Austin Scott Collins's Blog: Upside-down, Inside-out, and Backwards, page 7

Doing It Yourself

Spending time listening to authors talking about their experiences with independent self-publishing vs. traditional publishing is fascinating. It's remarkable how much technology has (a) brought greater freedom to writers and greater choice to readers by lowering the barriers between creators and consumers, and (b) scared the ever-loving shit out of the entire publishing industry. Successful and well-established authors are starting to exercise the self-publishing option and sell their work directly to the masses.

I'm no expert, but here are a few of the opinions on the subject of self-publishing I've been hearing from people who know way, way more about this than I.

Advantages:

1. No one tells you what to write. The publishing industry is driven by what sells, and few decision-makers want to gamble on something new and different. You may think of your work as quirky, offbeat, unique etc. but they'll call it a long shot.

A publisher wants two things from an author: first (and by far most importantly), an established name with a nice big fat list of devoted fans and readers. Second, a manuscript that is solidly within a well-defined genre that is selling very well right now and will be easy to market to a designated target demographic. Give 'em both and they're extremely happy.

What if you're not well known? What if you are writing stuff that either straddles or defies traditional genre definitions? Or what if you write within an unpopular genre? Even if a publisher thinks your stuff is good, the question is: "who can I sell this to?"

Selling your own work means you write what you want to write. You can do it your own way, for your own reasons and on your own timeline.

2. You don't have to surrender control over things that might be important to you. I'm a control enthusiast, and details such as typeface, formatting, cover design, and a panoply of editorial/stylistic choices matter to me. You might be adamant about certain unconventional things that make your work distinct, and as a self-published author you can go for it. The risk is yours to take. A traditional publisher might flat-out refuse to let you take a chance on something weird.

3. You can build an audience over time. In traditional publishing, you are at the mercy of the company that carries your book. You generally get one shot at success. If they botch your release and/or don't give your book the proper level of support and as a result it tanks, you may get dropped and find your career torpedoed, at least for a while. Now you're back to square one and have to start all over . . . a demoralizing prospect. The books's failure wasn't necessarily your fault, but you have to live with the shadow of the disaster.

When you sell your own work, you can be in it for the long haul. If your work is good, if it resonates, then it will eventually find its way into the hands of the right people, the people who will appreciate it.

Disadvantages:

1. For every hour you spend on your manuscript, you spend three hours (or more) on promotional efforts. If you don't do it, it doesn't get done.

I have a Twitter account, a Tumblr account, a Facebook author page , an Amazon author page, and this Goodreads author page in addition to my personal Web site. Keeping them all actively updated (and interesting?) takes at least as much time as the actual writing I do each day.

2. You don't have the vast resources and knowledge base of an editor, an agent, a publisher, a Webmaster and an advertising rep to tap into when strategizing your campaign. (Then again, this can also be a good thing in a way. See #1 from the "Advantages" category above.)

3. Some people need deadlines and criticism to do good work. In a vacuum, they flail about unproductively. It can be like trying to teach yourself a new subject without actually taking a class. Remove the pressure of tests and graded homework, and you might not have the motivation to stay on schedule.

I think what's happening in the world of publishing right now is similar to what's happening in the music industry: the Internet is pushing more responsibility back onto the producers (the writers, the musicians), but that's not necessarily a bad thing — and it brings with it unprecedented bi-directional access.

They Say It's Always Darkest Right Before the Dawn, But I Think It's the Same Amount of Dark All Night

"I hate writing. I love having written."
— Dorothy Parker

It is such a relief to finally put down your pencil (metaphorically) and say, "I'm finished with this manuscript." I'm having fantasies of that moment right now.

Dear readers, yours truly is currently elbows-deep in the deepest part of the river crossing that is Writing the Next Book. Did I mention that it's a cold, swift-moving river?

I actually do enjoy writing, but to be precise I only love certain things about it. Some things I tolerate, and others I can only just barely stand.

Immensely thankful am I for one thing: as an obscure and utterly unknown pseudo-novelist, no one cares what I do next. I take this as a tremendous blessing straight from the literary gods. I have read so many laments by famous writers on this issue. You write a book, then you embark upon a sequel, and suddenly the world is at your doorstep making demands. "More of this," they beg, and "less of that."

But what if that was, in the mind of the author, what the book was really all about? What if that was the whole gosh-darned freaking POINT? What if this was only something included reluctantly and as an afterthought to provide some counterbalance, or to serve some specific narrative purpose?

Well, at least that's one dilemma I do not currently confront. Maybe someday I will be one of those bestselling authors and I'll have to deal with rabid fans littering the Internet with hopes and expectations, but for now I have no hype to live up to — just a river to cross.

SO YOU'VE WRITTEN A BOOK

Congratulations! Welcome to the club.

Some things you should know:

1. It's a lot of work. Seriously, it's more work than you think it is. You thought it was hard finishing your manuscript? Cultivating a career means shepherding a novel across the rocky, barren terrain of total obscurity, across the jagged ridges of massive public indifference and into the lush green meadows of generous and abundant royalty checks.

Even if you have written a fantastic piece of fiction, it will languish undiscovered unless you unleash a ferocious uphill campaign to get it noticed. And even that is only the beginning; now you have to translate robust sales into an ongoing job — the kind of job that pays the rent, buys the groceries, gets you health insurance, puts gas in your car, and makes the payments on your dining room furniture. How many people get to make a living as writers? How many people try? Don't think about it too hard, or you'll start crying. Again. Just hunker down and focus. And it helps to have some kind of useful skill, like being a clapper loader or doctor.

You can easily spend eight hours a day writing, another eight hours a day marketing and promoting your work, and the other eight hours networking and answering email. (Then you have to find time to replace your toner cartridge, sleep, feed the cat, and binge-watch Season 2 of Game of Thrones.)

2. People will hate your work. Maybe it will be a few arrogant, hateful trolls. Maybe it will be a large number of people. Maybe it will be most people. But there is one absolute certainty: no matter how proud of it you are, someone will despise what you've written.

Consider the greatest works of literature from history. Pick any example. It's not at all hard to find passionate, articulate criticism by very smart people patiently explaining why it totally sucks donkey balls.

Now consider books that are extremely popular and successful in today's market — books that have sold millions of copies and been made into major motion pictures. Again, pick any example. A very quick Google search will yield pages and pages of people howling and snarling about how gut-wrenchingly, teeth-grindingly, eye-gougingly terrible it is.

That's what you're jumping into, so pull on your galoshes. Don't take it personally. That's a stupid thing to say. Of course you're going to take it personally. If you don't already have a drinking habit, now might be a good time to develop one.

3. You may think that writing a book is a fairly unusual occupation, and it is. I have no idea what percentage of the human population has (a) seriously considered writing a book, (b) actually started writing a book, (c) actually finished a manuscript, or (d) goodness gracious — actually published a book, but a few logical assumptions tells us that it's probably a fairly low figure. (It gets even lower when you filter out of the equation those who "wrote" a "book" using stolen permanent markers to write in all caps on the backs of paper placemats from seafood restaurants. And it gets far, far lower when you also remove from consideration those who call their work a "manifesto," as well as anyone who creates incoherent erotica involving pets and kitchen appliances.)

But once you enter the strange world of publishing, it will suddenly seem as if every single human being on the planet has written a book or is writing a book. You will find yourself surrounded by people who casually mention how disappointed they are that their sixteenth novel didn't make it quite as high up on the New York Times Bestseller List as their fifteenth. You will not be a special snowflake, Captain Authorpants. But this is a good thing, once you get over the initial shock. You are surrounded by a group of people who are going through what you're going through, and who understand the challenges, setbacks, insecurities, triumphs and absurdities of this peculiar business.

Some people are jerks, and writers are people, so you will encounter some who are by nature competitive and a few who are even bullies. The tactic for dealing with them is the same for dealing with any other toxic dickwad: to the extent possible, ignore them. Most of the writers I've ever met are basically nice people, eager to share and sympathize.

In reality, novelists are not competing against each other, even if they're writing in the same genre. Why? Because avid readers are always looking for more books, new books, different books, other books. It's a false fear that "she will buy HIS book instead of MY book!" If she likes the kind of stuff you write, she'll buy your book, too. The real enemy of writers — all writers — is a society that doesn't value reading. The other writer is not your opponent. The other writer is your ally against a much greater and more threatening nemesis: a world where kids grow up without ever being exposed to books and without ever being taught to love reading.

4. If you are brand new to the scene, more established, more successful writers have every reason to be cautious about you. You might be one of those annoying ramoras who try to latch on to famous or wealthy or powerful or popular people and get a free elevator ride to glory and prosperity.

So be sincere in your compliments, "Like" their pages, follow their blogs, signal boost their latest releases, give favorable reviews to their work, but don't expect or demand anything in return. Your work will ultimately succeed or fail on its own merits.

Someday, maybe YOU will be an established, successful writer. You will then find yourself bombarded with attention from eager young writers who are trying to get started with their careers and are hoping you can give them a lift. The same advice applies.

5. A lot of writers are introverts, so parties for writers can be really strange affairs.

6. It's totally OK to be friends with writers whose work you aren't into, and vice versa. Maybe they write romantic vampire novels set in 18th-century Budapest and you write courtroom thrillers. It's fine. You share a common love of writing and a common experience navigating the world of writing for a living, and that's more than enough.

7. Get a good agent. Better yet, marry one.

Staying on Track

In The Writing Life, her collection of essays about what it means to be a novelist, Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard contends that it generally takes between two and ten years to write a book.

It took me three years and eight months to write Dicing Time for Gladness. (I started it on Monday, March 8th, 2010 and published it on Wednesday, November 6th, 2013. See How It All Began .) So what makes me think I can write the sequel, Crass Caualty, as well as the conclusion, Hate's Profiting, in one year each? Well, that's a question I keep asking myself.

The main reason is that both books are already semi-written, although that can be a deceiving idea. The proportion of completeness is a notoriously tough thing to estimate. In shipbuilding or novel-writing, the last 10% seems to take 90% of your total time. You have what looks like a mostly finished structure — it has the overall shape of a boat — but the detail work is endless. With a boat, you're never truly finished; even long after you sail away, you're fixing, refitting, fine-tuning and tweaking things forever. With a novel, at some point you have to give up and call your last rewrite your final one, or else your manuscript will languish unpublished until the universe reaches a uniform temperature of absolute zero. (I've already found several profoundly embarrassing errors in Dicing Time for Gladness, and believe me, it does keep me up at night. One of these days I'm going to release a second edition with all the mistakes fixed.) So it's hard to say whether Crass Casualty, which I am in the middle of right now, is 23% or 52% finished in any meaningful sense.

I have days when I can hardly type fast enough to keep pace with my brain as the ideas come blasting out. I have other days when I spend an entire afternoon wrestling with a single problematic sentence. (I once inserted, deleted and re-inserted the same word, "golden," eleven times.)

All that having been said, I still feel reasonably confident I can get Crass Casualty finished to my satisfaction in time for my self-imposed release date of November. Progress is slow and uneven and my writing schedule is erratic and irregular, but I have allowed for that in my planning.

Stephen King said, "Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work." I'm not as prolific as King, nor even .0000001% as successful, but I do have a slightly modified version of that ethic. When I'm feeling creatively fluffed up and productive, I write the fancy stuff — the bold, sweeping strokes, the exciting scenes, the bright, memorable, significant things. And when I'm not feeling enthused, I grind away at the mundane (but equally necessary) stuff, the carpentry and masonry that holds it all together. This dialogue transition needs to be smoother; I already used the word "lugubrious" earlier; this description of the background scene needs to be cleaned up; this explanatory passage is clunky; this entire paragraph is useless and self-indulgent and ought to be culled. I have the luxury of dipping in and out of the project from high above because I always start with a detailed outline. (See My Process .)

Meanwhile, I go on seeking that elusive, properly balanced internal state conducive to both the intense concentration and disconnected, free-associative wandering of the mind that are equal requirements of novel writing. And the train continues to roll, although not swiftly and with numerous stops along the way.

An Indispensable Receptacle

Despite the planned release order posted on my Web site , I did not, in fact, start work on these nine novels in that sequence. I actually began the Divine Cortex trilogy in high school and started working on the Cyanide of the Masses books right around the year 2000.

Dicing Time for Gladness ended up being first simply because it felt more finished than any of the others, even though it was my most recent project. (See the story of how DTfG came into existence here .)

*Side note: there was an eleventh project, Fly by Night, which I actually finished in the early 90s, and subsequently dumped because it was exceedingly stupid. There was also a twelfth, which I completed in the late 80s, but even its title is too moronic to include here.

One of the things I discovered very early was the usefulness of what I descriptively call The Deleted Text File. It started out as a sort of vaguely conceived rationalization and quickly evolved into an essential tool.

As a writer, one of the most painful things to do is cut out something that you really like. Sometimes you write something that you're very fond of, very proud of, very attached to, and then realize that it just doesn't belong in that particular story. Not that it isn't good; it just doesn't fit.

So I created The Deleted Text File as a repository for anything worth saving. Maybe someday it will find a home elsewhere. Maybe not. But it's a way of relieving the acute sting of hitting CTRL+X on paragraphs or pages of smashing material produced at great effort. The real narrative usually begins about twenty pages in, and sometimes those first twenty pages have to go — even though it took a week of rum-fueled nights to pound them out. The simple, hard truth is that editing and revising usually entails mostly hacking away at the manuscript with a machete, then a set of pruning shears, and finally a tiny pair of mustache scissors. It's uncomfortable to watch a 20-page scene shrink to 5 pages, but if it was 20 ponderous pages reduced to 5 brisk, incandescent pages, then that's what needs to happen. (Not that I don't do it without an occasional grunt of rueful indignation.)

The Deleted Text File is a way of giving myself permission to slash ruthlessly at the text. Once the outline and the bulk of preliminary research that goes with it are finished (see "The Process" ), I confront the vast, barren wasteland that lies ahead: fleshing out each scene from a skeletal sketch to a fully realized chunk of prose, which is both tedious and laborious. What makes it much easier is knowing that I can begin by shooting at it with a wide-muzzled word cannon, and that I will be back to clean it up later. Often, the hardest thing to do in a day of writing is just convincing yourself to turn on the computer and open the manuscript file. Being able to say, "just write something; I'll fix it when I'm sober" is a wonderfully liberating motivator.

The Perfect Gift

Trish just surprised me with a present: a copy of The Writing Life, a collection of short, powerful essays by the Pulitzer-prize-winning Annie Dillard.

You know, one spends so much time focused on the business side of writing — marketing, promoting, networking, curating, monitoring, posting, updating (and yes, blogging) — that it's easy to lose touch with the fundamental, underlying pleasure of the act of wordsmithing, of crafting a story.

It is often observed that going to college is about 10% going to classes and 90% experiencing life outside the nest. Students are doing everything from hearing about new ideas to which they had never been exposed before to doing their own laundry for the first time, everything from discovering new aspects of their own individual, independent identities to meeting people way, WAY outside their previous insulated social circles (if they're lucky). It's all so huge and exciting that it's easy to forget you're here for a reason: to go to your classes, read textbooks, take tests, and hopefully get a degree.

Being a writer is a lot like that. You get so immersed in the fuss and commotion of publishing that you get forcefully disconnected from the central, vital core of it all: sitting down and putting words on paper.

So what I'm trying to say is: thank you to both Trish and Annie. I needed that.

Subway Walls, Tenement Halls

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
— Stephen Crane

I've been thinking about fame lately. Not just fame — celebrity. Celebrity is like a shiny, sparkly disease: an illness within society and an addiction within the individual. At the level of the general public, it's an obsession with icons and demons, heroes and villains. At the level of the person who seeks mass-recognition, it's a neurotic desire for some kind of affirmation. It's the same impulse that causes people to scribble graffiti in bathrooms. It's a way of saying: "at some point in history, I was here. I was real. I was alive."

In modern popular Western culture, being famous for any reason — or for no reason at all — seems to be a highly sought-after prize in itself. People are more than willing to be humiliated on television in exchange for the "privilege" of millions of people seeing their faces and hearing their names, even if they are being openly mocked for their lack of talent. Apparently, to them it's worth it.

To become a celebrity is to make a dreadful Faustian bargain. Once your identity is known to some portion of the world, you will come under attack. It is inevitable. Consider any well known actor or politician, any well known singer or business figure. The Internet is flooded with cruel and hateful jabs towards them, many of them dishonorable and with no rational basis whatsoever. You know, if you become famous, this will happen to you too. And yet the desire to achieve celebrity status wins out over the desire to avoid this kind of relentless harassment and antagonism.

Sometimes being a celebrity is directly linked to having a successful career, as in Hollywood. Other times, however, becoming a celebrity appears to be the end goal. And often it's a complete accident. These are the situations that make me flinch. Some regular, ordinary human being gets inadvertently caught up in some national drama like a disaster, a rescue, or a courtroom battle. He or she gets trapped, gets saved, or has to give testimony in a high-profile case. The next thing you know, trolls are using words like "stupid" and "ugly" and "pathetic" to describe him or her. This is a person who never chased the spotlight. But it doesn't matter. Once the spotlight is thrust upon you, like it or not, it's open season and you're fair game.

It's also a trap: you can never just stop being famous. Instead, if your light dims, you become a has-been, a footnote, a D-lister. And being famous is a lot of work. You must promote yourself incessantly, and you're always "on," no matter where you go. You have no privacy. You can never relax. You are observed and judged at all times. You are followed by crazy stalkers, ruthless pararazzi and nosy, unethical, uncharitable reporters looking for a juicy story. We all do foolish things and have moments of questionable or inappropriate behavior, but if you're a celebrity it becomes tabloid "news" the next day. People shamelessly make up outrageous lies and start vicious rumours about you all the time, and other people believe them because they don't know any better. People attribute statements to you that you never made, or take statements you did make wildly out of context. You wind up with an entourage of parasites, and you never know how many of them are real friends and how many are just there because you're famous. You never know who to trust. You get caught up in silly public feuds with other famous people. People may admire you or look up to you, and expect you to set a positive example. When you make a mistake, thousands of people will feel personally betrayed, as if you let them down. The whole thing sounds exhausting.

Not being a celebrity, on the other hand, is quite nice. It means you can come and go as you please, and go about your normal daily business. Obscurity is like a comfortable pair of shoes.

One of the nice things about being a novelist, I suppose, is that it is possible to achieve success without being a celebrity. There are writers who have published dozens of books and are making a perfectly agreeable living for themselves, achieving both creative and financial freedom, without being recognized and hassled on the street. They can go out to a restaurant or a bar and remain anonymous. They can go to the grocery story without it becoming an event.

One thing you can't avoid is criticism, both of yourself and of your work. But that's something you can't avoid anywhere, no matter where you go in the world or what you do with your life.

So to circle back to my original point, I think writing satisfies the same primal impulse as fame-seeking (to say, "I exist!"). Instead of seeking immortality through increasing the number of people who know who you are, as a writer you come to terms with your limits in time and space, and make peace with it through the act of synthesis. Writing a book is all about capturing the experiential essence of this temporary mortal incarnation, crystallizing it, slicing it up, and arranging it in a display case. It may be seen and enjoyed by a hundred other people (or a thousand or a million) or it may not, but that isn't the point. The point was the act of doing it.

I'm Legit; the IRS Says So.

I was a little surprised how excited I was to get my first 1099 form showing my book royalties.



It's unexpectedly validating! I feel so official now. I want to frame it or something.

Hooray for the Kooks and Weirdos!

Like Winston Churchill said, history is written by the winners. That's why I like the stories that get missed and forgotten, the ones that slip between the cracks and disappear until some intrepid researcher scoops them out.

Sure, history is about wars and nations, emperors and armies, but it's also about the spirit of a time and a place, the daily surface-level reality of normal people.

Normal people, of course, are often every bit as strange as "Great" people — and often quite a bit stranger. Unlike the wealthy and powerful, who can privately indulge their weirdness and wickedness, the ordinary folks must either publicly embrace their inner deviance or find brave and creative ways to hide it.

I think the real story lies in the words and deeds of the so-called "common" men and women . . . who were often anything but. If you want to learn the truth about the zeitgeist, about the cultural milieu, look at the crackpots and eccentrics, the iconoclasts and free-thinkers, the ones who had to find a way to function within a society that did not accept them. Those are the people who were forced to make some really interesting choices. The ideal Edwardian man, living in the Edwardian era, is hardly fascinating. The individual who would have been more at home in another century and/or on another continent and yet has to cope with the Edwardian era, on the other hand — now therein hangs a tale!

Four Things We Ought to be Doing to Teach History Better

Four Things We Ought to be Doing to Teach History Better

1) Quit sanitizing it!
History is not always pretty. In fact, it's often fairly horrific. One thing it is not, however, is boring. Students complain about how dull and monotonous history is, but that's only because it's being "taught" as a dry recitation of dates and treaties rather than a human story of blood, perversion, lust, and betrayal. Let's not fool ourselves; kids are already exposed to plenty of porn and gore. So why not tell them the truth? History is a grand pageant of sex, violence, greed, bitter personal feuds, petty jealous rivalries, vanity, pride, pathological cruelty, and some of the strangest carnal exploits imaginable. History is also an extraordinary collection of tales of exploration, discovery, adventure, faith, hope, redemption, the triumph of persistence, the occasional defeat of evil and ignorance by the forces of reason and kindness, and some really cool clothes.

2) Quit simplifying it!
History is complicated and frequently uncomfortable. History is a complex and ambiguous tangle of contradictory facts. History is a mysterious paradox. A deep and nuanced understanding of any aspect of history depends upon the assimilation and appreciation of thousands of closely intertwined factors.

Imagine, for instance, a group of 100 people. What is their story? Obviously there is no one story — there are at least 100 stories, each of which is interlocked with many others.

Yet we love a compelling narrative, and we love to prove points, so it's easy for the historian with an agenda to conveniently ignore what doesn't fit and generate a neat, tidy object lesson. A led to B, which caused C. Therefore, D. End of lecture.

This need to keep things simple and easy leads to widely repeated "facts" that are preposterously inaccurate. My favorite example of this is the dumb old elementary school concept that "Christopher Columbus discovered America while trying to prove that the world is round." No one who reads this blog believes that, but a shocking number of children are being told this and an even more shocking number of teachers seem to think it's true. Can we just take a moment to enumerate a few of the ways this 13-word sentence is wrong?

* In the 15th century, no one thought the world was flat, certainly not kings and navigators.

* Columbus did not "discover" the "New World." There were already millions of people living here, and there had been for centuries.

* Columbus was not even the first European to reach the North American continent. (Norse explorer Leif Ericson established a settlement on the northern tip of what we now call Newfoundland in Canada nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus sailed.)

* Columbus never reached the North American mainland. He only reached the Bahamas. (And other Caribbean islands on later voyages.) When a teacher says Columbus "discovered America," the word "America" is implied to mean "the United States." This is disingenuous; The Commonwealth of the Bahamas is not part of the United States.

What's even worse, this simplified narrative makes Columbus sound like a noble hero. If you read contemporary accounts of his conduct (and even, in some cases, his own journal), you find that he and his brothers and the men of his crew mercilessly terrorized, stole from, tortured, kidnapped, and enslaved the natives he encountered, sometimes parading their dismembered bodies through the streets as a grim warning to others. His reign of tyranny and genocide puts Columbus on an equal footing with many of the worst monsters of history. (See the report of Governor Francisco de Bobadilla, who was appointed by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand to investigate the atrocities after they removed Columbus from power.)

A better way to teach is by looking at the primary source material and doing a guided discussion. To continue with the Columbus example, let's read the story in his own words, and the words of those who were there. The expeditions of Columbus certainly did mark the beginning of the well-funded and systematic colonization of North, Central, and South America by European empires. What were his goals? (Money.) What were his methods? What was his plan? What were his main accomplishments? What was interesting and impressive about these accomplishments? What were some negative consequences? Who benefited? Who lost? What was the impact on the future of North, Central, and South America? How might today's world be different if Columbus had landed elsewhere? How much did it matter that it was Columbus, and not someone else, who arrived in these waters when and where he did? Was the colonization of the region inevitable? Given his connections and sponsorship, what were the implications on European politics? These are worthwhile questions with a multitude of possible answers.

Let's give kids some credit; they can handle the truth. They don't need to be spoon-fed sugary propaganda.

3) Quit making movies that are supposedly about history so ridiculously inaccurate!
Let's just go ahead and face that fact that the typical American gets most of his or her sense of history from movies. I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm just saying it's an inescapable fact of modern life. So what a missed opportunity it is when those movies depict events in ways that are grossly misleading or wildly wrong. I categorically reject the idea that it is always necessary to alter history to make it entertaining. History is already entertaining! The truth is usually just as good.

I am not insisting that every single tiny detail has to be 100% accurate. Nor am I demanding that the subject of every movie be real-world history. (Science fiction and fantasy movies may be quasi-historical, but there is no expectation that they are anything other than make-believe.) And yes, we go to the movies to be entertained, not educated.

But I am suggesting that IF you DO make a movie about A REAL TIME AND PLACE IN HISTORY you should try to get the most important major events right.

Movies like Pearl Harbor, The Patriot, The Far Horizons, They Died with Their Boots On and Pocahontas implant false beliefs that would have to be un-taught in American History class, and probably never will be.

4) Deliberately make conflicting historiography part of the curriculum.
There are few learning experiences more valuable than reading what appears to be a solid, lucid, well documented academic treatment of a topic with clear and appealing conclusions . . . only to read a second piece of equally robust scholarly research that essentially says, "no, what that other guy said was total bullshit." When I was learning about Victoria Woodhull, I read six books about her life. It was remarkable how differently each of the six authors approached and portrayed her. It was like reading about six different historical figures, not the same woman. This realization encourages students of history to go back to the original primary source material . . . and where there is none, to be very skeptical about what is being "taught."