This past September, in response to Ken’s post about mashing up Mormon literature and the purposes behind the repurposing of language and literature, in general, Ardis asked a question that turned my wheels a-spinnin’. Asked she, “[W]hat’s the point of being deliberately, unrelentingly unoriginal” by taking others’ work, repurposing it, and sending it out into the world? “Why is suppressing the urge toward originality,” as she assumes mash-up arists do, “more conducive to self-expression than the effort to, you know, actually be self-expressive?”

Seuss-style, I respond to Ardis’ question with three things (I was going to add my comment to the post itself, but my response grew beyond comment-length; hence, this):

Thing One: I don’t think it’s productive to argue that all mash-ups or remixes suppress the urge toward originality and self-expression. I’m thinking here of seven instances—four specific and three more general, though even as I think I stir up more instances—in which artists/creators have, to various degrees, remixed different aspects of culture or other preexisting materials in order to create something new:

a. God, who didn’t create anything ex nihilo, but who remixed extant materials in order to build universes, galaxies, worlds, us. And who’s going to call God unoriginal?

b. Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (among other works) in which he’s “borrowed” compositional elements, plot lines, bits of dialogue, costumes, etc., from a range of films to “piece” together his own story. Here’s a video that details some of these “borrowings.” (Caution: contains some graphic scenes).

Everything Is A Remix: KILL BILL from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

c. Greg Michael Gillis (aka Girl Talk), a musician who specializes in mashups and digital sampling. Here’s a video that illustrates his creative process, wherein he “borrows” a small bit of music (in this case a second or so of an Elvis Costello song) and manipulates it in various ways in order to construct a new, shall we call it, original song:

Girl Talk Creates a Mashup from OpenSourceCinema on YouTube.

Girl Talk has a huge following and is the subject of a really interesting documentary called RiP: A Remix Manifesto. For anyone interested, the film’s available in parts on YouTube and in full on Hulu. It’s a really interesting exploration of the issues surrounding mashups, including copyright laws and creativity. I especially like its opening line: “Today we’re going to create a mashup, a fun and adventurous way to create something fresh out of something stale.”

d. Mister Tim, who in his live-looping act not only mashes himself up against himself, but who also “covers” and mashes up songs from other arists as well in order to entertain audiences. I’ve embedded an example below. Mister Tim has appeared on AMV before, courtesy of mash-up lover Laura.

Mister Tim Live-Looping SWEET DREAMS (medley): 2009 Las Vegas A Cappella Summit from MisterTimVids on YouTube.

e. Found poems, which “take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.” This poetic form became prominent in the twentieth-century, in the shadow of Pop Art (think Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp) (ref).

In 1995, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard published a collection of found poems called Mornings Like This. In the Author’s Note, she suggests, as I have here, that found poems are “the literary equivalents of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Duchamp’s bicycle,” then she offers up something about what a poet does when s/he remixes existing texts into poetry: “By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles,” between it’s non-remixed function and it’s remixed function, wherein “[t]he poet adds,” she continues, “or at any rate increases, the element of delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of poetry. It serves up whole texts [to readers], or uninterrupted fragments of texts,” in the form and language of poetry (ix). So found poetry is ironic poetry, poetry conceived of and meant to critique, even overturn, the ironies of an ironic age. Dillard’s conclusion to her Note is telling in this regard, “This [book] is [the result of] editing at its extreme: writing without composing. Half the poems seek to serve poetry’s oldest and most sincere aims”—to create an aesthetic experience of human life and to give readers pleasure in language being perhaps two of them—”with one of its newest and most ironic methods, to dig deep with a shallow tool. The other half” of the poems, she says, “are just jokes” (x).

One of Dillard’s poems, “The Sign of Your Father,” seems apropos to our current context: discussing the artistic uses, reuses, and recycling of religious texts; the religious uses of art and culture. Here’s the poem (the epigraph cites its original context):

(From Mornings Like This, p. 8-9.)

In her Author’s Note, Dillard comments briefly on one function of this remixed text (the religious nature and implications of which she seems especially critical):

The New Testament Apocrypha is a loose collection of written legends and, chiefly, torn and damaged fragments. Scholar-editors print such texts carefully to show—using ellipses and question marks—where fragments break off and which translations are guesses. An edition of the New Testament Apocrypha yields a poem ["The Sign of Your Father"] about the baffling quality of Christ’s utterances and the absurdly fragmentary nature of spiritual knowledge. Like many of these poems, it looks surprisingly sober on the page. (x)

f. The oral-formulaic composition of epic poetry, wherein (the theory goes) poets like Homer and contemporary Serbo-Croatian poets drew/draw from a stockpile of formulas (including phrases and symbols) as aids to help them compose (”mash-up”) poems “on-the-fly,” in the act of performance. This theory was first posited and explored in depth by Albert Lord in his book Singer of Tales (from which I’ve only read a page or two). It continues to be explored and developed by oral performance scholars, including John Miles Foley, who offers an excellent introduction to the topic in his book How To Read an Oral Poem.

g. Language itself, which thrives because humans continually mash-up “stale” letters and words in different combinations in order to create “fresh” and mind-expanding combinations.

Which leads me, somewhat indirectly, to

Thing Two: Everything is a remix. Languages, cultures, literatures (including scripture, as Ken suggests), music, films. Nothing can be created ex nihilo. No act of self-expression ever arises independently of other expressive acts and materials. The link in my first statement leads to an excellent series of videos produced and distributed by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson and titled, of course, “Everything is a Remix.” These videos explore the idea of mash-ups and remix culture in ways that question a) our general take on creativity as making something wholly original and b) a lot of the premises of copyright laws, which leads me, again, to

Thing Three: In light of the explosion of creativity, knowledge-sharing, and user-generated content made possible in the digital age, I wonder how we might reconsider our deep-seated and fundamental reliance on copyright and intellectual property laws as means to control access to and distribution of information. I’m not saying everything needs to be distributed free-of-charge or that creators should surrender all rights to their creations. Lawrence Lessig, a lawyer, professor, political activist, and authority on issues of copyright, speaks convincingly to the idea that many of our laws may just be choking creativity. Many others (including Lessig and, to make the connection to some aspect of Mormon culture, BYU professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology David Wiley) are building a Creative Commons and working to instill open values and to implement the open sharing of knowledge in culture and education, among other things.

With our current, perhaps overly-strict conception of intellectual property and the policing strategies that accompany this strictness—especially in academia, though academia’s concerns over plagiarism often make their way into the broader culture—the knee jerk reaction many people have to issues of plagiarism might just create more problems than it pretends to solve. I think, for instance, of one of my wife’s former professors who wanted her students to cite every claim they make in their papers—every claim. She wanted to know where all of their ideas originated. Not only does this approach to writing and scholarship create a very prohibitive reading experience—who wants to read something with a citation, or often, multiple citations, after every sentence?—it’s unrealistic, especially since (per Thing Two) every idea is derivative and who keeps track of the source behind every idea they’ve ever had? Wiley shares a similar experience in this video on open education and the future (at about the 11 minute mark). Again, I’m not arguing that we allow students, scholars, writers, artists, etc., to draw wholesale from others’ work without giving credit where credit should be given. But I am suggesting that it’s probably time to think about and approach our discussions regarding plagiarism differently, including by exploring the places where the assumptions of a wholly print culture stand in opposition to the radical openness made possible by the digital age. This openness mirrors in some fundamental ways the openness of primarily oral cultures (as suggested in 1f) where language and its public performance are viewed as aggregative and communal because they build quite explicitly and openly upon what’s come before. And, shocker: performers in these cultures don’t cite their predecessors’ work.

As regards the mashing of Mormon literature, I think Gideon Burton has done something interesting and important with his Open Source Sonnets project, which he’s published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. What that means is simply that others are free to copy, adapt, distribute, transmit, and make commercial use of Gideon’s work, as long as they give proper attribution. Many of his sonnets are imitations (of Shakespeare, Milton, traditional carols, hymns, etc.) and several remix elements of scripture, generally, and Mormon culture, specifically. These include, to name only several, “Shakespeares of Our Own”, “Seeking the Good”, “Thy Mind, Oh Man”, “We Will Cross the River” (which was further remixed by Kathy Cowley), “The Shining One”, “Kingdoms Many”, “The Lord’s Prayer”, “His Yoke is Easy”, and “Unto the Least”. I think the openness with which Gideon has offered these poems and the remix-methods by which he composed them and with which others have responded creates a precedent that other Mormon writers might follow, in one way or another. It further presents an interesting test case of what Ken points to in terms of the possibilities of Mormon literary mash-ups and Mormon remix culture in general. But I’m not prepared to fully explore that case today. However, it’s in the works.

So let’s ruminate away for a minute on the creative possibilities of repurposed culture. And if you have additional examples of mashed-up artistry, share away…

A couple of months ago — shortly after my oldest son got back from his mission — I hijacked him for a day to go driving with me in the northeastern suburbs of St. Paul, about 45 minutes from where I live. He, unwary soul, neglected to ask the purpose of our expedition prior to departure. When eventually he did discover the purpose — to check out a neighborhood and high school that I’ve adopted as the model for the set of novels I’m working on at present — much eye-rolling was evidenced. (Note my clever use of the passive voice to clue the reader in to just how clever I am. For, um, using the passive voice. Yeah.)

I’m sure the only thing that made the experience bearable for my son was the fact that he didn’t have to interact with anyone himself and could therefore more or less ignore the embarrassing way his father was acting. Later, when I told him about emailing a vice-principal chosen at random from the school website with questions about the school — and then showing up in person one day just as school was getting out — he made a comment the precise content of which I cannot remember, but the sense of which was that (a) I’m really quite weird, and (b) the publishing industry does not have enough money in it to persuade him to go out and be nosy and intrusive and chat up complete strangers. Which, I pointed out, was kind of an odd comment for him to make, given that he’d just spent two years talking to strangers about religion. That, however, was Different. Or so he informed me.

I concede nonetheless that he has a point. Being a writer, I’ve found, frequently puts me in situations where I act in ways that push the boundaries of my comfort zone — and leave my family’s far behind. I’m reminded, for example, of the time I showed up at a community PFLAG meeting for No Going Back (Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays, except that now they’ve expanded it beyond the acronym to include other categories such as transgendered). I felt intensely uncomfortable going into the meeting — but I did it anyway, because I thought my writing would be better if I had actually experienced some of what I was writing about. And I think it was.

Part of the reason for my embarrassment, I suspect, is that I lack confidence in myself as a writer. Perhaps this will be different once I get a few more publications under my belt. When I say, “I’m doing research for a book I’m writing,” I feel very much a fraud, even though it’s nothing more than the truth. It’s a truism that if you act as if what you’re doing is perfectly normal, others are likely to treat it that way too.

I admit in this respect to a certain jealousy of Shayne Bell, a member of my old writing group Xenobia who (together with Dave Wolverton) was among the first to break into professional writing. Shayne had a remarkable ability to approach total strangers with what appeared to be absolutely no embarrassment when it came to requests related to his writing. So sincere was his demeanor, so clean-cut his appearance, so reasonable and modest his approach, that he could charm pretty much anyone into doing pretty much anything — or at least, so it seemed to me at the time. Shayne was a dangerous man, or at any rate could have been had he chosen to use his gifts as a con artist or politician instead of storyteller. Perhaps I’ll develop more of that kind of confidence when/if I have more published titles under my name.

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The day I showed up without prior notice at the school, I first drove around the neighborhood. My original intent had been to drive back and forth in front of the school several times (I wanted to observe while kids were getting out of school), but after a couple of passes, I decided that was a little too stalker-like. So I parked in the nearby district office lot,  walked over to the school, and then talked to someone at the school office, who in turn called out the vice-principal I’d been communicating with. We talked briefly. She said I wouldn’t be able to stay there and observe without talking to the principal first, and encouraged me to email her to set up something.

So that’s what I did. I thought about it for a couple of weeks, then decided that what I really needed was a tour of the school — ideally while students were there, but I assumed it would be less disruptive and easier to arrange after school. I composed an email to the  vice-principal, specifying the types of areas I wanted to see (halls, commons areas, auditoriums, etc.) and explaining that it wasn’t so much a matter of wanting specific information about the school but rather of wanting to get a feel for the school — which is both older and larger than the one my own children attend, and with a somewhat different student demographic. I also was careful to trot out my credentials as an actual published author, one who had even received a short review in one of the local Twin Cities newspapers, and listed my website. I then had to do the same for the principal — and was rewarded with a message asking me to schedule a time for a school tour with the principal. Success!

So that’s what I’m set to do tomorrow morning (the Tuesday before Thanksgiving — this part was originally written a week ago). I’m looking forward to it. Part of me wishes that I had been more self-assured from the start — it was kind of awkward talking to the office staff when I showed up without any kind of appointment, saying, “I just want to stand somewhere and watch the students going out the doors.” But comfortable or not, the fact remains that I actually did it: another small-but-real challenge surmounted in my quest to write my stories.

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So. I went into the office, spent about 10 minutes waiting — which was actually kind of nice, since I got to watch students going back and forth during one of the breaks between classes — then spoke with the principal. He had concerns about confidentiality, but when I explained that what I wanted was all in the nature of background and that I wasn’t planning to share any specifics about their school and its students, it seemed to allay those concerns. I also gave him a copy of No Going Back — don’t know if he’ll read it, but it seemed like the thing to do. (Note to self: remember to record the cost of the copy as a research expense…)

After we had talked, he fetched a counselor to show me around for about 20 minutes. We got to see open areas, the library (er, media center), the lunch area (with students eating lunch), the gym, and the halls. I took some notes — more as an immediate aid to memory then as anything else. I took in the ambience. And then I went home.

While acknowledging the view that these works are basically plagiarism, the article’s author, Kenneth Goldsmith argues (successfully, IMO) that our understanding of creativity as requiring wholly original works is flawed, and that even the organization of pre-existing material can be highly creative. Goldsmith, who teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, bases his argument on a course he teaches called “Uncreative Writing,” in which students are penalized for showing any originality and creativity. Everything they produce must be plagiarized.

While his article does explore the issues around plagiarism, Goldsmith ignores plagiarism’s more formal and rigid sibling, copyright infringement. Unless the source works an “author” uses for these works are in the public domain, publishers and print-on-demand service providers will hesitate to accept these works when they know about them. While I find these ideas invigorating, I, too, hesitate at the copyright issues (I think the plagiarism is easy to resolve — simply disclose what you’ve done).

If nothing else, Goldsmith’s article gave me a lot more food for thought, and more ideas about possible mashups, patchwriting, sampling, etc. Given that more than 10,000 General Conference talks have been given since the 1850s, surely a patchwritten talk would be easy to come up with. I sometimes think that enough has been said in General Conference that a creative “author” could say almost anything he wanted!

Or what about poetry mashups? Already archives of poetry contain thousands of poems; how hard would it be to piece together something new from a bunch of similar poems?

Even scripture, I think, is a source candidate. Of course many chapters and verses of scripture already come from other scriptures. In particular Proverbs and the other books of wisdom literature have been pieced together from many sources. It might be simple to do the same with favorite Mormon scriptures, perhaps constructing a doctrinal argument by moving from verse to verse on a topic. Or, the words of a favorite scripture might, with a bit of work, be transformed into poetry, even if the original wasn’t poetry.

Goldsmith explains his plagiarism requirement for his “Uncreative Writing” course by saying “the suppression of self-expression is impossible.” And that seems right to me. But it also leaves me wondering why we don’t have more self-expression from Mormons. I suspect that we lack writing of this nature because of issues like plagiarism and what we believe to be the appropriate ways to use sources, we self-censor. Perhaps using techniques like these might help us overcome this self-censorship.

So my question is: are there any stories out there that do the same (or a similar) thing with Mormon missionaries? I can’t think of any, but my reading in the field is by no means encyclopedic.

If there aren’t any, there should be. What a fascinating way of digging in to several of the key issues of our current day. And it’s got to be a fairly common thing. I know of several Mormons who have served non-stateside and have gone to back to their field of service to do charity work, or go to school, or start a business or career, or as a consultant or foreign service attache or tourist, etc. And the RM-who-returns is the perfect vector through which to tell stories: insider but also outsider in both his/her own nation and the one he/she travels to. The studying abroad or teaching English abroad narrative is a total cliche. And the missionary in the mission field is a bit of one now in Mormon literature. But RM who goes back? As far as I know, that’s open territory. Somebody should jump on that.

[Likely some in the AMV community know far more about this than I do, and I welcome their corrections and comments.] For the handful who may not know, works of fan fiction are derivative works created by fans of an original work, be it a book, film, TV show, cartoon, game, play, music, etc. Modern fan fiction is said to have begun with the 1967 Star Trek fan magazine Spockanalia, but it is also acknowledged that derivative works based on the characters of an original work or using the same setting as the original work have existed for ages. The bible has been a source of many “fan” works — much of the non-canonized apochrypha might be very similar to fan fiction, I suppose. And more recent works, such as Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880), fit the definition of biblical fan fiction quite well.

My first thought was to wonder about the Mormon connections with fan fiction. Are there many Mormons writing fan fiction? Are they writing about Mormon themes? Are Mormon characters appearing? Does fan fiction arise from Mormon works?

Historically, Mormon fiction has created derivative works that might be considered fan fiction in various ways. Some of the early stories published in LDS magazines, such as B. H. Roberts Corianton, are clearly derivative works from the Book of Mormon and no different from fan fiction. The tradition of writing derivative works on the Book of Mormon hasn’t really abated, as can be seen from more recent works, such as the Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites series.

Still, none of this is quite like the Modern fan fiction phenomenon. So I did some simple (and admittedly not thorough) searches on a few of the major, non-work specific fan fiction archives, fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org, trying to find Mormon works. And I did find some works, although not nearly as many as I had hoped.

The works largely mirrored what you might find in more formally published books. Many of the works simply mentioned Mormons as part of the text, such as an off-hand mention in dialogue. Infrequently others actually included a Mormon character. A few original works, such as South Park and the Book of Mormon Musical (yes, there is already fan fiction based on the Book of Mormon Musical), actually included Mormonism in the original work, and those characters and elements also appear in their fan fiction.

More interesting are the handful of fan fiction works that incorporate mormons or mormonism even though the original work doesn’t (for example, the short short story based on the TV show NCIS that explores what happens when character Anthony DiNozzo answers the door to find LDS missionaries, or the story by an LDS author that explores what happens when the Harry Potter villain Voldemort converts to the LDS Church through a kind of mashup with the film The Singles Ward).

Fanfiction.net even has a couple of stories that are based on the Book of Mormon itself. Blik writes a story about Abish, set about 110 B.C., which tries to parallel the story of Joseph Smith. And Beatlefan110’s story The Daughter of Ishmael looks at what happens when a non-member girl wakes up in Nephi’s time as one of Ishmael’s daughters.

Reading fan fiction does need to be approached with some caution. It has the reputation of being largely pornographic, although fanfiction.net claims to have eliminated any “NC17″ material and most of the large archives have rating systems for identifying the maturity level required. Since I didn’t look much at the archives and sites oriented toward a particular work (such as the many Star Trek and Harry Potter sites), I don’t know how common these ratings are or how well the ratings represent what is in the fiction. I can say that alternative lifestyles are common in this fiction, even if the work doesn’t rise to the level of pornography or of explicit nature.

I’m not sure what the relative lack of works about Mormonism means — although it is hard to say that it is different from the more traditional publishing venues. In books I don’t get the sense that Mormon-related (or even mormon-mentioning) works make up a very large percentage of the fiction published. In such a cursory look as this I have to wonder if the relatively few works that mention Mormons and Mormonism have to do with the popularity of the subject, or (at least in the world of fan fiction) with the popularity of the original works on which fan fiction is based. Could it also be that Mormons simply don’t think it is “appropriate” to write fan fiction based on Mormonism, or at least on the most “popular” of Mormon works, the Book of Mormon?

Where stories may not be about Mormons or Mormonism in general, there is plenty of fan fiction based on the works of Mormon authors. Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight garners more than 20,000 works on fanfiction.net and an additional 643 on archiveofourown.org and Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven has 30 works. And Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series yields some 310 works on fanfiction.net and 24 on archiveofourown.org.

Scott Card’s presence in these archives is very interesting, given the controversy that the Time magazine article discussed. While authors like Stephenie Meyer are encouraging of the efforts of fans to write fiction based on her characters and settings, Card sees such efforts as a violation of his copyright and a threat to his livelihood. Those who know Card’s works might see this as more than a little ironic, given that Card himself has written the Homecoming saga, which clearly derives its plot and characters from the Book of Mormon. I’m sure that Card will argue that he changed his characters sufficiently and placed them in such a different setting that what he wrote doesn’t qualify as fan fiction. If so, then I await further clarification from him, and, more importantly, from courts, as to exactly where the line is between fan fiction that violate the copyright law and permitted derivative works.

But Riess went further, suggesting that novelists who can’t get a contract with Deseret Book should self-publish instead of going with any of the other publishers in the LDS market. Really?

I’m happy to admit that most of the publishers in the LDS market aren’t as professional as they should be, and have a very limited reach. I’ll also admit that the results that the small LDS publishers can get for the author will likely not be as good as if the author’s novel was published by Deseret Book or by a national market publisher. But, shouldn’t the author also ask herself if self-publishing will be as successful as publishing with these small LDS publishers?

One of the first posts I wrote after I was asked to join AMV discussed the difficulties of self-publishing, even in the current POD-driven self-publishing world. Among other things, I pointed out that self-published titles don’t reach LDS bookstores the way that even titles published with the smaller LDS publishers do. And, many authors self-publishing their books simply don’t realize how difficult self-publishing can be.

I won’t cover again all that I wrote in that post. Instead, I want to highlight another reason for supporting independent LDS publishers, you might call it a political reason: If most LDS authors self-publish, then will the lack of strong LDS publishers and a more dynamic LDS market ever change?

At least theoretically, carefully selecting a small publisher who can reach the audience or who the author can help to reach the audience for his book should give an author as much or more success than self-publishing, even if it isn’t as lucrative. And, by strengthening the small publisher, an author not only helps him or herself, but also helps fellow authors who publish with that publisher.

In the long run (again, at least theoretically), stronger small publishers in the LDS market means competition for Deseret Book, and improved opportunities for authors. In this sense, by publishing with a small publisher the author can help herself. When a market has multiple publishers, the successful author can choose between them, and likely get a better deal and better distribution in the process. And the less successful author may actually get published by a strong publisher, instead of spending a lot of time and effort learning how to publish effectively.

The problem is that the hallmark of self-publishing is its instability and impermanence. Usually self-publishing doesn’t institutionalize its ability to produce and sell—i.e., publish—books. Successful institutions learn and apply what they learn to future tasks. Like it or not, self-publishing usually learns for a single or a handful of projects, and loses that knowledge once the project(s) are done or the author has moved on.

I don’t mean to suggest that authors should never self-publish. My view is that it depends a lot on the author’s abilities and resources. For some it is probably the best move. But, I do want to reiterate what I first said soon after joining AMV, that self-publishing is a difficult path to getting published (although admittedly the only path for far too many books).

And, I also want to emphasize that self-publishing usually does little to address the overall problem we face in the LDS market. [Its not really a problem for the national market, which is well developed.] If Deseret Book is really the only LDS publisher worth publishing with, then we are indeed in a difficult situation. But even so, the only way out of it is to develop strong independent LDS publishers. And someone will need to publish their books with those publishers in order to make them strong.

Back when I was in college, one of the best things I ever did was join Xenobia, an sf&f writing group. It was a great experience. I didn’t do much writing back then, but the process of reading, giving critiques, and listening to other people’s comments taught me a lot about both writing and what I value as a reader. For several years, it served as one of my primary social groups. Some of the people I met there have become longtime friends — people I’m still in contact with today.

As a writing group, Xenobia is no more, alas. (It still exists as a kind of email list where people share news and encouragement from time to time.) And I truly regret it, because now that I’m finally trying to get my own creative writing going again, I find that I need both readers to react to my work and people I can bat ideas around with.

This occurred to me again the other evening as I was thinking about the teenage empath in my current YA science fiction novel. I want him to be able to sense other people’s feelings (not their thoughts), but also physical sensations as well, such as pain or lust. I’ve been trying to figure out whether those are two truly separate things (in which case one might conceivably develop into the other), or if physical and emotional sensations can’t really be separated. That’s exactly the type of question we could have had a good discussion about back in Xenobia days. But I don’t really have a place to start that kind of conversation nowadays.

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I didn’t feel the lack of a writing group with No Going Back, partly I think because I knew that even without one, I’d be able to find people who would give me good feedback. And I did. Part of that was because of the kind of story it was — people had an intrinsic interest in the subject matter, and were relatively eager to give feedback on a book that was exploring new territory in Mormon fiction. Another part, I think, was because I’d been fairly engaged already in the community of Mormon letters. To some extent, AML, A Motley Vision, et al., were my writing group.

It’s different now. Partly that’s because no one has any community investment in the kinds of stories I’m working on right now. Mostly, though, I think it’s because I’m working in a different genre (YA science fiction). I feel the need to talk to people who read and write the kind of stuff I’m trying to write and get their take both on my writing and on the ideas I’m trying to make work.

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Thinking about what kind of a writing group I’d want to be a part of, I find that I’m a bit… picky.

As I indicated above, one of the things I really want is people who have first-hand knowledge of the genre I’m trying to write. It doesn’t necessarily have to be as a writer, but at least as a thoughtful reader. Indeed, in many ways a thoughtful reader might be an even better reviewer than another writer. Unfortunately, the way these things work, there’s very little most writers (including myself) can provide in pay to their readers — except an exchange of comments, something that has value only to another writer.

The underlying economy of a writing group lies in the exchange of comments. If I want to get good comments, I have to be willing to give good comments. That’s something I’m pretty good at, based on past experience — except that I’ve gotten a lot slower at it in recent years.

Back about 15 years ago, I reviewed a book manuscript from a friend of mine who’s a professional writer. It was an excellent story. I put in about 40 hours looking at the manuscript and making comments, which he told me were more valuable than what he got from the editor at his publishing house. It’s an experience and an accolade I treasure to this day. I have also never been able to make myself read the published novel, nor the stories that were its sequels (though I’m hoping that will change someday).

For me, writing stories and reading/reviewing stories by other writers occupy much the same (highly exhausting) mental territory. I could easily see myself putting energy into critiquing other people’s stories that should be going into my own writing. But I know that if I want to make my stories as good as they can be, I need good comments — which means that I need to be willing to give them in turn.

That being the case, I would ideally like for the people in my writing group to be on a level that’s more or less comparable to my own in terms of skill and/or knowledge. Working with people who are still trying to figure out how to write sentences and paragraphs is likely to prove frustrating for them and me both. On the other hand, I don’t think I belong in a writing group with the professionals either. I’m still learning too many of the basics.

This is a problem that solves itself naturally when you get into a writing group early in your writing experience. To some extent, all of you in the group get to grow along with each other, with people dropping out along the way (as I did) if they aren’t ready to go there yet. Unfortunately, I took a 20-year detour between college and the start of my creative writing career, so I need to start over at this point more or less from scratch with respect to finding a writing group.

The other thing I don’t want is people who think it’s their job to fix my story. Mostly what I want is people who will tell me what worked and didn’t work for them, how they reacted to things as they were reading them. An articulate and intelligent test audience, as it were. Then once a problem has been identified, I may want to throw it open to the group for discussion. That’s a point where suggestions from other experienced writers could be highly valuable. Most of the time, though, I want to try to fix it first myself.

It also turns out that I don’t react well to theoretical or model-based criticism, by which I mean critiques that start from some particular model or theory of what a story should be like rather than from a reader’s perception of what worked or didn’t work in a particular story. Basically, I don’t react well to appeals to authority in any form, aside from the authority of the reader to describe his or her own experience. I can easily see where this tendency on my part could give (and take) offense in some contexts.

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So where does that leave me in the quest for a writing group?

Up to now, this has been something I’ve thought I could defer until such time as I have a more complete manuscript and am ready to show it to someone. Basically, as I’ve commented elsewhere, I need to do my best to do the things I already know how to do before I go out and collect other people’s opinions about what I need to be doing better. And in terms of motivation, I know of old that involvement in a writing group is far more likely to function as a (highly enjoyable) social distraction from writing than as a stimulus to produce more.

Despite all of which, my frustrated wish for someone with whom to talk over the logic of my story serves as a reminder of the potential benefits of writing groups, even before my manuscript is ready to show to people. Maybe it’s time for me to start looking.

But even though I’d received this message many times in the past, I resolved to take it seriously and so I did an inventory of semi-viable (as in: not dead yet) projects. The result: 1 play, 2 essays, 14 works of fiction — a mix of literary fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and parable — and 1 epic-ish poem. And then I decided that based on my current interests, and where the majority of my short stories clustered, and what I enjoyed reading (although I read across a fairly wide range of genres), I needed to focus on fantasy with a literary sheen. And by that, I probably mean slipstream, but maybe not exactly, and, of course, it’s probably not the smartest of choices since it’s not the hottest of sub-genres at the moment, but it seemed to suit me. I even went so far as to secure a twitter account and domain name, and then spend a couple of hours installing textpattern and realizing that it really isn’t all that interesting of a CMS. Meanwhile I was actively not writing. Classic trap, but self-awareness of my bad habits makes things worse in my case. I tend to deliberately step in things rather than avoid them.

Fast forward to late April and Lisa Torcasso Downing posted What Does a “Good” Writer Write? on the AML blog, which led to a discussion of how most writers are unable to write at a high level across genres, and that caused me to think back to the inaugural The Appendix episode and my reaction to it, and I found myself torn again between the inclination to have feet in many camps and the desire to hone the craft in one specific genre.

And then last Saturday morning I blew off other obligations and wrote for two and a half hours straight and finished a short story. It was fun. I found myself able to solve some of the problems that had caused me to stop working on the story in the first place. I got that lovely rush from completing a draft. I didn’t let myself get sidetracked — I just wrote. But here’s the problem: the story was a piece of mainstream fiction of the Mormon faithful realism type. Even worse, I found myself making choices that led to transparent prose. Transparent prose people!

Sunday morning I found myself with a quiet hour and, still high from the previous day’s writing session, I finished another short story that had been lying fallow for quite some time. This one is Mormon speculative fiction of the weird variety. And while the prose has some strong resemblances to that of the day before, it is less transparent. And it was, again, great fun to write.

Now I don’t know if either of those short stories are at all any good. At the very least they suffer from what all of my work suffers from — nothing much happens, of what does happen too much happens in people’s heads, the endings are a bit too epiphanic, the prose is awkward in that it is not literary enough to scream literary, but not transparent enough to be windowpane (shout out to Shelah for introducing me to that term). But both stories have moments that seem to me to be authentically Mormon and authentically interesting. And both need to be in the genre they are currently in. And I love them equally.

And that leaves me in a strange place. I’m still very much the dilettante. I don’t want to commit. And so far I don’t know if I even can. I can’t tell what I’m best suited for, and I’m not sure if that’s because I’m just not very good at any of it, or because I could be good at a lot of it. And this weekend’s experiments in Actual Writing proved nothing — other than I should probably find more time to write fiction. In fact, that’s exactly what it all means. So, yes, this is another one of those “just write” or “you need to get a million bad words under your belt” or “you’ll never know until you try” posts, but it’s one where I’m also going to say this: focus is good for your career, but there are some small joys that come from dilettanteism.

Every minute of every day, each of us has to choose what he or she will do next.

Okay, maybe not every minute of every day. Practically speaking, most of the time we’re in the middle of tasks we’ve already started, and so not really actively thinking about our options. I suppose that technically, even at those times we’re choosing to continue what we’re doing by not choosing to do something else, but that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is the times when we pause at least briefly between two or more options. So maybe every 15 minutes, or every half-hour if we’re particularly focused or stuck in a meeting or something. Then again, who knows what we’re actually doing mentally while we’re in those meetings? (For the purposes of this paragraph, I’m choosing to ignore all those hours we spend sleeping, in comas, being experimented upon by aliens, etc., on the grounds that they’re not relevant to my point. Not relevant, I tell you! Bad reader! No milk bones for you.)

Ahem.

Anyway, it occurs to me that one very simple definition of a writer is someone who — among all the myriads of other things he or she could be doing — chooses to write often enough to actually produce something. The rest, as Einstein might say, is details. (And don’t you just want to whap Einstein upside the head when he says that? And people like me when they quote him?)

I like this way of thinking, because it puts the emphasis at a level where I find it manageable. I’m not the sort of person who can decide to sit down and write something for four or six or eight or twelve hours, five or six days a week, until I get it done. What I can do is choose to write in this particular moment — sometimes — and see what follows from there.

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Science fiction author Robert Silverberg (so I’ve heard) can produce 25 pages of text a day when he’s in writing mode. (Pause for all the writers and would-be writers to contemplate the pleasant thought of taking out a contract on Robert Silverberg.)

I can’t do that. Okay, maybe I could do that, if I was high on the Mormon equivalent of speed (and when you find out what that is, could you tell me?), but anything I produced would be garbage. And after two days of that, I’d be useless for the next month.

Much of the process of being a writer consists of strategies to increase the likelihood of choosing to write at any particular point in time. The process is illustrated admirably (both literally and figuratively) in Edward Gorey’s very brief story, The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel, which by the way I highly recommend for all the writers on your gift list, assuming that they have the right kind of offbeat sense of humor to appreciate Gorey. (But then, they’re writers, which ups the chances significantly.) I quote: “For writing Mr Earbrass affects an athletic sweater of forgotten origin and unknown significance; it is always worn hind-side-to… Mr Earbrass belongs to the straying, rather than to the sedentary, type of author. He is never to be found at his desk unless actually writing down a sentence. Before this happens he broods over it indefinitely while picking up and putting down again small, loose objects; walking diagonally across rooms; staring out windows; and so forth. He frequently hums, more in his mind than anywhere else, themes from the Poddington Te Deum.”

Some writers have routines. I highly recommend that, if you can pull it off. I have bad habits, which I’m constantly trying to evade for long enough to be at least a marginally useful human being. In the case of writing, rather than trying to write at a set time, what I’m learning to do is try to recognize those moments when story ideas and writing impulses are tapping on the window of my brain, and then go and let them in rather than run screaming into the night.

And then (to push the metaphor a bit) I do my best to jog along with my visitor as far as I can, until he/she/gtst vanishes into thin air or goes off in some crazy direction or leads me on until I drop, exhausted, by the side of the road. Not that crazy directions are necessarily bad, mind you. But it’s important to distinguish between crazy-good directions and crazy-falling-off-cliffs directions. At least, once one has fallen off the cliff, it’s important to be able to recognize that you and your story did just go over a cliff, and maybe it would be a good idea to get back up, climb out, and choose another route.

A certain degree of courage is required. Or, as the common misreading has it: “let no spirit of discretion overcome you in the [writing] hour.” The point is that you move. You do something. You write. Without that, nothing else one says or thinks or does as a writer is really important.

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Story writing (as I believe I may have written in a previous post for this series) requires a variety of self-induced monomania. Unfortunately, in my case at least, the tricks I use for throwing myself into that state are likely as not to backfire. Sitting down to “get to it” increases the pressure, and thus the urge to run away. Easing into it by doing other related things (such as writing a blog post about writing) can quickly become a substitute for the thing itself. At this point in my life, I find advice and experiences from other writers depressing rather than motivating. And the last time I tried to tell my wife and daughter about a story idea, they told me to go away. (The idea, so they informed me, was too embarrassing for them to listen to.)

The best and most productive times, I often find, are those occasions when the impulse to write sneaks up on me en route to doing other things. I can’t quite make myself believe that scribbling story scenes during sacrament meeting is a sign either of my own spirituality or the worth of my stories. (Indeed, logic rather suggests the reverse.) But writing moments are too precious to sacrifice, whenever they come.

It’s my hope that someday, once I’ve proven to the muse (and to myself) that I can be trusted to write at the times I’ve set aside for writing, that it will become possible for me to create and keep a real writing schedule. In the meantime, my goal is simply to find time to write, on a frequent if not regular basis, and see what happens.

For those who haven’t seen the news, the edition is credited to Auburn University English professor Alan Gribben, who is worried about Huckleberry Finn being dropped from reading lists because of its language. The publisher of this edition is NewSouth Books, a decade-old publisher that produces about 15 titles a year.

Actually, Gribben is right that the book has been threatened recently. For example, in 2009 the Manchester, Connecticut School District added a requirement that teachers who use Huckleberry Finn must attend seminars on how to deal with issues of race before using the book in the classroom after parents complained in 2007 that the book used the word “nigger” 212 times. It was also challenged in Lakeville, Minn., Minneapolis, Minn., and North Richland Hills, Tex. in 2007. [See pdf reports on Bannedbooksweek.org]

My wife says that this is just pandering to those who would censor the book. And I do agree that this clearly violates the author’s intent.

OK, so, now let’s ask another question. Honestly, before you found out about this new edition of Huckleberry Finn, what was your opinion of CleanFlicks and the other efforts to “clean up” films? When you comment below, please answer both questions before drawing your conclusions.

In my own case, I thought the criticisms of Gribben’s project were overblown. Huckleberry Finn is in the public domain. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of editions available in almost any format you might wish. The book is available for free in many places on the Internet (including images of first or near-first editions, such as this one at the Internet Archive).

Because of this, and the relatively small size of its publisher, its hard to imagine that this edition will be any real threat to the book or to the author’s intent. Instead, I think its possible that this edition will reach some who wouldn’t read it otherwise. Yes, I agree that it would be better for them to read it as the author wrote it.

But I’m also certain that Huckleberry Finn has a lot of value beyond just 212 uses of the word “nigger” and a bunch more uses of the word “injun” (or the value of its unmodified language). Surely Huckleberry Finn still has value, even modified! I’d prefer that readers get at least that value from the book, and then, perhaps after reading it, they might seek out the original wording.

As for CleanFlicks, like many people I’ve had doubts about the wisdom of editing of films. It is a little disrespectful to think that you know better than an author or director. But it is also somewhat disrespectful of authors and directors to ignore the deeply felt beliefs of their readers and consumers. While I’m queasy about the legality and propriety of editing, even with those methods that are clearly legal, I even more favor providing the reader or viewer with a way of seeing or reading the material that has some impact on them.

What makes me uncomfortable about these editing jobs is their indiscriminate, hatchet-job, search-and-replace approach. If I replace all the profanity in a work, I am also likely to replace any use of profanity that is important to the plot or crucial to what the author is communicating. In some few cases it could make the work impotent (if the point of the work is closely related to profanity or being made by profanity, for example). Better would be editing by someone who understands the work well—in the best case the author or director.

Authors write their works for a particular culture — usually one very close to their own culture. When another culture involves another language, the work must be translated into something that the culture will understand, and almost always that means not a literal translation, but a translation that brings the authors intent to the new culture. The translator then tries to write what the author would have written if the author himself were writing for the new culture.

In both of the cases here (those editing Twain and Cleanflicks), I think what is being sought is a kind of cultural translator—someone to bring the author’s intent to a new cultural viewpoint. While I’m sure that this won’t work for all cultures (just as some works simply can’t be translated to certain languages), certain American subcultures are requiring some kind of translation—even if just the equivalent of something far less sophisticated than Google Translate.

I’m sure there is a point where indiscriminate editing makes a work worthless. But for most works, be they in text or in video, that point will never come. They simply don’t require the offensive content to communicate well enough, and even a hatchet-job translation allows the work to communicate the essential.

After all, there is a worse fate for any work than being made impotent or hacked up — not being seen or read at all.