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?

I’m torn. I want to follow book news to keep up with the industry. At the same time, it’s so depressing. Every day, there’s an article, or two, or four, saying how publishing is dying, no one is reading, and no one is getting their books into print.

In real life, I don’t find this to be the case at all. People read plenty, books are dominating our cultural landscape, and I know lots of writers getting publishing deals or agents right now. I’m not saying there’s no truth whatsoever in the doom and gloom stuff, but sometimes it feels like everyone in the publishing industry is re-enforcing everyone else’s self-fulfilling prophesy. It makes me want to crawl into a closet and hide.

The reality is, writing has always been hard. And while I am concerned about aspects of the doom and gloom stuff, reading about it every day makes my own writing life suffer. It’s harder to write when I am discouraged.

So I go back and forth. I want to get the news and keep up with things, but I also don’t want to hear negative Nellys say that writing is pointless because in a few years, the book will be dead. The truth is, storytelling will never die. It’s part of being human. I know that perfectly well, but sometimes it’s hard to remember when everyone is bemoaning the coming book apocalypse.

In an essay in The New York Times, Arthur Krystal brings up something that has long bothered me as a writer. Why am I a good communicator in print, but a somewhat lousy one in person? Conversation is a very different art than writing, even though they both use words. Or put it another way, the process of bringing words out the fingertips takes a different part of the brain than bringing them out of the mouth. According to Krystal:

Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing. I don’t claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I’m expressing opinions that I’ve never uttered in conversation and that otherwise might never occur to me. Nor am I the first to have this thought, which, naturally, occurred to me while composing. According to Edgar Allan Poe, writing in Graham’s Magazine, “Some Frenchman — possibly Montaigne — says: ‘People talk about thinking, but for my part I never think except when I sit down to write.”

Krystal believes that writing actually creates thoughts–and so it does, in the sense that it helps us organize a jumble of connections and emotions into coherent logic. Writing just engages with thought and language. With speaking, there are all these other things to worry about–whether one is being boring, whether the other person has had a chance to speak, whether a topic is polite to bring up, etc. etc. Also, there’s the matter of time. Ask me a question and I might not know the answer off the top of my head. I usually have to think about it to give you an intelligent answer. Thus, I stumble over my words in person. Allow me to write the answer to the question down and I can manage to sound pretty smart, especially if I can revise the thought a few times to make sure it makes sense.

And so, I am a writer and not a politician.

In addition to dramatic stories bemoaning the economic downturn, recession, depression or whatever its currently called, the number of stories about the “death” of the publishing industry in general and literary publishing in particular rose exponentially. Well, it’s just not as bad as all that.

A study by the National Endowment for the Arts shows that the percentage of adults engaging in “literary” reading has gone up since 2002. Even better, the age group that increased most dramatically (18-24 year olds) is the group that previously showed the biggest decline. Youth is the future, and all that.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows: The number is lower than it was in 1992, and it’s only about half the nation’s adult population. (Really? Half of U.S. adults haven’t read one single book, short story or poem in the last 12 months???) But in a time when the media and publishing industry alike seemed allergic to anything even remotely resembling optimism, it’s good to hear something besides gloom and doom.

By 2012, let’s get that percentage up even higher than it was in 1992!!

Link

Anya Ulinich wrote a short story that one New York magazine critic says is ““entire work of fiction [written] with the sole purpose of a barely disguised personal attack on Jonathan Safran Foer.” Ulinich disagress.

Here is a passage from the story that elicited the theory:

Your characters are monsters who fashion heaps of bones into tiny missing pieces of themselves.

You can read the story here.

What do you think?

via Maud Newton

Frank Wilson has been reviewing books professionally since October, 1964. For most of the past decade he was Books Editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer… He retired recently. About five years ago he started blogging at Books Inq…

You can hear an interview with Wilson here.

Terry Gross has an interview with Lloyd Schwartz, who recently co-edited Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters. Schwartz established a friendship with the reclusive poet toward the end of her life.

At one point, Bishop was in the hospital, so she asked Schwartz to get some of her things from her home–including her notebook. At some point, he was left alone with the notebook in his hand. Well, who wouldn’t want a peek at a famous writer’s notebook?

When Schwartz opened the notebook, he read an unpublished poem Bishop had written called Morning Song. It moved him so much that he got a piece of paper and copied the poem out so he could keep it with him–without Bishop’s knowledge, of course. The poem was never published and didn’t show up with Bishop’s papers when she died. Schwartz finally sent the poem to her estate and it was subsequently published.

Gross asked him if he felt guilty for “borrowing” Bishop’s poem. He said:

She didn’t show me the poem so in some way I was doing something behind her back. I’m not exactly proud of that. On the other hand, I wasn’t doing it for gain or anything like that. I copied it because I loved the poem and I wanted to be able to read it and re-read it.

If someone did that to me, I would not like it. On the other hand, if he hadn’t done it, no one would have ever seen that poem. Bishop only published a small fraction of the poetry she wrote in her lifetime, which is a shame. However, she was the one who should have been able to decide what was publishable, not Schwartz or anyone else. On yet a third hand, the poem was released after her death, when it is typical of unpublished works to come out. So where does this leave us? Does it matter how the poem was acquired since we all ultimately benefit from it? Where does the writer’s wishes fit in here?

Oy… this kind of thing makes my brain hurt.

~ Joy

Vladimir Nabokov’s son says he will publish his father’s unfinished work “The Original of Laura” rather than destroying it. Since Nabokov’s death in 1977, his son Dmitri has been torn about whether he should follow his father’s last wishes and destroy the novel or share the work of a great 20th-century novelist with the world. Now in his 70s, Dmitri says his father would want him to stop suffering and go ahead and publish it.
As a writer, it makes me itchy to think that work that I didn’t think was ready for publication would be published before I was done with it. On the other hand, I am alive and not a world-famous author of significant literature.

My scholarly interest and personal itchiness are at odds in this case. Even with the context, will this unfinished novel diminish the other works he toiled to perfect? Do historical figures lose their right to control their legacies?

Current temperature: I’m not going to read it … until eventually curiosity takes over and I do.

-Marcia

via Guardian Unlimited

There’s an interesting, heated conversation going on at this blog about whether editors of literary journals solicit work instead of digging from the slush pile. Then, the writer from the aforementioned Writer, Rejected (which is fast becoming one of my favorite writing blogs, I must say) questioned whether editors should be soliciting work in the first place, saying, “The answers may make you start to think that getting published is who you know, not what you write. Seriously, some of the candid responses will make your hair curl.”

Well! That made some editors very angry, including Ellen Parker, editor of FRiGG, who Word Pirates interviewed awhile back. There’s some interesting commenting going on.

The way I see it, there are two kinds of solicitation:

A. The editor reads work she admires and asks the person to submit to the journal. I don’t see a problem with this. There’s no rule that a literary journal has to take from the slush pile. In fact, it’s good that these relationships exist because most likely, there is some sort of aesthetic connection between the writer and editor, and that can lead to great artistic partnerships and even, in the best cases, entire shifts in the literary landscape.

B. The editor solicits from friends and people she wants to network with to promote her own career. Naturally, this brings up issues of nepotism and favoritism, which go on in every industry there is. In the worst cases, it turns the lit journal into little more than a vanity publication for the editor’s friends.

In the case of A., the solicitation is based on writing. In the case of B., it is based on who the person knows. However! It gets further complicated, because most literary journals want to publish big names, which means soliciting writers based on their reputation, which is a little from column A. and a little column B. But you know, even that is understandable, as long as the journal doesn’t become something that is built purely to chase reputation and prestige.

As a freelance writer, it’s much easier when an editor and I have a working relationship. Trust is built. If they have an assignment, they come to me first because they know I can do it. If I have a great idea, I go to them first because I know they will be receptive. I don’t have to work so hard, neither does the editor. Does that mean that no other writers can write for that magazine? Of course not. It’s true that I am taking up a slot that keeps other writers out. The editor knows that my work will be clean, well-written, and turned in on time, so taking a chance on a new writer is more of a risk than using me. However, if a new writer approaches the editor with a pitch that is a great idea, fits in with the publication, and clearly demonstrates the ability to write the piece, the majority of editors will take that pitch.

Lit journals are similar. The editor is concerned with finding writers who not only can write a good story, but who can write a story that fits in with the journal’s aesthetic tone. It’s natural, then, that the editor would be more concerned with finding those writers through whatever means–solicitation, relationships based on respect (not favoritism), what have you–than digging through the slush pile for the one or two good stories that are in there. However, that doesn’t mean that when she does dig through the slush pile, and your story stands out, she’s not going to take it. It sucks that the odds are so low, but that’s the writing life. And really, if I were in that editor’s place, I would probably do the same thing.

~ Joy

Rejection is a part of writing. (Well, it is unless you don’t try to get your writing published.) However, it’s a part of writing that a lot of us don’t talk about with each other. It can be humiliating, demoralizing and sad. Or it can be funny.

On Literary Rejections on Display, one writer shared some (surely modified) excerpts from rejections he received for his novels. Some of my favorites:

we think there are too many “fucks” in this book

we are tired of publishing books about the Holocaust

we are looking for books that teach people how to improve their lives

we think your book would make the readers suffer

we think your book needs a happy ending

we think nobody gives a shit about the lives of farmers in Southern France

-marcia