Writing

Nov 16 2011

Nicole Krauss on writing

Robert Birnbaum sent around a link to his 2010 interview with Nicole Krauss (author of Great House) and I found it fascinating.  In particular, I found Krauss’s thoughts on writing intriguing.  The exchange below offers insight into why writers write; what makes them tick to use a cliché:

Cover of "Great House: A Novel"

Cover of Great House: A Novel

RB: Do you challenge yourself? For instance, do you set yourself to write about things that you haven’t written before or in a way that you haven’t previously? Ideas first or the process?

NK: For me writing is a long process of wandering and getting lost. I have no sense at all, setting out, what I am going to write. I think that will always, more or less, be the nature of my process. I can’t imagine being the type of writer who has a blueprint or a plan in advance that I more or less follow. Setting out, everything has to be unknown. I find that this allows very interesting and unexpected things to happen. It becomes an intuitive process, discoveries are made. That’s why writing has held my interest all these years, why it remains one of the only things in life that doesn’t finally bore me. If I knew what I was going to make in advance, and was equipped with all of the insight in advance, why would I pursue the project?

RB: This way of looking at things or being seems to be at odds with the planning for and of nurturing of children. Organization and planning are a great part of parenting

NK: Right.

RB: Is writing like bungee-cord jumping for you?

NK: I’m not sure what that means. But planning is certainly part of parenting. But intuitively responding to one’s child as he changes is even more critical. Being open to who he is, what there might be to learn from him, and how it might be possible to help him find the most comfortable way to live in the world as himself.

RB: What I am trying to get at is—I am not well organized, I always forget something—

NK: I understand. Life is filled with so many responsibilities, and limitations to who and what we can be. Unfortunately life is not an endless exercise in self-reinvention. You become who you are. You are formed by forces that bring you up into the world and you change, but not in epic or monumental ways, I don’t think. Or not very often, at least. Writing has always been for me the opposite of that. In my work I can become anyone. Inhabit any character. I can express all kinds of things that I might not otherwise think or be able to express. Everything is possible. That can be terrifying, but ultimately I think it’s thrilling and is the reason I continue to write.

 

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Oct 29 2011

From wannabe rockstar to successful writer

Interesting piece on how author Andy Ferguson (Crazy U, Land of Lincoln)  ended up writing political journalism:

Andy Ferguson never wanted to be a writer.

Not when he was growing up outside Chicago. His dream was to be a rock star.

“I wanted to be one of the Beatles,” Ferguson said. “Then it turned out they weren’t hiring, and I wanted to be a first baseman for the White Sox.”

Since he couldn’t do either of those he tried fiction but that failed as well eventually leading him to Washington, DC by way of Bloomington, Indiana:

Ferguson planned to write the Great American Novel. He was living in an adobe shack in Albuquerque, N.M., and continually sent pieces of novels and short stories to magazine editors.

“I think they had some kind of automatic system where the minute my envelope came in the office it just flung out a rejection letter,” he said. “So I was papering this little shack I was living in with rejection letters from The Atlantic and New Yorker and The Hudson Review.”

Ferguson came to the conclusion that if he were going to write, he would have to get involved with print journalism. So he moved to Bloomington, Ind. to attend the journalism school at the University of Indiana. At the time, Bloomington was the home of the editor of The American Spectator. Ferguson met him, struck up a friendship, and soon went to work for the magazine. When the publication picked up and moved to Washington, D.C., Ferguson followed.

“So suddenly from my little adobe hut in Albuquerque I found myself right in the middle of Washington journalism,” he said. “It was quite a thrill.”

Seems few writers take an easy path …

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Mar 15 2011

Ten Questions with Author Richard Lewis

Cover of "The Killing Sea"

Cover of The Killing Sea

I am a big fan of Richard Lewis. I Loved his first book and have been enjoying his writing ever since. Maybe it is his unique background, or just his personality, but he brings a different sensibility and viewpoint than most authors – and I enjoy it.

His latest work was self-published as an e-book for reasons discussed below. It might not be economically viable in today’s publishing world but – like all of his books – it is an engaging and entertaining read that I hope you will check out.

BTW, in light of recent events you might want to check out Lewis’s The Killing Sea.  A novel Booklist called “a powerful fictional tale of survival and cooperation in the wake of the 2004 tsunami.”

Richard graciously agreed to answer some questions via email about his books, writing and career.  My questions in bold and his below.

 

Remind us how you ended up writing young adult fiction in the first place.

I wrote a book for adults called THE FLAME TREE, set in Java, against the backdrop of 9/11, about the friendship of the son of American missionary doctors and a Muslim village boy.  It went on submission after 9/11, adult houses passed, but an editor at Simon and Schuster YA read it and loved it.  I had to cut out some sub-plots, but I still think it’s adult.

 

And what led to your self-publishing The Last Witch as an e-book?

Essentially, my four YA novels that S&S published didn’t make them money.  My career as Richard Lewis, YA author, was pretty much done–at least in the traditional publishing sense.  One of the brutal (and impersonal) facts of the business.  I had this novel on my hard drive, and I liked it enough to think it should at least have a chance for an audience.

How do you think the ability of authors to sell directly to readers via e-books changes the self-publishing and standard publishing worlds?
Gosh, so much has ink has been spilled, and pixels aglow on blogs and industry websites, about this topic.  As Yogi Berra said, prediction is hard, especially if it’s about the future, so I’m not sure what is going to happen, but I do think some measure of equilibrium between the two will be reached (by standard publishing I mean standard publishing houses publishing both print and electronic editions).  I’ve been honored to be a part of the traditional world.  There is a sense of self-validation in being print published by a major publisher.

What’s happening in the self-publishing world (whether a printed book or an e-edition) is a growing cacophony of noise, and so it seems to me that clever, dedicated, sly, and at times very loud self promotion is key to standing out. People aren’t going to read you if they don’t know you aren’t there.  Unfortunately, I don’t have that personality. I’m a writer–I love writing stories–well, I hate writing stories because it’s a process of continuous, frustrating, hair-pulling dissonance resulting in many nights of insomnia and grouchy mornings, but I do love it too. I’ve always loved putting together puzzles, and there’s nothing like making a story fit together from out of nowhere. But the process is like having ants crawl around in your brain.

The Last Witch has elements of science, higher math, faith/religion, mysticism, etc. All of these elements have appeared in your previous books. Do you use things that might not have been used directly in previous projects or that you “collected” along the way?

Everything that I’ve ever experienced in my life, or heard about, or read about (and I read a TON of non-fiction, love it) is fodder for my imagination, plus my imagination can come up with things on its own.  Being the son of missionaries, who grew up on Bali where the mystical world is just real as the world you see, add in my education in science and math (only to a first year PhD level before I bailed to go surfing), and that’s just the start of what I have to draw on in making up my stories.

As for the LAST WITCH, I’d been doing a lot of reading in science & religion, and the “new atheism” of Dawkins, Hitchens and the other High Prophets of There is No God, plus I’d read Philip Pullman‘s GOLDEN COMPASS trilogy with its atheistic world view, and so I decided to try my hand on the other side of the ledger, so to speak.  Not that I can write like Pullman, but it was a certain aesthetic & world view I wanted to express for myself in a YA story.   (And I’m doing the same again right now, but in an adult novel).  I was not entirely satisfied with the result, but satisfied enough to let it go out into the world, alone with bag slung over the shoulder, to make its way as best it could.

 

Do you find it a challenge to write from the perspective of a young girl? What helps you capture that voice?

Having a daughter helps an awful lot.

 

What drew you to Central Park as a setting? So famous and yet probably full of little known secrets and facts.

A huge sprawling park full of nooks and crannies (Eden both pure and corrupted) in a huge sprawling city (Gotham and Babylon)?  What a set-up for a fantasy, for all kinds of what-ifs.  I devoured books and websites on the park, scoured it with Google Earth.  And I might add, I’m not the only writer attracted to that place. A colleague of mine, Lesley Livingston, used Central Park as a principal setting in her terrific faerie novel WONDROUS STRANGE

 

Do you write with a particular audience in mind (Americans of a certain age, etc.)?
Nope.  The story shapes itself.  Who reads it, reads it.

 

You like to surf. What comes first writing or surfing?  Do you have a set schedule?

Surf depends on swell, which comes and goes. So if the surf is good, yeah, I probably go surfing before I sit down to write.  I also do a lot of boat trips to outer islands to go surfing.  I don’t write, but I catch up on my reading.  (I can’t wait to get a Kindle and travel with one device with a thousand books on it–but Kindle, and other e-devices, aren’t  available in Indonesia, not just the physical platform, but the downloading service.

 

What is one thing that surprised you about writing YA and something you find frustrating?

Nothing particularly surprising.  Or frustrating for that matter, except for maybe the increasing PR writers are expected to do.

 

What’s next? On to “adult” fiction? Can you give us some insight into what you are working on now?

Oh, adult fiction for sure. Last year I wrote a very adult novel on the 1965 massacres in Bali (over 50000 Balinese massacred by other Balinese as a consequence of a Communist-inspired coup attempt in Jakarta, although it’s more complicated than that).  Impossible to get this book traditionally print published at this moment of upheaval, but there is definitely a niche audience, so I will probably get it e-published later this year.

Right now I’m working on a more commercial project, a kind of post-apocalypse set in the States, from New York to Chicago to Vegas to LA. More info later!

 

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Nov 19 2010

Where Are the Conservative Novelists?

Mark Goldblatt wonders:

You have to wonder, under the circumstances, whether the ambitions of a young conservative novelist would be unreservedly encouraged and diligently nurtured in a contemporary MFA program.

If the answer is no, then the ramifications are profound — and profoundly disturbing. For the issue here runs deeper than the run-of-the-mill ideological browbeating that goes on in college classrooms across the country. Students can always weigh their professors’ rants against more moderate views, and indeed contrary ones, that they hear off campus. But MFA programs now seem to exercise a gatekeeper function. If you don’t pass through one of them, your odds of literary recognition are vastly diminished. It may be that we’re cutting off future generations of conservative novelists at the knees.

That’s not fair. Fairness, though, is a secondary consideration. If conservatives are being denied entrée into the halls of literary production — not by a sinister gentlemen’s agreement but by an inbred ideological disdain — then what we’re cutting off is not just a group of writers, or a political agenda, but an entire sensibility.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

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May 21 2010

Is the Book the Body or the Soul?

J. Mark Betrand ruminates on the End of the Book debate.  I particularly liked this passage:

Book is a shifty word, denoting both the physical object and the content within. As an author, I think of myself as having “written books,” when in fact I’ve typed hundreds of pages of fiction and nonfiction into various word processing files, e-mailed them to my editors, and only much later seen them take physical form. To say all that, however, seems pedantic. To describe myself as, say, a “content provider,” however fitting the term might seem, strikes me as something akin to insult. I write books.

And I’m a lover of books, too, unaccustomed to making a body/soul distinction where the printed word is concerned. The book is the object and its contents, inseparable in my mind. I dwell in a house lined with shelves, most of them bowed by the weight of their printed content. Beautiful books and ugly ones. Read and unread. Objects of comfort, outrage, derision, admiration. Some pristine and others scarred. Some bound in leather, some in paper (at least one in shagreen). Prized and cheap side by side. Tangible things, each with a history. I can tell you where they came from, where they’ve been. The ones I sought out and the ones I discovered unexpectedly. The ones kept under glass in dark bookstores and, all too often, the ones overnighted from the clean, well-lit warehouses of Amazon. All of that will disappear when the book’s body does.

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