 |
| Lex Luthor learns what happens to those who violate Cornell's Law (From Action # 900) |
I find it impossible to imagine that this could be of the slightest interest to anyone else, which is why I thought I'd better warn you first. But writing it has been extremely useful for me.
In fact, and without any exaggeration, it's been absolutely essential.
Seriously. Suddenly, I'd lost the ability to complete a sentence.
 |
| Ah, the debate at hand. (from Kinght & Squire # 6, appropriated from iFanboy) |
2.
“It is your job as a writer to seek out harsh criticism of your work and change because of it.” (Paul Cornell to the BBC Writer’s Room)
I wasn't seeking out "harsh criticism" last Sunday when I wrote about my concerns with the representations of sex and gender and sexual violence in "Flashpoint" # 1, but I had an awful feeling that it would turn up. Poking a hornet's nest does, after all, tend to provoke the hornets inside, as Mr Brigonos had warned me, and I was prepared for a sting or three. Indeed, with that probability in mind, I did my very best to ensure that the points I was making were as clear and as fair as possible. In fact, I think I worked so hard on trying to avoid sloganeering and demonising that the piece in the end lacked much of the spontaneity and spirit which it very much required. Oh, well. Better to look inept than to carelessly label good folks as folk devils. Being utterly unimportant shouldn't be an excuse for arrogance and rudeness, as I'm sure we'd all agree.
 |
| One of us? Well, I certainly think so, and I've every faith that you do so too. (Dr Faiza Hussain in Captain Britain MI:13- 4) |
3.
But the most challenging aspect of the response to "On Flashpoint # 1" had nothing to do with a few unreconstructed sexists, them pesky hornets them, and everything to do with the number and variety of reactions that the blog so unexpectedly provoked. It's relatively easy to mount an internal defence against the opinions of folks who seem to be clearly beyond reason, but it's far more difficult to work out how to engage with a whole range of quite reasonable opinions, including many containing both criticism and praise. For the reaction to "On Flashpoint # 1" was, within the context of a small blog such as this, rather remarkable. There were more than a thousand visitors to the piece last Tuesday alone, and the Statcounter tells me that closing in on double that figure have visited the page over the past 72 hours. A huge number of blogs would quite rightly consider such a number of guests as a mark of public disinterest, but where a blog concerned only with long essays on mostly obscure subjects is concerned, that's alot of people. Stranger yet, the conversation carried on elsewhere too. There's a generous article about the piece at the estimable DC Women Kicking Ass, for example, with 94 comments associated with it, and the board opened by Mart Gray at the CBG forums has been, shall we say, lively too. I really am grateful to the folks who thought those points worth debating in the first place, though the debates themselves have not gone quite as I would have imagined, had I imagined such a response at all.
But the most challenging aspect of the response to "On Flashpoint # 1" had nothing to do with a few unreconstructed sexists, them pesky hornets them, and everything to do with the number and variety of reactions that the blog so unexpectedly provoked. It's relatively easy to mount an internal defence against the opinions of folks who seem to be clearly beyond reason, but it's far more difficult to work out how to engage with a whole range of quite reasonable opinions, including many containing both criticism and praise. For the reaction to "On Flashpoint # 1" was, within the context of a small blog such as this, rather remarkable. There were more than a thousand visitors to the piece last Tuesday alone, and the Statcounter tells me that closing in on double that figure have visited the page over the past 72 hours. A huge number of blogs would quite rightly consider such a number of guests as a mark of public disinterest, but where a blog concerned only with long essays on mostly obscure subjects is concerned, that's alot of people. Stranger yet, the conversation carried on elsewhere too. There's a generous article about the piece at the estimable DC Women Kicking Ass, for example, with 94 comments associated with it, and the board opened by Mart Gray at the CBG forums has been, shall we say, lively too. I really am grateful to the folks who thought those points worth debating in the first place, though the debates themselves have not gone quite as I would have imagined, had I imagined such a response at all.
 |
| How nice it would be, to finish the exercise with some friendly tea (from Black Widow: Deadly Origin # 1) |
4.
In many ways, this should've been my best week in my time as a blogger. Even discounting the stats for the Flashpoint piece, the visitor numbers here are still slowly increasing, despite logic continuing to insist that a site like this should never be getting even the relatively few visits that it does. Elsewhere, the past seven days have presented some truly heartening opportunities. I've had the chance to be keeping Sequart up to date with the progress of my Mark Millar book, a process that was delayed by a six month appeals procedure with the government about matters to do with pensions and so on. (It was no-one's fault and no-one was being unfair, it was just a long and a nerve-wracking procedure, but Sequart were simply fantastically supportive throughout.) I've also been offered a chance to contribute to a couple of other sites which I regard very highly indeed, and there may be a third such opportunity on the horizon too. Even more surreally, on Tuesday night at 2am, I found myself talking on the phone to a publisher calling from the other side of the pond, and one who I've long thought well of. I found the conversation to be wholly inspiring. (That anyone would pay for such a call is a thought that can make me laugh out loud with amazement.) Whether I succeed in producing work of the quality necessary to justify his call is something which only time and hard work will tell, but just to have those 25 minutes was in itself an experience well worth having. It left me unable, or perhaps unwilling, to sleep for smiling, which, I'm sure we'd all agree, is a rather rare and to-be-cherished business.
 |
| "... making a fuss for whatever reason always feels like a rather shameful business." |
5.
But until last night, when I recalled Mr Cornell's law, I was anything other than happy. My background is working class Scots, and, as a result, making a fuss for whatever reason always feels like a rather shameful business. That's how I was raised, that's how I suppose I'll always feel. And the fuss about that article on "Flashpoint # 1" was far greater than I could ever have imagined. Just because it was an incredibly minor business in itself, and just because I know that's so, doesn't mean that it hasn't had a considerable effect on my sense of perspective. I've had comments left here, and great long tortured and furious diatribes too, arguing for points of view which I find almost impossible to credit as anything other the broadest of satire. For example, how is it possible to respond without despair to a declaration claiming that while there's nothing wrong with using sexual violence as entertainment, spoiling that entertainment by "polluting" the sexual violence with "politics" would constitute the real "obscenity". (Wrapping that particular argument up in an ill-digested take on libertarianism just made it all repellent). And of course, there were the even less rational and even more desperately offensive messages too. These folks will indeed scream and scream and scream, and they don't seem to grasp how a delete button on a Blogger site functions.
And anyway, why would anyone bother getting upset at me? How could that possibly be worthwhile anyone's energy and time?
And anyway, why would anyone bother getting upset at me? How could that possibly be worthwhile anyone's energy and time?
 |
| Well, why else would anyone be a blogger, or a furious commenter either? (Action Comics # 895) |
But far more disconcerting was the mass of feedback which I accumulated from folks talking elsewhere who were clearly never members of any carpet-chewing fraternity. For example, even many of those broadly sympathetic to my piece felt that I ought to have written it in a far more concise form, and I found myself feeling just a touch hard-done by there, because, I told myself, I hadn't been writing that entry for any other audience than myself. The whole stated purpose of TooBusyThinking has always been to allow me the opportunity to worry away at length about matters which inspire and concern me. Whenever I've written for elsewhere, for the stage or song or even the classroom, I've been scrupulous in providing pieces which delivered exactly what was required of them. Here, for all that having folks drop is a heartening business, the only audience is me. Yet, and despite my shameful sulking self, that's an argument that's clearly of no use to folks who might be interested in just a single piece here, and just a single perhaps-important headline issue there-in. I can safely ignore an idiot who decides that I must loathe Geoff Johns both as a man and a writer, when the piece said nothing of the sort and when last November saw a three-part, 10 000 word series lauding GJ's craftsmanship published on this very blog. But it's far more difficult to process a series of far more nuanced opinions expressed by people who, to a greater or lesser degree, weren't getting what they needed from the piece I'd written. This problem of responding to criticism was made all the more challenging by the fact that most of those discussing the piece in passing weren't talking to me at all, but to each other, and elsewhere on the net. Grasping exactly what's going on in such situations is often like listening in on a phonecall between strangers; the words may seem to make sense, but so much of the context is missing. In truth, I'd barely started to grasp why I was so unhappy myself with the piece as published, and now the problem was trying to make sense of its many, specific and apparently obvious failings where other women and men were passingly concerned.
Such situations can cause the mind to freeze up, in part from confusion, in part from a self-doubt that may very well be tinged with cowardice. Yesterday, I spent 12 hours writing material that I couldn't even bear to save, so conflicted were my ambitions, so confused was my thinking.
6.
It was at this moment, of an unconscious but all-too-real loss of perspective, that I suddenly, and rather shamefacedly, recalled the following by Mr Cornell;
Such situations can cause the mind to freeze up, in part from confusion, in part from a self-doubt that may very well be tinged with cowardice. Yesterday, I spent 12 hours writing material that I couldn't even bear to save, so conflicted were my ambitions, so confused was my thinking.
 |
| Oh, yes, can the real-world equivalent to super-villains please tune in to the other side, or even go there? (from Knight And Squire # 5) |
It was at this moment, of an unconscious but all-too-real loss of perspective, that I suddenly, and rather shamefacedly, recalled the following by Mr Cornell;
"Your mum won't give you harsh criticism of your work. It's her job not to. You've got to find people who will genuinely give you harsh, tough, scathing critique of your work. And then you've got to change because of it. I see people coming up to editors and saying to them "So what did you think of my piece?" and the editor will tell them. And the would-be writer starts to argue, starts to say "Oh no, you see what I was trying to do there was..." He's fending off the criticism because he doesn't want to listen. Doesn't want to change."
And, with his words working like a forgotten but perfectly functioning depth-charge, my ego ran right into Cornell's law. I'd been letting myself feel so battered by advice good and bad, explicit or implied, and I'd felt so disappointed in my failure to be of good service to the cause I was trying to argue, that I'd lost sight of what a tremendous opportunity I'd unwittingly stumbled into. From good folks expressing a generous mix of support and reproach, to, yes, the carpet chewers, I was being offered a chance to really change what I was doing, or at the very least to think about doing so in a way that's not marked by an inadvertent and thoroughly unhelpful self-pity. How many amateur writers ever get that amount of feedback? Certainly, I doubt I'll ever have this opportunity again, and, as I write this, the moment is most certainly long gone anyway.
 |
| Faceoff fighting the good fight, like folks are supposed to. (from Knight and Squire # 1, found at Pink Kryptonite) |
 |
| "Offering me another perspective, challenging me ... even surprising me." (Lex gets the assignment, but fails the test. Appropriated from DC Women Kick Ass) |
I certainly need to think about making sure that the key points in an essay such as that on Flashpoint # 1 are better signed up and made more distinct from each other. Did I make the mistake of placing too many headline points in a single piece, meaning that the force of the central argument was unproductively diminished? Less compound sentences, less repetition, a reduction of the personal dimension in favour of a bullet-point, headline-focused approach? Perhaps if I learned to write in Latin first?
And so on, and on. Quo %*!$ vadis?
Of course, I'm certain that Mr Cornell wasn't suggesting that the writer listen to the ravings of the irredeemably sexist and change according to their demands. And anyway, the truth is that I'm not, as you'll have immediately noted, a professional writer, and my ambition is to become a better wordsmith rather than a commercially successful one. Yet it's the matter of resilience which appeals to me in that formulation linking "harsh criticism" to "change". Paul Cornell's law changes the very conditions under which any writer, amateur or professional, responds to the world around them. Every apparent slight becomes an opportunity and every example of praise, qualified or not, becomes immensely useful, while every success of whatever stripe stands only as worthwhile as the new ways of thinking and working which it inspires.
 |
| Casual sexism; hubris inspiring nemesis. Listen to Pepper, Tony! (From Black Widow: Deadly Origins # 1) |
Not all criticism needs to be responded to, but it all needs to be considered and worked through. Perhaps I do need to have a private blog which perhaps a couple of folks might want to pop into every once a while, so that when my words do appear in a more public forum, they don't weary those who might otherwise be sympathetic to their meaning. After all, matters such as the representation of sexual violence demand that the writer ensures that their work is as transparent and convincing as possible. To fail at that is a shameful business.
This blog used to be my note-book, and of course it still is. But if there is the slightest chance that these words are going to spill out into a more public discourse every once in a while, then that's something which might well have to change.
It matters not a whit to anyone else, of course. But it matters to me.
 |
| Positive thinking, resilience; a positive evil when used to unjustly massage the unemployment figures, a boon to the brainlocked blogger. (from Action Comics # 900) |
It's 19.12 on the evening of the 19th May as I finish writing this piece. It's a fresh and gentle evening outside, the deep purple of the irises beneath my window proudly, beautifully, holding their colour even as the evening light starts just to fade. There's a baked potato in the oven, some chicken in the fridge, and the promise of catching up on series 3 of "Spiral" with the Splendid Wife in about an hour's time. There's "Headlights On The Parade" by the Blue Nile on the speakers, and though I'm almost ashamed to say it, because my angst of the past few days seems ever more misplaced and self-indulgent, the world really does feel like a - can I use such an unguarded word? - splendid place to be spending time in.
I have never managed to write myself back to happiness before, and I'd have always considered anyone else's claim to have done so with just a little touch of scepticism. It sounds too much like something promised on the back of a New Age writer's handbook. ("Discover Your True And Life-Enhancing Inner Self While Mastering The 19th Century Gothic Novel") But that's what's happened today, and I can't express how grateful I am to have experienced the workings of whatever processes have been whirring away as I've been typing, just as I'm very glad to have read Mr Cornell's advice to aspiring writers;
“It is your job as a writer to seek out harsh criticism of your work and change because of it.”
8.
Not every piece can be written for other people, I suppose, and yet, even the private exercises feel more real when they've been put up for others to chance upon, for ill or good.
Next time I'll do better. (" ... tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ...")
Mea culpe.
 |
| An ideal of grace under pressure (from Action Comics 894) |
OK, now I'm ready to write a piece about the art of Walter Crane and Alan Davis, an example of a blog piece which surely no-one has ever thought of, let alone thought would be a good idea. But I'll learn from it, and if you should ever have a loose moment, you'd be welcome here too. I hope your day has been a splendid one.
.
0 Comments