Re-Capitalism: A New Economic System That Fixes Everything Capitalism Won’t

My research team has analyzed the apocalyptic array of calamities facing our country (income inequality, stagnant wages, climate change, mosquito-born illnesses, too many labradoodles, etc.) and concluded that the fundamental problem in American society—the common denominator to all of these issues—boils down this: Rich people have gotten lazy.

The ultra-rich, multi-billionaire class in particular has succumbed to the seductions of sloth, and their indolence is imperiling the very foundations of American life.

Sure, the mega-rich may have worked hard for a while, toiling twenty hours a day to invent revolutionary products and technologies, overcoming obstacles with their indomitable spirit and entrepreneurial zeal, amassing their giant fortunes in relentless pursuit of the American Dream. Once they achieve The Dream, however, rich people tend to slow down. When their goals have been met and their wildest fantasies realized, they begin basking in luxury, coasting along on a plush carpet of cash, as if their work is done and they are now free to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Slowly but surely, their once-vibrant hunger to succeed is replaced by the insidious satisfaction of success itself, a condition of the soul that's as addictive as it is dangerous.

The symptoms are obvious. Once-vital captains of industry start sleeping late and hiring other people to serve them. They begin enjoying “leisure” time—i.e., time when they are not working—looking for ever-more-exotic ways to amuse themselves. After they’ve bought everything they want, and traveled everywhere there is to go, they end up shuffling around their mansions all day, their eyes glazed with boredom, unsure what eccentric pastime to take up next.

It’s quite sad. After their first billion, many tycoons gain twenty or thirty extra pounds (the so-called “billionaire bump”) and start taking long vacations on private islands where there isn’t much incentive to do anything. The more time they spend in these places, the less inclined they are to get back to work, creating a destructive cycle of inactivity and, ultimately, despair. The fire in their belly gradually dies out, and the energy and ideas that once sustained them—that once made them feel alive—become nothing more than fond memories.

The mega-rich aren’t the only ones suffering, though. Indeed, this epidemic of laziness among those larded with lucre is hurting us all. 

Consider: The mega-rich entrepreneurial and business elite are the most productive people in the world. They’ve created millions of jobs, built our modern society, kept the economy humming, and represent for all of us the virtue of hard work and the rewards that come with a well-funded, highly diversified stock portfolio. But now that a whole class of our most productive citizens are coasting, taking the foot off the gas pedal that got them there, they are slowing the rest of us down as well. The only remedy for this problem is to get our most productive citizens back in the game, doing what they do best: inventing products, providing solutions, building companies, and creating the glorious wealth to which all American citizens are entitled.

But how?

The solution to all of these problems (not to mention a few others) is deceptively simple. It lies in an innovative approach to capitalism called “re-capitalism,” which involves a radical restructuring of economic incentives that focuses on one essential goal: putting rich people back to work. 

The first step toward a re-capitalist society is to identify everyone in America who has a net worth of more than one-billion dollars.

The second step is to take all their money away. And I mean all of it—every last penny. Cash out all their stock options, liquidate all their assets, empty all of their bank accounts, and render them completely and utterly broke.

The last step in this innovative program is to give former billionaires a cardboard sign and a knapsack, drop them off at various freeway exits throughout the country, and wish them good luck.

I know what you’re thinking: Whoa there, cowboy, that’s income redistribution!

No, it’s not—it’s income re-capitalization. There’s a huge difference. If the income of billionaires were simply redistributed, there is a chance they could keep some of it. Income re-capitalization closes that loophole to ensure that former billionaires are stripped of everything, so that they can start over fresh, unencumbered by the baggage of their previous successes.

That’s ridiculous, you might say. Rich people would never go for it. And you’d be right, because, as I’ve been saying all along, rich people have gotten too soft and comfortable. But before you dismiss the idea entirely, ask yourself: Who is likely to be more motivated—a billionaire floating around on his yacht trying to figure out how to make his next billion, or a former billionaire who has lost it all and desperately wants to get it back?

This isn’t as cruel a proposition as it might seem. Remember, rich people are extremely smart and resourceful. They got rich once; they can do it again. And they don’t need luck, because they are goal-oriented self-starters who make their own luck. The only problem is that they are already rich, so they have no incentive to get rich. They’ve lost their can-do attitude because they’ve gone and done it. Re-capitalism simply puts the incentives back in the right place, giving rich people the motivation to go out and do what they do best—get rich, again.

They may protest at first, but trust me, the mega-rich will eventually embrace re-capitalism. By forcing rich people to once again pull themselves up by their bootstraps, they would rediscover the entrepreneurial spirit that once gave their lives meaning and purpose. And, by broadcasting their path out of poverty and back into the billionaire winner’s circle on the Internet, these über-citizens would provide us all with inspiring examples of how one person with no money and resources can, with the right attitude, get rich by sheer force of will.

The benefits to society would be immense. Just think what Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg might accomplish if they gave more than a portion of their wealth away, but instead were forced to cough up all of their money and start all over again? Gates might invent a computer operating system that never needs upgrading. Zuckerberg might invent an entirely new form of social interaction in which people abandon their computers altogether and gather in the same room to talk.

Imagine how inspiring it would be for aging baby boomers who can’t afford retirement to see Warren Buffett and Sheldon Adelson standing on the side of the road, strategizing bold plans to recapture the glory of their younger years.

Think of all the good that could happen if all six members of the Walton family—who have more money than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined—gave all their money away to the bottom 42 percent and started over? Almost half of all Americans would see their income double instantaneously, and then they’d be able to witness firsthand how the Waltons use their wit and guile to scratch their way up from the bottom and once again become the richest people in the country—as they inevitably would.

Following their lead, the rest of America would be inspired to work harder and be more productive, just like the Waltons. The Waltons themselves would rediscover the value of hard work (a value they have likely forgotten), and would be seen as heroes for leading the greatest productivity surge in American history—simply by showing poor people how it’s done!

Of course, implementing such a plan would not be easy. The rich have gotten much lazier than they are willing to admit, and have become addicted to the creature comforts and privileges of great wealth. And, like all addicts, they’ll do anything they can think of to avoid going back to work. And believe me, they’ve come up with some howlers.

For instance, most rich people like to argue that income and capital-gains taxes are way too high, and that if they go much higher, super-productive rich people will have no incentive to work. But that’s patently ridiculous, a) because they already don’t work, and b) because—as every conservative knows—handing people money to work harder is absurd. You wouldn’t give a homeless person $200 million and expect them to go out and bust their ass at a job for eighteen hours a day. No, the only thing that gives people an incentive to work is the fear of grinding poverty—and that fear is precisely what the mega-moneyed billionaire class has lost.

For the good of the country, it’s time to pull our most productive citizens out of their palatial estates, jolt them out of their diamond-studded bliss, and put them back to work. The fact is, society is not getting enough value out of its most capable capitalists, and that needs to change. They are the ones who got society where it is today, after all. They invented all these fantastic cars, mesmerizing gizmos, and shiny kitchen appliances, giving us all an intoxicating glimpse at utopia. Which is great. But in their zeal to serve the public interest, a few of our most magnificent magnates of money-dom forgot to clean up after themselves. They can’t just abandon us now, in our time of need, when the planet is in peril and life as we know it is on the brink of extinction. The job isn’t finished. In order to get out of all the messes we’ve gotten ourselves into, we need these paragons of productivity to work some more of their entrepreneurial magic—to sprinkle the pixie dust of prosperity on everyone, so that we can all shop at Whole Foods and feel good about the future.

Certainly, losing everything might sting at first, but remember: these are positive, resilient, extraordinary people. In no time they would realize that they didn’t “lose” all their money at all; rather, they gained an opportunity to reinvent themselves and rediscover the joy of building a business from the ground up, starting with nothing. In a matter of years, they would all be billionaires again anyway—because that’s not only what they do; it’s who they are—and experiencing the satisfaction of success the second time around would be that much sweeter.

Through the miracle of re-capitalism, the rich and lazy receive a reward much more valuable than money: they get to re-experience the sense of self-worth that comes from amassing so much wealth that most people can’t even imagine it. When the rush of economic victory courses through their veins once again, there is little doubt that the crazy rich will embrace a “new normal” by voluntarily giving all their money away every time they reach the billionaire mark, and happily start over again with a cardboard sign and a knapsack.

Once re-capitalism re-energizes the economy and everyone in America has a chance to learn from the masters, new forms of status will inevitably take hold. The size of one’s bank account will no longer matter; what will say, “I am filthy rich,” is the number of times a person has reached the billion-dollar-mark and had to start over, without so much as a hot shower to wipe the stink off.

Another added benefit to this program is that the next time you see some scruffy-looking fellow at a freeway intersection holding up a cardboard sign, you might not feel so bad for him. You could say to yourself: There’s one of those former billionaires. I can’t wait to see how he succeeds.

And you, of course, would feel inspired, not depressed, as you roll through the light and leave them in your dust.

Donald Trump Explained—for those sick of reading about explanations for Donald Trump

There’s an old Saturday Night Live skit in which a family is sitting around the dinner table for “leftovers” night. The father drinks out of a milk carton and recoils in disgust, because the milk has gone sour. Not believing him, the mother grabs the carton and drinks some herself. She too grimaces at the taste, but that doesn’t stop each and every member of the family from taking a swig to verify for themselves that the milk has indeed gone bad.

This is Donald Trump’s appeal in a nutshell: He is the carton of sour milk seemingly everyone in America must try before agreeing that it does in fact stink to high heaven.

It’s not The Donald’s fault. Human beings are naturally drawn to things that disgust them. Circus freak shows, hot-dog-eating contests, slasher movies, Marilyn Manson concerts, serial killers, cigarettes, lutefisk—all are beloved by some faction of the populace. There is a switch in the human brain, it seems, that can turn disgust into desire, in the same way that pain can, under some circumstances, be intensely pleasurable.

The corpse flower is a giant plant that blooms only once every ten years or so. When it does, it emits a smell that everyone agrees is putrid, like road kill rotting in the sun. And yet, wherever corpse flowers bloom—in greenhouses and botanical gardens around the world—people line up by the hundreds for the opportunity to stand near the flower and get a whiff, even though they know the stench is going to make their nose hairs curl.

Donald Trump has the same counterintuitive appeal. You’ve seen the debates, heard him spout the crazy, read all the nasty things he’s said, and been amazed by his ignorance of just about every aspect of the job for which he is running. It’s unbelievable. But how bad can it really be? Let’s attend one of his rallies to find out!

This analysis of course assumes that Trump’s supporters are revolted by him on some level, which may not be the case. The stinkier the cheese is, the more some people like it. And that is why Donald Trump confounds everyone politically left of Vlad the Impaler. They don’t like Trump’s stinky cheesiness, and don’t understand why anyone else would, either. What they fail to account for is the human capacity to convince themselves that gross, offensive things are actually delicious, attractive, and desirable. The food world is full of so-called “delicacies” that would make most people puke. (Next time you’re in Micronesia, try a little Fruit Bat Soup.) And now, with Donald Trump, the political world has a candidate who is vile and grotesque to some, but savory and marvelous to others.

After all, one man’s rotten milk is another man’s brie.

There will be no “try it you’ll like it” transformations among voters in the coming months; either you like this crap or you don’t. Nevertheless, every media outlet in America is currently in the process of passing around the sour carton of milk that is Donald Trump to decide if it’s gone bad. It was bad all along, of course, but until now everyone in America hadn’t gotten a true taste of Trump. A certain amount of sampling was necessary for a consensus to emerge: Yep, it stinks.

The same thing is happening with Ted Cruz, of course. If Donald Trump doesn’t win the GOP presidential nomination, and Cruz is the only viable alternative—well, that’s an outcome that many find even less palatable than Trump.

To understand how something like this could happen, we must once again recognize how tolerant human beings can be of things that are, on their face, repulsive. In Greenland, the Inuit people love a dish called kiviaq, which is made by sealing hundreds of tiny auk birds (the whole thing, feathers and all) inside a sealskin bag, rubbing the bag with seal fat, and leaving it under a pile of rocks to rot for 18 months. Over time, the birds turn into a kind of fermented sludge, which the Inuit people consume as a meal of celebration. They do this outside, though, because a freshly opened batch of kiviaq can stench up a house for months.

If Donald Trump is sour milk, Ted Cruz is kiviaq.

The natural reaction to a Cruz run for presidency should be involuntary wretching, followed by a day or two of shivers and sweat. But of course there are always people who will claim to their death bed that kiviaq the best thing they’ve ever tasted. All the rest of us can do is shake our heads and, when it’s offered to us, say, “No, thanks. I'd rather vote for Hillary."

Naughty, Sexy, Nude Scenes: The Curse of Depravity

During the writing of certain stories, there inevitably come occasions when your characters want to take their clothes off—and suddenly, you, the unsuspecting writer, are obligated to write a nude scene.

This can come as quite a shock to the uninitiated. One minute your characters are talking politely over dinner, then suddenly they’re testing mattress springs at the nearest hotel, or steaming up the windows of a ‘97 Buick Skylark.

Nudity can worm its way into the narrative in other ways as well. A character might suddenly decide she wants to take a shower in the middle of the day, so she can sit under a hissing stream of water and cry. Or, it might turn out that mild-mannered real-estate broker Jerry Parker likes to exercise in the nude in front of a mirror. Or, it might turn out that the lithe young heroine you’ve dreamed up has a mental condition that makes fabric feel like sandpaper on her alabaster skin, so she can’t stand to wear clothes.

Whatever the motivation, when the garments come off, it is the writer’s responsibility to continue telling the character’s story sans a protective buffer of cotton and polyester. When this happens, the writer must weigh the character’s dignity against the reader’s desire for her to have no dignity whatsoever. Or, if the character is male, the writer must decide which body parts should bulge the most—belly, biceps, or . . . ?

The characters themselves do not always make these choices easy. You might have a character who wants to take their clothes off in early January, right after the holidays, so they’ve packed on an extra ten or fifteen pounds without even realizing it. Or, you might have a character who looks fine with a shirt on, but when he takes it off there turns out to be a nasty rash on his back. It could be impetigo, shingles, hives, rubella, allergies—you don’t know. All you know is that it’s gross to look at, and now you have to describe it, because the idiot in your story decided to take his shirt off.

But even if their skin is smooth and young and clean, writing an effective nude scene can still be problematic. The reason every New Yorker story starts with a detailed description of the subject’s clothes—“he wore a houndstooth vest over a sky-blue Canali dress shirt and a gold Ferragamo tie, with Melton Oxford shoes so shiny he could see himself . . .”—is that the clothes themselves say something about the person who is wearing them. But if the person you are writing about isn’t wearing any clothes, you have to say something else about them—or worse, you have to start describing their thoughts.

Now, inner dialogue is part of the stock in trade of fiction writers. Many writers can go on for pages about a character’s thoughts and feelings while the character herself is doing nothing more than sipping a cup of tea. But take that same character’s clothes off and put her in a room with an attractive man, and there is a very real danger that her thoughts will wander into the uncomfortable territory of her deepest, darkest desires. Readers are always keen to know this stuff, but it’s the writer who must shine a light into the forbidden recesses of a character’s mind, and it’s the writer who has to deal with the consequences of what he or she finds there.

It’s not always pretty. There could be child abuse in the character’s past, or the unwanted attentions of a creepy uncle. Maybe they are shy about their own body. Maybe they have reason to be shy about it. Maybe they’ve had a double mastectomy. Maybe they have a war wound that blew their pecker off. You just don’t know until you get down there what you’re going to find, and by then it’s often too late. You may have thought your female chanteuse with the lovely singing voice was seducing her high-school sweetheart—but no, it turns out she’s from another planet altogether, one where they eat high-school sweethearts for lunch. Then you’re stuck with an alien teen-muncher in what was supposed to be a romantic coming-of-age story. And it all happened because they couldn’t keep their clothes on!

Describing the human body itself isn’t much fun, either. When you think about it—and, unfortunately, that’s what writers with naked characters must do—the human body is rather disgusting. On the outside, it’s just a bunch of folds and flaps of skin that secrete all sorts of liquids and ooze. And on the inside, it’s a lot of tubes and pumps and filters that don’t always work right, sometimes forcing things that should stay inside the body to shoot suddenly and violently out of it. Trying to make this repugnant contraption sound appealing in print can test the most eloquent of writers, and the English language is not always up to the challenge. Even the most compelling human body parts have ugly names (too ugly to mention here), and the euphemisms for these body parts aren’t much better.

Then there’s the fact that characters who are not wearing clothes inevitably want to engage in sexual intercourse—which, believe me, is precisely as distasteful as it sounds. Again, when this happens, it is the writer who must face the horror head on and render the scene however he or she sees it. Writers cannot flinch from this responsibility, because readers expect courage and honesty from the teller of the story, even if the teller is himself dismayed by what his characters are doing. Though many writers have tried to make it so, there is nothing poetic about the heaving biology of human lust, and there is nothing more regrettable than two or more characters who insist on disrobing and fornicating just because they can, not because they should.

There are always exceptions, of course. It’s rare, but sometimes it’s the writer who wants a character’s clothes to come off, and it’s the character in the story who is reluctant. Not all characters want to do nude scenes. Some will only bare their skin on the condition that doing so is integral to the story and shows their character in a positive light—usually candles, torches, or under the glow of a full moon. In those cases, it is the writer’s duty to convince the character that all of these conditions have been met, and that appearing nude in the story will not tarnish their reputation or cause their parents to think ill of them. Describing the scene as “tasteful” or “artistic” usually helps, and it never hurts to reassure them that no one will be peeking over your shoulder while the scene is being drafted.

My personal advice when it comes to nude scenes is to avoid them if at all possible. And on those occasions when such a scene can’t be dodged, my advice is to get it over and done with as quickly and efficiently as you can. The sooner your characters have their clothes back on, the sooner you can get on with the story. And that’s what people want—a story—not a bunch of pointless digressions into the bedroom or florid descriptions of thrashing human flesh, slapping and writhing like a freshly caught fish on a boat made of jello.

Nobody wants to wallow in that kind of depravity. But as writers, we must sometimes take our readers to places we would rather not go ourselves, and allow them to experience things that we ourselves find distasteful. Sometimes, a writer’s sensibilities must be shelved for the sake of the story—and, like it or not, this is the case with characters who cannot—or will not—keep their clothes on.

Existentialism 101: What is the Point of Writing?

The news is rather sad these days, what with the planet heating up, the glaciers melting, the bees dying, bacterial superbugs, the takeover of humanity by robots, the closing of Old Country Buffet, and all the rest. The world is one giant clusterfuck of calamities and catastrophes, it seems, and it doesn’t matter what we do, we’re doomed. So why even try?

It’s understandable that an aspiring writer trying to make sense of life on this forlorn little planet might one day sit down, take a deep breath, and ask himself: What is the point?

Of writing, that is—of spending a significant chunk of every day manufacturing words that are just going to burn to a crisp when the sun collapses on itself five-billion years from now and the whole solar system explodes in a giant supernova? Black holes are notoriously bad places to launch a publishing venture, and the job options for writers in other parts of the galaxy are limited by a general lack of creatures with eyeballs.

So why write at all?

Why wrestle with a life of the mind when you could just as easily immerse yourself in pleasures of the flesh and the restorative power of a strong, stiff drink?

Why toil away in anonymity and poverty, when you could be running a bio-tech firm and making millions?

Why ask the big questions when you can’t even get answers to the small ones—like, where is the melon baller?

Why indeed?

“What is the point of it all?” is a difficult question, though. And it is difficult because it brushes awfully close to several other existentially uncomfortable questions, such as “What is the meaning of life?” and “Can cats really smell death?” And, since life has no meaning, and no one knows what goes on in a cat’s mind, there is an understandable amount of confusion around the matter.

In the past, many people took up the pen as a hedge against death, scribbling feverishly in the belief that while their flesh may one day wither and rot, their words would live on, granting them a kind of immortality. But now that humanity’s demise is a scientific certainty, immortality itself is an illusion. All those people who are cryogenically preserving themselves in the hope that science might one day “cure” them are idiots. Science doesn’t cure anything—all it does is point at a problem and tell us how long it’s going to be before it’s a bigger problem. What’s really going to happen to these people is that the sun is going to explode, they are going to melt, and when they do, they will be granted about two seconds of consciousness before it dawns on them that, oh shit, they’re screwed.

Then boom, oblivion.

Nowadays, people blog feverishly in the hope that their words will live on electronically. What they don’t realize is that there will come a time when far too much of the writing on the Internet has been done by dead people. When that happens, all the living people will start demanding that the Internet contain more “relevant” content, and that all the writing from dead people be archived in a musty building somewhere, where it’ll be impossible to find their work unless you approach the bespectacled gnome at the front desk and use your “quiet voice” to utter the secret password: “Help.” Which people in the future will never do, of course, because no one wants a handout.

Plenty of reassuring words about the historical value of this content will be said to mollify the skeptics, but sooner or later some real-estate developers are going to decide that high-rise luxury condos should go where that building is sitting. The building will then be leveled, and the archive will be destroyed.

And once again, dead people will be dead.

Since cheating death through writing doesn’t work anymore, other reasons to write must be found. Unfortunately, finding a good reason to write isn’t easy, which is why so many writers blow their brains out. Usually, these poor souls get caught in the “meaning” trap—by which I mean they can’t accept the fact that they’ve spent their lives trying to make meaning out of something—life—that has no meaning. And it’s true: If you keep insisting that life on Earth has to have some sort of purpose, and that everything here happens for a reason, you are in for some serious disappointment. It’s much healthier to accept the absurdity of it all, laugh at life’s cruel ironies, then order a pizza and watch some TV.

When existential despair strikes, the key thing to remember is that every generation throughout history has had it worse than the last. In prehistoric times, children got eaten by dinosaurs. In the Middle Ages, people ate rats and got the plague. Then war got very popular. Our parents and grandparents had to live through World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. Then the Cold War set in, and everyone had to live with the daily threat of nuclear winter.

And so it goes. Like our ancestors before us, our generation is beset with a host of seemingly intractable problems. And yes, a strong argument can be made that no one in history has had it worse. Spotty cellphone service, sluggish download speeds, long airport security lines, insufficient parking, high drug prices, clogged gutters, recycling hassles, over-scheduled children, car repairs, noise pollution—taken together, these things gnaw away at our quality of life, reducing human existence in the 21st century to an endless series of unnecessary annoyances that really should have been taken care of by now.

But they haven’t. And so it falls to us to try to make life in this Earth just a little less hellish.

For me, at least, that’s a good enough reason to write. Because I know that if weren’t sitting here typing away in my basement for hours at a time, I’d probably be out making things worse for everyone. The least I can do is protect humanity from my shortcomings by limiting the damage I can do in the outside world. This way, the danger I pose to society remains confined to my house and backyard, where my behavior can be held in check by a high fence and signs warning the neighbors.

The pen is mightier than the sword, they say, but I don’t see how that’s possible unless you stab them in the neck when they’re not looking. So when I die, the world really should thank me—because if I weren’t writing all the time, who knows what kind of trouble I might cause?

The Big Blur: Is Anything on TV Real Anymore?

Like many Americans during the past week, I have been reluctant to leave my house because of what I’ve been seeing on television. Every night, it’s a toxic stew of politics, violence, corruption, manipulation, deception, and rage, all stoked by a compliant media that loves nothing more than to fan the flames of fear when evil seems to be marching toward certain victory.

I am of course talking about Season 4 of House of Cards, in which president Francis Underwood and his wife, the sociopathic ice queen Claire, have gamed the entire political system so adroitly that they are on the cusp of their ultimate triumph: separate jets.

You may be forgiven if, for a moment, you thought I was referring to the Donald Trump show. These days, it’s difficult to tell where reality ends and entertainment begins. When you have a billionaire tycoon running for president who ingratiated himself to the American people on television by firing people, then have that same fabulously rich television personality at actual political rallies promising to create jobs, while also claiming that he is going to “make America great again” by getting rid of all the pesky immigrants he hires to keep his casinos running—well, it’s easy to see why Comedy Central’s ratings are going down. Who can compete?

But back to House of Cards.

The scene is the 2016 Democratic national convention in Atlanta. The president has engineered a brokered convention and all hell is starting to break loose, what with delegates and super-delegates voting this way and that based on behind-the-scenes promises and threats—because, as everyone knows, the machinery of American politics can be easily controlled by a few nasty people with cellphones and an axe to grind.

Cut to the CNN Situation Room, where Wolf Blitzer and John King are analyzing the data, running the numbers and discussing the possible outcomes.

Wait a minute: Aren’t Wolf Blitzer and John King actual anchors on a legitimate news network in the real world?

Why yes, they are—or so they claim. But now they are also pretending to be fictional versions of themselves covering an imaginary political convention, using the same technology, techniques, and patter they use to cover real politics. And they are doing it to help the television show itself achieve a greater level of verisimilitude, so that the show will feel more credible—more real.

But in order for House of Cards to have that eerie this could happen! feel, it has to piggyback on the credibility that Wolf Blitzer and John King have built up over the years as reporters of actual news. And for this to happen, John King, Wolf Blitzer, and CNN all have to agree to lend (or sell) a portion of their legitimacy as journalists and political analysts. And for THAT to happen, all involved have to believe there is either no legitimacy worth preserving, or that the historical distinction between journalism and make-believe is irrelevant—or both.

I know, it’s confusing. But objecting to these cameos by the CNN duo on the grounds that it blurs the line between news and entertainment assumes there is still a line there to be blurred.

Apparently, there isn’t.

This wasn’t always the case. There used to be a distinction between news and, say, The Brady Bunch. One was fact, one was fiction, and most people knew the difference. One was boring, and the other involved honest, sober coverage of national and international matters of which engaged citizens in a democracy ought to be aware.

Not anymore. It has become commonplace for actual important people to make cameo appearances in television dramas. Madeline Albright, once the actual secretary of state, has appeared as herself on Madam Secretary, offering advice to the fictional Madam Secretary on the show (played by Tea Leoni), who is herself an idealized version of Hillary Clinton.

On The Good Wife, when Juliana Marguiles’s character, Alicia Florrick, was contemplating a run for state’s attorney, she was encouraged to do so by president Obama’s real-world senior adviser, Chicago pol Valerie Jarrett, and honest-to-god feminist icon Gloria Steinem, both playing themselves.

Pretty much everyone in show business has done voice-overs for the cartoon version of themselves on The Simpsons or Family Guy. And so many candidates have appeared on Saturday Night Live over the years, either playing themselves or other characters, that it would be weird NOT to see them on the SNL stage, pretending to go along with the joke.

So what are we to make of a world where fact and fiction bleed so seamlessly into each other? 

A couple of weeks ago, former Nightline news anchor Ted Koppel lit into Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly for turning the sober, responsible news of yore into a crass form of entertainment. And he is right, of course, because Ted Koppel has made a career out of being right. Unfortunately, Ted did his takedown of O’Reilly in that authoritative, condescending dad-voice that all elite newscasters adopt when they think they are saying something important. And that voice—that attitude—of high-minded media authority doesn’t work in today’s mutant, let’s-ignore-the-facts multimedia muck pond. Suggesting, as Koppel does, that news-people who interview Donald Trump should do some reporting beforehand so that they can ask intelligent questions—well, where’s the fun in that?

The logic behind the trend of mix-and-match media goes something like this: Nobody worries about damaging the credibility of major news outlets anymore because there is precious little credibility left to be damaged. Besides, any idiot can tell the difference between John and Wolf discussing fictional delegate counts on Netflix one night and real delegate counts on CNN the next. Just like they can tell the difference between real candidates for president debating serious policy matters and, during the commercial breaks, advertisements for a fictional president who is dedicated to "putting people before politics." They are totally different, and anyone who can’t see the difference isn’t likely to be watching House of Cards anyway, so what’s the big whoop? It’s fun to see trusted newscasters toying with our sense of reality, and if you’re stupid enough to be fooled, then you really shouldn’t have a Netflix account in the first place. 

But if that’s the logic, shouldn’t news networks themselves be doing more to capitalize on the public’s appetite for—and indifference toward—a more fluid interpretation of reality? Granted, “Wolf Blitzer” is an excellent fictional name for a hard-charging reporter with killer instincts, and the name John King does imply an everyman kind of royalty. But consider how much more fun it would be to watch two brilliant actors—Paul Giamatti as Wolf, say, and Brad Pitt as the fast-talking, jut-jawed analyst King—poring over election returns this November. To make things even more interesting, they could get Ted Danson to play a silver-haired Anderson Cooper, and reunite the cast of Friends as “the best political team on television.”

Even I’d watch that.

In the meantime, we have to settle for a billionaire reality-television mogul pretending to run for president on a hilarious platform of racism, sexism, and bigotry—all in the name of patriotism and the American Way, ha, ha.

I’m not worried, though, because any moron can tell the difference between someone who is really running for president and someone who is only pretending to run for the sake of entertainment and ratings.

The Narcissist Challenge: Writing in the Age of Self-Obsession

The market for books is highly competitive, so writers who want to largest audience possible can no longer afford to ignore an important and growing demographic: pathological narcissists.

It’s estimated that thirty percent of the population exhibits traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and that number grows every time a teenager takes a selfie or Donald Trump gives a speech. Writers who want to remain relevant in this new age of self-celebration need to stop seeing narcissists as people who don’t read books, and start seeing them as an under-served market segment ripe for exploitation.

To begin with, it’s important to understand why narcissists don’t read books. The main problem is that most books are about other people, and, since narcissists only care about themselves, other people’s lives do not interest them. Self-help books don’t interest narcissists either, because they don’t need any help. Many books are chock full of information as well—but, because they already know everything, narcissists consider such books redundant. They could have written the book themselves, after all, so what’s the point of reading it? Narcissists don’t read fiction, either, because their psychological handicap makes them incapable of sympathizing with characters in a story. Trying to make them care about another human being—one who doesn’t actually exist, no less—is pointless.

Or at least it used to be.

But the market has shifted. Now that almost a third of the population consists of raging egomaniacs, writers who want to sell more books need to develop storytelling strategies that will appeal to these people, annoying as they may be.

Unfortunately, writers who are trying to serve this growing demographic of self-involved non-readers are caught in a bind. Storytellers have always relied on the capacity of their audience to identify with, and feel compassion for, characters in a story, particularly ones suffering from misfortune, betrayal, or a grossly deformed part of their anatomy that cannot be repaired using conventional surgical techniques. Unable to cultivate sympathy with readers by traditional means, writers are being forced to invent character traits that will resonate with a narcissistic public, such as detectives who are too stupid to catch criminal masterminds, or heroes who, when their good deeds are recognized, call a press conference and give themselves a medal.

Imagining ever-more-amazing character traits for people who are secretly despicable is an ongoing challenge. Fortunately, it appears that a number of new technologies are converging to help solve this problem, making it possible for writers everywhere to create characters that reflect and glorify a society overrun by citizens whose estimation of their own competence borders on the delusional.

Because this is such an important issue, I have spent the past few months working with the folks at Amazon and Barnes & Noble—as well as my good friends at Barnes & Not-Quite-So-Noble—to develop a back-engine software program for e-books called Narcissassist, which turns books that narcissists would normally overlook or ignore into books they can’t put down. The program is still in development, so I can’t share all the details, but here are the basics:

One of the biggest problems with traditional books is that the words are printed on a medium, paper, that can’t be easily altered. But now that more than 72 percent of all reading is done on some form of screen—computer, phone, tablet, e-reader—the words that appear on those screens are just digits and pixels waiting to be manipulated. Without really realizing it, people are also doing most of their reading on a device that records their every thought and action, from phone calls and internet searches to purchase histories, bank records, social media, photos, videos, music, dating profiles, and whatever else narcissists do on computers, such as write love letters to themselves and conduct image searches for “people who look like me.”

Until recently, it was impossible to collect and use this type of information to create content that shamelessly appealed to the person using the device. But now that Big Data is getting bigger, the possibilities are expanding too. People are already accustomed to seeing advertisements pop up for products they have just searched. But this is only the crudest, most obvious benefit of marrying Big Data with artificial intelligence and shameless capitalism.

So much more is possible.

Enter Narcissassist. As soon as the Amazon deal goes through, anyone who downloads an e-book will receive Narcissassist free of charge. Running silently in the background of all e-book downloads, Narcissassist mines the data profile of the “reader” to determine if they are a narcissist. If they are, the program automatically customizes the content of the story they are reading to make it accessible to those whose abnormally high self-regard typically prevents them from giving a shit about anyone else.

Normal readers identify with a character’s thoughts, actions, and feelings by comparing those traits with their own and drawing thoughtful conclusions. Narcissists don’t like to think about other people, though, so Narcissassist helps these psychologically handicapped sociopaths by altering the main character in the story so that he/she looks, thinks, and acts like them. Using the reader’s own data, Narcissassist generates an eerily accurate psychological profile of the “reader,” then customizes the story to fit the reader’s unique ego demands. Once their sense of self is sufficiently inflated, narcissists can enjoy the altered, “improved” story—a pleasure conventional storytelling denies them.

So how does Narcissassist work in practice?

Suppose you’re a woman who has just bought a pair of super-cute Jimmy Choo black-leather ankle boots from Zappos online. If you are a narcissist, Narcissassist would automatically detect your level of self-involvement and seamlessly ensure that the central character in the story you are reading is wearing those very same boots. Having dressed the central character accordingly, Narcissassist would then have another character walk up and say, “Wow, I love those boots. You have such amazing taste,” or, “I wish I could afford those boots, but I’m guessing you’re a lot more successful than I am, so it makes sense that you’re wearing them, not me.” (Note: Narcissassist 2.0 will be able to outfit a character with the boots they want to buy, creating a perfect synergistic connection between the narcissist’s need for approval and their aspirational desire to buy things that affirm their own good taste and judgment.)  

The reason Narcissassist works so well is that the character in the narcissist’s version of the story doesn’t simply dress and act and think like them—it is them! Remember, in the ancient myth, Narcissus doesn’t fall in love with himself; he falls in love with a reflection of himself, whom he mistakes for another person altogether. The beauty of Narcissassist is that, because narcissists have no capacity for self-reflection, they don’t know why they like the character in the book so much; they just think he or she is the most awesome, amazing person they’ve ever read about. Once they get hooked on that character, they can’t get enough—which of course opens up all kinds of possibilities for book sequels or serials featuring the fascinating character who is them.

Another exciting feature of Narcissassist is that it allows narcissists to inject themselves into great literature, adding personal relevance to stories that were once too boring for them to tolerate.

Suppose a narcissist is reading Moby Dick and getting impatient with the whole “gotta kill the whale” thing. Narcissassist would detect their waning attention span and speed things up by having Captain Ahab admit to his shipmates, “Guys, it’s just a whale. I say we quit, go find an island, and name it after me.”

Or let’s say a narcissist is slogging their way through The Scarlet Letter, and finds the whole story ridiculous, because what the hell is shame, anyway? Narcissassist could help the struggling narcissist by inserting a character who approaches Hester Prynne and says something like, “I, too, have a tattoo. Would you like to see it?”—then, to make the story more relevant, seduces Hester into doing things that could get her arrested even in the 21st century.

And even narcissists are required to read George Orwell’s 1984 in high school. But with the help of Narcissassist, this boring history book would suddenly come to life when it turns out that Big Brother, who watches everything and everyone, is really a seventeen-year-old former Boy Scout who smokes pot in his parent’s basement and plays Call of Duty until four in the morning.

The possibilities are endless. And, because Narcissassist is connected to a vast network of artificially intelligent super-computers, it continues to learn about the user’s pathology and refine its ego-stroking algorithm to accommodate the narcissist’s ever-expanding estimation of themselves. (Note: For the purposes of public safety, the program also monitors the narcissist’s levels of vanity, entitlement, and arrogance, and alerts the authorities when a full-blown psychosis appears imminent.)

My hope is that Narcissassist will help writers and publishers serve this growing sector of the population. Not only will it expand the market for books, it will make the pleasure of reading available to those whose psychological dysfunction has turned them into the kind of impossibly boring person one tries to avoid at parties. Reading won’t improve their character or change them, but it will make them feel smarter. And that’s all a narcissist really needs: the illusion that they are better than everyone else.

Editorial Writing: How to Argue with Anyone—and Win!

As everyone knows, writers are full of “messages” that need to be conveyed to readers, so that readers can go around and pass these messages to their friends. If enough of a writer’s messages get through, the thinking goes, the pointless drudgery of human existence will at least have an explanation. And when you feel the vast, dark emptiness of the cosmos closing in on you, crushing your hopes and dreams, nothing is more comforting than a rational, well-written justification for your despair.

Fiction isn’t always the best way for a writer to send messages, however. Sometimes messages need to be more direct, which is why the newspaper editorial page was invented.

Newspaper editorials give writers of all kinds the chance to express their opinions in a form that lands on people’s porches early in the morning. And because most people read editorials while they’re still half asleep, they are an ideal vehicle for ideas that require a certain lack of skepticism from the general public.  

In order to write an editorial, however, one must have an opinion. And in order to have an opinion, one must be able to use what little one knows about any given subject and make it appear as if they know everything about it. This isn’t difficult. You just have to have the courage of your convictions, and know a few tricks of the trade.

The first thing any editorial writer must do is choose a topic. It could be anything. But if you can’t come up with an idea on your own, simply find an editorial someone else has written and argue the opposite. This is known as the “devil’s advocate” approach, because the devil has trouble coming up with good ideas, too.

As an example, let’s choose the favorite subject of newspaper editors everywhere: climate change. Suppose the article you want to rebut, or argue against, is one that denounces climate-change deniers as a bunch of scientific illiterates who wouldn’t know a data set from a tea set. Let’s say the article you are arguing against claims that 99.9 percent of all scientists agree that humans are cooking themselves by spewing heat-trapping gunk into the atmosphere, and furthermore, if you don’t believe climate change is real, you are a colossal moron.

At first glance, arguing against this type of article might seem difficult and foolish, because they have facts and science on their side, not to mention the moral high ground. But refuting an argument like this is really quite easy, if you know how.

First, you have to shift the playing field in your favor. The core of the issue is whether climate change is “real” or not, so all you have to do is question the nature of “reality.” So what if 99.9 percent of all scientists agree that global warming is real? Maybe they’re not real scientists, you could argue. Or maybe they’re not real people at all. Maybe the editorial writer made them up to prove his point. Where are these so-called scientists, after all? If we can’t see them, how can we be sure they exist?

Having called the reality of so-called “reputable” scientists into question, you could then attack their facts with some facts of your own. For instance, quantum physics tells us that there isn’t just one universe; there are really billions of universes unfolding at the same time all around us. This means that everything that can happen is happening, or will happen, in a parallel universe somewhere. All you have to do is explain that, using principles of quantum mechanics they couldn’t possibly understand, you are borrowing information on climate change from a parallel universe and using it in this universe. Furthermore, you could argue, Einstein proved that space and time can bend, so you are pretty sure you are using data from the future—data that says global warming is complete and utter bullshit.

That’s just science.

If basing your argument on scientific fact is too much trouble, another option is to make up your own facts. For instance, you could say, “Did you know that 87.2 percent of the people who believe in climate change are godless atheists?” Citing an actual number gives your argument weight it wouldn’t otherwise have, and making things up out of thin air has the added advantage of being difficult to fact-check. It might only take you a few seconds to make up a fact, but it could take a college intern a week or two to verify it. Throw in a few more “facts” like that, and you could tie up a fact-checker for a month or two. The math is in your favor, so the more facts you make up, the farther ahead you’ll be.

Another tactic editorial writers use is arguing from emotion rather than reason. The key to arguing with emotion is liberal use of the “caps lock” key, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE SHOUTING EVERYTHING!!! You’re not, you’re just typing, but the reader doesn’t know that; they think you’re really SHOUTING AT THEM! If you need to shout louder, use BOLD CAPS and an extra exclamation point (!!), and if you really need to get into people’s faces, use BOLD CAPS AND ITALICS, WITH TWO OR THREE EXTRA EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!

The only problem with arguing from emotion is that for it to work, you really do have to care. Unfortunately, caring deeply about a subject is something most writers are ill-equipped to do. Feelings cloud a person’s judgment, causing them to think that the roiling ball of fire in their chest is more important than the cool head of reason on their shoulders. Before you know it, feelers have that “caps lock” key clamped down permanently and won’t stop typing until the rest of the world knows how HURT and OUTRAGED they are by the INJUSTICE of it all—and, by inference, what AMAZING people they are for CARING so much. Most writers are incapable of caring that much, which is why they only capitalize the first letter of every sentence.

So far, we’ve only discussed how professional writers approach the editorial page. When it comes to writing editorials in the the local paper, however, there are times when non-writers want to participate in the public discourse of their community as well. Non-writers are often insecure about their ability to compose a cogent argument in print, but that shouldn’t stop them from trying. In fact, there is an easy way around the whole “I can’t write” problem.

For example, many non-writers shout their opinions at the television set in the mistaken belief that the little people inside the rectangle can hear them. (This may have been true back in the days when televisions were attached to so-called “rabbit ears,” but televisions nowadays do not have ears, so yelling at them is pointless.) Instead, try yelling at the television and recording your rant with a digital audio recorder. Then transcribe whatever you shout, print it out, and send it to your friendly local newspaper editor, who will be delighted to have thoughtful “input” from the “community.”

If an editorial you have written ends up in the paper or online, be forewarned that some people might disagree with your opinion and write their own editorial in response to yours. But that’s okay. It’s great, in fact, because it means you have written something so powerful that it motivated another human being to hate you. This is what people mean when they say the public needs to have a “conversation” about important issues.

Remember, disagreeing with other people’s opinions is a cornerstone of American democracy, and the more people who disagree with you, the better. Why? Because the more people who hate your guts, the more likely it is that God is on your side. And when God is on your side, there’s nothing you can’t make people believe.

Create Action and Suspense Like the Pros

One of the many challenges of writing is moving the plot forward. Action is the fuel of a plot, and it is the writer’s job to pour action all over everything and set it on fire.

All too often, however, writers just sit there and watch while their characters yammer away about one thing or another, sipping coffee and talking about “life” as if they didn’t have a care in the world. Or, even worse, writers will waste page after page describing a character’s interior dialogue—the ebb and flow of their precious thoughts—while the character waits for the bus or stands in line at the grocery store. In such cases, the characters themselves are doing absolutely nothing, and the plot inevitably grinds to a halt.

Dull, annoyingly introspective characters can poison an entire story. To avoid this problem, here are some tricks the pros use whenever the action stalls and something needs to happen:

THE CELLPHONE

One of the easiest ways to move a plot along is to bother the character with an important phone call. Let’s say your character is out getting a muffin and can’t decide between bran, which would move his digestive track along, or poppy seed, which he likes better because it tastes more like cake, save for the seeds, which get lodged in his teeth, forcing him to floss in the middle of the day. If, after a few pages, your character has failed to choose a muffin, all you, the writer, have to do to untangle him from the situation is make his cellphone ring. When the character answers, tell him something urgent and horrible, then watch him jump: “What? Slow down. You say my house is on fire?”

Instantaneously, your character will stop caring about the muffin and flee whatever coffee shop he’s in to go watch his house burn to the ground. If you really want to grab your character’s attention, remind him that he has two-million dollars in cash stashed under the floorboards. Then make his phone ring again, and tell him he has twenty-four hours to get two-million more dollars, or his wife and daughter are going to die. (Note: If you do this, always remember to alter your voice in order to throw the police off track.) Trust me, after a couple of phone calls like that, muffins are going to be the last thing on your character’s mind.

DEAD BODY

One of the best ways to grab a reader’s attention is to introduce a dead body. For instance, one of my favorite ways to move a plot along is to drop a body out of the sky. Suppose you’ve got two lovebirds sitting in a park, saying all kinds of romantic things to each other and basically boring the reader to death. Drop a body out of the sky on the pavement in front of them and bam, the boredom is gone.

Trust me, when a dead body falls out of nowhere, it raises all sorts of questions and makes it difficult for people to continue discussing their wedding plans or whatever other nonsense people talk about when they are in love. A dead body just splatted on the ground twenty feet away! Nobody can ignore that. At the very least they have to think, “WTF!” and call 911. After that, you are free to get rid of the boring park people and focus the narrative instead on your brilliant but flawed detective who seems groggy and uninterested in the fact of a body falling out of nowhere, but is really three steps ahead of everyone else at the scene because of his amazing powers of observation and his unparalleled network of underground informants.

CAR BOMB

Let’s face it, starting a car isn’t the most fascinating thing in the world, but if you plant a pound of C-4 under the driver’s seat and rig it to explode when the ignition key is turned, it gets a lot more interesting. Many lesser writers try to make car-starting more interesting by not having the car start, especially if the character is in a hurry or being chased by zombies. But this just prolongs the agony of car-starting—and besides, it’s a cliché. It’s much better to make the car blow up, incinerating whoever is inside, leaving everyone to wonder who planted the bomb and why.

People never get tired of exploding cars—or exploding anything, for that matter—so you’re on safe ground there. Just make sure your main character isn’t inside, or you are going to have do some fancy writing to bring her back to life: It was an identical twin in the car; the body isn’t who they thought it was; the character’s soul left that body and entered another body that was dying at the very same moment in a nearby hospital; the character in the car was beamed up by aliens just before the explosion—that kind of thing. Readers never get tired of finding out that someone they thought was dead is really alive, though, so however you decide to fool them is fine.

AMNESIA

One of the best ways to give your plot some momentum is to involve your main character in an accident that almost kills them, and have them wake up in the hospital with amnesia. This tactic never fails, because when your main character has amnesia, it means everyone else in the story must spend a great deal of time reminding them who they are and why anyone should care. Which of course gives you, the writer, plenty of time to figure this stuff out as well.

How much of the patient’s memory returns and when is up to you, but it’s best if the patient retrieves their memory in bits and pieces—fragments that don’t make much sense and frustrate the hell out of everyone, especially the investigators who are trying to figure out how the accident happened. Because it was no accident. This adds tension to your story. It also gives you an opportunity to write sad and touching but slightly creepy scenes between the amnesiac and their spouse, who is a little too interested in just how much the vegetable in the bed is going to remember when their memory returns, as it inevitably must. Indeed, the trick to using amnesia as a plot device is in convincing the reader that all those lost memories might not come back, even though everyone knows they will.

The amnesia story line is powerful and cannot be used too often. But there is one caveat: Resist the temptation to include more than one amnesia victim in a story, because writing dialogue between amnesiacs can be difficult.

HOSTAGES

Another trick professional writers use to generate movement and tension in stories is to create a hostage situation. This can happen any number of ways. It could be a bank robbery gone bad, or a kidnapping, or a psychotic who likes to torture people. Whatever. The key point is to put one or more innocent civilians in the hands of some desperate, evil criminals who seem credibly capable of murder. After the hostage or hostages are taken, the criminals should threaten to kill them if they don’t get: a) ten million dollars in cash, b) a helicopter to the airport, c) their own plane, fueled and ready to go, and d) a load of pizza delivered, stat.

The beauty of a hostage situation, from the writer’s point of view, is that they basically write themselves. Once the hostage is taken, there must be efforts to contact the criminal or criminals, tense negotiations must ensue, the police have to gather all the information they can about the criminals, and the criminals themselves must become increasingly desperate. To add extra tension to the situation, you can always give one of the hostages diabetes, or make them go into labor. Criminals hate women in labor. At some point, too, one of the negotiators must attempt to approach the criminals unarmed, usually to deliver the pizza and “just talk.”

None of these things is optional, so there isn’t much creative leeway. These are simply the things that happen in a hostage situation, and it is your job as the writer to present them as realistically as possible. Where you, as the writer, do have a choice is the ending. You have three choices:

Option No. 1: End the whole thing in a holy hail of gunfire.

Option No. 2: Allow the police to deftly negotiate a surrender without a shot being fired. (Never very interesting, in my opinion.)

Option No. 3: Have your tactical team secure the safety of the hostage victim or victims, then take the criminal out with two taps to the chest and one to the forehead. Or let a sniper with an itchy trigger-finger finish the job. Just remember that when the bullet hits the perp, they have to fall in slow motion—and slow motion is not easy to convey on the printed page.

So next time you are sitting around watching your characters talk themselves to death, borrow from the playbook of the pros. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for you. 

Mark Twain's Secret to Success: "Use Better Words"

One of the best-known quotes to come out of the Mark Twain Factory of Famous Aphorisms is: “Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”

That’s good advice for young writers, because money is scarce when writers are starting out, so it makes sense to use cheaper words. But as a writer matures and the royalty checks start rolling in, limiting oneself to cheap words is no longer an economically advisable or professionally pragmatic way to proceed.

The truth is, if you ever want your writing to improve, you have to start investing in more expensive words. Or, to put it another way, if you want your compositional labors to yield the most awesomely maximal dividends, you are therefore obligated to purchase at a premium price point the various adjectives, verbs, gerunds, and descriptors you use to obfuscate reality so adroitly and efficaciously on a daily basis.

I can hear the English teachers out there yelling: “No, that’s not what he meant! What Twain was saying was that good writing is not about flowery language, it’s about clear, concise communication. Short words that say exactly the right thing are much better than long words that say the same thing, but with a plethora of unnecessary extra syllables.”

As if.

Now, I’m sure Mark Twain had his reasons for saying what he said. But I’m also fairly certain it had nothing to do with advising other writers how to do their jobs better. Twain was a savvy businessman, and one of the most successful writers of his time. He could also do remedial math. So it stands to reason that if Twain could convince all the other writers of his time to buy up all the inexpensive words, he’d have all the premium luxury words to himself. Such a tactic would also limit the number of writers trying to compete for those all-important fantasmagorical super-words that go into “literature,” because no one else could afford them.

The truth is, Mark Twain did not become one of the richest and most famous writers of his era because of what he wrote. No, he became a literary legend because of his shrewd manipulation of the vocabulary market, and by leveraging his status and success to hoard higher-priced words, thereby limiting their supply and driving up their value.

How did this scheme work? Well, let’s say Mark Twain wrote a sentence with five five-dollar words, three two-dollar words, and four fifty-centers. That sentence would cost Twain thirty-three dollars. Now, suppose another writer wrote the same thing, but could only afford a couple of one-dollar words and ten fifty-centers. That writer would only pay seven dollars for his sentence.

Conventional wisdom would have you believe that the writer who used the cheaper words got the better deal. But—and here’s where Twain’s true genius kicks in—these aren’t sunk costs, they are investment dollars. Five-dollar words may cost more, but the rate of return on a five-dollar word is ten to a hundred times greater than that of a mere fifty-cent word. The average rate of return on a fifty-cent word is about ten percent, so the writer who uses a fifty-cent word is only going to make a nickel off it. But the rate of return on a five-dollar word is anywhere from a hundred to a thousand percent. That means every time Twain used a five-dollar word, he made at least five dollars off it, and sometimes up to five-hundred dollars.

If you do the math the way Mark Twain did, the writer who only invested seven dollars into his sentence made a mere seventy cents, while Twain—who invested thirty-three dollars—got anywhere from $33 to $3,300 back. Throw in the multiplication effect of a review in the New Yorker and a national literary prize, and one five-dollar word by Mark Twain could amount to as much as $10,000. Adjusted for inflation, that’s close to a million dollars a word!

Mark Twain used this simple economic principle to become one of the greatest writers of all time. The more he made, the more he invested in better words, eventually buying up all the ten- and twenty-dollar words as well. Rumor has it he even had a gold-plated, thousand-dollar word mounted in his smoking room. By the end of his life, in fact, Twain controlled ninety-nine percent of all the nation’s literary vocabulary, leaving all the other writers of his time to fight over the remaining one-percent of words available. No one could compete.

When, on occasion, his fellow writers complained, Twain’s rejoinder was, “Cheer up, it’s not like I own the alphabet. Yet.”

So go ahead, be a chump and use fifty-cent words if you want. But if you really want to crack the big time, it’s time to escalate your fiduciary commitment to polysyllabic syntactification. Trust me, you don’t want to live in a world where only a handful of best-selling writers control all the best words. Telling a good story isn’t easy if all you have to work with is the vocabulary no one else wants.

Beyond Lake Wobegon: Setting Stories in Minnesota

Settings in fiction are very important, because without a setting, characters in a story would just drift around in space, wondering where the bathroom is. But there can be no bathroom—or anything else—without a physical dimension in time, and it is the writer’s responsibility to provide this dimension, because forcing characters to hold it for eternity is just cruel.

Describing a setting that exists in real life can be tricky, though, because readers are always on the lookout for mistakes.

Suppose your story takes places in the year 1993, and you describe a character ordering a Butterfinger Blizzard from the Dairy Queen on West Seventh St. in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you haven’t researched that particular DQ carefully, some annoyingly alert reader is going to pipe up and point out that the DQ on West Seventh didn’t start selling Butterfinger Blizzards until 2001, so there.

Then they’ll wonder: If you couldn’t get that simple fact right, how can they trust the accuracy of other details in the story? Furthermore, doesn’t the blunder of the bogus Blizzard cast a shadow of suspicion on everything you have ever written? Do you think us readers are stupid?, they’ll say. Do you think we’ll just sit here quietly while you go around making shit up? From now on, is it going to be necessary for us to fact-check every detail in your stories? We don’t have that kind of time, they’ll whine. And besides, isn’t it the writer’s responsibility to do at least a scintilla of research before tossing in details, like the Butterfinger Blizzard, that can be easily checked by calling Dairy Queen headquarters and requesting a menu from 1993, or by locating someone—someone like St. Paul resident Josephine Parker—who worked at the Dairy Queen on West Seventh for fifteen years, from 1995 to 2010, and knows exactly which Blizzard concoctions were rolled out and when? Isn’t that your job, writer-man?

Writers in the Twin Cities get these kinds of complaints all the time, because—as several polls have shown—Minneapolis and St. Paul are the most literal cities in the country. It has something to do with all the colleges and universities here, combined with a climate so unforgiving that it cannot be accurately described with figurative language. In Minnesota, when people say they are freezing their ass off, there is a high probability that their ass cheeks are literally frozen and, if they don’t get inside soon, will turn black and fall off in hand-sized slabs of frost-rotted ass-flesh.

Likewise, when comedians come to town, it is often so cold that they can’t even think of a joke. There’s no room for hyperbole or exaggeration, because everything in Minnesota is so amazingly great/awful/weird/sad/beautiful/smart/terrifying/virtuous that simply reporting the fact of its incredibly awesome extremes is difficult enough. In Minnesota, entire newspapers are devoted to reporting the many ways in which Minnesota out-does every other state in the union, and every local magazine at the grocery store is a “best of” issue. There’s no gray area, no in-between—it’s either the best goddamn hamburger you’ve ever tasted or the worst blizzard or tornado or flood in history. Literally.

Because Minnesota readers are so highly literal and fact-bound, many Minnesota writers prefer to invent fictional settings rather than set their stories in real places. The most famous of these imaginary hamlets is, of course, Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, “the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.” (That’s how you can tell Lake Wobegon is in Minnesota—because it’s so fantastically perfect that it can’t get any better.)

As place names go, “Wobegon” is a great one because it is pronounced “Woe-bee-gone”—as in, get out of here, you goddamn bees—and because it sounds vaguely Indian, even though the residents of Lake Wobegon are German, Swedish, and Norwegian. But it’s not necessary to give your fictional town a ha-ha-that’s-clever name. Sinclair Lewis, another Minnesota writer that time has forgotten, invented all kinds of silly-sounding towns—Gopher Prairie, Banjo Crossing, Tuttleville, Zenith—and placed them all in a whole new state, Winnemac, which sounds more like a lottery scratch-off game than a state worthy of fictional America. And he won a Nobel Prize!

The thing Minnesota writers must always be wary of is inventing a name that sounds too real, because many towns in Minnesota sound like someone made them up. Coon Rapids, Embarrass, Sleepy Eye, Motley, Pillager, Nimrod, Climax—all of these town names are disturbingly real, so inventing one that sounds more real (but isn’t) can be a challenge. That’s why, when the founders of Minneapolis/St.Paul were looking for a clever name to describe the unique character and quality of these charming, river-straddling metropolises, they said, “Fuck it, let’s go with Twin Cities.”

Sure, some people objected: “They’re not twins. They couldn’t be more different. And they’re barely even cities. Don’t you think it’s over-stating things a bit?”

But the name stuck, because all the best bad names were already taken.

The lesson here is that the name of your fictional setting is not as important as the quality of your descriptive prose and the overall feel people get when they read about the place you have invented. There are many ways to achieve this important aura of verisimilitude, but in general every good fictional town must have a café where people can meet, a church where people can argue, and a discreet place where teenagers can procreate. It also helps to have a small local radio station that’s unregulated by the FCC, and at least one creepy person who stays in their house all day so that people can invent rumors about them.

The next challenge is filling your fictional town with all kinds of eccentric but harmless people who are quirky enough to be interesting, but not so quirky that the police need to get involved. Loveable grumps and slightly naughty nuns are good characters to include, as are artists who work in unconventional mediums (ice, auto parts, mud slurries, roadkill, etc.), gorgeous young teachers in search of true love, and judges who wear surprising things under their robes. The key is to populate your fictional town with people whom readers wouldn’t mind having as neighbors in real life. Remember, fiction offers an escape from the daily drudgery of people’s lives, and everyone hates their neighbors, so providing them with a steady supply of people who aren’t as deranged and annoying as the people next door is comforting.

The driving force of any good story is conflict, though, so every good fictional setting needs heroes and villains. As an example, here’s a brief description of a fictional city I am currently developing for a comic-book series that I hope to spin off into a movie deal. I haven’t mapped out all the details yet, because it’s a whole city, not just a town, but these are the basics:

The setting: Gollum City. It’s a dark, lonely metropolis where the sidewalks are empty and every time you step outside it has just rained. Wet, glistening streets reflect the tail lights of passing cars through fingers of steam rising through holes in the street—holes that visitors mistake for manhole covers, but really are gaping craters in the pavement. Criminals run the city, and the government is corrupt (villains all)—but there is one man (our hero) who is dedicated to fighting these villains. Our hero does his work at night, and wears a costume to hide his true identity, so the citizens of Gollum have named him after another nocturnal creature of the night: the wily skunk. Skunk-Man cruises the city in a tricked-out diesel Oldsmobile that spews clouds of greenhouse gases, and he neutralizes evil-doers by spraying them with noxious fumes that paralyze the perp’s nervous system just long enough for the authorities to arrive. Also, there’s something in the water supply that makes the criminals of Gollum look weird. Often, they take the form of an animal—a duck, lizard, or beagle. The regular citizens of Gollum aren’t affected, so it’s fairly easy to tell who the criminals are—though they, too, sometimes disguise themselves as household pets. Specifically, gerbils and goldfish.  

Again, I haven’t worked out all the details, but as you can see, Gollum City is a visually compelling place with quirky, interesting characters—and, because the city is policed by the story’s hero, the actual police are little more than an afterthought. And yes, Gollum City is in Minnesota, but it doesn’t sound anything like Lake Wobegon because that’s already been done and, frankly, everyone is sick of it. Also, I pride myself on originality. It would be unethical (not to mention illegal) of me to borrow ideas from other writers. Besides, as everyone who lives here knows, life in Lake Wobegon is nothing like real life in Minnesota. Through Gollum City, I am trying to invent a fictional cityscape that more accurately reflects Minnesota as it is today—but in a fake, made-up way that only sounds real.

I just hope readers can tell the difference. This is the Twin Cities, after all—the most literal place in the country, figuratively speaking.