Archives for 2010

Storytelling and the NFL

October 20, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

I like sports. What I like most is that sports go against the deterministic grain of storytelling. Where the effect of a story is prepared by authors in advance, the outcome of a sporting event is determined as it unfolds. As a storyteller I can often intuit how a drama will play out because I can see the thin wires of preparation leading to a particular resolution or turn of events. In sports there is no script. Just a cast of characters driven by goals and constrained by a set of rules.

This doesn’t mean, however, that there is no narrative in sports. Quite the contrary. The experience of watching a sporting event can be as emotionally involving, if not physically taxing, as any scripted story. Audience investment in the outcome of a particular game, or in the performance of a particular player, or a decisive moment, can lead to heights of excitement and depths of despair.

As with drama, the ability of an audience to become emotionally engaged in a sporting event hinges on the audience’s mental state. Prepare a safe and supportive context and you get wild enthusiasm. Force them to confront realities they don’t want to confront and enthusiasm will wane. [ Read more ]

Site Notice: Server Issues

October 19, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

It’s almost beyond belief to me that I’m continuing to have trouble with my site host, Network Solutions. I apologize to anyone who’s tried to visit this site or the small site I put up at the beginning of the week. The amount of data I’m trying to move is trivial, but for some reason the addition of one site to NetSol’s server capacity seems to have crippled its ability to send pages to your screen — if it allows those pages to be served at all.

I am once again in tech support hell, and have once again managed to escalate the issue to NetSol’s tech support by demonstrating that the problem is not on my end. I have tried several of the fixes they asked me to try, and if they didn’t make things worse they did nothing to resolve the problems at hand. My hope is that the issue will be resolved shortly.

— Mark Barrett

Transparency as a Critical Goal in Blog Fiction

October 19, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

When you pick up a book you know you only have to turn a few pages in order to begin to enjoy the contents. You don’t even have to engage the contents of those pages if you don’t want to: you can simply look for Chapter 1 and dig in.

If the contents are fiction, you know once you immerse yourself in the story that you will not be interrupted by authorial asides or editor’s footnotes. You will be allowed to forget about the book as a mechanism and as you embrace the contents.

When you watch a movie you expect the movie to believe in itself — unless it’s an art film whose raison d’etre is disrupting the audience’s “easy relationship with the cinema”.* Scenes play out without commentary from the director or actors, allowing the audience to believe in the world of the story. Editing, a musical score — everything is aimed at supporting the audience’s suspension of disbelief while making the medium itself transparent.

Even bonus commentary on DVD’s can do damage to an audience’s ability to suspend disbelief. While it’s interesting to hear how a movie is made — at least once — it’s also a bit of a letdown to learn that a gripping scene was the result of accident. “We only had one copy of the Magna Carta on the shoot. When the AD fell off the crane and split his head open, somebody grabbed it and used it to stanch the blood. What you see the dying wife holding in this scene is actually a place mat from a diner down the street.” [ Read more ]

WordPress as a “Known Issue”

October 18, 2010 By Mark 3 Comments

I put up a small WordPress site over the weekend. It’s on my shared-hosting package, meaning the new site resides on the same sever share that this site sits on.

After pointing people to the new site today I received a message that it couldn’t be accessed. I checked and it worked for me, but when I checked again a few minutes later I got a ‘permission denied’ page, as if the site was unavailable or under construction. Over the next ten minutes or so I was able to replicate the problem on the other site, and even on this site.

My first tech support call to Network Solutions — my site host — went well enough. They showed me how to reset the permissions on my site, and things seemed better after that. Until a couple of hours later, when the same thing happened again.

My second tech support call was less reassuring. Not only was I told that the intermittent errors were a result of total server load, but WordPress was specifically described as a ‘known issue’ in taxing server bandwidth.

Uh…no. If you’re one of the largest hosting providers in the world, and you’re having trouble feeding my WordPress pages to a small handful of visitors, that’s not a WordPress problem, that’s a YouSuck problem.

I’m now being pointed to some helpful tips on speeding up WordPress installs, and have been advised to try using WPSuperCache (a plugin I have considered before), but having one of the most widely-used blogging apps described as a known issue by my site host is a fail.

After allowing malicious code injections into my site, failing to notify me of such in a timely manner, degrading the response time of this site to +30 seconds, and now this, I can’t recommend Network Solutions to anyone else. I’ll probably play out the end of my contract, but between now and then I’ll be looking for reliable hosting without excuses.

The good news is that while I was on hold a robo-message informed me that J.D. Powers might call to ask about my tech-support experience. Please do.

— Mark Barrett

Blog Fiction and NeilRorke.com

October 18, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking about publishing and fiction and the internet for over a year now, in a dedicated way. I’ve been thinking about storytelling my entire life.

How do stories take hold in the mind of the audience? How is any story changed by the medium of expression? What are the necessary ingredients of a story? What is the craft knowledge any storyteller should have?

I don’t have all the answers. I can get fifty pages into a work and be as lost as anyone who ever wrote. But I also think I understand the basics, and after fifteen years of thinking about interactive storytelling I think I know where the limits are as well.

In time the internet will become a storytelling medium itself. It’s not there yet, but the potential is considerable. To further that goal I’ve put up a site that I hope to grow over time. It’s a storytelling experiment in low-tech transmedia, aimed at entertaining an audience while also discovering and advancing useful internet-based storytelling techniques.

I’ll be discussing NeilRorke.comin greater detail, but for now I wanted to let you know that it’s up and ask for feedback. What do you think?

— Mark Barrett

Blog Fiction: An Introduction

October 16, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

Blog fiction sees the internet not as a distribution pipeline or as a means of presenting stories, but as a storytelling medium itself. Text, sound, image and movement have all been used to create and embrace fictional characters, events and places in other mediums, and the internet will be no different.

Blog fiction attempts to advance the cause in two ways. First, by being honest, open and upapologetic in this aim. Second, by calling attention to ways in which internet storytelling might move toward mature craft techniques similar to those in print, film, television and theater.

The first step on the journey to realizing the potential of blog fiction is clarifying the medium for the intended audience. Just as a book has its cover, a movie its opening credits, and the stage its rising curtain, blog fiction requires demarcation. Without such a portal the audience may be confused about the intent of the experience, or distracted by authorial intrusions.

To see version 0.1 of a proposed technical and craft solution, click here.

The Lost TYOTE Queries

October 11, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

While digging through boxes recently I found some old rejections I received in response to queries about my short story collection, The Year of the Elm (TYOTE). In looking them over most seemed to confirm what I’ve been saying lately: the industry doesn’t care about the quality of your work, it cares about the marketability of your project. If you’re an unknown writer you’re probably out of luck regardless of your storytelling skills. If you’re a well-known celebrity and can’t spell your own name, you’re probably looking at a book deal.

The majority of rejections I received were photocopied form slips. (My favorite was the quarter-page slip that had been cut from a single sheet of four such notices. How much time had it taken to cut those pages into quarters, and how much money had it actually saved?) What seems abundantly clear in retrospect is that none of those agents made any sort of determination about the quality of my writing before saying no. They looked at the project only long enough to determine whether they could sell the collection, and since short story collections are death in the marketplace that determination took two seconds. Feedback about the quality of my work couldn’t be provided because those agents probably didn’t read far enough along to have an opinion.

Again, I understand all that in a business context. I don’t fault agents or editors for churning through submitted projects as quickly as possible, and I’m thankful to those who sent me any sort of reply. (Some couldn’t even be bothered to do that, despite the fact that I always included an SASE.) [ Read more ]

Judging the Quality of Your Writing

October 6, 2010 By Mark 4 Comments

In the previous post I said there’s no relationship between writing quality and publication. Book deals are made for economic reasons, not because great writing makes the world a better place. If a prospective but marketable writer stinks, the industry will hire a ghostwriter, treating content as just another part of the manufacturing process.

I said the same thing in a recent spat with Jane Smith. I said the same thing when Sarah Palin’s book was announced. I’ve pointed to, and will continue to point to, incidents where publishers have failed to meet the same standards they routinely accuse unpublished and independent authors of failing to meet.

I understand why publishing wants to promote itself as the sole judge of quality and merit. Such status equates to power, and power in the marketplace equals money. But publishing’s credibility is so completely corrupted by its own actions that nobody in their right mind would take the sole word of a publisher, agent or editor when it comes to judging writing on the basis of quality, any more than one would try a case if the presiding judge had a vested interest in the outcome. [ Read more ]

Snooki and the Real Writer

October 5, 2010 By Mark 9 Comments

The longer I look at publishing the more convinced I am that the most compelling reason to drive a stake through the heart of the industry is the hypocrisy of claiming critical authority on one hand while on the other reserving the right to justify any book deal on a purely economic basis. I was brought back to this theme late last week by the announcement of two deals that exemplify this hypocrisy, but in a way that may not be immediately apparent.

There was, I think, appropriate disgust at the announcement by Simon & Schuster that they had signed a deal for a first novel from Nicole “Snooki” Palazzi. If you’re not up on your pop-culture stars, Snooki is a developmentally-disabled Italian American who regularly appears on an exploitative MTV series called Jersey Shore. As a for-profit enterprise, it’s not wrong of Simon & Schuster to attempt to profit from Snooki’s celebrity, and I don’t fault the book deal on that basis. But having seen clips of Snooki communicating with the demons in her head it’s obvious that her capacity to write a coherent sentence, let alone a book, falls somewhere between the potential literary genius of metamorphic rock and small furry animals. If a ghostwriter hasn’t already been hired it’s inevitable that most of the words and all of the structure in her book will come from someone other than the credited author. Yet this fraudulent business arrangement is being funded and driven by an upstanding member of a publishing community which collectively insists on respect not simply as a money-making enterprise, but as a cultural bastion of taste and merit.

Contrast this with Knopf’s announcement last week of a $2.5 million book deal for the next novel by Kiran Desai. I’ve never read anything Kiran Desai has written, but there seems to be general agreement she can write, if not that she is an important voice. It might at first appear that Knopf spent all that money on the quality of Desai’s writing, except that’s demonstrably not the case. The deal was brokered not for a finished work, but over a four-page proposal. For all I know Desai’s next book will be unmitigated genius from start to finish, but it’s at least theoretically possible that hopes for the project may not be realized despite everyone’s best efforts. What that means is that either Knopf decided to gamble all that money on the quality of Desai’s next book, or Knopf already did the math on the market and expected sales even if the book stinks, and concluded they will make their money back and more.

While Shooki’s book is a fraud, and Desai’s book may aspire to the greatest of literary heights, the people throwing money at these projects are almost certainly doing so solely on the basis of the economics of the market segments they serve. From a cultural perspective, putting Snooki’s book out is pure capitalism, including the fact that the whole project is a lie. But so is Knopf’s bankrolling of Desai’s next project. If one is respected and one is not respected, that says nothing about why money changed hands.

It changed hands in both cases because these names will sell. In neither case was quality the determining factor.

— Mark Barrett

Burning Desire

October 4, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

I had occasion over the weekend to dig through some old boxes of scripts and stories I wrote years ago. I found some duplicate copies and stuff I no longer cared about and decided to get right of the dead weight.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard about writers burning their early works, but it seems to have been a fairly common occurrence. And I can understand the appeal. Fire as metaphor and ritual seems to be a human constant, signaling everything from death to purification to rebirth.

I had about five thousand pages to dispose of, and believe me, I wanted to burn them. I wanted the act, the warmth of the fire, and the ashes. Particularly the ashes.

Because we live in a world dying from greenhouses gasses, such things are frowned upon these days, and recycling is the norm. So I recycled.

But I wanted to look into that fire.

— Mark Barrett