Category: Writingthoughts

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I’m Back On Top And I’m Missing You, Baby Baby Where’d You Go?

Just the other day, I was thinking to myself, I haven’t had a popular article on Time’s Entertainment Blog for awhile. Have I lost “it”? and then, today, I look and see this:

So, here’s the funny thing: The #1 story? That’s mine. The #10 story? That’s a story from a year ago that I linked to in my story that apparently resonated with people. Look at me, resurrecting traffic for long-forgotten material! I feel inordinately smug about that.

In any case, here’s this week’s Time story, about the Moonlighting Curse and why it’s a myth. And, because I was out of town last week when it went live, here’s last week’s story, too.

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My First Attempt At A Public Debut

After thinking about zines and early days of writing yesterday, I’ve been thinking about my public writing debut. Years before Fanboy Rampage!!! or professional (paid!) writing, or even Tears Before Bedtime – the blog that introduced me to my wife and brought me to America, fact fans – I wrote for the student newspaper of the university my art school was attached to. I can’t remember why I thought it was a good idea, or how it all came together; all of that has disappeared in the mists of my memory. All I remember was that Andy Barnett, my best friend and partner in many many crimes at the time, and I somehow ended up in the situation of writing multiple things for the monthly newspaper for a couple of years. There was a column that was pretty much a collection of odds-and-ends, a tongue-in-cheek horoscope column, a comic strip about some event or other that either Andy or myself had attended at some point in the previous month (Something very clearly indebted on my part to Kyle Baker and Evan Dorkin’s Critics At Large strip from Reflex magazine in the ’90s, looking back on it – Andy had never seen those strips, I don’t think? – Like, embarrassingly indebted) and a “How To Dance Like A Britpop Celebrity” guide, too. Looking back, a bunch of material to come up with on a regular basis, but I remember loving the whole thing, especially the knowledge that people read what we were doing. Weirder, people recognized Andy (and, very occasionally, myself) because of the self-portraits in the strips; it was like being a very minor celebrity, and very compelling for an early 20-something as I was then.

Somewhere, I’m sure, I have copies of this stuff. I should scan some in and put it up on here, to embarrass myself.

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A Pox On Your Sales And Your Novels!

[I]f you fail to keep our promise, may other writers anticipate your plots, may your publishers do you down in your contracts, may strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints and may your sales continually diminish. Amen.

That’s part of the initiation ceremony British mystery writers had to go through in order to join the wonderfully named Detection Club in the 1930s, written by Dorothy Sayers and available here. You can learn more about the Detection Club here.

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Made By Hand, Made With Heart

A reason for me to go visit Floating World sometime soon: David Brothers has a zine of his fiction available there. I’ve been thinking a lot about zines and zine culture recently – I often train a lot of my wanting to be a writer to being zine-culture-adjacent back when I was in art school, and have found myself thinking about digital books as modern zines and what to do with that over the last few days – and found David writing about the experience of physically putting the zines together to be weirdly nostalgic:

At this point, I’ve got the cover, I’ve got the guts, I’ve got a stapler, and I’ve got no idea how long it’s going to take to put this thing together. Luckily, I’d been slacking on watching TV, so I just caught up on Louie, Black Dynamite, and Children’s Hospital while I folded. 25 doesn’t sound like a lot, but boy does it feel like a lot of work when you’re in the middle of it and half done.

For the degree show part of my bachelors’ degree, I made up 100 copies of five different booklets of me writing and illustrating stories (I wrote and illustrated a bunch throughout the final year of that course, and then picked five to mass produce for the final show, with the idea of selling them for… crap, I can’t remember how much. Cheap, anyway); I remember having to trim and staple all of the books over a couple of nights as the show approached, with everything lying on the floor of my bedroom and me staring at it all as the night went on and my deadline-driven insanity only got worse.

One day, I should see if I have any of those booklets left. I know I brought a bunch with me when I moved to the US a decade ago, but I’ve moved around a lot since, and have lost a lot of stuff across that time.

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Outlook Unclear; Try Again Later

I said I was crazy busy, right? That’s why I’m not even going to try and dress this up: Look! It’s my new Time essay, this week about political conventions and comic conventions. It’s another one of those that turned out being written multiple times; the first time I wrote it, I ended up going out on an entirely different journey than I’d intended to and, more importantly, than what I’d pitched to the editors. It wasn’t a bad journey, but it wasn’t what I’d promised, and that was a problem. Sometimes, such things happen, and occasionally they’re a good thing – I love the happy accident of writing, I promise – but I always wish that they’d take less time when they do happen…

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“He Was Operating, Most of The Time, Without A Safety Net”

Lehrer’s transgressions are inexcusable—but I can’t help but think that the industry he (and I) work for share a some of the blame for his failure. I’m 10 years older than Lehrer, and unlike him, my contemporaries and I had all of our work scrutinized by layers upon layers of editors, top editors, copy editors, fact checkers and even (heaven help us!) subeditors before a single word got published. When we screwed up, there was likely someone to catch it and save us (public) embarrassment. And if someone violated journalistic ethics, it was more likely to be caught early in his career—allowing him the chance either to reform and recover or to slink off to another career without being humiliated on the national stage. No such luck for Lehrer; he rose to the very top in a flash, and despite having his work published by major media companies, he was operating, most of the time, without a safety net. Nobody noticed that something was amiss until it was too late to save him.

From here, an article by Charles Seife, the man hired by Wired.com to look into whether Jonah Lehrer’s (unedited) blog posts for the site contained the same kind of recycling, plagiarism and lies that he has been found guilty of in his books and at the New Yorker. Short version: Yes, so much so that Seife suggests that Lehrer’s “moral compass” may be broken when it comes to journalism. Which, you know, is kind of a bold thing to say, really.

Over at Poynter, Seife is interviewed about the article, and he says something that really resonates with my experience as a blogger-turned-journalist (If that’s what I am?):

Seife worried that this sort of instant publishing “is a double-edged sword.” Editors might have slow you down as a writer and robbed you of some freedom, but “at the same time they protected you,” he said.

“They made sure they challenged you. They forced you to think harder about your work, and if you screwed up, they kicked your ass. Lehrer, I think it’s really sad because I do think he’s a very clear writer, he’s able to distill ideas very well.

“And I think that if he had a bit more oversight early on in his career, if he had a good editor or two to kick his butt, I think he might have become a star that would never have fallen.”

I remain compelled by this whole thing, for selfish reasons. I can’t stop myself hoping that someone writes a book about it, weirdly.

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All Apologies

As you could likely tell from my silence yesterday, my schedule hasn’t exactly settled down just yet. To be fair, I was absent because I was watching the first episode of the new Doctor Who season (It’s very fun), but still. I’m back now and will try to stay on top of stuff a bit more, apart from when I’m on vacation for a couple days in the near future, but that should be vacation and that’s good and and and… Hey! Go read my Time piece from this week instead of me rambling here. That’ll be so much better.

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10,000+

Not boasting, just explaining: I’ve written somewhere in the region of 10,000 words today for various things. No wonder my brain is quietly crying at me right now. It’s also the reason that the blog is going to go quiet through the weekend; I’ll catch up with 366 Songs on Monday, or at least try to. Right now? I need to not write things for awhile.

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“This Is No Longer An Industry That Rewards Working-Class Values, In Other Words”

To be a writer in this market requires not only money, but a concept of “work” that is most easily gained from privilege. It requires a sense of entitlement, the ability to network and self-promote without seeing yourself as an arrogant, schmoozing blowhard. And it requires you to think of working for free—at an internship, say, or on one of those gratis assignments that seem to be everywhere now—as an opportunity rather than an insult or a scam.

This is no longer an industry that rewards working-class values, in other words, and I underestimated how hard it would be to shuck them. It still seems strange to me that people work, unpaid, without a guaranteed job at the end. And I haven’t reconciled myself with the central irony here: that journalism, ostensibly a populist endeavour, is becoming a rarefied practice best suited, both financially and psychologically, to the well-off.

From here. Well worth reading, and lots of food for thought that I am still chewing, to extend metaphors past their original comfort zone.