Monthly Archives: July 2008

“I Am Legend” and Those Awful, Incredulous Atheists

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Credulity, it seems, is the quintessential American virtue.  Value is found not in closely examining claims to discover their relationship to truth but, instead, by expressing a willingness to abandon inquiry in favor of hope.  Would claim X, if true, make the world a better place?  If so, we should act as if it is true, regardless of evidence or consequences.  We can solve the energy crisis, for instance, if we believe strongly enough in green technologies and never mind the cost.  We can banish homelessness by giving those without shelter the hope of a better tomorrow, regardless of the underlying causes of their plight.  We can put an end to hate and bigotry by admonishing those who do not respect all beliefs.  We can justify a lifetime of suffering if only we hold fast to the idea of posthumous paradise.

Religion, of course, is the exemplar of this culture of credulity.  Faith is, at its core, wish fullfilment.  I want there to be an omnibenevolent God who loves me so, therefore, there is an omnibenevolent God who loves me.  I desire good to be rewarded and evil punished so, therefore, an afterlive exists designed to do just that.  The rejection of religious faith, thus, is popularly condemned as the broader rejection of hope.  The atheist must be bitter and suffering as a result of his choice–or perhaps his choice came about because of his bitterness and suffering.  Regardless, the atheist is the subject of pitty, if not outright scorn, because he has opted to turn away from a set of beliefs that are so nice.  Why, society asks, would any person want to undermine such an optimistic world view?

This condemnation of atheism is socially acceptable in a way that would seem immediately suspect if directed at a given religious sect.  A movie or television show that portrayed a Jewish character as brought low by his religion, only to find happiness by embracing Christ, would find itself labeled religious bigotry, not a messenger of embraceable platitudes.  A clear example of the banality of anti-atheist sentiment can be seen in the recent blockbuster film, “I Am Legend.”

Staring Will Smith, the movie tells the story of a scientist, Robert Neville, left alone by, and immune to, a global plague that turns many of its victims into zombie-like vampires.  By day, he explores an abandoned New York City, hunting the vampires and bringing them back to his lab to experiment for a cure.  By night, he hides in his home, which he has retrofitted into an armored bunker, hoping to live to see the next day. Whether Neville was an atheist before the infection is never explicitly told, though there is a scene at the beginning where he prays with his family.  We can assume, therefore, that he was, at one time, a man of faith, but lost his belief as a result of the evils he saw around him.  This is typical of Hollywood’s view of atheists: they only ever arrive at their atheism through a traumatic severing of faith.  Religion is the default human condition and to reject it must be the result of anger against the heavenly father.  Instead of atheism being a rational choice, one arrived at by weighing argument and evidence, it is instead analogous to the teenager screaming “You’re not my dad!” at her offending parent and slamming her bedroom door.  Atheism comes about through emotional rebellion, not intellectual application.  As such, it is less a philosophy than a symptom of a curable disease.  Why is the atheist so angry?  If we can alleviate that anger, he will gladly return to the fold.

Near the end of the film, Neville meets a woman and a young boy.  They are traveling to a safe zone somewhere in New England.  Neville, who has information that these protected areas, while planned, never materialized, questions the woman on how she knows of its existence.  “God told me,” she said.  Neville rejects this.  Returning to the theme of atheism as anger, he tells the woman that there is no God.  Would God have allowed this plague?  No, Neville says.  There must not be a God, because the disease is wholly the work of man.  The woman isn’t put off by any of this.  She knows God is out there and that he’s the one who told her about the safe zone.  When we first see her, she’s driving a car with a cross hanging from the rearview mirror.

The climax comes when the three are cornered by the vampires in Neville’s lab.  Neville discovers that his latest attempt at a cure, tested on a vampire he has imprisoned in the spot they’re now hiding, has worked.  He can fix the world’s greatest ill.  For reasons that make little practical sense, however, he decides that he must hand the cure off to the woman and sacrifice himself to protect her and the boy.  He comes to this odd conclusion through a clumsy recovery of faith.  His daughter, it seems, was fond of clasping her tiny hands into the shape of a butterfly, a fact he remembers as he notices first a butterfly tattoo on the neck of the vampire he’s captured and, second, the cracks in the glass separating him from the horde of undead, cracks which form, yes, a butterfly.  These coincidences convince him that there really is a god and that the woman’s claim to divine knowledge is true.  Neville hands her the cure, locks her safely away, and blows himself up.  He’s recovered from his unfortunate atheism but must still pay the price for rejecting God.  The film concludes with the woman and boy finding the promised safe zone and handing Neville’s cure to the proper authorities.

What are we to make of this heavy handed moralizing?  The message in “I Am Legend” is clear: belief in God makes even the extraordinary possible.  To reject belief in God, then, is to reject the possibility of the extraordinary.  What a sad and hopeless belief atheism must, therefore, be.  Of course, had Neville been Jewish and the woman more overtly Christian, anti-defamation leagues everywhere would have called for the film’s boycott.  That isn’t the case when the target of righteous condemnation is atheism.  All good, caring, and loving people necessarily have faith in a good, caring, and loving creator.  It is only the cynics and the miserable who would reject such a beautiful dream.

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Obama's Prayer and the Problem of Religious Leaders

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The act of prying Obama’s written prayer from the Western Wall in Jerusalem and handing it off to an Israeli journalist was unquestionably an invasion of privacy.  Forget the condemnation of the act as sacrilegious and as an affront to the relationship between a man and his god.  Those criticisms only make sense, of course, if that god exists and the religious claims about him are true.  In the event that Yahweh is fictitious, the piece of paper pulled from the Western Wall is nothing more than Barack Obama’s internal mutterings to an expansive fantasy.  But they were his own and the privacy of the words ought to have been respected.

That said, their content is troubling.  Obama wrote,

Lord – Protect my family and me. Forgive me my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will.

I’ve added the emphasis because the mainstream press hasn’t.  There are two explanations for Obama’s words.  The first is the cynic’s take.  He knew the prayer would be leaked to the press and used it as an opportunity to demonstrate the strength of his faith to religious voters.  Obama was raised without belief and so must make every effort to convince the nation’s faithful that he shares their reverence for things unseen.  An expressed lack of such faith would mean the immediate failure of his campaign.  But what if he’s not playing politics?  What if he genuinely believes what he wrote?  This second explanation, then, is that he was using the holiness of the Western Wall as other pilgrims do, to send a personal plea to the universe’s sovereign.

The possibility should deeply disturb all rational people.  It ought, in fact, to make Obama’s more thoughtful supporters reconsider their November votes.  To demonstrate why, we need only play a brief thought experiment.  Imagine for a moment that the god Obama hopes to be an instrument of doesn’t exist.  This would mean that any guidance he thinks he’s receiving from that deity in fact is a product of his own mind.  That, in and of itself, is fine.  We want our leaders to act on their own thoughts.  That’s why we elect one President over another.  But if Obama is acting through his own volition but believes he’s acting on the will of his god, then no amount of evidence and argumentation will sway him from his path.  What is evidence in the face of omniscience?  What is argumentation in the face of omnibenevolence?  This is a terrifying prospect.  And it’s one we’ve already rejected when the instrument of divine will is George W. Bush.  Why should we give Obama a theological free pass when his professed belief is just as dangerous?  Let us not forget that we are currently in a war, justified or not, with fanatics who themselves act in accordance with the will of their god.

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6 Tips on Promoting Serial Novels

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Serializing a first draft of a novel online is wonderful.  For reasons I’ve discussed in earlier an article, the experience of getting daily feedback and enthusiasm from readers is the best way I’ve found to push through the sometimes dreadful moments of carrying a story to novel length.  The trouble is getting those readers in the first place.  With the internet crowded by content, both fantastic and miserable, convincing readers to put the effort into to something that promises to be book length is a battle.  Getting them to actually land eyeballs on your work is no easier.

What follows are the techniques I used and the promotional options I tried.  Some worked well, others didn’t.  With many of them, I probably could have done a better job but, on the whole, I’m happy with my novel’s performance.  THE HOLE, at the time of this writing, has thousands of visitors every month and a couple hundred people signed up to get each new chapter in their email.  Those numbers aren’t staggering, they aren’t what Stephen King can expect from an online serial, but they feel pretty good to this first time author.

1) Nail the opening.

This is all most people will ever read.  You want them hooked at least enough to click the next link at the bottom of that first chapter.  Serial novels demand a lot of on screen reading, something most users, myself included, aren’t thrilled about.  It’s one thing to read a 500 word blog post and then click a link to something new, but the prospect of consuming 100,000 words on a monitor sounds like nothing by eye strain.  So it better be a great 100,000 words and the opening better be fantastic enough to convince readers that that’s the case.

2) Community news sites can be hit-or-miss.

THE HOLE began life as a series of articles published on the social news site, Newsvine.  That community driven newspaper allows writers to create their own subgroups on whatever topics are of interest.  I’d had success with my non-fiction essays on Newsvine before, often receiving several hundred thoughtful reader comments on each, and, finding a Newsvine community for serial fiction, I decided to try it out.

The results were mixed.  I did attract a handful of readers who have loyally stuck with me to the present, but it was only a handful.  These kinds of sites just aren’t for fiction and so that’s not what readers expect to find when they get there.  Still, if you already have a sizable following, there’s no reason not to cross post on a community news site and your blog.  The more places you make your novel available, the more potential readers you have.  And when you’re writing a book, it’s all about getting readers.  Worry about building a brand around your website later.

3) Social networking isn’t as productive as it might seem.

I never fully groked the social networking scene.  I have a Facebook account and maybe forty friends on it, but I don’t use it much, and don’t really get why others do, either.  Promoting your novel on a social networking site ultimately means promoting it to your friends, and that’s always been easy, even without the Facebook or MySpace go-between.  Just email them–and ask them to email their friends.

I did setup a Facebook fan page for my writing, since these pages allow anyone to join up, keeping my friends list limited to people I actually know–but it didn’t do a whole lot. Perhaps if I’d had more experience with social networking sites, I’d have been better able to leverage them as a promotional tool.  As it stands, Facebook (the only site I use) was a bust.

4) Social linking is easy, but don’t expect the world.

Social linking, such as Reddit and Digg, can provide some return, though I’ve come to expect little.  Reddit has been great for my non-fiction writing, but fiction submissions generally fail to bring many readers.  Digg, as a whole, isn’t worth the time to submit to.  It’s too specific in its interests, and fiction isn’t one of those.  I got in the habit of submitting occasionally, so as not to look like a spammer, and only to those sites that make it easy, such as Reddit, which requires only pasting a link.  Sometimes I’d get new readers that way, but usually not.

5) Sponsorships let you outsource promotion.

This is the one that’s probably most reponsible for the success of THE HOLE.  Early on during the writing, I was doing web searches for small press horror publishers, mostly to get myself excited about who I might submit to when the novel was completed.  One I came across, Permuted Press, had a message board where authors could post their online fiction.  I put the first chapter of THE HOLE up there, with a link to the rest of it on my site.  Besides the immediate and enthusiastic response from some new readers, I recieved an email from the publisher, asking if they might sponsor my book.  This involved me putting a link to them on the site and a tagline–”Sponsored by Permuted Press”–on my mock cover.  In return, they promoted the novel to their mailing list of horror fans.  Within days of the arrangement, I had nearly a hundred new subscribers.  Permuted even took the time to post about THE HOLE on various horror websites, drawing on their recognized brand to promote my book.  They also set me up with my own author message board on their forums.

6) Provide email sign ups.

This one’s easy and makes a huge difference.  Of the two-hundred people subscribed to the feed for THE HOLE, nearly all are doing so through Feedburner’s email service.  I can’t know the exact numbers, but my guess is that a large portion of those reader would have forgotten about the book at some point during its run.  Getting each new installment in their inbox as soon as it comes out keeps them reading.  This is why it’s also crucial that you not limit your book’s RSS feed to excerpts.  Again, the game isn’t to get readers to your website, it’s to get readers to your novel.  If that reading takes place in Outlook, that’s just as good as if it takes place somewhere you have banner ads.  You’re not trying to make immediate money.  Instead, you want an immediate audience.

I encourage readers of this post to add any further serial novel promotional ideas to the comments section below.  Have you written succesful online fiction?  If so, what worked for you?  What didn’t?

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Thoughts on "The Dark Knight"

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Thoughts after seeing it:  Excellent.  Terrific movie (though not the #1 best movie of all time, as it currently sits on IMDB).  The Joker was perfect.  Different, but fantastically scary in his own way, and easily now in that top pantheon of movie villains along with Hannibal Lecter and Darth Vader.  My favorite moment was probably the pencil trick, which was simply awesome, shocking, and wonderfully establishing-of-character.  I loved that they played up the we-need-each-other angle of the Joker/Batman relationship.

Only negatives were, first, Batman just doesn’t fit as well into the environment as the villains.  He looks like a movie superhero instead of a realistic part of the environment.  I don’t know if there’s any way to fix that in live action.  Maybe Batman can only ever achieve total verisimilitude when rendered by pencil and ink.  Second, Nolan still seems to want to keep Bruce Wayne grumpy but essentially sane.  He’s not.  He’s a rich kid who witnessed his family’s murder up close and messy and now he dresses up and fights crime.  He’s at least as nuts as all the guys he cases.  Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum nails this, and I missed seeing it in the movie.

Still, is was a great flick and firmly the best Batman on film.

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Four tips on writing a serial novel

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For a new writer, the problem is getting noticed. The amount of new fiction released each month, whether in book stores or blogs, is huge. Most of it is from people readers have never heard of and most of it is, sadly, terrible. For the new writer, then, the guy or gal toiling away over the keyboard without a waiting audience beyond close friends and immediate family, taking that initial crack at the market is a daunting task.

This is only exacerbated by the fact that writing is both lonely and front loaded. Penning a novel is not a social activity, nor is it quick. And, under the typical publishing regime, nearly all the work is done before the author has any sense of whether it will pay off.

I decided early on to serialize THE HOLE, though at the time I didn’t realize I was writing a novel. During the first month or so of writing, I imagined the story would run to 10,000 words or so, about thirty pages in paperback. Because the short story market is so limited for new authors and because my concern was not making money but finding readers, I had long ago opted to put all my short fiction online instead of sending it off to the various low circulation magazines.

And that’s when I discovered what I think is the true benefit to serializing for fresh authors. If you know you have a big advance waiting for you when you cross that second or third draft finish line, motivating yourself to crank out five-hundred or a thousand or two-thousand words nearly every day is easy. But when that’s not the case, when the only place your novel might end up is the echo chamber of unpublished manuscripts, spending a year or more writing the thing can be difficult. Serializing the first draft gives an immediate response. Assuming you can find a batch of readers (a topic I’ll discuss at length in upcoming posts–subscribe to my feed if you want to be notified as they’re available), you’ll get feedback and encouragement at every step of the way.

What’s more, that stable of regular readers creates an impression of obligation: If I don’t write regularly, those people waiting for new installments of the novel will get upset. Their attention will flag and they’ll wander off. I have to write to keep them happy.

Serializing a first draft has its share of gotchas, however. The biggest ones I encountered, in no particular order, are:

1) It’s risky. I’ve been told by a few people, one of them a best selling author, that serializing my novels as I write them is a mistake. Publishing houses, the theory goes, want exclusivity. They want to be the first guys to present a story to the world.  By writing the first draft in public, the big publishers–and most of the smaller ones–will automatically reject any subsequent drafts, no matter how revised.  This is a genuine concern.  I wouldn’t be happy with THE HOLE remaining a blog-only production.  I want to see it in print.  But there are publishers out there who are more willing to experiement with alternative models (my novel’s sponsor, Permuted Press, being one example) and that knowledge, along with a weighing of the benefits to serializing, convinced me to continue.  In all honesty, I don’t think my little horror novel would’ve been written were it not for the constant and cheerful reader feedback.  Or, if I had managed to bring it to completion, the process would have taken a great deal longer than a year and a half.  Still, the consequences of serializing a book need to be recognized, and anyone venturing along this particular path needs to be aware of what he may be giving up.

2) You’re not showing the world your best work. I suppose one could serialize a book by writing and revising it first and only then beginning the publishing schedule.  But, for me, this would defeat much of the purpose of serializing, which is the constant reader interaction during the writing process.  The result of posting as you write, however, is that your readers aren’t benefiting from the polish of a second or third draft.  They’re getting the raw output, complete with as many errors as you care to leave in.  Some of these can be addressed with effort, such as fixing typos, but others–continuity, character development, pacing, plot–are difficult to do anything with until the first draft is done.  This can lead to readers potentially being turned off by writing that’s not up to your best standards.  Again, it’s a risk.

3) You can’t fix major mistakes or change your mind about things. Early on in the book, I wrote one of my two main characters, Elliot Bishop, as something of an ass.  He lusted for Evajean Rhodes and was, in a sense, glad her husband had died, because it gave him the opportunity to make his move.  This felt right as I began writing, but it eventually became obvious to me–and many of my readers, based on their comments–that it was wrong for both the story and Elliot’s character.  Unfortunately, I’d already put those initial chapters out into the world.  Changing them would only confuse my readers.  Even more troublesome, though, was the issue of how the world in the novel ended.  Chapters near the start tell it one way, but, as the book drew to a close, I realized the plot would work better if I tweaked those events.  If I’d been writing only for myself, making these fixes would’ve been simple.  But having the text already out there, and having readers who likely weren’t inclined to go back and start over, limited my ability to bring the first half of the book in line with the second.  Still, this lack of revision capacity can be a benefit.  The only option I had in writing was to plunge ahead and finish the book.

4) There’s an obligation to finish. The first novel I made substantial progress on was called KARAOKE QUINTESSENCE. I wrote fifty-thousand words before deciding I wasn’t happy with where the book was headed and so I set it aside to work on THE HOLE (I will return to it as a new serial just as soon as the current novel is finished.) Because KQ was being written only for me (not even my then girlfriend, and now wife, was looking over my shoulder), I had the luxury of scrapping it when I realized it wasn’t going well. But if I’d written my way fifty-thousand words into a serial publication, with a couple hundred people or more subscribed to get every new update, the ease of calling it quits would have vanished. This isn’t necessarily bad, since it forces you to finish what you started, but it does take away a degree of flexibility.

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What I learned from writing a novel

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The first draft of my first novel, an apocalyptic horror tale called THE HOLE, is almost done. Writing has weirdly slowed as I approach the end, not because I don’t know how to finish it (I have the conclusion worked out in some detail) but because, I think, I’m nervous about having the entire thing out there for the world to see.

By way of procrastination, then, I’m going to set out some of the things I’ve learned along the way, especially those lessons I wish I’d known before I started writing. There’s nothing formal about them and they’re not meant as “Aaron Ross Powell’s Big Guide to Novel Writing.” No, they’re just thoughts I’m having as I stare at the blank word processor pages that’ll contain the final few thousand words of THE HOLE.

1) Don’t plan too much. This one obviously depends on the kind of story you’re writing. If your novel is a tight thriller or a complicated mystery, doing a good deal of planning up front is crucial. But too much planning can kill spontaneity, too, and it’s that spontaneity that makes coming back to the empty page everyday so enticing. I’ve tried outlining heavily in the past and the result was always stalled writing. The process of penning a novel is, first and foremost, storytelling and, because of the lonely nature of the craft, that means telling yourself a story. If you already know how every step is going to unfold, then writing the novel is much the same as reading a book after you’ve gone through the Cliff Notes. There’s still a process of discovery, because you’re experiencing the material with a new richness, but it’s just not the same as coming at it fresh. I had a general idea of where I wanted THE HOLE to go, but I didn’t have it planned in detail by any stretch of the imagination. And that kept me enthusiastic about writing. I wanted to know how it played out just as much as my audience did.

2) Characters really do define themselves. Just as it’s possible to over plan the plot and structure, you can do the same with characters. I remember checking out books from the library on character traits. They were these fat volumes filled with lists of everything that might make a person interesting. My intention was the give my main characters, Elliot Bishop and Evajean Rhodes, detailed personas before I expressed them on the page. That way they’d be deep–and character depth is that oh-so-important criteria of good writing, as this English major learned during his undergraduate years. The trouble was, every time I’d make a list of traits, they felt artificial. Eventually I gave up and just began writing. This leave it alone system wasn’t perfect. Elliot, for instance, is a very different person in the first ten or twenty pages than he is in the remaining three-hundred, and that’s something I’ll have to fix in the second draft. But Elliot and Evajean did quickly become their own people during writing. I still can’t set down exactly what makes them so. I can’t tell you Elliot has such and such traits, while Evajean possesses alternate ones. But the two characters*feel* different to me and, while I’m writing them, I can sense them telling me what they want to do in different ways. It’s a cliche of writing (“Characters will guide themselves.”), yet it’s still startling to experience.

3) Don’t plan too little. In his excellent memoir, On Writing, Stephen King talks about his plotting method. It boils down to “Just Wing It.” That may work when you have a ton of experience, but I don’t recommend it. Several times during the course of writing THE HOLE, I either bumped against problems I’d created for myself (I’d walked my characters into a corner I didn’t know how to get them out of) or I wrote scenes I didn’t know how to work into the larger plot. I managed to deal with all this, I think, but it wasn’t easy. Having a slightly better idea of what was going to happen next, as well as a more defined back story, would have gone a long way to smoothing the writing process.

4) Other people can’t teach you to write. The number of how-to books in the writing section of big chain book store can be discouraging. If that much needs to be said about how to do this thing, then how can I possibly expect to get it right? I read a ton of these tomes and ended up using nothing I’d learned. I think the key to telling a story is to just go out and tell a story. At some level, we all know how to do it and, thus, the only way to get better is to simply practice.

5) Your audience will be more impressed than you are. This is a lesson I’m still learning and, obviously, it’s not going to be true for everyone. If your writing is terrible, nobody’s going to like it–and I suppose it’s possible to convince yourself it’s good when it really isn’t. My writing isn’t the best there is, but it’s decent. People enjoy it, at least enough to stick with a serialized novel for over a year. The thing is, much of the time I’m not happy with it at all. I can’t stand reading my own work. I cringe when I come across what sounds like awkward wording or heavy dialog. I notice errors constantly. But when other people read it, they tend to see a lot less of that. I’m much more critical of my work than my audience is. I’m sure this is the case for any creative endeavor. The creator is involved in every tiny detail. He witnesses the process. The reader, on the other hand, consumes it in a gulp. Errors go down easier that way. Not that the writer should take this as an excuse to do shoddy work, but he should be aware that the whole is often of higher quality than the parts.

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