Wishful Thinking: Readers
There’s nothing wrong with wishful thinking, so long as you don’t rely on it. Sometimes the object of our wishful thinking is not a bad idea in and of itself, but is not practical to initiate or expect at any given time.
I engage in wishful thinking, and so do you, whether you admit to it or not. In this case, I have some wishful thinking about readers.
Mainly, I think it would be nice if more readers dug more deeply into possibilities when looking for something new to read. Beyond genre, and even beyond subgenre. If more of them were at least a few times ultra picky, ultra specific in what they were looking for, I think more unknowns, such as myself would get discovered.
There are millions of self-published books, and any given author is going to get lost in the crowd if they don’t have a lot of luck and some promotion savvy. My book will no more magically appear in front of the eyes of a reader who might like it than will a pot of gold. I get that, and I am doing my damnedest to figure all that out so more people will buy my books. (With limited success so far.) But that is in the non-wishful think world. In wishful thinking, people wouldn’t settle just for what is easily right in front of them when they search two or three keywords, or scroll through one genre, or one best seller list. They’d decide they wanted to take a chance on any book that contains their mega-specific set of interests, and seek out same by conducting a search that takes more than a few minutes. By doing so, they may discover they are a niche that an unknown author is writing for already.
I have done this as a reader. Searching for, “Papal, Vatican, suspense, mystery, political” I have found more than one book, and in one case, have read more by the author of same because I liked what I read so much. Books that combine those subjects and tones and genre aren’t exactly flooding the market. But because I decided to put in the extra effort to seek out books by authors (traditional or self-published) that contained so many of my particular tastes, I found someone I might not have otherwise found.
It is the authors who conceive the books, write the books, edit the books, or find the agents, make the revisions, do the promotions, engage in the marketing, make the connections. Use keywords, write synopsis, go to conventions and conferences and so on, all in an effort to stand out at the right time in the right place among the endless books out there. We do it, albeit reluctantly at times, because what choice do we have? All so one day someone, or thousands of someones will notice the book and choose to read it.
The reader is the one who hears of the books, gets it and reads it.
I’m not angry about it, but every once in a while, if the majority of readers put in as much effort as some do in finding something unique to read, we may just have more of both happy readers and happy authors.
Collaborative Learning Forced on Introverts? How About Not?
The subject matter in this article in The Atlantic annoys me. If you have read even a little of this blog, and certainly if you have known me for more than a few hours, you’ll know why once you read it. I don’t want to rehash an entire article, so go ahead and read it first before reading this response. It’s about introverts being left increasingly behind by design of our educational institutions in this country.
Read it? All right. Now some of my thoughts on the matter.
It stinks.
Not exactly my most probing commentary, I realize. Yet it absolute covers my feelings on it. Ridiculous, tone-deaf, unfair, short-sighted and typical would also have worked to describe my assessment in brief terms. (I guess they just did, in fact.)
I imagine that these types of collaborative work spaces are effective for a fair number of people. But the assumption that it is the apex of “human evolution” or whatever hoo-hah that one paragraph said, (to me it’s not even worth the time it would take to research the exact quotation) is as arrogant as it is misguided.
To me it’s like spending all day in school ridding kids of local accents, so we all sound like we come from New England, because hey, the Revolution started there. Or forcing left-handed children to write with the “correct” hand. (Our society used to do this.) There is a difference between access to, or brief exposure to a perception and process different from your own, and being shoehorned into an uncomfortable alternative while a captive audience in a school, because “human evolution.”
I’m introverted. Do I strike you as unable to advocate for myself and my beliefs so far?
I for the most part hate “group work” when the result is mandatory. In my experience, the kid who is loudest, or thinks himself the smartest or at least the funniest dominates the group, and nobody stands a chance to contribute their own ideas to the mix, unless the yell louder, more often, or enter into an equally unproductive confrontation with the boisterous types that also tend to take charge of such “groups.” That is “leadership” in more and more places in America these days, and it’s becoming an epidemic. I haven’t been to school in years, and it was already somewhat trendy when i did go, and I hated it. I lament for poor kids like myself who have to deal with its near-ubiquity today.
And bless the career of the author of this article for including this sentence, (one that is worth quoting exactly)-
“Meanwhile, some advocates for ‘active learning classrooms’ write about ‘breaking students and faculty out of their comfort zones’ like it’s a good thing…”
That’s at least partially in tune with my notion that forcing people out of their comfort zones for its own sake is not noble. When exactly are the more extroverted people in classrooms supposed to be made uncomfortable by sitting down and keeping their mouth shut and listening to somebody else talk for an extended period of time? By considering the possibility that someone quiet might have the best idea in the group even if they do not shout, and that everybody should calm down and listen to it for a moment? Have half of the kids in our class room step into that zone for a semester, then call me about comfort.
If I sound frustrated and annoyed by the concept making classrooms and universities more extroverted, as well as the attitude behind it, I am. If i sound like I am declaring extroverted efforts out of line for everyone, and collaborative learning to be worthless, I am not. I’m not against giving extroverted students, or those who thrive on energetic interaction in school being placed in situations that suit them. But let’s stop acting like those situations are some sort of ideal to which we must aspire, dragging kids along who obviously don’t want such. Let’s stop criminalizing the subdued and the quiet. Make sure they do not avoid their responsibilities in school, naturally, but make sure those responsibilities are in line with who and what they are.
Cussing in Fiction
Years ago a (now former) friend of mine agreed, with enthusiasm, to read an early draft of a novel I’d written. (Not the official first one I published this year. I never developed the novel I’m referring to in this story.)
I got her address, boxed it up and mailed it, all the while excited about what she’d think of it, wondering what suggestions she might make. I was twice as excited when she confirmed that it had arrived a few days later.
The next day all that excitement went away, replaced by irritation and disappointment. My friend emailed me.
“I’m sorry, but there are curse words in this book. You didn’t tell me there would be curse words. I can’t get past chapter one. I’ll have to stop. I’ll sent it back.”
Way to go back on a deal, right? And way to be sanctimonious about life. (There is more than one reason we are no longer friends.)
She informed me, after my stunned objections, that good stories can be written without “resorting” to “curse words.” This after I told her I was going for realism, and that there were some bad people in the novel. It didn’t matter to her.
Though I eventually left both that novel and that friend behind, I’ve never forgotten how it made me feel to be told that in essence my manuscript was not readable, after just a few pages, because someone in there said, “Damn it all,” or the equivalent. Characters, plot, theme, the vast majority of my prose, none of that could possibly have any value because, “I can’t get past the curse words.”
I sometimes wish that as a parting gift years later, I’d have mailed her not a manuscript, but a crowbar, with a note attached saying, “for the stick up your ass.”
Harsh? Yeah, probably a bit. On the other hand, get a clue. She knew this was based on some historical events, and that it involved royal intrigue and murder. That, she was ready to embrace, but the word “shit,” just crossed a moral line.
She’s not alone in this assessment, I know, but she was the only such person to read that manuscript.
Not that she altered the course of my future writing. When I think a curse word will work, or is realistic I use it in my fiction. I will continue to do so, unless writing a kids book, or some other genre that requires a particularly curse word-free story. Even then, only if I think there is such a story that I need to to tell. Story first, or what are we to make of anyone who writes a murder mystery?
Using curse words is for poor writers. Jumping right to bad words just proves you aren’t creative enough to come up with another way of conveying your meaning. It’s lazy.
Writers hear this literary pontification all the time, but is it as true as it is snooty? Yes, but only indirectly. What should actually be avoided in our writing is laziness, shortcuts, distractions. Curse words can be used in all of these poor ways, but so can twist-ending, character stereotypes, or any number of devices. If you don’t like to read or hear common swear words, fine, own up to that and be done with it. But don’t go out of your way to blanket their use as “bad writing.”
Let’s face it, sometimes a lack of swear words take us out of certain kinds of stories. Would a thriller set in a Bronx police precinct feel authentic, or naive if nobody in it, good guy or bad, ever swore? It might end up being an interesting literary experiment, possibly even a masterpiece of language and diction. Yet it would not rightly be considered a “gritty thriller” that takes place in anything like our own world. At that point, the criticism for cussing doubles back on itself; it becomes lazy writing to plug in a non-curse word every time. Who is using the crutch now?
Just as using a curse word is not de facto lazy, avoiding them is not de facto creative.
“Jake, I’m so tired of your feces.”
That line conveys something, and does so without a curse word in it. We probably have a general understanding of how Jake has made the speaker feel. It’s a correct, clean line as far as that goes.
It’s also patently absurd. It’s an atrocious, hackneyed, juvenile replacement, that outside of parody would almost certainly never be uttered in anger by a single human being on this planet. Using it would bring any semblance of story skidding to a halt, and proceed to beat the reader senseless with a wooden beam that has, “I, the author, refuse to use swear words because I’m clever,” burned into the side.
And yes, the opposite is certainly true. “I fucking hate going to the fucking store with that fucking stupid fucker.” I grant you, lines in this extreme are often deemed gritty and en vogue, and thus get better press. The truth is, though, it’s not any better than the feces line, because in this case the swear words are being used to establish cheap (and false) gravitas. This is what needs to be avoided, not curse words in their own right.
Truth be told, even when going for a realistic tone, I don’t have as much swearing in my fiction as I do in real life. At least not in the stories I’ve written so far. Just like good writing doesn’t include every single “er” and “umm” it probably doesn’t need to contain every swear word the average person in the situation would use. Yet to ban all of them, unless writing a children’s book or heavily religious fiction, does more harm than good, to me.
Christmas Creep…For Writers
September is in its final act this year. October is checking itself out one last time in the backstage mirror before making it’s entrance. (And there is my quota of theatre metaphor’s for the day.)
The Halloween stuff has been out for two weeks or so. But just as October lies in wait to take over for September, the masks, candy corn, plastic skeletons and witch’s cauldrons in the retail world don’t have to crane their metaphorical necks very far in order to see partially open boxes marked “Christmas” stacked up in the store rooms.
We, too, the consumer shall see the Christmas stuff trickle onto shelves and displays in a matter of weeks or less.
Christmas itself may not quite be around the corner, but “Christmas Creep” certainly is-the concept of retail businesses providing Christmas-oriented sections of their store, complete with decorations in some cases, in a theoretical effort to spark an early start to extra holiday spending. Though, as retail friends of mine have also explained, starting early is also a necessity because there is much less time available during the actual holidays. Fair enough.
So there are economic and practical reasons for Christmas Creep. And if you love Christmas, or have had a rough summer for some reason, you may find yourself poking around your Christmas playlist a bit early any given year, for a pick-me-up, if you like Christmas. So there’s a fun/spiritual element to it as well.
As the temperatures around here very slowly but noticeably drop, and the inevitable retail shift I described becomes imminent, I’ve been thinking about how author’s sometimes experience something similar to Christmas Creep. Sometimes we think about and plan for, and in some cases actually construct the ending of our stories before the rest is finished.
I would have love to shared a clever title for this phenomenon, but “Climax Creep” sounds pornographic, and “Denouement Creep” sounds either like a chess opening strategy, or something so pretentious that few mere mortals can process it.
The point is, it’s understandable in many cases; the climax or the final scene in our fiction, especially in longer works like novels, is one of, if not the most important parts of our story. I myself often have a notion of the ending of a piece even before I start work on the first draft. I feel free to change it, but I often do not.
Yet I try not to jump right into the ending. I knew how my first novel, Flowers of Dionysus was going to end for years before I finished it, and even before I started it. Not that I have a problem with writer’s who do so. If writing the ending first helps you write something to completion, I am all for it. I’m just trying to say that though I understand the temptation to start early on the end for which you are so fond, especially after you’ve been dragging through the dreaded middle, I don’t usually choose to try that myself.
Just as I don’t choose to do Christmas whole hog until it truly is Christmas time. I’ll admit to listening to a few Christmas songs in the early fall, and sometimes as a gag for a “Christmas in July” sort of thing. But I don’t decorate, generally don’t watch movies, and I don’t put up a tree. (Though my guess is virtually nobody does this months in advance, though one never knows.)
Setting aside the obvious depressing possibilities, Christmas will of course come, whether it creeps into early fall or not. Even in retails stores, people would still begin to spend more liberally come November, even if the Christmas stuff wasn’t out until after Thanksgiving. I look at writing a piece the same way. It may seem like it’s taking forever, and a lot may change in the middle, but the ending will eventually come. You’ll arrive at the exciting part eventually, unless you abandon the piece. (I have no Christmas metaphor for this, however.)
Who knows? Maybe some day I will jump right to the end of something I’m writing, and work backward, or otherwise in random order from there. If this is something you do, I’d be interesting in hearing about your process. But for now, I try to let the calendar of both the year, as well as my creative output, unfold in a linear fashion.
Merry Christmas.
Fall TV Shows. Meh?
Fall TV season has begun, or will soon begin, depending on the show. I read a magazine previewing all the new shows, and you know what? Almost none of them appeal to me.
This isn’t a critique on show business. Well, not exactly. In fact, by most metrics, television has somewhat eclipsed the movies as the place for the most creative writing. (At least according to studies and such. Look them up, they weren’t important enough to my point to track down and link to from here.)
The actual point is, I wonder why so few new shows appeal to me. not just this year but over the last several years. I’m a tad picky, it’s true, but not so discriminate that I have to be blown away by every single minute of television I ever watch. I’m capable of just being entertained without witnessing genius. But I at least need to feel some kind of hook, and generally I don’t when it comes to new shows. The last time I felt something sort of like a hook of interest was a few years ago when Elementary was the new show. Though I’m not riveted to that, I do still watch it. That, and Doctor Who. (Which sometimes goes a year or more between new episodes.) And I’m not a Whovian, as it were. I just watch the show as an escapist thing.
So I watch one current crime show, and one current escapist show. Everything else I watch is either news-oriented or on the various “old school reruns” channels.
Of course, the last few shows that I started watching were cancelled. I don’t remember all of them, but it seems a few times over the last ten years, whenever I would choose a “new show” it ended up cancelled. Maybe I’m not ready for a commitment after so many heartbreaks.
Who cares? Probably nobody. But I write about it now because I’ve been wondering lately if it is the offering on TV, or if it is me that is is flat lately. Not that there’s anything wrong with flat per se, but it’s not the first thing I want to be, of course.
Maybe I’ll just pick one of the shows at random, and see if I get hooked. You can’t always judge a show by its cover, of course, and it would be nice to have something else to talk about on the net sometimes, within the show’s community. Then again, even when I watch shows, I don’t often feel the need to discuss them with other people.
Man, maybe it really IS me.
Ty Unglebower 