Search Results for: "michael chabon"

Michael Chabon shows how it’s done in Wonder Boys

September 21, 2008 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

It would not spoil Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys to know that, about halfway through the novel, the wayward protagonist Grady Tripp speculates about the knowledge of his eccentric student, James Leer:

I wondered if perhaps it were all dawning on him at last; if he were beginning to realize that, having engaged, the night before, in activities as diverse as being dragged bodily and giggling from a crowded auditorium, committing grand larceny, and getting a hand job in a public place [from a man], he was now on hi sway to spend Passover, of all things, with the family of his dissolute professor’s estranged wife, in a dented Ford Galaxie within whose trunk lay the body of a dog he had killed.

What a sentence: its breathlessness mirrors the wild preceding 24 narrative hours. Each event described is, to be sure, unusual, and piled together they make us realize the sheer outrageousness of a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Chabon’s skill is such that that this improbable series seems not only plausible but even normal, like good fantasy novels that make supernatural powers an aspect of the landscape no more extraordinary than cars are to us. In another spot, Chabon turns cliche on its head with the chiasmus, “I suppose that I derived some kind of comfort from the fact that my relationship with young Hannah Green remained a disaster waiting to happen and not, as would normally have been the case by this time, the usual disaster.” Notice the adjective “young” placed in there to emphasize the distance between Tripp and Hannah, along with the temporal play between the expected and actual.

In another section, a character is alive more thoroughly in a paragraph than most achieve in a novel:

He was given to epigrams and I filled an entire notebook with his gnomic utterances, all of which every night I committed to the care of my memory, since ruined. I swear but cannot independently confirm that one of them ran, “At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.” He wore a patrician manner and boots made of rattlesnake hide, and he drove an E-type Jaguar, but his teeth were bad, the fly of his trousers was always agape, and his family life was a semi-notorious farrago of legal proceedings, accidental injury, and institutionalization. He seemed, like Albert Vetch, simultaneously haunted and oblivious, the kind of person who could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek.

Wonder Boys is not flawless—the middle sags like the paunch of its middle-aged protagonist—but even in such a condition Chabon is still leaner and faster than most writers ever are, and the end picks up enough to clear that cloud from the moon—although the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere and hence doesn’t have clouds. But I feel them clearing anyway.

This is the kind of novel that reminds me why I like to read so much, and why I find bad books disappointing out of proportion to their menial sins: because those bad books suck up the time, space, and energy, both mental and physical, that could be devoted to the wonderful and extraordinary.

Michael Chabon shows how it's done in Wonder Boys

September 21, 2008 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

It would not spoil Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys to know that, about halfway through the novel, the wayward protagonist Grady Tripp speculates about the knowledge of his eccentric student, James Leer:

I wondered if perhaps it were all dawning on him at last; if he were beginning to realize that, having engaged, the night before, in activities as diverse as being dragged bodily and giggling from a crowded auditorium, committing grand larceny, and getting a hand job in a public place [from a man], he was now on hi sway to spend Passover, of all things, with the family of his dissolute professor’s estranged wife, in a dented Ford Galaxie within whose trunk lay the body of a dog he had killed.

What a sentence: its breathlessness mirrors the wild preceding 24 narrative hours. Each event described is, to be sure, unusual, and piled together they make us realize the sheer outrageousness of a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Chabon’s skill is such that that this improbable series seems not only plausible but even normal, like good fantasy novels that make supernatural powers an aspect of the landscape no more extraordinary than cars are to us. In another spot, Chabon turns cliche on its head with the chiasmus, “I suppose that I derived some kind of comfort from the fact that my relationship with young Hannah Green remained a disaster waiting to happen and not, as would normally have been the case by this time, the usual disaster.” Notice the adjective “young” placed in there to emphasize the distance between Tripp and Hannah, along with the temporal play between the expected and actual.

In another section, a character is alive more thoroughly in a paragraph than most achieve in a novel:

He was given to epigrams and I filled an entire notebook with his gnomic utterances, all of which every night I committed to the care of my memory, since ruined. I swear but cannot independently confirm that one of them ran, “At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.” He wore a patrician manner and boots made of rattlesnake hide, and he drove an E-type Jaguar, but his teeth were bad, the fly of his trousers was always agape, and his family life was a semi-notorious farrago of legal proceedings, accidental injury, and institutionalization. He seemed, like Albert Vetch, simultaneously haunted and oblivious, the kind of person who could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek.

Wonder Boys is not flawless—the middle sags like the paunch of its middle-aged protagonist—but even in such a condition Chabon is still leaner and faster than most writers ever are, and the end picks up enough to clear that cloud from the moon—although the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere and hence doesn’t have clouds. But I feel them clearing anyway.

This is the kind of novel that reminds me why I like to read so much, and why I find bad books disappointing out of proportion to their menial sins: because those bad books suck up the time, space, and energy, both mental and physical, that could be devoted to the wonderful and extraordinary.

Links: Books, Text Slang for Adults, public goods and bads, Qwests’s weak Internet access offerings, Picplum, unlikely secrets, and more

August 12, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Literary agent Jane Dystel: “All of this makes me think that my colleagues on the publishing side have lost sight of the fact that in these new wild, wild west days in publishing, this is the time for them to take more, not fewer, risks. Taking risks has always been what the business of publishing is all about. There are no sure winners, guys, and the more fearful and cautious you get, the more authors will want to publish on their own—and won’t need you anymore.”

* Reminder: in the age of the death of the book, “Publishers sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1 percent increase since 2008. (See also: Umberto Eco and Jean Claude Carriere, This is Not the End of the Book, which is actually about a wide array of topics ancillary to the death, life, or zombiehood of books.)

* Text Slang for Adults. Sample: “NSR = Need some roughage”; “T4W = Time for whiskey.”

* Lev Grossman on writing The Magician King: “when you’re in a certain phase of novel-making, you’re like a magpie: when something gleams at you funny, you swoop down and grab it and take it back to your nest, because you know, you just know, you’re going to need it later.”

* This may be the most impressive blog comment I’ve ever read (it’s from Cory Doctorow):

Education is a public good. It is best supplied and paid for by the group as a whole, because no individual or small collective can produce the overall social benefit that the nation can provision collectively.

Education doesn’t respond well to market forces because many of the social goods that arise from education — socialization, a grounding in civics, historical context, rational and systematic reasoning — are not goods or services demanded by a market, but rather they are the underlying substrate that allows people to intelligently conduct transactions in a marketplace as well as establishing and maintaining good governance.

There is a long and wide body of evidence that people with wide, solid educational foundations that transcend mere vocational skills produce societies that are more prosperous, more transparent, healthier, more democratic — that attain, in short, all the things we hope markets will attain for us.

* If you can get FiOS, you should. Tucson’s Internet access choices are so bad that I effectively have a choice between Comcast, which offers ~12mb / sec down and ~2mb / sec up, and nothing. I saw “nothing” because Qwest offers “DSL” at 1.5mb / sec down, which would’ve been great in, say, 1999, but is terrible now. I actually sent an e-mail to Qwest Arizona president Jim Campbell asking if Qwest was actually going to roll out real competition in my area. To Qwest’s credit, his administrative assistant, Deborah Statt, replied and said there wouldn’t be any improvement in 2010. Also to Qwest’s credit, she’s followed-up consistently. Alas, however, responsiveness doesn’t mean improvement, and I’m still stuck with Comcast.

* Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union comes to life, at least in terms of villains.

* PicPlum calls itself “the easiest way to send photos.” I ordered some; we’ll see how it goes.

* We’ll Show You Ours if You Show Us Yours; “we thought it would be fun to round up the favorite dirty books of some of our most illustrious literary critics at The Times. Below, their spicy replies.”

* Someone found Grant Writing Confidential by searching for “secrets to writing like dan brown.” I would start by being incoherent on the level of the sentence.

Links: Books, Text Slang for Adults, public goods and bads, Qwests's weak Internet access offerings, Picplum, unlikely secrets, and more

August 12, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Literary agent Jane Dystel: “All of this makes me think that my colleagues on the publishing side have lost sight of the fact that in these new wild, wild west days in publishing, this is the time for them to take more, not fewer, risks. Taking risks has always been what the business of publishing is all about. There are no sure winners, guys, and the more fearful and cautious you get, the more authors will want to publish on their own—and won’t need you anymore.”

* Reminder: in the age of the death of the book, “Publishers sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1 percent increase since 2008. (See also: Umberto Eco and Jean Claude Carriere, This is Not the End of the Book, which is actually about a wide array of topics ancillary to the death, life, or zombiehood of books.)

* Text Slang for Adults. Sample: “NSR = Need some roughage”; “T4W = Time for whiskey.”

* Lev Grossman on writing The Magician King: “when you’re in a certain phase of novel-making, you’re like a magpie: when something gleams at you funny, you swoop down and grab it and take it back to your nest, because you know, you just know, you’re going to need it later.”

* This may be the most impressive blog comment I’ve ever read (it’s from Cory Doctorow):

Education is a public good. It is best supplied and paid for by the group as a whole, because no individual or small collective can produce the overall social benefit that the nation can provision collectively.

Education doesn’t respond well to market forces because many of the social goods that arise from education — socialization, a grounding in civics, historical context, rational and systematic reasoning — are not goods or services demanded by a market, but rather they are the underlying substrate that allows people to intelligently conduct transactions in a marketplace as well as establishing and maintaining good governance.

There is a long and wide body of evidence that people with wide, solid educational foundations that transcend mere vocational skills produce societies that are more prosperous, more transparent, healthier, more democratic — that attain, in short, all the things we hope markets will attain for us.

* If you can get FiOS, you should. Tucson’s Internet access choices are so bad that I effectively have a choice between Comcast, which offers ~12mb / sec down and ~2mb / sec up, and nothing. I saw “nothing” because Qwest offers “DSL” at 1.5mb / sec down, which would’ve been great in, say, 1999, but is terrible now. I actually sent an e-mail to Qwest Arizona president Jim Campbell asking if Qwest was actually going to roll out real competition in my area. To Qwest’s credit, his administrative assistant, Deborah Statt, replied and said there wouldn’t be any improvement in 2010. Also to Qwest’s credit, she’s followed-up consistently. Alas, however, responsiveness doesn’t mean improvement, and I’m still stuck with Comcast.

* Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union comes to life, at least in terms of villains.

* PicPlum calls itself “the easiest way to send photos.” I ordered some; we’ll see how it goes.

* We’ll Show You Ours if You Show Us Yours; “we thought it would be fun to round up the favorite dirty books of some of our most illustrious literary critics at The Times. Below, their spicy replies.”

* Someone found Grant Writing Confidential by searching for “secrets to writing like dan brown.” I would start by being incoherent on the level of the sentence.

How to be a faster writer: Don't

August 11, 2011 By in Tools, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

There’s a Slate article making the rounds on “How to be a faster writer,” which has lots of good advice, including some that a lot of people don’t seem to appreciate (like: you don’t become a good writer over night; you grow into it, like any other cognitively challenging skill.) It’s also got some not-so-good advice:

The research verifies that taking notes makes writing easier­—as long as you don’t look at them while you are writing the draft! Doing so causes a writer to jump into reviewing/evaluating mode instead of getting on with the business of getting words on the screen.

If research, outline, and so forth are actually part of the writing process, I think they can be smoothly integrated with the art of writing itself (as I write this, the Slate article I’m responding to is on the right and the Textmate window on the left, letting me look back and forth).

When I was writing completely unpublishable novels, I didn’t use outlines, and I ended up with piles of words that utterly lacked narrative tension and the many good qualities that stem from narrative tension. Such piles of words didn’t have much point, which more astute readers observed. One told me to think about writing a novel in which something happens.

So I went through a three-novel phase during which I’d heavily outline, and I’d usually have the outline on one screen (or one side of the screen) and a main document on the other. This prevented me from getting “stuck” or from writing off into nowhereville without the structure of a scene. A lot of amateur writers have trouble with plot: they think their novels should resemble famous ones they’ve read in school, in which characters spend a lot of time talking about their feelings in a very deep way, or the sense of being lost, or the ennui imparted by the modern world. There’s nothing precisely wrong with this sort of writing, if done well, but most people seem to like reading (and writing) novels where something happens in a series scenes that build to a climax better. Sure, a lot of novels you’ve read in school don’t really do that for various reasons, some very good, but if you imitate them, you’ll often be doing yourself and your reader a disservice. If you’re unconsciously imitating the boring novels you’ve read in school, that’s even worse, because you don’t have enough command over your craft to know what you’re doing.

These days, I still make a bit of an outline, but I can do a lot of the outlining in my head—the last novel I finished, One Step Into the Labyrinth, really needed an outline because the plot was complex; about half a dozen literary agents have the full manuscript or a piece of it, so you may yet see it in bookstores near you. The novel I’m working on now isn’t as complex, and although I’m not using an outline, I’m still writing in scenes that build up to something. In essence, I’ve learned how to write in scenes without necessarily needing an external structure to guide those scenes and make sure they work towards a whole. I suspect this to be a sign of growth, and, I hope, not a malignant sign, like cancer.

My Dad doesn’t write proposals using outlines. He’s internalized virtually everything he needs to know about delivering human services. When I gave technical writing students a proposal writing assignment for the Department of Education’s Educational Opportunity Centers (EOC) Program, however, I knew I couldn’t expect them to write like my Dad did, because what’s appropriate for experts isn’t appropriate for amateurs. I couldn’t just give them an RFP and let ’em rip—I had to get them to think about how services should actually be delivered and real-world constraints; many had a charmingly strong vision of the power and competence of volunteers. Others wanted to hire 30 staff people on an RFP that offered a $230,000 / year grant. Virtually all had to be taught to read between the lines. My Dad—and these days, I—will do that automatically.

Slate says that, during writing

the writer’s brain is juggling three things: the actual text, what you plan to say next, and—most crucially—theories of how your imagined readership will interpret what’s being written. A highly skilled writer can simultaneously be a writer, editor, and audience.

That’s basically what I’m describing above. Is something that took me a long time to grow but now that ability to be a writer, editor, and audience simultaneously exists. Even before it did, however, I used notes, outlines, a miscellaneous file, doodled; sometimes I had, and have, a chunk of text that I know will fit in a particular spot, as long as I find it, usually by digging through a miscellaneous file. In the novel I’m working on now, I’m still using two screens, as shown in the screenshots to the right (click to make them larger). Note: because this is work-in-progress, try not to read the text, because it’s not particularly important what it says and the conversation I was working on last night doesn’t make sense or have the same resonance out of context.

Anyway, as you can see, one screenshot shows my main window: I’m trying to use a program named Scrivener for the first time, which has a somewhat steep learning curve but is probably very useful for a novel with multiple speakers. The other is a second, 23″ Dell monitor which has a list of characters and a miscellaneous file where I drop notes, phrases, ideas, and so forth. I’m using Word at the moment, but I’ve used Mellel and all manner of other writing programs for this purpose. Nothing even remotely sophisticated is happening on those screens, so the word processor doesn’t matter much.

I can go for long stretches without referencing the second monitor, depending on the situation. But the second monitor, if anything, helps me stay in active writing mode. If I get an idea tangential to the main thread that’s developing, I don’t need to do a conditional jump and then try to find my way back to the main narrative. I hit the miscellaneous file, dump a couple sentences on the idea, and return to the main workspace. Sometimes I will read a lot of sentences on the second screen, comparing them with ones on the first. I don’t think this makes me move into strict “reviewing/evaluating mode,” because that’s part of the way I imagine “how [my] imagined readership will interpret what’s being written.” This might be something that comes from skill.

I’ve gone on long enough about a minor point of contention. I’d like to tremendously agree with some of the other points made in Slate, like this:

Second, read everything, all the time. That’s the only way to build the general knowledge that you can tuck away in long-term memory, only to one day have it magically surface when you’re searching for just the right turn of phrase. And, lastly, the trickiest part of writing—from a cognitive perspective—is getting outside of yourself, of seeing your writing through the eyes of others.

When people ask me what they should do to be good writers, I tell them to read a lot and write a lot. And, ideally, find a good editor. It’s nice to see that “science” agrees. If you pay enough attention to writers and would-be writers, I think it becomes apparent that a lot of them don’t quite have enough knowledge to pull off what they’re trying to do—yet. In her interview with James Franco, Terry Gross says that “I think that every young writer or painter actually goes through that […] putting out everything inside them, but there isn’t much inside them yet because they’re young and unformed.” And Franco agrees that he experienced the problems or possibilities Gross describes.

I should also explain why the last word of my post title is “Don’t.” I put it there because you don’t learn to become a faster writer through some kind of trick that will make you magically produce text faster. You become a better writer through experience and through reading. Those aren’t things you can do in a day or a week or a month. They’re things you do over years. The only way to start if you haven’t already is to start now, especially since the greatest value in writing isn’t always in writing for other people. I’ve been rereading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, which was even better the second time around than the first (probably because now I have the background knowledge to really grok it). He says:

[I]t is never a waste to write for intrinsic reasons. First of all, writing gives the mind a disciplined means of expression. It allows one to record events and experiences so that they can be easily recalled, and relived in the future. It is a way to analyze and understand experiences, a self-communication that brings order to them.

“A disciplined means of expression” is available to anyone, even someone with no readers. Csikszentmihalyi gets that writing isn’t just about writing: “If the only point to writing were to transmit information, then it would deserve to become obsolete. But the point of writing is to create information, not simply to pass it along. [. . .] It is the slow, organically growing process of thought involved in writing that lets the ideas emerge in the first place.” It’s about generating ideas that emerge through an attempt to express those ideas (Paul Graham says something similar in The Age of the Essay). Given that writing is about itself, we shouldn’t be as worried about how fast we’re writing; as demonstrated in Flow, when we’re really writing well we often won’t have a sense of time, because we’ll be in a moment-to-moment existence in which our task demands complete concentration and little else matters. Doesn’t that sound better than merely getting words on the page? It sure does to me.

By the way, you shouldn’t valorize writers and writing too much, because writing can have strange effects on the mind. In Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, Grady Tripp describes “the midnight disease” that writers suffer from,

[…] which started out as a simple feeling of disconnection from other people, an inability to ‘fit in’ by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and of unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers. Very quickly, though, what happened with the midnight disease was that you began actually to crave this feeling of apartness, to cultivate and even flourish within it. You pushed yourself farther and farther and farther apart until one black day you woke to discover that you yourself had become the chief object of your hostile gaze.

And I don’t think this unique to writer: programmers, hackers, engineers, scientists, and others probably feel too: all the people who, like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, still desire to walk free under the sun even as they are compelled to return to darkness and solitude. The solitude is what it takes to do the work: but for writers, they’re writing about people, which is odd that one needs to get away from people to describe people, but it’s nonetheless true for many of us.

By the way, most of those delicious quotes come from DevonThink Pro, but they’re still evidence that I’ve done a certain amount of reading and thinking about writing that enabled me to write this post over an hour or so (back to Slate: “It’s obviously a huge help to write about a subject you know well”). If I was 19 and writing this post, I simply wouldn’t have been able to write it. Not like this, anyway. If you look at the blog archives—I discourage you, but if you must, you must—and compare early posts to the posts I write these days, there simply is no comparison. That’s because I’ve learned how to write blog posts effectively, or somewhat effectively, anyway. I’m capable of doing things now that I simply couldn’t do then. Want to really write faster? You can teach yourself how in ten years.

Brady Udall Interview for The Lonely Polygamist: Part I

June 21, 2011 By in Books, Fiction, Interviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist, follows a suite of characters orbiting around Golden Richards, a polygamist with four wives and more than two dozen children who is trying to keep his construction business afloat and manage a family that practically requires an MBA due to its size. The novel shies away from overt religious discussion and towards the day-to-day comic combat necessary to merely the family together and functional.

This interview was conducted in May 2010 at Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe, Arizona. Although this is an incredibly lame comment, it’s nonetheless true that I simply forgot to post it when other issues arose. It’s here now, however. As we got started, Udall mentioned Daughter of the Saints: Growing Up in Polygamy by Dorothy Allred Solomon.

Udall reminded me of someone slightly too small and far too wary to make it on a high school football team. He spoke with a paradoxical mix of certainty and exploration. The first half of the interview is below.

Jake Seliger: I was listening to Bookworm on the way up here. It’s a radio show on KCRW, and Michael Silverblatt was talking to Michael Cunningham, and Silverblatt said Cunningham’s book was really about the primal relationship between fathers and sons. I heard that and thought to myself, “That’s a lot of what’s going on in The Lonely Polygamist as well,” except I was too dense to notice it the first time through.

Brady Udall: There’s a lot of distractions. Right? There’s no doubt that one of the things I was interested is that Golden, the main character, is an only child abandoned by his father. And then, he manages to have 28 children of his own.

JS: Almost overcompensating.

BU: Yes, yes. But is no better a father because of it. And I think that’s where I’m interested. Numbers have nothing to do with it, really. It’s just there’s something in men—and this is a gross generalization, but we have difficulty taking care of our obligations, emotionally. That’s part of what the book is about: Golden’s not up to taking care of his obligations emotionally.

JS: He seems unable to deal with his emotions in relation to Royal [Golden’s father]. It seems that there’s this Royal-Golden-Rusty [Golden’s son]—I don’t want to call the eternal golden braid, but—

BU: Yeah, you look at the names and there’s something going on. There’s definitely something there, and somewhere in the book I talk about the curse of the father. And we all live with that in some way or another.

JS: Sometimes the absent father, too.

BU: Yeah. So that’s definitely part of what I was doing.

JS: You mentioned that it’s not an issue of numbers, but it seems like there’s something going on—when you scale a family from, say, a two-person couple, to four children, to twenty-eight children, it seems like something has to change there. There’s a passage about that I wrote down somewhere—I can’t find it right now—

BU: Well, I don’t know what it says, but it might be the passage that says something about, when you have 28 children, and you’re a father, you have to try to treat them all equally. Which is nearly impossible. Because he’s not up to the task—if you pat one kid on the head, then everybody’s going to have to have a pat on the head—at some point you can’t balance—

JS: It’s a matter of time.

BU: Yes. He’s just not up to the challenge. He doesn’t know how to manage this. Could he have managed it with three or four children? Maybe, I don’t know.

JS: It’s funny that you use the word “manage,” because it seems like at this scale you almost need to have a managerial mindset.

BU: You have to be a logistical genius of some kind.

JS: And it’s strange, because there’s section on page 21—early in the novel, and Golden says that “whenever he walked into one of his houses he felt more than ever like a stranger, an outlander unfamiliar with the customs of the place.” It seems like you almost have to be unfamiliar with the customs of a place if you’re doing this rotation.

BU: The thing I’d say about that, those houses aren’t his. The family is a stranger. The wives are controlling the houses. He’s just an intruder in some ways. And it makes some sense because at the center of everything, yet he’s on the outside of it all. Which I think is cool.

JS: It’s interesting too that you use that kind of language—the center of everything but outside of it all—because to my mind I almost hear an aspect of the religious part of the novel, because religion seems to influence everything that’s going on, and yet it doesn’t seem as constant a presence. So it’s like the center that’s also outside. I don’t know if you agree or not, but that’s what I was hearing.

BU: Religion dominates these people’s lives, but I try to avoid it as much as possible.

JS: Which you succeeded at.

BU: I tried to, so if I include that I’m going to have to write a book that’s 2,000 pages long.

JS: You said in another interview that this one started out at 1,400—

BU: Fourteen, and I did address some of the religious or spiritual stuff. But really what I’m interested in is really—and I’ve said it before—how, how do you do it? How does somebody manage this? And there’s enough there to easily fill 1,400 pages. Some of the more esoteric stuff got left out.

JS: I think when I was coming in, I expected religion to be more front and center, and more important than interpersonal politics. Maybe it’s unfair. I don’t know if my perception is off—I might be unfairly stereotyping a lot of these people.

BU: If you think about it, even for religious people, who would take their religion very seriously, the religion disappears in some ways. It’s just their life. And so when you write fiction, that’s what you tend to focus on—the details of everyday life. How people live, how people interact, is what I think as a fiction writer you really have to think about. That’s going to make interesting fiction. Ideas . . .

JS: Have to be embodied in the events—

BU: Right, right. You can’t—they talk about a novel of ideas. I don’t think there’s ever been a successful novel of ideas, to be honest with you. There’s no such thing. People make the attempt. I’ve always felt, if you’re going write about ideas, write an essay.

JS: Pick a different genre?

BU: Exactly.

JS: That’s funny, because I wrote this paper for one of my grad seminars on Melville’s Pierre, which—I don’t know what to call it besides being about ideas—

BU: I’ve never read it, so I don’t know.

JS: Because no one has read Melville after Moby-Dick, because he seems to—my academic adviser is a guy named Ed Dryden. He’s written a lot about Melville and argues that Melville wants to break with fiction after Moby-Dick.

BU: That’s interesting. I’ve never heard that. That’s why people don’t read Melville after Moby-Dick.

JS: Well, that’s how you get Pierre and Israel Potter and The Confidence Man, which are novels that as far as I can tell no one but academics read.

BU: I’ve read The Confidence Man, I can tell you that. I have virtually no memory of it.

JS: Maybe that says something if you have virtually no memory of it.

BU: Yeah.

JS: As far as religion goes, there’s also a book by a critic named J. Hillis Miller called The Disappearance of God. He argues that in the Nineteenth Century God basically goes from being an active presence in people’s lives in fiction to being an absent center.

BU: And it’s continued to this day. Not to ask you this question, but—

JS: Why not?

BU: Can you name any contemporary fiction writers who address God in the lives of people? It’s very rare.

JS: I wonder if they’re out there, but they’re being published by religious presses that I don’t read.

BU: It could be, but Flannery O’Connor was writing about this in a certain way.

JS: Or a lot of Catholic writers, like Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene.

BU: Jewish writers don’t tend to write a lot about God. And it’s weird because America’s such a religious place. We’re not Europe. We’re very religious, yet if you read fiction of the past 50, 70 years, you’d never have any idea we’re a religious place.

JS: Yeah, or at least mainstream fiction. A lot of the Jewish writers are dealing with Judaism and Jewish culture more.

BU: Right. They’re not dealing with God. And it’s because it’s difficult, that’s really why. Most writers—I feel the same way—don’t feel like they have the authority to deal with such a large subject. But it’s still disturbing to see the lack of people—religious people—in fiction. And very often they’re the villain. And I’m not religious, so I’m not defending this in any way. I’m not a religious person.

JS: It’s like Michael Chabon’s book, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I don’t know if you’ve read it.

BU: Of course I’ve read it.

JS: The black hats, the Orthodox, are the villains.

BU: And he gets in trouble. Among Jews, he gets in trouble for his depiction.

JS: A little bit. But I don’t think he does like Philip Roth did—

BU: But people still get upset. I think one of the reason writers aren’t address it—if they don’t come from a religious background—I know this from experience—people get upset. If you’re going to depict the religion and religious people of that culture, they want you to depict it in a positive light. And if you don’t, they see it as betrayal.

JS: But it seems like people, oftentimes, whether they’re religious or not, reading about people in a positive light is boring. You want to read about foibles—

BU: That’s absolutely right. Life—fiction is about trouble. It’s about nastiness. It’s not about nice things. It never is.

JS: We have plenty of nastiness here—especially with Golden’s boss. Also with Rusty to some extent. Because he’s—

BU: He’s a little jerk. He’s not a kind—you know, there are idealized children in fiction. They’re education, they’re overly smart, they read in their spare time, I don’t know what. And you know, you don’t see that in real kids. A lot of them are little brats, like Rusty.

[Food shows up.]

Rusty’s a tough one.

JS: At the same time, he’s somewhat justified, and some of his behaviors are understandable. I mean, there’s the scene with his birthday party. And because there’s all these birthday parties—they get back to this individual / privacy issue. At that moment June says about Rusty, “I know he’s going to end up like me. No family, lost, wondering who he’s supposed to be with, what he’s supposed to do.” And it seems like a pretty accurate comment—this idea of lacking family or being lost. It’s easy to get lost in all these people.

BU: In families that large, you do get lost very easily. If you go along with the program, you’re okay, but some people aren’t cut out for that. You can be in trouble. And there’s no place for you. It’s especially true for the boys.

JS: Yeah. It never happens, but it seems like if Rusty were to go on, he’d be really lost, really wondering. Kind of like Golden.

BU: This happens to polygamous boys all the time. If you think about it, the math doesn’t work. There can’t be—all the boys can’t have four wives. All the men can’t have four wives. It just doesn’t work that way. So three out of those four men have to go somewhere else. They can’t hang around.

JS: It’s like what Tim Harford wrote about in The Logic of Life. He had a chapter called “The Marriage Supermarket,” where he develops a theoretical model of what happens if you have 20 men and 20 women who all want to marry. If you take one away from either side, the gender politics shift very rapidly. You can actually see stuff like this happening on college campuses, because now more women than men go to college.

BU: That’s right! It’s in our favor now. Well, too bad I’m not in school. You’ve got it better than we did.

JS: Yeah, and these shifts bring out different kinds of politics.

BU: It’s happening in China, where there are more boys born than girls. And that’s one of the inherent weaknesses of that culture—it’s just mathematics.

JS: And it’s a problem for the men and boys who will end up wandering, like Rusty probably will.

BU: You can end up with no place. You make one false move, you end up on the outs. That’s what happens.

JS: Even Golden growing up with his father, there was wandering for different reasons.

BU: There was a lot of unhappiness. And so there is a correlation between Golden and Rusty, obviously. I guess the way of thinking of it—it’s just easy to end up going over the edge.

JS: If Rusty gets away from the mob—if he survives—maybe he goes on.

BU: You could take it a long ways. Rusty’s sort of like the sacrificial lamb of the family. Somebody has to—something has to happen to bring this family back together. The one who doesn’t belong, is having the hardest time with the family—is the one who’s sacrificed for the greatest good.

JS: You have a feeling Rusty would not perceive it that way.

BU: No, no, the sacrificial virgin never does. It’s like, “Why me, man? Why am I getting thrown in the volcano? This sucks.”

JS: The issue of sacrifice is interesting to me. At the end—I think it’s the second-to-last page—we have Beverley’s voice, and she says, “She would spend the rest of her time tutoring Maureen and making peace with the other wives, to ensure that once she was gone the Richards family would soldier forward in harmony and righteousness until the promised day, on the others side of the vil, when they would be joined together again.” To me, I hear a lot of irony regarding what Bev really thinks, because if she really soldiers towards harmony and righteousness, that’s going to be a pretty big change.

BU: That’s true. The quote that I love—I just heard her say it—I don’t know if you know it—Mary Karr, she wrote The Liars’ Club—is that a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person. Once the numbers start going up more—

JS: The possible connections go up exponentially.

BU: It goes exponential. So the chances are, that they will soldier forward in harmony and righteousness, believe me, are just about nil. They just added, not only a wife, but two new kids to the family. Good luck to them.

JS: Wastrels, who’re happy to get away—

BU: They’ll just take Rusty’s place. So yeah, there’s The Liars’ Club.

JS: I get the impression from the passages that I’ve seen from Beverley’s consciousness, she probably believes that.

BU: Oh yeah, she does. You have to.

JS: It explains some of her obsessive ordering of the household too.

BU: In the background that she comes from, she believes that if you obey all the rules and in righteousness, having rules and regulations keep anarchy at bay. That’s what she strives for throughout the book. She’s right in some ways. I suppose what I’m saying is that you can try all you want.

JS: Too much order is as stifling as anarchy, and that might be what’s driving Rusty. He’s unhappy.

BU: And it probably drives the other wives, who don’t agree with her approach. So that’s why they’re all fighting with her, because they don’t go that far. Those wives are born and raised in the principle. She’s a newcomer to it. If you’re a convert to something, you get fired up.

JS: The convert’s zeal. There’s a section about it. I can’t remember off the top of my head, but the conflicts between Beverley and the others is a conflict between the first and the others. It’s hard because there has to be a disciplinarian, but no one likes the disciplinarian.

BU: Yeah.

JS: Yet there has to be one.

BU: I can tell you that in my family I’m the disciplinarian, and nobody likes me. My wife’s like, the super safe place to go. I’m like Nurse Ratchet or someone like that. It’s the oldest story in the world, I guess. In this case, it’s the wife.

JS: Because of Golden’s job, and because of how he rotates, in The Lonely Polygamist it would have to be the wife, or the wives, because he’s not there enough.

BU: That’s the truth about anything. Pierre and I were talking to this—a guy who’s gone all the time, working his ass off—he’s not going to be around to have much influence at all, positive or negative. Without influence there’s no power. So the only power he has is to pick his clothes every day. But I’ve seen it in these families.

JS: The power and the attention, because there’s so many children—

BU: Exactly. Because the kids know where the power is. You know what? I don’t think it would be that different if it was a family of four kids, and their father is gone all the time. The mother’s the one who has the influence. He’s not there, he doesn’t develop what he needs to. The entire story and situation—everything that’s true of a family of four or five people is just amplified four or five times. To me that’s interesting for the sake of seeing how far we can take this. For me, it makes things clearer. It helps you see what I’d call a regular family a little bit more clearly when you exaggerate more.

JS: Even regular families seem to be steadily declining, if we mean by that a mom and dad and 2.1 kids and a golden retriever. It’s a smaller proportion—

BU: Right. What I love—let me back up. I’ve put it this way before: what fascinates me about polygamy is that you can look at it as this alternative thing. Like gay marriage. Or you can look at it like this chauvinistic, terribly old-fashioned, ridiculous, unfair way to live. So you want to look at it.

JS: It probably depends in part on where you grow up, and whether you can really make an independent decision about where you want to live. It seems like not everyone grows up as a polygamist gets that.

BU: Most of the polygamist communities are closed, so it makes it hard for people to make their own choices. That’s not true of all polygamist families. But again, the same could be said of many cultures and subcultures in this country and around the world.

JS: You have ideological conformity.

BU: Exactly. Within family, within a neighborhood.

So you wanna be a writer: What Anthony Bourdain can tell you even when he’s not talking about writing

September 20, 2010 By in Books, Essays, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

There’s a great essay called “So You Wanna Be a Chef” by Anthony Bourdain, who wrote Kitchen Confidential. Based on “So You Wanna Be a Chef,” culinary schools sound rather like MFA programs. Money drives both decisions, even when artistry is supposed to:

But the minute you graduate from school—unless you have a deep-pocketed Mommy and Daddy or substantial savings—you’re already up against the wall. Two nearly unpaid years wandering Europe or New York, learning from the masters, is rarely an option. You need to make money NOW.

You could replace “cooking” with “writing” and “being a chef” with “being a writer” in Bourdain’s essay and have more or less the same outcome. Going into the “hotels and country clubs” side of the business is like getting tenure as a professor. There are a few differences between the fields—you’re never too old to be a writer—but similarities proliferate. Like this:

Male, female, gay, straight, legal, illegal, country of origin—who cares? You can either cook an omelet or you can’t. You can either cook five hundred omelets in three hours—like you said you could, and like the job requires—or you can’t. There’s no lying in the kitchen.

You can either sit (or stand) at a computer for years, producing words, or you can’t. There’s no lying at the keyboard. If you want to be a writer, the keyboard is where you’re going to spend a lot of your time (Michael Chabon on book tour in Seattle for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: “If you want to write a novel you have to sit on your ass.” I can testify that the same is true of writing a blog). All the chatter in the world about how how you prefer early Ian McEwan to late Ian McEwan isn’t going to help you produce words.

As with many disciplines, what’s important is not just being good or adequate—it’s being amazing. “There is, as well, a big difference between good work habits (which I have) and the kind of discipline required of a cook at Robuchon.” There is a big difference between good work habits and being an artist: a surprisingly large number of people can crap out a novel if given sufficient time and motivation. Milan Kundera in The Curtain:

Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional—thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious—is contemptible.

This overstates the case: an indifferent or “mediocre” novel by a “mediocre novelist” does not tangibly hurt anyone, and its most likely fate is to be ignored—which is the most likely fate of any novelist. But the writer needs to aspire “to a lasting aesthetic value,” which means that merely existing and producing something isn’t enough. Hence my derogatory phrase: “crap out a novel.”

Instead of traveling to “Find out how other people live and eat and cook,” as Bourdain tells the chef to do, the writer must read widely and voraciously and omnivorously. If you’re writing in a genre, read the classics. If you’re a literary novelist, read some of the better genre fiction (it’s out there). Read books about writing. Read books not about writing to learn how the world works. Get out of your literary comfort zone with some frequency. You’ll need it.

Also wise: “Treating despair with drugs and alcohol is a time-honored tradition—I’d just advise you to assess honestly if it’s really as bad and as intractable a situation as you think.” Steven King writes in On Writing about his own problems with drugs. He points out that drinking or taking drugs doesn’t make you a writer—if you’re a writer, you might drink or take drugs, but skipping straight to the drugs doesn’t do anything for you.

The bottom line: creative fields and top performers in many disciplines appear to have more in common than not. From what I’ve read, the same basic dynamic described by Bourdain applies not just to cooking and writing, but to software hacking, most kinds of research, athletes, architecture, music, and most forms of art. Don’t pursue these fields unless you want to master them. And you probably don’t. And if you do, you might be better off not realizing how difficult they are before you start, because you might never start.

So you wanna be a writer: What Anthony Bourdain can tell you even when he's not talking about writing

September 20, 2010 By in Books, Essays, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

There’s a great essay called “So You Wanna Be a Chef” by Anthony Bourdain, who wrote Kitchen Confidential. Based on “So You Wanna Be a Chef,” culinary schools sound rather like MFA programs. Money drives both decisions, even when artistry is supposed to:

But the minute you graduate from school—unless you have a deep-pocketed Mommy and Daddy or substantial savings—you’re already up against the wall. Two nearly unpaid years wandering Europe or New York, learning from the masters, is rarely an option. You need to make money NOW.

You could replace “cooking” with “writing” and “being a chef” with “being a writer” in Bourdain’s essay and have more or less the same outcome. Going into the “hotels and country clubs” side of the business is like getting tenure as a professor. There are a few differences between the fields—you’re never too old to be a writer—but similarities proliferate. Like this:

Male, female, gay, straight, legal, illegal, country of origin—who cares? You can either cook an omelet or you can’t. You can either cook five hundred omelets in three hours—like you said you could, and like the job requires—or you can’t. There’s no lying in the kitchen.

You can either sit (or stand) at a computer for years, producing words, or you can’t. There’s no lying at the keyboard. If you want to be a writer, the keyboard is where you’re going to spend a lot of your time (Michael Chabon on book tour in Seattle for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: “If you want to write a novel you have to sit on your ass.” I can testify that the same is true of writing a blog). All the chatter in the world about how how you prefer early Ian McEwan to late Ian McEwan isn’t going to help you produce words.

As with many disciplines, what’s important is not just being good or adequate—it’s being amazing. “There is, as well, a big difference between good work habits (which I have) and the kind of discipline required of a cook at Robuchon.” There is a big difference between good work habits and being an artist: a surprisingly large number of people can crap out a novel if given sufficient time and motivation. Milan Kundera in The Curtain:

Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional—thus not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious—is contemptible.

This overstates the case: an indifferent or “mediocre” novel by a “mediocre novelist” does not tangibly hurt anyone, and its most likely fate is to be ignored—which is the most likely fate of any novelist. But the writer needs to aspire “to a lasting aesthetic value,” which means that merely existing and producing something isn’t enough. Hence my derogatory phrase: “crap out a novel.”

Instead of traveling to “Find out how other people live and eat and cook,” as Bourdain tells the chef to do, the writer must read widely and voraciously and omnivorously. If you’re writing in a genre, read the classics. If you’re a literary novelist, read some of the better genre fiction (it’s out there). Read books about writing. Read books not about writing to learn how the world works. Get out of your literary comfort zone with some frequency. You’ll need it.

Also wise: “Treating despair with drugs and alcohol is a time-honored tradition—I’d just advise you to assess honestly if it’s really as bad and as intractable a situation as you think.” Steven King writes in On Writing about his own problems with drugs. He points out that drinking or taking drugs doesn’t make you a writer—if you’re a writer, you might drink or take drugs, but skipping straight to the drugs doesn’t do anything for you.

The bottom line: creative fields and top performers in many disciplines appear to have more in common than not. From what I’ve read, the same basic dynamic described by Bourdain applies not just to cooking and writing, but to software hacking, most kinds of research, athletes, architecture, music, and most forms of art. Don’t pursue these fields unless you want to master them. And you probably don’t. And if you do, you might be better off not realizing how difficult they are before you start, because you might never start.

Working out the plot with the Rejector, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, and other friends

August 5, 2010 By in Books, Publishing, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Over at the Rejecter, someone is asking whether an MFA program will teach her how to structure her novels. Actually, she’s asking about the professional and intellectual utility of MFA programs, but I want to focus on the plot issue, since that’s what the Rejecter doesn’t address. I had the same problems as the correspondent, but I don’t think I have them any more.

Specifically, the problem:

I have been writing novels since I was about seven. I literally think about it all the time. However, try as I might I have never been able to get beyond the 40,000 word mark before losing the plot and momentum of my story and deciding to start something else entirely. I’m a journalist on a big women’s glossy in the UK so it’s not getting the words down on paper that’s the problem, it’s rather getting my plot from A to B that stumps me.

That sounds really similar to me: the first two novels I actually completed are now, in retrospect, unpublishable, although I didn’t know that at the time and couldn’t have articulated why. Now I know: nothing happened. The novels had interesting premises but no action. There were a lot of bits of clever dialog and some good scenes, but nothing that held those scenes together. The novels lacked narrative tension.

The next two I wrote were and are publishable; they got a lot of agent activity and requests but no agents who took me on. Ditto for the latest, currently titled Asking Alice, which is still out. Look for my name in lights shortly.

One big thing changed between the first two unpublishable novels and the later three: I started writing outlines, which I’d previously considered unnecessary because I’m so smart that I can hold everything in my head (oops). Those outlines were and are pretty loose and fluid, but they’re outlines nonetheless, in which I asked myself essential questions about each chapter: what happens in it? Why? Why this chapter and not some other? What’s the central tension? What does each character worry about? These kinds of questions guided me toward writing better plots because I thought about how information was doled out and what kinds of things the characters are struggling to achieve. In addition, I thought about how drama works: is something important happening in this chapter? What is it?

If I can’t identify what’s important or why the characters should care, I’m probably doing something wrong.

This doesn’t mean each chapter has to end with someone getting shot, or the heroine declaring her love, or the revelation of a shocking fact, or an alien invasion.* But it does mean that I have to at least think about what the scene or chapter is conveying to the reader, what is happening to the characters, how it relates to the previous scene or the next scene, and, perhaps most importantly, what dilemmas it raise that have to be resolved in the future.

Every scene or almost every scene needs some kind of tension or uncertainty. Once again, this doesn’t necessarily mean a guy holding a gun: it could be highly cerebral. In Adam Foulds’ The Quickening Maze, the tension in some scenes concerns the interior dialog and sanity of John Clare: is he sane? Are we seeing the mind of someone else, or are we seeing his mind, which has assumed the shape of someone else? Those scenes can be quite tense but also quite subtle. Others can hinge on a piece of information, as when Randy Waterhouse realizes he’s actually building a datahaven in Cryptonomicon.

Over time, through reading and writing, you’ll learn where to end scenes and how the form of the novel works, and by “you” I mean “me.” You have to learn if you’re the kind of writer who wants to break that form successfully. I remember being on the high school newspaper and going to journalism contests. A lot of traditional news articles end with a whimsical or funny quote that’s not essential but does a good job of encapsulating the story. I’d read enough articles to have picked that idea up, and at one of the competitions I remember taking notes as a source spoke and putting a star next to something he said and thinking, “that’s my final quote.” I wrote the piece and later looked at what the judges had to say; I don’t think that was one of the times I won anything, but I do remember them commenting on the money quote at the end.

They did it because I’d successfully synthesized a principle no one had explicitly stated but that nonetheless made my article a little bit better.

Learning to write scenes is similar: you can’t enumerate all the principles involved, but over time you start to feel them. Once you become attuned to reading novels for what each scene does or what tensions exist in a scene, you’ll probably become better at plotting them for yourself—if you’re anything like me, at least. And you might start telling stories that build plots. I talked out a lot of Asking Alice, the novel making the rounds with agents right now, with a friend. It didn’t hurt and might’ve helped. Sometimes it’s also fun to make up a plot when you’re out. Michael Chabon portrays this in Wonder Boys, when the blocked English professor Grady Tripp and his gay editor, Crabtree, are in a bar:

‘Hey,’ said Crabtree, ‘look at that guy.’ […]
‘Who? Oh my.’ I smiled. ‘The one with the hair sculpture.’ […]
‘He’s a boxer,’ I said. ‘A flyweight.’
‘He’s a jockey,’ said Crabtree. ‘His name’s, um, Curtis. Hardapple.’
‘Not Curtis,’ I said.
‘Vernon, then. Vernon Hardapple. The scars are from a—from a horse’s hooves. He fell during a race and got trampled.’
‘He’s addicted to painkillers.’
‘He’s got a plate in his head.’

And they go on from there. They could be building a plot (telling the story of Hardapple’s rise and fall as a jockey) or they could be building the background. Either way, they’re doing something useful. Where do stories come from? Everywhere and nowhere. They’re not talking about plot, not just yet, but they begin moving in that direction.

The original querier to the Rejector has identified a particular weakness, which is a good start. My proposed solution: read some novels she admires; pick them apart and write outlines that focus on why characters do what they do, what information they reveal when, and so on. Some writers who I think do this particularly well: Ruiz Zafón, as mentioned; Elmore Leonard, especially in Get Shorty and Out of Sight, which I still think are his best; Anita Shreve in Testimony; Graham Greene in The End of the Affair; Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose. Mystery and detective novels are often very good at plot because all they have is plot. Note that this path is not recommended.

If anyone out there is sufficiently interested, drop me an e-mail and I’ll send you my quick-and-dirty outline of The Angel’s Game, although I wouldn’t recommend reading it until after you’ve read the novel. Ruiz Zafón is astonishingly good at making each scene count in both this novel and The Shadow of the Wind; one shocking thing about reading The Prince of Mist is how weak that novel is in comparison. Ruiz Zafón is clearly someone who’s learned a lot about writing over the course of his publishing career, and he’s an example that makes me more hesitant to condemn not-very-good first novels—even those that gets published. People learn over time. I’ve read Saul Bellow’s The Dangling Man and thought it was okay—but no Herzog.

That’s not a slam: very few artists of any kind in any medium do their best work on their first try. Like anyone else in any other activity, artists learn as they go along, and they have to assimilate a huge body of material.

Anyway, I’m not sure how many MFA programs teach plot or tell their students some ways to think about plot; if I end up teaching in one, you can bet I’ll talk about it some. As an undergrad, I took a lovely novel writing course from a guy named Bill Tapply, who passed away last year. Although I got a lot out of his class, he seldom talked much about plot, which in retrospect I find curious because his Brady Coyne mysteries work very well in this respect. From chatting with others who’ve taken fiction writing classes, I gather that this is common: they talk about language and ideas and description and all kinds of things, but not plot. If I ever end up teaching one, I’m going to talk about plot—not to the exclusion of everything else, certainly, but enough to give a sense of what my 19-year-old self needed to hear. And, from what the correspondent to the Rejecter says, what she needs to hear too.

This is important because I’ve read so many novels with dynamite first halves and dreary second halves, especially in literary fiction (one reason I like Carlos Ruiz Zafón and have been writing about him a lot lately: his novels hold together). Sometimes otherwise very good novels fall apart plot-wise. I started Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask a few days ago, based on an agents advice,** but gave it up because it feels too episodic and disconnected; the novel strays so fair that it loses me as I find my mind wandering and myself thinking, “So what? What’s at stake here?” By halfway through, the answer frequently felt like “nothing.” Too bad: the first page of The Ask is terrific. A lot of the droll humor works. It just lacks…

something.

Too bad I can’t better define what that something is. But I can talk around it enough to know when it’s missing.***

* For the record, zero of my novels thus far have featured an alien invasion, although I’m not opposed to that sort of thing on principle and my eventually deploy it. One of my ambitions is to eventually write a novel that begins as a fairly straightforward love story about modern urban couples / triangles and angst that suddenly shifts, about halfway through, when aliens attacks. I think this would be totally awesome.

** It was a rejection, but not a form rejection, which counts for a lot when they pile up and you’re looking for some pattern with no more success than people who see secret signals in the white noise of a random universe: “I hope you receive that as no more damning than had I written ‘I like hamburger dill pickles, but I love capers.’ ”

*** I’d like a book on plot that’s as good as How Fiction Works, which I could then add to my post on The very very beginning writer. Suggestions would be appreciated. The books I’ve found that deal with plot tend to be of the “heroine reveals her love” variety that I mocked above, instead of the, “this is how literature might work” variety that James Wood and Francine Prose offer.

Someone has probably already written a lot of what I wrote above. I just don’t know who that person is or where their work is.

Parties and sobriety

August 5, 2010 By in Life Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

“I drank for years, and then I stopped drinking and discovered the sad truth about parties. A sober man at a party is lonely as a journalist, implacable of a coroner, bitter as an angel looking down from heaven. There’s something purely foolish about attending any large gathering of men and women without benefit of some kind of philter or magic dust to blind you and weaken your critical faculties. I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.”

—Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys