Posts
Hiya. This is my first Daily People Watching entry. The concept is pretty simple, really. I sit in public for an hour every day, and I write down things I see. I do not listen to what they say; I don't care what they're saying. Similarly, I won't people-watch someone I know, nor will I post precisely where or at what time I was watching. If I find out any personal information about someone I'm watching beyond what I can see (i.e. overhear a name) I'm not going to post that either.
The point of this project is not to invade people's privacy, but rather to write about observations rather than ideas. To write without editing, and to write every day, and to try to find the beauty (or at least uniqueness) in everything everyone does.
Beard is red, pale green T. He talks with his hands, pounds them together, slaps them, cuts the air as he talks. When he swings his arms from the shoulder, his wrists and hands approach and hit each other like a wavebreak. He talks to a man behind a tree, wearing formless gray hoodie and formless black and white shorts. And when they leave, they disperse heads down and quickly, like spies with clandestine work to do.
Barefoot man tossing an undersized soccer ball in the air with his feet. He tips it to his son who's almost as good-- tip, tap, toe-to-air missile. The man's daughter, four at most, gets the ball and runs onto the playground, hugging it to her chest and beaming. When the dad kicks the ball it's controlled; three inch high bursts, till his ankle gets tired or the ball gets too much torque, and he passes it off to his son. His son kicks and knees the ball up above his head. He loses it more, but chases it better. Sometimes, he kicks the ball into the bushes and runs to pick it out of the leaves and twigs and flowers.
The lady's dress is black and she walks with conviction. Horizontal ribbing on the skirt portion, dark lipstick, legs shaved and stockinged, hair up, and high-heeled. She walks with impatient conviction.
Young-to-old, nicely dressed crowd. Women in dresses with colors according to their age-- the youngest in vibrant beetle-eye blue and green, or red-and-white flower prints; the oldet in an all tan dress complete with all tan stockings and an all tan shawl.
A grandma, red-auburn dyejob on her rhort permed hair, holds the scruff of a toddler's shirt. She walks him in circles round the jungle gym's chain ladder that he seems hell-bent on holding onto. His forehead hits his hairline about 4 inches too late, and his fat eyes ignore his grandma, because the rubber-coated chain he's got is just so damn interesting.
There's little boy testing his footing, atop a spiral slide. As he straddles the gentle pike of the roof, his Reebok's tap at the green plastic, until he decides he can't get purchase and slides off, onto the gym proper.
I'm sitting across from a man who looks like he'd be a natural at transvestitism. Thin face, sunshine smile perfectly proportioned to his peak of a nose. I think it's his eyes-- the lashes are long and full, and thick enough on the bottom so they look like natural eyeliner. His eyebrows too, flow to the bridge of his nose in shapely curves. Or then maybe it's his hair, that swoops over his ears, all salt and pepper and expensive shampoo. Step 1: Wax face. Step 2: Don heels. Step 3: Look fabulous.
Here's the dude that just walked by: Shock of blond hair receeded at the front and exploded in the back, like someone yanked a hanful of scalp back over his skull and left it there. He wore a sharp-green tank top, similarly vibrant red shorts and a fanny pack that jolted on his crotch as he walked-- what a schizoid color pallate!
A little girl climbs the chain-ladder, long brown hair in waves down her back. When her feet slip, the tangerine flower of a sundress billows at the ground like fire, and when her arms catch her full body weight, the hem of her dress flicks. She hangs there, dangling like an upside-down candleflame.
Young guy walks by, dark but pasty, brown eyes, hair long and swept back. Which is fine, except it's maybe half the thickness it needs to be; his skull shines through the whisps. He's gaunt-thin, and walks with his head bobbing forward. He's also the first person to look at me all hour. When he looks, it's wide-eyed and with the flesh round his sockets betraying fear. It's a vague fear, and not a nervous one. It's there before his head turns and it stays after he looks away-- grinding tension from something constant; not the sharp uncertainty of making eye contact with a strange man sitting at a computer. And then, when the gears click and he realizes I'm looking back at him, his head flicks away, back to his walking, and he turns into the shop.
The employee with blue hair scrubs tables down. Her hair's pilled into a loop of a pony tail, with long side-framing bangs round her face. She lopes with huge hoop earrings and glasses pushed to the top of her head. She sees some garbage on the floor and bends to pick it up, resting her wrist on a table. As she bends down, her off-hand curls delicately in a subconscious flex.
A man (my dear compatriot!) sits in a black leather coat and stares at nothing. He's got a G3 pen and a tiny pad, and scribbled lines of poetry that he mulls over before scratching out. His beard is curled and untrimmed, and he's pulled his hair back underneath a navy and red Nike hat. His leg bobbles up and down. He squints at the words in his head; he jots; he scribbles.
Blogject
Here's my new blog project: Every day, I''m going to go somewhere and people-watch. I'll blog about it real-time and post when I'm done.
Yup. That's my project. And I'm sticking to it.
Yup. That's my project. And I'm sticking to it.
First Publication Rights: A Rant
I've been a bit apprehensive about this whole big 'being a professional writer' business that I'm trying to break into, and I think I can speak for a while, at least, on why exactly that is. Before I posted or talked too much about it, I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just me whingeing on about it because of something silly and juvenile like "zomg, y for am i not published yet?" or "i read a story i didnt liek and it was published so publishing is dum". Yes, I have felt both these things before. No, they are not why I am posting on the subject of the publication industry.
Back to Basics: Why do people write? What's the point? Some people want a prize-- fame, and fortune, and that-- and write in a severely misguided attempt to achieve either or both of those. But most people do it because they have something to say, and they want you to hear it. Sometimes it's related to current events-- my playwriting prof. in Wales wrote a radio play on the 'subprime mortgage crisis' back when they were calling it the 'subprime mortgage crisis'. Sometimes it's about broader social issues like gender-identification, or the exportation (and subsequent dumping) of nuclear/toxic waste to unpatrolled waters/coasts, or post 9/11 discrimination against Arab and Muslim citizens. And still other times, it's all about the beauty a writer can squeeze out in a few well placed words. Always, always, though, it's to be read and heard.
The Problem: Here is the problem. Editors (not any editor specifically, but rather the whole class of editors) are greedy. They want not only the right to show your story as is their function, but they (almost always) want the right to show it first. Think back on your childhood-- the first kid to get a new type of action figure was always the coolest, right? Same thing, really. And that's fine. Sort of. I mean, it's their money, and they're giving it to you, so they should be allowed to ask for something fresh and exciting, right? Unfortunately, the product of requiring First Publication Rights (at least when 95% of markets are doing it) is that writers sit on their work. They submit their piece to a magazine (mags that don't accept simultaneous submissions only exacerbate the problem, by further restricting the number of people to read a manuscript), then the story is read by at most 9ish people (however big the editing staff is) and is rejected the vast majority of the time. Then, it goes off to 9 more people, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseam. Markets can have reply times of up to 6 months (as an average high)-- which means that a piece can keep going back through the cycle infinitely, in 6 month waves. For a piece written, especially about current events, this can have devastating consequences for its impact on the reader. There is nothing wrong with editors asking for First (world, north american, whatever) Publication Rights, except when it becomes common practice. At that point (see dictionary entry; The Distant Past), the written word society ceases to be a society of sharing and creating, and immediately shifts to one of withholding and ownership. The culture that's grown up around the "First Publication Rights" mindset is insane. If you post online-- a free, worldwide forum where anyone can read your work? What could be better?-- you're labeled amateur. If you submit a never-before-published piece to a mag. that accepts reprints, they send you very nice emails asking, roughly, 'What the hell?' The social pressures of publication culture mirror the perverse incentives system; not only do you not get paid for sharing your work without editorial approval, but you become the object of mockery from other 'serious' writers. I cannot think of a more psychotic way for writing as a culture to use instant, free, and world-wide distribution.
But Christian, Clearly You're an Idiot: Now, I know what you're going to say: But the whole point of editing (and the reason it's called that) is to let in only the best of the best. Why should we as readers settle for less? And I will rebut with 3 points:
1) The good will float and the bad will sink. Good things tend to hang around (unless they were shelved in Alexandria circa 50 BC), and bad things don't. Why? Because people are smart. Well, smart enough, at least, to stop reading when they're disappointed by the story, and to share awesome things with their friends.
2) Bad can be valuable. For example: A Midsummernight's Dream is bad-- look at the plotting, and the characterization. It's all piss-poor at best. Now! Look at King Lear. Or Hamlet. Holy balls, those plays are brilliant. Without A Midsummernight's Dream, Shakespeare never would have had the ability craft either of those plays. Not ever.
Similar to writing bad, reading bad can be valuable too. Don't believe me? If every 9th grader who wanted to write high-fantasy read the Eye of Argon, would we have such a plethora of cliche'd nonsense? I should say not!
3) Do you honestly think editors do a good job of letting in the good and keeping out the bad, now? Because I don't. Watership Down, the book with the single longest print-run (besides religious texts) in the world was rejected for publication 42 times before it was finally picked up. And it's fabulous literature. Conversely, I own a copy of a for-realz, published X-men/Star Trek crossover book. Yes. That happened. Seriously.
(A brief sidenote: I have done a little editing work, and believe me-- it's not the editor's fault! Reading through manuscript after manuscript tunnel-visions your perceptions, sometimes into expecting ludicrously high quality. It's not that editors are bad at their jobs because they're morons/blind/nutcases. It's that editors are bad because they posess the same frailties as any other human in their situation. Good Editors are simply the ones who can ground themselves better than the Bad Editors. It doesn't mean that Good Editors don't miss some great pieces, though).
4) Don't worry! Editors will still filter! Seriously, folks. Editors as a class of people, won't be going away anytime soon. If all editors cease requiring first publication rights, people will still go to magazines to see what the editors they've come to trust over the years consider good. Bad stuff won't make it into the magazines, mediocre stuff still will (at the same rate it always has) and good stuff will still be published there too. The only change will be that the good stuff will enter the light of day faster. The mediocre stuff will get feedback and review. The bad stuff will be forgotten, just the same way it always has (and hopefully the authors will get better from the experience).
Okay, Smartass. What's the Fix, You're So Clever:
Pretty darn simple, to be honest. Editors don't even have to change their practices. One thing, and one thing alone. Are you ready?
Posting stories/essays/poems online does not constitute publication. The end.
Right now, if I were to throw up a story online, it immediately becomes toxic to any editor whose magazine requires First Pub. Rights. Unless it takes off Scalzi-style (which is lightning-strike rare), that story is dead in the water.
The two reasons editors like being the first to publish something, as far as I can tell, is that it differentiates their magazine from their competitors, and that it bottlenecks traffic of people reading the story through said magazine.
If half the point of being the first editor to be able to show a given piece is that it differentiates your magazine from everyone else's, redefining self-posting online as 'not official publication' does not affect magazine's differentiation at all.
What's more, the in-print precedent of self publication was the following: If you print it out and hand it to random folks, guess what? It's not published. I honestly don't know why we departed from this, other than, as said earlier, editors are greedy.
So, that's it. We've reached the end of my rant. I hope you've been persuaded. And if not, that's okay. I would invite you to post comments, but that functionality seems not to work on my blog, for one reason or another... Hmm, I shall have to remedy that.
Cheers.
Back to Basics: Why do people write? What's the point? Some people want a prize-- fame, and fortune, and that-- and write in a severely misguided attempt to achieve either or both of those. But most people do it because they have something to say, and they want you to hear it. Sometimes it's related to current events-- my playwriting prof. in Wales wrote a radio play on the 'subprime mortgage crisis' back when they were calling it the 'subprime mortgage crisis'. Sometimes it's about broader social issues like gender-identification, or the exportation (and subsequent dumping) of nuclear/toxic waste to unpatrolled waters/coasts, or post 9/11 discrimination against Arab and Muslim citizens. And still other times, it's all about the beauty a writer can squeeze out in a few well placed words. Always, always, though, it's to be read and heard.
The Problem: Here is the problem. Editors (not any editor specifically, but rather the whole class of editors) are greedy. They want not only the right to show your story as is their function, but they (almost always) want the right to show it first. Think back on your childhood-- the first kid to get a new type of action figure was always the coolest, right? Same thing, really. And that's fine. Sort of. I mean, it's their money, and they're giving it to you, so they should be allowed to ask for something fresh and exciting, right? Unfortunately, the product of requiring First Publication Rights (at least when 95% of markets are doing it) is that writers sit on their work. They submit their piece to a magazine (mags that don't accept simultaneous submissions only exacerbate the problem, by further restricting the number of people to read a manuscript), then the story is read by at most 9ish people (however big the editing staff is) and is rejected the vast majority of the time. Then, it goes off to 9 more people, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseam. Markets can have reply times of up to 6 months (as an average high)-- which means that a piece can keep going back through the cycle infinitely, in 6 month waves. For a piece written, especially about current events, this can have devastating consequences for its impact on the reader. There is nothing wrong with editors asking for First (world, north american, whatever) Publication Rights, except when it becomes common practice. At that point (see dictionary entry; The Distant Past), the written word society ceases to be a society of sharing and creating, and immediately shifts to one of withholding and ownership. The culture that's grown up around the "First Publication Rights" mindset is insane. If you post online-- a free, worldwide forum where anyone can read your work? What could be better?-- you're labeled amateur. If you submit a never-before-published piece to a mag. that accepts reprints, they send you very nice emails asking, roughly, 'What the hell?' The social pressures of publication culture mirror the perverse incentives system; not only do you not get paid for sharing your work without editorial approval, but you become the object of mockery from other 'serious' writers. I cannot think of a more psychotic way for writing as a culture to use instant, free, and world-wide distribution.
But Christian, Clearly You're an Idiot: Now, I know what you're going to say: But the whole point of editing (and the reason it's called that) is to let in only the best of the best. Why should we as readers settle for less? And I will rebut with 3 points:
1) The good will float and the bad will sink. Good things tend to hang around (unless they were shelved in Alexandria circa 50 BC), and bad things don't. Why? Because people are smart. Well, smart enough, at least, to stop reading when they're disappointed by the story, and to share awesome things with their friends.
2) Bad can be valuable. For example: A Midsummernight's Dream is bad-- look at the plotting, and the characterization. It's all piss-poor at best. Now! Look at King Lear. Or Hamlet. Holy balls, those plays are brilliant. Without A Midsummernight's Dream, Shakespeare never would have had the ability craft either of those plays. Not ever.
Similar to writing bad, reading bad can be valuable too. Don't believe me? If every 9th grader who wanted to write high-fantasy read the Eye of Argon, would we have such a plethora of cliche'd nonsense? I should say not!
3) Do you honestly think editors do a good job of letting in the good and keeping out the bad, now? Because I don't. Watership Down, the book with the single longest print-run (besides religious texts) in the world was rejected for publication 42 times before it was finally picked up. And it's fabulous literature. Conversely, I own a copy of a for-realz, published X-men/Star Trek crossover book. Yes. That happened. Seriously.
(A brief sidenote: I have done a little editing work, and believe me-- it's not the editor's fault! Reading through manuscript after manuscript tunnel-visions your perceptions, sometimes into expecting ludicrously high quality. It's not that editors are bad at their jobs because they're morons/blind/nutcases. It's that editors are bad because they posess the same frailties as any other human in their situation. Good Editors are simply the ones who can ground themselves better than the Bad Editors. It doesn't mean that Good Editors don't miss some great pieces, though).
4) Don't worry! Editors will still filter! Seriously, folks. Editors as a class of people, won't be going away anytime soon. If all editors cease requiring first publication rights, people will still go to magazines to see what the editors they've come to trust over the years consider good. Bad stuff won't make it into the magazines, mediocre stuff still will (at the same rate it always has) and good stuff will still be published there too. The only change will be that the good stuff will enter the light of day faster. The mediocre stuff will get feedback and review. The bad stuff will be forgotten, just the same way it always has (and hopefully the authors will get better from the experience).
Okay, Smartass. What's the Fix, You're So Clever:
Pretty darn simple, to be honest. Editors don't even have to change their practices. One thing, and one thing alone. Are you ready?
Posting stories/essays/poems online does not constitute publication. The end.
Right now, if I were to throw up a story online, it immediately becomes toxic to any editor whose magazine requires First Pub. Rights. Unless it takes off Scalzi-style (which is lightning-strike rare), that story is dead in the water.
The two reasons editors like being the first to publish something, as far as I can tell, is that it differentiates their magazine from their competitors, and that it bottlenecks traffic of people reading the story through said magazine.
If half the point of being the first editor to be able to show a given piece is that it differentiates your magazine from everyone else's, redefining self-posting online as 'not official publication' does not affect magazine's differentiation at all.
What's more, the in-print precedent of self publication was the following: If you print it out and hand it to random folks, guess what? It's not published. I honestly don't know why we departed from this, other than, as said earlier, editors are greedy.
So, that's it. We've reached the end of my rant. I hope you've been persuaded. And if not, that's okay. I would invite you to post comments, but that functionality seems not to work on my blog, for one reason or another... Hmm, I shall have to remedy that.
Cheers.
Writing vs. Editing
So, at Ghost Comma today, I said something amounting to "I think the ability to edit is more important than the ability to write." Naturally, everyone jumped on the ZOMG WTF CHRISTIAN IS WRONG bandwagon. Meh. It happens.
Here is what I was trying to express.
I see the fundamental difference between Writing and Editing as this: Writing is inherently a creative process (inasmuch as it can be-- we all know the "Nothing is truly original" spiel). Editing is a process of refinement. (I believe this semantic difference is where most GC people held difference with me).
Writing is building a house. Hollowing out and cementing out the basement; erecting walls and injecting insulation and laying drywall; figuring out which internal walls will be load-bearing; and then roofing the whole thing. You're not *actually* creating anything-- just rearranging existing materials into what you want.
Editing is renovating it. There's the basics for a plumbing system, but they lack faucets. There needs to be furniture everywhere, and paint, and (if it's meant for kids to play in) those little covers over the light sockets.
Same thing with stories. Writing is making something someone can live in. Editing is making it somewhere people want to live.
Now, let's say, the room needs a half-wall to tie it together. No problem, right? You get to work setting it up, and yes. You're building something. But no one would say it's on the same measure as building a whole house. It's construction with the end of refinement, rather than with the end of creation.
Same thing with writing a story vs. writing a scene for a story. It's not necessarily that the magnitude is different, but rather that they're two different processes-- someone writing a story is concerned with theme and characterization and plot; someone writing a scene is concerned with the clarification of said theme, characterization, and plot.
Honestly, it's just equivocation on the word 'writing'. One is cap-W Writing (as in, creating a new environment) and the other is lower-case-w writing (the physical act of stringing words into sentences, in a to-be-read medium). So yes, writing is sometimes required in the editing process, but never Writing.
Now that we can move past the semantics, my actual argument is this:
1) First-draft writing is rarely (if ever) as good as it can be.
1.a) Writing, barring major overhaul of a piece, is only really an applicable skill to the first-draft of a piece.
2) Editing is the process of altering an existing work.
2.a) Knowledge of how to edit well is knowledge of how to alter it to a given purpose effectively.
2.b) The (typical) goal of editing is making the existing work better (in some definition).
3) Good writing is better than bad writing (ohh, I'm living on the edge with that comment).
Therefore, Since knowledge of how to Write very well will yield a few good pieces, and many mediocre pieces; and Since knowledge of how to edit very well will yield pieces of generally higher quality: A highly capable Editor will yield better pieces than a highly capable Writer.
It should be noted that yes, pieces need to be created before they can be edited.
Now. I have never been arguing that people should only learn how to edit, and have no skills whatsoever in creating their own stories-- I don't see how I could possibly stand behind such a position. I'm simply saying that a focus on the ability to edit and revise will yield higher quality manuscripts than the ability to Write.
To sum-up:
Someone who knows how to make a gun and no idea of how to use it can still kill people with it. But someone who practices his/her aim is going to kill a lot more people.
Killingest of all, is someone who knows how a gun operates-- understands the mechanisms and principles behind it-- and concentrates on knowing how/where to shoot it. Even when the gun breaks, that person can fix it and just keep shootin folks. That's what I'm advocating. Let's all know how to make guns, but know how to shoot them better than that, so we can get the maximum killing... Potential... You know what I'm trying to say.
(Daaaaaamn, that analogy got grim).
Here is what I was trying to express.
I see the fundamental difference between Writing and Editing as this: Writing is inherently a creative process (inasmuch as it can be-- we all know the "Nothing is truly original" spiel). Editing is a process of refinement. (I believe this semantic difference is where most GC people held difference with me).
Writing is building a house. Hollowing out and cementing out the basement; erecting walls and injecting insulation and laying drywall; figuring out which internal walls will be load-bearing; and then roofing the whole thing. You're not *actually* creating anything-- just rearranging existing materials into what you want.
Editing is renovating it. There's the basics for a plumbing system, but they lack faucets. There needs to be furniture everywhere, and paint, and (if it's meant for kids to play in) those little covers over the light sockets.
Same thing with stories. Writing is making something someone can live in. Editing is making it somewhere people want to live.
Now, let's say, the room needs a half-wall to tie it together. No problem, right? You get to work setting it up, and yes. You're building something. But no one would say it's on the same measure as building a whole house. It's construction with the end of refinement, rather than with the end of creation.
Same thing with writing a story vs. writing a scene for a story. It's not necessarily that the magnitude is different, but rather that they're two different processes-- someone writing a story is concerned with theme and characterization and plot; someone writing a scene is concerned with the clarification of said theme, characterization, and plot.
Honestly, it's just equivocation on the word 'writing'. One is cap-W Writing (as in, creating a new environment) and the other is lower-case-w writing (the physical act of stringing words into sentences, in a to-be-read medium). So yes, writing is sometimes required in the editing process, but never Writing.
Now that we can move past the semantics, my actual argument is this:
1) First-draft writing is rarely (if ever) as good as it can be.
1.a) Writing, barring major overhaul of a piece, is only really an applicable skill to the first-draft of a piece.
2) Editing is the process of altering an existing work.
2.a) Knowledge of how to edit well is knowledge of how to alter it to a given purpose effectively.
2.b) The (typical) goal of editing is making the existing work better (in some definition).
3) Good writing is better than bad writing (ohh, I'm living on the edge with that comment).
Therefore, Since knowledge of how to Write very well will yield a few good pieces, and many mediocre pieces; and Since knowledge of how to edit very well will yield pieces of generally higher quality: A highly capable Editor will yield better pieces than a highly capable Writer.
It should be noted that yes, pieces need to be created before they can be edited.
Now. I have never been arguing that people should only learn how to edit, and have no skills whatsoever in creating their own stories-- I don't see how I could possibly stand behind such a position. I'm simply saying that a focus on the ability to edit and revise will yield higher quality manuscripts than the ability to Write.
To sum-up:
Someone who knows how to make a gun and no idea of how to use it can still kill people with it. But someone who practices his/her aim is going to kill a lot more people.
Killingest of all, is someone who knows how a gun operates-- understands the mechanisms and principles behind it-- and concentrates on knowing how/where to shoot it. Even when the gun breaks, that person can fix it and just keep shootin folks. That's what I'm advocating. Let's all know how to make guns, but know how to shoot them better than that, so we can get the maximum killing... Potential... You know what I'm trying to say.
(Daaaaaamn, that analogy got grim).
