Art versus Commerce

I belong to two writer's groups on LinkedIn, am a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and I regularly look at writer's blogs. Many of the people who review self-published books are self-published themselves and so  comment on the writing life. A question that seems to come up often is a version of, "How do I write a best-selling novel?"

In an earlier post, I suggested that no one knows what will sell. But if you are interested primarily in selling, then you write the kind of novel the market seems to be buying: a romance, a mystery, a thriller—something in a popular genre that a publisher understands and that a bookstore manager knows where to shelve.

The problem with that approach, it seems to me, is that your book won't be very good unless you love the genre and know its conventions so well you can play with them, thereby setting your novel apart from the flood of romances, mysteries, thrillers, vampires, zombies, and werewolves now being published. Unless your novel is extraordinary, you will have difficulty finding a publisher and engaging an audience. Even if it is extraordinary, it may not sell.

The other approach, of course, is to ignore the market and simply write the best book you know how, trusting that your work will find a publisher and readers. These thoughts were provoked by Alice Munro's award in October of the Nobel Prize in Literature. A recent search of the University of Texas archives turned up Munro's rejection letters. As The Daily Texan reported, "One letter written in 1968 by Knopf’s editor Judith Jones after reading Munro’s first book of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, said her book had nothing particularly new or exciting, and it could be easily overlooked. In another letter from Jones to Munro on her first novel, Lives of Girls and Women, in 1971, she credited Munro’s style but still rejected the novel for publication. 'There’s no question that the lady can write but it’s also clear she is primarily a short story writer,' Jones wrote."

Senior lecturer Brian Doherty, who taught a entire course on Munro, said, “[It’s] depressing when you consider so many writers change their approach to writing and their approach to literature in order to increase salability. You have to really respect the writers who labor in obscurity because they believe in what they’re doing even though they might not get notoriety or Nobel Prizes.”

So I guess the question I ask is: Is it better to labor in obscurity because you think you can sell to a market, or because you want—need—to tell a story whether the market thinks it's salable or not?

The NaNoWriMo Experience

I'm back from NaNoWriMoland. During November I wrote 55,448 words on a new novel tentatively titled "Mt. Koya." I have not finished, but I have a clear idea where it will go and in the next week or so I will have a first draft.

The NaNoWriMo experience was extraordinary. I tend to be a writer who distracts himself easily. I will not happily go ahead with a new sentence, a new paragraph, a new section until I am happy with what I've just written—and I am seldom happy. With the challenge to write an average of 1,667 words a day, I did not have time to be distracted. I worried that if I fell behind by a day or more, I would never make up the words, and I had to think about the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. As a writing teacher says about first drafts: "Write too fast."

I know that some people think through an outline before November 1 so all (all!) they have to do is fill in the blanks during the month. I had an idea for a story and simply began writing. On result of this approach: I was regularly surprised by what the characters said and did. I would like to think this leads to a more spontaneous and interesting work.

I am now almost in the habit of turning out 2,000 words a day. I did it before, I can do it again. So saying that I'm going to get started on today's 2,000 words.

NaNoWriMo

This is just a quick note to explain why I (probably) will not be posting much this month. I've signed up for the NaNoWriMo event, and will be typing my little fingers off for it.

NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, is—to quote Wikipedia—"an annual internet-based creative writing project which challenges participants to write 50,000 words of a new novel between November 1 and November 30.The project started in July 1999 with just 21 participants, but by the 2010 event over 200,000 people took part - writing a total of over 2.8 billion words.

"Writers wishing to participate first register on the project's website, where they can post profiles and information about their novels, including synopsis and excerpts. Word counts are validated on the site, with writers submitting a copy of their novel for automatic counting. Municipal leaders and regional forums help connect local writers with one another for holding writing events and to provide encouragement."

I'll let my faithful readers—both of you—know how I've done in December. And if I need to procrastinate during November, I'll add to this blog.

Beg, Borrow, Steal

Beg, Borrow, Steal by Michael Greenberg is subtitled "A Writer's Life." As a writer myself, I am always interested in another writer's life. The book is 44 four- or five-page anecdotes from Greenberg's life. These he revised slightly from columns he had written between June 2003 and April 2009. Because Greenberg wrote the pieces over almost six years, I would have liked the publication dates. For example, he begins one piece, "The novelist William Herrick has died at the age of eighty-nine." I knew Herrick, and I would have liked to know when he died. (In another anecdote about Ted Solotaroff, Greenberg does add a footnote giving Solotaroff's date of death.)

The anecdotes are entertaining and wonderfully well-written. So why are my feelings for the book so tepid? Perhaps because Greenberg was working against space constraints, he did not have room to go into real depth when the subject seemed to call for it. For example, he and his first wife spent a year in Argentina in the early 1970s. His wife was arrested for demonstrating against the government. Greenberg managed to scrape together $900 so she was charged only with disorderly conduct. As soon as she was free, they escaped to Uruguay where their son was conceived. The story deserves more than four pages.

I had a sense at times that Greenberg was writing to reinforce the stereotype of the struggling, Brooklyn-born, Jewish writer, one who rejects a future in the family scrap-metal business to toil at dozens of dead-end jobs (waiter, street peddler, post office clerk, more) while writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting an unpublished (unpublishable?) novel. He meets interesting people, but, again, because of space constraints, we never really get to know them or what they meant to Greenberg.

Apparently his only other book is a memoir of his daughter's manic breakdown, Hurry Down Sunshine, and he writes an interesting—if too brief—essay about the challenge of writing about one's family, friends, and acquaintances. He quotes Philip Roth on the bind in which family members find themselves: "Their own material is articulated for them by someone else who, in his voracious, voyeuristic using-up of their lives, gets there first but doesn't always get it right." Even if you have no intention of settling scores, it seems almost inevitable that someone you write about will see what you write as settling a score. Unfortunately for Greenberg, the memoir seems to be the milieu in which he is happiest and most effective. I suspect it turns family gatherings into minefields.

Self-publishing Saga, Part 1

I've given up trying to interest an agent in my novel, Getting Oriented, and have decided to self-publish. For one thing, it does not fit neatly into a genre, and that makes it difficult to sell to a commercial publisher. But aside from the fact that it is simply a good novel, I had not looked at the manuscript for more than a year, and the last time I looked, I thought it was polished and ready to go. Ha!

When I began rereading, I discovered that I tend to be the Village Explainer. In an attempt to make everything clear, I say the same thing twice in different words, or put in extraneous detail, or simply repeat myself. Going through the manuscript, I discovered I could cut 5 percent or so of the words with no damage to the meaning and a major improvement in the story's flow.

When my wife, who is also a writer, read the manuscript with a copy-editor's eye, she pointed out that I had fallen into the habit of using ellipses in place of commas or to suggest pauses in dialogue. I'd also not used commas when I needed them. I brought in a new shipment of commas and retired perhaps a hundred ellipses.

The tweaks we've made to the manuscript improve it considerably. The characters, the story, the setting are all the same. I do think that the careful reader who cares about punctuation, wordiness, and—both of you—the overuse of ellipses will enjoy the story even more.

Wally Wood

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Annie Proulx's character names

As I've said in earlier posts, I think that Annie Proulx's ear for dialogue and her ability to describe the natural world and the appearance of her characters in her novel That Old Ace in the Hole is amazing. I found the names she gave her characters disconcerting and unsettling. While I am willing to trust her descriptions of the Oklahoma and Texas panhandle and willing to go along with her Candide-like main character as he looks for a place to site an agribusiness hog farm, almost every time she named a new character, my willing suspension of disbelief popped. Here's what I'm talking about:

Millrace Giddins...Ribeye Cluke...Tambourine Bapp...Wayne Redpoll...Marisa Berdstraw...Kevin Alk...Orlando Bunnel...Beryl Schwarm...High Dough...Dolly Cleat...Rohama Bustard...Jason Shrub...Tazzy Keister...Advance Slauter...Harry Howdiboy...LaVon Fronk...Rope Butt...Wally Ooly...Freda Beautyrooms...Parch Wilpin...Cy Frease...Charles Grapewine...Methiel Huff.

For all I know, Proulx paged through panhandle phone books, chose genuine first and second names, and then shuffled them to come up with these. My problem is that they don't sound real. I probably would have ridden along with her if she'd only used a few to establish a period and a place. When I name a character, I try to suggest a personality, social or ethnic background, geography, attitude, or events that occurred when the character was born. "Parch Wilpin" sounds to me like someone from Texas. "Ribeye Cluke," "Rope Butt," and "Freda Beautyrooms" do not sound like anything except random words mashed together.