quote

"Winning smells like bacon." -- attributed to Walter Abbott, University of Maine Black Bears coach, unverified

rules

The other day I mentioned the discussion about rules for writing, and I said writers like to talk shop. It's true. But here's something--Laura Miller, over at Salon, has weighed in, giving it right back to writers.

What she gives us are rules for writers formulated by readers--or, if you will, our customers--rather than other writers. Which is bloody brilliant.

3. The components of a novel that readers care about most are, in order: story, characters, theme, atmosphere/setting. Of course all these elements are interlinked, and in the best fiction they all contribute to and enhance each other. But if you were to eliminate these elements, starting at the end of the list and moving toward the beginning, you could still end up with a novel that lots of people wanted to read; the average mass-market thriller is nothing but story. If you sacrifice these elements starting from the beginning of the list, you will instead wind up with a sliver of arty experimentation that, if you're very, very good, a handful of other people might someday read and admire. There's honor in that, but it's daft to write something with the deliberate intention of denying readers what they love and want and then to be heartbroken when they aren't interested. If you want to engage with more than a tiny coterie, take storytelling seriously; if you think that's incompatible with art, you are in the wrong line of work.

Sure, you could have the debate about whether readers truly know what good writing is, and I'm sure some of you will. Maybe it's like they say about human rights, that we shouldn't be allowed to vote on them. But hell--if we don't give the readers what they want, they won't stay readers long, will they?

Which is not to say you should just blindly write a book meant to please an audience. Don't--you shouldn't. But it wouldn't hurt any book to keep Miller's comments in mind.

playing with fire

Just so you know, when you tell the cooks at the Thai takeout place to make your food spicy, they'll treat it as a license to kill.

cover

Jessa, over at BookSlut, sums up perfectly something I've inarticulately railed about, at some length, in the past:

Sometimes when an author comes up with a really great idea, and with it creates a monster of disappointment and despair, destroying every good thing that could have been, I wish it was okay for another author to do a cover version. Like all those Leonard Cohen songs with the weird women's backing vocals, which are always so much better when someone else sings them. Poor, poor book idea, you just presented yourself to the wrong damn writer.

titles

The AP is reporting the short list for The Bookseller's Diagram Prize for oddest book title:

• "Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter"
  
• "Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich"
  
• "Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots"
  
• "The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease"
  
• "Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes"
  
• "What Kind of Bean is This Chihuahua?"

According to the AP, "the shortlist, announced Friday, was narrowed down from 90 entries, including 'The Origin of Feces' and 'Bacon: A Love Story.' The Diagram Prize was founded in 1978 and is run by trade magazine The Bookseller. The winner, decided by public vote, will be announced March 26. Previous champions include 'Bombproof Your Horse' and 'Living With Crazy Buttocks.'"

hope floats

Go ahead and stare deeply into the eyes of some celebrated literary drunks and addicts in LIFE's odd gallery. Some of the pictures are interesting, or curious, some a little frightening. None of them, however, is particularly enlightening--it seems an odd choice for a photo spread.

Still, like all good train wrecks, I can't look away. My favorite photo might be John Berryman, the bearded Everyman--trending toward the Unabomber--talking with fellow drinkers at a neighborhood bar. I've had a similar photo hanging over every writing desk I've ever had. Don't ask me why.

Two quotes of note. Brendan Behan says, "I only take a drink on two occasions: when I'm thirsty and when I'm not." And Kerouac, "I'm catholic and I can't commit suicide, so I plan to drink myself to death." The caption helpfully notes, "And so he did."

Under each image, we get the writer's addiction of choice. Alcohol, Amphetamines, Herioin. Under Hunter S. Thompson, we get the wonderfully apt Everything.

Anyone else find this photo of Faulkner odd? For some reason, when I picture him at work, I get a very different image than this one, shirtless, in shorts, socks and shoes, with aviator sunglasses and a military haircut, typing on an ottoman.

books

A good post at the LA Times blog about the recent "scandal" involving books at the White House.

When conservative Rob Port took a tour of the White House this week, he was scandalized by the books he found on shelves in the White House library. "Photo Evidence: Michelle Obama Keeps Socialist Books in the White House Library," he blogged. He took a photo of the books in question, which includes "The American Socialist Movement 1897-1912" by Ira Kipnis (1952) and "The Social Basis of American Communism" by Nathan Glazer (1961).

Well, it was a first lady who put those books there, the Washington Post reports, but it wasn't Michelle Obama. It was Jacqueline Kennedy, who was known for the care and attention she gave to outfitting the White House; she hired Yale's librarian to stock it for her.The books Port photographed have been sitting in the library since 1963. The library came into being during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. In 1961, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy asked Yale University librarian James T. Babb to oversee a committee that would select books for the library. In 1963, 1,780 were placed on the shelves.

About the library Babb once wrote, "It is intended to contain books which best represent the history and culture of the United States, works most essential for an understanding of our national experience."

That kind of understanding seems to be lacking these days, and Port's manufactured uproar is the perfect poster child for the situation. The LA Times refers to comments on Port's blog post, including one which lays it out clearly: "These are history books, not how-to books."

Which is the point that's being missed: owning a book means an intellectual curiosity, not blind allegiance to what's inside it. We have a history of reading to understand and learn.

That, right there, is a great sentiment. It's also the LA Times' lead in to reprint the American Library Association's statement on the "Freedom to Read":

The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack. Private groups and public authorities in various parts of the country are working to remove or limit access to reading materials, to censor content in schools, to label "controversial" views, to distribute lists of "objectionable" books or authors, and to purge libraries. These actions apparently rise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to counter threats to safety or national security, as well as to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. We, as individuals devoted to reading and as librarians and publishers responsible for disseminating ideas, wish to assert the public interest in the preservation of the freedom to read.

That statement, the Times says, was written during the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Maybe we haven't come as far as we like to think. Need more proof? Read Port's defense of his outrage in response to this revelation.

rules

Outwardly I am, at times, a flaunter of rules. Inwardly, I fear them. This is due no doubt both to my Catholic upbringing, with its divine overemphasis on guilt as a presiding moral compass, and my parents' particular "Take no risks, make no enemies" sensibilities. Both laudable, to be sure, but like all rules, best broken from time to time.

See? Even that statement is a ridiculous contradiction, and circular in logic. It's a wonder I get through most days.

Rules apply to writing in many ways, including grammar. I firmly believe grammar should be understood in a 'close-enough' way--writers need not obsess about it--and broken when useful, as long as it's broken in a controlled, meaningful manner. This does not mean using the wrong "its," or foregoing punctuation, or writing in some pidgin patois born not of culture or region but ignorance or laziness. (Of course, that said, even those rules can be broken. Cormac McCarthy rarely uses quotation marks, and he's known some success here and there, hey?)

Aside from grammar, writers fret over other rules, too. Low-level ones like show, don't tell. Avoid the passive voice. Eradicate cliche. Eschew obfuscation. (That last one's a joke.) Higher-level ones governing plot devices, character development, first sentences. Strange and curious ones that worry over manuscript formatting, font size and choice, and submission etiquette.

It's difficult to sit down at a blank page and force your mind to be equally blank. Rules, once you're aware of them, become pesky. They hover and annoy like a mosquito in a dark bedroom. When I write I try like hell to ignore them. I try, too, to not be aware of audience, or what's selling these days, or markets., to just focus on what I'm writing and sort the rest of it out later. And yet, because of my dual nature regarding rules, it's not always easy.

Hey, I tell myself, if you wanted an easy job you'd have gone to medical school instead of being a writer.

As it turns out, I'm not alone. Writers love rules. And, similarly, writers hate rules. They're always drafting them up like some condo complex covenant, circulating them, holding public hearings for them, and revising them. Maybe it's because we're all looking for some guidance as writers, some literary Church to give us a moral compass to follow, an external skeleton to help us stand tall. Maybe it's because people like to talk shop, and writers, like fishermen, are no exception. Except it's easier to talk about the great steaming trout you let slip away than it is the story you're working on. Rules give us something to talk about.

I don't know. I tend to think they're useless. If writing was something you could do by following the rules, wouldn't we just have a bunch of, say, MFA programs teaching writing to people? (Ha.) Still, I respect them, even if only subconsciously, and dear God, there are plenty of rules to haunt me. They're often contradictory, and the canon is ever-growing.

Over at The Elegant Variation, Mark revisited Elmore Leonard's rules, which he called "unhinged dipshitery." He also linked to a bunch of other rules, which I'm relinking here. My favorite among them comes from Neil Gaiman, who can always be counted on to keep things interesting:

Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

I keep a copy of E.B. White's "The Elements of Style" on my desk. White is something of a personal hero of mine--if you ever want a great read, pick up "One Man's Meat," his essays written from his saltwater farm in Brooklin, Maine. His book, itself a revision of his old teacher William Strunk's collection of rules, is full of good advice.

But it's also full of bad advice. And if you tried to follow every rule in the book you'd be paralyzed. So, rules--what do you think?

beautiful sentence fragment

"The necessity of dark places for dark transactions..." --David Mamet

the cold, hard north

A review in today's NY Times Book Review begins thus:

It’s hard to give movement to a story about stasis. Grief, as all those immersed in it are chillingly aware, causes a numbness, an arrest — a “formal feeling,” as Emily Dickinson put it. To tell it straight is to tell of a person’s repeated, futile reaching for the absent loved one, the insistent return to the original moment of loss.

This is a nice graph. And it's insightful. My novel--which, dear God, now dates back to 1998--deals with grief. And much of the feedback I get on it, from editors and other readers, circles back to this review's inaugural statement: It's hard to give movement to a story about stasis. It's very much a flaw with which my story struggles, and, by extension, with which I struggle.

The review is of Lisa Moore's "February," and is written by Sylvia Brownrigg. I've not yet read Moore's book, but this review makes me want to.

The novel’s heroine is Helen O’Mara, a tough, pragmatic Newfoundlander whose husband, Cal, perished in the 1982 sinking of an oil rig. A mother of three at the time of his death, Helen discovered soon afterward that she was pregnant. Stolidly raising their four children alone, she never managed to get over the shock of losing her husband. As Moore eloquently writes in the book’s early pages, Helen “was outside.” This is, Helen believes, “the best way to describe what she felt: She was banished. Banished from everyone, and from herself.” “February” traces the slow effort she finally makes to come back inside.

Moore, like her novel, is Canadian.

As an aside, Canadian literature appeals to me, which is a ridiculous, sweeping statement to make, I know--and yet, it's true. I don't just mean books written by Canadians, but books and stories set there. "The Shipping News," for example. " Howard Norman's wonderfully odd "The Bird Artist." Heather O'Neill's "Lullaby for Little Criminals." Michael Basilieres' hysterical "Black Bird." Leonard Cohen's "Beautiful Losers." I've got a handful of others on my shelves I'll need to search out to recommend. Another Canada book I've not yet read but hope to is "Last Night in Montreal," by Emily St. John Mandel. I've got ARC galleys for it but have yet to find the time.

As for "February," the idea of setting a novel that confronts grief in a stark place like Newfoundland makes sense. I set mine in rural, northern Minnesota for much the same reason. The isolation. The climate. The quirks of the north country.

So now, the question is, will I give this book a fair read, or will I hold it up against mine and be unnecessarily critical? We'll see, I guess. I look forward to reading it.

trust

A non-literary related item, but this can't be good. According to MediaBistro, a new poll conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media asked, in a poll, "How much do you trust the news and public affairs programs that networks broadcast?"

The rankings show the most trusted news sources and institutions as follows:

PBS - 40%
FNC - 29%
CNN - 27%
NPR - 25%
CBS - 21%
ABC - 21%
NBC - 21%
MSNBC - 18%

So PBS is trusted a great deal. That makes sense. But Fox News Channel is second? And CNN beat NPR? Wow. No surprise that MSNBC is last. If I have to watch one more rerun of Chris Hansen's "To Humiliate A Pedophile" on that channel.

Maybe we don't know what trust is anymore?

reaching

Reaching
by Raymond Carver

He knew he was
in trouble when,
in the middle
of the poem,
he found himself
reaching
for his thesaurus
and then
Webster's
in that order.

candle

Happy birthday Wallace Stegner, wherever you are.

buckets

As I've mentioned, Gray's Sporting Journal has published a piece of my fiction in its current issue, available on newsstands now. Here's something of interest--at least to me. The story is set in an unnamed town in Southeast Alaska, more or less modeled on Sitka, where I lived for a few years. To illustrate the story, the magazine ran a photo by Eberhard Brunner.It's a great photo, and it captures Alaska well. The curious thing, though, is that Brunner shot this photo in Homer, the town I moved to when I left Sitka--a happy coincidence. How can I be sure? For one thing, that's Mt. Iliamna on the horizon. For another, a friend of mine in Homer, the science fiction novelist Michael Armstrong, sent me his own photo after seeing my story in GSJ.


Look familiar? They were taken from the same location--one popular with local photographers. Just goes to show you, Alaska's a big state, sure, but it exists in a small world.

da

I've been a little grumpy here lately, so I'd like to offer this up as a gift. It's impossible to overstate how beautiful I found Claire Keegan's story, "Foster," in last week's New Yorker. The language, the Irish-inflected dialog, the narrative, the reserved emotions of the characters who, to a one, are in pain--all of it.

Just impeccably written, and impossibly lovely. Thank you, Claire Keegan, and thank you New Yorker.

the objective is not objectivity

Creative Loafing points us to this story...

Atlanta Progressive News has parted ways with long-serving senior staff writer Jonathan Springston. Apparently, Springston’s affinity for fact-based reporting clashed with Cardinale’s vision. And, no, that’s not sarcasm.

In an e-mail statement, editor Matthew Cardinale says Springston was asked to leave APN last week “because he held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News.”

If you thought newspapers were in trouble because no one reads them, you might still be right, but maybe we're starting to see why no one reads them any more? (Of course, it's not just papers that are losing their objectivity.)

deal

Oh, good. Senator-for-a-week Scott Brown is shopping a book deal. The world needs that book. Oh! And James Cameron is writing an Avatar novel. Not a novelization of the movie, but a new novel. Yippee.

tact

George over at the always-enviable Canadian site BookNinja points us to this audio classic, a taped phone call from Hunter S. Thompson to the audio/video store that installed a home theater for him.

Warning: Because it's Hunter S. Thompson, I shouldn't have to say this, but I'm going to anyway--if you've sensitive ears, are at work, abhor cussing for any reason, or have children in the room, don't play this. The man was not known for his politesse, nor his tact.

stop thief: or, crime pays

Holy Kaavya Viswanathan, it's happened again. A German writer whose debut novel is up for a major award has been caught plagiarizing. Same old story? Not quite. The much-praised writer is 17, for one thing. Also, the judges of the major award were aware of the plagiarism before they shortlisted her, and don't seem to care about it.

Her excuse? "There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity." She blames a generational culture of sampling, mixing and appropriating, although "blames" is the wrong word. Attributes, maybe? No, too ironic, considering she failed to credit the novelist, Airen, whose writing she liberated.

Oh, by the way? Not just a few lines. Not just a metaphor here or there. Full pages.

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

A powerful statement, but the line originally was written by Airen, on his blog. The plot thickens, however, and shows that perhaps more than simple cribbing is at work. When another character asks Edmond if he came up with that line himself, he replies, “I help myself everywhere I find inspiration.” (NY Times)

Man. That's brazen.

books

catcher in the tabloids

Ummm... hello?

I cannot go into details for legal reasons, but JD Salinger and I never spoke on the telephone, we only corresponded. He loathed modern Britain almost as much as I do, and particularly hated what he called phonies like Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and, surprisingly, VS Naipaul. In fact he once hinted I should beat Naipaul up, but dropped it after I told him I was a friend of Shiva Naipaul’s, as well as of his wife Jenny. Nearly all adults were suspect to JD Salinger, as well they should have been—that’s why he has a man who Holden respects make a homosexual pass at the youngster. A boy alone in a world of hypocrisy and false values. That was the real JD Salinger, at least the one I got to know through hundreds of letters. Stay tuned.

story

If you ever have occasion to read Susan Perabo's short story, "Explaining Death to the Dog," first published in a 1991 issue of The Missouri Review, please do. I read the story when it came out--I'd either taken a sabbatical from college or I'd dropped out, depending on who you asked, and was staying with a friend's family in St. Louis when I picked up the journal. The piece moved me in a way that maybe no short story had yet, at that point in my life.

I've reread it dozens of times over the years. Looking now at my copy of TMR, it's dog-eared, faded, and reeks of twenty-year-old cigarettes.

I went back to school the following year and studied writing, not because of this story--I was well on that path already, and just trying to work out the details and logistics, which I'm still trying to do two decades later--but this story served as sort of a road map for me. An example of what good fiction could do.

Perabo published a collection of stories later, and this was the title story. It's widely available used. You can also watch some woman--I have no idea who she is--reading this story aloud as part of a forensics competition here. I haven't watched it and can't vouch for it.

In that issue of TMR is also a good G.W. Hawkes' short story, "The Guy Downstairs Blows Sax."

Funny how stories can stick with you for so long, isn't it?

this space for rent

Already a lot of negative feedback for this Bud Light "book club" commercial that ran during the SuperBowl. Sure, it's sexist, and belittling toward literature, but it's a Bud Light ad. What did you expect? They can't make ads any better than beer, apparently.



I'm posting the ad here not as an endorsement for Bud Light (although I do endorse beer drinking), but for discussion's sake. Were you offended? As a man, as a woman, as a reader? Or just as a beer drinker?

bolano

Someone please explain the current, lingering infatuation with Roberto Bolano's fiction? Or at least explain his story, "William Burns," in last week's New Yorker?

I admit it, and I don't care if it makes me uncool or stupid, but I don't get the story and I don't get Bolano.

in from the cold

I wanted to like this essay by Dani Shapiro in the LA Times about the sad state of affairs in the literary world, how writers no longer seem willing to toil "in the cold" through years of rejection, and how the industry no longer supports those who are. And it's got its good points. The premise--that "authors used to expect to struggle as they gained experience, but now it is sell--or else"--is valid, and intriguing.

The writer's apprenticeship -- or perhaps, the writer's lot -- is this miserable trifecta: uncertainty, rejection, disappointment. In the 20 years that I've been publishing books, I have fared better than most. I sold my first novel while still in graduate school and published six more books, pretty much one every three years, like clockwork. I have made my living as a writer, living off my advances while supplementing my income by teaching and writing for newspapers and magazines.

As smooth as this trajectory might seem, however, my internal life as a writer has been a constant battle with the small, whispering voice (well, sometimes it shouts) that tells me I can't do it. This time, the voice taunts me, you will fall flat on your face. Every single piece of writing I have ever completed -- whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review -- has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess.

Call it stubbornness, stamina, a take-no-prisoners determination, but a writer at work reminds me of nothing so much as a terrier with a bone: gnawing, biting, chewing, until finally there is nothing left to do but fall away.

To ask us to be impressed with her stick-to-itiveness, her resolve, in the face of her own doubts when she's facing so much success seems a stretch. I know dozens of writers who have just as much resolve, and just as much doubt, with none of the success, and to me that's a far better example of bravery. Maybe I'm misreading it--she's probably not asking for our sympathy, and I should give her the benefit of the doubt. She's a fine writer.

But Shapiro sprinkles so much "look how successful I am and it's hard for even me" in there, it reminded me of something. I finally figured out what. This:

Last week, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele told a crowd at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, "Trust me, a million dollars is not a lot of money." Median income in Arkansas is $38,820.

I'm going back to my head down toiling and my rejection and my sad, sad life in which even $38,820 would be a shit load of money. The rest of you can do what you want.

print

Went into a bookstore with a friend today and found my byline in two different magazines. That was a first, and kind of fun.

genesis of a chain

Ever wonder how Barnes and Noble got started?

advice

A little advice, novelists--no, not from me. I wouldn't presume. This is from Tony DuShane, this weeks' guest blogger over at Powell's World of Books:

"Have an absolute blast when you're on a roll. During my rewrites, I'd walk into a café with my red marker and 500 sheets of paper wrapped by a rubber band. I'd drop the manuscript onto the table from a few feet in the air. THUD! People would turn around and I'd tell them, It's my novel. You don't need a publisher, great reviews, or an agent to have your heart and soul wrapped in a rubber band.You don't need a publisher, great reviews, or an agent to have your heart and soul wrapped in a rubber band.
...
Be gracious. Get rejected. The agents and publishers who read my work and rejected me, I hold in high regard. Many were honest as to why they couldn't work with my manuscript. Publishing is a business. Agents and editors work their asses off and to even get rejected, that's a privilege."

distraction

According to this Washington Times story,

The work computer of one regional supervisor for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showed more than 1,800 attempts to look up pornography in a 17-day span: "It was kind of distraction per se," he later told investigators. But he wasn't alone. More than two dozen SEC employees and contractors over roughly the past two years have faced internal investigations after they were caught viewing pornography on their government computers, according to records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and other public documents.

This is why Bernie Madoff got away with what he did. (It's also why my novel is still an unfinished manuscript. No, I'm kidding. Really, I'm kidding. This is why my novel's still an unfinished manuscript.)

gaming the lists

Here's one way to make your book a bestseller:

Ex-AK Gov. Sarah Palin's (R) PAC spent more money buying copies of Palin's best-selling book than it gave in contributions to political candidates, according to new FEC reports. The papers filed over the weekend show SarahPAC spent $47,777 on copies of "Going Rogue" during the last 6 months of the year. Meanwhile, she handed out just $43K in donations to candidates seeking federal office. (The National Journal)

It's actually sort of brilliant. She probably gets copies at a significant discount, and she also collects royalties for each sale--assuming, of course, that she pays off the advance. So by buying these discount copies with other people's money, she's essentially paying herself. And people call her stupid?

Anyway, mid-list writers, take note. Spend nearly $50K on copies of your novel and watch it soar up the lists.

UPDATE: I know, I know, I'm not being fair. Author Purchases don't generate royalties, and often, they don't count toward overall copies sold, and therefore don't affect bestseller status. But we don't know if she bought these as Author Purchases. Let's say she didn't--she could have bought them through, say, Amazon for $9.99, which is the lowest price for which they were offered, according to GalleyCat. Those would count toward royalties and total copies sold. So I wasn't being fair, sure, but only mildly so.