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In the latest New Yorker Magazine, author Jonathan Franzen writes that a fiction author’s body of work is a mirror of that writer’s character. This does not mean that fiction writers are necessarily writing about themselves or using biographical details from their own lives. What Franzen is saying is that the choices a writer makes in inventing a story reflect his or her character.

In the article, Franzen is writing about Edith Wharton whose advantages in life make her hard to like:

“To be rich like Wharton may be what all of us secretly, or not so secretly want, but privilege like hers isn’t easy to like; it puts her at a moral disadvantage.”

Franzen goes on to describe some of Wharton’s exceptionally beautiful, but unlikeable heroines. Not until AGE OF INNOCENCE, he maintains does Wharton produce a novel in which she arouses the reader’s sympathy. Written in 1920, after Wharton’s Gilded Age had ended, the book has a scope and hindsight missing from her other work.

According to Franzen, sympathy is what makes fictional works matter:  “I suspect that sympathy or its absence, is involved in almost every reader’s literary judgments. Without sympathy, whether for the writer or for the fictional characters, a work of fiction has a very hard time mattering.”

Often accused of arrogance, Franzen, the writer, sparks little, if any sympathy, although his characters sometimes resonate. This is a curious piece for him to write, and we look forward to the way this insight may affect his next book.

In the meantime, if you are in the midst of writing a novel, this bulletin that you are indeed exposed in your manuscript probably doesn’t come to you as good news. But it does explain why writing is such a stressful business. As much as you are hiding behind characters that are very different from you and placed in a situation foreign from yours, you are nevertheless exposed.

From the Bengal tiger in LIFE OF PI to Rudyard Kipling’s Shere Khan in THE JUNGLE BOOK to Tony the Tiger of Frosted Flakes fame, the tiger is among the most pre-eminent of literary (and sometimes not so literary) symbols. Poet William Blake nails the tiger’s perfect symbol-ness in “The Tyger” (1797) when he describes a creature at once awesomely beautiful and terrifying. Anything that confusing has to mean something. Speculation has been all over the place as to what Blake’s tiger symbolizes including the evil or the presence of evil in the world and, paradoxically, the divine.

Now, there’s THE TIGER’S WIFE by Tea Olbrecht. This runaway best book of 2011 has generated a lot of discussion among our family and friends. The book club had an enthusiastic discussion about it although one member complained later that we hadn’t adequately addressed the book’s symbolism (presumably the tiger).
Like Blake’s tiger, Obrecht’s is dichotomous. An escapee from a zoo in an unnamed Balkan country, the tiger stalks a mountain village terrorizing the villagers except for the butcher’s mute wife who feeds him and invites him in to purr on her hearth. Witness to all of this is a young boy, who knows about tigers from THE JUNGLE BOOK, a copy of which he carries with him into later life when he becomes the grandfather of the book’s narrator. The tiger’s story is among many stories in the book which vividly evokes the Balkan wars of the 1990’s.

The tiger is what captivates our stepfather, who has read the book twice partly to suss out the meaning of the big cat. There are two tigers, he muses, “One is Shere Khan and the other, the actual tiger which terrified villagers and indeed, ate some of them…”

Tea Obrecht has given a fair number of interviews about her book, including the following excerpt from The Daily Beast in which she describes her intent vis-a-vis the tiger:

“I think animals can end up being symbols, but I've never begun a story using an animal as a stand-in for a theme or as a metaphor. With the tiger, for instance, I was interested in his character's journey. Whatever he came to represent to the people of the village, the origins of the tiger in the context of the narrative. Animals have a way of tapping into human emotions and strife as well.”

But who can let go of the notion that something that magnificent has to mean something. “Yes,” says our stepfather, when we share the above quote with him, “that may have been what she intended, but it doesn’t stop the tiger from being a symbol.” He ruminates, “The tiger escaped from the zoo. It was half tame. Half wild, but half tame.” He pauses to be sure we have absorbed the significance of that and then, he pounces, “It is hard not to see it as a metaphor for the Croatian people.”

TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

-       William Blake

We have book doctored and/or edited some wonderful books this year. We have traveled from Iraq, to Zimbabwe, to Tibet in the 1950s, to WW II Poland, to the Civil War, to early 20th-century Afghanistan through our clients’ works – and it has been quite a ride.

We have learned about surviving the 1958 Lebanese Civil War, hip hop music in Israel, exercising to stay fit, dying with dignity, building successful businesses, drug dealing in Washington DC and wheeling and dealing at top government levels. We have been transported to fantasy worlds and inspired by religious fiction. We have been behind the scenes in Hollywood and the White House and to the scene of fictional murders in the Pacific Northwest and 19th century England.

You have made 2011 an exciting and challenging year for us. We are in awe of your dedication, your discipline, your prolific-ness, your enthusiasm, your various talents and most of all…your stories.

So instead of blogging about New Year’s resolutions for writers – such as always making a time to write or finishing a book or keeping a journal or overcoming writer’s block (as if a resolution would fix this) – we want to offer you a round of applause.
None of you is paid for writing. You do it in your spare time, often in addition to working a full-time job, and you work hard at it. You can be sure of no reward; the desire to tell your story, fiction or non-fiction, keeps you at it. Thus, we would like to take a moment at the beginning of 2012 to congratulate you for all you have achieved.

So, to all our authors and would-be authors: skip the resolutions and just continue to follow your muses. You are doing great.

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.

~T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

What we have been asking as we edit various memoirs lately is: Who? Recently, a number of them contain only one named character, the person whose moniker appears on the title page after the preposition, by. No one else in these books has a name. Instead, they are full of characters like my mother, my father, my sister, my friend, my boss, my son, my therapist, my parole officer, my cleaning lady, my colleague, my grandmother and so on. In one book, there is a whole group of characters referred to as my aunts. Thereafter, John/Jane Memoirist writes blithely about going to visit my aunt or my aunt sending me a letter as if these individual aunts are only a component – an individual cow – of a herd.

It goes without saying that this practice comes across as incredibly ego centric, although we don’t think our memoirists are necessarily aware of their omissions. They are simply writing about the people in their lives and perhaps they think of them as my fill-in-the-blanks.

The real problem with this practice though is that it makes for incredibly boring reading. Names help to define people. Referring to my friend is completely different from referring to Charles Wentworth or Abdullah Ibrahim or Jimmy Bob Jenkins. See how the names change your perception of the anonymous “my friend”? Adding names alone will make your memoir richer. (If you want to protect someone’s identity assign them a fake name.) Your book will be even more enjoyably readable if you also include physical descriptions of my mother, my boss etc. and maybe even some stories about them.

Ultimately, your memoir isn’t just about you; it is also about the people in your life and the more interesting they are as characters, the more interesting you will be too.

We have been watching AMC’s “The Killing,” the murder mystery television series set in Seattle. And we have been struck by the endless rain and how it feeds the feeling of gloom that pervades the story – and brilliantly characterizes the city. We come away with a definite sense (accurate or not, the series was actually shot in Vancouver) of Seattle.

Nothing as simple as the weather characterizes Washington DC. It is a city of great power and considerable wealth but also wretched poverty, street crime and yes, a barely mentioned middle class. A large portion of the population is not native to the city and there is little indigenous culture, including no definitive Washington novel: “…something of an old wound around here: Though a few have come close, the Great American Novel has bypassed Washington,” wrote Mark Athitakis in the local “City Paper” in 2008.

Washington’s great-novel-less status has been the subject of real study. Jeffrey Charis-Carlson, read more than 200 DC novels from spy thrillers to chick lit to congressional intrigue for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Iowa. His conclusion, quoted in the “City Paper:” “[The consensus is that] the great Washington novel is something of an oxymoron.”

As residents of the city, we are on a periodic search for the DC novel. (We also once tried to writing one which is maybe why we are now editors.) The trick, we think, is to make the city a character in the book – and Washington seems to defy characterization.

We just read George Pelecanos, whose oeuvre of many books, takes place across many DC neighborhoods and trends in the city. Pelecanos bicycles through the neighborhoods he writes about, and when he mentions a specific house, say, you can bet it is real.

The rap on Pelecanos is that he writes only about poor and downtrodden Washington. This, we think is unfair because writing about the entirety of any city must be impossible. But we had a hard time separating Pelecanos’ DC from his Baltimore. (Pelecanos was a writer/producer for “The Wire.”)

Other contenders for great DC novel have included:

DEMOCRACY, Henry Adams: Not sure why this hasn’t achieved definitive DC novel status. It does a great job of showing how politics is the social life of this city. Published in 1880, it has had plenty of time to ascend the throne but hasn’t.

ADVISE AND CONSENT, Alan Drury: Here, DC is said to be too much of a backdrop for the plot.

WASHINGTON, DC, Gore Vidal: Too much about rich, powerful Washington and not enough about ordinary folks, critics say.

Christopher Buckley’s novels: Humor is not at the soul of the city.

ECHO HOUSE, Ward Just: “This is a portrait of Washington at once so knowing and so cynical that only a Washingtonian could ever truly love it,” wrote the “New York Times” in 1989. Exactly. Has anyone but certain Washingtonians heard of Just?

THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS, Dinaw Mengestu: Not on everyone’s short list. Mengestu is not a Washingtonian. Also, his book may be too small to be a great novel. But give it time, the book was written in 2007. Set in gentrifying Logan Circle, the book is the story of one Ethiopian immigrant, but it allows Mengestu to touch on many of the city’s core themes: gentrification, rich/poor, black/white, the immigrant experience, politics and what we believe may be the defining characteristic of DC, outsider status.

We wonder if it won’t take an outsider like Mengestu to characterize DC – and that opens the door to pretty much all of you. Have at it.