Someone Else’s Writing

So, apparently James Patterson is the world’s most successful writer (via Pimp My Novel) [key quote: “Patterson may lack the name recognition of a Stephen King, a John Grisham or a Dan Brown, but he outsells them all. Really, it’s not even close. (According to Nielsen BookScan, Grisham’s, King’s and Brown’s combined U.S. sales in recent years still don’t match Patterson’s.)”]. This is fascinating stuff, especially when you dig in and read how hard the man works, although he’s pretty much just a Content Supplier at this point, and not so much a writer.

Which is cool; I doubt Patterson has sleepless nights regretting that he never wrote that spiritually devastating Serious Novel. The man pays co-authors out of his own pocket in order to publish 9 books a year; there’s no way he has any angst about the road he’s taken. Plus, sleeping on a bed of money kind of eases the pain a little, I’ll bet.

Some struggling authors might be jealous of Patterson’s success. Some who have even had a measure of success might be envious, but not me. And not because of fruity artistic concerns, either (they can make Avery Cates lunchboxes if they want, or — OOH! — Avery Cates cologne), but because I do not ever want to work that hard.

I can’t speak for other authors, because I shun the company of other writers (all they want to do is talk about craft and writing and the business of publishing, when all I want to talk about is who is buying the next round, when will the next round be forthcoming, and where are we going after closing time), but for me, my authorial dream life has always been the sort they depict in the movies and television: Rich writer spends about 5 minutes a day writing, about six hours a day endorsing huge checks, and the rest attending fabulous parties. I enjoy the writing, so writing for a few hours every day is fun, but that’s about where my ambition ends, and I fully believe in paying other people to do things like read my contracts, market my books, cut up and pre-chew my food, etc.

SO, I will never be quite as rich or successful as Mr. Patterson, sure, I accept that. Trust me, you will never hear me complaining because I haven’t published nine books in the past year, and I will never, ever, bemoan the fact that I’m not allowed to run my own marketing meetings at Hachette. Trust me. I’m putting all my efforts into becoming Castle from the TV show, sans daughter. Although, I must admit, the idea of paying other folks to write my books for me is kind of appealing. Except for the paying part. Maybe I could start the first ever unpaid internship for ghostwriting? College kids would submit writing samples and I’d pick three every year to live at my house and write a novel each for me to submit under my name. IT’S GENIUS!

Who’s with me? All accepted interns would be required to address me as El Jefe. Submit your resumes via my contact page.

I’m a huge fan of the 1967 TV showThe Prisoner, created, mostly written by, and starring Patrick McGoohan. In fact, The Prisoner remains the one and only fanfic I ever wrote, a novella penned in 1991 called Return of the King and no you cannot see it (although I was pretty proud of it at the time – and, to be honest, I posted it to alt.fan.prisoner back in The Day so you can probably locate it on teh Googler, though I used a pen name). Ah, the vagaries of youth!

Anyway: I was interested in the reboot/re-imagining/whatever on AMC, so I tuned in to the first episode. Sadly, I did not finish the first episode. Some folks seem to be enjoying this show, and that’s fine. For me it wasn’t so much that the show is terrible, it’s more that it’s boring as hell – or at least was for the first 30 minutes, and how much longer am I expected to give a show? None much longer, that’s what.

Still, plenty of television shows disappoint or don’t connect. What grates on me about AMC’s The Prisoner is the fact that they changed it so fundamentally and completely from the original I wonder why they didn’t just rebrand it and create a new show. Was it the name-recognition of the original? I dunno; while band geeks like me (and you, probably) are aware of the original and possibly still like using the phrase “Be Seeing You!” in cheerily ironic situations, I don’t think Prisoner-mania has swept the nation in the last 20 years. Probably it was somebody’s pet idea, to update the charming old cold-war concept, and that‘s fine too, but in that case they really should have pulled back a little. There’s almost zero 1967-era Prisoner in 2009-era Prisoner, aside from some cheeky visual and vocal references. They should have called it something else and tagged a “inspired-by” line on it, because aside from the most general description of the show – man wakes up in a mysterious Village after resigning his position, weirdness ensues – it’s completely different. Why bother?

On a possibly-loopy side note, I gave up on the first episode when Six looks up in the sky and sees a faint outline shimmering in what looked very much like the shape of the Twin Towers. I thought to myself, myself, he’s been pegged as from New York City – if this turns out to be everyone who was in the Towers when they fell living in purgatory or something, each numbered as a victim, I will set my own house on fire in rage.

I haven’t watched the rest of the episodes, so I don’t know if I’m anywhere near on that instinctive prediction, but the very thought of it was enough for me to change the channel. I think I watched House Hunters instead. Real Estate porn, activate!

I watched the season finale of Mad Men the other night, and really enjoyed it. While I don’t think Mad Men has done anything particularly new or groundbreaking, fiction-wise, it’s done everything – or almost everything – well. Which is really all it takes to be a classic piece of storytelling. However, over the course of three seasons I have put my finger on what I think Mad Men‘s weakness is: Frankly, it’s the plot. Some of the storylines are interesting, gripping, and laugh-out-loud funny. Some are dull, plodding, and hamfisted in their symbolism. I’ve realized that the division between these two sets of storylines is pretty obviously the office plots set in the Sterling Cooper offices and involving its employees (good), and the soapy storylines involving Don Draper’s home life (or anybody’s home life) (bad). Put simply, when Mad Men is in the Sterling Cooper offices and people are plotting against each other, or bickering, or trying to come up with a great pitch, I’m enthralled, and the characterizations and the things we know about the characters inform and improve the storylines. When we’re home listening to the loathsome Betty Draper (loathsome on purpose, and wonderfully written as a character, but loathsome nonetheless), I start thinking about mixing a fresh drink and checking my email.

Now, this is just part of the cost of doing business with a show like Mad Men. It is, at its heart, a soap, and part of the drama is supposed to be Don’s home life. However, something’s starting to happen in science fiction and fantasy television (and maybe in other mediums): The SF/F shows are starting to take on this model as well. You have the interesting, good stuff (SF/F), and then you have the soapy stuff that plods along. In shows involving aliens, spaceships, magic, flash forwards, mysterious islands, death rays, elves – whatever, we suddenly have all sorts of subplots about infidelity, unrequited love, terminal illnesses and every other soapy mainstays. SF/F shows used to be about action, about fantastic concepts, with a minimal amount of soapy stuff, but the balance has been inverted.

Consider Star Trek: The Original Series. You didn’t have scene of Kirk arguing with his girlfriend, or Chekov grousing about how his career is stalled. This was because they were too busy fighting aliens in desert arenas, firing phasers, and discovering that once again their forward shields wouldn’t hold. In today’s market, they’d have to make Kirk married or at least get him involved by season three.

I understand the impetous behind this: SF/F is spreading beyond its traditional confines. It’s getting a general audience, and general audiences like a nice soupy mix of storylines. These are the folks who really liked the “sexual chemistry” of Moulder and Scully on The X Files, and wanted more of that. The creators of these shows think the audience needs a mundane handle to grab onto. So, okay, you have the survivors of flight 815 getting deeper and deeper into a Weirdness Cavern, and maybe some viewers are worried about how weird its getting, but then you have a nice solid love triangle like Mom used to make, and if nothing else you can hold onto that.

Cynical? Maybe. I can’t help but wonder if something like FlashForward wouldn’t be better if they stopped worrying about who’s going to get married and who’s going to start drinking again and started worrying about why in hell everyone passed out for two minutes and saw a vision of the future. Just a thought.

But as SF/F keeps spreading, keeps building mindshare and keeps seeping into the mainstream I think this is going to get worse, until eventually SF concepts will simply be settings for soap operas. This will be right around the time they roll out Star Trek: Academy on ABC, where every episode will involve romances, betrayals, and hidden pasts, and every sweeps week mysterious aliens will invade and the Federation Academy kids will have to fight them off using wormholes or something. And then back to who’s boinking who.

Screw it, I’m going to mix myself a fresh drink.

Last night, through a series of bizarre events I can’t even begin to describe, I watched a random episode of Castle on ABC. Now, Castle isn’t an SF show, unless you consider the concept of a crime novel author being allowed to partner with a detective in the NYPD to help investigate homicides to be “augmented reality”, which of course it is. “Augmented reality” being code for complete bullshit, but let that slide – TV shows have a storied history of crazy concepts delivered with a straight face.

It’s not a terrible show, saved by Nathan Fillion‘s infinite charm and occasional bouts of clever dialogue. Not exactly a show I’m going to schedule my life around, but if it’s on I might stick around for an hour and watch it. This, despite the fact that interspersed with the clever dialog are lengthy stretches of Bad Writing. Specifically, the form of Bad Writing known as The Dummy Double Tap.

DDT is a simple concept: Assume your audience is a crowd of lowing morons and write down to that image by having characters utter completely unnecessary clarifying statements. Things which are perfectly clear to anyone with half a brain get underscored by someone spelling it out for the Slow Kids in a way that no one actually does in real life. For example, in this episode a suspect had earlier stated that he was at a party from midnight until 3AM and then at home, providing himself an alibi for the murder. Later, the police follow up on this alibi (paraphrased because I can’t be bothered to get the exact wording):

DETECTIVE: The club said he was only there from 11:30 until Midnight.

CASTLE: But he told us he was there until three!

The audience heard the suspect say that about thirteen minutes before this, so the assumption is that we don’t have the brain power to retain that information for thirteen minutes and make the rather obvious connection that the suspect is lying about his alibi. Are there people in the world this stupid? Sure, I’d assume so. Are they a significant portion of the population, and hence the potential audience for a generic show like Castle? I hope not, for if they are, civilization is doomed. Another example: Early in the investigation they discover that the murder victim, who everyone adamantly denied would ever use drugs, had diet pills in her system. While interviewing folks, the detectives are told that one of the suspects once crushed up a diet pill in someone’s drink in order to sabotage them. The detective character and Castle then proceed to explain that maybe the suspect did the same thing to the victim! BECAUSE WE ARE APPARENTLY INCAPABLE OF MAKING THIS OBVIOUS CONNECTION OURSELVES. <Head explodes>

If you removed the Dummy Double Tap lines, the show would only be forty minutes long with commercials, and only slightly improved, as the story I saw was pretty boring and bland. The scenes with Nathan Fillion’s Castle character at home were much better – lighthearted and humorous, with some decent lines and no need for DDT because, I assume, no plot was being advanced so the producers decided that if the audience couldn’t follow the complex interactions of Castle, his mother, and his daughter nothing would be lost. And Fillion’s fun to watch.

To be completely fair, since I started writing this little essay we watched another episode and it wasn’t nearly as bad, without much DDT at all, although I can now see that every episode follows the well-worn trope of having the main suspect change every five minutes as new information is discovered – usually due to terrible, terrible police work. As in, a complete failure to ask simple questions that would have solved the crime immediately. That aside, however, I think Fillion can ride his Firefly goodwill a few years on something like this. Why not?

Two things to mention today. I know that blogging’s been a bit dodgy of late, because I am frickin’ busy. Now, you may be imagining some sort of network-TV version of a writer’s life and picturing me dashing about in a tuxedo, solving crimes and cashing huge checks, but no, not that kind of busy. The boring kind.

First off: I should mention that longtime correspondent and pal Rob Tillitz has a book out that you should read:

Rob’s a fascinating guy with a style all his own, and his book’s already been optioned for a film. Check it out!

Second, I am not going to see the new Transformers movie. I saw the first one on cable and of course, as everyone acknowledges, it was batshit insane terrible. The sort of movie that takes your childhood memories and not only eats them, but then craps them out onto a plate and forces you to consume them again. If life was a horror movie, Transformers would be the ravenous brain-sucking alien that sucks out your brain. And if there was any doubt that the sequel is even worse, I have the fine folks at i09.com to clue me in.

But I don’t need cluing in. Science fiction movies have become more or less the new western;  mainstream and stripped of anything that might be too taxing for the general audience (which is not a jibe at the intellect of folks out there – a general audience hive mind is, by its very nature, bland and generic) and thus anything that might make it interesting or, damn it, science-fictiony. Transformers was about as SF as your average car commercial. Sure, it had robots. From space. I think. Their origin was never very well explained, nor was their ability to somehow look like current-model American cars, or anything, really. The dearth of actual ideas beyond BIG WHOMPING ROBOTS FIGHTING and MEGAN FOX HAS TEH BOOBAGE was pretty startling, even for a cynical summer blockbuster.

What is, after all, science fiction? Do you just need one big SF macguffin to qualify? Shouldn’t there be some speculative thought in there? Like, how is the world changed now that the Autobots live amongst us? Can their technology be adapted? Wouldn’t someone suggest capturing one and tearing it to pieces to steal their secrets? FOR GOD’S SAKE THERE ARE SENTIENT ROBOTS FROM SPACE. Who built ’em, and why? Or did they evolve, and what does that mean for the rest of existence?

Nope. At the end of Transformers I the world is exactly as it was when the movie began with the exception of a couple of sentient robots living secretly around us – if you call that living – and no one seems to worry about the Autobots and what they represent. Because Transformers was an action movie that happened to have robots, and none of the creative team involve gave a shit about those questions.

In short: Transformers was not a Sci Fi movie. And neither is T2, apparently.

So: Happy Fourth of July, Americans. Don’t blow your hands off with M80s, don’t get sunstroke after your fifth beer (I speak from experience), and don’t go see Transformers 2 unless you know exactly what you’re getting into.