A Platform to Stand On I: Engagement

The elements of an effective publishing platform for a writer, Part I

Continuing with my posts recounting craft tips from the Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend that I attended in mid-September, let’s talk about platforms. I’m a crusty old curmudgeon, so even though I’ve been around social networking probably longer than any of you, I’m still like, “Platforms? Really?” But yeah, it’s a thing, and you need to know about it if you want to get published these days.

This is the first of three posts on the topic, derived from a seminar on author platforms delivered at PD Weekend. The presenter (and, full disclosure, close personal friend of mine) Danielle Girard, has launched a platform that effectively uses web, social media, and ecommerce to drive sales of her fourteen highly successful thrillers. In this post, we’ll provide a definition of an author platform and talk a little about the platform’s primary objective, engagement. In follow-on posts, we’ll cover the elements of the platform and something Danielle called the brand recipe.

Platform Defined

First and foremost—and mercifully—Danielle gave us her definition of a platform: It’s essentially your brand, delivered to your readers through a steady flow of communications such as social media posts, e-mail newsletters, and website updates. The key term publicists and social media mavens use is engagement, and the idea, Danielle says, is to be consistent without being annoying.

Engagement

Effective engagement attempts to do one or more of four things:

• Educate
• Inspire
• Enlighten
• Entertain

Danielle was keen to point out that selling is not one of the direct objectives of author engagement. The idea is to connect with readers, not to separate them from their money. (That comes, if all is done well, over time.)

And, of course, there are certainly people—too many people, I would say—who enrage to engage. If that’s who you are, you’re of course free to do what you will, and if you can do it while still playing nice, more power to you. (More on that in Part II.)

The Art of the Pageplay II

What novelists and story writers can learn from film techniques, Part II

As promised, here is the second post on the Fred Leebron seminar titled, “Narrative Techniques from Film,” from the QueensMFA Professional Development Weekend, which I attended in mid-September. (See The Art of the Pageplay I, which covers the films “Pulp Fiction” and “Vertigo,” for Part I.)

The third film scene Fred covered was from “Hidden Figures:” the pivotal, wrenching bathroom speech delivered by the mathematician Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) when she is confronted by her director at NASA, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) about intermittent absences during the day.

The advice here: As a fiction writer, you have the option to allow your characters to say what they would never allow themselves to say, so do it. And when you do, employ dramatic scene construction, something like a lone African-American woman rushing soaking wet into the middle of a roomful of white men in identical white shirts and black ties, and tonal variation in the dialog, or in this case, monolog, which begins as a panicked confession, then quickly rises to a soulful condemnation of the institutional injustices heaped on women and people of color—of which, of course, Johnson is both—during the 1960s.

The visual power of a scene like this certainly cannot be reproduced in text, but the essential elements can be emulated.

Similarly, we can learn from techniques employed in a haunting scene in the film “Cabaret,” in which innocent and devoted Germans, led by a particularly earnest young man in a Hitler Youth uniform, burst spontaneously into song on a beautiful day at an outdoor café.

The song, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” was written to emulate the patriotic “fatherland” anthems of the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s, and is thus laden with a sense of dread that lies in wicked contrast to the pearly white skin, pressed uniform, and blonde hair of the lead singer and many of the extras who join in.

These unspeakably high stakes are the key to the scene, which reaches its apex in a foreboding chorus of unspeakable tragedy to come. Fred’s message here, that “any good scene reaches beyond itself,” can be buttressed further by an aftermath: in this case, the characters of Brian Roberts (Michael York) and Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem) departing the café with Brian asking Max, “Still think you can control them?”

In calling out the utility of film techniques in prose writing, Fred is not alone: This is something Benjamin Percy—among others, I’m sure—did consistently and to great effect in his workshops for years. So take it to heart, and have fun with it.

The Art of the Pageplay I

What novelists and story writers can learn from film techniques, Part I

Read the book, or wait for the movie? An age-old question, to be sure, with an obvious answer: Always do both, and it doesn’t matter what order, because the book will always be better.

(Okay, maybe I’m a little biased, but anyway…)

As promised, here is the first of several posts recounting craft tips from the Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend, which I attended in mid-September. Fred Leebron, the martini-drinking spiritual captain of the Queens program, delivered a seminar he called “Narrative Techniques from Film,” during this year’s weekend, and it was a good one. Bringing the vividness and immediacy of film techniques to your writing practice can be both incredibly powerful and a lot of fun, which is a good way of generating badly needed energy when you’re losing your pep.

Fred showed clips from familiar movies and then talked through the narrative techniques that can be applied to prose writing, particularly fiction writing. In this post, we’ll cover two of those examples, and save two more for a follow-on post.

His first example was the opening scene of the Quentin Tarantino film “Pulp Fiction,” during which the characters of Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and his girlfriend Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) sit in a diner discussing human nature and plotting a crime. 

The action within a fixed space—in this case, a booth in a coffee shop—drives the frenetic tension between the characters by containing it, squeezing it, in a sense. And as the tension grows, the camera angle shifts, first to contrast these criminals with the cherubic vision of the waitress, then to show us the characters’ eyes and contorted faces as they look at each other, all of it reinforcing their strange bond.

All of this can be reproduced in text, as can idiosyncratic dialog. “Syntax causes emotion,” Fred told us, and the syntax of the characters’ lines as they reach the climax of the scene drives not just emotion, but confusion, the ideal combination in a prelude to violence:

Pumpkin: “Bars, liquor stores, gas stations, you get your head blown off sticking up one of them. Restaurants, on the other hand, you catch ‘em with their pants down. They’re not expecting to get robbed. Not as expecting, anyway.”
Honey Bunny: “I bet you could cut down on the hero factor in a place like this.”
Pumpkin: “Correct. Same as banks, these places are insured. Manager. He don’t give a fuck. He’s just trying to get you out the door before you start plugging the diners. Waitresses, fucking forget it. No way they’re taking a bullet for the register. Bus boys, some wetback, getting paid a dollar-fifty an hour, really give a fuck you’re stealing from the owner? Customers sitting there with food in their mouths, they don’t know what’s going on. One minute, they’re having a Denver omelet, next minute, someone’s sticking a gun in their face.”

Create tension by containing the characters, create contrast by shifting the camera angles, drive emotion through syntax—all techniques a writer can employ in text as well as on screen.

From here, we moved on to the Hitchcock classic, “Vertigo,” and the bell tower scene where Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) chases the mysterious Madeleine (Kim Novak) up the bell tower stairs. The scene is, of course, famous for the “Dali counterzoom,” which “stretches” the bell tower visually to inject the reality of Scottie’s vertigo into the viewer. 

While this effect is all but impossible to emulate in print, other aspects of the scene are not, and in fact, are highly suitable to text.

The strength of Scottie’s vertigo in the scene, and the reason Hitchcock felt the need to show it in such a stark fashion, is that it renders Scottie helpless to stop Madeleine from charging up the stairs and plunging to her death. A character incapacitated in this way is the height of drama.

As the scene rolls, and tragedy unfolds, Scottie’s horror—and the horror of what has actually transpired—is corroborated through shifts in point-of-view and the sudden presence of additional characters: a pair of nuns running up the walk, then a priest and groundskeepers scaling a ladder to Madeleine’s body, then the final shift in point-of-view, where the priest appears on one side of the bell tower as Scottie emerges on the other, escaping the scene undetected. Sensory detail within the characters and in the wider scene, and shifts in point of view to make all of it more vivid, are techniques that translate nicely to text.

The next post in the series continues the recap of Fred's seminar on film techniques, taking us through scenes from the Oscar-winning hits "Hidden Figures" and "Cabaret."

Work Party

Good times at the Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend

I sit in my writing room looking out the window at a light rain falling on Silicon Valley—

Whoops, I’ve just committed one of the many sins of writing I was taught (but apparently never quite learned) during my years in the MFA in Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte. This sin was labeled “The Weather Report,” and stressed in many a seminar and workshop by Pinckney Benedict, one of the more charismatic instructors in the program, and it goes something like this: Starting a piece with a broad-swath description of the “warm sun,” the “cool rain,” the “whistling wind,” or any other aspect of the natural environment—a.k.a. “the weather”—is cliché. Never, ever do it. Get into the action of the story, and do it fast. Never mind the fact that great writers have used The Weather Report with great success, or the fact that as I wrote that, I actually was sitting in my writing room, and I actually was looking out at the first rainy day of the fall here in Silicon Valley. Because using The Weather Report immediately pegs me as a loafer among modern authors, one who doesn’t have enough confidence in my story to jump right in and start telling it.

So, there you have your mini–writing lesson for the day.

All this is on my mind this morning as I reflect on the fifth or sixth biennial Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend, which I attended a couple weeks ago. The gathering allows graduates and some current students to participate in seminars, workshops, and readings, and to meet with influential editors and agents, and, of course, Queens faculty. I’ve found it to be worth the time and money, but for those who were unable to attend this year, this is the first in a series of blog posts where I’ll share what I thought were useful lessons I learned this time around (as I have done in the past).

But this post isn’t about writing lessons—other than the “Weather Report” lesson above, for which you are very welcome. This post is about the intangibles of an MFA program, and the important people who came into my life during my years at Queens. I entered Queens in 2006 at the age of 46, with ten years of college and two degrees under my belt. During those first two college stints, in my teens and twenties, then again in my mid-thirties, I made no lasting friendships. I held fast to the people close to me: my large family, my best friend / college roommate / best man (all one dude), and my wife. Having little understanding of who I was, let alone the confidence to project myself out into the world, I focused on work and career and social outings that often felt more obligation than celebration. Being a natural introvert who is drained rather than energized by social interaction, and a Virgo with a high bar for closeness, deep friendships were often fleeting or just too demanding for me.

Then I went to Queens, where I met the four people pictured with me here. The primary draw for my trip to Charlotte last week, in fact, was not Professional Development Weekend itself, but a too-long-awaited reunion with these friends and fellow writers. As expected, our rambling, heavily punctuated conversations lasted well into the wee hours without notice, until someone slid their wine glass aside and glanced at a phone clock reading 1:22 a.m. Alone, we’re typical writers, comfortable as ever with a page and a keyboard, but less so with actual people actually looking us in the eye. But together, we move as a five-person dynamo, charging into every situation with the chutzpah of a mob boss, not necessarily dominating the scene, but projecting something intangible that often draws people to us. And then there are even more connections, and more opportunities for all of us to shine as individuals, all because we shine so brightly as a group.

Surprisingly, this relationship with these late-in-life college pals has enhanced my friendships here at home, too. Having the repeated experience now of sitting comfortably for hours and hours discussing, emoting, invoking, exploring, or just plain blurting shit out, has changed me. And it’s carried into all the situations with all the friends I’ve gained along the way: no urgency to speak, or to know, or to be something more than I am, just a simple desire to be there for as long as I can manage it. So, that was weird. What started out as a blog post on writing craft suddenly turned into a declaration of friendship. Whatever. I’m cool with that.

And now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, you can stay tuned for more from Professional Development Weekend, consisting mostly of tips on craft and promotion.

Language of the Times III

The Death—and possible rebirth—of discourse

I’ve written here about language before—typically screeds lambasting the cooptation of perfectly good words and phrases like faith. But I’m switching gears this time, writing about an crafty verbal stratagem that might just save American political discourse. My Aunt Monessa Overby, who I’ve written about before, was born on the same date I was, 27 years before me. It’s a unique connection that has kept us close over the years. On the phone the other day, she shared this advice: “What I’m trying to do,” she said, “is avoid saying ‘I am a Democrat.’ Instead, when asked, I say, ‘I tend to vote for Democrats.’” She went on to tell me that she had, in fact, voted for at least one Republican: Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now, I’ve never voted for a declared Republican, but there have been Republicans who, if they had decided to run, would have gotten considerable attention from me. The point being, we express our political affiliation in this country as though we’re describing some in-bread, inextricable part of our identity. “I am a Republican,” we say. Or, “I am a Democrat.” But in reality, neither is true, ever, and, in fact, neither ever could be true. And that is simply because the Republican and Democratic parties have both evolved over the years (Republicans: party of Lincoln. Democrats: Home for decades to vile southern racists.) And, in fact, they’ll continue to do so. (I doubt my aunt could ever conceive of voting for anyone in today’s Republican Party.)

But how does this save discourse? Well, I shifted things a little in that conversation with Monessa. I said, “Think what a different impression you’d make if you used that phrasing when starting a conversation—like, ‘How do you tend to vote?’ instead of ‘Republican or Democrat?’” She hadn’t thought of that, but it resonated with her, and I now put it to you: We all—particularly us late boomers—have those people in our lives who we know have different, and sometimes opposing, political views, so we either avoid political discourse with them at all costs, or find ourselves in debates that are either useless or emotionally scarring, and typically both. Political polarization gets personal sometimes, unfortunately.

So, for those friends, and even acquaintances, of opposing political persuasions, try this new way of asking, and even more than that, try this new way of thinking, about political affiliation. Because we don’t vote for a particular political party because of flowery, often equivocating sentences in campaign speeches and party platform documents: We do it for human reasons. We do it because we see underprivileged people in our communities and beyond, and we want to help them. We do it because a close relative or neighbor was killed in a war, and we want to know why, and we want their families to be cared for. We do it because we’ve seen both arrogant opulence and brave, completely unnecessary poverty. Any of these feelings, impulses, and attitudes might be shared by the person you’re talking to. And I think we can all assume—particularly in this polarized age—that this approach has a better chance than starting with, “Republican or Democrat?”

To David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez: Our Deepest Apologies and Regrets

Why Brett Kavanaugh is the worst thing that has happened to America since Mitch McConnell

Mitch McConnell is undoubtedly the worst thing that has happened to the United States of America in the 21^st Century—until now. Wait, you ask, what about the Bulbous Orange Baby? To which I say, Sorry, but without McConnell, the Idiot-in-Chief is nothing. He is a blob of human waste that hasn’t had a salient thought in his entire painful existence. With McConnell stroking his shaft, however, he’s the Messiah. He is the purveyor of policies (he doesn’t understand a single one of them) that McConnell enshrines into law. He is the champion of constituents (he doesn’t give a flying fuck about a single one of them) in McConnell’s coal-producing southern state. And most importantly, he’s the nominator of judges (he’s never heard of a single goddamn one of them before) who are summarily “vetted” and approved by McConnell’s ill-reputed house of Senatorial prostitution. In short, the Drumpführer is the puppet’s puppet, McConnell is the puppet, and the Kochs, the Adelsons, and the Mercers are the puppeteers.

But now, McConnell has outdone, and, in a sense, replaced himself. He is no longer the most dangerous man in America. That title now falls to his latest creation, the pasty-faced, beer-slamming, sexual predator now known as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. We’ll call him Wah-Wah!

 The unmitigated American apocalypse that is Wah-Wah! is all laid out in painful detail in a pair of unrelated articles in this week’s New Yorker.

In the weekly Comment (“Will the Supreme Court use a New York City Regulation to Strike Down Gun Laws?”), Amy Davidson Sorkin describes the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. New York, which the U.S. Supreme Court—now with Wah-Wah! on board—is about to hear. The case challenges a New York City gun regulation that prohibits the transportation of firearms outside of a home for any purpose other than a visit to one of the seven NYPD-licensed gun ranges within the city’s limits. The regulation means gun owners cannot take their guns out of the city or, if they have multiple residences, they cannot move their guns from one house to another. Even someone who favors stronger gun laws might consider this law restrictive enough that striking it down doesn’t sound like a big deal. But that’s not how the Supreme Court operates. As Davidson Sorkin explains, the case will very likely build on recent precedent set in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010). Heller essentially emasculated the “Well Regulated Militia” clause of the Second Amendment, and McDonald ruled that that standard applied to all gun control laws enacted by the states. Enter Wah-Wah!, whose views on these matters couldn’t be clearer. As Davidson Sorkin explains:

As an appeals-court judge, [Wah-Wah!] wrote, in a 2011 dissent, that the District of Columbia should not be allowed to ban semi-automatic assault rifles, largely because they were “in common use.” He added that asking people to register their guns is unconstitutional.

So, game-set-match, Wah-Wah! is just the dude the NRA has been looking for to, as Slate put it in a recent piece, “make every state’s gun laws look like Texas’.”

But with Wah-Wah!, the bad news gets worse, and Louis Menand gives a vivid illustration of why in his piece, “The Supreme Court Case that Enshrined White Supremacy in Law,” a review of several recent books on the landmark 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, which provided the legal basis for institutionalized and publicly sanctioned racism in the U.S. In the piece, Menand describes an America in which a succession of post–Civil War Supreme Court majorities, sometimes with detached ambivalence and at other times twisting itself up in knots, perpetuated racist practices like segregation, voter suppression, and redlining, while tacitly approving more beastly practices like lynching, all the while using Plessy as its legal foundation. The legacy of Plessy couldn’t be clearer:

• There were 130,334 African-Americans registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896, the year Plessy was decided. In 1904, eight years later, there were only 1,342. In Virginia that year, the estimated black turnout in the Presidential election was zero.
• In a 1927 Supreme Court case that ruled against a Chinese family in Mississippi whose daughter had been expelled from school on racial grounds, the unanimous opinion was delivered by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former U.S. President, and among the Justices who heard the case—and voted with the majority—were the American legal giants Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis.
• Institutionalized, legally sanctioned racism lasted for a full century after Plessy: It wasn’t until 1995 that Mississippi became the last state to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery.

Menand’s account of how these things can pan out over long decades of legal precedent, combined with Davidson Sorkin’s explanation of what’s at stake in the New York case, all adds up to this: With Wah-Wah! on board, we’re looking ahead to decades of living in cities overrun by successive generations of increasingly deadly and barbaric weaponry, all fueled by unfettered capitalism, social unrest, and ignorance, none of which seem to be in short supply these days.

So, in a utopian progressive future, when a President Kamala Harris and a Senate Majority Leader Corey Booker work with Speaker Nancy Pelosi to reduce the number of Supreme Court Justices from nine to seven, to banish Neal Gorsuch and Wah-Wah! to obscurity, and to start the process of returning sanity and reason to American jurisprudence, do not be surprised, do not be aghast, do not suddenly start clinging to comforting tradition. There’s no time for that anymore.

Just be thankful.

I’ve Fixed Facebook. You’re Welcome.

An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg 

Dear Mark,

I’m not a social media expert, but I play one on the internet. This is why I’m able to give you the following advice that will solve all the problems of your company—advice which is, I assure you, at least as good as any of the advice you’re getting on the inside.

And don’t give me that “Problems? What problems?” bunk.

You’re not only being held responsible for genocide, and for the bulbous orange baby now occupying the White House, you’re also being blamed for all kinds of discrimination. The New York Times, writing about one such example, points out:

Facebook has been criticized in recent years over revelations that its technology allowed landlords to discriminate on the basis of race, and employers to discriminate on the basis of age. Now a group of job seekers is accusing Facebook of helping employers to exclude female candidates from recruiting campaigns. 

Yeah, you got problems, dude. Here are three steps to solve them:

1. Go back to being the geeks you truly are 

Mark, your company is a tech company. And why is it a tech company? Because you’re a geek, Mark. What’s more, you have all the earmarks of a lovable geek. You’ve got the benign awkwardness, a wife you met in college who is her own form of geek, and the cool tech you brought into the world. In fact, the only times you stop being lovable is when you try to be something more than just a geek.

I’ve been in Silicon Valley since before it even was Silicon Valley, and I can tell you, Mark, we love guys like you. We’ve got 80-year-olds running around this valley who are just like you, except they’re wearing pocket protectors. And we love them, just like we love you.

So why does everyone else hate you? Because you’ve forgotten that, first and foremost, you’re just a geek. You’re not a publisher, you’re not a social engineer, you’re not a diplomat, or a lawyer, or a judge, or even a neighborhood watch volunteer. And you’re sure as hell not a politician. (And thank heaven for that, am I right?) No, you’re none of those things. You know why? Yeah, you know, repeat after me: because you’re a geek.

So, all these solutions you’ve come up with—the citizenship requirement for political ads, the 10,000 people you’re going to hire to manually deal with all this crap, or that crazy war room you’re building to safeguard elections—are never going to work. Because a tech company peopled with geeks needs to come up with solutions that are 100% tech solutions. Anything that relies on human intervention of any kind just will not scale. Dude, you’ve got 2 billion users! That’s a haystack the size of which humanity has never seen before, and the needles you’re looking for are the tiniest, shiniest, and sharpest of all.

And, in fact, you know this, because near the close of your misguided September 12 blog post, you admitted the following:

“The last point I’ll make is that we’re all in this together. The definition of success is that we stop cyberattacks and coordinated information operations before they can cause harm. While I’d always rather Facebook identified abuse first, that won’t always be possible.” 

To which I’ll say, nah, man, don’t drag me or my tax dollars into your shit. Instead…

2. Leave the other crap to the people who are paid to do it 

I’ll just say you made a huge mistake, Mark, both on the day you decided to refer to yourself in court as a publisher, and over the period of time you began acting like one by taking responsibility for the content on your platform. The only way an enterprise of the size and scale of Facebook is going to survive in the long run is to completely divorce itself from the content shared on the platform. Again, it’s a simple matter of scale. (Remember, 2 billion users!)

As much as I abhor Alex Jones, the law and society at large, not Facebook, should have been tasked with doing something about his violent incitements and other abhorrent behavior. And as much as I despise Donald Trump and the Russians who used your platform to help get him elected, it’s the job of government and, again, society at large, not Facebook, to address that very serious national security threat. Instead, you’ve got a bunch of idiot pundits and Congress-monkeys pointing the finger at you guys every time some butt-head posts something offensive, polarizing, discriminatory, or even mildly unpleasant.

And now you’ve even got viral Facebook stars and even your own employees jumping all over your shit. It’s like an amoeba, dude! Every solution you try just squeezes between your fingers! I’ll put it this way: I’m sure Samidh Chakrabarti is a great guy, but what the hell are you doing with a Head of Civic Engagement in the first place? You’re a geek! Your company is a tech company! Get out of the moderation business, man! I’ll say it again: 2 billion users!

One more thing…

3. Quit being so goddamn greedy

All this madness probably started well before your IPO gave you an out-of-the-gate market cap of $104 billion (or, after the immediate drop because of the “fiasco,” about $50 billion), but it was certainly IPO day that put the whole thing on steroids. You were interviewed by Evan Osnos for his New Yorker piece fittingly titled, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy,” but you were probably a little shocked when you read the final piece. Yes, Mark, Osnos did some incredibly thorough reporting and laid it all out for us. A “Growth Team,” Mark? Seriously? Fifty million users weren’t enough? I understand that your perfectly valid response to that could be, “Screw you, bub. We’re up to 2 billion.” To which I say, see above.

But seriously, all I’m saying is, maybe picture yourself with personal wealth in an amount slightly lower but every bit as obscene as $67 billion. Maybe $5 billion, or $7 billion. You can still live in your mansion, still own all the adjacent properties, still have a healthy philanthropic presence, still put your kids through the best schools. But you’ll be able to forget about your shithead shareholders. They’ll be turning on you soon enough anyway. Put that IPO squarely in the rearview mirror, let your user base dwindle down to a nicely sustainable 200 to 500 million, let some competition come in, and go out there and compete the way you and your fellow geeks like to compete: on cool tech, on features, on UX, on practical jokes, even—on anything, that is, but that cancerous, corrosive, congealing pathogen known as attention.

Because the thing is, Mark—and this is the last thing I’ll say, I promise—lovable geeks aren’t greedy, and they never have been. Those 80-year-olds with the pocket protectors, they’re sitting there stymied by the fact that their Cupertino ranch houses are now worth millions. They’re making digital movies of their grandkids’ kindergarten graduations and distributing them to their families—on DVDs.

One day, that could be you.

You’re welcome.