Critics

May29

Last Sunday after the TV series SMASH ended its run in a blaze, some cast members were tweeting their thanks to people who like the show. In the midst of thanking fans for their love, enthusiasm, support, and so forth, one cast member thanked us for something unusual:

Our forgiveness.

What was that about? In the first place, no one in front of the camera on SMASH needs to be forgiven for anything. In the second place, it is surprising to see someone acknowledge the divide between fans and critics. The difference between loving something and judging it.

(I tried to find that tweet again this morning and could not, so I can neither identify the actor nor prove that I didn’t imagine it, but I am pretty sure it was real.)

I am glad I am not a critic. I could have been one, probably—I can write well enough. But call me lazy: I’d rather enjoy a thing, or if I don’t enjoy it, walk away from it.

Before a thing is published or released, criticism guides people toward their best work. That is not the kind of criticism I am talking about.

Long ago, I decided that the one and only thing I wanted from critics/reviewers was a reasonable description of what happens, minus spoilers if possible, so that I could make up my mind whether I wanted to see that movie, read that book, go to that event. Critics’ opinions can be entertaining, annoying, or insightful. What they cannot be are yours.

As any fiction writer knows, readers are the ones who complete a story. (An unread story is an unfinished one.) Every reader completes the story in their own way. You can guide this process. You can do things to increase the odds that readers will not regret giving you their time. But in the end you CANNOT control it

The same holds true for movies, TV shows, art, music, and really, any experience at all.

Fans versus critics

Fans want to like you. Critics do not. It is not in their best interests to be positive too often, or they will be out of a job. Mere readers/viewers/listeners, on the other hand, have a stake in being positive. We can be put off, of course, but it takes longer. We come to rocks in the road, hit them, and keep going—if we think the journey is worth taking. That’s forgiveness again.

Critics enjoyed micromanaging SMASH. They didn’t like this and this and this. Fans might wish some things had been done differently (I did), but the good in the show was SO good that the objections were unimportant. Fans enjoyed the ride.

A good critic enlarges your experience of seeing/listening/reading by adding a perspective you might never have thought of. A good fan loves what you do best.

Popular?

May22

I was thinking about popularity—what it is and what it means—in the context of NBC’s fine series SMASH being cancelled because not enough people watched it (apparently). That means it had only a few million loyal viewers. If I had a few million loyal readers, I would be successful beyond my wildest dreams.

The sequel to CEL & ANNA is at the “stringing pearls” stage (that is, close to being ready for editing). Unlike SMASH, my books do not depend on the numbers. I can chose not to cancel the work that matters to me.

A blog I read took the position that everyone should write a book once. Why? Because it is hard work and you will learn a lot about yourself in the process. This advice, obviously, is not about popularity.

Popular is complicated

The definition is simple: when you are popular, more people in a given group (eg, TV viewers, your high school) like you than don’t like you. In commerce, the most popular products make the most money.

But popularity has other facets, too.

Popular is fickle

Every Christmas there is some hot kids’ toy—the one they all have to have. This desire spreads like a thought virus, infecting millions through advertising on the part of the manufacturer, naivetee on the part of the children, and goodwill on the part of the parents. After a while, everyone recovers, and last year’s hot toy is this year’s junk. Something replaces it, and the cycle starts again.

Popular can be wrong

Thinking for yourself is harder than going along with what everybody else is doing, and there will always be pressure/temptation to go along. Sometimes it is fun; if you have ever been a theater full of people cheering for a movie or concert, you know what that high feels like. Good. Very good.

But you have to come down from that high to know whether you experienced a meaningful connection or a group trance. Whether you heard truth or lies. “Popular” does not answer these questions.

Popular things can be junk and unpopular things can be gold. Everybody knows that. You are more likely to find the gold if you think for yourself, though. That’s my experience.

But everybody wants to be popular

When I published my high-tech science fiction novel CEL & ANNA in 2011, it got good reviews. Since there was zero motive to read it based on what everybody else was reading, the readers did truly like it. It connected.

You can’t impress the whole world, even if you are J.K. Rowling writing HARRY POTTER. So chasing popularity, for itself, is an empty exercise. The right thing at the right time in the right place, yes, but how do you figure out what the right thing is, when and where?

You could go mad trying to figure that one out. Even experts can’t do it.

So lead with your best work. People who try always to please are basically followers.

***

What things do you like best in life? How many are popular?

How to be productive

May14

As every writer knows, there is a ton of bad writing advice out there. Ten things you should NEVER do. Ten things you should ALWAYS do. Writers, particularly unpublished ones, are susceptible to self-doubt, and therefore are vulnerable to the kind of “help” based on telling them they are idiots.

Relying on the advice of someone who thinks you are an idiot (but who can remedy your stupidity if you give them enough money) is about as surefire a recipe for failure as I can imagine.

There used to be vanity presses. Now there are businesses to assist people who want to self-publish. Never mind that everything you need to know about self-publishing is available for free or at low cost on the Internet.

Follow This Advice (for Free)

Know where you are going

Before you start work, sketch out your goals for the scene you are writing. Jot them on the back of envelope or an old bill if you want, but write them down. The three or four minutes you spend writing them down will be repaid many times over.

This is especially good advice if you, like me, are the sort of person who writes to figure out what you are thinking. The work goes much better if you have some idea what you are thinking before you start writing. Trust me.

Once you know where you are going, just write.

Kate Laity blogged about this at the Knife and Quill. Her message is short and to the point:

Shut up and write.

Once you start the journey, finish it. Do not second guess (not yet). Keep going. Practice is how you improve. Nothing else.

Stay focused

People have different ways of doing this. Some lock their computers off from the Internet; I’ve found this impractical.

Try Tomato Timer. This free program tracks work and break time according to the Pomodoro Technique, a proven time management strategy. You can read more about at Making Time Productive.

The strategy is simple:

1. Work on a task for 25 minutes.

2. Take a 5-minute break.

3. Work for another 25 minutes.

4. After 3 or 4 work sessions, take a longer break (15-30 minutes).

It Is About the Journey

This advice, none of which is original to me, has advantages. No grandiose goals, no self-punishment, no money spent. And real progress.

Christa Polkinhorn on families, relationships, and her new novel EMILIA

Apr8

Christa Polkinhorn has just published the third book in her Family Portrait series: EMILIA. The other two are LOVE OF A STONEMASON and AN UNCOMMON FAMILY. These novels—set in Switzerland, Italy, Peru, and France—trace the fortunes of artist Karla Bocelli as she grows up, finds her vocation, marries, and has children.

EMILIA begins with Karla discovering she is pregnant again at age forty-five. The birth of the little girl, Emilia, changes everything.

I asked Christa “Why do you write about families?” This is her answer:

***

Why families?

I think the seeds of the topics we chose are in our own personal life, no matter how fictional the final story is going to be. How do we choose our subjects, or how do they choose us?

I have always enjoyed reading stories about family and relationships, love relationships, relationships between parents and children, or between friends. When I started to write, this topic kept coming up again and again. I often tried to write in a different genre but never got very far. Perhaps part of this has to do with my own history when it comes to family and relationships.

I was born late into my parents’ life—just like Emilia in the novel with the same title, although the circumstances in my family were very different from the family in the novel. My only sister was eighteen years older. She married and had children when I was still a child myself. Since my sister and my brother-in-law lived right next door, I lived both at their house as well as with my parents. I was an only child with my parents and had “siblings” at my sister’s. So I grew up in a slightly “uncommon family” (which also became the title of one of my books, although here again the family in the novel was nothing like my own family).

In the end, it was growing up in my parents’ house as an only child rather than in a larger family like my sister’s that made a more permanent mark on my character. I became independent, adventurous, and somewhat of a hermit. I moved across continents as a young woman and lived far away from my childhood family. I got married, got divorced, and didn’t have any children. This dichotomy of being my own person yet yearning for and appreciating “family”—the joys, the disappointments, the turmoil, the peaceful times—followed me all through life.

It was at a time of a crisis in my own family in Switzerland that got me started on the first novel I wrote, LOVE OF A STONEMASON, which eventually became the second book in the Family Portrait series. My mother died at the ripe old age of 102, and she was the last person in my immediate family to go, my sister and father having passed earlier. As many of us know, the death of the last member of one’s childhood family is a crucial, painful, and unsettling event. It makes us aware that we are the last surviving member and that we are most likely going to be next.

Another important event was a discussion with one of my nieces in Switzerland. She expressed a fairly negative view of relationships between couples, telling me that so many of her friends were separated and divorced. I couldn’t deny the fact that a lot of couples broke up and relationships were some of our biggest challenges. My own experience with marriage and relationships should be testimony enough for me to agree with her. But because I am an optimist by nature, this whole negative attitude just didn’t sit right with me. Wasn’t “relationships don’t work” just an excuse for our inability (or selfishness or whatever else) to make them work?

I thought about this over the following few days. I started thinking about couples and relationships in my own family and among my friends and I suddenly realized that for every broken one, there were quite a few that survived. My parents certainly didn’t have a marriage made in heaven, but they stuck with each other until “death does us part.” My sister and brother-in-law and many of my married friends stayed married and weathered all kinds of storms. So it was possible.

One of the reviewers of LOVE OF A STONEMASON wrote the following quotation she had found somewhere while trying to think of what to write about my novel: “I don’t pretend to know what love is for everyone, but I can tell you what it is for me; love is knowing all about someone, and still wanting to be with them more than any other person, love is trusting them enough to tell them everything about yourself, including the things you might be ashamed of, love is feeling comfortable and safe with someone, but still getting weak knees when they walk into a room and smile at you.” (Review by Misty Baker, Amazon.com)

I couldn’t have said it any better. I guess my novels are a way of exploring both the challenges and joys of relationships. Being close to someone can be dangerous; it makes us vulnerable, it scares the heck out of us, but without it, we live an impoverished existence, no matter how “rich” we are.

Links for Christa Polkinhorn

Website:
http://www.christa-polkinhorn.com

Blog:
http://christa-polkinhorn.blogspot.com/

Author Page on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/Author.ChristaPolkinhorn

Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/christa.polkinhorn

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/cpolkinhorn

Goodreads page:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4202173.Christa_Polkinhorn

“We want a beautiful solution”

Mar27

The 18th century automaton called The Turk could play chess with humans and win. It once played Benjamin Franklin and presumably beat him. It attracted acclaim for this chess-playing ability.

Except the cabinet that supposedly held the Turk’s clockwork machinery held a human chess player willing to work anonymously and in cramped conditions. In short, the Turk was a hoax. But this hoax is interesting for what it says about our willingness to believe.

In this essay for BBC News Magazine, writer Adam Gopnik considers the Turk. He observes that people want choose beautiful and mysterious solutions over cynical ones. Then, Gopnik goes into a meditation on talent:

So the inventor’s real genius was not to build a chess-playing machine. It was to be the first to notice that, in the modern world, there is more mastery available than you might think; that exceptional talent is usually available, and will often work cheap.

Good stuff, all of it.

A Point of View: Chess and 18th Century artificial intelligence.

The Next Big Thing

Mar12

Another indie author, Christa Polkinhorn, invited me to participate in a round-robin blog tour in which authors of various stripes would describe their next project. (See links for Susan Eisenberg and Christa at the end.) My new novel is a sequel to CEL & ANNA: A 22nd CENTURY LOVE STORY.

The sequel is due out this summer. This Q&A is the first look at it:

What is the working title of your next book?

Its working title is WARNING: SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING. The title came from my niece Brynn’s linear algebra notebook. She is studying physics at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Where did the idea come from?

From the book that preceded it: CEL & ANNA: A 22nd CENTURY LOVE STORY. At the end of CEL, a cataclysmic event occurs. The sequel deals with what happens next.

What genre does your novel fall into?

It is science fiction, with the caveat that there is no actual science in it.

What actors would you choose to play the major roles?

The book has two settings: the Reunited States (Earthworld) and the internet (Networld). In Networld, actors could only voice the characters, and I don’t know who I would pick. In the Earthworld scenes, I would cast as many actors as possible from the series SMASH. I love that show.

What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Networld attacks Earthworld.

How long did it take to draft the manuscript?

A little more than 2 years, though there was down time in that 2 years.

Will it be self-published like your first novel or will you be represented by an agent?

Self-published. I have wised up considerably about that process.

What other books are similar to WARNING?

My book is centered around the rise of machine civilization. This is a common theme now; check out Science Fiction – High Tech at Amazon.

What other elements might pique the reader’s interest?

Here are some chapter titles:

Extreme Reality Warning

The Government Is Down

The Strange Case of Rampal-E

Magic, As It Electrifies

In a World White as Dawn

Shadow and the Stovepipes

Here are the first 98 words:

Time as humans perceived it had no meaning to Cel, either before he made the jump to Networld or after. A year was long as a lifetime; a millisecond was a nice bite-sized bit of time. Cel could move around comfortably in a millisecond. When he ran at top speed, he went far faster than that.

The first thing that surprised him about Networld was that it had become a kind of electronic primordial soup, from which life arose in abundance. The second thing that surprised him was how unintelligent and disposable most of that life was.

Visit Susan Eisenberg’s blog at Unsynchronized Passions to learn more about her next novel, LUCKY FOR YOU.

Visit Christa Polkinhorn’s blog at Christa Polkinhorn Bookworm Press to learn more about her new novel, EMILIA.

Visit Gloria Bowman’s blog at Gloria Bowman Stories to learn more about her new collection of short stories, MEN WITH LONG HAIR.

Check out hashtag #BlogNextBigThing on Twitter to find more author blogs about works in progress.

We are all typists

Mar7

The only useful thing I learned in high school was how to touch-type. It a good thing to know, even with the awkwardness of the QWERTY keyboard. (Its purpose was not to slow typists down, by the way. It was to prevent early typewriters from jamming.)

Texting requires different skills though. For some reason, the hardest one for me has been getting initial caps where I want them with the iPad. Something about the timing of the touch for “Cap” — I haven’t got it down.

The age of written (versus spoken) communication has taken us back to another time. We now know what it was like to write a letter and wait for a response. Someone posts a Facebook status update and checks back in several times a day, hoping for comments and likes in the same way that a letter writer opens the mailbox every day, looking for an answer.

As an ex-English major, I greet the rise of written communication with pleasure. I am in my strength with it.

But the rise of written communication also means the rise of the typo. Dealing with typos is now part of everyone’s life.

Typos come easily in a world of keyboards. That is why we have spell-checkers, shortcuts, and auto-correct. The purpose is not just to save keystrokes. It is to ease the typo burden. We first-worlders spend a lot of time tapping out messages on little keyboards unsuited to human hands. But computers are inflexible, and we are adaptable, so we do what we always do: adapt.

Imagine how much time goes into fixing typos, apologizing for typos, and being embarrassed by typos. The productivity drain, on a worldwide level, must be staggering.

Like death and taxes, typos are certainties. In the 200,000 or so years that modern humans have walked the earth, we have never before had to deal with typos as a way of life. But here they are and here we are, and we fix, fix, fix them.

The power of story

Jan2

Last week I found an old college notebook and on one of the pages was this quotation from Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea:

A man is always a teller of tales. He lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

Stories are nets we throw over reality to shape and tame it. Some stories have repeatable results: we call those stories “science.” Others make us see higher, deeper, and better than we could have seen on our own; we call those “art.” Others explain life, the universe, and everything else; we call those “religion.” Some stories give us respite and escape; those are entertainment. There are as many stories as there are people to tell them.

There was a scene in the movie Argo where some airport security thugs were enthralled for a few minutes by a man who used storyboards to tell them a tale that they wanted to hear. This scene surely was false to the reality of the escape, but it is true to the power of stories. They work that way.

Hardwired

I believe we are hardwired for story. Think of it. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a story. So is the 23rd Psalm. Every ad tells a story, the purpose of which is to get you to buy what the ad is selling. The adage “change your thoughts, change your life” is another way to say “learn to tell yourself new stories.”

Stories and violence

Do violent stories cause violent behavior? Good lord, no. Imagine how we would live if they did, with nine guns for every ten US citizens and supersized portions of violence and cruelty dished up every day in entertainment and the news. We would have to abandon public life entirely.

Never mind schools—people would not gather in public anywhere. No libraries or town meetings, no malls, no businesses, no bars or restaurants, no grocery stores. No movies, no shows. What provisions we needed we would order online, and these would be delivered by people wearing body armor, with an armed guard always present (remember: they are afraid of you, too). We would work at home. We would put on armor like we put on coats, and carry weapons always when we went out. If we went out.

A few businesses might survive. They would have TSA-like security at the door, and patrons could shop or eat or be entertained in the shadow of a banner saying “This is what makes us free.” Think of a combination of a police state and a lunatic asylum.

No, violent stories don’t cause violent behavior. A steady diet of stories that glorify and sanitize destruction (by “sanitize” I mean that it is consequence free; the violence goes over a cliff into the ether) would never turn me into someone who murders innocent people. I’d kill myself first, not last. But suppose you are the kind of person for whom those stories do take. Suppose there is a cancer inside—never mind where it came from—that grows because it is fed these stories. Cancer cells need food, the same as anything else alive. They can be starved, too.

It’s a lock and key relationship, the one between who you are and the stories that shape you. Some take. Others do not. Two people see the same movie and have opposite reactions. What is thrilling for one is boring for another and vice versa. This is not news.

I think mass murderers almost always commit suicide afterward because they know that reality is coming fast. And they won’t like the story it has to tell.

Life stories

Do you think stories have no effect on you? Think again. When you watch television, what shows do you choose? What about movies? Books? Games? And don’t stop with fiction. Has a news story ever gotten to you? Why? What about the stories told by relatives, coworkers, bosses, neighbors, friends, and enemies?

When someone says “that’s the way I roll,” what are they talking about? We live and die by stories.

Little, Big

Dec13

I know people who get tens of thousands of hits a month on their blogs, but I am not one of them. Barring some freakish celebrity, this will not happen. Should I stop blogging, knowing this?

Sometimes it is claimed that numbers below a certain benchmark are equivalent to “nothing” or “nobody.” (This benchmark is determined arrogantly by those who have a stake in believing it.) But in blogs, as in so much else in life, small can be beautiful. The people I reach and who reach me through Writer’s Rest are—believe me—a very, very, VERY far cry from nobody. I learn from them and they from me. The campfire that is my blog has attracted some choice readers.

This is not nothing. It is not even small. Considering that every act reverberates forward, we don’t know (and often would not believe) the scope of our influence.

This came clear when I was thinking about, of all things, sewing. A woman from another time who sewed beautiful things for her family and friends would not be on board with the suggestion that she was sewing for “nobody.” She would not consider her numbers to be inadequate. Nor would they reflect on the quality of her work. The recipients of her gifts got to feel lucky. Especially lucky.

Everyone loves to discover something the greater world has not tuned in on yet. A little restaurant. A great store. An inn that flies under the radar. This is the world I live in, and it is a good place.

***

What small things make big differences in your life?

Genius

Dec10

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830. In honor of her birthday, here is a post from 2009.

“I’m nobody! Who are you?”

Emily Dickinson wrote that line, but she didn’t mean it. She knew she was somebody. If you have genius-sized talent, you might have an uneasy relationship with it. But you could hardly fail to notice it was there.

Both sides of her family had produced poets before, but nobody like her.

This is how she described herself physically:

“[I] am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Burr–and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves.”

She rejected editorial meddling, refused to publish during her lifetime, and consigned most of her 1775 poems to a drawer. Recipients saved about 1100 of her letters with no idea of her future fame or even, in some cases, that she wrote poetry at all. When you browse the letters, you know why no one wanted to throw them away. They are like the poems—sometimes better.

I ask God on my knee to send you much prosperity, few winter days, and long suns.”

This is what she wrote to a friend on the death of the friend’s newborn child:

Don’t cry, dear Mary. Let us do that for you, because you are too tired now. We don’t know how dark it is, but if you are at sea, perhaps when we say we are there, you won’t be so afraid.

The waves are very big, but every one that covers you, covers us, too.

Dear Mary, you can’t see us, but we are close at your side. May we comfort you?

Then there are the Master letters, love letters to an unknown recipient that she may never have sent. Those are practically incandescent.

The “doors of perception” were jammed wide open for Dickinson. The way people feel during life’s most intense moments—such as births and deaths—was the way she felt almost all the time. That is my guess, anyway.

I believe she was telling the truth when she wrote, “I feel ecstasy in living.The mere sense of living is joy enough.” And: “Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous.”

Emily Dickinson’s desk