Quote of the day

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it.


Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.

Mark Twain

Feeding the dragon

Blogging has come a long way since the days when it was the Internet version of the CB radio.  With services like Blogger and Wordpress, setting up and maintaining a blog is almost effortless and even the greenest computer tyro can reach a potential audience of billions in a matter of minutes.

Unfortunately, one thing hasn't changed about blogging and that is the problem of what I call "feeding the dragon". The key to a successful blog is to get people coming back on a regular basis and the way to do that is to post items frequently.  The more often you post, the more likely people will return.  If you're posting only once a week, you're going to get a very low rate of return unless you're a major celebrity or giving away free iPads.  If you're posting at irregular intervals of three or four months, you're going to be invisible. At least daily should be your target and even more often if you can manage it.

But hang on,you say,  if I have to post so often how am I going to find enough material?  I'll be dry in a week.
That's feeding the dragon.

Finding things to write about every day or even several times a day starts with planning your blog.  What do you plan to write about?  Does it interest you?  Do you know much about the topic?  Do you want to learn more about it?  If answer no to any of these, then go back to square one and rethink your blog.  If you enthusiastic about your topic, if you have a lot to say and can't wait to read up on it, then you're bound to gather a huge supply of material that will keep you going for years.  On  the other hand, if you are only writing about a topic because it's in the public eye at the moment, don't know much about it, and forget about it the moment you hit "send", then that well will dry up very fast.

That being said, there are a few tricks you can use to keep your blogs coming.

This being the digital age, exploit it.  Subscribe to RSS feeds and create Google alerts.  Develop a morning routine of checking your best sources for new information.  Use social networks like Facebook and Twitter as additional sources.  Get things set up right and topics will be waiting for you in the morning in you inbox or browser just waiting to be sorted through.

Along similar lines, encourage feedback from your readers. Allow comments on your posts, set up polls, prominently display your email link.  Soon you'll find your readers doing a lot of leg work for you.

Another idea is to keep your posts short.  User studies show that when people are online they don't like to scroll, so if you want more posts that grab people's attention, break up that long post into several smaller one.  You'll cover more days and they'll be more effective.

Insurance is a handy thing and keeping a post in reserve is good insurance.  If you come up with an item that is likely to stay fresh and interesting for a time, tuck it away against that slow day when you can't find anything to write about or the world keeps you from doing any writing.

One tactic I use is to give myself a couple of days off on the weekends.  My readership tends to slack off anyway then, so I use Saturdays and Sundays to post something different, such as the book readings on this blog.  It makes for a change for my readers and I get a chance to recharge my batteries.

If all else fails, use the old newspaper columnist's trick and write about your personal life.  It may be as dull as a railway cafe knife, but if you write about how dull it is, you'll be on to a winner.

Or write about your dog.  If you don't have one, get one.

Pohl on collaboration

Frederik Pohl writes about how he approaches collaboration.  It's well worth a look. 

Quote of the day

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

E. B. White

The Stone Tape: Writing for television

Television technology has shot ahead over the past sixty years.  Today, television producers can do things that their colleagues only ten years ago could only dream of.  Editing, which was once almost impossible on the small screen, has become a matter of drag and drop.  Video cameras have gone from static monsters to portable high-definition machines that are inexorably forcing film cameras off the market.  And, of course, digital technology means that a producer on a tight budget can do things that once required giant studios with deep pockets. However, despite all of this, television remains a very different animal from cinema.  No matter how big the television screens get, how high the definition, and how sophisticated the home theatre systems, it isn't possible for cinema and television to merge into one.  At least, not without the offspring being less than the sum of the parts.

Looking at television today, it's clear that many producers believe exactly the opposite.  Switch on the talking fish tank any night and you can find programme after programme filled with long zooms, fast cuts, helicopter shots, wobbly cams, shots where people are barely in the frame, and actors adopting that maddening habit of modern films of whispering their lines instead of speaking in a normal volume–much less projecting.  If you don't keep your eyes glued to the screen every second you miss half of what's going on and if you do, you still miss the other half.  Why is this?  As in any profession, incompetence explains most of it.  The rest comes from a combination of ambition and inferiority complex on the part of producers, directors, and actors who see television as merely a springboard to the "real" world of cinema.  Unfortunately, they're missing the whole point.

For all the modern conceits, television is not a junior version of cinema.  Cinema is a communal experience where a person sits in the dark with many other people all sharing the same experience to the exclusion of everything else–with the exception of one's date and a large tub of buttered popcorn.   Television is a more individual or family experience that must compete with many outside distractions  Though it uses images as well as sound, television is much more a medium of the ear and of the mind than cinema.  This is partly due to television's roots in radio, but also due to the fact that television is a much more intimate medium than film.  This was true when television sets were the electronic hearths around which families gathered in the late 20th century and it is even more true today with television available on desktop screens, tiny media players, and even over cellular phones.

To understand this, let's look at a very good piece of television writing:  The Stone Tape, produced by the BBC and aired in 1972.  Only repeated once the following year and not seen again until its recent release on DVD, The Stone Tape has the reputation of being one of the most frightening, and certainly one of the best written, stories ever made for television.

Written by the legendary Nigel Kneale (the man behind the Quatermass series) The Stone Tape (script here) is set in a Victorian Gothic folly of a country house that's been taken over and converted into a research centre by an electronics firm.  Peter Brock and his young, over-enthusiastic crew of engineers arrive like an unruly group of schoolboys gearing themselves up for their task of developing a new recording medium ("Wagner's Ring Cycle on a ball bearing") to replace magnetic tape and steal a march on the Japanese.

The only snag in Brock's plans is that the computer storage room isn't finished after five months because the workmen refused to go back in and walked off the job.   It turns out that the reason why is that the room in question is haunted.  Or, at least, the image of a running, screaming woman appears at intervals.  What is peculiar is that people see the apparition to varying degrees.  Some see and hear it faintly, some not at all, and some, such as the team computer programmer Jill Greeley experience it so strongly that they can't stay in the room at all.

Brock is intrigued and treats the "ghost" like a scientific phenomenon.  Like an unwinding detective story, we are carried along as Brock and Jill uncover the history of the room, which is part of an ancient structure upon which the house was built; the apparition, which is that of a serving maid who died in a fall off a blind flight of stairs in the room in the 1890s; and of the appearances.  Eventually, Brock realises that the room is the key to the new recording medium that he's been searching for.  Somehow, the stones have recorded the last moments of the girl's life.

This doesn't come a moment too soon because Brock has a rival at the company in the form of pompous, impractical "practical" man who is forever going about with dye-stained hands in his quest to build a computerised washing machine.  If Brock can't deliver on The Big One, than his cutting-edge scientific research will give way to an overpriced joke of a home appliance.  Unfortunately, he doesn't know how the stone recordings work or how to make it play back on command.

It goes beyond unfortunate to tragic that Brock and his team are so obsessed with the physical aspect of the phenomenon that they can't see what Jill senses from the very start; that something terrifying is behind it all and the more that's learned the more frightening it becomes.  More and more questions arise, yet only Jill cares.  How did the girl die?  Why was she running?  Why did she scream like that?  What was she doing at the top of stairs that went nowhere?  Why did one person go mad after being in the room and another run like a scared rabbit?  How did the recording manage to cause the computer to type out "save" and "pray"?  Is the recording just of sound and image?  Could a personality be there?  Is the dead girl still trapped and suffering in the stonework?  Question upon question heaps up. Brock ignores their implications as he tries to force the recording to play back at his command, but he goes one step too far and rather than mastering it, he erases it (and the girl) from the stones.

Having blundered his main chance and, worse, lost to a washing machine, Brock ignores Jill as she uses the computer to continue analysing the data collected.  He even refuses to listen as, alarmed, she tries to tell him that there was another recording under the 19th century one; a much, much older one going back at least 7000 years.  A recording of something that is still aware and malevolent.

If you haven't seen it yet, I'll leave the synopsis at that.

What's interesting for us here is that The Stone Tape uses the nature of television rather, as is too often the case today, seeing it as a limitation to fight against.  There's very little in the way of special effects and what there is wouldn't impress a jaded 21st century viewer.  There are, however, impressive sound effects that push the story along and raise the hairs on the back of the neck at appropriate moments.  Clever editing, frequent cuts and incessant background music aren't the thing here.  What carries the load is powerful dialogue and actors who can deliver their lines without emoting and with projection.  Words provide the exposition, they reveal character, they are the medium of conflict.  Neat little throwaways like "Just an amateur opinion.  Qualified amateur" give real insights into the characters and their relationships.

For over half the scenes, you could turn your back to the screen and still be totally involved because of the dialogue.  From simple conversations we learn that Peter Brock is brilliant, but he's also manipulative, ambitious, and willing betray his wife and kids in order to inflict his overcharged libido on female members of staff.  Even without ghosts we know that Jill is an extremely intelligent woman with emotions as sensitive as the raw nerves of a burn victim; one who can't fit into the tight, schoolboy team that Brock surrounds himself with.  We don't need set pieces or blazing arguments to get this across.  In Kneale's script, it comes across in conversations about Father Christmas. 

Kneale, however, had been working in television for over twenty years and he understood the medium.  It may have been a household item that people used as electronic wallpaper and where writers had fallen back on restating plot points two or three times in a programme to cover people who went to make a sandwich or put the cat out, but Kneale understood that the television in the living room or on the bedroom dresser made it an intimate medium and a clever author could exploit that intimacy.  The Stone Tape is a teleplay that you can half watch while doing the jigsaw and you'll come away with a passable bit of drama, but if you start to pay attention, if you let it draw you in like a trusted friend telling you a ghost story over the embers of a dying fire on Christmas Eve, then it really gets its hooks into you.  You start picking up on those questions that Jill notices and no one else does.  You start seeing their implications.  What Kneale says to get you to suspend disbelief and put you in the right state of mind that sets you up for what he does not say, so your imagination fills in the gaps–or worse, darkens the shadows.  It doesn't matter what your mind comes up with; it will be a thousand times more effective than anything that CGI could ever deliver.  When the climax comes, it turns "Oh, that's a bit scary" into "Oh, sweet Jesus!  I'm sleeping with the lights and the radio on!"

The moral to take from this is:  When writing for television or any other medium, don't fight against it; learn the nature of the medium, it's strengths and weaknesses, and use them to your advantage.

And for heaven's sake, put it in the script notes that the actors should PROJECT!

Quote of the day

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

Hermann Hesse

Review: The Creature from Cleveland Depths

Originally posted on Tales of Future Past.

The modern smart phones are clever little things. They update our calendars, they write our memos, they check our email, they text our messages and they generally keep us in touch with our colleagues in the workaday world. They can even be used as phones!

But is this enough? Couldn't someone invent something just a little bit better to keep us alert and efficient on the job? Science fiction writer Fritz Leiber thought so and set forth his idea in his short story "The Creature from Cleveland Depths" (Galaxy, December 1962).

The time is the near future when the Cold War is still raging and most of the United States population has withdrawn into that sci-fi cliché, the underground city. Gusterson, an idea man with a rebellious streak, who refuses to move his family from the surface to Cleveland Below, is fed up with the pestering of Fay, a representative of the Micro Systems Company, who wants new ideas for consumer products. After suggesting things like automatic lint collectors, orbiting bubble homes, synthetic beauty masks, and plutonium-eating termites, Gusterson's patience reaches its limit and he suggests the following:

I’ll tell you what you can have that ignorant team of yours invent. They can fix me up a mechanical secretary that I can feed orders into and that’ll remind me when the exact moment comes to listen to TV or phone somebody or mail in a story or write a letter or pick up a magazine or look at an eclipse or a new orbiting station or fetch the kids from school or buy Daisy (Mrs Gusterson. ed.) a bunch of flowers or whatever it is. It’s got to be something that’s always with me, not something I have to go and consult or that I can get sick of and put down somewhere. And it’s got to remind me forcibly enough so that I take notice and don’t just shrug it aside, like I sometimes do even when Daisy reminds me of things. That’s what your stupid team can invent for me! If they do a good job, I’ll pay ’em as much as fifty dollars!

Three weeks later, Fay returns with a prototype of the gadget Gusterson described. It's a bit like a cross between an alarm clock and an audio recorder with a vibrating alarm added for good measure. Worn on the shoulder, it reminds the owner of appointments with prerecorded announcements and a discrete buzz. Gusterson is not happy and wants nothing to do with the "Tickler", as Fay calls it.

Fay returns to the Gustersons periodically and each time he's wearing the latest version of the Tickler–each one larger and more sophisticated than the last. Soon the Tickler is feeding Fay subliminal verbal stimuli to keep him motivated, monitoring body electricity and blood chemistry, and injecting him with drugs. It grows so large (It weighs two stone!) that Fay resembles a hunchback and has to wear special shirts and jackets with holes cut in the shoulder. You'd think this would make Fay a bit conspicuous, but not when everyone else in Cleveland Below is wearing similar.

Then Gusterson gets a good look at the latest model and, to his horror, sees that it has a camera and two tiny mechanical arms, so it looks like a cycloptic robot monkey squatting on Fay's shoulder. The thing is even reading Fay's memos for him and tearing up the ones that it'd rather the man not read.

Then, one day, it starts whispering in Fay's ear

Day by day, in every way, you’re learning to listen … and obey. Day by day—

Excuse me while I dump my phone down the toilet.

Quote of the day

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping.

Ed Zern, Field and Stream, November 1959

Review: Sh*t My Dad Says

You worry too much. Eat some bacon... What? No, I got no idea if it'll make you feel better, I just made too much bacon.

 Says Dr Sam Halpern, the 21st century's answer to Lazarus Long–except that Dr Halpern has a much more colourful vocabulary (it took me an hour to find a quote that didn't need asterisks) and his philosophy is less cracker barrel and more direct.   At age 28, Maxim.com writer and Dr. Halpren's son, Justin Halpern was forced by circumstances to move back in with his 73-year old father and found himself faced with comments like,

The worst thing you can be is a liar...Okay, fine, yes, the worst thing you can be is a Nazi, but then number two is liar.  Nazi one, liar two.

As a sort of coping mechanism, Justin Halpren started posting his father's aphorisms on his twitter account and before he knew what was happening his followers started numbering in the hundreds, then the thousands, and then the hundreds of thousands.  It became that artefact of the digital age: The Internet sensation and soon Mr Halpren was facing book offers and television deals.

 The result is the book Sh*t My Dad Says, a spot on the New York Times Best Seller's list, and an incarnation on television as $#*! My Dad Says starring William Shatner.  Not bad for a Twitter feed.

Sh*t My Dad Says is a thin volume, which is a plus because it's an extremely funny book and Halpern knows that the joke can only carry for so long before it wears out it's welcome. It's basically the story of the younger Halpern's relationship with his father, who is described as the "least passive-aggressive person on Earth".  In fact he's so blunt and given to, um, creative language that it surprises some people that the elder Halpern is a retired research scientist in nuclear medicine.  At least, it surprises people who haven't met many research scientists.

In between accounts of how the the elder Halpern guides the younger Halpern ("The one Dad yells at") through such things as lying about a science fair project, Little League baseball, and The Talk (at Denny's in full earshot of a table of fratboys), we're treated to more words of wisdom such as,

First things first: A car has five gears.  What's that smell?...Okay, first thing before the first thing: Farting in a car that's not moving makes you an ***hole.

The book is very economically written and Halpern is honest about his (many) shortcomings and his father shines through as a man who cares about his son, but isn't letting that get in the way of getting the last bowl of Grape Nuts.  It's touching in places, hilarious and infinitely quotable in others, and as blue in language as a barber shop parrot, but it achieves something that is a real rarity: A humour book that people will remember a few years down the line.

Book at Bedtime

The Wisdom of Father Brown

The Innocence of Father Brown

Quote of the day

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

G. K. Chesterton

The importance of routine

Discipline is a great help to the struggling writer.  It can mean the difference between a relatively painless job and a drawn out frustration where your writing becomes a drudgery that never gets started, much less done.  Full-time writers have a hard enough time sitting down at the keyboard.  Since writing is such a cerebral occupation and thinking and research provide so many excuses for distraction, the writer has to work very hard at ignoring temptation and not wasting time.  When the writer works at home and friends, neighbours, and relatives take this as meaning said writer is always available for some little errand.  Get enough of those little errands together and you can lose an entire week.  It's for this reason that the professional writer often acquires the reputation of an anal-retentive curmudgeon who answers the phone with a growl.

It's even worse for the beginning writer because he has to deal not only with all the problems of putting words on paper, but also the responsibility of family, friends, pets, and a paying job.  If he doesn't, then he's in real trouble.  Finding time to write at all can be like jamming a quart into a pint.  You can start the day with the best intentions of writing 1500 words and end up going to bed promising to make it up tomorrow.  Then tomorrow comes and it's the same story.

So, how to prevent this from happening?  The answer is to make your writing a matter of routine.  Set aside a particular place and a particular time every day and reserve it exclusively for writing.  Preferably, this should be at a time when you have the most energy and in a place with the least distractions.  I find the public library at about three o'clock in the afternoon is good, but if circumstances mean it's six AM in a McDonald's or propped in bed with a reading light at 11 PM while the significant other is sleeping, then that works, too.  The important thing is that it is in a time and place that you know you can get to each day.  It doesn't have to be a long time; two hours is great, but fifteen minutes does the job if that's all your day can spare.  You won't get as much done, but you'll get something done.  And look on the bright side; if you can't write all down tonight, you'll have something to start on tomorrow.

It's hard at first.  For the first few weeks it will feel like a miserable chore, but soon this routine will become, well, routine.  Eventually, it will be like running is for fitness nuts; you'll feel uncomfortable if you don't get your daily scribbling in.

That's all well and good, you say, but what if I can't come up with something to write at exactly that time of day?  Maybe I can't get the muse to strike at 8:15 every night.  Think so?  Here's a secret I learned years ago:  Muses are overrated.  True, being struck by inspiration and getting on a role is great.  It's an exhilarating rush like skiing over fine powder combined with the comfort of a cigar that's drawing nicely, but you don't need it in order to write.

I'll say it again.  You. Don't. Need. It.  I learned this when I was writing a comedy about twelve years ago and I was facing all sorts of deadlines.  I was annoyed, I was miserable, I didn't feel at all in a joking mood, yet, to my astonishment, I discovered that I could be funny even when I didn't feel like it.  I could turn the funny on at will.  I could turn out ten pages of farce and wit, then turn to my dog and scream, "What the *&^% are YOU looking at?!?"

If you have something to say, it will come out during your writing time.  You won't be able to stop it.  If you don't, then work on something else.  Blog, journal, compose e-mails, brainstorm, free associate, make outlines of your next book.  It doesn't matter so long as you stick to your routine and keep writing.  You'll get into the groove before you know it.

Final point:  When's the best time to start a routine?  Right now.

What are reading this for?  Get going!