I love this picture of three little girls looking at “a heavily marked-up manuscript for “A Christmas Carol” that Charles Dickens wrote, and rewrote, in 1843.” It’s from a NYTimes piece about Dickens editing the famous Christmas tale, focusing on some of the smaller changes of the manuscript and its publishing history.

The NYTimes was also allowed to scan 66 pages from the book for their readers to view on the web, although I found them hard to access.

It shows how much a book can change, even up to the last minute. For example:

At least one change did not occur until the book was at the printer. You will note that the manuscript is silent on whether Tiny Tim lives. But before the first editions went out the door, a line was curiously inserted on page 65 noting that “and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father.”

Citing a 2004 book by Michael Patrick Hearn, “The Annotated Christmas Carol,” Mr. Kiely said Dickens added that line as “an afterthought.”

Aren’t we glad he put that in?

As soon as I saw the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, I had a serious case of book lust. It has 800,000 meanings for 600,000 words in more than 230,000 categories and subcategories. It took 44 years to make. It also costs $400, which is sadly out of my price range for a reference book. A girl can dream…

Anyway, I was interested to learn that the longest entry in the thesaurus is the word “immediately,” with 265 synonyms. Why so many words for immediately? It all gets down to the nature of human procrastination:

According to Professor Christian Kay, who has worked on the project for the past 40 years, it is down to the human tendency to procrastinate. (Procrastinate: foreslow, adjourn, proloyne, protract, tarry, defer, delay … ) “A lot of the words that once meant ‘immediately’ came to mean ‘soon’, so you then needed another word that really meant ‘immediately’. ‘Soon’, for instance — its original meaning was ‘immediately’.”

!

Word Pirates loves Lydia Davis. She has a style like no other, and really gets to the core of emotions without a lot of fuss. A critic accused her of having all autistic narrators, because she does not have characters relate directly to each other in her stories. Here’s part of her response:

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.

Lots of good stuff on the craft of writing in this interview. I don’t approach things the way she does, but there’s something about hearing a writer articulate how she does something that makes me think about my own technique in a new way. She calls her work “isolated events in a context of mystery” … intriguing!
Believer Lydia Davis interview

Ever read a novel that had no story? According to the Guardian, if you read according to the tastes of the Man Booker Prize, then you most certainly have. I don’t follow most awards or prizes, but I think I know exactly what kind of novel the piece is referring to:

For years, many Booker shortlists have been synonymous with “baffling”, or “unreadable”. There was something almost crusading about Booker prize juries’ preference for that bird without wings, the novel without a narrative. The more the market for “literary fiction” boomed, the more impenetrably Stygian the lists became. The truth that dared not speak its name was that many of the books in the Booker catalogue were below par. … Remote, Olympian, at times impossibly grand, Booker has held itself apart from the vulgar manifestations of commercial storytelling.

The books on this year’s shortlist are supposed to break that cycle. Hurray! I believe in stories. Somewhere along the way it became very “literary” to stray from the literary tradition of telling damn story. I appreciate experimentation, but since when did it become low-brow to expect something to *happen* in a novel?
It’s important for authors to write without worrying if it will be popular or if Joe Public or Jane Marketer will get it. But I think slapping each other on the back for being inscrutable is a bad direction for the literary community to go. I still believe a novelist is creating a world for me to explore. If your world is the written equivalent of a pretentious student film where everyone is dressed in rags and talks backwards, I’ll pass.

Return of the Cracking Good Read – Guardian UK

I am reading The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown because I like to keep up with the big books that come out–plus someone gave it to me. When I first started the book, I thought this article by the Telegraph on Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences was harsh. (Sample sentence: “Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.”) Having read almost half the book, I now think the article is right-on. It’s frankly disturbing how bad of a writer Brown is, especially considering his rampant popularity. Someone called The Lost Symbol “Harry Potter for grown-ups,” but that’s an insult to JK Rowling, who is a pretty good wordsmith.

I don’t put this up here to make fun of another writer, but because Dan Brown’s writing ticks are common ones that all writers should avoid. Reading bad writing can be as educational as reading good. The Telegraph’s 20 sentences are examples of telling not showing, overuse of unimportant details, unnecessary formality, clichés, excessive adjectives, and most commonly, word misuse. Amazingly, Brown’s writing is littered with words that he seems to only half-understand the meaning of. As such, his images contradict themselves and end up giving a muddy picture of what’s going on, even though you usually understand what he’s trying to say.

Which leads me to this smart analysis of Brown’s writing by linguist Geoffrey Pullum. His opinion of Brown, quoted in the title of this post, is pretty damning. And he backs it up with analyses of samples from Brown’s writing. For example, take this passage from The Da Vinci Code:

A voice spoke, chillingly close. “Do not move.”

On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.

Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

Pullman: “Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn’t speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. “Chillingly close” would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man’s pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.”

The post is well worth reading, and not just for schadenfreude. It’s also a reminder that writers should pick words carefully, be specific, and make sure that even on the smallest word level, everything you write makes logical sense.

Language Log: The Dan Brown code

Telegraph: The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences

I enjoyed what Stephen Corey at Georgia Review had to say about the short story in the most recent issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

If you are truly serious about doing distinctive work that will make its mark, slow down.

A great poem or story or essay is not a line on a vita, a selling point in a job interview, or a ticket to tenure. Any person who writes one great poem or story or essay per year for twenty years will take his or her place on the short list of the finest writers of all time. Slow down. Read voluminously, year after year, both for pleasure and to be reminded of all that you must not do, and all that you must exceed, in order to make your own special, indelible mark.

That’s a good reminder that writing should be a construction of a work of art, and sometimes that means taking the time you need to really finish it. As long as, you know, you are actually working on it and not, say, watching re-runs of Family Guy on Cartoon Network… (or blogging…).

~ Joy

One of the core beliefs of Word Pirates is that writing should be entertaining. It should have a pace, avoid being self-indulgent, and keep the reader’s attention span in mind. I think the reason so few people read lit journals and anthologies these days is because so much of them are frankly boring. I mean, yes, people are reading less and there’s more competition for their time and blah, blah, blah, but also, for reals, much of modern literature is boring, stodgy and pretentious. (And much of it is over-commercialized and gimmicky, which is the other side of the same ugly coin, I guess.)

Anyway, all that to say, someone agrees with me–about essay anthologies, at least. I have had the 2007 Best American Essays sitting on my shelf for five months now, and I have yet to open it. Why? Well, David Foster Wallace edited it, and he is known for a brand of essay that I have low tolerance for: long ones about tiny things that don’t really interest me; essays that try my patience as the writer examines every side of the tiny thing or strings tiny things together with admittedly excellent language but just a hint of self-indulgence as well.

Is it just me who finds it hard to finish these kinds of essays? It’s such a chore. Your mind wanders. You count the number of pages to the end. You worry you’re not getting the point, assuming there is one. Well, I hope it’s just me, because apparently it’s the preferred tone for essays nowadays:

The essay that is considered “literature” in our day is not an ambitious or impassioned (if sometimes foolhardy) analysis of human nature. It is not an argument, or a polemic. It is not a gun-blazing attack on a social trend, a film, a book, or a library of books. Those sorts of pieces, sniff the anthologists, are mere journalism.

The essay they prefer has a distinctive tone, which Epstein has called “middle-aged.” I’m not an age-essentialist, but Epstein is, and what he means by “middle-aged” is clearly quiet. Slow-moving. Soft-hitting. Nostalgic. Self-satisfied. It’s the tone he perfects in his signature essay, “The Art of the Nap.”

I also liked this bit:

It’s tempting to create a composite portrait of the Preferred American Essayist: Educated at Harvard, he or she has spent significant time at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, written proposals for New York Public Library Fellowships (often lovingly paraphrased in the essays) and received medical attention at Sloan Kettering Hospital. Chances are good she’s a doting dog owner who has done such things as lace her pet’s dinner with “Prozac, Buspar, Elavil, Effexor, Xanax, and Clomicalm” (Cathleen Shine, 2005) or write gourmet cookbooks for his discerning palate (Susan Orlean, 2005 and 2006). More likely than not, he (if it is a he) has had a lifelong love affair with fishing or baseball, preferably both. An added bonus is to discover—or at least reassess—a Jewish ancestor in one’s family tree.

This article gets at another of my pet peeves: It seems like no one tries to address big ideas anymore in essays–friendship and wisdom and what is man and who is God and all that. Truth, after all, is big, scary, and seemingly subjective. We’re told that we can’t know truth, but really, I think it’s just easier not to try. (God? Who knows. But this paper clip on my desk, that is definitely there.) Could this be why our intellectual culture seems so stagnant? Why there’s so few new philosophies or political thoughts these days?

I understand the hesitation to take on a big truth. To write about a large issue is to take on all of its history, all that has been written on the subject, and to state that you have something interesting to add to this long, intimidating conversation. That is hard. But Cristina Nehring, who wrote this fine article, thinks it’s time for a change.

Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace—as their predecessors did—big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We need to destigmatize generalization, aphorism and what used to be called wisdom. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth—however provisional it might be. As long as persons with intellectual aspirations are counted idiots for attempting to formulate a wider point, they will not do so, and even if they dared, most editors would not publish them and most critics would not praise them.

I agree.

Apparently, though, these thoughts are not new.

And Seneca, like Montaigne, like Francis Bacon, like Samuel Johnson, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, like Henry David Thoreau, was in the business of learning—and in the process of showing others—how to live and die. “Philosophy is good advice,” writes Seneca, before proceeding to mock the scholars of his own age who (precisely like those of ours) spend their time playing word games and toying with their navels. “I should like those subtle thinkers … to teach me this, what my duties are to a friend and to a man, rather than the number of senses in which the expression ‘friend’ is used. It makes one ashamed,” he declares, “that men of our advanced years should turn a thing as serious as this into a game.”

Exactly, Seneca. Exactly.

Read the article here. (Via)

~ Joy

“Mail & Guardian” has a commentary by Tim Lott called “Whatever happened to literary love?” In it he says that stories about love are becoming rare, though they were once the standard of great literature.
Richard Curtis, screenwriter of “Four Weddings and Funeral,” “Notting Hill” and “Love Actually,” brings the point home:

“If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it’s called searingly realistic, even though it’s never happened in the history of mankind. If you write about people falling in love, which happens a million times a day … you’re accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental.”

I am assuming Lott means love as the sole plot for a story, because tons and tons of books have a love relationship as a part of it. (Heck, you could easily argue “Fight Club” is a love story, but I’m sure that’s not the kind of book he means.)
A good love story is hard to write. You are writing about a universal experience, so it has to resonate as true. But you also don’t want to bore people with cliches. You want to say something new. You want to be original.

The New York Times best seller list is topped by mystery and suspense books. Was there a time when it was topped by romances?

-Marcia

Kelly Spitzer of “SmokeLong Quarterly” and Ellen Parker of “FRiGG” ask a group of writers about money … Do you only write for publications that pay? Do you pay reading fees and contest entry fees?

They seemed to agree that pay wasn’t a concern when considering where to submit their stories.
Dave Clapper, also of “SmokeLong Quarterly,” said of reading fees:

When working as a stage actor, I never had to pay to audition (and the potential pay there dwarfed these prizes, while the potential audience was smaller). Why should writing be different? Do painters pay galleries to have their work considered? Sculptors? Dancers? Singers? Maybe I’m wrong and some of these disciplines do require fees to be considered, but it seems like literature is the only artistic field where this is the accepted norm. Why?

Me? I’d prefer to submit to places that pay, even if it is a token payment that simply acknowledges that you gave them something of value. However, I wouldn’t call it a hard-and-fast rule, and it would depend on how much I loved the publication.
As far as reading fees, I feel like “labor of love” goes two ways. OK, publication, I concede that you aren’t in it for the cash either. But if you want to be a publication, you have to process the submissions that come your way. I realize it’s not a racket. These literary publications aren’t laughing and rolling in piles of money on round, velvet-covered beds. But if you are using writers to fund anything, your publication will probably go under soon anyway.

Reasonable contest fees are a little different, since this is a competition for a prize. There will be a winner and, if you win, you will get something. (Unless the contest is judged by Zadie Smith, see previous post) As long as it’s not some literary Ponzi scheme, these fees can be a way of ensuring a contest remains manageable with serious entrants, in addition to providing some funding. (This differs from a reading fee in that fewer people will submit something without the promise of a financial pay off)

What do you think?

–Marcia

Memoirs are tricky business. As someone who writes almost exclusively about things that have happened to me, I am interested in the ethics and conventions of the memoir. James Frey aside, there was also the whole hullabaloo with Augusten Burroughs settling with the foster family portrayed in “Running With Scissors” and changing the author’s note in the book after publication. And there’s been talk that there is just no way in hell that David Sedaris’ family is that concisely funny. (Although, Amy has publicly proved herself funny, so you never know)
The LA Times book blog points out a pre-emptive move made by another memoirist:

… Robert Leleux’s “The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy” … A note to readers is prominently displayed on the page preceding the table of contents. Here’s an excerpt:

“This is the story of my Texas life. And while (essentially) true to my experience, I must warn that it often reads better (as in funnier, or happier) than it was lived. This service I’ve performed not merely for the sake of your sensibilities, but also for my art. After all, how does the old song go? A hat’s not a hat till it’s tilted. Well, mea culpa, I have tilted hats throughout….”

Is this the literary equivalent of a warning label that serves only to invalidate legal claims? Or is it a sign that our expectations for truth and accuracy in memoirs are changing?

I have always been cynical about memoirs and assumed that they were a fiction/non-fiction hybrid more than an accurate retelling of events. It’s frequently left me wondering what all the fuss in these ’scandals’ is about. Of course, I’ve also never been written about in a published book. I’ve never had anyone put words in my mouth I didn’t say or attribute someone else’s personality quirks to me to save time and keep the pacing quick.

–Marcia