You need experiences to write compellingly. Yet having experiences naturally quells the palate. Seen this, done that. How can anything measure up?
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A Norman Mailer essay, “Birds and Lions,” in The New Yorker back in 2002 spoke to me. He wrote of the need for writers to have experiences before they are able to […]
You need experiences to write compellingly. Yet having experiences naturally quells the palate. Seen this, done that. How can anything measure up?
……………….
A Norman Mailer essay, “Birds and Lions,” in The New Yorker back in 2002 spoke to me. He wrote of the need for writers to have experiences before they are able to write stuff worth a reader’s time. So much fiction, he wrote (I paraphrase heavily), is dull because writers young and old can’t capture and enhance the lives of bricklayers, bus drivers, bureaucrats, bullfighters, barmaids, beauticians, baseball players, ballet dancers, barbers, or babysitters because, well, they are professional writers, often with MFAs, whose excitement was mostly limited to the halls of academia and summer workshops. Plus,writing is by its nature, a solitary experience.
I think about that essay all the time. His words encourage me, a middle-aged guy with a successful career in engineering and consulting emboldened to write fiction. You accumulate experiences by living. You take risks. You deal. I had experiences worth the reading public’s time. I have lived.
Like most things in life, these accumulated experiences are a double-edged sword.
After you’ve traveled around the world, worked for 35 years, raised a family, seen hundreds of movies and televisions show episodes, read a thousand or two books and hundreds of short stories, bought hundreds of CDs and been exposed to thousands of songs and compositions, eaten in hundreds of restaurants whipping up every kind of ethnic cuisine, dealt with thousands of people in hundreds of different normal and abnormal situations, played a few musical instruments, owned six different houses (not at one time, no John McCain here), and driven nine different cars, been there, done that, what, really, is new?
What comic situation could you write about that hasn’t been beaten to death by Seth Rogen, the SNL players, and the rest of Hollywood? What scenes in a contemporary novel could impress when, lurking in the subconscious and screaming from the forefront, are a dozen images that are similar playing the mind’s movie reels?
This isn’t just a challenge in writing. It’s a challenge in reading and viewing, too. It’s a challenge in simply having a conversation. My kids plead with me not to list the bands that came before, and sound much like, the one they just suggested I might appreciate. I visibly shut down with people because I’ve had the conversation before, with them, not once, but several times.
If you are the type that likes a certain format (i.e., a genre type person), maybe this isn’t so troublesome. If you are the type, like I fashion myself, who constantly seeks to discover the new, it’s frustrating as all hell.
Your warehouse of accumulated experiences is inventory for the next writing project, but it’s also where the new enters and, usually, exits immediately, humbled and hung. When will I read a novel written in second person that can stand up to Bright Lights, Big City? Do I die before I read a western that bests Lonesome Dove? Who would tackle a novel about race relations in the deep south when To Kill a Mockingbird (book and movie) exists? I can’t write a 900 page novel, not about baseball, but about a baseball, the one hit by Bobby Thompson in the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951, because Don DeLillo already did. I wouldn’t even attempt a novella about a baseball now.
Of course, writers make the old new again all the time. I don’t think I can be that kind of writer.
How to discover the new? I read differently now. I start lots of novels (lots of non-fiction too) and don’t finish. I make endless lists of new music and books. I listen to a community radio station that prides itself on keeping its distance from the tried and true (they aren’t as successful as they’d like to believe, but still better than commercial radio). I’m not sure I write differently, but I try to think about all the other people out there who have vast experiences just like me.
Mailer’s words have proven to be doubled edged. It’s not just about your experiences. It’s about exposing your experiences to the accumulated light of everyone else’s out there, then determining whether you’ve truly illuminated something that could blind someone, or not.
In a post the other day, a writer new to getting published asked what “pitching” was. I joked in my response that pitching is when the person across the table from you holds all the good cards. But that’s not really true. You hold the best hand there is if your belief in what you […]
In a post the other day, a writer new to getting published asked what “pitching” was. I joked in my response that pitching is when the person across the table from you holds all the good cards. But that’s not really true. You hold the best hand there is if your belief in what you are pitching never wavers. So what if the other person walks away from the table? This is especially so today, with so many options for getting your work out there and promoting it. The challenge, as I have discovered across different businesses, is that only a very few, very lucky folks experience the phenomenon, “if you build it, they will come.” Building it only seems like the marathon. Compared to getting them to come, it’s more likely to feel like the sprint.
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I’m always struck by similarities among endeavors, like how getting your novel published is so much like raising venture capital (VC) as a tech start up. I spent several years working with clients to raise VC, and I’ve spent many years writing fiction (although only now beginning to pitch a novel).
In fact, I found the similarities so striking that, with partners, I launched a publishing company four years ago originally based on the VC model. It was a classic good news-bad news outcome – the good news was that the business model worked. We published and cultivated an author who then landed a big deal agent (one of the biggest of all, in fact) who then “sold” said author to a big deal publishing house, an imprint of a very large publishing enterprise. The bad news was that we grossly over-estimated the number of zeroes after the digit that we could get for doing this. No worries, the company continues as an indie publisher specializing in regional authors.
First, tech startups pitch for money. They pitch at confabs identical to confabs where literary agents show up to hear pitches from novelists. You have to get your company’s or your novel’s reason for existing and taking up the precious time of the agent or investor down to a few minutes or less.
Second similarity is that VC investors and publishers rely on the big kill rule. You invest in ten start-ups in the hopes that one makes it really big and covers the losses of the others. Most publishing houses, especially of literary fiction, rely on only a few titles to cover the significant losses of the others. To an extent, all businesses operate this way. 80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the activity, or some variant thereof.
More importantly, in the very tech world, at least the world I was involved in, most, if not all, investors never really fundamentally understand, at the molecular level, how the technology works. They just understand the business model. In the literary world, reader and buyer tastes are so subjective and fickle, and the background culture is changing all the time, too, that agents/publishers don’t really know what will sell next. Agents/publishers and investors aren’t all-knowing taste-makers.
But they do know two things. They know what worked well in the past. And while every investor and agent/publisher knows the old adage, past performance is no guarantee of future results, they still mostly on past performance to gauge what’s next. Let’s face it. That’s why so much entertainment is cookie-cutter. That’s why so many tech start-ups fail.
They both also know what I used to call in my VC raising days their “comfort window.” The first time my brother tried to raise money thirty years ago, he was told his degree would “sell” (his was from an Ivy league school and a top graduate engineering school) but his partner’s would not (his was from a state university in the deep south). The comfort window is determined by trusted advisors, credentials from ranked sources (formally or informally), degrees, professional network, etc. Everyone in the literary world senses the magic conferred by the four letters I-o-w-a. Everyone in the tech world senses the wizardry conferred by the three letters M-I-T.
When you fundamentally don’t have the capacity to understand chemistry or physics or engineering, or when you fundamentally can’t objectively evaluate how well a novel will sell (regardless of how beautifully written), you rely on your comfort window. Hell, we all do this all the time. We rely on the opinions, sometimes informed, often not, of family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues to make buying decisions. But the more subjective the sales situation, or the less the buyer understands about what he/she is buying, the more critical the comfort window becomes.
Business is about managing risk, regardless of the business. People who stake their money to a business strive to make it less like gambling and more deterministic, more science than art, more deliberate than random.
The most universal element of all successful business, though, is unwavering faith in what you have discovered, then adapting to the realities of the marketplace as you develop and scale the technology. Likewise, the one thing that can’t be subjective about your novel is your faith in what you have created. I’ve witnessed entrepreneurs with faith in their ideas miss multiple waves of opportunity. In the world of my professional work, those waves might only come every five years. Most wanna-be novelists have heard the stories of successful authors being rejected hundreds of times before getting their shot. It isn’t just about the numbers; it’s about believing in what you’ve created.
In a post the other day, a writer new to getting published asked what “pitching” was. I joked in my response that pitching is when the person across the table from you holds all the good cards. But that’s not really true. You hold the best hand there is if your belief in what you are pitching never wavers. So what if the other person walks away from the table? This is especially so today, what with so many options for getting your work out there and promoting it. The challenge, as I have discovered across different businesses, is that only a very few, very lucky folks experience the phenomenon, “if you build it, they will come.” Building it only seems like the marathon. Compared to getting them to come, it’s more likely to be the sprint.
The seminal challenge today for a writer, especially of literary, contemporary, or experimental fiction, is to engage with readers without plunging through pools of writers. Here’s one idea: Wherever you live, there’s bound to be dozens if not hundreds of reading groups. Ask one or more of them if they would consent to read a […]
The seminal challenge today for a writer, especially of literary, contemporary, or experimental fiction, is to engage with readers without plunging through pools of writers. Here’s one idea: Wherever you live, there’s bound to be dozens if not hundreds of reading groups. Ask one or more of them if they would consent to read a draft of your novel or a few of your short stories and discuss it/them. (Bring pastries and booze when the big day comes!).
I am a consultant to the electricity industry in my day job. Usually when I mention that to people at a party, they slither away towards the bar. Except every five years or so, when the energy industry gets hot in the stock market. Then I hold court with people seeking free investment advice.
Whether I am helping them communicate about their technology to customers or venture capitalists, often, clients ask me, well, what should we say? How should we respond? My answer always is, “honesty seems to work best in my experience.”
I’ve been writing fiction for about fifteen years. Mostly short stories, Now I’ve completed a novel. I am in a slow (painfully so often) transition out of consulting to something else. What, I am not sure. But I know that writing, and writing fiction, will be part of it. Writing has been part and parcel of my life since sixth grade when I started a family newspaper (it lasted two editions).
Honestly, what does a fiction writer want? To connect with readers, I think. If you write mysteries, thrillers, crime, romance, science fiction, etc., it’s a little easier. Genre writing is pretty organized and a very open field today given the disruptions to the traditional publishing business model. But if you write literary fiction, which is what I think I am writing, it’s not so easy. Literary fiction is still very controlled by the traditional publishing apparatus. If you don’t have a academic platform or an MFA (Masters in Fine Arts), it’s really difficult to reach readers of literary fiction.
Writers are passionate readers for the most part. Most writers hope to find readers through other writers. We all participate in writers groups, on-line and face-to face. Let’s face it though. We are mostly reaching people like ourselves, people who have a story to tell…and sell. Isn’t the real goal to connect with readers?
Only a pure reader can give a writer pure feedback, free of a subconscious “I would have done it this way,” or “They say never to do this in workshop,” or “She’ll never get an agent with this as a first chapter.” Readers are looking for great reads, great ideas, great story concepts, engaging characters, momentum in the plot. This is doubly true because writing is so subjective. They don’t care how a book got to them. They crave a great read.
Trying to connect with readers through other writers is like trying to sink to the bottom of a salt-laden sea. Mostly, you float on top of what other writers think and say.
As you write a novel or a short story, shouldn’t you inform your thoughts on revision based on what other readers think? I’m not talking about line edits, I’m talking about more general impressions.
Genre writers have expertly applied social media to interact with their readers. But let’s not kid ourselves. This is as much soliciting feedback and engagement as marketing, building loyalty among the customer base or fans, as it might be informing the writing or revision process. It’s hard enough to get feedback from five people (in a critique group, say) to converge on useful revisions that don’t destroy the story. Imagine soliciting from dozens or hundreds on-line?
We all know (or should know) that the vast majority of literary journals out there are read (or place on their shelves) by other writers and exist because academics survive under the publish or perish paradigm. I don’t care how much noise their staff makes about “seeking new literary talent, fresh voices, etc,” what they really want is for wanna-bees to buy or subscribe to their publication. I mean, I can’t tell you how many of these lit journals I’ve purchased or read over the years because, in submitting, I am admonished to read the journal to understand what they publish. I read them, and have no earthly clue what they expect in their submissions. These are the journals which have the gall (well, fewer do this today) to demand that you submit to them exclusively while they take their sweet time, often months, to respond. Most operate under the slave labor of graduate students, too.
When it comes to literary novels, the buying public, the customer, is largely conditioned by the opinions of leading opinion-makers, namely the New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and a few other leading outlets. With few exceptions, these channels are part of the traditional publishing model. The five big publishing houses remaining (with their myriad acquired presses), much like the characterization of Goldman Sachs as the “vampire squid,” courtesy of Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, are for the most part impenetrable without a New York agent. As just one example, many of the short stories published in The New Yorker (Yes, The New Yorker) appear timed to help the author promote a collection or a new novel. I doubt anyone at the publication is going to admit that this is deliberate, but my informal analysis, and the suspicions I have heard from many others, suggests it’s a credible conclusion.
If you write literary fiction, then, you have a few poor choices – try to penetrate the traditional publishing apparatus, try to break into the recognized literary journals set up for a publish or perish paradigm, or publish in the proliferating print and on-line journals essentially established to gratify writers with more writers as readers – at best.
So, I maintain that the seminal challenge today for a writer, especially of literary, contemporary, or experimental fiction, is to engage with readers without plunging through pools of writers. Here’s one idea: Wherever you live, there’s bound to be dozens if not hundreds of reading groups. Ask one or more of them if they would consent to read a draft of your novel and discuss it. (Bring pastries and booze, chocolate and red wine, when the big day comes!). Or work with branches of your local library to arrange a discussion of your draft or stories.
Yes, we need all the help we can get with editing and revising. I maintain (two decades of experience as the lead writer, chief editor, reporter, and technical and business specialist for an industry trade publication taught me this) that writers cannot edit their own stuff.
But what we crave is the feedback from the reading experience. That, more than anything, will keep us from becoming “workshop boy or girl.”
Your thoughts on how to connect with real readers are welcome.
Reading stories by emerging writers, unknown writers, struggling writers, and widely regarded authors is a delight. Most recently, I was gratified to judge the St. Louis Writers Guild Short Story Contest. A few days ago, I listened to the six winners (three honorable mentions) read their work. I was surprised to learn that one […]
Reading stories by emerging writers, unknown writers, struggling writers, and widely regarded authors is a delight. Most recently, I was gratified to judge the St. Louis Writers Guild Short Story Contest. A few days ago, I listened to the six winners (three honorable mentions) read their work. I was surprised to learn that one of the winners was a young man barely out of high school or into college, one was a lady who had never entered a contest before, and one was a lady who read her work beautifully.
Gems in a stack of manuscripts are rare. Let’s face it. Entries inducing the onset of headache are frequent. But writers coaxing their work into a new dimension through reading are the rarest of all. All writers are told how important reading aloud is. Writers are rarely taught how to read aloud well. In writing conferences I have attended, writers are encouraged to read, and “readings” are always an integral part of the program. In workshops, writers whose works are about to be discussed often are asked to read a passage first. But I have yet to attend, or hear of, a writing conference or workshop where reading is taught or work-shopped as a parallel craft.
Big name authors who come to town, or sign up as workshop faculty, usually read well. I don’t know if it’s because they read the same passage and get better at it by repetition, or their agents or publishers make them practice.
But I digress. For several years, I volunteered to review story collections for an on-line publication called The Short Review. The collections came from the English speaking countries around the world. Most of the time, only one or two stories were memorable in any way. But glimpsing what writers are trying to get from the inside to the outside is always fascinating to me. Even more, comparing what is being done on the “emerging,” “struggling,” and local/regional stages to what gets published and widely circulated through the usual national and international outlets (The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, the better known literary journals, and most recently the story apps delivering stories to your computer or device) is instructive.
What shocks me is the ratio of what is memorable or worth reading again or saving for another time to read again is about the same – sadly, very, very low. I guess the moral is a perfectly publishable story from a pro, or bubbling through the literary cognescenti, may be no more worth reading than an imperfect one ripped from the pen of an “amateur.” Past acceptances are no guarantee of future enjoyment. Perfecting a story for publication may take all the fun out of it.
Note: This excerpt is the first five pages of the first chapter, which is a split scene with the last chapter. Together, they constitute the “end” of the story/novel. I would value knowing your initial impressions, and send me a note if you would like to read an uncorrected proof reader copy.
The Moment […]
Note: This excerpt is the first five pages of the first chapter, which is a split scene with the last chapter. Together, they constitute the “end” of the story/novel. I would value knowing your initial impressions, and send me a note if you would like to read an uncorrected proof reader copy.
The Moment Before
by Jason Makansi
PART I
The end
(November 2012)
The first thing he notices is the frigid, sanitized air chilling his skin. He pinches the bridge of his nose, fighting a sneeze. He’s always been allergic to these cheap motels, never properly cleaned, dust accumulated over the decades in old air conditioners with suspect thermostats that rattle and whir like a turbo prop at close range. He pulls the blankets up. The dream he wanted to remember fades with the blur he rubs from his eyes. It’s time, but he hesitates, burrows his head in the pillows.
Three minutes of mind time, twenty minutes of clock time later, his first clear thought crystallizes: Banal discussions of people in the aggregate eventually boil down to one person whose life is forever fucked by decisions made by others. He commits this to memory.
For Stuart, the judgment begins now. What comes after, he doesn’t know. Today he faces Elias, one person who embodies the vengeance of a nation, a man for whom words have not been invented to convey his suffering, whose life, history has not yet judged.
He throws the blankets forward, then, out of habit, immediately tries to fold the top layer to neatly match the bottom.
In two steps, he draws the blinds, shields his eyes with his arm. Today, the man, the abstraction, becomes real. Resolve descends upon him like faith surely does moments before death. He is ready to see the man’s face. Elias Haddad.
Later, as the bus ambles towards the prison Stuart feels his throat constrict, chaotic flutters in his gut, decades of professional confidence in his duties leaking into a pool of doubt. He feels the burden of his own people, the centuries of persecution, the weight of his family’s past in Europe. It straightens his back as he steps down into a blustery Midwest autumn breeze whipping around the bulky front of the bus. Behind him is his crowning bureaucratic achievement, the Saluki Federal Repatriation, Rehabilitation, and Detention Facility.
“Banal discussions of people in the aggregate…someone forever fucked by others…” He shows his government identification and security clearance to the burly guard armed with a pistol at his side and an automatic rifle slung across his chest. The man wears a bullet-proof vest, a helmet, and a visor over his face. Where the man’s gear ends and his body begins is hard to tell.
For ten years, Stuart has been an enlisted bureaucrat in the domestic army responsible for the safety and protection of three hundred and fifteen million Americans. Enthusiastically, he’d transferred out of the Department of Energy into the newly created Department of Homeland Security. His family and friends, even his wife, were not happy with his move. Stuart had shrugged it off. He wanted to make a difference. He wanted to keep the American people safe.
Now, the question, Are we safer now than we were ten years ago?, torments him, occupies a growing volume in Stuart’s mind, as if he’s cowering in the corner of a room filling with poison gas. This is the central question, the existential question, of his department, his livelihood. Until Elias, he would have confidently answered yes. There have been no major attacks on the homeland.
We are safer. But at what cost?
The accounting hasn’t begun.
Perhaps it begins today.
The misery inflicted on this man hasn’t found its way into the national ledger. Forty years it took for the country to apologize for the internment of Japanese citizens after Pearl Harbor! A century and a half later, an apology came for the systematic destruction of Native American lands. When will atonement for Elias Haddad begin?
Sometimes, the cost measured in human lives, the full accounting, never takes place.
One by one, the prisoners exit, hobbled by leg irons, navigating the steps. Each takes a careful glance towards his new home, away from the crater of suffering, injustice, and denial of constitutional and international human rights. Each one of them is a line on the ledger. They are the externalities of a safer homeland. Stuart once loved this word: externality – the cost or a consequence of a product or a service that is not factored into its price. It seemed to explain so much in his old world of energy. He had loved it when it had to do with pollution, with safety. Carbon dioxide emissions are an externality of energy production.
Human externalities had only recently occurred to him.
“Banal discussions in the aggregate…”
He watches as the men blink in random patterns against the brightening Midwestern sunshine, getting their first look at their new surroundings, men of all ages, dark complexions, heavy beards, days, weeks, or months unshaven. One looks hostile, another perplexed. Stuart excavates their expressions, the subtle lines and angles of their faces, the palate of skin tones, etched and eroded like sandstone on canyon walls, searching for signs of their suffering, for the history behind their arrival here today. Stuart contemplates the cultural biases that make him and his fellow Americans see all these swarthy men as sinister. Would a line-up of British or Scandinavian prisoners invoke the same impression? He shakes his head and bites his tongue, wishing he were not so susceptible to the same prejudices that for centuries confined his own people as second-class citizens in Europe.
A second, equally large security guard follows the last two prisoners off the bus. One of the two is noticeably older, much older. He’s smiling. Somehow his smile is contagious. Stuart can’t help but crack a sliver of a smile back. He sees this man’s smile as an infinite number of points along a curved line oscillating with joy and relief, a thousand points of light beaming upon his new world.
Stuart squints up into the mid-morning sun and waits for his eyes to adjust. He smells the faint hydrocarbon vapors emanating from the freshly poured asphalt. Squiggles of heat rise mirage-like into the cooler air above. He starts to sweat. It’s too warm for the camel-colored overcoat he’s brought with him from D.C. He feels silly wearing it. Is he sweating from the heat or from what others might think of him for dressing inappropriately? He sheds the coat, placing it over the crook of his elbow. Immediately, he is more refreshed, but the crook of his elbow sweats profusely.
Stuart stretches one arm over his head, then the other after transferring his coat, twisting his body to relieve the kinks in his spine from the long, uncomfortable ride. He often forgets that he’s not a young man anymore. Chronic aches and pains are permanent features of his physical landscape. The smiling prisoner is shackled at the ankles, handcuffed, hands bound to his waist by a thick metal belt. Still, he smiles.
The accounting begins now.
The guards in the security detail carry enough weapons to suppress a small insurrection. They unnerve Stuart, though as a Homeland Security operative, he’s loath to admit it. Security personnel in potential target cities are one thing, but here, in the agrarian calm of the Midwest, they feel intrusive, like he’s watching a grainy video from a Cold War satellite nation.
The armed men begin to herd the prisoners toward a wide door into their new home, built on land taken through eminent domain. Sunlight beams off the structure to who knows where. Stuart wishes he could concentrate the rays through a magnifying glass and vaporize his guilt about John Veranda’s property. He’d have to sort that one out later. Heap that onto what he feels about Elias, his “career,” and he might just break down right here, right now.
Sort it out later? Who was he kidding? After this, he’d have to confront Veranda. An evening in Saluki wasn’t in his travel plans but if not now, when? The inevitable cannot be postponed.
Stuart walks by the men once more. Awkward doesn’t come close to describing how he feels, but he forces himself to embrace it. There’s relief here, too. A tension that’s been building for months finally ready to dissipate, a fever on the verge of breaking.
Stuart wants to say something, but he doesn’t know how. What do you say to people who have been abducted from distant parts of the globe, swept away from their homes and families, detained for years against their will, with no explanation or justification, held captive for reasons no longer understood? What do you say when indefinite detention turns into hundreds of wasted lifetimes, into men grown old in prisons for reasons that have faded with years not even sufficient to qualify as history?
Last week, I read most of (skimmed parts) Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey McDonald. Books can be far more memorable for how they make you think than for their subject matter. Morris made me obsess with the idea of how we construct our personal narratives, and how they are constructed […]
Last week, I read most of (skimmed parts) Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey McDonald. Books can be far more memorable for how they make you think than for their subject matter. Morris made me obsess with the idea of how we construct our personal narratives, and how they are constructed for us.
Errol Morris is a documentary film-maker. I watched Morris’s The Thin Blue Line sometime in the 1980s. It is accompanied by a Phillip Glass score. It was my introduction to documentaries. I may have watched a few before that, perhaps in a high school class or mindlessly on the television at home. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was also my introduction to how narratives are constructed, or perhaps more frequently or accurately, how they emerge and take on a life of their own, for better or worse.
The documentary essentially is about a guy wrongly convicted of a murder in Texas and the guy who did it. Incidentally, Morris is credited with winning the wrongly convicted guy his freedom and his life. Ironically, he was sued by that very same guy years later.
There are two scenes I remember. The first is when the guy who wasn’t convicted of the murder essentially confesses. The second is when one of the guys (or maybe both) are sitting in a cheap motel watching The Swinging Cheerleaders, a soft-core porn movie. Well, as the definitions were then. I remember watching that movie at a drive-in with a car full of buddies in 1972 or thereabouts. I thought cheap movies to drive adolescent fantasies disappeared as fast as they were released. I won’t lie. Seeing that snippet of that movie in a documentary about person wrongly convicted of murder overwhelmed me with feeling I’m not sure I could describe even to this day. For whatever reason, that tiny common data point in my own personal adolescent narrative haunts me all over again when I see the movie.
The Thin Blue Line reconstructs the narrative of how that guy was convicted and how the other guy got away. It is hard to separate the chill from how terribly wrong the reality of our social institutions can be from the mind-numbing impact of Glass’ minimalist score of repetitive tonal fragments.
A Wilderness of Error does the same thing, reconstructs the narrative of this guy who has been sitting in prison for several decades for the murder of his family. The details are beyond sickening, the errors in evidence, judgment, etc. I’ll just offer the most peculiar. The guy who was convicted, the father, was also stabbed 27 times with an ice pick during the altercation. The trial apparently demonstrated, convincingly, that he did this to cover up his crime.
The processional through life causes all of us to construct, refine, tweak, embellish, interpret and (many other verbs you could insert here) articulate our own personal narratives. Others, those close to us, those we work with, attend service with, neighbors, have their own narratives about us. Imagine reading one paragraph of a description about yourself from family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.
In certain situations, usually under duress, narratives change and emerge. When something unacceptable is revealed, when gossip is passed around, when something is said that is out of character with our narrative, a new narrative can emerge. Often, it is out of your control. When the crap hits the fan – in the worst case in the examples above, but consider suddenly losing a job and not being able to pay the bills, or if a family member is accused of a crime – the narrative begins to be reconstructed by institutions. Churches, banks, companies, clubs, and on and on.
Every documentary, movie, every article, every research paper, thesis, book, biography, autobiography, account of history, is a narrative, a connecting of dots, whether fact or fiction, proof or speculation, and every combination imaginable of all of these. In research and analysis, we might plot points on a graph and try to “capture” a broader story by drawing a line to represent what we observed. That line becomes an equation that explains a theory which emerged from the data points. We do this every minute of every day without thinking. Often for our livelihoods, we capture the narrative, freeze it in time, and “publish” it.
We construct our narratives in real time too, of course. My 25-year old daughter, a history major in college and a strong writer, has spent the past year, collaborating with her sister and mom in writing and publishing a dystopian genre novel. She also blogs about writing. She has followers from around the world. The novel is selling better than probably 95% of all self-published works. She is using every tool being thrown out there as a result of the breakdown of the traditional publishing world to construct a professional narrative.
I worked for 35 years as a writer of technology, science, and business, and in the last fifteen years fiction. Initially I quietly resented how she essentially entered the world of fiction writing in a year. Then I realized she was doing what I had done when I graduated from college. I got my degree in engineering, but with an eye toward writing about engineering. I remembered telling my advisor/professor I was an excellent writer. He probably had never heard this from the mouth of an engineering student. He asked me to help him with an article he was preparing for Scientific American. In my first engineering jobs, I told everyone I was an engineer who knew how to write. And loved to write to boot. Soon, everyone brought their proposals, their papers, their reports, their memos for me to review. I had no real idea how well I could write. I just convinced everyone I could writer better than they could (not that difficult with engineers, I accept). My professional narrative became reality. A virtuous feedback loop ensued. The more people brought me their work, the more skilled I became. Just like my daughter is doing.
In many ways, the very meaning of life is constructing and reconstructing narratives, comparing narratives, challenging narratives (e.g., peer reviewed research), originating narratives, that involve other persons and phenomena, and your self. It’s done with facts, assumptions, speculation, words, with numbers, consciously, unconsciously, loudly, quietly, with ambition, with confidence. But we all know we construct that narrative within an envelope bounded by ethics, morals, and the ability to perform as we say. When the narrative emerges from others, especially institutions, we have to be more cautious by several orders of magnitude.
You either define your own narrative, or have it defined for you. Within reason. Within boundaries.
Sometimes, especially when the shit hits the fan, you don’t have a choice. You are a victim.
Errol Morris’s work convinces me there are precious few facts in this world. Arriving at some version of the truth, however well accepted or not, to fill in the yawning gaps (and in some cases, canyons) between the “facts” or data, requires a great deal of influence, superiority, rank, institutional behavior, guessing, assumptions, ambition, speculation, preconceived notions, agreement among specialists, and ideology.
I have a favorite saying: Nothing is so satisfying as creating your own mythology, nor as dangerous as believing it. I often wonder if megalomaniacs think about this once their heads hit the pillow.
As for what the future might hold for narrative construction, imagine every thing you write, everything you’ve written, every video you appear in recorded by a surveillance camera, captured in a computer server somewhere, regardless of whether you’ve deleted it from public view. It is still captured digitally somewhere. Every feeling, every mood you decided to record for posterity, most of your movements. Imagine an Errol Morris, good intentions or malicious, in ten years gaining access to all of those records and constructing or reconstructing your narrative. Worse, and probably more appropriate, imagine an algorithm, a bot, putting the pieces together, and detecting patterns, and making conclusions from them.
A narrative can be a thing of splendor, or a thing of terror. Sometimes they are constructed and sometimes they emerge. Perhaps always they are a combination. When each piece of data, each piece of evidence is examined, under a microscope in Morris’s cases, it can be horrifying to understand how the story can change, and change the victims.
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- Error gathering analytics data from Google: Error 404 (Not Found)!!1 *{margin:0;padding:0}html,code{font:15px/22px arial,sans-serif}html{background:#fff;color:#222;padding:15px}body{margin:7% auto 0;max-width:390px;min-height:180px;padding:30px 0 15px}* > body{background:url(//www.google.com/images/errors/robot.png) 100% 5px no-repeat;padding-right:205px}p{margin:11px 0 22px;overflow:hidden}ins{color:#777;text-decoration:none}a img{border:0}@media screen and (max-width:772px){body{background:none;margin-top:0;max-width:none;padding-right:0}}#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/1x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) no-repeat;margin-left:-5px}@media only screen and (min-resolution:192dpi){#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) no-repeat 0% 0%/100% 100%;-moz-border-image:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) 0}}@media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:2){#logo{background:url(//www.google.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_150x54dp.png) no-repeat;-webkit-background-size:100% 100%}}#logo{display:inline-block;height:54px;width:150px} 404. That’s an error. The requested URL /analytics/v2.4/data?ids=ga:66373148&metrics=ga:pageviews&filters=ga%3ApagePath%3D%7E%2F2014%2F03%2F.%2A&start-date=2024-11-24&end-date=2024-12-24 was not found on this server. That’s all we know.
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