“Publication – is the auction of the Mind of Man.”

By The Word Process on Aug 27, 2010

Fewer than a dozen of Emily Dickinson’s poems – including the one above – were published during her lifetime. Yet Dickinson kept writing poetry, adding to her backlist of poems until she had written something like 1800 of them. Maybe, just maybe, she valued writing poetry more than being published.

Many of our clients ask if we can help them get published. Sometimes they ask this even before they have a book to be published in whatever sense they are talking about publication (this is a term with many definitions these days). We think they are missing the point – and we always say we are here to help writers improve what they have written.

This goes back to our previous blog in which we shared the idea that writing is a gift. If this is true, if the words that come to the writer are a gift, is it appropriate to think of selling them or at least, to think only of selling them?

Harvard fellow and teacher at Kenyon College, Lewis Hyde, whose hypothesis this is, says, “…works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies,’ a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.”

When readers read something that informs them or moves them or even entertains them, they too are receiving a gift. And Hyde believes that an artist’s gift needs to be re-gifted in this way in order to remain a gift. If so, the more appropriate question for writers to ask is, how can my work inform, move, entertain. Publication may or may not follow.

Dickinson’s poems fit none of the conventions of 19th century poetry. They were too short; their punctuation was odd. The ones published during her lifetime were heavily edited. No wonder she had such a dim view of publication:

Publication — is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man —
Poverty — be justifying
For so foul a thing

Possibly — but We — would rather
From Our Garret go
White — Unto the White Creator —
Than invest — Our Snow —

Thought belong to Him who gave it —
Then — to Him Who bear
Its Corporeal illustration — Sell
The Royal Air —

In the Parcel — Be the Merchant
Of the Heavenly Grace —
But reduce no Human Spirit
To Disgrace of Price —

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Where do the words come from?

By The Word Process on Aug 24, 2010

What do the following quotes from writers about writing have in common?

“Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.” ~Sharon O’Brien

“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.” ~Vladimir Nabakov

“It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.” ~Joan Baez

“Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.” ~Samuel Butler

“There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes.” ~William Makepeace Thackeray

All of these disparate writers seem to be saying that the words just come to them, not as a result as of an effort they make, but serendipitously: crawling down the writer’s sleeve, forming themselves in invisible ink, insisting on being written. This notion that the words just appear is common among writers. This is not to say that there isn’t work involved in organization, research, waiting around for inspiration, focusing, self-editing, revision and so on. Writers work hard, but when it comes down to the moment when the writer is alone with the blank page, the words do pretty much magically appear.

Poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic Lewis Hyde writes about this phenomenon in THE GIFT, CREATIVITY AND THE ARTIST IN THE MODERN WORLD (1983). In this book, which has become something of a Bible among writers, Hyde maintains that a work of art is a gift: “We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed on us.”

Hyde adds that the gratuitous aspect of creativity is what produces the feeling of exhilaration that writers feel when the words appear. If you write, you know that feeling: joy blended with gratitude that any human being should be so lucky as to be a conduit for these words. It is what gets writers so hooked.

“Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me.” ~D.H. Lawrence

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The danger (and joy) of politics in the novel

By The Word Process on Aug 20, 2010

The Napoleonic Wars (1803 to 1815) had been raging for some time when PRIDE AND PREJUDICE was first published in 1813. But you sure wouldn’t know it from reading the book. In fact, you wouldn’t know anything about English politics of the time. Jane Austen just doesn’t go there.

But papermaker and novelist Robert Bage did. Radicalized by the French Revolution, Bage advocated the abolition of the peerage as well as the banning of institutional religion – and it is all lurking in his best-known work, published in 1796, HERMSPRONG OR MAN AS HE IS NOT.

Possibly, you are all but sick of hearing about PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and have never heard of HERMSPRONG.

Hermsprong, the eponymous hero of Bage’s book, is an American brought up entirely by native Americans without formal education. (Think Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the natural man.) Hermsprong, who walks everywhere, falls for the daughter of the despicable Lord Grondale. Yellow and living in sin with his housekeeper, Grondale embodies the corruption of the upper classes.

The book also embraces the rights of women in an independent, free-thinking character called Maria Fluart, who packs a pistol:

“His lordship (Grondale) now began to bawl out for his servants. The butler ran, the cook and two footmen.
‘Stop this woman,’ said his lordship; ‘Stop her, I charge you.’
‘Let me see who dare,’ said Miss Fluart, producing a pistol, and almost overturning his lordship as he passed.
‘Seize them I command you,’ said the enraged Lord Grondale.
No one obeyed; and the intrepid Miss Fluart walked on to the hall door, which she opened by herself unimpeded even by the porter.”

During his lifetime, Bage was admired for his radical views and his books were held in high esteem by such people as William Cowper, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sir Walter Scott, and yes, Jane Austen, who may have taken a certain book title from him. This sentence of Bage’s describes two minor characters: “But the tender interest they had in each other was torn asunder by pride and prejudice…”

As soon as the Napoleonic Wars started and patriotism ran high, Bage’s reputation suffered. Less than 10 years after his death in 1801, he was being referred to as passé. Today, he merits only a few sentences in Wikipedia.

So this is a cautionary tale about the dangers of including politics in novels. But HERMSPRONG is in print, as well as on Kindle – and it is a delight to read 200 years later.

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The Trouble with Knocking off Jane

By The Word Process on Aug 17, 2010

Jane Austen inspires love like almost no other author. We re-read her books regularly and we are not alone if the market in knock-offs is anything to go by. The most recent of these may be THE THREE WEISSMANNS OF WESTPORT by Cathleen Schine. This update of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY got a great review in the New York Times Book so we read it – and enjoyed it a lot. But is it the incomparable Jane? No.

One reason we think is that it is set in the late nineties, which to us seems a pretty mundane era, unlike early 19th-century England when social mores were stifling, women had almost no alternatives but marriage, men had limited choices of profession and playing cards was everybody’s idea of fun. But, hey, it was a long time ago and the clothes were great and romance could happen then.

That romance is not what it once could be made to seem is apparent in Schine’s book when one of the two heroines falls for another woman. The other pretty much fails to notice her swain. This is modern romance – and it’s very funny, but it doesn’t do what an Austen novel does when the heroine finally falls into the arms of the hero and the reader’s eyes well up. (Or not, in the case of our clear-eyed millennial daughter who will have nothing to do with Austen. Take note of that, those of you who are writing updated versions of NORTHANGER ABBEY or PERSAUSION.)

Jane also had a much tighter framework to work with. Her world was small and rigid, a solid framework on which she could improvise. She had little to do but observe. Even if one could take the time to do all that observing today, it would be harder to get society into a nice, satiric box. Schine succeeds with this in many ways but she always bumps up against the reader’s own view of the nineties.

Maybe the THREE WEISSMANNS OF WESTPORT just has to age so that we can read it with the same rosy glasses we read Austen. Maybe we will get to see the end of the last millennium as a quirky time and not just an era of excess before the recession. It would be fun to pick this book up again in 20 years to see if its bouquet is still fruity and fun but has more than a hint of Austen.

Speaking of Jane knock-offs, Jane is now blogging:
http://laussieswritingblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/greetings-from-bath-jane-austen-is.html

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Is blogging writing or avoiding writing?

By The Word Process on Aug 13, 2010

We wonder about this when we stumble onto writers’ blogs: if writers are blogging, are they writing?

We blog to promote our business and we have no choice but to fit it in around our paying work. But during the times when business is slow and we actually have an opportunity to indulge in writing of our own, the blog interferes. This is not to say that we don’t enjoy blogging. The trouble is we do, and it is much easier than writing a novel or even a short story. So, we let it distract us.

Thus, when we read writers’ blogs, we always wonder what is really going on with the writing the blogger is allegedly doing. We googled ‘writing blog’ and found a number of blogs by writers that have clearly been abandoned. The last entries were in March or April. (Spring must be a good time to give up blogging.) This just deepens the mystery. Have all these bloggers, whose good intentions pave the Internet, returned to other forms of writing – or have they gotten a life?

In the meantime, we offer this bit of evidence posted this week on the blog, Arcana Chronicles, random thoughts of unpublished writer R.B. Wood (arcanachronicles.blogspot.com):

“Time away from the keyboard has done wonders. I hadn’t realized how stressed I’d made myself over the last few weeks. I was piling on work without planning and forethought. The end result was the fact that there were no end results.
So this morning, It’s (sic) back to work.”

Back to work? Blogging or writing?

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Got the bourbon for my sore back, switching into first person: #amwriting

By The Word Process on Aug 10, 2010

#amwriting is a hashtag, a grouping of tweets relating to a particular subject. This one happens to be writers, tweeting as they progress through their writing day.

We try not to retweet, but hey, it is August and we think this is a lot of fun, not necessarily good for the writing all these tweeters are purportedly doing, but their daily, isolated (familiar) struggles to get down to the work leads to amusing and sometimes thought-provoking tweets. Here are some that came down in just a few minutes this morning:

“House quiet (she remarks suspiciously) could it be that at 8:30 a.m. it’s time for some uninterrupted #amwriting?”

“To paraphrase Thomas Edison, ‘I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 [queries] that won’t work.’”

“New blog post? Oh yes dear sinners.”

“Do you worry that you only have one novel in you?”

“It’s 5:20 and I am now on a new quest – start project Remove 10,000 words from Polyphony… and we’re off!”

This is more than fun of course. It is a way for writers to come out of their shells and connect in the kind of community that really works for the writing personality. Learn more about #amwriting at amwriters.com

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Unrealized expectations – when the novel flops

By The Word Process on Aug 6, 2010

“This schizophrenic second novel…veers from sluggish philosophizing and ponderous verbosity to snappy repartee and crisp narrative.” This is the beginning of a “Publishers Weekly” review for a 1992 novel called SEASON’S END. The review does not get any better as it goes on.
SEASON’S END, a tale of minor league baseball and the American dream, is the work of Tom Grimes, who not only dreamed of making it big as a novelist, but was encouraged to think he might by the former head of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Frank Conroy. Conroy, who is best known for his 1967 memoir STOP-TIME, granted Grimes a scholarship to attend the workshop in the late 1980’s.
Grimes writes about his experience at Iowa and his relationship with Conroy in his new memoir, MENTOR. Both men were working on novels at the time. Both novels went on to be published. Neither was a best seller and Grimes was forced to take a low-paying teaching job after the publication of SEASON’S END. He suffered a severe breakdown.
Grimes’ tragedy may have been that he was encouraged. Most writers do not have mentors like Conroy. But Grimes takes the responsibility on himself: “I’m a failure as a writer because I’ve overreached; my ambition was larger than my talent. Yet I willingly accepted that risk.”
MENTOR is a reminder that making it big as a novelist is a long, long, long shot even for someone whose talent was as lauded as Grimes’. But while his book may serve as a cautionary tale about publication and success in the marketplace, Grimes is not down on writing. His explanation about why he writes is simply beautiful:
“For me, writing is a necessity. I exist in sentences. I forget my sense of failure. I forget time. I forget that I’m aging. I forget that one day I’ll die. Revising sentences is an act of hope, and connecting with a reader is the only leap of faith I’ll ever take.”

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What the dragon tattoo says about the girl

By The Word Process on Aug 3, 2010

A girl with a tattoo is completely different from a girl with a dragon tattoo. The girl with the generic tattoo could be anybody these days, a college co-ed, a rock musician, the checker at the grocery store – and the tattoo could be anything from a discreet flower blossom to a full-blown demon. But specifying dragon tattoo says something more. At the very least, one senses that a character with a dragon tattoo might do a little fire-breathing.

But that’s not all. Here is some of  what vanishingtatoo.com writes about the dragon motif:

“The dragon is a “classic” tattoo motif, popular with both men and women. As a tattoo design the dragon shows the profound influence that Japanese and Chinese culture have had in Western tattooing for nearly two centuries… The dragon is a culturally far-ranging character whose apparent bad temper should be interpreted as simply amoral, neither good nor evil. The forces of nature are not human-hearted, representing as they do the cycle of life and death, followed again by birth and renewal. Nature nurtures and nature destroys. So too, does the dragon.”

This description reveals why the dragon is such a good symbol for Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo in the mega bestseller by the same name. In his initial description of this compelling character Stieg Larsson says Salander had “high cheekbones that gave her an almost Asian look.” Androgynous, of indeterminate age, amoral and a complete force of nature, Salandar roars through Larsson’s three books, an embodiment of the dragon on her left shoulder-blade.

The point here is that detail matters a lot in character creation. And Salander is brought to life with telling detail. Her red hair dyed “raven” black was “short as a fuse,” Larsson writes. “She looked as though she had just emerged from a weekend orgy with a gang of hard rockers.” Yet, “in spite of the tattoos and the pierced nose and eyebrows, she was well, attractive.”

In the imagination of the reader, she is well, alive. And we think this is a big reason behind the success of these books.

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Keeping the characters straight when writing from multiple viewpoints

By The Word Process on Jul 30, 2010

In FAITH FOX (1996), British author Jane Gardam writes from the point of view of at least 17 characters, just about every character in the book except that of Faith Fox, a homeless newborn whose mother has died in childbirth. Faith is at the center of the stormy lives of her family and extended family, although almost all of them are missing that point completely. That is the joke of the book and it depends on the reader getting caught up in lots of noisy lives.

How does Gardam do it without head hopping? For the most part, she devotes different chapters to different characters so the reader can be assured that if the chapter is written from say, Jocasta’s point of view, it won’t suddenly leap into the head of another character.

Gardam is also careful to establish point of view in the very first line of her chapters, so there is no confusion:

“At the beginning of December Jocasta sat in the workshops with the Tibetan women, cutting paper and half listening to them talk.”

“Dolly was answering the telephone in the passage as Mrs. Middleditch began her assault through the letterbox.”

“’Are yer goin’ ont sans?’ yelled Philip over the racket of the motorbike.”

But even successful authors have trouble with point of view. In several places, Gardam breaks into an omniscient voice to explain things that can’t be explained when the reader is comfortably in the head of a clueless character. In one place – and only one that we could find – she suddenly goes first person:

“I tell you, everyone looked for the crumbled feet of clay on this shining girl, and nobody found them.”

The unidentified  I is talking about Faith Fox’s deceased mother, Holly. It is a little like a supreme being has parted the curtains of heaven to describe her before closing them again at the end of the second chapter. Possibly something like that is intended, because there is a nativity theme that culminates at the end, but it is odd and it threw us off track as we tried to get in to this entertaining novel.

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The Novel as Video Game

By The Word Process on Jul 27, 2010

We indulged in some vacation reading last week, notably we read MR. PEANUT by Adam Ross. We bought this much hyped book in hardcover, thus bucking the three-month trend at Amazon that has e books outselling hardcover volumes. But this hardcover novel, MR PEANUT, and that e-book trend have something in common, we think. They are on the same trajectory, the one that is taking us into a world where various media as we have long known them are getting all mixed up.

None of the reviews we have read have mentioned it, but MR PEANUT really seems to be constructed like a print edition video game. There are some hints that this might be the case. The protagonist, David Pepin, is a video game designer. As the book opens, he is in the midst of working out the bugs in a new game based on an optical illusion by M.C. Esher:

“The challenge of the game was to guide your avatar… through each inescapable level, each round and round realm, until you found the secret means of escape, the button or tile that uncoiled the environments’ Mobius strip.”

This could be a description of MR. PEANUT which operates in interlocking Mobius strips that twist and turn and reshape themselves. You never know exactly if a character is a character (nor in which book, since Pepin is writing a novel) or an avatar. Mobius is the name of the stooped black humanoid who rules the realm in the video game. He also shows up in the book as a mysterious wife murderer who Pepin (or his avatar) must confront.

MR. PEANUT is a fun read if you are into games. It is also a brand new twist on the novel and worthy of note for that reason. Here is a book taking the shape of a video game. Imagine the next step in which the book becomes interactive like a game.

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