Booker Winner Announced. Betting Endorsed.

If you missed the shortlisting for the Mann Booker Award (I did), they announced the winner last week - Julian Barnes.

This is the British Commonwealth's most prestigious (and, I believe, best-paying award), so it's always healthy to take a look at their winner, their short list (the finalists) and their long list (the contenders) to see what the Brits consider quality. Of course there's always a clunker now and again, but --hey!-- it's chosen by a committee! What do you expect?

The other aspect I like (but I shouldn't, as a Christian), is that they allow the British Isles to bet on the winner. Of course, for people to bet intelligently, they have to read the books first. So, if you dont' have Oprah, then betting on books gets non-readers to read and that's not a bad thing. (Is it?)

The Perverse Monstrosity of Our Beautiful Work

Another thoughtful article on writing by L.L. Barkat that helps put criticism into perspective: "It’s important to be realistic in two directions. You need to be realistic about your weak points, but you also need to be realistic about your strong points."

Strange Sources

I’m still plugging away on a long project, updating it almost daily – sometimes a new paragraph, sometimes a line edit, sometimes 2-3 pages of rewrites. As I do this, I find myself veering into unusual reading terrain, as I know of no working author who doesn’t voraciously read, be it for research or inspiration and instruction.

To dig deeper, I find myself reading music criticism (because the language offers a precision on topics I rarely describe), a book on smiles (because I want to see how a professor classifies the physical difference of a smile of lust and a smile of love; a politician’s smile and a parent’s smile. I can implant this authenticity into my piece.), and even the liner notes from the albums of jazz great Miles Davis (because it’s the background color and history for some amazing music).

My audio book choices have veered as well. I’m suddenly listening to 18^th and 19^th century tales of adventure: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Three Musketeers (all choices I now regret passing over earlier in life) because somehow contemporary stories (which I’m writing), especially those with a strong voice, taint my own writing through their influence. It’s terribly hard to explain except to say there’s too much contemporary overlap for me to remain uncorrupted – especially when I’m making progress on my own work – so I must discover founts from other eras.

In the meantime, these tales by Dumas and Stevenson offer a certain timelessness with tricks (Dumas makes a loooong conversation between the four musketeers riveting because his protagonists bet they can eat breakfast in a battle zone for an hour. It’s a lovely case of moving the story forward, revealing character, foreshadowing, and straightforward action.) I would do well to learn.

New language. New ways of seeing my areas of interest. Writerly insights. If it stops, then my writing is likely to wither away. There’s always something new to discover.

It’s a strange state to live in—but it’s working.

Why Do You Write

It's International "Why I Write" day! You can add your reasons @ #whyIwrite or read the reasons of others on Twitter!

6 Things Your Writing Must Have to Wow Readers

Haven't you always wondered what they are? Don't miss L.L. Barkat's sage advice over at her blog, Seedlings in Stone. 

Worth Reading: James Wood on Denis Johnson

New Yorker lit critic James Wood offers some great insights on writing and choosing the best word in this short review of Denis Johnson's Train Dreams.

Like this:

There are continuities with Johnson’s earlier work; the visionary, miraculous element in Johnson’s deceptively tough realism makes beautiful appearances. The hard, declarative sentences keep their powder dry for pages at a time, and then suddenly flare into lyricism. The story’s unaffected tact and honesty are admirable. There are several compactly realized minor characters, caught in a sentence or two; Johnson’s gift for quick, glancing portraiture is evident. Johnson’s fiction has always turned on questions of vision. His characters are often weirdly privileged noticers, sometimes stoned. Grainier is not stoned, but he is a steady noticer of the natural world, and the prose follows his eye with frequent exhalations of beauty, for example, a cluster of butterflies, fluttering “magically like leaves without trees.”

E-Book Readers or E-Mag Readers?

Great article in The New York Times on the changing nature of book and magazine reading.

“On the one hand, a Kindle or a Nook is perfect for reading a 1,000-page George R. R. Martin novel,” said Eric Simonoff, a literary agent. “On the other hand, these devices are uniquely suited for mid-length content that runs too long for shrinking magazines and are too pamphletlike to credibly be called a book.”

and

"Many of the works sold as e-books are more of a hybrid between a long magazine piece and a serialized book. Each Random House-Politico e-book will be in the range of 20,000 to 30,000 words, and the releases will be spaced out over the course of the campaign."

“We think that the nature of a book is changing,” said Jon Meacham, an executive editor at Random House and a former editor of Newsweek. “The line between articles and books is getting ever fuzzier.”

They Lived Where?

Narrative Magazine offers fun Tuesday literary puzzles. Recently they offered a look at the homes of favorite authors - from Twain to Louisa May Alcott to Nabokov!

Take a peek! (You'll need to scroll down.)

Writing Tips: New Yorker's Book Bench

The New Yorker, that bastion of the short story, always interviews the writer who wrote that week’s story in their Book Bench column. Whether or not you’ve heard of the writer, or like their story, they often have great insights into the writing process. For instance, Ben Marcus shared these gems:

On Setting

I first used Ohio as a setting because I hadn’t been there and knew almost nothing about it. It seemed like a perfectly plausible place to live, and it kept me from relying too much on autobiographical details, which would, I was sure, lure me into terrible spasms of sentimentality. I felt that I needed to avoid this at all costs, so I leaned on places totally removed from my experience. I prefer using personal experience that is emotional—feelings I’ve had, feelings I’m afraid of having—rather than experience that is specific to geography. Denver gets this treatment, too. “Write what you don’t yet know” is maybe the motto. I think the vacuum I sense around a place I haven’t been, like Cleveland (I guess I’ve been in the airport), is helpful to me, absolving me from being a tour guide, letting me focus on the story itself.

On Using Real Life

I’ve noticed how flashbacks (childhood causes, memories, back story, etc.) can take the sting out of a story, trading drama for information, mystery for facts.

Character Tension

The reader, by having access to Paul’s thoughts, the little crimes of his mind, has much more information than Paul’s parents and sister. But these characters, in turn, have information about Paul’s past that the reader doesn’t have. Maybe a tension becomes possible because of this, everybody knowing something different, no one on the same footing?

Be sure to bookmark Book Bench for regular visits. There’s always something interesting going on.

Characterization: Radical Uncertainty

The Guardian (of the UK) has consistently been the best literary spot on the web for the devoted reader for about 10 years now. Apparently, they're also sponsoring Master Classes on writing fiction.

They've got a bunch of short, tantalizing articles on "Creating Suspense," "POV," and this on "Characterization" that I quite liked:

“At its simplest, its barest, characterisation is about a writer's grasp of what a human being is. When we set out to write, we do not do so out of a sense of certainty but out of a kind of radical uncertainty. We do not set out saying: "The world is like this." But asking: "How is the world?" In creating characters we are posing to ourselves large, honest questions about our nature and the nature of those about us. Our answers are the characters themselves, those talking spirits we conjure up by a kind of organised dreaming.”