Genji Press

Fan Faction Dept.

2013-05-23T17:00:00Z

Lots of folks have jumped on the announcement that Amazon is setting up a system by which content owners can license what they have to allow officially-sanctioned fanfiction. I don't see this so much as a triumph of fanfic as I see it as Amazon, and maybe the content owners as well, sensing an emergent market ... and perhaps also trying to keep the next Fifty Shades of Gray from getting produced (or at least prevent it from not returning them any money to them in the process).

What's most striking to me is not the fanfic side of it per se but the process being put in place. In essence, this isn't a "fan fiction mill"; it's a streamlining of the pitch process for tie-ins and spin-offs — things the creators usually set up on their own and then hire in people from the outside to write for them. But if they have a veritable army of people willing to do the job, why not let them have at it? (Assuming that doesn't tick off the established professionals who worked hard to write for such a thing, only to be displaced by a bunch of upstarts, etc.)

And what more, it's not the content creators that seem to have been the trigger for this process. Rather, it's the pipeline — Amazon — sensing a market that has yet to be created, and doing what it can to bring it into being. Shrewd work on their part. From here, they could go any number of places — e.g., partnering with musicians to allow tracks to be remixed or sampled (and further monetized by all three parties). Just as long as the original content holders have the last word ....

The World Crashes In, Into My Living Room Dept.

2013-05-23T14:00:00Z

The Somewhat Clogged Culture Pipeline | Steven Savage

The Pipeline isn’t doing it’s job. There’s a flattening, blanding, ahistorical problem in our culture. We’re not getting sold things of deep value, we’re getting sold something again and again. Our culture is too important to be left in the hands of simple profit-loss calculations.

The pipeline, as Steven and I have come to call it, is everything that gets culture to you. Mainly, it's the mix of distribution mechanisms that are owned and run by some corporate concern — the Wal-Marts, Amazons, Best Buys, theatrical chains and so on. They're the ones who are actually buying what's out there, which is what makes them so important.

What hasn't gone too closely examined, I fear, is the long-term cultural-ecological effects of this system. Every now and then someone comes along and bleats about "mass culture" (pace Dwight Macdonald once again), scores a few points with exactly the wrong sector of society — mostly the folks who would be happier if everyone threw Harry Potter on the bonfire and picked up some good clean Shakespeare instead — and vanishes in a puff of footnotes. As a result, it's difficult to talk about "cultural pollution" without sounding like a fuddy.

But with each post I write about this topic, with each new slice I take off a different side of it, I see more and more that the ecological analogies are not at all out of line. To talk properly of "cultural pollution" requires we go less into what is being produced than how. We don't worry as much about a factory that is carbon-neutral, solar-powered and cradle-to-cradle with its raw materials, but we have good reason to worry about a factory that dumps sludge into a river and churns out products destined to sit in a landfill and leak heavy metals into our water table. If the world crashes into our living room, doesn't it stand to reason that it'll take out a load-bearing beam or two in the process if we're not careful?

]]> The biggest problem with the pipeline, as I see it, is that it is an unwitting facilitator of cultural pollution. It makes it all the easier to deliver things — but without regard for whether what's being delivered is garbage or gold. Most people want it that way, because one man's garbage is another man's gold (at least, in theory). What's less widely discussed is how, through this system, the gold of a few is being displaced by the garbage of many — garbage not because of what it is, but how it is what it is. A comic book movie by itself is not a problem; it only becomes one when it becomes logistically impossible to create anything else because no one expects the money to be there for it.

Media companies are the same as any other company. They exist to turn a profit, and they will do this by any expedient means. Few of them take seriously the idea that cultural pollution is a pervasive problem — after all, it takes all kinds of tastes to make a world, doesn't it? Sure, but what if some of those tastes come at the explicit expense of others?

Yet another analogy comes to mind, one that Steven ought to find familiar: food. We have more of it than ever now, thanks to industrial farming, and the vast majority of it is terrible — not just bad for you, but coarse-flavored (sugar, salt, fat). Worse, its mere existence creates that many less incentives to cook one's own food. The environmental devastation caused by many kinds of farming shouldn't be ignored either, but one disaster at a time.

The mere presence of the pipeline, I fear, is its own form of pressure to move everything in that monolithic a direction, because the pipeline runs on expectations. If you build twenty feet of shelves and only put four feet of stock on them, people assume something's wrong. Nobody wants a supermarket that's 90% empty; that smacks of famine. People expect there to be something on all those TV channels, whether those people are advertisers, promoters, or audiences.

We have become remarkably aware of how dangerous it is to litter the world with things that poke holes in the ozone, that trap heat in the atmosphere, or that fall to pieces entirely too slowly. We need to consider that the way we make and deliver culture — high and low, sacred and profane — demands an ecological approach of its own.

Waves of the Future Dept.

2013-05-22T14:00:00Z

Steve wonders if the more traditional formats for delivering SF (prose, video) are the best ones:

Science Fiction: The Old Ways Are Best. For Now. | Fan To Pro

... as I read a solid SF novel and muse over what forms work, it seems apparent to me that the forms of novels with a physical footprint and singular/episodic video (television shows, but maybe online) are the best methods at this time.

By this, he means in comparison to "new media" like webcomics and such. I agree with this idea up to a point, but only so far, for a couple of reasons. (Addendum: Rob Barba has his own reply here, which is well worth reading.)

]]> My feeling is that new media (a lousy term, but let's use it for now) are great for getting the word out about something — creating sizzle, drawing attention, throwing off sparks. Think of how many movies wind up being at the center of a whole galaxy of promotional efforts and tie-ins: video games, prequel comics, novelizations, etc. But no one doubts that the movie is ever at the center of all this, in big part because the movie is being positioned as the core experience from the git-go.

The same can happen in different combinations, of course — e.g., the video game that gets a novel backstory, etc. I am hard-pressed at this point to say that a video game can't tell a story that's as engaging as any novel, in big part because we are only just now learning how to "read" and "write" such things, and the whole experiential mode for such things is just now being sussed out. We shouldn't cut ourselves off from future possibilities here. (See also: Haunting Melissa.)

Note that what the core experience amounts to, I am not saying should be confined to any one thing. As Rob pointed out in his other post, what that is could vary enormously, and does.

That said, I see what Steven says about the tried-and-true ways being a good first round draft choice. For one, it cuts down on the number of things you have to invent (or learn anew) to make things work. What's most important about going old-school, though, is it keeps you from falling too quickly into the trap that gobbled up a lot of artists in the previous century: the idea that in order to express something really new, you need an equally new mode of expression to do it.

This wasn't a wholly insensate idea for a world that had had its eyeteeth rattled and then kicked out altogether by two world wars. But what small germ of truth there was in this idea was quickly swept aside when the fact of the experimentation turned out to be far more of an attention-getter than the point of such work. The creative energy expended went all the more into the form, rather than the content, and soon the content of those works became starved to the point where it became fair game to say the content wasn't even the point anymore — that only a country bumpkin of literature would really care about plot or character in the first place. This idea seems a first cousin to another fallacy that gets barfed back up a little too often, the one about there being nothing new under the sun or there only being X number of stories out there, which is cute if you're a historian of literature but deadly if you're a creator of it.

Using an existing, time-tested mode forces you to think about what you are really trying to say. It leaves you with that many less stylistic or aesthetic fronts to put up, less things to hide your work in.

Whenever we talk about the future, we always do so from our present moment in time. That means everything we do in that context is all the more susceptible to becoming dated — not just the content, but the delivery mechanism as well. The more time-tested the delivery method, the more timeless the message becomes — but by all means, let's leave some room for new delivery methods to come into the picture, but for the right reasons. Not because they are "new", but because they work.

Not A Soul In Sight Dept.

2013-05-21T14:00:00Z

Abhorring a Vacuum | New Republic

it is an urgent task of contemporary American fiction, whose characteristic products are books of great self-consciousness with no selves in them; curiously arrested books that know a thousand different things — the recipe for the best Indonesian fish curry! the sonics of the trombone! the drug market in Detroit! the history of strip cartoons! — but do not know a single human being. Such books, congested and anxious, resemble the millipede mentioned by Meyrink, which, when it realizes it has a thousand legs, is suddenly unable to move an inch.

The first time I read these words, I couldn't help but think of the same problem facing SF. If anything, SF has this issue, only even more acutely. It has hypotheses about terraforming, quantum computing, faster than light travel, et any number of als, but it has the worst time thinking about how a single genuine human being who is not an authorial stand-in would live with such things. The shining exceptions get little recognition in either SF or mainstream circles, since they break unspoken rules for both domains.

]]> Fantasy, too, has the same problem in a different way. I think back now to a friend telling me about a friend telling him about this fantasy novel's magical system, which he proceeded to recount in mind-numbing detail. Not one word about the story or the characters, which from the sound of it were all tertiary concerns to begin with.

These things don't just happen because character is hard to know and to do well, although that's a big part of it. Modern SF&F marketplaces train their prospective writers out of being interested in such things, both as creators and as consumers. It's become all the more urgent for creators contributing to those fields to get their cues from something other than the most recent (and increasingly inbred) generations of work produced in them. But if they have no curiosity about such things to begin with, it's hard to get them to believe their attention is worth being directed elsewhere in the first place.

Knowledge of the world is not merely a matter of technical information, although enough of it, and provided colorfully enough, can serve as a dandy simulation of same. This is the sort of thing David Foster Wallace did a great deal, but in the end he seemed a victim of his own approach, not a master of it. His work always seemed like distaff SF to me anyway, and not just because of its subject matter but because of its deeply dehumanized flavor. The few authors who make such dehumanization and technocratic use of language and concept work in their favor — J.G. Ballard, for instance, and sometimes Anthony Burgess — have a gift that was developed first in a domain outside of mere curiosity about a given technical subject.

But in the end, there has to be some curiosity about people — what they are like, what they want, and how they tick. The best writers could never get more than a certain distance from that if they tried, but we seem to be training outselves how to not have to get very close in the first place. Nifty stunt, that.

Template In The Head Dept.

2013-05-20T14:00:00Z

Regular readers of these pages know I have issues with the way mass-market entertainment is pounded out according to a series of predictable formulas. With movies, it's the three-act script structure (the "Syd Field" template), which has become so standardized that not only screenwriters but producers take lessons in how to write scripts like everyone else, less they not know what to look for. Other examples abound, but that's one of the most egregious and obvious of the bunch.

Some folks manage to make the templates work with them, not against them. PIXAR are masters of this sort of thing — well, at least they used to be, until Disney's commercial pressures got the better of their storytelling impulses.

For a long time I had trouble explaining why three-act beat-structure storytelling bothered me so much, aside from the obvious indictment that it was storytelling-by-formula, and that when you do anything by a formula you get nothing but variations on the formula. It took a conversation with a friend the other night to put better words to the objection: it's a conflation of an explanatory device with a generative device.

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When literary theory first reared its tousled little head, it was confined mainly to the academics who were still sussing out the newly-created field of literary studies. This whole business of studying books as books is relatively new, not dating back more than a hundred fifty years tops. Before that, literary theory consisted mostly of individual authors debating between each other about what made for a better story. This isn't to say that systematization was such a terrible thing, but it brought to light a whole slew of new ways of thinking and discussing literature. Some of them have been wonderful: I don't think I would want to do without such delights as Professor Ian Johnston's lectures. The point of such work, though, was to take what had already been produced and slice it along different axes to see what it looked like.

Over time, the components of literature and drama — the concept of the protagonist, the structure of acts, etc. — became regarded by screenwriting as more important than the alchemy of personality, which is what any story worth its paper is really about anyway, but not something you can reduce to a formula. When you wanted to write a movie that worked, in the sense of putting asses in seats and keeping them there for two hours, you didn't want to mess around with airy notions that weren't reproducible. You wanted a process, in the same way the guy running a refinery wants a process for taking the black gunk piped into one end of the place and cracking it into a dozen different parts for a dozen different applications. You wanted the reliable flame of commerce, not the wild sparks of genius, which were so difficult to court and touch off in the first place.

The side effects of such story-manufacturing become clearer when you see how many bad movies can be made that adhere perfectly to the formula. They are bad because the amount and variety of work put into fulfilling the formula has driven everything else off the page and the screen, in the same way the end products themselves displace everything not made along those lines. Just because a given story can be explained according to a formula does not mean the formula is the best place to start when creating a story.

One example of how the formula fails both creator and audience is through the concept of conflict, as appropriated by formula storytelling. Stories are about conflict, we are told, and so every story must have conflict rigorously engineered into it as a way to keep the audience's attention from wandering into the theater next door. The problem is, not all conflicts are built the same. Some are just not as interesting as others, and to use many of them well requires expressing an intimacy of understanding that doesn't lend itself to being distilled into a beat sheet.

Think of all the films that are ostensibly about "family", but simply simply slot in prefab conflicts with the "family" label stuck on them (father dying, kids estranged, wife divorcing you) as a way to fulfill the narrative obligations. Granted, much of what makes one kind of conflict or another worth the while is up to the writer, but the formula — and more importantly, the market pressures of those who use and expect the presence of the formula — gradually drive out more complex forms of conflict in favor of the thuddingly obvious ones.

It's been said that the formula supplies discipline to the storyteller, and to a degree it does. But the next question too often goes unasked: is it not possible for that discipline to be supplied any other way? The formula supplies useful discipline for beginning writers and beginning audiences, but to pre-emptively cut out the possibility for evolution on the part of either party is damaging. Turn all of storytelling into a mere technocratic process, and you don't have storytelling anymore — or, for that matter, stories. You have checklists, and checklists are not by themselves interesting.

It's possible to reduce most anything to a process, especially a technocratic one, as long as you don't mind the long-term damage done to creativity along the way. I am reminded of John Cage's statements about jazz and "serious" music: the former is best left to grow wild, and when the latter derives from the former, the situation becomes rather silly. I did not agree with him entirely — after all, then I'd have to say uncharitable things about works like Bill Dixon's Intents and Purposes -- but I do see where he gets the idea from.

Look, Ma, No Subject Matter! Dept.

2013-05-18T14:00:00Z

From the comments to Science Fiction Repair Shop: A Defect Of Character Dept. (Genji Press), where I lamented the way SF&F authors seem to be untrained in (or discouraged from) digging into personal experience and thus establishing an intimate rapport with their readers:

Going from the idea that there's a loss of intimacy and connection [between audiences and creators in their works], then is it possible that need is acknowledged - in other media? Authors blogging, connecting on twitter, showing up at conventions? Is that in part a substitute for a lack of intimacy in the media itself?

I suspect this problem has been around since long before the recent explosion of social media, so while those things didn't create this problem, they certainly haven't been of much help alleviating it. The root of the problem seems to be the way we confuse merely having an audience with actually having something to say.

Every author¹ craves an audience, and not always for reasons they themselves fully understand. Some write simply because they have a vision to communicate, one with more appeal to the senses or the emotions than the intellect, and where any intellectual content is most likely discovered after the fact or attributed retroactively by others. Some write because they have a specific agenda to advance, whether aesthetic, political, social, or personal. And sometimes that personal agenda is nothing more than the cultivation of an audience: they want to write so they can be heard.

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This by itself isn't the issue, or even an issue. Most everyone writes because on some level they want to be heard, or need to be heard. Such an impulse is not by itself a sin; without it, few people would ever have the impetus to make their work public in the first place. Nobody wants a society of folks like Henry Darger, working in obscurity and silence until they die, and only then having the closet into which they stuffed their opus break open and disgorge its contents.

But the opposite isn't healthy either. Nobody needs a society where the sole function of every piece of written work is to simply create an audience for its author. That's the celebrity mentality, where people are famous for being well-known and well-known for being famous. The merits of them as human beings, let alone creators of anything, are thrown over the side of the boat and left to sink.

I have known too many authors, fledgeling and otherwise, who more or less admitted their main motive for writing was to get some attention. I don't think they felt there was any shame in admitting such a thing, and I doubt they would have let anyone convince them otherwise either. What was wrong with wanting a little of the limelight for themselves? Everyone else does it, and besides, how else is a boy supposed to sell his book?

What goes buried under all this, or maybe forgotten entirely, is how the idea of having something to say is more than about drawing attention to yourself. Storytelling is not merely about making a claim for your cleverness or your inventiveness, although it can contain those things. It is about positing a way things could be, for good or ill, and thereby saying something about our world that can only spring from the cultivation of a philosophy or a point of view.

Such things do not come automatically to people, and do not express themselves automatically, either. They require training and discipline to manifest, and one of the surest ways to never let that happen is to be distracted by all the different clamors for mere attention that the world can send your way.

¹ For "author", freely substitute any other kind of creator.

Mass Market, Crass Market Dept.

2013-05-15T14:00:00Z

In an essay named "Economics Not Culture", my friend Steven Savage asserts that economic processes have replaced cultural ones. I agree, and I believe the problem is even worse than the way he describes it.

I admit this is not a new concept, or a particular profound one. But it has taken on a new and virulent form in the last few years. It is the idea that there is no better way to determine the worth of something culturally by how well it performs in the marketplace — and by that token, the only things worth producing are those which get mobbed on by enough people that no unusual efforts (aside from efforts of scale and scope) have to be made to sell it.

The idea of economics as a cultural force (at least as it is most relevant here) can be traced back to — who else? — Marx. His concern was that capital reduces the individual to an integer in a system that inevitably exploits him. That all had a germ of truth to it, but he missed several other things which severely undermined the predictive power of his work.

]]> Most crucially, he ignored (or failed to comprehend) the way people do not conveniently inhabit one economic role exclusively. A worker is a capitalist the minute he enters a store he doesn't actually work in and buys something with his money. The owner of a business is said to work for himself, but he really works for the clients he has and the customers who buy his products; without them, he's just as hapless as anyone he would be allegedly exploiting.¹ Otherwise, economic boycotts would not have any power.

Out of any economy there can arise a cultural creed: the only things worth creating are the things worth selling. This by itself is not bad, but it grows ugly when compounded thus: the only things worth selling are the things worth selling to the biggest possible audience. Not the audience that is right for the material, whatever size it may be; just the biggest possible audience.

Like Steven, I am not against mindlessness. I'm against the way mindlessness drives out everything else from the marketplace. I've said before that it's not the fact of the success of The Avengers that bugs me, it's the fact that most every big movie from now on — that is, most every movie with a large budget, or a large marketing budget — is going to be a variation on that theme. (It has been for some time now, but this only cements it all the more.)

I've come to think of this not as a failure of creating, or even a failure of capital, but as a failure of marketing — or, rather, a triumph of the most technocratic aspects of marketing. When someone says about a particular thing, "We can't figure out a way to market this", chances are they really mean, "We aren't going to bother figuring out a way to market this, because there's other things we could sell for minimal effort that will get us orders of magnitude more money." The idea of getting behind something you give a damn about is jettisoned, and not just because everyone has to earn a living.

I admit, no business I know of would consider this to be defective thinking. But the problem with such an approach is that it impoverishes the culture all of us are forced to live with, and live in. When the only things left on the market are things that are so, well, marketable, then all the other possibilities vanish. The idea of art for art's sake (which has already gone impoverished for decades) doesn't even rate a footnote, except in a museum — and putting something in a museum is the fastest way to kill its cultural significance.²

What's ironic is how the very companies that can afford to spend the time and effort to market quirky things in the first place simply don't bother to do so. It's just not their job. Every minute they're not trying to sell the next Hunger Games or Fifty Shades of Gray is, for them, wasted time (and thus wasted money). They might well be served better than they think by taking a small portion of the purse they reap from their blockbusters and setting that into a fund to help give a market to things that won't sell millions, but might well find a core audience of devotees. It would be, in essence, a version of the R&D departments at various technology companies that don't have to develop salable technologies, just interesting ones.

Here and there are signs this can happen. Labels like Shout! Factory and the Criterion Collection bring quality (and quirky) work to an audience that's just big enough to justify the investment, and make a tidy profit. But almost no big-box bookseller, movie studio, or record company considers such things worth their time, in part because nobody in the driver's seat at those places thinks twice about the consequences of creating a cultural environment where there is no genuine alternative to anything. Or if they do, it consists entirely of preserving pieces of the past rather than investing in new work for the future.

The long-term consequences of this cultural pollution are insidious and often invisible, like rising carbon dioxide levels. Its most visible symptom is the lackluster, lock-step, by-rote quality of so much of what is put out there, because it is bred to be that way from the beginning. Everything starts to look the same. Ennui sets in. The idea that a work of fantasy could be something other than a Tolkien clone, for instance, seems unthinkable. A whole generation of people grow up with the idea that things cannot be any different, or that the most we can hope for is variations on a theme. Nothing new under the sun, so why try?

I am not going to make the argument that there was once a time when things were better, so all we have to do is wind the clock back. Not only is that impossible, it explains nothing: it doesn't tell you why the current state of affairs is so problematic. There was never a time when Hollywood was not a business and its function was not to buy talent. But the way all this happens now — not just with the movies, but most everywhere — makes it all but impossible for work to exist without it having to pander to the largest possible audience and thus denature itself.

Some would be inclined to say, if folks can't compete, then it's their fault, isn't it? Sure, one grain of truth can be found there: many of the folks who are shoved out of the picture do not want to do the legwork needed to make themselves visible. But not all of them are like that. Some work very hard indeed, and find themselves confronted by the haplessness of marketers who are simply looking for the easiest possible way to do their job: by promoting variations on the already-successful themes.

Tempting as it is to say that's life in the big city, such a homily doesn't explain everything. It doesn't explain why there is such a push not only to find but to construct work that fits all the more readily into a commercial pipeline: e.g., the realms of how-to-get-your-screenplay-sold books, which mostly consist of advice on how to write exactly like every other screenwriter. It obscures the fact that the biggest customers for such work are not the "punters" as they say in the U.K. — the ticket-buyers and seat-fillers — but the pipelines themselves, the big-box chains, the exhibitors, the distributors, the Amazons and Costcos and Best Buys. They only have so many slots to fill, only so many inches of shelf space, only so much effort they're willing to put into promoting something, because of the sheer volume of stuff out there. Anything that isn't worth their time, or so they think, isn't going to be worth anyone else's, either.

The other day, in another forum, people were lamenting the way a lot of moviegoers seem to be ahistorical: they don't care about anything made before they were born (or even made before ten years ago, and to hell with anything in black and white). I doubt this is new, but I do believe, again, it is being exacerbated by current circumstances. It has become all the easier to be sealed into a bubble of one's own tastes, especially when those tastes are informed by what's readily available and popular.

The creators, too, become infected with the same ahistoricity: they don't have any incentive to study anything older than the last wave of goodies, because they don't imagine there's a point to such an exercise. We already know what works, they say to themselves, and then the soil gets that much more fallow for yet another generation. Kiss goodbye the idea that the creator should also be a scholar of the things he is creating.

The real danger of economic behaviors supplanting cultural ones is not merely that we are surrounded by movies with numbers at the end of the title. It is that we lose the power to wonder how, or why, any other state of affairs could exist. It is a failure of many things, but predominantly a failure of imagination, and a society without imagination is spiritually dead.

¹ None of this is to say that exploitation doesn't happen, only that it doesn't always map conveniently into the narratives we often use to explain or describe it.

² There are still places receptive to the idea that you can create something for the sake of creating it — the Creative Commons culture, for instance. But it seems they can exist only in contrast to commercially-oriented culture and cannot wholly replace it.

A Defect Of Character Dept.

2013-05-14T14:00:00Z

The other day I was talking to a friend, doing my usual back-of-hand-to-forehead routine about SF&F, and out came this bit: "I feel like the whole way we go about exploring ideas in SF and fantasy these days is so depersonalized. Not [just] in the sense that there are no characters, etc., but in the sense that there is none of us, ourselves."

The first germ of this complaint sprouted back when I read Harlan Ellison's discussion of Charly a/k/a Flowers for Algernon. The book embodied for him a major, ongoing complaint he'd had about SF — the way the genre had consistently failed to deliver characters worthy of being remembered. Here we have a Paul Atreides, there an Ender Wiggin, but for the most part character in SF is relegated to the back seat, if not the glove compartment, in favor of concept and gadget. It took TV and movies to deliver memorable characters for SF, in big part because you have to go big or go home with such things in those media.

]]> I soon theorized this problem is cyclical. Literary SF&F ought to be well-suited to the exploration of character, but the demands of its creation (read: marketing) shortchange us too often on that possibility. Then the next generation of would-be SF&F authors reads it all, and with vanishingly few exceptions, perpetuates the problem. Fantasy is marginally more often about an intriguing character than SF is, but both are too often starved by lack of influence from writing that is character-driven.

Worse, many SF&F authors assume "character-driven" means "plotless, pretentious drivel", since much of modern literary fiction has become hardened in a way that's just as reactionary and uninventive as the genre fiction it pretends to disdain. They see what's going on in literary fiction right now and, too rightly, find much of it such a windy bore that it isn't worth learning anything from.

All of this I've lamented before, but the most recent bit of insight is into why SF&F isn't more people-driven. The obvious target is the industry end of the equation: SF readers want "action books" and "idea books", not "people books" — never mind that some of the best books in the first two categories are also great books in the third category, if they had examples of same to draw from in the first place.

What's most lacking is the courage to take proper inspiration from outside the genre bubble, and to take it in ways that aren't simply a matter of copying the most obvious external attributes. As a youth, Dostoevsky enjoyed the Gothic thrillers of his day, and even mined their construction and deployment for inspiration, but never failed to enrich them with his larger social and spirital concerns, and the end results were always unmistakably his.

This act of courage, or so I theorize, requires another act of courage to support it — the willingness to go into one's own life and bring back things which are one's own and nothing but, and not to simply mine the rest of the surrounding genre. A work of imagination, especially one in a genre that lays claim to being driven so thoroughly by imagination, needs to embody its intentions as completely as possible.

I come back to this often, if only because I'm now also seeing how little work we do to encourage people to do more than simply imitate the things around them that seems successful. We give them no commercial support structure, certainly, but not much of one outside of that either, no sense of how the cycle of bad work can be broken and replaced with something more inventive.

Made Over Dept.

2013-05-13T14:00:00Z

From the comments to Indie Pandering Dept. (Genji Press)

I think we both discount and overemphasize imagination at the same time. On one level it's viewed as "making stuff up." On the other hand there's the emphasis on how supposedly imaginative people make tons of cash.

And if you think making stuff up is the fast road to riches, I have various water-spanning properties in the Five Boroughs for sale.

I don't think most people believe in the get-rick-quick part of this stuff anymore — well, they'd better not, or they're in for some major letdown! — but I do think they are just as often, if not more so, under the sway of a delusion that is no less damaging, the idea that imagination is nothing but "making stuff up."

]]> My reigning theory: Imagination is at least as much about keeping one's eyes open for things that go unobserved by others, and then using that as the raw material to bring into existence things that seem entirely new. Most anyone can "make stuff up"; few can truly invent.

I wonder how much of our current training in creative endeavors takes this into account. I don't get the impression that many folks in the self-pub / fan-am[ateur] space are taking this approach — not as long as the majority of self-publishing consists of dreary warmed-over versions of what's on the bestseller list.

The Sounds Of Salesmen Dept.

2013-05-11T16:00:00Z

5 Questions for Paul Rhodes [INTERVIEW] | BookMachine - the book publishing portal - events, views and publishing tips

... there is one truism that augurs well for publishing: Great marketing is no longer enough – if your product, be that a book, game or other storytelling project, is substandard, you will be found out, and the days of getting by on reputation alone are numbered. Basically, make a great game/book/product, and build your marketing with confidence from that point.

On the other hand, I no longer believe you can expect a great thing to accrue its own marketing on its own. The magic word-of-mouth we all like to assume exists, the kind where the stone you nudged downhill with your toe turns into a landslide, is as much a product of sheer luck and network effects as it is effort.

That said, I suspect there are very good reasons why those things are a product of sheer luck and network effects. In other words, the code can be cracked if we're diligent, but I suspect it requires access to the kind of metrics and stats that most self-published authors are either not in the habit of harvesting or simply don't have access to.

The fact that each self-publishing platform is an island unto itself doesn't help — it's next to impossible to harvest data from them, since they don't publish it. Maybe a sort of coalition of performance data sharing between self-publishers could be created — a way for individuals to tap into the collective data created by so many people working solo, side by side.

Human After All Dept.

2013-05-08T14:00:00Z

If We Need SF, What’s The Best Form? | Fan To Pro

... my theory is we need the kind of SF that inspires people to explore science and technology and invent new things. Good SF gives us ideas to aim for as it imagines solutions we want in some relatively conceivable manner, or it extrapolates on existing technology that gives us a rough idea of where to go and how to get there. Having these goals and at least vague directions, we get inspired to do things with science and technology.

Steve and I have been going back and forth about these issues (1,2,3) for some time now. My feeling is that every time we start talking about a concept of the future that revolves around what to invent or how to invent it, we are doomed to fall short if we don't think first and foremost about who is going to be inventing those things and why — what kind of human being. The real things we need to be thinking about inventing are not gadgetry or infrastructures. They will be new ways of living, of which those gadgets or infrastructures will play a major role.

]]> Now, just typing this makes me realize we might have no way to plan such a thing, that the only way we can move towards such a future is by an inch-by-inch slouching towards that particular Bethlehem. The problem with designing a future and then attempting to implement it is that the designs (and the designers) inevitably ignore major aspects of human nature. The future can only be built incrementally, because we carry the baggage of the present around with us no matter where we are. We can only discard the past, and implement the future, a bit at a time — and that includes the kinds of people we are.

We have tried to think about the future man before, and the ways we implemented that (or failed to do so) speak for themselves. The social experiments of the 1960s and 1970s attempted to produce a new kind of person and a new society, but the vast majority of that experimentation delivered only the most incremental changes. The changes brought on by technology have been far more normative by many orders of magnitude than any such experiments — but again, that does not mean all the changes have been positive, or liberating, or have resulted in a better and more humane kind of human being. They can, but I'm not convinced we can get there by simply inventing something normative and crossing our fingers. For every one of these things we invent, we need to undertake at least as much effort to learn how to employ it humanely and responsibly.

There has to be some way to teach ourselves how to regard our own future work with care and respect, and not simply to do it because it's worth cashing in on. We measure too much of the value of our technical expertise in terms of its market value, which is nothing more than what other people think it's worth paying for. And if someone's idea of value is dictated entirely by what the market has borne, they will be all the more inclined to simply buy the newest iteration of a given toy. (Small wonder the real innovation in, say, the smartphone market has been in the software, not the hardware.)

Consider the way various companies are now attempting to commercialize space travel. Right now it seems to amount to a plaything for the rich, but if the whole thing becomes a commercial concern and competition drives cost down to the point where a trip to the moon and back becomes halfway affordable, that would on the whole be a good thing. After all, one could argue that the original NASA-style space exploration was no less crassly commercial in its own way (after all, aerospace = defense, right?). But none of this — either the NASA model or the corporate model — helps us produce a social framework for the use of such things. That falls to us to develop, and we consistently fail to do so. We seem to think those things will just manifest spontaneously, like a fairy ring in the forest.

So — if I see SF having a place in all of this, it's in giving people a socially cautionary and skeptical way to think about this stuff ahead of time, and to have a sense of what kind of person is needed to deploy it all responsibly. This requires far more than just the Michael Crichton scare-fiction model, or even the Uncle Tom's Cabin / The Jungle mode of crude consciousness-raising. If one of the unspoken missions of all fiction is to provide us with models for how to become better human beings, then SF's mission should be no different, and perhaps all the more urgent since no one else seems willing to do the job.

"Embedded in every [work of fiction] is a utopian vision that, if achieved, would make the words irrelevant, redundant, unnecessary," wrote Dale Peck. He was not writing about SF specifically, but he might as well have been.

Bakshi to the Future Dept.

2013-05-07T14:00:00Z

Ralph Bakshi is alive, well, working on a new film (which you can fund on Kickstarter), and very, very angry in a good way.

Ralph Bakshi: Still Railin After All These Years | AWN | Animation World Network

I never went and did a film to make audiences feel good or happy. I could care less what my audiences cared about. What every big director in Hollywood today is really doing, most of them, they’re creating lies. Now what do I mean by lying? It’s that they get together in a room…I was there so I know…they get together in a room and they say, “OK, how do we make audiences happy? How do we make a film that gets them excited?” So they forget the truth. The truth isn’t the issue anymore. It’s all smoke and mirrors. That’s the reality. A lot of them are very, very successful. When I approach my films, I’m asking myself what am I angry about, what do I want to say to people? Who cares what they think. That’s always my approach. And I’m dying for them [the audience] to show up and see it. Don’t get me wrong. I’d like a Ferrari. I would love to buy a Ferrari and drive around America, you know what I’m saying? There’s nothing wrong with money if you make it honestly. I always wanted audiences to come, I wanted them to like my films. Every artist wants you to like their work. But I didn’t bend my work towards what I thought they would want to see.

Sitting on my desk right now are a few books that embody the obverse of this argument, all of them books on screenwriting I picked up from the dollar rack at a bookstore I frequent. Their argument, which I believe I am not caricaturing too badly by phrasing it this way, is that a story not worth selling to a large number of people is not worth selling, period.

]]> This may be true for something that people are going to pump $120M into, but what about something 1/100th of that scale, or even less? Why do we assume the only market worth having is one where everything is a tentpole project, or can be marketed as one? The other day I saw a trailer for a movie that was ostensibly an indie production but was constructed out of all the same beats, formulas, and zingers as a big-budget movie — not to say that those Hollywood hotshots don't know their marketing craft, but that their model winds up elbowing everything else out by sheer dint of being the most marketable one.

I'm fairly sure none of the people who wrote those books would have anything kind to say about Bakshi's ragged but sincere moviemaking. I loved Wizards despite its many flaws (heck, maybe because of them) and my biggest complaint about Fire and Ice was that it wasn't much of a story. But I never got the impression Bakshi did anything only because there was a buck in it — or even because there was a positive test-market audience card in it. (Cool World was taken out of his hands and drastically altered by the studio to be palatable to the folks who run multiplexes; go read the comic adaptation to get some hints of what the original story had been like.)

... People lose that ability to be honest and stop copying other artists or saying this is mine now that I put it up my blog, I love UPA so much I must be a genius. I’m a great fan of a certain style so I must be great too. It’s kind of sick. I love all those cartoons that they put up on the blog but I don’t try to take those cartoons over. I respect them, I love them, I learn from them and move on. But I don’t try to suck them dry. I certainly don’t think I am as good as any one of them.

What Bakshi's describing here is something I've seen in too many other venues to count, and one common to both creators and fans alike. The more strongly you identify with something else, the more strongly you can be identified with it, to the point where other people are willing to assign you attributes that used to be exclusive to the other thing.

My nasty way of putting this is, it's a shorthand way to be credited for something you never did in the first place. Any circles where fandom proliferates become breeding grounds for this attitude, because a) it's encouraged and b) too many of those circles don't inspire people to distinguish themselves in other ways, such as actually, y'know, creating something.

... because art criticism has disappeared, everything goes, everything is a masterpiece, everyone’s a hit, everyone is a genius for a couple of weeks and then they're gone. So I mourn the lack of criticism and intellectual discussions on music, on art, on films and I think that has made audiences less aware of what they are watching.

Not long ago I was given the first installment in what is promised to be a three-book series (only the second one is out so far), which came trailing a whole comet's tail of orgasmic blurbing from various authorities who ought to be halfway trustable — namely, other authors in the field. The first book turned out to be so awful that I couldn't bring myself to read the rest of it.

It was not the first time I'd had hammered home the truth that an author may not be a good critic — that some authors, in fact, have perfectly ghastly reading tastes, and don't even see it as their business to develop critical standards except inasmuch as they are a reflection of the very audiences they are tooling themselves to serve. But the sheer breadth of the praise lavished on the book in question made me wonder if it was even possible to be respected for having critical standards in the first place. I didn't think the book was just bad, I thought it was a bad example to emulate.

My point is not that the critic in me is right and anyone who reads this series and enjoys it should turn in their card and go home. It's that the criticism of a book should be as distinct an enterprise as possible from just getting it out there and getting it read, if for no other reason than because it enforces a more honest set of critical standards.

Criticism is important because it helps us separate what is good about work — its ambition, its intelligence, its grace — from all the things that make it merely popular. No one critic is the guiding light for making this happen, but an informed dialogue of which they are part of is key to it. A society that can't tell the difference between being flattered and being enlightened is doomed to be forever at the mercy of its flatterers.

Trust Me, I'm A Marketer Dept.

2013-05-06T22:00:00Z

BattleBlock Theater devs say digital releases, crowdfunding won't 'stabilize' indie scene | Polygon

"I think as more content becomes available you are going to see individuals who are not devs and maybe not working at hardware companies becoming the 'trusted source' of what is good out there in the mass of games," Baez said, noting he thinks digital platforms will adopt curated feeds in the future. "This will differ than just ratings or being a reviewer; I think it will become more like your favorite radio DJ who you listen to because you like their taste."

Sound familiar? Granted, it's an entirely different venue from the bookstore or record store, but it has the same flavor. We never really had a culture of indie gaming stores — or, rather, they were subsumed into other things like comic shops and whatnot — but if there's a way to make curation happen that serves audiences of all kinds, to get them interested in the genuinely new and inventive rather than simply straitjacket them into buying a minimally-revved version of what was out last year, let's see it.

Paint By Letters Dept.

2013-05-06T18:00:00Z

Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data - NYTimes.com

For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers.

Yes, this is every bit as gruesome as it sounds. It's applying the Nate Silver quant-crunching approach to creativity.

Among the gems unearthed by this crew: movies with bowling scenes in them tend to tank, so don't include them. So much for The Dude, then! And yes, The Big Lebowski did not do well in its original release, but it's been consistently reissued on video multiple times since and has become a cultural touchstone — something which they achieved, I add, with relatively minimal risk given the movie's budget.

Or what about There Will Be Blood, whose final scene took place in — yes — a bowling alley? The absurdity of this approach just stretches on and on.

]]> The other problem with this approach is that it draws on an audience's certainty that it knows what it wants, since it uses focus group survey results as part of its crunching. If you ask someone what they want and then give them nothing but that until they puke, you're not doing them any favors. Nobody knows how to be pleasantly surprised; if they did, it wouldn't come as a pleasant surprise to them in the first place.

Look, I understand the reasons for, and to a degree empathize with, the work being done here. Moviemaking is a risky business, and people want some guarantee that their investments will not disappear. But the mad rush for absolute surety is only contributing all the more to a long-term creative malaise.

Big Picture, Little Picture Dept.

2013-05-05T14:00:00Z

Steven Soderbergh has made a few films I admire (Traffic) and others I haven't, but the man has seen enough of the industry from the inside to comment on it quite deftly, as he does in this remarkable lecture:

Read Or Listen To Soderbergh’s STATE OF THE CINEMA Address… | CHUD.com

... the meetings have gotten pretty weird. There are fewer and fewer executives who are in the business because they love movies. There are fewer and fewer executives that know movies. ... You’ve got people who don’t know movies and don’t watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie you’re going to be allowed to make. That’s one reason studio movies aren’t better than they are, and that’s one reason that cinema, as I’m defining it, is shrinking.

... One thing they take into consideration is the foreign market, obviously. It’s become very big. So that means, you know, things that travel best are going to be action-adventure, science fiction, fantasy, spectacle, some animation thrown in there. Obviously the bigger the budget, the more people this thing is going to have to appeal to, the more homogenized it’s got to be, the more simplified it’s got to be. So things like cultural specificity and narrative complexity, and, god forbid, ambiguity, those become real obstacles to the success of the film here and abroad.

... The sort of executive ecosystem is distorted, because executives don’t get punished for making bombs the way that filmmakers do, and the result is there’s no turnover of new ideas, there’s no new ideas about how to approach the business or how to deal with talent or material.

Emphases mine.

]]>

Much of what he is talking about has been echoed by others, too: that the people involved with the business of filmmaking are not themselves interested in film, or even show business. As crass as the Louis B. Mayers of the world used to be, at least they had a showman's bone in their body, a sense of how to take splashy risks. The beancounters took over a long time ago, which is why everything coming out of the system is so shot through and weighted down with the smell of their own fear of failure.

Soderbergh's comments about the foreign market made me think back to the debut of Rashōmon . Japanese critics thought the movie was too "Western" and derided it as such; its premiere as one of the first Japanese films to reach a wide international audience led to the misconception that all Japanese movies were like this. Movie buffs within the U.S. have generally looked to the cinema of the rest of the world for sublety and complexity not generally available from Hollywood, and are now finding that those things are being driven out of the picture even in their own home markets. Why bother with all that when you can just imitate the big success story out there, and get more back for your investment in the first place? Such are the hazards of having any cultural enterprise devolve entirely into a business. (This isn't to say that these things should not be a business, only that there is more than one way to run such a thing.)

The end result of such a business is a culture that is being stripped of all the things that make it, well, cultural: the specificity and narrative complexity, and, god forbid, ambiguity, that make any art interesting, even an art that has been produced to appeal to a broad audience. The screenwriting books and storytelling masterclasses that one part of Hollywood sells to the other part of Hollywood are marketed to and for producers as much as they are screenwriters, lest the former lack some sense of what to look for. The audience is to be treated with kid gloves: don't confuse them, don't give them more than they can handle, and whatever you do don't force them to think about anything more complex than a yes/no decision.

Aa lot of what Soderbergh says here, though, apply to other entertainments as well. I could not tell you how many publishers or people involved with publishing are not themselves voracious readers (or even casual readers), but if I had to go by what's being published, I would have to guess they read nothing except the bestseller lists. That said, there seem to be a few basic ways to have a book capture people's attention, in roughly descending order of utility:

Have it resemble an existing publishing event that for whatever reason has become the center of attention.
Have it capitalize on or tie into an existing social event or trend.
Imbue it with the aura of some past literary success.

Dark-ish young-adult fiction with supernatural themes is the big thing right now, so much so that at my last trip to Barnes & Noble I found an entire shelf section with the label "Supernatual YA Fantasy". A subdivision of a subdivision, I thought, and one that's entirely the product of a market research team. Imagine trying to bring out The Phantom Tollboth or one of Daniel M. Pinkwater's quirkfests in this atmosphere: everyone would complain they have no way to sell it, when what they really mean is they don't want to waste their energy bucking the odds when an easier buck can be made. Why fight to get something like that any recognition when you can just pre-select something that could be marketed with far less effort? And given how slender the margins are in publishing in the first place, it only makes business sense to be cowardly.

Elsewhere in the piece are hints about how indie creators can avoid becoming the very things they hate. It means doing at least as much promotion as creation, for one — which means the real expense or difficulty of publishing is not in publishing itself. And if you're a publisher yourself, it never was to begin with.