Tropic of Fiction

Raw Material

2008-09-10T21:38:00.002-04:00

From the short story "Raw Material" by A.S. Byatt, appearing in The Atlantic in 2002, before they stopped doing fiction.

The protagonist teaches writing classes.

"In fact he had tried unsuccessfully to sell two different stories based
on the confessions (or inventions) of his class. The students offered
themselves to him like raw oysters on pristine plates. They told him
horror and bathos, daydreams, vituperation, and vengeance. They
couldn't write; their inventions were crude, and he couldn't find a way
to perform the necessary operations to spin the muddy straw into silk,
or turn the raw, bleeding chunks into a savory dish. So he kept faith
with them, not entirely voluntarily. He did care about writing. He
cared about writing more than anything—sex, food, beer, fresh air, even
warmth. He wrote and rewrote perpetually in his trailer. He was
rewriting his fifth novel. Bad Boy had been written in a rush
just out of school and snapped up by the first publisher he'd
sent it to. It was what he had expected. His second novel, Smile and Smile,
had sold 600 copies, and was remaindered. His third and fourth,
frequently rewritten, lay in brown paper, stamped and restamped, in a
tin chest in the trailer. He didn't have an agent."

available online at Raw Material by A.S. Byatt

One of Two

2008-08-01T22:57:00.001-04:00

"Monica had always wanted to have an enemy. A life of rancor and vendetta was not what she had in mind exactly, but it did seem obvious that if no one disliked or disagreed with her vigorously, she must not stand for anything . . . if everybody approved of you, you must not cast a shadow, that was all . . . She even discussed this with her husband, Rudy, and they decided that it would be fine with them if they were not so universally considered decent and admirable. Not that they were planning to go out and start fights -- they had to trust that in a life properly lived, enemies, like wrinkles or laugh lines, would naturally occur."

-Rosellen Brown, the short story "One of Two," as reprinted in THE BEST OF THE PUSHCART PRIZE XII.

About paying attention

2008-07-24T07:25:00.001-04:00

"Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. Now, if you ask me, what's going on is that we are all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that not yell at another. Otherwise we'd all be barking away like Pekingese: 'Ah! Stuck in the shit! And it's all your fault, you did this . . . ' Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein. But you can't do it if you're not respectful. If you look at people and just see sloppy clothes or rich clothes, you're going to get them wrong." - Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird.

Strained looks of adolescent misery

2008-05-04T11:56:00.003-04:00

James Atlas, in "Summer Memories of Egghead Camps" in the collection Sleepaway: Writers on Summer Camp:

"The following day, I registered for classes: 'Creative Writing: Poetry' and 'The Art of the Short Story.' My poetry instructor was a sad-faced man with thinning hair who wore an ascot and was said to be going through a divorce. He liked to read aloud from Yeats in a delicate, musical voice. Whenever he was particularly moved by a poem, he would look from the volume in his hand - The Oxford Book of English Verse - and say, 'Now, if anyone here could write like that, I'd be happy.' Still, he was polite about our work, though seldom effusive -- a measured response, given the self-indulgent confessions we were turning out. Often, as I sat by the window listening to the incessant chirp and whir of crickets on the summer fields while some girl with a strained look on her face aloud a poem laden with adolescent misery, I longed to be back in Wisconsin playing Capture the Flag."

Fourteen years and a book

2008-04-28T09:33:00.001-04:00

David Haward Bain, writing in The Old Iron Road about his previous book, Empire Express, a history of the Transcontinental Railroad. He labored on the project for fourteen years.

'...During that time I went around the country for research, depended on the kindness of many strangers, wore out the interlibrary loan staff at the Middlebury College library, filled up a four-drawer filing cabinet with photocopied handwritten documents and official reports and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase with books, and wrote a 1,100 page manuscript...A publisher's advance in 1985 stretched out pretty thin over thirteen years, on top of which was my wife's small salary and mine as a part-time writing instructor. There were no grants, and as part-time faculty I was not eligible for paid leaves. What sustained us through most of these hard times was the warm, bright light our children brought into our lives, and also the fact that pursuing such a project as Empire Express was the greatest gift I could could be given as a writer and a historian . . . It may have been a challenge for our family to get to the end of each succeeding month over fourteen years, but I seldom sat down at my desk in the morning without a rising sense of excitement and curiosity about the people and their stories, and how they all fit together, and how the narrative was going to be built."

Bain then got the news that powerhouse Stephen Ambrose was planning to write a book on the same topic. He got his publisher to buy out his teaching contract and spent the next year writing seven days a week. Bain's book got to market ten months before Ambrose's.

Caring for Your Introvert

2008-01-08T08:19:00.000-05:00

From "Caring for Your Introvert" by Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic.com:

Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay—in small doses."

Digital Age

2007-12-31T13:54:00.000-05:00

From the New Yorker, May 2007, an an article about Microsoft's Gordon Bell, age 72, who has decided to go paperless and pays an assistant to scan/archive his life:

"Bell's archive now contains a hundred and twenty eight thousand e-mails; fifty-eight thousand photographs; thousands of recordings of phone calls he has made; every Web page he has visited and instant-messaging exchange he has conducted since 2003; all the activity of his desktop (which windows, for example, he has opened); eight hundred pages of health records, including information on the life of the battery in his pacemaker; and a sprawling category he calls "ephemera" which contains such things as books he has written adn books from his library; the labels of bottles of wine has enjoyed; and the record of a bicycle trip through Burgandy, where he treid to eat in as many starred restaurants as he could."

Too much information.

("Remember This?" by Alec Wilkinson)

Humility comes with the territory

2007-05-28T18:02:00.000-04:00

Garrison Keiler, from the International Herald Tribune, on authors and books:

"And when the book is done, which it will be, and it's in the bookstore, people ask, "How does it feel?" You say, "Great!" but that's not true. You feel relief, and disbelief, and a sort of sorrow that it's gone and what will you do with your life now? Also there is that long passage in the sixth chapter that you meant to rewrite and did not and now you know you should have. And there is that typo. The publisher sent you a copy of the book hot off the press and you opened it at random and there it is, the word "releif" - God showing you that no matter how hard you try, you still fall short. Humility comes with the territory.

Writers get obsessed with a project and lock the doors and sit and work at it, like animals in a leg trap trying to chew through the leg, which is not good strategy.

My advice is to get out of the house and take a walk, a good first cure for the depression that hits after you've been working for a year and it dawns on you that your book is not "Huckleberry Finn" but you must finish it anyway because the publisher's generous advance has been spent on a new pair of shoes for the baby and she has worn a hole in them already, so you press on - on - on - though it strikes you that the world has a great many books already and does it need yours?"

Playing by the rules

2007-02-16T13:50:00.000-05:00

Anis Shivani, “Why is American Fiction in Its Current Dismal State?” Pleiades 27:1

"The younger fiction writers today, Mr. K’s all, are themselves entirely self-constructed as bourgeois citizens, playing by the rules of the publishing game, pursuing their grants and promotions and accolades from wherever they might come, hungry for any scrap of attention from the limited sources each niche is likely to offer them. Writers today are polite, sociable, inoffensive, wanting to spark no controversy, staying clear of any dangerous, big, meaningful ideas, even at the cost of their own increased commercial viability. To win the game by making a large statement, and thus causing discomfort within one’s established social zone, is not worth winning the game at all . . watch them at readings and conferences, making eye contact, acting like team players, uttering only banalities, and creating an atmosphere of good feeling, routines with which they’ve had great success since grade school onwards. . . . there is no magic in contemporary literary fiction. And the players go on celebrating their own death. "

Journal writing

2007-01-02T09:45:00.000-05:00

Over at livejournal, there's a community called Embodiment to promote journal writing. Author and teacher Christina Baldwin had this to say about journal writing in the Nov '06 issue of The Writer:

"I cannot imagine my life without writing. Writing has changed everything about how I live, though it's hard to say exactly how because I have no comparison self who doesn't write. The reason I spend thousands of lifetime hours creating something that 99 percent of which no one else is likely to ever read is that writing itself is the gift. Writing organizes the mind and the actions that lead from the mind. Over time, the decisions and choices we make in the rush of the moment are informed by the self-knowledge our story gives us. We learn that if we have practiced articulating our story, if we have honored the path to this moment by writing it down, the choices we make are congruent with who we say we are. This is one of the primary promises of story: It was true in oral form and remains even more true in written form. For in writing we live life twice: once in the experience, and again in recording and reflecting upon our experience."

Hemingway and the lonely life

2006-12-20T09:59:00.000-05:00

Ernest Hemingway's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize:

"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you."

Train stations

2006-11-19T18:11:00.000-05:00

Non-fiction from "The Railway Station" by J. Richards and John MacKenzie:

The great train-shed, one of the glories of the nineteenth century, lasted just as long as the century itself. It was the triumphant and majestic application of the techniques perfected for . . . the Crystal Palace, an arching rib-cage of iron to support a skin-covering of glass, admitting light but excluding the elements. It was a brilliant and classically simple construction, which created a formal beauty of line and curve, and facilitated constantly changing patterns of light, shade, and steam . . . In some stations the train-shed became the central feature, an eye catching shape dwarfing an insignificant frontage. Eloquent testimony of this is to be found in John Gay's magnificent photographs of London terminals, depicting, for instance, the forests of columns, arches, and metallic tracery supporting the roof of Liverpool Street Station and the line of Brunel's 'all-interior, all-roofed-in' Paddington, achievements that could leave only the most die-hard curmudgeon unmoved.

Writers and actors

2006-08-26T09:49:00.000-04:00

From John Lahr's article "Petrified" in The New Yorker, August 28, 2006:

"The entertainer's journey through fear is the burden and the blessing of performance; it's what invests the enterprise with bravery, even a kind of nobility. "There was no other treatment than the well-worn practice of wearing it--the terror--out," (Sir Laurence) Olivier wrote. "The battle takes man strange and creative forms. Some performers drink to give themselves courage; some pop beta-blockers; some meditate or practice various other tension-reducing exercises; some play inspirational videos in their dressing rooms; some, like Charles Rosen, simply see stagefright as an inevitable and appropriate result of a virtuoso's perfectionism. "Stagefright is not merely symbolically but functionally necessary, like the dread of a candidate before an examination or a job interview, both designed as a test of courage," Rosen writes. "Stagefright, like epilepsy, is a divine ailment, a sacred madness . . . It is a grace that is sufficient in the old Jesuit sense--that is, insufficient by itself but a necessary condition for success."

Ayelet Waldman on discipline

2006-06-16T20:48:00.000-04:00

Ayelet Waldman, author of two novels and the Mommy Track mysteries, wife of Michael Chabon, quoted in The Writer (July 06):

"The only difference between a writer and someone who wants to be a writer but isn't is discipline. The one thing you have control over is how much time you devote to your work. You have got to get your butt into the chair every day (or five days a week), more or less at the same time, and write. Write anything, write badly, write 1,000 words (or 500 or whatever) and don't stop until you're done. Writing is a habit. It's a physical discipline. People who wait for the muse don't up writing anything but email."

The musician and trees and astronauts

2006-06-09T01:59:00.000-04:00

Musician Jim White, quoted in The Believer, on how he writes songs:

"Most people, if they built a tree, they would start with the roots and then a trunk and then add branches and twigs and leaves. What I do is start madly throwing leaves in the air, then twigs, then branches, and so forth, and somehow hope they'll all get attached."

on Flannery O'Connor:

"...we were married when we were sixteen. It was a chaste relationship, though, because she was Catholic and dead. No, actually, I was back in Pensacola, one of the times I was going crazy and having a nervous breakdown, thinking I had to flee the South. My friend gave me her collected stories and I read "The River" and it knocked me out...my brain burned as I read those stories."

Also in The Believer, Nick Hornby on Andrew Smith's book MOONDUST, about the Apollo landings:

"There are now nine people in the world who have walked on the moon, and unless something dramatic happens (and I'm talking about a governmental rethink rather than a cure for death), it won't be too long before there is none. That might not mean anything to a lot of you, because you are, I am led to understand, young people, and the moonwalks didn't happen during your lifetime . . . But it means a lot to me, and Andrew Smith, and when the Apollo missions, the future as we understood it, become history, then something will be lost from our psyches. But what do you care? Oh, go back to your hip-hop and your computer games and your promiscuity. (Or your virginity. I forget which one your generation is into at the moment.)"

Irregular

2006-05-29T13:53:00.000-04:00

David Sedaris, interviewed in the Northwest Airlines inflight magazine (May, 2006), on why he no longer teaches English:

"Everyone thinks they can teach English, but when you're learning another language, you have to offer people hope. You can't just say, "That's the way it is. It's irregular." You have to give them something to hold on to. Like I don't know what a preposition is. I'm sure that I've used several of them today, but I don't know what they are. I think you really kiind of need to know that. Or the imperative tense. I don't know what that means."

Seen in passing:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” - James D. Nicoll

From a writer's mouth

2006-04-08T07:59:00.000-04:00

From E.L. Doctorow's essay "From Will-of-the-Wisp to Full-Blown Novel" in the anthology The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work:

"...wherever books begin, in whatever private excitement of the mind, whether from the music of words, or an impelling anger, or the promise of the unwritten-upon page, the work itself is hard and slow, and the writer's illumination becomes a taskmaster, a ruling discipline, jealously guarding the mind from all other, and necessarily errant, private excitements until the book is done. You live enslaved in the book's language, its diction, its universe of imagery, and there is no way out except through the last sentence."

Paul Levine, The Deep Blue Alibi

2006-03-30T14:42:00.000-05:00

From Paul Levine's The Deep Blue Alibi, page 151:

"In the space of seven minutes, Judge Alvin Schwartz--eighty-one years old, nearsighted, absentminded and cantankerous as a hemorrhoid--threatened Steve with contempt, ordered him to put his pants back on, reserved ruling on his motion for summary judgment, tossed all lawyers out of his chambers, but commanded Ms. Tami Stepford and all her silicone charms to remain behind, while His Honor considered the weighty legal precedents concerning injuries suffered while wrestling bikini-clad women in vats of Jell-O.

On the way out of the courthouse, Steve felt elated. Victoria had made the legal arguments, and he'd handled the single-leg takedown and crotch-and-a-half pinning move. Surely Victoria must realize they were a terrific team."

Non-fiction: Los Angeles car chases

2006-03-17T23:12:00.000-05:00

From The New Yorker, Jan 23-30, 2006, Tad Friend on L.A.'s love affair with televised car chases:

"The classic pursuits are diverse in their astonishments. There was the Samoan who led the California Highway Patrol on a two-hour chases in a blue pickup, weaving through traffic the wrong way with two tires blown and the rims shooting a comet trail of sparks. There was the guy who stole a 7 UP truck and started running red lights in the Valley, smashing into cars and rounding corners with cases of soda flying out and geysering across the road; he eventually drove into a cinder-block wall, ran, and climbed a tree, then fell out of it. And there was the motorcyclist on Ventura Boulevard who was suddenly swarmed by six pedestrians with their arms extended, 'Night of the Living Dead" style; he eluded them by doing a figure eight, then raced free through traffic--and T-boned a Mercedes at the next intersection.

To achieve classic status, however, you must adhere to certain rules. You must have long, stringy hair. You must keep going even when any scrap for escape is gone...And if you have eluded your pursuers with masterly driving for a goodly period you must then pull into a fast-food joint to be overpowered. Last April, for instance, a man in a glittery purple cape provoked the police into chasing him by slaloming down the 405 at more a hundred miles an hour, sometimes steering with his feet. After nimbly avoiding spike strips to deflate his tires, he suddenly pulled into a Donut World in Dana Point. Given home-field advantage, the cops got him there with bean bags and pepper spray."

Not A Girl Detective

2006-02-19T10:08:00.000-05:00

From Not A Girl Detective, by Susan Kandel, about an amateur sleuth who idolizes Nancy Drew:

"I'd been asked to give the keynote address at the annual Nancy Drew fan convention. Some persons in my life had found the very idea amusing. Like my daughter Annie and her husband Vincent, who about choked on their Komubucha mushroom tea when I told them...It was a paycheck, for god's sake. When you write biographies of dead mystery writers for a living, you need as many of those as you can get. And it would be great publicity for the new book, which was almost finished. But I was nervous. Those fans knew a hell of a lot, and they'd probably love to catch me in a mistake, like not knowing that the spine silhouette for number 24 was missing a scarf. Or that early printings of number 18, The Mystery of the Moss-Colored Mansion, made reference to the forthcoming volume as The Quest of the Telltale Map when it was actually printed as The Quest of the Missing Map.

Fan is short for fanatic."

Inner Fat Girl

2006-02-12T13:37:00.000-05:00

From Robyn Anderson's essay "The Devil Inside," collected in Erin Shea's Tales from the Scale:

"I call her Tallulah, and she's a total drama queen, my inner Fat Girl...I don't know how long she's been there in my head, making my life miserable, but I'd hazard a guess that she was created when I was young and chubby, and as I got older and fatter she got stronger and louder Every time someone made a comment about my weight, every time some asshole drove by and mooed me, every time I thought that the only important thing about me was that number on the scale, every time I realized anew that I couldn't fit into the clothes from the "normal people" store, every time I caught a sidelong glance from a stranger and was immediately aware that I was seen as lazy and smelly and stupid because of my size, my inner Fat Girl grew and grew and grew. She took up more space in my brain, sounding more assured, as if every word she spoke were the truth, until I took every word she said as gospel.

And my inner Fat Girl is such a bitch."

Opening paragraph, 33, by Joe Donnelly

2006-02-06T10:33:00.000-05:00

From the story 33 by Joe Donnelly, in the Feb 1st edition of L.A. Weekly:

"Thirty-three. It’s a tough one. A lot of all-time greats went down at 33. Jesus was 33 when they hung him up on that cross. So was Keith Relf of the Yardbirds when a high-voltage shock unplugged him forever. Rushton Moreve from Steppenwolf was born to be wild but not to see 34. He died at 33 in a car crash. Same thing happened to Rob Collins from the Charlatans UK. Don’t forget poor Lester Bangs, dead at 33 of “flu-like symptoms.” The great Sam Cooke got shot dead before he could sing himself a sweet, happy 34th. Remember Lee Morgan, the legendary jazz trumpeter? Murdered when he was 33. And, of course, there’s John Belushi, who was done in by a speedball at 33. Fifteen years later Belushi lover Chris Farley performed the sincerest form of flattery and did himself in the same way. At 33."

Ten Wise Ways & Smashing Vegetarians

2006-01-31T23:08:00.000-05:00

From Rosaleen Love's story "Two Recipes for Magic Beans," from the anthology of Australian speculative fiction Dreaming Down Under:

"Jinny knew she could handle dragons on account of her knowledge of the Ten Wise Ways, through truth to tell she'd not yet been put to a proper test, not with a full grown dragon. She watched gloomily as the baby dragon lalloped its snivelling way, half flying, half jumping, across the river flat. It was on occasions like this Jinny had to agree with Grandfather that genetic engineering, particularly in the hands of medieval theme park entrepreneurs, was wrong. Especially when the dragons went feral and took off over the electrified barbed wire on top of the battlements."

Same anthology, from Jane Routley's "To Avalon:"

"No one could know Meg for five seconds without her vegetarianism smashing its way into their consciousness. Gina's first experience of her had been pretty typical. At the house warming party Gina and Gary had thrown at their shared flat in Palmers Green, Meg had shown up drunk as the proverbial skunk and told Gina she wouldn't shake hands "because I don't shake hands with cannibals." She had then proceeded to persecute a blind workmate of Gina's all evening about the slavery of his guide dog (a cheerful Labrador with the habits of a vacuum cleaner who was only too delighted to be taken anywhere food was) and to stub out her cigarettes in the pepperoni pizza as a protest."

Lillian Hellman and The Feel of Candor

2006-01-21T23:04:00.001-05:00

From Anthony Arthur's "Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrels from Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe," re evidence that Lillian Hellman plagarized or invented parts of her autobiography:

"...some defenders have taken a different tack, one that relies on Orwellian doublespeak masquerading as sophisticated literary criticism. Marsha Norman simply denies that the truth matters, as she said in the New York Times (August 27, 1984): 'I am not interested in the degree to which Hellman told the literal truth. The literal truth is, for writers, only half the story.' ... Truth is impossible to determine, then: it requires, along with the words real and fictional, ironic quotation marks around it and complicated parenthetical modification by the adjectives selective and representational. Hellman was praised because she conveys "the feel of candor." If ordinary readers are taken in by "'the feel of candor" and disappointed to learn that "Julia" is not really Lillian Hellman's own story, it's because they don't know how to read sensitively. They lack the proper literary training."

Singing the hitherto unsung- John Updike

2005-12-28T08:48:00.000-05:00

From an interview John Updike conducted with himself, collected in Books of the Century:

"...as long as there is one unlucky person in the world, life is grim. (Writing) makes it less so. I cannot do justice to the bliss that attends getting even a single string of dialogue or the name of a weed right. Naming our weeds, in fact, seems to be exactly where it's at. I've been going out into my acre here (gestures toward a scruffy meadow visible from his windows) and trying to identify the wildflowers along the fringes with the aid of a book, and it's remarkably difficult to match reality and diagram. Reality keeps a pace or two ahead, scribble through we will. If you were to ask me what the aim of my fiction is . . . it's bringing the corners forward. Or throwing light into them, if you'd rather. Singing the hitherto unsung."

Prep

2005-12-23T17:48:00.000-05:00

From Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld:

"Life is clearest when guided by ulterior motives: walking to chapel, I felt a sense of true purpose. I was on my way to kill McGrath Mills, a junior from Dallas whom I'd inherited from Allie Wray. I'd heard McGrath was good at lacrosse, and I thought that an athlete would be harder to kill--there was more of a chance he'd be into the game."

Later:

"'What's your name?' McGrath said. He had a Southern accent, a slight twang, and he'd stuck the orange sticker from his shirt onto the pad of his middle finger.

'My name's Lee.'

'Did you try to kill me back there, Lee?'

I darted glances at the faces of the other boys, tne looked back at McGrath. 'Kind of,' I said, and they laughed.

'Here's what I'm gonna tell you,' McGrath said. 'It's okay to try. But it would be wrong to succeed.'"

Best American Short Stories 2005

2005-12-11T07:30:00.000-05:00

From The Best American Short Stories 2005:

"Wind was pouring into the car, and the sirens were growing louder, an army of them, and Gwen's face was an inch from yours, her hair falling from behind her ear and whipping across her mouth, and she was looking at you, she was seeing you--really seeing you. Nobody'd ever done that before, nobody. She was tuned to you like a radio tower out on the edge of the unbroken fields of wheat, blinking red under a dark-blue sky, and that that night breeze lifting your bangs was her, for Christ's sake, her, and she was laughing, her hair in her teeth, laughing because the old lady had fallen out of the bed..." - Dennis Lehane, "Until Gwen"

"She had been sitting for hours here on the outskirts of a Kansas mining town, waiting for dark, so she could find a bar and a man to buy her drinks. She was in a foul mood lately, as her plans for a life of riotous adventure had thus far come to nothing. She'd fled a teenage marriage in Canada after seeing a Wild West show, complete with save Indians and lady sharpshooters, and come west to seek her fortune among such fierce creatures. Her career as an outlaw was not going well. The problem was men. The problem was always men." - Tim Pratt, "Hart and Boot"

"Raccoon, an only child like me, had nothing. The Kletz brothers called her Raccoon for the bags she had under her eyes from never sleeping. Her parents fought nonstop. They fought over breakfast. They fought in the yard in their underwear. At dusk they stood on their porch whacking each other with lengths of weather stripping. Raccoon practically had spinal curvature from spending so much time slumped over in misery. When the Kletz brothers called her Raccoon, she indulged them by rubbing her hands together ferally. The nickname was the most attention she'd ever had." - George Saunders, "Bohemians"

First paragraph: Bleeders

2005-12-04T12:29:00.000-05:00

From Annie McFadyen's story "Bleeders" in Tin House vol 7, on stands now:

The dialysis outpatients with complete kidney failure are called Tanks, because they never pee. Bleeders are the patients with thin blood. Neil appreciates the Bleeders because their blood doesn't clot fast enough to clog the dialysis filters Neil cleans at night by hand, in a bucket with a special brush. During the day, Neil works in the clinic with the dialysis patients. He pumps the patients full of anticoagulant, to keep the filters from clogging, and then hooks the patients up to the dialysis machines. But when he unhooks the Bleeders from the machines, anticoagulant still in their thin blood, they never stop bleeding. The old Bleeders, the ones who have been on dialysis for years, have rubber tubes spliced into their arm veins so the veins won't collapse from so many needles.

Celebrity author

2005-11-30T20:02:00.000-05:00

Frank McCourt in the L.A. Times, on becoming a celebrity author:

"I wasn't prepared for it. After teaching, I was getting all this attention. They actually looked at me — people I had known for years — and they were friendly and they looked at me in a different way. And I was thinking, 'All those years I was a teacher, why didn't you look at me like that then?' "

read the whole article here

Writers' careers

2005-11-26T19:38:00.000-05:00

Barry Malzberg to Mike Resnick, in the Summer 2005 issue of the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) Bulletin:

"...as my friend Carter Scholz noted years ago "There is no career path for writers" and that cannot be uttered strongly or repetitively enough. There is no career path for writers, most writers, as Nelson Algren said, kind of fall into it, come to writing as a means of not having been successful (or not feeling successful) somewhere else and even then they just kind of wander around. Careers begin, advance, go into inexplicable retrograde, collapse, soar, seemingly out of the writers' control; they are unpredictable most of all to those having them and yesterday provides little clue to tomorrow in career terms (maybe a little moreso in terms of fulfilling contracts). That dense and tangled wood in which Dante's protagonist found himself distinctly resembles the world of the writer. . . Dr. Angst makes home visits. Of course you will deny this circumstance in your own life, but, as a I wrote a long time ago...you write from the authority of success, I from the authority of failure, and failure, old pal and comrade, can teach you a few goddamned things that success never will."

Making It Up

2005-11-20T10:22:00.000-05:00

From Gail Caldwell's Boston Globe review of Penelope Lively's "Making It Up;"

"Any writer who shoves around words all day will tell you that order's the thing: All nouns and verbs must line up under the author's steely gaze, compliant as schoolchildren in a fire drill. Otherwise, where's the joy? One writes to imposte the ego's scaffolding upon the messy business of life, and what chaos the ordinary life presents! Even the most rigorously truth-bound writers will bend and rearrange the facts, if only by where they choose to put them. Fiction writers, a wilder and sneakier bunch, get to sort through their rummage-sale findings and use them willy nilly . . . having elected to serve this god of imagination, fiction writers must be ruthless in the hunt--they haul their kill into the cave and hope it will help to feed the beast."

Families

2005-10-23T08:58:00.000-04:00

From Sarah Smith's review of Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire :

"The title is a question rather than a description: teenage Liir is trying to find out whether he is Elphaba's son...As we meet him at the beginning of the book, he is mid-journey through the ruinous land of Oz, searching not only for the family he needs, but for what it means to have a family. Maguire...knows that a family is a set of stories, not all of them pretty ones. The fairy-tale story works for a fairy-tale son. But if Liir is wicked Elphaba's son, finding his family may be finding his villainy."

One of my favorite passages from Michael Chabon's The Wonder Boys:

"Luckily for me an absolutely superb idea for a novel soon followed--three brothers in a haunted Pennsylvania small town are born, grow up, and die...I had to much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. It was about a single family and it stood, as of that morning, at two thousand six hundred and eleven pages, each of them revised and rewritten a half dozen times...I was nowhere near the end."

Pat Conroy

2005-10-15T08:22:00.000-04:00

From an interview with Pat Conroy, in the collection "Writing for Your Life":

"Asked why his books make such entertaining movies, Conroy says, 'I always figure it's because I'm incredibly shallow. I write a straight story line, and I guess that's what they need. The dialogue also seems to be servicable in a Hollywood way. But most important, I do the thing that Southerners naturally do--I tell stories. I always try to make sure there's a good story going on in my books.'"

First paragraph: The Women Were Leaving the Men

2005-09-30T21:04:00.000-04:00

"The men weren't obviously bad--not in any way visible from the outside, but the women were leaving them. The women who left the men had money, were lawyers, were doctors, were tenured professors; the women who left the men were not-so-well off, worked at J.C. Penney, answered the phones for plumbing contractors, toiled as adjunct professors, actually had unsteady financial prospects, but were going to leave anyway. They were not leaving the men the way women left men in the previous generation, with a sense of breaking out of prison or smashing something evil and oppressive, or opening their eyes after years of blindness, or because they were finally deciding for themselves. Yes, there were still some women who left their philandering, gynecologist husbands in the traditional way: outraged, victimized. But something new had been happening, and the men didn't understand what it was."

- Andy Mozina, "The Women Were Leaving the Men," Tin House Volume 6

Let the Children Bury Us

2005-09-21T08:21:00.000-04:00

From "The Denial," by Bruce Sterling, in the September issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction:

"It was almost a proverb. 'Let the children bury us.' There was a bliss to that, like a verse in a very old song. It meant that there were no decisions to make. The time was still unripe. Nothing useful could be done. Justice, faith, hope and charity, life and death, they were all smashed and in a muddle, far beyond his repair and retrieval . . . Let the next generation look after all of that. Or the generation after that. Or after that. Or after that."

Methinks of global warming. Trillion dollar deficits. Nuclear waste.

Imploding hotels and expensive tofu

2005-09-06T20:51:00.000-04:00

Forays into non-fiction, courtesy of The New Yorker's food issue. From an article about egg cooks in Las Vegas, by Burkhard Bilger:

"The Flamingo was built in stages, like the Vatican. Its pink glass towers stand on the ruins of a low-slung nineteen-fifties pavilion with a neon column that bubbled like champagne. Beneath that lie the elegant remians of Bugsy Siegel's supper club and riding stables, from a time when horses could still be hitched in front of the stores downtown. The result is a maze of ramps, stairs, and blind corridors that crisscross behind the hotel's sleek new interiors, like something from an etching by Escher. 'This is why they implode hotels,' a former head of food service at the hotel told me."

and from an article about tofu, this recipe for shima dofu ($50 for a few slices), by Judith Thurman:

"Negotiate a contract for organic soybeans with a reliable farmer whose fields lie on the slope of Mt. Hira, in the Shiga Prefecture, where the soil and the water are unpolluted. Make sure that the farmer harvests the beans as late as possible--preferably in December. Pick the beans over carefully, throwing out those eaten by worms--a desirable sign that the farmer isn't cheating with a little DDT. Soak them overnight in very cold spring water. The beans will swell. Rinse them in more of the same, and grind them with a granite mortar, using all your strength, for two hours. Drain the pulp in a bamboo colander, and put the white soy juice you obtain--gojiu--to cook on a stone hearth. Let it bubble, subside, and bubble again, several times...hire a boat, and locate the tiny sland of Hateruma on your charts. The island is inhabited only by several hundred farmers, who raise sugarcane. Off the coast there is a coral reef...gather the seawater that cascades from the reef, which has an exceptionally rich and complex mineral content. This primordial bouillon is your curdling agent. Add some to the strained gojiu, stirring with a wooden paddle, and turn the thickened curds into the slatted, four-by-ten cedar boxes that you have lined with a fine-grained cheesecloth. Cover them, weight the covers with blocks of lava--about ten pounds per box--and leave them to dry."

This is why I order a lot of take-out.

Letters of Raymond Chandler

2005-09-04T08:00:00.000-04:00

From January 1955, a letter Raymond Chandler wrote about the death of his wife Cissy in December:

"...many times during the past two years in the middle of the night I had realized that it was only a question of time before I lost her. But that is not the same thing as having it happen. Saying goodbye to your loved one in your mind is not the same thing as closing her eyes and knowing they will never open again. But I was glad that she died. To think of that proud, fearless bird caged in a room in some rotten sanatorium for the rest of her days was such an unbearable thought that I could hardly face it at all...I am sleeping in her room. I thought I couldn't face that, and then I thought that if the room were empty it would be haunted, and every time I went past the door I would have the horrors, and the only thing for me was to come in here and fill it up with my junk and make it look the kind of mess I'm used to living in...For thirty years, ten months and two days, she was the light of my life, my whole ambition. Anything else I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at. That is all there is to say."

A month later, Chandler tried to shoot himself. He lived for five more years in states of drunkenness, anxiety and despair. When he died, only 17 people attended his funeral. The Raymond Chandler Papers, edited by Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane, highlights the best of Chandler's letters and nonfiction, including valuable advice to writers.

The same ordinary world

2005-09-01T21:52:00.000-04:00

From Alice Munro's story "The View from Castle Rock," in The New Yorker 8/29/05:

"This is what Mary sees plainly in those moments of anguish: that the world which has turned into a horror for her is still the same ordinary world for all these other people and will remain so even if James has truly vanished, even if he has crawled through the ship's railings--she has noticed everywhere the places where this would be possible--and been swallowed by the ocean. The most brutal and unthinkable of all events, to her, would seem to most others like a sad but not extraordinary misadventure. It would not be unthinkable to them."

The story is about Scottish immigrants aboard a transatlantic ship in 1818, and it's quite good.

Rick Moody, Ben Yagoda

2005-08-29T09:46:00.000-04:00

From Rick Moody's essay at NPR:

"I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket. I believe in reading books because others dislike them or find them dangerous. I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind."

and

"I believe there is not now and never will be an authority who can tell me how to interpret, how to read, how to find the pearl of literary meaning in all cases."

Listen to or read the full essay here. Anyone can submit an essay for consideration.

Ben Yagoda, author of the excellent writer's resource The Voice on the Page writes in Slate about My Life as a Hack and why he's getting out of the non-fiction freelance biz:

"New York magazine paid $1 a word in 1996 and pays the same rate in 2005. Catholic Digest's fees were $200 to $400 in 1989 and are the same today. The Village Voice was in the news this month for planning to slash its already low fees: Short pieces that used to go for $130 will now fetch $75. There are a few glossy exceptions, but stagnant rates are the rule. That's even worse than it seems. Magazines commonly pay by the word and have been assigning ever shorter articles—which means that writers are virtually certain to get less for a typical piece."

Fireworks and cover art

2005-08-21T08:30:00.000-04:00

Hunter S. Thompson's remains blast off in the company of fireworks.

Recommended blogging: Best-selling author Tess Gerritson on the importance of cover art in selling books.

In The Atlantic summer fiction issue, author Curtis Sittenfeld writes about watching her first novel become a bestseller. She angsts over an early review, but "Eventually that review forced me to realize that I had to be the one who decided whether or not my novel was a success or a failure; if I believed that only a publication or another person could legitimize my work in a way that felt permanent and satisfying, I'd be waiting a long, long time."

She also relates the humbling experience of having her taxes done at H&R Block:

Prep

Crap?

Prep.

Crap?

Prep

Buried by books/Gardens in bloom

2005-08-18T08:47:00.000-04:00

From the L.A. Times, an article on when you're buried with books.

The garden which Edith Wharton gazed at while writing The House of Mirth has once again bloomed. "The mistress had a corner bedroom so she could look down on her flower garden while writing longhand in bed. This she did each day from about 6 a.m. to noon, often with a dog propped under one arm as she dropped each completed page on the floor to be collected by her maid and typed by her secretary."

First Pages
From Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi:

Every night she would fall asleep with the prayer that, while she slept, her body would stretch itself, grow to the size of that of other girls her age in Burgdorf--not even the taller ones like Eva Rosen, who would become her best friend in school for a brief time--but into a body with normal-length arms and legs and with a small, well-shaped head. To help God along, Trudi would hang from door frames from her fingers until they were numb, convinced she could feel her bones lengthening; many nights she'd tied her mother's silk scarves around her head--one encircling her forehead, the other knotted beneath her chin--to keep her head from expanding.

Reading Rec: Tin House, Summer Issue

2005-08-14T17:55:00.000-04:00

The summer reading issue of Tin House magazine (available in Barnes & Noble and others) has a number of lovely stories in it, including the creepy, electrifying "Bouncing," by Robert Travesio. An excerpt:

In the beginning it wasn't a big deal because he was just ten and only weirdos and freaks and really advanced kids killed their mothers at ten.Also in this issue, an excerpt from Rick Moody's (Garden State and more) new novel The Diviners:

Double Dutch

Envoy of Desire

Travel and Leisure

Free fiction

2005-08-07T21:30:00.000-04:00

Over at Bartleby.com, many fine classics by authors such as Dickens, Woolf, Fitzgerald and more, including the lovely story collection Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, first published in 1919. I picked up a copy of it for a dollar in a used bookstore last month, and have been enjoying it thoroughly.

If modern fantasists are more your cup of tea, the first chapter of Neal Gaiman's new book Anansi Boys is available here.

Reading recs

2005-08-03T11:47:00.000-04:00

My story "Bluebeard by the Sea," which appeared in Talebones last year, got an honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Eighteenth Annual Collection. I'm delighted.

Recommended blogging: Joe Konrath on book tour hell. I've toured his web site before and found great stuff there re agents and persisting in the face of writing adversity. His mystery hardcover Whiskey Sour has sold about 15,000 copies.

Recommended reading: A Wedding Toast by Katie Holmes's Former Best Friend by Jay Dyckman at McSweeney's (funny and biting) and Neils Bohr and the Sleeping Dane by Jonathan Sullivan at Strange Horizons. History and mysticism and interpersonal conflict, all good stuff.