I’ve taken to Twitter like a duck to water. Its simplicity allows the user to customize the experience with relatively little input from the Twitter entity itself. I hope they keep it simple. It works because it’s simple. I was never interested in Facebook or MySpace because the environment seemed too top-down mediated. They feel like malls to me. But Twitter actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter.
Monthly Archives: September 2010
Prior Decisions
As a teacher I often think of Thoreau’s dictum. Much of the trouble that writers get into is caused by cart-before-the-horse disease. Writers fixate on the successful final product, forgetting that they will only create that product if they start at the beginning and get the process right. I’ve found that most writers embarking on a memoir can already picture the jacket of the book. They can also see the narrative line of their story in its seamless chronology. Their only problem is how to find an agent and get the book published. They have thought of everything except how to write the book: all the prior decisions—matters of shape, content, tone, and attitude.
Between
It would be convenient, certainly if only I (as an Irishwoman who has lived first in the UK and then in Canada, and writes books set in various parts and centuries of the English-speaking world) could figure out which. Literature is generally classified by nation, and book prizes and many other facets of the publishing-related world too; publicity works most smoothly if a person who lives in X Place has written a book set in X Place. A man at a party, soon after I moved to Canada, warned me darkly that like Brian Moore, I would fall between various stools: never fully appreciated as central to the literary traditions of any of his native lands. That’s probably true – I’m seen as Irish sometimes, Canadian sometimes, even vaguely British sometimes, and I’m probably assumed to be American by the Americans who make up the majority of my readership. But that’s just how it is. I grew up reading books from just about anywhere and I still do; I believe a writer’s imagination carries no passport.
Fairness
Fairness wasn’t giving the same things [to my daughters]; it was giving each girl what she needed. This was harder than it sounds and required a lot of explanation, as my kids didn’t see it that way. It was a challenge but it worked out.
—Cyndi
via Chookooloonks
Revelling in the novel
Crimes novels/detective fiction … are the only kind of “genre” that has ever won me over, and I think it’s because these are novels that wear themselves on their sleeves. The same mechanics are present as in any novel, but their workings are much less subtle, and I think that when we revel in detective fiction that we are revelling in the novel in general.
Love is
But I did not want to finish this book. Some of the books I’d read had told me that love is fleeting; some of the other books I’d read had told me that love is eternal. But they were wrong. Love isn’t either of those things. Love is not wanting the thing you love to ever end.
—Brock Clarke, Exley
via Bookslut
17: Heart and Soul
Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy
This was also from the spring library book sale. It’s a hardcover (most of the library books are). To be honest, it felt weird to be reading Maeve Binchy in hardcover. Every other Binchy I’ve read has been a mass market paperback, and that definitely feels like how they should be read.
Back in the day (high school/university), I read a lot of Binchy, but I haven’t read any in a long time.
The first Binchy I read was Light a Penny Candle (her first novel). I have a strong memory of sitting at the kitchen counter reading the mass market paperback version, completely addicted. This would be when LaPC was fresh in paperback (1983/4, Amazon tells me). My mom was reading it and I picked it up. I don’t even think she was finished reading it, but I just couldn’t put it down. Totally engrossing. Re-read it a bunch of times.
Heart and Soul wasn’t like that at all. It was pleasant, but that’s about it. She still makes you believe in her characters and their world, but the story is lacking.
First, there are too many characters. Each gets a chapter or so of attention, so there’s not enough time to get attached to anyone.
Second, it relies too much on prior knowledge. The book is chock-full of cameos from Binchy’s prior books. I could tell that, by the way she mentioned the characters and because some of the names were vaguely familiar, but I read her previous books too long ago for them to have any real meaning for me.
Third, there’s no conflict. Oh, there’s some faux-conflict, but it’s all essentially misunderstandings. Everyone’s nice! It all works out in the end! I think she can’t be mean to her characters anymore. And that’s a problem. Writers need to be able to be mean to their characters.
In conclusion, I know it’s in part nostalgia for a time when all did was devour paperbacks, but I think her early books were much better than this one. I should re-read Light a Penny Candle to confirm.
Quirky Choices
The idea that as a literary person there are a certain set of books you must read because they are important parts of the literary conversation is constantly implied, yet quite ridiculous. Once you get done with the Musts — the Franzens, Mitchells, Vollmanns, Roths, Shteyngarts — and then get through the Booker long list, and the same half-dozen memoirs everyone else is reading this year (crack addiction and face blindness seem incredibly important this year), you have time for maybe two quirky choices, if you are a hardcore reader. Or a critic. And then congratulations, you have had the same conversations as everyone else in the literary world.
Or, you could join me on the Dark Side aka the Side that Consists Almost Entirely of Quirky Choices (I’ll allow you one or two Must reads, if you’re hardcore). Come on, I dare ya. It’s toasty warm and cheesy over here…
Reading as fast as you can
As we sit over a hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Will and I try to articulate what we love about this series and about The Hunger Games. It is difficult to express the emotionally charged relinquishing of reality and the fervor and flush that comes with truly inhabiting a fictional world. “Just the idea of the book,” he shrugs, stumped. “Just the story.”
With imaginative and driving plots that are both similar and alien to your everyday world, in the really good books, the characters are rich and complicated, but when they are not, it doesn’t really matter. They are doing, and you are reading as fast as you can.
Of course, one of the reasons you can read this fast is that the language doesn’t always delight your synapses or persuade you to kick off your shoes and stay awhile. When I’m reading Collins’ writing, I’m not savoring a sentence like I do when I’m reading Michael Chabon. The plainspoken pulse of The Hunger Games doesn’t beg a reread like the poetry of The God of Small Things, or set you still like a scene of Cormac McCarthy’s. But I’m not reading Mockingjay for those reasons.
Subtle discouragement
Unconscious bias doesn’t just affect reception; it shapes female ambition and determination, in visceral, hard-to-pinpoint ways. Studies have shown, for instance, that in the face of subtle discouragement (facial expressions and so forth) candidates perform less well. It’s really, really hard to write a book. It takes a lot of time and solitude. In my experience, women are not as good at insisting they need that time and solitude. (I wonder how many female writers have, like me, sometimes wished they were a man so everyone—family, friends, partners—would understand a little better when they go in the room and shut the door for weeks on end.) If the world around you reliably reflects a slight skepticism about, a slight resistance to your talent, it’s easy to begin to internalize that notion and to strive for less, or just be turned off by the whole racket. I often wonder if this, in turn, means that women end up writing less ambitious books. I’d sorely like to put that question to bed, but I can’t help asking it over and over.
The Remainder Table 