Posts
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 27 - Structural Tinkering
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
If there’s anything I like, it’s when people do something interesting with structure.
A good example of this is from the Firefly fanfic Forward. River’s thoughts are centered on the page, and will shift into bolds or italics.
Ra does something similar. Magic spells are written in monospaced font and a different color.
I like how toying with the structure reveals our implicit assumptions about that structure. By adjusting it in the right way, authors can reveal those assumptions, then push their boundaries to describe things without words. Done properly, it gives a sense of completeness - the text content gets tied to the medium itself, and neither can easily be separated from the whole.
When I write blog posts, I’m on the lookout for structural gimmicks. In yesterday’s post, I was pretty pleased with myself for finding a way to use “***” twice in a row, once to indicate how I use it as a section break and once as an actual section break. I’m also pleased I got to discuss section breaks right before using one in today’s post as well. The joke’s wearing thin, so I promise this is the last time I’ll use this gag.
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For a while, I was seriously considering writing a post made entirely from quotations. I would have cited quotes about plagiarism, using the structure to blatantly show I was copying from everybody else. At the same time, the structure would also show how organizing all the quotes together was itself enough to make it original. It was going to show the boundary between plagiarism and original thought by having elements of both appear in its construction. Look, I even collected some quotes I was going to use.
There is nothing new under the sun.
(Ecclesiastes)
Plagiarize
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don’t shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please “research”(Lobachevsky by Tom Lehrer)
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
(Isaac Newton)
Eventually I abandoned this project. I still like it conceptually, but the reward-to-effort ratio is way too small to justify writing it. I tried a quote-heavy post in Memorable Quotes and called it a day.
I know of one other person who came up with a similarly convoluted structure, and actually went through with it. That person would be Mark Rosewater, head designer for Magic: the Gathering. He writes weekly articles about the design of the current sets, and sometimes about game design as a whole.
Way back in 2004, he decided to write an article on Elegance. It is the most divisive article he’s ever written. I haven’t kept up with MTG very closely, but I doubt anything has matched the backlash or praise.
The structure is completely insane. The article is a home page of 50 words. Each word is a link to another 50 word snippet. It’s conceptually beautiful, but it’s also horrendously difficult for the reader. The fanmail got crazy enough that he ended up spending another article responding to the reader response to “Elegance”.
I’d recommend reading his response article by itself, but I’ll briefly summarize it here. Rosewater’s key point was that elegance was a very difficult concept to explain. It was so difficult that he felt the best way to explain elegance was to have the article itself be elegant. He wanted to highlight the gap between elegant concepts and elegant executions, so he wrote an article that showed how one didn’t imply the other. The disconnect between the elegance of its structure and its readability was the whole point of the article. The words themselves were less important.
Personally, I got sick of “Elegance” around the 7th link, but after reading his response, I have a lot of respect for the idea. It’s a fantastic example of how structure influences communication.
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 26 - Titles Are Hard
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
When I look back on the posts I’ve been writing this month, I notice I’ve been using a lot fewer section headings than I did in my previous posts. Instead of making up a section title, I’ll add a divider like
***
And move on to the next topic. I wonder why?
***
One reason I’ve been doing this is that making up titles is hard. No, really, it’s awful. Fun fact: back when I first set up a personal site on Blogger, its title was actually “Titles Are Hard”. This was back when I indulged in recursion and self-reference a bit more than I should have. (I blame The Monster at the End of This Book for awakening that part of myself.)
Now, it may not have been a good blog title, but at least it was accurate. It is really hard to create a good section title, especially when I’m writing by the seat of my pants. When I use a title, the implicit promise I’m giving to the reader is that the title is going to be related to the upcoming section, possibly in some pithy way.
This is so hard to do well! Look, here’s how my writing has gone this month. First, I come up with some seed topic. From there, I let the idea germinate into whatever it wants. I then prune the extra leaves to make it appear like I had a plan of what to write all along. But, when I place pressure to produce more quickly, I don’t have time to do lots of pruning. To continue this tortured analogy, I allow the plant to grow with no constraints, realize I’m running out of time, trim the most blatant errant leaves, and reveal what I have so far. Then it’s on to the next plant.
For me, writing is this gradual process where I realize what I want to write after I write it. When the topic is always shifting under my feet, it’s hard to pick a title that matches the ideas I’ve been talking about. This blogging gauntlet is focused on raw output. That means there are no incentives to go back and decide on good titles, because that takes time, time I could spend writing more material instead.
Whatever cleanliness there is in my writing is simply the byproduct of whatever I find acceptable on that day, nothing more.
An Ending of Sorts
While I’m on this topic, you know what else is terrible? Endings. I have without fail hated my ending on every first draft. If I had the time that day, I would rewrite the ending again and again until it was acceptable. More commonly, I left it the way it was.
Much in the way that it’s hard for me to come up with a pithy way to sum up a section, it’s hard for me to come up with a nice way to end the post as a whole. Conversations don’t have a fixed ending, they continue until the points naturally die. In writing, the standards are different. People expect to read something to take home.
On the other hand, I’ve read several blog posts that also didn’t have a good conclusion. They simply stopped at the moment they said everything they were planning to say.
Maybe that’s okay after all.
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 25 - We're Not Misogynistic, Reality Is
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
For the record: I know this title is clickbait, but I couldn’t find an alternative I liked.
I watched The Social Network for the first time a few months ago.
It’s a pretty good movie, but it was also very obviously written to be an entertaining movie instead of an accurate story. In reply to criticism along these lines, the scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin said, “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling. What is the big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy’s sake, and can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?”
I think it’s self-evident that Sorkin bent the story to make it more cinematic, and he achieved his goal very well, but I’m not sure it makes up for its depiction of the tech industry.
For one, the whole movie is pretty misogynistic. No, I mean really misogynistic. Almost every female character in the movie is defined by having sex, dating a male lead, or partying half-naked. Turns out I’m not alone in feeling this way, because based on news articles from the time there was a lot of backlash over how the movie depicted women. In response, Sorkin said this.
Facebook was born during a night of incredibly misogyny. The idea of comparing women to farm animals, and then to each other, based on their looks and then publicly ranking them. It was a revenge stunt, aimed first at the woman who’d most recently broke his heart (who should get some kind of medal for not breaking his head) and then at the entire female population of Harvard.
More generally, I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80’s. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)
I’m not sure I like this explanation very much. Sorkin’s claim is that he wanted to present people the way they were, and the people he presented were actually that misogynistic. In other words, if you found the movie’s depiction of women distasteful, it was supposed to make you feel that way. This falls apart when you realize he wrote out Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg’s long term girlfriend during Facebook’s early years. If you’re bending the facts for your narrative, I’m not sure you get to claim you’re depicting people accurately.
A similar defense was given by the show writers for Silicon Valley. Now, for the record, I haven’t seen the show. By my understanding, their goal is to satire startup culture, so they feel they have an obligation to present the world as accurately as possible - meaning a very homogeneous cast of almost all white dudes.
There’s an issue lurking behind the show’s success—and it’s the same one that faces the real Silicon Valley. The show is overwhelmingly white and male, especially in the first season, where the only “diversity” comes from one South Asian programmer and a female VC.
Berg said they’re not shying away from the issue at all. They’re just reflecting the valley as they see it.
“We shot some crowd footage at Disrupt,” the real TechCrunch conference that fictional Pied Piper competes in, he said. “I have a friend in tech who called me, and she said, ‘Those crowd shots are absurd, you didn’t put any women in there at all.’ I had to tell her—those were real shots. The world we’re depicting is fucked up. Do we have a responsibility to make the genders on our show more balanced, when this is the world we’re depicting?”
It’s an interesting question. Should show writers be obligated to present the world as it really is, or should they present the world as we wish it should be? What’s the right balance between aspirational and reality?
I think show writers actually do have a responsibility to depict gender balance, even when it doesn’t reflect reality. Your show is going to be unrealistic anyways. If people are going to give you shit for gender balance, they can go to hell.
For the record, I partially defend Silicon Valley’s depiction, because they’re trying to lampoon the tech industry. The whole point of the show is to portray Silicon Valley accurately, then make a few biting comments to point out its absurdity. I wouldn’t have made the same decision, but I understand why they did.
On the other hand, The Social Network doesn’t have this defense. It takes the diversity issues in tech and exaggerates them for the sake of drama. It tries to show how personal issues among the people closest to Facebook led to isolation, but the movie can’t avoid portraying those people with glamour. In the end, everyone still comes out ridiculously rich.
There are people in public health who campaign against depicting smoking in movies. And again, people have made the same defense - we’re trying to depict the world as it is. People smoke in real life. People are going to smoke in movies too. On the other hand, back in the 1950s a lot of actors were on tobacco company payrolls, in the sense of “advertise smoking or we aren’t going to give you funding”, which made that argument a lot weaker.
In contrast, I highly doubt there are people who are going to pull funding if a movie’s cast is too diverse, or its plot is too progressive. Oh, unless you count instances where executives thought a movie wouldn’t sell with a female lead or an Asian lead, and gently pushed for someone less likely to shock the audience. Yeah, on second thought maybe this is still an issue.
I’m not saying the whole media industry is against dated depictions of society. I’m just saying there’s enough aggregate resistance against diversity and misogyny to make it continue to be an issue. Maybe it’s the optimist in me, but I think a show can be aspirational in its depiction of gender and race and be successful as well. It’s been getting better in real life. Why can’t it be getting better in cinema?
If you actually want to depict the world the way it is, why focus on the negatives, when you could focus on what people are doing to make the world better? That’s reality too.
Somehow, I doubt I’ll ever see a show about a company’s efforts to improve workplace diversity. But, a man can dream.