Guy Goodman St.White Reviews George Orwell: Genre Hack (1984 and Animal Farm)

Would have been brilliant.
Except for all the fucking talking ANIMALS in it.
Genre crap.

Good evening,

Guy Goodman St.White here.  I'm your utterly British sounding host and this evening we'll be reviewing George Orwell.  What, you say?  I've been going roughly in order and George Orwell skips from Shakespeare's contemporaries straight into the mid 20th century, if you hadn't already noticed that is a half empty bottle of Jack Daniels sitting on my desk, so my preoccupation with reviewing the cannon in the proper order is somewhat...relaxed this evening.  I apologize to those of you who have become accustomed to my fastidious professionalism, but I'm still coping with the fact that this is the kind of a job where I might have to fight off dimensional invaders or lose colleagues to rogue generals. Let's just say this job is definitely not worth eleven-five a year.

That's eleven dollars and five cents in case you're unaware of the budgetary constraints here at Writing About Writing.  Ever since Chris blew fifty trillion dollars on research and development trying to get bacon to come through the internet, the budget around here has been a little shoestring.

But let's not get distracted.

Orwell: Total Hack

Orwell's two most well-known books--indeed the only two books of the nine he wrote of which most people are aware--are 1984 and Animal Farm.  An interesting factoid, which most plebs like to accumulate like brain detritus, is that these two books are the best selling pair of books of any 20th century author.  Other books did better, but no single author wrote TWO books that did as well.  Stephen King will have to just stick it in his ear.  (And the collected hackworks of J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown straddled the 20th/21st century divide.) That makes this author unquestionably one of the best selling of the 20th century.

Of course the taste of the plebs is, as ever, no more than an example of what real literature isn't.  You show me a book with the slightest bit of commercial appeal, and I'll show you a book that bloviates with sub-optimal prose skill, and Orwell the sellout is no exception.  The speculative drips from Orwell's sophist offerings to the written word in what one can only assume is a deliberate attempt to write the worst examples of genre tripe in the 20th century.  And Orwell just happens to be awful enough to pull it off.  One of these books is no more than rank science fiction and the other some bent piece of magical realism.  My two year old also has a book with magical talking animals in it.  Neither of Orwell's novels are worthy of any literary attention due to their total lack of realism.  If Animal Farm had been a seedy portrayal of the actual Russian Revolution with actual people instead of some wannabe side story in the Chronicles of Narnia, it might have been truly literary--and interesting to far fewer people.....which means it's good.  Throw in some same sex relationships and a couple of unaccepting parents, and Orwell could have been one of the greats.

And if 1984 had been.....well, there's really no way to salvage that steaming pile of speculative flotsam. Setting a story in the future means it is automatically not literature.  Ever.  Or didn't George get the memo?

I'm not exactly sure how Orwell thought he could portray the human condition when he was writing about animals (who somehow manage to engage in agriculture without prehensile thumbs).  I mean...the human condition is human, right?  It's not called the farm animal condition.   Clearly both this linguistic "shart" (as you yanks say) and the exploits of Winston Smith, frolicking about in a not-even-remotely accurate prediction a dystopian future, can't even come close to real literature.  They are no more than trite examples of genre work that offer nothing in the way of quality character development or compelling themes.

13 o'clock?  Bah!  That's not literature.

So please join us next month for our next installment of "Speculative Fiction Sucks Balls--And Not in the Good Way."  I'm Guy Goodman St.White.  Good-night.



P.S.- Chris has insisted I begin to sell out in my reviews.  Even though you could get both of these books at any used book stores for probably about a dollar, if you want a shiny, new, overpriced copy delivered right to your door, you can get them here.



    

My Stance on Grammar

She's so unsupportive, I had to use a generic picture
of an angry woman who isn't even her!

[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer them each Thursday as long as I have enough to do.  I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous.  My comment policy also may mean one of your comments ends up in the mailbox.]   

(I’m paraphrasing an in-person question that I was given permission to write about.)  Alex asks:

I'm a little confused about your stance on grammar. Do you care hugely about grammar or not? You will go on these huge, beautiful rants about what assholes prescriptivists can be (and I agree), but then you turn around and insist it is vital to learn grammar, post grammar jokes, and seem to be very worried if you make a grammar mistake in a post. Which is it?

My reply:

[Grammar in this conversation was not referring exclusively structure, but anything from the meaning of words to paragraph construction that could be considered the more technical, "rulesy" side of writing. ]

My initial answer to this would be "all of the above," but don't worry.  I won't leave you hanging like a zebra who walked into the hyena convention at the Marriott.

As with many complex situations, Alex, the key is context. Are these people laughing at a grammar joke that creates an amusing word play in a comic or are they laughing at someone else's expense? Are they correcting like a benevolent teacher might help someone not make an embarrassing mistake, or are they smearing their faces in it? Are they engaged in a linguistic purism that echoes cultural ethnocentricity and even racism and corrective behavior much like telling people how they ought to be moral? Are they correcting someone gently because they want to help, or are they doing it to show those people up?

Are they aware that different style guides have different rules and that sometimes different grammar is equally correct, or are they just being an asshole about how they learned it in high school? Are they taking ownership for the fact that a "pet peeve" bothers them far far more than it really should or are they behaving as if they are perfectly justified in acting more offended by the misuse of "less" with a count noun than by genocide in Syria?  Or like double spacing after a sentence is a crime against humanity? Are they grousing quietly about the "misuse" of the less perfect or are they writing self-righteous web content. And if they are writing self-righteous web content, is it a funny comic about the Alot animal or is it a baleful nastygram that compares a extraneous apostrophe to the collapse of civilization and the invasion of the mentally defunct? Are they

Is "being right" more important to them than communication? (For it is quite simple to muddy communication by being too strict, formal, or intractable about linguistic drift.) Are they acting like the word police? Are they being haughty and snotty about a word that has shifted its meaning in common usage because they know what it "really means"? Are they treating someone if they are stupid or ignorant to use "irregardless" or "PIN number," someone who may have simply heard a word used around them so much that it's very difficult for them not to assimilate it, rather than understanding how easily lexicon is transmitted given the constructions of our brains? (I got the whole house saying "totes" this week--it doesn't mean they're stupid--that's just how language works.) Are they equating a single standard grammar (for which they are always the judge) as the yardstick for intelligence despite the presence of incredibly smart and educated people who speak and write differently for reason from dialect to being a second language speaker? Have they decided that since the U.S. does not have a formal language academy to judge what is right or wrong that they have the authority and qualifications to be the sole arbiter of the job?

Are they holding people's informal usage to the rigor of formal academia instead of acknowledging that code switching actually makes for better communication than enforcing a single standard? Are they derailing someone's story to tell them they used the wrong meaning of "moot" or to point out that they used "disinterested" incorrectly not because it wasn't a good story but because they wanted the spotlight on THEM and how fucking brilliant they were to know that? Has stringing phonemes together to convey meaning become to them something that can be "right" and "wrong" and moreover timeless like a math equation, rather than a changing, evolving elastic thing more like culture. Are they really correcting a Facebook status to help a person communicate better or to make themselves look good (and if so, why didn't they just message the person privately)? Was that sentence they condescendingly corrected really unclear, or was it perfectly clear, but they simply appointed themselves the guardian of language? Are they doing the linguistic version of "Well, actually..."

Are they aware that a formal study of linguistics almost universally results in a far more liberal understanding of grammar, context, and language and that their pedantry actually reveals a semi-educated state not unlike someone who can quote and recite Kierkegaard, Augustine, and Hume but doesn't really understand them?

Because, as complex as the rationalizations for this behavior can become, it is almost always laughably easy to determine when someone is using language pedantry to be an elitist douchecanoe. The justifications for this behavior are so transparent and so disingenuous compared to the way the sentiment lands that there is almost no doubt what motivates these people to speak out. They are not unlike Christians who just "had to tell those people they were going to hell." The difference between someone truly delighted by an unorthodox use of language, genuinely confused by a turn of phrase, gently informing someone of something they might not know, or trying honestly trying to help someone avoid embarrassment, and the near giddy correction of a haughty pedant at the sight of a mistake they get to point out is SO apparent as to make any attempt at those rationalizations almost insulting.

However...as a writer, I have to hold myself to a higher standard. I just have to.

Writers simply have to learn some grammar if they want to be taken seriously as writers. I have met a distressingly large number of writers who think that grammar will not be important--many of them like to "latch on" to the the arguments about how hoity toity grammar wanks can be (and they can) as an excuse not to learn it. They think their mistakes are no big deal or (worse) that their ideas are so fucking brilliant that publishers will fling editors at them by the truckload. These writers are in for a difficult road of reality shaped hand prints on their cheeks from the incessant bitch slapping life will be giving them.

Trust me. I know. I have a few "Learn to write, kid," rejection letters to prove it.

A writer deals in language. Grammar is "hella" important to being as clear and precise as possible. It might be an ass move to correct someone who just used the phrase "very unique" on the street, but a writer has to know why that's a problem. If they don't understand how grammar helps meaning, their relationship with language is flawed...and they probably aren't actually a wonderful writer. Sure, it is actually is possible for grammar to obscure meaning and books really don't sell these days if their prose reads like Victorian lit, but a writer still has to know how and when to bend rules and break them and which ones are bendable and which are intractable, and that means knowing what those rules are. A writer has to know that certain grammar errors can totally change the meaning of a sentence from what was intended (they're called "global" errors) and a writer will never know what those are or how to avoid them if they think they're too good to spend some time brushing up.

Gertrude Stein, ee Cummings, even Virginia Woolf in Room With a View all had unconventional grammar that added to their writing, but if anyone thinks for a second that they didn't KNOW the rules they were breaking and EXACTLY what the effect would be, they should read again.

Writers must also be aware that their skills are being judged by their compliance to grammar. Right or wrong, fair or not, enlightened or douchy, it happens. A writer's ability to write is being gauged directly in relation to the number of errors they commit ALL. THE. TIME. No matter how Rage Against the Prescriptive Machine you are, the fact is that every gatekeeper you will probably ever face--be they publishers, agents, editors, or even those reviewers who could make your career with a kind word--they are all judging your ability to write based on grammar. They are almost all writers themselves, with either abandoned or puttering creative careers, who found that their skill set suited them more towards the technical or business end of writing than the creative. They have no problem throwing away a submission that has more than a couple of mistakes early on....without even reading it. In their experience, no one's brilliant idea is ever really that brilliant if they can't be bothered to know enough about writing to use the right their/there/they're. They know all too well that a writer's ability to get an idea from their head into another person's is absolutely dependent on their command of language. They even know that if they do take a messy piece on, editing that manuscript will be like pulling teeth instead of polishing silver, which will cost them time and money.

And also....just so you know....most of them have a Strunk and White shrine in their closets and sleep with a copy under their pillow. So if you have to pick a grammar rule to follow from among a few choices, go with the S&W one.

And that is to say nothing of the legions and legions of readers who conflate grammar with overall writing ability as if there is absolutely no difference in the two skills. The very fact that copyediting is pretty much the only part of the writing process that can be farmed out to another person should belie this, but it doesn't. It would be splendid if we lived in a world where a where grammar was seen as the rather minor aspect of writing that it is. If you open a dimensional portal to that world, let me know, because this sure as hell ain't it.

That is why I try to be conscious of grammar and why I'm embarrassed when I make a big mistake even though, generally, I think it is really snotty and obnoxious and unkind the way people gleefully point and laugh at grammar errors in the same way a bully might point and laugh at someone whose pants just fell down around their ankles or to behave as if one's own high school grammar class was the end all of linguistic complexity.

75,000 Views! Our Purple Suited Book Pimp Will Have to Wait

Lollapalooza 2008 also had 75,000 viewers.
Image by nme.com

I started to get ready to introduce everyone to Twizzlefizzlepop, the gnome book pimp who will be joining us here on Writing About Writing to pimp out the occasional book, when I realized that today we're going to go over 75,000 page views.  Which, as awesome and pimptacular as Twizzlefizzlepop is, is simply not a bellwether we can pass quietly--or with only a Ben Stein caliber shout out--even though he has his ear hair in dreadlocks and an engineering specialization that lets him invent auto-page turners and stuff.



So let me say that again...in a Keanu Reeves "What. Do. You. DO?" kind of voice:

Seventy-five THOUSAND pageviews!

Visual proof of epic awesomeness.

I mean this is like the entire population of Mountain View (where Google is headquartered) clicking on my blog.  From the Google employees to the soccer moms to the retirees.  This is like the active military forces of Lybia and would be bigger than the armies of Canada, Australia, or The Netherlands.  Not that I would send a bunch of gentle writers up against the untamed fury of the Dutch armed forces, mind you, but just by way of comparison.  And even though I'm past the point where I'm making a triumphant post every time I make another thousand views, or even 10,000 views, this one calls for something a little special.

So instead, I'm going to take today to tell you all how awesome you are!

I kicked off Writing About Writing in February of 2012 (technically it was the tail end of January, but only by a couple of days).  Back then I was primarily on Facebook asking my friends to come and check out my blog, and I'm pretty sure most of them did it either to be good, supportive friends or just to see what I was up to.  The number of people among my friends who A) are interested in writing and B) don't know as much or more than me about it is quite small.  Some of my tech writer friends might learn a thing or two about the craft of fiction, but I'm not telling someone who writes for a living anything too insightful when I bang my pots and pans about writing every day.  I'm pretty sure most of them thought I was either stupid or insane, likely both.  I had a lot of friends over the next few months say within a few seconds of running into me "I don't read your blog," like they felt guilty and wanted to get that off their chest right away.  Sometimes they even added a small shrug or an "I'm sorry," to that.  And even though I never felt anything but head-spinning euphoria when a friend said "I LOVE your blog,"it was always really okay if my buddies were not quite the W.A.W. niche.

So back then, I was pretty happy if I pulled in over twenty hits a day.  I'd get forty or fifty hits if I savaged Prometheus because my friends could read between the lines or ignore the writing advice to get to get at the jokes.  But I thought it would probably be a year before I broke 10,000.  I thought it would be yearS before I got anything like 75,000.  I don't mean I didn't have my idle fantasies where I wrote a post that took the world by storm and my average day consisted of deciding the balance among doing talk show interviews, meeting patrons who wanted to throw money at me, having blistering hot groupie threesomes, and writing more brilliant stuff.  But when I thought realistically about where things were going and how long I could reasonably expect to take to get there, I never in my most reasonableish dreams(wildest maybe but not reasonablish) thought I would come this far, this fast.

These days I'm averaging around 700 page views a day and extra awesome days like this have happened more than a couple of times in the last month.

It takes my breath away every time I think about it.  And it's all because of you.  As much as I put myself on social media and say "Check me out.  No seriously check me out," in my best Strong Bad impersonation, there is simply no way I could have gotten to this point without all my friends hitting their tolerance of my self-promotion, grabbing torches and pitchforks, and marching on my house while singing "Kill the Beast!"  The reason I can look at this before I've even reached my one-year anniversary is that all of you rock beyond the telling of it.  You've put articles you liked on Reddit or Digg.  You've mentioned me in other places and to other writers.  You've boosted the signal.  And though I have a long way to go before I can claim blogging is a "real" job, I couldn't have gotten to this point in such a short amount of time if I didn't have wonderful and awesome readers.  You all are the bomb.  Which is weird since that's a definite article and I'm using it to describe thousands of you, but it is still true.  You are THE bomb.  All of you.

Thank you so much for reading!

It's Really Okay Not to Write. Really. Part 1

A picture of a pencil gives this post authority
that it wouldn't otherwise have.

Introduction...

One day on a family trip my ex-girlfriend dug out a bunch of old drawings she'd done when she was a tween and teen. Turns out she was a fandamntastic artist back in the day with a penchant for Disney princesses.  At first, I thought the art had to be traces, but S.G. assured me that they were drawings.  For traces they would have been pretty good.  For drawings they were rather impressive.  I’m not saying that the ghost of Andy Warhol would have shown up and given her a proud mentor nod, but they were pretty good.

“I don’t know why I stopped doing this,” she said.

“You should start back up again if you enjoyed it,” I said. 

“I don’t really want to,” she said.  “I’m enjoying knitting and cooking right now.”

There was a long pause where I was just looking at her.  It was the kind of pause that if we had been in a bank heist movie would have ended in a shoot out.  Fortunately, we were just in the living room, eating our body weight in tacos. 

“That's probably why then," I said. 

She blinked as if I had just told her that everyone she loved had just died in a giant vat of Brussels sprout jello.  But then, it was as if the clouds opened and pure understanding beamed into her soul.  She seemed at peace with the universe and it's harsh machinations.  Then, with great zen, she nodded sagely and bit into another taco.  

Totally a metaphor!

I wonder sometimes if somewhere between the Puritan work ethic and the parable of the five talents, we didn’t emerge as a culture with a sense that if we have the slightest proclivity towards something, we are morally obligated to do the crap out of it. “Don’t waste the gifts you’ve been given!” messages float all around our consumable media.  I mean can you imagine a movie where the middle aged woman says passionately to the young main character, “You’ve been given a gift, child!” and the plucky protagonist who is irreverent, but basically good at heart, replies, “Yeah, but I don’t actually enjoy doing it.” or “I'd much rather do this other thing that I’m less good at it.  It brings me more meaning.”

I don't know why so many people who are good at writing or enjoy writing thinks they ought to be taking it to the limit--eighties-montage-style.  Why is writing in particular so lacking of people who say "it's just a hobby," or "I like it, but not enough to pursue it professionally," or even "I like writing, but I don't like revision enough to ever really get published"?  Instead, everyone seems fixated on some far-off point of success--being a writer usually chief among them despite the irony of the fact that that only requires earning your er, followed closely by the holy grail of book publication, and then groupie threesomes. (Or maybe that last one is just me.) But instead of matching expectations to effort in a realistic way, writers often invest in these convoluted rationalizations that they will reach the same goals without really working.  Well, we know how slow going it is to try and tell anyone ever that success takes work.  There's a reason that stern-father-man saying sternly, "The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary!" causes a ping on the cliche-dar of even the most oblivious.  So instead, maybe it might be more useful to give people permission to just LIKE writing again, instead of always feeling like the slightest enjoyment or talent must obviously be translated into a career as a novelist.

So here it is folks:  Your ultimate permission NOT to write.  Even from Mr. Mean Taskmastery Boot-In-Your-Ass Chris.

Part 1-  The Journey Begins
  -or-
  You really don’t have to love writing as much as the writers you love love writing.  Really.

Whenever I venture out into the wonderful world of writers (physically or online) and especially if I dare to go of on one of my “writers ought to actually write...maybe” rants, I always run into people seeking permission not to write. Maybe seeking is the wrong word. Demanding might be better. They start crawling out of the woodwork to take umbrage with the idea of writing daily. Sometimes "crawling out of the woodwork" isn't even an expression. They start coming out of air vents and from under stairs and stuff with cries on their lips about how they don't have to write every day. The last time I posted such an article, this guy crawled up my main sewer pipe so that his head was in my toilet when I went to take a leak. It was disconcerting to have him glaring up at my junk and insisting that writing every day wasn’t that important.

Dude. I'm just trying to pee.

"Questing" might actually be the best word for what aspiring writers do to be told they don't need to write, for what’s possibly even more telling is that when writer of any established reputation says in any context (ever) that it’s okay not to write every single day, there is a *gush* of “Oh THANK you!” type comments. “Oh, I’m SO relieved that you told me I don’t have to write every day. All those other “mean” writers tell me daily writing is critical. This is SUCH a relief. I feel so free! Thank you SOOO much.”  

(You can play the home version of our game. Google "you don't have to write every day" and read the comments on any of the links you find.)

They start telling each other about these posts. “Hey guys!” they yell. “There’s a writer who says you don’t have to write every day over on Blogspot! Hurry!” In small groups it's like Mouse saying "Morpheus is fighting Neo!" But the small groups join with other small groups and they flock to these places of validation like a car accident...between Garth Brooks and Rod Stewart....where both immediately started doing a free concert.

These people confuse me a bit, I have to admit. It’s not because they don’t want to write every day.  I get that. There are lots of things I don’t want to do everyday. I don’t want draw every day. I have no desire to knit every day. I want to floss every day, but I'm terrible about remembering it. I absolutely do not want to be chased down by a trio of rabid tigers with eye-mounted lasers every day. What confuses me is when the same people turn around and say that they love writing more than anything.

Huh?

Everyone I know who loves writing “more than anything,” can’t wait to do it. They’re not looking for permission not to write. They’re looking for rationalizations that their queer, antisocial behavior of favoring writing over friends and sometimes family is somewhat socially acceptable. They duck into the bathroom to do a few lines. They do three lines in the morning just to feel normal and another before a meeting. They do a line before a party and still end up sneaking off to do a few lines every hour.  They do lines on their days off. They sometimes do a line or two before bed. And when they actually down to a “session”....they do whole paragraphs.

It might not be entirely healthy to be honest.  They rationalize their obsession and tell their partners it’s no big deal. “Baby, just let me do this one last sentence, and then I promise I’m done...for today...oh wait, I just thought of one more thing.” When they start writing, they almost go into a trance like state, and you can just see their dendrites firing like machine guns behind their eyes. Oh yeah. They can stop ANYTIME.

I honestly wonder if substance abuse is so rampant among famous authors not because of any boost they give to creativity, but because writers are so often already addicts and they have all the neural biology of addictive personalities. Writing is just their drug of choice.

It’s been obvious for a long time that the most successful people in arts and entertainment are almost always driven and completely obsessive people (also prone to addiction, actually). Painters, actors, directors, writers, musicians--it’s the same story over and over and over again. What these people have in common is that their devotion is consuming. What we are only now realizing through addiction studies is that the greatest artists are probably so great because they are complete junkies.  They just happen to be addicted to creation. We like them because that addiction leads to wonderful art, but these people are not balanced, well-adjusted individuals. So often, they rip through the non-career parts of their lives like a natural disaster. Multiple failed marriages, spectacular drama, substance abuse, suicide, falling-outs, breakdowns--they're all extremely common motifs among the most famous artists.

You don’t need to feel this way about writing. You can approach writing in a healthy way, and incorporate it into a balanced life. You can do it when you enjoy it and not when you don't. That is really, really okay. Really. You might not be as famous or timeless as your fantasies, and you might not make so much money you can't spend it all, but your life might be better for it in the long run. So if you don’t feel a burning to write every day like your gums are tingling and your antecubital itches, it’s probably for the best.

Part II (Chesslectric Boogaloo)

Prompt: Make Yourself Aware of Filtering

This prompt relates to the craft element of filtering.  So if you're not sure what filtering language is, you might want to start there.  As always this is a prompt and not the start of your Dragoncruiservampkiller Saga, so relax and don't forget to have fun.  This prompt is intended to help you become aware of filtering language and how to remove it from your prose.

Prompt: Attempt a two page scene filled with action from a character's point of view (first person or a limited third, but not omniscient).  This prompt will be easiest if it is only one character's point of view the whole time. Include as much possible filtering language as you can.  Let the pages drip with "he noticed" and "she saw that."  In the words of Dr. Cox from Scrubs: "Just go nuts!"  If possible, include no direct action at ALL, but make every single thing "filter" through the focalizer.  Have fun making it as filtery as you can.  By the end it should be comically bad.

Next, go through and fix all of it.  Every last filtery bit of it. If you feel the need to reiterate that the focalizer is the witness to the events, then you must earn it.  Otherwise see how it feels to get rid of all of that filterfication.  Do you ever "forget" whose point of view it is, or is it pretty clear even through the action.  Notice how everything seems more crisp and direct?


The great thing about filtering language is how easy it is to notice and fix once you have an eye for it.  (Though you'll notice it in other writing too, so get ready for a feeling similar to being told there is a smudge on the movie screen.)  A few simple exercises to train your Notice-Filtering Gland and you'll be on your way to snatching the marble from your Sufi's hand in no time.

Cause Tonight, I'm Cleaning out The Closet.....of the Guest Bedroom.

We're cleaning ALL OF THE THINGS here at Writing About Writing.

Okay most of the things.

Okay, a few of the things.

Okay, like six of the things and maybe a seventh thing if we're not too tired.  And really if we're only on the fifth thing by the time dinner rolls around, we're probably going to call it good.

Anyway The Supers are about to get another crime fighting addition to our Crime Fighting League of Crime Fighting.  It's part of a Super Hero exchange program we have going with Australia.  It's kind of like when Commander Riker served aboard the Klingon ship in that episode of The Next Generation.  Except we're the host.  And not a ship.  And we fight crime instead of Romulans and The Borg.  And she's not like the first officer.  Other than that, totally the same.  I don't know much about her except that she's called The Workaholic.  She works so hard that eventually the criminals just give up and go to jail to avoid having to keep escaping and outthinking her.   So I figured I better spruce the place up a bit and get rid of whatever random bits of Octorian tentacles might be still laying around from the war.  Our janitor, Michael Dukakis, has gotten the big stuff, but it's going to be weeks before he finishes a thorough clean of the entire compound.

So I figured as long as I was cleaning the compound, I might as well clean the site too.  I'm still behind on tagging some old entries and I might try to straighten up some of the menus and things as well.  If you notice a sudden dramatic change, it's probably just me futzing with the layout.


This great cleanup will also involve some copyediting efforts too!  Supportive Girlfriend has recently been making a huge effort to distance herself from Unsupportive Girlfriend by becoming Outrageously Supportive Girlfriend.  Not only is she trolling literary events for groupies to bring home for hawt sessions of "discussing literary themes" (if you know what I mean), but she's also offered to help me copyedit my entries if I can get them to her soon enough.  She won't catch every mistake, but between us we should have a much cleaner copy to post.

This is good because even when I offered an editor half of my profit they said something about not being interested in 2 cents a day.  It's all materialist tools in this industry, I swear.

I might have a prompt for Sunday, but if not, I'll be back and kicking on Monday.

25 Words of Wisdom From Fight Club to Writers (Part 2)

I wonder why it's written in soap....

Part II 

16-25: The Fighty Stuff

Be sure and check out:

Part One: 1-15: The Non-Fighty Stuff.  

I'm jumping straight into the action from there.  Spoilers abound.  Your milage may vary. Tax and licensing not included.  May cause anal seepage.  Void where prohibited.

The Fight Club Metaphor.  What "fighting" REALLY means.

Don't get me wrong.

Uncle Ima isn’t saying you need to get into an actual fight to be a writer.  You won't churn out As I Lay Dying with a busted lip and ruptured spleen. The "fighting" in Fight Club is probably a metaphor.  
No, really, hear me out. 
This isn't just in some corny way that a lit major can swear to you that your favorite rabbit cartoon is Arthurian legend and the story of the magician on the island trying to marry off his daughter is a condemnation of colonialism.

This one's legit.

Tyler even says "our great war is a spiritual one." 

Riddle me this, Litman.

If you look at the surface of the Fight Club plot, the fighting itself is a very strange detour in the arc (rail against STUFF--punch each other in the nose--blow up STUFF--free people from their attachments to STUFF; which one of these things is not like the other?). 

The fighting ends up being unimportant to the climax as well other than maybe the fact that Tyler and the Narrator fight near the end. (He struggles with himself, you see....) It is the start of Project Mayhem, but why couldn't Tyler just be so charismatic that he raises an army directly? Why is this club dedicated to fighting such an important middle step? For that matter what does fighting have to do with the rejection of material wealth that is at the heart of both the beginning and the end of the movie, and peppered within several soliloquies during, lest your short attention span forget? Why the out of sync middle section? There's nothing thematically or directly about fighting until 40 minutes in, then it's a big thing, but only to establish the next step of the plot and then it mostly goes away again. And yet, it is somehow still the title of the movie and the story's central focus.   

Hmmmmmm.....  

Clearly one answer is that the toxic masculinity that has them fighting in humid basements is fueling the engines of their entitled sense of rage against the machine, and of course the "but it's just satire" crowd would have us believe that, but there are some strange things going on parallel to that as well. 

There are enough other quotes about what happens between the fights of fight club and about destruction as an act of creation to believe that the actual “Fight Club” itself works as a metaphor for strife--especially the expression of anger to directly confront all the materialistic messages in our culture that the first part of the movie sets up.  

In fact, if fighting could be seen instead as an extended metaphor for the struggle against materialism and attachment that is established in the first half hour of the movie, the fighting then fits rather elegantly with the story arc. This is the moment in so many movies where "we fight back."  If seen in this context, we can look at the fighting as our more primal struggles.  Instead of letting the world tell us that our happiness will come with just one....more...thing..., we can rather find our meaning, our very identity, in the struggle against those forces.  They cannot be ignored.  They cannot be escaped.  But they can be fought.

Or maybe I really should have skipped that Adderall pill. 

Once we consider it from this angle, the movie takes on a whole new dynamic.  The nameless faces springing up everywhere to do combat against each other with no organization, hierarchy, or lasting resentments, then suddenly this story is no longer are about random men trying to beat the shit out of each other, but as the very movie premise implies, and as happens on camera OVER AND OVER again, it is rather about a massive struggle against ONESELF.  The little fights are just battles in the spiritual war.  Consider how the characters say fight club makes them feel, and how on the first night, they HAVE TO fight.

Of course, for a writer the implications of struggling against lifestyle obsession are too many to number.  When you start fighting the idea that a yin/yang table defines you as a person and your worth is based on the label on your latest, very-tight fashion jeans, you are insta-liberated not only from the bullshit that you're somehow wasting your life to spend it in pursuit of things you care about instead of what other people tell you you OUGHT to care about, but also from the lifestyle of an insatiable materialist hunger.  It's amazing how soon writing can pay the bills, when you've got the bills down to the essentials. 

16- “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight.  I don’t want to die without any scars.” 

The scars Tyler is talking about in our metaphor are failure. They are life fucking you up. To truly "fight" we have to risk. We can't just take on a struggle that is ours to abandon or complete as we wish. We have to take on forces that can fight back. We have to risk losing. As a writer, unless you achieve some Stephen King level of success, is likely to be a struggle against endless forces telling you to quit, that your worthless, that you don't matter, and that writing really isn't worth it.  There's no fame, no fortune, no fans. You haven't been so disappointed in the difference between reality and the picture on the box since the McDLT. You are a washed up suchandsuch headed towards X age who is still barely scraping by! How can you not have STUFF by your age? Critics, society, your mom who wants a grand-kid. Everything out there is telling you that you're being foolish and a few of those things bite. I wish I could tell you you can shrug them all off, but you can't. Some are going to bloody your upper lip. Some look like relationships that don't work out because one of you wants a promotion that requires a big move. Some look like friends who don't hang out with you anymore because you can't afford to do the things they do.  Some are just people who will flat out call you a nut if you reject the importance of material possessions. Some of this shit....it's gonna hurt.

17- “Self-Improvement is Masturbation”  

This quote is, I believe, key to unlocking the metaphorical view of "fights" and "scars."  If you listen to it in the context of what is happening in the movie at the time, all that is being talked about is improvement. Life improvement, physical improvement (even as the main character plucks out his own teeth) and social improvement as gods of their own world. The rest of life is "turned down," he says. Tyler even forces people, at gunpoint, to improve themselves. Why put this quote here when there so obviously is improvement because of Fight Club and Tyler? 

Plus Tyler seems like a guy who probably has a pretty exceptional view of masturbation. 

Because we so often improve ourselves with an external idea of what we’re trying to achieve and in a way that has no possibility of failure. We don’t risk.  We don’t fight. We don't pit ourselves against other forces. We improve quietly towards our sense of some unachievable goal that the media tells us is ideal. We might quit, but we can’t actually fail.  You can quit going to the gym, quit your diet, quit your 100 pushups app thing.  But you would never say "Shit, man, I lost," about any of those things. Failure requires taking on forces that fight back. Your push up app isn't going to tell you that you're a terrible person and that clearly you don't mind living like you're in some developing nation.  People are known to do that if you try to reject materialism around them. Take some chances.  Risk that life is going to kick your ass a little--and it will.  Fighting--even the metaphorical kind--isn't something we can set a gentle pace on and do when we have time and energy.  It's something that might jump us in an alley on our way to get some gyros and we just have to be ready for it.

18- “I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let’s evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”  

This is probably the most important quote in the movie, for anyone, but especially for writers.  For a guy with a grand master plan who is constantly showing people how to be better versions of themselves, this is a very strange thing for Tyler to say.  Nothing Tyler does is random. Everything is trying to break people out of their complacency and fuck with their sense of safety in the world so that they live life a little harder.  

He never lets the chips fall where they may.  

Tyler is constantly fighting--not sitting back to watch. But here's why this quote is so important. When most people struggle for perfection, they're focused on the perfection. They have some idea in their head. This isn't GOALS per se, but simply the line we've been fed about what ought to matter to us and what we should be trying to achieve thin...but not TOO skinny, making "decent" money (as is always defined as: a little more than we make now), fair skin...or "exotic", no grey hairs, wrinkle free, big tits, nice ass, great legs, stylin clothes, broad chest, thin waist, washboard abs, teeth so fucking white, they're whiter than teeth actually are, matching furniture, odor free, with a great car, living in a neighborhood where nothing bad ever happens ever, and of course, a coffee table that defines you as a person.  [Is it any wonder that the only physical characteristic mentioned in the whole movie, and the person who is in the only fight we ever see the end of, is considered the "ideal."  Oh the "too fucking blond" is a funny joke, but as with all good writing, there's even more going on there than a snicker.]  Instead of focusing on the perfection, Tyler focuses on the struggle.  Evolution is a messy, violent struggle for dominance, and the word choice here was no accident. 

Ug want duvet.  Ug need evolve into materialistic culture.
Or Oog just call it blanket.

For writers, decoding this one is easy. You can't control who will publish you. You can't control your sales. You can't control your success.  You can't control your fans. And as Chris would no doubt point out, you can't control how many groupie threesomes you have.  Forget "making it."  Get into the trenches and fight with the shit you can control like your procrastination or your fear of failure.

19- "Guy came to Fight Club for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough.  After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood.”  

I’m not really sure if someone can see this kind of physical improvement in just “a few weeks” of fighting once a week, and I'm not here for the ostensible, surface-level fatphobia anyway. (Maybe. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug.) However, if you think about this quote in terms of the themes of struggle instead of actual fighting it becomes a little more telling.  What you CAN do in that amount of time is realign your world view. You can challenge the cultural assumptions beamed gently into your brain from every quarter all the time. And in just a few weeks of being conscious of culture's "background radiation" you can become rock solid against much of it. You can start to see the irrationality of commercialism and how completely ridiculous the world is. You don’t have to live in a tree to do this, and you'll still lose some of those fights. But just being able to recognize that your choice of shampoo will not result in an orgasm and you are not actually unhappy because you don't own an Infinity is a good start.

20- After fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down.

I'm sorry. I need what to live a fulfilled life?
Paper towels?
A fish trophy that sings?
A duvet?
I'm sorry I can't hear you.

Tyler talks a lot about what "they" tell you and the explicit codification of our cultural background noise.  And whenever the comparison happens between fighting vs. regular life, the scene always takes place in the hated job done for all the things that aren't needed. Pedestrian life becomes less and less important to the narrator when he is fighting. When you fight, in the metaphorical sense, the messages you were fighting are muted. You take the kick out of their A1 sauce--as if A1 ever had much of a "kick" ~rimshot~. When you struggle against an idea like materialism, the next time a commercial comes on where some woman is telling you that her marriage was saved because of Ortega taco shells, you can look at that shit and say: "Holy flaming archbishop testicles, how did I not SEE this before." When you're not afraid to lose your job because you're not afraid to lose your STUFF because you're not buying in to the lifestyle obsession, and your boss is being a total douchecanoe--nay, a douchebattleship!--on a power trip, you can say: "Holy crap! This guy is being an absolute, complete rectal fissure. There are more important things in life than the STUFF I own as a recompense for putting up with your fucking face! Even if I have to give up some shit, I want a job that doesn't suck--ergo, one without YOU."

For a writer, this applies any time a decision might run counter to the mainstream--be it pursuing art for a living or living on very modest means. The struggle itself will help to turn the volume down on the siren song of culture's bullshit that you actually ARE your khakis.  The struggle itself gives you focus.

21- “Without pain.  Without sacrifice, you will have nothing.”

I've yet to meet a writer of any success who didn't have to give something up.  Social life, video games, family, something.  Most of them gave up more than one.  Those with a family came home from a day of work, started writing and had no life.  Those with a social life had no family.  You get the idea.  No one was able to give up nothing and frolic their way to success.  NONE of the writers I've met haven't had a moment where writing caused them pain.  Where it would have been easier to just quit.  Where it sucked beyond the telling of it to be a writer.   And the only thing that kept them going through those moments was that not writing would have sucked even more.

You are not defined by your triumphs.  At most, they are the punctuation on the end of a sentence.  You are defined by your failures--how you handle them, what you learn from them, and whether or not you let them destroy you.

22- “Most people--normal people--will do just about anything to avoid a fight.”

Most people don't want to fight the system.  In fact, most people--even when they're aware of the system--still won't struggle against it.  If I were Lawrence Fishburne, I would be telling you that "most of these people are not ready to be unplugged."  And then you would Kung Fu Fight Club or something.  But the point for writers this is simple: most people will not join you, or even appreciate you.  They may kind of hate you.  Most people will tell you extensive convoluted excuses for why they can't write rather than simply risk failure and will become angry if you don't share or accept them.  Most people don't want to challenge this system, even when they know something is very wrong with it.  They will go out of their way to avoid facing these truths in any meaningful way and even further to avoid fighting them.

23- “If you were to die right now, how would you feel about your life.”

This may at first seem like a line that belongs in part one's list of non-fighty quotes, but it is delivered very close to the end of the movie, after a lot of the fighting happens, and is closer to when Tyler and the narrator's views are crystalized.  In this moment, Tyler is not steering the car and they are drifting off the road. But this line is best examined in the context of the struggle that has been happening and the "fighting" (as a metaphor) that has been going on.  

Would you turn around and say "Oh my god, what a fucking waste!  I spent so much time on shit that didn't matter!  Why the hell do I have so many 70's sitcom metal lunchboxes?  Welcome Back Kotter wasn't even that good of a show!  WHAT DID I DO WITH MY LIFE??"  or would you be like "FUCK YEAH, they told me I was wasting my time tracking down old lunch boxes in yard sales, but I got my Welcome Back Kotter metal lunchbox and it was the crown jewel of my collection.  I found intense meaning and fulfillment in this life.  Fuck you, culture!"  Have you written that book?   Have you cleaned up that short story?  What are you waiting for and if you died RIGHT NOW--before even finishing this sentence--how would you feel about your life?

So many writers seem to be waiting for their lives to start.  They will always get to writing after this one more thing.  And even if you take out the people in perpetual excuseville, I think there are some who really honestly put things off because it hasn't quite occurred to them that some day they won't be able to put anything else off....ever.

24-“I wanted to destroy something beautiful.”

This whole scene is filled with Fight Club goodness, and it's one of those moments in both screenwriting and cinematography that you can watch over and over again and keep catching something new.  But besides what's happening on the surface, you have the modern media ideal being obliterated, and even beyond that, in the bigger picture, the "beautiful thing" that is destroyed is the life of the narrator.  His STUFF is all blown up.  His beautiful life is destroyed.

But, in fact, he couldn't do it on his own.  He needed Tyler's help.

Uncoupling from your things isn't exactly easy.  Rejecting materialism is fucking hard once the movie is over.   It will be, in many ways an act of self-destruction to end the existence where you are a slave to your STUFF and a slave to the lifestyle obsession. You will probably going to work harder than you might imagine to hang on to your slankets and fine collection of DVD's (that you've been replacing on Blu Ray for your plasma TV) and your coffee table that defines you as a person.  You might not think any one thing is vital, but if you try to decide what isn't important, you end up looking like the junk lady from Labyrinth in about five minutes.  That's why so many sentiments Tyler says echo the idea of destroying what you have or that hitting bottom is "not a vacation."

25- “I look like you wanna look.  I fuck like you wanna fuck.  I am smart, capable, and most importantly I am free in all the ways you are not.”

Remember Dorothea Brande and her advice that writers need to cultivate what is almost a dissociative disorder? (Problematic wording for today, but she wrote it over a hundred years ago.) Watching Tyler Durden changing the life of his buddy--helping him to uncouple from materialism and fear--takes on an entirely new facet if watched metaphorically with Tyler Durden as a creative force (a muse if you will) that is working to free people from themselves from the fetters of a lifestyle obsession and commercialist materialism by having them recognize and confront it.

Tyler creates through destruction. His every act of terrorism is simultaneously an act of creation and rebirth.  He becomes this sort of fucked up cross between Christ and Shiva (where the only way to be born and become who you really are is to destroy yourself).  You must die to be born again.  ("In death, he has a name.  His name is Robert Paulson.")  One of the primary metaphors in the movie is the soap, the creation of which produces both a benign and a violent way to wipe things clean. This is why I think the primary metaphor of the movie--the act of fighting that destroyed who they were and gave them their new identity--needn't be read literally.  Because I can't imagine it's a coincidence that the ONE piece of furniture that is mentioned and shown multiple times is a yin/yang coffee table. Tyler is the balance. He's the reactionary swing to The Narrator. He's no more right than the narrator is at the movie's beginning. They are two sides of a dichotomy out of balance. That's why the movie ends in the explosion that isn't stopped. Tyler dies, but Tyler's new world lives on.

But it also means you don't have to go live in an abandoned house near a paper mill to be a good writer.  Just keep shit in perspective and don't let the other side take over.  Consider the creative force that exists within destruction both on the page and within your own lifestyle obsession.  Understand the power of a tabula rasa.  End your life of fetters and be free in all the ways you can't be with them.

Besides, don't you know?  Art is subtraction.  And you really should be killing your darlings...

Of course, without the "tell" of obvious satire, it's arguably also super sexist psudo-intellectual crap that elevates the nihilistic mainstream male id to near godhood among its most ardent fans, and satire walks a thin line as it is between being edgy critique and just saying whatever it is. It's mostly white men who can afford to tell their bosses to fuck off and still run around nursing a persecution complex. But whether you're here to defend your baby as the scathing satire against toxic male entitlement culture it is, or you just secretly love Tyler in a deep place you don't talk about at parties, it's probably for the best that Fight Club's cult, but huge, cultural significance is in the rear view mirror. 

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