One of my students sent me a link to this Q & A by Salon advice columnist Cary Tennis. The question comes from a writer who got writer’s block after reading the slush pile at a publishing company. The writer asks:

How do you believe in your own writing? I don’t mean after it’s finished, but while you’re writing it? Is there a way to work with the imaginary reader instead of fighting with him/her?

Tennis takes the opportunity, in his answer, to wax rhapsodic about releasing yourself from your own judgment, and while he has certainly been taken to task for completely failing to answer his readers’ questions in the past, he has something valid to offer here, I think. You have to enjoy the exuberance of his response, at least.

We cannot judge harshly without also living in fear of being judged. And it is that creeping fear of being judged ourselves that can prevent us from writing fluidly and with ease and courage. So I say step out there and be really, really bad if you want. Who cares? Step out there and write the worst prose imaginable! So what? There’s no law. Do it with gusto. Write the worst possible prose. Write poems that are so bad you can smell them. Do it. Look around. Have you been arrested? Have you been fired? Are you being held up to public ridicule? No. It’s safe. It’s safe to write whatever you want. And you never know. Some of the most awful stuff might be the best. You don’t know. You can’t judge your own work or control how others respond to it.

I have to disagree slightly with the last bit, though. It certainly is hard to see your own work with any degree of objectivity, but with enough careful attention to craft I believe you can tell, in general terms, if your writing is hitting the mark or not. You’ll still need some trusted external readers to be sure, but your own responses will be truer and more reliable. That’s been my experience anyway, and it’s something I try and instill in my students. Through workshopping, writing, and reading great work, you are effectively educating your own internal imaginary reader, to phrase it in the letter writer’s own terms. Turning him or her into a useful friend, instead of a foe. There’s nothing more enabling than that. It’s practical and learnable and it works.

Which is not to say that there isn’t room, sometimes, for a more esoteric response. Looking through some other Cary Tennis columns for this blog post, I came across this one, from 2007, in which an MFA student from “a certain rather prestigious MFA program” asks: what am I doing here?

Cary’s response, in which he confesses that he was once an MFA candidate too, is rather brilliant:

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So first up, regular readers — yes, that means you mum — will have noticed that I haven’t been updating much recently. Been working my ass off, is why. Not my actual ass, mind, just my literary ass. My editing ass and my writing ass. My literary ass is in pretty good shape right now! Tight! I’m going to get back to nearly daily posts here soon, promise.

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.

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.

David Carr Will Save Memoir! Or so says Leon Neyfakh at the New York Observer. Apparently Carr, author of a new book about his drug experiences, was so loathe to trust his drugged out memories that he reported on his own life, interviewed his friends and family, and even hired a private investigator. This makes him, in Neyfakh’s eyes, memoir’s “…white knight, galloping in to show how a personal story can be engrossing, shocking and true.”

This hilarious collection of Carr’s mashed potato analogies suggests otherwise, though.

Stuart Jeffries on the non-reading epidemic. Pithy.

There is a thing called reader’s block. It is not the same as writer’s block. In fact, reader’s block is a phenomenon partly explained as a reader’s all-too-understandable response to so many writers not having writer’s block.

My man Salman might just win the Booker prize again.

And, care of Booksquare, Jennifer Epstein, author of the Painter From Shanghai, on moving from writing books to blogging and blogs:

These short, sharp little sites and pieces can be vastly engaging and informative, and I’ve found several that I truly love. That said, they feel like the very antithesis of the way I write; tight deadlines, immediate readerships.

For New York type writing folk, Guernica magazine is looking for a managing editor and benefit director.

Or: We Don’t Do It For The Money.

From The Guardian (scroll down for this juicy snippet):

Forbes magazine has revealed that JK Rowling is not only the world’s richest author, but the world’s highest-earning celebrity; her income last year was £150m. But before aspiring scribes boot up their computers en masse, inspired by dreams of wealth and fame, it is worth remembering that becoming rich through writing is only slightly more likely than achieving an Olympic medal in Quidditch. According to the Society of Authors, the average salary for a writer in the UK is £10,000 – which should give anyone thinking of entering the field pause for thought.

Thank god there are other rewards. Like the creative satisfaction. The intellectual work-out. The joy of sharing your art with others. Right? Right. Right!

I think I just moved through the three stages of writerly grief there: Disbelief, resignation, defiance. Finally, acceptance. Write.

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.

The links section to the right is currently in progress. As soon as I get the time I’m going to be adding more: more people I know and love, more literary sites, more good stuff.

In the meantime, here’s a few interesting snippets for you to peruse.

This article about Kindleporn just throws up so many weird questions. Does the design of the Kindle facilitate easy one-handed operation? Are there now authors out there who are packaging their erotica into Kindle-page sized chunks? How should a Kindle be cleaned? The mind boggles.

Then there’s this: Robert Downey Jr. Postpones Candid Memoir. S’up Bob? Got creatively blocked, did you? Was your memoir so unbelievably candid that you were afraid of what your family and friends might think? Or was it just too much of a literary challenge? You should have called me, dude! I could have helped you with those issues. I do that kind of thing all the time!

Finally, literary tattoos. Try not to read the comments at the end from all those uptight and morally indignant Telegraph readers, just look at the pictures.

I do have a tattoo, and it does have words in it, but it’s not a literary quote. And that’s all I’m going to say about it. If I were to get a literary tattoo, though, it might be this quote from Thomas Mann, which is currently one of my favorites:

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Actually, I think all writers need to have this tattooed on their bodies somewhere, because it’s so easy to forget. We think that, because it’s difficult, we must somehow be doing it wrong, and there are other writers out there who find writing easy, and they are the real writers and we are not. Mann’s quote reminds us that, in fact, the opposite is closer to the truth.

What about you? What literary tattoo would you get?

I take it back. A couple of posts ago I said that the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction was the most lucrative award for fact-based writing in the world. Then I go and find out about Warwick Prize for Writing. I hadn’t heard about it before because it’s brand new — the debut biennial award will be given in 2009, when some lucky writer will be £50,000 (or $100,000) richer. But here’s what makes this award particularly interesting:

1) It’s open to all genres, from poetry to scientific writing, other forms of nonfiction (creative or otherwise) to fiction.

2) It’s open to all forms of publishing, from internet based works to self-published books to works in translation and co-authored books.

Presumably illustrated books and kids books could be included too — why not? Everything else is.

3) It’s international — work must have been published in English, anywhere in the world, within a two-year time frame.

And here’s the clincher:

4) The theme for the inaugural award is, wait for it, complexity. The banner from the top of this post is borrowed from their website. The message it contains might not be cheery, but it’s certainly interesting, and, well, not easy.

So, to summarize, this is an intellectually rigorous award, available to all writers published in English, regardless of form or genre, and open to experimental work. The judges are interested, as it says in their FAQs, in exploring “what literature is, and what new shapes and forms it might be taking.”

Wowzers. In this era of “high concept” pitches for fiction and nonfiction alike, that’s like getting a lungful of sweet Alpine air.

The final thing I love about this award is that it’s democratic too. According to booktrade.info, “…all members of the University of Warwick Staff – from nursery staff and gardeners to professors and porters – are invited to make a nomination for a prize entry by August.”

This is complexity for the masses, people — as all great literature should be.

Kelly Nuxoll has written an informative and thoughtful article for Poets and Writers magazine about citizen journalism, making the case that what she and her fellow citizen journalists do is more akin to creative nonfiction than it is to traditional political commentary. The immediacy of it gives it power — one of Kelly’s colleagues, writing for the Huffington Post, was the woman who broke the “Obama thinks that voters are bitter” furor. I advise you to read the whole of Kelly’s article to see her argument in full.

The online version of the magazine includes Kelly’s “Postcard from the Campaign Trail” that expands on her thoughts, and includes this paragraph:

I have an MFA in creative nonfiction: Reported, first-person pieces are what I do. I disclose information and use language to reveal my bias, and I expect the reader to take my work for what it is—the perspective of a single individual. I also take my task very seriously. I’m the eyes and ears for all the people who aren’t in the room, and I try to convey both the substance of what happens and also the mood, the setting, my own reaction and those of the people around me. These, the devices of fiction, are important in making a scene come alive. But they are especially critical in describing a presidential campaign, which can be sanitized by sound bites or spun into unrecognizable fluff by a press office. As citizens in a democracy, we need all the information we can get about the candidates and the apparatus that surrounds them. Creative nonfiction offers a lens that is colored by voice, tone, and critical intelligence.

Kelly’s thoughts remind me that, after all this time, creative nonfiction is still a term that a lot of people have problems understanding. I’ve had to define it innumerable times, sometimes even to people who work in publishing. (more…)

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?