Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

I didn’t expect to enjoy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I picked a copy up on the cheap a few years back, part of a workshop I was taking where one of the exercises involved best-selling novels. There was a remarkable dearth of best-sellers on my bookshelves at the time, so I grabbed a bunch of ebooks to get me up to the quota I needed: Stieg Larson; one of the Alex Cross books; the most recent Nora Roberts I could find.

I loved the Roberts. Didn’t enjoy Kill Alex Cross, but developed an appreciation for what James Paterson does via books like Zoo and his Bookshots Novellas. And yet, despite all that, I still went into Steig Larson’s crime novel with a sense of trepidation.

It occupied that space: a best-seller. Not my thing. A book loaded with assumptions predicated on how much it sells, none of which it actually fulfilled when I sat down and devoured it in the space of a single evening.

At the same time, I’m gearing up for tutorials this semester. I’ve got ten weeks of talking writing and genre fictions, theory and practice. I’m gearing up for the usual vehemence that tends to get directed against certain novels: The Da Vinci Code; Twilight; Fifty Shades of Grey. Easy targets because they’re popular books, and the people perceived as their target audience are easily disregarded.

They’re easy books to identify what you’re against as a reader, even if you’ve never read one of them or asked yourself what it is you dislike about it. Being against something is so much easier than inviting judgement for things you like, the types of work you’re really for.

And I’m tempted–so very tempted–to dig out the half-hour class I did on the opening chapter of Twilight a few years back. Pulling apart all the things it does well from a structural level to draw you in, build up immediate empathy for Bella and invest you in her story. Even if you dislike the politics of the book, and the focus of it’s story, a close look at the craft makes it a little easier to see how it became one of the books that really sold.

ONE: MAPS by the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s

A few years ago, I noted a trend where every autoplaylist I left running would eventually return to the Arctic Monkeys Do I Wanna Know. That epoch in youtube has apparently moved on, for now it is an inevitability that all playlists will find their way to Maps instead.

TWO: I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW by Tiffany

I think I looked up this song once because I couldn’t remember it, and wanted some context for a joke that’s made in Mega Python vs Gateroid.

I haven’t even watched Mega Python vs. Gateroid.

THREE: I HATE MYSELF FOR LOVING YOU by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

There are Joan Jett songs that I love. There are Joan Jett songs that I do not love.

This is one of the former.

FOUR: DIRTY DEEDS DONE DIRT CHEAP by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

There are Joan Jett songs that I love. There are Joan Jett songs that I do not love

This is one of the latter.

FIVE: THAT’S NOT MY NAME by The Ting Tings

This song was released twelve years ago and I listened to this on a loop back then, but my heart belonged to Shut Up And Let Me Go. This was just the road that took me to the place I truly wanted to go.

SIX: HEART OF GLASS by Blondie

No.

Seriously, no.

Bad youtube. No cookie for you.

SEVEN: CRIMSON & CLOVER/I HATE MYSELF FOR LOVING YOU (Live) by JOAN JETT

Finally, the algorithms seem to pick up what I’m trying to do with my morning.

The most interesting essay in Tom Bissell’s collection, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation, takes a close look at the differing styles of writing books and the kinds of promises they make to prospective writers.

Ostensibly a survey of several different books, Bissell pithily outlines the rules of engagement for each type: the users manual, exemplified by Strunk and White, which focuses on the mechanical aspects of crafting sentences; the Golden Parachute books, such as Donald Maas’ Writing the Breakout Novel, which trades equally on the promise of creative fulfilment and future commercial success; the Nuts & Bolts crowd, where a mid-list writer share techniques and exercises that worked for them; the tea and angels crowd, driven by the same impulse as the nuts and bolts crew, but with a considerably more mystical and muse-driven approach. 

Then, of course, there’s the Olympus books: written by highly esteemed writers, wether it’s Stephen King or Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates, and focused on more personal insights and motivations that are aimed as much at established fans as emerging writers looking for insight.  

For someone who has been involved in teaching writing, in one form or another, for the last twenty years, it’s an incredibly amusing (if occasionally dismissive) breakdown of books that, by and large, sit on my shelf and get referenced often.

It’s also an incredibly useful framework to have in mind as I launch into a few months of shoring up my skills as a publisher for Brain Jar Press, figuring out what I need to do in order to level up my business. There is a decided streak of Golden Parachute-ism at work in a lot of the books, blogs, and webinars that I’m reading, a logical hold-over from a few years where indie publishing was new and folks were making big money.

The ones that I’m getting the most milage out of, however, trend towards the nuts and bolts approach–fewer frills, more laying out of what worked and what didn’t.

It’s not that I dislike the premise of Golden Parachute advice–as I’ve mentioned before, the subtle core message of every writing book or blog, including mine, is usually please by my stuff. The problems is that the demands of the Golden Parachute form require total confidence in the techniques presented, otherwise you’re offering a parachute with all sorts of unsightly holes. 

Some writers can do that and make it easy to pull out their useful advice. Others…well, they deploy the same rhetorical tricks as self-help books like Who Moved My Cheese, confirming their usefulness by deploying immediate stories about someone who achieved fantastic success–often disconnected from any other information that might provide additional context about the market they’re working in and the business plan they’re using.