Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

From the “What Publishing Needs to Know” files:

I read the cover story of Time that week, “The Clean Energy Myth.” The piece was a winner – a conceptual scoop, an important and timely topic, and – this was the really surprising part – a true argument, an attempt to make a point. It was so refreshing, and so different than the warmed over “on the one hand, on the other hand” pap I was used to from most newsmagazines. This article was great journalism, and it had a serious point of view.

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But in any case, it struck me that Time was starting to realize what conversational media properties already knew inherently – you can’t survive on distribution alone. You need Voice and Point of View.

I noticed another thing about Time recently: The magazine now writes a leader opinion piece, often strongly worded, to kick off the entire magazine. I love this idea, we did it at The Standard. It says “This publication stands for something. We’re leaders, arbiters of analysis.” ^{^}

The illusion that journalists can be objective has already fallen. You can try as hard as possible to be objective, but you’re limited to what you see. You’re also limited by the market forces that limit you. You’re also limited by your intelligence, time on task, mobility and even eyesight. So the idea of a “100% objective” article is not sound, but so is the idea of objectivity in anything. That requires a God-perspective that can only be found after entering cheat codes in video games.

Now that we’ve done away with that illusion, we have another: that good journalism mimics objectivity by taking down the points of view of the parties involved, repeating them, and adding a sappy ending so we can “feel the pathos” of the situation. It’s called dueling press releases in practice, because in the three hours allotted for an article in our very competitive media, there’s time to call a few people, type in a few quotes, and then send it out the door.

Dueling press releases has gotten old, as has its corresponding gesture in literature, which is the “profile” story or book that tries to show us the point of view of a character far different from our own. From this we get the real weirdness and sappiness that has afflicted the book industry for the past decade: divorced mothers saving baby basilisks from that evil corporation building a new highway, urchins who live to hack for a free Tibet, drug addicts who have secretly discovered mathematical truths to the universe, and so on. When you step back from it, it’s like a bad Saturday Night Live skit about how writers are morons.

What this has done is make literature and journalism almost totally irrelevant to the lives of the average person.

The Novelists Guild of America strike, now entering its fourth month, has had no impact on the nation at all, sources reported Tuesday.

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While the strike has been joined by an estimated 250,000 novelists—225,000 of whom have reportedly stopped in the middle of their first novel—it has done no damage to any measurable sector of the economy, including bookstore chains, newspapers, magazines, all major media, overseas markets, independent film studios, major film studios, actors, editors, animators, carpenters, those in finance or banking, the day-to-day lives of average Americans, or anything else anyone can think of as of press time. ^{^}

It’s amateur hour out there, folks. The publishing industry did not know how to react to the onslaught of the internet any more than the record industry did. They opened up the floodgates and tried to inundate us in “exciting” but not adventurous books, books that had no voice or point of view. They’ve bored us into tears and we want something more.

It’s that something more that literature has always been about.

I was reading Virginia Quarterly Review’s intriguing entry about complaints for returning submissions too quickly. They used to get angry letters because it took them months to return submissions, because they relied on paper; now, they get angry letters because thanks to their new electronic submission system, they can give something a quicker review.

Part of the problem they face is that people expect a Santa Claus response. That is, they think of editors like Santa Claus reading the letters kids send up to the North Pole. In their minds, they’re sending their story to some cute little old guy who reads it carefully, maybe over a cup of tea and some cake, then considers it over a long walk in the snow, reads it aloud to his reindeer, then returns to it later over the next couple weeks and really thinks hard about it. He’s more concerned about letting one good story go than he is about time, so he peruses it idly. He’s looking to understand the author before he’s even read the story. This vision is completely out of touch.

Back in reality, there are thousands if not millions of people who want to be published authors. They send their stories in by the truckload, especially over summer, and they all want the same Santa Claus treatment. On the other end of the process, there are readers who don’t have the time to meander through a story trying to figure out what the author meant. The editors make a smart compromise: they give each story about the same time a reader will, which is 15 seconds to five minutes, to give them some insight into what it offers. This allows them to process the load of stories and not really get backed up with 10,000 in the queue and no end in sight.

This compromise is smart, because it allows the magazines to continue operation, but it’s dumb because it means that stories get increasingly focused on the external, flashy aspects, because you’re not going to read for literary content in five minutes. If the greats of literature were submitting today, they’d be doing it for a long time before someone discovered them, because many of the greatest stories don’t immediately grab you with some outlandish, wild plot and emotional, flamboyant characters. Editors are missing out on the subtler “content” of literature because they’re focused on the external aspects in order to drop the 99.9% of stories that are not relevant.

When people write angry letters in to their editors, they’re complaining about this choke, whether it’s too fast or too slow. Right now, since the methods of submission have sped up and gotten much cheaper, it’s going too fast and so we’re choked with the lack of editor time. In the past, it moved too slowly, but much of that had to do with opening mail, marking manuscripts, and getting them back in envelopes to mail back. The problem is the same, and that’s that literature is choked with submissions.

Personally, I’d like to see a return to a hierarchy of journals and literary magazines. Not every magazine should be subjected to the same flood of stuff. It makes more sense to have some magazines filter it all, and other more established magazines to publish out of that flow, so that stories move up the chain and at the end of the year, we have some magazine which is publishing the top fifty stories in all of North America, for example. It might make the submission frenzy abate a bit, and might give editors some breathing room to consider what makes great literature, instead of looking for the “isn’t total junk” category.