We're an odd lot, novelists. Obsessive. Why else does someone launch a project that consumes so much time and holds out such a wavering promise of reward? I wrote my first three novels in deep night-the only time I had-and I used to put things away (in a dish bucket, set against the kitchen wall) in a tired heave of sadness, as if I might never pick them up again, as if my fledgling world might never be real. And of course it never was, because that's a large part of the siren call of the novel: Come hither and create your own world. Put what you know and believe and want into story. Defy the randomness of real life; make meaning. This is a long-haul project and it is so much a part of who you are, you can't imagine not doing it, not even if it takes years.
Links of the week December 4 2017 (49)
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:
11 December 2017
My advice is short and simple.
You should feel driven by a story you want to tell, even if you don't know every nuance of it.
You must be able to live with the ambiguity of the enterprise.
You must have a commitment to a schedule of writing.
A writer who waits for the ideal conditions under which to write will die without putting a word on paper," E.B. White said in a Paris Review interview. He chose to write in his living room, surrounded by "noise and fuss," adding: "In consequence, the members of my family never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing man. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go."
Ernest Hemingway famously wrote standing up at his desk. In an interview with George Plimpton for the Paris Review, he said he started "every morning as soon after first light as possible," when "there is no one to disturb you." He added, "You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next, and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.... It's the wait until the next day that's hard to get through."
William H. Gass, author of Omensetter's Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and Middle C, died on Wednesday at the age of 93 at his home in St. Louis. Gass was a boundary-breaking experimental writer (please read In the Heart of the Heart of the Country) as well as a critic, essayist and philosophy professor. Most importantly, Gass was a reigning master of the art of the sentence, and every one he wrote, he wrote with singular purpose. "If I am anything as a writer, that is what I am: a stylist," he told The Paris Review. "I am not a writer of short stories or novels or essays or whatever. I am a writer, in general. I am interested in how one writes anything."
Be stubborn, even in the face of rejection:
I was turned down for ten years. I couldn't get a thing in print. My writing went nowhere. I guess you have to be persistent. Talent is just one element of the writing business. You also have to have a stubborn nature. That's rarer even than the talent, I think. You have to be grimly determined. I certainly was disappointed; I got upset. But you have to go back to the desk again, to the mailbox once more, and await your next refusal.
-from a 1995 interview with BOMB
Suresh Ariaratnam, literary agent
I set up as an agent in 2007 and about a quarter of my clients are people of colour. Representing them draws on my experiences of growing up as a second-generation immigrant and wanting to ensure that our culture today reflects all of us. In comparison to five years ago, there is greater receptivity, which is a positive, but more can and needs to be done.
Sarah Shaffi, BAME in Publishing co-founder
It would always be nice for change to happen faster. It would be good to have scope for fast-track management programmes for all under-represented groups, and to accelerate this process. We don't want to be waiting 20 years to take a slow, meandering path to the top tier. The problem at the moment is the whole pipeline. People of colour don't see themselves in books and in publishing houses. Publishers say they don't get the stuff coming through from agents, agents say there are few submissions from writers of colour, people of colour don't see people like themselves published - and so the cycle never breaks. We have to be proactive until the gateways are opened up.
To me, the keystone of the phrase "the great American novel" is not the word American but the word great.
Greatness, in the sense of outstanding or unique accomplishment, is a cryptogendered word. In ordinary usage and common understanding, "a great American" means a great American man, "a great writer" means a great male writer. To regender the word, it must modify a feminine noun ("a great American woman," "a great woman writer"). To degender it, it must be used in a locution such as "great Americans/writers, both men and women . . ." Greatness in the abstract, in general, is still thought of as the province of men.
The writer who sets out to write the great American novel must see himself as a free citizen of that province, competing on equal ground with other writers, living and dead, for a glittering prize, a unique honor. His career is a contest, a battle, with victory over other men as its goal. (He is unlikely to think much about women as competitors.) Only in this view of the writer as a fully privileged male, a warrior, literature as a tournament, greatness as the defeat of others, can the idea of "the" great American novel exist.
The narrative that important, authoritative female novelists ultimately owe their brilliance to men refuses to die as we close out 2017-and it's ensnared one of our newest literary stars. The plagiarism allegations against The Girls author Emma Cline, leveled by her ex-boyfriend, have set off a bruising legal battle and exposed Cline's personal life. But more than just sordid, they're a public attempt to silence a young and intriguing literary voice.
The assertion that Cline, however subtly, owes her brilliance and accolades to a male hand is recurring in literary circles whenever a woman pens powerfully-like when some critics thought Elena Ferrante was a pen name for a man, even though the Italian novelist's Neapolitan works told a story that felt so subjective, so deeply and unquestionably female. These novels, too, were a portrait of a lifelong female friendship (or frenemy-ship), set against the backdrop of a community that experienced poverty and domestic and mob violence. In Lila and Elena's desires for escape, fury at the world and obsession with each other, many of us who succumbed to Ferrante Fever saw an exhaustive exploration of a female psyche-not necessarily ours, but someone's. That felt new and thrilling.
If you cannot see the Ojibwe in Louise Erdrich, perhaps that's because two centuries of popular culture have depicted this nation's first people as cartoons. You can hear Erdrich's paternity in her Teutonic surname; her mother is half-French and half-Ojibwe, a group known also as Chippewa, who are among the many indigenous people on this continent collectively called Anishinaabe.
In the novel The Antelope Wife, Erdrich writes, "You make a person from a German and an Indian, for instance, and you're creating a two-souled warrior always fighting with themself." I met Erdrich this October in Minneapolis, at a restaurant next door to the small independent bookstore she owns, Birchbark Books. I read the quote from The Antelope Wife back to her and she laughed. "Absolutely," she said. "I was thinking of myself."
"Endless" is an apt word. Erdrich's 16 novels are the heart of an astonishing achievement, one of the most impressive bodies of work by any American writer alive. Some writers are prolific; some are shape-shifters. It's rare and intimidating to encounter one who is both. It's further confounding when so serious an artist also manages to be entertaining - and Erdrich never fails to offer the reader that particular pleasure.
JK Rowling must be thanking Dumbledore that she has her Cormoran Strike series to fall back on, after a predictive keyboard wrote a new Harry Potter story using her books and it became the funniest thing on the internet.
After the team at Botnik fed the seven Harry Potter novels through their predictive text keyboard, it came up with a chapter from a new Harry Potter story: Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash. It is worth reading.
"He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione's family. Ron's Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself.
‘If you two can't clump happily, I'm going to get aggressive,' confessed the reasonable Hermione."
It continues in this vein: almost making sense, but mostly just gloriously bonkers, like: "To Harry, Ron was a loud, slow, and soft bird. Harry did not like to think about birds." And my favourite: "They looked at the door, screaming about how closed it was and asking it to be replaced with a small orb. The password was ‘BEEF WOMEN,' Hermione cried."
4 December 2017
Successful authors work their butts off either way. There is no such thing as a lazy successful author.
The hardest part of getting a book published is the actual writing. All it takes to see this is the number of people who dream of publishing a book but never manage to hammer out a rough draft. I spent 20 years trying to write my first novel before I finally pulled it off. It's not unusual for an aspiring writer to struggle for years and never produce a finished product to submit to agents or editors.
Once the hard part is done and a draft is written, there are two basic routes a writer can take. Much ink has been spilled over the past few years about the rise of self-publishing-even though the route predates Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin. To self-publish requires hiring cover artists, editors, and typesetters or learning to do these things on one's own. The difficult task of emailing a cover artist to hire her services is often used to frighten authors away from self-publishing. That's because there's a myth that authors are lazy, and a myth that some authors merely write for a living. No such creature has ever existed.
I had beyond-exciting fantasy plans for my latest novel, The Age of the Child, and first among them was that it would not be self-published.
I've self-published before. My first novel, Pretty Much True, received agent praise but no takers. As it was explained over the phone by one praising, but non-taking, agent-and by another who said essentially the same thing in a very nice email-the book was literary and I was an unknown. "So hard to market in this climate," they said. It was because of the agents' praise that I felt safe to self-publish.
I didn't try for an agent with my second novel, The Year of Dan Palace, because I'd been disillusioned about the traditional publishing business. (More on that later.) Between the disillusionment period and the completion of The Age of the Child, however, four long years had passed. I'd forgotten the turmoil and was ready to try again.
I was first introduced to what it meant to have the "right" approval in an undergraduate literature class. The instructor was discussing the difference between literary and commercial fiction, and I remember that I was annoyed by what I perceived as her high snobbery of elevating one style of fiction over another. (If Nathaniel Hawthorne's heavy-handed symbolism was "literary," I thought, I'd take commercial. I've since learned that in addition to a complex algorithm measuring sparseness, inventiveness of style, and the plot-to-character ratio, in what way breasts are described-and how long the author has been dead-has much to do with whether fiction qualifies as "literary.")
It might feature such thought-stretching concepts as time travel and warp drives, but reading science fiction actually makes you read more "stupidly", according to new research.
In a paper published in the journal Scientific Study of Literature, Washington and Lee University professors Chris Gavaler and Dan Johnson set out to measure how identifying a text as science fiction makes readers automatically assume it is less worthwhile, in a literary sense, and thus devote less effort to reading it. They were prompted to do their experiment by a 2013 study which found that literary fiction made readers more empathetic than genre fiction.
Talk to anyone who worked in book publishing this year and no matter how chipper the conversation may begin, once you're a few drinks in the talk will turn gloomy. Sales are flat, or down. There have been no market-defining breakout hits, no hot new genres to plump up the annual earnings statement. Everyone blames this on the election and the news. Books are the intellectual equivalent of slow food; you know it's better for you and tastes better, too, but you're too rushed and frantic to care as you white-knuckle it through an avalanche of push alerts. So even for a notoriously Eeyore-ish industry-you can find people lamenting the decline of the book business in issues of trade magazine Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/ dating back to the 1920s-2017 was a grim year.
"Why can't they just count up all the books that have sold?" a friend once asked me when I described the Times' baroque method for calculating its list. But books aren't movies, which are made available in a limited number of theaters that are able to instantly report the number of tickets they dispense over the film's opening weekend. Books slowly make their way to a bewildering number of outlets, ranging from small gift shops, book fairs, and drugstores to big-box retailers, many of whom can't or won't provide timely and accurate figures. CEOs and the pastors of megachurches, as well as certain political figures, have been known to buy, directly or indirectly, crates of their own books to give away to friends and associates. Those books are certainly sold, but not to individual readers with a genuine interest in them, so those sales don't tell us much about how popular a book truly is. Then there are e-books, the leading retailer of which, Amazon, refuses to release sales figures.
Do we like reading about fictional rape? An affirmative answer would make us sleazy and voyeuristic, but it's a common enough fantasy and so present in our culture that to answer with an unequivocal no can't be right either. Yet it's conundrums like this that make living in rape culture so confusing. The proposition that we do indeed like it validates fears about our most debased impulses, that we (or enough of us) get off on violence at some primal level. This is hard news to hear, especially for women, who we know read for pleasure more than their male counterparts. Yet it also makes innate sense to the noir fan, who understands the irresistible pull of the ugly. Even I have my limits, and I read a lot of dark stuff. I put aside novels by Jo Nesbø, who I also admire for his psychological insights and natural way of building suspense, because I found them too violent towards women. I also put aside books by Pierre Lemaitre and M.J. Arlidge because I couldn't stomach them.
Suggesting that we might enjoy reading about rape in no way correlates violent fantasies with real-life desires. It could easily be that reading about rape inspires a strain of magical thinking, that if we experience it vicariously we are inoculated from it happening to us. But it does happen to us, in shattering numbers: in a 2014 report, the CDC estimated that one in five American women will be raped. And rape culture enables and reflects this.
On August 4th, 2017, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead tweeted, "Saw lady reading my book & was gonna say hi but I'm wearing the same shirt as in author photo & didn't want her to think I only had 1 shirt." The tweet garnered 16,000 retweets and 111,000 likes. "This would so be me if I ever wrote a book," responded one user. "Famous author problems," another said. Whitehead's joke is relatable to anyone who has experienced sartorial anxiety (everyone), or is haunted by the line "Lizzie McGuire, you are an outfit repeater!" (me). But it especially struck a chord within the literary community, where author photos immortalize one outfit in print - for as long as it takes to write the next book.
Curtis Sittenfeld, who retweeted Whitehead, estimates she's had 10 author photos over the course of promoting five books. Her first short story collection, You Think It, I'll Say It (Random House), will be published in spring 2018 with her best author photo yet - largely owing to the fact that it was taken by her younger sister, Josephine. "[Josephine] is definitely my favorite photographer in that I feel comfortable having my picture taken around her and I generally I don't enjoy having my picture taken," says Sittenfeld. But you wouldn't know that Sittenfeld is camera shy from her newest picture; she stands smiling in a flowered blouse with her hands in the back pockets of her jeans.
The self-publishing industry is perhaps one of the most successful industries today that has lifted itself up with it's own might. It is clearly burgeoning because of the clear advantages it offers. Of course, that doesn't mean self-publishing is everyone's darling as this article proves. That said, self-publishing has managed to surprise us, by its rapid evolution into a self-sustained industry on its own.
1. It is already massive and still growing
The self-publishing industry is growing faster than ever. Since the entry barrier to self-publishing is lower, the industry is swelling at 21% growth rate of registered ISBNs from 2014-2015( apparently, the most recent data available.) The growth is expected to grow even further with self-publishing options are integrating largely into Amazon, leading to a multi-billion dollar industry for its book production services alone.