Funny little video making fun of promoting your book in today’s Twitter/Facebook/YouTube world, while simultaneously promoting this guy’s book in that world. Clever! I tell you, it’s hard to be a writer now when you have to waste time with all this stuff (, she blogs). Whatever… what are you gonna do? (Via)
Poynter has an interesting little contest going on–six-word journalism mottos. Some are pretty funny–”Dirty commie latte-sipping liberal scum”–and some are kind of depressing–”Stop the presses! Oh, you did,” “They’ll miss us when we’re gone,” and “We’ll always have Paris … or Britney.”
Of all of them, the one I most relate to is: “But this IS my day job!”
(Side tangent: I think it’s kind of silly that people think print is going away. It’s clearly not, it’s just readjusting itself to include the new media. Also–and I say this as someone who writes for three blogs AND supports herself a professional writer–blogging is not the same as writing. Bloggers are not “authors.” Gawker writers and PerezHilton are not the same as journalists. Please, please, please, can we stop moaning about this subject on every writing/lit blog out there?
Everything is going to be fine.
There. Six words.)
This has been an insane week. I am glad it’s almost over. A lot of things happened this week, many of them cool. I got to:
Next week looks a little saner. I have two articles due and am having dinner with friends. And that’s it. Whew.
I am doing a lot of writing lately. For example, I’m writing book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle and PopMatters, an article on Pacific Leatherback Turtles for Bay Nature, an article on product placement in fiction for The Writer, I get to see Billy Collins read (again) for an article on poetry I’m writing for the Pacific Sun, I’m going to be a judge for a book contest run by Writer’s Digest, and so on!
On top of that, Marcia and I are thinking about having a second Word Pirates reading sometime in May. Last year’s event was a big success. There was even a pirate dance. So, as Word Pirates nears its second birthday, it seems like a good thing to do again. You are invited! And it will be free.
Other new ventures include writing for the The Compulsive Organizer, which I blogged about yesterday. But tomorrow I plan to post about making vegetable broth! (UPDATE: post here.) Kyle and I have also been very social since getting our dishwasher. Apparently, doing dishes was the major reason I stopped having people over before. Now that that’s not an issue anymore, my house has turned into Grand Central Station.
And yet somehow I had time to make some jewelry to list on my Etsy store. Here’s a pair I plan to list sometime later today:
I like when life is busy like this.
Ladies and Gentlemen Writers (Writers and Writeresses?), introducing the Gender Guesser. (More from me about this application after the link.)
This week I’m reading through my novel before starting a new draft. I have filled a notebook with notes of things to change and I haven’t even gotten to the end yet.
Overall, I’m feeling better about the book this time through, but I am still amazed by my tendency to repeat myself. Although I don’t repeat major events or metaphors without meaning to, I do repeat small things within the scene. Thus, I have learned that my characters:
Love to smile. Oh how they smile. They beam. They grin. They smile slowly. Their smiles fall off their faces. Their smiles bloom. Their smiles turn their faces from plain to beautiful. They smile deliberately, with calculation. It is a book filled with smiles, and it will make you smile when you read it.
Cry easily. Yes, as much as my characters love to smile, they also love to cry. Fortunately, they do not cry as easily as they smile–that would be quite a rollercoaster!–but they sure do burst into tears when provoked. In my characters’ defense, most of the crying is manipulative or after a great tragedy, so it is somewhat understandable.
Look people up and down. You might think that with all these emotional outbursts, my characters lack analytical skills, but you would be wrong. They are good at sizing people up. They look along people’s bodies, sometimes suspiciously, sometimes sexually. Nothing gets past them, boy howdy.
Are well-dressed. At least, that’s the best I can figure what with all the description of clothes in this novel. There are entire wardrobes of clothes in this novel. Very little of it is relevant to the plot, but it helps you to know that the main character is wearing a pink dress, right?
In light of this, I am considering the possible title: All Smiles: The Story of Crying, Well-Dressed People Who Will Look You Up and Down by Joy Lanzendorfer.
Sometimes writing feels tedious. It takes a lot of patience to slow my brain down and translate my thoughts word by word onto the page. In the future, I could see myself getting suckered into one of those devises that connect to your brain so that all you would have to do is think for the words to appear on the page. It would be less frustrating and it would increase my productivity by a lot. Yet at the same time, I’m concerned about these attempts to develop technology that can read people’s minds. It just can’t be a good thing. I mean, who does that benefit, really, other than quadriplegics and evil geniuses and lazy writers? No, no, it’s better we don’t have devices that read our thoughts. I should just try to type faster.
I know, in theory, that I’m supposed to write about writing on here, but I never seem to do it. I think writing is always going to be a private endeavor for me. As for writing-related links, I’ve been posting that sort of thing over at the Word Pirates blog.
Still, I think I should write something about writing on here. After all, it’s one of the biggest parts of my life. So, here are two writing-related things I started in the new year that are working so far:
* I’m focusing on what I produce, not what happens to the writing after I submit it. In other words, instead of focusing on what an editor thinks of a query, I make the goal about writing the query itself. As long as I write X in X period of time, I’ve done my job. Beyond that, it’s out of my control. This keeps me from going crazy. If editors ignore me or reject me or fail to see how X is a good idea when other, non-competing magazines are jumping on the same idea pitched by other writers–well, fine. I tried. I’m just doing my job.
* I’m reading one new literary journal a month. One is all I can make time for, but it’s a lot more than I read last year. Lit journals are full of cutting-edge story structures and new ways to think about writing, so they shake up inspiration. I’m actually dreaming of new ways to write short stories because of this new habit. I highly recommend reading lit journals if you do any kind of creative writing.
Oh! Bonus writing thing: Marcia and I are going to Writers with Drinks at the Make-Out Room in San Francisco on Saturday. Aimee Bender will be reading. I really liked her short story collection Willful Creatures. Hooray!
I was wondering why book people were so interested in the career move of James Wood from book critic at The New Republic to staff writer at The New Yorker, until this article explained it to me. In his time at The New Republic, Wood has criticized many of the writers who are held up as the pinnacle of today’s literature by esteemed institutions–writers like Philip Roth, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.
[Wood] is not indirect in his criticisms. The Nobel Laureate Morrison’s novel Paradise, Wood pronounced a few years back, “is a novel babyishly cradled in magic. It is sentimental, evasive, and cloudy.” DeLillo’s Underworld, he has written, “proves, once and for all, or so I must hope, the incompatibility of the political paranoid vision with great fiction.”
Apparently, Wood doesn’t like “‘hysterical realism,’ his coinage for books that attempt to convey the raucousness of contemporary life through outlandish proliferating plots, allegory, bizarre coincidence, and high irony”–so pretty much all the books that are held up by the establishment as important literature of our day.
And here’s why the move to The New Yorker is so interesting to folks:
Even his detractors concede that such takedowns are the fruits of a love for the novel — of a certain sort. But what does it mean that the most storied magazine in American history has aligned itself with a critic who essentially rejects the premises of a broad swath of contemporary American fiction?
That’s a good question. Here’s a person who doesn’t seem to like the aesthetics of major writers like, say, John Updike, taking a job at a magazine that Updike writes for. In other words, here’s a person who regularly points out faults of a certain kind of fiction getting to point them out to the audience of a magazine that helped legitimize that very same style of writing in the first place. What if Wood, gasp, actually changes the status quo here?
Well, sometimes the status quo needs challenging. While I like individual books by people like Pynchon/Roth/Morrison–no one can deny they are great writers–their work is often over-hyped. It’s as if critics have decided that these are the writers who will make up the next chapter of the Norton Anthology of Literature, the chapter English majors of the future will read to understand the literature of today. Someone, somewhere, decided that these are the people leading the aesthetic movement of our time, and therefore when one of these writers puts out a book, it is much more likely to get the attention, the good reviews, the awards, the top of lists, etc.
Of course, many brilliant writers are ignored in the process. But more interestingly, there are problems with the assumption that the highly ironic, jammed-packed, complex books these writers write are reflections of modern America. As the article puts it, “a messy, sprawling country demands comparable novels.” That may be true, in part, but America has to be demanding other kinds of novels by now as well. How much can really be said about consumerism and paranoia and alienation in America at this point? It seems like we covered those topics pretty thoroughly in the 1970s. Nothing has changed in the last 30-odd years?
If, like me, you believe the role of art is to reveal and reflect life, some of these books can come off as a little too cartoonish, a little too much like the writer is showing off. Of course, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still good books, but as Wood himself says in the article, “people are still dying around us, having children, making friends. Without wanting to make fiction domestic in a dreary, writing-workshop way, you do feel a lack of these experiences in fiction.”
Maybe that’s why books like Gilead, about religion and the love between a father and son, feel like such a breath of fresh air to me. Maybe that’s why Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, about death and grief, did so well. The human experience is a poignant thing, as anyone who has lived any of it can tell you, and it is a continual consternation to writers that language can never fully cover those experiences. I think writers are scared of topics like love/death/friendship/etc. because it’s so hard to say anything new or concrete about them, so they escape into acrobatics and vivid imagery and wordplay. But without the meaning underneath, these tricks can ring hollow. As Wood said in the article: “If you love Bellow, you love exuberance and stylistic showing off. That is exactly my complaint against someone like Rushdie. It’s not style, it’s all noise.”
And if Wood can reasonably point out the difference in his new post at The New Yorker, then more power to him.
Link via Bookslut.