WordWacky

It’s a truism of writing a novel in this post-everything literary climate. There are no new stories, no truly unexpected twists, not a single surprise, anywhere. The butler did it. He gets the girl in the end. After his circular journey, the hero comes home.

Here’s an old story:

One of my heroes was caught retelling that old yarn at a literary festival in Wales.

Ian McEwan — whom I read voraciously, and who is almost prolific enough to keep up — read a passage from a work in progress. One attendee spoke up, reporting that the anecdote had been written about before. Most famously it was told by Douglas Adams in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, and so many times in all that it’s a standard short film assignment for would-be directors. McEwan’s version uses crisps instead of biscuits, but it’s the same old story.

It’s something of an urban legend, this story. McEwan says he overheard it. And though the festival incident may seem embarrassing for McEwan, there are two other writing truisms well illustrated by the story.

First, always have readers. Is it so impossible that this very thing may happen in the world? No. Could he have gotten away with printing the story? Probably. Would it have been awful? Certainly. He was saved from a much greater embarrassment — a McEwan-sized printing of that story in his next novel.

Second, yes, we’re back to “kill your darlings.”

The mix-up over the crisps had the feel of an urban myth to it, McEwan said, adding that he would be grateful for any more information about the anecdote’s provenance.

[Ed: Provenance. Don't you just love that guy?]

Folks, if it sounds like an urban myth to you, it should likely be cut. I’ve learned that myself, and I have the darling carcass to prove it.

On the other hand, if there aren’t any new tales to tell, then why not just retell the good ones — the ones with adages to sum them up and all of the characters neatly paired off in the end?

Every now and then, for years, I have strolled down Broadway in Seattle’s Capitol Hill and passed Brett Dean McGibbon and his sidewalk book stand. Sometimes he’s handing out free poems to passers by. Always there are his own works, handbound in both paperback and rough-cut leather. He sells similar volumes as journals.

I remember taking a poem from him once, and though I don’t remember how I felt about his poetry, I do remember thinking long and hard about his business model, only to decide he must be at least a little off to think a home-baked scheme like his would work.

On Friday, after a happy hour cocktail smoothed my work-frayed mood, I passed McGibbon, sitting at his card table with his books. He was outside the new location of Capitol Hill News, on the north end of Broadway. Feeling chatty, I stopped to talk.

“So can I ask you something?” I’ve never been one for false formality.

“Sure,” he said, his face not revealing any sign of unease.

I waved my hand at the table. “So, do you make your living from this?” Maybe my incredulity was insulting. “I mean, I’m a writer, too, and I just wondered if you were able to support yourself this way.”

“I make my living through my book sales, yes.” And a man who knows his audience, he then tried to sell me a copy of his CD, Successful Self Publishing of Fiction and Poetry.

I didn’t buy the CD. It’s not that I support wholeheartedly the publishing institutions, it’s more that the leap of faith required to “go McGibbon” is so great that the barriers to getting your book published through traditional means seem minor in comparison.

Returning to the car with my copy of Lucifer’s Redemption, I told my wife, “I’d be good at that. Sitting around talking to strangers and selling books.” I started to read the book aloud to her during the ride home, and we’ve left it in the car for story time. While I’ve found a few places that McGibbon could have used a good copy editor, and the book is decidedly handmade, I’m also finding great sentences and vivid imagery.

It’s a little bit like building your own house versus hiring an architect and a contractor. The outcome may not be as polished as some of the other houses on the block, but every inch of it is your own.

1. Write at the same time every day, no matter what.
2. Never, ever use an exclamation point!
3. Have an agent if you want to sell to a big publishing house.
4. Don’t expect to get rich writing — do it because you love it.
5. And conjunctions don’t start sentences.

I buy at least a couple of books on the subject of writing every year. Seldom do I ever pick them up to read them. And even more infrequently, I finish them.

I read Strunk & White in high school or college, and it was a godsend. Through careful editing and rigid adherence to the standards, I could make my writing correct — even if correct did not necessarily mean good.

Strunk & White’s best quality? Its length. The book is about 100 pages long.

As a story addict, a lover of narrative in its true, fictional, and semi-fictional forms, instruction books are the least appealing way to spend my reading hour and my library quarter (library delinquent that I am). That includes instruction books on writing. Yet who doesn’t wish for a few guiding principles, a checklist which is guaranteed to make a piece better?

Roy Peter Clark, author of Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, has posted a collection of 50 solid tools to add to your craft toolbox. Thirty-two of them are even podcasts — you can “read” them in the car driving to work. [via Writers Unbound]

“Learn the rules, then you can break them.” That this idea would only tame the unkepmt talent! The argument is that by choosing when and if you break a rule, you can use the rules themselves to say something about the story, the characters, the setting, whatever you choose. I subscribe to this idea, and my most exciting moments in literature often happen when rules are carefully broken.

The prescriptivists would say that standards are the keepers clarity, the basis of common understanding of new ideas, while the descriptivists think the linguistic mores of this time are fleeting, at best, and will always be broken.

Keep this in mind: if language changes from the bottom up, the writers are the last to catch up.

Writer’s block is a controversial idea among writers. While some struggle for days, months, years to slay the beast, others mock it as fiction: so much Sasquatch.

You can count James Frey in that latter camp, and an off-the-cuff, quotable comment he made at a reading has injured the feelings of — not writers, but bankers.

Frey is easy to pick on — even Oprah, the guardian angel of modern American women, has had her turn. And unlike Oprah, the field of banking has never been known to champion the underdog, so it’s not surprising that they’d resurrect his past “mistakes” [Editor's note: I believe these same mistakes to be present in all memoirs, to a greater or lesser degree.] and call him a “Fake Writer.” A fake writer he is not.

From Dealbreaker:

At a reading last night, when asked by an audience member if he ever found it difficult to come up with material, he responded, “Writer’s block is for chumps. To me this is a job, like being a banker, or a teacher. You never hear of banker’s block.”

Well, it turned out that some bankers had heard of banker’s block. Said one particularly eloquent banker:

“I’d like to see how long it would take Frey to try and write a public filing that describes the ass-rape of Bear Stearns without using profanity. Do you have any idea how long I sat there trying to come up with an acceptable alternative? At first I thought, okay, how about the ‘non-consensual fucking of Bear Stearns,” but that didn’t work. Then I tried “backdoor surprise,” but that didn’t cut it either. I literally sat there for hours with nothing but that infernal cursor staring me in the face before deciding to go with “involuntary and immediate liquidity injection requirement.” Late at night, I lie awake and see visions of that cursor. Taunting. Mocking. Making a fool of me. So don’t you dare tell me there’s no writer’s block in banking.”

Is the point that in all pursuits people have lackluster days, days where nothing’s flowing, no progress is made? Or that some people, whatever their pursuit, are chumps, staring at the mocking cursor?

Or maybe there’s more in common between writing and banking than we previously realized, Mr. Frey. Whaddya say? Career switch?

Writer Unboxed, a site Writer’s Digest picks as one of the 101 Best Sites for Writers, is a blog “about the craft and business of genre fiction.”

They maintain a Google Notebook to display their business links for the week. Brilliant!

I don’t consider myself a genre writer, but I have a feeling that’s a little like saying, “But I don’t have an accent!” 

Literary (self- and other-identified) writers often turn up their noses at genre writing. The words “genre writer” are an accusation, a dismissal in certain company. An inflection adds a touch more French to the genre, making it that much more foolish. Or it’s spoken flatly, with no betraying emotion whatsoever.

The problem is, there are plenty of literary mysteries. Sci-fi writers must still labor over their work, struggling for clarity, the right pacing, that perfect verb. Truman Capote created the true crime genre. And I’ve learned a lot from genre writers.

Genre writers have in fact mastered some skills that litfic could take a page from: building an audience and making a living on words alone.

In a Radiohead-like move, author Paulo Coelho increased sales of his books by offering downloads of them for free. His publishers, inspired by the increase in sales, later did the same.

Coelho himself has an answer to my title question, “Why buy the book…?” from Torrentfreak:

“A (real) book is easy to carry, easy to read anywhere. Reading a book on a monitor on the other hand is very tiresome, and it would be even more expensive to print (considering cartridge prices) than to buy a paperback,” he says.

Coelho considers the downloads previews, and hopes that previewing encourages readers to buy the book. It has, too — in its 34th week on the Bestseller List, The Alchemist is number six.

Never mind that citing Coelho as a favorite will lose you dates, if you believe the readers of the New York Times book blog, Paper Cuts (read the comments). This is the same New York Times that maintains the bestseller list on which Mr. Coelho has managed to rise back up to #6 with a book that is fifteen years old.

Can you sue the world if you don’t like a word in general use? My instinct says no, but apparently someone is trying.

The people of the island of Lesbos are not pleased. It seems that one famous Lesbian’s sexual activities have trumped the accomplishments of the entire island. No longer can a straight woman from the Greek island say she’s a Lesbian without raising eyebrows. This is the complaint of a lawsuit filed against the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece. [via Deblog]

While the homophobic implications of this are undeniable, I have to say, I empathize for a few reasons.

• I’ve never liked the word, even though I will cop to the identity in certain settings. I prefer to call myself a dyke. It’s hipper, more in-your-face, less apologetic. While I am eternally grateful to the feminist lesbians of earlier generations for doing their absolute best to de-stigmatize the word, I’m not sure it worked. There’s something about the way the way it forms in your mouth that makes it sound a little like a disease, or like you’re trying to spit out a hair caught in the back of your throat. Is this internalized homophobia? Probably. But it’s how I feel, nonetheless, and I’m not alone.
• The activities of certain a soon-to-be-ex-President make me embarrassed to call myself an American. While I won’t equate bombing nations, destroying their infrastructure, claiming their natural resources, and watching the nation’s decline into civil war with, say, cunnilingus, I can understand how one person’s actions should not define that of an entire geographical region.

The man behind the lawsuit, Dimitris Lambrou, also mentions that she wasn’t really a lesbian dyke, anyway. New research (funded by whom, I wonder) has unearthed that Sappho had a family and killed herself over a guy. Two things to say to that: 1) So?, and 2) She should have stuck to women.

Despite my qualified empathy with the plight of the Lesbians, I will enjoy watching this initiative fail. For one thing, there are far more of us than there are of you. Your brand has been co-opted, people of the island of Lesbos.

Sorry?

Apparently Woody Harrelson is not only a “hemp” activist, but a spoken word performer:

“…Morality is legislated
prisons over-populated
religion is incorporated
the profit-motive has permeated all activity
we pay our government to let us park on the street
And war is the biggest money-maker of all
we all know missile envy only comes from being small…”

Check out the full piece (with visual accompaniment).

Speaking of the spoken word, here are a couple of performances featuring Seattle writers coming up in the near future:

Bent & Andrea Gibson
Tuesday, May 13, $10 at the door

Champion slam poet Andrea Gibson performs with great local queer poets.
Re-bar, 1114 Howell St, Seattle
$10 at the door
http://bentwriting.com

Writers in the Schools: 2008 Student Reading & Celebration
Thursday, May 22, 7 p.m., free!

“The best of the best” elementary, junior, and senior high Seattle students perform their original work.
Benaroya Hall, 200 University St., Seattle
For free tickets e-mail wits@lectures.org or call 206-621-2230
http://www.lectures.org/wits.html