Death of a Photo Blog and Why Writers Stop

One of my favorite blogs is called A Photo Editor - smart, informed, to the point, and interesting. Owner Rob Haggart has an interview with a former photo blogger, Alec Soth, who gave up the writing for a number of reasons that are interesting:

• It stopped being a creative outlet and became another "business."
• So many people wanted something from him that he couldn't keep up.
• It began to affect his real life relationships.

It's interesting to see the pressures that can come about even when you want to write something for your own enjoyment.

Journalists Outsourcing Their Own Work

There are days I end up scratching my head, wondering what could possibly happen next. And then I get my answer. Today, it's in the form of a newspaper columnist in Texas who has just resigned because the person who had been doing some ghostwriting for him finally asked the editor for a byline. Here's a bit form the story that ran in the Guardian:

On his own blog, Burr tried to write the scandal off as a case of his being "a little overzealous"- which is an interesting way of describing getting someone else to do your work for you.

This, to me, is like becoming a shoemaker, and then hiring someone else to make the shoes for you because you get tired of doing so. Why bother to keep doing it?

A Screenwriter and Happiness

Cory Turner from NPR went to film school, met the girl of his dreams, wrote a script, found out that it was going to be produced but almost lost the girl. His commentary is almost like a mini romantic comedy. It probably wasn't so neat and tidy in real life, but just think of the movie it might make.

Publisher Brings Down the House of Cards

The blog Gawker has an interesting post about how Free Press and William Morrow have essentially been complicit in yet another fabricated memoir: Bringing Down the House, the story of a blackjack team trying to beat the house in Las Vegas, and the basis for the new movie 21. Their post is based on the Boston Globe Sunday magazine story, House of Cards:

Yet "Bringing Down the House" is not a work of "nonfiction" in any meaningful sense of the word. Instead of describing events as they happened, Mezrich appears to have worked more as a collage artist, drawing some facts from interviews, inventing certain others, and then recombining these into novel scenes that didn't happen and characters who never lived. The result is a crowd-pleasing story, eagerly marketed by his publishers as true - but which several of the students who participated say is embellished beyond recognition.

And publishers wonder how faked memoirs can come into being? Clearly this has gone beyond the publishers having insufficient resources to fact check and has entered the land of deliberately looking the other way:

Both Mezrich and the book's publisher, Simon and Schuster's Free Press, see nothing to apologize for. The book, they point out, was published with a disclaimer (in fine print, on the copyright page) warning that the names, locations, and other details had been changed, and that some events and individuals are composites, created from other events and individuals. Nearly all the details and facts in the book were culled from his research, Mezrich says, and where they were compressed or creatively rearranged, the fundamental truth of the story he tells is undiminished.

What the hell are they thinking? Supposedly there is only one actual, real character - Jeff Ma - who ended up doing things in the book that the real Ma had never heard of. There's a big problem any time one starts to urinate in the well that provides your water - not only in the practical implications, but in the very attitude that leads the person to do it. And that's exactly what the publisher, editor, and writer have done: urinated all over the industry, profession, and reading public.

Grisham Has Healthy Attitude

I just read this AP piece about John Grisham. He apparently - correctly - views what he does as straight entertainment, not literature in the slightest:

"I'm not sure where that line goes between literature and popular fiction," the mega-selling author says. "I can assure you I don't take myself serious enough to think I'm writing literary fiction and stuff that's going to be remembered in 50 years. I'm not going to be here in 50 years; I don't care if I'm remembered or not. It's pure entertainment."

Now out with his 21st book, he's likely right, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Not all writing has to be high literature or something that will last the ages. But I'd hope, at least, that any writer would try to make what he or she did as polished and pleasing from the view of the craft as possible. If not, I can't imagine something that would be duller and more painful to undertake.

No Scripts for Late Night

The late night talk shows are going back on the air, but without benefit of scripts, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apparently the networks are pressuring the shows and their hosts to return - I guess there is only so much reality television that even industry executives can take. But because many of the hosts are members of the Writers Guild, they will not be doing anything that smacks of writing, including writing monologues, plotting sketches, or creating fictional characters, which means, according to another take on the situation (can't remember the source), up to one-third of the show material may be prohibited. One answer is supposed to be more and longer celebrity interviews, but many of the actors and actresses that the shows are trying to book won't cross the picket lines. Personally, I think that it's a plan by the networks to make reality tv look appealing.

Writers? Scratch that - Entprepreneurs

If Hollywood thought that splitting revenues with writers and then a strike were problems, then it has the real shock coming. This LA Times piece reports on how television and movie writers are beginning to turn into entrepreneurs, pretty much cutting the studios out of the major business. Movie stars apparently take lower pay if there are actually good parts, versus what most studio machined movies have, and writers get to pocket a lot more money. Maybe the studios can go on strike, trying to get a cut of the Internet revenues ... oh, wait, that's right, they can't actually hold up anything.

Norman Mailer, Gentleman

It's sad to hear of the passing of Norman Mailer. Not that I was a huge fan of his work - being the erratically and questionably read person that I am, I hadn't read much of it, although I wonder how many hours a day one would need to devote to turning page after page to address even a smattering of the "absolutely necessary" sections of whatever canon was in question.

But the issue of how much time should be devoted solely to reading or writing is part of what Mailer an interesting person. He eschewed the bookish existence, and thought that a writer should embrace the earthy, and not just the ethereal. Certainly he had an ego and could be publicly pugnacious, and his ability to deal with a stable family life would raise an eyebrow, but he refused to retreat into the safety of the study.

I never spoke with him, but did exchange letters about two years ago. I had a provisional interest on the part of Pages Magazine, back when it was in existence, in a piece I wanted to write on writing feuds, their nature, and why they came into being. Of course Mailer was on my list of potential interviewees, given his toussels with Vidal, Capote, and others. Not having his address, I nevertheless sent a letter to him in Provincetown, thinking that the post office could certainly find him, and it did.

Unlike Vidal, whom I also tried to contact, Mailer actually wrote back, apologizing that he was finishing a new novel (that did finally come out) and that he, unfortunately, had to turn down all interview requests. The degree of thoughtfulness in that gesture touched me. He could have simply tossed the letter, but didn't.

Perhaps it was ego that drove him, though I find that people fueled only by self-conceit often ignore the "little people." Maybe it was his having had to dig up sources and do the legwork necessary for his own journalistic endeavors. I still hope that tipping the balance was that I had included a SASE and used Joe Lewis commemorative stamps on both the envelope to him and the one to return to me. He did love a good fight.

YouTube and the Writer-Editor Relationship

Here's a video on YouTube about how writers and editors work together - and it's even funnier if you realize how close to the truth it lies.