Fearless Writer ... General discussion

Epigrams

Flying by the seat of your pants should always be preferred to sitting on it.

Writing is the science of the soul.

Religion is for those who have nothing else.

Why I walk up the escalator

Those who catch trains to the city can be split into two groups, about 50-50 by my observation. One group walks up the escalator from the subway platforms, the other group rides the escalator, staring dead-eyed at the person in front of them. Sometimes someone from the latter group (who is either ill-informed or totally oblivious to the world around them) will ride the escalator on the right-hand-side, thereby blocking the passage of those who choose to use their legs. If someone wakes the rider up to his or her inconsiderate behaviour, they will try to shuffle aside and then offer a glare of incomprehension. It's easy to guess what that stare says:

"Why on earth would you want to walk up the escalator? What's so goddamned important?"

Now, as you've probably gathered, I'm a walker. I don't mind if people choose to ride, so long as they stand to the left, but I have a realy problem with that glare. So, to explain why I and all the others climb the escalator, I'm going to indulge in a little mathematics.

Let's assume that a walker arrives at the top of the escalators on average 30 seconds earlier than a rider. Most of us ride an escalator at least twice a day, so that's one minute. Your average person works five days a week, so now we have five minutes. This is then multiplied by 48, which is how many weeks we work a year. Calculating ... 240 minutes, or four hours. If a rider works for 40 years, he or she has spent 160 hours or more than six and a half days of their life on an escalator (which works out at much more when you consider we are usually only awake for about 16 hours in any one day).

So ... maybe if I was doing nothing with my life, maybe if I had no goals or aspirations, I would ride the escalator. But as it is – get out of the way and stick your moronic glare right up your back passage. Oh, and when you're on your deathbed, ask yourself if the escalator rides were worth it.

The Fearless Writer

The stress of billions

The exponential expansion of media coverage and communications led to the exciting buzzword (or rather buzz-term) that you don't hear much of now that the Internet has lost its novelty: the global community. This has been touted as an advancement for the human race generally, allowing people to know what's going on in a foreign country (often before the people in that county do) and letting two people on opposite sides of the earth to speak in real time, among other things.

But how much better off are we?

Don't be misled, this is not going to be a technophobic rant about the evils of this and that. I use the internet and email every single day and would be utterly lost without them.

However, there appears to be a dark side to instant information. As recently as 100 years ago, people were living in the dark (comparatively speaking, anyway). Only local news could be considered timely; national news was limited by what could be transmitted via telegraph and as for international news – well, how fast did ships travel?

Now, when there is a terrorist attack in a country we have never been to, or a natural disaster that affects a country we have never even heard of, we get it all – exhaustive reports, streams of images (constantly updated, if you have a news channel) and reporters adding a verbal commentary, most of it telling viewers how they should feel. In this way, the world's problems become the individual's problems. And the worst part is that this inherent interest in negative news is exploited for financial gain. Bad news sells, all the media companies know it, and the unstoppable rise of reality TV shows proves that when enough isn't enough, they'll manufacture their own human drama.

We really have become a global community – it's a small town community where everyone minds everybody else's business. The media encourages us to have an opinion about everything, even if secretly, deep down below our "educated" exterior, we really couldn't give a shit.

Business vs Creativity – Round 2

Further evidence of business's inherent anti-creative nature can be seen in modern film and music. While these two creative pursuits as industries have always been about making money, that aspect has slowly assumed the ascendency until we are left with the current situation of endless remakes (or in the case of music, 'covers'). These remakes are the manifestation of bean-counters' nervousness. Their fear is that their new product will not be popular and therefore fail to turn a profit. So what's the best way to avoid this (supposedly)? Take a successful movie or song from yesteryear, make it again with inferior talent, then market the Christ out of it.

The galling thing, the thing that makes me sometimes lose faith in humanity, is that more often than not this approach works. It seems to tap into a basic human dislike of the unfamiliar, pandering to timid filmgoers who are afraid to try something which hasn't already been tested, or which at least adheres to a formula. But considering that, I guess, it's the general public who is at fault. They are willing to blow their hard-earned on yesterday's left-overs, so why wouldn't the studios and music companies keep feeding them such cheap tripe?

Business vs Creativity

Listen to your average windbag businessman and he'll tell you how important creativity is in the workplace. What he really means by this is 'coming up with ideas', but creativity and coming up with ideas are only linked in the most tenuous fashion. The truth is that anything really creative is going to appeal to some people, but if the product is original and unadulterated, it is probably going to offend or displease others.

Business people – ie, those who see the pursuit of money as an art – are morbidly afraid of offending anyone who might have a dollar at their disposal. Unless you're talking a third-world nation, that's most of us. It's here that business and creativity split apart and cannot be sewn back together again. The true artist doesn't care who he or she offends, so long as the integrity of their vision remains in tact. On the other hand we have creativity as it is defined in the business world, best exemplified by television advertisments, where the creatives' original vision is modified, homogenised, dumbed-down and generally meddled with until the conceptual spark is all but snuffed out. The same goes for custom publishing (a field in which I have considerable experience), where a true writer's prose is 'edited' by people who have trouble stringing a coherent sentence together. The final result is a review (for example) with the same basic structure as the writer envisioned, only with all the style, substance and interesting turns of phrase removed. It is, in essence, a form of taxidermy, except in this case the subject is still alive while its vital organs are ripped out and replaced with cotton wool.

No, business and creativity live on two sides of a wide river. They might occasionally engage in trade, but there can never be a true synergy between them.

Fear of horror

I spent the first twenty-seven years of my life completely oblivious that some people thought an interest in horror was ... well, a little abnormal. Stephen King has been asked again and again, to the point of lunacy, why he would want to write about 'that stuff', and during a home screening of the movie Saw last night, someone asked, "Who comes up with this shit?"

I raised my hand, eliciting a look of perplexity (presumably that I should confess to such unnatural deeds).

All serious writers are asked eventually going to be asked where they get their ideas, and the writer of SF, fantasy or horror is going to be asked the most. It seems to me that those who ask the most often have the smallest imaginations, and therefore an active imagination is something strange, even something to fear. Particularly as reality TV and other intellect-sapping pastimes gain precedence, the use of the imagination -- essential to any reader of fiction -- begins to atrophy. What will be the final result of this? I'll leave that up to your imagination...

The Fearless Writer