Press 2 To Exonerate: The Hazy Line of Reality vs. Fiction

Like most of the population, I watched Netflix's docuseries Making A Murderer on a binge, staying up too late three days in a row, debating evidence with friends and co-workers, and volleying Facebook messages back and forth with something approaching warmth when the person on the other end failed to see my point. Avery's guilt or innocence aside - because at this point the waters are so muddied I don't know what to think - the magnitude of people who are incensed by the series has led me into some dark arenas of thought.

When I learned that a Change.org petition had received over 300k signatures (most recent count: 450k), and that a (separate) petition asking the White House to pardon Avery amassed over 130k, I said to a friend that while the series raised a lot of questions for me, I'm not going to put my name on anything.

Here's why.

I think the filmmakers did an excellent job putting together a masterful narrative, with pacing that is spot on. However, I don't think their claim of neutrality is feasible. Without wandering into details that would derail this into yet another post about Avery's guilt or innocence, I'll only say that as a fellow creative I understand how lighting, positioning, and framing are influencing the viewer subconsciously. A well shot B-roll with the right score cueing up can sway a person one way or another, and while many of us are aware of that - how many more aren't?

What bothers me much more than the details of one particular case is this - what comes next? The entertainment industry has learned that true crime is a huge money maker, and almost half a million armchair detectives were created in one month - and those are just the ones that put their names on paper. If a well executed documentary can open the possibility of freeing a man from prison without all the facts, how far are we from phoning in to exonerate (or hey, let's go there - execute) our favorite accused instead of voting up our favorite singer?

The more than decade-long popularity of reality shows has raised a generation that enjoys seeing real people in real situations - and it's culminating in a world where one such former star is running for President, and public opinion holds real sway in a murder case.

Reality is a twistable thing, especially in the hands of those who know how to manipulate it. It's possible to report facts - which are stubborn things - and still maintain a bias, and it's equally impossible to find news that is imparted without bias. Colorful stories and people will get the most coverage to ensure ratings, spawning recognition, which in turn creates a manufactured popularity.

And in our culture, popularity equals power.

We've all been brought up in this soup, and it's my opinion that many of us can't differentiate between reality and a skillfully processed fiction anymore. In fact, a recent news story (content warning: don't click unless you have a strong stomach) about a cruise line employee who was crushed to death in an elevator shaft drove home to me the flip side: fiction provides a comfortable escape when reality proves too much... yet it also devalues the event itself.

The vacationers who discovered the grisly scene on board the ship described it as "a real life scene from The Shining," the pop culture reference safely dropping the fourth wall to distance the audience from what it was seeing. Likewise, many eyewitness of the 9/11 attacks described that day "like a movie," comparing it to Die Hard, Armageddeon and Independence Day.

I don't blame any of these eyewitnesses for retreating into the language of fantasy to describe something as horrific as these events, and I completely understand the inability of minds unfamiliar with horrific violence to process it. When fiction is our only frame of reference for such occurrences it is to be expected that we will use such vocabulary. But it opens up the door to the substitution of entertainment for truth, and it seeps into our everyday processing.

In the above video concerning the cruise ship death, one observer can be heard saying, "No, that can't be right! No, that's not possible!" I often find myself saying similar things as reality plays out around me, a statement of denial that instead infers that the speaker truly understands what has occurred, and simply cannot believe it.

My Dad Read to Me - And That's Awesome

I want to talk about two things that go hand-in-hand in my memory.  My dad, and kid's books. I come from a farming family, and anyone who knows anything about farming knows that farmers work hard - and often. My dad came home right around our bedtime, and was usually back in the fields before we were on the school bus. But he made time to read to my sister and I, one book for each of us. Mom would offer - Mom would darn near beg if it was getting late and he wasn't home yet - but we wanted Dad, cause he was our reader man.

Sister and I had a lot of books from the Weekly Reader Book Club, and if you were born in the same decade I was you probably had books whose first page looked like this:

Yeah, that's right, I spelled my name with a "b" at one point in my life. Actually, due to my confusion regarding the number of bumps in an "m" or an "n" and the (I felt) misleading nature of the letter "d," I often identified myself as "Mimby" when claiming my books, something my immediate family like to remind me of whenever I forget that I can be wrong sometimes.

I had a lot of awesome books from Weekly Reader, and other places too. Sure, I had RUNAWAY BUNNY and MIKE MULLIGAN and yes, they rock. I also had some awesome books that haven't stood the test of time in the sense of the big picture, but in my house they were golden.  

I had books that originally belonged to my Dad. And those books have his name on the inside cover - he spelled it right, by the way.

So, I want to hear about those unsung children's books that you wouldn't let your grubby little hands put down. Tell me about the authors and books who've passed down from parent to child, inspiring those moments when you don't need to turn the page because you know the words, even though you haven't laid eyes on it in twenty years. And don't forget to tell someone who read to you:

When You Have A Party & Nobody Shows

When I was pre-published I thought book signings must be glamorous things, with those twisty line corral things like they have at amusement parks, people peering over one another and snapping shots while the author signed the 100th book that had been put in front of her. Yeah, maybe I watched a little too much Castle.

Post-publisehd I've learned this is a myth. Even those of us who are somewhat well known can do a signing with only two or three people showing up - and some of those just happened to hear you tapping on the mic at the bookstore and wandered over to see what was going on. And in a lot of ways this is actually nice because we can give very personal attention to the handful of people that are in front of us.

Much like bad reviews, you build up a callous over the "ouch" factor when your latest signing fell flat. A lot of us travel in packs because of this. It's much easier to laugh off a bad turnout when you go out for drinks afterwards with a couple of writer friends.

I'm three years into published life, and have had some success. I'm happy with my sales, have contracts into 2018, and have a signing or event somewhere or other on most weekends. Do I feel famous?

Um... no.

I recently had the experience of exactly zero people showing up to my presentation and signing.

If this had happened at the beginning of my career I probably would've cried and crawled into a hole. But after three years of speaking to small groups I knew that eventually the day would come when I had my laptop hooked up, a screen pulled down, chairs set up, a display of my books for sale... and no one would be there to see it.

Did it kind of suck? Yeah. It kind of sucked. But at the same time I now have that low as a benchmark. Every signing from here on out will be better than that, or at the worst, match it. It's impossible for negative people to show up to a signing.

So I've hit my low. From here on out, the only place I can go is up.