Question and Answer with Christopher Hitchens in the New York Time Magazine:
Did you write the book for money?
Of course, I do everything for money. Dr. Johnson is correct when he says that only a fool writes for anything but money. It would be useful to keep a diary, but I don’t like writing unpaid. I don’t like writing checks without getting paid.
I'm reading Hitchen's memoir, Hitch-22 and found the above quote about why he wrote the book. Now, if writing for money means I get to hang out and play word games with Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, then definitely, I need to make sure that I write for money.
For an author, money can be a motivating force to improve your craft. In our society is also the economic indicator of how many people the writing reaches. More money = bigger audience. Hitchens the journalist understands this well.
Yet, I personally like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen's reason for writing fiction, because I think they are correct.
[Fiction is the] ‘neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being’: this, we decided, was what fiction was for. ‘A way out of loneliness’ was the formulation we agreed to agree on.
Writing is about creating a connection with other people. No writer I've ever met is content with their words being stuffed in a drawer or a hard drive (although they often end up there). Pleas to artistic desire or writing compulsion are nothing more than screams for connection. No artists writes a book so no one else can read it.
No audience, no art.
No audience and it is artistic masturbation, while possibly pleasurable, much more productive and fun if shared. So in an indirect way Hitchens is correct, money means more connection and that is what writing is all about.
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Monday, September 6, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Hell
I finished a book this week -- Hell by Rob Olen Butler. I don't write much about the books I read, probably because I read more than I write. My brother (who is also reading it, as is my wife) described the book as Dante's Inferno for the 21st Century -- a more accurate description after finishing the book would be Dante's Divine Comedy for the 21st Century without the terza rima.
A theme throughout Hell is the inability to actually get inside someone else's subjective, interior thoughts. Satan in all his anticipatory sadistic power can't do it. The denizens of Hell certainly can't do it, but with Butler's post modern irony, the reader of Hell gets to spend a lot of time in everyone else's head -- well at least Butler's head.
This isn't the first time Butler has played around with the concept of what is going on in someone else's noggin. An earlier foray takes the phrase "in someone else's head" quite literally in Severance, a compilation of short 240 word epigraphic epitaphs of the last words going through the minds of the beheaded (apparently you have enough oxygen after being beheaded to get through 240 words before it is lights out.). Butler goes a step further in Intercourse giving the reader the internal monologue of participants in the sex act.
Writing itself is an act of disclosure, an act of placing at least a portion of one's thoughts on the screen or page. Imagine your last 240 words after the knife slices through your neck. Remember your last internal monologue in the throes of passion. Imagine what your own hell and your own redemption would be like. Remember the darkest or scariest thought you don't dare speak.
The writer's hell is the rejection of the interior. The writing gets thrown out in a desperate attempt for readers to accept the internal and often fractured offerings of the author. Every time I type a word, I want someone to read it and even more importantly, understand me, but somehow writing and reading is more transformative. Intaking the words through reading alters the words into a new subjective reality that is far beyond the author's control or ability to anticipate.
My wife is a writer. She's married to me because she is a writer, because she put her words out there for me to read. For a bookish soul like me, maybe that was the only way to change me, by getting her thoughts inside my head in a form I was used to. This week she finished her latest novel, TDTM. The book has been created from out of the mist of our daily life together and those pieces are scattered throughout. Our discussions about the book have influenced the plot. When I read it, my internal thoughts will register something different because of that experience, but it will connect me to other readers as we share the communal aspect of having heard the same story.
A book is the closest a human can come to entering someone else's mind.
Great writing organizes the subjective thoughts of the author, but remains true to the interior mind as the thoughts are edited on to the page. The trick of great writing is to create enough flow with the reader that you hijack their thoughts. The writer also wants to create a parallel thought pattern in the reader -- See, here I am writing, you are reading, we think similarly and you know where this can go and you know what it means and you listen to what I write, knowing this isn't your thought, but mine, but you understand because you think like this too at times. Pulling it off with one stream of conscious sentence if easy. Maintaining it for the length of a book is hard.
JulieAnn's friend, Emily Pearson, has written a memoir, Dancing With Crazy. Of all the writing, a memoir is by its nature the most personal. Every word in the memoir has impact and meaning for the author, because the author knows what every word represents -- an entire interior reality is constructed around each word, each paragraph, each incident. The problem is that the reader doesn't have access to all of that interiority. As the three of us discussed her memoir, there was agreement for the need for an edit from the right editor to give her work its full impact. The editor would help bring her distinctive voice to a much wider audience.
I'm nearly 50 years old and for the first time I think I finally understood why an editor is so important for a book. The great editor, like the great writer, helps organize the words so the interior thoughts of the author come through on the page. The editor points out the author's own internal blind spots and brings to the book something the author doesn't have -- an external point of view. The combination of the editor's external and the author's internal is the bridge from the writer's mind to the reader's interior.
Again, with a writer for a wife, I get to see this editor/writer dance. JulieAnn recently finished line edits on her book that is about to published, Falling Back to Earth. The editor's comments and changes at this juncture are the fine tuning on the book's ability to connect to the reader. The occasional editorial aside that a scene is suspenseful or moving makes me realize that something magical is taking place with JulieAnn's words, someone else is seeing the beauty, depth and struggle that I have become so familiar with in our marriage.
Which brings me back to Hell. All week long a phrase that I have uttered often and with heartfelt meaning has been transformed by another human being. Robert Olen Butler has taken up occupancy in my head. He appropriated a word and amplified it for me, so that I hear nuances I was deaf to before. I don't know that this is what he intended or even if it is what he meant, but it is what he did to me. For a writer and for a reader, this type of Hell is heavenly.
A theme throughout Hell is the inability to actually get inside someone else's subjective, interior thoughts. Satan in all his anticipatory sadistic power can't do it. The denizens of Hell certainly can't do it, but with Butler's post modern irony, the reader of Hell gets to spend a lot of time in everyone else's head -- well at least Butler's head.
This isn't the first time Butler has played around with the concept of what is going on in someone else's noggin. An earlier foray takes the phrase "in someone else's head" quite literally in Severance, a compilation of short 240 word epigraphic epitaphs of the last words going through the minds of the beheaded (apparently you have enough oxygen after being beheaded to get through 240 words before it is lights out.). Butler goes a step further in Intercourse giving the reader the internal monologue of participants in the sex act.
Writing itself is an act of disclosure, an act of placing at least a portion of one's thoughts on the screen or page. Imagine your last 240 words after the knife slices through your neck. Remember your last internal monologue in the throes of passion. Imagine what your own hell and your own redemption would be like. Remember the darkest or scariest thought you don't dare speak.
The writer's hell is the rejection of the interior. The writing gets thrown out in a desperate attempt for readers to accept the internal and often fractured offerings of the author. Every time I type a word, I want someone to read it and even more importantly, understand me, but somehow writing and reading is more transformative. Intaking the words through reading alters the words into a new subjective reality that is far beyond the author's control or ability to anticipate.
My wife is a writer. She's married to me because she is a writer, because she put her words out there for me to read. For a bookish soul like me, maybe that was the only way to change me, by getting her thoughts inside my head in a form I was used to. This week she finished her latest novel, TDTM. The book has been created from out of the mist of our daily life together and those pieces are scattered throughout. Our discussions about the book have influenced the plot. When I read it, my internal thoughts will register something different because of that experience, but it will connect me to other readers as we share the communal aspect of having heard the same story.
A book is the closest a human can come to entering someone else's mind.
Great writing organizes the subjective thoughts of the author, but remains true to the interior mind as the thoughts are edited on to the page. The trick of great writing is to create enough flow with the reader that you hijack their thoughts. The writer also wants to create a parallel thought pattern in the reader -- See, here I am writing, you are reading, we think similarly and you know where this can go and you know what it means and you listen to what I write, knowing this isn't your thought, but mine, but you understand because you think like this too at times. Pulling it off with one stream of conscious sentence if easy. Maintaining it for the length of a book is hard.
JulieAnn's friend, Emily Pearson, has written a memoir, Dancing With Crazy. Of all the writing, a memoir is by its nature the most personal. Every word in the memoir has impact and meaning for the author, because the author knows what every word represents -- an entire interior reality is constructed around each word, each paragraph, each incident. The problem is that the reader doesn't have access to all of that interiority. As the three of us discussed her memoir, there was agreement for the need for an edit from the right editor to give her work its full impact. The editor would help bring her distinctive voice to a much wider audience.
I'm nearly 50 years old and for the first time I think I finally understood why an editor is so important for a book. The great editor, like the great writer, helps organize the words so the interior thoughts of the author come through on the page. The editor points out the author's own internal blind spots and brings to the book something the author doesn't have -- an external point of view. The combination of the editor's external and the author's internal is the bridge from the writer's mind to the reader's interior.
Again, with a writer for a wife, I get to see this editor/writer dance. JulieAnn recently finished line edits on her book that is about to published, Falling Back to Earth. The editor's comments and changes at this juncture are the fine tuning on the book's ability to connect to the reader. The occasional editorial aside that a scene is suspenseful or moving makes me realize that something magical is taking place with JulieAnn's words, someone else is seeing the beauty, depth and struggle that I have become so familiar with in our marriage.
Which brings me back to Hell. All week long a phrase that I have uttered often and with heartfelt meaning has been transformed by another human being. Robert Olen Butler has taken up occupancy in my head. He appropriated a word and amplified it for me, so that I hear nuances I was deaf to before. I don't know that this is what he intended or even if it is what he meant, but it is what he did to me. For a writer and for a reader, this type of Hell is heavenly.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
A 220 Volt Plug
The compulsion to write is really a compulsion for connection. My initial thought was that I'm a 220 plug in a 110 volt world -- no connection is actually possible. In the scrambled mass of neurons that is my brain, this thought took me to one of my more ill-fated home improvement efforts.
I was working on a basement apartment in a house I'd just bought. I turned off the power to the entire house at the circuit breaker because I was going to be working around a 220 volt electrical outlet. Why? I have no clue, it was too long ago. What I do remember is that I stuck my rubber gripped pliers on the wires and got knocked back across the room from the electrical jolt. I hurt my hand landing on some tool, but was otherwise unharmed physically. An inspection of the pliers showed that the live wires had melted a nice pattern on the metal pincers. For some unknown reason the house had been wired with this solitary 220 plug separate from all of the power at the circuit box, thus leaving the wires live unless turned off at another circuit box hidden on the side of the house.
Long story for a stretch of a metaphor, I suppose, but I'm coming quickly to the conclusion that writing is a lot like that 220 plug. You throw words out there and you don't know if the power is connected or not and whether the words will shock and repel the reader, melt themselves onto the reader's psyche or if there really just won't be any juice in them at all.
Nothing like hanging out at a writer's conference to question whether words can conceivably have any impact at all. Mostly we are all hanging around, hoping for the happy accident of writing something that can melt metal.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
The Author as a Commodity
This week I'm attending a writer's workshop in New Orleans with my wife, who is the real writer in the family. I rather hate being the living cliche of attorney who is a wannabe writer, but I'm finding that it is easier to aspire to be an author than it is to take the attorney out of my psyche.
For example, the instructor of our class is filling in our little workshop group on the travails of the publishing world. Specifically, She claimed that authors are "brown leather pumps" to the publishers. She said it to make the point that authors were mere commodities to the book industry and the fickle reading public will burn through a book and it doesn't matter much whose book it is. If you don't write it, someone else will. My poetical version: authors are the meat that is ground up to make book sausage.
I don't doubt the wisdom of the instructor's comments. From what I can see, commercial fiction (and non-fiction) on a visceral level work in this way. The formulaic novel, the ghost written celebrity book, the tough life memoir and the motivational/spiritual tome really could be written by anyone and consumed by the undiscerning hordes as the corporate book manufacturers scoop up the majority of the cash.
The best example of this is James Patterson, who doesn't even write all his own books. He hires would-be authors to write them for him. This is the final end game of creating books as entertainment (a game that has sadly been encouraged by "cut and paste" technology -- How much of the Harry Potter series was cut and pasted back story?) The brand supercedes the art. Sure there is quality control and a formulaic sameness that soothes the reader, that is why it works.
Looking at the entire process through the legal lens, I see a supply chain of author to agent to editor to proofreader to printer to book distribution company to book retailer with every participant sucking off the teat of the writer's words. In much the same way a lawsuit bleeds the litigants dry, the publication process bleeds the author's work dry.
And if this really is how it works, why would an author (attorney or not) want to be treated like a pair of brown leather pumps chewed on by the book industry puppy?
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Sunday Morning Musings
It is so quiet -- birds chirping, sun rising as I see the contours of the ridge line cut across the scrub oak as the mountain's shadow sneaks towards me. Unbelievable as it may seem to those of you who know me, a little kitten is perched on my shoulder, purring softly, asleep. Maybe not quiet so unbelievable is that the kitten's name is Henry Miller.
This week I've been thinking a lot about writing. My wife, JulieAnn, is an exceptional writer -- and she writes. Boy, does she write. One of her greatest skills as a writer is her tenacity. I've watched her develop her talent and watched her in practice. I envy her ability to just dive in and work on her novel of the moment. Her first published novel is why I'm married to her in a very real way, since it was the catalyst to our meeting.
Books (and thus writing) seem to be headed in the same direction that music went ten years ago. Books are becoming more and more a commodity and the price for the book is dropping, creating an economic pressure on both authors and publishers. They can be easily copied and transferred, even with some DRM encoding. I find myself gravitating towards author's I know and still pick up on new authors and hot books from the Sunday New York Time's Book Review, so I'm strongly in the traditional publishing realm as a consumer.
Yet, I can feel it all changing underneath my feet. I'm worried about it from a dual perspective -- as a potential author and as the husband of an author. Who do you listen to if you want to get a good recommendation for a book? How do you develop an audience? How big of an audience is enough? How do you hone the writing craft when the ability (and the compulsion) is there to spew out your thoughts onto the Internet in a blizzard of uncensored typing?
I'm sure my day job makes me look at writing from an economic perspective. Writing takes time. Time equates to money. How much money do I need for myself and my family? How do I increase the time I have for writing?
Sunday morning and I have all the questions and none of the answers.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
More Writing and My Job
Most of what I write is crap.
"I love my job."
Now that sentence is simple to the point and probably crap. It loses all nuance in a bold, white declaration of affection. I do get a thrill out of my work, but love is a word that is devoid of meaning in this context.
When people ask me what I do, I tell them "I Robin Hood for a living, taking from rich, evil creditors and give back to the poor and destitute, while skimming a little off the top for myself."
Now, that is a more accurate description than saying I love my job, but again -- crap. Not all creditors are rich or evil. Not all clients are poor and destitute. I don't really skim, but take court ordered and disclosed fees for my work. I am trying to create a persona, a facade -- to make my job and myself, way more glamorous than I really am. I know, because when I tell people I am a consumer bankruptcy attorney I get one of two reactions -- 1) Eyes glaze over and the subject is changed or 2) A smile, a nod and "Wow, you must be really busy these days. Glad someone has work." Much better to describe my profession by turning Robin Hood into a verb, but while greasing the social skids, the words are still crap.
Writing is an attempt to connect with other people on a non-physical plane of existence that removes time from the coordinates and takes the physical and transforms it into the mental. Maybe this is why I think everything I write is crap. Writing is a modified and socialized form of what the psychics call "remote viewing." I think psychics are crap.
Take the word, "crap." I am using this word in a metaphoric sense, as well as the colloquial meaning of "not good." As a metaphor, physical crap is the detritus of biological functions and metaphoric writing crap is the detritus of my mental functions. This is also why we refer to excess material possessions that have become useless as our consumerist version of crap -- the shit we have left over from our spending.
Another thing about crap is that no one is really interested in crap -- their own or others. Although you may check out your own crap or grouse about how much crap you have or how your writing is crap, you never check out anyone else's crap or care how much crap someone has (unless it is bigger and nicer crap than yours) or you rarely read someone else's crap, because after about two sentences, or if the writer is lucky, two paragraphs, you say, "This is crap" -- and stop reading.
So I'm stopping -- for today.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
A New Book
Everything has changed. At nearly 47 years of age, I stand on the precipice of the future and realize that the dreams of my youth have been made irrelevant by life and technology. Things are changing so quickly and I’m adapting with the speed of a slug – mired in salt.
One problem with the rapidly changing world is no one realizes how much it is changing. We whir along and change without even thinking about it. I realize that hardly anyone reads what I write on this blog, but I think nothing of the fact that I sit here on a Sunday morning in slippers, typing and in a moment my thoughts will be accessible to anyone who cares to listen. This is were you get humility, because no one is really listening. We are all too busy talking and worrying about ourselves to give anyone else much thought.
Writing Dream: Be published. When I was thirteen, being a published author was the holy grail of all I wanted. Instead of pursuing writing, I ended up in the law, but I’ve clung to this dream of being published. Publication brings about serendipity. Your words get out there and you have no idea who will actually connect with them. My wife gets to put up with me because she was published. So all seems right with the world, my dream to be published is still alive and kicking.
Wrong – sort of. The infrastructure of the past and the machinery of publication still spits out books. Every Sunday in the New York Times I can read reviews of the latest and greatest. I’ve developed a fondness and attachment to particular authors, living and dead, reading almost everything that they write – Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Saul Bellow, Douglas Coupland, Chuck Palahniuk – the list goes on and on. I read them, connect and think I want to be like one of those guys. (Yes, honey, I realize that they are all white males and about half of them are Jewish, but I still read women authors, too. You being my favorite woman author and so much more than just a friend.)
I realize why I have no friends to speak of – my friends are authors and their books. Being friends with an author is easy. They don’t ask of anything other than you spring for the price of the book. In fact they tend to hate creepy stalkers and emails, so they prefer it if you put their book on the shelf and leave them alone. If you are busy and ignore them, they don’t care, as long as you keep reading.
Publication always felt to me like the one sure way to obtain immortality. A book bound with your name on it could speak after you were dead. Now, it is possible to literally speak after you are dead with recorded voice and video. Nearly any aspect of our lives can be reduced to digital format and “published” for the future. The philosophical implications of the ease of publishing are seemingly endless with one of the biggest questions being does the urge or desire to publish one’s life interfere with living one’s life?
Author’s by nature must be at least a little exhibitionistic and simultaneously reclusive, J.D. Salinger any one? They flash us with their words, not their presence. And they want us to look at the words, but they love the barrier the book and word creates between themselves as people and the reader.
I know because it is that desire for connection, understanding and dialogue that has compelled me throughout my life to want to write. I want to talk to my friends the authors and the social structure is such that I talk to them by putting out my work for others to read. My value in the conversation is determined by the audience I develop, not by what I say. I want to be published because I don’t want to violate the social norms of author-hood.
And yet, the world is changing. I can see it, feel it and realize it and the dream is fading with every Google search I commit or every “friend” I add on Facebook. There are better ways now to connect with the authors, the friends of my life than books. Publication was all about access, public knowledge and public acceptance. Access to text has gone from extremely difficult to instantaneous and easy. My original desire to be published was so that others could have access to my words. Technology has eliminated that need.
The problem has shifted from access to letting the public know and care about what I write. The previous social milieu of books was a sub-genre of the celebrity culture, a culture where our heroes walked on Olympus, dropping words like lightening on us mere mortals. The digital age is crumbling Olympus and words are flying everywhere. The old guard remains fortified by publishing houses and Barnes and Noble, but the attack on them is relentless and continuing unabated.
Carnegie Libraries, public libraries, law libraries and school libraries are fading into the digital abyss. Why go to the library, when I can find any book at home on my laptop or Kindle? When an entire library of a University is digitized by Google, why pay all that money and take up all that space? It doesn’t make sense and cities and schools will stop doing it.
Suddenly, my desire to be published seems silly. Throw out a book into the enormous and never shrinking, constantly expanding digital slush pile. Within my lifetime it appears that most, if not all books ever published will be available digitally. No single person can ever attempt to read or comprehend all that material. The Renaissance Man or Woman has been killed by a tidal wave of text and information.
With the publication of a book, there was always the possibility that someone would stumble upon it at a much future date. Publication was about social recognition and a stamp of approval from the society that there was at least some merit to the words. The pesky one and zero that digitized everything changed that – the one and the zero don’t discriminate, they accept all comers. I’m laughing a little bit this morning when I think back to the dismay I used to get walking into Barnes and Noble and wondering how even if I managed to get a copy of my book on the shelf would it ever get read, there were so many choices. I had no clue. It is a million, possibly a billion times worse than I ever imagined. (Translation technology is improving at such a rate that it is going to be easier than ever to translate books between languages, so for us English writers, the competition is about to jump by about 4-5 billion more potential authors.)
So I’ve dreamed a new dream. I haven’t always followed through on adapting to rapidly changing things, but I still have the same desire to be published, but I’m going to do it for a new digital age.
1. First I’m going to take a page out of Facebook and look for friends for my writing and friends for me. This is the replication of my own author focused friendships I’ve developed over the years.
2. I’m going take a page out of Blogger and Word Press and use the ease of publication and search to create a digital persona for myself that will hopefully stick around for awhile after I’m gone.
3. I’m going to take a page out of Google and include everything and make my digital persona searchable.
4. I’m going to take a page from the publishing industry and provide human editorial control over the content. Having everything is cool, but time consuming for a reader. Editorial control allows for different layers of friends from the mere acquaintance to the best friend that knows everything about you.
5. I’m going to take a page out of cloud computing and move my information, writing and digital persona out of my laptop and office and on to the cloud of the new Olympus, a digitally replicating and growing Colossus of new information. It is out of that Colossus’ Chaos that a new world is being created.
6. I am going to take a page out of my upbringing and look for integrity in my digital persona, so that it matches up completely with the flesh and blood version. Those who know me will wonder how this is even conceivable given the numerous facets of my identity, but I’m becoming more convinced that privacy, especially as an author, is a rapidly dying concept. Creating an integrated digital persona is the only method to eliminate privacy concerns. We are all celebrities now.
So far my new book is only six pages of infinite length or at least the length of a lifetime.
One problem with the rapidly changing world is no one realizes how much it is changing. We whir along and change without even thinking about it. I realize that hardly anyone reads what I write on this blog, but I think nothing of the fact that I sit here on a Sunday morning in slippers, typing and in a moment my thoughts will be accessible to anyone who cares to listen. This is were you get humility, because no one is really listening. We are all too busy talking and worrying about ourselves to give anyone else much thought.
Writing Dream: Be published. When I was thirteen, being a published author was the holy grail of all I wanted. Instead of pursuing writing, I ended up in the law, but I’ve clung to this dream of being published. Publication brings about serendipity. Your words get out there and you have no idea who will actually connect with them. My wife gets to put up with me because she was published. So all seems right with the world, my dream to be published is still alive and kicking.
Wrong – sort of. The infrastructure of the past and the machinery of publication still spits out books. Every Sunday in the New York Times I can read reviews of the latest and greatest. I’ve developed a fondness and attachment to particular authors, living and dead, reading almost everything that they write – Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Saul Bellow, Douglas Coupland, Chuck Palahniuk – the list goes on and on. I read them, connect and think I want to be like one of those guys. (Yes, honey, I realize that they are all white males and about half of them are Jewish, but I still read women authors, too. You being my favorite woman author and so much more than just a friend.)
I realize why I have no friends to speak of – my friends are authors and their books. Being friends with an author is easy. They don’t ask of anything other than you spring for the price of the book. In fact they tend to hate creepy stalkers and emails, so they prefer it if you put their book on the shelf and leave them alone. If you are busy and ignore them, they don’t care, as long as you keep reading.
Publication always felt to me like the one sure way to obtain immortality. A book bound with your name on it could speak after you were dead. Now, it is possible to literally speak after you are dead with recorded voice and video. Nearly any aspect of our lives can be reduced to digital format and “published” for the future. The philosophical implications of the ease of publishing are seemingly endless with one of the biggest questions being does the urge or desire to publish one’s life interfere with living one’s life?
Author’s by nature must be at least a little exhibitionistic and simultaneously reclusive, J.D. Salinger any one? They flash us with their words, not their presence. And they want us to look at the words, but they love the barrier the book and word creates between themselves as people and the reader.
I know because it is that desire for connection, understanding and dialogue that has compelled me throughout my life to want to write. I want to talk to my friends the authors and the social structure is such that I talk to them by putting out my work for others to read. My value in the conversation is determined by the audience I develop, not by what I say. I want to be published because I don’t want to violate the social norms of author-hood.
And yet, the world is changing. I can see it, feel it and realize it and the dream is fading with every Google search I commit or every “friend” I add on Facebook. There are better ways now to connect with the authors, the friends of my life than books. Publication was all about access, public knowledge and public acceptance. Access to text has gone from extremely difficult to instantaneous and easy. My original desire to be published was so that others could have access to my words. Technology has eliminated that need.
The problem has shifted from access to letting the public know and care about what I write. The previous social milieu of books was a sub-genre of the celebrity culture, a culture where our heroes walked on Olympus, dropping words like lightening on us mere mortals. The digital age is crumbling Olympus and words are flying everywhere. The old guard remains fortified by publishing houses and Barnes and Noble, but the attack on them is relentless and continuing unabated.
Carnegie Libraries, public libraries, law libraries and school libraries are fading into the digital abyss. Why go to the library, when I can find any book at home on my laptop or Kindle? When an entire library of a University is digitized by Google, why pay all that money and take up all that space? It doesn’t make sense and cities and schools will stop doing it.
Suddenly, my desire to be published seems silly. Throw out a book into the enormous and never shrinking, constantly expanding digital slush pile. Within my lifetime it appears that most, if not all books ever published will be available digitally. No single person can ever attempt to read or comprehend all that material. The Renaissance Man or Woman has been killed by a tidal wave of text and information.
With the publication of a book, there was always the possibility that someone would stumble upon it at a much future date. Publication was about social recognition and a stamp of approval from the society that there was at least some merit to the words. The pesky one and zero that digitized everything changed that – the one and the zero don’t discriminate, they accept all comers. I’m laughing a little bit this morning when I think back to the dismay I used to get walking into Barnes and Noble and wondering how even if I managed to get a copy of my book on the shelf would it ever get read, there were so many choices. I had no clue. It is a million, possibly a billion times worse than I ever imagined. (Translation technology is improving at such a rate that it is going to be easier than ever to translate books between languages, so for us English writers, the competition is about to jump by about 4-5 billion more potential authors.)
So I’ve dreamed a new dream. I haven’t always followed through on adapting to rapidly changing things, but I still have the same desire to be published, but I’m going to do it for a new digital age.
1. First I’m going to take a page out of Facebook and look for friends for my writing and friends for me. This is the replication of my own author focused friendships I’ve developed over the years.
2. I’m going take a page out of Blogger and Word Press and use the ease of publication and search to create a digital persona for myself that will hopefully stick around for awhile after I’m gone.
3. I’m going to take a page out of Google and include everything and make my digital persona searchable.
4. I’m going to take a page from the publishing industry and provide human editorial control over the content. Having everything is cool, but time consuming for a reader. Editorial control allows for different layers of friends from the mere acquaintance to the best friend that knows everything about you.
5. I’m going to take a page out of cloud computing and move my information, writing and digital persona out of my laptop and office and on to the cloud of the new Olympus, a digitally replicating and growing Colossus of new information. It is out of that Colossus’ Chaos that a new world is being created.
6. I am going to take a page out of my upbringing and look for integrity in my digital persona, so that it matches up completely with the flesh and blood version. Those who know me will wonder how this is even conceivable given the numerous facets of my identity, but I’m becoming more convinced that privacy, especially as an author, is a rapidly dying concept. Creating an integrated digital persona is the only method to eliminate privacy concerns. We are all celebrities now.
So far my new book is only six pages of infinite length or at least the length of a lifetime.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
On Writing, Deliberate Practice and Renaissance Excellence
I've been reading Geoff Colvin's book Talent is Overrated and I was struck by a couple of points, particularly in regards to blogging and writing. As someone who has had a lifelong ambition to write, I found Colvin's book to be both inspiring and despairing.
The one sentence summary of the book is as follows: Talent means little compared to ten years of deliberate hard practice if you want to achieve greatness.
Inspiring because it means I have to work hard -- despairing because it looks like I've got about nine years and eleven months to go on my writing goal. I went back and discovered that in the past I've done a little over 350 blog posts on various sites, not to mention comments and discussions on-line and the reams of digital paper that I've filled up on my computer.
The other inspiring aspect of Colvin's book was I realized the huge amount of room I have for progression and improvement. Much of what was suggested I already knew, but it is always nice to get a booster shot for reinforcement.
One of the least discussed aspects of blogging is the ability for blogging to act as a method for writing practice. As you can see there have only been about 17 posts on this blog, so my other posting forays have been spread out over numerous sites and different times. I'm particularly interested in developing a writing style that invokes engagement with the audience whether through duration of reading or through direct response and comments. Stat counters feed the feedback loop with their mountains of data on where the audience comes from, how long they stay and how they leave.
Given the huge amount of information and entertainment competing for our precious time, developing a writing persona and style that attracts an audience seems to be the most critical.
After reading Colvin's book I wonder if I shouldn't take my writing practice and devote it to concepts of bankruptcy and personal finance, since I've got more than ten plus years in legal practice and countless hours of talking to people about how money and debt is ravaging their lives. If nothing else, it would help my legal career -- if not my writing.
I've always wished I could be a Renaissance man with excellence brimming from everything that I touch, but the realm of knowledge has expanded so rapidly that there is no chance I'm going to be excellent in relativistic physics, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, 17th Century French Literature, 20th Century Japanese literature of Abe, Murakami and Mishima, criminal law, constitutional law, history, computer science, philosophy, politics, business management or even current events. I don't even have time to work out properly, let alone become a master of the intellectual universe. No one has that kind of time. All we are left with is varying degrees of ignorance and a fairly poor concept of epistemology. It seems at 46, going on 47, that I need to focus.
Which brings me to my lovely and beautiful wife. She has resisted Colvin's ideas as I've tried to discuss them with her. She has a strong sense of innate talent dictating how well people perform at certain tasks -- for her, painting and writing specifically, since those are her passions. I would definitely describe my wife as a talented painter and writer, but that is not what separates her from the thousands of painters and writers that are also "talented."
If Colvin's book inspired me, I've been living with an inspiration. I've never seen anyone work as hard and deliberately on writing as my wife. I'm not sure where she is on the whole ten years of hard practice before achieving world class excellence and 'overnight' success, but I can tell she is close. She has seven or eight books completed and the last one she has just finished is her best yet. I hope you all get to read Away from Eden soon and if I don't get lost in my quest for being a 21st Century Renaissance man, look for my novel in about ten years.
The one sentence summary of the book is as follows: Talent means little compared to ten years of deliberate hard practice if you want to achieve greatness.
Inspiring because it means I have to work hard -- despairing because it looks like I've got about nine years and eleven months to go on my writing goal. I went back and discovered that in the past I've done a little over 350 blog posts on various sites, not to mention comments and discussions on-line and the reams of digital paper that I've filled up on my computer.
The other inspiring aspect of Colvin's book was I realized the huge amount of room I have for progression and improvement. Much of what was suggested I already knew, but it is always nice to get a booster shot for reinforcement.
One of the least discussed aspects of blogging is the ability for blogging to act as a method for writing practice. As you can see there have only been about 17 posts on this blog, so my other posting forays have been spread out over numerous sites and different times. I'm particularly interested in developing a writing style that invokes engagement with the audience whether through duration of reading or through direct response and comments. Stat counters feed the feedback loop with their mountains of data on where the audience comes from, how long they stay and how they leave.
Given the huge amount of information and entertainment competing for our precious time, developing a writing persona and style that attracts an audience seems to be the most critical.
After reading Colvin's book I wonder if I shouldn't take my writing practice and devote it to concepts of bankruptcy and personal finance, since I've got more than ten plus years in legal practice and countless hours of talking to people about how money and debt is ravaging their lives. If nothing else, it would help my legal career -- if not my writing.
I've always wished I could be a Renaissance man with excellence brimming from everything that I touch, but the realm of knowledge has expanded so rapidly that there is no chance I'm going to be excellent in relativistic physics, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, 17th Century French Literature, 20th Century Japanese literature of Abe, Murakami and Mishima, criminal law, constitutional law, history, computer science, philosophy, politics, business management or even current events. I don't even have time to work out properly, let alone become a master of the intellectual universe. No one has that kind of time. All we are left with is varying degrees of ignorance and a fairly poor concept of epistemology. It seems at 46, going on 47, that I need to focus.
Which brings me to my lovely and beautiful wife. She has resisted Colvin's ideas as I've tried to discuss them with her. She has a strong sense of innate talent dictating how well people perform at certain tasks -- for her, painting and writing specifically, since those are her passions. I would definitely describe my wife as a talented painter and writer, but that is not what separates her from the thousands of painters and writers that are also "talented."
If Colvin's book inspired me, I've been living with an inspiration. I've never seen anyone work as hard and deliberately on writing as my wife. I'm not sure where she is on the whole ten years of hard practice before achieving world class excellence and 'overnight' success, but I can tell she is close. She has seven or eight books completed and the last one she has just finished is her best yet. I hope you all get to read Away from Eden soon and if I don't get lost in my quest for being a 21st Century Renaissance man, look for my novel in about ten years.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
ON DIGITAL PERSONA, FLESH PERSONA, AND PRIVACY
I’ve been fascinated by the idea of persona lately, whether it be a literary persona, a work persona, a dramatic character persona, a psychological persona or the new incarnation of the digital on-line persona. I find myself constantly donning masks to the point of wondering who I am. Am I the husband? The parent? The lawyer? The writer? The sinner? The saint? Am I my digital persona? Who the hell am I?
Social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace are exercises in persona creation. I get to pick and chose the facade I give the digital world. The more devout afficionados of the digital world create their own websites. The real world is reflected in the digital world, but it is a funhouse mirror warped by the design and desire of each person posting.
The creation of a persona or societal mask is nothing new. High school is where every adolescent cuts their teeth on persona creation and the high school personas are predictable – the hot girl, the bookworm, the jock, the drama queen, the rebel. Go rent a copy of The Breakfast Club if you need a refresher course. Adults aren’t much better in the lawyer’s suits, the houses on the hill, the cars (or big trucks) and the entire fashion and makeup industry.
Digital persona are frighteningly easy to create, desperately hard to maintain and control. Fleshy manifestations of persona aren’t easily copied or replicated and due to years of culturization more easily interpreted. Changing one’s flesh persona took time and effort and was a gradual process. I’m no Luddite, but the digital persona swoon can make me light headed.
Another downside is the Narcissistic quality of digital persona, basically a "look at me" culture. Maybe that is why it always feels like high school – it is the adolescent technology screaming for attention. How will digital technology mature? Or are we to be always mired in MySpace and FaceBook?
As I was writing that last paragraph, I realized that I was a little bit off put by the fact that the geeky technology, which used to provide anonymity and protection to my anti-social side has turned into an exhibitionistic orgy with the explosion of social networking sites. I’m the nerd with glasses again being simultaneously turned on and socially overwhelmed by the cheerleader.
The technology has advanced to the point where maintaining a digital life is a little bit like being an adolescent whose diary is always accessible to their parents. Whatever you post, whatever you say, whatever floats off your keyboard into the internet ether is probably and in most instances lost forever, yet on occasion, it comes back transfigured into something unrecognizable or terrifying, often carried by the panting mutt, Google.
Google sounds like goggles and those Google goggles are peering at your every move trying to reduce your fleshy persona into a consuming, buying, advertising accessible animal whose data is slowly being filled in. Google is trying to clone you and anticipate your every move and like Pavlov’s dogs we salivate because Google gives us what we want. Google is the digital Big Brother watching our every move.
My predisposition has always been towards privacy – be it digital or earthly. Yet, I’m starting to wonder if privacy is such a great thing. I’m still very interested in protecting things that people want kept private, but I see a benefit to the lack of on-line privacy. The benefit is by being constantly googled, goggled and gapped at, the mature development is to create an on-line persona with integrity that includes the various flesh incarnations’ strengths and faults. In a world of ones and zeros, the digital persona that best reflects the real person will give the real person the most value in the real world. Become one with your digital self.
The other factor in this privacy debate is that the Internet is essentially the marketplace. Humans have always congregated for social and economic exchange and the two have always gone hand in hand. Posting on-line is supposed to have an economic impact for the participant. Do any of us really expect privacy in the marketplace? The two are incongruous. You enter the marketplace (and I envision street bazaars or farmer’s markets) and nothing is private. To resurrect a cliche, people who live in glass blogs shouldn’t post stones – or something like that.
Simply realizing that the on-line world is a big market free-for-all changes all sorts of perceptions about on-line privacy.
We now convey information more freely, but we are still working on the infrastructure for how that is to function economically. Our libraries are manifestation of the willingness to pay economically for ideas, but the pricing of those ideas has always been a conflict. I’m writing this sitting in my library at home, cocooned in books. Many of the authors died impecunious – Thomas Paine and Oscar Wilde are a couple that spring to mind. Great ideas and great writing have not always ended in an economic payoff. Dying has often been one of those great mechanisms for validating an artistic position. The point is the old system wasn’t always that great at allocating economic resources to benefit the writer and artist and the new system suffers from the same problem, but also offers some unique solutions.
The main solution I see is that it allows us to create social networks that match our own predispositions. I’m no economist and I’m a little bit upset that they made economics such a dry topic when I took it in college, because I’m fascinated by it now, particularly as it pertains to writing and art. I read a short story by Tolstoy, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" this week. The moral of the story is essentially don’t forget your mortality in your acquisitiveness.
How much income does an artist need? This is the question I find intriguing in light of the internet culture. I wonder how much income would I need from my writing to pull the literary equivalent of a Gaugin and chuck it all and move to Tahiti and spend the rest of my life swimming in the warm tropical words. I do the math. 1000 fans at $10 a month and I think I could probably do it. Math is an evil thing, because 10x1000 is such an easy equation. You see someone with 850 friends on FaceBook or you see the amount of traffic other blogs receive and it almost seems do-able.
The problem is that the art suffers if you turn from artist to huckster to get your thousand, so the art must come first. Which brings me back to the original thrust of this post – what is a digital persona? Is it the huckster selling? Is it the tortured artist? Is it the social butterfly? Is it the bitter misanthrope? Who am I and why have I donned this digital mask and entered this new frontier? In the past, I’ve always been just a little bit fearful of what I’ve posted on-line, wondering about the what ifs were a client, a potential reader, a judge, another attorney, my siblings or my parents to read this. The answer is amazingly simple and amazingly difficult all at the same time – be a person of integrity and it doesn’t matter.
Social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace are exercises in persona creation. I get to pick and chose the facade I give the digital world. The more devout afficionados of the digital world create their own websites. The real world is reflected in the digital world, but it is a funhouse mirror warped by the design and desire of each person posting.
The creation of a persona or societal mask is nothing new. High school is where every adolescent cuts their teeth on persona creation and the high school personas are predictable – the hot girl, the bookworm, the jock, the drama queen, the rebel. Go rent a copy of The Breakfast Club if you need a refresher course. Adults aren’t much better in the lawyer’s suits, the houses on the hill, the cars (or big trucks) and the entire fashion and makeup industry.
Digital persona are frighteningly easy to create, desperately hard to maintain and control. Fleshy manifestations of persona aren’t easily copied or replicated and due to years of culturization more easily interpreted. Changing one’s flesh persona took time and effort and was a gradual process. I’m no Luddite, but the digital persona swoon can make me light headed.
Another downside is the Narcissistic quality of digital persona, basically a "look at me" culture. Maybe that is why it always feels like high school – it is the adolescent technology screaming for attention. How will digital technology mature? Or are we to be always mired in MySpace and FaceBook?
As I was writing that last paragraph, I realized that I was a little bit off put by the fact that the geeky technology, which used to provide anonymity and protection to my anti-social side has turned into an exhibitionistic orgy with the explosion of social networking sites. I’m the nerd with glasses again being simultaneously turned on and socially overwhelmed by the cheerleader.
The technology has advanced to the point where maintaining a digital life is a little bit like being an adolescent whose diary is always accessible to their parents. Whatever you post, whatever you say, whatever floats off your keyboard into the internet ether is probably and in most instances lost forever, yet on occasion, it comes back transfigured into something unrecognizable or terrifying, often carried by the panting mutt, Google.
Google sounds like goggles and those Google goggles are peering at your every move trying to reduce your fleshy persona into a consuming, buying, advertising accessible animal whose data is slowly being filled in. Google is trying to clone you and anticipate your every move and like Pavlov’s dogs we salivate because Google gives us what we want. Google is the digital Big Brother watching our every move.
My predisposition has always been towards privacy – be it digital or earthly. Yet, I’m starting to wonder if privacy is such a great thing. I’m still very interested in protecting things that people want kept private, but I see a benefit to the lack of on-line privacy. The benefit is by being constantly googled, goggled and gapped at, the mature development is to create an on-line persona with integrity that includes the various flesh incarnations’ strengths and faults. In a world of ones and zeros, the digital persona that best reflects the real person will give the real person the most value in the real world. Become one with your digital self.
The other factor in this privacy debate is that the Internet is essentially the marketplace. Humans have always congregated for social and economic exchange and the two have always gone hand in hand. Posting on-line is supposed to have an economic impact for the participant. Do any of us really expect privacy in the marketplace? The two are incongruous. You enter the marketplace (and I envision street bazaars or farmer’s markets) and nothing is private. To resurrect a cliche, people who live in glass blogs shouldn’t post stones – or something like that.
Simply realizing that the on-line world is a big market free-for-all changes all sorts of perceptions about on-line privacy.
We now convey information more freely, but we are still working on the infrastructure for how that is to function economically. Our libraries are manifestation of the willingness to pay economically for ideas, but the pricing of those ideas has always been a conflict. I’m writing this sitting in my library at home, cocooned in books. Many of the authors died impecunious – Thomas Paine and Oscar Wilde are a couple that spring to mind. Great ideas and great writing have not always ended in an economic payoff. Dying has often been one of those great mechanisms for validating an artistic position. The point is the old system wasn’t always that great at allocating economic resources to benefit the writer and artist and the new system suffers from the same problem, but also offers some unique solutions.
The main solution I see is that it allows us to create social networks that match our own predispositions. I’m no economist and I’m a little bit upset that they made economics such a dry topic when I took it in college, because I’m fascinated by it now, particularly as it pertains to writing and art. I read a short story by Tolstoy, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" this week. The moral of the story is essentially don’t forget your mortality in your acquisitiveness.
How much income does an artist need? This is the question I find intriguing in light of the internet culture. I wonder how much income would I need from my writing to pull the literary equivalent of a Gaugin and chuck it all and move to Tahiti and spend the rest of my life swimming in the warm tropical words. I do the math. 1000 fans at $10 a month and I think I could probably do it. Math is an evil thing, because 10x1000 is such an easy equation. You see someone with 850 friends on FaceBook or you see the amount of traffic other blogs receive and it almost seems do-able.
The problem is that the art suffers if you turn from artist to huckster to get your thousand, so the art must come first. Which brings me back to the original thrust of this post – what is a digital persona? Is it the huckster selling? Is it the tortured artist? Is it the social butterfly? Is it the bitter misanthrope? Who am I and why have I donned this digital mask and entered this new frontier? In the past, I’ve always been just a little bit fearful of what I’ve posted on-line, wondering about the what ifs were a client, a potential reader, a judge, another attorney, my siblings or my parents to read this. The answer is amazingly simple and amazingly difficult all at the same time – be a person of integrity and it doesn’t matter.
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