Category Archives: Writing

That Narrative

It’s a grey ethical area for writers. Memoirists are vampires and thieves, you might say: vampires and thieves with shards of ice in their hearts. However much [Candia] McWilliam may want us to think about her story in terms of the sentences, of course we are also interested in the sense. In a prurient (or perhaps hope-filled) desire to read about how a famous novelist hit the bottle and rock bottom and then somehow got her life together again. Yes, of course that’s a deliberately clichéd version of her story and an unfair reflection of McWilliam’s rich writing. But it would be naïve to suggest the book won’t be read for that narrative.

—Charlotte Higgins

Tragic Desperation

Reading someone’s handwriting can be incredibly intimate and revealing, perhaps especially in an age of e-mail and texting. The confines of font streamline and depersonalize emotionality, in contrast with the romance of thoughtful script or the tragic desperation of slanted scrawls.

—Kristina Budelis

Direct and … pleasant

I’ve noticed two things [are different since publishing my last book]. One is that I’m able to observe via Twitter the global launch of the book. I’m able to simultaneously see for the first time that the English language editions, which have been exported from England into Europe and Australia, are released a week and a half before they’re released to the rest of the world. I kind of vaguely knew before but didn’t think about. The other thing is the number of Twitter users asking me questions that I’m usually woefully unable to answer about formats and editions.

I am [experiencing a greater level of fan engagement]. It’s much more direct and much more pleasant than I would have expected it to be.

—William Gibson

The reality of the Web, not the dream

This original conception of hypertext fathered two lines of descent. One adopted hypertext as a practical tool for organizing and cross-associating information; the other embraced it as an experimental art form, which might transform the essentially linear nature of our reading into a branching game, puzzle or poem, in which the reader collaborates with the author. The pragmatists use links to try to enhance comprehension or add context, to say “here’s where I got this” or “here’s where you can learn more”; the hypertext artists deploy them as part of a larger experiment in expanding (or blowing up) the structure of traditional narrative.

These are fundamentally different endeavors. The pragmatic linkers have thrived in the Web era; the literary linkers have so far largely failed to reach anyone outside the academy. The Web has given us a hypertext world in which links providing useful pointers outnumber links with artistic intent a million to one. If we are going to study the impact of hypertext on our brains and our culture, surely we should look at the reality of the Web, not the dream of the hypertext artists and theorists.

—Scott Rosenberg

Plate of Spaghetti

Heartbreak is every bit as much a psychological adaptation as is the compulsion to have sex with those other than our partners, and it throws a monster of a monkey wrench into the evolutionists’ otherwise practical polyamory. It’s indeed natural for people—especially men—to seek sexual variety. My partner once likened this to having the same old meal over and over again, for years on end; eventually you’re going to get some serious cravings for a different dish. But I reminded him that people aren’t the equivalent of a plate of spaghetti. Unfortunately, we have feelings.

—Jesse Bering

(Previously.)

Raw Clay

Reading their life story in scattered posts feels exactly like reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. The landmark 1957 novel about modern love was told in four books written from different characters’ points of view against the backdrop of inter-war Egypt. Incidents we glimpse in the first novel, Justine, aren’t fully realized until we see the observations of characters in the subsequent stories. Readers are asked to construct the whole picture by collecting puzzle pieces sprinkled throughout four narratives.

Of course Susan and her circle are more of a satire, as their banal posts give us a hilarious glimpse of early 21st century life. But the online confessions offer just the sort of raw clay that fiction writers love to lay hands on. Let me quote from her bio: “I’m madly in love! I’m free!” Many friends click the thumbs-up “Like” button.

—Shannon Rupp

Ok, I hadn’t thought about that, but it reminds me that I really should read the whole quartet (re-read Justine and read the others) now that I’ve found all four of them. I can call it research.

A room of one’s own

[My] garret was a bit bleak, actually being the back of my very strange bedroom closet/storage area … but it was a garret, and it had a window, and an outlet, and it was nothing to scoff at, being a room of one’s own. Or at least a corner of an expansive closet of one’s own, which was plenty.

But it turns out that after a day at home alone … spending an evening alone in the back of a closet is bad for the soul. Or so I imagine, having not bothered to try. For the last year, my office has been a chair in the corner of my living room, by the window with my laptop, with my husband busy at his actual desk on the other side of the room. I miss him when he’s at work, and when he’s home I like to be close to him, even if neither of us are talking and both of us are working on various projects.

—Kerry Clare

The ability to keep going

What many talented people lack is the ability to keep going when external rewards are minimal or non-existent.

…

Every writer gets rejected, sometimes over and over. But the ones who only have potential stop submitting (or just stop writing) somewhere along the way. They get discouraged and feel beat down.

And then, before you know it, they’ve become someone who used to be a writer. Or someone who wanted to be a writer.

—Chris Guillebeau