Read some new fiction of mine in The Collagist, an excellent new online mag from Dzanc Books.
That would be National Novel Writing Month. The goal: Write a 50,000-word novel between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30.
That's crazy talk, you say. I agree. So of course I have signed up to do it. How do you like my chances?
If there are other DC-based NaNoWriMo-ers out there--even in this acronym-soup town that's a mouthful--let me know how you're holding up under the strain of writing 1,667 words a day. Easy pie, as my 7-year-old would say.
Much of the advice one hears about writing falls into what, for lack of a more inspired term, I'll call the man-up category. As in: Just do it! Believe in your book! Persevere! Embrace your creativity!
I'm all for confidence, although it's not always in great supply in my life. I do believe that perseverance--which appears in many different forms, not all of them recognized by the Writer's Marketplace crowd--is a very useful quality for a writer to have. We have all heard that lecture, and too often it has the effect of making the audience feel inadequate. ("If I were a real writer, I wouldn't take no for an answer.")
It's time to rehabilitate fear as part of the writer's arsenal. In man-up parlance, fear is a no-no. Fear is the bad thing, the inner critic, the cork in the bottle, the voice that says you'll never amount to anything, you have nothing to say, you really are a talentless hack, you killed a tree for this?
A lot of fear is destructive and distracting. Let me argue, though, that writers should learn to harness fear in a way that drives rather than hinders what we do and how we do it.
You're a journalist working on a story. Are you worried that you'll get your facts wrong and look dumb? That fear can drive you to make the calls and have the conversations that make the story worth a read. (There is such a thing as being too confident.)
You're a fiction writer worried that your stuff just isn't good enough to send out. Aren't you afraid that you might be wrong (and wouldn't you like to be proved wrong)?
Writers, what are you afraid of, and how can you use that?
In my latest foray for the Chronicle Review ("Creature Consciousness," Oct. 18, 2009), I take a look at the field of animal studies, which has taken hold in many corners of the humanities and social sciences. By animal studies I don't mean animal rights, articulated so forcefully by the likes of Peter Singer and Tom Regan. Philosophers and literary scholars working in animal studies have an agenda that might be revolutionary; they want to overturn the anthropocentric models of humanism and substitute a very different way of thinking about how human animals relate to other creatures. I also take a look at some of the ways in which historians and social scientists have approached the question(s). It's a complex and fascinating subject--and an important one, I think--and there's a lot of work out there that I didn't have space to write about. I hope you'll take a look. The story is part of a package on "the animal question"--all worth a read if you have the time and inclination.
An aside: Speaking of animal rights, I was amused to see a reader take me to task for omitting Singer from the story. An earlier draft had a paragraph that mentioned Singer and several other figures who cast a long shadow, including Regan and J.M. Coetzee; the graf was cut during edits. I didn't mind too much at the time, because the animal-studies scholars I wrote about are moving in a different direction from Singer's work, although many of them do merge animal advocacy and theory. Anyway, if you're wondering, yes, I'm aware of Singer's work, and so are the scholars profiled in the article.
A personal note: The human-animal bond (see, there I go, falling back into the humanistic trap) is on my mind this week for another reason. We had to euthanize our senior cat, Kimba, yesterday. I don't really need to tell you how powerful these attachments can be. Goodbye, friend.
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the untimely death of the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Encyclopedia of the Dead). My friend Rich Byrne pays tribute to Kiš' "painfully comic vision of human beings careening through a universe of injustice and accident," and talks about how his work affected the Yugoslav/Serbian literary scene and how it anticipated the horrors to come:
One of the great ironies of Kiš' career is that "Boris Davidovich" set off a lengthy war within Yugoslavia’s -- and mainly Serbia’s -- literary establishment that turned not upon interpretations of Stalinism (the vexed question that forced both author Mihajlo Mihajlov and director Dušan Makavejev into dissidence and exile) but on questions of nationalism and literary cabalism....
The battle over "Boris Davidovich" presaged the violent breakup of Yugoslavia set in motion a decade later, and Kiš clearly articulated the vicious mentality that would later sweep through the nation as rooted in paranoia, banality, kitsch and ignorance.....
The comments feature on the blog isn't working properly at the moment, so apologies if you've been trying to post and haven't been able to get through. Ah, technology. We're working on it.
When word came down that TriQuarterly magazine would shift to an online-only, student-run model next year, the news rattled many in the lit-mag community (yes, there is one). In look and editorial feel, TriQuarterly helped invent the formula for what we think of--or what we have thought of--as the small literary magazine, a print powerhouse where writers on their way up could share space with some of the big names in the game. Ever since I can remember, which is longer now than I care to admit, the writers I've known have been jockeying to get their work into the pages of TriQuarterly or Ploughshares or the Mississippi Review or any number of other journals that paid mostly in prestige.
I remember the thrill of placing a short story with Virginia Quarterly Review, a k a VQR, the feeling that I had found a door into the real-writers' club. Did anyone ever read that short story? My friends did. My family did. An agent or two did. Now that VQR has put its archives online, the story may find another reader or two. But the story I published in the story collection D.C. Noir has gotten a lot more traction--more readers, more feedback, more second life. Maybe it's a better story. I know if found a more visible home.
I'd bet cash money that the latest generation of writers still feels the pull of the lit mag. The days of the SASE (the ever-annoying Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope) are fading, now that magazines are moving more and more to online submissions, but the desire to get the lit-mag stamp of approval lingers. Maybe it should: Agents still trawl the TriQuarterlies of the world, and publishers seem more willing to believe that a writer Has Talent if he or she comes stamped with the lit-mag seal of approval. Would I publish again in a small literary journal? In a heartbeat, if I had some short stories to send out. (Soon, soon.)
But--yes, there's a but--who reads these things, other than agents (important, granted) and the writer's friends and family and maybe a few rivals? How many subscribers do most of these journals have now, and how many of those subscribers will actually sit down and read the contents? How many ever did? Having a lot of readers does not mean that you're a good writer, but if you're a good writer and readers don't find you, the creative loop doesn't fully close.
I don't mean to play favorites, but a magazine like VQR, which has reinvented itself under a new editor and which has a strong online presence and a splashier print presentation than it used to, may have a relatively robust readership in the digital era. Other journals I worry more about. I don't have answers, just a feeling that the journal-as-proving-ground model has gotten creaky, at least when it comes to attracting readers. Maybe it still works for the writers and the agents and the publishers. I'd like to know where the readers are in this equation. Are the powers behind TriQuarterly right to move the operation online and turn it over to a new editorial crew, or is there life in the old lit-mag model yet? Writers, where do you want to publish, and why?
