Rashomon Overdose

Akira Kurosawa and Ron Howard both make movies. They both know more about film making in their little finger than I ever will--which is an accomplishment because most people don't store knowledge in pinkies.

In 1950 Akira Kurosawa made a movie called Rashomon about a crime and the court testimony about that crime. The crime is horrific--a rape and murder--and it is recounted from four perspectives. This was groundbreaking in 1950, because the story differs significantly depending upon who's telling it. It marks the beginning of the popularization of this key insight of Postmodernism: "truth" is always mediated through the subject who perceives it, interprets it, and recounts it.

In the wake of Rashomon we've seen a change in the parameters of storytelling. It's now cool and commonplace to show the same events multiple times through different eyes. And that's the big deal with the new season of Arrested Development. Each episode follows one character or another and tells a story showing the same events with the camera focused on that character. In early episodes, there are clues that something funny or even mystical is going on. In later episodes, the reader can infer what was going on by examining the same event from another character's point of view.

This is catnip for fan boys who can stop. rewind a bit, then examine each frame at a time. After I watched the last episode I felt like going back and watching the earlier episodes again knowing what I now know to pick up the things I missed the first time around.

It's like watching A Beautiful Mind, finding out that the girl is a fig-newton of Nash's imagination, then going back to confirm that she does not disturb the birds in the yard where she's running around them.

Aside: One of the ways to tell whether a photo has been faked is to look for people's reactions to the odd thing that's been added. When a honking huge flight of Soviet jets go roaring over Red Square, someone in the crowd is going to look up. Keep that in mind when you see something remarkable on the Internet.

The fact that the entire season of Arrested Development consists of a few events that are told and retold leads me to think that Arrested Development is suffering from a Rashomon overdose. I think it works because the series has a cult-like following, and here is something that the cultists can chew on.

I also think that it does not work so well for non-cultists. You have to care about the characters before you want to see the same events rerun several times from their several perspectives. The focus on the minutiae of each character's foibles detracts from the larger scope of the story. Does it do it too much? Yes and no. I call this note "Rashomon Overdose" because I think there's a more than optimal amount of retelling from diverse perspectives. It makes some people queasy and others nauseous while others who have built up a tolerance just want more.

There is something else going on here: narrowcasting.

If you can identify a cult and write a story that its cultists will love, you can make serious money serving this niche market. Amanda Palmer broke records for Kickstarter fundraising by reaching just 35,000 enthusiasts.

Felicia Day puts the emphasis on being able to reach your audience and stories with cult-following should be easier to reach.

The Netflix-Arrested Development hook-up can be wildly successful while drawing numbers that would mean instant-cancellation on a broadcasting network like Fox. 

The key is to keep your overhead low enough that you don't spend more money than your cult can pony up.

A Planner Manifesto

There was an ancient despot named Procrustes who had a bed. All of his guests were compelled to lie in this bed. If they were too tall, he'd cut off their feet. If they were too short to fit on the bed, he'd put them on the rack and stretch them until they did.

In writing there are two warring camps, the "pantsers" and the "plotter." The former believe that writing is best done by the seat of the pants. You sit down, the story comes to you and you write it. Conversely, the latter school says you must create an outline of your work before you can begin to write.

When I call this a "Planner Manifesto" I'm not mandating a procrustrean formula for writing. In fact, I think I would not do very well if I were forced to exclusively lie in either a "pantser" or a "planner" bed.

My primary concern is pragmatics. You can be a pantser and certain benefits will attend your approach and your writing will face some risks you must overcome. You can be a planner and different benefits and different risks will accompany that approach. There is only one "wrong way" and that's the way that does not yield a completed manuscript.

When I began my first novel I did not know any better. So, I wrote up a complete outline--a fairly detailed one in fact. And I supplemented it with a fair amount of scaffolding. Subsequent writing projects have been done either by the seat of my pants or carefully planned with mixed results.

Without any regard to what approach you take, you'll have times when writing is just a matter of moving your fingers across the keys fast enough to get the words out. And there'll be times when you stare at the blank page and blinking cursor. I had both experiences with my first novel.

After I finished my outline, I started writing and my fingers flew like I just described. I wrote without any concerns whatsoever. In particular, I wrote without taking any heed of my complete outline. It was glorious and I thought that perhaps that outline business wasn't necessary.

The only trouble is that after writing about one third of my novel I finished a chapter and thought, "now what?" My mind was completely blank. I had no idea what to write next. And I panicked. But because it was my first writing project, I did not abandon the work. Instead, I read the now dusty outline. "Oh, it doesn't go like that at all," I thought to myself as I read the first third of the outline.

But the overall story arc in the outline still made sense and the end was solid. Just the middle had this jump discontinuity between what I'd planned to write and what I'd actually written. What do do? I started revising the outline, I took the first third and changed it to make it look like the work as written.

And then I looked at the middle and figured out how to revise the middle to link up between the first third and the last third. After I was satisfied with the revised outline, I noticed that I knew for certain "now what?"

I backed up a scene, rewrote that, and set about to writing the middle third based on that clear mental image of where I was going. Did I look at the outline? No. I just wrote until I got to "now what?" again. And I repeated the steps above.

About 75% into the work, I caught fire and started writing thousands of words per night. It was glorious and I was done a short while later.

For my next three writing projects I thought I didn't need no steenking outline, so I just wrote as the spirit moved. And the spirit moved me into three cul-de-sacs. I had three failed, abandoned projects. It was like hitting the wall at 10,000 feet and I had no where to go and no vision how far to backtrack to get to a satisfactory story arc.

That taught me that an outline isn't as much an engineering blueprint for a story, but an insurance policy against getting lost and wandering in the wilderness for forty years. The outline does tend to keep your mind on what the story is about and that can be helpful when you're called upon to make a synopsis.

In the world of business startups there's the notion of an "elevator talk" which is a brief description you can give of your business idea in the time it takes to share an elevator ride with a potential investor.

You need an "elevator talk" for your work in process. It needn't be a synopsis, but it has to convey your  vision for the work and why you are the person to tell this story. Can a pantser come up with an "elevator talk" for his or her work in progress? Probably. It's less straightforward than if you're a planner. If you are a pantser-fundamentalist, set me right on this point in the comments.

The reason why you need an elevator talk is that while you're working on your project you'll still have a life where you meet and talk to people and build your author's platform. And when you are meeting and talking, you should try to learn two things: how can I reach my book's audience? and how can I win this person over to the idea of reading my work? Bonus points: how can I get this person's help to spread the word about my work? The best way you'll learn this from the people you talk to is when you've got a clear vision of what your project is about.

I'm told that 90% of the work happens AFTER you finish your project. Why not get started on that at the very beginning? In fact, if you listen to the Lean Startup guys, you shouldn't even start on a project until you know you've got an audience you know you can reach who wants to read your project. I'm not sure how you can do that if you're a pantser, but if you're a planner, all you need are the rudiments of an outline.

But the main thing you have to remember is whether you believe in being a pantser or a planner, or something in between, remember Robert Heinlein's advice and be a finisher.

In Love With Felicia Day

Let's make something clear first off. No, I don't want to date her avatar. I'm happily married, thank you.

Nevertheless, I love what Felicia Day is doing and what she represents, because I believe she represents the future of world culture--I hope. I guess it started with her addiction to World of Warcraft. After she went through that she took her experiences and turned them into a series of video shorts called The Guild. These went up on YouTube and elsewhere and then they went viral. If you have not yet watched The Guild, you've missed a treat.

In particular, pay attention to Season Five where the guild members are being courted by celebrities who want to learn how this Internet thing works. This probably reflects Ms. Day's experience as she was simultaneously a gamer and a working actress.

This is important, because folks in the existing media business understand the "what" of a successful promotion even when they don't grok the "how" of Going Viral. I didn't make this connection when I watched the season five episodes. I was too distracted by the incongruity of the "cool kids" sucking up to the "geeks." (I identify more strongly with geeks than with cool kids.)

Happily, fate gave me a second chance to take delivery from the clue train. The Reddit guys conducted a video interview with Ms. Day wherein they presented a number of questions to her. You can see the interview here. The third question was what occasioned this post.

The questioner points out the success of low-budget projects like Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog and The Guild then asks what are the leading roadblocks are now that having big financial backing is no longer the defining factor. Ms. Day's answer won a place in my heart alongside Linda Chorney.

She said, "The biggest challenge now is, What do you do once you've made something?"

• What does Felicia Day do once she's made "The Guild?"
• What does Linda Chorney do once she's made "Emotional Jukebox?"
• What does Amanda Palmer do once she's made "Theatre Is Evil?"

(By the way, if you haven't had a chance to see Amanda Palmer's TED talk, take a look at it now. It is pertinent to the point I'm making. Go ahead. I'll wait.)

Each of these delightful people takes a slightly different path to the same destination: Going Viral. If you're thinking, "so what, I write books," please consider Felicia Day's question,

"What do you do once you've made your book?"

Your book might be a stinking pile of excrescent pornography. But hey, there's a market for that. You just have to make sure your work becomes known to your audience. And it is easier for the excrescent pornographers out there. You know who you are and you know others like you. All you have to do to sell to that market is to flash the appropriate trust cues and insinuate yourself into all the excrescent porn message boards.

Seriously, niche markets are good because you can readily identify members thereof. If you think that so-and-so's book is just Twilight fan-fic, then you'd better tell so-and-so to post on all the Twilight boards.

Humans sort ourselves into tribes. We choose things we're interested in and then we go looking for like-minded people. And when we find products that are tailored to our tribe, we're more inclined to buy it.

Here's an example. Consider Science Fiction. I love Science Fiction and have ever since I was a little boy in grade school reading the classics. The golden age of the 1950s produced the SF I love best. Yet, Science Fiction is a huge, huge market with millions of people following blue police call boxes and identifying their religion as Jedi. (Sith is cooler--it's just misunderstood.)

Because of my long-standing love affair with Science Fiction, I wrote some stories and had good luck selling them to Raygun Revival and other markets. Raygun Revival is a good fit because they are well suited to what I love most.

But I didn't learn from the fact that the SF category is far too broad to target.

I collected about a dozen of my best Science Fiction stories--time travel stories that form a coherent arc. The stories follow the career of a pair of time travelers named Sid & Nell. These stories went into an anthology called Finding Time. I put my current work in progress, Steamship To Kashmir on hold for about a year while I put a fine coat of polish on Finding Time. I hired Joanne Renaud to do art for each story and I hired Kemp Lyons to do a trailer for it. Then I put it out there with a big splash.

What did this accomplish? Modest sales and INCREASED sales of The Aristotelian. I had stopped mentioning The Aristotelian story once I brought out Finding Time. Yet, while sales of Finding Time have declined over the months, sales of The Aristotelian, have held steady!

What? How could this be?

Why is this? Because the market for mystery stories where the detective is Sherlock Holmes or Mycroft Holmes is much more easily targeted. I can find Holmesians more easily than I can find generic time-travel fans. (Maybe this is just a reflection on my abilities, not the shape of the market.)

Felicia Day speaks of the potential for finding an audience. She wonders, "Where is my audience?" And all day, every day, she works to get the word out there to that audience. For the Guild, she says 90% of the work is after the production is done. That's why she tries to target a specific audience, the narrower the more efficiently one can get the word out.

She tries to really think like an audience member, which is easy because she was a World of Warcraft addict. She tries to find out where is somebody who is going to enjoy her work. She asks, "Where are they on the Internet today?" "What kind of person are they?" If I were trying to find my ebook, how would I hear about it?

The key paradigm shift is to think from an audience point of view. She says "trying to force behavior on the Internet is like herding cats--if you are really intelligent about getting the word out then it will be much easier and it'll catch on and your audience will help you because they see what you are doing is grass roots and you don't have a big machine behind you."

That's what I've been missing. I have been needing my audience to help me and I've not done enough to ask for that help or encourage my readers to help. I may not know how to do this viral promotion thing, but I'll wager people who have bought The Aristotelian or Finding Time are a lot smarter than I am. My biggest challenge is just finding an audience.

Can you help me?