The Horror, The Horror: Forays into Horror Fiction

Be Afraid, Very Afraid . . .

I didn’t think I liked horror fiction. In my teens, I didn’t want to watch Jason or Freddy Krueger slash their way through their teenage victims. I didn’t read Stephen King. That stuff freaked me out.

But, you say, that’s what horror is supposed to do, freak you out, give you a good scare. That’s the thing, back then, just hearing about Jason and his friends freaked me out. I was scared enough without seeing it on the screen or reading it on the page.

Some of that had to do with a religious upbringing and probably the Satanic Panic (brought about by my parent’s fears of Dungeons & Dragons) of the ’80s. Some of it had to do with a general dislike of jump scares in movies or even real life.

Even though I shed my religious upbringing, reading horror fiction wasn’t high on my list (horror movies still don’t rank high–that jump scare thing still gets me)–until now.

. . . Or Enjoy Great Characters and Great Writing

Now, I think I’ll spend more time reading horror fiction, especially after reading Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians and Bentley Little’s The Consultant.

I read Jones’ book after reading a couple of interviews with him about writing. I read Little’s novel after watching the Prime series starring Christoph Waltz as the delightfully sinister Regus Patoff.

In both the series and the novel, a software company in dire straits hires (in the series, the CEO kills himself; in the novel, the company loses a lucrative merger) Patoff as a consultant to do what consultants do in real life–“consolidate staff, streamline practices and procedure, [and do everything needed] in order to stay viable in today’s competitive marketplace.”

The novel is, as Little notes in his dedication, about the “horrors of the modern workplace.” It’s also about ordinary people like protagonist Craig Horne getting caught up in something extraordinary and seemingly beyond their control.

It’s the characters that are also the most engaging part of Jones’ novel. In it, four Native Americans, Lewis, Ricky, Gabe, and Cassidy come to regret an elk hunt on land reserved for tribal elders from a decade before the action of the novel takes place. During the hunt, the four men in a frenzy kill a large number of elk, including a mother with a live calf. They think the hunt is a bounty, one that could keep them fed all winter. But, they have to discard the meat when the law catches up to them.

Lewis, in particular, is well drawn. A decade after the hunt, he’s settled down, gotten married, and works at the local post office. He’s also the first of the group to discover he’s being stalked by a supernatural being, an elk woman that seems to represent both the mother elk and her calf.

Jones masterfully builds sympathy for the characters, focusing on their ordinary lives before tearing those lives apart. He also ends the story with a twist that seems unusual–I won’t spoil it here, because the novel, along with Little’s, is well worth the read.

New Story Published at Every Day Fiction

This will be a brief post today to announce the publication of the short story A Good Life at Every Day Fiction. It’s a dark fantasy story. You can find it at the link below:

A Good Life

On writing, writers, and money

“I have no money, no resources, no hope, I am the happiest man alive.”

So writes Henry Miller early in “Tropic of Cancer.” It’s an exuberant voice, as Erica Jong notes in her biography of Miller, “The Devil at Large.” It’s an infectious voice. It certainly infected me when I first read “Tropic of Cancer” in my twenties. Almost 30 years on, I can’t remember now whether I read “Tropic of Cancer” before I saw the movie “Henry & June” or if I saw the movie first. Probably, I saw the movie first and then picked up “Tropic of Cancer,” wanting to see how the movie and book compared.

The movie is actually drawn from Anais Nin’s journals. I didn’t know that then. But, I loved the movie. I loved the way it depicted the impecunious Miller (played by Fred Ward) delighted by the joie de vivre of living, writing, and bumming his way through Depression-era Paris. The movie was much more infectious than the book for me in my twenties trying to be a writer.

“Henry & June” was the first movie I’d seen that depicted a writer’s life. It was the life for me. Disdain money. Celebrate art, freedom, what have you. If you’re a writer, you’re an artist. You shouldn’t worry about how to make a living from writing. I wasn’t worried, then, about how to make a living as a writer. I was in graduate school hoping I might one day teach lit at a university and write on the side.

The funny thing is, as I was learning to write, I rarely put too much of a thought to earning a living as a writer. Oh, I fantasized about getting paid a thousand bucks for a short story in Playboy or the New Yorker—I think Playboy might have paid better. Or, I assumed I’d write a bestselling novel, be hailed a literary genius, and never have to worry about money again. I would just write and write and write. Naive fantasies. Rock star fantasies.

As I was learning to write (fiction, primarily, because writing fiction was “real” writing) I spent a lot of time and money on how-to-write books. Some, like John Gardner’s “The Art of Fiction,” are invaluable, especially for the exercises. Others, forgettable. Even now, as someone who has written professionally as a journalist, I buy and read and even learn from books about writing. Of course, while books about writing help, you still have to write and read novels, stories, poems, essays—everything—to learn to write.

While many of these books on writing are great—another I’ll recommend here is Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Steering the Craft”—and have great exercises and advice on the craft of writing itself, many consistently seem to stray from one topic: the business of writing. How do you make a living as a writer?

A few answer the question. Stephen King’s “On Writing” addresses writing as a business, in particular, writing fiction. The first writing book I ever read, Rita Mae Brown’s “Starting From Scratch,” has chapters about going into newspaper journalism and writing for magazines as ways to make a living writing while you write fiction on the side and hope for the best. (I went into newspaper journalism largely because of Brown’s advice.) Brown doesn’t go into great detail about how to freelance for magazines; she just suggests it as an avenue to income and recognition.

“Starting From Scratch” came out in 1988 and “On Writing” in 2000, and both books are probably woefully outdated, especially now as newspapers and magazines go extinct. Every millisecond turns into an asteroid now with any sort of publishing, and almost everything seems to go obsolete within seconds of appearing. Perhaps writing itself is obsolete.

Richard Rhodes’ “How to Write”—published in 1995— is probably just as woefully outdated as Brown’s or King’s, regarding the business of writing, but I love this book. I recently reread it—I first read it in 2003—as I’ve been sporadically rereading all the books I have on writing. Rhodes’ early chapters on overcoming fears about writing—I reread these, even just a paragraph or two, when I need to pierce my own self-doubts and fears—are worth the price of admission.Throughout the book, Rhodes writes about the business of writing of personal dealings with publishers and editors and other scoundrels, but he also dedicates a full chapter on writing as a business.

While some of his advice on breaking into publishing might be outdated, his outlook on trying to make a living as a writer is sober and realistic. “[T]enacity, not to say obstinance . . . is a valuable asset if you want to write, because it’s not easy to find your way to publication. It’s even harder to make a living writing, and few writers do.”

Like other businesses, a professional writer has to network. You have to “overcome the proverbial shyness that afflicts fledgling writers,” Rhodes writes, and talk to other writers and as well as editors. You have to make contact with agents and publishers. You have to do the type of things you might do to find jobs of any kind.

I’m not sure how much the world of indie publishing has changed this. Agents might be less necessary. But, you’re still going to have to market your work so you can make a living.

Many writers—myself included—also have to get past a learned disdain for money or commerce, the idea that somehow art and commerce don’t or shouldn’t mix. That somehow, if you make money as a writer, you’re nothing more than a hack. I’ve struggled with this notion for years, and it’s still an idea I have to wrestle with. While the seeds of my issues with money were planted in a religious upbringing that took seriously the idea that money was the root of all evil, I kept finding reinforcement in it throughout my life. Confirmation bias was deeply entrenched in my psyche.

In the next-to-the-last chapter of “How to Write,” Rhodes quotes at length from Anthony Trollope’s “Autobiography”. The 19th-century English novelist was prolific and productive, to say the least. He would finish writing a novel and immediately begin writing the next. Rhodes notes Trollope fell out of favor with his Victorian audience after his autobiography was posthumously published. What scandalized the Victorians weren’t sexual confessions, as Rhodes notes, but Trollope’s honesty about and pride in creating a career as a professional writer.

I am well aware that there are many who think that an author in his authorship should not regard money,—nor a painter or sculptor, or composer in his art. I do not know that this unnatural sacrifice is supposed to extend itself further. A barrister, a clergyman, a doctor, an engineer, and even actors and architects, may without disgrace follow the bent of human nature, and endeavor to fill their bellies and clothe their backs, and also those of their wives and children, as comfortably as they can by the exercise of their abilities and their crafts.

Where did the idea come from that writers—any artists for that matter— not regard money? Did we do it to ourselves when we stopped, somewhere around the end of World War I, being “faithful witness[es] of everyman,” as John Ralston Saul posits in his book “Voltaire’s Bastards,” and became literary navel-gazers? There’s probably some truth to that. The Romantics probably had something to with it, too. Romanticism was fresh enough in Trollope’s time to influence those who might want Trollope to shut up about money and simply create art for art’s sake. And in Henry Miller’s exuberant exultation about having neither money nor resources and yet being the “happiest man alive” there is a thread of Romanticism tied to literary modernism.

I suppose, ideally, it’s what we ought to strive for as writers or artists. But, having no money or resources is rarely hopeful, despite Henry Miller’s claim. Writers need to be paid, and not despise money.

Life without enough resources is just another source of fear that can stifle writing, or any person for that matter, as Trollope so poignantly notes:

It is a mistake to suppose that a man is a better man because he despises money. Few do so, and those few in doing so suffer a defeat. Who does not desire to be hospitable to his friends, generous to the poor, liberal to all, munificent to his children, and to be himself free from the carking fear which poverty creates? The subject will not stand an argument;—and yet authors are told that they should disregard payment for their work, and be content to devote their unbought brains to the welfare of the public. Brains that are unbought will never serve the public much. Take away from English authors their copyrights, and you would very soon take away from England her authors.

Make a habit of it: Stephen King’s “On Writing”

I started this blog post at around 8 p.m. on a Wednesday. I try to write at the same time every weeknight, currently for about 30 minutes to an hour. It doesn’t always happen, but I try to make a habit of it.

If there is anybody who knows about making a habit of writing, it’s Stephen King. “I like to get ten pages a day,” he writes in “On Writing,” “which amounts to 2,000 words.” He also tries to write every day. By establishing this writing habit early on, King’s become one of the most prolific living writers on the planet.

Ten pages a day seems like a hefty amount, intimidating, really, especially if you were a writer just starting out. But, the king of horror goes on to say that 1,000 words a day, or about five pages, is an achievable goal for new writers—and you can even take a day off. I’ve tried reaching that five-pages-a-day-goal, probably after reading “On Writing” for the first time. It’s tough. Blank pages, blank Word documents are intimidating. Trying to sit still long enough to do it when you have the blank screen and no words coming is intimidating.

Of course, what’s intimidating you is fear. “Fear,” writes Richard Rhodes in another favorite book on writing “How To Write,” “stops more people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do?”

Similar questions or harsher ones probably cross your mind when you sit down to write, although Rhodes offers a good way to break the wall of writer’s block: “When fear is upon you, write for yourself. It doesn’t matter what you write as long as you do it regularly [habit, again]. Set aside an hour or a half-hour daily or as often as you can . . . .Forget spelling . . . . Forget punctuation if paying attention to it inhibits you—you can always add it later. . . . Don’t think about how you’re writing: write.”

It doesn’t really matter—especially at first—what you write, you just have to write, Rhodes notes, even if you’re just writing about a process.

I’ve spent a good part of my writing life trying to develop a consistent writing habit. One of the more difficult aspects of establishing a writing habit is working it around a full-time job, especially when that job involves writing. Working for newspapers made it even more difficult, given the erratic schedules I’ve followed. Shifting your mind from nonfiction to fiction can be difficult too, but I was able to do it.

Establishing a writing habit has many purposes. If you’re writing fiction, when you write regularly, it keeps you in the world you are creating. “Once I start work on a project,” King writes, “I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to ‘feel’ like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death.”

I think this can be said for nonfiction as well. An article or essay can grow stale, you can lose the narrative and the connection of one thought to the other. Even writing daily, you can get lost and essay too far from the original path.

Establishing a habit helps you tap into the flow of your imagination, into the unconscious mind without needing to wait for the Muse to whisper in your ear. The Muse, as King notes, is “a hard-headed guy who’s not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. . . .Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ’til noon or seven ’til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making magic.”

But, you can also hurt yourself psychically if you’re too rigid about sticking to your habit. As Roy Peter Clark notes in his chapter about “On Writing” in “Murder Your Darlings,” a writing habit can be self-defeating, especially if you’ve set up some staggeringly impossible rate of productivity. “You do not have to exercise every day to gain maximum health benefit,” Clark writes. “In the same spirit, do not be discouraged by violating your self-imposed writing schedule.”

Clark’s right about this. You overwork yourself lifting weights, say, and you strain or tear a muscle, you’re not getting any benefit from the exercise. You keep working out, trying to work past the pain, and not heal, you hurt yourself worse. No pain, no gain is bullshit. No writing every day, no success is bullshit too. When you beat yourself up for not writing every day, or not getting in 2,000 words a day, you’re reacting to another form of fear, the authoritarian and demanding ego telling you, “You can’t really be a writer if you don’t write every day.” Listening to that voice can be as debilitating as not writing at all and never producing anything.

Still, at the same time, to be a writer, you must write. When you establish a writing habit, you’re working past fear, and becoming productive. You’re producing words, sentences, paragraphs, pages. Pages become articles, stories, and books. A page a day is a book a year, as Rhodes notes. If your intention is to become a professional writer, you have to produce, and then submit what you write. And that’s another fear you have to overcome—the fear of submitting what you write, the fear of being rejected, or maybe even the fear of being accepted.

I’ve set up my own walls when it comes to developing a career as a professional writer. Oh, I could establish a writing habit. Often, even with a full-time job, I could make time to write, but mostly what I would write—as far as fiction goes—were writing exercises from writing books. Not to say I didn’t learn anything. I did.

As an aside: No matter what kind of writing you do, if you want to challenge yourself, do the exercises in John Gardner’s book “The Art of Fiction.”

So, I wrote those exercises. I incorporated them in my writer’s toolbox. When I got my first newspaper job, I wove some of those skills I learned into my journalism. Using these tools certainly made me a better feature writer.

The thing is, I aspired to write fiction, and I was writing fiction when I wrote those exercises. I just wasn’t finishing anything. I wasn’t putting all those techniques together into a finished project. Or it took me months just to write a short story when I finally put it all together. I would revise and polish and polish and revise the same story. I might submit it once or twice to the big prominent magazines and journals like The New Yorker or The Paris Review, and once the story was rejected, I’d set it aside, and find a new book with more exercises.

Doing the exercises was a way to tell myself that I was dedicated to the art and craft of writing without really being productive. I was also learning—sometimes from the writing books—to disdain the notion of being a “professional writer,” while at the same time I craved being published. I craved a literary life, one in which I wasn’t really producing a whole lot of literature.

When I first read “On Writing,” I didn’t pay too much attention to King’s section on developing a career as a writer. I wish I had paid more attention to it. King’s composite writer, “Frank,” as his success grows, as he begins to publish more, he begins to think in terms of publishing as a business. He begins to see himself and presents himself as a professional writer. He takes as much care crafting letters to agents and publishers as he does crafting his stories. Those letters are like a resume, the first thing a potential employer usually sees of you.

Of course, in the 20 years since “On Writing” was published, publishing has changed drastically, especially as indie publishing has gained more and more respect. Still, King’s advice has value. You have to keep producing. You have to submit. You have to act as if you are a professional, whether you take a traditional route, an indie route, or become a hybrid.

And, writing is about more than publishing and producing and making lots of money. Writing is always about writing. “I have written,” King writes, “because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side—I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for the joy, you can do it forever.”

Writing’s something I hope to do forever because it gives me joy. I make a habit of it because I can travel through my imagination. I make a habit of it because it helps me think and is meaningful. Of course, making a great deal of dough from it wouldn’t hurt too much either.

On Writing: Talking Heads

If you’re anywhere near my age, you know Talking Heads was a pretty good band from the ’80s. Their sound is electronically funky and weird, fun to listen to. On the other hand, when you find yourself following talking heads in large chunks of dialogue, you find yourself in a not so beautiful place. You find yourself lulled mad by a monotonous drone.

Let me explain: a couple days ago at my local library, I turned in unfinished John Scalzi’s The End of All Things. I still had a couple of renews left on the book, the sixth in the Old Man’s War series. But, I lost interest midway through the novel, so there was no reason to renew or read on.

This is a shame, because I’ve loved the other books in the series. Like any great series, Old Man’s War has an engaging cast of characters, great individual story lines and a compelling narrative arc that stitches each novel together into a unified whole. As a bonus, the series is punctuated with bits of Scalzi’s wry but affable sense of humor.

And, at first The End of All Things seems to have this, too. It follows from the action of The Human Division. Earth’s been betrayed by its presumed defender, the Colonial Union. The Colonial Union has a shaky relationship with the alien-run Conclave and no longer has a resource in the Earth for its Colonial Defense Force. And, something sinister is in the works, the result of collusion between humans and aliens. That collusion is discovered, investigated and, I assume, thwarted in The End of All Things, which Scalzi structures as a series of four linked novellas, told in a variety of voices, beginning with Rafe Daquin, pilot of the starship Chandler and a brain in a box. Daquin’s voice — which is all he has, of course — comes across with a sense of humor about his situation as he outlines his compulsion to tell his story — to help the Colonial Union, and maybe, just maybe get a fresh body.

“I’m not a writer or an orator,” Daquin reports. “I’m not a storyteller. I’m a spaceship pilot, so let me just get that right out there.” His story isn’t going to be “classic literature” (though the voice is reminiscent of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye); instead, you’ll have to bear with him because his story is going “to skip around. I’m going to get lost telling the story and come back to points and then get lost again. I’m doing this off the top of my head.”

That last sentence is classic Scalzi humor. But the voice and its narrative thrust is what drives this first novella. It’s highly readable, entertaining stuff. Just the kind of thing you’d expect from Scalzi.

Where the book lost me is in the next section, told from the point of view of one of the aliens of the Conclave. This should be the most compelling and interesting part of the novel, but no matter how hard I tried in reading it, this portion didn’t and couldn’t hold my interest.

Primarily, it’s because the narrative and a compelling voice gets lost in lengthy bits of dialogue. About 90 percent or more of the section is dialogue, or rather talking heads. None of the characters — alien or human — are distinct, other than some science-fiction babble of made up measures of time and new words for food. (Of course, not to single Scalzi out, this is a problem of much science fiction, whether on the page or screen, especially handling aliens, which aside from outward appearances are all too human.) Still, this section pretty much violates everything we writers have been taught about dialogue.

Dialogue in fiction and nonfiction has many roles, one of which is to give characters or subjects a voice, so we as readers get a feel for who they are. In other words, it characterizes characters and shows (remember, show, don’t tell) relationships between characters.

Dialogue can also be used to move the action along, but as Hallie Ephron notes in her book Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel, “Not everything your characters say belongs in dialogue. It’s better to summarize and fast-forward through the necessary but unexciting bits than risk bogging down your story with trivial talk.…Only use dialogue when it’s dramatic, when it moves the story along, or when it develops characters and their relationships. Never force a character to deliver a speech about himself or another character, or why something is happening.”

As I say, almost the whole of the middle section of The End of All Things uses dialogue primarily to summarize and present what could be best left to expository or descriptive narration and makes scenes of potential political intrigue boring. Scalzi also could show us his science-fiction writing chops and give us the unique voice of an alien species tasked to be an ambassador caught up in an intrigue between human factions. The only time within the section the alien ambassador seems alien is when it describes to another alien how the young of its species are cannibalistic, and how this is a good thing for the species.

The section reminds me of soap opera characters narrating their actions at the first part of the show — just in case you missed the last episode — as if we’re not intelligent enough to pick up the story through visual clues or through regular dialogue. Get on with the show. As a reader and writer, it’s frustrating to see good writers like Scalzi do this sort of thing.

Scalzi’s not, of course, the only writer guilty of this. It seems to appear often in genre writing. China Mieville, for instance, does it in his otherwise superb novel The City & The City, a blend of science fiction and mystery. As the novel climaxes hero Inspector Borlu confronts villain Professor Bowden and in a long expository dialogue, Bowden explains his villainy:

Borlu, I can kill you where you stand and, do you realise, no one will even know where we are. If you were in one place or the other they might come for me, but you’re not. The thing is, and I know it wouldn’t work this way and so do you but that’s because no one in this place [the novel is set in two cities that share the same dimensional space; it is illegal for each city’s citizens to even acknowledge the other’s existence], and that includes Breach, obeys the rules, their own rules…

…And so on for a full paragraph. Soap opera villains do this, as do comic book villains and many villains in TV crime dramas. They explain their madness. It’s distracting, and often boring.

Still, I have to say, as I typed this excerpt from The City & The City, I caught unique speech patterns from the professor. He seems to be unraveling as his plot unravels. Or maybe he’s buying time? So, there is some redemption to this and shows that even as Mieville slips into a clichéd genre convention, he’s a capable writer.

But, generally, long swaths of reported speech like this should be avoided in fiction, and nonfiction, as well. Long quotes in nonfiction should convey some important information that otherwise can’t be summarized. Otherwise summarize. Or find your book back on the library shelves, unfinished.

— Todd

Recommended Reading: News: A User’s Manual by Alain de Botton

The News: A User’s Manual
Alain de Botton
Vintage, 2014
Paperback, 272 pages

If the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life” were sung today, instead of singing “I read the news today, oh boy,” John Lennon might just sing “I saw the news today, oh boy!”

“Oh, boy!” Indeed.

On its Web site, CNN’s breaking news around 10 p.m. CDT July 9, 2018, is a photo of Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s Supreme Court Justice nominee, at a podium presumably at the White House or on Capitol Hill or somewhere in D.C., the president smiling smugly in the background, Kavanaugh’s family off to one side, wife smiling lovingly.

This is important news, right? At least for the U.S.? Then why do I almost automatically disengage from it? Why don’t I click the photo to read or listen to the story that follows?

Below the photo is a headline: “Trump’s Supreme Court pick is a DC insider who worked for special counsel Ken Starr during the Bill Clinton investigation in the 1990s.” That headline is among many about Kavanaugh.

Twelve hours later, Kavanaugh’s nomination is no longer the lead story. The lead is about the rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach trapped in a cave in Thailand. Scrolling down, however, I can pick from five different headlines analyzing Kavanaugh. Still, I find myself uninterested enough not to click any of the links.

It’s not that I’m politically apathetic. I vote, I sometimes follow political news and even comment here and there, usually on Facebook.

The problem: There’s already so much analysis about Kavanaugh, just from this one source, it’s numbing. My problem, as with many of us who follow the news regularly, or not so regularly for that matter, is that it’s the same story different name as the last nominee. I could begrudgingly switch to the Fox News Web site, and though they’re likely to praise the nomination, the analysis, in general, will be similar. I’m disengaged because I’m bored with the analysis, no matter who’s presenting it; it will continue in the days, weeks and months leading up to the justice’s confirmation — and then continue afterward until his first decision, which, in turn, will get analyzed … well you get the picture.

This sort of disengagement is addressed in Alain de Botton’s The News: A User’s Manual, an analysis of how news, as it’s presented now, affects us, and how the news could be better and serve us better as consumers of it — and as providers of it, better present it.

“We regularly come across headlines of apparent importance that, in private, leave us disengaged,” De Botton writes. “Boredom and confusion may be two of the most common, but also two of the most shameful and therefore concealed, emotions provoked by so-called ‘serious’ political stories presented by the news organizations of modern democracies.”

De Botton is an essayist, philosopher and public intellectual known for such books as Essays on Love, How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy. He also runs the School of Life, a school, as its Web site notes, dedicated “to developing emotional intelligence,” a sort of self-help school that promotes philosophy, art and literature over pop psychology as practical sources for changing lives and making one’s way in the world a bit more tolerable.

On the surface, in De Botton’s estimate, the news, no matter what’s covered — politics, crime, celebrities — doesn’t make our lives more tolerable. Even just a casual perusal of the news is likely to cause us fear or anger, despair or apathy or lust or envy, depending on the stories we follow, or where we happen to catch the 24-hour news cycle. Some news might elicit all these emotions at once.

The medium in which the news is presented doesn’t seem to matter. De Botton draws examples from print, TV and presumably online — given that most print media (or what once was print) is now followed online. (The book was published on the cusp of social media’s dominance as an outlet for news, even individually created “news,” and smart phone technology, but with minor adjustments, De Botton’s critique easily applies to those media as well.)

For instance, here are some headlines De Botton cites early on from the BBC that could have come across our newsfeed on Twitter or Facebook or on TV at any time and pretty much from any source, local, national or international:

• “COUNCIL SPENDING ‘LACKING CLARITY’”

• “ANTI-TAX GROUP LEADS CONSERVATIVE CHARGE”

• “SYDNEY MAN CHARGED WITH CANNIBALISM AND INCEST”

Only the third headline might command our attention, but probably just insofar as to cause us anger or outrage at such hideous acts. The story itself would in print probably run three-to-four-hundred words in length or gain a minute or two of broadcast time, and then it would become a mere piffle in our minds. Just a few of us, including the journalist reporting it, would follow the story from arrest to prosecution to sentencing — unless the Sydney man happened to hold celebrity status or the story itself, especially in trial, were to reveal gory, gruesome and macabre details. Otherwise, it’s water-cooler talk.

Which, is the issue, De Botton says. What’s the point?

De Botton offers possibilities to improve news and its presentation, primarily suggesting news dig deeper into the “whys” of events or people it reports on are important. Why should we care about a war in Africa when we’re drinking our coffee in our kitchens in the U.S.? What if we see the every day lives of those caught in the war, to see the universals in their lives, then maybe we might just care some? Or we might see a crime as more than just an event in which in which we can express our self-righteous outrage at the perpetrator.

“The tragedies of others should remind us of how close we ourselves often are to behaving in amoral, blinkered or violent ways,” De Botton writes. “Seeing the consequences of such impulses harrowingly played out in the lives of strangers should leave us feeling at once scared and sympathetic rather than hubristic and self-righteous.”

While on one hand De Botton’s suggestions for how news should be gathered and presented is highly idealistic — especially to the reporter, the journalist who is frantically trying to daily fill column space or airtime with something to keep his job — on the other hand, his ideas are intriguing and his critique of the news is spot on in the way it influences those who consume it.

As reporters, we often just go about writing the city council story, knowing the city’s budget will usually fall short or that the next Supreme Court justice will influence the workings of the nation one way or another. We will too often go just to the people in power to get some quotes and then go onto the next story and talk to more talking heads. We ask the same questions and get the same narrative. We don’t always go out with our notebooks to understand the whys of a story, to dig out what a story means, if anything at all.

The kind of journalism De Botton seems to advocate does exist in longform magazine writing, it existed at its best in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s as The New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, et al, emerged. But then, that style peaked by the ’90s. Still, those journalists ferreted out meaningful stories by training literary lenses on their subjects.

Is this the kind of journalism consumers of news now want? Do they have the attention span to read such stories, to watch a lengthy documentary film? Perhaps after reading De Botton’s book, they will want more of that kind of journalism, rather than what they are getting?

I want to think that’s what news consumers want — news with meaning and richness of texture, news that looks at the world in its ordinariness as an artist does. It’s why I am encouraged when I read a great narrative piece in a magazine, online, or even in a newspaper. It’s why I was encouraged that until a few weeks ago CNN had a great show that showed us the world through its people, its food and its culture in the late Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown.”

I would like to see De Botton’s idealistic approach put to the test. It might be more encouraging and less “Oh, boy!” than you think.

— Todd

On Writing: The Glamour of Grammar

If there was a moment in graduate school that dismayed and hurt me more, I can’t think of anything worse than the day my first seminar paper was returned.

To see that big green F — ironically green pens were used to grade papers because green ink was supposed to be less antagonistic than red — at the top of the page and all those inserted green commas — my paper looked like it had grown a football field. And I was Tom Brady watching the Philadelphia Eagles celebrate their Super Bowl victory while I sat helplessly and forlornly in the middle of the turf at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. Defeated not by linebackers and a last-second touchdown pass, but by flawed argumentation and grammar.

I dropped the course immediately.

But, I didn’t let the F end my graduate career, no more than a Super Bowl loss has ended Brady’s career. I refreshed my grammar rereading some basic composition texts and the goat text for most writers — The Elements of Style.

For me then — and since — grammar mattered.

Do you really have to grasp every element of grammar to be a great writer? Spelling seems to be a bugbear for many. There are of course the legends: F. Scott Fitzgerald apparently couldn’t spell and Shakespeare spelled his name six different ways — that, of course, was before spelling in English had become formalized.

And there are, of course, experimental works of genius like the unpunctuated last chapter of Ulysses — but Ulysses is an exceptional piece.

What about commas? Does Cormac McCarthy really know where the commas, or periods for that matter, go in passages like this from All the Pretty Horses:

“That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies  …”

And so on for another quarter of a page until the sentence/paragraph comes to a full stop. So what? Does this evocative lyrical piece in McCarthy’s signature Faulknerway style need commas or conventional punctuation? Clearly like Joyce, McCarthy is trying to show us the unconscious flow of the mind, of consciousness, of a dream state in this case. Where, exactly would you punctuate it? Still, if he’s trying to evoke a dream state, why does he keep reminding us this is a dream by repeating the phrase “in the dream”?

And, of course, as you’re reading this post, many of you might ding me for sentence fragments or using colloquialisms like “goat” for “go-to”. And, if you are like a recent editor of mine, you’ll cringe until your spine snaps to see me begin sentences with conjunctions. “And” at the beginning of a sentence particularly bugged him.

Probably as much as I was bugged as an editor when a writer of mine couldn’t name the parts of speech, and yet wrote well. Another writer couldn’t spell well and often wrote cringe worthy sentences, but was a great reporter. She got the details and great quotes. And with some great editing, won an award for feature writing.

Still, for me, grammar matters. The trauma of a green F sticks with me. It makes me check and double-check my copy and makes me fierce editor. All writers should know the basics, as Roy Peter Clark says in Writing Tools.

Even if you aren’t a professional writer, clear, generally grammatically correct writing affects communication no matter the field. At the very least, there is a utilitarian necessity for clear writing.

“Poorly written reports, memos, announcements, and messages cost us time and money,” Clark writes. “They are blood clots in the body politic. The flow of information is blocked. Crucial problems go unsolved. Opportunities for reform and efficiency are buried.”

— Todd

Current News: Why Anthony Bourdain Matters

Unless you count imaginary trips, I haven’t traveled much, although I hope to do more.

Yet, I feel I’ve traveled the world vicariously through — the rest of this sentence seems unreal to write — the wanderings of the now late Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain, 61, the celebrity chef, writer and host of CNN’s “Parts Unknown” died June 8, apparently of suicide.

In the past couple of years, news of celebrity deaths seemed to outnumber celebrities. I’m not much of a celebrity watcher/follower. Of course, I have my Hollywood heroes — Harrison Ford, Jack Nicholson, Frances McDormand, etc. — and certainly as a teen I was obsessed with pretty much everything the band Van Halen did.

But, I didn’t get into celebrity gossip, unless you count the great TV talk shows like the “Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” as celebrity gossip, or regularly follow TMZ — though that show has begun to warrant some legit breaking news.

The closest thing I suppose I have to celebrity obsession is with writers. I used to collect writer’s obituaries and, when I really get into a particular writer, I will read what I can about him or her. If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’d probably find a hint or two I’ve had long love affair with Ernest Hemingway.

In 2016, in particular, it seemed every Hollywood star, every rock star was turning up dead, only two celebrity deaths genuinely affected me as if I’d actually lost a relative or friend — Carrie Fisher, of course was my princess, like she was for many of you. What more can you say about the space princess who was your first movie star crush?

Of course, David Bowie and Prince rank high up on the loss scale, too.

Then, however, came writer Jim Harrison. Harrison died March 26, 2016, sort of the ideal writer’s death, I suppose, if there is any ideal death — at his table, writing in longhand.

I came to Harrison, late, introduced to his writing by my mentor and colleague, Clay Coppedge. Before I ever read a word of Harrison’s prose, I heard Harrison read at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, when he was promoting his collection of essays, The Raw and the Cooked.

This is where I get back to Anthony Bourdain. As any reader of Jim Harrison knows, the man was a gourmand. Harrison took pleasure in food like no other writer I’ve ever read, other than Hemingway (Harrison would have hated that comparison).

Until 2009, I had no idea Anthony Bourdain was such a fan of Harrison’s.

Then, I had become a religious watcher of Bourdain’s show on the Travel Channel, “No Reservations.” It became an obsession. In Bourdain, I found a kindred spirit — I longed for adventure; he adventured. He ate, he drank and he loved life. He also wrote well about it and had his own TV show.

It was hard not to love his show and him. I was in the second year of long-term unemployment, edging toward divorce and straining under a savage bout with depression. Bourdain’s joie de vivre was intoxicating, a relief from the darkness crushing against me from all sides, from the high place of my mind.

I made sure not to miss the episode Bourdain visited Harrison in Montana.

“I’m in awe of him,” Bourdain says of Harrison in the episode. It’s refreshing to hear a celebrity say he’s in awe of someone and mean it.

And it’s clear from Bourdain’s book Medium Raw, the chef was in awe of Harrison. Harrison is “the man who has done everything cool with everybody who’s ever been cool, dating back to when they invented the fucking word.”

Like Harrison, what the bad-boy chef —Bourdain was once called the Hunter S. Thompson of celebrity chefs — writer and traveler gave us was authenticity, the kind of thing that seems missing in our world of corporate ken dolls, the kind of thing Bourdain gave his fans, even in a Montana that, as wild as it still is, has also become overrun with CEOs and moguls.

In all of his shows — his most recent was “Parts Unknown” — Bourdain traveled and ate and drank and gave us armchair travelers a touch of depth about a place, the sort of thing you can’t get with ordinary tours. He went to out-of-the-way places, had a love affair with street food and in Vietnam famously ate a bowl of $6 noodles with President Obama.

After Bourdain’s passing last week, all I could post about it was “Damn.”

I hadn’t watched “Parts Unknown” in awhile, but I loved every episode for its touch of authenticity. Plus, more often than not, he’d end up citing a favorite book — in Tangier he recalled Sheltering Sky author Paul Bowles, and probably talked about William S. Burroughs — or he’d somehow work in a line from “Apocalypse Now.”

Just this week, The Atlantic, talks about Bourdain’s authenticity. “The key ingredient of Bourdain’s career was indeed realness.”

That’s what mattered about him. He was a pop culture icon. And yet, he could stand in awe of other icons like Harrison.

He mattered to me, because he showed a life of no fear, and he talked about good food, good books, good music. He wasn’t afraid to be cultured or crazy.

It’s the kind of thing we need now. We need pop culture of the variety of Bourdain and Harrison, even Hemingway and Twain. People unafraid of the world or life. People without borders, because somehow we’ve become a culture isolated and wanting protection through walls.

I’d rather live in Bourdain’s borderless world.

There’s a photo that’s circulated around social media. I found it on a Jim Harrison Facebook fan site. It’s of Bourdain, Harrison and the now late actress Margot Kidder. They are drinking at a bar in Livingston, Montana.

It’s a poignant scene, the kind of thing that makes you wish there were an afterlife, but only if you could hang out at bars with your friends and with great actors and writers and chefs.

It’s the kind of afterlife I hope Bourdain is enjoying.

— Todd

Recommended Reading: Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War

By TODD GLASSCOCK

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
Mary Roach
W.W. Norton, 2016
Hardcover, 285 pages
 
Almost three-quarters of a century have passed since some 13,000 paratroopers dropped from the skies over Normandy a few hours before thousands more Allied soldiers would land on the beaches to begin the liberation of Europe from the Third Reich.

Those paratroopers dropped with anywhere from 90-120 pounds of gear, including parachutes, rifles, knives — some dropped with machetes — entrenching tools, flashlights, compasses and maps, packs of rations, and extra ammo and grenades. All this gear was meant to be used to survive anything Hitler’s Wehrmacht launched at them: bullets, bombs and bunkers or panzers, machine pistols and panzerfausts.

On their way down the paratroopers probably prayed not just that their lives and their comrades’ lives would be spared the barrage of flak coming at them, but that they had, on landing — and if they survived that landing — the guts and guns to fight the men firing that flak at them and at the planes that dropped them. We know they had the guts and guns. That’s well-documented.

What we don’t know is whether they worried if their iconic cotton-twill uniforms might survive the blasts of a grenade’s explosion or wick away their body heat as they marched from one Norman farm field through another. These sorts of worries are the meat of research at the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center in Natick, Massachusetts. There, scientists test Kevlar body armor and its variations; they test fabrics to see which cling to the skin in the vacuum created by an explosion, worsening burns, or which cloth lifts away from the skin, lessening the damage the victim might endure.

When you think of military science, you might think of the marvels of engineering that might go into the so far hypothetical F19 stealth fighter or even the strategy and tactics a commander uses to launch a successful campaign.

In Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, Mary Roach explores the sort of military science performed at Natick, the kind that researches the best uniforms that protect the men and women wearing them from “all that modern warfare has to throw at them: flames, explosives, bullets, lasers, bomb-blasted dirt, blister agents, anthrax, sand fleas.”

It’s the unsung, behind-the-scenes science of warfare that Roach puts into the spotlight, the things rarely talked about in history books or heard of on the news, “the quiet, esoteric battles with less considered adversaries: exhaustion, shock, panic, ducks.”

Ducks? Exactly.

Unless you’re Elmer Fudd, I doubt you think of a duck as something that poses a risk to national security. But “birdstrike,” as the military calls the mass of geese, gulls, ducks and other birds that collide with Air Force jets, costs “$50 million to $80 million in damage and, once every few years, the lives of the people on board.”

The Air Force tests birdstrike — so you’ll know— with an aptly named chicken gun, which hurtles chickens against jets at speeds of 400 mph or more.

Grunt is Roach’s fifth book. I’m currently reading her first, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, which explores how cadavers have been used to aid the progress of medical science, and even of military science, as they were in 1893 when Capt. Louis La Garde of the U.S. Army Medical Corps experimented with what’s now termed stopping power of the then new .30-caliber Springfield rifle, firing the gun at a series of naked and unarmed corpses.

With the advent of ballistics gel, the military, as well as law enforcement, rarely use cadavers in weapons testing any longer — the freshly dead, as it turns out, aren’t good test subjects to determine stopping power. The already stopped often don’t react to damage from bullets in the same way the living or simulated living parts made from the gel do.

Actually, one primary task of the military now is to prevent its personnel from becoming corpses. One way to do this is to train medics in gruesomely realistic settings, as the 1st Marine Division does its medical corpsmen at Camp Pendleton. In its combat trauma management course, the Marines find themselves in the midst of a simulated Afghan village when all hell breaks loose during an insurgent attack.

Only, the corpsmen aren’t anywhere near Afghanistan; they are in a movie studio designed to give them the feel of war. Here, they find actors — in some cases amputee Marine veterans — screaming in agony as gouts of movie blood fountain from the same sort of special effects equipment that makes a mess of soldiers on screen. In the background all the while, as the medics tend the wounded, realistic sounds of combat blare out over speakers — audio from the movie Saving Private Ryan.

While these scenes are engaging, Roach gives us her best with the quirky stories ­ — sometimes asides in a chapter — that have the most potential for maximum gross-out factor, as when she turns to the subject of wound care using maggots.

She first encounters the fly larvae in Stiff, where she describes her visit to the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility. There, where forensics researchers study decay in cadavers in the name of law enforcement and solving murders, Roach notes “grains of rice” squirming in a man’s belly button. “It’s a rice grain mosh pit,” she writes with her characteristic sense of humor.

Only, these aren’t grains of rice. They’re maggots, which she decides to give a much more palatable name to — “haciendas”. In Grunt, she graduates to making roses roses and maggots maggots, when she visits wound care researchers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR).

Maggots eat dead or decaying meat. “When the meat is part of an open wound,” Roach reports, “the act of eating performs upon the meal a kind of debridement. Debridement — the removal of dead or dying tissue — fights infection and facilitates healing.”

The last thing a wounded soldier trying to recover from those wounds needs is infection. Enter the WRAIR maggot therapists, who treat wounds using said fly larvae, to eat away dead, decaying, infectious flesh. These larvae, of course, aren’t grown in the wild but safely cultivated in sterile environments by the therapists — sometimes in home labs.

Having seen maggots at work before, Roach is less squeamish this time around: Maggot therapist George Peck places three of the wriggling larvae on the tip of Roach’s index finger. When they rear up in search of food, Roach likens them to puppets on Sesame Street.

It’s sort of a sweet scene — if you think of the maggots as, say, puppets or playful puppies. Then comes the kicker, when two of the larvae lift their companion up as if in celebration. Peck informs Roach, “They do cannibalize.”

Which, indeed, is what they do.

Roach peppers her book with scenes like this. At once graphic, yet somehow endearing, largely because throughout the book, Roach charms with her voice, a voice that is at once affable and serious. Voice and narrative always make a piece work.

Grunt works because of Roach’s voice and her ability to set scenes like those above. Still,  war is a grave, serious subject, and while Roach’s voice is often charming and witty, she never makes of her subject a frivolous thing.

She tells the story of the people involved in the science of war with humanity and depth, and how their work affects them.

Grunt ends poignantly inside the morgue and mortuary of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, where military autopsies are performed. Roach notes that since “2004, around 6,000 autopsies have taken place here,” all of men and women killed in combat.

Here, autopsies uncover more than the cause of death. They uncover what could save the next soldier’s life. The beefed-up, buff pectorals of many weight-lifting soldiers and Marines, for instance, have caused small needles to miss their mark when medics try to relieve air pressure off of shot-through collapsed lungs. Autopsies discovered this. Now, longer needles are used on buffer pecs.

In the end, however, war is about the dead, the dead young men and women going through the morgue and mortuary, and the question posed by one of the medical examiners, “Was it worth it?”

History shows us it was worth it to land behind the lines of the Norman coast in 1944. Still, it’s a difficult question to answer. Roach leaves us pondering that question with a final image. She sees a stepladder in the exam room: she learns it’s used by autopsy photographers to get perspective, to get the whole body in the frame.

“I guess war is like that,” Roach writes. “A thousand points of light, as they say. Only when you step back and view the sum, only then are you able to grasp the worth, the justification for the extinguishing of any single point. Right at the moment, it’s tough to get that perspective. It’s tough to imagine a stepladder high enough.”

The Business of Writing: Being an Expert on You, or What’s Your Work Style?

Most of my professional writing career has been as a full-time employee, primarily in journalism, but also in marketing and textbook publishing.

For approximately a year, I freelanced full time. I did OK, until my bread-and-butter client went away.

Freelancing full time is scary. And I was live without a net, without any strong understanding of the business side of things. It made working for myself harder than I ever imagined.

Now, I’m back to freelancing part time and I’m trying at the same time to put up the safety net of better business skills under me. One way I’m doing this is through reading and I recently bought Sara Horowitz’s The Freelancer’s Bible to get a better grasp of what I need to do on the business side.

Today, as I was reading a bit of the book at lunch, I came across this passage on working with clients under the subhead “Be the expert on you”: “Even if your client has worked with freelancers before, everyone’s different. Put a page on your website about how you work. Tell your client how you work.”

According to Horowitz, knowing yourself and how you work helps you stay organized. It helps you work with the client about your preferences. How do you prefer to be contacted? When, for that matter, are you available?  How will you and the client work together so you make a good fit?

The passage hooked me because I was recently on an interview for a full time writing gig (hey part-time freelance is great but it doesn’t pay all the bills) and I was a bit stumped when the interviewer asked, “What is your work style?”

I feel I flubbed this question, because I didn’t know quite what it meant. Did the interviewer want to know if I worked fast and accurately? Or how I structured my work day? How did I prioritize? How do I take direction? (I spent an awful long time about how I hated micromanagement.) Did I prefer to take constant direction or did I prefer to get my assignment and prefer to be left alone until it was done? Did I prefer email? Phone calls or in-person communication?

Yes, to all. The interviewer wanted me to talk about each of these things when asked about work style, according to thebalancecareers.com.

The work style question, according to the site, is meant “to decide whether you will fit in well with the company culture and the job. This question also reveals to the employer whether you are self-aware enough to recognize and clearly communicate your work style.”

Answering the work style question also seems a good tool to put into your freelance tool kit. Know yourself and your client gets to know you better.

— Todd