Writers' Blog

Bob Ross is an important cultural icon for generations of PBS viewers. I remember discovering him on TV one day and being able to go to school the next day and mock him with everyone understanding who I was talking about. But over the years I have changed my attitude toward Bob Ross and have come to admire him for what he means to us as a society. In more than 30 seasons, he handed out peace, self-discovery, and joy in 30-minute increments, in over 403 episodes.

Recently, watching Bob Ross episodes I have also learned how much he has to say to web writers like me, who have to adapt our traditional writing techniques to the vigorous demands of constant content for our SEO clients. So, here they are: ten lessons from Bob Ross for web writers:

A half hour is enough to create a worthwhile piece of art. Many times, web writers have to produce a lot of content, and it's easy to think you don't have time to create anything worthwhile, but that's not true. 30 minutes is probably not enough to create a magnum opus, but every time you put your fingers to the keyboard, you should try to make every piece an actual unique creation, never "just another blog." If you're tired and bored when writing it, how do you think readers will feel? Give every piece a little something special to reward a potential reader.

Everyone's writing is different. Bob Ross constantly repeated that he didn't want viewers to try to "copy" his painting. He was merely offering people techniques they could use, but they should apply those techniques as they saw fit to create their own unique canvases of joy. When someone tells you there are specific "rules" to web writing or just one way to write a "perfect" blog, page, or article, just ignore them. What makes the web so popular is its sheer diversity of voices, and though there are some techniques that seem to be more popular, when the web becomes saturated with too much of the same thing, people get bored and seek out something else. Don't follow the pack and be the same old thing today. Strike out on your own and be tomorrow's "next big thing."

Depth and distance are very important. What Bob Ross taught was creating the painting in layers to give it texture and depth. Most web content is so superficial that adding depth to your writing can really help you stand out. Trying to create a piece in half an hour puts strict limits on your word count, but you can always sacrifice breadth to create a very focused, detailed piece that answers a specific question for future users.

Delight in your work and get a little crazy once in a while. Okay, so when Bob Ross said stuff like this, he never really went that crazy. But as I said above, if you don't enjoy your work, how can you expect it will bring enjoyment to anyone else? And one way to increase your enjoyment is to always be honing your craft. Experiment with words, syntax, and concepts to constantly refresh the way you write. Let your writing evolve the way nature does it: mutation and selection.

Make up little stories about your work. This goes along with Bob Ross' encouragement to "get a little crazy": he often created narrative arcs to enrich the locations of his paintings. Do the same for your work. Instead of writing to a huge, amorphous web audience, imagine one specific person you are speaking to. Give them a specific situation and background, and speak to the details of their experience. These details also help to give your work depth, distance, and texture.

Overworking will muddy the colors. Bob Ross said that when he was a "traditional" painter he would work on a painting until the colors became all mixed up, leaving him with a bland mess of grey or brown. A light touch, he said, is key to keeping the material vibrant and fresh. The same is true in writing for the web. Spending hours trying to craft the perfect sentence will do nothing but reduce the punch of your prose. "The Moving Finger writes and, having writ, / Moves on." There's always another blog, page, or article to write.

Anything you can imagine, you can create. Don't let the scope of your imagination be limited by what is already out there. If you see something different in your mind's eye, go for it. Whether it's voice, subject matter, or genre, let your wildest dreams be your guide. If you are true to your imagination, you will find your audience. It may be large or small, but it's out there.

A lot of great work will never be seen. One of the frustrations of watching Bob Ross is that he will often have what looks like a beautiful painting and then he will paint something in the foreground. Although it always turns out okay in the end, there are many great details in the painting that simply get covered up and lost forever. Be prepared for and accept this in your own work. Whether it's a fact or phrase that just doesn't fit in the final draft, a piece you love that gets rejected by a client, or one that just doesn't get the traffic or responses you think it deserves, just remember those beautiful details never meant to be seen, and write on.

There are no mistakes, just happy accidents. Which I'll leave open to your interpretation. Everyone has a personal threshold dividing "happy accidents" from actual "mistakes" in writing. Write enough and you'll find your own.

Matthew Candelaria

In an interview with Stan Lee, the comic book legend highlighted the importance of working with artists in creating his comic book characters and stories. He said,

All of my life in comics I have worked with artists, so I've collaborated with them. . . . I feel, when you collaborate with talented people, they inspire you. I would hope that you spark them also. And I find that working with people whom you respect, and who are as eager as you to do things that will excite an audience, that's the best way to go.

Lee credits collaboration as contributing to the vitality and significance of his characters. And it's true that a comic book character is both textual and visual. What a character looks like reinforces who they are, creates an entirely new dimension and helps them to become real to the readers. Unfortunately, comic book publishers seem to have too little respect for this and often put other priorities before ensuring the quality of the art that is a vital part of the book.

A good example of this is The Exterminators, a DC-Vertigo comic that came out in 2002. It was the first time I enjoyed the excitement/anticipation/frustration of following a comic month to month. Up to this point, I'd always been so busy catching up with back-issues and series that there was no need to wait for something to read. But The Exterminators was a good comic and it was perfect for my dissertation (which is on vermin in literature, film, and science), so I was there every month to pick up my new issue.

When the comic began, the artist was Tony Moore, and he did a great job in creating characters. They were expressive, textured, and very real. Consider, for example, Laura James, the wife of our protagonist, Henry. The shape of her face is slightly masculine (square chin, strong nose), a feature that comes out especially when she is angry, as in this picture.

The strength of her character comes out in her features, but she can also express vulnerability, as here when she is being chastised by her boss.

But one thing that doesn't change is her out-of-control hair, which always falls all over, quite against her wishes. When she is assertive, she peers through her hair, but when chastened, she hides behind it. And the texture of it gives a real impression of depth and layers, not to mention the natural color.

Unfortunately, after a few issues, they changed artists on me. They didn't even replace Moore with one artist, but with a rotating cast of pencillers, all of whom had their own style, which might be better or worse, but none of whom seemed to really capture the essence of characters. Here's an example of the same character as drawn by John Lucas, who became one of the regulars in rotation.

I'm sorry, but in these drawings, she has lost her strength and her original character. She's been given more feminine characteristics: softer chin, rounder nose, bigger eyes, larger lips, and smoother, paler skin. And her hair has been changed from its free, unruly, natural mess into cute, in-control curls that are lustrous and artificial.

Next time I picked up my monthly issue, I mentioned my disappointment in the change to the guy at the comic book store (Astrokitty in Lawrence, Kansas). He told me why they made the change because apparently Tony Moore was a local artist and friend of the shop. Apparently, Moore had trouble with deadlines. He was a perfectionist and wanted everything to be right before sending it in and he kept running up against the production schedule, which demanded that every issue be produced on time to get it into my hot little hands every month.

If they'd asked me, I'd've told them to hold the presses and wait on Moore, because once they changed artists, not only the art, but the story line suffered as well. I imagine that the writer, Simon Oliver, initially depended heavily on Moore to help refine his ideas, and when he wrote out ahead of the artists his plot arcs became boring and his characters flat.

My Point

In case you might have lost what I was saying or just scrolled down here to get to the end, I guess what I'm saying is:

Artists and writers produce better work together than either produces alone.

Good art takes time.

Good art is worth waiting for.

Writers, artists, and other creative workers are often familiar with the provisions of copyright, the law that allows creators of work to control how that work is used and secure compensation for use. However, artists have a number of other rights, which are often described as "moral rights." In many countries, these moral rights are acknowledge and protected by law. Copyright law in this country is primarily a capitalist apparatus: it defines the worth of a work in terms of money. It says that if an artist is getting paid, then everybody should be happy. If an artist attempts to assert moral rights, they are denied recourse. Among the moral rights is the right of attribution: the right of an artist to be acknowledged as the creator of a work.

The Case of Alberto Vargas

One famous case where an artist was denied his right of attribution was the case of Alberto Vargas in his dispute with Esquire magazine. Esquire was "The Magazine for Men" even in the 1930s and 40s, when it was roughly the equivalent of FHM or Maxim today. Obviously, this magazine depended on pictures of voluptuous women to sell to its magazines and related products to its key demographic: men aged 18-40. Its current artist, George Petty, began in 1939 or thereabouts to demand compensation commensurate with the value of his work to the magazine, and the editors began shopping around for new talent, when they came upon Vargas. Vargas, an immigrant from Peru, had developed a small but respectable reputation with advertising work for the Ziegfeld Follies, various movies, and a number of product lines. His talent was easily the equal of Petty (see my comparison of their work here), and he had two additional qualifications that appealed to Esquire's publishers: he didn't know the law and he didn't know the value of his work. They would later discover that he also loved to work, would hold himself to so high a personal standard that he rarely needed much supervision, and had a hard time saying "no," all desirable characteristics in an employee. When Vargas produced his first painting for the magazine, an editor suggested changing his name to "Varga" in the paintings, which would be known as "Varga Girls." Both terms were later trademarked by Esquire.

Over time, Esquire gradually increased its demands on Vargas for productivity, to the point that he was producing at least a painting a week for the magazine, plus "freelance" work that the magazine negotiated for him. On top of the volunteer work he did painting mascots for US military units on request, Vargas was wearing himself out, and at some point he got a vague sense that he was not being fairly compensated for his work. When a friend saw the contract he had signed, they urged him to get out of it, which he eventually did.

However, when Vargas left Esquire, the magazine took all the as-yet-unpublished paintings and changed their name to "Esquire Girls," giving Vargas no credit whatsoever for his work. This was easy because Vargas had been told there was no need to sign his paintings, the magazine would use a "Varga" slug (like that used in the image on this blog). Vargas sued Esquire for many things, the right to his paintings, the right to use the name "Varga" that he had built with his hours of devotion to his craft, and the right to be acknowledged as the creator of the paintings.

Although Vargas won an initial decision releasing him from his contract and granting him compensation, on appeal the court found for Esquire (in a decision some note had all the earmarks of a payoff). A countersuit bankrupted Vargas. It would take him twenty-five years to pay off the legal fees from the lawsuit.

Learning from Vargas

In his lawsuit, Vargas argues for the concept of moral rights, distinct from economic rights. Vargas wanted the court to find that although an artist could assign away his economic rights through a contract, the moral rights--including the right to be named as the creator of a work--could not be assigned and therefore remained with the artist. However, the court rightly refused to grant such an argument because the law in this country does not grant moral rights to artists. And it is important to note that Vargas first undermined his own case by allowing the company to change and take ownership of his name and his artistic persona. Ceding moral rights at the beginning forced him to cede all rights in the end.

Since this 1947 decision, there have been some changes to the law that grant some limited moral rights to painters, sculptors, and photographers (the Visual Arts Rights Act), but none exists for writers. This is not unusual, because in this country (despite the demands of some activist groups) we are loath to legislate morality. However, I believe it is up to us as individuals to act morally, and it is up to us as artists to agitate for our moral rights, far more than for our economic rights.

The devil Iago, ever using truth in the name of lies, says,

Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;

'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands:

But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him

And makes me poor indeed.

We all need money in this world, but it is the moral rights of the artist that continue to bind the work to the artist's soul, that allow us to create a body of work, a reputation, and a persona that is ours.

In talking about this issue to my fellow creatives, I have been surprised to find how many of them are either indifferent to it or explicitly do not want their name connected to their work because they are ashamed of the work they do. This is a bad sign for our company, both for the quality of work we produce and for our esprit de corps.

Personally, I am proud of the work I produce at Page 1 Solutions, and I always strive to create work that I can be proud of. I wish Page 1 Solutions took an equal amount of pride in my work and in me.

Wow. Three huge awards. All departments worked so very hard on these three sites, but I must say, the Platinum Award for www.eyes.com is probably the most rewarding for me because of all the hard work Meli in Design and all five writers put into this project.

When Dan first approached me about the writing department producing over 100 pages of content all about eye ball stuff, I was like, "OMG, what are you thinking???" I hinted around that a freelancer could handle it (because our workloads at the time were crazy big, and I just couldn't imagine we'd find the time to produce so many pages on topics that required some in-depth research), but we did it, and we did it by the deadline we were given.

We wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote some more. We wrote about LASIK. We wrote about PRK. We wrote about CK. We wrote about eyes and sun damage. We wrote about age-related macular degeneration, and we wrote about some very gross diseases of the eye. Some very, very gross diseases of the eye.

And while we were writing, Meli was designing her heart out while juggling multiple other tasks (not sure who helped with what in Design so my apologies for that). But I know the design was all Meli and the content was all Jenny, Matthew, Neil, Andrew and me.

With Ashley and Dan leading the way and SEO working their magic, a masterpiece was created.

Congratulations to everyone who had a part in this huge project. Platinum. Wow.