Audience

My sister-in-law recently commented on the different reactions people had to the same movie. She watched October Baby with church friends, and again with school friends, and found a disparity in focus. Her church friends thought the movie was all about a young woman’s discovery of her adoption, then survival of an abortion, and the forgiveness and healing that followed. Her school friends were more interested in the burgeoning relationship between the protagonist and the guy who is not her boyfriend in the beginning but obviously will be by the end because his eyes are the most dreamy, or something like that. I happen to know that my sister-in-law’s father (who is incidentally also the father of my wife) thought of it as a story of a daughter facing difficult revelations at the same time that she is leaving home, and how a father learns to love her through the transition of their relationship. Movie critics tend to agree with the church crowd on what October Baby is about, although many stood on the other side of the argument; they took it to be a smarmy, disingenuous attempt to undermine the pro-choice position.

Perspective is one of those things that writers do a lot of thinking about. You can completely alter a story by shifting the narrative from third to first person, and exchanging a disembodied omniscient narrator for a personal, fallible one. Likewise, present tense can be more immediate and impactful but also irritating, so past tense should be considered as well. Then we get embroiled in the world of the characters, using whiteboards or reams of notebook paper to keep track of who knows what and how each would react to which bit of information, and it’s easy to forget the most important perspective of all; that of the audience.

It’s all about the audience. We can talk about artistic integrity all day long but in the end we have to eat, and it is the audience who pays us. All art consumers bring their own worldviews, personal prejudices and kinks to the table when they read and watch and listen, and each will willfully, gleefully misinterpret the art as they see fit.

My writing audience tends to be exceptionally small, usually a single English instructor, and in my experience English instructors have been relatively easy to please. Show a working knowledge of the material, bonus points if you reveal an interest as well. Make sure your citations are done correctly and you’re good to go. I’m looking forward to the time when I can worry about what my greater audience will think, but in order to do that I need to get an audience.

One gets an audience by being published.

One gets published by submitting content.

One needs content before he can submit it.

Well folks, my clever insight about audience just got turned into another reminder of my procrastination. I’ll write, I swear, just as soon as I finish my coursework and...

Net Value

I know a guy who cuts people up for a living. Of course, he does sew them back together again when he’s done. He’s one of the best and they pay him handsomely for it, because when he’s through people can walk again, or run or just shuffle around the house but the common thread here is that their lives are substantially better after they come out from under his knife. There’s another guy I know that is into building systems, specifically those having to do with water. We just blithely breeze into shops and offices and homes assuming that they have running water, useful for drinking and washing our hands and flushing away our rancorous waste to destinations both unseemly and unknown, we care not where so long as it is not near us. This guy knows where that water comes from, how it gets to us, and where it goes when we are through with it. He knows because he designed it all. He is also compensated, not with quite so princely a sum as a surgeon, but well enough.

We value things like health and clean water, and you can tell by the way we pay the people who give them to us. In fact, you can learn a lot about people by the way they spend their money. Americans like the ability to go anywhere we want to whenever we feel like it, as evidenced by the large market for motor vehicles and the oil that fuels them. We like to push our physical limits where sleep is concerned, so there’s money to be spent on sugar and caffeine. We like to be entertained, so we pay the cable company, and we prize our relationships, so we trade our hard earned clams for internet connections, data plans, and the multifarious devices with which we navigate the web and stay in touch. How do we come up with all of this money to spend? By giving other people things that they want, of course. It only follows that if you have something they really want, they will give you more money to spend on things that you really want. Looking at it this way, it’s easy to quantify your own personal worth using dollars.

Calculating your net worth is not as simple as figuring how much you make, though. You also have to consider how much you spend, and how much you save. Take me, for instance. I bring in a governmental check through the GI Bill, but it’s frankly not enough to offset the tuition that I incur. I also do the cooking and grocery shopping, making sure we stay under budget with our food expenses, and let’s not forget child care. I am worth more for this house for the money I save as a child care provider than I could make at a job with my current credentials. However, I also have this nasty book habit that is usually taken care of at the library but sometimes… sometimes the library doesn’t stock what I need. What, then, is my net worth?

Then there’s the question of net value, which is not the same as net worth by a long shot. There are things out there that elude quantification via raw currency, things that we all have, things we can choose to trade or give away in hopes for a different kind of wealth. Time is one. Monarch, middle class or miscreant, we all have the same amount. What is part of the value of a Jimmy Johns sandwich? Is it that it tastes so much better, or is it that it arrives that much faster? Would anyone put up with a dialup connection now, in 2013? I hope to sell a book some day, but I just recently recognized that books are more of an investment than the mere dollar amount because of the time you must spend reading one. Even the fastest readers cannot consume the book faster than the two and a half hours it takes to watch the movie version. Sure, it’s not the full story, but does the full story justify the time? The movie is almost as good, and it is so much shorter, so much more efficient in communicating the gist of the story. Therefore, when I write anything, this blog post included, I have to try extra hard to make sure that you come away believing that what you just read was worth the cost, be it time or money, that I exacted from you. This is why it is so hard to get people who are not friends or family to read your work, and so difficult to get unbiased opinions from those same friends and family. When people you know decide to read your work they are not simply investing time into the piece, they are also investing their time in you, in the relationship, and when they critique it they are taking that relationship into account. Because of the relationship factor I only half believe my friends when they tell me how great my writing is; I am terrified that what they are really saying is “I think you are a nice person,” which is gratifying to me as a person, but not helpful to me as a writer. Nice people don’t sell books. Nice people don’t make people think, or light fires in their hearts; good writers do.

That being said, lavish compliments (deserved or not) inform me that I am valued. Time spent over lunch, a warm slap on the back, a brief exchange of embarrassingly terrible puns, all tell me that I am worth something to someone, and I prize these moments above any amount of paper bills. Frighteningly, this intangible relationship value can and often does work in reverse. Money is always involved, but does it measure the true cost of divorce? A life insurance claim can cover the costs of a funeral, but does it salve the loss of a son? Our relationships can build and destroy wealth faster than a casino on the Vegas Strip.

It is with much relief and just a little wistfulness that I admit; my worth as a writer is and always will be only a small part of my net value.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

Emotions have been running a bit high in the news media these past few days. In case you didn't know, a black ex-Navy Reservist ex-cop posted a manifesto and killed some people. He is now dead, presumably from a self inflicted gunshot after a siege, but there are some questions as to whether the L.A.P.D. conducted themselves in a strictly legal manner or not. Politicians on both sides are trying to figure out how to use this, for gun control, the race debate, due process, veteran care etc. In the meantime, innocent people are dead and we won't ever get the whole truth because you can't try a corpse, but America doesn't care about that so much because the whole thing has the makings of a great story. A dark, edgy anti-hero wronged by The Man, fighting for justice until he met his fiery end is truly compelling stuff, so we'll roll with that. The news media knows this, so that's what they will give us. It doesn't matter if the truth reveals some gaping plot holes in their narrative, they will omit and ignore facts that don't fit the storyline they want, which is really the storyline we want.

Journalists claim that they aren't in it for the story. They claim they are the fearless, unsung heroes on the front lines fighting a grim, ugly war with greedy capitalists and power mongers alike, ferreting out the Truth, defying the status quo, bringing balance and perspective to the fore,  defending the defenseless with the power of the pen, the mike, the poignant question, the headline and the teaser (tonight at 9!). It turns out, though, that Truth doesn't sell ad spots. Stories do. Conservatives love to vilify the "liberal media," and liberals adore cursing Fox News and radio talk shows, but the truth is that no news outlet has an opinion. They do have a bottom line, employees to pay, expenses to write off, and hungry tummies that need to be filled. The media is simply a market that sells to consumers and those consumers happen to be liberals and conservatives. The media will tell us what we want to hear, according to the market they serve, because if they don't we will stop listening to them and they will have no jobs. Therefore, they will brand themselves as investigative journalists and chase the emotional stories, the powerful stories, the stories that tell you how your side is the bright, shining beacon of good sense and the other side is full of selfish, misguided demagogues. If it turns out that the girlfriend with leukemia that died in a car accident wasn't real, or the cycling cancer survivor was 'roiding, or the blue collar hero who stood up to a Presidential candidate didn't actually have a plumbing license, well, we'll ignore it for as long as possible. Those things ruin the story, you see. It seems it's only a matter of time before CNN cuts a deal with Jerry Bruckheimer.

I've heard people scoff at fiction. They scorn the genre novel as a waste of paper/pixels. They deride the people who read that stuff as delusional escapists, and claim they personally don't have time to be entertained. It's a farce, of course, and the media knows it. "Here we are now," we shout, fist fulls of money raised high, "Entertain us!" and the news media will always oblige. If you want to be outraged they will douse you in vitriol, if you want your heart to be warmed they will smother you with perseverance and honesty and cuddly puppies who beat the odds. You can find all of those things in fiction as well, but the difference is that authors are honest about their dishonesty; we admit that our stories are lies. It's up to you to decide who you buy your lies from.

Motivation

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about value and worth as they relate to our commodities of time and money, but I’d rather not write about that today. I’d like that idea to marinate for a while longer, and hopefully I will soon have something cohesive to say about the subject, perhaps something earth shattering and inspirational. Today is not that day.

Instead I have something slightly related that has been both lurking in the back of my mind and just leaped out at me a half hour ago as I was reading Shelley for my Brit Lit class.

Why do we write?

If we want to be boring the answer is obvious. We write because we want to communicate our ideas, but there are a hundred more ideas tied to this conceit (yes, exactly 100. I counted them). Why do we want to communicate? Which ideas? What makes us think these ideas are worth communicating? Are you getting some kind of validation from writing? Do you want to change the way people think? Do you want to make them happy, make them afraid, do you want to entertain? To inform? Why? Why?

Wordsworth and Coleridge and Blake, all three were poets who wrote in rebellion to John Locke and Cartesian Dualism which is fine, but notice that Locke and Descartes were philosophers, not poets. Philosophers shaped the world these three railed against, and philosophers shaped it after. If you really want to change the world with a Liberal Arts degree, the English department is not the place to start! Shelley wanted to fight injustice, but again, he was a poet. When you hear about the movers and shakers of social reform his name is not on the list. Wilberforce is there. Shelley isn’t. If social justice was his aim then politics may have been a more efficient choice. We see that poets don’t change anything. At best they serve as a marker of the times, showing what some people were thinking during the French Revolution, for example.

I think of the writers that I have met and talked to, and there is no uniform answer to the question from them. Writers are creative people, we do things without questioning it and this is often the point; we express our thought and/or emotion and throw it out before pausing to modify them, edit them, make them fit into social norms that people can look at and read and wear without feeling uncomfortable. If we knew what it was that we were saying or doing and why we would be tempted to temper it down because we also tend to be needy, we crave acceptance just like anyone else. When we are afraid that our art is too much we worry, we try to change it, and it becomes something that it shouldn’t have been. What I am trying to say is that most artists, writers included, have no clue why we do what we do and this is a good thing. When you ask us we will come up with some silly answer (like the one above) that we may or may not believe ourselves, but we don’t really know.

Maybe a better question for me is “why do they make me read Shelley?”

High-purr-bowl-ee

There's a phrase that has gained some small amount of popularity regarding mictruation and specific breakfast cereal. The particular words are "Who peed in his Cheerios?", but my attractive and soft spoken wife likes to up the potty room ante by changing the voiding action to defecation; "Who pooped in his Cheerios?"

I like the common version because it invents a humorous possibility for the antagonist's chagrin,  noting that their sour attitude is disproportional to the situation, yet simultaneously somewhat excusing them for it. It's a wonderful way to quickly communicate the notion that yes, you recognize that you are not the only person that this unpleasant individual has had to deal with today and they likely have a reason to be so openly hostile, but gee whiz, you  weren't the cause of the annoyance, do you really have to be the one to reap the harvest of animosity? That, and it's funny to think of some bloke just unzipping his fly and urinating in a bowl of milk in a provocative demonstration of disregard for social norms, at least, it was for the first dozen and a half times. My wife's version goes a little too far, though. Pee is quite bad enough in my opinion, but turds in the cereal are simply outrageous. Everyone has to suffer a little pee in their heart healthy morning meal, but I really would want to know who it was that pooped in his Cheerios, and see the offender punished. But mostly the reason I don't like my wife's version is because it leaves the speaker with no place to go. Poop. In the Cheerios. Nuclear option dropped (pun absolutely intended) in round one, there is nothing left to say. Hyperbole has struck once again.

Language is a wonderful, exciting thing. In it we have the means to express every feeling in every degree. We don't have to settle for the generic descriptor "happy," we can choose "comfortable," "thrilled," or "orgasmically delirious." Each of these communicate a specific point on the vague range of happiness and this is useful to writers because all we have is words. You can't see the heroine's face to gauge the exact kind of fear on her face, whether it is the "am I going to have to touch that?" face or the "is that thing going to devour my innards and lay eggs right behind my eyeballs?" face. Instead we use words like "squeamish" and "terrified," and the reader gets the picture.

The problem is that all storytellers, whether they are paid professionals or weekend warriors gathered at the water cooler, have a need to over dramatize. Otherwise the listeners are not suitably impressed, which is the entire point of telling a story in the first place. Thus, the temptation is to turn the descriptors up to 11 every time, which is fine if you can pull it off, but afterward you have no place to go. In my military experience I heard "the F word" a lot. This single word can be used to describe the gamut of human emotion, relying on volume, context, prefixes and suffixes, and tone among other things, to communicate the exact version you are attempting to evoke. The problem is when you are in the habit of yelling it at the top of your lungs when you are, say, perturbed. What are you left with when you become upset, or truly angry? I have seen grown men reduced to gibbering, raging idiots because they had no way to communicate their emotion other than to use their stock reaction over and over again.

The only defense against hyperbole is to possess an extensive vocabulary and a conscious effort to use it. I encourage you to build your vocabulary by reading. If you aren't encountering new words when you read, find a smarter book. I promise there are books that are both intelligent and fun, you just need to look for them. If you have a broader vocabulary you open yourself up to better reception and delivery in your communication. You won't regret it, I promise.

Austin, Ephron and Jobs

The other day a friend of mine mentioned watching You’ve Got Mail on the television. I hadn’t thought about that movie in a long time but I know it well, as it was one of the ten films that my family owned on VHS. Thinking about it now, it occurred to me that this particular artistic endeavor has much more to say in 2013 than it did in 1998, though I’d imagine most people won’t be bothered much to think about it because let’s face it: You’ve Got Mail was so 15 years ago, and as far as artistic efforts go it wasn’t exactly Sundance fodder or Oscar bait. One of three movies starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, it was just another light hearted rom-com, though executed better than most.

You’ve Got Mail was also the first movie in which I recognized reverent reference to other art. I was familiar with parody, of course, but You’ve Got Mail borrowed from Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice without mockery or plagiarism, and I felt very smart for seeing it. Not that it was hard to recognize. Joe blatantly says to Kathleen, “You are just like Elizabeth Bennett, from Pride and Prejudice” in the third act, and the similarities between Joe and Mr. Darcy are not exactly subtle. The parallels do not end with the key players, however. Austin’s Mr. Collins has a  striking resemblance with director Nora Ephron’s Frank Navasky; both have similar relationships to the leading ladies, both are unnecessarily verbose and not a little socially awkward, but each of them enjoy an implied happy ending off page/camera. It turns out that many, though not all, of the characters in You’ve Got Mail borrow heavily from Austin’s most popular novel. What I didn’t know until just last week was that the plot also heavily borrows from a play by Miklós László called Parfumerie, a tale in which a man discovers that his anonymous pen pal is really a rival coworker. Added to that are the multifarious handwaves to all manner of art and artists, including but by no means restricted to Joni Mitchell, The Godfather, and many children’s books and authors, not to mention the fabulous soundtrack ranging from Billy Williams and Stevie Wonder to The Cranberries. It cannot be doubted that Ephron intended You’ve Got Mail to be a virtual tour de force in artistic, literary, and musical culture.

The film became more than that, though, almost certainly more than Ephron could have known. In addition to being a fun, slightly silly flick featuring more culture than a night at Carnegie Hall, it is also a hilariously tragic timestamp indicating that no one, least of all Hollywood, understood this strange phenomenon called “Internet” in 1998. The characters use dialup and AOL, which are quaint reminders of how far we’ve come in technological and software development, but most telling is what the characters use them for. Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox think of the Internet as a fun and safe way to talk to strangers, which isn’t odd because that’s pretty much what everyone used it for at that time. While the curtain closes on the kissing couple and Harry Nilsson croons a wistful cover of “Over the Rainbow,” it never occurs to Joe that his Big Box bookstore, which is clearly modeled after Borders and/or Barnes and Noble, is in imminent threat from this silly little “pen pal service.” Neither does Kathleen realize that, angry as she is that Big Box is crushing her tiny, personal bookstore, she may soon be supporting them as they battle E-books and Internet retailers. At least Fox Books had actual, physical books being sold by living, if a little incompetent sales staff. These are quickly being replaced by electronic copies with artificial expiration dates and web pages declaring “20 results, see more?”

Of course it all seems so obvious now, after Apple has reengineered our expectations for technological mobility and interface, after the advent of w-fi, streaming and continuous access to the cloud, after we have begun a second Industrial Revolution. Like cavemen using fire only for warmth, we never understood the applications and consequent implications of what we had in front of us. It makes me wonder what we have now that we don’t understand, and where we will be in another 15 years.