January 31, 2010

100 Things About A Novel, Pt. 2

Katie Price, promoting her new 'novel', "Sapphire", shows us one future for authorship and novel promotions in this new publishing era.

[Note: Part 1 is here.]

25. Novels are hard, not like diamonds but like fate, the choice you make that reveals it was never a choice at all.

26. Then it is the novel as jailer. You in a small dark room with no answers to any of your questions and no one seems to hear your pleas, not for for days, months, years. Indifferent the entire time to all requests for visits or freedom. Hard labor too.

27. Or novels can be Champagne Charlies. The limo pulls up, there’s cash, a stocked bar and an entourage. A boyfriend/girlfriend you haven’t met already mad at you for not calling enough, arms crossed, pretty face steamed.

28. Or it is the Fugitive, arrives at night through an open window. Not quite a dream, it carries a work order signed by the president of your own dream factory. You strain to recognize your handwriting.

29. As the work proceeds, the factory is near the roads leading back and forth to the jails and the Champagne Charlies can be seen headed in and out. Sometimes it is clear that the prisoners and the party are trading places (the entourage fits in the cell). Sometimes not.

30. The Fugitive leans at the window, watches, has guessed the limo and the cell are the same.

31. Or it is a Lover. It is impatient, it wants you to know everything. And it won’t stop until it’s done. Factory, cell, limo, it doesn’t matter where you are or with who: the conversation will not stop. It is not endless but is long, it is longer than the writer can contain, and so it gets written down and is born that way.

32. This being because a novel is a thought that is too long to fit in your head all at once until after it is written or read.

33. It is not shorter then. Your hats still fit. But inside you there’s more room.

34. Think of a dream with the outer surface of a storm and the inside like the surface of your days as you have sometimes found them. The novel being the only way to lead anyone to the entrance of those days.

35. Or it is a stranger on the street, walking up to you, grabbing you by the lapel and walking away with you quickly, with passports, money. You fall in love as you leave immediately, together.

36. The novel coming not from the mind but the heart, which is why it cannot fit in your head. Why, when you hear it, it seems to be singing from somewhere just out of your sight, always.

37. Meanwhile, or the duration of the novel your heart can believe it is a liberator. You will not deny it this belief as you do at other times in your life because you are distracted by the story. It is why you love novels more than you think you do when you read them.

38. You discover you are in love with the unmet ending—or rather, you long for it. It is the radio station that plays from your radio only when it is in this one corner of the room, which is to say, at the center of your chest.

39. The heart’s ruse is nearly over. This entire time, it has convinced the novel it was only following along.

40. This entire time the game it has played with the novel was like the date that begins with love’s possibility but ends with the memory of the other, the one you lost or who lost you and who you fooled yourself into thinking was gone from your heart forever, but instead put on a mask, that of the stranger who you kiss against the wall in the street at night.

41. Of course a novel is also a mask.

42. Not for the novelist. Not for the reader. But for something else the novelist brings in from the back of the tent like a lion on a chain.

42. Do not notice the slashes in the novelist’s shirt, the welts along the arms and legs. Do not try and decipher them. If the lighting is right you will see them only when you have the chain in your hands and you are ready to let go. You will remember then. The cuts will make you try to imagine what the novelist went through. This is also a fiction but you will not write it down and it will leave on the wake of the next thought you have.

43. Unless of course you are also a novelist and then it is sometimes your next novel. You wake to realize you are in the back of the tent.

3 Comments

Filed under novels, travel, what I am working on, writers, writing

Tags:

January 22, 2010

100 Things About A Novel, Pt. 1

  1. Sometimes music is needed.
  2. Sometimes silence.
  3. This is probably because a novel is a piece of music, like all written things, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it.
  4. Sometimes I have written them on subways, missing stops, like people do when reading.
  5. It begins for me usually with the implications of a situation. A person who is like this in a place that is like this, an integer set into the heart of an equation and new values, everywhere.
  6. The person and situation arrive together, typically. I am standing somewhere and watch as both appear, move towards each other and transform.
  7. If you still don’t understand me, think of how you think differently of Clark Kent once you see him run into the phone booth and change into Superman.
  8. It is like having imaginary friends that are the length of city blocks. The pages you write are like fingerprinting them, done to prove to strangers they exist.
  9. Reading a novel successfully is then the miracle of being shown such a fingerprint and being able to guess the face, the way she walks, the times she fell in love incorrectly or to bad result, etc.
  10. The written novel in the hand tries to be the most precise analogy the writer can make as to what was seen in the rooms and trains and skies and summer nights and parties where the novel was written, as the writer walked in moments with the enormous imaginary friend, before returning to the others. Keep reading →

18 Comments

Filed under fiction, novels

Tags: , ,

January 8, 2010

January 8th, 2010

1.

In a thread on Darcy Cosper’s facebook page, I learn that the New York Times forbids writing in the present tense, as it is technically a fiction, even when used in the presentation of nonfiction.

2.

A hand-tinted stereograph of the Tuileries Palace, during the 2nd Empire

My old friend Gerard Koskovich, the historian and archivist, was shopping the yard sale of a young woman who’s mother had just died. The mother had a life-long interest in photography, and the value of it—and of her possessions—was lost on the daughter, who sold her pictures for nothing, including 6 hand-colored photographs of the interiors of the Tuileries Palace, destroyed by angry rioters during the Commune.

When you walk out into the Tuileries gardens from the Louvre palace, if you look left and write as you pass the wings to either side, you are walking through the footprint of the old palace. Which is where a good deal of my 2nd novel, The Queen of the Night, is set.

One of the challenges in writing this book has been that much of what I would want to see doesn’t exist anymore. Gerard’s photos come into my hands after I’ve already spent years trying to imagine what it was like, through reading memoirs and novels from the period, looking at any existing photos, tracking down architectural plans. So when I find them, they are more like the confirmation of a hunch than a revelation, beautiful as they are.

So that is what that lamp looks like, I think, as I sit in Gerard’s red velvet visitor chair and turn it in my hands. We speak of some other things, related to one of the novel’s minor but still important characters, and then I thank him and leave.

3.

I’m reading Robert McKee’s Story as I think about writing a screenplay. In it, he says something perfect about research and cliché. If you don’t do your research, he says, you lose your ability to be original–you won’t have any ideas, and so your brain will pick up things it remembers from other things you’ve seen—your lack of research will make you a kind of thief. As I read it, I realize it wasn’t what I thought about my research at all, but I can see, immediately, the truth of it. My first novel was drawn autobiographically, the second, not at all, but both required a great deal of research.

You may think you know your home town, Annie Dillard used to say in class. But chances are you don’t. What is the main industry? When was it founded? The population? What are the plants, throughout the seasons? She was speaking of the importance of researching even memoir.

4.

Happy New Year to my readers here. 2009 was a great year for this blog and for me. Here’s to 2010. To celebrate, I’m taking blog post requests in the comments.

22 Comments

Filed under author's own, fiction, letters to you, novels

December 18, 2009

The Mis-Education (Perhaps) of Louis Menand – When to Get Your MFA or Not, part 3

[This is the conclusion, part 3 of a series, When to Get Your MFA. Or Not]

Ford Madox Ford and James Conrad wrote novels together, shared work and talked theories of fiction writing.

There are skeptics as to the value of a MFA in writing, much less the teaching of writing, and some are not where you might think. I remember a few years ago standing in the parking lot outside of the Wesleyan English department one night, in conversation with a colleague who was also a former mentor, from when I was an undergraduate there (Wesleyan is my alma mater), when he said “You can really do this.” He looked shocked.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Teach writing,” he said.

When I pressed him, he admitted to having been skeptical to the idea it could be taught.

One reason for this distrust is partly that as writers, our palette is language, which belongs to us all. And so everyone feels, and this includes English professors, that if they were to really concentrate, just sit down and really try, they could do what we do. And they certainly believe, in those moments, they can do it without the benefit of a teacher.

I thought of this last spring, reading Louis Menand’s assault on MFA programs in a review of Mark McGurl’s book The Program Era in the New Yorker. Menand begins the review with a blistering first paragraph full of mistaken information mixed to create a hypothetical straw-man of a workshop that doesn’t exist anywhere, if it ever did (I have not read The Program Era, to be clear, just the excerpt available at the publisher’s site). My background: 9 classes in creative writing as an undergrad and then a graduate student, and 13 years of teaching, inform me when I tell you, this class, to my knowledge, has never existed as he describes it, at the graduate level (and that is what he implies).

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers. People who take creative-writing workshops get course credit and can, ultimately, receive an academic degree in the subject; but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon) and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.

By the last paragraph, he contradicts his lead, certainly–we are initially told the teacher is an unpublished one–but by the end, we are given either-or scenarios. We are told of a theory that is at the core of all writing workshops, and yet there is no history of the theory mentioned, no name as to whose theory this is. This is the method of a political slander, and it is also bad journalism. Menand is better than this, for sure.  Keep reading →

18 Comments

Filed under MFA programs, writers, writing

Tags: ,

December 13, 2009

Generation Born in 80s Now Performs 80s

Rifle Men (above) are on the label that brought us MGMT, Cantora Records.

I’m at the Book Mill with my friend Melanie Fallon, on a writing date. It’s going well. A beautiful brown lab dog is periodically walking through and making friends. Some people are using outside voice inside, though. Not great. I think of them as lonely–it isn’t enough for the people in front of them to hear them.

On the way here we talked about the 80s so much that we missed our exit and drove too far. But in the process, we concluded the 80s aesthetic that is so popular is a nostalgia for the period when Americans believed we’d won the Cold War, Capitalism had defeated Communism and we were safe from our greatest enemies. An addictive mix, despite the emergence of AIDS and the first Gulf War.

The conversation was an extension of one I’d had with my friend Teddy O’Connor at the home of Sabina Murray and John Hennessy. Teddy showed us the above video after dinner, and we all talked at length about how perfectly his generation, born in the 80s, performs the 80s.

This all feels a little eerie now. But I still like this song. The video of course references the popular aerobics classes in Williamsburg now.

Returning with part 3 of the MFA series shortly.

7 Comments

Filed under dance break

Tags:

December 6, 2009

When to Get Your MFA. Or Not. [Part 2]


What I imagined, back then, all of Iowa would look like.

[In last week's installment, I detailed my undoubtedly flawed if also successful plan to apply to MFA programs. This week, how I made my decision to go, and some advice.]

Connie’s point, that I would just have to get a job once I got out of the program, made me think, but I had instantly understood she was being responsible to me, even as she offered me what I thought of as the chance of a lifetime. And once I got to Iowa and saw how many people there had, like myself, packed up their lives and left, and the various problems–financial, marital, etc., that can occur as a result–did I understand why she offered this caveat.

I had the kind of job I would try to get once I got out, in other words. Did I want to give it up?

To be clear, I was not just surprised to get in, I was shocked. I had applied with a chip on my shoulder, sending a story about a clairvoyant adopted Korean high school student in a coven. He worked with the police to find lost children. The story was filled with explicit gay sex, witchcraft and psychic powers and there was even a scene where he was possessed by a ghost. It was a mash-up homage to many of the books I’d read as a kid, and to my strange high school friends. I expected to be told, No thanks. I had even said to people, “I just want them to know what kind of freak I really am”, and we’d all laugh nervously and I would think, There is no way this freak is going to get in there.

And to that freak, they said, not only yes, but, Yes, and here’s some money. Come if you can.

Why did I do this, or think like this? Well, I didn’t believe people like me got into that program and I was acting out my resentment to the standards I imagined for them–a fairly youthful thing to do, though, this practice of making up answers for other people and then having vituperative reactions to them is an increasingly American mode, no matter your age or profession. And there wasn’t one Korean American openly gay writer I could think of–my Wesleyan professor Kit Reed even said, “If you move quickly, you’ll be the first.” And I now I am.

I was and am making it up as I went along. I don’t have a role model, per se. I am living this life off-menu.

But of course, you have to go because it is right for you, and not for any other reason. I liked my life back then and didn’t want to leave it: I had friends, a serious boyfriend, a shared apartment in Fort Greene I could easily afford, living with a painter and his beautiful pitbull mix dog, who sat at my feet while I typed on my typewriter and was too gentle even to chase the mouse that would sometimes appear near the stove. But the days of sitting and typing with the dog had become pretty few and far between under the weight of a 70hr-a-week job at OUT.

When I listened to my fears about going, they told me I feared vanishing if I went to Iowa. That I would go and my friends would forget me, my boyfriend break up with me (he had not gotten into Iowa), my nascent magazine career blowing in the prairie wind.

But I was tired already of writing to house style–it felt like ventriloquism, not writing. And I had other fears talking to me: I didn’t want to be another gay man in New York with a job he sort of liked in an apartment he sort of liked, waiting for the chance to trade up–living like that seemed like no life at all, but I knew a lot of people like this. Yes, I was doing work I loved and felt strongly about politically, with some excellent people, and startups can feel like an adventure, when they don’t feel like working for too little money and no health insurance. But I wasn’t getting any writing done. And worse, after I got off the phone with Connie, to my surprise, my boss told me I was in line to be promoted, made, perhaps, managing editor in a few months.

A job I would have been terrible at, because back then the last job I wanted was one that involved going around to make sure everyone’s work was done. And yet of course, it would mean prestige, and so it was tempting. Most of the best mistakes are.

I ran into an author friend as I tried out the idea of going. “Iowa?” she said. “Everyone is so competitive there, though.” Keep reading →

49 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

November 25, 2009

When to Get Your MFA. Or Not.

995 miles from Iowa to New York doesn't really describe the distance.

This came in via email last night from a reader, and I was actually writing a post to address this.

Q: I am debating applying to MFA programs but am not sure how worthwhile they are.  What made you decide to get your MFA?  I’ve heard some complain that MFA’s didn’t improve their writing while other writers said they wanted the degree purely so they could teach.  The programs are expensive and time-consuming, and I’m not even sure I want to teach, yet I would like to improve my writing and build a network.  Would I be able to do this on my own by taking workshops in the city and reading more?

A: I think a good place to begin is with this quote from The Morning News, in a discussion between Robert Birnbaum and Tobias Wolff. This is Tobias Wolff speaking here:

Sometimes someone will ask me, “Should I go to a writing program?” And I invariably tell them that they should not go into a writing program until they have gone out and worked for at least two years, and probably three or four would be better, and keep writing as they’re working. If they can do that, and their writing is getting better, then they should consider going to a writing program because it could be helpful.

In college, I had two writing teachers with opposing views of the MFA: Annie Dillard urged me to go right away, and Kit Reed said don’t go, in fact never go, get a job, preferably a magazine job, and just write.

I tried Kit’s advice first, which appealed to the loner contrarian I was back then. And so in the time between when I graduated college and when I applied, I moved to San Francisco, took a job in a bookstore and got a cheap apartment with two friends. I found an internship at Out/Look, the journal of LGBT studies and culture, and helped organize Out/Write, the first national LGBT writers conference in San Francisco. I published my first short story, “Memorials”, in the prize anthology for the Holt, Rinehart & Winston student literature prize and it was nearly included in a textbook–the textbook editor signed the story up and then cut it for space at the last minute. The editor of Out/Look gave me a chance to write a cover-story for the magazine after the writer dropped out–she knew I knew about the topic, the activist group Queer Nation–and I ran with the opportunity. That led to my first free-lance writing work. And at every chance I got, I went to cafes with my friend Choire to write. A travel article I published in Outweek brought me to the attention of David Groff, an editor then at Crown, who invited me to have lunch with him in New York to see if I had a novel.

My point in telling you all of this is that while I was not in an MFA program, I found and entered a community of writers, I tried to publish, I took work that put me in touch with working writers and had career opportunities, such as that lunch at Crown, that many young writers today believe only come from being in a MFA program for those now-mythical ‘connections’.

After two years, I moved to New York, taking another cheap apartment with another friend, and continuing my work as a bookseller, which, in New York, was terrifying–as in the pay, which meant questions like “Do I take the subway to work or do I save the money for a bagel for lunch?” My boyfriend of the time, also a writer, was very seriously sending away for MFA brochures. I was skeptical of the idea but thinking about it–I increasingly resented the time I spent at my day job.

I sat down and set parameters:

  1. I wasn’t going to take out loans to do this. A writer’s life with high overhead of any kind is a curse, and New York was like that already. So I established the goal of getting a fellowship.
  2. Failing getting a fellowship, I was resolved either to wait and apply again, or to go to state schools, with low tuition costs.
  3. Going through the boyfriend’s brochures, I looked to see which schools had graduated the most professors–the credentials of the faculty, in other words. At the time, I noted three rose to the top: University of Iowa, University of MA, Amherst, and University of AZ, Tucson.

I decided to test the waters and apply just to those three schools. In October, I wrote to Annie Dillard and Kit Reed for letters of recommendation. This elicited a postcard from Annie: “Of course you’ll get in and I’m thrilled you’re applying, but am concerned you’re applying to just three schools! Apply to at least 9, which most do.”

My boyfriend was applying to 9 schools. This struck me as too much work, as I was unsure of the reputations of the other schools back then (I know considerably more now). I don’t recommend this small a sample, but in any case, by March, the happy result was that I was accepted at two of the three schools, Amherst and Iowa, with fellowship offers. Arizona turned me down. This was crushing to me, because I’d made it my first choice, despite the desire to study with Marilynne Robinson at Iowa.

Worse, in what seemed like an act of fate, my boyfriend of the time was accepted at Arizona and U Mass but rejected at Iowa.

By then, I was also an assistant editor at a little start-up magazine called OUT Magazine. The University of Massachusetts Amherst had offered me a tuition waiver plus a fellowship, and John Edgar Wideman had blown my mind by writing me a note, saying he liked my work. The boyfriend and I rented a car, drove up to Amherst and had lunch with Mr. Wideman, where we learned a hiring freeze due to the bad economy was going to mean faculty shortages within the program [again, note---all of this information dates from over a decade ago---U Mass has since recovered]. Connie Brothers, the assistant director of the University of Iowa’s program, then called me at work, offering double what U Mass had offered. My whole office freaked out, as did I. And then Connie said something I still think about.

“Before you say yes,” she said, “do you like your job?”

“I do,” I said.

“Well, think about it before you say yes, because we’re just going to have to get you another one once you get out of here.”

[This is one of two parts. For part two, click here. For more of my posts on the MFA in writing, check out the MFA FAQs and 4 Things You Didn't Know About the MFA in Writing. ]

Share

19 Comments

Filed under MFA programs, ask koreanish, fiction, writers, writing

Tags: ,

November 18, 2009

From The First Sentimental Education

I am reading up on Flaubert on a whim, partly, though also because he wrote in the first person present tense, a device sometimes attacked as a recent literary pretension (and as such, an unwanted upstart, aesthetically). More on that on a post to come hopefully this weekend.

I found this inside the introduction to Flaubert’s The First Sentimental Education:

  • I too have had my period of nervousness, my sentimental stage; and like a galley slave, I still carry it’s mark on my neck. Besides, can one ever forget anything, does anything ever disappear, can one separate himself from anything at all? Even the most frivolous of persons, if they could reflect for a moment, would be astounded at what they have retained of their past. There are subterranean constructions in everything; it’s only a question of surface and depth. Plumb the depths and you shall find.

It is much on my mind.

3 Comments

Filed under fiction

Tags:

November 12, 2009

Refresh, Refresh

Picture 1

During the semester I read approximately 250 pages a week, to as much as 600, if it’s thesis season–and that doesn’t even include my own writing or my email. But I also don’t notice it–I just do it, like breathing or drinking coffee or noticing where I’m walking. I did take an old-fashioned speed-reading course in grade school (described in my first novel, Edinburgh–yes, this is among the autobiographical parts) and so that is part of it (we were not taught to skim, but shown the lines at high speed via a slide projector), but all the same it can be hard to muster the energy to find books not related to my research or my curriculum. Books for pleasure, in other words.

This, of course, is a trap, and should be fought. So today I fought.

I’d gone out to the Post Office today for an errand, to find it dark due to Veteran’s Day, and with the time I’d allotted, went to my local bookstore, Amherst Books, where I found Refresh, Refresh. This is a graphic novel, based on a story by Benjamin Percy, and tells the story of the sons of three soldiers, all friends, and the turmoil of living life with a father who’s off at war. It’s one of the most honest things I’ve read about what the lives of these boys are like, and the ending is devastating. I’ve just met Percy recently and am now also looking forward to his new collection, of the same title.

Yes, all you’d have to do is watch CNN to decide you were never going to use Twitter–few things make me despair like seeing an anchor read reactions off Twitter–but for writers and literary feeds, if you use it right, it’s like having a crowd as your research intern–researching what you don’t know or wouldn’t think to look for but still want to know. Think of each entry as being like an electronic catalog card, for something you weren’t looking for explicitly but are happy to find. This is more true now with the list function. Today for example, Matthew Hunte shared a find from the Believer–Donald Barthelme’s syllabus, 81 books he wanted his students to read (pictured here). Matthew is, in the short time I’ve known him, one of my favorite people on there, and I highly recommend following his feed.

Many of the titles on the Barthelme list were familiar, but there was one I noticed I’d always seen but never read: The Changeling, by Joy Williams. I’m something of a Williams Completist, owning even the guide to the Florida Keys she wrote, but this had always escaped me, and it turns out, from this post over at Paper Cuts, there was a reason: when it came out, Anatole Broyard destroyed it in a review, and it faded out of sight. Last year, though, the Fairy Tale Press brought it out again in a 30th Anniversary edition. And soon it will be mine.

If you’re interested, here is an interview at Bookslut with Tao Lin interviewing Joy Williams on the occasion of the reissue. Kate Bernheimer, the publisher at Fairy Tale, is the one who edited me in the anthology Brothers and Beasts, with my essay “Kitsune”, about the fox demons in Edinburgh.

6 Comments

Filed under author's own, blogs, books, comics, essay, fiction, fox demons, graphic novels, novels, writers, writing

Tags: , , , , ,

November 6, 2009

Orhan Pamuk Writes By Hand. Hillary Mantel, Before Her Coffee.

The arts section of the WSJ is turning out to be a must-read for writers—kudos to whoever the editor is. This week brings us the writing habits of 11 top authors. I liked this section on the habits of Dan Chaon, who works very differently from me:

Dan Chaon writes a first draft on color-coded note cards he buys at Office Max. Ideas for his books come to him as images and phrases rather than plots, characters or settings, he says. He begins by jotting down imagery, with no back story in mind. He keeps turning the images over in his mind until characters and themes emerge.

His most recent novel, “Await Your Reply,” which has three interlocking narratives about identity theft, started out as scattered pictures of a lighthouse on a prairie, a car driving into the arctic tundra under a midnight sun and a boy and his father driving to the hospital at night with the boy’s severed hand, resting on ice. He described each scene on a card, then began fleshing out the plotlines, alternating among blue, pink and green cards when he moved between narratives.

During the early stages of writing, he carries a pocketful of cards with him wherever he goes; as they accumulate, he stores them in a card catalogue that he bought at a library sale. It often takes two years before something resembling a novel takes shape. He eventually transcribes the cards onto the computer and writes furiously from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m.

from How To Write a Great Novel, by Alexandra Alter

10 Comments

Filed under books, fiction, writers, writing, writing exercises

Older Entries