The Paradox of Choice
Filed Under: Speculative Fiction, Writing Process
This New York Times article hits on something that I’ve been worrying about for some time, which is that it seems that there are more and more people taking up writing, while at the same time, fewer are reading. I thought this was a problem specific to the SF short fiction world, but it sounds like a greater issue in publishing in general.
I’m not gloomy about the possibilities though. For a determined reader, there is more out there to find than there ever has been before (of course, you can say that in any given moment, as old books don’t go away, at least not immediately). What we need are better ways of fitting the content to the consumers. I do think that before the information revolution that came with the rise of the Internet, finding content you would like to consume was easier. There was less to choose from, and you could evaluate your choices more quickly. Now, I suspect many are paralyzed by choice.
Barry Schwartz, writer and researcher, believes that infinite choice is exhausting. He makes a very interesting case for this in a talk that he gave at TED recently. He also published a book in 2004 called The Paradox of Choice (amazon). I haven’t read this book, but I think it’s going to go on my stack of things to read.
One aspect of the article that struck home with me was this:
On the whole, Zaid is unworried about the proliferation of books, though he doesn’t think everyone should set pen to paper. “About would-be writers, André Gide used to say: ‘Découragez! Découragez!’”(discourage!), Zaid said in an e-mail message. “The implication was that real writers would not be discouraged, and the rest would save a lot of time. Of course, some mediocrities are never discouraged, and some potential real writers would be lost. But there is so much talent around that we can afford it.”
I was discouraged, along with many other 8th grade writers, by James Gunn just as I was starting to be interested in writing. He gave a depressing and detailed talk to us about how difficult that it is to become published, and how little money there was to be made. Even before the Internet, things weren’t all sunshine and roses around here. He was never asked back to our conferences, which was a shame, because I think he brought up some very good points. But I think he shared the same opinion that Gide did. However, his discouragement didn’t stick, and I hope to meet him again sometime in the future to thank him. In some ways, his discouragement spurred me to push on with my writing. At the end of his talk, despite being so negative, he encouraged those of us in attendance to mail our manuscripts to him and he would provide us feedback. I don’t know if anyone else did, but I sent a story I had written recently, a kind of paranormal SF piece. He sent back the most carefully written, wonderfully helpful comments. His generosity has not been forgotten, and along with Ann Tonsor Zeddies, I consider him one of the first to mentor me in the craft.
I want to write more about this paralysis and paradox of choice, and some possible solutions. I think we can find ways to artificially and helpfully limit our choices without stifling new creative work. We already have some services, such as Amazon Suggests and some features on Netflix that help to do this. I’d love to see a system built that tracks as much of the short story market as possible, having database entries for each story. As readers, we would open accounts and flag the stories that we liked. And then, the site would make recommendations based on what we have liked in the past, suggesting new authors, new publications, and new stories that me might not come across otherwise. The system would learn and be trained over time, and soon, it could be a very effective means of limiting choice without burning down markets or running of writers. It’s a long tail tactic and it isn’t going to make anyone rich, but I think it has some merit. I’d look into building something like this, but I think the matching algorithms are way beyond my programming skills, and the data entry part would be difficult to maintain without the help of the individual editors and publishers. No one person could keep the content up-to-date, although I suppose you could offload that responsibility to the readers as well–but then, that sounds like work, and might reduce the potential user base for the site. Also, you introduce the possibility of typos, introducing duplicate data that would make matches much harder.
I will write more on this subject when I’ve read more on the paradox of choice, which has implications in web design as well—something I was thinking about as I designed the layout of my new site, and is the reason you don’t find a full-fledged archive anywhere. I attempt to limit the choice of new readers to my best entries and the latest content, and I put many choices in the footer, kind of pushing them out of the way so that only the determined would find them, and they wouldn’t interfere with the more casual reader. I can’t say how well this has worked yet.
How do you handle the glut of choice available to you in your reading today? Does it result in you reading more, or less? What are your strategies?
The Addictive Properties of Creative Work
Filed Under: My Writing, Writing Process
As I enter a phase of high productivity, I am reminded of the parallels I detect between the way I interact with my creativity and the effect of addictive drugs (as I have read, anyway. I’ve never taken any, unless you count xanax.)
Acts of creativity bring on an emotional and energy high while I am in the act, but after the work is done, that high dissolves rapidly and often becomes a full on energy crash. Novelists call it the post-book blues, I think? I get the post-Flickr upload blues. I wonder if chemically, the act of creation operates in a similar effect–or is it really just the zen state that we enter when we act without thought, when we are in the “zone” that has the high/crash/addictive properties. It’s a bit of a chicken-or-egg problem in that context.
I find that the best way to keep from crashing after a project is to roll immediately into a new one. Finish a photoshoot, process it, upload it, bask in the awesome comments of my blog readers, and at least do 20-30 minutes on the next thing. The basking part, the positive feedback, is part of the addictiveness as well, and the part I don’t manage as well. It stretches out the high, I think, and carries the good feelings from the creation onward longer. After I post new pictures, I have a hard time leaving the computer, and not refreshing Flickr and checking my email 10 times an hour. I find myself craving that injection of warmth, and as it peters off, as all things do, then I get cranky and low. I’m trying to value feedback a little less, but given that my self-esteem is tied in some ways to the external perception of me, it’s not an easy thing to do. “Awesome image/story/website” are the phrases that boost my self-confidence more than almost anything else. I’m trying to change that, but that’s another subject entirely.
Do any of you have this problem of the post-work crash? How do you deal with it? What are your coping strategies?
Writing Progress, Lack Thereof and Tropes, Liked by Me
Filed Under: My Writing, Writing Process
I am utterly failing to keep up the pace of writing this week. No words. Not even any revisions. I probably shouldn’t have bought that design book earlier this week. It’s great for the day job stuff, but reading it eats up the time and energy I should be spending working on my next story.
There’s this trope I am examining right now. One of the things about second world fantasy that bothers me is that it’s rarely very ambitious with how different things are from our world. Now, before you burn me at the stake, hear me out.
Read the rest of this entry »
Postmortem:”Babe, I Am Going to Leave You”
Filed Under: My Writing, Speculative Fiction, Writing Process
Yesterday, I released my intensely personal story of death, Led Zeppelin, and how families cope with death, “Babe, I am Going to Leave You” as a CC-licensed story. A friend asked what my thinking was behind doing this, so I thought I’d break it down in a blog post, in case anyone else was interested.I wrote this story, over the course of about a year, in an attempt to come to terms with my own father’s death from cancer. I always intended to try and publish it somewhere like any other story I wrote, but once I tried doing so, I found I had invested too much of myself to be able to handle the rejections. Most rejections are slightly painful, but you can shrug them off. I just couldn’t shrug off rejections to this story.
I struggled with whether I should essentially “self-publish” the story. I don’t have a large readership here. I’m not John Scalzi or Jay Lake, although I hope to attract as many followers some day. Am I the only writer who wonders about maximizing the audience for their stories, or do we all worry about that? I don’t make much money from my stories, so I’ve focused on growing an audience more than the money.
I also worried that some would see releasing the story myself as a coward’s way out. I do feel guilty for not trying harder to find a place to publish the story that could have given it more readers than I could on my own. The story is, in a big way, my way of honoring my father. Did I do him honor just releasing it to the handful of people who read this? I don’t know. I was tired of having it here, and having no one read it though. I really wanted to do good with this story. I had experienced something profound and painful, and I wanted to help others get through a similar experience. The chance to do some good, even a little, is what convinced me it was the right thing to do.
I want to thank those of you who linked my story in your own blogs. I really appreciated that. It made me feel much more like I made a good choice here. And those of you who have written me, thanking me for posting the story. I am glad that it has helped you.
In the future, I will definitely continue to release reprints of my stories online under the Creative Commons. It can only help a writer at my stage of career. I don’t think I will release any other unpublished stories though, because I think it’s too easy and attractive to circumvent the rejection/acceptance process.
For example, I have this story about a plague that turns famous people into plastic statues and about the people who collect the formerly famous like baseball cards. It’s got a very political slant, and never found a home probably because of that, or maybe because it’s not as funny as I think it is. There’s a strong temptation to just publish it on the web, especially because it’s partially about Bush and he’s about to leave the White House (I hope) and the story will lose its relevancy at that point. I don’t know. Maybe I can find a publisher for it int he next 9 months. Or I can sell it as alt-history futurism later.
Still, regardless, I am glad I released this one story this way. Thank you for reading it.
