In over twenty years of reading damned near any writing book I could get my hands on, a very few select quotes have stuck with me as belonging to the Major Arcana of communication. One of them, attributed to journalist James Reston of the New York Times, associates public relations with “the art of denying the truth without actually lying”. Working in marketing myself, I can attest to the veracity of that observation.
Our world has always been neck deep in denying the truth. Conservatively, I’d say 90-95% of allegedly objective “news” found on television today is public relations spin of some kind, and perhaps 75-80% of print media. So when something hits the airwaves that sounds a little too good to be true – such as the recently announced Amtrak “Residency” program – you have to know that it is.
And the more I think about it, the more I find to think about it.
The idea itself is a mashup of attractive and silly. Amtrak plans to give away a couple dozen train trips to creative professionals, so that today’s up and coming writers and artists can discover their work’s potential while enjoying the romance of the rails. I mean, who wouldn’t want to sign up for that?
Dan Zak over at the Washington Post did a pretty good job dissecting the Amtrak Residency program as basically a scam cooked up by their marketing department to get a bunch of free advertising:
Math, the antidote to romance. Also deflating: The Amtrak Residency’s terms and conditions, which prescribe a search for publicists, not the next great American novelist. Applications and writing samples that pass an initial evaluation will then be judged by a panel “based on the degree to which the Applicant would function as an effective spokesperson/endorser of [the] Amtrak brand.”
Definitely worth a read, even if the program itself doesn’t interest you.
What amuses me is that over 8,000 people have applied for this thing. Any professional writer knows better than to sign up for this kind of deal without reading the fine print – especially the copyright transfer elements – first, which tells me quite a bit about the program’s crop of applicants.
The folks who are jumping at this aren’t budding novelists and professional wordsmiths, but the aspiring and lukewarm dreamers. The guys sitting in Starbucks with their Macbook Airs, Charles Bukowski t-shirts and Kindle editions of Kerouac twiddling around with bad poetry and “stick it to the man” anti-corporate manifestos. The rebels who live on the rail.
“On a rail” is a reference to video game design, referring to games that offer only the illusion of choice but actually don’t leave much room for choice at all. Most first person shooters are on a rail, moving relentlessly forward, driven by the needs of plot and little else. It’s a safe and predictable way to build a game, and many, many highly profitable and entertaining games have resulted from it. The appeal is essentially the same as reading a novel, watching a movie or locking into a great TV series: you’re guaranteed (or should be, anyway) a satisfying story arc that reaches a solid conclusion.
The true “rebel” writer icons – Hemingway, Kerouac, Bukowski and the like – weren’t rebels at all. They were screwups, misfits and misanthropes. They became writers because they were unable to successfully become anything else. They sure didn’t live in neat story arcs.
So I look at this Amtrak program for writers and just think, damn, what a great metaphor for the writing life. A program created by a public relations department, carefully engineered to produce a profitable result, aimed at such a specific group of people. The vast wannabe armies who want to be writers but can’t abide life off the rails.
The truth – the truth so often denied about the writing life – is that the work is usually a mere consolation prize. After you’ve spent years or decades screwing up, making short shrift of opportunity, and muddying your way through shambling relationships and weird experiences, the least you can do is learn to properly tell stories about it all. At its best, the work acts as a kind of do-over for life, empowering you to reshape some of that chaos into a form that offers order and meaning without succumbing to the rail. And that’s okay. That’s the way it should be.
And I’m very grateful for that opportunity. My life would be significantly emptier, bleaker and lonelier without it. I wouldn’t be able to look ahead and see hope the way I do today, instead only seeing the scenery and signage placed along the rail by the professional deniers who got there first.
The life isn’t always fun. But it is always interesting. And, thankfully, we can usually get good stories out of it.