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Thursday, 24 May 2007
Hone, Hone, on the Range
Honing my craft.
Define.
You'll remember in this blog a while back me saying no-one at any level of writing could define "Show, don't tell." Well, here's another meaningless little would-be aphorism for you. "You should spend more time honing your craft."
Absolutely, all for it, if only we knew what it was.
Okay. My chosen craft is writing. Now I must hone it.
Hands up those who know what honing is, or when they last did it? Do you even know how it feels to hone?
If we are not exactly sure how to hone, or even why we might hone, how the fuck do 'they' propose we actually do hone?
Hone -vb. To sharpen or polish with or as if with a hone.
Hone n. a fine whetstone, esp for sharpening razors.
Fine, the translation therefore is:- "You should spend more time sharpening your craft with a whetstone until it is sharp as a razor."
Useful advice for woodcarving maybe, not so great for a novel. Although I do think the world needs more razor-sharp everything. On the other hand I'm looking around me and seeing a hell of a lot of professional writing that's as sharp as a woolly sweater. I'm guessing there's not a whole lot of honing going on.
In all my sad and sorry years of being a writer I have only ever seen this maxim spouted in two places, the same two places, coincidentally, where I have also seen "Show don't tell." In the ranks of perpetual amateurs and in form letters from large publishing houses.
I once even managed to combine these two when I got an editor from a large publishing house who talked about writing with all the stunning incomprehension of someone who'd never actually done it, plus she managed to use both phrases at once.
But I like to think she was the exception rather than the rule. (If only.)
I came across "honing your skills" tonight on a sci-fi writer's blog. He/they (he was part of a writers' group – aieeeeeeee) offered forums where you could "hone your skills." Which made me immediately click on the little cross on the top of my screen with the darkly muttered words, "Oh, fuck off and die."
Talk about instantly losing your credentials and your audience. That in turn brought me up short, wondering why my reaction was so emphatic, and I realised just how often I read those words on the net and how utterly, unbelievably stupid they are.
It's like some universal panacea for the original-thinking-challenged. All these poor suckers going to their little websites, their local classes, believing that 'doing' 1,000 words every Thursday and letting Needle-head, Broadbin, Strawberry-moon and Carribbean_boy 'critique' them is somehow "honing their skills."
Sharp as a razor? I don't think so. If there was anything sharp about them they wouldn't be doing it in the first place.
Is it all just a question of ignorance then? Is it simply that they have not yet learned better? Yes and no. The very young may be duped for a while by such pocket catchphrases, but anyone who has been writing for more than a year or two should begin to notice what works and what doesn't. More importantly, if you're serious about writing you shouldn't have to fall back on hackneyed nonsense to express yourself. If you're not sure what the phrase means exactly why the fuck are you using it?
No, there is something a little more sneaky and dubious afoot with these cheery little phrases, and it's the form letters that give us the clue.
Why would 'the professionals' use them, if they don't mean anything?
You've just answered your own question. Because they don't mean anything. That's what a form letter is, an official statement of not meaning anything.
If a publisher never wants to hear from you again he isn't going to offer you genuine criticisms of your work. He doesn't want to get into a debate with you, he wants you to go away. So this is what he says:-
You should "buy a copy of the Writers & Artists Yearbook." – Translation: Go away and don't bother me. I'm not a fucking resource.
You should "hone your craft." – Translation: I didn't read your MS, so I have no idea what the quality of your prose is. As this statement doesn't mean anything I am not actually asking you to do anything you could actually do, and therefore you will go away and not bother me.
You should "show, not tell". Translation: No two people understand the same thing by this phrase, therefore you have no idea what I am asking you to do, therefore you cannot do it, and come back and bother me.
They have a lot more of these "not legally binding" expressions they love to use, all equally vacuous, but because they have appeared on so many form letters, for so many years, amateur writers have adopted them like Pavlov's dogs learned to get food – the publishers keep saying them so they must be true.
What must be true? They haven't actually said anything. That's the point.
This is why falling over phrases like these on 'writers' sites makes me switch off – if they are so undiscriminating and gullible (or patronising and pedantic) to use this line in bull, what could they possibly teach me?
The use of any of these phrases by a writer – amateur, professional or somewhere in-between – is a sign of bullshitting, plain and simple. Sometimes professional writers will use them, but usually only on amateur writers. After all, they've learned from the masters on how to make the little people go away.
These phrases show up most often used by one amateur against another as a sad attempt at one-upmanship. Among the legions of amateur writers on the net their use is rife, screaming a total lack of genuine experience. You can hardly go ten yards in any direction, in any field of amateur writing, without falling over some 'Queenie' type (and it is usually a woman, I'm sorry to say) holding court over her disciples, captivating them with her writerly wisdom, which is supposedly based on writing erratic quantities of unedited short 'stories', seen by no-one but her net acquaintances, but which is really based on memorising as many useful maxims and phrases from 'professional writers' (i.e. manuals and articles by other amateurs) as she can.
A bona fide is as good as it sounds, to someone who's even more ignorant than you are.
I've been a full-time, professional writer for 20-odd years (can't remember and I'm not fucking working it out). I have enough writing credits to tattoo both arms and part of my chest, but you will never see a list of them anywhere.
That's not anywhere. Ever.
Why? Because parading old writing credits is sad beyond belief and a sign of rank amateurism. The only time I ever used them was when my CV was sent to magazines that had not used me before. I couldn't even tell you now who I wrote for. I can barely remember three of them… when I try hard. I tend to remember the ones I missed rather than the ones I got (thus proving you regret what you don't do rather than what you do). I rely on my human memory stick (Mr Scratchmann) to remember shit like that.
I stopped freelancing in the eighties, although I did a little briefly in the nineties – why the fuck would I want to remember what I did twenty years ago? What bearing would it have on anything? Why would that impress anyone? Other than sad amateurs, of course.
It's like the club thing. Remember Avocado (see preceding blog) with her Romance Writers of America? Well, in the eighties when I was freelancing we got the notion that it would help our credentials to join The Society of Authors.
For those not in the know this is the writers 'club' in the UK. It's one of Britain's two professional bodies, a sort of writers Trades Union. It's expensive to join, but, more important than that, you can't just get in for the asking. It has a strict professional credits system. You have to have done not only enough, but the right kind of work, paying the right level of money – no five copies and a stick of bubble gum for these mothers. What's more, it gets far more applications than it can handle and it doesn't need your money.
Well, we applied and got accepted. We were members. We belonged.
And what changed? Nothing. After the first glow of 'I must be a real writer' wore off we realised that it didn't get us more work – the quality of our work and our reputations did that. All the Soc of Auths did was cost us fees. We stayed in it for a year or two and then quietly let it slip away, unnoticed and unmissed.
You are only as good as your writing. Not your proposed writing, or the writing you would do if you weren't too busy criticising others' writing. Not the writing you'd do if you were writing the screenplay to the new Batman, not the writing you could do because you are a member of the Romance Writers of America, but your actual bona fide writing. That stuff you're supposed to be honing, remember?
Come to think of it, that's what honing might be if it actually existed – just sitting down and writing.
Rather like this now, in fact.
Fuck, I've been honing all along and I didn't even know it.
Well, whaddya know?
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet read DANNY? You can check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read a BIG extract for Free! Or grab a copy on Amazon here.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads)here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust. 
23:19 Posted in Blog , Books , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Wednesday, 16 May 2007
Hey, You Big Thief - Stop Hitting That Little Thief!
PLEASE NOTE: As the following is a long-winded tale I have assumed prior knowledge in my reader so that I don't die of old-age and you don't die of boredom. If you have not read the preceding blog, and its attached comments, it will all be meaningless. It actually is meaningless. If, however, you wish to follow the rest of us into the realms of Franz Kafka then you need to read Dragging Cassandra Clare to the Gas Chamber before you tackle this. May God be with you.
I am writing to you from deep inside the hole in the doughnut, seduced so far into the darkness I may never get out again. This is indeed a tale told by an idiot, full of the sound and the fury, signifying nothing.
Following the Cassandra Clare epic as an interesting study of envy did not quite prepare me for the full extent of the surrealism I was to encounter, the sheer mind-boggling dimensions of this play from The Theatre of the Absurd.
This is indeed a story of envy and an envy that grows more and more uncontrollable in some parallel universe where the story of The Princess and the Pea is turned into a matter of life and death.
It would be easy to imagine it was about Cassandra Clare, arch plagiarist and cunning manipulator of gullible fangirls, but it isn't.
It's the tale of the insignificant one, the lurker, the lethal eavesdropper. It's the tale of Iago, a character I know and love.
Our Iago is one Avocado. The whole of the woman's tragedy can be summed up in that one word. I might as well stop writing now.
Avocado goes more commonly by the name of White Serpent and it is in that schizophrenic disparity that her whole essence is contained - one part of her a dark, dull, fat-assed little fruit that is so flavourless everyone thinks it's a vegetable, the epitome of bland; the other a thing of elegant beauty, slim, a rare albino, feared, respected, mystical, magical – and as far removed from the pedestrian truth of an Avocado as only an internet name can be.
I lay awake last night, knowing I'd have to write this today, wondering how the hell I could do it in anything less than twenty pages, but all I could think about was why, in God's name would anyone call themself Avocado?
Why?
Is it self-deprecation taken to some insane height? It's not cute, like calling yourself Little Cabbage, say, or Petit Choux. Or ditzy, like calling yourself Carrot Top, or Potato-head. It's just cruel. It's the kind of thing a malicious parent would call their least-favoured child. "Yes, you're my dumpy little Avocado, my little fatty. You'll never be a beauty, will you? Never mind, that acne will clear up some day. If you just stop pigging out on chocolate. Dip you in mayo and put you in a BLT, my little piggy-pig. Oink-oink. Ha, ha, ha, ha, haaaa…"
I'm not labouring this point just for fun. I want to show what an odd schism it reveals in her character, because it has a bearing on what happens in this sad little tale.
It begins in 2001, now six years ago. And it begins with plagiarism. Rampant plagiarism, on a fan fiction site called FanFiction.Net, in a Harry Potter fandom.
Anyone who wishes to remove themselves from the strange netherworld of the hole in the doughnut can do so right now. Because the sad truth of this entire story, the inescapable, irrefutable truth (and it's not often you can say that about truth) is that there can be no plagiarism in fan fiction, because ALL FAN FICTION IS PLAGIARISM.
It is as absurd to discuss the ethics (good Christ!) of plagiarism in fan fiction as it is to discuss the ethics of criminals stealing pens during a bank robbery.
I read a lot of whining and bitching during the fifteen, incredibly detailed pages of Avocado's defence (see second link in KL's comment, last blog). And I hear all about "the grey areas" of plagiarism.
There are grey areas in plagiarism only in a court room. In a fan fiction forum the only grey under discussion can be in levels of hypocrisy.
When I first saw Avocado's painstaking account of the Cassandra Clare debacle I kept waiting for the villain to appear. I read on and on and on and, around page twelve, when numbness was setting in, I realised there was no villain, not in the plagiarism stakes. The only villain was our sad, little consumed-with-righteous-indignation snake-disguised-as-a-vegetable.
If you could take Muriel Spark's Jean Brodie and mix her with one of Kafka's bureaucrats you would have Avocado at her purest. Lecturing "my girls" on the artistic life, telling them how it's done, "warning" (her word) Cassandra when she unwittingly errs from the set of fictional rules in Avocado's head.
Miss Avocado, darling of the literary world and member of The Romance Writers of America "for the past eight years". A fact which she just has to tell us on the first page. For why? Do romance writers understand the concept of plagiarism when the rest of us do not? Has this given her some magical insight to discern the difference between stealing characters, themes, settings, linguistic styles, phrasing, ideas, inventions, whole fictional universes (okay) and stealing "actual lines" (not okay). That's much more sinful according the Gospel of Saint Avocado. By what lunatic standard, I wonder?
And why did she need to tell us that she belongs to a club? What are we intended to measure and evaluate with that? That belonging to a romance writers club gives you wisdom, discernment, a right to judge? We should listen to her because she aspires (but does not) write romance?
Despite the deliberately-trying-to-be-innocuous little description from Fanhistory describing Cassandra as "relatively well known" (first link KL provided and which, coincidentally, is a site owned by an I'm-retiring-in-disgust admin chum of Avocado's) we can see from Avocado's own description of events that the truth is a little different.
Cassandra was, in ugly fact, already famous in her small world. Watch Avocado's green little eye balefully recording this. "I should note, here, that I had certainly heard of the Draco Trilogy... At the time, it seemed like around half of the Harry Potter authors on FanFiction.Net had Cassandra Claire listed among their favorite authors. People praised her witty dialogue; people borrowed "Draco in leather trousers." All in all, she was difficult to miss."
But, before this telling introduction, she casually mentions that she knew of Cassandra before even setting eyes on her fiction and for quite a different reason:- "I was still feeling slightly irritated at Heidi's apparent attempt to incite slashers to go over to another list and defend Cassandra Claire's right to slash. On the other hand, my ceaseless quest for Severus Snape/Sirius Black fanfiction propelled me over to join the HP_FanFiction list."
So, before she even grudgingly reads one of Cassandra's fictions she, by her own admission, is feeling resentful of someone defending her over a previous matter, in which she was not involved and was, therefore, none of her business. She doesn't even know her, but already she thinks she's getting too much attention, too much devotion, too much praise. Praise and loyalty that she, Avocado, does not have. Yes, already, right up there on page one, we see that all this started because Cassandra stole Avocado's praise. She plagiarised her praise. That's the real theft in this tale.
But, of course, it goes on, the envy ball is rolling now and anyone who understands the emotion knows that it can only be stopped by the death or misfortune of the person who invokes it.
Trouble is, Cassandra's on a roller. She writes well. She copies and extends the Harry Potter universe with wit and panache, pulling randomly, and with a certain intellectual flair, references from current pop culture. She's sophisticated and clever, within the confines of where she writes. She writes easily, comfortably, profligately almost, pouring them out, snowballing-up followers almost like a real writer.
A Real Writer. Oh-oh. Trouble in Paradise. Did Avocado miss that? Was she unaware that Cassandra had this dedicated following, suspiciously like that of a real writer? We know that she didn't. We know that already she isn't even hiding her disgruntlement and her addition of the adverb "slightly" to her irritation does nothing to disguise the emotion that she later refers to as, "I was furious-- and furious in a way that I can't even begin to explain." With not a slightly in sight. And it's not the last time she uses the word furious, or rage.
She takes to studying Cassandra's text, minutely. She gets the real books off the shelves, actually sits and compares them line by line. She's read them all ten, fifteen times, she knows them all virtually by heart. She reruns Buffy, Black Adder, notes lines. She's a human compendium of infringements, growing ever-monstrously larger.
But she has a problem. The publishers of Harry Potter, Buffy, others have a tacit understanding with fandom to overlook fan fiction. It's good word of mouth and, let's be honest, most of it is so bad it offers no threat at all to the real McCoy. What better way to spread the word? Write on. They're making millions. They don't care.
What's even more frustrating is that Cassandra puts very forthright and fulsome disclaimers on all her work stating that she's stealing. She's stealing everything and says so. Openly.
Who cares? No-one. They are ALL stealing. A point which cannot be emphasised often enough. The discussion here is not whether Cassandra was stealing but the fact that her accusers were all stealing also – so why was she singled out? For plagiarism? Oh, come on, plagiarising on Planet Fandom? You're kidding, right? Please tell me you're kidding.
But sooner or later Avocado hits pay dirt. She spots some lines from Pamela Dean, a then out of print author who wrote a trilogy entitled, "The Secret Country."
Now, it is very, very important to know and understand two things here, because this is the technical point with which envy's blue touch-paper was finally lit. Cassandra Clare ran a disclaimer, as usual, crediting the sources from which she'd stolen. In this she included "The Secret Country", by name. She said she "couldn't recall" the author's name, a fact which is belaboured to an insane degree throughout the fifteen pages of excuses for her following persecution.
The second point is that is was commonly and freely known that Cassandra deliberately included lines of dialogue, and direct lifts, in her text as a kind of fictionalised Trivial Pursuits. Common knowledge, referred to (as you'll see if you can bear to read through it) many times by Cassandra herself. She was open about it, as in not hidden. You have got this, haven't you?
So let's look at this again, in case we're losing sight of the point here.
Cassandra steals; the vegetable who is accusing her steals as she also writes fanfiction; vegetable further steals by reading fanfiction and frequenting sites that host it. That's unimportant because stealing, i.e. plagiarising, is what fucking fan fiction is about.
Cassandra is very open about what she steals. In The Big Serious Steal she names the actual book, if not the author. A trained chimp could find the book from that information, without getting out his high-chair, but somehow, somewhere this become the raison d'etre of Avocado's campaign.
This absence of the author's name somehow proves she was deliberately stealing lines and incorporating them into her text to fool her following, which she doesn't deserve because they're not really her lines, they're Pamela Dean's lines, one of Avocado's favourite authors, and everybody mistakenly loves Cassandra and thinks she's witty, but Avocado knows THE TRUTH and so she must expose her, expose the evil-doing of stealing pens during a bank robbery, and then everyone will stop loving Cassandra, and right will be restored, and that little bit of fame will go back into the great Cosmic Fame Pool and then, just then, maybe, our self-described "lurker," mummy's little fatty, Avocado, will get her long-awaited, desperately coveted chance at fame.
She will be loved, respected, have a following. Dedicated fans will defend her right to slash, donate money to replace her stolen computers, rush to embrace her as one of their own. And she will deserve it, because she knows all the rules and she didn't steal to get where she is today, oh no…
And so it goes on.
There is a lot of little asides in Avocado's defence about doing this for Pamela Dean, her moral outrage on her behalf at Cassandra taking credit for her work. But there are two notable holes in that excuse. One, she never, ever reports it to Dean or her publisher, although she has many opportunities, and despite the fact that she herself says, "I have never read anything that so clearly screamed, "Sue me!" What few references there are to contact with Dean are in e-mails that occur after others force Avocado's hand by going to Dean themselves, something which she is noticeably very uncomfortable about.
She claims this is because of the danger of litigation, but consider this, if Pamela Dean had simply replied from the outset, as many publishers/authors do, "I don't have a problem with fan fiction" then where would Avocado stand?
Up to her neck in shit with no 'case' and no canoe.
She couldn't afford to take that risk, so instead she sneaks behind the scenes at FanFiction.Net and "unofficially" reports Cassandra to an administrator who, oddly, was not the T.O.S (terms of service) admin, although Avocado knew who that was. She went instead to an admin she knew would be sympathetic to her 'cause' and got her to approach the TOS admin with the idea already firmly in place that Cassandra Clare was Breaking the Rules.
And, behold, Cassandra was tossed. Without, notably, the right to correction or defense.
It is also very important here to point out that all Cassandra's replies and comments are on Avocado's defence and she is a model of good behaviour. Had I experienced the hypocrisy that she did I would not have been nearly so polite. I would have nailed their asses to the wall. She, however, let's everyone off exceedingly lightly and is seen asking her fans and supporters (who had various boycotts and walk-outs) not to e-mail FanFiction.Net, not to start flame wars, just to let it go. She says repeatedly that FF.Net were entitled to toss her and she does not want reinstated. She is a model of restraint and decorum. This would be the "obnoxious behaviour" I heard so much about, then.
In fact I think this calm acceptance on her part, her getting about the business of writing without letting it crush her, actually played against her. Can you imagine anything worse than 'punishing' someone like this and she treats it like water off a duck's back? The pain of that. Not only has the might of your envy not crushed her, diminished her in any way, but she has the audacity to carry on and grow, and do it with dignity.
Christ, it's a miracle they never lynched her.
Oh, but Avocado tried. She pursued her relentlessly through various fandoms, insisting Cassandra clean up her act and do things the way Avocado felt they should be done in The Perfect World of Avocado, where she reigns supreme as White Serpent, Queen of the world.
But Cassandra didn't. Cassandra stayed right on course, and I can't imagine that was easy. No matter how tough you are, any mass of people gunning for you, especially with a 'case' as flimsy and transparently personal as this one, had to take its toll.
It certainly took its toll on Avocado who, several years down the line, collapsed and was, ever the drama-queen, hospitalised.
I could go on and on for pages, quoting a million little tells, a million little dreadful flaws that fall out of Avocado's mouth no matter how hard she tries to cover them up, but I'll let the finale of the story tell itself, in all its tragic glory.
Avocado spent five years pursuing this chimera. A dedication to the absurd not found anywhere in literature, not even Kafka. During this time she received only a smattering of coolly distant e-mails from Pamela Dean, the author she was 'protecting', where Dean makes it plain that she is not interested in the 'problem' and that she has handed it all over to her agent.
Which means in Real Writer speak - Go away, little stalker, and don't bother me.
The last piece of fan fiction that I could trace by Avocado (without actively looking for it – no more of that, okay?) was on her own website and was posted in April 2006, but was written in February 2001.
I have linked it here because it is quite the most poignant of documents I have read in some time, coming to it as I did, after reading everything else. Avocado's Tragic Testimony to a Life Lived by The Rules
Avocado cannot even post a five year old fan fiction, plagiarised, as all fan fiction is, from a children's book, without breaking the narrative every four lines to give long dissertations on how she feels this bit of writing is substandard, or she hasn't achieved that, or some other sad little plea of how she is not worthy. She is the Cliff Richard of fan fiction, consumed by mock-humility, watching the world nervously over her shoulder, wondering if they will judge her unkindly.
She has apparently written nothing since then, her whole life turned into mindless pursuit of the pea she can feel under fifty mattresses, a life lived in the hole in the doughnut. Her fear of not being good enough has completely paralysed her creativity, feeding her envy of those who run, unfettered, without it until it completely consumes her. Avocado has locked herself forever into the darkness of "wanting what she's got".
And the epitaph? Cassandra Clare went on to write more fan fiction, taking her fan following with her, winning a professional contract with Margaret K. McElderry in the U.S. and Walker Books in the UK, published her first book, City of Bones, which then promptly landed her on the New York Times bestseller lists for Young Adult fiction and is currently touring the United States promoting it. All in the exact same time Avocado spent chasing her round the net, insisting she put Pamela Dean's name on her fanfic, and telling anyone who would listen how Cassandra wasn't a Real Writer - Avocado had been in the Romance Writers of America for 8 years, and she knew.
Like I said – full of the sound and the fury and signifying nothing.
And that last bit, should you wish to sue me, was plagiarism.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet read DANNY? You can check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read a BIG extract for Free! Or grab a copy on Amazon here.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads)here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
19:10 Posted in Blog , Books , Web | Permalink | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Monday, 14 May 2007
Dragging Cassandra Clare To The Gas Chamber
Just completed the weekend long Word Festival here in Aberdeen.
This activity is entirely alien to me. I am not a writerly/authorly person and never feel at home in environments like these. I always find them too middle class, precious and 'refined'. There's some rarefied, almost sanctimonious atmosphere that makes me feel like a fish out of water.
Also, being such a cleverly evasive little cow, I have learned how to avoid the hole in the doughnut. This expression is stolen from David Lynch who said the secret in film-making was to concentrate on the doughnut and not the hole. Meaning that it's too easy to get caught up in the petty, unimportant stuff and forget about why you are doing your thing in the first place.
I find that these 'mixing with your own kind' kind of events can be a tremendous disrupter of energy. If you find yourself going off, even in the teeniest of ways, into worrying about comparisons with others it can descend into anything from endless speculating with "what ifs" on your own career path to outright self-loathing because you've somehow failed to live up to someone else's imaginary standard.
These fits of self-pity or introverted pique never last for me, but in the past I have been distracted from myself for as long as a month or more by someone else's 'success' and I am nowadays very niggardly about time spent in indulging in such futility.
If I even catch a whiff of someone else's outlook not meshing with mine (in my 'field') I will give all that is theirs a wide berth, especially if they are famous/celebrated. Celebrity nowadays always comes with a package of the Right Way Disease – we live in a culture of Experts – so that it can be genuinely disruptive to watch the whole world dancing attendance on an ideology that feels like a cheese grater over your nipples to you.
This is as dangerous as envy gets for me, being distracted from my goals by having to run through other people's M.O.'s.
Too time-consuming and irritating by half. Avoid.
However, as part of The Global Domination plan we will be selling Brand Stone to the festival circuit so we decided to put our money where our mouths are and actually attend one. (You have to admire the boldness of that concept.)
Oh, it hurt. I felt all defensive and odd, like I'd turned the clock back twenty years. I didn't, but I wanted to grumble, "I've done my stint at this, bunch of fucking academic, self-important, retrogressive ass-wipes. I don't belong here. What the fuck am I doing here?"
Instead I psyched myself up to go along, keep quiet and listen with as open a mind as I could muster while still keeping the necessary grip on who I was and what I was setting out to do.
As it turned out it was a whole lot easier than I expected. I wouldn't go so far as to say enjoyable, but it was certainly different and interesting – in places. And the only twinge of 'envy' I got was at two billed-as-edgy male authors who wrote humorous books and who were basically rather charming and sweet - if stereotypical (beards & beer) - geek boys writing slightly dumb surrealist humour. And the 'envy'? My Mum was right, I should have concentrated on writing humour for the BBC (I did a little radio comedy work in the eighties).
It lasted all of half an hour and amused even me when I confessed it out loud. No idea where it came from, but it does illustrate my point – the 'success' of others can be an oddly alluring distraction.
The best event for us was the last one of the weekend – a woman author of children's books.
I didn't pick this one, it was Mr Scratchmann's choice. He tried on and off to get various children's projects going in the eighties and nineties, finally getting some success in 'adult' comics' (that's graphic novels, not porn). He is, apparently, considering trying again (mad fool). So I was really there to keep him company, and she turned out to be the most interesting thing in the festival for me.
She was a self-published author who had been taken up by mainstream publishing, and Random House at that.
She was like Poison Pixie in that she'd actually self-published as a business, not gone POD, and had an initial print run of 10,000 copies.
I nearly fell off my fucking seat. Christ, here, at last, was someone even more insane than me. She was madder than me by 8,000 copies. You've got to admire determination (stupidity) like that. She got, by means of a lucky break (i.e. the child of a book buyer fell in love with her book), distribution in W.H. Smith – a lucky break of extraordinary proportions.
Six months down the line she was selling 50,000 copies of her book in Smith's in one month alone. And then Walker Books took notice.
She glossed over this part of the story but I ruthlessly interrogated her till she 'fessed up on exactly how she manoeuvred this feat. I, for one, couldn't believe that it wasn't till she hit 50,000 copies that the big guns came calling (and them so shrewd and professional too) and, incidentally, all started vying with each other and thus pushed her final contract up from a three-book deal to a twelve-book deal.
We even got one good idea from her which we'd both overlooked, much to our shame, and so it was a happy day for all concerned.
But, most of all, I was struck by the fact that the only poor relative of envy that showed his face in the entire weekend was the weird childhood throwback at the 'edgy' novelists. You'd think she'd have hit my buttons. Her self-publishing journey - with no intention to belittle her, she was smart and hard-working - was a piece of piss compared to mine and yet, there she is with the Random House deal. It made me realise that I'm not at all sure I'd like the Big Book Deal, as alluring and seductive as I'm supposed to believe it. And, of course, I'm not even vaguely interested in children's books. But I'm not interested in experimental edgy books either. Ah, childhood programming, it's a powerful thing. Which brings me to…
Remember I told you a while back that I'd been trying to find books on envy on Amazon? Well, I did manage to find one, out-of-print, "The Snow White Syndrome" and another which was aimed specifically at writers and whose name I can't remember.
Well, the writers' book turned out to have very little on envy but was a bloody good book nevertheless. I am now on "The Snow White Syndrome", also, in a completely different way, a very interesting book.
It comes from the eighties and is strangely dated already. For example, not really as aware of celebrity culture as it might be, and oddly sexist in its approach to female envy.
The most alarming chapter in the whole book is where she interviews 20 celebrities on how envy affects them, and all most of them talk about is how they try to play their achievements down so as not to invoke envy.
What the fuck? Could you see a man doing that? Depressing isn't the word for it.
But here is the most interesting thing about it – I only knew two of the celebrities – Billie Jean King and Janet Leigh. Ah, the fleeting nature of fame. A book on envy that unintentionally illustrates the futility of envy - how neat is that?
However, the overriding experience of the book has been heightened for me by a weird, synchronistic coincidence that has occurred while I've been reading it. (I read in the bath every morning and at no other time – thought you might like to know that. Oh, the quirks of us eccentric authors.)
For a while I'd been watching, with a kind of half-interested eye, a strange little drama that I fell over on a hater site which was trolling my blog a while back. They were/are one of Journalfen's many sites where insecure fangirls go to avoid encountering the harsh realities of the real world by playing at big, scary roaring without being bitch-slapped.
Well, during the tedious job of going through the pages of their copyright infringements I kept seeing myself coupled up with one 'Boodith'.
The fangirls have a paranoid fear that they will be caught out in naughty behaviour so they have developed a self-censoring pet language, a baby-talk full of miss-spellings and mispronunciations. Sadly, it is incredibly easy to crack their 'code'. Sadly because you're reading it. But, nevertheless I kind of started to see a pattern with Boodith and in the follow-up days when we were checking to make sure they'd cleaned up their act I kept finding her. I looked her up on Live Journal in various combinations (I am nothing if not thorough) but there was only more troll sites in her name.
Anyway, one evening wasted in warped self-indulgence was quite enough, and I forgot about it until a good while later I started getting mass spam on Blogspirit. The spam was simply dead links, weird, meaningless shit, irritating but not damaging.
I dutifully went back to my haters' site to check if they were doing their usual "Look how smart I am" bragging, but no, nothing. However some link in there alerted me to their Wiki (a little on-line guide/encyclopaedia, for those not familiar) and there was Boodith again (and me, of course). This time some clever fangirl had said who she was - one Jassandra (or Jassie) Jlaire. It wasn't rocket science that this still wasn't her real name but I felt it was damn close - it was redolent with that 'bragging' feel again. Only I couldn't know if it was scrambled, anagrammed, referenced in some other way. I tried LJ again and I think it was there (don't quote me) that someone mentioned the title of Boodith's book.
Aha! Pay dirt.
Now, I'd realised by their 'discussions' that she had to be a fellow-fangirl and a fan fiction writer and that their hatred of her focussed on 1) her 'plagiarism' (their favourite peeve) and 2) her size. I had actually come across a picture of her linked there where several mice were tearing into her in that delicious, we're-all-girls-together kind of way that goes something like this:- "Fat cow, she's tragic, couldn't get a boyfriend." Five increasingly vindictive permutations of this follow then one says, "Actually, I feel a bit bad about making these sizeist remarks." 'Me too' discomfort half-heartedly follows until Don't-You-Make-Me-Feel-Guilty-Mouse chimes in, "I don't hate her because of her size. It's because she's so obnoxious. It's her behaviour."
Aha, the old 'Obnoxious Behaviour' clause. Lets you say and do absolutely anything you like with impunity - always a great stand-by of mindless brick-heavers.
By now I felt a little terrier-like. My curiosity was well and truly up and running. This girl was getting a lot more vituperation than I ever got. She was being sliced and diced. And all because of plagiarism which – surprise, surprise – no-one could quite identify (where have I heard that before?)
I began to smell a rat, one that was intimidating all these little mice so badly it was almost the personification of the envy syndrome. So on I dug. I found a journal on Live Journal (one of many) dedicated solely to Boodith's acts of 'plagiarism'.
Now, before we go any further we're going to do a William Castle stunt. Let's do a VOTEATHON!
How many members of our band of haters do you imagine are involved in hating Boodith? I can tell you. All of them. And all those cultural vigilantes together, determined to out her as the dirty little plagiarist she is, how many instances of 'plagiarism' do you think they found? I'll be generous and let you count even really flimsy ones, like she used the word 'and' in a sentence. Or she had a heroine in her book. Count 'em all, knock yourself out. Now write it down on a bit of paper. Okay, done?
Okay, off you go, go see how many counts of plagiarism our chums managed to find, and out, on their site intended just for that. Here's the link, BOODITH.
Are you shocked, saddened, or tickled beyond pink as I am? All those self-congratulatory back-pats, that nit-picking dedication, and they could only find one instance of plagiarism (it's been there since the 3rd of November 2006, for Christ's sake) where she'd plagiarised herself apparently (they do understand the word plagiarism, don't they?) which one of their own did not think really qualified. Trufax. (That's true to you and I. Cute, huh?)
Now, as I said, I had found the title of her book but, at that time, I still couldn't find it on the net. The only City of Bones I could trace belonged to a Michael Connelly, and she was definitely not him. Then I had the bright idea of trying .com rather than UK Amazon, and there she was. (She's on UK now)
Cassandra Clare. Yep, that would be the Wiki Jassandra Jlaire indeed. They'd changed the first letters of her name. The subterfuge and cunning of that was astounding.
Here, at last, was Boodith, the girl my trolls hated even more than me. Now I could find out why. Now I could trace her web site, now I was right at the heart of her, now I could see her obnoxious behaviour first hand, her theft, her ugly fat, her lies, her sheer magnetism for well-deserved hatred. Someone this shabby, this low and loathed, would surely be oozing blackness from every pore. She had to be a whole lot worse than me to be so manifestly and roundly reviled.
Frankly I expected a cross between Michael Moore and Howard Stern, only in a vampire fandom kind of setting. It was sure as fuck going to be freakily interesting.
And this is what I found. A rather witty, conversational web site, very easy-going and relaxed, no bad language, no controversy, abuse or vitriol. Nothing to mark her as the demi-god of nasty bitches with the 'You have issues, Chancery' cachet of someone like me.
I'd like to say I was mystified, disappointed, but I was horribly, horribly pleased. Damn it, I was downright self-satisfied. I'd found the answer, right there. Just and exactly as I expected.
Cassandra Clare (or Claire – she spells her name differently for publication) was a Fangirl Who Had Made Good.
Cassandra's evil was not her plagiarism but that she'd dared to step out the ranks of fandom and sell her book to A PROPER PUBLISHER. I'm putting that in blocks so that you get the full weight of just how serious and grievous her sin was.
In short, Cassandra had done what they all aspired to do - without actually working for it, of course - but couldn't. And I imagine, like most published authors, she'd achieved it through dedication and hard work, but who's caring about that? That lying bitch STOLE THEIR PUBLISHING CONTRACT.
This 'lack of abundance' thinking is at the root of every single vindictive comment she got thrown at her. "If she's got it I can't have it. She stole it from me." This poisonous, all-consuming fear of deprivation is what makes people mix up jealousy and envy (they mean two different things, folks). Jealousy would mean she took it from you, as in stealing your agent, or pushing you off the bestseller lists. But, as in this case, you never had it. Envy is wanting what she has and it is a far meaner emotion than jealousy which, at least, has a little dignity lent to it by being founded in the painful reality of loss.
Even by this stage, although I thought, "Mm, this might make an interesting blog," I still couldn't quite work up the enthusiasm to write about it.
Until it got a way lot better.
Now, I'm sorry, but as I wasn't hard-planning to write about this I've lost my trail here. I can't remember how I found this out, whether it was via my trolls or directly at source, but I know Blogspirit was spiking for a week (3,000+ pages a day being read, but with few extra bodies to account for it) and I was looking to see if it had been mentioned somewhere when I fell over this.
Oh, it doesn't get any better. Now not only has Boodith gone and got published 'properly' but the bitch has got herself on the bestseller lists. Oh, there's no stopping the venom now.
I wouldn't normally suggest this, but I urge you to look through these comment threads. It's like a catalogue of human misery. Watch them all floundering around in everything from "It shows you it's who you know" to the flabbergastingly unbelievable, "Who did she have to sleep with to get published?"
Now, wait a minute, wasn't she, a matter of weeks before, being lambasted for being an "Ugly, fat, cow"? Now that she's on the best-seller lists she's a sex bomb sleeping her way to the top? Is the CEO of Margaret K. McElderry a secret feeder then?
But it still gets better. Look what we've found here, like flies on shit. Popping up all over the hysteria is none other than the author of the 'essay' (I still love that description) on The Reasonable Face of Baying Mobs quoted in my previous blog, 'I'm Just an Unattractive, Unassuming Individual' (see archives).
I can't believe it. Despite our fangirl's vehement denial of envy playing a part in a "baying mob's" make-up, here she is, in flagrante delicto, charging over the barricades to lead the attack of a baying mob whose sole, undisguised motivation is outright, blatant-to-all-but-the-blind envy at another fangirl's success.
Sad or hilarious?
You decide - I'm off to plagiarise something.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet read DANNY? You can check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read a BIG extract for Free! Or grab a copy on Amazon here.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads)here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
00:55 Posted in Blog , Books , Web | Permalink | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Monday, 07 May 2007
MOMMEEE... I Just Done a Big Buffy!
Doing the new web site.
Oh ha-ha, ha-haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Am I fuck.
Getting exactly nowhere. In fact I'm so stuck it's sticking everything else for me too. Everything in life has lost its flavour. It's all pointless. I want to die.
Understand, this is not writer's block. I don't get writer's block because there is no such thing as writer's block. Writer's block is fear, plain and simple, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar and a self-deluding fool – shun him. Pander not to writer's block; it is a chimera, an illusion, a way of dignifying the cowardly and dubious emotion of fear.
Why would you need to? Easy, because if you told the truth you'd have to face something even uglier about yourself. Why you are writing in the first place. And, believe me, a lot of people can't afford to face that one.
This is how it goes.
We have a 'writer'. Said writer can be anything from a rank amateur who wants to rewrite his favourite TV show to a literary darling with one novel to his name that won the Booker. What these two have in common is this – they don't write.
Strangely though, they have other things in common – far more than you might think. In fact I have a pet theory that they are exactly the same person just wearing different uniforms.
The Rank Amateur meticulously studies his favourite TV programme. He knows – to a stalkerish level – what the characters eat and drink and all the back history he has been able to find on the internet. He collects children's toys, wears the T-shirt and goes to conventions. He belongs to so many chat rooms it's a miracle he has hours in the day to pee. In fact, he doesn't. He does that at his computer.
Rank Amateur wants to be the characters, or at least the person who writes them.
It used to be that Rank Amateur couldn't get anywhere near the professional side of the business, now he is the business. You've seen the articles saying fanboys are running Hollywood. Sadly it's all true. Otherwise how do you account for every second film being from a comic book, the 12 certificates, the total absence of sex and, of course, special effects instead of characters. For fanboys SFX are the characters.
And this is how our Rank Amateur, aka The Fanboy Who Took Over Hollywood, gets writer's block.
It's the pressure. And the pressure for fanboys is exactly the same for them as it is for The Literary Giants – performance anxiety.
All writer's block is fear and that fear is performance anxiety by any other name.
For the Literary Giant who wrote The Great American Novel it's how to keep his 'edge', his 'nowness', his 'unique voice'.
Newsflash – the annoying cunt next door has a 'unique voice', all voices are unique. No matter how dumb you are there's only one of you in the world and, like your fingerprints, that makes you unique. Sorry, world of artistic greatness, unfortunately God cornered the market in uniqueness ahead of you.
The Literary Giant knows the world is waiting for him to slip up, to fail to be as obscure, 'deep' and meaningful as the last time – hell, the only time.
Remember that novel he wrote about the impoverished biscuit maker in Brazil? Remember his inspired use of unique voice, that character that spoke in tongues – yeah, it was Aramaic except every third word was a bakery ingredient in German and that contained the code that would cure AIDS. God, that was something, so moving. And his gay dog, the one with hepatitis C that saved the lunatic who thought he was a seagull. Remember that beautiful, haunting passage where he sings to the moon, lip-synching to Maria Callas? So touching. I wasn't the same after I read that.
In actuality, nobody got past page 28 before they lost the will to live but, fortunately, there was so much talk of it in the media, and there was that film with Mel Gibson, Keanu Reeves and Justin Timberlake as the dog – you know, the manga-inspired version with the great ILM AIDS cartoon sequence – that we all know what it was about anyway.
Hell, it was the literary sensation of the year, the Art equivalent of all those kids that own Harry Potter novels as fashion accessories but don't actually read them. It's like Coles Notes for the TV generation. Less words than a cereal box.
How the hell is Mr/Ms Literary Giant going to top that?
Answer – they can't. And they know it.
So, writer's block is a fear of not being good enough? But, of course. Only that's not the question.
The question is – not good enough for what?
And it is in the answer to that that you find the real dark heart of writer's block.
Fanboys and Literary Giants both fear exactly the same thing, for exactly the same reasons, because they are exactly the same people.
Writer's block is a fear that all those people you are trying to impress will be unimpressed or – worse, much worse – contemptuous. They might dislike you and your work. They might say you are a bad person, talentless, a hack, a no-hope, a………..LOSER!
God, no, the pain.
It would be nice to believe, because it gives us such an elevated sense of our own importance, that writers are all perfectionists, so determined to create the best writing in the world that they can't live up their own concepts of Greatness.
Yeah, my arse. What the fanboys and the Literary Giants fear is that their ruse has been rumbled. The fact of the matter is they are all derivative, imitative, far more interested in being WRITERS than in writing.
For love of the craft? You'd have to explain what the fucking craft was first.
For those of you old diehards who have been reading this column since its inception you may well remember Eileen Barnetson, my childhood friend who wrote fan fiction - although she didn't know what that was at the time as it hadn't been invented yet. (See archives – Eileen Barnetson Lives!)
You will also perhaps remember how much I admired Eileen's skills – and she was skilled. Obviously my memory is maybe a little rosy but I remember her at thirteen writing like a woman three times her age. I remember it being professional, that writing. I seriously admired that girl. I was even a touch envious. (Aha, see, I can be envious too, you know. I knew I had it in me.)
But the fact remains that I seriously doubt if Eileen went on to become an author. (If you're reading this Eileen and I'm wrong, do let me know.)
Eileen married a policeman and worked in the local tax office. Eileen didn't become an author because she didn't love writing, she loved what the story gave her. Eileen only wanted more of the same. She had no burning desire to tell her own story, or indeed say anything very new or original – she just wanted more Little Women. She couldn't make Louisa tell her more so she mimicked Louisa's voice and carried on telling herself the story.
Eileen was a fangirl extraordinaire. And a very good one too. What she wasn't was a writer.
Oh, she learned how to be Louisa May Alcott and no doubt she could have learned to be anyone else she chose but that was all she was learning.
So I'm saying you can't learn how to write by copying other writers?
Hell, no. That is how you learn it. Well, at least how you learn to do it well. What you can't learn is a burning need to say something. Nobody teaches you that. Absolutely no-one. Ever. No discussion.
Eileen didn't have a burning need to say something. The creator of the current high-vogue TV show, Heroes, didn't have a burning need to say something. He doesn't even look like a fanboy on first glance and he isn't, not of comics or superheroes. But he was a fan of Lost and thought it would be a good idea to combine that idea with some "kids with special powers" – always guaranteed to get you those fanboy votes.
And votes he has.
I haven't seen Heroes and it will no doubt be a good long while till I do (is it showing in the UK?), so I have no idea whether it's good, bad or indifferent. But it wouldn't make any difference if I did. Good fanboys make good fanboy TV. Just as Eileen wrote good Louisa May Alcott.
That's not the point. The point is this – if you have a whole world of fanboys out there waiting for you to give them more of the same, and they are very touchy on just what typifies 'the same' – you better not fucking disappoint.
And there you have writer's block in a nutshell.
Because the fanboy is not saying anything of his own, merely regurgitating, he always runs the risk of alienating his very picky audience. The pressure is immense. He has no inner resources to fall back on. Unlike the Ernest Hemingway school of writing wherein every author has "an inbuilt shit-detector" he has no such luxury. He doesn't have an inner voice. He's never had one. He has vampire voices, filmic voices, super-hero voices, Clark Kent voices, super-villain voices, James Bond's voice, film noir's voice – even the voice of grindhouse cinema.
There is no him. So that if he, unfortunately, develops his own voice, decides he has something to say – oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
Now the fans don't love him. Now he is going to know what hate feels like. All that thwarted loss of the Mother-teat, and it's all coming at him. All those people who feel offended and wounded because Buffy would never do that, Superman isn't conflicted, Dr Who can't be Scottish, Welsh, Irish, black. All coming back to bite the fanboy in the ass. His career, riding high in Hollywood, his Emmy award, his reputation, all going down the toilet – all because he decided what would be good for the characters. All because he decided he could write.
That wasn't the contract. That wasn't the deal. Think we loved you because you were a writer? Think again, fuckwit. We loved you because you gave us more of the same. We don't want you. Who you?
And it's exactly the same for the Literary Giant. Don't be fooled by the fact that he has a "unique voice". That voice is like every other "unique voice" that went before it. If you don't believe me look at all the true "unique voices" that he aspires to. James Joyce, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, e.e. cummings. All condemned out of hand as everything from illiterate rubbish to unspeakable filth (that one was Bronte, believe it or not). They were not "unique voices" in their own time. In their own time they were either common trash (Dickens) or even more unspeakable filth (Joyce this time).
The Literary Giant knows that The Art Establishment is watching him, judging him, making sure he doesn't get too cocky, doesn't get to thinking he gets praise out of hand, for the asking. No sir. He has to perform. He has to give them more of the same.
Metaphors, allegories, allusions, insights, literary Tradition, prose poetry, lexiconography, linguistics, erudition, meaning, depth, and lots of dense, impenetrable prose with big words you have to look up. If his book doesn't help you understand a junta somewhere he is in serious shit.
What both these schools of writers lack – and they make up a formidable body of artisans – is anything to say, so that when they are facing an empty screen, a blank piece of paper, they have nothing to fall back on, no inner well of purpose.
People who have writer's block are afraid - that simple. And they are afraid of performing, being judged. They are afraid they can't measure up to the people they are trying so desperately hard to impress, the people who give them meaning, a definition of themselves, self-validation.
Writers who are blocked crave one thing and one thing only, acceptance, love, the belief that they are Writers – capital letter. They don't care if they can write, if they have anything to say, if they are saying it well. They care that their significant others – the public, the critics, the fans - believe that they are Writers.
It is one huge con game with needy, hungry little souls thirsting at the centre of it, belligerently pounding on their chests and announcing "I'm a Real Writer, me. Look, all them people says so – so there!"
At last……. Mummy loves them.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar or simply post the following text into your RSS browser:
http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet read DANNY? You can check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read a BIG extract for Free! Or grab a copy on Amazon here.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads)here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
21:55 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this