Author: J.S. Bangs

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Grant not unto me a spirit of idleness,
of discouragement,
of lust for power,
and of vain speaking.

Thus begins the prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian, which we Orthodox Christians repeat every day during Lent. Now, I’m aware that today is Easter for those of you on the Gregorian calendar (which is, um, everyone), and that a good portion of you are not religious or don’t care about Orthodox Lent. But never mind that! This is a series about writing, not a series about religious observances.

I am going to use this prayer to structure the next few posts, though, because it’s a good one. The challenges of writing are not so different from the challenges of the spiritual life, and the pleas of St. Ephraim are certainly applicable to the writer’s vocation. So let us take this line by line:

Grant not unto me a spirit of idleness

Hoo boy.

I saw a tweet the other day that said, roughly, “Being a writer is 3% talent and 97% not being distracted by the internet.” I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer who didn’t identify with this sentiment. For me, given that I’m still writing in my free time while also trying to hold down a day job, it’s especially acute, because after a hard day of work the thing I most want to do is to curl up and read webcomics. Or play Magic. Or do any number of things other than the difficult, demanding job of writing a stupid story. I tell myself that the full-time writers have it easier… but I don’t actually think that’s true.

I have been very bad at this for the past few months. Mostly, it’s because I let my Magic playing take over too much of my writing time. I took a hiatus from Magic for Lent, and my writing output has gone up dramatically. As a result, I’ve reevaluated how much time I’m going to devote to the game once the fast ends, regardless of how much I love it.

A maxim I’ve heard over and over again from pro writers is that you need to put your butt in the chair and write. No amount of other things can possibly make up for sitting down and puking out words until you have enough; and then you have to pick through your verbal vomit to find out which chunks of it are gold. Everything else is just idleness.

Next time: Discouragement

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So here’s the first of two publication announcements: my story The Lion and the Thorn Tree will soon be appearing in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. The story should appear in the spring edition, coming out at the beginning of April.

This sale is a lesson in not auto-rejecting yourself. I wasn’t sure that this story was really a good fit for Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, given that it features an early industrial tech level and a pregnant female protagonist. It seemed pretty dissimilar from the sword-and-sorcery that’s the usual fare at HFQ. But, I reasoned with myself, they do publish a wide gamut of stories within the guidelines of their genre, and I shouldn’t assume that the editors are unwilling to take something a little less usual. So I sent it in.

And of course they accepted it.

Look for the story in April!

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So it’s been a while since I posted anything substantial here. The reason? Most of my blogging-style effort has been going to Twitter, where I can pontificate and tweak noses and post links in convenient 140-character chunks. With Twitter scratching my itch for off-the-cuff social sharing, the blog has mostly gotten the leftovers and elements too long for Twitter. Which I haven’t had many of lately.

I guess this is my way of saying that it you want to follow me more closely, you should get on Twitter.

However, I do have a series of posts coming up for Lent. Since Orthodox Lent has just started (it’s much later that the Latin Lent which nearly everyone else follows this year), I’m going to do a series called “A Writer’s Lent”, taking some of the verses from the Prayer of St. Ephraim and applying them to a writer’s vocation. Although I’m using a prayer to structure my ruminations, the actual content of this series isn’t religious at all, so don’t let that keep you away.

Also, I have two happy announcements to make sometime in the next few days.

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And like all elites, they believe that they not only rule because they can, but because they should. Even many quite left-wing folks do not fundamentally question the idea that the world should be run by highly verbal people who test well and turn their work in on time. They may think that machine operators should have more power and money in the workplace, and salesmen and accountants should have less. But if they think there’s anything wrong with the balance of power in the system we all live under, it is that clever mandarins do not have enough power to bend that system to their will. For the good of everyone else, of course. Not that they spend much time with everyone else, but they have excellent imaginations.

— Megan McArdle, America’s New Mandarins

I think that McArdle is right on, and that this is the most important political shift going on in our country today. Far more important, and probably far more damaging, than whatever is happening on the GOP v. Dem reality show.

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Our primal endowment—formless, destructive, uncontrollable instinct—paralyzes and isolates us. We cannot trust ourselves or one another until a firm structure of interdictions has been installed in everyone’s psyche. These must be expounded by an interpretive elite, ratified through a calendar of rituals, and enforced by stern authority. Every culture is a dialectic of prohibition and permission, renunciation and release. Freud would have agreed; but whereas his followers concluded that the original “yes” of instinct was silenced, or at least muted, by the “no” of repressive authority, Rieff countered that instinct was cacophonous and only the original, creative “no” gave it a distinct voice.

— George Scialabba, The Curse of Modernity:
Philip Rieff’s problem with freedom

Restrictions breed creativity.

— Mark Rosewater

No!

— Sebi, age 2

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One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

–George Orwell, Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali

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Time marches on, and the coming backlash against the internet is getting ever closer. I ended my last post on this subject with idle speculation about the internet would be downgraded to banal or actually evil:

The current crop of tech-lovers are certainly not evil themselves, and we haven’t yet seen anything that is both clearly evil and fundamentally tied to internet-enabled communication. Wikileaks, though, gives us an interesting glimpse at what may be to come. If a ponce like Julian Assange can embarrass the most powerful country in the world and get away with it, then it’s possible that someone who’s smart, ambitious, and evil could do something similar in a way that would be really disastrous. Our e-Hitler could easily get the sympathy of most of the world’s hackers and geeks, who would gladly participate in an open-source world-domination project written in Python if it were framed in the right way. And if that happened, you’d better believe that the rest of the world would turn against the tech-lovers right quick.

However, that’s a far-fetched scenario, the sort of random thing I was able to come up with in a few minutes of theorizing. Recently I read an article about Jaron Lanier in the Smithsonian that suggests a more plausible avenue to internet evil:

At last we come to politics, where I believe Lanier has been most farsighted—and which may be the deep source of his turning into a digital Le Carré figure. As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web culture—the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websites—as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself. At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism.

It’s taken a while for this prophecy to come true, a while for this mode of communication to replace and degrade political conversation, to drive out any ambiguity. Or departure from the binary. But it slowly is turning us into a nation of hate-filled trolls.

Well. Once you put it that way, it seems obvious, doesn’t it?

By this time, it’s a commonplace that internet comment threads, especially those about politics, are a cesspool of hatred and vilification. Everybody knows this. Political orientation doesn’t matter, either: left-leaning and right-leaning comment crowds are equally vitriolic, equally contemptuous of those who disagree, and equally devoid of serious thought and intellectual rigor. There are exceptions, here and there. I know that in my head I keep a short list of sites where I’ll dare to read the comment threads. But basically everything else is guaranteed to be like dipping my face into a toxic pit of filth and hatred.

We all know this. But have we really considered what it means when the internet becomes the dominant arena of political discussion? I can carry on a cordial discussion of politics with my neighbor, but I won’t risk a discussion of politics with basically anyone, unless I’m well-prepared with a flame-retardant suit and some sharpened mots justes of my own. Is this what we want? It seems pretty clear that the spread of the internet is making our political dialog stupider, angrier, and more extreme—in other words, that the internet is actively making the world a worse place.

At the end of the article, Lanier suggests that we could see the internet’s capacity for mass action set up a legitimately evil mass movement, an echo of the outbreaks of popular cruelty that found their expression under fascism and communism. I’m afraid to say, that sounds really plausible. It also sounds like something that I don’t want to see.