Posts Tagged ‘Craft’

by Mark S. Weiner

On a winter afternoon in 2006, on my birthday, I gave away my library.

The previous week, I owned so many books that I built teetering stacks of them on the floor of my study. I stored the overflow in my wife’s office, and on the shelves next to the treadmill, and downstairs, beside the television. I loved those books, each one, and I had spent countless hours in their company—some I had known for over twenty years. Just looking at them made me feel secure, as though all the supportive friends I had ever known were by my side, ready to offer me their wise advice and comfort.

Then, after my wife and I crammed our ailing station wagon full of white shipping boxes, and drove to the local post office, and lifted each box to the chest-high counter, and watched an agent wheel them behind a wall, they were gone, on their way to a public library that had a use for them. Poof! The process was over surprisingly quickly. (more…)

Authors and Editors in Conversation

Mitzi Angel: I particularly enjoyed your portrait of Dublin in This Is the Way. It’s an inside-out portrait of a city, seen through the eyes of someone who does not feel at home there. How have your own experiences of that city influenced Anthony’s Dublin?

Gavin Corbett: Funnily enough, only last Thursday afternoon I had an experience that strongly reminded me of the sense of Dublin I used to have growing up. It was one of those typically Dublin days, weather-wise – drizzly, misty, the light diffuse. I went down this canyon-like street I’d never been on before, this street with seemingly nothing in it, just high brick walls on either side. And I found myself behind a notorious former Magdalene laundry. Have you heard about these Magdalene laundries? They’ve been in the news recently.

Mitzi Angel: Yes, those Church-run laundries the Irish prime minister apologised about? (more…)

Authors and Editors in Conversation

Jonathan Galassi: Rebecca, lots of people are going to be asking, Where did this all come from? I mean: a fly. I mean: a Jew in 18th-century France becoming a fly here and now. We’re well beyond the bounds of realism here. Can you tell us what the first kernels of Jacob’s Folly were, and where you found them?

Rebecca Miller: The first thing I wrote was in the spring of 2008. It was the moment where “reliable, true” Leslie Senzatimore, the volunteer fireman, is peeing on his front lawn as the moon sets. So all I had was this big, very good man peeing at dawn—and then I saw a creature above him, nestled in the sky—some kind of demon or sprite, a mischievous soul stuck as if between two harp strings in some sort of transmigration accident, laughing down at him. So I started with a human and a low-order divinity. This spirit/human dichotomy had been fascinating to me since I was a small child and used to stare and stare at my mother’s tiny Mexican earthenware chapel that contained a few people praying, a priest blessing them, and the devil laughing down at them all from the roof. For some reason this little object fascinated me and I would spend hours staring at the praying people, and then up at the laughing devil. The irony of the situation, the fact that the people had no idea the devil was there, and the mirth of the devil, was fascinating and a little terrifying to me, maybe because it implied that nothing was as it seemed. That little object opened me up to the void, the mystery behind the material world. (more…)

Authors and Editors in Conversation

Eric Chinski: In The Fun Parts you’re returning to short stories after publishing a novel, The Ask. Do you approach writing stories and novels differently?

Sam Lipsyte: Once I know what I’m writing I start to approach them differently, but in the beginning I’m just trying to get something down on the page. As I go I can start to sense whether it’s opening up and might be something longer or if a closing is already in view. Sometimes I know it’s a short story from the start but often it takes a little while. Nathanael West, who wrote rather short novels, said, “You only have time to explode.” I think of that when I write the short pieces. You are creating a new world and new language to navigate it and there will be some nice effects along the way, but you are usually after a single moment for the piece to turn on. You are putting something – characters in the case of some stories, the very mode of utterance in others – under increasing pressure. It’s the same with the novel, in some sense, but you vary the pressure, digress in a controlled way, gather in more stories to feed into a larger narrative.

Eric Chinski: I don’t think it quite hit me until I heard you read from The Ask a few years ago, but there’s clearly a Sam Lipsyte sentence. I heard music at that reading. Your sentences are as much about rhythm and sound as character and plot. How do you think about the sentence in the broader context of a story?

Sam Lipsyte: I’m after music and meaning at the same time. I want poetry and life, or as much as prose can deliver those things. I prefer it when sentences are doing a few jobs at once, like male and female models strutting down the runway, looking great in their wild, impossible outfits, and at the last possible moment leaning forward to deliver some important plot or character information, before returning to the wings. And I’m backstage, screaming at the other sentences to get ready.

Eric Chinski: Some of the stories in The Fun Parts have been marinating for many years. Do you spend a lot of time on revisions? How do you know when a story is done?

Sam Lipsyte: Most of the stories are new, but some took me a while. I wrote a version of “The Dungeon Master” twenty years ago. The old version has no resemblance to the one in the collection, except the title. I wasn’t ready to write it then. I threw it out and forgot about it. Then one day I started thinking about it. The old story was lost but I remembered an element or two and thought maybe I was ready to write the story now. But that’s very rare for me. I usually write a draft of a story, get excited, decide that it sucks, put it away, take it out in a few weeks or more, get excited, decide that it sucks, etc. I go through this cycle for a while. But in the excited stage I can really see what the story could be, I’m doing a lot of revision. I don’t know when you’re ever done. You just have to stop. All you are doing is moving commas around. You don’t want to let it go because you are worried nothing else will come to you. That’s when you have to walk away.

Eric Chinski: No one gets the male mind in all its gory details as well as you do. In The Fun Parts, though, you take the reader inside the heads of several female characters who are wrestling with some pretty dark thoughts. Did this shift present any particular challenges for you?

Sam Lipsyte: I’ve lived long enough to know so many different kinds of women and men, and I just trusted I could handle these close third perspectives. They aren’t based on some preconceived notion of “what a woman thinks.” That would be generic nonsense. They felt very close to me, closer than many of my male characters. I’ve shared my life and thoughts with a woman for a long time. And she’s shared her life and thoughts with me. And I thought a lot about some of the things that might be hindering these characters, provoking them, and so forth. I was interested in the mix of pressures, cultural, biological, but just as important, the ones unique to them, based on their idiosyncrasies, which are clearly also connected to some of mine.

Eric Chinski: Some critics insist on calling you a comic novelist. Do you think there’s an inherent tension between a comic and literary sensibility? How do you think of the potential for comedy in fiction writing — and does it come with certain constraints?

Sam Lipsyte: I don’t see the comic and the literary as distinct categories. I think you have literature, and most of the good stuff is often very funny. Comedy and tragedy work best in tandem. Put them together and you have literature. I think maybe I make certain assumptions about my readers, that they understand that I’m not just going for laughs, that there are other currents running through my work, and I think my assumption is correct based on the response I get. But I’m also flagging in my struggle not to be pigeonholed by critics. As I’ve said before, I guess if you’re a pigeon it’s better to have a hole than not.

Eric Chinski: Many readers have hailed you as a writer who has captured a generation’s angst and lost illusions. Some fiction writers deliberately set out with the ambition to show us the way we live now. Would you put yourself in this camp? Can a short story take on our contemporary moment in the same way as a novel?

Sam Lipsyte: I don’t sit down and say, “Today I’m going to write something that shows us how we live now,” mostly because I would become paralyzed immediately. I’d ask myself too many anxious questions. I do, however, like to engage with the present, to use its textures, or else employ it as a jumping-off point. Some say write what you know. Some say write what you don’t know. The present, for me, is both, especially because of its speed. Roth was right about the futility of trying to keep up. You don’t have to keep up. You stand on the banks of the roaring river and look at who or what washes up. That’s what you make stories out of. All that heartbreak. I think you can do this in prose fiction no matter the length.

Sam Lipsyte is the author of Venus Drive, The Subject Steve, Home Land, and The Ask, the latter two of which were New York Times Notable Books. He won the first annual Believer Book Award and was a 2008 Guggenheim fellow. He teaches writing at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

Eric Chinski is Editor in Chief at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

by Rebecca Miller

I started with one image: a fireman peeing on his front lawn, at the moment between night and dawn, just as the darkness began to drain from the sky. I knew his last name was Senzatimore. I had known a young man with that name—he was, in fact, the assistant editor on my last film—and the grandeur of the name bewitched me. Senzatimore means “without fear” in Italian. It has an aura of the Middle Ages, of our more primitive, real selves, when names could be wishes, or properties of being, and had not devolved to mere accidents of birth. I wanted my man to be a kind of Titan because then his fall—the fall my hunch told me was coming in the story—would be all the more meaningful. And another element came to me as I wrote Leslie Senzatimore peeing on his front lawn: a spirit creature, some mischievous, malevolent entity, which at the time I saw as a soul frozen between lives like a spat-out chunk of bread stuck between two harp strings. I saw him looking down on Leslie, and laughing. (more…)

by Dennis Mahoney

It’s 1990 and I’m a loser. Becoming a novelist hasn’t crossed my mind. I’m a high-school junior who’s shown some aptitude in art, and by aptitude I mean I’m better than classmates who don’t try at all. My art teacher is just happy I do the assignments instead of throwing Exact-o knives into the ceiling.

I had a creative impulse throughout my early life, fueled by supportive parents, Legos, and the original Star Wars trilogy. Relatives raved about my drawings. I got a spaceship illustration printed in the local paper during grade school. And I didn’t really want to be Luke or Han. I wanted to be George Lucas and create something awesome.

But I couldn’t be bothered to develop any skills. Mötley Crüe was big in my life, as were the Commodore 64 video games my friends and I swapped along our paper routes. I had bad hair, just shy of a bowl cut. Major cysts instead of zits. A soft, pale, jean-jacketed body. I’d never had a serious girlfriend because girls have standards, and because I kept thinking my luck might change, which is the best way to ensure it never, ever does. (more…)

by Ben Schrank

Writing a novel should be fun. At the beginning, meander. Don’t be afraid to play around. Get lost. Fall down. Get dirty. The stakes aren’t high because whatever is written will be tossed, ideally without fret or regret. When I began to write Love Is a Canoe I thought I wanted to write about a girl who gets advice from her grandfather while paddling around in a canoe. I meandered for over a year before that girl turned into a boy. I wrote additional narratives that wandered far afield of the novel I would eventually complete, built complex lives at a country inn and indulged in pages of imagery and then, when I found characters I believed in (a senior publishing executive who had disappeared into her persona, an unhappy young married couple, a writer who wrote a popular book of advice on marriage) I wound their stories together. But on the way there, Peter Herman, the character who wrote the book within my book, Marriage is a Canoe, officiated at marriages and then got horribly drunk at them. He was attacked in his house by an unhappy married couple. He started work on a novel. I had a wild time at that wedding, was shocked at the violence an unhappy couple can inflict, and I plotted and wrote a lot of Peter Herman’s dirty, indulgent novel. Then I tossed it all.

Most, if not all, writers work through several drafts. The concept of the writer writing and then throwing material away is not new. But they never say they liked doing it. Julian Barnes says of first drafts in an interview with the Paris Review: “The pleasure of the first draft lies in deceiving yourself that it is quite close to the real thing. The pleasure of the subsequent drafts lies partly in realizing that you haven’t been gulled by the first draft.”
 Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan tells us, in an interview with CNN, that when she writes a novel, it may go through 50 or 60 drafts. Egan says: “The key is struggling a lot.”

Some years ago, Alexandra Alter interviewed 17 authors in the Wall Street Journal about process. All shared some variation on this line, from Amitav Ghosh, “It never gets easier; it’s always hard, it’s always a test.” None said, “It’s indulgent and can be messy and I love every minute of it.” Why does no one writer want to admit that the process of writing, while often terribly trying, can also be bliss? Are writers trying to keep this secret to themselves? I don’t mind dwelling for months on plot lines that likely won’t work. I am happy to lose myself for hours in a conversation between characters that isn’t relevant to the story I know I’ll eventually tell. Perhaps the pleasure I take in process makes me unprofessional. I don’t care. I’m rather a Spartan person but I am defensive of the luxury I indulge in by writing this way.

Visual artists often talk about the allure of retaining the qualities of a child. Picasso’s line is most famous and also most representative: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” But novelists only chest-thump about the pain involved in making their work. Why? If they have been attempting to erect barriers to keep would-be writers out, surely all can agree that that attempt at gate-keeping has failed.

I am now meandering again, working with images I find compelling, like a couple arguing on the moon and a woman sitting on her brownstone stoop in summer. I don’t know how that couple got to the moon or when that woman will get off that stoop. I do know I will happily spend as much time as I like building their stories. Then I will blow them apart without ever feeling bad about the time or energy spent. I am not harming anybody. I believe that if you don’t enjoy the actual process of writing, why write? Pressure to publish? How could one possibly feel a thing so ridiculous at a time like this? Writers should admit that novel-writing is a pleasure.

Ben Schrank is president and publisher of Razorbill, a Penguin imprint that is home to many award-winning and New York Times–bestselling books for children and young adults. Ben is also the author of the novels Consent and Miracle Man. He wrote “Ben’s Life,” a monthly column for Seventeen magazine, in the 1990s. He grew up in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and son. For more information, please visit the author’s website, www.benschrank.com. You can also follow @BDSchrank on Twitter.

Love Is a Canoe, Ben Schrank’s most recent novel, will be published in January. You can read an excerpt here.

(Steps In Reverse Order)

by Matthew Quick

Step 5 – You are going to need a lot of people to purchase your novel—and I do mean a lot! Like, more than you can even imagine. Yes, your father will buy copies for all of his business associates; your mother will tell (in great detail) every single person who comes within a twenty-foot radius all there is to know about you and your work; you will even be contacted by the caretakers of your late grandfather, and they will say he proudly pitched your novel to every doctor and nurse he saw until his last dying breath; your siblings and friends will do everything they can to support you, making signed copies of your movie tie-in edition the standard go-to birthday and holiday gift; but all of this will never be enough—even if your family is enormous and you have impossibly generous friends. You will need complete strangers to buy your work, to fall in love with your words and encourage others to do the same. Sometimes these strangers will write beautiful e-mails that make you ache and believe that maybe you really are on your way, but mostly these strangers will never ever contact you, as you pretend you’re not obsessively checking Amazon numbers and Goodreads reviews. You will have woefully minimal control over the millions of potential book-buyers in the world, even if you tour around; give many TV, radio, and print interviews; speak often; and maintain a healthy web presence. (Even if you miss spending your birthday with your wife for the first time since 1993 so that you can promote the film and MTI.) It’s like trying to control the weather with your hopes and dreams.

Step 4 - Of course, you will need Hollywood-types to adapt your novel and make a movie. There’s a lot more to this than you would think. First, you will probably be surprised when you learn your literary agent has an agreement with a film agent at CAA. In fact, if you are anything like me, you will be shocked when you get the call from LA and a stranger says you have a movie deal. (“I have a film agent?” was the first thing I said.) Then, for the next four or five years, you will wonder just what it was that Hollywood saw in your work—what made your book jump out from the thousands and thousands on the shelves? It helps tremendously if you can manage to land an Oscar-nominated director, like David O. Russell, and a star-studded A-list ensemble cast. It’s very helpful to have the extremely recognizable (and beautiful) faces of Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper on the cover of your MTI. Names like Robert De Niro and Chris Tucker don’t hurt a bit. When you are sent out by The Weinstein Company to promote the movie, you will learn that the subject matter of your book, mainly mental health awareness, is extremely important to David O. Russell. He had never done a book-to-film adaptation before. The source material spoke to him. It also spoke—on a deeply personal level—to many others involved with the film, all of whom fought passionately to bring The Silver Linings Playbook to the screen. You didn’t know who your art would touch when you were creating it. And now that it’s in the world, you realize that it’s taken on a life of its own—over which you have little control.

Step 3 - You’ll need an editor. And if you can land a famous editor who has her own imprint, even better! Sarah Crichton is my editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I probably didn’t have to tell you that, because The Silver Linings Playbook is a Sarah Crichton Book, after all. It says so on the spine. How did I end up with Sarah? During one of our first meetings, she told me about a meal she had with a handsome Italian editor in a beautiful suit. She asked what was good on the market, and he told her he had just lost a bidding war in Italy. Then he raved about the novel he had failed to acquire; it was called The Silver Linings Playbook. Sarah contacted my agent the next day and purchased the book soon after. A very happy accident! Once you sign with an agent, you really have no control whatsoever; you can only trust your agent. Before you are partnered up with your editor, no matter how much good work your agent puts into your career, you will worry at home and ceaselessly annoy your significant other with unanswerable questions, like, “Do you really think my book will sell or am I a delusional hack?” And your significant other—if you are truly in love—will drip-feed you the verbal reassurance you need every thirty seconds or so, whenever you are not sleeping or adequately self-medicated. Cross your fingers, if you need something to do. (I also recommend crossing toes.)

Step 2 - Secure a literary agent who believes passionately in your work—an ally who will weather the ups and downs of your career without changing his mind about your potential. Douglas Stewart is my agent, and he’s amazing. He gets my work. He gets me. During my agent search, I did months’ worth of research and tried my best to secure referrals. None of that helped. The research led to rejections. The referrals went nowhere. I used to coach high school basketball with a tall man who—if my memory is correct—once played for the Washington Generals, the team that is supposed to lose to The Globetrotters. His name: Doug Stewart. After being rejected by dozens of literary agents, I queried Doug Stewart (the agent)—knowing nothing about him—mostly because the same-name coincidence made me laugh. (I am easily amused.) The universe was amused too. My manuscript was plucked from the slush. Almost immediately, my new agent made incredible things happen for my career. And I have since learned that Doug Stewart the lit agent and I are a perfect match. Another happy accident! You will have minimal control over the agent search. You will do research and send out carefully written query letters, but fate plays the largest role.

Step 1 – You must write a book that is authentically you—a novel in which you believe unequivocally. This is the rally flag you will hoist high in hopes that the right sort of opportunity makers will see it and move closer. It is the hand you extend into the darkness, trusting there will be another to shake; the leap you take off the cliff, believing the proverbial net will appear. The writing should take you to new adrenaline-pumping, heart-pounding states of mind; force you to reveal a hidden part of your identity—it’s a coming out, if you will!—keep you up at night; and make you break out into the occasional sweat. For me, good scotch is necessary to make it through the writing process. If your loved ones are worried about your mental health, this is a fantastic sign—historically, you are in impressive company! Knowing that there will be critics, friends, and family even, who will make you feel ridiculous for birthing these words, who will make you feel as though expressing yourself honestly is the equivalent of doing a striptease in the middle of your family’s Thanksgiving dinner, you do it anyway, because there is no other choice. In many ways, this step is completely irrational, but if it’s in you to do, do it you will! You must. Think of all that may happen! And here’s the most beautifully stunning part: at this point in the process, over the words on the page, you have 100% control. It’s just you. You.

Matthew Quick is the author of The Silver Linings Playbook and two novels for young adults, Sorta Like a Rock Star and Boy21. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, the novelist Alicia Besette. He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter. For more information, visit: MatthewQuickWriter.com.

Related:

by Iza Wojciechowska and Rosalind Harvey

“Some people say I’m precocious,” begins Juan Pablo Villalobos’ super-slim, super-fast first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole. What follows is a beautiful, heart-breaking story told from the perspective of Tochtli, a precocious kid whose dad is a major Mexican drug lord. Tochtli has seen people murdered and has found his father’s gun room, but those things aren’t as important to him as collecting hats and acquiring a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. Slowly, though, he begins to reconcile the world he understands with the world as it really is. Written in Spanish and translated by Rosalind Harvey, the book is an incredible debut—and a wonderful work of translation. This is Rosalind’s first solo translation, having previously worked with Anne McLean to co-translate Oblivion by Hector Abad (FSG, 2012) and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas (New Directions, 2012). I talked with Rosalind about Tochtli’s advanced vocabulary, her advice for young translators, and about the potential for more mainstream Estonian chick lit, Indonesian thrillers, and Bolivian erotica. (more…)

Earlier this month, FSG published two books on twentieth-century American political figures: William H. Chafe’s Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal and Joseph Crespino’s Strom Thurmond’s America. Neither one is a straightforward biography. Bill and Hillary, which tracks the Clintons’ lives but is focused on the dynamic of their relationship, almost resists classification. Meanwhile, Strom Thurmond’s America is a political biography that out of necessity highlights its subject’s greatest personal failure. We asked the authors to read each other’s book and then discuss, over email, the art of biography. (more…)

This week, Hill and Wang, an imprint of FSG specializing in books on American history, published Brown historian Robert O. Self’s All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s. Self sees the civil rights, gay rights, feminist, and antiwar movements, as well as evangelical Christianity and neoliberal economics, as threads in a single grand narrative. Rethinking the past fifty years of American political life, he is the first to argue that competing ideas of the family fractured liberalism and paved the way for the rise of the conservative right.

All in the Family has been seven years in the making. We asked Self to write about the process, from the first spark of inspiration to the submission of the final draft. What follows is a year by year account of how a historian conceptualizes, researches, and writes a book. (more…)

by Iza Wojciechowska

Whether or not you’ve known it, or whether or not you’ve wanted to, you’ve heard the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. You’ve certainly heard him on the radio or on CD if you listen to even a bit of classical music; but if you steer clear, you’ve still heard him. You’ve seen a commercial for American Express or iTunes, or you’ve heard old Nokia ringtones, or you’ve simply been around music during Christmas. Bach, arguably more than any other composer, is ubiquitous, even now, more than 250 years after his compositions were written. But how did he get that way?

One answer is: technology. Paul Elie, a former editor at FSG and a creative writing professor (mine, in fact), has written an astounding book that traces the evolution of Bach’s music through the evolution of technology. From the creation of wax cylinder recordings, through LPs, CDs and MP3s, each stage in technology’s progress coincided with a major breakthrough for Bach’s music. In Reinventing Bach, Elie presents this history, interweaving the story of Bach with those of the musicians who played his music, as well as with his own. (more…)

Lisa Zeidner, the author of Love Bomb, directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Camden, where Jay McKeen is a student. Jay retired as Police Chief of Hamilton Township, NJ, after service as a detective and Detective Bureau Commander, Operations Commander, and member of Tactical Containment and Underwater Search and Rescue Teams. He provided technical advice to the author.

McKeen: First, thanks for putting up with a cop in your classes over the years.

Zeidner: No, thank you. No student I’ve ever taught has seen more dead bodies. Plus it was useful to have you show up armed to workshops when things got testy.

McKeen: I’m looking forward to giving you the third degree for a change. You comfortable? Some water? Loosen the handcuffs? Here’s a softball, so you don’t invoke the 5th. The initial picture of the domestic terrorist in wedding gown, painted boots, clown socks and gas mask startles and sticks—was that image the genesis of Love Bomb? (more…)

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, whose debut book of poetry, The Ground, published this week, recently sat down with fellow FSG poet Lawrence Joseph. We’re happy to share with you their remarkable discussion on the craft, translation, mythmaking, and–of course–Phillips’ stunning new work.

Lawrence Joseph: First of all, I want to say how much I like this book. In fact, I think it’s a masterpiece. Why the title The Ground?

Rowan Ricardo Phillips: Good morning… and thank you! As opposed to “the land” or “the floor” or “where you are” or “the street”, there’s something feral, archaic, and really part from ourselves in “the ground”. It’s the word we often relate with the ceremonial end of our physical selves—we’re buried, we tend to say, in the ground—and yet it also inhabits, in our English language at least, a point of progression: we build on things, and on ourselves, from the ground up. If you replace “ground” with “earth” in those two phrases they become too self-conscious and overly willful. Similarly, “the land” is a word almost entirely self-conscious of ownership and power. For example, switch “land” with “ground” in Frost’s “The Gift Outright” and you have a different poet. I should point out that none of these aforementioned words were candidates for the title of the book. The Ground came to me instinctively as I was working on through the poems. It was as insistent, like a pulse, and I wanted to capture the feel of that in the entire book, the way the ground pulsed in my imagination as I wrote. As you read through the book I’m hoping you feel the pulse of the ground in it, both as concept and character. It’s incredibly important for a poet to recognize and come to terms with his or her temperament—I can’t stress that enough—and my temperament left me not wanting to have a titular poem in the book. That’s not me. A representative poem for the book—that wasn’t where The Ground was heading; I could feel that strongly even in its earliest moments and movements. (more…)