The post “Standing By The Work Is The Only Option” appeared first on Jewcy.

Re: MFAs

I know writers who say they don't read while they're writing for fear of being too influenced. But if, like most writers, you're writing all the time, then that means you're never going to read, which is a real problem for a writer since the best education you can get is from other books. Besides, I've never understood the anxiety of influence. We should all want to be influenced — just as long as we're being influenced by the right stuff. Imitation is how writers achieve their own voice. There was a class in imitation when I was in grad school — one week you wrote like Woolf, the next week you wrote like Faulkner–and everyone found it tremendously helpful. It's interesting that you mention Philip Roth’s visit; I had a very similar experience with Richard Ford. This was shortly after he'd won the Pulitzer for Independence Day, and he was sitting there with Charles Baxter, a wonderful writer and one of our teachers. Ford said that he and Charlie were both at that stage in their careers when they sometimes got paid for work they hadn't yet written and that was nice, but that the page was just as blank every time they sat down. And though at that point I had only published a couple of short stories, I realized that even if I managed to achieve further success as a writer, the page was going to feel just as blank. I feel that more than ever now. You reach a point where you know that what you write won't be so abysmal that it wouldn't pass freshman English, but will it be really good? Will it be magical, will it jump off the page? Why is it that we read a novel we love, and then we read another novel by the same person and don't love it nearly as much, and then we read a third novel by them and we love that one? Were they good and then bad and then good again? I just think that some books work and some don't and there's often no telling why. Charles Baxter has three early novels that were never published, and he might say that those unpublished works were instrumental in getting him to where he is. For the same reason, I have no regrets about the three thousand pages I threw out. You need to throw out a lot of bad pages in order to get to the good ones. In that sense, I'm temperamentally well suited to being a writer. What separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls is the ability and inclination to rewrite–to really revise in a deep way. I also understand what Roth was saying about the time between novel. In a way that's why I started to write novels in the first place — because I was having that experience to the nth power with short stories (with novels, it happens only once every few years, whereas with stories it can happen every couple of months). I happen to love stories, am perplexed as to why story collections don't sell (you'd think, with today's attention spans…), and think that in many ways stories are harder than novels because there's so little room for error, every word counts. The issue of not apologizing is important. Which doesn't mean that a writer shouldn't be receptive to criticism, editing, etc. There's not a writer in the world who isn't helped by a good reader (I have several who really saved MATRIMONY a few times along the way). But the key is never to be tentative. Fiction is about convincing your readers that something untrue is in fact true. That's no easy feat. A writer is basically up a creek if they themselves aren't convinced that what they're writing is true. You have to do what Zadie Smith told Charlie Rose: take your readers by the lapels and refuse to let them disbelieve. Sometimes I see real tentativeness in my students' work, even on the sentence level. They’ll write sentences like "she turned slightly to the left" or "he was a little nervous." Why not just say "she turned to the left" or "he was nervous"? Words like "slightly", "a little," "somewhat," etc — all these qualifiers — are littered all over my students' stories and they almost always weaken the work. It's as if the writer is saying, well, maybe you're not going to believe me when I say the character is nervous, so I'll say she's slightly nervous, how about that? I don't mean to make such a big deal about a single word, except what else are writers going to make a big deal about if not words, and it's a rare to be tentative on the sentence level without also being tentative on the bigger levels of narrative and character. I feel the same way about foreshadowing. Too many writers over-foreshadow–it's another case of under-confidence. I visited a book group recently — they were discussing MATRIMONY — and there ensued a long discussion of a key betrayal discovered midway through the novel (sorry to be coy–don't want to ruin things for people who haven't yet read the book). Anyway, someone asked me why I didn't foreshadow that betrayal more–why didn't I leave more popcorn along the narrative trail so that what happened could have been seen. The answer is that I didn't want it to be seen. In general when we’re busy trying to foreshadow events, we’re stepping out of our characters' heads and out of the fictional dream state. Flannery O'connor talks about a good ending to a story being both surprising and inevitable–you didn't predict it, but once you get there it feels exactly right. I think that's true not just for endings but for everything about a piece of fiction. Speaking of O'Connor, she also said (in her wonderful book of essays Mystery and Manners) that anyone who's lived until the age of 10 has enough material to write about for a lifetime. Which I think is her way of saying that there's no reason to be embarrassed about writing autobiographically — and so I agree, you have nothing to apologize for when it comes to your novel. There are pitfalls, of course, to writing autobiographically, but I think there are greater pitfalls to writing about material that isn't close enough to you. In MATRIMONY, Professor Chesterfield tells Julian that he should write what he knows about what he doesn't know or what he doesn't know about what he knows — sounds like a bad LSAT problem. But what he means, and what Julian takes to heart (and what I take to heart), is that a writer needs to find a balance between being too close to and being too far from the material. My undergrads, in particular, tend to err to one extreme or the other. They write simply what they know (a transcript of Friday night's frat party) or simply what they don't know (martians). But what a writer needs to do is be close enough to the material that there's heart in it, that something's at stake, that the writer is at risk, but not so close to it that the writer is concerned about fidelity to actual truth. Fiction is about using the imagination to get at a deeper kind of truth. All that said, I'd rather be too close to my material than too far from it. It's much harder to put heart into something you don't care about than to achieve the kind of aesthetic distance necessary to make autobiographical material work. Which is my longwinded way of saying that I'm all for writing from one's own experience, and though the plot/events of MATRIMONY are fabricated, the kind of people I'm writing about, the situations they're in, the concerns they have all come from my own concerns in some deep, even if hidden, way. My sense is that the anxiety I spoke of about writing about writing and the anxiety you spoke of about writing an autobiographical novel may come from a similar place in our culture — that we privileged Americans, children of the university, haven't lived enough and that if you're writing about your own experience then you're being narrow, self-indulgent, solipsistic, etc. While it's certainly true that there's a good deal of solipsistic fiction out there, I don't think it's confined to those who are writing autobiographically, and I think O'Connor is right. If anything, I think writers should be writing closer to home, not farther from it. Hemingway was certainly a good writer, but I see him as responsible (perhaps inadvertently) for a lot of the nonsense about how a writer should live/what a writer should do. I'm talking about this idea that the way to be a writer is go hike the Himalayas, or hang out in cafes in Paris, or Kyoto, or Prague. Well, all of those are fine things to do, but if an aspiring writer asked me whether it would be better to spend a year in Nepal or a year in the local library reading great books, I'd say the latter without an instant's hesitation. The writer as cowboy — this is all the product of some romantic idea that people have, and these are usually people who are more interested in being writers than in actually writing. This whole issue has very much been on my mind because I’ve recently written a number of essays in the blogosphere and in print about MFA programs — my experience being in one and now teaching in a few of them. I argue that, though MFA programs aren't for everyone, they can, if you combine the right student with the right teacher, be incredibly helpful. I know they were for me, and I've seen many of my own students make tremendous leaps. The attitude that is so prevalent is that writing can't be taught, that it shouldn't be taught, that it's all a big scam. I disagree strongly. What I'm getting at is I think the cultural forces that make people feel the need to apologize for writing about writing or writing autobiographically are also the forces that dismiss MFA programs as overpriced finishing schools. While I think there are many legitimate criticisms of MFAs, I think the programs and writing workshops in general are unfairly maligned. So I want to end this round of our correspondence with a question for you. I gather you went through an MFA program yourself. What was your experience like, what are your thoughts about MFA programs in general, and do you think there's any relation between the criticism of MFA programs and some of the broader issues we've been talking about regarding what material from life is and isn't fiction-worthy?

The post “Every Word Counts” appeared first on Jewcy.

Re: Writing About Writing Hi Josh, So many meaty thoughts to chew on. I have read Crossing to Safety– though it has been a long time, and I probably should revisit it. I loved it when I read it, and now I can see the inspiration for Matrimony, for sure. I am always interested in how writers use models for their work. I know people who look directly to the texts they've loved, copying structures exactly, and others who just owe a debt to a book because it inspired them so. But finding models is such a crucial part of the whole process, and certainly of pulling yourself back when you're feeling like you have no idea what you're doing. Which, I'm happy to hear you say, is so much of the time! It’s heartening to hear that other writers feel that sense of floundering. Philip Roth came to a grad school class I was in once and said that he never is more depressed than when he’s in between books. He didn't say that he necessarily ever feels like he doesn't know how to write another one (I mean this is Philip Roth we're talking about) but at least he has some version of that too. And I like the idea that maybe this is part of the process for novel writing precisely because novels are such beasts, in the sense that every one is (or should be) unique, and every one calls for a completely different set of rules and a different approach and attack, and the key is to have the patience to figure out the right tools for the next one. Hard, because change is always hard, and patience is always hard, and because you can never be sure you're on the right track. But isn't that always the way. I found what you said about the present moment (vs. flashbacks) so interesting. It particularly hit home for me because in an earlier draft of my novel I had the narrative leaping back and forth between a present tense narrative and long past tense sections. One of my first readers (and an important teacher of mine) made the (very key) point that structuring the book in this way served to devalue the past tense sections, as the reader was always waiting to get back to the present and see what happened next, and therefore disengaged from the direct emotion of the past sections. This led me to a complete restructuring, so that now the book goes chronologically, and the present tense part only comes at the end. It's so fascinating to me how important these structural changes are, in a novel, and how much these leaps of time (that, yes, as you point out, seem to a reader to be so effortless) affect the way the book is read, and processed, and understood. One of the greatest pieces of advice I got about writing a novel — which is exactly what you say you eventually did in your book — was from a teacher who said that the key to novel writing was trusting that you could jump in time, and that actually the more gaps you have that you don't fill in, the better. You you don't have to say "and then she worked in a restaurant for 4 years," you can just skip to four years later. Sounds easy, but it's so hard to take that leap of faith, trusting your readers to fill things in. I agree with you, too, on the "writers writing about writing". The distinction you draw strikes me as the right one: there's a difference between dropping a random reference to writing a short story, and embodying a character who happens to be a writer. I think, really, that that aforementioned teacher would probably even agree with that. If your character is a writer, and if you take him seriously as such, then it becomes another occupation, and it really comes down to the quality of mind that you apply to the treatment of it. I think your point about tentativeness is especially key, and is one I take to heart. I have been feeling like apologizing a lot lately…mostly for writing an autobiographical novel, which for some reason makes me feel some kind of shame, or need for apology…and it comes down to the same point. Never apologize! Tentativeness is death! We have to take what we do seriously, or who will? It's the same thing with finding time in your life to do the work…if you succumb to the phone ringing or to someone asking you to have a coffee during your writing hours it's tantamount to the same kind of apology, to devaluing the job as not as important (I am particularly guilty of this right now, too). Also, about sentiment: I truly don't understand books without it. It is always the writers who are straightforward about feeling and truth that I most admire. Have you read Stoner, by John Williams, by the way? Most people haven't, and I'm on a personal crusade of getting people to read it. It skyrocketed to my top five pretty much immediately. There are few books that are this clear on sentiment, without becoming necessarily sentimental. But I think, finally, what I found most enlightening about the sentiment in the Mia/Cancer part of Matrimony was the way that you took on her fear. I think fear is rare for fiction. It struck me while I was reading about Mia's fear that it’s rare for a character's fear to be so boldly portrayed.

The post “We Have To Take What We Do Seriously, Or Who Will?” appeared first on Jewcy.

Re: Never Apologize Nellie– Thanks for the awfully kind words about Matrimony; I really appreciate them. I have indeed read Yates's Easter Parade, and any comparison to Yates makes me one happy guy. I think Revolutionary Road is one of the truly great novels out there–one of the best I've ever read–and I like Easter Parade a lot too. In some ways, the book that was most directly (if subconsciously) influential on me in writing Matrimony is another book that covers a long period of time and is also about love and friendship and writing and academia, and is also about two couples, and that's Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety. Have you read that one? A terrific book. Anyway, as to whether I always write like this, it's hard for me to know because after two novels and a bunch of stories, I'm still trying to figure out what “always” is for me. I do tend to write pretty simply and directly. When I sit down to write I'm hoping I'm going to write some big, complex David Foster Wallace-type thing, but that's just not how I write, and I think in any case that being simple and straightforward can be the hardest thing of all — no tricks to hide behind. I'm thinking, for instance, of Tobias Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life, a book I just adore. What I love about Wolff is how not written his work seems, how effortless. But as you yourself no doubt know — as any writer knows — it takes a huge amount of effort to make something seem effortless, so much sweat and endless revision, etc. What is in fact new for me with Matrimony is the temporal scope. My first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, covers about a year, and most of my stories are in fairly compressed time, and the new novel I'm working on now takes place over a single July 4th weekend, but Matrimony covers twenty years. On one hand, it's a really sprawling book, but on the other hand, it focuses on a relatively small cast of characters, is told in only two points of view (Julian’s and Mia's) and, sentence by sentence, it's pretty tight. But you’ve really homed in on some of the key struggles I experienced in writing the book. Matrimony took me ten years to write and I threw out over three thousand pages. I was on a pretty long book tour in the fall, and when I told audiences that there were a whole lot of gasps and shakings of head at my tenacity/pigheadedness/stupidity, and then came the inevitable question of how it could possibly have taken ten years to write a 300-page book. It was a big and long learning process, and I won’t pretend it's over. Novels are such beasts. They're real leaps of faith in that it takes a couple of years before you know not whether it's going to be a good novel or a bad novel but whether it's going to be a novel at all. And then you have to start anew with the next one, and the page is just as blank. So I know exactly what you mean when you say that you feel you've never written a novel even as your own novel sits right in front of you. I wonder if that feeling every goes away. How do you write a novel that covers twenty years without turning the book into a boring chronology? How do you know what to include and what to exclude? I always start at what I think is the beginning and then move forward, but I'm often egregiously wrong about where the book is going. In fact, if I'm right about where I think the book is going I worry something is seriously amiss. Writing for me is a discovery and if I'm too sure of what's going to happen before it happens then I end up straitjacketing my characters in a preordained plot (and I get what a friend of mine likes to call Lipton-cup-a-story), which is the last thing I want to do. In this particular case, I knew the story was about a love relationship and I knew it took place at a college reunion. Well, Matrimony is (in part) about a love relationship, and there is in fact a college reunion in the book, but that reunion doesn't happen till about page 260 and it lasts for all of 7 pages. I teach writing, and I'm always telling my students that they need to take the here and now of their stories seriously. It's like the Passover question: why is this night different from all other nights? Well, it's the fiction question too. And I think for complex psychological reasons a lot of writers, and perhaps especially a lot of student writers, find it much easier to write in flashback than to write in the here and now, and so they use the here and now as a mere gazing-back point — an occasion for memory — and when they do this the narrative almost always feels inert and the obvious question is if you're really most interested in what's taking place in flashback, why not make the flashback the here and now? I had this epiphany when I was reading Richard Russo's Empire Falls — he does such a good job of revealing information in flashback — and shortly after that I began to think in a new way about the structure of my own novel. That's when I came upon the idea of the leaps in time — between each section of the book I skip about four years. It's like presidential elections. The reader is dropped into a new time and place and slowly s/he figures this out. And though a lot of important material gets imparted in the here and now, a lot gets imparted in flashback too. It was figuring that out — when to pause for longer scenes and when to fold in material in back story — that took me so long. The second big struggle was writing about writing. I'm not surprised your writing teacher said you shouldn't write about writing. Just about everyone says that, though it's worth noting that there's a lot of really good fiction about writing and writers, including Ian Mcewan's Atonement, Martin Amis's The Information, Francine Prose's Blue Angel, a bunch of Alice Munro stories (have you read "Family Furnishings"?), and many, many others. But it's become such a mantra — don't write about writing. Earlier drafts of Matrimony suffered from a deep self-consciousness on my part about writing about writing, and it really infected the whole book, even the parts that weren't about writing. The tone of the book was entirely different. It was much more ironic, playful, coy, at times farcical, and it wasn't working. I was so panic-stricken about violating this taboo against writing about writing that even when I wasn't writing about writing (and certainly when I was), I was too busy being playful and winking at the reader. At some point I realized this is ridiculous. Why shouldn't a writer write about a writer? There's good writing about writers and bad writing about writers, just as there's good writing and bad writing about butchers, engineers, football players, and taxidermists. I realized that if Julian had been a doctor or lawyer or a mobster or a secretary, I would take those occupations (and the aspirations that go hand in hand with them) seriously. When I have a student who's writing a story that has nothing to do with writing and then all of a sudden there's mention made of a short story the character has written, that strikes me as a failure of imagination. The student has writing on the brain and so s/he turns to the first thing s/he can think of. But when a writer is writing about a writer, it's criminal not to take that seriously, and criminal to apologize for it. To me, tentativeness is the death of a writer. Zadie Smith said something similar when she was interviewed by Charlie Rose about White Teeth: a writer must always go for it. As soon as I stopped feeling the need to apologize for writing about a writer, everything in the book changed. I began to take Julian more seriously, and he became a real character to me. Which is my long-winded way of saying that I think your writing teacher is wrong. As for the cancer material, I thought of Mia's mother's death as the central event in the novel, in that it prompts Julian and Mia to get married much earlier than they otherwise would have. But Mia's own health scare came much later on in the writing process and the whole question of testing for the Ashkenazi Jewish breast cancer gene came even later. In earlier drafts Mia didn't have a sister– Olivia was fairly late in coming. As for writing honestly about fear and other such powerful emotions, I always try to do that. A writer wants to be writing about big things–there should be something at stake. My grad students are so fearful of being cheesy and over the top, they're so afraid of sentimentality, that they rob their work of sentiment. Sure, you don't want to be sentimental, but you do want sentiment, and I think too many writers are so fearful of sentimentality that there's no feeling in their work. I think a writer always needs to risk going over the top. Charles Baxter says something to that effect in his essay In Defense of Melodrama. A lot of my students are so afraid of direct emotion that they're subtle to the point of obfuscation. And ironically, I think the more direct you are the subtler you end up being, and the more you try to be subtle the more you end up confusing the reader and actually not being subtle at all.

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Jewcy presents a conversation between a Nellie Hermann, a young writer who's anticipating the publication of her first novel, and Joshua Henkin, whose novel Matrimony was called "beautiful" by Michael Cunningham and "lifelike" by Janet Maslin.

From: Nellie Hermann Hi Josh, Just for a bit of context–I am a writer myself, and my first novel is set to come out with Scribner in August. Because of this, probably, I read your book as someone who is feeling pretty scared of publication and is always on the lookout for models, tools, and advice as to how to handle certain aspects of the process. That said, let me tell you how much I enjoyed your book. I read it in two days, couldn't put it down, which is not an experience I often have. It reminded me very much of Richard Yates's The Easter Parade (have you read it?), namely for the way that it swept along, following its characters as they grow and change, moving in a straightforward way, the narrative blissfully free from tricks. I wonder, do you always write like this? I mean, covering this much ground? Or was the sweep of the book a conscious choice for this particular story? This is, I suppose, a larger question about novel construction (a subject I'm particularly interested in now, after finishing my first book, because it feels to me as if I've never written one even as I can see it in front of me…and I'm bewildered as to how it happened). How did the construction of the book grow or change? Did you start at the beginning and just follow the story? Straightforward narrative construction is always a bit of a revelation –Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake comes to mind as another example — and it makes me wonder what it exactly it is about novel construction that makes this style unique these days. Another aspect of the book that I found really interesting was the element specifically about writers and writing. You brazenly (and admirably) go right into the realm of the writing workshop, which I was under the impression was off-limits for a work of fiction. I had a writing teacher who admonished us never to write about writing, never to have our characters writing, never to discuss the act of writing, for the ways that it took the reader out of the dream-state of reading and made them remember that they were, in fact, reading a piece of writing, which for him was strict no-no. But I admired the way you did it…and it made me wonder about how much of the self-referential aspect of writers writing about writing is “okay”. Have you had responses on this score from writers and non-writers who have read your book? I wondered, as I was reading these parts, how they would strike me if I wasn't a writer, and how then I would relate differently to the narrative. Along these lines, a lot of what I admired about how you did it was how much of your own tricks of the trade you put into the book; how much of your own feeling about good writing and how writing is made. Do you feel any trepidation about having put this aspect of yourself into the book? One more line of inquiry, and then I'll stop. This is already enough to keep us going for a while. I really loved how you handled the cancer stuff throughout the book. I was particularly interested in the way you balanced Mia’s extreme fear, contemplating and even planning on having a preemptive mastectomy, with the great hope that is manifested in the act of having a baby. The balance of these two things was so human, and so honest, and I was struck by how few books are that honest about the fear that people experience (particularly people who, like Mia, have lost loved ones to disease), and the way that the fear is balanced by life. Tell me about the conception, if you would, of this. Were there other iterations of this phenomenon that you worked out? Did you wonder at how best to balance this aspect of the book? I have many more questions — we could discuss all day how the concept of "Matrimony" fits the book — how the book is also about friendship, and how the idea of friendship also dovetails with matrimony — not to mention all my questions about how it feels to finish a book and to move on from it, which happens to be my own preoccupation at the moment. But I'll leave it here for now.

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From: Ed To: Adam, Chris, Daniel, Peter Good morning gentlemen. Here's a simple question for our final day: the book tour is an odd yet cool phenomenon of our times (full disclosure: I trained/drove/toured a bunch of miles this week and now, back home again, not sure how efficient/effective such travel is—not sure, really, if efficiency/effectiveness are the right criteria). What are your favorite stories/experiences from the road? Worst stories/experiences? Things that happened on book tour #1 that you vowed would never happen again? Events you wish you could attend weekly? And, bonus question: what question(s) do you wish we'd tackled this week (it's not too late)? *** From: Chris To: Adam, Daniel, Ed, Peter I love giving readings. It's probably my favorite part of the publication process. I love getting an emotional reaction from an audience.

Obviously I'm most happy when the audience is visibly moved (which doesn't happen very often) or leaps to a standing ovation (which has never happened). But I also like it even when they ask all those expected questions about whether I write longhand or on a computer, or what I'm working on now, because these are people who care about books and, simply by their presence, are validating my vocation as a writer. I write for them, so I have an obligation to honor the time they've taken out of their lives to spend with me. Of course I like it when they ask more challenging questions, or say, "Hey, that was good!" or buy multiple copies of the book. I love the hotels, even when they're sterile Marriott Courtyards. I love eating dinner alone at the hotel bar and making inconsequential conversation with the people around me. I love walking aimlessly around towns I'd never otherwise visit (Akron; Keene, NH) and imagining who I might have been if I'd grown up there. I love avoiding friends of friends who live in these cities with whom I'm supposed to "grab a drink," because my life is crowded enough, and these tours are a nice opportunity just to be alone. What I can't bear are event hosts who aren't prepared for the visit, who don't even remember I'm coming, and/or who think it's no big deal if no one shows up. I find that very insulting. Not because I deserve the red carpet treatment, but because it devalues my time not to put down any carpet at all. They would never treat their accountant or their lawn guy this way. This doesn't happen often, but when it does I take it personally, and then my dinner at the bar feels very lonely and pathetic, and I can't even call the friend of a friend b/c I'm too embarrassed. My "rite of passage" reading was at an independent bookstore in Keene. I was on tour for my first book, and had read in NYC the night before. I overslept and drove up from the city at breakneck speed, panicked that I wouldn't arrive in time. I got to the bookstore at 6:58 for a 7pm reading, ran inside, and found rows and rows of empty chairs. The events person (a sweet young girl who'd taken time off from college to work at the store) was apologetic when no one—not a single person— showed up, and gave me the standard excuse: "there's a lot going on in town tonight." I read to her for about ten minutes (because she asked), and at the end she even clapped for me, which, by the way, is the saddest sound in the world: two hands clapping in an empty bookstore on a Tuesday night in rural New Hampshire. When I got to my hotel, just a 5-minute drive, I had a message to call the events girl. She wanted to take me out. Actually, she wanted me to come to her house. She made it quite clear that she lived alone and that we would have "our privacy." I politely declined, mostly because she wasn't my type. (Had she looked more like Tom Brady, I'm not sure I could have declined her offer, given the vulnerable state I was in). I was grateful, though. She knew my ego needed to be soothed. She was giving it the old college try. At another reading, this one recently at Border's in Boston, the chairs were full when I arrived (again at the last minute). I was thrilled, and a little bit shocked. Then, as soon as the events guy announced that the reading was about to start, *everyone* got up and left. Apparently there was very little seating at this particular Border's. I read anyway, because it was being broadcast to the entire store, and because I have no shame. *** From: Daniel To: Adam, Chris, Ed, Peter My very first Lemony Snicket reading was in Lansing Michigan. It was raining. It was a Borders. The woman taking me around was from HarperCollins and had agreed to do this for the free plane ticket so she could visit her parents. I had a whole shtick prepared expecting some children an elementary school was supposed to ship over. They backed out due to rain. There were two adults there. I did the shtick anyway to their stony faces, and afterwards they came up to me and said, "We're buyers from the independent down the road. We hate your books and we just had to see what kind of sicko wrote them."
We drove to the hotel where I had fantasies of closing the hotel bar on Harper's tab. But there was no bar. It was the sort of hotel you stay at when driving across the country and you're afraid if you don't take this place it'll be another 3 hours before a hotel appears. The check-in guy gave me a key, and then handed a duplicate to the woman I was with, and then, glaring at me, said, "There's a fax from your wife, sir." The fax said "Happy Birthday," which was a joke. It wasn't my birthday. My wife just had a fax machine at work, and this was back in the day when that was inherently hilarious. But the hotel guy thought I was cheating with the secretary on my birthday. It gradually got better. *** From: Ed To: Adam, Chris, Daniel, Peter One book tour credo: there's safety in numbers. Many of my best events have been readings with other writers. And many of the best of those have been in bars, which could lead to another credo you can coin yourselves. The First Fiction Tour was an incredible idea whose time has come and, alas, apparently, gone (but hopefully will return): great independent bookstores and local bars working together, producing fun, well-organized, vibrant events. Closest I'll ever get to what it must feel like to be in a band. My most depressing event was also strangely joyous by the end. On the First Fiction Tour, we stopped in Iowa City to read at an event sponsored by Prairie Lights, one of those fabled stores I'd always wanted to visit, in a fabled town with a fabled writing program directed, then, by Frank Conroy. I was looking forward to being a part of that storied scene, if only for a night, and I was particularly looking forward to meeting Frank Conroy, about whom I heard so much, and whose memoir, Stop-Time, I'd read, and loved, during my conversion from pre-med to creative writing in college. When we arrived in town, we learned that Frank Conroy had died earlier that day. We wound up in the appointed bar, drinking and mourning, which may be a common Iowa City pastime. No one came to the reading. Until just before we started (we were going to read no matter what, the organizer told us, because that's the way Frank would have wanted it) when a gangly kid I recognized walked in hand-in-hand with a young lady. Turned out he was an ex-student of mine who'd driven in with his sweetheart all the way from Minneapolis. Crazy. Exactly the kind of craziness and chance that, in one way or another, tends to salvage even the gloomiest readings. *** From: Peter To: Adam, Chris, Daniel, Ed This continues to feel very strange, is this what it is to be a blogger? I can see why people do this. Can tell an unlistening world anything you feel like. I've been trying to fast for Yom Kippur and so far this morning I've had cream in my coffee and a half a cookie. It's only 10 Chicago time and I got up at 9:15. I'm not on a book tour—I'm in my home town researching my childhood, which is an odd thing to do, I can't quite find it. In Seattle I once read to a single person. He was a former postman who'd lost his job, his wife, and his house, he said. He said he came to the back of the bookstore to get a little peace and quiet, but go ahead, why not read a little? Couldn't hurt, he said. And so I did. I read to him. His name was Harry. After, he said he enjoyed it. I stole a copy of my own book and gave it to him. He shoved it in his coats and wandered out into the rain. ***

* Enjoyed this Klatch? Check out our first Book Klatch, moderated by Jewcy heroine Elisa Albert.

The post Book Tour Horror Stories appeared first on Jewcy.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree:

For years I thought that Kubla Khan was some freaky Jewish architect, and my father does now pretty much read exclusively Dick Francis, but back then we were a very literate household. *** Next: Should I bring my politics into my writing?

The post Can I Balance Writing and Fatherhood? appeared first on Jewcy.

From: Ed To: Adam, Chris, Daniel, Peter

William Kennedy, Pulitzer-Prize winner and one of our finest writers, end of sentence, but also one of our finest writers about politicians, corruption, and the trappings of power, recently cited Camus when asked how writers should engage with/in politics. The Camus quote he referenced:

"It would appear that to write a poem about spring, would nowadays be serving capitalism. I am not a poet, but I should have no second thoughts about being delighted by such a poem if it were beautiful. One either serves the whole of man, or one does not serve him at all. I like men who take sides more than literatures that do."

I've been thrilled by the appearance of LitPAC and look forward to doing what I can to help that writers-based PAC grow and prosper. I'm curious, though, about where/how you draw the line between giving political support when you see fit and bringing/letting politics into your writing lives?

Another way to think about this goes back to Peter's point about the actual decrease in the space fiction writers are given these days in traditional magazines/newspapers/etc—I mean, it's a relatively clear indication that fiction is, on some level, seen as less relevant, less important, less of-the-moment than all the other work for which those magazines/newspapers/etc reserve plenty of pages. Or, to alter slightly that Camus quote: What do we do in a culture that likes men who takes sides more than it likes literature? And, hey, you've heard, of course, that Pres. Bush has been reading Camus, too, right? P.S. I hope everyone is in good health this morning, with the buckets cleaned out and back under the sink…. *** From: Daniel To: Adam, Chris, Ed, Peter "Political" is like "experimental," "realistic" or thousands of other adjectives applied to fiction—I'm more convinced by an individual example. Mr. Orner's last novel was so swell it made me think every novelist should be engaged specifically and directly with culture. The Yiddish Policeman's Union made me think, scratch that, the fantastical is the best way to get at large cultural ideas. Whenever I read David Markson I think, never mind, the novel's over, this is the direction writing is going in. A great novel makes you think all novels should be like that, in the way that if I'm driving around with the windows down listening to Revolver or Purple Rain or Velvet Underground With Nico I can't believe I ever listen to anything else. Until I go the opera and then I think pop music is ridiculous. I'm happy to be politically active and to put my money where my mouth is. In terms of my work I can't picture writing a novel that's overtly political. But then again, my literary agent says all literature is political—it either supports the status quo or doesn't, and the good stuff doesn't, and she sees representing the Snicket books as part of the political literature she's represented over the years. So here we are again with the slippery adjectives.
*** From: Peter Orner To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Daniel Handler, Ed Schwarzschild I'm of two minds on this, on the one hand, there's a war on, and on the other, when isn't there a war on? The Clinton years were like a strange dream. The fate of the republic hinged on a stain in a dress. I long for the days. What this has to do with writers, any more than accountants though I'm not sure? I've also had a few beers tonight so maybe I'm not in position to say anything relevant, but I will say we have a responsibility to be engaged citizens no matter who we are. But I think this should only leak into our stories so far as it doesn't make them boring. If Daniel's books are political because they question authority and more—they make a complete mockery of authority—then all books should be so political. And I think that's the upshot. I'm with Kennedy—who also understands that politics is about people and if your people are real and if your people make trouble, your politics will never be boring. Long live Roscoe. *** From: Chris To: Adam, Daniel, Ed, Peter Writers are truth-tellers, and telling the truth is an inherently political act. In writing nuanced dramatizations of the lives of people in your (fictional or nonfictional) town, family, or country, you create empathy among readers. You create documents of a particular time and place, and those documents become a sort of history. I love that oft-quoted line about history being written by the winners and literature by the losers; we need both perspectives. In fact, we need lots of losers and lots of winners giving us their various perspectives on any event. I do think writers have an obligation to be politically engaged, but mostly because writers should have an insatiable curiosity about what makes the world tick. *** From: Ed To: Adam, Chris, Daniel, Peter Yes and yes and yes to being swept up and engaged and insatiably curious, and a big No in thunder to being boring about politics or anything else—nothing worse than that. Sometimes seems to me we need a politics of reading, or a politics that includes much more reading. The recent stat that had 1 in 4 Americans stating they hadn't read a single book during the last year (zero, zilch—no Dan Brown, no Harry Potter, no nothing) is a bad, bad thing for this land. Tricky, I know, to say that writers are/should be role models, but this need for writers to be engaged and insatiably curious and absorbed by what James Agee called "the certain normal predicaments of human divinity" is really, I like to think, a crucial political statement, a political demonstration of how to study and make sense of the world around us. Maybe it's naive of me to say, but here it is anyhow: people who read Orner, Castellani, Handler, Johnson, and their literary ancestors will be, I guarantee it, better political—and human—beings. ***

* Next: Book Tour Horror Stories

The post Should I Bring My Politics Into My Novels? appeared first on Jewcy.

The book club event at Odyssey Books was a blast, attended by a handful—a klatch, one could say—of sharp readers, which made the trip out here more than worthwhile. It made me think more about audience and my dream of a world full of strong, thoughtful readers and writers. This leads, I like to think, to questions about teaching. It's interesting (but not surprising) to see that day one included references to various teachers (some specific, like Andre Dubus, and others less specific, like the soon-to-be tenured beer drinker).

We've all done various kinds of teaching ourselves. How have your experiences as students of writing shaped your goals as teachers of writing? What classroom experiences do you hope to re-create and what classroom experiences do you hope desperately to avoid re-creating? Also: how were/are you influenced by other writers and how do you hope to influence the students you teach? Seems like a great opportunity, too, to talk about involvement/interest in organizations like Grub Street, or 826, or Gotham Writers Workshop, or what have you.

Rock/bop/hard bop on–

E

***

From: Daniel Handler To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Ed Schwarzschild, Peter Orner

The only writing class that ever did anything for me was one I took with Kit Reed as an undergraduate. She had eight students, all of whom had to turn in 20 pages of fiction every two weeks. We met individually with Reed in her kitchen. She was a careful reader and had a great sense of what I might read that might help me. ("This is a creepy story. Have you read Joy Williams? Rachel Inghalls? And look at Kafka again, he's great at creepy.")

The class only met en masse three times over the semester: an opening meeting, a midway check-in, and a party at the end. I wrote a lot that semester, and read a lot too. I also got the message that writing is writing: if you don't like to do it, you shouldn't be a writer.

I don't have an MFA and I've never taught more than the occasional one-day workshop. In general I'm suspicious of the whole enterprise. Certainly many terrific writers are coming out of MFA programs, but in general they seem to have gotten over hurdles that seem inevitable to the whole workshopping process: groupthink, imitation of some flavor-of-the-semester, deification of a teacher, obsession over literary gossip. In my experience there were enough hurdles to get to be a writer without getting these tossed in front of me. And I don't think I know a single teacher of writing for adults who wouldn't quit if they didn't need the money.

The major benefit of writing programs that's often touted is the time and encouragement to write, and I'm suspicious of that most of all. I believe wholeheartedly in that kind of encouragement and scheduling when you're ten. When you're twenty-seven I'm not so sure. Literature isn't begging for more practitioners. You could spend your life only rereading Isaac Singer and end up fulfilled. Some of our best writers overcame unimaginable hardship to get words on paper, and now, increasingly, we have programs for people who are largely (with many significant exceptions) overcoming inconvenience. I'm not sure this makes for the kind of writer I like most: a lifer, a person who can scarcely help themselves but write. I imagine this is an unpopular answer.

***

From: Ed Schwarzschild To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Daniel Handler, Peter Orner

Well, we'll see as the day unfolds if it's an unpopular answer, but I'm betting it won't be. It is, though, most definitely thought-provoking.

Growing up, I was told so often by so many people that I would grow up to be a doctor that, like any good kid, I started repeating that mantra to myself, repeated it loud and long enough that I crammed through pre-med cutthroat courses as an undergrad and signed up to take the MCAT not one or two, but three times, without ever taking the damn thing. Hope they used all those test fees well.

Anyhow, all those years, at least from elementary school on, I loved reading and writing, but I wasn't getting the encouragement, let alone the instruction, I needed. Then, finally, I took a writing workshop, taught by Dan McCall. For me, the space that McCall created was essential—he made it possible to imagine a writing life. He also made it clear that there were no promises of success, but without him, I fear I would have pushed through into med school and beyond (I can, like many Leos, be stubborn), and that would most likely have led to no good for potential patients or my own potential happiness.

A small thing, that class, and probably not deserving of a worldwide MFA industry. And yet, teaching at a big state school these days, I'm struck by how little encouragement the students I see have been given to think of themselves seriously as writers, to think of how what they read is written, to think of how they imagine and what they imagine and why they imagine. So, at one edge of the spectrum there's the vexed, age-old question of whether or not writing can be taught. But, keeping that at the far edge for the moment, there's the more vital question of can students be given the chance to create some space in their lives to think of themselves as readers and writers. Can they be encouraged to push back against the pressure to pre-professionalize they've been getting since elementary school, if not earlier?

Maybe the kind of encouragement I'm talking about—in undergraduate education, but also at places like 826 and Grub Street and elsewhere—is only an accidental side-effect of the growth of MFA culture, but I like to think it's more than that, and I like to think its benefits to society as a whole are substantial.

And, yes, it's true, if money were not an issue, it's safe to say I would teach less. I might even hire a paper-grader from time to time. But I'd still want to teach regularly, especially since that inspiration I got as a student is, I like to think, a two-way street.

***

From: Peter Orner To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Daniel Handler, Ed Schwarzschild

My thought's this: people are pretty resilient. They survive divorces and they survive plane crashes. Broken homes, unbroken homes. They can even survive the sometimes goofy horrors of an MFA program intact and go on to write decently, lifelong. I do agree that the proliferation of the programs seems to create more writers, but I'm not sure it creates more readers—and this does bother me a lot.

I also cannot stand the way that it academicizes the writing of fiction. Daniel mentioned yesterday that he wasn't even sure what a short story was—and thank god for this. The idea that, armed with MFA, anybody might hold the key to how to write a story or anything else is alarming. And yet those letters seem to encourage a lot of crap. The proof of this is how much work out there is competent, but not inspired or even interesting.

But I think we'd get cookie cutter work without MFA programs too. All you have to do is go to the bookstore and see this.

In my own case I was lucky to have some great teachers who were less teachers than writers and getting a small dose of them—if it was only them saying, go read all of I.B. Singer, go, now, don't talk to me, just go read, do it—often was enough.

Once, as an undergraduate at one of those big state schools Ed talks about, I slipped a story under a writer's door. And he actually read the thing—and wrote me a typed response on onion skin paper. I still have it around here somewhere. He particularly liked that I said a room smelled like potato chips. And then he said, go and read Arcturus by Evan Connell. My own story was dogmeat, but the Connell I still re-read.

Last point—as someone who also works at a big state university, I get a lot of people walking through my door who would normally never get the attention of anybody. Least of all anyone interested in their stories. There's no time, and when the student to professor ratio is like a 150 to one, as opposed to 10 to 1 as it is at some small elite private schools in this country, there's very little opportunity for contact with faculty. But I try (not always, but some days), as someone once tried with me.

Okay last last point: the MFA programs that provide funding in exchange for work — are undoubtedly the best. They give some people a chance who might not have had one, and like I say, sometimes people survive them and go on to write pretty well. It is said that Flannery O'Connor sat at the back of her Iowa classroom and scowled. But by no means are they are necessary—and can be damaging to the brain if people aren't careful. But so can a lot of things. Transfats.

All right last last last point, two questions really, and one I do not know the answer to. Why fewer outlets for fiction than ever before (excluding the internet) and yet all these programs? And why do certain major magazines still bore us with articles on the issue of MFA or not MFA? Why don't they just publish more fiction?

***

From: Adam Johnson To: Chris Castellani, Daniel Handler, Ed Schwarzschild, Peter Orner

I think that Daniel's right that eventually you'll have to thrive on the aloneness of writing, and for some that should come sooner than later. For me, finding mentors in writing was pivotal—I'm lucky I didn't find a great mentor in the sanitation or arson field, because if he or she had given me time, attention, and rigor, I'd be burning trash cans right now, your trash cans.

As an undergraduate, I liked writing short stories and was happy to be in the air conditioning, rather than out banging nails in the Arizona heat. It was cool to hang out with other people who loved books and go to smarty-pants parties. But it was a teacher who took me aside, a mentor who made me strive, a writer who showed me that all my perceived faults—lying, exaggerating, daydreaming, rubbernecking—combined to make something good called a story.

All the bad press about MFA programs is probably true—mediocrity, burned out teachers, politics, proficient but heartless work—I saw all of that as I milked the grad school world for as long as I could. But I also had great peers, wrote a ton of writing and was in the game every single day. More people will read the Unabomber's "Manifesto" than anything I ever write, so I'll set the quality issue aside.

Mostly, the MFA program allowed me to practice being a writer—showing up every day, reading as much as possible, humbling oneself to improve—until I became a writer. And in general, I don't think most people would look back at the end of life and regret having spent a couple years doing something they were passionate about.

Remember when Dante strayed from the path and encountered the She-Wolf of Incontinence? What Dante needed was Virgil, and what I was most blessed with were great teachers—writers who were generous, patient and demanding, who helped me make leaps, see faults, and who treated even my worst work seriously. Writing stories was cool, but my teachers showed me that to be a writer was different: it meant seeing the outside world differently and it meant being on a first name basis with the voices in your head; it meant being evangelical about the oracularity of narrative; and it meant seeing the humanity of pretend people in order that we better approach real people.

I know it sounds like I'm writing a pamphlet on earnestness, but there's no way to be pithy about people who gave me so much, whether I deserved it or not. And since there's no way to ever pay back your teachers, it's what makes helping my students so dang rewarding.

***

From: Chris To: Adam, Daniel, Ed, Peter

Hello Sexy Ones,

I want to say first that mentors were *crucial* for me in my MFA program. One professor and three (of 9) classmates offered invaluable perspective on my work, and helped give me the confidence to pursue it. They were my first editors, and who doesn't need editors, especially when they're insightful readers and, personality-wise, a perfect mix of cheerleader and critic? Is it so wrong to seek these editors at a certain stage of your career?

Though I've made many of the criticisms of MFA programs you've already mentioned, I bristle a bit when I hear writers complain about them. It smacks of elitism. I am guilty of this myself, going on and on at parties and conferences about how lifeless American fiction has become thanks to all these programs churning out the same Chekhovian story again and again.

It makes me feel important to rail against these programs and pretend that "real writers" like me don't really need them, even though I attended one and basically learned a hell of a lot from it, and would give my right arm to produce a story worthy of being called Chekhovian. But frankly, I can think of worse problems than a proliferation of programs promoting the craft of writing, whether or not I agree with their approach.

Yes, these programs are cash cows; yes, they take some advantage of people who have naively idealized the life of the writer; yes, individual instructors tend to teach to a particular aesthetic. But these programs put money in the hands of emerging writers (like me, like many of my good friends); they create and fuel often passionate conversations about things like character development and point of view; they valorize the discipline of writing itself; they create a world, however fleeting, where the written word is king.

I think it's a myth that the majority (or even a large minority) of these programs focus mainly on the marketplace and not the art. In *every* program I've either participated in or had friends participate in, the instructors belabor the point that if you're not in this business because you love stories and words and art, you're in for a rude awakening.

The whole "cookie-cutter approach" to writing may also be a myth. I think it's rare that a truly original voice that doesn't fit the "classic" model of a short story or novel gets discouraged or "molded" into a form where it doesn't belong. Quite the opposite: teachers are thrilled when they discover or nurture a voice like this. The people who get molded are usually those who are trying to achieve that particular model, but are failing miserably because they simply haven't read enough or haven't written enough stories (i.e. haven't practiced enough).

I like to apply to MFA programs what Grace Paley (may she rest in peace) said about the teaching of creative writing to children:

"For some people it meant that as a teacher you had to make great writers: either a student becomes a great writer or what's the point in teaching writing? Whereas the person who believes that you can teach math never thinks about whether or not the idea is to make a great mathematician. Nor does the history teacher belives that it is essential, in order to be a honorable teacher of history, to produce a great or famous historian. In a way, they are right about what they're doing: they want to produce women and men who love history, or math, or chemistry, and would understand what they (the teachers) are doing, and love and maybe understand the world a little bit better."

Like all of you, I absolutely wish that, instead of printing another article about what's wrong or right with MFA programs, journals/newspapers/magazines would print more fiction. But I do think (naively?) that the proliferation of writing programs are, in fact, creating more and better readers. Who else—other than friends, family and the homeless—takes a couple hours out of their night to attend a reading at a local independent bookstore?

***

NEXT: Warning: Being a stay-at-home Dad may damage your career

The post MFA Programs: Are They Worse Than Plane Crashes? appeared first on Jewcy.

Adam Johnson, author of Emporium and Parasites Like Us

Daniel Handler, author of Adverbs and the Lemony Snicket books

Chris Castellani, author of A Kiss From Maddalena and The Saint of Lost Things

Peter Orner, author of Esther Stories and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

Moderated by Ed Schwarzschild, author of Responsible Men and The Family Diamond

*****

From: Ed Schwarzschild To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Daniel Handler, Peter Orner

Good morning, kind klatchers!

The basic idea here is simple: Imagine we're hanging out, kicking back, talking about the writing lives we're living and contemplating. We're a mid-career, all-male klatch by design, which I hope gives us an opportunity to get some interesting takes on specific issues both old and new.

Here we go:

How does it feel to be a mid-career writer? What new pressures/pleasures surprised you? How have the processes of writing and publishing the 2nd, 3rd, etc books felt different from that first book? And how did you push on to become a mid-career writer? Were you ever tempted to stop and switch careers? If so, what kept you from doing that?

Can't wait to hear your thoughts.

Klatch on!

Ed

*****

From: Daniel Handler To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Ed Schwarzschild, Peter Orner

I pack my kid off to school, pour myself the second cup of coffee, check my e-mail and learn I'm mid-career already? I should have stayed in bed. Mid-career? Let's hope, as with the author himself, it's a pretty big middle.

I'm trying to cling to my innocence as far as writing fiction goes. I work best when I don't know quite what I'm doing, and all the writers I admire seem to maintain a certain amount of naiveté throughout their careers. (I used to have a fragment from one of Melville's letters taped up near my desk, in which he admitted to a friend that he had no idea what his new novel was even about. It was Moby-Dick.) I'm trying to finish two short stories in the next few weeks, and I'm at complete existential crisis: not only do I not know how to make these stories better, but I'm beginning to wonder what a short story is, exactly. I hope I always have that kind of vertigo even if it wears out my shoe leather through pacing.

Naturally it's nicer to write a book knowing that in all likelihood it will be published, rather than the fear I had writing my first novel (and then, my first real novel) that it would be found in a box by distant relatives and turned to mulch. That's a substantial difference in temperament now that I'm "mid-career," but it's basically the only one.

Towards the publication of my first novel I found myself wondering what in the world I could do for a living, as being utterly broke and unpublished seemed acceptable but utterly broke and published just seemed pathetic. Writing for children kind of fell into my lap and then, as is so often with young men, my lap took over.

But that's another story.

***

From: Chris Castellani To: Adam Johnson, Daniel Handler, Ed Schwarzscihld, Peter Orner

First of all, it's nice to hear that I'm mid-career. Most days I feel either as though my career, such as it is, is in its awkward pimply sweaty adolescence, or that it's been over since my most recent pub date (Oct, 2005). What a relief to hear I still have at least half my life to live.

I wrote and sought publication for my first book for (too) many reasons: as a gift to my parents (whose immigrant stories inspired it), out of vengeance toward a writing professor who said I'd never publish anything, as a fulfillment of a wish/goal I've had since I first started reading for pleasure, because I loved the setting and the characters (of course), and because I had to save face with the dozens of people who'd had to listen to me complain about writing for five years.

My second book I wrote because I'd settled into that identity as a writer, and I felt confident that I had a story to tell. I put no pressure on myself to prove anything to anyone. I thought, "no one expects anything from a second book, anyway," and because of those low expectations I actually *enjoyed* the process, let myself experiment a bit, and didn't carry around so much baggage. Most people say that the writing of their first book is more "pure," but for me it was the opposite. Instead of feeling tainted by the marketplace and the criticism and the touring, I felt as though my experienced with all of them inoculated me.

Because neither book made me a fortune, I've worked as a teacher and a non-profit administrator for the past few years, and I can't imagine NOT having (an)other job(s) to occupy my mind. I've never once considered not writing as an option. My nonprofit Grub Street is in the literary world, so it feeds my desire to write rather than diminishes it. I also get to meet a lot of amazing fellow writers. So I wouldn't change a thing.

I hope this is OK as an initial response, though, as I read it over, it strikes me as quite boring. I'm looking forward to hearing from the rest of you.

***

From: Adam Johnson To: Chris Castellani, Daniel Handler, Ed Schwarzschild, Peter Orner

While getting a degree in writing, I had a professor who liked to hold court over beers after class. One time he delivered a mini-lecture on why the third book was the real test for an author, of whether he had "it." His basic argument was that everybody had a book inside, and writers should certainly have two, so the third book determined whether you were a navel-gazing, auto-bio type, or whether you could really write "fiction." It seemed like pretty useless advice to a table of unpublished students, and looking back, it's really clear that this professor had just published, to his great relief, his third book and thus secured tenure.

And yet, here is where I find myself, working on my third book. Like Daniel, the process of writing seems eerily the same, if a little more difficult and contemplative—right now I'm working on a short story, one I don't completely understand, and I hope I don't fail it. But the "mid-career" label seems to refer to the public side of being a writer. As a guy who is pretty much on the sideline of this business, the mid-career label kinda means: Instead of writing for readers, mostly, you're now writing for other writers. Real readers are hard to find, and it seems like publishers are willing to promote the books of literary stars and books for "new," "discovery" and "debut" writers. After two books, I am neither new nor a star, and my next collection of stories is likely to sell to the few thousand people who tried to write a short story themselves in the previous year.

But if you're writing for yourself, or for your wife, or for your close friends, none of that matters. I was always gung-ho over a new short story by Mark Richard or Lorrie Moore, and I'd talk about them with friends whose shared enthusiasm put us somewhere between sneakerheads and war reenactors. And honestly, I didn't start really reading contemporary fiction until I started trying to write it, so it was probably destiny that I would head toward being a writer who writes for other writers. AKA, Mid-career Johnson.

***

From: Peter Orner To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Daniel Handler, Ed Schwarzschild

Above a urinal in a bathroom in St. Louis this morning (yeah, I hang out in midwestern bathrooms, you got a problem with that?), I read this:

125 YEAR PLAN: LOVE EVERYBODY

I'm trying to employ this kind dictum even toward Ed Schwarzschild for getting me into this. I'm with Daniel. Midwhat? I have enough trouble with feelings of inadequacy every day facing the page, now I have to feel this way on email?

I've always been bored by gambling. But writing (and so much else) has always seemed to me like a crapshoot. I never know if I am going to write another decent sentence from one hour to the next. If I pull a few off, I'm thankful and surprised. And grateful. This is a strange job. And I have always thought of the writing of the sentences as the job part. Not the other part, the publishing part, which is something different entirely, but at the same time determines whether or not bills get paid. This too is a crapshoot, with even wierder odds. Good books get published. Bad books get published. Good books don't get published. Bad books…you get the idea.

Andre Dubus has a beautiful essay in his collection Broken Vessels about Richard Yates. In it he describes the small Boston apartment where Yates spent his last years. It was modest and book-filled. It wasn't squalor, but it was cramped and book-filled, and it was, fitting for Yates, lonely. In the essay Dubus wishes that the apartment could have been preserved in that state, not as a shrine, but so that aspiring writers might see where one writer wound up.

Again, not to show that this is a miserable thing to do with your life, but to demonstrate that even if you are good, and Yates was very good, you might end up in a place like this. Or you might not. But get used to the possibility.

Now go home and write something honest and don't worry about what it might bring you.

***

From: Daniel Handler To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Ed Schwarzschild, Peter Orner

I've always loved something Brian Eno supposedly said, that the Velvet Underground didn't sell that many records, but everybody who bought one started a band. That's how I like to think of literary fiction—regardless of whether or not it finds a large audience, it's the readers who really take it to heart that count. One of the things I love about having left New York, the literary capital of the world, is bumping up against people who are reading whatever occurs to them, and forming opinions about the writing that aren't informed by literary gossip or an article in the Observer. It's a reminder to me not to think about the size of the audience but the passion of the few readers who really take it to heart. A few months back I met a guy, not a writer, who mentioned that his all time favorite book was Robert Coover's first novel, The Origin Of The Brunists, offhand a novel I wouldn't think anybody read who wasn't either a writer or a Coover freak or both. And yet this guy just had it in his head—in effect, he started a band with it—and to me that's the best kind of reader.

***

From: Ed Schwarzschild To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Daniel Handler, Peter Orner

Gentlemen!

Fired off question #1 at some ungodly hour last night, then crashed out, awoke early to take the train from NYC to Boston so that, like any glorious lower-mid-career writer, I could then rent a compact, very fuel efficient car to drive 2 hours into Western MA tonight to meet with a book group at a cool indie bookshop. I could have been worrying about whether anyone would show up at all at the event (who knows? who cares?) It's a great bookstore—Odyssey Books, in South Hadley—and the owners and their faithful are folks who love books and I love them. Instead, my worries were focused elsewhere: would the klatch fly? What a treat to arrive here, find that there is occasional wireless in this chilly old house where I'm lodged, and then discover your great responses. Yes! The klatch is aloft and soaring!

I'm not surprised that we're more or less resisting the "mid-career" label. I mean, no one likes to be pigeonholed, categorized, etc. (well, except perhaps in extreme cases, like "Pulitzer-Prize winner" or "Nobel Laureate" or something like that. This will all lead to a future question, so please allow pigeonholing to flutter around your consciousnesses until, say, Wednesday or Thursday). But for now, I'll just say that I share the jitters around the term "mid-career". Sometimes it seems that I live my life in fear of jinxing the future—from baseball games to opening sentences, especially opening sentences—and even the label "writer" can seem awfully presumptuous, reminding me of how Auden (I think he's the one) said that after finishing a poem, he was never certain he'd be a poet again, because (this part isn't Auden) who the hell knows what is going to happen when you sit down with pen/pencil/laptop/graffito tool? In other words, as Peter rightly and eloquently reminds us from the stalls, it's a crapshoot.

But there has to be some way to describe writers who have 2 + books out in the world and are working on the ones after that. They're no longer sexy debut authors, so they must have entered into their sexy mid-career-age. We could get into the whole lower, upper-middle, upper class mid-career vocab, but let's not. In any case, I'm betting there won't be too much resistance when a future question focuses on the fact that we're all male.

But, on a more serious note, I'm really drawn to the question of audience—from Daniel's Coover fan, to Adam's vision of writing for other writers. Maybe it's safe to say that one thing that develops as we move past first books involves a sharper, clearer sense of audience—who we're hoping to write for, whose eyes we long to have on our pages. Which might be another way of saying that our expectations clarify. But more about this to come.

***

From: Daniel Handler To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Ed Schwarzschild, Peter Orner

Charlie Parker said, of the "bop"/"hard bop" debate, "Let just call it music." I say we call authors who are past the second book simply "sexy."

***

On Day 2 of the Klatch: You survived a divorce and a plane crash. Can you survive an MFA?

The post Five Male Fiction Writers. One Massive Existential Crisis. appeared first on Jewcy.