Furthermore, as observers like Chris Anderson (in “The Long Tail”) and social scientists like Sheena Iyengar (in her new book “The Art of Choosing”) have pointed out, when confronted with an overwhelming array of choices, most people do not graze more widely. Instead, if they aren’t utterly paralyzed by the prospect, their decisions become even more conservative, zeroing in on what everyone else is buying and grabbing for recognizable brands because making a fully informed decision is just too difficult and time-consuming. As a result, introducing massive amounts of consumer choice leads to situations in which the 10 most popular items command the vast majority of the market share, while thousands of lesser alternatives must divide the leftovers into many tiny portions.
Archive for the ‘books’ Category
Some Predictions About Books By Way of Some Predictions About Music
We Burn Books
I came across this nice article by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing wherein he makes some interesting points on how current copyright laws have censored the majority of books.
the legal changes introduced in the years after Fahrenheit 451 did more than just extend terms. Congress eliminated the benign practice of the renewal requirement (which had guaranteed that 85% of works and 93% of books entered the public domain after 28 years because the authors and publishers simply didn’t want or need a second copyright term.) And copyright, which had been an opt-in system (you had to comply with some very minor formalities to get a copyright) became an opt out system (you got a copyright automatically when you “fixed” the work in material form, whether you wanted it or not.) Suddenly the entire world of informal and non commercial culture — from home movies that provide a wonderful lens into the private life of an era, to essays, posters, locally produced teaching materials — was swept into copyright. And kept there for the life of the author plus 70 years. The effects were culturally catastrophic.
This issue brings to mind the hardest part, for me, of working in publishing—seeing how many books are destroyed and being powerless to stop it. You would think that out-of-print books are worth more, since the moment it is declared out of print it is limited edition, i.e. those that exist now may be the only copies left in the world. The book industry in the only one where retailers are allowed to return the product if it doesn’t sell. But if they hold onto the book after it is out of print, the publisher will refuse the returns. Thus as soon as a book has been declared out-of-print book sellers nationwide box up every last company and return them to the publisher, who, having nowhere to sell them, has them demolished.
Naturally, you are wondering why they don’t just donante the books to libraries or other book-hungry institutions. The problem is again returns: they assume that a certain percentage of these would find their way back to the bookstores, who will return it for full price. On each of these books the publisher, author and distributor are then paying the bookstore for the book and making zero profit—a risk they’re not willing to take.
So every time a book goes out of print, it is also removed from the shelves and incinerated. Yay, capitalism!
One Writer’s Process II
My apartment is a disaster. There are dishes scattered about, paper strewn, twice-worn clothes in a heap. My ass has been reshaped into the form of the cushion, and it hurts. My shoulders are killing me. I’m sick of listening to music.
“No! Take it back!” you say. For I am never sick of listening to music, as you, dear reader, probably know by now.
But I have been sitting in this same spot, listening to music and staring at this novel for the last twelve hours. I had determined that a four-day weekend was plenty of time to finish the ten scenes that I haven’t been able to find the time to write for the last ten months.
OK, to be fair, I did write some of them. But writing scenes inspires a need to write more scenes, so no matter how much I wrote the conclusion of the novel seemed at least ten scenes away.
Believe it or not, in those twelve hours I got very little writing done. Hardly a page.
Instead, something even better happened. It was like a gift from my fairy godmother!
Where the writing happens, only much filthier
I had been miffed at myself of late. I had had plenty of good ideas for character, dialog, description (etc.) and not taken the time to get those ideas down. Then when I wanted to go write them later, of course the words didn’t take shape quite as easily.
I thought because I had been keeping up with entering the changes in my edited drafts, that I had most of the hand-written scenes entered.
I was wrong. I was so wrong.
Turns out those good ideas had been put to paper. I decided to go through every journal I have used since I started the novel and finally type in every last scrap of anything that I had hand-written but not entered into the draft yet. We are talking eight journals and assorted random pieces of paper. They were sentence fragments on legal pads, plotpoints in margins, conflict and dialog written sideways on notes from work meetings, whole scenes in journals I was sure would have nothing but diary entries cataloging various breakups…like the typical artist, my journals are as scatterbrained as my mind.
All together, in those twelve hours I typed seventeen pages, or roughly 8,000 words. I didn’t put them in their place in the story, just typed them straight through, separating them with useful headers.
You’d think it would be better for me to have written those enigmatic ten scenes, since this stuff would get entered at some point regardless. You would think also that it would be better if there were several whole scenes rather than a ton of fragments.
Au contraire! I say in a terrible French accent.
Because the hardest part of writing is starting. It is much, much (much) easier to finish off a scene than put one word on a blank piece of paper. Now most of the scenes I need to write have already been started. I just have to fill in the gaps. Even the two monumental mind-fuck *scenes that are going to be the hardest to rewrite had some significant edits hidden away that I had forgotten about.
Furthermore, this is tremendous validation that I actually did something in 2009 besides bite my nails, Blip, and fret over the aphids eating my tomatoes.
And plenty of what was written didn’t suck! That’s key of course. I’m excited just to get this fresh content in because I am sick of looking at the same tired sentences I’ve been editing for ages. And those ten scenes smell a lot more like four scenes at the moment.
Moving forward: First step, naturally, is to stick all those scenes in the appropriate place in the draft. That may take the rest of the weekend. Then I will reprint the draft and continue editing it. This time I’m going to leave big spaces where I think there should be more content. Not sure whether I will start from page one or pick up where I left off.
Now to get off my ass and be unproductive!
_______________
*They entail describing pretty much the entire history of humanity in a touching, infuriating, frenzied dream. Exactly like that scene from Adaptation, actually.
One Writer’s Process
As some of you may recall, I started writing a novel in November 2006. It’s a jerky process. And by “jerky” I mean both Steve Martin-esque and filled with more stops and starts than a pimply teen learning to drive a stick shift. I can hardly believe it has been two years and my best hope is that it will be no more than another year before I am willing to show it to a stranger. Not before then, surely. Coming November I’d like to participate in National Novel Writing Month again, which is the event that prompted me to start the thing in the first place. So I have set the goal to get the plot written out before November, hopefully with a week or so to plot out the project I’ll begin for NaNoWriMo becuase it will be no fun writing daily without a plot. Even less fun editing it later. Trust me, I know.
By writing out the plot, I mean writing every scene that takes place in the book. Right now I have a chapter by chapter outline, scenes of which are written in caps like this: IF JANET IS GOING TO SHAG ROCKY, MAYBE ADD A SCENE HERE WHERE SHE SINGS TO BE TOUCHED? For many months I struggled to wholly finish the chapter outline because there was one character I just hadn’t gotten right from the start. He kept whispering, I’m not who you think I am. And I knew he was right. It made it damn near impossible to write his scenes because his dialogue and movements were all uncertain. Its one thing to write a scene with the expectation that the writing may be crap and will have to be redone. Its even more annoying to be unclear about what characters are thinking/doing because a wrong fork may mean you have to redo every scene following.
About a month ago it all came to me, in the form of a power outage of all things. The power outage introduced a new and significant character as well as a subplot that threatens to dwarf the major plot.Maybe not. The major story arc was finished almost two years ago and I am seldom working on it so it is tough to say. And now that i have this new subplot I’m thinking I may not need all the others. But they are so intrinsically tied into my story that I’m not sure where I would snip them. I’m just going to run with it. If whole sections need to be cut out, now is not the time to decide that. I have to stay focused on the goal of getting the whole thing written out first. Like I can’t worry about if the protagonist is likeable enough (not a major deal, though I hear books with femaie protagonists don’t sell if the lead isn’t likeable) because there are more opportunities to flesh out her motivation as more gets added.
I find I spend more time than I would like adjusting the outline to reflect changes in chapter length, story, etc. The outline is essential because it is really easy to forget where you are in the story (what secrets the protagonist knows, if someone is dead and whether someone else knows it, for examples). If Shakespeare wrote with a feather and a candle I have no room to bitch. But next novel, I’m using some kind of outline program.
Now that my plot is written out, I went ahead and counted how many scenes I need to write for my goal. I came up with eighteen. This is a misleading number because more often than vice-versa, what seemed like one scene will take multiple scenes to develop when pen gets to paper. I don’t think this is overwriting, it is a sign of maturity as a writer in my mind. Sure sign of an amateur is an underdeveloped plot—you know, the guy and gal are making out and they just met last scene? Still, 18 scenes could definitely be written in a month!
Hopefully, post November I will have the seeds of another novel to puzzle over. That should be put aside for December, when I plan to pick this one up and look at it afresh. At that time, I have a number of read-throughs to do, each of which will involve reading the whole thing from start to finish. These include:
*making sure the dialog is consistent for each character’s personality
*plotting everything on a calendar to find inconsistencies.
*Make depressed character more sad.
*One plot point that afflicts the character needs to be brought up and developed more throughout.
*I noticed on the show Weeds that every character in every scene wants something and this adds more drama to every scene. I want to do a read through where I think about that.
*Make dream sequences more surreal and tighter, better written. There’s only one I’m happy with now.
*The five senses: what season is it? What’s the weather? How does the room smell? Some scenes are strong on this but I still have whole scenes that suffer from talking-head syndrome.
*The verb tenses are all screwed up, but I think I can deal with passing this problem along to my volunteer editors.
OK, now the good news! Since I did that count a few weeks ago, I am down to thirteen scenes that need to be written. Out of 20 chapters, I have the story written out for nine. This means I’ve written five of the eighteen projected in under a month. And through that chapter, things flow pretty smoothly, meaning I didn’t just plug the scene in with no context, I wrote the necessary stuff to make it fit in with the story line, even if that means rewriting parts of Chapter one. I even entirely rewrote one of the later chapters. There was nothing wrong with it, I just decided I could do it better. One sentence entered my mind and then another and another and before I knew it, dawn was upon me and the chapter was reborn. It felt great. It felt like writing should feel: exhilarating, liberating, total immersion. Today was another great day. I watched an episode of telly, ran some errands and then threw myself into it for 12 hours, stopping only to intake and elimate fuel. Every two hours I would look up and be surprised that so much time had passed. Then I would keep on truckin’.
J.K. Rowling’s Reckoning is Beckoning
She Can Cry All She Wants But That Doesn’t Mean She Has A Case
There has been a lot of hoopla about the case against the authors of the Harry Potter Lexicon. Teary fans throw curses at this evil, evil fan who dared to make J.K. Rowling cry. In case you’re out of the loop here’s the story: the guy who runs the fansite the Harry Potter Lexicon decided to publish the contents of his site in a book. He’s had this site a long time and Rowling has even expressed her approval for it in the past. What’s changed now is that Rowling wants to publish her own Harry Potter encyclopedia and isn’t too keen about the competition. So she has brought her pack of lawyers to bear on the young man for copywrite infringement.
I am not a lawyer but I do work in a publishing house that has jumped through legal hurdles to publish a Harry Potter related book so I would like to comment on the ways this lawsuit should fail.
Many of the fans are arguing that a dictionary is just cutting and pasting from her books and selling it as his own. Rowling herself on the stand called it “outright theft.” Creating a dictionary involves more than cutting and pasting. The editorial process of indexing and organizing each word is lengthy and not to be trivialized. Furthermore, if you take the time to visit the website (www.hp-lexicon.com) you will see that the content is original. For example, (from the site).
“banshee - Rating Unknown (PA7, GF21, FB)
A Dark creature with the appearance of a woman with floor-length black hair and a skeletal, green-tinged face. Its screams will kill. Seamus Finnigan is particularly afraid of banshees (PA7). The Bandon Banshee was supposedly defeated by Gilderoy Lockhart (CS6) but was actually defeated by a witch with a hairy chin (see CS16). The singer Celestina Warbeck performs with a backing group of banshees (DP).”
Clearly this is not copied from the text of the book but a wholly original definition of the word “banshee”. I suspect they will have to double-check that some of it isn’t lifted from Merriam Webster but it’s obviously not from the book. If there some portions that are too similar, Vander Ark, who runs the site, would obviously change them. He himself cried on the stand. After all, he has devoted a lot of commitment to this project because he is a fan. The lawsuit is not saying, “some of this needs to be changed.” They are saying he has no right to publish such a book, regardless of the wording.
Rowling claimed on the stand that one reason she is suing over this particular derivative is it is sloppily written. “‘Alohomora,’ a spell that opens doors in Harry Potter’s word, does not come from ‘aloha,’ the Hawaiian salutation, she said on the stand. Rather it derives from a West African term meaning favorable to thieves, she said.” But that’s the beauty of capitalism: she can write her own version, and do it better! There is no law against writing poorly.
The copywrite law is to protect from someone else selling a book that steals sales of your book, for example, condensing it or changing the names and selling what is essentially the same product cheaper. Obviously, this book wouldn’t take sales away from any of the existing HP books. It may take sales away from the Encyclopedia that she hasn’t written yet–there’s the rub!
It took many years for the Harry Potter Lexicon to evolve to the place it is at today, with the help of numerous writers. Thus it may be as good, at least from an organizational perspective, as Rowling’s own Encyclopedia. Dictionaries, after all, don’t call for much in the way of creativity and one can hardly expect her to spend eight to ten years writing it. I don’t believe that she would be making such a fuss unless she thought it to be an actual threat to her own encyclopedia.
But that book hasn’t been written. She is trying to apply the copy write of her existing book to the sales she thinks she will lose on her forthcoming book. While this is unlikely, I can see her up at night worrying that her book won’t be as comprehensive as the Lexicon that already exists. Which, when you come down to it, means that she has gotten used to having no competition and feels that she should not have to compete when it comes to characters she created. Unfortunately for her, the U.S. (I believe the Lexicon is an American site, though I may be wrong) system loves competition. Yes, she created those stories. But if someone else wants to write another book based on her characters, they can. If someone wants to analyze the stories, they can. If someone wants to make a reference book, they can.
And isn’t it better that way? When you step out of the situation and look at it with a clear head, why shouldn’t fans be able to create works that are derivative and complementary to the originals? They won’t draw sales away from the original books. If anything, they will give readers something to cling to once the series is over. The fan-written sequel to Mrs Brisby and the Rats of NIMH was not nearly as good as the original but it in no way diminishes the classic it is based on. Does the estate of Dr. Seuss suffer if I write a dictionary of the delightfully silly words from his books? Does Stephen King suffer if you publish an index of all the characters that have died in his books? Of course not.
But no! I can hear the fans crying what if she wants to write that book! He has stolen her right to write the book!
Hogwash. There is no copy write protection from a book that doesn’t exist yet. And thank goodness: now Rowling claims she is so distressed that she fears will never be able to write it. So she would have her book or no book, and possibly no book anyway. What a perfect example of how fickle writers are. It is a good thing the laws are set up as they are; this way maybe we will get something. And maybe we’ll get two books! Or three! And if Rowling can muscle up the strength to face the competition she will undoubtedly write it better and more critically.
Rowling’s lawyers have been getting more and more aggressive lately. She has passed over many opportunities to sue and I believe this makes her feel like she can have her pick of the litter because she passed up all those other chances to litigate. Personally, I have always been a fan of Rowling (as a person, not just her books) but her claims that this case has forced her into some kind of dramatic writer’s block disgust me. I suppose she’ll have to take to drugs like all the other great plagued writers out there. Or maybe stop surrounding herself with lawyers and yes-men that coddle her. If only writers could sue their way out of writer’s block we’d be swimming in literature!
