Mark T. Conard's Blog, page 2

PLATO ON TRUMP AND THE CORRUPTION OF TYRANTS

In a recent New York Times column, “The Revenge of the Lesser Trumps,” Frank Bruni talks about those who have been sucked into Trump’s orbit, fell out with him, and now are turning against him. He writes:

The problem with being Donald Trump isn’t just being Donald Trump. It’s all the other, lesser Trumps around you. It’s the versions of yourself that you create, the echoes of yourself that you inspire. They’ll devour you in the end.

I don’t mean his biological offspring, though they’re no picnic. I mean his spiritual spawn. I mean the knaves, nuts, schemers and dreamers who have taken their cues from him or turned his lessons against him. This is their moment. This is their month.

Bruni is thinking of such Trump White House insiders as Omarosa Manigault Newman, who has written a nasty, tell-all book about the administration, and Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who is cooperating with prosecutors after pleading guilty to eight criminal charges, going so far as to implicate Trump in federal crimes.

This phenomenon—corrupt leaders surrounded by equally corrupt followers—is not new with Trump of course. But it raises an interesting (if ultimately unanswerable) question: Does the would-be Nero or Mussolini corrupt those around him, or does he attract those who are already corrupt? (Using the masculine pronoun purposefully.) Bruni’s obviously not a philosopher or a political scientist, so he’s not making an argument, but he claims it’s the former: “It’s the versions of yourself that you create…”

Bruni finishes the column with a colorful image of a Borg-like Trump shedding cancerous offspring that take on a life of their own:

The genre usually invoked to describe his presidency is reality television. Science fiction is more apt. He’s an entity whose components split off to form independent existences that now threaten to undo him. His hunger for attention became Rudy Giuliani; his thirst for pomp, Scott Pruitt; his taste for provocation, Avenatti; his talent for duplicity, Manigault Newman. They’re an army of emulators, adding up to Trump. And they’re on the march.

These questions of corruption and tyrants were of the greatest interest to Plato and his mentor Socrates. Both suffered at the hands of tyrants, and Socrates himself was charged with (and ultimately lost his life for) corrupting the youth of Athens.

[image error]Socrates

As you may know, it’s a bit difficult to separate the thought of Socrates from that of Plato. This is because Socrates never committed anything to writing; and because Plato wrote dialogues, the main character of which is often Socrates. That being said, I’m going to talk about two dialogues in which the distinction between them is pretty clear according to conventional wisdom: Apology and Republic. Apology is one of the early “Socratic” dialogues and is an account of Socrates’s speech at his trial. Experts tend to agree that of all the Platonic dialogues, it is most likely the closest representation of the thought and words of the historical Socrates. Republic, on the other hand, is a solidly Platonic dialogue from the mature period of his writing.

First, the speech in the Apology, where Socrates is defending himself against the charge of corrupting the aristocratic youth of Athens (like Plato himself). He has three accusers at his trial, only one of whom, Meletus, speaks. In this segment, Socrates is cross-examining Meletus and arguing against the claim that Socrates is willingly turning his neighbors and associates into bad people:

What follows, Meletus? Are you so much wiser at your age than I am at mine that you understand that wicked people always do some harm to their closest neighbors while good people do them good, but I have reached such a pitch of ignorance that I do not realize this, namely that if I make one of my associates wicked I run the risk of being harmed by him so that I do such a great evil deliberately, as you say? I do not believe you, Meletus, and I do not think anyone else will. Either I do not corrupt the young or, if I do, it is unwillingly, and you are lying in either case. (Apology, 25d – 26a)

Socrates’s argument here is that if he were to corrupt one of his neighbors willingly, turn him into, say, a thief or a murderer on purpose, he would inevitably be harmed by that neighbor (he’d be robbed or murdered in the end). No one wants to be harmed in that way; consequently, no one would willingly do this. Thus, it would follow that if someone like Trump has a negative influence on people around him, turning them into scoundrels like himself, he’s only doing it out of ignorance.

But Socrates goes further than this. Later in his speech he claims that it’s not possible for a better person to be harmed (that is, corrupted) by a worse person:

Do not create a disturbance, gentlemen, but abide by my request not to cry out at what I say but to listen, for I think it will be to your advantage to listen, and I am about to say other things at which you will perhaps cry out. By no means do this. Be sure that if you kill the sort of man I say I am, you will not harm me more than yourselves. Neither Meletus nor Anytus can harm me in any way; he could not harm me; for I do not think it is permitted that a better man be harmed by a worse; certainly he might kill me, or perhaps banish or disfranchise me, which he and maybe others think to be great harm, but I do not think so. I think he is doing himself much greater harm doing what he is doing now, attempting to have a man executed unjustly. (Apology, 30c – d)

There are a couple of pretty radical ideas here. First is Socrates’s claim that killing, banishing, disfranchising someone (or at least Socrates himself) doesn’t amount to harm. Clearly, according to Socrates, the only thing that really counts as harm is corruption of the soul. The second radical idea is that someone else can’t corrupt your soul; only you can do that to yourself. Anytus and Meletus aren’t harming Socrates by accusing him unjustly and having him executed; rather, they’re harming themselves—corrupting their own souls.

Applying this to the case of Trump, the claim then would be that Trump is unable to corrupt the souls of those around them, and thus unable to do them real harm. Those who fall into his orbit and end up disgraced and/or in jail are corrupting themselves. Whether this claim is completely true or not, there’s something to be said for it, I think. After all, Trump’s lawyers, Cabinet members, aids, etc., can always resign rather than follow his directions and get drawn into doing terrible things. On the other hand, Socrates’s claim that material, even physical, harm isn’t real harm is, it seems to me, impossible to defend. Think about Mexican immigrants, whose lives are being torn apart at Trump’s direction, or the women he has himself physically accosted and abused. Their souls might not be worse off, but they’ve most definitely been harmed by Trump’s actions.

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Things are different in Plato’s Republic. As I said, this is a mature work of Plato’s, and he’s no longer simply recounting Socratic conversations (or at least Socratic-like conversations). He’s now the father of Western philosophy and is developing his own original thinking. In terms of the content of its ideas, the Republic is a sprawling work. It covers metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. The central issue is justice: What does it mean to lead a just life? What would the ideal, most just political organization be?

Much of the dialogue is taken up by discussion of how the rulers of the ideal city will be chosen, trained, and educated. Plato firmly believes that some people are naturally suited to being philosophers and thus the ruling philosopher kings (and others are more naturally suited to being soldiers or tradespeople). The upbringing of these potential philosophers is all-important. Socrates (the character now, not the historical person) says: “We must now look at the ways in which this nature is corrupted, how it’s destroyed in many people, while a small number (the ones that are called useless rather than bad) escape.”

The education of many aristocratic youth of ancient Athens was handed over to a group of teachers call ‘the sophists’. They taught rich young men how to speak and argue, preparing them for their lives as leaders of the city. Many had contempt for the sophists, claiming that they had a corruptive influence on these young men, teaching them skill in rhetoric and logic, for example, but giving them no respect for truth or wisdom. But in Republic, Plato isn’t buying that argument:

[Socrates:] Now, I think that the philosophic nature as we defined it will inevitably grow to possess every virtue if it happens to receive appropriate instruction, but if it is sown, planted, and grown in an inappropriate environment, it will develop in quite the opposite way, unless some god happens to come to its rescue. Or do you agree with the general opinion that certain young people are actually corrupted by sophists—that there are certain sophists with significant influence on the young who corrupt them through private teaching? Isn’t it rather the very people who say this who are the greatest sophists of all, since they educate most completely, turning young and old, men and women, into precisely the kind of people they want them to be?

[Adeimantus, Plato’s real-life brother:] When do they do that?

[Socrates:] When many of them are sitting together in assemblies, courts, theaters, army camps, or in some other public gathering of the crowd, they object very loudly and excessively to some of the things that are said or done and approve others in the same way, shouting and clapping, so that the very rocks and surroundings echo the din of their praise or blame and double it. In circumstances like that, what is the effect, as they say, on a young person’s heart? What private training can hold out and not be swept away by that kind of praise or blame and be carried by the flood wherever it goes, so that he’ll say that the same things are beautiful or ugly as the crowd does, follow the same way of life as they do, and be the same sort of person as they are? (491e – 492c)

Plato is suggesting here that the real corruption of the philosophic nature comes not from private instruction (by sophists or anyone else), but from the noise of the crowd. Young people tend to get swept along by the loud voices, the bluster, the thrill of being part of the multitude. (Images are now popping into my head of young people, kids even, at Trump rallies, waving ‘MAGA’ signs.)

All this leads Plato to a discussion of the worst form of government and the worst form of life for a person to lead: tyranny. A person who has a tyrannical soul is someone who can’t control him- or herself, someone who is pulled this way and that by his or her wants and desires. In this case, one is being tyrannized by one’s animal nature. Think of drug addicts, alcoholics, people with a gambling addiction, compulsive liars. This is the worst way to live. But even worse than this, says Plato, is the life of the actual tyrant.

[Socrates:] In truth, then, and whatever some people may think, a real tyrant is really a slave, compelled to engage in the worst kind of fawning, slavery, and pandering to the worst kind of people. He’s so far from satisfying his desires in any way that it is clear—if one happens to know that one must study his whole soul—that he’s in the greatest need of most things and truly poor. And, if indeed his state is like that of the city he rules, then he’s full of fear, convulsions, and pains throughout his life. And it is like it, isn’t it?

[Glaucon, another of Plato’s real-life brothers:] Of course it is.

[Socrates:] And we’ll also attribute to the man what we mentioned before, namely, that he is inevitably envious, untrustworthy, unjust, friendless, impious, host and nurse to every kind of vice, and that his ruling makes him even more so. And because of all these, he is extremely unfortunate and goes on to make those near him like himself. (508a)

Let’s contemplate the language here a moment. The tyrant (or would-be tyrant) is “compelled to engage in the worst kind of fawning, slavery, and pandering to the worst kind of people”; he is someone “envious, untrustworthy, unjust, friendless, impious, host and nurse to every kind of vice, and…his ruling makes him even more so.” Sorry for editorializing here, but this description, as far as I can see, fits Trump like a Speedo. He panders to Putin, for example. He’s clearly envious, untrustworthy, and unjust; it’s hard to imagine that he has any real friends. Pious? Forget about it. And he does indeed display every kind of vice one can think of.

[Before Trump was even inaugurated, the great Andrew Sullivan posted this piece on Plato’s anticipation of the Trumpian phenomenon: Click Here.]

Just note that the mature Plato is arguing against his friend and mentor, Socrates. Plato is here claiming that good people can indeed be corrupted by those who are worse than they are; and he seems to be implying that the tyrant necessarily corrupts those closest to him: “he is extremely unfortunate and goes on to make those near him like himself.”

As I said, there’s probably no way of definitively answering the question of whether Trump corrupts those around him or if he merely attracts those who are already thoroughly corrupt. All I know is, if he offered me a job, I’d run the other way.

 

 

Luke Cage 2: The Mythologizing of Harlem

I thought the first season of Luke Cage was the best of the Marvel shows on Netflix (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, etc.), so I was looking forward to the second installment, which was released on June 22nd, 2018.

There are pluses and minuses about season 2. On the negative side, the narrative meanders a bit, which is often a problem with the second season of a series. After the initial success, the writers are trying to figure out what to do next, how to top what they’ve already done, and the story line ends up being looser. I find the Jamaican accents the actors do in season 2 to be distracting often to the point of being annoying. Gone is the standout character Cottonmouth (rivetingly portrayed by Mahershala Ali).

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On the plus side, the show has the same gritty feel of season one, and similarly great music. Most of the primary characters are back. And stepping into the breach left by Cottonmouth’s absence is Mariah Stokes Dillard (portrayed just as rivetingly by Alfre Woodard). Woodard and Reg E. Cathey, who plays Luke’s father, James Lucas, give the second season an emotional depth that, it seems to me, is not to be found in any of the other Marvel Netflix series.

The one aspect of the show I want to comment on is the way it not only uses but even fetishizes and mythologizes Harlem. I always thought it was amusing how the characters in Daredevil remind the viewers that the show is set in Hell’s Kitchen every five minutes or so. The same is true (or with an even greater frequency, if that’s possible) in Luke Cage. The opening credits contain several visual reminders—street signs, a subway station—that Harlem is the setting, and then, as I say, the dialogue is peppered with references. My suspicion is that the writers of Daredevil include those references just because “Hell’s Kitchen” sounds cool; whereas Harlem is a place that has a storied history, a place that everyone knows and has some associations with.

But of course the setting isn’t really Harlem—it’s a fictionalized Harlem, a romanticized Harlem. It’s a Harlem that’s both far more violent and far more insular than the real thing, as if it weren’t a changing neighborhood with loose, fuzzy borders that’s becoming gentrified; but rather a crime-ridden, monochromatic city-state with ironclad boundaries, ruled by a crime lord. The writers have created a fictional setting where a superhero is desperately needed. Batman does something similar with New York City, but in calling it ‘Gotham’, the creators indicate that the location is fictionalized. Not so with Luke Cage. In the latter, we’re not given any clue that the location isn’t real.

[image error]Alfre Woodard as Mariah Dillard

In this way, Luke Cage is very much like a western. A mythologized lawless setting calls out for a strong but flawed individual (a gunslinger-Marshal or Luke Cage) with a commitment to justice to defeat the forces of chaos and evil, in order to restore law and civility to the community. This basic outline is true of a lot of superhero narratives, but in those stories the setting isn’t always (or perhaps often) mythologized, and the antagonist is usually a supervillain, someone with powers to match those of the heroes. While Bushmaster is something of a supervillain in season 2, the crime lord and boss of Harlem in Luke Cage is Mariah Dillard, a city councilwoman. It’s ultimately her defeat that Luke must ensure in order to bring balance and civility back to the neighborhood. In that way, Luke Cage is akin to Rio Bravo, My Darling Clementine, or High Noon, for example.

On a personal note, I was living in Harlem around a decade ago when I spotted one of the first Starbucks to open in the neighborhood. At the time I thought a good title for a story would be “A Starbucks in Harlem,” because of the contrast between the corporate, white bread franchise and that storied history I mentioned above (Duke Ellington, James Baldwin, Malcolm X). Today there’s a Whole Foods on 125th Street and Malcom X Boulevard, just down the street from the Apollo Theater. Gentrification indeed.

 

A Conversation about James Lee Burke

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James Lee Burke

I invited my friend and fellow writer, Craig Terlson, to have a conversation about James Lee Burke, a fine crime/suspense author with a substantial body of work. Burke has sold a ton of books, but he’s lesser known than giants like Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, or Michael Connelly, but when he’s firing on all cylinders Burke’s writing ranks with the best of them.

Burke is from the Texas-Louisiana gulf coast area, which shows in his writing. He’s written nearly forty books. Most of them feature former cop and occasional detective Dave Robicheaux. He’s also written a handful of novels concerning the Holland family, including four about Billy Bob Holland and four featuring Billy Bob’s cousin Hackberry Holland. Burke has won several Edgar awards and was nominated for a Pulitzer.

[image error] The Awesome Craig Terlson

It was Craig who first introduced me to Burke, when he recommended Black Cherry Blues, a Dave Robicheaux novel. Now, Craig is like my Canadian doppelganger: we both write crime/suspense fiction, appreciate all things noir, love and play the blues, adore good food, wine and an occasional bourbon. Craig’s excellent Fall in One Day was released a year ago by Blue Moon Publishers. Set in 1973 during the Watergate hearings, the story concerns fifteen-year-old Joe Beck, who takes it upon himself to locate a missing friend. It’s a great read, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

MC: So, Craig, let me start this off by asking why you first recommended to me Black Cherry Blues? Why that particular book?

CT: Because I wanted to turn you onto Dr. Pepper. (Robicheaux’s favourite beverage.) Okay… some years ago I was told that some of my work had echoes of James Lee Burke in it. This was before I had even read him. I was told to start with Black Cherry Blues by another writer, whose name I forget. I didn’t read much crime fiction at the time and was more into the literary genre—not realizing that’s really what Burke writes. Anyway, I still remember reading it in bed, and my wife seeing the lurid cover, saying, “That’s not the sort of book you usually read.” But I knew that cover aside, this was a whole ‘nother take on the crime fiction genre. The prose was lyrical, poetic even, the structure complex, the main character haunted, and it was a just a damn fine book. I recommended it first to you because it was where I started.

MC: Well, I loved the book. I was a bit startled when I read it that I hadn’t heard of Burke before. It was like discovering Scorsese or Hendrix for the first time: I really should have known about this guy! Anyway, “poetic” and “lyrical” are good adjectives. There’s a richness to Burke’s writing: His descriptions are so full and evocative, I was captivated from page one. Plus, as you suggest, his characters are three-dimensional. They’re living, breathing people you care about. Now, just to get this out of the way, you and I have discussed some weakness in Burke’s writing. Can you elaborate on that?

CT: I am not sure it’s a weakness, or a question of where modern readers are at. If you look at crime fiction from the 50s and 60s, like John D. MacDonald, there are some similarities to what Burke is doing. I’m talking about his tendency towards long descriptions, and plots that seem to meander a bit. Myself, I love settling into a book that places me in an environment that I can taste—but a lot of readers today (if the bestseller list is accurate) want fiction with a lot of narrative drive, and too much description or even character development slows things down too much. When you read reviews of Burke’s work you see a polarity of those who love the descriptive language, and those that ask, “where the hell is the story?” Me, I love the language.

MC: That’s a great way to put it. Yes, that’s the weak spot I was referring to. I think some of Burke’s writing needs a bit more editing. I’d like to see some of his plots meander a bit less—but without sacrificing any of his superb, rich descriptions of things or his fully-human characters. Another aspect of that richness, and this goes back to what you were saying about his work being lyrical and poetic, is his ability to dig deep into his characters’ lives, thoughts, emotions, their environment and comment on it in profound ways. This is really risky stuff. It could easily come off as overblown or purple, but Burke is able to pull it off masterfully.

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I’ll confess that I like Burke’s Hackberry Holland novels a little more than I like the Robicheaux novels. The former are set in Texas, and Burke captures the landscape and the life there in a way that to me is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy. Here’s a taste of Feast Day of Fools:

SIX HOURS LATER, Pam Tibbs and Hackberry Holland drove down a long dirt track, twenty miles southwest of the county seat, to a paintless gingerbread house that had a wide gallery with a swing on it and baskets of petunias and impatiens hung from the eaves. The landscape looked particularly strange in the sunset, like terrain that might have been used in a 1940s movie, hard-packed and rolling and biscuit-colored and notched with ravines, marbled by thunderheads and the reddening of the sky and dissected by lines of cedar fence posts that had no wire on them.

Lightning rods flanged each end of the house’s roof, and a windmill in back was ginning furiously, pumping a jet of water into an aluminum tank where three spavined horses were drinking. A white-over brick wall surrounded the house a hundred feet out, like the walls at the Alamo, the top festooned with razor wire and spiked with broken glass. The wood gates on three of the walls had been removed and pulled apart and the planks used to frame up two big vegetable gardens humped with compost, creating the effect of a legionnaire’s outpost whose defense system had been rendered worthless.

“What’s the deal with this place?” Pam asked.

“Miss Anton bought the house from a secessionist who took over the courthouse about twenty years ago. After she moved in, I think the Rangers were sorry they locked up the secessionist.”

“Miss?” Pam said.

Hackberry was sitting in the passenger seat, his Stetson over his eyes. “It’s a courtesy,” he said.

I chose this at random, but it well-illustrates, I think, the power of his descriptions and his ability to capture the true feeling of a place. There’s also the fun and intriguing back-and-forth between the Sheriff and his Deputy, Pam Tibbs. I’m reading this book for the second time now, and every evening I savor a few pages. It’s like sipping good whiskey. Is there a favorite passage from Black Cherry Blues you’d like to share?

CT: – Wow, there is so much wonderful stuff in there – good whiskey is right, and I get the McCarthy parallel. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cormac was an influence on Burke. When I read through this I think about the fresh details. Burke’s descriptions are always rich, and sure some go on too long, but I so admire, “biscuit-colored and notched with ravines, marbled by thunderheads…” They are alive on the page and give, as you say, the true feeling of place.

I picked up Black Cherry Blues again this week – forgetting how chilling the opening was. I had a thought that the haunted suspense of a character being gunned down in a bedroom had gothic overtones to it. The idea of the “sublime” especially in gothic fiction, where romance, terror, and death are all woven together and you feel every crack in the wall and raindrop outside, is evident in Burke’s novels. His writing is so attuned to the senses, and if you lean into it, you are immersed in a world where everything matters.

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The opening paragraph of Black Cherry Blues is a fine example.

Her hair is curly and gold on the pillow, her skin white in the heat lightning that trembles beyond the pecan trees outside the bedroom window. The night is hot and breathless, the clouds painted like horsetails against the sky; a peal of thunder rumbles out on the Gulf like an apple rolling around in the bottom of a wood barrel, and the first raindrops ping against the window fan. She sleeps on her side, and the sheet molds her thigh, the curve of her hip, her breast. In the flicker of the heat lightning the sun freckles on her bare shoulder look like brown flaws in sculpted marble.

That is a fantastic setup for the next line:

Then a prizing bar splinters the front door out of the jamb, and two men burst inside the house in heavy shoes, their pump shotguns at port arms.

I mean… just try to stop reading at that point.

MC: Yes! You’re “immersed in a world where everything matters”—that’s beautifully put! And quite accurate. So, on that eloquent note, I’d say it’s time to wrap this up. Thanks so much, Craig, for engaging in this appreciative discussion, and thanks especially for turning me onto Burke. His work is truly inspiring.

CT: Loved doing this Mark, thanks for asking. It’s made me want to dive back in and read more of his amazing work. He is a fine example of how expansive the genre of crime fiction is, and how beautiful writing is beautiful regardless of genre. Burke continues to be an inspiration in my work, and I’m delighted that you have found him the same.

The Mind Projection Fallacy, or: Do You Exist Before I Look at You?

This is a fun piece from a while back. Have a look.

Mark T. Conard

In my humble opinion, one of the wackiest things about contemporary physics is the notion of indeterminacy, or the idea that (as a recent essay put it): “Reality Doesn’t Exist Until You Look at It.” This title is doubly silly, since it equates reality with what goes on at the subatomic level, and not with trees, dolphins, mountains, gerbils, Buicks, and non-fat yoghurt (the yoghurt definitely exists before you look at it, fyi). This was Schrödinger’s complaint with his famous cat thought-experiment (read here for the details).

For a long time I’d been naming this the “fallacy of deriving ontological conclusions from epistemological premises.” Ontology is the study of being; epistemology is the study of knowledge. So, in other words, one has premises concerning what one can or cannot know, and one derives a conclusion about the structure of reality from those premises. This is as illegitimate as…

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Finding An Agent: Back to the Beginning

As some of you may remember, late last year I signed with a literary agent. I blogged about how very difficult the process is of securing an agent, and you can read that post here.

I’m sorry to say that things didn’t work out with that particular agent, and what happened with him and his agency was very unfortunate. I really got shafted.

Those of you in the literary world may know Janet Reid. She’s something of a super-agent and runs a blog regarding agenting, querying agents, publishing, etc. I wrote to her about what happened to me, and she agreed that the way I was treated was “brutally unfair.”

Ms. Reid published my sob story on her blog, and you can read that here. (I’m really embarrassed that my email to her contained a typo, but she’s right that, given the context, it’s pretty hilarious.)

Suffice it to say, I’m back to square one with regard to finding an agent.

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A Writer’s Question: To Plot or Not to Plot?

I recently read Stephen King’s On Writing for the first time. Everyone knows that King is a wildly successful writer, and there’s that perennial question of whether he’s actually a good writer. (Yes, bad writers can be wildly successful, witness Dan Brown, who is a horrific writer.) I’ll confess that I’ve only read one of King’s novels (though I’ve seen a number of films adapted from his works), and it was a recent one: Mr. Mercedes. I’ll likewise confess that I didn’t finish it. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, exactly; it just didn’t grab me.

But On Writing was a very engaging book, and not just because of the writing advice. It’s an actual page-turner. He offers a memoir about how he began writing and the course his working life took until he became successful. What’s more, the book was an eye-opener for me in a couple of ways. For one thing, his suggestions about the amount of time one needs to devote daily to writing, and the word count goal one ought to set for oneself, motivated me to be more aggressive about my commitment to my craft and to my output.

But there was one thing in the book that was a real shock to my system. King doesn’t mince words that he thinks plotting is a bad idea. “I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible” (163), he says. Even stronger, he claims, “[As a tool, plot is] clumsy, mechanical, anticreative. Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored” (164).

Instead of plotting, King begins with a “what-if” situation. It’s barely a sentence, sometimes not even written down. “What if vampires invaded a small New England Village? (Salem’s Lot)”; “What if a policeman in a remote Nevada town went berserk and started killing everyone in sight? (Desperation)” (169). And he sits down at his computer and lets the story come as it will. He insists that the writer doesn’t and can’t control the direction of the narrative; the narrative dictates to the writer where it wants to go.

King is convinced that “stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world” (163), and that the writer’s job isn’t to force the ingredients of it together, as if he’s baking a cake; but rather to dig it up with fine-grained tools, as if he’s trying to get a fossil out of the ground.

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Now, all this was a shock to my system because I’m an obsessive plotter. All the novels I’ve written have been plotted, and as I’ve worked over the years, the outlines have become more and more detailed and complex. In the last few years, they’re in the range of 30 – 40 pages, single-spaced. And that’s just the outline. It doesn’t count the reams and reams of notes I’ve already taken just to get to the outlining stage.

Now, it could be that King is right, and my writing is artificial and labored; it could be that I’m robbing my stories of any true spontaneity and inspiration by plotting them out so thoroughly. After all, he has made a kabillion dollars from his books. Or it could be that there are different ways to go about the process, such that what works for one writer may not work for another.

First, when King says that stories are “part of an undiscovered pre-existing world,” I’m reading that as a metaphor for the creative process itself. I assume he means that, during the creative process, the writer needs to shut down the analytical, rational side of him- or herself, and let the truly primal, instinctive, creative part run wild; he means that the analytical part of the brain will constrain and hinder, will get in the way of, what the heart and the guts can truly accomplish.

If this isn’t meant as a metaphor, and King literally means that stories pre-exist out there somewhere, then he’s either bought into some absurd metaphysics, or he’s schizophrenic. So, I’ll go with the first option and read it as a metaphor.

My retort to King, then, is that the process of coming up with ideas and constructing a plot is a creative exercise. It just happens a step removed from the construction of the actual prose. That is, suppose I’m writing a suspense novel. Choices have to be made about every aspect of the book, the characters, the situations they find themselves in, how they get into and out of those situations, what the big confrontation is at the end, etc.

If I’m like King, I sit down at a blank page, and write the prose on the spot, without planning anything out ahead of time. I do all the creative work in that moment. But in the way I actually do it, some of the creative work is done ahead of time. Who is the main character? Who are his friends and his love interest? What’s the inciting incident that turns his world upside down? What’s the first act climax? The second act climax? And so forth.

However, in the process of thinking about those issues, and making those decisions, my rational and analytical faculties are not holding me back. All the ideas that occur to me come from inspiration, from the guts and the heart. They don’t necessarily come as the narrative unfolds, that is, chronologically, in story-time. They may well come out of order, and more in bits and pieces. But, as I say, they are the product of creative imagination; and not all narratives work in a linear chronology anyway.

Okay, so maybe I lose some of the spontaneity, but I deny that spontaneity is absolutely necessary for creativity. In subsequent drafts, King surely adds lots and lots of elements to his stories. Why, I ask, is introducing some cool idea in the second draft somehow original and inspired, but coming up with that idea during the note-taking or outlining phase isn’t?

As many chills as King gets down his back writing those inspired moments in the midst of a scene, I get as well in those great bursts of creativity in the planning and outlining phase. Stuff happens, the story goes in particular directions, that I didn’t see coming. The difference is that, (for me) trying to write a suspense novel (or worse, a mystery) without an outline is asking for trouble. You can write yourself into difficulties that you might not be able to get out of without starting over or throwing out lots and lots of pages.

Further, just because I outline extensively doesn’t mean I outline absolutely everything. I have a road map of where the story starts and where it goes. Most of the important and interesting details are provided in the actual writing of the prose. Even with that structure in place, there’s still a great deal of room for spontaneity, for the story to come to life, for me to put meat on its bones.

So, my conclusion is that King is wrong to say that plotting is the death of creativity, “the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.” It’s just not the way he does things. You and I are free to do it differently.

Perseverance: A Writer’s Virtue, or: How to Get to ‘Yes’

A little over two years ago, I posted a piece called “I Tweet, Therefore I Am,” in which I bemoaned the current state of publishing, swore of self-publishing forever, and argued that it didn’t make sense for someone to build an online presence before he or she had produced something to promote (e.g., a novel).

I declared in that post that I was determined to follow the traditional route of finding a literary agent and pursuing industry publishing. I’m very pleased to announce that I have indeed signed with a literary agent, and he is set to begin pitching my work to publishers this week.

But this is after two more agonizing years of work, of writing and rewriting, of revising and editing, of querying more agents than I can count, of sending out requested manuscripts, only to be rejected over and over.

[Daily, I read the blog of literary super-agent Janet Reid, the one and only Query Shark. She’s smart, funny, and her posts are full of good advice. Just the other day she talked about the virtue of perseverance for a writer, or as she puts it in that post: “Be resolute.” Writers fret over every aspect of the process of writing and the vagaries of querying. We agonize over how best to get an agent’s attention. We parse emails for every bit of evidence, every clue we can divine, over an agent’s interest or intention. It’s mostly a waste of time, of course. “You can control ONE thing right now,” says JR, “what you write. Write the best book you can.” That’s good advice.]

If you’re determined to be a writer, then there’s nothing else to do but write and get better at writing. That’s your first priority. Everything else is secondary. And if you’re truly determined, you won’t quit, no matter how many disappointments, no matter how much heartache.

[image error]Sisyphus must have been a writer

I’m not going to talk about the book my agent is pitching, since who knows what’s going to happen to it. Suffice it to say, when I first started pitching it, I really had little idea how to go about querying, and I’ll write a separate post about that. Here, I’ll merely provide a snapshot of what it took to get to ‘yes’ from an agent.

* I first started querying the book in January, 2014. It was a mere 49,000 words. I should have known that, at that short length, the book wasn’t done.

* Between January, 2014 and late 2016, the full manuscript was read by some 20 very good agents. [Writers, you heard that right: TWENTY AGENTS READ IT AND SAID NO.]

* By January of 2015, I was still revising and querying. The manuscript was now at 55,000 words.

* During this process, I connected with a number of great beta readers (other writers who read your work and give you feedback). They gave me inspired advice about how to improve the book. For a long time, I thought of the writing game as a solo act, but it’s really not. You have to have good critique partners (and those with whom you can commiserate).

* By the beginning of 2016, the manuscript had stretched out to 76,000 words. I’d kept working on it, developing it, and the story began to build. At first, I’d had a mere skeleton of a plot. As the process developed, it got some meat on its bones.

* It was around this time, perhaps a bit earlier, that I connected with a very well-established agent. He was really captivated by the book but thought it needed work. His advice, and the comments of his readers (and of my beta readers), were invaluable in the final major revisions to the work.

* In the last, big changes, the book went through a revolution. It was transformed. I pushed it beyond anything I could initially have foreseen or imagined. The initial idea was solid, but the execution was limited and pedestrian. By the end, I had a real story on my hands.

* The final manuscript stands now at 82,000 words—almost twice as long as the original version.

During this long, grueling process, I learned a number of valuable lessons about how to develop and revise a story, about the need for critique partners, how to query agents, how to persevere.

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve signed with Alex Franks at The Donaghy Literary Group. Thanks to some prodding from Alex, I re-imagined the beginning of the story (started it in a different place), and the book is once again improved. I look forward to doing some great work with Alex.

“I’m back, baby!” (said in George Costanza voice)

 

 

Plato on the Rise of Trump, or: Philosophy in 140 Characters?

“The greatest punishment, if one isn’t willing to rule, is to be ruled by someone worse than oneself.” (Republic, 347c)

“Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are not called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophize, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide…cities will have no rest from evils…nor, I think, will the human race.” (Republic, 473d – e)

The other day I posted a video from the BBC. It’s a short piece from the journalist Andrew Sullivan, who says that the rise of Trump reminded him of a passage from Plato’s Republic that he’d read in college.

[Watch the video here. I especially like Trump’s glowing head.]

Plato took a dim view of democracy, claiming it was the second worst form of government. In the passage that Sullivan reads, Plato describes a descending, corrupt democracy, and argues that it’s the perfect breeding ground for a tyrant. The passage from the Republic seems eerily prescient; it seems really to capture important elements of our dysfunctional 21st Century democracy that enabled Trump to come to power.

I thought the video might be of interest for some of my Twitter followers, so I posted it with the comment: “As usual, Plato nailed it.”

A number of people retweeted or “favorited” the post. But I received a couple of negative comments from people I’d never interacted with before.

@CrispinSartwell said: “no philosopher has ever been wronger about anything than plato about politics.”

In his bio, Sartwell notes that he’s a philosophy professor, so we can assume he has some knowledge of Plato (maybe a lot). However, his comment exemplifies the impossibility of doing philosophy on social media (particularly on Twitter). What he wrote is the equivalent of: “You’re just wrong!” or “My dad can beat up your dad!”

In other words, the comment is exaggerated and philosophically unhelpful. It’s meant to shut someone down, rather than to open up a conversation. This is not to blame Professor Sartwell. His comment is perfectly appropriate for Twitter. It just illustrates my point that you can’t say anything truly subtle or analyze something properly in 140 characters.

Then, @NealCurtis made two comments. First: “No he didn’t [nail it]. Plato supported aristocratic government. It is natural he would oppose democracy. This is just age-old conservative bullshit.”

Second: “Plato supported aristocracy & opposed to democracy. It’s like using David Duke’s writings as evidence miscegenation is bad.”

[image error]Plato

Mr. Curtis’s bio says: “Interested in critical theory, comics, capital, SF, and technology,” so there’s no way to tell what his background in philosophy or Plato might be.

Mr. Curtis’s claim that Plato was opposed to democracy is correct. Plato was elitist and anti-egalitarian. However, his claim that Plato “supported aristocracy” is quite misleading, at least as far as the arguments in the Republic go. “Aristocracy” means literally “rule of the best,” so Plato wasn’t advocating the divine right of kings.

Rather, he was claiming that in the ideal city, the best people suited to ruling would rule. They’d have to be truly wise people, philosophers in fact. What’s more, in this utopia, the rulers would have no private property, to prevent bribery; and they would have no individual spouses and wouldn’t know who their own children were, so that they’d have loyalty to the city-state, and not to an individual family. This is a far cry from the historical examples of aristocracy we’re familiar with.

Misleading interpretations aside, it seems to me, that both Professor Sartwell and Mr. Curtis’s comments are short-sighted. Even if you disagree with Plato’s politics, and even if you disagree vehemently with his assessment of democracy, his discussion in the Republic may hold some key insights into the ways in which a democracy such as our own, when it falls into dysfunction (which it has), can become a breeding ground for a tyrant.

Indeed, especially if you disagree vehemently with Plato and hold democracy and its freedoms dear, you should pay close attention to the dangers he foresaw. Perhaps if we’d all read the Republic a little more closely, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.

Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction, Benjamin Percy. A Review.

This is a craft book about writing fiction that reads like a novel. In other words, Percy is giving writing advice, while at the same time telling engaging stories about himself, his life, his process in writing. It’s all very engaging, sometimes even thrilling, and the advice is solid to inspired.

The book is broken up into different essays, each containing a central lesson: “Thrill Me,” “Urgency,” Making the Extraordinary Ordinary,” “Designing Suspense,” and so on.

Some of the recommendations are familiar. Set goals for your characters; introduce a ticking clock; if it sounds like writing, rewrite it, and so on. But, even though these bits of advice are familiar, they do bear repeating.

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A few of the tips I highlighted, because I need to be reminded of them: “Be specific” in writing descriptions, “avoid abstraction.” “Never give us a generic description.” Percy has what he calls an “Exploding helicopter clause”: “If a story doesn’t contain an exploding helicopter, an editor will not publish it, no matter how pretty its sentences and orgasmic its epiphany might be.” (16)

He elaborates:

The exploding helicopter is an inclusive term that may refer but is not limited to giant sharks, robots with laser eyes, pirates, poltergeists, were-kittens, demons, slow zombies, fast zombies, talking unicorns, probe-wielding Martians, sexy vampires, barbarians in hairy underwear, and all forms of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic mayhem. (16)

You’ve got to keep the reader wondering, “What happens next?” “What happens next? is why most people read. It’s what makes us fall in love with books.” (17)

One of my favorite lessons from the book concerns what Percy calls “flaming chain saws.” He wanted to find out why Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was such a worldwide hit. So, Percy sat down with the book and outlined it on a legal pad. He color-coded each plot complication, and he ended up using a lot of different pens. What he discovered is that Larsson would introduce a problem on a certain page, then come back to it 50 pages later, and then another 30 pages later, and then another 70 pages later. In the meantime, he would introduce a second problem and do the same thing, and then a third, and a forth, and so on.

Larsson didn’t introduce one problem, neatly wrap it up, and then introduce another. Percy discovered that dipping into and out of those plot complications kept readers turning the pages. And so Percy named those complications “flaming chainsaws.” The author has to keep them in the air as the narrative progresses. “Your success as a storyteller has to do with your ability to juggle them,” (84) says Percy. “Every time the flaming chainsaws pass through your hands, they gain speed, become more perilous, until at last they are extinguished.” (84)

I have one quibble with Percy. He matches singular nouns and plural pronouns: “When a reader first picks up a story, they are like a coma patient…” (119). This is an abomination. No one should do it.

Otherwise, this is a fine book about the craft of writing that contains lots of good advice and is a lot of fun to read.

Nietzsche and the Philosophers

I’m very pleased to announce the release of my anthology, Nietzsche and the Philosophers. It’s a collection of essays devoted to Nietzsche’s relationship to other great thinkers in the history of philosophy, figures such as Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Emerson, and Rousseau.

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I was lucky enough to recruit some of the most important scholars working in Nietzsche studies for this project. The essays included in the book are truly excellent. I’m very proud of this work.