Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries, wrote a long, honest article called Why I Write, which I enjoyed very much. It talks about how he got into writing, why writing is important to him, how little money it makes, how he deals with that, and how he writes. There’s some interesting stuff about the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, which Elliott attended, and details on his publishing life. For one thing, Elliott published 5 of his 7 novels without an agent. For another, he purposely avoids teaching or pitching magazines. He makes $30,000 a year writing, which is nothing in San Francisco, but he writes what he wants. It’s a trade-off, as he says. Some interesting points:

But how do writers get by? That’s more complicated than it sounds. What do we mean by “getting by”? Do we need as much as we think we do? How important is it to make more each year than the year before? While working on a first book, almost everyone has a job that has nothing to do with writing. When people tell me they would write if they had more time I’m always skeptical. The hardest-working fellows at Stanford rarely wrote more than four hours a day.

…

It sounds spoiled, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with considering yourself an artist. There are sacrifices as well as payoffs. When I was discussing my new book with two married writers, they kept asking how I could work without an advance. I didn’t see how they could work with one. They said they needed a certain amount of money and that they had children. They made their children sound like a tremendous burden, and I felt they were using the word need when they should have said want. There’s nothing wrong with prioritizing something higher than writing. The husband has sold a lot more books than I do and has plenty more money than I have, but being a writer seems to make him unhappy. One day, when he was telling me how easy I have it and about the kind of advance he needed, I snapped. I said his book wasn’t worth more than my book just because he has kids. We’re lucky to be writers. Nobody owes us anything.

More here.

Here’s a stop-motion ad made out of a book. It is promoting books and the New Zealand Book Council.

Happy Thanksgiving!

“Yes little Bobby and Suzy, when Grandma was 18 years old, there was this series of books called Twilight about a sparkly vampire who falls in love with a teenager. No one reads these books anymore but they were quite a to-do in my time, let me tell you. What? No, he was sparkly because his skin shown like diamonds in the sun. I don’t know why. Anyway, children, that is why I show you this tattoo. Take it as a cautionary tale of why you should not get a tattoo at a young age. I mean, did you read this thing? It’s not even punctuated properly. What was I thinking?”

More here.

Here’s a cool interview with Cormac McCarthy in The Wall Street Journal.

WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

(Via BookNinja)

For years as a fiction writer, I have felt pressured to write creative nonfiction, even though I’m not that into the genre and don’t really like talking about myself. But everyone was making such a big deal out of the memoir that I felt it was something I should be doing. There was something going on in the culture where the idea of something being literally true (as opposed to metaphorically true, which is what you see in fiction) made it more worth reading.

Of course, James Frey and Herman Rosenblat show that truth and the memoir can be a very fuzzy thing. Maybe that’s part of why nonfiction sales are dropping while fiction is rising. “Sales of this year’s top 10 non-fiction books in October were down 52% year on year, while sales of hardback fiction titles have soared by 90%,” says Bookseller.com.

Finally, a trend in publishing that I like.

I never know whether to believe British newspapers, because they vary in quality. But the Telegraph says a computer program that is supposed to grade A level English papers (which I think is end of high school?) gives poor marks to Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway.

[Churchill’s ] reference to the “might of the German army” lost him marks because the computer assumed that Churchill had intended to say “might have”, instead of using “might” as a noun.

Graham Herbert, deputy head of the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors, said: “The computer was limited in its scope. It couldn’t cope with metaphor and didn’t understand the purpose of the speech.

“We also tried a passage from Hemingway. It couldn’t understand the fact that he had a very spartan style and [it] said he should write with more care and detail. He was also rated less than average.”

Are UK schools (and American schools, according to the article) actually using this program? Possibly. I get such a kick out of these kinds of stories. Every once in a while someone thinks a computer can have reading comprehension or write. Considering how few humans seem able to do either, I find that highly amusing.

Link

In the never-gets-old category: The Wall Street Journal asked a bunch of writers about their writing habits. Edwidge Danticat writes her books in those blue exam notebooks they give you during your college finals. Michael Ondaatje likes 8½-by-11-inch Muji lined notebooks. Richard Powers writes by speaking into voice-recognition software on his laptop.

Good stuff. I’m not sure why this topic continues to hold fascination for me since I have long since established my own peculiar writing habits, but it does. Maybe I’m checking to see if I’m doing it correctly?

So Publishers Weekly put out a list of the top 10 books for 2009 and didn’t include any women writers on it. Everyone is in an uproar, at least according to some sources.

As I have written before on here, I am torn about this issue. I don’t want women to get special treatment, and yet lists like these clearly show that there is a bias against women writers in the publishing industry. And since gender has nothing to do with whether writing is good or bad, it suggests that the people who control these lists either ignore anything written by a woman or they don’t like the subjects women tend to write about.

Troublesome indeed. Still, in this case, I just can’t bring myself to care that much. Why? Well, it’s Publishers Weekly.

The Guardian digested read of The Humbling by Philip Roth calls him a dirty old man. It’s pretty funny. Sample:

After his release, Axler had retreated to his farmhouse in upstate New York and it was there that Pegeen had visited him. Her parents were old friends and he had known her since she was a baby, suckling at her mother’s breast. Now she was 40, a lesbian teaching at a progressive women’s college in Vermont. “Have you ever slept with a man?” he asked.

“Not for more than 20 years,” Pegeen replied. “But there’s something about your arthritic body I find irresistible.”

“I can only make love if you’re on top of me because my back’s playing up,” he said, fondling her heavy breasts.

“You’re a smooth talking lesbo-converter, Philip . . .”

“It’s Simon.”

“Whatever. No one else could make me want cock.”

(Via Bookslut)