Big Ed's Place

One of the challenges the arts, be they visual, performing, musical, or literary, regularly face is “how the heck to we pay for it?” Good art requires time to develop talent, time to produce, and time to perform or otherwise get in front of an audience.

Now I don’t know much about the history of art, but I suspect that over most of human history, “paying for it” was done by patrons. The poor were too busy scrambling for survival. The rich, on the other hand, could afford to spend money on aesthetic pleasures. Similarly, ruling bodies such as governments and churches could commission work to glorify their chosen objectives, using the wealth extracted from their citizens.

I also suspect “paying for it” became easier with the rise of the middle class. Instead of one patron paying for the entire cost, it could be spread among multiple individuals. Obviously, this is less true for some art forms, such as sculpture, where it’s hard for multiple individuals to share a single work of art. However, a good theater run spreads the cost of a play among many non-rich individuals. So does a long concert series. A musician can make a living if enough people pay to see them every night and they don’t have to be the same people every night.

It also became easier for those art forms that worked well with commerce. Notably, anything that could be copied and distributed to “the masses” could have the entire “paying for it” cost spread out among the entire audience. If it cost X to make a record album, and it could be sold at Y, then obviously X/Y determined the number of copies that had to be sold. True, there was often a cash flow issue still since the cost had to be paid before the sales were complete. But there was little need for a true patron.

Enter the digital age. It’s become much harder to predict how many copies of a digital art form could sell. Most of this is simply the newness of the process. There are substantial debates on how much ebooks should cost. The only answer seems to be “less than print books.” Well, that leaves a wide range.

We’ve already seen this impact of uncertainty in the recording, movie, and publishing industries. The big industry giants are largely chasing the blockbusters these days and letting the midlist and minor talent wither. I believe the major reason is simple–they can predict the blockbuster payoffs better. Is another James Patterson novel going to sell? Yep. Is this unknown author writing a fantasy young adult series going to sell? That’s a gamble (which they’ve lost more than once).

However, we shouldn’t entirely discount the problems of digital transmission. The artist can’t control what happens with copies of their work or how many copies get made by others. The copies are de facto free.

Which means that the cost for these art forms is more reflective of the cost of sculpture and much of history. The true costs all reside in the first production. How does that get funded?

I can’t help wondering if we’re headed to a realm with more traditional patrons. I’ve recently participated in a Kickstarter campaign (for Nobilis Reed, here) and I may end up going that route for Deep Dish, if I can’t get a publisher interested.

I also wouldn’t be surprised at more ‘garage shop’ operations where artists bootstrap their way into sustainability. It’s a harder, longer road, but it might end up being just as valid.

No answers–just musings.

This past week, like the week before, started off productive and then got completely sidetracked by side issues. Ya see, I had one of those ‘Face meets desk” moments where you bang your head on the nearest available flat surface for being foolish or stupid.

For I realized that I was making a serious mistake on trying to get Deep Dish published. It’s a novel and, unlike short stories, simultaneous submissions of novels to multiple publishers is common. Instead of submitting it serially, I needed to do so in parallel. At least if I want to speed up the chance of getting it published.

So much of this week was spent researching potential publishers (there aren’t many, unfortunately). I found that one of them wants paper rather than electronic submissions, which triggered another round of research on paper types. I wanted photo quality finish but matte instead of gloss. That’s not easy to find. Then I had to deal with my printer issues. I have a Dell. It sucks. It regularly loses its mind and forgets how to scan, or how to print from my wife’s computer. It’s also annoying because of its insistence of telling me it’s out of ink when it’s half full. And then also telling me it’s out of ink if I’m using a refilled cartridge.

I’ll never buy Dell again.

So I bought a new printer (HP this time), already wireless compatible, and then discovered I’ve misplaced the piece of paper that had my WEP key written on it. More running around and fighting computers instead of writing.

But in the end, I did get Deep Dish printed and into the mail. It was a lot of necessary work, and hopefully the simultaneous submissions will pay off.

Meanwhile, I also finished the crappy first draft of A Smile on my Face. It came in at 5120 words, which is a very respectable addition of 1941 words in a week. Particularly when I also added 456 words to Oral Histories, bringing it to 1732 words. 2400 words in a week? Pretty good, pretty good.

But it also makes me wonder what I could have accomplished if I’d not had the distraction with printers and resubmittals. We’ll see… maybe this week will be similarly wonderful, or maybe the editing of A Smile on my Face will slow me down like the Deep Dish submittals this week did.

I hope everyone had a good Christmas! I realized I’ve been talking about Deep Dish for sometime without really saying much about it. Since I’m trying to sell it professionally, I can’t reveal too much about it, but I thought y’all might like a sneak peek. Below is Page 1 of Deep Dish. Click on the image to enlarge.

I submitted Deep Dish to my first publisher. As expected, it was harder to hit ‘send’ than I expected. I intellectually knew that it wasn’t a big deal to do so, and I knew intellectually that if I got rejected, it wasn’t a big deal. That didn’t stop the nerves.

And the thing is, of course, that I’ve been rejected plenty of times in my life in a wide variety of venues before now. When I first started applying for jobs out of school, I mailed 101 resume’s and had 19 interviews before I got an offer. I probably went on dates with close to a hundred women before I met my wife. And that’s not counting the women who I tried to reach through online dating sites that never bothered to even acknowledge my email.

That hasn’t prevented it from being nervous and sweat inducing each time I step into a new arena.

For the pattern in each case was the same. I’m on edge about the first time. I get rejected and it stings more than I anticipated. But I pick myself up and try again. I get a second rejection which stings again. After a few more rejections, the sting gets less and less, as if I’m building up an immunity or a tolerance. And then at some point, it becomes almost a game and I find I don’t care.

This was literally true in the year before I met my wife. I was online dating and I reached the point where I said, before going on a first date, “either I’ll have a good time or I’ll have a story to tell.” The fear of rejection was long gone.

So I know I’ll eventually stop being nervous and submitting to publishers will feel like old hate. But damn, going through this again and again is getting old. My brain knows better but the gut continues to churn…

Have I mentioned that I hate December? (I have). This past week has been particularly ‘Decemberish’–an absolute ton of work to do in the day job, plus a ton of additional to do at home, plus a sick wife, plus…. yadda yadda yadda.

So, I only had one non-working lunch this weekend and brought work home 3 separate nights to do after my son went to bed. Those are my two prime writing times–gone. I did manage to finish the Deep Dish script and first draft of the cover letter. I also managed to skim Unmasked to remind myself what I was doing.

And that’s it. Nada.

And the hard part is that I know that the lack of time and energy are excuses as much as anything. I found plenty of ways to fill up my remaining spare time with other things. Basically, when I did get a few minutes, I websurfed, edited for a friend, read a trashy novel, and found plenty of ways to avoid actually submitting Deep Dish to a publisher.

In other words, I dithered. A lot.

I’m not happy about it, and it doesn’t help that I’m very aware that I was doing it. I’ve committed to a friend that I’ll mail Deep Dish out within a week, despite the work load and other obligations that will suck my time. Hopefully that will help get it done and move on to the next story, whatever it is.

And that’s part of the block. None of my queue stories are tugging at me hard enough to overcome the weight of chores and other burdens that are sucking up my time. So I have to guard against more dithering on them in the near term as well. We’ll see how it goes…

This past week, I’ve been at my in-laws. This is not the most conducive environment for writing–even ignoring the content issues involved in what I write. We’re here to spend time with them, after all. Burying myself in the basement with my laptop isn’t exactly spending time with them.

But that hasn’t prevented me from stealing time, mostly after everyone’s gone to bed. The irony in me losing sleep on vacation is not lost on me, but such is the nature of life.

I did finish scripting 10 pages of Deep Dish, with detailed outlining of pages 11-18. I also knocked out a draft of the synopsis, which will require a few more revisions before it’s ready to use as a fundraising document. No progress on Unmasked, leaving it neglected at 3,466 words. I did it in scrapes and scraps of time, with many of my gaps being due to lack of internet while I worked.

But such are the steps we take when we’re obsessed.

An author friend of mine appears to be recovering from a year of burnout. I say ‘appears’ because until he releases his most recent work in progress, it’s hard to tell if this is a true recovery or just a temporary spurt of enthusiasm.

The burnout’s been difficult to watch, secondhand. A lot of it was that he’d hit the dreaded marathon mile 22, when it just hurts to continue, but the end isn’t in sight yet. Some of it was because he had some writer’s blocks that were both subtle and difficult. He didn’t realize how one loose end was slowing him down, even though it wasn’t something imminent in his story. It was like the dirty dishes on the table that make it hard to concentrate on the computer because you keep thinking, “I need to take those to the kitchen” but don’t actually do so. Then add in the fact that his life became more complex and non-writing elements became more emotionally rewarding and thus more distracting.

Like I said, it was difficult to watch. Sometimes he’d complain about not wanting to write. More often, he’d spend a great deal of time analyzing why he wasn’t writing, but the analysis would never turn into actual writing. He’d identify ‘all I need to do is x” and “x” would only last a few days. He was thrashing in emotional mud and there wasn’t much I could do to help.

For writing, especially when it’s not a career, is a largely solitary, self-motivated effort. Outsiders can’t compel creativity to flow onto the page. Bribes can sometimes work, particularly with some people, but not always. There are times when the emotional burden is just so great that an author would rather mop their floor than write another word, even if the rest of the time the writing is a joy.

Which brings me to the flip side and opposite extreme–obsession. Damn. I’ve been obsessed lately with Deep Dish, and this is rare for me. It’s not just the ‘thinking about the story in the idle moments of my day’ that seems to be common for most writers. It’s staying up two hours later than I should so I can keep hashing out a single page of the script. It’s wondering if I’m sitting far enough back in the boring business meeting to pull out my notes and work on it (which would be disastrous if I got caught). It’s spending hours trying to find just the right picture of a 1970′s diner to pass on to my artist so he knows what I’m thinking of (and, FWIW, it’s all but impossible to find such a picture). It’s not wanting to do my standing obligations, or even other aspects of writing that I love (like this post) because it’s taking me away from my obsession.

When I step back from myself, it’s fascinating to watch. It isn’t quite as painful as watching burnout, though in some ways just as scary. Am I going to sacrifice something I shouldn’t? Am I going to push things further than I should in stealing time from elsewhere? What if, despite my obsession, it doesn’t work out, either creatively or as a project? I could do a ton of work and still end up with something that’s either crap or that I can’t get published/finished.

It’s mania, to burnout’s depression.

I don’t know if other authors go through such swings, or if this obsession looks familiar to them. But it’s a wild ride right now. And perhaps it’s just a touch of mania that we need to keep us going sometimes.

One of my high school English teachers used to argue that the frame defined the art. Take a hammer and use it–it’s just a tool. Put it on a wall and put a frame around it, and it’s art.

Later, I had a teacher explain that the frame was what separated the art from the real world. The art of photography is often the art of selecting that frame–what in the panorama is worth focusing on?

But I eventually came to believe that it’s really the fact that all traditional art starts with the limitations of its form. A painter begins by selecting a canvas, which defines the size of the work. Then he or she picks the paints, which defines the limits of the pallette. Then they pick the style–realistic? Abstract? Impressionist? Styles have rules to hold them together coherently. All these choices and many more are made before the artist begins and therefore are the true definers of the art to come.

I’ve been thinking about this recently with respect to writing. By choosing to write, I immediately accept several limitations. The art is restricted to words alone. Since I’m not doing a podcast, they are written words and not spoken words. A story must be written predominantly in a single language if I want any reasonable audience, even if I wasn’t monolingual.

Then there’s the two kickers–style and length. The style question is the same as for other art forms. There are restrictions to fiction, further restrictions to genre fiction such as erotica, and certain readers’ expectations for pleasurable fiction. I find that I’m forced to write stories with a ‘satisfying’ ending. It doesn’t have to be happy, but it can’t just hang or leave the reader irritated. That bounds my plots.

As for length, I honestly thing that stories that start out with an anticipated length work better than the rambling never-ending morasses on some of the free sites. Stories have a beginning, middle, and end, and it’s a little tricky to actually write a story if you don’t know where the end will be. It’s a good constraint to define the story, even if it’s not a hard one.

For me, length is usually not the challenge. I enjoy writing flash fiction, where I’m forced to tell an entire story in a brevity of words (see my flash fiction page). Similarly, the challenge of writing for a publisher’s word requirements are a matter of setting the scope correctly in the beginning. Basically, I can get 3-4 major scenes in 5000 words, so I scale the plotline accordingly. Or I fix the number of characters, because each major character requires about 1000 words to introduce. I know the tricks.

However, length is biting me on Deep Dish. As a foray into a new art form (graphic novel), I don’t have the tricks up my sleeve, or rules of thumb. So I agonize more about how to hit my desired length target.

Which is what brought me back to this topic. I think more accomplished artists are more aware of the frames they pick, and the implications of those selections. I don’t know how much of that is intuited and how much is learned through experience or instruction, but it does seem to be fundamental. At least to me, right now.

I made no progress on Unmasked this week, leaving me at 3,466 words. The major reason is I took a detour to work on Deep Dish.

Now, for those who haven’t been following, Deep Dish is a graphic novel project. I’m writing the script and plan to have Tzratzk illustrate it. The tricky part is funding it–this isn’t one I can offer for free, unfortunately. Since all Tzratzk does is art as a freelancer, he can’t afford to engage in a major project for free or on speculation that it’ll get picked up and he’ll get paid down the road. I understand that and I’m fine with that. Him doing ‘work for hire’ has a nice side effect that I own all the rights to it when we’re done. The hard part is that a graphic novel is still a big project, and will need more than I can fund out of my pocket right now.

So the first step towards funding it is establishing how long it is. Tzratzk did the first two pages so I could see how much story I could fit onto a page. In parallel, I combined my arc outlines into a single outline. Then I was able to estimate the page count.

Which is unfortunately higher than I’d like. So my writing time this week went into editing and tightening the outline, which allowed me to chop it down by 10%. I’m still looking at whether to make more cuts, because I’m still longer than a publishing house would ideally like. I’m not committed to going to a traditional publishing house, but if I want the option, I need to consider their needs. So there’s more contemplation of the story in my future.

One of the challenges of creative enterprises, I believe, for many artists and writers is the gap between vision and execution. We can see (or hear) what it should look like. We just don’t necessarily have the ability to pull it off. And so the world gets stories of painters destroying canvases they’ve worked months or years on, or writers burning completed manuscripts. I really don’t think those cases are egotistical–”this isn’t up to my standard”–so much as they are “this isn’t what I want it to be” and the destruction is frustration incarnate.

So how do we cope?

In some cases, the answer is obvious–give up. For example, I really appreciate fine art nude photography. I even went so far as to sign up for a general photography class in my mid-twenties at a local community college. My thinking was that I’d get some experience and practice and I could have some female friends pose for me (hence, the source of the photography scenes in Friends and Benefits).

The problem was–I just wasn’t good enough. I could visualize a great pose or shot, but I’d burn a roll of film and still not have the results even qualify as mediocre. Given how expensive film was, it only made sense to continue if I was interested in photography overall and was willing to be the guy who carried the camera everywhere and was always taking shots of families and vacation scenes. I.e., I’d have to learn photography in general in order to get good enough to do nudes.

That was too big of a jump, so I hung up the camera.

Writing, however, offers some different options. There’s no sunk money–just time–in improving one’s skills. For several stories, I know my current ability isn’t up to my vision, so I’m waiting on those projects while I practice with others. Specifically, I want to write some more female POV stories before I tackle The Boys of Summer. There are other examples, which tend to hang around the middle of my queue.

But that leads to the other dilemma of the gap–if it doesn’t meet the artist’s vision, is it still good?

Recently that debate came to the fore in the literary world. Nabokov had requested that his manuscript for Laura be burned if he died before finishing it, which he did. But his son and those who read it thought it was very good. They had to choose whether to follow his wishes and destroy it, because it didn’t measure up to his vision, or publish it, because it was still better than most of the books out there today.

In Nabokov’s case, the decision rested solely in his son’s hands. But for more general cases–who’s to judge? I’ve had more than one author tell me that “oh, that was a piece of fluff that I didn’t think was very good. But it’s my most popular story.”

So writing, especially in the internet era, offers the option of publishing a work that might not quite meet the artist’s vision and seeing if readers appreciate it anyway.

But that doesn’t end the frustration, I’m finding. I want it to be right and sometimes I just can’t find the turn of the phrase that correctly evokes what I see in my mind. So I stall. Or I rewrite and rewrite. Or I start bitching about some constraint (like maximum length) that I think is hampering me. Or maybe I give up and the story goes into the inactive file.

It’s particularly challenging for me because I’m more visual that auditory, and writing is more sound-based. I struggle with translating what my eyes can see into lyrical phrases that do the imagery justice. That’s part of why I’m exploring a graphic novel as one of my current projects. It’s easier to say, “no, that’s not quite right” when I see a scene, even if it was created by another.

Aside–it’s also one of the things that makes me a decent first reader. I just reviewed another first draft this weekend which only suffered from one major flaw–the physical angles for the sex were prohibitive. The words were smoking hot, but I had to say, “ummm, you do realize how hard it is to slide two fingers into a woman when she’s bent over at that angle, right?” I’m seeing the movie play out in my head when I read, and that tends to include where the odd limbs and other body parts have to be to make the scene work…

Second aside–which is something we’re explicitly breaking in Deep Dish. I told Tzratzk that a POV he’d drawn was impossible unless the stage was too low for an upcoming scene. He told me to ‘learn to cope.’ The artistry was better than it’d be if he raised the stage and no one would notice but me anyway. Since he was right on both accounts, I decided to shut up.

So I struggle with this gap between vision and execution regularly. I’m not sure it ever goes away, either, because vision can expand just like talent advances. How common is this struggle? I wish I knew. I do know other artists and authors who face it, but it’s so rarely admitted to, that it’s hard to tell.