Because I am neither superhuman nor magical, feeling powerless is an occasional and unfortunate fact of life. … But this is why I love NaNoWriMo. As a writer, I am the master of my domain. … In addition to having full control over every event in my story, there is the added benefit of deciding where and to whom these things happen. … At last, my say-so is the only one that matters!
—Lindsey Grant
(from the NaNoWriMo newsletter)
In fact, novels do lie – they can’t help doing so – but that’s only one part of the story. The other is that, through lying, they express a curious truth, which can only be expressed in a veiled and concealed fashion, masquerading as what it is not. This statement has the ring of gibberish. But actually it’s quite simple. Men are not content with their lot and nearly all – rich or poor, brilliant or mediocre, famous or obscure – would like to have a life different from the one they lead. To (cunningly) appease this appetite, fiction was born. It is written and read to provide human beings with lives they’re unresigned to not having. The germ of every novel contains an element of non-resignation and desire.
[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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
[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)
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.
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!
[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.
Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself.
—Katherine Mansfield,
in Letters and Journals
& The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks
The Remainder Table 