Two for the new year … woof!

greek dogTwo 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 coverSetz'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.

galera coverThe 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.

Off the grid, away from writing … and surprisingly happy about it

couch dwarf So I had a chunk of time off this holiday season, but I knew one thing about this extra time -- it's very deceiving. Extra time off doesn't always translate into more time for yourself.

How did I spend some of this extra time? I ran errands. Endless errands. I spent more hours at the grocery store than I ever wanted to … and picked up a fender-bender in the parking lot from someone looking more overwhelmed than me when we got out of our cars and assessed the damage (very minor).

The home dynamic, as you probably know, is also different -- everyone's there, 24-7. No pockets of stillness. Visitors coming by at all hours. Too many TV marathons to catch up on.

During the holidays, what's usually haunted me more than Marley's ghost is John Gardner's rule: you must write every day, no matter what. It just never happens.  This season was no exception: I read very little and wrote even less… even though my novel is waiting for me to make some time-sensitive revisions.

But experience has taught me that the usual result of such a situation is only frustration. So, what did I do?  I chose to do something else.

I restrung one guitar, I raised the action on another and gave it an open tuning (and learned to play "When the Levee Breaks," ah yeah), I hung Xmas lights outside that were so artfully and sturdily anchored that an F-5 tornado couldn't rip them off.

In other words, I was creative … even though I didn't create anything on the page. I was channeling someone else instead of Gardner: Louis De Bernieres, one of the finest novelists around. When he was once asked by an interviewer about writing daily, he said he didn't, but he made sure that he was creative every day even if it wasn't with words.

What was more important to him was to feed the soul with satisfying activity, not a word count.

I'm off to a nice start with those revisions I mentioned earlier, but I don't think I'd be in this pleasantly settled state of mind if I hadn't avoided writing for a while. As we look ahead to 2015, my friends, this little lesson is what I want to share with you: Don't beat yourself over the head with Gardner's commandment, but give your soul some space if there's just not enough time to write.

Go string up a guitar instead … or knit a quilt … bake cookies .. buy flowers for the kitchen sill … and all of it will help the writer in you to take your next step (whatever that is) when the time is right. I have faith in you.

Onward and upward, my beloveds… always 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.

Neil Gaiman with Ursula Le Guin at the NBAs

"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.

On writing: Grace in the Madness

(My friends, so pleased to be able to share the following guest post generously provided by A.R. Williams, owner and sole proprietor of the very fine blog, Entropy: The Other Constant … enjoy!)

 ***

 

"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Not so long ago, there was an internet tempest in a teacup over a divorce lawyer who created a hot/crazy chart as a satirical teaching tool to help other men sort the women they were dating into one-night-stands, dating potentials, and wife material.  Redheads were all lumped into the “no go zone” of crazy.  Of course I thought that I belonged down there in unicorn territory, being a solid 8 and reasonably sane.  This turned into a conversation with a friend of mine, who rightly pointed out that the writer thing raised my crazy quotient considerably.  Even if I dyed my hair brown, I’ll never make it into the unicorn zone.

chart

I couldn’t argue.  I wanted to, but what grounds did I have?  I make implausible stuff up, I think obsessively about creating amazing stories, I agonize over characters and plot choices, I careen wildly between thinking I know what I’m doing and the conviction that I’ll never be good enough.  And I do it of my own volition.  For not much by way of a tangible reward, at least none thus far.

At the very least, this isn’t normal behavior.

van goghThe crazy artist thing is an overused cliche.  Poor Van Gogh is at least as well known for slicing off his own ear as he is for Starry Night.  Every time someone wants to talk about art and crazy, out comes Van Gogh and his severed ear again.  The truth is, there are all kinds of crazy.  Climbing Mount Everest is madness too.  Does that make the climber crazy, or just the climb?

Because I still want to argue that it isn’t exactly that writers are crazy, it is that writing is madness.  A madness filled with grace.

We write.  Rejections from agents and publishers.  Still we write.  Thousands of words sliced from the manuscript and discarded because one thing you hadn’t thought of yet occurs to you and changes everything.  And we write.  Ideas get plucked out of the ether and someone else gets to the story first.  We write.  Writer’s block.  Still we write.  That writer over there is better.  We write.  Real jobs and commutes that leave little time for any more than laundry and groceries.  And we give up sleep so we can write.  An audience you can count on two hands. Yet we write.

There’s no explanation for it.  It isn’t self-dismemberment crazy, it’s the kind of madness typified by behavior that lacks an obvious antecedent or a clear reward.  Writers are, for the most part, harmless.  We hoard words and observations, constantly both there and not there, participating in and watching life concurrently, a little late on the response when asked a question in a meeting because we were somewhere else.  Writing.  Fixing other people's sentences for impact, sketching characters, thinking through that imagined scene to get to the mystery even we haven't sorted out yet.

prometheusThere’s some crazy involved.  Of course there is.  You’d have to be just a little off to think of Persephone as a means to sooth our ancestor’s fear over a permanent winter.  Unicorns, Frankenstein, Dracula, the Faerie Queen...  Just like I’d never in a million years come up with the idea to make and then eat Foie Gras, normal people could go forever and never come up with the story of Prometheus.

We’re just not right.

And the “not right” thing shows up in the relationship to the work.  Every word can feel like you’re both the eagle and Prometheus: the predator digging around in the hot muck of entrails for the next word, the body feeling the sharp claws wrapped around the appendix as that knife-like beak goes searching for exactly the right bit of liver to follow the last one.  And yet we do it.  Perhaps cursed by the gods for some infraction on their dignity in a past life.

***

“Have I gone mad?   I’m afraid so, but let me tell you something, the best people usually are.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I called it a madness filled with grace a few paragraphs ago.  What grace is in this thing that owns me, where not writing is just as difficult as writing?

I don’t know.

Perhaps it is that storytelling is the first thing that made our ancestors different from the other animals around them.  Lions eat and drink and copulate.  They do not lie around after the fact with a belly full of wildebeest and create new worlds out of words.  They don’t create Alice in Wonderland to delight the object of their inappropriate affection.  That’s the purview of humanity.  Before there were accountants and lawyers, there were storytellers.  As far as age-old professions go, I would wager only only the prostitutes can claim a similar history.

We’re human.  We need stories.  We need to tell stories.  It’s what we do.

And then you get it right. It all comes pouring out: the thing you mean to say in the most economical arrangement of nouns and verbs imaginable, both evocative and open-ended at the same time.  Specific to the thing you want to say, but with enough room in it for the whole world.  There’s no feeling in the world that is as deliciously satisfying, at least not in the same way.

everest

Like climbing Mount Everest, writing is the hardest thing you’ll ever do.  But the words are like photographs.  You take them out and finger them later with a profound sense of peace, like you can travel back in time and comfort your then-self with assurances that there will be a time after.  Like your then-self can travel forward to the moment you’re in now to remind you that you are exactly where you need to be.  Equally, you can imagine your words doing the same, traveling around the world, bobbing into the future with comfort and companionship for people whose name you’ll never know.

And therein lies the grace.  It is in the connections: to your self, to those fire-lit cave-dwellers with their fanciful explanations for comets and seasons, to the worlds you create out of nothing, to someone halfway around the world who needs to hear that one thing only you can say, and to the future.  Seriously, how many of us have called Jane Austen a friend, centuries after she put pen to paper?

Or maybe it is just that God/ess is a storyteller, and writing is the part of us that connects to the breath that gave us life.

And so a secret kiss Brings madness with the bliss --Tom Waits, Alice

A.R. WILLIAMS

Entropy: The Other Constant

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Writing and the reviewers: Eight hours … really?

malczewski 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.