Even here on the Darkling Plain there are beacons of light that, in their turning, cast rays of sunshine across the wasteland of the Forgotten Writer. One such beacon has just flashed its light across my window pane, and so I’d like to take time out from my usual harangue to pay tribute to a fine old American journal, The Sewanee Review. Published by the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and ably edited by George Core, it is one of the nation’s oldest and most distinguished literary quarterlies. And not coincidentally, I suspect, it is the only magazine that for some years now has seen fit to publish this blogger's serious work. As witnessed by the Spring 2012 issue, which opens with a story by your friend Sinbad the Sailor, writing as usual under the pen name of Thomas Bontly.
The story is entitled "Lightning on the Hill," and it comes from my new novel, Legacy of Dreams, which is now in its final (I do hope and pray) revision. The novel covers five generations (fool that I am) of an American family, but this particular story focuses on one year in the life of a young woman who finds herself stranded on her family’s Wisconsin farm. Longing to escape from her dreary life, Gertrude Lantz dreams of becoming a poet like Emilie Dickinson, a novelist like Emilie Bronte, though whether she has the talent to achieve such goals is indeed an open question. Using excerpts from her diary and a few of her poems, the story portrays a tragic incident in the life of the family that changes them all forever. The incident is based on a story my father told me, a local legend from the little town where he grew up, and I had been trying to find a place for it in my fiction for well over fifty years.
This particular issue of the Sewanee, by the way, is volume CXX, number 2. If I remember my Roman numerals correctly, that’s volume 120, as in 120 years of continuous publication. I don’t know what the first issue looked like, but my guess is that the journal hasn’t changed very much over the years. The current issue has a very traditional look, and one that hasn’t changed since Sewanee published my first submission back in 1996. It has a light blue cover made of stiff paper, bearing the name of journal and a selected table of contents. The interior pages are a non-glossy but bright enough white, the printing (by Johns Hopkins University Press) clear and dark. The editing is superb; you will look long and hard before you find a typo, spelling error, or abuse of English grammar anywhere in the magazine. There are no photographs or illustrations and no advertising, except for a few pages at the very back. It is in all respects a feast of words.
Now it’s true that since creative writing programs got their foothold in academia, many universities and colleges have launched literary magazines, most of them edited by graduate students with the input of a faculty adviser. We have such a magazine at my old program, Cream City Review by name. I helped to secure funding for it, served on its advisory board, even published in it a time or two, as did several of my colleagues. By now it’s had a distinguished run of thirty-six years. Like most such magazines, it affects a modern, or excuse me, postmodern look: lots of vivid art work, lots of experimental poetry and prose. Very highbrow, very stylish, very chic. I feel quite sure such a magazine would never publish one of my old-fashioned stories.
So it’s important that there are journals like the Sewanee, where shipwrecked sailors like Sinbad can send their stories with some hope of finding a receptive editor. My first submission, made through my agent at Curtis Brown, the much-missed Emilie Jacobson, was a chapter torn from a novel on which I’d worked long and hard called Lucky’s Blues. Lucky was an aging, alcoholic jazz musician who tries to escape the downward spiral of his life by learning an "honest trade"–shoe repair. The chapter focus on a day when he encounters his ex-wife–a very bitter hour for Lucky, during which he remembers many sins of his youth. Most of the editors who saw the complete novel said they admired the writing and characterization, but felt the story was just too "downbeat" for the current market. That’s downbeat, as in realistic, honest, and true to life.
After thirty or so rejections, I set about excerpting several chapters I thought might work as short stories. "Lucky’s Blues" was the first of these, and Emilie was delighted when it was accepted by the Sewanee Review. Since the paycheck was modest, her commission even more so, I didn’t quite understand at first why she was so pleased by the sale. Later I learned that Sewanee has a special relationship with its contributors. They tend to appear in the magazine again and again, not to the exclusion of new writers, but with the regularity of old friends. Not everything Emilie sent, or I’ve sent since her death, has been accepted. George Core does have his standards, his preferences, his idiosyncracies of taste, and he complains of getting too many submissions and accumulating too much material, so that publication may be delayed for several years. My next published piece in the Sewanee was a memoir and critical perspective on my old mentor and champion, Wallace Stegner. An admirer of Stegner’s work, George asked me to review the next several posthumous collections to appear. I also reviewed other works of fiction in which I took some personal interest, published another extract from Lucky’s Blues, and three brand new stories, including "Lightning on the Hill." Altogether, that just about sums up my out-put for the past fifteen years. Without the Sewanee, my name would’ve entirely faded from the scene.
The magazine has sometimes been criticized as a "southern good old boys’ club," but not all of the writers to appear in its pages are southerners (I’m certainly not), and not all of them are men. They are good writers, however, and many of us are "old," at least in terms of our approach to the arts of fiction, poetry, and criticism. You will find no experimental postmodernism in the Sewanee, and no critical theorizing. What you will find are traditional stories about love and death, hope and despair, good and evil; surprisingly traditional poems that focus our attention on bits of nature, moments of truth, the smaller miracles of life on earth; essays that genuinely care about the literary object and the mind that produced it, the relationship of the individual to the land, and a host of other subjects distinguished by their intelligence and general interest.
And here you thought such magazines had totally vanished from the face of the earth! No, fellow forgotten writers, at least one survives. And that’s why I urge you to obtain a copy of this latest issue of the Sewanee (the one with my story in it, did I mention that?) and devour its contents at your leisure. You can order single copies or a one-year subscription by contacting the Johns Hopkins University Press/Journals Division, PO Box 19966, Baltimore MD 21211. Now whether you, too, will be able to publish your work here, or whether you will need to find your own version of the ideal literary quarterly, I urge you to try. The pay’s not great–you won’t be able to live on it–but the self-respect and gratification you will get from seeing yourself in print, and in such good company, will be sufficient reward. It will be like attending an extraordinary dinner party in the company of scintillating people. After several hours of intensely passionate conversation, you will walk out into the night, guided by the beacons that still light the Darkling Plain, and think strong clean thoughts under a starry sky.
Until next time, mariners.
Sinbad
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
The Not-so-Fine Art of Self-Promotion.
Today, fellow darklings, I thought I’d talk about a subject of considerable importance to the Forgotten Writer, though it concerns an activity I once considered beneath the serious writer’s contempt: the promotion of one’s own work. I suppose I picked up this elitist attitude from writers of the fifties like J.D. Salinger (one of my early gods), who was famously adverse to interviews and other forms of publicity–though it is not known that he disdained the royalty checks his fame brought in. Ernest Hemingway (another god of my youth) once said that a writer could "stoop no lower" than to read his own work aloud for an audience of paying customers. And one of my revered teachers at Stanford told me he routinely turned down publicity appearances with the curt dismissal, "I don’t do that sort of thing."
The view of art animating such contempt implies that a work of art must stand or fall on its own merits, and that anything its author says can only falsify and cheapen whatever one has accomplished. Moreover, it was felt, writers had better things to do with their time than shill their own books; they should be writing more books capable of speaking for themselves. There may even be a notion that history, not momentary popularity, willd determine a literary work’s true value. We all knew of books that had been famous ten or twenty years ago and were now justly forgotten. We also had our list of sacred texts that had slumbered for decades in the budget bins of used book stores and were now considered classics. "What about Moby-Dick?" we’d say. "What about the early Faulkner?"
My attitude began to change when I published my first novel–which, of course, wasn’t done without a great deal of help from other people. In a future blog I intend to write about the champions every young writer needs in order to get her work before the public. But that’s not today’s topic. Today’s topic is how, having published a novel, most writers would like, not just a "fit audience, though few," but an audience extending to the unwashed masses. After all, having found a publisher who is kind enough to put your words in print, you want that noble fellow and his firm to be suitably rewarded. Besides, the fate of your next book may depend the sales record of your last. So just like that, one tosses aside the scruples of a Hemingway or a Salinger, shrugs off the cloak of elitism, and becomes a huckster. At least that’s what I did. Flattered by all the requests I was getting, and assured by early reviews that the book really was pretty good, I began accepting interviews, speaking engagements, bookstore signings, whatever the literary world wanted to throw at me. Often I was scared, sometimes humiliated, rarely gratified. Pimping one’s book was, in those days, a tough way to make a small amount of money.
I remember my first signing at a Palo Alto bookshop in a busy shopping center. I sat at a table with a stack of Competitors in front of me, pen in hand, ready to chat up anyone who stopped to look or buy. There were people in the store, but no one came near my table. I began to feel a bit in the way, like an old sofa in a snazzy new apartment. Some people came in the door, saw me there, and scurried out again. Snubbed! I wanted to crawl under my table and hide. Eventually a couple of my profs and classmates wandered in. The profs all dutifully bought a copy of the book; the classmates mostly grabbed some of the free cookies, gulped down some punch, congratulated me, and left. I don’t think I diminished that pile of books by more than six or eight copies. At three ninety-five a book, royalties at three percent a copy, that came to approximately three dollars and nineteen cents for three harrowing hours in the store. Not what you’d call a great pay-off.
Then there was the radio interview I did at a crowded San Francisco restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. The interviewer, a locally famous radio personality, was ensconced at a round table in the corner, surrounded by his producer, technicians, equipment, and guests. We all got a ten-minute slot between ads and patter, our words masked by the background noise of the hectic restaurant. "So how’d you come to write about a shoe store, Tom?" the personality asked me. "Well, I used to work in one when I was an undergraduate," I told him. "So you used to work in one," the personality said. "That’s great. So what are some the dirty secrets of the biz, Tom? What are some things customers ought to know when they walk in that store?"
I’m not sure how I answered that question, but I could’ve told the interviewer that shoe salesmen were people–sometimes suffering people--who had real lives and interesting stories of their own. But I wasn’t quick enough to say that. Most likely, I mumbled something about the pressure we were under to sell shoe polish and purses. What we called "Up-fronts." "Up-fronts!" the personality said. "Gotta watch out for those up-fronts, folks. They’ll get you every time. Now our next guest . . ." A week later I got a check in the mail for $75 and felt I’d earned every cent of it, even thought I’m pretty sure I hadn’t given the show a full ten-minute segment.
Once I joined the faculty of a Midwestern state university, I had a captive audience, though at first I declined to take advantage of it, regressing to my earlier mode of haughty contempt for self-promotion. It was the mid-sixties and poetry readings were big at our school, a Friday night occasion for kids in psychedelic attire, reefers at the ready, hints of revolution wafting through the air along with puffs of pot smoke. Our poets reveled in the attention they were almost getting; our fiction writers (me and one other guy) stayed away.
But times change, and so do the attitudes they engender. My second novel proved much harder to sell than my first. That was partly because I’d lost my original champion when I left graduate school, and partly because, despite its good reviews and my feeble attempts at promotion, The Competitor hadn’t sold especially well. My old editor departed for greener pastures. My new editor was a kind lady but lacked the older guy’s swat. Then there was that lawsuit, which cost Scribner’s a bit of money (who would’ve thought that shoe salesmen, of all people, would read a book?). But mostly it was because my second novel just wasn’t very good--too hastily written, too clumsily conceived.
You always have to take the quality of the work into account, and sometimes, when you find you can't publish something you wrote, it’s not because the world’s against you. It’s much more likely that the book or story stinks. Even good writers, I was to learn, have a few bad books in them. Of course if you’re like me, you may not be able to tell your good stuff from the bad stuff until it’s too late--until you’ve shown the lousy manuscript to enough agents and editors to besmirch your reputation. Then, when you do, in the natural course of things, write another good book, you have to work extra hard to get someone interested in it.
So it goes for us "mid-list" writers who never give up and keep on writing despite diminishing returns. When my second novel came out in 1974, the air had cleared a bit in the rooms where poetry was read and I agreed to join my colleagues by reading from my new book. Since I had written a novel about rebellious teenagers (The Adventures of A Young Outlaw), full of sex and violence, obscenity and profanity, with a wry, satiric tone appropriate to the times, the kids loved it. Their enthusiastic reception gave me a fatal taste for applause. The book, however, came out to mediocre reviews. Younger readers (those under thirty, attuned to the times) tended to understand what I’d tried to do. Older readers (especially most reviewers) were shocked and appalled. The novel died an early, ignominious death, but not before it gave me some wonderful moments of reader-adulation. "Finding the right audience" thus became the mantra I lived with.
But that is easier said than done, since generations come and go, taste and styles change accordingly, and the writer himself keeps growing older and wiser, or maybe just foolish in different ways. In any case, I no longer wanted to write about adolescent rebellion. Having been a full-fledged academic for well over ten years, I wanted to write something a little more highbrow; I wanted to show off my erudition. I also wanted to write about England, where I'd spent a magical year in my impressionable youth. And so in due course (after two or three more failed attempts) I produced a novel called Celestial Chess, which is about a haunted manuscript in the library of a Cambridge college. The narrator is an ironic, cynical American scholar who finds his life and outlook changed by his research into a remarkable thirteenth-century poem by one Geoffrey Gervaise, a mad monk who imagines he is playing chess with the devil. Alternating chapters take us back to the thirteenth century to glimpse parts of Gervaise’s tragic story. The intervening chapters, set in contemporary England, employ a more comic tone. Even if I say so myself, the novel is a fairly intricate and elegant piece of sustained irony, and this time I was not disappointed by its reception. Critics tended, on the whole, to like its mixture of modes, readers enjoyed the story, and I got many fan letters from readers young and old.
Once again I plunged myself into the readings, autograph parties, interviews, and speaking engagements, usually going no further afield than the twin nexus of the Wisconsin’s literary community, Madison and Milwaukee. I suppose I was a local celebrity for, oh, all of six or seven months. Then the wave receded and I was left on the shore, straining to come up with a novel that might do as well. The problem, I soon realized, was that I was now type-cast as a writer of fantasy, which wasn’t what I’d set out to do at all. I had little interest in dungeons and dragons, witchcraft and sorcery. What I’d been trying for was a witty, philosophical parable in the manner of Iris Murdoch, one of my current favorites. But why wasn’t anyone able to see that?
You see, attempts at self-promotion and self-definition don’t really help readers to see your work more clearly. Or maybe the readers see what’s really there, and you are the one with illusions. In any case, my career floundered for another ten years, was sidetracked by various administrative tasks (always a great temptation for the writer in distress), and I didn’t make it back into print again until 1989, with a pseudo spy-thriller called The Giant’s Shadow. I say "pseudo," because once again the generic husk of the novel was, to my mind, a mere convenience. It’s heart was once again pure academic psycho-drama. A middle-aged scholar, as grim and gray as any imagined by Graham Greene, finds himself recruited, while on a sabbatical in Germany, by the CIA, who want the scholar’s help in smuggling his old friend, a radical poet, out of the Soviet Union. Whatever the novel’s merits (and there were many, I think), my timing was atrocious. Barely a month or two later, John LeCarre would upstage me with The Russia House, and little more than a year after that, the Reunification of Germany and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union would render the Cold War spy novel effectively obsolete.
So much for tapping the popular pulse. Though my Giant did sneak off with at least one prize–a selection by the Reader’s Digest Book Club, which, as embarrassing as it might be for an academic, did yield a satisfyingly large paycheck. And it came, I assure you, with absolutely no promotional efforts on my part. My cagey old editor had simply milked a connection and the deal was done. The Giant now lives on in a single volume with three other condensed novels that will never leave the bins of used book shops.
We now fast-forward to the 21st century, mostly because nothing much of importance happened to me or my work during the nineties. Oh yes, I wrote, but to no avail. Novels I believed in, novels I considered at the time my best work ever, were routinely declined by polite and often apologetic editors. "This is exactly the kind of novel I like to read," one such editor wrote me, "but not, unfortunately, the kind I can afford to publish any more." Aside from admiring this fellow’s honesty, one can only wonder at the state the literary world has reached when editors must forego books they like for books they have no real interest in. But times, as I think I’ve said before, do change, and it is now the task of the Forgotten Writer who wishes to leave his darkling plain to determine how he can best promote, or hucksterize, his novels in the Brave New World of . . . you guessed it, the internet.
But I see this has become a much deeper subject than I anticipated when I first set out to chart its waters. We will need at least two installments to fathom all that lies below us and around us. And so I will put off for another blog my next installment, in which the resourceful old dog tries to learn from his younger, more nimble competitors, and sets out to avail himself of the opportunities now available to writers desperate enough to seize them. In a phrase, we shall go a-waltzing Matilda on the cybernetic dance floor.
Until then, fellow darklings, don’t forget that your comments and indeed even your own stories are welcome in this space, and if you don’t interrupt me soon I may eventually run out of gas.
Yours, Sinbad
Today, fellow darklings, I thought I’d talk about a subject of considerable importance to the Forgotten Writer, though it concerns an activity I once considered beneath the serious writer’s contempt: the promotion of one’s own work. I suppose I picked up this elitist attitude from writers of the fifties like J.D. Salinger (one of my early gods), who was famously adverse to interviews and other forms of publicity–though it is not known that he disdained the royalty checks his fame brought in. Ernest Hemingway (another god of my youth) once said that a writer could "stoop no lower" than to read his own work aloud for an audience of paying customers. And one of my revered teachers at Stanford told me he routinely turned down publicity appearances with the curt dismissal, "I don’t do that sort of thing."
The view of art animating such contempt implies that a work of art must stand or fall on its own merits, and that anything its author says can only falsify and cheapen whatever one has accomplished. Moreover, it was felt, writers had better things to do with their time than shill their own books; they should be writing more books capable of speaking for themselves. There may even be a notion that history, not momentary popularity, willd determine a literary work’s true value. We all knew of books that had been famous ten or twenty years ago and were now justly forgotten. We also had our list of sacred texts that had slumbered for decades in the budget bins of used book stores and were now considered classics. "What about Moby-Dick?" we’d say. "What about the early Faulkner?"
My attitude began to change when I published my first novel–which, of course, wasn’t done without a great deal of help from other people. In a future blog I intend to write about the champions every young writer needs in order to get her work before the public. But that’s not today’s topic. Today’s topic is how, having published a novel, most writers would like, not just a "fit audience, though few," but an audience extending to the unwashed masses. After all, having found a publisher who is kind enough to put your words in print, you want that noble fellow and his firm to be suitably rewarded. Besides, the fate of your next book may depend the sales record of your last. So just like that, one tosses aside the scruples of a Hemingway or a Salinger, shrugs off the cloak of elitism, and becomes a huckster. At least that’s what I did. Flattered by all the requests I was getting, and assured by early reviews that the book really was pretty good, I began accepting interviews, speaking engagements, bookstore signings, whatever the literary world wanted to throw at me. Often I was scared, sometimes humiliated, rarely gratified. Pimping one’s book was, in those days, a tough way to make a small amount of money.
I remember my first signing at a Palo Alto bookshop in a busy shopping center. I sat at a table with a stack of Competitors in front of me, pen in hand, ready to chat up anyone who stopped to look or buy. There were people in the store, but no one came near my table. I began to feel a bit in the way, like an old sofa in a snazzy new apartment. Some people came in the door, saw me there, and scurried out again. Snubbed! I wanted to crawl under my table and hide. Eventually a couple of my profs and classmates wandered in. The profs all dutifully bought a copy of the book; the classmates mostly grabbed some of the free cookies, gulped down some punch, congratulated me, and left. I don’t think I diminished that pile of books by more than six or eight copies. At three ninety-five a book, royalties at three percent a copy, that came to approximately three dollars and nineteen cents for three harrowing hours in the store. Not what you’d call a great pay-off.
Then there was the radio interview I did at a crowded San Francisco restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. The interviewer, a locally famous radio personality, was ensconced at a round table in the corner, surrounded by his producer, technicians, equipment, and guests. We all got a ten-minute slot between ads and patter, our words masked by the background noise of the hectic restaurant. "So how’d you come to write about a shoe store, Tom?" the personality asked me. "Well, I used to work in one when I was an undergraduate," I told him. "So you used to work in one," the personality said. "That’s great. So what are some the dirty secrets of the biz, Tom? What are some things customers ought to know when they walk in that store?"
I’m not sure how I answered that question, but I could’ve told the interviewer that shoe salesmen were people–sometimes suffering people--who had real lives and interesting stories of their own. But I wasn’t quick enough to say that. Most likely, I mumbled something about the pressure we were under to sell shoe polish and purses. What we called "Up-fronts." "Up-fronts!" the personality said. "Gotta watch out for those up-fronts, folks. They’ll get you every time. Now our next guest . . ." A week later I got a check in the mail for $75 and felt I’d earned every cent of it, even thought I’m pretty sure I hadn’t given the show a full ten-minute segment.
Once I joined the faculty of a Midwestern state university, I had a captive audience, though at first I declined to take advantage of it, regressing to my earlier mode of haughty contempt for self-promotion. It was the mid-sixties and poetry readings were big at our school, a Friday night occasion for kids in psychedelic attire, reefers at the ready, hints of revolution wafting through the air along with puffs of pot smoke. Our poets reveled in the attention they were almost getting; our fiction writers (me and one other guy) stayed away.
But times change, and so do the attitudes they engender. My second novel proved much harder to sell than my first. That was partly because I’d lost my original champion when I left graduate school, and partly because, despite its good reviews and my feeble attempts at promotion, The Competitor hadn’t sold especially well. My old editor departed for greener pastures. My new editor was a kind lady but lacked the older guy’s swat. Then there was that lawsuit, which cost Scribner’s a bit of money (who would’ve thought that shoe salesmen, of all people, would read a book?). But mostly it was because my second novel just wasn’t very good--too hastily written, too clumsily conceived.
You always have to take the quality of the work into account, and sometimes, when you find you can't publish something you wrote, it’s not because the world’s against you. It’s much more likely that the book or story stinks. Even good writers, I was to learn, have a few bad books in them. Of course if you’re like me, you may not be able to tell your good stuff from the bad stuff until it’s too late--until you’ve shown the lousy manuscript to enough agents and editors to besmirch your reputation. Then, when you do, in the natural course of things, write another good book, you have to work extra hard to get someone interested in it.
So it goes for us "mid-list" writers who never give up and keep on writing despite diminishing returns. When my second novel came out in 1974, the air had cleared a bit in the rooms where poetry was read and I agreed to join my colleagues by reading from my new book. Since I had written a novel about rebellious teenagers (The Adventures of A Young Outlaw), full of sex and violence, obscenity and profanity, with a wry, satiric tone appropriate to the times, the kids loved it. Their enthusiastic reception gave me a fatal taste for applause. The book, however, came out to mediocre reviews. Younger readers (those under thirty, attuned to the times) tended to understand what I’d tried to do. Older readers (especially most reviewers) were shocked and appalled. The novel died an early, ignominious death, but not before it gave me some wonderful moments of reader-adulation. "Finding the right audience" thus became the mantra I lived with.
But that is easier said than done, since generations come and go, taste and styles change accordingly, and the writer himself keeps growing older and wiser, or maybe just foolish in different ways. In any case, I no longer wanted to write about adolescent rebellion. Having been a full-fledged academic for well over ten years, I wanted to write something a little more highbrow; I wanted to show off my erudition. I also wanted to write about England, where I'd spent a magical year in my impressionable youth. And so in due course (after two or three more failed attempts) I produced a novel called Celestial Chess, which is about a haunted manuscript in the library of a Cambridge college. The narrator is an ironic, cynical American scholar who finds his life and outlook changed by his research into a remarkable thirteenth-century poem by one Geoffrey Gervaise, a mad monk who imagines he is playing chess with the devil. Alternating chapters take us back to the thirteenth century to glimpse parts of Gervaise’s tragic story. The intervening chapters, set in contemporary England, employ a more comic tone. Even if I say so myself, the novel is a fairly intricate and elegant piece of sustained irony, and this time I was not disappointed by its reception. Critics tended, on the whole, to like its mixture of modes, readers enjoyed the story, and I got many fan letters from readers young and old.
Once again I plunged myself into the readings, autograph parties, interviews, and speaking engagements, usually going no further afield than the twin nexus of the Wisconsin’s literary community, Madison and Milwaukee. I suppose I was a local celebrity for, oh, all of six or seven months. Then the wave receded and I was left on the shore, straining to come up with a novel that might do as well. The problem, I soon realized, was that I was now type-cast as a writer of fantasy, which wasn’t what I’d set out to do at all. I had little interest in dungeons and dragons, witchcraft and sorcery. What I’d been trying for was a witty, philosophical parable in the manner of Iris Murdoch, one of my current favorites. But why wasn’t anyone able to see that?
You see, attempts at self-promotion and self-definition don’t really help readers to see your work more clearly. Or maybe the readers see what’s really there, and you are the one with illusions. In any case, my career floundered for another ten years, was sidetracked by various administrative tasks (always a great temptation for the writer in distress), and I didn’t make it back into print again until 1989, with a pseudo spy-thriller called The Giant’s Shadow. I say "pseudo," because once again the generic husk of the novel was, to my mind, a mere convenience. It’s heart was once again pure academic psycho-drama. A middle-aged scholar, as grim and gray as any imagined by Graham Greene, finds himself recruited, while on a sabbatical in Germany, by the CIA, who want the scholar’s help in smuggling his old friend, a radical poet, out of the Soviet Union. Whatever the novel’s merits (and there were many, I think), my timing was atrocious. Barely a month or two later, John LeCarre would upstage me with The Russia House, and little more than a year after that, the Reunification of Germany and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union would render the Cold War spy novel effectively obsolete.
So much for tapping the popular pulse. Though my Giant did sneak off with at least one prize–a selection by the Reader’s Digest Book Club, which, as embarrassing as it might be for an academic, did yield a satisfyingly large paycheck. And it came, I assure you, with absolutely no promotional efforts on my part. My cagey old editor had simply milked a connection and the deal was done. The Giant now lives on in a single volume with three other condensed novels that will never leave the bins of used book shops.
We now fast-forward to the 21st century, mostly because nothing much of importance happened to me or my work during the nineties. Oh yes, I wrote, but to no avail. Novels I believed in, novels I considered at the time my best work ever, were routinely declined by polite and often apologetic editors. "This is exactly the kind of novel I like to read," one such editor wrote me, "but not, unfortunately, the kind I can afford to publish any more." Aside from admiring this fellow’s honesty, one can only wonder at the state the literary world has reached when editors must forego books they like for books they have no real interest in. But times, as I think I’ve said before, do change, and it is now the task of the Forgotten Writer who wishes to leave his darkling plain to determine how he can best promote, or hucksterize, his novels in the Brave New World of . . . you guessed it, the internet.
But I see this has become a much deeper subject than I anticipated when I first set out to chart its waters. We will need at least two installments to fathom all that lies below us and around us. And so I will put off for another blog my next installment, in which the resourceful old dog tries to learn from his younger, more nimble competitors, and sets out to avail himself of the opportunities now available to writers desperate enough to seize them. In a phrase, we shall go a-waltzing Matilda on the cybernetic dance floor.
Until then, fellow darklings, don’t forget that your comments and indeed even your own stories are welcome in this space, and if you don’t interrupt me soon I may eventually run out of gas.
Yours, Sinbad
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
So What Is It We Do Here Again
So What Is It We Do Here Again?
Before I started this blog, I thought it prudent to look at some of the many other blogs that exist on the internet that involve writers. I didn’t make an exact count, but I’d say they are about as numerous as dandelions in a junk yard. It turns out, however, that most of those I looked at actually concern poets (always the most sociable of literary creatures) and quite a few others are dedicated to beginning writers. Topics like How to Write A Story and How to Get Published. There were none that seemed to be written for, or by, writers like myself: that is to say (and not to put too fine a point on it) writers "of a certain age" who feel the literary world has totally forgotten them. Well, perhaps not totally. I do have a new short story in the Spring issue of that fine old quarterly, The Sewanee Review. But it has been an embarrassing number of years since my last novel was published, and it hasn’t been, I assure you, because I haven’t been writing them. Some time I’ll show you my rejection slips.
Anyway, the idea was to open a space on the internet where writers like myself could get together in a sort of cybernetic café to compare their hard-luck stories and air their grievances against that same literary world. So far no one has asked to sit down at my table. Now I know it’s early yet, but perhaps I misjudged the tenor of the times. Maybe the forgotten writers out there (I know you’re out there, forgotten writers!) would just as soon stay forgotten. Or maybe they’re so sunk in their morass they just don’t respond any more. Maybe some are so out of touch they don’t even own laptops, or know about the internet . . . but it is useless to speculate. Why should any of these folks want to talk to me anyway? In my first blog I promised mermaids, but have I produced any? I promised excursions across the vast wilderness of the Darkling Plain, but here we are back on the seashore again. So I’m rethinking my options. And, as usual, open to suggestions. Here are some possibilities.
1. Pedagogical. All of us probably have things we’d like to communicate to the younger writers of the world. These might consist of warnings, admonitions, promptings, imprecations, whatever. Whether these pups will listen to us old dogs is a matter of little concern–we’ll get what we want to say off our chests. If you have thoughts along this line, send them to me and I’ll put them on the blog. Expect some thoughts from me, soon.
2. Self-promotional. I, for one, find it hard to imagine that any writer, having written a novel or story, doesn’t feel some paternal responsibility for it. One wants to see it published, read, admired, and most important of all, preserved in print. Increasingly these have become all but impossible goals for writers "of a certain age." But here, at least, we could publicize our work, our latest efforts to escape the Darkling Plain. I, for instance, will soon have a brand new website I intend to link it to this very blog. Other links for other writers are indeed possible, subject to my approval. I also have an unpublished novel (my best one, I’ve always thought) I’m hoping to release as a Kindle e-book, and another novel, still being revised, for which I intend to seek an agent. These are the kinds of things this blog might well promote.
3. Creative. Though my own fiction tends toward the long side–too long for a blog, I would estimate–there remains the possibility of placing bits and snippets of one’s creative work on the internet via this or some other sight. Perhaps I’ll "publish" one of my own works here as a serial. "Tune in next time for the next exciting chapter of One Man’s Slush Pile, when we hear hard-drinking editor Brad Bologna say, ‘Bring me the starter fluid, honey, and a long match.’" Maybe we’ll see just how much this expanding cyber-universe really can expand when we start cloud-computing our novels. Can one overload the system?
Any of you have suggestions? Sometimes I get the feeling I’m back in the classroom again, trying to conduct a discussion of a story no one seems to have read. C’mon kids, help me out here. Where are the damn symbols in this piece of bogus profundity? Kids: blank stares, hostile smirks, yawns. Ever have dreams like that? Tell us about them.
Well, class over for the day. I’ll be off line for a few days, visiting family and friends in a place far removed from the Darling Plain. I expect to find lots of email in my inbox when I return.
Yours faithfully, Sinbad
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Slaying the Monster
Slaying the Monster Narcopiteous.
Of all the strange and wonderful creatures the Forgotten Writer is likely to encounter on the Darling Plain, none is more fearsome, more sly and insideous, than the many tentacled serpent known as Narcopiteous, or in plain English, Self-pity. This ravenous beastie has destroyed more than one unwary Forgotten Writer who fell into its clutches, so I thought we’d devote a post, right at the start, designed to help newcomers to this realm recognize, combat, and slay the venomous villain.
Since he lurks in darkness and comes out only at night to attack his victim while it sleeps, you may never see one of these creatures face to face. But you will recognize him by the way his presence begins to warp and usurp your normal patterns of consciousness. If you find yourself drinking more and enjoying it less, avoiding bookstores and libraries, no longer drawn to literary journals, preferring instead vapid TV shows like "The Bachelor" and "Real Housewives of Bloom County," or cruising the web for alluring new forms of pornography; if you cringe at the mention of a young novelist who has been recently discovered by the literati, or you bristle at the thought of an older writer whose works are still widely admired (the cad!), you can be sure the serpent has you in its clutches. It’s only a matter of time until he subverts your intelligence and integrity to such an extent that you can no longer call yourself a writer at all, forgotten or otherwise. It is time to take drastic measures.
Step 1. Immediate sustenance required. Go to your own bookshelf and take down one of your own published novels, or a story in a magazine you were proud to publish in. Sit down in a nice comfortable chair and start reading. Allow yourself to enjoy the prose, relish the imagery, admire the sharply drawn characters and swiftly moving plot. Yes, you wrote these words. This was you at the top of your game, and weren’t you good at it? Like Dickens, you may wish to exclaim, "By God, what a writer I was then!" Of course you were. Did you think fools and amateurs ever succeed in this craft?
Step 2. Thus fortified, you move on to sterner measures. You go into your study, to the file cabinet, desk drawer, or wherever you have stored your unpublished manuscripts. Open the drawer and take one out. Make it one you once had high hopes for, though you know you didn’t spend as much time on it as you should have. Now sit down at your desk with a red pencil and start reading carefully, critically. Mark the stuff you don’t like. Cross out excess verbiage. My word, what a mess this piece is! How slowly it moves! How heavy and plodding the language! If, after five or ten pages, you can bear to go on reading, you must be seriously blind to your own failings. But sit back; reflect seriously; compare this garbage to the work you published. Is it any wonder your career had its ups and downs? Too much of this stuff and anyone would wind up forgotten.
Step 3. Now we’re getting somewhere. We’ve already lopped off several of the worm’s tentacles, but there are more to be destroyed. We proceed to the general situation in which you find yourself today. First, financial. If you taught at a certified public or private institution, you surely must have taken part in a pension plan. Are you now receiving that pension? Is it adequate to your needs? Great, now reflect that the pension was based on your salary, which was in part determined by your merit raises, which in turn reflected your publications. See, you are still receiving royalties of a sort! You haven’t been forgotten after all.
Now regard your domestic situation. Are you married, or happily shacked up with someone you love, or at least like a whole lot? Does he/she love you because he/she thinks you’re a great writer? Man, you should be in seventh heaven! Do you have children? Are you in touch with them? Maybe grandchildren you see on occasion? Are in you in reasonably good health? Do you have a few hobbies you enjoy? Golf, fishing, knitting, cooking? With every good thing you can identify in your life you have severed another of the worm’s tentacles. You are draining it of its life’s blood. I think it’s time to celebrate with a drink, and by taking your significant other out for a good dinner. Maybe afterwards you’ll stroll through a bookstore (if you can find one these days) and take note of the new titles by writers you’ve never heard of before. Wouldn’t it be fun to read one of these books? Noble to buy it? After all, we who live by the arts should also cultivate the arts. Noblesse oblige!
Step 4It is now time to look back on your entire life and ask yourself what else in the world you would have wanted to do. You were certainly not cut out for medicine, the law, business, the military, or any of those technical or manual jobs. Machines hate you. Labor tires you easily. Sales strikes you as a particularly unhappy way to earn a living. Computers? Forget it! So you correctly chose your profession and, judging from Step 3 above, you did fairly well at it. So you’ve been temporarily forgotten–but perhaps this exile here on the Darkling Plain is only temporary. One successfully published book and you’ll be right back in the limelight, with folks paying top dollar for your out-of-print books. That’s right, my friend–one more good book!
Step 5. We are now nearly finished with our short course in monster slaying, but there is one more, supremely important thing you must do to make sure the serpent is dead and stays dead. You must go to your computer and GET TO WORK! Yes, that’s right, friends–there is nothing that can banish that old demon self-pity like a day spent writing something new. Or at least revising something old. As the words tumble onto the page, as the ideas form in your feverish brain, as you transmit these phantoms into the living, breathing essence of fiction, you will once again experience the joy, not to say the ecstasy, of the living writer. It won’t be long before he who was forgotten will be found and the Darkling Plain will be but a gloomy splotch in your rearview mirror. Trust me, I’ve driven through this place before.
If any of you know of similar monsters and have found effect ways of coping with them, please do let us know. This blog is meant to be an open forum, so send me your comments and ideas. You will surely get sick of reading my stuff before long. Until then, this is your friendly blog-master, Sinbad the Sailor, signing off.
Of all the strange and wonderful creatures the Forgotten Writer is likely to encounter on the Darling Plain, none is more fearsome, more sly and insideous, than the many tentacled serpent known as Narcopiteous, or in plain English, Self-pity. This ravenous beastie has destroyed more than one unwary Forgotten Writer who fell into its clutches, so I thought we’d devote a post, right at the start, designed to help newcomers to this realm recognize, combat, and slay the venomous villain.
Since he lurks in darkness and comes out only at night to attack his victim while it sleeps, you may never see one of these creatures face to face. But you will recognize him by the way his presence begins to warp and usurp your normal patterns of consciousness. If you find yourself drinking more and enjoying it less, avoiding bookstores and libraries, no longer drawn to literary journals, preferring instead vapid TV shows like "The Bachelor" and "Real Housewives of Bloom County," or cruising the web for alluring new forms of pornography; if you cringe at the mention of a young novelist who has been recently discovered by the literati, or you bristle at the thought of an older writer whose works are still widely admired (the cad!), you can be sure the serpent has you in its clutches. It’s only a matter of time until he subverts your intelligence and integrity to such an extent that you can no longer call yourself a writer at all, forgotten or otherwise. It is time to take drastic measures.
Step 1. Immediate sustenance required. Go to your own bookshelf and take down one of your own published novels, or a story in a magazine you were proud to publish in. Sit down in a nice comfortable chair and start reading. Allow yourself to enjoy the prose, relish the imagery, admire the sharply drawn characters and swiftly moving plot. Yes, you wrote these words. This was you at the top of your game, and weren’t you good at it? Like Dickens, you may wish to exclaim, "By God, what a writer I was then!" Of course you were. Did you think fools and amateurs ever succeed in this craft?
Step 2. Thus fortified, you move on to sterner measures. You go into your study, to the file cabinet, desk drawer, or wherever you have stored your unpublished manuscripts. Open the drawer and take one out. Make it one you once had high hopes for, though you know you didn’t spend as much time on it as you should have. Now sit down at your desk with a red pencil and start reading carefully, critically. Mark the stuff you don’t like. Cross out excess verbiage. My word, what a mess this piece is! How slowly it moves! How heavy and plodding the language! If, after five or ten pages, you can bear to go on reading, you must be seriously blind to your own failings. But sit back; reflect seriously; compare this garbage to the work you published. Is it any wonder your career had its ups and downs? Too much of this stuff and anyone would wind up forgotten.
Step 3. Now we’re getting somewhere. We’ve already lopped off several of the worm’s tentacles, but there are more to be destroyed. We proceed to the general situation in which you find yourself today. First, financial. If you taught at a certified public or private institution, you surely must have taken part in a pension plan. Are you now receiving that pension? Is it adequate to your needs? Great, now reflect that the pension was based on your salary, which was in part determined by your merit raises, which in turn reflected your publications. See, you are still receiving royalties of a sort! You haven’t been forgotten after all.
Now regard your domestic situation. Are you married, or happily shacked up with someone you love, or at least like a whole lot? Does he/she love you because he/she thinks you’re a great writer? Man, you should be in seventh heaven! Do you have children? Are you in touch with them? Maybe grandchildren you see on occasion? Are in you in reasonably good health? Do you have a few hobbies you enjoy? Golf, fishing, knitting, cooking? With every good thing you can identify in your life you have severed another of the worm’s tentacles. You are draining it of its life’s blood. I think it’s time to celebrate with a drink, and by taking your significant other out for a good dinner. Maybe afterwards you’ll stroll through a bookstore (if you can find one these days) and take note of the new titles by writers you’ve never heard of before. Wouldn’t it be fun to read one of these books? Noble to buy it? After all, we who live by the arts should also cultivate the arts. Noblesse oblige!
Step 4It is now time to look back on your entire life and ask yourself what else in the world you would have wanted to do. You were certainly not cut out for medicine, the law, business, the military, or any of those technical or manual jobs. Machines hate you. Labor tires you easily. Sales strikes you as a particularly unhappy way to earn a living. Computers? Forget it! So you correctly chose your profession and, judging from Step 3 above, you did fairly well at it. So you’ve been temporarily forgotten–but perhaps this exile here on the Darkling Plain is only temporary. One successfully published book and you’ll be right back in the limelight, with folks paying top dollar for your out-of-print books. That’s right, my friend–one more good book!
Step 5. We are now nearly finished with our short course in monster slaying, but there is one more, supremely important thing you must do to make sure the serpent is dead and stays dead. You must go to your computer and GET TO WORK! Yes, that’s right, friends–there is nothing that can banish that old demon self-pity like a day spent writing something new. Or at least revising something old. As the words tumble onto the page, as the ideas form in your feverish brain, as you transmit these phantoms into the living, breathing essence of fiction, you will once again experience the joy, not to say the ecstasy, of the living writer. It won’t be long before he who was forgotten will be found and the Darkling Plain will be but a gloomy splotch in your rearview mirror. Trust me, I’ve driven through this place before.
If any of you know of similar monsters and have found effect ways of coping with them, please do let us know. This blog is meant to be an open forum, so send me your comments and ideas. You will surely get sick of reading my stuff before long. Until then, this is your friendly blog-master, Sinbad the Sailor, signing off.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
The Forgotten Writers' Blog
Gingerly I dip my toe into the vast sea of the internet. The sea is calm tonight, the water not too cold. I see tiny shell-things swirl up from between my toes. Near the bar, a school of flying fish go by, while out on the horizon a whale sends his kingly spout into the breeze. And what are those things closer in? Are they sharks' fins? Have I gone out too far? I can feel icy water now around my calves, in the crook of my knees . . . . can I make it back to shore--?
Of course I can. Here I am back on the sand, amid the stink of algae, dead fish, decaying marine life. I can walk along this beach, seeking others of my kind. Perhaps a mermaid or two will appear. Lift a conch shell to your ear and what do you hear but the sad song of the forgotten writer. "I grow old, I grow old, I shall my trousers . . . "
Let me tell you a story.
Once there was a young man who grew up wanting to become a writer. As a child, his parents read books to him every night, like The Little Engine that Could and Make Way for Ducklings. He "read" his own books, guessing the story-line from the vividly colored panels. He listened to his favorite programs on the radio: "Superman" and "The Lone Ranger." He learned continuity and dialogue from such programs, suspense, sound effects, the vast theater of the mind. At the age of four he dictated his first "novel" to his parents, who dutifully wrote it down and preserved it for posterity. A career was launched.
In school the boy learned the sterner pleasures of the written word and soon found his favorite medium. At home he now read books. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was his favorite; he read it start to finish three times. Older, he read westerns, science fiction, hard-boiled detective novels, all the time groping his way toward (ta-dah!) SERIOUS LITERATURE. In highschool he was allowed to read books like The Old Man and the Sea, The Grapes of Wrath, Crime and Punishment, The Catcher in the Rye. He knew now what kind of writer he wanted to be and figured it was just a matter of time before he became one.
In college he discovered the English major and through its required courses the dreaded dragon of the CANON. Promptly he began sawing off its limbs. Meanwhile, he took creative writing courses and received modest encouragement from his instructors. He wrote his stories on a typewriter and read them to his girlfriend, who thought they were wonderful. He resolved to marry the girl, who also kissed like gang-busters and had other endearing qualities. He began to think about graduate school. Life was good. The young man thought he had it all, or would soon achieve it. What could stop him?
Well, I'll stop him, because at this point I'm wondering how many writers out there--writers of "a certain age"--share a similar story. Many of us did go to graduate and took advanced degrees leading to teaching jobs in colleges and universities, where creative writing programs were just becoming a growth industry. We did publish our work in various magazines, large and small, and found publishers for our novels. We were able to hold our heads up in academia, feeling we had earned the right to call ourselves writers. And so we trained other young people who wished to become writers, never guessing we were sowing the seeds for the generations that would render us obsolete. We founded MFA programs and literary journals. We organized conferences and built organizations. We were surfing the tide, riding the wave, and then . . .
We woke up one morning to discoved the tide had gone out and we were stranded on the shore. We could no longer find publishers for our work. Agents weren't interested. The literary journals were edited by young writers who didn't dig our prose, our irony, our whole approach to the art of fiction. The publishing world was changing, we heard. The old houses were crumbling, and in their place rose the terrible fortresses of the conglomerate. There was something in the wind called the Internet, the e-book. What could this portend but doom?
If you fit this profile, this blog is for you. Even if you don't, you're welcome to come in, look around, and collect what pearls of wisdom you can find in the shells scattered along the shore. You're also invited to submit pearls of your own discovery. But first, a few important rules:
1. Having read a post, please leave a brief (or if you wish lengthy) comment. I will review all comments and figure out some way to feature them on the blog itself (I'm pretty new at this, you see.)
2. If you have a longer offering you'd like to post, please send me an email with the text pasted within it (no attachments). You'll find the email address in my profile, but make sure you specify in the subject line that your message concerns the blog, otherwise I'm likely to delete it as spam. This blog will not venture into politics, religion, sex, or other really important matters, except as they happen to bear on our major concern--the problems and resources of the Forgotten Writer.
3. Since I am now revising my next neglected novel and cramming all the writing I can into what remains of my life, I make no promises about how often this blog will appear. It will appear when it appears--watch this space.
I will await your submissions while I scout the beach for mermaids.
Yours,
Tom (Sinbad the Sailor) Bontly
Of course I can. Here I am back on the sand, amid the stink of algae, dead fish, decaying marine life. I can walk along this beach, seeking others of my kind. Perhaps a mermaid or two will appear. Lift a conch shell to your ear and what do you hear but the sad song of the forgotten writer. "I grow old, I grow old, I shall my trousers . . . "
Let me tell you a story.
Once there was a young man who grew up wanting to become a writer. As a child, his parents read books to him every night, like The Little Engine that Could and Make Way for Ducklings. He "read" his own books, guessing the story-line from the vividly colored panels. He listened to his favorite programs on the radio: "Superman" and "The Lone Ranger." He learned continuity and dialogue from such programs, suspense, sound effects, the vast theater of the mind. At the age of four he dictated his first "novel" to his parents, who dutifully wrote it down and preserved it for posterity. A career was launched.
In school the boy learned the sterner pleasures of the written word and soon found his favorite medium. At home he now read books. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was his favorite; he read it start to finish three times. Older, he read westerns, science fiction, hard-boiled detective novels, all the time groping his way toward (ta-dah!) SERIOUS LITERATURE. In highschool he was allowed to read books like The Old Man and the Sea, The Grapes of Wrath, Crime and Punishment, The Catcher in the Rye. He knew now what kind of writer he wanted to be and figured it was just a matter of time before he became one.
In college he discovered the English major and through its required courses the dreaded dragon of the CANON. Promptly he began sawing off its limbs. Meanwhile, he took creative writing courses and received modest encouragement from his instructors. He wrote his stories on a typewriter and read them to his girlfriend, who thought they were wonderful. He resolved to marry the girl, who also kissed like gang-busters and had other endearing qualities. He began to think about graduate school. Life was good. The young man thought he had it all, or would soon achieve it. What could stop him?
Well, I'll stop him, because at this point I'm wondering how many writers out there--writers of "a certain age"--share a similar story. Many of us did go to graduate and took advanced degrees leading to teaching jobs in colleges and universities, where creative writing programs were just becoming a growth industry. We did publish our work in various magazines, large and small, and found publishers for our novels. We were able to hold our heads up in academia, feeling we had earned the right to call ourselves writers. And so we trained other young people who wished to become writers, never guessing we were sowing the seeds for the generations that would render us obsolete. We founded MFA programs and literary journals. We organized conferences and built organizations. We were surfing the tide, riding the wave, and then . . .
We woke up one morning to discoved the tide had gone out and we were stranded on the shore. We could no longer find publishers for our work. Agents weren't interested. The literary journals were edited by young writers who didn't dig our prose, our irony, our whole approach to the art of fiction. The publishing world was changing, we heard. The old houses were crumbling, and in their place rose the terrible fortresses of the conglomerate. There was something in the wind called the Internet, the e-book. What could this portend but doom?
If you fit this profile, this blog is for you. Even if you don't, you're welcome to come in, look around, and collect what pearls of wisdom you can find in the shells scattered along the shore. You're also invited to submit pearls of your own discovery. But first, a few important rules:
1. Having read a post, please leave a brief (or if you wish lengthy) comment. I will review all comments and figure out some way to feature them on the blog itself (I'm pretty new at this, you see.)
2. If you have a longer offering you'd like to post, please send me an email with the text pasted within it (no attachments). You'll find the email address in my profile, but make sure you specify in the subject line that your message concerns the blog, otherwise I'm likely to delete it as spam. This blog will not venture into politics, religion, sex, or other really important matters, except as they happen to bear on our major concern--the problems and resources of the Forgotten Writer.
3. Since I am now revising my next neglected novel and cramming all the writing I can into what remains of my life, I make no promises about how often this blog will appear. It will appear when it appears--watch this space.
I will await your submissions while I scout the beach for mermaids.
Yours,
Tom (Sinbad the Sailor) Bontly
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