Reading and Watching: Near and Far
In marketing, we often talk about adjacencies.
If your book has a lot to do with a character whose hypnosis treatments seem to turn up multiple personalities, then practitioners of hypnosis are an adjacent group of potential consumers for your books. Adjacent to them are those mesmerizing folks’ professional associations. Adjacent to them are their doctorate programs on university campuses, classrooms in which you should be guest-lecturing so they’ll find (and buy) your book. Then there are the caregivers who work with multi-personality disorders. And so on.
What we don’t talk about as often are adjacencies that impact a writer’s work itself–choosing what to read or watch according to what level or kind of adjacency it might have to your own work.
The crassest example I can offer will send you screaming out into the night: I hate comedy. In all its forms. I don’t want to sit back and relax. I want to sit forward and be tense.
I refuse to watch comedies on television or film, I refuse to read them, and I refuse to waste my time in discussions about them. What makes this all the stranger is that I love to laugh and generally take a joking pathway through conversations. But that, it turns out, is the key.
I’ve learned over the years that one of the things I have the least respect for in a story is camp. I’m referring here to camp not as being necessarily related to homosexual humor, which is one connotation of the word, but as any effort to send up an otherwise serious subject, to “camp it up.”
As soon as I catch an author camping up his or her work, the book is sailing across the room. The “irresistible” joke can always be resisted and should be. But it’s surprising how many writers, playwrights, screenwriters, and others seem to think themselves very witty for camping up their work.
If anything, I find that I admire more and more the writers who can “stay serious.” It actually takes a lot of work and control of your material to get there and stay there these days, not least because the consumer base largely thinks that “laughter is the best medicine” (they also think clichés are clever), and they’re frequently displeased if a story “never gets funny.”
The Postman Rings More Than Twice
Do you know Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business? Postman wrote it in 1985. Penguin published an anniversary edition in 2005. It’s still important reading, not least because Postman (who died in 2003 at age 72) was able to foresee how the force of the commercially propelled entertainment culture would pervade everything.
In my early days as a critic on Broadway and off-Broadway, for example, dramas not only were plentiful but they were anticipated and celebrated. Arthur Miller in an interview with me about 10 years before his death talked about how there had been a day when theatergoers and readers who met him would demand to know–cordially but urgently–what he was thinking next, what was his latest theme? By the end of his career, he said, nobody cared about what writers were identifying as important issues–nor for dramas built on them.
And while we’ll only touch on this subject glancingly, it does need to be said: Imagine what Miller might have thought if he’d lived to see the surreality show of Donald Trump in the White House?–in some interpretations (you need not agree, we’re moving right on), the arrival of the real-estate-and-reality-show-president is the apotheosis of a decades-long trend in which entertainers and entertainment have become international leadership material in the minds of many.
That, Postman wants us to remember, is a way of “amusing ourselves to death.”
So when I’m “choosing content,” as we moderns say these days, I find that I’m looking for work “adjacent” to my own, in terms of humor and seriousness. There are several other important adjacencies relative to my current work, but this is one of the biggest because I find my admiration growing for writers so formidably in command of their intelligence that they can start serious, stay serious, and end serious, unafraid of honking off the people who “just want to laugh and have a good time.”
Want an example? Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (the screenplay from Faber & Faber, and Garland’s film). Its humans are hardly with out a typical capability to get off a line in a funny way, but the story itself is deadly serious and makes no apology for that.
Want another? Jackson’s Dilemma by the late Iris Murdoch, an astonishing study of isolation.
One still new to television? The Man in the High Castle from Amazon Studios (the third season under Frank Spotnitz’s direction starts October 5).
What I’ve learned about my own writerly inclinations is that I’m able to stay closer to the seriousness of my work if I don’t expose myself more than is necessary to the “goddamn laugh riot” (Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band) of society’s current preoccupation with humor. The temptation to camp something up is exacerbated by being around people who can’t write–or read–their way from one end of a book to the other without getting off a few good guffaws. (On the planes, these are the people who laugh aloud at funny passages they’re reading, know the ones I mean?)
So a contextual or conceptual adjacency I find myself looking for in material these days is what we used to call a “straight drama,” meaning a piece the intent of which is serious. I learn from reading and watching such material. I get a lot more out of work that’s serious over silly, determined over ditsy, meaningful over heart-warming, intelligent over emotional.
All the Way to the Bank
That’s just me (Mercifully, right? I mean really.) And it’s easy to imagine other possible adjacencies that could mean things to other writers engaged on other works in progress. And that’s my provocation for you today.
Do you learn from material that focuses on relationships? Or does your work’s focus lie adjacent to stories about high-concept social issues, policy matters, corporate challenges, scientific exploration?
Does your creative focus these days get more nourishment from reading something from history or something futuristic? Are your topical and creative adjacencies showing up more readily in tales of faith or crime? In stories of confusion and loss or struggle and achievement? In books about youngsters and idealism or about mature citizens grappling with hard truths?
Drop a line in comments here about the adjacencies that mean the most to you at this point. Because the funny (gosh, did I laugh?) thing about adjacencies is that you may find that someone else’s are much closer to yours than you’d expected–more … adjacent to your own.
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About Porter Anderson
@Porter_Anderson is a recipient of London Book Fair's International Excellence Award for Trade Press Journalist of the Year. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, the international news medium of Frankfurt Book Fair New York. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for trade and indie authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman. Priors: The Bookseller's The FutureBook in London, CNN, CNN.com and CNN International–as well as the Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, and the United Nations' WFP in Rome. PorterAndersonMedia.com
Recently I was able to spend several hours in one of the last great used bookstores, Ohio Book Store in Cincinnati. The place is a treasure trove. What was among the 30 or so books I shipped home?
I’m afraid my selections don’t support your thinking about adjacency. The clerk who rang up my purchases commented, “That’s quite an eclectic mix.”
Indeed. I bought books on typographic design, sailboat racing tactics, a Secret Service memoir from the 1920’s, a history of early hand-built motorcars, a short history of American literature, and so on. None directly relate to my current WIP. All were only on topics that made me curious.
In my reading, at least, adjacency is not what I seek. Stimulating my imagination is the point. There is a time for research, sure, and a time to read comp titles to ready a pitch, but that’s only once in a while. I like to roam.
Hey, Benjamin,
Thanks for getting back, and I’m completely with you — eclecticism in your reading (and viewing, listening, etc.) is entirely good. Nothing whatever asgainst it.
For me, this, too, is the norm. If anything, there have been points in my life in which I needed to rein in my natural breadth of interest in order to focus on projects and what would feed them.
My interest in this piece was in — at those times of focus on a project — where the adjacencies occur. For me, of course, in drama rather than comedy. Also in world art trade. Also in social advocacy. Several areas, but more concentrated and refined than in my more normal state (in which the sailboat racing book would be especially interesting to me, too!).
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum–I can’t stand books that take themselves too seriously.
To me, heart-warming is meaningful and emotional is intelligent. Some writers who are afraid of making themselves vulnerable hide behind humor, but just as many hide behind “depth.” Terrified of being perceived as “sentimental,” they write stories about too-cool-to-care heroes who react to danger with sarcasm and to death with a shrug. When the characters are 2D derivatives of Philip Marlowe, gritty political thrillers can be just as vacuous as chick-lit romances.
Human beings have emotions, and I admire authors who aren’t afraid to admit it and explore it. I learn just as much from stories about relationships as I do from stories about Important Issues. Issues come and go, but joy and despair, dreams and fears have been the same for thousands of years.
Hi, TK,
No problem whatever here with your enjoyment of more emotional work, that’s just fine.
I don’t think I said that you needed to agree with me or have the same sensibilities, did I? Nor do you need to feel the need to defend yourself.
I would just caution you about asssuming that a book that has a different “emotional temperature” from yours — or a film that works within the contexts that aren’t part of your natural inclinations — are hiding something on the part of the writer. Everybody actually is not like you. They may not even want to me. So you can just take them at face value, as I’m sure you’d like your work to be taken, right?
I’m with you on the vacuuous nature of many characters (especially in crime drama these days, in which I find this emphasis on the “quirky” sleuth, the “imperfect” investigator, to be insanely tiring, lol).
But I do think that we need to give each other the room (and credit) to experience and enjoy whatever we do.
When you write, “Issues come and go, but joy and despair, dreams and fears have been the same for thousands of years,” you’re right. But when writing in the world of issues, you can actually help lead people to connect with their own dreams and fears because you’re not putting the emotional pain or pleasure right in front of them.
Most of us in life discover many of our emotional depths when issues show them to us.
I like literature that does the same. And this–and I–am no threat to you, I assure you. :)
Thanks.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Interesting article, because I realized after reading it that my writing and reading adjacencies are probably polar-opposites. The two novels I’ve written (alternate world fantasies) are based off of social justice themes–the first about child protection and sacrifice and the second about leadership and responsibility in politics (I started it back when Mitt Romney and President Obama were facing off). I’m a social worker and that just was what came out. However, it’s in a packaging that might be considered by some as campy. I’m not sure…
My reading choices are far from social justice issues. I live those issues every day at work and then at night on the news. Reading is my escape. I don’t think I gravitate toward nonsense, but definitely prefer a nice cozy mystery that has no significant violence and the bad guy is always caught. I need justice in my life, and cozy mysteries give me that assurance that justice will be served, SOMEWHERE, even when it’s not a given in real life. :)
Hey, Lara, thanks for commenting!
What you’re saying makes total sense, not least because your writing is close to your daily work. I think that wanting to read or watch lighter work is completely logical if so much of your daily life and creativity are going into a more serious arena.
And that, in fact, is an interesting adjacency. In a sense, the content you’re seeking out informs the work you do through opposition (even “apposition,” in the classic sense). You’re looking for the reflection of the world through a lens that changes the emotional direction and impatc.
Utterly logical.
Enjoy that, you’re obviously going exactly where you need to.
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I’m in complete agreement.
Cool, David,
And good to hear from you, thanks for writing.
I’d just say that — while I appreciate a kindred soul — I’m also interested that some have felt they needed to defend their (different) interests from my own.
It’s a sign of how competitive we’ve made life in our age. Whenever you express an opinion, there seem to be so many people lined up to tackle it. I wonder if this is germane only to our age or if people have always felt the need to combat “other” ideas? I fear the current dynamics of politics and social patterns are exacerbating this.
At any rate, thanks again, great of you to read me and drop a line.
Cheers,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Like you, I can’t take much of what passes for humor (and only in small doses), but appreciate instead the genuinely funny – whatever causes the day’s first belly laugh. That, I like – and pass on, usually on Facebook where I found it. It counters so much of the daily negativity we live with lately.
I thought, from the beginning paragraph, that this was going to be a post on taking advantage of adjacencies – for marketing a book. And was a bit disappointed because it didn’t continue on in that vein.
It seems endlessly ironic to me that the novel trilogy I’m penning has so many themes with those possible close connections – and the very circumstances of its existence are tightly entwined with a complete lack of energy and mobility for taking advantage of them. I couldn’t have written what I have if I were not intimately acquainted with it – and that precludes me from marketing it properly.
So – maybe a post on how to exploit the cross-connections?