Screenwriting 101: What Fiction Writers Learn from Star Wars

Essays Screening Room
July 28, 2016 | 2 books mentioned 5 4 min read

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For the last twelve years I have taught fiction writing at Delta College in Michigan. For six of those years I have also taught Introduction to Screenwriting as part of Delta’s Film Production program. Arguably, screenwriters and fiction writers are going about the same thing, even if in different forms: they are trying to tell a good story. I certainly can’t say that the ways I teach screenwriting and fiction writing are universal, but I have noticed that, while the two courses essentially focus on storytelling, my pedagogical approaches for each are very different.

When I teach fiction, I usually focus on the “craft” of fiction. I use words and phrases like “conflict,” “character development,” “backstory,” “interior landscape,” and “dialogue.” When it comes to plot, though, I find myself saying something cryptic like, “Plot comes out of character. Whatever your protagonist does must be true to his or her character.” It’s good advice, I suppose, but it doesn’t really help students understand what makes for a solid plot. When I talk about fiction writing, the vibe is mystical: “You don’t need to know where you’re going. Just sit down and write. Discover what you have to say sentence by sentence. Let the journey surprise you.” Sometimes I’ll even quote E.L. Doctorow who said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I love that simile, but the more realistic side of me notes that it’s also a perfect situation for crashing and going nowhere.

Screenwriting often seems so much more practical and story-oriented. Right out of the gate, I am talking with students about the importance of movie-mapping. Much more time is spent on the plotting of the story to make certain that “something happens” and that the movie is always escalating tension and conflict as it moves toward the climax. For such a modern form of storytelling – barely 125 years old – screenwriting seems to draw much more of its understanding of plot from Plato’s dissection of narrative structure.

Before my students begin to learn screenplay format, I first ask them to consider their film’s major dramatic question, or MDQ. In screenwriting, the major dramatic question is a yes-or-no question that is answered by the climax. For instance, in the 1977 classic Star Wars: A New Hope, the MDQ would be, “Will Luke blow up the Death Star?” Before ever writing, my students are encouraged to know their MDQ and to know the answer. They have to know what they are writing towards in order to make every scene lead the audience there naturally and believably. To understand how movie structure works, we talk about a movie’s Inciting Incident, Plot Point 1, Mid-Point, Plot Point 2, and Climax. Screenwriters are encouraged to know their ending before anything else, which seems very different from all of that driving blind in the fog business.

Star Wars: A New Hope provides a good example of the rest of the plot points. The inciting incident of a movie is the event that is necessary to get the movie going. Usually the first ten minutes of a film focus on character and situation introduction, but right about ten minutes in, something happens that calls the protagonist to his or her quest. In Star Wars, the inciting incident occurs when the droids escape Princess Leia’s ship with the plans to the Death Star inside R2-D2. (Notice how the inciting incident already alludes to the MDQ.) If the droids don’t escape Leia’s ship, then we don’t have Star Wars…or at least not the Star Wars that we know.

Right around 25 to 30 pages into the script, the screenwriter must begin to think about Plot Point 1. This is a moment in the movie that makes action on the part of the protagonist necessary. In Star Wars, Luke isn’t really sure what he’s doing with the droids. He’s chasing R2-D2 rather than making his own choices. Even when Ben asks Luke to join him, Luke says that he can’t leave his uncle’s farm. It’s only when Luke races back to the farm to find his uncle and aunt dead at the hands of the Empire that he can commit to his quest. Nothing is holding Luke back, and his hatred toward the Empire has been fueled.

About halfway through the script, screenwriters need to give thought to the Mid-Point. The Mid-Point often shows us a strength in the character that we have not seen up until this moment. In the first half of Star Wars, Luke takes a backseat to the much more interesting Ben Kenobi and Han Solo. It’s only when Luke is free of them that he can truly shine. Rescuing Princess Leia, Luke faces a daunting chasm. Storm troopers are slowly opening the door behind him. Across the chasm, stormtroopers fire upon him and Leia. Oh, and as you’ll remember, the bridge across the chasm is no longer functional. Probably unknowingly using the Force, Luke flawlessly tosses a grappling hook up to an overhead pipe and swings himself and Leia to safety. He does this on his own. That’s the movie’s midpoint, which helps the audience believe what happens in the climax because it reveals that strength of character that the audience had yet to see.

Finally, to escalate conflict and to make success that much more difficult, a screenwriter has to think about Plot Point 2, which is a major setback to the protagonist. In Star Wars, the setback happens when Ben is killed by Darth Vader. It’s a major blow to Luke, and it makes their entire mission against the Death Star seem that much more hopeless. Watch nearly any movie, and right around three-quarters into it, something really bad will happen to the main character. That event serves to escalate tension and keep the audience uncertain.

The rest of the movie now plays out toward answering the MDQ. If the movie has been plotted well, the climax is not only satisfying but believable.

It’s my belief that no novelist would be hurt by taking a screenwriting course or by studying a screenwriting text, not for jumping ship and becoming a screenwriter, but to understand storytelling from a new vantage-point. At Delta College, the students who take creative writing courses represent a small but passionate pool. They often take every creative writing course available. In Screenwriting, I will sometimes get students who want to adapt a novel that they are working on into a screenplay. More often than not, they actually end up learning what they have to do to make their novel work as a novel. It is the strict attention to plot involved with screenwriting that helps them see how they can make their story work better in prose form. At the end of the class they’ll tell me, “This class helped me understand my novel so much better, and now I’m going to rewrite the entire thing.”

teaches English at Delta College and writes poetry, fiction, and screenplays. His books of fiction include Emergency Stopping and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press), the novel Into the Desperate Country (March Street Press), the novel Landscape with Fragmented Figures (Bottom Dog Press), and Threatened Species and Other Stories (Whistling Shade Press). His third novel, American Poet, won the Stuart and Vernice Gross Award for Excellence in Writing by a Michigan Author and a Michigan Notable Book Award from the Library of Michigan. In 2016, Whistling Shade Press released his new novel, Detroit Muscle. He maintains a website at www.jeffvandezande.com.

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Essays

Only Spinning Forward: On the Commercial Viability of LGBTQ Literature

Essays
June 19, 2014 | 2 books mentioned 10 5 min read

Gay is the new vampire. Everywhere in YA fiction, boys are kissing boys, girls are sidling up against the captains of their swim teams, and queer kids are getting cute. It’s wonderful. YA books with LGBTQ themes and characters, written by straight and by LGBTQ authors, are winning critical acclaim and they’re selling.

A super short list of great recent YA LGBTQ books might include Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, everything by David Levithan, The House You Pass on the Way by Jacqueline Woodson, Some Day This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron, and The Vast Fields of the Ordinary by Nick Burd.

While some of YA LGBTQ lit’s appeal might be its current sociopolitical relevance, most of its appeal is simply that this is our world now. We live in an era where, year by year and state by state, our lives are becoming fully integrated into mainstream American culture. “There’s no question,” says Emily Danforth, the author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post, “that there are generations now of teen readers ready for these books. It feels more normal—and that’s a problematic word—if you’re 14 to have queer friends and talk about sexuality in a way that is very different than it was 15 years ago.“ Not to mention, there’s a universality here: All teens, regardless of their orientation or identity, are working out what it means to be sexual beings, with the confusions, desires, and pressures that entails.

Yet there’s a tremendous disconnect between what’s happening in the YA marketplace and what’s going on with adult fiction. This is true across genres, for both literary and commercial books. While there are some well-known LGTBQ writers like Michael Cunningham, Alice Walker, Armistead Maupin, Edmund White, and Dorothy Allison, there aren’t many. In fact, these few writers feel more like the token exceptions that prove the rule. Overall, mainstream LGTBQ adult fiction is non-existent, even in 2014.

But why, especially when contrasted with the YA boom, is this the case? On first thought, we might attribute the differences in popularity to demographics, to generational perspectives, with all the statistics showing that younger people are more likely to be gay friendly than older folks. Perhaps straight teens are cool with the LGBTQ experience in a way straight adults simply are not? When thinking about these differences, author and writer for The Huffington Post Kergan Edwards-Stout said, “Younger people in general seem to be much accepting of LGBT issues and people and approach life a little more globally. I think older audiences tend to be closing themselves off, instead of expanding.”

Unlike the static adult audience, the YA audience is dynamic. Every six years or so, the next mini-generation of teen readers emerges, with new interests, references, and cultural trends that can be tapped into. However, with a 2012 study showing that about 43 percent of YA readers are adults (primarily between the ages of 18 to 44), this demographic explanation alone doesn’t suffice. After all, if so many adults are willing to read YA fiction with LGBTQ themes, why aren’t they also reading adult fiction with LGBTQ themes in comparable numbers? We need to look at deeper distinctions to help us understand this disparity between the YA and adult marketplaces and understand the ongoing exclusion of LGBQT writers.

There is a thick history here where writers with non-dominant identities (LGTBQ writers, writers of color) are isolated into their own genres. That is to say, if you’re gay, you don’t write “fiction.” You write, “Gay fiction.” This still holds true. Novels like The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud or The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, which feature gay characters, are fine, but novels with actual LGTBQ protagonists written by an actual LGTBQ authors are likely to be relegated to their own audiences, genres, and bookstore shelves. These books often aren’t seen as marketably mainstream.

First, there’s the cultural element to consider. There may be cues in LGBTQ novels and stories that straight readers “don’t get.” Fictional LGBTQ characters sometimes inhabit spaces that are unfamiliar to straight readers. There are the gay bars, lesbian hang-outs, and…queer poetry readings? While we can talk about these occasional unique cultural differences, this isn’t really it.

Because there’s the sex. And sex, as any reader of Jonathan Franzen, Alice Munro, or Philip Roth will know, is a constant of contemporary fiction. Where would our literature be without heterosexual adultery as a convenient plot device? And the thing about gay sex is that it can be “a bother,” to use Kergan Edwards-Stout’s euphemism, for straight readers. Which is to say, two same-sex teens kissing in a YA novel may be acceptable to a predominantly straight audience. But two dudes blowing each other—or engaging in anal—is, well, a touch “too gay.” From a commercial perspective, the nitty gritty of LGTBQ relationships is often still seen as unpalatable and other.

Aside from sucking generally, this dismissal of LGBTQ artwork has personal resonance for many LGTBQ readers and writers, including me. A couple years ago, an agent told me via email that my first manuscript was, in a sense, “too gay.” The agent’s exact words were, “this is America, after all, where a million soccer moms will read 50 SHADES OF GREY, but wouldn’t touch a book that is far less graphically gay than that one is graphically straight (or so I hear, anyway).” That concluding parenthetical aside—“(or so I hear, anyway)”—is perfect and speaks to the lowest common denominator of audience acceptability. It’s as if the liberal, cosmopolitan agent is shrugging, What can you do about the tastes of the heterosexual hoi polloi?

Though exuberant gayness certainly wasn’t the only thing that made my first manuscript not commercially viable, I was struck by the straight-up-ness of the agent’s assessment: Gayness, like actual gayness (versus the unremittingly pleasant kind you might encounter through Modern Family, Ellen, or a David Sedaris audiobook), well, it just doesn’t sell. This issue, when compounded by the well-documented gender disparities in publishing, is exacerbated for lesbian, trans, and queer writers for whom the intersectionalities of their identities mean they are even more likely to be excluded and ignored.

Of course, this isn’t anybody’s fault per se, which is exactly the point. You can’t blame agents for not representing LGBTQ adult fiction because they think it won’t sell to publishers, since the publishers are pretty convinced it won’t sell to readers. It’s a form of cultural exclusion that isn’t unique to publishing. There are few out Hollywood actors, for example, and fewer still mainstream movies with LGBTQ protagonists (unless they die vis-à-vis AIDS or driving off a cliff a la Thelma & Louis—my gosh, it’s 2014, and the two most mainstream gay movies are still Brokeback Mountain and Philadelphia.)

Which isn’t to say there aren’t amazing LGBTQ adult books (and movies) created every year. Caleb Crain’s splendid 2013 novel Necessary Errors proves how well-crafted prose, engaging characters, and beautiful language can capture any audience. And as YA author Nick Burd wrote in an email interview, “I like to think that all readers dive into books willing to encounter people and situations that are foreign to them. But I guess that’s slightly wishful thinking.“ Still, LGBT books for adult audiences, especially those containing a fair bit of sexual congress, face significant barriers. Luckily, there are smaller presses like ITNA, established earlier this year by Christopher Stoddard, the goal of which is to publish off-beat books, all of which so far feature gay, occasionally transgressive themes.

With all these factors to consider, it benefits us to look at the burden of “relatability.” When the notion of “relatability” is discussed, this burden is usually placed on the cultural object, on the book or movie. Audiences, we’re told, are drawn in by relatable characters, relevant stories, and accessible prose. But this should be a two-way street. Readers need to challenge themselves, to expand their own definitions of what they find relatable, to break free from provincial mindsets where the sole purpose of art is to provide a mirror, not of life, but of readers’ own lives. We need to explode the established notions of relatability. All the LGBTQ writers I talked to or emailed with conveyed this idea in some way or another.

What’s clear is progress, even if it’s slow, is being made. Research by YA author Malinda Lo, building on the work of Christine Jenkins, shows consistent growth in publication of YA LGBTA novels going back all the way to 1969—with the biggest gains occurring since 2004. These teen readers, with their broadening notions of relatability, are growing up, growing into adult readers. Hopefully, soon they will be eager to share in more adult LGBTQ stories, ready to embrace a world that only spins forward.

Image Credit: Pexels/Markus Spiske.

Essays
| 2 books mentioned 10 5 min read
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Essays

Dreams of My Father

Essays
June 17, 2016 | 2 books mentioned 4 13 min read
For years, decades, I did not dream of my father. I thought of him. I resented him occasionally for my imperfect childhood. Never was he in my dreams. Sometimes I wondered why that was. Everyone dreams of the dead, sooner or later.
Essays
| 2 books mentioned 4 13 min read
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5 comments:

  1. Ah, so THIS is why almost all the new novels I read (for 20-50 pages, then toss out the window), read like paper televisions!

    I think the article-writer’s formulae work best with Space Operas, Bodice Rippers and Dan Brown Books (which combine the former and the latter, sort of) but, well, let’s try this stuff out on a few of my favorite novels:

    1) Roth’s SABBATH’S THEATER. What’s the “MDQ”? Erm… will Mickey Sabbath live or die? Answer: YES. Inciting Incident: shit hits fan! Plot Point 1: more shit hits fan! Mickey Sabbath’s Mid Point Strength: huh? Plot point 2: shit/ fan. Climax: idem
    2) DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD. What’s the “MDQ”? Erm… erm. Inciting Incident: erm… erm. Plot Point 1: a baseball…? Sputnik… ? H-bomb…? erm…?
    3) Sebald’s AUSTERLITZ (shrugs)
    4) Nabokov’s LOLITA. What’s LOLITA’S “MDQ?” Will Humbert… erm… will he…?
    5) Miller’s TROPIC OF CANCER… yup. Climax? Yup.
    6) Vonnegut’s SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. What’s the “MDQ”? Will Billy PIlgrim… … will he… have stuff happen to him? Answer: YES! Inciting Incident: WW2. Plot Point 1: … he’s kidnapped by… Tralfammadorians… ?

    But so what? The character might just as well have fallen into a giant vat of butterscotch pudding and floated for a week while recalling high-points of his adolescence. Because, UNLIKE in a one-dimensional hardware-epic like Star Wars, in which ACTION is the essence of the attraction, what counts in Slaughterhouse Five (and all the above-cited books) is not so much what the character does or must do as what the writer says about what the character does or must do, and how the writer says it, and all the collateral details and quirks and jokes and clues with which the writer repays the reader’s attention.

    In a movie, the plot is an excuse for fireworks (explosions and/or boobs); in a book… a good book… the plot is just an excuse for good writing. It is the least-important aspect of the text’s mechanics and is often little more than a sop to conventional expectations; a pacifier for the literal-minded. A good book, like Life, is a jumble of colliding sub-plots fleshed out with enlivening particularities. What’s the “Plot” of *your* Life?

    Just as photography took over the chore of visual reproduction, freeing painting to do what photography *can’t* (no photograph gets closer to the core of its subject, or of the viewer’s subjectivity, than a Lucian Freud painting did or would have), TV is very good at bringing basic narrative to the narrative-hungry. Which should free The Novel to do what even cinematography (armed with CGI) cannot: read back to you the organized contents of a literary genius’ mind in your own inner voice. Miraculous.

    I can remember reading the “hooks” on the dust-jackets of the books in my grandmother’s library: “The shocking story of…!” “The inspiring story of…!” “The True Life story of…” Back during the last gasp of the novel’s high responsibility to Plot, before Character and Style (aka, how the Novel runs rings around Film) took over.

    Sure, an occasionally not-badly-written book comes along with a plot-driven Story to tell… but aren’t these usually examples of an amusing reversal of the old dictum that the Book is always better than the Film? In these cases, I actually wait for the film. In fact, ironically (speaking of Roth), Barry Levinson’s film of “The Humbling” took Roth’s uncharacteristically-thin book and rewired its Plot into something better. But that’s only, mind you, because the Novel wasn’t at its best there.

    Please, good Ladies and Fellows: stop diminishing the Novel by teaching it as “Plot”! Reducing it to “Story”! Very much like reducing any given painting by Modigliani to a matter of colors. The color is as much the point as plot is.

    Oh, and writing can’t be *taught*, anyway. It can only be *learned*.

    It’s about reading. Lots of reading. “Creative Writing Teachers” would do lots less damage if they pointed their students to 100 good books and then politely kept out of it. The Genuine Talents will take it from there and the rest will (thankfully) find something else to do.

  2. @steven augustine

    ‘“Creative Writing Teachers” would do lots less damage if they pointed their students to 100 good books and then politely kept out of it. The Genuine Talents will take it from there and the rest will (thankfully) find something else to do.’

    Do you seriously think you’re gonna get away with this? I may not know anything about curmudgeonly comments section submissions, but I know it when I see it.

    In fact, in one writing seminar I’m thinking of applying to, one exercise requires spending a week in fetal position in a vat of butterscotch pudding. When I requested “chocolate”, they told me, without apology, “chocolate is not in the spirit of our seminar.” And like second sun of the planet Tatooine, it was suddenly double clear to me that writing is about not compromising your values. Capote was just damn wrong: writing is almost always typing. And Star Wars vs Austerlitz? Am I *really* the only person who can never keep them straight?

  3. @il’ja

    “In fact, in one writing seminar I’m thinking of applying to, one exercise requires spending a week in fetal position in a vat of butterscotch pudding.”

    Okay, I admit that THAT particular writing seminar is pretty damn good (obviously)… but learning to write at what cost, Il’ja? A yeast infection…?

    (scratches)

  4. A yeast infection or watching a bunch of damn movies, apparently.

    THE CHOCOLATIER – MDQ? Is aspiring student/author sufficiently committed to hurdle every obstacle for the sake of his craft? Answer: YES! inciting incident: pudding immersion added to prerequisites for graduation. Plot point 1: Butterscotch ONLY! Plot Point 2: Author-student confronts anti-chocolate pudding prejudice, placing certain fame in jeopardy. Key Scene: Moving soliloquy before student disciplinary panel exposes institutional hypocrisy. Epilogue: future students create powerful internet meme involving being filmed while standing on head in bucket of chocolate pudding.resulting in a wave of pudding-themed literary fiction issuing from mid-tier MFA programs.

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Essays

Love: A Burning Thing

Essays
March 16, 2007 | 2 books mentioned 6 5 min read

I guess I re-enter the ring of fire at my own peril, but I feel compelled to return to what has become (or so the publish first, ask questions later crowd would have it) “n+1 vs. lit-bloggers.” At times, the whole kerfuffle has seemed to confirm some of the liabilities n+1‘s “Blog Reflex” sought to diagnose in lit-blogs: a tendency toward contempt or wet kisses, an emphasis on performance over analysis, a reduction of big questions into partisan orthodoxies. These are, in fact, the very same liabilities I thought I detected in the n+1 piece. On the other hand, without some very engaging performances, you probably wouldn’t be reading this. Despite the extremely high temperature at which tempers seem to be running, or perhaps annealed by the flames, several noteworthy questions seem to have emerged. To wit:Does instant communication encourage combat? If so, why? (Is the media the message?) When does anger work to enrich understanding, and when does it hinder it? Are those even the metrics anymore? How can a medium so bound up with the culture industry manage a critique of that industry? Is the blog-as-antidote-to-ideology itself part of the ideology? Is good writing good for writing? Does mass culture exert a leveling effect? Can highbrow and middlebrow coexist peacefully, and if so under what circumstances? What becomes of critique when words are control x-ed and control v-d and the very idea of context, the context of context, starts to evaporate?I’d like to advance the proposition that we’re all engaged in a test-case. To the extent that we can do something productive with these questions (which will likely involve listening as well as talking, reading as well as writing), we support the idea that the blog has some place at the table of cultural criticism. To the extent that we spend time finding ever more inventive ways to give one another the finger, we prove out the idea that, behind the hypnotic flickering on our shiny new screens, nothing of much worth is happening.Here, I find myself rooting for the blog in the way I used to root for the Red Sox – passionately, but cautiously. Weirdly enough, this may be not too far removed from n+1‘s attitude. The original “Blog Reflex” piece – which I have read, and recommend others do, if only at the bookstore – proceeded from the tacit assumption that the blog isn’t by its nature the enemy of “critique.” Keith Gessen’s and Marco Roth’s thoughtful, if controversial, their comments here and at Long Sunday only confirm that they believe that the blog might, at least theoretically, offer some counterweight to an increasingly narcotic media environment… a point with which I think most literary bloggers agree.I took issue with the n+1 polemic because I thought the rhetorical choices – use of the past tense, sweeping generalizations, accusatory tone – tended to prejudge unfairly, and at a very early date, the results of the blog experiment. And to make ad hominem attacks without naming names. Again, I think n+1 editors Gessen and Roth are, if not in agreement with me on this point, then at least open to the criticism. (And in this kind of volatile discussion, it takes courage to come out and offer even a partial recantation, as Mr. Roth did, rather than sticking to the mode of turf-defense.)Moving forward, it might help to clarify what we mean by “lit-blog.” (A contraction of a contraction of a contraction is bound to cause some confusion.) In responding to “The Blog Reflex,” I took “lit-blog” to mean “blog about books,” because I contribute to one. But I’ve come to see that n+1 meant something closer to “blog that filters contemporary culture through a literary sensibility.” I’m happy to accept this more expansive definition. Thus, as Keith Gessen suggests, my very short catalogue of popular blogs that seemed to refute n+1‘s generalizations should be amended to include not only Maud Newton and Moorishgirl, but also Long Sunday and Crooked Timber and so on. In all candor, Gessen seems to read more blogs than I do… which only makes me wish that “The Blog Reflex” had been more specific in its targets, lest babies and bathwater both end up in the gutter. (To be fair, the “Intellectual Scene” section of n+1 has always been more about the generalities of culture; the specifics are usually covered in the longer essays.)I stand by my plaudits for The Quarterly Conversation, the LBC, and the Pynchon roundtable, as I stand by my own reviews, but that’s a matter of taste. What’s noteworthy is that each of us seems to be able to come up with a list of exemplary literary blogs. I do resent the imputation that “Keepers of the Flame” name-checked only the blogs of friends or that I prefer blogs that make “noise.” I’m not online enough to have known that there was “a little circle,” and I mentioned Scott Esposito’s blog specifically because I thought he didn’t seem like a noisy writer. (I’m open to correction on this point, but check out his photo on the website… he looks so gentle!) I don’t know Scott from Adam any more than I know Ed Champion from Bat Segundo. I literally just reached for a couple of examples, from among the 10 or 15 blogs I read.I also think “phenomenally ignorant” is unfair, as are the unbanked assertions in some of Mark Sarvas’ and Ed Champion’s responses to Gessen and Roth’s comments; we could debate the value of name-calling, but – again – we’d be debating taste. I’d prefer for the name-callers to spell out what they mean, or to admit that, hey, in the heat of battle, they lashed out… and move on.But Mr. Gessen’s momentary lapses in what’s generally an intelligent post – like Mr. Roth’s admission to getting angry; like Ed’s “Je refuse,” like my own flirtation in the original post with imputing the worst motives to “The Blog Reflex” – points to a phenomenon the subsequent comment thread bears out. And which bears analysis, should anyone wish to undertake it: there’s something about instant communication that encourages high dudgeon. This is not always the enemy of thoughtful “critique,” but it does not, in and of itself, constitute critique. “When it comes to hatred, most of us are cowards,” as Marco Roth puts it. Hatred can be a cleansing fire, but to hate bravely requires discipline.As I see it, the challenge for literary bloggers – at least those who would admit to the temptation to flame, and who would also admit to feeling like their most combustible writings are not their most intelligent – is to find a way to preserve the agonistic pleasures of the medium while doing important work for the culture. I’m not sure if I agree with Gessen’s premise that “bad writing is bad for writing”… that it’s an offense against writing (though Milan Kundera thinks so). But I know I don’t want to waste time reading bad writing. There’s a war on, for Pete’s sake.Ultimately, the most useful point of comparison for the blog seems to be the print periodical in all its variations. The blog as a medium seems capacious enough to contain short reviews, 5,000-word essays, war reporting, dumb lists, gossip, “ignorant railing.” Anyone has a right to make whatever complaints they want, and – here’s the blessing and the curse of the medium – to hear rebuttal or retraction or further discussion in fairly short order. Rather than spending my time telling other people to shut up, or trying to impose a reign of virtue, I’d prefer to try to step up my own game.And anyone who doesn’t like that can suck on it.

Essays
| 2 books mentioned 6 5 min read
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