Author Archives: Theryn

Her narrative is compelling

[Lisa’s] blog is great. But I haven’t completely settled the “is she talking to me” question.  While Lisa follows me back, we don’t interact with each other. She uses Tumblr in a very social way, she isn’t really part of the crowd of people whom I otherwise follow. And I find this somewhat troubling. … I like following her because, for whatever reason, her narrative is compelling.  Following her blog is somewhat akin to watching a reality TV show (Not one of the ones where they try to out-dance each other or diet for money, but one that just follows someone’s daily life). She’s my Jersey Shore. But of course, Lisa isn’t a reality TV character, she’s a real person. Yes, I know Snooki is real, too, but celebrities are different.  … treating real people, regular people, the same way we treat celebrities, is problematic.

—Patrick Brown

Where does this feeling bad for reading (reading!) a published piece of writing come from? When and why has it become so transgressive to read? I can see perhaps feeling bad for reading something a third-party wrote about a person, for example, if it’s nasty gossip or a breach of confidence. But when it’s a person writing about themselves… well, they’ve made a choice to be a writer (or at least a “writer”) just like Snooki has made the choice to be an “actor.”

Brown is right that personal blogs are compelling in the same way as reality TV. In fact, I think personal blogs are as much responsible for the decline of the soap opera as reality TV. I think lots of people read blogs as episodic stories (there’s a limit to how many interactive relationships a person can keep up), but it’s unpopular to admit to doing this, because it transgresses the “rules” of blogging/social media. It’s ok to watch an episode of Jersey Shore and then shut the TV off and go about your day, but if you read a blog entry, then close your browser and go about your day, you’re “creepy” and a “stalker.” The overuse of those two words probably gets to the heart of why Brown feels bad about reading someone’s blog in the way he wouldn’t if he were reading a book written by the same person.

Where his argument falls apart is in his analysis of celebrity. Arguing that bloggers are not analogous to reality TV stars because people wouldn’t recognize them on the street is fallacious. People who are on TV are obviously more visually recognizable than people who write. But that doesn’t make every TV personality more of a celebrity than every writer. How many people would have recognized JD Salinger had they passed him on the street? At any rate, it’s not like Brown is acting like a papparazzo, virtually stalking Lisa with the goal of finding out something salacious to sell to a gossip blogger. He’s reading her blog. And, in this case, she actually knows he’s part of her audience, and may even be reading his blog.

He asks “is she talking to me”? The answer, obviously, from his pov is yes. He finds her narrative compelling. Ergo, she (or, more specifically her writing, her narrative) is talking to him. Now, did Lisa anticipate that people outside her immediate social circle might be interested in her writing when she started blogging? Perhaps she did, perhaps she didn’t. But once she decided to blog publicly, she opened herself up to the possibility that her real readership (audience) might, and probably would, extend beyond her imagined readership.

Strange romance about the writer

If I didn’t think creative-writing programs were helpful, I would not, of course, teach in one. I’m always a little puzzled by people’s insistence that writing, alone among the art forms, be sui generis. Few people question artists going to art school, or musicians going to music school. There’s some strange romance about the writer as a Bunyanesque figure who goes untutored and unaccompanied into the mountains and returns years later with a newborn novel in his hands.

—Michael Cunningham

Desire to Read

Over dinner the other night I asked my wife Caroline to describe what moods, for her, correlate with a desire to read fiction. After a moment she said, “When I’m feeling stimulated, I like to read fiction, and when my life feels sterile, I don’t.”  This rang true to me and I think it captures one of the essential paradoxes of fiction and art more generally: that to engage it requires a withdrawal from life, but to appreciate it requires a deep immersion in that very same thing.

—Kevin Hartnett

Hmm. Really? I think I feel the opposite. Well, I want to be reading fiction all the time, but I tend to actually read more in the lulls, the times when I don’t feel like I should be doing something else. Although, I’ve been trying to work on that because I realized I’ll be putting off reading for fun indefinitely unless I set aside some time for it.

Fictional Consciousness

In her essay “Fail Better,” Zadie Smith suggests that writing style is not so much a matter of syntax and word choice, but the expression of a writer’s personality, their soul even, a reflection of how he or she interacts with the world. … I love this essay, but I always wonder what Smith might say about first-person narrators who are different from the writers who create them. I wonder what happens to style in those cases, and how it might be defined. Is every fictional consciousness a mere variation, an extension, of the writer’s consciousness? Can a writer’s consciousness, his true style, emerge when the words on the page are the words of some imagined person? If the self is a pesky, slippery thing that can only be revealed in glimpses, what happens when a writer chooses to subsume that self in another, fictional, self?

—Edan Lepucki

19: Anything Considered

Anything Considered by Peter Mayle

From the library book sale in the spring. Read Peter Mayle’s Provence books a long time ago, thought I’d give this a go. Same setting, but Anything Considered is a novel rather than a memoir.

This was (I’ll say it) total dick lit, i.e. the male equivalent of chick lit. I think they call it “lad lit” in the UK.

The MC is Luciano Bennett, because he’s half-Italian, so he tans nicely, and half-English, so he’s… English-y. Of course, he’s called Bennett, because Luciano is too twee. He’s mid-30s, doesn’t really have a job, lives in France. He’s broke—he alludes to some misadventure in the past where someone made off with his life savings—but this really isn’t an impediment to his lifestyle. He lives for free (IIRC) in the house of some guy who’s on sabbatical or something. I guess you could say he’s house-sitting? Except a housekeeper came with the deal.

Anyhow, the premise is that he places an ambiguous ad looking for work, and a Really Rich Dude answers it. A job is offered, and Bennett accepts, thinking he’s essentially getting a paid vacay in Monaco where he can work on the aforementioned tan. (Silly characters! Don’t they know nothing is ever as it seems?) Instead, hijinx ensue. Naturally, he partners up with a chick who happens to be both formerly a model and formerly in the Israeli Army. So she’s hot and she can kick (his) ass. Of course! (What other kind of woman would be worthy of an unemployed middle-aged dude our esteemed hero? ;-))

Well, I won’t tell you any more. This had the potential to be terrible, but it was not. It was total cheese, but the good kind. The writing was good, and I think that makes the difference between fluff and dreck. It’d make an entertaining cheesy TV movie.

Your own work

The only person you’re in competition with is yourself. You can’t control how many people are out there [writing books], how many queries agents are getting, how many celebrities are writing books, etc. etc.

All you can control is your own work. Focus on that.

—Nathan Bransford

A writer’s time

[T]here is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments — moments of sustained creation — when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

—EB White,
in One Man’s Meat
(via Maud Newton)

Permanent Fixture

I thought about the one story I’d ever done substantial research for, which was set in 1976 when the CN Tower first opened. I have long been fascinated by my impression of the CN Tower as a permanent fixture on the horizon, as old as the universe, or at least as old as the TD Tower, but then to realize that it’s only three years older than I am (but then, don’t we all envision ourselves too as well as permanent fixtures on some horizon, old as the universe?). That, not entirely literally, Torontonians went to bed one morning and woke up to a tower in the sky.

—Kerry Clare

It was funny to read this, because I’d just been thinking about my impression that the songs we sang in elementary school choir had been around “forever” (not old as the universe, but you know, decades old) and how disconcerting it was to realize later that these were contemporary songs (maybe not brand-new, but only a few years old). I wonder how many other kids felt the same way? The funny thing is, I’m sure the choir director thought he was being totally cool, picking these  new songs for us to sing. I suppose it’s just that when you’re >10, you really don’t have a concept of scale wrt time. Everything is just divided into three time-groups: “stuff that happened before you were born,” “stuff that happened after you were born but you don’t remember,” and “stuff you can actually remember happening.” I think this is probably a good thing to remember when writing for children or from a child’s pov.

P.S. I had no idea the CN Tower only opened in 1976!

A promise

[T]he first chapter is a promise to the reader. It tells them what kind of story they’re going to be getting, and what to expect. This is true, even if you don’t intend for your first chapter to do that, because it’s the way we read. Breaking that promise can frustrate, and disappoint your reader. … By the end of the first chapter, the reader should have some sense of what the main conflict of the book is going to be. They don’t need to know all the details, but they should be able to tell the genre, have a good sense of who (what type of person) the main character is, and how their world is changing.

—Valerie Kemp

The social side of reading

[M]ore and more we’re starting to explore the social side of reading. We’re asking questions like: in a world where every store has every book, is the best store the one with the most interesting readers, connected in the most interesting ways? By connecting them, can they find books they otherwise would never have found? Or read a book more deeply? … [Sometimes] reading is about ideas that want to be shared or fought over or debated. With us, those debates can rage around the pages themselves, as they’re being read. We can connect those readers in a way that no publisher or bricks & mortar bookseller ever could.

—Michael Tamblyn of Kobo
(via Bookninja)