Literary vs. Genre

Great little article in the New Yorker on famous "literary" authors who loved reading mysteries & other "genre" material. Great (respectful) angles on how each offers great reading, if not different expectations.

Currently Reading: The Book Thief

...by Marcus Zusak with my 9th grader. It's about an orphan girl trying to survive Nazi Germany who steals books (from burning pyres, etc) whenever she can so her soul can survive. It's paced well, not especially quick, though the language is beautiful & feels original.

New Study: Fictional Characters Affect Real Life

Read a book, vote on election day! That's what a new study shows from the Ohio State University.

Because Mark Twain Said So, That's Why!

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover” — Mark Twain


A quote by Mark Twain is almost obligatory on a lit blog.

Writing as Belief

"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe."— Gustave Flaubert

So what does your writing say you believe?

The Big Question About: Misery

Have you ever been so miserable you had to write?

It didn't have to be good or long or deep. It wasn't necessarily as an escape from reality. You just had to create something to prove to yourself that something positive could be made out of your misery. As if creation itself was an answer.

Have you ever been so miserable you had to write?

The Calling to Create Art

A rambling video about one author's need to write.

For 10,000 hours.

Before he--or anyone else--can be any good master the craft.

What do you think?

Mystery Winners Announced

The annual Edgar awards were unveiled over the weekend, giving mystery books for all audiences tappropriate prizes. Probably the most prestigious of mystery awards, the Edgar winners are listed here, with some quotes from winners here (and a great pick-up line if you think a single mystery writer is especially hot--"What's your favorite way to kill people?"

Storytellers or Authors?

"Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs." -Max Beerbohm

Is it fair to say that most authors who crank out a book every year (or more) are mediocrities and our best authors only deliver a book once every few years? Or are those annual authors actually "storytellers" who fill our mind with wonder over a short period, while "authors" feed our soul forever?

Awful Person, Brilliant Artist: On Art

"Art is the elimination of the unnecessary." -Pablo Picasso

Got a book you need to publicize? Here are great instructions on how to create your own "Do It Yourself Book Tour." The source is "Writer's Ask," a solid source of writing insight culled from endless interviews with published, often famous, writers that is sorted by topic. All of my copies are highlighted all over.

"Writer's Ask" is worth subscribing to if you want to deepen your writing skillset.

Put Yourself in the Classics!

Want to be the one falling in love with Mr. Darcy? Want to have your nephew duel wits with Long John Silver? Want to solve that dastardly murder with that mysterious Baskerville hound? For a unique gift, put yourself and your family or friends into a classic novel!

It sounds like a great gift to me.

Science Says "Read Fiction!"

Mysteriously, reading somehow rewires the brain into something better the more you read. This is one of the reasons to mourn the lack of reading in today's society. As the New York Times illuminates in a synopsis of neuroscience considering, "Your Brain on Fiction." For instance:

". . . individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind . . ."

A Fork on the Page

Strangeness. Have you ever been writing a story you know you're making progress on and keep getting nagged with solid ideas for another story? Sometimes this happens to me when I'm stuck in the primary story or I'm scared (perhaps not even admitting the fear to myself) where to go next, so it's easier to pursue another (underdeveloped) story where everything is still in the infatuation stage of perfection. That make sense to me.

This doesn't.

At present I'm working through a fun, extended scene of a first date where romantic magic & mischief intertwine -- and I'm being cascaded with whole swaths of dialogue & character insights & interesting settings from a (probable) short story. It's maddening, because it keeps drawing me away from my primary. It's also maddening because -- forgive my self-confidence here -- a lot of these distractions are pretty solid and some of it's quite good.

I have too many distractions from writing as it is. Getting distracted by my own imagination is unbearable!

Food for Thought: Portraying Motives

The value of reading cultural criticism is you can learn to perfect your craft by reading the criticism of others. From The New Yorker:

"It’s Mad Men’s neatest trick: By letting a character’s motives bubble beneath behavior, rarely expressed out loud, the show has maintained an air of perverse, contradictory realism. Story developments that seem out of the blue make sense only in retrospect, sometimes years down the line."

Steven Johnson: What is the Space for Creativity?

In his Ted Talk, Steven Johnson offers some fascinating insights into how certain spaces encourage creativity--and better ideas. After all, as he says, an idea is a network, not a single thing.

Food for Thought: Talent vs. Character

"Talent develops in tranquility, character in the full current of human life." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The "Mysterious Strengths" of the Novel

One great reason to read literary criticism is that often the writer fills you in on a specific author, their major works, and then adds some nifty insights into the writing process as well. Jonathan Franzen does this in the New Yorker (Febraury 13 & 20, 2012 edition) on Edith Wharton. It's not the best criticism/literary article I've ever read, but there are some great insights on the novel and fiction writing, for instance:

"One of the mysterious strengths of the novel as an art form, from Balzac forward, is how readily readers connect with the financial anxieties of fictional characters . . . Money, in novels, is such a potent reality principle that the need for it can override even our wish for a character to live happily ever after, and Wharton, throughout the book (The House of Mirth), applies the principle with characteristic relentlessness, tightening the financial screws on Lily as if the author were in league with nature at its most unforgiving."

And this:

"But sympathy in novels need not be simply a matter of the reader’s direct identification with a fictional character. It can also be driven by, say, my admiration of a character who is long on virtues I am short on (the moral courage of Atticus Finch, the limpid goodness of Alyosha Karamazov), or, most interestingly, by my wish to be a character who is unlike me in ways I don’t admire or even like. One of the great perplexities of fiction–and the quality that makes the novel the quintessentially liberal art for–is that we experience sympathy so readily for characters we wouldn’t like in real life. Becky Sharp may be a soulless social climber, Tom Ripley may be a sociopath, the Jackal may want to assassinate the French President, Mickey Sabbath may be a disgustingly self-involved old goat, and Raskolnikov may want to get away with murder, but I find myself rooting for each of them. This is sometimes, no doubt, a function of the lure of the forbidden, the guilty pleasure of imagining what it would be like to be unburdened by scruples. In every case, though, the alchemical agent by which fiction transmutes my secret envy or my ordinary dislike of “bad” people into sympathy is desire. Apparently, all a novelist has to do is give a character a powerful desire (to rise socially, to get away with murder) and I, as a reader, become helpless to make that desire my own."

Top 100 Fantasy & Sci Fi Novels

Let's give NPR credit for revealing a fascinating list of high brow and low brow titles that almost everyone has to admire. If you're mulling over your Summer Reading List, this is a good place to start.

Hemingway: Author or Brand?

Slate magazine ran a great piece (with new angles and insights, who would've thought it possible?) on Papa.  Solid criticism like this:

“His work of this period connects with our animal habits of consciousness. And the struggle it brings to the foreground is the struggle to make sense of—to find a line of narrative through—this disordered experience. Hemingway’s insight was to understand that this struggle was not just a literary one. It’s a fundamental part of how people themselves perceive and try to make sense of the world.”

Definitely worth your time.

Also, Hemingway does a book trailer - and tells us how much profit he'll be receiving out of the $3 per book price:

Chip Kidd @ TED: The Story Looks Like This

Chip Kidd, the preeminent book designer in the business today, offers his thought on how to entice people to buy the books he designs at a recent TED talk.  A fascinating take on Jurassic Park, Haruki Murakami, and two old movie stars, among others.

Enjoy.

John Grisham's Favorite Mistake

Yep, he gave away multiple thousands of dollars worth of first editions away without realizing it. Real all about it here!

Poetry: How Great is Our God?

“How Great is our God” is the song that we sing

As we bring this thing call worshiping as our praises wing

Their way to the throne of grace which pervades both light and space.

No word evades when He invades the place to taste our praise

But how much do we really know about God?

We nod in response to the preacher’s rod,

And when he makes a good point we all applaud!

But how great is our God? That’s the question.

Well, first I should mention His suspension

Of His condemnation for us in our sinful station;

We’re free from sin, but death still has us on probation

Did we miss the orientation on what it means to praise Him?

Not just words, a lifestyle should be our life’s ovation.

Secondly His creation of us with the formation of our brains

To generate great information.

How about the fact that He placed us in this nation

With freedom to praise Him without fear of segregation?

God is good to us. He gave food to us, He’s never rude to us

And He took the punishment due to us on Himself in lieu of us.

God is always true to us, but all this truth shouldn’t be new to us.

Here’s the point, let me clarify, because if I don’t really try

To tell you why we should shout His praises out to the sky

Then you will listen and maybe cry, but let these words pass on by continuing to fly

Blind, not knowing why we praise Adonai the most high.

So let’s take an example from the seraphims in the praises that we share for Him,

Singing “Holy!” worshiping Him, just like we worship in psalms and hymns.

Check it out in Isaiah 6 and once again in Revelation 4:

We can see them singing “Holy!” just because He’s the eternal LORD.

Psalms 7 verse 17, we see a command to praise the king

Just because of His righteousness, not because He gives us things.

The Maker of all the universe, the Creator of everything on earth

Is a righteous, holy God Who was manifest in a virgin birth

To save us from death’s curse; that’s what gives His name worth.

We owe Him, it’s not reversed; He beat sin to remove the curse;

We should’ve died, we deserved a hearse, but He stretched His arms wide to save the earth.

That’s the God that I praise; Do understand now why I raise my hands

And say “Worthy is the Lamb!” I can’t stay still, I have to stand and worship the great Jehovah-Olam:

Everlasting God, He stays the same. Do you comprehend now why I praise His name?

So because of Christ’s purchase of my worthlessness and purposelessness;

In return I got assurance of an eternal insurance

So I worship to honor and give furtherance to His holy purpose

And my actions every Sunday service are not just a show, like a circus

But a response to Christ goodness; that’s why I worship.

Submitted by college student Johnnie Peyton.

Have You Entered the Kill Zone?

If you're looking for a solid blog for thriller and mystery writers, you can't do much better than The Kill Zone, which features James Scott Bell, Nancy Cohen, Kathleen Pickering, Joe Moore, and several others.

Flash Mob? No, a Book Mob!

The St. Louis Independent Bookstore Alliance is reinventing the (now dated) Flash Mob concept by hosting a Book Mob on World Book Night, April 23, 2012. Yep, expect a group of readers to appear beneath the Arch that day with a favorite book.

What a great way to have fun and encourage reading! More details here.

Food for Thought: Defining Writing Success

Does this quote make you a writer or just a writer-wannabe?

"In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it." -John Ruskin 

Condescending to the Past

I like what The Atlantic's Benjamin Schwartz says in this review about T.S. Eliot's letters:

"Because I find the condescension of posterity—through which we applaud ourselves by imposing our enlightened standards on a supposedly benighted past—to be a particularly unattractive reflex..."

It's a great thing to remember when we write about the past. If it's fiction, you can juxtapose someone who condescends against someone who doesn't to create a nice frission of ideas.

The Soul: A Poem You Must Read

Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska offers some lovely thoughts on the Soul, that--while not entirely biblical--doesn't lack for thoughtfulness and power. I'm not a poetry guy, but this one's worth your time, for instance:

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

Food for Thought: Misunderstanding No More

"We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us." -Quintilian 

New Monthly Book eMagazine

If you were unaware, Slate magazine has started a monthly book review. It's juicy. Bookmark it!

Food for Thought: All Time Favorite Quote

This is my all-time favorite quote on writing: “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” -W. Somerset Maugham 

Food for Thought: 5 Kinds of Truth

“In the course of that conversation, I mentioned my belief that there are five kinds of truth: the truth you tell to casual acquaintances, the truth you tell to your family and close friends, the truth you tell to only a very few people in your life, the truth you tell yourself and the truth you don’t admit, even to yourself. 

In the end, the miniseries about the points and shadings between what we think we know about these characters, and the truth — what that says about them, and what it says about us.” 

-John Michael Straczynski

21st Century: Novels No Longer Work

Critic Roger Kimball offers up a fascinating, if a bit long-winded, discourse on why the novel might be the best art form for the 21st Century. The article is studded with spectacular insights, well worth your time.

Here are a few:

"The problem with computers is not the worlds they give us instant access to but the world they encourage us to neglect."

"Everyone knows Andy Warhol’s quip that someday everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Behind the humor—or perhaps I should say “behind the cynicism”—of that remark is the dark prospect of significant cultural diminishment. A quarter-hour’s fame is not fame. On the contrary, it is the demotic parody of fame; it is mere celebrity. It is worth pausing to consider how much of our cultural life—even in its most august precincts—is caught up in the voracious logic of celebrity. It is a logic that builds obsolescence into the banner of achievement and requires that seriousness abdicate before the palace of notoriety and its sound-bite culture."

"It does seem as if there have been important alterations in the relation between life and literature—between life and the world of culture generally—and this is as much due to changes in the character of life as to changes in the character of culture."

Called, but Not Crafted

It never stops grieving me how many Apostolics feel called to the writing ministry, yet so few better their craft by taking workshops once they're out of college. Yes, of course it costs money and time, but most of us take vacations and most of us spend our money on something. Why not our calling? Could we stand to miss a camp or General Conference so that our innate talent can be better-directed by knowledgeable mentors? Are we afraid to be challenged to change ourselves (and our writing methods) so that more can be reached?

The fun of February is in seeing all the Summer Writing Workshops offering their wares. If you want to improve  your craft, then the University of Iowa's Summer Writing Festival offers both week-long & weekend classes, while the Washington University Summer Writer's Institute offers an intensive 8 day workshop worth examining.  For a more general experience in April, check out the Festival of Faith and Writing!

They all exist so that you can be a more effective communicator Christian. Dare to take the challenge?

Big Picture MFA the Franzen Way

Jonathan Franzen offers up a big picture MFA in Creative Writing via a press conference at the world-famous Hay Festival in  Great Britain. Lots of good stuff, like:

A big problem for the novel is that the world doesn’t stop, it’s moving so fast and here you are slowly struggling. You have to be aware of that, keep it in mind and think about how to write a book that will not already be out of date at the time it’s published. You have to have a lot of patience, you have to have faith that it will matter when you’re finally done with it. If you are writing a novel, that can be a faith in God but it can also exercise the same faith muscles without having a religion attached.


As a practical matter, I think it’s very important not to have an internet connection when you’re working. You have to turn down the noise. The thing about the media is that they say the same thing thousands of times a day. You can cut out 99.9 per cent of that and still get what you need. Because what the culture is telling you is important isn’t necessarily what’s really important. The novel’s job nowadays is to listen carefully, cut the noises down and pay attention when the culture is not paying attention.


The most inspiring thing anyone ever said to me about writing was Don DeLillo, and it was simply: ‘The writer leads, he doesn't follow.’

Food for Thought: Live to Write, Write to Live

“I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.” -Francoise Sagan

Food for Thought: Saved By Mistakes

"Sometimes all that saves me is being willing to make mistakes. There are projects that strike me as so beautiful, important, complicated, or just plain big, that they convince me of my own inadequacy. This awful state of reverence leads to paralyzing brain freeze. At times like that the only way out is for me to decide, ‘. . .  I can’t do it right, so I’ll do it wrong. I can’t do it well, but I can do it badly.’ Sometimes, with luck, while I’m sweating to do it wrong, I stumble on a right way.” -Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love 

Quote discovered in Poets & Writers, Jan/Feb 2012

It's Not Too Late!

Sign up for Calvin College's Festival of Faith & Writing (April 19-21, 2012) and you'll get the early registration price of $175.

The speaker /session slate is stuffed with biggies like Marilynne Robinson, Jonathan Safran Foer, & Chinamanda Ngozi Adichie, among others.

One of the fun features of this festival is the Festival Circles, where you spend 2 meal periods on a writing topic of your choice. The choices are immense.

This is the premier Christian writing / reading festival in the country. Because it only occurs every 2 years, save your pennies & make an effort to attend in April!

Not Exactly Writer's Block

It wasn't writer's block so much as writer's fatigue. Basically a week went by without being able to add more to my large project, so I sat uninspired before my laptop. Often I add a paragraph, reshape some dialogue or a setting, or even skip down to work out a rough outline of the next pages. All DOA.

Then I felt a pull from an unexpected scene, one I had never even worked on, but it felt promising: what if I wrote a scene from the girlfriend's perspective about my protagonist? (Instead of my usual protagonist's perspective.) Focus on what she would be thinking and feeling (even though she's a minor presence in the "real" story I'm writing.) Maybe it would be their first date. A setting occurred to me that I hadn't planned. An unexpected reaction between the two lit my imagination.

The first date I had sketched out long ago was mild and predictable. This wasn't. His reaction to her surprised me in that first impression. I didn't see him as that romantic, even playful, perhaps hard to get. I was intrigued. This was worth exploring. Soon I had her two (unnamed) friends involved. Plus her mother's reaction to their pairing.

Honestly, I don't see this sequence going into my real story, but I'm writing it anyway. Maybe it will be key backgrounding that will give me crucial insights into my characters and their intertwined history. Probably I will only hint at this to readers of my real story, but that hardly matters. It's working. I'll keep writing it for another couple days and see what occurs - though I won't let it eat up an inordinate amount of my energy or become it's own story that sidelines my large project.

This lark is developing my back story, while pushing me to develop a new voice. Whether anyone else reads it or not hardly matters. I'll be a better writer because of it.

(Image taken from TripleCrit.com.)

What's Your 5 Year Plan?

If you're a freelancer, then you've always got to be hustling to find new projects. Sean Gordon Murphy is a comic book artist, but he's got some great advice for anyone in the creative fields who freelances.

He discusses Talent, 3 Things at Once, Write (or in our case, draw), Branding, Attitude. Most of it is spot on for any creative. Take five minutes and then see if you can answer the question, "What's your 5 year plan?"

What Book Editors Want in 2012

The Andrew Lownie Agency asked 23 editors what they were seeking this year at their publisher. Vampire novels. Kidding! (I think.)

While some of the answers are sadly predictable, some give writers reason to dream, yes? Check it out yourself.

Food For Thought: Shadows Surround Words

Most people think that shadows follow, precede, or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories. -Elie Wiesel

When the Lights Go Out...

The Type bookstore in Toronto captures the magic of an independent bookstore after hours.

Englander: Imagine Without End

If you've never read the short stories of Nathan Englander's short stories, especially his first collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, then he's worth your reading time. He writes about the Jewish community--orthodox, ultra-orthodox, Reformed, and secular--in a way that reminds me of our own Pentecostal movement.

Recently, he had a new story published in The New Yorker, which meant he was interviewed for their Book Bench blog. Per usual, he had some solid advice for writers everywhere:


But you’re asking if it was liberating to work with very limited elements, and the answer is: Wildly so. Everything is so much clearer once a world is framed. Maybe it sounds crazy, but with writing it’s infinity that is limiting, and the limited that allows for the truly infinite. Once all those elements are in place in a story, the brain is truly freed up to imagine without end.

American Religious Poetry: The Connecting Thread

I just learned that Marilynne Robinson reviewed Harold Bloom's compilation of American Religious Poetry in the May, 2007 Poetry magazine.

As they say, if you've never read it before, then it's new. She's always worth the read.

There's great lines throughout, for instance:

Those who try to understand religion from an outsider's perspective share the tendency of anthropologists to mistake the limits of their own comprehension for a crudeness, a rudimentary character, in what they observe. Anthropologists now acknowledge this error, if they have not yet learned to avoid it. Those who look from the outside at religion, however, still occupy precisely, and intentionally, the posture of the European Enlightenment, priding themselves on their exasperation at finding the natives so intractably primitive. It is important to remember that religious thought has had brilliant expression throughout world culture, and that the idea of the sacred has refined the sense of the beautiful in every civilization. The very narrow sense in which the word is understood in the public conversation in contemporary America—again, by many of its proponents and defenders as well as by its critics—distracts from the profound resonances of religion throughout history.

What We (Really) Love About Our Favorite Authors

One reason I love to read a novelist's criticism of another novelist is because the best often start with a fascinating insight into literature, then segue into their criticism. While the criticism might be bracing and insightful, it is often only positive, as if no one will betray the literary brotherhood. (Joyce Carol Oates is said to insist on only reviewing titles she enjoys.)

I mention this because of Martin Amis' brilliant start to a (largely positive) evaluation of Don Delillo's lastest work in The New Yorker:

When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on “Ulysses,” with a little help from “Dubliners.” You could jettison Kafka’s three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of “Paradise Lost.” Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (“As You Like It” is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with “King John” or “Henry VI, Part III”

I notice he sticks to only English greats. I wonder what he would say about Tolstoy, who mastered both the epic novel and the short story? (The only one ever to do both.) While his later pieces were too often monotonal diatribes, he could still rock the world when he chose.

The entire review is worth your time, but spend time on the first page of the link and agree with his overall point, even if you disagree about his specific examples. (Though I agree with all of his specifics above and am thrilled someone is willing to classify Joyce and Eliot as they deserve. Later, I disagreed, finding Persuasion as one of Jane Austen's superior, not inferior, works.)

2012: New Marilynne Robinson!

Expect a new book of essays on March 13 from one of the best writers of our time - Marilynne Robinson!

Entitled, When I Was a Child I Read Books , it is described as highlighting "the role of faith in modern life, the inadequacy of fact, the contradictions inherent in human nature." 

Rejoice all ye people! Rejoice!

Not so strangely, the release date is a mere month before Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Writing, where she will be speaking.

Best Books 2011: My Version

Only one of these titles was released in 2011, but these are the best titles I read in 2011 (in chronological order of my reading):

• True Grit by Charles Portis (Fiction)
• The History of the Medieval World by Susan Wise Bauer (History)
• The Death of Adam by Marilynne Robinson (Essays)
• Kim by Rudyard Kipling (Young Adult Classic)
• Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol (Classic)

And the best lectures I heard was Classics of British Literature by John Sutherland (of the Teaching Company).

I'd probably rank Taras Bulba and True Grit as my best reads in 2011.

Food for Thought: Beauty Defined

"Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason." - Nobel laureate Andre Gide