Story Literacy & The Shrinking Memory

There's an excellent post today on mystery writer James Lincoln Warren's site about Story Literacy. Go read it. I'll wait.

Hey. Welcome back.

One of my mentors, (my first boss out of Uni, actually) was fond of saying that he thought that the idea of taking undergrad journalism studies was ridiculous, because you were so much better off actually doing a general degree in something else. If you could write, you could learn the journalism. But there comes a certain point where you can't distill knowledge and insight if you don't possess any yourself.

I took Radio & Television Arts as an undergrad, and for the most part, I've never regretted it. Okay, I did waste ten years whoring myself in low-rent infotainment, but nobody's perfect, and I did get to interview P.J. O'Rourke, Peter Gabriel, and Ted Turner along the way. What I missed, though, was the value of a real grounding in the canon.

I make a vow to try and catch up every once in a while, but the victories are few and far between. I'm proud of my Mark Twain phase, and hell, Great Expectations was better than I thought it would be - but there's never enough time to really read and absorb -- not when you're hustling as a freelancer.

What I do have, though, is the benefit of about sixteen years of crushing Catholic dogma. And, unlike some RC's I know, I figured if I was going to dutifully go to the classes, maybe I'd read the Bible now and again, too.

I'm consistently amazed by the number of times I talk to younger writers, (and by that, I mean anyone my age and younger,) and find that they don't know the basic myths, have no knowledge of the Poetics or Greek Drama. Never mind Brush Up Your Shakespeare: there's lots that just haven't read him.

It extends to movies too. Warren talks specifically about Film Noir. I've had that conversation, too. Then there's the comedy writers who have never seen The Marx Brothers, Keaton and Chaplin, or Preston Sturges. Or Drama writers that have never studied Alan Bennet or Dennis Potter or Harold Pinter or Edward Albee or Capra or Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller or Dalton Trumbo or Capote or Paddy Chayefsky or Billy Wilder.

I've met young turks who want to write half hour comedies who don't know who James L. Brooks is. "No, wait," they'll say, and my teeth will grind cause I know what's coming... "didn't he write for the Simpsons?"

This is turning into an old fogey post from someone who's not actually old enough to make one, but bear with me a second here, cause I'm getting to the point.

I started teaching part-time at the same University I attended when I was 25 years old. That means I've been seeing a parade of 20 year olds come through for more than a decade. And what I've found, unmistakably, in that time, is that the cultural memory has shrunk.

Time was, if you were 20, you'd know about stuff that happened long before you were born. You'd recognize who a singer was. If you heard a cover song, you'd eventually find out who did the original and feel a momentary burst of embarrassment that you didn't know that someone had been there before.

This, at least for my generation, was a natural outgrowth of something that we kind of always resented: always being in the shadow of the #%#%@ baby boomers.

Because of the baby boomers, for whom no degree of self-congratulation or self-absorption was ever too great, I think I was thirty before I ever read or saw something where a character was exactly my age...a story that was aimed squarely at me. I don't know if that had anything to do with why I knew who Jack Paar or Steve Allen was, why I got Uncle Miltie jokes or knew that Orson Welles had been the Shadow... but I know that it made my own explorations and creative efforts richer. In fact, it probably caused me to go back further. The crushing orthodoxy imposed by having to know the boomer cultural narrative meant that I went back further: that's how I discovered flappers and Jelly Roll Morton, and Sinatra and Cole Porter.

I've seen a lot of students over the last few years, when they try to sell themselves, say, "I know pop culture." As if that was something to be lauded; as if that wasn't the bare baseline these days.

Effectively, in my experience, I've found the cultural memory of a 20 year old today doesn't stretch much past about 1996. 1996 was "back-in-the-day." You can't make a literary, cultural, or other reference that pre-dates that time, and have any confidence that it'll land.

Unlike when I was growing up, today's newly minted adults (all of them budding screenwriters, or at least so-I-imagine,) have been culturally targeted and catered to all their life. The machine slices them ever thinner, trying to satisfy them by giving them exactly what they want.

Which is great, until you sit your ass down in the chair and actually try to say something.

The Internet is a crazy and amazing thing. It still surprises me that if I hear a snatch of a lyric of a song I haven't heard before, that I can Google it and know who sings it in a minute; not spend weeks hoping to catch an announcer telling me who's singing it on the radio. It stuns me that I can be writing something and wonder if it's a cliche, and Google that line and get 8000 hits and know for sure. I'm floored that I can run across a word or a name when I'm reading something and -- never mind have to write it down and look it up on my next trip to the library -- I can click, type, smack, boom, know it within ten seconds without leaving my chair.

We live in an age when it has never been easier to satisfy your curiousity and thirst for knowlege; and yet lots of you don't seem to be curious any more.

Well...not good enough.

If you haven't read your Bible, read it. Don't assume that reference was from Star Trek. It's easy enough to find out where it really came from. When you're working on a story, Google the particulars, ideas of plot, time, setting -- see what can you learn?

To some of you, this may seem, like, obvious. But trust me, I read a lot of newbie scripts every year.

It's not obvious.

If you're not curious, I don't know how you can be a writer. I simply don't know.