Preach it

• Farhad Manjoo spotlights one of my biggest pet peeves at Slate.

Finally, someone exposes this error for the foul offense it is:

What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space "rule." Still others said they used two spaces all the time, and they were thrilled to be so proper. When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know.

Thoughts of a random nature while writing

GalleyCat's National Novel Writing Month tips have been really cool so far. Some of the tools they point you to were already on my radar but most weren't. The OneLook Reverse Dictionary, spotlighted today, is a particularly helpful one.

And now, Mr. Waits:

You got to get behind the mule
In the morning and plow.

The snake swallows its tail

• Now they're publishing rejection letters.

I got a coverage report by a reader at ICM on one of my screenplays that was actually quite a good piece of criticism. I kinda wish I still had it. But I decided to light it on fire instead.

Now, I suspect that the real aim of this compendium is to provide the rejected with a bit of cold comfort, an opportunity to offer some kind of riposte to the publishing professionals who have hurt their feelings by saying that their space operas or Jane Austen adaptations just aren't good enough. What I suspect the book won't do, however, is acknowledge that writing rejection letters is a delicate skill, one that must be fine-tuned over time (weeks, even) as one digs out from under the slush pile. For it is not easy to achieve and balance the two central goals of a truly accomplished rejection letter: trying not to make the writer feel distraught whilst also discouraging him or her from ever contacting you ever again.

Hopefully this will add up to more than a collection of elegant insults.

A question worth asking

• Alison Flood wonders how much effect Word would have had on Kerouac at the Guardian Book Blog.

Kerouac wrote the novel fast because the "road is fast". He'd delete unwanted phrases by crossing them out with a pencil or typing over them.

These days, the computer is the writing implement of choice. It allows us to delete, shift sections around and continually edit, in the way that Kerouac, writing on his lengthy scrolls, could not.

The typewriter/computer/notebook are, of course, just the instruments of the trade, but it's possible they have more influence on the eventual product than we think. Paul Auster, for example, writes by hand in notebooks, revising each paragraph until he feels it works – and I think his polished, elegant prose reflects this.

It would be different, that's for sure. There's a quality to handwritten stories that's unique. But whatever the mechanism you choose, you have to make your story work, and moving the words around until they do is what matters.

Department of bad ideas

• Kim Hart profiles WEbook, a Bethesda-based writing-collective, in the Washington Post.

One of those pieces that reads like a slightly rephrased press release. And it's a lousy idea, too. If you want to be a part of a bunch of people that rewrite material to death, move to Hollywood. There's getting feedback from a collective, and then there's a thousand monkeys banging on a thousand typewriters, et cetera.

WEbook, which launched last week, invites writers, editors, topic experts and anyone else who has something to say to put their virtual pens together to work on literary projects. If the finished works get high marks from the site's members, WEbook publishes hard copies and sells them through online booksellers such as Amazon.com and retail stores including Barnes & Noble. Some books can also be read via mobile phones or in e-book format.

WEbook's first published novel, a 58-chapter thriller called "Pandora," was written by 17 people and will hit shelves next week.

Words which assembled come to life

• James Wood on character in The Guardian Unlimited.

Still, even if there must clearly be a reasonable middle position, somewhere between the book-club self-identifier and the full-blown postmodern sceptic such as Gass, the difficult question remains: just what is a character? If I say that a character seems connected to consciousness, to the use of a mind, the many superb examples of characters who seem to think very little bristle up (Gatsby, Captain Ahab, Becky Sharp, Jean Brodie). If I refine the thought by repeating that a character at least has some essential connection to an interior life, to inwardness, is seen "from within", I am presented with the nicely opposing examples of those two adulterers, Anna Karenina and Effi Briest, the first of whom does a lot of reflection, and is seen internally as well as externally, the second of whom, in Theodor Fontane's eponymous novel, is seen almost entirely from the outside, with little space set aside for represented reflection. No one could say that Anna is more vivid than Effi simply because we see Anna doing more thinking.

The truth is that the novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as "a novelistic character". There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.

Exploding a trend piece

• At The Smart Set, J. M. Tyree takes apart the notion of "death of literature" pieces.

Equal parts on-the-nose and highly arguable; overall a very worthwhile read. On the nose:

The “death of print,” the “death of literature,” the “death of books,” and the death of reading culture — the death of irony, and now the death of the short story — nothing dies more quickly than the “death of” article...

Great novels and short stories separate us from our fellow human beings, temporarily. They might leave us better equipped to imagine their suffering upon our return. But during the experience, we’re disengaged, sometimes mute. In that sense, serious fiction seems diametrically opposed to the kinds of imaginary communities, games, interactions, and buzzing, surfing, and chatting experiences available online. “Only connect,” E. M. Forster once wrote, but the how and why of connecting online seems categorically different from how fiction works. That quality of all-consuming solitary readerly absorption — what Birkerts champions as “depth” — is essentially humane and its evaporation is alarming. For many the plug-in required to run serious fiction gets disused or was never installed at the factory to begin with because the developers considered it a fancy and unnecessary optional extra. But the real question is whether the Internet and other new digital platforms are more of the same assault begun by movies, television, cable, and computer games, or whether, after serious fiction writing reaches its nadir, it can re-infiltrate the culture using a combination of books, the Web, and wireless screens. Call me, Ishmael — or, better yet, text me — when the answer emerges, because I don’t pretend to know.

Highly arguable:

No pessimism of any sort can be admitted in the cheerful propaganda dispensed by the Glee Club of technology boosters who claim they’re going to save literature using Web sites, blogs, POD publishing, National Novel Writing Month, podcasts, iPhones, e-books, and the like. According to the gurus of the interweb, the cultural changeover from print to digital is supposed to usher in a golden tomorrow of universal democratic access. Sony, Amazon, and Google are the latest contenders in new e-book schemes that most people thought died a whimpering backroom death in the 1990s. HarperCollins is touting browsable free samples of books for the iPhone, starting with Ray Bradbury. Amazon is starting a fiction contest with Penguin, featuring online submissions to be judged by Amazon’s top citizen-soldier book reviewers. And from this day forward until the last instant of recorded time, every Harlequin Romance — hundreds of titles a year — will be downloadable from the privacy of one’s home.

The short fiction writer’s reaction to most of this stuff is probably “Ugh.” Students and business travelers, who can ditch armloads of books and read from a palm-sized device, will probably rejoice over the new e-books. These devices make the skin of most writers crawl. Many if not most serious fiction writers still think of digital media as a threat rather than an opportunity. The online world, especially for the older crowd, is still conventionally depicted as a kind of South Bank of London filled with the literary equivalent of bear-baiting.

A big leap, methinks, hence the "probably" in the first sentence of paragraph #2 to soften the claim. Somehow I doubt "serious" fiction writers look at e-books as a threat; I think what Tyree refers to elsewhere in his essay as "the human need for a story and a storyteller" will supersede any quibbles about how it's delivered. People seek out stories to make sense of the world, in whatever form, and all these various forms of new media are just new wrinkles, new ways to bring clarity to all the madness. Reading, for some, is like faith is for others; it doesn't matter how you do it, just that you're doing it. Anything beyond that is to your own benefit. Probably.

The state of the short story

• Stephen King proclaims the short story alive and well in The New York Times.

Could have done without the bloodstained graphic -- what, exactly does that have to do with anything, except to serve as an unnecessary reminder that King has written scary books? Still a good read, as always.

Last year, I read scores of stories that felt ... not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.

And yet. I read plenty of great stories this year. There isn’t a single one in this book that didn’t delight me, that didn’t make me want to crow, “Oh, man, you gotta read this!” I think of such disparate stories as Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” John Barth’s “Toga Party” and “Wake,” by Beverly Jensen, now deceased, and I think — marvel, really — they paid me to read these! Are you kiddin’ me???

Talent can’t help itself; it roars along in fair weather or foul, not sparing the fireworks. It gets emotional. It struts its stuff. If these stories have anything in common, it’s that sense of emotional involvement, of flipped-out amazement. I look for stories that care about my feelings as well as my intellect, and when I find one that is all-out emotionally assaultive — like “Sans Farine,” by Jim Shepard — I grab that baby and hold on tight. Do I want something that appeals to my critical nose? Maybe later (and, I admit it, maybe never). What I want to start with is something that comes at me full-bore, like a big, hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky. I want the ancient pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes the eject button in his F-111. I certainly don’t want some fraidy-cat’s writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness about what Bob Dylan once called “the true meaning of a pear.”

An invisible tribe

• Gary Kamiya extols the virtues of editors in Salon.

I concur:

Good editors work with and not against a writer. They calibrate how aggressively they edit according to how good the writer is, how good the piece is, the type of piece it is, the kind of relationship they have with the writer, how tight the deadline is, and what mood they're in. But an editor's primary responsibility is not to the writer but to the reader. He or she must be ruthlessly dedicated to making the piece stronger. Since this is ultimately a subjective judgment, and quite a tricky one, a good editor needs to be as self-confident as a writer.

Most good editors are tactful in communicating with their writers. Bedside manner is important. It isn't so much that writers are sensitive plants -- some are, some aren't -- as that there is a fundamental difference in what each party brings to the table. An editor needs to remember that writing is much harder work than editing. Sending something you've written off into the world exposes you, leaves you vulnerable. It is a creative process, while editing is merely a reactive one.

Of course, some writers are more vulnerable than others. Daily news reporters tend to be like old suits of armor, so dented and dinged by years of combat that they are impervious. When I was an editor at a daily newspaper, I worked with some reporters who had been so ground down by impossible deadlines, column-inch restrictions, and that soul-destroying newspaper specialty of cutting pieces from the bottom that you could replace every adjective in their stories with a different one and they would just shrug. I've also worked with writers who have reacted to my gentle suggestion that one of their precious, ungrammatical commas might perhaps be removed as if I'd insisted that Maria Callas perform "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" as the final aria in Bellini's "Norma." Like a savvy football coach, an editor learns which players need the stick and which the carrot.

Life according to Chuck

• Chuck Palahniuk answers readers' questions at The Onion A.V. Club.

Mostly it's the usual dumbassed "what's your favorite color of Crayon?" type of thing, but there's one good bit:

Q: Can someone be a brilliant artist without being seriously fucked-up? Can someone be a brilliant artist and be completely sane and well-adjusted? Can the sane and good create art that is meaningful and not simply bland or pretty to look at? —Isaiah Technician

CP: Here's my theory: Anyone who makes a career in writing, music, painting, or whatnot succeeds as being a constant witness, always harvesting from the world. Any "artist" makes a living by expressing what others can't—because they're unaware of their feelings, they're too afraid to express those feelings, or they lack the skills to communicate and be understood. Being fucked-up isn't required. In fact, it tends to cut careers short.

Setting fiction aside for argument

• Jonathan Ree profiles novelists who turn to essays in Prospect.

Yet another genuflection to the influence of Cervantes, but still a good read.

The art of reading a novel involves a dash of experiment, conjecture, even risk. It requires readers to try out different narrative perspectives, styles, even personalities, and so to explore the inherent variousness of experience, and to recognise the vein of arbitrariness that runs through any possible version of events. Novels, in short, are implicitly pluralistic. In this respect they resemble essays, which, as it happens, came into existence at more or less the same time (Montaigne launched the form in 1580, with Bacon following in 1597). Essays tend to be classier, more learned and more demanding—there is no essayistic equivalent of the "popular novel"—and even when written in a perfectly casual style, they are likely to be strewn with half-concealed quotations or allusions to flatter or perhaps annoy the smarter class of reader. As exercises in hesitation, exploration and experimental self-multiplication, they are like novels, only more so. You might even say that the novel aspires to the condition of the essay, and there is certainly no shortage of novelists who have aspired to be essayists too. Think of Eliot or Henry James, Woolf, Forster or Orwell, or Mann, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus and Mary McCarthy. And as the four recently published books now lying open on my kitchen table demonstrate, the essay-writing novelist is still a literary force to be reckoned with.

What do your words look like?

• Slate asks writers which font they write in.

This is fun. Luminaries like Jonathan Lethem, Nicholson Baker, Andrew Vachss, Richard Posner and others chime in. Courier's the reigning favorite but a few interesting choices pop through. Dushko Petrovich's, for example:

My first job out of college was in the career-services office at Yale. It was oddly civilized in there: People smoked, we had very nice carpets, and the dean looked out for everyone. So much so that one day she sat behind her beautiful desk and personally revised my résumé for me. The first thing she did was change the font. "Which one's that?" I asked. "Palatino," she said. And then, after drawing in the cigarette: "You can change it if you don't like it."Out of admiration, out of superstition, out of habit, in chivalrous devotion, on too many computers (for how many thousands of words?), on three continents, at all hours of the day and in every single human mood, I have remained completely loyal to this font. Fourteen point, to be precise.

I'm a Book Antiqua boy, myself.

A comment is a terrible thing to waste

Following up from yesterday's post about Richard Schickel's anti-blog stance:

I have a fundamental disagreement with the notion that you need to have a certain level of exposure to the arts, in whatever form, to contribute a valid opinion. But one's reaction to a piece of art is always one's own. My belief is that criticism is a thorough and complete examination of a personal reaction. You don't need a bunch of classes and degrees and magazine articles and book titles to your credit to have a valid opinion about something that you experience -- you just have to be able to think about what you're seeing and to say what you feel. That has always been my contention. Anyone can get into the heavy stuff -- it just takes a little bit of effort, and, sadly, most people are not conditioned to think about the things they read/see/hear. (I guarantee you that if everyone in this country were to take a course in basic film editing techniques, they'd look at the nightly news a whole lot differently. But I digress.)

But what I think Schickel is reacting to, mostly, is the overwhelming glut of crappy writing out there. And it's true -- lots of blogs have a lot of shitty writing. Including mine. But if the Internet is now the public forum par excellence, then maybe us bloggers need to step up to the plate and take greater responsibility for the things that we dash off. If we're the future, let's earn that mantle. Be able to justify everything -- every factual error, every comma splice, everything. Without the peer-to-peer system that an editor brings to the table, most bloggers are pissing into the wind because they have no one to guide them. Let's think a bit further ahead and start learning how to guide ourselves. Look at a posting before you hit "Publish" and go, is this the best that I can do? Is it really? This ain't set in stone -- this is the Internet, after all -- but can I see myself in 10 years holding my head up and going, yeah, I stand by that?

Digging up yourself

• David Grossman writes about writing in The New York Times Magazine.

I write. In wake of the death of my son Uri last summer in the war between Israel and Lebanon, the awareness of what happened has sunk into every cell of mine. The power of memory is indeed enormous and heavy, and at times has a paralyzing quality to it. Nevertheless, the act of writing itself at this time creates for me a type of “space,” a mental territory that I’ve never experienced before, where death is not only the absolute and one-dimensional negation of life.

Writers know that when we write, we feel the world move; it is flexible, crammed with possibilities. It certainly isn’t frozen. Wherever human existence permeates, there is no freezing and no paralysis, and actually, there is no status quo. Even if we sometimes err to think that there is a status quo; even if some are very keen to have us believe that a status quo exists. When I write, even now, the world is not closing in on me, and it does not grow ever so narrow: it also makes gestures of opening up toward a future prospect.

I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up.

The novelist's curse

• Michael Dirda reviews Milan Kundera's newest book of essays in The Washington Post.

In subsequent pages of "The Curtain," Kundera discusses humor, 19th-century fiction's discovery of the "scene," an author's rights, the main problem of modernity -- "the 'bureaucratization' of social life"-- and how such masters as Broch and Musil used the novel as a vehicle for real thinking about society, politics and human purpose. Throughout, Kundera writes plainly but with passion. He bewails our current "ethic of the archive" -- the conviction that every scribble from a writer's hand is important -- and urges instead an "ethic of the essential." Only the aesthetic project itself truly matters, the fully achieved novel, poem or play. In this light, the desire for artistic fame isn't mere egotism:

"Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produced books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional -- thus non-useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious -- is contemptible. This is the novelist's curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania."

One may disagree with this -- surely, there is a place in our lives for entertainment and escape -- but, as the French expression goes, Kundera always gives you furiously to think.

Writing by committee

• Penguin announces plans for a "wiki-novel."

Based on the principles of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, the novel, called "A Million Penguins," is open to anyone to join in, write and edit. None of the words, characters or plot twists will be attributed to any individual and - and this is the element of the project most likely to bruise delicate egos - participants are free to edit, chop and change other writers' work.

In an effort to avoid the kinds of "reversion wars" which blight Wikipedia, a "core team" of students from De Montfort's Creative Writing and New Media course will act as moderators and the ethical guidelines listed on the wiki urge contributors to "be polite" and to treat others' contributions as they would like their own to be treated. Nonetheless, it is a shot in the dark, as Penguin acknowledge.

"To be honest, we don't know exactly what is going to happen or how this will turn out," says Jeremy Ettinghausen, Penguin's digital publisher. "We hope people will enter into it in the spirit we intend and leave their egos at the door. It's not about individual work and individual brilliance - it's about people working together as a community".

The short, sarcastic comeback to this idea is that Hollywood has been doing it for years -- it's called screenwriting.

I doubt this will ever bear fruit, if only because it ignores the notion that artistic singularity is what makes great works great -- the complexity and variance of a singular point of view. It's eminently democratic, of course, but chances are Penguin will end up with a muddle that pleases no one in an attempt to appeal to everyone. Furthermore, I submit to you that neither "polite" nor "ethical" are terms that will grease the wheels of literary innovation.

An interview's treacherous waters

• Bookforum looks at a quartet of writer-interview collections.

Featuring choice soundbites from Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack Kerouac and others:

Interrogating writers for publication is indeed an adversarial experience (Twain thought it a kind of "torture"). Authors, as they are wont to do, wish to control their words—something easily done on the page, not so much so in conversation—while the interviewer strives to elicit something newsworthy or at least fresh. It is this tension between desire for control and the spontaneity integral to the situation that constitutes the literary interview's chief draw. Interviews with filmmakers, composers, and painters may be of great interest, but since their jobs aren't deploying just the right word in just the right place, there's less at stake. The interview is a particularly high-wire act for writers—sentences they might otherwise rewrite a dozen times turn up in print they way they fell from their tongues. And even though writers seek to impose intentionality on their spoken text, to craft their self-presentation as a director might stage a play, nevertheless there's always the possibility of a misstep, maybe even a tumble. Remarks may not be literature, but they are often a prelude to amusement or distress; daily life makes this all too plain to us.

Telling the truth

• Zadie Smith writes about writing in The Guardian.

Good stuff:

What is a cliche except language passed down by Das Mann, used and shop-soiled by so many before you, and in no way the correct jumble of language for the intimate part of your vision you meant to express? With a cliche you have pandered to a shared understanding, you have taken a short-cut, you have re-presented what was pleasing and familiar rather than risked what was true and strange. It is an aesthetic and an ethical failure: to put it very simply, you have not told the truth. When writers admit to failures they like to admit to the smallest ones - for example, in each of my novels somebody "rummages in their purse" for something because I was too lazy and thoughtless and unawake to separate "purse" from its old, persistent friend "rummage". To rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence - a small enough betrayal of self, but a betrayal all the same. To speak personally, the very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life. But it is easy to admit that a sentence makes you wince; less easy to confront the fact that for many writers there will be paragraphs, whole characters, whole books through which one sleepwalks and for which "inauthentic" is truly the correct term.

Wrestling with Charles Dickens

• Simon Gray discusses the difficulty of writing a play about Charles Dickens in The Guardian.

Like I say -- nothing that's worthwhile is ever easy.

I had never before in my writing life accepted money for work not yet done. I'd like to think that this behaviour came from some sort of principle, a high-minded belief that inspiration would be poisoned by commerce. But then why have I always been so envious of fellow playwrights who not only accept commissions but ask for them, and, when they've got them, announce them to all who care to listen, and many who don't? Perhaps it's because I know that's what real playwrights do: even Shakespeare accepted commissions, though as far as I can make out they were mainly from himself.

The fact is, I have difficulty in thinking of myself as a playwright. On those official forms where you have to put down your occupation, I clung to "lecturer" for years after I'd retired. Now I write "writer" in a loose sort of way, with a little gap between the i and the t, connected by a squiggle. Wri~ter.

I can't write when I'm afraid to write. When I force myself I become self-conscious, which is worse than not writing, as it makes me feel ashamed, and bogus. On the other hand, not writing makes me feel stolen from - but by whom or what? Time, perhaps. I decided to give up on the play for a while, get stuck into something else.

The need for stories

• Paul Auster talks about writing in The Guardian.

From Auster's acceptance speech for Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters:

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next. For years, in every country of the Western world, article after article has been published bemoaning the fact that fewer and fewer people are reading books, that we have entered what some have called the 'post-literate age'. That may well be true, but at the same time, this has not diminished the universal craving for stories.

Novels are not the only source, after all. Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories. They need them almost as desperately as they need food and however the stories might be presented - whether on a printed page or on a television screen - it would be impossible to imagine life without them.