Making it the best it can be

So, I live in DC, and I’ve been snowbound in the city for four days and counting.  The city has shut down, and I haven’t been teaching. I’m grateful for the snow days; they’ve given me time and space to address my doubts and fears about rewriting over 130 pages of my novel.

I’ve managed to decide on the new direction that I need to take, and I’m feeling confident about it; what seemed staggering four days ago now seems merely overwhelming.  During these lengthly conversations with myself (not out loud, of course . . . well, not usually), I kept analyzing and re-analyzing my motives for this decision.  My first concern was:  Am I merely diving back into the novel to avoid further rejection?  As hard as writing can be, nothing is more frightening than facing rejection (mainly because you have so little control over it).  My second concern was:  How do I know this new direction will produce results?  Of course, I think the rewrite will produce an even better novel, but how can I be sure?  My final concern was . . . well, about you guys, the readers of my blog.  When I began keeping a blog, I saw it has a public journal about my road to publishing my novel.  Well, that road may be a bit longer than I had originally anticipated.  Will you bear with me?

Although I didn’t emerge with answers to these questions (in fact, I’m not sure there are answers), I did come to a conclusion about something:  To be a good writer, you really have to work at it.  To write something that will last, that your readers will respect, you have to give it your best.  As a writer, I’m always growing, so my best is always changing.  My best last year isn’t what it is this year.  I look at many of the books that are being written today and the ones I admire are less the product of shear talent and more the product of a little talent refined by hard work.

Ultimately, I want my novel to be a work I admire this way.

The Next Step is a Step Back

So, it’s been a while since I blogged (Thanks to Jeff Herrity for filling in for me and sharing his ideas about marketing and the Kindle.).  I hit a point in mid-December where I needed to focus exclusively on my manuscript.  I was determined to complete my next set of revisions by the new year.  These revisions were in response to the feedback I had received from the reader of the agent who I had been courting (Jeff Kleinman of Folio Literary Management), and I wanted to get the novel to him by the first of 2010.  Well, at that point, his reader gave me more feedback, which I felt I could respond to in short order, so I dug back in through the month of January.  All of this is to say that last weekend he read the first three chapters and said no.  Ugh.

Of course, I know that rejection is part of the game, but it’s also hard to take, especially after I spent so much time responding to Jeff ’s feedback.  I’m not angry, though.  I get it.  In fact, I’m really grateful for the amount of feedback I received from him; it’s made my novel even better.  But, now, I have to decide what to do next.

Jeff turned me down because he felt that the voices of my narrators weren’t distinct enough.  My first response was to be defensive.  I felt that the voices were distinct (which I still believe), but over this past week, I’ve come to realize that although the voices may be distinct, they don’t contrast enough.  So, is this a problem?  At first, I wasn’t sure.  I enjoy the subtlety of the voices, and they fit the characters. But what I realize now is that they really do need to contrast.  From a practical standpoint, if I present a reader with two narrators, his or her expectation is that the voices should be more than distinct; they need to represent viewpoints that are, to a certain degree, in conflict with one another.  It heightens the tension, the heartbeat of any narrative.

This is a difficult thing to admit to myself, because it means that I have to recast the role of one of the narrators, essentially invent an entirely new character (These things have to be done from the inside out.) and rewrite half of the novel.  This means that I may not be ready to send my novel out for another year.  Yes.  Another year.

The good news is that I know what I have to do.  My new narrator is emerging in my mind.  I even know her name.  I’ve even been inspired to view my entire novel in a different light.  The bad news is that I have to call on an extraordinary amount of patience with myself and this process.  I believe that my novel has a great plot and great characters and those elements won’t change, but I still haven’t found the best way to tell parts of it.

It’s important for me to have intregity and produce something that I can really believe in.  I think such a change is the answer, so I’m going to rewrite it.  My search for an agent is officially on hold.

More kindling for the fire

It’s Jeff again and I wanted to follow-up my post last week with some articles that I found shortly after posting To Kindle or Not to Kindle.

It seems that many people have been focusing on the Kindle as a reading device, Kindle as a marketing device, and Kindle as a publishing tool.

The market is soon to be flooded with the ‘latest’ e-ink device and everyone is scrambling to be first out the gate with some crazy success stories. Tomorrow Apple will be announcing their newest device…hold on, here we go! (As a student and future art educator, i’m really hoping the Apple device is more school or creative in focus)

Enjoy!

From the New York Post: With Kindle, the Best Sellers Don’t Need to Sell

Amazon Kindle moves to App Store’s 70/30 revenue split

To Kindle or not to Kindle

(Hi everyone, it’s Jeff. John is taking a blog break this week to celebrate the winding down of his revisions to his book Dodging and Burning. )

The other day John finished his last revision of his novel Dodging and Burning and has thus removed his ‘revision’ hat and must don his ‘marketing’ hat again. We’ve been waiting for this moment and we can now focus again on some marketing ideas while John finds an agent.

Because we are heading back to the marketing grind, John and I have had many conversations about the publishing industry and the economy and the impact that has on new writers getting their books out there. One game changer is the Kindle and e-book craze. Is a book still what a book was years ago?  Now, people are downloading books to read.

This past holiday season e-readers flooded the marketplace and the number of Kindle downloads surpassed the number of books purchased at Amazon. Barnes and Noble tried to get into the game with their Nook (which makes me think of Charles and Rebecca’s cute pooch of the same name…) but did not make it in time.

I would think that publishers are really keeping their eye on the e-book phenomena and must rethink their own marketing strategies. One thing I didn’t mention about the number of Amazon downloads is that many are priced well below the standard $9.99 Kindle price-point, and are FREE. Yep, Free.

You really can’t get rich off of ‘free.’

Is there a new viral approach to publishing that needs to be explored? Does a writer still need an agent and a publisher and all the hoops that must be jumped through to get a book out to readers?  How can the Kindle effect benefit the industry instead of kill it?

Offhandedly, I mentioned to John that he could publish his novel on the Kindle himself. I suppose this goes the route of ‘self-publishing’ and is something that John isn’t interested in, but as a means to find a publisher, it could be helpful. Much like a blog and website, having your e-book out there will generate more interest and more potential buyers.

Combined with a very active online marketing campaign and a book that is available, it would be possible to get some real traction and some data to support other offline efforts. Wouldn’t a publisher be thrilled to know that the book they are considering is already a ‘hit’ online and that it’s readership can venture off the grid?

This past summer John and I discovered a musician that had created a free downloadable playlist of his songs. He didn’t have a record label but had some music that he wanted to promote. His ‘cd’ became a favorite of ours, and he has since removed the free songs because he got a record deal. All in the power of FREE.

I think every writer should be considering all angles to get published. With the current craze of the Kindle, we must start thinking of how it can be used as a marketing tool.

Third Time’s A Charm, Right?

So, goal accomplished.  I’ve finished a third, extensive revision of my novel.  After a read through, I’ll be sending it out to Jeff Kleinman at Folio Literary Management and, if it’s not for him, then on to other agents. (I’ll say a little more about this process next week, when I’m knee deep in it!)

As much as a close revision, such as the one I’ve given my manuscript this fall, can be painful, it’s also safe.  The only critical eye I’ve had to worry about is my own, and no matter how critical you are of your own work, you own the criticism.  Now, I’ll have to tussle with rejection.  No matter how thick-skinned you are, rejection is hard.  And the more work you put into something, the more you believe in it, the more painful the rejection. It’s the nature of the beast.

My mother once asked me: “What if you never publish a novel?”  At the time, I thought she was being needlessly pessimistic.  Then, later I realized she was being pragmatic: “Adjust your hopes, your aspirations, John.”  Now, though I think it was an important question, because it forced me to ask myself: “Why do you write?” In other words, if you knew you would never publish, would you still write?

Well, the answer is yes, I would.  Of course, I would approach it differently.  When I was a kid, I made up stories all the time for my own entertainment and the entertainment of a few friends.  That’s still the first reason why I write.  Of course, I want to publish. I’d rather my audience be more than just one or a few.  I know I can tell a story that’s worth readers’ time.  But that’s not my first motive for writing.

So, as I send out my manuscript and brace for rejection, I’ll remind myself why I write.  I’ll know that I have an answer to my mother’s question.

Where you end and your writing begins

As of recent, we’ve been discussing In Cold Blood in my “Thrillers: Page to Screen” course.  Capote fabulously absented himself from the text in order to create the feel of a fictional work and, in my opinion, create the illusion of objectivity.  In the past few years, several films, Capote and Infamous, have stuck Capote back in the story, making him the central figure.  As we discussed the evolution of this story across several texts, my students became fascinated with the relationship of author to story, almost more so than the story itself.

Writers—even unpublished writers such as myself—often get asked if they write themselves or people they know into their work.  Often they get annoyed with readers who are interested in their lives or want to know where the art ends and the autobiography begins.  I suppose they feel their art should stand alone, hallowed. Personally, I’ve been much too fascinated with other writers and their lives—Woolf, Fitzgerald, etc.—to ever be offended by such interest from others.  Of course, it’s just friends and family asking me these sorts of questions now.  Perhaps, my feelings will change if I publish.  I don’t know.

It’s human nature to be fascinated with the creative process, because it’s rather mysterious, even to the creator.  However, some readers want to validate the truth they sense in fiction or poetry with some sort of absolute reality.  The logic goes: this feels true, so it must be based on fact.  If I uncover the fact, then I can know that it is true.

I take issue with this motivation, because it often arises from discomfort. Facts often allow the reader to box and store the experience he or she has had with a fictional work.  For instance, if you read something disturbing and then learn that the writer has had a hard life, you can say, well, that’s just the writer working through his issues.  Suddenly, you don’t have to deal with what you’ve read; it’s someone else’s issues.  You become a passive, perhaps condescending, observer.

Also, it’s wrongheaded to draw a line directly from a writer’s life through his work.  The relationship between the events of a writer’s life to his work is complicated.  In my case, I never set out to represent myself as a character in what I write. Nor do I set out to represent anyone else.  However, I feel as though all my characters are parts of me, and in as much as other people are a part of me, my characters are parts of the many of the people I know.  Some of those parts are superficial, some rather deep.  Every character is a collage.

A reader should be permitted, even encouraged, to read about and think about a writer’s life.  Heck, I’m asking for the new, well received Patricia Highsmith biography, The Talent Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar, for Christmas.  But readers need to remember that the relationship between art and life is complex and not easily packaged and shelved. They need to be open to discovering more questions than answers when learning about a writer’s life.

Pining for Perspective: The Problem with Deep Revision

In my creative writing class this week, we are discussing revision.  I’m having them read Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and The New Yorker article titled “Rough Crossings” about Carver and Gordon Lish’s troubled but significant writer/editor relationship.

In having my students read both texts, I hope for them to gain a sense of how much editing must occur before a work of literature emerges in its final, publishable form.  I want them to understand that, unlike Athena from Zeus’s skull, their stories don’t spring from their brains fully formed and fall to the page ready to go—a romantic notion, I’m afraid, many teenagers (and adults) hold on to far longer than they should.

Of course, revision has been on my mind a lot recently.  By the new year, I will have completed another intensive revision of my novel.  At this point, I’m so close to it—my nose inches from the paper—that I have a hard time really knowing if my revision has been successful.  I find this lack of perspective maddening, because only weeks or months away from my manuscript can provide the distance that will allow me to see whether or not I’ve been successful.  But I can’t take this time.  My relationship with this story has to be constantly evolving, it seems, or it will become burdensome.  I must push through to the end, seeing only a few feet before my face, or I’ll lose momentum.

So, I crave perspective, but have little way of achieving it at the moment.  I’m looking forward to the day (oh let it be so!) that I’ll be able to have a relationship with a good editor.  Of course, I want to avoid the horrible emotional tangle of Carver and Lish’s relationship—The New Yorker article seems to serve as a sort of warning—but I can’t help but yearn for a fresh perspective on my work.

Should regional voice conform to a reader’s expectation?

Today, to prepare to teach Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”—one my favorite stories—I read an excerpt from Mystery and Manners, her book of essays, speeches, and commentary on writing and the writing life.  At one point, she is responding to several stories that she has read from a student writers’ workshop.  She says, “With the exception of one story, there was practically no use made of the local idiom.”  And then later, she adds, “. . . when the life that actually surrounds us is totally ignored, when our patterns of speech are absolutely overlooked, then something is out of kilter.  The writer should then ask himself if he is not reaching out for a kind of life that is artificial to him.”

I don’t consider myself a regional writer, although both novels I’ve written take place, for the most part, in a small town near the Appalachian mountains in Virginia.  The reality is that my prose is flavored with the region, but not over spiced.  It’s important to give a sense of place through language, but I try to avoid calling up regional stereotypes to confirm for my audience that, yep, that’s how them those folks talk down there in that there holler.  The truth is that my home town of Marion, VA, which is the inspiration for the town in my manuscripts, has all sorts of people in it and always has, from the highly educated to the illiterate, from the wealthy to the poor, from the provincial to the worldly.  All strata of society play roles in the functioning of town life, and my desire is to represent as many different perspectives as possible.

But I worry.  I worry because the town I present in my novel may not be the town that people expect me to present.  The truth is that I grew up in a privileged household, went to boarding school, lost my Southwestern Virginia accent, went to college, and have since lived elsewhere.  So much of the literature that comes from that area is about the harsh lives of mountain folk.  I was never mountain folk.  I was town folk and lived very comfortably.  In fact, my family has been town folk for many generations.

When O’Connor writes, “The writer should then ask himself if he is not reaching out for a kind of life that is artificial to him,” I get a twinge of anxiety.  I fear that, because my version of Appalachia doesn’t conform to the common stereotypes of that region, readers will think it “artificial.”  I hope this won’t be true, but stereotypes are powerful things—so is reader expectation.

 

 

 

A Good Day for Poetry

I’m a fairly cynical teacher.  At times, I feel as though what I say to my students, what I try to teach them about literature, about how to love literature, never makes it through.  I do my song and dance.  I try to project my enthusiasm for Shakespeare or Flannery O’Connor or Truman Capote or whomever, but I’m never sure if they’re buying what I’m selling.

During an extended assembly at my Flint Hill today, I watched fourteen contestants recite poems for the nationally sponsored Poetry Out Loud competition (Go NEA!), and I was astonished by the bravery of those kids.  Sporting events and even musical and theatrical events command a certain respect in high school culture, but a poetry recitation typically doesn’t appeal to a teenage audience.  But today my school proved itself to be anything but typical.

I was moved twice during the recitations.  First, by the passion that these students exhibited for the poems they were reciting.  Each contestant brought something of him or herself to the experience, often interpreting the poems in personal and meaningful ways.  Second, and perhaps even more remarkable, I was impressed by the audience:  500 hundred high school students—athletes to Latin scholars—remained respectful of the contestants for the duration; they seemed, even at times despite themselves, to get caught up in the poetry.

So, it was a good day for poetry and a reminder of the transformative power of literature.

Tending toward the dark

When I was a sophomore in at boarding school, my roommate’s mother thought I was suicidal.

For parents’ weekend, my English teacher collected stories from our creative writing journal and assembled a photocopied handout for parents.  I submitted a story about a bereaved man who decides to take a bottle of pills and end it all.  He wakes up and thinks he’s in heaven—everything is white and glow-y, warm and fuzzy—but he soon realizes that he’s in a hospital and that he failed to kill himself.  He feels depressed about this, of course, but concludes he shouldn’t try again.

My roommate’s mother read this, noticed a few Dungeons and Dragons guidebooks in my bookshelf (always a telltale sign), and immediately came to the only logical conclusion: her son’s roommate must be on the cusp of a nervous breakdown or, worse, suicide.  My roommate assured her that this wasn’t the case.  It really wasn’t.  I remember being plenty angry and frustrated in high school, but suicidal—no.

My imagination has always tended toward dark subject matter.  I’ve always been fascinated with the unknown and the gloomy.  It’s strange how, even as a teenager, I was getting the message that if you’re thinking and writing about grim topics, something must be wrong with you.  This didn’t deter me.  I’m still fascinated with violence, sadness, and grief.  I always will be.

In preparing a blog post for my Creative Writing class recently, I came across this quotation from Tobias Wolff.  It says so much about why writers continue to explore dark subject matter: “So many of the things in our world tend to lead us to despair.  It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it’s one of the affirming arts . . . A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act.”

Perhaps, writing about suicide in 10th grade was an optimistic act, if fairly pessimistic subject matter?  I don’t know.  I just remember being entertained by that story, by loving the irony of my character waking up and thinking a hospital was heaven.  It never occurred to me that it might be taken so seriously.