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Revisiting the Book Review Problem

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A few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece on the inherently dubious business of paid book reviews. If you’re an independent author or are writing a book for any reason other than personal interest the article is a must-read, but not for the reasons you might think.

As anyone knows who’s ever tried to search the internet for the best spatula or best toaster, finding credible reviews on the internet is impossible. No amount of persistence and no set of keywords will ever produce what you’re looking for because keywords are the life blood of both search engines and the soulless, SEO-driven marketing weasels who exploit them. The only chance you have of getting an unbiased opinion about anything is to already know sources you trust, and to hope they’ve reviewed the product you’re interested in. For many products ConsumerReports provides that kind of objective, metric-driven coverage, but when it comes to books there’s little chance a title you’re considering will have been reviewed by someone who doesn’t have a personal axe to grind or who isn’t part of the publisher’s own extended marketing effort. Worse, if you’re an independent author there’s almost no chance that you’ll be able to have your book reviewed by a reviewer who has established their own credibility.

The internet workaround for this problem has been to allow customers to post reviews of products they’ve used. The practical result of this workaround in the book world is that authors and their friends and family salt and sock-puppet their own positive reviews when a book comes out, while competitors and griefers and put-upon students post scathing negative reviews about books they have often never read. The resulting noise can be sifted through endlessly or judged in the aggregate, but even then it tends only to reinforce whatever sense of the work the prospective customer already had.

As the article notes, almost all of the current paid-review options are not in fact reviews at all, but sponsorship and marketing. And consumers of reviews are not confused about this transactional relationship. In fact, whether you pay for a review or not, the default assumption by the public is and must be that your review is corrupt. And since it doesn’t matter how sincere a paid reviewer is, that consumer bias only corrupts the process that much faster, with the lion’s share of the paid-review business going to the most corrupt reviewers. (What authors are paying for when they buy a reviews is a positive review, and paid reviewers know this.) I have no doubt that the best of paid reviews are better than the worst, cleverly avoiding, for example, over-the-top claims of grandeur, but the goal is always the same: to help sell, rather than to independently judge.

Made almost comically explicit in the article is the idea that traditional arms-length reviewers do not have this credibility problem because they do not participate in the review process as adjuncts to marketing and sales. But that assertion is patently false. It’s true that the New York Times Review of Books doesn’t take checks or cash up front, but they certainly take phone calls from publishers, and it’s a fair bet that the people at the highest levels of the traditional publishing industry all know each other and how business is done. If the good friend of an editor writes a book it somehow ends up on the top of that editor’s stack. If a book is written by a despised peer the title somehow gets lost, or savaged by a hostile reviewer chosen for exactly that purpose. If there are humans involved, and money and power hanging in the balance, you can be certain that the process is inherently corrupt no matter how squeaky clean the press releases are.

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The Zombie Problem

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When I was growing up there were two zombie variants. You had your Dungeons & Dragons zombies, and you had your Night of the Living Dead zombies. While I was too young to see that classic movie when it first came out, years later I watched it all alone, very late at night, on the Chanel 9 Creature Feature, which was sponsored by an aluminum siding company. No human being was ever more grateful for an aluminum siding sales pitch than yours truly that night.

At about the same time I was also binge-playing D&D, and in both contexts I still remember debating the moral and ethical issues surrounding the slaughter of zombies. It might seem that the only justification needed for hacking a zombie to pieces or shooting one in the face is the fact that they are intent on eating healthy non-zombie people alive, which is super creepy. But tigers and lions also display that same proclivity at times, yet except for a few low-brow, atavistic big-game hunters still wandering the world in search of their genitals humanity has generally moved away from the idea that every potential existential threat deserves to be turned into wall art or a throw rug. And besides — back in the day zombies moved so slowly you could always run away from them unless you were a total idiot, like, unfortunately, most of the characters in Night of the Living Dead.

If the mere threat of zombies wasn’t enough for me to justify their execution, then, there was the fact that zombies represented a desecration of the dead. Rather than allowing the deceased to rest in peace while politely decaying out of sight, zombification forced the dearly departed to get up and wander around in search of bloody meat, regardless of any physical injury or decomposition they may have previously suffered. Not only was this a cultural abomination, but it was super gross, and on that basis alone suggested a wide range of acceptable motives for zombie killing, from godly mercy to wholesome tidiness.

In the end, as young men often do, I settled on cheap contextual heroism as my ethical justification for hacking zombies to pieces or watching them get their brains blown all over the landscape, but even then, in the primal pre-narrative recesses of my mind, I knew I was getting away with something. I was killing without killing. Taking life without taking life. Murdering without murdering.  [ Read more ]

Demystifying Authorship

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I grew up with a reverence for authors. If you made a movie, or wrote a play or directed a play or starred in a play, that was cool, but if you wrote a book (fiction, and to a lesser extent non-fiction, but to a greater extent philosophy) you were somebody. Authors weren’t just artists using the medium of words, they were culture.

As the internet has devalued writing it has also demystified authorship in ways that I think are unique to the times. From the dawn of the first printed book until the public began expressing itself en mass I think a reverence for authors has been the norm. To be published was to be validated in ways that most people could only aspire to.

This does not mean, however, that any cultural stewardship claimed by the publishing industry was real. Far from it. Publishers have engaged in gatekeeping for no end of duplicitous purposes, and the people populating those power centers have never shown the slightest hesitation in abusing whatever trust the public placed in them. Where power, money and desire meet you can scoop cockroaches by the pound and never see the bottom of the barrel.

So complete was publishing’s power over the concept of authorship that anyone who attempted to publish outside the industry was deemed by all to have admitted failure. A painter could work in solitude, a musician could compose for an audience of one, a filmmaker could go independent, but to be a real author — to be a part of the culture — you had to sign a contract with someone else and give them editorial control.  [ Read more ]

Social Networks and Self-Inficted Storytelling

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There’s no question that the internet has changed the world for the better. Individual voices now have as much reach as the dominant political and cultural voices had when every broadcast medium was controlled by gatekeepers. Aggregate enough individual voices and the power to dispute if not disrupt corporations or governments anywhere on the planet becomes real, in real time.

This feeling of empowerment was a critical factor in mass adoption of the internet. For the first time in history individuals were no longer limited to yelling back at their televisions and radios, but could immediately broadcast their own responses. While most such responses proved to be inane, some were, shockingly, no less informative or entertaining than what the cultural gatekeepers were shoveling. In short order these unknown but insightful individual voices validated the internet not simply as an email delivery system but as a democratic medium of mass communication. If you wanted incisive commentary on the web about anything from a film to a political battle you were as likely to find it on an obscure blog as you were on the website of a mainstream media outlet. Those mainstream voices, saddled as they were with bureaucratic restrictions and marketing directives, were outgunned by individuals who had no axe to grind except the facts of a matter and no audience to pander to but themselves.

While this revolution prompted a virtual land-grab by individuals eager to set themselves up as online experts, watchdogs or counter-culture trendsetters, not everyone wanted to manage their own site. What the revolution did confirm for everyone, however, was something that had long been suspected. In the media universe of programs and publications authored by other people, each of us was the content we’d been waiting for.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Afterword: Writing in General

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The Ditchwalk Book Club has been reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

The final section of Hill’s book is also the most personal. Departing from the twin subjects of fiction and craft that bound the rest of the work, Hills writes of his own experience with nonfiction and of the eternal self-abuse that is any kind of authorship.

If you are serious about making writing an ongoing part of you life, sooner or later you’re going to find yourself sitting in a dusty corner, staring across the room at your desk, wondering if you’ve lost your mind. You’re going to experience a crisis of faith that has no bottom. You’re going to think that you’re doing it all wrong while every other writer is doing it with ease.

When you do, this chapter will remind you how wrong you are:

If the way my mind works when I’m trying to write has any resemblance to the way real writers’ minds work, then I pity them all. When I have time to write the ideas aren’t there — or if the ideas, then not the words. Forcing myself to put the words on paper helps not at all: insights become platitudes as phrased when under self-imposed duress. You see?!

I’ve long been thankful that someone had the guts to admit that writing is a nightmare. Not a sexy, drunken-binge nightmare or a death-tempting, drug-addled nightmare or an artistically obsessed, relationship-killing nightmare, but a self-imposed, lost-at-sea nightmare. Because the romantic, angst-ridden writing process portrayed in the movies, and often by authors themselves, is a fraud. Writing is hard even when it’s going well, and most of the time it’s not going well.

Hills ends the chapter in a two-page-long, single-paragraph monologue that I reread whenever I feel like banging my head on my desk or taking an axe to my computer. And every time I read it I laugh and am reminded that I am not alone.

Whether you write fiction or nonfiction your success will be determined by your ability to merge multiple, fragmented lines of thought into a coherent and focused whole. Whether writing about the actions of imaginary characters or addressing a real-world subject you’re going to lean heavily on reason and logic to find your way, and sooner or later you will get lost. At that moment the best thing you can do for your sanity is remind yourself that what you’re trying to do is really, really hard, and all the more so if you’re trying to do it well.

As a fiction writer I find Rust Hills’ book to be an invaluable aid. As a writer I find this chapter to be soul-sustaining.

Writing is a solitary pursuit that routinely destroys good people. I want you to have your dreams but I don’t want them to break you. Whenever you run aground, this chapter will make you laugh and remind you that you are not alone.

— Mark Barrett

WIG&TSSIP: The American Short Story “Today”

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The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

In commenting on the previous section I noted that I’m personally not interested in belonging to any literary movement or critical school. I have my own literary perspective, certainly, but if I belong to any literary tradition it’s the one that puts human experience and truth ahead of everything else.

My complaint about literary movements and schools is that they are inevitably temporary and almost always fad-driven. This section of Hills’ book unintentionally proves the merit of that perspective in that it replaces two sections that appeared in the original 1977 printing. Those sections were, in order, Fiction and the New Journalism and Real Fiction, as against the New Fiction.

In the late 1970’s New Journalism and New Fiction were hot literary topics. Like all hot literary topics they faded soon afterward, rendering Hills’ own commentary effectively meaningless except for historical value. In reading those sections again I think the current narrative non-fiction movement owes a debt to New Journalism, while flash fiction and other current experimental forms owe a debt to New Fiction. But it also seems, at least to me, that these movements are part of a never-ending effort to make fiction be somehow more than fiction. Whether the hot literary topic is meta-fiction or anti-fiction or hyper-fiction, the aim is always to make plain-old fiction do more, when plain-old fiction does what it does better than any trendy variant ever will.

As Hills wrote in the section on New Journalism:

Imagination is anyway implicit in the very definition of “fiction,” as distinguished from its opposite in the absurd term “nonfiction.” And fiction and nonfiction are, again anyway, both perfectly good things in themselves — there doesn’t seem to be any point in mixing them. The resultant hybrids aren’t a new strain of literary art at all. They’re just intermittently useful, futureless one-timers, as unaesthetic and recalcitrant as mules.

In removing those two sections and replacing them Hills demonstrates the merit of his own words and the futility of embracing fad as craft. If you really feel the need to write from the crest of every literary wave I support you in that pursuit. Not only is it not for me, however, I don’t think it’s a particularly good way to become one with the ocean.

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Tim Schafer, Kickstarter and You

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Before you get excited, two things to keep in mind. First, Tim Schafer is an interactive entertainment legend. He is his own brand and his own reputation for quality in a way that few people ever are. If you’ve never heard of him that only means you have a giant, gaping hole in your database of important cultural knowledge. (And you’ve missed out on a lot of fun.)

Here’s Kickstarter on Kickstarter:

Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.

You know you’re reading marketing hype when you read the word amazing (or excited). You know a web site is super-serious about its marketing hype when it uses all the colors of the rainbow to format its text. (Click here, then on the link at the top to “learn more”.)

Tim Schafer likes making very smart and very comic adventure games. The greater gaming industry likes making routinely dumb and routinely disappointing crap. Because of this mismatch in interests, Schafer and others like him have had a very hard time getting funding for projects they want to pursue. At least until a few days ago, when Schafer put a proposal up on Kickstarter seeking to raise $400,000 over the course of a month.

He achieved his goal in eight hours. He raised One Million Dollars in a day. Currently the total is $1.37 million and rising.

Now remember: this guy is a legend. And whatever Kickstarter is all about, nothing helps sell a project like celebrity, which Schafter has in spades even if you’ve never heard of him. And while plenty of people have used Kickstarter to get their own projects off the ground, it’s not at all clear that all of the potential legalities — including frivolous or hostile lawsuits — have been beaten out of this or any other crowdfunding system. This is cutting edge stuff, which means it’s both cool and risky. (And I’m willing to bet Tim Schafer has a lawyer making sure he’s protected six ways.)

Still, it’s pretty impressive, and all the more so because it directly connects a creator with the audience that person would clearly like to reach. If Tim Schafer can get advance sales of a game sufficient to enable completion of that game, then he’s in business for the rest of his life. No more funding hassles, no more percentages off the top, no more publisher beating him to snot and running off with his IP, no more time spent raising money like a bottom-feeding politician trading a tattered soul for one more term. Just a straight-up trade: we give you some cash and you make us laugh.

Since most of you reading this post are writers, I know you’ve already gotten bored with Schafer and are wondering if you can fund you own, smaller projects in the same way. This list of smaller projects would suggest the answer is yes. But remember: if it blows up in your face for some reason it’s not my fault. Do your homework, protect your copyrights at all cost, and don’t promise something you can’t deliver. Your credibility is more important than whatever you think is more important than your credibility.

Update:

Very good comments here on a related thread. Covers many of the concerns I have while underscoring how this model allows creative people to avoid the gatekeeping inherent in third-party funding. My biggest concern is simply that a weasel could raise money then pocket some or all of the cash by saying the project failed for any number of reasons. Kickstarter disavows any responsibility to vet projects, and leaves the risk squarely with investors — which again underscores how important your personal credibility is in this weasel-infested marketplace we call the world wide web.

— Mark Barrett

WIG&TSSIP: The New Criticism

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The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

The full title of this chapter is The Short Story and the New Criticism. In this section Hills provides a historical basis for many of the artistic freedoms authors enjoy today, as well as an explanation of why the short story as a literary form is uniquely positioned to take maximum advantage of those freedoms.

By separating questions of intent and effect from the question of merit, the New Criticism introduced:

….an aesthetic that considered a work of literary art as more or less an independent object, and denied the relevance of its effectiveness as either an expression of the author or as a communication to the reader.

The core argument in support of this perspective is compelling. If a work of art can only be understood by considering its historical context, or the mindset and intent of the author, or the effect on people who experience the work, then what is the value of the work itself? In a literary context this question is a bit difficult to grapple with because artists and critics use the same medium: language. It is easier to see the point in the visual arts, and particularly in abstract works. If a free-form sculpture means nothing without context, how can any work of art actually be a work of art? If an abstract painting requires historical relevance or biographical importance in order to be understood as a painting, then who is the author of that work — the artist that creates it or the critic who provides that context?

To insist that art is context may seem almost absurd today, but that was the dominant critical view at one time across a variety of schools, and it still remains a popular way of responding to art. By treating art as object the New Criticism put the question of merit squarely on the work itself, denying even the role of the artist. At first blush this might sound equally absurd, but note: it’s not credit being denied but the relevance of context. New Criticism simply asserts that each work stands on its own apart from who the author is, and I don’t think that’s a particularly radical notion even among the general public. Whatever criteria you use to judge any artist, you probably perceive qualitative differences in their individual works regardless of your feelings for that artist, even if you make no claim to critical objectivity. In focusing on art as object New Criticism takes this idea to its logical conclusion by denying the influence of everything from commercial and popular success to an author’s persona or biography. What’s good is good because of qualities inherent in the work.  [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: Theme

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The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

As regular readers know, I don’t have a lot of patience for the subject of theme. To see theme drawn, quartered, burned at the stake, tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail, click here. To see previous posts on the subject of theme, click here.

Fortunately, Rust Hills isn’t party to the kind of high-flying rhetoric about theme that so deservedly demands the subject be shot down. Rather, as suggested by a quote in the previous post on Style, Hills primarily sees theme through a critical lens, as another way of understanding an author’s work over time:

This coherence in the world he creates is constituted of two concepts he holds, which may be in conflict: one is his world view, his sense of the way the world is; and the other is his sense of morality, his sense of the way the world ought to be.

Hills spends the bulk of the section on theme talking about where different writers plot on this matrix, but nowhere does he suggest that the authors he cites made a specific choice to approach their fiction in that way. More important than the theme of any particular story is how those authors integrated their world view into the craft of their fiction.

As to the utility of theme as a technique, Hills is thankfully explicit:

“Theme” and “word view” as an aspect of fiction seem to come very much after the fact. A beginning short story writer will have very little sense of any overall coherence in his efforts so far, and it’s better that he doesn’t.

If you feel you have something important to say about the world, fiction can be a great medium of expression. But front-loading theme into a badly crafted work is an eternal recipe for failure. The best way to integrate theme or anything else into your storytelling is to concentrate on craft. I know it’s fun to strike an authorial pose, I know it’s fun to agonize about the state of the world or literature or the contents of your refrigerator over leisurely cups of coffee at the local cafe, but it’s not enough. At some point the rubber has to meet the road.

If the only rubber you have is theme, you’re going to write a lot of flat tires. If you haven’t read Thomas McCormack’s piece yet, do so now.

Next up: The Short Story and the New Criticism.

— Mark Barrett

WIG&TSSIP: Style

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The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

Style can be thought of in two ways: as an aspect of fiction and as a technique. When I talk about style as an aspect of fiction I tend to use the word voice — which Hills recognizes as synonymous in that context:

To some extent, obviously, theme and tone and style — as well as “voice” and “vision” and “world view” and so on — all overlap one another so much in meaning that they can be thought of as all meaning pretty much the same thing.

Voice (style) to me is inherent. To speak of Hemingway’s voice or Fitzgerald’s is to speak of the way they wrote apart from what they wrote; their distinctive use of language and phrasing. Voice in that sense passively reveals something of the author, in the same way that a person’s accent or speaking cadence may affect how you perceive them no matter what they are talking about.

I don’t think authors should try to manage or shape their voice. I think it should evolve organically as a writer learns to tell stories. There is always some mimicry in any author’s early writing — an inevitable influence either by passive preference or intentional emulation — but over time such affectations tend to fade. Writers establish a voice not in the way retailers establish a brand, but in the way friends establish trust. Voice (style) is organic in that sense, and I think it should be.  [ Read more ]