1.
“We’re closing in on a deal,” my agent told me on the phone. “I’m just turning him upside-down now and shaking him for loose change.”
It was midday on a Monday in early August of the year 2000. The Nasdaq, rested from its breather in the spring, was sprinting back up over 4,000 toward its March peak. Vice President Gore, demolishing the Bush son’s early lead, was pulling even in the polls. TV commercials depicted placid investors being wheeled on gurneys into operating rooms, stern-faced doctors diagnosing their patients with dire cases of money coming out the wazoo.
The previous Friday, bidding on my first novel had reached six figures, then paused for people to track down more cash. I’d later learn one editor spent the weekend trying to reach her boss on his Tanzanian vacation, finally getting through via the satellite phone of a safari boat on the Rufiji river, but that he wouldn’t OK a higher bid because he couldn’t get the manuscript in time.
I was 32. I’d never made over $12,000 in a year.
I’d signed on with my agent only a couple of weeks earlier. He was about my age, a clean-cut, preppie-looking guy named Bill, just making the transition from being an assistant to having clients of his own. He’d walked me through an open-floored office, agents and subagents stepping out from behind their iMacs and glass walls to shake my hand. We’d sat down in a sunny conference room, and after a few minutes I knew he was thoroughly attuned to my work; moreover he’d put his finger on a couple of remaining weak points, about which I agreed entirely and was eager to go home and address.
“How soon do you think an editor might read it?” I asked. I’d met with another interested agent a few days before. She’d told me it was the summer and things were slow, but my novel was so good—and so timely—that she knew an editor at Grove she was almost sure would read it in as little as four to six weeks.
Bill looked out the window, thoughtful. “It’s the summer, things are slow. Everyone’s hungry right now. We’ll give them the manuscript to take with them to the Hamptons to read over the weekend. Then the following week, you’ll meet with them and we’ll see who we like.”
It might have taken a week for the editors to read rather than a weekend. But the week after that I had meetings with editors scheduled every day.
This was, perhaps—after eight years as an itinerant grad student, sending out writing and waiting months to receive boilerplate rejection slips—somewhat overwhelming. By the first meeting, at a well-respected independent house, an all-too-familiar seasick feeling was coming on, as the editor introduced me around. Somehow over the last few days, nearly everyone in the office had read the manuscript. An assistant told me she loved how the metropolis my novel was set on the slopes of a smoking volcano, how no one who lived there ever brought it up or seemed to care. She asked me if I’d ever been to Hawaii, where she was from. Everybody there seemed smart, energetic, likable, young. I tried to smile as they crowded around me, aware I wasn’t saying much, got through my goodbyes, and made it to the bathroom, where I shat blood, and managed not to throw up.
The following morning I was too sick to make the next meeting at all. I was staying for the summer in a rent-stabilized East Village sublet I’d found, narrow as a submarine. The regular occupant was a special ed teacher, an aspiring playwright and outsiderish painter of traumatic childhood events. His mammoth canvases stared down from the peeling plaster around his bed, captioned with black-painted script at the bottom. “And then June cut her leg” featured an overweight girl in a swimsuit with a bloody gash above her knee and a wide howling mouth. “Tommy liked to shoot rats from the porch” depicted a ramshackle house at night, and an adolescent boy in an undershirt, his rifle barrel aimed straight at the viewer. Lying there with June’s scream and Tommy’s reddened eye taking a bead on me, I thought about how long I’d been living for this break, some hateful inner voice telling me it had all been too good to be true.
My younger brother, who lived in the neighborhood, came over with some anti-nausea medicine and sat with me, improvising a visualization exercise to calm my mounting panic. The exercise helped, and the massive doses of steroids I’d begun taking were kicking in. With the ulcerative colitis episode subsiding, I was able to make the rest of the meetings.
I felt like I saw half of the city that week—the inner half—every door previously closed to me suddenly thrown wide, like I could walk into any office on the island and start shaking hands. I was an overnight connoisseur of tome-filled lobbies and plunging city views. Most of the editors I was meeting, like my agent, were young—my age, my generation, elated to be finding one of their own. Each of them seemed to feel the book was saying something they themselves had been struggling to express; I felt as if I’d been childhood friends with them all. The last editor, Bill told me, was going to be a little older, in his mid-forties, one of the great editors of the era, in fact. Bill rattled off a list of the man’s authors, several of whom were heroes of mine. But one thing I should know—he was battling cancer. Doing well, though, word was. The prognosis, thank God, was good.
By that last meeting on Friday, the steroids and I were fully in our usual honeymoon period—nausea banished, colon stunned out of attacking itself, energy cranked enough to bestow a calm unstoppability while not yet at the level of sleeplessness or vicious mood swings. Whatever remaining woozy unease I was feeling was banished by the sight of Robert Jones, who was so clearly sicker than me. Instead of making me wait in a lobby, he’d come down to meet me at the HarperCollins front desk, walking slightly stooped, his left arm held in protectively against himself.
“Excuse my pace,” he said, his tone somehow both deadpan and luxuriating in melodrama, “I recently had my left side removed.”
We shook hands and stepped outside so he could smoke a cigarette. In the course of our conversation, I asked about some of his more famous authors, expecting guarded and respectful replies, but he cut right to the juicy stuff, telling me how he practically had to move in with one author to help him get his book done, complaining how another refused to promote his books but would bend over backwards to hawk a movie version.
“I suppose these aren’t the kind of stories an editor should tell a young author whose novel he wants to acquire.” He regarded me merrily. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to move in with you.”
I would have felt blessed to work with any of editors I’d met that week, but Robert was my first choice, and Bill’s as well. Robert, though, left nothing to chance. He was the highest bidder at auction, consenting to be turned upside-down and shaken for change. At day’s end, after Bill told me the final figure on the phone, I wandered numb out of the special ed teacher’s apartment and up St. Marks to the subway. I was having dinner with two of my closest friends from college, also aspiring writers, one of whom had been gifted by a grandparent a coupon good for two free entrees at a Ruth’s Chris steakhouse, our plan being to split the cost of the third. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them how much money I’d just made. I said it was a lot. Then I kind of laughed. Then I said it was a whole lot. There was an uncomfortable silence as we all realized I wasn’t going to get more specific.
I didn’t tell my brother. I didn’t tell my parents, whose average income wasn’t much more than mine, all of us feeling that weirdness, that new distance of me not telling them. Part of the purpose of a large advance, I understood, was to gain a book publicity. But I told nearly no one. Instead, for weeks, I did math in my head. I subtracted my agency’s cut and divided the figure by the five long years I’d lavished on the book and came out with a perfectly reasonable—boring, even—middle-class salary. I divided it by the ten years since college I’d been writing, the result more lackluster still. I thought of acquaintances and friends of friends who’d been riding the dotcom wave into stupefying wealth. I was basically a peasant, I reasoned. But one who could pay off his student loans. One in need of tax advice.
It was about a third of a million bucks.
2.
“Beautiful!”
“The white background.”
“The bone made of products.”
“And the cover itself, beneath the jacket. So colorful.”
It was true. The hardcover book, hot off the presses, was a work of art. I could barely pry my eyes from it as the HarperCollins marketing and publicity teams passed it around the conference table.
“Without the jacket, it looks like a textbook.”
“Like a marketing textbook!”
This was true, too. Beneath the white jacket, the cover—front, back, and spine—was a single, glossy photograph of a supermarket shelf, brimming with snack foods.
“We should market it to marketing classes,” said a marketer, to laughter and general accord.
I’d been at first worried what the marketers might think of my novel, exploring, as it did, certain complex emotions with regard to consumerism. But they were proving to be among the book’s biggest champions. They’d read it with attention and care, told me how moving they’d found it, how relevant and what was more, timely. The Diet Water. The rainforest fashions. The feeling that all this gorgeous, crazy decadence was about to blow. The marketing director said that reaching the end of a chapter on her way to work she’d looked up to realize she’d missed her subway stop.
I had the sense that they, the marketers, had been working nearly as lovingly on the book over the last few months as I had been. While I’d been going through the rounds of edits and copyedits and proofreading, they’d come up with a postcard campaign and a press kit, and made sure the otherwise austere galleys came wrapped, like presents, in that colorful supermarket shelf. It was now the summer of 2001, and so much had changed. The Bush son had won the national election by a vote of 5-4. The NASDAQ lay in smoke and ashes. On the evening news, dotcom workers with designer nerd glasses and odd, lingering smirks could be seen walking out of bankrupted startups, boxes in hand.
But the city once more was sunny and mild, and we’d all survived. I’d turned 33, filed my first accountant-assisted tax return. And my editor Robert was back from the brink of death. He’d come through the chemo and radiation and had been promoted to editor-in-chief. He’d edited two seasons’ worth of manuscripts, including my own—with great insight and gusto and even joy, judging from his running commentary in the margins. He wasn’t here at the marketing meeting, but we’d been assured that he was fine, on vacation in California, soaking up the waves. It might have been hard to believe, had I not seen him the month before in Chicago at the Book Expo, in a slick gray suit and a yellow tie, hair fully regrown, slightly flushed but otherwise in top form. He’d latched my elbow and directed my gaze to a thin curl of a woman hunched in a corner of the HarperCollins reception, scribbling on a pad.
“Joyce Carol Oates,” he said. “One of my authors. She’s writing her next novel.”
“Here? At the party?”
“What are you smiling at?” he exclaimed. “Where’s your pad? What have you given me lately?”
That afternoon, I was sat behind a table, where I signed galleys for the occasional book collector (“Don’t make it out to anyone,” they instructed, annoyed. “Just sign and date.”) or fan of the more established writers drifting over from the long lines nearby. Two tables down, Clive Barker, in a silk shirt with the top four buttons undone and an iron cross hung from his neck, was calling for more tea.
“Do you know what ‘teabagging’ is?” he asked an elderly woman waiting in front of him with her open book, then proceeded to provide her an anatomically detailed explanation.
Barker was another of Robert’s authors, as was Ann Patchett. I met them both later that night, at a dinner Robert had scheduled for the four of us, along with my girlfriend, and Clive’s muscular husband, at the five-star, immodestly-named Everest, done up in faux-zebra-skin chairs and perilously shard-heavy chandeliers.
“My newest star,” was the way Robert introduced me, sprinkling pixie dust. “And his lovely girlfriend.”
“We’re going to party all night,” Barker announced, in his ravaged, British rock star voice.
Patchett, conversely, expressed consternation that the dinner had been scheduled for 9:30, saying she never went to sleep later than eleven. Robert shot me a mischievous smile.
We didn’t stay out all night, but afterward, out in the empty downtown street, Clive and I lingered, wishing each other luck on our upcoming tours.
“Don’t let them put you in second rate hotels,” he said. “They’ll try to do that sometimes. And make them fly you first class. They’ve got the money—they’ll pretend they don’t, but they do.”
He got into his waiting car. I waved as it pulled out. Over dinner, he’d talked about the undead-themed videogame he and Electronic Arts had just put out. I knew I wouldn’t be asking HarperCollins for airplane upgrades anytime soon. Nonetheless, I was honored, a little awed, too, by this advice, from a certified star to—could I allow myself to entertain the notion?—a rising one.
On the occasional visit to my parents back in Brooklyn, my father, an actor who’d had a too-brief brush with the big time when he was younger, had taken to commenting on the performances of celebrities on talk shows for my benefit: who looked natural, who stiff, whose posture was slumped, voice was crimped. Sharyn Rosenblum, my book’s vivacious, fire-haired, warrior-woman publicist, had been gauging my readiness as well. At the Expo, she’d put me in front of a reporter and watched with concern as I tried to explain my trendspotter-characters’ beliefs—how the culture was supersaturated with irony, how a strange, new, schizoid era of what they (and I) termed “postirony” was on the way—going into too much detail and well over soundbite-length. She’d taken me to a party in a sprawling hotel suite and introduced me to a Fresh Air producer, neglecting to tell either of us who the other was, and watched us stand there trying to figure out why we were shaking hands.
Now, back in New York after the marketing meeting, she steered me into her office, where she and her equally vivacious protégé, Claire, became my personal media trainers, boxing coaches in pumps, firing off interview-from-hell questions:
“Why is the book so dark?” Sharyn asked. “Aren’t you worried about getting too trendy yourself?” And then: “What do you think of all this promotion and packaging and hype surrounding your book?”
The two of them studied me as I fumbled through my responses.
“Don’t say ‘um,’ so much,” Sharyn said.
“Or ‘you know,’” Claire said.
“I don’t know,” Sharyn said. “You’ve got to tell me.”
“Don’t mumble,” Claire said.
“If you don’t know what to say,” Sharyn said, “stall by saying, ‘That’s a very good question.’”
“‘Wow,’” Claire demonstrated. “‘Great question!’”
“See? It’s flattering too.”
Sharyn took me to a couple more parties in downtown lofts and steered me around, but mainly she was working on getting me ink. She thought there was good chance People magazine would run a profile of me for their October issue, to coincide with my novel’s mid-September release. Meanwhile, Details wanted to do a photospread. The idea was that I would pose in various haute-couture outfits, which would then be tagged in the captions, listing designers and prices.
“So it would be . . . an advertisement?” I asked her.
“Alex,” she said. “They’re bumping Jimmy Carter to get you into the issue.”
I went on, for a minute or so, to question Sharyn about the wisdom of having the author of a trenchant novel about consumerism selling clothes in magazines. A week earlier, she’d come to me with a proposal from a major cigarette company to host parties for my book despite (or perhaps due to) a scene in it depicting a creepy rave sponsored by Camel. I’d politely nixed the cigarette deal, but it didn’t take much to convince me to do the photoshoot.
The Details team met me at a trendy, white-vinyl-upholstered East Village bar they’d leased out for the day. Except for the lighting guy, a droll ponytailed German who looked to be about my age, they were all disconcertingly young, mid-twenties at most. I got the feeling they were assistants and interns getting their shot at a shoot of their own. I’d been carefully growing out my hair, hoping to counteract the staidness of my hardcover photo, in which I’d hoped to look unpretentious but just looked angry and square. But comparing my actual face to the one on that same picture from the press kit, the hair stylist shook her head and set about re-trimming my hair. They then dressed me, for no reason I could fathom, in 80’s garb—a dark suit jacket and a striped polo shirt with the collar flipped.
“It’s a funny book, right?” said the photographer. “So you should smile really wide.”
I’d never done this with my face before. Then again, I’d never worn a polo shirt. I tried. The result seemed to unsettle her, but she went on, undaunted.
“And jump off that bench.” She pointed. “And throw out your arms and kick up your heels.”
Off I went. From their expressions, I could infer what my own must have looked like: like I was being stretched on a rack.
“Eighties Man,” the German sardonically pronounced.
The other event at an East Village bar that summer was a pre-launch party for the novel which Sharyn had arranged.
“Great news,” she said on the phone the morning thereof. “It got picked up in the Observer. They even ran an excerpt.”
It was the first piece of press the book had gotten. On my way to the party, I bought a copy:
How to market a book by a young Ivy League author whose prose thoroughly confuses you? Compare him to Thomas Pynchon, cross your fingers and hope for the best, baby!
This was followed by an out-of-context sentence from a sex scene. Followed in turn by some other party one could go to instead.
Stricken, feeling like I’d been molested, I threw the paper away, took deep breaths, and entered the bar. At every table, and spaced every three feet down the bartop, lay photocopies of the article. A few early guests were perusing it. Sharyn came up to me, a whole stack of them in hand.
“Did you see it yet?” she asked.
“Did you? Did you read it?”
“So it’s a little snarky. They’re like that with everyone.” As my parents came through the door, she stuck copies into their hands.
I made a few small, wince-worthy blunders at the party, and spent too much time trying to impress a group of postcollegiate interns at Charlie Rose who were clearly just there for the free drinks. But it served its purpose, and Sharyn seemed happy with how it went. People was indeed going to run the profile. More good news followed, as the early reviews showed up in the trades—all of them glowing. It was really happening. Faced with the evidence, even that cynical little inner voice was finally starting to quiet.
The only dark spot was that Robert was back in the hospital. We were all told that it was just a minor setback and not to worry. Worried anyhow, I went to visit him. I’d been preparing myself, but the sight of him shocked me. He smiled, nervously. For the first time since I’d known him, he was at a loss for words.
“So how’s that vacation going?” I said.
He laughed, smile easing. “It was splendid up until two days ago.”
He’d been on a California beach, he went on to tell me, wading into the waves, when his lungs had begun filling with fluid.
To make up for his foreshortened vacation, we now took turns extolling the vaguely aquatic theme of the room, cataloging everything from the peaceful East River view to the aquamarine hue of the visitors’ couch to the waterworks of the lung machine itself, which, as we spoke, was sucking reddish liquid from his chest through a long plastic tube and into a burbling plastic tank at the foot of the bed. The lung problem, he said, was correctable by surgery. There was a chance it wouldn’t work, he admitted, and his eyes shone as he said it, but he’d come through worse. I asked if he had family coming, and he said he’d ordered his mother not to, figuring he’d be out of the hospital by the time she would have gotten here; and that besides, he had his authors to keep him entertained.
“So entertain me.” He made a gesture like asking a waiter for the check. “Write something!”
3.
Robert’s memorial service was held on September 10, 2001, eight days before my novel’s release. It was a star-studded, though brief, affair in the auditorium of a midtown social club. Afterward, Bill and I retreated to a low-key restaurant, Bill talking loudly about how fake the whole thing had been, how disgusted Robert himself would have been. Bill was outdrinking me but even so I was surprised how quickly he’d gotten drunk. He went to the bathroom for the second time and I ordered another drink, hoping to catch up. I almost wished, that afternoon, I could have been outraged over the loss of Robert, too, but really all I could feel was gushing gratitude, for having had the brief chance to have been the man’s friend, for the whole HarperCollins juggernaut he’d marshaled on my book’s behalf, for the simple fact that here I was, hanging out with my savvy, preppie friend and agent a week before my first novel’s release. It would be a long time before I’d learn that in the bathroom Bill was calling his dealer, arranging a buy; that when he hurriedly paid and left, it would be to smoke crack all night; that he’d keep right on using, and disintegrating, from there.
The next morning I was getting ready to leave my parents’ apartment in Brooklyn for the airport when my father turned on the radio. We climbed the fire escape to the roof and watched the first tower burn. A cloud of white pages had fluttered all the way across the river and overhead. I thought they might be messages from the terrorists, but when my father caught one, it was just legalese. Fearing the possibility of chemical weapons, we went back downstairs and watched the rest of the catastrophe on cable TV. With the first collapse, amid the senseless snuffing of all those lives and all the rest of the sickening loss, I registered a faint pop within, as everything I’d been filling my head with this last, banner year snapped away like an idle minute’s daydream.
“There goes your novel,” my father said, in a dry little voice I recognized anew.
I watched the second one fall, then went and lay down. My very loss was meaningless compared to those who’d lost for real. Then I went out and walked around, trying to volunteer for something like everyone else.
No sooner were the politicians and pundits and media makers back at their posts than they were retooling for the grim new era. Roger Rosenblatt and Graydon Carter proclaimed “the end of irony,” and good riddance. President Bush and Mayor Giuliani exhorted citizens to patriotic acts of shopping. Flag-filled, “keep America rolling” commercials for cars and pickup trucks began rolling out over the airwaves. Few were in the mood for certain complex emotions with regard to consumerism, as felt by a group of fictional trendspotters making the best of their glittering, supercool, doomed little world.
A couple of reviews, over the coming weeks, deemed the book prophetic, though more didn’t fail to mention its unfortunate untimeliness, and even some of the raves read more like obituaries (“a sharply observant relic of the recent past”). I toured the country, observed by my fellow plane passengers with suspicion and occasionally returning the sentiment. Here and there bookstores offered a modest turnout; many were empty. In Seattle, I read with the writer Rabih Alameddine, who’d been having a far worse time than me in the airports, and whose tour after that night was being canceled altogether. HarperCollins, in my case, cut its losses and pulled the second advertising round it had planned. People magazine pulled my profile, because of its mention of a bomb scene in the novel, which they felt, under the present circumstances, might offend sensitive readers. The Details photospread (mercifully, in this case) was reduced to a single page, a few lines about me and the novel running over a picture of the top half of my head, my eyes peeking over the bottom of the page—no 80s garb visible at all.
There were no national television appearances, but through sheer tenacity, Sharyn got me a couple of local cable spots in New Jersey and Connecticut, and I was determined to make her proud. I rode alone in a car service to the latter, a daytime talk show in a sound studio out in the middle of an industrial park, and waited to go on in a small green room with an Asian-American girl who played the cello. They called me up to the stage and sat me down with the host and hostess, their faces caked with makeup, which I found amusing until I looked up at the monitor and saw that onscreen they seemed rosily healthful, whereas I, sans makeup, looked either like I was bound for the crypt or had just risen from one. With only seconds to go before we went live, the hostess turned to me and said her first question was going to be what I had to say to people who were saying my novel was irrelevant.
I gave her my most winning smile. “How about a different first question?”
(All images courtesy the author)
Virginia Woolf took copious notes before she wrote her novels, as did Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov (his notes on index cards). William Faulkner scribbled his outline for A Fable on a wall which his wife tried to paint over. Joseph Heller created an extensive spreadsheet for the correspondences between various plots in Catch-22.
And of course there are many other points along the continuum. Italo Calvino started from an image and then expanded it. “If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph, my last page first, and then I go back and work towards it,” says Katherine Anne Porter. And writers’ processes may be regarded differently by themselves than by others. George Eliot may have been prompted by the serial format of Middlemarch to unify her novel more than it otherwise would have been, but she nevertheless considered her work more as “experiments in life” than “moralized fables, the last word of a philosophy endeavoring to teach by example,” as Henry James remarked of her work.
The divide exists with equal prominence in more mass market or “genre” schools. There the archetypal planner might be someone like J.K. Rowling, who extensively outlined the Harry Potter series, or John Grisham, who reportedly outlines each of his books prior to writing them. Stephen King, on the other hand, thinks it’s “dishonest” to pre-determine a plot, and William Gibson dislikes planned writing, which he considers to smack of “homework.” Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem likened his writing process to “dipping a thread in a liquid solution of sugar; after a while crystals of sugar begin to settle on the thread, and it grows thicker and thicker, it puts on flesh, so to speak,” and this is reminiscent of what fantasy author Neil Gaiman says of his novels: that they “accrete.” Lem’s description is reminiscent of what Stendhal says in his deliciously acute Love of the idealization involved in passionate love. When a twig is left in the salt mines, Stendhal writes, it eventually emerges utterly sheathed in delicate, interlacing crystals. In the same way, a person in love encloses their beloved in a seamless vestment of imagined perfections (never, however, with less ground in reality than the shape of the crystals have in the topography of the underlying twig). Perhaps writers like Lem need to idealize their work before writing it.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, love, lunacy and poetry are all related, and so of course Delphic prophecy of old is practically the picture of divine inspiration. The idea of divine madness possessing poets and prophets (and I include novelists under these grand rubrics) is an old one. Kalidasa, the Indian poet, is said to have had the sigil of inspiration painted on his tongue by the goddess, after which the waters of creativity simply poured forth. Madness and divine inspiration here are opposed to calm, clear, intellectual rationality and planning.
The planner William Faulkner said, after all, that this is precisely what he did with As I Lay Dying: “I simply imagined a group of people and subjected them to the simple universal natural catastrophes, which are flood and fire, with a simple natural motive to give direction to their progress.” And it was a book for which he claimed to know practically every word prior to writing anything down. More broadly he claimed of each of his books that “there is always a point…where the characters themselves rise up and take charge and finish the job — say somewhere about page 275.”
Dostoevsky wrote his extensive notes no doubt because his works had to illustrate complex philosophical ideas like the “positive idea of beauty” in The Idiot, or the possibility of acting beyond morality in Crime and Punishment.
Pantsing vs. planning, properly understood, is not a debate at all. Every writer I know (and I know several dozens) has their own methods. The right way is whatever works. I am mostly a pantser because, as suggested in the article, I need to tell myself the story to know its contours.
When possible, I d plan in advance, but I frequently can only predict what will happen a few chapters ahead of where I am. Then again, does that make me a secret planner? A hybrid? Might it be, not mutually exclusive choices, a continuum along which each writer finds their own place along the line?
Honest novelist search his unconscious mind and try to find out meaning for his life.All writing is write for self interest Those who write for fame and money is not honest writing. Novel must first and last satisfy to writer don’t care it satisfy to readers .
“]Proust] claims, indeed, to have possessed no imagination at all, though this remark likely ought to be taken about as seriously as Montaigne’s claims to a poor memory and and dull storytelling ability.”
On the contrary, both writers showed the acute insight into their limitations and lack of ability that the author of this piece clearly lacks.
What a woefully unoriginal and inaccurate article.
Other commenters have pointed to the false dichotomy drawn here, betraying a total lack of nuance and understanding of the complex back-forth writing process.
But moreover, the author does major injsutice to the authors cited by basically getting it wrong in most of his examples with simplistic reductionism and inaccurate portrayals by the author of each writer cited. I’m not sure the author did his research at all, and just cherrypicked quotes from each writer that seemed to fit into his broad-brushtroke depiction.
One example that immediately struck me is the lazy and inaccurate depiction of James Joyce. Biographies of James Joyce and research into Ulysses would show that Joyce planned and researched into the minutae detail of his work.
Got to this site and article through ALDaily… and won’t be visiting themillions again if this is the quality of the articles.
Oren C, surely accusing this article of reductionism is reductionist in itself. The article reports on an artistic debate, and provides evidence for both sides. Maybe Joyce planned, but he also said ‘don’t plan’. Other contradictions like this are listed in the article.
I’m surprised by the clarity of GRR Martin’s analysis of the question. He is more thoughtful and honest than King, who calls planning an immoral act. In fact, people favour the method that works for them. Whether it works for the good of the final work is for the reader to decide.
The author’s description of James Joyce rings true, How much planning does it take to produce a novel with no discernable plot, no dramatic arc, and no basic structure beyond a random walk through the English dictionary as well as Dublin. Another commentator opined that Joyce did extensive research. How so? He wrote Ulysses in Paris, without Wikipedia, and set it in Dublin. He seems to have had an extraordinary memory of the city. But, in the final analysis, the book is, in my opinion, unreadable gibberish.
” How much planning does it take to produce a novel with no discernable plot, no dramatic arc, and no basic structure beyond a random walk through the English dictionary as well as Dublin.”
I respectfully submit that what you would seem to find the best about reading “The Novel” is not what Joyce does (nor is it what he tries to do) in Ulysses. But the same could be said of any number of fine books the spiritual and intellectual godfather of which being L. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
“The Novel” is a capacious form; why should the thrilling possibilities of narrative be restricted to the good old shape of the campfire-tale? To reassure the bourgeoisie? If you enjoy reading thinly-veiled rehashes of Goldilocks/ Cinderella/ Little Red Riding Hood, that’s fine… but surely you can allow that there are other ways that appeal to other types of reader? And that not all of these readers/writers are idiots (or phoneys) simply because they don’t share your tastes?
I find, these days, that there’s a red hot strain of totalitarian intolerance, found in discussions of Art and bred by the corrosive over-confidence of the Consumer, who knows so absolutely what she/he likes but confuses that kind of knowing with knowing what is good. You’re not a professional critic, of course, so it’s no sin that you haven’t made much of a case here.
Re: “structure”: Ulysses is one of the most famously “structured” books in English; Joyce makes his über-anal acolyte Anthony Burgess (who structured his novels like sheet music) look slapdash in comparison. You need to actually *know* a book before you can get too specific in tearing it down.
PS Here’s one version of structure in Ulysses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_schema_for_Ulysses
Perhaps I could have been clearer by stating, “I find Ulysses to be….” instead of, “in my opinion…” Correct, I am not a critic, but rather a writer who appreciates a tightly written narrative, not one that seemly tries to use every word in the English language. Many readers enjoy Joyce, good for them. I find it hard to “know” a book when my eyes glaze over ten pages in. Is it too much to ask for sentences that actually get somewhere instead of running on for pages? For some sort of point to a story? For clear prose, even if sophisticated. What is the elevator speech summarizing Ulysses? What is it about anyway? And, if Ulysses is a classic, perhaps the classic novel, why isn’t Finnegan’s Wake, which is more of the same, not? In my books, I try for an interesting, complex story line and language an educated reader can appreciate. For me, Joyce does none of this.
To each their own, of course, but I have written novels both with extensive outlines/plot lines and without, and the “pantsers” approach has yielded infinitely more creative and interesting material, for me as well as the reader. I’m of the camp that it all derives from character, and every morning I ask the question, what will these characters do and/or what will happen to them today? One can, and must, edit after the fact, but along the way, great surprises that make better stories. Cheers.
@Ed Cobleigh
Please post a link to an excerpt from your material, Ed. I’m curious.
My website is http://www.edcobleigh.com. Or you could click on my name on the original post, both will take you my site with the usual stuff and links to my books on Amazon. You might get a few grins from my blog about finding Hemingway in Paris. Feedback is always welcome, perhaps not heeded, but welcome all the same.
Ed
The atrocious right wing claptrap of your politics aside, I can see that you have a good ear for storytelling. You know how and when to deploy the unexpected, particularizing detail. But your Art is essentially oral… the Art of the campfire… transcribed to the page. There are at least a dozen right-wingers who seem to frequent the comment threads, here, who would probably enjoy your stuff immensely: to them I recommend your books.
I remember reading texts like yours in my mother’s copies of The Reader’s Digest. There was quite a market for that stuff, then, and perhaps there is one still. But the “clarity” you trumpet is merely inelegant simplicity. This matches your politics… I can see why you despise (or feel threatened by) Ulysses. I can imagine you aiming a flame-thrower at a first edition of that book with glee. Modernism… Communism… what’s the diff?
I find the intellectual/psychological divide here interesting, Ed. Also hilarious. In the little preface to one of your books, you mention how you (or “we”) tried, and failed, to “save” that part of the world from The Commies. The Commies won (against tremendous odds) and, years later, we see the dire results: Vietnam does business with the rest of the world, just like Ireland, or Norway, or Texas, or Red China (and with less corruption than Chicago).You had a proud hand in the killing of c. 2 million Vietnamese civilians in an effort to avert that “terrible” outcome….?
No, Ulysses is not for you.
Steven,
Thanks for your comments. You are correct, War for the Hell of It was written in a.coversational tone. When folks tell me the book sounds as if the reader and I are sharing drinks and tales at the Officer Club bar, I know I’ve nailed it. You are also right in that there is a market for such. The book has sold over 13,000 copies.in 8 countries, and counting.
The Pilot is something else again, a novel with a layered story. Some readers follow the plot twists, some can’t. Take the (short) time required to read it. I offer a money back garauntee, if you don’t enjoy the book, I’ll refund your costs. Is it oral art, I certainly hope so. I read every line aloud before I go final.
My politics are anything but right wing, I’m a dedicated independent. I vote for the best choice on offer at the time. This year it’ s Hilary. In the past, it has been, at times, Carter, Clinton, and Obama.
Ed
Actually, you provide a perfect little lesson in the difference between the naive Art of the campfire tale and the great ambiguities of the Higher Art embodied by a genuinely complex (and subversively funny) text like Ulysses. Ulysses functions, essentially, above the venal con of Society; Joyce’s witty and prolonged assault on the institutions that oppress us in the name of Morality (aka Money) and Order (aka Power) indicate, first of all, that he was not duped by the venal cons that keep us in line. And every great novel/ novelist works in a hierarchy that *begins above* “Society” in order to sing its Truths against Society’s age-old cons.
But your Talents (like many Writers’), Ed, work from within the Illusions of the Society Joyce preemptively anticipates and rejects. What you do, then, is: rather than supplying Propaganda’s Antidote, you amplify and disseminate it. Your Fighter-Pilot/Death Machine books have confirmed the brainwashed beliefs and aspirational feelings of 13,000 and counting. You functioned as a cog in the American Killing Machine that rolled over Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and your books relive your experiences (directly or with padding) as that cog. If these books don’t rage with shame about the horror of being this cog, they are merely propaganda and you have done your part to keep at least 13,000 readers from recoiling in disgust at what American Killing Power has done (and does) in the name of More Power. Just as your colleagues around the world write not-badly-written bilge to support the Evil Inanities of their respective Societies. Even in Russia, I’m sure.
Hilary is as right wing as they come (ditto her terrifying husband, who, among other things, destroyed Yugoslavia to boost his poll ratings; even Reagan didn’t go that far, opting for the invasion of Grenada, for his little poll bump, instead). Obama has drone-killed how many thousands of children as of this morning? That’s the beauty of propaganda: it can make you think Right is Left, Wrong is Right and War Crimes are Humanitarian Interventions. The Republicrats (or is that Demublicans?) are all Far Right. As a “dedicated independent” (sic) you’ve faithfully chosen, each time, one of the TWO (laugh) choices, between a rock and a hard place, that our masters offered. The game is rigged and Joyce knew it. You don’t appear to.
How can you illuminate any reader’s consciousness if you’re so deeply duped yourself? Joyce would have listened to five minutes of any (H or B) Clinton speech and laughed until vomiting. Well at least he would have pitied that poor dupe Carter.
But my larger point is: the possibilities of The Spooky Art are much greater than the often-reactionary pleasures of the Campfire Tale. The possibilities inherent in all Great Art are, in fact, Radical in the fundamental (and etymological) sense of the word. And, again: your aversion to Joyce’s great (and deeply radical) work is telling.
If you think “plot twists” are a measure of literary complexity, try to find a copy of Weldon Thornton’s mammoth “Allusions in Ulysses: A line-by-line reference to Joyce’s complex symbolism”.
You are playing less than patball to Joyce’s champion game (not to flatter you with this allusion or anything…. laugh).
Reading list:
http://www.michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html
http://literarylondon.org/the-literary-london-journal/archive-of-the-literary-london-journal/issue-3-1/london-language-and-empire-in-oxen-of-the-sun-of-james-joyces-ulysses/
My only thought is never study books on how to write unless they are by a well known highly published writer, and as my major influence always said, “Whatever it takes to get the coon.”
Dear Steven Augustine,
Just wanted to let you know that you are a patronizing moron since you’re so obviously incapable of seeing how you come across with your ludicrous verbosity, or of recognizing the obvious stupidity of your positions.
There are many canonical writers who held conservative views. Your insane idea that aesthetic superiority is somehow tied to looking at the world like your obvious master and arch-moron Chomsky, is truly deranged as well as fundamentally stupid.
I don’t know anything about Ed other than what’s written here but you seem to intimate he is a Vietnam vet. Far better men than you gave their lives to preserve our freedoms. And no, Vietnam is not Chicago. I have been there and it is still a Communist hellhole but I don’t expect a Chomskyite Pol Pot-loving denialist like you to even begin to understand.
Good day.
“Far better men than you gave their lives to preserve our freedoms.”
Nice! I haven’t heard a line like that (without a laugh-track) since Nixon was in office! Your “freedoms” to cheer on your Gubmint as it serial-blitzkriegs defenseless nations to acquire and/or protect corporate markets and assets? Or your “freedoms” to inhale deep-fried Snickers? Because, like, you were afraid the Vietcong (like the Iraqis) had long-distance canoes…? (gets out map of Earth)
“Your insane idea that aesthetic superiority is somehow tied to looking at the world like your…”
Nah, I implied that aesthetic *competence* is tied to elegant, inventive, cliché-free writing. The right wing claptrap was addressed as a separate issue, you big old cuddly flag-wavin’ thang! You aren’t sharp but you do sparkle!
Um, but what I really want to know is how you feel about “Ulysses”…? I take you for more of a “Portrait of the Artist…” fan, though. Close…?
“The right wing claptrap was addressed as a separate issue, ”
Um. No it wasn’t. Maybe you should read your own claptrap.
“Joyce would have listened to five minutes of any (H or B) Clinton speech and laughed until vomiting.”
You know that how?
I repeat. There are many great canonical novelists who held conservative, even ultra-conservative views.
You were trying to conflate aesthetic appreciation for Joyce with a left-wing worldview. It’s asinine. Just admit you’re wrong and that you feel superior to the vet.
By freedoms I mean those that do not exist in Vietnam or Cuba or North Korea, such as the righto to freedom of expression, the right to freedom of assembly, the right to a vote. The right–this ones for you, sparkly–to be openly gay.
Since I have lived in both Vietnam and Cuba, I know what I’m talking about. You?
The better men than you are the ones who fought the wars that brought the expansionist Soviet bloc and its allies down in the end, thus freeing half a billion people from brutal tyranny (see above). Same goes for those who fought Hitler and Hirohito.
Too bad they failed in Vietnam. And it wasn’t canoes. Once the VC took over it was boat people, it was death camps. But you don’t want to see that side of the equation.
Ulysses, actually, by far. Dubliners a distant second.
J-Babe:
The distinction I was making was between a minor writer who swallows boilerplate nationalist propaganda and regurgitates it as commercial prose, and the other species of writer capable of seeing through the fog and creating prose useful in leading the reader out of society’s labyrinth of seductions, double-think and outright lies. I wasn’t, therefore, arguing that a less-conservative writer will write better, or more fancy prose: I was arguing that a clued-in writer (eg Joyce) will help to create clued-in readers. Sorry I didn’t make that clearer for you, chum. Hope it’s clear now. I can type more slowly if you prefer.
“Since I have lived in both Vietnam and Cuba, I know what I’m talking about. You?”
And Ohio is full of closeted members of the Klan; should I trust their appraisals of the pros and cons of living in Ohio? Laugh.
One of my friends, Khue, was born in Berlin, of Vietnamese parents. She’s been going to Vietnam, on vacations, roughly once every two years or so since she was fairly young. Her chief complaint was always about how difficult it was, for her (as a German, essentially) to relate to most of her Vietnamese relatives there (especially when she’s over there for longer spells). She never mentioned it being a “hell-hole”… she often said it was “Gorgeous”… whereas, on the other hand, I *know* Chicago is a hell-hole, and I haven’t been there in 20 years!
So maybe the Vietcong should have saved the US from the inhuman depredations of Late Phase Capitalism? I mean, as long as we’re granting governments carte blanche to use carpet-bombing as a tool of social engineering.
Or is there only *one* government that’s so special that we allow them to get away with war crimes like that….?
Which passage in Ulysses is your fave? The part where Joyce heaps praise on men who order the mass-murder of innocent women, men and children for political gain… or the part where he praises the Dupes of such men?
As I thought.
You don’t actually know what you’re talking about. You’ve never lived under communism nor probably even visited a communist regime.German pals notwithstanding, you’re just another provincial American.
What’s really amusing–no, sad–is that you praise cliche-free writing but you’re whole spiel on here with its am-I-typing-slow-enough and it’s look-at-me-I’m-so-much-clever-than-you-are nonsense is the antithesis of honest, hard thinking on the issues you raise.
You’re all cliche, all pose, far more so than the vet with his campfire yarns. You’re just repeating Chomskyite agitprop of the kind you can hear recited by the legions of drones in any undergrad dorm, expressed in an obvious and unfortunate attempt to mimic Vidal.
I think your tired combination of patronizing superiority and abysmal ignorance plus a measure of cruelty is far more likely to have made Joyce throw up than any speech by Hillary. (Not to mention the overtly political and reductionist reading of his own text!)
Meanwhile in Tehran they just hanged a few more people for the crime of being gay. Meanwhile in Hanoi my friend, uh, who lives there and is, uh, actually Vietnamese, and who can’t vote and has no right to say what she wants and lost half her family to communist labour camps, well she just woke up at 4 am and put her whole family on a scooter to get to work, including her 11 year old who has to sell trinkets all day because school’s not in the cards for him. In the worker’s paradise. But hey, your German pals says all’s “gorgeous” there so life’s got to be great under the red star . . . pass the barf bag.
But at least it’s good to see that you’ve rethought and appear to be retracting your idiotic position that great novelists are all left wing ideologues. Because they’re really not.
War crimes? From a certain moral perspective all war is a crime. But if great literature teaches us anything it’s that hard choices have to be made in an imperfect world.
“A hesitating soul, taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.”
J-Babe:
Well, you clearly don’t like me but I like you a lot. I love how one eye of yours is that much bigger than the other (giving you a visionary appearance)… and, also, that vein that bulges in your forehead (all the time). But, to get to your philosophically heavy investigation of Life…
Indeed, J, the world is not a Disney ride. It’s not a Disney ride in Chicago, it’s not a Disney ride in Detroit, it’s not a Disney ride in the Appalachians or across a sizeable chunk (if not the overwhelming majority) of the US of A, just as it’s not a Disney ride in Tehran (um, is Tehran run by “Commies” now, J?). Yes, J, an 11-year-old in Vietnam has to sell trinkets (much like an 11-year-old in Compton has to sell drugs)… isn’t that pretty much Capitalism at work?
Which is why I left the US in 1990. I fled for a Social Democracy. Much more civilized than living in a full-on Capitalist Gulag. University educations are essentially free, here… not so in the US. Generous maternity leave, long holidays, socialized health care (and not only did my Wife and I get excellent, high-tech, prenatal care for the nine months before our Daughter arrived, but we also had doctor and two midwives AND a birthing suite to ourselves on the big day and a follow-up house-call from the doctor… I think we paid the equivalent of 200 bucks, in total)… all thanks to the lingering spirit of Socialism!
I’m suspicious of the bourgeois-underpinnings of most so-called “Communists”, you know, but Social Democracy has been very good to me. Even when YOU aren’t supposedly living in Vietnam and Cuba (why didn’t you throw Beijing in, while you were at it?) and “reading Ulysses”, you live in the Third World, in comparison. Where you are “free” to go homeless at any minute.
Speaking of which, I’m more on the Parenti “functionalist” (AND “structuralist”) side of the debate than a Chomskyite “structuralist”. Parenti’s lectures on the age-old struggle between “the few” and “the many” are eye-opening. You, J… you’re a member of “the many” who has been trained, like a little dog, to yappingly “protect” the interests of “the few”.
“Meanwhile in Tehran they just hanged a few more people for the crime of being gay.”
Nice to see you’ve evolved somewhat since the previous message during which you sneeringly implied that I’m Gay, J! Or were you flirting? But my Wife (a ferner!) is very pretty, J. So forget it (though I’m sure there are some who are into your type). And if I *were* Gay you’d probably be too… you know. “Dinky”.
“War crimes? From a certain moral perspective all war is a crime.”
Logically speaking, therefore, the country waging the most Wars (technically speaking they’re blitzkriegs/ invasions, since a “war” is between two nations with actual armies) at any given time is the biggest criminal, no? Go on, J. Put two and two together. I’ll wait for you. I know you can do it…
(or maybe not)
See ya! Peace, Babe!
PS What are you wearing right now? Are you even wearing pants?
Actually, Faulkner outlined ‘A Fable’ on SEVERAL walls.
There is a parallel between the West & East. Western paintings traditionally were carefully planned & executed; Japanese & Chinese painting were spontaneous and followed Zen principles (in addition to archery and swordsmanship, painting is also a traditional Zen discipline).
The idea continues into such things as microscopes: the critical aspect of a microscope is the lens. The Germans and Japanese dominate the market. The Germans make lenses very carefully and expensively, and reject few; the Japanese make many lenses quickly and cheaply, test them, and reject most of them.
What is interesting, the resulting quality and price of the microscopes are about the same…
I liked this article. Anytime you categorize, of course, you can argue things aren’t so black and white. Still, it’s fun to know which authors outline and know an ending before starting, and which don’t.
I don’t know much about writing, so I found this article very interesting. It displays several different approaches. Starting with a plan means to first draw a sketch, then fill in the details. But you can also start drawing from a chosen point without any sketch, complete the work part by part, then polish the result. To me, the second approach is more fun, but will often lead to dead ends.