Words, Words, Glorious Words and the Tool Called the Dictionary

I have about as much focus and energy today as can be expected of someone who slept poorly, shovelled ten inches of snow a couple hours ago, has another sick cat to deal with later today, and spent the night unnecessarily buggering about with words: words, the bane of all mankind, so easily misconstrued and so widely misunderstood – and yet vital. I could wax pathetic on the poor vocabulary of the average modern human being, but that would be unfair to the handful of people who have a decent vocabulary, and it would obscure the actual topic of this blog, which is an altogether more specific gripe of mine: the inability/lack of desire of folks to use tools like, oh, dictionaries…for example.

My immediate gripe is about the differences between the words efficiency and efficacy. I won’t post all the definition options here, but will stick with the main ones:

• Efficiency means “the state or quality of being efficient;” and
• Efficacy means “capacity for producing a desired result or effect.”

Now, most everyone grasps the meaning of the word efficiency, but it seems that efficacy escapes many, despite it being interchangeable with the term effectiveness. (Yes, I could always use the word effectiveness and eschew the use of the word efficacy altogether, but gods above, that seems like a pointless reduction of the vocabulary of language just to suit ignorance, and that rubs me the wrong way.)

You might be thinking, “But what’s the beef?” Well, the meat in my grief sandwich over this is that for the fifth time in a year I have had someone insist that the two words are synonymous, and declare that with a degree of self-righteous authority that is deeply frustrating. When I became so annoyed I said, “look up the definitions,” I got a reply that doesn’t bear repeating, but it translated along the lines that dictionaries weren’t meant for synonyms. Whether that is true (it isn’t) more or less remained irrelevant to the efficacy of my suggestion, which was that this ignoramus needed to educate themselves by use of a tool that would, if used, have made it possible to observe that the two terms are not synonyms at all – they means different things altogether. (They could also spend a moment to look up the word synonym, which might further free them of a delusion about what it means.)

Now, I realise that the actual issue here is the person in question is stubborn and arrogant (so am I, but I still use a dictionary to self-check), but the deeper issue is that they are convinced a dictionary is good for only one purpose – spelling! I mean, really, if you cannot come within ten miles of spelling a word, how will a dictionary help you? It can’t; it is about defining words more than spelling them, which is proved by the basic fact it contains, of all magical things, definitions. Stunning though that may be, I find it twice as fascinating to know that there is a human being alive who doesn’t even know the purpose of the tool itself. (As an aside, dictionaries can be useful for spelling, too. And they even have synonyms and wild animals called antonyms.)

Still, all considered now, when did the world’s appreciation of words as tools fade? No one sent me a memo that read, “You must always use the absolute most common term, with no variation of form or tone, in all communications.” I’m certain I would have remembered that. Well, fairly certain…I think.

My gripe is nearly done, but I have this to add: when a language is stripped of all variations, archaic and colloquial, it is dead; and when readers have no compulsion to self-check against a word’s meaning, they are doing themselves a disservice. It is not only the variant subtleties of meaning that get lost, but the opportunity to turn a phrase neatly, and a loss of the flowers that spring from language.

CIBC: The People versus the Evil Empire

This is my follow-up to my semi-annual rant against CIBC, because I stand by a policy of disclosure of the solution/problem/etc.

I spoke to the local branch, and came away with an understanding of the events that clarified the failure:

1. Deposit made: 5250
2. Hold applied: 4250
3. Deposit deemed NSF (not CIBC’s fault)
4. Deposited amount withdrawn: 5250 (but it did not post till this morning, and so there was no clear visible explanation in the online transaction logs – which is the first step to creating a service problem)
5. Hold on deposit not lifted: 4250 (again, no actual indicator in the online transactions to clue the customer in – adding to the problem)
6. Combined amount of hold & withdrawn deposit: 4250 + 5250 = 9500
7. 9500 exceeded amount in account, so accessible balance was < 0.
8. Customer (me) tries to pay bill, gets insufficient funds message, and notices weirdness on balance. BUT, there was no indication anywhere online to even show the deposit was withdrawn (bad, bounced, NSF). Customer, therefore, is confused and makes first mistake…that being an expectation of service.
9. Customer calls CIBC customer services (turns out there are at least 3 separate “customer service” numbers – who knew).
10. Customer wastes a good 20+ minutes on hold listening to music that is too loud, etc..
11. Customer Service Representative # 1 (CSR 1) confuses the living daylights out of already confused customer, to the point where customer gives up all hope. The only valid advice CSR 1 gave was deal with it at the branch. At this juncture, the customer is confused because CSR 1 didn’t clarify the deposit had tanked; using the term charge-back rather than hold regarding an amount of 4250, which was obscuring the truth about what it was. The end result of all this was that as a customer, being confused and somewhat perturbed already, the customer was bedazzled and gave up.
12. Wife asks for details…customer (me) gives confusing account, courtesy of CSR 1. Wife balks, and customer calls again after digging around for more information.
13. CSR # 2 (CSR 2) gets at least half the mystery resolved, cluing in confused customer to the fact the 4250 is related to the deposit itself, same as the 5250. CSR 2 also basically confirms the suspicion that the deposit was NSF-returned to the depositor (the client deposits the cheque third-party). I suspect had I not been so confused, and had not pressed for a definition of the term “charge back” this poor bastard might actually have eliminated the confusion, because in retrospect he was on the right track. But at this juncture CSR 1 had me focused on the 4250 as some mysterious other amount that was going to be yanked from the account on the 14th of December. Customer, in retrospect, makes his own life more miserable. To CSR 2’s credit, at least he left me with a fairly certain belief the account was not compromised. Still, by then, it was hopeless.
14. Customer has sleepless night, largely due to semi-annual CIBC “customer service” experiences that always absorb hours and lead to nothingness. The fallacious thought this is some kind of weird NSF fee gone awry is embedded in poor customer’s head, along with a fear that if the rest of the service experience continues to generate this much confusion it will take forever.
15. Decide to message CIBC support, and after website fails twice, send a third message to the effect George Carlin wasn’t creating a training video when he was referring to customers being bent over. Unable, at that juncture, to do anything more since the service experience is low by that instant it can only be seen by digging into the earth.
16. Wake up to message form CIBC in online message centre, and become annoyed when an attempt to read it returns “presently unavailable” on the first 3 tries. Then I get to it, and reply don’t bother even forwarding it when I do get there, since by now I’m too annoyed to care anymore, and already committed to go to bank anyhow.
17. At 10 AM on Friday, wife takes two hours off work to take care of daughter, and customer (yeah, still me, sadly) goes into branch. I am polite, the issue is explained without any yelling (I know it isn’t their fault), and within minutes we discover that it is already fixed. (See the rest of this missive.) I then get this explanation, which I will note here before continuing my CIBC customer service experience:
1. When deposit was made, the hold of 4250 was set to expire on the 14th (totally legitimate).
2. When the deposit was determined NSF, the transaction system flagged it as coming back out, but instead of automatically dusting the hold and just withdrawing the cash, the hold was left on.
3. When the withdrawal of the NSF deposit was noted, the hold remained on. Since the gross amount on-hand less that deposit was less than 4250, the account was essentially at a < 0 available balance.
4. It turns out, while I was there, at the branch, it “fixed itself.” (See point 20!)
5. Still, I have no explanation for $14.11 credit that occurred, but I was too tired to flog that dead horse at that instant.
18. Went to spend time with daughter at Stay’n’Play; got home to receive CIBC support message. Already annoyed by CIBC, so I called back and I was irritable. What lit my fuse again was that the person who called (CSR 3) said it was “about my blog.” Bad choice of words, really, because it raised two issues: first, how did they connect my phone number to my blog without accessing my account information, and was that a valid protection of privacy; and, second, why is it a blog entry gets a response but two calls to support result in such poor communication I end up more confused than I started? I grumbled and vented in my return message, which might have been avoided if the first time I called them back the CIBC phone system didn’t dump me into a void, making me stew for a five minute stretch before cutting me off. (And, as a note, bad customer service that results in a blog is usually bad enough that at that point even attempting to contact the person is going to annoy them.)
19. CSR 3 called back after I left my bitter message, and I did the civil thing, apologising for making my angst her problem – she, after all, was not the failure point. I conveyed the idea that what this really was, was a problem created by poor customer service: concerned customer calls twice and gets no clarity; communication is so bad they are, in fact, more concerned after two calls; and the historical experiences with CIBC customer service only make the situation worse. In essence, the NSF was what it was, and it happens; the problem here though arose because no one communicated effectively.
20. CSR 3 reveals she actually lifted that hold amount manually, explaining why at the bank it was magically lifted. (Now, assuming she had not, then technically it would have been on there till Monday?).
21. I tell CSR 3 to look into that credit of $14.11 because I doubt it is correct, mostly because nobody can tell me where it came from. maybe it is valid, but I detest not understanding even a credit. CSR 3 says she will try to discover the credit source, and will leave a message about it when discovered.
22. CSR 3 offers $100 by way of apology, which I decline, observing all I wanted, and all I ever wanted, was the problem to be fixed – it is fixed, so I intend to go on my merry way.
23. CSR 3 reveals that the numbers I called were, in fact, a source of less reliable support than the one she was reachable at. (Who knew there were multiple support centres? Why are there?)

Now, I still stand by my statement CIBC executives are sociopathic pricks, and if they all died in a fiery explosion we would be better off, but I need to observe that, weird as it may be, the problem with CIBC is not its workers. The workers are decent, and try to be helpful, and I am sure that CSR 2 and CSR 3 were both trying their damndest to be helpful. (I am not so sure about CSR 1.) My guess is that my confusion made the job of CSR 2 harder, and obscured the opportunity that I grasp the problem sooner. And I know for sure CSR 3’s job must suck something awful, since I doubt very much most people as frustrated as I am are as polite as I try to be to actual humans. I apologised to CSR 3 a few times for my tone, etc., and it was due to them – because they are of the people, and not the “Evil Empire.”

Still, here are some additional thoughts about why the CIBC empire sucks a tailpipe:

• Yes, the client buggered the cheque and it ended up NSF, and CIBC should have withdrawn the deposit. BUT, their system should have instantly reconciled that the “hold” (never say charge-back to a customer when hold makes actual sense) and cancelled it. What they created by not having that happen was a condition where the actual negative balance potential existed; they made that happen; they created the root problem, regardless of how it was triggered. That kind of double-dipping is probably an intentional “feature” of their system, because I can see how in large deposit business accounts that could neatly give the bank possession of funds for longer stretches. I may just be a confirmed cynic, but since this kind of behaviour is a banker’s standard, you just know it was a by-design condition.
• Second, when such a transaction is taking place, post a note to the online transaction list. The thing reflects payments out in real time, so there is no way it could fail to reflect that transaction. That is, unless there is a reason not to; but it would be a stretch to make one up. Someone chose to create a lag there, for a reason, and whatever that reason is, it must be beneficial to the bank. Now, I get the need to prevent drawing on cash related to a deposit that fails, regardless of why, but to not post the details to clarify it is asking for grief.
• Third, when a hold is attached to a deposit, and that deposit fails to clear, there is no rational reason to have that hold not automatically die with the transaction reversal. The fact someone manually reset it, or took it off, or whatever, suggests a by-design situation. But what conceivable reason would there be for that? Are the banks systems that badly designed? Or, is it intentional?
• Forth, when you have “customer service” it needs to be delivered by one contact point, all the time, because otherwise (even if the support tiers are valid) you are assuming your customers can decipher those tiers by themselves. Had I been able to speak to CSR 3 on the first call, I would never have had an issue. After all, CIBC isn’t at fault for the rubber cheque, and had they done a handful of things differently, there would never have been a problem.

In fact, let me wax longwinded a moment about how this should have happened technically:

1. Deposit in.
2. Hold applied.
3. Deposit bounces away.
4. Deposit withdrawn; hold removed.

Had that happened, my beef would have been with the NSF cheque and the client, and CIBC would never have heard from me at all.

But that didn’t happen, because their system is not discarding holds on defunct transactions. Sadly, I expect that earns them cash, since the customer who ends up with no available balance, even where one should exist, is essentially prevented from using their cash. The longer a bank holds a deposit, the longer they work it. For large accounts that could easily give them access to millions for days at a time.

Yet, even after such a failure, there was ample opportunity to turn a seriously irritated customer into a pussycat. The steps are easy:

1. Have one customer service number, so the client is talking to the right person the first time, or at least doesn’t waste a good 30 minutes trying to figure our which point of contact to try.
2. Train CSRs to avoid industry terms, and focus on clarifying for the customer rather than adding to the confusion, and who come across like they want to assist rather than bored. (That’s a polite observation about the impression CSR 1 left; and an observation that charge-back, while probably a correct term, is not something most folks are familiar with.)
3. Provide access to people who can identify the problem, for real, and give the customer the necessary understanding to deal with it. In some cases, it is all about knowledge.
4. Provide access to people who can fix the obvious problems, and will, because they know it’s right to do right. My whole dance would have been reduced to a 10 minute call had I access to a person with knowledge, because the issue was pretty obvious in the end.
5. And, while an aside, if you want us to use the online systems, make sure they work, because every time a point of contact fails, the issue grows more complex.

CIBC as an organisation is like the Evil Empire of Star Wars, in that it is too big and run by nefarious MBA graduates and the like. Individually its workers are trying to help, but they are hampered by an intentionally complex model that benefits the bottom line. That is where the problem lies; it satisfies the greed of the executive suite to leave it as-is..

As a final note, since I need a whopping big post just so I know my venting is complete, NEVER offer the customer/client cash to try to make them happy. That will work for the limited few who value cash above all things, but the vast majority of people want to have a solution, not what, after so much forced customer contact, feels like hush money. For a lot of us, it is a tad insulting, because it suggests our good opinions can be bought. They cannot, and many of us resent any company that thinks otherwise. Yes, I know, banks are about money – CIBC is not the only greedy cesspool in that industry, not by a long shot – but, shocking though it may be, most people are not as greedy as their bank. All we want is to be serviced without feeling like the purpose of the service is to bend us over a table and give us a limp.

There, now I feel satisfied I vented well.

 

Next time I might just vent about something more useful than a bank.

CIBC: The Bank Who Works Its Customers Hard

For the past several years I have been regularly involved in doing work for my bank, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). I never get paid for it, since it is work correcting their errors on my time, at my cost, wading through their tiers of mostly useless customer support. You can count on CIBC to make simple errors large, and painful, and to abuse you as a customer at every turn. They have no moral, ethical, or even rational substance, since almost always in the end this sort of nonsense takes a toll on all involved, and yet, paralytic ignorance of service and greed combine for them to test the patience of saints.

Let me tell you a story (only the most immediate in along line of sometimes even more ridiculous fumbles I have suffered at the hands of these corporate shills).

I get paid well to do what I do. I am far from wealthy, since I have a family and debts, and like all people the tax man carves a huge hunk of my money away before I even get to see it. I am stolidly middle class, but essentially self-employed, and so I have no benefits, and nothing like a medical plan. I pay for myself and my family, work hard, and have no shame about what I own, because I worked damn hard for it. As a self-employed person, I am an anathema to banks in general, yet I have never missed a payment on anything, not even a bill, and have never overdrawn my accounts anywhere; I have a low level of commercial debt (credit cards, etc.), and spend hours a month declining more credit; and I have an excellent functional credit rating, which I maintain diligently as I am nearing freedom from my debts. In any rational world, I am the customer a bank should treat with some respect, because I use their services, I always pay what I owe in full and on time, and I hardly ever cost them anything in terms of their time – I almost never even walk to the counter. I am a low-maintenance, potentially high-value client.

Yet CIBC believes that George Carlin’s skit about bending the customer over was a training video rather than a sarcastic jab in the eye of multinational commercial entities.

I presently work pretty much exclusively for a single client, and twice a month they deposit money directly to my CIBC account. The cash goes in, the bank holds it to rape it for interest for a week or whatnot, and then they charge me various fees to use my money. Such is the world, and this is accepted by all involved. Now, as a self-employed person, I pay my GST, my taxes, etc. My clients have in the past buggered up a deposit, and I accept that this happens. I even accept the NSF fee that adheres to a bounced deposit, though I wonder how the CIBC rationalises this to cost $42.50 when it is largely automated. Still, this, a bouncing deposit, is where my adventure of the day begins…

Prior to the deposit I had a couple grand sitting in the account in question, free and clear of holds and other encumbrances. After all, being Christmas and that I have a 3 year old daughter, I thought having some ready cash was possibly useful for helping Santa along. I also had some in there to cover sundry bills, being as life costs.

The deposit went in, and I ignored it as I usually do, knowing well it is all earmarked for the tax man, etc. Basically, half of what I earn services various expenses of the business, taxes, and all the rest of those costs that make it possible to earn a  living at all. I know this, and I seldom cut into what I call the mid-month deposit, because it is spoken for. In a weird sense, there is/was no pressing reason I needed access to this cash; I could survive days without even seeing it. (Of course, it can take 5 to 10 days to clear at times, so I do tend to recognise it has gone it; I like being paid to work, and do remain conscious of the obligations I have that are paid from these funds.)

Tonight, I had a mobile phone bill – business-specific – and decided since the cash had gone in, and would clear whenever, I would pay the bill. It was a mere $60, which meant that even if the entire deposit was held, I had about two grand in there; somehow, my arithmetic implied $60 was less than $2,000. So, I went online – saving the bank service effort – and entered the bill, surprised to read the feedback “insufficient funds.” I assumed at first I had mistyped the amount, but then noticed I had an available balance of zero (the actual balance line was correct). I scratched my head, since according to every visible part of the online system it said the same thing – the money, even if partly held, was there.

So, I committed the first act of bravery for any CIBC customer – I called customer support. I was deafened by music, on hold a couple dozen minutes, and finally pressed enough buttons to speak to a human being. She gave me the impression I was a hindrance to her, and was useless in terms of explaining this phenomenal loss of access to all my money. This customer service representative (CSR) told me there were two pending ‘charge backs,” totalling about $9,500. She would not even confirm the source of these, though I immediately realised one was the amount of deposit, and so probably the client had done me a NSF favour (yes, sarcasm). She claimed the charge-back equalling $4,250 was a mystery to her,and advised only my local branch could discover its source. She provided me with such a wonderful CIBC-specific level of service I eventually gave up, and sat in my stressful state hoping the account had not been compromised.

My wife was not pleased I had given up, so I ended up having to call back, to get an explanation of what a charge-back was in this context, and see if I would win the CIBC service lottery, which is the rare moment when the only decent CSR is free enough to actually try to help. I managed some success, and the chap confirmed several points: the larger charge-back was because the client cheque was NSF; the other charge-back was also spawned by that same transaction; and on the 14th I would actually owe them about $2,200. (Nice to know; Merry Christmas to all CIBC executives, and may your multimillion dollar homes be invaded by aliens with probes who can introduce you to the experience you provide cheerily for your customers.) In essence, I was being charged about $9,500 for the cheque the client bounced. The CSR had no way to help, and no knowledge of the cause of this massive second charge-back. He advised only the local branch could help, but did at least reassure me the account was not compromised.

Now, at this point I had wasted a couple hours I should have been working; and I wasted another to call the client and confirm that yes, despite their being sufficient funds, the cheque did manage to come back to them. I was therefore armed with at least a confirmation that, even if an erroneous NSF moment, the deposit had failed to take. In that conversation the client grumbled the other charge-back was madness, and observed they were charged about $50.00 for an NSF, this remark in passing. And it was a remark that spawned my next wasted block of time.

I wasted another 30 minutes of my life searching the CIBC website to discover that their NSF fee was $42.50, which, suspiciously, is two decimal places away from the mysterious charge-back value of $4,250. This implies some clerical error misplaced a decimal. Of course, the side-effect of this is that I now have no money, and on Monday I may be $2,200 in the hole – all because CIBC made a mistake, could not even fathom it during two “service” calls, and has the arrogance to make it my management task to physically appear at the branch to argue my case. (I do realise the fault is ultimately all mine for banking with these infuriating pricks, and I am feeling chastised by my stupidity – expecting them to treat me as  customer. Ha!)

I expect that many people are familiar with this sort of customer-centric service, of which CIBC is a mastermind. Yes, they will probably bow and correct the error, and I may even get my money back; and my credit rating may not suffer a black eye because they are stupid to the last shred of their inhumanity; but, at the crux of the issue, the problem is that in making me manage their stupidity, they are treating their customer with an absolute indifference, at least, and more pointedly with disrespect. I am not probably wealthy enough to qualify as a “good customer,” and their attitude is, “let him manage our inability to provide service.”

Now, my wife cautioned I should be nice to the local branch manager. I will be, I observed, but I ought not to have to be. Tomorrow, I will add to the 4 wasted hours tonight. I expect it will cost at least 2 more hours, not because any of the local people are ignorant in any way, but because the systemic structure CIBC has in place is designed to fuck the customer. I will therefore have to prove that I am right; and meanwhile they will hold me hostage at their whim. And they will, based upon my past experiences, slip a probe into the collective asses of their own frontline people, making it almost impossible to help me efficiently. They have no moral, ethical, or even rational basis for this type of behaviour other than that it is accepted; and that the people who perpetrate this sort of business behaviour are untouchable.

Here is what will probably happen: I will go in when they open at 10 AM and wait, explain myself fully, and they will then have to confirm it with at least two tiers of defence of the bank’s interests. It will matter not one whit I am obviously correct, or that everyone agrees it is ludicrous to charge me a fee for an NSF deposit a client made that is almost the size of the deposit itself. Everyone will agree that the number was improperly keyed somewhere along the way, because no other possibility will exist; everyone will agree it is wrong – and no one will have the authority to just fix it. They will leap and grind like crack whores, trying to resolve the simple wrong their organisation committed, and possibly even succeed – but it will take two hours; maybe even more. Maybe I will even hear the words, “It should be corrected by Monday.” No matter how hard they try, no matter how much the local branch wishes to help, it will be made complex and more frustrating because they too are meat in the CIBC grinder. The only thing CIBC loathes more than its customers are its workers.

Here is what has already happened:

• I spent 4 hours tonight figuring out what was wrong for the bank, which I could have spent with my wife and daughter, or earning money, or just picking my nose.
• I am now stressed near Christmas by bankers’ stupidity, because even a few days delay here can cause a cascading mess for me with credit ratings, bill payments, presents for my daughter, etc. (Thankfully, CIBC doesn't give a fuck, which is at least some solace, and removes some of the angst I feel. Really, it does, because I would feel so much worse if they were ashamed of themselves for being so organisationally incompetent.)
• Tomorrow, when I am supposed to be at a Stay’n’Play session with my daughter, which is the highlight of my week, I will be in a bank, doing the job of the bank, for free, losing time with my daughter that cannot be valued in dollar terms. Again, thank the gods CIBC couldn’t give a shit.
• Tomorrow, my wife will have to take time off work to care for my daughter, losing her pay, while I work for the CIBC again.

And in the end, I will probably get what I want: access to my money, this erroneous charge-back corrected, and all of it done in a reasonable amount of time (mostly because I will not leave until it is fixed). What I will not get are tonight’s 4 hours of lost productivity, the lost 2 hours of playing with my daughter, my wife’s lost pay, or an apology that matters. What I will not get is the satisfaction that would come from lining up the CIBC bank executives, pathetic cowards that they are, and punching each one in the face for all the folks like me who are sick of being ass-reamed by their inability to manage the simplest service requirements that should exist in a banking institutions.

Why would punching these human wastes in the face matter? Well, because if it was possible, CIBC would not operate the way it does. That, is the actual core issue: if banks were managed by human beings with faces, who had to explain themselves to their “customers,” who could be held accountable for their failures, the failures would never occur. It would never occur for the same reason the local branch manager will genuinely try to help me, because to her I will be a real human being. I will be a human being who she cannot imagine away, whereas her masters are self-important sociopaths who cannot even conceive that they have a level of responsibility to their customers. When corporations became too large, and faceless, they realised that their sole purpose could be raping the society they once served, and any pretence otherwise is lost when one considers that actions do speak louder than words. CIBC – the bank founded by greedy pimps who view their clients as whores, to be abused and sold as necessary to pay for the next big bonus – mastered this method of business long ago, and will never have to change.

Am I angry? Yes. Will I take it out on the small people? No. Should I? probably; because the small people make up the large entity.

Taking away the humanity, I can say three things that are true (though horrible):

• Kill every bank executive alive and there would be a net gain in human society instantly, because they are worthless cowards to the last;
• Regulate banks into straightjackets and there would be a net gain in society (and this is a shocking statement from me, because I am a pure capitalist); and
• I actually can understand why people become so frustrated by institutions they resort to violence, because the institutions are designed to perpetrate violence.

Now, I will basically exist until 10 AM when I can resume my work for the bank that forgets its time is never as valuable as the time of those it pretends to serve.

Thoughts About eBooks

I have been spending the last few weeks wrestling with changes to a free eBook I posted to Smashwords, since I think any reader who enjoyed the book enough to offer some proofing feedback deserves to be taken seriously. I’ve written previously that some of the suggestions were more obvious than others, and noted even the simplest ones end up absorbing a lot of time. As a writer, you tend to have a structure to your writing and process that is inevitably time-consuming, because if you actually write you tend to care enough to bother, and caring is a groin-kick of an experience. Still, many of the suggestions were spot-on, and this experience is an indirect trigger for the topic of this post…the effects of freeness. (I only just discovered “freeness” is considered a real word!)

A writer who publishes traditionally has a technical support system, and while never what one would call a well-paid profession (the Stephen Kings of the world are exceptions to the rule), the support model provides some compensation for the enormous expenditure of time it takes to construct even a bad book, short story, or article. The cost of producing a title in the traditional model is so high that publishers have no incentive to take a risks. So, we have shelves lined with genre pieces, most of them utter crap, to pay for the few gems – many of those gems selling almost nothing compared to the fast-reads that genre pieces supply. But regardless of quality (recently, I discovered 107 obvious typographical spelling errors in a 348 page book by a well-known and decent author!), those support systems offer some offset for the time, and make it possible to earn a reasonable living writing once you can crack the entrance to that world.

Freeness changes all the rules, and my experience with the eBook I’m tweaking is an example of it. While I make decent money doing my real job, it also requires time – and I have a 3-year-old who requires even more time – and I have a wife who gets shorted time regularly. (I have given up having much time for myself, as in the near-term it seems a pointlessly depressing pursuit.) The same time-consumption exists to write a book, as always, and the more you give a shit the more time that amounts to; but because your publication is unlikely to generate cash, it creates a pure cost scenario that, frankly, makes writing almost impossible unless you can afford to spend the time without any hope of recovery. In itself that isn’t a bad thing, because most writers are obsessive narcissists, and we love nothing more than to express ourselves. What it means though is the lack of traditional systems can turn the working process into something far more time-critical.

Freeness also means the following:

• You will never perfect the manuscript for grammar, because no writer can revisit the same text often enough to either explain their cleverness or excise the side-effects. It’s a depressing reality, because while most of us would gladly pay a professional to proof a book, the cost is too high to excuse when you will make nothing from the work. If there was even a way to guarantee enough return on the investment to bring the net cost to zero, it would be a standard approach – but it amounts to layering pure financial cost onto pure time cost, and taking a loss that is impossible for most writers to bear for long.
• You will have to publish much more slowly to avoid a glut of complaints. People make no allowances for freeness, expecting some quality level that meets their personal standards (often exceeding them, in fact), without really honestly asking how this is to be achieved when the producer is handing the entertainment away for free. We all do it, and that is human nature, but from a publication perspective it is difficult when you are the writer, because you are conscious of the quality deficit and often torn between publishing as-is, or maybe never having the time to revisit the manuscript at all. Do you let the piece go to be enjoyed somewhat, or seek some level of perfection and never release? (And once pinned, do you do what I decided to do and invest further time, or flip the readers a bird and chuckle? We all want to do the former, but the cost of it is extraordinary.)

The real crux of this, of course, is that freeness is an expectation on the Internet. It is an issue of economics. When faced by the choice to pay to read the last 50% of a book you like versus reading a free one you also like, we all know the choice that will be made. (Statics I have support the contention, and numbers also support that even a decent selling eBook earns nothing near enough to pay for professional support like proofing.)

The public at large just will not pay for unknown authors, for the most part, because they perceive the value proposition differently. Buy a hardcover and you get a physical product to wrap the intellectual one; it is not the case when you read an eBook. You get nothing physical, and the so the economic view is different. People simply never think about the enormous investment in time a writer made to shape the book, and this is doubly true if the book is enjoyable and you lose yourself in it.

Will eBooks be successful in the long-term? Yes, they will. Will there be stars of the eBook world? Certainly. But will they ascend in quality or descend over time? The latter, I expect, since the compensation model is different; and that represents a cultural challenge.

eBooks are likely to destroy the publishing industry as we know it today, not because of content issues, but purely because reading is a personal experience. There will come a tipping point where the majority of casual readers reject paying for material, and exclusively consume free works. Since there will never be an end to free works, it will reshape the concept of a book (probably lowering quality over time, since most writers will be working gratis).

Will I stop publishing? No. Will I decelerate the process? Yes, because I care about the quality enough to realise I have no option but to do it. I don’t have the spare time to continue to write new works, act as an editor, etc. So, I will end up with far fewer publications, possibly of slightly better quality, and certainly with a much more hardened attitude toward the process. Maybe some day, I will also be proved wrong, and sales of eBooks will reach a level where decent writers can afford to engage a support system to improve the broader cultural landscape. I won’t hold my breath though, as I doubt anyone can hold it quite that many decades.

Character Tracking

A good friend of mine recently asked a question about how a writer keeps track of all the characters in a given story. I thought it would serve as a good topic for a blog, since anything remotely requiring focus is pointless tonight due to an ongoing disagreement with my back. (It disagrees with my contention it is here to hold me upright.) This will neither be comprehensive, nor particularly deep thinking for the same reason – lack of focus. Still, I will attempt to generate some sensible insights.

The flippant answer to his question is most writers don’t keep track of their characters closely…not at all.

Look at any television show and you can see this where in any given episodic teleplay some actor portrays a character who is stuck with the most obtuse lines, necessary to advance the story, but against the established grain of the character. Only a deeply talented thespian can pull off a role like that and not look ridiculous, and even then it is not uncommon to cringe when some poor bastard has to produce a dialogue mash-up. One that comes to mind as I sit here, is on the program Criminal Minds, where the characters routinely spout dialogue that would require the average genius to be a walking encyclopaedia. While the show can be entertaining, and several of the actors are top-rate, absolutely any episode of the show can produce a handful of glaring dialogue twists to advance the story in favour of maintaining the integrity of the character. I suspect when Mandy Patinkin left it had a great deal to do with a worthy actor feeling exhausted by a character that was horribly inconsistent; that he made the character watchable was testament to his enormous skills.

While far less common in novels, and even less common in short stories, there are still examples aplenty in the world where a character suddenly makes a pronouncement that is painfully obvious as a plot device. Some marvellous writers, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, manage to embody this plot progression naturally in a character of such precision and depth that you hardly notice (Sherlock Holmes, in Doyle’s case), and other writers are less subtle (Agatha Christie comes to mind, where Miss Marple has a few enormously amusing expositions here and there, which if read aloud are wonderful but ring false against all the remaining dialogue). In both cases these are brilliant writers, avoiding the precise narrative context since human beings grasp context better via dialogue. This awareness explains, neatly, why so many writers use the mechanism.

The number of times even good writers contort a character to give a necessary plot performance is painful to witness (from a writer’s view), but I think most writers also agree you have to, in some circumstances, advance the plot over characterisation. Otherwise, you get a stagnation that can kill the characters as fast as it can kill the flow of the story. These intentional twists can usually be excused, and are why even the best dialogue is an artificial projection. You have to use the words coming from characters to expose their participation in the plot flow.

As usual, I meander like a hungry cow on a rich pasture, but I do it to get to a destination most cows would not perceive at all, being endlessly enamoured by their browsing.

There are different schools of writing, and the answer to my friend’s question would depend entirely on what school a writer subscribes. In my case, I am a naturalist when it comes to dialogue. I believe three key truths about all dialogue: it cannot be too clean; it is the main formative substance for any character; and it is the core method to advance the story emotionally. Any naturalist will largely agree with those keys, and some on the fringe will add that dialogue must be exceedingly imprecise to maintain authenticity. I don’t go quite that far, since it seems to me that writing is an act of sacrifice, and you need to maintain a balance in plot and character, or the reader will find themselves blocked by the inconsistency of the thematic flow.

What does all this have to do with keeping track of characters?

When I write, I begin in four quadrants with every character, even the smallest. I call those quadrants: history, placement, emotional context, and dialogue formation.

I often write complete biographies for the characters, ending them about the time the story I want to tell is beginning. This gives me a substantial detail pool to tap, and forms a reliable historical basis for interacting the characters. You need to know a great deal more about a central character than will ever show up in the book, including formative details that may have little bearing on the core story being told, because those formative details inform their responses. As a naturalist, I require this level of detail to be in place to obey the dialogue constraints as best as is possible. The more detailed the characterisation in the context of the story, the more detailed the historical biography for that character. (Sadly, what often slows me enormously in developing new stories is that I often have hundreds of pages of life experience notes for any character, even smaller ones, which imparts so many constraints I can then struggle to excise the details more than provide for them in the story itself.) The first pass of these histories is always mechanical, with chronological integrity, a coldness of a distant God, and cause-and-effect linear awareness. Most of this, if used well, is never visible in the final story, but shapes its interactive elements.

Once history is developed thematically, woven inside that history will be “placement,” which is a physical practicality. If a character grew up in Spain, for example, I need to be in Spain with them. I need to see the location at all times, as they would, usually myopically, through a fog of inefficient memory. This is especially true if the story is fantasy, because then the geographical reality has to be impressive (not in the sense people would ever say, “wow,” but in the sense it must have impressed itself upon the function of the characters). Every physical location that informs the character needs to be documented, and woven into the history effectively. If, for example, a given character was drunk the entire time h3e was in Scotland in his youth, it is vital the memory of those locations be flawed by that obscuring condition. There is nothing more disruptive to a naturalist writer than over-descriptive writing that is not informative to the characters. (A deep aversion I have is to describing, in unnecessary detail, the physical aspects of a location that is familiar to the character. No one, in life, save a few oddball geniuses, is capable of providing a sensual inventory of even their bedroom. As soon as a writer flings a five paragraph scene placement at me, I rebel mentally, because it has two deadly side-effects: first, it steps outside the capacity of a normal being, the character, to provide such discrete descriptive inventory; and, second, and far more devastating, it relegates the reader to a passive participant – and I believe, right or wrong, the reader is integral to the story and its perception as a whole.) If a particular location is formative, I will usually go so far as to model it in three dimensions, though I will almost never allow the depth of detail to survive the first pass edit on a story, since it is distracting.

Emotional context then comes into play, and is layered into the history. Contrary to what one might assume, the context here isn’t what I think, but always what “they” think, with “they” being the specific character. When two characters are interactive in their historical context, there will always be variations of perception, and I frequently find reading my own notes introduces new texture to following scenes. What I mean by this is that every character gets their own emotional context, and their own pre-story arcs: this defines them at the outset of the story, and predicts their future reactions to any events. It also, hopefully, when done decently, gives an emotional weight to their presence; the reader can begin to feel their viewpoint, but can also probably perceive the context for that, allowing that sometimes the view of any character can be horribly malformed. This humanity-factor is critical, because we are, after all is done, defined by our emotional context. People today take tonnes of pictures (and then never look at them), because they fear the fade of the tactile and its replacement by the confusion of emotional context. And yet, it is the emotional avenue that informs us about the true personality; it is the emotional avenue that allows us to like or dislike a character, and perhaps even change that perception as a story progresses.

The final formative factor for me is “dialogue formation,” which is the use of the other three quadrant elements to create a structural integrity for their dialogue. For example, I strongly prefer to have a character say only what they can know; and by having these three elements in place first, I can then set the parameters of their dialogue. This is also the place where I can test the interactive quality of a character, and that sets the voice for the story that will follow from those interactions. That voice becomes the fundamental narrative voice, and as a naturalist I prefer to surrender the right of the voice to the interactions of characters, rather than impose my voice. (We all do, eventually, have to do so if we want clarity; but the goal is to avoid it as long as possible. Of course, this is where I stylistically run afoul of so many people: I reject the consistent singular narrative voice for the convergent one that forms by interactions of characters, and this does affect the integrity of the narrative structure for anyone who is used to a single-voice narrative, whether it is first- or third-person.

These rambling remarks finally allow me to provide a sort of answer to the question asked.

How does a writer keep track of characters?

The answer, at least in how I write, is that I tend to know these characters better than I know human beings I coexist with daily. I know their history, the placement within physical terms, their emotional context, and the permissive boundaries for their dialogue. There is no challenge then to writing for them, or keeping track of them, because they are fully formed before the story ever rises. The challenge is not burdening the story with every miniscule detail I know; keeping track of them as characters is easy – they exist.

Probably a more interesting question is whether this form of writing works at all, or whether it is fundamentally flawed. That is for greater minds by far.

Before I close this blog, I’ll add a few tangential thoughts:

• Keeping track of characters during the storyline flow is a matter of simply extending what is known against the contrivances of the plot (all plots are contrived; try writing something that isn’t and readers will wish death upon your ancestors in mere seconds). You already know how the people will react, because you know their historical context; and, yet, it is enormously satisfying when a character refuses to conform. That is a true heroic moment, and they are fun to write.
• Visualisations are vital, and I admit to having sketches and photographs of all my characters (at least while writing them). But I came to a conclusion long ago, which was that it is better to allow the reader to project their emotional acceptance on the visual element of most characters, rather than force them to accept the imposition of too much detail. I also subscribe to a theory that says , in writing, it is impossible to precisely convey subtleties of facial expression and body language. This being so, it is critical dialogue be informative in itself, and the nuances be left to the blunt instrumentation all readers can grasp. I know there are a dozen ways to say a person was sad, and a precise reader will be aware that despair and sorrow are near the top register of sadness, but it is seldom wise to be too precise with that kind of conveyance; the vast majority of readers will not make the differentiation, and you will distract them from the creative infusion of their perception if you are too demanding of either their vocabulary, or their conscious mind.

Now, i will retire my back to its hunched state of pain.