Posts
Writers are fiction programmers.
If we begin viewing fiction as software, and writing fiction as programming, then we can free ourselves from publishing’s hard copy centric business model and move it into at least the 20th Century, if not quite the 21st.
You can’t tell yourself a story as good as a story Stephen King can tell you, so you pay to read, hear, or see his. Delivery system matters little. You can have it in hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, on a CD-ROM, on a cassette tape, or filmed as a movie on a theater screen, TV screen, computer screen, iPod, or cell phone. Movies are delivered mostly on DVD but sometimes still on VCR tapes, and electronically.
What matters is the story you are after, not the format it comes in.
And even if you are Neil Gaiman or Peter Straub, and can tell good stories on your own, you still can’t tell yourself a Stephen King story, so you’ll still pay to get one of his, if you like his work.
A story is mental. Stories are ideas presented in a certain way to provide an experience. Each story is software.
Fiction writers program a story experience and we then buy access to it. Access can be in readable, audible, or visual form.
Publishing needs to begin viewing fiction as software to be licensed. Buying a license for a single download in one or more formats is how fiction should be acquired.
A new market model: Publishers sell access to programs, (stories), via a variety of formats or delivery platforms.
Writers license their programs, (stories), to publishers or license access directly to consumers via the internet or other systems.
Publishers will be able to offer value-added aspects such as multiple formats, backup files, and, soon, hypertext or other multimedia enhancement. At core, though, each story is a programmed experience access to which is to be licensed on a per-download basis. Download is an electronic term but a physical copy of a book, printed and bound, will count as a single instance of access. Some publishers may wish to offer multiple formats for a single price; audio and electronic downloads if one buys a hard copy, for instance.
This simple shift of outlook can and very likely will transform publishing and writing. It is a good interim solution to the many questions facing intellectual copyright as technology brings such rapid changes.
/// /// ///
Friday, April 11, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
A Cure for Style
What is a writing style and how do we get or avoid it and can it be cured?
Style is how you think because style runs deeper than just choice of word, topos, or trope. If it were otherwise, then parodies of Lovecraft or Hemingway would be as good as the best of the originals. They never are because they focus only on the glittery surface of style, not the thinking that led to those choices.
Writers with distinct voices don't rely on an aggregation of the elements of style. Instead, they think in a distinctive way. Vonnegut is a good example. His voice is much more in how he thinks than what word choices he makes, or what images he deploys. He makes us see things in new ways, from angles we may not have thought of before.
Yes, style can consciously be analyzed and reproduced. This can, as you pointed out, easily lead to self-parody. Hemingway ended up that way as his thinking was gradually scrambled and he clung more to method than manner of thought.
Recipe for style: Think twice, write once. Then rewrite for clarity and concision.
Yes, style shifts with mood and changes with need. Creating atmosphere specific to each tale may require a tone different with each.
As with actors, some styles always play themselves, others are recognized only upon seeing a by-line. Is your style to be movie star or character actor?
Style is either the putting on, or the taking off, of a mask of words. It is either misdirection or revelation. It is, most often, all these things at once, most of it done unconsciously.
It is obvious that a search for the right metaphor is part of my style, for instance. It is all rooted in how I think. Modeling is part of my makeup.
In no way am I advocating that art and artist are the same, please understand that. Art and artist, although obviously on intimate terms, often do not reflect each other, at least not in ways humanoid primates can explain. Vile reprobates can produce sublime sacred art and saints can produce the scurviest pornography - go figure.
Yet, at root, it's part and parcel with how they think. Whether it reveals, conceals, or does a bit of both inevitably, ultimately style is thinking because that is what influences preference and choice.
Jagger famously said It’s the singer, not the song. Diane Keaton in ANNIE HALL showed it was the person, not the clothes, that creates style.
Style is how, not what. Focusing on the what of style helps to parse it for each given writer but learning how to be true to one’s self is the deeply personal thing that produces real style.
To cure style simply write to another’s standards. Not only is this a simple, inexpensive cure, but a popular one, to judge by much of what’s published.
/// /// ///
Style is how you think because style runs deeper than just choice of word, topos, or trope. If it were otherwise, then parodies of Lovecraft or Hemingway would be as good as the best of the originals. They never are because they focus only on the glittery surface of style, not the thinking that led to those choices.
Writers with distinct voices don't rely on an aggregation of the elements of style. Instead, they think in a distinctive way. Vonnegut is a good example. His voice is much more in how he thinks than what word choices he makes, or what images he deploys. He makes us see things in new ways, from angles we may not have thought of before.
Yes, style can consciously be analyzed and reproduced. This can, as you pointed out, easily lead to self-parody. Hemingway ended up that way as his thinking was gradually scrambled and he clung more to method than manner of thought.
Recipe for style: Think twice, write once. Then rewrite for clarity and concision.
Yes, style shifts with mood and changes with need. Creating atmosphere specific to each tale may require a tone different with each.
As with actors, some styles always play themselves, others are recognized only upon seeing a by-line. Is your style to be movie star or character actor?
Style is either the putting on, or the taking off, of a mask of words. It is either misdirection or revelation. It is, most often, all these things at once, most of it done unconsciously.
It is obvious that a search for the right metaphor is part of my style, for instance. It is all rooted in how I think. Modeling is part of my makeup.
In no way am I advocating that art and artist are the same, please understand that. Art and artist, although obviously on intimate terms, often do not reflect each other, at least not in ways humanoid primates can explain. Vile reprobates can produce sublime sacred art and saints can produce the scurviest pornography - go figure.
Yet, at root, it's part and parcel with how they think. Whether it reveals, conceals, or does a bit of both inevitably, ultimately style is thinking because that is what influences preference and choice.
Jagger famously said It’s the singer, not the song. Diane Keaton in ANNIE HALL showed it was the person, not the clothes, that creates style.
Style is how, not what. Focusing on the what of style helps to parse it for each given writer but learning how to be true to one’s self is the deeply personal thing that produces real style.
To cure style simply write to another’s standards. Not only is this a simple, inexpensive cure, but a popular one, to judge by much of what’s published.
/// /// ///
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Clarke
Tuesday 18 March 2008 American Midwest time,
Wednesday 19 March 2008 Sri Lanka time:
Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died at age 90 in Sri Lanka, where he's lived since the 1950s.
I have an 8X10 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY poster hanging above my desk. It is framed because it is signed by Sir Arthur in white/silver ink.
My friend Dan gave it to me as a gift.
Clarke was my favorite sf writer in large part because his work is concise as well as smart. It wastes neither time nor intellect.
I hope the mention he'll receive in media from his death encourages people to read his work more widely.
Economy of thought and word requires understanding. Clarke grasped his work fully before writing. He could present complex ideas simply and spell out mind-boggling implications directly.
Many found his work unemotional. It was, instead, visionary. His emotion was invested in lifting us up into bigger, better worlds.
He was visionary not only technologically. His work often held a touch of mysticism. Childhood’s End is literally and metaphorically transcendent. One of Clarke’s comments in 1965 about the movie/novel he was then working on with Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, was, "MGM doesn't know it yet, but they've footed the bill for the first six-million-dollar religious film."
Characterization was not considered his forté but HAL, from that novel/movie, is perhaps as vivid and well known a character as science fiction has produced.
He detailed communication satellites in stationary or geosynchronous orbit in a technical paper in 1945. After WWII he got degrees in Maths and Physics. He was a genuine scientist yet lent his name and attention to ARTHUR C. CLARK’S MYSTERIOUS WORLD and ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S WORLD OF STRANGE POWERS, both dedicated to examining fringe or Fortean topics with an open mind. In one notable episode he caught the semi-amusing James Randi cheating in his analysis of a dowsing experiment and stiffly corrected the math, and conclusions, in his summation.
In his novel Imperial Earth he introduced a gay character, marking a shy literary coming out Clarke later embraced openly on his own terms.
Clarke supported Humanism. He worried that religion was the one meme mankind might not survive yet retained faith in the fact of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. While he lived an enviable life of the mind, including a long debate in letters over technology with C. S. Lewis, he was also an avid SCUBA diver most of his life and argued for the preservation and exploration of the world’s Oceans.
The City and the Stars was an early favorite of mine but I’m not sure today which version I read as a kid. There are two, one the original, the second a rewritten version that improved scenes and changed some specifics.
Childhood’s End staggered me. I had never read anything so simultaneously shattering and uplifting, and the African scenes drew me with a visceral vividness.
Another fond memory is curling up on my mother’s rocking chair in the living room, under a quilt my great grandmother had made, reading Clarke’s short stories, savoring each and thinking about it for a few minutes after finishing, until I could no longer resist reading the next. The motion of the rocker helped evoke weightlessness, lower gravities, and the endless fall of a spaceship.
In this way I read through the early Ballantine collections Expedition to Earth, Reach for Tomorrow, Tales of the White Hart, The Other Side of the Sky, The Wind From the Sun, and the Nine Billion Names of God, the latter named for perhaps Clarke’s most famous short story. In it, monks have purchased a supercomputer to help them name the nine-billion names of God more efficiently. They believe that, once this is done, this cycle of reality will end and, as the technicians who installed the computer are descending the mountain from the monastery dusk falls and, one by one, the stars blink out. It is an elegant, chilling, and inspiring story, and quite brief. That Zen concision again.
The Sands of Mars, with its urgent message not of ecology but of terraforming, has enthralled me with desert visions as compelling as Frank Herbert’s Dune or the movie LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, but with science replacing the espionage and realpolitik. Earthlight drew me to imagine colonizing Luna and living in new ways. This novel’s espionage and politics were the opposite of indoctrination for me. His stories got me ready to forge new traditions and experience different loyalties. Upward was outward, and freedom meant embracing the universal rather than the parochial.
It goes without saying, perhaps, that 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is my favorite movie. I would probably say favorite science fiction movie these days to make room for favorites in other categories but I would be hard pressed to name a film of any type I admire as much. I saw it on the big screen and people cried when the lights came up; I sat stunned, unable to absorb how layered and amazing it had been for me. To this day the film mesmerizes me. If it is on cable as I scan through channels, I’ll stick on it and watch again, instantly enthralled.
I wore out a copy of The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 by Jerome Agel. A compendium of facts, interviews, and backstories about the movie, the book was also crammed with pictures, each image evoking a thousand others in my mind. Could there have been a denser message delivered than 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY? Enticement balances warning; technophila vies with technophobia; man and machine negate each other, yet both triumph; there is space travel and earthbound politics; there is conspiracy and revelation; the ancient past, implicit in archaeology, uncovers a future both unimaginably far off yet here, now; there is loss and transcendence yet again; evolution is made vivid and taken beyond comprehension; the aliens are genuinely incomprehensible; every instant of the film is laden with rich signal, some still being decoded 40 years later.
Clarke’s body has died, the inevitable result of not switching to Machine/Digital Intelligence soon enough but his memes, in large part his mind, the best parts of it, live on for any and all of us to discover anew.
Go read some Arthur C. Clarke and celebrate an astounding personal human odyssey.
/// /// ///
Wednesday 19 March 2008 Sri Lanka time:
Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died at age 90 in Sri Lanka, where he's lived since the 1950s.
I have an 8X10 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY poster hanging above my desk. It is framed because it is signed by Sir Arthur in white/silver ink.
My friend Dan gave it to me as a gift.
Clarke was my favorite sf writer in large part because his work is concise as well as smart. It wastes neither time nor intellect.
I hope the mention he'll receive in media from his death encourages people to read his work more widely.
Economy of thought and word requires understanding. Clarke grasped his work fully before writing. He could present complex ideas simply and spell out mind-boggling implications directly.
Many found his work unemotional. It was, instead, visionary. His emotion was invested in lifting us up into bigger, better worlds.
He was visionary not only technologically. His work often held a touch of mysticism. Childhood’s End is literally and metaphorically transcendent. One of Clarke’s comments in 1965 about the movie/novel he was then working on with Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, was, "MGM doesn't know it yet, but they've footed the bill for the first six-million-dollar religious film."
Characterization was not considered his forté but HAL, from that novel/movie, is perhaps as vivid and well known a character as science fiction has produced.
He detailed communication satellites in stationary or geosynchronous orbit in a technical paper in 1945. After WWII he got degrees in Maths and Physics. He was a genuine scientist yet lent his name and attention to ARTHUR C. CLARK’S MYSTERIOUS WORLD and ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S WORLD OF STRANGE POWERS, both dedicated to examining fringe or Fortean topics with an open mind. In one notable episode he caught the semi-amusing James Randi cheating in his analysis of a dowsing experiment and stiffly corrected the math, and conclusions, in his summation.
In his novel Imperial Earth he introduced a gay character, marking a shy literary coming out Clarke later embraced openly on his own terms.
Clarke supported Humanism. He worried that religion was the one meme mankind might not survive yet retained faith in the fact of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. While he lived an enviable life of the mind, including a long debate in letters over technology with C. S. Lewis, he was also an avid SCUBA diver most of his life and argued for the preservation and exploration of the world’s Oceans.
The City and the Stars was an early favorite of mine but I’m not sure today which version I read as a kid. There are two, one the original, the second a rewritten version that improved scenes and changed some specifics.
Childhood’s End staggered me. I had never read anything so simultaneously shattering and uplifting, and the African scenes drew me with a visceral vividness.
Another fond memory is curling up on my mother’s rocking chair in the living room, under a quilt my great grandmother had made, reading Clarke’s short stories, savoring each and thinking about it for a few minutes after finishing, until I could no longer resist reading the next. The motion of the rocker helped evoke weightlessness, lower gravities, and the endless fall of a spaceship.
In this way I read through the early Ballantine collections Expedition to Earth, Reach for Tomorrow, Tales of the White Hart, The Other Side of the Sky, The Wind From the Sun, and the Nine Billion Names of God, the latter named for perhaps Clarke’s most famous short story. In it, monks have purchased a supercomputer to help them name the nine-billion names of God more efficiently. They believe that, once this is done, this cycle of reality will end and, as the technicians who installed the computer are descending the mountain from the monastery dusk falls and, one by one, the stars blink out. It is an elegant, chilling, and inspiring story, and quite brief. That Zen concision again.
The Sands of Mars, with its urgent message not of ecology but of terraforming, has enthralled me with desert visions as compelling as Frank Herbert’s Dune or the movie LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, but with science replacing the espionage and realpolitik. Earthlight drew me to imagine colonizing Luna and living in new ways. This novel’s espionage and politics were the opposite of indoctrination for me. His stories got me ready to forge new traditions and experience different loyalties. Upward was outward, and freedom meant embracing the universal rather than the parochial.
It goes without saying, perhaps, that 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is my favorite movie. I would probably say favorite science fiction movie these days to make room for favorites in other categories but I would be hard pressed to name a film of any type I admire as much. I saw it on the big screen and people cried when the lights came up; I sat stunned, unable to absorb how layered and amazing it had been for me. To this day the film mesmerizes me. If it is on cable as I scan through channels, I’ll stick on it and watch again, instantly enthralled.
I wore out a copy of The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 by Jerome Agel. A compendium of facts, interviews, and backstories about the movie, the book was also crammed with pictures, each image evoking a thousand others in my mind. Could there have been a denser message delivered than 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY? Enticement balances warning; technophila vies with technophobia; man and machine negate each other, yet both triumph; there is space travel and earthbound politics; there is conspiracy and revelation; the ancient past, implicit in archaeology, uncovers a future both unimaginably far off yet here, now; there is loss and transcendence yet again; evolution is made vivid and taken beyond comprehension; the aliens are genuinely incomprehensible; every instant of the film is laden with rich signal, some still being decoded 40 years later.
Clarke’s body has died, the inevitable result of not switching to Machine/Digital Intelligence soon enough but his memes, in large part his mind, the best parts of it, live on for any and all of us to discover anew.
Go read some Arthur C. Clarke and celebrate an astounding personal human odyssey.
/// /// ///
Thursday, March 13, 2008
My Guitars
I saved for my first guitar for a long time. I was 13 and had to rely on random jobs like lawn mowing. Then I had to find a guitar for sale by an individual because the ones in the stores were way too much.
My aunt Nancy, who is only a few years older, told me a friend of hers might sell her guitar to me so the next time we visited my maternal grandparents I took what money I had saved.
The friend, Paula Winogle, met my aunt Nancy and me on the cul-de-sac where they both lived. I really liked the tone of the guitar. “How much do you want for it?” I asked, and she said, “$15.”
All I had was $14 but I told her I could owe her one dollar and pay her in a week or so.
She said, “Don’t worry about it.”
The guitar is a Regal, a no-name but very sturdy and with excellent action despite a tailpiece bridge that is mounted askew.
I got a lesson book soon after and tried to learn on my own but then my mother heard that a college student was giving lessons at the local music shop, in a basement room entered from the back of the store. It was $5 a lesson, once a week, and we really couldn’t afford it but my mother found the money for a few weeks. This was over summer.
One day on the way home I was attacked by a large collie. I was backed against a car until finally a toddler, naked but for a diaper, came out of a house and shouted, “Tarkas, no,” saving me. I did not take another lesson.
A few years later Aunt Nancy fled from an abusive husband, all the way from Japan to Pennsylvania where we lived, and she brought a Yamaha guitar -- which she gave me. My first and only real guitar all these years, a dreadnought style basic Yamaha with poor action due to a bent neck.
My only other guitar is a Stella Harmony half size, found at an estate sale. It's so old it's discolored but it plays fine. Should use it more, it's so portable, but I don't usually bother. I usually pick up the Yamaha, now that I've had the neck straightened and the machine heads fixed, and play along with iTunes, ad libbing fills and working out key changes so I can play with melodies and chord structures.
Is it any wonder I don’t play like anyone else I’ve ever seen or heard?
/// /// ///
My aunt Nancy, who is only a few years older, told me a friend of hers might sell her guitar to me so the next time we visited my maternal grandparents I took what money I had saved.
The friend, Paula Winogle, met my aunt Nancy and me on the cul-de-sac where they both lived. I really liked the tone of the guitar. “How much do you want for it?” I asked, and she said, “$15.”
All I had was $14 but I told her I could owe her one dollar and pay her in a week or so.
She said, “Don’t worry about it.”
The guitar is a Regal, a no-name but very sturdy and with excellent action despite a tailpiece bridge that is mounted askew.
I got a lesson book soon after and tried to learn on my own but then my mother heard that a college student was giving lessons at the local music shop, in a basement room entered from the back of the store. It was $5 a lesson, once a week, and we really couldn’t afford it but my mother found the money for a few weeks. This was over summer.
One day on the way home I was attacked by a large collie. I was backed against a car until finally a toddler, naked but for a diaper, came out of a house and shouted, “Tarkas, no,” saving me. I did not take another lesson.
A few years later Aunt Nancy fled from an abusive husband, all the way from Japan to Pennsylvania where we lived, and she brought a Yamaha guitar -- which she gave me. My first and only real guitar all these years, a dreadnought style basic Yamaha with poor action due to a bent neck.
My only other guitar is a Stella Harmony half size, found at an estate sale. It's so old it's discolored but it plays fine. Should use it more, it's so portable, but I don't usually bother. I usually pick up the Yamaha, now that I've had the neck straightened and the machine heads fixed, and play along with iTunes, ad libbing fills and working out key changes so I can play with melodies and chord structures.
Is it any wonder I don’t play like anyone else I’ve ever seen or heard?
/// /// ///
Saturday, January 5, 2008
What Do I Write?
Publishers want marketable traits, preferably one per writer. Variety confuses things and versatility in a writer is a curse for sales.
Knowing this, I wondered what I write.
What fix do you come to Gene Stewart for?
My wife once suggested I call myself the Paladin Prince of Paranoia. She swears she wasn’t joking.
My general topics usually include the unseen, the covert, and the occult. My work reveals what’s hidden and explores behind the scenes. Much of it deals with espionage in some way, usually indirectly. Gothic Realism is one of the terms I’ve coined, but that is inadequate to cover all my work. I rarely write straight genre, but Slipstream is too vague. The New Weird isn’t even a hint fateful enough. Yes I can be transgressive, but only in flashes. I am a mainstream monster, a literary lark, a genre jerk, yet ineluctable. Call me TETAR: The Exception To All Rules.
Bodes ill for a career, such blurring.
‘Jack Ketchum’ has that problem. He writes superbly, but if you like one of his books, you may not automatically like another. They vary that much.
On the other hand, Dean Koontz’s books vary, too, yet he has something consistent running through all of them that brings readers back. A voice, a tone, or perhaps just an outlook or viewpoint. I think it’s optimism.
In theory, the use of different by-lines solves this problem. Different kinds of books can be sold under different names. Try telling an agent that, though. Or you could pull a Graham Greene and label some works Entertainments, thereby implying the others are Serious. You have to be a writer of status before you can do that with a straight face.
One friend suggested a label for my work: The Bitter Truth Will Set You Free. Much of it is about discovering and facing up to the cold, hard truth, after all. It’s an odd quality for fiction with so many imaginary and speculative aspects, but it rings true for the most part.
But who wants the truth? Who can handle it besides Jack Nicholson? Don’t most of us spend most of our free time avoiding the truth like roaches dodging light?
Escapism’s what sells. Whether it’s labeled sf, fantasy, horror, mystery, or romance, or even politics, Fortean, or fringe, it takes people away from their everyday concerns for awhile.
If most readers want escapism, fine, but this writer wants more. I want my work to matter.
Translation: I’m too fucking serious. I need to lighten up, but can't.
Is this a legacy from having begun in mainstream / literary fiction, early in both my reading and writing?
I was born on Dickens’s birthday and he is my favorite writer, so maybe I got it from his work, all that social conscience.
I once read an encomium from Norman Spinrad, I think it was, about PKD. It said, "He wrote serious fiction in popular form; what higher praise can there be?" And that's been my ambition. Well, it describes what comes out of me, anyway, I should say it that way. It's not as if I sit and plan to be overbearingly serious.
To me, fiction matters, so I want mine to matter, too. In order to matter it has to address truth, no matter how bitter, inconvenient, or uncomfortable.
Make sense?
And escapism evades truth. It ducks the heavy and goes wide around what’s prickly.
I am not referring to factuality. Facts are for nonfiction and the nerdiest hard sf.
Truth is more elusive. It lives, and hides, in stories. Only fiction can reveal truth in its fullest form, by touching upon the ineffable.
To matter, fiction must deal in truth.
I wrote an essay called Happy Endings: More Than A Cancer? addressing this very thing. It concluded that happy endings don't like the truth much. They prefer easy lies. They prefer delusions, propaganda, and nonsense to anything like real, pointed truths.
Next time you're confronted with a happy ending, ask yourself why you're not angry about being treated with such contempt? Are you a child who needs protected from anything harsh or upsetting? Must you be lied to in order to be seduced, enticed, or otherwise strung along?
But escapism relaxes us, you cry. It lets us rest from all the important stuff. It offers breathing space.
All true, which is why entertainment is the first principle of all good fiction. Beyond that, though, lies what matters. It is possible to entertain and tell the truth at the same time. In fact, writing that seeks to enlighten without entertaining does neither, as someone once wrote.
In jazz, the best don’t play trumpet, sax, piano, or drums, they play “the truth”.
You know it when you hear it. If you have to ask, you’ll never know.
William S. Burroughs said, “I write reports.” He was not kidding. He reported in from where ever his head took him, and did the best he could with difficult material.
What do I write? The truth as I see it. Come to me and I’ll tell you bluntly what I see.
If I’m not the type to lie about everything working out okay, what else can I do?
/// /// ///
Knowing this, I wondered what I write.
What fix do you come to Gene Stewart for?
My wife once suggested I call myself the Paladin Prince of Paranoia. She swears she wasn’t joking.
My general topics usually include the unseen, the covert, and the occult. My work reveals what’s hidden and explores behind the scenes. Much of it deals with espionage in some way, usually indirectly. Gothic Realism is one of the terms I’ve coined, but that is inadequate to cover all my work. I rarely write straight genre, but Slipstream is too vague. The New Weird isn’t even a hint fateful enough. Yes I can be transgressive, but only in flashes. I am a mainstream monster, a literary lark, a genre jerk, yet ineluctable. Call me TETAR: The Exception To All Rules.
Bodes ill for a career, such blurring.
‘Jack Ketchum’ has that problem. He writes superbly, but if you like one of his books, you may not automatically like another. They vary that much.
On the other hand, Dean Koontz’s books vary, too, yet he has something consistent running through all of them that brings readers back. A voice, a tone, or perhaps just an outlook or viewpoint. I think it’s optimism.
In theory, the use of different by-lines solves this problem. Different kinds of books can be sold under different names. Try telling an agent that, though. Or you could pull a Graham Greene and label some works Entertainments, thereby implying the others are Serious. You have to be a writer of status before you can do that with a straight face.
One friend suggested a label for my work: The Bitter Truth Will Set You Free. Much of it is about discovering and facing up to the cold, hard truth, after all. It’s an odd quality for fiction with so many imaginary and speculative aspects, but it rings true for the most part.
But who wants the truth? Who can handle it besides Jack Nicholson? Don’t most of us spend most of our free time avoiding the truth like roaches dodging light?
Escapism’s what sells. Whether it’s labeled sf, fantasy, horror, mystery, or romance, or even politics, Fortean, or fringe, it takes people away from their everyday concerns for awhile.
If most readers want escapism, fine, but this writer wants more. I want my work to matter.
Translation: I’m too fucking serious. I need to lighten up, but can't.
Is this a legacy from having begun in mainstream / literary fiction, early in both my reading and writing?
I was born on Dickens’s birthday and he is my favorite writer, so maybe I got it from his work, all that social conscience.
I once read an encomium from Norman Spinrad, I think it was, about PKD. It said, "He wrote serious fiction in popular form; what higher praise can there be?" And that's been my ambition. Well, it describes what comes out of me, anyway, I should say it that way. It's not as if I sit and plan to be overbearingly serious.
To me, fiction matters, so I want mine to matter, too. In order to matter it has to address truth, no matter how bitter, inconvenient, or uncomfortable.
Make sense?
And escapism evades truth. It ducks the heavy and goes wide around what’s prickly.
I am not referring to factuality. Facts are for nonfiction and the nerdiest hard sf.
Truth is more elusive. It lives, and hides, in stories. Only fiction can reveal truth in its fullest form, by touching upon the ineffable.
To matter, fiction must deal in truth.
I wrote an essay called Happy Endings: More Than A Cancer? addressing this very thing. It concluded that happy endings don't like the truth much. They prefer easy lies. They prefer delusions, propaganda, and nonsense to anything like real, pointed truths.
Next time you're confronted with a happy ending, ask yourself why you're not angry about being treated with such contempt? Are you a child who needs protected from anything harsh or upsetting? Must you be lied to in order to be seduced, enticed, or otherwise strung along?
But escapism relaxes us, you cry. It lets us rest from all the important stuff. It offers breathing space.
All true, which is why entertainment is the first principle of all good fiction. Beyond that, though, lies what matters. It is possible to entertain and tell the truth at the same time. In fact, writing that seeks to enlighten without entertaining does neither, as someone once wrote.
In jazz, the best don’t play trumpet, sax, piano, or drums, they play “the truth”.
You know it when you hear it. If you have to ask, you’ll never know.
William S. Burroughs said, “I write reports.” He was not kidding. He reported in from where ever his head took him, and did the best he could with difficult material.
What do I write? The truth as I see it. Come to me and I’ll tell you bluntly what I see.
If I’m not the type to lie about everything working out okay, what else can I do?
/// /// ///
Friday, December 14, 2007
A True Man
So last evening my wife walked in from picking up one of my sons at the public library and handed me Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote.
http://www.amazon.com/Portraits-Observations-Essays-Truman-Capote/dp/1400066611/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197666545&sr=1-1
I fell into it and have only just surfaced. Read it all, or all that I'd not already read or want to read just now. Reminds me how good he could be: "Handcarved Coffins" is riveting, for instance.
"You trying to kill me or get me killed?" I asked my wife once when I glanced up. "You know this will just quicken my ambitions."
On the back of the book is quoted an excerpt from the Preface for "Music For Chameleons". It says in part, famously, "...Writers...who take genuine risks... bite the bullet and walk the plank..."
He is comparing writers who go for broke to professional gamblers but he misses the mark. It's an act of redemption and you risk trading your soul for your art. As he so notoriously did with In Cold Blood and as he so vividly understood.
There is an interesting passage in this book during which he discusses having published two chapters from his work-in-progress Answered Prayers. These famously caused backlash from rich friends who felt he'd betrayed them. In this passage he says no, he merely used his material, as all writers must, and then goes on to say, much more interestingly -- because their reaction is inconsequential to him compared to what he discovered -- that after the chapters had appeared he reassessed all his published writing, and found all of it wanting, and, worse, knew why. He says he had systematically tried to conquer all forms of writing, some with great success, others with little. He says the failing he spotted was built in to each form; by following the techniques of a given form, he was forced to leave out abilities and effects he may have mastered from other forms. Thus he conceived the ambition to bring all of it to bear at one time -- everything he'd learned from novels, short stories, poetry, screenplays, stage plays, essays, reporting, and so on.
He claims this is the style one sees in the book Music For Chameleons and perhaps most effectively in "Handcarved Coffins".
I chose to read this book as a collection of high spots. Many reviewers scrambled to sneer at its lesser pieces, such as a portrait of Liz Taylor. Their loss.
There is a remarkable interview with Bobby Beusoleil, one of the Manson Family, that reveals several aspects Bugliosi's lies about helter skelter cannot cover up forever, and there are any number of amazing passages and entire pieces that sustain a focus and balance that was, and is, remarkable. He is shown to have been nothing like the effete, lisping femme of his image, but a very tough-minded, agile-minded, single-minded writer who gave everything to his art and who looked deeper and less blinkingly into evil than many a seemingly tougher guy. Maybe than any of us.
He concluded the one unforgivable thing was deliberate cruelty.
Funny how that is what so many offer his memory now.
/// /// ///
http://www.amazon.com/Portraits-Observations-Essays-Truman-Capote/dp/1400066611/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197666545&sr=1-1
I fell into it and have only just surfaced. Read it all, or all that I'd not already read or want to read just now. Reminds me how good he could be: "Handcarved Coffins" is riveting, for instance.
"You trying to kill me or get me killed?" I asked my wife once when I glanced up. "You know this will just quicken my ambitions."
On the back of the book is quoted an excerpt from the Preface for "Music For Chameleons". It says in part, famously, "...Writers...who take genuine risks... bite the bullet and walk the plank..."
He is comparing writers who go for broke to professional gamblers but he misses the mark. It's an act of redemption and you risk trading your soul for your art. As he so notoriously did with In Cold Blood and as he so vividly understood.
There is an interesting passage in this book during which he discusses having published two chapters from his work-in-progress Answered Prayers. These famously caused backlash from rich friends who felt he'd betrayed them. In this passage he says no, he merely used his material, as all writers must, and then goes on to say, much more interestingly -- because their reaction is inconsequential to him compared to what he discovered -- that after the chapters had appeared he reassessed all his published writing, and found all of it wanting, and, worse, knew why. He says he had systematically tried to conquer all forms of writing, some with great success, others with little. He says the failing he spotted was built in to each form; by following the techniques of a given form, he was forced to leave out abilities and effects he may have mastered from other forms. Thus he conceived the ambition to bring all of it to bear at one time -- everything he'd learned from novels, short stories, poetry, screenplays, stage plays, essays, reporting, and so on.
He claims this is the style one sees in the book Music For Chameleons and perhaps most effectively in "Handcarved Coffins".
I chose to read this book as a collection of high spots. Many reviewers scrambled to sneer at its lesser pieces, such as a portrait of Liz Taylor. Their loss.
There is a remarkable interview with Bobby Beusoleil, one of the Manson Family, that reveals several aspects Bugliosi's lies about helter skelter cannot cover up forever, and there are any number of amazing passages and entire pieces that sustain a focus and balance that was, and is, remarkable. He is shown to have been nothing like the effete, lisping femme of his image, but a very tough-minded, agile-minded, single-minded writer who gave everything to his art and who looked deeper and less blinkingly into evil than many a seemingly tougher guy. Maybe than any of us.
He concluded the one unforgivable thing was deliberate cruelty.
Funny how that is what so many offer his memory now.
/// /// ///
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Apocalyptic Calypso
I woke up from my second day in a row of dreaming about total destruction. Yesterday's dream has faded but involved running through a landscape of bombed-out buildings, smoldering craters, and a panicked, dangerous populace.
In this one, first I was a kid in a school for fascists, taught to fear brutal trained chimps and baboons that would come into one's room to search out disloyal books and so on. At one point we were encouraged utterly to destroy our rooms and all our possessions in a frenzy of state loyalty simply to prove we gladly followed any and all directions; it felt so awful.
And then I was adult me, in my old home town of Ebensburg, PA, as the fascists soldiers came with demolition in mind, literally to raze the town with the people still in it. If we ran, they killed us. If we hid, they knocked the buildings down on us. I kept having to duck, and watch above me. I-beams fell on people, little three-legged robots rushed soldiers around to shoot stragglers, and tremendous sheets of glass fell and shattered. Flying shards cut us; my hand caught one as I blocked my face. I saw them using small squibs to knock out supports so the buildings would just collapse sideways and take out whole streets. I saw them torching what ever burned. I saw them driving trucks over people and swinging wrecking balls at windows full of screaming people. Everything was falling and crushed us, and there was nothing stable underfoot as debris shifted. You had to run on half-crushed people, some grabbing your ankles for help. There was nowhere to go, and as you ran from soldiers you had to try to avoid cul-de-sacs and dead-ends. There was literally no refuge, either. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. It was terrifying, and it ended with me and some kid standing in a field surrounded by the debris of a housing development -- I'd somehow gotten out of downtown proper. We stood panting and jittery, responding to every sound, and then there was a huge, deep rumble and we looked over and saw the courthouse going down in a huge plume of smoke, and in the distance we could hear more of that low sound and I thought, Ah, Johnstown's going down. A cat came by, walking arrogantly the way cats do, and the kid said, without moving, "We could eat that; wh didn't we kill it?", and I said, "We didn't kill the cat because then we'd be like them. We can scrounge, though. Canned goods and stuff. Trouble is, winter's coming, and our fires will give us away. Unless we live in the burning rubble. Maybe then they won't bother looking."
Really bleak.
And just as I woke I thought, "Uh-uh; you'd have no meds. You'd croak from the effort of scrambling for survival."
Another day in Paradise, eh? LOL Whoa.
///
Vast is the Earth, yet so is it small. To a demon, Earth is a bauble. To one lost in a desert, it is a solid echo of the sky.
Between those truths we live our mad scramble lives from dark to dark.
Balanced on a grain of sand called love, those truths keep each other at bay. Size and its lack encompass us. Micro and macro swing us in their arms.
And so we sleep.
--From the Liturgy at Hessia Abbey
///
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
-- Bertrand Russell
///
May I humbly suggest "Never Tear Us Apart" by INXS as theme music for this Apocalyptic Calypso dream? Made me cry right after I wrote down the dream; elegiac defiance. J. S. Bach’s “Air On a G String” provides a nice cool-down, then, followed by "Don't Cry" by Guns & Roses for a stirring bounce-back.
///
Story is the song, writing is the singer.
--W B Kek, informal talk
In this one, first I was a kid in a school for fascists, taught to fear brutal trained chimps and baboons that would come into one's room to search out disloyal books and so on. At one point we were encouraged utterly to destroy our rooms and all our possessions in a frenzy of state loyalty simply to prove we gladly followed any and all directions; it felt so awful.
And then I was adult me, in my old home town of Ebensburg, PA, as the fascists soldiers came with demolition in mind, literally to raze the town with the people still in it. If we ran, they killed us. If we hid, they knocked the buildings down on us. I kept having to duck, and watch above me. I-beams fell on people, little three-legged robots rushed soldiers around to shoot stragglers, and tremendous sheets of glass fell and shattered. Flying shards cut us; my hand caught one as I blocked my face. I saw them using small squibs to knock out supports so the buildings would just collapse sideways and take out whole streets. I saw them torching what ever burned. I saw them driving trucks over people and swinging wrecking balls at windows full of screaming people. Everything was falling and crushed us, and there was nothing stable underfoot as debris shifted. You had to run on half-crushed people, some grabbing your ankles for help. There was nowhere to go, and as you ran from soldiers you had to try to avoid cul-de-sacs and dead-ends. There was literally no refuge, either. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. It was terrifying, and it ended with me and some kid standing in a field surrounded by the debris of a housing development -- I'd somehow gotten out of downtown proper. We stood panting and jittery, responding to every sound, and then there was a huge, deep rumble and we looked over and saw the courthouse going down in a huge plume of smoke, and in the distance we could hear more of that low sound and I thought, Ah, Johnstown's going down. A cat came by, walking arrogantly the way cats do, and the kid said, without moving, "We could eat that; wh didn't we kill it?", and I said, "We didn't kill the cat because then we'd be like them. We can scrounge, though. Canned goods and stuff. Trouble is, winter's coming, and our fires will give us away. Unless we live in the burning rubble. Maybe then they won't bother looking."
Really bleak.
And just as I woke I thought, "Uh-uh; you'd have no meds. You'd croak from the effort of scrambling for survival."
Another day in Paradise, eh? LOL Whoa.
///
Vast is the Earth, yet so is it small. To a demon, Earth is a bauble. To one lost in a desert, it is a solid echo of the sky.
Between those truths we live our mad scramble lives from dark to dark.
Balanced on a grain of sand called love, those truths keep each other at bay. Size and its lack encompass us. Micro and macro swing us in their arms.
And so we sleep.
--From the Liturgy at Hessia Abbey
///
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
-- Bertrand Russell
///
May I humbly suggest "Never Tear Us Apart" by INXS as theme music for this Apocalyptic Calypso dream? Made me cry right after I wrote down the dream; elegiac defiance. J. S. Bach’s “Air On a G String” provides a nice cool-down, then, followed by "Don't Cry" by Guns & Roses for a stirring bounce-back.
///
Story is the song, writing is the singer.
--W B Kek, informal talk
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