At the Ridgecrest conference, the culture gap was again hammered home by a couple of classes I attended. In a class about writing “curriculum” for small group studies, all the examples shown were videos with a little bit of writing in a book; the intent being to watch the video and discuss it, using a few simple questions from the book. The videos were the typical run-from-scene-to-scene, or shot to shot, with almost no time spent on any one shot. No time to focus on what is being said, to absorb the points made. Just run, run, run. One video-based study we spent a little time viewing was The Trouble With Paris. We watched the first five minutes, which was totally unmemorable to me. I think the on-camera narrator said something about our culture being a problem, but the study title was not explained. After watching, our class instructor said Paris referred not to Paris, France, but to Paris Hilton, as a symbol of what’s wrong with our culture. Funny thing was, the video itself seemed to me a symbol of what I don’t like with the trend in the culture. I immediately decided this was Gen-X stuff, and I can’t write it.

Another class was on fiction writing. The instructor, talking about the importance of conflict in the modern novels, said, “Knock your hero down with angst, then shovel angst all over him.” Later, I talked with this same instructor in an informal setting, and mentioned I liked best the sagas, such as written by James Michener and Herman Wouk. He said, “You and three other people.” They won’t sell. A novel over 100,000 words won’t sell. We live in a TV culture world, and books have to compete with American Idol, Survivor (another show I’ve never watched), Lost, etc. The population at large has fewer readers than we used to, as a percentage of population. Words aren’t enough to captivate the mind. We must now have fast-paced visuals as well, and more of that than of words. Don’t let description crowd out dialogue. Don’t let dialogue crowd out conflict and angst.

I suppose every generation decries the culture of the next, and I’m no different. All this stuff saddens me. It seems like the culture has been coarsened by television and the Internet. More and more I find myself further and further away from the mainstream in America. I once wrote a poem that included this couplet:

for I, I must with sorrow state
was born two centuries too late.

More than ever I think that is true. Maybe not really 200 years, but at least fifty.

I leave most writers conferences, after some initial time of wondering “why am I here” with a feeling of “I can do this.” Then, a week later I realize what “this” is. It means writing things I don’t particularly like to read just to get published. It’s a form of prostitution. I guess I’ll have to think about it some more.

[Sorry for my absence of late. As I said in my last post, work was particularly busy, but I have just passed that time. Plenty to do at home, but maybe I can be more regular in posting. But hey, this week I have “captured” three writing ideas, put them on paper, and put them in the notebook.]

On CNBC, Wednesday nights at 8:00 PM Central Time is a show American Greed. I don’t know how long it’s been running. I’ve seen three or four episode, each one about someone in the corporate/financial world who got ahead by cheating/milking their company, but who were eventually was taken down. Tonight was the CEO of Tyco, Kovlowski.

Last week was the founder/chairman of CyberNet Engineering Group, a Grand Rapids, MI company. I don’t remember his name, though I might look it up and edit it in. He had earlier in his career embezzled money from his own companies or otherwise cheated investors out of much money. He dodged prison, plea-bargained down, moved to a new city and set up his evil shop again. He did this three times, ending up in Grand Rapids. There, he co-founded CEG, a value-added reseller of computing systems. In the 1990s the business was perfectly positioned to make money from the burgeoning computer market. What did he do? He set up a small legitimate business, and a huge fake business, complete with fake invoices for fake inventory for fake customers. The deception was an incredible web of deceit. Moreover, the deception must have taken just as much work as a legitimate business would. The work of doing evil was not less than the work of doing right, and might have been more. So why did he do it?

For now, evil pays more than doing right–most of the time. I believe doing right–i.e. doing good does pay well compared to doing evil, especially if you take a wall-to-wall view of costs and benefits. However, those who are evil have trouble seeing it. It appears the internal evil blinds them to the good, the right. They see the apparent huge payoff for doing evil, and they go there.

Somewhere there is a lesson in this for us.