matthew’s alibi

Seth Godin’s chart of passion/pop. Graphic © Seth Godin

Even though I always feel like an interloper - I’m not business-y enough - when I read Seth Godin’s blog about marketing, I am totally, hopelessly addicted. (Marketing! Let’s just say it’s not a topic I ever would have thought to list as one of my interests on Facebook, but Godin is fantastically insightful. They don’t call him a guru for nothing.)

His post today about the “passion pop gulf” goes a long way toward explaining one of the most unexpected challenges of organizing Guerrilla Gay Bar.

Godin’s passion/pop theory says that there are two normal distributions: one for the passionate early adopters, and one for the masses. The curve for the masses is taller - there’s more people in there, but it can be at the expense of edginess and authenticity.

And the reason this is important?

The reason you need to care is that gap in the middle. Every day, millions of businesses get stuck in that gap. They either move to the right in search of the masses or move to the left in search of authenticity, but they compromise. And they get stuck with neither.

After nearly two years of Guerrilla Gay Bar, one of our biggest challenges is that we’re moving slowly but steadily toward the pop curve. We’re becoming mainstream - instead of just our friends and our friends’ friends and whoever seemed worth talking to at a party, we’ve got all of those people plus all of the people who read about us in the Los Angeles Times. And then the New York Times!

The move was intentional, at first. For our first few events, our home was securely at the top of the passion curve. But back then, we looked with such longing toward the pop curve. We wanted to increase our mailing list, throw ever larger and more impressive takeovers.

It happened. It has been very satisfying to watch, and the media attention has been fun, too, but now, almost two years later, we’re victims of our own success: it’s significantly less easy to find a cool bar with extra space on a Friday night for 300 people than it is for 75 people.

And — I want to tread carefully here, because it’s certainly fun to be popular — but the tone of the takeovers has changed, as the number of early adopters has been dwarfed by the folks who came later. As our numbers grew, with a healthy number of people coming because they read about us in the mainstream press, we have lost some edginess and authenticity.

The grass-is-greener phenomenon is part and parcel of the dichotomy. Seth says:

Inevitably, you’ll itch to move to the other curve (cause it’s bigger or because it feels more authentic) and I worry about your ability to do that.

The best choice is to choose.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the curve where Guerrilla Gay Bar belongs is passion. Our events work better with a smaller number of attendees who have to go a little bit out of their way to show up.

In the early days, the fact that we were a little further underground meant that our attendees were that much more self-selected. It takes a particular kind of person to go out of their way to an event like ours in the beginning, when no one with any cultural authority has yet vouched for it. As a result, just about everyone who showed up to our first few takeovers was a little out of the ordinary, and very much worth talking to.

As our list keeps getting bigger and bigger, the crowd feels a little more like the kind you would find in a typical gay bar. (We’re not there yet! We would quit if that happened. But there’s a slight, noticeable trend in that direction.)

So, is the solution to manufacture ways to make it a little more challenging for people to come to our events?

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Photo © beastandbean via Flickr

Between Aimee Mann and Julie Andrews, I went to a second mystery panel. My goal this time, sadly, was not to ogle the local hunky mystery writer, but to learn something or other about writing a first novel in a mystery series. Thus, I set out for the encouragingly named “Mystery: Starting a Series” panel.

When discussing how they came to write their series, a couple of the writers indicated that they had not set out to write a series initially, and some had not even set out to write a mystery.

It sounds as though panelist Christopher Reich, in fact, does not write mysteries at all, but rather, thrillers; and this brings me to the first point I’d like to make about the two mystery panels: I wish people would use the term “mystery” in the classic sense. But, that’s a rant for another day, and notwithstanding my fit of pedantry, the panel was illuminating.

Jacqueline Winspear, author of the Maisie Dobbs books, had a great quote about inspiration, citing the frequently told story of how J.K. Rowling had a moment of inspiration while riding a train across Britain (which resulted in Harry Potter); to which Winspear remarked “the only thing I’ve ever got on a train in England is a soreness in my back and cold tea.”

Despite the quip, Winspear came across as the sort of writer all of the writers’ motivational books lie about and pretend doesn’t exist. She talked about how the characters and their arcs revealed themselves to her relatively painlessly, in a flash. Curse you, Winspear. Lucky devil.

Christopher Reich is at least familiar with the classics, even if he prefers thrillers to writing mysteries. When asked about his inspirations, he answered that when he submitted his first book, Numbered Account, his editor responded with a question:

“your main character is a U.S. Marine, right?”

Reich confirmed that he was.

“So why does he talk like Lord Peter Wimsey?”

Reich spoke about meeting General Tommy Franks, who he got to interview in the course of writing a TV series, and from whom he ended up getting the germ of an idea for a book. Reich characterized Franks as a man who “doesn’t just smoke cigarettes. He smokes cigarettes and chews tobacco at the same time, and he likes a few drinks at the end of the day.”

Reich’s first entry into a new series, featuring a Doctors Without Borders international aid worker named Jonathan Ransom, is due later this year.

But the most useful thing I got from the panel - heck, maybe from any panel all weekend - was when Sandi Ault, author of the Jamaica Wild series (and winner of this year’s Mary Higgins Clark Award special Edgar) said “you’ve got to write the murder.” Even if it doesn’t appear in the book, you’ve got to write it. Because if you don’t know exactly how it happened, that will come through in the rest of the book.

Such simple, obvious advice, which I think may have made the difference between my (in retrospect) painful first draft, and the second (hopefully less painful) one.

But Ault wasn’t the writer on the panel who I’d most like to be - no, that would be moderator Sarah Weinman, who gets a paycheck from the L.A. Times to write about mystery fiction. How cool is that? Weinman really knows her stuff, and did a terrific job at keeping three very different writers on track.