A Bright Shining Lie - Magazine - The Atlantic
Underlying the hype [about Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke] is the silly notion that if a work introduces plenty of characters and traipses after them for enough years and pages, it is ipso facto ambitious. The true mark of an ambitious work is its style and depth. We would recognize Anna Karenina as such a novel even if only its first few pages had survived, because they depict characters with extraordinarily rich and complex inner lives.
I scarcely need to defend the proposition that SF&F make the same mistake: a bigger book, a longer series is by definition a more ambitious one or a better one. It's easy to confuse scope or sprawl with depth.
Adam Roberts tried to cut into the heart of this problem back when he was forcing himself to read the whole of The Wheel of Time and figure out for himself the appeal of such a derivative, repetitive, one-dimensional series where a great deal goes on but not a whole hell of a lot actually happens. The conclusion he came to was that the books are not so much stories as they are environments for the reader to swath themselves in, so they can forget about all the crap going on around them for a little while: literature as anesthetic, or as Jacques Barzun put it, "art as the detergent of life".
Is it unfair to wrinkle my nose at this? Maybe, but wrinkle I do, if only because the sheer amount of such detergent is having a detrimental effect on our literary water table, so to speak. Not in the sense that people should read the classics instead of all that newfangled crap, but in the sense that bad writing of any grade, high-art or low-, begets more bad writing. When Lester Del Rey found he could repackage third-rate Tolkien and sell it over and over again, he kicked off the Big Book Fantasy boom of the Seventies and Eighties via the Shannara series. The result was not just that a whole generation of readers came into existence thinking a five-book series was automatically better than a single book, but that a whole generation of potential writers also came along primed to believe the same thing, and who cheerfully repeated the same mistakes. I've mentioned before how Dale Peck argued something of the same thing had happened with Joyce's Ulysses: in his purview, it was the book's flaws and shortcomings that were most widely imitated and had the greatest influence, and the end result has been an astonishing amount of Big Fiction that is all but unreadable. (More on this again in the future.)
I have to be careful about who I single out for criticism here, as there are series I have enjoyed despite their flaws: the Vampire Hunter D books, the Elric novels (those in particular serving as a great deconstruction of a lot of common fantasy tropes), Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld books, the Mardock Scramble cycle, Yoshikawa's Musashi novels, the Foundation cycle, etc. I should not make it sound as if I am attacking the idea of a series of books. What bothers me is when the storytelling becomes distended, pumped full of air to fit the container, as it were, and everything that was good about one story becomes smeared across multiple books like someone trying to economize the use of a single pat of butter across several pieces of bread.
What I resent is not the writing of multiple books alone, but the conflation of size with scope and length with depth, which in SF&F is most symptomatic in books that come in multi-volume containers. I am not going to convince anyone that a given book could have been trimmed by hundreds of pages and lost nothing, because it's always possible to find a retroactive justification for why a book is a given length, whether courtesy of the reader or author. Readers who band together and swap notes about the details of a given work (e.g., George R.R. Martin's fans swapping Westeros trivia) create an atmosphere where it becomes that much harder to consider leaving anything out -- even the things that might well be left out for the sake of telling the one story that truly matters instead of the twelve that don't. Good writing is about selectivity, "about what's in the frame and what's out" as Scorsese once said about movies, and just because an author can cater that much more completely to his fans by flooding them with goodies doesn't mean it's going to be a positive thing for either one of them.
I suspect the reason why is because of the above-described thirst for an environment rather than a story. These parallel needs -- one for environment, one for narrative -- serve different functions and are expressed in different degrees. MMOers and RPGers play a game not just because of the backstory, but because of the immersiveness of the game: it gives them something to get conveniently lost in for a little bit (and sometimes for not such a little bit). People don't just want a good yarn, they want something they can lie down inside too.
Is that so bad? No, not at first. But the long-term consequences on the culture of books they have access to is another story.
]]>Ain't It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news.
I think that filmmaking is like digging more than anything else, and it starts with Brit and I. We start digging, we see the shape of something, the outline, the top of something, and that keeps us going. Then the cinematographer comes and he picks up a shovel, and the production designer and the costume designer and then the actors come. In both SOUND OF MY VOICE and THE EAST, we’ve been extremely lucky, so Patricia Clarkson comes and she picks up a shovel. Ellen Page comes and she picks up a shovel, and then Skarsgard comes and picks up two shovels, and by the end of it we are all sweaty and tired, and we’ve uncovered something and we spend most of our energy doing he digging, so you don’t really have time to worry about budgets and constraints and “I wish I had that. I wish I had this.”
This is completely consistent with my own observations: the creative process is more akin to archaeology than architecture. It's less a matter of building something than unearthing something, one jagged piece at a time.
]]>The notion that contemporary fiction possesses greater relevance for us because it talks of the Internet or supermodels or familiar brand names is ridiculous. We can see ourselves reflected more clearly in Balzac's Parisians than in a modern American who goes into raptures when his daughter says "Toyota Celica" in her sleep.
I'm going to be quoting a great deal from Meyers's excellent essay (even better in its full-length book-sized incarnation) in the near future, but I wanted to start with this particular snippet.
"Relevance" is a buzzword, and I sincerely wish it wasn't. When we say this or that work of fiction is "relevant", we typically leave off the phrase to our lives as they are now or something of that ilk. We tend to think of Gravity's Rainbow or better yet something like Charles Stross's Rule 34 as "relevant" because they are about things that are immediate or of our current moment in time. It's reassuring to read fiction (or anything at all, really) that understands what kind of world we currently live in and makes some attempt to address its vagaries and difficulties.
]]> This is a valuable impulse to serve as the underpinning for any book. What it comes at the expense of, all too often, is some sense that a story can convey the feeling of the world being larger than the reader's moment in time and space. All that Brat Pack fiction of the Eighties (McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, etc.) was quite obviously a product of its sophisticated urban environment, but it hasn't aged well, and today it just seems narrow and provincial instead of incisive or revelatory.SF&F almost always start from the built-in premise that we are reading about Something Else, Somewhere Else. (The fact that the world of David Copperfield is not our time or place is a positive by-product of the book's existence, even if not one of its explicit goals.) That gives it a head start in terms of being unchained from the moment, of being able to see beyond and above. But it all too often falls right back into the here and now by dint of who wrote it, under what circumstances, and for what audience. The best SF ameliorates this or makes it irrelevant: we don't particularly care that the technology and science in The Foundation Trilogy are downright quaint by today's standard, because of the era of its production and the fact that there's so much else good about the story.
That said, it's hard to get to that point. Whenever I read SF that invokes ideas of what the Internet will be in a few years or some other 20-minutes-into-the-future conceit, the vast majority of the time I feel I am reading something that passed its sell-by date in the conceptual phase. This disdain typically takes the form of two questions:
The second problem, as you can guess, exacerbates the effects of the first. If you think you have a great idea, it becomes easier to let the halo of that idea crowd out everything else in the story. I've mentioned before that Asimov has been panned for his thin characters, but hell, at least his characters have a Dickensian energy that makes them worth hanging around for.
It's possible to knock the first question for being besides the point. If a story is written to address some present, pressing issue, one should not deride the author for not creating a timeless masterpiece, etc. Fine. But that in itself is a reflection of where the goals really lie in such work. If we aim low, we hit low, and it becomes harder to understand why aiming high reaps such rewards. I can no more pan Stross for writing Rule 34 than I can slam, say, Harriet Beecher Stowe for writing Uncle Tom's Cabin (not that I'm paralleling the two works directly), but I also can't ignore how it seems a sin against the very talents of SF to use it mostly as a way to jab at things that are too much of the moment. I'm reminded of one of my central problems with Firefly: why go that far into the future, just to recapitulate all the dead clichés of oat operas?
A contradiction seems to be presenting itself. On the one hand, I speak constantly of how any work cannot be written except as a product of its moment in time and space. We are doomed to create nowhere but in the here and now. On the other, I invoke -- and celebrate -- its ability to provide the reader with a sense of their universe being larger than the moment they are trapped in and the spaces they are forced to navigate. Both the past and the future are part of such a process. When I read Dom Casmurro or Wolf Among Wolves, other times and places come alive, if only briefly or in varying levels of detail. (The Brazil of the former is less vividly and meticulously depicted than the Germany of the latter, but that does not mean the first book is a failure. They aim for different things.)
What I want more than anything else from SF&F is not just to escape, not just to see something new, but to feel as if I have escaped into and among the company of others who are genuinely worth my time, who can make my experience of the new all the more resonant and meaningful.
]]>The first is something that was brought up by, of all people, Ross Douthat of the New York Times (the last person I would have ever expected to weigh in on this issue). He noted that the success of something like The Avengers means it is now that much harder for anything not a "property" to get made in Hollywood. I agree, up to a point: it's not possible to spend $150-200 million on something that isn't a proven property, because Hollywood executives were not born yesterday and are not about to blow that much money on something that comes entirely out of the blue. (Cf.: John Carter.)
]]> I've argued in the past that for every one of these movies that gets made, there are tons of others that don't. Not just because of the money that gets spent here instead of elsewhere, but because of the promotional efforts, the bookings in theaters, the amount of legwork done by the studio (there is only a finite amount of all that bandwidth, after all) to make people aware of something. Yes, it is possible to make a movie on $100,000 that looks far better than one made a decade ago, but it won't mean anything if no one sees it -- and as with the book industry, it's Hollywood that has the distribution and promotional muscle to get something seen. And they are reserving that muscle more and more for things they know are sure bets: comic books, flashes in the pan, adaptations and remakes.The second is how this feeds back into Hollywood no longer sponsoring "films for adults". The kinds of audiences that used to exist for such things simply don't exist in the kinds of numbers that justify drawing their attention -- in big part because no one is acting as if they are worth marketing to in the first place. The shuttering of many boutique sublabels at the studios (e.g., Fox Searchlight) is further proof of this. The adults who want to see something other than stuff blow up are left to their own devices, and to each other, to find the movies that matter to them -- via NetFlix or Amazon's recommendations systems, in much the same way enthusiastic readers do via Amazon or GoodReads (or, if they're damn lucky, their still-open local bookstore). They have to hunt and peck, and so much of what is good to them is in the crevices and corners: Margin Call, You Don't Know Jack, etc. Not costly movies at all, but in their eyes not worth throwing a promotional budget at, and it's not like you can make Burger King glasses for a (tremendously smart, perceptive, well-played) movie about Jack Kevorkian. No, not even when he's played by Al Pacino.
When the current wave of Marvel films started hitting theaters, I was pleased, but at the same time apprehensive. I was glad that we were getting good, smartly-made comic-book adaptations. But I was also uneasy at how those things were coming at a cost that almost no one could pick up on: the shoving-aside of a great many other films that would either never get the attention they deserved or would simply never get made.
Again, it's not that I don't want to see Cap, Thor and Tony Stark all throwin' it down. It's that I don't want that to be all I ever get to see. And I'm sure even Joss Whedon doesn't think he's really part of the problem.
]]>No, even he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s a lethal admixture of two normally incompatible impulses: a guilty conscience and an impulsive heart. Stealing Nanako’s shorts and tank top will take him the rest of his life to pay back; this he is positive of. And yet he went and did it all the same … and, worse, he finds out has a witness to his crime: Nakamura. This is not one of the other boys in his class, who rib him about his love of weird books and his moon-eyed feelings for Nanako. Nakamura is another girl, and if the text for Takao’s spirit is a hesitantly-read Baudelaire, hers is an enthusiastically-devoured Marquis de Sade. ]]> What’s her story? At least in the first volume of The Flowers of Evil, we don’t find out: Nakamura explodes onto the page fully formed in her foul flowering, like Athena straight from the head of Zeus. When she gets a zero on a test (which she didn’t even bother to supply a single answer for), she enmires the teacher with language better suited to a dockworker … and stares him back down when he raises a hand to smack her back into line. She fits the textbook definition of a budding sociopath: she seems to be at a loss as to why other people aren’t just as impulsive and unempathic as she is.
Small wonder the hyper-moral Takao is such easy pickings for her. On cornering Takao after his “crime”, Nakamura makes a contract with him: she’ll agree to not tell anyone about the business with the gym clothes as long as he follows her orders to the letter—many of which involve doing things with Nanako’s gym clothes which leave him speechless. “You’re a pervert,” she insists, “and I must be a pervert too.” What she wants is something between a victim, a protégée, and a witness to her own variety of mind-crime. Takao seems primed to provide all of that and then some, especially after he sticks up for her when she’s accused of swiping someone else’s lunch money (the better to avoid her wrath, he tells himself).
Write up a plot like this in such blunt language and it comes off sounding like the storyline for one of those manga where horrible things involving lots of tentacles happen to schoolgirls. But Shuzo Oshimi (of Drifting Net Café) keeps this story focused on the mechanics of psychological manipulation and bullying, not the panopoly of perversities explored by any characters in it. (This is not one of the titles Vertical Inc. needs to put in shrinkwrap, although it’s definitely not for younger readers.) “I’ll peel off all the skin you’re hiding behind,” Nakamura tells Takao. “I want to see a real-deal genuine pervert raze this town with genuine perversion.” Why not just her? Because it doesn’t count that way for her: she wants to know she was able to get someone else to do it, and thus be not so alone. In a twisted way, this is her quest for companionship-of-a-kind. Better a companion in evil than no companion at all, and to her mind the only way to get someone like that in her life is to recruit them by force.
Anime and manga (and a fair slice of Japanese popular culture generally) seem to be far more obsessed with the “Madonna-whore” complex, and in a far more pronounced way, than analogous Western media are. Flowers of Evil is constructed from the same kind of template. A timid man with minimal prospects with women has his life upended when a woman of predatory sexuality comes along; this endangers his chances with another woman who’s far more upright and gentle. Sometimes it’s one guy and the “Madonna”, while a whole harem of far more aggressive women circle around him and try to steal him away. What remains consistent, though, is the male character being hapless and out of his element. Will he be able to man up, reject the bad girl, embrace the good girl (and protect her), and live happily ever after? Find out next episode.
From a Western standpoint, though, this makes for a downright regressive psychology of the sexes. I am not prepared to back this up with hard numbers, but I’d be willing to believe one sees in manga the above-mentioned dynamic far more often than one sees, say, the kind of balance between male and female that Joss Whedon put at the center of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This isn’t to say that it never happens, only that the polarization between the “good girls” and “bad girls” is a lot stronger and far less nuanced than we might be used to seeing elsewhere. If The Flowers of Evil can see past the mere invocation of its trope, it’ll be well worth the ride. For now, though, what we do have is still very good—a nihilistic teenaged take on the kind of games Shinya Tsukamoto depicted in A Snake of June. Even I wasn’t expecting to make a connection like that when I started this cunning little sleeper of a story.
]]>I swapped a few words in that sentence and got something even more relevant to where I stand: "Every word you take out of the imagination and put on the page is a word you are taking responsibility for." This goes way beyond "show, don't tell" (which I think should be "show and tell in the right measure").
By "the imagination", I'm referring to the imagination of the reader, not just the writer. Every time you call attention to something, describe something, you are asking the reader to surrender that much more of their imagination for the sake of yours.
]]> This is not a bad thing; sometimes you have no choice but to do this. The reader has no way of knowing what your protagonist looks like until you say something on the matter. The trick is to know when to stop.It's rarely hard to know when to start. A coherent story has to begin somewhere, with descriptions that give the reader someplace to put their first steps when they land on a page. But it also has to end somewhere -- not just in terms of the storytelling coming to a halt, but the author stepping back and letting his words do their work in the reader's mind.
Every writer seems to have a different process, a different set of thresholds, for sussing out where to begin and end with this. Georges Simenon, master of brevity, would never have spent the amount of time on a description or a scene setting that Dostoevsky did. But neither of them were working to the same ends, and neither of them should be seen as being the "better" author because of it. Granted, I've done my fair share of grousing about the lack of brevity being a drain on good spec-fic writing (Wheel of Time, I blame you), but I'm backing off from the position that brevity is a requirement.
In SF&F, it is tempting to succumb to what in Japanese popular culture has been called "too much explanation disease": the urge to explain and explain until all possible pleasure of discovery or insight on the part of the reader has been bled out. This is more than just the misdemeanor of stopping the action cold to dump information in the reader's lap by one means or another; this is also the felony -- often all the more dismaying for being done in earnest -- of explaining a character's behavior to us, sometimes at the additional risk of having the explanation we receive not jibe one bit with the actual character we see portrayed on the page. An author who stamps his foot about the heroism of a given character, only to show us a selfish git with an ego the size of the moon, is not doing himself or his audience any favors.
It's been said that the single most difficult thing in fiction of any kind is the successful delineation of character, which may explain why it's often easiest in many kinds of stories to fall back on tapping into the cultural shorthand that the author knows the reader also has at hand. It's easier and faster to stick The Hooker With A Heart Of Gold into a story than it is to show us, say, someone doing something she hates for what she once thought were good reasons only to find herself beaten down even further by it than she ever dreamed. It's difficult to show such things because few of us have access to something like that in our own lives, or would want it -- and if we did, we might not know how to make it into part of our story without seeming grotesque or maudlin or both.
The same problem becomes all the more complicated in SF&F, when you are faced with the prospect of inventing people who are products of social circumstances that simply don't exist in our world. Or at least, that's how it might seem from the outside. As long as what you are writing about is recognizably human, or has enough tenuous connections to the human to be described as such, then you owe it to yourself to mine what's human around you for their behaviors. When Ridley Scott and Dan O'Bannon developed a story about a spaceship crew meeting a menace, they left behind the Intrepid Explorers template and instead used one a little more down-home and accessible: Truckers In Space. Thus came Alien, which worked so well in big part because its crew were not bold and brave confronters of the unknown but underpaid, harried, blue-collar greasemonkeys. From what I've seen of Prometheus, though, Scott seems to have gone back to the Intrepid Explorers template.
So how do you show such people off without talking them to death, especially when you're dealing with a world which may not be ours? For starters: give those people freedom of speech and movement. That requires having a character who has some roots in real life as you have experienced it, because only then does it become possible for them to do the talking. If your story pushes them into a corner (and all great stories are about people pushed into a corner), let them push back as they would. This tactic is not only useful for the delineation of character, it helps weed out characters from your story too: if they push back in a way that just isn't interesting or is downright counterproductive, then perhaps you've picked the wrong person to talk about.
Once again I must fall back on Milton Glaser for the last words. When faced with the dictum "Less is more", he struggled with it. Sometimes less is just less, and sometimes more is just more. Perhaps better to say "Just enough is more". I have, in my own way, come to the same conclusion. Your people, no matter what their origin or their circumstances, need to be given the freedom to stand on their own feet and speak for themselves. Omnipotent author you might be, you still cannot do this for them.
]]>I think there can be a philosophical novel in this day and age, and it’s more important than ever that one is published. But it faces challenges, which Erdal says are essentially “balance” and the question of what it would look like to consumers.
On the balance of it, SF&F seem to be the most likely place to find the philosophical novels of the age. So much of what they have been preoccupied with for so long has been philosophical discussion of things that affects all of us: artificial intelligence, extraterrestrial sentient life, the impacts of technical progress, etc.
That said, very little SF&F is reminiscent of what I would call the "big novel of ideas" approach, the sort of thing the author of the above piece attributes to folks like "Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus and countless others". I will most likely surprise no one when I say I love such books. I'm in the middle of re-reading The Brothers Karamazov now in one of its new translations, and I see firsthand (doubly so in this new translation) what a novel of ideas can do at its most unchained and vivacious.
]]> The paradox is that such books work because they are not novels of ideas. They are novels, period, with robustly depicted characters involved in things that draw our attention, and those things just happen to be big ideas. Such writing seems to have fallen out of vogue, if only because to evoke a "serious" idea in fiction seems to require that you treat it with manifest unseriousness. Can you think of a serious novel in English about religion since Graham Greene pulled the last pages out of his typewriter?SF&F books that hew in that direction seem to end up in territory more akin to the "big family/historical saga" vein of story -- very James A. Michener (or maybe Alexandre Dumas) with a dusting of Jack London for good measure. They rarely fail to sprawl or pack in the details, but even when they have a few key characters front and center they're mostly placeholders for the action and the ideas. And when it comes to the ideas, they seem to leave the philosophical side of their stories as a given. In other words, they expect the mere presence of issues to count as an analysis or discussion of those issues.
This is a common trap to fall into, and I think it's one of the reasons why a work can have the veneer of something philosophical without being that way itself. A work that contains a great many things without actually being about any of them will simply be an overstuffed suitcase, with too many of the wrong things jammed into it sidelong. This explains the proliferation of fiction about "issues" as opposed to ideas or, well, philosophies -- the sorts of things James Wood found fault with in Zadie Smith, that B.R. Meyers shook his head over when he found it in Jonathan Franzen: "The critics do their bit by acting as though name-checks constituted themes and issues. I can hear the prize laudation for [Franzen's] Freedom now: 'It is a novel about commercialism, about the war in Iraq, about the pervasiveness of Hollywood culture …'"
Funny how Dostoevsky's book, despite being written a century-plus ago, is more "relevant" to me than anything in Freedom. Franzen's friend David Foster Wallace made a stab at trying to ask why Dostoevsky still rings so true in his piece "Feodor's Guide" a ways back, and the most he could come up with was some talk of "a passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we, here, today, cannot or do not allow ourselves". That didn't ring true for me when I read it: writers today seem to be going bananas over trying to tackle deep moral issues, but they largely fail because they think of them as just that: issues. Any politician makes key "issues" a plank in his platform and can often do so without showing a sign he cares one real whit about the subjects in question; it's clear to me now novelists are no less capable of that kind of duplicity. (And then there's stuff like Atlas Shrugged, which is to philosophy as Naugahyde is to leather --and I'd argue a similar analogy applies to its status as literature.)
What really kills the project is how the formats created for modern "serious" fiction are so un-serious, how those books end up so loaded with coy wordplay and farcical contempt for the very people they claim to be so interested in. When I read Dostoevsky I feel he is serious not simply because he is tackling Big Themes, because it's clear anyone can claim to do that. His distinction is in how he gives everyone in the story a fair shake, gives them freedom of speech and movement, and allows the seriousness of the story to arise naturally out of those things. He was not mining the whole thing for coy little digs and cute little cheap shots. Today's authors are unable to think of a pet issue of theirs in any terms other than how they can most snidely caricature an embodiment of the other side of it -- or, worse, caricature both sides. (Don DeLillo's oft-praised White Noise seemed like the nadir of this sort of thing.) They lack the empathy and the curiosity needed to provide a story about "issues" with the spaciousness and freedom of movement it needs. They take the cheap shots because they've been led to believe anything more ambitious than that is of historical interest only, that taking cheap shots is all that's left. "We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well," said Alfred Jarry, and it seems his demolition squad is still drilling to China.
SF&F has the courage to tackle the really big, normative issues that get short shrift in other venues. That makes it all the more suited to the philosophical novel, but that also makes it all the tougher for it to live up to such promises. because of all the baggage SF&F carry along, some justified and some not. A big part of it is expectations and audience: if I write a book that depicts the next thousand years of human civilization after the invention of a drug that confers immortality, does that mean the book is about the drug? Or (let's go with a real-life example) a book about the thousands of years that pass after the invention of a science of the behavior of human populations, right when galactic civilization is about to take a nosedive? "Genre" readers wouldn't have any problem with a book that was just about the drug or the science; in fact, they'd be wildly curious about it. But literati would see that as a shortcoming; they'd demand more than just a story about the consequences of a given technological innovation. They are not wholly wrong for wanting more, but their criticism may go unheard for all the wrong reasons.
]]>A person who can’t fathom why the public fell in love with Lisbeth Salander or Edward Cullen is probably not going to be able to write something they’ll like just as much. Whiling away a couple of summer afternoons reading a trashy novel is a harmless way of wasting time. But writing a book even you wouldn’t want to read? That’s just killing it.
There's some good meat in this article, but the presumptions at the end are ludicrous.
]]> Nobody I know of, and nobody I have ever heard of, writes books they themselves would not want to read. I speak for myself on this one: the reason I write my stuff is because I wanted to see such books come into existence. Nobody else was writing them, so I wrote them.That they are not selling trillions of copies means nothing -- and, in fact, if they were selling trillions of copies, that might be a problem of its own as well.
I'm reminded of Irving Berlin's formula: the reason they call it "popular music" is because a lot of people like it. A lot of people can like things which are terrible for them, which have no sense of craft, or which are just artful enough to get away with it. None of this stops those things from becoming popular. For whatever reason, it catches some wave, and it becomes the current big thing. A year later, it's a trivia question. (I will wonder why in another posts.)
That's why some writers scream and gnash their teeth and gnaw on the platens of their typewriters when they hear things like "You know, you'd reach more people if you only wrote this kind of book." They hate the idea that the only way to get peoples' attention is to become a meme, a buzzword. They want to work to stand on its own and speak for itself independent of the time in which it was written -- but that almost inevitably comes at the expense of being welcomed with open arms by a contemporary audience. (Pace the list of things which we now recognize as groundbreaking and culturally significant but which at the time were greeted with head-shaking and sneering.)
It's the same reason anyone hates to find themselves at odds with popular taste: they think they have something important to give to the world, and then they find the world doesn't want it. The world wants junk food with too much salt and fat and empty calories, and forever defends its bad taste as freedom of choice. But the alternative to that should not be a form of aesthetic fascism, which replaces the tyranny of the masses (which is at least protean and therefore mutable) with the tyranny of a single conceptual view (which exists by defending itself against all such change).
One of the comments in hat piece was right: some of us don't particularly care to write things that would be quickly labeled as best-seller fodder. I have a friend whose father was goading her to write Clancy-style techno-thrillers, out of some mistaken sense that "she knows this stuff" and "she would be good at it." She doesn't write those books because those books are not interesting to her. I've read a few of them myself, and while they're passable, they're not the kind of thing I want to dump into my brain over and over again. I'm only modestly more interested in them than she is, and I don't want to write such things at all, because they bore the living hell out of me too.
It's hard to explain such things to people who do not write for pleasure; they seem to think that writers are like jukeboxes of words that can simply spit out Techno-Thrillers or Love Stories or Iambic Pentameter if the right buttons are pushed. I am not convinced such people can be made to understand that when you want to write, that means you want to put yourself in a chair every single day and write something that is beautiful and meaningful to you, and the last thing any such person wants is to make the prospect of doing that physically repellent by forcing themselves to write something they hate, hate, hate.
How hard is that to understand? If you're a fellow author, not terribly. If you're only a reader ... it's anyone's guess.
* * *
That said -- as I've been documenting in posts here recently -- I keep thinking the tension between "popular" and "literary" work is largely a red herring drummed up by people who have a vested interest in either side of the equation. I'm not sure I want everyone and his mother to be reading Joyce's Ulysses. For one, you could pick a hell of a better book, even from Joyce, as a crown jewel for literati.
Okay, let me rephrase that: I'd love nothing more than a world where people picked up and read books as challenging as Ulysses with the same ardor that they reserve for the latest glop-buster. Yes, and I hear JetBlue plan to use winged pigs for their new domestic routes, too.
]]>In most cases the film soundtracks I love are for films I know, but Music for Films is the exact opposite, and all the more fascinating for it. It’s a compilation of film music where the music preceded the films: Eno created the music in 1976, and then sent copies of a limited edition of the album to filmmakers so they could consider using it in their movies. In time, some of the music ended up in films as diverse as John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, and Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. Then again, Eno composed the classic Windows 95 startup and shutdown themes, so I’m used to him popping up in places where his name wouldn’t normally appear. ]]> Films consists of eighteen very short tracks—the longest clocks in at 3:23—rather than the ten-minute-plus or LP-side-long driftwork that Eno garnered most of his original attention for. Each track has the distinctiveness of an antique bauble found in a jewelry box: it sticks around long enough to make its general feeling known, and then fades out. When a track uses elements that shouldn’t be “ambient” (noises like the strange little guitar snarl [is it a guitar?] that opens “‘There Is Nobody’”), it manages somehow not to be jarring, and not just because the volume has been turned down. Even the loudest track in the whole collection, “M386”, has a pleasantly subdued flavor to it.
The original limited edition of the album was far more of a jumble. When reissued in the form most people are familiar with today, Eno selected and programmed it so that it played far more like a suite and not just a compilation of library music. Imposing that kind of narrative sweep on the whole album makes it feel all the more as if it could be the soundtrack to a film, singular. Even the brevity of the tracks doesn’t work against it in this regard: the ending, the appropriately titled “Final Sunset”, has notes that drift off into its conjured sunset as elegantly as the album opener, “Aragon”, begins from nothing more than a primal pulse.
I mentioned above how the tracks in Films have a way of showing up in odd places. One track (“Alternative 3”, added in the later editions of the album) was originally composed for a film of the same name whose very obscurity became the most significant thing about it. Said movie was a bogus April Fools’ episode of the UK TV series Science Report, purporting to be about a secret U.S./Russian space colonization plan, and the mere fact it was unavailable for so long allowed it to be taken entirely too seriously by people of the David Icke persuasion. It’s since restored to life on DVD and YouTube bootlegs, and Eno’s music is one of the more notable things about it: it’s insidious, creepy, “futuristic” without also being embarrassingly dated before its time. A big part of that I chalk up to Eno’s skills as a composer and not simply as a sound designer.
I confess that at first I resisted the album’s collection-of-little-pieces approach. I wanted the better, more interesting ideas to hang around and be developed further. Then I realized that was a mistake—that the real thing to be gleaned from the album was the imagery that suggested itself with each track for however long we had it. This isn’t a slap against the use of these tracks in actual films—just that most of their usage in films has been so esoteric that it’s best to approach these pieces on their own terms and let the imagery concoct itself. The real films in Films are the ones on the backs of your eyelids or behind your forehead, much as they must have been when Eno was first creating them.
It’s curious to come back to Films (and Eno’s other Music For … albums) now that “ambient music”—or, worse, “program music”—now has a repulsive cachet to it. In the decades since Films was released—and even before that—music has become a part of the air of public life whether we like it or not. Go out and take note of how many public places (shops, offices, etc.) have some kind of music playing. It’s difficult to drive a car for any length of time without succumbing to the temptation to snap on the radio. Even while sitting here typing this, I feel strange if there isn’t music playing, and having the excuse of needing this very album to listen to for the sake of writing this review doesn’t make it feel any less like a, well, an excuse.
To be a music lover on your own terms is one thing. It’s another entirely to find yourself in a society that has made the presence of music—bad music, dull music, any music—all but mandatory. Erik Satie, bless his misunderstood soul, wanted his music to be a functional kind of music, something that would fill in the spaces between the sounds of the cutlery and flatware hitting each other. He might well have set fire to his work if he imagined it would ever lead to the state we’re in now.
What I resent is not the music itself, but the lack of options created in the face of it. If I despise the Muzak from the speakers overhead in the drugstore or the DMV, my only alternative is to plug my ears … and maybe also to substitute my own soundtrack, within which Films might well appear. The fact I can do this is no compensation for the sense that I should not have to.
That might explain why I actually don’t listen to Films often outside of the house. It feels wrong to use it just to stuff up my ears against something else. This is music I want to approach on my own terms and use as a road to creating new things, rather than just something I want drizzled in my ears while waiting for my checks to be deposited.
Most everyone I know, me included, makes playlists that are meant to be soundtracks for creative projects. I’m not sure if I’ll ever come up with something that demands to have Music for Films used as its soundtrack, but given how much I love the record, I’d feel remiss if I didn’t. Maybe that is the highest honor I can pay something of its kind.
amazon.com=B0007GFFVQ mp3.amazon.com=B000THINB2]]>Rebel Buddha is another well-written general introduction to Buddhism, by way of Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, and for that reason alone is worth checking out for beginners. What makes it doubly interesting is how it attempts to approach Buddhism as something that is inherently transplanted from one culture to another. Buddhism has migrated from India to China, Korea, Japan, the rest of Asia, and into Europe and the United States, and along each step of the way has found ways to become a living part of the culture that accepted it.]]> It’s been debated whether or not this integration is even possible in the West, which today is bound together more by the values of capitalism and certain principles of governance than any spiritual traditions per se, Bible-thumping aside. Ponlop believes it is possible and even urgently required—that a truly Western Buddhism is finally taking shape, and that what’s needed is more work to make Buddhism’s core principles available without spiritual baggage that is really only of interest to historians or hard-core scholars of Buddhism. People should not have to learn about the principles of internal combustion to drive a car, and likewise people curious about Buddhism probably don’t need to be simply dropped into the deep end of the dharma pool when they want to learn how to swim.
This stands in somewhat stark contrast to many of the unspoken assumptions about Buddhism that I have personally encountered. Buddhism is first and foremost a philosophy of action—something that is done, not simply talked about or entertained as a nifty idea—and few people dispute that. But time and again I have encountered the sense that true Buddhism consists of also embracing some manifestation of its cultural exoticism. It didn’t matter if you picked Zen or Tibetan or what have you, as long as you picked something that had real cultural force behind it—otherwise, the lessons imparted would have no weight.
I was never able to come out and admit the problems I had with this attitude, in big part because I myself believed they had a grain of truth to them. Wisdom always seems to have more heft to it when it comes blasted from the trumpet of authority, and authority in turn has that much more weight when it comes with the force of centuries of history and the breadth of a whole culture behind it. It seems harder to take the same advice when it comes to us just-so, out of our own lap of discovery, so to speak. It’s easier to distrust in that form, because it has more the flavor of something merely pulled out of the ear, and the last thing we want is to be duped all over again by someone who’s just, well, pulling things out of their ear.
But a big part of why Buddhism operates the way it does is because it uses teachings and doctrinal texts as starting points, not foregone conclusions. The meaning of a given sutra is rooted only partly in its origins as a text in a given language, and in fact some of those things can get in the way of the real meaning. Hence all the (mostly fruitless) debates about whether or not Buddhists believe in reincarnation, just because the Buddha used the terminology of same to make metaphorical points to an audience that at the time was primed to believe in such things (as Richard Gombrich pointed out). The more we use the cultural context of a given piece of wisdom as the only starting point by which to access that wisdom, the more dependent we become on contexts that are alien to us.
This is one of Ponlop’s key points, and he demonstrates it to us in his own introduction to the book. He had his own identity crisis of sorts: he spent his early life in a monastery in Sikkim, then spent time in Canada and then the United States, and now resides in Seattle. No one label seemed to suffice for him. Out of that came the sense that the wisdom he had been imparted, and which he wanted to impart to others in turn, was something that deserved to transcend easy cultural labels. Tibetan Buddhism in particular is strongly bound to its own culture via practices and concepts like tonglen or dzogchen, much of which is esoteric and doesn’t lend itself to being communicated without its associated Tibetan cultural elements. But Ponlop had some practice with this before in his 2003 book Wild Awakening, where he did just that, albeit with language a little drier and less engaging than what he shows here.
Rebel Buddha is based on two lecture series that Ponlop delivered—one written, one spoken—and covers roughly two parallel tracks. The first track is a general introduction to Buddhist concept and practice, aimed at the layperson with no prior experience with Buddhism. The second, which intertwines with and is derived from the first, is about how Buddhist practice has evolved over the years and how it has become a separate incarnation as a cultural force in every land it’s taken root in. A Western, and even an American, Buddhism is not a watering-down of Buddhism, but simply its newest iteration—that is, as long as its motives are sincere and its practice is true.
Ponlop’s own introductory explanation makes it clear that the book’s main intention is practical, not theoretical. “[This book is] an exploration of what it means to be free and how we can become free.” The rebel part of “rebel buddha”, he explains, is a metaphor for the Buddha’s own description of how our enlightenment is always there—always dormant, always ready to burst out and allow us to liberate ourselves, and not something that needs to be discovered or added to us so much as it is something to be let out of us. From time to time, if we pay attention, we can feel “rebel buddha” (small b) manifesting within us. The trick is to find out how to let the tiger out of its cage in a constructive way, to ride it instead of letting it chase us around and gobble us up.
The Buddhism Ponlop espouses could be called “core” Buddhism, since it focuses entirely on the practice and nothing else: “Buddhism is primarily a study of mind and a system for training the mind. It is spiritual in nature, not religious. Its goal is self-knowledge, not salvation; freedom, not heaven.”
One of the mistakes I have seen made in many other “introductions” to Buddhism is how they quickly become top-heavy with the mythology and spirituality of Buddhism, while the practice—the most important part—becomes relegated to a second- or third-tier part of the work. Ponlop wisely avoids most of this, since he starts not by talking about the historical Buddha and his quest, etc., but rather by looking at our day-to-day experiences, and how inner freedom and rebel buddha manifest there. Since Buddhism is about the mind, first and foremost, he steps us through why knowing our own mind is crucial—how and why we construct an image of the self, and how to use our own neurotic understanding of ourselves as a starting point for all the work we need to do. I particularly liked this aspect of the book, since it helps cut an end-run around one of the things most people stumble over when they investigate Buddhism.
The idea that there is “no self” or that all things are “empty” seem alien and threatening, but Ponlop takes the reader by the hand and leads them around to the real meaning of those things using plain, friendly language, and by relating the book's subjects to everyday practice. In fact, he makes it clear that there isn’t anything but everyday practice for most people. “If you need reminders that will urge you toward practice, you can easily find them in your own life. … Look at your mind when you wake up in the morning and discover that there’s no milk for your coffee, it’s raining again, the car needs gas, and your kids have their headphones on and are refusing to speak to you. In that moment, where is your equanimity, your compassion?”
Time and again, he stresses how these practices are things that we must find in the lives that we are surrounded with right here and now, and not in the cultural origins of Buddhism. “The purpose of our meeting [the Buddha] is not to become a student of another culture or to discover someone else’s wisdom. We’re not practicing Indian culture to become Indian, or practicing Japanese or Tibetan culture to become Japanese or Tibetan. Our purpose is to discover who we truly are, to connect with our own wisdom.” There’s more than a little echo of Brad Warner in such things: he, too, is most interested in Buddhism as a way to examine ourselves fearlessly, and not just as a way to assimilate trappings of a culture. One can produce a remarkable simulation of wisdom that way, but it isn’t the real thing.
The second track of the book, where Ponlop talks about where Buddhism came from and where it’s headed, are not integrated into the rest of the book with the elegance they could have been. Some of this is because, ultimately, the whole subject of Buddhism’s past and future as a cultural force could easily be a book, or a whole series of books, on its own. That said, I did appreciate having this material here, because it supplies (if occasionally in a clumsy way) a context for the quest described in the rest of the book. We can be “Buddhist” without that implying any particular cultural connection, and that in fact might turn out to be for the best since it puts more of Buddhism’s vital elements directly into the hands of the people who need it most.
Rebel Buddha has been mentioned along with, but stands in contrast to, Stephen Batchelor’s works (e.g., Confession of a Buddhist Atheist). The two works don’t seem to be comparable: Ponlop’s book is practical, while Batchelor’s work, what I have seen of it, is mainly philosophical and focused more on the intellectual interpretations of Buddhism in the modern day. Batchelor was immersed headfirst in some of the headier strains of Tibetan Buddhism and over time grew disenchanted with its mysticism, while Ponlop seems to have found a more graceful way to keep separate the mystical and practical parts of Buddhism.
Most of the complaints about Buddhism’s mystical overtones seem to be more criticisms of the way Buddhism exists as an extension of local belief systems, rather than a proper criticism of Buddhism itself. Time and again Buddhism has merged syncretically with local belief systems whenever it was brought to new lands, acquiring both new variations on its practice and new spiritual accoutrements. That might explain why Buddhism was welcomed most broadly into the West when it appeared in the form of Zen – its most stripped-down, un-religious incarnation, which was broadly compatible with any number of other spiritual practices (as Thomas Merton could attest). The real heart of the matter is the practice, though, and every work like this one that lets us strip things back down to the basics is always welcome.
amazon.com=1590309294]]>The problem is, we don't live in that kind of world. But we can sure surround ourselves with what amounts to a dandy simulation of that world. Bangs's comments about building your own concentration camp seem all the more relevant with each passing year. When your friends' lists and comment feeds consist of an increasingly self-selected and insular group, it becomes that much easier to open your mouth and let fly something that sounds like a nifty laugh riot to you and your friends but amounts to a razor through through the spleen for the people who just walked in the door. And if they, in turn, let fly at you, you can't plead ignorance or, god help us, the consequences of privilege as a defense.
I was like this once (I hope to god I'm not like this now; I try not to be), and it came home to roost most pointedly one evening about ten years ago when I was at a friend's party and was being pretty careless with my language. It's starting to become less and less cool to use the word rape to refer to anything except an actual act of sexual assault, especially when the word is thrown around in a sloppy George-Lucas-did-this-to-my-childhood sense. Heck, it was uncool ten years ago if you had the wax out of your ears, and I had the wax scoured out of my ears good and proper at the time. It didn't help that the scouring was courtesy of someone who, for reasons tangential to all this, wasn't someone whose advice I was inclined to take. Now I know good advice is about more than whoever utters it.
Talk like this inevitably compels some people to step up and talk about someone they know who's a loudmouth and who says a lot of things that sting, but they don't really mean it, or they are just like that, or some other wince-inducing variation on that idiot formula. I've had more than a few such people, Offensive And Proud Of It, drift through my life, and my patience for that kind of "gotta be me" arrogance evaporated long ago. Yes, some people can "get away with it", but does that mean they should? Or that you need to subscribe to such do-it-yourself cretinism by following their example?
Paradox time. On the one hand, writers make their whole living -- and a good deal beyond that -- invoking the power of language. On the other hand, some of us (and a great many others besides) are stupefyingly inconsiderate when it comes to the way those words lance into people when they're coming outta the mouth instead of coming off the page. I am not talking about easy targets like the f-word and the s-word, which may be vulgar but have the benefit, however marginal, of not deriving their power from the denigration of any kind of person.
When certain people I know open their mouths about Jews this or women that and then turn around and exempt local company from the bloodletting slashings of their invective, I know they are speaking out of ignorance more than anything else. What I wonder is, how long does it take before they themselves twig to their own ignorance, and start letting experiences speak louder for them than their own mouths? Answer: too damn long.
]]>Every piece of work finds and keeps a different readership. It's not always possible to know, in advance, what kind of audience you get -- although you can make educated guesses based on what the readership is for previous work in a similar vein. This is where the concept of the target market (I know, yecch) comes from, for good or bad, and I suspect I'm going to be invoking it at least as much as I end up deconstructing it and tunneling under it during these discussions.
]]> Talk to Hollywood marketing folks and they eventually mention another word that makes creative people crawl under the table: demographics. Specifically, they talk about "quadrants": male, female, over-25, under-25. The way they see it, a movie that can hit all four of those quadrants is a guaranteed financial success. If something only appeals to one or two of those, it's limited at best. If the film's not a clear sell to any of those demographics -- or if they don't think it is -- it gets pushed into the swamp and laughed about some years later in "X Biggest Bombs" lists on io9 or FilmJerk.I thought about how a story in general can be considered to have quadrants of its own -- not in terms of demographics it's meant to reach, but in terms of what it provides to the reader. Here's the split I came up with:
I noticed after typing this that each one of these elements requires slightly more explanation than the previous one. No accident, I suspect: the further you go into the list, the more heavy lifting is needed on the part of the author. It's easier to entertain than it is to inform, and it's easier to do both of those things than to either impart what you've learned or make us care about someone.
Small wonder, when I hear one of the hardest kinds of books to write is works for children. There, you can't not afford to engender empathy and affection for your characters; it only looks easy from the outside.
This formula is still very much under wraps, and I don't expect it to be any kind of absolute. Consider it a draft guide for my thoughts as they continue to evolve on this subject.
]]>This applies to a lot more than just pixels.
]]> I'll start with the pixels first. I haven't seen the footage in question, but there's a lot of things that keep coming up -- namely, how the very crispness and detail in the imagery also reveals the very fakery going on in front of the camera. Maybe all of that will be cleaned up in post (and that's what a lot of people suspect), but the whole thing exposes a very basic problem: Is more always better?The "film purist" argument seems to revolve around the idea that 24 fps is somehow ideal, that we could have gone to 30 fps decades ago (with the home video revolution) but didn't, or some variant of that. The "progressive" argument is that 24 fps is just what we associate with "the film look", that 60 fps or better is better all around because more picture information is being provided to us temporally, etc.
The romantic in me would like to believe there's something about the nature of 24 fps that hits a very deep level of our brains. I have not been shown much scientific study in this field, though, which is why I'm filing it under "romanticism." But for the sake of romanticism, here is my defense of 24 fps:
1) The film look is something that stands right on the threshold of what we accept as realistic motion, but at the same time isn't -- and therefore has a kind of dreamtime, just-one-step-detached-from-reality look to it. Just enough of our imaginations are engaged to fill in the blanks.
2) When I watch a film, I am not obsessed with realism or forensic replication of reality. Even a "realistic" film does not have to be realistic to be interesting. I'm reminded of Ebert's old formula about black-and-white vs. color. Who looks better: your grandparents in their (B&W) wedding photo, or your parents in their (color) wedding photo? The more "realistic" thing is only the more "interesting" thing when the imagination is chained up.
3) A more realistic picture is not always one more suited to your intentions. Costumes and props that look great on stage -- when you're seated at least twenty feet away or more -- look hincty and loud up close. I don't mind 24 fps hiding some features and exposing others, because it's the director's job to call attention to the things that matter anyway, and to know how to work within the limits of his medium. I don't mind 24 fps limiting how quickly you can pan the camera, because when you're dealing with a screen that big (and you are dealing with a screen that big, yes?) waving the camera around becomes counterproductive.
Again, I haven't yet seen the 48 fps footage. I'm curious, and I expect to have more to say afterwards. But from what I've seen in other realms (60 fps non-interpolated progressive playback), 24 fps still garners affinity for a reason, and so far I feel those reasons are more than just inertia and the habits of history. Something else is at play here.
Now about the "more than just pixels" line -- actually, I should save that for a second post...
]]>And the original article that started it all. Read that first if you're wondering what this is about.
]]> Now that I've gone through each of the points (with one particular point condensed into another for the sake of brevity), a thread common to most of the posts has become clearer:Science fiction (and fantasy) (SF&F, for short) have many things to teach self-consciously literary fiction, just as the latter has many things to teach the former. The problem is that each has learned the wrong lessons from the other. SF&F has taught litfic to pretend an interest in technology and science as a cover story for the same-old same-old, and litfic has taught SF&F to be pretentious and audience-alienating.
This isn't how it's supposed to work. SF&F should teach litfic how to he truly unrestrained in its vision and sense of wonder, and litfic should teach SF&F how to observe and report back on human behavior, wisely.
The number of books on either side of the camp that accomplish this is small, and that may will just be Sturgeon's Law at work, ensuring that the number of truly good things in any field remain a minority. There are very few SF&F books that feel like they are about people or that seem to stem from any sense of well-observed human behavior, just as there are few litfic books that seem to have any real sense of wonder or curiosity about existence.
Random example. I submit as evidence for the latter Jonathan Franzen's recent statements about technological efforts towards immortality, which he finds silly -- and not in the sense that Stanisław Lem found them silly. Lem made fun of them in the way Swift mocked his countrymen: he wanted to provoke them into taking a good hard look at themselves. Franzen doesn't even seem interested in the subject as one worthy of literary study, not even for satire's sake; he comes off as incurious, a word I feel terrible typing but which seems all too fitting here. (It's not helped by the fact that his own POV on the subject -- which amounts to "why would anyone want to do that?" -- is itself worthy of a good discussion, but if his mind's elsewhere, no amount of grousing from me will change it.)
Is it any wonder that there is such renewed interest in fiction normally marketed to young adults? There, at least, some sense of wonder remains alive, even if it is being squeezed into forms more amenable to marketing than awakening a greater consciousness about life. People my age and older read The Hunger Games and feel for once like they are being shown something halfway new. We should feed this urge as best we can, and it's not as if we have any shortage of material for doing so. We just do a terrible job of presenting it and awakening interest in it.
My position is ticklish because I walk from one side of the aisle to the other freely and sometimes feel as if I am doing the people I just left behind a disservice by doing so. If I tell this budding author of military/political sci-fi that he should read Graham Greene instead of David Drake, will he feel like I'm doing him no favors? If I mention to this one with more conventional literary ambitions that a little less posturing and a little more storytelling wouldn't be a bad thing, is he going to feel like I'm saying he should tattoo SELL OUT on his knuckles?
Please note I'm not saying these things out of some sense that only I have the answers that would bridge the gap between the two. I have more questions than I do answers. I've only just started to wade into this dilemma, and I'm not even up to my ankles yet. All I can promise is that I'll continue to grapple with it.
]]>You shall not spend your life explaining why your not-boring is better than your fellow writers not-boring. Instead you will shut up and write.
In my words: "Your work should speak for itself."
This connects with something I have touched on throughout this series: the justifications writers cough up for why their work is the way it is.
One of the exercises that people do in a writing workshop is to have your work read by someone else to the class, and then to have everyone else in the class give spot reactions to it. The author sits with his mouth shut. He can take notes, but he can't respond out loud. This is a writ-small version of what happens in the real world: the author typically isn't there to respond on the spot to any bewilderment or dismay felt by the reader, and so the work has to stand as much as possible on its own two feet.
]]> It's tempting to say the Way We Live Now (pervasive Internet, sites like GoodReads, etc.) makes it possible for the writer to be that much more proactive in defending his work. Sometimes this takes the form of a writer making a spirited defense for something other people freely condemned, and sometimes it just consists of the poor guy putting his foot into his mouth and knocking out several teeth.When a book of mine (The Four-Day Weekend) appeared on GoodReads and garnered widely mixed reviews, I didn't run over there and start arguments with everyone who'd pooped on my parade. One, I'd seen too many other people commit exactly that mistake and get roundly booed off the stage for it; two, I'd received far worse (and more pointed, and more trenchant) criticism elsewhere.
Instead, I read what they had to say and thought about it. It's not the worst thing in the world to be told someone doesn't like your book; you can always write another one. I wrote that one mostly to get its particular time and place down on paper. I took some risks doing that, and I walked in knowing full well such risks existed. If I failed to make the goings-on more accessible to the non-clued-in, that's something I had to learn from by doing.
I learned something else on top of that after finishing Weekend: when you start a project, you tell yourself you're not going to make the same mistakes everyone else did. Then you find all these ways to justify making those mistakes, which is how you trick yourself into thinking you never made them in the first place. It's not the mistakes, but the justifications, that become the real culprit.
Not every piece of criticism is well-intentioned, and not all of it is accurate, either. There are some things other people will say about your work which springs entirely from their opinion, and which can be discounted easily. It's not easy to learn what criticisms are unfounded, because what seemed like a perfectly good idea to me at the time later turned out to be a bullet hole in my foot.
I am not of the opinion that a writer works best when he plugs his ears to the outside world and follows his own little inward path to the exclusion of everything else. At the same time I know, without being told, how important it is to have a vision of your own and remain ruthlessly true to it. Some of my favorite works have been inspired by that kind of holy madness. Yes, it helps to be guided by a voice only you can hear, but not when it's marching you straight into brick walls. I have seen this happen way too often, and I don't want to end up a casualty of that kind of hubris if I can help it.
It's hard to balance these two impulses -- the impulse to fly by the seat of your pants, and the impulse to let yourself be told what to do by people, often very smart and capable people, who make very good arguments. Most people heed the former over the latter. I have been yanked in both directions, sometimes at the same time, and it was never pretty.
I have no formula for how to balance the two, and I don't know that I ever will, except in the form of individual decisions made about individual criticisms rendered on individual books. This one, I took risks that were the ones I needed to take at the time; that one, I played it too safe; over here, god knows what was going through my head. Each of these steps alone is not what's crucial.
What matters most is, once the dust settles with any one of those works, being able to sit back down and begin anew, and roll everything forward once more into, one hopes, work that stands up that much more on its own. You just have to keep sticking your neck out.
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