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Watching Heroes the other night, I realized I was suffering from plot whiplash.

Heroes is just one more nail in the coffin of the implied compact between storytellers and their audience. Maybe it all began back with Twin Peaks. It has certainly flowered in Lost. But some time, somewhere, smart script writers figured out how to manipulate the plot system — kind of like the financiers who figured out how to manipulate derivatives to make obscene, and essentially unearned,  fortunes, right before they crashed the entire financial system.

Dramatic and surprising turns in plots have always reliably created an audience reaction. A character suddenly does or reveals something drastically at odds with everything we’ve known about him or her, or a hugely unexpected, unlikely or puzzling event occurs, and the reader/viewer is reliably brought to the edge of his/her seat. The excitement isn’t created by the unexpected twist alone, but because there is a built-in trust that the twist means something, that subsequent events will demonstrate how the anomaly fits convincingly into the larger reality — that in the end, it will all make sense. The bigger the anomaly, the reader/viewer reasonably supposes, the more spectacular and satisfying the revelation that will eventually explain everything.

These junk bond dealers of the literary world are shamelessly abusing that trust. They rack up the profits from bizarre and outrageous  turns in character and plot without any intention of ever repaying the emotional investment. In their stories, absolutely anything can happen, because they know they will never have to explain it all. They’ll just create another distraction downstream, and then another.

All that weird stuff happening on the island, analyzed and parsed by fans ad nausea? Well, the real revelation is, it doesn’t mean a damn thing. The writers are just making it up as they go along.

Anyone who regularly watched Battlestar Galactica knows how expertly the show’s brain trust kept viewers on the edge of their seat. Each twist was a kind of commitment, an IOU for a satisfying explanation. But as the twists accumulated, the indebtedness grew ever larger, and I began to suspect that I was being taken. This whole show was a pyramid scheme. These people had no idea where any of this was going. They had no plan to repay their investors.

And when the margin was called, when the show finally couldn’t defer explanations to another episode or another season, it all crashed down, the proverbial house of cards.  The final episodes were hideous, desperate little things. Far-fetched didn’t cover it. The gaps in logic could only be measured in light years. The show’s fans could only have felt like fools holding fists full of worthless paper.

Trust me on this.

Story Surgeons has been up for about six months now. It’s been a great experience for me so far. I hope my clients have felt the same way. If you’ve used my editing services, I invite you to leave a comment here.

Just had a weird experience with a book editor on a book project I was helping a writer with. To keep it anonymous, I’ll have to relate the story in parable form. Imagine it was a wonderful book about a cat who wanted to have an adventure in the world, then encountered a big, mean, scary dog and, panicked, ran up a tree. Of course, once the cat got in the high branches, he was too scared to come down. The rest of the book is about how the community rallied to find a way to get the cat out of the tree.

The editor receives the manuscript then two months later sends a note, which says: “Looks good, but I’m thinking you should change the cat character into a horse.”

True fable.

An every-day expression offers a fabulous glimpse into how a mindless decision to shorten something turned it from brilliant to drivel. The expression is, “happy as a clam.” There is nothing whatsoever happy about a clam, and yet the phrase has insinuated itself into the language. It’s a mystery, and like all good mysteries, if you solve it, you have a wonderful revelation. The original expression was “happy as a clam at high tide,” which is wonderfully wry and clever. It invites the reader to become a party to the joke, deducing that a clam must indeed be thrilled at high tide. Well, as thrilled as a creature who lives in muck and filters dirty water for a living can be. By comparison, anyway. Because at low tide, as everyone knows, oysters are exposed to humans, who delight in plucking them from the muck, frying them up and slurping them down. Some editor somewhere in the pre-history of editing thought he could save a few words by cutting the “at high tide” from the statement. That editor was stupid as a clam.

When I was editing magazines, everyone always wanted to know, Who is your target demographic? And I always thought: people with lively minds. It seemed to me that any general interest publication’s most crucial audience was people who cared for, were curious about and interested in the world around them. What became very clear over 25 years was that this group cut across any traditional idea of a discrete segment: It could as easily be a janitor as a hedge fund manager, a 13-year-old or an octogenarian, a recent immigrant or a D.A.R. blue blood. More than IQ level, membership only really required an open mind and an outward focus. These people were receptive to new information, even if it ran counter to their expectations. They thought critically, but were willing to be persuaded by facts and reason. They felt things, and delighted in the mysteries of the world. They are people who are truly alive, as opposed to merely living.

And yet, because they don’t fit into an easy slot, they are invisible to many in the media, who in any case wouldn’t know what to do with them. Just as they are difficult to categorize, so is the content which appeals to them. The one thing for certain is: you can’t do it with a formula. What you need to do is present materially which is original, honest, and authentically interesting, created for its own sake, rather than as a tool to manipulate an audience.

So you can see why the janitor-hedge fund manager demographic hasn’t gotten as much attention as it deserves. It’s just so damn hard to exploit.

People ask me, Tom, what’s your proudest accomplishment? Turn’s out,
that’s an easy question to answer. It’s not any journalism prizes, book
titles, or even paternity

It’s having an indie rock song named after me. A DC group called the Gena Rowlands Band, led by a guy named Bob Massey who was once a news aide at the Washington Post, wrote a song that seems to be about someone waking up in someone else’s body — which was either inspired by or made Bob think of Old Souls, my book on cases of small children who appear to recall previous lives. It’s called Tom Shroder’s Blues, a tribute no doubt to the immortal 1976 Tom Waits ballad, Tom Traubert’s Blues (which may be my favorite Waits tune of all, and his best lyrics).*

Actually, the Gena Rowlands Band isn’t bad at all. You can hear some of their work on YouTube, though unfortunately not Tom Shroder’s Blues, (only 99 cents at the i-Tunes Store!) Not that I’m shilling for it. I don’t get a cut. Though maybe I should.

*Tom Traubert’s Blues

Wasted and wounded, it ain’t what the moon did
Got what I paid for now
See ya tomorrow, hey Frank can I borrow
A couple of bucks from you?
To go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me

I’m an innocent victim of a blinded alley
And tired of all these soldiers here
No one speaks English and everything’s broken
And my Stacys are soaking wet
To go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me

Now the dogs are barking and the taxi cab’s parking
A lot they can do for me
I begged you to stab me, you tore my shirt open
And I’m down on my knees tonight
Old Bushmill’s I staggered, you buried the dagger
Your silhouette window light
To go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me

Now I lost my Saint Christopher now that I’ve kissed her
And the one-armed bandit knows
And the maverick Chinaman and the cold-blooded signs
And the girls down by the strip-tease shows
Go, waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me

No, I don’t want your sympathy
The fugitives say that the streets aren’t for dreaming now
Manslaughter dragnets and the ghosts that sell memories
They want a piece of the action anyhow
Go, waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me

And you can ask any sailor and the keys from the jailor
And the old men in wheelchairs know
That Matilda’s the defendant, she killed about a hundred
And she follows wherever you may go
Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me

And it’s a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal
No prima donna, the perfume is on
An old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey
And goodnight to the street sweepers
The night watchman flame keepers and goodnight to Matilda too

Afraid of letting Hank Stuever run away with the day, Joel Achenbach dug deep and came up with a classic post on Achenblog, vintage Achenbach — smart, funny, self-referential to a self-deprecating degree, and actually making a good point that needs to be out there, ie: Tiger wasn’t really fooling anybody about being Mr. Family Man. As Joel notes:

The argument has been made a million times in the past two months that Tiger held himself up as a great guy and squeaky-clean family man, and earned all that endorsement money, and has now been exposed as a fraud and deserves whatever humiliation and agony he has endured. Weirdly, despite spending a fair amount of time staring at the TV, I somehow missed all the Tiger Woods Christmas Specials where we joined the Woods family as they sipped eggnog and discussed what’s going in the stockings. I barely knew the guy had kids. The one thing for sure is that he hasn’t faked beating the crap out of Phil Mickelson and everyone else for the last 13 years.

Just being clever can only get you so far. Real humor, like any other kind of writing, requires keen observation, and something interesting and novel to say.

Hank Stuever is just now shifting into high gear in his new role as Washington Post TV critic. He totally kicked ass with his review of the new Spartacus. What other TV writer would think to begin as follows?

I am Spartacus’s trainer: We worked his core group for three hours a day, then did lower body strengthening for another two hours, then an hour of cardio, and then a Pontius Pilates cool-down. Every day. He ate nothing but egg whites and grilled chicken breasts. And now, just look at him.

I am Spartacus’s stylist: In the first episode of “Spartacus: Blood and Sand” (Friday night on Starz), he’s still a Thracian villager joining the Romans in war, and he’s a bit Visigothy, so we went with a wig of shoulder-length tresses with only the softest bit of curl. At first it was too “Spinal Tap,” and then it just came to me: Viggo in “Lord of the Rings”! Right? Later, in the second episode, thank God the story picks up the pace and Spartacus is captured and sent to that gladiator camp. Because then we come to that scene where they whack his hair off. But, hello? With a knife? Honey, we labored on that haircut. I didn’t want it to look too-too Caesar.

A Pontius Pilates cool-down? A bit Visigothy?

All his schtick is the perfect way to bring home the silliness inherent in these over-the-top costume dramas that really and truly are more about abs than Abyssinia. And nobody can be quite as convincing as Stuever is in loving something even as he cuts it to confetti, a la Edward Scissorhands.

For those who have a vested interest in decently compensated professional journalism, a sentimental fondness for it, or a core belief that what it contributes to democracy is essential, a recent OJR post by Robert Niles is important, if severely depressing, reading. I’d recommend  the whole piece, but the killer paragraph comes at the end, after he establishes that there is no real hope for replacing income lost to newsrooms forever:

“It’s time to … find a publishing and production model that allows a news publication to live within its current income means. That’s where the real change will happen in news publishing – the expensive, labor-intensive, manual newsroom model will give way to new, distributed, communal reporting and editing models, ones that are now being forged by journalist entrepreneurs. I wish that news businesses, foundations and journalism schools spending resources on searching for new funding models would abandon those futile efforts, and instead redirect that funding toward cultivating and studying innovation in news gathering and production. And in doing that, I wish that industry would quit looking to print editors and broadcast station managers for leadership and instead look toward online publishers and editors who are making nascent efforts work.

“Unfortunately, too many print and broadcast veterans don’t want to change their production model. So they instead devote their time and energy toward getting someone to fund another doomed quest to look for their revenue model Holy Grail.”

I think he’s nailed an inconvenient truth here. But he’s also glossing over what to me is the most troubling implication. By “distributed, communal reporting and editing models” he means some variation on “citizen journalists” and Wikipedia-type open source editing; newsrooms consisting of thousands of individuals with their laptops more or less volunteering their time, plus  whatever automated data dumps, gee-gaws and hoo-has can be innovated.

Anyone who has ever tried to produce high-quality, groundbreaking, earth-moving journalism — the kind that often requires individuals to ignore all other aspects of their lives, including family, physical health and sanity — understands just how unlikely it is that communal journalism will produce the same. It’s the equivalent of firing Shakespeare and hoping a million monkeys working together will produce Hamlet. Some journalism, and I would argue the most important kind, requires trained and experienced individuals to dig deep, break through every wall and wade through every swamp to get to the heart of  the matter — not to mention the talent and energy to make sense, and in some cases literature out of it.

Hard to volunteer for all that, without at least the solace of a decent pay day at the end of the slog.

But Niles’ point is that there’s no purpose served whining about it. And he’s dead right. An historic,even tectonic, shift is at work here. It used to be publishers had to own a printing press, a warehouse full of paper and a fleet of trucks. Now all you need is a $500 laptop. There’s no going back to the old economics that aggregated the wealth in a handful of large media companies, which in turn divvied up a portion of that to a group of carefully selected journalists.

Now those journos are increasingly on their own.

But I remain convinced that even as the new realities diminish the best kind of work the old order produced, the need and desire for that work will not diminish. At the same time, the tectonic shift that destroyed the old order makes it dramatically easier to build a new one.

To an ever increasing extent, an individual with the journalistic goods will become his/her own publisher, publicist and distributer. The cost of  finding and connecting with an audience based on interest, rather than geography, will approach zero. The economic scale will suddenly favor small operators, and make targeted, hightly motivated audiences available.

To adapt an Army rectuiting slogan, we can all become A Media Conglomerate of One.

The pathways to get there still have to be hacked out of the jungle, of course. But I recommend we all sharpen our machetes.

Can you guess what well-known personage made the following statement?

“I don’t like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!”

The personality who said this would have been a natural writer. In a handful of words, he (ok, I’m giving you a hint, it was a man) not only manages to create an unforgettable, totally original  image that instantly conveys a complex activity — but he does so in a way that makes you burst out laughing. (The humor comes mainly because the two frames of reference, preaching and bee-keeping, are so discordant, yet when you think of the image, so perfectly apt.  The joke is that maybe they aren’t so dissimilar after all.)   It describes perfectly and lampoons brilliantly in the same phrase.

Now that I’ve written that last sentence, I realize I  could only be referring to one of two people: Mark Twain, and the man who actually uttered this remark.

One more hint: