This is for a lot of reasons – among them, whether I should care on a general level or on a personal, terrified, this-will-absolutely-affect-my-paycheck level – but mostly it’s because he’s evolved, somewhat, into the Author’s Bulldog On All Things, always ready to scrutinize any new announcement and decipher if this hurts or helps the author’s position.
Spoiler: it usually hurts. Including in this new Amazon Kindle Worlds thing, where Amazon will pay you for your fan fiction, but keep all of your rights for doing so.
[...] I suspect this is yet another attempt in a series of long-term attempts to fundamentally change the landscape for purchasing and controlling the work of writers in such a manner that ultimately limits how writers are compensated for their work, which ultimately is not to the benefit of the writer. This will have far-reaching consequences that none of us really understand yet.
Yep. Business as usual, then.
I don’t have a hugely strong position on Fan Fiction. I’m for it, mostly because I first got my taste for writing by composing (get ready) Warcraft 3 Fan Fiction in anticipation of when the game came out. And most first novels, whether someone knows it or not, are basically fan fiction, closely mimicking a beloved author’s style, putting on daddy and mommy’s clothes and posturing in the mirror.
I know if I ever got to the point where fan fiction of my stuff appeared, and got read, I’d pop some champagne – because it’d mean I did a good enough job making up a world that people feel there are untold stories taking place in them.
But I don’t think I’d sign with a publishing house that would essentially allow people to play around in my house and get paid for it. For one thing, this feels like a scam, and for another, it completely fucks up the authority structure. Who’s in charge of the show? What’s legitimate, and what isn’t? Is there any defining voice owning and articulating the thing?
But, apropos of nothing, if you want my broad feelings on the eternal “internet/e-rights/how do I get paid for this/information wants to be free” mess that’s been ongoing for the past 15 years or so, here are my general, BigMcLargeHuge, perennial thoughts, broken down:
Markets are based on scarcity. The value of a thing is based on how unavailable it is.
The scarcity of art is wildly unclear. Theoretically, anyone could produce art. Therefore, it is impossible to assign a fixed market value to any art.
Because art has no fixed market value, the end user often projects the value onto it – “It should cost however much Isay it costs!” While on the one hand, charging $11.99 or whatever for a paperback and $11.99 for an e-book doesn’t make sense from the scarcity-based approach (“It’s all just bits and bytes! This is ridiculous!”), from a producer/writer’s standpoint, when someone says an e-book shouldn’t cost the same as a paperback, the producer/writer is hearing, “The experience of your art is not worth $11.99.” In essence: “Me liking it should be enough for you!”
Two things will be forever at odds here: “Information/art wants to be free!” vs. “I sure like getting paid for work.” People, like water, are always looking for the more convenient option: as water flows downhill, people will always gravitate toward easier money, and more money. If a writer can exercise their creative muscles in a satisfactory way in a more lucrative industry – movie, TV, etc. – they will do that, and will stop writing books.
These days, we take a lot of things for granted. For example, we take phones and computers and television for granted, assuming that, because they are superfluous in our lives, they must be so in the world.
We forget that this is a position of privilege – we have these things only because we can have them. And as more and more of the world moves online, more and more of the people who can’t afford the appropriate devices lose access to that world.
There are many, many people in the world who don’t spend all goddamn day on their phone because they can’t afford one - the device, the plan, or both. They don’t have the world in their pocket. They have very, very little, and taking away libraries would take away a big cut of the little that they have.
Monstrous inequality aside, hearing “Libraries should be cut BECAUSE INTERNET” makes as much sense as “Schools should be cut BECAUSE INTERNET.” I mean, it’s all information, right? Right, it’s all just data! So let’s keep your kid home, and he or she won’t go to college, and they can just google up a degree, download “COMMUNICATIONS MAJOR” into their brain like Neo, and be done with it, because that’s completely the same as having an in-person, tactile educational experience. Looking at youtube videos is exactly the same as attending lectures and spending a shitload of time in front of a book.
Even if libraries did no more than provide us with a quiet place to read, they would still be worthwhile. Shit, I wish I was in the library right now.
I’m a bit in limbo at the moment, writing-wise – City of Stairs is off being judged and reviewed by any number of unseen eyes, and I’m just sort of sitting here, not wanting to jump into anything just yet because those judgments could be returned at any time.
However, after reading some interesting conversation over on Chuck Wendig’s twitter feed, I got a bit dragged into thinking about one of the thorniest writing questions out there:
To outline, or not to outline?
For those who don’t know, outlining is the process before a writer starts something when they essentially graph out everything that will happen in the book. It can be a summary, a chart, a timeline, however you want it, it’s basically an instruction kit for which part needs to go in which place at which time in order to Make The Book Go.
The benefits for outlining are several: for one, you know what happens. Each time you open up a blank page, you have a good idea of what should be on it. This is hugely valuable, and anyone who’s tried to write anything generally knows that.
For another, you will not forget necessary things. This is actually quite important: a book is a lot of moving parts, with plots surfacing during one point of the book and then submerging – still invisibly operating, unbeknownst to the reader – only to resurface at some incredibly crucial point down the line. There have been times when I’m rewriting something where I realize a character has received a piece of information from a source who has no business giving it; then I realize I had actually thought of a solution to this, and forgot to write it, which means I have to rewrite a lot more than I normally would have.
Which of course makes you ask – do I outline?
No. No, I don’t.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all being that, when I commit to a book, I usually do so knowing the start point and the end point. (I definitely know the end point – the start point often takes some readjusting.)
I know the image or feeling the book should end on; I know what I want the book to explore; I know the feeling and the ambiance and the color of the book; and so on, and so on, and so on…
So I have a very general trajectory. I know what I want to do. I just don’t quite know how I want to do it.
And that’s exactly what I want. I don’t want to know at all. The reason for this being that I am not actually in charge of anything I’m writing, or at least it feels that way. Books are their own things, their own identities, their own beings. Sometimes when I stumble on something that really, really works in a book, it doesn’t feel like I wrote it – it feels like it was always there, and I was just fortunate enough to unearth it.
I know it’s not always exactly quite like that, of course: books aren’t set in stone at the start. But they are organic: they grow and change and shape themselves. They know what they want to be, they have their own momentum, and my primary job is often just to get the hell out of the way.
More to the point, when a book or a character surprises me, that’s when I know it’s really going well. When something surprises the author, then it probably surprises the reader, and that’s good. Anything that throws off the audience but keeps them on the hook is a very, very good thing: the phrase, “That was exactly what I expected,” is not a positive thing to hear after someone reads your book.
A story must have room to breathe, and room to grow, I think. If I didn’t have that when I was writing, it’d take a lot of fun out of it.
But the question lurking in all this is… since you don’t outline, can’t that cause logistical problems?
And the answer is: oh my goodness gracious, yes.
I’ve had times in a book where a character didn’t really become themselves until the final third. I realize then, at that point in writing it, that they should have been this person from the start, so I have to go back and rewrite all their scenes to make them that person. This is actually extremely normal for me – it’s almost my default mode of writing characters. Find out who they are when it really matters, then go back and make them that person when it matters just a little bit less.
And there have been times when I’m writing a book when I think the book is looking at one thing, but towards the end I realize it isn’t, and I have to go back and adjust the path of the entire book until it rolls along and comes to the point where it examines the thing it’s supposed to. (This is less normal – knowing this is what makes me want to write the book. But it has happened.)
Are these really problems? I don’t think so. There are a lot of philosophies about writing, but one I subscribe to most is: writing is rewriting. Hindsight has 20/20 vision, and that’s even truer when it comes to writing. I rarely know what a book really, really is (or was supposed to be, I suppose) until I’m almost done with it. That’s when I have to go back and even it out, provide supports, make sure it’s paced properly – in other words, to use a coder term, to see if it properly compiles.
And I have tried outlining before (to a very loose degree), and in each case it didn’t turn out well. I had a fixed, outlined ending for characters in two different books, but when I was actually writing that book and writing their story, I could feel those endings changing, nudging me to different places… Yet because It Was Outlined, I felt obliged to keep it that way, and I violated their momentum by forcing their arc.
I didn’t keep the final stories in either case. I wound up having to rewrite them all anyway.
So my feeling is… since I usually have to rewrite outlined stories anyway, wouldn’t it be better to not outline at all, and give them the space to breathe and grow and become, well, more of themselves, as the saying goes?
It is a little amusing that I’m primarily cited for Mr. Shivers, the book I wrote when I was 22, which seems so long ago and so absurd that someone thought a 22 year old could do anything of worth that it practically makes my brain hurt.
Old novels are like old photographs to their authors: you recognize that this was you, once, but it seems so alien that you used to be this thing that you can hardly understand it. You primarily see your failures and regrets, the things you didn’t know that you know now: for real life, you see how to talk to the opposite sex, how to behave professionally, how to do laundry, etc.; for writers, you see how this sentence was clunky, this idea was poorly articulated, all this here should have been cut, etc. I know I’m not alone in thinking this: I’ve heard of other authors revisiting their mega-hit works 10 years later with a distinct sense of unease.
I very, very rarely reread anything I’ve written once it’s in its final form. I certainly don’t want to reread Mr. Shivers or any of the rest anytime soon, chiefly because I’m afraid I’ll see all the things I know I can do better now. (I flipped through Mr. S a few times, and I could definitely tell a 22 year old wrote it – but this might be more in my head than it is in the text.) But this is part of doing anything, in that you must make mistakes in order to learn how to do better, and just because you made a mistake in a work, and learned from it, doesn’t necessarily mean that the work is bad. It just means you know more now.
And as a note, I am the sort of person who tends to believe that the thing he’s currently working on is The Best Thing Ever, and everything he’s ever done before was Obviously Just a Warm Up for The Best Thing Ever. Then, when I finish The Best Thing Ever, it immediately becomes another Warm Up. So I guess I’m saying I’m a pretty shitty judge of these things.
It’s an interesting idea, to me. Writing is a highly individualistic process – it’s one of the few jobs you can do entirely alone, inside your head. (Getting it published and read, however, is a huge team effort.) And it’s an extraordinarily complicated process as well, brimming with conscious and subconscious associations, connections, ambiances, tones, many abstracts that one can hardly articulate – an odd quality for a process that is, in essence, articulation.
I will say this: the actual articulation portion, for me, and I think for many writers, occurs when I’m faced with a blank page. When I say “articulation,” I mean the actual putting words behind one another, finding a way to make the events and people in my head manifest on the page. This is the actual work of writing, and – for me – it’s not unlike a salesperson who’s gone out and made a lot of deals having to come back to the office and log all those deals in the company database.
This is probably a hugely reductive metaphor, one that does a disservice to the actual manufacture of prose. A lot of incredibly important gears engage when you sit down and start to parse out sentences – and that’s the only time they engage. But in some ways the metaphor is correct, because the punching of keys and arrangement of prose is not the whole of writing.
For me, writing occurs almost as much off the page as it does on. Writing is a thing I never stop doing: some portion of my brain, in some respect, is always writing. Sometimes it’s a very negligible percentage – 1%, maybe 2% – and sometimes it’s very, very large, 80% or 90%. But there’s a lot of middle ground, when I’m mowing or folding laundry or driving or waiting to fall asleep when my brain is writing at about a 30% to 40% capacity, when I am pushing big blocks of ideas around and seeing what fits where. (My wife notes that there are times when she’s telling me something important, and I’m not meeting her eyes but my lips are moving like I’m whispering – and that’s when I’m probably figuring out a piece of dialogue in my brain. Before you ask, yes, she absolutely hates this. Don’t ever ask me to get something from the store – I am wildly unreliable.)
I get a lot of work done this way. I come up with an idea, take out my phone, and shoot myself an email that’s sometimes just a snippet of dialogue or an order myself to cut this or add that. My gmail is currently at 60% capacity, using 6.1 GB of my 10.1 GB, and I’d guess that a good 10% to 15% of that are emails from myself to myself – they don’t have huge memory requirements, because they’re just 5 to 10 words, but there’s so many that I’m sure they make a dent.
But I’m not always writing the book I’m currently concerned with: there are a lot of pet projects I mentally compose, usually something akin to fan fiction or movie scripts. Many times when I fold laundry I’m mentally preparing myself for the time when everyone forgets about the M. Night Shamylan movies and I can have a go at writing the Avatar: the Last Airbender movie scripts myself. Or, I’m dreaming of the day when I get a deal from FX and can make a serialized Batman cartoon myself, a slightly more grown up version of The Animated Adventures, a show that’s zippy and fun but has all the complicated institutional interplay of something like The Wire.
This isn’t probably productive work, but it’s hugely necessary nonetheless: writing is a mental state you have to be able to slip into and slip out of easily. It’s something you need to learn how to activate and catalyze as much as you can. It’s both a muscle and a meditative state, a part of yourself you need to go to whenever you’re able. So even if what you’re writing isn’t something you plan to sit down and, well, write, it’s still important to mentally flesh things out, develop a feel for what’s working and what isn’t, and…
Well. You never know. Those good scenes in the silly little projects you dream up might wind up working exceptionally well in a big, important project much later.
The book is science fiction, but has at least a splash of horror, unsurprising for a novel by a Shirley Jackson Award winner. Horror is a deeply subjective genre – second only to erotica – and I’m not particularly put out by tentacular grotesques or things that go chitter in the night. Or rabbits. Those who find their nightmares haunted by the chitinous or oozing, may find the horror more pronounced. But in any case, these things are pressed up against more suburban horrors: the desperate need to keep up appearances, a stifling marriage, parents who sacrifice their children for the protection of a powerful patron. It’s the combination of the two, the mundane and the Lovecraftian that give the book an unease that seems to radiate from the pages.
I’ll be checking on the AMA occasionally throughout the day, so if you have a question you’d like to ask, please feel free to do so!
Probably one of the most feverishly adored characters on television right now – among a certain demographic of viewers, including myself – is Ron Fucking Swanson.
Why? Because Ron Swanson is old school masculinity to the point of deconstruction. He’s uber-competent. He’s indifferent, and supremely dismissive. He’s self-reliant, and confident. He’s contemptuous of anything emotional or modern. He doesn’t need anything, and he’s definitely not going to ask you for anything. He’s a walking, talking anachronism, an early 20th Century Man (or even 19th Century) living in the 21st Century – without, you know, the racism, sexism, and so on.
A lot of this character’s appeal comes from the brilliant work of Nick Offerman, the actor who plays him. Offerman underplays Swanson to an unbelievable degree, usually donning a dead-eyes scowl and murmuring his lines with a Midwestern nasal growl. And a lot of Swanson is based on Offerman, a Midwesterner, carpenter, and respectful manly man.
As Ron Swanson is, in a lot of ways, an amalgam of masculine archetypes from anywhere from the 1890’s to the 1950’s, it’s worth examining those actual historical eras, and what was happening. This nostalgic perception of masculinity didn’t come from nowhere, after all.
In a few broad strokes, from the 30′s to the 60′s, you had around two whole generations of men who had been in overseas combat and had gone to school on the GI Bill. This was probably the largest civic mobilization of a demographic in American history: not only training generations of men to be highly resourceful, self-reliant servants (while also learning to operate within a system – for what bigger system is there than the American military?), but also actually, genuinely teaching them, sending them to school to learn things they never got the chance to before.
And that’s probably a huge factor: the men Ron Swanson seems to reference were likely the very first people in their family’s history to achieve this level of education and success. These people were given incredible opportunities (under incredibly hardships, of course) at a time when America was firing on all cylinders. I sincerely doubt if any large demographic is or could be placed in such a sweet position today.
In addition, it’s worth noting that these opportunities in those eras were only offered to a select few. Women did not get any of those opportunities, so that’s half the population right there that’s not competing. Minority males may have gotten some degree of these opportunities, but I’m willing to bet that whatever they got was a much-reduced package in comparison to what white males received.
Today, kids are entering the world with a terrible economy, a poor public education system, and an astronomically expensive greater education system that does not train them to be resourceful or self-reliant, but instead prepares them to do one thing – electrical engineering, essay-writing – very, very, very well.
So yes. Kids today, especially males, will probably look back on the men of the 40′s, 50′s, and 60′s, and feel like they haven’t done the same. They will feel lesser – unaware that though they’ve received plenty of opportunities, they aren’t the same as the previous generations, which got to use those opportunities in a relative vacuum, with few other demographics competing.
But things go beyond the historical perspective. Not only do we not have the opportunities that created men who were, to an extent, like Ron Swanson – we also don’t have much need for one of their greatest virtues.
We don’t do that anymore
The appeal of Ron Swanson (and the fundamental appeal of general masculinity, I think) is the concept of resourcefulness. Ron Swanson doesn’t buy a house: he goes out in the woods, chops down 30 trees, and builds one. He doesn’t get his car serviced: he fixes it himself, and if he needs a part he smelts one in his own goddamn smithy.
Not only do I think that, on the whole, that’s not what we’re training or preparing coming generations to be, but I also think that way of life is more or less defunct. We’ve developed our economy and our culture in a manner that it’s easier to buy a new shirt than it is to fix your old one. If your kitchen appliance breaks down, we are not trained to take it apart and fix it – we just go to Target and get a new one. We’re slowly entering a stage of post-scarcity, where we have an abundance of goods, and a better use of your time is not to fix or repair the cheap thing you have, but to get a new one – something the people in the 30′s, 40′s, and 50′s probably thought was unimaginable.
This also extends to cars and computers. Apple specifically makes it so you can’t take Powerbooks apart and noodle with them: they want you coming back to the store. Cars these days are more computers than machinery, and I dread the idea of trying to do work on my Prius. (Cue my wife laughing immensely.)
This isn’t to say that this is a good or a bad thing – it is what it is. This is the world that we’ve chosen. We’ve opted to maximize individual buying power over individual resourcefulness. Ideally, this means we spend less time on the day-to-day minutiae of living – mending clothes, fixing cars, fixing your house – and more time on greater abstracts previous generations didn’t have the time for. (Reality television, pornography, etc.)
We’ve made a trade, in other words, but I think we’re discovering that we valued the pride derived from that resourcefulness more than we thought.
I think it’s time for a reconceptualization of what we think it is to be a man.
I was thinking of my own ideas about masculinity, which change the older I get. I’m not a kid anymore. I have a wife, a son, and I essentially work two to three jobs. I don’t spend three hours a day at the gym like I used to. I don’t drink beer all the time and I don’t rotate through a series of women. And I don’t especially know a huge amount about home repair or fixing up my car. (Landscaping is another matter, though.)
So what I do I, personally, think of as masculine? Well, I was casting around for an icon manliness that would work in the 21st Century – or indeed any century – and what I came upon was a little less Ron Swanson, and a little more…
Aah, yes. That’s a lot more like it.
So I started thinking about the qualities I found masculine in Atticus Finch – wisdom, humility, devotion to family, being conscientious of others, a willingness to stand up and take action when needed – and I started to realize something.
What I was identifying as masculine in Atticus Finch was not actually masculinity: they were basic moral tenets. This isn’t stuff that makes you a man: these are things that make you a good, decent person. Anyone can have any of these qualities and still be considered however the hell you want to be considered – they’re functionally genderless.
Being a good person is manly. Being a good person is feminine. Being a basically decent person should be, in other words, the centerpiece of any sort of ideal human being, regardless of gender, creed, or nationality – and doing so does not detract from that ideal, whatever it may be, but only add to it.
[...]Bennett has produced a novel that defies easy description, blending elements from genre and story into a rare hybrid that can appeal to all lovers of well crafted tales. When I recommend this book in the future, as I know I will, I will take an approach I save for only the most prized books on my shelves. I’ll simply ask; do you like to read?
