The Magic Bauble

Over the last month or so, since finishing the rough draft of the last book of the series (now officially titled Victory Square), I’ve been struggling to conceptualize the next novel, about which I’ve only been sure of one thing: it’s gonna be a spy novel. A lot of writers are able to go with this, and simply start writing (and I’ve tried that too), but it’s become clear to me that I’m a formalist when it comes to writing.



By this, I mean that, before writing in earnest, I need to have an idea of what shape the book will have. Will it be long or short? Will it be part of a series? Multiple perspectives? Heavy, or light, or even satirical? Will it read as a single continual tale, or be told in episodes? It doesn’t matter if my original concept is what I end up with (it seldom is)—I just need a reason to get excited, which gets my ass in gear.



Sometimes, I feel I’ve answered a few of these questions, and so I start writing, only to learn, some days and many words later, that I didn’t get it right. (I’ve probably written about 300 pages by now, all of which have been tossed aside.) And by “right”, I mean something that’s both interesting and original. So I pull back and return to pondering. This isn’t necessarily the best way to write, but we all develop our habits over time, and become dependent on them. It’s just the way it is.



Among my circle of friends here in Budapest are a lot journalists, and it’s often said that every journalist wants to be a thriller writer. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s true of many that I’ve met. We often talk about writing thrillers, coming up with plots surrounding some earth-shattering wicked conspiracy, or some earth-shaking invention that some people want to get hold of. And though my have stories rarely dealt with such “big” storylines, the conversations have started to sink into my brain.

The focus of these conversations always surrounds what that earth-shattering thing is. Fellow Nomad Robin once called it “the magic bauble”, the thing around which all the suspense and death revolves. We can call it “the stakes”, and in contemporary thrillers, there’s the assumption that the stakes must be huge.



Back to me: In various incarnations of my many pages so far, I’ve been dealing with this idea, that the underlying plot must be something that either makes the planet quiver, or at least means the death of large numbers of people. Which is one reason I keep tearing up pages. And why, now, I seem to have turned a corner.



Largely it’s the result of frustration, but I’m starting to think that the big stakes, no matter what they are, all look the same. Nuclear bomb? Yeah, okay. Poisoned water supply to a metropolis? Sure. Terrorist uprising? Of course. A new energy source that the oil companies want to keep quiet? Why not? But all these magic baubles are beginning to feel about the same to me. We’re dealing with fiction, after all, and we know that whatever disaster occurs will end by the end of the book. We know that the magic bauble is only there to keep things running along.



So I find myself moving in the opposite direction. I’ve recently become interested in an old television program (no surprise for those of you tired of my television talk!), Danger Man (in the US: Secret Agent), starring Patrick McGoohan (before his seminal series, The Prisoner). It’s “the thinking man’s Bond” in one way, but it’s also James Bond without all that pretense. Rarely is McGoohan’s agent, John Drake, saving the world. In the half-hour episodes of the first season (it went to a full hour afterwards), he sometimes finds himself in some pseudonymous Middle Eastern or Eastern European country, saving someone from assassination. But often it’s not even as sensational as that.

in absentia



















Friar Wignall

Triffids!

Last night I caught the three episodes of the 1981 BBC dramatization of John Wyndham’s apocalyptic novel, The Day of the Triffids (1951). It’s hard to give a summary of the story without feeling you’re giving something away, but I can at least identify the “triffids” of the title:

Triffids are very strange fictional plants, capable of rudimentary animal-like behaviour: they are able to uproot themselves and walk, possess a deadly whip-like poisonous sting, and may even have the ability to communicate with each other.

Day of the Triffids



BlindnessJose SaramagoTriffids



The Stand



Triffids

It Ain't You, Babe

I came across this rather bleak article (PDF) published in the Quill & Quire by Denise Bukowski of the Bukowski Agency in Toronto. It’s called “Why Your Novel Isn’t Selling”, and just gets worse from there.

We used to say at the Bukowski Agency that we look for writers who have the potential to make a living from their fiction. Not any more. Now we tell our authors to make sure that they have income from other sources: non-fiction books, scriptwriting, journalism, teaching.

There has been a sea change in the fiction marketplace, and understanding it requires an international perspective. To give you two examples:



Fact : Foreign rights to American novelist Edward P. Jones’s bestseller The Known World, which last year won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, were not sold until after it had won those awards.



Fact: U.K. star Andrea Levy’s Small Island, which not only won the Orange Prize but also was recently declared “The Best of the Best” of the first 10 years of the prize, was turned down all over New York; Picador finally picked it up for a pittance as a paperback original, after it won the prize.

How to Disappear Completely

There are many mid-list, mid-career American novelists whose latest manuscripts are wandering around New York homeless.

Besides the U.S. and the U.K., Germany used to be the third major market for fiction, but now German publishers buy virtually no new authors. The German economy has been in a tailspin, and publishers have folded or amalgamated. One German editor told me he has been buying only the new books by his already-successful foreign authors for years now; he dares not risk a new author. At Frankfurt last year [2004], German literary editors failed to show up for their meetings with agents because they had been told to buy nothing.

Novelists I tell these things to do not want to hear them, so they protest, “But isn’t it cyclical?” Economies are cyclical, so those factors in the U.S. and Germany that are dragging their respective economies down, and the book market along with it, will surely, some day, improve. But what do we do about that one ubiquitous chain that dominates the British market and is beginning to dictate publishers’ lists? That’s not cyclical. What do we do about a popular culture where the market for SUVs (until recently, anyway) and computers and $100 running shoes and all kinds of fancy electronics and entertainment and communication gizmos seems to be unlimited, but the book market is stagnating? Pottery Barn is full of customers every day, and so is Holt Renfrew. That’s not cyclical.



[…] So, it really ain’t you, babe: you are still the wonderful writer you were last time around. Don’t take it personally if your new novel is not published in 63 languages like Harry Potter. If it is being published in Canada by a mainstream house, that is validation enough. But it definitely won’t pay the rent.

Alum Profiling

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been hearing more from my grad school, Emerson College, than I’ve heard in the previous seven years. Before, I got the occasional email asking me to become part of their alumni group, and, never much of a joiner, I always kept my distance. (And since I still owe a crippling amount for that education, the idea of donating to the alumni organization seemed a little much.)



For whatever reason, the preliminary reviews of my fourth book caught their eye, so now I’m giving them a story to use in their alumni magazine, and I’ve just sent in the answers to an “alumni profile” the school will use to advertise themselves to potential students.



Answering the questions on the profile got me thinking again about that whole educational experience. I got an MFA in creative writing, and though the degree itself—that is, the piece of paper—never did me any good (and some harm, I suppose, given the debt), the actual classes, and working with some excellent writers, really were important to me. And this, of course, is what the profile wanted to know about. How did the school help, and how were its lessons important in your career?



A lot of things are bandied about concerning MFA programs, some of them true, some not. Sure, there’s a tendency for those programs, by their group-critique format, to produce a monotone, safe style of writing. And yes, they are often outrageously expensive. But as I wrote my answers, I started to recall just how wonderful it was for me, at that point in my life, to have some major writers (Gail Mazur, Andre Dubus III, Christopher Tilghman, to name a few) treat me as if I were someone to be taken seriously.



I went to grad school with many questions, but probably the central one was: Am I any good? I learned I was good, and I learned I needed to get better if I wanted to be published. I learned there were no magic tricks involved, just a lot of hard work.



To say the program “taught me writing” is of course overstating the issue. I knew how to write; I just didn’t know how use my skills to hone the writing I was doing. In other words, I didn’t know how to make myself learn to write better. My self-critiquing skills were terribly underdeveloped.



I can’t quantify the amount I learned over those two years, but I do know that I emerged from the program (going soon afterward to Romania on a Fulbright grant), with the conviction that there was hope. An added layer of confidence covered me, and I knew that, given enough time and effort, I’d make it.



As I also mentioned in the profile, the life I have now is not what I imagined when I left Emerson. This is true in many ways. What I imagined—what I think most reasonable people would imagine—was a life of teaching (the only job that degree could actually earn me) and publishing the occasional book when time allowed. What I never imagined was that I’d never actually teach, and instead beat around the world with library jobs (a wonderful career if you can get it, by the way) and then move full-time into novel writing. While it was always a dream, it was never really a possibility.



Part of this is due to the fact that I don’t write the kinds of stories I imagined I’d be writing. In grad school, I didn’t read, or write, anything approaching genre fiction. We didn’t study it in class, focusing instead on purely literary works. And so, by example, I that was all I wrote, and was convinced that was all I’d ever write. Was there some snobbery inherent in my conviction? Certainly. But what I didn’t know then was that, a few years later, while shaving one morning, I’d have a moment of realization.



Over the previous years, I’d written lots of stories and a few novels and sent them all home. My mom would read them and give her comments, but I never heard anything from my dad. So I cornered him once and asked what he thought of the stories, and he admitted that he didn’t read them. He tried, he said, but after a few pages would give up. No insult meant, but they just weren’t his kinds of stories.



So, shaving, I mulled over this frustrating situation, and decided that it was time to try to write something that even my dad would read. And so I gave crime a try. And one thing led to another.

Could I have reached this point without the expense of an MFA? Probably. But I do think that it would have taken much longer. An MFA is more like an acceleration of learning, two years in which your sole occupation is learning the craft. Some learn more, and some learn less, and the difference between the two has less to do with the school than the student’s level of commitment.



It’s possible I’m wrong, and that things would’ve ended up about the same without the program. But I have no way of replaying my life without it, and so I have no regrets. I even have some good memories. And who knows? Maybe some day I’ll find myself teaching students who are a lot like I was at that age, young writers who just need a little encouragement, an occasional rap on the knuckles, and a little respect to help them become what they truly want to be.

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)

Tech Note: New Theme

If you scroll down to the bottom of the right-hand margin, you’ll find a new link called “Beta Theme”. Click that, and it’ll take you to a mostly blank screen telling you to follow another link. Click that, and you’ll end up at the new template I’ve been working on. It looks kind of like this:

First Novels

Over at Bookforum there’s an interesting piece called “The First Novel” by Craig Seligman, looking at first novels by such luminaries as Faulkner, Burroughs, George Eliot, and more, with personal reflections on the idea of the “first novel” by John Banville, William Gass, and others. While most prefer the definition that points at one’s first published novel, I prefer Jonathan Lethem’s recounting of the one he wrote when he was fifteen. Now, that’s a first novel.



I was 19 when I decided, wholeheartedly, to become a writer. A bit of luck, that, and it was spurred by my reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (I know, a little too appropriate to be believable, but it’s true.) I’d written stories and poems at younger ages, but never with the aim of becoming professional. Now, it was different. Though I immediately set to writing, starting with a (terrible) Waiting For Godot rip-off play, I didn’t write my first novel until I was 21.



Fifteen years later, I’m trying to remember it. The overblown title was The Elementals And Their Dreams. (Yeah, I know…I was 21, okay?) It concerned a friend-triangle, a straight couple and their gay artist friend, and a book that, when read, drives people insane. (Or was it a movie? I’m honestly not sure anymore…I don’t recall where the manuscript is.)



Though it’s a slim book—probably less than 40,000 words—it was full of dream sequences and set pieces. At some point, the artist, having gone insane by reading (or watching) the dangerous art, commits suicide by self-crucifixion in a gallery. (Something that, at 21, struck me as a shocking and powerful statement, but now seems childish.) And though I can’t be sure, I have a feeling all the characters except the woman end up dead. (I really need to track it down.)



Oh yeah, it also includes flashbacks to the Holocaust.



I did try to submit the novel for publication, and received (if memory serves) three rejections before deciding that it probably wasn’t worth publishing anyway. I’d typed it up on a Brother word processor, which had a detachable keyboard and a four-inch screen and printed everything like a typewriter. I took those pages, went to the Kinko’s of the day, and had it bound with gray covers. Two copies. One, I signed and gave away to an ex-girlfriend who admitted to liking the book. The other, perhaps, is in some box around here.



Though it wasn’t a published first (thank God), it was a “first”, and it made the second (a horrible book I wrote one grad school summer, years later) easier to do, and the third (the unpublished opus on the Romanian Revolution) easier as well. Once I’d finished Elementals, I knew I could write something of some length, and it freed me up to stop being amazed by mounting page-counts, and to think instead of story. It was a start, and in that way it was a very good first.



Any interesting “first” stories out there?

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)

Spametry

My Yahoo! bulk folder seldom gives me much more than suggestions that I should “enhance” various things, and pieces of remarkable insider stock information. Today I was surprised to find that the fine people at the unreachable address “paperbagwomen.info” had sent me some cut & paste Dadaist poetry.

Keep called been may different our because that country.

Around room just show.

Keep other between heard will too who first before following.

Another we time began being old.

Knew looked are right.

Sea tell until part.



Been have told me need hand would into mr too.

A go himself heard then took.

Best have like far where we people been miles play.

Part small so has look often few why people.

Until under live learn five animals together.



Keep what why we.

Only come hand way keep place will why.

With last and high keep set.

Only after we help me a with might.

Answer well where big being again.

These make many say play.

Live page above saw say live she.



Have came high she learn.

Feet take make read.

His page find night began about miles things hard.

Said that see well him.

Near where right three several made same year men we.

If big way parts.



Then left of next.

Near get against part earth many way.

Best new that them there can last her school between.

When father made been.

If want day parts people.

Far next have head called had.

Days people men say.

Grass Roots

Over the last weeks, Günter Grass’s admission of having briefly been in the Waffen SS (that is, a part of the SS that didn’t run concentration camps) has been plaguing him all over the world. I personally don’t have a problem with it.



Grass, like innumerable men of his generation, has hidden a shameful part of his life, hoping that it wouldn’t return to bite him. Of course, Grass gets more grief, seeing as he’s built his reputation upon being Germany’s moral voice (getting Germans to face up to their Nazi past), and yes, that makes him a hypocrite. But I still can’t feel very bothered by it.



Partly it’s because I see a writer’s works as separate from the writer. Some real shits have written some wonderful books, and those books have gone on to do wonderful things. Grass’s role in postwar Germany was good for the country and German culture as a whole.



But the other reason I’m not bothered by it is more disturbing.



In my lifetime (or at least the part where I was paying attention), fiction writers have never struck me as all that important. Their works, yes (well, sometimes), but not them as people. The age of the writer as a political force seems to have vanished into the nostalgic haze, and I’m not sure people of my generation listen to anything they say.



This came up before when Pinter made some vocal criticisms of US and UK foreign policy while accepting the Nobel Prize. Now, thinking on what a major political as well as moral voice Grass was in his time, I feel again as I did then. When Grass spoke in the sixties, people listened and took note. When Pinter shouts in the present, it gets some airtime, a tempest in a teapot, and then fades away.



When I wrote on Pinter’s statement, I was preoccupied—I think erroneously—on the artist-as-politicians model, which I don’t think is a particularly good thing. What I was forgetting, and what I’m re-remembering now, is that being a moral force in society is simply that. Speaking about moral complexities and ambiguities through your writing, sometimes into a microphone, and letting others figure out the policy side of it.



In Grass’s time, it was different. Writers and artists could speak directly about policy issues, back certain parties, march in demonstrations, and (unless my memory’s nostalgic) it had an effect. These days, though, it seems that all that’s left to us is speaking in abstracts, through fables and metaphor. Indirectly.



And when we speak directly, we’re “kooky”, or as ridiculous as a bunch of Hollywood actors throwing a tantrum about…well, whatever.



I may be wrong about this, and if I am let me know. Bring up some examples—in the English-speaking world, please (South America still gives its writers a public voice)—of the direct action of writers having more effect than a momentary column-inch in the newspaper. Hopefully I am wrong.



But I don’t think I am.

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)

The First Reviews

Numbers Say A Lot