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.

So this is the result of all those Harry Potter books: More Britons dream about becoming an author than any other job, according to a new survey.

A YouGov poll has found that almost 10% of Britons aspire to being an author, followed by sports personality, pilot, astronaut and event organiser on the list of most coveted jobs.

Well, most Britons read, so I guess there’s nothing wrong with this. (I have a problem with people wanting to be writers when they never pick up a book.) Still, why someone would dream of being poor and frustrated everyday of her life is beyond me.

Personally, writing was never my dream job. In fact, I tried not to be a writer for several years. Then I figured out that there’s nothing else in this world I’m cut out to do, so I gave up and accepted my fate. Speaking of which, I’m on deadline today…

ETA: I wrote this after reading a swath of self-published books, which inflamed a long-term pet-peeve of mine in writing:

Think about it. When have you seen eyes flash? I mean, with emotion, not because they are reflecting light. Can’t think of it happening, can you? And yet, in book after book, people have flashing eyes. They flash in anger. They flash in desire. Sometimes they flash with impish glee. Always with the flashing and the eyes.

And for that matter, eyes do not twinkle. Nor do they smolder or blaze. In fact, what does that even mean, blazing eyes? That somebody’s eyes are on fire? Also, eyes most certainly do not darken dangerously. Never in the history of the world has eye color changed from someone being angry.

And while we’re at it, eyes are rarely emerald green, okay? Unless the person is wearing colored contacts, it just doesn’t happen. So if all your characters have ivory skin and emerald green eyes, you might want to re-think that. Ditto ice-blue eyes, although I suppose that happens in nature more often than emerald-green eyes do. But really, the vast majority of people have brown eyes. Yup, plain brown, completely lacking the drama or specialness of violet or black or teal eyes. And yet, I’ve heard people say that brown eyes are actually quite lovely sometimes. Give them a chance.

Here is how eyes portray emotions: we have hundreds of muscles in our face. When we have an emotion, some of those muscles move to suggest the feeling. This can be difficult to pin down. What would shift in a face to suggest that a character is angry? Would his eyes narrow? Would he tighten his mouth slightly as he stared straight ahead? Deciding on these details will make your description vivid and grounded in reality. It will also keep you from using so many clichés.

So please, writers-of-books-Joy-is-reading, stop with the bad eye descriptions. When you’re using eyes in creative writing, make them brown or hazel or blue or non-emerald green, and make them move like human eyes actually move. Your description will be better off for it. And I, in turn, will no longer have to visualize lightning bolts shooting across your characters’ irises every time they lose their tempers.

Ten notepads, two composition books, two packs of markers, one pack of crayons, and glue sticks. $4.50

Seriously, ten cents for a notepad! Back-to-school is like an office-supply nerd’s dreamland.

I will write something real on here soon.

Ever wonder what would happen if great works of literature were disguised and submitted to publishers today? In today’s market-driven advertising-controlled literary world, would the great writers of yesteryear be rejected along with the rest of us?

Turns out, the answer is yes. Writer David Lassman sent typed chapters of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to 18 literary agents and publishers, changing only the titles and character names.

He got 12 rejection. No one offered him a book contract. Only one of them recognized Austen’s work.

Penguin, which republished Pride and Prejudice last year, described the work as a “really original and interesting read” but not right for them.

The literary agent Christopher Little, who represents JK Rowling, said it was “not confident placing this material with a publisher”.

These people are not doing their jobs. They don’t recognize Jane Austen? Even more troubling, they can’t recognize brilliant writing when they see it? Makes you wonder what else are they missing.

Thanks to Marcia for the link.

Oh wow this is so cool. Someone do this to my laptop… Please?

“Writer Mary Robinette Kowal modded her laptop so that the keyboard would resemble keys on an old-fashioned portable typewriter. ”

Link via Boing Boing, which broke Mary’s website. I will have to look into how she did it later.

UPATE: More here.

Usually, I don’t have that much to say about writing. After all, you’re pretty much just putting one word in front of the other, then reading the words, and then rearranging them and rearranging them until they sound good. What is there to say about that, really? I could tell you about my new list of transitional phrases that I over-use and my struggle to get out of the habit of using them, but why would that be interesting to read? The process of writing is boring to all but the writer (and sometimes even to her). It’s the finished product that’s supposed to be interesting.

Personally when it comes to writing, I like hearing what people are working on. And I do have projects going on. I have a book proposal out, a novel that is still being edited, a book contest I’m judging, new short stories that are almost finished, and articles coming out. I’m writing queries to get new articles too.

As a rule, I don’t talk about what I’m working on in detail. Sometimes I will tell people I really trust about my work, like Kyle or my mom, but in general I’m tight-lipped about it. This is such an ingrained habit, I forget that I have good reasons for this rule. I don’t talk about on-going work because:

1. People steal ideas. This happens a lot. You have to be careful who you talk to about projects.
2. Although they mean well, people tend to ask you about works-in-progress all the time. It gets tiring explaining why something is not finished.
3. It’s not fun for me to have people witness rejection. I’d rather keep projects to myself and talk about successes.
4. Sometimes it’s inappropriate to talk about a project. I can’t talk about judging a contest or editing someone’s manuscript, for example, because there are other parties involved.
5. Talking about it can crush inspiration. Half-formed ideas and vague imagery can seem suddenly stupid if you have to explain what they are about and why anyone should care about them.
6. It bores me to talk about my work. I would rather talk about books or politics or what you have been doing lately.
7. I am weird about my writing and a very private person in general. I like my little writing world that only I know.

Sometimes I feel a little prissy sticking to this rule, but every time I have bent it, I have regretted it. It’s a weird thing though. Most people who don’t talk about their work can’t talk about it–they work for the government or signed a contract holding them to secrecy. Other people have boring jobs that no one wants to hear about. I have interesting work that I can talk about as much as I want, and I don’t.

Because, I guess, most of the time it just seems better not to.

Awhile back, I wrote a short story that I really believe in. In grad school, my thesis adviser blithely told me that it would get published.

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “It has been rejected a lot.”

“How many times?” he said.

“I’m not sure. 20 times?”

“Well, keep going,” he said. “I’m sure you will get it published. It’s a good story.”

A couple of days ago, I counted how many times that short story has been rejected. The answer? 54 times.

Now, this is a good story, if I do say so myself. Everyone who reads it likes it. It even made one person cry–in a good way. And yet, it has been rejected 54 times.

When I say that writing is harder than I ever thought it would be going in, this is what I mean. Yes, I expect stories to get rejected. But when you know, know, that something you wrote is good, and it is still rejected this many times, you start to get a sense of how hard writing actually is. This is not a career for people who aren’t really stubborn and who don’t really love writing and reading.

However, seeing that number hasn’t been all bad. After moping for awhile, I took stock of all the short stories I had finished and considered publishable (there were many more I consider unpublishable). The number was pathetically small–something like 5 stories.

Then I looked at the number of short stories I had started and hadn’t finished. There were dozens of them. Maybe more.

It put things into perspective for me: Maybe I have focused too much on this one story. Maybe I need to finish more stories, enough to fill a collection. And then wait to see if those are rejected 54 times each.

Because I can:

Enough short stories to fill a collection
A sundress
New placemats
Weird paintings with talking animals
A mushroom quiche
Fingerless gloves
A collage or shadow box
A silver wire necklace
Sausage and pepper pizza
A hat
Lists, lists, lists
A novel.

Fiction is weird. It leads you down paths of thought you hadn’t anticipated going down. This is often exciting, but it can also be troubling when you want your work to feel real to the reader. The substance of fiction is in the details. If you want your fiction to hold weight, you have to get those details right.

The answer, of course, is research. You look up the details and fold them into the fiction in some non-plagiarized form. For example, before writing my current novel, I researched the California Gold Rush and the history of famous cults and Utopian communities. That’s all well and good, because there’s lots of information on those two things. It’s the obscure questions that leave me hanging. Too often, there simply isn’t all that much information about the things I want to know about.

Some questions I have Googled lately:

And etc.

I’m not saying there are no answers to these questions. I’m saying the Internet is not prepared to answer them! And I really don’t want to shift through endless books to find out the answers. But in the end, that’s probably what I’ll end up doing–or else cut the scene. Or … guess.