This is probably the exact wood violet that Glück was talking about in her poem. Maybe.

My father recently sent me a quote from the poet Louise Glück who, in her collection of essays, Proofs and Theories, writes that the fundamental experience of the writer is…

…helplessness…most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write, wanting to write differently, not being able to write differently. It is a life dignified…by yearning, not made serene by sensations of achievement.

Which is affirming, if you look it at one way, and see it as confirmation that your own struggles — and what writer does not struggle? — are par for the course, a consequence of the difficult art you have chosen for yourself, and not a symptom that you suck.

So many people that I work with think that their writerly torment means that they are doing something wrong, or that they shouldn’t be writing, or they believe that that no one else finds it so hard. Me and ole’ Louie G are here to tell you otherwise.

At the same time, though, jeeze, Louise. Bleak much? I replied to my father’s email with just such a sentiment. “I get it,” I wrote to him. “I experience it, but what’s the freakin’ payoff? Why do this?”

His reply: “Well, the reason for doing it is that there’s no other way of ‘getting’ it than by doing it. That’s the payoff: being in it. ‘Cos otherwise you’re not in it. And then where are you?”

That’s a prime esoteric father response right there, readers. I get it though. Do you? Is this your reason for writing or are you driven by something else entirely?

As a closing note, here’s a link to a Glück poem, called “April,” because we are in April and despite all the writerly torment that we all put ourselves through on a daily basis, the spring sunshine outside is glorious. This is not at all what the poem is about, though.

Part one features Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, and AL Kennedy.

Part two features Hilary Mantel, Michael Moorcock, Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Motion, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Philip Pullman, Ian Rankin, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, and Jeanette Winterson.

No distribution information or date, though, so maybe the film is…bad? Watch and decide for yourself.

Thanks to Jeremy D’Arcy for his fine design skills and for accommodating all my persnickerty requests with such good grace. There are a few broken images and links here and there – I have to find and fix them, which I will do forthwith. Bear with me.

I’ll tell you something else that is also awesome: The writing of Rainer Maria Rilke. Something I read today prompted me to go hunting for a quote of his that I half remembered – about, appropriately enough, memory. I found it, and also this quote, which I did not know, but love, and which sums up my feeling right now:

“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”

In the right hands, a memoir is the flecks of gold panned out of a great, muddy river. A memoir is those flecks melted down into a shapable liquid that can then be molded and hammered into a single bright band to be worn on a finger, something you could point to and say, “This? Oh, this is my life.” Everyone has a muddy river, but very few have the vision, patience, and talent to turn it into something so beautiful. This is why the writer matters, so that we can not only learn from her experience but find a way to shape our own. I’m not talking about shaping every life into a work of art. I’m talking about making our life into something we can understand, a portable object that has the weight and power of an entire terrain.

This interesting article from the Wall Street Journal should make anyone (like me, for example) who seems to spend hours in unfocused thought feel a little better. A couple of quotes:

…our brain may be most actively engaged when our mind is wandering and we’ve actually lost track of our thoughts, a new brain-scanning study suggests.

And:

By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.

A third? If all is going well, I’ll spend longer daydreaming than that, mate. There’s nothing like a good daydreaming session to make me feel productive. The brain mechanisms that this article talks about might also be the reason that I get great writing ideas when I run. As I’m plodding round the park, sometimes, admittedly, I’m listening to 1980s rave tunes and reliving my clubbing days. But other times, my mind enters a fugue state and, well, I just realize something. That scene I have been stuck on, about my grandmother? It’s really about my father. Aha. Of course.

Haruki Murakami, a novelist I admire, is also a runner, and his book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, contains his own treatise on why running is good for the writer’s life. In this quote from an interview on the Runner’s World website, he seems to describe the same experience that I have had, and that the researchers in the Wall Street Journal article are talking about. Murakami says:

I try not to think about anything special while running. As a matter of fact, I usually run with my mind empty. However, when I run empty-minded, something naturally and abruptly crawls in sometimes. That might become an idea that can help me with my writing.

Our next challenge is to pay attention to that thing that has crawled in. Write it down. Follow where it leads.

In fiction, Berlin’s famous distinction between hedgehogs and foxes, drawn from the pithy fragment attributed to the classical poet Archilochus (”The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”) remains influential. Hedgehogs, in Berlin’s celebrated essay, see the world through the lens of one big, defining idea. They include Plato, Dante, Proust and Nietzsche. Foxes, who scour the landscape, drawing on a wide variety of experience and are indefatigably averse to a single explanatory idea, include Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, James Joyce and, dare I say, Salman Rushdie.

McCrum doesn’t stop there, though. He also contrasts “history course novels” (such as those produced by Pat Barker and Ian McEwen) and the kind of “English course novels” that Martin Amis and Lorrie Moore write. Then, in nonfiction, there are the “mores” and the “differents.”

Mores are writers who, as the label implies, are immensely gifted and vastly superior to their fellows, but are conventional in their vision. Classic mores include Thomas The World Is Flat Friedman and Niall The Pity of War Ferguson. Your different, who might be a hedgehog or a fox, is a mould-smashing one-off, usually an original, and probably quite undisciplined, writer. Differents include Dostoevsky, Oliver Sacks, Naomi Klein, Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell and Atul Gawande. As readers, we may be better satisfied, in the short term, by the mores, but it’s the differents we remember, and who will probably have the lasting influence.

McCrum’s argument is that “foxes” and “mores” win more prizes than “hedgehogs” and “differents.” It would take more of an in depth survey than I am prepared to carry out to prove him right, but I can certainly get on board with the idea that we live in a fox’n'more orientated society, and it’s these writers who seem to earn the most money. We demand versatility from our writers, and breadth of knowledge. It ain’t easy being different!

Aravind Adiga — The White Tiger
Sebastian Barry — The Secret Scripture
Amitav Ghosh — Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant — The Clothes on Their Backs
Philip Hensher — The Northern Clemency
Steve Toltz —  A Fraction of the Whole

Two first time novelists, one woman, and no Rushdie.

The two first-timers, Aravind Adiga and Steve Toltz, are currently getting the best odds, though how the bookies calculate these things I have no idea. Here’s a link to The Guardian’s “condensed read” version of the books. And here’s an absolutely fascinating article, also from The Guardian, in which Man Booker judges from previous years talk about their experiences. Warning, folks: It ain’t pretty.

Fist fights, politics, authors getting dismissed out of hand, deals being struck. A judge threatening to throw himself off a balcony. Another resigning in a huff. Bitter arguments. And very little actual literary discussion, it seems. This, from judges of an award that The New York Times says is “…considered by many to be the most prestigious award for literary fiction in the English-speaking world.” Here are some teasers from The Guardian article:

George Steiner, a judge from 1972, called his whole Booker experience “very grim.”

Paul Bailey from 1982 said: “There are many things I regret doing, and being a judge for the Booker prize is one of them.” He also calls the award process “…a perfect recipe for envy, back-biting and self-glorification.”

Hilary Mantel, from 1990, says: “‘I’m glad I was a Booker judge relatively early in my career. It stopped me thinking that literary prizes are about literary value.”

Even the great literary critic James Wood, a judge from 1994, has this to offer: “Some wonderful books win the Booker, of course, just as the flypaper occasionally catches some really large flies. But it means – or should mean – nothing in literary terms.”

Ouch! And it goes on:

Jonathan Coe, 1996: “Anyone who sets great store by the choices of Booker prize panels should remember this: the process consists of nothing more rigorous than five people sitting in a room together for a few hours, swapping personal opinions.”

Several judges claim that they started reading more nonfiction after being forced to plow through so many novels. Several also say that no one ever changes their mind about their choices, and it all comes down to a numbers game. It’s not all bad — some of the judges seemed to have enjoyed the experience, and believed in the process, and even (shock! horror!) supported the final choice. But I don’t think anyone who reads this article could look on the literary prize-giving process in quite the same way afterward.

I certainly feel a little disillusioned, but ultimately, knowledge is power. That’s what it’s like out there, people. Every time you send out work to residencies, for fellowships or awards, or even for MFA applications, a similar process applies. Know that it’s a crap shoot and keep writing and sending out work anyway. That’s the only reasonable response to an unreasonable world.

One good thing I got from from the article: recommondations for two books I haven’t yet read, but which I now intend to (I’ll be adding them to my scarily long Amazon “to buy later” queue). They are JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower — the first is an overlooked “Best of Booker” contender, the second an overlooked non-winner, and both are referenced by enough of the judges to make me think I should check them out. I’ll report back as soon as I get to them. Should be by at least 2010.

Rhythm in writing is [...] a completely intuitive matter. I don’t really understand the process. It’s related to the substance of Flaubert’s famous letter to George Sand: “When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By searching I find the proper expression, which was always the only one, and which is also harmonious. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Is there not, in this precise fitting of parts, something eternal, like a principal? If not, why should there be a relation between the right word and the musical word? Or why should the greatest compression of thought always result in a line of poetry?” This is crucial stuff for me. I write intuitively, not knowing where I’m going, not knowing what the next sentence will be until this one has guided me there, and knowing how the sentence goes begins with my hearing its rhythm in my head, and then filling in the specific words. If the sentence is cloddish and clunky, it’s simply wrong—and not just wrong-sounding but wrong in its meaning.

I can’t think of a better reason for paying close attention to the construction and flow of every single sentence. Ugly sentences, the ones that don’t scan, the ones that the reader stumbles over? No less than a failure of meaning.

The instinct might be to fix the sentence: rewrite it till it flows. I’d suggest stopping and thinking and getting clarity on what it is you are trying to say before you do that. As Flaubert says: The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Find the idea and the words should, in theory, take care of themselves.

Ah yes, you say, but what if you don’t know what you want to say? What if the idea is elusive, impossible to pin down? Isn’t that one of the reasons why we write in the first place? To discover what it is that we feel and think?

To which I say: that’s what first drafts are for! Write it out in order to know it, to understand it (whatever “it” is here: story, idea, feeling). Then write it again, with this new knowledge having been dredged up and placed, to some degree, at the front of the mind. These two documents might have very little in common. The first enables the second, and the second isn’t so much a rewrite as a re-imagining.

That’s my thoughts on process for today folks, inspired by Flaubert, care of Luc Sante, care of Guernica magazine.

In the meantime, here’s three things that I have come across recently about blurbs. You know, those juicy little quotes from authors, promoting other authors. First up, Rebecca Johnson in Salon, sharing about her blurb-hunting woes. Choice quote: Johnson spots a potential target at a party and sidles up to her, intent on extracting a blurb.

“Hi,” I said a little too brightly. Was it my imagination, or was she already moving away from me? After a few forced pleasantries, I brought up the book and asked if she might be willing to read it. The expression on her face — part horror, part sneer — was exactly what I would have expected had I released a large fart and asked what she thought of it.

Then there’s Rachel Donadio in the New York Times, talking about a company that intends to sell blurbs. Oh, the horror! Donadio talks about “blurbing up” (Rick Moody on William Gaddis), “blurbing down” (famous writers endorsing students) and “blurbing the safely dead” (young neophytes attaching their names to prestigious classic authors).

Then there’s the great churning mass of lateral blurbing, where patterns are harder to discern and dangerous rivalries might lurk, with hard feelings existing among the blurbers themselves.

Finally, agent Nathan Bransford, whose blog I have come to truly appreciate, writes about blurbs in query letters. Bransford has a four tier system for assessing a blatent blurb. Read his post for more.

The general consensus seems to be that blurbs do not actually matter too much, unless they are particularly super-duper. One of my coaching clients, Anita Naughton, was blurbed by Tina Brown, Oliver Sacks and Sandra Bernhard. That’s pretty super-duper. Her book sold out three print runs. I’m not saying it was the blurbs that did it — the book happens to be funny, moving, and brilliantly written. It sold on its own worth. But if you have contacts like Anita did, and can work them, it can’t hurt.