Author Archives: Kirsten

Can Job and New York’s Gay Marriage Bill

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So this cracks me up.

One of my characters in Can Job — the heroine’s best friend — is gay, and in one of the first scenes in the book Taylor joins her at a protest related to a gay marriage bill in New York State.

Mind you, the book is not really political, unless you count poking fun at politicians as “political.” The particular pol that figures in this scene is Bo Valgus, whose biggest mistake was not his position no the issue necessarily but that he wasn’t quick enough to voice support for it during a local radio interview. This being fiction, I also couldn’t miss a chance to take a dig at a certain former state governor :-)

The DJ had asked his opinion about same-sex marriage and he’d answered “I haven’t had a chance to think about it, to tell the truth.” The idiot. Everyone knew that a same sex marriage would have come to the floor if ex-Governor Eminent Flipzer’s ungovernable hetero sex drives hadn’t led him to disgrace and ruin. Well, if not ruin, then a brief time-out to think about what a bad boy he’d been.

Overnight, the legislature had become suddenly paranoid about any issue associated with the letters s-e-x.

And so here they were, to express their chagrin with Bo Valgus.

Anyway, I’m laughing today because only a couple months after self-pubbing the novel, a same-sex marriage bill has now passed in our state.

My book is already dated!

lol

But I really couldn’t be more pleased :-)

As one of my FB friends posted, it’s a great day to be a New York Stater.

Writers like to believe they can change the world. This one actually did.

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In today’s Wall Street Journal, Fergus Bordewich reviews Mightier Than the Sword by David S. Reynolds: a book about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Bordewich quotes from the book that in the first year after its release, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

sold 310,000 copies in the United States, triple the number of its nearest rivals.

It would eventually sell a million copies in Great Britain alone.

The book “opened the way for a widespread acceptance in the North of antislavery arguments that had long been ignored or dismissed.”

It helped pave the way for Lincoln’s efforts to “convert countless apathetic Yankees into men willing to fight for the emancipation of slaves.”

I read the book many many years ago, as a pre-teen — it was one of the novels I found as I worked my way through my hometown’s little library. Even then I recognized it was not only dated but propaganda; I recognized that the writing was in service of a Cause rather than an esthetic.

But what a cause, and what an accomplishment for a writer to almost single-handedly turn an entire country away from its acceptance of slavery . . .

In praise of authorial intrusion

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An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.

— opening sentence in the novel “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,” by Henry Fielding, 1749

Shakespeare relied upon the audience and, with such devices as the soliloquy, extended the play towards it; the drama did not comprehend a completely independent world, but needed to be authenticated by the various responses of the crowd.

— Shakespeare, The Biography, Peter Ackroyd

I’ve broken a rule in my latest self-pubbed novel, and I’m worse than unrepentant. I’m defiantly unrepentant. It’s the rule forbidding “authorial intrusion.” Here’s how my novel opens.

There are a ton of stories about it floating around on the web. Half of them are baloney. The other half—baloney and cheese.

The woman is a biologist. A trained scientist. Meaning: for her, things either stack up to the measure of the five senses or you brush them aside.

So forget what you’ve read.

Forget what you’ve read from people who say she’s some kind of New Age Messiah.

And while you’re at it, forget the stuff that denounces her as a cynical fraud.

Here’s what really happened.

The book, not by coincidence, is about a woman who discovers she can see fairies. This makes it a fairy tale, and I’ve begun it with my own little twist of Once Upon a Time.

Which makes me, of course, a Bad Writer.

I wouldn’t have been judged so harshly a couple centuries ago. There was a time when authorial intrusion was not only accepted, but expected. Not today. Today, if you were to pester an agent or editor with a novel that opens like mine, your book would go straight to the reject pile.

Now I’m not saying this new novel I’ve pubbed is good. On the contrary. A) It’s not my place to say whether it’s good. And B) the experience of attempting fiction is a humbling one. Writing a good novel is extraordinarily difficult. And having finished four, I am still only a rank beginner.

It would be presumptive of me to suggest I’ve managed to produce anything that might be objectively described as “good.”

So my thoughts on authorial intrusion, or any other stylistic convention, don’t carry any particular authority. But hell. This is the Internet, and I have an opinion ;-)

It goes something like this.

There was a time when fiction was closer to its oral roots.

Before the emergence of a literate middle class, stories were told, not read, and the teller — the author — was therefore a part of the experience. It doesn’t take much imagination to put yourself in a village square in the 12th century, somewhere in Europe, where a small crowd has gathered around someone telling a story — relating an account of some battle, perhaps, or the death of a monarch, or a shipwreck, or pirate raid. A person gifted with a sense of timing, and an expressive vocabulary, a sense of how to play the audience’s emotions, would hold their interest longer. People would ask the speaker to repeat the story. The story teller would gain a reputation, would become sought-after.

And then there were the tales that were repeated orally, the epic poems and fairy tales. Why are there so often multiple versions of these stories? Because some of the people who got their hands on these stories changed things, edited things, added embellishments. These were the storytellers who knew how to juice the plot, how to better engage listeners.

Early novels translated this oral experience to paper.

When Fielding begins the tale of Tom Jones, he does so by inviting the reader to come into a public house, put down a bit of money, and have a listen. Fielding is there, in the room, not self-consciously but because it’s assumed he should be there. It’s Fielding, telling the story; reading his novel is simply a way of inviting him into your drawing room. There’s no 20th Century  conceit that he be invisible, that the story is somehow “a completely independent world.”

So what happened?

Why did authorial intrusion become taboo?

I’m no lit scholar, but I can hazard a guess. As more and more people fancied themselves novelists, the pool of second- and third-rate novelists grew. And many of these writers handled authorial intrusion clumsily.

You’ve probably come across an example, if you’ve ever picked up a badly written 19th century novel in a thrift store. It can be extremely off-putting to find yourself lectured by some long-winded boor in the middle of what is supposed to be a novel.

But our fiction taste-setters haven’t decided that authorial intrusion is taboo only if it’s badly done. They’ve made it taboo entirely. The reason for this (they say) is that authorial intrusion breaks the spell. Even the phrase itself suggests a despoiling: something intrudes on that “completely independent world;” the author has become an interloper, a violator.

Again, I agree that if done badly, authorial intrusion can spoil the mood.

But how strange that in, say, television dramas or comedies, the Fourth Wall is no longer off-limits, but in fiction it’s assumed the reader must be continually immersed in an alternative world; that the experience will be ruined if the author calls attention to the fact that the work is fiction, the characters are fiction — that you’re reading an invented tale spun by another human being.

Perhaps we’ve lost the ability, as novel readers, to switch back and forth from “suspension of disbelief” to an awareness that that novels are actually a collusion between reader and writer.

But I don’t think that’s the case.

Our literary gatekeepers have done too good a job at screening fiction against a master list of taboos.

And as a result, writers haven’t had the option of experimenting with authorial intrusion. We don’t know when it works, or doesn’t work, because it’s a tool that’s been locked away.

And that’s too bad.

Christopher Hitchens has a new piece up on Vanity Fair that you’ve maybe come across. [UPDATE: link sadly no longer works…] Hitchens’ cancer has now progressed to the point where it is destroying his vocal cords. The piece is about the interconnectedness of self/personality, writing, and voice.  “To a great degree, in public and private,” he writes, “I ‘was’ my voice.”

And now that he’s losing his voice, he appreciates how much the quality of writing depends on the quality of one’s speaking.

In some ways, I tell myself, I could hobble along by communicating only in writing. But this is really only because of my age. If I had been robbed of my voice earlier, I doubt that I could ever have achieved much on the page.

He closes the piece with advice for writers, starting with this:

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?”

The ability to hold an audience’s interest orally is no different than the ability to hold an audience’s interest on the page.

Now in the oral tradition, speakers used literary devices to invite their listeners into a fictional world. But it’s silly to assume that once you were past the “once upon a time” gate, the story teller never again “intruded.”

Of course they did. “Once upon a time” the spinner of tales was an active participant in the experience, casting a spell, then withholding it, teasing, making promises and then pretending to back off of them — like the grandfather reading the story in Princess Bride, interrupting a scene to tell his grandson not to worry, Buttercup doesn’t get eaten by eels. Yet.

Authorial intrusion was once part of the experience.

Not only that, but it added to the listener’s pleasure — just as Fielding’s greeting adds to the pleasure of reading Tom Jones.

So yeah. It’s a shame we’ve thrown out this particular baby on account of some stinky Victorian bathwater. But maybe now that indie authors are retaking the industry, we’ll see some authorial winking and nudging inserted here and there.

And maybe readers will actually enjoy it.

Maybe writers will begin to understand that the notion of a “completely  independent world” is itself a conceit, and in some respects an increasingly tiresome one.

Maybe we’ll start to realize that authors don’t need to always be invisible.

Maybe we’ll welcome our story tellers back into the room with us, pull up our chairs and start to listen . . .

Johnny Appleseed preached Swedenborg????

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That wasn’t in the Disney version! John Chapman (Appleseed’s real name)

kept Swedenborg’s “Heaven and Hell” with the Bible in his cookpot hat. Arriving at a house on one of his walkabouts, he would greet the inhabitants: “Will you have some fresh news right from Heaven?” The answer didn’t matter—he was already reaching for the cookpot. Chapman’s “religious intensity,” not his apple planting, was “the driving force of his life,” Mr. Means says.

Guess what else. The apples that grew from his trees weren’t the big luscious bake-into-a-pie sort you find in the supermarket today.

Nope. They were little sour things — that people grew to make hard cider.

LOL

Steinbeck’s story breaks into a Million Little Pieces

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Pretty amazing bit of literary investigation, here. Bill Steigerwald set off to retrace the trip John Steinbeck recounted in Travels with Charley, and discovered that the trip was largely fictionalized.

My initial motives for digging into Travels With Charley were totally innocent. I simply wanted to go exactly where Steinbeck went in 1960, to see what he saw on the Steinbeck Highway, and then to write a book about the way America has and has not changed in the last 50 years.

But when Steigerwald started cross-referencing events Steinbeck recounts in the book against other evidence — letters, hotel records, etc. — he discovered so many discrepancies that, he concludes, “virtually nothing [Steinbeck] wrote in Charley about where he slept and whom he met on his dash across America can be trusted.”

Steigerwald’s piece isn’t an attack. He personally believes that Steinbeck didn’t set out to deceive anyone. He was, at the time, 58 years old, in poor health, and had promised to produce book for which “he had taken virtually no notes.”

Whoops.

Still, it’s interesting that for 50 years the book was trusted as a nonfiction account of what one man discovered when he crossed our continent, when in fact it’s fiction.

Good thing Steinbeck never appeared on Oprah ;-)

All hail the book machine

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Those of you who know me personally know that for many years I’ve worked as a marketing communications professional supporting some pretty big, name brand companies, including one fondly known as an anchor company here in Rochester, NY. And as it happens, over the course of my career, I’ve had occasion to write about some of the more sophisticated printing devices these companies manufacture — machines that can produce one-off items from digital files.

Since I also follow the book publishing industry, I’ve been waiting for years for the day when book publishers would embrace the technology.

Good thing I wasn’t holding my breath.

Oh, I know, per-book cost goes way up — it’s a lot cheaper, per copy, to do a traditional print run of 10,000 or a million books than produce them in onesy twosies.

But in a world where just-in-time manufacturing principles are now the norm, it would seem a no-brainer to work these POD technologies into the production stream somehow. Think about it. You’d have a database of your content on the back end. Orders come in from distributors via a front-end web portal and are automatically sent to the printer — nobody would need to touch them (lowers your overhead right there). Suddenly the backlist is relevant again, it’s available to respond to demand. And as new media arises — ebooks, say — you just hook up a new output path, kind of like the Smashwords Meatgrinder.

I suppose the idea of transitioning to such a radically different production model was too wearying for publishers. Heck, they don’t even have their rights tracked in databases yet, apparently.

That said, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the entire industry will shift to a just-in-time model, albeit belatedly. But in the meantime, bookstores are installing POD systems, essentially taking over the production piece of the publishing business.

The above link is a story about The Expresso Book Machine, invented by Jason Epstein, 83, the guy who also came up with the concept of mass market paperbacks(!)

The Expresso Book Machine is basically a digital POD printer + book binder.

But get this. The article’s author, Ilya Marritz, first notes:

People in the book industry revere Jason Epstein, but they are increasingly skeptical his latest innovation will take off. The Espresso Book Machine is bulky, its menu of books limited mainly to backlist and public domain titles and users can’t operate the machine on their own – they need help from trained bookstore staff.

Guys, the reason titles are limited to backlist & public domain is that the publishing industry hasn’t realized, yet, that it needs to support POD with current titles. So it’s kind of two-faced for “people in the book industry” to be “skeptical.” Instead of being skeptical,  how about building an infrastructure to feed the POD stream?

Sigh.

Contrast with this a couple paragraphs later:

But the machine has proven to be a hit with customers. More than 1,000 books were printed on the machine in the first four weeks for prices starting at $8 apiece. Kurtz said the main attraction to the Espresso Book Machine is that it is a tool for self-publishing.

Not surprising that self-publishing has emerged as a strong use case. Indie writers “get it.”

But IMO, if this were marketed properly, with the proper front end, it would be a huge hit with consumers as well.

There is absolutely no reason on earth I shouldn’t be able to go online, order a book, the book gets printed at my local bookstore (or library. or supermarket) where I can pick it up — or maybe a courier brings it to my house later that day —

I should be able to do that by clicking on a link of a book review I read on a blog or online newspaper, or from my e-reader.

I should be able to do that from a kiosk in a bookstore.

Think about it. Bookstores would no longer have to be mammothly expensive warehouses (that’s all a big box store is, when you think about it — a warehouse with carpet and escalators). They could be salons, gathering spaces designed more like living rooms than commercial spaces.

Bookstore managers could stock based on real time data about what is selling or to support promotions they’re running. Poetry reading tonight? Print one or two copies of books by major poets and set them out for sale. Holiday coming up? Local paper run a review of a new title? Author in town for a signing? Ditto.

But most of your titles, you’d sell not by putting out physical copies but by generating opportunities for word-of-mouth sales and by running in-store promotions. I love golf, for instance. Think I wouldn’t notice if a local bookstore kicked off spring by hosting an event by a local teaching pro in conjunction with a sale on golf titles, make it a Masters tie-in?

The possibilities are endless, literally.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz once said that he envisioned Starbucks as “the third place” — the not home/not work place you spend time because it’s comfortable and familiar and you feel welcome there.

There is absolutely no reason bookstores couldn’t also become “the third place,” but only if the business model supports it–which means you have to lower overhead. Smaller footprint, no more warehousing books based on publisher push instead of local market pull, and emphasize creating communities rather than moving product.

Could happen. Would like to see it, personally. I’d hang there.

of the 1 or 2 . . .

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Of the 1 or 2 bad habits

that have crept back in since you moved

there is this:

that I take books to bed.

They accumulate

in the space that was once yours.

take up more and more room

as if I need anything more to disturb my sleep

E-Voice. Some Thoughts on Social Media.

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I’ve always felt that the line between social media and traditional media was an artificial one, but it occurs to me now that my perspective is shaped by my being, when it really comes down to it, a writer first.

When your primary goal is to communicate, your audience is always there, in front of you. You’re always trying to tell a story that will connect with your readers.

What’s different, with social media, is that readers can talk back.

I recently added the TaylorMade Facebook page to my FB feed, and I was reading the comments this morning to a new post they’ve put up. It’s a short note about some new irons that are now available (Tour Preferred MB, MC, and CB irons), and one of the things that is immediately obvious is that some peoples’ comments are . . . shall we say, feisty.

How different from the days when a PR or marketing communications person would issue a press release without having to exit his or her comfortable mar-com bubble. If someone’s response to your company’s news was negative– “that’s ugly/too expensive/like someone else’s brand better”–you wouldn’t know. Sure, some inkling of those responses might trickle back to you over time, but it would be long after the release was issued, published, and essentially forgotten.

Now you know immediately.

And that’s a good thing, for a couple of reasons. First, it affords companies the opportunity to gather feedback. No, the comments on a Facebook page don’t reach the standards of bona fide market research, but there is data in there, if you know how to qualify it.

Equally important, the feedback ensures you put communication first.

Communication is not a one-way endeavor. It requires listening as well as talking. It’s reciprocal.

Which gets me to what I think of as “e-voice.”

The risk with traditional marketing communications has always been that the company’s voice sounds out-of-touch. You see it in pieces that are “corporate-y.” They speak with marketing department lingo instead of sounding like real people, by which I mean the folks who actually might buy the product or service. The language is stiff and formal, instead of being conversational. At its worst, the communications devolve into flat descriptions of features-benefits, devoid of any humanity whatsoever. It becomes noise–and people tune it out.

Carry that style into the realm of social media, and you set yourself up for mockery or worse. One local business here in Roch, in a particularly egregious example, has used its Twitter account to repeat the marketing tagline created for its radio and television ads. Sorry, but that is no way to win a social media audience.

E-voice is different. E-voice is genuine. It feels like it’s a real human being, not a marketing slogan bot. It is casual, conversational. And it is always aware of that reciprocity. Even when the person tweeting or facebooking or blogging doesn’t respond to commentors, e-voice always sounds as if it’s addressing actual people. It is always an invitation to converse, rather than a one-sided proclamation of some kind.

There was a time when companies, sensing all this, got a bit nervous. And some probably still are. But an e-voice doesn’t need to be out of control. It doesn’t need to diverge from the parameters set by a company’s brand and reputation.

In fact, e-voice is essentially a kind of fictional character, bound as surely as a fictional character by the constraints of personality, habits, values, even decorum.

You could think of e-voice as the 2D textual version of Old Spice Guy. It’s a creation, a manufactured entity, and yet because it has a personality it suggests a life of its own, and so resonates with its audience.

You almost need to start, with social media, by creating this character–this persona–behind the scenes. The rest just follows naturally, and the conversation begins.

Can novels take your breath away?

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Dani Amore, writing on technorati.com [UPDATE: link no longer good…], weighs in on the “how to price an ebook” debate by attempting a comparison between songs and novels. This cracked me up:

A song that sells for 99 cents that just happens to be a masterpiece of beauty, timelessness and meaning and can change a person’s life, is much more valuable than a $2.99 novel that the minute it’s downloaded immediately causes your Kindle to smell like a rest stop toilet.

But it’s a little sad, too, because the fact is people don’t think of novels as beautiful, timeless, and life-changing. For good reason — they’re generally not.

But should they be?

Have you ever read a novel that took your breath away, that gripped you the way a song can? What was it, and how long ago?

And what would you pay to experience such a novel again?

7 reasons why you should NOT be in a writing group

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Okay, so this post extolling the virtues of writing groups is about poetry, a literary pursuit for which the chance of monetary pay-off is so slim it’s basically off the table entirely. [UPDATE: link no longer good, sorry!]

But if you’re writing fiction, and your goal as a writer is to find a real audience for your work, sorry, but I think you have to be very cautious about joining a writing group.

Here’s why.

1. Blind leading the blind. If you want to learn how to become a success in anything, you need to find mentors,  models, and teachers who are already successful at that thing. A writing group — unless it’s well-stocked with published authors — can’t offer you anything but the opinions of people who are capable of educated guesses, at best. At worst, they may well be naive or even ignorant. You have to ask yourself: what sort of person do you want advising you on your work?

2. Your precious time. Participating in a writing group takes time. The meetings alone take time. Critiquing other peoples’ work takes time. And what could you be doing, if you weren’t spending all that time on your writing group? Um, writing, perhaps?

3. And your precious focus. One of the most important things you have to do, as a writer, is to pinpoint what you want to accomplish with your WIP. Any time anyone peers over your shoulder, points at a sentence/character/theme and says “well, what about this, though?” and you are obligated (because you’re polite!) to respond, then guess what. You’ve just been distracted. And when you’re distracted, you’re not honing in on what you’re trying do do, as a writer.

4. Committee syndrome. Related to #3, but important enough to merit it’s own line on the list. Committees create only one thing: consensus. Committees cannot create novels, or any other kind of art for that matter. The minute you start offering your writing up to some committee, you build a nice consensus on what’s “good” and what “works” etc. etc., but you are also consigning your WIP to mediocrity or worse.

5. False security. Say you manage to wow your writing group members with your latest example of scintillating prose. So what? To paraphrase Dean Wesley Smith, the only readers who matter are the ones who are going to pay you for your work. And here’s the thing: being praised for something we’ve written is a peak experience — it’s satisfying, it sates us as a culmination of sorts. The danger is that after that peak, we tend to let up. This is often subconscious, of course. “Oh,” says our sneaky little mind. “I’ve done it. I’m finished. I can rest for a bit now.” Well guess what — you’re not finished. Wowing your reading group means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. And every second you spend your time polishing that little trophy on your shelf is another second you’ve wasted when you should be pressing forward toward your real goals as a writer.

6. False insecurity. Okay, let’s look at the opposite scenarios. Say your writing group hates your latest example of scintillating prose. Does that mean you stink? Well first of all, maybe not. See #1 above. But even if the group is correct, and your stuff could use some work, what do you gain by knowing? Nothing, except if you count it as a “gain” when you let people suck you dry of all that pesky self-confidence. Look, it takes tremendous courage to become a writer. Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re spending your bravery reserves on the wrong things.

7. Creating and judging are mutually exclusive pursuits–and the creating bit is the one that is most important to writers. It’s “the zone.” I’m a golfer. And I can tell you that if I’m in a self-critical frame of mind, I cannot hit a pure golf shot. Well guess what, the same goes with writing. Yes, there’s a place for looking at your work critically. The risk is that participating in a writing group will cause you to add too much of that self-critical mode to the mix that makes up your writing life — in a sense, to your identity as a writer. Put another way, as a writer you have to learn to get in the zone, and that means controlling the self-critical periods of your writing cycles very, very carefully — because too much self-critical destroys creativity.

So does that mean writing groups over absolutely no benefits? Well, no. They may be a networking resource. They may be your outlook for socializing. You may, if you’re lucky, win a couple of future readers through writing group contacts.

But if you want to invest in yourself as a writer by getting feedback on your work? Look for workshops where you can learn from published, successful writers.

My 2 cents.