John Scalzi is a Smart Man

I know that on this blog I don’t talk about politics or law but since I blogged about the budget deficit, what the heck I’ll blog about contracts.  But this is NOT legal advice, this is just my reaction to an ongoing series of posts at John Scalzi’s blog Whatever. 

Let’s let him set the stage:

Recently New York magazine published a story, in which Columbia University’s graduate writing program invited James Frey to come chat with its students on the subject of “Can Truth Be Told?” during which Frey mentioned a book packaging scheme that he had cooked up. The contractual terms of that book packaging scheme are now famously known to be egregious — it’s the sort of contract, in fact, that you would sign only if you were as ignorant as a chicken, and with about as much common sense — and yet it seems that Frey did not have any problem getting people to sign on, most, it appears, students of MFA programs. Frey is clearly selecting for his scheme writers who should know better, but don’t — and there’s apparently a high correlation between being ignorant that his contract is horrible and being an MFA writing student.

I think I’m going to steal the phrase “it’s the sort of contract, in fact, that you would sign only if you were as ignorant as a chicken, and with about as much common sense” and I’m going to use it at work.   I don’t count it as plagiarism if I blurt it out in a conference room in a sidebar with a client.  Maybe I’ll sheepishly say “John Scalzi said that” after the client looks at me incredulously.  As a general rule one shouldn’t insult paying clients but sometimes it is necessary to get their attention. 

I’m really torn on this whole issue.  I think these MFA students were taken for a ride.  On the other hand I have no patience with suckers. 

These are people who want to write for a living.  They want to string together nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs into sentences.  And get paid for it.  They want to string together sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into chapters and chapters into novels.  And get paid for it.

And yet when someone puts a piece of paper in front of them full of nouns and verbs and a few adjectives and adverbs, they can’t figure out by simply reading it that there is a very good likelihood that they are being taken for a ride?

These are people who will pay $50,000 for an MFA program in writing (!!!) and won’t pay a lawyer to look at the first contract they are offered for their writing? 

Ok.  I know I’m being harsh.  I am not suggesting that they should understand all the contractual terms written in legalese or the terms of art for the industry.  But they should be able to smell a rat when the sentences written in plain English have terms that are unconscionable.

In fact, Elise Blackwell, the director of the MFA program at the University of South Carolina, responded by saying exactly this:

… it requires little training to identify Frey’s contracts as absurd. (Does anyone really think $250 is fair market value for a commercially viable novel or that letting someone else use your name as they please is smart?) The writers who signed those contracts weren’t acting out of ignorance but from some combination of desperation, hope, and a sense of exceptionalism that writers need to get out of bed. (“I know James Joyce died in poverty, Kafka worked a desk job, and Dan Brown can’t coax a sentence out of a bag, but I can be brilliant and rich.”) Some of them were just taking a flyer.

Yep.  They were living the dream and they didn’t want to wake up and face the contract in front of them.

Scalzi responds to Blackwell:

The issue with that awful, awful contract isn’t what’s obvious, but what’s not. Sure, anyone with a brain could see that $250 for a novel is terrible, but what those damnably ignorant MFA students were looking at wasn’t the $250; they were looking at the alleged 40% of backend, which includes (cue Klieg lights and orchestra) sweet, rich, movie option money!!!!!!!! And what they don’t know, or undervalue because reading contracts is difficult when you’ve not done it before and no one’s explained them to you, is that it’s not really 40% of everything, it’s 40% of whatever Frey decides to give you after he’s trimmed off his share, and, oh yeah, you have to take his word for it because you’re not allowed an audit. So yes, the $250 (or $500) for a book is awful and obvious. But it’s everything else about that contract which is truly rapacious, as it appears to promise so much more, and it all seems perfectly reasonable when you don’t have the experience to know what a horror it is.

Well, yeah.  But the fact that the plain English sections were so egregious should have been a clue that the other parts that were harder to understand had problems too.  Again, these people want to  write sentences in English for a living, so they can read.  And presumably they can use the Google.

And once you have Google you aren’t living in a vacuum.  If they really want a movie contract someday they probably read news stories like, oh I don’t know, how Peter Jackson had a big lawsuit over what he was actually owed by the studio for Lord of the Rings and how Hollywood manipulates percentages.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that contracts that have anything to do with movies are known for screwing the writer.  All it takes is someone who can read and knows how to Google.   In this day and age, anyone who can’t figure out how to use Google to get a basic knowledge of industry standards is just plain stupid.

But that’s not the problem.  It isn’t really about stupidity.  It’s about the dream.  The fact is, these people didn’t want to know the contract was bad.  Most of these students probably never even read the contract before they signed it.  That’s right, they never read it.  At most they skimmed it.   

Here’s the thing.  People sign stupid contracts all the time.  And when I ask them why they signed the stupid contract, most people tell me that they didn’t know it was stupid because they never bothered to read it. 

I used to be surprised by that.  A long time ago.  When I was young and innocent.

But now I just expect it.  As do most lawyers I know.  So, rather than than berate clients after the fact, we try to take affirmative action before the fact.  We give seminars and invite clients and potential clients.  We tell them all the bad things that can be in contracts.  We try to scare them to death.  Sure, we do it to drum up business but we also do it because we love our clients and we don’t want them to sign stupid contracts without reading and understanding them. 

And that’s why Scalzi makes the very, very smart suggestion that MFA programs offer their students some training.

So, MFA writing programs, allow me to make a suggestion. Sometime before you hand over that sheepskin with the words “Master of Fine Arts” on it, for which your students may have just paid tens of thousands of dollars (or more), offer them a class on the business of the publishing industry, including an intensive look at contracts. Why? Because, Holy God, they will need it.

A very practical suggestion.  Not because it will make these students experts on contracts (god no), but because it will, hopefully, scare the shit out of them for their own good.  Because it will ruin the dream before the bad contract is ever put in front of them.  And, hopefully, the nagging little voice in their head will say, “I really should get someone to look at this.”

Here’s my non-legal advise.  If your MFA program offers a business class, take it. Whether it does or does not, when you take out your loans to cover the the $50,000 for the MFA program and the extra to cover some living expenses, decide to live on more Ramen noodles than you’d like and put some of the funds aside.  Call it your business fund.  And use it to pay a lawyer to look at your first contract. Do a little research and pick a lawyer who specializes in these kinds of contracts.  I know they can be expensive, but this is your livelihood you are screwing with.   If you are lucky, your local Bar Association may have a Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts program that can get you a discounted rate. 

And read the contract before you go to the lawyer to discuss it.

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. 

Fiction vs. Reality

A couple of times I’ve blogged about the difficulty some authors seem to have, when writing historical fiction, in coming up with the fiction part.  When I blogged about Loving Frank I complained that the author, Nancy Horan, seemed constrained by the historical facts she was working with and that made her narrative dull in parts. 

The novel suffered from too much exposition and not enough "scenes". It also suffered from lack of a dramatic arc. One of the problems with writing historical fiction is that history is history and lives don't always have dramatic arcs although they may have dramatic moments. To make a better story the author might have to alter history. Since Horan obviously didn't want to do that, it seemed to me that she really wanted to write a nonfiction work but didn't have enough research to make a whole book.

One of the books I am currently reading is Lindsey Davis’ Rebels & Traitors and I’m finding it far too full of exposition about the English Civil War and not full enough of the story of the characters.  So I’ve been thinking a lot about historical fiction lately.

I was, therefore, delighted to read a piece that David Simon recently wrote in the Times-Picayune in connection with his new television series Treme that addressed this issue.  In Treme Simon is portraying the post Hurricane Katrina New Orleans and he says

… we have tried to be honest with that extraordinary time -- not journalistically true,  but thematically so. We have depicted certain things that happened,  and others that didn't happen,  and then still others that didn't happen but truly should have happened.

This is a nice way of saying we have lied.

I’m glad he put it so bluntly.  I’ve come to believe that lying is essential to good historical fiction – lying is the “fiction” part of historical fiction.  If you stick only to the “historical” part and ignore the “fiction” you might as well write a non-fiction book or do a documentary.  There is nothing wrong with documentaries or non-fiction books, they convey truth.  But do they convey the whole truth?

By referencing what is real,  or historical,  a fictional narrative can speak in a powerful,  full-throated way to the problems and issues of our time. And a wholly imagined tale,  set amid the intricate and accurate details of a real place and time,  can resonate with readers in profound ways. In short,  drama is its own argument.

It is a delicate balance.  Too much reality and the argument can be ruined.  Not enough reality and the argument isn’t made.  How does a writer find the balance?

If we are true to ourselves as dramatists,  we will cheat and lie and pile one fraud upon the next,  given that with every scene,  we make fictional characters say and do things that were never said and done. And yet,  if we are respectful of the historical reality of post-Katrina New Orleans,  there are facts that must be referenced accurately as well. Some things,  you just don't make up.

Admittedly,  it's delicate. And we are likely to be at our best in those instances in which we are entirely aware of our deceits,  just as we are likely to fail when we proceed in ignorance of the facts. Technically speaking,  when we cheat and know it,  we are "taking creative liberties, " and when we cheat and don't know it,  we are "screwing up."

I don’t have cable and I haven’t seen any episodes of Treme, so I can’t say if Simon achieved the right balance.  At least, not until it comes out on DVD. 

Dialogue

One reason I’ve never even considered writing any kind of fiction is my dialogue-writing induced asthma.  Back in high school I took my one and only creative writing class and it was torture.  It didn’t help that I’m not very good at creating narratives, but that wasn’t the real problem  With a whole lot of effort I could come up with some kind of plot.  But dialogue.  No.  And since I dislike reading fiction without much dialogue (a problem I’m having with 2666) I wouldn’t want to create fiction without dialogue.

If my psyche was looking for a good nightmare scenario it would put me in a room full of screenwriters all staring at me, waiting for me to come up with some pithy bit of dialogue.  And as I opened my mouth, out would come toads. 

Because of my own limitations, I have respect for television and movie writers even when I’m making fun of the bad dialogue they have written.  After all, at least they try. So I was interested in reading Jane Espenson’s latest blog post (yes, she’s back) in which she talks about the early days of movies and the transition from silent films to talkies.  I never thought about who “wrote” silent movies.  I guess I assumed that someone came up with the narrative but I never thought much more about it.  I certainly never thought about whether novelists would be good at writing silent movie scripts.  But Jane has:

The skills of a novelist were very appropriate for this kind of screenplay writing, which was descriptive, evocative, and internal. By "internal" I mean that it was concerned with what the character was thinking and feeling.

But when the transition to talkies came and Hollywood was looking for writers who could write good dialogue, they expanded their universe of writers.  Who did they find was good at dialogue?  Journalists.

They had an ear for naturalistic dialogue and they knew how to write concisely and tell stories with clear-eyed details, not evocative prose. The novelists tended to write longer and more stylish (or stylized) speeches and descriptions. Beautiful stuff, but not as valuable as something short and potent.

It makes sense but is not something I ever thought of before.  So Jane’s advice is:

Think like a reporter -- pare the story down, find the bones of it, and listen to your characters talk in the language of whatever street they come from -- even if you let them ramble on a bit in the first draft, eventually try to find the succinct quote.

Making the List

In December there was a to do when certain “best of” lists didn’t include many women authors. Lots of writing about it. Much of it interesting.

In an Op Ed in the Washington Post, Juliana Baggot talks about why this might be. She notes this:

What's interesting, however, in the Publishers Weekly list is that the books are not only written by men but also have male themes, overwhelmingly. In fact, the list flashes like a slide show of the terrain I was trying to cover in my graduate thesis, when I wrote all things manly -- war, boyhood, adventure.

Lydia Netzer stirs the pot and responds.

She notes:

As December wanes, it's the traditional time for women everywhere to scan the names on the "Best Books" list, realize they are woefully underrepresented, and complain.

But, she says, complaining gets you nowhere and, she thinks, Baggot is right to examine why this is happening.

While Baggott and others call out a sexist bias, Baggott goes a bit farther, asking why this imbalance in artistic recognition exists. Too often feminists and other axe-grinders reel around shaking their little fists and saying "This is bad! Bad list!" Then they totter away, ending the train of thought in comfortable outrage. But this isn't about morality, or whether something is right or wrong. This isn't church, and we don't get points for being right. It is what it is. The interesting question is "Why is it the way it is?"

Baggott suggests the lists favor men because they favor male themes: "war, boyhood, adventure." She says that she was discouraged, early in career, from writing about motherhood, a female theme, because "it would be perceived as weak." So, maybe the reason women aren't "Best of" is because they don't write about "Best of" things.

I have to agree with Baggott's theory.

At first I thought that Netzer was going to say that “Best of” themes aren’t necessarily the best themes, they are just themes that are more likely to get you on the “best of” lists. I thought she was going to tell the women who care about “best of” lists that they need to learn to play the game. Which I think is very practical advice. But she goes further.

Netzer examines three theories one can have about the list:

The list is real. The numbers are what they are. As I see it there are three possible explanations:

1. The list is sexist, purposefully oppressing women. The solution in this case would be, I guess, to burn down the list. Make a new list. Get those bastards. This seems kind of weak and paranoid.

2. The list is false, reflecting a lame and lingering cultural bias that is on its way out. The solution is to wait. After all, we didn't count the black writers, or the South American writers. It will all come around, given more time. I guess this is what I would like to believe.

The third possibility is more alarming than the others, because it is the simplest explanation, and therefore the most viable:

3. The list is right. The things that women write about are neither culturally nor historically significant, and the books that women write are not the best books.

Yes, she is being intentionally provocative. And at first I chafed at the idea in number 3. But I keep coming back to her next point which is very much based on the work of women in the last decade:

Baggott mentions the deification of Faulkner, Chekhov, Hemingway. I have to ask: In the last decade, what woman would you put up against these giants? Maybe there were moderns that could carry the torch -- Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, or others from the 20th century: Harper Lee, Willa Cather, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison. But now? Where is my Gertrude Stein? Who can stand up against Junot Diaz and Khaled Hosseini and Kazuo Ishiguro? Is it really supposed to be Alice McDermott?

Netzer concludes in a very practical vein which goes back to where I originally thought she was going – there are “best of” topics. They may not be the best topics in your opinion but they are the topics likely to get you on a “best of” list:

The lesson of the list is that nobody's going to do us any favors. We're not going to get prizes just for showing up and writing our little books. Girl books are great; I like to read them and write them. But if we're writing girl books, we're not getting on "Best of" lists, and that is the reality. Do with it what you will.

There’s something I like about this attitude. It is realistic. Personally, I don’t think getting included on someone’s “best of” list means a hill of beans as far as merit goes. There are lots of very good authors out there, not only women, who don’t have a large readership and are never going to catch the attention of the people who make “best of” lists, at least “best of” lists that anyone cares about.

But being on a “best of” list probably does mean something in terms of book sales and financial remuneration. And, lets face it, it probably does mean something in terms of having a work that will last in the consciousness of the public. It doesn’t mean it will one day be deemed a classic; but at least it brings the book to the attention of the people who might decide to teach it and thereby make it a classic.

So if it is important to a woman to get on the “best of” list, start writing the type of thing that gets picked for a “best of” list and stop writing the stuff that doesn’t.

This seems very practical to me.

But at the end, when she softens her advice a little, she again got back to that nagging question she had asked above. Speaking of novels about motherhood she says:

Yeah, motherhood is important, we wouldn't be here without it. But we wouldn't be here without eating either, and I don't see a lot of cookbooks winning Pulitzers. Maybe it's not about writing about "man themes" but about human themes. Maybe it's not about pandering to the list, but evolving, as a gender, into people who address the important stuff, the big stuff: death, war, sex, adventure, as it pertains to women and men.

Evolving as a gender. Where is our Kite Runner she asks?

Personally I wouldn’t put Khaled Hosseini on a par with Faulkner and Woolf either. But I get what she is saying. He does paint on a large canvass.

Everything I read tells me that women make up the vast majority of readers. And the ranks of would-be writers are full of women. I read a lot of women authors. And I enjoy much of what I read. But I do think that most of the time, even when the women is writing about what I think is a culturally or historically significant theme, the women paints on a small canvas.

I compare a novel like Brick Lane to A Thousand Splendid Suns. I consider both of those novels to be stories of individual women and novels about political situations. Although I thought both authors succeeded with many things in their novels I wouldn’t elevate either of those novels to “great” novel status. But I do recognize that the (male) author of A Thousand Splendid Suns decided to work with a broad canvass while the (female) author of Brick Lane chose to work on the small canvass. It is almost as if the (male) author of A Thousand Splendid Suns told his tale to a large audience gathered in the living room while the (female) author of Brick Lane told her tale to the women in the kitchen shelling peas. I felt that Hosseini expected that men and women would read his tale of two women in Afghanistan where I felt that Monica Ali assumed that mostly women would be reading her novel.

I was thinking about this as I was reading Ted Genoway’s current piece in Mother Jones: The Death of Fiction. That’s a somewhat misleading title. He’s really writing about the death of literary magazines. He compares the situation that editors of Lit Mags in years past face compared to the situation today.

Consider this: When Wilbur Cross was elected governor of Connecticut in 1930, an unlikely Democratic victor in an overwhelmingly Republican state, his principal qualification was his nearly 20 years as editor of Yale Review. Indeed, Cross essentially invented the modern quarterly when he reshaped the sleepy review to more closely mirror The Atlantic in its discussion of current events alongside literature and criticism. While preparing to take office, he was in correspondence with Aldous Huxley, Sherwood Anderson, and Maxim Gorky about their contributions to the next issue. In fact, through four successive terms, Cross never left the helm of Yale Review—publishing John Maynard Keynes on microeconomics and Thomas Mann on the threat of Nazism—at the same time he was pushing back against legislated morality (such as Prohibition) and enacting tougher child-labor restrictions. When the New York Times asked how he found time to read manuscripts and review proofs while performing his responsibilities as governor, Cross deadpanned, "By getting up early in the morning."

Cross could do this because the number of submissions to a Lit Mag at that time was manageable. Then everyone began writing. Submissions increased. Creative writing programs proliferated across the country. Universities started new Lit Mags and Journals to publish all these new writers. And yet. And yet their circulation was and remained tiny. No one was reading them.

Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies. In short, no one is reading all this newly produced literature—not even the writers themselves. And with that in mind, writers have become less and less interested in reaching out to readers—and less and less encouraged by their teachers to try.

My emphasis, not his. Genoway doesn’t fully develop, in my opinion, this idea of writers becoming more insular in what they write about. And he doesn’t focus primarily on women writers. But I found the idea interesting and I’ve been thinking about it in conjunction with Netzer’s comment about writing “culturally and historically significant” works.

Genoway points out that, as the topics that authors were writing about became less commercial (more insular) the commercial outlets for short fiction dried up. Magazines that would regularly publish short stories pretty much stopped including fiction. I’m not sure if there really is a cause and effect here. I remember when Glamour Magazine published short stories but it might be that it wasn’t a problem with the stories that caused them to stop but, rather, a different profit model. In any event:

One would think that the rapid eviction of literature from the pages of commercial magazines would have come as a tremendous boon to lit mags, especially at the schools that have become safe harbors for (and de facto patrons of) writers whose works don't sell enough to generate an income. You would expect that the loyal readers of established writers would have provided a boost in circulation to these little magazines and that universities would have seen themselves in a new light—not just promoting the enjoyment of literature but promulgating a new era of socially conscious writing in the postcommercial age. But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

That’s my emphasis, not his. Again, he doesn’t really develop this thought about the content of the fiction. But it brought to mind Netzer’s advice to women writers who want to be on “best of” lists (and as the editor of a lit mag, Genoway is the kind of person whose opinion is representative on these types of lists).

So how do you write a ‘culturally and historically significant novel’ or short story that shows you give ‘two shits about the world”? Got me. I’m not a writer. I do know that writers are told to “write what you know”. And I’m reminded of the latest John Irving novel in which his literary main character scoffs at that advice:

What bullshit was this? Novels should be about people you know? How many boring but deadeningly realistic novels can be attributed to this lame and utterly uninspired advice.

Irving is, of course, writing a novel that has lots of characters based on people he actually knows and experiences he actually had. But I think there is some truth in his character’s scoffing. Everything you write about doesn’t have to be based on your experience; some of it can be things you imagine.

And if you can imagine living in town different than your own or having a job different than your own why can’t you imagine your characters are caught up in a “culturally and historically significant” event?

Again, it doesn’t personally matter to me in my reading if a novel is on a “best of” list. That’s not what this is about. But “best of” lists do exist and getting on them does matter to many women authors.

And I do find that I applaud the idea of reading more books by women that are the equivalent of War and Peace. Or even The Kite Runner. Or today’s equivalent of To Kill a Mockingbird. I would like to read more novels written by women that may have strong women characters but that also intend to start a political discussion that is not only a political discussion of issues that concern primarily women. I like the idea of reading women authors writing about what Netzer calls "the big stuff."

More Jane Espenson

Jane Espenson and Tim Minear appeared at the 2009 Creation Entertainment Serenity L.A. Con (I’m not sure exactly what that is) to talk about the television script writing process.   I’ve said before that Espenson is one of my favorite television writers.   You can watch it here:

Jane Espenson has written for shows including Ellen, Gilmore Girls, The O.C, Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse, among many others. She is especially proud of her work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and on Battlestar Galactica, where she wrote episodes, co-wrote the Emmy-nominated webisodes, and wrote and produced the BSG TV movie "The Plan." Jane is currently Executive Producer of "Caprica," the Battlestar prequel series set to premiere on Syfy in January of 2010.

The whole presentation is broken into six segments and takes about an hour.    

Looking at the list of shows she’s been involved with, I really wish a worthy successor to Gilmore Girls would appear.  I still haven’t seen any of BSG, although a close friend and her husband are now hooked watching it on DVD and tell me I should watch it.   Presumably it won’t be necessary to have watched it to enjoy Caprica, since Caprica is a prequel. I’m hoping it will be available on hulu – the pilot is.  That’s how I see Stargate Universe.   And Sanctuary.   If not, I may have to visit Truman when it’s on.  Lucky I know a dog with cable.

Sir Walter

Back in 2002 my sisters and I took my parents to Scotland as a “retirement” gift for my dad. (I put the word “retirement” in quotes because he continues to go to work each week in a part time capacity.) We drove all over the eastern part of Scotland from the Borders up to Loch Ness.

Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

The first John Irving novel I tried to read was The World According to Garp.  I got to the point where someone (I don’t remember who) had an eye poked out and I stopped.   I didn’t try another John Irving novel for a long time, not until someone whose reading judgment I trust recommended A Prayer for Owen Meany.   I loved it.  (Someday I’m going to re-read it.)   A few years ago one of my reading groups chose A Widow for One Year as  the selection and I enjoyed it too.  I saw the movie Cider House Rules, but I never read the novel.   And that’s been about it for me as far as John Irving goes.

Castle’s Heat Wave

The other day in my post about Dollhouse, I talked about the creative marketing that the show was using, including having characters “tweet” updates that fit in with the plot and creating a complete corporate website for the evil Rossum Corporation.

RT @CapricaSeven: Remember. No one is born a good writer. Babies can't write.

Unlike many, I haven't gotten into Twitter that much.  I follow about 40 people and I allow about 12 people that I personally know to follow me.   I regularly forget to even look at my Twitter account for days at a time.  And when I do look at it I realize that I haven't missed much.

Except every once in a while when I catch a recent tweet by Jane Espenson.

It is no secret that Jane Espenson is one of my favorite television writers.   She's working on a new show right now called Caprica Seven (which seems to be some kind of sequel/prequel to Battlestar Galactica) and she tweets under the name CapricaSeven.  A couple of television blogs that I follow re-posted some of her initial tweets a few months ago and I was intrigued because she was, among other things, giving writing tips.  So I began following her. 

Cold Comfort Farm/Thursday Next: First Among Sequels

One of the problems with having a love of reading but no formal education in literature is not knowing how to classify novels within genres.  To the extent that we covered genre in my high school literature courses or my college freshman English courses (which I actually mostly took in high school), it was only in a cursory way.  So I tend to classify literature in a cursory way.

What I've found is that "real" English majors are always correcting me when I try to classify novels.  Cursory isn't good enough for them.  I understand that; it's how I feel about generalized discussions of the law.  But since, most of the time, the genre really isn't necessary for what I want to talk about when I talk about novels (and since the "correction" often takes the form of an extended lecture that forms a huge digression from the topic at hand) I tend to avoid mentioning genre.

But that's hard to do when talking about novels that fall into genres like, for instance, satire. 

I'm just going to admit right off the bat that I know next to nothing about satire as a genre.  I recognize that there are all kinds of genre classifications that may fall within satire or may well be slightly (or majorly) different from satire.   I've never figured out how those classifications work and, inevitably, whatever I decide to call something, I'm told it is WRONG! 

Maybe that's why I think I don't like satire.  I do think that I don't like satire.  I don't think I hate it.  But I do think I don't like it.

So with all those caveats ...

As I said the other day, I was not fond of Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.  I remember that, mostly, I was bored by it but I kept reading because "everyone" said it was so great.   It took me a while to figure out that it was supposed to be satire and that was partly because it didn't seem all that over-the-top to me, a girl from the midwest.  As far as I was concerned, people from New York really were like that and the things that happened to them really happen to people in New York.  Where was the satire?  Eventually I got it.  But I didn't like it.

My formal introduction to satire (wasn't everyone's?) was Jonathon Swift's A Modest Proposal.  But I had read Huckleberry Finn before that.  I liked Huck Finn. No one told me it was satire but I understood that Twain was playing with me.  On the other hand, I've never wanted to re-read Huck Finn.  I've never wanted to re-read A Modest Proposal.  I've never wanted to re-read anything satirical that I can think of.   The way I look at it, once you "get it" there isn't any point in reading it again.  And that's how I've always looked at satire - as something that is meant to convey a message (usually with blunt force) and once I get the message I can discard the medium.

I sometimes think that the reason I avoid satire is because I'd rather just "get it" by reading a book of non-fiction and really learning about the subject.  The kinds of satire that I like are the short humorous kind that make me laugh.  A Modest Proposal, for all it's cleverness, isn't going to make anyone guffaw.  The Onion, on the other hand, makes me laugh quite often.  But I wouldn't want to read a novel-length version of an Onion story. And is The Onion satire?  I think it is.  But it is also a parody. 

I like parody. And here we get into deep waters because I have no idea if parody is a sub-genre of satire or is it it's own genre or is a technique that is sometimes used in satire?  I'm sure someone will enlighten me.  

I think I like parody because the key to understanding and "getting" parody isn't knowing any fact about society in general (political or religious etc.) but knowing something about the works that are being parodied and what their strengths and weaknesses are.  The Onion is a parody of a newspaper.  It may satirize the news, but it only works because people are familiar with newspapers. The Daily Show  is wonderful because it is a parody of a news broadcast.  It uses that parody to satirize the political news of the day but it only works because people understand news broadcasts and their strengths and weaknesses.

Most parodies that I like have nothing to do with politics but are strictly parodying a particular type of work of literature or film or television.  For instance, I thought the film Galaxy Quest, a parody of the Star Trek franchise, was fabulously funny.   There are certain elements of parody in Buffy the Vampire Slayer that make the entire concept work.  As far as I'm concerned, a good parody is written by someone who loves the underlying work being parodied and is enjoyed most by people who love that underlying work too.  I think that's why I liked the film Australia but other people didn't.

That leads me to Cold Comfort Farm, which is a parody. (Is it also satire?  Google it and you will see it associated with satire.)  I read Cold Comfort Farm because a number of people recommended it.  It took me a while to realize it was a parody and not just some other form of 1930's comic novel (although I was fully on board with the fact of parody by the time that the protagonist got to the farm). 

Cold Comfort Farm is the story of Flora Poste ("Robert Poste's daughter") who is left an orphan after finishing an expensive education that prepared her for nothing.  She has not enough money to support herself so she decides to do what all orphans do in novels, go live with relatives.  She chooses some mysterious relatives who live at a place called Cold Comfort Farm and who owe her father some mysterious debt.  When she arrives she finds that she has stepped into a situation much like a 19th century novel not only in the living conditions but in the mindset of the inhabitants (or, apparently, much like early 20th century popular British fiction).  This pleases her because she can work to change the lives of the people for the better.  And she does.

I never read the popular British novels of the day that Gibbons was parodying, but I have read the Brontes and DH Lawrence and that was enough to "get it".   One of the interesting things to me was that Gibbons wrote the novel in the 1930's (obviously before World War II) and yet the story is set at a later date (the early 1950's?) while the life of the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm is right out of Lawrence or Bronte.  This gives the novel an unpredictable feel that is, I think, essential to keeping the reader turning the pages.  I kept being pulled into the 19th century aspects of Cold Comfort Farm only to be jerked away by the appearance of telephones and aeroplanes and chevy vans and "talkies". 

I think this is important because one of the reasons I don't go out of my way to read parodies is because I fear being bored.  If you are familiar with the underlying work that is being parodied then you essentially know what is going to happen.  Humor can only go so far in keeping my interest.  What I need is a "new" problem for the author to solve.  And in Cold Comfort Farm the problem that Gibbons set for herself was how to integrate this "modern" woman into a 19th century setting without destroying the subject that was being parodied and while still keeping the woman "modern". 

I think she succeeded in part by making Flora Poste (the heroine) not really very likeable.  I didn't become invested in Flora for a very long time.  In fact, at the beginning, I wondered how I was going to tolerate her long enough to follow her through a novel.  But Gibbons uses some of the characteristics of Flora that could be annoying (her self-assuredness, her insistence on having things her way, her refusal to listen to naysaying) as a counterpoint to the people at Cold Comfort Farm who are stuck in their 19th century life simply because they can't bring themselves to act to change their lives.

In 19th century and early 20th century novels the heroine who brings change to the people "set in their ways" doesn't do it through force of character.  Jane Eyre is constantly described as quiet and unassertive.  Mary in The Secret Garden gets nowhere when she is assertive in her temper tantrums, it is only when she becomes a "good child" that she is able to work change.

Flora has no interest in being like those kinds of heroines.  She is a "modern" woman. And that is what makes this an interesting parody.  She is, in some ways, a parody within a parody.

I admit that it took me about half of the novel to really begin enjoying it.  It was only when I saw that Flora really was going to follow through on her intention to force changes that I became interested in what was going to happen and how she was going to make it happen.  I feel that it is a novel that I will read again some day because I know that I missed a lot on first reading.  But when I put it down I didn't think much about it and I did not intend to even write about it.  (Partly because of the whole parody/satire connection /dichotomy.)

Then I picked up Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next: First Among Sequels.  As Fforde says, fiction is "strange, unpredictable and fun!" 

In this novel, there is an agency known as Jurisfiction that patrols BookWorld and keeps plots in order and stops rogue fictional characters from leaping from novel to novel or worse, leaping out into the real world (or Outland, as it is referred to).  As an Outlander, Thursday Next works with fictional characters (mostly from books that are seldom read anymore, because those characters have more free time to do other things).  They meet in locations that are "back story", for instance the ballroom of the Dashwood estate in Sense and Sensibility.   It is a difficult concept to explain but by this, his fourth book in the series, it is understood by his readers.

Think of books as you think of them when you read them - as a small universe that you enter and that really exists.  Or at least exists in the sense that a television set with actors playing the characters exists.  In Fforde's fiction a few chosen people really can enter into books and walk among the characters, as long as they stay in the back story so that the reader doesn't "see" them.

But a book in Bookworld doesn't have all the detail that readers imagine when they read a book.  As Thursday ponders:

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so.  When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work -- the author might have died a long time ago.

In Bookworld, each book floats in the great Nothing in which text cannot exist.  But the books also exist in clumps (maybe like galaxies) that are composed of genres. (Groan.  Genre again) Characters have learned how to communicate and jump from novel to novel (except no one can get into Sherlock Holmes yet) and they have, collectively, formed their own type of government complete with a legislature and an enforcement branch.  Thursday and the fictional characters on her team do the monitoring as well as keeping the peace between genres.

For instance, in this novel one of the subplots involves a border dispute between the Racy Novel genre and its neighbors, Feminist and Ecclesiastical.  The senator for Racy Novel reveals they have developed a "dirty bomb", a "tightly packed mass of inappropriate plot devices, explicit suggestions and sexual scenes of an expressly gratuitous nature" and threatens to detonate it.  This is of great concern to the Feminist and Ecclesiastical genres. As Thursday  explains:

A well placed dirty bomb could scatter poorly described fornication all across drab theological debate or drop a wholly unwarranted scene of a sexually exploitive nature right into the middle of Mrs. Dalloway.

I can't really classify Fforde's novels.  They are fantasy.  They are comic.  They are mysteries.  Are they parodies?  Maybe Fforde tries to answer that in this novel.   

At one point Thursday is cast out of her own Thursday Next novel into the great Nothing.  Because she is not text she can survive where a fictional character cannot (that part of the novel is a graphic novel - no text, get it?) and she eventually manages to make her way to the next book ... Cold Comfort Farm.   (Where she incidentally discovers there really is something nasty in the woodshed.)

So Cold Comfort Farm and Thursday Next. Neighbors.  Linked by genre. At least in the mind of Jasper Fforde.   Is it because they are both in the parody genre?  Or is it because they parody multiple genres?  As I said, I avoid those discussions. :)

By the way Thursday Next was one of the books I was going to read this year in What's in a Name Challenge.  Two down.

In Praise of Editors

The Elegant Variation just ran a four part series in which it reprinted in full (with permission) an essay by Susan Bell, "Revisioning The Great Gatsby", which appears in The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, a collection of essays that offers "aspiring writers insight into the craft of writing."

This essay explores the way in which F. Scott Fitzgerald's editor, Max Perkins, influenced the final version of The Great Gatsby.

Here's a taste:

In autumn 1924, Fitzgerald sent Perkins the Gatsby manuscript. The editor diagnosed its kinks, then wrote a letter of lavish praise and unabashed criticism. “And as for the sheer writing, it is astonishing,” wrote Perkins. “The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry are most extraordinary.” A crucial problem, though, was the hero’s palpability. Perkins explained:

Among a set of characters marvelously palpable and vital—I would know Tom Buchanan if I met him on the street and would avoid him—Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim. Now everything about Gatsby is more or less a mystery, i.e. more or less vague, and this may be somewhat of an artistic intention, but I think it is mistaken.

Gatsby’s vagueness was intentional, according to Fitzgerald’s December 1 reply: “[Gatsby’s] vagueness I can repair by making more pointed—this doesn’t sound good but wait and see. It’ll make him clear.” To make Gatsby too clear would make him too human and unheroic. Fitzgerald wanted to clarify Gatsby’s vagueness, not Gatsby himself. But in a fascinating turnabout, on December 20 the author wrote again, this time to confess that the vagueness was not altogether intentional:

I myself didn’t know what Gatsby looked like or was engaged in & you felt it. If I’d known & kept if from you you’d have been too impressed with my knowledge to protest. This is a complicated idea but I’m sure you’ll understand. But I know now—and as a penalty for not having known first, in other words to make sure I’m going to tell more.

Here are links to all four parts. Well worth reading in my opinion.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

This & That

Some stuff:

Sarah Waters.  The Guardian had an interesting interview with novelist Sarah Waters this week.

In the past, the literary grandes dames of the 20th century were larger-than-life figures as complex as Radclyffe Hall and Djuna Barnes or as frankly posh and exotic as Daphne du Maurier. Waters, who has the potential, and perhaps the appetite, to achieve a du Maurier audience, is not like that. She is at pains to stress her ordinariness. "I think I'm an unhysterical person," she says. "I do see myself as normal." Everything about her situation here advertises normality. "But," she goes on, "I think that what's behind normality is very interesting."

PD James and Elizabeth George.  At the beginning of May, Rohan Maitzen wrote a blog post that I intended to point to earlier about James and George called Who Cares who Killed ... Whoever it Was?  I had read George's last novel a few months ago but I just finished James' last novel The Private Patient recently.  I found a lot to think about in her post.

Often in my course on mystery and detective fiction we talk about the limits working in this genre sets on certain literary elements, chief among them characterization. A mystery novelist can not afford to mine the depths of her characters as long as they are suspects in the case. This technical limitation is most apparent in writers of 'puzzle mysteries,' such as Agatha Christie, but even with writers who develop their people quite fully, as James and George do, an element of opacity is required, not just about their actions, but about their feelings and values, else we will know too quickly "whodunnit." (There are exceptions, of course, as when some of the novel is openly from the point of view of the criminal, though often then we have inside knowledge without knowing the character's outward identity.) The same limits do not, however, apply to the detectives--which is one reason, as historians and critics of the genre have pointed out, for the appeal of the mystery series. Across a series of novels, we can come to know the detectives very well, and a developmental arc much longer than that of any single case emerges. Though the case provides the occasion, after a while the real interest lies with the detective.

I think that's true.  At this point I only read George to find out the next chapter in the saga of Lynley and also Barbara Havers.  The mystery is really irrelevant to me.   I read James because I like the way she writes and less to find out what happens to Dalgleish but that's only because I long ago learned that James will not reveal all about Dalgleish.   And this is why I continued reading Janet Evanavich all last summer even as I grew to almost dislike her formulaic writing.  I wanted to find out if Stephanie and Joe would get together - finally and completely.  When I figured out that Evanovich had no intention of doing anything but tease us with that relationship to sell books, I lost interest and I've never read her last novel.

Speaking of mystery detectives ...

My Summer Book Wish List.  Lindsey Davies has a new volume out in her Marcus Didius Falco series - volume #19.   It's called Alexandria and, yes, the mystery will be irrelevant.  I want to find out what's going on with Marcus, Helen and the kids.   Iain Pears, has a new novel out:  Stone's Fall.  Reviews say it's more like Dream of Scipio than An Instance of the Fingerpost, which sounds encouraging.   Dream is one of my favorite novels.  (And the fact he lists Robertson Davies' The Deptford Trilogy as one of his three favorite books pleases me very much.)  A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book won't be released in the United States until October.  Will I be able to wait?  Or will I need to get it from a commonwealth country (hello Canada!) before then?  Or maybe someone who is traveling to Europe will pick it up for me in an airport bookstore ...

Finally ... a feel good story:

Sister Francis Xavier

I just started reading the fifth (and last) book in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.  It's called The Last Olympian and Riordan dedicated it as follows:

To Mrs. Pabst, my eighth grade English teacher, who started me on my journey as a writer

A couple of things struck me about that dedication.  First, that no matter how old you are the taboo against using a teacher's first name is hard to ignore.  I was at a meeting the other night and my 11th grade English teacher was part of the committee.  I usually end up calling her nothing because I can't bring myself to use her first name.  But, second, I thought this was a wonderful dedication and I hoped that Mrs. Pabst was still alive to appreciate it.

It made me think about my eighth grade English teacher, Sr. Francis Xavier, who is no longer alive.  She was a nun, a School Sister of Notre Dame, and she took no prisoners.  She wore a full habit even when the other nuns were moving to the short habits with the half veil.  During mass (which we went to every day) she would stalk up and down the aisles monitoring everyone (not just her class) and if she didn't feel we were singing the hymns loud enough she would hiss "ssssssing!" at us. 

She was also one of the best teachers I've had in my life. 

I had Sister for English from sixth through eighth grade.  Twice a week she would write the beginning of a sentence on the board and our homework assignment was to go home and write "a paragraph" using that as the opening.  For instance, she might write "Today, while I was brushing my teeth ..." and we would have to write something beginning with that phrase.

It wasn't really a paragraph, it was both sides of a sheet of paper (the special "control" paper that was assigned to sixth through eighth graders).  But she always referred to it as "a paragraph".  I think she was trying to make it seem as if it was not that big of a deal to write something.  You didn't have to write a whole story, just a paragraph.

The next day, before we turned in our work, she would look at her class roll and call out a name.  The lucky student would trudge to the front of the classroom, stand behind the podium and read his or her paragraph to the class.  Sister would say thank you and check his or her name off the list.  We would spend the entire class period listening to the work of our peers.  If you weren't called on during that class period you would be called on the next time.  Or the next.  We had forty-two kids in our classroom so you could never tell when you might be up again.   (Yes, forty-two).  And sometimes she'd cheat and call someone early, just to keep us on our toes.

We never earned anything other than a checkmark for our work, but the mere fact that we knew we could be called on to read our work out loud made everyone work hard to be somewhat entertaining.  You could tell if your classmates were impressed.  They nodded or laughed or occasionally gasped.   Usually Sister would just say thank you, but occasionally she would ask a question if the student had written about something factual or, if the student had written about something personal, she might express some appropriate emotion.  But mostly she just listened along with the rest of us.  If, however, the student used improper grammar (which of course happened often) she would stop him or her in mid-sentence and what followed was the equal of the Inquisition.  She didn't rest until everyone understood what was wrong with the sentence and how it was to be corrected.  But she did it all through questions and answers - law professors using the Socratic method could have learned a thing or two from Sister's technique. 

Reading paragraphs was two days out of our week.  Two other days were spent diagramming sentences.  She would write a sentence on the board, we would diagram it ourselves on our papers and then she would look at her class roll and call someone to the board to diagram it on the board.  if the student got lost she would look at the class and we would raise our hands to help out. 

Today, over at So Many Books, Stephanie comments upon an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that a professor at Trinity College is teaching a class on diagramming sentences because the students asked for it. 

They start off with easy sentences and build up to complex ones, their final assignment for the class asks them to diagram 120 lines of their favorite poem. The class also thrives on a little competition. At the end the 30 students are broken up into two teams. Each team has a week or two to write a sentence for the other team. Then on competition day the sentences are exchanged, the stop watch starts ticking and they have something like 40 minutes to diagram the sentence. The teams work at the same time each on their own blackboard. Each team starts off with 100 points and get deductions for errors. The team with the most points after deductions wins.

That sounds like something Sr. Francis Xavier would have liked.  She was a hard taskmaster and the class lived in fear of her but we learned from her.  Oh, did we learn.  The character that Meryl Streep played in the movie Doubt reminded me of her.  But, unlike that character, she was never the principal and I don't think she actually wanted to be the principal.  And it truly would have been a shame to remove her from the classroom.

I don't remember what we did on our fifth day in class.  I don't think there was a set regime, I think she mixed things up a little on those days.  I remember sometimes she would have us read things written by professionals and pull them apart.  Not for meaning but for grammar and structure.  (We had a different teacher, Mrs. Kearns, who taught "Reading" which was really the English literature class.)

Sr. Francis Xavier is long dead.  She taught me at the end of the baby boom when class sizes were enormous and when nuns were expected to "serve" without pay, just a convent to live in and food to eat.  Unlike the priests in the rectory, they cleaned their own homes and did their own grocery shopping and laundry.  And they did that after a long day teaching in classrooms crammed full of elementary school children .  Some of them were not very good teachers.  Some of them were not happy people.  Some of them were, frankly, downright mean.  But others, like Sr. Francis Xavier, were great teachers who were not appreciated nearly enough.  

I don't know if any of her students ever became a professional writer and dedicated anything to her.  But she certainly deserves such a dedication.

This & That: Style, Books etc.

Some stuff I've been thinking about:

• Reading the April hard cover edition of the ABA Journal I ran across this.  The co-head of DLA Piper's international arbitration group was tired of the bickering between firm lawyers working on a case where the workload was spread between the firm's New York and  London offices.  Seems that they "couldn't stop correcting one another's grammar and writing styles styles based on their respective country's English."   So the firm ended up developing its own English style guide.  It doesn't say how long that took and how much bickering and compromise was involved.  But I'd like to see it.  I regularly spell words the British way because I read so much British literature.  
  
• Sadly, I have reached the end of the Tess Monaghan series (at least until Laura Lippman writes another).  Sometimes a series will get stale the further it goes, but I think this series just gets stronger as it goes along.  (Although I do think she should strive to end the next book without a shooting at the end, that's getting a little old.) The last book, Another Thing to Fall, involved a television production in Baltimore.  Unlike the multitudes of people who dream of working in movies and television I've always known I'm not cut out for that life.  I'm a night person, not a morning person.  This novel confirmed that.   While reading this series I never bothered to find out anything about Laura Lippman on a personal level.  I knew she was a former reporter because every time I would go look for a link to one of her books it mentioned that.  But I didn't know that she was married to David Simon until I read the afterward to this book.  That is one creative household.   And it reminds me that I still need to watch the last two seasons of The Wire.
  
• More Twitter Lit:  Baby Trotsky, a Twitterary Magazine.  I just love the phrase "Twitterary Magazine".
  
• Happy Earth Day - what's left of it.

Characters Online

I recently read somewhere (I wish I could remember where) that a movie script in which two persons were unable to connect through the entire movie was deemed unrealistic in an age of cell phone proliferation.

What I'm waiting for is a movie in which two people are in constant communication, are completely on the same wavelength, have a real connection, are close friends and yet never lay eyes on each other and only interact digitally. In this age of social networking sites, blogs and other digital communication, this seems like a realistic scenario. In the past this only occurred if one of the characters was a computer but now the possibilities seem endless.

A couple of years ago I was reading Nancy Pickard's The Virgin of Small Plains (which I highly recommend) and in the midst of the story one of the minor characters logged onto her computer:

In her room, seated in a straight-backed chair in front of a scarred old wooden desk, Catie logged onto thevirgin.org which was the most popular of the small number of websites that had sprung up about the Virgin of Small Plains. Without even stopping to read through the entries from that day, she opened a new window to type up her own account of the astonishing thing that had truly happened to her.

Pickard then created Catie's blog post. For those of us who spend time online this was a very true moment. For those people who know nothing about blogs, it was a small enough part of the story that it didn't distract from anything.

At the time I thought it was just a matter of time before someone created a virtual community that was integral to the plot. And that is what Laura Lippman did in her mystery novel By a Spider's Thread. Lippman's detective Tess Monaghan is asked to track down a missing wife and mother who has run off with her children. Tess, who is in Baltimore, discovers that they are in the the Midwest. But instead of traveling to the Midwest herself, Tess relies on a network of other female private investigators with whom she communicates via a listserv and instant messaging. The listserv is called Snoopsisters. The members help each other out with cases but they also listen to each other. They share their frustrations and their successes. The conversations that Monaghan creates sounded realistic to me and Tess couldn't have solved the mystery without the Snoopsisters.

I liked this idea and I hoped that Lippman would continue it in later books. But, although she mentions the Snoopsisters in later books, they aren't integral to the plot and Lippman doesn't create any conversations for us to read.

It is only a matter of time before someone writes an entire story involving people who only know each other digitally. Or who have met but only interact digitally, like old college friends who have rediscovered each other through Facebook. Or blog friends who finally meet each other in person. Maybe an updated version of the country house mystery where the bloggers spend a weekend at a bed and breakfast. Perhaps in southern Indiana ...

On the Sentence

I have often said that the most important thing for me in reading a novel (or indeed in reading anything) is the writing.  A good sentence can make up for a bad plot twist.  This is, of course, a gross generalization.  A novel with a bad plot is a bad novel.  But a novel with a good plot is not, in my view, necessarily a good novel.  A good novel needs a good plot and it needs good characterization, but mostly it needs good writing. 

But I never get any farther in that analysis because it is hard for me to define what I consider good writing.  Today I found the transcript of a speech given by the short story writer Gary Lutz to the students of Columbia University's writing program last September.  In the speech he talked about how he evolved as a reader and eventually learned to love reading and he said, far better than I ever could, what he was looking for when he read:

As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself.

Yes.  A novel with sentences that are works of art in and of themselves, even when separated from the rest of the work.  That is my favorite kind of novel.

The rest of Lutz' speech was about sentences.  I found much of it interesting, although I am not a writer. 

The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language. So many of the sentences we confront in books and magazines look unfinished and provisional, and start to go to pieces as soon as we gawk at and stare into them. They don’t hold up. Their diction is often not just spare and stark but bare and miserly.

This is how I feel about much of what I read.  That the writer has a good idea for a novel but hasn't spent nearly enough time and effort on the sentences that make up the novel.  As Lutz goes on to describe, even if the syntax and grammar are correct and the sentence conveys the idea that the writer wants to get across, it will not be a great sentence without more.  

These writers recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words. This intimacy is what we mean when we say of a piece of writing that it has a felicity—a fitness, an aptness, a rightness about the phrasing. The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other—the way people and their dogs are said to come to resemble each other, the way children take after their parents, the way pairs and groups of friends evolve their own manner of dress and gesture and speech. A pausing, enraptured reader should be able to look deeply into the sentence and discern among the words all of the traits and characteristics they share. The impression to be given is that the words in the sentence have lived with each other for quite some time, decisive time, and have deepened and grown and matured in each other’s company—and that they cannot live without each other.

I buy books that I hope will make me a pausing, enraptured reader. I am disappointed when I find, instead, that I have purchased a page-turner. Lingering over a poetical sentence is my idea of heaven.   At last, someone has described my heaven for me.