The Mechanic & the Muse

Steal...er, download this book

Cory Doctorow, sci-fi author and co-editor of Boing Boing, online destination for all things weird and wonderful online, is a pioneer in many ways.

On December 1, Forbes.com published "Giving it Away," Doctorow's account of the counter-intutitive way he markets his books: he offers them as free downloads while at the same time they are published as hardcover books. Not only does he not mind giving them away, he's convinced he gains much more, in particular a loyal audience, many of whom do buy his books.

There are marketing lessons here for newspapers clinging to traditional audiences and desperately seeking ways to lure new ones, as I point out in a centerpiece column inspired by Doctorow's piece and posted tonight on Poynter Online.

Doctorow's philosophy also suggests different options for publishers and writers. In addition to Doctorow's experience with his publisher, I focused on my experience as the co-author of a novel that appeared first in serialized form online and then as a hardcover book, and a new one newspapers around the country have purchased to provide their readers for free.
 

To me, the central question is whether books offered as online freebies can translate into sustainable revenues that can support writers, newspapers and publishers?

After chewing over these thoughts all day in my head and on the screen,I hope you'll read the column and offer your feedback from your perspective/s as reader, writer, editor, publisher.

Dropping out of the "Stick Figure School of Art"

Physical description is an essential way to put people on the page, to transform them from sources ("Goldilocks, 12, of 2200 Sylvan Way") into characters. Consider this example from yesterday's New York Times Magazine profile of an artist. Instead of referring to her as "Sculptor Kiki Smith, 52, Times arts critic Michael Kimmelman, provided readers with a detailed physical description that not only made it possible to see, but also understand her.

At 52, Smith has a thick halo of gray hair and porcelain skin liberally tattooed with turquoise rings and stars. They make rows on her fingers, arms and legs. She also wears strings of necklaces and bracelets stacked atop one another. You can hear when she’s coming because her jewelry jingles. She looks a little like the woman who runs the local candle shop. Her hands constantly fiddle: she’s always drawing or making things out of clay or whatever. Partly, it’s a way to distract her gaze. Mostly, for her, making art is like breathing.

Physical descriptions are often the most challenging task for newspaper writers. Putting people on the page requires rigorous reporting. It’s hard work, especially for reporters who are used to seeing people not as rounded characters, but as sources or subjects identified merely by title or status (official, voter, victim, criminal, survivor, etc.) I confess I sometimes shy away for fear of offending a source with an insensitive observation, or questioning my right to make subjective opinions about a person. The stick figure approach is less risky than presenting a rounded mini-portrait. And sometimes we just can’t find the words.

But the excuse that "the photographs" show the reader what she looks like doesn't fly. "My task," said novelist Joseph Conrad, "which I am trying to achieve, is -- by the power of the written word -- to make you hear, to make you feel. It is, before all, to make you see. (my emphasis added. cs) That -- and no more. And it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm -- all you demand -- and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."

It takes a little more effort to zero in on the physical attributes that distinguish one person from another, but that’s one of the writer’s gifts that makes storytelling such a special experience.

• First you must report, collecting an overabundance of concrete details.
• The next step is focus. Sum up the subject's appearce, the single dominant impression, in one word.
• Then select the details that support that theme.
• Outline the paragraph, relying on the 3-2-1 structure, that moves, in reverse order, from details to meaning.
• Freewrite a description, writing or typing as quickly as possible.
• Print out what you write. Mark up the draft with additions, cuts, shifts in order.
• Return to the screen and make the changes.
• Repeat as necessary.

And don't forget the power of "modeling lessons," that is, copying out physical descriptions that impress you (Plagiarism alert: Remember to write the author's name and the source of the description at the top: "by Michael Kimmelman, "The Intutitonist," The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 6, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/magazine/05kiki.html)

When something strikes you, stop, hit the CAPS LOCKS key and record your observation.

"You can hear when she’s coming because her jewelry jingles." KIMMELMAN DOESN'T LIMIT THE SENSORY DETAILS. HERE HE USES SOUND. INTERESTING.

Or:
"She looks a little like the woman who runs the local candle shop."  NOW HE RELIES ON A SIMILE. IS THAT  GOOD? I MEAN WHAT ABOUT READERS WHO HAVE NEVER BEEN IN A CANDLE SHOP? WONDER HOW HE GOT PAST THE EDITORS WITH THAT ONE? MAYBE YOU CAN PUSH THE ELEMENT THAT WAY.

Make us see.

What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #3

On literary devices. Continuing from "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

"The third device was the so-called “third person point of view," (emphasis added) the technique of presenting every scene to the reader through the eyes of a particular character, giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character’s mind and experiencing the emotional reality of the scene as he experiences it.

"Journalists had often used the first-person point of view—“I was there”—just as autobiographers, memoirists and novelists had. This is very limiting for the journalist, however, since he can bring the reader inside the mind of only one character—himself—a point of view that often proves irrelevant to the story and irritating to the reader. Yet how could a journalist, writing nonfiction, accurately penetrating the thoughts of another person?

"The answer proved to be marvelously simple: interview him about his thoughts and emotions along with everyone else. This is what I had done in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, what John Sack did in M and what Gay Talese did in Honor Thy Father."

Next: Status details

What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #4

The last of the four literary devices cited by Tom Wolfe from "The New Journalism," by Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

"The fourth device has always been the least understood. This is the recording of everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaving towards children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic details that might exist within a scene. Symbolic of what? Symbolic, generally, of people's status life, using that term in the broad sense of the entire pattern of behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be. The recording of such details is not mere embroidery in prose. It lies as close to the center of the power of realism as any other device in literature.

"It is the very essence of the “absorbing” power of Balzac, for example. Balzac barely used point of view at all in the refined sense that Henry James used it later on. And yet the reader comes away feeling that he has been even more completely “inside” Balzac’s characters than James’s. Why? Here is the sort of thing Balzac does over and over. Before introducing you to Monsieur and Madame Marneffe personally (in “Cousin Bette”) he brings you into their drawing room and conducts a social autopsy: “The furniture covered in faded cotton velvet, the plaster statuettes masquerading as Florentine bronzes, the clumsily carved painted chandelier with its candle rings of molded glass, the carpet, a bargain whose low price was explained too late by the quantity of cotton in it, which was now visible to the naked eye—everything in the room, to the very curtains, which would have taught you that the handsome appearance of wool damask lasts for only three years)”—everything in the room begins to absorb one into the lives of a pair of down-at-the-heel social climbers, Monsieur and Madame Marneffe. Balzac piles up these details so relentlessly and at the same time so meticulously—there is scarcely a detail in the later Balzac that doesn’t illuminate some point of status—that he triggers the reader’s memories of his own status life, his own ambitions, insecurities, delights, disasters, plus the thousands and one small humiliations and the status coups of everyday life, and triggers them over and over until he creates an atmosphere as rich and involving as the Joycean use of point of view."

 

What Balzac, Dickens et all Hath Wrought #2

On literary devices. Continuing from "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

...record the dialogue in full, (emphasis added) which was device No. 2. Magazine writers, like the early novelists, learned by trial and error something that has since been demonstrated in academic studies: namely, that realistic dialogue involves the reader more completely than any other single other device. It also establishes and defines character more completely than any other single device. (Dickens has a way of fixing a character in your mind so that you have the feeling he has described every inch of his appearance—only to go back and discover that he actually took care of the physical description in two or three sentences; the rest he has accomplished with dialogue) Journalists were working on dialogue of the fullest, most completely revealing sort in the very moment when novelists were cutting back, using dialogue in more and more cryptic, fey and curiously abstract ways."

Next: Point of view

What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #1

Dick Cheney, hunter extraordinaire, was the ostensible subject of my recent post, "Ready, Aim, Oops." But reader Harris Salat was eager to learn the source of the final paragraph when I described a tool of 19th century literary realists that Tom Wolfe and other so-called "New Journalists" relied on in their nonfiction.

I replied that it's from a long introduction by Wolfe in "The New Journalism," an anthology edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, published in 1973. There are used copies on Amazon.com

But that seemed a stingy response, and so I copied out the seven paragraphs Wolfe used to define status details and three other device the New Journalists borrowed from their literary ancestors. I'll dole them out one by one over the next four days. The source is my hardcover edition of "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, pp. 31-32. Wolfe writes:

"If you follow the progress of the New Journalism closely through the 1960s, you see an interesting thing happening. You see journalists learning the techniques of realism—particularly of the sort found in Fielding, Smollett, Balzac, Dickens and Gogol—from scratch. By trial and error, by “instinct” rather than theory, journalists began to discover the devices that gave the realistic novel its unique power, variously known as its “immediacy,” its concrete reality,” its emotional involvement,” “its gripping” or “absorbing quality."

"This extraordinary power was derived mainly from just four devices, they discovered. The basic one was scene-by-scene construction,(emphasis added) telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative. Hence the sometimes extraordinary feats of reporting that the new journalists undertook: so that they could actually witness the scenes in other people’s lives as they took place…"

Next: Dialogue