The winner of the UK based and BBC Radio Four sponsored Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction was announced a coupe of days ago: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale. The author receives £30,000, or $60,000 at today’s crapulous exchange rate. I think this makes it the richest purse for nonfiction in the world. Even the Pultizer prize winners only get a measly $10,000.

Being Brits, the organizers have to hyphenate nonfiction — something I choose not to do as I have been living in the States for nearly ten years now and besides, “non-fiction” just seems so…formal. Plus it puts more emphasis on the components of the word, which makes it seem like a reaction of a genre, defined in opposition to the “true art” of fiction. Am I the only one to hear the implied slur in that, or am I just being over sensitive?

I have actually been looking for an alternative to “nonfiction” for some time. Faction? Reality prose? Both gross — any better suggestions, anyone?

A post is brewing in my mind that would develop my last post about intuition and craft (or should that be intuition v. craft?) I need another few days to gestate it, so for now I’ll just direct you to this essay about writing and money by Keith Gessen from n+1 magazine, the literary publication where he is an editor and co-founder. These are uncertain economic times, and Gesson has some clear-eyed and sobering observations on the compromises that writers have to make to get by. He says:

There are four ways to survive as a writer in the US in 2006: the university; journalism; odd jobs; and independent wealth. I have tried the first three. Each has its costs.

I think this is as true in 2008 (year of posting) as it was in 2006. Hell, I think it was true in 1906 too, and is likely to hold in the future, indefinitely.

A lot of the people I work with, either as a coach, editor or teacher, state that it is their aim to make a living as a writer. (more…)

A commentator (OK, it was my wonderful sister, Anna) asked a very pertinent question in response to the last blog post: How do you know if your work really is a piece of shit?

Anne Enright says you must not to listen to that internal voice, but instead practice some “mood management.” You must “…wrestle [your emotions] down to something roughly the size of the page.” While I do think that this is solid advice, there are ways that you can, with some practice, learn to assess your own work.

These methods I’ll call developing your intuition, developing your powers of assessment, and building an external feedback loop. (more…)

The title of this post is a line from this forthright essay about the writing process by Anne Enright, taken from the Guardian books section. Read the whole essay to see the line in context, but here’s the opening paragraph as a teaser:

It doesn’t matter what you think about your work. This is one of the weirdest lessons a writer has to learn, that the emotions that push you to write better, with greater accuracy, truth, verve, wit; the despair that makes you cast your eyes to the ceiling and then plunge back to the keyboard; the running pleasure of one good word being followed by a better; the glee as you set a time bomb ticking in the text; the glorious megalomania with which you set out to describe and yes! conquer! the! world! … are all completely redundant once the piece is finished.

Enright won the Man Booker Prize in October 2007 for her fourth book The Gathering, which introduced her to a whole new audience. The Times book blog Paper Cuts posted something about her back then, and the tenor of the comments – most of them asinine in the extreme – is indicative of her reception. She got in a lot of trouble for her essay about the McCanns in the London Review of Books. UK media commentator Janet Street Porter – a woman who might be described as shrill if she wasn’t simultaneously so horsey – encouraged the public to boycott Enright’s books.

I find Enright’s essays (and check out her others in the LRB while you are over there – one on religion and her children, and one on breastfeeding) to be refreshingly honest and powerfully written. I think this is why she provokes so much ire: she writes about the things we think and feel but are afraid to express. Which, in my book, makes her a good writer. Which takes us back to: The thing you have written is a piece of shit. What writer hasn’t thought this, at one point or another, about their own work? Enright’s point is that you can’t let that voice dictate to you or you’d never write another word. I couldn’t agree more.

I admit it: part of the reason I started this blog is because I spend an hour an unreasonable amount of time every morning looking around various literary websites and blogs*, and I needed a way to justify that investment – plus I wanted a place to put all the thoughts that were prompted by what I read.

So here are two things I looked at this morning, which seem to work together nicely. Over at the New York Times Paper Cuts blog, Barry Gewen offers his assessment of Judge Richard A. Posner – not a cultural critic that I have ever sampled, admittedly, though Gewen does a pretty good job of convincing me that I should. What struck me about the post were these lines:

Posner likes to quantify, and sometimes he tries to quantify what isn’t quantifiable. David Brooks caught the problem perfectly in his review of Posner’s magnificently wrong-headed book “Public Intellectuals”: “Watching Posner try to apply economic laws to public debate is a bit like watching a Martian trying to use statistics to explain a senior prom. He is able to detect a few crude patterns, but he’s missing the fraught complexity of the thing.”

Then, over at the Syntax of Things, I came across this video, which kind of blew my mind.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4515877390655740878&q=booklamp&ei=Ukt2SJLLAoL6-gHNnIW-DA]

Half of me thinks this is a brilliant, if totally geekish idea. The other half thinks: There is no way on this earth that such a technology could work or help in anyway whatsoever. So BookLamp might be able to tell me if a book is plot heavy or light on dialogue, but it can’t come close, presumably, to judging the quality of a book’s style. It must miss the fraught complexity of the thing, no? And isn’t that why we need good critics? And isn’t that complexity, the kind that resists being reduced to a statistic, the kind that authors strive for? Could this technology possibly work on poetry? I think not.

Actually, after thinking about it, the bigger half (and I know there’s no such thing) thinks that BookLamp is a totally wrong-headed idea, but there’s a little geek in me that thinks it’s kinda cool and that there’s probably a use for it somewhere. Assessing the appeal of books just isn’t it.

*OK, so maybe I check People.com too. And, um, realitytvworld.com. But that’s because, with as little posturing as possible, I cast myself in the tradition of those who think so-called “low” and “middle brow” art as worthy of cultural discussion and assessment as that stuffy old high brow stuff. If this approach was good enough for Orwell, it’s good enough for me.

Finally, I have entered the world of blogging. Here it is – my first ever bouncing baby blog post. It seems appropriate, somehow, that this one be self-referential.

One of the most common complaints I hear from the writers that I work with is how hard it is to title their work. I understand their frustration – I struggle with the issue as much as the next writer, but I also know that titles are crucial. They are signposts and framing devices, the first thing that the reader actually reads (assuming they do not skip them altogether, which is surprisingly common). Titles can give a taste of what is to come: create atmosphere, foreshadow, or even, sometimes, ruin the surprise of a piece of work (Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff anyone?)

Over at the Virginia Quarterly Blog, Waldo Jaquith has done everyone a great service by compiling the most common titles from the slush pile of material submitted to the magazine. Some titles from the 2007 list also appear on the 2008 one. **Sound of writers rushing to their computers to retitle anything currently called “Waiting” or “Grace.”** Incidentally, Grace is now the number one girls baby name in the UK. Coinky-dink? What do you think?

Accordingly, I did give some thought to the title of my blog. Boolah. A portmanteau of “moolah,” slang for money and the name of my incorporated company (I figured if I called the company that I might actually make some it) and “books,” which will be one of my primary concerns here: good books, bad books, book related posts of all kinds.

Boolah also means “an expression that conveys excitement” according to the Urban Dictionary, which I didn’t know until I had chosen it as a title, but which makes it especially germane. I’m feeling excited about my blog. Boolah!