Why Piracy is Not Responsible for 'Ruining' Comics [Op-Ed] - ComicsAlliance | Comic book culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews

Comic books aren't competing with other comics or being damaged by piracy so much as they're competing with video games, movies, music, and more. They aren't competing with baseball cards or riding around on a dirt bike any more. Is the latest issue of Daredevil more entertaining than Saints Row the Third? In a way, that's comparing apples to oranges. But to consumers, they're both entertainment options.

I suspect this argument cuts in all directions. The range, breadth, and availability of entertainment has broadened to such a degree that competition between all flavors of entertainment has also increased. I'm becoming convinced it's a cycle, and not simply a one-way street.

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There’s been any amount of talk lately about how comics, science fiction and fantasy, movies, and all the rest of pop culture constitute a new mythology for the age. I go back and forth about this one myself, because one of the things a mythology seems to imply is the presence of some larger belief system about what is being mythologized. Maybe it’s a matter of terminology: would a fairy tale for the modern age imply that much less baggage than a new mythology?

It isn’t as if I think fairy tales sit further down the ladder from full-blown mythos — more like they occupy different seats on the same general bus. One thing I can say about Osamu Tezuka is that he seems to have been comfortable in any of those seats, as well as comfortable driving the whole bus. He created works that were not only mythology for the new age (Phoenix) but which dealt with real-world myth figures (Buddha) — and on top of that created a whole slew of manga which we could comfortably call fairy tales without feeling like either his work or the term itself was being demeaned.

10 Writing "Rules" We Wish More Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Would Break

... "sympathetic" isn't the same thing as "compelling" — a character can be unsympathetic but utterly fascinating and spellbinding. Like a lot of the things on this list, this is all in the execution — if you're going to go with a protagonist who's fundamentally unsympathetic or unrelatable, you're going to have to do an amazing job of making the reader care about him or her in spite of everything.

The Stars My Destination comes to mind as a great example of this. Gully Foyle, the hero — er, protagonist  — is one of the less likable characters of any SF story I've read. What makes him the center of such a compulsively readable story is a) we know exactly what he wants, but we never know how he's going to go about trying to get it next, and b) he does humanize as the story goes on. He begins as a brute, mutates into a creature of revenge, evolves into a spy / supersoldier, and ends as a repentant and a transcender of human limitations.

Theological Science Fiction - Reason Magazine (Gregory Benford)

The point of speculative ideas and science fictional treatments is not to foster propaganda (though many do so, usually obviously and unsuccessfully), but to make us think. As a literature of change driven by technology, science fiction presents religion to a part of the reading public that probably seldom goes to church.

The piece as a whole is only okay — it was written in 2003, and it doesn't trot out a lot of stuff that we haven't heard before and since — but the above comment deserves some expansion.

The Little Red Umbrella: Sell Out: An Open Letter To Young Fiction Writers by Andrea Grassi

Writers shouldn't think of adopting a genre as selling out or pleasing the market, but rather as an homage to their heroes, and a small step towards saving society: an opportunity to reinvigorate the calibre of popular fiction by writing it well.

Good advice and thoughts all around, and it's nice to see more folks coming out of the woodwork and saying something that's been unjustly ignored or snubbed for too long: genres are not evil. 

(Note: My boilerplate Point-In-Time Disclaimer applies for this post.)

Not long ago, in another part of the web, I watched a discussion wherein someone attempted, very unconvincingly, to defend the position that money should be abolished. He had no coherent idea about what to replace it with; in fact, he didn't seem to be of the opinion we should replace it with anything.

From what I could tell, he had far bigger problems than the fact he was stumping for a not-very-defensible idea in the first place. He could barely hold a train of thought long enough to complete a sentence, let alone complete it coherently.

But out of that grew some thought on my end: would there come a time, far enough in the future, where money might well be abandoned as no longer serving any useful purpose? Note that I'm not talking about a "cashless society", but a society where the very concept of money has been ditched.

I didn't think this would happen, and here was my reasoning for same.

I've been hinting on and off about a new novel-length project, Flight of the Vajra, but I haven't actually talked about it in detail for a couple of reasons.

One, I'm always a little reluctant to reveal a lot of details about a project in progress, because things could change quite radically between now and the final draft, and I hate the idea of looking like I'm pulling a bait-and-switch. Earlier this week I read about how Dostoyevsky fed his original draft of Crime and Punishment to the flames after realizing his story deserved to be told anew in a better way. I was appalled at first, but then I realized a) it was his damn story, and b) look what we got because of his willingness to break from his own continuity.

Two, I don't want to get into the habit of substituting talking about my work with actually producing it. I have a deep-seated aversion to such things — I think it comes from having spent time with too many people who were themselves more talkers than doers, and I don't want to imitate their habits if I can help it.

So here's what I'm gedankening: Rather than blog about the book, I'll be talking on and off about themes related to the book, posted under a general topical heading (Flight of the Vajra). Some of the stuff I talk about there may make it into the final draft; some might not. At the very least you'll be guaranteed an interesting time.

As they say in advertising: Watch this space.

(Smartass voice from off-stage: "Why, what's it doing?")

After reading Nick Mamatas's sarcastic advice to would-be writers, I have to agree with him on one point: there is a great deal of advice being flung around for writers, and most of it is little more than a way for some writer to justify what worked for them. From what I've seen, most of the writers out there who have made it are too busy actually writing to bother with such overbaked homilies.

That said, here's my take on his rules. Nothing dogmatic here, just some observations from my side.

1. Don't give up, but don't get a swelled head either.

If you want to write, you almost certainly will continue to do so without any incentive other than the reward of writing itself. What you need to want even more than that — assuming you have it — is the willingness to look at your work as egolessly as possible and improve it.

2. Show what needs to be shown and tell what needs to be told.

There is no golden rule for this; you have to figure out on your own what the thresholds are. Look for other examples of showing and telling that seem to work; compare notes with others whose opinions you trust.

3. Be yourself.

You're a writer, sure, and you want your work to be noticed. But you're a lot of other things, too. Don't crowd that stuff out of the picture, because those things feed back into making you a better writer (and, most likely, a more balanced person.)

Most people are going to be more interested in you as you-the-person instead of you-the-writer, especially if you aren't published yet — and sometimes even if you are. If you're a schlub, work on that first. It'll benefit more than just your writing career.

4. Be yourself on the Internet as well.

See #3. Just remember that anything you type in anger at 2 A.M. is probably not going to help your position.

5. Aim ahead.

Don't aim for the top; aim forward. The "top" is arbitrary. Selling a million copies of something is a very narrow definition of "success" — it's nice, but it's not the whole picture, and it can be misleading.

Finish the work you have in front of you, make it the best possible work you can in this moment in time, learn from what didn't work, and move on to whatever else you have planned. Kurosawa said it best: "When I am asked what my favorite of my films is, I say 'My next one.'"

6. It is what it is.

It helps to be able to see your ego for what it is and what it's trying to do to, and, in, your work. The more you practice this, the better you get at listening to it when it matters (as in when you need that voice to give a story its particular force and energy) and ignoring it when it's just getting in the way (as in when it's telling you to leave in things that simply do not help).

7. Revise as you must.

The more you actually write, finish, and revise, the easier it gets to tell what needs another round and what doesn't. Some things are best left as-is in their first white-hot incarnation. That said, you should always consider anything you produce worthy of a second look.

8. Write every day.

Sorry, I have to dissent on this one. The question of how much is open-ended, though. A thousand words, two thousand, five hundred — none of those are absolutes. Pick something that fits your life. If you find the ideal number is zero, at least then you won't be kidding yourself.

9. Don't think about the goals.

This is my way of stepping around all those other recommendations in one swoop. The more you get hung up on addressing arbitrarily goals (and believe me, they're all arbitrary), the less interesting writing itself seems.

If you dread the idea of sitting in front of the keyboard that much, either confront the dread or get another hobby. You'll be much happier either way.

10. Get out and live a bit.

Writing isn't like anything else, and neither is life itself. Go get some life under your belt so you have something to write about. Watching movies is not life. Reading other books is not life, either. They can add to life, and they often should, but they aren't substitutes for direct experience. Don't draw on the way people interact on TV when you can draw on how they interact right in front of you. And if you're not paying attention to that stuff in the first place, why cheat yourself?

Will any of this work for you? I have no idea. Why not go find out?

I've added category-specific navigation to the "Next" and "Previous" links at the top of every article. This way you can easily browse back and forth between movie reviews, books, etc. Turns out there was a very easy way to do this in Movable Type; I thought it required a plug-in or some other low-level monkeying.

This serves as a good follow-up to my earlier post about the misuse of sexual violence in fiction:

The Bigger Picture: What happens when we find The Line as viewers? - HitFix.com

... at the age of 41, at about 94 minutes into "The Divide," I reached a breaking point, and I realized that I am pretty much incapable of sitting through one more cheap, pointless, exploitative rape in a movie.