Writerly Maladies

This article about "maladies" many writers out there are afflicted with is hilarious!

Excerpt:

Description Overload: Upon this page there is a period. It is not just any period, it is a period following a sentence. It follows this sentence in a way befitting a period of its kind, possessing a roundness that is pleasing to the eye and hearty to the soul. This period has the bearing of a regal tennis ball combined with the utility of a used spoon. It is an unpretentious period, just like any other, the result of hundreds of years of typesetting innovations that allows it to be used, almost forgotten, like oxygen to the sentence only darker, more visible. And it is after this period, which will neither reappear nor matter in any sense whatsoever to the rest of the novel, that our story begins.

Writing As It Was

A long time ago, speech was the main mode of communication. Few people knew how to read, let alone write. Those who were literate were held in high esteem, and only works of great significance were actually written down. Everything else was oral.

Even once most laypeople knew how to read and write, they wrote with care. Letters were often well thought-out chronicles of a person's life and thoughts. They were things which were treasured. Writing was not cheap, either. Ink cost money, paper cost money - a person used these things prudently and conscientiously.

Today, we approach writing differently. Everyone writes. Everyone sends text messages and IMs, people write status messages and emails in shorthand. Whole words are a thing of the past, grammar is ancient history, and how much thought actually goes into most texts and emails? How personally can we actually take a thing of writing addressed to us? How much care goes into those words?

Everyone these days seems to have a blog. The entire world has turned into one big party of journalism. Some aspects of blogging are an imperative part of what brings society together: open communication. The more we are able to communicate with one another and - even more important - the more we are able to actually listen to one another, the greater our understanding will be of those different from ourselves.

Hirhurim linked to an article that has some fair critiques of the blogging world, but that also makes an excellent reminder about what good writing ought to be:

"Writers who expect sustained public inspection tend to think long and hard before publishing. Readers who assume writers have thought long and hard tend to read with intense attention. This leads, in general, to good writing, good reading, and good thinking. Such an environment is a precondition for vigilant citizenship and a civil society vibrant with critical intelligence. What is more, this environment disciplines speedy, prolific, lively writers, ultimately to their own advantage.

Of course I have no idea what policies, programs, or movements could plausibly revive what Postman calls the Typographic Mind. The only solution I know is a slow, personal one: It is the painful discipline of changing my own detestable habits of inattention, sloppiness, and waggish opportunism in daily conversation, whether written or oral, and of writing with the assumption that my reader's attention is generous and his time valuable.

[...]

Certainly, indolence, cowardice, or vanity can hide behind pretended reverence for words, but irreverence seems quite obviously the more pressing danger. A little care and humility is in order, for words are the main vehicle of culture and science, and the vital medium of a free republic. They bind the living and the dead, God and man into a communion of love and knowledge. Words are not lifeblood, except in the sense that they are."

We clearly approach the written word differently today than we did centuries - or even merely decades - ago. But perhaps it's good to remember that writing is a thing which used to be shown respect, that reverence was given to those who were good at it, and that thought and care used to go into every stroke of ink on the page. Maybe we can still treat the written word that way now.

A Defense of Art, Part 2, or More on the Trashy Novel Stuff

The Apple was so kind as to email me this article from the New York Times. Instead of providing a link, I just copied and pasted the whole thing, you if you want the link, it's here.

Great Literature? Depends Whodunit

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: February 3, 2008

IN a British court recently, an author said, in effect, that glue-sniffing had made her write a thriller. The author, Joan Brady, is a 68-year-old American who has lived in England for the last several decades and in 1993 became the first woman to win the Whitbread book prize. She received a £115,000 out-of-court settlement after arguing that fumes from the glue and solvents used in the Conker shoe factory next door to her home in Totnes had poisoned the air and made her sick. She suffered nerve damage, she said, and a loss of concentration that caused her to abandon the literary novel she was working on, “Cool Wind From the Future,” and instead crank out a potboiler called “Bleedout.”

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Jeffrey Smith

“Fumes Made Me Go Lowbrow, Says Writer” was the headline in The Times of London, and Ms. Brady took exception, claiming that the voice in the new book was exactly the same as the one she had used in her highbrow Whitbread winner. You have to wonder, though, how many literary novels have flap copy like this, from “Bleedout”: “Even after Hugh Freyl lost his sight he was invincible. But late one night, in the library of the elite law firm that bears his name, he was beaten to death.”

You also have to conclude that Conker or its lawyers don’t know much about the publishing business — that is, if they really believed that Ms. Brady had suffered from turning to thrillerdom. Thrillers by and large do much better than literary novels, and though the title “Bleedout” turns out to refer, disappointingly, to kosher butchery rather than human carnage, it has done pretty well, selling some 50,000 copies in Britain alone since it came out in 2005. An author seeking damages would do better, one would have thought, by claiming to have become so addled that she had decided to forsake a certain payday for the vain hope of literary success. In that case the Times headline might read: “Fumes Float Author’s Fantasy.”

But what’s behind the Brady controversy, of course, is the assumption that genre fiction — mysteries, thrillers, romances, horror stories — is a form of literary slumming. These kinds of books are easier to read, we tend to think, and so they must be easier to write, and to the degree that they’re entertaining, they can’t possibly be “serious.”

The distinction between highbrow and lowbrow — between genre writing and literary writing — is actually fairly recent. Dickens, as we’re always being reminded, wrote mysteries and horror stories, only no one thought to call them that. Jane Austen wrote chick lit. A whiff of shamefulness probably began attaching itself to certain kinds of fiction — and to mysteries and thrillers especially — at the end of the 19th century, with the rise of the “penny dreadful,” or cheaply printed serial. The market and public appetite for this stuff became even larger in the early years of the 20th century with the tremendous growth of pulp magazines, which specialized in the genres and eventually even added a new one: science fiction.

Pulp writing, amply on display in “The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps,” a new 1,000-page anthology edited by Otto Penzler, was often crude and formulaic, but it could also be thrillingly racy, taking on themes that politer fiction ignored, and eventually a few of the pulp writers — Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, for example — got promoted into the mainstream. The puzzling thing is that such promotions don’t happen more often. Both Ian Rankin, the British mystery writer, and Stephen King, the horror-meister, have complained about a double standard — a conspiracy, in effect — among critics and reviewers that tends to ghettoize genre writing and prevent its practitioners from being taken seriously.

But if there is a conspiracy it’s one that authors — highbrow authors, anyway — are sometimes complicit in, frequently adopting pseudonyms when they want to dabble in, say, crime writing. The most curious case recently is that of John Banville, the Booker Prize winner who has published two highly regarded mysteries under the name Benjamin Black but hasn’t taken any pains to keep his true identity a secret. For a Web site, he has even interviewed his alter ego. Perhaps not so surprising is that what makes the two Black novels, “Christine Falls” and “The Silver Swan,” so good — their atmospheric descriptive writing — is precisely Mr. Banville’s great strength, while Benjamin Black, whose third novel is currently being serialized in The New York Times Magazine, is still learning some of the ropes when it comes to plot and suspense.

The Black novels belong, in fact, to that interesting category of novels that are often said to “transcend” or “almost transcend” their genre. This compliment, however backhanded, used to be awarded all the time to John le Carré’s cold war thrillers. Mr. King hears it a lot now, especially from reviewers who want to imagine that he is gradually abandoning his horror roots. To transcend its genre, a book has to more nearly resemble a mainstream novel — it has to be less generic, in a word. A good example is the mysteries of P. D. James, justly praised for a characterization so rich and detailed that for long stretches you can forget you’re reading a crime story in the first place.

But is that always what we want — to forget why we’re reading what we’re reading? In a review a couple of years ago of a Robert Littell thriller, John Updike wrote about genre writers — Mr. le Carré and Ms. James included — who sometimes give signs of wanting to be “real” novelists and seem restive about living up to their implicit contract with the reader, which is to deliver on the promise that a particular genre entails — whether it’s a murder solved, a cold war plot thwarted, a horror unmasked, a love requited.

What we look for in genre writing, Mr. Updike suggested, is exactly what the critics sometimes complain about; the predictableness of a formula successfully executed. We know exactly what we’re going to get, and that’s a seductive part of the appeal. It’s why we can read genre books so quickly and in such quantity, and happily come back for more of the same by the very same author. Such books are reassuring in a way that some other novels are not.

Does that make them lesser, or just different? Probably both on occasion. But it doesn’t necessarily make them easier or less worthwhile to write. Henry James’s story “The Next Time” is a tragicomedy about Ralph Limbert, an author who desperately wants to be popular and write potboilers but can’t for the life of life of him manage, as the narrator says, to turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear. Like Ms. Brady, he even moves to the country, but without the benefit of fumes, he is doomed to being highbrow. The story is partly autobiographical, and not without a twinge of both snobbery and self-pity — James, too, wanted to be more popular than he was — but is also informed by a sense that for most writers there is no such thing as slumming. You write, by his lights, what you have a gift for writing; anything else will be revealed as fakery.

James talked a lot about “trash,” and whether he knew the difference between good trash and bad is doubtful. Yet he understood all about genre writing. “The Turn of the Screw,” one of the best things he ever wrote, is an unabashed ghost story.