As we await the airing of the first episode of Lost’s final season, our minds naturally drift back to other, similar experiences… other times we’ve seen the final seasons and episodes of complex, episodic shows… final episodes which often sucked. Like Battlestar Galactica.

Shows like Lost and BSG (my fingers are getting tired) have a particular challenge in finding good endings because they’re not just “arc” shows with continuing storylines, they’re also “mythology” shows: a lot of the fun of watching them is getting more and more details of the backstory, details that are most often unknown to the main characters as well as the viewer. Not all arc shows, or even all SF/Fantasy shows with arcs, are mythology shows (Buffy, for instance, flirted with being one but never really was, as the mythology was both inconsistent and mostly irrelevant to the plot), but it’s hard to think of a mythology show that isn’t SF or fantasy. (Soap operas don’t count because there has to be a sense that the mythology was created before the show started, whereas the revelations in soap operas are generally retcons.)

What makes mythology shows different from others in terms of how we watch them is that we’re not just watching for the story, the characters or the performances: we watch, in large part, because we want to better understand the world the writers have created. As wiser people than me have noted, we humans have a built-in tendency to look for patterns, and we feel a kind of pleasure when we identify one we didn’t see before. The flip side of this, though, is that if something we think is a pattern turns out not to be, we can get very annoyed. This is what happened with BSG: by the end of the series finale we had all the pieces to the puzzle, but for most fans they didn’t fit together to make anything meaningful – or at least the picture they created was so far from what we expected as to have the same effect. So here are some lessons the producers of Lost could take from the final season of Battlestar Galactica:

What have you done for me lately?

Fans are fickle creatures. No matter how much we enjoyed the first five seasons, if the final season – and the final episode – aren’t satisfying, we will quickly toss you on the Junk Heap of Forgotten Pop Culture Artifacts.

Don’t marry your ending

Ronald D. Moore has said that he had the final scene of the last episode – where Head Baltar and Head Six wander around New York and watch dancing robots – planned out from the beginning. Which is great, except that after several years of making things up as he went along, that scene no longer made a lick of sense. Honestly, after all the things that came up in the series, the last message he wanted to leave us with was “hug your robots tight”?
A good example of a show that did this right was Babylon 5. J. Michael Straczynski made a similar comment while the show was running, saying that he already knew the ending… except that when circumstances changed (the original lead actor leaving the show) he changed the ending, making it the ending of that character’s story but not the overall series. B5 had its share of problems in its last season, but marrying the ending wasn’t one of them.

Exposition does not equal drama

Sure, fans of mythology shows want to find out the answers to all your mysteries. But those answers need to come out of drama and conflict, not just be parceled out in economy-size lumps of exposition (or worse yet, explained in post-series interviews.) We wanted to know who Head Six and Head Baltar were, but having them suddenly talk about God as if they spent weekends with him was not an interesting way to do it. We wanted to know the connection between the Colonies and present-day Earth: having a newscaster explain it was not an interesting way to do it. And so on…

Some revelations are optional, some are not

The producers of Lost have said that not every mystery raised in the show will be resolved. Well, good, but it’s important to discriminate between which mysteries the fans will accept you leaving unanswered (or otherwise defusing) and which they won’t. How do you know which is which? One clue is to look at the mysteries you yourself defined as important. For instance, BSG spent much of a season teasing us by having some characters hear bits of a mysterious tune. During the season finale, in a very well-executed and dramatic sequence, we discover that they’re actually hearing “All Along the Watchtower” – at which point the camera zooms out to a view of the whole galaxy, and zooms in to what is recognizably our Earth. Wow. So what was the significance of the song – why were they hearing it, and why that song? It’s obviously related to the mystery of the connection between the Colonies and our Earth – the equation is laid out for us visually in that sequence. So when Moore says (after the series is over) that the song didn’t have a significance… that there are just tunes that somehow reverberate through human (or Cylon) consciousness throughout time and space… we may feel just. A tad. Cheated.

Don’t give up the ’shippers

Remember what I said above about exposition not replacing conflict? This goes double for relationships between the characters. As much as we love learning about the mythology, a lot of viewers are even more invested in what happens to the characters, particularly their love lives. Don’t try to elide these issues or wrap them up too tidily. Avoid having characters fall out of airlocks or have their parentage retconned so that the writers don’t have to deal with them anymore. In improve, this is a kind of blocking called cancelling: instead of resolving the conflict that’s been raised in a scene, you come up with a reason why it just isn’t an issue. (“Oh no, a bear!” “It’s okay, he got caught in a bear trap.”) Look at the relationship between Kara/Starbuck and Lee/Apollo in BSG: on the most basic level, people wanted to know Will they wind up together? Was he her one true love, or were her feelings for him just another one of her self-destructive qualities? Not to mention her whole dying-and-coming-back-to-life thing, and the question of whether or not the Kara in the final season was the real one. So with that amount of screen time and fan speculation invested in a relationship, what you don’t do is have her disappear into thin air just when all the impediments to them being together have been removed. That’s not tragedy, it’s not irony, it’s just cancelling.

Hey. while those of you eligible are nominating Matt’s story for the Aurora Awards, why don’t you nominate that Beatles thing I did? Win-win.

Here, I’ll even set up a copypasta for you:

“Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer” By Christopher Bird (http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2009/11/10/scenes-from-an-alternate-universe-where-the-beatles-accepted-lorne-michaels-generous-offer)

See? Easy-peasy. Nominate me in “short fiction, English.”

In an act of shameless self-promotion, I’ve posted my short story “The Coldest War” (which originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction) online here. If you’re a Canadian citizen (not necessarily living in Canada) or a permanent resident, you can follow the handy-dandy links to the Aurora Awards nomination page once you’ve finished reading the story.

Last week, as you may have heard, Fox cancelled Dollhouse. Also last week, as you probably didn’t hear, whatever network aired Hank cancelled it too. Neither was a surprise: they were both solidly bottom-of-the barrel performers — Dollhouse was considered a worse bet than reruns of House to run during Sweeps Week, while Hank was frequently outperformed by its competition on Spanish-language networks. What ought to be a surprise is the reaction each received: the end of Dollhouse resulted in anguished howls that reverberated across the Internet and all the spheres of nerd-dom, while Hank’s cancellation was received by a chorus of crickets.

The easy answer, of course, is that Dollhouse was a good show while Hank sucked. But presumably the people who were watching Hank didn’t think it sucked, and on average about twice as many people watched Hank as Dollhouse (though the two were on different nights, so the comparison isn’t entirely fair.) So our question remains: why were Dollhouse fans so much noisier about its cancellation, and about the show in general, than Hank’s fans? The answer, I think, is in the phrasing: the people watching Hank were really just viewers, while the people watching Dollhouse were fans.

“Fan” is short for “fanatic,” of course, and the qualities that distinguish fans from viewers do have some similarities to fanaticism. Fans, in general, have a personal investment in whatever text it is they are fans of: they feel pleasure when other people recognize its quality (and pain when others criticize it), they care strongly about the narrative, they think about the text when not consuming it (sometimes to the point of wanting to be part of its creation), and they identify personally with its success or failure. All of these are similar to how one relates to, say, a political philosophy or religion.

What’s interesting is that while just about all religions or philosophies have attracted their fanatics, only certain texts have typically attracted fans: what are called (by non-fans) “genre” texts and, in general, the most marginalized and despised of those genres — science fiction, fantasy and their adjacent genres such as superheroes. That marginalization probably has something to do with the strength of fan-feeling — we define ourselves as much by what we’re not as by what we are, and shared exclusion can create a strong bond — but that’s obviously not all there is to it, or we’d be swimming in Gilligan’s Island fanfic. Another factor is probably the unreality of these genres, which provides the audience with “blank spaces” they’re invited to fill. Star Trek, for example — really the classic fan-text — provided next to no detail about its universe beyond what was absolutely necessary for the story, which led to endless speculation and discussion about just how many moons Vulcan has and what happened to Kirk’s nephew and so on. More importantly, it’s impossible to treat an SF or fantasy story as a “found object”; its unreality means someone must have written it. That may explain why I’ve never met anyone who read science fiction or fantasy fan who didn’t also want to write it, at least in passing.

For a long time mass media, and TV in particular, valued viewers over fans: a show that makes fans is, by its nature, harder for the casual viewer to get into, and therefore, all else being equal, will be watched by fewer people. But recently that trend has been reversed: with new distribution channels (particularly DVD sets) and increased competition from other media, the greater commitment that fans bring makes them worth more as consumers than simple viewers, which has led to the inclusion of fandom-generating elements such as continued stories in non-genre shows. As well, the Internet has made it much easier to connect with other fans of the same show, which has had the interesting result of creating fandoms for shows that traditionally wouldn’t have them. (The prime example of this is Mad Men, which has reached some kind of pop culture singularity where there are more people discussing it online than actually watch it.) It’s an odd and perhaps surprising phenomenon — I don’t know about you, but I threw up a little in my mouth when I learned there was such as thing as House fanfic — but it reveals just why a classic laugh-track, always-return-to-the-status-quo sitcom like Hank was such a dinosaur, and died so completely unmourned.

But, you ask, what does all this have to do with Being Erica? Okay, few of you — all right, none of you — are asking that, and probably most of you don’t even know what I’m talking about. For those among us from south of the border, Being Erica is basically My Name is Earl done as science fiction: the title character meets a mysterious “therapist,” Dr. Tom, who has her write down a list of regrets and lets her travel back in time to revisit each one, trying to make it better. Except that not only is it not called science fiction, the early promotional material insisted that it was not science fiction. I can only assume this was for the same reason that Margaret Atwood claims her books which clearly are SF aren’t: because many people, and in particular many women (the core target audience of both her books and Being Erica) simply won’t consider reading or viewing something if they think it’s SF. The result has been a tightrope walk, avoiding outright science fiction while providing fandom-inducing elements. This season has introduced a key one of those elements — a mythology, as we learn more about Dr. Tom, discover that there are other therapists like him, and that they have some sort of hierarchy — and I’m curious to see what effect this will have on the show’s already shaky ratings. In the first season Dr. Tom was really just a device, but with these added elements the show has moved clearly into the realm of the fantastic. If the conventional wisdom about women and SF is correct, it might just kill the show — but on the other hand, it could make it a show people will miss.

The call-for-requests post generated about seven emails all along the same line:

I’d really like to know how you wrote that Beatles story.

Okeydoke.

Will, in the Diablo Cody debate from Friday, says:

Also, I’d call her “In summation: you try it,” condescending at best and ignorant at worst; I’d wager that a large portion of the people criticizing her work and method in the first place have, in fact, tried it, but unfortunately were never able to take up stripping to quit their dayjobs, an experience from which they drew a quirky, acerbic memoir they could sell to Penguin and which would, given some prodding from their manager, help them break into the industry with no previous screenwriting experience whatsoever.

Will may say that I am misinterpreting him a bit here, but the overall tone of the comment has a sort of “she cheated” vibe to it, and that’s something I just can’t allow to go unchallenged.

First off, just about everybody breaks into the industry with no previous screenwriting experience whatsoever, because screenwriting is an industry that doesn’t translate well to… anything, frankly. You have to demonstrate to any potential boss that you have talent and that you have the work ethic necessary to rewrite your entire script on a moment’s notice. Not a lot of people have this. Not a lot of aspiring writers have this either. (Healthy amounts of natural talent are rare; people willing to put in the time to cultivate it to the point where it means something are rarer.) So it tends to be a bit of a grab bag when you hand somebody your CV.

Oh, wah, she took up stripping and wrote a memoir. First off, I’m pretty sure she didn’t have the memoir planned when she chose her new, different life path. Second, there’s nothing stopping anybody who doesn’t have dependents relying on them doing what Cody did. You don’t have to strip to find interesting stories. Go work in the merchant marine, or as an oilrigger, or become a video editor who edits gay porn, or as a court reporter, or… whatever, life is inherently interesting, is the point, and if you’re any good you can create a decent memoir from it. (And if you do have dependents, there’s a memoir there as well that doesn’t require you taking up an interesting lifestyle.)

Sure, Candy Girl isn’t the best memoir in the world (it’s not bad, but Cody’s style tends to grate towards the end – although I think she’s improved as a writer since then), but it’s got a style that people liked and it’s about a topic that doesn’t get that much play in the literary memoir world, and that got some notice. How is capitalizing on this bad? Christ, most writers just throw their shit out to the four winds with a “judge me and find me wonderful” attitude that I find wholly annoying.

Really, the attitude that Cody’s choice to use networks to leverage her minor literary success into something potentially greater baffles me (and Will’s echoing of that is far from the first time I’ve heard it). Cody thinks that her work deserves greater exposure and did what it took – and did nothing particularly amoral, either – to get that. How on earth is this wrong? It’s exactly how I got my job at Torontoist, and in turn how I started getting to appear on the CBC, and if the CBC stuff works out well then I’ll use that too. I have no shame about putting any of this in a cover letter.

Ditto this blog. Not that I don’t like entertaining you people – I mean, if I didn’t like doing this, I wouldn’t do it – but if you think I don’t keep in mind the value of exposing my work to a greater audience along with being able to point to my readership stats (which are frankly very good for a personal journal of somebody who is not for-reals famous and/or a teenaged girl who shows titty) when I try to get related work elsewhere, you’re crazy. The fact that the blog has helped me in the past is part of the reason I try to make sure it gets updated fairly regularly with original (and not-so-original) work.

In short: Cody earned her right to call people out fair and square, and she’s wholly right when she points out that a lot of people dissing her do so out of sour grapes. Not all of them, of course – it’s entirely fair to have legitimate issues with the quality of her work. (I often wonder how legitimate a lot of those issues are, considering I’ve seen people slam Cody’s “unrealistic dialogue” in the same paragraph where they praise Aaron Sorkin or David Mamet, both of whom write dialogue so stylized it bears no resemblance to real-life speech at all, but that is neither here nor there.) But a lot of the hate directed at Cody is nothing more than simple spite and envy, often mixed with a healthy amount of sexism as well, and that’s obvious, and she’s got every right to get sick of it from time to time.

And she’s completely right to say that a lot of her detractors couldn’t hack her job. Because that’s the truth. (A lot of her detractors can’t handle regular fucking blogging, for crissake.)

For my part, I think Juno is good from a writerly standpoint. Yes, the dialogue can grate somewhat depending on your preference, but it’s a movie with a strong emotional core and good character arcs for everybody involved. Do I think it deserved the Academy Award? Not really, it’s rough around the edges. Do I think it’s “proof” that Cody is a one-trick pony? Far from it.

To all those complaining about the shitty “Mephisto makes Peter give up his marriage to save Aunt May with devil-magic” storyline currently going on in Amazing Spider-Man – look, this one is so easy to fix it’s almost redundant to mention it, and by “fix” I don’t mean just retconning it away, but instead making it work on a larger scale.

Ready? Because it’s really easy.

Via United Hollywood, your viral video/writer’s strike mention of the day.

I really kind of suspect that the studios had no idea what they were getting into when they forced a strike.

Found in a Pyjamas Media column’s comments:

I’m not sure you do. Hollywood has made utter garbage at least 90% of the time for at least 10 years, if not more. I will provide just one factoid. In the last two decades, more actresses have won the academy award for portraying a prostitute than for portraying any other profession. Why do current Hollywood writers have such a obsession with prostitution?

First off, I went and checked, because I was pretty sure that “factoid” was not actually, like, true. And of course it isn’t. Only one woman has won an Academy Award in the last twenty years for portraying a prostitute, and it’s kind of a stretch to say that because the woman in question was Charlize Theron for her work as Aileen Wuornos in Monster, and the most distinguishing aspect of the character was not that she was a prostitute but that she was a serial killer.

In comparison: two cops (Helen McDormand in Fargo and Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs) and three rich British ladies (Helen Mirren in The Queen, Emma Thompson in Howard’s End, and Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love). WHY does Hollywood continue to glamourize cops and rich British ladies? WHY?

Secondly, though, I wanted to just make my general disgust with this line of argument known. You can argue against the strike in good faith (and Brad Fox has done so, both here in the comments and at his own joint), even though I won’t agree with you. But the line of argument advanced above – and it’s easily the majority opinion among those (mostly conservative) commenters is “I don’t like it so they don’t deserve anything.”

And that’s just abhorrent. It doesn’t matter if you think Hollywood makes a lot of crap; they also make about a trillion dollars a year in revenue, so the question of whether you personally are invested in the product is moot. It’s both stupid and insulting to think that you have to like a business to determine whether or not its practices are sound.

The question is simple: do writers, having helped to produce a product that is financially successful, deserve a share of that financial success? Answer that question. Jesus, how is this hard?

Let me be plain as possible before I start giving you links:

The WGA writers’ strike is practically the definition of a just strike. This is a battle over corporations earning billions of dollars and unfairly refusing to give those most responsible for the creation of the content which mandates their profits their proper due.

Most screenwriters aren’t rich. Yes, the average salary of a Hollywood screenwriter is $200,000. However, that figure is overinflated by the high end of rich screenwriters, the tiny minority who make millions per picture, the Tina Feys and the Steve Carells. (Both of whom, I might add, are striking.) The median salary for a screenwriter is about twenty thousand dollars. So this isn’t a battle between “billionaires and millionaires,” much like the last actors’ strike, where everybody focused on Leonardo DiCaprio’s salary and ignored the fact that most actors, stunningly enough, are not Leonardo DiCaprio.

So, links:

- John August explains the basics.
- John Rogers lays out some excellent metaphor (”that tiger went tiger“) and some mild prediction.
- Ken Levine provides some perspective.
- Rick Schimpf quotes Micah Wright’s now-infamous “Screwed Over For Spongebob” post and adds some commentary. Also, he provides a link to this informative Youtube.
- An account of what happened at the eleventh-hour negotiations.
- Chris Kelly explains residuals.
- Related to the previous item: Mark Evanier explains why residuals aren’t just fair but also encourage writers to perform better.
- Brian K. Vaughn weighs in.
- And finally, Craig Newmark asks the pressing question on everybody’s minds.

THE HEAD CHEERLEADER SLASH QUEEN BITCH OF SCHOOL

This exhaustingly crap old trope is so annoyingly stereotypical it honestly makes my teeth itch every time I see it – which means my teeth itch a lot, because of the following true formula:

1.) Most writers are nerds.
2.) Most nerds hated high school.
3.) Many nerds have not gotten over #2, and most writers-who-are-nerds definitely haven’t.

Thus, when creating an antagonist in a high school setting and feeling lazy, most writers end up channeling their own inner biases and taking it out on whoever they thought had it easier than them in high school, which is almost always the athletes and especially the cheerleaders. (The cheerleaders, far more often than not, come off worse than the athletes do. I leave it to the reader to chart the obvious gender politics inherent in this point.)

And if the cheerleaders in general get the shaft, well, the head cheerleader is especially singled out, like the queen bee of an evil hive. The head cheerleader, by definition in this writerly world, has to be the bitch of bitches, the alpha female, the leader of the vicious pack, et cetera ad infinitum. She’s almost always the worst, most hateful type-A-personality she-devil; almost always amoral, usually slutty (hellooooooo gender politics, again), and on top of that our stereotypical TV/movie head cheerleader, more often than not, is stupid. So not only is she evil and in a position of power, but the inference is that she only got there because she was lucky.

Let’s not kid ourselves: most head cheerleaders will be type-A personalities, that’s an entirely fair characterization. Why? Because cheerleading is difficult and demanding, with relatively little reward. (Yes, there are some full athletic college scholarships available for cheerleaders – but if a female athlete wants an athletic scholarship, statistically she’s better off pursuing swimming or track.) To excel at it requires a lot of determination and commitment, and to captain a team you have to be the sort of person who enjoys command and competition for its own sake.

But cheerleaders aren’t inherently evil. Most of the ones I’ve known in my time, both through my own schooling and through the schools of younger friends and family, were just competitive athletes, usually good students (because, well, they had to be to stay on the team, much less go to college), and perfectly friendly. Heck, outside of the football-crazy portions of southern America the cheerleaders aren’t even necessarily the top of the social pyramid – the “cool girls” subset can just as easily be totally unrelated to cheerleading.

The Head Cheerleader Bitch is a construct. It’s a sexist one to boot, usually existing to contrast feminine sin from womanly virtue: our Good Girl heroine isn’t ANYTHING like Tammy McSlutty who runs the cheerleaders. (This is so prevalent, in fact, that in Bring It On, where the heroine is a cheerleader, the writers felt it necessary to insert not only a head cheerleader who was duplicitious, slutty and kind of scanky, but two ambitious underling cheerleaders trying to backstab the virtuous Kirsten Dunst.)

It needs to be retired. Re-tired! Re-tired! R-E-T-I-R-E-D, that is what it means to me! Oh yeah! Oh yeah!

From the comments, a while back:

Now the question is whether we start a petition asking you publish Vampire Hitler

Well, it’s not finished as such. Hence why I’m still working on it.

However, I will confess that it contains the following things:

- a race war between the incoming Aryan vampires and the city’s native vampires, which are largely black,
- a jive-talking number one soul brother vampire who got turned in the 1970s,
- an order of vampire-hunting rabbis, including one shot with all of them walking towards the camera in slow motion, their long black coats fluttering behind them,
- an archvillain who has a cane tipped with a sharpened diamond, which he uses as a weapon,
- a RENEGADE COP, LIVING ON THE EDGE,
- and a chainsaw shaped like a Star of David.

And yes, it was originally meant as a serious project for a direct-to-video distribution model. The conversation that spawned the concept essentially went as follows:

ME: Okay, so if we wanted to do a straight-to-DVD project, what would be a good concept?
OTHER GUY: Has to be horror, of course.
ME: Right, but it has to be good horror. High concept horror. What’s a good bad guy?
OTHER GUY: …Hitler?
ME: Good, but it needs something more. What’s worse than Hitler?
OTHER GUY: …Hitler and he’s a ninja?
ME: That’s not a horror movie, though.
OTHER GUY: Hitler and he’s a vampire?
ME: YES.

Someone forwarded me this link because, I dunno, having posted once about Your Webcomic Is Bad makes me an authority on it or something, I don’t know.

(Memo to entire world: if you want a ton of unsolicited email from total strangers asking your opinion about practically everything under the sun? Start a blog. It does not fail, I assure you. Not that I’m complaining, because replying to it/acknowledging it is completely optional, because the writers in question understand that you are a very busy person who has a blog.)

Now, most of the link in question is just flaming and “he’s full of shit,” and I don’t care about that, because either you enjoy reading John Solomon and company’s rants or you don’t. It’s a taste. Presumably the people who don’t like reading John Solomon likewise have an intense dislike for the works of Joe Queenan or Ambrose Bierce or Lester Bangs, and this is, I believe, their loss.

(It’s certainly stupid, of course, to suggest, as some have, that John Solomon is a “bad writer.” I recognize the need to claim bullshit as gospel truth out of a sense of spite, but come on – either you recognize simple writerly skill at crafting inflammatory rhetoric, or you don’t. As Penny Arcade once said, paraphrased – which is it, are you stupid or a liar?)

But one thing about it caught my eye – not least because the author took double-plus care to make sure it would catch any reader’s eye by bolding and italicizing it, so I don’t think it’s presumptuous to think this the main idea he wants to communicate with his essay:

The moment you really give a shit what a site like this (or any other) says about your webcomic, you lose.

This is quite possibly the stupidest thing I have read in a very long time, and understand I’ve spent the last month reading bullshit court decisions that nonetheless established binding legal precedents of dubious value in Canada – so when I say “stupidest,” it carries with it some weight. (It is, granted, less stupid than the dialogue of Carpoolers.)

THE RETAIL MANAGER/ASSISTANT MANAGER WHO IS WAY TOO INTO HIS JOB

Hey! Are you a screenwriter, struggling to emphasize how Important your protagonist is in the grand scheme of things? Then you need a gung-ho retail manager (or assistant manager). Nothing illustrates importance like somebody who’s really into retail, because retail, as we all know, isn’t important at all. Your protagonist has so much more to worry about than weekly sales targets or the new discounting initiative!

I would like to stress I’m not calling retail work an awesome life calling or anything, because mostly it isn’t. But the Gung-Ho Retail Manager/Assistant Manager is particularly grating every time they show up, because in real life, they do not exist. There are retail managers who are serious about their job, of course, but they are mostly people who are desperately afraid of getting fired: sole providers, single parents, people working their ass off to pay down debt. There are also retail managers who genuinely enjoy the service aspect of retail, helping people find the product and/or service they need.

However, in real life, there are practically no retail managers or assistant managers who use war metaphors to describe the retail struggle. There are honestly precious few retail managers or assistant managers who will hold up their MANAGER tag and say “you need to have heart to get this.” The vast majority of actual retail managers and assistant managers do not particularly consider their job a calling or of any great importance at all.

But on TV and in movies, just about every retail manager and assistant manager is a self-absorbed, self-important dickface. It’s terminal laziness, a shortcut of the most annoying type – especially when you know the annoying dickface is just going to be a one-episode appearance to remind us all how Comparatively Important the protagonist’s struggle is. (That we have already seen a gung-ho manager show up on the season premiere of Heroes should surprise absolutely nobody, considering “let’s take a lazy shortcut” is part and parcel of that show’s plotting style.) There’s also a dickface assistant manager wannabe on Chuck, but that guy actually has a role for the entire season so maybe they’ll develop him a bit beyond being the butt of “hah this guy is so dumb he thinks he and/or his career is special” jokes.

To sum up: if, in the process of writing your show’s pilot, you have your character encounter/work for an egotistical jackoff retail manager/assistant manager, please spare us all some grief and write in some other character instead.How about a fanatical dogcatcher? We haven’t seen a fanatical dogcatcher in years.

I’ve recently seen a few people upset by or about Your Webcomic Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad, and the usual comments about that site have emerged, and as usual they are all wrong. No, the writer is not uncreative or lazy (writing a funny rant – and they are funny rants – is hard), and yes, they’ve almost certainly done professional writing of their own (they claim to in various comments, and given the talent involved I can believe it). No, exerting creative energy does not inherently make you a better person.

The reason I enjoy YWIBAYSFB is because one of the greatest fallacies inherent to the Internet that I see repeated, over and over again, from all sorts of people, is this:

“In real life, people don’t say nasty things about your work like this to you directly.”

And to that I have to go “whuh?” because, unlike most of the people who say this, I have a stack of rejection letters. From Asimov’s and Fantasy and Science Fiction and lots of other non-genre magazines and publishing houses. From script agents, from script competitions, from producers. I started submitting in my teens, under the mistaken assumption that I was the next Gordon Korman. (Go figure, I wasn’t.)

These are professional assessments, and let me assure you, not all of them are nice. Most of them are, because I when I submitted them I was in that category of “very rough, but there’s promise,” and editors tend to be pleasant to that level of talent (if for no other reason, because someday they might need a favour from you). But they aren’t all nice. A sample of a few of the less nice ones:

There is no way I can call this anything other than derivative dogshit.

Step one towards getting me to consider your submission: proper formatting. Step two: not copying the stylistic quirks of [writer] in a manner so blatant it’s frankly embarrassing.

You are, at present, years and years of bad writing away from even being tolerable.

I have one word for you to consider: accountancy.

Fairly rough stuff to get, especially when you’re in your teens. But you know what? They were right. I was writing shit then. I don’t write shit now, and yes, it’s partially because of those rude editors. I know some might want to attribute my improvement entirely to the helpful editors who went through the generic, tedious crap I was churning out then and gave me helpful pointers on establishing my own style and avoiding bad writing tropes, and I won’t debate for a second that they were all very helpful.

However. The rude ones were helpful as well, because they said one thing, over and over again, either directly or indirectly. They said “this form to which you aspire has standards which we expect you to meet.”

Think about that for a second, the concept of standards. The idea that your work is part of something that is larger and more important than you, that what you contribute in expression will help to define the movement, and indeed, in a way, all art with it. It’s something that’s steadily been dropping off the edge of the creative map over the last fifty years – maybe society as a whole has gotten more self-important, maybe it’s a shift in personal philosophy as a whole, I don’t know. But it’s an idea in regression, of that we can be sure; it’s one that merits a comeback.

Going back to Your Webcomic Is Bad again, what I think a lot of people don’t recognize is that it, and sites like it, have arisen in direct response to the internet’s total lack of editorial control. Don’t get me wrong: I think that, by and large, the creative freedom the web has given us is a good thing, allowing those artists who would otherwise get lost in the shuffle to make their voices heard. That’s valuable.

The problem is that said creative freedom is a double-edged sword, because without the channels the editorial system built up over the years, anybody can just put up any piece of shit, and with an essentially infinite audience, they will in turn eventually get a loyal horde of fans slavering devotion on what is, bluntly, horse crap masquerading as a story. The same goes for photography, or drawn art, or music, or what have you – in every creative industry there exists a system to separate the dross from the (relative) gold. Yes, sometimes it means we get Thomas Kinkade or Britney Spears because people use that system for material gain first and foremost, but take any art history class and you swiftly learn there have always been people like that and that the commercial crap fades away.

(An aside: in 1964, when the Beatles were breaking huge in the United States, somebody tried to make a buck off them by getting a girl group together, calling them “the Beatlettes,” and recording “Yes You Can Hold My Hand.” Ninety-nine point a lot percent of you have never heard that song, or indeed of the Beatlettes at all. That’s less than fifty years past and they’re already a footnote. That’s my point right there.)

Most webcomics are shit. Yes, there are webcomics that are not shit, from the philosophical, writer-driven hilarity of a Dinosaur Comics or XKCD to the artistic free-flow of a Wigu or Scary-Go-Round to the pure story-ambition of a Gunnerkrigg Court or the sheer professionalism on all levels of Penny Arcade or Order of the Stick. But these fine works are exceptions, and not the rule.

The reason for this is inherent in the philosophy of most webcomics, where “professionalism” is frequently treated like some sort of bizarre optional extra nobody would ever consciously choose, much like putting herring on a sundae. Create a sporadic updating schedule then don’t stick to it – because come on, you’re doing it for free! (Anthony Trollope wrote for two hours. Every day. Period. He did not publish his first novel until he had been writing for fifteen years.) “Draw” a comic in a lite cartoony style without ever having learned the fundamental rules of anatomy and composition first – hey, that’s just how you roll! (Most of the great early comic strip artists learned basic life drawing skills while in the Army.) Use an unoriginal, boring meme for your “punchline” in some desperate attempt to identify yourself to your readers as one of them – well, all the other comic people are doing it! (Charles Schulz – actually, I could just say “Charles Schulz” as a blanket response to every bit of webcomic hackery ever performed.)

And then, when some actual professional creative person, someone who sweats out work and gets paid for it despite never being certain if what he’s produced is good enough (and if you don’t have that gnawing demon in your stomach saying “it’s crap” every time you commit yourself to work in any artistic form, seriously, look into accountancy, because doubt is what creates all art) – when that person finally snaps at the umpteenth schmuck who pumps out generic, meandering, derivative crap in their spare time – it’s always in their spare time – and has found within themselves that precious nugget of superego and nurtured it into a towering colossus of self-important narcissism because they’re creating something, dammit – it’s always the professional’s fault for not being polite.

When did “polite” become such a positive attribute in art, anyway? Not “considerate,” you understand, that’s never the word used, it’s always “polite” – when did Miss fucking Manners dictate proper behaviour within the artistic community? Go back to your art history books and you’ll see again and again that art thrives when the artistic culture is rude and challenges the living hell out of anyone who would dare practice it for their living. Look at the Baroque and Romantic composers, who worked in a period where being a professional composer meant not only writing the absolute best music possible but also politically burying your rivals whenever possible. Look at the sheer chaos the Expressionists created, not just on canvas but in the salons and gallery halls.

(If Mark Waid ever loses his shit with me, I totally promise to take it with a smile, because it’s not like I wrote one of the best runs of Fantastic Four ever, you know? PS. Dear Mark Waid: I still think Kingdom Come kind of sucks.)

Why shouldn’t established professionals get a bit dismissive when amateurs with no real standing beyond a bunch of people they sort of know saying “I like this” – and you can find 200 people who are willing to say “I like this” about absolutely anything – demand equal standing? Because when a rank amateur says “I’m a writer” or “I’m an artist” or whatever their chosen artistic field is, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Robert Rodriguez, in his fun book Rebel Without A Crew, mentions that saying “I’m a filmmaker” (and you can of course extend that to other pursuits) is a wonderful ego boost, and a useful tool for motivating yourself to finish a project. And he’s right. But he also says that it’s only the first step, that next you actually have to become a filmmaker. Some people go to film school; others, like Rodriguez, make a shitty movie or two then come up with a business plan to make another movie. (El Mariachi wasn’t his first, and it’s worth remembering that his original plan was to sell it to the Mexican video market and maybe make back two or three times its cost.)

But absolutely nobody worth mentioning says “I’m a filmmaker” and then prints business cards saying “Chuck Sluckerson, Filmmaker,” and kind of half-asses their way through the basic steps of a project they’ll never really make, but it’s something to talk about at dinner parties. “Oh no, I just work at the insurance company to pay my bills. I’m really a filmmaker.” (This is not to say that this does not happen – merely that they are not worthy of mention.)

Worse yet, the ones who go out and buy a digital camcorder and, without understanding anything about shot composition or pacing a scene or anything that makes narrative film watchable, shoot their abominable short movies and now it’s “I’m a filmmaker – you can see my stuff on Youtube!”

And if you’ve got the temerity to point out that they don’t know what they’re doing, they defend their shit as “artistic choice,” because art can’t be wrong, man, it’s all about personal expression, man! And it occurs to me at this point that I’m getting a bit far afield here, but just pretend that I said Robert Rodriguez was a famous webcomics maker instead, if you like, because the parallels are exactly the same.

In summary: Editorial standards are good things, because art is not a one-way street and never has been. Art is a committal to the audience: you are standing up, proclaiming that you have Something To Say And It’s Important. When you do that, it thus falls upon you to do two things: to make sure that what you say is Important (at least to you if no one else), and that you communicate it effectively. The editorial process is all about creating people who are more skilled at said communication, and if a medium arises – such as webcomics – where that process is absent, don’t be surprised when people create it spontaneously and it’s less helpful than some would like.

So, yesterday I put up my rendition of a comic book hero’s version of the Gettysburg Address, and offered people to get the chance to guess at it.

Here it is again:

Ninety-odd years ago, our mothers and fathers made a new country out of nothing, where we were all free and we were all equal. Now we’re in the middle of a civil war, because not everybody agrees with the whole “free and equal” part nowadays. Here, where our friends and family have fallen, we’re going to build a final resting-place for them. They deserve that – but they also deserve our solidarity, because they paid the ultimate price for our freedom, and we owe them the willingness to pay that price ourselves, if we have to. We have to remember what they did for us, and we have to use that memory to keep fighting, for as long as we have to fight. And we’re going to win, because we have to win.

So, the answer?

I recently got some email from somebody enthused over my comics parodies (it happens), and they asked a question I started to answer in email but then, after realizing how much I was writing to them, that I might as well turn it into an article for the site.

The question was “how do you write dialogue so well?”

People may call me immodest for saying this, but I write good dialogue. (Modesty is just passive aggression described as a virtue anyhow.) I’m not nearly so good a descriptive writer as I am with dialogue. It’s a knack. Some people are just good at drawing, they have the natural instincts to make it all fit together even before they learn the skills to really improve themselves. I got dialogue. Go figure.

This is not to say that I am without flaw in this area. I tend to be overly verbose. My style is recognizable after a while (I can live with it, considering you can say the same about Warren Ellis or Joss Whedon). I have certain systemic tics in my writing that I only notice after I finish and start going back and editing (a tendency to start sentences with “and”, for example, is one of my big ones). But I am good at it.

One of the reasons I’m good at it is because I think a lot about character voice. I get the little bastards talking in my head and I know how they should be talking after a while of listening to them. And a trick I learned years ago to codify this is the revoicing trick.

The trick, which I pass on to you, is very simple and you’ve probably seen it elsewhere before, is this: take a famous passage, preferably a speech. Now rewrite that passage as if the character you want to write is saying it. I myself favour the Gettysburg Address, because it’s distinctive, not so long to make the work tedious, but not so short that you don’t learn anything in the process, and because it’s dramatic – Abraham Lincoln could write one hell of a speech. (Another good trick: imagine the character telling “the Aristocrats” joke.)

Consider, for example, Brainiac Five’s rendition of it.

Eighty-seven years ago our ancestors created a new nation here, dedicated to the principles of equality and liberty. Now we war against our own, and now we will learn if this experiment will work. Today, we come to Gettysburg to dedicate this cemetery to those who have fallen in battle – but our dedication pales in comparison to the dedication of those buried here. Long after history forgets my words, it will remember their sacrifice. It falls to us, today, to resolve ourselves to continue the struggle, that we be willing to sacrifice as greatly as they. We cannot allow their deaths to become pointless. We must ensure that our nation, our belief in equality and liberty, triumphs in this dark hour. We must.

Now, that’s my Brainy saying that, rather than Keith Giffen’s or Mark Waid’s or whomever. But I think it works. Consider what you learn about the character voice by doing this.

No flowery language. He’s a scientist, not a poet. Brainy uses long words when they’re technically appropriate, and the rest of the time he speaks for maximum comprehensibility (not least because he hates having to repeat himself). Also note: “eighty-seven” instead of, say, “eighty-seven point two one six”. He’s not a computer, and no reasonable listener needs to know down to the thousandth decimal point how accurate the timeframe is. (He knows the decimals, but you don’t say everything you know, after all.)

Stark, firm rhetoric. Brainy’s an idealist. He frames his moral argument in absolutes as much as possible – This Is How It Is, and This Is How It’s Going To Be. And his tone, while compelling, isn’t particularly friendly. Note “cannot,” rather than the more comfortable, personable “can’t.” Note the use of active voice wherever possible (which is just a good idea generally, really, but for a character like Brainy, a must).

No sarcasm. This isn’t to say that Brainy isn’t sarcastic – he is – but there’s a time and place, and this time and place aren’t appropriate for that sort of thing with him. (Conversely, Plastic Man might launch a few bombs.)

I hope that explains a bit to the person who asked how I try to build character voice up in my head. Remember that different characters should sound different, even when they’re saying the same sort of thing – but also remember that different characters should sound different because they are different characters, if that follows.

And, as another example, here’s somebody else. I’m curious to see if people can guess who it is: I’ll just say that it’s a major comics hero(ine) with their own title and leave it at that.

Ninety-odd years ago, our mothers and fathers made a new country out of nothing, where we were all free and we were all equal. Now we’re in the middle of a civil war, because not everybody agrees with the whole “free and equal” part nowadays. Here, where our friends and family have fallen, we’re going to build a final resting-place for them. They deserve that – but they also deserve our solidarity, because they paid the ultimate price for our freedom, and we owe them the willingness to pay that price ourselves, if we have to. We have to remember what they did for us, and we have to use that memory to keep fighting, for as long as we have to fight. And we’re going to win, because we have to win.

Any guesses?