Jason Fry's Dorkery
I write stuff. I do stuff. Some of it's even cool.
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On Ike Davis, Matt Harvey, and a spectacular run of pitching by Dwight Gooden.
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You know what’s worse than mob rule? Digital mob rule. Proving that blind people can type, ESPN voters selecting the best uniforms picked the Pirates over the Giants, the Cubs over the Dodgers and the Orioles over the Tigers.
This is obviously and manifestly insane. I’d have taken the Dodgers over the Yankees after an elite eight of Yanks, Tigers, Red Sox and White Sox in the AL and Dodgers, Cardinals, Cubs and Giants in the NL. But then I’m fully sighted, have a vague sense of aesthetics and understand the difference between liking a franchise and liking its uniform.
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The Mets try a platoon between “Maybe” and “Why?”
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Rediscovered this marvelous NYT portrait of Jack Vance, one of my favorite writers. Carlo Rotella captures a hard-to-capture writer perfectly by describing a key component of Vance’s style as “feral, angling politesse, the marriage of high-flown language to low motives”.
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For the first time in history, we understand how isolation can ravage the body and brain. Now, what should we do about it?
Heartbreaking and fascinating.
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Over the weekend I finished editing my first draft of the second Jupiter Pirates book, tentatively titled The Treasure of the Isis. It’s now in the hands of my wife, a careful reader and ace editor, and will then go to my kid, who’s both of those things plus a one-boy focus group.
I learned something new in struggling with some scenes in JP2, and getting through that struggle let me put a name to the issue. (I’m sure other writers have their own names for the problem, but since this was new to me I’ll stick with my own terminology.)
I did a pretty detailed outline for JP2, as I now do for everything. The pivotal scenes in the book came pretty quickly once I got to them — which was no surprise, since I’d had them in my head since before the outline existed, and had been sub- or semi-consciously working through them for months and months.
Where I got bogged down was in some of the smaller scenes — the quieter moments leading us from Point A to Point B (or from T to U). Several times, the writing slowed to a crawl and I alternated staring at the monitor with even less-productive fits of self-loathing. Sometimes I advanced by writing a couple of hundred or just a couple of dozen words a day until I escaped. Other times I’d tear the whole scene down and start over. Neither approached worked particularly well.
Until, finally, I realized what was wrong: Those scenes were missing an engine.
I knew why the scenes were there: They had to advance the plot, or introduce a character or concept. But that’s not the same as the engine.
The engine, as I came to think of it, was why the scene mattered — why it belonged there beyond reasons of simple exposition. The reader had to leave the scene not just further along in the plot but also more invested in the story. He or she had to think differently about one or more characters, or have a new perspective on one of the book’s themes, or be in possession of something that was both real and resisted easy definition.
Once I figured this out, I stopped scrapping and clawing for forward progress or resorting to sullen teardowns. When I got bogged down in a scene, I stopped and asked myself what the engine was.
Most of the time there was an answer, which was good news: It meant my instincts had been right when I included that particular bit of action in the outline. But my execution needed some work — I’d been buffing a hood with nothing underneath it, and it was no surprise that the car wouldn’t move.
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On Shaun Marcum, Jordany Valdespin, Mike Baxter and Angel Hernandez. Served with a side of sigh.
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An interesting essay by my friend and mentor Roy Peter Clark of Poynter on how transparency in storytelling (particularly journalism) can be an enemy of narrative. Roy’s solution: translucence. This is an intriguing read for reporters and editors alike to think about.
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Notes from an odd night spend wandering around a ballpark.
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So look at that byline. “Contributing Op-Ed columnist.”
NOLA.com has 350 of these.
Sweet Jesus.
When people like me wonder why Advance cut back print in New Orleans despite lacking even minimal digital competence, this is what we mean.
It would be hilarious if it weren’t a tragedy. This paper is dear to my heart, and what’s being done to it by its owners is just so sad.
