The Elegant Variation: HERE'S A FUNNY THING (cause for hope, perhaps?)

TEV DEFINED

The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

October 22, 2004

HERE'S A FUNNY THING (cause for hope, perhaps?)

So, I’m actually steering this TEV spaceship! Sometimes one’s life just gets to be strange and wonderful.

I’m sure most of you out there don’t know me. Here are some funny things about myself:

-I’ve been a daily reader of The Elegant Variation for about 6 months, or for half of its lifetime
-I’m a twenty-six year old writer living in a suburban outpost of the San Francisco Bay Area
-I never finished college and never formally studied writing
-Though I’m still pretty young, I’ve been married for five years to a woman who amazes me daily by the depth of the love she inspires in me
-Beginning in March, 2000, I wrote a novel set in my own backyard in the 19th-century
-It’s now October, 2004 and the novel (The Green Age of Asher Witherow) has just been published nationally by a brand new house, Unbridled Books, whose editorial team has won praise from readers, critics, and booksellers for several years, since these are the folks who founded the legendary MacMurray & Beck (publisher of William Gay’s The Long Home, Susan Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Steve Yarbrough’s The Oxygen Man) and, subsequently, started the maverick Putnam imprint BlueHen (publisher of Debra Magpie Earling’s PermaRed, Marc Estrin’s Insect Dreams, and Susann Cokal’s Mirabilis)
-This publisher just so happens to function upon a belief I myself have long held: "that the highest literary standards and a relatively broad readership are not mutually exclusive"
-I now find myself consumed in the fun and frenzy of the first-novel-promotion period, but for the bulk of the past four years my days have consisted of long, solitary hours at the desk
-Or reading in a chair in a room
-Or walking in these pastoral suburban hills that surround my apartment-home
-Or watching movies with my wife
-Or receiving anonymous rejection slips in response to my endless outflow of short fiction submissions
-Or dreamily forecasting the general future date when I’d have a full-length book published under my name
-This month, I traveled to Minneapolis, 2,000 miles from my home, to give my first public reading from the novel in question, and had the pleasure—the inexpressible pleasure—of meeting folks who had read and enjoyed my words
-My book’s pre-publication reviews, with one exception, have been entirely positive (I hoped . . . but didn’t know what to expect) and the book was selected as the #1 Booksense Pick for October
-My agent is a wonderful person as well as a dynamic professional
-My novel has a cover I’m crazy over
-My editor has my tremendous respect
-My publicist moves mountains daily on behalf of my novel . . .

To put it directly: I am an upstart. I am distinguished by neither formal education, hard life experience, or former achievement. On the strength of a certification no stronger than a high school diploma, a number of hard-won literary magazine publications, and a manuscript that was successfully alluring to the proverbial gatekeepers of modern novel publishing, I find myself embarking upon an author’s life (by no means am I financially in the clear, but how many authors are?).

How can so much good stuff happen to one unassuming, albeit hardworking guy in this dusky American era of market-driven publishing, this bookselling culture beset with corporate gluttony?

Though it would be disingenuous to deny a certain startled pride, I don’t mean to be self-adulatory here. Instead, I mean this little intro to be an encouraging dispatch from the positive realm of my positive experience in the literary domain. Before last summer, when my agent said she wanted to represent me, I had exactly zero affiliations in the world of publishing, save a few blind and brief correspondences with lit mag editors. A charmed life? Maybe. But I think there’s more to it than that. It would be inaccurate to say that the literary universe is a completely open one, but I am living evidence that doors have been known to swing despite lack of an MFA degree, lack of a roster of distinguished associations, or lack of a friend whose friend has a friend who works with Editor A at Random House. What’s more, I am a first-hand beneficiary of the wonders of small press publication: all its glorious civility and professionalism and integrity.

So. . . greetings TEV readers and literary bloggers. I’ve offered the foregoing both for whatever inspiration it’s worth, and as a general tone-setter—for, aloof as I am from an MFA experience or even generally academic background, there’s a chance my TEV posts might smack of ardor or pursue inquiries into the art of fiction which seem old-hat to the more studied. But I’m simply a reader and a writer, little more. And to put it bluntly: I’m the kind of guy who’s watched The English Patient a hundred times over . . . You’ve been warned.

Posted by Mark Cunningham at 08:00 AM | Permalink

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Comments

Welcome, Mark! I look forward to reading your book at some point - Dan Wickett told me about it. Anyway, thanks for giving those of us in your situation hope. I plan on getting there one day.

Posted by: Justin | October 22, 2004 at 12:09 PM

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October 22, 2004