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May 25, 2005

Bookmark Now Section #1: Beginnings

Okay, a little about the book. It's divided into 4 sections, the first of which is called "Beginnings." In "beginnings" I wanted to pull back the curtain of vaugery that hangs too heavy around that question you always hear at readings: "How did you get published?" which can be reframed as "How did you become a writer?" or "How do you get to make money and get interviewed and read at this bookstore? I've got a book in me too but I'm clearly not where you are yet."

It's difficult to give a whole, honest answer to this question because it can involve giving the better part of the autobiography of your creative life. But too often, writers on the spot swing way the other way and offer up a bromide "Work hard. Read. And write all the time" then shrug awkwardly, as if they don't really know they got there either.

In truth every writer knows exactly how they got to where they are, how they met their agent, how long it took that agent to sell their first book and what crappy job they were working when it happened. Sometimes they networked like hell, shaking a literary career out of a gatekeepers hands. Other times they plain-old got lucky in that they were writing great stuff someone nondescript and the right person noticed. Increasingly, they had serious pedigree, a glittering MFA degree, publications in prestigous journals, enough medals to draw agents like flies to a cookout. Once in a great while, they get plucked from a slush pile and annointed, although that happens far less than the aspiring writer industry of conferences, seminars and how-to books would have you believe.

There are 5 essays in this section, each addressing where and how it began. No one here went to the Iowa Writers Workshop or got published in The Paris Review at 19. Each got to where they were through a blend of fortitude, talent and luck. Some of their circumstances were extraordinary (Christian Bauman's "Not Fade Away" discusses his lonely writing nights as a soldier in Somalia), some completely of their time  (novelist Pamela Ribon came from the late 1990s world of online diaries) others less halcyon than you'd expect like Michelle Richmond's expose of 3rd tier MFA programs. But I chose them because they make a geniune attempt to answer the question so few writers seem to answer honestly when asked: "How did it happen for you?"

So why don't they? Why does a writer giving a reading, when faced with that inevitable question, not tell their story?

Posted at 04:17 PM |

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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."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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