Putting down a book

Hello everyone,

I recently put down a book and didn’t finish it. It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, I’m sure, but it is enough to me. It provoked a lot of thoughts in me about the commitments duty of the reader (which is a fallacious way to put it). I decided to address it in two parts: what it means for the reader and what it means for the writer. The former comes first.

1.

The book I put down was Journey to the End of the Night, and I decided to re-read Maus instead. If, by chance, you know these books, you’ll see I traded in a difficult and obscure read for an easier (well, as much as one about the holocaust can be) and popular one.

Now, before you decry me, slander me for being a copout, a little backstory. I’ve been reading a book every week or so for quite awhile. It does get tedious at times. For example, the book We was quite a slow read. It was an excellent book for the reasons I said in my review, but every day I opened it I had to set reading goals. I usually get my book from the library, so I have three deadlines to fulfill: reading the book by the time it’s due (not a big deal), making sure I have not only it read but thought it through enough to write a review and something to think about for the podcast . Early on, I established a pattern of 5-15-30-50 (as in percents I read of the book per day or pair of days), but I’ve had to slow down because I’m starting to feel fatigued.

Backstory’s done so now I’ll go back to the present. It’s always easier to abandon a work in progress. Commitment is hard, and I know that so I try not give many things up. But this book, Journey to the End of the Night hoo boy. Let me talk about it. It’s written between the world wars and semi-autobiographical before that style really took off (maybe that’s just my ignorance speaking).

Anyway, it’s got pretty good parts, really heavy parts and a lot of philosophical musing. It has a lot of French cynicism and some criticism (mostly warfare of the 20th century and colonialism, at least up to the part where I got to. I’m sure there was a lot more later). However, there are a lot of paragraphs where the most intriguing, controversial idea isn’t the first or last sentence but instead somewhere in the middle and at random. Sometimes it’ll be two sentences of description surrounding one of a philosophical/observational nature. In other words, you are constantly assaulted by importance, never knowing when the meat of the book will appear (or is it everything? Bro, dude, think about it).

I didn’t start writing this to complain. It’s a good book and one I’m sure I’ll revisit when I have time or less concerns (hah, I wrote this sentence before the libraries closed so it may be awhile). What I did want to say is that I think it’s fine to put down something you don’t like. It felt bad to put something down. I used to never do that, whether it was TV, a video game or a book. I think, in my youth, those things were a lot more scarce.

Once upon a time, my brother once told me that I shouldn’t ditch school unless I had something better to do. So little in my family is done capriciously, and putting this book down, for me, is important. It may not be for you, either in the literal or metaphorical sense (please, for the love of god, don’t care about it the literal sense), but it is for me.

2.

Now for the second half of my argument. I want to address something that I think is a little larger than the title, but the first argument leads to it. As I talked about the consumer (the reader) in the first half, now I will talk about the producer (the writer/artist) here. Who knows if I’ll make myself clear? I will put it this way, simply: no one deserves your time. Anyone who wants you to pay attention to them shouldn’t win by default.

My argument may seem to be pretty abstract (oy vey, this is what a week’s pause does to my mind), but let me try to say that everyone to a degree acknowledges no one has a right to anything but must get it. And so, just like everything else, entertainment is a form of trade, and the commodities are money and the consumption of time (the consumers’, not just the producers’). I think this may be similar to the whole argument about the commodification of art, but I don’t actually know too much about that other than what it sounds like.

Anyway, back to my argument. Writers have to sell themselves (that gets another oy vey) and their work, and they’ve figured out how to do exactly that. The many conventions of this are the correct formula (hoo boy, such a simple word for a complicated idea), marketing and silly things like cultural ideas like you owe anything to a book.

I guess I’ll go into the correct formula thing before I talk about my opinion. You can see the correct formula really clearly in television. If you watch The Next Generation every episode is structured almost exactly the same. At the same point, there’s some conflict, there’s an introduction to the problems, the first and failed answer (or if it succeeds it turns out to not address the problem), the complication, etc. In books, the most common structure is the three act play. Sometimes it becomes four like Recursion, but that’s rare.

In September or October (I can’t remember exactly), I read Robert McKee’s Story, one of the bibles of scriptwriting. It also has a lot of stuff, inadvertently, about book writing. One of those that made me laugh is the ‘there are only so many types of stories to tell’ spiel. I don’t think it’s accurate. I think what it says is that there are only so many ways that people have thought to tell a story. And the other ones have been ignored because they’re not seen as profitable.

Okay, more to the point, he talks about how every scene needs to have some quality going up or down, such as good to bad or fidelity to infidelity, etc. It’s more nuanced, but the premise is that. Also as the story goes on, the contrasts must become wider and more impactful. His argument isn’t that far from Aristotle’s. I don’t agree, really. Life does not have these sorts of quantifiable (at least in terms of the writer) ups and downs. The less expert writer will have these sorts of contrasts moving this way and down to increase tension or make their story more interesting even where they don’t make sense. An easy example is characters needlessly facing off with each other like Another Life. Characters acted, both in space and on Earth, like they were in high school. Oy vey. A more expert writer will incorporate these into the text without much of anyone paying attention. Nevertheless, these persist.

The typical counterargument to this is life isn’t like that. And yeah, that is some of what I have to say, but I have something else to say. It’s not like I’m a fan of long, drawn-out scenes that have nothing interesting in them. I know about word efficiency and stuff like that, that we pick and choose our scenes (I’m not going to talk about it in this blog post). However, does conflict or some surpassing of a goal actually indicate something? I see it as a thing like the three act structure where stories which are structured this way tend to be the good ones, and it weeds out a lot of bad ones, but everyone acts as if it were exclusively the correct choice. Instead of most good stories fit these criteria, the opposite is taken: no story can be good unless they fit the criteria.

Where this is more nefarious is where publishing comes in. Because it is a commercial venture, and commercial ventures are risk-averse, agents and publishers favor the more secure bread winners. Especially relevant now (and hopefully it won’t be soon) is modern YA. It needs a competition (Ender’s Game, The Hunger Games), a love interest (The Hunger Games), a growth of difficulties and risks (every modern book ever), trilogies (don’t blame Tolkein for this), etc. Did any of you read Red Rising or the subsequent books? I did. I read all three. And it follows the formula perfectly, and none of the books are memorable or valuable. No one will remember it in ten years, nor will anyone particularly recall it for their children when they’re a teenager. It confines rather than enhances storytelling. But that’s capitalism.

Marketing, and it’s something I’m learning about, is something I don’t care to address in depth right now. There’s newsletters, promos and ads. It’s all a bit normal but things I’d, in a perfect world, like to see outside of my responsibilities and not necessarily required as they are now. A writer, traditional and not, needs to do this. And the career also becomes about you and not just your work. I’m not gonna bother giving examples and instead lay the burden on you.

Obviously, I personally don’t agree that writing should be like this at all, but (and here’s the but) it’s the world we live in. We could change it, and I would really prefer if I could never think about anyone ever reading my books or anything I do. I’d like to just write and create, and people could partake if they want. But I have to look into a bunch of things to promote book sales. Our current market economy (and every one in history almost) demands that an artist must sell their art. It means that every entertainer, just like a business, must try to gain a foothold into the market of selling you their product (consumption of time) when there is only so much time to be consumed.

When I was in college I took a philosophy class to get my honors (summa cum laude, by the way, which I feel I get to brag about). I got exposed for the first time to people like Kant, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre and Walter Benjamin. The last of these brought up something that I’d never considered before, the reproducibility of media. He was writing during World War 2 and was escaping Nazi Germany. He had no idea how much every type of media would get reproducible with the invention of computers. His world has less to do with ours than we thought.

Effectively, every movie, book and anything filmed can be infinitely replayed by use of the internet. Why every piece of data isn’t available comes down to money. I should say profits, not anything else. Disney doesn’t want you to see the movie off iTunes (for example) without paying a fee to see it. It makes sense for a loaf of bread or a table, but it doesn’t make sense of an infinitely reproducible work. What does it cost them to distribute the movie? Nothing or pretty close to nothing. It’s a few cents at most.

Now, I’m not going to get into the specifics of how costs or funding for films or the arts happens (that we need the money people to make most everything). I think, objectively, it isn’t hard to say this situation and think that, for the sake of money, ideas are less available. I was brought up to always value books (and I’ve expanded that to everything, such as film, TV, paintings, etc.), and part of that appreciation is wanting to see them more available and distributed. What is holding us back? Not ability!

You may look at this or know some authors (or about them) and, my dear strawperson, you’re asking “So you’re saying you, personally, and every author I know are money grubbers who don’t put everything they have up for free?” No. The choice is not in most people’s hands. The few people that really have a choice about this sort of thing are the big shots and the publishers. The rest of us, by design, are scrounging the scraps that are left.

Okay, so what I mean by that is that remember what I was saying about vying for attention? And how things are infinitely reproducible thanks to computers (and let’s be honest, books/movies/etc. could be mass produced pretty well before that since we’re no longer living in the 1940s). Well, it really is zero sum. One good book can occupy the attention of literally everyone. One good movie will get watched by everyone. The nature of these things is that .001% of authors will occupy 99.999% of everyone’s attention (it’s more disproportionate, but you get the idea). So even if I believed in the system, everyone must acknowledge that it is by nature unfair. But this is not my purview or belief so it borders on arguing in bad faith. I don’t think artists (I’m using it as a blanket term to include even people who I think very incapable of art such as R.A. Salvatore) should have to participate in capitalism even if it were perfectly fair and even.

All authors are trying to not die penniless. There is no way most can win, and the idea of the competition. This isn’t to beg for sympathy. It’s, for me, a realistic view of the situation, that the nature of creativity (which is, let’s be honest, inherent to humans and important to prosperity, which is especially evident now with everyone being in lockdown—or you should be) coerces us to produce, and we should not be punished for it. I was going to end on a comment about the market economy, but instead I’ll say this: I doubt I’ll see the better world I want in my lifetime. I don’t think only writers or artists deserve this sort of absolution, but they are one of the many who do.