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Modern Expressionism

So, an artist goes into an Apple store. . . .

No, it’s not a joke, and I don’t really care about the minor legal trouble this guy got into. What interests me about this article is that he seems to think he’s discovered something significant in the way people interact with computers. We’re all staring zombie-like at these screens and it’s turning us into zombies. Oh-noes!

Of course we have a blank expression most of the time we’re staring at a computer screen. What expression should you have? You also stare blankly at the TV, out the windshield of your car when driving, at the tile wall when showering. . . . Just about any time you’re not looking at another person, your expression is pretty blank. That’s because facial expressions are for other people, not for inanimate objects.

Don’t believe me? Open up a video chat with another person. You’ll smile, laugh, and frown, because you’re interacting with a person, not a screen, and that’s what facial expressions are wired for.

Putnnam’s Law: Conform or Else

Puttnam’s Law.

In the tech field we used to say, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” (Now it’s Microsoft.)

No matter if it works out or not; if you follow the herd, you didn’t make a mistake and can’t be blamed. It’s only if you try something different that you can get in trouble.

No Excuses, Dad

Dan Benjamin is probably a great dad. Let me get that out of the way first. I have no reason to think he’s anything but a great dad, with a happy, well-adjusted, son.

Something he said the other day got me thinking, though. I was listening to one of his Back To Work podcasts and he was talking with Merlin Mann about passive-aggressiveness and parenting and how we say weird things to our kids. The example he used was telling his son, “I’m sorry you don’t want to go, now get out of the car.” (The anecdote starts 74 minutes in.)

His son, four-years-old, didn’t want to go to camp. He’d been with mom and dad all the time up till now, but now mom and dad had a little baby and not as much time for the older kid, so he had to go. He enjoyed the first few days of camp, but then one day he ‘inexplicably’ doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to do the talent show they’re doing at camp, he doesn’t like the other kids, he doesn’t want to go. Dan is certain the kid is making up excuses and forces him to get out of the car and go to camp.

Now, the kid ended up having a good time (or so he told Dan), so I guess it worked out, but that is so totally not how I would have handled it. Maybe I’m the bad parent, but there it is.

I make my son, Nathaniel, do things he doesn’t want to do. That’s part of the job. He has to pick up his toys and eat his supper and not torture the cat. But I don’t try to force fun on him against his will. If we want him to do something that we think he’ll enjoy, we try to talk him into it, we talk out any objections he may have, and quite often we can persuade him to try it. But we never issue a Parental Decree that he shall go, and he shall have fun.

We made him take swimming lessons when he was three. He didn’t want to. He hated it. He hated is so much that three years later his hatred of the very idea of swimming lessons burns with the fury of a thousand suns. He’ll probably never take another swimming lesson in his life.

Yesterday, I noticed that he was setting up a new account in Monkey Quest. I thought that was a little unusual because he had a high level monkey in his old account, with cool items. Why didn’t he want to play that monkey anymore? I could have just said, “You’re not setting up a new account. You already have an account; keep playing in that one.” I didn’t.

I asked him about it, but he said he didn’t want to talk about it. I said, “Okay, if you really don’t want to talk about it that’s fine. I was just curious why you want to stop playing Numi, with all the cool stuff he has, that you spent Nick Cash on.”

He just did, he said. Just wanted to start over. I could buy more Nick Cash for him.

“Well, we’re not buying more Nick Cash for that. Now, you’re not in any trouble or anything, I was just wondering; did someone in the game maybe say something that bothered you?”

Ding! Some other kids had told him that he had to change his monkey’s name. The only way to do that was to create a new account. We had a little talk about it and as I type this he’s happily playing as his old monkey, with all his cool stuff.

Sometimes kids make up excuses to try and get out of things they don’t feel like doing. Every parent knows that. That’s usually not-fun things, though, right? Kids don’t usually try to get out of fun. Nathaniel makes up all kinds of excuses to not eat a supper he doesn’t like the look of, but he’ll never say, “No, I don’t feel like going to the water park today.” Not without a good reason. (Like he’s afraid the water will hurt the scrape on his knee. Good reason. I remember not wanting to get in the water when I was a kid because I was afraid it would hurt the cut on my lip.)

When a kid doesn’t want to do something that they usually enjoy, shouldn’t we as parents wonder why? Sometimes, sure, it’s just whimsy. But sometimes kids really do have a reason for not wanting to do something, though they may be reluctant to tell you what that reason is. You’ll never know which it is if you just say, “I don’t care, you’re going anyway.”

Maybe Dan’s kid really just didn’t feel like going that day and was making up excuses. Most likely that’s all there was to it. But maybe he didn’t want to go because some of the other kids were picking on him, or bullying him. I don’t know. Here’s the thing, though: Neither does Dan Benjamin. He doesn’t know what was really going on, and probably never will. Because instead of trying to find out why his kid didn’t want to go to camp, why the boy was screaming and crying about it, he just made the boy get out of the car.

I remember as a kid not wanting to go do things and my mother making me go.

“You’re going to go do this thing today.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I don’t care. You’re going. It’ll be fun.”

It wasn’t fun. Ever. Whether it was being dumped at some stock show or summer camp or a movie I didn’t want to see, I hated it. More, I knew perfectly well that my mother didn’t care if I enjoyed it or not, if I was going to have fun or not. She was just dumping me somewhere, getting rid of me, so she could go do her own thing and have her fun.

Listening to Dan Benjamin talk about making his kid go to camp when he didn’t want to, what he pretty obviously feels is, “The boy didn’t want to go, for some silly reason, but I made him and he had a great time. I win!” What I hear is, “We paid a lot of money for this camp, we have other plans for today that don’t include you, so get out of the car.”

I’m probably being unfair to Dan, but there it is. Different backgrounds, different world-views.

Sometimes as parents we have to make our kids do things they don’t want to do, and it really is for their own good. Sometimes we make our kids do things they don’t want to do and it’s for us, but we sell it like it’s for them. It’s up to us, as the adults in the relationship, to know the difference. Is what you’re making your kid do really for his or her benefit, or is it for your benefit and they just have to endure it?

Because they may know the difference even if you don’t.

Logic and Magic?

This article by N.K. Jemisin seems to have caused a minor kerfuffle. Some people agree: “Yes, it’s fercrissakes magic. It’s supposed to be all about wonder and stuff, not logic.” Some disagree: “Magic is energy and energy is physics and physics requires logical rules. Also, you can’t have a plot and character development without rules and logic.”

Clearly there are two very different schools of thought here. Both have good points, both are missing a point or two.

Jemisin makes some good points; magic is, well, magic. It’s anti-logic. That’s what makes it magic. (She’s dead wrong about the need some people have for rules and logic in magic coming from D&D; D&D got its magic system mostly from Jack Vance’s short stories. The plot-puzzle type of story, where each spell is a key that fits in a particular plot-keyhole predates D&D by decades.)

The other side has good arguments as well; if magic can do anything, how do you construct a plot that makes sense to the reader?

What a puzzle, eh? Perhaps an example will (magically) illuminate the subject.

The magic in LoTR is almost completely unexplained. What powers does Gandalf have? Elrond? The Nazgul? How does their magic work? We don’t know. It doesn’t matter. All we really know–all we need to know–is that Sauron’s power is tied to the One Ring, and the only way to destroy the Ring (and Sauron) is by tossing it into the fire where it was forged.

But Frodo doesn’t use magic to solve that problem. The magic in the Lord of The Rings is almost entirely in the background, not used to resolve plot problems, so it doesn’t need to be explained.

Here’s the real Important Rule of Fictional Magic Systems: The magic in your story-world requires rules and explanation in direct proportion to how much you’ll be using magic to solve plot problems.

This is a subset of a larger rule; the reader must be able to follow the plot-threads that you use to resolve the story conflicts. If you use magic to resolve the conflicts, the reader must be able to understand how magic works well enough to follow along, just as she would the science in a science fiction story, or the law in a legal thriller.

As with everything else in your story world, explain as much as the reader needs to know to follow along and don’t worry about the rest. No magic; just the basic rules of storytelling.

Hitting The Wall

This author calls it Bad Brain Days. I call it hitting the wall. It’s that point in writing your book when you think it sucks, it’s never going to be any good, you’re not any good, you’re just wasting your time, etc., etc.

Writing a book–novel, non-fiction, whatever–is a marathon. You slog away and slog away, a word at a time, a page or two or five a day, and eventually you cross the finish line. But at some point in that process, you hit The Wall, and going any further seems like any unbearable waste of time and effort.

It’s The Wall the separates the experienced novelists from the inexperienced ones. If you’ve actually written an entire novel, you know that you can write an entire novel. You can get through The Wall and finish. The inexperienced novelist doesn’t have that advantage; the wall looks insurmountable. Many novels die there.

There’s no easy fix, no neat trick to learn. It’s just a matter of putting your head down and slogging. Keep putting one word after another, just like an endurance runner keeps putting one foot in front of another, even when it seems like he can’t take one more step, and you’ll get through it. It’s simple. Not easy, but simple.

Don’t look back. Don’t start thinking about how you need to take a different approach, don’t go back and revise chapter one. Keep going. Finish the project. Only when it’s done can you go back and see what really needs to be changed in the second draft. You’ll probably find it’s a lot better than you think.

And once you’ve done, you know that you can do it again, and The Wall won’t seem quite so high the next time.

How do you sit down and write 120,000 words? One word at a time.

Seeing The Future

This started as a comment about the future of publishing on Billie Sue Mosiman’s Facebook page (nice lady; buy her books), and I thought it worth preserving here.

(Yes, I’m the sort of jerk who may drop a short essay into your Facebook comments. Writers, eh?)

Prediction Warning!

What I think is going to happen is that the mmpb is largely going to go away, replaced by electronic editions. (Within ten years, maybe five.) Hardcovers and trade paperbacks will be reduced, but still sell for the foreseeable future.

Most of us don’t remember it, but there was a time before mass market paperbacks. (The modern mmpb was introduced in the 1930s.) But when they were introduced as a low-cost alternative to hardcovers, hardcovers didn’t go away; some people have always been willing to may more for the nicer edition.

Publishers seem to be trying to position electronic editions as less-expensive alternatives to hardcovers, but readers see them as less expensive alternatives to mmpb. I don’t see how the publishers can win that one. I also don’t think it’s going to turn into a four-tiered market (hardcover/trade paper/mass market paper/electronic). That’s too much division in the market and I think readers will gravitate to one end or the other, squeezing the middle. It’s going to be hardcover/trade paper/electronic. Booksellers, plan accordingly.

Longer range, we may see bookstores make a comeback, in a somewhat different form. You could browse through the sections of display books, neatly organized. Select the books you want at one of the in-store terminals (maybe looking at a few reviews in the process), and decide which edition you want. Select an electronic edition, and sends you a digital copy. Select print, and a copy is printed up for you right there in the store for you to take home.

Perhaps that’s just wishful thinking, but there is no technical reason why it’s not possible.

Big Bad Block

I’ve been thinking a little about writer’s block lately. Haven’t had it, thank goodness, just been thinking about it.

A lot of people will tell you that writer’s block is a made-up thing. Plumbers and laborers and computer programmers don’t get writer’s block, right? You never hear a plumber say, “I just can’t fix another toilet today. I just don’t know how.” And it’s true that people who work at certain kind of jobs may find themselves hating their work, contemplating suicide rather than go to work, or desperate to change their line of work, but they rarely or never find themselves psychologically unable to do the work.

So, writers who claim to be blocked are just whining drama queens, right?

Maybe not.

I first heard about ‘the yips’ a couple of years ago, when the Red Sox acquired catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia from the Texas Rangers. There was a lot of talk about how earlier in his career Salty had suffered from the yips.

What the hell, I thought, are ‘the yips?’

In baseball, ‘the yips’ are when a player suddenly loses their ability to throw the ball. There’s nothing physically wrong with the afflicted player, he just suddenly can’t get the ball to go anywhere near where he wants it to. Similar symptoms can afflict other athletes as well. Golfers, too.

Usually, the player can work through it and regain their old form. It’s a psychological block, not a physical condition.

Hmm. Block? Yes, so it would seem. Professional athletes can suffer from a condition very much like writer’s block, where they suddenly lose the ability to do something that they used to do as naturally as breathing.

I thought this was very interesting and it made me wonder about those plumbers. Their work isn’t typically very high-pressure, like playing professional sports, or creative, like writing. (Not to take anything away from plumbers; what they do is essential, and often hard and dirty work. But they rarely have to create something completely new, or do their work in front of an audience of tens of thousands of people.) How about other creative professions, what some people call ‘knowledge workers.’ Do they suffer from anything like writer’s block?

Yes, it seems like they do. (So much for Eben Hewitt’s claim that no one has ever said such a thing.)

So do musicians. Probably a lot of other creative professions too.

And it turns out that every now and then, when faced with something that requires creative thinking, plumbers get blocked too. Just like writers, programmers, and musicians. I bet it also happens to carpenters, architects, engineers, and all sorts of other people that we rarely hear about being ‘blocked.’

Sometimes people who are called on to come up with something new just draw a blank. They can’t figure out what comes next. They’re just stuck. Athletes can become stuck at the point where they have to release the ball or swing the club, commit to acting and whatever result is going to come from it.

I think there’s a similar underlying psychological issue at the root of these blocks and yips. Sometimes the part of our brain that spits out new ideas, the part that works under pressure, just quits on us. Then you’re stuck with trying to coax it back out of hiding.

As for what to do about your block, if you’ve got one, well, I don’t really have any new ideas there. It’s been talked to death. Maybe just knowing that it’s not just you, that it’s not even just writers, is some comfort. I still think that the best way out of writer’s block is to not get it in the first place, and the best way to do that is to follow Hemingway’s old advice: Never write yourself dry. Always stop for the day while you still know what’s going to happen next, so when you sit down the next day you already know what you’re going to write, at least to start with.

If you’ve got it, though, good luck to you. You’ve probably heard all the familiar advice for getting unstuck (just start typing anything at all, etc.) and it’s either worked or it hasn’t. The most interesting idea I came across while researching this post is from the Rhythm Creation article linked above. “Limit the equipment you use to produce your tracks.” (There are actually several ideas in that article that can be applied to writing, but I thought this was the most interesting.) If sitting at the computer and banging at your keyboard (or sitting at your computer and not banging on the keyboard) isn’t working for you, take a pen and notepad and go outside somewhere. Sit under a tree or on a bench in the mall and scribble the old fashioned way. What’s the worst that can happen? You don’t write anything?

Or you could go fix some toilets.

Leaving The Pages Behind

It seems that pages may not be my friend.

This is something I stumbled across by accident. When writing my last novel I tracked my progress by pages. It was important to me to use a word processor that displayed the page count, so I could tell how far I’d come, when it was time to start looking for a new chapter break, etc. What I settled on was MS Word (version 2008), and it worked well enough for those purposes, but it was so buggy that by the end of the book I loathed it and swore never to write another story in Word.

(I have notes on most of the word processors I’ve tried since switching to the Mac about four years ago. My notes on MS Word read: “Big fat ugly pig. Weird screen artifacts when scrolling rapidly through a document (shows some lines repeatedly on the screen, doesn’t refresh properly). ‘Fucking MS Fucking Word just fucking crashed on me fucking twice trying to edit a fucking header.'” So, there you go. Not a huge fan.)

The one thing Word has that I’ve missed, though, is the so-called ‘Normal’ view. That focuses the display window on the text and compresses the page break down to a single dashed-line. No other word processor does that quite as well. Typically you have a choice between ‘layout’ view (in which your document window shows a picture of a piece of paper with your text on it, wasting a lot of screen area) or ‘draft’ view, which focuses on the text, but doesn’t show page breaks at all.

I hate ‘layout’ view for writing fiction, but resisted ‘draft’ mode for a long time. I really, really wanted those page breaks. I’m writing my new novel in Bean, though and reluctantly went naked, without visible page indicators. In ‘no layout’ mode Bean doesn’t even show the page count in the status bar at the bottom of the screen, just a word count. It was just me and a long window of text.

The new novel is moving along much more briskly than the last one. It’s hard to point to one thing and say “That’s why,” but I have to wonder if part of the way the words are flowing is the lack of that page break every 250 or so words. It’s not that I’d say, “Okay, I’ve got my four pages. I can stop now.” I think it’s just the little mental tick, that awareness of, “Oh, I’ve flipped over to another page,” that may have been interfering slightly. That little bit of focus on pages, which don’t really matter to the story, instead of words and scenes, which do.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s switching from Courier font to Menlo. Maybe it’s the story, or other things going on in my life, or the weather. But it’s hard not to think that the the unimpeded flow of words in the word processor may have something to do with the unimpeded flow of words coming from my fingers.

I’m not talking about a ‘distraction free’ writing environment, such as have become all the rage lately. If that’s your thing, fine, but I use other windows when I’m working (mainly a text file up on another screen with notes and character names). I’m just talking about in your word processor itself. If you’re using a view mode that shows page breaks, try turning them off. Arrange your application window so there’s nothing there but your words. Close the toolbars if it’ll let you, so you can fit an extra line or two of text on the screen.

It’s worth a shot, and it doesn’t cost anything to try it. Maybe you can get rid of some friction that you didn’t even realize was there.