Tag Archives: Fiction

Miscellaneous (Mommy)Blogging Quotes

Just some quotes from posts I had bookmarked, which may or may not be useful.

Shirley Jackson might have been a part-time mommy-blogger, had she lived in the internet age. … Life Among the Savages, a memoir of her life raising three small children in Vermont … is a direct ancestor of the current crop of mothering memoirs — someone should put together a history of the genre — and it shares their frequently jokey “if I didn’t laugh, I’d cry” tone, a tone so different from that used in “The Lottery” that I had to check to make sure this was the same Shirley Jackson. The beginning sucked me in completely[.]

—Stephany Aulenback

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The real problem, of course, the real reason why I’m not “squeeing” over BlogHer (ugh, what a word, squee), is that these aren’t really the blogs I read. … BlogHer is a meetup for a particular set of blogging communities, and that’s why people bond and hug and clap and get so emotional. The problem for me is that I read geek blogs and copyright blogs and academic blogs and some politics blogs and some crafts blogs, and those bloggers aren’t at this conference. This conference is for a fairly specific slice of the blogosphere, and I guess it’s not really the slice that I feel at home in.

—Jill Walker Rettberg

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While the first BlogHer conference, in 2005, seemed to be about empowering women bloggers, today, empowerment appears to be about “look how powerful we are, corporations take us seriously and want to give us free swag!” But of course, if blogging becomes mainly about accepting free swag and loving the corporations, well, that’s not empowerment, that’s more like oppression – a slightly more subtle form of oppression, perhaps, maybe willing oppression. It doesn’t bode well for the power of blogging to actually spread the voices of the people, though, if the people are happy to speak for the corporations.

—Jill Walker Rettberg

*

Honesty – how truthful do you want to be in your blog? There are plenty of examples of fictional blogs that have presented themselves as real. When readers discovered they were fictional, they felt cheated and became very angry (I’ve blogged about why readers get angry at this. On a smaller scale, most bloggers leave out the ugly bits and maybe play up the good stuff, as in the quote from Lars Tangen in this blog post. I’m not saying you need to be utterly honest (in fact, the more literary blogs get, the less factual truth matters, in my opinion, but you do need to think about this.

—Jill Walker Rettberg

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Dooce.com is now the full time job of both Heather and her husband, Jon. The blog supports an online community and a merchandise store. Heather is the author of a bestselling book, was named by Forbes as one of the 30 most influential women in media in 2009, and just signed an exclusive development deal with HGTV.
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In a recent post entitled “Check Up for Self Delusion,” Penelope Trunk, another popular female blogger, recently wrote, “Probably the most accurate representation of women is in the blogosphere. There is no filter here, no need to appeal to both Peoria and Pasadena all at once.” She goes on to compare Dooce.com with an even more popular mommy blog, The Pioneer Woman.

—Alaina Smith

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Probably the most accurate representation of women is in the blogosphere. There is no filter here, no need to appeal to both Peoria and Pasadena all at once. But even the whole of the blogosphere does not represent the female experience particularly accurately.
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The Pioneer Woman is largely housewife porn. The men are hot and rugged, just like in a romance novel. The author, Ree Drummond, is running an operation similar to Rachel Ray or Martha Stewart, but she markets herself as a stay-at-home mom, and a homeschooler at that. The whole thing strikes me as totally preposterous. … On Dooce, Heather Armstrong blogs about depression, her kids being difficult, and her parents being Mormon. I love Heather Armstrong. But she’s the gold standard for writing a blog about your life and keeping a marriage together, and she is not, actually, writing about the female experience for married women.

—Penelope Trunk

A part of the story

[C]reative nonfiction writers do not make things up; they make ideas and information that already exist more interesting and, often, more accessible.
…
In creative nonfiction, writers can be poetic and journalistic simultaneously. Creative nonfiction writers are encouraged to utilize literary and even cinematic techniques, from scene to dialogue to description to point of view, to write about themselves and others, capturing real people and real life in ways that can and have changed the world. What is most important and enjoyable about creative nonfiction is that it not only allows but also encourages the writer to become a part of the story or essay being written. The personal involvement creates a special magic that alleviates the suffering and anxiety of the writing experience; it provides many outlets for satisfaction and self-discovery, flexibility and freedom.

—Lee Gutkind

Rebound

When a book I love is ending—no matter how devastating the final pages, no matter how desperate I am to know how things will turn out, and what the very last line will say to me—I slow down. Like a kid on a bike heading downhill, I use both my brakes and my feet, let the rubber soles burn off, will the book to magically grow longer before my eyes.

One musn’t wait too long before committing to the next book, though: this is how reading ruts begin. …

What I need is a rebound book, a palate cleanser.  Maybe today I’ll search for a thick-but-lightweight, no-strings-attached thriller, something that can rope me in quickly, make me forget, at least temporarily, the heartbreak I felt over the last book leaving me.

—Elizabeth Ames Staudt

Stories have formed us all

I was reminded of Carolyn Heilbrun yesterday when someone mentioned writers who committed suicide.

What matters is that lives do not serve as models; only stories do that. And it is a hard thing to make up stories to live by. We can only retell and live by the stories we have read or heard. We live our lives through texts. They may be read, or chanted, or experienced electronically, or come to us, like the murmurings of our mothers, telling us what the conventions demand. Whatever their form or medium, these stories have formed us all; they are what we must use to make new fictions, new narratives.

—Carolyn Heilbrun
Writing a Woman’s Life (1988, p.37)

If it can be taught at all

Craft refers to the mechanics of fiction: plot, characterization, dialogue, pacing, flow, scene-crafting, dramatic structure, point-of-view, etc. I think craft is pretty easy to teach and it’s easy to learn. It’s technique, the foundation upon which writers use their artistic skill to build their story. Knowing the mechanics of craft enables you to use it to create the effect you want.

Story refers to the page-turning factor: how compelling is your story, how unique or original, does it connect with the reader, is there that certain spark that makes it jump off the page? Is it sufficiently suspenseful or romantic (as appropriate)? Does it open with a scene that intrigues and makes the reader want to know more? Story comes from the imagination of the writer and is much more difficult to teach than craft (if it can be taught at all).

Voice is the expression of you on the page—your originality and the courage to express it. Voice is what you develop when you practice what we talked about yesterday—writing what you know. It’s the unfettered, non-derivative, unique conglomeration of your thoughts, feelings, passions, dreams, beliefs, fears and attitudes, coming through in every word you write.

—Rachelle Gardner

The Significance of Silence

Mood and atmosphere are vital in [Chekhov’s] explorations of emotional dilemma which, at times, border on the abstract. For him, the purpose of art is the depiction of unconditional truth and the pursuit of it; he invariably exposes hypocrisy and deception, most emphatically self-deception. Above all, Chekhov, described by Tolstoy as impressionist, understands compromise, downplays plot and avoids conventional denouement. As a playwright he knew both the risks and the significance of silence on stage, of the pause that articulates truth.

—Eileen Battersby

Searches for Truths

Members of the OnFiction group have (if I may speak for all of us) been a bit dissatisfied with the idea that non-fiction is true and fiction is untrue. We prefer to see fiction in terms of its subject matter: exploration of how selves make their sometimes problematic ways through the social world.
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Uncertainty about what really happened is an issue that rightly exercises historians and journalists. But the deeper issue, raised by [Frederic] Bartlett though not mentioned by [Daniel] Mendelsohn, is that when remembering or, indeed, when trying to make sense of anything for the first time, we are constantly engaged in an “effort after meaning” (Bartlett, p. 20). In his refusal to write an autobiography, Freud wasn’t worrying about truth and untruth, but about truth and lying.
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Fiction, then, in which one searches for truths other than those of mere actuality, as if from the inside, may be the real expression of the human effort after meaning.

—Keith Oatley

Blame Writers

So there’s this article titled “The Death of Fiction?” in which Ted Genoways laments the demise of various print journals, etc. The gist: writers are writing self-absorbed crap so no one wants to read it. (Not addressed: why he’s—I guess—publishing said crap.)

Anyhow. Genoways is the editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review, a university-sponsored print journal. Apparently he makes $134,000/year for editing VQR, a figure I am gobsmacked by. I had no idea any literary journal editor made that much (solely from their position as editor).

In light of that tidbit, I wanted to comment on the accompanying blog post:

Here at VQR we currently have more than ten times as many submitters each year as we have subscribers. And there’s very, very little overlap. We know—we’ve checked. So there’s an ever-growing number of people writing and submitting fiction, but there’s an ever-dwindling number of people reading the best journals that publish it.

…

We dare say that half of the top fiction venues of the last decade—and indeed some of the great American fiction venues of all time—are in danger of folding or have already folded for lack of readership. And yet the number of fiction writers grows and grows. Fiction writers, we’re asking you directly: Why don’t you subscribe to just one or two magazines? Is $50 too high a price for the future of literary fiction?

Unfortunately, yes, there are people who write (not well) but don’t read. It’s been a peeve of mine since forever. But that crowd aside, it’s fallacious to assume that just because writers don’t subscribe to your publication, they aren’t reading it (and it’s a huge leap from there to assume that they aren’t reading at all).

So why aren’t writers (the ones who do read) subscribing to “the best journals that publish it” at the same rate they’re submitting? Well, it’s not hard to figure out. Let me unpack it for you.

First, it’s pretty much guaranteed that any writer submitting to VQR via the slush pile makes far less than $134,000/year given that the median income in the US (where presumably most of his unsolicited subs come from) is $32,140.

For some of those submitting, the best way to spend $50 may be on food (or some other necessity of life). A library card is free and gives one access to an array of journals. It’s still ok to go to the library, right?

But assuming I have $50 to spend on lit journals, I have to decide whether a subscription to a single literary journal is the best use of my money. As a writer, I’m not just reading to read, I’m reading to see where my work will fit. It follows that, as a writer, it’s more prudent for me to go to a bookstore and spend my $50 on individual copies of four different literary journals, which gives me insight into four potential venues for my work. (“Best of” anthologies appeal to writers for similar reasons.) A subscription, as nice as that would be, only gives me insight into one (and, ack, maybe it’s not the right one for me).

On the other hand, for a reader (who doesn’t write), a subscription is a good idea. Assuming you like the editorial direction, it makes sense to subscribe—you know you’ll get more of the same quality/aesthetic every issue. This is, I think, the main reason more non-writers than writers commit to a subscription.

One more thing to keep in mind is, everything else being equal, it makes sense that non-writer readers would have more subscriptions. Assuming writers-with-day jobs  have the same amount of free time to spend writing and/or reading as readers-with-day jobs, the readers have more time to read. Because they’re only reading. Writers have to read and write.

I mean, if what you really want is for writers to produce good work, you have to allow they need time to write, right?

Oh, but that’s not really what you’re saying at all, is it? Really what you’re saying is: Great unwashed masses who think you are writers? You’re not. Stop submitting to us, already. In fact, just stop writing. Go away. Oh, but, hey? Before you go, please buy a subscription. Pretty please? You owe it to Fiction! All paid up? Good. Now fuck off out of my lit journal’s slush pile.*

Seriously? If you don’t want to read slush, close your journal to unsolicited subs. Otherwise, keep reading and just say no to the stuff that doesn’t cut it. It’s not that hard: “No, thanks.” (Wait, do you even send out rejections?) Whining about how many subs you get when you probably don’t even read them until they’ve been through a few rounds of vetting by unpaid undergrad interns is just annoying. Talk about navel-gazing.

/long-winded answer

My question is, would Genoways still edit VQR if the position were unpaid?

*Apologies to Gordon Ramsay.