Truth And Pornography

I'm going to blog about politics. Rational, coherent discussion of politics in the US is impossible: There are just too many cannibals and whores filling both parties. I'm going to try to say nothing at all on any political topic during an election year. And I will fail. Nevertheless, this is why I'll try.

Reading classics is a Good Idea. The political axe grinding of Pliny can be ignored because it is irrelevant today. Let's suppose you're a Whig Party faithful. While I'm discussing demonology, I make a snarky comment about Daniel Webster--the Whig statesman of two centuries ago. You will NOT BE thinking about the things I write about the Devil because you're thinking about what I said about Daniel Webster.

Now, substitute the word Whig with Democrat or Republican, and replace the name Daniel Webster with whoever the other party's leaders are demonizing this week. This is why I don't want to say anything at all about anyone except Whigs this election year.

I believe that Art tells the Truth.

The truth is complicated. There are aspects of the truth that support or undermine any partisan political camp. If you make any assertion, and you keep looking, you'll find exceptions to that proposition. 2+2 is 4? Yes, but what if you're working in a mathematical context called Galois Field 4? Then 2+2=0. OK, that's an exception.

In anything non-trivial there are exceptions to exceptions--like the turtles that hold up the world, there are turtles all the way down.  The Mandlebrot set has little balls sticking off the sides that in turn have smaller balls sticking off the sides of the little balls. And tiny balls sticking off the sides of the smaller balls. The truth is complicated like the Mandlebrot set is complicated because of those exceptions to exceptions.

People are more complicated than mathematical objects. And this means that in every person you'll find a mix of good and evil. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that the line between good and evil passes through the heart of every person. This means your protagonist must have a dark side, and your antagonist must have some redeeming qualities. If you fail to do that, you aren't telling the truth about a realistic character.

Fail to give your hero that dark side, and you'll probably be accused of creating a Mary Sue character. Your most convincing antagonists will be good people who are pursuing good ends that just happen to have evil means. E.g. "Terribly sorry, Mr. Hero, but I must stick a knife in your back for the greater good." You can't tell the truth about people without relating their flaws.

Ayn Rand would disagree. If you've got a hero with a wart on the nose, don't show the wart or else all the good of the hero will be undermined by the wart. Because that wart will be taken out of proportion. She has a point. When young Hugh Hefner published photographs of Marylin Monroe, he airbrushed them. We're not talking about Eleanor Rigby, he airbrushed Marylin Monroe!

The truth is that the girl is not the Platonic ideal feminine form, but a realization of that form in an Aristotelian world of particulars. You can always find something wrong with the girl if you look close enough. (If you're in a relationship right now, it's wise not to look too closely for that person's faults.)

I believe that Pornography is Airbrushed.

Pornographers airbrush the parts of the truth that are complicated--the parts of the truth that undermine the message they're sending. For Mr. Hefner, that message was "here is feminine perfection." For Ms. Rand, that message was "here is objectivist heroism." I'll let others critique Ayn Rand's writing, except to note that John Galt and Dagney Taggart never evinced self-doubt or uncertainty such as is common to all mankind.

A filmmaker recently said that the subject of his biography--a politician--had no flaws. Really? Pliny's Panegyricus Traiani finds no flaws in the Emperor Trajan, but many flaws in former-Emperor Domitian. The truth is that both men were imperfect leaders who succeeded and failed in mixed measure as do we all. Airbrushing failures off of Trajan and on to Domitian is just as pornographic as Playboy magazine. Corollary: All propaganda is in this sense pornographic.

I advise that you write the truth--warts and all. If you're a Whig writing about a Whig protagonist, then you'll know some facts that support and some facts that undermine the Whig platform. A pornographer/propagandist will write only those things that support and make a strawman of what undermines the party platform.

I happen to have a political viewpoint that you can determine, but I believe I have an obligation to write the things that undermine both partisan positions--particularly my own.

Mary Sue Baxter

 If you've been paying attention to writing, you've heard the term "Mary Sue" and I had the bad fortune to have Mary Sue shoved in my face last night. The snow outside was such that I spent the evening in with the delightful Mrs. Poling watching streaming Netflix. Before we found an acceptable movie, we sampled two clunkers, "Journey to the Seventh Planet" and also "I Hate Valentine's Day" I was in the mood for Romantic Comedy and the latter seemed a better bet than it proved. We had enjoyed "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and this movie had the same male & female leads. And we really liked John Corbett's work in "Northern Exposure." Sure, this movie had bad reviews, but we could overlook some flaws, right? Wrong.

I don't want to bad-mouth Ms. Vardalos, who seems a delightful person I wouldn't mind knowing, but I saw one huge mistake she made in Valentine's that I've committed and I want to warn you against. It's the same mistake that George Lucas and others have made, so she's in good company. When you watch the opening credits on Valentine's you'll see one name recurring as writer, director, and actor. "There's your problem." Ms. Vardalos works all three jobs. In Wedding she adapted her one-woman show and had someone else direct, also, she had some big names who knew something about romantic comedy as her producers to say those magic words, "you can't do that." Without the words "you can't do that" you get things like Jar Jar Binks.

The trouble with Valentine's is that Ms Vardalos has written a role for herself to play and that character is a Mary Sue. And without a director or producer to say "you can't do that" disaster results. The story has a good premise and I think all the supporting actors do their jobs well. There's just this spinning vortex of Mary Sue at the center of the movie that destroys everything.

If you now what a Mary Sue is skip this paragraph. A Mary Sue is any character, male or female who is the projection of the writer's wish-dream into the story. In my writing, watch out for a male protagonist who looks a lot like Thomas Sullivan Magnum and talks a lot like Wesley Crusher. If you see that character in my writing, schedule an intervention.

My writing friends say that you should kill your Mary Sues. That's not bad advice, because everyone hates a Mary Sue except the writer. There's nothing in the world you will find more boring than my prose about me. When my solipsism is personified in a Mary Sue the reader response isn't merely boredom but rage. You want the reader to first sympathize with and then identify with your protagonist.

That will never happen with a Mary Sue. The fatal flaw of Valentine's is that Ms. Vardalos made her protagonist a Mary Sue. Everything about her character was perfect--too perfect. All the other characters orbited about her and served to setup her lines or laugh at her jokes. So, I started wondering how I might rescue the story were it within my power.

It came to me in the shower this morning. In Romantic Comedies, you generally have two people who'll be together in the last scene having resolved the problems posed by the last 90 minutes of cinematography. Often those characters meet in an early scene and are immediately attracted to one another, BUT the problem is that they're already attached to Someone Else.

This is such an overused trope of such story telling that they made a movie The Baxter wherein the rejected guy is the protagonist. One characteristic The Baxter stresses is the dullness of the character. But if you look at the classics, you'll see the Baxter is not necessarily dull (e.g. My Favorite Wife).

As a writer, you want the reader to be presented with a romantic competitor who's everything your protagonist is not. Strong where s/he is weak. Smart where s/he is stupid. Good where s/he is venal. The worst thing is for the audience to identify with Baxter instead. You want your audience to be identifying and rooting for your protagonist while hating the oh so perfect Baxter. Sometimes this is done by making the Baxter somehow horrid, a snob, a racist, or just doesn't like the love-interest's kids. Or, horrors, a chartered accountant!

That's a cheat. Make the Baxter a better man (or woman) than your protagonist. Better in every way, and perfect--just like a Mary Sue.

Scaffolding

Some years back they rehabilitated the Statue of Liberty. No, she hadn't become an alcoholic, but the years and the elements had caused enough damage that extensive repairs became necessary. For a while the appearance of the statue changed dramatically.

In fact, you could hardly see the statue itself for the scaffolding that had been built up around it.

You need scaffolding whenever you're building something bigger than a bike shed whose walls your brother can prop up while you're nailing it together. Though there is a certain aesthetic appeal to the cathedral shrouded in scaffolding, it looks a lot better when it stands alone.

What has this to do with writing?

Some writers build worlds. It's a lot of fun. If you intend to design, say, a galactic civilization complete with competing empires rising to power and smashing together in war, you'll at least need a spreadsheet to keep straight all the birth dates and ages of the characters and how old they are when they found the Sirian Confederacy or abandon the Terran Empire. That spreadsheet is scaffolding. You the writer have to create and maintain this thing to keep things straight. And the amazing thing is that when you do this spreadsheet you'll see relationships and get ideas for stories you are not yet working on. This spreadsheet is scaffolding.

Likewise, it's embarrassing to discover that your strawberry-blonde supporting character with green eyes becomes blue-eyed a hundred pages later. To spare yourself this you may want to create a cheat sheet with all such characteristics safely tucked away in one place for quick reference and update. This cheat sheet is scaffolding.

Or let's suppose you've got a bit of backstory. Maybe the protagonist's and antagonist's fathers knew each other in the war. And maybe they exchanged some token. It's your story and your backstory. The reader needn't be bothered with the details. But you the writer must know all of them. The writer must understand why the backstory is as it is. In a case like this, I write a vignette of the elements of the backstory to work out the details. This vignette is scaffolding.



Maybe you're stuck at a point. You can passively wait for inspiration to strike you. Bad idea. Or you can write something related to, but off the arc of your story. By all means do so, you need to keep your writing muscles exercised. This puttering needn't go anywhere. You're just puttering until something breaks loose. This puttering is scaffolding.

Or maybe your story has a puzzle that the protagonist must work out. How did the murderer lock the door from the outside? You've got an idea, but you have to verify that it works. In my case, I got a chair and a door and a bit of string. It didn't work. So, I added a sheet of linoleum to make it work. (If I change linoleum to tin, it can leave telltale scratches your detective can detect.) Run the experiment with wife standing by in case something goes horribly wrong. This experiment is scaffolding.

Finally, there's that lovely map of Middle Earth with which you track your heroes movements. And estimate how many days journey lies between hither and yon. Scaffolding.

One thing about scaffolding is that although you may have a ball constructing it, you must tear it down and pack it away prior to publishing. Go ahead and do as much scaffolding as your world or your story or your scene requires. Scaffolding is not story.

And just because you don't sit down with the intention to write scaffolding, it doesn't mean you have not done so accidentally. One rookie mistake is to load your story down with unnecessary prose that does not contribute to the story arc. Usually, there's this preface or long expository passage in the front of the tale to "set the stage." Fooey. Dump it and start with your story's inciting incident while planning to dole out the fewest details only when needed. But it's pretty. Yes, dear, so is the scaffolding about the Statue of Liberty, but we have to put it away now.

No scaffolding should meet the public eye--with the exception of a map and a dramatis personæ.

Superlatives Are For Children

One of the things I notice about beginning writers is that their stories use superlatives: the strongest knight, does battle against the vilest dragon to win the most beautiful princess. The writer wants to impress and evokes those things that impress him the most. It's a rookie mistake.

This is telling, not showing.

Suppose the princess is the most beautiful woman in the whole world. OK, what does that look like? Show us. Describe what this nonpareil princess looks like to qualify her for the title of most beautiful. And after you've limned the curve of her cheekbones, the way her hair graces her shoulders, the dancer's legs, heaving bosoms, moistened lips waiting to be kissed, and--most importantly--the response of the gallant to her visage, the dear reader won't need to be reminded that she's not only easy on the eyes, but more so than any other girl ever.


Superlatives take the reader out of the story. Let's suppose you've got your knight, princess, and dragon. They've each punched the time clock, reported for work, and are at their stations ready to go. When you say this is the vilest dragon and what does your reader think? Viler than what? Other dragons. OK, who are those other dragons? Puff was nice, but Smaug wasn't very nice. But Glaurung was worse... Now, your reader's mind is crowded with those other dragons. Or worse, your reader has gone off in search of dragons of comparative vileness.


Now suppose your knight must venture forth to the dragon's lair. His mom sends him off with a nice lunch and a warm coat into the worst blizzard ever. Oh? Would that be worse than that blow we got back in '03? Then a geezer pipes up: Nah, that was nothing, you should have seen the blizzard of '78. That was something. Then an older geezer says: You young pups didn't live through '62 in Kamchatka. Once this starts there will be a game of one-upsmanship where one liar tops the next liar with a bigger lie. (Unless I'm telling the fish story, then it's true.) Once you write "worst blizzard ever" your readers will start mentally playing this game. The smart writer realizes the only way to win this game is to not play.


As stories get scaled larger and larger, the reader tends to lose connection. Let's suppose the knight is set upon by some knave with a knife. They fight hand to hand; the knife is kicked away; hands close around his throat; his head pounds about to explode; he can't breathe. The reader has some skin in this game. Contrast this with the villain with the big red button marked "Destroy The Earth." He pushes the button? So what. We won't have to go into work Monday. This is why James Bond always has a big hand-to-hand fight with Jaws or someone in the control room over who'll get to the big red button.


The writer does not need to make the hero any more heroic or the villain any more villainous than the reader needs to engage with the story. The most beautiful princess need not be any more than the girl in Starbucks with a nice smile. The strongest knight need not be more than a GI back from Afghanistan. The vilest dragon need not be more than an unpleasant supervisor. I'm not saying you shouldn't make the hero stronger, the love-interest prettier or the villain viler. Just don't make them the most-est.

Sherly, You're Joking

I recently saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie. And I liked it. But not the way you're thinking. If you want to see a great action movie, by all means take in Game Of Shadows.

But the movie reminds me of a local restaurant called Twisted Rooster. They have on the menu a sandwich they call a Reuben sandwich, and it's a great sandwich with coleslaw and Russian dressing--but it's not a Reuben sandwich.

Game of Shadows is a cool Steampunk 007 movie. I'll buy Sherlock Holmes being an action hero, but he's not a spy--he's a private eye. And I'll buy into Mycroft Holmes being a gubmint official, but he's not a diplomat--he's a mathematician. The shaken-not-stirred character is cool, but not Sherlock Holmes.

It's someone else.

Just as Sherlock Holmes is not a Steampunk 007, Mycroft Holmes is not a Victorian M.

The considerable powers Mr. Fry brings to the role were significantly underused. When he played Jeeves to Hugh Laurie's Wooster, I saw the makings of an excellent Sherlock Holmes. The years and Mr. Fry's expanding waistline has made him into a perfect Mycroft, but he was used largely for comedic effect in this movie. He didn't really do anything significant--just like M does in your typical 007 movie.

I once had the occasion to know several cryptanalysts and cryptologic mathematicians. They manifested the very sort of smarts one would expect of the Holmes brother who went into mathematics. Sure, there's deep involvement in a nation's intelligence community, but it's an armchair sort of thing that you saw in the Tom Clancy stories where a roomful of analysts debate the significance of a radio intercept or a satellite photo--not the parkour-style chasing about that you'll see James Bond do.

I had altogether expect Mycroft to be heading the codebreaking effort against Moriarty's notebook, not Dr. Watson's lovely bride.

Other quibbles. Dr. Watson was mustered out of the military because of a war wound. In the canon he has delicate health, but in this movie he walks with a limp. A limp that goes away when he's dancing, or when he's running. Hmmmm.

Then there's Mycroft's nudism. It has comedic effect, but it's altogether gratuitous--unless you were wondering about Mr. Fry's middle-aged spread. Like wise Sherlock's aversion to horses? Where'd that come from? Arthur Conan Doyle had no problem making Sherlock an expert swordsman and boxer, why would he stint with horsemanship?

Moriarty is some kind of Lord of War (without the cocaine), and he's aiming to start a World War by sabotaging some kind of peace conference that reminds me a lot of a Star Trek episode.

Finally there's Rivendell on the Reichenbach falls. This is Rivendell.:

This is the Reichenbach Falls where Holmes and Moriarty have their final conflict:

 

Notice any difference?

I happened to like the Lord Of The Rings, 007 movies, Star Trek and the Wild Wild West, but I will never confuse them with Sherlock Holmes.

Does Bad Writing Exist?

This seems a ridiculous question until asked to define bad writing.

Months back I was reading about how John Locke sold a million books and his response to his critics is unique. He doesn't engage any assertion that his books might be poorly written. Instead, he shrugs and says the haters are simply not his market. There's some virtue in this way of thinking and it is a paradigm shift.

Yet I think this paradigm has its limits. I've tried to follow two commandments in my writing:

• Thou shalt be interesting.
• Thou shalt be clear.

Honor those two commandments and I have no quibble with John Locke. Otherwise, I suppose bad writing does indeed exist: It is writing that is unclear and/or uninteresting.


Give Catnip To Cats and Dognip to Dogs
So, are you cool with a writer interrupting a narrative with an extended treatment of discrete mathematics complete with equations? No? Would that constitute bad writing because it's uninteresting? Doesn't Neal Stephenson do that? Or how about an extended political monologue? Didn't Ayn Rand do that?

Mathematics and libertarian politics are--to some readers--what Elmore Leonard calls "the stuff people skip." To other readers the stuff is pure catnip. Some people are bored to tears by that which titillates others. This makes the first commandment of being interesting an audience-dependent thing.

The writer needs to know who's going to be reading his work before he can know how to keep that first commandment. Thus, if you are in any way inclined to read my work, please tell me about yourself.

Don't Make Enemies

 I may surprise you, but less than 100% of the people reading this supporter the Whig Party, belonging instead to the parties of Lincoln and Jefferson. Reflect for a moment on your response to someone writing something that's identifiably from the other side. The contradictory politics distracts from the writing and from the story. There is absolutely no good reason to alienate the 50% of the book buying public who belongs to the other party. (Or in my case the 100%.)

In addition to politics there's religion. Not that many of you are Zen Baptist Puritans, and if you make your book into a tract for Something Else, I'll probably toss it against the wall. Good and evil are concepts that are non-denominational and non-sectarian. C.S. Lewis wrote from a Christian perspective, but nobody would call Narnia a heavy-handed tract because he engaged his readers at the level of good and evil as it runs through the center of human nature. He didn't engage in Bible thumping because it would alienate everyone who doesn't think the Bible to be God-inspired.

There are zero-sum games. I can think of a few topics of conversation that always end badly, because no matter what position I take, the issue is so polarizing and the passions so strong, that someone on one side or the other will be so angry, I'll create an enemy. The only way to win these games is to not play. I just won't go there.

Don't Be Evil

There are some things that warrant nothing less than complete, unequivocal condemnation. Period. Pedophilia? The Ancient Greeks may have tolerated it, if so they deserve whatever hell they're burning in. Nazis? Only Mel Brooks can joke about Springtime for Hitler.

Sometimes you can be ambivalent about gray areas. People of good faith disagree about whether such and such is acceptable behavior or not. That's not the case here. The writer needs a moral compass that's magnetized enough to sense when there is a consensus that a thing is wrong and must not be treated ambiguously.

A friend was deeply offended by a "romance" novel that depicted rape and pedophilia with too casual a treatment. I'll take my friend's word for it that the work stunk. I thought it unworthy of the time and bother of condemning it. But my friend grabbed hold of it and brought every cannon to bear in deprecating the work in the harshest possible terms. If the work was merely bad, she would not be so motivated to badmouth it, but the work was evil, and my friend felt a moral obligation to condemn it as evil--like Captain Ahab pursuing Moby Dick.

Personally, I noticed this a couple years ago when I revisited Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter stories. Since these are all in the public domain, I reformatted them to look good on my Sony Reader (This was in my pre-Kindle phase.) I read a few of the novels and then ran into something I hadn't noticed when I first read the books when I was a teen. John Carter's son--the protagonist of whatever novel I was reading--owns slaves, and the antagonist insinuates himself into the young man's household as a slave. Who should I root for? I don't approve of slavery, even fictional slavery on another planet. I put the book down and haven't read anything else by Edgar Rice Burroughs since. 

Don't Be A Writer

Shakespeare said, "the play's the thing." Same goes for the narrative. Your reader is not going to want to read beautiful words. S/he wants to read a story. The words of a story are like the wires holding up Flash Gordon's spaceship. They have to be there, but it's better if nobody notices them. Clear writing is like clear spring water: It is transparent. It is invisible.

I've goofed around trying to write in a style or voice that's congruent with the time and place of the POV character. This is a mistake. Yeah, it's cool to write like a Victorian. I rather like the old stuff better than I like the new stuff. And this lets me write like what I prefer to read. But I hear people remark about the words and I realize they're not thinking about the lifeless body hanging in the locked room . Fail.

After NaNoWriMo Then What?

My daughter won NaNoWriMo over a year ago. She didn't do it this year. And after she finished her novel, she put it in a drawer or something. It hasn't seen the light of day since. She won't let me see it.

I don't think she's unusual. And I think that's a shame. It's easy to figure that after writing with such intensity the writer will want to kick back and rest for a bit. And after that the manuscript is easy to leave in the desk drawer to languish.

Instead of languishing, something else should happen. Or maybe it should languish if the novel is really bad. Who's to say? That's tricky, because sometimes what I think is a bad novel is regarded quite highly by someone else. Or vice versa. In olden days, it was very easy to know what constituted a good novel: someone in New York would take it from a slush pile and declare it publishable. Maybe it would sell, too.

I think that after November finishes, all those novels submitted to http://www.nanowrimo.org/ should be read by someone. They may not be ready for public consumption, but they should be read. And this got me thinking about A Proposal for Improving Ebooks that I posted a few weeks back.

Suppose someone were to create an e-reader program that runs on iPads, Android tablets, PCs and Macs, but this e-reader program is tied to a server. The reader signs up to read someone's NaNo opus, then goes through it adding annotations identifying typos and--more pertinent to Nano--providing feedback to the author of a more editorial nature. This feedback, like the novel, would not be made public, but would go from reader, to Internet server, to author with only those things the reader and author want public seen by anyone else.

Alternatively, writers and readers can using something like Google Docs, specifically Jae-Sung Lee's Pinfolio, to give readers editable copies of the novel. But I have never been able to work this way. I think the only person making changes to the novel should be the author. And the reader should only be making annotations that are for the author's eyes only. The author alone should be responsible for doing something about these annotations.

My current thinking is that someone needs to lash up a prototype e-reader to give readers a feel for what I have in mind. And mockups of the server screens with diagrams that illustrate the processes of finding/choosing readers by writers and hooking things up to the NaNoWriMo people. This would give the NaNoWriMo author a system to take his work to the next level.

What do you think?