The Art of Illiterates

After Labor Day in Grand Rapids, MI the "next big thing" is ArtPrize. I've commented on it before. This usually gets me thinking about art qua art. (And saying hifalutin words like "qua.") My wife remarked at breakfast this morning that one of the profs (who teaches movie-making) repeated this quote: "Film should be looked at straight on, it is not the art of scholars but of illiterates."

I believe the point he was trying to make was that film naturally puts few demands on the viewer.

Keep in mind that illiterates are not necessarily stupid. There have been some very clever people who never get around to learning to read or write.

Film, by presenting brute imagery and sound to the consumer, is consumed without necessarily engaging the higher cognitive functions.

I suppose this means the screenwriter must strive to represent the mythic or iconic in her screenplay, because that is how it will be best consumed.

Conversely, the author of Russian novels realizes her readers have strong arms and great upper-body strength to lug around those long, heavy tomes. The author of Victorian novels realizes her readers have long attention spans. And the contemporary author expects her readers read at at least a sixth-grade level.

The gallery viewer of walls-sized canvases brings different expectations to the art than the comic book reader who sees virtually the same thing.

When you produce art, there's more than just "the medium is the message." Each medium brings a different audience.

The different audience brings different eyes and ears to the work depending upon their expectations. We all should work to understand our audience and work with their expectations as opposed to against them.

There is a time for the mathematics lecture that you can find in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. And there's a time for breathless action scenes as you can find in Larry Correia's Monster Hunters International. Your job is to sense who is buying your books and produce the time they are expecting.

Apology: i fear you might draw the wrong conclusion from my choice of pictures from Roy Lichtenstein and Tony Abruzzo. Though I question the intelligence and common sense of those who spend big bucks to fill modern art galleries, I do NOT want to demean any comic book readers and intended no slight toward Mr. Abruzzo by juxtaposing his art with a derivative copy.

Gods and Supermen

When I was a tender lad a taboo eroded in the first Superman movie when Lois Lane suggests her boyfriend is a god. Let's be clear: there is only one God and I'm not him. Yet, mankind has from time immemorial fashioned idols that were a bit more manageable than the One who created all there is. The taboo that eroded was the notion that calling Superman a god would be blasphemous. (But nowadays, blasphemy is not a consideration, unless you're near one of those religions that sanction violent, criminal acts.) Yet we cannot let the charge of blasphemy cloud our thinking about gods.

Consider the old Star Trek episode, "Who Mourns For Adonis?" Captain Kirk and his posse happen upon a planet where the Greek mythological figure Apollo has his crib. After a bit of to and fro it is established that Apollo demands worship and Kirk says, "say what?" There's a bit of petulant rage and some '60s vintage special effects, and Apollo decides its better to fade away than burn out. Or something like that.

All the Greek gods were like that. Petulant. Jealous. Petty. Olympus was sort of like High School with lightning bolts. These gods were just normal Greek dudes and dudettes cranked up to 11. There was nothing transcendental about them or qualitatively better than their worshipers.

Then there's Superman. Not that one, Friedrich Nietzsche's ubermensch. He's a 19th century retread of Socrates' punching bag, Callicles. And he's the sort who goes beyond petulance, jealousy, and pettiness by declaring these things to be moral goods when he does them. This will to power distinguishes the everyman who is bound by social convention and the uberman who flouts it. It's a lot more sophisticated--in a Hermann Goring kind of way--but it's still not really transcendent.

When writing about aliens, they can either be dumber than us, as smart as us, or smarter than us. Moreover, when considering alien technology, it can be less advanced than ours, equivalent to ours, or more advanced than ours. Science Fiction writing is a lot easier when it's less than or equal. Less so when it's greater.

We can extrapolate small steps from what we know and understand to something just a little better. If I take 10 minutes to do my homework, Zontar over there can do it in 5 minutes. Likewise if my computer has EGA monitor on it, Zontar's has VGA. In such cases the advanced creatures are at supermen. They are not gods.

But what if the advancement is so extensive as to be incomprehensible?

This is where transhumanism comes in. If you plot improvements in the human condition and in the capabilities of our machines, you don't find linear growth curves, but exponential ones. And if exponential curves go on long enough their slope goes vertical. This is called a singularity and technological aficionados think it's mega-cool. Or mega-scary. To depict such characters, you have to make them more than supermen. You can't just crank things up to 11 or 12, you have to change from audio to video. Somehow.

Vernor Vinge has written stories wherein he talks about the singularity. His novel, Marooned In Realtime, has a character who was marooned in the future from very close to the singularity. Vinge can only provide hints and glimpses of what such people would be like and what they'd concern themselves with.

Or perhaps those exponential curves level out? That could happen. Most exponential curves I've seen flatten out then level out into a tame S-shaped curve.

That's what Michael McCloskey depends upon in his novels The Trilisk Ruins, The Trilisk AI, and The Trilisk Supersedure. He explains that there are practical, combinatorial limits on how much one can scale an AI. If you're dumber than me, you can consider 5 things in the time I'll consider 10, and if you're smarter than me, you can consider 15 things in the same time. Thus, advanced computer intelligences will run be able to consider hundreds of things more than we can, but the combinatorics will be such that they will be doing so in a sea of billions and billions of additional factoids.

The term is "combinatorial explosion" and does not mean detonation, but a very fast increase in combinations. Consider a simple example: you have 2 parents. They in turn had 2 parents. Etc. If we go back just 10 generations, that's 1024 people. If you go back 20 generations, that's over a million. With a simple branching-factor of just 2, you get a million in just 20 steps. But what if you can branch between, say the 26 letters of the alphabet? Did you know there are over 11 million five-letter words? When you throw all the factoids available to Google right now, given reasonable branching factors, the combinatorial explosion can swamp a brain the size of a planet. Only gods can digest combinatorial explosions. (They call calculus elementary TRANSCENDENTALS for a reason.)

So, maybe the singularity won't happen. It's just be another S-shaped curve that we're not smart enough to recognize. (Exercise: Apply this line of reasoning to the ideas of Thomas Malthus.)

McCloskey does aliens extremely well. He doesn't dream up aliens that look like cats or cousin It, but really alien aliens with 20-lobed brains, golden exoskeletons and 40 legs who are deaf as a post. Or aliens who have 3-lobed brains who like to body-hop into other races that are shaped like parasols. The movies will need more than guys in rubber masks.

When I finished the Trilisk Supersedure I thought he fell into the superman trap, because his aliens were a bit too mundane in their interests. My reasoning was that any race THAT advanced wouldn't fuss with the likes of us, because even if they enslaved us, we'd be incapable of creating anything of value to them.

Upon further reflection these aliens may not be capable of godhood, merely supermanhood no matter how far their technology advances. And their cognition is limited by that same combinatorial explosion I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. Sorry, you're just superman, not a god.

The Trilisk Supersedure reminded me of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and also Snow Crash. The alien AI is accessed by means of "wishing" for things. And if you can dream up something, you can get it by wishing. This is a pretty cool concept. And when you combine it with the notion of Trilisk Supersedure--where aliens jump into people's minds, that notion of gods speaking to not-yet-conscious people starts to resonate. I will wager that McCloskey enjoyed Snow Crash wherein Neal Stephenson toys with bicameralism.

All in all, I found McCloskey's three Trilisk novels altogether enjoyable space opera. 5 stars.

Mantras from Writers Groups

I trained as a Mathematician and then as a Computer Scientist. So, when I finished my first novel, I figured I'd better find out how awesome it was. About that time I saw a notice of a fortnightly writers' group meeting on Wednesdays. And about a month later I learned of a second writers' group on Thursdays. And I started going to both. Then the Wednesday group started meeting every week. It was like drinking from a fire hose and I learned a ton of useful stuff about writing.

The first thing I learned was the social dynamic between writers and how some of them did things that made everyone hate them. That's when I started writing murder stories where an archetype of each annoying person in a writers' group got bumped off. It was very therapeutic.

Over time I started noticing other things. Certain exhortations about good writing kept recurring. It wasn't that people weren't listening. New people coming into the group were doing the same things.

I started writing them down and calling them "mantras" because I kept repeating them. The list is fairly long and I won't burden you with the whole thing all at once.

These mantras are general principles, not rules. Treat them as forces that you balance between one another. There are times when one principle contradicts the other and pulls you in different directions.

Imagine iron filings sitting on a table obeying the law of gravity. When you pass a magnet over the table, the iron filings are pulled in the opposite direction because of the law of magnetism. The iron filings stay on the table or fly toward the magnet based on whether magnetism overcomes gravity. In a similar manner, balance these mantras against one another.

1. Work your opening paragraph to death.
2. Give no excuse to dismiss your work in the opening pages.
3. Bracketing a story often works.
4. So does “in media res.”
5. Make your reader want to “get on the train” with your characters. 

These are just the first five mantras. I plan to enumerate the rest at a later date. 

Work your opening paragraph to death

Unless your work has been assigned as homework, every reader looking at it will make a decision to read it or not. After people judge a book by its cover, they start reading. Most people start reading at the opening paragraph. The better that excerpt is, the more likely they'll decide to read further.


The reader you're aiming at is an agent, editor, intern at the publishing company, or the customer at a bookshop. Sadly, a lot of publishing decisions are taken without consideration of the last category of reader.

"It was a dark and stormy night" is more than just something Snoopy typed in the Peanuts cartoon. It was written by Edward Bullwer-Lytton a very popular Victorian novelist, who contemporary writing experts LOVE to hate. They even have a bad-writing contest in memory of Bullwer-Lytton.

You want to Not Be That Guy.

Give no excuse to dismiss your work in the opening pages

This is less important today than it was a few years ago. Nowadays you can self-publish and avoid the gatekeeper editor.

Editors bring to the manuscript certain expectations. Fail to live up to those expectations and your manuscript will never survive the slush-pile. Your spelling has to be correct. You'd better know your grammar well enough to get all the jokes in the Grammar Nazi video.



There are other expectations an editor will bring to your text. If you stake out any identifiable political or religious territory, remember that your editor also brings to his reading his own political and religious opinions. "Springtime For Hitler"won't fly.

I've never seen that, but I have seen someone bring in a writing project that was a mix of Religion and Letters to Penthouse. I figure that anybody who reads Penthouse would be offended by the religion and anybody who's religious would be offended by the sexuality. Offend one group or the other group, but not both.

Bracketing a story often works

One reason why I like The Princess Bride is the exchange between the narrator, Peter Falk, and the grandson, Fred Savage. They serve to contextualize the work for the viewer. This device is one of the places where the sly writer can slip in some editorial comment.

In ancient times, the Greek Chorus served this role. You seldom go wrong following a literary trope of the classics. Freaking Shakespeare used this technique.

In addition to providing editorial comment, your story might need a bit of explanation that would be untidy to include within the narrative proper. OK, have the grandson interrupt the story and voice an objection so that the narrator can explain it.

If you're really good, you can intertwine two narratives in such a way that one narrative provides answers that are not elaborated in the other narrative and vice versa. Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon followed WW2 and contemporary narratives to good effect. But there's a risk in doing this. Few authors can take this on without leaving some threads dangling or (almost as bad) tied up in a mad rush at the end.

So does “in media res” 

Captain Nathan Sanderson keyed the mike and laughed, "Your butt is mine, sucker." He didn't wait for a response but pulled the trigger unleashing a stream of simulated rail-gun projectiles at the Blue Force fighter. The scoring computers on the Blue fighter and Sanderson's Opfor fighter negotiated an equitable degree of damage and degraded the Blue fighter's capabilities accordingly....

In media res is Latin for start with something going on.

Did the paragraph above interest you? Maybe not if you picked up a romance novel.

I left gaps in between the facts that I presented in that paragraph to capture attention like Velcro loops grab lint. You probably realize some kind of mock aerial battle is going on and I hope you'll want to know how Sanderson gets splashed by the girl four paragraphs later.

The war-game serves to introduce a larger story. Don't mistake this for a framing device of a story told in flashback. The story builds on this bit of action, but because the action came without explanation, it raises questions in the reader's mind that I had better answer in the next scene introducing the girl and the navy of the Sirian Confederacy.

Make your reader want to “get on the train” with your characters

A story is an investment of time. The reader's most valuable possession is her time and reading is a bit like getting onto a train with the characters of the story. Are the characters in the story jerks? Are they people you can relate to? Sure, sometimes you will want to hang around some unpleasant person to see them get their comeuppance.

Just think for a second of your reader's experience, his response to your prose. Do you want fear and loathing of the despicable Snidely Whiplash? Or fear that sweet Polly Purebred will suffer a fate worse than death? Your reader engages with the characters. Even if you're in the distant reaches of outer space, you want someone the reader relates to and cares about. I recall a rather disagreeable TV show that had plenty of action that I liked, but it was all happening to and with characters I could care less about. If the ship exploded killing everyone in the series, it would have been an improvement.

Recently I started a novel that had plenty of interesting back-story. Although the novel was extremely exposition-heavy, the universe the writer constructed had a lot going for it. But then I found out that everyone on the space ship was just an AI made to seem like some dead person. Oh. They're just robots. Nobody's human? Nope. Oh. And after the protagonist died and became a robot, she also became a lesbian. I can relate to alternate lifestyles, even gorgeous fembots with a penchant for evil, but seriously?

It really wasn't the robot lesbian angle that put me off so much as that it was the last straw. There wasn't a single character I could relate to within light years of anywhere the story was going. And the exposition-heavy opening didn't help. I didn't toss the novel across the room because I was reading it on my Kindle, but I found something else to read in short order.

Update: This is the first of a series of writers mantras. The next one is here.