What Writers can Learn from Guilty Pleasures

 

I like the 2000 film, Battlefield Earth. I’m not proud of the admission. Seriously, BE is barely a movie at all and the subtext is horrible. The book BE is based on was written by L. Ron Hubbard who struggled with mental-health issues as well as a deep-seated distrust of psychiatry. The villains in BE are called “Psychlos.” So, yeah, someone’s Freudian slip is on full display.

 

BE is a guilty pleasure because it’s also loud and fun and a thoroughly over-the-top camp-fest.

 

Last week, I wrote of how we judiciously assess our favs before sharing with others. Truly, we don’t want to be judged by what we enjoy—joy-shamed, if you will. So, we’re careful with our darlings. Honestly, I think writers are the worst about this. Mostly, because criticism is how we learn and grow as writers. As a result we get REAL good about judging other people’s joy. 

 

True to form, I criticize a lot of writers that a lot of people enjoy as a means of pointing out how, or how-NOT-to write better. The tricky part is that I enjoy (most of) those writers. I cut my teeth on their stories. I firmly believe their stories have merit and we can learn from their work. Otherwise I wouldn’t bother with them.   

 

Positivity often pops up in some fairly jaded places.

My Missus, Gaye, is currently recovering from breast-cancer surgery. Her comfort book is Hillary Clinton’s What Happened, (but we’re fine now, really, not hardly angry at all, anymore, she can stop rage-strangling the Kindle anytime she wants). Her comfort movies, (television, whatevs…) is Sex and the City. 

 

Yes, like many trendy-styles, it is brash, tacky, and primarily a thing of its time. SaTC is also an excellent example of character development and story arc, (even amid contract disputes) with compelling stories and enraging situations. So, yeah, I watch as well.

 

So good is the writing that you see past the “you’re so brave,” clichees of Samantha’s cancer episodes. Charlotte’s journey to adoptive parenting—with all the entitlement of a lawyer-husband and a Park Avenue address—hardly rankles when taken with the excellent writing and fantastic acting. Substance is key.

 

Gaye and I went through the adoption process without success. It’s hard and cold without money or prestige. It would be easy to hate these story lines based on the blatant privilege alone. But Kristen Davis’ nuanced performance perfectly distills down on the optimism in the face of heart-breaking bureaucracy. Rather than entitlement, her success (no less clichéd) feels hard-earned and rewarding to the viewer.  

 

While far from a NYC publicist with a model-turned actor boyfriend, Gaye felt a kinship with Samantha. A self-described former Dairy Queen employee, Samantha did not come from money. She obviously clawed her way from the sticks and got herself to one of the most fabulous cities on earth at the first opportunity.

 

Yet, for the kinship, Gaye also felt betrayed by Samantha’s cancer diagnosis when the storyline originally debuted. It felt shoehorned in and distinctly contract-dispute-y. 

 

But watching in retrospect, on the heels of her own cancer battle, Gaye recognizes the fear in Samantha’s voice as she sees pieces of herself falling away with her chemo-blasted hair. When Samantha laments that she will never be the same again, Gaye grieves the same loss. It’s the fear that most (if not all) cancer patients have in common: losing themselves to the disease and treatment.

 

When Samantha, speaking at a fundraising award ceremony, drenched in sweat, shucks her wig, acknowledges the unspoken side of cancer treatment, and does so with a gang of f-bombs, Gaye could see the path to finding herself in her own battle against cancer. She could see her way through a process that often obliterates identity. She could see herself beyond cancer-patient status. That’s what good stories do. They give us victories to sustain us in our own troubles.

 

Sometimes the silliest moves are the most soothing.

 

When Battlefield Earth came out in 2000, I hardly noticed. Between night-shift work and early-morning classes, (and a house I foolish bought before I graduated from university or secured a job) I had no time for movies, good or otherwise. 

 

A couple of years later, I had a degree but still no “grownup” job. I also had too much time to brood. The dot-com bubble had popped. Enron had just begun to meltdown. Jobs were tight. Worry and late-payment notices snapped at my heels.

 

I ate too much bad food, worked too many overtime hours, and moved too little. My weight ballooned. It was a miserable circle. 

 

Several years later I would figure out it was depression. At the time, it was just misery. Meanwhile, Battlefield Earth was in heavy rotation on basic cable. I would leave my hourly-wage job early in the morning with no classes to attend, few prospects, and infuriating hurdles for the scant jobs out there. Desperate, I would find something mindless on television to clear my worries so I could sleep. 

 

At least twice a week, it was Battlefield Earth.

Unencumbered by the socio-sexual consciousness or gender-commentary of Sex and the City, BE doesn’t do subtle. It’s good/evil at play in a simple, simple story.

 

Our hero, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, (Barry Pepper) has no doubts, no dark night of the soul. There’s no crisis of trust between him/his fellow humans. Our villain, Terl, (John Travolta) is unambiguous and unencumbered by lost faith or mission-fatigue. His tragic backstory is sleeping with the wrong person’s daughter and drawing a crap assignment. So, no, there’s no character arc.

 

There’s scarcely a story arc. Hell, there’s scarcely a story.

 

If not clear, BE is non-challenging, soothing even. Jonnie, Terl, and Ker, (Forest Whitaker) camping it up, helped me turn off the worry for a little while. After an hour or so of what, at best, is a live-action cartoon, I could tune out the feelings of utter failure and just sleep. 

 

No, I’m not comparing my mild depression to my wife’s battle with cancer. In fact this isn’t about me at all. This is about stories. Specifically the stories that sustain my Missus, right now. If you want to read more about her cancer journey, you can find it here. 

 

This is also about the power of story to take a reader somewhere else when they’re stuck right where they are.

When Gaye watches SatC, she gets the subtext and commentary—but that’s not what she watches it for, especially now. Gaye watches for the clothes and art used in the show. She watches for the street-views of a city we only visited for a few days but fell for nonetheless. Mostly, she watches it to see women winning. While she watches, she doesn’t think about cancer or treatment.

 

That’s a damn-good story.

The photo above, Battlefield Earth is the property of Morgan Creek Productions/Warner Bros. Pictures. It is used here for educational/illustrative purposes as covered by the Fair Use Doctrine. 

When Authors Push the Envelope Too Far

 

In 2009 Jon Lucas and Scott Moore wrote a story about three groomsmen looking all over the seedy underside of Las Vegas for their lost groom while battling morning-after-debauchery haze. It is a masterclass in writing a mystery. For that matter, writing a successful subversion of a trope. The “successful” part is key. Not every attempt at undermining viewer (reader, you know, whatevs…) expectations is a rip-roaring success.

 

Meanwhile, The Hangover robbed the proverbial bank, grossing over $400mm against a $35mm production budget. It became the highest-grossing R-rated film ever. It was in fact so successful that it spawned two sequels.

 

That is the power of comedy. We love to laugh. When asked about a favorite movie, the average person will waffle between childhood favorite (Star Wars) and cool-movie favorite, (Goodnight and Good Luck) while usually forgetting the movie we never consider a favorite but is the go-to comfort film, (Tinker Tailor Solder Spy). You ask the same person what their favorite comedy is, (Young Frankenstein) and usually, you’ll get an immediate, unequivocal answer. 

 

“Jokes kill,” English axiom

 

But what makes comedy so delightful—subvertion of expectations—is also the inherent risk. There is the setup or establishment of expectations and then the punchline, typically wildly different from the expectation. As comedy has evolved, comedians have pushed the envelope of propriety, (Lenny Bruce, Paul Mooney et al) with varying degrees of success. 

In comedy, the only failed joke is the one that doesn’t get a laugh. Vulgar, offensive, abusive even, as long as it’s funny, no harm, no foul, no hurt feelings…among comedians. The audience is another matter.

 

There are comedians who make the audience the butt of the gag. That shtick goes back to court jesters. So does heckling and throwing rotten food at comedians. Both, turning the audience into the joke and heckling comedians, resembles assault for a reason—both hurt. Thankfully, the most common reaction to an abusive comedian, (in my limited comedy show experience) is audience members exiting in the middle of the show.

 

“I don’t care. Leave. You already paid for the ticket.” Steve Harvey

 

Those people—injured by the act and insulted to have paid to be wounded—will not give that comedian another dime of their money. Trust and believe it. The last standup show I saw, (easily ten-years ago) was Sheryl Underwood. I expected her to go blue, (profanity) I did not expect the degree of vulgarity. I certainly did not expect her to delight in audience discomfort. The Missus and I stuck it out for the full set, even as a quarter of the audience made for the exits. However, not only would we not go to another Sheryl Underwood gig, we have not attended another comedy show since.

 

You run the same risk when pushing the envelope in your book. There is a fine line between pushing the boundaries and pushing your reader away. In previous discourses, I have written about the importance of NOT placing you (the writer) and your catharsis ahead of the story and/or reader. Inflicting your trauma on the reader will not engender affection or compel further reading. In short, if you hurt people they will throw your book in the trash.

Pat Conroy, Frank McCourt—yikes—once was more than enough of each.

 

Of course books are, (like comedy) subjective. Some people LOVE Jodi Picoult, others can take/leave her. Few who have read her would argue that she struggles with endings.

There’s a fine line between Franz Kafka’s troubling Metamorphosis and James Joyce’s nearly unreadable Ulysses.

 

Obviously, we’re talking about the innovative stories that broke new ground and not simply stories we don’t like. I did not like Wide Sargasso Sea, Confederacy of Dunces, or Postcards (Proulx not Fisher) but there is no denying the collective brilliance of the writers or the merit of the stories. Most importantly, those books—with difficult and/or not fun passages—may challenge but do not assault the reader. 

 

If studying history doesn’t make you angry, it is not history, it's propaganda. 

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is the antidote to the romantic mythos of the American west. It is also an unrelentingly brutal exploration of how the west was “won.” Throw in an indictment of the religious underpinnings of our racism and “manifest destiny,” and you have fun for the entire family. The Manson family, maybe.

The cover beautifully contains the horror there-in

Blood Meridian follows a barbaric company of "Indian fighters" as they commit genocide on the very people they were paid to protect. The carnage in this book is more than a literary or even a salacious device. It is an assault on the reader using the reader's interest as a setup and factual events as a bludgeon.

 

Result

 

If I had read Blood Meridian first, I would have never read McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. Reading Blood Meridian helped me realize that I didn’t need that much misery in my entertainment. Brilliant as the man is, I have not read any of McCarthy’s other books.

 

“…and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Sarah Kane’s 1995 play, Blasted, is the ultimate example of how Nietzsche’s quote works in the real world. All of Kane’s plays explore themes of redemption, despair, and profound pain all infused with an unhealthy dose of sexual dysfunction. However, Blasted—which depicts graphic torture, sexual violence, and cannibalism—gets right to the heart of Kane’s battle with mental illness. Audiences were appalled. Critics were acidic and savaged the exploitation-for-shock-value writing.

 

Result

 

In the decades since, Kane’s 1999 suicide her work has been reassessed. UK newspaper, The Independent lists Blasted as one of its 40 best plays. That’s critics. I sincerely doubt that many recreational theater-goers lined the street to attend the revival. 

 

“It's not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn't be the audience. They would be the artists.” Alan Moore

 

Alan Moore is the standout, most popular writer here, (based on sales and exposure). His work in graphic fiction (comic books) turned the genre on its ear. More than formulaic caped crusaders and dastardly villains, Moore wrote protagonists and antagonists as actual people. One of Moore’s most charismatic creations, John Constantine, is a chain-smoking con man who does good based on expedience to his hustle game.

 

Moore used comic books to explore themes—sexuality, domestic abuse, psychological issues—not previously seen in the medium. His work ushered in a new era in comics with gravity and purpose. So, what’s not to like? 

 

As his work found larger audiences and his Watchmen series catapulted him to the top of the industry, Moore expanded on themes of child abuse, sexual violence, and exploitation—less tropes of writing and more cudgels of grievance. Around the time his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, series was released, I read a fan comment, and I paraphrase, “Is there buggery? Because it’s not an Alan Moore story without buggery.”

 

Moore went beyond “buggery” in LoEG he takes Edward Hyde (Jekyll and Hyde) to his logical extreme. Far from a mindless stand-in for the Hulk, Hyde is smart. Smart enought to know one of his fellows is working both sides and smart enough to set a trap to catch the traitor. Unsatisfied with raping and mutilating said traitor, Hyde inflicts attrocity on the traitor and the handlers. Moore stops short of calling Hyde a hero, but the tongue-in-cheek memorial does the heavy lifting.

 

Result: No more for me, thanks... 

 

Moore’s work continues to find an audience but the fans tend to be title-specific. They are League of Extraordinary Gentleman fans or Watchmen fans or From Hell fans. That means they will read Watchmen, (still published by DC) or LoEG or Miracle Man, no matter who writes it. There are three other LoEG graphic novels and a Nemo spinoff series but I have no interest in any of them.

 

Don’t bite the hand

 

In 2011, The Hangover II hit theaters. Following the same territory, with Bangkok subbing for Las Vegas, the “Wolfpack” searches for…really, no one cares. It’s about these morons trying to fix what they broke the night before and fans were there for it. The film made over $500mm. My friend (and cousin-in-law) Josh and I watched the movie for notes to apply to our spec script.

 

The tone was slightly off but it was different writers. Then, about midway through there was a gag that went too far. Never “American Playhouse,” TH had racist and sexist gags aplenty. As one critic wrote, AH turned from "mean and edgy to vicious and dark" for no apparent reason. 

More than a jocular punch to the arm, the racism, trans/homophobia and cultural exploitation was a backhand to the viewers mouth. In the theater you could feel the entire audience cringe when that gag landed. The laughter was uncomfortable, like when you realize that you’re the butt of the joke and you're not sure how to respond.

 

Result

 

Did the series end because of that gag? Hardly. The third movie was green-lit while the second film was still in theaters. But by 2013 everyone had heard the joke. TH III did $300mm against a $100mm budget—successful to be sure. Still, it was just as clear to the studio that returns were diminishing. Hollywood says, (only half-jokingly) that  the last sequel is the only one that loses money. No one was willing to see if there was gas in the tank for a fourth movie. Obviously, after the slap in the face of TH II, I didn’t see the third turkey.

 

Takeaway

 

Whether you write literature, genre, or cartoons, be savage in your self-assessment. Find beta readers with critical reading skills, who know your genre, and who have an eye for “tone.” They can save you from yourself. 

When you push the envelope and write that kind of scene, the kind that gets pushback from your beta-readers it's time to assess. Ask yourself what changes about the story with—AND without that scene? Then ask is the scene about the story or something else? 

It’s not simply a question of “will this offend someone?” The question becomes, "does it further the story?" Does it make or break your story? Is it absolutely instrumental to the narrative? Does your story hinge on that push? Because if the push exceeds the story, it very well may be the reader’s breaking point.

I own none of the photos above. All are used here for educational/instructional purposes as covered by the Fair Use Doctrine. 

Reviews, Literotica, and Self-Publishing

When I am unable to work on my novel, (work, school, professional certifications, etc.) I experiment with short stories completely outside my criminal wheelhouse. It allows me to write without any "what will I do with this?" pressure. It's writing as entertainment.

I noodle around in science fiction, fantasy, and even erotica. Those stories will never see the light of day. Mostly because when I write anything remotely suggestive, I turn beet-red and giggle like a boozy goose. That said, I did briefly consider posting on a site called Literotica, where my scribble sibling Sofie Le Coure posts her work. 

Literotical is an erotic-fiction website that encompasses a cross-section of writers working across myriad subgenres.

As with Amazon Self-Publishing or Kindle Direct, skills on Literotica run from sophomoric, (we all started there) to master-level, (few of us will ever get there). Writers on Amazon and Literotica have something else in common—what all writers want to have in common—readers. 

And, just like Amazon, there are WAY more readers on Literotica than writers. 

That may seem unlikely with the number of books/stories on Amazon. But I encourage you to look at the reviews/comments. There are multitudes of readers, looking for something in their little neck of the genre woods. Same with Literotica. 

That is both good and bad.

Just like on Amazon, there are a lot of peopleon LIterotica who write reviews but haven’t written their name since direct deposit became a thing. They have opinions with little/no idea of how difficult it is to tell a cohesive story. We won’t even get into the skills necessary to convey a cogent idea in an entertaining form.

Before you get the wrong idea, the comments/reviews on Literotica are actually more objective, even generous than much of what you see on Amazon. In truth, most are even-keeled, if brief. 

“I liked it.” 

“Good story.” 

"I didn’t like it.” 

“Too long to get to the point.” 

Other reviews are more pointed. 

“You started off good but you screwed it up by rushing the ending.” 

That is gold, right there. If you doubt me, please consider, that I once read a BOOK review on Amazon that concerned the “reviewer’s” inability to buy the 36-count of Jimmy Dean SAUSAGE BISCUITS. I wish I was making that up. Seriously, I’m not that clever or I’d be stacking Stephen King money.

“What’s the good news?” You ask.

On Literotica, like Amazon, like KOBO, and probably dozens more outlets—THERE ARE READERS WHO WANT TO READ WHAT YOU WRITE. 

Readers are hungry for your stories. Those folks on Literotica, or on Kindle and KOBO are looking for a good horror story, or a two-fisted actioneer, or space pirates. They are not (all) pedantic twits. They want the story more than they want to correct your grammar and spelling. In short, it is an opportunity for support and an opportunity for growth. 

If not obvious, Literotica isn’t the only game in town.

There are countless fan-fiction sites where you can stretch your writer-legs, get some feedback, and engage a community of people with similar tastes. Before you down-nose fanfic, please remember that E.L. James' Fifty Shades books started life (purportedly) as Twilight fanfiction.

There is interest. There is support. There is a hunger for your work. Even the trolls want to read your work. So get to it.

The photo at the top, Fifty Shades of Grey movie poster is the property of Universal Pictures. It is used here for educational purposes as covered by the Fair Use Doctrine.