1) Write. There is no substitute. Write what you most passionately want to write, not blogs, posts, tweets or all the disposable bubblewrap in which modern life is cushioned. But start small: write a good sentence, then a good paragraph, and don't be dreaming about writing the great American novel or what you'll wear at the awards ceremony because that's not what writing's about or how you get there from here. The road is made entirely out of words. Write a lot.
Links of the week December 19 2016 (51)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
19 December 2016
2) Remember that writing is not typing. Thinking, researching, contemplating, outlining, composing in your head and in sketches, maybe some typing, with revisions as you go, and then more revisions, deletions, emendations, additions, reflections, setting aside and returning afresh, because a good writer is always a good editor of his or her own work. Typing is this little transaction in the middle of two vast thoughtful processes. There is such thing as too much revision - I've seen things that were amazing in the 17th version get flattened out in the 23rd - but nothing is born perfect.
I do not think it is a coincidence that the novel as a form reaches maturity at the same point as the bourgeoisie as a class are ascendant. Although the novel has its forerunners and predecessors - Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, de la Fayette - it gets into its stride with affluent, middle-class white men: Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett.
Will Self has recently written about the shift from page to screen, word to image, and while agreeing with much of what he writes about the nature of narrative, I'd like to propose a more optimistic vision. The novel is hamstrung by its 18th-century origins and the TV box set sets fiction free. There are certain things about the novel we take for granted. The protagonists have intact selves. They have cogent agency - they choose to do this (marry Mr Darcy, say) or not do that (marry the Rev St John Rivers, say). They have memories that they trust - and can trust - and desires they comprehend.
E-book devices like the Kindle and Nook have already changed the industry of publishing in their relatively short lives. Much as the iPod did with music, now authors can self-publish right from their laptops and readers can carry with them every book they own in something about the size and weight of a paperback.
But while the e-book readers might seem good, uh, on paper, you might consider continuing to read print books for the foreseeable future. Science has given us several reasons why the health and wellness benefits of reading printed material outweigh the convenience and affordability of their digital brethren.
By now, we've come across all sorts of articles and nosy interlopers reminding us that staring at the screens of our tablets and phones is hurting our ability to fall asleep and stay asleep. Well, if you're using a multipurpose device (like an iPad) as opposed to a purpose-specific e-reader like a Kindle with e-ink, it doesn't matter if you're reading US Weekly's home page or War and Peace - you're exposing yourself to the same blue light that's messing with melatonin, circadian cycles, and the like, which all lead to you feeling tired when you wake up.
That said, the act of reading still serves as a great remedy for occasional insomnia or restlessness. Just make sure it's a print book you're diving into, otherwise you could be making matters worse.
Pamela Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, hopped on reddit yesterday afternoon to answer questions about the Book Review and the recently published list of their editors' picks for the 10 best books of the year. In addition to recommending a number of great books and writers (Nora Ephron, Christopher Hitchens, George Orwell, George Eliot, and more), dubbing Colson Whitehead one of the greatest novelists of our time, and suggesting that, of the Times‘s Top 10, a Trump supporter might most enjoy The North Water, Paul shed a little light on how things work at the Book Review (a question that some of us have been asking ourselves lately!). Below, find a few things you may or may not have known about how books are assigned, reviewed, and considered for the year-end lists of the paper of record.
"Here at the Book Review, the editors select which books we want reviewed, and then we find reviewers to write about them. We review all genres, though our tastes reflect the tastes of our editors and those of readers of The New York Times. The staff critics for The Times choose which books they want to review themselves."
December 15, 2016 - For years, I knew Octavia E. Butler, the famed African American science fiction and fantasy writer, by her first name only. That was the way she introduced herself when I first met her back in the fall of 1999. Butler had just purchased the house across the street from my parents' and joined the ranks of our rather conventional suburban community in Lake Forest Park, WA, located just north of Seattle. A spate of rumors had attended her arrival on the block: "Octavia" wrote novels (about aliens!); "Octavia" had one of those "genius" grants; "Octavia" lived alone and was a reclusive artist type. An interview with Butler appeared in the Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Enterprise, our humble (and long-since defunct) local weekly, explaining that our new neighbor was, indeed, the author of a dozen novels and a MacArthur Fellowship recipient.
Nonetheless, I imagine that the move to our neighborhood constituted a dramatic change for Butler. She couldn't help but stick out among the mostly white, unvaryingly middle-class residents of Lake Forest Park, the majority of whom tended to structure their lives around the very things that she lacked - namely, cars and children. But Butler, it is clear, was no stranger to the experience of being a stranger. "I'm black. I'm solitary. I've always been an outsider," is the way she put it in a 1998 Los Angeles Times interview.
These are clarion calls for booksellers to rally around and encourage the consumer to make the conscious decision to buy books from bricks-and-mortar bookstores rather than Amazon. A couple years ago, the American Booksellers Association hired a non-partisan firm to research the economic impact of Amazon. The results were astounding, and got even more so when the study was updated to include 2015: Amazon's stranglehold on our economy has caused a net loss of over 200,000 jobs, a sales tax loss of over $700 million, a property tax loss of more than $500 million, and a net national revenue loss of $1.2 billion. Yes, BILLION. Each day, Amazon gets closer to becoming a monopoly and a monopsony, vertically integrating in a way that dominates all levels of our retail economy in nearly every consumer market.
We're booksellers because we love books, and nobody gets into the book business looking to make buckets of cash. We love language and stories, and enjoy an exciting, uplifting, and reaffirming companionship with our colleagues. Many of us, if faced with the prospect of meaningless office jobs, would probably rather gouge out our eyes with rusty spoons.
But no one should have to sacrifice a living wage for their dream job. We find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being believers in social and economic justice while struggling to pay our employees a salary they can survive on. We urge our customers to Shop Local but make hardly enough money to do so ourselves. It is an unintentional hypocrisy, one that has gone largely ignored and unaddressed.
Joe Pan, better known to the small press world as Brooklyn Arts Press, rarely enters his books into consideration for the big literary awards-one book, once a year, tops. For a one-man publisher with a yearly operating budget of under $20,000, the risk, he said, is rarely worth the rare reward. "When I make a decision to submit a book to a prize like this, it [costs] around $125," Pan said, referring to the submission fee for the National Book Awards, to which he submitted an uncharacteristic two books this year. "Some of our books cost $800 to produce," he added. "So it's the difference between using a quarter of the funds delegated to another book to send a book out for a prize, or just holding onto that money and using it for the next book."
"I have a friend who's a successful writer who told me, ‘All cream rises to the top,'" Pan said. "Well, no it doesn't, because I'm surrounded by cream.... There's a huge new wave of small publishers our size that have been working under $20,000 a year to produce what I think of as the poetry of the future.
"We get to take risks that big publishing houses don't," he added. "If something is crazy wild and experimental, I don't have to sell 5,000 copies of it to validate its existence."