OG’s BLOG

Occasionally I get into discussions with other artists, who despite seeming almost normal in many other respects nevertheless exhibit symptoms of artitis pretensia, claiming that the only Art worth pursuing disregards the audience. This attitude that Art for Art’s Sake is the only true Art seemingly applies to all artistic forms. Dance as if no one’s looking. Sing as if no one’s listening. Draw as if no one will see it. Write as if the page will never be read. And then keep it that way.

Poppycock, I say. Isn’t the point of Art to communicate? What does it mean without an audience? I say without an audience, the act of art is meaningless. Literally, meaning occurs in the mind of the beholder, and therefore without an audience, you’re just making noise by yourself — sound and fury signifying nothing. An argument could be made that the artist in this case could be considered an audience of one, but isn’t this artist really just talking to himself? Is that the same thing as communication? I don’t think so.

Da Vinci and Michelangelo didn’t make their work solely for their own enjoyment. They never intended for it to be hidden away in the basement. They created their work for the public, and put it on display in piazzas and temples and town squares for the public – the Great Unwashed – to enjoy. What’s more, they were – *gasp!* – PAID to do it! Does anyone really believe the Disciples of Art for Art’s Sake have a better grip on True Art than the Old Masters?

I wonder if the idea of producing Art for Art’s sake is really just an excuse for an artist to hide his work away. If you never show it to anyone, no one can give you their impression of your art (not that you’d claim to give such opinion any validity). Hide it away, and the work will never be subject to critique, or market pressures, or any opinions aside from those of its maker. That doesn’t seem to be the brave, ruggedly individualistic move that the romantic notion of Art for Art’s Sake seeks to conjure up, does it? To me, it seems timid and insecure, and I don’t like it. I’ve seen the notion used to maintain the illusion of one’s own superiority while decrying those who actually brave the public, for good and bad.

Or, to put it another way, don’t hide that light under a basket. Brothers and sisters… let it shine.

Desk Morons are frustrating. You know, those Customer Service types who feel it’s their job to get in your way. They’re long on smiles. They’re long on sorries. They’re long on what-can’t-be-done.

They deny the insurance coverage which you’ve paid for. They refuse your check even though you’re a frequent, known customer in good standing. They’re long on explanations that I’m Sorry, Sir, But It’s Just Our Policy. As if that makes it OK. As if it makes sense. As if they’re truly sorry.

“Policy” so often gets in the way of customer service and is nothing more than a convenient excuse to be lazy and inflexible. Now I understand why these people are so frequently behind bullet-proof glass.

The Parable of Myst II is an article from FastCompany, which I read shortly before interviewing at Cyan. Those of you who are Myst and Riven fans may enjoy learning a little bit about the company that made those games. Perhaps you’ve already read it. I know I’ve read it several times by now; it is 12 years old.

But it offers an interesting portrait of a Cyan I narrowly missed. Some of the things were unchanged by the time I got there, and others changed greatly. Bonnie did leave, as one gets the feeling from the article she would, and Josh Staub finally did get the Art Directorship one gets the feeling he wanted and had been promised.

One thing that did not change was Cyan’s fanatical devotion to Art in videogames. It was so nice to be in an environment where Art and the Artistic Process were taken seriously. I took for granted that all game company art departments operated like that, but in fact this devotion to quality was one of the things that made Cyan different from most.

The changes you can see already under way in the article were in full swing by the time I got there, so I worked for the company Cyan became next. But I still wonder what it would have been like to work for the Cyan described in this article. I got to see the last fading echoes of that version of the company, and it was still pretty sweet.

Today’s Drawer Geeks topic is “Clowns”. My entry is above.
(CLICK to ENLARGE)

Trying to go for more character moments and more interaction. I’m not quite there – the salesman is more watching than anything, but I’m hoping there’s the feeling that he’s on the cusp of a sale, and this is the pivotal moment: he’s finally found the right car for the right buyer.

Well, I’m at the point I knew was ahead of me – the point I’d need to remove a third of my story so far. Y’see, I’d gotten too damn clever for my own good. I told the first half of the story from one character’s point of view. Then, because of all the questions I’d piled up by that time, I thought I’d tell the same story from another character’s point of view. It answered those questions all right, but you wound up with a strangely schizophrenic story and a large risk of losing the reader. Hemingway said “Kill your darlings”. Holy geez, it’s hard to do, and I LOVE what I have in the second half of this tale, but I know all this extra stuff is wrong for the story. It’s not about the other character. It’s only about the primary character. I need somehow to condense all that other stuff into a chapter’s worth of exposition and get on with the actual story. It’s gotta go, that’s all.

I have debated long over this – about a year, if you can believe it – so it is with a heavy sigh I have removed 21,000 words from my novel tonight. Perhaps you heard the sigh from your house tonight and thought it was just the wind…

You know… sometimes writing fiction can seem like a horrible waste of time. Fictitious people living fictitious lives in fictitious worlds… And yet, I know there is a value to it. I’ve known it for decades, but never been able to put my finger on it.

There was something in a Northern Exposure episode where a Shaman comes to town, collecting stories to see if he can find evidence that White Man uses stories medicinally as the natives do. Just as he’s about to give up, the Shaman finds what he’s looking for when he is introduced to movies by Ed Chigliak, a fledgling filmmaker. As somebody who has dabbled in storytelling – song lyrics, comics, animated films, and currently a novel – this subject is interesting to me, as well.

And now, to put a fine point on it, enter RadioLab. Their show of 01 June, 2007 deals with the Placebo Effect, and it turns out a lot of the ways we view the world is due to Story. Take the way we experience pain:

Henry Knowles Beecher was a doctor in WWII and found himself in the great battle of Anzio where the Americans landed in Nazi Europe. He was on the beach, bullets were flying, soldiers were being killed. And some were being wounded.

And since Beecher was the doctor, it was his job to treat them. The treatment for pain at that time, as in our time, was morphine. One problem, though. Beecher’s unit was cut off from supplies and reinforcements, and he began to run out of morphine. He had to figure out which soldiers needed it the most.

So, he’s talking to them and asking them about how much pain they’re having. And he would go up to these patients and say to them, “Soldier, as you lie there, are you having any pain?” Now, imagine you’re a soldier, and you’re lying there. These are severe injuries. And you haven’t had any morphine for 7 hours previously. What would you say?

The striking finding was that 75 percent of them would say that they didn’t need morphine. This didn’t make any sense to Beecher, because he knew about pain. Before the war, he ran a clinic in Boston, and he would see people with bullet injuries and gut injuries, more or less the same kinds of injuries he saw on the battlefield. But back in Boston, they really hurt. For some strange reason, the intensity of the pain associated with being shot was lower in the battlefield than in civilian life.

What could explain that? Context. That was Beecher’s very simple explanation. Meaning that the pain that you feel when you’re hit by a bullet is not just about the bullet. It’s just as much about the story that comes with the bullet.

So, consider these two different stories:

Story 1:
You are a soldier, and you’ve been shot. As the bullet passes through you, the first thing you think is “Oh, man, I’m shot!” But the second thing you think is, “Wait a second… I’m alive! If I can be evacuated from here, I’ll have a period of recuperation, they’ll take me to a hospital, there’ll be nurses there… I may get a medal, and a pension, or a bonus, I’ll certainly be acclaimed. Maybe they’ll send me home, throw me a parade!”

Story 2:
You’re a civilian in Boston. Maybe you own a shop. And you’ve been shot during a robbery. As the bullet passes through you, this time, the thoughts flashing through your head have nothing to do with Glory. Instead, you think, “Yeah, I’m alive, but what’s going to happen to me now?” You wouldn’t get a medal. You were in trouble; “How am I going to pay the doctor bills? I’m going to lose my job, how am I going to pay the rent?” And if your family was depending upon you, they suffered. “Nothing good is going to come of this,” you might think.

One bullet, two very different stories. And it’s the difference in the stories, said Dr. Beecher, that explains the difference in the experience of pain.

Are those stories somehow filtering the pain? Even before it’s felt? Yes. Even as the bullet enters the skin, or within seconds thereafter, you spin yourself a story about what’s going to happen to you next. Not consciously, but way down deep in your head. And the story you tell, that makes all the difference.

Looks like Ed Chigliak was more right than he knew. Stories matter. Amen.

Ouch, that hurt. Almost a thousand words gone from the first dream sequence in the middle of Act II, just tonight, just like that. But it had to be done. As I was reading through the original, I couldn’t even see what had been so important to me about every single little detail. And if I can’t, gentle reader, I know you wouldn’t be able to, either. So that’s that.

Of course the good news is that I’m nearly half way through Act II…

My buddy Kazu has finally gotten a new Copper strip up at his site after over a year in which he was busy with other things – his continuing series of award-winning and generally excellent Flight anthologies, and full time production on his forthcoming graphic novel, Amulet.

Don’t know when he finds the time to sleep. Perhaps he doesn’t.

If you don’t know Copper, you should use the lull to get acquainted. The strip started off a little unsure, but got consistently better. By the sixth strip, I was reminded more and more of Calvin and Hobbes, which is no small compliment. This latest strip I believe reflects Kazu’s recent thoughts about the movie industry and the unbalanced relationship between complexity and storytelling.

Anyway, Kazu’s back on the Copper horse, and you can expect a new Copper strip in October. Those of you who harbor fantasies of making a comic one day, watch yourself. Comics are contagious, and Copper’s infectious.

Well, that was a loooooong time coming. Seriously. But Act I of my little novel is now in really good shape. I wound up making a lot of changes after my little Second Draft experiment from last month. I know the advice of Writers Everywhere is don’t do what I did. Don’t let anyone read it until it’s done. Don’t edit until the whole book is complete. But I had to. The book had some problems, I knew it deep down. And my Beta Testers have pointed the way.

Rather than submit the Second Draft of the first 30 pages to the agent as I had intended, I went back in and restructured what is actually the first Act. Someone had told me that I had left a little too much out about the village, and someone else told me that the beginning felt rushed. Bingo. Two coherent critiques coming at the same problem from two different angles.

So, I let the village breathe a little bit. And boy, did it breathe. I got a bunch of characters running around there now, and a lot of texture and friction between the personalities. Also, the mother of the main character, which was almost a cameo before, is the strong, capable woman I knew her to be and failed to show.

All of which has made the first Act very strong, and a great launching pad off into Act II.

Now the bad news. Or the good news. Really, it’s only bad news if you were thinking I’d let the book go as soon as I restructured Act I. I’m not. If you’re hoping the book will be good one day, then this is good news, because the same things that were wrong with Act I are wrong to a degree with Act II. But more than anything else, I have a structure problem with Act II. Both of these problems need to be fixed before Act III will do what it’s intended to do. So off I go on another Fool’s Errand, doing exactly the opposite of what they tell you to do in all the Writer’s workshops and books.

Act I turned out to be over 25,000 words long, interestingly enough about 5K longer than I thought the whole book would be when I first set out to write it. Currently the entire manuscript sits at just over 76K. Don’t get used to it. As I dig into Act II, I am going to lose thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of words. But it has to be done. Hemingway said, “Kill your darlings.” And so I shall.

The main problem with Act II is that I was trying to be clever, and only succeeded in derailing things. I’ll have to see what I can do about that. More about that next time.