Write what you know

The first rule of creative writing is "write what you know." Don't try to write exotic tales set in Renaissance Italy, write about things, places, and people that are part of your life.

In general, I think that advice is sound. Faulkner is the greatest because he imbues his small, Southern universe with universal humanity. Steinbeck does the same with rural California. Joyce with catholic Ireland. And so on.

But it seems that modern American "high literature" is much more narrow than that of the past. Instead of taking the reader to rural California, fictional Mississippi, or the depressing Pacific Northwest (Carver), the reader always ends up in either New York City or a college English professor's office. The universe of settings and motifs has seemed to shrink, not expand, with globalization. Part of me thinks this has to do with the "write what you know" commandment. If all American writers today are university professors or New York City residents, what else can they write about? Maybe we need to find ways to support writers who have jobs other than pointy-nosed professor or Brooklyn hipster.

I, like Tucker, am somewhat ambivalent about Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. Part of my ambivalence is that the book, while very not short, seems narrow in its impact. It doesn't touch the pulse of the country in the same way that Faulkner or Steinbeck do. The book reveals much about modern life in NYC, but maybe not as much outside of it. Even though half of the book is set in Minnesota, is seems that the denizens of that frozen tundra are really NYC residents - they just don't know it yet.

I'd love suggestions on new (last decade) American literature that breaks with the academic NYC mold. My personal favorite is Marilyn Robinson who writes about small-town midwestern women. But Marilyn doesn't exactly break the mold - she's a professor at Iowa.

Haiku-ption Contest #2

It's that time again. Previous rounds can be found here. My entry is below, yours are in the comments. Away we go...

Jonesin'

Oooh! Lemme out here.

I've got a bad hankering

For a 'dog with kraut.

Bring it in the comments!

Photo courtesy of Retronaut

Re-reading Faulkner



The other day I did something I almost never do. I reread a book. Here’s how it happened.

I was coming to the close of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (an audiobook, on my way to work, so I had no idea when the book was going to end) when the final line absolutely punched me in the face. After sharing an exasperated “WHA?!” with the laptop bag sitting in the passenger seat, I immediately pulled up track #1 and started the whole thing again. It was the first time I’ve reread a book in years.

A little background for those who aren’t familiar with the book: Anse Bundren is an incompetent and lazy ne’erdowell of a character who constantly complains that he “wouldn’t be beholden to no man,” but who in reality is beholden to everyone around him. This is a man who not only drives his kids across a raging river in a quixotic quest to carry his wife’s coffin to her home town for burial, but who deals with the numerous setbacks along the journey by riding roughshod over every other member of his family.

He sells Jewel’s horse (his one prized possession), takes Cash’s money and sets his broken leg in cement to save a trip to the doctor, has Darl committed to a mental institution, and takes the money Dewey Dell has hidden away to end an unwanted pregnancy. Still, the reader is almost willing to excuse this obviously broken man of all his imperfections, because he is trying for once in his life to do the noble thing and carry out his late wife’s last request. That is, until the closing lines smack you over the head.

When he shows up for the journey home with his long-coveted set of false teeth and a brand new woman in tow (An old acquaintance? A relative of his wife’s?), one starts to question the whole premise of the story. And when Anse speaks the final words that bring the novel to a close, the reader realizes there never was a single shred of nobility anywhere in him:

 “Meet Mrs. Bundren,” he says.

Those final words cast a dark shadow over the entire novel. I had to go back immediately and reread the book through this new prism to see what I had missed.

I rarely reread anything, and can’t say that I’ll make it a practice. But with this book in particular, a stream-of-consciousness tale told from the heads of fifteen narrators with a slightly jumbled timeline, I was absolutely floored by the amount of color and texture and depth that had gone unnoticed on my first pass through the book. Maybe I agree with Nabokov on the subject of re-readings after all. 

What about you? Do you reread? And if so, what are the books that have made the second cut?



The Art of the Pseudonym

There have been a number of articles and blog posts on the subject of pen names. This post is not meant to rehash the various reasons for adopting a pseudonym or to examine the foibles of doing so in today’s social media environment. Rather, we examine the pen name as a venerable literary tradition and explore the customary methods of concocting one. That’s where all the fun is anyway.

From tiny tweaks to complete re-inventions of character, authorial aliases have always run the gamut. Some writers change only their last name- John Irving, instead of Blunt- while others tinker only with their first name- Cormack, instead of Charles McCarthy.

Some pick and choose some combination of names from the abundant mouthfuls of syllables written on their birth certificates. Joseph Conrad and Anatole France come to mind (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski and Jacques Anatole François Thibault, respectively).

Some, regardless of name length, have decided to throw the whole thing out and start over from scratch. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), Aynd Rand (Alisa Rosenbaum) and George Orwell (Eric Blair) are examples of this school.

Still others combine this wholesale change philosophy and go one step simpler than Conrad and France by assuming an elegant, one-word handle. Voltaire and Stendhal, you’ll readily agree, are infinitely cooler monikers than François-Marie Arouet and Marie-Henri Beyle. But using a one-word pen name to dial the bad-boy quotient up to 11 probably isn’t for everyone- especially in this age of mononymous pop-stars.

Then, of course, you’ve got your gender benders. There were the Bell brothers, Acton and Ellis and Currer, who turned out to be the Brontë sisters, Anne and Charlotte and Emily. But in that day there were lots of women who guessed they’d sell better as men. George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) was one. George Sand (Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin) was another. This second faux-George not only took on a dude’s name, but attracted sideways glances by sporting men’s clothing, as well.

You’ve also got your androgynous initial-takers: S.E. Hinton (Susan Eloise) and J.K. Rowling (Joanne, no middle name) among them. And I would include J.D. Robb in this group if that author didn’t already headline a more curious head-scratcher of a category: pen names that have absolutely no purpose. {The J.D. Robb books I’ve come across are all marketed with the confusing cover attribution “Nora Roberts, writing as J.D. Robb.” I get that Penguin is trying to cross-sell to her original audience, but the whole thing seems a little cock-eyed. That’s like going to see a movie because the poster says, “Steven Spielberg, directing as Marv Perkins.”}

But even allowing for some stinkers like the Robb alias, I’m an avowed fan of pseudonyms and love few things more than conjuring them up. I used to pen satirical poems for open-mic poetry night under the mysterious nom de guerre of Mt. Kenmore. Was it a name? An abbreviation? A mistyped acronym or initials? Was I merely the offspring of eccentric parents? Those questions and more were the burden of my audience and bolstered my black-turtle-necked mystique.

So, if you find yourself in need of an eponym, I’ll offer what little advice I can.

The following are what I consider to be poor motives in constructing your name:

·         Choosing Aaron or Aikworth as a last name, in the vain hope that you’ll one day appear on the top shelf of the bookstore’s fiction section.   Lame.   This isn’t the yellow pages. If you’re book is worth finding, people will search for it.

·         Choosing a name so close to that of a famous author that you can’t help but be seen together on the same shelf. There’s almost zero chance I’m going to pick up a book by Zachary Faulkins, just because I’m searching for William Faulkner and happen to see it in the vicinity.

·         Choosing a name that is evocative of a famous author in the hopes their shine will rub off on you. If you’re planning to write under the name of T.S. Fitzhemingjoyce or Leo Nabokstoevsky, you’d probably better be in the humor section.

So what criteria should you choose as you construct your pen name? There is really only one:

·         Make it cool.  It’s a pen name, for crying out loud. It’s your one chance to throw off the chains of being Harold Snodgrass and become Alistair Gilchrist, Emory Stanton, Thibadeaux Sykes or Jewett McFadden. (See? I could do this all day!)

So blow it up in the comments. What are the coolest pen names you can come up with?

The Science of Powerful Prose

-from Strunk and White's Elements of Style

I read quite a bit. And with almost two hours of commuting every day, I listen to a lot of audio books. But whether I’m reading or listening, I often come across a passage so good that it stops me dead in my tracks, and while I fumble for the rewind button or take another pass with my eyes, all I can do is mutter some astonished and appreciative puff of air, and hope in vain that I can write like that someday.

But how does one write like that? There’s got to be some trick to it- some science behind the effect- whether the author masters it consciously or not.

Lots of intangibles fall into this hard-to-describe, "I know it when I see it" category: physical attraction, musical beauty, humor... We're coming to know, for example, that facial beauty has something to do with our expectations of symmetry and proportion. Musical combinations strike us as consonant or dissonant based on the intervals between the notes’ frequencies. We seem to find humor in things that violate our social norms without threatening us or our worldviews.

Scientists in various fields are delving into all of these mysteries. But I’ve never seen the study that’s tried to unravel the secret of breathtaking prose, and even Strunk & White seem to be at a loss to explain it:

“Here we leave solid ground. Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent?”

Who indeed.

Still, there has to be some explanation. There’s got to be some way, if not to prescribe good writing, at least to describe it when you see it.

Aristotle taught that good dramatic endings had to deliver an air of both surprise and inevitability. I think there's something to that concept that applies to memorable prose, as well.

My best guess is that for a line to really jump out at you, it has to provide a striking contrast with the lines that surround it (it has to surprise), and paint such a perfect picture, that in hindsight you can’t imagine it having been put any better way (it has to feel inevitable). Most, if not all of the jaw-dropping lines I've come across would measure up to that standard pretty comfortably.

That’s my working theory, anyway. What’s yours?

Don't Quit Your Day Job

Lapham's Quarterly recently ran an interesting chart detailing the day jobs enjoyed (or endured) by a few famous authors. It's worth a look:

It's a pretty odd assortment, to be sure. But it got me thinking about day jobs in general. There are a handful of professions that seem to creep up in the bios of a lot of famous authors. I think I may just do a series on some of the most common ones. Stay tuned...

In the meantime, what's the craziest day job you've ever held? Shelf Actualizer Orlando and I once served as hot-dog, nacho and churro mongers in a municipal swimming pool snack shop. Yep. I have lived the dream.

Contest Follow-up

There was no prize announced, and no timeline for entering, but since we’re about a week out from our next Haiku-ption contest, I thought we better determine a winner from contest #1. This, you’ll remember, was the inspirational prompt:

And these were the entries:

1.

We talk of baseball

Jones, perched on his stool, and I,

Elbow deep in cow

2.

Go to school, dad said.

Or you’ll end up sweeping streets.

(I’d kill for that now)

3.

Damnit, where is it?

Why did I not remove my

Fraternity ring?!

4.

Some don’t like pipe smoke

Sometimes, I clamp my pipe tight

Pipe smoke beats some smells

5.

I still hate my job

My resume says it all

Cow proctology

6.

In college I bragged,

"Yessir, I'll get tail. You'll see!

I'll even get paid!"

7.

Shit in a Shovel

And an uncomfortable cow

All in a day's work

8.

Mid America

Cow Anus in Black and White

Privacy Foregone

9.

Two men and a cow.

Both rest their limbs on a stool.

Earl drew the short straw.

10.

-"It'll never work."

--"They said that about the mule."

-"You're an idiot!"

11.

This is why pigs say:

All men are enemies, all

animals comrades.

The results were intriguing, to say the least. Some entries were descriptive (1), some historically researched (10), some evocative of extreme bad luck (2,3,5,9). Some treated the obvious subject lightly (4) and some made a farce of it (6). Some were thematically true to the art of haiku, with separate, short glimpses that painted a full picture (7,8). But when I look at them all together, there’s really one clear winner that emerges for me:  Entry #11.

First of all, it was the only haiku to take the animal’s point of view. So, kudos for that. But what’s more, the author even managed to quote George Orwell’s Animal Farm almost verbatim- taking us full circle back to literature. An impressive effort.

Which are your favorites?

Leed la Revolucion!!!

Thanks to the cascading revenue stream that is this blog, I'm taking an all-expenses paid trip to Cuba next week. I feel like Hemingway, only without the shotguns, sadness, and sexism.

Last night I went to my local library to check out some guidebooks. While there, I glanced at potential literary companions for my Lonely Planets. But I suck at picking travel lit - I always end up with some bizarre combination of book and locale. Help from our global readers would be appreciated.

Here are the options as I see them:

1. SETTING-BASED READ - Reading a classic English-language novel set in the current location. For instance, reading The Sun Also Rises in Spain, The Quiet American in Vietnam, or New Moon in Forks, Washington.
Pros: You know what to expect - a fantastic read. The setting pops even more when you are there.
Cons: It feels a little contrived. If I'm going to re-read The Old Man and the Sea, I might as well be taking a "Hemingway Bus Tour."

2. AUTHOR-BASED READ - I could read the classics in Cuban literature. Alejo Carpentier is considered the greatest Cuban novelist of our time.
Pros: This seems a more authentic choice than the prior one; less anthropological. It can set up the emotional nature of a country.
Cons: Reading foreign novelists, while often rewarding, can be deceptively difficult. While I like Murakami and Pamuk, I can't shake the feeling that my foreignness holds me back from embracing their core.

3. BEACH READ - I can always say, "screw it, I'm going to read about Girls with Dragons for Tattoos."
Pros: Easy read. I can pick up the book on my layover in Des Moines.
Cons: Why am I wasting my time in (amazing foreign locale) reading this again?

4. HISTORICAL READ - Learn about that time that Che and Fidel played a round of golf after right after they did the revolution.
Pros: Informative; educational; substantial.
Cons: Informative; educational; substantial (while in amazing foreign locale)

First Line Friday!

It’s time for “First Line Friday” again!

So, turns out that perhaps the most buzzed novel of the last several years, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, actually has a pretty stunning first line:

'The news about Walter Berglund wasn’t picked up locally - he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now - but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times.'

Read it again slowly, as if it’s all you have to depict the purpose of the novel. Here is what I love about this first line:

• I love the name Walter Berglund. Not sure why. It’s cumbersome, to be sure, but it sticks. Walter Berglund. Sounds American. Sounds like a protagonist.
• I love how much this sentence says: There is a guy named Walter, he had a wife named Patty, they had lived in St. Paul, then moved to DC, and there is some unforeseen “news” that we’ll learn about later in the novel. It’s actually quite a lot of information for one line, but it’s smooth and eloquent. Not unruly or overly burdensome.
• I love the phrase “the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill.” The phrase so accurately depicts white people coasting through St. Paul in an Audi on their way to Starbucks prior to attending their daughter’s lacrosse game. It says all of that in 6 words: The Urban Gentry of Ramsey Hill. Love it.

As for the rest of the novel, I am still torn almost a year after reading it. It has glimpses of greatness, but also has lulls of meaningless. But that’s a topic for another post.

Just enjoy the first line today.

A Quick Holiday Gift-Giving Guide

I know, I know, I know...

I know what you're thinking. Why would anyone need to look any further than the Shelf Actualization Shopping Page for their Holiday gift-giving needs? I get it, I really do. We have some awesome T-shirts:

But what if you're the second or third person to buy someone a Shelf Actualization T-shirt this year? (This happens all the time.) Do you really want to be that guy? You see where I'm going with this.

So, we've pulled together a few other ideas for booklovers everywhere. Read on.

If you're bound and dertermined to give a T-shirt to a loved one, might we suggest you take a look at Out of Print Clothing? They have an awesome array of vintage book-cover Ts for men, women and children.

Plus coasters, phone cases, eReader jackets and more. And for each product sold, a book is donated to a community in need. Pretty cool.

And speaking of books, why not give some of them away? I'm not talking about the overhyped stuff on the front tables of your local bookstore. I'm talking interesting books they won't get anywhere else. You can take advantage of Dalkey Archive Press's amazing Holiday Sale. They are offering any 10 books for $65, and any 20 books for $120- shipping included. Tucker's reading one right now.

Or you could give the gift of early adoption. Why not get that special someone the hot new eReader?

              

Or, you may want to go for something truly unique. You could pick up a "literary scent" from the good folks at I Hate Perfume (H/T to BookRiot). Choose from In The Library, a scent that "is a warm blend of English Novel, Russian & Morrocan leather bindings, worn cloth and a hint of wood polish," or A Room With A View, which "captures the scent of the hills above Florence- the vineyards, the wild grass, the finocchio, the hot dusty Florentine earth. And of course a torrent of Violets...

And if you don't find what you need there, there's no end to unique gifts for booklovers on Etsy. Here's a smattering from my ten minutes of dedicated research:
 The Catcher in the Rye Recycled Book Bracelet:

The To Kill A Mockingbird Book Purse:

The book bag that simultaneously pays homage to War and Peace and Sir Mix-a-lot:

You've got your Vintage Book clocks:

Your Vintage book rings of all sorts:

The Love-worn Book Necklace:

And finally, what library is truly complete without a hollow book safe?

Seriously, a hollow book safe. How cool would it be if Santa brought you one of those? If only my wife followed this blog...

What will you be getting your bookish friends and relatives?