Dennis Cass Wants You To Be More Awesome

Obviously you need some technical skills to pull this off, but it’s the level of obsessiveness (and the amount of spirit and heart) that makes it all sing.

Thanks to comments to this recent post, the Awesome blog back channel chatter (i.e. my Gmail account) and my own life, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to adapt the content and themes of a novel into an essay or an op-ed.

What follows is less a how-to than the beginnings of a mental framework for approaching this opportunity:

1. Fiction and nonfiction aren’t that different

Being a novelist doesn’t automatically qualify you to be an essayist, but they aren’t as far apart as they might seem. A good argument builds and progresses like a good story does. They both have beginnings, middles and ends. In each case you want tension, surprise, changes in emotional value, and so forth.

You may not consider yourself an essayist, but if you can shift your beliefs, then you may find that you’re more of a nonfiction writer than you think.

2. Overt is good

One of the nice things about essays is that they’re about what they’re about, and you can say what they’re about without being penalized.

In your novel, two characters are keeping secrets, but the reader doesn’t even know they’re keeping secrets until page 100. In an essay, you get to announce it right up at the top:

Here Is My Essay About Secrets and What They Mean Today.

3. The background becomes the foreground

In your middle-grade reader, two ten-year old boys have a complicated friendship. In your research, you discover (warning: I’m making this up) that in Ancient Greece children were assigned a friend in order to learn the value of friendship.

The insights you glean from your research into Ancient Greek arranged friendships is invaluable, but in your book it only realistically works as backstory. In this case, an essay allows you to put otherwise unusable material to work.

4. Finding the peg

Writing for newspapers and magazines is all about timing. The story that is irrelevant today is essential tomorrow. Succeeding at writing tie-in articles requires patience, diligence and opportunism.

You want to have your essay relatively ready to go. Then, when that story breaks about keeping secrets or strange friendships, you can start contacting people. You say, “Hey, you know how Obama keeps talking about the importance of friendship? Well, I have a personal essay about friendship that includes some little know facts about arranged friendship in Ancient Greece. Interested?”

5. Tie-ins can happen before, during or after

I waited until my book was out before I started pitching related essays. In retrospect, that was a mistake. Writing tie-ins to your book (whether it’s fiction or non-) is a great way to test out material, build audience, and mark territory. As I mentioned in post about author Jason Bradbury and his model robot, there is no need to wait.

6. Remember this is all optional

Is writing an essay based on your novel a good idea? Of course!

Is it also yet another opportunity to beat your head against the publishing brick wall? I’m afraid it is.

Don’t kill yourself trying to make this work. Wear this advice lightly, but be on the look out for opportunity.

Paul Lukas's Tournament of Meat

Thanks to Eric for sending this gem from sportswriter Paul Lukas, who has been kind enough to put together a NCAA-style tournament bracket . . . of meat.

It’s a great piece, but in light of Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir’s recent book THE ENLIGHTENED BRACKETOLOGIST it also brings up an interesting issue in terms of competitive works.

Personally, I expected a nod to Reiter and Sandomir’s book in the end note, even though I know it’s not customary for the author of an article to pimp someone else’s work. [ed. note: See below for an IMPORTANT UPDATE on this paragraph.]

Then again, maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the mock bracket (like the mockumentary or fake news) isn’t ownable. It’s an obscure form, but it’s still a form. As such, it belongs to everyone and what matters is what you do with it.

Judging from the comments so far, no one seems to care. They are simply enjoying arguing about meat and making jokes about vegetarianism.

Perhaps that is the ultimate lesson. Only a portion of your audience cares about the provenance of your work. The question then becomes whether or not that part of your audience is

1. Large

2. Influential

3. Important to your personally for whatever reason.

Final thought: I’m not in any way calling Lukas out. I’m a huge fan of his work and find him thoughtful, funny and original. Lukas’s Uniwatch blog is a model for spinning obsession into gold. Study it well.

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

If you click on the comments you’ll see a note from Paul Lukas, who contacted me to inform me that he was unfamiliar with THE ENLIGHTENED BRACKETOLOGIST.

Upon reviewing my post, I realized that I had unfairly assumed that Lukas was aware of the book and that, despite my disclaimer, I was sounding accusatory.

The original paragraph read that I “would have appreciated” a mention of the TEB. I have since changed that to “expected.” I also removed an aside about how it wouldn’t have killed Lukas or ESPN to mention the book. That wasn’t fair.

In short, apologies to Lukas. As I mentioned in an e-mail to him, if I were doing this piece for a magazine I would have called him to find out what he did or didn’t know. Just because this is the Internet doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have similar standards.

Dana Stevens of Slate nicely sums up what Joaquin Phoenix’s “public decompensation” (decomposition?) is all about:

There are multiple theories as to what Phoenix’s public decompensation is all about. (He announced in October that he was giving up acting for good to pursue a career as a musician and has since had one disastrous live show in which he rapped inaudibly and fell off the stage.) He could be spiraling down into alcohol or drug addiction—the actor has done a stint in rehab in the past. He could be mentally ill. Or the whole thing could be an elaborate hoax, staged with the help of his friend and brother-in-law Casey Affleck, who’s planning to direct a documentary that’s ostensibly about Phoenix’s transition from acting to rapping but will (according to theory No. 3) turn out to be the chronicle of an Andy Kaufman-style piece of performance art.

I hope it’s theory No. 3 because I do love me a good art project. There is something about that level of commitment to an idea. (This is also the theme of one of my favorite movies in recent years The Prestige.)

I also love the uneasiness that it creates in the audience. If he’s joking, then why am I not really laughing? If he’s not joking, then why do I find this all so funny?

Two years ago, I envisioned this website an art project. I decided against it because my mandate is to help people. (If I’m the fake headmaster of some kind of real/not-real Institute for Awesome Studies, then it’s about me not you.) Still, even thinking about DCWYTMBA in that way expanded my horizons.

Here is an exercise for you:

Ask yourself what your current project would look like if you erased the boundaries between art and artist and audience and turned it all into one crazy, big-ass THING. How might you go about the work differently? What kind of character or personae might you develop? How would that personae free you up? How would that personae limit you?

And then the most important question of all:

How far would you have to take your idea in order to transcend the ordinary?

I’d give this kid a shot based on this video alone:

The medium is video, but he thinks like a writer.

A reader writes:

At the risk of another over my head, costume-filled, insidery, confusing to poor dumbheads like me riddle–
What ever happened to that whole “there’s a better way to get published than querying” thing???

This question is a holdover from the old site, and I’m happy to see it resurface. I will start working this idea in the coming weeks. First, in order to bring our new readers up to the proverbial speed, here is the “costume-filled” parable I wrote about getting in:

Three days before Halloween you learn there will be a surprise Big Event at a small, intimate theater in your town. Tickets are free, provided you’re wearing a costume. Of course, they can’t let in everyone, so your Erotic Space Vampire is going to have to make the grade. There’s also a rumor that the people with the absolutely best costumes will be rewarded with special all-access passes. You want.

You have very little time to get your costume together, but you do your best to make it look as tight, as professional (and as fun) as possible. Thanks to some Big Event blogs, you’ve heard some rumors about what the bouncers like and don’t like. You do your best to adjust your costume accordingly, but your Erotic Space Vampire look is still uniquely you. Fingers crossed.

The big night arrives. When you arrive at the theater, you are first struck by the sheer number of people who are lined up outside. Wow. You knew this Big Event was going to be popular, but you had no idea.

First reaction: mild relief. There are some pretty bad costumes. People with sheets over their heads with holes cut in them. People with store-bought sh*t. There are even some people who aren’t in costume at all, who are obviously just wishing. Suckers.

Second reaction: mild panic. There are also some pretty amazing costumes. Elaborate costumes that you would never have dreamed would work. Basic, traditional costumes (including some classic, widow’s-peaked vampires) that are so beautifully executed that they almost seem real.

Third reaction: total panic. What’s up with all the other Erotic Space Vampires? You thought you’d be the only person with that point of view, but there are in fact several. Some are sexier than you. Others really amp up the space element. One person even brought a friend, whom they pretend to feast on. You wish you’d thought of that.

No matter. What’s done is done and all you can do is wait. Now you have time to really look around. You notice that in addition to the front door, there are several other ways to get into the Big Event.

There is a service entrance where the tech crew and support staff are busy getting things ready.

There are journalists and media types covering the Big Event. They seem to come and go as they please.

There is also a side entrance manned by a bouncer with a clipboard. Some of the people entering through the side are in costume, but others are not. You have no idea who they are, but they seem to walk right in.

Pretty soon it’s your turn to be judged. You walk up to the bouncer at the main entrance. He briefly looks you over (in your mind too briefly considering how hard you worked on your costume and how much you want to go inside) and says . . . .

***

Here’s the question:

If you knew the Big Event was going to happen in a year, would you still put your time, effort and emotional energy into your costume, or would you explore alternative methods of gaining access?

What if the show were five years away? How about ten?