News

Kill Those Trees!

Leave a Comment
Future paper.

Sorry, but you have to die, tree.

I know, I know. But before you pick up your green placards, please hear me out. To begin with, these are not my words (not that I need to pass the blame), but these words come from Amina Gautier, whose work, especially her short story collection, At Risk, I have come to admire.

Yes, Gautier is very environmentally conscious. At the same time, she recognizes that the same way a painter requires a canvas and a sculptor wood, clay, stone or metal, a writer needs paper. Granted, this is the electronic age and almost every industry is going paper-less, but for a writer, the use of paper is still an indispensable part of the craft.

If you have ever proofread, you will agree that it is so much easier to catch errors on a printed page than it is on the computer screen. Gautier’s recommendation to use paper, however, has to do with craft, perfecting one’s work. In the revision phase, she recommends printing multiple copies of a story and revising each stack for a single element of craft. This means components that work together to bring a story to life, such as character, mood, setting, voice, conflict, dialogue, imagery, scene vs. summary, and so forth, must be compartmentalized. In this way, you give undivided attention to each aspect of craft, revising with specific questions in mind.

Practiced writers know that you cannot underestimate the value revision. Reading Isaac Babel’s story, You Must Know Everything in one of The New Yorker’s fiction podcasts, George Saunders said that what he admires most about Babel is that he can tell that Babel was extremely disciplined, a heavy editor and was hard on himself. This is exactly what Gautier says writers must be if they are to produce memorable stories. She says the same way that models and actors spend money on photo shoots, writers must use up reams and reams of paper in the revision process until that masterpiece comes to life.

Image source.

“I Love That You Made Him Gay”

Leave a Comment

When I was 20 years old, I wrote a science fiction novella which for all its narrative potential was flawed beyond structural and grammatical repair. I had just started to take writing seriously and made all the common mistakes new writers make: abounding clichés, barely-fleshed scenes, a cringe-worthy voice more amused with itself than the story. Despite these problems which, at the time, I had no idea how to repair, I knew the story had a heart.

The heart belonged to a man whose male friend had been hijacked and murdered in the depths of space and who had lost his parents the same way, in front of his eyes, as a child. And while he seemed on one hand to be a hackneyed, hard-boiled detective zooming around the future as the Everyman Space Opera Anti-Hero, seeking revenge against his friend’s killer, underlying this was something that made him resonate with me.

My protagonist loved his friend. He understood the impermanence of life, and he had found someone who he truly loved more than himself. I knew this as soon as I had finished writing the novella, which ended with the protagonist standing over his friend’s coffin, talking to him as if over mugs of coffee, with a familiarity we are lucky to have even once with someone in our lives.

When I had an acquaintance read over the manuscript, the acquaintance commented that the final scene was the most poignant of the story.

Then the acquaintance said, “I love that you made him gay.”

I was surprised. I didn’t have any opposition to writing gay characters, but that wasn’t the way I had seen the character when writing his story. I had seen the bereaved and the deceased as fraternal childhood friends. I thought, what about the story indicated that the protagonist was gay? As if it was just another error in the narrative that needed fixing.

***

Long Live “Print is Dead!”

Leave a Comment

It has become a popular parlor trick to predict the future of the publishing industry. Friends gather at the home of some mustachioed landed gentleman, and the good host closes his eyes, rubs his temples and says, “Profits from ebook sales will represent a fifty-percent market share by 2020,” or sometimes, leaning against a shimmering black piano, the host will lower his eyes and whisper, “Print is dead.”

But for as much as we love to participate in this game, as much as we enjoy applauding with righteous indignation as heroes lament the gurgling collapse of printed books and newspapers, the future is unpredictable. We can see patterns, and we can make analogies from similar industries in the past, but the future is truly unknowable.

I have previously suggested that neither the book industry nor the newspaper industry are terminal. And now, Evan Hughes, writing for Wired.com, echoes my thoughts by illustrating some of the vast complexities of the publishing industry:

Of all the worries in the publishing world these days, the king of them is cultural irrelevance. “The fact is that people don’t read anymore,” Steve Jobs told a reporter in 2008, blurting out the secret fear of bookish people everywhere. But consider this: In one week, people who don’t read anymore bought about half a million copies of a really long book called Steve Jobs. In the past year, Vintage has sold one book from the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy for every six American adults. The Big Six publishers—Random House, Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins—all make money, and at profit margins that are likely better than they were 50 years ago.

Hughes masterfully illustrates how the interests of a variety of parties — writers, Amazon, the Big Six publishers, and readers — have become murky. New technology has altered the marketplace like a black light changes an unlit room. But to claim, as has been claimed since before Mark Twain’s day, that “print is dead” — to claim that this latest new bit of technology will destroy the others — is to make a claim inconsistent with the complexities of the present and the curious weavings of the past.

But maybe it makes sense for publishers and authors to whip together a fear frenzie about print’s impending doom? Much the way North Korean leaders have kept their starving nation in perpetual late-stage preparations for global war, maybe a constant terror stream about the future of print will keep otherwise borderline book-buyers safely in the cradling arms of writers and publishers?

So I say, why not? I say: Long live “print is dead!” It may be all that is keeping print alive.

Lectores Series Available on YouTube

Leave a Comment

One of the great benefits of the University of Tampa MFA program is the visiting authors and publishers. In the first term of the nascent program, superstar crime fiction author Michael Connelly dropped by the program and talked about story construction and concepts of literary merit in the sometimes unfairly termed “genre fiction.” Then, in the evening, he gave a reading from his 2011 work, The Drop, as a part of MFA program’s Lectores public readings series.

Well, my description of this event no longer has to be the sole record of it online. The UT program wizards have uploaded video excerpts from the Lectores readings, includings Connelly’s reading from The Drop:

Connelly shattered a lot of our expectations that first residency period. He, more than most, gives popular fiction a good representation, both in the quality of his work and the depth of his insight.

View also, if you’ve the time, Arther Flowers’s singular presentation, an excerpt from Tibor Fischer’s hilarious The Thought Gang, or a typical, fantastic reading from George Saunders.

You can find the rest, of those so-far uploaded, on the MFA’s web page here.

A tup of the hat to D.A. Hosek for pointing out these videos had gone live.

Inspiration from the Unconnected and the Absurd

Leave a Comment

I happened upon the STRFKR video for their song “Atlantis” today, and it makes little to no sense. Actually, the video may have some profound deeper meanings, but I am not letting that detract from my enjoyment of it. In other words, I am letting my core reaction to the film shape my interpretation, not the other way around. I am not, as many an English teacher trained me to do, dissecting the piece for the creator’s intent, letting the interpretation dictate my reaction.

Watch the video for yourself:

The video has obvious playful elements, a level of absurdest humor similar to the TV shows Portlandia or Comedy Bang Bang. But the images in the video still have space enough to capture elements of reality, whether intended or not.