The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist

My review which was in the Reads Monthly section of The Sunday Star yesterday :

What actually happens when we read a literary novel? And what is in the mind of an author when he writes one? These are the central questions addressed by Orhan Pamuk in The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist. And since the Turkish writer is both an avid reader and the Nobel Prize winning author of several internationally acclaimed novels (including Snow, My Name is Red, and The White Castle), he is extremely well-qualified to do so.

The title of the book is taken from the famous essay by Friedrich Schiller . Pamuk’s “naïve” novelists, he says, are unaware of the techniques they are using, and they write spontaneously as if carrying out a natural act, as opposed to “sentimental” or reflective novelists “who are concerned with artificiality of the text and its failure to attain reality”. I have to say though that I did not find the distinction a particularly useful scaffold for Pamuk’s arguments, particularly as the author himself admits that all great novelists ultimately have to be a blend of both. At times, his discussion seems rather abstract and academic, perhaps not surprisingly, as these six linked essays were initially delivered in the form of lectures at Harvard University in 2009.
On Naive and Sentimental Poetry

But it is when he writes more anecdotally and personally that he is at his best. Anyone who has fallen passionately in love with reading will recognize themselves in Pamuk’s descriptions of his younger self, encountering the great works of fiction for the first time, discovering in them important truths about life, and acquiring from them “a breathtaking sense of freedom and self-confidence”. Pamuk draws on the classics for his examples, including Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Pamuk captures the special magic of the literary form. He describes how the words on the page become invisible as we look through them onto an entire landscape with the ability “to oscillate between the long view and fleeting moments, general thoughts and specific events, at a speed no other literary genre can offer.” We can simultaneously see, he says “the broader picture, the whole landscape, the thoughts of the individual, and the nuances of the character’s mood.”

More than once he refers to the “intense and tiring effort” required to read a literary novel, and he lists a whole lot of different things that the reader actually has to do simultaneously to connect with the text. We observe the scene and follow the narrative, and transform the words on the page into images. Our memory labours intensively to hold all the threads of the story and what we know of the characters. We appreciate the style, make judgments about the moral choices the characters make, and congratulate ourselves for being able to read “a difficult” novel.

As we read, we are constantly wondering, he says, how much of the novel tells of real experience and how much is an act of imagination, and also how much of the author’s own life is invested in the fiction. Indeed, he devotes a whole essay to the topic, but concludes, not surprisingly, that “the novel is not completely imaginary nor completely factual.”

But even as we are deriving pleasure from the surface details of the novel, we are searching at a deeper level for “motive, idea, purpose”, in fact what he calls “a secret centre”. Reading literary fiction, he says, is the act of determining the real centre of the novel, “whose source remains ambiguous but which nevertheless illuminates the whole.” It is the slow uncovering of this centre that gives the reader full satisfaction.

Popular genre fiction, he says, typically lacks this centre, and is read largely for comfort. But he does single out some genre writers (including Patricia Highsmith, John Le Carre, Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick) as authors whose work can be read at a deeper level.

Pamuk is perhaps at his most controversial when he talks about the creation of character in the novel. He suggests that over the past 150 years our curiosity about characters has taken up much more space in the novel than it has in life, and that “It has sometimes become too self-indulgent, almost vulgar”. He believes that “People do not actually have as much character as we find portrayed in novels” , and reckons that human character is not nearly as important in shaping our live as it is made out to be in the novels and literary criticism of the west. This certainly is food for serious thought.

He goes on to attack the idea of the character-driven plot, where the author seems to expect that “… the hero like a prompter on stage will whisper to the novelist the entire course of the novel.” This approach, taught extensively on creative writing courses, “merely goes to show that many novelists begin to write their novels without being sure of their story, and that is the only way they are able to write.” He says that in his own writing his protagonist’s character will be formed, as a real person’s is, by situations and events.

Much of what is written about literature in academic circles is made inaccessible to the ordinary book-lover and writer by the jargon of literary theory. This book can be enjoyed by both the enthusiastic reader and by writers, and should serve to spark deeper discussion of the craft of the novel - whether or not one chooses to agree on all points with Pamuk.

And of course, perhaps more importantly for fans of Pamuk’s work, The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist gives an intriguing insight into the preoccupations and approach to writing of one of the world’s most important authors.

Inside a Writer's Head

This message was posted by one of the participants on the Yahoo Group I run for my creative writing courses and it made me smile so much I thought I would pass it on :

Am reading a collection of short stories by Sheila O'Flanagan, and the first story starts like this:

Jennifer Jones sat at the table on her balcony.

No, thought Corinne, that's too boring. It doesn't say anything, doesn't let people know where she is. Or what sort of person she is. Or what might be about to happen to her.

Jennifer Jones watched the crystal-clear water from the chair on her balcony.

But what's she doing sitting down? Corinne asked herself. Why is she sitting around like a lame-ass when she's somewhere gorgeous and exotic? And when she's supposed to be gorgeous and exotic too? And especially when she's supposed to be a sassy action heroine? She shouldn't be sitting anywhere just looking at the sea like a feeble pensioner. (Though pensioners don't have to be feeble. Note to self: how about a pensioner heroine for a future novel? Mightn't that be interesting? Or is that too Agatha Christie? Miss Bloody Marple, of course. Nobody can do a pensioner like Miss Bloody Marple, can they?) Corinne frowned as she looked at her revised opening sentence again. I haven't even said that it's the sea she's looking at, have I? Crystal-clear water could be a lake. I'm still not giving any information about what's going to happen to her at all.

Jennifer Jones... Jennifer Jones... Corinne stared at the open laptop in front of her. Oh bloody hell, she thought. What the hell is going to happen to her? I've no damn idea. She pushed the laptop away from her in disgust and stared out over the blue and white wooden rails of the balcony of Room 404. She sighed deeply. Bloody Jennifer Jones. She loathed the woman. Detested her. Hated her. Abhorred her. Corinne pulled the laptop towards her again and clicked on the thesaurus. Abhor. Abominate. Deplore. Detest. Dislike. Execrate. She frowned. Was execrate a verb? She wasn't sure. She'd never heard of it before. But it would do. If it meant what it was supposed to mean, then she absolutely totally and utterly execrated Jennifer Bloody Jones.

Thought some of the writers here might be able to identify with this! *grin*

The Man from the Boys

All fiction is autobiographical. But you move the furniture around. So all fiction is also invented. Real life shot through with fantasy – that is what novels are.

Shahril Sewa interviews author Tony Parsons in Starmag today. 

I very much enjoyed Man and Boy when it came out and bought it as a gift for friends.  Now the third novel featuring Harry Silver, Man From the Boys, is out and I have some catching up to do.

(I love the quote above and will throw it at the folks doing my writing classes, because it's precisely what I'm trying to tell them.)

Dangerous Novels for Aspiring Authors

Any young person who wants to be a novelist should of course be a reader as well. But some novels can be more hazard than inspiration. They are often well-written, but their effects have generally been disastrous: they inspired younger writers to imitate them, they created awful new genres that debased readers' tastes, or they promoted literary or social values that we could very much do without.

Among the authors Crawford Kilian lists on The Tyee website are Tolkein, Rand, and Hemingway.  And I have myself just been reading the work of a Kerouac-wannabe who would do so much better trusting his own voice. (Pic of the author left.) Rushdie has a hell of a lot to answer for too.  Any more you can think of?

Also listed are those authors who might be dangerous to newer writers - simply because they are so  good they leave us dumbfounded!

Maintaining Confidence

For those of you who write, there's a great piece on Forbes.com (found via BookRabbit on Twitter) about how successful writers maintain their confidence. Alan Rinzler, Executive Editor at Jossey-Bass (an imprint of John Wiley) points out that :

To write well requires energy, discipline and a sense of humor.

And he offers some sterling advice to writers to help them soldier on through periods of doubt, - among them :

Even if you don’t love what you’re turning out, keep putting those words on the screen or down on paper, regardless. What may feel like a massive writer’s block may be only the need to pause, or to work out the story on an internal, unconscious level. You can always polish or delete what you’ve written, but sustaining the discipline will be encouraging and ultimately valuable. You will actually build confidence by sticking to the task at hand.

A Thoroughly Chaotic Writer of Neatly Plotted Stories

Her less-than-refined writerly day began with finding her notebook, which surely she'd left right there. Then, having found a notebook (not the one she'd used yesterday), and staring in stunned amazement at the illegible chicken scratchings therein, she would finally settle down to jab at elusive characters and oil creaky plots. ... Christie's promiscuous note-taking meant that any one novel or play might be distributed over multiple notebooks and many, many years.

I thought I was a chaotic writer but didn't expect the same to be true of such a neat plotter as Agatha Christie!  In Slate magazine Christine Kenneally, a great fan of Christie's work, pours over Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks : Fifty years of Mysteries in the Making. She finds that :

The contents of the notebooks are as multi-dimensional as their Escher-like structure. They include fully worked-out scenes, historical background, lists of character names, rough maps of imaginary places, stage settings, an idle rebus (the numeral three, a crossed-out eye, and a mouse), and plot ideas that will be recognizable to any Christie fan: "Poirot asks to go down to country—finds a house and various fantastic details," "Saves her life several times," "Inquire enquire—both in same letter." What's more, in between ominous scraps like "Stabbed through eye with hatpin" and "influenza depression virus—Stolen? Cabinet Minister?" are grocery lists: "Newspapers, toilet paper, salt, pepper …" There was no clean line between Christie's work life and her family life. She created household ledgers, and scribbled notes to self. ("All away weekend—can we go Thursday Nan.") Even Christie's second husband, the archeologist Sir Max Mallowan, used her notebooks. He jotted down calculations. Christie's daughter Rosalind practiced penmanship, and the whole family kept track of their bridge scores alongside notes like, "Possibilities of poison … cyanide in strawberry … coniine—in capsule?"

Most surprising of all, it seems that Christie did not always know who the killer was when she started writing her crime novels, but allowed herself the space to try out different possibilities. I always thought that an outline of the plot had to come first when writing this particular genre (I know that this is how Elizabeth George works, for example.)

John Curran's book also includes two previously unpublished Poirot stories and sounds like a must-buy for anyone who loves Christie's books.  I'm fascinated by the creative process, love to study writer's notebooks, and will add this to my wishlist.

A Bit of Discomfort Makes You a Better Writer

Real writers need frustration. They need embarrassment. They need cold, uncomfortable rooms, miles from a mobile signal. There should be an infestation of at least one parasite, a backlog of warnings from the Student Loans Company and just enough coffee for what Don DeLillo calls 'an occasional revelation'.

Do you need a comfortable space to do your writing? Stuff and nonsense says Matt Shoard on The Guardian blog (undoing all the good advice I've been giving to my writing classes about creating a special place in the house to write!).  He waves the example of Dan Brown at us - a cushy lifestyle, a huge mansion, and flaccid prose.

As a creative writing teacher Shoard does sound a bit of a sadist! :

Personally, I like to hold "hungry" creative writing seminars through lunch, far from a vending machine, at the cold end of campus with the heating down. You can almost see Dan Brown leaving and David Foster Wallace taking his place. "I want to smell the breath of a stranger as he speaks my name," wrote one student this week. They're no more prolific, but they're gutsier. Discomfort cures overwriting.

Wondering what I should do with my writing classes now. Should I turn off the aircon and the fans and let them sweat their way to better prose?

The Writing Advice Industry

The market for fiction shrinks every year, the attention paid to novels by the media diminishes monthly, booksellers demand ever-lower prices, everybody in the industry says it’s the worst it’s ever been. And yet more academic or private creative-writing programs are created every year, and the demand for advice on becoming a novelist remains furiously high. Indeed, the selling of advice on writing has become a self-supporting industry: I know young writers who are doing masters of fine arts in creative writing so that they can in turn become creative-writing teachers in similar programs. Any magazine article like this one generates Internet responses as lengthy as any novella. The discussion of creative writing seems more popular than creative writing itself.

Russell Smith in Canada's Globe and Mail comments The Guardian's recent 10 Rules for Writers lists and remarks on one of the biggest literary ironies of our time - everyone wants to be a writer, we swallow whatever advice we can get about writing wholesale, fuelling a whole advice industry ... but fewer of us can be arsed to read fiction!

Plenty of truth in what he says, of course, but it does seem sour-grapesy.  I for one am grateful for whatever insights about the writing process I can gather from books, article, courses and author chats, and find my appreciation of what I read deepened by such insights.

(BTW Linked to the article in the comments is this rather enjoyable blog post from Lauren B. Davis - Ten Questions Never to Ask a Writer.)

Ten Rules

Those of us who write love to glean the advice from those who have made a success of the business of fiction. Crime writer Elmore Leonard's list of ten writing rules appeared in The New York Times in 2001 and has since been much quoted. (Rightly so, because it's sterling stuff.)

1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5 Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "Ameri­can and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're ­Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it

Now a book for writers based on the list is due to be republished next month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.  (You can hear Leonard talking about the book and other writing here.)

The Guardian goes one better, and asks a whole lot of famous authors  - for their 10 Rules.  The result (in two parts here and here) is somewhat overwhelming (24 pages when I printed it off!) but there is a great deal of good stuff in there.  One or two points I highlighted because they rang true with me :

Margaret Atwood :

If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.

Roddy Doyle :

So not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, espcieally if the authro is one of the famous ones who commit suicide.
Do not search Amazon.com for a book you have not written yet.

Anne Enright :

The only way to write a book is to write a book.

Neil Gaiman :

Style is getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.

Andrew Motion :

Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly.

Annie Proulx 

Write slowly and by hand about subjects that interest you.

Colm Toibin

Finish everything you start.
Stay in your mental pyjamas all day.

So ... which bits of advice do you like the best? Anything you'd chuck out the window?  (Hari Kunzru on Twitter this morning called lots of these rules "nonsense" - would love to know which and why.)

Where Ideas Come From

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if...?

(What if you woke up with wings? What if your sister turned into a mouse? What if you all found out that your teacher was planning to eat one of you at the end of term - but you didn't know who?)

Another important question is, If only...

(If only real life was like it is in Hollywood musicals. If only I could shrink myself small as a button. If only a ghost would do my homework.)

And then there are the others: I wonder... ('I wonder what she does when she's alone...') and If This Goes On... ('If this goes on telephones are going to start talking to each other, and cut out the middleman...') and Wouldn't it be interesting if... ('Wouldn't it be interesting if the world used to be ruled by cats?')...

Those questions, and others like them, and the questions they, in their turn, pose ('Well, if cats used to rule the world, why don't they any more? And how do they feel about that?') are one of the places ideas come from.

Perhaps the most annoying question that authors get asked by those who would like to write themselves is - Where do you get your ideas?, and Neil Gaiman tackles it just beautifully on his blog.

And This is the Secret ...

You have to treat this as the single most important part of your life. You do not need anything as fancy as inspiration, just this steady habit of writing regularly even when you're sick or sad or dull. Nothing must stop you, not even your beloved children. If you have kids you do what Toni Morrison did—write in the hours before they wake. If you wish to be a like the champion who swims for four hours every day of the year, you will need extraordinary will. You either have this or you don't, but you won't know unless you try.

Biggest congratulations to all those who finished this year's Nanowrimo with 50K words under their belt. Even if those novels never see light of day, they are preparation for the one that will.

Those who signed up for the biggest of all writing competitions have been receiving regular pep talks from famous authors. The final one was this one from Peter Carey which arrived in everyone's inboxes last night. If you want to be a published author, all the advice you need to suceed is here.

Tap Tap

More on the topic of typewriters :

The Guardian blog responds to the news of McCarty's auction with a piece about other authors and their typewriters. Julian Barnes says :

I think you need the technology that suits the way your brain works. Sometimes you need your thoughts to go down your arm in what feels like a direct feed via pencil or felt-tip to paper, sometimes you require a more formal "sit up and address a machine".

When I tried writing on a computer, it felt an inert business. I had no relationship with the machine; whereas my IBM 196c makes a nice hum, as if it's saying quietly: "Come on, get on with it" or "Surely you can improve on that."

I also found that, while the myth of the computer was that it made everyone write at greater length, and under-correct, because on the screen and in neat print-out it looks more finished than it is, I found that I was constantly over-correcting, ending up with something too tight and unflowing for a first draft.

Another piece on the blog lists Will Self, Don DeLillo and Frederick Forsyth as more authors who use a typewriter.

Says Self :

Writing on a manual makes you slower in a good way, I think. You don't revise as much, you just think more, because you know you're going to have to retype the entire fucking thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it.

And Fredrick Forsyth definitely has a point when he says :

I have never had an accident where I have pressed a button and accidentally sent seven chapters into cyberspace, never to be seen again.

Worth browsing is the site myTypewriter.com :

Authors A-Z is an ongoing project featuring the lives, works, and typewriters of the most outstanding authors around the world. Created in 2004 by Kevin McGowin and Charles Gu for myTypewriter.com, the project is both a celebration and an exploration of writers and their writing machines. Consisting of more than 80 contemporary authors from Mark Twin to Ayn Rand, Authors A-Z is a growing project documenting the important role of classic typewriters played in the formation of literature master pieces.

May i just add the note, I used typewriters for many years ... and was Typex's best customer!

BTW, the image at the top is a sculture using old typewriters by Jeremy Mayer. More can be found here.

Postscript :

Worth reading also is George Tannebaum's post Tools vs Toys [via] :

Today, of course our tools are more sophisticated than typewriters. We can do sophisticated motion graphics and editing at our desks or on a plane. We can make type dance like Isadora Duncan on LSD. We can compose and record music. We can buy a $49 video camera and shoot stuff.

These are all things Mr. McCarthy can't do on his Olivetti. But they don't make us better than McCarthy. Because Mr. McCarthy's trade involves ideas.

So far no one has built a desktop app that produces those.

Typewriter for Sale, One Careful User ...

It has never been serviced or cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station hose. ... I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not published. Including all drafts and correspondence I would put this at about five million words over a period of 50 years.

I don't think I can better Patricia Cohen's headline in The New York Times - No Country for Old Typewriters. Yes, this is Cormac McCarthy's machine we're talking about, a :

portable Olivetti manual typewriter he bought in a Knoxville, Tenn., pawnshop around 1963 for $50

on which he has written, among much else :

more than a dozen novels, several screenplays, two plays, two short stories, countless drafts, letters.

It's now being auctioned off after McCarthy's friend and colleague John Miller offered to replace the aging machine. The proceeds will go the Santa Fe institute which both work for. The replacement McCarthy selected is ... a used portable Olivetti which cost around $11. There's a lot to admire in the simplicity of that, I think.

Helpful Stuff for Writers

With the ultimate writing competition, the Nanowrimo, just round the corner, it's the right time to put up some links to the good stuff you can find online to help you write November's magnum opus.

(You don't know what I'm talking about? Go visit the website.)

First off, do you need an instant plot for your work of genre fiction (whether dragon-filled, neo-noir or dismally dystopian)? This hilarious generarator from Wondermark [found via]... well, it might not actually help you, but it is sure to raise a good chuckle.

Paperback Writer links to Ten Things for the NaNoWriMoer's including blog badges; a progress graph so you can chart your progress towards the 50,000 word target; a random name picker to help you name your hero or heroine; and advice to help you write the outline of your novel in 30 minutes.

Mashable also has a very useful toolkit for the writer with plenty more nice things to play with.

I'm finding Twitter enormously helpful as a blogger (since it enables me to scoop up interesting stories quickly, and I can tweet even when I haven't time to blog) and it is nice to discover about how it can also help writers. Debbie Ridpath Ohi lists ten ways, and has blogged A Writer's Guide to Twitter with lots of good advice.

There's nothing like advice from the master, and Kurt Vonnegut gives us some excellent advice about how to write with style, which he nicely distills into 7 principles (Finally someone who doesn't feel the need to have as many points as they have fingers!) :

1. Find a subject you care about

2. Do not ramble, though

3. Keep it simple

4. Have guts to cut

5. Sound like yourself

6. Say what you mean

7. Pity the readers

Handwriting : A Lost Art?

The art of handwriting teaches us to control our hands and encourages hand-eye coordination.... [it]obliges us to compose the phrase mentally before writing it down. Thanks to the resistance of pen and paper, it does make one slow down and think. Many writers, though accustomed to writing on the computer, would sometimes prefer even to impress letters on a clay tablet, just so they could think with greater calm.

Well, we might be writing more and more, but does it matter that we are doing it at the keyboard rather than by hand? Italian author Umberto Eco thinks that it does and his concerns are shared by many.

In the US there has been a great deal of public debate about the issue, here Associated Press writer Tom Breen looks at what is happening in American schools.

And Neil Hallows on the BBC website discovers that :

A century from now, our handwriting may only be legible to experts.

I think handwriting matters too. I write differently when I write by hand. I am more in touch with my feelings. And the feel of a favourite pen flowing over good paper and forming your words is frankly sensuous. What do you think?

Welcome to “Real Life”

Writing is as real as anything in your life, and probably more real than most things.** So stop calling that other stuff “real life.”

This is a lovely piece by Mur Lafferty to poke the excuse-making writers among you (including meself!).

Why Older Writers Aren't Necessarily Better ...

Yes, writing is a lifetime’s vocation. Which is why a 45-year-old writer is no more “superior” to a 25-year-old, than 45 years of life are “superior” to 25. The common mistake is to assume that at the later age you have all that you did at the earlier, plus 20 years experience. The truth is, people forget. At 20 it seems scarcely conceivable that we were once six years old — a child is a stranger — and similarly, at 40 the young person is a stranger. His or her way of thinking and feeling is irretrievably lost — it shows in the clash of the generations, and it shows in the writing. “Experience” is not a commodity that keeps increasing quantitatively; it only keeps changing qualitatively; and so, incredible though it may seem, the 25-year-old writer possesses as many passionately felt thoughts, and as many means of expressing them, as he or she ever will. Looked at another way, it is worth noting that there comes an age beyond which one word fits all: the word is “adult”, and if you are not one by 25, you probably won’t be one by 75.

Aditya Sudarshan in The Hindu has some interesting things to say about age and the fiction writer - a topic which we've visited on this blog before ...

Five Laws of the Novelist

American psychiatrist Stephen Bergman (who writes fiction under the pen name Samuel Shem) contributes an anecdotal piece called Five Laws of the Novelist to The Boston Globe.

I liked this :

Law Four: There Is No Humiliation Beneath Which a Writer Cannot Go. My second novel had come out in paperback, and my wife and I were on a hiking trip in New Hampshire. We stopped in a mom-and-pop store for lunch. There, in a spindle bookrack, were two copies of my novel. I immediately suspected my wife had placed them there, to make me feel good. Nope. I took both books off the rack and went up to the little old lady at the counter, and announced, “I wrote this book.’’

“Oh, you wrote that book?’’ she asked.

I averred yes. I asked if she would like me to sign the copies.

“Oh no, our folks would never buy a book that was writ in.’’

Another standard humiliation: At an author-signing in a bookstore, sitting at a desk near the window, facing a wall of Grishams, watching people hurrying past as if you are a child molester. Not fun, especially if your publisher has overlooked advertising the event.

Also worth reading is his paper Fiction as Resisitance.

Rejection Hurts!

Telling those who aren't finalists in the MPH-Alliance Bank Short Story Competition what they already know ... I saved this link up specially.

Rejection affects the human brain in same way as physical pain notes Self Publishing Review [found via Literary Rejections on Display blog - where else?] citing a study by a UCLA-led team of psychologists :

Rejection, a writer’s fate. Whether impecunious and unpublished or Pulitzer-prize winning and flush, the encounter is inescapable. Unless the writer is a “fulltime” masochist (“part-time masochists” are hereby exempted) the meeting is rarely stumbled upon or bumped into. Rather it’s a consequence traceable to the writer’s own exploits. It comes after months of research, followed by years of writing and rewriting. It comes when the pandemic self-doubt that is manifestly rampant in the writer’s head during the writing process, suddenly peters out, shape-shifts, and re-emerges in the form of unrepressed self-esteem. This cryptic and schizophrenic phenomenon occurs in syncopated climax with the writing of the two most mesmeric words in the writer’s lexicon: The End.

And it is in this gluttonous – perchance self-delusional – state that the writer dares to think the work all-out brilliant – surely worthy of representation and publication. So convinced, the intrepid writer takes that fateful flying leap into the duchy of literary agents and publishers – the very locus of the infamous Mr. Rebuffer, and his Gongoresque rejectionists-in-training. The writer includes the compulsory SASE with each manuscript, though certain none will be returned. Then the writer waits. Assuming that the odds of enlisting an agent and getting published are working against the writer, there are two scenarios afoot: Immediate rejection or delayed rejection. Either way, it hurts – literally.

And there are suggestions for accelerating the healing process, which includes the instruction :

Luxuriate in self-pity. (Sad music is an expeditious and freely accessible portico into this seemingly bottomless abyss. Suggestions: ‘Hurt’ by Johnny Cash or Nine Inch Nails. ‘Concrete Angel’ by Martina McBride. ‘Hallelujah’ by Jeff Buckley. ‘Back to Black’ by Amy Winehouse. ‘The Promise’ by Tracy Chapman. ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ by Sinead O’Connor. ‘In the Real World’ by Roy Orbison. ‘Gloomy Sunday’ by Billie Holiday. ‘Drugs Don’t Work’ by The Verve. ‘Lonely Day’ by Systems of a Down. ‘Creep’ by Radiohead.)

The post concludes :

In the end, though physical and emotional pain may technically register through identical mechanism, “rejection” may, in fact, serve the heroic writer well . . . by strengthening both heart . . . and mind.

(Pic from Literary Rejections blog)

The Author in Her Habitat

I did everything but write in that room ... I paid bills. I printed things out. I sent faxes. I was connected to the Internet. ... The assumption is that writers can write wherever they can sit down ... But the main thing you need as a writer is a sense of certainty that you won’t be interrupted.

Novelist Roxana Robinson, talks about her personal writing space in The New York Times, and explains why she abandoned her book-lined study for a more austere working environment.

And she isn't alone, she says, in seeking a space away from distractions. As she points out :

Raymond Carver ... claimed that he wrote his short stories in the front seat of his car. Ernest Hemingway holed up above a sawmill in Paris. When the essayist Annie Dillard wrote in a college library, she found the comings and goings in the parking lot outside her window so distracting that she drew a sketch of it, closed the Venetian blinds, and taped the sketch onto the blinds.

Many more writers' room at The Guardian.