It’s true. I can’t get anything done while there are more Sarah Pain videos out there for me to laugh at. It used to be that my first stops on the internet were literary: maybe Papercuts, followed by The Guardian books section, followed by, say, The New York Review Of Books. Now it’s straight to Wonkette and the HuffPo.

It seems I am not alone. This week, someone writing under the pseudonym “Stumped” sends this complaint to Cary Tennis, Salon’s advice guru and creative coach:

I am taking a creative nonfiction writing course, and I’m supposed to be working on a piece about what I ate for breakfast. The problem is, every time I sit down at the computer to work, I start compulsively reading the election coverage online, sometimes spending two hours or more on variations on the same five articles. I am ashamed of my lack of self-control in this area.

I hear that. I’d find it tricky to write about what I had for breakfast too (two slices of multigrain toast with hard boiled egg, in case you were wondering). More to the point, I am ashamed by my lack of self-control in the internet area also. I have watched that clip of Palin’s interview with Katie Couric, the one which shows her stammering about the economy, fifty sixmany times. That should be enough. Alas, it is not.

“Stumped” has other problems too, though, including what sounds like an over achievement complex combined with some self esteem issues, and Cary’s full response is all over the place, accordingly, while never failing to be encouraging and supportive, which is one of the things I like about him.

My one critique is that he kind of skips over the essential point — a lesson that is essential for all writers. Here it is:

(more…)

There’s a great interview with Luc Sante up at Guernica magazine. The interviewer, Suzanne Menghraj, weaves in questions about music and rhythm and solicits this great quote from Sante:

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.

A few weeks ago, Tao Lin, poet, novelist, short story writer, and editor at 3:AM Magazine, moved into the futures business – offering to sell, for two thousand dollars each, six ten percent stakes in the royalties of his as yet unfinished second novel, due to be published next year by independent Brooklyn press Melville House. A full article about the venture can be found here, care of Publishers Weekly.

Interesting, I thought, and kind of smart. After all, if David Bowie can do it, why not Tao Lin? Make some money, get some publicity, and build an audience. A few days after I found out about the offer I went to check out Lin’s blog, Reader of Depressing Books, but I was too late. The offer had been closed. No matter — I probably wouldn’t have shelled out the cash anyway. Instead, I found myself drawn into some of the other posts, in particular one about how Lin had been flamed on the internet (by what he calls “a shit talking entity”) and so he was inviting his blog readers to chime in about what a good and honest person he is.

I’m intrigued. What is it that people are saying that could be so bad that he feels he has to mount such a public defense? Then I remember that I have heard about Lin before – on Gawker, no less – when I was directed, by a link, to this article from the Seattle based alt weekly The Stranger, in which Lin charts the various levels of writing greatness. I remember reading that piece and thinking — hmm, there are not many people I know who could compare Anne Tyler to a $9.98 Petco Gerbil and get away with it. I remember also thinking, there’s someone who is very clear-eyed about how this whole publishing world works.

So I hang out at Lin’s blog a little more and read more posts, and the comments left in response to those posts, and I deduce a few things. The first is that Lin has quite the following, and many of his acolytes leave comments that seem to be written in his own style. Ergo, Lin is already influencing people. Ergo, he must be original to some degree, and have things to say that others respond to. So what exactly is his style? (more…)

There’s an interesting article about the art of magic in the New York Times. You can read it here. The article draws on another, more scholarly piece in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, in which “…a team of brain scientists and prominent magicians described how magic tricks, both simple and spectacular, take advantage of glitches in how the brain constructs a model of the outside world from moment to moment, or what we think of as objective reality.”

I have long though that writing is a kind of sleight of mind. The author plants images and emotions in the reader’s brain, giving just enough direction for them to be able to form a whole new reality, based on no more than a bunch of words on paper. All reading requires a certain suspension of disbelief which leaves us open and receptive to the world a writer creates. Great writing messes with people’s heads — it’s that powerful and that strange. The abstract for the original article says: “Magic shows are a manifestation of accomplished magic performers’ deep intuition for and understanding of human attention and awareness.” Substitute “novels” for “magic shows” and “novelists’” for “magic performers’” and that statement would be just as true.

Now, for some fun: though I still can’t figure out the embedding video thing, here’s a link to Apollo Robbins picking pockets. His analysis, at the end, of how he “slices attention” is as fascinating to me as the tricks themselves.

The great literary critic James Wood has a new book out, and he is being publicly fellated in print all over town. Nothing gets a book critic more excited, it seems, than the success of another book critic.

“In studying how fiction works, Wood shows how the critical mind ought to work,” exclaims Peter Conrad at The Observer (UK).

“Wood’s reviews are events,” froths Delia Falconer at the Australian.

“Reading Wood, no matter the book under review, provides enormous pleasure; his prose is at once buoyant and momentous, his judgment swift with imperial grace.” That’s from Gideon Lewis-Kraus at the LA Times.

David Gates at Newsweek, in one of the more tepid reviews, still manages to remind us that Wood is “one of the best critics alive.”

And Louis Bayard, over at Salon, starts his review with this line: “James Wood makes me want to be a better man.” He follows that up with: “Wood writes like an angel, with all the austerity and voluptuousness that implies.”

Bayard’s review is actually one of the better ones, despite these ebullient lines. He brings some of his own insights to bear, including this one, on the question of whether fiction even really needs to be explained:

Surely, if it’s doing its job, it need only be experienced. If it can’t be experienced without tearing off its gown to expose the skivvies beneath, then it’s even more of a minority art form than we feared. What, finally, is better for the soul: reading Tolstoy or reading how to read Tolstoy?

I’d vote for the former, but then I’m a sucker for writing about writing and insights into literature, so I’ll be checking out the book anyway. There’s something about the reverential tone reserved for Wood that irks me, though, which is why I was amused to see this somewhat crass attack on the Wood oeurvre from the authors of the Vulture blog over at New York magazine. The great literary critic James Wood seemed to feel so misrepresented that he responded to their implied attacks on his intellect in person. That’s all well and good, James, but do you still collect dirt?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvrKD241gRs]

“Yo, dude, I think you might have won a Poo-litza!”

This, apparently, is how Junot Diaz received word of his big win.

I used a Junot Diaz story in one of my workshops last week — “Fiesta, 1980″ from the story collection Drown. It chronicles the experiences of an adolescent Dominican boy as he navigates his nausea and family life during a trip to a party in the Bronx, with flashbacks that reveal the deeper dynamics behind the up-front action. We spent a lot of time talking about point of view in the workshop. It’s a first person retrospective piece that sometimes brings the reader in close to the 12-year-old protagonist’s experience, and other times privileges the adult narrator. The shift between the two is sometimes smooth, sometimes jarring. Diaz gives us a few lines of the protagonist’s dialogue, only to puncture the illusion of our closeness to the character by throwing in adult words or perceptions. In this way, we are both inside and outside of the protagonist’s mind at the same time. The narrator is effectively treating his younger self as a character. This is a technique called indirect interior monologue — and in the first person, it’s more often employed in memoir and personal essays, when writers often have to recreate some version of their younger selves on the page. See this great essay by David Jauss for more on indirect interior monologue and other techniques of point of view. It’s technical, but worth it.

In the meantime here’s a link to an interview with Diaz, (from which the opening quote of this blog entry is taken) conducted by Meghan O’Rourke, Slate’s culture editor, and Deborah Landau, the director of NYU’s MFA writing program. (Try as I might, I couldn’t embed the damn thing. Anyone with the know-how, please help me!)

O’Rourke looks comfortable on camera. Landau, not so much. But it’s still a good interview, not least because it gives a good feel for how Diaz really thinks and talks. Just how autobiographical is Diaz’s work? That’s something else we discussed in our workshop. The point of view in “Fiesta, 1980″ certainly leads us to read it as nonfiction, and “Junot” would seem to have so much in common with his protagonist “Junior” (also the protagonist of his Oscar Wao book?) that it’s not hard to make the imaginative leap and think it’s as much memoir as fiction. But, of course, that’s pure speculation.

It’s interesting that NYU is teaming up with Slate to produce this kind of content: a service to writing students and interested Slate readers alike, and an indication that NYU’s program is at least trying to utilize new media technology as part of its offerings, which is more than can be said for some other MFA programs.

I’m working, working, working today — on deadline for a couple of things, so for now I’ll just cross post to this great interview with Tom Kealey, author of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook and main man behind the MFA blog.

Kealey offers lots of great things in this interview, but one of my favorites is this quote, from Doris Lessing:

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust your own judgment, learn inner dependence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad.

Which is kinda like learning to identify and trust your own inner instincts, something I posted about a few days ago.

Oh Salman.

It’s hard to know how to read this letter of yours. Is it carefully constructed to imitate the tone of a curmudgeonly and egocentric fool, which would make it a masterpiece of parody and indicate that you have a sly and self-deprecating sense of humor? Or are you — could you really be — such a petty kind of man, one who would take an attack on his signing rate to be an excuse to start a pissing contest on the letters page of a national UK paper with a bombastic and loud-mouthed writer like Malcolm Gluck? Which is it? I just can’t tell!

Here’s a link to the “controversy.”

And here’s the letter in its entirety, as sent to The Guardian newspaper:

It’s always a delight to return to London from an arduous two-month book tour of North America to find myself being accused of “illusions” – that is, lying – in your letters columns. The weirdest part of Malcolm Gluck’s unpleasant little missive (July 17) is that he begins by saying it’s impossible that I could have signed my name 1,000 times in an hour and ends up by revealing that he did it himself. Anyone who has ever attempted to sign a lot of books quickly knows, as Gluck says, that the key is to have the support of bookstore staff experienced in the construction of a smooth “assembly line”. He tells us he had the assistance of such staff when he did it, but refuses to believe that I could have.

So let me be clear: I did not initial the books, but signed my full name; I did have the support of experienced staff at Ingrams book distributors in Nashville (and at many other US bookstores), who will confirm that among the fastest present-day signers of books are President Jimmy Carter, the novelist Amy Tan, and myself. I understand that Mr Gluck may be miffed that his own accomplishment has been equalled or bettered. That does not entitle him to accuse another writer of untruthfulness, without a shred of evidence to support the accusation. And, if memory serves, I actually signed the 1,000 books in Nashville in 57 minutes as against his 1,001 in 59, so his record is toast.
Salman Rushdie
London

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…)