A touchy subject: How writers make their livings

Ten years. That's how long I think Susanna Clarke spent on writing her alternative history of English magic, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.  I used to think, " 'Swounds, ten years? How is that possible?!"  Yes, it's a very big book, easy to mistake for an old phone book, but ten years?

Now, as the days creep by and I see myself on Year Seven (or eight, I've lost track) on my own book, I'm really not so surprised anymore.

Every writer's growth and evolution is different. For some, it happens quickly; others, like myself, procrastinate on other things before finally deciding to stop wasting time. In my case, I spent too many days -- and too many good brain cells-- chasing after other people's books as a part of my job.

My waking-up moment happened when I was still at The Times, digging through a pile of Da Vinci Code clones for a piece on how easy it was to have a religio-conspiracy thriller published thanks to Dan Brown. I thought, "I can do this!"  And then, "I must do this!"

In the years since I've watched my book grow away from that impulse and change, just as I have … there have been months of good work, of planning and creating. Then a family emergency or deadline of some kind will intervene. All the work stops for months until the healing's done and you're ready  to pick up the skein again. Time passes.

As I near the finish of another revision, I just read Ann Bauer'sSalon piece "Sponsored" by my husband: Why it's a problem that writers never talk about where their money comes from." If this is a topic that you're interested in, the article is worth reading and is definitely for you.

I like the article -- Bauer's insightful, and I appreciate her honesty about the whole situation -- but I also hope it's the last one that any media outlet ever gives attention to.  Why?  I think we finally have to stop torturing ourselves and asking questions about every successful writer's personal circumstances. That's an easy question to ask, especially when you're young.  You're starting out and you don't know anything.  It's natural to ask for someone else's advice and personal circumstances, especially when they're at the top of the pyramid.

But it's all beside the point.  It leads to a bunch of fuming, upset working writers -- like the ones in the thread of that Salon item -- who are thinking a little too much of the "how" instead of the "why." (Ok, cue up New Agey, mystical music now)   The most important question you should answer is "why do I write?" That's where your energy should be located.  Envy is a bad thing, especially for a writer. It sucks away all the passion that's better spent on the page.

For myself, I've realized that my dear novel, my precious "litel bok," and its journey through three revisions -- and plenty of rejections -- has been a friend to me over the past 7 (or 8) years.

I'm totally blessed -- blessed with the best family and friends -- but my novel, A Walker in the Evening, has been a special blessing --- a companion at those times after, let's say, a funeral when I was tired of talking and tired of thanking everyone for their consolation.  Then, I'd go off and  find a pocket of time when the family was in bed, and walk around with my narrator in his little village on the edges of Eastern Europe. There was nothing else so healing. I've felt immensely lucky.

I wonder what would've helped me if some publisher had bought the earlier version of the manuscript years ago and it quickly disappeared into thrift stores and secondhand bookshops. It's something I don't like to think about too much.

The same is also true of the end of this work, which is coming. I feel it this time. Feel it in my bones. And, to be perfectly honest, my best beloveds,  I don't like it. It's an amazing reversal from my attitude years ago. This may seem effing crazy, but I think I'm actually going to feel sad when it's all over.

Ten years? Ten years is nothing.

Two for the new year … woof!

Two novels that arrived in the mail made me think, almost instantly, of the oddest pairing:

• Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
• Carolyn Parkhurst's Dogs of Babel.

To be honest, it's not the canine connection that made me pair these two books. It's something else: the fact that both freshen the sometimes very stuffy genre of mystery by placing clues and answers into the hands of unexpected characters: a dog in Parkhurst's book; in Haddon's, a teen on the autism spectrum.

The obvious obstacles to communication created by these situations turn up the heat … and the suspense.

Such information obstacles are also at the heart of the above-mentioned new arrivals in my mailbox: Clemens Setz's Indigo (Liveright/W.W. Norton) and Blood-Drenched Beard by Daniel Galera (Penguin Press).

Setz tells his tale using a mosaic -- a collection of reports, articles, and accounts, hearsay and ambiguous events … a style used and perfected by Pynchon, who's clearly the presiding deity of this superbly complex novel by a writer acclaimed and celebrated in his native Germany.

Setz's narrative approach is what you often find in stories of a son or daughter reconstructing the hidden corners of a dead parent's life, a parent they thought they knew. Bits and pieces gradually coalesce. But here, in Setz's handling, he deploys it to tell a story of the unexplained disappearances of children with a condition referred to as "Indigo."

Gaps and small abysses abound in this novel. It takes an enormous imaginative faculty to make sure the pieces of the mosaic cohere, something Setz deftly achieves as we follow his alter ego, also named Setz (there, you see? another Pynchonesque homage), in the search to understand what has happened to these children.

The same kinds of obstacles to our understanding abound in Galera's novel for another reason: his narrator, an unnamed young man searching for answers to his uncle's murder in a small fishing village in a South American country (probably Brazil, which is the author's home), suffers from prosopagnosia.

Keep that one for your next Scrabble tournament. It's a condition which undermines facial recognition. A person with this condition (which Oliver Sacks, unsurprisingly, knows plenty about) can't recognize the faces of other people or, when he glances in the mirror, himself. When an author gives this condition to a character on a detective's mission, you can see the enormous challenges to that mission …and how intriguing this is for a reader who doesn't have to negotiate the same identity hurdles in his or her daily life.

***

What I offer, my beloved friends, along with the usual recommendation to read each of these books, is that each also offers provocations and stimulations for your own writing projects.  The undermining of a conventional narrative, especially in Galera's hands, raises the concept of an unreliable narrator to the Nth degree … and all of it should make for some fresh, and refreshing, grist in your own fiction mill.

Keep on with your work, and ever upward.

On writing: Thank you, Ursula

Though the American holiday of Thanksgiving is long past, there's still a reason for many writers to be thankful, and it has nothing to do with Pilgrims, pumpkin pie, or U.S. history. It's a message for struggling writers, especially those dedicated to fantasy, the supernatural, and all related genres.  Next time you feel a pang when you hear that some high school sophomore has had her first book, about young lovers in a war-torn dystopian world, optioned by Paramount after publishing a few chapters on Wattpad … take heart.

Let Ursula Le Guin slap some sense into you with the speech she gave at the recent National Book Awards ceremony.

"Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art," she told the audience.  "Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit … is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship."

You can read more of her incandescent plea that's directed at you -- yes, at you, my friends  -- by following this link to the virtual pages of The Guardian.  It's not a long piece, but it packs a powerful, inspirational punch.

And when you're done, I'd ask you to think about that sharp pang of jealousy/frustration that you felt over someone else's incredible luck.  Why does it bother you so much?

Think about what Le Guin says.  Are you part of someone else's marketing plan, or are you a writer?

Do you want a big payday from your writing -- if you do, why not try something else?  Go into real estate … build a stock portfolio … write a TV sitcom… success is more likely in one of these areas.

As for the rest of us, we embrace the scrivener's craft, as A.R. Williams nicely puts it in her recent post here at the Call, to find the grace inside the madness.

And when we manage to find it, there's nothing quite like it in the world.

Onward, my dear friends. Take good care.

Writing and the reviewers: Eight hours … really?

What two words are a synonym for ineffectiveness?

Book review 

I know what you're thinking.  Here we go.  The ex-newspaper reviewer bitterly turns on the industry that used to feed him.  What a jerk.

It's not that, my friends.  I'm still a reader of book reviews; this blog provides me with a modest little foothold in the industry, a place to celebrate the wonderful publishers who are still out there doing God's work — but the reason why I read book reviews and why reviewers write them has little to do with the actual books supposedly under review.

A short NYT Q & A with Dwight Garner ("Book Reviewer Tell-All: Dwight Garner on Reading, Reviewing and Avoiding Blindness") illustrates that point.

I've never met Garner, never worked with him, but I enjoy reading him. His answers made me smile, especially when he talks about the parts of the job I enjoyed (being the eternal student with a book tucked under your arm, the piles of book packages arriving every day, that special sensation of tired eyes after a good day's work).

But this Q & A also reminds us how fickle the business is, how your hope of a review in a major mainstream publications rests on one person's tastes and moods; how your book is sometimes little more than a vehicle for someone else's enthusiasms and interests … far far FAR from a science.

   "A few books I know on sight I want to review," Garner says, "because I'm fond of the topic or of the author's previous work."

Fond of the topic -- professional reviewers tend to gravitate to what they like because, when you're living on a deadline treadmill, it's easier to muster the energy to write well about something that already matters to you.

"I've always got a book I'm carrying for work. The average one takes about eight hours to read."

Eight hours?  I spent eight hours making revisions to just one small section of my current novel.  He's going to give someone's labors eight TOTAL hours?   I probably did the same thing once, but now that the tables are reversed, the whole notion is horrifying to me.  No assessment based on eight hours' of reading can do any book justice.

With a shiver, I turned from this Q & A in search of something soothing and inspiring.  I found it in my old New Directions copy of the poetry of Dylan Thomas, who's been in the news again recently for the exciting discovery of a forgotten notebook.  Why do I write?  Thomas knows best.

I labor by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages

But to appeal to the lovers out there … even though, the poet adds, they probably won't care, either.

Self-publishing: John Ashbery, Czeslaw Milosz… and you

 

A few more points, my friends, about why you might consider self-publishing … if/when you're ready.

Here you'll find some statements (in boldface) culled from arguments in a recent Call of the Siren post against self-publishing ("Self-publish, are you crazy?").

Each is followed by a paragraph-length rebuttal that (I hope) provides some understanding ... and maybe some inspiration, too.

• Publishers have better promotional channels than you.

Ok, publishers do have promotional infrastructures, but they actually can't (and won't) promote every title they represent.  And even when you're one of the lead titles in a publisher catalog, self-promotion still seems necessary.  You'll always be the most passionate advocate for your own work.  It's breathtaking how many mid-tier books appear in catalogs, arrive in galley form followed by the finished hardcover, and then disappear ... without a sound.  Those writers, I think, made assumptions about what their publishers would do for them -- and paid the price for it.

• If you're published by a mainstream publisher, you're legit.

I feel sorry for the North Carolina six-day poet laureate.  Maybe the rest of the poetry community felt snubbed that a self-published author had been chosen and just couldn't stand it -- even though the publishing marketplace is woefully small even for established poets with some kind of following.  Self-publication isn't a reason to dismiss or discredit someone, especially a poet.  If that were true, then I guess we should add Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, and other former dissidents to that list.  After all, self-publication -- samizdat -- was the only means available to them in the Soviet Union.

And let's not forget what John Ashbery thinks about e-publishing.  One of our preeminent American poets today, Ashbery actually likes how his poetry looks on an e-reader.  Years ago, fonts and formatting were terribly bland and impersonal.  But today, as resources have improved, another strike against self-publishing's digital side has been removed.  Ashbery isn't self-publishing, of course -- he's still one of the few poets carried by a major publisher -- but his attitude to digital versions of his work is something encouraging for any self-published writer.

• The only real money is in mainstream publishing.

I still don't trust the claims made by some self-published authors about their monthly incomes.  You shouldn't either.  But I'd tell you to embrace a little skepticism when it comes to money in traditional publishing, too.  That doesn't mean that writing a book today can't be profitable for you.  It can.  In fact, earning enough to live as a writer seems possible if you start with small expectations, especially when established writers, like novelist Will Self, are reporting in publications including The Guardian a serious decline in royalties (once the bread and meat of a writer's regular living).

• Self-published vs. firm-published 

There are plenty of other recent posts and articles on this topic -- it's hard for me to keep up.  Consider this post, like the others on this topic at Call of the Siren, as the blogger's version of a starter kit.

Not long ago, above all the noise and chatter about self-publishing, I heard a loud voice that belonged to agent Michael Larsen, a colleague of my friend Jim Rossi who's been assisting him on his own self-publishing journey.  Jim passed along something that forced me to ask myself, Why do you write? I kept thinking about this question as I read through Larsen's "Declaration of Independence for Writers," and I think you should, too.  It will help you keep your focus on what should matter most to any writer: taking advantage of a multitude of media platforms today to share a special vision with sympathetic readers.

Take care, my friends. Onward!