How About Splunge?

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rachel Toor examines creative nonfiction and insists that “we can come up with something better to call ourselves.” (via Kenyon Review)

Pay the Writer

Brian Farnham, The Biggest Deadbeat Editor in New York

brianfarnham.jpgAs Choire Sicha reported back in September, Brian Farnham, the editor of Time Out New York is not a big fan of paying his freelancers. And that includes me. I wrote a profile piece for them in July, but didn’t get payment for it until four months later. And the only reason I was able to effect payment that quickly was through persistent emails and phone calls, going directly up the ladder to Farnham. I did, after all, have rent to pay. Farnham made repeated promises about the check coming from Chicago. This never happened. And after several communications from me, his staff had to cut a check from the New York office — something that the TONY cronies had previously told me was “impossible” — and I had to go down there and pick it up at their office. Because given the constant misrepresentations, I didn’t trust them to get my address correct.

A few weeks after another piece I wrote for them ran, I sent an email to find out what the status was on this second payment, thinking I might experience the same four month return time and receive similar misrepresentations from the TONY offices. I never received a reply. I followed up two weeks later. The Editorial Coordinator wrote back telling me that she was “checking in with our accounts payable department to find out when your check will be cut.” I left a voicemail asking for more specifics. The Editorial Coordinator hadn’t bothered to inform me in her email that, oh actually, “the financial director is on vacation this week.” I fired back a forceful but reasonable email, telling them that I would call their office “every day from Monday on — with equitable and reasonable intervals, I assure you — until we resolve this dispute, until we have a definite answer, and until there is a check in my hands.”

This afternoon, I got a phone call from Farnham. It was an effort to try and shake me up. I had experienced this approach before by bullies in high school, but hadn’t seen much action in my adult life outside of bars and law firms. “How dare you!” he screamed at me repeatedly over the phone. “Who do you think you are?” These were lines out of a bad melodrama. I responded with facts. I pointed out that I was not the one who had allowed four months to pass before the last check. I pointed out that I was not the one to let two weeks pass before replying to a payment query and repeated that I was completely understanding of a delay in payment, if only the efforts were communicated in a forthright manner. “You’ll get your check,” he seethed, sounding like a frat boy who can’t get a new pledge to hand him his beer bong.

When it was clear to Farnham that I could not be shaken up, that I would be polite but not kiss his ass (apparently, I was the asshole for being a professional and following up on payment), this infuriated the man. So he followed up with an alpha male threat that I “would not write for Time Out New York or any other magazine I edit.” Perhaps because of his Everest-sized ego, it apparently hadn’t occurred to Farnham that I’m not a fan for writing for publications that don’t honor communication, much less timely payment. Every place I have written for has always communicated with me in precise and reasonable terms, communicating to me when a check is late and being honest in every way. Most people, I believe, are kind and reasonable. “That’s fine,” I said, “I have no interest in employing my professional services for fucking deadbeat douchebags.” He hung up. A coward and a bully to the last.

I should point out that I think Michael Miller is a fine and demanding books editor. Because of this, I was happy to arrange the Sacks profile with him on short notice, getting a copy of the book the day before I had to interview the man and staying up during one twenty-hour stretch to read and prepare and ask Sacks questions he hadn’t been given before. So on this note, I regret the developments.

But if you are pondering writing for Time Out New York or any publication Brian Farnham is involved in, I present this anecdote to reveal just what you might be in store for.

You see, a writer is as much of a professional as a plumber, a barista, a lawyer, or a doctor. They have rents to pay and mouths to feed. Why is it then that so many want to screw them over?

[UPDATE: Emily Gould is a sweetheart. And for what it's worth, Farnham had his deputy messenger me the check this morning.]

But It Took Him Considerably More Than 14 Minutes to Move On

Chronicle of Higher Education: “Fourteen minutes. That’s how long it took Prestigious University Press to reject my proposal to edit a book of new essays on an early-modern philosopher. Apparently that’s the time it took the acquisitions editor to receive my e-mail message, open the 10-page attachment, make a professional judgment, and then write back with a curt one-sentence rejection stating that my proposal was ‘too specialized’ for the press’s successful series of handbooks on individual thinkers. That’s also how long it took me to go into the kitchen, eat a sandwich, and return to my computer to find his reply.”

You know, most of the time, a writer doesn’t get any kind of reply at all.

(via John Fox)

Writing and the Internet

R.U. Sirius was kind enough to include me among many more distinguished writers in asking the question, “Is the Net Good for Writers?”

All Roads Lead to Writing

John Baker coaxes Jenny Davidson to chart her writing process. And I find it very interesting. Because there are many things there that I can’t fathom (for me, the premise announces itself in the writing) and many things that I can (write something every day). But so long as all roads lead to creating work, I think it’s fantastic and that it doesn’t really matter what road takes you there. Perhaps personal temperament — and not some horrible seminar that tells a starry-eyed hopeful the absolute way to write — is the thing that determines how one goes about this discipline.

Love/Hate Write

To answer Jason Boog’s query over whether writers hate to write or love to write or what not, here is my answer on the subject:

I love to write. I love having written. I hate to write when my brain doesn’t work and when I end up writing drivel or I fail to challenge myself. But this is not endemic to the writing itself, but a rather ruthless castigatory impulse directed towards self. I don’t hate having written. I am a goal-oriented monkey and I can sometimes convince friends to throw bits of banana into my mouth; from this vantage point alone, I suppose I must love writing, even though writing is nowhere nearly as easy as it looks and there is that synaptic problem of mediocre prose sprouting forth like fungi on a white screen. There is clearly some sadistic part of me that likes to kill the fungi, slashing at it with blue pen or selecting text and nuking the site from orbit with one mighty push of the DELETE button. But when I write and there is nothing but fungi, I don’t necessarily hate the writing. Write better you bastard! Thoughts along those lines. I do sometimes hate the fact that fungi is all I’m good for, thus causing me to question whether there is a capable mind inside my thick skull (partial answer: there is, I suppose, but why dwell on it and become a smug megalomaniac when there’s a fascinating world of exciting people to contemplate!). Thus, how one answers this question of being a writer says a lot about the writer himself. Writing is work. It is sometimes difficult, sometimes easy, but it is not a painful process. Compare writing to working in an office or a maquiladora. Get some perspective, for Christ’s sake. Trying to figure out how to pay the rent is a painful process, but how one decides to do it or the degree of difficulty that one places in paying the rent is a matter of choice, depending upon how one’s interests run against the system that runs our world. But spare me this nonsense over whether you love or you hate writing and simply write and write the best prose you can with love and life attached to it.

Writers who don’t love writing are easy to spot. As for John August, it would seem to me that he does not love writing and that he has not loved writing ever since his fantastic screenplay, Go.

ed was wise…

…to disable youtube embeds.

Here’s why.

[ED: That's what you think!]

Yes, it’s “Soccer Practice”–I’m just shocked it hasn’t appeared here before.

Oh wait, this is a litblog?

Someone invited me to this thing called “Good Reads.”

My profile is here.

I reviewed my own book, EEEEE EEE EEEE.

I reviewed almost every book I like.

They link to places like Amazon to buy books from.

You can go to other places though.

The cash is in your hands.

The choice is yours.

McNally Robinson ships any book anywhere in the world.

I will give you some advice now.

Some practical advice to actualize your liberal politics in concrete reality.

1. To get free books go to your pile of books, in your room, and pick up an Amy Tan book, in your hands, bring it to Barnes and Noble or Border’s, and exchange it for a book by an independent press.

2. If an author you like is reading at Barnes and Noble or Borders and you want to give them your book, that you wrote, go to the bookshelf in the store, take the book, in your hand, write a note in it, then bring it to the author who is reading who you like, and give it to him or her.

Barnes and Nobles in NYC, and probably in other places, don’t have tags in the books, but I think Borders has tags in some books. You can just flip through the book and find it though, and take it out, and put it on somewhere else.

Go to Good Reads and be my friend and read my reviews.

I reviewed Noah Cicero, Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, Richard Yates, Lydia Davis, Matthew Rohrer, Jean Rhys, Ann Beattie, Todd Hasak-Lowy, Bobbie Ann Mason, Kobo Abe, Celia Farber, Peter Singer, Mary Robison, and some other people.

The Confused Manatee and Bear829

The confused manatee wakes at 3 p.m. most days and begins writing at 10 p.m. after drinking a double espresso with soy milk. The confused manatee is unemployed. She has been rejected from Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Cincinnati Review, Other Voices, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Eclectica, Mad Hatter’s Review, Pindeldyboz, Hobart, McSweeney’s, Mid-American Review, NOON, and Fourteen Hills. The confused manatee’s hobbies include finding secluded areas and staring at them, touching the covers of literary magazines, and pushing seaweed into giant floating piles and then swimming away.

Confused

Bear829 lives in Greenwich Village with three humans. He enjoys shopping at Whole Foods, doing push-ups in his room, and petting his own head while saying, “It will be okay. It will be okay.” He emails his mother once a day.

Bear829

what is this

I’m not sure what this place is or what I’m doing here. I got an email with a login URL, a username, and a password. I forgot about it for half a day then emailed back asking what I should be doing with this. Then I remembered a few days earlier, someone asked me if I wanted to guest blog somewhere. But I didn’t know when. Now I realize that when is now. The reason Ed didn’t return my email is because he’s away; that’s why he needs guest bloggers.

I’m a stranger here, I think.

Here’s an interview with me that was posted on Michelle Lin’s blog today.

In the interview I talk about my book and about how my dog attacked me when I was five. We put the dog “to sleep.” That’s a phrase I like.

Here’s my book, which is called Fires.

Another novel you might like is The Magus by John Fowles. It’s very good.

I’m tired. I ate many oysters tonight, as well as some mango sorbet.

Here’s the beginning of a new novel, which I may never finish:

passing through

Strangelets pass through the planet at 900,000 miles per hour. Space is a great river, the earth is a porous cloth, and in the water are strangelets. (Or you might say they’re a part of it, actually.) Other things in, or of, the water: neutrinos on their way from the sun in the trillions of trillions, muons careening out of deep space, and perhaps even the ghostly and sluggish Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, which no one is sure exists. Those things are all passing through the planet—easily, in numbers beyond comprehension. They are passing through your face now—your eyes and teeth and hair.

Here’s a post on my blog about accidentally going to a gay pool party this weekend.

bored

THE MOOSE AND THE GERBIL

I was going to blog about this Marco Roth, n+1, Benjamin Kunkel thing (which happened after this Marco Roth thing) and type some things about censorship, different kinds of people, and concrete reality vs. the world of abstractions but stared at the computer screen for a long time with a concerned facial expression then bought and ate a salad then came back and typed this post called “THE MOOSE AND THE GERBIL.”

THE MOOSE

The moose is forthcoming in The New Yorker but feels conflicted because its short story was edited a lot, to the point that the moose believes it is a “completely different story.” Sometimes at night the moose goes outside into the woods and headbutts trees while interminably thinking, “What is the function of art?” The moose’s life partner tells the moose it’s okay because “look at the art, not the artist,” but the moose stopped taking its life partner’s advice seriously over half a year ago during an epiphany where he distinctly thought the following sentence, including punctuation, “This moose is not someone I would be with if I were not as lonely and irritable as I am; actually I would talk shit about almost everything this moose says and thinks if I were less lonely and more attractive and less irritable than I am.” The moose lives in a studio apartment in mid-town Manhattan and is a senior editor at Riverhead.

THE GERBIL

The gerbil is an aspiring writer who has just discovered the online writing community called Zoetrope. It has completed three short stories but is unsure which to post for feedback. All three of the stories are very autobiographical and the gerbil has read many disaparaging remarks about autobiographical stories. The gerbil has brown hair and often feels alienated from its peers, despite that it has almost always received only praise for its “kind-hearted nature,” “intelligent-looking, beautiful blue eyes,” and “quirky sense of humor.” Its only friend, who it talks with almost every day through email and gmail chat, lives 4000 miles away, in Norway. The gerbil itself lives in a four-person apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which it found on Craigslist.

WaPo on the triumph of the little people

I dunno how to create bullets any more than Matthew does (most of the stuff I create falls into the category of another word beginning with the same first four letters), so I’ll just say that as a short story writer who has never wanted, ever, to write a novel, I’m glad to see The Washington Post write about a widening appreciation for the short story.

For My First Post: I’m going to cheat

Hey guys, I’ve posted this piece a couple of places, but I wanted to see what reaction it would get from a different audience. Originally I posted this at my blog and over at Crimespace, so if you’ve seen this post there, my apologies for the cross post. More original work to follow in the coming days.

There’s a conversation going on on Crimespace about pet peeves of incorrect grammar. Everybody has one. Mine is people saying “I could care less” when they mean “I couldn’t care less.” But I have another argument as well.

Grammar is not important.

Well, I’ll back off of that… simple grammar is something everyone should learn young and grasp. But after that, who really cares?

What is important, and what I stress when I teach, is meaning. A student has to be able to put together an argument or a storyline or a sentence that has meaning. They have to learn how to put together a logical progression and THEN you can go back and fix grammar.

Hell, look at a lot of writing in books these days. People break grammar rules all the time, whether to sound colloquial or to create effect. I understand that you have to understand grammar to break the rules, but grammar should still not be the end all be all of writing.

It should be the least important thing.

National tests these days do not grade on grammar and spelling. They let most errors go as long as it does not affect meaning. Hence, meaning is where we should focus. That’s what I work on.

If a story starts:

“Me and you went to the store. Your a giraffe and heads spilld across the road.”

I am not going to sit there and help fix the “me and you” and the correct “your” first. I’m going to ask why is there a giraffe in this story, why were there head’s spilling across the road, and what does that have to do with the store you went to.

I want to get to the point where someone will write “Me and you went to the store. You bought skittles and I bought a soda.”

Then we can go back and fix grammar.

I think people worry about grammar because it’s easy to fix. You can–when you edit someone’s piece–say well this is wrong and this is wrong and it’s easier than saying, but there’s a plot hole here on page 202 and I don’t know how you can fix it. That involves a back and forth and a conversation.

I’m always willing to talk about writing, be it with students or with other writers. I’m always willing to brainstorm plot ideas and why a paragraph works as a thought. But folks, what it comes down to is this: Whether you are in 8th grade or writing for ten years, most grammatical errors can be fixed by just reading your sentence out loud.

Meaning, however, takes work.

What do you think?

FOR THE RECORD: This is in no way an attempt to trash teachers. I am a teacher and I believe in teachers. All teachers want to make students smarter and more well rounded young men and woman.

However, I think there is an old fashioned thinking vs. a new type of thinking among all citizens of the United States on whether or not grammar should be the key to good writing.

Wise Words for Writers

Sarah Waters’ workspace: “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

There are more workspaces here. (via Bookninja)

The Dangers of Confessional Writing: Two Case Studies

There was a point in my life when I revealed damn near everything about myself on the Web. I ended up attracting a stalker who tracked down my home address. This ostensible “fan” knocked on my door and announced that she was going to “help” me. I was baffled by this. I was just some guy on the Internet. And as far as I’m concerned, to this day, I remain “some guy on the Internet” lucky enough to talk with authors and get paid for his writing every so often.

This stalker and I talked. It was creepy enough that this stalker discovered where I lived. But she also divined aspects of my personality that I had unintentionally revealed through my words and that she, a troubled soul herself, related to. This, she explained, motivated her trek to San Francisco. (I was somewhat relieved to learn that she lived in the East Bay, as opposed to some Midwestern town halfway across the country. It was as if this shorter distance somehow undermined her troubled temperament or partially justified her stalking.)

We chatted for about twenty minutes. I felt extremely exposed, but I somehow steered the conversation away from my personal life. I listened to her tell me about her life and, when she claimed that honest writing was the existential answer, I suggested that she keep a journal. A safe place for her to record her thoughts and tell the truth. I never heard from her again. I hope she turned out okay.

This incident made me acutely aware of what I revealed every time I wrote a personal essay. I eventually decided to reveal aspects of myself only when I felt sufficiently informed or wise enough to translate my character into essays. I began seeing a therapist, who helped me to overcome many lingering demons, and I got out my often feral personal confessions in a more constructive manner. (I stopped seeing the therapist a few years ago, save for one visit after last year’s skirmish with the police because I was terrified that I would slip back into territory that I had thought long conquered. But I do keep a journal and take long brisk walks whenever I come up against my neuroses. And I am prepared to go back again if I ever fall off the wagon.)

I also decided to take down my earlier incarnation of edrants.com, although I kept and adapted many of the styles I employ to this day. There’s a marked disparity between the various voices I adopt on this blog and the person who I really am, just as there are certain crossover qualities. While I do my best to remain as humble as I can, even I must confess amusement when some of my more outrageous posts are taken seriously. I’m also immensely entertained when people are absolutely convinced that they know me exclusively from my writing and form the most amazing impressions. I respond to this game by fabricating additional details to throw them off further. (By the way, did I ever tell you about the time when I was terrified of walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, or the time I entered a hot dog-eating contest, or the time I jumped naked into the Pacific Ocean? Only one of those anecdotes is true. Believe at your own peril.)

* * *

Which brings me to John Freeman.

I should note from the onset that, despite all of my criticisms of the man, I happen to believe that John Freeman is a good guy.

The two of us went to high school together. I can tell you that he was one of the only middle-class jock types who didn’t tease me mercilessly because of my comparative poverty, my hair in recurrent need of a barber’s scissors, the dark trenchcoat I wore to hide my wiry and hungry frame, my Looney Tunes tees (acquired not so much because of cultural loyalty, but because they were extremely cheap at Marshall’s and there wasn’t a lot of money to go around), and pockmarked jeans.

I talked with John Freeman on the phone last year and I can tell you that he’s still a good guy. And it is because I believe him to be a good guy that I must write this.

I was prepared to say nothing, but a few months ago, Freeman began turning out a series of essays that were overly confessional, much as my personal writing had been many years ago. I figured that, after many hard years freelancing as a book critic, John Freeman was entering a transition phase, searching for a more ambitious voice. But in Freeman’s ambition, I recognized the voice of a man who doesn’t know himself nearly as well as he thinks or, to be more equitable, a man who didn’t seem to be aware how much he was really confessing. And I grew concerned. I had once walked down the same road.

I didn’t want to embarrass him. So I didn’t link to this Babble essay about being childless, which, unlike other Freeman bylines, didn’t list Freeman as NBCC President. It was the kind of personal essay written without hard introspective insight, much like the essays I once wrote. It was the kind of writing you never want to reveal to the public because you’re still too immersed in the turmoil to see it clearly.

(I must pause here and point out that, with enough hard thinking, one can write about an ongoing personal dilemma. As evidence, I refer to Tim O’Brien’s infamous 1994 essay. Despite some shocking revelations, such as O’Brien revealing his suicidal impulses, it doesn’t come across as embarrassing. O’Brien has clearly mulled over his predicament, demonstrating in compelling and lucid language the development and continuing existence of a twenty-five year old problem. Additional examples of such essays include nearly anything written by Joan Didion and, more recently, Jonathan Lethem’s “The Beards,” which can be found in his essay collection, The Disappointment Artist.)

Then I stumbled upon this essay in The Believer (to be found in the current issue) and became even more uncomfortable by what Freeman was revealing about himself. It was very much like Ayelet Waldman’s troubling 2005 essays for Salon or Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone, where the writing serves as a surrogate for therapy (or, for those who disbelieve in therapy, a reasonably healthy method of confronting personal trauma). Freeman’s essay likewise featured brazen revelations, embarrassing for all parties, thrown into a thesis (in this case, how John Updike’s writing serves as a personal crutch, not dissimilar from Jonathan Franzen’s extraordinary revelation that he wanted to learn how to live by continuously reading Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters) and didn’t feature a resolution, or at least a conclusive cognizance, after a linear progression of events, but a man making the same mistakes over and over again and possibly not seeing this.

Then there was this outburst on the Critical Mass site, which was picked up yesterday by The New York Times. While I didn’t entirely disagree with Freeman’s comment, as NBCC President, I was surprised by Freeman’s decidedly undiplomatic tone, particularly this sentence:

I’d be curious to know how many of my fellow NBCC board members who voted for this book have been inside a Muslim household, let alone a Muslim country?

This led fellow NBCC member Jennifer Reese to remark that she had lived in a Muslim household for two years and had voted for the book, despite its controversial content. And it led me to wonder if Freeman’s personal confessions were creating more rancor than resolution.

I don’t know what’s going on with John Freeman, and I can’t profess to know. I’m not a mental health professional. I write here as an observer and a humanist who hopes that John Freeman is aware of what he is doing, or I hope that he becomes aware by way of this essay, assuming he doesn’t take offense at my speculations.

I must observe that writing, in and of itself, is not a panacea for personal problems. Writing is certainly a starting point for half-formed visceral or intellectual reactions to the world around us that we writers often discover later, if we’re smart enough (and often we’re not), or we have pointed out to us.

But it is not the manner in which one goes about finding an identity. That takes much more. To begin with, it takes a remarkable degree of confidence, discipline and/or drive to carry on as a writer. (Even those working writers who view themselves as sacks of shit have some ability to continue writing and not let anything stand in their way. Whether this is compulsion or confidence, who can say?) It is certainly not a profession for the weak of heart. It is an often absurd vocation. Every writer, no matter how good, is greeted with continuous rejection, with an acceptance accompanied by a paycheck of varying dollar value. A writer often never knows when her next paycheck is going to come from. A writer never knows if an editor who shoots her steady work will decide if her work just doesn’t fit the publication’s needs anymore, with even the most steeled writers often contemplating whether this might in some way be personal.

Given these circumstances, why would any writer turn to professional writing as a catholicon, essentially prostituting his personal experience in lieu of therapy? Why would a writer turn to a medium he knows damn well is devoid of the stability and nurture one should experience when dealing with an alarming undulation in this crazy little thing called life?

I am not against unfettered expression and I’m certainly not suggesting that today’s personal writers shy away from explicit personal writing. I am only asking for today’s confessional writers, who often lack the measured hands of O’Brien, Didion, and Lethem, to consider that spilling it all onto the page simply isn’t enough. This seems, in my mind, to be the motivation behind all the recent daddy memoir writing and it seems to be the m.o. behind Freeman’s recent essays. These writers should know better. A good writer simply doesn’t write an essay about a subject he knows very little about. A good writer knows how to organize his thoughts. Should not these same principles apply to confessional writing?

The Myths Behind Slow Writing

Justine Larbalestier: “I keep coming across two assumptions about writers who publish a lot of books per year. The first is that if a book takes less than a year to write then it can’t be any good. So if a writer can produce two or more books a year they are total hacks. It ain’t necessarily so. People write at different paces and in different circumstances. Some so-called slow writers are slow because they also have a full or part-time job, because they have a family, because they’re running the household, and their writing is snatched in the time between waking and going to work. Or before the kids come home from school. Or on their lunch hours.”

Next Up: How to Staple Your Fingers to the Keyboard

As someone who is now in the brain-eviscerating (but fun!) throes of a first draft, Miss Ribon is quite correct.

Scruffy Little Fleabags

Stephen King: “It’s nice to have your own place, I will admit that. And it’s nice to have your own time because you can keep people from calling you on the phone and breaking your concentration. Of course, what they’re really doing by breaking your concentration is scaring that scruffy little fleabag back into the bushes.”

The Myth of “Stealing” Ideas

Tayari Jones notes an exchange she had with a young writer who was terrified of sending her work to an agent because this writer believed that her work would be “stolen.” I think Tayari is right to suggest that this is a crisis of confidence. Literary agents simply do not have the time to “steal” anyone’s work. And think about it. Why would they open themselves up to an expensive legal battle when they are already drowning in manuscripts and strapped for time and money? Further, even if a writer can make the case that the work was “stolen,” do you honestly think that this is the only idea a writer’s ever going to come up with?

I once met a temp who was convinced that the producers of the movie Michael had “stolen” her screenplay about an angel fond of debauchery.

“Did you register your screenplay with the WGA?” I asked.

She hadn’t. And, in fact, upon close examination of her story, I realized it was bullshit. She mentioned Pete Dexter, but could not convince me that she had met with any producers, much less signed any contract. I pointed out to her that sometimes ideas come in patterns, pointing to all of the Freaky Friday-like movies of 1988 (Big, Vice Versa and Like Father, Like Son). But she was unfazed. She was convinced that the producers had “stolen” the idea from her.

What’s more, this woman was extremely miserable about it. And this was the excuse she had made to stop writing.

When I was a younger and more foolish man, I was pissed at Tab Murphy in 1995 because of a movie called Last of the Dogmen. Shortly after high school, I had written a screenplay about some teenagers stumbling upon a forgotten tribe of Native Americans. But this Tab Murphy guy managed to get the movie made before I could attract any interest. And what’s more, it starred the insufferable Tom Berenger. The bastard! Still, I didn’t let it faze me and I kept writing.

I’ve seen posts and associations I’ve made on this website seemingly pilfered by newspaper columnists. Or were they? Really, why should I be so self-important to think that they got the ideas from me?

The point of all this is that if you’re a writer clinging to the stubborn notion that someone is out there to “steal” your work, and if you are letting this get in the way of writing, submitting, or pitching, then I ask you for the good of humanity to step out of the way. Take up something else. All good writers are idea machines. All good writers have distinct and original voices in which an “idea” is just one component of an equation as intricate and inexplicable as love.

Perhaps this fundamental misunderstanding of the writing process is what causes so many people to ask the question, “Where do you get your ideas from?” Would these same people ask a bookkeeper, “How do you keep focus when you’re inundated with so many numbers?” It’s just the way writers are wired. For a writer, ideas flow through the noggin like a barely controllable fire and trying to manage all this is a bit like a good head rush during a run. There’s really nothing writers can do about this other than set it down on paper and do the best they can to convey this frenzy in coherent terms. If they’re lucky, they can make a living at this.

Hope for Writers With Boring Jobs?

Edward Jones: From MFA to Pulitzer in 22 Years (via Rarely Likable)

Miss Snark, Brave Soul

Over at Miss Snark’s, the Crapometer festivities have begun. Some of the entries are truly astonishing in their mediocrity (”The candle on the adjacent nightstand beckoned the shadows, and brought them to life” is one sentence for a novel set in “Medieval 18th Century Scotland.”). But Miss Snark doesn’t shy away from telling these folks what’s wrong with them. If this is an accurate examplar of what’s in the slush pile, then I have greater sympathy for agents and editors.

Rejection’s a Virtue?

The Stranger: “Like most 39-year-old, single, jobless, hetero men in Seattle, I thought I knew a thing or two about rejection. Then I decided I wanted to write for a living.”

Bookninja is right. Who can resist that lede? But if Jesse Putnam really wanted to write for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, he would have delivered the signing telegram.

Crapometer Redux

Miss Snark has opened up her pages once again to the Crapometer for her helpful (and, depending upon your point of view, brutal) criticism. Fiction writers who desire to test out the merits of their synopses and first pages might want to give this a try.

Plunging the Depths of Research

Ian McEwan wanted to know how long it would take to hack off another man’s arm. Really. Read this.

Lamarck Would Be Ashamed, But the Matter Must Be Settled

Over at Michelle’s, some interesting questions have been raised: Is sex better than writing? Is writing better than masturbation? And, seeing as how writing and masturbation serve practically the same purpose, why is one valued over the other?

This is a grand philosophical question. The beginnings of an elaborate taxonomy finally putting variants of sex in line with variants of writing! The ultimate crossover, or existential mash-up! If one must style a list, I would argue that the order of things goes something like this:

1. Sex
2. Writing
3. Masturbation
4. Reading
5. Blogging

What are your thoughts, dear readers?

Chime in at Michelle’s or here, whatever your pleasure.

Julia Scheeres: Freygate II or Troubling Trend?

Sherry Early over at Semicolon notes of Julia Scheeres’ Jesus Land:

The most appalling abuse that Ms. Scheeres documents in her book is spiritual abuse. Counselors and house parents force teens to mouth words of repentance and faith in Christ in order to earn “points” toward release from the school. Even though the James Frey debacle has placed a pall of suspicion over the memoir genre, and even though I have grown up around evangelical, fundamentalist, and Calvinist Christians and have never witnessed anything like the kind of abuse that Ms. Scheeres tells about in her book, I am forced to believe that New Horizons Youth Ministries has been guilty of a serious betrayal of the trust placed in its program by parents and their children.

In the ongoing debate over whether memoirs are “true” or not, this is certainly a good point. When one’s experience is translated and reconfigured upon the page and the words, in turn, become shocking or even run counter to conventional wisdom, at what point must we send in the journalists to corroborate or disclaim a person’s experience? Part of me tends to think that, at least in Jesus Land’s case, there might be a tad too much scrutiny being applied here, which is an understandable impulse after the James Frey scandal.

But I think Early unearths a far more substantial issue in her questioning. Have today’s memoirs become too subjective? (And by “subjective,” I mean to suggest centered almost exclusively around the memoirist’s redemption. Perhaps “solipsistic” is a better word, although this is, in my judgment, a mite too harsh a modifier.) Part of me suspects that most memoirs published today are near-Pavlovian experiences. The memoirist tells his tale of abuse and the reader is then obliged to feel pity and/or moved for the memoirist, until the inevitable film adaptation, in which the reader transmutes into a filmgoer and is obliged to sit through a five-hankie Hollywood tearjerker of the same experience, the contents further divested of integrity.

This might be oversimplifying the problem, but one need only look at the pre-scandal marketing of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces to see this wholesale celebration of bathos. Consider the sentiment expressed by Oprah in which she declared to Frey that, while reading the book, she flipped back to the cover to see if he was all right. Is this really the stuff that makes memoirs so rewarding?

Allow me to put forth the following hypothesis: Is the memoir so locked in the personal experience of one that it is now impossible or less likely, due to current market conditions or what is currently expected from contemporary memoirs, for the memoirist to even get inside the head of her abusers or those who she would decry as evil, much less herself?

What, for example, makes Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story or Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind good memoirs? I would argue that it isn’t the personal salvation component, although the aftermaths of both women are certainly comforting to hear about, but that it’s the humility and candor that Knapp and Jamison contribute when describing their respective experiences. Both writers are self-critical and both are unafraid to reveal their behavior, warts and all. But simultaneously, they don’t completely demonize themselves or others, nor do they paint themselves as total victims. They are respectful enough to allow the reader to draw his own conclusions. Indeed, it is the very lack of solipsism that makes these two memoirs striking.

So what happened to the memoir in the past ten years? Was it Dave Eggers sullying the memoir genre with his endless pop cultural references? Was it Angela’s Ashes demanding that all memoirists up the existential ante if they earned the right to chart their experiences?

Whatever it was, I think some sincere component was lost along the way. The memoirists forgot that their purpose was to paint important portraits of human behavior, rather than cater to a specific marketing niche or impress the crowd with stylistic pyrotechnics. Which is a pity, because before all this nonsense (and even after), I always thought that the memoir was one of the most promising places to read about the human experience. And so did William Zinsser in On Writing Well.

(Major hat tip to Brandywine Books)

Who Knew That Typing “Noooooooooo!!!!!!” Was So Stressful?

Matthew Stover, author of the Revenge of the Sith novelization: “I was shaking, and I practically burst into tears — but that probably had a lot to do with the book being about six weeks over deadline.” (via Rarely Likable)

The Dartboard, Alas, Is Not Represented

Idea Generation Methods (via MeFi)

DNA Disco-Dancing

As the great Jimmy Beck has pointed out, the 1970s portion of the Paris Review DNA of Literature series is now alive and active. You’ll find Anthony Burgess, a remarkably square-jawed James M. Cain, Stanley Elkin, Joyce Carol Oates, Anthony Powell, the not-quite-dead P.G Wodehouse and Eudora Welty.

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