The Pulp Pacing Problem

Posted by natechen on

The pulps were once an incredibly popular medium of entertainment known for publishing stories printed on inexpensive, leftover paper at incredibly cheap prices. These could be formatted as books but were just as often magazines collecting short stories or sometimes serializing novels on a monthly basis. Because there were so many magazines with so many stories they tended towards two major characteristics. The stories were experimental and they were short.

By experimental I mean they hit on any and every genre they could imagine and created a couple new ones along the way. By short I mean shorter than a similar story would be today.

Pulps are often considered to be the peak of fast paced storytelling, quickly setting up a character, situation and stakes and resolving the situation in a few thousand words. Pulp novels rarely last longer than 80,000 words and frequently got down to 50,000. By contrast, the modern novel is usually much longer, running around 75,000 words and up. Most acquisition editors today prefer longer manuscripts to shorter ones.

There is a fair argument to be made that the shortest story that says all it needs to say, and no more, is the ideal. From this point of view long novels are not ideal. In point of fact there are a lot of modern writers who admire the pulp era and strive to recapture some of the brevity and verve of that unique time in their own writing. Brevity being the soul of wit, I wish them the best. However, I think that trying to write in a style from a century ago for the modern reader is a bit of a mistake. After all, the ideal length of a story is the length that says all it needs to say.

The question is, how much do we need to say? Does it change from one era to the next?

This is a topic none of the pulp aficionados stop to examine so let us do so for just a moment or two. At the dawn of the twentieth century the world was a much different place. There were no high speed, intercontinental communications, for example, and schools of pedagogy tended to agree on an established set of classic literature and preferred interpretation. In short, cultures were more homogeneous and shared many cultural touchstones. The importance of this cannot be understated.

Let me reframe this using an example from my experience partaking in Japanese entertainment. There is a form of address in Japanese known as “keigo” which creates a structure of social relationships between speakers. There are loose equivalents for some keigo terms in English. The -san suffix could be thought of as a gender neutral version of a respectful “Mr.” or “Mrs.” while the term sensei refers to a person of learning and is often used for a teacher or a doctor.

There are also many keigo terms which don’t translate well. A senpai is someone who has proceeded you. In what have they proceeded you? It could be anything. A senpai could be an upperclassman, a colleague with seniority in the workplace or just another person with the same hobby who’s been involved with it longer.

A kohai is the opposite of a senpai, someone who came after you. The culture of Japan places a lot of importance on the relationship between senpai and kohai, loading implied duties of respect, care and even affection behind these two words. This cultural weight cannot be directly translated into an English word and often results in one of two things. Either the words will be left as-is, with footnotes or endnotes explaining their meaning and implications, or clunky and illfitting equivalents will be forced into the dialog. Neither one fully encapsulates the ideas the words imply.

All this from just two words in the keigo system, which is full of dozens or hundreds of such terms from different time periods and dialects. It’s a lot to take in for new readers. Both methods of adapting keigo come with considerable drawbacks but the concepts cannot be omitted from the story or the characters will not make sense. This is to be expected from a work written in another country.

They say the past is a foreign country as well.

As I mentioned before, the pulp writers were drawing on shared traditions, shared culture and shared education. If they mentioned Achilles, for example, we could be reasonably sure they were all drawing from the same source. The Iliad was still in on most secondary education reading lists. Just as importantly, there were very few other interpretations of the character to muddle the meaning and significance of his name.

Furthermore, pulps were primarily publishing to people in their immediate area. Books rarely went overseas due to the expense of shipping them, just for starters, but also due to frequent language and legal barriers it tended to be impractical. In the modern era, these obstacles no longer exist. Everything from distribution to copyright law is much simpler and that has made media audiences much broader and yet much narrower. Past audiences were quite restricted in what media they could afford and access. By necessity those audiences engaged with a much broader array of media and were much less picky about its genres and quality.

Now, when an audience can easily access media from anywhere in the world, new problems arise. You can no longer be sure what cultural context your audience comes from. If they find themselves unable to parse your prose there is a real possibility they will simply set aside what you have to offer and move on to something else. Dense prose full of allusion that doesn’t make sense or requires research to understand rarely holds attention now. Audiences are looking for something they can relate to what they know and yet anticipating what they know is harder than ever.

Even if your goal is to tell your story in the fewest words possible you must still face the reality that more words are needed to explain yourself now than in the past.

Added to these hurdles is the reality of modern day mediums. Brevity may be the soul of wit but prose is ill suited to the modern conception of brevity. The shortest, most information dense communication mediums in the modern era are all transmitted via the Internet and facilitated by companies like Twitter/X, TikTok and YouTube. They are multimedia and visual as much as verbal. Audiences craving the brief and concise turn to these places for their media fix. Rather than compete along the lines of brevity most successful prose opts for depth, the one angle of communication where it remains unrivaled. By exploring ideas as thoroughly and deeply as possible prose can still compete for audiences when up against these much more concise, information dense mediums.

It’s all well and good to admire punchy, fast paced storytelling. Again, I have no beef with the pulp fans who want to explore that style of writing in their own work and come back to that kind of writing over and over again. However I am not one of those writers who believes we are on the cusp of another golden age of pulp prose. The media and cultural environment just doesn’t suit it. Audiences who want that kind of story can get it many other places in forms that capitalize on the strengths of pulp far better than the written word. I believe we are now in the era of deep prose, and that is the style of writing I strive to achieve. Perhaps your experience is different, and if so please let me know. In the mean time, it’s probably time I started getting ready for my next project…

In the mean time, if you’re interested in supporting my work check out my previous project give a look at Have Spell, Will Travel, my weird western anthology on sale on Amazon! Give it a look using this handy link:

One Piece of the Puzzle

Posted by natechen on

“One Piece Fan Letter” was a special episode of the One Piece anime series, released after episode 1122 but not counted as one of the numbered episodes. It is a fascinating and touching love letter to the series itself, from fans who have worked their way into positions where they can work on the show they love. This could be a disastrous concept. Fans writing themselves into stories they love has such a bad track record that one of the best known examples of bad writing, Mary Sue, was created as a satire of the practice. (Ironically, Mary Sue succeeds in this satire, which makes her story an example of good writing.)

As an artistic achievement “One Piece Fan Letter” is remarkable. The animation is beautiful, the story skillfully weaves a number of narratives from the book Straw Hat Stories and the characters grow to be memorable and lovable in a very brief window of time. However, I’m not here to break down the approaches and techniques used by directors Megumi Ishitani and Nanami Michibata and their teams. I’m not really the best person to tackle that. I’m pretty out of touch with the anime, its production and it’s history. However it does achieve something I find very impressive. The narrative creates several characters that feel like members of the audience who have ascended into the story, while avoiding the many pitfalls satirized by Mary Sue.

It’s difficult to discuss if you haven’t seen the episode and it’s about 25 minutes long so if you have the time, I’d recommend checking it out. It may not make a huge amount of sense if you’re not familiar with One Piece in some form or another, at least up to the Return to Sabaody Archipelago, but many of the broad strokes are clear even if you’re a novice. You can find it for free here:

https://www.crunchyroll.com/watch/G14UVQ5D5/one-piece-fan-letter

Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s start with the element I find the most interesting. None of the new characters in “Fan Letter” have names. The closest is the Marine captain called the Benevolent King of the Waves, who is known by a very grandiose epitaph. However the rest of the characters are known by their family or profession. The book seller, the wholesaler’s daughter, the green grocer’s boys. In one sense these people exist to be broad archetypes, entities that don’t even need names, because they represent the normal people in a world of pirates. Most normal people never make a name for themselves in any world. That goes double in a world as chaotic and cutthroat as one in the midst of a Golden Age of Piracy.

At the same time, a forgettable, nameless kind of character with a murky background is typical of a self insert protagonist. It could be a marker of lazy writing. But in practice, in “One Piece Fan Letter,” it is an invitation to the audience. These characters are like us, looking up towards the nearly mythical pirates of One Piece from their mundane, dreary lives and dreaming of adventure.

However the closest they can get is a distant admiration.

That brings me to the second element I find interesting, namely the separation between the protagonists of “Fan Letter” and the protagonists of One Piece as a whole. While all the episode’s new characters, including The Benevolent King of the Waves, catch at least a glimpse of the Straw Hat they admire, there is always a degree of remoteness to it.

The Benevolent King finds the tiny Chopper adorable. Yet the King is also a Marine officer with a duty to arrest pirates so he can’t give too much thought or deference to the Straw Hat’s mascot character. Several characters debate the world’s strongest swordsman, unaware that Zorro, one of the contenders, is in the bar with them. The elder green grocer boy admires Monkey D. Luffy. Not because he’s a pirate or even because Luffy did him a favor once. Rather, we see how Luffy’s desperate struggle to save his brother from execution gave the green grocer’s son the extra measure of inspiration needed to drag his own brother out of danger during the Paramount War. They were in the same place but their paths barely crossed for more than a second.

These are not direct connections. These are characters who see the Straw Hat Pirates from a distance and glean a little relief from mundanity or inspiration for the day by admiring them. There is no one this is more true for than the wholesaler’s daughter. When the Paramount War turned her world upside down she saw it as nothing more than a nuisance. In the years since Gold Rogers called the adventurous to the seas many pirates have sailed through her home, flexing their muscles and pushing people around on their quest for legendary treasure. The Paramount War was a particularly bad brush with the world of piracy but Sabaody Archipelago had seen many similar disruptions before and would doubtless see just as many after. The cynical child clearly believed there was nothing she could do about that.

Except one of the pirates responsible for that brush with piracy was Nami. Navigator for the Straw Hat Pirates, a woman with no particular powers beyond her sense for the weather, Nami held her own on that crew through her wits and charm. Over time, the wholesaler’s daughter convinced herself that if Nami could thrive in a world of power and violence so could she. And in the confines of this one brief story, she does just that.

The wholesaler’s daughter is one of the characters that changed the most from Straw Hat Stories to “One Piece Fan Letter” in that there was no such character in the book. The comparable character in Straw Hat Stories was, in fact, a man who admired Nami for… other reasons. This girl is, in my opinion, what really solidifies “Fan Letter” as a story about a self insert characters.

See, Ishitani and Michibata are two women who have had to make their way through the world of entertainment. It’s a world where the powerful often take advantage of the weak. They’ve had to make their way by wit and charm, and they clearly have a great admiration for Nami, who has done the same in a world much the same. They invite us along on an adventure to try and reach the characters that have inspired us over the years. It turns out those characters were much closer to us than we thought. At the same time, there is a gulf between us and them that cannot ever really be bridged, no matter how sincere our admiration or how meaningful the impact their stories had on us.

Stories are real, in a sense, but we cannot cross into them.

Yet we can look into them. If we are very, very lucky we can ever create a part of them. What Ishitani and Michibata chose to do with that rare, precious opportunity was to create a place for all of us to stand and admire those stories from a point just a little bit closer. Through the eyes of the wholesaler’s daughter. The green grocer’s boys. The book seller and the bar patrons and the Benevolent King of the Waves. Together share that admiration with one another for a few magical minutes. That was their love letter to the fans and I am very grateful for it.

I haven’t been fortunate enough to create a part of a cultural touchstone like One Piece but I have created a few stories of my own! If you’d like to support my work the simplest way to do so is to pick up my book Have Spell, Will Travel, available in ebook from Amazon today!

Get Have Spell, Will Travel Today!

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For those who haven’t seen it yet, my first book went on sale a week ago! At $3.99 it’s a great pick-up for Cyber Monday so if you enjoy what I do here and have been looking for some way to support me this is a great way to chip in with no subscriptions or signups needed. Get it on Amazon today.

Of Rakugo and Legacy

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One of the trends I hate the most in modern storytelling is the focus on the moment and the total disregard of the past. No longer do the facts of an existing story matter for high and mighty artists looking to do their own thing. This trend shows up everywhere nowadays. Amazon’s Rings of Power, Disney’s mangling of Star Wars (particularly the old Extended Universe), every Star Trek movie and series since the end of Enterprise – the list goes on and on. Old stories are cast aside to ‘make room’ for new stories, as if the old was some kind of barrier to achievement. There is an outright hostility to legacy in the major American studios these days.

There’s a lot you can say in response to that in the abstract, commenting on the way SoCal is childless, and thus views legacy as aberrant, or on the fetishization of rebellion that has defined the arts for the last hundred years or so. These kinds of observations are fine for what they are. But I am a storyteller and I tend to respond to these kinds of attitudes by reflecting on stories that see legacy not as some kind of obstacle or enemy to be overcome but as an asset or even the heart of the story.

Akane-banashi is a manga written by Yuki Suenaga and illustrated by Takamasa Moue that focuses on the art of rakugo. This is a traditional performing art that is somewhere between 200 and 250 years old that enjoyed it’s greatest influence in the early 1900s. It consists of a single person sitting in a formal pose and telling a story to the audience. Character, situation and action are all conveyed through use of pantomime, changes in voice and the use of a paper fan and piece of cloth as props. The performer is known as a rakugoka.

Shinta Arakawa is the stage name of Tehru Osami, a man studying to be a rakugoka. He has invested thirteen years of his life into mastering skills and studying under his master, Shiguma Arakawa, as a member of the prestigious Arakawa School of Rakugo. His family struggles to make ends meet, his daughter gets into fights at school when bullies call him a deadbeat and his wife’s family has never quite approved of him. Yet his daughter admires him, his wife supports him and his house is full of the magic of rakugo.

So Shinta continues to perform to small audiences, hoping to get promoted to the rank of shin’uchi, a rakugo headliner. Then he can get bigger gigs and a larger share of the profits. All he has to do is impress the leading performers in the Arakawa school at one big performance. In particular, he has to impress the school’s leader, Issho Arakawa.

Except he doesn’t. When Shinta and six other Arakawa prospects are given the opportunity to perform for Issho Arakawa and receive acknowledgment as shin’uchi the result is shocking. Issho expels all seven of them without explanation. While there’s nothing preventing them from starting over from scratch with another rakugo master in another school, Tehru does not have that luxury. His family is depending on him and he can’t keep them waiting any longer.

So Tehru Osami sets aside his stage name and gets a job selling concrete. He does well, draws an impressive salary and never tells a story again. His family eats better, his neighbors respect him more and his house… well, the magic of rakugo vanishes from it. And Akane – his daughter – is mortified.

A few months later she comes to Shiguma’s door and demands to learn the art of rakugo from him, so she can prove that the performances her father gave were not worthless. Taking up her father’s calling she sets out to prove her own mettle and redeem Shinta Arakawa’s name.

In and of itself, Akane’s struggle and goal is compelling.

However, the Osami family legacy is only the tip of the iceberg in Akane-banashi. Rakugo is a traditional art form, something that has much stronger connotations in Japan than in the US. It can only be passed down from a master to an apprentice. The very concept of legacy is built into the way it propagates. As Akane learns more and more about the art form she discovers that everyone who performs it carries at least as much emotional connection to rakugo as she does.

Ironically her biggest target, Issho Arakawa, is no exception to this. As the antagonist of Akane-banashi, Issho is a fascinating enigma. Rakugo is generally considered a form of comedy yet Issho is almost never shown smiling when he’s not performing. In fact, on first glance he’s a bit of a grump, always grumbling and complaining. Then we realize that’s an illusion. Issho is actually focused on his art form with a frightening, laserlike intensity that allows for no failure or contradiction.

When Akane finds an opportunity to confront Issho in person and ask why her father was expelled from the Arakawa school we gain our first major insight into his character. He deflects the question by telling Akane he is in mourning. Rakugo is dying, you see. In the modern age, with the Internet and smart phones affording the average person a constant bombardment of entertainment, there’s little hunger for the simple yet profound entertainment rakugo provides. Only the most captivating rakugoka have any hope of retaining an audience in that environment. In short, Issho feels he must carry the legacy of rakugo itself on his shoulders.

As time goes on we find that Shiguma, the man who taught both Tehru and Akane the art of rakugo, also bears a legacy from his master. One he hoped to pass on, first to Tehru and then to Akane. And it is a legacy he and Issho fought over, for it turns out the two of them both learned their art from the same man.

As time goes on and the story of Akane-banashi builds on itself the legacies of each character and the legacy of rakugo itself join together like the pieces of a mosaic. We go from a story about a single character, trying to master a craft and right a wrong, to a vast web spanning generations, all tied together by a passion for performance. Here the old is no impediment to expression. It is the very foundation of it. Even Issho Arakawa, for all his dour moods and callous behavior, presents hard but realistic lessons that the up and coming talent must eventually grapple with.

It is this web of generational legacy that makes this simple story about traditional comedy tick. It transforms a tale about finding a career from a straight forward, if beautifully illustrated, coming of age story to a deep, rich and compelling emotional journey. It makes rakugo more interesting than blockbuster movies with multimillion dollar budgets. And it is why, if you have any interest in the performing arts or legacies, you should absolutely make the time to read Akane-banashi.

A Slow Thaw

Posted by natechen on

I admit that the Cameron Winter mysteries fill me with an odd sense of delight.

To explain that I feel I have to backpedal a bit to when I first read Andrew Klavan’s The Great Good Thing, a memoir of how he came to love writing, literature and eventually Christ. For a person who is fond of all three of those things, Klavan’s memoirs were fascinating reading. However after reading The Great Good Thing and listening to a few of his podcasts I thought I would try one of his novels out and bought a book titled Werewolf Cop.

Perhaps I should add a disclaimer.

In his nonfiction prose and his podcasting Klavan is witty, wry and humorous, beginning most of his shows with a two or three minute satire segment and inviting his audience to laugh with him through the fall of the Republic. I was aware that Klavan’s fiction was focused on gritty tales of crime. However I think I can be forgiven if my expectations for a book titled Werewolf Cop were slightly colored by how Klavan speaks when addressing his audience directly.

Klavan’s stories are fascinated with the darkest parts of human nature. They are also wrapped up in the question of how we, as people, must fight back against that darkness. However, in order to properly ask that question he first has to take us deep into the worst parts of our nature to confront who we really are when all the lies we tell us about how nice and kind we are get stripped away. We must know the enemy before we can fight it.

On my first reading of Werewolf Cop I was surprised by how dark the novel was, how little the surface level ridiculousness of the title bled through into the narrative and how closely tied to the existing culture the overall plot was. It wasn’t a bad book, in concept, but it lacked something in the execution. The protagonist was an interesting character but his ability to grapple with the evil of his situation seemed almost… off kilter. The darkness of the situation felt like it should have had a much bigger impact on him, on his family and on his life than we really got from the story. The impact of such a thing felt like it should have extended much further.

All this brings me back to Cameron Winter.

By structuring the series as a slow unfolding of Cameron’s past in conjunction with a series of very depraved crimes Winter must unravel in the present Klavan accomplishes two things. He allows Cameron to grapple with the present from a position of semi-detachment. At the same time he justifies Cameron’s distant attitude by telling us about Cameron’s past and the many deep marks it has already left on him. Klavan weaves the past and present together with great expertise. Stories play out over two time periods with the events in each period expounding upon those in the other.

In my review of the previous book in the series, The House of Love and Death, I mentioned that I thought Cam was at a turning point. After reading A Woman Underground I feel both vindicated and surprised. It is, indeed, a turning point in Cameron’s life but not quite the one that I was expecting. At the end of Love and Death Cameron was on the cusp of forming a healthy relationship with a woman for the first time in a long time. However at the opening of A Woman Underground we learn he hasn’t contacted Gwendolyn Lord, the woman in question, for over five months. He isn’t quite ready to take that step yet.

Then, for the first time in the series, Klavan allows a character from Cameron’s past to enter his life in the present of their own volition. Charlotte, the girl who is the source of half of Cameron’s neurosis, makes a brief and fleeting effort to contact him and throws everything in his life out of whack. The result is a slow rolling disaster that forces Cameron to finally face and resolve a small part of the misfortune that has twisted him into such knots for most of his life.

As usual, Klavan ties his plots of hard-hearted and selfish men and women with threads of modern day events. This is done more to create a backdrop for the story than for any political commentary, which I appreciate. Fans of recurring characters like the Recruiter or Stan-Stan will not be disappointed either. However the most controversial element of this story will probably be Charlotte herself.

By exhuming, staking and burying a ghost of his past Cameron has made a definitive step forward in his character arc, fundamentally changing the dynamic between himself and the rest of the cast he works with. Charlotte, who’s shadow defined most of the character work in the first four books of the series, is going to be much less of an element going forward. Some readers, particularly those enamored of the predictable formula of television, may dislike that. I am optimistic that it signals we are going to go even deeper into the element that made the series appeal to me in the first place: Cameron’s past and how it shapes his present.

There is also a meta commentary in this story on the nature of story itself, something most authors can’t help but slip into their work at some point or another. Both Cameron and Margaret, his therapist, comment on the hand of a storyteller at work in Cam’s life. It’s the first hint of faith we see from the stubbornly agnostic protagonist and a bit of a tongue in cheek fun from Klavan himself. More than that, there is an interesting subplot early in the story that hinges on an author. The use of fiction to push an agenda and reframe a story is an interesting twist. Normally this would be the plot element where an author makes their apologia for playing god but Klavan chooses to refrain from this particular cliché. Instead, that kind of editorializing author is left to a rather ignoble fate.

As an author myself I can agree with that message but as a reader it did feel a little intrusive. Fortunately this is not enough of a major plot thread to create a negative impact on an otherwise excellent story. While others may come away with a different opinion I implore you not to let doubts about such a storyline keep you from enjoying a well told tale. As usual, I look forward to reviewing Klavan’s next work, whether it be fiction or nonfiction. Hopefully it will come soon.

Speaking of books, I am proud to announce the release of my first book! It compiles eight stories of high adventure in a West that never was. Follow Roy Harper as he makes a living as a magic wielding mercenary, making the West a better one bounty at a time. Get it here:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNP7DC82

AI – Two Reasons for Optimism

Posted by natechen on

There’s been a lot of hand wringing around the potential innovation and potential hazards of a thing called “AI.” There have been many debates about ethics and implications. The technology could force a significant shift in the way we look at intellectual work and intellectual property and I regret to inform you that any attempt to prevent it’s development will inevitably be worse for humanity than allowing it. (Don’t believe me? Look into why Roman technology stagnated.)

What I don’t want to do today is contribute to that debate. I am more interested in some things I’ve seen in AI that are actually signs for optimism about the way we will react to the technology. This is not to disregard the shortcomings and hazards AI may pose. But I am a creator first and foremost. We survive by making things that emphasize the good and beneficial aspects of our tools rather than by constantly dwelling on all the shortcomings. Hazards are things to be avoided and drawbacks things to be compensated for. The real question is what will we get if we avoid and compensate our way to a successful AI creative environment?

Well, the first thing is we will get a much more verbal society. Ever since Apple Computers introduced the first graphical user interface (technically inspired by Xerox, I believe, but still usually credited to Apple) electronics have been moving us towards a visual culture. Look at any smartphone screen and you can see the upshot of this. Lots of pictures, very few words. However the things we call AI are large language models (LLMs) developing algorithmic prediction based on a neural networking framework – a bunch of fancy terms meaning they read the Internet and form an idea of how the words connect to each other. That means in order to get an output from the LLM you must input words. You cannot press buttons with pictures on them. You cannot draw something.

You. Must. Use. Words.

This is very different from the way using electronics have been going for the last twenty to thirty years. Nothing has dealt more damage to the modern person’s verbal skills than how little they are needed to use modern tools. Don’t get me wrong, the visual communication employed in modern user interfaces is quite impressive. Given the international market for much of these products its also very practical. However it has also reduced the interest in and power of verbal communication in almost every aspect of society. An AI built on an LLM pushes the pendulum back in the other direction by forcing prospective users to interact with it verbally. For the writer and the storyteller that is a positive development.

Of course, AI requires a very idiosyncratic kind of verbal communication right now and that’s less than ideal but I will take what I can get.

That brings me to the next thing about AI that gives me cause for optimism and that is the need for framing. If you have used some kind of online form in the last five years or so you may have been asked to find all of the stop lights or buses in a picture before you can submit it. The primary purpose of this exercise is to prevent automated programs from flooding the form with submissions. The bots that fill out these forms cannot understand the pictures so they fail this simple test.

The secondary purpose of this exercise is to create AI that can understand the pictures.

One of the things no AI can do is frame an object. When the AI program looks at that picture all it sees is a bunch of pixels arranged in a grid. It has no way to tie specific groups of those pixels to a concept like a bus or a stoplight because buses and stoplights are arbitrary concepts invented by humans. The AI has to be taught the concept to understand it. The idea must be “framed” for the AI by human beings who already grasp it.

Human beings have a remarkable ability to learn new concepts and apply them to the world around them based on their pattern recognition skills. It is this ability to “frame” issues that gives rise to creativity, language and communication. Even if an AI can be taught the very broad, basic aspects of something like the law or medicine it still will not grasp the intricacies of a given situation in its specifics. Working out these intricacies and communicating them back to an AI is going to be a necessary skill going forward. This, in turn, will demand people develop situational awareness and communication skills, things which technology has so far driven people away from, rather than towards.

This emphasis will, once again, push people to develop verbal skills which our society has largely allowed to atrophy over the last thirty years or so. In this environment there will be plenty of opportunities for people with a strong command of language to thrive. Better yet, it may change cultural tastes. Visual art is all well and good, don’t get me wrong. I love to draw as much as I love to write. However there hasn’t been as much taste for verbal craftsmanship as there has for visual craftsmanship in my lifetime and if the rise of LLM AI pushes our culture towards verbal excellence again I think it would be a nice development.

I am not saying these things are guaranteed. Nor am I in any way implying that AI will not cause our culture considerable difficulties as it grows towards its full potential. The printing press and the Internet did those things as well. However I do see some reasons to embrace this shift in technology not just for its ability to boost dreary things like efficiency and productivity but also for its ability to push our culture towards aspects that have long been ignored by most people – the communication of ideas through verbal excellence. It is by no means guaranteed but one can hope.

The Empire of Southern California

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Most artists are obsessed with their craft, thinking about it constantly and drawing strange connections between disparate points of data to arrive at new conclusions. I am no exception to this rule. A long term study of the art of storytelling has led me to an interesting conclusion – there is more to the strange distortions that have felt through American culture than just a loss of skill or a growth of a particular ideology.

In some ways this was not a huge revelation to me. While there are real signs that ideology has taken over vast swaths of the people who produce most of America’s modern stories, that cannot explain things on its own. Sure, overpowering ideology creates blinders that get in the way of storytelling. It hampers the development of key storytelling skills and distorts the sense of truth and beauty that all the best art relies on.

Ideology is a very limited thing. In and of itself it creates a framework for viewing the world and if that framework is detached from what makes a good story that’s an issue. But if the ideology has good grounding in truth then steeping in that ideology can actually be beneficial. Ideologically driven stories can also succeed if they are tempered by other contributions from people with less ideological commitment, or at least equally significant commitment to artistic merit. So long as the ideology has a grasp on the true and beautiful there is hope for good art to come from it. So I have always found the ideology excuse for modernity’s bad art insufficient to explain the situation. That’s not to say the ideology driving much of modernity’s stories is good, I don’t think it is, I just don’t feel that alone explains the issue. That leaves lack of skill as a possible reason for bad stories.

It is harder to pinpoint what exactly could cause an artistic community’s skill to slip away and thus harder to tell whether or not it has happened at all. Many once great creators like Ridley Scott or James Cameron have produced films that fall far short of their best efforts. Is that because they have aged, as we all must? Or is some other factor at work? It’s hard too tell in an objective, testable way. The creation of art is not a scientific process, nor are the intricacies of creating it as measured and precise as science demands. I have only my intuition and a handful of data points to work from.

However over the last few months I’ve started to wonder if there might be a third explanation I’ve overlooked. What if modern storytellers are just too insular?

Indulge me in a brief digression. One of the greatest English language authors to ever live was a Regency era British woman named Jane Austen. All six of her novels were about the lives of minor, upper class British women juggling their social standing, family obligation and personal ambitions. They are wonderful studies of character and human nature. Like all art they grasp very true ideas and present them to the audience in fascinating ways. They also come from a very specific historical and cultural context.

If a Jane Austen novel were presented to the people of the British Raj or West Indies who lived at the time they were published there is a good chance they would not find it engaging or entertaining. While the basic character archetypes of, say, Pride and Prejudice are universal to the human experience the situations those characters find themselves in are very specific. That very specificity would make the entertainment provided by the narrative harder to receive for those unfamiliar with British life. Even those living in a theoretically British culture. There is just no point of cultural connection between the far flung cultures of the Empire and the culture of Jane Austen.

The purpose of this rather lengthy analogy is to undergird my theory on why so much of modern storytelling (and art in general) fails to resonate with so many people. Most modern stories, particularly in America, are seen through the filter of a small group of people in Southern California. Yes, publishing houses are mostly headquartered in New York but few Americans read stories anymore so, for the purpose of a broad discussion, publishers are sadly irrelevant. The rest of America’s modern storytellers are in Hollywood and the gaming industry. Even if these industries are not headquartered in SoCal the people who write for them come out of schools thought and schools of education that are exclusively focused on the Hollywood frame of mind.

The reason SoCal is important here is that it has a very unusual culture compared to the rest of America. It is demographically diverse, urban, childless, full of people who have spent a large chunk of their lives in “higher education” and share an extremely permissive attitude to sex. This culture is foreign to the rest of the nation. Perhaps more foreign to the majority of other Americans than British Regency culture would have been to the Indian and Caribbean cultures they ruled over.

The people of SoCal create stories steeped in their own, insular values and seem shocked when the rest of the world find these stories inaccessible to them. They are much like the oft depicted, out of touch British visitor to some far flung Imperial holding who doesn’t understand why everyone looks different, speaks oddly and eats with their hands. I have come to this conclusion lately specifically based on events around the gaming industry. For the sake of being thorough, some examples:

The game Black Myth: Wukong was criticized for lacking “representation” for black and Latino characters even though the game is based on Chinese myth. This demonstrates that the resident of Imperial SoCal cannot conceive of any culture being represented that doesn’t have the ethnic make up of the world right outside their widow. The point of the game was to represent ancient China, not modern California, so the American storytellers were scandalized.

The game Dragon Age: The Veilguard features an entire storyline about a character’s pronouns. This is a bit of linguistic drudgery born of too much useless college education, the kind of thing so detached from reality only the ultra wealthy in the entertainment and tech sectors really pay attention to it. The audience found it tedious and stupid yet Imperial SoCal cannot understand why no one cares about it.

The game Dustborn features entire mechanics built around shaming and verbally abusing other people to defeat them in “combat” using the social standards of South California’s Empire. The results range from sad to unbearably cringe inducing. The game flopped horribly. Yet the creators insist the basic system is both interesting and narratively insightful.

Audiences do not connect with the stories or critiques above. They are based in a context we do not take part of and don’t really want to understand. Modern storytellers don’t seem to understand that because they are so deeply embedded in their own insular culture. Does it explain why they struggle to create anything that resonates with the rest of the world? It could.

How is the problem to be solved? That’s harder to say. But with the problem diagnosed we are one step closer to that goal. Til next time, friends. 

The Silent Fire

Posted by natechen on

The hospital loading dock was nearly identical to all the others Vince had visited in his life. He trotted up the ramp onto the loading platform, the gym bag over his shoulder bumping against his leg. When he reached the top he held out his hand to the man there. “Mr. Hartman? I’m Vince Porter, from First Missionary.”

“Call me Steve.” Steve Hartman shook Vince’s hand with a short, quick motion then smoothed down the front of a very rumpled dress shirt in a futile effort at looking presentable. He was a tall, wiry man and much better dressed that Vince would expect from a head janitor.

“Remi didn’t give me many details when she forwarded this commission to me,” Vince said. “What can you tell me about your problem? Does it show up here?”

Steve’s eyebrows jumped towards his vanished hairline. “Problem? Is that what you folks call ghosts now?”

“No. Typically we attribute the behavior of what the general public considers ghosts to demons or fair folk. Remi thinks demons are more likely or she wouldn’t have sent me.”

“Fair folk?” Steve raised an eyebrow. “Do I want to know?”

“They’re almost exclusively European so hopefully it won’t ever matter to you.” Vince scanned the loading dock. “Anyway, what’s the deal here?”

“Not here, it’s down in the basement,” Steve said. “All the incidents take place in the sub basement levels, usually in the machinery or sanitizing facilities. I’ll show you where in a minute but first we need to check in with the head nurse. He wanted to be a part of this.”

Vince followed the other man into the hospital proper. Given his role as a pastor he’d been to Northview General more than a few times over the years. However Steve led him through unfamiliar hallways into the facility’s administration wing. “Has the head nurse seen any of the phenomena caused by the ghost?”

“No, not that he’ll admit, but he collected some of the stories that led to us calling you in. And, to be totally fair, he also doesn’t want you here. So he probably feels like he had to flex on you in some way or another.”

“Doesn’t believe in ghosts or problems with religion?”

“Little of both.” Steve hesitated outside a door at the end of the hallway they’d been walking down. “I hope you won’t hold it against him.”

That struck Vince as odd. “You’re the head janitor, right?”

“Head of Maintenance.”

“Do you work with the head nurse on a regular basis?”

“He’s my little brother, helped me get this job.”

That went a long way to explaining Steve’s defensive comments. “Well, I told you on the phone that we need to try and work out who is being pursued or possessed by the demon in question. Was there a common person or place involved when the phenomenon takes place?”

“I don’t know.” Steve knocked on the door as he spoke. “Ryan hasn’t told me any of the details yet, says they’re confidential.”

“Ryan’s your brother?”

“That’s me,” said the man who opened the door. He was just a hair taller than his older brother but considerably larger than Steve. It wasn’t his build, either. Northview’s head nurse looked like he was a hearty eater and not in the healthy sense. “You’re the priest?”

“Vincent Porter, at your service,” he replied, offering Ryan Hartman a handshake. Through an effort of will he managed not to correct him on the term priest, which the Missionary Churches didn’t use. Something told Vince that Ryan wasn’t interested in the nuances of that particular point of doctrine. “Thank you for having me.”

Ryan scowled at Vince, then his brother. “Not sure what Steve expects you to do, especially given how vague the so-called issue is.” He waved the two of them into his office. “Steve told me you wanted to know about common places or people involved in the manifestations.”

“Yes. Without going too deep into the weeds, what’s important here is figuring out who the demon’s target is or was.” Vince sat down in one of the folding metal chairs facing Ryan’s battered partical wood desk. “If I don’t know the demon’s target there isn’t much I can do to get rid of it. They tend to manifest under particular conditions, at least at first, so that will help me narrow down what it’s objective is.”

Ryan made a phlegmy sound in the back of his throat as he took his own seat. “Very well. Based on the testimony there are three people that have been at the majority of the sightings. Myself, Steven and Mrs. Wright, who works nights in the morgue. None of us have been at all the reported incidents.”

“Can one demon afflict multiple people?” Steve asked.

“I’ve never heard of one presence possessing multiple people,” Vince said. “But they can have multiple people in their sights. Steve, you mentioned that most of the incidents take place in the mechanical spaces or near the sterilizer?”

“Yeah, stuff in the sub basements. The morgue is down there too, if you were wondering.”

“I was. Which one are the three of you most likely to use on a typical day?”

“I’m in most of those places every day,” Steve said. “But I don’t think Ryan or Kendra go into the machinery rooms at all.”

“Do you have a lot of use for the sterilizer, Steven?” Ryan asked, tone sounding more than a little patronizing.

“It may come as a shock to you but yes, I do. Not only do we have to run diagnostics on it once a month I’m also in charge of demonstrating it to prospective clients.”

“Clients?” Vince raised an eyebrow. “What, do you let patients boil their clothes there or something?”

Steve chuckled, the first expression of any emotion other than stress Vince had noticed all night. “Hardly. C’mon, it might be easier to just show you. We can pick up Kendra along the way.”

The morgue was in the basement, which was typical for hospitals in Vince’s experience. Northview’s was overseen by Kendra Hall, a laid back woman in her late twenties who’s bright pink turtleneck sweater contrasted with her mahogany skin in a very pleasing way. She studied Vince while fingering a simple cross necklace absentmindedly. Finally she asked him,  “Do you think you can exorcize this thing on your own, Father?”

“I’m not your dad,” he replied with a smile, “just a shepherd. But like all who are in Christ I’m never alone so I’m not too worried about your problem. I’m told you’ve experienced some sign of the thing’s presence?”

“I think so,” she said, not looking to reassured by what he said. “Three weeks back I was preparing the latest batch of cadavers from the residency program for the sterilizer when I thought I heard someone crying. I’m not here during visiting hours so that kind of visitor is pretty rare. When I looked around I didn’t see anyone so I thought I imagined it, because this is the morgue and the patients I work with are past making sounds.”

“I take it you forgot all about it until Ryan asked about strange occurrences in the basement?”

“Nope. It wasn’t til the day after he sent the email out that I realized it might be something worth mentioning. The regional waste had just come in down the hall when I heard the sterilizer kick in. And I mean it kicked in right away. Usually it’s an hour or two before they get it up and running but that time it fired up maybe five minutes after they brought the waste down.”

“Okay, I think it’s time someone explained what the deal with this sterilizer is,” Vince said. “It doesn’t sound like something a demon would be interested in but I’m curious.”

“Step this way,” Ryan said. “It’s just down the hall. We’ve had a state of the art medical waste sterilizer and disposal unit for the last sixteen years and the hospital supplements its income by handling medical waste disposal for most of the county as well. We get two shipments a week.”

Vince wrinkled his nose. “Is that a lot?”

“No,” Steve said, loading them out into the hallway. “The hospital alone puts out almost twice that much over the same time period, which is why we can justify the time and energy costs.”

“Got it. So you heard the incinerator going?”

Kendra nodded, fishing a set of keys out of a jacket pocket. “The morgue creates a lot of its own waste and I usually try to get it into the sterilizer with the contract waste so they don’t have to fire it up again on another day of the week. But they were starting up so early that…” For the first time Kendra hesitated and Vince caught a glimpse of the strain she was under as her breathing hitched in her throat. “Anyway, I was going to ask them to wait for me to get things together but when I let myself in there… there wasn’t anyone else in the room and… the sterilizer was cold.”

Kendra slowed to a stop, her eyes locked on the double doors on the left hand side of the hallway. “Do any of you hear a baby crying?”

Ryan took the keys from her gently. “I’m sure it’s just your imagination, Kendra, just like last night.”

“All this happened last night?” Vince asked. “I thought you the had the most experience with this thing.”

“Kendra and I have seen or heard the entity every night for the last week,” Steve said. “She hears children crying, I hear machinery that isn’t there mixed in with crying children. But so far Ryan’s the only one to actually see it.”

Vince saw the way Ryan rolled his eyes. “I take it you wouldn’t agree with that assessment?”

“I’ve never heard any of the strange stuff they talk about,” Ryan retorted. “Do you hear children crying right now? Or machinery? Of course not, because this is an old building that plays tricks on your hearing and if you’re not ready for it you could mistake it for just about anything.”

“So why do they think you’ve seen the demon, Ryan?” Vince asked.

“Because last week some kid around the age of twelve got lost, wandered into the admin wing and asked if I could help him find his parents. When I got up and led him out into the staff break room he slipped away from me.” Ryan sorted as he unlocked the doors. “Steven is convinced this is a manifestation of his mental illness, I think that the manifestation is his insistence the child is a specter.”

“Come on,” Steve said. “You really think all this freaky stuff is in my head?”

“It’s a reasonable assumption,” Vince said, to the surprise of the other three. “What? Demonic influence, in the form of possession or oppression, is actually very rare. The theology of that is kind of convoluted but I’d be happy to give the curious a primer on it at another time.”

“None of you hear that crying?” Kendra asked.

“No,” Vince admitted. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a force here that only wants you to hear it. That’s not uncommon in demonic oppression.”

“It’s just that the oppression itself is rare?”

“That’s right.” Vince unzipped his shoulder bag and pulled out his sword and a pump action t-shirt gun on a sling. “Go ahead and open the door, Ryan.”

The nurse studied his weapons skeptically but did as he was asked. Inside there was a room about ten feet square. Along one wall was a conveyor belt feeding into a roughly three foot by three foot doorway currently covered by a heavy steel shutter. There was a stack of crates along one wall with labels bearing the names of various medical businesses like Pinecrest Dental or Northview Family Planning. The sterilizer was off and no one was in the room. “You just got a shipment today?”

“Remi said you wanted to see the circumstances most likely to cause the being to manifest,” Steve said, approaching the conveyor and poking at the controls. “When I called her we heard things mostly on delivery days. This thing shouldn’t be on.”

“It’s not,” Ryan said.

Kendra made an uncomfortable sound and Vince carefully touched her on the shoulder. “Do you see anything?”

“No,” she whispered. “But someone’s singing to the children now. I can’t understand what they’re saying.”

“You’ve never seen anything here?” Vince asked, giving Ryan a skeptical look. “No phantom sounds, no apparitions, no strange sensations?”

“Sensations?”

“Physical feelings like touches or wetness that doesn’t have a physical source.”

“No.” Ryan shook his head. “This is ridiculous, there is nothing here. Kids wander into restricted parts of the hospital all the time, they’re kids it’s practically what they exist for.”

“It was your idea to take local contracts,” Steve snarled, pulling the side of the conveyor belt housing off and studying the quiet mechanisms inside. “That makes this your fault.“

Kendra slid down next to the wall, her hands over her ears, and started to hum a strange, tuneless song with her eyes screwed shut. Vince sighed and slid down next to her, one hand on her shoulder, and softly said, “Kendra, I’m going to ask you a very serious question that you don’t have to answer. I just want you to know that it is important.” Her eyes fluttered then opened and focused on him, brimming with trepidation. Finally, after studying him for a long moment, she nodded. He took a deep breath and said, “What happened to your child?”

She licked her lips, a shudder running up and down her from her toes to her shoulders and back down again. Her eyes never left his. Finally she said, “I left him at the fire station. In one of those boxes they have, you know? Must have been two, three years ago and I…”

She trailed off and finally looked down at the floor. Vince took bother her hands and pulled her to her feet saying, “You’re a qualified nurse, right?”

“Yes?”

“Then I’d suggest finding a new job, ma’am. A nurse can find work just about anywhere in the city, much less the state, and I don’t think this one is good for you.”

Her eyes flicked to the sterilizer. “What about…?”

“If you don’t have anyone to pray with you I’d suggest trying to find someone. Services at First Missionary are at 9:30 on Sundays, if you don’t have anywhere else you go. But I don’t think there’s anything there that’s interested in you so if you put it behind you and fill the hole you’ll be okay.”

She studied him for a long moment, nodded and hurried away.

Ryan scowled. “What is that? She’s one of the most promising nurses we’ve had in the last five years! Do you know how hard it is to get a serious, intelligent nurse to stay in a tiny city in the middle of Wisconsin?”

“But even if she’s not being targeted by anything the job is clearly unhealthy for her, isn’t it?” Vince asked, slipping his sword back into his bag. He was beginning to suspect he wouldn’t need it.

Ryan made a frustrated sound and spun towards his brother. “What is wrong with you, anyway? You’ve wasted a huge amount of my time, cost me one of my most promising nurses and made me look foolish in front of management! Leave the damn machine alone. It’s off already.”

“But I hear it running, Ryan! The furnace is burning, the children are screaming, the pumps are pumping and I can hear it!”

“No you can’t.” Ryan grabbed his brother’s shoulder and dragged him upright. “We weren’t even conscious, you couldn’t hear it then and you can’t hear it now.”

Vince glanced at the crates then back at the brothers and slid his t-shirt gun back into his bag, too. “Got a question for you, Ryan.”

“No, I don’t attend church,” he spat, shoving his brother away and whirling to face Vince. “And I’m not interested in it, either.”

“Actually, I was wondering if the contract Steve mentioned was the one with Northview Family Planning?”

Ryan hesitated, looking uncertain. “Yes. Did he tell you about it?”

“No. How many brothers do you have?”

“Two,” Ryan said at the same moment as Steve said, “Five.”

Vince nodded. “Artificial insemination, I take it? And your mother wasn’t prepared to carry six children at once.”

“She couldn’t have provided for them anyway, not with our father,” Ryan spat. “Of course she had to terminate some of the pregnancies. What does it matter?”

“Steve.” Vince ignored Ryan and gently turned his brother around. “Steve, the pumps have stopped. They stopped a long time ago.”

“NO!” He jerked back but Vince wouldn’t let go. “I can still hear them! The children are still crying!”

“No, they’re not, Steve. The pumps have stopped and you can’t do anything for those three brothers anymore. You need to start paying attention to what’s around you. You’re not well.” Vince turned and jerked his chin towards the place Kendra had left. “And you’re starting to hurt people who get caught up in what’s happening around you.”

Steve shuddered and shook his head. “I don’t know what to do.”

“That’s all right,” Vince said, patting him on the shoulder. “Head back to your office and I’ll meet you there. Remi and I will figure out who the best person to sort yourself out is.”

For a moment he wavered, thinking about it, then headed towards the door.

Which left Vince with Ryan.

“He wasn’t even conscious,” Ryan repeated.

“We don’t really know that,” Vince replied. “And either way, the trauma remains. To me it looks like you’re both haunted by your brothers, in different ways.”

Ryan stalked up to him, speaking in the barest whisper. “I’m not interested in your preaching. You’re going to tell me I’m the one possessed, aren’t you? I’m the one the demon is interested in because I don’t believe in it and that means I have the least resistance. But you should have tried that before you made it clear you knew there was no demon and my brother and Kendra were just hallucinating because of trauma in their histories.”

“You’re wrong in a huge number of ways,” Vince replied. “First, demons aren’t really interested in people, they’re just a means to an end so one wouldn’t really be interested or uninterested in you. Second, you lack resistance because you are the only thing in you. I’m not afraid of possession by a demon because I’m already possessed by a greater Spirit. Those who don’t belong to anyone are in the most danger. Third, I didn’t know for sure your brother and Kendra weren’t possessed until I got here. Fourth, you’re not possessed.”

Ryan snorted. “Of course not. I’ve never heard any of these phantom sounds or believed in your phantom god. You’ve wasted enough of my time tonight. If my brother wants to talk to you he can explain himself to management, I’m done with it.” He grabbed the housing of the conveyor belt and started replacing it on the sterilizer. “What a waste of everyone’s time. I told him there was no demon here.”

As he walked out of the room Vince glanced at the ‘family planning’ box one last time, shuddered and called over his shoulder, “I never said that.”

Happy Halloween, everyone, and thank you for reading!

This post was written as part of the Haunted Blog Crawl for 2024, a collection of spooky short stories by various talented writers! Be sure to check out the other two using these handy, dandy links!

Cabin Fever by Sarah Pierzchala: http://skirkpierzchala.substack.com/p/3ffa5df4-f834-4122-b4ad-7789e0d1ddb2

Where Dead Wolves Fly by Jacob Calta: https://365infantry.substack.com/p/where-dead-wolves-fly

Putting this event together was facilitated by Daniel P. Riley, who did not contribute a short story as he is in the process of launching his own spooky novel, Heir of the Dragon. Give it a look here: https://www.amazon.com/Heir-Dragon-Modern-Horrors-Book/dp/B0DFWGPL67

Again, thank you for reading. I’ll see you next week!

Art and Boundaries

Posted by natechen on

One of the strangest platitudes bandied about in creative circles is the notion that art exists to push boundaries. Most people will say this, or some variant of it, and never once stop to think critically about it because they have heard it all their lives. That’s unfortunate because it’s a sentiment that falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.
The most common art form I have heard it about is comedy. Common wisdom is that the betrayal of expectations is a major part of what makes things funny forces the comic to constantly dabble in subjects considered taboo or morally repugnant, pushing the boundaries of society and forcing us to reexamine our cultural norms to see if they still hold true. They have to do this, we are told, because surprise is essential to comedy. How can we laugh if we already know the punchline of the joke?
My response to this is to ask a very simple question: Must we subvert expectations in order to tell a joke?
In general I believe the answer is no. There are plenty of very funny jokes, stories and pratfalls that have gotten me to laugh more than once. If some kind of manipulation of expectations is inherent to comedy then that should not be the case, as knowing the punchline to a joke makes it impossible for said punchline to take me by surprise. My expectations cannot be subverted. Yet i still laugh when watching Duck Soup.
There are many reasons we laugh at a joke. We can find the skill it is delivered with delightful, as we do when watching the physical comedy of Buster Keaton or Red Skelton. We can laugh at the absurdity of a situation, as we might when watching the pratfalls in Home Alone. There is an entire genre of comedy that finds humor in the awkwardness of life, embodied in shows like The Office. We can, indeed, laugh because a joke surprises us. However none of these things are funny because they push boundaries alone. As we would say in college, they are funny because they are true.
When we laugh at skillful physical comedy we laugh because we see something we would have thought impossible carried out in reality. Yet when props, special effects or even animation, as in Looney Toons, push things beyond what is real we still laugh because of the absurdity. The contrast with reality becomes the joke.
You can string together a series of non sequiturs and no one will laugh. Surprise is only funny if the twist has some kind of truth beneath it. The way the twist comes together is important, of course, and it is the skill with which the twist is created and delivered that is the difficult part of comedy. So it’s not surprising that this skill aspect of comedy gets so much emphasis.
Now we could say that a comedian pushes boundaries by pushing their skills. I don’t disagree with that idea. However I don’t honestly believe that anyone who says comedy is about pushing boundaries means that. They are referring to some nebulous idea about bringing new concepts into the cultural discussion. It’s a very psychological, Jordan Peterson-esque idea. That’s not surprising given the laugh-a-minute natures of psychology and Jordan Peterson.
Now the above, my friends, could be construed as a joke. Since it was not a great one I will take a moment and do that thing comics are not supposed to do and explain the joke. It functions by contrasting the very serious, deliberately unemotional affect of psychologists in general and Jordan Peterson in particular with the idea of laugh-a-minute comedy. The contrast is stark and surprising and thus funny, if not particularly so.
This joke is more than just a piece of humor. It also says something about our culture and how we look at the field of psychology, both in general and one psychologist in particular. It is this power, the ability to entertain while also commenting on and, via the observer effect, shaping the way our culture functions that makes comedy so powerful.
All artforms have this power to some extent. This function is what pushes boundaries on those occasions where art comes up against some kind of social boundary. It’s not surprising that this is what grabs people’s attention when talking about the power of art. However to confuse it with the purpose of art is to make a dangerous mistake. It is to make the assumption that the purpose of all things is power.
The purpose of art is to immortalize what is true and lasting, to put the audience in touch with an experience beyond the confines of their normal life in one way or another. That is why a story like A Christmas Carol remains almost universally beloved even though it permeates or culture to an equally universal extent. It doesn’t have to seek out boundaries to push. In many ways it is a boundary in itself, a standard for stories about how those set in their ways can change for the better. It can do this because it is art that fulfills it’s purpose, rather than seeking to exert its power. Whether you are a comic or otherwise, that is an idea worth keeping in mind.

The Sidereal Saga – Afterwords

Posted by natechen on

Every time I finish a piece of fiction I feel like I’ve finished a new, bizarre struggle. Taking an abstract idea and putting a series of events and recognizable characters on top of it is difficult every time but trying to incorporate new ideas and lessons learned from previous work puts a new spin on it every time. When I sat down to write the Sidereal Saga I hoped to put together a short, fast moving story told in a series of vignettes that I could move in and out of freely.

What resulted was something quite different.

The Sidereal Saga is the longest single project I’ve written, so right away I fell short of a central goal. Furthermore, in the course of writing I discovered I had a harder time multitasking between it and other projects. Perhaps this was a side effect of the space opera genre. Up until this point I have never tried to write something with such a large cast of characters spread across so many venues with so many variables to keep track of. The complexities of the story made pivoting away from it much harder.

While that complication is intuitive, it did make structuring Lloyd’s story as a series of vignettes with other stories scattered through it much more difficult as I could not find the time to set aside for writing them. So I ultimately failed in that goal as well. When taken as a whole the lesson learned was a significant one – don’t bite of more than you can chew. I always knew space opera was a complicated and difficult genre. Seeking to write one while juggling other projects was a wildly optimistic goal and one which was clearly out of my reach.

With all that said, I feel I did fairly well in writing the story itself and that is always an important threshold to reach when working on any project. While I had some ideas for character beats and payoffs that did not quite come to pass as I had a solid outline that is only slightly different from what ultimately came together. (At some point I will do a post summarizing my outline and the resulting story. I’ve done this before but I think the result this time is passive p particularly interesting.) So I also feel like much of my prep work paid off well.

As per my usual structure, I will be taking some time to publish some essays on the state of writing, my own and others, before jumping into my next project. There will not be a many this time around,  I think. Less to say that I haven’t already and I am very eager to get started on the next thing. There may also be a special Halloween story this year. We will see.

However, first and foremost there will be a short break. As is usual, now that I have finished a story I will take a week off. I am so grateful to ask those who tube in on a regular basis. You can’t imagine how encouraging it is to see another name sign up for updates of how many visits on Saturdays to read the new chapter. Thank you so much, and I will see you in two weeks!