I’m on the phone with the manager of my marketing campaign, J. Ryan DiMassa, another spicy little Italian number in my life (gotta love it). Ryan (I have no idea... yet... what the “J” stands for but I’m working on her) has this accent that’s a cross between something you’d hear in Sicily and something you’d hear in New York City. Suffice it to say I could listen to her talk for days without sleeping.
We’re talking about how the blog is doing and how it’s all translating into sales and building a “knowledge base.” The KB we’re talking about is the sheer number of people interesting in adding their creative ideas to the Mardi Gras 3000 universe. Like, even if you have only one tiny teeny idea, if you posted it on the forum and I was like, “Wow! That’s perfect!” then the universe is that much more smarter and richer than it was before your idea. It’s a creative collective. We are the united borg mind... only, uh, without the nasty assimilation tubes... and, sadly, without Jeri Ryan (or Patrick Stewart). Damn. Our collective may never be whole without them. Sigh.
So you go into a movie and you’re sitting in the dark with a bunch of strangers because your ratty friends bagged on you and you’ve got only your jumbo, extra butter, double the trans fat popcorn and a mega stack of peanut butter cups that have never even brushed up against a real peanut. You’ve never seen the movie you’re about to see and neither has anyone else in the theatre but, somehow, as the movie unfolds you find yourself able to second guess major and minor points of the plot and characters. You can tell you’re not the only one with the sudden ability to know the future (minus the ability to paint it onto canvas ala a certain “Hero”) as all around you strangers are groaning at the predictability.
Robert McKee wrote about it best (“Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting” which every novelist should be forced to read before subjecting their manuscripts to over-worked, under-paid editors). When sitting together in a darkened theatre, the audience has a kind of collective mind. All the movies we’ve seen, all those darkened rooms and theatres, we’re reminded of them all. The environment being the same or similar opens up all those passageways of memory and we find ourselves watching the new film while remembering all the prior films. Like those kick-butt SF authors I was talking about earlier, we’re building on our previous knowledge (our nifty prior art) and our minds are actually making connections and assumptions much faster than the film maker can lay out the images and block the scenes.
The point? The collective mind is always smarter, sharper, more creative, and just damn faster than the singular mind. “What?!” you scream. “You telling me that ‘Mona Lisa Overdrive’ would have been better if Gibson had been the Gibson Collective?! Are you insane, woman? Sexy, sure, but are you truly insane?” In short? Yes. Not ‘yes’ I’m insane, but ‘yes’ a collective mind would have been incredible.
An author puts out a framework. Asks questions. Starts the conversation. Let’s say that four hundred creative individuals start bouncing off these ideas, asking their own questions, adding to the conversation. Twists that perhaps a single mind might not have come up with are introduced. In addition, ideas from all the masses will inspire other flashpoints in the focused and creative mind of the original author. Just as reading a science magazine or a bunch of patents (okay, I’m a geek, so sue me) inspire me, reading the threads of thought from a dozen or a hundred individuals also gets my gears going.
Think of the potential when you focus that many minds on a single topic or universe. Think of how that universe grows, builds and is enriched. No one has to have their mind on the very end product except the original author. Everyone else can just go wild—share everything, share shoe size, share sky color.
What do you want from the blog, sweet reader? Heck, I don’t know. You want to know what I ate this morning? A Clif bar and a cup of coffee. What I’m wearing? Levis and a pumpkin-colored tank. Perfume? Patchouli. Shoe size? 6. Sky color? Newborn blue. Or do you want to know what I want from you?
I want your mind.
Wanna share?
E.J.
