But now it’s over – and after sitting down for an all day crunch session spent powering through the single-player campaign yesterday, I’d like to talk about the storytelling in Starcraft 2. There are some great moments and storytelling techniques in the game, but for the most part, the story and storytelling techniques are largely disappointing. If you haven’t played the single player campaign yet – don’t worry, I intend to keep this analysis spoiler free. I’m going to talking about the concepts, not the plot specifics.

So let’s start with what Starcraft 2 does well. There are some great techniques in the game that betray a real understanding of how gamers want to learn story in games.

The Good: Short, Punchy Cutscenes

First and foremost – the cutscenes are short, punchy, and don’t overstay their welcome. I know that some gamers love watching 30 minute cutscenes in RPGs, but most don’t – most are playing games to play them, not to watch them, and Starcraft 2 does a good job of getting gamers the plot and character information they need to know and letting them get back to the action.

The Good: Characters and Characterization

Starcraft does a lot with setting, mood, and nonverbal storytelling to get character details across without words. Instead of having a character saying, “I’m one brutal goddamn badass,” it’s shown through small actions instead: dark eyes in a cutscene, cigar smoking, facial expressions, etc. This is preferable – there are still so many games that forget storytelling in games is a visual medium – it’s not just about dialogue. The dialogue, for its part, is well done – filled with colloquialisms and interesting phrases – this is another plus. There are a few times where characters feel a bit stock, but the characters are pretty damn good for a video game.

The Good: Players Can Choose More or Less Story

Good God, I’ve been waiting for a game that did this effectively for so long, and finally Starcraft is an example of optional story done right. In between each mission players are sometimes shown mandatory cutscenes, but many of the cutscenes are optional – players can choose to talk to other characters in between each mission, or watch an ingame “news” segment, but they aren’t required to do this to still have a basic grasp of the story and the characters. If a player chooses, each mission can be started directly after the previous mission ends – all that optional story can be skipped. It’s about time that there was a game players could pick their level of immersion. Kudos, Blizzard. You did this right.

But now it’s time to talk about the flipside – there are a number of things I would have expected a game in development for as long as Starcraft  2 to have cleaned up, but these problems remain nonetheless.

The Bad: Nonlinear Missions Lead to a Weird Plot Arc

Many of the missions in the game, after the first few, can be undertaken in any order. This mechanic is fine – it’s worked in other games (like Dawn of War 2) – but for a game that really needs a consistent plot arc, it’s a poor choice. There are several subplot arcs in the game that take a few missions to complete, but the player can choose to undertake the missions interwoven with missions for other subplots. This is fine for the mercenary, go collect the Macguffin missions, but for missions that instill a sense of urgency (“OMG protect these people before they all die!”), it feels a bit silly to come back to them after taking a few side jobs.

Now, of course, the player can choose to power through and ignore the side jobs until the urgency is over, but this goes against decades of gamer logical progression. The side jobs are generally easier missions that give good upgrades, so doing them first allows makes the urgent missions easier. Plus, the way they are revealed to the player still gives the sense that missions revealed to the player first should be undertaken in the order they are revealed, so as to not get overwhelmed. Overall, it’s a poor mechanic that could have easily been remedied by allowing players to choose several mission arcs instead of individual missions. This would have made the plot hang together better.

The Bad: Not Enough Content? Hey – Throw in a Subplot

The other major problem with this choice is at least one major subplot with a player choice that doesn’t seem to matter all that much in terms of overall story – the subplot may carry to the sequels (via a save game or something) but it still feels strangely tacked on. Without giving too much away, I’m talking about the “Spectre” plot arc specifically. This arc only slightly impacts gameplay and feels like filler content. It doesn’t really fit into the overall story and just serves to compound the pacing problems brought on by a user-selected mission order.

The Bad: Mishandled Emotional Moments

This is a hard notion to discuss without spoilers, but I’m going to do my best. The plot mishandles several moments that could be interesting emotionally. It also relies way too heavily on a Macguffin that brings about a Dues Ex Machina ending in the worst way – instead of solving problems through character growth, the problems are solved by a particular item.

It’s strange, for a game that has great characters and great characterization, the characters don’t feel like they are fully explored in terms of their backstory and emotional reactions to situations. For a company that has created some truly beautiful emotion dilemmas in their Warcraft universe, I was disappointed that the story telling in Starcraft 2 didn’t live up. There are a bunch of missed chances for better character-driven story – the kind that elevates a cheesy plot to a good one – and I’m scratching my head as to why these opportunities weren’t exploited fully. I have specific examples for this, but I’ll save them for another post so as to not give away spoilers in this one.

So that’s the good and bad of the storytelling techniques in Starcraft 2, at least for the first installment. It’s a 3 part game, so maybe the story will get better as more expansions are released. But I’m not holding my breath.  The thing is, for as long as it takes Blizzard to release games, I should be salivating for more and cursing Blizzard for being so slow. I should be on the edge of my seat.

But I’m not really. In fact, I kinda don’t care. And that, really, is a huge mistake.

Not on trial here though. Come on. It's a metaphor.

In summer the need for genre reading grips me, stacks of fat squat books howling my name like newsprint-scented wolves. I love serious fiction. There are Great Books gathering dust unread on my shelf. But ultimately the call of the genre will get me, wrap me up in a quick-drawn world and plot-drive me where it will. The inevitability makes me wonder how bad a fate that is.

[Want to know what I mean by genre? Luckily I told you here.]

Most of genre is reading for entertainment—it’s choosing Saturday morning cartoons and blow-stuff-up movies instead of Citizen Kane or something poetic and subtitled. And let’s all say it together: “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

But literary empty calories do cost. When I’ve been reading genre, I speed through with barely a thought about whether I can trust the narrator, or whether all is what it seems—unless the author wants me to think something’s fishy, which is generally noted with a line like, “Samara thought something seemed fishy.” I don’t think about symbolism. The emotional weight of what happens to the characters doesn’t hit me—even if the murder victim is the sleuth’s dear ol’ grandma, I know she’s basically a blue-haired, peppermint-scented MacGuffin, nothing more than an excuse to push the plot forward.  I excuse clichés and flat characters and terrible writing with hardly a thought.

And then I find myself writing things like “with hardly a thought”—tied-up stiff phrases that mean next to nothing. It’s contagious. If you’re a writer, genre can cost more than time. Garbage in, garbage out.

If you’re an omnivorous reader, think of the bad reading habits genre forms—skimming, speed-reading, ignoring insignificant details, expecting side players to come from Stock Characters ‘R’ Us and avoid unnecessary movement. That hurts anyone who wants to appreciate what the written word can do for truth and beauty.

But there’s also something to be said for these plot-driven page-turners. Genre opens doors to other worlds, often wider and brighter-lit doors than the narrow crevices of Serious Fiction.

Barbara Neely’s Blanche White series of the 90s is definitely genre—but it’s edgy, political, and some of the best writing on contemporary African-American culture in the business. In 2000, Neely told Ms. magazine, “I thought I was writing a novel that happened to have murder in it… But when the book did so well, I realized the mystery genre was perfect to talk about serious subjects, and it could carry the political fiction I wanted to write.”

Science fiction genre entries usually involve ludicrous sexual politics and at least one scientific impossibility, but many books use the “speculative fiction” angle to tease out questions of morality and philosophy, or toy with the consequences of real developments. The Laws of Robotics are the classic example, but I’ve also read stories from midcentury discussing the backlash from an issue as seemingly modern as in vitro fertilization—before the first human test succeeded, of course. Then there are the books that blend mythology into their plotlines, passing on centuries-old folktales in a new guise.

As for romance, that behemoth of fiction sales, the genres within it break down in their own ways. But some of those bodice-rippers involve real history, accurate portrayals contemporary conditions and plenty of period research. Some are half travel log or Dirty Jobs episode. When the plotline and outcome of the story are basically a given, you’d better have some pretty great window dressing to control 60% of the fiction market. Legal and military thrillers, likewise, can use their platforms to educate as they titillate, competing between books for the most “authentic” issues as well as the most exciting.

And then there are the methods any decent genre writer has mastered—the kind of thing plenty of weightier wannabes could do well to learn. Pacing. Suspense. Tight plotting. Giving just enough of the big reveal to keep us one step behind the game. Those are not simple techniques, and yet read enough genre, and you can manipulate that familiar dance to whatever ends you can imagine. Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose is a masterful exploitation of those cues—I really want to spoil it, but I won’t here. Read it.

There’s no point arguing, really. Genre is and undoubtedly will remain the silent bulk of books read and written, whether it’s classed as pure brain candy or some potentially redeemable sort of light snack. The pack is calling me regardless. But as I reach for my beach reads, I’m going to remind myself about all those mitigating circumstances.

Anybody have a recommendation?

Since then, I’ve come a long way – I’m using the program to lay out a comic book now and I use it to make all my book covers. Recently, Levi Montgomery even asked me to make a cover for one of his books and I used In Design for that, too.

Since I have at least a passing familiarity with the program, I thought I’d share what I know. This isn’t a comprehensive guide, just some quick tips to lessen the feeling of overwhelming awe the program gives you the first time you open it. Because, damn, it’s pretty complicated.

When you first open In Design you will be overwhelmed, especially if you’ve never used Adobe products before. The vast number is options is expected for a professional-caliber program, but luckily Adobe’s products have a great community – you can easily find any information you need with a little Googling. Beyond that, the real trick with learning any new software (or anything else) is to have a goal in mind before you start. When you’ve got a new project you need to lay out (like a book cover, for instance) – that’s the best time to start learning In Design.

Before you start, picture what you want in your mind’s eye or sketch it out on a piece of paper. Surely you will change your mind as you begin pulling it together, but this initial visualization will give you learning goals – if you want a drop shadow under your text, you know you need to learn how to do a drop shadow. If you want colored rectangles, you know you need to learn how to make colored rectangles. Coming up with a list of things you need to know, broken down into the smallest steps, is the best way to begin a daunting project.

Once you’re ready to start, open a new document and set up the size.

If you’ve ever used Microsoft Paint or any other type of simple drawing tool before, at least some of the tools on the left side will be familiar to you – the brush and the rectangle tool and the text tool. That’s enough to get you started. However, be prepared for a bunch of different interface conventions that you’re not familiar with, especially if you routinely use Microsoft’s products. You can do all the same things you can do in other designing programs, but all the tools are renamed. Ladies and Gents, start your Googles.

Apparently you “Place” pictures, not “Insert” Them

If you’re designing a document that’s going to be spread over the web, especially for something as important as your book cover – use a picture you took yourself, or a picture you have rights to (as in, you paid for it or got it from a free photo website that has usage terms you’re comfortable with). For god’s sake, don’t just rip something off Google images. Now, with that in mind, there are times when Google images is useful, say, if you’re designing a concept draft or something like that. When I was putting together the first draft of Levi’s book cover, I ripped a picture straight off Google images for the concept. Once I found out he was happy with the basic idea, I found a created a picture I had actual rights to use. The lesson here: only use what you have rights to use.

Oh, and one more thing – inserting pictures into the document is under the “File” menu and it’s called “Place.” Don’t strain yourself for thirty minutes looked for the “Insert” command, because it’s not there. Adobe and Microsoft need to get together on this one and standardize some business, if you know what I mean. I mean BUSINESS.

Why won’t this damn picture just resize?!?!?!

One of the first major differences you’ll notice is that when you place a picture into the document, it comes with two outlines – a blue “cropping” outline and a brown “resizing” outline. I don’t know what these are really called, I just know how to use them. You can switch between these by clicking on the picture over and over until you have the one you want, but the important thing you want to know is this: if you want to drag and make the picture bigger, you have to make both outlines bigger. Or, you can make just the outside blue one bigger and then right click and “Fit Content to Frame.” But don’t get discouraged that it’s not as easy as resizing something in a program like Publisher or Paint. You’ve moved up now to the (East/West) side. Feel free to have more customization, effort, and the snobbishness to go along with those. You’re so cool.

Fonts and the People who Love Them

People who love fonts are called Fontophiles or Typophiles or some other word I can’t remember right now. And those people are crazy because they hate awesome fonts like comic sans and papyrus. Hell, I’m considering changing all the fonts on this website to be a combination of those two fonts, alternating every other word. It’ll be awesome. But anyway – font are kinda like pictures in that you can’t use some of them unless you pay, which is pretty stupid. But that’s something to be mindful of.

Second, fonts are really important – half of the time you design something, you’ll spend more time messing with the fonts as anything else. Luckily, In Design makes it pretty easy to flip through lots of fonts fast. Just put your text on the page, in a text box, in about the place and size you want it. Next, select the text and place your cursor up in the font box on the top menu. Then hit your up and down arrow keys – bam! Scrolling fonts.

Keep going until you find at least three you are happy with, then switch between those until you pick one you like. I don’t have time to talk about what makes a good font here, but know there are lots of rules or something. Go ask one of those fontophiles or just pick comic sans, which is the bestest font. God even wrote the Ten Commandments in it. In Hebrew. Like a billion years ago and comic sans has been ruling the house ever since.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Layers Panel

Now you have a bunch of pictures, colored rectangles, and text all your document. Stuff is all over the place, stacked weird and on top of each other and it’s pissing you off. Now’s a good time as any, I guess, to tell you about the Layers panel. The Layers panel is one of the main features that differentiate professional tools from amateur tools. By using the layers panel to create multiple layers in a document you can easily place an object or text on top of another object by simply putting it in a higher layer. Once you’re satisfied with the layout of a layer, that layer can also be locked.

A locked layer cannot be altered until it is unlocked, so you don’t risk accidentally screwing up your work. You can also layer objects inside a layer by selecting an object and using Ctrl+[ or Ctrl+], which will move things up and down inside a layer. It’s possible to use these “bring forward” and “send backward” tools instead of individual layers, but the visual advantage of seeing your layers in the layers panel makes your objects much easier to track. You can also name layers so you can see the ordering of your layers with a simple glance.

Man, I just said layers like a million times. I must have a lot of layers. I’m totally, like, deep. Like an onion. I also, make people cry, so that makes me even more like an onion.

Threading isn’t Just for Tailors Anymore

Aside from book covers, you can also use In Design to layout your entire book. It would be possible, I guess, to arrange the text on every single page by itself, but only if you felt like shooting yourself in the face with a rusty railgun. If you do, by all means, go do it, it sounds like a royal blast. But if you don’t, you can also lay out text using the Story editor and Threaded text tool, which will thread your text automatically between text boxes. Google how to do that – I’ll wait.

Links and Swatches are like Variables in Programming

The Swatches and Links panels are two of the the features that make In Design (and most Adobe products) more complicated than it first seems. These features act as menus that allow you to update all the pictures or colors in your document with just a few clicks, so they make a redesign of a document very easy and powerful. If you’ve ever used the Styles in Microsoft Word, these features work the same way.

If you place a picture in your document in several places and then decide to update that picture, updating it through the Links panel will update every use of that picture in your document. Similarly, using a Swatch to color several pieces of text or shapes makes it easy to change all the colors of those things by just changing the color of the selected Swatch. These things make it faster to quickly switch between different iterations and really speed up work once you get used to using them. Plus, Swatch is a really fun word to say. Go ahead. Say it out loud right now. I won’t tell.

HA! You did it! I lied! I’m totally gonna tell everyone!

Color me Medium (That’s, like, Pirate Talk! Arr!)

Whenever you’re designing a document – knowing beforehand if you plan to print the document or only view it on a screen is important, because the way colors are picked for both is different. Documents intended for print use CMYK colors and documents intended solely for onscreen viewing use RGB colors. There are slight differences in how they look on the screen, but it can make a major difference when printing. In a pinch, I usually stick with CMYK colors, since the Adobe algorithm for translating those colors into RGB for onscreen use is pretty good. The reverse, however, isn’t true. The other reason I stick with CMYK? I know it better. As more and more things move onscreen only, really it’s up to you. But you should still know the difference, just in case. If you want to know the science behind the two color schemes, go Google it. I’m not a textbook of uh…book learnin’…or whatever.

Noobin’ it up with Gangsta Flair

By now you have your book cover all laid out, in multiple layers, with cool fonts and pictures and it’s all in the color scheme you wanted and you feel really awesome. Except something’s missing. Your images all have white outlines around them and your junk is just laying there, all flat and boring on the page and you need it to really pop Pop POP, right? Right!

It’s time to add some flair. First, right click on those pictures, go to “Effects” and “Transparency.” Pick the “Multiply” mode. Make sure the “Preview” box is checked and adjust the slider. First, you’ll notice that all those white backgrounds on your pictures will go away. Second, you can fade your pictures in and out to make them like ghosts or something. Scary? No. Well, maybe SCARY AWESOME!

Next, get outta that and click on your text boxes. Don’t select the text. Select the boxes, otherwise you will be really annoyed that what I’m gonna tell you next isn’t working. Anyway, select the box, then go to the top menu. Select “Object” then “Effect” then “Drop Shadow.” Yeah, you know what this is. It’s drop shadows, man. They’re cool. They’re super cool. They’re like icebergs and shit.

Anyway, so mess with your options till you like it and make sure the Preview box is checked so you can see what you’re doing. Alright ? Alright.

So there you go. You’re all set – time to pump that thing out and put it on the web where my grandma can make fun of you for your design skills. Or not. Maybe you’re awesome at this.

Either way, I gotta go, because my English has somehow degraded into a lotta bad language. Don’t worry about me. I’m totally using all of it, like, ironically and junk.

Tune in next time when we’re gonna talk about the basics of Adobe Illustrator so you can learn how to add sweet lens flares to anything. AND EVERYTHING.

Programmers are familiar with algorithms, but for the rest of us: algorithms are the steps that a computer programmer must take solve a programming problem. Since computer programs must be laid out in exact steps so the computer knows what to do, writing algorithms is essential to planning a program.

It’s easiest to design algorithms in a tree structure, breaking down a major problem into smaller problems and those smaller problems into even smaller problems, and so on, down to the very last turtle holding up the program (even though it might be turtles all the way down).

For instance, if I were a programmer designing a Word Processor, I’d start with a big problem – Design a Word Processor. Boom. That’s the whole problem. Next, I’d list the sub problems underneath that problem.

For instance, my Word Processor needs a way to handle text input from the keyboard, it needs have a user interface with a menu system, and it needs a way to save documents. From there I can break down each of those problems into smaller problems. To save documents, my Word Processer needs to access the hard drive and know multiple saving formats. To save in multiple formats my Word Processor needs to know how to save in each format and each format needs access to specific API’s, etc, all the way down. You get the idea.

If done properly, before a programmer sits down to start actually writing anything, she already knows the thousands of smaller problems she needs to solve to build the program into the whole thing. Although it might seem counter-intuitive, solving a thousand smaller problems is much easier than solving one big one, because each of those smaller problems is just a tiny step – the tiniest possible if she’s done her work correctly.

So that’s how computer programmers use algorithms, but this method can be used to solve almost any task. When I talked my students through a research paper I we would always start by listing all the problems we could think of on the board as they yelled them out. These problems included:

How to stay awake to write the paper

How to come up with a research topic

How to research in the library and online

How to make the paper convey the information it needed to convey

How to write a “Works Cited” page

How to use transitions between paragraphs

Etc.

Once we’d listed all the major things they needed to know, we’d consider ways to solve those problems. They needed to know how to write a “Works Cited” page, so we’d spend 20 minutes covering that. They needed to stay up late writing their papers, so we talked about where on campus sold coffee late at night (bear in mind, I tried to stress that not writing it the night before on a caffeine high was better, but we tried to be as realistic as possible about what problems they would encounter), and so on. Once we were done, the students had an algorithm for writing the research paper. All they had to do was solve little problems one by one and the paper would be the output.

For the most part, my students enjoyed the method – they had fun coming up with problems to solve, brainstorming solutions to those problems, and found it easier to tackle overwhelming tasks. But this problem solving method isn’t just for computer programmers and freshman composition students – it’s useful for almost every problem. For instance, since I’m writing some tutorials for Adobe software right now, I want to talk about how I used this method to learn software.

The most important thing that this method needs is a learning goal, or a problem – you can use those things as synonyms for each other. I believe that learning things without a goal in mind is useless – you won’t be personally invested in the information you’re learning and there’s no goal to keep doing it. So let’s start with something the self-publishing community has to do all the time – designing a book cover for your self-published e- book.

First we have think about what a good book cover does. Don’t just parrot back what other people say about this – the most important part of this problem solving method is clearly identifying the sub problems. So what does a good book cover do? What’s the overarching, most important problem your book cover must solve?

Problem:  a book cover entices the reader into buying the book

I thought about it for awhile, and in the most general sense, this is why a book cover exists. If I’m wrong, please drop a comment after this post to call me out. But assuming that enticing a reader into buying the book is the cover’s job, what sub problems does that idea contain?

Sub Problem: The book cover must convey what the “spirit” of the book is about

Sub Problem: The book cover must be easy to read in all sizes, including full size and thumbnail

Sub Problem: The book cover must be visually interesting

Those are our sub problems, as far as I can tell. We’re still operating at a pretty high, vague, level here, but we’re getting closer to problems we know how to tackle. So let’s keep breaking this down.

Problem: The book cover must be easy to read in all sizes, including full size and thumbnail

Sub Problem: Need to use software that makes it easy to test multiple fonts quickly

Sub Problem: Need to select a font that you have legal rights to use

Sub Problem: Need to know how to pick ascetically pleasing fonts

So now we’ve broken down further and are rapidly approaching problems we know how to solve. These problems are all, for the most part, research questions. And we have resources to research these things– google searches and asking people on twitter. To be fair, you can also break these problems down further – into how to research, etc. The trick is to break down the problems into the smallest size you feel comfortable tackling in just a few minutes.

The same thing applies to learning the software that you’re going to need to make your book cover. As long as you have goals, learning the information you need isn’t difficult. If you know you want a drop shadow under your text, you can easily research how to make a drop shadow using the program you’re picked. If you know you want your cover to have a blood-red see-through rectangle over half your cover, you can learn how to do that by researching transparencies and rectangles. Good googling habits can solve these problems – you can search for transparencies or opacities, or even “see though” – there’s a good chance that with some effort you’ll find out what you want to know.

You might not know the language and menu items your program uses at first – most of the time a program’s users will know what they want to do, they just don’t know how to do it. Every program labels things differently – what one program might call “text flow” another might call “story editor” or “stringed text.” Finding out what the designers of the program labeled the feature you want to use is the first step to learning how to use it.

But more than anything, you have to know what you need to know. And that means having a goal in mind before you start and the willingness to break down the problem into sub problems until you have it busted into smaller pieces you can lick.

The concern is certainly justifiable.  I often find myself wondering how the transformation of literature through digital means will effect us, the readers.  I still like having a physical copy of a book, turning the pages, feeling the weight of it – literally and by extension thematically.  But I similarly was adamant about collecting DVDs and CDs 10 years ago.  By now, the digitization of audial and visual media is essentially complete.  The digitization of literature is easily achievable, but the fact that digital bookstores didn’t come into existence until well after digital movie and music stores connotes one of two things: either literary audiences are more stubborn than music and movie lovers about staving the evolution of their art, or the cultural relevance of said art is waning.  My love for literature insists it’s the former; my empirical observations as a reading teacher prove it’s the latter.

The battle against the digitization of literature is not a battle.  It’s not even a losing battle.  It is nothing.  While Alexie is fighting for something that I may deem worth fighting for, it’s akin to being an Italian war veteran from WWII who insists that the war is not yet lost and vows to soldier on.  The truth is that the digital literature debate is only a symptom of the fallout of a war long since lost.  It’s an ancient war, and the two struggling factions have gone by many names.  On the one side is subtlety (theme, implication) and on the other is description (moralizing, dictation).  David Mamet calls one “proteins” and the other “carbohydrates” and suggests he’s on an artistic Atkins diet.

Or consider Sterne’s description (while also considering the tendency of his narrator to be melodramatic): “It is a terrible misfortune for this same book of mine, but more so to the Republic of letters; so that my own is quite swallowed up in he consideration of it, that this self-same vile pruriency for fresh adventures in all things, has got so strongly into our habit and humour, and so wholly intent are we on satisfying the impatience of our concupiscence that way, that nothing but the gross and more carnal parts of a composition will go down: The subtle hints and sly communications of science fly off, like spirits upwards, the heavy moral escapes downwards; and both the one and the other are as much lost to the world, as if they were still left in the bottom of the inkhorn.”

As you can see, subtlety was dying a long, slow death even in the 18th century.  I think that by now it is well and truly buried, its remnants distant memories passed down from literature professors to soon-to-be-unemployed literature majors like an oral tradition – seemingly impossible to maintain.  We seem to have no use for and no patience with subtlety.  Our technology has precluded the need for it.  The pace of our information consumption is at a constant sprint.  The amount of information combined with its ease of access makes it possible for us to convey all of our combined humor and wisdom through 140-character platitudes, web comics, animated GIFs, and wiki entries.  Our constant interactivity makes the (American) human experience so easy to share and the (American) human condition so easy to express that the metaphors and allegory of literature and literary movies and music seem bloated and redundant.  Maybe this communicative shift is good, but for readers and writers, it will be an uncomfortable one.

Case in point: music has undergone a similar transformation.  Shostakovich composed some incredible symphonic pieces, a few of which you’ve probably heard before.  But they’re dense and cumbersome to unpack.  Christopher Stewart and Terius Nash, on the other hand, took a one-measure-long drum loop and added some synths and a melody, and inexplicably turned the lyrics, “Baby, baby, baby, oooooo” into a legitimate cultural point of reference.  You can sit around and judge these composers on their artistic merits, but in the end, a larger contemporary audience identified with the pop song, because an instantly recognizable melody can be derived from it.  You can sing the first “Baby,” and by the time you get to the second one, three other people have joined you.  Once you’ve all finished the “oooooo” together, you can all get back to whatever it was that you were doing.  This sort of instantly consumable art is what our culture supports.  It’s uncomplicated, easily shared, and easy to move on from.  These are three characteristics that literature unflinchingly denies.  But everyone knows that if a Shostakovich suite is being performed in the same town as a Justin Bieber concert, Bieber will win every time.

Alexie may believe the value of the book is in danger of disappearing, but what he doesn’t understand is that it’s the value of what’s inside the book that has disappeared.  It doesn’t matter if the pages are physical printed pages or an pixels backlit on an LED panel.  The fact is that, as writers, we either need to accept the transitive nature of information along with the complacency of our culture, or leave our words in the bottom of our inkhorns since they’re likely to fall on deaf ears regardless.  For those of us who love to write, I guess we’ll have to learn to live with the apathy our carefully selected details will be subject to.  A painful feeling.

If the devil is in the details: hallelujah, what holy times we live in.

Making the comic has been a multi-step process I’ve learned through trial and error (by wasting lots of digital PDF ink – luckily it’s free). I don’t know all the ropes – I only know what works for me – but what works for me might work for you, too. So I thought I’d take a few minutes and explain my process:

The Script – Microsoft Word

Tune Comic Script page 20

The first thing I did, before anything else, was write the comic book. In my case, I adapted a script I’d written for a video game, since it was largely visual anyway, but I imagine that starting from scratch would be similar.

I wrote in a Word document, with each page in Word devoted to a page in the comic book. At the top of each page was a line telling me the page number and how many panels the page needed. Here is the actual top line from page 20 of my script:

20 Page – 6 Panels – 4 same sizes, 1 long bottom wide panel, one small shot at the bottom

I did it this way to make it easy to lay out later – because of my layout process, knowing how many panels I had on each page (before diving into the content) was easiest for me – it made the layout faster.

Next, I described each panel one by one, listing the description of picture first, and following that with the narrator dialogue or character dialogue for that panel. If I were working with an artist, I would have to be more exact about my panel descriptions, but since I planned to draw the whole thing myself, I was able to be pretty lax with the descriptions. I knew what I wanted for each panel in my head. Still, when I started this I knew that it was going to be a several month process, so I would need to describe what each panel should contain in case my memory faded as I worked on the comic.

The Layout – Adobe In Design

Tune Layout Page 19 and 20

Once the whole comic was written, I took the script and used Adobe In Design for the layout. I picked In Design because I wanted to use Adobe’s tools to draw the comic and Photoshop and illustrator blend seamlessly with In Design. Since In Design is the ideal layout tool, it was the only real choice, though I could have used Illustrator, I suppose.

I created two layers in the program, one for graphics and one for text. After that was done, I laid out all the pages using colored rectangles for the panels. I planned to place the drawings in later. Inside each panel I also included the panel descriptions in text so I could visualize it better.

After the panels were laid out, I inserted all the text into the text layer. I built rounded rectangles with a gradient for the narrator and voice-over text and I used a group of pen tool, text, and stroked ovals for the speech balloons. As a rule I didn’t lay out the speech balloons until after the drawings were inserted (because placement can be different once the drawings are there), but I wanted to text inside the comic right away so I could read it through like a comic book and get a sense of the thing. I’m big on each step giving me a rough picture of the final product.

Once that was all done, it gave me a better idea of how the comic would be completely laid out and read from beginning to end. This meant it was easier to see the problems, and it caused a round of revisions.

Now, most “real” comics are drawn and laid out at the same time by the artist, on a single page, on paper. But I’m not really an artist and I’ve never laid out a comic before. I wanted the ability to rearrange pages and panels on the fly, as well as easily resize my panels. Since I originally planned to do all my drawing in Illustrator (which outputs vector images), my panels would be infinitely resizable. Doing my pages one drawing at a time means I have to visualize the page beforehand in my head to make sure the drawings fit together and overlap correctly (unless I was going for that old panel/white space/ panel look), but in the end it made the drawing much, much easier.

Drawing – Adobe Illustrator

Drawing Tune Panel

Once the comic was all laid out, it was time to start the drawing. To do this, I picked Adobe Illustrator because I wanted vector incase I needed to resize panels. Later I started rasterizing in Photoshop so it didn’t matter, but I’m used to Illustrator now so I still use it for most of the drawing and coloring.

I start with three layers, a black and white outline top later, a panel layer, and a color layer. Usually, by the end of the drawing, the color is actually more like five to ten layers, but I always start with those three. The panel layer doesn’t make it into the final drawing, but it gives me a good idea of the boundaries of my panel before I start drawing. I usually just copy and paste the panel from In Design.

I use a Wacom Intuos 4 (the smallest one – I’m not loaded) to do the actual drawing, using a small stroke pressure sensitive brush. You can flip the drawing pen to automatically switch to the eraser tool, which helps tons. I erase a lot.

Since I’ve considered printing this thing some day, I’m using CMYK colors, including rich black (63, 52, 30, 100) for my lines. Even on the screen, Adobe’s algorithm makes standard black (0, 0, 0, 100) come out as a very dark gray, which I don’t like. Rich black looks better.

One more note about drawing: I’ve had a few friends ask me why I don’t draw on paper and scan in the drawings, instead of drawing on the screen. Well, first, drawing with the tablet is way better than drawing on paper once you get used to it. The lines are fluid, you can zoom in close for detail, and erasing is much easier. Plus, I tend to draw thick lines and erase a lot, which destroys all but the thickest, most expensive drawing paper. I don’t have cool physical artwork to keep, but the process is much more streamlined. The only thing I wish I could do was rotate the art board like I can rotate a piece of paper, but that’s not a huge deal.

Coloring A Comic Book

Once the drawing is done, I lock the layer and use a combination of the pen tool, multiple layers, and large brushes to color the drawing. Occasionally I use clipping masks, but half the time they take longer to set up than it would take to just color something manually or use the pen. Very rarely I use the Live Paint Group tool, but since my lines tend to not go all the way to the edges, it’s often more hassle than it’s worth to keep fixing them so the paintbucket works right. Also, to use the Live Paint Tool I either have to color in my black and white layer (big no no) or make a copy of my black and white layer and color that. It’s usually not worth it.

Drawing and coloring take a decent amount of time, depending on the drawing, but learning the shortcuts and workflow for the thing has sped up my drawing process quite a bit, from about four hours per panel to two hours per panel. I’m sure as I get better at drawing it will get faster.

Shading – Adobe Photoshop

Shading the Panel

After drawing and coloring in Illustrator, it’s time to move to Photoshop for the final stage: shading. It’s possible to shade in Illustrator, but it requires much more time, since Illustrator lacks the crucial Dodge and Burn tools. Maybe CS5 has them – I’ll have to check that out. But I’m using CS4 and that means moving to Photoshop to shade.

In Photoshop I dodge and burn and undo and dodge and burn some more. I use the tablet for this, too – it’s pretty easy to get the right area and the iPod-like wheel on the side can be set to change brush size and opacity on the fly with a click and a spin – worlds easier than using the hot keys, in-program menus, or a mouse. Shading takes about a half an hour or less, depending on the drawing.

More Layout – Adobe In Design

Tune Layout

Once the drawing is done, I go back to In Design and to place the drawing in the correct panel. I resize it, tweak it so it looks good, and move the panel a little to make sure it’s right. Next, I finalize the text that goes in or around that panel. If I haven’t added the speech balloons to the panel yet, I do that.

Then it on, on, on to the next one, ad infinitum until the job is done. Right now I’m done with fifteen pages of the 32 page comic book. After that, I still have four more comics to go to finish the whole story.

But hey, it’s damn fun.

Does anyone have any questions about something I didn’t cover? This was a broad overview, but I’ll be happy to go into more detail if you want it. Anyway, thanks for reading! I hope you’re as excited as I am to check out Tune once it’s finished!

So, what does this study mean for books?

Part of the reason that we crave small bits of information is because we have to cram information into the tiny moments between other moments. That necessitates small bits for small moments.

I’m not proud of it, but when I went to my mom’s college graduation last weekend, a 1.5 hour gulag of name listing, bad music, and canned motivational speeches, I found myself playing on my smartphone almost the whole time, pausing only to clap as my mother walked across the stage to get her diploma. The rest of the time I was tweeting, surfing facebook, reading RSS feeds, and bidding on ebay.

After it was all over I thought to myself, “holy hell, I don’t know how I got through these things before I could carry the internet with me.” I used to bring a book, I think. But I have another confession to make – I haven’t read a whole novel in over five months. Part of the reason is because I’m pounding away all my spare hours drawing art for a comic book. I’ve read about 800 comic books in the last six months to learn as much as I can about the medium. Comics have been the majority of my reading lately.

But beyond that, I find that the few times I’ve tried to read a book lately, I get sidetracked. I’m more aware of my body, too – all of a sudden I’m looking for any distraction – I adjust the light, get up to drink a glass of water, and leave the couch to see what the cat is doing. I find myself overcome with a nervous energy stemming from not checking my phone every few minutes for the most up-to-date information. Usually there’s nothing new of interest waiting for me, so I return, in shame, to my book.

Even if it’s just a personal anecdote, things like this that tell me books, at least in their current form, will probably change quite a bit in the coming years. I was also surprised to learn that people don’t seem to be in favor of serialized fiction, either (at least in the small inquiries performed by the guy who founded Smashwords). If small bits are what people desire, you’d think that serialized fiction would be the answer. Strange, that.

If the way our brains work is indeed changing, then what’s to become of long-form fiction and books? Reading has always been something that culture is willing to fight for – it’s a worthwhile activity, there’s no doubt. And I’m sure that there will always be people who will fight for reading. But will those numbers dwindle until long-form fiction has the following of a less mainstream medium, say, like poetry?

If I was a Venn diagram, the red side would be my fear that reading would disappear. The blue side would be my excitement for the new mediums that are popping up in place of it. The purple section in the middle, of course, is the mix of both.

photo credit - enterthepassage.com

Cronin has been teaching writing and producing fine, intimate novelistic portraits of American life for twenty-five years. Sometime around 2006, he began work on The Passage, the first of a “triptych” of postapocalyptic novels that span a thousand-year period of the end of civilization as we know it. With vampires. The sample sold big in New York and the movie rights went (to Ridley Scott) soon after. The book sold 40,000 copies on its first day. The quick headline goes something like “E.M. Forster’s Gig Pays Minimum; Novelist Quits For Stephen King Territory.”

But seen from the perspective of the E.M. Forster crowd, this isn’t necessarily a victory. Is it a straight-up sellout, from literary circles to the beach-read big bucks? And if it is, do we have a problem with that? On the first question, I can’t say for sure until I read the whole thing, or at least a couple inches. But for the sake of argument, let’s contemplate whether selling out, in this instance, would be a problem.

Cronin’s Mary and O’Neil is as near to a perfect novel as I’ve read anywhere. Go read it, now. There is no question that the man can write. But his career path has led through the Infinite Workshop Swamp, the Valley of the Critically Well-Received, Day-Job Doldrums and the Mountains of the Little Mouths to Feed. Any working or aspiring writer who begrudges this man success in the superlative doesn’t know which side his bread’s buttered on. We want talent to be rewarded. We want tenacity and practice and continual new experiments to be rewarded.

Let’s say maybe one of those experiments is a genre novel. Maybe it’s a large-scale genre novel. Who says that’s going to sell? Well, this one did. It must have been good by the standards of genre—in fact, since it was initially shopped under a pseudonym, that’s the only thing that can have sold this. So Cronin can write literary, and he can write genre, QED. The question becomes, does he then have to choose literary in order to hold his head up among his ex-classmates at Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop? I don’t always choose to read literary fiction. I like genre, for the quick thrills, for the plot twists, for the random specialist knowledge thrown in to make it seem realistic. It’s not high art, it’s entertainment. Few people would argue that we need to be in poetic thrall to the masters of the form 365 days a year.

Of course, a novel is a work of thousands of hours. And while, like poverty, there’s no shame in genre, there’s no great honor either. Our culture melds popularity with quality, but they’re not the same thing, and Cronin knows that. If he’s written a novel more focused on plot than internal truth—or whichever measure you choose to describe what it is that literature is trying to get at—he’s chosen to do it at the expense of whatever else he might have written.

Here’s where you maybe throw up your hands and call him a sellout, someone not living up to his artistic potential, someone going for what the people want instead of the story the pen moves to tell. I have a couple words for you, then.

First, bullshit. As this blog has well documented, being an artist in America requires an outside income and some free time. The income limits the free time, the free time limits the income. In one fell swoop—okay, a four-year swoop–Cronin has gotten rid of a lot of the limitations on his free time. And he’s done it using his abilities, not in spite of them. If you can come up with a better way to get some time to focus on your work, for the love of red wine and Motrin, share it now!

Second, also bullshit. The stories we write are the stories we choose to write. If you have something inside you bursting to come out, you’re probably better off seeing a doctor than a literary agent. What Cronin’s done is to choose the story with the best chance, the story that can make it out and build a bridge back to what other ideas he can build and shape and present. At least with this offering, we’re getting a well-written bestseller bringing genre up out of the literary muck. If people are reading vampire doorstops, let them read this vampire doorstop. It has deep characters, big thoughts and beautiful language. Nobody glitters.

The fact is, none of us live up to our potential. The best we can do is to keep trying, keep making the tradeoffs that make sense. Some of us, like Cronin, might eventually make it. Most won’t. Make what opportunities you can, throw it against the wall and maybe if you’re lucky someone will make fun of you for it when you’re rich and famous. From here on the ground floor, selling out is just one more dream.

Now, it is a fact that not all stories are character-centric, focusing on an individual or group of individuals who form the core of the story. The works of Annie Proulx, for instance, often have weakly defined characters. This is not an inherent weakness, however, since the “character” of her stories focuses more on the environment the characters live in rather than who they are and what they’re doing.

Annie Proulx, 1999

Writers who take this approach often consider individual people to be largely inconsequential to the greater scheme of things, and they are generally powerless to affect great change. This is a philosophical choice a writer must make, and I cannot argue with Ms. Proulx’s success, but I will say that it is a style that I personally dislike. The best stories, the ones people come back to and cherish the most, I feel, are the ones that possess a character that draws us in, that allows us to connect to the story, rather than to observe a tableau where largely faceless characters struggle against inexorable fate. These are the timeless stories, such as with Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, Sethe and Denver in Beloved, and Abel in House Made of Dawn. These stories allow the reader to delve in to the minds and lives of people as they learn and develop, allowing the reader to connect directly to the story.

It is also no mistake that most works of popular fiction also focus so strongly on characterization. It’s human nature, voyeurism, the ability to look in on other people’s lives and observe what they do. Why do you think biography, memoir, and reality TV have become so popular in recent years?

Harper Lee, 1960

They’ve been around in one form or another for a long time, but the trend has become stronger more recently, and writerswho wish to be published in the here and now would do well to know what people want to read. They want characters to bond with. Lords know that even a weak story, plagued with iffy writing (Twilight) can survive on the backs of characters that allow readers to connect with them. This is especially true of serial stories, where the same characters appear again and again.

For instance, Terry Prattchet has constructed dozens of characters that regularly appear off and on in his Discworld novels, such as the incompetent wizard Rincewind, and the cunning Commander Samuel Vimes. Jim Butcher has built a career on the back of his powerful but notoriously unlucky wizard, Harry Dresden, in The Dresden Files. These are characters that compel readers to return again and again, to see what trouble they have gotten themselves into now.

Jim Butcher, 2000

All the aforementioned characters share something very special in common. They are fairly average people. Some may be possessed of extraordinary abilities, but at their core they are people. Flawed, at times vulnerable, and their concerns and worries are not so dissimilar from our own. Often times they are down on their luck, or put in untenable situations, or have significant hurdles to overcome. Everybody loves an underdog. This trait is not universal, but it is common enough. Even the most competent or powerful characters, such as the legendary Sherlock Holmes or superheroes such as Superman, Batman, Spiderman, etc, possess the same basic human traits and must overcome significant odds in order to succeed. The struggle to persevere is central to every single character and story ever written. Without struggle there is no story to begin with. And without a connecting character or characters it is often difficult to become connected with the struggles in the story. People like stories about other people – especially extraordinary people.

When it comes to my own writing I usually begin with a single character, a primary protagonist. I get to know this character usually by constructing a character philosophy, answering certain questions that help me get into the character’s head. How did he/she grow up? What interests him/her? If confronted with X situation, what will he/she do? Then, sometimes, I compose fictional journal entries for the character, giving the character a written voice. This allows me to delve into the head of the character, especially if the story is told from a third person perspective, where it is more difficult to get into individual characters minds without breaking the barrier between narrator and character. In first-person perspective stories it is easier to get into the character’s head, but the philosophical questionnaire still guides me to think from the character’s perspective, allowing me to distance myself stylistically from the character while still engaging with him or her in writing. This may seem a little overly-complex, but think of it in terms of being an actor, getting into character. Once I know who this character is, I can then build a story around him/her, or them in the case of an ensemble group.

The hope is that in the end the characters feel very natural, and in the case of groups of characters, that their interactions among each other are consistent with their personal philosophies and manners of thought. In the end, though, it saves on editing time for me. When I first began I simply wrote, letting the chips fall as they may. Some writers can get away with this, but I suppose I’m a bit of a scatter-brain, so these character outlines allow me to maintain style, voice, and consistency throughout the first draft, limiting how often I have to go back and alter previous sections where I find a character “slipping,” or simply fading into the background (unless the character in question is meant to do so). When building a character in outline I first envisage basic physical appearance, age (not always specific, but generally in the age range I intend the story to focus on, such as Late teen/Early twenties), and then answer certain questions in-character. Most of my outlines read a lot like a personality test, determining what actions they would take if, say, they were confronted by a physical threat to themselves or a friend, and then a stranger. The outlines are never long, but serve me as a touchstone as I craft the story.

While it is not universally true, characters will often be of a similar age to their intended audience. For those that don’t, their mentality, actions, and the situations they find themselves in will be relatable to a certain age-range. Take Rincewind of Terry Prattchet’s Discworld novels. He is older, never determined specifically but he is likely in his mid-late forties, but the situations he finds himself in as the universe’s punching bag, running through a story filled with socio-political pop-culture references makes him a character more appealing to a 20+ year old age bracket, whereas Scout of To Kill a Mockingbird is a child, but the story is certainly not childish. It may be seen from the point of view of a child, but her story is one that has touched people from their teens and into their twilight years, since her story is a universal one. Other characters have a definite intended audience, the largely teen-based fans of Twilight for example, but they still share qualities that appeal to women in their twenties, thirties, or forties. Truth to tell I can only guess why in this case, but such is the nature of voyeurism and the desire to live vicariously through another. If you want to attract the widest possible audience, this is an important lesson to learn for commercial publishing: the characters you create must reflect a target audience, but still be accessible to those outside that audience. This is even more important if the characters you create will appear again and again, sufficient to attract a following.

One final element to character design that I feel is important is to view the world in which the characters operate as a character in and of itself. This is especially true in the genres I operate in most – Science Fiction and Fantasy. The world has a way of working all its own, and defining how it works is vital to building a story that remains consistent throughout. In The Dresden Files for instance, Jim Butcher builds his world-character from a combination of various myths, legends, and histories. In the world of Harry Dresden, Earth has languished under the yoke of the Age of Reason, but in the modern times magic, the supernatural, and the many creatures of folklore and legend are beginning to return in force and to become more noticeable. Most people still ignore the strange and unusual, since it defies the logic we as a species have nurtured for the past few centuries, with the rise of science. The world operates by unique laws, governing how magic is used (a la the White Council and its rules regarding the use of magic) to how practitioners of magic interact with the modern world (such as shorting out complex machines, frying computers by simply being near them, etc). In Terry Prattchet’s Discworld, the world itself is actually the most important character, the one major constant in all the many stories that occur on it. A disc, resting on the backs of four elephants that in turn stand on the back of a giant turtle, floating through the vastness of space. The unique play of magic, light, and forces on the Disc determine how the characters operate, and what stories occur.

Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, 2004

What a particular character is like is of course important, but understanding how they live in their world, especially when that world differs so much from the real one, is even more important, since it will guide how they operate and how the story unfolds. Once that is done the story itself is comparatively easy, especially since all stories ultimately boil down to two things: Stranger enters the scene and stuff happens, or the character goes abroad and stuff happens. Frankly, when it comes down to it, that is the operating system of all stories ever told, with the only defining factors being what specifically is happening, and what the characters do about it. Building the world and building the characters, really getting inside their heads, and then working on the story or stories has for me been the most effective method of writing with consistency and focus. It is not a method that works for everyone, and it might seem overly mechanical, but I recommend giving it a try, experimenting with it, and seeing how it works for you. And hey, once you have a whole universe built-up, the possibilities for new characters and stories is endless.

Cheers, everyone, and good luck in all your future writing endeavors.

That’s all well and good – artists in other mediums have needed tertiary skills like this for a while – and it’s probably time for writers to catch up. That’s cool. I get it.

I also get that all writers aren’t Emily Dickinson or Thomas Pynchon. Some writers thrive on self-promotion. Indeed, self-promotion might BE the logical extension of the urge to write in the first place, if the urge to write stems from self-expression (I’m not convinced that it does, but that’s another conversation).

But what about the writers who tend away from self-promotion? There’s a dilemma there, especially for self-publishers who don’t have any corporate help.

I’ve been considering all this because of the #amwriting hashtag that’s recently appeared in the self-publishing community on twitter. Including the hashtag in a tweet is the first step to being included in the corresponding website, amwriters.wordpress.com, a writer biography portal and storefront.

It’s silly to be conflicted about little things like a hashtag, but damn it, I’m nothing if not a dude who over-analyzes things.

So, while I respect what amwriters.wordpress.com is doing for the community by linking writers together, I can’t help but feel the same way about the #amwriting hashtag as I do about that hipster I see in every coffee shop ever. You know the one I’m talking about. He’s always sitting in the corner, typing away on a Macbook, wearing emo glassses, a plaid shirt, and pants so tight I can see his sack, all while trying his best to look like he’s concentrating on the NEXT BIG THING even though he’s really just blogging to rant about silly things that don’t matter (VERY AWARE OF THE IRONY, THANK YOU).

“But, luke,” you say, “Aren’t you the guy who always writes his name in lowercase like a pretentious tool and shamelessly promotes your work even while you’re still writing it?”

“Why yes,” I’d say (in our theoretical conversation. Also, you should back up a little – I can tell you had garlic for lunch), “I am indeed such a person. But, lo, I sayeth unto you – there is a key distinction between promotion of the work itself and promotion of the activity that produced it, and therein, as they say, lies the rub.”

What the hell am I talking about, you ask? I’m talking about people who have to declare that they #amwriting. It feels to me like something they are doing to “be seen” rather than just doing because they like it, just like that hipster guy who has to write in public.

Writing is inherently a solitary activity and the real thing that matters is the product, not the activity itself. The actual act of writing is stupidly boring to the outside observer – that’s the reason they’ve never made writing into a reality show ala Project Runway. Writing is some person sitting at a desk for hours typing and playing “let’s pretend.” There’s no reason to broadcast that activity to the world – when you put out a book, a story, or anything else written, people know how you did it. You sat there and you wrote for awhile.

Now, I get that some people might include the #amwriting hash tag not to be seen, but to feel community solidarity and encourage themselves that they are doing something meaningful. But it seems to me that if they need those things – a community and public encouragement (for performing the activity. Encouragement for producing a quality work is something totally different) – then they should question why they are doing it in the first place. The meaningful thing is the work that’s produced.

Unless I completely misunderstand the intent (which is possible, I suppose), including the #amwriting hashtag is no different from informing people you’re doing other things. Perhaps I should start including #amdefecating or #amstokingmyego hashtags in my tweets.

Because it’s the same damn thing.

Or, it’s even worse – it’s attempting to buy into an idealized conception of an artist, the idea that artists are these mystical unicorns that should be encouraged for doing what they do. But that’s dumb and not anything like the actual experience of writing.

Robert Heinlein said it best when he said, “Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”