Page 1 Writers' Blog

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.

One of the most frustrating things in writing for our clients is dealing with the vagaries of their feedback. Many times they will reject pieces out of hand, or ask us to just rewrite something because they "didn't like it." If pressed, they will say that the content is either "too impersonal," or "not professional," which, in their limited understanding and ability to communicate about texts are essentially antonyms. Clients are always looking for content that is "warm, friendly, and personal," or "professional and authoritative," or some combination of the two. If you try to get more specific comments, they get flustered, blubber, and maybe point out some particularly dreadful website whose content they inexplicably like. This is not their fault--they just don't have the language to communicate what they mean. Words like syntax and diction are as foreign to them as the superficial muscloaponeurotic system was to me before I started this job.

This week I was dealing with just such a task. I had written some sample content for a new client, Marietta Plastic Surgery, and they liked it, but when the flancer wrote the bulk of the website content, they complained that it was "too impersonal." It's not that the content was bad. Apart from a few technical errors I should have caught, some disagreements these surgeons seem to have with the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, and things they had apparently changed their minds about between the writing call and the content review it was good content. But it wasn't what they wanted. Why not? What was different between the two types of content?

As a person interested in both science and literature, I often find myself turning to metaphorical understandings of scientific problems and looking for mathematical explanations of literary dilemmas, so I turned to numerical analysis to find an answer to this common problem, maybe even a way to check content before sending it to clients.

Because the client described the content as being "just a description of the procedures," my first thought was that the flancer had not used the second person as much as we like to. So I compared the incidence of "you" and "your" with the incidence of "the." My thinking was that "the" as the most common word used in writing, especially technical writing, it could be used as a metric against which to compare the other two. Here's what I came up with:

Certainly, there is a change in the frequency of "you," and when compared to the use of "the," it seems significant (you:the ratios 0.72_A (Accepted) vs. 0.66_R (Rejected)), but it's not as much as I had hoped. However, it does raise another intriguing possibility: the shift in the proportion of you & your is at least as great (you:your 1.4_A vs. 1.2_R). It occurs to me that this might express the difference between talking to the reader and talking about the reader (e.g. "you can get the look you desire" vs. "your surgeon will measure your breast"). To further test this possibility, I looked at the instance of these words on individual pages which have different styles and demands for levels of information vs. personal address.

Main Landing Pages

Main Procedure Pages

"Questions about" Pages

One thing I like about this data is that it expresses nicely the changing style between the pages. From landing pages through procedure pages and into questions pages, the style is supposed to become less personal and more technical, which manifests as a changing you:the ratio: 1.1_L vs. 0.98_P vs. 0.67_Q. The flancer does this for breast reconstruction (1.5_L vs. 0.73_P vs. 0.53_Q) and for body contouring/liposuction (1.6_L vs. 0.89_P vs. 0.71_Q). With the possible exception that the variance between the pages is very high, there doesn't seem to be any complaint there. What about the you:your ratio?

For my pages, the you:your ratios are 1.2_L vs. 3.0_P vs. 1.36_Q. For the flancer's pages the ratios on the breast reconstruction sequence are 1.5_L vs. 2.2_P vs. 0.89_Q and for the body contouring / liposuction sequence are 1.0_L vs. 1.9_P vs. 4.0_Q. So this test doesn't seem to work at all. It is equally unhelpful when I compare content rejected by another plastic surgeon, Dr. Nick Slenkovich, for being "impersonal" and the revised accepted versions accepted as being appropriately "warm and fuzzy":

So something is definitely missing here. Then it occurred to me: what about "we"? When we add this number in, the difference becomes clear. For example, the overall difference in the Marietta content:

This is a huge difference! I used "we" almost three times as much as the flancer. Look here at the difference in our main landing pages:

That's right, there were several pages where "we" wasn't used at all. In so doing, the flancer created a disembodied, personless voice that, though it addressed the reader, didn't connect with them.

Now, if we look at the rejected content for Dr. Slenkovich and its revised, accepted version:

Wow, no wonder the new text seemed more personal, it had ten times the number of "we"s!

Now, let's use this to test a situation where a client accepted one page almost without revision and rejected another page in the same batch without a real explanation (It was "poorly written."):

Which makes perfect sense. In previous experience with this client, Chaikin, Sherman, Cammarata, & Siegel, P.C., I have learned that what they really want is "professional" content, which means that it should be impersonal and explicitly not "touchy-feely." The high rate of "you" and "we" in the rejected content probably made it seem too personal and led to its rejection.

Cutting to the Chase . . .

Based on this analysis, I think that constructing personal content requires the use of both "you" and "we" in significant numbers. To determine whether content is "warm and personal" or "professional and impartial," according to the client's demands, a statistical analysis of the incidence of "You" and "We," using "The" as a baseline can provide significant information. I used the website Livekeyword Analysis to get the numbers.

I was hoping here to find a good sing-along version of "The More We Get Together" to put here (I was thinking of the Shmoo version, partly because his amorphousness expresses well the vagaries of client comments), but couldn't find one. Instead, I'll use this awesome one of "Little Brown Jug." Enjoy!

One of the places where I disagree with many of my fellow writers, here at Page 1 Solutions and in the world at large, is on the use of singular "they." This is technically grammatically incorrect, but it actually has a long history of usage (Shakespeare did it, and he wasn't the first--or the last), and it has increased significantly with the drive for gender-neutral or gender-equal language.

First, a brief introduction for those who don't know what the heck I'm talking about. Consider the following sentence, adapted from our Orlando personal injury lawyer, Michael Barszcz, MD, JD's page on driver distractions and car accidents:

A driver risks a car accident if [ ] takes [ ] eyes off the road, even for a second.

Every place where there are square brackets requires a singular pronoun, and in English, the singular pronoun options are "he," "she," and "it" and their cases. Typically, we use only he and she to refer to people, in which case we are implying the child's gender. In the past, English followed the pattern of many Romance languages, and just used "he" wherever gender was indeterminate. This was known as the neuter or generic "he." As part of the attempt to create a more gender-neutral or gender-equal language, the use of generic he has come under fire and fallen out of favor.

There have been a number of solutions proposed to this problem, including:

Reword the sentence to avoid the issue:

There is an increased risk of a car accident if a driver's eyes are off the road, even for a second.

This option means that you can never enter any situation where a pronoun would be required, such as using it as the subject or object of a verb, or the possessive of a noun. Another option might be to rephrase using a plural form:

Drivers risk car accidents if they take their eyes off the road, even for a second.

Every time you do this, you're basically saying, "I wish I could use they as a singular," and it's time to step up and just do it.

Another option would be to repeat the noun instead of using a pronoun:

The driver risks a car accident if the driver takes the driver's eyes off the road.

Which is obviously no good. And even if you can use this method to avoid the problem on some occasions, it is still not a good option for my job, which requires rewording the same information multiple times which can easily become stifling if you shut off too many grammatical options.

Use "one":

A driver risks a car accident if one takes one's eyes off the road.

This option just doesn't sound natural to contemporary readers. I'll grant it to you if you're Virginia Woolf or if you take up "thou" (see below).

Use "he or she":

A driver risks a car accident if he or she takes his or her eyes off the road, even for a second.

We all know how cumbersome this becomes very quickly. Enough said.

Use "s/he":

A driver risks a car accident if s/he takes his/her eyes off the road, even for a second.

Because of the dissimilarity of the cases of he and she, this solution is generally just as bad as "he or she." Even at its best it is problematic. "S/he" are graphemes without determinate phonemes. In other words, how do you pronounce it? "Ssss-he"? "Sh-[pause]-he"? "She-he"? Or just "she"? I don't know. And neither do you. And if you think you do, likely we don't agree, which creates uncertainty in language, which might be good in language play but is to be avoided if the purpose in writing is to convey information.

Use "she" exclusively:

A driver risks a car accident if she takes her eyes off the road, even for a second.

It seems to me that this solution is no better than the problem it replaces. Plus, it introduces potential problems, if you seem, as you might on this page, to be saying that women are more prone to be distracted drivers.

Use "he" and "she" in equal numbers:

Basically, this strategy means that you need to have a tally sheet where you would keep track of which you used last so that you can use the other one next time. This may be a good solution for some, but to me any solution that introduces an external, mechanical element into the writing process is, frankly, lame. And it doesn't eliminate the problem with using "she" exclusively if you happen to use either pronoun in a place likely to cause offense.

Reasons to use the singular "they":

In contrast to all the above solutions, there are some very good reasons why the singular "they" should be the favored usage:

It's cognitively efficient.

This means that it's easily used by writers and understood by readers without difficulty. In teaching writers, I've noticed that many go first to "they," and then look for a substitute. Also, at least one study of reading speeds seems to suggest that readers take no longer to read a sentence than one using the generic "he." On the other hand, most other options take longer to read.

It has a long and distinguished history.

As I said above, Shakespeare used the singular "they," and he's not alone. Prominent examples can be found from distinguished writers in almost every century until jackbooted grammarians arose to rule by iron dictat.

It's popular.

Because it's cognitively efficient, many people use the singular "they" all the time in their day-to-day communications. I would say that in my classes of incoming freshmen this was probably used regularly by 49/50 students. Admittedly, we don't want to adopt every popular convention (I dare you to put OMG on my gravestone and see if I don't rise from the dead to remove it.), but in combination with other arguments it adds significant weight.

A decent plan today is better than a perfect plan next century.

The problem is here and now. Singular "they" is also here and now. Let's not futz around for another century waiting for someone to invent the perfect neuter pronoun. (I've tried it: believe me, it's harder than it looks.)

It's not the first time it's happened.

Have you ever wondered why we say "you are" instead of "you is," even when we're only talking to one person? It's because "you" is actually the plural second person pronoun. The singular form, "thou," has largely fallen out of favor. But if you take up "thou," I'll grant you amnesty from all my arguments.

And so, that, in a very big nutshell, is why I think we should adopt the singular "they." However, as I said, most don't agree with me, so I will suffer a while longer with "s/he" and all the other inadequate solutions.

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.

After nearly two years writing content for Page 1 Solutions, I have gained a great deal of knowledge about many subjects in which I never in my wildest dreams thought I would become an "expert." Sometimes, I find this newfound knowledge highly entertaining, such as when I get to research the wacky side of plastic surgery for the Cosmetic Surgery Directory blog. However, sometimes, this knowledge makes me sick to my stomach. Elder abuse falls into the latter category.

I have been the unfortunate recipient of many writing tasks requiring me to delve into the horrors associated with elder abuse. As someone with aging parents, I am particularly sensitive to this issue. While my parents are still healthy and vibrant, I worry that a time may come in the next 10-15 years when they may no longer be able to take care of themselves. Since neither my sister nor I live in the same state as our parents, we may be forced to rely on a nursing home or assisted living facility if their health were to fail. My time writing at Page 1 Solutions has made me view that possibility with a sense of impending dread.

When Page 1 Solutions decided to make a concerted effort to participate in Elder Abuse Awareness Day this year, I knew I wanted to be involved in some capacity that goes beyond writing a few extra blogs. So I placed a phone call to my friend Spencer to arrange a concert.

Spencer is the Recreation Director at Mesa Vista, an assisted living facility in Boulder. For years, we have been talking about organizing a concert with my band, Jababa, at the facility. I felt like now was the time to make it happen.

Unfortunately, our guitarist couldn't get off from work in time to participate, so we had to perform as a trio. Regardless, the event was a huge success. Jababa played an afternoon set a couple of weeks ago during the Friday afternoon banana split party. There were about 25 residents in attendance.

The residents seemed to enjoy the show immensely, and afterwards, Spencer told me that several of them were more animated than he'd seen them in years. One resident even jumped on my organ for a few minutes, contributing a solo at the end of one of our songs. Granted, her solo didn't exactly fit into the context of the song we were playing, but that hardly seemed to be the point. She was grinning from ear to ear for the rest of the afternoon.

In my brief time at Mesa Vista, it seemed like the type of facility that you would want caring for your loved one. Staff members were very friendly and patient, and residents seemed to receive quality care. After reading about so many subpar facilities, it was refreshing to visit one that did their job well.

We spent a good half hour or more talking with all of the residents after our set. We discussed a variety of topics including their favorite music, their favorite foods, and life at Mesa Vista. Overall, the entire band had a great time, the residents had a great time, and hopefully there will be another Jababa show at Mesa Vista before the end of the summer.