Tag Archives: Writing

You’re not helping: the world of haters and publishing fads

January 21, 2013 6:17 pm / 1 Comment /

It looks like we’re in a relatively quiet moment in the writing world. I say “relatively” because the publishing industry is still changing dramatically and everyone knows it. Still, there hasn’t been a Twilight lately. The Hunger Games is already becoming old news. Depressing to think about it, sure, since everyone was talking about it only months ago. The 50 Shades of Grey thing seems to be dying down as well, which means that we’re in between fads.

I’m not saying the books behind these fads have stopped being relevant, by the way. Twilight will remain a profitable franchise, as will The Hunger Games, as will 50 Shades of Grey. What I’m saying is that it seems everyone’s had enough of buying them in a rush, then moaning about them, or just moaning about them without having bought them.

It’s as a writer that I’m talking right now: a writer who, like most writers, has been mesmerized by the success of this or that fiction franchise, and shared opinions, and noticed a discouraging difference between the size of my bank account and that of, say, JK Rowling’s.

We’re in between fads, and there will be new fads coming along soon enough. But before that happens, before I can be accused of just trying to go against the grain in the heat of the moment, I’d like to say this:

Stop whining about fads in the publishing world.

I’ve said this before, both to weirdly incredulous people sitting right in front of me and to angry people online (who are brilliant and omniscient because they are on the internet), and I’d like to say more eloquently now. Stop whining.

If you “bought a copy of Twilight and gave it a go, but had to put it down because it was so bad” — the only thing you accomplished was adding a few dollars to Twilight’s sales.

If you “can’t believe so many people are reading junk like 50 Shades of Grey” and you’ve “lost all faith in humanity” — take a breath and ask yourself what you actually sound like when you say this stuff.

The point is, if you lament the decline of literary standards, or you wish new, interesting authors were given more of a chance, you are not alone. But you’re not helping by pitting yourself against the masses of idiots who bought 50 Shades of Grey instead of your favorite indie author’s book.

Book fads are the likeliest to involve a reading public you’d never ordinarily call a reading public. If you know people who have only read 10 books and 7 of those books feature Harry Potter, it’s worth wondering what kind of public you’re really missing out on. These are not necessarily voracious readers. From a glass-is-half-full perspective, they collectively injected a lot of money into the book world, at the cost of encouraging publishers to focus even more on trends.

And if you want to be a pessimist, if you want to insist that not only is the glass half empty, it’s almost totally empty, then allow me to take this to an even more extreme height: For every minute you spend worrying about the 50 Shades herd you despise, the hive mentality that magically turns your fight for good literature into something godly and historically necessary, you are wasting a chance to change things for the better.

Perhaps it seems like a lot of work, but let me suggest it anyway: Google something inanely phrased that expresses your feelings about a franchise you hate. I just tried it with “twilight sucks” and got predictable results:

Twilight Sucks Forums

Why Twilight Sucks

100 Reasons Why Twilight Sucks

There’s a whole bunch of Yahoo! Answers posts about this, as well, which feature opening words of the most humbling and depressing variety:

Hello i am composing a list of reasons why twilight sucks. i have already thought of several reasons of my own just wondering other peoples thoughts

You can mock Twilight all you want. I’d rather mock the Pokemon mentality that goes into this kind of debate: Gotta catch all the bad metaphors in Twilight! Gotta list all the reasons my refined reader tastes are offended! Gotta list all the basic rules of good writing I have internalized over my years of publicly talking about my own writing! Gotta mark my territory!

Because that element seems to me worth emphasizing. My scientific research is conclusive: 87.5% of the internet hates every franchise you hate. You are not alone. Everyone agrees with you. Everyone who has ever learned about effective metaphors, either in a high school English class or a college lit class or Wikipedia, agrees with you. That battle has already been won. There is nobody in the world, except maybe people who actually like Twilight, who considers those books well-written.

If you want to wage a war, how about creating a website about an author you consider neglected? No, I mean it. Your favorite indie author has not received the recognition you think she deserves, so why not play a part that doesn’t turn you into another insect voice in the chorus of franchise bashing? You could create a Facebook page called “(Author’s name) deserves more readers” instead of “The Twilight Series Sucks & Stephanie Meyer is a Terrible Writer” — the latter, by the way, beautifully exemplifies the impotent snobbishness of those who gather online to spend some time not actually getting any writing done. Let me quote from their introduction:

These are the types of people this group caters to:

1) People who, upon reading Twilight, immediately vomited and burned their copy of the book as is appropriate for bad literature.

2) People who liked Twilight initially but as the story dragged on recognized Stephenie Meyer’s mindless drivel for what it really is.

3) People who wanted Bella dead from two paragraphs into the first chapter.

4) People who realize that the style in which Twilight is written is, in fact, just properly punctuated fanfiction.

Those are the first 4 of 70 so far, most of which are “suggested by group members.” The hater’s tendency to self-flattery is the marketer’s secret tool. Twilight bashing and Twilight loving are both responsible for Twilight having been a success. Financially helpful hype is generated by hatred, not just fandom. This is not complicated, it’s not a divine revelation, and saying it won’t change the human desire for bonding through mutual interests. But it’s still, as far as I can see, true.

Go write something.

Posted in: Writing / Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Nobody gives a f*** that you wrote something

January 2, 2013 7:27 pm / 3 Comments /

The single most popular post I’ve written here is Ten Brutally Brutal Writing Commandments. It’s the one that brings in the most daily traffic, and I still think it represents my thinking on writing pretty accurately.

This is a follow-up post from Caleb J Ross, one of my great writing friends, whose novel Stranger Will I’ll be re-releasing in a bigger-badder versino through Perfect Edge this month now that his old publisher closed down.

—

Nobody gives a fuck that you wrote something.

Every internet-savvy person writes enough text messages, emails, blog posts, or forum messages to fill out multiple books per year. Producing, in-and-of-itself, is not an accomplishment worthy of praise and monetary reward. The truth is nobody but your therapist gives a fuck that you wrote something. And in your therapist’s case, she’s getting paid to feign interest in your output.

Let’s dissect a few of the most common assumptions made by new writers.

Soul Destroying Assumption #1: “People need to read my book”

Most new writers have delusions about how successful they will become as published authors. “Sure, the odds of professional success to the level of sustaining a median lifestyle are terrible. But,” says the naive optimist, “my book is something that people need to read.”

Who the fuck cares? To make a living as an author, you have to forget what you think people need to read and instead focus on what people want to read. This basic rule of economics is precisely why Author is not my primary job title. I write what I want to read. When other people like it, I’m ecstatic. I feel like I’ve found a like-minded community. I’m connecting. All good things. But none of these things are commercially viable on the small scale. I’ve learned this hard lesson, and you should too.

Soul Destroying Assumption #2: “Everyone will love my book”

Writing a book is easy. Publishing a book is easy. When the production of a product is easy, gaining market share (ie, competing against the trillions of other authors out there) becomes incredibly hard. “But everyone,” you argue, “is going to love my book.”

If everyone loved every book ever written, consumers would gladly pay $20 for an ebook and Borders would still exist. The truth is the market simply cannot support every book.

The back-of-the-napkin math

I know that the circumstantial observations I’ve noted above are not going prevent most writers from assuming themselves as the exception. After all, people still buy lottery tickets. So let’s delve into some math.

For an author to make $50K/year, s/he would have to sell 25,000 books annually (10% royalties of a $20 cover price, no advance), using a traditional publishing model. It is commonly stated that a traditionally published book sells around 1,000 copies during its LIFETIME.

For self-publishing, the numbers still aren’t very good. Let’s ignore for now the learning curve and additional expense inherent in self-publishing (hiring editors, cover artists, and printers). If selling your book on Kindle exclusively, at say, $9.99 (which is quite high in my opinion, but I’m trying to paint a rosy picture here), the author would have to sell 7,153 copies annually ($6.99 royalty per book). The average self-published book sells 100-150 copies during its LIFETIME.

The very act of authoring a book is not special. The author, in making a conscious effort to write professionally, is essentially saying “I just invented new blood-borne disease. Who wants it? WHAT?! Nobody wants it?”

Verdict: a substantially small percentage of people give a fuck that you wrote a book.

Soul Destroying Assumption #3: “I’ll be set for life if I can write just one good book”

I’ll give you points for optimism. But as you’ll learn, you can’t feed a family with points.

Think of the publishing sales structure like a grocery store sales structure where the grocery story is equivalent to a bookstore. You approach the canned good aisle. Hundreds of varieties of cans (books) line the shelves. Del Monte (A publisher) knows that it cannot viably support itself by canning and selling only peaches (only romance fiction). So, they produce many different foods (genres), in hopes of integrating themselves into every meal a person eats. You know where the author is in this model? In the fields, picking the peaches, pears, and pineapples to fill the cans.

The publisher has the financial benefit of multiple revenue streams to keep itself alive. If Del Monte only packaged and sold peaches picked by a single picker somewhere in California they wouldn’t survive. Likewise, an author who wants to pick peaches for a single season and be financially set for life is banking on some unrealistically amazing peaches (Nobel Prize winning book).

Writing begins with the message, not with the medium

Writing a novel must be approached as a component to overall personal gratification, not unlike other selfish activities like eating donuts, taking the trash to the curb in the winter without wearing shoes, and masturbation.

The inherent difficulty is that what constitutes personal gratification literally prevents the act from being gratifying to anyone else. But this is the risk we take as authors.

My advice: determine early in your career what kind of books (yes, plural) you want to write.

  • If your primary goal is to be financially sound, then write what sells the most: currently this is fast-paced, young adult, hard-genre fiction or cookbooks.
  • If your primary goal is to write life-changing literature, then do just that, but make sure you’re not burning any day job bridges.
  • If your primary goal is to be financially sound and write life-changing literature, then get a different primary goal. You might luck out and win the lottery, but counting on a lottery win is stupid.
Posted in: Writing / Tagged: , , , , ,

How to be a writer without writing: an overview of melancholy

October 23, 2012 4:20 pm / Leave a Comment /

“The transcendence of the Being of Dasein is a distinctive one since in it lies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation,” Heidegger wrote; and you wonder what a writer, armed with that single sentence, might make of its various elements.

“Being” a writer, identifying as a writer, leads your soul down an oddly isolated path. I embody the writer when I write, yet I feel it isn’t enough: I must also be a good writer, and my actions must conform to that ideal even when writing is impossible. I behave the way writers behave whether I am writing or not. I imagine the act of writing at inopportune or tragic moments: my lover leaves and I project onto the traces of her presence a profounder meaning than she could ever have left behind without me. A smear of lipstick, incidental the night before and no part of that night’s authenticity, suddenly overflows with possible secrets. Was the night itself a smear? Was there no more to our moments than the pressure of lips on things now smeared? And there the writer sits, not writing, embodying his own ideal of the writer by going beyond the act that defines him; instead of aching dumbly, instead of reaching out for new contact, he sits staring at the smear like the protagonist of his own inventions and validates the moment with poetry. He need not lift a pen.

Dark more with brooding than genuine profundity, I’m satisfied to do nothing at all, to be eloquent with myself, to curse the vanished lover by the voodoo of my eloquence. She doesn’t have to know; and if she did, she wouldn’t understand. She, too, is an ideal, more than herself in these quiet meditations. She could protest that it was only ever casual, or that her husband must come first, that her solitude is supreme, her lipstick would mean nothing if I truly sought to know her. But she’d say these things only out of sheer incomprehension. She’s a symbol of more than she suspects.

The room itself is now the universe and I’m free to flatter my own judgements. How given to suffering I am; how sublime I make it seem. Let her think she’s the point, the object of my longing: by now the smears and empty glasses have no relation to last night. I’ve turned them into truths and only I, the writer of this world, can see them in their clarity.

I don’t have to write a single word. Like you, like her, I’ve written all the words into the brute meaninglessness of silence after love.

Posted in: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Writing / Tagged: , , , ,

A serious reason to keep writing seriously

June 22, 2012 11:07 am / Leave a Comment /

Everybody loves the series of nervous breakdowns we call “finishing a novel.” I suspect most writers have experienced this kind of thing. You start out strong, write continuously for a few weeks or months, and then you grow very aware very quickly of a dangerous danger: what if you’re not writing towards anything like a satisfying resolution? What if you’re going to have to cut out fifty pages because you can’t figure out how to make them work in the novel as a whole? What if your readers hate your protagonist, even though he’s little more than a faithful transcription of his author’s honest thoughts and feelings? What if people don’t “get” that it’s satire? What if they don’t “get” that you’re deadly serious? What if you get sued for libel by someone you’ve never met, just because of a freakish coincidence of names and geographical detail? What if you don’t win the Nobel Prize at the end of your long and arduous career?

Impossible not to love this kind of narcissistic panicking. Usually it lasts a few minutes for me. If I’m lucky, it doesn’t happen for a long stretch, a few weeks perhaps. I don’t really care about cutting out fifty pages if it’s necessary. I don’t really care about getting sued for libel by some stranger — free publicity. And if the Nobel Prize still has any credibility in forty years, I’ll worry about that then, when I’m out of ideas for actual writing.

But there are bigger insecurities to slay than these, and they are Hydra-headed and subtler. They’re the insecurities that come from a lifetime of being here, doing this, losing, winning, being amazed or bored or hungry. You come to see them as “programmed” into you: the fear, for instance, of never being able to say what you want to say. Or of having nothing to say. The fear of being totally neglected even though your book is worth something. The fear of writing for an audience that doesn’t even exist.

By October I hope to present to my publisher a final draft of my current project, so I can get back to academic life, to my PhD work, to the pleasant grind.

This will be the sixth complete novel I write, and the first that I feel does something like what I always tell people good books should do: it is an isolating, probably difficult book. Last time I spoke to my friend and fellow author Caleb J Ross (a contributor to this blog, too) I told him, in bullet-point form, what I feel a great novel can achieve: instead of “uniting” people, communities, it can make you feel totally separate from others. It’s a pleasant solitude, the kind of self-imposed exile that seems to transform you over time. It’s not bonding material, the way a beach read bestseller tends to be. (Note: I’m not against popular or commercial fiction. I’m one of the few people I know who doesn’t like but defends the Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey series out of principle: you have to be snobbish about the right things and that ain’t it…) A truly great book cuts you off, makes you feel enlightened but no wiser, calmer, more independent, different somehow from yourself and from the world. I’ve had this experience only a few times with a book. One was The Recognitions by William Gaddis: I took six months off to read it. Six months of not touching another book, looking things up, rereading and rereading and rereading certain chapters. It’s not about mastering the text. You can’t master it. It’s going to resist you anyway. But you can grow with it.

Another book of this kind is Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a truly difficult and incredible and totally artificial novel that still strikes me as profounder than almost anything I’ve read.

The Book of Ecclesiastes is another, because so many of us can relate to it, but it still feels particularly relevant to me. As it must to everyone else.

Finally, Ezra Pound’s Cantos. I’m not sure what happened: I’d been reading Pound for weeks trying to make sense of him, and then one night I had a fever and a lot of Red Bull and spent several incredible hours in a daze on the couch reading the Cantos. Of course I didn’t get to the end; I didn’t get halfway there. It was more a case of reading the same verses over and over, committing them to memory, looking up the Greek (I can get by in Latin, but Ezra didn’t make as much us of it as Greek in those early Cantos). One of my favorite “easy” parts of the Cantos is a particularly disgusting vision of hell:

The slough of unamiable liars,

bog of stupidities,

malevolent stupidities, and stupidities,

the soil living pus, full of vermin,

dead maggots begetting live maggots,

slum owners,

usurers squeezing crab-lice, pandars to authori

pets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books,

obscuring the texts with philology,

hiding them under their persons,

the air without refuge of silence,

the drift of lice, teething,

and above it the mouthing of orators,

the arse-belching of preachers.

And Invidia,

the corruptio, fretor, fungus,

liquid animals, melted ossifications,

slow rot, fretid combustion,

chewed cigar-butts, without dignity, without tragedy

. . . . .m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles,

monopolists, obstructors of knowledge.

obstructors of distribution.

I mean, Christ!

These are the English-language works that have severed me from humanity for a while. There are also French and Portuguese novels that have produced the same effect (English is my third language, even though I speak it the most nowadays). They’re books that make you feel you’re “getting something” that the rest of the world is too busy to get.

And when I have these little narcissistic breakdowns around the completion of my new novel, I have to force myself to remember that the pleasure I get from reading doesn’t seem to be similar from the pleasure that the “average” reader gets. I don’t much care for plot or suspense anymore. Often even “character” means something altogether different to me than it does to my other writer friends. And if I’m writing this novel at this point in my life, it’s not because it’s going to be read by a million grateful readers. It’s going to be read by a few people who do give a shit, maybe, but more importantly, it’s going to be read by someone like me, I hope. Someone who accepts the novel’s flaws as part of its purpose, who perhaps attains that sense of isolation you can get from better books like The Recognitions. I’m trying to do something good here, something that will inspire someone as lonely as me. There doesn’t need to be a fan club; I want to feel that for every ten people who find my novel “boring” or “self-indulgent” or “confusing” or “difficult” there will be one person who sees why I did what I did, or who understands what I was trying to do and is sympathetic.

I’m never going to write the Cantos. I will never be able to produce The Recognitions. But I can add my voice to this very talented group of writers, and even if they kick me out of their choir three minutes later, who cares? They will perhaps be flattered I even listened to their song.

Posted in: Literature, Writing / Tagged: , , , ,

About my anxiety

June 15, 2012 5:38 pm / 7 Comments /

Finally, more than three weeks after I first tried to write this post, I’m giving up all pretension to eloquence. Let me just type as I want to type, without making it literary or clever.

For the last decade I’ve been struggling with anxiety. It’s getting to the point where I can’t pretend things are improving. If I’m making progress, it’s emotional progress: I feel better about my anxiety, in that I’m not longer angry at myself for feeling it so often and at such an elevated level.

In my book about my mother I also talk at some length about myself: in particular, the psychological bullshit I went through as a teenager. I won’t dwell on it now, because it’s unbelievably boring to do it after having written about it in a memoir. In brief, I had a few psychotic episodes in my mid-teens that left me hospitalized in various places, and it took a block of years of medical treatment and psychiatric support before I was much better. I’ve been on antidepressants and antipsychotics for the last ten years. I am much better, more stable, less prone to long stretches of feeling like shit. Overall, it’s been a story of success.

But the anxiety never leaves. I wake up anxious and spend the day anxious before going to bed anxious. It never stops. My body is always tense. My shoulders take a few minutes of serious stretching before they even consider loosening up. Even when I’m feeling okay, or quite well, or great, I’m still anxious. I’m still sweating, tapping my fingers on the table, drumming on the floor with my foot.

I’ve been prescribed different pharmacological “fixes” for the anxiety. So far, the only one that’s worked for me has been lorazepam: sadly, beta blockers don’t seem to be particularly effective for me, and Xanax made me forget everything as soon as it happened.

Lorazepam has been my addiction, I suppose. Everyone seems to have one. I don’t drink very much at all. I used to smoke but I quit cold-turkey one day: the result was a few weeks of pacing, sweating, craving it, but then it just stopped. I was fine.

Not so with lorazepam. It’s a wonderful thing, when you take it once in a while. I’ve been taking it twice a day every day for months. I had stopped a while back, because I knew it was addictive. Every year I take lorazepam for five or six months, and then I try to quit. This has been happening since high school.

After my mother’s death I started taking lorazepam very, very regularly. It’s been three and a half years now — I’d estimate there’s only been about 8 full months during those three years in which I didn’t take the stuff.

Lorazepam creates a feeling of calm. It lets me focus. WIthout it, I can’t sit still, I can’t be alone, I can’t be with people, I can’t control my eating, I can’t do any writing, I can’t make music. This is because when I am at my most anxious, I am incapable of doing much more than pacing around very quickly and talking to the walls: to myself.

Sometimes I go for a professional massage. That usually helps a lot — for about three hours. After that, it’s back to the routine of JESUS CHRIST HELP ME CHILL THE FUCK OUT.

I’m not unhappy. I was unhappy when I was a kid, a teenager acne and very long bouts of depression that made me feel totally isolated from everyone. That kind of thing happens to a lot of people, and I’m glad it happened to me — it was back then that I started writing and listening instead of talking at all my classmates like everyone else. I’m quite convinced having gone through that early in life made me more sensitive to suffering in others. I’m an easily impatient guy, and irritable, and grumpy, but I believe it when people say I offer good advice.

What advice do I give myself, now, at this point in my life? The obvious answer would be: STOP RELYING ON LORAZEPAM. Go back to therapy, and try to deal with it. I took my own advice a couple of weeks ago, in Brooklyn. I was stayed at a friend’s house for ten days and tried to reduce my intake of lorazepam. Cold turkey was a very, very bad idea. I felt feverish, hopeless, terrified. My head was in a daze from morning till night. I couldn’t leave the apartment. I wish God would just show up and prove he existed, so I could mention to him that the friend I was with was extremely patient with me and supportive and wonderful. She made everything much less horrible. Still, it was horrible.

I went back to taking some lorazepam, about half what I was taking before. Thought I’d taper off instead of plunging into sobriety (the water’s much colder than you think). Now I’m still trying to reduce the amount I take further. With an upcoming trip to Hong Kong, where I’ll be surrounded for three weeks by new people taking the same course as me, I don’t want to stop completely now only to start again when the stress gets too strong to ignore.

I’ve decided to write about my little anxiety problem here so that it’s out in the open. Lots of people are following my posts by now. Usually I write about books or psychoanalysis or music or my writing. I’m adding a new type of post now: the kind where I just vent and use this blog the way so many others use their blogs. To feel less alone.

Posted in: Uncategorized / Tagged: , , , ,

Why writing and being naive go together so well

April 8, 2012 12:53 pm / 1 Comment /

I insist on maintaining a position of basic naivety toward art. The emphasis should be on “maintaining” — it’s a maintenance job. Only the very naive can remain naive without trying.

RIght now I’m on an extremely luxurious farm, full of flowers, dogs, horses, lakes, fields, beautiful paintings. This farm is a work of art: but it constantly needs maintaining. And thinking about this helps me get to the core of my assumptions about art. When I see the amount of work that goes directly into keeping this farm not only functional but beautiful, the money that gets spent every month to ensure it’s perfect for as long as possible, to keep the dogs happy, the horses and cows fed, the rabbits breeding, the rifles clean, the water free from all sorts of weeds — it’s insane.

Without proper management, without a whole crew of people dedicating their lives to this, the farm would not survive. It’s not a static object of endless beauty. This place’s beauty is a product. It sounds unappealing to put it that way, but then anything loses its “naive” appeal when you look at it from the perspective of its daily maintenance. Just as a beautiful human being has “ugly” maintenance needs, just as a sophisticated and beautiful piano composition needs to be rehearsed if it is to be played correctly, this farm is like a machine, a dynamic set of relationships that would vanish if nobody saw to its functioning.

Like it or not, until enough heads have rolled and the capitalist system crumbles (I will leave this eventuality to those who would wish to see such a crumbling), the objects of art we call “timeless” are only timeless because of the social links and routines and systems in place that allow for a fragile sense of timelessness.

No, of course I’m not saying anything particularly new, but with my involvement in publishing, and my stay at this farm — it all adds up to some considerations on the nature of art’s relation to time. Paintings need restoring. Memory changes. Conceptions of what is good and bad in art change.

I get a bit down about this sometimes. A sense of duration, of real longevity, would suit me nicely. And most of the time I can get away with fooling myself: I am uncompromisingly elitist when it comes to what I read: I want great classics, difficult books of little access to Woolf’s “common reader” — and of course, because I am semi-deluded, I write my books assuming that someday they will be appreciated by the finest minds.

But the world keeps trying, only somewhat altruistically, to instill in me a sense of “realism” about these things. And the world is probably right, and in the end the world will kill me to prove that it’s right. When I work on a book, I continually insist on this naive illusion of the timelessness of art, the belief that great art always ends up being adored by those who “get it” and so on. It is naive. It is an illusion. Yet I need it, and it informs my work all the time.

When I’m writing, I don’t want to think of the human work that will go into printing the book. I don’t want to think of my distributor, sitting in a warehouse, breaking wind and chatting about things that aren’t timeless while waiting for a van to arrive so the books can be loaded onto it. But that’s the human, the “maintenance” element, that allows the timeless delusion to stay propped up in our imagination.

So I force myself, when I’m writing this new book, this short little novel that will be printed on paper produced in a factory and marketed by marketers and distributed by distributors, to think in terms of infinity. That way the fucking book gets written…

Posted in: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Writing / Tagged: , , , , , ,

Jonathan Franzen vs. the Future

February 1, 2012 12:41 pm / 2 Comments /

Jonathan Franzen and I have something in common: we like books. We do differ in some ways. I’ve never read Franzen’s novels. Actually he hasn’t either, but writing them probably grants him some say. Probably. Still, arrogant as I may seem, Franzen is far more egregious:

“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now… I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change…Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”

Now. That may seem like the harmless tomfoolery of an unabashed luddite (not bad in itself) but there are implicit dismissals in every smug syllable. In fact, it’ll be easier to do a fun line by line reading if we are to get to the crux of why Franzen’s attitudes betray his fear of experimentation and the potential for new literatures that could – gasp – splay open his chosen genre of “Literary Fiction” and flick the withered heart a little.

“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom.” 

The “American” paperback edition is oddly specific. I’m guessing that Franzen doesn’t particularly care which country’s version falls into the hands of the willing reader. Perhaps he’s very fond of birds looking at giant slanty text. There’s just no way of knowing.

 

Bird too close to read properly. Birds can't read.

So beautiful.

 

More important is his use of the word “technology”. This is something he’s very keen on making clear. Books in their physical form are technology. What does he mean by this? It’s a bizarre way to describe literature. Are libraries thus in possession of all the latest technology, by virtue of them containing the latest releases? I’m being fatuous, sure, but there’s thought in my inanity.

He goes on:

“I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now.“

 Franzen’s concept of good technology is its ability to withstand water damage. If someone told me their new smartphone was incredibly advanced because it could work at the bottom of the sea… sure, that’s kind of impressive I suppose. But… still. That isn’t really what it’s for. The problem is that Franzen tries to pass paperbacks as technology in the same way an embarrassing teacher might try to name Shakespeare as “The World’s First Rap Musician.” There may be a point in the argument, but it hints at a lack of confidence in sticking by one’s guns. Shakespeare was a poet and dramatist and there’s a reason that’s important. Books are books. There’s a reason why that’s important. If you’re going to defend books, why not just call them what they are, and why that’s worth preserving, instead of trying to appropriate “technology” to mean, y’know, anything.

People are afraid of technology. Proof:

 

No wonder. Franzen’s been made a wealthy and respected man from the traditional model. There’s no shame in that. Great authors always have. Many still do. It is in the closing sentences of the quote, that Franzen shuns exactly what makes e-books so exciting:

“I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.”

Okay, that’s more or less understandable. A text may remain the same and be comforting for that, even if a reading of said text might alter along with the person reading it. But he goes on:

“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”

 This is so bizarre I’ve had to read it several times. Has an author thus far – admittedly still in the infancy of e-books – ever decided to largely edit and alter their work? If the practise were widespread, Franzen may be onto something. A novel is a substantial part of a writer’s life, a great deal of time and emotion, and the authors who wouldn’t put their work on display until every sentence rang true surely outnumbers those who would.

Regardless of all that, Franzen is missing the potential for something great. There will be (and have been) an onslaught of trashy crap made available by the unprecedented ease of e-book releasing. An inevitable annoyance (one it is easy to ignore, and utter garbage has always managed to seep into the traditional publishing route too).

Reader: you do not have to choose. There is no either/or about any of this. I’ve creaking bookshelves and a stocked iPad. The literary eschatologists are wrong. Nothing’s dying. It’s changing shape. May books become artefacts that are more than just the text. Then they shall live.

If an art form is given time, it will stagnate and lose its power to shock and challenge. Franzen is not the lone voice in traditionalist dissent, decrying the death of the novel form. That we are agog in front of screens all the more, forgetting books once existed as wads of pulped wood.

Good riddance to bad pulp. Make the physical novels worth saving. Blocks of texts are more convenient on an e-reader. A rise of authors who recognise technology as an aid to their work, rather than a death knell, can lead the charge and turn the book into an artefact. Something worth owning. Franzen must build something beautiful.

Posted in: Literature / Tagged: , , ,

Pynchon: An Imagined & Failed Biography

January 30, 2012 11:27 am / 1 Comment /

From a chain of pilgrim milk, Pynchon was born. That is to say, Pynchon’s ancestors heaved onto Massachusetts soil in 1630, and from said landing did a combustion of genes and chance result in Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (that is his real middle name, and if I were friends with him, I’d ask if I could call him it and pretend not to be hurt when he refused).

Did he start writing V in early adulthood, or before he was even born? Certainly not the latter.

Pynchon (or Ruggles, as I call him) is now in his mid-seventies. We don’t know what he looks like, what he does in his spare time. Marijuana – or the memory of it – permeates his novels, from slight whiffs to heavier wafts, culminating in the great green plume of paranostalgia in Inherent Vice. “Doc” Sportello is a man unaware of what’s going on in the dying decade (the Sixties), the jittery instability of which remains like a wine-stain. And that’s saying something, because I wasn’t born, but I feel great Fear. Like the Sixties was a horrible preamble to an inevitable implosion, Nixon as a cackling vizier, and the failure of some avert tragedy did not allow history’s wound, coming to a long overdue spurt of pus, to breathe and scab over.

Ruggles… I would not dare call him Ruggles where I to meet him.

Dear Mr. Pynchon,

 I’m trying to think about you in a blog post that few will read, fewer will find interesting, but am finding it an enjoyable enterprise. For example, did you enjoy my portmanteau a paragraph or two up? (Paranostalgia.) I threw it in mid-sentence, so as to not draw attention and act like I just shit new words. An artist. I imagine you drink a lot of lemonade for some reason. Can’t imagine you listen to much modern music, but what am I basing that on? 

Images of Against The Day, hazed by a few years, makes me think of gunpowder and the cracked earth and dust under the feet of anarchist plotting. For a while, it was my favourite Pynchon novel. Better than Gravity’s Rainbow. Now, I’m not so sure. I need to reread it. The Chums of Chance occur, apropos of nothing, hovering in their airship, pursuing their bizarre adventures, always moving forward. Threesome between a woman and her father’s two murderers. Dog biting a penis (the owner of said penis mistakenly thinking the dog was trained in sexual service). Gunshots at nice. Franz Ferdinand being an utter bastard in a Chicago bar. Time machines and Iceland spar. Nikola Tesla in a tent. All those things could not conflate into a mediocre book. It is one of my favourite books.

Pynchon graduated and went into the U.S. Navy. No, he didn’t graduate. He left halfway through a Cornell degree in engineering physics. After the Navy (in V. a hamburger being cooked by invisible waves, not appropriate method of contraception) he returned to a degree in English. Nabokov lectured. Stories began to trickle. (He notes an embarrassment towards some of his earlier stories in the introduction to the collection Slow Learner.)

V. is my third favourite. Images include shotguns in the sewer, a priest in the sewer with vermin congregation, Kilroy was everywhere, dangling from a building as part of a daring break-in, applause for impalement, and a great spout of water. My experiences were stuttering and confused, struggling with the unusual but beautiful language. A sentence stands out, half a decade later: “His pants puddled on the floor.” I’m fairly certain I’ve remembered it wrong, but banal as it seems, it made me think yes, that’s exactly what that looks like, when trousers are down, that’s so simple and perfect.

But then! Good reviews for V. Alas, a blockage. Pynchon tries to write several novels at once. Fragments may or may not survive in what eventually hit shelves, after gaps of up to seventeen years. Or the complete things emerged only just prior to the current millennium. He dislikes his next book, The Crying of Lot 49.

Horrible confession: I’ve not read Vineland (the first one I bought, because I was vaguely aware at seventeen that the author was worth my time) or Mason & Dixon. The latter haunts me, following across countries and bookshelves. Soon I shall read it. Many call it his masterpiece. I almost daren’t complete my Pynchon reading in case he’s done writing them.

Images from Crying of Lot 49: Insane doctor locked in office, the obvious recurring symbol, a cork ricocheting between the corners of a hotel room as the inhabitants remove clothes, Lolita reference in lyrics, the auctioneer’s gavel, the parting twosome talking of W.A.S.T.E. communication.

Every year a Nobel disappointment.

Gravity’s Rainbow (images in parentheses to reduce mundanity of selfshit rambles, inserted as they come) was a thick paperback, that invoked great anxiety and awe at its very handling. The (pig suit, then castration) first pages were a wade through treacle, each sentence another sweet trudge, and it carried on this way for a hundred pages or so. And this (Rocketman!) all with a guide to help me! Reading the novel, in its scatological rambling glory, against the unlikely setting of sunny Portugal. Almost felt like giving up. What was going on? Why exactly was (Slothrop pursuing harmonica down a toilet) the protagonist diving into a toilet? V2 rockets falling at the sites of his sexual activity. (Eating a series of disgusting “jelly” sweets.) (They were in love, fuck the war.) (The haunting ending.)

Gravity’s Rainbow changed a weird thing in me – incidentally, the biography of Pynchon is clearly abandoned now, his later life remaining unknown and of little relevance – because beautiful language did not necessarily go with humourlessness. The more characters the merrier. References to King Kong and Mickey Rooney, even if inconsequential, were absolutely fine. Absurd offshoots, Byron the Bulb in particular (we are given the biography of a lightbulb), somehow add a great deal in their pointlessness. The main character fragments. SLOTHROP WAS HERE.

Pynchon’s books, even the ones I’ve read, are still a mystery to me. The above rambling was an attempt to deduce what he is to me, what I’ve learned. Nothing is solved. But writing lessons were learned. So a list:

Anxieties Induced: 

How can I ever learn so much information? How can someone know so many things?

Christ, my character names are so dull.

This book is long. That must take years. And then most people have trouble reading it.

I live in dull times.

Joyful learnings:

Hey, books can be funny in a slapstick way! Disgusting too!

Dialogue doesn’t have to be boring, like in real life.

Too many characters are only too many if they’re all dull.

Explain a lot of the inconsequential. Explain little of the important.

It's Pynchon!

 

Posted in: Literature, Writing / Tagged: , , , ,

The Encoded Unnameable or: A (Failed) Stagger Towards What Literature/Writing Is For.

January 24, 2012 6:08 pm / Leave a Comment /

There may be people in an alternative universe, tapping through on an unholy radio, wanting a proper explanation of what the point of reading (sitting and staring at configurations of words, provided by someone that isn’t known to you) and writing (putting said words into said configurations so that strangers will like you). What if these denizens of the parallel are tap-tap-tapping right here to this page?

Fine.

What is it to me? A transmission of something unnameable and unsayable. In the lacunae of language’s unfilled spots – the crevices, the fact that I could write a 900 page novel about what it feels like to caress my big toe at half past six on a Wednesday morning, in every detail, would require me to account for every physical and nonphysical instance in the universe, and even then would remain incomplete – lies a truth we all grope for. There is no truth there, to quote Gertrude Stein (but changing her words and meaning, stripping it of poeticism and novelty).

Language refers to itself, words refer to other words, nothing at the centre. Big pit of blank. Can’t handle that myself. There is something missing. I’ve a great yearning, and you’ve a great yearning, and she’s a great yearning, and he’s a great yearning. The yearning is for whatever is in the big blank pit. There is nothing in the big blank pit. That makes no difference. My idea of a trowel is not yours, never was or is.

Think: a writer as transmitter, using the book for this very device, like Orpheus twiddling the dials to hear fragments of poetry and decipher a meaning. What meaning is there? None, none told by Cocteau.

Then: a reader as receiver, scanning the words. They make sense but they are not what they say. Books have something else. Don Quixote is not a classic because it is an account of a mad old man who wishes to be a gallant knight (if we can agree that it is about this, we cannot). It is in the lacunae that the blank pit lives, where resides the unnameable (remember, not named because nothing there).

Robert Meeks: “I’ve a fear that to scratch my skin will reveal something else. There’s a skeleton under my skin, somewhere.”

Regardless of the ontology of it all (irrelevant at best), why do either of these things? I don’t know.

Enjoyment is not to be dismissed. Life would be a parade of hemlock-drinkers and twitching nooses without enjoyment.

Why not make do with films or music or comic strips or sculptures or paintings? There are things they do better. It is worthy of a sneer when someone says that a film adaptation “misses things” out from the book. They should be different, otherwise why bother?

Why bother? “Because we are always coding, darling.” – Robert Meeks.

Something is encoded, a specific kind of nothing, an unnameable, when we write. No author can fully account for the monstrosities they have birthed. No reader can fully account for why they love/hate a text. It is just something there, encoded, dead on the page, but then pumped through with some kind of unnameable meaning/feeling by the reader’s gaze.

But why bother?

“Why The Word? Why not The Pause, or The … ?” – Robert Meeks.

.– …. -.–   -… — – …. . .-. ..–..

A compulsion to connect or the satisfaction in at least attempting to seek meaning? The code is unbreakable, and even if it wasn’t, what’s to find.

Answer: Not sure.

Posted in: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Writing / Tagged: , , , ,

Writing Journals: Getting the Facts Straight for Purposes of Twisting or: A Baseline for the Narrative Examined with Several Discursions into Vaguely Related Tangents

December 11, 2011 7:14 pm / Leave a Comment /

There are certain facts that underlie this book. This impending book I mentioned before. What do you mean you don’t know what I’m talking about? I SAID ALL THIS LAST POST TIME. Jack done write a book. And I’m writing about techniques here for the interested few, and to stagger towards some kind of “writing methodology.”

THESE ARE THREE FACTS:

  • There is a band called Paris and the Hiltons, consisting of Phil Jourdan and Sam Folkes.
  • I know these people. I live with one of them right now.
  • They play the instruments I say they do. That is to say, Phil sings and plays guitar. Sam plays keyboards.

Those things don’t change in the book (although the living situation gets a little fuzzy). Straight away, those facts are established.

This is a biography, this isn’t a biography. This is a novel.

So. Decisions about what to keep from life and what to dispense with. The three facts exist as a sort of narrative anchor (narranchor). From there on everything becomes invention.

Why make that decision? Because:

  • Writing about the reality is boring. Music is made in a very slow process of experimentation, failure, less failure, success. Furthermore, I have no musical aptitude at all. I’m unable to describe anything of any worth, musically speaking.
  • Where’s the narrative there? It could be about the rise and fall of a band, tastes of fame, tastes of failure, except I think I’ve read that story quite a number of times and find it to be very tedious. There’s no reason to give the slightest shit.
  • If I were to try and write a straight biography of the band, beyond finding it unimaginably dull, there would be too many things I couldn’t know, or wouldn’t want to. I could interview Sam and Phil, but they would naturally not want to tell me things that didn’t reflect well on them, as would anyone. At which point I would start embellishing, because I am a liar.
  • Again, who cares? There’s no stake in the actual success of the band unless we are warmed to the characters. That’s possible. Someone could write that. I’m not going to write that because I would find it dull.

BEGINNINGS

The novel opens in a bar called “Dug’s Wake”. A Paris and the Hiltons gig is about to take place. The main character, me, is sitting at the bar. I’m the main character, because then I can present the story as an outsider. That was always the idea. There’s a difference in how it evolved though.

The Original Concept

Jack Joslin, the character, is a borderline stalker who believes himself to be instrumental in the band’s success, and thinks of himself as a great friend to the two band members who, although polite to his face, have no idea who he is. Think Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire. There was to be a homoerotic subtext, frequent insinuations that I was in love with Phil and/or Sam, and that I would go to hugely uncomfortable lengths to be considered part of the band.

In my view, this isn’t a bad idea for a book. I might do it with something else. But it didn’t work, because I started finding a different voice for the narrator. Me.

Fiction As Excavation of Selfshit

A bizarre reflection comes when you put yourself in a story. I do it a fair bit. I’ll come on to why in a second. But there was a strange dialectical process towards the Jack Joslin character that comprises the final book.

The first Jack, from other stories, was a sort of laconic and quiet narrator, impassive and accepting. Reasons for doing this? Because I wasn’t particularly good at having a narrator with a voice yet. Because I wanted to put myself in fiction, but wasn’t sure who I was or what I wanted to sound like. This seemed like the best option. Problem: No honesty. I am not a cool and impassive loner, leaning against a brick wall with a… with a toothpick in my mouth, like loners do. Even if I was, that’s not exactly interesting.

Weird discomfort crept in also: I was trying to make myself look good in writing. Granted, no one would read the bloody thing. But it made me feel uncomfortable, as though I’d been bought a round of drinks because I had told people that I was a moviestar. Or at least implied it. Not interesting.

The second Jack, the one I mentioned a minute ago, the original star of this book, went to the other extreme. Like a frenzied steroid junkie whipping out a shrivelled penis (most likely his) rendered useless by muscledrug, so that he can humiliate himself and thus prevent others doing it. That’s what I was doing. (I’m not a steroid junkie and my penis is almost average size.) I was all smug and proud that I’d found a way to present myself that didn’t look arrogant. But it was. I wasn’t permitting real vulnerability or human emotions. It was just a stupid clown, full of eccentricities, only alike me in name.

Wrote about 5,000/6,000 words in that voice. I didn’t like him.

It was a formula. Social event appears! Jack engages with social event in abrasive and stupid way! All is lost! Hahaha!

Ha. Ha.

Ha.

NEW AND IMPROVED JACK THREE, the humble narrator, the one that will be in the final work, is born!

Still a twat. That’s the thing though: you can be a twat and still sympathetic. This Jack Joslin has a great deal of me in him, to the point of potential embarrassment. It took a lot of meditating on how to make him interesting, to think of various literary devices to evoke both a sense of being pathetic and sympathy at the same time. There are things in there… I don’t even want to point out the real bits.

This Jack is terrible with women, he is rude and discourteous and jealous and then utterly bewildered and enraged when they refuse him. But this comes from a place of desperation and loneliness.

This Jack is a liar and a coward, who picks fights with people and then begs for mercy. Who blames the world for his misery. Who takes small and petty revenges and is constantly in mental conflict about them. This guy is still a twat, but there’s sympathy. He’s just very alone and doesn’t think things through.

He’s very flawed. Very. So flawed that, in the course of the book, he will accidentally begin a process in which billions die.

Fulfilling earlier promise of explaining why Jack Joslin frequently uses Jack Joslin as narrator

Narcissism. And exploring the fuzzy boundaries between fact and fiction, and what effect it has on fiction if some things in it are completely true or, even more interestingly, what effect it has if you adamantly insist everything’s true, especially if it’s impossible.

And narcissism.

Posted in: Writing / Tagged: , , , ,