The Grasshopper #20: Ambiguity
Life is not black and white
I am a fan of ambiguity in storytelling, of not defining pure good or pure evil, because nothing in life is pure. This life is messy, loose around the edges, not always in sharp focus. Things and people often turn out to be different than first impressions.
This ambiguity is what creates conflict and conflict is essential whether it is actual physical conflict or conflict within a character.
The writer’s world has changed, drastically
I started my writing career nearly thirty years ago, pre-internet, which is like saying pre-history. We were practically writing on stone tablets back then. I got my first computer, a Mac SE with 4 meg of Ram and 40 meg of hard drive space. It had a nine inch black and white screen, it was slow as hell, and it changed my life.
I never learned to touch type, to my great regret. I’m tapping this out with one finger on my IPad. When I was Marketing Director of a software company the developers would laugh at me slowly pecking away while they could type like banshees.
I’d just tell them I wrote nine books that way.
That life in the nineties seems unimaginably distant. One of the results of the internet was the dilution of the value of writers. Instant communication meant that wannabe writers were everywhere, desperate for recognition and work, and those in need of their services found they could get them for next to nothing.
Meanwhile the general public thought writing had something to do with best-seller lists, though 99.9% of books never come near those things. Amazon took over the lucrative vanity publishing industry by giving anyone the ability to publish a book, no matter how crappy.
This resulted in the overall value of writing getting even more diluted. Advances for that 99.9% of books published, dwindled to nearly nothing. I stopped even thinking about publishing in the traditional sense. And old school media like newspapers and magazines died along with the rates they once paid.
My first national magazine article in the early nineties paid $900 for 900 words, a dollar a word. Today it would pay nothing.
So, I reinvented myself as a digital marketing guy in the software business, which was actually almost all about writing, except it paid very well and had benefits. Finally I was making money doing what I knew best, sort of.
Boy, has my life changed since then. Today I write what I want and make a few bucks from it and I’m very happy with that. I honestly don’t feel poorer than when I was making six figures, though I make a fraction of that.
It’s enough.
Writers get tired of the ‘do what you love, and money will follow’ thing, because for most it didn’t happen. But it can, though it might be very different than you can imagine. You just have to make your own media, like this newsletter or a platform like Medium, and build an audience bit by bit, but it is doable.
I’m lovin’ it.
Putting in the work
I suppose to some, I am a hack, but I like being a hack, hacking out work word by word and idea by idea. I’m a student of how writers work, constantly reading interviews where famous writers talk about their process.
The main benefit of reading that kind of thing is understanding that, no matter how famous, those writers go through the same struggles we all do. One of my go to places to find writer interviews is the Paris Review (subscription required but worth it).
The recurring message you find is that you have to plug away at it, regardless of mood or inspiration. Waiting for inspiration is all backwards. You find inspiration by doing the work.
The title of this issue is Ambiguity and ambiguity is inherent in writing, especially in early drafts when you’re still discovering the story or the perspective you need on a topic. As you edit, random ambiguities are removed here and there, tightening up the flow. But you also leave some in because they create questions in the reader’s mind, questions that keep them reading.
But you better find some way to resolve those questions before the end. I’m currently reading Sea of Tranquility, the recent novel by Emily St. John Mandel. It is one of a number of recent novels that jumps around drastically in time, not exactly science fiction, but more a reflection of the disconnections we all experience in life. The time jumping is a tool- we don’t really care how it works.
So, in St. John Mandel’s story, the reader is placed in a zone of constantly wondering where things are going and why. But as you read, these things fall into place and you start to see a logic emerge. I have not finished the book yet so I can’t tell if she succeeds but I’m pretty sure she does.
This is the second book I’ve read this summer that does that. The first was Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr which weaves a complex story across many characters and times. It winds together masterfully at the end, in a totally unexpected but remarkably elegant twist. I loved that story, ambiguities and all.
It is the last weekend of meteorological summer. I spent most of it at home writing while going through a six month recovery process after getting a pressure fracture of a lower vertebrae in a fall. Travel was not really an option because my walking was limited and travel without walking is not for me.
But that is much better and fall looks to me as a time to get out of town while doing a lot of writing. Cooler weather, needed rain, and the recharge that comes with the change of seasons, are making me feel good about life.
Thanks for reading, comments are welcome, and there is a new Thread here to tell us about what you are reading. M
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