How To Write A Book

Also: Barbie! And other things

I have written a book. In fact I’ve written ten or so, but you probably already have all the others - they’ve been out for ages - so today I’m letting you know about the current one. It’s called 100 Weirdest Tales From Around Australia, and you can buy it right now.

In fact, not only can you buy it, but I’ll go further: you should buy it. I suppose it’s possible that you might not buy it, but if so I could not possibly imagine why. To be blunt, if you don’t buy this book, I can’t help but look upon you as a quite dangerous pervert.

OK, so now we’ve come to that understanding, let’s examine another, oft-neglected aspect of the issue of my having written a book: that is, just how did I do it?

A lot of people come up to me in the street or at the gym or at a regional wine-tasting and tell me, “Good God you are an amazing man. I could never imagine writing a book, for someone like me i.e. a complete cretin it is absolutely impossible.”

Now I don’t like to contradict these people, and there is certainly wisdom in what they say. But actually, they’re not one hundred percent right. While it’s basically impossible for a normal person like you to write a book as good as mine, writing a book per se is not out of the reach of the ordinary or dull-witted. Plenty of perfectly serviceable books have been written by people who aren’t me at all. For example.

But it’s not an easy task by any means. Before writing a book, you need to learn how to write a book. Luckily this is a service I provide.

How To Write A Book by Ben Pobjie, Author Etc.

Firstly, decide what your book is about. With certain specialised exceptions, pretty much every book is, in some way, about something. For example, my new book is about weird stuff in Australia. But not every book has to be about that: in some ways the literary landscape will be richer if they’re not. But whatever your views on that, it’s important that you decide what your book will be about before you write it, or at least before you finish writing it.

There are some who say there are only two stories in the world: a hero goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. They are incorrect. There are many more stories available. Here are a few of them:

1. A friendly tiger befriends an member of the Hitler Youth and teaches him about tolerance.

2. A sexy stepmom is forced to share a bed with her stepson due to a hotel booking mixup.

3. J. Robert Oppenheimer meets the Mummy.

4. A woman calls her son Graham with disastrous consequences.

5. NASA discovers a planet made entirely of ambiguity.

6. The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas.

7. Gamma rays transform a mild-mannered bus driver into Abraham Lincoln’s twin sister.

8. A hobbit develops unusually sensitive hearing.

9. Black people and white people have a fight.

10. An ageing film director makes his masterpiece: a stop-motion adaptation of Infinite Jest.

11. Pants become evil.

12. Toadie from Neighbours in ancient Greece.

13. Mary Wollstonecraft: Lion Strangler.

14. Nude Masterchef.

15. Just a bunch of people spanking each other for hours.

16. The Sound of Music but you set it in outer space so nobody notices it’s the same thing.

17. Dinosaurs return and sue the city council for failure to maintain the footpath outside their unit.

18. A tree and a lumberjack learn to be friends but fall out over their love for the same woman or female tree.

19. Rowan Atkinson Live.

20. A sexy young woman has to eat five hundred hams in a month or her grandfather will be executed.

As you can see, the possibilities are near-infinite, especially when you consider that every subject a book can have is actually two subjects, because you can do exactly the same thing but make everyone the opposite gender. The above 20 are not the only things a book can be about: there are probably four or five others. But I don’t have time to go into those here. Once you have your subject, though, you move on to the second stage of the book-writing process:

Write a first draft. A first draft doesn’t need to be especially good, but it is important to get it out of the way so you can move onto the proper stuff. In fact, to speed things up, it’s best to just copy another book out, call it your first draft, and get on with:

Drum up publicity. You can’t wait until your book is in stores before you start raising awareness. It’s important to get buzz going as early as possible. Preferably, the day you come up with your book idea, you should call every bookstore in your city and tell them you’re about to start writing a book. If they ask who you are, don’t tell them: there needs to be some sense of mystery remaining. From that point on, keep the momentum going: every day, after you finish writing for the day, take a drive around your neighbourhood with a bullhorn, shouting “I AM WRITING A BOOK” continuously. Also, write to reputable newspapers and literary magazines informing them of what your book is about and offering large sums of money for good coverage.

Write a second draft. Your second draft should be perfect. If you have to write more than two drafts, you have to face the fact that you are a bad writer and should give up forever.

Send the manuscript to a publisher. Some authors send their books to more than one publisher, but this betrays a fatal lack of confidence in their own ability. If you send your book to multiple firms, they will sense that you are hedging your bets and throw away the manuscript: no publisher will ever want to be associated with an insecure writer. In choosing a publisher, make sure you do your research: don’t ever send your manuscript to a publisher that does not have a website and/or a phone number. Also, before you send it, call them anonymously and ask how much spare paper they have: it’s no use sending your book to a publisher that doesn’t have enough paper to print all your pages on.

Harass the publisher. Publishers don’t like publishing books, so they need a lot of encouragement. A few calls a day, for several months, should do the trick. Don’t go too hard too early though: bomb threats on the first day leave you nowhere to go. Build up to the threats gradually and in an organic manner.

Sell the movie rights. You can do this on eBay, or at most weekend markets. Be sure to insist on script and casting approval.

Practise your autograph. You’re going to be doing a lot of book signing and you need to know people won’t be laughing at your childish scrawl. An author’s signature should be big and bold and have lots of stupid loops in it for no reason. It should never at any time be recognisable as your name.

From there, there’s only one thing left to do:

Buy a huge house and lots of drugs. You’re now an author!

A Man On Barbie

I’ve seen a lot of comment about the place that men should keep their opinions on the Barbie movie to themselves, because the movie isn’t for them. Out of respect for those commenters, here are my opinions on Barbie.

It makes me wonder when I see “It’s not FOR you” as a response to criticism of anything.

I mean, it makes sense. No piece of art or entertainment is for everyone. For example, I just saw the movie Sisu, which is a Finnish WWII western consisting almost entirely of creative ways to show the deaths of Nazis in graphic detail. As such it is not a movie for, for example, my mother, who lets out an involuntary cry of concern when she sees an open-handed slap in Midsomer Murders.

If my mother wrote a review of Sisu, it would be extremely negative, but would boil down to “they should not make movies about people killing people”. I think of this when I see men give opinions on Barbie which boil down to “they should not make movies about Barbie”.

So I get it, honestly. When so many movies seem specifically geared to the tastes of men, and every time a big mainstream movie of a more feminine sensibility comes along a bunch of whiny man-children sob about how girlie movies are turning everyone trans, it gets wearing.

And even short of the extreme opinions you get from the chronically online, it’s always annoying when any work gets reviewed by someone who doesn’t so much dislike the particular work, but dislikes the whole genre. There’s just no point to someone who hates heavy metal reviewing a Metallica album. There’s no point to someone who hates mystery novels reviewing Agatha Christie. And there’s no point to someone philosophically opposed to feminist themes or movies about dolls reviewing Barbie. There’s nothing wrong with preferring a different kind of movie: it’s just that if you start from the point of view that the existence of a movie is illegitimate, your opinion on its merits or otherwise is irrelevant.

But the other side of that is that, while no piece of art is for everyone…they also sort of are. Because anyone should be able to give any piece of art a chance, and while there’s no way everyone will like any particular movie/show/play/book/song/painting/whatever, there’s no real way of predicting, purely from demographics, with one hundred percent accuracy, who will.

So it is that although I am a straight man in his forties who has never owned a Barbie doll, and therefore it would be unsurprising if I disliked the Barbie film, or if I were so uninterested in it that I didn’t even bother going to see it, the facts are these:

I saw it, and I liked it.

And doesn’t that just go to show?

The thing is, that although it’s true that movies about reified little girls’ dolls are certainly not what I would naturally gravitate to, clever funny comedies with good writing, good casts, brilliany visual aesthetics and loads of sweet pop culture references definitely are. And Barbie’s all of that, so I liked it.

See, you never can tell. My mother would hate Sisu, but another 70-year-old grandmother might love it. There’s no age limit on enjoying seeing Nazis stabbed through the brain, right?

So this is why I get the whole “It’s not for you” thing, I also kick against it a little, because if you decide something is not for you without even giving it a look, you might be depriving yourself of something you love - and if you declare that any particular segment of society has no right to an opinion on something, you might be selling them short.

But that doesn’t mean that posting your review about how Barbie is the filmic equivalent of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto and Margot Robbie might as well have just filmed herself diving like Scrooge McDuck into an enormous pool of severed scrotums is a reasonable way for an adult to behave. And frankly, Barbie is not only a movie in which the male lead gets all the best lines, but I think there’s an argument to be made that it’s actually pretty pro-man - as long as you don’t believe that nothing can be pro-man unless it endorses the status quo entirely.

The point is - I think, if I recall correctly - Barbie is good. It’s funny, and it’s fun, and I had a great time watching it.

But.

Of course there’s a but - why would I bother to write about a movie if there weren’t a but?

Barbie is good, but it could’ve been great. It could’ve been perfect. It had the potential to be sensational.

And to be clear: yes I’m writing this as a man, and Barbie has never meant that much to me, so I don’t kid myself that the movie means as much to me as that part of society which for delicacy’s sake I shall refer to as the more vagina-ey half of humanity. A lot of people are going to find that Barbie strikes deeply in a place that is far more important than quibbles over narrative structure. That’s pretty cool.

But here are my quibbles over narrative structure.

Barbie could’ve been an all-time classic, if Greta Gerwig - or maybe the suits who were looking over her shoulder, who knows what went on in the boardroom - had managed to make a real decision about what the movie was about.

As it is, Barbie keeps switching its focus around, hedging its bets and trying to be three or four films at once, and it loses because of it. The pieces are all there, but they’re not deployed as well as they could’ve been.

Take the song I’m Just Ken. It’s an AMAZING song. Totally brilliant. I’ve been listening to it over and over, I love it.

But it’s obviously in the wrong place, right? Like, so obviously that it’s weird nobody working on the movie noticed.

It’s a song of self-actualisation, in the classic musical tradition of “I’m unsure of what to do, but by the end of this song I will have asserted my identity and steeled myself for what is to come” numbers. It’s also a song that deals mainly with the sadness Ken feels at being rejected and disrespected by Barbie.

There are two places the song could’ve gone: before Ken decides to accompany Barbie to the real world - after being told she doesn’t need him, he would sing it as a way to work through his insecurity and galvanise him to go with her after all.

Or it could’ve come right after Ken returns from the real world: if Ken, with his new knowledge of patriarchy and the self-confidence that brings, had attempted once more to win Barbie’s heart but been shot down again, that could’ve led to the song as the pivot point in Ken’s life: the moment when he decides damn it all, I’m not going to take this. The song, in fact, would work perfectly as the representation of the emotional trigger for Ken putting his male dictatorship in place.

Instead, the song comes on the eve of, and then in the early stages of, a battle between the Kens, which in itself isn’t a very interesting part of the plot and seems to kind of just sit there in the story because the writers didn’t quite know how to get from A to B. But the battle between the Kens isn’t related to the themes of the song: the battle comes after Ken has already established patriarchy, after he has already declared the supremacy of Kens. He’s already done all of the stuff that would naturally flow from the emotional arc depicted in the song.

Either make the song about the events at the time it’s sung, or put it in a different place. Put the song earlier and it wouldn’t just be a brilliant song, it would actually be a huge boon to the story.

Speaking of the story, what is it? Is the movie about Barbie saving Barbieland from the invasion of the negative vibes of the real world, or is it about Barbie saving Barbieland from the tyranny of the Kens that the real world unleashed, or is it about Barbie empowering America Ferrara and her daughter, or is it about Barbie’s journey of self-discovery in learning she actually wants to be human and therefore needing to escape the evil Mattel executives who want to put her in a box, or is it about Barbieland needing to make changes to its society to make it richer and fairer for all?

The movie as made is kind of about all of these, at different times, and there’s just not enough time for it all. At times it makes it disjointed. At others it just feels rushed.

I personally think Barbie should’ve had a lot more time in the real world, playing the fish out of water bit, learning about the ways of humans and having her eyes opened. That way she could’ve come back to Barbieland and put her newfound wisdom to good work, either battling Ken’s idiotic macho view of the world, or teaching the Barbies that there’s more to life than the plastic cliche Barbie ways.

In fact if she’d learnt more in the real world, Barbie could’ve been the hero who comes back and delivers a fierce speech about the difficulties of being a woman. As it is, America Ferrara does, and that speech kind of comes out of nowhere for no reason. She does it because she is so sad that Barbie doesn’t think she’s beautiful and smart - but she’s spent so little time with Barbie that it sounds empty when she says it, because she can’t really know anything about Barbie except that she’s a doll she loved as a kid.

And while we’re on THAT subject, America’s daughter’s rant about how destructive Barbie has been to women would carry a lot more weight if it weren’t delivered at a point in the movie when the girl has no reason to think Barbie is anything but an escaped mental patient. Geez, give the kid a LITTLE more time to interact with our heroine before she goes off on one. As it is, she calls Barbie a lunatic, then ten seconds later, having been given no reason to revise her opinion, she’s wasting her breath with a feminist monologue that only makes sense if she’s swallowed the “I’m Barbie” story wholesale.

More time with the kid, and her mother, and Barbie interacting in the real world before we get to grand declarations and monologues would’ve been great. It would’ve made the story make more sense, and also meant America Ferrara’s character didn’t seem superfluous to requirements and her daughter was something more than an irritant who shows up, plays the scowling feminist for half a minute, and then just bobs along for the ride for the rest of the film.

Or maybe Barbie doesn’t need to spend more time in the real world. Because maybe the real threat is from Ken and his co-Kens. In which case, make that the story. By which I mean, make that the focus of Barbie’s character arc - because, you know, she’s supposed to be the main character, right? Once Barbie returns to Barbieland she’s practically sidelined: she just kind of goes along with things that Weird Barbie and America Ferrara want to do, and then turns into someone who yearns to be a Real Girl for reasons that are not quite clear, unless it’s just a really strong desire to have genitals?

That’s the thing: at the beginning Barbie has her world, and it’s shaken by disturbing developments, and she sets out to make things right. Great! Brilliant stuff. But as soon as she leaves for the real world, she begins a process of changing her motivations and her goals over and over until it’s uncertain just what the hell her story even is. In fact for a good chunk of time, it doesn’t even seem to BE Barbie’s story. After going back home and being dissed by Ken, she goes into a funk because she’s “not pretty anymore”. Where did that come from? Not only does she have no reason to think she’s not pretty, that was never the issue anyway. That’s not even the point of the whole Ken takeover. It’s just that, having hit a dead end in the script and not knowing how to get out of it, Greta Gerwig pivoted without rhyme or reason to Barbie suddenly having entirely new problems, so that America Ferrara can deliver an inspirational speech and a plan can be hatched that doesn’t really make sense.

At the beginning the problem was that bad feelings about Barbie in the real world were leaking into Barbieland and disturbing the natural order of things. By the end this problem has not been addressed. Everyone’s kind of forgotten it ever WAS a problem.

I’ve gone on a lot about what I think is wrong with Barbie, but of course it boils down to what I think is wrong with most movies: the director has made it without checking with me whether I could improve it. They’re always doing that, and it’s foolish.

But please, go see Barbie! It’s really funny and joyous and totally worth seeing, probably multiple times. And in all the history of Hollywood, poor screenplay structure has never been a barrier to a film’s success, so it’d be really unfair to start now.

Weekly Random Thoughts

• There are people who will have watched the Logies this year, and yet will still watch them again next year. Is it any wonder we can’t get action on climate change?

• Have you heard of this game called cricket? It’s fucking horrible. I hate it.

• There’s a game called rugby, too. Even worse.

• Did you know I’ve written a book? You can buy it.