Guest Author: Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson makes neuroscience fun and entertaining. His latest book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, explains "how today's pop culture," especially video games and television dramas, "is actually making us smarter." New Yorkers can come here him talk about the topic at SoHo's Apple Store (and since it's not a Wiley book, they can buy it there, too), but that's just the first of several tour dates. Today, though, he's letting Beatrice readers in on how the book changed radically from initial conception to publication.

How Everything Bad Got Better
by Steven Johnson

A little more than two years ago, as I was finishing up my third book, I went through a brief phase where I decided that my next project should be a "little" book--a collection of essays, perhaps loosely united by some kind of theme. I had a few longer pieces that I'd written over the past five or six years that I thought could be expanded and packaged into a book with minimal effort. I knew a collection of essays was not likely to be a huge moneymaker, but I figured it would be fun, and relatively painless, to track down all these orphaned essays and bind them together into a single volume.

My wife and I were still living in the West Village then, and one morning while making the morning commute back from the Sheridan Square Starbucks, a title popped into my head: Everything Bad Is Good For You. I'd known all along that I wanted the opening essay to be about the chronically under-appreciated complexity of video games, and so it occurred to me that perhaps the theme uniting the collection could be a general inverting of various received ideas: if you think video games are all about mindless shooting, here's why you have it exactly the wrong way round. And so the phrase "everything bad is good for you" appeared out of nowhere on my stroll home--or not exactly nowhere, since there was already a trend floating around towards complete sentence titles, along with titles that prominently used the word "everything." Ironically, while the title itself seemed intuitively right to my ears, I almost instantly forgot the exact syntax of it. It took me a couple of days before the phrase came back to me. Two years later, when I finally started telling people about the book, I found that the same fuzziness happened to them--they'd say things to me like: "I'm really looking forward to All The Bad Things That Really Aren't So Bad" or "When are the review copies coming out for What You Thought Was Bad Turns Out To Be Good?"

And so it was that book--a collection of loosely connected, contrarian essays called Everything Bad Is Good For You--that we sold to Riverhead. But then a strange thing happened. The videogame essay started colonizing all the other essays: either killing them off, or assimilating them. I had been thinking of doing a defense of reality television as one essay--this one based on new material--and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that games and reality TV shows share many common structures, so much so that I started to see the reality genre as being the ultimate testimony to the cultural dominance of games today. So I began to think that the essays should be limited to discussions of popular culture, and as it happened this was right about that point that the whole Janet Jackson Super Bowl fiasco was breaking, and everywhere I looked the consensus seemed to be that pop culture was steadily declining into either moral depravity (if you were on the right) or tabloid-mentality, all-ads-all-the-time detritus (if you were on the left). And so I decided that my "little" book was not a collection of essays at all--it would be a full-on polemic that would prove, for once and for all, that pop culture has actually been growing more intelligent over the past thirty years, and not growing increasingly juvenile.

The irony of this is that the book that I sold as the most disconnected, loosely-joined of all my books turned out to be the most linear, most tightly-bound of the four. The others are ultimately voyages through different intellectual worlds with me as a kind of tour guide, and each destination can stand on its own to a certain extent. But Everything Bad is a pure work of persuasion: the sequence of the argument--and my responses to the reader's anticipated objections--are essential to the book. (Which just goes to show you that whatever you wrote in the proposal you sold is meaningless, as long as your publisher doesn't mind you switching gears.) What I wonder about now is whether I would have ended up following this path had I not come up with what was at the time a relatively arbitrary title. Looking back, I think what happened is that I somehow came up with the right title for a book whose content wasn't at all clear to me for another twelve months. Technically, this is what we call the title tail wagging the content dog, but I have no complaints. Whatever its flaws may be, it's a much better book than it was a proposal.