From the official Style Sheet, as drawn up by my publisher, St. Martin’s:
Author’s style
- uses fragments
- favors vague pronoun constructions (e.g., “It would be like finding a new kind of bird,” where “It” has no clear antecedent)—lightly edited for especially confusing instances
- recounts visits, demos, etc. in present tense
- uses “human” as noun form for “human being”
The fully copyedited MS came today. It was like Christmas a month early.
I’m a participant in this year’s , or NaNoWriMo, which challenges people to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.
I’ve been “writing” a novel in my head for six years, with several starts that have been abandoned. I’ve been teaching novels and telling people how to write them and giving advice on my friends’ novels for years. Years of talking about writing novels. Now I’m writing one.
NaNoWriMo is easy to hate. In the midst of more writers in the world than readers to read their work, why should we encourage this production of writing for writing’s sake? What good novel was ever expurgated in this way, in 30 days?
All I know is that I moved in here August and since then I haven’t really written anything. I’ve done some revising. I wrote for a blog a review of my own contribution to Mud Luscious Press’s stamp stories project, which I’ll probably link to if it ever gets posted. I’ve written here. But I haven’t written “real” writing while worrying about writing “real” writing.
Now I’m writing, averaging about 2,000 words a day. Continue reading The No I'm Wri-ing
I’ve been asked by Michael Martone to talk a bit to his publishing class about being a writer, living the life of a writer, and how both submitting my work for publication and publishing the work of others plays into it all. I can say that they’ve always been twinned for me, that around the time I started thinking about writing for real I also started thinking about starting a magazine, which I did in 2002 in Pittsburgh and promptly published my first online essay. It wasn’t all we published, we being I and my friend and fellow alt-weekly contributor Jenn, but it was there.
I suppose it begins earlier, with the alt-weekly internship I got the same semester I took an intro to journalism class. While learning what AP style was and how to write a good lede and how to structure stories in inverted-pyramid form, I also was sent out into the city to write about events, or more specifically to call people on the phone about events that were going to take place. I wrote what’s called previews. I showed up in the office, I was given a task, I wrote it, it got in the paper the following week.
Continue reading Some Notes on Publishing
From the New York Review of Books, 28 October 2010:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea…. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine.
—Jefferson (qtd. p. 4)
What another sees and tells you is not yours, but his.
—Emerson (qtd. p. 25)
Fight!
Teachers of prose in America are often at a loss when asked to recommend studies of style. Such studies almost invariably talk about it in terms of texts the student has never heard of. One English theorist recommends, as a useful means for testing conciseness in English prose, quick translation into Latin or Greek. Americans, students or not, live in another world. They are trying to learn something about prose style without the whole context that has rendered prose style comprehensible and has given it meaning. They are trying to learn in a vacuum. And we may, of course, add as a footnote to the contemporary scene, the much-heralded demise of the book. American used to read only current fiction. Now they read nothing at all. For written utterance, they have as context only journalism. How accurate such prophecies of doom really are, I suppose few would want to say. But the teacher of composition, at whatever level, will speedily be reminded that he is trying to teach prose to people who, at least voluntarily, seldom read anything.
These words are older than I am, from Richard A. Lanham’s 1974 treatise, Style: An Anti-Textbook. Academics perennially love an illiteracy complaint.
Sigh:
A raft of sea otters are at play in a narrow estuary at Moss Landing, near Santa Cruz, Calif. There are 41 of them, says a guy in a baseball cap. He counted. They dive and surface and float around on their backs with their little paws poking up out of the water, munching sea urchins or thinking about munching sea urchins.
The humans admiring them from the shore don’t make them self-conscious. Otters are congenitally happy beasts. They don’t worry about their future, even though they’re legally a threatened species and their little estuary is literally in the shadow of the massive 500-ft. stacks of a power plant.
One of the humans admiring them is Jonathan Franzen. Franzen is a member of another perennially threatened species, the American literary novelist.
Does JF court this kind of wretched coverage that makes him look always like America’s Greatest Living Twit, or is this just the way we can characterize those writers, reporters, and critics who like him a lot?
I like him a lot. I’m really excited about his new novel due out this month, though I’m wary of that title: Freedom. But I think I’d like JF a lot more if he never, ever appeared in the media. I guess what I’m saying is that “Jonathan Franzen” has done more damage to JF’s career than anyone. I’m no image consultant, but how hard could it be in this case to do a better job?
“JF, don’t let this reporter watch you fawn over otters.”
“JF, don’t demand Oprah’s logo be removed from your book’s otherwise uninteresting but perfectly fine cover.”
“No, no, JF, don’t write those personal narratives for The New Yorker!”
Books have trailers now, too, have you heard? It’s a thing I may want to be wrangling with, soon, so I’ve done some research. Turns out there’s a much broader variety of approaches than what we’ve come to expect in film trailers. (Which makes sense probably.) More than two voiceover artists are used, for starters.
If by “favorite” I mean “the one that most made me want to buy and read a book I hadn’t previously been much interested in buying and reading,” here’s my favorite:
Yes, that’s Pynchon’s voice. You have, like with so many great books, to wait until the very end to get to the best part.
Yours truly = open to ideas for a trailer on a book that uses taxidermy to get at human-animal relationships. Yours truly = even more open to any video-production expertise thhat could be shared.
Question 1. (Suggested time—45 minutes)
Read carefully the following poem by Emily Dickinson. Then write an essay in which you describe the speaker’s attitude toward the woman’s death. Using specific references to the text, show how the use of language reveals the speaker’s attitude.
Continue reading 1991’s College Board Advanced Placement Examination ENGLISH LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION Section II
Did you know that Yahoo! has released, or is soon to release, its own style guide for editing and publishing on the Web? On, yes, “the Web,” capital-W. So sayeth Yahoo! In this it falls in line with the AP, which tackled a lot of new Internet (capital-I) lingo more than a decade ago. And while Yahoo! prefers “Web” and “Web Feed” and “Web hosting” it also demands “webcast,” “webpage,” and “website.” This seems arbitrary, but then again what style guide isn’t? And who wants to keep writing “You can find it on my Web site” for the rest of our lives?
Strangely, you have to buy a print copy of the style manual to read it all, but you can browse through a sampling of the official Yahoo! word list here. Let the outrage commence.
This (left) may or may not be Robert Atwan.
Regardless, here’s a quote from him, courtesy of :
“The compound seems inescapable: a piece of writing may be aesthetically true, yet verifiably false; just as it can be—as is so much contemporary memoir—verifiably true but aesthetically false.”
Atwan series-edits Best American Essays. I love/hate the idea of a thing being a best American essay. But I tend to love Atwan. Here’s something else he once wrote, which I’ve told students for years: Essays are all about seeing a mind at work.
Atwan!
Two things:
I.
A couple weeks ago the Times Book Review complained that a book of nonfiction conflated two dates into one. This week, it reviews David Shields’s Reality Hunger, and has this to say, paraphrasing Shields:
After all, just because the novel is food for worms doesn’t mean that fiction has ceased. Only an artificial dualism would treat every non-novel as if it were reportage or court testimony, and only a fear of the slipperiness of life could perpetuate the cult of the back story.
So which is it, NYTBR? Is nonfiction’s liberation from fact an inevitability from the decline of the novel, or does it damage a writer’s moral authority, as Charles Bock argued in your pages two weeks ago? Maybe it’s a bad idea to demand critical consistency from a reviewing organ, but what’s such an organ’s editor’s job, exactly?
II.
Below is a photograph I took of my friend Steven last night. More insectile than cervine. I’ll need to work on the scale in possible future pics.
Tonight in class I had students write the worst fiction they could. It’s a common exercise, the idea being that it gives us a way to talk about what we value in creative writing and what we abhor. And the writing always ends up surprising and good in complicated ways. I wrote alongside my students, for the first time. Here’s what I came up with. Continue reading Writing Badly
John D’Agata writes books in and about nonfiction that get me very interested in and excited for the genre. After the first generation of “New Journalists” who just decided to get out and write great, engaging, personal, subjective nonfiction without dickering over the name of this genre, and then after their 2nd-gen acolytes who made their careers precisely through such careful dickering and promulgation, here’s our 3rd-gen go-to guy, whose nonfiction work seems so smartly disinterested in what (other than its author’s own assertion) makes it nonfiction. And yet his work is so journalistic. By blending and maybe even disregarding genre, D’Agata’s found a way to move the genre forward.
His new book seeks connections between two public events in Nevada: the U.S. Senate’s debate on whether to use Yucca Mountain as the dumping ground for our nation’s nuclear waste, and a 16-year-old’s suicide accomplished by jumping from the observation tower of a Vegas hotel. There is, of course, no connection between these events. The boy’s suicide was not a call against nuclear energy. And yet this is the job of the writer: to look around and make some sense by piecing elements together.
Continue reading Some Questions Asked to/about a Book I Need to Read Soon
No, it’s not chlamydia. Nor is it the secret mark he made on his keys over there in the glass bowl by the front door, the one that lets you know which are his. It’s this, from his essay, “Distance and Point of View”:
It is not surprising to hear practicing novelists report that they have never had help from critics about point of view. In dealing with point of view the novelist must always deal with the individual work: which particular character shall tell this particular story, or part of a story, with which precise degree of reliability, privilege, freedom to comment, and so on. Shall he be given dramatic vividness? Even if the novelist has decided on a narrator who will fit one of the critic’s classifications—”omniscient,” “first person,” “limited omniscient,” “objective,” “roving,” “effaced,” and so on—his troubles have just begun. Continue reading Wayne Booth Has Something to Share with You
Here’s another book I want, seen in a well placed ad in the New York Review of Books. Why (and not, please, whether) we care about literary characters is a subject I’m committed enough to to want a read a whole book that finds an answer.
Would you believe it’s $60.00 through Johns Hopkins Press’s site? Sixty! Amazon drops that down to a mere $43.20.
We won’t ever care about Blakey Vermeule, no matter how brilliant her book may very well be, the way we do about, oh, John Dowell, say. And The Good Solider has surely never cost $60, not even with its adjusted-for-inflation 1915 first-edition rate. What the F’s?
It’s clear: there are very few university presses in the world whose business models don’t hinge on overcharging libraries for their products.
Taxidermist Carl Akeley is considered by most taxidermy folks to be the father of modern taxidermy. Taxidermy. Taxidermy taxidermy. Certain words when you write a whole book become very easy to type. Taxidermy. Can’t remember the last time my fingers in that pattern didn’t hit their targets: Taxidermy. Certain words’ meanings begin to fade as their sounds take over. Or no: their status as signifiers gets lost, and they become instead like one’s eyes’ specific shade of yellow, or a hairstyle one’s worn for too long.
For the record, in all my notes, taxidermy’s rendered as capital T. Taxidermists become “Tmen”, viz., “Purpose here is to do what 13 Tmen did up till yesterday—mt part. [i.e. “mount partridge”] in exact pose as reference pic.” I know: Tmen. I regret the sexism.
At any rate, Tman Carl Akeley is the father of modern T. He’s famous enough that you can be his Facebook friend, but his a little too famous to respond to friend requests on time. My book opens not with his birth, but just after: with his first mounted specimen of a canary. Beginning at his birth wasn’t much of a choice because all of us get born in more or less the same way and it takes some time for us to become people enough. People enough to write about. People who act and speak and think on their own in ways that can be illustrative. So gone from the book are the first 12 years of Carl’s life. It’s not a problem.
Continue reading On Finishing Up a Book I’ve Been Working on for Four Years, Part 2.
There’s a new book I want. Well, it’s two books, the two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. I like very much my Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, which has smart little editorials on words and their usage from Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Stephin Merritt, and other smart people whose opinions I don’t just trust but more like place the entirety of my faith in. (And I know, having read thoroughly my DFW, that the late grammarian would have no problems with the preposition hanging out at the end of that there sentence up there.) The other great thing about the OAWT is its superlative tables for certain groups of adjectives. Like the one that ties “kind” to “cruel” through words like “humane” and “inoffensive” and “pitiless”. Also the tables of specifics for those writers like this one who tend always to satisfy themselves with dull generics. A whole table of terms involved with knitting and crocheting! A list of oaths and curses inclusive of both “fuck it” and “jeez Louise”!
Continue reading The Value(s) of Books
Today the Times‘s book review asks Stephen King to review the new biography of utter wretch/mad alcoholic Raymond Carver, who, after taking Carver to task for being such an utter wretch of a mad alcoholic (at a party, he reportedly smashed a wine bottle over the head of his first wife—who seems to have supported him throughout most of his early career—when he thought she was being flirtatious), has much more ire to throw at Carver’s legendary editor, Gordon Lish (pictured at left in, strangely, a photograph attributed to William F. Buckley, Jr.):
[I]n 1973, when my first novel was accepted for publication, I was in similar straits: young, endlessly drunk, trying to support a wife and two children, writing at night, hoping for a break. The break came, but until reading [this] book, I thought it was the $2,500 advance Doubleday paid for “Carrie.” Now I realize it may have been not winding up with Gordon Lish as my editor.
Burn! I’m not a Carver fan, and but this may be mostly a reaction against the morass of it and its predecessors I’ve had to swim through in a creative writing program. And but also I’m if not a Gordon Lish fan than a fan at least of some Gordon Lish disciples/associates (Christine Schutt, Gary Lutz, Leanord Michaels, Barry Hannah—if I’m not being too presumptive about any of these folks). I wonder whether reading the newly restored “author’s cut” of Beginners, Carver’s original title for the Lish-usurped What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, would restore some admiration I could have in the writer.
Then again, I’m reluctant, perhaps overly so, to admire writers who can’t help themselves from drinking too much and then terrorizing the people they decided to marry and to bring into this world. Then again, I admire John Cheever.
C.B.’s own bad example of superimposing the past on the present was bad, he said, because it didn’t involve any kind of superimposition at all, merely an interjection. A “flash back” if you will:
Ramona was bored by Baxter’s presentation in the Little Theater. What was he talking about? Lushness, or something. Outside, the grass was fragrant. Sitting back in her uncomfortable chair and gazing first at the grass and then up at the ceiling’s crisscrossed wooden beams, Ramona thought back to the previous week, when she had visited the Vermont State Fair. [. . .] Suddenly startled, Ramona came back to the present. Baxter was still droning on about lushness.
The problem with such a passage is its implication that the past resides in a place separate from, or beside the present. That we exist in both times at separate occassion, whereas, Baxter argues, quoting Faulkner, “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” If the past resides in the present, then writers looking to capture that experience need to render both simultaneously.
Continue reading Charles Baxter, “Lush Life” craft lecture (part 2)
