Month: November 2006

It could be worse. I once bought an $8 train ticket with a $20 bill at the station, and the machine gave me my $12 change in $1 coins.

Right now, in my in-box, I have spam messages with the subject headers

It’s Christa
It’s Claudia
It’s Clifton
It’s Freddie
It’s Hilary
It’s Hugo
It’s Jose
It’s Stacie

Are these all from the same person — and, if they’re not, are memos circulated among spammers to let them know about that day’s chosen format? Because I definitely notice patterns in the spam I get. One week, everybody’s hawking cheap Rolex watches or Viagra. The next week, they’ve all moved on to coffee makers or dietary supplements. But these new messages aren’t just similar products; here, the wording is almost exactly the same, no matter which e-mail address is purporting to have sent it. That’s why I’ve also got spam in my in-box with subject headers like

Keisha wrote:
Landon wrote:
Mariana wrote
Millard wrote:

And I still don’t understand why so much of it is addressed to “Barry.”

Although, you know, looking at most of it now, I see that they all have return addresses beginning with some permutation of “debora-“, so chances are good these did all come from the same person after all.

I’m continually amazed at how bad most spam is. Some of it, a very small percentage, seems almost believable, like those PayPal or eBay phishing scams. They’re equally reprehensible, and they don’t take a much to see through, but you can almost understand how someone might fall for them. Most spam, however, is just completely unbelievable, so over the top — so obviously spam — and that’s just compounded by the insistence these idiots have of sending out dozens upon dozens of similar messages to the same addresses every day.

If I get fifty messages saying, “It’s so-and-so,” even if I think I know who so-and-so is — if I know a Christa, or a Claudia, or a Hugo — I’m going to see that message stacked up against a ton of others and realize, oh, you know, that’s probably not my Christa or Claudia or Hugo. That’s probably just spam. And I’ll delete it, unopened and unread.

“It is an architectural enema,” says Gilliam, 65, who made his name with his surreal animations for Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the 1970s. “It was an attempt to be spare and clean for once.”

Sometimes watching something really good is inspiring. Sometimes it’s paralytic, because you end up staring at your own words and muttering, “Why aren’t you better?”

So, reasoning from this experience, you know what you might find fun and inspirational? Read something bad. Something really bad. It doesn’t have to be in script format — in fact it’s likely not to be. Look for something abominable — there’s loads of it on the web. Read someone’s first try at Simon and Simon fanfic or whatever. Find something really bad and truly roll around it in.

What you’re going to notice are all the things that you do really well. The things you do so well that you don’t even think about them anymore. The mistakes you don’t make — totally on-the-nose dialog, stories with no events in them, characters who are clearly awkward stand-ins for the author of the story. If you’re writing spec scripts, you aren’t sitting at a keyboard for the first time, pushing the notion of fiction around in your brain like an interesting new insect. You’ve either learned, or have always instinctively known, things about writing that others don’t (yet) have access to. It can be very encouraging to remind yourself of all the things you know, all the weapons you have in your arsenal, to look back at the road you’ve traveled to get here.

I’m not going to say that some of the submissions I get for Kaleidotrope are bad — or, even if I am saying that, I have to keep in mind T.S. Eliot’s admonition that “a bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one.” I’m just saying that there’s a lot to be said for reading something that clearly gets it wrong. Writing workshops, for instance, work not just because they offer criticism of your own words, but because they get you critically thinking about why some things work and some things don’t. Learning to spot the flaws in someone else’s writing can definitely help you spot them in your own.