I’m Late, I’m Late, for a very important….

Cyberspace and the digital world conjure for me the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland and the rabbit hole.  I feel all too often that something I’ve sent off via the internet disappears into a rabbit hole to arrive not at the intended destination but some alien world across the galaxy from us.  I fear that the same could happen to intellectual property rights when dealing with digital or online formats. 

Recently, my scientist friend and I were talking about the Shostakovich 5th Symphony, specifically a performance by the Minnesota Orchestra conducted by Osmo Vanska that I heard in concert several years ago.  I wanted her to hear it and suggested she check out the Minnesota Orchestra’s broadcast concert archive at Minnesota Public Radio’s website.  But the concert wasn’t there!  I felt like I’d dropped suddenly down the rabbit hole because I’d perused that archive in the past.  Where had it gone?  A very helpful fellow answered my query, telling me that they no longer offered those concerts online due to rights issues. 

As a music-lover, I was not pleased by this.  But as a writer who owns intellectual property, I understood the broad issue.  Musicians, like writers, create a product, and like anyone who makes something to sell, they want to be paid for it.  In the realm of books, we now have e-rights for e-readers or other electronic formats that can be licensed to those who produce the e-readers.  At the moment, publishers are processing this fact, revising their boilerplate publishing contracts in order to clarify who owns the e-rights and for how long.  No writer should give these rights away (or any other rights, for that matter), and allowing someone to license the e-rights “forever” or some equivalent would be giving those rights away. 

Kindle, Sony’s e-reader, and other devices recently introduced to the reading public mean that the future is here now.  But what does that mean?  To me, it means only that readers have another way in which to experience stories.  They can read the words on paper in books, listen to them on CDs, or download them from the internet stores to read on their digital device.  It means that writers own another set of intellectual property rights for which they need to be paid, as they are for printed books and audiobooks. 

I’ve seen people on city buses with Kindles.  In sunlight, the screens are difficult to see, at least from my vantage point looking over a bus rider’s shoulder to peek at what he was reading.  It reminded me of the electronic readers in the Star Trek universe, specifically Star Trek: The Next Generation.   In Evan Quinn’s world, only 40 years in the future, people have the choice of how to read their books and magazines, just as we have today.  What enchants Evan, however, are “real” books.  He loves the smell of them.

Perhaps those Minnesota Orchestra concerts will remain archived but unavailable online, but that’s OK.  I think dealing with not having something at one’s fingertips, with not getting instant gratification could be a good thing….

That All-Important Relationship

Back in the day (ahem), editors edited.  They guided writers, taught them about language and grammar, illuminated narrative structure for them.  The best and wisest understood that the novel was the author’s not theirs and never tried to impose their suggestions for changes on the writing.  They were the pair of eyes a writer sorely needed to gain objectivity about what they’d written.  Those eyes needed a sharp but compassionate intelligence behind them, with a broad canvas of experience and knowledge.  Such editors still exist, but more and more, the most recent generation of editors do very little actual editing, from what I’ve heard from other writers and from editors themselves in published interviews.  The newest incarnation of the old-fashioned editor is the freelance editor.

Magazine editors are a different creature entirely.  The basics are the same, but the format is shorter, and the turnaround time faster.  A really good editor responds with specifics of what he/she needs; and while working with a writer on a piece, makes specific suggestions, focusing in on the parts that need work and those that please the editor.  I’ve learned a lot from good editors.  I really enjoy working with them.  The best respect my writing, my efforts, my time and intelligence, as I respect them.  They are not adversaries but allies in the process of publication. 

How I wish every editor out there were good!  But there is a range, as in any business, of intelligence, competence and ability to communicate to writers what they need from them.  There is a range of writers of intelligence and competence, too, but I want to focus on the editor here because more often than not, the focus is on the writer: how a writer needs to work with an editor. 

What to do when you encounter a less than stellar editor?  The first thing I ask myself is: how badly do I want this gig?  Sometimes, publication in the magazine is worth the aggravation of working with a less than stellar editor, depending on which magazine.  Sometimes, not.  The second thing: How much will I be paid?  The money better be good.  If not, I would respectfully take my leave.  Working with a difficult editor takes patience, clarity of your communication, and fearless but respectful questioning.  Beyond a certain point, vague feedback, changes without substantiation regarding the editor’s thinking specific to a sentence or paragraph, or lack of clarity in communication can frustrate me beyond words, especially when the editor becomes frustrated with me because I’m not getting what he/she has said.  But I’ve never walked out on a commitment.  I do the best I can and chalk it up to my continuing education.  Sometimes it’s a genuine relief if the editor kills the piece.

Most editors know what they’re doing, what they want and are able to communicate it well.  In the all-important working relationship between editor and writer, the editor has a responsibility to the writer as well as vice versa.  We just don’t hear about it as much as what the writer’s responsibility is toward the editor.  Both must want to forge the best possible writing between them…..

For Crying Out Loud

After writing last week about music that makes me cry, I spent the last week thinking about crying, which led to characters crying, which led to novels that have made me cry, which led me back to quality art and how emotions must be a part of the criteria for quality.  But how?

My first thought involved a recent horror movie much in the same vein as The Blair Witch Project, i.e. made on a shoestring budget and now raking in the big bucks because it’s scaring the bejeezus out of audiences.  I’m not a big horror movie fan.  I don’t enjoy being frightened.  It’s not entertaining to me.  But I love suspense, especially psychological suspense.  Much as I hate to admit it, horror and suspense movies are closely related.  They’re both scary, but in different ways.  One uses external things to frighten characters and the viewers, the other uses internal things.  In the former, the viewer really doesn’t have to invest emotionally or intellectually in the characters; just as the external things or forces affect the characters, so do they affect the viewer.  But in the latter, the story demands that investment.  Character motivation and behavior create the suspense.  For example, I watched an episode of the excellent Criminal Minds last night in which one character, a young man, fears that he’s descending into homicidal psychosis.  He’s at the age when serial killers are thought to begin acting out their early fantasies.  He’s also an extremely intelligent teen who seeks out the genius PhD on the BAU team for help.  Meanwhile, the BAU team works a serial killer case that mirrors the teen’s worst fears about himself.  What will the teen do?  Is he actually the serial killer?  This plotline created the most intense suspense for me, even more than the serial killer case.  The ending was a brilliant use of editing and paying off my emotional investment in the teen.  I was scared for the teen, not of him. 

A writing “rule”: if the character cries, the reader won’t.  There’s a corollary rule for screenwriting, i.e. never have a character cry more than once or twice in the story.  The thinking is that if the emotion is acted out on screen, viewers won’t feel it.  I tend to disagree, but I still agree with the rule.  It’s annoying to see a character crying all the time.  On the other hand, if I cry while I’m writing a scene, chances are my readers will also be affected emotionally.  I think the same rule applies for emotional expression of all kinds.  On the other hand, how a character expresses emotion, or doesn’t, is an important character detail.  Is he comfortable expressing emotion?  Does she repress her emotions?  Or does the character only express one emotion, e.g. anger?  Character development needs to take into account the emotional being of the character, and not in cliched ways but in genuine, human ways.  How was his emotional being molded and shaped?  By whom?  A character’s psychology includes his emotional being.

What novels have made you cry?  My most recent tearful experience with a book was The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  I’m still not certain if I cried from relief, sorrow or fear at the end of that novel.  I felt all those emotions.  Another deep emotional experience with a novel was The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.  The novel possessed an intense suspense in the bomb-defusing sections, and for me, a growing horror in the other sections about the English patient.  As I read, my hatred and disgust for Almasy grew until the revelation about his torment and the reason he had not returned for Katherine.  That left me gasping, like Ondaatje had punched me in the chest, followed by tears.  Brilliant.

Humans need stories.  Whether it is for us to learn about life, about how to live, about other people, or to experience the range of emotions we’re capable of, stories give us far more than they take…..

The Story Behind the Story

“Journalism, done right, is enormously powerful precisely because it does not seek power.  It seeks truth.  Those who forsake it to shill for a product or candidate or a party or an ideology diminish their own power.”  (From Mark Bowden’s article in the October 2009 The Atlantic entitled “The Story Behind the Story.”)

In the 2048 of the Perceval series of novels, America is a dystopian country where the guarantees of the Bill of Rights no longer exist.  Politicians and other “elected” officials pay lipservice to freedom of speech, of religion, and the press.  Journalists are no more than scribes for the New Economic Party, or talking heads on television news shows.  The NEP controls information and its flow for the general population.  I had considered, at one point, of making Joseph Caine, the composer who mentored Evan Quinn, a journalist who defies the NEP by writing investigative reports exposing their unconstitutional activities.  Caine would have taken over the story, I realized, stolen it from Evan.  I returned to Joseph Caine, composer.  But in Evan’s family tree, I gave him an uncle who was a journalist, and who had been rounded up in the First Purification and never heard from again.  In a very early draft of Perceval (at that time, entitled “Shadow Lovers”), the first chapter had been set on the last day of school when Evan was ten years old.  He and his best friend Paul were ambushed by the neighborhood Vigiciv gang but rescued by the neighborhood bum, who, Evan discovered, only pretended to be drunk.  This bum, Adam Burns, had been a journalist and had known Evan’s uncle.  Once again, the journalist threatened to take over the story.  So, I abandoned Adam Burns and the entire idea of a journalist in Evan’s life.  A shadow of Adam Burns remains in what Evan chooses to wear in the wee hours of the morning after his last tour concert in Vienna.  Such is the way a writer’s mind works.

The other day, I read Mark Bowden’s article, The Story Behind the Story, and as I read, a chill went through me.  He took the example of the early coverage of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court to show that what was being reported about her background and beliefs in newspapers, newsmagazines and on television hadn’t originated from hard-working reporters researching and investigating Sotomayor’s professional life to present a fair, balanced profile of her, but from hard-working bloggers searching the internet for videos that they could use to smear her essentially and cater to their conservative readers.  The idea for this article rose out of his surprise and curiosity that all the television stations reported the exact same thing about Sotomayor on the day President Obama nominated her, i.e. the exact same video clips.  In the article, he deconstructs the videos, including the context where none existed before, talks with the bloggers who originally found them and released them online, and shows how the internet and the proliferation of bloggers have in many, many ways made genuine democratic debate nearly impossible because of the adversarial nature of what he calls “the post-journalistic world” that’s been created via the internet.  In the article’s conclusion, he contrasts what reporters do with what bloggers do, and shows how reporters, working in the old journalism style, would contribute to a national dialogue by presenting fair and balanced reportage, challenging each side without taking sides.  What chilled me to the core was the quote at the top of this essay.  The idea that power entered into journalism in any way now, that reporters had become no more than bloggers disseminating what they find on the internet in service to one side or the other in order to gain power, to win. 

Now I understood the complaints that mainstream media leans to the liberal left, that it favored one candidate over others last year, and so on.  Now I see it.  Now I get it.  And it could be the beginning of the end of freedom of the press…and the beginning of the creation of the America in 2048.  Or not…..