book kindling

While checking Amazon.com for Art Spiegelman's book on 9/11, I came across an unusual message from Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos on the home page, announcing that more units of their Kindle e-book reader are now ready for purchase and inviting one to read his letter to Amazon shareholders on the topic. Interested in the phenomenon of e-books, I took the trouble to read Bezos's letter.

As a book lover, I have had mixed feelings about e-books and therefore about Amazon's Kindle. (While Bezos says that the name Kindle is meant to suggest that it will "start a fire" and "improve the world of reading", I have always found that the name reminded me of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451--the temperature at which paper and therefore at which a physical book combusts. It's not impossible that Amazon at some level intended this reference to the auto da fe of book-burning. On the other hand, the most powerful parapraxes--as Freud called them--are unintentional, like the original name of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003: Operation Iraqi Liberation, soon changed because of its acronym, OIL.)

In general, it seems to me normal and inevitable that technology will provide a new way to deliver and read books. My concerns with it are two:

• that it will make the experience of reading itself less pleasant


• that it will not be secure enough to ensure that authors receive full payment for their work

On the first point, I suppose my concern is that people in general will be willing, as often happens, to trade quality for convenience--even for someone else's convenience. In order to have such a handy and portable device, people may be willing to put up with a slightly inferior reading experience. I think about groceries: how the modern tomato has been bred to assume a more cubic shape so that it can be packed more densely and transported more cheaply, and perhaps also so that it resists bruising. What has been traded is flavor, and perhaps nutrition. In this way, maybe a second-rate reading experience will drive out a first-rate one, eroding the quality of life for us readers.

But that concern is perhaps relatively minor. After all, if people like e-books and e-book readers, whether the Kindle or some other, then they should have them. If there are still people who love paper books enough to buy them, then they will no doubt continue to be printed. New technologies seldom eliminate old entirely, after all. The movies did not eliminate theater; television did not eliminate either movies or radio. The Kindle will presumably not wipe out ("burn") books entirely.

As a content creator, more important to me is the issue of author compensation. The integrity of Kindle files is presumably protected by some form of encryption or "digital rights management" (DRM) which prevents people from distributing the content promiscuously without payment to its creators and publishers. But it seems that DRM systems all get cracked sooner or later--hackers often regard it as a point of honor to do so. And there are those who think that once a file has been acquired, it should be free to be distributed on, as over a peer-to-peer network. Preventing people from "sharing" files is an infringement of their freedom!

To such people, I can only suggest that they try writing for a living for a while. If they can't write, they might be able to get a feel for it, as an economic proposition, in the following way. Go to your regular job, full-time or part-time as the case may be. Each week or two, instead of receiving a paycheck, you will receive a ticket to a small lottery that will be drawn in, say, five years' time. After the five years are up, you'll find out whether you receive any money for your work. (The likelihood is that you will not.)

Cracking a DRM system would change this scenario by, essentially, eliminating the lottery at the end. The tickets you've received are for a lottery that has been canceled. Instead of being won by someone (usually other than yourself, true), it's won by no one.

That's my fear.

Still, there are grounds for hope. The phenomenon of iTunes shows that people are very willing to pay for downloadable content, if they want it enough and the price is right. They recognize that there is a principle of exchange, that if you receive something you value, you should pay for it, unless it's been offered for free by its actual owner.

But I think to of how writers have usually lost out, all the way back to ancient times, such as in Rome, where books were "published" (that is, copied by hand and sold) by people who had no concept of paying anything to the writer of the work being copied. Since writers at that time were usually men of leisure, it was not so important perhaps. Ever since then, writers have struggled to receive compensation for their work.

All of that being said, I applaud Bezos's vision for e-books. As an environmentalist I like the idea of publishing works without the destruction and pollution caused by felling trees, making paper, printing books, and shipping them. The costs of publication will drop dramatically, and therefore so should the cost of books. More marginal and eccentric works could be published. And e-books are seemingly ideal for the kinds of things I like to do with books: highlight the parts of interest, and search through them for what I want.

We'll see. I do like Bezos's aspiration to provide any book ever printed in any language within 60 seconds. What's not to like about that? Some books I want now I can't have due to their high price, which I believe (these are out-of-print books) is due to their physical rarity. As used books, none of the price they command will go to their authors in any case. Why should those books, with the knowledge they contain, not be available to us all?

the artist: pregnant, worried, normal

Still involved mainly with copywriting. Due to the short timeline it's taking most of my days this week, and no doubt on into next week. I'm afraid my own creative project sits in neutral except for a bit of note-typing in the early morning, my research reading in the afternoon, and of course some worrying in the dead of night.

In fairness to my project, a goodly chunk of that worry is devoted to the fact that I'm not really working on it at the moment. The worry takes the form of, How will it ever get finished if I don't work on it? Since the answer to that question is straightforward and undeniable, worry ensues.

I have to accept that worry is a normal part of the process--normal for me, anyway. I've been thinking about the relationship of creators to their work, and how a creative work is indeed much like a child. One of the similarities is that once it is made (born), it becomes its own person with its own career, independent of oneself. It might be loved by others, hated, or largely ignored, the exact reaction being hard to predict in any individual case.

No doubt there are countless examples of creative works--like children--for whom great things are predicted by their creators, but who never achieve any conspicuous success. But there are the interesting opposite cases too, of created works for which their creators foresaw only a modest career, but which went on to fame and fortune. I think of the little book Man's Search for Meaning by the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, essentially a memoir of his experience as a prisoner at Auschwitz. He expected the book to have a certain limited appeal to his fellow psychiatrists, but not beyond that, and he wrote the main draft in nine days. When it was eventually published it became an international bestseller (and deservedly so), to his own astonishment.

Another book that shocked its own creator with its success, as I recall, was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, published in 1974. This odd book, a mix of philosophy, autobiography, and I think fiction, became an immense bestseller for Robert Pirsig, its author. It represented a discontinuity, not part of the smooth stream of things being produced and published at the time, not part of the pack.

As I think about it now, I like both of these books partly because they are not frivolous. The authors take life seriously and have something important to say about it. I feel heartened that there is (or was) an audience--a large one--for that type of work, for when I look at what is being published as fiction today, and produced in film and TV, I see a great tide of frivolity. Contrast this observation by Thomas Pynchon in the introduction to his collection of stories called Slow Learner:

When we speak of "seriousness" in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death--how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate. Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the apprentice age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted.

To me, frivolity arises from pretending there is no such thing as death. Our society as a whole tends to indulge in this neurotic fantasy, so perhaps it's no surprise that so many of our cultural and artistic products reflect it.

Anyway, I set out to say that, given the parallel between a created work and a child, I'm now still at the gestating-mother stage. As far as I know, it's normal for mothers-to-be, especially first-time ones, to worry, at least sometimes. "What if that hamburger I ate has a negative effect on junior?", etc. The worries themselves probably do not have any positive effect on the developing baby, but they probably don't have much negative effect either. Nature takes its course, and the result is an unexpected creature--often one that has certain distressing similarities to one's own parents...

bookstore blues

Yesterday while out on our shopping errands Kimmie and I went to Park Royal. While she prowled Fabricland for snippets of fabric for her Barbie-doll outfits, I stopped in at Staples to buy highlighters (two packages of four Sharpies--don't want to run out of highlighters!), then down to Chapters-Indigo to check out the books. In terms of floor area it's a fairly large bookstore, but it doesn't seem to have much in it. But, as I sometimes do, I decided to search for a novel I might want to read.

I had been slightly inspired at our earlier stop at Wal-Mart at Cap Mall, where I browsed the (very small) book rack while Kimmie negotiated the checkout. As usual, I picked up a few paperbacks and checked out their opening sentences and opening paragraphs. For me, all off-putting, except a novel in a vermilion jacket called Gone by Jonathan Kellerman. Apparently it's a murder-mystery/thriller of some kind, but I found its opening much better than the typical bestselling (or any-selling) novel. I don't recall the opening sentence, but Kellerman sketches a portrait of a 68-year-old rancher somewhere in the southwest, out in his truck to buy some animal feed and pick up some chips and beer at a store. The author gave me a strong, plausible sense of this crusty old guy with his various medical problems, opinions, and sick animals--a portrait I basically believed in. Soon, of course, a naked girl comes running out screaming in front of his truck, he slams on the brakes, and the thriller lurches into motion. I didn't read on from there (didn't have time).

But I thought, Hm, I might read a book like that, given a chance. So at Park Royal I thought I'd scour the long, low fiction shelves to see what I could find.

Nothing. As usual, whole sections were no-go zones, occupied by writers I know I don't want to read (Maeve Binchy, Danielle Steel). To me this makes the fiction section look the way a woodlot does to a forester in central B.C.: whole swaths turned dead orange by the mountain pine beetle. But even the still-possible interstices were filled with stuff I couldn't get interested in: chick lit, formulaic thrillers, series novels ("a Chet Brockton novel", etc.). No, no, no.

I did pause at one book: a Penguin paperback with a black cover, City of Shadows by Ariane Franklin. Set in Berlin, 1922, it is about a cabaret owner who, finding out about a woman in an insane asylum claiming to be one of the Romanovs, gets the idea of trying to put her back on the throne (I think that's the idea). Not a murder mystery, not a thriller, not a ponderous effort at comedy around mating themes--something different. I perused the opening, flipped ahead, and decided against. I still detected an effort to write for show--to portray characters in broad, flippant strokes rather than get into the reality of someone's world, someone's life. Novels seem to be borrowing their attitude and approach from the sitcom--a dead form, as far as I can tell.

I did not buy. I left the store depressed and disappointed.

a cold eye on publishing

A couple of days ago, while checking in on Debra Young's pendrifter blog, I clicked on to a post by novelist Holly Lisle about the destructiveness of the contemporary publishing industry on the career of the writer.

Yes, it sounds bad: how the impersonal, automated methods of big-box bookstores, by programmatically ordering ever-fewer quantities of a writer's books, and distributing them throughout the chain in ways that make little sense, systematically choke off the writer's ability to attract readers and effectively ruin that writer. Holly Lisle is a staunch fan of the independent bookstore, where human beings who are knowledgeable about books and who like them choose to promote writers based on a variety of factors, thus allowing writers to build audiences and make a living at their craft.

I'm sure all of this is true. Certainly, big-box stores are impersonal and filled with a lot of stuff that doesn't interest me. The main bookstore here on the North Shore is the big-box Chapters-Indigo on Marine Drive, with another one opening (or just opened) at Park Royal in West Van. There are many titles in these stores, but still I usually can't find what I'm looking for--in fact, almost never can I find what I'm looking for, if it's something specific.

Of course, when ordering and stocking decisions are made by computer programs, these will probably be inferior to decisions made by knowledgeable people. Also, big-box bookstores are inferior even to other big-box stores, like Wal-Mart, which is able to keep prices low. In general, at Chapters-Indigo I pay full price for books (with a discount that I get for buying an annual membership card--a loyalty program that could just as well be instituted by an independent). And their growing monopsony power over publishers is terrible, in that they can drive down prices, as Wal-Mart does (while not passing these on to the consumer, for the most part), and delay even longer than smaller bookstores in settling their accounts. To me, this is probably the single worst attribute of the chain stores, and the most damaging to publishing as a whole.

But I'm wondering whether the big-box stores are really as bad as they are made out to be. In one sense, the big question is how much retail shelf-space there is out there for books. For no matter who orders the books, or how many copies are ordered, there is only so much retail space in which to put the product. The more copies of your book there are on the shelves, the fewer copies of mine there are. It is a zero-sum game.

This problem has long been a big factor in grocery retailing. There are far more providers of food and related products than there are supermarket shelves to put all that stuff on. The result is a ferocious Darwinian war between suppliers, who have to pay off retailers to stock their stuff, or to put it at eye-level, or to set up end-of-aisle displays. The war for shelf-space created the old phenomenon (not practiced so intently now, I think) of cereal boxes' being much larger than their contents (remember the old package advisory, "this box is packed by weight, not volume; some settling of contents may have occurred"?). The reason for this "settling" was to take up more shelf space, presenting a larger billboard to shoppers and depriving competitors of space. A freaking rainforest-ecosystem in there.

As far as I know, nothing so intense happens in the war for bookstore shelf-space. But space is still limited, and in a certain sense it's just a matter of taste as to what fills it.

So, yes, writers' careers are ruined. Holly Lisle makes the point that no one cares about midlist writers because there are always plenty more where they came from. I've heard the "turtle eggs" analogy used. In fact, writers have always got the short end of the stick, right back to ancient Rome, when the "publishing industry" first started. In those days, entrepreneurs would make copies of a writer's book and sell them, and often make a lot of money. There being no concept of copyright, the writer would get nothing.

Back then, of course, writers were mainly gentlemen of leisure, who had no need or expectation of revenue from their writing.

The bigger problem, in my view, is that there is too much product out there. As with movies and TV, the industry has built itself on the pipeline model, where product--as much of it as possible--has to be moving through the pipe in order for the business to keep going. Thus, there are too many books of too-low quality. The pipelines are all operating at as high pressure as they can, spewing product into the limited space of bookstore shelves. This might keep publishers afloat, but are readers' interests being served?

I think not. The great mass of books, especially fiction, are junk food. It's churned out quickly and disposed of. If you're Doritos you don't want to be edged out by Cheez Pleezrs, but in the big picture, does it really matter?

my little blockbuster

Summer heat is setting in. Kimmie is off work with her cold. I'm balancing my own writing with a copywriting job on the side.

Today another book arrived in the mail (yippee!), always a treat. This one is Writing the Blockbuster Novel by the literary agent Albert Zuckerman, who has represented Ken Follett, among others. I look forward to it, since I enjoy informed, technical advice on how to improve the commercialness of writing, even though I am not a "commercial" writer.

What am I really trying to say here. I am not a commercial writer in the sense that I mean: that is, someone for whom the commercial aspect of writing--making money--is at or near the top of his priority list. The cash-starved creative writer is an ancient character, and has included most important literary authors as well as mainstream hit authors such as Stephen King. I've been one myself--am one myself--and I didn't like it. Most genre writers and other professional income-earning authors are under pressure to turn out a book a year or so in order to pay their bills.

Fair enough. Other writers are more like artists, who can't or won't (or don't have to) subordinate their creative standards to the need to earn a living from writing. Here I think of writers such as James Joyce and Franz Kafka and Malcolm Lowry. They put the quality of the project at the top of the priority list, and then make ends meet as best they can. While I don't pretend to be in the same quality bracket as these writers, they represent the values that I hold in writing: quality.

On the other hand, I am not a "literary" writer. I don't put any value on having an elevated or poetic prose style, or deliberately frustrating readers' plot expectations, or creating work that anyone might be tempted to call "experimental". I regard all those things as low-hanging fruit, and not productive of enjoyable reading experiences.

No. For me the top literary value is storytelling. Yes: I'm saying that a novel with a well-crafted story is of higher literary value than a more overtly academic or experimental or poetic work whose story is weak or absent. As Robert McKee says, writing is relatively easy; storytelling is hard.

And storytelling, of course, is a "commercial" quality. Books with strong stories sell well, because this is what readers--virtually all readers--are looking for. It is rarely achieved. I believe that most breakout bestsellers--those novels that propel a new author to the bestseller lists--have good stories. (Most books on the bestseller list, on the other hand, are by brand-name authors who at some time in the past wrote a good story, and who enjoy the good fortune of a loyal audience even though their follow-up works are not as good.)

So, I have bought Zuckerman's book (on the advice of the Grumpy Old Bookman, by the way, who used to be a client of Zuckerman's as well), not so much to turn my opus into a by-the-numbers blockbuster (no chance of that, and no interest either, since most "bestsellers" are boring to me), but to learn what he has to say about the crafting of story to create a "big" book. I hope to make it better by my own criteria; if I also make it more saleable, then so much the better.

on writing what you want to read

Up early and out into the dark of morning to escort Kimmie to a medical appointment over town. Afterwards we went riding on the SkyTrain for the hell of it, to see the Millennium Line, which neither of us has ridden since its completion a couple of years ago. We walked along Columbia Street in New Westminster (near-deserted, blustery under the wet overcast), then rode on to Commercial Drive in Vancouver. We had a very good late breakfast there at the Cafe du Soleil, a dim spacious place of dark wood and an open kitchen area behind the heavy bar. We walked awhile through the narrow streets of old houses as the first microdroplets of rain blew from the sky.

So no writing today: I'm truly in the spirit of vacation.

I caught some interesting comments in my post of the other day about novel openings. Of course, my opinions on this, as on other aspects of fiction and fiction-writing, are my own. They have not been taught to me; they are based on my experience and reflection. I accept that I am an isolated case; I do not share the enthusiasm of most readers for most fictional works. When I look at works that others gush over, I usually do not see much to like. I am an outlier.

Still: I love good writing, and have long been an eager reader and buyer of books. I would be happy to buy probably 20 novels a year--as many as I could read--if I could find ones I liked. In 2005 I think I've bought only two: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and Forty Signs of Rain. The first I finished, the second I didn't. Both, I felt, had more or less serious execution problems.

I'm not sure whether it's just that the publishing industry doesn't care about me--doesn't want the extra $200 or so each year from me--or that there really is not good stuff (by my definition) being written and submitted to publishers. Am I unique? Or am I a member of a new fiction market--one that's currently not being tapped, not being served? If the latter, how big is this new market? No one knows.

I'm writing the kind of book I want to read. When I prowl the fiction shelves--as a reader--this is what I hope to find. I understand that this was how Gone with the Wind came to be written. Margaret Mitchell, laid up with a broken leg or something, had her husband fetch books from the library for her. The day came when he couldn't find any more books of the type she wanted, so he gave her a pad of paper and a pen and told her to write her own.

Maybe it's apocryphal--but it's still true. You have to write something that you yourself would want to read. Although Gone with the Wind has some excellent qualities, it's not my kind of book. But it was Margaret Mitchell's--and she wasn't alone, as it turned out.

I don't think I'll be alone with mine either. But only time will tell.

integrity vs. success

An abbreviated writing morning since I was driving Kimmie up to another ultrasound appointment at 11:00. I skipped research notes and went straight to story notes over my coffee.

When I got back I checked Agent 007's blog-post of yesterday. In it, she tells a story of two assistant editors faced with the same problem: that their further advance up the corporate ladder depends on sucking up to department heads in the company. One assistant could not swallow this, and left the industry altogether. The other (007 herself--or her narrator) immediately decided to embark on the "Great Sucking-Up Campaign", "put 110% into it", and went on to publishing-industry success.

The title of the post is "A Word About Advice for People Who Don't Want to Take It". I was glad that 007 posted on this topic, for it is close to my heart. She closes the tale with this moral: "You may not like the truth, but that doesn't make it untrue".

After reading the post, I did not feel that this was the true moral of the story. The moral I would have drawn would be more like: "Integrity is the price of success in publishing".

Of course, it's not just about publishing. Any time there are worldly prizes being striven for, competed for, the question arises: what are we are prepared to do to attain them? I arrived in television at a similar situation: I was told that I must not question the creative decisions of certain network executives, but simply do as instructed. My fate was more like that of assistant editor 1: I was cashiered from a hit show that I had created and written.

Was I outraged? Yes. Did I regret my decision? No. Not then (1993), not now. I regret not fighting harder to make the show even better than it was; I regret whatever ground I may have given that I didn't need to.

No one can corrupt us; the decision is ours alone to make. They can show me the buttocks, they can tell me to kiss them, they can tell me what they'll do to me if I don't kiss them, but the decision to kiss is mine. Industries become corrupt because people who sacrifice their integrity for career success do not like to see people rise who have not made the same sacrifice. Would you? The ego-defense mechanism called rationalization kicks in and you develop a myth to justify your decision and the subsequent ones which are easier to make. Now, for the sake of your own self-esteem, you serve the myth of Necessity: the myth that checking your integrity at the door--kissing ass--is the price of doing business. Someone who doesn't do that isn't One Of Us and has to go. They're guilty of "pride"--the first Deadly Sin.

Of course, kissing ass might be the price of doing business. It was on my show. If so, it's not a business I want to be in. I'd rather be a voice in the wilderness than have success on those terms. In television my allegiance was to my audience, not to power-drunk honchos, not even to my own "career". My allegiance is still to my audience. I'm placing my trust in, betting all my chips on, the conviction that the power of whatever I can create will arc through the insulating wall of ass-kissing careerists to find its audience. I might even find like-minded people who live by the creed that quality really is job one. If I fail, I will have failed by putting my best effort into something I believe in. If I must fail for any reason, let it be that.