Ambition

January 24th, 2011 § 0

We want. You, as a writer want something. To tell a story. Have your face on the back of a book jacket above a blurbed bio. The Times Bestseller list. Respect. Something that will outlive you. Your friends want, too. Love. Kids. The ubiquitous catchall happiness. Everyone wants. Some people daydream about it. If I had a little more control. A little change. A chance. Some peace and quiet. Most of them wouldn’t change too much. Nothing major, anyway. No one wants to seem greedy. It’s not like they want billions. Just a couple million. A little raise. An extra bedroom. Just so I can retire early. Put my kid through college. Pay off the house. Move to Myrtle Beach and golf year-round. It’s not too much to ask.

But the people who don’t want billions are the people who go to casinos on weekends instead of their offices. Who’d rather gamble instead of work. They’re the ones who find reasons not to go out and make even their modest dreams happen. They want, but they don’t need. The difference isn’t greed. It’s ambition, that strange mix of ego and determination. Ambition is about accomplishment. Doing something. Creating something. Building something. Improving something. The most interesting stories are written about ambitious people. People who’ve funneled a narrow focus into their eyes and charged at their target with foolhardy abandon. You only ever have a book in you if it comes out of you. You’re only going to get better with work. Your character is only going to be interesting if he’s got something he has to do, to understand, to figure out, whatever mix of needs that creates the requisite hunger in him to go after it. To save someone, solve something, find himself, reach, attain—or not. These are the stories of lives lived. As opposed to lives spent shuffling through daydreams and milquetoast contentedness.

A hungry writer, like all the turks streaming out of the Chambers Street station downtown, is ambitious. It’s an interesting thing to be ambitious. It means that you not only want something, but you’re working every day to get it. No one has to tell you to work. You may not know what to do, but you want to learn. You’re humble enough to know when you don’t know. You’re thinking about it even when you’re not. The nest of synapses in your head collapsing into that singular focus, connecting everything back to your story, your work, this life you’ve chosen. You’re doing it.

Think about how interesting it is to be compelled to work like this, and then think about what you’ve been writing. If your story is going to be worth reading, your character has to be doing something too. Hiding, searching, working, running, chasing. Subtle, complex things; lying, thinking, strategizing, doubting, worrying. You have to be willing to almost break him, to take almost everything away, to leave him stranded, cornered, to flash a blade and mean to use it.

If you’re character’s not doing something then he’s wasting his time. And you’re wasting yours. There has to be a reason, even if it’s subtle. If he hasn’t left the couch in a week what’s he hiding from? What is he waiting for? What’s he afraid of? If he spends all his time in a bar or getting high, what whisper in his heart is he trying to mute? Don’t waste your time. Don’t waste your readers’. If you’ve gotten what you want out of a scene or moment, end it. Keep things moving. There’s no time to waste. Be lean. Be working. Be ambitious. Because I can promise you this: it’s going to take more than you think you’ve got.

Why authors should care about social media

January 6th, 2011 § 0

Ahh, the great question for those of us who have notions about big “L” Literature: How is social media important? Forget branding yourself. Forget followers and tweets and friends. Climb up this spiral stair with me and take a look at where we really are, as authors.

Facebook, Twitter, even blogs, owe their existence to the hope that people want to communicate with one another, hear what others have to say, start conversations, build relationships, learn, grow, actualize—and that we want do it all together. As they’ve evolved, the form of communication has shrunk drastically (though I would argue the value of communications has increased). Communications have been projectized, streamlined to focused on a single objective so readers/friends/followers can get it and then get on with their lives.

As a writer, I look at a character limit of 140 as a hurdle, even an insult. I’ve got sentences in my book that could be hours-long tweeting miniseries. How can anyone be expected to tell a story in 140 characters?

“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” ~Hemingway

And we’re done. I even had space to put in the attribution. That’s a story, and by a pretty decent writer (if you go in for literary landscape-altering talents). The point isn’t that it can be done—we all know it can be. The point is to understand the validity of it, and what that means for your readers. Not how your book would look as a Twitter feed, but how your readers expectations have changed.

Social media are idealistic tools. They hope we want to communicate. They hope people want to share. They hope to build movements where no one previously could. That’s an incredible amount of idealism to pack into a bunch of relatively short sentences. And there’s a particular demographic that’s particularly bent toward such idealism: youth. Remember when you were a kid and you couldn’t focus your thoughts because you were so excited? You could be building a Lego castle one minute then playing tag with your friends the next. It was a constant search, the proverbial “childlike” sense of curiosity and wonder, that was really interesting. That’s what social media allows us to do now. To be constantly engaging and disengaging, choosing, learning, expanding our field of play and deepening our understanding of the strategies and tactics we’ll use to win. And it’s all done with people we’re interested in, with our friends, our family, our peers and our rivals. We’re invested personally, professionally, and emotionally. Now that’s a great story.

Which means our stories have to not just compete, but beat all that stimulation. People who really use these media, use them as tools, fun tools, social tools, but tools. Unless we give readers something else, something better to focus on, they’re going to go play with the other children. We have to write stories that make people care more. That’ doesn’t mean catering to a common denominator. Exactly the opposite. It means being more unique. Providing more insight, better, more surprising perspectives. It means respecting the audience enough to know that their time is valuable, that your style is unique enough and your characters engaging enough to merit their investment.

Forget marketing. We’ve got work to do if we’re going to steal a few hours’ time with people who could be doing anything else.

All Hail the Acrobat

January 3rd, 2011 § 0

Around the time I finished college I was passed a copy of a book by Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All. I loved it. And what tends to happen when I’m seduced by an author—Tom Robbins being the second of what has turned out to be many (Hunter Thompson, in college, being the first)—is that I just start reading everything I can get my hands on. I spent my post-collegiate summer backpacking through Europe and catching up on what I’d been missing. Still Life with Woodpecker. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. Another Roadside Attraction. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. And what I recently re-read during the lull between Christmas and New Year’s, Jitterbug Perfume.

Robbins is a bit of a lyrical acrobat. He’s not overly wordy, but he’s playful, and his prose, when he really gets rolling, can read like well-punctuated verse.

Lily poured the last of the champagne. Briefly, she regarded the uneaten oysters, which, although beginning to look increasingly flabby, lay in perfect repose upon the remaining hemispheres of the dream houses in which they’d once enjoyed such exquisite solitude. Two strong hands and a steel blade were required to storm the privacy of the oyster’s dark entrance hall. It takes a team of four horses to force the giant clam of the South Seas to yawn against its will. Every passive mollusk demonstrates the hidden vigor of introversion, the power that is contained in peace.

When I think of wordsmiths I think of Updike or Colum McCann, among others. The tenor of their words is a deep, low vibration, a stand-up bass string tied, at one end to the reader’s heart and at the other to the utter “seriousness” of their chosen topic. Reading Robbins again, it occurred to me that it’s probably a measure of some myopathy in our culture that we put so much stock in being “serious” about “serious” matters. Robbins is a player. He’s improv with talent. Jazz. He doesn’t present seriously, sneaking jokes in sentence predicates or directly addressing the reader, which in truth has probably caused some critics to discount the serious quality of his writing over the longer term. But he’s good. Instead of a stand-up bass, he’s more like a banjo. His voice is home-brewed moonshine, natural, entirely unique, and carries within its sonorous notes the author’s relish of putting words on the page. Salman Rushdie is fairly credited for the ingenuity of his prose, but if you’re reading two of their books side by side (which I am now), I’d say it’s a photo finish. Rushdie, being the only popular novelist to have ever been issued a fatwa by a terrorist, is by default considered a “serious” author and artist. And rightly so. But Robbins has sort of been overlooked. This is a guy who’s been hailed as a “vital natural resource,” and if you drop his name in conversation half the people you’re talking to (maybe more at this point) will tilt their heads and squint. Tom Who?

Which gets us back to Jitterbug Perfume. Sure, there’s something about perfume in there, but it’s really about cheating death by living, which is to say, good hygiene, healthy eating, lots of gymnastic, Kama-Sutric awesome sex, and of course, good, harmonized vibrations by way of breathing properly (you’ll understand.) It’s about the power of memory to recall the ones we love, and vitality found in joy. There’s a lot to unpack, and Robbins does it at turns brilliantly and hilariously and touchingly.

Alobar, king of a pre-Romanic Bavarian tribe, will be ritually killed if his followers find out he’s got a gray hair. (Can anyone say “metaphor”?) He’s indignant. He still feels vital. Why must he die? Why, for that matter, must anyone?

Priscilla, waitress to for tables 5-15 at a Seattle Mexican joint, is queen of nothing. She is, however, a genius chemist. She has a bottle of perfume that someone found in the mud of the Mississippi Delta near New Orleans, and it’s perfect. Unique, erotic, human yet delicate. It’s going to make her millions if she can just figure out what’s in it. She knows it’s got jasmine and citrus, but there’s something else, a base note that she can’t figure out. What’s been added to give these otherwise common scents such vigor?

The book is Robbins answer, and along the way, the wordplay and storytelling are nothing short of stellar. Jitterbug Perfume is, as the cover blurb promises, an epic, spanning hundreds of years, love, religion, science, politics, and the great adventure of millennial love. All packed into less than 350 pages. Take a gander. And give Mr. Robbins his due while you’re at it.

Confidence, man

December 20th, 2010 § 0

It’s almost impossible for me to overestimate how much I love the term “confidence man.” Not con man. A con-man’s just a sleazy, greasy, smarmy rat bastard. He’s wearing a decade-old suit and the lapels are shiny. His shoes are scuffed. His gold watch needs to lose a link. His eyes dart around a room on entry, looking for prey. Truly confident, intelligent people make him a little nervous. People who demonstrate they know more about what he’s talking about than he does make him want to change the subject. That’s a con-man.

But a confidence man. He’s smart. Earnest. He cares. There’s a continuity to his movements, an economy like that of an experienced athlete; from from his shoes to his haircut to the balanced assertion of his voice. There’s nothing that doesn’t fit. He’s dignified. Almost regal. He doesn’t steal. Never. He listens so well, promises so immaculately, he makes you want to give whatever he wants away. Which is in fact exactly what you do. Oh, it’s still a bit of a swindle, but you can’t help admiring him just a little bit for it. He’s elevated his craft to art. A great improvisational actor with a long view of the story he’s involved in, the role he’s playing, and what he wants.

The term confidence man is shortened, I’m sure, not just for brevity’s sake, but because labeling someone thus seems to inflate their talent (and insinuate our relative innocence in the face of his charms), while “con-man” correspondingly debases it (and inflates our character). It takes something special to be more than a con-man, in any business. And rest assured there are con men in every business. Writing’s no different. When you start it’s not much more than a con. You’re not sure if you can pull it off. There’s a hollow twang you think you hear inside your words. An echo of the authors you love, maybe. The sentences don’t quite line up flush. It’s a grind. Incongruous puzzle pieces.

But no one’s born a confidence man. Your friends might tell you you’re great, but they’re not going to care too much if you fail. Your mom might remember how you used to write stories for your school paper and say something like “you’ve always been a writer.” But when you’re waiting to be published, waiting for an agent, waiting for something other than a form rejection letter, she’s not going to be there waiting with you. People can love you with every ounce of strength they have, hope for you with same, pull for you, pray for you, and shower you with praise. They can’t give you confidence.

That comes from practice. From hearing it out loud. From patiently cutting and framing and searching for just the right word. From the constancy of effort and explosion of genius that comes only when you least expect it, when you don’t even know it’s happening and suddenly the whole chapter pours out of you faster than you can get it down. When you’re laying in bed at three in the morning and can’t sleep because there’s something building in your head. That’s when it stops being a con. When you know you’ve done it and you know it’s gotten better every time you’ve tried. It doesn’t happen the first time, but it happens. If you’re afraid to keep going, to keep pushing because you don’t think you have it, then you’ve already lost. You have to expect that your best is not just enough, but that it’s more than enough. Be humble enough to know where you stand, but believe that you can always get better. Confidence, more than anything else, is a learned skill.

Empathy, working from the inside out

November 25th, 2010 § 0

When I finished my book and sent out the first batch of query letters I was hoping that the innate genius of it would carry the day. Some hot-shot agent would call asking for a partial, barely able to formulate sentences because he was so awed by the first chapter. I dreamed of skyrocketing to literary stardom, interviews on Oprah, and my face on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. I was hoping for all that, but I was planning for something different. I was planning for a career.

I had a few friends in the digital creative field who I peppered with questions. The first: “What’s it like?” The second: “Do you like it?” And finally: “How do I get in?” (This last I’m still trying to work out. Hint, hint.)

Being a scribbler my first thought was copywriting. Scripts, site content, clever tag lines. But having a modicum of respect for the writing profession I realized that it’s a unique skill, doing what copywriters do. It takes time to learn. I’ve never written a treatment for a commercial, never spent an hour looking for the four right words to sum up a campaign. My second thought was project management, since that’s what I did in my previous incarnation as a corporate drone.

But the fact remained that I didn’t have experience in the business, so a friend suggested I develop a 30 second pitch, something I could say to someone who was only going to listen as long as we were in the elevator. Here’s more or less what I came up with:

Empathy. This much I know: Good stories are experiences for readers. We, as readers, identify. Not completely, but with the feeling, the spirit of the story. It’s a power not in the plot, but in the theme. From a writer’s point of view, readers must be, in the most melodramatic terms, “touched” by literature. The same is true in marketing. There are all sorts of things great marketing should be, and there are many thousands of people more qualified than me to write about it, but the one thing I do know is that in an increasingly fragmented and segmented consumer environment, the ability to create empathetic relationship between your story and your audience is a huge factor in determining a brand or campaign’s success.

If you’re a content creator (in digital, fiction, or non), your goal should be to make people want to spend time with you. Tell stories they can relate to. That doesn’t mean trying to intuit exactly what someone is thinking, their intentions. It doesn’t mean trying to tell them what you think they want to hear. It means presenting unique content that manages to tap the spirit of something shared. It means working from the inside out. Look beyond trends, beyond the external, and thinking about motives. The emotions and desires we all share that drive us. It works. Smart companies have humbled their marketing language accordingly. The pusherman, we-tell-you-what-to-like, one-way dynamic has a high rate of failure. If marketing is a form of storytelling–and I believe it is–then it has to be about engagement. A dialectic. Empathy.

(What gets really interesting, across digital, fiction, journalism, etc., is how discerning the most knowledgeable content consumers become as they learn more about whatever media interests them. These are the people that drive the art form. But that’s a topic for a different post.)

A cynic might say nothing’s changed. That by tapping into these sub-dermal layers slick capitalist dogs are just finding new ways to manipulate us, which presumes that consumers are powerless or stupid or both. I like to think it’s about companies respecting us more, recognizing the enduring power of great stories.

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