The Peril of Re-Writing

Rewriting is not the same as revising. Rewriting is when you tear the page up and start all over again.

Or, at least, that’s how I do it. I get a strange pleasure out of spending ages writing something, printing it off, opening a new word document, and writing it all over again. Granted, I usually highlight sentences and sections that I definitely want to keep – so that I don’t accidentally lose those moments when a perfect line smacks me from nowhere. But chances are that the second draft will be completely different to the first. 

One thing I hate about modern technology is that once the story is done, I can’t do what Roald Dahl did and have a massive bonfire where I burn all the first drafts so that society never has to find out that I’m actually crap at this writing lark and get by through constant revisions and peer-feedback.

Because it’s all very well and good to just go ahead and write a story, then throw it down declaring it a masterpiece. Unless you're Mozart, who apparently wrote without needing to draft or revise (though, I’m hoping that one day someone’s going to stumble across thousands of sheets filled with really awful music and Mozart drafting his suicide note in the margins) then it’s not going to be a masterpiece. More likely than not it’s going to be more unpleasant than having your prostate examined….by Hitler. 

Your first draft of anything is going to be rubbish, because what you give birth to will be a blob of antimatter. A twisted, uncontrollable mess. Buried in there somewhere will be a fine piece of writing, the real problem is bringing it forth. Anyone in the world can dig for diamonds, but you need the tools to dig…and once you’ve found the diamond you need the skill to cut it. Everyone has a novel in them, but it takes an effort to commit it to paper – and afterwards you need to rewrite and rewrite until you’ve extrapolated all the goodness found therein. 

A lot of writers say that once you’ve completed the first draft, you should leave the novel for a few weeks before returning to start again. Honestly, I would only leave it a day. The longer you leave it, the more bulbous the blob of antimatter will become. Finish the first draft, take the night off, get drunk or watch a film or play a game or have intercourse or do whatever you do to relax and clear your mind after a long day. 

Only distance yourself from the novel once you’re pretty certain it’s there. Once you feel you have a perfect representation of your talent as a writer, then put your work in a drawer and forget about it for a few weeks. Return, and if you still think this is what you’ll be remembered for – then great! Do a quick proof-read and send it off for the world to see. If not, start again. 

Just keep starting again. No matter what.

Gamers Clearly DON’T Want Gaming To Be Art

Oh look, the gaming community is still full of idiots. This is why I’m so glad to be a Gaymer, because I can just retreat to my little niche where all the sane people belong.

On the topic of Gayming, I recently picked up and played Gone Home. Whilst it’s a ridiculously overpriced game and thus I’m very glad I bought it in a sale, I really enjoyed it. It’s basically a point and click adventure game told through a first-person perspective – which is something I want to see more of. There are already games like Amnesia and Outlast, but their mostly linear horror stories, and Outlast gets real generic real fast.

Gone Home is not a horror story, despite the game taking place in the largest bloody house in the world with an obnoxious lighting sound effect that actually made me turn part of the sound off. What it is is a surprisingly seamless interactive story where through reading clues you discover the story as you go on. Whilst there are aspects of linearity, it’s possible for you to listen to Sam’s journals out of order, and doing so won’t necessarily confuse the story.

It’s not a perfect experience. I’m not going to do a ‘Best Games of 2014’ list at the end of the year, but if I did then Gone Home wouldn’t be on it. But it deserves its place in gaming as an example of the art form continuing to push itself. So I was surprised to find that the majority of Steam-users hated this game – dismissing it because you could barely interact with anything, and frustrated by the lack of choice. All these comments reminded me of this hilarious video about The Stanley Parable, and yes, the video is based on an actual review.

So, just like Depression Quest, we have another game that pushes how an interactive story can be told…and yet again the gaming community has proceeded to reject it en-masse.

Couple this with the fact that Antichamber – one of the most original games I’ve ever played – has thus far sold poorly, Proteus – another original game – has been rejected, and everyone is complaining that feminism has ruined gaming. Look at all this from a distance, and you’ll realise that clearly the gaming community doesn’t want gaming to be an art.

Any attempt to dissect and challenge gaming has been rebuked. Attempts to make us question precisely what a game is, and attempts to apply the same critical thought that’s applied to any and every other artform has been shunned. The gaming community clearly does not define ‘art’ as an entity worth scrutinising – it defines ‘art’ as acceptance. It thinks that if the world defines gaming as art, then gaming is socially acceptable.

Of course, it already is. The fact that there are adverts everywhere for Far Cry 4 means that gaming has now reached the same ubiquity as film, television, and literature. Gaming is no longer an entity pushed to the edge of society. It’s very much part of society.

The gaming community is so obsessed with painting themselves as maligned and ostracised by the public that they’ve forgotten that this image no longer exists. Gaming is a socially acceptable recreational activity, and there is no longer a stigma surrounding gaming. Violent gaming is no longer a hot debate, and Grand Theft Auto 5 was released to considerably less controversy than Grand Theft Auto 4…mostly because it’s just the same game.

Gamers just want the whole world to kneel before video games, worshipping them as this holy entity that is without flaw, and smiting those who subject it to critical discourse or re-invent it. That’s not art – that’s invasion. Stop it.

Five Reasons Why ‘X Reasons’ Lists Should Go And Explode

 1. The Trivialisation of Everything

Life is not a list. That may seem obvious, but think about it.

  

Nothing in this world can be coherently ranked unless it’s abhorrent. I can’t say whether bread is better than cheese, but I can definitely say that either is better than celery…and chocolate trumps them all.

Life is a thing with infinite possibilities, infinite values, it’s just infinite. But listing reduces it to a finite, arbitrarily ranked slip of paper to be stuck on your wall and never looked at. Life becomes not something you explore, discover, or even just observe – it’s something to be stuck in a filing cabinet.

2.      2. The Dumbing Down of all Discourse.

You probably don’t even know what discourse is, do you?

Listing has turned articles about various topics into a series of viral images. There used to be a time when people would have to articulate their points. Even the tackiest website would have to use that ‘P.E.E’ structure the ‘writers’ giggled at when they were thirteen. (My history teacher went one step further and introduced ‘C.O.C’ and ‘F.E.C’ to the world.)

But now we have just one simple sentence followed by a picture of a cat. And that’s our lot. Sometimes we’ll get two sentences if we have an Oscar Wilde in our midst.

Because who uses words to convey witticisms, anecdotes, and banter? That’s SO 1850! We use Anchorman GIFs now! We use pop-culture to express our views on pop-culture. We exist in this great big ball of excrement outside of actual thought or creativity!

3.      1. The Plaguing of Social Media

Social media already has pseudo-charities and pseudo-socialism and pseudo-autobiographies and sodding Ice Bucket Challenges without also needed these lists. I don’t even know what anyone’s doing even more. I think my cousin might be dead. My childhood friends might be in prison for drug-trafficking. I don’t know – all I’m getting is pop-culture drip-fed via barely-literate articles.

4.      8. The Promotion of Discussion When There is None

Never encourage online discussion, because there is no discussion online. It’s impossible to have a conversation online because you can’t see who you’re talking to and you’re communicating through different plains of existence, both literally and figuratively

Lists always end with something like: “Disagree? Share your thoughts in the comments.” And then you scroll down to find either idiots or, more likely, nothing.

There is no discussion online – there is only debate, and I never engage in debate because in a debate there is no right or wrong answer. People will just shout until their blue in the face and nothing will be achieved. And with that, I’ve just summed up the internet in a nutshell.

5.     #. The Whole “Number 3 will have you in tears” Bollocks

I don’t know about you, but as a writer I’ve always been told never to say how your reader should feel. So my scrotum shrivels like a chestnut whenever I see that the title of ‘One Reason Why Oxygen Is Good For You: You won’t believe number one!”

You don’t have to say “you will now be amazed” or “you’re about to be terrified” when you’re a writer. Just amaze or terrify! Once you’ve set the readers expectation so high, you can either meet it or flunk it. You can’t exceed it.

Telling your reader what they should think is Orwellian, smug, condescending, and just appalling writing. In fact, that’s what wrong with these ‘articles’ in the first place. I should have just written this paragraph and then bunked off…just like everyone else who writes lists.

Disagree? Then sod off. You have the free-thought to ignore this post completely and carry on with your life never thinking about me again.

Gamergate, And Their Anti-Logic

The gaming community is a volatile one. This is mostly because for a long time gaming was considered a fad that would soon die out – and some still consider it so. Thankfully those people will die soon and gaming will be universally regarded as an artistic movement.

I’ve frequently defended gaming. OK, the industry is run by anti-consumer robots who are merely trying to imitate Hollywood instead of actually making games that we can play. Said robots also continue to systematically erase the history of gaming in the hope that we’ll stop noticing that the current triple-A climate is the worst gaming has ever been because we’ll have nothing else to compare it so.

But despite companies pouring enough money to feed the whole of Africa into their latest ‘white man with gun in open world’ game, gaming is still the most exciting artform around at the moment. Behind the big-budget flops, there is Papers Please, Anti-Chamber, Gone Home, and The Stanley Parable. Even triple-A releases like Bioshock Infinite and Far Cry 3 are proof that gaming is still climbing upwards despite the endless Call of Duty sequels.

Which is why it’s disappointing that I’m reminded of how the community behind this exciting new artform is horrid. I’ve never really liked the term ‘Gaymer,’ but I mostly remain within that community just because the people that inhabit it are actually nice.

It’s great that finally Anita Sarkeesian is bringing into light the sexism prevalent in a disturbing number of games – in the same way that during the 70’s, critics such as Laura Mulvey (who Gamergate definitely hasn’t heard of) began to write about the sexism prevalent in television and cinema. I hope Sarkeesian will one day be regarded alongside Mulvey as key figures in academia.

But, of course, there is the backlash. And the backlash is absolutely ridiculous.

Many seem to be taking Sarkeesian’s comments about the sexism in games personally, which baffles me. Gamergate and Sarkeesian’s other various critics assume that because Sarkeesian is pointing out sexist tropes then she must be attacking gaming as a whole – and by extension attacking any and every gamer in the world. She’s not attacking a game; she’s attacking them…according to her critic’s anti-logic.

This is rather like me saying that Transformers 4 was a terrible film that not only insults its audience but the art of film as a whole. Does that mean I hate film as a whole? NO! Does that mean I hate everyone who’s ever seen and liked a film? Of course not! Do I even hate people who liked Transformers 4? Not really. I wish they could raise their standards, but who am I to dictate a person’s artistic taste?

Similarly, I think William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is sexist. Does that mean that I hate theatre? NO! Does that mean I hate Shakespeare? NO! Does that mean I even hate The Taming of the Shrew. Not really. Its sexism is regrettable, but the play still has Shakespeare’s sublime wordplay and they usually get a really talented female actress to play the leading role.

I would discuss Zoe Quinn – another public figure who’s being harassed by Gamergate to the point where she’s had to leave her house – but Gamergate’s reason behind the death threats to Zoe Quinn are even more ridiculous. Rumour had it that Zoe Quinn, a game-developer, was sleeping with a game journalist. This turned out to be completely false, yet Gamergate continues to hurl online abuse at Quinn for no reason whatsoever.

So Gamergate is the worst thing ever, and is fuelled by no logic whatsoever. I can’t believe I’m even warranting it the merit of discussion, and I never want to speak of it again.

Good/Evil – How Damaging It Is

So fascism is the new democracy in Europe, as intolerance builds like bathroom mould. The cause of all this is quite simple: Idiots. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Even if you bunked off all your Literacy classes at school, you will know that all stories require conflict. The easiest conflict is ‘Good vs Evil’, where the story will begin with everything being all lovely, then baddies will arrive, the goodies must battle them in some way, the baddies seem to get the upper hand, but then at the last minute good vanquishes evil forever and everything goes back to being lovely.

There. I have just summed up 99% of everything ever written.

I call this structure ‘The Narrative Filter.’ TV Tropes probably has a better name, but I can’t be bothered to spend the rest of my day flicking through one of the biggest and most interesting websites ever created. ‘The Narrative Filter’ is thus named because the real world does not work like the template I described. You are seeing reality filtered so it appeals to a broader taste. Not a bad taste – just one everyone can get behind easily.

“But Max!” pipes up a fictionalised version of yourself I have just created, “the majority of all stories are devised for the sake of escapism. Sometimes the real world is really depressing, and it’s great to escape to a place where it’s clear whose good and whose evil.”

Yes, your right - fictional version of you. The only problem is that fiction and reality becomes far too confused through ‘The Narrative Filter’. You only need to look at the last Call of Duty game to see reality condensed into a broad, untrue narrative. The USA are good, Russia/South America/Arabs are evil. The baddies are evil because they want to defeat the USA…for some reason, and the USA are good because they fight back with their infinitely more powerful military hardware.

Do you see how damaging this might be to ones perspective of reality? ‘Baddies attack so we attack back harder,’ ‘Anything that attacks us is the most evil thing ever,’ ‘You prod us with a stick and we nuke you off the face of the planet because you totally deserve it’

Obviously not everything is as dumb as the Call of Duty franchise and its subsequent hellspawns. But this whole thing of evil baddies being evil because they are evil and must be stopped because they’re evil because they eat celery needs to stop.

The best villains talk sense. Richard III is hated by all due to his deformities, so he decides to live the rest of his life as a villain. Salieri (from Amadeus) becomes jealous of Mozart’s talent in comparison to his own mediocre music and wants vengeance. Big Brother (from 1984) is of the belief that its ideology will be the first to last forever – and thus Big Brother will exist forever. Magneto doesn’t want to live in secrecy as a mutant. The HAL_9000 sees all the humans on-board as threats to the mission and attempts to terminate them. Nigel Farage suggests that immigration is detrimental to our econo-ohwait.

The best villains need to talk sense because otherwise they do not exist. They are just targets for our heroes to shoot at. We look at them and think “Oh, I’ll never be like that guy” “Oh, something like that would never happen” “Oh, no-one would ever partake in the demonization of a different race. It’s not like we’re making the same mistakes RIGHT NOW”

Villains need to make us think “If something went wrong in my life, could I be this person?” Without any understanding of how the villain works the audience will begin to assume that actions do not have motivation. Someone bombs a marathon and everyone is like “That person must be evil. There is no other reason” Someone drives a plane through two towers and everyone is like “These people just want to watch the world burn. They had absolutely no reason to attack us.” People who vote UKIP are like “We’re not racist. We just want all these brown people out of our country.”

Our entertainment is propaganda. Ever since the Bible, good and evil have been finite states with no middle ground or motivation or redemption – and it’s really, really damaging. Because people don’t know that there is no such thing as good or evil, humanity continues to make mistakes…and we’re not learning from those mistakes.