Sotto Voce.

"Qui plume a, guerre a." — Voltaire

The Fraud Squad

A small group of fiction writer friends and I have started to get together once a month at a local Irish pub to talk shop. The idea behind the group was the desire to discuss craft — the standards like character, plot, and voice, but also the second-ring things like habits, style, and software. And our insecurity, apparently. One of the constants for any working fiction writer is this nagging fear of being discovered as a fraud. Even Neil Gaiman, so I am told, keeps nervously waiting for the day that some guy with a clipboard shows up on his doorstep to tell him that the gig is up.

What is this peculiar feature of fiction writers? And it is peculiar to fiction; no professional nonfiction writer colleague of mine has ever reported jolting awake in the middle of the night with the fear that the readers of Sheet Steel Industry News are finally going to discover that he’s been faking it all these years.

Is it tied in with the whole Facebook Insecurity thing that everyone secretly feels? As someone once wisely described FB, it’s like comparing your outtakes against everyone else’s highlight reels. When you’re comparing your fiction against another person’s work, you’re pitting something that you know intimately against something that you’ve only seen in final, polished form. When you look at your own piece, you see all the seams and patches and holes; when you look at the other person’s piece, you see a gleaming, polished surface. Somehow we fool ourselves into thinking that, while we had to open an artery and bleed onto our keyboards to get our story, the other person’s story must have emerged like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, fully formed and wearing shiny armor.

Speaking of the ancient Greeks, I think the solution lies partly in Plato.

Plato is the guy who came up with the concept of perfect forms. There is an ideal form for everything — a Perfect Tree, a Perfect Dog, etc. Everything is striving to represent its ideal version of itself, and everything in our reality can only invoke it, without actually embodying it. And so it is with our fiction. We have an ideal version of the story in our heads, which we can see or hear in a kind of abstract perfection. We can imagine our satisfaction with it. We can imagine the reaction of the reader to it. And we strive to create something that comes close, ever so close, to that ideal version in our head.

But there’s always that one scene that we just couldn’t get right. That one bit of exposition that feels too contrived. That one line of dialogue that sounds flat. Or worse, that one whole chapter that you had to stick in there because none of your beta readers could figure out how you got from X to Y even though it was so clear, so obvious, in your head. So naturally you end up not as happy with it as you had imagined you would be, and of course you expect your readers will be just as disappointed with you for not providing them with the perfection-bound-between-two-covers that they believe they deserve. And when the reviews come in, the good ones are just flattery anyway. And if it gets an award, well, that’s just the result of politics and horse-trading, right?

Here’s what I think. Feeling like a fraud is the coke that results from the combustion of our creative fuel. The harder we try to write that story to match the perfect version in our head, the hotter we’re going to stoke that flame and the more of that ash we’re going to create. We have to recognize it for what it is; evidence that we’re working our tails off. We just have to remember to shovel it out of the oven every now and then so it doesn’t choke off the fire.

Jeez, that sounds like some real motivational poster crap, doesn’t it? I think it’s still a good metaphor anyway, though.

It’s like I’ve said before: if it’s true that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” then let me stand with the perfect and declare the good my enemy as well, and march into battle under its proud banner.

And to be honest, there are stories that I haven’t seriously attempted yet because I am intimidated by their perfect forms. Channel 37 stories are fun because their perfection is much more easily achieved. But I am feeling the pull more and more — the need to don my armor and fight my own personal Agincourt, to back a trainload of coal up against the blast furnace, etc. — to start doing these stories some justice.

You’re right, Bud. There’s going to come a point where I’ll want to do more.


My Favorite Comment Ever

I’m a lifelong Star Trek fan, but I like to poke fun at the franchise because, well, that’s how my sense of humor rolls. (But don’t just take my word for it; the best jokes about Star Trek are to be found in the bar at any science fiction convention, from the fans — and often from the writers and the cast — themselves.)

So for fun back in my college days, I started writing tongue-in-cheek “reviews” of the movies, and I’ve kept it up ever since. When I launched SV, I collected them all on the page Star Trek Films: The Good, The Bad, and The Sublimely Ridiculous.

However — and as hard to believe as it is — there are some people who don’t appreciate fun being poked at the show. And last night, I heard from one of them in the form of a comment on the aforementioned page. The thing is, the comment is such a masterpiece of fannish outrage that I couldn’t simply approve the comment and have it languish at the bottom of the page; no, it deserved to be featured in a post all to itself.

What The Eye of Argon is to science fiction, what Stardust the Super Wizard is to comic book action heroes, what My Pal Foot Foot is to rock-n-roll, this comment is to Sotto Voce. It is that good.

With the identity of the commenter hidden for his own good, here in all its unedited, raw glory — with all typos and grammar preserved in amber — is the comment that arrived in my inbox last night:

From: Humor-Deprived Fanboy [virgin@parents-basement.com]
Subject: [Sotto Voce.] Please moderate: "Star Trek Films: The Good, The Bad, and
The Sublimely Ridiculous"

Get over yourself already!!!!! What IS your problem?! Granted TMP pretty bad 
& extremely sloooooow! Shatner's direction of #5 was all about him even tho 
he tried to shirk it off when he spoke to (Harve Bennett), but the line was barely 
audible. What kills me is all you folks are more concerned w/ whether things match 
technically that you technogeeks don't ACTUALLY WATCH THE STORIES AND JUST ENJOY 
THEM. I'm great at catching continuity errors, but to take issue with sweaters and 
uniforms or Chekov's panel displays--OMG!! That is so picayune, I don't even know 
where to begin!! 

Y advice to you and others like you is to take a chill pill, remember it's TV's 
beloved characters and they're getting old--just like YOU!! Just enjoy, because 
they're going fast. Kelley was the oldest by a few months over Doohan and they're 
gone. But we enjoyed them--we laughed, cried, got exasperated WITH THEM AND STILL 
KNEW IT WAS FOR OUR ENJOYMENT!! Adore them while you can. The signatures on#6 was 
their way of saying goodbye. They knew it was the end and Gene had only see a 
rough cut before his death 3 days later, and passing on the baton. Star Trek, esp 
the original is ethereal & ephemeral. It will always be. If you want to gripe 
then gripe about TMP uniforms--how horrible!! I was happy w/the changes, updates 
& sweaters!! So get off your soap box and just enjoy it all; the 
experience!!!!!

I think it reaches sublimity at “picayune.”

There’s a sad postscript to this story, however. When I tried to reach Humor-Deprived Fanboy to thank him for the laughs, I was saddened to learn from his mom that he had just died of apoplexy after hearing that someone once made fun of Firefly on a discussion board.


Help Indie Authors Fight Censorship!

Censorship via the “free” market: PayPal, claiming to be acting on behalf of credit card companies, has been threatening to close down the accounts of retailers and distributors that sell works of certain types of erotica. Faced with this ultimatum, many distributors have asked those authors to pull their works (at least for now).

Smashwords has managed to buy some time for its authors by opening a dialogue with PayPal to seek a less odious solution. A positive outcome could lead to a partial or even total rollback of PayPal’s demands. Go, Smashwords!

(Disclosure: My books, published under the Channel 37 banner, are available on Smashwords. As my books do not fall under the categories affected by the censorship, I have no financial stake in the outcome of the issue — only a moral one.)

I am a firm believer in the right of authors to write what they want to write, and of readers to choose what they want to read. This is not a decision that belongs in the hands of institutions that have the power to demand compliance with policies of convenience by threatening authors and writers with the ultimate economic sanction.

That’s not how America rolls.

In the coming days, Smashwords will be launching a call to action. In the meantime, here’s a list of things we can all do (via Smashwords):

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

Although erotica authors are being targeted, this is an issue that should concern all indie authors. It affects indies disproportionately because indies are the ones pushing the boundaries of fiction. Indies are the ones out there publishing without the (fading) protective patina of a “traditional publisher” to lend them legitimacy. We indies only have each other.

Several Smashwords authors have contacted me to stress that this censorship affects women disproportionately. Women write a lot of the erotica, and they’re also the primary consumers of erotica. They’re also the primary consumers of mainstream romance, which could also come under threat if PayPal and the credit card companies were to overly enforce their too-broad and too-nebulous obsenity clauses (I think this is unlikely, but at the same time, why would dubious consent be okay in mainstream romance but not okay in erotica? If your write paranormal, can your were-creatures not get it on with one another, or is that bestiality? The insanity needs to stop here. These are not questions an author, publisher or distributor of legal fiction should have to answer.).

All writers and their readers should stand up and voice their opposition to financial services companies censoring books. Authors should have the freedom to publish legal fiction, and readers should have the freedom to read what they want.

These corporations need to hear from you. Pick up the phone and call them. Email them. Start petitions. Sign petitions. Blog your opposition to censorship. Encourage your readers to do the same. Pass the word among your social networks. Contact your favorite bloggers and encourage them to follow this story. Contact your local newspaper and offer to let them interview you so they can hear a local author’s perspective on this story of international significance. If you have connections to mainstream media, encourage them to pick up on the story. Encourage them to call the credit card companies and pose this simple question, “PayPal says they’re trying to enforce the policies of credit card companies. Why are you censoring legal fiction?”

Below are links to the companies waiting to hear from you. Click the link and you’ll find their phone numbers, executive names and postal mailing addresses. Be polite, respectful and professional, and encourage your friends and followers to do the same. Let them know you want them out of the business of censoring legal fiction.

Tell the credit card companies you want them to give PayPal permission to sell your ebooks without censorship or discrimination. Let them know that PayPal’s policies are out of step with the major online ebook retailers who already accept your books as they are. Address your calls, emails (if you can find the email) and paper letters (yes paper!) to the executives. Post open letters to them on your blog, then tweet and Facebook hyperlinks to your letters. Force the credit card companies to join the discussion about censorship. And yes, express your feelings and opinions to PayPal as well. Don’t scream at them. Ask them to work on your behalf to protect you and your readers from censorship. Tell them how their proposed censorship will harm you and your fellow writers.

Visa:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=V+Profile

American Express:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=AXP+Profile

MasterCard:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=MA+Profile

Discover:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=DFS+Profile

Ebay (owns PayPal):
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=ebay+Profile

Add your voice today, and stand up for the rights of readers and writers everywhere!

The voice you save could be your own. Someday.


When MacGuffins Attack!

This is a palimpsest of an essay that I’m fleshing out for possible use as a future “37 Minutes” column on Channel 37. Pardon the construction.

As my writer friends know (because I rarely shut up about it), I have been a huge fan of the action-adventure show Burn Notice ever since catching it midway through its second season. From a writing standpoint, the show was a master class. The dialogue was sharp without ever sliding into cliche, possessed of just the right amount of banter at just the right spots, deliciously clever in weaving the minimum of necessary exposition into conversation, and always delivered by top-notch actors who knew how to deliver, not simply recite, their lines.

You’ll notice that I’m using the past tense in describing the show. Well, that’s because this past week Season Five ended, and . . . I have been struggling to say this out loud, so here goes: it was a disaster. A season-long slow-motion derailment. There, I said it.

Heaven knows the core cast is still as brilliant (individually and as an ensemble) as they ever were, but no matter how they tried — and it sure looked like they were trying very, very hard — there was simply no way to make that flat, sawdust-flavored dialogue come alive. There was no way to act convincingly in front of those two-dimensional plots. Oh my ghawd, it was horrific to behold. From a glory to a tragedy in one season. I am in mourning.

When the season finale was over and after we had turned off the TV and sat in stunned silence for a few moments, Mrs. Sotto Voce finally broke the spell and asked the question that had been pounding in my head all season long: “Where did it go wrong?”

I thought about the last time I had watched a beloved show commit narrative seppuku: the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. And while I ran the two side-by-side in my head, I suddenly realized the answer:
Read the rest of this entry »


Attention Deficit

Relationship of Attention Span to Content, as a Function of Medium and TimeMonday morning I did a telephone interview with Tom Ahern for an article I’m writing on nonprofit communications, and we ended up having a ninety-minute free-wheeling conversation that was one of the most fascinating, stimulating, entertaining, informative, educational, and frankly just downright brilliant discussions I have had in a long time. And one of Tom’s most endearing traits is that while he may be the smartest guy in the room, he makes the other guy feel like the smart one. How does he do that?

Ernest Hemingway once said that writers need a “built-in, shock-proof crap detector.” Well, I came away from that interview convinced that Tom Ahern has a drop-forged, precision-machined, jewel-movement, laser-leveled, multiaxis-oil-bearing, gyroscopically-aligned, atomic-clock-calibrated crap detector that can guide a missile to within a centimeter of its target before breakfast.

Anyway, enough gushing. One of the topics we covered was social media for nonprofits, and he had an interesting story to share. He had just come back from a conference in Australia where he’d met someone who was actually raising some serious money for his nonprofit using social media as his primary communications tool. His secret? He spends 80 hours a week on it, and has something fresh every 20 minutes or so. Presumably except when he’s passed out from exhaustion between cattle-proddings.

So this chart popped into my head, which when I described it Tom said was brilliant (he was probably just being too polite to tell me that he’s already written a dozen articles on the same idea). The theory is that our communications technologies are moving toward this reductio ad absurdum where it will take more and more content to get fewer and fewer eyeballs.

With physical media you have natural brakes on the flywheel. It takes time to lay out and print newspapers. It takes time to truck them to the places where they will be sold. Books, same thing plus the time it takes to deliver them from warehouses to the purchasers. There’s a lot of friction built into those systems that slow things down to a human-scale velocity. I put newspapers at the intersection because they seemed to hit that sweet spot of getting just the right amount of information to just enough people just often enough to make readers feel like they got what they needed and to make advertisers feel like their money was well spent.

Increase the level of abstraction by reducing or removing time (for printing) and space (for transport and storage), and you start letting off on the brakes. That was the miracle of radio and then TV. But with those you still had few channels and one-directional flow to slow things down. Add the infinite channels of the web, and then the feedback and self-distribution of social media, and now you have a virtually frictionless system. The trend is toward an infinitely large amount of information being pumped at an infinitely small number of eyes.

What did they used to call that? Oh yeah. Junk mail. Spam. At this rate, everything will become spam. (In the time it takes you to read this sentence, Seth Godin will have written and published Everything is Spam: How to Win in the Frictionless Economy and Cory Doctorow will have churned out at least one dystopian novella based on the idea. You’re welcome, fellas.)

Anyway, this is just a thought exercise. I don’t have any arguments or conclusions to make off of it yet. So don’t read too much into it, but please do think about it.


A Dream, Fulfilled

Steve Jobs at Apple iPad Intro EventWhen Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPad back in January of last year (has it really been that long already?), there was a moment during the presentation when he seemed to forget he was onstage, and for a few seconds he sat there absorbed with his wonderful new device — just a man and his slate, suddenly peacefully alone while surrounded by millions of live and virtual eyeballs. There were a few nervous titters from the audience as the pace of the heretofore smooth and slick presentation seemed to hiccup. And then, he was back to the pitch, and everything moved on.

I followed the keynote via live blogs and Twitter, and several people commented on the moment; it sounded like a glitch. But when I went back to watch the full video of the event after Apple posted it, I suddenly felt certain that I was looking at something quite deliberate. I was watching Steve Jobs fulfill a secret, cherished dream. Somewhere along the line, so the feeling went, he had dreamt that he was on a stage, sitting comfortably with a magical computer made of glass with no keys, playing with it while the whole world watched. And that everything he had done since then was an effort to make that dream come true.

That Steve Jobs would dream about being on stage doesn’t sound farfetched. The man was possibly the most naturally gifted salesman of his generation, and he was deeply confident of his instincts and his talents. That he would dream of being alone at the center of the world’s attention fits too; like many great showmen, he was also an intensely private man who insisted on, and got, boundaries. That he would dream of a device unlike any other before it — well, that was his day job.

Whether or not my gut instinct was correct, and Steve Jobs really was fulfilling a personal dream onstage that day, I’ll probably never know. But that he knew his time was running out by then is plausible, making such a moment all the more urgent — and all the more special and poignant — regardless.

A teacher once told me, “You can measure the extent of an idea’s importance by the number of times people said ‘it can’t be done’ before it ended up being done anyway.” Steve Jobs wasn’t interested in what other people said could or couldn’t be done, no matter how loudly they insisted. I think that’s because he knew that most of the time, he was also right. To take risks and to be right — and to trust in one’s particular combination of those two traits — makes for an extraordinary life. You see this combo at work in the lives of our best artists, writers, statesmen, and inventors. It’s a particular combination that we used to celebrate and cultivate for making Great Men and Great Women.

We’ve just lost one of our Great Men. He took terrific risks, he was right most of the time, and I hope that he was able to fulfill all of his dreams in his insanely great time.

(Update: The Writer Underground recalls a unique personal encounter with Steve Jobs here: “Steve Jobs: the Earthquake has Stopped.”)


Edward R. Murrow on Slogans

To the slogan-wavers of all political stripe who have been marching up and down Facebook of late, I offer this quiet but insistent rejoinder:

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions -- Edward R. Murrow

Feel free to redistribute.