Making Conversation

Laura Miller, book critic at Salon, wrote a post questioning the value of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWrMO).  Carolyn Kellog at the LA Times picks it apart so I won’t bother.  There’s a lot that’s wrong with it. 

And, as a writer I know put it, the piece was “mean spirited”. 

Yes, it was. 

But here’s my dirty little secret.  I liked that she said things that were mean spirited. Because thinking about aspiring writers makes me say things that are mean spirited too. 

No, that’s a lie. I don’t say mean spirited things.

I think them. 

And then I think, “gosh that was mean spirited, you can’t SAY that.”

You want examples?

I’m thinking, my GOD you are so BORING!

See?  Mean spirited. 

People say lawyers are boring but they should spend time around  writers.  Case citations can’t possibly be more boring than word counts.  Yes, word counts.  Oy.  

Of course I’m kidding.  Not all writers are boring.  Just the ones I know. 

KIDDING!  Really.

They aren’t all boring.  But they are far more boring than the writers I knew years ago. Yes, the quality of writerly conversation has deteriorated.

I used to work with mystery writer Michael Kahn who was quite entertaining.  The thing is, he never talked about writing.  He talked about other stuff.  Sometimes he talked about books – other people’s books.   He never talked about word counts.

And when I was in law school, Francis Nevins was one of my professors.  He also wrote mystery novels.  And he never talked about writing in class or out of class (at least when I was around).  He talked about other stuff.  He talked about trusts and estates law. He never talked about word counts.

And I worked across the hall from Richard Dooling when he was a young summer intern at a law firm where I was a paralegal.  He was hilarious.  I never dreamed he was an aspiring writer.  I just thought he was a funny, creative person.  Ok, let’s be honest.  I thought he was way too funny and creative to be a lawyer.  I was sure he’d be bored out of his mind!  Again, he never talked about writing. He talked about other stuff.  Sometimes he talked about books – other people’s books. He never talked about word counts.

Now, if you put all these men in a group their conversation might not be as fascinating as, say, what I imagine the Bloomsbury Group conversation was like. But it wouldn’t be boring.  You would come away thinking that they were engaged in the world around them, they were interested in the world at large and that they were reading the fiction being published by their contemporaries.

But over the last five years or so, as I encounter people who “write” I find them obsessed with discussing word counts.  And that doesn’t even count all the people I don’t really know but who I read on line who talk about it even more. Counting is not a problem for me, I just don’t want to hear about it. Do we think that Virginia Woolf sat around talking about page counts?  I hope not.

And the thing that has been bugging me for a few years is this … these aspiring writers really don’t talk about other people’s books. At least not around me.  Not most of them.  And when I ask what they are reading, I feel like I’m interviewing Sarah Palin. 

Ok, YES, not ALL of them.  But enough that I’ve noticed.  Enough that I’ve thought about it regularly.  Enough that it has really bugged me.

See, the thing is …

I’m convinced that many of them don’t read.

Really.

So when Laura Miller relates this story in the middle of her piece, I found myself nodding:

"People would come up to me at parties," author Ann Bauer recently told me, "and say, 'I've been thinking of writing a book. Tell me what you think of this ...' And I'd (eventually) divert the conversation by asking what they read ... Now, the 'What do you read?' question is inevitably answered, 'Oh, I don't have time to read. I'm just concentrating on my writing.'"

Carolyn Kellog rips this by asking: “Where on earth does Miller get the idea that the writers participating in NaNoWriMo don't read books? She cites one dinner party anecdote, one Atlantic article referencing an unnamed independent publisher.”  

Good point.

But I’m with Miller on this one.  I have nothing but anecdote either but when you are bored out of your mind by people who claim to be fiction writers, you just know that something is wrong.

Kellog writes:

At NaNoWriMo, I checked out the Fictional Character Crushes II forum. Among those setting the writers' hearts a-beating: Sherlock Holmes, both Jay Gatsby and Nick from "The Great Gatsby," Mr. Darcy, Aragorn from "Lord of the Rings," Anne from "Anne of Green Gables," the Cat from the Neil Gaiman short story "The Price," Algernon Moncrieff from Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," Alcide from the Southern Vampire Mysteries, Edmond Dantès from "The Count of Monte Cristo" and Archie Goodwin from the Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout. There are also plenty of crushes on TV and film and anime characters, which just goes to show that these hopeful writers are readers as well as watchers. They are contemporary cultural consumers, and in NaNoWriMo, they're trying to create something.

um.  Does anyone else notice that most of these characters are from books these people should have read in high school?  What are they reading TODAY?  Neil Gaiman obviously.  But who else?  Any LIVE authors they are reading?  Are they discussing the work of their contemporaries?

Look,  I like Jane Austin’s Mr. Darcy as much as the next person and, yes, I’d gladly welcome a discussion of him.  But did they actually read the book recently?  Or did they read it in high school/college and just recently see the movie?  Because in my book that doesn’t count.

See?  Mean spirited.

Look, I don’t give a shit if people want to sit around all month writing.  I’m not against this writing month thingy, not at all. 

But I’m sticking with Laura Miller on the idea that writers need to read more. They need to be engaged in what is going on in the world.  They need to know what their contemporaries are writing about and they need to be EXCITED by someone’s writing that isn’t their own.

It might not make them better writers.  But it would certainly make them less boring at parties. 

And if they promise to never bring up word counts I promise not to talk to them about statutes of limitations. 

Catch a Wave and You’re Sitting on Top of the World

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction was recently awarded to Tinkers, by Paul Harding.  Via Like Fire, I learned this:

Tinkers, especially, flew in under the radar. It came out as a paperback original, with hardcover copies printed only after Powell’s Books requested a hardcover run for its Indiespensable subscription club.

And that’s pretty much what I expect in the future.  Books will come out in paperback and digital versions.  If someone needs them in hardback for some reason, a limited run of hardbacks will be done.

It’s the wave of the future. 

Now, does anyone KNOW anything about this book?  Have you read it?  I’ve never heard of it before this.

Paperback Writer

To play while you read:

In the comments the other day, we were discussing the rise of digital publishing and there was a general consensus that printed books were not going to disappear soon.   I thought about that as I read an interesting article in Smithsonian Magazine about the evolution of  …Paperback Books.  Until the 1930’s paperbacks did not exist as they do today.  They existed but were used mostly for pulp fiction. No “regular” novels, even classics, were available in paperback.   And then, along came Penguin Books.

The story about the first Penguin paperbacks may be apocryphal, but it is a good one. In 1935, Allen Lane, chairman of the eminent British publishing house Bodley Head, spent a weekend in the country with Agatha Christie. Bodley Head, like many other publishers, was faring poorly during the Depression, and Lane was worrying about how to keep the business afloat. While he was in Exeter station waiting for his train back to London, he browsed shops looking for something good to read. He struck out. All he could find were trendy magazines and junky pulp fiction. And then he had a “Eureka!” moment: What if quality books were available at places like train stations and sold for reasonable prices—the price of a pack of cigarettes, say?

A weekend in the country with Agatha Christie?  How murderously delightful!

Lane formed Penguin Books himself when no publishing house would back him.  It was a successful venture. Looking at it with 20/20 hindsight it seems clear that paperbacks would be popular.  Well, why wouldn’t they be?  They could not only be sold at railway stations and the five and dime stores, they were more lightweight than hardbacks which made them perfect for commuter reading in a country that relied on trains.   And look at who they were publishing:

The first ten Penguin titles, including The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy Sayers, were wildly successful, and after just one year in existence, Penguin had sold over three million copies.

Soon a similar venture was tried in America.   The advent of World War II made the industry grow because paperback novels were easy to distribute to troops during wartime and easy to carry around.  Today paperback versions of novels are ubiquitous. 

Personally, at this point I prefer paperbacks although I read a lot of hardbacks.  I like to read some authors immediately without waiting for the paperback version.  I also use my public library and they buy books as soon as they are published, which makes for a lot of hardbacks.  So I lug around hardback editions all the while wishing I had a paperback edition. 

Hardbacks last longer, it is true.  But hardbacks seem to be designed for people who have the luxury of reading at home, in a comfortable chair under a good reading lamp.   They are not good for lugging around in a purse to be read between bites at lunchtime.  Or to be read in a car as one sits through very long stoplights.  They are not even very good for reading in bed (I sometimes had a fear of breaking my nose when I tried to read my hardback copy of War and Peace in bed and wold start to fall asleep.)  And there is a psychological reason I like to carry paperbacks around - I don’t feel as bad if I bang them up as I would if they were hardbacks.

On the other hand, even paperback versions of long books are hard to lug around.  It took me forever to finish Anna Karenina because I had no reading plan and I found it too heavy to easily carry around with me and read as the spirit moved me.  Right now I’m reading 2666 in paperback and it too is heavy to easily lug around, although I do.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the virtues of a Kindle these past few months.  Since I took my sabbatical from all my reading groups, I’ve used my new freed up time to read some very long books.  I’ve finished War and Peace (over 1000 hardback pages) and An American Tragedy (over 800 paperback pages).  I’m reading 2666 (about 900 paperback pages) and Lindsey Davis’ Rebels & Traitors (about 800 hardback pages).  Even the shorter books I’ve been reading haven’t been all that short.  I just read The Glass Room by Simon Mawer which was over 400 paperback pages.  And I’m working on Byatt’s The Children’s Book which is almost 700 hardback pages.  The last two I read at home so it isn’t so much of a problem.  But the others … a Kindle would have been nice.  On the other hand, 2666 and Rebels & Traitors aren’t available on Kindle.  What’s up with that publishers?  These type of long books seem ready made for carrying around digitally.  

For what it is worth, my prediction is that hardbacks are going to be phased out.  They will still be available in special editions for collectors, so they won’t disappear entirely.  But I think we are going to see a world dominated almost completely by paperbacks and e-versions of books.  Even brand new novels by big name authors of literary fiction will eventually stop coming out first in hardbacks.  And paperbacks will be purchased by people who want to read at home or who rely on the library or book sales, the way hardbacks are now. The same “Eureka” moment that Allen Lane had back in the 1930’s applies to e-books today: “What if quality books were available at places like train stations and sold for reasonable prices—the price of a pack of cigarettes, say?”   Once you get past the cost of the reading device, this is happening today.  Quality books are available wherever you happen to have access to an internet connection and, although the cost is more than a pack of cigarettes, it is still relatively cheap.

h/t: Mark Athitakis

The End of the World as We Know it

Tomorrow the ipad will be released and the world as we know it will end.

Or something like that.

Lisa Peet’s Like Fire blog featured, a few days ago, this clever little film by UK publisher Dorling Kindersley about the future of publishing. It is both a creative use of word play and also a reminder not to fall into the trap of thinking that one person’s world view is the only world view:

As a reader, I am concerned with the current upheavals in the publishing industry.  Not as concerned as publishing companies are, of course.  Or authors, possibly. But I am concerned.  My concern is, of course, all about me.  I’m concerned that, during this current period of chaos, two things will happen that will affect me negatively: (1) big publishing houses will narrow the type of books that they choose to publish and they won’t be the type of books I want to read, and (2) the smaller publishing houses won’t have access to the capital necessary for them to take advantage of this opportunity and fill the void.

Yes, people living through the chaos of revolutions tend to be a bit selfish.