Been thinking about writing.

What a surprise.

Harlan Ellison is on record as saying that not everyone should write. That not everyone can write. That, in point of fact, those people who want to write should be actively and even aggressively discouraged from doing so. They should be shut down. They should be shot down. He’s done this, apocryphally, on more than one occasion. Last I checked, his rationale was that, if someone truly wants to write, they won’t give him any due whatsoever. In brief, it’s a test. Believe what he says about you, your writing, your desire to write, set the pen down and walk away, you’ve failed; say “nuts to you, Mister Ellison, sir,” and you’re a step closer to becoming a writer.

I’ve said before that I think writing is an illness, not a profession. The world of difference between the writer who is up at the crack of dawn, putting down words until their eyes have gone teary and their vision has blurred, and the person who writes “when they feel like it” is enormous. It’s the difference between a professional and a diletante. It’s the difference between doing it because you have no alternative, and doing it as a hobby. This distinction has no immediate reflection on the merit of said writing, mind; I’m more than willing to accept that the hobbyest will occasionally knock one out of the park. I just cannot accept that the same hobbyest is likely to hit the metaphoric ball consistently.

I also believe that writing cannot be taught, per se. The nature of the craft is so intensely individual that what works for one may not, perhaps even cannot, work for another. But more, the nature of the craft is tied directly to the crafter; I write the way I write, the stories that I want to tell, the way I want to tell them. The exact same stories, with the same beginning, middle, and ending, in the hands of (using comic writers, here) a Gail Simone or a Mark Waid or a Kelly Sue DeConnick become, by necessity, different animals. Who we are as people is different, thus our view of the world is different, thus our stories, inherently, are different, even if they are ostensibly, apparently, the same.

Writing cannot be taught, perhaps. But it can be learned. It can be learned through reading and thinking and doing. I cannot read your work and tell you “do this, do that, do the other,” and make you a writer. I can, at best, read and try to understand what it is you’re trying to achieve, and judge its success or failure in my own eyes. I can tell you where I feel you stepped wrong, I can suggest ways to correct the perceived error. I can tell you what isn’t working, and why I think that is the case. I can offer to you those writers I hold in high esteem, and sometimes point to their expertise, their tools, their techniques, offering them as examples to emulate. I can offer my own tips and tricks and advice and experience, but in the end, that is never enough, because you have to do the writing yourself, and writing is perhaps the most intensely isolating, solitary artistic endeavor of our species. You are, ultimately, on your own.

And what I cannot do, ever, is tell you the story you should write. All other advice given, all other suggestions made, you are the person to tell your story, and it is not my place nor right to attempt to make that my own. The story is yours. Your voice, your vision, your passion, your drive. I may hate that story you want to write, but that’s not the point. I may think it’s worthless and pointless and even stupid, but it’s yours. Uniquely yours. Properly yours.

(As an aside – it can be far harder to discern the story you’re trying to tell than you might think. More than once, I’ve written something only to finish it and then, seeing the whole, come to understand what exactly it was I was trying to write about. This is why we revise. This is why we have drafts. This is why we rewrite. This is why no story is finished, only abandoned.)

So, I’ve been thinking about writing. And I’ve concluded – all things being equal, presuming the same command of the language, the same indefinable need to tell a story, the same passion – that there are (roughly) five traits I look for when looking for good writing, writing of quality, writing of merit.

In no particular order, these are: Honesty, Courage, Discipline, Commitment, and Passion.

Seems to me those are five perfectly fine topics for upcoming Dispatches, so that’s my plan for the next couple weeks, taking us into the start of Chapter Two.

Next up, Honesty.

Hold fast, and enjoy your long weekend, if indeed a long weekend is what you have in store!

Greg

We’re coming to the end of Chapter One, here, which – as Rick pointed out on our weekly status update phone call this morning – has really been one long reveal. We started in “tight,” as they say, on Lady S’ shoes, and since then have steadily been pulling back further and further to show the wider context, to hint at the expanse of the world. I think it’s a fair read. I think it’s an accurate read.

It was also entirely unintentional. Or, more specifically, it was entirely consciously unintentional.

Resorting to yet another anecdote – I do this a lot, I realize, because, again, I can only speak for myself, and thus, uhm… well, I shall. Anyway, some years back I was on a panel at a mystery convention in Bristol. The panel was – I think – about process, and I remember one of the audience asking some question or other about characters “coming to life” and one of the panelists went off on this poor woman for even to dare suggest such a thing. He held forth at some length about this, and the thrust was, essentially, that he felt it was bullshit, that if any writer was actually hearing their characters in their head, they needed help, and they needed it fast. He was emphatic on the matter; his characters didn’t do a damn thing unless he wrote it; he was the master of his domain. Characters didn’t control him, he controlled them. He got a lot of laughs.

And I could see where he was coming from, and in many ways – in the most literal of ways – he is correct.

In others, he’s wrong. He’s just dead wrong.

Because it’s not that simple.

Like many things when one talks about writing, the idea of Characters Coming to Life is often, and perhaps even actively, misinterpreted, right up there with Write What You Know. I’ve said before that Write What You Know refers to an emotional truth, not a literal one; if it did, you’d never have books like The Forever War or, more recently and more popularly, A Game of Thrones. If I only wrote what I knew, there’d be no Lady Sabre, never mind the several hundred super-hero comics I’ve penned.

Characters live. They live through the author, and if the author is extraordinarily fortunate, they live through the audience, as well. Fan fiction is the most ready evidence of this, and fan fiction has existed for millennia; all the internet did was make it that much easier to share. But you spend enough time with anything, you take it into you, you make it a part of yourself. This feeds back to what I’ve said about role-playing; there’s a reason gamers love to talk about what they did – they did it, even if they did it pretending to be some accursed demon-spawn descendent of the high elves of Happyland or whatnot. It’s also why listening to a gamer talk about what they did is so terrifically boring in the main; it’s them talking about themselves.

Spend enough time with your characters and you learn them beyond intimacy. Get a group of people working together on the same characters, the same story,and the mix becomes more arcane, more potent. This is the creative breath of life. This when characters can talk to you, when you know what they will do and why they do it in every situation. They are real, even if only within the confines of the mind, and thus they are alive. This is when they surprise you, when you think you’re writing one thing, have a plan or a plot, then see it suddenly tipped on its ear by words you’ve typed that you’re not at all certain where they came from.

I’m not a neurologist. My understanding of how the mind works is decidedly limited, despite my curiosity in the subject, especially in regards to creativity. Some artists put their creative ‘force’ outside of themselves, call it a muse or inspiration or genius, perhaps. Others root it firmly inside. The source doesn’t matter, perhaps, because in the end, it’s the work that’s the proof.

One long reveal. Rick’s right, it is.

Wish I’d known that was what I was writing when I wrote it.

Hold fast.

Greg

The newest member of the crew

Congratulations to our silent co-conspirator Eric and his bride Karen, on the birth of their son.

Seven pounds, one ounce, twenty inches long, and already a master of the blade.

As it should be.

I am technically on vacation. This means that my blog post for Tuesday is a day late and I’m writing less-regularly than normal. Apologies for the delay. I am also in a mood, and that’s probably not a good thing to be in when trying to write a blog post, but I’m going to post this anyway, because it’s that kind of mood. You have been warned.

My son and I went to see Captain America about two weeks back, and it was as enjoyable and delightful a trip to the movies as I can remember in years. My days as a bitchy critic of cinema are long past, mind you, and I’m not interested in posting a review. I could do that. I once did do that. I stopped doing that 20 years ago. The proliferation of people who mistake their opinion for criticism made me stop. We enjoyed it tremendously, and that’s enough. Given the current state of cinema, it may be more than enough.

Rick and I did an interview on Monday for The Long and Shortbox of It with Jon Gorga and Josh Kopin, and over the course of the conversation, we ended up discussing the continued slavish devotion to that which is labeled “dark” and “gritty” in super-hero comics. You’ll get an earful on this when you listen to the podcast, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about off and on for a while now, and this seems as good a time as any to get something off my virtual chest, so to speak.

When I was working on 52, I half-jokingly asked Geoff Johns what it was with him and decapitations. If you’ve read his work, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Black Adam, in particular, had a penchant for removing the top, so to speak. His response was that he’d grown up playing Mortal Kombat. Fatalities were common, as he put it; a decapitation was de rigueur. Me, I was in college when Narc came out. Late formative years, and I still remember being taken aback the first time I watched the animated pitbulls tearing me apart on the screen.

Rick and I want Lady Sabre to be fun. Stealing a page from the Clevinger-Wegener manifesto, if it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing. If it’s not fun, we’re doing something wrong.

Captain America was fun. It was pure, and it was sincere, and it never once apologized for being either of those things, and in fact, that was why Steve Rogers was chosen to become the First Super Soldier. I credit an enormous amount of its success to these factors.

Here’s the thing: I am sick and tired of super-heroes who aren’t super and aren’t heroes, but more, I’m sick and tired of Hollywood blaming us for their failures. I am sick and tired of hearing various Hollywood studio execs who are as disconnected from the reality of middle-American taste as Rick Perry is from Christianity excusing the poor performance of their ill-executed product by tacitly blaming you, me, and everyone else of us who didn’t pay to see their garbage. Catwoman fails? Instead of, perhaps, just perhaps, acknowledging that the movie is a piece of excrement unworthy of use as fertilizer, they conclude instead that a female lead can’t open a movie unless her name is Jolie. So now we’re not only guilty of not being willing to pay for 90 minutes of intellectual abuse, we’re all apparently sexist jerks, as well. The problem with Green Lantern’s performance at the box office is that it’s not “gritty” enough? I don’t think so.

Art – and even if that art is commercial art, produced for entertainment – feeds and is fed by the society that consumes it. So I ask you, right now, looking around you, what flavor of escapism will go down best with you? In an era of terror alerts and bipartisan dysfunction, of rising hate and blossoming intolerance, of bank failure and wide-spread, global unemployment and recession, is gritty really what we need?

Look, I like gritty. I write gritty. There is a time and a place for gritty. I’ll take my Batman gritty, thank you, and I will acknowledge that such a portrayal means that my 11 year old has to wait before he sees The Dark Knight. But if Hollywood turns out a Superman movie that I can’t take him to? They’ve done something wrong. Superman is many, many things. Gritty he is not, something that Richard Donner certainly understood.

(Pet peeve time: for the contingent out there who sneer at heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman and Captain America, those icons who still, at their core, represent selfless sacrifice for the greater good, and who justify their contempt by saying, oh, it’s so unrealistic, no one would ever be so noble… grow up. Seriously. Cynicism is not maturity, do not mistake the one for the other. If you truly cannot accept a story where someone does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, that says far more about who you are than these characters.)

This is not an argument of era or audience sophistication. Sophistication does not negate sincerity, nor does it even deny it, as the Captain America movie proves. Sophistication demands better storytelling, clearer motivation, purer intention. “Gritty” is an apologist word in this sense, used in the place of “realism.” We don’t go to the movies for “realism.” This is why documentaries aren’t the major product in the theaters. Sophistication does not demand realism; it demands smart.

I can think of no other industry where the consumer is made to bear the blame for the product’s failure as much as Hollywood. Seriously, let’s think that one through. The movie didn’t perform, therefore it’s our fault? You got food poisoning eating the fish they served and you paid for, it’s your fault? The brakes on your new car crapped out and you wrapped it around a tree, it’s your fault?

Here’s a crazy thought.

Maybe you made a bad movie.

Hold fast.

Greg