Wrestling

Watch This: Wrestling Isn’t Wrestling

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I watch a fair bit of pro-wrestling. Partially because I’m a fan and partially because it’s an extraordinarily complex sequential narrative with decades of continuity, and I like figuring out what I can learn from it as a writer.

If you’ve got twenty minutes to spare, Max Landis does a phenomenal job of explaining the appeal of wrestling – and why it’s narratives are so complex – by parodying two decades of the career of pro-wrestler HHH. I’m not the greatest fan of Landis – Chronicle bored the pants of me – but he gets this one thousand percent right. Wrestling fans should watch it for the parody elements. Non-wrestling fans should watch it ’cause it says something powerful about character, evolution, and story.

Great Writing Advice Learned from Pro-Wrestling, Part One

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Unless you’re a wrestling fan, you’ve probably never heard of Al Snow. He was a wrestler, and a damn good one, and he’s spent years behind the scenes training new wrestlers and talking about wrestling and generally holding forth on the state of the industry. Basically, Al Snow is a smart wrestler whose fond of a good rant, and as a fan of wrestling in general I’m okay with paying twenty bucks for an entire DVD full of his rantings.

Some of his rants about wrestling contain remarkably good advice about writing.

For starters, Al Snow never lets you loose sight of the fact that wrestling is a business. It may be fake – it’s always been fake – but the wrestlers job is to get in there and put on a match that allows fans to suspend their disbelief and buy into the illusion that it’s real. This is no different to fiction, at all, and it’s one of the reasons I’m always perplexed when people look down on pro-wrestling.

In Al Snow’s wrestling world, “good” is less valuable than “profitable.” He looks at Wrestlemania III, arguably the biggest and most-watched wrestling show of all time, and challenges the conventional wisdom of wrestling critics that suggests that the technically brilliant match between Ricky Steamboat and Randy Savage was better than the headline match between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. The critics aren’t wrong. You can find both that matches on YouTube if you search, and there’s no doubt that watching the athletic display of the former is far more interesting than the plodding actions of the latter.

But people paid to see Hulk Hogan – a charismatic bodybuilder with a five-move arsenal – bodyslam Andre the Giant and that makes it the best match on the card in Al Snow’s world. Hulk-Andre made the company money, it kept people coming back for more, and it had casual fans invested even if the hardcore wrestling fans would rather watch the guys in the midcard.

Replace “Hulk-Andre” with “Twilight” and you’re probably seeing the analogy I’m making. I may not enjoy Twilight as a reader, I may find it enormously problematic, but that doesn’t mean I want it to ease existing. By some objective standards it may qualify as the best book in publishing – it’s not only a blockbuster that generated new readers, but it’s now spawned a second blockbuster (equally maligned) in the form of 50 Shades of Grey.

It’s all very well to get caught up in the art of writing, or in producing the best work you can, but at the end of the day writing and publishing is a business, and business has a pretty useful way of figuring out who wins and who loses.

If you’ve got the most money, you’re the winner on that day. If you’ve got the most money and people are *hanging out* to see what you do next, then you’re the big winner overall.

Given the choice of being Ricky Steamboat or Hulk Hogan, I’d still probably choose to be Steamboat. He was smaller, faster, more  athletic, and over the course of his career he drew plenty of money as a wrestler. People paid to see him wrestle, to see him gain and defend championship belts, to see him face down nemesis after nemesis. He coupled quality matches with the ability to make money, and while he never became the star Hulk Hogan did, you’d be hard pressed to say that he didn’t do okay for himself.

But it’s stupid to look down on Hulk Hogan when what he’s doing works. When what he’s doing is bringing other people to the show, and creating the platform that allows everyone else to earn money as well.

It’s okay to create art, but treat your fucking business like it’s a business. Figure out how it’ll earn you money, ’cause paying rent is one of those things that needs to be done and it’s no fucking fun dying alone and broke in the gutter.

The Final Stage of the Long Goodbye

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I put in my notice at the dreaded dayjob today. In eight days time, I shall be free. Free I tell you!

I mean, sure, there’s a new dayjob coming, but I’m fairly sure I wont actually dread this one.

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I’m still spending time away from the computer (and the house) in an effort to force myself to a) write, and b) mark assignments for the not-so-dreaded-and-sadly-almost-done dayjob. My absence from the internets will continue apace for another week, but to keep you amused here’s  a grab-bag of stuff to go look at.

First, Christa Faust’s Hoodtown has just been made available on Kindle. I picked up a copy of this book several years ago and it immediately became one of *those* books. You know, one of the ones you adore with a fierce and hardcore love that makes you skittish about recommending it to anyone, because if they don’t love it you can no longer respect them as reader or a person.

Hoodtown fuses hardboiled detective fiction with lucha-libre wrestling in ways you’re probably not expecting, and it’s easily one of my favourite books ever. You could pretty much read this and Dirk Flinthart’s Brotherly Love and figure out how, I ended up writing Horn .

Also, Charlie Jane Anders’ Six Months, Three Days over on Tor.com is one of the best short stories I’ve read this year. It’s one of those stories that dances along a very narrow thread between awesome and potentially-twee with the confidence and aplomb that makes you forget the thread is even there. Which probably isn’t selling it terribly well, but I’d ask you to trust me – it’s good, it’s free to read, and it’s worth reading.

And Jay Lake says some sensible things about psychotic persistence and writing over at the Shimmer blog. I’ve kinda lost track of the psychotic persistence thing this year, but I’m slowly starting to get it back and this was a useful reminder.

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I am terrible with email at the moment. Actually, I’m kind of terrible with everything at the moment, but it’s manifesting itself spectacularly in the email: I keep discovering there’s messages I thought I’d sent, which it turns out I hadn’t, and occasionally there are emails that I’ve resent when they weren’t actually necessary, ’cause I’d already sent them a few days earlier and forgotten to cross things off the to-do list.

Or I’ll half-write an email and think “yes, that’s done” when really it’s sitting in the partially written email draft folder on my computer.

It’s probably a good thing my dayjob doesn’t involve the use of heavy machinery. Driving a car is probably risky enough, all things considered. My subconscious responds to the chaos of change by creating more chaos, and it has ever been thus.