Perhaps He’s Missing The Point
I do enjoy embarking aboard USS Clueless every once in a while. The good captain Den Beste has insanely long posts, and occasionally outstanding analysis. He’s an engineer by trade, and the worldview this experience affords him is useful in taking apart many situations.
However, he’s grumpy today, and perhaps it’s a fundamental disagreement with, or misunderstanding of, how people operate.
If you read the post you’ll see that he’s groaning under the heavy load of readership; and is annoyed when eighteen people write him to correct some pedantic speling eror or other some such. He really gets tweaked. He’s already compared it to water torture (although the “water cure” might be a better analogy).
As for me, I get one email a week about this website, usually because I’ve commented somewhere else in the blogosphere, not because of the writing. So I don’t have that problem. However, perhaps I could offer a solution.
Robert Heinlein (pbuh) had a similar problem. Heinlein had a different view of the situation, which is apparent in the voice of his character Lazarus Long:
Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motive, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.
Den Beste sees no moving parts because he just writes and allows people to see what he did. Heinlein saw that the lonely writing process is still a form of social intercourse. What to do when he got so popular that he got letters nonstop, in a pre-form letter age? He could answer the letters, but would not get any writing done otherwise!
Heinlein settled on an elegant solution. He and his wife printed index cards regretting his inability to individually respond, but thanking the writer for the time. Sometimes he’d respond more directly if the writer was more interesting.
The result? A large number of people who to this day remember their interaction with the Master fondly and with warmth.
So here’s the point that Den Beste, to my thinking, misses. One reason a person writes is to have influence on how others think or act. By ensuring that enemies were not made unnecessarily, Heinlein improved and deepened his influence by maintaining some semblance of politeness in a difficult situation. (A rule I try to live by: Make your enemies only on purpose. You’ll get enough of them as it is.) Den Beste could have a piece of form email stationery on his computer, a bin different from the Bozo Bin to put pedants and helpfulx1000 emails, and then send all his correction squad a nice note that acknowledges the other’s existence with negligible effort on Den Beste’s part. The emailer isn’t turned off (and never to read again and learn something) due to Den Beste’s insistence on playing exclusively by his own rules. Den Beste doesn’t get the return email and thus gets less annoyance.
Perhaps I should email Den Beste, pointing out this potential solution!
Or not.
7 Responses to “Perhaps He’s Missing The Point”
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April 16th, 2004 at 9:37 pm
“Heinlein saw that the lonely writing process is still a form of social intercourse.”
That is the #1 reason I started my little site. I never really expected anyone to read it. Comments? I wasn’t even going to put those out there. But, imagine my surprise over the number of wonderful people I have had the chance to interact with.
I have always believed that when the joy goes out of an activity – Stop It. I hope you are right and it’s just a bad day for Den Beste.
And please note – this is a comment just because this is a great piece! :)
April 17th, 2004 at 10:06 am
Thanks very much!
I of course am making generalizations about a person I have never met, but hey, free advice is worth every penny you pay for it…
April 18th, 2004 at 6:34 am
Actually, maybe you missed another point: the two “authors” you discuss in the above post have (had; Heinlein died in 1988) fundamentally different viewpoints on WHY they wrote.
I have been reading Steve DenBeste at USS Clueless for over 18 months now (and he has all the previous posts archived) He has said repeatedly that he does NOT necessarliy write just to get his message heard. He bought his own computer equipment( including the servers), he pays for his bandwidth, and basically writes whatever he wants to. That does not mean that it is not almost exclusively original content (some links and reader’s e-mails inspire him), thoughtful, insightful, or accurate (he researches his facts), or that he ignores what his readers send to him. He has written to me personally several times when I have asked him a question, or pointed out links that I thought directly referenced one of his posts.
On the other hand, I have been reading Robert Heinlein’s published works for about 30 years, and I started at the END of his career. Robert Heinlein himself expressed his views on publication many times, but he was basically a COMMERCIAL writer, in that he felt that he MUST give the public what they wanted, or they would go buy someone else’s book (or magazine). The fact that the stories he wrote contained such wonderful, unique and thought-provoking ideas were secondary, because he felt that NO ONE would have ever read them had he not been able to captivate the reader with such great stories FIRST.
That’s the difference! SDB in one sense could care less whether or not you read what he puts out there. RAH had to give the audience what they wanted, and also answer their fan mail politely, to ensure that his reading public would get larger. The fact that both men have such profound ideas, and they also both write (wrote) such engaing prose, just proves that the public knows a good product when it reads it!
April 18th, 2004 at 11:20 am
Cas,
You have a good point, but under the surface I think there’s a different dynamic going on. I agree that SdB says he doesn’t care whether or not anyone reads his work, but his actions to me indicate otherwise–paying for bandwidth, and responding to emails, and cultivating a community of readers, takes real effort. If he really didn’t care about other readers, he’d password protect his blog or post to his c: drive, or write in a journal or mailing list.
I wasn’t clear about that in my original post. Thanks for helping me clear that up. Over the past year or two, I’ve also followed SdB for his illuminating analysis. My personal impression in different posts, like the one I commented about, and his posts on atheism, and similar thoughts, are similar to my experiences with other smart folks I used to work with who were brilliant at technical things but tone deaf when it came to interacting with people on a one-on-one basis. (Even down to the “I don’t care” said publicly and forcefully, indicating that the person did care.) I didn’t get too into that in my post because I’m being impolite by analyzing someone I respect but never met, without good information.
On the other hand, you’re right about style differences. That’s definitely SdB’s house style–take it or leave it. My personal approach is to take more effort in keeping from turning off people if I can avoid it (even though it happens anyway).
September 10th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
[...] to fan mail in “Grumbles from the Grave”. There are references here and there to an index card form of it as well. The actual form letter itself I had never [...]
September 18th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Apropos nothing, were you aware that Heinlein was a former naval officer and USNA graduate?
September 19th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Indeed, but I wouldn’t want to go all nitrosyncretic on ya. Here’s last year’s trip to Kansas City.