Writing Notes #4

Notes on Podcasts and Pornstars

Link to the story

Podcasts and Pornstars

Process comments

Original draft

A couple of years ago I wrote a draft story about a world in which every guy works on an optimisation podcast. Most of the podcasts synthesised information on optimisation from other optimisation podcasts, all the way down… That world was the beginning point for writing this story—not the character or plot, just the world.

Cultural observation

Growing up, my dad said this joke a few times. ‘How do you make a million dollars? You write a book called How to Make a Million Dollars and sell a million copies.’ I think about that quite often, including when I wrote this piece. To me, it gets at an essential and widespread fraudulence in our culture, one evident in podcasting.

Optimisation and wellness gurus lecture you on how to optimise your life. But all they do with their excessive health and optimisation is make more optimisation and health content. They are not doers, exactly. They speak for a living, they yap. They should really advise on how to yap yap yap for a living, rather than how ice baths allow them to be their best selves. (Ice baths allow me to yap about ice baths at greater length.)

Yet like all social trends there were the original few who were… original. So I’m not saying no one should talk about optimisation or health. I’m more getting at the cultural aspect, the proliferating nature of copycats. The one-hundredth guy to do it is surely aware of the first ninety-nine, yet he does it anyway. Why? I guess I doubt his sincerity and motives. Does he really want to tell me about ice baths, or does he want to resemble the other guys (in wealth, status) who already tell me about ice baths?

The same goes for all things. So many standup comedians, when I see their reels, resemble other standup comedians. Their crowd work is identical. The way they cut the footage, identical. Their dress, tone, topics, identical. They know the other guys exists, so why are they doing it? I think impersonation is actually the point. They don’t care about the art, the skill… they care about the image, the identity. And I hate that. And when I catch that impulse in myself, I want to drown it in a bucket.

Themes

Out of these thoughts emerged the themes of ambition and decay. If the true motivation of a sufficient percentage of the population is mimesis (to copy those around them in action and desire), and the things they copy are bullshit (high-paying corporate jobs, hack artistry, Instagram fame), then are we not doomed to a slow, entropic decline, like lemmings marching off a cliff?

And in a world that only values attention and fame, like Ligma’s world, those deprived that opportunity are also destined for immediate personal ruin.

Throughout drafting I had a line about the asymmetry of loneliness. It was something like ‘someone deprived of what they need will only settle for everything.’ It’s a common cliche: the child deprived a parent’s love becomes the great athlete, musician… There’s some hole they are trying to fill. Well, the same would still apply in a world of utter bullshit. In podcast world, for example, those lonely souls would not be happy until the entire world idolises them. And that is the story of Ligma Mary-Weatherby and why, in the end, he chose fame over family.

Prose comments

Momentum

With this piece my challenge was to balance exposition with action. I wanted to flesh out Podcast World without it becoming either an essay or a play-by-play retelling of Ligma’s demise.

To balance the two (exposition and action), a tactic I used was to depart the action/plot at a point where hopefully the reader wanted to continue. Only then would I commit to a run of exposition. I viewed the switching between like momentum. I tried to generate enough momentum through action to climb the next hill of exposition.

For example, in the below snippet of paragraph 4 I stayed with the action until I had (hopefully) established enough intrigue into the significant of the woman’s expression. Only then did I switch to three paragraphs about the world and Ligma’s ambitions.

Then, at the other end—from exposition to action—I tried to tie the exposition itself to concrete action. The below snippet is the end of paragraph seven of the second section. After four paragraphs of exposition about the decaying infrastructure and culture, I tied the thread back to the act of setting up the tripod.

Tense and imperative sentences

The below paragraph shifts from past to present tense. I highlighted the line in green where I made the switch. I thought this was nifty. The word ‘began’ in the previous sentence was key. The paragraph basically works like: they did, they did, they BEGAN doing, and now they do, they do, they do… It was a multi-sentence transition. I also like the strong imperative sentence at the end of the paragraph.

This matters to me because being able to switch tenses and perspectives, along with sentence types, syntax variety, sentence length and complexity, allows for more options to create your own shit, to control pace, etc.

Mirroring

I like the beginning and end to be mirrored in some way. The final paragraph below does a good job—I think—of mirroring the beginning and contextualising the topics discussed in the story. It wraps it all up nicely. It also gives new context to the first paragraph (a false beginning of sorts), revealing that it was Ligma kissing the mic.

Haecceity or ‘thisness’

I saw a gent on YouTube, a well-known video social media platform, discuss haecceity in fiction. It basically boiled down to using really specific detail to make something more… itself. In this story, I tried to do that, to include details of the world that could not be confused with another world. Usefulness aside, this was an enjoyable task.

Conclusion

I think this story is a step in the right direction. (A step in the write direction or just ‘write direction’ will soon be the name of a podcast and the thought makes me want to karate chop furniture.)

Anyway, thanks for reading. If you like my stories or my post-story comments, please consider subscribing. If you are subscribed, please share with a friend. I am still trying to reach 200 subscribers. Only then—world dominator that I will be—can I rest.

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Short stories, fiction. Original absurd, satire and humour writing. Influences include Pynchon, DeLillo, Vonnegut, Adams, and Norm Macdonald (all lovers of SEO).