Bullshit

The Writing Bona Fides: Software

The Page Cannot be Displayed by Jeff Somers

The Page Cannot be Displayed by Jeff Somers

I’m a lazy, lazy, lazy man. I mean, just writing that sentence exhausted me, and I had to go and have a shot of whiskey to regain my energy and lust for life.

I’m also an easily distracted man. I can’t remember what I used to be like pre-Internet, but with the Internet sitting on my desktop, I am a cocaine monkey.

So, to recap; I am lazy and have the attention span of a small fly. And yet I am a professional writer of some success. Let’s not quibble on what the precise meaning of success is in this context. Or professional. Or quibble. Let’s just say I have sold some books and make a living with words, and yes, there are plenty of teachers in the Jersey City School System who would be very amazed to discover this.

When interacting with folks who want to be writers themselves, I get a couple of standard questions. You can probably guess a few of them — what’s my process, will I read their manuscript, will I please give them back their cocktail, which totally wasn’t mine to just grab off the bar — but a couple always confound me, especially questions about the software I use when writing a novel.

I usually respond by grabbing them by the lapels and screaming are you going to buy me a whiskey or what until they flee. But the questions stick with me, because whenever I answer I feel like a fraud.

The Stipulations

First, a stipulation. This is important.

I am a moron.

No, seriously — I’m an idiot. A charming, handsome, well-spoken, pantsless idiot. I am frequently ill-informed, I sometimes have trouble hearing people and pretend I understand what they’re saying, I parrot opinions all the time and am easily confused and defeated in rhetorical competition. In short, for god’s sake my experiences are my own and mine alone and nothing I say here is meant in any way as a proclamation. In other words, there are many, many paths to writing a novel or having a freelance writing career. If your experience differs from mine, that’s great! I am a moron.

The Edumacation of Jeff Somers

The software question mystifies me, because writing a novel is the most straightforward thing you can imagine. You have an idea. You tell a story. It’s literally a process of putting one word after another until you have, oh, 80,000 of them. That’s it. It’s that easy. That’s one reason I aspired to being a writer in the first place, because it’s easy.

Of course, not everyone thinks it’s easy. I can understand that. Because it actually isn’t all that easy — the process is easy. The intellectual effort of creating characters, premise, action, and coherent narrative is hard. But writing is and always will be the act of putting one word after the other. Until about 20 years ago, I wrote novels on a manual typewriter. On paper. I still have drawers stuffed full of hardcopy manuscripts. When I grudgingly switched to writing on a computer because no one wanted to receive 400 pages of typescript covered in coffee stains, correction fluid, and shocking pornographic doodles, I used an open source, free word processor and still do (Libre Office, currently).

And that’s it.

The idea of using complicated software to track plot arcs, characters, and other minutiae frankly mystifies me. The idea that any App or software is helpful in any way is mystfiying to me. I’ve never felt the need for it, and can’t see the benefit, and that alternatively makes me feel smug and triggers my Imposter Syndrome.

Imposter Syndrome

Sometimes the accoutrements of a profession, the jargon of a profession are comforting. You might not be at the top of your profession, but at least you know how to use the super secret tools that the rubes don’t even know exist. At least you know the passwords. So when people ask me about the tools I use to write fiction and my answer is literally “Uh: words?” and they give me that look I know so well from all the times I have emerged from pub restrooms without my pants, I wonder if maybe I am fooling myself. Can you be a professional if you don’t use any tools?

At other times my answer to that last question is fuck yeah you can. But the use of specific tools can make you feel like you’re at least part of the club. When I’m on panels or in informal gatherings and a writer starts talking about the complex array of tools they use to write their novels, I do start to feel a little like the Slow Cousin, and I wonder, if only briefly: Would my work be better, or would there be more of it, or would it sell better if I started using some kind of magical software?

And then I am usually distracted by alcohol and forget all about it.

“10 Cloverfield Lane” & The Oldest Trick in the Book

I AM UNRELIABLE

I AM UNRELIABLE

So, there will be spoilers in this essay. Like, seriously. Like, this essay will be about 88% spoilers. So if you plan to see 10 Cloverfield Lane at any point in your life and you want to do so unspoiled, this essay is not for you.

So: 10 Cloverfield Lane. Good movie! Not like revelatory or anything, but solidly constructed, inventively plotted, well-acted, and frequently surprising. The premise is tight: A young woman named Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), fleeing a bad relationship, gets into a bad car accident and wakes up chained up inside a bunker-cum-bomb shelter owned by a man named Howard, played by John Goodman. She’s terrified, but he assuages those fears: He’s not a crazy pervert, he tells her he’s saved her life because the Earth has recently been attacked by aliens using some sort of gas weapon, and everyone outside the bunker is dead.

And off we go. 10 Cloverfield Lane has a lot of fun with expectations, zigging and zagging several times as it fools the audience, and it does so using the oldest trick in the book: The film literally tells you exactly what’s happening in the first twenty minutes or so, but the audience dismisses the information because of the batshit, unreliable character who delivers it. Namely, Howard, who Goodman portrays as violently deranged even when he’s being quiet and plaintive. Because Howard is so obviously nuts, when he tells us aliens have attacked, we dismiss it. Guess what? That’s exactly what’s happened and Howard is 100% correct!

That was unexpected for me, because I fell for the oldest trick. I tried to be smart, because I like leaning over to my wife and telling what’s going to happen in movies five minutes before it does happen, but I got fooled this time, because Howard couldn’t possibly be right. I figured something weird was going on, of course, but I also figured it couldn’t be an alien gas attack, because that’s what Howard said it was.

Of course, Howard also turns out to be a deranged pervert just as Michelle feared he was, which is more complicated because Howard also specifically denies that. And yet his unreliability didn’t fool me there–nor was it intended to–because, again, Goodman plays him as the Creepiest Survivalist Ever from his first appearance on screen. His behavior negates his denial over his motives for rescuing/abducting Michelle, and thus we’re not fooled, whereas his behavior makes his statements about alien invasions seem crazy. The great part is, he’s lying about one thing and telling the truth about the other and we’re completely wrong about which is which.

The reason his secret motivation for saving Michelle remains a bit of a twist though is because it turns out to be aliens. When Michelle makes a desperate grab for his keys and gets thisclose to escaping the bunker, she’s stopped by the revelation that everyone outside is, in fact, dead of some horrible chemical attack, and that she is, in fact, safe in Howard’s bunker. And so the audience forgets all that stuff about Howard being a weirdo perv, because suddenly he’s a hero who’s been telling the truth this whole time.

It’s a nice pair of tricks, and they elevate the movie significantly. And they remind us that sometimes the best way to fool your audience is also the simplest.

The Awful Miracle of the Post Office

DIRTY MAGIC

DIRTY MAGIC

My wife hates the Post Office with a white-hot passion. This has nothing to do with politics or economics or anything rational; she just believes every single interaction she’s had with the post office has been horrible, terrible, no-good, and thus it should be burned to the ground and the ashes made into a delicious, nourishing tea.

Me, I have a more complex relationship with the Post Office. As a long-time zine publisher and a lifetime short story submitter from wayyyy back in the days before the Internet, I’ve spent a lot of time in post offices. And frankly, I am amazed that I can spend less than 50 cents and have something arrive halfway around the country in a few days. It’s like modern magic.

So, all respect to the beleaguered postal workers of the world (and they are beleaguered, trust me, baby), but stepping into the post office is often like stepping back into 1995. Which might have been the last time the PO was financially stable thanks to our friends in Congress, but let that drift. In other words, have you ever tried to mail something to Canada or (god help you) another country form the PO? Jebus.

Okay, so first you have to fill out a form CN-22 declaring what you’re mailing. Well, first you have to locate a CN-22 somewhere, and that can be a quest of some magnitude. And no, you cannot fill them out online or anything without special permission. How do you get that special permission? I have no idea, because my job is not “learn about obscure postal regulations.”

So you fill it out and then you show up and wait in line, and then you hand the person behind sixteen inches of bulletproof glass your package and your CN-22 and they proceed to type everything into their computer system by hand. I am not shitting you. You stand there while the beleaguered (and they are beleaguered) postal worker laboriously types in everything you just hand-wrote on the form. MY FUCKING GOD.

Now, imagine you have, oh, six or seven packages going to Canada. And one to Germany. OH MY FUCKING GOD you just lost like forty minutes of your life.

How is this the process in 2016? How? For the love of all that is holy, how?

Now imagine you walk into the Post Office at 10:30AM and it is empty. And as you stand there while the postal worker tries to figure out if you really meant 0 instead of O in that postal code, slowly a line of about thirteen people forms behind you. And all you can do is stare straight ahead and do subtle limbering exercises so when they jump you, you’ll be ready.

And yet, in a few days, people will be receiving things from me in other countries. And that still amazes me.

An Evening Out

YES PLEASE

YES PLEASE

A Play in One Act

Jeff and The Duchess meet a friend for dinner. They arrive early at the restaurant and sit at the bar.

JEFF: A whiskey, please.

THE DUCHESS: And chips! And guacamole! And a bottle of wine!

The BARTENDER pours Jeff a whiskey roughly the size of the ocean. Imagine a bottle of Scotch, poured entirely into a tumbler the size of Jeff’s fist, and you have some small, meager idea of how deep this pour was. In the history of heavy-handed bartenders pouring deep drinks for you, this one ranks as possibly the deepest pour ever known to man. If Dylan Thomas had drinks this deep poured for him he would have died after three, maybe four.

JEFF: <sizing up drink> Yes, that seems about right.

<TIME PASSES>

BARTENDER: Another, hon?

JEFF: YES PLEASE.

BARTENDER (the true hero of this play) proceeds to pour another entire bottle and perhaps a bit of a second bottle into the tumbler. JEFF’s eyes grow wide and his whole body begins to tremble.

JEFF: <whispering> As it was prophesized …

<TIME PASSES. JEFF and THE DUCHESS meet their friend and are seated at dinner. JEFF finishes his second whiskey and begins to work on the bottle of wine>

THE DUCHESS: What do you think?

<JEFF smiles beatifically at her. One eye is apparently focused just over her shoulder>

JEFF: WAZZIT?

THE DUCHESS: We were discussing politics, and you need to tell your friend here that he’s wrong.

JEFF: Bizzurp. Fonda! MINGUS!

THE DUCHESS: Oh, dear.

JEFF: <standing up and tearing off trousers with one motion> MIIIIINNNGUUSSSSS!

And: Scene.

The lesson here, my friends, is that you’re never too old to be a jackass. Also: The Drink is good. But the Drink is Chaotic Neutral.

This Is Not For You

Vinyl on HBO

Vinyl on HBO

The combined age of the main forces behind HBO’s new original series, Vinyl, is 200. That by itself means nothing, and lord knows when I am 73 years old, like Martin Scorsese is, I hope I am half as spry and mentally nimble as he is. Same for Mick Jagger at 73, and even Terrence Winter, the relative child here at the ripe old age of 55.

Watching their new show, however, you get the sense that it does matter, at least a little. Not simply because it’s a period piece set in 1973, or even because it’s a period piece that reconstructs certain events in a slavishly worshipful way that implies these events meant something to these men, in a personal way. But because the story they’re telling, at least through two episodes (as I write this) is one of those stories that seems pretty bare-naked in its psychological underpinnings, which in this case seems to strongly imply that these three old white guys are firmly looking backwards at this point in their lives. Because while there’s certainly an exciting story in the American music scene of the early 1970s, with the Summer of Love years in the past and punk rock bubbling under like acid, what Vinyl mainly is is a bubbling pot of clichés involving midlife crises, rock n’ roll as mystical energy binding the universe together, and, as Richard Hell put it, Scorsese’s “relentless framing of life as nothing but competition among men for power — represented by money, willingness to betray and kill, cocaine, and pussy.

This is Not For You

Privilege is awesome, let me tell you — you simply must try it someday — but it can really fuck with your head. When you’re younger and moderately affluent, everything seems like it was made for you, because it was. And even the stuff that isn’t made for you seems like it ought to be, or at least seems like you should be able to just wander over and get into it. And then you get older, and the world shifts, and things stop being aimed directly at your pleasure centers. They throw you over for a younger crowd, or a more diverse crowd, or just a different crowd, and there you are: Middle aged or thereabouts and confused. Why are people so excited about this new thing that you don’t get? It’s maddening!

I recall back in the days when Anthrax and Public Enemy were vibrant parts of pop culture, and their collaboration was Big News. I went to see them play a gig at the New Ritz (or maybe it was the Old Ritz, who the fuck can remember) and being super excited. The place was crowded with Public Enemy fans who were not in the least interested in skinny white kids like me, desperately trying to mosh around, and I got a bit roughed up when PE left the stage and half the crowd simply walked out rather than stick around for Anthrax. They weren’t friendly. It wasn’t for me, but I’d been convinced it was.

Anyway, Vinyl. Vinyl is the story, so far, of successful record producer Richie Finestra, who started off like everyone in the record business by screwing over a poor black artist and in 1973 is principal shareholder and CEO of American Century Records, a record label in trouble. Richie is struggling to stay sober, hates half the artists his company has on its roster, and is destined by the end of the first episode to have the sort of violent epiphany that only happens in fiction. Vinyl is a smorgasborg of things you have heard before, including the rather ancient saw about how Rock n’ Roll is some sort of primitive energy superpower that can change your life as long as you don’t lose sight of it.

I mean, seriously. This is 2016. Rock n’ Roll ain’t what it used to be, but here’s another story about how a moribund musical genre was once the most powerful force in the universe. But what it really is Scorsese, Jagger, and Winter looking back on a time when everything was, in fact, meant for them.

The Good Old Days

Most people have those moments when an experience kicked you in the ass. And for a lot of people — myself included — many of those moments included a discovery of music. Whether it was the first song you heard that really made you feel something, or a soundtrack to a special moment, we’ve all been there. So there’s nothing wrong with the way Winter and Scorsese pepper Vinyl‘s narrative with hallucinations of famous rock stars performing — Bo Diddly suddenly appearing at a birthday party, Jerry Lee Lewis turning up in an office, Karen Carpenter singing along to her own song on the radio in a car sailing down the highway. These moments are self-indulgent but passably interesting.

The thing is, Rock n’ Roll is no longer the magical culture-changing power it was in the 50s or 60s or 70s or, god help us, the 80s or 90s. We can argue about exactly when Rock n’ Roll stopped being a magical force that changed lives — some might argue it never was, of course — but the fact is any story that is predicated on just how powerfully transformative music can be is a snooze. What Vinyl represents is the recollection of people for whom Rock was personally transformative. We’re supposed to believe it because they can scrounge up the budget to have someone impersonate The New York Dolls and then film a nicely edited sequence where the sheer power of Personality Crisis brings a building down on Richie’s head and he walks away with that dazed look of wonder that truly powerful music can inspire. You know, the sort of music that makes buildings collapse. Because it’s so powerful.

Buried in that tired narrative, however, is something else: The constant refrain in the show’s first two episodes that popular music is crap. So far, characters on Vinyl have slagged just about every dubious rock artist of the era, from Chicago to ABBA to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer to Donny Fucking Osmond. With the smugness of hindsight, all the cool characters know this music is shit, and the music they love — old jump blues, the Dolls, Black Sabbath, burgeoning punk rock — is the real good stuff. But what they’re really saying, I think, is that today’s music sucks. Because it’s not for them. They can have someone on the show disparage Jethro Tull because it’s 2016 and seriously, no one can believe that Jethro Tull was a thing. But under that is the implication, I think, that if Richie were to wake up in 2016 he would be horrified at what’s happened to pop music, because, I suspect, Scorsese, Jagger, and Winter are horrified.

That Last Grasping Moment

Time leaves us all behind. I think people of a certain age who grew up with Rock n’ Roll’s first wave could wrap their heads around punk rock and heavy metal and grunge because they were just permutations, evolutions. They were even at times a return to roots, to a simple chord structure and insistent beat and personal lyrics. You could go from Jerry Lee Lewis to Television in just a few hops.

By 2016, things have changed. Rock is in such serious decline the only time you hear about a guitarist is when they wheel someone like Joe Perry out onto the stage to lend some hot licks to the goddamn new Pitbull song. If the last time you thought you had your finger on the pulse was when CBGB’s was still booking acts, it sure must feel like everything’s gone to hell, and telling a story about a coked-out record executive whose life is changed by The New York Dolls seems like a bold statement. It isn’t though. It’s just kvetching that not everything is for you.

Aw, Man!

We'll take the hippies and the hipsters, but not the Irish!

We’ll take the hippies and the hipsters, but not the Irish!

For some reason today I realized that I have been using the word man as a general epithet, greeting, and acknowledgement since I was about ten years old — which was probably the last time it was cool, hip lingo. Not to mention the last time it wasn’t humiliating. Not to mention my probable emotional age. Let it drift.

I can remember my Mother admonishing me to stop using it in her presence because she considered it to be, I don’t know — smartassy? uncultured? simply annoying? But obviously her shaming me didn’t have much effect; when I’m not thinking I still call everyone man, as in “Thanks, man!” or “Hey, man!”

Today for some reason I suddenly found myself ashamed of this. I’m a middle-aged grown up, after all, but I call everyone man like it’s still 1975 in my head (I also have the wardrobe of a hobo unless The Duchess cleans me up for adult events, so what?). In many ways it is 1975 n my head; I still expect everything to cost fifteen cents, including gallons of gas and shoes, and get very cranky when presented with invoices costing more; just ask The Duchess. But that’s no excuse. Today in the grocery store I told the kid working the checkout line Thanks, man and he looked at me as if I’d turned to dust and crumbled away in front of his eyes.

OLD HABITS, OLD MAN

Language gets embedded like that. We all need our go-to phrases and lines, the things we utter when we’re on autopilot, or don’t have time to think. Thanks, man just pops out, and in my head it sounds friendly and loose, casual in a cool way. Because that’s how it was when I first picked it up, a bunch of scurvy street kids playing Wiffle Ball with black electrical tape on our bats, doing complicated handshakes when we met up every day. Calling each other man because someone saw it on TV or something one day.

What bothers me is the lack of evolution and the lack of consciousness; I prefer to think I am captain of the S.S. Jeff Somers, this shambolic body I inhabit, and not merely a doughy-eyed passenger. A long time ago the word dude entered my lexicon about the same time it entered everyone approximately my age, and I spent a long time rooting it out and eliminating it, for the most part. Because dude may be the worst word ever invented, and must be burned from our minds. Once in a while I use dude ironically, and once in a while I regress 20 years in a moment and it slips out, but it’s rare. I won the Dude War. So the ongoing battle against Man irks me: Every time I utter the word I feel like a jackass.

EVERY MAN

Of course, what’s the alternative? I suspect man persists in my everyday speech because it’s egalitarian in its way. Take the boy at the grocery: What should I use to address him? Thanks, kid makes me feel like I’m 105 years old, or possibly in a old noir movie. I could go with just an unadorned thanks, but that sounds abrupt to my ear, almost rude. I could go full-on hipster and make up nicknames for everyone — thanks, Stretch; thanks, Noodles; thanks, Starscream — but somehow I expect that won’t solve my problem. Maybe this is why some people just smirk silently at everything. It saves them the embarrassment of calling someone Chuckles or something.

See, with Man, it’s levelling: Everyone is Man. You’re all my equal when I whip out the circa-1980 secret handshake and call you man (and yet if I said Thanks, woman to a lady I’d likely be entered into some sort of police database, or possibly a Future Cyborg Watchlist). On the other hand, man seems acceptable to me mainly because for one brief shining moment it was considered cool. I could say Thanks, person! and it would be just as universal, but because it sounds so robotic and nerdy, it just doesn’t have the same panache … panache that perhaps only exists in my tiny, booze-soaked brain.

So, man remains, like mild brain damage I can’t cure. So be it. If only I didn’t sound like such an idiot when I used it.

The Unbearable Whiteness of “The Intern”

Shiny Happy People

Shiny Happy People

Because I have committed terrible crimes in a past life, The Duchess made me watch The Intern the other day. Someday I will get myself hypnotized to discover what sort of child-killing Venetian nobleman I was in the past to deserve stuff like this, but for the moment I just accept my punishments as what I deserve.

A pretty not-good comedy starring Robert De Niro as a 70-year old widower who participates in a “senior” internship program at Anne Hathaway’s ultra-hip startup based in Brooklyn, the film sparked an observation I make from time to time that drives The Duchess crazy: A Whiteness Analysis. And holy cow, this is the whitest movie I’ve seen in a long time.

Now, I don’t think every single cast has to be colorblind or forcibly integrated, and yes, there are also films with entirely black (or other) casts. But it’s easy to argue that an all-black film is a necessary correction against the overwhleming diversity problem in mainstream Hollywood, and many of those films also include at least a few white folks, because they’re set in something resembling the real world. Films like The Intern are set in a weird fantasy land where Brooklyn, New York is more or less a White Enclave. Literally no one with any sort of face time in the film is non-White (there might have been a few background characters who were black or another ethnicity). In other words, a film set in a borough of New York City that has

  • a population of 2.5 million people and which is
  • about 36% non-White (or, you know, nearly one million people)

doesn’t have any non-white characters.

As Gwen Stefani might say while she was appropriating even more Japanese culture to sell us her wretched things, that’s bananas.

The Opposite of Good

Now, I’m no paragon of racial virtue. I’m an asshole, and I walk about draped in my white privilege like some sort of King. But I grew up in Jersey City where my friends and schoolmates were of a wide variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, so my eye is trained to think that a lot of skin tones and accents and strange cooking smells that hit you in the face when you come over for dinner is normal. Bland Whiteness, on the other hand, freaks me out, even though I am quite bland and quite white.

None of that means a movie is good or bad. A movie can have a painfully white cast and still be amazing — and vice versa. It’s just that once I notice the absolute lack of black characters of any kind, it grates on me a little. Sometimes it’s justified due to the focus of the story or the setting, true enough. But not The Intern, as noted above, because it’s set in one of the most racially diverse places in America.

And let’s be frank, The Intern isn’t a good movie (er, spoilers here if you care, though I can’t imagine why you would). It’s not awful, but it’s that mythical story that lacks any sort of conflict. De Niro’s character is friendly, supportive, intelligent, and only mildly stymied by modern technology and slang. His fellow interns and the employees at the company find him charming and a font of wisdom. Anne Hathaway’s major problem is that the investors at her wildly successful company want her to hire a CEO. And yes, her husband is cheating on her — but, as it turns out, only because she has emotionally abandoned him, he totally still loves her he’s just a modern man struggling to find manliness while being a house husband. Or something.

In other words, there’s no villain, no conflict. Everyone is jolly. Lessons are learned. The movie feints at making Hathaway’s character a bitchy ageist who dislikes De Niro simply because he’s observant while being old, and resolves this ghostly image of conflict literally one minute after it surfaces. This is a movie where everyone apologizes immediately for every single mistake so that no drama can possibly sprout from the seed. In that regard its very much like Downton Abbey, another show where conflict goes to die in a field of muttered apologies and hugs. And also a very, very white show, but they have at least established that black people and Indian people, at the very least, exist in the Downton universe. Plus, as mentioned above, the focus and setting on that show justify the monochromism to some extent, even if there is absolutely no justification for the total lack of stakes or conflict.

Authorial Struggle

Are there areas of this country where literally everyone around you is white? Sure, of course. And maybe those audience segments get unsettled when they see a diverse cast, so maybe there’s a marketing aspect to this sort of casting. I know in my own writing I sometimes have to take a step back and ask myself if my characters are all essentially just me and people I know and am comfortable with, and sometimes I purposefully model a character on someone outside of my tiny circle of friends in order to break out a little. So I can see that if you’re a writer who has pretty much all-white friends and family (which is just a circumstance and does not mean they’re a virulent racist) they can unconsciously write characters who are all more or less familiar to them without thinking about how it all looks.

That can happen. You write what you know, and if you don’t have anyone outside of your own ethnic and cultural experience around you, that’s a thing that can happen. It’s still jarring to see it, whatever the ultimate explanation.

Of course, if I started writing characters based on only the things I interact with on a daily basis, all of my books would feature cats, and would basically be 300 pages about napping.

Writing Lessons from Assholes

I WILL CUT A BITCH

I WILL CUT A BITCH

I was an indifferent student, because I am the Laziest Man Ever Born. To this day the fact that I actually earned a college degree is kind of amazing, not because I’m dumb, but because it’s difficult for 2016 Jeff to believe that College Jeff actually performed the bare minimum of work in order to achieve a BA in English, which is the Do Nothing Bitch of college undergraduate degrees. Most of my memories of my college days involve a television, so the degree thing is a mystery.

I do have one memory that I like to tell people about because it a) makes me look smart and b) underscores the ridiculous nature of academics in general — and now I can add a third reason: c) there’s a lesson about writing in it. So let’s recount the glorious Moment Jeff Made a Professor Look Stupid.

The Glorious Moment Jeff Made a Professor Look Stupid

I was taking some laugher of a 200 level English course; I honestly can’t even remember what it was. Tortured Rhyme Schemes in Early 19th Century Poetry? Inscrutable Medieval Symbolism 203? Allegory for Potheads? I have no idea. It was a 200 level course so I can assume my strategy was to attend as few classes as possible and bring Other Stuff to Do when I did attend.

We had to write a paper at some point, with the stress that we had to cite original sources and all that usual drama. Again, I have no recollection of what the paper was supposed to be about. I know I hit up the library (my god if the Internet had existed I would never have had to leave my dorm room/apartment during college), wrote my paper, and handed it in. And when I got it back, I’d been given a big fat D.

Now, I was never very ambitious about my academics, sure, but this was fucking bullshit: A D? On an English paper? No fucking way. I wasn’t ambitious, but I had pride. So I scheduled an appointment with the professor and asked why.

The professor, as I recall, wasn’t a full-on professor (200 level class, remember) and might have been a grad student or something, possibly a homeless man recruited to watch us for an hour twice a week, who knows. Like I said, my memory is sketchy and very much like Homer Simpson’s habit of imagining himself in a tuxedo when he tries to remember his evenings. I had no curiosity about his status then, and certainly no memory of it now. I remember he had shaggy, thinning blondish hair and big moon glasses and a nervous tic that involved licking the corner of his mouth with his tongue. And he told me, in condescending tones, that I’d obviously plagiarized the paper.

I think my head almost exploded. You can accuse me of a lot of things and I won’t care. Say that I have poor fashion sense and hygiene? Fine. A tendency towards run-on sentences and semi-colon abuse? You may well be right. The musical talent of a wallabee? Fine. But suggest that I plagiarized something and Jeff Smash. So I asked him how he’d come to this conclusion, and he told me that the writing style was far too academic and elevated. I asked him if he’d found, you know, actual proof of plagiarism, and he said no, but he knew no one at my age could write the way the paper was written.

So I asked him if I could show him plenty of other examples of my writing that was at that level, would he change my grade? He said he would, so I brought him five boxes of manuscripts and papers from recent years. He took one look at the boxes, said he believed me, and changed my grade. The kicker? This paper that was so well-written he assumed it was plagiarized? He gave me a B. A FUCKING B.

Still. Angry.

The Writing Lesson

I think of this today because it actually points out one of the often-overlooked aspects of writing, in terms of that dreaded word craft: mimicry. Copying someone’s writing style is challenging, and while you certainly don’t want to steal someone’s style for your own, it’s a very useful exercise. Writing in a styler or voice that isn’t your own gives you an objectivity about word choice, phrasing, and other technical aspects of language that you sometimes get blinded to when it’s your own creative output.

I never realized how often I mimic what I’m reading until that unfortunate day when I came within seconds of murdering a pudgy teacher. Since then, I’ve been much more aware — I do it more or less without thinking about it. If I’m reading a book and really into it, I’ll start cribbing bits and pieces of the style, stealing tricks, and after a few weeks I’ll more or less be writing a pastiche of the style in question. Now that I’m aware of it, it’s a tool: I can indulge in it, learn something, work on something different from my normal stuff, and then keep whatever’s useful and incorporate it into my own evolving style.

And all it took to learn this was an awkward encounter with a smug teacher and a brief, passing interest in my own academic career.

The Obligatory David Bowie Post That I Will Try to Make Into Something Interesting and Probably Fail

Blackstar

Blackstar

I’ve never been the biggest David Bowie fan. His more mainstream and accessible songs, sure. The awe-inspiring genius of the open-chord riff in “Rebel Rebel,” the effortless cool of “Modern Love,” the howling pain in “Heroes”—genius songs each. His more avant-garde work, his jazzy digressions and artsy pretensions left me behind. I am a simple man. I like a 4×4 beat and some major chord progressions.

I also don’t know much about Bowie as a human being. After the shock and awe of his passing faded, there have of course been a plethora of backlash pieces, concerning his interactions with underage groupies in the 1970s. I never knew that. I don’t care how many drugs were involved or what year it was, any grown man who has sex with an underage girl is shitbag, and that complicates my impression of Bowie.

As does Blackstar, his final album, apparently written and released not only in the full knowledge of his coming death due to liver cancer, but as an artistic comment on it.

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Recently, Nick Mamatas, who I’ve met once and who has published me a few times, posted links to heartbreaking stories about writers who committed suicide. The latter I had read years before, the former was recent. They’re both tales of desperation, of people who have slowly given up on their dreams, become hopelessly tangled in the endless bullshit life rains down on all of us. Life is, after all, death; everyone we know slowly succumbs, and everything we do is tainted with the knowledge of its transience. Some people handle this, sheltered by loved ones, friends, a vibrant social life. Some of us lose that shelter, or never have it.

Oh, I’m lucky. And yet despite my good fortune, I can see myself in those stories. How easy would it be to slowly lose people? To find yourself alone, truly alone? Easier than we think. Easier than I think. It happens so slowly and subtly and then so quickly and suddenly. And money and fame is no certain bulwark against it; Harper Lee has both and I suspect she is lonelier than ever.

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Blackstar is Bowie’s final album, and it’s pretty clear he planned it and the surrounding publicity—the photographs and videos and the design of the physical album and the liner notes et al—to be a funeral card. A final performance. The lyrics of some of the songs seem to clearly reference the cancer that was killing him and his awareness of a legacy.

That’s amazing. To think that for a year and a half he labored under the doom of his rebellious cells and produced something that was designed to be his swan song. I find myself wondering if he scheduled his death as well, coming as it did so close to the release of the album. The discipline is impressive, and even if David Bowie wept and begged at the last moments, it doesn’t take away from his achievement. Whether Bowie was a good man or not, whether he committed crimes or was a secret asshole, he faced the one thing we all face in the end and he used it for fuel. He created something from it, and turned his own demise into a Moment.

I despair of ever having that kind of discipline, or creativity. When informed of my own death—assuming I get more warning than a shouted “Hey!” or a sudden sense of gravity having turned against me—I’ll likely wallow in self-pity and booze for a long time and then watch a lot of Netflix and then die, bewildered and irritated.

I won’t release a Blackstar, I don’t think. And that’s kind of sad, yes?

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I’m obsessed with legacy. I don’t really believe in an afterlife, so much of my motivation to publish and self-publish is to leave a slime trail behind me. I have a strong suspicion I have just been outclassed.

What “The Affair” Can Teach Us About Arc Mysteries

Adultery Doesn't Look Like Much Fun, Actually

Adultery Doesn’t Look Like Much Fun, Actually

A lot of TV shows hit the small screen with noise and thunder, inspiring think pieces and heated discussion. Few series maintain that level of fascination. For every Game of Thrones there’s The Affair, a show that debuted to a lot of harrumphing about its central storytelling device (conflicting POVs) but has settled into a groove of “premiere television.” Who knows how many people are actually watching this show, and while it still gets mentioned here and there it’s certainly not a cultural obsession.

I enjoy it, although I’ll admit the central device — those conflicting POVs — is irritatingly mishandled, at least in my not-so-humble opinion. Maybe there’s a brilliant long game there, but after two seasons my main takeaway from the POVs is that they are often so wildly inconsistent the characters must be insane people. Unreliable narrators is a great idea: Looking for clues to the truth in two different versions of the same story is potentially powerful. And the show sometimes attains that greatness in little moments; for example, the male protagonist Noah (played, brilliantly as always, by Dominic West) remembers himself consistently as an asshole, which is a really wonderful note to strike, considering the character is clearly selfish, self-involved, and going through a real doozy of a midlife crisis. That sort of detail in an unreliable narrator — plus the fact that he actually often comes off a bit better in other people’s POV — is a great use of the device.

Unfortunately, frequently the recollections of the same scene from different people are so different it’s literally impossible. No one knows better than my wife and I how two people can remember a moment differently, but not to the extent of warping time and space the way The Affair does. It takes a powerful device and renders it ridiculous and irritating.

But! I have not come here to bury The Affair or to praise its misused conceit. I have come to discuss how brilliantly it’s using its central season-spanning mystery.

The Potboiler

Initially, the show is all soap opera: A frustrated father (Noah) of four takes his family on a vacation to Long Island. Feeling like a professional failure and outsider with his wife’s rich family, he starts a passionate affair with a troubled local waitress (Alison). The conflicting unreliable POVs are used to some good effect as the two recall the beginning of the affair differently. Spoilers to follow if you have not watched the show but plan to someday.

There are also flash-forwards to future events that the show’s timeline is slowly catching up to, a future in which Noah is divorced from his ex-wife Helen, and has a child with Alison, in which Noah has published a successful novel which is basically a thinly-veiled account of his affair with Alison, in which Alison’s former brother-in-law has been killed in a hit and run, and in which Noah is the main suspect in that crime. The details of this soapy set up can get a bit convoluted, so let’s just boil it down to the fact that the second season of the show has been leading to the reveal of what actually happened when the brother-in-law was killed. And here’s where the show, which has mutated now from a relationship drama with a borrowed literary device (that did more for the show’s pretension level than its effectiveness) into a show about a murder mystery, did something very smart. It set up a scenario where all three of the main characters — Helen, Noah, and Alison — are involved and complicit in the killing.

The show’s been very patient in setting up the threads it brought together in the Season Two finale, planting seeds for the characters so their decisions leading up to the accident make sense, and their mutual decisions to cover it up make sense. The end result is exactly what an arc-mystery is supposed to do when it’s clarified: It complicates things and provides fresh motivations for the characters. The show is now completely transformed, it’s no longer about an affair and its repercussions, it’s about one boozy night and a dead man and the fallout from the decisions made in the wake of that. The fact that all of these threads spin out from the show’s original premise — the titular affair — makes it feel very organic.

So Often Wrong

The problem with most arc-mysteries is twofold: One, they don’t actually have any resolution, the writers are just making things up as they go. and two, they often resolve in ways that are designed to leave the basic DNA of the story undisturbed. A show like Lost will always be remembered more for the frankly awful way the central mystery of the story was resolved than for the glories of its storytelling. And too many shows have offered up solutions to arc-mysteries that try to simultaneously be shocking while allowing the writers to go back to business as usual in the next episode. Arc Mysteries are easy ways of generating buzz and getting people hooked on a show as they collect clues and exchange theories, but they’re also constricting if there’s no plan. It sure is easy to write a scene where something mysterious and mind-blowing happens. It’s much more difficult to come up with a clear explanation for it later.

The Affair did it right. Whether or not they capitalize on that in future seasons remains to be seen, of course.