Wordless compressed narratives

I mentioned yesterday that I would be back to Up. Near its beginning Up uses an interesting self-contained narrative block, a “wordless compressed narrative” that gains emotional power by what it leaves out. Up uses it to good effect by showing the unremarkable life of a married couple and giving it heft by compressing it into a series of moving snapshots.

WALL-E did this, in a relatively uncompressed form, showing the robot’s routines before they are interrupted. And Saving Private Ryan did it in the Omaha Beach scene that starts the movie. There it is a few hours over a wide area compressed into a tight series of scenes.

Aside from their impressive quality, these three sections share something else: they are all much better than their succeeding movies. Saving Private Ryan becomes a fairly routine WWII movie, with a few annoying Hallmark Card intrusions by the manipulative Spielberg. WALL-E turns into a limp satire of consumerism with cute anthropomorphic robots. I think people were seduced by that first half hour and neglected to be bothered by its other problems. And Up...

Up, I would say, does not fall down as badly, but does tie itself up into mundane narrative knots by the need for an evil protagonist, in this case a lost explorer who, by the order of events, has to be at least a century old, and murders other explorers so he can be the first to find a specimen of a large bird. All that takes a lot of narrative time which would have been better spent just exploring and having adventures. And developing the characters of Karl and Russell, who really could have handled it.

This method has been used interstitially, as in the snapshot flips in Run, Lola, Run, and the character bios Jean-Pierre Jeunet used in Ameilie and A Very Long Engagement, but those were all short.  I'm sure the method has been around for a while, but I can't remember seeing it before, particularly at the same length ( something like half an hour in the case of Ryan).  I’m not up on recent cinema (except, obviously, those I take my kids to).

When bad henchmen happen to good villains

I saw Up the other night, with my wife and daughter. I liked it fine, but certainly did not think of it as one of the great works of art of our era, as others seem to have.

I’ll deal with some of those issues later. Right now, I want to point out a recurrent character arrangement that is characteristic of most children’s films, and seems to have crept into books as well. It certainly appeared in this one.

It’s this: the evil character, villain, criminal mastermind, bully, whoever, always has two moronic, clueless sidekicks. The leader doesn’t have sinister henchmen, resentful slaves, or co-opted intellectual ideologues. He has buffoons, always two.

I first noticed this in the weirdly complex and deranged Thomas and the Magic Railroad (2000). The evil Diesel has doofus locomotives to admire his evil, provide comic relief, and execute commands poorly and incompetently, giving the heroes a chance to succeed. Its plot ease and comic relief that are the real functions.

In wartime propaganda, the enemy leader’s minions are often portrayed as incompetent toadies, cowards, sexual perverts (not common in children’s versions, at least openly, though sometimes appearing as fetishistic attachment to some object or procedure), cross-dressers, and sufferers from obscure and embarrassing maladies. Think of Goebbels, Himmler, and Goering in WWII propaganda.

What’s interesting about this scheme is not whether or not it makes sense in real life (Goebbels and Goering were evil, but far from comical and incompetent), but how stereotyped and unvarying it is. It ranges from Crabbe and Goyle in the Harry Potter books to the shark Bruce in Finding Nemo, with his hammerhead and mako companions. You could lift the pop-culture-laden, befuddled dialog from one movie and plop it down in another and not even notice.

Ticklish tasks: setting up a reader and a writer

You know how it is. If you mention a writer you like to someone without suggesting a specific work, your friend will invariably be drawn to the worst hackwork that writer has ever perpetrated—some Scooby-Doo tie-in book, or a late completely unedited doorstop bestseller dedicated to a much younger third spouse, or the subsequent comic novel set in academia with a recognizable grudge character based on that unfortunate late-period spouse.

But recommending the best, or most representative work might not be a great idea either. Any more than the first book of a series is always the best choice. Some writers get worse as the series goes on. Others get better. Some hit slumps and then come back stronger than before.

For example, I discovered the mystery writer Reginald Hill’s Dalziel/Pascoe novels midway through, with Bones and Silence. That turned out to be an excellent choice. That middle period of D/P novels, from that book to On Beulah Height (including Recalled to Life, Pictures of Perfection, and The Wood Beyond) are a perfect blend of detective novel and literary game playing. Before that they are more standard, though still good; past that the literary game playing takes over and they make less and less sense as actual detective novels.

Sheer luck on my part. Otherwise I might not have taken to him like I did.

When Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels came out, a reviewer said it was fine, but that Fifth Business was much better, and the best place to start. The reviewer was right, and I’ve since read almost everything Davies has ever written. Even the less-good stuff is great, but I might not feel that way if I’d tried to start with The Rebel Angels.

One collection of recommendations for mystery novels I saw posted in a mystery bookstore recommended starting the Lord Peter Whimsey books with Gaudy Night, possibly the best way to put someone off Sayers for life. I started with Strong Poison, perhaps not the best place, but it worked for me. I’d say start before Harriet Vane appears, probably Murder Must Advertise, and work your way toward her. Not Five Red Herrings either, unless you have a fetish for train schedules.

Pynchon? The Crying of Lot 49 is an obvious choice (short!), but I’d say V.: if you can’t take the length, stay out of the Pynchon.

David Foster Wallace? The Broom of the System (TCOL49 updated), his two great early travel essays “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All”. Try a story, and if you don’t like it in a few pages, try another, because it’s not going to change. Wallace short stories are weirdly isotropic, no matter how long they are. They’re the Red Queen’s Read: you’ll run through a lot of words but you’ll end up in the same place.  If you like that place, great.  If you don't, leave.

And Jack Vance, mentioned in several other posts?  I'd say The Star King, then into the Demon Princes series, though The Blue World is a good standalone.  And here's where reader preferences really do need to be consulted.  Someone with a bent to fantasy might prefer Lyonesse.  But the wrong choice can really put someone off him.  That's actually what started me thinking about this.  Years ago I recommended Vance, and a friend went to The Gray Prince, a weird and twisted little work, a precursor to his later "cosy genocide" manner, which I found a bit off-putting, for Vance completists only.

So, if you can, ask.  And heed warnings as well as recommendations.

Happy birthday mom

I was away this past week celebrating my mother's 80th birthday, at the Lakeside Inn in Southwestern Michigan, near New Buffalo.  Alla has made it through the purges (her father was arrested in the Red Army purges of 1937), the German invasion, traveling alone to America, getting a degree in cytology, raising some difficult children, and a successful career as a watercolorist.  Not that we felt that she had to "earn" her celebration.

The inn had a huge front porch, though you could not actually see the lake from it.  Trees.  Lots of trees in Michigan.  And the beach was many steps below.  My mother climbs up and down from her fourth-floor apartment daily, disdaining the elevator, so she made it up and down better than many people half her age.

We all had a great time, and she did too.  Here's to many more.

The real trolley problem

If you read intellectualoid blogs enough, eventually you come across the trolley problem. This purports to be some kind of psychophilosophical conundrum about "double effects". You know the one: hurtling trolley about to kill five people. Pull the switch and save them: yay! Uh oh, instead, you have to push an avoirdupois-challenged man in front of the trolley to save the other five: boo! Or, actually, I guess, “yay/boo” (it’s meant to be engage contradictory decision circuits simultaneously).

Aside from the dubious notion that you would actually be able to push an individual big enough to stop a trolley with his sheer bulk if he didn’t want to be pushed, no matter what claims this problem makes for itself, it is actually nothing but a gigantic piece of crypto anti-trolley propaganda.

Because what does it say? Trolleys kill people! They hurtle out of control and smash people into strawberry jam. In some versions of the problem they kill small children. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your moral reasoning, somebody dies horribly. Was this example funded by GM, Standard Oil, and Firestone?

Trolleys may or may not be a carbon-correct solution to regional transportation problems. But we need to decide this issue on the merits, not based on the sly well poisoning of so-called “philosophers”.

Who do I pay for news?

This morning Megan McArdle mentions the shortage of hard news from Iran in the wake of its election.  She does mention that The New York Times, my regular morning reading, does have full coverage.  But almost no one else does, because newspapers have been forced to cut their foreign bureaus.

I know that newspapers are going to vanish, to be replaced with some other means of conveying the news.  I also know that keeping expert staffers in various locations around the world, often at great risk, is expensive.  I know that developing stories over long periods of time is expensive.  I know that research, fact-checking, and editing are expensive.

I'm willing to help pay for this.  I'd gladly pay for more news that I get.  I'd pay to find out more about the situation on the ground in Belarus, in West Africa, in Central Asia.  I'd pay for more non-sensationalist news about science too.

My question:  in the future, who do I pay, and how?  I prefer a few well-edited words to many more flaccid ones, and I want a channel I can trust, so I don't have to keep worrying that what I'm learning is wrong.  I don't want to be the only one paying:  I can't support a news channel on my own.  But if there are too many free riders, no one will work to supply me with what I want.

I'm sure I'm not alone here.  I want other people to undergo months of discomfort and danger to bring me the story, and I'm willing to pony up for it.  When the newspapers are gone, who will step up to take my money and give me what I want?

When is it worth updating a classic?

This week I went to a performance of Pirates! (yes, the exclamation point is in the original), a "modernization" of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance.  It was not as bad as you might think, largely because the performers and orchestra were good, and most of the music (if not the book) remained.  They even bootlegged in the Lord Chancellor's nightmare song from Iolanthe to open the second act, to good effect.

The modernization involved pretty much what you might think:  sexual references, throwing up, references to colonialism, some more sexual references, including jokes about virgins and the difficulty of finding them older than the original operetta, and some "topical" mentions.  The Pirate King was played as Johnny Depp doing Jack Sparrow, something I'm sure even Johnny Depp is tired of.

Since Gilbert was always topical, it makes sense that those of us not enamored of the cultural details of the Victorian Era would enjoy having references updated. But there is an inherent problem of cultural production here.

Since Gilbert was a genius, you have to be pretty good for your modern patches not to seem even dimmer than they are by contrast to the bright intricacy of his language.  But if you're good enough to match Gilbert's quality, you're good enough to be doing your own work.  So such updatings are either the leisure exercises of people known for other things, or second-rate work by those who have nothing original to contribute.  In this case, it is very much the latter.

All in all, not the root canal of an experience that some recent Huntington productions have been.  But my friends and I have decided not to resubscribe next year, and instead explore a selection of other performances around town.  That's our power in this case:  exit.

The universal appeal of Jack Vance

As I mentioned below, I grew up as a big fan of Jack Vance.  I found him so eccentric that I'm always surprised to find how many other fans of his there are.  Even Eliezer Yudkowsky, on one of my favorite blogs, Less Wrong, praises him, in a blog entry on whether awfulness is a requirement for intense fandom.   His point:  Vance was not awful, in fact was a real craftsman, and still has intense fans.

Well, I don't know how intense.  And there always comes that terrible question about one's youthful loves:  can an adult read them?  Vance's prose, widely praised, is ornate, bookish, and arch, very much a specialized taste.  One of my favorite passages, still resonant after all these years, is from The Palace of Love, the third of the Demon Princes novels.  Edelrod, a poisoner from a planet of poisoners, explains a poison that looks like a lump of gray wax:

Observe this deadly material.  I can handle it without fear:  I am immunized!  But if you were to rub it on an article belonging to your enemy--his comb, his ear-scraper--he is as good as gone.  Another application is to spread a film over your identification papers.  Then, should an overofficious administrator hector you, he is contaminated, and pays for his insolence.

The exclamation mark is also a characteristic of the dialogue of Bruce Sterling, now that I think about it.  Not an obvious successor, but there is a connection when you look.

Vance's plots are collections of coincidences and misunderstandings, his favored women seductive and remote,  his cultures each built around some key obsession, his aristocrats pompous and bumbling, his aliens genuinely weird, and his novels journeys through beautiful and elegant puzzles.  I see Gene Wolfe as the closest thing to an adult Vance.

And, of course, he has been an influence on me.

Who makes healthcare expensive?

In the June 1, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Atul Gawande has one of his usual fine articles about physicians and healthcare, this one about the influence of physicians on healthcare costs.  McAllen, Texas has extremely high costs.  El Paso (in the same state, though some hundreds of miles away) has relatively low costs.  Physicians in McAllen order more tests and order more procedures.

And the higher costs translate, not into better outcomes, but into similar or slightly worse outcomes.  After all, every procedure and every hospital stay increase risk.  I think it's worth some effort to stay out the hospital.  It's Dr. Stork vs. Dr. Log.

The Dartmouth Atlas has been studying this issue for years.  Different areas have wildly different utilizations for various procedures.  With utilization comes higher cost.

Gawande points out that neither single payer or consumer-based models are likely to save us.  I agree that making someone pay a higher percentage of the cost of their emergency cardiac bypass isn't going to affect things at all, though do think a louder consumer cost signal has appeal.

But the real issue here is culture.  Each area has its own physician culture.  Physicians seem arrogant to the rest of us, but between themselves they are intensely conformist.  The seek approval constantly.  After all, think of those premeds at school.  These are people who always want an A, and the way to get the A is the give the right answer.  Like many complex professions, there is an extended time of apprenticeship, where they learn not only the business, but the culture and expectations.  One doctor trains another.

There's also a lot of habit involved.  Referral patterns tend not to vary.  A solution used once will be used again.  Drug company reps have always taken advantage of this.  A drug prescribed once will tend to be prescribed by default for that condition.  The day is just too busy, and the problems too various and complex, for a reevaluation of all the basic facts every time.

Note:  this is not all doctors, and not all of the time.  But we all tend to underestimate the power of our situation in our decision-making.  Culture and habit are incredibly powerful.  Changing a place like McAllen is not just a matter of changing some regulations.  It means changing a culture.  That can be quite a job.

The perils of childhood play

As I’ve mentioned before, I like the 100-year-old photo blog, Shorpy, both for the pictures and the comments. But the comments on this one startled me.

The title is "Children's playground, St. Louis", and it is from 1936, taken by Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration.

One commenter sees this as "a wonderful place to go play."

I see a horrendous, dangerous dump, not a happy scene of “use what’s available” childhood play. And I think the photographer’s caption is sardonic.  This is what people then were trying to get rid of.

You always get some “good old days” commenters on Shorpy, but this time they seem to have gone off the rails, describing the healthy joy of playing with old springs and bones in a cesspit.

Now, sure, open and unrestricted play in a mildly dangerous and ominous place is one of those real pleasures of childhood that is definitely rarer now than it used to be, and I suppose that’s a loss. Jerry’s Pit, near my house, was a flooded brick pit that for years served as the local swimming hole, and the skinny kids in the pictures of it sure do look happy.

But this scene is something quite different. For one thing, the kid is alone in this spot. Think there’s a reason for that? He’s making the best of it. But I don’t think that best is all that good.

The hero of David Copperfield's life

The problem with a bildungsroman is that the protagonist eventually grows up.

There are several interesting entries on About Last Night about David Copperfield, about the brilliant beginning, of Copperfield's sad and poetic early childhood, and the inevitably more mundane life he leads afterward, for all its Uriah Heeps and Mr. Micawbers.  I recently reread it, and though I would not have put the boundary down as sharply as Carrie Frye (CAAF) and Graham Greene do, but there is a lot of activity in the book, including a weird doubling of fallen women, elaborate scheming, and shipwrecks.

Such depictions of childhood have a unity that the adult world lacks, and the potentialities of that time can never fully be realized.  I am put in mind of a book from my own genre, SF, called Emphyrio by Jack Vance.  After a somewhat melodramatic preface, it depicts the odd and somewhat ominous childhood of a boy named Ghyl Tarvok (Vance's made-up names always have a specific rhythm to them) in a city called Ambroy.  He is raised by his mysterious father, Amiante, a brilliant craftsman in a world where mechanical reproduction is banned.

The first part of the book has a tender and melancholy mood that is rare and hard to maintain.  There are mysteries to the half-ruined city, and Ghyl, amid all the activities of his youth, tries to puzzle them out.  Then, in the latter part of the book, he goes offworld, has adventures, finds some things out...none of it has the sombre energy of the first part.

But such complaints just show how demanding we are when a writer raises our expectations.  Dangerous, to be too good at the beginning of a book.  Make your protagonist's childhood mundane and somewhat tedious, and we will find his young adulthood much more interesting....

Dream on: a sin of fiction

Over on her blog, Nancy Kress asks whether you should start a story with a dream.  And I see plenty of stories, particularly those meant for younger readers, that do so.  It's an easy way to introduce quick drama (it's not usually a dream about waiting in line at the DMV) and maybe some background information, and then start the story with a "waking up" that is both metaphorical and real.

Two problems.  One is just a matter of building reader trust.  When I read a story starting with a dream, my first thought is that the writer couldn't figure out a better way to start the story.  I started the first draft of my next book After the Victory with my main character having a dream and waking up.  It does start in the middle of the night, with an emergency alert.  But my suspicion of the trope, rather than any inherent lack of sense to it, made me remove it.  Too sensitive to being called a lazy genre writer?  Maybe.

The second problem is that real dreams make no sense whatsoever.  It's like building a narrative based on the names of cars that pass you on the highway.  Any coherence is imposed retrospectively, but a conscious mind that doesn't have any privileged access to the sorting and discarding processes of REM sleep.  A sensible dream that conveys useful information to the dreamer, or even predicts the future, is another piece of...let's say casual workmanship on the part of the writer.  Of course, dreams have served divinatory purposes all through history, so I'm kind of swimming against the current of human expectations in general here.  It is not unreasonable that a character in the story would think that a dream conveyed useful information.  But that's the different between what the characters think, and what the reader is supposed to think.

Dreams can't bear the weight that has been put on them by fiction.  Any writer should be wary when a dream presents itself as a solution to a narrative problem.  And any reader should be wary when they come across one in fiction.  Make sure the writer is giving you good weight.  Your time is valuable.

Double threat edits

My morning/weekend job (writing fiction) and my day job (running marketing for my employer) have both thrown up gnarly deadline requirements simultaneously.  I have the intensively copy-edited manuscript of Brain Thief to return in a week or so for the one, and a significant rebranding, web site rewrite, and collateral redesign for the other.

I seem to be doing okay on both, but wish me luck.

Definite article

If you think we writers just throw a bunch of words down on a screen and then send them off and get them printed that's...sometimes not true.  Sometimes there is editing.  Sometimes there is agony.  And sometimes there is obsessive devotion to detail.

My next book is called Brain Thief.  It almost wasn't.  It was almost called The Brain Thief (it was originally titled Remembering Muriel, but that was a lot of drafts ago, so forget about that).

The title The Brain Thief was a suggestion of my editor at Tor, David Hartwell.  I liked it.  Then, at a reading, my friend and workshop member Brett Cox suggested, delicately, that the rhythm would be better without the definite article.  The three thudding monosyllables seemed wrong to him.  In addition to being a fiction writer and critic, Brett is also a poet and songwriter (and this does not exhaust his descriptors).  I realized he was right.

But, for some reason, the title change never got noted in the right place, until I noticed that blurbs were coming back with the old title.  I asked David.  And then there was much discussion at Tor.  I have no idea how many people had to spend time on this.

In the end the title change was approved.  Brain Thief it is.  I love my family, but there is no way anyone here would understand why I fret about things like this.  Fortunately, my editor does.

Whenever you read anyone's prose, feel glad that you can't actually see the little droplets of blood all over it.

Monument to a forgotten figure

One of my...hobbies, interests, whatever, is public sculpture. I was just down in Washington DC with my family, and got to see a lot of it. I favor the period roughly 1870-1920, which seemed to have developed a style and training regimen which allowed for a large number of skilled practitioners to be working across the country at the same time. As I travel, I find work even in small towns that is of astoundingly high quality.

Take a look at this:

This is part of a memorial to Ulysses S. Grant, one of the most respected figures of the late 19^th century, now bulking nowhere near so large as his greatest opponent in the field, Robert E. Lee. It stands on the high end of the Mall in Washington DC, just below the Capitol, looking out to the memorial to his boss, Abraham Lincoln.

It took twenty years for the sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady to study and create the two dynamic groups of mounted soldiers and the gigantic statue of Grant on his horse Cincinnati (supposedly the third-largest equestrian statue in the world), along with some lions, reliefs, and other features.  If you've never heard of Shrady (I hadn't) it might be because he died two weeks before the monument was dedicated.  He deserves to be better known.

To my eyes, the work is startlingly Hellenistic, rather than Classical.  The cavalry group on Grant's right and the artillery group on his left struggle dramatically through mud.  Every body part of horse and man is torqued, exhibiting force and movement.  Garments flap, faces are contorted.  You feel the terror and stink of the Overland Campaign.

Here is the cavalry group:

Here is an artilleryman's face:

For his part, Grant sits with grim calm, his hat foursquare on his head.  He was a man who needed impending disaster to be able to relax.

The monument, though dramatic, has trouble holding its space.  It looks a bit of an afterthought, and I gather that changes have occurred around it.  The sculpture can't manage the space alone--no sculpture can.  It could use a flight of stairs or a colonnade.  It wouldn't even need to be architecturally distinguished to do the job.  The new National WWII monument, elsewhere on the Mall, is pretty much a decorative fountain (big in monuments nowadays), but its big blocky columns with their metal wreaths define the dedicated space effectively.

Wikipedia entry on the memorial.

Some other photos, not by me.

Metafictional Ferrellism: Stranger Than Fiction

A few days ago, I watched the movie Stranger Than Fiction with my son. It’s a metafictional story, where a person recognizes he is the character in a work of fiction, and struggles to escape. It was pretty OK. The character, an IRS employee, is played by Will Ferrell, the writer by Emma Thompson, ragged-haired, chain smoking, un-made-up. The literary theorist Ferrel goes to for help is played by Dustin Hoffman, somewhat reprising a similar role in I (Heart) Huckabees, a movie I enjoyed a great deal more than this one.

There was a lot to like, though I was disappointed by how superficial Hoffman’s analysis and critique are: there are all sorts of questions of genre, audience expectations, and issues of characterization (“it’s weird, but I’ve really started noticing what brand of pen people use”) that he could use to figure out the author’s identity, but he focuses on the phrase “Little did he know...”, a wooden piece of foreshadowing that makes the writer seem pretty industrial grade.

But let’s talk about Thompson’s writer. She hasn’t published a book in ten years, and, from Hoffman’s professorial admiration of her, you figure she’s a literary writer, not big on sales. Nevertheless, her publisher sends an enforcer, played by Queen Latifah, to get her to finish her book. This smooth woman gets paid a fulltime salary to bring highbrow midlist authors to parturition, a character who could only have been invented by a writer who knew nothing about the writing business. Or maybe it is a blocked writer’s greatest fantasy: “my unwritten book is so important that everyone’s greatest interest is that I finish it”. Latifah doesn’t get enough to do, either as a character, or in the plot. She’s mostly someone for the writer to explain things to.

But what story is Ferrell in, if he’s not in a metafictional one? Thompson’s book seems immensely dull without the character’s revolt, down to the irritatingly self-righteous baker, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, whom Ferrell audits, and whose life-affirming joy warms Ferrell from his useless, enclosed life...well, you’ve been there a hundred times before. “Why am I suddenly meeting only wooden, stereotyped characters? And why do I feel compelled to explain everything to you, even though I barely know you?”

Charlie Kauffman is the master of this kind of thing. For real metafiction fun, Synecdoche, New York is the movie to see, probably more than once.

How long will we keep going to plays?

I am a longtime playgoer. I have had a subscription at the Huntington Theater in Boston for more years than I care to think about, and for many years had one at the American Repertory Theater, in Cambridge.

I love plays. I also love trains, and my experiences on Amtrak are, regrettably similar to my recent experiences in playgoing.

Last night I saw The Miracle at Naples, by David Grimm. It is set in Naples in 1580, in is what suppose could be called a “comic romp”: a commedia dell’arte troupe comes to Naples, and the various members get into various scrapes, mostly sexual. There are some vague attempts to connect what happens to the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of St. Gennaro, a local tourist draw, but the blood is eventually forgotten. It has the vaguely limp feel of the comic relief sections of a Jacobean drama, without the drama. There is nothing even vaguely 16^th century about the characters, their issues, or their reactions. There is no plot, no real characters, and few good jokes. But the stage set, a courtyard dominated by a huge statue of St. Gennaro as bishop, was incredible, using perspective to make it look like the courtyard extended way back behind the stage.  But, as Dorothy Parker supposedly once said, the actors kept getting in front of it.

The play, to use a precise critical term, sucked. Most of the new plays the Huntington puts on suck. Some are just inept, while others are active offenses to the soul. The previous one we saw, Two Men of Florence, was a painfully earnest and labored play about Galileo (what do these people have about the 16^th century?) by Richard Goodwin, speech writer to JFK and husband to Doris Kearns. This too had a great set, with a big turntable, stars that appeared in the sky, and dramatic experimental apparatus. But man was it dull. Not bad. Not even inept. Someone in a play workshop would probably feel justifiably proud of having written it. But it had no business wasting the time of a bunch of good actors (including Edward Hermann) or an audience, as part of a season of works to which we are supposed to pay attention.

Even the fairly good new plays by new authors the Huntington has put on (Sonia Flew by Melinda Lopez, Boleros for the Disenchanted by Jose Rivera, Well by Lisa Kron) suffer from poor structure, lack of ambition, and a kind of easy spiritual uplift. And the bad ones (most notably Persephone by Noah Haidle) are almost mesmerizingly bad. You have to rely on established writers, like Theresa Rebeck, Tom Stoppard, and David Lindsay-Abaire to get anything maybe worth watching.

Why should younger writers go for the theater?  There's more fun to be had, and more money to be made, in TV and movies, not to mention video games, YouTube videos, and corporate training videos.  I presume they write them as prestige resume builders.

So why do I go? I like to go to the theater, I like getting together for dinner with my friends, and I am always hopeful. But that hope is not immortal. And it’s not like the Huntington’s choices are bringing them in: playgoers are a graying demographic, and the performance I attended was more than half empty.

I keep wondering if I’ll ever have the nerve to boo and catcall. Routine standing ovations show that the form is moribund. Hearing a boo might reassure people that it still lives.

Who’s with me?

Sins of the writer: popular characters

If, as I discussed yesterday, writers can try to destroy your pleasure in reading by teaching you good writing technique, and thus get you to realize how rare it is, how can I not join in?

Here's a simple one.  You have a character who is a performer, an artist, or...a writer.  Since this is your protagonist, or a character you really like, or even, maybe, a thinly disguised version of you, this character is good at what they do (yep, singular "they".  The guys on Language Log say it's okay, and it's just too convenient).  Of course?  There are only two kinds of artists in fiction, failed and brilliant.  Sometimes both.  "Pretty good", "just okay", "occasionally interesting" are seldom used to describe the work of a character we want to be admirable.

Okay, so how do you show that this person's work is more than just pretty good?  That's right, you have them create something, and you have everyone else think it's great, and it becomes incredibly popular overnight.  Simple.

There might be reasons I take this personally, but this isn't the time.

With the possible exception of Emily Dickinson, we all hope to be recognized someday.  But be wary of the writer who takes the easy way out.  If a character's work has quality, it's up to the writer to convey that quality to you.  I tried to do that in Carve the Sky, by telling the story through the perception of a connoisseur.  It proves to be easier to convey the skill of a critic than that of an artist.  Go figure.

Beware the writer who teaches writing

I observe that other writers love to teach readers about writing.  I "observe" this, because I don't share the urge to run writing workshops, give seminars on writing, write books about how to write, or even give blog tips on pronoun usage.  Truth in ranting:  I do belong to a peer writing workshop, where I give criticism in order to receive it, so, at some level, I am complicit in the system.

In other entries, I've talked about the sins of writing:  the ways writers consistently and persistently convey reality incorrectly, either through the inherent problems of fiction, or their own mental inadequacy, or (ahem) the unreasonable demands of their readers.

To the extent that teaching writing does the same thing, and is effective at doing it--explain to the would-be writer how to convey reality, or inner states, or fantastic situations, or suspense better in functional and elegant prose-- to that extent does it risk ruining the reading experience.  Why?  Because most writers aren't much good at most of that stuff.

I've become an enormously sensitive reader over the years.  I don't mean perceptive, or anything else virtuous.  I mean princess-and-the-pea sensitive.  Bad sentences leave me queasy, even if the plot is suspenseful.  Characters introduced to exemplify some flaw, and be bested by the virtuous protagonist, infuriate me.  And this last is used way too frequently in my field, speculative fiction.  I won't go on.

But most readers of writing manuals, most attendees at writing workshops, most readers of blogs with writing tips, will not become writers.  They will stay readers.  But they will be more demanding readers.  This may seem good.  Moving the demand curve upward for better-quality writing will increase supply of same.

But I fear that all it does is make you unhappy with what used to be simple pleasures.  I read many popular books in my field and see what makes people like them, without being able to share in that pleasure, because I don't see why the writer couldn't have done the rest of the job up to the same quality.  But the cheerfully clueless readers are made happy by the books, because they don't care about those other issues.

So, beware, you writing students.  Your teachers are actually teaching you to read.  And once you learn how to do it, you can never go back.  Do you really want to make most science fiction and fantasy seem like unreadable dreck?  Whatever will you do with your time?  And how will you talk with your friends?  It will all seem like a lover after the end of the affair, all irritating snorts, bad habits, missed birthdays, and unbearable self-righteousness.

Don't say I didn't warn you.