Trump

Lie of the land

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I know we’re not really in a post-Trump era yet, but it feels as if we are. It feels as if not every post has to be about Trump, that he doesn’t colour everything any more, or wear everything down. For the first time in years, it feels as if we can have other concerns and even enjoy tiny, little ones.

Such as this. I don’t think I’d have had the room in my head before to notice but this week one school in America replaced all its world maps with a different design. This one school’s decision slightly narked me, slightly made me frown, and completely reminded me of a true story. It’s a story about the map they chose and ultimately it’s about one person’s ego.

When I said world map just there, you pictured what I imagine you know is called the Mercator map. Strictly speaking, it’s the Mercator projection. And what this school says it has changed to is called — if you listened to its creator back in the day and you didn’t find him as irritating as apparently everyone else did — the Peters projection.

You know this one, too. It’s the one where the world looks funny, where every country is oddly skinny.

I’m not going to name the school because I don’t know it. And I’m not going to criticise them because I hope they’re teaching their students what this all really means. It’d be good if they also taught about map gerrymandering by politicians to redraw districts so that voting favours them, which is clever and abhorrent and not the story I want to enthuse about with you today.

Anyway. The usual claim is that Geradus Mercator’s map is wrong and Arno Peters’s one is right. Mercator did his in 1569 and Peters, well, borrowed his in the 1970s. He brought this out then and shouted about it so much that quickly people pointed out to him that exactly the same idea had been done by James Gall in 1855.

It was exactly the same because it would be. These two designs, Mercator’s and the Gall-Peters one, are not paintings, they are maths. If you believe that Mercator’s map is wrong, you are correct. But the Gall-Peters one is precisely, I mean exactly as wrong –– just in a different way.

Proponents of the Gall-Peters version say that Mercator distorts the shapes of countries, that he makes ridiculous decisions that make smaller countries look as big as, well, big ones. And that their version shows every country in exactly the right size. Ta-daaaa.

The list of things I love about this started with Peters pissing everyone off so much that they searched back into the 1800s to find a way to diss him. And it continues with how that claim about Mercator’s distortion and Gall-Peters’ showing the correct sizes is simultaneously entirely true and entirely bollocks. Isn’t that wonderful? If anyone ever insists there are two sides to a story and won’t listen to you saying there are usually more, settle the discussion by pointing out that both sides can be bullshit.

I’m going to take Gall out of it for a second because by all accounts he knew what his map did and did not do whereas Peters, though he must have known, pretended it was perfect. So there’s Peters, way back in the 1970s, righteously adamant that his map has the correct sizes of every country. And if anyone should point out that the sizes are right but the shapes are not, he’d point to someone else and say “Next question.”

It is not possible to have a flat map of the world that doesn’t have something wrong with it. If you want a correct map, buy a globe. The act of transferring a map from a sphere to a flat surface is an art, sure, but it’s chiefly maths. It’s called projecting the globe onto the map and you have to make certain decisions about which way you’re going to do it.

Sometime in the 1990s, I interviewed the owners of a Geographical Information System, a GIS, and asked them about this. These two men looked over their shoulder to see if their PR person was listening and when she wasn’t, they nodded at me with these gigantic, enthusiastic grins. And then they showed me how their GIS map is really exactly as wrong as everyone else’s. It was a very good system and you had to do an awful lot to it to hit this projection issue in any way that would be a problem, but you could do it.

You just don’t have to be a dick about it.

If Peters had been like Gall and just said here’s a map, it does this, it doesn’t do that, well, he might not have been noticed, there may not have been much attention paid to him. He talked himself up, though, he claimed a creation that wasn’t his, he reportedly slammed all alternatives. Oh, god. You’re thinking this too. He did claim he had the best maps and he was lying.

Anyway. Here’s the thing for me. I like Mercator’s projection and I like it for a very specific reason. The Gall-Peters projection is usually used as a political tool. It is used by people who know full well how maps work but reckon you don’t and so they can say they’re putting right centuries of misrepresentation.

Whereas Mercator did his map in the way he did because it does a job. Mercator did not set out to misrepresent countries or distort continents, he set out to make a map that ships could navigate by. Use his map and you got where you were going. That’s it.

I like that honesty of purpose. I like that purpose. So if we have to have maps that are wrong –– and we inescapably do, it is impossible to have a completely correct map of the world –– then I vote for Mercator. I vote for the one that was designed to help everyone, not for the map some eejit used to aggrandise himself.

That list of things I love from this tiny fact of a school changing its maps. I said that Peters was apparently so irritating that people not only looked up the previous James Gall version, but they also rubbed Peters’ nose in it as much as they could by always referring to his projection as the Gall-Peters one.

They stopped short of drawing on it with a Sharpie. But they did very quickly call it something else.

The Unmitigated Gall-Peters projection.

Count on it

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I’ve been asked to do a talk on plotting next week –– you know, around the time we may finally know the who’s the leader of the free world and who’s Trump — and you also know, I hope, that it’s not going to be me who does the talking. I have to tell this group something, I suppose, but really they’re going to talk, I’m going to listen, and we’ll probably discuss, well, I don’t know the name for it. See what you think of this, please, and tell me if you can think of a word to describe it all.

Last time I did anything like this, I wrote out what I called the Ten Rules of Plotting. Of course they’re not rules, of course there were Twelve of them. But I thought it was a useful kind of –– guide? list? brochure? — or something. Chiefly because I thought it included some things — nuggets? pearls? a third thing? — that could help you avoid the kind of plot choices that make your audience switch to Netflix or your reader turn to looking up the US electoral college count. Again.

It also had –– suggestions? tips? advice? –– on how to make your plot last longer, which is immensely useful for scriptwriters becoming novelists.

And then there is this.

The quickest way to create a plot, I believe, is to think of a character and then ask yourself what the worst thing that can happen to them is.

There is more, as in you really shouldn’t take your first thought. Especially since that first thought is probably that they die. Look for what’s worse and especially what is the worst thing for them, not just for anyone, specifically for them. My usual quick example is when your character is a surgeon and I offer that the worst thing that can happen for her is that she catches her hand in a car door.

That’s career-pausing, could be career-killing, but I think it’s more than that because in my mind this character is an egotist and she’s just had everything that she thinks makes her special deleted from her.

I love putting characters into situations they cannot live with –– and then seeing how they live with it.

To my mind, that’s really character and that’s what’s really interesting and the car door is just a prop. Plots are a prop for characters. But you can find plots by testing your characters.

Which is all well and good, except I have never been more politically aware and we are at a time when it feels as if politics moves on by choosing what the worst thing to happen is.

I love putting characters into situations. I’ve had enough of this happening to us all in real life. And I do know a word for that.

You couldn’t make it up

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Long ago when I worked at BBC Radio WM in Pebble Mill, the sports department had a shelf of highlights on. Large spools of reel to reel tape with the recordings of famous local sporting events.

Only, I can picture that shelf now and I can remember being in that newsroom, looking at the reels and thinking well, er, no. These are not recordings of sports events.

They were recordings of radio presenters commentating on these events instead.

I’m not knocking the commentators, I’m in no way knocking the reasons for keeping the archive. It’s just that although it’s a slight difference, the tapes were regarded as the events themselves, not as the radio station’s commentary.

There’s something in that disconnection that I’ve been reminded of by all the writing about Donald Trump and Brexit. I keep hearing the phrase “you couldn’t make it up” and actually, yeah, you could. I think by now your audience would be a bit bored. They’d want some new characters, they’d be thinking we’ve got antagonists up our armpits, we need someone to be the hero. Anyone. Please.

I think the thing is that you wouldn’t make it up this badly. No matter whether you were commentating on events or especially if you are the poor sod who’s going to make a TV drama about all this one day, your very medium imposes certain things.

Commentators expect to be able to draw on previous statistics. TV drama writers inescapably want light and shade, they want pacing, they want to build to a conclusion.

None of that is available to us. It’s all dark, it’s all unrelenting and statistics are now alternative facts.

Hopefully this is just me but I can’t dramatise what’s going on. It makes me want to go write something else, to write about something or to create something that I can fashion, that I can explore, that I can convey something through.

We have the most visibly, publicly, proudly illiterate people in power that we may ever have had. Yet they are defying writers to comprehend them, they are controlling the disarray we’re in.

Maybe it will ultimately be good. Maybe this will shake us out of habits and patterns that we are used to, maybe it will make us – okay, me – writer better and deeper.

I don’t know about me and what I can do. But I do see journalism trying to fight back and I do see the writers of Saturday Night Live being on their best form in two decades because of it.

Maybe what I’ve been doing is trying to use writing to help me understand. Maybe I’ve been focused on the commentator’s tapes and really what I should do is go to the event.

Perspective

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A friend was telling me of someone he knew whose young daughter in America was grabbed between the legs by a young boy in their school. And – I’m afraid you know this is coming – that the boy said it was okay to do this because it’s what the President-elect does.

This is not the first such event and I’m ill that it won’t be the last, but I don’t think we’re ever going to get inured to it. We’re never going to become so used to it happening that it doesn’t feel sickening. I’d like to do more than shake and vomit but most of me doesn’t know what.

There is a part of me that I’m hiding away from that has an idea, though. It is a writing idea, since I am a writer, and while I’m trying not to think about it because it falls into this area of 2016dom, there’s more. I’ve been trying not to think about it because it is too hard.

Follow. Ever since I heard the story of this boy, I’ve been wondering what I would do if he were my son.

I don’t have children. I do have characters. So the next step in this chain I’ve avoided is to wonder what I would do if he were one of my characters.

I want to say I’d delete him and start again.

But he’s a human being and a character of mine who did this would have to be a human character. I mean human as in a full person, not a cipher or someone in the story for plot exposition, someone there to be the easy target of the foul, numb bile I’ve got.

And that’s where it’s hard.

That’s where I fail as a writer.

No, strike that: this is one area where I fail. If it were the only one, I’d take that and be happy. Well, reasonably happy. Well, miserable.

As a writer, I need to be able to write a character like this and make him real. I could do a fair job of convincing you I’d pulled it off by having a character do certain things, say certain things, but it would be a front. Ultimately you wouldn’t be convinced. I need to have him say and do things, yes, but the inner workings have to be right before the movement and the dialogue is both real and worth it.

I have to understand the character from the inside. Which means I actually have to find a way to like him. No, truly: we all think we’re right, that boy thinks he’s right, and we all find ways to justify what we do. Everyone else is a bad driver but it’s fine if I drink because I can handle it.

I have always, always had difficulty with the fact that I piddle about with text while in the real world women are being raped. So far I’ve managed to hide back inside that text but that’s just harder and harder now.

Even now, even here, even saying this to you, I’m conscious that this is a form of piddling about with text. I’m effectively saying that to become a better writer, I need to get inside these abhorrent characters. Like it matters to the world whether my writing improves. It matters to me, it matters so much, this talking with you matters so much, yet there must be something we could actually, actively do to counter 2016dom.

Except of course there is. I think there is. And it’s piddling about with text. Understanding abhorrent characters is a writing goal but understanding abhorrent people is maybe the only way we can change things for real.

Writing to ourselves

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This is a tough one because I can’t quite form the thought that’s bubbling but I want to try. It’s clearly about the little local difficulty this week, that tiny of thing of Trump getting elected. And it’s also definitely about the disconnection between most things I read beforehand and what a majority of the US public must’ve read.

But other things keep popping in. Like the photo of a spray-painted sign that went went around social media this week. It’s so peculiarly spaced that you have to think for a moment but what it’s trying to say is “Make America White Again”. Forget that it’s an inexpressibly painful statement and instead if you see the photo, look at the symbol between the words.

Here’s someone doing the America-for-Americans crap but he – it’ll be a he – uses a German Nazi Swastika symbol. That symbol had a life long before the Nazi Party but that’s over, that’s gone, that’s erased: this logo is forever Nazi and German. If the painter knows this, he’s just broken his own ambition of building a wall between the US and ‘foreigners’. If he doesn’t know, then he’s even more ignorant than you already think.

Yet here’s an ignorant prick turning to writing. Writing matters. It reaches people: even his hateful message got widely circulated and I’m part of that. We couldn’t be more different, this man and I, yet he wrote something and I’ve passed it on to you.

Usually, though, it is true that we write and read within our own walled gardens. This has been an issue with the rise of Facebook and Twitter where if you don’t agree with someone, you can just remove them from your social media life. It’s definitely a big issue now as the result of the election was a surprise to pretty much all of the media writers. No question, they believed they were right and no question, each article condemning Trump backed up their view.

Only, I don’t think the walled garden idea is entirely fair. At least part of the problem with media coverage of the election is that people lied to them. People knew that it was bad to say they supported Trump, so they didn’t say it. The more they didn’t say it, the more the accepted view was that you couldn’t support this man so the more they didn’t admit it.

Obviously they knew they were lying, obviously they chose to lie, and it follows that they did so because saying they backed this foul man was socially unacceptable. It isn’t any more. He won. So the haters feel they’ve won too. Even if we didn’t have the evidence from Brexit here and even if we weren’t already seeing it in the States, you could predict that hate crimes would rise, that the darkest sides of people would come out into the light. Because they think they can do it, because they know it is socially acceptable to enough people, because their President is truly theirs.

That makes me shake. That’s a walled garden where the people in it have just discovered each other and are crowing about it.

It’s horrible but it’s not new. Even though Facebook and Twitter have exacerbated the walled garden idea, we have always had this exact same thing. Think back to when newspapers mattered: you didn’t see very many dinner dates between a reader of The Sun and one of The Guardian.

Go back even further, no, further than that, keep going, still more, nearly there, here you are. Pre-industrialised society. Whatever were the generally accepted norms in your village could be very different to what was thought right in the next. Back then the barrier was a physical problem of separation, now it’s more human response.

And I’m afraid it is human. We are born into one tribe and even if we leave, we seek out others. Writing has enabled us to leave sooner and spread further, yet we still and always will gather in similar groups. Aaron Sorkin once had a character say that if you’re dumb, surround yourself with clever people and that if you’re clever, surround yourself with clever people who disagree with you. We won’t.

I don’t write to you because I consciously think you’re in my tribe, I write to you because I like you. My Facebook friends are people I like, or people I’ve worked with, or people I’m pretty sure I know even if I can’t quite place them at the moment. Amongst them, there’s been a lot of talk about blocking and unfriending people who are pro-Trump. It is tempting but I’ve resisted because I do want some gristle, I do want to learn and grow and persuade and be persuaded.

But I accept that in the main, I am in a walled garden and I am writing in one. I also accept that this is bad and that we should do what we can to break those walls down.

Only, there is a part of me that thinks this isn’t the problem. If Trump and Clinton supporters are in walled gardens, if Brexit’s Leave and Remain sides are in walled gardens, we probably can’t change that.

What we need to do is make our walled garden bigger than their walled garden. And we’ll do it with writing. You and I.