Category Archives: Author

Talk about an Income Gap!

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Hudson News, airport news stand

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Let’s call a temporary moratorium on grousing about how little money most aspiring book authors make—90 percent make absolutely $0—and peep through the keyhole at how the rich fare. Forbes last month published a list of the world’s top-earning authors and it includes some newcomers who demonstrate the appeal of “young adult” lit for people of all ages. Maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise since American adults, on average, read at the 8th grade level.

We all know that royalty checks arrive by the cartload to James Patterson—presumably shared generously with the humming hive of workerbees who help him produce 14 books a year—and brought in the top figure, around $90 million last year, June to June. In a laggardly second place is Dan Brown, with $28 million.

Three women writers complete the top-earning five: Nora Roberts ($23 million), Danielle Steel ($22 million) and Janet Evanovich ($20 million). Suzanne Collins, who hit it big with The Hunger Games, had to be satisfied with a measly $16 million. Speaking of falls-from-financial-grace, I’ll be a snob and confess my delight that E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey scam netted her only $10 million last year, precipitously down from the $95 million of the previous year.

She was beaten out by young adult author Veronica Roth, a recently young adult herself at age 26, who earned around $17 million from print and ebook sales of the Divergent series over the past year—not counting income from the film adaptation. John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars, received some $9 million from U.S. book sales, plus more from last summer’s movie. He ties for 12th place with Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl (a review of that movie posted here Oct 6).

J.K. Rowling had $14 million in earnings, putting her in 8th place. Others in the double-digit list are John Grisham, tied with Stephen King at $17 million, George R. R. Martin ($12 million), David Baldacci ($11 million), and Rick Riordan ($10 million).

OK, enough wallowing in piles of filthy lucre. Back to reality.

A Reading Future: 5 Under 35

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5 under 35, National Book Awards, Redeployment, Panic in a SuitcaseHere’s another item to add to the long list of not-happening life events—after riding in a helicopter and becoming a triathlete—being a National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 honoree. The books of this year’s selection of five distinguished young writers are an exciting foretaste of our reading futures. The honorees, selected by past National Book Award winners and finalists, are:

  • Yelena Akhtioskaya, Panic in a Suitcase, two decades in the life of a Russian immigrant family in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn
  • Alex Gilvarry, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, a young Filipino immigrant steeped in New York’s fashion world finds himself accused of participation in a terrorist plot
  • Phil Klay, Redeployment, a novel of the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq still being waged in the minds of our returning soldiers
  • Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd, three narrators’ overlapping stories of love and loss
  • Kirsetn Valdez Quade, Night at the Fiestas, intense and darkly humorous stories that cover the range of human desires “to escape the past and to plumb its depths”

Reading them can definitely go on my list of happening things.

Ravel-Edged Storytelling

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forest poetry

(photo: as0.geograph.org.uk)

A walk in the woods of poetry and prose and pleasantly lost in thickets of words.

The current (subscription only) newsletter from AGNI—Boston University’s well-regarded literary magazine—includes an interview with prize-winning poet and nonfiction writer Rosalie Moffett about “Ravel-Edged Storytelling.”

A Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, Moffett says she mostly considers herself a poet, but believes that the two genres—poetry and nonfiction—“share a border, and sometimes I look up to find I’ve crossed it.” A work that started out to be one thing takes an unexpected and serendipitous turn to become the other. In reading this month’s submissions to the writer’s workshop I attend, I encountered one 1200-word short story excerpt that seemed to want to become a poem and might have become one, by just changing the line lengths.

Answering Questions

Moffett says she writes prose and poetry for the same reason: to answer questions and, most of the time, poems “end up being the best arena for my mind to answer them.” This suggests a mind that ranges freely through a forest of possible answers, where the ambiguity of words can be pulled into service of meaning and intent. Strung together in a particular way, they can be the perfect example of the whole being more than the sum of the parts. That phenomenon is is one function of subtext.

dinner table, family

(photo: creative commons generic license)

AGNI online offers Moffett’s essay Sidney, whose story she says absolutely required “the ravel-edged” kind of telling offered by prose. Prose also provided a more valid recreation of how she originally heard—or overheard—the family stories, and the stories about Sidney himself, with all their half-bits of information, inferences, and unanswered questions like loose threads in a bag of knitting ravaged by moths or kittens. Prose “puts our stories together in a way they never had the chance to be before people died, got bitter, or went off their rockers.” I urge you to link to it and start reading; you won’t be able to stop!

And Telling Stories

In the essay about Sidney, she talks about how as a child younger than six visiting her grandparents, she got up late in the evening feigning hunger, so she could camp out in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal and overhearing the adults’ conversation in the next room: “I remember the music of the stories more than their substance. I sensed their pull and power. I wanted, suddenly, nothing more than to have stories to tell, and to sit at that table and tell them.” “Sidney” shows she absolutely got her wish.

I think I resonated with her responses in the interview largely because of the process in the last two weeks, of writing my blog posts, The Rouge Shadow and Coming to Amerika, based on a longer essay about my father’s immigrant parents. So different from Moffett, who can draw on a deep well of family detail—conversations, rooms she’s spent time in—I know next-to-nothing about my father’s parents. Yet, even from the few stray threads I have, many stories could be woven. To write these essays, I pieced together the backdrop for a plausible narrative from minute clues. Moffett says writing an essay “feels like the hunt for an answer.” And sometimes the answer is that there is none.

Further Reading

Rosalie Moffett’s website includes links to some of her poems, including this one, “Gifts from the 7-11.”

Agni is the ancient Vedic god of fire and guardian of humankind, a messenger to the other gods. You can find out more about this aptly named literary magazine here. And about the god of fire here.

The Art of Subtext, by Charles Baxter– The most eloquent and approachable group of essays on subtext that I’ve found. For only $3.88 used to $10.28 new, you can awaken to new possibilities. Reading it was like seeing, after not seeing.

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*** Three Ellery Queens

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jaguar

“Spotted Ghost” by Lou Hedge

Finished three issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine recently—August 2014, September/October 2014, and, embarrassingly, August 2012. Some items in my reading pile are truly “aging in place”! For variety of locale and time, the monthly collections in this deliciously pulpy magazine can’t be beat. These three issues contain stories from Colonial America, to 1890s San Francisco, to modern Taiwan, to Belize City, where tourists hunt the elusive jaguar.

One of the scariest involved the escalating war of nerves between an adolescent boy and his new neighbor, written by popular short story writer David Dean, author of the novel The Thirteenth Child. A funny tale about a couple who owns a dry cleaners’ shop also appeared in the 8/14 issue, by British author Belinda Bauer, known for the “blackly funny” style of some of her books.

The most recent issue departs from longstanding EQMM tradition by including some stories with paranormal elements. Despite its title, “Ghost Town,” by Terence Faherty, does not. It refers to the near-abandoned Ocean City, New Jersey, in February, plagued by a series of mysterious break-ins. One of the shorter stories—“The Hard Type” by Carl Robinette—packed the most emotional punch. In it a young boy questions his actions when he sees a couple terrorized by a motorcycle gang.

I also enjoyed “Jaguar,” about a young girl brought to New York as part of a human trafficking ring. Short stories by its author, Joseph Wallace, have appeared in several anthologies, including the Best American Mystery Stories. His most recent novel, Invasive Species, is a science fiction thriller.

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Life is a Riddle and a Mystery

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By Linda C. Wisniewski, Guest Blogger

pen and ink, writing, memoir

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

At my Unitarian church, we sing a hymn with the repeating refrain, “Mystery, mystery, life is a riddle and a mystery.” I read lots of mystery novels, and I write and teach memoir. For me, the two genres are not that far apart.

Writing a memoir is a lot like unraveling a mystery. Where you think you are going is often very different from where you find yourself at the end. Good memoir writing, and I mean good for the writer as well as the reader, always involves the process of self-discovery.

Just as all stories begin with the main character’s motivation or desire, the same is true in memoir. The writer wants to discover something about his life, or the characters in his life story. Quite often the process of writing changes the motivation of the memoirist.

In my memoir, Off Kilter, I wrote that “I wanted to understand why my mother couldn’t protect me from my father’s verbal abuse. I wanted to know why she cut me down instead of building me up….She let herself be silenced. She silenced herself. More than anything, I want to understand.”

While writing is not therapy, it can be therapeutic. It wasn’t so much that writing helped me understand my mother, but rather that it helped me accept who she was. I discovered the answer to the mystery of my life: I held in my hands the ability to create my own happiness, as a grown woman, apart from her. After Off Kilter was published, friends suggested more ways I could try to understand my mother. Call relatives, research history, read self-help books. But I was no longer interested. My motivation had changed.

In his memoir, Elsewhere, Richard Russo comes to suspect his mother suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and feels tremendous guilt, seeing himself as her “principal enabler. Because…like other addicts, obsessives can’t do it on their own. As they gradually lose the control they so desperately seek, they have little choice but to ensnare loved ones.” He holds this discovery for the very end, creating a powerful resolution for himself and the reader.

Years ago, I opened my lunchtime talk at a senior citizens center with the rhetorical question, “Why should you write your memoir?”

A tiny woman in the front row piped up so all could hear, “Yeah, why should I?” She made me laugh, but I totally get where she was coming from. I’ll bet her children and grandchildren were always telling her to write down the stories of her life. But she didn’t want to, and I was hard-pressed to convince her otherwise. I listed the mental and physical health benefits of writing about emotionally significant events, but she did not sign up for my class. And she had a very good point. She could see no reason to revisit the past.

Critics complain there are too many “confessional” memoirs, perhaps recalling the confession or romance magazines aimed at working-class women. In the New York Times Book Review Neil Genzlinger wrote a piece called “The Trouble with Memoirs,” in which he asked for a “moment of silence for the lost art of shutting up.” It caused quite a stir, but the conclusion can be drawn that he was complaining about badly written memoirs, of which there are many.

Stephen Elliott wrote in The Rumpus that “…celebrity memoirs are rarely interesting, despite how interesting their lives appear from the outside. The problem is not that they don’t live interesting lives, it’s that they’re not writers.”

Memoir writing is a risky proposition. “I see you in a whole different way now,” said my book club friend after reading Off Kilter. When I started to write seriously, I joined an online group called Risky Writers. We wrote and critiqued short pieces which involved emotional risk when shared. What would others think if they knew we had done these things? We learned to critique the writing, not the life style of the writer.

Despite the temptation to judge the lives of memoir writers, we don’t think of judging fictional characters. “She shouldn’t have done that!” Well, yes, she should have. That’s how she got into trouble, and why we keep turning the page, especially in a well-plotted mystery. Will she get what she wants in the end? Or does she discover something better?

Genzlinger ended his Times Book Review piece like this. “Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb: If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it.” I would add, don’t publish it yet. And don’t give up looking for the mystery.

Linda Wisniewski

Linda Wisniewski (photo: courtesy of the author)

Linda C. Wisniewski lives in Doylestown, Pa., where she teaches memoir workshops and writes for a local newspaper. Her credits include newspapers,  Hippocampus, other literary magazines, and several anthologies. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won first prizes in the Pearl Buck International Short Story Contest as well as the Wild River Review essay contest. Linda’s memoir, Off Kilter: a Woman’s Journey to Peace with Scoliosis, Her Mother, and Her Polish Heritage, was published in 2008 by Pearlsong Press. Visit her at www.lindawis.com.

Junot Díaz & Difficult Characters

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Junot DiazJunot Díaz, fellow New Jerseyan and one of America’s top young writers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao(2007) and a certified MacArthur Foundation “genius,” is interviewed in the fall 2014 issue of Glimmer Train. Last year, he published a book of short stories, This is How You Lose Her. (This is the book a friend of mine starts reading whenever she and her husband have a disagreement.)

“She’s sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.”(TIHYLH)

About his recurring character Yunior, who narrates much of sci-fi addict Oscar’s story, and who also features in the short story collection, Díaz says “He is the classic dumb-ass character who makes all the right mistakes to produce, for me, in my mind, great stories.” Yunior shares some biographical details with Díaz, a parallelism that he believes makes writing—or reading—a little easier. “You get free heavy lifting from readers . . . by blurring that line between fiction and biography, a confusion that adds an extra serving of real to the tale.” Getting readers to do some of the work for him, some of the world-creation that keeps them on the page, is especially important in fiction, he believes, when writers “are asking them to confuse our work for the world and often to connect to characters who are difficult.”

“Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.”(BWL)

“Her rage filled the house, flat stale smoke. It got into everything, into our hair and our food, like the fallout they talked to us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow.”(BWL)

Junot DiazOne of the ways Yunior is difficult is in his relations with women, his infidelities, and his objectification of women, and Díaz explains that he includes that aspect of his character because it’s “one of the standard ways our culture operates.” Díaz gets some blowback on this, and says the shock of recognition when readers see this aggressively masculine point-of-view on the page “in what I think is so honest a way, it often repels us in ways that the very presence of it in our real lives doesn’t. . . . It’s as if it’s only in this book where these guys exist.”

“You can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”(BWL)

While the writer of the Door Stop Novels blog called Brief Wondrous Life “incredibly offensive,” she added, “it is also absolutely one of the funniest books I have ever read in my life.” Her bottom line: “I think that is what I like most about Díaz —the man goes for broke.” He isn’t writing allegory, with a lot of message overlaid about his real political views; he isn’t writing religious. He is describing the worldviews of very particular people, and it’s in the detailed rendering of those views that make people love or hate his work, but, either way, to believe it’s real.

“The half-life of love is forever.”(TIHYLH)

 

Writers as Storytellers

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front porch, rocking chair, storytelling

(photo: Lars Ploughmann, flickr)

Eric Nelson’s recent Ploughshares article describes the “10 times in life when writers have the upper hand.” Writers who can tell stories out loud and off the page, that is. As Nelson says, “With the right kinds of stories, you can sell anything, including yourself.”

I have a friend who writes monologs, and I’ve come to appreciate the amount of work that goes into shaping this material, polishing it, honing it, and then, hardest of all, making it sound spontaneous, fresh, alive. The impact of his stories on the page versus what happens when he “tells” them is transformative.

In the days before television, storytelling was a much-appreciated front porch gift that we’ve mostly lost track of. Even writers, who should be superb oral story tellers, may limit their audience to the glowing rectangle. We keep our best stories, the personal, true ones, locked up inside.

The organization The Moth (“True Stories Told Live”) sets out to preserve and celebrate oral storytelling, and a book of 50 “brilliant and quietly addictive” stories from its archive has five stars on Amazon. Like my friend’s work, the best stories display honesty, vulnerability–and a little structure. This is not the same storytelling as effectively recounting “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”; these are true stories of the kind familiar to This American Life addicts.

Life situations when Nelson says a good story—or the ability to put one together—comes in handy include childcare (“It’s easier to keep a car full of kids from hitting each other by entertaining them with stories than hoping their iPad batteries hold out”), the classroom—from first grade to adult education, parties, job interviews, dates, the doctor’s office, therapy, on juries, in political campaigns, and at the DMV (where everyone is bored silly “except the writers. They’re too busy working on their stories in their head”).

Nelson refers to a recent article by Neil Gaiman about being asked to appear at The Moth—something out of his comfort zone, and so a good reason to do it, Gaiman says. Something he says about the importance of stories really resonates, given this week’s news events: “And the gulf that exists between us is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin colour, gender, race or attitudes, but we don’t see the stories. And once we hear them we realise that the things dividing us are often illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are no thicker than scenery.”

What’s Your Green?

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Rorschach

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Having a political discussion with my friend Don is almost impossible. In conversation, I avoid the hot-button issues I know will set him off. Unfortunately more of those topics crowd the landscape of his mind than I anticipate, and stumbling on one is like setting off a land-mine. Why is it we can’t just have a conversation? It’s because our points of view are so different, there’s little room for mutual understanding, and we might as well be speaking different languages. Point-of-view determines not only which facts each of us takes in, but also what we see when we look at something as quotidian as three people standing on the street corner.

In a recent Glimmer Train essay on point-of-view, Bret Anthony Johnston, director of creative writing at Harvard, wrote that his students get this concept when he trots out the old saying, “To a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.” He says writers need to understand their characters’ obsessions—their hammerness—and those ten-penny features that loom so large in their minds. Sometimes their preoccupations are so consuming they don’t see the pile of screws right nearby or, more likely, interpret it as another pile of nails. “To the brokenhearted, every couple looks happy,” he says.

I’ve read Johnston’s award-winning book of short stories Corpus Christi: Stories, and this year he published the novel, Remember Me Like This (NPR review and interview). The novel deals with a family whose son disappeared, then is returned to them four years later. While he understood going in that this lost, this hiatus in relationships, would color every aspect of his characters’ lives, “what I didn’t know was how different and revelatory their perspectives would be.” Each family member reacted in a unique and shaping way, and required of Johnston—and the reader—different levels of empathy. “In fiction,” he says, “every detail is a Rorschach test” to be interpreted through the lens of the character. We ask about a character’s experience not “what does it mean?” but “what does it mean to her?” If we didn’t, we could never read with understanding the story of anyone not exactly like ourselves, should there be such a person.

Despite the popularity of multitasking and our self-deception about our skill at it, in truth our brains are pretty much wired to handle one thing at a time. This inattentional blindness, Johnston says, is “point-of-view in its purest form.” What captures our characters’ attention demonstrates what they are most interested in and care about the most. This is perhaps why the unimportant details that new writers include in their scenes—in a misguided effort to make them concrete—are so distracting. “Find out what your characters notice, find out where their gazes linger and why, and you’ll find out who your characters are.”

Johnston has published a nifty set of writing exercises, too, and he included one with this essay. You might try it. He suggests grabbing pen and paper and moving through your surroundings making a list of everything you see that’s green. (This will be a long list in my case, as I always say, “I don’t care what color it is, as long as it’s green.”)

see, eye, green

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Done? Did you notice particulars you’d forgotten about? Will you see items in your surroundings in a new way for a while? Were memories stimulated? Briefly, “green” was your mind’s obsession. I’ll bet dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists would create a somewhat different list than would a graphic designer.

“Now do the same thing for your characters,” Johnston says. “Find out what their ‘green’ is.” What readers need to know isn’t just what your characters look at, but, more important, what they see.

 

Faraway Places

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York, England, Cityscape, roofs

(photo: author)

No doubt about it, setting a mystery in a faraway locale adds a touch of romance. Fans of the Venice-based detective stories of Donna Leon, Edinburgh’s Inspector Rebus series by Ian Rankin, or Tarquin Hall’s Delhi-based private eye stories, see their cities as practically another character. But these authors live or have lived in the places they write about. Can authors pull that off from afar? A panel of American mystery writers at last weekend’s Deadly Ink conference discussed where, why—and most important, how—they do it. This is of intense interest to me, because my mystery series character, Eugenia Clarke, is a travel writer, and stories about her take place where she’s on assignment—Alaska, Morocco, Rome.

For the most part, Annamaria Alfieri (writing about South America and colonial East Africa), Albert Tucher (beginning a series about Hawai`i—a great excuse for a tax-deductible research trip, he said), and Cathi Stoler (Tuscany and that foreign country, Las Vegas) have spent time in the places they write about, supplementing their own experiences with research. They talked about how the challenge is far greater than pasting on a few superficial references. Street names, landmarks.

When they’re really cooking, their research—on the ground, through interviews, background reading, online—will lead to a plot and characters uniquely of that place. They’ll end up with a story that could not have happened in Columbus, Ohio. Readers recognize that legitimate sense of place. For example, an estimated 500 English-language books—mostly mystery or suspense—are set in Italy, and this website rates them as to whether they really capture “the essence” or merely use Italy as a lure.

On the Murder is Everywhere blog, which features a group of far-flug writers, Alfieri recently quoted from John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which he describes the fundamental reason writers write: “We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is.” Setting a story in a far-off place puts the writer’s head—every bit as much as the reader’s—in a place where that can happen.

History, Mystery, or Miss-story?

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4th of July, early America, John Lewis Krimmel, Philadelphia

John Lewis Krimmel, Fourth of July in Centre Square, Philadelphia, 1819 (photo: wikimedia.org)

A panel of six mystery writers explored the elasticity of history at the Deadly Ink 2014 conference this weekend. They were, in chronological order by their topics:

One of the most interesting questions these panelists were asked is how comfortable they are changing facts to suit the fictional purposes of their story, and the division of opinion was striking. Belsky’s point of view seemed to be “It’s fiction—do what you want,” whereas others, including Alfieri and Inglee, especially, believed that if you incorporate real historical individuals, you have to be true to their attitudes and actions.

Belsky pointed out that we may never know the whole story or maybe even the true story of past events—and Irving pointed out that applies to current events as well—freeing the author to fill in the blanks. (My own opinion on this is there’s a big difference between not knowing a fact and making one up.)

When an author must change a fact, a date, or other detail, they can use author’s notes to describe what and why. With that manes, Scott Turow acknowledges some of the liberties he took in several pivotal event in the WWII novel Ordinary Heroes: “There was no ammunition dump at LaSaline Royale, which is actually situated a few miles from the site I describe . . . Heisenberg (Werner Heisenberg, physicist) did run from Hechingen, but not because anyone had attempted to blow up the secret location of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on Haigerlocherstrasse. FDR’s death was announced near midnight overseas, not in the afternoon of April 12, 1945.” This last detail seems to be one that could have been fictionally accommodated. It was an event, like the Kennedy assassination, that every American alive at the time remembers vividly.

Alfieri created a character drawn from life down to his toenails and gave him his own name, much as real people appear in the novels of E.L. Doctorow, but when her mystery plot required this character to commit a violent act for which there is no evidence, she renamed him. She was able to build the character in the first place because of the strength of her research, and several panelists endorsed immersive research for fiction, which must appeal to many writers’ innate inwardness.

When an author knows enough about a period—how people thought, what they thought about, what they ate, how they made a living, what they feared—new story elements arise organically from that substrate. They fit the story, the story isn’t made to fit them. Such an approach makes for an infinitely richer reader experience, even if most of that research never appears explicitly in the book. The writer moves forward with confidence.

Another reason to get the details right is that readers will be sure to ding them if they don’t. Errors can destroy a book’s credibility and readers’—and reviewers’—interest in it. To avoid mistakes, Kelly and Rubin said they work with historians. Rubin, especially, because he is published by LSU Press, has to meet scholarship standards.

A final difficulty for historical writers is language. The conversations among characters have to read as if they are of the period, yet a precise rendition of old-fashioned language—by writing “forsoothly”—may be unreadable. David Mitchell, discussing the language he used in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (I loved this book!), described writing dialog for characters who were native speakers of Japanese, who were Dutch and speaking Japanese, Dutch and speaking Dutch, English upper-class sea captains, English lower-class seamen, and so on. Plus, the book begins in 1799, with two hundred-plus years of language evolution in between. Mitchell developed a language he called “bygone-ish,” which had the ring of the old and the clarity of the current, with variants for each nationality and class.

Mitchell’s approach points out an important issue that applies not just for words and phrases. Even if an event actually did happen or a word actually was in use at the time a story is set, writers of historical mysteries may avoid it anyway, because it will sound too modern, out of place. In this way, truth is more powerful than fact. And if this seems like another way of saying, “it’s fiction—do what you want,” it isn’t.

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