Category Archives: Writing

Project 366 – Week 1

1/366
first day fades into
shades of blue, mountains and sky
lights line snow ribbons

2/366
rearranging shelves
empty, fill, more space to breathe
raising clouds of dust

3/366
new year, first work day
wireless network won’t connect
to the internet

4/366
dark morning waking
to pounding of rain on roof
roll over, burrow

5/366
so much impatience
it’s all about me, myself,
and I couldn’t wait

6/366
rain falling in sheets
running will make me feel like
a superhero

7/366
this is Saturday
must wash the dishes before
they take over the—

Edges

What may be more insidious is the pressure to fiddle with books for commercial reasons. Because e-readers gather enormously detailed information on the way people read, publishers may soon be awash in market research. They’ll know how quickly readers progress through different chapters, when they skip pages, and when they abandon a book.

The promise of stronger sales and profits will make it hard to resist tinkering with a book in response to such signals, adding a few choice words here, trimming a chapter there, maybe giving a key character a quick makeover. What will be lost, or at least diminished, is the sense of a book as a finished and complete object, a self-contained work of art.

Not long before he died, John Updike spoke eloquently of a book’s “edges,” the boundaries that give shape and integrity to a literary work and that for centuries have found their outward expression in the indelibility of printed pages. It’s those edges that give a book its solidity, allowing it to stand up to the vagaries of fashion and the erosions of time. And it’s those edges that seem fated to blur as the words of books go from being stamped permanently on sheets of paper to being rendered temporarily on flickering screens.

—Nicholas Carr

There is so much to unpack here! It seems so weird that there are laws that keep private what library books you borrow (i.e. the titles), yet, if you’re an ebook reader, someone’s analyzing how long you pause on each individual page. I suppose it’s analyzed in the aggregate, but still. Somewhere, someone knows what you, individually, are doing. I guess that’s also true of the library info, but again, they only know the titles of the books you read, and again, laws.

Beyond privacy or the lack thereof, how accurate is that kind of info anyhow? Maybe you just got distracted by something. You know, like when you leave a browser window open for a half a day. You’re not actually spending 12 hours reading a 500-word article. You just haven’t got around to reading it yet.

And the rest gets into the whole literary vs. commercial work, especially when you’re talking about fiction. Everything I’ve read about ebooks makes it seem like people are more keen on fiction ebooks than nonfiction ebooks. This just seems backward to me. I totally see the benefits of ebooks for books that are frequently updated (guidebooks, textbooks, etc.). There’s also the convenience. Physical textbooks are heavy/bulky; with ebooks you can have them all with you at once. Same for guidebooks. These kinds of books are about the content, not the form. They’re also, frequently, works for hire, written by multiple authors working for a corporation.

But fiction? Fiction is an art. It’s a creative work. There’s an emotional investment in the work on the part of the author. While it’s true that some authors have revised work after publication, this is their own choice. Suggesting that writers revise their completed/published work on the basis of market research (i.e. reader feedback), changes the whole artistic process. No longer would the writer whose name is on the work be the sole author, whether or not this acknowledged. This is not to say this can’t (or hasn’t) been done; it’s just that it’s a different creative process.

You can see this how this happens by looking at the evolution of blogs. Early blogs were clearly the product of individual writers, but at this point, the voice of any blogger who has a substantial readership and continues to blog, has been drastically affected by their readers (& sponsors/advertisers). What they write and how they write it is a collaborative, not individual, process. (It might be a subconscious effect, but it’s still there.)

Revising published fiction based on reader feedback would be like an artist revising a painting after reading the comment cards from the gallery where the painting hangs, then rehanging it, so that the visitors who see the revised painting are seeing something different than the original visitors did, even though the painting has the same title. Would this change be acknowledged? Or would it be something that is not mentioned unless a visitor happens to return and notice the difference? And would the changes continue? Would the process be repeated again and again? And what happens when the artist dies? Would someone else continue the revisions? And how does all this revising affect new output? Is the artist so busy revising things already created that s/he has no time to create anything new? Shouldn’t an artist’s energy be put into new projects?

So many questions.

I Miss Mail

To be clear, I don’t mean business and bills and such. I much prefer email and online banking for that kind of stuff.

No, what I miss is personal mail. Letters.

I’m obviously not the only one who feels this way. A while ago, I ran across the Post a Letter Social Activity Club and just this morning, Letters in the Mail.

Somewhere along the line, email for personal communication lost its allure. I suppose this was inevitable. Back in the day (the mid/late ’90s), most email was friend email. That, combined with the novelty of immediacy, meant that email was soon the way to communicate with friends. There was a brief point in time when receiving an email seemed special.

But then, as you know, Bob, we started doing everything online and email became routine, just one more task on the to-do list. Receiving (or sending) an email not only didn’t seem special anymore; it felt impersonal.

In snail mail days, you stuck your bill stubs and payment in plain #10 envelopes. Business correspondence was typed on white letter paper and stuck in the same plain white envelopes. But for your personal letters, you pulled out the fancy-pants paper and envelopes, stationery you carefully picked out or someone bought you for a birthday gift (in the hopes of receiving a letter, natch). You handwrote and and maybe you used a purple or green pen. Maybe you decorated the envelope or enclosed something along with the letter. Each letter was a mini-package, a gift, even if it was just a birthday card or a postcard.

An email is an email is an email. Business or personal, you type in the same box. The content differs, but the appearance is the same. Personal “letters” now look just as bland as business correspondence. But that’s not the whole story.

Receiving a letter was genuinely exciting. Mail! You got to open it, read it, and then you had time to savor it. You actually got to enjoy the receiving of the letter because there was no expectation of an immediate reply. First, the sender didn’t know when exactly the recipient received a letter. Second, there was an understanding that one didn’t reply immediately, but waited until a more convenient time (Sunday afternoon, perhaps) or until one had a few letters to reply to. Third, once the reply letter was sent, it’d take several days to get to the recipient, so once you sent your reply, you could bask in the satisfaction of a task completed. The cycle of letters might take a month to complete, but this was ok, because in between there was the anticipation, and also letters from other people (which you also got to savor & enjoy).

And so it turns out immediacy really isn’t so awesome for personal correspondence. You send an email, you know the other person gets it right away. You receive an email, you know the other person knows you’ll see it as soon as you check your mail. Your excitement at receiving a personal email is tempered because replying immediately goes on your to-do list. But if you’re anything like me, the reply keeps getting pushed down the list, because you want to write a real response and that takes time, so you keep putting it off and putting it off…

(…thinking of you and you and you and you and you…)

Then, when you do finally get around to catching up on your personal correspondence and hit send, your satisfaction is mixed with dread because the recipients could reply right away and if they do, shouldn’t you reciprocate by being equally speedy, but omg, you’re exhausted. Writing is draining! You can’t write another letter right now. It’s too. much. pressure.

(And that’s not even getting into the whole questionable privacy of email issue.)

People who lament the loss of old media are often framed as Luddites fetishizing objects. Content is content, technophiles say, however it is delivered. And this is true, in some cases. It doesn’t really matter how my phone bill is delivered so long as I receive it on time to pay it without penalty. I’m not a hoarder; I don’t have a room full of old utility bills I can’t bear to part with because each one is a unique flower. In this case, content is content. Form is irrelevant.

But a letter from a friend is not the same as a bill. The form does affect the content. It affects what the letter-writer writes and what the recipient receives. At the very least, a physical letter is a tangible reminder of the person who sent it. Beyond that, form also affects practice. It affects how we write and what we write. The individual multiple-page letters we used to send are today more likely to be brief messages broadcast to our various social networks. And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with those kinds of messages, it’s that they aren’t ideal for the kinds of things we used to write in letters to our BFFs, our deepest, darkest secrets, the grime and embarrassment of our lives. Now it’s all public and we’re all surface, granite and glass and stainless steel, light and shiny—just in case someone googles us.

Writing Goals for 2012

All right, it’s January 1st! Time to set some overly ambitious goals for the new year 🙂

Goal 1: 1hr creative writing 5x/week.

I’ve been successful at incorporating running/yoga into my everyday life, so I’m modeling this goal after my running/yoga practice. I started thinking about why I’m successful at that, but writing always gets pushed to the bottom of the list. The thing with running & yoga is that I don’t really think about product on a daily basis. I know I’m never going to be the best runner or yogi and that isn’t really the point anyway. The point is the practice. If I go for a run or spend an hour doing yoga, afterward I’m satisfied—even if was a crappy day and there will be crappy days—because the satisfaction comes from just doing it. In the long term, daily practice does lead to rewards (like personal bests & the ability to do poses that used to be difficult) but the nice thing is these are a bonus. (Whereas if product goals are your primary focus, you’ll feel like a failure until you achieve them, and if you never do, you’ll probably quit.)

Lately so much of my writing time has been product-focused. When you need to produce a completed piece of writing, you can’t just say “I’ll spend x hours on this” because at the end of x hours, you’ll probably not be done (everything takes longer than you think it will) and you have to keep going until you are done (which is frustrating), but you probably also have a deadline (which is stressful). All of which adds up to a generally unpleasant writing experience. With this goal, I want to focus on writing as a practice, and on shifting my mindset from viewing creative writing as a reward (which is why I always leave it till last—it’s the  “I don’t deserve to take time to do this because I haven’t finished x, y, and z” mindset) to viewing it as a necessity, something that will only benefit my other writing. Speaking of other writing…

Goal 2: draft of dissertation by end of year.

Goal 3: blog 3x/week.

Goal 4: 366 project.

…discussion of goals 2, 3 & 4 reserved for future posts (see Goal 3 ;)). Goals 2, 3 & 4 are definitely overly ambitious, but I did warn you.

The simple act of writing regularly

A 48-year-old high-school biology teacher from France, Alexis Jenni, won the country’s top literary prize this year, the Prix Goncourt. … In the Alexis Jenni school of thought, a writer may be someone, anyone, with a compulsion to scrawl or the conviction of having something to say. A writer is not defined by his career, but the simple act of writing regularly. And authors who found success through the muck of making ends meet have taken that approach for some time now, in practice at least.

—Betsy Morais

Make Stuff. Make Stories.

And I came to writing fiction, in the first place, out of being an art student. From the beginning, I wanted to make stuff. I wanted to make paintings and sculptures. And so the idea of artifice and craft and artificiality seemed really like the baseline condition of my gesture to begin with. The idea of verifiability or objectivity-these characteristics that writing inherits not from the arts but from journalism or scholarship-those weren’t native to me in any way. I was a failed student. I had never written a thesis, let alone a dissertation. I’d never done any journalism. I wasn’t even a person who kept a journal. I just wanted to make stories.

—Jonathan Lethem