I used to be a professional photographer. I was good with a camera, and I was especially good at portraiture, which is partly about careful posing, partly about careful lighting, partly about careful composition - and mostly about getting the subject to relax.

What I wasn't good at was darkroom work.

Don't Let The Dark Leak Out!

When I initially set up a darkroom, it was in the pump house. There's more to setting up a darkroom than blocking doors and windows so that the dark can't leak out. A pump house runs about 56F, year-around, and that's far too cold for developer. You can compensate for the fact that cold developer is slower to work, but when you stick your fingers in the developer, you're warming up the developer closer to your skin, and you can't compensate for uneven developer action.

I didn't have equipment that was very good, either. Instead of plastic trays, I had square frames of wood with oilcloth tacked in them, and my enlarger was a cheap piece of junk that had been abandoned by its original owner 3 decades earlier. With enthusiasm and confidence, though, I talked my way into a darkroom job in a big city portrait studio - and found out that the obvious problems were masking a more serious one: my low-light vision was very poor, and I couldn't produce work I was proud of.

He Fired Me

My boss wasn't very proud of it, either, and he fired me. I was insulted at the time, but leaving a job that you're bad at is always a good move, no matter who initiates the move. Thanks for firing me, Ed!

I learned lots in that job that I used in seemingly-unrelated work later on, but one of the greatest things I learned was Doll's Law. I commented at break time to John Doll, a photographer of skill and talent (which are not the same thing) and wit that it seemed like photo contests were always won by amateurs, no matter how big the prize, even when pro photographers were allowed to enter. Of course, he said. A pro photographer knows what he's doing, and he always comes back with a photo, but he'll get it by doing what he knows will work. Amateurs don't know what they're doing, and when you do things wrong, 99% of the time, you end up with crap, and 1% of the time, you luck into a truly amazing photo.

I've been preparing some books for publication in electronic format, and so I've been thinking a lot about the creative process. Doll's Law seems to be an important part of that process.

Bob Was A Starving Artist

I used to employ a woman whose fiance, Bob, was a Starving Artist. He paid the rent with a day job, but every Saturday afternoon, he'd knock out a dozen or so sofa-size paintings of the same half-dozen scenes.

The way he explained it, those paintings were sold in weekend sales in Holiday Inn rooms in various cities. He first did a painting. When that the marketing people decided that the painting looked like it had potential, they asked him to make five more copies. If he was able to mass-produce the painting, they exposed that painting for sale - and if customers bought it, they had him produce more and more copies.

Bob had little respect for those Starving Artist paintings and the people who bought them. I thought otherwise, but as I pointed out above, if you are doing work that doesn't live up to the standards you set for yourself, you end up hating your job.

And He Did Boudoir Portraits

Bob also did portraits. The process wasn't a whole lot different. The paintings were so-called boudoir portraits, paintings that women had made for their husband or boyfriend. He had the women step into his shower, with the sliding glass door half-shut. They'd be leaning back and peering out into the bathroom, and their nudity would mostly be obscured by the steam on the glass. He'd take a photo, and deliver the painting a week later. In practice, the photo was mostly to get the face right; the rest of the image changed little from woman to woman.

He wasn't very happy with those portraits, either, although the women and their husbands were really pleased with them; he had a steady flow of customers from referrals. What he wanted to do was Fine Art paintings, meaning every painting was different.

Fine Arts Painters Are Duplicative, Too!

When you look at fine art painters, though, you find that they may produce the same art for a decade or more. Pablo Picasso went through his "blue" period. Thomas Benton Hart seemed to do his romantic industrial art forever. Frank Frazetta's wonder science fiction paintings varied little for decades, because he got everything right. Who knows how long Jackson Pollock would have done his amazing abstracts had he not had a fatal drunk driving accident.

The same situation holds for all creative artists, whether it's painting, literature, dramatic arts, music, sculpture, or what-have-you. Creative people have to invent themselves, and sometimes reinvent themselves, creating something that satisfies themselves and the audience they choose to address.

And for half a century, recording artists have reinvented themselves with each album, not filling each one with songs randomly chosen, but ones that are selected to contribute to a theme. I think we've lost something when we stopped buying our music by the album, and started buying it by the single cut.

Doll's Law And The Album

Some songs on an album will be greater successes than others, but the album structure has forced an artist into the disciple of a theme. Without that discipline, perhaps the artist will be satisfied with a good song, and move on to another concept, instead of fully investigating the every corner of their chosen theme, finding a rare gem that wasn't obvious at first. The singles artist is like the professional photographer, who consistently produces a good photo, but never achieves a great one.

I'm in the process of preparing some books for electronic publication. Legacy publishers kept few books on their "back list" because of tax implications. Until you destroy unsold books, you cannot fully deduct the costs of preparing the book for publication. With e-books, most of those costs go to zero, and it makes sense for the self-published author to keep his book available forever. Instead of the 100,000 books currently available to a regular bookstore, within a couple of years, there will be tens of millions of titles available.

Good News For Novelists

That's good news for fiction writers. If you liked "The Runaway Jury", you'd probably enjoy all of John Grishham's books. If you liked "The Search For Red October", you would probably enjoy all of Tom Clancey's books. Most self-published novels sell for $1 to $5, instead of $30 apiece, so it's reasonable to assume that a reader discovering a great novelist may well buy everything the novelist has written.

And that really helps the novelist. If someone enjoys a novel and buys a $30 that's published on paper, the author makes less than a quarter of what he'd get if the same reader were to spend the same $30 buying ten $3 e-books.

Of course, that only works for fiction. If someone enjoys Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff", he's more likely to look for more books about the space program than to seek out Tom Wolfe's book on modern architecture.

But I'm No Novelist

And that hits me. Because I have Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism, I can't easily pick up on nonverbal cues when people talk. Since conversation is such a big part of fiction, that means I need to stick to non-fiction.

If someone has 10 fiction books out there, an enthusiastic reader of any of the 10 books may well buy all ten books, giving him 100 times the sales that a single book would generate. By doing non-fiction, 10 books give me 10 times the sales, not 100 times the sales. Rats.

But Maybe....

But the fact that books are becoming incredibly cheap, incredibly portable, and incredibly easy to buy, is probably going to help me more than the expanded back list might hurt me.

Robert Frost said that over the years, he found he could summarize life in three words: it goes on. Unfortunately, he spoke too soon, for in 1963, it turns out that sometimes it doesn't. But there's no point in complaining. It'll just make your enemies rejoice if you do. Electronic publishing is bringing the cost of literature down for readers, and the income potential up for writers. What a great development that is - Doll's Law or not.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Asperger's Syndrome - boudoir portraits - darkroom - e-books - Frank Frazetta - Holiday Inn - Jackson Pollock - John Grisham - Pablo Picasso - pumphouse - royalties - starving artist - tax laws - Thomas Benton Hart - Tom Clancey