I am a screenwriting consultant. That means that I help aspiring and established screenwriters and hobbyists alike write better scripts. I help them test their ideas for originality and write characters (and dialogue) with more believability and depth. I coach writers through the rough patches and keep them encouraged and writing. I help them structure their scripts in the way that both hews to classic Greek storytelling ideals but that also best serves their story. I make sure writers see to the boring details like the very specific formatting of scripts, proper language usage, spelling, and so on. Some people would call me a story analyst. Others a writing coach. I think of myself as a therapist, teacher and story analyst. There are many people like me, who work in and around Hollywood. Such is the flow of content coming in to Hollywood each day. And the vast majority of it is just terrible. So writers seeking a better shot at entry into one of the most exclusive industries in the world come to people like me to get a leg up and have a better shot.
But in an industry with seemingly dwindling returns, box office disappointments, and built in exclusivity, it's tough to provide encouragement to those outside the bell jar (LA) much less those in the bell jar - but not inside the citadel.
It is so far beyond my ability to manipulate the vagaries of an industry to achieve the sale of a script for a writer that it is mind-boggling. I would have to be the equivalent of Allen Greenspan, God herself and maybe Sumner Redstone - combined. Even then, Hollywood is a bitch.
It is a Herculean feat to keep trying to break into an industry that for the most part, guarantees exclusion. Except for sometimes. And it is those sometimes stories that keep writers (including myself) trying. It's a lot like Las Vegas. For writers, the desire to express is as powerful an addiction as that to gamble.
Counter-intuitively, innovation of new venues for content exhibition (the iPad, the Kindle, Netflix Instant Queue and of course the holy grail that is the internet) fuels a demand for content that is rising as quickly as opportunities for writers in Hollywood are narrowing.
Writers trying to break in feel patronized, excluded and frustrated. Hollywood is unfair, not nice and does not care how hard you try, how smart you are or awesome you think you are, but rather how successful, connected and talented you appear to be. And this sticks in the craw of aspiring writers like a bitter pill.
Some of the most excluded, bitter writers hang out on online chat boards. They vent by writing epic and epically emotionally violent diatribes about whomsoever or whatsoever seems to be standing between them and Hollywood. It is never the case that their writing is not up to snuff, no, it is that a writing competition was judged unfairly, a consultant gave them feedback that they didn't like or that various learning tools or software were a "rip off".
For the most part, these internet trolls, as they are known, appear to have endless hours of free time in which to verbally filet anyone stupid enough to come into their sights. And god forbid the target should try to defend him or herself. If words could draw blood, their keyboards would be drenched with it.
Online attacks have nothing in common with the wicked sarcasm of Oscar Wilde or the biting wit of Noel Coward. There can be no response, there is no personal contact and there is certainly no reason or intelligence behind the cascade of red hot words. Online attacks bear nothing in common with the most fiery presidential debate you've ever seen. Cyber bullies operate using fear, intimidation and the pure force of their words and sheer perseverance. Cyber bullies post for hours upon hours.
Cyber jerks tend to group together and create online mobs. Torches are lit and carried through message board villages and whomsoever the unlucky one is, with a slight real or imagined is strung up publicly. Tarred, feathered, and humiliated.
Cyber bullying is something we fear for our teenagers but it happens to adults every single day on some website, somewhere. The wonderful thing is that the obvious is true: when one turns one's computer off, the bullying ends effectively and immediately giving one a sense of powerful control. It's not real if you don't engage it.
But if you own a business which operates on the internet and through word of mouth, these so-called flame wars and character assassinations can cost income, reputation and years of hard work at the hand of ten or twelve cyber jerks with too much time on their hands and enough venom to bring down an elephant in three seconds.
Safely and conveniently anonymized behind fancifully named avatars, one wonders who these people really are. Do they have jobs? Relationships? Pets? Are they normally nice but late at night, online, they morph into Mr. Hyde?
I have recently received a drubbing by a very tiny group of internet trolls whom I have never met who spend hours each day in a virtual world that does not exist. And they were upset about something that I didn't say about something that didn't happen. You can try to follow that logic but you'll need an Advil to do the math. I still can't figure it out. But then, I was never good at math.
As I did my due diligence and scrolled through thirty-one pages of personal attacks and vitriol directed at me, my seventeen year old daughter at my side, read along with me in horror, some of the things said about her mom.
But mom, my shocked teen said - the PSA's for TEENS about the internet say you should never write something you would not also say to someone's face. Are these people ADULTS?
The information super highway is equally as much a utopian town square, a rich banquet of information, facts and entertainment as it is a dank, Byzantine labyrinth of dark alleys and sewers. The internet is the new "don't talk to strangers" and "don't get in the big white van".
Are cyber bullying and cyber lynch mobs a fact of modern life? Do moderators have the responsibility for quality-checking replies on posts? Or do users? Is this our brave new world, in which lives, reputations and businesses can be affected deeply by the rantings of an isolated, unreasonable few who demand "freedom of speech"?
The part I find most appalling is that my educated guess is that internet trolls (as they are known) are in general, regular people who would say excuse me if they bumped into you at the grocery store and who would rather cut off their own arm than say to you in person what they say to you anonymously online. It's a secret identity. It's where the rage goes to metastasize.
If I am a public figure do I have no choice? Does being dismantled personally and professionally, without mercy or dialogue come with the territory? None of my detractors in this particular incident are aware that my brother took his life 7 weeks ago and that I am a shell of myself. None know how many hours and how hard I work to do everything I do with integrity. They do not know how much Scotch-American father from Boston gave me a bootstrap work ethic to rival anything Ayn Rand could have imagined. And yet I have been disassembled and shown wanting. By people I've never met who spend hours each day in a world that doesn't really exist.
Is online rage the new porn? Something done secretly and furtively? Is it where helplessness goes home to roost? We tell our children not to be cruel online and we guard them against it carefully. The definition of a bully is someone of whom you are afraid . A bully is someone you make an about-face to avoid. Bullies leave you dry-mouthed and anxious. Bullies just never quit.
Who ARE these people who live among us by day but cozy up to their computers and commit verbal and emotional violence against total strangers in private? Are you one? If your friend were, would you know it?
Show me an internet bully and I'll show you a frustrated, lonely person who feels utterly powerless.
Like Bruce Banner, mild-mannered and polite, the cyber jerk mutates into the Hulk and all that rage, all the unfairness, all the slights of life erupt online. Could be aimed at you. Could be aimed at your teenager or friend.
All over the world, in an office near yours even now, anonymity is the only thing between the average citizen and a cyber jerk. A delicate filament of decency is easily torn asunder when there are no consequences for or interruptions of our words.
In an increasingly sterile world, the internet allows steam-letting and has birthed a new kind of violence: unchecked verbal abuse in the form of rants, screeds and character assassinations.
What have we done wrong as a society that the internet is the last refuge of the silent, emotionally violent types that have nowhere else to go? And more importantly, what can we do about it?
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