.
FADE IN:
INT. LEO’S OFFICE – DAY
LEO MCGARRY is at his desk. On the phone.
LEO: Yeah. Okay. Thanks.
He hangs up.
LEO: Margaret!!!
MARGARET pokes her head in, notepad and pen at the ready.
MARGARET: You really don’t need to yell.
LEO: Yeah, this time I do. Send in Josh and Toby. Tell the Secretary of Agriculture he needs to be up on the Hill smooth-talking the committee chair on 404. And I need the next five minutes the President’s got.
MARGARET steps out. JOSH LYMAN and TOBY ZIEGLER enter.
JOSH: Leo, settle something for us. You’re on a desert island and you have a choice between Iolanthe and the Mikado.
LEO: Yeah, I don’t really care. Listen…
JOSH: This is about the Ag Bill, isn’t it.
TOBY: It’s not the Ag Bill.
JOSH: I bet it’s the Ag Bill.
TOBY: It’s not gonna be the Ag Bill, the one that we just spent seven weeks negotiating, to the detriment of our physical and psychological health, not to mention every social relationship we ever pretended to care about.
LEO: It’s the Ag Bill.
TOBY (resigned): This is why I continue to hate the world.
JOSH: What happened?
LEO: I just got off a call with the Minority Whip. Republican leadership is attaching an amendment.
TOBY: To the Ag Bill.
LEO: Yeah.
TOBY: To the bill that cost us the support of the entire progressive wing of the Democratic caucus.
JOSH: I’m telling you, we coulda used those three votes.
TOBY: To the bill that is basically a laundry list of every Republican priority on agriculture in this country. A bill that could not be more Republican-friendly if we called it the “Ronald Reagan Second Amendment Let’s Blow Up an Abortion Clinic and Drill in Yellowstone Bill.”
LEO: Yeah.
TOBY (smirks, looks down): Why?
LEO: They’re not happy with the subsidies for organic hen farming and pork production. They want them taken out or they won’t move the bill out of Committee.
JOSH: The Republicans are threatening to block the bill because they don’t like green eggs and ham?
LEO: They do not like green eggs and ham.
TOBY: I do not like them.
LEO: Sam!
SAM SEABORN is walking by the open door. He stops and pokes his head in.
SAM: I am!
LEO: Siddown. Republicans are attaching an amendment to 404. We need to see if we can unlock some Democratic votes for it.
SAM: If they didn’t like the bill before, they’re not going to go for it with another Republican amendment. What is it this time?
TOBY: Green eggs and ham.
SAM: The organic farming section?
LEO: Who do we have on our side that’s movable if that part’s gone?
SAM: You might get Jankowitz, Stephens… Geller’ll vote for it just to stick it to Martindale and his three.
JOSH: I can probably wrangle three more from the Blue Dogs.
TOBY: Nothing like fighting for a watered-down joke of a bill we never wanted in the first place.
LEO: Okay. Time to make some calls. We need this win, I don’t gotta tell you twice. The latest Gallup says our poll numbers are softening and the country is crying out for a solid agricultural policy.
TOBY: Which we’ll get by getting rid of green eggs and ham.
JOSH: It’s okay, nobody likes green eggs and ham.
PRESIDENT BARTLET enters from the side door.
BARTLET: What’s this about green eggs and ham?
LEO: Republican amendment to 404. Deleting the organic farming section.
BARTLET: Well, if there’s one thing we can count on Republicans for, it’s screwing Mother Earth with her pants on.
LEO: Sir…
BARTLET: Did you know that organic farm subsidies account for a tenth of one percent of all federal spending on agriculture? We’re happy to fork out the cash, so long as you’re spraying your fields with toxic sludge you wouldn’t dare use to wax your own car. You know what the problem is? No one’s ever been forced to try green eggs and ham. We’ve become a country so accustomed to the comfort of familiarity that the thought of change has become a terrifying prospect. Even if that change is for the better. The problem with that is, it’s not what the Framers had in mind. America was meant to be an experiment in constant change. Forming a more perfect union is about forever trying new things with the understanding that some of them will be scary, and some of them won’t work. Some will be spectacular failures. But we have to try them anyway, because we’ll never know if we don’t. It’s like Voltaire said: we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the necessary. Who knows – in the midst of all the noise, all the partisan bickering, maybe we’ll find out in the end that we do like green eggs and ham.
Determination settles upon the faces of his staff.
LEO: About 404, sir?
BARTLET: Let’s have a debate. A real debate. We the People can decide if they like green eggs and ham.
SAM: Not for nothing, but I’ve always liked them.
LEO: Sam…
SAM: I am.
FADE OUT.
What’d ya think? Anyone else want to give it a go? Pick a different writer – novelist, screenwriter, whoever, and retell your version of Green Eggs and Ham in their voice. Put the link to your story in the comments. Anxious to see what you come up with!
My friend George sent me a link to a really long (but interesting nonetheless) rant about Star Trek Into Darkness the other day. The author of said rant was not in any way a fan of Damon Lindelof, the Hollywood screenwriter who co-created Lost and contributed to the scripts of both Ridley Scott’s misfired Alien prequel Prometheus and the most recent reimagining of Gene Roddenberry’s vision. To paraphrase, it’s perhaps enough to say that the author’s main gripe with Lindelof is that his writing forgoes logic, rules and consistent characterization in favor of “gee whiz,” “cool” and giggling at boobies instead. Even as someone who enjoyed Star Trek Into Darkness for what it was, I found it hard to dispute this point. One of the biggest of my own gripes about it was the ending, cribbed almost note for note from the superior Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, to the point where it came off as something like a cinematic exercise in karaoke. Movies in this genre nowadays rarely, if ever, make you feel anything. And the reason, plainly, is that they are being made by a generation of filmmakers who have not felt, but rather have experienced life only by watching other movies.
I don’t know Damon Lindelof and I can’t pretend to know what he’s gone through in his life. Certainly his drive and his skill at achieving the career he has is to be admired and envied. But he seems to be one of a breed of young writers and directors from the mold of Quentin Tarantino, who spent their formative years working in video stores, absorbing thousands upon thousands of famous and obscure movies into malleable brains, uploading raw data Matrix-style to that place where the memories of life would normally be stored. The work they produce now as the chief drivers of the Hollywood machine is endless pastiche; pieces of other works recombined and reimagined for modern consumption. I had a discussion with my uncle recently about the decline in quality of movie scripts and I told him it’s because foreign markets make up the majority of a movie’s profit potential, and vehicles driven by visual effects and explosions and “cool!” will do better overseas than more literate works filled with idioms and ideas and cultural mores that don’t translate into Mandarin or Hindi. Studio executives hire filmmakers who can deliver dollars, not philosophy. (If they can do both at the same time, fine, that usually means Oscars, but the former is always preferable). This is where folks like Damon Lindelof find their wheelhouse. (In fairness to him, Star Trek Into Darkness was co-written by Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci, and certainly director J.J. Abrams had major story input as well). They can deliver the popcorn with consistency and efficiency. But that’s all.
There is a semi-famous story (to Trekkers, anyhow) around the writing of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. When Nicholas Meyer was hired as its director, he was told there were at least five different scripts for it floating around, none of which were suitable to shoot. Meyer suggested a meeting whereby the creative team made a note of everything they liked from any of the drafts – a character, a scene, even something as minor as a line of dialogue. Meyer took these notes away and wrote a draft of what would become the movie we saw in only twelve days, forsaking a writing credit simply to get the movie in shape to shoot. In any other hands such a cut-and-paste job might have resulted in a hackneyed, disjointed mess, but Meyer’s literary background enabled him to infuse a theatrical quality into what was otherwise a straightforward story of revenge and sacrifice. What was most remarkable about the screenplay was that it dared to present its hero as old, tired and washed-up – traits actors loathe playing because they think the audience will project them onto their real-life selves. Meyer was young when he wrote the screenplay, but as a struggling artist he could empathize with those things. Hotshot screenwriters who’ve bounced effortlessly from pre-sold blockbuster to pre-sold blockbuster as the new Star Trek team have done are incapable of this. They don’t know what it’s like to fail, to come up against your own limitations and find yourself wanting. They simply can’t dramatize what they have never felt. And so they reach toward the only place they’ve ever found traces of those feelings – other, better movies.
When I picture Nicholas Meyer writing Star Trek II, I see an angsty face hunched over a typewriter, sucking down his twentieth cigarette, plumbing the depths of his soul as he agonizes over le mot juste, fighting to find the emotional truth of the story. When I picture the story break sessions for Star Trek Into Darkness, I see a room full of young guys in baseball caps scarfing down pizza and Red Bull and trying to one-up each other with statements like “You know what would be totally awesome? A shot of the Enterprise rising out of the ocean.” “How about they come across this ship which is twice their size and totally painted black?” “COOL!” “Hey, guys, check this out. What if the bad guy… is Khan? And the end is exactly like Wrath of Khan only we switch Kirk and Spock’s places?” “Yeah! I love it!” “It’s pretty good, but we need some hot alien chicks with tails. And more Beastie Boys songs, that went over so well last time.”
I had the same problem with Superman Returns, which I watched again recently, and I chalk it up once more to a screenplay written by capable but very young scribes Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris (they have cameos in the movie as high school students) who were great at dreaming up “Cool!” trailer-worthy moments like a bullet bouncing off Superman’s eye but not so skilled at crafting emotions or believable characters. Superman is a difficult character to write even if you’re a seasoned pro, but the main reason that movie didn’t connect with audiences was because Superman really has no story in it. He’s just… there, as lifeless as the dated-looking CGI used to render him in some of the flying scenes. He talks about having been gone for a while but doesn’t seem to have been changed by his experience, or have any compelling reason to have come back (apart from using his powers to stalk Lois Lane in several unnerving sequences). The movie is more interested in the “whiz-bang” spectacle of Lex Luthor’s overly complicated plot to create a new continent in the Atlantic Ocean using stolen Kryptonian crystals and kryptonite, which in the end Superman just ignores as he lifts the entire landmass into outer space (a point not lost on my young son who remarked “isn’t kryptonite supposed to make him weak?”) And for a movie that directly raises the question of whether or not the world needs Superman, it never gets around to debating this point in a satisfactory way. Compare the wafer-thin Superman Returns to the profundity in the Richard Donner original that it is paying homage to, and it comes up extremely short – because the young writers of the former simply don’t have the chops of the great veteran Tom Mankiewicz (whom they crib lines from in the movie’s only memorable scenes, just as Lindelof, Orci and Kurtzman quoted Meyer’s famous dialogue verbatim in Star Trek Into Darkness). Instead, we get dumb gags about dogs eating each other.
Someone once decimated Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace by pointing out that the plot was a series of scenes of characters going from meeting to meeting to meeting, a reflection of the life of George Lucas at the time. I’m all for encouraging young screenwriters to get their shot at the big time, but as a lover of stories that matter I prefer the visceral resonance you’ll see in works by writers who’ve lived long enough to have had their asses kicked around the block a few times. If you’ve never been the underdog, you can’t know what it’s like to be looking up at the mountain and be paralyzed with the fear of taking the first step. In the absence of those memories you reach for what others have done in older, better movies, and cough up pale copies that rely on flash and swagger to cover the absence of substance. “Yeah, it doesn’t matter that none of these characters say or do anything memorable or touching, ’cause… cool badass aliens with frickin’ laser beams! Like in that other movie that people enjoyed!” The abiding irony in all of this is that as it concerns Star Trek, some of the most memorable dialogue in The Wrath of Khan was itself lifted from other sources, namely Moby Dick et al. But in that movie, it didn’t feel so obviously recycled, because Meyer’s informed writing and directing (and terrific performances, by the by) sold the emotional truth of each word.
I’m not saying there should be some rule that you can’t write a movie unless you’re at least 40, have been divorced once and be suffering a deep psychological resentment of your parents for taking your favorite blankie away when you were four. I’m saying that some of these young guys pulling in six and seven figures for rewrite jobs should perhaps look away from a screen once in a while, get out and live a bit of their lives. Read some classic literature. Rediscover what it means to feel something that isn’t necessarily just the high of sleeping with models after a gala premiere. Worry less about what’s cool and more about what connects. Recognize that what touches us about movies and stays with us long after we’ve left the theater isn’t the awesome shot of the ship tumbling end over end into the atmosphere, it’s the quiet dignity of man in his darkest hour and the deep bonds we forge to fight against our intrinsic loneliness. It’s the humanity. And if you can’t feel that in your own life, you’ll never successfully translate it to the page, let alone to the screen.
I tend to go through phases in what I choose to write about here. There have been politics phases, James Bond phases, Aaron Sorkin phases, family phases, phases devoted to the craft of writing as I see it. Lately though I’m finding a lot of what I’m writing is focusing on the idea of connection. Amanda Palmer’s video from a few weeks ago really slammed the back of my head against the wall. My piece for Huffington Post Books about Ksenia Anske touched on this idea as well. Because connection is how we make sense of the world. We’re a vast palette of individual colors who want to blend together. Yet there is a critical connection that we often fail to make as we throw our line out into the universe, hoping for the elusive nibble. In our focus on the potential connections out there, we forget about the connection within – the connection to ourselves, to who we are, what we want, and how we feel.
Writing can be a purely intellectual exercise; a collection of arguments and supporting evidence, arranged in the most coherent order to maximize the strength of the opinion being presented. Academia has thrived for thousands of years using this method, and our knowledge and scientific standing have been advanced immeasurably. But the stories that stay with us through the generations are those that touch the more primal part of our brains; the part that feels. We have this incredible disconnect, between aspiring to a higher stratum of intelligence while still being governed by passions that are as far from rational as can be imagined. The best writing, and the writers who make the most lasting connections, are the ones who can tap into these passions and share them in a way that tells complete strangers, “I get it. I get your pain. And you’re not alone.”
I’ve been accused of being passionless on more than one occasion. It’s a defense mechanism; a shield against loss and the pain that comes with it. There was a story I read once about Julian Lennon, and how John once screamed at him that he hated his laugh, and to this day a laugh from Julian is very rare. Similarly, emotional extremes are not my thing. For me the thought of ripping off that bandaid and letting the agony pour through the reopened scar is tremendously intimidating. Letting it loose publicly is even more frightening. Yet one looks at what someone like Ksenia Anske is willing to admit to the world and one’s own history seems laughably tame in comparison. I also consider it in the context of being a new father and not wanting my son to grow up thinking his dad’s a Borg drone.
There is great pain lurking beneath the armor – the pain of a lost father and mother, an adolescence and young adulthood spent wandering, feeling very much alone, not knowing what to make of this thing called life, feeling a sense of drift that persists to this day. There is anger and regret over very bad choices and their lingering consequences. There is frustration at the inability to articulate a clear vision of where I’m going and what I want. This last one is brutal for a writer. In creating characters you need to be able to define what they want, and how can you do this for a fictional person if you can’t even do it for yourself? Without wants there is no reason for the journey – there is no story.
Even if I was to never write another word, I still need to connect to my inner self. It’s very possible that once that connection is firmly established, the desire to write might fade away. If I am truly satisfied with who I am and the state of my life, then I may stop asking those questions of strangers, stop seeking connection out there in the ether that is the global consciousness. Stop noticing, as Amanda Palmer says, that this looks like this, because it just won’t matter anymore. And yet there’s another, more tantalizing possibility – that the other connections will grow deeper, that things will make more sense, that I will be able to articulate a vision of substance, of meaning, of true passion. I’ll know what I want and I’ll go after it at ludicrous speed, and those who don’t want to come along on the ride can eat my plaid dust.
If you fancy yourself a writer, you have to ask this very important yet somewhat awkward-sounding question of yourself: Is all of me in this? Are you writing the story of the sexy female vampire who runs her own shoe store and fends off the advances of a hunky foot-fetishizing merman because you have a deep, abiding need within your soul to spill your soul all over the blank page, or are you doing it because it’s a fun distraction and you’re tickled by the highly unlikely possibility of becoming the next Twilight? Do you have what it takes to push past being ignored, past the hit statistics on your blog ticking down to zero, past people who greet your latest missives with apathy and indifference? Is using your voice important enough to you that you can shake off the jealousy that can sometimes spike at the sight of others achieving great success by twists of fate, and say what you want to say anyway? Fundamentally, are you passionate enough about it that it doesn’t matter if nobody but your significant other ever reads anything you ever write? Intellectual exercises can be well-written, but they will never move anyone. They will simply exist in a moment of time and be forgotten. They will never connect.
Look, there are more than enough writers, both published and not, out there filling servers full of blog posts with advice on how to write, what works and what doesn’t (in their humble opinion, of course) and I don’t want to be that anymore. The only advice I can offer is this, and it comes from the school of “those who can’t do, teach”: You will only achieve what you want when you learn how to feel, when you have connected to everything you are. When everything you do is to its fullest potential, and when you’ve smashed through the self-imposed mental barriers keeping you from experiencing all the joy, wonder and even the sadness that life has to offer. When you cast off the stupid, pointless, time-wasting shackle of intimidation and become.
Thus endeth the lesson. Let me know how you make out. I will too.
Presenting this with (minimal) comment this morning. So many writers look for validation in the wrong places; comparing ourselves to others who are far more popular, or financially successful, or better-looking, or seem to be able to compose aching beauty without effort. This is Amanda Palmer at Grub Street’s Muse and Marketplace Conference, and she just nails the truth. It’s a little over half an hour but if you can even just put it on in the background while you write your TPS report, it is absolutely worth it. (I guarantee you will promptly lose interest in said report and give her your undivided attention.)
That’s my mea culpa for the day. If I had to rank my perceived strengths as a writer in descending order, description would linger odiously in the basement with the lawn furniture and the dresser my wife keeps reminding me we need to sell. I’m good at dialogue, at proposing ideas and batting them around, at the exploration of questions of human nature and our place in the universe, but, ask me to put any of these items in a setting that leaps off the page and I will curl up in the corner of that setting sobbing like an infant afraid of having his wooby taken away. Every time I go back through my novel for revisions and start to think, “hey, this isn’t so bad,” I encounter someone else’s work that blows me back through the wall and turns my confidence to lime Jell-O. I just can’t seem to crack that important element and it drives me bonkers.
I’ve devoted a lot of self-examination to trying to figure out why this aspect is so difficult for me. Some writers seem to be able to do it flawlessly. Within a few short, concise phrases you know exactly where you are – your imagination is triggered and the setting shimmers into existence around you as though you had stepped into the holodeck and announced “Run Program.” Writing, as someone famous whose name escapes me for the moment has observed (I think it was Joyce Carol Oates), is about creating atmosphere. My focus, however, has always been on character, though, and how the characters interrelate, and that usually means dialogue, and lots of it. (And of course, you run into plenty of writing advice that suggests too much dialogue is a bad thing. Can’t win, can’t even quit the game.) In a perfect world, this is how I would describe almost every scene, so I could get on with crafting conversations (from Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett):
A country road. A tree. Evening.
A few more words about Estragon trying to pull off his boot and we’re off to the races. Okay then, you’re asking, why don’t you just write plays then? I’ve written exactly one play, it was called Brushstrokes, a three-act examination of hidden love and the inability of men to admit their feelings tied together with a tenuous nail polish metaphor, and well, the less said about it the better. That’s not to say I’ll never try another one, but in writing it I missed the ability to digress into stretches of narrative, to get into the heads of the characters and figure out what they were thinking. It is not to suggest that novels don’t have to have structure, or limits for that matter, but they tend to be a freer place to play. You can linger on a particular thought, explore its depths and its reaches, without worrying too much about a foot-tapping, finger-drumming audience waiting in exasperation for the next line. It can be rather like the van that took forever to fall off the bridge in Inception without seeming to drag down the pace – again, depending on how you write it. So it helps if you’re really good at that.
Many great writers are poets and can bring that sensibility to details as slight as a flake of ash falling from a burning cigarette, or the single flap of a hummingbird’s wing. My description, by contrast, tends to be simple and straightforward. What you need to know and no more. Here’s an example from my novel:
Splinters of wood and crumbling brick from ramshackle buildings line the pockmarked street. Lampposts bent by storms and vandals stand eerie sentry. The rattle of broken window shutters is this rotting borough’s only tenant.
And another:
Dotted by whitecaps, the river is an icy gray. Brine and rotting algae poisons the air. The north side of the city lurks, cloaked, beneath frigid fog. At the end of the jetty, a flat barge with a water wheel at its stern strains against the grip of the ropes anchoring it in place. Creaking twin planks on its starboard side wobble under the boots of passengers laden with sacks and baskets who are shuffling aboard to claim a precious portion of the hard benches in the center of the craft.
One more:
A paved drive marked by a trail of brass lanterns on iron posts conducts us through spacious, garden-rich grounds, past a stone-rimmed lily pond watched by a gazebo, once-trim shrubs and dwarf trees grown wild with neglect. The secluded manse that presides is half-hidden by branches yet still exudes wealth and pretense, as if trying to compete with its neighbors. Long thin windows with black shutters adorn the exterior, while a portico supported by white columns protrudes over the front entrance. A terraced second floor is set back on the high roof of the first. A pointless relief of vine-entwined roses on the portico adds to the sense of superfluous money that permeates this place.
There is nothing technically wrong with any of these passages, but poetry they sure as hell ain’t. Even looking at them sitting here out of context I want to rewrite them from word one. One’s spirit crumples into crushed tinfoil at the possibility of being considered a candidate for a Bulwer-Lytton award, or as the latest Eye of Argon. But you do what you can with what you have and keep trying to do better. And though sometimes you gnash your teeth at the raw talent on display in some other people’s mere first drafts, you can’t let that stop you from moving forward.
The mistake that I tend to make and that many others probably do as well is in not having the description of the scene push the story forward in any way. Think of it in terms of the last time you related a funny anecdote to your best friend. You didn’t say, “So, I was at the grocery store. It was a massive, soulless building painted in black and brown and the floor tiles bore the smudges of the soles of a thousand tired mothers dragging screaming children who were unable to comprehend the simple nutritional logic of why it wasn’t a good idea to eat chocolate at every meal.” Your friend is sitting there saying “I don’t care! What happened at the store?!” You want to stage the scene and sprinkle in some color, but putting in that kind of description is like hitting the pause button. It breaks the momentum and adds nothing.
Those who know what they’re doing, even writers who are incredibly journalistic and fetishistic about detail, like the late Ian Fleming, use that information to push the narrative – to tell you about the character they’re trying to sketch in your mind. The sometimes excruciating manner in which Fleming waxes on about James Bond’s breakfast preferences still manages to tell you something important, that this is a man who defines himself very much by his tastes, and he is as much a social competitor with the villains he squares off against as he is a knight trying to slay the fearsome dragon. It works, though, because everyone knows how Bond likes his martini, and “shaken, not stirred” has become entrenched in the zeitgeist (even if Aaron Sorkin insists it’s wrong).
Also, as human beings, we tend to notice individual details rather than the big picture. This is crucial when you are writing first-person perspective as well because you can’t use that detached, “I SEE AND HEAR ALL” narrative voice. When you spot an attractive person coming towards you, there’s probably one specific trait that strikes you first; their eyes, their smile, what have you. And that characteristic will define them in your mind from then on. That girl with the long dark hair, the guy with the shark tattoo on his right forearm. (It does not have to be a visual characteristic either: the girl who sings like a parrot with laryngitis, or the guy who smells like apple cinnamon soap.) The same goes with scenery. The tall building with the broken window on the top floor. The car with the coughing exhaust pipe. If your character has a particular perspective on the world, what they notice will flow organically out of that perspective as well. Mine is accustomed to the peace of a silent forest, so the things she takes note of are what stands out to her as unusual – noise and artifice. If I’ve done my job correctly, that should tell you something about her and how she views the world. If not, then it’s back to the rewrite shed for another round of head-splitting angst and wondering why, despite people telling me contrary and often, I continue, in my own mind, to suck.
Anyone else struggling with this stuff? Let me know. Let’s help each other out.
It’s a dream shared by a great number of aspiring novelists; that someday they’ll be sitting in a theater watching their characters buckle their swash on the big screen. Browse through the interwebs and you’ll locate many an author’s website with a special section devoted to who they’d like to play their heroes and heroines. I’m not gonna lie, I’ve had this dream myself. It’s perhaps unorthodox to admit, but I’m more of a movie person than I am a reader. It probably has to do with the happier memories of childhood; more of them involve sitting on the couch with my dad watching James Bond or The Natural or rewinding that one part in Star Wars where R2-D2 gets zapped by the Jawa and falls on his face to giggle at it for the nineteenth time, than involve hiding under the covers with a flashlight in the wee hours of the morning flipping pages of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or the Black Stallion books. But we all chart our course toward our dreams in different ways (Tele, you must be influencing me lately with these nautical metaphors I’ve become prone to). Lately it’s been reading Percy Jackson as a family and noting how much was changed for the adaptation and thinking (blasphemy!) that the screenplay was an improvement. Novels and movies are both in the business of telling stories, but they are drastically different media and what works in one fails utterly in another (see: Tolkien purists’ criticism of the changes in the Lord of the Rings movies).
Nicholas Meyer, the director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, in his excellent DVD commentary for that film, talks about the limitations of certain forms of art: a painting does not move, a poem has no pictures and so on. The person experiencing the art has to fill in the rest with his own imagination, his own personality. Only movies, says Meyer, have the insidious ability to do everything for you. What does that say about the creative process of someone who writes a novel having been apprenticed largely in cinematic technique? When I’m writing fiction, I’m going at it from two different angles. On the one hand I love wordplay and the sound of wit and a phrase well turned. On the other, when I’m staging a scene I’m picturing it in my mind as though I were directing it. My first draft involved a lot of mentions of character movement – turning away, turning back towards something else, entries and exits from the stage as though they were actors shuffled about by a beret-wearing and megaphone-wielding auteur in his canvas chair. I’m basically writing the movie I see in my head, with the dialogue timed the way Aaron Sorkin does it, by speaking it out loud and judging its flow. (I do write a lot of – and probably too much – dialogue, but, without trying to sound immodest, it’s what I’m good at, and to me, there is no better way for characters to get to know each other and to reveal themselves to the reader. I almost wrote “audience” there; see how the two media are so irrevocably intermixed in the recesses of my brain?)
I’m much lighter on physical character description, however, and I give just enough to establish those traits that are, in my mind, crucial (you may disagree). I’d rather that you cast the part yourself. You probably won’t see my protagonist the same way I see her, and that’s totally fine. In fact, it’s against my interest as someone who is trying to captivate you with my story to tell you how it should look in your mind, and that your interpretation is dead wrong because I made her up and she’s mine and so are all her subsidiary rights. You need to be able to claim her too. With that in mind, I’m happy to let you indulge in your own speculation once I let the story out into the world but I’ll never tell you who I think should play her. Let’s be mindful of the tale of Anne Rice, who famously blew a gasket when it was announced that Tom Cruise would be playing Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, only to publicly recant and offer Cruise heaps of praise after she saw the actual movie. Besides, if we ever get that far, authors (unless they’re J.K. Rowling) have zero say in who plays whom. Often the real world gets in the way anyway – the preferred choice either isn’t interested or isn’t available. There’s also the possibility that you don’t get your dream cast but you end up with somebody better. I seem to recall that on Stephenie Meyer’s website years ago she talked about wanting Henry Cavill (the new Superman) to play Edward Cullen; without getting into my opinion of the quality of those movies it’s probably fair to say that no one among the many Twihards of the world was disappointed with landing Robert Pattinson instead. (Truthfully, had it actually been Cavill they would have lusted over his smoldery-eyed poster just as much.)
What, then, is the point of the preceding rant? As the chairman of the British “Well Basically” society would say: well, basically, I think authors and aspiring authors do their readers a disservice when they talk about who they’d like to see play their characters in a hypothetical big screen version. Even though it’s usually done all in fun, that interpretation gets taken as definitive since it’s coming from the creator, and any ideas the readers and fans might have had, imaginative as they might have been, are immediately supplanted because, you know, the guy who actually made it up has spoken. It was like when Harry Potter merchandise first hit the shelves and all the kids who had until that point been making their own creations out of spare cloth and construction paper now settled for making their parents buy the officially licensed, made in China plastic crap.
So, in the unlikely event that someone someday wants to make a movie about something I’ve written? Don’t ask me who I’d cast; my own counsel will I keep on that matter, young padawan. I’ll be perfectly happy so long as they find a role somewhere for this lady:
You know, if she’s available and she’s interested.
Some depressing Graham’s Crackers statistics to start off with. Total posts, March 2012: 26. Total posts, March 2013: 2 (including this one, 3 if you include the piece I did for HuffPo about International Women’s Day). And the frogurt is also cursed.
Yes, I know, oh mighty gurus of blog, you’re not supposed to post about how you haven’t posted in a while. But this is my sandbox and my rules and prithee, I shall beg indulgence while I raise a kerchief to my brow and lament in plaintive tone the lack of productivity shown these past fortnights. It isn’t as though there’s nothing to write about, after all. Nay, verily, my literary cup runneth somewhat over. I do admire though, those who can juggle the heavy spheres of work and family and simply keeping up with the pace of life and still churn out a few thousand words each day. Something one should aspire to as well, if one were not such a piss poor scheduler of one’s time (guilty, Your Honors).
To that end I am raising a metaphorical glass to my friend Tele Aadsen of Hooked for her much-deserved accomplishment of landing a publisher for her memoir. Now, Tele and I have never met or spoken to one another and our interaction has been entirely in reading each other’s writing and exchanging comments and tweets. But ours, I think, is a kinship of letters, of recognizing and appreciating the power of the written word and how we can use it to connect across otherwise impassable chasms of time and distance. Would I, a dude of a somewhat insular urban upbringing in the Greater Toronto Area, have ever assumed that I would have the slightest thing in common with an Alaskan fisher poet? Yet I do, and I’m grateful, and my life is the better for it. Anyway, there was a Twitter hashtag that was trending a few days about people you’d most like to meet, and predictably, the most common answers were celebrity names (Bieber again? REALLY?) Tele’s at the top of my list. Someday soon, I hope – that is, if I haven’t now come off sounding like Creepy Stalker Guy™. If for nothing else than just the chance to say thank you. And get a personalized, autographed copy. It’s not for me, it’s for my friend of the same name.
Onwards and upwards then. Amongst my pursuits I am occasionally fortunate enough to attend digital media conferences. Toronto held its second annual Digital Media Summit last week, gathering a roster of experts and thought leaders from across the industry of ye olde cyberspace – names like Don Tapscott, Erik Qualman, Cindy Gallop, Amber Mac and Neil Shankman among dozens of other luminaries delivering informative addresses to hundreds of lanyard-wearing, smartphone-tapping digital worker bees. I was there on behalf of my employer, of course, but I still view things through the filter of writing and how what they were all saying could be used to further a writer’s reach (who are we kidding – my reach) in this rapidly advancing age. You know, sometimes one can get a bit cynical as one carefully strings his words together and hits “publish” and… nothing much happens. Admit it; on the surface, we’re all happy for the blogger who rejoices “I got Freshly Pressed on my very first post!” while inside we seethe that our own 189 pearls of literate wisdom usually go unnoticed by all but a select (if wonderful) few. If you can take your ego out of the equation, it’s not difficult to understand. Time is precious, an individual’s time is even more precious, and in order for them to grant you even a few seconds of theirs in between bathing the dog and walking the baby, you have to touch them with something that inspires real passion. There was an interesting statistic revealed at DMS that on Facebook, even posts by the most famous, highly-liked brands only reach about 15% of their followers. (That’s why, even though in between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+ or whatever else you’re linking your blog posts to you may have a thousand connections, hits on your latest and greatest might not top a hundred. At least, that’s how it works for me.) And just because you get them, it doesn’t mean you’ll keep them. I’ve received a couple of (relatively) huge traffic spikes that have come from famous people tweeting links to my blog. But they don’t last – after a few days the hits drop to their usual, more stable level. Maybe you retain one or two, but the vast majority treat you like a cheap motel along I-75, moving on once the new day has dawned and the open road beckons. And that’s cool. I mean, how many blogs have I looked at once because they posted something I wanted to learn more about only to forget about them thirty seconds after hitting the red X? It’s life, and if you want to be loved, adopt a golden retriever.
Those moments when you do tap into something and really connect with people, well, I suspect there are few varieties of crack cocaine that can measure to the high. Someone at the DMS called them “little pellets of love”; you know, the tiny charge that you get when you open your Facebook and see the little red number in your notification section. “People are interested in me! Yay!” Same goes on Twitter when we get a retweet, or a new follow, or a reply from a celebrity we really admire, or on WordPress when we get the notification that somebody liked, commented or shared our work. When one finally does cross that fabled Rubicon from giving it away for free to receiving the first cheque for something we penned, does that vindication truly compare to the spiritual fulfillment of knowing that someone, even a stranger, really digs us? I suppose in those cases by contrast when we’ve written something that really pisses people off, the money compensates for the death threats.
What then, is the lesson for today? It’s karma, sports fans. Ya gotta put it out to get it back. And as my learned better half is wont to tell me when I sink into the occasional bout of self-pity, you need to write to touch people, not to prove how smart you are about things no one cares about. You’ll see, I’m sure, when Hooked is released, how Tele does it. Hopefully as I continue along here I’ll get better at it. And we’ll see where the ocean takes us.
Graham's Crackers 