Burps

Here on the porch we are readers and writers and when the newspaper world twitches we jump.

In the news this morning: the Denver Post and its disappearing copy desk. Those are the people who catch errors of fact and style. Will anyone notice (besides us)? Most online news sites clearly did it long ago.

Besides, copy is shrinking. In the Twitter café, thoughts come in 140-character burps. The medium has replaced the message. And the webbing between American writers trembles, rearranges itself, its individual nodes take note.

Jennifer Egan is one such node. Her new story, “Black Box”, will be serialized on Twitter. When it hits print in the New Yorker’s summer Sci-Fi issue (yes, really), it will be a story told in 140-character increments.

It may be a wonderful story--hers usually are--but think of the distraction. (Not yours, sweetie.)

Now a fiction writer has to think about the platform, obsess over something entirely unrelated to the story itself. Writers are always longing for something fascinating to do or think about to avoid actually writing, so this is actually perfect. The potential effect on the work, the "product", the "content", may be something else, however.

In the long run, if there is a long run, it may not matter. But what will truly suffer is the long, elegant sentence that sets the heart to race and lifts the spirit. Oh, and the two of us on this porch, looking for something really good and transporting to read.

Dog Books

There is a phenomenon trotting across the landscape of publishing, and it is the dog-book. (I blogged about this in my first post in December on my other blog.) Possibly the reason for so many in one year is the phenomenal success of Marley and Me.

Whatever the cause, it has emboldened me to try short fiction from the point of view of a dog. This is an illuminating mind-meld. We all can immediately imagine the amount of interest a dog has in food or the pleasures of chasing prey. But what then?

Dogs sleep a lot, and they dream. What do they dream of?

If ever you really study a dog, you will see all sorts of expressions cross his or her face. I think anxiety of one kind or another is fairly frequent. Just think of it--here's this wonderful hunting machine, capable of high intelligence as it interacts with its world, an individual, adult creature, and now it exists at the whim of an owner. An owner it didn't ask for, but still manages somehow to love depite the owner's necessary failings.

The owner is leaving. Will she return? The day is growing dark. Will they remember to feed me? I am thirsty and the toilets are closed (or perhaps the dog hasn't learned the availability of the eternal spring). I am a creature that NEEDS to smell many things, and I am confined to a closed house or apartment for endless hours. When will they take me for a walk? Well, you get the drift.

Love is clearly one of those emotions a dog feels, though. We were at a neighbor's house on New Year's Eve and one of the dogs--who has visited us several times on his wanderings around the neighborhood--spent much of the evening lying at, and sometimes on, my feet. He likes me, and I have no idea why.

Has that ever happened to you?

I don't know whether a story will coalesce out of my imaginings, but the seven pages I've written so far are the first fiction I've felt like writing for a couple of months. So, viva!

Inspiration

(December View image for today follows. Please see end of post for what it is, if you don’t already know.)









Don’t know about you, but we keep old New Yorkers around for dipping into during dull moments. There’s not really a place to sit in our house where you won’t find a New Yorker within reach. Every few months, we have to go around and collect their tattered selves, and send them on their way to the landfill.

Last night therefore, while waiting for sleep to fall upon me, I opened the Oct 20, 08 issue and my eye fell upon “Late Bloomers”, an excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers.

As it happens, this was a big mistake. The trick to bedtime reading is that you should look for intrinsically uninteresting material. Also it should be material written in a voice you don’t mind hearing replayed in your head for the next few hours. I had no trouble with the voice, but the subject was far too riveting for my own good.

Gladwell begins with the story of Ben Fountain, whom we know as the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, one of the hot story collections of 2006. He sets us up with how Fountain quit his law firm job to write fiction, with no more track record than a couple of college creative writing courses. Had some early luck with two stories, then nothing until he got a story published in Harper’s, after which le deluge of success.

Same old, same old, right? Well, not exactly. Because the fateful day he quit the law firm was in 1986, twenty years of publishing not one word before taking the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.

I found this enormously encouraging, since my first two published stories hit print right around that time and I’ve been laboring in the vineyards pretty much ever since.

Even more interesting, though, is the analysis of what makes a late bloomer. “Genius, in the popular conception ,” Gladwell says, “is inextricably tied up with precocity.” Think Mozart or Picasso. A researcher from Chicago named David Galenson, however, decided to find out if this myth was true. It was not.
I don’t want to recapitulate the whole article here, but it’s worth reading. Late bloomers, apparently, are the marathon runners of the artistic world. We’re the ones who have to explore, and try, and fail, and try again, and just keep on hanging in—indulging in a continually experimental process of attempting to realize our fuzzy goals.

Late bloomers get better as they get older.

I’ve been a little downhearted lately over how many years (about the same as Fountain’s) I’ve spent working on a story about post-partum depression, a continually evolving novel that by now probably amounts to three separate novels, with only an element or two in common. Just knowing that this might yet prove not to have been a complete waste of time is quite consoling.

(The image is the surface of Winedale Road, a material we call "blacktop.")

Day One

I'm trying to figure out how to deal with not writing fiction for a while.

Recently, it occurred to me that I've been using fiction to escape living. (I don’t know why I didn’t notice this years ago.) Maybe I'm noticing it now because for the past two weeks I've found myself obsessing about a measly 8 pages of text. Obsessing is not a good feeling. It's like you're a gnat caught in water swirling down the drain--very hard to reverse course.

I should mention that the pages in question comprise the beginning of a 350 page novel I completed last May. They were not virginal text. No. They'd been rewritten before, many times, in the first person, the second person, and more than once, in the third person. For a while this section had reposed in the middle of the plot, where I still think it made more sense.

Now it was to be the beginning of a revision of this novel. More than a revision, actually. A complete re-write, with an up to the minute 2008 story line featuring terrorist acts and the US presidential election. Why on earth?

Rejection, that’s why. The agent who read it passed it on to her 20-something intern. The intern clearly missed the point. She failed to appreciate the mature nuance of the complicated ending, and even got the factual aspects wrong. I’m being judged by a 20-something intern and I failed the test. It pissed me off.

Once I calmed down, however, I saw that she was right about the ending, of course. The complications were too complex. To get the emotional point, one has to be able to follow the plot. Her boss was also correct in her explanation that “quiet” novels—that is, reflective novels focused on character rather than plot—are difficult to sell in the current market. She already represents a number of established authors whose novels in this vein are being turned down. Why take a flyer on someone new? That this conclusion depressed me is an understatement, of course.

The lesson I drew from it, however, was that I had to try harder. I had to grab the reader in the first 50 pages.

So I decided to begin again and invigorate the plot. I’ve begun again before, I’m ashamed to admit how many times. For more than twenty years I’ve written drafts of novels and, finding them unsuccessful for one reason or another, set them aside and started over. I called it persistence.

This time, though, it went much more slowly. I began to obsess. That’s when I understood that I don’t have the energy to write this story again, even with a different, "noisier", plot. I’m tired of these characters. Bone tired. They have run out of quirks with which to surprise me.

So, although I have other ideas for novels, I think—for now—I might just write about where I’m living. I have the good fortune to be in the country, at present. I sit here in the corner of a room formed by two windows at right angles. My computer occupies an old desk from a country school—the kind with initials carved in the wood and a hole in the top where the inkwell was intended to go. I look out onto a rose garden, and beyond it into woods.

It’s bucolic, and yet it is not a dream of arcadia. There are worms and carcasses. The beautiful live oak that shades part of the yard is in extreme stress, losing many of its leaves. After a drought of several years duration, the tree may not make it. We have contributed to the problem, too, in the way that human beings, attempting to solve one set of problems, often create completely new ones. Our responsibility for these mistakes requires contemplation. Stewardship of the land is not all that different from raising a family. You do the best you can and hope.

My husband and I, the ones who commit the acts and must reap the contemplation, are not young. Every day presents its own challenges, connected to the effect of age upon the body’s mechanics. Who will build fence? Who will spread compost? Who will clean the gutters? These chores must be managed.

But there, off to my right, is a post oak whose leaves appear to be gilding by the moment despite the day’s temperature of 77 degrees. Elm saplings in the woods have already engaged the transition and begun to drop. Here in the middle of November in central Texas, it is autumn. Change is constant. We will witness it.