Some time ago I was working at a client site which used one of those popular time wasters for communicating. You know, one of those slack/snap/whatever chat things where millenials while away hours “discussing work” getting absolutely nothing done. Out of the blue one of my coworkers posted what at first looked like an indecipherable block of text. A few clicks later it turned out to be Lorem Ipsum.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
No, you aren’t expected to translate the hunk of scrambled Latin, many have already done that and traced it back to its origins, you can find that out by clicking the link and reading the back story. What you are expected to do is think about all of the times you were given “good writing advice.” You know:
- Start with action in the first sentence.
- Get to a sex scene in the first paragraph.
- You have to hook the reader in the first 37 words.
The list goes on. According to such learned people every novel written today has to be a big budget action flick with lots of sex. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind _watching_ a big budget action flick even if it doesn’t have a lot of sex, but, it certainly isn’t the type of writing I like to read. As you age and, hopefully, become more intelligent, you will find it is not the type of writing you wish to read as well.
Now, for the lore we as writers have forgotten.
When you wrote a book, or any work which needed to be published on physical paper it had to be typeset. Lorem Ipsum was the tool used to do the job. There was a time when every writer had to use the archaic manuscript format having no idea or control as to how their work would appear. That time was followed by a period where writers were expected to learn massively over complex and, speaking as a software developer, grotesque page layout software. Packages here ranged from commercial products like PageMaker to current OpenSource catastrophes like Calligra. Yes, there was and still is a gauntlet of needless frustration in between.
Today, with the dumbing down of things to work with E-books, writers are back to having little control as to how things turn out. If you make the horrible career choice of getting enslaved to an actual publisher you will have zip-point-spit. You won’t even get to use a worthwhile word processor because your work will have to fit a template so it can run through their automated processes for editing, proofing, and content translation. Most publishers today do even less than the Indie author when it comes to page layout and typesetting.
Most of you will not know what I mean when you read the word “typesetting.” Please click this link and look at pages 1-2 through 1-4.
Never mind if you know or care nothing about the geek subject matter. Pay attention to the running page header switching sides, the flow of text around images, the different fonts and spacing used to set information apart and the full justification of paragraphs. While many in the industry will burn me at the stake for saying this, in simple terms, all of that is typesetting. It used to be magic which happened far removed from the writer. Now, without using overly complex software with insanely stupid user interfaces, we can all do what you see there using LibreOffice.
Interior designers for books are becoming even less employable by the day. The simple, well written software has become so pervasive most of us “could” do a pretty complex layout if we wished. That said, most of the books you find in a book store have a cookie cutter interior. Why? The input file needed to flawlessly translate into the crippled world of E-books.
Some of you reading this will be of “a certain age.” When typesetters and typesetters worked magic. Even if you had no money to purchase books, attending public school let you open biology and other texts which had amazing use of color, font and images. You were too busy doing and complaining about the homework at the time, but think back because you will never see such work on Kindle. Thanks to Amazon and Kindle, you will probably never see it again.
Ah, now comes the final piece of lore writers have forgotten. Where did that “good writing advice” come from? In short, it came from publishers wanting every one of their authors to churn out a movie deal with every title. Why spend a dime marketing a book when you can get Hollywood to spend millions marketing the movie? This is once again fallout from the desire to streamline content flow. In comes a templatized story done with a crummy word processor, churn-churn-churn go the servers then out the other end poops a book, ebook, on-line content and a movie.
The vast majority of advice and instruction you receive by attending the vast majority of “creative writing” and other writing courses/degree programs isn’t trying to turn you into a better writer. It is trying to turn you into a better revenue generating slave for a publisher. You may or may not have to improve your writing to do that. What you do have to do to become such a good little slave is lose your spine by submitting to the template and the crummy word processor. You also have to lose the vast majority of your creativity. No more visualizing how the page should look or what fonts to use. No more doodling or drawing images which come to you while writing because _that_ is a different department. No more choosing chapter titles or even chapter order.
What do you get to do after graduation? You get to write stuff which has action in the first sentence, sex in the first paragraph and desperately tries to “hook the reader” in the first 37 words.
