Admitting is the First Step…
For anyone who notices inconsistencies in movies, say a Timex watch in a battle scene of Spartans or a station wagon zooming along in the distance behind the supposed terrain of Hobbits, or as I have, the particular sunny clothing of a pair of friends as we walked through the sunny urban park amid drizzles of coarse bleached white sand and white cotton “snow” stitched up around the trees to give the impression of Winter in July, there’s something to consider in the power of combining forces with other writers – historic or otherwise.
Writers of this persuasion fulfills a specific niche that is sadly underrated, and often in need of a wake up call. Writing is not about being a detail monger or a comedian, it’s about becoming a critic – with something important to say.
If you understand context, you know something about the way stories themselves are stitched together. It’s not what’s on the page, but the symbolism behind what isn’t said because it is universal and doesn’t have to be. A man hitting a baseball is nice only in the image or mood it stages – and the stage up to that point is empty. Babe Ruth hitting a ball after promising a boy on his death bed that the next home run is for him – that is a story.
Culture is the same way. It’s the grandfather of thought and the writer’s secret weapon in an age of conformity. The sort of stuff they don’t teach you in cliche investigation of everybody’s feelings as in many writer’s classes. It’s too risky for most people to really delve into the polemics, but that’s how it also becomes that much more relevant. It’s rare.
Ideas and culture, not just money, passes from hand to hand like invisible gold. Why then, asks the collaborator’s argument, shouldn’t the ideas of books? This argument in particular makes it sound like the evolution of thought is mandatory. And, well isn’t it?
That’s precisely how conversations about collaboration should start:
Collaboration: The argument for Freedom of Speech, Assembly, the Press, and Adaptive Learning through Human Knowledge
It’s inevitable that cultural ideas be borrowed, and there’s no legitimate argument against the passing along of basic tribal wisdom – the glue that helps collaborative efforts from ratifying constitutions to deciding who’s going to pick the kids up. Culture is practically reality itself. This is not to say stealing is in any way related to writing, but understanding where you are on a map of cultural conditions is a key to grasping where you’re heading.
Rhymes with Orange
Some things you just can’t place. They seem so new and shocking it’s hard to believe they’re old hat. Others are so diluted their trademark is long gone. They are the gears that keep our cultures tick-tocking along. They are big and heavy, and we see them all the time, like the eagle clutching arrows, the blind lady justice, the twinkling city scape glowing behind the pillar of the Washington monument. Each of those was reverently borrowed from the Romans and Europeans, who were themselves borrowing from the Egyptians and the Greeks. And who came before the Greeks? Somebody of course. They shared as well – if they could. That’s evolution after all. The cultural choices they made formed successful cohesive societies.
To go to the grand scale view, those are all the reasons we are here writing now. Present tense. No one ever thinks that one idea, once as common as the term “bandaid” or “Kleenex” could become so forgotten and yet still intrinsically carry so much human value that it could be resurrected a thousand years later as a 500 level dedicated college course. But it happens all the time. What we discuss now as fossilized language was their every-day reality. Why, then, can’t we write about what we’ve learned from our own little tribal nooks and vantages?
This is the appropriate argument for open sourcing tomes of knowledge like Plato’s “Republic,” as well as the late great-aunt Maude’s “Blueberry Preserves: Secret Recipe – and Others” (leather bound) for the greater good of the public domain. Human information that would otherwise be extinguished with the author is preserved and carried on.
Human beings learn most efficiently from one another (some would say most efficiently from the written word) and with more options they learn rapidly, building great things together. Sometimes these things are the Incan highland cities of Peru, thrumming turbine fields, and hybrid cars, other times they are the atomic bomb and the Radon Girls. But we learn.
We learn the point of tribal knowledge is not to go there again if it was bad the first time. Why keep burning ourselves in future generations? Seems downright uncivil not to course correct with a little polemic and earnest discussion when the ideas in need of moving are all the greater in present force. Non-interference seems a weak excuse when we are Prime – not some value, but the very living source – of Vanilla Ice lyrics and too much metal hand waving fame. Of Elvis the Pelvis and also Miriam Mekeba bringing joy where there was once apartheid. She was a polemicist and she was prime – willing to sing out and cause change. It wasn’t about her back yard, it was about everybody.
Writers are about everybody. Remember that every day that you write. A prayer for relevance and the power to turn heads and do great things.
When we consider who owns what idea, be it a boy on a flying kite, or a plan for a sub-atomic missile, all of these elements play into the final judgment call.
Human stories are open to being retold and given richer meaning and symbolism to grow legs and get away from us, and get closer to other people who need those ideas for their very survival. For anyone to try and stop that sharing and divide the human race out of some misguided notion of fossilized perfection, which itself inevitably misuses the term “perfection” in support of some unrealistic, imbalanced social power, the splitting of hairs is exactly what poetic license was created to overcome.
The truth is, throttling and chaining down the meaning of what we have learned drowns the whole purpose of wisdom in the first place. Power is supposed to spread – through the generations and new experiences. It’s supposed to flow like water. It’s not meant to congeal like spattered blood. Congealed power is decay, and we don’t want that. We want to share our crayons.
The Rabbit Hole: The Special Advantages of a Writer-Collaborator
That lack of understanding of where “borrowed” becomes “lost” is by far the biggest problem we have today as professional writers. It may seem odd that in the solitary profession of writing, collaboration is pushed as such a necessary source of (sometimes painful) inspiration. But writers will only sync up for brief periods with the rest of society unless their wares are specifically engineered with a public target in mind.
The truth of the professional writing process, be it screenwriting, fiction, or even autobiography, is that writers start out the givers, and only end up the takers later on as the market allows. There can only be a few bestsellers a year. Even with the break-down of the traditional model of book and movie sales. While we are already as a culture allowing more niche options available over non-traditional distributional methods, there’s still only so much bandwidth the consumer population can have. For this reason the temptation is strong to follow the buzz extolling the fast track of “the formula.”
While there is certainly a real craft to mixing the right formula of entertainment, suspense, and laughter in any project, there’s also the higher art of contextualizing the work resonate with reality, social need and the warning of the dangers to come. Writers who jump to rephrase their work in the cookie-cutter format of whatever sells is missing a huge point as well as possibly further sabotaging their own work. Instead of bending your ideas into the shell of a specific meme, find the cultural significance in what you as a writer are actually trying to say.
Writing at the end of the day is a public service, and writers are responsible for being the scouts as well as the poets in order for a thriving society to continue abiding its checks and balances.
Never forget this rule. Follow it, and you will find your readership.
