By John Ramsey Miller

Statisticians are working overtime to furnish us with statistics. The world runs on numbers and those numbers types are never going to slow down. As long as things happen, they will continue to crunch and spout. Long after we tire of listening to the results of their crunchings, they will be sitting in cubicles around the world comforted by their calculations. Even if they have to re-crunch old numbers and regurgitate them. And the numbers are always changing even as society changes.

In my world, Yahoo is the largest publisher of insipid crunchings. The top ten anything you want to know about will appear there on the home page along with the most frightening news available, the cutest animals, or just plain boring celebrity news they can accumulate. Want to know the top ten worst-smelling cities on earth? The top ten friendliest hell holes, The cutest kitten’s top ten favorite planets? How many dogs just like Obama’s people will be sell to people who want to be just like the President, but without the ears. The top ten best smelling decaying objects? It’s all there because somebody thinks we want to read the lists in order to improve our lives. They’ll never give you the names of the stat-crunchers until they want to list the top-ten-most-beaten-up statisticians in the United States. I’ve had way too much of this endless top tenning. It’s time for about 90% of statisticians to be in the unemployment lines.

Here’s another one that has stuck in my mind for eight point three percent of my adult life. A few years ago some scientists somewhere announced that fully ten percent of the matter in the Universe was unaccounted for. I still can’t wrap my mind around that one. How many scientists did it take to go out and weigh the mass of the Universe, to count the atoms and decide that a full ten percent was simply gone? Maybe it’s in the pants pockets of God, like so much dryer lint. Or maybe he made Paris Hilton’s ego with it. I don’t know a lot about science, but I have a God-given bullshit meter that goes off several times a day. I guess the scientists who made that statement will eventually sober up, or they will discover which Black Holes have sucked up the missing matter. I didn’t take it and I don’t really care who did.

I guess everybody has a calling in life, but list compilers are called from the ranks of accountants and actuaries who want more excitement, some way to introduce creativity, into their dull, number-generating careers.

Okay, I’m being unfair to statisticians. Some people need the comfort of numbers to make decisions. Me, I just run blindly from one situation to another, flying by the seat of my pants. I’m an emotional creature and I don’t generally make sound decisions based in reality, or on numbers. My wife will attest to this seventy percent of the time.

My business partner and I once hired a full-time statistician for our ad agency. I can’t remember why. It was doomed from the start. Perhaps it is like the time we got loaded and bought a quarter dozen pythons for our reception area. Seemed like a good idea at the time. We often did things like that. I guess we hired him because we were trying to kill the party reputation created by the festive snakes our clients were greeted by. That boy flat bubbled over and lit up like white phosphorous when he had new numbers to present to us or to a client. Clients love numbers that show growth. They hate numbers that point to stagnation or a reversal in sales. A good statistician can make the numbers sing his tune. Instead of ninety-nine-point nine percent of the readers of the newspaper didn’t act on our ad. Our guy explained that one-point-one percent of the people who read the newspaper acted on our ad, so it was amazingly effective. Stats were made to be spun like a drunk square-dance girl. Okay spinning stats could explain why one day coffee drinking is good for you, and the next it will shorten your life.

The truth is that I have no pressing use for that missing matter, so I vote we stop funding scientists to look for it and ask them to do something more constructive with the 90% of matter we have. One thing’s for certain, if it was my matter, I’d never be able to find anything close to ninety percent of it at any given time. Right now, the top ten things I can’t find [to save my life] would include my cell phone, phone book, car keys, and my electric razor.

By John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com

My home city, Washington, DC, is blessed with a vast community of writers. Every three or four months, my dear friend Dan Moldea pulls a bunch of us together for an Authors’ Dinner at the Old Europe Restaurant in Georgetown. The one requirement to be a “member” of the otherwise non-exclusive group is to be a published author.

As you might expect for Washington, non-fiction outnumbers fiction ten-to-one, and the politics of the room lean decidedly to the left. My own lean a bit to the right, as do those of a few other members, and this is a group that loves to talk politics. And you know what? It remains civil throughout.

Most writers I know are intellectually honest; they understand that two people can easily view a set of facts and draw entirely different conclusions. It’s refreshing. People accept that a well-reasoned position is at least, well, reasonable. Discussions get heated from time to time, but the heat is 99% passion, not anger. I’m certain that few minds are changed, but at least people listen. How rare is that in this day and age?

I’ve been an avid debater of issues for as long as I can remember, and here’s what a lifetime of political discussions has taught me: Most “liberals” and “conservatives” are actually “moderates” whose political outlooks hover somewhere between 47 and 53 on my imagined 100-point political spectrum. Why, then, are the airwaves filled with take-no-prisoners extremists on every significant issue?

Come to think of it, when did it become so offensive to discuss politics among friends? Why is it so offensive? Could it be that too many of our fellow citizens don’t truly understand what they think or why they think it; that they are merely parroting what they hear from Keith Olbermann or Rush Limbaugh or Oprah Winfrey and know that they can’t possibly defend their positions? I know a lady who routinely asks people at nearby restaurant tables to stop talking politics among themselves because the discussions make her feel “uncomfortable.” In her mind, it’s rude to discuss issues within earshot, but it’s not rude to inject herself into an eavesdropped conversation. How’s that for an interesting social compass?

Hey, look, I’m not suggesting that anyone be rude to guests at a dinner party by putting them in an uncomfortable position, but it seems to me that silence on issues comes with a heavy price. When reasonable people don’t afford themselves the opportunity to vet their thoughts, the issues themselves get hijacked by extremists, and the debate becomes polarized by gas bags who make their living by filtering and shaping the “truth” into something that in fact bears little likeness to it. Comity and compromise become the first casualties.

For the sake of votes or ratings (the common denominator in either case being money), the gas bags assign labels wholesale to people on the “other side” of issues. People stop listening to ideas yet start parsing phrases to perpetuate presumptions. In legislatures throughout the country, I worry that what used to be the loyal opposition has simply become the enemy. Majority control is becoming a license to bully.

It’s scary, it’s bipartisan, and we’re allowing it to happen in part, I believe, because we’re afraid of speaking our minds.

A friend of mine, whose politics rest around 48 on my imagined political spectrum while mine hover around 52, put it best when he told me, “John, we vote for different candidates because the crazies in your party scare me more than my crazies in mine. But only by a little.”

What do you think? How do we bring civil discourse back into fashion? Is it even a good idea? Can a democracy (or even a representative republic) continue to exist without it?

John Ramsey Miller

My wife’s bank was purchased by this other huge bank with offices in San Francisco and she was in that fine city all week, while I was at home with the chickens and dogs. Monday she went to Alcatraz Island and took the tour. She called me to say that she couldn’t believe how bleak the place was and how small the cells were. I knew that already since I’ve been in prisons before. And I reminded her that she had been there too, albeit only in the visitors area.

When I was photographing country music artists for album covers and magazine features I went to “The Walls” in Nashville with Tammy Wynette and Mel Tillis to photograph their concert for CBS Records. I got pictures of Tammy walking around in a huge room filled with a few hundred inmates armed only with a microphone, and she was a safe as she would have been sitting at home, where she actually died some years later. One of the inmates was also taking pictures and I talked with him about photography. The walls was a gothic prison where Burt Reynolds filmed the Longest Yard. Tony M., the inmate with a camera, was there doing 54 years for armed robbery.

A week later, I was approached by the warden at the prison (who later lost his job and, if memory serves, went to prison himself for borrowing money from inmates) who said Tony had asked him if I could help him set up a photographic darkroom for use by the inmates who put out the prison newspaper and I agreed. I looked at the space, which was across the main yard where the inmates spent their days. I designed a well-equipped darkroom, which Tony was to run. Tony was a very nice guy for an armed robber. In fact he was a nice guy period. The inmates liked him because he furnished them with pictures for their loved ones. In exchange they traded him things for the pictures, which is how prisons work.

For a period of a few weeks I would present myself at the gate and the guards would open the gates and let me in and I would wander to the designated darkroom space. I had nothing to fear because the inmates knew I was helping Tony, and I walked around unaccompanied by guards as safe as a newborn puppy. I went everywhere with Tony and being under his protection and I spent a lot of time talking with inmates. I taught Tony how to use the equipment I selected, and he was a natural. After Tony was moved to a newly built facility two years later I would take my wife and two-year-old son to visit him on Sundays and my son would sit in his lap.

Later I went to Leavenworth, Kansas to photograph Johnny Paycheck in concert in that federal facility, and it turned out that the warden was a nephew of Bill Monroe, the Bluegrass Icon. Bill Monroe was a casual friend of mine, and I had done a couple of his album covers. I was invited to go coon hunting with him. The warden gave me the celebrity tour, and I visited the rooms where the Birdman of Alcatraz had done his bird thing. The bird man was a cold-blooded sexual predator and murderer who had a soft spot for birds. The warden told me that the birdman killed several inmates after he’d raped them and that was the reason he was never released on parole. Hard to imagine Burt Lancaster filming a scene like that for the movie. I met well-known mobsters, a Brinks truck robber, killers of people with Federal implications, and other famous criminals. It was the kind of tour normal people didn’t get. That day I was with the warden, who walked around without an escort. I was amazed.

In 1981 I was living in New Orleans, and one night at a dinner for a mutual friend (Tony Dunbar, a lawyer who worked for Amnesty International). I was seated beside Sister Helen Prejean who lived in the projects and ran a ministry from her apartment. She worked with death row inmates. This was before she wrote DEAD MAN WALKING and I found her brilliant and totally delightful. She asked me how I felt about the death penalty and I said I was all for it. Long story short she said if I knew the inmates she worked with I couldn’t hold that belief. Two years later I found myself on Death Row setting up a formal portrait studio in the main hallway and loaded film in a cell on death row at Angola. During those two years I had spent untold hours negotiating with attorneys, inmates, and prison officials in order to do portraits of the men under sentence of death. In 1981 executions had been halted for a few years, and the big burn was in the works as cases wound through the courts. I met and photographed Elmo Sonier (Son-yay) one of the two men turned into one for the movie. The other was Robert Lee Willie, I didn’t photograph him. Elmo was one of an impromptu two-man team who raped a teen-age girl and murdered her and her boyfriend. The pictures ended up running in John Grisham’s The Oxford American in the largest selling issue in its history. The pictures, formal large-format portraits of smiling men dressed in street clothes ran years after the men in the pictures were executed. The handcuffs and leg shackles didn’t show in the portraits. If you saw MONSTER BALL, you saw Death Row and depictions of the guards. None of the guards were pro death penalty (at least they told me they were against executions) because they spend their days with the men they would have to help kill.

I have never written about prisons in my books, even though I am familiar with them and got to know more than a few inmates. After that series, I lost interest in photography, and began writing. When those men were executed it depressed me. I was depressed because I felt deep compassion and empathy for the victims, and I felt a sense of wasted lives of the inmates. I look at the pictures of smiling death row inmates and I try to imagine how their victims saw them in their last moments alive. It was impossible to imagine these men as cold-blooded murderers, but they were, and had done horrific things I won’t go into here. They did the crime and they each paid the price society exacted. As long as people harm others, prisons will be necessary. A lot of prisoners shouldn’t be there, but a lot should and have to be. The death penalty has the purpose of making certain that people who are executed never kill again. But the truth is that killers don’t think they’ll ever be caught, much less convicted and executed. It isn’t a deterrent. And it is certainly barbaric. Not much I can do about the people in there, but I can live my life hoping I can help someone make better choices, and know they are valuable.

Here I go wandering again and not blogging about writing, but talking about my life. (It’s all about me). Everything is about writing because our sum totals go into everything we write. The fact is that people flat amaze and astound me. That’s a huge part of why I write, and the people I’ve been fortunate enough to know furnish parts of the characters I put on paper. It seems to me that we all have an amazing capacity for doing good things and being positive influences on people in our lives. At the same time we all have the capacity (hopefully unrealized) for channeling evil and destroying lives. Although most of write about evil, it rarely if ever wins in the end, and good triumphs in the end. I like to think life is like that and good will always shine through and prevail.

By John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com

It’s June, so another graduation season is drawing to a close. In high schools and colleges all over the United States, proud students are donning caps and gowns, and posing for pictures with even prouder parents and grandparents. Late spring is the time of unbridled opportunity. Those young men and women literally own the future—their own, to be sure, but also mine, by extension. Given the inherent joy of the season, I wonder why so many adults seem to take pleasure in screwing it all up.

When the announcement is made at the family dinner that young William or Wilhelmina has a computer science degree or a business degree, or that they’ve been accepted to the law school of their choice, the sense of approval is palpable. Everybody knows that those kids are set for life. Their future will be filled with money and material gain.

Have you noticed that music majors or creative writing majors or acting majors don’t receive the same universal acceptance? Is it because the presumed path to wealth isn’t quite so linear? Is it because liberal arts and social sciences aren’t as important to society as harvesting a new crop of lawyers? This bothers me.

I find it difficult to believe that at the doddering age of 21, every law school inductee is truly pursuing his or her passion. I could be wrong—I’ve spent a lifetime being wrong many, many times—but whenever I see a newly minted lawyer or accountant, I get the sense that in more than a few cases, their beaming smiles are reflections of just their own ambitions, but those of Mom and Dad as well.

Maybe I don’t want to see so young a person with so pedestrian a dream as being a lawyer or accountant. Age forty-one is the time for 12-hour work days and heavy responsibility, not twenty-one. Is this really their dream? For some, yes. For many, I suspect no.

You want to see lofty dreams? You want to be inspired by a youthful spirit? Sit down and talk to those creative writing students and the musicians. They know that the odds of success are stacked against them, but they don’t care. They’ve got a passion, and they’re going to pursue it to the end, until they either succeed or are forced by finances or a broken spirit to declare defeat.

If they beat the odds—and let’s face it, they are long odds—naysayers will pronounce them to be “lucky.” But that’s only if the success is huge. Like George Clooney or John Grisham huge.

Otherwise, in my experience, people will find a way to diminish true success and turn it into something less than it is. It’s only a TV movie, not a real movie. It’s only being published by a small press, not a major house. It’s only the Washington Opera company, not the Met. It’s only the touring company, not Broadway. Sure, he made it to the Chicago Bears, but he never made it above second string.

It’s a shame about William. He never really made it. Never mind that William is doing what he loves.

I feel sorry for the kids who have been career tracked by their parents. It’s foolish to think about becoming an artist, they are told, because it’s impossible to make any money at it. They’ll prove their point by reciting a litany of one hit wonders and abject failures from among their own childhoods. Give up now, son; you’ll never make it. This from the same mother or father who said never give up on the soccer field or in Math class. Those are important. Without the connections and the A-plus report card, Harvard is off the table, don’t you know.

I know that I am painting with a very broad brush here, but I’ve known these parents. I’ve had to justify why I was ruining my own son’s chances at success by not shipping him off to boarding school where he could start networking at age fourteen. (I’m not making that up. I turned the debate around, though, when I asked the overachievers why they were willing to surrender custody of their adolescent children at the moment in their lives when they most needed the steady hand and constant love of their parents.)

So listen up, graduates: It’s your life now. You have the God-given right to live it as you please. If acting like you’re forty when you’re 20 years younger is your thing, then go for it. But if you want to start a rock band or become a poet or set a new standard for sculpture, this is the time. If it doesn’t work, how much harm can you do to an accounting career that hasn’t started yet?

How do you even know that you want to be an accountant if you haven’t tried a dozen other things? I’ve got nothing against accountants, don’t get me wrong, but this is an important life choice. Suppose you hate being an accountant? Changing your mind becomes a lot harder after you’ve got kids and a mortgage, and I think that the seeds of doubt over what might have been if only you’d tried could be crippling.

I say if you’ve got talent and a dream, pursue the hell out of it. This is the time. Success only comes to those to endeavor to achieve it. Failure only comes to those who surrender.

And to surrender without trying, well, that’s just cowardice.

John Ramsey Miller

As if authors weren’t insecure enough… the sky is falling …again.

“Holy shades of the terror, Danton.” For as long as I’ve been in this game, the publishers, agents and editors have said things have never been worse in publishing, and everybody was always looking back at the “good old days.” Maybe this time they are right. If not worse, certainly our world has changed forever. And it could get worse than it is. The shakeout is not over, but there seems to be a lull in reorganizing and reshuffling at the major houses. At least it appears the wholesale bloodletting has slowed for the moment. The publishing behemoths seem to have reshuffled their cards and, leaning the fat, have resettled on their foundations. Some are acquiring books again in increasing numbers.

I’m not a businessman, but this is what I’ve managed to figure out:
More than usual even, booksellers don’t want to tie up capital in excess inventory. Most bookstores have lots and lots of books on their shelves, and the object is to roll inventory as often as possible. Thousands of books come out. If the author is new to them, and unless the buzz is enormous, they order as few copies as possible. If those sell, they might buy more, but normally they wait to see what the demand is before doing so––ordering as people ask them to. They order their stock based on the past sales of a book by a previously published author. On a clever or lucky buy, they will sell the books before they have to pay for them. Even though they can return books to the publisher for a refund, it’s a pain to lift them up and place them in boxes for shipping them back where they came from. With paperbacks they can just tear off the covers and ship them in envelopes to get credit, or a refund. I’m not sure exactly how the flow of funds between entities works because it’s irrelevant to me. Probably they send each other checks in the mail.

This is how it seems to go. If your book sells five copies, next time the store will order up to five, but probably less than five. If you are lucky, the people who bought the last book liked it enough to buy another book you wrote. But they might order it from Amazon, so the book the seller bought in anticipation of another sale to the same [hopefully loyal as if there were such a thing] customer, gets his feelings hurt and his computer places a black ball by your name.

The good old sink or swim move. A publisher pre-sells your book to the tune of 5,000 copies. They print 10,000 copies, ship the five they’ve sold, and put the other five in a warehouse in Soprano, New Jersey just off the turnpike near a group of storage tanks filled with things like food-grade motor oil. In the good old days the IRS allowed publishers and record companies to write off the (unsold inventory) boxes of books while the pages yellowed and the glue got stiff and lost its ability to hold things together. They do not tell anybody your new book is coming out, or brag about it when it does, (which is the sink-or-swim or natural selection). If it starts selling they will promote it because that makes sense. But the IRS decided this writing off inventory for years was a bad thing (on the order of writing off three-martini lunches) and put a stop to it. Martinis are great business greasers, and I believe that the captains of industry made better decisions while under the influence thanks to the 3ML. The loss of the three-martini lunch write-off did more to kill liquor sales than prohibition, but that is another story.

The way publishing works is the sort of thing you tell a room full of potential authors at your local high school if you want to nip future competitors in the bud. But seriously, authors need to know that no matter how good their books are, there’s slim chance they’ll rise to Dan Brown’s status.

The really dedicated upcoming talent will do as we authors have done and ignore the incoming rounds, forging ahead with laptops open and take our places on the shelves. The truth is, the odds are always stacked against us, and it’s the bean counters who make the decisions about our careers, not the editors and salesmen who actually like us and love our books. Always remember the words of Michael Corleone; “It’s just business.”

What I’m actually saying is that we authors are not selling dreams, which is what we think we are doing when we get into this life, we’re actually supplying a widget for the buying public and our careers depend on how many of them want to dream with us by purchasing our gizmos.

When I spoke to my local high school’s writing class the other day, I asked how many intended to become writers. I told them that when I was their age I didn’t think I’d make my living writing. I told them that life would lead them where it wanted them, and like me, although I didn’t set out to become a storyteller, the stories just began to pile up in my head and I just decided to put them down. I might not have done so had I known the probability of ever being published, but luckily I was ignorant of the astounding odds against me. I told the young people that once they discovered what they loved doing, they might be lucky enough to make a living at it as some of us have. I know the writing side pretty well, but the business side of the industry is impossibly murky. Sure there’s no security, and the work is really hard …if you do it right.

By John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com

Of all the instructional clichés, I think that “Write What You Know” discourages more new writers than any other. It’s a particularly pernicious thing to say to students, who tend to take such things more literally, but it’s also misleading for adults.

So here’s the Gilstrap version of that advice: Unless you live one hell of a life, stay away from what you know.

Who wants to read about commuting to and from a job, working hard and loving a family who loves you back? I can’t imagine a more boring story. (Actually, I can. The daily diary of a novelist: Got up this morning. Made stuff up. Went to bed.)

Looking at my own fiction, I’ve never: killed anyone; escaped from prison; blown up a chemical weapons facility (came close, though); survived a plane crash; or rescued a hostage. I like to think that I make my characters’ experience real enough for readers, but there’s no way I can say that I wrote those stories as something I “know.”

I have a hunch that the person who first launched the cliché actually meant something closer to, “Write From Your Heart.” Or maybe, “Write So It Feels Real.” I can live with those. To me, it’s about extrapolating emotion.

It’s about imagination. It’s about doing what most of us started doing as children, and then never grew out of: role playing. If you’ve loved people, how hard is it to imagine what it would be like to lose them?

I’ve never been in a knife fight, but I’ve been frightened and I’ve cut my hand slicing a bagel. If I’m writing from the point of view of the attackee, I’ve got everything I need for a convincing scene. (If I’m portraying the attacker, on the other hand, I have some research to do regarding fighting technique.)

I’ve taught writing seminars at the high school and college level where “Write What You Know” has actually stymied creativity. “Does that mean we can only write about school?” students ask. “I want to write about a serial killer.”

Then write the story, I tell them. If there’s a story in your soul pounding to come out, then write the damn thing down. Get it off your chest and out of your brain. Just do enough research to make it convincing. And make me love your protagonist from within. Imagine the character fully enough that I can see what he sees and feel what he feels.

It’s about the—forgive me—Human Condition. As a writer, your job is to pull me in.

I got it! The instructional cliché should be: “Write What You Understand.”