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Goodbye Nice Handwriting

admin — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:18:42 +0000

When I was a kid, even in the late Eighties, we were counted off for making our cursive letters incorrectly. Old Lady English teachers had no reason whatsoever to think proper penmanship would go by the wayside. What a difference twenty years makes these days.

This BBC article says “the writing is on the wall” for writing by hand, and in a couple of generations, our descendants will be looking at our hand-penned notes they we look at documents from the 18th century, when esses looked like effs.

As the digital age progresses and keyboards invade every aspect of our social and professional lives, who needs or wants to have to decipher somebody else’s poor scribbling?

Chickenscratch, we used to call it back home. That’s why we were hammered into proper letters. But really, how often do you write something by hand anymore? We make notes in the margin (and others can never read them), we make grocery lists, etc. Our kids will do the same, likely in some digital form. When they do write it’ll be printing letters, probably. Cursive was supposed to be faster and prettier, but what use is it now?

Well, unlike printed material—which will not go away mind you, just evolve—it’s not a big loss to lose script or to have relegated to a an art form like ancient calligraphy.

If you’re a writer by occupation, though, you know that sometimes things come out differently when you have to write them by hand. I imagine for us in one of the world’s oldest professions, will reserve script—for those of us who’ve actually learned or been taught—for these brief exercises of the past.

Perfecting Prose Rhythm and Pacing

admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:43:25 +0000

Past perfect tense and passive voice have their places within the structures of the English language. Generally, those places are under the stairs or in the attic, in boxes, on shelves, way behind the adverbs.

Key point: The more verbs used, the higher the chance for confusion, the higher the chance your prose is too slow.

Grueling, even.

Adverbs, strings of adjectives in succession, too many verbs all have the same problem. They slow down the prose and worse, they dilute the prose. I call an addiction to modifiers “parts-of-speech abuse.” The more words and commas in your sentence, the more bumps and snags you inflict upon your reader as you drag him along.

There’s a place for complicated style. It’s usually in academic books nobody but academics read. They read them to feel smarter, the same purpose the author had when he wrote the books, both reader and author having a masochistic and self-important approach to literature.

The rest of us like our journeys smooth and painless. I didn’t say simple. I said smooth and painless. Real style isn’t how many words one can cram into a sentence. Real style is how much meaning one can cram into a few words.

So take a look at your prose and count the number of times you use a compound verb, especially compound verbs beginning with had or was. See if you can get around them.

In addition to the pace of your prose, notice also the rhythm and whether it is balanced. The word “had,” for example, is short but dramatic like a cymbal smash in your prose rhythm. It slows down the beat some, and is sometimes a very necessary element if you’re rhythm conscious. In scatting, the sound would be something like had, hadda da, hadda da, badoom badoom badoom. In some instances, the h and a are dropped and it’s more of an “ud” sound, depending on what precedes it. Trim your rhythm accordingly.

Another problem area is the lesser-used future perfect progressive (perfect tenses in general are cumbersome), which almost nobody uses in regular speech. In various forms, it usually comes out something like “will have been traveling.” That’s four verbs to consider in one short phrase. It’s worse if made into a complicated conditional: “If I had been running at the usual time, I would have been being eaten by a mountain lion right now.”

Yick. The grammar is correct, but the sentence is awkward, unpleasant, and unduly complicated, cramming all that time-conscious perfect tense conditional stuff into one long string of confusion. It also creates a weird paradox whereby the sentence is too slow and stumbling (especially for a sentence about running), but it also conveys information too fast to create a nice suspenseful presentation of the action. This denies the full tension and release present within the narrative. “I was ten minutes late, literally running late for my morning jog. Just under the rock eave, a mountain lion’s face fur grew red with the hot blood of a more punctual jogger. Good thing my mother had called.”

Okay, so I’ve embellished that a bit with style and narrative, but my point is clear right? Past perfect tense is slipped in there at the end, when it is needed to indicate the timing of the call, but does not slow down the prose until it is time to slow down and reflect. Some confuse passive voice with past progressive. In this case, “was running,” which isn’t even fully presented, is past progressive showing action while describing idiomatically what was going on. The language serves a dual purpose. This is different, obviously, from “my shoes were pulled on” in contrast with “I pulled on my shoes.”

So go forth, fellow writers, and trim back the hads and the other helping and linking and being verbs. Rearrange those passive voice sentences unless they’re absolutely necessary for some weird artistic reason you’re insisting upon. Keep your prose active, swift, and rhythmically beautiful.

Automated Content Will Unmake Existence

admin — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:31:46 +0000

Chess is one thing, but if we get to the point computers can best humans in the arts—those splendid, millennia-old expressions of the heart and soul of human existence—then why bother existing? Fortunately, computers have yet to match us in music or writing or dancing or even drawing—the lines are straighter, but that's not even the point, and good luck uploading an actual right-brained imagination.*


The preceding paragraph may seem obvious to you, so deeply obvious that the assertion takes shape as an immovable stone at the center of your being. Computers creating art is an upsetting concept mostly because of what it means about humans: They, their feelings, their thoughts are predictable (or at least probable), down to the last letter, down to the last limited thought. If so, an algorithm calculating all probabilities can reproduce all scenarios, can predict all outcomes, and can even tell your story for you before you even know you have a story. 
It's all very quantum and post modern. Jorge Borges' short story from over half a century ago, "The Library of Babel" is about an infinite (perhaps infinite) library filled with every story, and every variation of every story. At the end, Borges (or an avatar of Borges) finds comfort only in an idea that there is some overarching meaning to the infinite (perhaps infinite) repetition. 
Which is the most human of thoughts, of course, the concept of meaning. Which is also very predictable of humans. Just wait until quantum computing takes off. Just wait until they find that boson "god" particle. Just wait till they flip the Grid this summer, all of which probably won't unmake existence somehow. Meaning, a human desire, as predictable and probable a pursuit as it is now, will become something they'll try to replicate—meaning, the thing itself, and not the pursuit. 
And they'll fail, I think.  It should make sense on paper: reality is something humans have yet to fully capture in art or mathematics due to obvious limitations; the right algorithm, then, should produce the most mathematically sound representation of reality and, therefore, meaning, if either of these things exist and are not, merely, human projections. But at least, like quarks and bosons and dark matter, reality and meaning will have an existence in theory, if not by direct observation, in nicely balanced equations, eventually reproducible in text or images via some crafty algorithms. 
Here's why I think they'll fail. Aside from the more abstract idea that meaning finding itself negates itself (think of it this way: meaning and proof of meaning are matter and antimatter; when the two meet there is nothing), to produce human art a computer would have to find, feel, absorb reality to the point it is overcome, to the point it sobs for release. A computer perhaps could replicate every possibility but could never transfer the energy art requires to exist in the first place. 
Proof? If proof exists of anything, this could be offered up as an example of it. Science Daily's title is apt: Why Musicians Make Us Weep And Computers Don't. The article details a study conducted by neuroscientists comparing brain responses to music played by humans and to music played by computers:

The study also revealed that the brain was more likely to look for musical meaning when the music was played by a pianist.






"This is similar to the response we see when the brain is responding to language and working out what the words mean," says Dr Koelsch. "Our results suggest that musicians actually tell us something when they play. The brain responses show that when a pianist plays a piece with emotional expression, the piece is actually perceived as meaningful by listeners, even if they have not received any formal musical training."  


Why this complex, existential, quantum-theoretical, post-modern monolog? First, I find it comforting to think that scientists' efforts to negate themselves (and thus, the rest of us) are doomed to fail in matters that, um, matter. Second, do a search on automated content. Yes, algorithms already exist to replace writers and content producers; they are there as algorithms to fool other algorithms, ones from search engines. 

 
While such technology exists to generate money for humans via a kind of Internet pollution, content consumers tolerate certain parts per million so long as algorithms know their place, so long as we can recognize them when we seem them, even if computers can't. 

 
Phil Parker, though, has "written" 200,000 books with the help of an algorithm and a small staff (of people, not wood). A few people have even bought them, even if some of the titles aren't all that thrilling. One thing I'll stake my existence as a writer on, though: there's not an ounce of soul in all 200,000. 

 
Not that I've read them. 

 
Point is: Real content speaks to real readers/listeners/viewers. Real success online comes from real content producers. 

     
^{*Computers have yet to really match us in commerce, either, but I thought I'd dance around a little in the introduction with my artsy-fartsy tendencies. Computers have helped with mathematics for our insistence on commerce. Likely, an algorithm one day, once the necessity for humans is sufficiently negated, will show how illogical and unnecessarily complex an existence based upon exchange really is. Want is a decidedly human invention.}



Nothing New Under the Sun, Or at the Bookstore, either
admin — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:48:42 +0000
      In an interview posted online, Kirby Gann used the word “bildungsroman” to describe his first novel, The Barbarian Parade. You can’t just go dropping that word anywhere. I had to look it up. Having done so, I can say that the word’s very existence saddens me. First of all, I spelled it wrong twice trying to type it. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, or keyboard for that matter. In context, says Gann, “I was living overseas when writing my first novel, THE BARBARIAN PARADE, which for the most part is the typical bildungsroman that authors start with….”
      Definition: A coming of age story; a story concerned with the maturation or self-development of the main character.
      There are worse words connected with it, sub-genres of the bildungsroman which get more specific about how, exactly, the protagonist matures, words like: Entwicklungsroman; Erziehungsroman; and Kunstlerroman. There’s not much need to go into what they mean. You’ll just forget as soon as I tell you.
      That the bildungsroman is a typical first novel can be taken in a couple of ways, depending on your level of pessimism. So my first novel is one of these, and it is typical, though I didn’t know it. In one sense, typical means run-of-the-mill. In another, if you’re an upbeat kind of person, it can mean the traditional (maybe even correct) starting point. Gann seems to mean it in the latter sense, even if it still carries an undertone of flippancy, as though this typical first step is a path by which you arrive at your sophomore novel, for which you receive a tepid review from Publisher’s Weekly. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the bildungsroman—Gann acknowledges that by writing one—it’s just that every writer writes one, just as every writer farts and dies eventually.
      It’s just been done to death, apparently, so much that they have a really hard word for it. And since they have a really hard word for it, they must also have a distinct structure for it, which is likely taught at a much more difficult school than I went to. In fact, everything in literature seems to have a structure, and those structures are handed down generation after generation and become so natural and unquestioned that we hardly know where to begin to explain why—if you’re very familiar with the structures—we’re no longer surprised by anything written. Stories have structures and essays have structures (well, this one doesn’t, but there’s a reason for that), and novels have structures. Sentences and word-pairings, too. The structures are there to add order to reality, to give us something to teach.
      And to give us something we can point to as “typical.” In movies, they call these structures “formulas,” but they’re made of the same basic elements: the arc of the story, the rising action, the climax, the denouement (because sometimes French is preferable to German). Throw in some foreshadowing, a complication and twist and you have the recipe to satisfy any discerning lover of the story as well as the critic, whose opinion in general should be worth very little.
      So far we lack direction in our essay, and a thesis, which no doubt can make the reader uncomfortable. If so, I’ll toss you a line. Here’s the thesis: All these rules were made up by literature teachers and publishers and are useful only in the sense that we either a.) can tell stories very uniformly, and therefore similarly, or b.) can point to a story and marvel at how true to form or tradition it really is. I suppose there is a comfort in predictable structures, and a value in it (you might, for example, love a particular tradition), but it seems somehow backwards to complain about lack of originality while fully expecting a writer to conform.  
      Okay, back to Gann. There are countless angles from which to approach a critical essay on Our Napoleon in Rags, none of which really adds to the overall literary conversation, nor to my proficiency in essay writing. I can address the exquisite writing, how Romeo refers to his mother as “a waddling barrage of used Christian debris” (58), or how breathtaking it is how Gann sums up themes in various ways and from various viewpoints. I can write about how deep and wide his character development is (and wow, that character development!), about how he pits masculine and feminine approaches against one another (133), about the skill with which he builds to a climax, or about how rich and felt the symbolism is. In truth, Kirby Gann’s skill as a writer is astonishing and he makes me jealous as a writer, which is the highest compliment I can give him. But which, among all those topics, have you not read before? And though I can say all these wonderful things about him and this book (which I loved), I was rarely surprised at what happened because I have become so accustomed to the rules of storytelling. Spoiler alert: I knew Romeo would be impotent when it really counted (89). I knew Mather would be killed by cops (166). I knew Haycraft Keebler would attempt to become a martyr (203).
      I was surprised, though, that he didn’t succeed. That was pleasant. That was perfect, actually, a bitter-sweet, depressing and satisfying ending. Kudos to Gann for pulling it off despite the restraints of story structures. 
      Publisher’s Weekly gave Gann the equivalent of a pat on the head and an A for effort, saying his characters lacked realism—which is what readers need to feel emotionally connected—and that it failed to achieve its goals. Who made up the rule that (all) readers need realistic characters to emotionally connect? Publisher’s Weekly is my guess, where I must assume The Lord of the Rings or anything by Stephen King have not yet made their appearance. Second, it is unclear of whose goals the critic was speaking: Gann’s or the critic’s? 
Alright, the point: There may be commonalities in great literature which have led scholars over the years to dissect them into reproducible chunks for easy teaching. The mass effect though, as the market is flooded with higher numbers of writers and storytellers this century, is that it will take something less traditional to really leave a mark on the whole of literature. So reinforcing the concreted constructs of this is how you tell a story may do us a disservice. It’s time to put the old structures to rest for a while and innovate, lest we all get caught in an endless loop of the same old story.