All archived and tucked away, quite safe. But after long deliberation I have to face facts:  I can’t (1) find time to contribute here regularly; (2) stop worrying about being unable to find time to contribute here regularly.  So I’m shutting Storytelling down. That means there will be no more dynamic content here, but what you will find:

• a way to contact me (link to the right)
• links to other places where I leave an update on occasion (links to the right)
• a place where you can find all the published bits and excerpts available for download (also to the right)
• finally, a couple faq. It’s still pretty rough.
• selected older posts (below; this will take me a while to sort out, but if you’re interested, please check back once in a while)

I owe my readers a great deal. I appreciate every one of you and I am sincerely thankful for your support of my novels.  Which are all still in print, by the way.

Rescued Posts

• craft
  • dealing with a creepy character
  • pov
  • The reality of the fictional person
  • the story arc according to Cinderella
  • writing gesture
• cranky pants
  • …to say nothing of the dog (proofreading)
  • Open letter to Steve Jobs, Part 1
  • Open letter to Steve Jobs, Part 2
  • things to hate about books
• etc
  • authorial confessions
  • heroic and linguistic anachronisms
  • Martin Amis on (what else) genre
  • Shirley Hazzard v. Stephen King
  • Symbolically Stalin
• laugh, or cry.
  • Dear Editor
  • If I had a hammer: or, that opinionated bitch, my muse
  • the bat, the knee, the bicycle helmet and dick, the doctor
• memoir
  • depression
  • the bear in Lincoln Park Zoo
  • what came before; what’s coming
• reviews and interviews
  • Review: Bet Me
  • Review: Loving Frank
  • review: party girl
• surviving the biz
  • Advice for aspiring authors of fiction
  • the midlist/midlife crisis

1. If you ask me a question about some particular plot point in the Wilderness stories, half the time I won’t know which book it happened in. So if you say — ‘you know that time Hannah amputated a leg? — I’ll remember the amputation itself, but not the book it’s in.

2. Hundreds of minor characters, the majority of which only show up once or twice — I forget their names, too.

3. If I pick up one of the early books and open it to a random page, I often have absolutely no memory of writing what I read there. I often am surprised at a turn of phrase. I have asked myself: where did you get that from? And not been able to answer.

4. There are scenes in various novels which I really dislike, and would cut, if I could. In a similar way, I sometimes listen to one of the books on tape and cringe (although not too often) at a word choice.

5. Sometimes an author gets tired of a character. In these cases, a heart attack or carriage accident comes in very handy.

6. Sometimes authors vent their frustrations on characters by giving them a really unpleasant case of hives or a head cold. A character who won’t shut up is easily dealt with by means of a bad case of laryngitis, or simply by getting lost in the woods for a day or so.

7. An author who is sure of his or her audience can explore some of his or her darker impulses and get away with it. Stephen King, for example, has a fascination with nose picking and the products thereof. There are whole paragraphs about this in some of the Dark Tower novels that go to such extremes that I got distinctly nauseated. My personal promise to myself: if I ever get to the point where I am compelled to put stuff like this in a novel simply because I can get away with it, I will quit writing, or see about having my meds changed.

8. When you write a long series of books, you run out of names you like to use for your characters. Sometimes in a fit of desperation you decide to name a new main character Harvey or Harold or Geraldine. This is something like what happens (or used to happen) in big Catholic families, where the first kids were named Mary, Ann, Jean, Carol, Betty, Susan, etc etc and then the parents just gave up and let the older kids name the youngest ones. I personally know somebody whose name is Coco, for this very reason.

9. It’s really hard to keep relative ages and dates straight in a big novel or series of novels. The Mathematician makes charts for me but sometimes even that isn’t enough. So if you think there’s some weirdness about somebody’s age or a date, you may well be right.

10. Anybody who writes for a living reads a lot, and most likely started reading intensively at a fairly young age. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books. Thousands of stories, characters, conflicts, resolutions. Every author sits in front of the blank piece of paper and reaches for the right words to describe what’s happening. How Connie feels when she finds a page ripped out of her high school year book, how Mark reacts when a telemarketer interrupts dinner. Every author reaches for something unique, but simple arithmetic indicates that a lot of what ends up on paper has been there before. A truly original way to describe a sunset? I doubt it. You can work toward a way that’s particular to your character at that moment.

But here’s the thing: Sometimes I worry (and I would guess this is true of most authors) that the really solid image I just put down, or the bit of dialog or description isn’t really mine. My subconscious grabbed it out of the distant past, from a book I read twenty three years ago at age twenty, riding the Clark Street bus on the way to work, a book that I might see tomorrow in the library but not recognize.

It’s no secret that the publishing houses are spending ever less resources on marketing and advertising novels. More and more it’s up to the author to handle these things, and most of us don’t really know how, or really don’t want to. Paperback Writer has an excellent post on how different authors handle (or fail to handle) the necessity of self promotion.

Because it’s the only way to survive, these days. Here’s the reason why:

You sell a book to a particular editor at a particular press. The offer is made, and the agent and the editor start to hammer out the details. Royalties, copyright, all those crucial matters are discussed. Somewhere in the negotiations, the agent asks the editor for details on marketing and advertising. What will the house do to promote the novel? The agent wants specifics: print and internet advertising, ARCs, media promotions.

Here’s where Alice falls into the rabbit hole. Because somehow or another, your novel is unlikely to get any real marketing no matter how enthusiastic the publisher sounded when you were in negotiations. Unless you are already a big, well known name. Then you will get a decent marketing package. There will be product placement in the big chain stores, sometimes special cardboard stands designed specifically for the novel in question, posters, national print advertising, guest spots on talk shows.

Most authors get none of that. Instead, this is what often happens:

A novel comes out in hardcover. The publisher has great hopes for this novel, but they aren’t willing to invest the funds for a real campaign; if the author wants to pay for a publicist of his or her own, great! But the house isn’t going to do it. The sales staff go to meetings with the buyers from big chain stores but they have dozens and dozens of books to pitch, and instructions on which ones to push hardest. They focus on certain novels — the ones by the big names. The chains are conservative, because they too are responsible to their shareholders. They buy lots of the new novel by the big name, and token amounts of the midlist.

From here it spirals downwards.

When the softcover comes out it won’t sell because it’s not in the stores. It’s not in the bookstores because the big chains didn’t order it. The chains didn’t order it because the hardcover didn’t do very well. The hardcover didn’t do very well because the big chains didn’t order it. They didn’t order it because it was clear the publisher wasn’t really behind it, no marketing, no advertising. The publisher didn’t make the effort, because…? That’s the mystery. Publishers these days seem to be indulging in a lot of magical thinking.

Imagine you go into a gardening center and buy a big, leafy, healthy plant. You pay a lot of money for it because by gosh, it’s exactly the kind of plant your neighbors have had such luck with. Once you get home with the plant, you put it in a closet and neglect to water it. A few weeks later you open the closet in the hope that the plant will have doubled in size and be heavy with big beautiful flowers.

Now you are peeved. The plant is dead, and you’re put out because really, if the plant had been any good to start with, it would have taken care of itself and not demanded things like sunlight and water. You clearly made a mistake when you bought that plant. It failed you completely.

That is the situation for hundreds and hundreds of novels. More every year. Every year authors get more inventive — and desperate — about self promotion. I predict wild stunts. Come see the author walking a tightrope twenty stories up, and no net! Can I interest you in this free, glossy full-color five page introduction to her newest novel? Do you think the head buyer for Barnes & Noble might like expensive chocolates?

The publisher and the bookstore chains are responsible to their shareholders; they watch the bottom line and cut back on the cost of things they hope to do without. Authors need to get their books into print and so they grit their teeth and sign on the dotted line. Thus another co-dependent relationship blossoms.

Sooner or later, something has got to give.

Eudaemonia has a very thoughtful post up about what she looks for in a novel, in which she first considers what a few other people have said about their preferences before she explains her own. As I was reading the post — which is beautifully put together and worth the effort — I was thinking about Martin Amis.

Most specifically I half remembered an interview with Amis on Salon. And lo and behold, I found it right where I left it.

Here’s one relevant quote:

Discussing his fiction in an interview with the Paris Review, [Martin Amis] dismissed “story, plot, characterization, psychological insight and form” as merely “secondary interests” compared to a novelist’s prose, little more than the apparatus on which to hang some bitchin’ sentences. So it hardly seems an insult to say that his specialty is not substance, but style.

From “Terror and Loathing” by Laura Miller, Salon 1 April 2008

Then I went back to Lisa’s post and read the comments, and I came across Steve (who writes a weblog called on the slow train). I’m going to quote an excerpt from his comment on Eudaemonia because he has expressed something I have been trying (and failing) to say about the literary genre (as it is represented by Amis) for ages:

I’m afraid modern literary fiction is going the way of orchestral music in the twentieth century–aiming toward such a specialized audience that it alienates virtually everyone else. Just about anyone can enjoy Beethoven or the Beatles, but few can appreciate Alban Berg without years of study. And even then, it can be an ordeal.

I think Steve has hit it on the head, and some evidence of that is provided by Amis himself (passively, I admit). He is a very large presence in the literary genre, but I always wonder how well known he is outside those confines. If you asked ten people at random if they recognized his name, what kind of return would you get? And why this perverse pride in honing his art to a point that it alienates the majority of readers?

In any case, if you are interested you can read more about Amis in a lot of places. For example: the review of his London Fields in the New York Times (calling Amis “fiction’s angriest writer”) and a biography of sorts at The Guardian.

Finally, I repeat my mantra: literary fiction is is just another genre with a self-defined readership and a set of arbitrary conventions. That is, it is not intrinsically better or worse than any other genre. No matter what Amis may think.

If you are yearning for some interesting and quite thought provoking reading, you might go here where Sarah Weinman has collected a list of posts on the most recent iteration of the genre wars (her term). You know, that literary fiction vs. all other fiction thing. Usually a new battle breaks out (as in this case) when a so-called litcrit type takes a swipe at a genre type. Almost always the litcrit type is spewing sour grapes. In this case (the criticism was of Stephen Hunter) I’d have to say the same.

At any rate. Have a look at the links (I especially recommend Laura Lippman’s take on all of this).

Or if you prefer, repeat my mantra (to the right) to yourself.

————————————

And this one from April 2006:

I’ve made the point before (and will make it again) that the distinction between  literary fiction and genre fiction is artificial and has more to do with social and class issues than anything else.  Literary fiction is just another genre,  with its own set of expectations and history and intended audience. Some people would argue that the literary genre is inherently more worthwhile or better than the other genres, but I see those arguments as circular and self-serving.

My take on this whole thing in a nutshell: characterization is crucial, but so is story. That is, plot is not a four letter word. A really good novel will have great characterization, a compelling, well put together plot/story, and in bonus cases, beautiful prose. These three things are not mutually exclusive. I’m raising this topic because I just finished reading James Lee Burke’s newest novel, <em>Crusader’s Cross</em>. I’m not going to do an in depth review, but I will say this: the man has all three crucial points covered: plot, characterization, prose.

There are some writers out there who are quite content as non-literati  and who are both commercially and critically successful. Burke is one of them. Elmore Leonard is another. Both of them write crime fiction, and both are very good at what they do. They deserve general praise and love and lots of readers. But I’m busy wondering how that happens. Why are some authors who write outside the literary genre spared the sneering of the crit-literati? Is it that some genres are lifted into the realm of literature over time? Think of the first big immigration waves from Ireland and Italy, and the discrimination those people had to deal with. Within a couple generations they were running city hall and giving fancy balls. With enough time they lifted themselves into the higher society and took their turns sneering at the new immigrants.