Author Hannah Sternberg (debut YA novel just out) has an essay with an interesting premise: “B-side books” — less-than-famous novels by famous writers.
Tag Archives: writing
A tale of beer and books
Out there in The Long Tail you’ll find some mighty fine brewskies. P.S. Southern Tier, please bring Iniquity back. Thank you.
Only imagine: MSNBC has a story up about beer sales, and lo and behold, they’re plummeting — for mainstay brands like Bud, Old Milwaukee, and Michelob. [UPDATE: sadly, story no longer there…]
Of the 23 “largest selling beer products” in the U.S., “eight . . . have lost a staggering 30 percent or more of their sales between 2005 and 2010.”
Yikes.
But here’s what strikes me. For years, we’ve been hearing that “digital” is killing the publishing industry. Digital is killing newspapers. Digital is killing music.
And the focus for the most part has been on the medium. You’ve probably heard “kill the medium!” arguments along these lines:
- Blogging makes it too easy for know-nothings to pose as journalists. Result: newspapers face too much competition from low-quality websites. Newspaper circulation plunges.
- Digital music is too easy to steal. Producers can’t control their product any more — people are getting for free what they used to have to buy. Music sales plunge.
- Self-pubbing books is too easy. Now unvetted self-proclaimed “writers” can put their better-hold-your-nose junk on Amazon or B&N with a click of a mouse. They are squeezing out legitimate publishers. Print book sales plunge.
But here’s the thing. With beer, you take the medium out of the equation. People can’t buy or sell beer in digital form. It’s an analog world experience still, thank doG.
So beer becomes a control case.
Right?
You have your traditional, old school industry — all those gargantuan beer brands that our grandfathers used to drink — and you have this nascent (well, still sort of nascent) decentralized craft brew movement with its funny labels and quirky flavors.
And what happens?
We learn that when people have a choice, lo and behold, they will abandon “safe,” boring, insipid products and seek out interesting, imaginative, vibrant alternatives. In proverbial droves.
This also suggests IMO that “brand” — which you may have noticed has been elevated in the past couple decades to near-mystical status in the marketing lexicon — is actually not enough to carry a product. On the contrary, “brand” has some mighty heavy clay feet.
Anyway, a prediction. Bud, and Old Milwaukee, and Michelob (which btw is in my WP spellcheck. Really? My spellcheck doesn’t recognize the word “spellcheck” but it generates its red squiggle if I type Michalob or Michelobe? Really????) are already working furiously behind the scenes to launch a stunning new menu of “craft-style” beers.
Second prediction. Book publishers will engage in a parallel activity, if they’re not already. And they’ll figure out which self-pubbed products sell well (possible examples: shorter novels; serials) and start assembly-lining e-books into those niches with a vengeance.
But without offering author advances ;-)
In praise of authorial intrusion
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.
I’ve broken a rule in my latest self-pubbed novel
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 . . .
Can novels take your breath away?
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?
Fear of the banal is a good thing, actually
Okay, so I so get this post, and I’m glad there are writers out there who have the sense to be afraid of being banal. And here is why, and yes I’m harping again on the topic I alluded to a few posts ago: you can’t throw a rock without hitting somebody passing along tips about the “craft” of writing, and craft is all very well and good, but tell you what it’s not everything, not by a long shot. If you (the writer) pay close attention, when you write, you’ll notice that there is a point when the thing you are trying to write about has No Form, and than a moment when it has Form — that is the moment at which you are able to express it with words. And that moment, or event, or demarcation, not sure exactly, has something to do with perception, which in turn has something to do with consciousness. So you can’t necessarily equate Writing with Being, but you can’t separate the two, either — and Being can’t be taught — although we can, with time, chip away at the things that get between us and our connection with Being.
(This all sounds very abstract, but abstraction is another trap, as well. We also have to remember William Carlos William’s caution no idea but in things. The antidote to falling into the trap of becoming too abstract.)
But if we avoid that trap, hell yes banality is a nightmare, but not one we fend off via craft — it’s one we fend off by being authentic, and then communicating that authenticity in our writing.
When Hemingway said “write the truest sentence you know” I think this is what he meant. I didn’t understand that for the longest time, but I think, now, that is what he meant . . .
Dialogue tips for the mouths of babes
Okay, so the intent of this piece is not to help fictioneers but to lament a trend in spoken English.
It’s by Clark Whelton, who as a speech writer for NY City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani (!) screened interns over a number of years.
Around 1985, he noticed that college grads began to sound increasingly inarticulate.
I agree, this is lamentable. (And what does this say about the future market for fiction? Whoa, let’s not go there . . .)
But if we set aside our angst for a sec, we have some great tips here in how to write dialogue when the speaker is a teen/young adult.
There is, of course, the ubiquity of the word “like,” and the interrogative rise at the end of declarative sentences (personally, I wouldn’t end declaratives with question marks too often in my fiction; its the sort of thing that should be used sparingly; but if used sparingly is a great tool for conveying that speech pattern in a character).
Another that is pretty well known — to the point of being widely parodied — is “Playbacks, in which a speaker re-creates past events by narrating both sides of a conversation.” Example: “So I’m like, ‘Want to, like, see a movie?’ And he goes, ‘No way.’ And I go . . .”
Then there’s the verbal tic Whelton calls “Double-clutching.” The example he gives: “What I said was, I said . . .”
He also gives some examples from Catcher in the Rye:
All the way back in 1951, Holden Caulfield spoke proto-Vagueness (“I sort of landed on my side . . . my arm sort of hurt”), complete with double-clutching (“Finally, what I decided I’d do, I decided I’d . . .”) and demonstrative adjectives used as indefinite articles (“I felt sort of hungry so I went in this drugstore . . .”).
Pretty nice little tutorial there, don’t you think?
The trick will be to write this kind of dialogue without making your character sound like a nitwit, or worse yet annoying your readers. LOL
Related: The Decline of the Imperative.
Pop goes the book bubble
In NY Daily News, Alexander Nazaryan — writing about Border’s troubles — makes an this observation:
What happened to real estate is now happening to books: An industry colluded to push an overpriced product on a public whose purse strings were tightening and whose tastes were changing. Demand dropped steadily, but supply kept soaring – only now is it coming down to earth. Nothing reminds me so much of those tracts of foreclosed houses in Florida as stack upon stack of hardcover books, desperate to be bought for $25.99.
[UPDATE: link no longer works… sigh.]
If you scan the covers of vintage pulp fiction books, one of the things you may notice are the prices.
The vast majority are 25 or 35 cents.
What would a 35 cent book cost in today’s dollars? According to this online inflation calculator: $3.09.
When’s the last time you saw a brand new $3.00 paperback in a bookstore?
Some might argue that the reason mass market paperbacks have doubled or tripled in price is that there’s now an infrastructure that, in aggregate, raises the quality of our books. They’re better vetted, better edited.
But I suspect that if the quality of the writing is better, today, it’s thanks to the vast industry devoted to teaching craft. The writers are better.
What’s really happened is that the publishing industry isn’t set up to keep prices reigned in. That’s never been a priority for it.
And as a result, print books are overpriced.
And with a quarter of a million or so titles published every year in the United States alone, of course the whole thing was ripe for a collapse . . .
Can you think a good book?
That’s a serious question.
I’m pondering it because of the explosion of writerly advice that crops up all over the intertubes these days.
Like this piece, which has a lot to offer, don’t get me wrong.
And goodness knows craft is important.
But I wonder sometimes.
For the first couple hundred years after the birth of “the novel,” writers didn’t worry about things like “structure.” Yet they managed to turn out very nice books.
How?
Okay, devil’s advocate. Maybe only *some* of them turned out very nice books. Maybe I don’t realize how many terrible novels were written by contemporaries of Fielding and Tolstoy and Dostoevski and James and Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Maybe there were hundreds or thousands of self-pubbed novels along the way that were such crap it was good riddance to them the second they were forgotten.
But that still doesn’t explain how someone working with pen and paper or typewriter could turn out an Anna Karenina or Great Gatsby without first having consumed a library’s worth of books on the craft of writing.
How could that happen?
Well. Maybe it has to do with oral story-telling.
Maybe great writers — in the classical sense — are (were?) actually great listeners. And I mean listening in the sense of paying attention to how how language — and more specifically story-telling — affects other people.
Can you tell, when you’re relating something that happened to you while you were at the grocery store last week, when your audience has begun to lose interest?
(Ooh, I hope so!)
It doesn’t have to be when you tell a story in the formal sense. We all constantly narrate our lives to other people. We’re constantly telling stories. When someone asks you how you’re doing, and you say, “I think I’m coming down with a cold,” you’re telling a story. A very dull story incidentally. Please spice it up next time. Give your story some structure!
I was about to walk out the door when my neighbor — you know, the one who can’t afford a car so she rides that ridiculous power scooter everywhere — asked me to look after her kid (again? are you kidding me???) — five minutes she said, right, it was more like an hour, and the kid has this horrific cold, she soaked a box and a half of Kleenex easily before mom toodled back up on her scooter again, and of course three days later I wake up all stuffy, fever of a hundred and two, omg, please bring soup!
But that’s not all. If at any point during your tale about your self-centered neighbor and her snot-nosed urchin you notice your audience’s attention is starting to wane — you edit. Immediately. On the spot.
I was about to walk out the door when my neighbor — you know, the one who can’t afford a car so she rides that ridiculous power scooter everywhere — asked me to look after her kid (again? are you kidding me???) — well long story short, the kid had a cold, gave it to me, I’m miserable, please bring soup!
We’d get a lot closer to spinning good stories on paper if we paid attention to how our stories hold people’s attention when we spin stories orally.
So yeah. I think there was a time when writers honed the aspect of the craft we now label with words like “structure” by telling stories — or more specifically, by paying attention to the way people react as they listen to stories.
Tell you something else. When writers began to play with the novel as if it were a painting — moving words around as if they were objects, rather than written versions of oral language — and in that way devised what in its most extreme form we’d call experimental fiction, they began to separate the novel from the connection it once had with with oral story telling.
It amounted to a distortion, of course. So maybe one reason some people need to study “craft,” now, is because the “the novel” became so distorted that post mid 20th century writers are . . . not ignorant, exactly, but maybe the connection of the novel to oral story telling isn’t as obvious to writers today as it once was, and as it needs to be.
I’m not sure, however, that this is something that can be taught from the head. Which gets back, finally, to the title of this post. The ability to pick up on the non-verbal signals people give off, when they’re listening to a story, is not something you do with your intellect.
It’s something you do with your whole self — your body, your heart.
Imposing rules on a novel via your head might result in a novel that is well-thought-out.
But is that the same as “good”?
The coming nonfiction e-tsunami. Watch out for floating “Babe Ruth bars.”
Website Magazine cites a research report from Yankee Group [UPDATE: link no longer good, sorry!] that estimates ebook sales will reach $2.7 billion in sales in 2013. That’s compared to $313 million two years ago, in 2009.
Quite the leap.
Average prices, meanwhile are expected to drop to $7.
The article suggests that the downward price trend is one reason for the explosion in sales. Makes sense — it’s basic economic principle, after all.
Given that Website Magazine‘s audience is web developers and small business owners, it’s no surprise that the article veers to the topic of self-publishing white papers, how-to’s, and re-packaged blog posts. It also suggests business owners jump on the trend by publishing ebooks themselves:
Expertise in any industry can be used to create an e-book in short order, then sell that material or use it as a promotional or cross-sell incentive.
True. But I hope business owners realize that self-publishing a badly written, poorly organized ebook will be a liability, not a smart business decision. And I think it’s a stretch to suggest that the average small business owner can expect to “add revenue along the way.”
Business owners who self-publish should expect nothing more than pocket change. They should focus instead on the value of the ebook as a promotional tool.
Yes, there will be exceptions, but only if the venture meets at least one or two of the following criteria:
- It already has an audience — i.e. it’s an established business vs. a start-up nobody’s ever heard of;
- The topic is both catchy and compelling;
- The business does a great job at PR and marketing the ebook;
- The ebook offers information of genuine value;
- The ebook is well-written enough that readers can understand and apply whatever it’s trying to teach them.
What percentage of ebooks in the coming nonfiction tsunami will meet at least two of those conditions, do you think?
And what percentage will more resemble floating Babe Ruth bars?
New Kindle feature a soft sell tool for writers?
Article on the MSNBC Technoblog by Wilson Rothman [UPDATE: link no longer good, sorry] leads with the news that the next Kindle OS is going to support “real” page numbers.
That’s a good thing — but what really caught my interest is another upcoming new feature, “Before You Go . . . ” which Rothman says will let readers more easily rate books — and buy new ones:
Just as you’re finishing a book, you’ll now get a “seamless” invitation to rate the book, share it on Twitter or Facebook, and of course, buy more books like it, or by the same author.
It will be interesting to see how this is handled.
On the one hand, this might help writers build audiences. After all, what better time to sell another book than when your scintillating prose is fresh in a reader’s mind?
But I also wonder whether I might personally find it a bit annoying to have my e-reader suggest I take an action of some kind.
Will there be a forced interim step between the last page of a book and the home screen?
Will it seem intrusive?
UPDATE 10/1/2011: New post on how to rate a Kindle book.
