The Mallet of Loving Correction Part 13

To which you may say, "Yes, but-" To which I say, you've gone one word too far in that sentence. There is no 'but' involved. Once again: The job of a writer is to write. Anything else a writer does is entirely on his or her free time and subject to his or her own whim.

Commensurate to this: 2. A writer's obligations are not to you. Here is the list of the people and things to which I am obliged, in roughly descending order: 1.My wife and child.

2.My work.

3.My friends and the rest of my family.

4.My editors and producers.

Now, you might notice that you are probably not in that list. You know why? Because you and I don't share a life bond/genetic consanguinity/mutually beneficial business relationship.

Now, as it happens, I also feel an obligation to my various "communities"-the spread-out groups of people who share common interests with me-and one community I think about quite a bit is the community of writers. However, two things here. First, my sense of obligation to the community of writers is both voluntary and rather significantly less compelling to me than the obligations I feel to those enumerated above, and also does not mean I feel obliged to any particular member of that community (i.e., you). Second, there are lots of other writers who may not feel a similar communal obligation.

You may or may not feel this is proper on their part or mine, but so what? It's not up to you. Which brings us to: 3. The person who determines what a writer should do for others is the writer, not you. Why? Well, quite obviously, because it's not your life, and you don't get a say. And if you're somehow under the impression that well, yeah, actually you do have a say in that writer's life, take the following quiz: Think of your favorite writer. Now, are you: 1.That writer?

2.That writer's spouse (or spousal equivalent)?

3.Rather below that, a member of that writer's immediate family?

4.Rather below that, the writer's editor or boss?

If the answer is "no" to the above, then guess what? You don't get a vote. And if you still a.s.sume you do, that writer is perfectly justified in being dreadfully rude to you. I certainly would be. I certainly have been, when someone has made such a.s.sertions or a.s.sumptions. And if necessary, I will be happy to be so again.

Beyond this, you don't know the circ.u.mstances of the writer's life, so you don't know what his capacity is for doing extra-curricular good deeds for random strangers, or his interest, or his ability. The writer may simply not have the time. He may not have the connections. He may not feel competent to evaluate your work. Or he may just not want to, because after everything else he does, he's tired and just wants to kill zombies on his computer.

Again, you may object to this, or feel your favorite writer should make a special exception for you and your work. But again: So what? It's not your life.

4. Writers are not d.i.c.ks for not helping you. Let's say you ask me to read your work and I tell you "no." What happens then?

a)You perish in a burning house.

b)You starve to death.

c)You die due to sepsis of the blood because both your kidneys have failed.

d)You are smothered by adorable kittens and fluffy bunnies.

e)Nothing.

The correct answer is "e". Because you know what, my refusal to read your work has not damaged you or your work in any way. This is not a life or death situation, and all the normal ways of intake into the world of professional writing-the various query and submission processes, the workshops and writers circles-remain as open to you as they ever were.

Let's review. When you ask me (or any writer) to read your work, you are asking for a favor. A favor is generally understood to be something that someone is not obliged to do and is indeed an imposition, to a greater or lesser degree, on the person being asked by the person asking. People are not d.i.c.ks for refusing to grant a favor, and someone who believes them so either doesn't understand the nature of a favor, or is a bit of a d.i.c.k themselves for thinking that favors must or even should be granted.

Along this line: 5. People asking for favors from writers often don't understand the consequences of that favor. You know, right after I announced that I was hired as the Creative Consultant for Stargate: Universe, people I didn't know came out of the woodwork asking me if I could hook them up with gigs or send along their scripts or if I could give them the e-mail of the producers so they could talk to them about this great idea they had. You know what would have happened if I had done any of that? If you say "oh, you'd probably have gotten fired," you'd be absolutely correct. It would have been frankly insane for me to jeopardize my gig that way. I ended up putting up a note telling people to stop asking, but I still to this day get people who think that it's somehow logical to ask a complete stranger who knows nothing about them (and who they know nothing about) to carry water for them.

When you ask a favor of a writer, you're asking her to take time from her own work and/or her own life. You are asking her to a.s.sume you're not crazy or won't turn spiteful or angry when she can't give you 100% of what you want. You are asking her to a.s.sume that 10 years from now you won't sue her because something she's written is somewhat tangentially related to something you asked her to read. You're asking her to a.s.sume that continually pestering her own contacts on behalf of people she doesn't know at all won't jeopardize her own relationships with those contacts. And so on.

6. People asking favors from writers are often crazy in some undiagnosed way. Yes, I know. You're not crazy, and you won't become an a.s.shole to the author, and you won't sue them even though that story is exactly like yours was, sorta. But there are two things here.

First, the people who ask a writer to do things for them underestimate the number of times authors get asked for these sorts of favors. People: you're not special when you ask us for our time/effort/connections. Personally, I started getting asked for hook-ups by strangers when I was still in college (I was freelancing for the Sun-Times then), so that's two decades of being solicited, and no, not even posting a "why I won't read your unpublished work" post here stops it, because lots of people believe, oh, that doesn't apply to them.

Second, ask a writer and they will tell you a horror story of trying to help out someone by critiquing their novel or some other nice thing they tried to do in their capacity as a writer, only to have that person go completely nuts on them, for whatever reason. The specifics will vary, because crazy is a multi-headed hydra of abject terror, but just about every writer I know has a story. Some, who still believed in the fundamental sanity of people after such an experience, have two. Almost none have three.

The point is, you may be a nice, sane, rational person who will be grateful for any help you get from a writer. The problem is, other people out there are flat-out bugs.h.i.t nutbags, and they are asking for the same things you are. It only takes one of them to ruin it for the rest of you, and the problem is that from the outside, you all look pretty much the same. Sorry.

7. Writers are not mystical door openers. At least not in a professional sense. If I read your novel and critiqued it, the critique will tell you how to make the novel more like something I want to read. But you know what? I'm not an acquiring editor at a publisher, and what I consider readable and what that editor were to consider saleable are likely not in parallel. Likewise, I could introduce you to my agent or editor, but I guarantee you that neither of them are going to suspend their judgment to rely on mine; they will happily reject your work if it doesn't suit their needs, even if I love it insensibly.

The most I or almost any other writer can get you, professionally speaking, is a small jump ahead in a line. But if your writing doesn't work, you're still going to get rejected. And if I spend all my time touting people who my agent and editor end up rejecting, in a very short period of time I'm going to become someone you definitely don't want on your side.

What it comes down to is that the belief that selling work really comes down to who you know is magical thinking, or at the very least it's wildly overrated in terms of what actually sells work. Yes, there are authors for whom their a.s.surance of a blurb on your cover might convince a publisher to buy your novel, sight (and quality) unseen. Currently, they are called "Stephenie Meyer" and "Dan Brown."

As for every other writer in the land, well, it's nice you imagine us with such mighty powers. But you really are better off simply submitting your work the regular way.

Finally, there's this: 8. Writers remember: If you ask for a favor and I say no and your response is to throw a fit about how elitist writing a.s.sholes such as myself are pulling up the ladder after us and we all suck, I will remember that. If you ask for a favor and I say yes and you don't end up getting what you want and you throw a fit about it, I will remember that too. If you ask for a favor and I say no and your response is gracious, I will also remember that. And if you ask for a favor and I say yes, and you do end up getting what you want, I will remember how you respond to that as well. As will any writer in my position.

What will it mean that we remember these things about you? On one hand, it might not matter much. On the other hand, writers, like all professionals, talk shop. We talk shop with other writers, with editors, with publishers and with everyone else in our little industry. Occasionally we are in a position to help people. Occasionally we're in a position to influence the selection of a writer for an a.s.signment. Occasionally there'll be work we've been offered and can't take, but will be in a position to suggest someone who can. Occasionally we'll switch hats and become editors or producers and be in a position to buy work. And then, of course, remembering will, in fact, matter.

It doesn't mean I or anyone else will take the opportunity to be a d.i.c.k, mind you. We will simply remember who we think is worth helping or considering, and who is not.

And that's something for you to remember.

And now we're done.

On the Pa.s.sing of Ray Bradbury: "Meeting the Wizard"

Jun

6.

2012.

As many of my readers know by now, Ray Bradbury, science fiction grandmaster, has pa.s.sed away. To note the day, and what he meant to me, Subterranean Press has graciously allowed me to reprint here my introduction to its edition of Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. It's called "Meeting the Wizard".

When I was twelve a wizard came to town.

And immediately I have to explain that comment.

First: Quite obviously, the wizard under discussion is Ray Bradbury.

Second: Understand that when you are the age you are now, and the age I am now, an author coming to town to talk about his work is no magical thing. The author may be your favorite author, and you may be genuinely excited to hear him or her speak-you may even be nervous and hoping you don't act like a complete fool when you get your forty seconds of conversation with them as they sign your book. But you know them as what they are: an author, a person, an ordinary human who happens to write the words you love to read.

But when you were twelve-or perhaps more accurately, when I was twelve-things were different. To begin, authors were not just common schmoes who happened to string words together. They were, in a word, mystics. When I was twelve I had been a reader for a decade and a writer for about a year, and in both cases at a stage where I was old enough to finally understand that writing didn't just happen; it was an expression of both will and imagination.

What I didn't know-and honestly at age twelve couldn't have known-was how to put the two together. I would walk through the stacks of my local library, where I spent a genuinely huge amount of my time, running my hands along the spines of the books, wondering that each book represented a single person. How did they make it happen? I could barely manage four pages in a lined composition book before I began to sweat. Here were whole books of dense, close-set, unlined words, spanning hundreds of pages.

I simply couldn't grasp how it could be done, and I think now that I believed something at age twelve that I would describe as a literary consonant to Clarke's Law: that any sustained effort of fiction writing was indistinguishable from magic. Magic was the only way people could possibly write as long, and as well, as they had to in order to make a book at the end.

Therefore: Authors were wizards.

And Ray Bradbury, to my mind at least, had to be the top wizard of all. Because of all the wizards practicing their craft-or of the ones I was reading at the time, which is possibly an important qualification-he was clearly the one most in control of his magic, the one who again even at the age of twelve I could see was doing something with his words that no one else I was reading was doing.

I should pause here to note that my introduction to Ray Bradbury had come the year before, in Mr. Johnson's sixth grade cla.s.s at Ben Lomond Elementary, when I was a.s.signed by my teacher to read The Martian Chronicles. Now, understand that being a.s.signed a book is no positive thing. It's a well-known fact that if you wish to inspire in a child a vast hatred of any single book, all you have to do is a.s.sign it to him in school. This generally works like a charm, and is why, for example, I to this day loathe George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss with the sort of pa.s.sion normally reserved for ex-spouses or whatever presidential candidate it is you're d.a.m.n well not voting for.

Fortunately for me and for the book, there were two significant mitigating factors. The first was that I had already been inducted into the cult of the science fiction geek; the door had opened in the fourth grade, with a copy of Robert Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky. I had wasted little time getting myself over the threshold, burning through the school library's rather meager collection of science fiction-mostly Heinlein juvies and a few poor imitations of Heinlein juvies, their t.i.tles and authors now lost due to pre-adolescent critical expunging from memory. I was primed, basically, to receive the book.

The second factor was that the book came, not from an approved curriculum list, but from Mr. Johnson himself. Every student has the teacher who looms in memory, and Keith Johnson is mine-a fine, handsome and fearfully smart man who didn't take any c.r.a.p (which is an excellent trait in handling sixth graders) but who also saw each of his students as an individual (which is an exceptional trait in handling sixth graders). Mr. Johnson gave me The Martian Chronicles to read and said this to me as he handed it over: "You should be reading this." He also said it was one of his favorite books.

To get the book, vouched for in that way, felt like an intimacy between the two of us. I realize using the word "intimacy" there opens things up to an unseemly interpretation, which would be, mind you, ridiculous. What it means is that while in no way stepping out of the teacher-student relationship, Mr. Johnson was treating me as a confidant, and even in a small way as an equal: This book means something to me, he was saying. It might mean something to you, too. It was, in other words, a powerful recommendation.

And Mr. Johnson was right. It meant something to me. The Martian Chronicles is not a child's book, but it is an excellent book to give to a child-or to give to the right child, which I flatter myself that I was-because it is a book that is full of awakening. Which means, simply, that when you read it, you can feel parts of your brain clicking on, becoming sensitized to the fact that something is happening here, in this book, with these words, even if you can't actually communicate to anyone outside of your own head just what that something is. I certainly couldn't have, in the sixth grade-I simply didn't have the words. As I recall, I didn't much try: I just sat there staring down at the final line of the book, with the Martians staring back at me, simply trying to process what I had just read.

I could tell you now about all of it-I'm a good enough wizard on my own now-but that would take more s.p.a.ce than you would have tolerance for in an introduction. I know you are eager to get through this and start re-reading the book you love.

But I will give you one example: The Martian Chronicles was the first book to make me understand that words themselves, and in themselves, had power. The genre of science fiction vaunts itself as the literature of ideas, which seems a bit much. It's more to the point that it's the literature of engineering, originally springing forth from the minds of proto-geeks fascinated with the technical potential of the future. These men (and occasional women) used words as fine-tooled machines to work those ideas into print, practically rather than poetically.

There's nothing wrong with this. I largely stand in this tradition myself. What it does mean, however, is that much of science fiction prose reads flat. Great colorful playful ideas, packaged in a big cardboard box.

Ray Bradbury's words are not a cardboard container for his ideas. His words have weight and rhythm and pace and form; they are a scaffold of filigree for his ideas to weave themselves in and around, taking form through them. Bradbury's people did not exist for the sake of exposition or simply to have things happen to them: He sketched them in what they said (or didn't say), and how they said them or not. Words gave rise to character, economically but fully revealing a s.p.a.ceman disgusted with his people, two strangers from different times meeting on a road, a man who learns he's okay being alone, a father teaching his children about who the Martians truly are.

The Martian Chronicles was the first science fiction book to make me feel a character's righteous rage (not to mention the concept of ironically literal death, both in the same chapter) and the first science fiction book to make me feel loss and loneliness in my gut, doing it without featuring a single human, save as a shadow on a wall. And more than the first science fiction that did all these things: the first fiction, too.

The Martian Chronicles, in short, showed me what words can truly do. It showed me magic.

And now you might understand how, at age twelve, I was amazed beyond words that this wizard was coming to town, and would be somewhere I could meet him and see him, in the flesh, for myself. Because I was geek enough to be well-known to all the librarians, who were hosting this wizard's appearance, I managed to wheedle my way into being in the group that would welcome him to the library and would get him ready to meet his public in our library's common room, which we grandly but not wholly inaccurately labeled a "forum." I would meet this wizard of all wizards, I would spend time with him, and perhaps I might even get him to show me some of his secrets. It was an excellent plan.

Which didn't work. Ray Bradbury's magic is strong, but the black magic of the 210 Freeway at rush hour is stronger-Bradbury arrived only minutes before he was set to speak. Nevertheless, the librarians, knowing how excited I was to meet him, pushed me forward and introduced me to him, and gave me a prime opportunity to talk magic with the wizard.

At which point my tongue, previously full of questions, fell out of my head, and all I could do was squeak about how much I liked his books. As I recall, the wizard tousled my hair, said something I don't remember except that it was kind, signed the copy of The Martian Chronicles I had in my hand, and then went up to our forum to do another kind of magic, which was to entertain a room full of admirers for an hour.

I would say that I never got another chance to have the wizard show me his magic, but that's not quite true. I never have met Ray Bradbury again in person. His magic, however, is there in his work. When you read it, if you pay attention, the wizard shows you all his magic and power. If you're smart, you see how it works. If you have some talent, you might be able to pull off a trick or two. Will you become a wizard? Well, that depends on many things, some of which will not be under your control. But you won't be able to say that this particular wizard has not been generous with his magic.

What I have never gotten another chance to do, however, is to thank the wizard, for what he's showed me and taught me and how he's inspired me to use my own magic. This seems as good a time and place as any. So thank you, Mr. Bradbury, for all of it.

And now, like the rest of you, I'm off to read The Martian Chronicles another time. I suspect this wizard has more magic to show me here. I want to see it.

The Only Time the Conservative Politicians Ignore Warren Buffett Aug

15.

2011.

It's when he tells them it's okay to tax the rich more, as he does in a recent New York Times opinion piece. Indeed, Buffett is not only saying that it's okay to tax the rich, but that the rich ought to be taxed more, because they are disproportionately shielded from the "shared sacrifice" that the rest of America's citizens are being asked to shoulder: While the poor and middle cla.s.s fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to cla.s.sify our income as "carried interest," thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they'd been long-term investors...

Last year my federal tax bill-the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf-was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income-and that's actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent...

[T]hose making more than $1 million-there were 236,883 such households in 2009-I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more-there were 8,274 in 2009-I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

Buffett's opinion piece does not only suggest raising taxes on the rich; he also and reasonably points out that there is a need to trim back spending, obliquely referring to "promises that even a rich America can't fulfill." Fair enough; there's not a lot of specificity there, but then, the piece isn't about those things, it's about taxes. Buffett's point there is simple: The rich, in fact, will do just fine if you raise their taxes a bit. They will do just fine because, among other things, they are doing just fine already.

The worries for the tender sensibilities of the rich has been a hallmark of conservative American politics since time immemorial, but the current gag-inducingly lickspittle levels of it are a bit much. Among other culpable parties, I lay some blame for this at the altar of Ayn Rand, who imagined a world in which the t.i.tan of industries "go Galt" in the face of creeping socialism. Over time the rather silly book this scenario plays out in has been confused by the greedy and clueless (and cynically touted by the greedy but somewhat more crafty) as a reasonable simulacrum of the real world, to the extent that I think there's a genuine fear by the credulous-which unfortunately correlates to the most vocal elements of both Republican primary voters and politicians today-that if the state moves to raise taxes on the wealthy, the lot of them will flounce in a huff, taking their money with them and retiring to a creva.s.se where they will await the end of the world. This sort of madness is gussied up and made slightly more respectable by rhetorical feints, like calling the very rich "job creators," as if the investment bankers profiting by pa.s.sing off c.r.a.ppy mortgages as AAA investments ever created a job, or the folks who increase shareholder value by laying off ten of thousands of workers are job creators.

Leaving aside the fact that raising taxes on the capital gains that people accrue by pushing around electrons in a financial system that ultimately is not tied into any tangible measure of value is not the same thing as nationalizing real-world industries, in the same way that being tickled by a feather duster is not the same thing as being attacked by a large flock of angry geese, this misapprehends the psychology of those who desire to become very very rich, or who are already very rich and wish to be more so. The sort of person who is very rich does not become so by flouncing when the rules of the game change, to sulk in a gully. The sort of person who is very rich becomes so by understanding the rules of the game and leveraging them to their maximum benefit. This is why there have always been the ridiculously rich, even in times when the top marginal tax rate in the United States was 92%. The very rich don't flounce, they fiddle. They always have. They always will. The fantasy of the enraged rich packing up and going is just that, a fantasy.

It's not a particular surprise that recent polls say the majority of Americans would like to see the wealthiest Americans taxed more, because most Americans seem to realize that bringing in more revenue is an essential part of dealing with debt. The problem here as I see it is that the majority of people who agree that taxes need to be raised are somewhat squishy on the subject, while the minority of people who are opposed to any taxes being raised ever are very very very very opposed. They are so opposed that there's little chance of reasoning with them; even Warren Buffett, by many measures the most successful investor of the last half century, is unlikely to get them to entertain the possibility that the very rich will survive a few ticks up on their marginal income rates. They'll happily take his advice on any other aspect of the business world except for this.

This does raise the question: In matters of governmental fiscal policy, if one is to follow the advice of someone who is not an economist by profession, is it smarter to follow the economic advice of a man who has played the financial world to the tune of $50 billion in personal wealth, or that of a writer who bent her own moral and philosophical rules to take government a.s.sistance when it was fiscally convenient for her to do so (although she of course had a fine rationalization for that, which is generally consistent with how many conservatives square away their use of government services and programs they oppose)? The answer to this question for many conservative folks is not about what is smart, but rather what is politically and philosophically orthodox, so I wouldn't expect much by way of an answer here.

As someone who in the short term benefits from the current conservative overweening solicitousness for my financial well-being, but who in the long-term would like a solvent, financially-stable country with a healthy middle cla.s.s and solid if basic social net, I find myself generally aligned with Buffett here. Yes, please, raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and I include myself in that (although I'm definitely waaaaay down the list from Mr. Buffett, and indeed below his suggested cutoff; even so). It's not the only answer to the financial mess the United States finds itself in these days. But it is part of the answer. You don't have to be worth $50 billion to see that.

An Open Letter to MFA Writing Programs (and Their Students) Nov

15.

2010.

Dear MFA writing programs (and their students): Recently New York magazine published a story, in which Columbia University's graduate writing program invited James Frey to come chat with its students on the subject of "Can Truth Be Told?" during which Frey mentioned a book packaging scheme that he had cooked up. The contractual terms of that book packaging scheme are now famously known to be egregious-it's the sort of contract, in fact, that you would sign only if you were as ignorant as a chicken, and with about as much common sense-and yet it seems that Frey did not have any problem getting people to sign on, most, it appears, students of MFA programs. Frey is clearly selecting for his scheme writers who should know better, but don't-and there's apparently a high correlation between being ignorant that his contract is horrible and being an MFA writing student.

I don't blame Columbia University's graduate writing program for inviting James Frey over to talk to its students about "truth." If there's anyone who knows about the word truth contained between ironic quotation marks, it'd be James Frey, and it's probably not a bad idea for the kids to see a prevaricating hustler up close to observe how one of his kind can rationalize bad actions and even poorer ethics as transgressive attempts at literature. It's always a joy to see how a master of bulls.h.i.t spins himself up; publishing and literature being what they are, the students should probably learn to recognize this species sooner than later, all the better to move their wallets to their front pockets when such a creature stands before them.

What does bother me, however, is that Frey apparently quite intentionally was working his way through MFA programs recruiting writers for his book packaging scheme. You could say there's an obvious reason for this, which is that MFA writing students are likely more competent at writing than your average schmoe writer on the street (this is a highly arguable contention, but never mind that now), and they're all in one place, which makes for easier recruiting. But I suspect there's another reason as well, which is that in general it appears MFA writing programs don't go out of their way educate their students on the publishing industry, or contracts, or much about the actual business of writing.

And so when someone like James Frey breezes in and starts blowing smoke about collaborations, the response is this- We were desperate to be published, any way we could. We were spending $45,000 on tuition, some of us without financial aid, and many taking out loans that were lining us up to graduate six figures in debt. A deal like the one Frey was offering could potentially pay off our loans and provide an income for the next decade. Do a little commercial work under a pseudonym, sell the movie rights, and never have to suffer as a writer in New York. We wouldn't even need day jobs.

-followed by a number of students receiving and then signing a contract that pays them next to nothing, and offers a deal so constrictive that by the terms of the contract Frey could publish works under their names and keep them from publishing again (via a gloriously vague "non-compete" clause). Frey was no doubt counting on the students being starry-eyed at the presence of a real-live bestselling author (even a disgraced one) who was waving a movie deal in their faces, but one reason he could count on it was because he was speaking to an audience whose formal educations did not include learning how to spot a c.r.a.ppy deal.

So, MFA writing programs, allow me to make a suggestion. Sometime before you hand over that sheepskin with the words "Master of Fine Arts" on it, for which your students may have just paid tens of thousands of dollars (or more), offer them a cla.s.s on the business of the publishing industry, including an intensive look at contracts. Why? Because, Holy G.o.d, they will need it.

Now, perhaps you are saying, "We focus on the art of writing, not the business." My answer to that is, please, pull your head out. Your students are not paying as much money as they do for your program strictly for the theoretical joys of writing. They are paying so they can publish, and it's a pretty good bet, considering how many of those Columbia folks scrambled to pitch to Frey, that they actually want to be published commercially, not just in university presses, in which (sorry) low advances and small print runs don't matter since it's just another line on the CV. Yes, you are teaching an art, but whether you like it or not you're also teaching a trade-or at the very least many of your students are coming to learn a trade, and put up with the art portion of it as part of the deal. Teaching them something about the trade will not hurt your program.