Even One Word

I’ve been working on a review of my novel from Novel Writing Month, and I’ve gotten a bit stuck. To steal words from the immortal Wil Wheaton (http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/) , sometimes in order to write, you must write about writing.

SO! Here’s to writing about writing! More generally, about life:

Every discipline or craft in which I’ve ever participated, I’ve found that there is a divide between the “doing” and the “creating” professions. In music, there are composers and there are performers. In development, there are architects and then front-line developers who implement architecture. In my comics, there are scriptwriters, and then those who draw the thoughts of the script. To extend that to film, there are the screenwriters, and then the entire crew of people who make these thoughts a reality. The only strange place I’ve found a difference is in writing. And by writing, I mean the profession of the written word, such as the medium of novels, journalism, and etc.

In all of these cases, the final product is essentially a polished version of exactly what sprung from the mind of the writer. Stop and think about this for just a moment: whatever end-user ends up consuming the product of the writer turns up seeing the medium exactly as it left the hands and mind of the author.

To me, this is vastly interesting. I think being a good composer tends to be all about creating something that a performer can realistically perform, or a computer is capable of producing in an audible format. The final medium is not in the liner notes of your album or the notes you pass out to concert-goers: it’s the raw audio data you create.  In scriptwriting, you must create something an artist or a crew or a troupe of stage actors can realistically perform. In that way, you are limited. As an author: your world is unlimited. Setting your piece in a fictional world composed entirely of fictional materials that don’t exist in the natural spectra of our world? No problem, just explain that to your reader.

And therein lies the rub. Can your reader really conceptualize a world in which the only physical matter is actually a made-up equivalent to their own universe? If they can, do they care?

We arrive now at the second act: we have discovered the problem, now we must develop the tools to encounter and ultimately defeat it. (The meta in this blog is heavy: I warned you by title only).

Before I begin, I must address the tools themselves. Technology has provided us a set of implements beyond what we originally thought possible, giving us the ability to explore vast depths of history and culture and technique without even leaving our home. With that being said, there’s always something to be said about the value of the old tools. For the sake of ease, let’s discuss an analog.

My brother gave me a classy old-fashioned shaving kit for Christmas. I now am the proud owner of a set of arcane and ancient shaving implements. Rather than a straight razor (he’s not a sadist, after all), he gave me a “safety razor,” a shaving bowl, a shaving soap container, and a set that contains all of the individual pieces. It’s not nearly as fast or “efficient” of a shaving toolset as a can of Edge(TM)  and a three-blade razor. It takes a great deal more time and care to work the process, but in the end, I feel much cleaner and the shave is always a great deal smoother. This wasn’t the case for the first two weeks: I cut myself and missed large spots at a time. I think this applies to writing. Even though I have a great deal of tools at my fingertips, the ones I find the most powerful are in fact the most simple.

I’ve spent some time writing in a leatherbound journal in my office, which gives me the pretentious feeling of being some sort of aristocrat in bygone times, but additionally gives me the gift/curse of being forced to move at a much slower and more intentional pace.

What am I trying to prove with this massive nonsensical rant?  That the tools you will find most valuable are not in fact the most mechanically advantageous: they are the ones that free you from the fears of creative freedom by providing the most carefully constrained creative limitations. Working within a framework binds you to a medium, a genre or perhaps even a universe with built-in rules and a pre-existing narrative from which to build your story.

This is incredibly important in the medium of writing because of the following fact: your art is your word. That’s it. You’re not creating  three-dimensional world on Digital Light Projection with 8.1 surround-sound. You are combining a series of words into a story, and the only thing between the very raw and symbolistic integrity of those words and their actual comprehension by a reader  is the understanding of the very same reader.

This poses a different, but no less challenging conflict. If you are writing a story that must be told in 16:9 anamorphic widescreen, you are careful to think of the interactions of character so that people can understand them even if the wide parts of the letterbox have been cut off. In the same way, if you are writing about a universe with a completely fictionalized set of rules and ideals, you must put the understanding of the reader into consideration when you create.  Did you use too many words they didn’t understand at the beginning? If you did, were you sure to explain each and every one somewhere before the first half of the book, so they’re not just dropping out and saying “this is something weird and foreign and I don’t care”? If so, are you sure to use those words again, so they don’t just end up occupying some vacant lexicon in the reader’s mind?

Therefore, I posit the following theory: the doer in this medium still exists. It’s the reader. In order for your universe to work, in order for your theories to come to some kind of rational, emotional fruition, the reader must invest some kind of energy or effort. They have to make some kind of logical leap, or at the very least, allow themselves to temporarily be transported to whatever dream world of magic or mystery you have created for them. You need them to meet you (at the very least) halfway. That being said: are you (the writer in this hypothetical question) investing enough effort to get to the halfway point?

I think this rumination has led me to the following conclusion: I must proceed (with the most simple and familiar tools) to relate my fictional universe in  a way that matters to the reader. Not only in a way that engages them, but in a way that compels them to continue. I doubt this diatribe would work, but it’s helping me to form the philosophy on my way to the other aforementioned goals.

Against my own better judgement, and most likely my own well-being, I’m going to open a can of worms. More: a case of cans of worms. I’m going to do my best to think this out without resorting to proposing solutions, because there are no solutions.

Anonymous, the upcoming election, Arab Spring, LulzSec,AntiSec, SOPA, PIPA, Occupy Wall Street… just as one thing fades something else comes back up, and I’m starting to realize they are all threads of the same complex and interwoven cloth. If you get the chance, try to read Quinn Norton’s eloquent and careful analysis of Anonymous available on Wired.com (this link will show all posts tagged anonymous 2011, and you’ll find some other stuff in there as well : http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/anonymous-2011/ ).

Typically when it comes to these kind of things, I find myself very much in the place of South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who posit the viewpoint of the boys: “this is pretty f*cked up right here.” When pressed for their opinion on most issues, they’ll give you the same spiel: there are two diametrically opposed sides, and both are completely wrong. A majority of people find themselves caught in the middle, and the only voice of reason is to say “alright, let’s stop fighting and use a little common sense here.”

As far as Occupy Wall Street, I found myself at first completely behind the movement. I’ve literally spoken for years about the need for a vigorous and effective series of protests to protest the problems in this country. I didn’t care which problems were picked; honestly there are too many from which to choose. My only view was that the government of this nation had become simultaneously too powerful and too apathetic. It was at once applying policies with strict vengeance and ignoring its own rulings to let things slide. My conspiracy-theorist friends were all too quick to point out that this has always been the way. Those in power don’t care for the wellfare of the common man and woman, they only care for the ones who can get/keep them elected. Those friends started making me also realize that the protesters bore a lot of similarities to the people who I derided the most: hipsters. Perhaps I was wrong to jump behind this hive-mind of anti-conformity, mainly due to the fact it was in fact another “ironic” expression of conformity itself. Maybe the arguments were valid, but how much impact can drum circles and camping around things really have? Why was this so different from the Tea Party, and how was it being derided by so many people and vilified? Maybe I was wrong, these people actually deserved derision for the fact they were just complaining instead of going back to work.

So in the end, I found myself where I belong: in the middle. How did I get here? By deriding the hypocrisy of both sides, as a typical pretentious ass might. I saw some of my friends saying “this is ridiculous, my father/uncle/cousin is thriving because of all of their hard work in this economy. They work ninety hour weeks and already pay way too much in taxes, you protesting asshats need to go to work.” Then, I saw some of them saying “just got back from another set of interviews. Been trying for over a year to get work and haven’t even gotten a callback yet. Why can’t anyone with a degree in modern interpretations of renaissance art get work around here?”

After striking my head repeatedly on the desk I realized the problem. As with all of the different movements and events of the past year, I find myself questioning not the sincerity of the members, but their willful ignorance of the facts.

If your father is working ninety hour weeks as a small business owner, he’s not in the crosshairs of these people. He probably doesn’t even pay the so-called “millionaire” tax because he makes less than the cutoff point after all your business expenses and losses are paid. The people in the crosshairs for these protesters and activists are the ones who climbed to the top positions of these financial companies, and made incredibly short-sighted decisions based on the rationale that when the bubble burst, they’d have enough money to ride out the wave of water that drowned everyone beneath them. If you are a small business owner, there’s no way you’re standing on enough shoulders for that to even BEGIN to describe you.

If you can’t get a job in underwater basket-weaving, thus paying off your $40,000 student debt, it seems like you made a series of bad decisions before you came to your current predicament. You probably had absolutely no interest in researching the future of the field that you went into, you just did what your parents told you. And now, you’re probably blaming them for putting you through college (co-signing those massive loans) and sleeping on their couch while you refuse to work at a McDonald’s in order to help pay the bills.

That’s the derision speaking, so I’ll let the cynic go for awhile and come back with the optimist. Your father is probably scared about his company being taxed. He’s probably terrified that the government is going to do even more to curtail his rights as a business owner, and do things that make owning and operating a business (which in all rights should be seen as a service to this country as being willing to create jobs) more impossible. If you haven’t gotten a job in your field, you probably actually DID research before you chose your path, and at the time (before the bubble burst) you actually had a job lined up and were ready to go. You probably don’t have time to work at McDonald’s because you’re spending all your time trying to interview for jobs that can support you in your own place and allow you to live up to the dreams you had as a student.

And that’s when it hit me: this world is different. No, it’s not just a different job market than it was when our parents got out of school (which it is). It’s not just a world in which technology has brought greater power and freedom to the individual than ever before (which it has). It’s a world in which all of these things have happened at such a break-neck speed there is absolutely nothing to hold on to. People, as a rule, will polarize in times of crisis. They’ll fall behind ideals and supporters. Immediately after a catastrophic event, people begin to find who to blame. Soon after, camps of “us” and “them” form. And this is exactly what’s happening, and has been happening for the last twenty years.

I can only speak for the last twenty-eight years to which I’ve been a witness, and more specifically the last twenty I was intelligent enough to understand at least the mood that pervaded our culture. As brought up before in my analogy to South Park, two sides emerge, and begin trying to polarize the masses to them. It is only the sensible people who refuse to be pulled into a camp for the betterment of one of the sides. Anyone who gives you an ultimatum (you’re for us or you’re against us) has absolutely no respect for your decision. You’re a tool to them, or you’re an obstacle. And this is the underlying problem.

People are not obstacles, and we are certainly not tools to be used by others. There was perhaps a time in my life that I counted myself among the Machiavelians who would argue that humans are a resource to be utilized in a war of life or commerce. But after seeing the daily struggles, triumphs, and failures of my fellow humans, I arrive at only one conclusion: the only thing that is valuable, if anything has value, is life.

Rather than bore you with a thousand anecdotes (which are ultimately symptoms) of this particular problem, I’ll just bring up one example that has colored my entire understanding of this situation.

There was a man who lost his job due to the company closing its doors. He had been smart, planned for prolonged unemployment, and saved enough money to live off of savings (including his mortgage payments) for upwards of three months. So, as a responsible citizen, father, and homeowner, he called the bank to ask what he should do to make sure he didn’t lose his home. They told him to request an option to change his terms via certified mail. Again, a responsible man, he notified his bank via certified letter that he had lost his job and would be searching for a new one, but in the meantime may need to defer some of the cost of his home, perhaps paying the principle and electing to pay into the escrow towards the end of the year, or temporarily modify the terms of his loan based on his current equity. He was five years into a fifteen year note, so he had a fair amount paid, and had never missed a payment. The bank responded with a foreclosure notice. According to them, the terms of his loan stipulated he maintain employment. Upon further research, that was never the case, it was only a question of whether he could pay the bills, which he was sure he could do for at least a few months before even having to miss a single payment. The bank’s response? “Take it up with your congressman.”

You see, this man had an FHA loan, and as part of a government financing program, they pushed the responsibility to the government. So of course, he did his best to find out what options he had in civil court and with lawmakers. They told him to talk to his bank.

This is one story, there are literally millions of people who have had this exact same experience. I’m not saying I know what the solution is, but this is clearly a man who was responsible and did everything he could to make things work. He was reasonable and measured and did everything you are told you’re supposed to do, and in the end he wound up with nothing. When he went to the occupy protests with his two kids, it was because they had been kicked out of their home and had nowhere else to go. Burning through his savings to keep his kids clothed and fed, he ended up having to unload them on relatives and live out of a tent while he “took it up with his congressman.”

I realize this is only one story out of the millions out there. Some people are protesting on the street because they made bad decisions. Some of them have much more compelling stories. But in the end, this man is just one of millions, and so am I. His story is just another one in the pile of stories, and mine could be too. I pay all my bills on time, I don’t buy things I don’t need, I try to invest for my future. But tomorrow I could be on the street because of circumstances completely beyond my control, and that doesn’t just scare me, that pisses me off.

I don’t care if you agree with the protesters. I don’t care if you think they are completely ignorant or if you think they personify everything that’s great about this country. No matter your feelings about them, they are people. Some were duped by a system that didn’t care about them. Some of them ended up making human mistakes and are being punished for the rest of their lives for it. And some of them did everything they were supposed to do, and are still turned out on the street for it. And I think that’s a problem. They, and we, are continuing to pay for crimes we did not commit. This has to stop.

Before I wade through the massive pile of projects that have become a part of my daily work routine, I usually check my e-mail, Facebook, and Myspace to make sure that I’m up to date on everything before I dive into forcing designs to work on non-compliant browsers. When I logged in this morning I had a note from one of my programmer friends, and something dawned on me that I hadn’t really fully formulated in my mind.

Working in the web world, or on video games, or anything involving developing applications with user interfaces, is potentially the eternal struggle between Pirates and Ninjas.

I know, I’m hitting this fad at the end of its popularity, but it’s something my friends and I have always argued about. In this world, the ones who do the coding are Code Ninjas, and the creative types are Design Pirates. How so?

Code Ninjas- When a code ninja does his job well, you will never see his code. He operates silently and stealthily, taking out objectives that are completely transparent to the user. You may be on a web application one day that you’re positive is Flash-based, and you suddenly right click… AJAX has struck and you had no idea. Sometimes the code ninja’s ideas for the way things look, however, is very spartan. All black doesn’t fit every UI, and all those pointy square edges are great for shuriken but everyone who’s ever read a magazine about “web 2.0″ wants a rounded border. Sure, those tables are a lot easier to use to scale up a code wall, but it’s harder and harder to validate code using tables as major layout items.

Design Pirates- A lot of people bring up the fact that in a fight, a pirate would lose to the superior skill of a ninja. Then again, there’s only a loose pirate code, and the point of being a pirate is breaking the rules. It’s all about presentation, theatrics, and looking good doing what you’re doing. You want sleek? You’ll have a crew of tightly bound buccaneers running a corvette through the harbor, and you’ll see every bit of it validates as valid CSS. You want flashy? You’ll get a lot of flash, with nice obscured borders and redraw boundaries so your eyes are drawn exactly where the design pirate wants them. After all, misdirection is 90% of a pirate’s job. But sometimes the design pirates want something so flashy you can’t even find what you’re supposed to be doing. Sometimes the latest trendy colors make it so the user can’t see the form they’re supposed to be clicking.

And so, the fight goes on. Ideally, in a good environment, the battle eventually leads to a pretty sturdy application or overall website. If you’re lucky, you’re like me and you jump between camps depending on the project, and everyone else in your office is the same way. And if you’re really lucky, all your employees don’t end up dead from dangerous office pranks.