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Reinventing Books
Jul. 17th, 2005 12:38 amWhat if movies, books and music became a participation between artists and their fans?
This week I finished reading a book that I really wanted to like. To my suprise, I didn't. Although it had much to recommend it, there were very specific things wrong with it.
At first I was really disappointed and felt almost depressed. The ending of the book had closed like a jaw over my hopes of eventual fulfillment. But the cage around my hopes was a cage that only existed in my head-- I was reacting in a twentieth century mindset. In the twentieth century, once a movie, show, book, or piece of music was published, there was basically nothing left to do about it but either recommend it to your friends, or complain. But now we can do more. "Star Wars: The Phantom Edit" showed us the way. Even if we aren't actually professionals, we can perform our very own remixes, to tune a piece of content into our very own flavors of preference. Upon this realization I decided to participate in the creative process instead of complain, and my sadness immediately gave way to excitement. Over the next eight hours I came up with an outline for a supplementary addendum to the novel which, when inserted between the chapters, fixes it completely. At this time, I don't plan to remove anything.
Having ideas is always my most difficult step. That came in an unprecedented rush of brainstorming on Friday, which tested Bill Putt's patience and made him think I'm even weirder than usual. I think I'll prune a dozen or two of the ideas over the process. The book is now (in my mind) connected thematically between its unrelated parts; its sub-plots will have more dependency on each other; most of the questions are answered; instead of being character-driven the book is now driven by the development of a theme. One of the characters in the book quoted Chekhov about writing: "If a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third." So I took a half-dozen guns from the novel that I considered (in my private opinion) unfired, and found out what the book would look like if I fired them. It's a very different book.
Today I started getting more than the outline out of my head and into words. I'm always most creative while lying in bed in complete darkness or pacing a dark, perfectly quiet house, but can rarely reproduce my thoughts the next morning, so it can't wait. It's now almost one o'clock on Sunday morning and I've got 600 words so far. It's not much, but I delete and edit incessantly. They're 600 words, but they're good words, and cover the key moments of four of the most crucial developments.
This week I finished reading a book that I really wanted to like. To my suprise, I didn't. Although it had much to recommend it, there were very specific things wrong with it.
At first I was really disappointed and felt almost depressed. The ending of the book had closed like a jaw over my hopes of eventual fulfillment. But the cage around my hopes was a cage that only existed in my head-- I was reacting in a twentieth century mindset. In the twentieth century, once a movie, show, book, or piece of music was published, there was basically nothing left to do about it but either recommend it to your friends, or complain. But now we can do more. "Star Wars: The Phantom Edit" showed us the way. Even if we aren't actually professionals, we can perform our very own remixes, to tune a piece of content into our very own flavors of preference. Upon this realization I decided to participate in the creative process instead of complain, and my sadness immediately gave way to excitement. Over the next eight hours I came up with an outline for a supplementary addendum to the novel which, when inserted between the chapters, fixes it completely. At this time, I don't plan to remove anything.
Having ideas is always my most difficult step. That came in an unprecedented rush of brainstorming on Friday, which tested Bill Putt's patience and made him think I'm even weirder than usual. I think I'll prune a dozen or two of the ideas over the process. The book is now (in my mind) connected thematically between its unrelated parts; its sub-plots will have more dependency on each other; most of the questions are answered; instead of being character-driven the book is now driven by the development of a theme. One of the characters in the book quoted Chekhov about writing: "If a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third." So I took a half-dozen guns from the novel that I considered (in my private opinion) unfired, and found out what the book would look like if I fired them. It's a very different book.
Today I started getting more than the outline out of my head and into words. I'm always most creative while lying in bed in complete darkness or pacing a dark, perfectly quiet house, but can rarely reproduce my thoughts the next morning, so it can't wait. It's now almost one o'clock on Sunday morning and I've got 600 words so far. It's not much, but I delete and edit incessantly. They're 600 words, but they're good words, and cover the key moments of four of the most crucial developments.
