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Six Rules for Better Reviews

Updike knew how to criticize with style.  Wish more reviewers would pay attention, especially to #1:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/05/john-updikes-6-rules-for-constructive-criticism/256643/

Niche Interview

Over at Niche, an exciting new litmag, I did an interview on the perennial MFA question.   Check it out here.

Five Things I Wish I'd Known When Writing My First Novel

Recently I saw this post by Tayari Jones over at She Writes (a great site if you haven’t checked it out yet) about what she wishes she’d known when she published her first book.  I especially love #1:

“No one article or review will make or break me.  When I published my first book, I got a slam from one of the pre-pubs and I was convinced that this was the end of my writing career.  I literally lost sleep imagining bookstore owners, potential readers, librarians, etc. crossing my name off a list labeled GOOD WRITERS.  About bad reviews or weird articles, my good friend Nichelle Tramble said it best—Let it spoil your breakfast, but don’t let it spoil your supper. In other words, mourn it and then keep moving.”

Good advice, no matter if you’re talking about Library Journal or The New York Times Book Review—Lord knows it’s something most all of us are going to need again and again and again.

There are so many things I wish I’d known when I was writing and publishing my first book.  I wish I’d known about process and keeping my sanity.  I wish I’d asked for a year to finish the book when my editor said six months.  I wish I’d known how to keep my own hopes and fears in check, or to ask for Prozac when I couldn’t.  

But even more than that, I wish I’d known that the only thing you have control over is the writing itself.  Everything else is luck and timing.

Here’s what I tell my DePaul students who want to be novelists about the process of actually sitting down to write a novel:

5. Surprise yourself.  I know plenty of writers who like to outline first, but unless you’re a nonfiction writer or John Irving, don’t decide too much, too soon.  Maybe write out a few ideas, a list of major points or beats, but don’t commit to them completely.  Allow yourself to stray from the outline if a great idea occurs to you partway through.  If you can’t surprise yourself, you can’t surprise a reader either.

4. Give yourself small goals every day.  I once went to a talk by Richard Bausch, who was auditioning to be the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  To the inevitable question about process, he said he asks himself: “Did I write today?” If the answer is yes, then he’s satisfied.

A 120,000-word novel doesn’t write itself in a day.  If you try to write as much as possible in one sitting, you won’t have enough left over for the next day.  A small goal (mine is 1500 words a day) will allow you to make progress and still leave you feeling ready for more the next time you sit down.

3. Write quickly.  Just as a novel won’t write itself in a day, it won’t write itself in 10 years either.  If your first novel takes you three years to write (as mine did), you’ll be a different person with different interests and even a different writing style than you were at the beginning.  Getting the first draft done as quickly as possible will be better both for you and the book.

2. Don’t try to write a perfect draft.  My thesis advisor once said that unfinished novels don’t need to be workshopped, they need to be championed.  I wish I’d heeded this advice a little more when writing my first book, because a perfect draft doesn’t exist—that’s why it’s called a draft.   Don’t revise too much, or at all, the first time around.  Get words on the page.  Recognize that the draft is imperfect—makes notes if you want—then move on.  Until you have an ending, you don’t know if you’ve begun in the right place, so there’s no point in finely crafting every clause, every comma, when half of them are going to end up getting cut or moved around anyway.

1. Write the book you want to read.  You’ve got a killer idea, but the genius is always in the execution.  That’s where the little gremlins of doubt and fear creep in: should I make it big?  Small?  Choose a funky point of view, an exotic setting, a big plot twist?  What will improve my chances at winning the National Book Award, of being on the bestseller list, of keeping this book from ending up as toilet paper in the Random House bathroom?  Do I want to be the next William Faulkner, the next James Patterson, the next Jacqueline Howett?  Will my colleagues laugh their asses off when they read it?  Should I use a pseudonym?  I should use a pseudonym, really, shouldn’t I?

In the end, none of it will get you to The End, and most of it will only make you crazy.  There are dozens of different ways you could turn every idea into a book.  Some of them might be legitimately successful.  Some are probably awful.  Most of them will please some of your readers.  None of them will please all your readers.  In the end, your only job is to write the book you’ve always wanted to read but couldn’t, because no one but you was able to write it. 

So there you have it.  Now what’s your best advice?

Search Terms

Like a lot of obsessive-compulsives I watch my sitemeter traffic to see who's coming here and why, and what I've discovered is that there are three main subjects that bring people to this blog when they're not looking for info on one of my books.  (Which, let's face it, is most of the time.)

1. The first is the picture of Libs I posted on her first birthday, a candid snap of her big blue eyes framed by a towel, since I'd just taken her out of her bath.  For some reason there are a lot of hits on this pic from India and the Middle East especially.  I'm curious what search terms people are using that bring up this photo, but more than that I'm no longer comfortable wondering what folks are doing wtih this pic, so I'm deleting it.  I don't want to see it used for some ad campaign for diapers in Lahore.  It was fine when a few random friends were only reading this blog, less so when the entire world can find it.

2. The second most frequent search is at least book-related: "everything is illuminated why did grandfather kill himself" (or "why did grandfather commit suicide" or "was grandfather a jew").  I'm actually #9 on Google for that search term.  Now I love that book and thought the suicide, though not explicated in the text precisely, was intuitively done.  (Not so the movie, alas.)  But what does it say about that book that roughly 1/2 the people coming to my blog are looking for some insight into the ending?

3. The other most popular search is, without a doubt, "cement garden review."  I'm actually #2 on Google for that search term.  In fact, nearly every hit on my blog from the Netherlands or from England is looking for this term. I didn't think my response to that book, while honest, was all that earth-shattering.  Are there no other places on the web for The Cement Garden?  It's too excellent a book to leave all of you with my semi-profane thoughts on the subject. Maybe I should do another, more detailed review for the edification of the poor bastards who find their way here looking for that book?

At any rate, it's become apparent that I need to watch what I say, and post, more carefully.  In some ways that's not a bad thing.  But you can't have that pic of my baby girl, folks, sorry.

Next Things

One of the most frequent questions an author gets at appearances is "So, what's your next book about?"  And probably nothing terrifies us more, and leads to more umms and ahhs and clearings of throats.  Because more often than not, we don't know. 

It's a rare person who can leave one book and jump immediately into another.  I know people who can do it, but mostly I don't like them very much.  In the words of Anne Lamott, I don't think they have a rich inner life, or that God likes them or can even stand them. (She sounds a lot less bitchy/a lot more funny saying that than I do, but the sentiment is the same.)

Six months after the pub date of my second novel (and ten months after finishing the draft--they just whipped that thing into print), I'm not sure what I'm going to do next.  I have ideas, sure.  I have buckets of ideas.  But which is the right one?  Which is the one that will work best, that will follow best my other two books, that won't be completely out of left field or make people say "What was she thinking?" 

Should I do the contemporary marriage drama?  The slightly futuristic young narrator?  The completely wacked-out magic realism?  A spy thriller?  Heroic fantasy?  What?

What will allow me to continue to have a writing career in this shocking and strange new publishing world?

Which idea am I ready for?  Which is ready for me? 

I hate this in-between time, the time between novels.  When I'm well into a novel, when I'm sure what I'm doing and have got over this initial uncertainty, I can write four, five hours a day without stopping and get usually 1500 words at a time, or about five pages.  I love when a novel is well-established and cranking along; I love knowing each day what I'm going to be working on, and coming back to the world I've made is like settling into a comfortable chair.   I take a breath, read over what I did the day before, and I'm off.

What I don't like are the wobbly first pages, the tense decision-making that leads to first one idea coming to the forefront, then another, then another still.  I doodle and futz.  I create characters I love one day only to shrink from them the next.  I may write 200 words that seem brilliant one day only to cut them all the next.

This stage can go on for months.  After Icebergs, it was years.  More than four years, in fact, while I doodled and futzed and fumed and threw away nearly everything I wrote.

Of course I also started my teaching career during those years, and moved to a new city, and had a baby.  It wasn't like I wasn't working.  I was working all the time, in fact.  It's just that the work wasn't always leading somewhere.

Frank Conroy, who was the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop while I was a student there, used to call this stage "meditating on the text."  It doesn't look like work, because you're not getting a lot on the page.  But it is work.  It's important work, in fact, and I know now, from experience that eventually it will lead me somewhere.  I will write another book, some more stories.  I can trust that these in-between days will come to an end, eventually.

But if I seem cranky and distracted, it's because I haven't found the answer to the question yet.  It's there, waiting. 

I know--the James Patterson ripoff.  Right?  RIGHT???

To be XX or XY? That is the Question

A lot of my writer friends, male and female, have been as distressed as I have about the recent statistics published by VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts.  And yet I can't say I (or really any of the other women I know who write) were terribly surprised.  Women write a lot of books, and women buy a lot of books, as Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult and others have noted.  But women writers (and by extension women readers) are viewed rather cynically by the "serious" male literary establishment.  One need look no further than Jonathan Franzen's comments about Oprah's Book Club, made in 2001, to see a "literary" author worry that women readers might be his primary audience:

"So much of reading is sustained in this country, I think, by the fact that women read while men are off golfing or watching football on TV or playing with their flight simulator or whatever. I worry — I'm sorry that it's, uh — I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience and I've heard more than one reader in signing lines now at bookstores say 'If I hadn't heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it.' Those are male readers speaking. I see this as my book, my creation." (NPR's Fresh Air)

And who could blame him ?  I too worry my books will be ghettoized this way, that only women will read them--that half my potential audience will look at my first name and pass the book by. 

The problem begins, many believe, in the gender roles assigned to us in childhood.  When I worked in children's publishing, the rule was that girls would read books about both boys and girls, but boys would, as a group, only read about boys.  When they grow up, women will read books by both men and women, while men, in general, tend to read largely male authors.  Far too many of my male writer friends list not a single book by a woman among the works that most influence them.  Yet I can't think of a single woman who does not list a male author, or several male authors, among her influences.

There's no accounting for taste, of course.  As Michael Schaub and Jessa Crispin argued with each other over at Bookslut, taste is a complex cultural and psychological stew.  Do male writers not take women seriously because they're women, or because of what they write about?  Would the same book written under a male name be more palatable to male readers?

I wonder.

The "lady-writer" problem has dogged writers as remarkable at the Bronte sisters and George Eliot, all of whom published under men's names.  And don't even get me started on Jane Austen, who wrote remarkably clever and densely plotted social comedies (a fact that can be easy to forget under the onslaught of bad fan fiction that's appeared recently).  If she'd had a Y chromosome, would she have been lauded as the second coming of Shakespeare?  Even today her stories are dismissed, even by women, as mere "romances."  They all end in weddings, the critics moan.  Would the critics make the same complaint about "Twelfth Night," or "A Midsummer Night's Dream"?  Or would Shakespeare be entirely forgettable if he hadn't written tragedy as well as comedy?

Lest you think this is a nineteenth-century problem, consider: last fall I had lunch with a writer friend, a woman who has won an impressive array of awards for her work and had seen her work appear at least once that I can think of on the New York Times bestseller list.  She has a new book coming out this year, but she knew the Times wouldn't cover it.  Not one of her books has appeared in the Times, in fact.  If she can't get reviewed there, the ivory tower of American literary criticism, who on earth can?

Which leads me to wonder.  I have a book project in my vault, a project that feels to me startingly original and interesting, but I worry: would it be dismissed if I wrote it under my own name?  Should I choose a pseudonym--a male pseudonym--to get it taken seriously, or write it under my initials, like AM Holmes or JK Rowling?

So here's my question, ladies: Have you ever been tempted to write under a man's name?  To see what would be different if you weren't saddled with the specifically feminine?  Have you actually done it, and what happened?

Ploughshares Blog

Here's a little post I wrote a few months back about the inspiration for my short story, "Perpetua in Glory," now appearing in the Winter 2010-11 issue of Ploughshares.

The Social (Marketing) Network: Can an Analog Girl Thrive in the Digital World?

One recent Friday morning, as I was dropping off my daughter for preschool, the director stopped me in the hall.  “Congratulations!” she said.  “I didn’t know you were an author.  That must be so exciting.”  I mumbled something about how yes, it’s an interesting job as jobs go, though not one I usually go around announcing randomly—unless, of course, someone asks about my work, which the director most decidedly had not done until that morning.  How had she found me out?

It turns out my cousin, whose kids attend the same preschool, was the one who had let the cat out of the bag earlier in the week, the day my second novel, The Countess, hit bookstores.  “Yes,” said the director, “she mentioned you don’t like to toot your own horn.”  She smiled as if pitying me a little, or maybe that part was my imagination.  “Congrats again!” she gushed.  And I got out of there as fast as I could.

She was right about one thing: I don’t like to toot my own horn.  At all.  I’m a Midwesterner and a woman; bragging about my accomplishments, such as they are, is about as comfortable to me as stripping naked and dancing in the middle of the Edens Expressway.  (Even typing that last sentence I couldn’t keep myself from adding “such as they are,” or risk feeling like the worst kind of gasbag.) 

I get nauseated before appearances; I find blogging terrifying.  I started this blog because the guy who designed my web page said I should, that it would increase my webpage traffic, but the only time I’ve enjoyed working on it was when I was certain no one but a small handful of friends were reading it.  I could bitch about the tornado that hit my house and the endless repairs it engendered, or the multiple rounds of infertility treatments and disappointments my husband and I suffered leading up to the birth of our daughter, and know that maybe three people were even bothering to read it.  Certainly no one was coming there to look up my novel, the reason I had set up the blog in the first place.

And for the most part, that was okay with me.  I often said I became a novelist because I didn’t like talking about myself, because I felt that no one was really interested in me.  I prefer to let my characters do the talking.  Let them be the pushy ones, the attention hogs, so I don’t have to be.  

In the four years since the launch of that first book, a modest critical success that hardly anyone actually read, book-review pages in major newspapers have shrunk, if not completely disappeared.  Book tours are rare and precious, and yet both publishers and authors have more riding on each and every new book launch.  Thus social media platforms have become perhaps the most important widespread tools for authors, especially relatively unknown authors, to get the word out about their books.  And that’s important to me, because my new book is the best thing I have ever written, and I want to get it into people’s hands.

But to say I have mixed feelings about social media is an understatement.  Do Facebook and Twitter and Goodreads and their ilk actually help the process of getting out the word on a new book?  Can the presence of a dozen reader reviews on social-media sites replace even one really great professional review?  And how much am I pissing off my friends by sending them emails and updates about my book when all they probably want to do is play Farmville and watch LOLcats videos and surf the pages of people a hell of a lot more interesting and successful than me?

***

I came to Facebook a couple of years ago for the reasons most people do: I wanted to look up people I knew from high school and see how bald and pouchy they’d all become over the years.  Especially I wanted to see what had become of the bullies who had tormented me during junior high, the ex-boyfriend who’d broken my heart at 16, the girl my husband had dated before we’d met. 

And yes, I wanted to keep in touch with the friends whose presence in my life had once been essential but who had fallen out of touch with years and distance.  As someone who’d moved zip codes a half-dozen or so times in my adult life, there were more of them than I cared to admit, and most of them had found their way to Facebook over the past few years.

Facebook and Twitter are great for allowing people to keep in touch without having to actually touch.  In a world where even writing an email feels like work, updates and tweets offer the appearance of meaningful contact between acquaintances without the icky need to actually contact anyone.  Updates go out into the ether, to be read or ignored by lists of friends who may or may not actually be logged on at any particular moment, and who may or may not give a damn about what your cat just chased, or what you made for dinner, or how you feel about the healthcare bill.

So why should I expect these same friends to be interested in my book?

I ask myself that question every day.  I dread posting Facebook reminders or sending out email announcements about book launches or appearances.  I imagine that the people receiving them, even people who of their own volition decided to “like” my public page, must be getting these reminders in their inboxes, sniffing derisively, and then instantly deleting them as the work of some kind of literary hack too pathetic to be worth the attention of traditional media.  The fact that I myself am often the recipient of these same emails from other writers, and that I don’t mind receiving them in the least, is something I always manage to dismiss as irrelevant.  (Like a lot of writers, I tend to believe people are telling me the truth only when they’re being negative.)

Beyond Facebook, I try to update my Twitter accounts regularly (I have one in my name and one in the name of my novel's main character), but I must confess I find the Twitterverse somewhat baffling.  All those hashtags and little bits of embedded code usually leave me wondering what the hell everyone is talking about.  I can’t figure out how everyone else can link to such nice tiny little URLs in their updates when mine are as long and gnarly and twisted as the plot of The Phantom Menace.  I don’t know what a # does.  I just barely understand how to write @someone.  Even admitting to such makes me feel like the old lady on her porch screaming at all those damn kids to get off her lawn.

Worse, my posts and updates never seem as interesting or relevant as those of the darlings of the social-media literary set, the Jessa Crispins and Maud Newtons and Ron Hogans whose posts and tweets I look forward to every morning.  I’m not clever with a comeback or a quip as my social-media idols, and rarely do I come up with anything meaningful as a cultural commentator, especially on the fly.  I need to think about something, and especially to write about it, before I really understand how I feel and what I think.  I’m an analog girl—ponderous and painfully shy and terribly old-fashioned when it comes to writing even a status update.  Will so-and-so see me announce a reading and think I’m the worst kind of self-promoter?  Will I turn into one of those obnoxious Facebook stalkers that people secretly make fun of IRL (in real life)?  Should I bother writing anything at all?

When I do write about something I care about, I’ll rewrite and rewrite again.  I’ve rewritten this post twice already, and will probably do so at least twice more before I let anyone see if.  If I let anyone see it at all.  Rewriting is the novelist’s greatest pleasure, and something that, in the social media universe where timeliness rules all, isn’t terribly important.  By the time I’ve written and rewritten a post to the point where I’m happy with it, Facebookers and the Tweeps are already on to something else, and I’m left standing there with a dumb look on my face, like the girl who took so long getting ready for the prom no one noticed she wasn’t in the limo.

Yet every day, I make myself feed the social-media publicity machine.  I jump on Twitter and send out announcements about events.  I email Facebook fans about book launches and reviews.  And I write long, rambling blog posts making fun of my own ineptitude with it all.  I do it because in a world where the book tour is a dying animal, where book review pages disappear every day, where too many books are published and not enough are read, I want to continue to work.  Because my next book will be the best thing I have ever written.

Being Bad, Because It Feels So Good

A couple of years ago, I started to notice something about my writing students.  Specifically my female writing students.

They're too nice.

Not just too nice to each other in workshop, though that certainly can be the case, but too nice to their characters.  They go out of their way to keep their characters out of trouble.  Some of them have so much trouble letting their characters do evil, speak evil, that they will literally turn their plots inside out to avoid the ugly stuff.  Case in point: one student of mine wrote a story in reverse order--literally backwards--to let her protagonist avoid saying or doing anything bitchy or cruel.  In the four semesters she studied with me, she never let her characters cause problems for themselves, or others.  And she wasn't alone.  Most of my female students--the ones who don't write vampire fan fic, anyway--have some difficulty letting their characters be bad.

Is it a "lady writer" problem?  Perhaps.  But I think it's also a Midwestern problem.  It's what we're taught from birth: Be nice.  Play nice with others.  Don't rock the boat.

Which might be fine in life.  But in fiction, niceness is death.

Playing nice does not make for good writing, and most especially it does not make for good reading.  Where would we be if if Captain Ahab had decided to turn the other cheek, if Humbert Humbert had seen a qualified therapist, if Dracula had stayed home in Transylvania and not bothered the neighbors with his insatiable thirst for human blood?

After I started noticing this issue in my students, of course, I started noticing it in myself as well.  Where were my troublemakers, my angry young women, my larger-than-life nasty bitches?  My mother might be proud to have raised a "nice girl," but my babies--my fictional ones--needed to have a little bit more bite.

One might say that Erzsebet Bathory might be taking this desire for badness a bit too far.  She's about as far a cry from the nice Midwestern protagonists of Icebergs as you can get.  She's vain and selfish and cruel as hell, and what's more, she's completely indifferent to the sufferings of others. 

But oh my God, was she fun to write.  That might seem like a strange thing to say about a woman accused of being the world's most notorious female serial killer, but it's true. 

I've finally learned what the bad girls have known all along: being bad, at least in fiction, is much more fun than being good.

The Horror

I just took this book quiz, and guess which book I am?  That's right--

I'm Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

I would try to deny it, but it's pretty much fully accurate, and since it's one of my favorite endings of all time (no, not "the horror, the horror" but the visit to the Beloved) I can't fight it. Except that I've never been to Disneyland.

"To you, life is a journey. You just didn't necessarily expect that it would be into the abyss. Now that you're on your way into the deepest and darkest part of humanity, you are doing your best to see the brighter side of something you're not even sure you'll escape with your life. Your favorite word is 'horror' and your favorite ride at Disneyland is the Jungle Cruise."

Sorry about the lack of blog posts of late.  Novel-writing takes precedence over blogging, but with one mostly out of the way I should have room for the second once again.

Happy end of 2009!