The Lessons We Learn From the Smiley Face

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The yellow smiley face was first designed in 1963. State Mutual Life Insurance hired the designer, Harvey Ball, to create the logo attached to a company-wide “make friends” campaign after a merger decimated morale. They paid him $45 for the creation of two eyes, a smile, and a yellow circle.

Nobody trademarked the smiley face, although plenty of found ways to copyright specific expressions of it. In 1970 the Spain brothers, Murray and Bernard, appended the words “Have a Happy Day” underneath and made a killing selling merchandise with the ubiquitous symbol. Contemporary operating systems all agree that the smiley face is a useful icon or emoji, now represented by the ascii digits of a colon and a closing bracket – 🙂 – but each system has its own expression of those emojis when the OS interprets the characters and translates them into graphics.

As you might expect, the smiley face is a copyright nightmare once you dig into its origins. The Spain brothers took credit for the creation on national TV when appearing on Whats My Line in the seventies, despite knowing good and well that the originator was Ball. A second group attempted to take ownership of the design in 1971, when a French journalist launched The Smiley Company (and they seem to have been successful, with the Smiley Company fending off a copyright claim by Walmart in over 100 countries back in 2005). In 2001, Harvey Ball’s son Charlie started a non-profit dedicated to reclaiming the rights to his father’s work.

I love the history of the smiley face because it touches upon so many of my favourite mantras for writers:

  • Take care of your copyrights
  • Never think you can predict which work will take off
  • Never doubt that a simple idea can be great
  • And, sometimes, even Capitalism can’t contain the right idea hitting at the right time

That Thing I Do When I’m Not Writing Or Publishing

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

The 2022 Brisbane Writers Festival program went live today, if you’re curious about the things produced by the day-job I took back in October. It was an exhausting, aggravating, ambitious beast of thing to land–especially given that we were sideline by omicron and a flood. 

My my brain isn’t quite at the level of being proud of the job we’ve done, but I’m definitely proud of some elements. Mostly spots where we’re showcasing new and emerging voices, or the combination of talent feels like it’s going to resonate in a really intersting way.

Here are the fifteen events I’d make an effor to go and see over the course of the weekend, as I think they’ve got the potential to be sleeper hits (with the possible exception of Windswept, which is an In Covnersation likely to be a plain old hit given the autor involved) :

I’ve started to accumulate a lot of thoughts about how I like to program, and why I like to program that way, as a result of this experience.

Mostly, it should be noted, because I disagree with my boss and the various people doing the actual programming, and frequently found myself biting my tongue because deciding on events wasn’t really my job (I’m logistics and pulling the events together, not the hands-on programming). 

A Cloud Of Questions

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

A guy named Clive Thompson’s built a tool that will roll through a piece of text and only show you the questions posed in the writing. I learned of it via a Austin Kleon post, and I applied it to a text I’m focused on a lot right now, the re-release of Winged, With Sharp Teeth. The results aren’t particularly pretty in terms of formatting, but they are interesting:

Then, Steve said, “how often does it come?” “That many?” “You ever been tempted to go?” “No?” Why wouldn’t you, when life gets hard?” He stopped and brought out that smile again, turned it on Steve full force “But as an adult? You just got to pay attention to what’s going on around you, yeah?” “Well?” “How are things with your new man?” “Just good?” “How old is he?” “Him?” “You’re sure?” “What do you dream about?” “But when you were a kid?” “What did you want to be?” Duke said, “Do you ever regret not going, back when you were a kid?” “But how do you know?” “We just…stopped working, you know? “What?” “What’s so wrong with forgiving someone?” “Isn’t that what love is?”

I’ve got this bookmarked as an editorial tool, because I long ago came to appreciate just what too many questions marked in a draft-in-progress. Sometimes they’re good exchanges, but often they’re a sign a writer trying to lock down details and using Q&A to build a scene. Questions appeal because they feel like conflict, even if they’re just scouting out what happens next (in much the same way that “I woke up and didn’t know where I was” feels like an interesting starting point, because exploration becomes conflict resolution, even if it’s not engaging for a reader).

The line between good questions and bad questions in a story often comes down to subtext. Questions that aren’t really asking what they’re asking come pre-loaded with stakes, and give the reader a space in the interrogation because they’re interpreting what’s going on.