That’s right, once more I am available for purchase.  Michelle Witte, formerly of Gibbs Smith, is showing much greater ambition and courage than I could ever muster by daring to start up her own indie children’s bookstore in Springville, Utah.  How fantastic and gutsy is that!  To help her get things off the ground, she’s holding an auction with a number of books and services and other odds and ends (stress the odd, such as Wendy Toliver’s bracelet). 

If anyone is interested, I am one of her odd wares.  Likely the oddest.  I’ve offered to critique a proposal package consisting of a cover or query letter, a synopsis, and the first ten pages of a manuscript.  The current bid is $50.  If you’re interested just see the list of auction items by going here. 

There are a lot of other things worth bidding on as well.  Books, all signed I believe, by my old friends James Dashner and Jessica Day George, newer friends Bree Despain, Kristen Chandler, Shannon Hale, Mette Ivie Harrison, Mike Knudson, Janette Rallison, and Sydney Salter, and many others—they even have a book signed by Neil Gaiman!  Services include everything from critiques to an interview for marketing opportunities to lunch with Bree Despain (who, yes, is very lovely, but is also happily and healthily married, so don’t bid too much on that thinking it’ll be THAT kind of lunch). 

A few things that caught my eye: the manuscript critique and phone call by Molly O’Neill from HarperCollins; the picture book critique by Rick Walton (who is described as all-knowing not as propaganda but as a matter of documented and undeniable fact); the manuscript critique by Sara Zarr (I believe my last post made clear my thoughts on her abilities); two admissions for the Teen Writers Conference, which could very well be a life changing experience for teen who is interested in writing; and, especially, Wendy Toliver’s bracelet (as readers of my blog, I assume you have some familiarity with the magical and fantastic, and so should know the power a personal item like that can give over you; her daring magical enslavement to help a children’s bookstore is truly heroic).

I believe bidding on most items (all except those with no current bids) ends this Saturday, so if you’re interested you’d better take a look quick.

What do you call a bunch of librarians?  A pack?  A mob?  I hope it’s not a murder (it is for crows, you see).  Next month I’m presenting at the UELMA (Utah Educational Library Media Association) Spring Conference, where I’ll begin the session by pointing out that Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and R.L. Stine’s Welcome to Dead House are essentially (in terms of archetype) the same story.  I’ve never known any books to generate such antipathy in elementary educators as the Goosebumps books, so I’m a little worried that the session will end prematurely in some violent episode. 

If it doesn’t, I’ll claim much more than a foundational sameness between Great Expectations and Welcome to Dead House; I’ll argue for the following texts being riffs on the same elemental story: Pride and Prejudice, The Harry Potter Series, The Graveyard Book, Holes, Much Ado about Nothing, Fablehaven, A Wrinkle in Time, The Tale of Despereaux, Last of the Mohicans, Dracula, Dune, Little Women, The Illiad, and the books of 1 and 2 Samuel from the Old Testament (the story of King David).  And just for the record, I am NOT making a comment on the veracity or lack of such of scripture.  Archetypal theory is about narrative, not fiction; it addresses the structure humans apply to everything, including facts and events, in order to construct meaning.

Sound implausible, all those books being the same story?  Well, if you’re not a librarian you may have to figure out how and why this is true on your own.  Then again, once I have a presentation in my toolbox I’m not one to let it rust in there.  If things go well I’ll see about doing the presentation other places.  Then the world can share in the wonderful knowledge that Mr. Darcy is Darth Vader, Japanese Kabuki is only technically and cosmetically different from classical Ballet, and not only do all the world’s great religions believe very similar things, but that these things are taught using the same story that undergirds life.

I’ll let you know how things go next month, as always.  But next on the docket is LTUE!

People sometimes accuse me of having a man-crush on Neil Gaiman, and deservingly so.  I’ve never met him (I hope to in the next few years), and I suspect that if and when I do it will take a monumental effort of will—along with a huge dose of false coolness—not to go full-blown fanboy.  I feel entirely justified in this.  Not only because he gives literary awards away for Halloween (kids, be sure to hit the Gaiman house this year—you just might get a Newberry that ain’t chocolate); not only because he writes everything but the same thing he’s written before, and sells lots of copies of all of it, and nobody manages to stop him; not only because he has that dreamy Brit-boy articulation that makes some of the world’s great audiobooks.

But also because reading his stories makes me happy.  I’m not certain why, but just a moment ago it struck me how remarkable that is.  My philosophy is that when I’m not happy, it’s probably mostly my fault for looking at things the way I am.  I’m not terribly comfortable with the notion that exterior events have the power to dictate my contentment in life.  So it’s no mean statement to admit that something makes me happy.  But reading Gaiman’s stories does. 

It doesn’t matter if the story is happy or not.  Strike that.  Happy stories don’t make me happy, and Gaiman doesn’t tell happy stories.  (The Blueberry Girl is a bit different.)  He tells stories that end happy, often, but the stories themselves carry conflict and trauma to the gills.  Yet when I read him, I’m happy.  I can stop and think of all the other things I might be doing, or should be doing to be productive, and am still happy to be reading a story.  To me, that’s magic in the most literal sense.  It’s something outside the norms of reality. 

Any truly great story I read is a magical experience.  Most stories don’t qualify as great; even those I enjoy very much all too often aren’t great.  But those few that are break the bonds of expectation and reality and make me happy.  To such stories I am an object to be acted upon, and am content to remain so.         

*****

Today in the Writing Center we are celebrating the National Day on Writing with several contests.  Students come in and write according to prompts and win prizes, including Utah Jazz tickets totalling nearly $240 in value.  I don’t think we employees are eligible to win, but I had to post my favorite word anyway: lilliputian.  Yes, it really is a word, and we have Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels to thank for it (and most profuse thanks we owe them).  It means tiny and comes from the diminutive nation of Lilliput.  (In theory, we may as well say Blefuscian, which would be fun too.)  I don’t think proper names were allowed, so I couldn’t place Hippocampaelephantacamelos (see Cyrano de Bergerac), which if you ask me is possibly the most underutilized baby name ever.

Oh, and for those who are interested in fake colors, a lip gloss of a most peculiar hue came to my attention today: flirty pink.  As a male, I am genetically permitted to believe in only ten or so colors, and flirty pink is not among them.  So I must assume it is, instead, an allegorical representation of some sort.  I’m still trying to figure it out, so insight from others is most welcome.   

I say that as an admission because, apparently, that fact that I don’t Tweet (is that right?) is quickly becoming a crime in the literary promotion realm.  But early on when I first heard about this new technology, I made an arbitrary decision (which describes most of my decisions) that I would be the last writer under the age of, say, seventy to Tweet anything to anyone for any reason.  (For those who doubt this, I swore the same solemn vow about refusing to own a cell phone, and I still live cell phone free.)  So while Neil Gaiman can light the world on fire with 255 or however many characters of text (he could probably do it with 4), politicians have a new realm for their snake-tongued soundbites, and their daughters can scandalize the public by sharing photos of their endowments, anyone reading this here will have to display the patience to plow through 250 or so whole words.   Maybe even more.  Bravo for those of you willing to brave the marathon!

*****

For those who aren’t aware, there’s a new Kurt Vonnegut short story—excerpted from a forthcoming volume of his unpublished fiction—that you can read for free in Vanity Fair.  It’s all about a woman who writes the story of her life and how her husband is this brilliant, sophisticated, virile love machine, and sells said story, becomes rich, and all this ruins her life.  Anyone doubting that Vonnegut actually wrote the thing only need read that the story in the story takes place in “Hypocrites’ Junction” to know of its authenticity.  Read the story and improve your life, because this is what all Kurt Vonnegut stories do. 

For my part, I am determined to test his hypothesis.  I now intend to write lots of stories that sell for lots of money, draw inspiration for these from my brilliant, sophisticated, virile love machine wife (Note to self: get brilliant, sophisticated, virile love machine wife), and see whether it makes me miserable.  Preliminary results aren’t in yet, but I’m leaning a little more toward ”exultant” rather than “unhappy.”

*****

Random yet important thought (which characterizes most of my thoughts, I believe): Including the words ”based on a true story” on either cover of a novel—or anywhere in between—is one of the worst and most pointless ideas statistically possible, even from a random firing of neurons.  It’s like a highway slathered in mayonnaise.  I see many possible repercussions, but none that justify sticking the one with the other, and none of which I can possibly see as beneficial.  A novel means fiction.  It means “I made this up.”  How, exactly, does the qualifying “based on a true story” change that?  By indicating that some unidentified portions of the text to some unidentified degree correlate to some unidentified situations in the life of a person who may or may not be identifiable by the name used or, in many cases, would more accurately be described as an aggregate person combining several products of the above simple formula. 

What? 

You made the story say what you want, when you want, and where you want.  That’s fiction.  If all it took to make something “based on a true story” was correlation of inspiration to a “real” event there would be no such thing as fiction.  Every story ever written reflects the human experience of reality.  Every story is “based on a true story.”  In fact, every story is “based on the life story of its creator.”  All story is, therefore, “true.”  Not all story is factual.  (All the world’s—or worlds’, whichever you prefer—wisdom is rooted in semantics, after all.) 

So let’s get our terms right, okay.  If you’re writing a story that incorporates many facts you’ve uncovered about some person’s life or experience, and you change those when desired to craft effect, you’re writing a novel.  It’s fiction, so don’t go trying to invent some in-between quasi-realm where a story that didn’t happen will feel more tangible.  The moment a reader reads “novel” they, by necessity, doubt every word of every page in the book.  Whether things really happened or not becomes, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant.

The point, I guess, is this: if you want to tell people what happened, do it as well as you can without sacrificing veracity, or as much of it as you can attain; if you just want to give people the best story possible, who cares which parts of the story were inspired by what.  And if you’re trying to do both without doing either completely, you’re ladeling more mayonnaise on your highway.  Go ahead if you want, but I’ve got this bad feeling that whatever else happens, as the day drags on I think things are likely to start stinking in the sun.           

Thursday’s signing/workshop went off just fine, with the workshop, not surprisingly, being more fine than the signing. I have a lot of experience teaching and I really enjoy it, especially in workshop format where there’s a lot of exchange back and forth. But no complaints about the event as a whole. Sold some books for B&N; met some nice people there, including their fine CRM Michelle Sargent, whom I’d only spoken with on the phone previously; saw lots of friends and made a few new ones. The workshop was on characterization as the key to multi-fuction story, and those in attendance were enthusiastic and wonderful participants. We had a number of great discussions, including an interesting adventure into how to categorize plot vs character driven stories, and whether we even should.

For those who weren’t there (and didn’t have important meetings, other events to attend, or car trouble, and I know of instances of all three of these that kept people away), shame on you.  Here’s a sample of what you missed: the secret of what 3 things actually make story, which it seems to me writers had better know; when and why sunshine isn’t always sunny even if it’s bright; why the crime and punishment in Dostoyevsky’s novel has little to do with the murder in the story; opinions on R.A. Salvatore’s melee combat play-by-play; the notion of emotive “flags”; the confirmation of Neil Gaiman’s theory that airports aren’t distinct places at all but rather a generic type of place common to many actual places (read American Gods for more on this); and much interchange on smells, the value of nasty ones, and how much to include in our stories (I say the more and the worse the better). 

My one real regret is that I forgot to use my chaste marriage metaphor.  Well, that’ll give all of you who missed Thursday a reason to come in the future, won’t it.

It looks like my first school visit tours for GDC are beginning to settle into place on my calendar. Most aren’t set yet, but I’ll be in the north and south Salt Lake area sometime in September, and in Layton on Sept. 9-10th. Each tour will include a Thursday signing at Barnes and Noble. I won’t put these up on my calendar until they’re finalized, but I thought I’d give a heads up—after all, I haven’t written anything in a week and needed something to say.

Here’s another something. I just passed the six month mark of a certain publisher considering a certain requested manuscript. When they buy it—yes, when!—I’ll let you know just what “certain” means.

And finally, I’ve been so busy I had to invent time to read, so I no longer spend half and hour or so puffing away on my elliptical every morning—instead, I spend half an hour puffing away on my elliptical every morning with a book in hand. It means all the stress of the machine is born by my bad knees but so far I’m managing to tough it out. The book of the moment is Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Just started two days ago, but so far? It’s a really fun read, which for me on Neil Gaiman is about an “egh, so-so” level comment. I’m not finding it on the same level as American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book, but then saying something isn’t on par with one of the hundred greatest novels of the last hundred years, a Newberry winner, and a should-have-been Newberry winner isn’t the most biting of criticism. I’m liking Anansi Boys better than Stardust, which was a fine book in its own right. Let you know if my feelings have changed when I finish.

Learned on Neil Gaiman’s blog that the National Institute of Health is taking comments on their draft of new guidelines on the regulation or banning of stem cell research.  I have opinions on that matter that I won’t share here, but if any of you want to make your voice heard you can do so at this link.  Neil asked people to link to the page from their blogs, and I fail to see how obeying Neil Gaiman can result in any negative karma or bad juju—I also think it’s a debate well worthy of any informed citizen’s voice.

Hi everyone.  Back from my anything but relaxing three day hiatus from posting.  It’s nearing finals week at SLCC, which means constant chaos at the writing center.  Without the odd moments between sessions to post, I didn’t find time to even consider my blog yesterday.  So I’m posting early and trying to ignore the fact that I’ve still got to run for a half hour before work. 

So I must be brief: J. Scott Savage, known as Jeff in certain of his other lives, is a total rock star—at least for ten year olds.  Wednesday he kindly invited me to observe a school visit he did at Cherry Creek Elementary in Springville, UT, and I’ll tell you, those poor teachers would have preferred all their kids be injected with pure sugar rather than the state Scott left them.  It was nuts.  I’ve seen several very good school visits, but Scott Savage is without doubt the best I’ve witnessed.  Anyone who has gone to Brandon Mull’s release parties (roughly 5 million kids packed into a darkened auditorium waving glowsticks and screaming), picture that only with 400 students.  If he gets that reaction at every visit he does, soon Scott Savage will be a real person to reckon with, seeing as he’ll be at the head of an army of 4-6th graders who do anything and everything he tells them—except be quiet.  They tried, they really did, but it was too much for them.

Thanks as well to Jennifer, who is the force behind the Savage School Machine.  I learned a ton about how to do school visits effectively and hope I’m ready to start scheduling them next month.  Also met YA author Janette Rallison, who is a very nice lady.  (A school that will remain nameless treated her not so nicely when they cancelled her visit because her book had three kisses in it.  Apparently this qualified as “content problems.”  No, it makes perfect sense; vampires hungering for seventeen-year-old girls who are actually succubi and having undead children together is so much more appropriate.)  Together Scott and Janette, along with Jessica Day George, did a signing/reading in the evening, which confirmed my decision never to do a reading for kids.  They were all good readers with good stories, but it’s just asking too much of 8-11-year-old kids to sit through those things (unless you’re a truly great reader of your own work, like Neil Gaiman or David Sedaris, which I most certainly am not.) 

So, the short and long: learned how to do school visits, was reminded how silly censorship can really be, ate some good Mexican food, vowed never to do a reading for kids, and am now anticipating J. Scott Savage taking over at least one of the smaller states with his army of giant-chocolate-pudding-incensed children.  Oh, and here’s my two cents on Jessica’s and Janette’s conversation on the relative discomfort of bearing children or eggs: I’m heartily glad I’ll never do either (that I can foresee), for I’m far too big a wuss to be a mother. 

Next time: Just got info on my schedule at CONduit, which I’ll share with all of you baited-breath waiters.

I have received the first commentary of position divergent from my own since starting this blog.  (Very cogent and respectfully written, I might add, so read it here.)  It is a red-letter day!  And I can’t help but love the fact that the first person to really disagree with me on something here is named Clint Johnson.  (And yes, it really is a whole other person.)  How great is that!  It’s deliciously wondrous in a postmodernist way, as well as suitably schizophrenic for this blog.

So, yesterday Other Clint brought up some very good points about committee or group composition that I think deserve discussion.  Here are my thoughts on his ideas.

Other Clint said:

I’ll have to work on a variant of my name to set us apart.  My full name is John Clinton Ralph Johnson so I have options.  J. Clinton R. Johnson sounds, and looks, sufficiently pretentious.

I don’t know if there is such a thing as sufficiently pretentious (as those who know me will attest), but J. Clinton R. Johnson is a great start.  I propose Jintalph Johnson.  Doesn’t it have the phonetic flavor of, say, truffle stuffed hotdog deep-fried in panko? 

Other Clint again:

…a Canadian television series is usually run by a room full of producers in Toronto, trying to meet mandates of a room full of bureaucrats in Ottawa, that is then shot in Vancouver by hired gun directors.

Sounds like they tried that room full of monkeys with typewriters and found the method too efficient, doesn’t it.

Other Clint:

…an American television series is almost always helmed by a showrunner who is also the head writer.  They will create the outline for the series as a whole and work with the other writers in the writing room to break the episodes to work individually as well as cohesively inside the series arc—then send the individual writer off to write the episode.  The showrunner gets the script back and makes a pass to make sure that it is what was discussed and doesn’t conflict with what the other writers are creating.  Good, bad or indifferent, the series usually reflects the storytelling ability of the showrunner.

The American model can create material that is very, very good; I will hold Buffy the Vampire Slayer up against any series of novels.  They are different mediums and when television plays to its strengths it can be truly great storytelling.

I confess, I’ve never watched Buffy, but I don’t disagree with your premise—given two stipulations.  One you identify yourself: that the medium must be taken into account when evaluating the narratives that come via that medium.  The other is an important matter of semantics: just how does the best of television “stand up” to the best “series of novels”?  Note that you chose to correlate a television series to a series of books?  That isn’t necessarily a true parallel unless you’re also paralleling a television episode to a whole novel, and look what happens to our comparison then.  It just doesn’t work.  The greatest 30-minute or hour-long television episode is vastly different from a great novel.  This distinction can be very useful when examining and evaluating the different creative methods behind the writing for the different mediums.

Television is episodic.  Long narrative (short narrative works differently) usually isn’t, at least not in a closely related way.  The most significant distinction between the two is how they handle interrelation and connectivity.  All art (and comedy) is based on forging connections distinctive from those presently in existence.  Without that newness of interconnectivity, you get trite rehashings of old ideas, bald plagiarism, or, to stick with our current context, Knight Rider.  The simple fact is that an episodic structure does not require—and does not allow—the same interconnectivity over a protracted arc that a novel, or standard screenplay, or any other long narrative form facilitates.  It just so happens that this is the main weakness of group story composition as well.  It’s not as difficult to keep a variety of identities from creating inconsistency in one episode as it is over a season or the life of a franchise.

We see this by looking at television history.  Most of the best-written shows didn’t place much emphasis on season and series arcs.  Start with the variety days and comedy shows like the Carol Burnett Show, where they didn’t even use episodes but rather unconnected vignettes.  Then look at early sitcoms like the Honeymooners or even MASH, where the series mostly hinges upon characterization as a means to explore theme.  Even more modern examples, such as The Simpsons during its richest decade or Seinfeld, blatantly disregard the need for protracted narrative arcs.  Those television shows that do accept the challenge of strong connectivity between episodes, such as The Sopranos or The Tutors (I don’t watch much TV, but I’ve heard these are well written), still can’t work outside their episodic structure. 

For an episode to work, there must be a fairly high level of genuine resolution at the end of each mini-arc.  By necessity, that means that lots of the material covered in the episode cannot be too heavily interconnected to the season or series arc.  If it were, there wouldn’t be enough independent substance in each episode to satisfy viewers with a day’s resolution.  Series like Burn Notice don’t even hide this dual necessity; each episode alternates time between the season narrative and the episode narrative.  And if you look at the amount of time dedicated to each, you realize that the majority of a television series is often dedicated to the episodic arcs.  If you write a novel this way it isn’t a novel; it’s either a story collection, a series of vignettes, or a really bad novel.      

As for a showrunner making for better story, I agree.  The more autocratic the creative process, the better (as long as you have a skilled, diligent autocrat).  But you still sacrifice things in a group composition process that you can’t get back.  Every story wants to achieve several things to as great a degree as possible, most significantly having a unique perspective that is still consistent.  The more people you add to the process, the more you diminish the ability to do both simultaneously, especially in limited writing time (and television is mostly, by necessity, an assembly line model).  If, for example, every episode writer is a great writer with a unique voice, some of that distinction has to be glossed over to fit with other equally inventive writers’ work.  If you don’t gloss over individuality enough, you lose consistency.  The showrunner is the main conceptual artist, but when it comes to carrying out the actual on-the-page composition, she transitions more to a role of editor.  In such a circumstance, the showrunner’s talents at unifying disparate elements by shaving them to fit a whole shows their skill.  A single storyteller is very different, as their skill is shown in every facet of the artistry and by undiluted, unadulterated, and to as great a degree as possible, uncompromised communication of natural connections they’ve made between elements of experience.  When you read a novel by Terry Pratchett, or Neil Gaiman, or George R. R. Martin, or Haruki Murakami, or any other really distinctive novelist, you get 100% of both uniqueness and distinction, in vision and voice, as well as 100% consistency (or as near these two things as can come from a human being).  Get a bunch of geniuses, real geniuses, into a room together, and you can’t match that mix of uniqueness and consistency.  Now, you might end up with a fine product.  Maybe even a great one.  But you’ll have made compromises in areas that would not have happened with a single author, and so I doubt the final product will be as good as may have been in regard to this tricky balance. 

The fact that group storytelling limits interconnectivity across a long arc doesn’t mean near as much in television because of the medium’s episodic format.  In novels, it’s a big, big deal.  Hense my loathing for The 39 Clues.  It’s literally taking the strength of the novel, its very heart, and denying it in favor of assembly line production. 

As for the Man-Kzin Wars (see Other Clint’s post), that’s short stories, so we’re talking different narrative forms.  An anthology of great writers is wonderful because of Poe’s unity of effect (focusing everything in service of a single premise, point, or impact), which allows for great differentiation that isn’t all-encompassing.  This helps integrate individual stories within the whole without cutting down too much on that central unity of effect (though compromises are made, even here).  It’s totally different when you get several writers into a room, have them plot out a series, and then they divvy up the work and each write their own book.  Do I think your scenario of a Niven-as-”seriesrunner” led team writing multiple good books in one year is plausible?  Yeah, it’s a real possibility.  I’m certain, though, that give Niven all the books and enough time to write them, you’d get a better series (as long as you appreciate Larry Niven). 

That’s the essence of the debate, really: does time-efficient narrative production justify sacrificing some of a story’s potential?  For novels, my answer is no, at least in most circumstances.  It’s much more understandable in mediums that favor episodes, such as television.  

Finally, Other Clint addresses his dark alternate world’s writing contract paradigm:

Using this model, the publishing house that “produced” the series would own the intellectual property but then would have to compensate for the writers similarly to television writers—if not in quantity then at least in kind… [it] would be a way for more writers to make a living at writing rather than trying to find room to write around the full time job.   

Which is exactly why Scholastic did this, to try to make more money, partially at the writer’s expense.  That ticks me off, but even worse is the fact that it will create inferior stories.  Not necessarily bad stories; maybe even good stories.  But it won’t create great stories, or stories of wild, unified truth.  That is what I find truly offensive.  The novel is what it is and does what it does; making it more like television, or comic books, or a symphony, or anything but what it is, would only be done for one reason—because making money is more important than telling the best story possible.

That’s my take.  Loved the comment Other Clint.  I hope more keep coming, all of you.

A few thoughts on Amazon’s Kindle 2 and electronic media in general, and their impact on publishing writers.

Short version: I’m not hiding beneath my bed in panic (at least, not from the Kindle).

Here’s the deal as I see it. Yes, the Kindle 2 does appear to be the first electronic reader deserving of notice by writers. And that’s all it deserves, notice, like a possible penny on the sidewalk. Whether that penny turns out to be a quarter (wahoo!) or a dome of dried gum (lesshoo), it probably isn’t going to dictate my financial plans for the rest of the fiscal year. I don’t see any electronic platform acting the lethal meteor to good old-fashioned books, at least not in the foreseeable future. Kindle certainly ain’t it. The novel reading public has not transitioned to acceptance of electronic readers; to the contrary, such a transition is in its infant stage. It’ll take a while, and even as people acclimate and explore this new medium, they won’t abandon the old standard. That won’t happen until (or unless) proficiency with the new technology becomes comfort, and comfort becomes preference. We’re decades away from that, at least (I’ve seen this in my crystal ball, which is jet black, so you know it works).

Now, I’m not saying the Kindle won’t have an impact on the market. It will carve it’s own niche, just as audiobooks have. But that niche isn’t going to kill the established body of distribution for published fiction. It’ll just change the shape a bit. In fact, I suspect this is a good thing for all of us writers. Electronic reading will initially be adopted by techies more than lit junkies and recreational readers, so in some ways the Kindle will broaden most authors’ market exposure, not shift established readers from book to electronic format. Book people will be likely to buy our work in book format, so electronic media represents a chance to expand our audience. And a wider readership can only be good. If a few people do transition from book (comparatively profitable for writers) to electronic form (comparatively unprofitable for writers), it won’t break the bank. And the additional readership is likely to generate additional word of mouth, which is the great god at whose table we all wish to feed. Now, if too many readers switch transition to electronic format… Well, ain’t going to happen. I’ll cover that in a moment.

Before I move on from the Kindle to electronic readers and media in general, here’s my two cents on Kindle’s text-to-speech option. Having a machine read a story with all the performative skill of Stephen Hawking in the middle of an electromagnetic storm doesn’t count as infringing audio copyright. An audiobook is a performance, distinctive even from reading the text (and less pleasant, in my opinion). A linguistic annunciation of prose is more akin to a well-worn mathematical formula or proof—the answer may make sense, but nobody cares. I’m not certain it even counts as story. I’ve worked with a few students who are blind using the Jaws reading program and trust me, machines will never threaten storytellers with their oratory. Besides, if I buy a book there’s no copyright against my reading it out loud to a friend. Why should a machine doing so in a far inferior manner do so? For those who disagree with me, know that I agree with Neil Gaiman, which settles the argument. If you still wish to debate, do so with him here.

Okay, so why won’t electronic media’s narrative take over the world and save forests everywhere from paper production? Because electronic media, from web journalism to the Kindle, is about ease of access and convenience. We hear all the time how these things are coming to dominate our culture, and in many spheres this is true. But you know what? Some things just can’t be made into a sound bite. Some communicative genres don’t fit certain media well. Try memorizing a phone book as an oral tradition. It wouldn’t work unless you provided mnemonic devices so frequently as to reinvent the genre itself. (For other examples, written alphabets and media development such as papyrus and paper played a part in the separation of poetry from prose. For most of human history they were, by necessity, the same, because the rhyme and meter were needed to aid in memory of the narrative.)

Long narrative is not an especially accessible form, nor are the genre’s contained therein. By necessity, it demands prolonged dedication of time and sustained concentration to read. Generally speaking, such attributes are not dominant characteristics of cutting-edge electronic media consumers. Congruently, such readers are usually not traditional novel readers or purchasers. A book person isn’t likely to simply be a fan of long narrative; they’re likely to be a fan of books–old, familiar, tangible, feel-their-weight-and-substance-in-your-hands books. It is unlikely a computer can match this expectation, no matter how light, or readable, or simple to operate. The media’s strengths do not match the character of the narrative form, and I don’t think that dissonance is going away any time soon.

Also, as Kindle keeps racking up more available titles, writers and publishers in the technological know are most likely to have their work available in this format early. This will define Kindle’s early consumer base, and thus its primary readership and discourse community. Not all genres will thrive equally well on Kindle. As previously said, it will change the market by shaping it, bubbling off its own niche and accreting to the already established cluster that is modern publishing.

For these reasons, among others, I anticipate that most people, at least for the foreseeable future, when they go looking for a good long story are likely to seek out a book.