A Little More On the Business of Writing (with just a little touch of Franco rant)

I wanted to say a few more words about "New Yorker Rejects Itself."

Shortly after The Review Review's story on the New Yorker rejecting one of its own previously published stories, Slate published this rebuttal, in which David Haglund argues that big journals have no time to respond to plagiarism with anything more than a form rejection. Thus, he suggests the journals recognized the piece from the start. Unfortunately, he offers no evidence to support this assertion.

My own experience (one year of working as a graduate assistant at the Georgia Review) contradicts Haglund's argument. The editors were as time crunched as any, yet they treated plagiarism with the utmost seriousness. They would definitely have contacted the author of a plagiarized submission had they recognized it--and would have told that author never to darken their door again. And I'm not just guessing that this is the case. While working there, I found a story that had lifted a line from a story I knew. I brought it to the associate editor's attention and watched the result first hand. What's interesting is that the Haglund does not seem to have asked the editors at the New Yorker what policies they have and follow regarding plagiarism. He only speculates.
 
Though Haglund's defense is based on speculation, I do think the New Yorker's rejection of a New Yorker story is defensible on different, more modest grounds. Every journal has its own style and space limitations. Just because a piece suited the taste of one editor at one magazine, no law states it must naturally suit all other editors' tastes as well. One New Yorker slush reader may have loved the story in the past and passed it up the chain. Another didn't. Or they did but this time, the story was up against unusually stiff competition and didn't make the cut. That hurts, but I understand that those decisions are part of the business.

What's less defensible and also sadly true is this: literary fiction magazines must sell copies to stay in business. Why else would Esquire publish this bit of dross by James Franco? Or Ploughshares for that matter? Why else would Graywolf accept his collection? Franco may not be a talented writer, but his name will sell copies. I won't launch into my full Franco rant, but this is where I get conflicted because, generally, yes, I feel optimistic about the business. I feel that if we strive and try long enough, we can make it. I wasn't simply blowing smoke when I wrote last week's post. But Franco still stares me in the face, contradicting that faith.

Here's what I don't know: will Franco sell enough copies to allow Graywolf to take a chance on an unknown writer? Will his name work like a carbon offset? Will Graywolf purge itself of the pollution of his poetry by taking on more projects from the kind of writers it has long been respected for--namely, the little known literary talent? Did Esquire and Ploughshares bring other writers, more talented but less known, into public awareness because they were in the same issue as his piece?

And I'm asking sincerely, because I do want to stay optimistic. And also because it fits with my experience with editors so far--including the many who've rejected me--which is that they care passionately about words and art and have suffered many years of low paychecks and long days to give that art a forum. I know that optimism tends to be read as naivete or, worse, stupidity, but the questions we face as writers are too easily written off with cynicism. It's equally simple-minded to be passively jaded or actively angry because of one instance of rejection. There is no one kind of editor or journal or publisher--and thank God for that. Every day, people sit down to their work at small presses and magazines and attend to their business with the same passion with which I sit down to my own work.  
  
The truth is, I have no idea what goes on in the New Yorker's editorial office. I hope and suspect they still are driven by passion, but I don't know firsthand, and it's fruitless to speculate. And you know what? At the end of the day, fretting over what they do or don't publish only distracts me from my own part of the writing business, the humble business of sitting my bottom in a chair, placing my hands on the keyboard, and writing.

Why I Should Not Have a "Career" (and why I do)

I've seen a lot of gloom and doom lately about the state of the literary publications market. Last week, for example, The Review Review published a story aptly titled "New Yorker Rejects Itself" in which the author takes a lesser known New Yorker story, replaces the author's name with an invented one, and submits it for publication there and several other highly regarded journals. At each one, it is rejected.

My friend Jeff Newberry (author of Brackish) saw the article and said it reminded him of this piece from OneHundredRejections.com, in which a novelist resubmits his own best-selling novel (name & title changed) to his own publishing house's slush pile, only to have it rejected.

Both articles seemed to confirm what so many of us feel in our darkest hours. It was the old Catch-22. Namely, that the odds are impossibly stacked against us, that one can't get published without a name and one can't get a name without publishing.

In the face of such stories, it's easy to give up hope. As painful as writing is, why keep doing it if there's no chance it will reach an audience outside ourselves? Why did we sign on for this? Where is that bottle of Bourbon?

I've been there. Sometimes, I admit, I still feel that way. I talked to an author last summer whose first short story collection is garnering huge praise everywhere (major awards and prizes, full color spreads in popular magazines, etc, etc), who told me that she had never had her work in the slush pile. A few years ago, her MFA director had told a highly reputed literary magazine's editor-in-chief to look at her work, which he did. That editor published her story, and her career was off and running. Sometimes, editors asked her to send to them directly. Sometimes, friends put her work in their hands. Either way, her stories skipped the slush pile altogether.

The thing is, I know that kind of treatment doesn't happen unless you have incredible talent, and, knowing that, I wanted to be happy for her. This writer struck me as a thoroughly cool person. As fellow strivers, shouldn't we all be cheering each other on?

Instead, I felt the cold gut punch of jealousy. There was no one in my life who had that kind of clout, no one willing to stick his neck out that way for me. I was doomed.

I got over it. She is talented and amazing. I don't want to be a bitter, jealous person. I want to cheer her on sincerely because she, too, is a writer, and even if publication might have come a little easier in the end, the words never do. She got her reputation because she sat down to the keyboard like all the rest of us and wrestled phrases and images into the magical spell that is all good short fiction. She worked--and that's something none of us should take lightly.

What's more, I've come to see it as much role as a writer much differently. I'm not a person who's ever known people in high places. My role, instead, is to claw and scratch my way through the backdoor of the publication world. And I have. I've gotten pieces in journals I'm incredibly proud to be in (Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, Versal, etc)--places whose editors were willing to take a chance on a girl they'd never heard of just because they liked her words. My first novel is coming out from New Rivers Press in October--the same press that published Charles Baxter, one of my all time favorite writers--for the same reason. Somehow, over time, my work has begun to find an audience.

I'm going to be honest: back in those undergrad days, my writing did not stood out above that of my peers. I had no discernible talent. By the time I began my Master's degree, I recognized how poor my own writing was compared to my peers. I spent the next six years struggling to be better. Slowly, my work was starting to get acceptance letters.

What I have going for me isn't untrained ability, and it certainly isn't "connections." What I have is perseverance and a willingness to learn. What I have going for me is a world in which editors do care and do want to find new voices. What I have going for me is a writing community of people who support each other, even when things look bleak. And you know what? It's enough.

I'm Late! I'm Late!

OK, so I haven't put up my weekly post yet, and the promise I made myself was that I would at least post a writing prompt every week, even when I was slugged down by life and didn't have a chance to write a longer post. This week's prompt is inspired by the fact that I missed my deadline, and by Alice in Wonderland.

As you no doubt recall, Alice is lazing in the field when she chases the white rabbit, who's running late, down his rabbit hole. Here's the prompt: Write a character who appears somehow average at first but whose voice reveals him/her to be anything but. This character will chase his/her inverse--someone who appears strange but turns out to be concerned with mundane affairs--and the chase will result in a spectacular story, something wholly unexpected.

Good luck, my friends!

If It Hadn’t a Been For That Horse: Semi-Connected Thoughts on Image and Strangeness

1. There’s a Louis Black stand-up routine in which he rants about two girls he overhead talking in a restaurant. One had said to the other, “If it hadn’t a been for that horse, I would have never made it through college.” Black did not have the opportunity to ask what this dropped phrase meant, and it drove him nuts that he would never find out. Like so much language, it dropped into his ear context-free. Worse, he could not imagine any context in which the statement made sense.

2. On an Air Schooner podcast, an interviewee discusses writing ekphrastic poems. She says, it isn’t enough to write about art from the outside; ekphrasis at its best imagines a way into the artwork.

3. Yesterday morning, I had the pleasure to attend an AWP panel on Larry Levis, put together by poet Joshua Robbins, whose book Praise Nothing has just been released. One of his fellow panelists, Kathy Fagan, talked about the Levis poem “Sensationalism,” collected in Winter Stars, an ekphrastic poem responding to Josef Koudelka photograph of a man talking to a horse. It struck me as a perfect example of a writer imagining himself in, as Levis begins to imagine the absent context back into the photo. He writes, “I begin to believe that the man’s wife & children/ Were shot & thrown into a ditch the week before this picture,” and continues his imaginative flight from there.

4. As writers, we strive to find what Eliot called the “objective correlative”—the concrete image that captures an abstract emotion and thus creates that unnamed emotion in the reader. It strikes me now that there is an implied formula here: 1) Locate emotions you want to write about, 2) Substitute things to create that you hope will emotion, 3) Remove traces of abstraction so the images can do their work.

What I’m wondering now is whether this formula is accurate. It seems to me what makes Levis’s poem so successful is that he finds the strange image, the one without context, the one that has no implied response, and then contextualizes its strangeness into his own life’s story—the story with which he is most deeply familiar and with which he makes the reader familiar as well. I want to make a connection here to Russian critic Victor Shklovsky who said we must make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, but the interplay here is more complex. Strangeness and familiarity are intertwined, perhaps even parasitic.

5. Levis writes, “Once, I was in love with a woman, & when I looked at her/ My face altered & took on the shape of her face.” He tells us, “She went mad, waking in tears she mistook for blood.” The familiar, the strange, the imaginative leap from self to not self, the inability to recognize what we make.

6. Today, I want to find a piece of strangeness. I want to feel along the seams of its door and then climb into it like a sports car. I want to press the pedal to the floor and shove the gearshift hard into one place then another as I move from second to third and upward. I want to hear the tires of that strangeness squeal across the pavement and smell the rubber burning under my feet. I want to drive that strangeness hard and fast until it takes me where it always does: that place where horses speak and guide us straight into the truest and most distant part of the familiar, the place where art lives.

Literary vs. Commercial: A Panel Report from AWP 2013

Yesterday, I went to a talk on bridging the gap between “commercial” and “literary” novels. The speakers (Ed Falco, Julianna Baggott, Lisa Haines, and Benjamin Percy) were phenomenal. They were the kinds of writers you want to be friends with so you could sit over beers late at night talking about favorite books. They were all that a panel should be—funny and insightful, approachable but authoritative—and they made a number of comments that I’ve been mulling over ever since. For example, I liked Ed Falco’s point that we should not be judging books by genre but by quality. He rightly argued that there are badly written literary genre books and well-written commercial ones, and that the quality of goodness or badness in the writing itself (rather than genre) should determine how we judge it. He said that the text, once done and sent to the publisher, is not inherently “literary” or “commercial.” It’s the author’s attitude when writing the book that puts it there. If you’re thinking only about your needs as an author and what you feel you must write, you are writing from a literary impulse, but if you are thinking about the audience and how the book might appeal to them, then your impulse is commercial.

Perhaps it is because I agree with him that I found the question and answer portion of the talk to be a bit frustrating. A young writer behind me asked about how the literary/commercial distinction affected the writing of the book—a good meaty process question—and the panelists (I want to attribute this answer mostly to Haines and Baggott, but more might have chimed in) responded that you write what you feel you must write, ignoring the generic question altogether. I am sure this answer feels utterly true to them, and I’m also sure that it is the best answer available, but I have to say, I can’t help but recognize it as an oversimplification. After all, anyone who has written creatively has faced the wealth of artistic choices, each beckoning with its own siren song. We have ridden through the yellow wood and faced, over and over again, the divergent paths. Sometimes, the street signs on those paths might as well be labeled “commercial” and “literary.” They lead us to different ends, but it isn’t always clear which is the better path.

Let’s be honest: our choices determine the book’s audience and the level of respect it earns with The New York Times book review or, as Haines pointed out, a tenure committee. Haines and Baggott both said that their most commercially successful books were left off their academic CVs or listed as supplementary to their other work because they knew those books would hurt rather than help their cause, and failure to make tenure means the loss of a job and the primary means to feed the family.

I’ve been at the cross roads with my second novel now for the past few months, trying to decide exactly how gritty, how “real,” I want this book to be, knowing that making it too gritty may not appeal to young adult readers who are likely to be its primary audience. The creative genies have yet to come to tell me which path I should take, and this fence rail has long become uncomfortable.

Who was it who said “the truth is rarely pure and never simple?” That’s the message I wish the panel had given the young writer in the audience struggling at her own crossroads. And maybe if they hadn’t been on the spot, under pressure to give the quick answer, they would have. Or maybe I am projecting too much. Maybe the choices have always been clearer for them. Haines and Baggott, after all, are talented and prolific—far more so than I am. Maybe they don’t get stuck on these questions as I am and have been. Maybe they don’t wallow in indecision. Maybe that’s the heart of genius.

Since I am not a genius, though, I will simply say this to that fellow writer and struggler who asked her bold question: many of us share your doubt. The answer Baggott and Haines gave is undoubtedly right—we must determine the road by being true to our work. Yet I come back to Falco (silent during this portion of the Q&A) who said that it is during process that we find ourselves following a literary or commercial impulse. Sometimes, those two masters give contradictory orders, and the writer must determine which s/he serves. The choice is rarely pure and never simple.

Donkey Spatula

My students were feeling their oats last Wednesday. As often happens in a writing workshop, the creative energies bounced off one another, colliding and colluding, building into a sort of fervid silliness. Wednesday, this silliness was taking the form of random word pairings and uproarious laughter that was eating into the start of our class. "We have to get to work," I told them, feeling that I had better take charge lest someone lose precious workshop time.

"We are working," the students replied. "We're being creative."

"No," I told them. "Putting random ideas together is not creative. It's just absurdity. I can't say 'donkey spatula' and consider myself creative. To be creative, the two words must come together to create something."

I should be crediting someone for this idea because I know it is not original with me, but my mind cannot lay its finger on the name. (Gardner? Roethke? Readers, you'll help me out in the comments section, won't you?) Nevertheless, the distinction is an important one. Two disparate ideas yoked together by force doesn't necessarily create something. It's the poet who puts the disparate together in a way that becomes harmonious and enlightening, that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. The words might create an idea or a setting or a character or a voice or perhaps even a sound, but unless something is created by the seemingly random pairing, then it has failed its work.

Our class has a running list of mottos we should put on class tee shirts. I'd like to nominate "donkey spatula" as a tee shirt idea and a reminder to all of us that creating is harder and nobler work than it may seem--but I'd like to nominate it, too, as a celebration of the silliness that allows us a much needed reprieve for that work.

I'm so grateful for my students, who add levity and light to every class.

There are many things I'm good at...

...but blog design is not one of them.

This week, my publishers at New Rivers Press sent me my cover design, giving me the first glimpse of what my novel will look like when it comes out in October. (Squee!!) I decided that, now that I have the art, I'd better redesign the blog to match, hopefully bringing the blog design more up to date along the way.

I'm no graphic designer, though, and I'm afraid it shows. I see how things could be improved but have no clue on how to improve them. I guess this is why it's my job to write the books and someone else's job to make a beautiful cover.

So, for this week, rather than a reflection on writing, I thought I would offer this writing prompt for a story, poem, or screenplay:

Write about a character whose heart's desire is to do a job well, but who has no talent whatsoever for that job. Let the job be one that others would see as mundane or easy. Let the character have another talent, perhaps one that would be lucrative, but let that talent be ignored or dismissed. Your character can't see how what s/he's good at is any help at all. The job has become his/her sole focus.