I’ve been having trouble making progress on my current novel in progress. There are always glitches in these things. Usually if I get hung up on something for too long, I switch to another project for a while and then when I come back to it I can make some headway.
That hasn’t worked.
We put warning labels on all sorts of things.
I read fan fiction with some regularity, and it has been customary for some time at most places where one can post such stuff for the authors to include “trigger warnings.” Trigger warnings didn’t start on fan fiction sites, they were first used on forums where people discussed topics such as rape, rape prevention, domestic abuse, and so forth. The original intent was to alert people who suffer from psychological trauma that the story or commentary they were about to read contained intense and graphic description of one or more common areas of trauma. Psychologist refer to events that cause a person to relive a traumatic event a “trauma trigger.”
Now, one can understand that in a discussion dedicated to a topic such as domestic abuse, that from time to time descriptions of specific cases of abuse might come up. One can also understand that among the people who might be reading content on such a site will be people who have suffered actual domestic abuse, and they are seeking information, or recommendations, or just commiseration. So the original notion of “trigger warnings” in those sorts of places makes perfect sense.
One can also understand that in a fiction-publishing setting sometimes people will write stories which include the bad guys doing bad things to the hero, or to innocent bystanders who will need to be rescued by the hero. So if one is familiar with the notion of trigger warnings, it is understandable that one might decide such warnings are warranted on some stories.
But when you see a 700-ish word story sporting three dozen trigger warnings, one suspects that perhaps someone has lost sight of the purpose. I’m sorry, there is simply no way that in 700 words you can graphically describe that many different potentially traumatic events.
The problem is two-fold. People are worried that they’ll forget to warn someone about something, and someone will be traumatized, so they figure it’s better to be safe than sorry. On the other hand, a lot of people who don’t suffer from psychological trauma get all upset if they accidentally read something which is merely distasteful to them.
Now, I understand that people have a right to not look at anything they want. I have certainly gone on a rant or two about certain themes and topics in certain works of fiction. When I run into those topics, I may get angry or disgusted. I may literally throw the book across the room. But I do not have an actual panic attack. I do not relive an actual traumatic event.
I simply stop reading the stupid book.
That sentence right there is a great example of this phenomenon. There are people putting trigger warnings on stories merely because one character calls another “stupid” once. There are people who insist that trigger warnings are needed for one character calling another stupid once. There are people who insist that the word “stupid” is completely unacceptable in any civilized conversation—as unacceptable as reaching across the table and stabbing someone in the eye.
That is unintelligent, foolish, and utterly lacking in any understanding or sense of perspective.
In other words, that is a stupid.
Yes, it is extremely rude to call another person stupid. It is also true that one could write a scene where one character heaps a lot of abuse, including using the word stupid, on another character that could be intense enough to trigger a traumatic memory for a reader who survived an extended period of verbal and emotional abuse at some point in their past.
But if the word pops up in the dialog of a scene depicting two characters engaging in verbal banter, that story doesn’t deserve a trigger warning. What makes the other scene a trigger is not merely the inclusion of the word “stupid,” but the intensity of the entire abusive behavior of the character.
Getting back to a person’s right not to read something: such a right does not entitle you to a guarantee that you will never inadvertently see, read, or hear things that you find distasteful. You are not entitled to a world in which you only see what you want. Your fellow humans are not obligated to contort their own lives, words, or artistic expressions in such a way that your delicate sensibilities can never possibly be violated.
Courtesy dictates that we observe the niceties and comport ourselves in public and social situations in a manner that won’t cause harm or humiliation. But the obligation is to refrain from behavior and speech which could reasonably be expected to cause someone pain or embarrassment. Describing an autopsy at the dinner table can reasonably be expected to cause some people to feel nauseated, so it would be rude to do it. Telling that story of the drunken, debauched weekend you and some buddies had in college during the best man’s toast for one of those buddies, in front of parents and families of both the bride and groom, can reasonably be expected to cause embarrassment and perhaps instigate an argument between the couple-to-be, so it would be both rude and stupid to do it.
But mentioning that you are really sad that Dry Soda has discontinued their kumquat-flavored soda* in the presence of a friend of a friend who years ago had a beloved aunt die in a tragic kumquat-related accident, and mention of the fruit always makes the person break down into sobbing? It’s not at all reasonable for you to anticipate that, so you are not rude or insensitive for doing it.
And, let’s be real, here. Even if we accepted the notion that it’s reasonable to warn about a single instance of a single word, how could you possible do that? “Warning, mentions kumquats?” The warning itself would be the trigger!
* Seriously! I like the Blood Orange flavor which they brought out to replace it, but I really do miss the Kumquat Soda.
I lot of people were sharing a blog post last week by Gavin Aung Than called “BILL WATTERSON: A cartoonist’s advice.” Watterson is the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, and Than being a web cartoonist, has long admired him. I read someone else’s re-blog of the text and tweeted it out to my followers. I didn’t realize that the text was only part of the post. He also drew a comic in Bill Watterson’s style, using excerpts for a commencement speech Watterson gave way back in 1990.
It’s an awesome cartoon and you should go look at it.
In the accompanying post, Than quotes some things Watterson wrote by way of introduction to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.
As the blog was linked and re-linked, I saw a few people, some of them Big-ish Name types, who seemed to be angry about Watterson’s decision, made years ago, never to license Calvin and Hobbes for any merchandising. There were never any Hobbes dolls on store shelves, never any Calvin and Hobbes lunch boxes or action figures. Just the comic strips, and various books collecting those strips together.
Watterson stopped writing and drawing the strip years ago, and because he refused to license either the characters or the strip, that means that Calvin and Hobbes came to an end.
The angry people take issue with Watterson’s decision (made many years ago) to eschew merchandising deals. If I follow their logic, they think it is hypocritical of Watterson not to license his property because the book collections are a form of merchandising. If he was willing to publish books, then why object to anything else?
I have several responses to that, but I’ll try to keep it to three:
1. Reprinting is not merchandising. The original strip was visual art and text published in newspapers. The books were collections of the exact same visual art and text. Republishing your original art exactly as it was is not the same thing as letting someone else make action figures which may include things you would have never had the characters use, for instance.
When this was pointed out, I saw at least one commentary complain bitterly about the fact that a certain number of unlicensed window clings are out there, showing Calvin pissing on a corporate logo, or praying in front of a cross. “And that’s all we’ve got!” Unlicensed things will happen whether Watterson licensed the characters or not. That is happening outside of his control, and it seems more than a bit illogical to blame him for that.
But the heart of the objection is revealed in that “that’s all we’ve got!” In other words, they’re angry because they can’t buy those hypothetical lunchboxes or dolls. This gets me to the second point, in which I will paraphrase Neil Gaiman:
2. Bill Watterson is not our bitch. Neil Gaiman famously explained to a fan who was complaining about George R.R. Martin not writing the next Game of Thrones novel as soon as the fan wanted that he isn’t entitled to complain. To translate Neil’s argument here: the people are complaining about Watterson’s decision as if their reading of the strip and/or buying the books constituted a contract: they bought the books, and now Watterson is obligated to do everything in his power to create (or allow to be created) things that they want.
Bill Watterson doesn’t owe us anything. While he was still creating the script, he did his best to tell us an engaging story. That is the only obligation any artist has to their audience: to do their best. He created characters that millions of people loved, and he told stories about them that millions of people enjoyed. How can you complain about that?
3. Bill Watterson’s life is his to live as he chooses. We don’t get to dictate what project he undertakes or what goals he pursues. He chose to end the story of Calvin and Hobbes while it was still doing well, because he didn’t want the quality of the stories to degrade, as has happened with other series which continued too long. In doing that, he was still fulfilling the only obligation he had: he was doing his best. He knew that continuing the story would not be his best. So he stopped.
We can disagree with his choice. We can be disappointed that there isn’t another Calvin and Hobbes strip, or a Calvin and Hobbes movie, or whatever. But we aren’t entitled to begrudge his choice.
You liked his work? You are free to re-read it. You want something new? There are artists out there creating new stuff. Go find something you like, and support a new artist or writer or singer or dancer or something.
I would usually at this point proceed to advise, “if you can’t find something you like, maybe you need to try creating something of your own, not fan art or fan fiction, but something that’s yours.”
Except the sorts of people who feel as entitled as these complainers do, they need to work out their overblown entitlement issues before they can create anything worth our time and attention.
When I wrote, yesterday, about why fiction is not the same thing as lying, I may have given the impression that storytellers are in the business of imparting The Truth (the definitive article), or at the very least His/Her Own Truth when telling a story.
We aren’t.
I over-complicated things, I think, by including the anecdote about parables and a Biblical literalist of my past acquaintance. I’ll try to steer clear of anecdotes today.
First, I don’t believe in one and only one truth. Yes, in certain circumstances, such as certain types of mathematical problems, there can be one and only one correct answer, but that’s dealing with a very restricted system of factual discourse. Truth, with a capital-T, occupies a different realm than facts. There is always room for another way to look at things. There is always a circumstance that we haven’t considered—sometimes because we don’t have the necessary framework to even imagine the circumstance, yet.
When I tell a story, my first obligation is to tell the story the best that I can, while remaining true to the story. That means, among other things, not holding back. Bits of my self will be revealed in the story. A poet might say I leave a part of my soul in each story; I think of it more as my notions of what is True will be evident—not so much in the words spoken by any of the characters or even the narrator, but rather in the way that things come about. An author’s fundamental beliefs inform how the story is structured, what consequences occur, and how those consequences are framed.
I’ve written about characters whose worldview is diametrically opposed to mine, and I’ve written them convincingly enough that readers assume what the characters say is my belief. I’m not being deceptive when I do this, and it isn’t even something that I’m thinking about at the time I’m writing. Once I imagine a character, I have to write them as they would react and as they would speak. If I don’t, the character isn’t believable. And I don’t mean just unbelievable to the reader—if I stop believing in the character, I can’t write them any longer.
Most stories have more than one character, and often one or more of those characters are opposed to the others. That means that a little bit of each character’s truth has to be in the story, as well.
So even in the first draft stage, a story will contain a number of Truths, some of which contradict each other. And other than trying to remain true to the vision I had when the story first came to me, and to the integrity of each character, I haven’t been thinking about a deeper truth or meaning. I’ve been focused on the story. But there comes that ah-ha! moment, when the story comes together for me, when the story reveals a truth or two I hadn’t been thinking about to me.
But that’s just the beginning.
Once I have put the story together as best as I can and reveal it to an audience (whether I am actually telling the story, or writing it for publication), an entire new kind of truth enters the picture. Because each reader will receive the story through their own perspective, and each will find their own truths within it. They may also see and recognize the truths I saw as I wrote the story. They may see some of the truths I wove into the tale along the way. They may agree or disagree with any or all of them. But if the story works, they will also find a truth of their own in there. And it may well have little to do with any of the truths I put in or that I discovered.
Other readers will also find their own truths, and each may be very different than that found be any of the other readers.
And all of those truths are real.
And by truth I don’t mean a life-changing epiphany. Sometimes we have something like that. More often it’s something as simple and mundane as, “some people never catch a break.” Most often it’s something much more ephemeral, and hard to put into a single sentence.
It’s my story, and I poured some of my self and my truth into it, but once I tell it to you or let you read it, it’s your own meaning that you find.
My story, but in the end, your truth.
When I was 18 and a member of an evangelical touring choir, we were on a weekend retreat. We’d spent the day rehearsing, having a Bible study or two, and otherwise prepping for an upcoming tour. Of course, there was also time to socialize and otherwise get to know each other. And somehow one of those conversations turned into one of the guys asking me and the other sci fi geek why we liked reading lies.
I think my first response was to talk about the value of imagining what might be possible. I thought his beef was with science fiction specifically, but it soon became clear that he thought all fiction—including things such as Romeo and Juliet—were immoral collections of lies.
“If it isn’t a true story, then it’s a lie; and we shouldn’t listen to lies!”
I called his attention to parables in the Bible, and he became offended. The Bible is true, every single word, he insisted.
“But Jesus told parables. They are made up stories to illustrate a deeper truth,” I argued.
“No,” he said. “Jesus knows everything that has happened and will happen to all the millions of people who ever lived. And he told true stories that had happened.”
I just had to shake my head and walk away. As my great-grandpa, Shorty, was fond of saying, you can’t talk sense with someone who hasn’t got any.
I was reminded of this recently when a writer made a joke about writers and politicians, and how they both tell lies for a living. I’ve always cringed when writers referred to what we do as lying, because it isn’t.
Oxford’s definition of lie begins: “an act of instance of lying; an intentional false statement; an untruth; something that deceives; an imposture.” And if you look up imposture, it’s “a willful and fraudulent deception.”
Some people might say that “fraudulent deception” is a redundant term, but they’re wrong. A lie is intended to mislead or otherwise betray your trust. A story doesn’t do that.
A story may consist of a completely fabricated series of events happening to totally imaginary people, but for a story to work there must be at least a grain of Truth in it. When I create characters in a tale, they won’t resonate with the reader unless they are believable, and a storyteller can’t make them believable without drawing on true things about human nature.
When I tell a story, I am not trying to delude you into believing something that will harm you, or steal from you, or otherwise enrich myself by diminishing you. When I tell a story, I am trying to enrich both of us. I hope, in the process of hearing/reading my tale, that you experience some happiness, and perhaps have an insight or two. I hope that I will experience the joy of creating something and sharing it with you.
This doesn’t mean that when I tell a story I start off with a message that I want to convince you of. I have, foolishly, written some tales like that, and have always regretted it.
The best stories, instead, come from a place of wonder and curiosity. Sometimes, such as in one of the collaborative projects I’ve been involved with, it’s reading someone else’s story and having one of the characters in the tale pop up in my imagination telling me what happened next. Sometimes it’s walking down the street, listening to music, and seeing something on the ground that makes me ask, “How did that get there?” Sometimes it’s two characters springing to life in my head and arguing about something.
I don’t know what alchemy happens in my subconscious to create stories. I do know that when I’m writing the first draft, one of my motivations is to discover how it ends. Sometimes I think I know how it’s going to end when I start. And sometimes I’m even right, but I seldom know exactly how I’m going to get to that ending when I do. Other times I know very precisely how it ends, and all of my writing work is trying to figure out where the story starts, and then how do the characters get to that ending.
It’s exploring and figuring out all mixed up. I often learn something or find myself looking at something which I already knew in a new way during the course of finishing the story. And when everything falls into place I experience a moment of joy. That moment of joy is something which a storyteller feels compelled to share. Which is why we tell the story, or rewrite it until it’s ready to publish, or otherwise put the story out there.
Of course every writer dreams of the day when he can live off his storytelling. If someone is willing to pay me for a story, I will take the money. But hoping to be paid for a job well done is not about taking from the reader. What I hope has happened is that I’ve given them an experience which they enjoyed, found value in, and that they think is well worth the time and expense.
And as a reader, when you pick up a book, or open a web page, or sit down to listen to a storyteller, you are asking the author to tell you a story. You know, going in, that what he or she tells you will not be factually correct and the people she or he describes are not actual specific persons who did those exact things. You know it’s a story. You want the author to make you believe in the story for a little while. You’ve agreed to go on that journey of discovery, together. If it’s a story you enjoy, if it is a story that moves you, if it is a story that made you laugh, or root for one of the characters, or cry when one of them was hurt, then the story contained some kind of truth.
And that isn’t being deceitful. It isn’t manipulating. It sure as heck is not lying.
“I don’t understand why anyone goes to see movies any more. And another superhero film? I couldn’t be more nonplussed.”
I followed up with the person who posted this to make certain I understood them. They meant that they couldn’t care less about seeing another superhero movie. And they expressed amusement that I didn’t know what nonplussed meant.
I sent them a link to an actual definition.
They stopped talking to me.
It isn’t used often, and I’m quite certain that if the word “nonplussed” doesn’t go extinct altogether, that very soon the word will come to mean “not impressed, uninterested, or unmoved.”
But that’s almost the exact opposite of what it means.
nonplussed adjective, 1. filled with bewilderment, 2. perplexed completely, 3. dumbfounded, 4. rendered speechless or incapable of further action.
The word comes to English from a Latin phrase: non plus, literally “no more,” as in “nothing more to do.” According to Oxford, it first appeared in English in the late 1500s as a noun meaning, “a point at which no more can be done, a dead end.” Within a century it had come to mean a state of being so exasperated by an intolerable event or insoluble problem to the point of being overwhelmed—a point when one is ready to throw their hands in the air and shout, “I can’t take any more of this!”
As time went on, it frequently referred to a situation during an argument or conversation in which one person says something so unbelievable or mind boggling, that the other person just stares back, speechless, perhaps with their mouth hanging open in consternation.
I remember I used to see the word a lot in books I read during elementary and middle school. There would be a discussion going on between two or more characters, and eventually one of the characters, instead of replying to a particularly witty statement of the other, would be nonplussed. I remember trying to work out the meaning from the context, and being confused until I got hold of a dictionary. Then I became rather fond of the word.
I think the problem (besides the fact that people aren’t being taught Latin and Greek roots any more) is that the word doesn’t look like it is describing something as energetic and frantic as “being exasperated to the point of being overwhelmed.” Flabbergasted or dumbfounded are active states. When a person is in that frame of mind they do things like a double-take, or their mouth drops open and their eyes bug out.
Nonplussed looks like a much more laid back, almost contemplative word.
Which is a shame. Dumbfounded and flabbergasted are great words, don’t get me wrong, but neither conveys both the idea of being perplexed and at one’s wit’s end in quite the same way as nonplussed once did.
However, language is a living thing. So I know in the long run it’s a losing battle. Right now, at least half the readers will think it means the person is unconcerned and cool as a cucumber if you do use it.
And that’s a real shame.
As a writer, sometimes you want a character to be mysterious. In good writing this mysteriousness should either further the plot, or speed along one or more of your main character’s emotional arcs. Sometimes, the character just is mysterious because that’s how she or he first came to you, the writer. Whatever the case, once introduced, a mysterious character must be handled with care.
Anyway, there hadn’t been an issue of Hulk in the rack in several months, so I had missed the previous few issues, and I didn’t know how the story line had gotten to this point, but there the Hulk was, and some strange guy in a yellow and blue costume seemed to be fighting him. Of course, I bought the issue. We didn’t learn much about this Wolverine guy in this issue. He apparently worked with the Canadian government and had been parachuted into the wilderness to try to stop the Hulk from rampaging, or something like that. Note the text in the black arrow on the cover: the world’s first and greatest Canadian super-hero!
Note that this is not an X-men comic. In 1974 the X-men were on hiatus. Their magazine was being printed, but it was reprinting stories from the 1960s, for reasons that must have made sense to an accountant, somewhere. The team had never been terribly successful before that. It would be a couple more years before the team was Re-booted (though we didn’t use that term back them), with a lot of new members and only a few of the old, and Wolverine began his off-again, on-again relationship with the X-teams.
For a long time he was a cool character precisely because he was mysterious and always seemed very reluctant to get involved with other people. It’s not exactly an original character type, but generally it worked pretty well. He’d come to help with a specific problem for reasons that weren’t always entirely clear, be gruff and business-like and morally ambiguous, betray a glimmer of affection or respect for one or two characters, then disappear for awhile, only to turn up again and repeat the process.
The problem with mysterious characters is that, if they catch the reader’s attention, the reader wants to know what’s behind the mystery. A writer may keep tantalizing and teasing readers for a while, dropping hints here and there, but you have to be careful, because there’s an extremely thin line between tantalizing and annoying to the point of wanting to take the writer by the throat and squeeze the life out of them.
You don’t want your mysterious character to turn into the Sphinx.
One problem is that the revelations have been contradictory. Subsequent attempts to make the revelations less contradictory pushed his backstory into pure ludicrousness. And his characterization has consequently become worse and worse. He’s a loner, except that he’s joined pretty much every team Marvel has ever published. And has picked and consistently abandoned a disturbing number of adolescent female protegés/sidekicks. He’s supposed to be a highly skilled assassin, except he’s a chaotic brawler. He’s supposed to be an honorable Samurai (with all the training in the ritualized combat/politics of same), except he’s also a savage killing machine. He’s amoral, except he’s noble and self-sacrificial.
Now, when a character is appearing in a series, and written over a number of years by different writers, this sort of thing might appear to be unavoidable. Except that it doesn’t have to be. Batman, for instance, has a much longer publishing and movie history (first appearance in comics in 1939, first movie in 1943 {a delightfully cheesy serial that I happen to have a copy of, if you want to watch the WWII era special effects and dumb cliffhangers}), but despite all those reboots, retellings, et cetera, the central core of the character has been kept intact: witnessing the murder of his parents as a child, he obsessively trains and studies, eventually becoming a dark detective and vigilante who prowls Gotham at night, foiling criminals and bringing the worst to justice. At various points they’ve wandered into the quite campy, to the darkly romantic, and other odd places, but all of the writers have managed to bring the character back to that core.
I’m working with a mysterious character in my current novel in progress. The previous novel, to which this is a sequel, also had a mysterious character—one of my two protagonists. But she wasn’t a dark, brooding person with hints of a tragic past. She’s one of the most cheerful and optimistic characters in the whole book. There were simply mysteries about her from the beginning, hints were dropped here and there, until during the big battle at the end (it’s a light fantasy with epic fantasy tropes, so there has to be a big battle!) a chunk of the mystery was revealed. It was not revealed in a big bunch of exposition. A crisis was reached, and in an act that resolved her internal conflict at the same time as saving one of her comrades (and temporarily thwarting the big bad), her true nature was revealed. I think it worked. It is currently in copy edit, and does not yet have a publication date, so I will have to wait for the readers’ verdict.
I’m a bit more nervous about the mysterious character in this one. He’s specifically hiding his identity for reasons that are both in character and important to the plot. He’s not a protagonist, he is helping one of the protagonists. Because he is specifically hiding his identity, and because his sub-plot is built around trying to protect a young woman who various people want dead, a lot of his scenes tend to be dark, grim affairs. I hope, when his identity is revealed, that the reader goes, “Oh! Oh! Why didn’t I realize that? Of course it’s ______!” rather than, “Yeah, yeah, we saw that coming a mile away…”
Wish me luck.
My friend, Sheryl, likes to characterize a particular form of blogging as “what I ate for breakfast” posting. It’s easy to fall into the trap. You feel as if you should post something, and you may think of your blog as being the equivalent of sitting down to coffee with your friends, so you just babble about minutiae of your life without regard to how many people might actually be interested.
One reason that that sort of thing works in a face-to-face conversation is because there is (usually) a give and take. If you start to talk about the scrambled eggs you made, a friend might comment that they have never been any good at scrambled eggs, or another might comment about how their spouse is allergic to eggs, and the next thing you know, the topic has drifted to something else that everyone is interested in. But with your own blog, without any immediate nonverbal feedback from your friends, it’s really easy to just go on and on…
I try to avoid that, but one problem is that we don’t all classify minutiae the same way. I have posted, over the years on various blog and blog-like places, about my continuing battle with hay fever. That’s why I started titling those posts, when the topic comes up again, “Why I hate hay fever, reason #NNNN” with a new number in the thousands. I hope that the headline conveys to people that I know I’m about to babble about a topic that I’ve mentioned a lot, and even if you are a close personal friend who regularly comments on my blog, I will not be offended in the slightest if you just skip right over the post, perhaps thinking to yourself “Oh, no! Not again!”
A related phenomenon are long and/or frequent blog posts about the purpose of the blog, the nature of blogging, or the philosophy of blogging. Which is perfectly fine to do every now and then, particularly if you’re making a major change, and want to give people fair warning that this blog which used to be about your favorite local sports teams will from now on be all about collecting porcelain dolls.
I’m not making a major change. But based on a couple of comments I’ve received (not as comments on the blog, but either in email or in person), I thought I ought to mention that I’ve been using the Schedule feature here on WordPress, a lot.
Before I moved my primary blog to WordPress, it had always been the case that at any given time I had three, four, or a couple dozen essays/posts on various topics in various stages of completion. Some were completely done, and I was waiting for an appropriate time to post them. Most are only partial drafts. I poke at all of them from time to time, until they get finished and then become tomorrow’s post.
Frequently, thanks to confluences of events and the fickleness of my muse, three, four, or more will all get finished in a single evening or over the course of a Sunday afternoon when we don’t have anywhere else to be. So I wind up scheduling posts to go live around noon my local time over the next three to five days.
One of the reasons multiple postings will get done at nearly the same time is because they are on related topics. I have more than one aspect of a particular thing that I want to comment on, so I break it into different posts and set them to publish on consecutive days, for instance. What can I say? I am something of a motor mouth.
If something comes up that I feel I have to post about right away when I already have a bunch of days scheduled, I bump the others back and post the new thing.
In case you were curious.
“I’m retired now, and thought I’d try to write a book about my experiences.”
This sentence might seem perfectly innocent. And anyone who has spent much time with me knows I’m always encouraging people to draw, write, sing, play instruments, and so on. I think everyone should try to make art every now and then.
I do.
But the above sentence fills me with dread when I hear it (and you may be surprised how many times I have heard that, or a close variation) in the context of someone just learning for the first time that I’m a writer (and editor and publisher). Because in that circumstance, it inevitably leads to them wanting me write their book for them.
They may not put it that way. They usually don’t believe that’s what they’re asking. They just want some advice, they say. They want someone to bounce some ideas off of, they say.
When I give them advice, they don’t like it. “First, you need to write. Don’t talk to people about your idea, sit down and start writing. Don’t know where to start? Here are some excellent books on writing. Here are my recommendations for software to use for the actual writing. Go to my writing web site (sansfigleaf.com), go to the Essays section, and click on the Writing tag. You’ll find over 60 essays I’ve already written on the writing process.”
My favorites are the ones who react to the list of books or the essays with, “I don’t have time to read all of that!” I’m only using the word “favorite” in that sentence half sarcastically. If they are that upfront with their unwillingness to learn on their own, they’re easy to deal with. “If you aren’t willing to read something that can help you achieve your dream, what makes you think anyone would want to read what you’re going to write?”
For a long time, the next most common objection was, “Why do I have to learn how to use a word processor? If my story’s good, won’t the publisher help me with that?” Trying to make them understand just how much time and expense is involved in transcribing a novel length story is always fun. Sometimes I can just go with a variant of the book answer: “If you think it’s too much trouble to learn how to do it, why do you think other people would be willing to do it for you for free?”
This usually leads to me having to explain that books which simply break even are the exception, and books that make large profits for all involved are rarer still. And no one can be certain which books will or will not take off in advance. No matter how awesome your story is, getting a lot of people to just look at it is an expensive undertaking. No one is going to take that chance on you if you make it even more expensive for them than other writers who submit completed stories in proper manuscript format.
There’s a special subset of these who will come rightout and say, “How about I tell you the stories, and you write them up for me? I’ll give you a portion of the proceeds!”
Computers have been ubiquitous in the American workplace for long enough now that fewer would-be memoirists balk at using them. But I expect a rise in the complimentary problem. “Here, let me show you what I’ve written so far!” And they send me a file that consists of a few hundreds words of babble. Sometimes it’s perfectly spelled babble, but it doesn’t make sense. Don’t get me wrong. I am the king of typos. If there is a circle in hell reserved for people who make too many typos, that’s where my soul is heading to in the afterlife. I’m not talking about typos. I’m talking about fragments that don’t quite make a sentence; sentences that don’t connect to each other; and either no paragraph breaks at all, or paragraph breaks that make no sense.
Don’t get me started on the pronoun problems. If I can find a few sentences that make sense to someone who doesn’t already know the people involved, the industry and its conventions, and so on, at all, then there will be a whole slew of he’s, she’s, him’s, and her’s with no way to be certain which he is which person.
No matter how they react to the other questions, if I keep having contact with them, they will ask for advice. However, in the middle of whatever advice I give, they will interrupt because I’m not giving them what they want. They want me to tell them some magic words which will make the whole thing just happen. Or they will try to recite one of their experiences to get me to tell them what part of the book it should go in.
The ultimate problem is that the person most likely to say, “I should write a book about my experiences” doesn’t understand books. A book, even a memoir, is not just a collection of interesting anecdotes. To be a book, there needs to be an overall narrative, something that shapes and unifies the whole thing; some sort of logical flow of one part into the next. If you’re going for a collection of barely related essays, something such as Sarah Vowel or a David Sedaris might write, each chapter or essay or whatever you call it has to have some sense of narrative completeness to it, with a theme that contributes to understanding the other sections.
Your anecdotes may be hilarious when told in person in small doses, but writing is a different language than speaking. An essay is not the same thing as an amusing anecdote. A book is more than just a collection of words. Stringing a few stories together isn’t writing a book.
There’s an old cliché that the difference between real life and fiction is that fiction must make sense. It doesn’t just apply to fiction. All writing, even writing about bizarre coincidences and strange behavior, has to make some kind of sense to the reader. A writer’s job is not simply to transcribe what happened. A writer’s job is to find that meaning, and convey it to the reader in such a way that they don’t notice that the writer is imposing a meaning on the events. A writer’s job is to fool you into thinking that the meaning he has carefully constructed is simply a fascinating experience you are having.
That isn’t something you can learn in a single evening over cocktails.
I’m a fan of lots of things, and I’m used to most people not quite understanding my obsessions. Many of the other kids watched Lost In Space, for instance, while it was running in prime time during first and second grades, but didn’t understand why I still liked to watch the reruns in sixth grade. And none of them seemed to be watching Star Trek when it was on prime time, so I got a lot of blank looks if I talked about it, until years later when it became a big hit in syndication. Similarly, all the kids knew who Superman and Batman were, but thought I was weird for reading the Avengers and Doctor Strange.
Once we finally moved to a town big enough to have a significant sci fi contingent (10th grade), I started feeling a little less like a freak. And when, that summer, the original Star Wars came out, it seemed for a while as if everyone was at least a bit of a freak. Though I still got some funny looks and rolled eyes when people found out that I had driven to a large screen theatre in another state 13 times just to see Star Wars on the highest quality screen and sound system I could find.
And so for the last couple of years I’ve found myself having to explain the appeal of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a show originally intended for little girls.
The truth is, I resisted watching it. When I first heard about the Brony phenomenon, I thought it was mildly amusing, but more because other people were making such a big deal out of young adult men watching a kid’s cartoon. Then one of my friends started showing episodes to my husband while we were all at a comics con together, and though I tried not to watch, I couldn’t resist.
The answer to “why ponies?” is simply that the scripts were well written. Yes, Lauren Faust, the producer for this relaunch of My Little Pony, had wanted to create a show for little girls, but specifically she wanted to get away from the sexist assumptions of most toys and shows aimed at little girls. She wanted a story that treated girls as humans, not little princesses who are only interested in dolls. So the six main characters, all female, are written as six young adults with diverse interests and occupations. We have an athlete, a baker, an animal caretaker, a farmer, a designer/seamstress, and a librarian. The emphasis, in the first season, at least, was less on outlandish mystical villains (though, yes, there are a couple of those) and more on personality conflicts, misunderstandings, and mundane misadventures.
More importantly, the writers don’t generally talk down to the audience. Instead of writing stories that will appeal only to children (or what some adults think would appeal to children), they write character-driven stories.
It reminds me of a theme I read again and again back in the days when I regularly read Writers Digest and The Writer magazine: a good children’s story was a good story, period. Every established children’s author or editor of children’s publications has tons of stories of meeting aspiring writers who have the mistaken notion that writing for children is a good place to start, because children’s writing is easier, because children are simple, right?
Children are people, they just don’t have as much experience as adults. Yes, there are areas of the brain that don’t reach full development until mid-to-late twenties, there are topics that children may not have the emotional maturity or context to handle easily, and there are topics that society generally agrees aren’t appropriate to share with children. Their priorities and perspectives are different, but they aren’t stupid and they aren’t simple-minded. Their stories, therefore, shouldn’t be dumbed-down versions of adult stories.
And that was certainly the case in the first couple seasons of the show.
Another thing I like about the show is the utter lack of cynicism within the stories and so far as I can tell in the execution of the series. It’s just a fun, often joyful experience.
I understand why some people don’t like the show. I understand why some people think it is strange that adults follow the show, organize conventions to talk about it, and so forth. But then, I also think that more people should ask just what the appeal is to so many otherwise intelligent adults of the by-the-numbers, totally unchallenging, practically sleep-written Law & Order franchises.
Come on! What’s with that?
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