When the Market Gets You Down…

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Lately, the writing market is getting me down–which is ridiculous because, if you want to win the lottery, you’ve got to buy a ticket–and if you want to get something published, you need to send your work OUT.  Which, of late, I have not been doing.  Nevertheless, along the lines of “nothing ever changes,” I found some words of Jack London perversely comforting.   From Martin Eden:

“…He was amazed at the immense amount of printed stuff that was dead.  No light,no life, no color, was shot through it.  There was no breath of life in it, and yet it sold…(p.118)  …they sound the popular note, and they sound it so beautifully and morally and contentedly… .   They are the popular mouthpieces.  They back up your professors of English, and your professors of English back them up.  And there isn’t an original idea in any of their skulls.  They know only the established,–in fact they are the established… their function is to catch all the young fellows attending the university, to drive out of their minds any glimmering originality that may chance to be there, and to put upon them the stamp of the established. (p.201)”

And from London’s article,”The Question of a Name,” published in The Writer, in 1900:

“‘The chance of the unknown writer’ may be discussed ad nauseam, but the unpleasant fact will yet remain that he has not the chance of the known writer…he cannot compete with the latter on equal ground of comparative merit.  Every first-class magazine is overwhelmed with material (good material), of which it cannot use a tithe; and it will reject an unknown’s work, which may possess a value of say, two, and for which it would have paid a price of, say, one, and in place of it accept a known’s work with a value of one, for which it will pay a price of ten….the magazine editor must consult first and always the advertisers and the reading public; he must obey the mandates of the business department, and be deaf, very often, to the promptings of his heart.  Trade is trade.”

Apparently, the writing life–or at any rate, the struggle to get published in established markets–was ever thus.

 

 

 

VERMONT STUDIO CENTER

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Red Mill, on Gihon River at VSC in Johnson, Vt.

Red Mill, on Gihon River at VSC in Johnson, Vt.

Observed on April 8, 2014:  A few days ago, although a low rapid gushed on the far side of the bridge, the Gihon river was mostly covered with ice.  You knew water must be flowing under it, but except for a thin stream along the shorelines, the surface was white, cold, and still.  Yesterday, the ice began breaking up a bit and, today, the river is suddenly flowing fast in a snake-like curve around the remaining broken ice beneath the bridge, a swirl of tiny ice-shards roiling down the middle, as the water comes.  The sudden power, after the days of seeming stillness, invigorates, instilling a sense of anticipation, excitement, even danger—power now exposed, not hidden.

A green-headed wild duck darts from the sky straight at the water, but somehow ends its dive on its belly, treading water in the middle of the river, paddling against the current, moving a little upstream, and then paddling towards the shore.  A piece of ice about the duck’s own size crosses its path, but just misses hitting it.  My studio window gives me a good view of the flowing river.

I spent the first two weeks of April at the Vermont Studio Center (VSC), in Johnson, Vermont.  VSC offers residencies for visual artists and writers and, when you get the right combination of people at a residency, the quiet little town of Johnson provides, daily, an inner excitement and sense of anticipation.  It is a wonderful, renewing experience that stays with you after you go home, and  leaves you wanting to find ways to keep the spirit you found there alive.

In my short time at VSC, the resident writers (no more than sixteen of us) and artists (the balance of approximately 50 people) had a wonderful spirit of playfulness and curiosity as well as an appreciation for and encouragement of each other’s work.  This was true not only within disciplines, but between them.  When the writers got together for their informal readings, artists were welcome to come and listen, but also to participate if they had something written they wanted to try out.  Some were fascinated to see the writer’s process–how we develop our work and analyze what we have done.  Writers (at least this writer) were welcomed into studios where the visual artists were happy to take time out to talk about what they were working on and their process.  I was fascinated by the visual artists’ experimentation with the tools of their various media.  Just as I might play with writing devices, many of them experiment to see how one medium will affect another (eg. the effect created by spilling cleaning fluid on a color magazine photo).

Meals are communal there, and conversation at lunch or dinner, when not happily silly, often was a time when you might be asked what you were working on or how the work was going and thus given an entrée to talk out a problem you had with your work, or bounce an idea off of someone, or become inspired by an idea or problem they were working out.

In addition, during each two-week period (most artists stay for one month), there is at least one writer or poet who comes for some days as a visiting writer, gives a reading, a craft talk, and meets with those who want critique of their work.  (In my two-week period, the writer was Rikki Ducornet.)  Likewise, there are painters and sculptors who come to give a talk and slide show of their work and visit with visual artists who want a critique.  (in my time, these were Kyle Staver and Kim Jones).  The resident writers (who wish to) have an opportunity to give formal readings once per week, and the resident artists (who wish to) likewise have the opportunity to give slide shows of their work.  Other than these events, we made our own fun:  bonfires, roasting marshmallows, Karaoke at the local Italian bar/restaurant on a Saturday night, a Friday night dance party in the Red Mill dining hall’s downstairs lounge (organized informally), even a makeshift séance.  One poet was working on a series inspired by Hitchcock’s oeuvre, and so, with her, one night, a small group of us watched a dvd of Rear Window together.  And through it all, the beer, and wine, and chocolate flowed.  (And coffee and tea and marshmallows and chips, too.)

The creative impulse and comradeship we found together in this month of April was far more free-spirited than I have experienced at any previous residency.  I think I can speak for many of us when I say that our greatest desire is to find ways to sustain that spirit and those supportive friendships now that we have come home and back to our everyday lives.

The Benefit for Freelancers of Joining a Union

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There was no post in February.  I’ve been away dealing with family illness.  I’m back, but part of my mind and energy was left in Michigan.  It will take some time to recapture them.  In the meantime, I thought I’d put in a plug for the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981.

Freelancers, by definition, are at a disadvantage when bargaining concerning pay for their work, especially when dealing with large corporate concerns, whether book publishers, newspapers, or magazines, etc.  No-one should work for nothing–not even interns.  And categorizing people as “independent contractors” is a way both to get rid of the responsibility to provide benefits and to get rid of collective bargaining–the same old struggle.  Organizing “independent contractors”–especially freelance writers who may live and work anywhere–is a more difficult task, I think, than doing so in an industry where the employees work together in the same location.  But the adage is just as true amongst freelancers as amongst any other workers:  there is strength in numbers and in unity.

What does the National Writers Union (NWU) offer to freelancers?

NWU has already proved its worth in fighting for freelancers’ rights in Tasini vs. the New York Times, as well as in mass grievances brought against Inkwell Publishing, Heart and Soul and Natural Solutions magazines that refused to pay their writers, though using their work.

NWU’s contract and grievance section provides advice about agent and book contracts; and about contracts with magazines and newspapers (a starting point, at a minimum, for what terms are okay and what to avoid; what rights to NOT give away; copyright; and what you may bargain over and how).

In coordination with other authors’ organizations, NWU is working to defend copyright and combat Google’s copyright infringements.

NWU is contacting online writers and bloggers about what they do and who they do it for as part of an effort to establish a livable pay scale for those who write for for-profit online publishers like the Huffington Post, etc.

NWU has local chapters that offer seminars, webinars, workshops and writer networking.

NWU’s political action committee is working for a federal shield law for freelancers, the Freelance Payer Protection Act, and a Copyright Small Claims Court.

The yearly dues are fairly reasonable and, based on self-reporting of writing income, are staggered according to the amounts one earns from writing per year.

To learn more, see www.nwu.org.

 

 

 

 

 

Mystery Writers of America–Mid-Atlantic Chapter

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The Mid-Atlantic chapter of Mystery Writers of America (MWA) meets once per month in or near Washington, D.C. for dinner and a speaker.  The speakers range from well-known authors to experts in various fields related to the subjects mystery and suspense novelists explore.

In November, the speaker was Dr. Max M. Houck, Director of the D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences.  Dr. Houck’s initial training was in physical anthropology.  He spent time as a medical examiner in Forth Worth, Texas, and seven years at the FBI.  He also was a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution.  His cases have included the Branch Davidian investigation, the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, and U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa.  He is a founding co-editor of the journal, Forensic Science Policy and Management, and co-authored the textbook, Fundamentals of Forensic Science.  Truly, if one is writing mysteries that require knowledge of forensics, this is a man to hear from.

Amongst the interesting points Dr. Houck made:

1.  Forensics is the science of relationships; that is, it demonstrates the relationships between people, places and things:  who knows who and when?  What is it? –a hair?  a human hair?  Where did it come from?  Is there more than one possible source?  Is it a bullet?  Or could it just be metal from a ricochet?  If a bullet, is it a usable fragment from which one can make a comparison?  (Dr. Houck noted that, for comparison, a water tank is used.  The gun’s trigger is pulled in water; it goes into the water and drops to the bottom of the tank.  The bullet is then removed and examined for markings transferred to it from the gun’s barrel, which is harder than the bullet.)

2.  The more you plan, the more evidence you leave behind; the more trails.  Last minute crime, on the other hand, is harder to unravel.

3.  The core of forensic science is the hunt.  That is, it is not the deer one looks for, it is the traces left by the deer–the tracks.

4. One collects everything; the difficulty is determining what is relevant to a death.

5. Context trumps evidence.

6.  A coroner can be a funeral director; a medical examiner generally will have a medical degree.

Dr. Houck noted that the National Academy of Sciences has expressed the view that forensic labs should be independent of law enforcement agencies.  He also made two final points:  (1) no matter how dirty  his own house is, it is spotless compared to crime scenes; and, (2) anyone is capable of anything.

You may find more information about the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, events or membership, at www.mwa-ma.org.

 

WHY I WRITE

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I’m late with this post.  Some crises of life have intervened and, at the moment, are ongoing.  My attentions are focussed on that, so I don’t have the patience or organization of thought to sit in one place long enough to write.  Instead, I am posting a small essay I wrote in 1998, for a class in the Johns Hopkins writing program.  I should, at some point, re-examine this question, consider why I write now, and whether the reason has changed.  But here is what I felt then, and for all my life before:

WHY I WRITE:

Why do I write?  Right now, I’m writing because characters keep coming into my head–characters with pasts and with futures that I have to get down on paper, or no-one but me will know they exist, and they’ll fade away.  Last year, or the year before, perhaps, the driving motivation was often something specific I wanted to say–political, philosophical–events or conflicts that brought on a Swiftian anger which writing (and expressing to a public) relieves.  But, when I started writing, in my teens, I just wanted to have fun.  To play.

There was nothing dramatic in the decision.  Reading, discussing literature, and writing were in the air all around me while I was growing up.  My father, my mother, and my brother (who is nine years older than myself) all read to me.  The three of them talked about literature around the kitchen table.  There were always books–history, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, art, dance, mythology, poetry, and fiction, above all, fiction–read to me, handed to me, suggested to me.  Also, although I don’t think either of my parents ever published anything, my father had, before I was born, written stories and poems.  My mother wrote witty, artistic letters which really could have been short stories or the basis for them.  And she would come to my father the way one comes to an editor:  to comment, to suggest revision, to suggest a flourish.  My brother, in school, also wrote creative fiction–pieces that, these days, might be called experimental (who knows?)–like his own version of The Odyssey, or a satire in which a poor country’s ambassador to the United Nations writes home to his president.  But that’s what I mean by “in the air.”  It was just there.

The attitude toward writing was that one should have a sense of play.  Not take it too seriously.  Just take in the technique of this or that writer and feel free to try it out for oneself.  And that’s how I started.  Playing with styles, with words, with ideas.  I wrote a story in the style of Louis Carroll.  I wrote a dialogue in the style of Tom Stoppard in which two actors argue about whether they should take their bows for acting in his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.  I wrote a story in which Oscar Wilde’s entrance into heaven depends upon the literary assessment of his works by a jury of fellow writers.  (I didnt’ write about personal things because I hadn’t lived enough then.  And I don’t write directly about personal things now, because I can only write poorly about things that are too close to the heart.)

Then two things happened.  I taught myself to draw.  And I became a lawyer.  (The latter can be blamed on my father, who handed me Irving Stone’s Clarence Darrow for the Defense when I was twelve.)  After working all day writing legal decisions, it was much easier to draw or paint than to sit down again and try to write.  So, for many years, I thought about writing but didn’t do much more than make notes on possible themes, or set down snatches on possible plots and characters.

What got me back to writing?  There’s nothing like a few deaths to make one realize they can’t put things off forever, to give one that kick in the bum.  My mother had always looked at my art work and said, “That’s nice, Jess, but you should be writing.”  When she died, I thought, if not now, when?  So I began again.  I found I had some things to say about politics (in the broad sense of the word), and philosophy–about my view of the world–and I used poetry as the means of expression.

At the same time, I kept telling my father about an idea I had for a novel, and he kept telling me not to tell him the story, but to write it down.  Then he died.  And that was the kick in the backside that got me to actually sit down and write the novel.  The characters became, and still are, very real to me.  It’s not that I don’t know the difference between fiction and reality, but, even with the novel completed, I can sit anywhere and have my characters wandering in my head in new adventures, and in conversations with each other which will play and replay with variations.

There are a number of short stories I’ve written that some people say should also be novels.  While I think these stories really are short stories, I also think to myself–well, I could make them into novels as well.  Then those characters start wandering about in my head, expanding their worlds, their histories, their adventures.  Somehow, I’ve moved from playing with ideas to creating universes and, in some odd sense, living in all of them as well as the real one, simultaneously.  And now, while I generally still do have some particular point I want to make with a story, and that desire to make the point sets me off, I suspect what keeps me at it is creating those worlds.  That’s why I write.  This year, anyway.

 

Some pointers for Composing Personal Essay

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This advice is not given from my personal experience, as I am essentially a fiction writer.  However, last week, I attended a panel for freelance writers, sponsored by the National Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists.  (No–I am not thinking of defecting to a career in journalism, but it is interesting to learn about everything.)  This particular panel was on what magazine and newspaper editors look for from freelancers and much of the process seemed more or less similar to what editors and agents say at these kinds of forums about fiction.  However, one of the panelists, Jenny Rough, suggested a number of pointers for writing good personal essays (presumably for mainstream consumption) that I think worth sharing:

1. Use a conversational style;

2. begin with a good lead (an obvious point; but she noted some examples: (a) an anecdote; (b) dialogue; (c) beginning in the middle (in medias res (?), and circling back to the beginning;

3.  in the body of the essay, alternate between scenes and narration;  and

4. take an experience that is personal and make it universal so that the reader gains an insight from it.  (There should be moments of insight as the essay moves along.)

I think number (4), in particular, is good advice for writing fiction, too.

 

 

Passing Thoughts

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For me, September was a tough month filled with medical research, hours on the phone dealing various other personal and financial concerns, not to mention a troubling reaction to a vaccination I got on the first day of October, and frustrated preoccupation with the obstruction causing the federal government’s shut-down.  So I did not do as much writing, or as much focused thinking on literary matters, as I would have liked, but I did do a bit of reading, and have some passing thoughts on what I read:

*****I have been reading, contemporaneously, Showing My Colors, by Clarence Page; Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin; and a Dover Thrift Edition of selections from the writings of Frederick Douglass, with an introduction about his life by Philip S. Foner.  My impressions:

Granted, Clarence Page, a columnist at the Chicago Tribune and often a guest pundit on MS-NBC news shows, is the product of a different time and different circumstances from that of either Baldwin or Douglass, and his essays are, perhaps, attempting something different from their works.  (Page might justifiably protest that he is a journalist while they were, essentially, advocates.)  Nevertheless, since all three address some of the same subjects, I can’t help making the comparison and feeling that his book pales next to their works.  Page’s essays suffer from what ails many modern pundits:  too great an effort to sound erudite–to lean on conventional sociology, and to quote other experts, while pretending to say something original–and too little inclination to take a position on what they address.  It makes such works, in the end, rather wishy-washy endeavors that use many words to tell us not much.

Baldwin, and Douglass, on the other hand–while also themselves products of very different times and circumstances–write directly and powerfully.  They take my breath away (particularly, Frederick Douglass), and once I pick them up, I cannot put them down.  They were true original thinkers.

*****I read a bit of Agatha Christie’s They Do It with Mirrors, and though I was not expecting great depth, I was hoping for an enjoyable escape.  I was not impressed.  It’s the first Christie book I’ve ever picked up, so perhaps I needed to try an earlier work.  Maybe her writing got more pro forma after the upteenth book she wrote.  It happens.  Perhaps the National Public Television rendition of They Do It with Mirrors prepared me to expect better, but I found the writing and the characters quite thin, even for a cozy.

*****I also read a number of stories in The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith, and I’ve got to say, I think her work has been highly underrated.  Her stories combine the cynicism of a Saki with the whimsical turns of a Hitchcock.  And, in this very thick book, the stories run the gamut from mystery to domestic to science fiction to ghost stories of a sort.  I particularly liked the short-short “The Female Novelist,” which takes a poke at fiction writers who are essentially self-absorbed persons writing masked autobiography.  On the second page, the female novelist complains about her novel’s rejection, saying “I know my story is important!”   Her husband refers to mice he has seen in the bathroom and responds:  “So is the life of the mouse here, to him.”  What has that to do with anything, the wife asks, and he responds:  “…mice are concerned with a more important subject–food.  Not whether your ex-husband was unfaithful to you, or whether you suffered from it, even in a setting as beautiful as Capri or Rapallo…”  As I am sometimes fond of saying, a story about a love affair ending shouldn’t be about “my boyfriend left me,” but about the nature of love.  There needs to be a connection of the particular to the universal.

******Finally, I read Pat Barker’s novel, Blow the House Down, and for gritty toughness, I’ll only say:  “Take that, V.S. Naipaul, when you say women’s writing is unequal to you because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world.”  I’ll match her toughness against yours any day.  Nyah. (You must picture me sticking my tongue out.  And if you don’t know why I’m bringing Mr. Naipaul into this, see my post from July 2013.)