The Ultimate Writing Prompt

My driveway was plowed early yesterday--apparently after the newspaper was delivered, as I spotted its bright blue plastic wrapper peeking out of a snow bank this morning. I read the "Weekend Arts" section over lunch and hit gold in an article about the Winter Antiques Show, A Smorgasbord of Fine Art, the Strange and the Old:

At Allan Katz, there is a sculpture of two voluptuous nude women, one fondling the other’s breast, smoothly carved from a solid block of mahogany. This comical, curiously erotic fusion of autodidactic craft and neo-Classical style is believed to have been created by an unknown artisan about 1920 for a Buffalo sex cult.

1920. Buffalo. SEX CULT.

Think of the possibilities: Farce, murder mystery, morality tale, amorality tale...against a backdrop of snow and Niagara Falls.

The mind boggles.

Quote for the Ages

...novels should not be honest. They are a pack of lies that are also a set of metaphors; because the lies and metaphors are chosen and offered shape and structure, they may indeed represent the self, or the play between the unconscious mind and the conscious will, but they are not forms of self-expression, or true confession.

--Colm Toibin, New York Times Book Review

"The writer has led us back to ourselves."

My friend and Charlottesville VA Literary Lady Janis Jaquith gave a terrific keynote speech in January at the Roanoke Regional Writers Conference. Read it at her website, or listen (if you have QuickTime) here.

A Thoughtful Xmas Gift for Mom & Dad

Writer Janis Jaquith forwarded me a hilarious job posting from Craigslist, Ready to Write About My Sex Life - But I Suck at Grammar. Seems that a woman who's been wearing out the Hollywood casting couch needs help with her memoirs:

...after my husband left me for another actress that he met on a new set, I began to write about the men I met in Santa Monica, my old marriage, and what brought me to LA. Sometimes steamy, often sexy, and very real, I have been writing many paragraphs, but I need help - Preferably from a woman with a healthy attitude about men, dating, romantic, often lusty encounters, and basically my very story about a girl that finds herself sleeping her way thru LA....

So I am looking for help, because I would like to self-publish my stories by Christmas and send them to my family for always being there for me.... Going back East to see people I haven't seen in a long time. Christmas is only three months away....

I see this as the jump-off for a novel, not a ghostwriting job.

Falling In and Out of Love

News flash: Writing a novel is hard!

I've reviewed hundreds of books, some of them stinkers that made me proclaim, "I could write better than that." Now I have embarked on writing The Great American Potboiler (The Great American Novel is too much pressure) and it's taking a lot of time and effort. And that's just for the research. Oh, and much of what I've written is crap. But at least it's my crap, and as author MJ Rose observed in a Readerville forum several years ago, "It's easier to edit crap than air."

Via Editorial Ass, I found a terrific, funny post by Libba Bray, Writing a novel, a love story. Under deadline to finish the draft of a novel, she has:

become convinced that I could advertise on Craig's List for gangs of homeless gerbils to run across my keyboard in an agitated, looking-for-the-water-tube state, and they would do a better job. This is how it goes. Every. Single. Friggin'. Time.

In fact, writing a novel is very close to falling in love. How so? I'm glad you asked.

Bray then details the stages of love/novel writing, from The Beginning through First Draft, several Revisions ("F*@*#&ing book. I hate you. I wish I'd never met you. YOU MAKE MY LIFE HELL! HELL! I wish there were another word for hell but my thesaurus says there's not."), Third Draft, Final Drafts, Copy Edits and The Finished Book.

Quote for the Day

"If I wait for the genius to come, it just doesn’t arrive."

-- Ian Fleming, who wrote 2000 words in four hours each day, per Remember Fleming, Ian Fleming in today's New York Times.

Here We Go Again...

Today’s NYT has an “Ideas & Trends” piece by Charles McGrath: Great Literature? Depends Whodunit. The pull quote recycles an ancient myth beloved by the literati:

Today's novelists feel as if they have to choose either pedestal or plot.

"Oh please!" I groaned, to the complete uninterest of two women deep in conversation in an unknown (to me) language at a Las Vegas Starbucks this morning.

In the 4th graf, McGrath states:

Jane Austen wrote chick lit. A whiff of shamefulness probably began attaching itself to certain kinds of fiction — and to mysteries and thrillers especially — at the end of the 19th century, with the rise of the “penny dreadful,” or cheaply printed serial.

Not exactly. Novels and their mostly female readers were decried as "frivolous" long before penny serials made their appearance--in the 1850s, according to Wikipedia. Austen's NORTHANGER ABBEY, written in the late 1790s and published posthumously in 1818, lampoons sensational Gothic fiction as exemplified by Ann Radcliffe's 1794 THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO. In NORTHANGER ABBEY, teen protagonist Catherine and her new best friend Isabella rapturize over Udolpho et al. the same way I and my friends did over our favorite books--first Nancy Drew mysteries, then as we grew older, works by Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt. The clothing and hairstyles may be different, but girls are still the same. That's what makes Austen timeless.

McGrath discusses how genre writers, such as Chandler and Hammett, are "promoted" into the mainstream.

The puzzling thing is that such promotions don’t happen more often. Both Ian Rankin, the British mystery writer, and Stephen King, the horror-meister, have complained about a double standard — a conspiracy, in effect — among critics and reviewers that tends to ghettoize genre writing and prevent its practitioners from being taken seriously....

To transcend its genre, a book has to more nearly resemble a mainstream novel — it has to be less generic, in a word. A good example is the mysteries of P. D. James, justly praised for a characterization so rich and detailed that for long stretches you can forget you’re reading a crime story in the first place.

But is that always what we want — to forget why we’re reading what we’re reading?

Why not? To me, a hallmark of a good book, no matter what genre, is that it makes me forget why I'm reading it, even if it's been assigned to me for review, or for a class. In fact, a really good book makes me forget myself entirely: I'm totally immersed in the world the author has created, to the exclusion of everything else. I don't care about what John Updike, per McGrath, describes as the novelist's "implicit contract with the reader, which is to deliver on the promise that a particular genre entails."

The promise of any novel should be to hold the reader in thrall from beginning to end. I couldn't put down A VERSION OF THE TRUTH by Jennifer Kaufman & Karen Mack (and not because they took my publicity workshop for their first novel, LITERACY & LONGING IN L.A.). Whereas that's just what I did when THE WINTER ROSE by Jennifer Donnelly brought my suspended disbelief crashing to the ground. I was all the more disappointed because I loved A NORTHERN LIGHT, her (very grown-up) YA take on the case that inspired Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

McGrath ends with Henry James, who wrote a story about an author who wants to write potboilers, but can't manage "to turn a silk purse into a sow's ear."

...for most writers there is no such thing as slumming. You write, by his lights, what you have a gift for writing; anything else will be revealed as fakery.

Exactly. Which is why I have given up on writing The Great American Novel. Now I have my sights set on writing The Great American Potboiler--and not feeling guilty or ashamed about it.

Undue Non-Diligence 3

In its Daily Lunch, Publishers Marketplace is still all over The Australian's coverage of the mounting pile of errors and discrepancies in Ishmael Beah's bestselling memoir A LONG WAY GONE. On Friday the Ozzies reported, in Child soldier questions Beah's tale, that a map in the front of the book "is deeply flawed." Yele, a settlement where Beah allegedly fled on foot after an attack (whose date is now questioned) on his village is pictured as 450km (approx. 280 miles) to the southwest; in reality it is only 6km (3-3/4 mi.) away--an easy walk.

Per The Australian, the freelance cartographer:

had based the map on information he received from publishing house Farrar Straus & Giroux....

The publisher had reviewed his work and did not ask for any corrections to the depiction of the long trek to Yele.

The book's publisher, Sarah Crichton, said yesterday she had not been involved in the creation of the map, which she said was put together by the cartographer and an assistant editor who had since left the company.

And now today the Ozzies bring us Deadly fight Beah describes 'didn't happen':

RELIEF workers from Sierra Leone and international agencies have cast further doubt on best-selling author Ishmael Beah's account of his time as a child soldier, saying they can find no evidence of a deadly fight that he claims took place in a rehabilitation camp in 1996.

The article quotes reporters, UN and Sierra Leonean officials, as saying that such a fight never took place. Additionally:

Kabba Williams, a prominent former child soldier and activist for child combatants in Freetown, said child soldiers had often been angry at the way they were treated in the camps, but added: "I don't believe anything like that happened."

Here's the money quote:

Beah's publisher, Sarah Crichton of Farrar Straus & Giroux in New York, has refused to discuss what fact-checking or independent verification of his story was carried out before the book was published.

Disclosure:
I met Crichton 10(?) years ago at a reception after the NBCC awards. Even though I mistook her for Jane Smiley (they're both tall and blond), she was charming and chatty. To my amazement and gratitude, when bigshot editors Gary Fisketjon and Morgan Entrekin came over to talk with her a few minutes later, she graciously introduced me and included me in the conversation (not your typical NYC publishing party behavior). I haven't seen or communicated with her since, but she made a big impression on me.

Undue Non-Diligence 2

Along with the Ishmael Beah story on Tuesday, under the headline "More Breaking News," Publishers Lunch noted articles in the New York Times and San Francisco's BeyondChron about books with identical titles.

The NYT piece, Can’t Tell a Book by Its Cover, or Even Its Title, It Turns Out, focuses on a new book with an old name: THE SAUCIER'S APPRENTICE. Written by Bob Spitz and being published in May by W.W. Norton, its subtitle is "One Long Strange Trip Through the Great Cooking Schools of Europe.”

Problem is, there's another SAUCIER'S APPRENTICE--by Raymond Sokolov, restaurant columnist for The Wall St. Journal and food & wine columnist for Smart Money. First published in 1976 (!) by Knopf and now in its 16th (!) printing, its subtitle is "A Modern Guide to Classic French Sauces for the Home."

[Said Sokolov] “I looked into it, and I’m certain that this was not a blunder, that Norton knew about the existence of my book.”

Mr. Spitz said that he came up with the title when he was working on the proposal for his “Saucier’s Apprentice.” He added that until recently, he had no knowledge of Mr. Sokolov’s title, which is listed on Amazon.com. “I interviewed a lot of people in the food industry for my book,” Mr. Spitz said, “and not one of them mentioned there was already something else with that title. I thought it was a stroke of genius, but as it turns out it was Ray Sokolov’s stroke of genius.”

Or humorist S.J. Perelman's. The NYT notes that his essay, “The Saucier’s Apprentice,” ran in The New Yorker “about two decades before Mr. Sokolov’s book.”

And then we have Paul Krugman Ripped Off Wellstone’s Book Title in BeyondChron, which begins:

Yesterday’s New York Times had a piece about authors ripping off book titles from other authors. Although it’s technically not illegal, reported the Times, the practice is certainly unethical. What they didn’t mention is that one of their own columnists, Paul Krugman, just did it himself. Krugman’s new book, “Conscience of a Liberal,” has the same title as a book that the late U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone wrote in 2001 – which is still in print. Now Krugman claims that he didn’t even know about the book title, a mistake that was at best careless.

So we're supposed to believe that a bestselling author (Spitz wrote THE BEATLES: A Biography) and a renowned NYT columnist/author/economist/Princeton professor, their agents, editors and publishers never even thought to go online to see if their titles were original?

As they say in New York: Yeah right.

And in London: Pull the other leg; it's got bells on it.

Undue Non-Diligence 1

GalleyCat and Publishers Lunch have been all over the story, broken in The Australian (first article here, follow-up here), about "major factual errors" in Ishmael Beah's memoir, A LONG WAY GONE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Seems that reporters Peter Wilson and Shelley Gare did some math and fact-checking, and discovered numerous discrepancies in Beah's account of his young life in war-torn Sierra Leone. For example:

The date of the key event in the book's narrative is curiously out by two years, according to Inquirer's lengthy investigations, turning the child soldier-recruit into a soldier who would have been in his mid-teens.

If the dates are wrong, this would also mean that it would have been impossible for Beah to have been in the army for two or so years, as he has written. Instead, he may have been in the army for just two or three months....

Beah writes on the second page of his story: "The first time that I was touched by war I was 12. It was in January 1993.''

But the event he goes on to describe did not occur until January 1995.

The reporters also wrote:

The Australian believed that those inaccuracies were a result of Beah's memory being impaired by the trauma, drugs and extreme youth he describes in his book...Beah suffered a terrible ordeal during his country's civil war. However a book sold to hundreds of thousands of readers as non-fiction should accurately recount that ordeal.

Beah came back hard with his own statement, trashing the reportage. Per the second newspaper article:

Efforts by The Australian to have the timeline discrepancies explained by Beah, [his editor, Sarah] Crichton, who has her own imprint at publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, or his New York agent Ira Silverberg have been met with evasiveness, unreturned calls and, at times, unrestrained hostility.

On Friday, Crichton said that Beah, now 27, "stands by his book", but she did not offer the same support on behalf of FSG.

I understand that memories, particularly of traumatic childhood events, may be inaccurate. But it's one thing to rattle off dates and events when recounting a story aloud; it's another thing entirely to write them down as hard truth without checking.

Here's a trivial case in point:
Yesterday I wrote an email to a friend, telling how scared I was as a child by "The Old Dark House," starring Tom Poston. I was dead positive that I'd seen it at age 5. But just to be sure, before I hit "Send," I looked up Poston's filmography on imdb.com. I scrolled down to find the year in which I turned 5. Nothing. I looked again. Ditto. What the hell? Then I searched by film title. Surprise! "The Old Dark House" came out on Halloween of 1963, a week before my 8th birthday.

So. Why didn't Beah's US or Australian publishers verify his dates and facts? Why isn't a memoir subjected to the same rigor as a biography or history? Do the words "a million little pieces" not ring any bells? Incidentally, Silverberg was also hoaxer JT LeRoy's agent.

Question Bank Overdrawn. Won't You Help?

This just in from Dr. Sue, who answers writers' questions every Friday on MJ Rose's blog, Buzz, Balls & Hype.

END-OF-YEAR QUESTION DONATION OPPORTUNITY (Extended!)

Dear Friends,

2007 was an outstanding year for our question bank at Buzz, Balls & Hype. You all gave wisely and generously, and we here at Dr. Sue Inc. pride ourselves on having shepherded our resources well.

Questions are a volatile commodity, however. Once opened and examined, they lose their potency. As committed as we are to recycling, we have not yet found a viable way to reuse already-addressed questions. Thus, as our store diminishes, we have been reduced to alternating serious, important questions with boring theoretical treatises and embarrassing self-referential blather.

These episodes are curable, but only with your help. Please donate your new or gently used questions TODAY--and save our needy and deserving readers from this blight.

All questions are 100% tax-deductible through the end of January.

Fear Itself

Novelist Walter Mosley was one of the speakers on a panel at the National Book Critic Circle's annual members' meeting in New York last March. He had a new book hot off the press, so new that he opened the first carton at the meeting and gave out copies to anyone who wanted one. The title: This Year You Write Your Novel.

Great! I thought. I have a novel I want to write. Actually, I had three, one of which I've been mulling for some 20 (!) years. Now there's a fourth, of which I wrote two chapters in November and then stopped.

I started reading Mosley's book as soon as I got back home. It's terrific. He spells out exactly what one has to do, and how to go about doing it. This looks easy, I thought. I could do this.

But I didn't. I put Mosley's book down, unfinished.

Why?

Because I was afraid.

I can only admit that to myself now that I've read this:
The Nasty Four-Letter Word That Keeps You From Writing, which Darling Husband just sent me a link to.

Someone asked me what my New Year's resolutions are. I responded:

1. Stay healthy.
2. Stay sane.

Now I'm adding:

3. Overcome my fear.
4. Write that novel.

These are in addition to my perennial resolutions, courtesy of British critic James Agate (1877-1947):

1. To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging.


2. To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.

Crush Those Dreams!

"I'm really mean," I told the attendees at my "Prep to Pitch" workshops at the Backspace Agent-Author Seminar last week. "If I can crush your writing dreams and have you crawling out of here on your bellies, my work will be done."

I wasn't completely serious, though there were a few there who needed a basic writing class, not one on pitching agents. And people left smiling (some even sent thankful emails), so I failed as a meanie if not as a workshop leader.

Nevertheless, I'll be the first to sneer that there are wannabe writers whose work shouldn't be inflicted on anyone other than themselves. (Ditto musicians, visual artists, singers, etc.) But if writing gives you pleasure, and keeps you off the streets and out of the pool halls, who am I--or anyone?-- to say, "Give up, you're wasting your time"?

This morning I was talking with Steve Bennett, the mastermind behind AuthorBytes. (Small world: Book Promotion 101 alum Julia Flynn Siler, author of HOUSE OF MONDAVI, is a client.) Steve sent me links to some of their other recent creations, one of which is the relaunch of Chris Bohjalian's site. The Q&A page has the ultimate dream-crushing story; scroll down to:

Many writers are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?

The Awful Truth

Publitron, co-writer of my new favorite blog, Slunch, offers terrific publicity advice in A Thousand Splendid Blogs-an open letter to Peter Sacks.

Over at Heretic Spire, a Damn Lie author Cherie Priest has churned out an instant classic of authorial advice: Things I've Learned Since My First Book Got Published.

I've been...GASP!...writing lately. Willingly, yet. (Better late then never.) In so doing, I've discovered that I'm one of those people who can spew into Word or spew into Blogger, but not both. Hence no blog posts for the past six days.

I was going to bang out more deathless prose today, but woke up feeling stupid and viral. And now I feel even more stupid after spending 3+ hours vainly searching for the errant HTML that's screwing up this one web page--but only with Explorer; Firefox is A-OK. No creative writing for me till my brain unclouds.

Yet Another Quote for a Lifetime

There is no point in writing unless you have something to say and are determined to say it well.

--Alexander Waugh in FATHERS AND SONS: The Autobiography of a Family, quoted in a NYT review by Michiko Kakutani.

Wannabe Published? Read This! #5

An agent's advice on doing a "pitch slam" at a writers' conference:

Don’t talk the whole time during a pitch. You should be able to do your sum-up in under 2 minutes (and if you can’t, you know you have a problem). Then allow the agent time to ask you questions and to get to know you. We are just as interested in seeing if you, as a person, would be a good fit for the agency.

Yes, we know you’re nervous but treat the pitch like a job interview. Fake it till you make it with your confidence. You’ll come off professional and we won’t know the difference. We like professional, confident authors.

The pitch is not the start or the end of your writing career. Don’t treat it as so. It’s just one facet of this whole business.

Wannabe Published? Read This! #4

From an agent:

My main advice for newbies is to do their homework. Make sure they are targeting specific agents who represent the kind of book they've written. I HATE getting submissions for sci-fi, fantasy, screenplays, or other genres I don't represent. There are plenty of resources --guidebooks like the Jeff Herman book, acknowledgments pages, plus online sites--so this information is not terribly difficult to find.

What makes a writer stand out from the pack is if they've taken the time to investigate the types of books I do and write a personalized letter. I automatically delete email queries addressed to "Agent" or "Dear Sir or Madam" or "Yo." I also delete queries without any salutation at all, and believe me, I get plenty of them. (Truth be told I like those because I don't even have to take the time to read them, I just hit the delete button).

Writers should be able to describe their project in one short paragraph. They should not launch into a detailed description of the plot. The cover letter should be no more than one page and should include aforesaid description, plus some pertinent biographical information. Begging, pleading, apologizing, being cute and gimmicky generally does not work. Ass-kissing doesn't work either (well, sometimes it does, but rarely). The main thing for writers to remember is that they should always present themselves in a professional manner.

Wannabe Published? Read This! #3

From an agent:

Understand that if someone takes email queries, you're better off NOT just cutting and pasting your printed query letter into an email and hitting send. You have to write to a different rhythm.

People read differently on the screen. Actually move their eyes differently, in fact.

Short paragraphs, short sentences, lots of white space.

You can't double space between each line to create white space, so you have to construct your sentences differently AND lay them out differently on the page.

Another Quote for a Lifetime

“No matter how much you can generate a windmill and a hype around a book,” Ms. Kamil [Dial Press v-p & editorial director] said, “in the final analysis what matters is if the book connects to the reader on the page.”

From an article in the NY Times about the video trailer for an upcoming novel by Holly Peterson, Manny and the Socialites: Let's Roll.

Wannabe Published? Read This! #2

From an agent:

Most of us agents and editors are real schoolmarms when it comes to grammar, spelling, and punctuation. And usually--to be blunt--we know far more about these matters than the average aspiring author. IT IS ESSENTIAL that an author have the query letter, proposal, and sample chapters proofread thoroughly, preferably by a literary professional, before they send them in to us. Even that friend of yours who is the local high school English teacher, sad to say, is usually not good enough to accomplish this task properly. I'm not looking for writers who are going to require me to spend time correcting their manuscripts; that is not my job.

And if I sound pissed off about this, it's because after years of such submissions, I AM!