Ten Literary Trends That Need to Go Away

The list, care of Accredited Colleges Online.

From said list...

Remixing the classics

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was funny at first: a fresh, postmodern take on Jane Austen's Regency classic. And then Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters happened. Followed by two more Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sequels, Little Women and Werewolves, Jane Slayre, Little Vampire Women, Mansfield Park and Mummies and many, many more mashups. Although this definitely falls under bandwagonning, the added element of building on popular public domain works adds an extra literary dimension. Yeah, the cheekiness definitely amuses, but the market's become quite saturated with them. Enough already!

The Rise of Robot Authors

The New York Times discusses the rising scourge!

From the article...

But the invasion of robot-books is unsettling for another reason. I think we can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up nuclear waste. But how could we have allowed them to commandeer one of the most gratifying occupations, that of author?

Which brings me back to Lambert M. Surhone. Might he be a robot? Reading the fine print, I traced some of Surhone’s books to a VDM branch office in the island nation of Mauritius, off the coast of Madagascar. I called. As the faraway phone rang, I fantasized about what I would say to Surhone. By now I imagined him as a character in a Vonnegut novel, and so I was tempted to ask whether he hailed from Tralfamadore, the planet inhabited by robots. But I never had a chance. No one at the company answered the phone.

Then, when I least expected it, Surhone came for me. One day, a book titled “Pagan Kennedy” popped up on Barnesandnoble­.com, priced at $50. The lead editor: Lambert M. Surhone. I was both thrilled and creeped out. Reader, I ordered it. Within a few days, the book appeared on my doorstep. The cover was adorned with a stripy abstraction that looked like a beach towel. Inside was the Pagan Kennedy Wikipedia entry, and then a random collection of wiki-text tenuously connected to my path through life. (About a quarter of the book is devoted to Dartmouth College, where I worked as a visiting writer a few years ago.) Some of the text is so small you might need a jeweler’s loupe to read it. So the book was, as advertised, Wikipedia content — though it’s hard to imagine anyone would want it in this format.

Around that time, I also heard from a managing director of VDM, who responded to my badgering questions about robots. “Our wiki-books are produced by a group of about 40 editors,” Wolfgang Philipp Müller told me via e-mail. “Editors start at A and end their work at Z. Every topic that has enough content for a book is our target.” He said that last year, the company sold about 3,000 wiki-books — not a lot. Still, with prices that average around $50, it’s likely the company sees a high profit on each one.

Being Charlie Kaufman

The cult screenwriter relives his big breakthrough – and offers a few writing tips for the Guardian.

From the piece...

I wrote Being John Malkovich while I was waiting for [the next sitcom] hiring season. My idea was that I would write a script and use it to get work. I had this idea that someone finds a portal into someone's head, and I had another idea that somebody has a story about someone having an affair with a co-worker. And neither one was going anywhere, so I just decided to combine them.

It got a really positive response. I started to get a little known. People would read it and tell me how funny it was, invite me for meetings, tell me nobody would ever make the movie. I had maybe 15 meetings like that, so I wasn't really expecting it to get made. Then it got to Spike Jonze, and he was in a position to get a movie made. I didn't really expect it to be anything. I don't think Spike did either. I remember it going to the Venice film festival, which was the first exposure it had. I wasn't invited, but they went: Spike and Cameron Diaz and Catherine Keener. I just got a phone call saying that it was this big thing, and then all these articles got written about it. It was exciting.

Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.

Jottify

A new space for writers to share, read and sell.

10 Things I've Learned from Sending Out Stories for 12 Years

Josh Rolnick offers up some tips, care of the Millions.

From the piece...

2. Send stories out broadly – ten to twenty journals at a time. This is particularly important if, over time, you hope to receive useful feedback. Since sending my first story out in January, 1999, I’ve sent to 225 journals, contests, or competitive retreats; I’ve received 219 rejections and had six stories published. But I’ve received some kind of encouragement – from formal letters to “send more” checked on a postcard – from 71 publications, about one-third of all my submissions.

3. Aim high. Make a list of the top tier journals you’d love to have your story published in, then start at the top and move down. I submitted my very first story in 1999 to 12 places, including the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Zoetrope, and Virginia Quarterly Review. While the odds are very low, any feedback you receive can keep you going.

The Ecstacy of Influence - a Plagiarism

Jonathan Lethem, in Harper's, discusses artistic appropriation and plagiarism.



From said piece...



“When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” The line comes from Don Siegel's 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach's blazing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel's long, sturdy auteurist career. Yet what were those words worth—to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience—in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presumably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into “Absolutely Sweet Marie”? What are they worth now, to the culture at large?



Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan's music. The songwriter has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza. He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott's study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan liked the general resonance of the title, in which emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness of love, as they do so often in Dylan's songs. Lott's title is, of course, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, which famously identifies the literary motif of the interdependence of a white man and a dark man, like Huck and Jim or Ishmael and Queequeg—a series of nested references to Dylan's own appropriating, minstrel-boy self. Dylan's art offers a paradox: while it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan's newest record, Modern Times. Dylan's originality and his appropriations are as one.



The same might be said of all art.

The Teacher Who Encouraged Me to Write

Dave Eggers heaps praise on an old English teacher.

From an article on Salon...

I took his course when I was a junior, and the first book we read was "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." In those first few weeks, he showed us a caricature of James Joyce from the New York Review of Books. In it, Joyce's hands were rendered large, cupped and moving, as if paddling through water. Mr. Criche asked if anyone knew why the artist had depicted Joyce that way, and I raised my hand. "Is he swimming through a stream of consciousness?"

Mr. Criche cocked his head a bit, confirmed the answer, and a wave of validation swept over me. I hadn't known, until that moment, how badly I'd wanted his approval. I was going through some rough times at school and at home -- my face and back were covered in acne, my chest was concave, my last name sounded like food -- but in that class, I felt I had worth. After that, I took it upon myself to impress him. Though William Faulkner wasn't assigned reading, for weeks I brought "As I Lay Dying" to class, stacked neatly upon my other books, hoping he'd notice. (He didn't.)

He was kind to me, but I had no sense that he took particular notice of me. There were other, smarter kids in the class, and soon I fell back into my usual position -- of thinking I was just a little over average in most things. But near the end of the semester, we read "Macbeth." Believe me, this is not an easy play to connect to the lives of suburban high schoolers, but somehow he made the play seem electric, dangerous, relevant. After procrastinating till the night before it was due, I wrote a paper about the play -- the first paper I typed on a typewriter -- and turned it in the next day.

I got a good grade on it, and below the grade Mr. Criche wrote, "Sure hope you become a writer." That was it.

Write What You DON'T Know

That's the advice recently given in an essay in the Atlantic.

From the article...

I don’t know the origin of the “write what you know” logic. A lot of folks attribute it to Hemingway, but what I find is his having said this: “From all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive.” If this is the logic’s origin, then maybe what’s happened is akin to that old game called Telephone. In the game, one kid whispers a message to a second kid and then that kid whispers it to a third and so on, until the message circles the room and returns to the first kid. The message is always altered, minimized, and corrupted by translation. “Bill is smart to sit in the grass” becomes “Bill is a smart-ass.” A similar transmission problem undermines the logic of writing what you know and, ironically, Hemingway may have been arguing against it all along. The very act of committing an experience to the page is necessarily an act of reduction, and regardless of craft or skill, vision or voice, the result is a story beholden to and inevitably eclipsed by source material.

Another confession: part of me dies inside when a student whose story has been critiqued responds to the workshop by saying, “You can’t object to the _________ scene. It really happened! I was there!” The writer is giving preference to the facts of an experience, the so-called literal truth, rather than fiction’s narrative and emotional integrity. Conceived this way, the writer’s story is relegated to an inferior and insurmountable station; it can neither compete with, nor live without, the ur-experience. Such a writer’s sole ambition is for the characters and events to represent other and superior—read: actual—characters and events. Meaning, the written story has never been what mattered most. Meaning, the reader is meant to care less about the characters and more about whoever inspired them, and the actions in a story serve to ensure that we track their provenance and regard that material as truer. Meaning, the story is engineered—and expected—to be about something. And aboutness is all but terminal in fiction.

Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things.

Stories aren’t about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.

Writers and the New Happiness

Whereas previous generations of accomplished writers were awash in alcoholism and cigarettes, sexual-romantic openness, spiritual misery, and financial ruin, today’s young writers are more likely to faithfully drink 8-10 glasses of water daily, be married, get 7 to 8 hours of sleep each night, and have a decent credit score.

From a piece in the Millions...

I’ve been noticing for a while that health and happiness – a balanced, stable life – are “in.” The trend has been building for some time, and seems to coincide roughly with my generation, i.e., Gen X and younger, the college-educated children of baby boomers. What I find most interesting is that the trend seems to make no exception for writers and artists, historically the vanguard of counterculture.

There is a sense that we’ve been scared straight. Whereas previous generations of accomplished writers were awash in alcoholism and cigarettes, sexual-romantic openness (these days known as “promiscuity”), spiritual misery, and financial ruin, today’s young writers are more likely to faithfully drink 8-10 glasses of water daily, be married and/or monogamous (definitely married if there are children), get 7 to 8 hours of sleep each night (maybe even on a memory foam mattress), and have a decent credit score. Joan Acocella wrote in a 2004 New Yorker article about writers’ block:

In my observation, American writers today drink much less than their predecessors. I asked a psychoanalyst what they do instead, to take the edge off. ”Exercise,” he said.

So sharp is the cultural turn toward health, that in an artists’ mecca like New York City, you can no longer smoke outside in public spaces without incurring a fine of $50 (the law seemed to pass with barely a shrug from New Yorkers).

How Not to Write a Book Review

Robert Pinsky, on Slate, gives us three golden rules.

From the piece...

Every book review, said the anonymous document, must follow three rules:

1. The review must tell what the book is about.
2. The review must tell what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.
3. The review must tell what the reviewer thinks about what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.

If this template is not actually Aristotelian, it has that philosopher's breathtaking plainness and penetration. To sneer at it as obvious would be a mistake. Even the clunky or stammering expression of the three rules ("what the reviewer thinks about what the author says about that thing the book is about") works as a hammer, driving home the essential principles and their distinctly separate, yet profoundly interrelated nature.

Applying the three-part standard to every book review I read, I find that many—or most?—fill only one or two of the requirements. Sometimes a reviewer dutifully paraphrases a book, fulfilling Rule One with a stab at Two, but seems too shy or fearful for Three. Another kind of writer, eager to show off, proceeds directly to Rule Three with a perfunctory glance at One and nothing about Two. Only a few reviewers do their work well enough to provide all three kinds of information, and a certain number—disciples of John Wilson Croker—avoid all three.

How to Undress a Victorian Lady in Your Next Bodice-Wripping Victorian Romance Novel

Now we know how, thanks to the Wall Street Journal.

From the piece...

For most people, giving a presentation in skivvies to 100 professional peers sounds like a bad dream. But Ms. Gist was giving a workshop on Victorian clothing at the Romance Writers of America's annual convention this summer. The romance novelists had gathered in New York to learn how to dress—and undress—heroines in their novels.

It took an hour for Ms. Gist to squeeze into a dozen layers that a lady would have worn in the 1860s—stockings, garters, bloomers, chemise, corset, crinoline or hoop skirt, petticoats, a shirtwaist or blouse, skirt, vest and bolero jacket. By the end, workshop attendees were skeptical that seductions ever occurred, with so many sartorial barriers.

"How did they ever have hanky panky?" asked novelist Annie Solomon.

With great effort, it turns out. Women wore blouses under their corsets—making actual bodice ripping fairly pointless. Corsets fastened in front and laced up the back and couldn't be undone in a single passionate gesture. "You'll see pictures of corsets on bare skin. That's completely historically inaccurate," Ms. Gist told her audience.

Digital Lit

The Globe and Mail discusses how e-readers are changing the way books are written and how they're read.

From the piece...

Some speculate that the move to reading off electronic tablets will force writers into shorter and more direct narratives. Others worry that the rush to add video will turn writers into screenwriters on creative teams that produce novels as a branch of filmmaking, and they wonder if the nifty interactivity of video games can ever be applied to serious writing to create a new digital literature. As for us faithful readers, will we be hard-pressed to ever find a writer who can still produce a good old-fashioned novel?

“There is a kind of reading people do on screens that is different from the reading they do on the page,” Lev Grossman, the American novelist and technology writer for Time magazine, recently told the Book Summit, an annual industry conference in Toronto. “It is powerfully linear, which can be really intoxicating … [On an e-reader] I sometimes find my finger is clicking faster than my eyes are going. I have to keep up with my madly clicking finger. It’s a … very powerful narrative, very plot-y feeling to the reading and, as it happens, I am a plot-y writer.”

The e-book format doesn’t encourage lingering on particular images or phrases, referring back, skimming forward or comparing passages; so Grossman predicts the emergence of hybrid novels that combine literary fiction with plot-driven genre writing. For example, his 2009 book The Magicians – an adult science-fiction/fantasy novel about a youth who enrolls in a university of witchcraft but finds it unsatisfying – operates both as genre fiction and as a critique of genre fiction.

Not everyone agrees, however, that the e-book will make much difference to writers’ style.