In other words, be human

An unshaven man approached the podium, nervously shuffled his papers and took a deep breath. He looked out at us and admitted he had never given a keynote address before. "So, in other words, you're all busting my cherry."

Yesterday's Conversations and Connections literary conference yesterday was rather like Steve Almond's hilarious yet depressing keynote address -- filled with enthusiasm for writing and yet a little disheartening in the reminder of how hard it is to be human, particularly the weird humans that writers tend to be. A strange but ultimately inspiring combination, for if we weren't so strange and conflicted, there wouldn't be much to write about! And it was certainly exciting to discuss writing with some talented, charming people. I figured I'd share a few highlights:

- A 79-year old Greek immigrant who is a retired engineer and has written a fictionalized memoir asked me if I worked aside from writing. I said yes and he replied, "Good. You have to go out and live." I thought that was a nice reminder, if not universally applicable.

- Give yourself a break and be kind to yourself. As Steve Almond put it, "Set the bar a little lower." You don't have to be a superstar to be a success - making good decisions about your writing is hard enough.

- With regard to point of view in a story, once you as the author have established it, get out of the way. No need to say, "she thought" or "she remembered" because the reader is already with that character.

- A quote from Steve Almond's book, "This Won't Take But a Minute Honey," which is really cool and he only sells in person:

... Readers are drawn to stories not because of your dazzling prose, but because they wish to immerse themselves in a world of danger. More precisely, in the heart of a particular character on the brink of emotional tumult. It doesn't especially matter what your heroine cares about, as long as she cares a lot.

- Oh, and for goodness sake, follow directions when submitting to literary magazines. Editors are human too and with all the demands on their time they can use all the kindness we can give, starting with accomodating their individual submission systems.

I bought The Calligrapher's Daughter at the conference yesterday because the author, Eugenia Kim, is a local and was participating in a panel. I'm excited to read it!

Good news!

First bit of good news - I'm going to have a story published! The kind people at the Silk Road Review have accepted my bribe, er, story and I expect it'll be in their Summer/Autumn issue. I learned about this just a week or so before one of my writing partners found out a poem of hers will be published, so I think there's something in the air! (By the way, the Silk Road Review is having a Flash Fiction Contest so anyone interested in winning $500, check it out!)

Second bit of good news - tomorrow is the Conversations and Connections literary conference here in DC. I've heard that it's a fun group of people and I'm really looking forward to mingling with writers and learning!

Anyone else have good or exciting news?

On wanting to like the narrator

To label someone an "unreliable narrator" is, in a certain sense, to understand that the narrator is human and neither omniscent nor objective. Unreliable narrators run the gamut - from the charming but mischevious Huck Finn to any number of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's old, lacivious men. Often unreliable narrators display a crucial human flaw in their unreliability, be it pride or shame or incurable optimism. I love how fiction shows humanity in its rich complexity and so I like narrators that aren't afraid to show their bias.

But it gets complicated when the person narrating is completely despicable or utterly detached from reality. Hubert Hubert in Lolita was pretty appalling but he works hard to make us like him, or at least understand. The books I've been reading lately, however, don't even try. One is about a rat who reads literature and loves books more than food. Sounds like a good premise, right? Except that he's so insecure about being a rat that he is constantly whining and completely pretentious. Not someone I want to spend 200 pages with. So I put that book down and tried another, one I had high hopes for. But that narrator turned out to be completely, off-the-wall insane, without the advantage of realizing it. Why should I want to read the narrative of a crazy person, why spend my time sifting through his madness to find what's relevant and what's not? I know some people think we should be able to learn from narrators we can't stand and I'm willing to admit that that's true. I am certain I could learn something about humanity by spending time listening to the unhinged rants of the mentally ill. But neither exercise sounds pleasant so I'm going to pass.

Which means that I am in a really dry spell for books! I'm dying for a sink-right-in-and-immerse-yourself-so-you-never-want-to-take-a-breath book. Any suggestions?? A historical epic would be wonderful, for example.

The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds

In the mid-19th century a middle-aged poet was consigned to a progressive mental institute just outside London. The man, known as The Peasant Poet, believed he had two wives and alternated his delusions of having other identities (like Byron and Shakespeare) with moments of piercing, brutal clarity. John Clare suffered greatly in an era when mental health treatment had progressed little beyond the releasing of "humors," even in Matthew Allen's relatively progressive institue.

This institute, nestled in a forest shimmering with Midsummer Night's Dream dew, is home to a number of other tortured souls, a count soon increased by the arrival of Alfred Tennyson, who stays on the property to support his depresssed brother. Clare, Tennyson, Dr. Allen, his daughters, and the other inmates struggle to reconcile their inner worlds with the harsh reality of a changing, modern life, one that lies both beyond and within their enchanted forest.

The Quickening Maze does not have a plot, so to speak, but draws its strength from the trials of its fascinating characters and the questions about life that they raise. It is a book in which very little is explicit, even the settings and the characters, but it manages to be quite haunting. This would be an excellent choice for a book club -- it raises questions about poetry, love, mental health, modernity, craftmanship, and, most poignantly, the constant tragedy that comes from human yearning. I wouldn't say I loved it, as the writing was too impressionistic for the book to seize onto me, but it was definitely interesting. Has anyone else read it?

A 79-year-old's "Confessions of a Young Novelist"

Umberto Eco, let's admit, is a bit quirky so I guess he can get away with calling himself a young novelist at age 79. The man has a tremendous imagination and idiosyncratic intellect, as any reader of his novels can tell you. He has recently published Confessions of a Young Novelist, a set of four essays about writing and/or fiction. It is an engaging and stimulating work and I recommend it. One of the highlights for me came right at the beginning and, in the interest of spreading the joy, I'm going to quote it.

When interviewers ask me, "How did you write your novels?" I usually cut short this line of questioning and reply, "From left to right." I realize that this is not a satisfactory answer, and that it can produce some astonishment in Arab countries and Israel.

Now I have time for a more detailed response. In the course of writing my first novel, I learned a few things. First, "inspiration" is a bad word that tricky authors use in order to seem artistically respectable. As the old adage goes, genius is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspriation. It is said that the French poet Lamartine often described the circumstances in which he had written one of his best poems: he claimed it had come to him fully formed in a sudden illumination, one night when he was wandering through the woods. After his death, somebody found in his study an impressive number of versions of that poem, which he had written and rewritten over the course of years.

Eco later talks about the preparatory work he did for his novels, including drawing a precise map of the monastary where In the Name of the Rose takes place, and sketching out the faces of the characters in The Island of the Day Before. (He also traveled to the South Pacific and spent days learning about the oceans and the night sky on one of those islands - obviously a research technique better suited to an author who has earned money from previous books.) For Foucalt's Pendulm he spent evening after evening wandering the museum where much of the action takes place and then walking Paris streets at night. The result is a verisimiltude that has earned the awe of legions of obsessive fans.

I love books rich in learning, observation and thought. I am extremely wary of books written quickly - Eco's quickest writing was two years, for In the Name of the Rose, since he could rely upon a lifetime of medieval research. (That's one reason I've never been even remotely interested in participating in NaNoWriMo, although dear friends have convinced me that it has its place.) Do you think you can tell the difference between a novel written on the fly and one that took its author years to plough through? Do you have a preference?

The downside of self-publishing for a reader

A friend of our family published a book last year. In the spirit of solidarity, I bought a copy and read it. The first warning light went off before the opening paragraph - the book opened with acknowledgements. Ok, unconventional, but fine. No mention of an agent. Ok, maybe I just couldn't pick out the agent's name, or maybe the author sold directly to the publisher.

Within pages I could tell that this was not prose that would have passed muster with my writing group. Too many commas, too many adverbs, and, most damningly, too many fluctuating emotions on the same page, paragraph, or even (the horror!) sentence. I read about 50 pages before loyalty could compel me no further. And I was grumpy all that morning about the wasted time - time I much would have rather spent reading a good book. I found out later that day that the book was, effectively, self-published.

Obviously readers often find books they're disappointed with. But I think the vetting service provided by agents and publishers often - not always - helps narrow the field. I recognize that there are exceptions and that some self-published works are quite good, while many (many!) traditionally published books are horrible. But as the floodgates open, how is a reader to defend herself and her precious time? I sure hope interpid book bloggers more brave than myself will do some winnowing and recommending for the rest of us.

Useful Writing

The Washingtonian Magazine's recent issue includes a lovely interview with author/journalist/teacher/grandfather Roger Rosenblatt. It's clear from the interview that not only does Rosenblatt have an impressive resume but he also has a thoughtful and kind heart. The interview is worth reading if you can get your paws on it (the Washingtonian only posts content after its subsequent issue hits newstands), but in the meantime I'll take the liberty of quoting one bit.

[The Washingtonian] Your writing book ends with a letter you sent to your students. In it you say, "For writing to be great ... it must be useful to the world." Can you talk about that?

By "useful" I don't really mean practically useful, although I'm sure there are practical applications. There are only four reasons for writing that I can think of. I didn't put this in the book, but I've thought about it since.

First, writing makes suffering endurable, and it does this by making it beautiful. Marsha Norman writes 'Night, Mother about suicide. That play is unrelenting in its sadness, and it ends in suicide. Someone might say, "Why do this?" The answer is because art made it endurable, made it beautiful.

Second, writing makes evil intelligible. If we ever think evil is beyond our capability, we're kidding ourselves. Look at Iago -- Othello's sort of a stiff, but Iago's the one we really remember. If you know that evil is intelligible, that anyone is capable of it, then you can make moral use of that.

Third, writing makes justice desirable. I can't imagine anything more important to you, me, or any people we know and like than justice or injustice. Every time there's an injustice, your fists clench. The Winslow Boy fights England, and when that barrister's motto, "Let right be done," is said, tears well up and it's just wonderful.

Finally, writing makes love possible. All these things--suffering, injustice, and evil--one can still love above these things, love the animals we are and wish them well. That to me is the sublime use of writing.

What more is there to say than that? Rosenblatt's book about writing Unless it Moves the Human Heart just moved to the top of my wishlist. Check it out!