Did My Mother Make Me Weird?

In conversation on film, movies will come up such as Commando or Nightmare on Elm Street or Rambo III, and I will casually mention that I have not seen these movies, usually to the horror of whomever I'm talking to at the moment. Their constant refrain: "How can you not have seen these movies?"

The simple answer is that they were rated R before 1996. And my mother kept a firm clamp on my media consumption before I was about 18. I vividly remember purchasing with birthday money Weird Al Yankovic's "Fat" on a Friday and listening to is straight through that weekend. Monday came and by the time I had come home from school, the tape had disappeared from the stereo, box and all. I looked for it everywhere, but never did find it. It was like the tape had never existed at all.

This happened again and again with books, tapes, and CDs throughout my childhood. A t-shirt with a vampire on it. Gone. My copy of Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Disappeared. Interview With a Vampire was left in the bathroom one evening and never seen again.

At the time, I blamed myself. How could I be so sloppy! My thin precious allowance was parceled out judiciously to purchase only the most important of media, such as Marvel's early 90's Cable anthology, and then I go and lose my treasures! I would grind my fists, and go for a ride on my BMX instead of listening to Prince.

And I suspected nothing. Mom wouldn't be throwing out my stuff and not telling me about it. Would she?

My mother's policy on TV and film was just as merciless. The cartoon Ghostbusters was only allowed once a week, because it had ghosts in it. Star Wars was "filled with all those weird people." Dungeons & Dragons was tinged with Satanic influences. Rated R movies were of course totally forbidden, even if they were on TV, and other movies had first to be vetted by a trusted source, like a neighbor or a friend, before they were cleared for consumption. (This is the only reason I was able to see Ghostbusters one New Years' Eve in a basement. And it blew my mind.)     

She also only ever let me buy one toy gun a year. I would save up my gun rations for two years to go to Disneyworld and buy a brace of pistols at Pirates of the Caribbean.

And it was the gun-buying which was the key. Despite being 35 years-old, I still have a thing for buying toy guns. I have three in my closet right now. And when I mentioned this curious habit to my mother, her response was, "Well I tried so hard, not letting you buy 'em, but I guess it's the way you are."

But am I Mom?

To what extent did forbidding the purchase of guns make them more desirable?

And in thinking back on it, when asked why she would forbid the watching of movies or reading of books, she would say things like, "You're not old enough," or "Those books aren't good for you."

There are books that aren't good for me?

Is it any wonder that I have turned out to be a voracious reader and consumer of all books, but with an especial eye to the outre and the elliptonic? The weird and the wondrous?

If the books aren't good for me, the books must have a power. There must be some secret knowledge within them that changes me. And in trying to keep me from the strange, all my mother did was make it more enticing. I remember telling friends about the thrills of listening to Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, and White Zombie in high school, and how the best thing about the music was that it was dangerous. The looked at me like I had two mouths and said, "Whaddaya mean, dangerous?" And I explained that it felt like the kind of music that might in someway expose you to Satan, and they said they never got any of that from NIN.

And after reflection, I realized they were right. It was a strange thought. Why would music expose me to Satan? And that's when I realized that it was my mother's thinking living in my head.

To what extent did my mother fly my freak flag for me?

One On Writing

Having finished a novel in early June that represents two years’ labor, I have decided to work on nothing but short pieces for the foreseeable future. It has proved much more difficult than expected in every way.

Firstly, I am torn between whether or not I have too many ideas to get down on paper or not enough. One day, I feel like I have a thousand ideas, well okay, more realistically, I have two ideas for novels. And I curse myself for them. What kind of a maniac would go straight from working on one novel to working on another? I want to give my subconscious a rest. I should give my subconscious a rest, right?

Secondly, when I write, it’s just not the same as it used to be. Writing, at its best, feels like flow. Words pour from mind to hands to computer. Lately, writing has felt like the dry heaves. I scrape and force to get ideas on to the computer. What I get I am actually rather pleased with, but writing has gone from a task I run to do, and willingly do as long as I can, to a miserable hour of forcing out a thousand words before hiding in the bathroom to read Brandon Sanderson novels.

All this is exasperated by the futility of novel-writing. I am confident in my novel. It is the best thing I’ve ever written. I also am confident in my own abilities to self-assess. This is the first novel I’ve ever written which deserves to be published. It is my 5^th novel, or 7^th depending on how you count. I’ve been able to grok the level of dog-crap in my work. The dog-crap has been steadily decreasing. This last novel was two years spent making sure I did not make any of the mistakes I made in my other novels in this one. Furthermore, it was my sell-out novel. And in that last regard, it was certainly a failure.

While in many ways, there has never been a better time to be a writer than now, (Mao said “There is chaos under heaven; conditions are excellent.”) it is also possible that there has never been a worse time to be an unknown writer than now.

Stranger yet, I am more successful as a writer now than I ever have been before. I have a magazine that regularly publishes me. I’ve made some money. What I’ve written has been well-reviewed. It is a magazine I grew up reading, and if you told me that my first work in print would have been in its pages I would have shot myself over the moon with joy.

And yet it is harder than ever to heave my ideas on to the page. It grates, it grinds, but rarely flows.

Nietzsche talked about those who felt contempt, and how he loved them because their hate for the way things were would drive them forward to create the Ubermensch.

I look at the things I am writing for the magazine, and constantly find things to hate among them. I tell myself my work must be new. If it is not new, why would anyone bother to read it? I tell myself my work must be unique. If it’s not, why would anyone read it?

And so I pull poke and prod at my own creations, terrified that my current works will not match the modest success of my previous ones.

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I read Charlotte’s Web. I’ve been taking writing truly seriously for the last ten years. What got me through those last ten years was telling myself daily that if I just kept at it, I’d be published before I died. Now I’m published and I am consumed with envy at the success of others. Their money, fame, and interviews with Ira Glass.

In some weird way, it seems as though getting closer to my goal has in some way frustrated me.

Oh, and in a final shot, anybody else out there a regular listener to "I Should Be Writing"? Anybody else notice that since her success, the podcast has nose-dived?

Okay, enough navel gazing. I’m going to stick my finger down my throat and get to work.  

E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, Plot, Story, Genre or How I Learned to Love Plot and Start Writing

In 1927, EM Forster of Passage to India and Howard’s End fame delivered a series of lectures at Trinity College which have since been put into book form as Aspects of the Novel. The lectures break the novel down into its component parts like an anatomist taking apart a corpse. I cannot recommend the book highly enough. Even if one disagrees with Forster about particulars, it is a snapshot into the mind of a talented novelist on the craft.

He lobs bombs left and right as he proceeds through the lecture. He disagrees with Aristotle on the use of action, regrets that a novel must tell a story, describes English language novels as less than world class, and classes Joyce’s Ulysses as a fantasy. (Quick! Reshelve it with the rest of the genre fiction!)

His thoughts on story and plot are most interesting and germane to a writer working in the 21^st century. Plot, so long the red-headed stepchild of writing, has again taken her place on the dais. If a writer wants people to read what they write, it would be wise for them to include plot within it.

Forster’s take on the issue is noteworthy. Clearly, he believes it to be of import as he devotes two of his nine lectures to it, one chapter entitled story and the other plot.

Forster heaps scorn upon the story. Story, which he defines as a narrative of events arranged in time, is old, and has as its only virtue that it leaves the audience wanting to know what happens next. He summons the ghost of Scheherazade from Arabian Nights, who is only able to survive by leaving the king in suspense every morning so he won’t have her executed because he wants to hear what will happen next. Forster paints a picture of cavemen huddled around a fire “fatigued with contending against the mammoth or wooly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next?”

And Forster looks at this and sees the presence of story in the novel as a flaw. He writes of the fact that a novel must tell a story “I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different- melody, or perception of truth, not this low atavistic form.”

All those facts which Forster presents as flaws on the face of story I look upon and see nothing but marks of beauty. Who would not be proud of keeping an audience awake, held in suspense by nothing more than the power of their words? And as for the primitive, primeval ancestry of the story- Well, like vampires, its antiquity is what gives it strength. The novel has been the campfire of the past few centuries ‘round which we have huddled to hear tales which yes, keep us awake and wondering what will happen next, but also give order to the world.

Let us move on to plot, which Forster has a higher opinion of. Plot, Forster says differs from story in causality. The famous example from Aspects of the Novel is that a story is “The king died, and the queen died afterwards,” whereas a plot is “The king died and then the queen died of grief.”

The element of causality in the second example links the first event two the second, and makes whole what could be two random happenstances. Here he does present a vital truth which writers should understand. A plot, unlike a story, is linked by causality. Event A, leads to B, which leads to C, and produces a greater effect than A happened, then B happened than C happened. Voldemort killed Harry’s parents, Harry became an orphan and went to Hogwarts where he foiled Voldemort’s plots and eventually threw down Voldemort himself, which is vastly more interesting than if Harry had never met Voldemort before and then defeated him.

But we must ask ourselves now, are not all the shameful angles present in story not also present in plot? Is the plot not of antediluvian lineage? Does it not usually move forward in time? Does it not leave us in suspense? And if story is shameful for those reasons, why is plot laudable?

And what is the difference between story and plot again? Oh yes, causality. A leads to B, etc.

But if plot is just story with one added component, a crucial component it is worth noting, is Forster making an artificial distinction?

Are what Forster calls plot and story basically the same, but what Forster calls “stories” are bad plots and what Forster calls “plots” are good plots? The answer is of course yes.

Forster because of his genius, makes the lesser argument appear the greater, convincing us all for almost a century that there is a division between these two words.

I see in this distinction, as with so many things which may not entirely make sense in literature, the shadow of elitism. Story is for housewives who purchase novels at the grocery store, and pencil-necked geeks who find in fantasy stories power they didn’t have in high school. Plots are for novels purchased by college-educated intelligentsia at independent bookstores. Midwesterners and southerners write stories. Real people live near oceans and write plots.

This frisson of elitism is present even in Forster’s own work. In his chapter on story, he imagines asking three Englishmen “What does a novel do?” The first, a bus driver, and the second, some sort of businessman, both agree that a novel tells a story and enjoy the fact that it does. And the third man, who Forster admits is himself, says “Yes- Oh dear, yes- The novel tells a story.” It is this regret, this hesitancy to admit that the stories Forster enjoys could be the same as those enjoyed by a bus driver, which hints at the reason behind the division.

I reject it wholeheartedly. There are good plots and bad plots, which are differences of quality, not kind, as Forster puts forth.   

Aristotle and Dr. Horrible: The Utility of His Poetics to a 21st Century Author

          Since its rediscovery during the Italian Renaissance, Aristotle’s Poetics has been an essential text for dramatists and critics.  In it, Aristotle lays out his theory of tragedy and dramatic structure.  He gives us terms still in common usage among any would-be David Mamet scribbling through Playwrighting 101 such as katharsis and mimesis.  He is the first to write about the importance of having a beginning, middle, and end.  However, in the twenty-three hundred years since Aristotle put stylus to papyrus much has changed.  Narrative has evolved and while much of the Poetics still applies, it can not be regarded as any more infallible than a Kitty Kelly biography.  Aristotle’s theories have been ignored and rebelled against.  The result was sometimes brilliant, and sometimes barbaric. For today’s advanced consumers of narrative and the writers who write for them it is worth considering how much of Aristotle still applies today.  Our lens for this examination will be Aristotle’s exhortation that the true poet will depict a hero of good character and Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.

            Dr. Horrible is a musical tragicomedy about Dr. Horrible, a less than perfect mad scientist and applicant to the Evil League of Evil.  Dr. Horrible needs to pull off a big heist to impress the chairman of the ELE, Bad Horse, the Thoroughbred of Sin, but he’s foiled at every turn by his nemesis Captain Hammer.  He’s also crushing hard on Penny, an advocate for the homeless who goes to the same laundromat as Dr. Horrible.  Dr. Horrible sings about how he’s planning on giving Australia to her when he finally conquers the world and Bad Horse’s missives are always sung by a three-part Western chorus.  Despite all the jokes and songs, Dr. Horrible fits into Aristotle’s vision of tragedy and can be turned around to gauge the utility of Aristotle this late in history.    

            Dr. Horrible slides into Aristotle’s theory of tragedy as easily as a bikini model into a swimming pool filled with vaseline.  Aristotle defines tragedy as “a representation of an action which is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude… and through the arousal of pity and fear effecting the katharsis of such emotions.”[1]  On this last point Aristotle goes on to add that because tragedy represents “events which are fearful and pitiful, this can best be achieved when things occur contrary to expectation yet still on account of one another.”[2] 

            By dissecting the plot of Dr. Horrible we can see how its plot conforms to Aristotle’s vision.  Dr. Horrible needs to murder someone to clinch his position in the Evil League of Evil, and decides on Captain Hammer, Horrible’s much despised heroic nemesis.  In addition to foiling Horrible at every turn, Hammer has recently taken up with Horrible’s secret flame, Penny.  At the unveiling of a statue honoring Captain Hammer for his recent homeless advocacy, Dr. Horrible shoots Hammer with his Freeze Ray, paralyzing him and giving Dr. Horrible a chance to terrify the assembled guests in song.  He fails to see his longed-for Penny hiding in the back of the room.  Unfortunately, the Freeze Ray powers down before Horrible can blast Captain Hammer into sashimi with his Death Ray.  Captain Hammer knocks Dr. Horrible to the ground and takes his Death Ray away from him.  Captain Hammer points the Death Ray at Dr. Horrible’s head and pulls the trigger, but the weapon backfires and explodes, leaving Captain Hammer on the ground whinnying in agony and Penny wheezing her last with shards of Horrible’s own Death Ray protruding from her vital organs.  Having defeated his enemy and committed a murder, Dr. Horrible is welcomed into the ELE with open hooves though he finds no joy in his success coming as it does on the slaughter of his beloved.     

Dr. Horrible’s ending occurs contrary to expectation but on account of previous events, exactly as Aristotle would recommend, and katharsis is the result.  Since Dr. Horrible is the protagonist and protagonists more often than not come out on top, the viewer expects that Dr. Horrible will somehow end up with Penny, but probably not defeat Captain Hammer and gain entry to the Evil League of Evil.  The viewer hopes that Horrible will somehow transmogrify into a hero and be worthy of Penny’s love.  Instead the opposite occurs, but not due to randomness. The ending precedes perfectly from what came before it, yet produced a surprising result, as Aristotle said the skillful writer should do.

One crucial piece of character that guarantees a tragic ending is that Dr. Horrible is about as successful at being a mad scientist as BP is at plugging oil wells.  Throughout the story, Dr. Horrible’s inventions are depicted going awry.  His matter transporter can take gold out of Fort Knox, yet when the gold arrives in his lab there’s nothing left of the gold but soupy carbon.  “The atoms shift during transport,” Dr. Horrible explains.  In its first incarnation his Freeze Ray takes a few seconds to warm up, giving Captain Hammer time to throw a car at Horrible’s head.  No one is surprised that his Freeze Ray only paralyzes Captain Hammer long enough for Dr. Horrible to sing a song, or that his Death Ray explodes.  If Dr. Horrible really does have a PhD in Horribleness, he must have got it at night school. 

Dr. Horrible’s incompetence leads the viewer to believe his plan to defeat Captain Hammer will fail, yet the outcome of these events is exactly contrary to expectation, as Aristotle recommends.  Because the poorly constructed Death Ray backfires, Captain Hammer is defeated and innocent bystander Penny is murdered.  We are left to watch Dr. Horrible comfort his beloved as she dies, her last whispered words “Captain Hammer will save us,” echoing in his ears.  This loss leaves the audience feeling the fear and pity that define katharsis and put Dr. Horrible in the camp of tragedy. 

Dr. Horrible arrives at this tragic conclusion despite violating numerous Aristotelean rules on the way.  One of the most important rules Aristotle lays down for tragedy is that “wicked men should not be shown passing from affliction to prosperity, for this is the most untragic of all possible cases and is entirely defective (it is neither moving nor pitiful nor fearful.)”[3]  Dr. Horrible does exactly what Aristotle says a writer should not do but still succeeds as a tragedy.  Aristotle goes on to state that the most important aim of the tragedian in composing characters is “that the characters be good.”[4]  And it is worth considering Mr. Aristotle’s point here. 

Anne Frank was a good girl murdered.  The world did not treat with her in justice, and we are all moved to pity.  We reflect on how much less entitled to life we are than Anne Frank, and feel fear knowing that it is only by happy accident that we are alive and she is dead.  I myself am a 35 year-old sinner willing to confess myself less deserving of my years than Anne Frank, yet I have them and she does not.  This Anne Frank effect heightens katharsis, and is the reason that Aristotle recommends that tragic characters be good.  Their goodness, like Job’s, reminds us that their fate is not punishment, and that the greatest of evils may befall the best of us.    

Dr. Horrible is funny.  Witty.  The kind of guy you’d like to play ping-pong with at a keg party.  But Dr. Horrible is not good.  He is an evil wanna-be.  He looks up to villains, and despite his charm and humor, Dr. Horrible’s politics can at best be described as fascist.  “The world is so messed up and I just want to rule it,” Dr. Horrible muses in one blog entry.  Later he tells us that his “wish is [our] command.”  All of this grandiose talk is tempered by the occasional talk of “social change” but the audience is never let in on what this means.  Is Dr. Horrible’s vision of social change more Harry Reed or Joe Stalin?  At his best, Dr. Horrible is a vandal.  At his worst, he is a megalomaniacal traitor bent on world domination.  Yet we are not left disgusted or morally outraged by the passage of Dr. Horrible from rooming with a henchman named Moist to being a member in good standing of the Evil League of Evil.  Instead, we feel pity for the loss of his lady love. 

Dr. Horrible succeeds as a tragedy despite the evil of its protagonist.  Why?  Audiences have changed.  For two millennia since Aristotle wrote, artists and writers have been using the Anne Frank effect to heighten katharsis and improve on their works.  Righteous heroes have been “more sinned against than sinning”[5] for so long that we are all sick to death of them.  Hamlet would have been a good king had he but lived.  Reverend Dimmesdale dies after his confession.  The rise of the anti-hero in the 20^th century is like downing a shot of white lightning after centuries of having no beverage more thrilling than hot milk.  Audiences are willing to endure the amorality of these new protagonists because of the arresting novelty they offer. 

Another explanation of this shift in attitudes was hinted at by Mr. Aristotle himself.  In addition to good, characters must “be appropriate.  For it is possible to have a woman manly in character, but it is not appropriate for a woman to be so manly or clever.”[6]  Let us leave aside how Aristotle’s draconian gender politics and focus on the artistic content of the statement.  He is telling writers not to tax the suspension of disbelief by creating improbable characters.  Aristotle’s example is that women shouldn’t be too smart or too strong, because who could believe that? A less troubling example to prove the same point would be a character who is both a baby and a genius. Such a character would be appropriate in a comedy, but in a tragedy it would simply remind the audience that what they are seeing is false. Disbelief would be taxed to the shatter point.   

The modern audience and Aristotle differ in opinion on the content of the human heart, specifically concerning the possibility of goodness.  We have all “supped full with horrors” for the past hundred years.  In school we are taught the litany of atrocities that fill the last century.  Knowing that men will kill children at the behest of a superior, knowing that serial killers endeavor to feel closer to their fellows by murdering and eating them, knowing that our government would let cancer go untreated in the name of science, we can no longer believe in the perfect goodness of a character.  A lily-white hero seems so improbable as to be inappropriate for a modern audience. 

The popularity of Batman and sunset of Superman are here called to mind.  The past twenty years have given us six Batman films grossing a total of over $2.5 billion over the last twenty years. Batman is dark, gritty, human and inhabits a world of impossible choices with imperfect results. People see in Gotham City a reflection of our own world.  The first Superman film of the 21^st century failed to even to spawn a sequel. The second, Man of Steel was successful, but to give the sequel to that film extra juice, rumors are flying that Batman will be included.  Superman seems impossibly good, so good that with every virtuous act he reminds the audience of his own artificiality.  Where was Superman on 9/11? 

Troglodyte Batman is a hero we are all comfortable with.  Deeply flawed, permanently damaged, feeling every blow that a villain lands on him, and despite all his imperfections and the harshness of the world, the Caped Crusader eeks out some small benefits for society.  But Batman cannot be in two places at once, and because of that people die.  Aristotle recommends a writer write a tragic hero who is as inappropriate today as Superman.  A tragic hero like Dr. Horrible is one we are all willing to believe in.  Perhaps we get the heroes we deserve. 

Aristotle’s Poetics was written hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.  The gulf of time between its creation and application by a writer this late in history cannot be ignored.  People have changed.  Slavery, the basis of the ancient Athenian economy, has all but disappeared from the world.  Women, considered unworthy by the ancient Greeks of any role in society, are now rulers of nations.  As modern democracies ignore these specifics of the Greek political model, so should the artist carefully consider the exhortations of Aristotle.  Yes, a story should have a beginning, middle, and end, but audiences have also seen stories with a three act structure so often the beats of the arc have become predictable.  Aristotle’s theory is an excellent framework, but the judicious writer will be cautious in the slavish application of Aristotle because audiences have different expectations than their ancient Greek counterparts did. Aristotle could not have imagined the world as it is, so the artist must be thoughtful in applying his guidelines.    

---

[1] Pg. 37

[2] Pg. 42

[3] Pg. 44

[4] Pg. 47

[5] King Lear III.2

[6] pg. 47

GenCon Day 1.1

GenCon is a highlight of the year because I am by nature lonely. There is not much better for the soul than seeing thousands of my unwashed but eager geek brethren occupying the center of a major American city. It is a reminder that none of us is alone, and especially that geeks, who are eternally convinced of their own powerlessness, at least have power in their numbers.

And my God! Their numbers.

I have never in my life seen a GenCon like this. I watched the opening of the Great Hall from a second floor balcony. When the crowd surged for the doors it was like watching the tide roll in.

Inside, my homies and I first made for the Fantasy Flight booth. We literally spent five minutes trying to get to the end of the line to get to the booth, then decided and it was so long that it wasn't worth waiting in. We decamped to the Paizo booth where we were again balked by a line so long that I-94 would be jealous of its length.

So then we decided to check out the D&D Next product on sale as a GenCon exclusive. No line for that though.

Makes me think that the decline of D&D has been good for the community, and opened up opportunities for creative designers. Also, a quick poll of nerds at the con found that while people tend to be excited about projects that FFG and Paizo are undertaking, they feel dread and worry when they hear the words "D&D Next."

One of my goals for the con is to explore some indie rpgs. I spend a lot of time designing games for my classroom, so I am interest in novel mechanics that I can steal.
I hit a seminar on DungeonWorld which piqued my interest and led me to pick it up later in the day. I also attending a roundtable on indie rpgs which convinced me to pick up Our Last Best Hope which is about a group of people who have to save the world from an impending threat.

More to tell, specifically about designers behaving badly, but I must be off to game!

Blogging the Con! Blogging the Con!

Gen Con! Whew whew!

Excited to be here.

The moment I started to get that Christmas morning feeling in the pit of my stomach was Wednesday at 5:30. I stopped at a rest area about 90 miles north of Indianapolis and when I went to the bathroom, there was a guy with a stormtrooper helmet on standing between two guys wearing D&D t-shirts. And I shouted "GEN-CON!" And they responded "GEN-CON! What WHAT!"

And now I am off to Con.

Gandalf Needs YOU! Join the War on Literary Fiction!

My sisters and brothers, like you I have been watching with interest the flame war in print and blog over genre fiction and literary fiction for the past years. It has erupted over questions such as “Is Stephen King a literary author?” and “Can genre fiction be considered literature?”

The literati have told us no, genre fiction can no more be literature than a pig could write Hamlet. A representative statement comes from Arthur Krystal of The New Yorker:

“Make no mistake: good commercial fiction is inferior to good literary fiction in the same way that Santa Claus is inferior to Wotan. One brings us fun or frightening gifts, the other requires—and repays—observance.”  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/its-genre-fiction-not-that-theres-anything-wrong-with-it.html

And so brothers and sisters, we are banished to our ghettos and garrets to read shameful, dog-eared novels of dubious provenance in which robots save the day, detectives find the killer, the girl kisses the guy, and the dragon’s head falls under the warrior’s blade. And as we turn page after furtive page, each sentence compounds a guilt which not even confession can absolve us of, that of being base and ignorant and low and profoundly uncool.

Yet our champions have gone forth. The position of the genre-ista has been most succinctly defended by Ursula K. LeGuin who wrote that literature is “The extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.”

Her argument is obvious and common sense, though I would add one simple appendix. All novels are literature, but there are indeed two kinds of novels, good ones and bad ones, and they can be found in what its partisans would call “literary fiction”, but which I shall henceforth call “high fiction.”

And for the past year I have waited for LeGuin’s argument to prevail, thinking in my simplicity that what she said was right and true, and therefore it would outlast all the rockets and bombasts of the literati.

I was wrong. The war has gone on.

The literati sit in the cafeteria telling us we can’t read those books at their table. They stand in the door of the school like George Wallace, telling us that the walls between high fiction and genre fiction will last now and forever. We must read our books in another place.

And the ultimate reason for their disapprobation is that our books just aren’t as good as theirs.

Brothers and sisters, for too long we have brooked their disrespect. For too long we have sweated in shame under the haze of their judgment. For too long we have tolerated their bullying.

And now I cry to you “No more!”

If the literati fail to see the absurdity of their own argument, we shall steal it from them that they might see their own absurdity. We shall become a mirror which allows them to face an ugly truth within themselves. They are segregationists. The literati make into two that which should be one, an act which all sages in all times have decried as leading to chaos and disorder. For too long they have said, “Our books are better than your books,” and for too long our reply has been “All books are equal!”

No more will our line be that of the accomidationists, those who simply wish to see genre seated at the table of literature beside high fiction. No no!

Instead brothers and sisters, our line shall now be: “Genre fiction is superior to literary fiction!”

And in truth we are wrong as they are wrong. But in being wrong, we will demonstrate their own wrongness to them.

And the literati will first laugh at us, saying they believed us fools before for enjoying Dennis Lehane, and we have now proved it. But as all who went before them who wished to make into two what was in fact one, from the antebellum slave power to the lawmakers of Jim Crow, they have not a logical leg to stand on. And we will demonstrate it with the brashness and boldness of our evidence.

Genre fiction is democratic. We write for the people, not the ivory tower. They would raise up works so erudite and impenetrable and plotless that only graduate students and professors have the time or desire to read them. People, I would add, with advantages of race and class which we in the Genre Army could only fantasize about being born with. The works they choose are walls thrown up by the establishment to keep the common man out of their classrooms, lectures, and away from them. Heavens know, a person without a master’s degree may smell a little of sweat, and that would be most unpleasant.

Genre fiction is vigorous. It is the way of the future. It is why partisans of high fiction are put in the awkward position of defending a type of literature so absent ideas that its most talented practitioners have turned to writing genre fiction! Micheal Chabon, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, and the list goes on. These authors demonstrate that talents are attracted to the healthy climate of genre, and the freedom it allows.

Freedom! Genre writers are free in ways literary writers are not. Cannot circumscribes the space of the writer of high fiction. A writer of high fiction cannot write sincerely of God or religion, cannot write a story that takes place anywhere but Earth, cannot write of exceptional men and women, cannot write a story set in the future or in the past, cannot write a story with a happy ending, and should wrap their shoulders in sackcloth for penance if they write a story with a page-turning plot. Like monks and their vows, the road of the writer of high fiction is one of abstinence and denial, for only in self-abnegation can our literary sins be forgiven. The writer and reader of high fiction is suspicious of any book, which may be- Joyce forbid! enjoyable.  

Imagination, which is finite but unbounded, is the only limit of the genre writer. And the matters which high fiction is so fond of discussing can be folded into genre stories. Because genre fiction is capable of containing the stories of high fiction, but high fiction cannot abide to tell genre stories, genre fiction is clearly superior to high fiction. In the same way that the shark is higher on the food than the seal it consumes, genre fiction shall rend to pieces and feed on the corpse of high fiction before moving on to find some fiercer, more worthy, prey.

And the literati will listen to all you say, and appear unruffled as a turkey in the yard the day after Thanksgiving. But in the bitter watches of the night, when they stare up at the ceiling unable to sleep and wonder if Don DeLillo is built for eternity, they will fear that we are right. And their fear will drive them to agree with the position that is the truth: That there is but one literature.  

As we genre-istas are the bearers of a greater teaching, I submit that we must no longer bear the bullying of the literati with patience. I take their segregationary and exclusionary policies and black-shirt tactics as a crime against culture.

Brothers and sisters, no more moving to the back of the bus!

No more hiding at the corner table!

Remember, genre fiction is superior to their “literature”! We must fight until the halls of academia ring with Elvish!   

Burn your unread copy of Infinite Jest!

Use Jonathon Franzen for toilet paper!

Genre fiction is better than literary fiction!

Why Won't You Take My Money?

The internet is a disruptive technology, and no one has yet fully grasped what its implications will be.

It gutted the recording industry, and its corpse has lain on the roadside, a warning and prophecy to others. And the ravenous eyes of the internet lolled next lolled at publishing.

Like the recording industry, recent technologies have made the sharing of digital books insanely easy, and the line between “sharing” and stealing/piracy is a thin one.

Digital sharing technologies sliced open the neck of the recording industry. CD sales went from 750 million units in the early 90s to just over 200 million this past year.

And while it is easy to see that the recording industries attempts to stop this bleed out (lawsuits, digital rights management technology, etc.) failed utterly, still publishers are trying these same tactics against the monster internet, hoping for a different result.

Technology always wins in the end. 

Unless the publishing industry finds a different model, its corpse will litter the road beside that of the recording industry.

The model of the Catholic Church comes to mind here. The Catholic Church had in the middle ages proven itself quite adept at crushing local heresies when they popped up in Europe. Send in some knights, kill everyone, let God sort them out, etc. And when the heresy of Lutheranism sprang up, they trotted out the same old playbook, but this time if failed. And why? Because of the disruptive technology of the printing press. Killing heretics is only effective when they are isolated geographically and small in number. The printing press allowed protestant ideas to spread so widely and quickly that the Catholic Church could not keep up, and its religious monopoly on power in Europe was forever shattered.

Now publishing industry, if the Catholic Church could not rollback the changes of the printing press by burning people at the stake, what do you think you can do against the internet by pretending it does not exist? Technology always wins in the end.

Which brings me, really, to my point. Yesterday I wanted to buy a PDF of a classic Dungeons and Dragons module from the 80s, Ravenloft. I went to Amazon and DriveThruRPG, and while there are numerous PDFs of books from that time period available for purchase, this one was not. Likely because the module was so popular that it was expanded in the early aughts into a longer, more expensive book which is available for PDF sale. I already own said book in print, and wanted the original to compare the two.

I suspect that the cheaper, earlier, and possibly better module was unavailable for sale, lest its purchases cannibalize those of its more recent and expensive counterpart.

The company that runs Dungeons and Dragons, Wizards of the Coast, took all PDFs off the market six years ago in response to piracy. Just year, they began selling PDFs again, but Ravenloft is not among them.

But when I go to Google and type in Ravenloft PDF, the second item that pops up is of course an illegal and free download of the book. So much for combatting piracy.

Now I am not interested in stealing the book. The company deserves money for their product. Furthermore, I want to give the company my money in return for their product but they won’t sell it to me!

The situation is absurd, and like a beer-lover during Prohibition, I am forced into the quandary of abstaining or going outside the law. 

A Card From a Student

One of the perks of being a teacher is end-of-year gifts. It doesn't happen at every school, but it happens at mine, and it gets real. For a small example, I think I have $85 in Barnes & Nobles gift cards waiting to be tapped thanks to my students and their parents.

But as an 8th grade teacher, I also get out-of-this-world goodbye cards from graduates. I got one this year which is absolutely fantastic:

"Dear Mr. Riggs

     I still remember the very first class I had with you and how you showed us a power point on your adventurous past. Honestly, at that time, I really didn't know what to think of you. I didn't know if you would be a really cool teacher or a teacher that just cared about teaching. Throughout the last two years though, I've come to a conclusion: You are an amazingly cool teacher and you absolutely love teaching. I can see that you just get so excited when you teach students. I see it in your face. You like look down and then you gradually flex your nostrils so they become bigger, and trust me I will always remember that look.

     [The student then goes on to talk about how I helped develop them into a 'mature and romantic writer.']

     By the way I think you have really good taste in music.

     Thank you,

     No Name Sue"

The Novel and the Future

What is happening to humanity, and what has the novel got to do with it? 

Anyone over the age of thirty has witnessed a technological invasion of their homes. The machines, which first sent spies of refrigerators, radios, televisions, and heaters, followed with legions of Ataris, VCRs, PCs, microwaves, Nintendos, CD players, and cell phones. Even our bodies have fallen to the invaders. And who would complain about high blood pressure medication, insulin, or Viagra? Who would complain about iPads, Playstation, Netflix, or MP3s?  

But still.

This has all been a bit much a bit quickly, and change is only speeding up. What will the world look like in 30 years? What will it look like in 90? As we gaze at our blackening skies, back cautiously away from our coastlines, hide in bolt holes from tornadoes the size of whole towns, and gaze in horror at middle and lower classes growing thinner, paler, hungrier and more impoverished by disruptive technologies and an unresponsive political system, we are right to wonder. We are right to be afraid.

Who knows the path forward? Who has walked this way before? Has anyone? No. Scientists and engineers can predict the paths of stars and the workings of nanobots, but none can say what our technology will do to us, or what we will do with our technology.

And so the task of making sense of what has happened and what is to come falls to writers, that half-mad clan crouching in solitude and darkness to bang away at keyboards like obsessive-compulsives washing their hands until they crack and ooze blood.

And we read what they write because their words order the world. Their books are maps pointing the way we have come, pinpointing where we are, and scouting the road of the future. One of the most powerful tools in the writer’s garage is the novel.  

The novel, like God, has been pronounced dead. Its murderers, we are told, video games, movies, TV, and the internet, run rampant in the halls of culture. Who can bring them to justice?

But the truth is more nuanced. Yes, sales are down. Since the creation of moveable type, there may never have been a harder time to be a writer, or make a living at it, than this historical moment. And while the novel has had to make room for others on the stage of culture, that does not mean the novel has been slain, for the novel has a number of unique features which guarantee not only that it will continue to exist, but that it may be a vital tool for understanding whatever new world is waiting for its line to come on stage.

First, stories, and even modernists and theorists will concede with horror that a novel does tell a story, are powerful. Stories, beyond being enjoyable, add experiences to the life of a reader. This is not just metaphorical or wishful thinking. Researchers have demonstrated that reading does not just stimulate the brain’s language center. It goes beyond to engage other parts of the brain. A passage about movement will stimulate a reader’s motor cortex. A paragraph describing the interaction of Jim and Huck will activate centers of the brain devoted to socialization.

In other words, the brain of a person reading a novel acts as though the reader is experiencing what they read. 

A reader of Elie Wiesel’s Night does not just hear a story and learn about the Holocaust. It is deeper than that. Her brain behaves as though she lived through the horrors of Auschwitz. A reader of To Kill a Mockingbird’s brain behaves as though she was a witness to prejudice and racism.

How do we quantify the benefits to society and civilization bestowed of the novel by making all of us into survivors and witnesses? 

Secondly, a good novel should engage its reader emotionally. We fly through chapters because we care about characters, and want to know what will happen to them. We stay up so late that getting up will be a chore because we care.

Emotion is regulated in the brain by the limbic system. There are more neural fibers going from the limbic system into the brain’s rational centers than vice-versa, which is why appeals to emotion are often more effective than appeals to rationality. The novel makes just these sorts of appeals to a reader.

Furthermore, memories made when emotionally engaged are more persistent. It is why a reader can remember all the reversals and horrors that have befallen the Stark family in A Song of Ice and Fire but would struggle recall similar material from a textbook on the War of the Roses.

So the lives we live when we read a novel can be as memorable, or even more memorable, than the events of our own daily lives.

Third, the engagement generated by a story and the emotional involvement of the reader allow for the length of the novel. Adults with no interest in so much as a short essay on the difficulties of adolescence will ravenously consume The Hunger Games and Harry Potter. And we are right to wonder what fruit The Hunger Games will produce when a generation of 12 year-olds taught to be suspicious of tyrannical, over-powerful governments reach voting age.

These same 12 year-olds would not be interested in reading Rousseau or Locke, but they consume lengthy novels on similar topics with avidity. Novels spread ideas in ways and to people who would not encounter them otherwise, and these same people will consider these ideas at length because they are in the form of a story.       

Fourth, writers are allowed to experiment in ways which creators of other media are not. Movies are expensive, and their failure leads the sacking of their creators. Ditto for video games and television shows. But a writer? If she chases some bee of a thought back to its hive to discover it was a wasp and there is no honey, all she has lost is her time. A writer can spend two years writing a novel, decide it’s all drek, and toss it. Writers can go for walk, kick an idea around, show it to their spouses, hide it in some obscure word file, and if they decide the idea is not up to snuff, no one else ever need know about it. Writers can try out a thousand ideas, and only publicize the three brilliant ones. Writers have the time and the space for failure. 

And failure is important for creative innovation.

The lessons of Pixar come here to mind. Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich said, “Screw-ups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.” Knowing this, Pixar’s movie-making process involves lots and lots and lots of drafts and revision, a process strikingly similar to making a good novel. They are not afraid to take an idea back to the drawing board, schedules and deadlines be damned. For example, Toy Story 2 was initially conceived as a direct-to-video release, but when Disney liked the storyboards, it was made into a feature release. When director John Lasseter saw the existing storyboards, he decided the entire movie had to be reworked. With Disney insistent on its release date, the entire movie had to be re-done in nine months even though most Pixar features take years to produce.

Consider for a moment the cojones required of Lasseter in this decision. Disney already liked the movie they saw in the storyboards! Even though he was dissatisfied, he could have bit his tongue, and made the movie, avoiding a rush or time crunch which might have proved ruinous. Instead, Lasseter risked a massive failure with only himself to blame to create one of the best sequels of all time.

Yes, successful writers do become subject to the kind of review and cookie-cutter critique as film-makers do. It has a pernicious effect on the writer as an artist, and is why the sophomore slump is a literary as well as musical phenomenon. (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets anyone?)  

Despite this, experience has shown that because of the cushion for failure provided by the writing life, novelists can create more innovative and culturally enduring ideas than other media-makers. To demonstrate the point, successful novels will generate plays, musicals, television shows, video games, and movies, yet after all those different, raucous, glowing, humming media formats have been unleashed upon the novel’s plot and characters, the cliché still stands that “The book was better.” A look at the top grossing movies of 2012 is instructive. Of the ten highest grossing films, six of them are based on novels or comic books, which I would argue are serialized novels with a visual component. The ideas and stories birthed in novels are so puissant that they are keeping the American film industry alive.  

Consider that for decades, the novelizations of films have cluttered bookstores and landfills. Pity the poor tree that gave its life to print the novelization of Rollerball. These books rarely become bestsellers. They certainly don’t win prizes. Because everyone understands, universally, that they will suck because they take a 10,000 word story and force it into 100,000 words.

Yet novels can be put into countless different media, and their story, ideas, and characters will translate. Witness the success of The Lord of the Rings movies, and soundtracks, and video games, and table-top role-playing games. The novel possesses a vitality and robustness for translation which other media lack, and which I lay upon their length, and aforementioned tolerance for early and private failures.

A novel must be planned or it will never be finished. It must be cogent and engaging or it will never be read. Unless your name is James Joyce, in which case your novels will be inflicted upon undergraduates by professors insisting like a doctor administering a shot, that it is for their own good.   

The experience of reading a novel is like living a whole other life. This makes novels engaging. Memories created while emotionally engaged are more persistent than other memories, which allows novels to be long without losing the attention of the reader. Because the art of writing has more room for failure than more high-stakes media, novelists can produce vigorous, robust, and innovative ideas. This is demonstrated by their success when translated into other formats, and the failure of stories generated in other formats to succeed as novels.

It has been said that all art is perfectly useless, an assertion which every artist has known to reject on its face but in the darkest watches of the night has secretly feared to be true. Science, research, and experience now shows us that not only is the novel useful, I would argue it is necessary. We need to understand ourselves and our world now more than ever because we have more power over both than at any other time in history. We need ideas for dealing with the challenges that lay before us, and for democracy to have a hope in hell, we must bring an understanding of the world to masses of people. Novels can help us because novels can change us.   

Bibliography

http://www.empireonline.com/features/secret-of-pixars-success/p4

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?

pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct94/vol52/num02/How-Emotions-Affect-Learning.aspx