I didn’t come up with the title, Drew Leifeit over at the Budacast did. Listen to an interview with me—“the man who went back into the cold,” as Drew describes me. Play your cards right, and you just might win a signed copy of my last book.
Yes!
Also, get the scoop on punks and sedation in Budapest…
…if that makes any sense.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
As someone who uses the wonderful Wikipedia on a regular basis—in Hungary I don’t have the resources of English-language libraries—this article in USA Today (that bastion of all true knowledge) was particularly interesting.
John Seigenthaler, one of Robert Kennedy’s administrative assistants in the 1960s, as well as one of his pallbearers, was surprised when his son pointed out this Wiki-bio:
John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.
John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and returned to the United States in 1984.
Over at my previous home I began a series to look a little at the aesthetics of writing. Rather than try to explain things everyone probably already knows, it was primarily to get my own thoughts straight. As a writer, it’s good to feel like you know where you stand—are you writing art, entertainment, or shit? Or some wonderful combination of all of these?
Some exploratory posts led to comments, and sometimes the issue of the Master’s of Fine Arts came up. One was a teacher in the same program I attended, at Emerson College, while some from outside the academy had harsh words for the assumption that all those MFA dollars go to anything worthwhile.
My own experience was, overall, very good. I’m still in debt to the tune of…well, something very big…and I haven’t touched the principal yet. But I don’t regret the debt to and major degree. Because it was in my program that I finally felt like, yes, I’m a writer.
Now, I’d never suggest that an MFA makes anyone a writer. In fact, I can confidently say that less than 5% of the people in the program were both any good and had any chance of making a career of writing. But the virtue of it is that, for 2 years, and perhaps the last time in your life, writing is your central occupation. It’s what you’re expected to do, and unlike NaNoWriMo you’re faced with a crowd of people at the end who’ll tear it to shreds.
Of course there are real-world problems with the prevalence of these MFAs. The book market is oversaturated as it is, and the review column inches aren’t getting any longer.
Before the MFA, I had nine or so years of writing in a void. It was important for me to find out if I was actually any good or not—my family and friends had their opinions, but those were only so dependable. So I immersed myself in my peer group and realized I was all right. I’m not saying this was worth the price of admission, but it was valuable nonetheless.
But did I learn how to write? At first I was naive enough to expect this. Soon, though, it became clear there was no hidden secret passed down by hooded men from Dan Brown’s imagination. Writing isn’t about knowing secrets. Yet some things can be taught, and a good professor can help you spot what not to do in your writing.
To me, teaching or learning writing is about percentages—that is, lowering the probability that you’re going to write shit. There are occasional rules, but largely it’s about practice, and a good teacher can shepherd you in a straighter line and help you to not wander down errant paths.
Which of course makes a degree program difficult to quantify. You can’t put grades on this stuff. Lousy writers who nonetheless show the desire to improve—even if there’s no physical evidence—can get fine grades.
Something you can get—but it’s not assured—is confidence. I had a few professors who convinced me that, despite my insecurities, there was some talent bubbling under the surface. And, with time, it could be cultivated into something decent.
My advice, if there’s anyone reading this who’s already decided to enter a program, is to ignore the grades and remember at all moments just how much you’re shelling out for this. Make sure the professors are earning what you’re paying—ask them what you feel you need to know.
And listen. While the professor’s assessment generally trumps what students say, listen to everyone. Just learn to translate criticisms into something you can use. If people have problems with what you’ve written, it’s usually rooted in a real flaw—but beyond that be wary. Solutions are your problem, nobody else’s.
I’m sure other people reading this have their own opinions, so let it roll in the backblog.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
To the right you’ll find a seemingly haphazard list of links that accompany all sites these days. Check them out, you might find something you like.
One of my contributions is the Institute of Official Cheer, which has been around for years, and was part of my old site. I have a feeling few people followed the link, and that’s why I’m drawing your attention to it now.
Its crowning glory is Interior Desecrations (which then became a book). Years ago, when I was in New York, a friend sent me the link and I troubled all my workmates by falling on the floor in spasms. But really, it’s all good. How can one live without the nutritional lessons of The Dayalets? Or without the fashionable pointers of The Dorcus Collection?
Visit. Please.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
The latest episode of the Budacast is up, and it’s an interesting listen. “Nearly Free” looks at press freedom in Hungary, as well as letting everyone in on what’s on the bill in Budapest for fun times. Check it out.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
a busy week, though not because of, like usual, an over-enthusiastic attempt to complete 10 projects at once. No, I’ve been resolutely focusing on one project, the last book of the Eastern European series, called The Falling Sickness.
As I’ve mentioned before, it’ll be a rather cumbersome book upwards of 1000 pages, but I’m nearing the end of the first of its three large section, titled “1986: The Leaving Party”. The next major sections will take place in 1989 and 1990. Not done, but the end of this one section is in sight.
Because of the size, each section is essentially a novel, with a beginning-middle-end, a self-contained storyline, and a conclusion of sorts. Put simply: Writing this will take the work of writing three novels.
So while I’m pleased to have made it this far, I know there’s tons of work still ahead. Which is why it was a nice encouragement today to find in the Los Angeles Times a section called “A Few of Our Favorite Books”. They “asked a number of writers about the most surprising new book they encountered in 2005.” And unexpectedly, esteemed historian, journalist and novelist David Halberstam had this to say:
This summer, I picked up a copy of “36 Yalta Boulevard” by Olen Steinhauer, a detective novel set behind the Iron Curtain. Steinhauer is a young American writer who spent time in Romania on a Fulbright listening closely to old stories of the worst of times, and he has now fashioned a precinct house all his own out of that world. What he’s created is a group of detectives, all with secrets and vulnerabilities, at work in an Eastern European country in the early 1950s, dealing with the political burden of the Stalinist years. Some of the names are Hungarian, some Polish, some Czech, and the setting feels like Budapest. His people are real, the crimes genuine, and he is telling larger truths about that era, making it unusually accessible.
A few weeks ago when I made some posts on aesthetics and entertainment v. art, I suggested that the issue of what the artwork is “saying” is of importance. Some folks at other blogs rightly pointed out that too much self-consciousness leads to polemic and hackneyed writing, but wrongly assumed I was advocating self-consciousness. I never begin a novel with an idea of a message I want to communicate—if I did, I’d write an essay.
(This is one danger of blogging—if you don’t cover all your bases, people will assume the entirety of your position has been laid out, when in fact it’s just a fragmented thought.)
With this misunderstanding in mind, I came across this interesting interview over at Frank, with Duff Brenna and David Applefield. It’s been nicely broken into thematic sections, and “The Role of Intuition” is particularly apropos.
One thing I love about writing novels is that you cannot control everything. When faced with 100,000 words, the mind balks at holding onto it all. And so, intuition, or the unconscious, necessarily takes over. At the end of a book, I’m always deliriously surprised to find connections, motifs, themes and, yes, messages, in it I was never aware of.
For example, around February I sent in the manuscript of the book that’s coming out next year. My editor’s reaction was briefly perplexed. “It’s strange,” she said, “after the previous 3 books about individuals being controlled by the political world, this one seems to be saying, The political doesn’t matter.”
This surprised me as well, so I went through it again and realized she was, as usual, exactly right. Most importantly, I realized that, in the context of the story, I believed this as well, but never realized I did. And it all fit—the book deals with seventies communism, where the political apparat had become so degenerated and sick in most countries that the “ideals” of the previous decades were just jokes. Only in the very, very last edit did I actually know what my central theme was, and made a couple small edits to focus that theme a little more.
Which then makes all this talk of aesthetics a little moot, because if intuition and unconscious pondering lead to the central themes, then how can anyone claim to understand its inner workings?
Which is then a rhetorical question, because plenty of people make careers assuring us they they do know, and know well. Why? Because there’s a market for it, budding writers want to know. When I entered graduate school I too believed that my published professors had the magic key. For exorbitant tuition fees, I could buy a key that would not only show me how to write well enough to be published, but write well enough to be remembered.
There is no key, and even if there were, I doubt anyone would know what it looked like.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
Last Sunday I emailed my agent a short novel that I wrote earlier this year and recently revised. It’s a curiosity because of its short length (35,000 words) and the fact that it’s not a crime novel at all. There’s a minor level of mystery and a few little shenanigans, but it’s focused on the emotional experiences of a set of characters over the space of a night in Budapest, everything triggered (as I’ve mentioned before) by a chance meeting in the street between an American tourist and her dead husband—who, of course, never was dead, but decided to leave his life on 9/11, as everyone would assume he was in the Towers. It’s called Disappearing Americans.
I’m interested in his reaction to it, as it’s really off the scale of anything I’ve given him before, but I know from the outset that it’ll be a tough sell. Why? Because it’s marketing thing. When you’re a published author, the industry works as quickly as possible to pigeon-hole you. I’m marketed as a “thriller writer” (with the first book I was a “mystery” writer, but the second book wouldn’t quite fit, so that had to change), and the publisher works hard to solidify my identity. Because my publisher knows the market is like a dog—it’s very conservative. Dogs like routine, they like the predictable. The market’s no different. So if a “thriller writer” produces an epic poem the size of The Cantos, there’s gonna be problems.
One interesting anomaly is Mark Haddon, whose Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time was followed in the UK by The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea—yes, a book of poetry. (The reviews have either loved its simplicity, or ridiculed its simplicity.) But Haddon, with only one mystery under his belt, could change identity pretty easily still. I’ve just turned in my 4th thriller, and wonder if it’ll be much harder for me.
On the other hand, it might not be difficult. Because the fact is, my name and its link to the word thriller is known by a relatively small group of people. I’ve not achieved Curious Incident fame, and so I imagine my market identity is still malleable. Which is why I want to strike now with something different.
Because I’d rather it be “writer” rather than something more narrow. What I’d like is for the market to expect the unexpected from me. We’ll see if it works out.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
In the Washington Post, Walter Mosley has put down his own two bits about this thing called writing, specifically writing for an audience and dealing with politics. Though he doesn’t use the word “art”, this is, to my mind, the essence of what he’s talking about. What is your writing getting at? Why should it even exist? Because the truth is that simply because novels exist doesn’t mean they should. And to try and keep everyone happy is a treacherous path. His words are worth listening to in a way that mine often aren’t.
It comes down to this: Writing novels requires an obsession with our truths. Those truths are not put into novels for witnesses but for co-conspirators. The good novelist knows that Truth is always accompanied by its silent partner: Guilt. She knows that our humanity makes us responsible for events that transpire in this world. She knows, too, that we’re not willing to accept the blame. We don’t see our culpability even though it’s our dollars being spent, our God we prefer above all others, our own image in that silvered mirror that becomes our standard for beauty and innocence. The novelist has the potential to shine light on these blind sides. But she must do it deftly, with a sharp beam. Blindside a reader, and you forfeit everything.
Although the recent entry on Amazon points out that the book won’t be released until August 2006, today I received the typeset pages for Liberation Movements, my fourth book, from the Hungarian FedEx guy—a nice young man who’s sadly a little scared of our dog. The pages look great, and I’ll have a month to go over them with the proverbial fine-toothed comb before sending them back in mid-December.
It’s funny how things like this become rote after a while, yet retain a glow all their own. This is the 4th stack of typeset pages I’ve dealt with in my life, preceded by the 4th stack of manuscript copyedits, and to be followed by the 4th ARC (advance review copy). I’m no longer floored by the experience, as I once was, but I still get a little giddy. I still treat the objects, the first day, like religious relic, weighing them with my hands and marveling at their solidity. From the mind to the real world, an amazing movement.
But then the feeling fades, because it has to. The object is not a relic, it’s just a stage in the process of creation. If the feeling stays, then the author will never be able to edit well, never be able to make the necessary changes . Personally, I only feel that with this book have I been able to separate myself completely from marveling. In the copyedited manuscript stage, I made more changes, caught more mistakes, and found more passages that were not just bad, but not good enough, than ever before.
I hope the sobriety stays with me through December.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
