Gridley Fires

2012 shortlist announced | The Man Booker Prizes

The books shortlisted this year should be encouraging to new novelists and those published by indie presses. Read on:

11 September 2012

The six books were chosen by a panel of judges chaired by Sir Peter Stothard, Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. The shortlisted books were selected from the longlist of 12 announced in July. 

The shortlist is:

Author, Title (Publisher)
Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories/Faber & Faber)
Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt)
Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury)
Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)

ManBookerPrize

 Visit Bob's website here and his FB fan page here.

 

Finding One's Way

This may or may not prove intertesting to readers of this post, but after reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (and another book I'll post on soon), I watched the movie(s) the book(s) inspired. It occurred that while many others may have read one and seen the other, maybe they haven't drawn a contrast. So I'll give it a shot.

image via amazon.com

 

The 1977 movie version of Portrait accomplished a rare and admirable thing: it strayed not a whit from Joyce's book. If the flick had any shortcomings in that respect, it was that the ninety minutes remaining after editing gave much of Joyce's autobiographical self, Stephen Daedalus, short shrift.

But to this viewer's interesting part.

While my reading of the book seemed what was probably not an abnormal coming of age in early twentieth century Ireland (or much of anywhere else), the movie's nuances seemed markedly different. In the book, Daedalus' childhood found him, after acclimating to his family's strictures, in a parochial school that placed discipline above learning, fear of the Divinity above spiritual growth. As young Stephen matured, he explored religion, sex, learning (of a more generic sort), arriving at something of a provisional personal philosophy that was (we assume) to govern his adult life.

The move version, though, seemed to add another dimension to this journey-to-adulthood - - that each phase was an attempt at seduction. I'm emphasizing that because, first, that's what cinema does: it's sensorial, and it seduces. Second, it's easy to add such emotional leverage to such a well written and eminently well thought out book. But more importantly, because that's what life gives us at the end of the day - offering after offering of seduction. It offers the inviting security of family, the lure of faith in what is beyond our ability to perceive, and it entices us with attack after attack of intellectual enthrallment. 

What makes Portrait an important book in the western literary canon - and what I think the movie makes clearer than the book - is that while we're all subject to such a gauntlet in our youth, how we deal with these various seductions determines precisely who we become as adults, what we believe about ourselves and the world, and what we do with our lives and our talents.

 Visit Bob's website here and his FB fan page here.

Going One’s Own Way

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce

image via plodit.com 

 

It sometimes takes a while to warm up to writing such as this first major work by James Joyce. His title tells the story cleanly enough, but there’s more to this bildungsroman than simply a young man coming of age in 1900s Ireland. 

The story is of a young man, Stephen Daedalus who, as we all have probably been in our youth, was subjugated to family, school, and religion. And in this era of Ireland’s history, these constitute a formidable albatross. I’m synopsizing to a great degree, but Daedalus’ first onus is a rather formal Catholic education, in which discipline is paramount. The school’s rules are an end unto themselves. 

Of course, this is a Catholic school, so the sensibilities of education and religious training are intermixed. Daedalus and his mates are cowed by this one-two societal punch, much time being spent listening to a priest telling the boys of the horrors of Hell. Daedalus’ reaction? “It put me in quite a blue funk.”

Young Stephen quickly comes to experience the carnal, courtesy of a girl he pursues, Eileen, and later, a fantasy girl. But these are just set-ups for the priests in his life to bestow guilt on him. Stephen hurries to confess his earlier life a way and considers a commitment to the priesthood. 

At this point the book - and Stephen - experience a sea change of sorts. He has two choices here: he can knuckle under to the approved Irish/Catholic lifestyle, or he can go his own way. And of course he chooses the latter.

Some of Joyce’s writerly techniques wouldn’t pass muster today, but that’s hardly a knock, since he did more than anyone of that generation (other than Hemingway) to change novel writing technique. Joyce plays the philosopher, the roue, and the iconoclast, perhaps in ways never played out on the page before. It must have been hard to accomplish what Daedalus managed toward self-determination, but then that’s what Joyce is giving his readers - the opportunity to throw off the burdens of an overly strict society and to go their own way.

 

My rating: 17 of 20 stars

 

 

The Writing Process' Big Reveal

I've just finished a second major edit on a medieval novel, tentatively entitled Gerbert's Book, about three primary characters, two real, one fictional, living around the turn of the first millennium. Gerbert and Otto are the two real ones, Zosimus the fictional one. The fictional character is a device similar to Scott Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway, in Gatsby, a "first person peripheral" character, who, hopefully, adds literary flesh to Gerbert's and Otto's imagined bones. The Gerbert character is a book lover, a collector of books, who has amassed one of the largest book collections in Europe.

image via nancydimauro.blogspot.com

My story structure, then, is a book within a book: Gerbert's life story is told by two Benedictine monks - and by Gerbert himself. The reason for this structure is obvious, but it has a lot of complexities as the story is told in hop-and-skip fashion covering the years between 967 AD and 1014 AD. Could I tell this story in this way - - and make it easily palatable to a future reader? One can try.

But enough of that.

Prior to the initial writing, I decided I needed to outline the whole thing in order to have my structure make sense. During the initial writing, then, my major concern was not to have the book be a series of "information dumps" from real history. I had to let my characters inform history.

My first major edit had to evaluate whether this was a true novel or whether I was simply allowing my characters to spout history. I found that my characters did indeed work fairly well in informing history, but the problem there was the devil in the details. The book centers about Gerbert, and so his foibles, his path through life, seemed real. My problem was that you can get caught up in allowing peripheral characters such as Zosimus to be simply a narrator, without allowing him to live a "normal" life of ups and downs. I realized in the first edit that I had to do more of that with Zosimus, and I had to allow him a significant role to play - not only in Gerbert's life - but in the story as a whole. But I couldn't allow his story to overwhelm Gerbert's. So I had to make changes where Zosimus was concerned. 

In the second edit (and to some degree in the first), I found myself in my normal editing position of polishing by adding. What I mean by that: My first drafts are, for reasons I've never been able to fathom, a bit sketchy. My first draft was approximately 67,000 words, and when done with the first edit, it had grown to 70,000. I picture my process as something similar to that of a sculptor's - I block out the story first (the outline), and then do the rough sculpting (initial draft). The following edits are mostly adding a word here, a sentence there, perhaps a paragraph there, to make the story and the characters resonate with details in ever-sharper relief (as does as sculptor). Now the story is approaching 72,000 words. In these edits, I do remove things - irrelevant bits, narative depictions I have been enamored of but ones that don't add to the story - and adverbs, adjectives, and the like - simple fluff and non-taut writing.

I expect to do a couple more edits - these dealing with voice and tone more than anything else, and I will be watching the panoply of history like a hawk as my characters live it.

image via jemsfreelancewriting. com

Finally, I plan to turn the manuscript over to a writer friend, and then a freelance editor for comments. The need for this is that in today's pub biz, there's little editing going on, I find. Oh, you may land an agent who wants to obsess over your story, but likely not - it's either "I like it and will support publishing it," or "I don't believe in it the way it's written, and so I reject it."

Real life Made Personal

 

Creative Nonfiction, Summer 2012 Issue

 

This isn’t a writer’s magazine, but then it is. First and foremost it’s a doorway to publication for writers in the genre of personalized, real-life subjects. Creative Nonfiction publishes experienced writers, writers with the ubiquitous MFAs and people who just happen to have a story to tell from their lives.

This particular issue (Lee Gutkind, the editor, usually assigns a theme to each issue and advertises it several months ahead) deals with the subject of true crime, even with the ethics of writing about crime. Why ethics, you ask? The issue’s roundtable discussion on the subject deals with that circuitously, but a lot of the concern has to do with romanticizing criminal acts. 

But this issue’s stories?

They’re all riveting, and most use Gutkind’s favored technique of weaving supporting facts into a personal account of crime. Among my favorites are:

AC Fraser tells of prison’s manner of having one submit to regimentation and rather demeaning life there, something she calls Identity Folding. 

Steven Church writes about one of the Tyson-Holyfield fights, in which Mike Tyson bit off a piece of one of Evander Holyfield’s ears.

Joyce Marcel’s account of robbing ancient graves in Peru of historical artifacts blends that derring-do with her sexual exploits.

The common thread through these stories is the ultra-personal, almost psychological approach to the persons involved in the various violations and violences. This isn’t reportage - it’s much more than that.

Again, editing such magazines in a Herculean task, and sometimes the approach taken doesn’t work. Gutkind’s approach for Creative Nonfiction does work in this issue, and it works well.

 

 

The Writer As Many Characters

image via awpwriter.org

The Writer’s Chronicle, September 2012 Issue

The Writer’s Chronicle is my “go-to” magazine for perspectives that will help me grow as a writer. Simple as that. It’s a university organ, and as such it leans toward the academic approach to creative writing; still, there’s plenty of relevance, for this seat-of-the-pants writer, at least. 

In the interest of time (yours - you’re welcome), I’m only going to spout off on two article/essays that interest me in this issue. One, “Borges as Self - Toward Teaching Creative Writers,” (see what I mean about the academic approach?) by Eric LeMay begins by using the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges as an example of many people inhabiting the creative writer’s psyche, and how to channel those personality complexities into fiction. 

All fiction writers at some point realize they are not the personality when they write that they are when “in real life." According to LeMay, the creative writing instructor’s task is first to make students aware of that personality divide, and then teach them how to accept it and use it. 

A quote from the article:

“When students develop an objective purchase on that part of their identities from which their writing emerges, they become more responsible for, in control of, and reflective about themselves as writers.” (emphasis is Lemay’s)

What the author of the article seems to be saying is that, properly done, creative writing instruction also helps create a more self-aware writer (emphasis mine), hence one not prone to vomit out psychoses on the page in self-indulgent fashion. Hence these writers become better, more responsible persons by becoming better writers.

The other article, “An Epistolary Plea,” by Heather Stanfill, interests me because I use the technique - and it's a way for your many personalities to shine. If you’re not familiar, it’s the use of your characters’ letters (remember writing letters, before e-mail and Facebook?) in a novel to shine a more detailed light on your characters’ makeups. Stanfill doesn’t go into a lot of detail here, but the proper use of the epistolary technique can do in a minimum of words  what it might take volumes more to do through internalization of the characters thoughts and though dialogue and action. 

It’s an old technique, and some have made use of e-mail in recent times to modernize it. Quite rightly, I think, Stanfill writes that for the epistolary technique to work using modern communication techniques will take some doing: these use slang, too-clipped language, and a tumble of data that give little to the reader in the way of characterization. Of course, someone will, sooner or later, make revolutionary use of this old tool in our modern settings.

 

 

 

Properly Fortified...

...and then back to editing that novel......

 

Balancing Opinion With Perspective

image via mobilism.org

 

Harper’s Magazine, September 2012 Issue

 

As a reader, my affection for Harper’s Magazine continues to grow. That’s not because of its leftward political cant, but because its articles usually contain explanatory substance behind most provocative statements made. That could be because with the U.S.'s current political malaise, the leftward leaners feel a need to explain every step they take, but then that’s an issue for at least a six-pak of someone’s lager. 

But even as I write this, I have to confess to occasional frustration with Harper’s reportage. My frustration is most evident in this month’s centerpiece articles on Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. But some explanatory background:

As with the The Atlantic's reporting previously written about here, there’s a lot of hyperbole concerning what the Prez should have accomplished in his first term. In pursuit of this angst, David Samuels follows Obama from fund raiser to fund raiser, and he gives us as complete a picture of the man’s glaring complexities (the no doubt necessary complexities) anyone must have in order to compete in the Presidential sweepstakes.  

Regarding Romney, Dan Halpern  is less detailed but just as jaundiced in his examination of the challenger. Here, he portrays Romney, not through a personal microscope, but through the montage of perspectives within the wild and wooly Republican base, perspectives Romney must juggle (maybe to make everyone equally unhappy with him?) in order to keep his base corralled. Talk about herding cats - the Republicans are now having to learn how to manage intra-party diversity, as the Dems have always had to do.

What leaves me with a bad taste here is that both Samuels’ and Halpern’s dissatisfaction with their subjects isn’t supported with specific political weaknesses. Both writers are trying damned hard, it seems, to portray some depth, but their reportage is weighed down by their own biases. As a result, Harper’s gives us opinion pieces, not journalism we can use.

I’m also disappointed in a piece of fiction by Stephen King that I’d expected to like. The story, “Batman and Robin Have an Altercation,” concerns two elderly men who, in the midst of a living-in-the-past conversation and interactions with relatives, manage to get under one another’s skin. You would expect King’s writing to be taut, occasionally provocative with a tad of sentiment, and it is. My problem here is one of a genre novelist trying after all these years to write short literary fiction. He has all the writerly chops, but the story leaves me as cold as one by a mediocre MFA grad. Sorry, Stephen - I hate having to leave you with that.

Harper’s has always enthralled with their you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up snippets that speak volumes about life in the U.S. and within the modern world, and they don’t disappoint in this issue. Also, there’s a spectacular photo essay on Africa’s Niger Delta that will take your breath away.

You win some, and you lose some in taking on a magazine issue, but as I’ve written before, being an editor and trying to reach the complete spectrum of a magazine’s readership is a tough job. I’ll keep on reading. Things will be better next month.

 

 

Wanna Satire?

Are you sitting there this Labor Day weekend wishing you could be the next Mark Twain? The reincarnation of Kurt Vonnegut? Well, you need to know about satire:

the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the contextof contemporary politics and other topical issues.

It's been said that humor is a corrective social device - it presents imaginary or exaggerated situations that poke at falsity, whether in an individual's ego, or in the more collective social sense, but it does so without being seen as a diatribe or personal attack. In this way, for instance, a supremely vain person will see him/herself in a joke or witticism, will then consider his/her own behavior, and hopefully moderate it. 

image via rferl.org

Politics is a fertile field for correction through satire, and Jon Stewart is possibly the best at it today. Forget for a few moments which side of today's ideological divide you fall on, and pay attention to how Stewart deals with satire in this interview.

 

See Bob's website here, and his Facebook fan page here.

A Noble Tool For Aspiring Writers

Poets & Writers, Sep/Oct 2012 Issue

 

I’ve subscribed to this ambitious writer’s mag magazine for a lot of years now, and my relationship to it has changed over those years. I used to plumb the interviewed writers’ minds for writing tips, always unsure of my own skills. But you can’t write seriously for two decades and not grow past such, and that’s my story here. Now I have an eye out for commiseration from these essays and interviews in a writer’s market overloaded with MFAs, a market constantly unsure of what it wants from its writers. Maybe this down, overloaded, and unsure-of-itself market is the way of this postmodern era, I don’t know. 

At any rate (did I mention MFA?) this is the MFA issue. Before I read though those pearls to wannabes, I read articles by writers struggling with trying to maintain a writership within the old 9-to5, the onus of several failed novels, the perils of marriage and parenthood, and the inevitable magnetic force of teaching as a way out of writing recognition’s frustrations.

To me - and this issue pretty much exemplifies this - the MFA factories are caught up in one thing and one thing only: teaching creative writing. Within the industry, this means technique, technique, technique. I see little anywhere to urge aspirants toward the richness of life that engenders a perspective worthy of writing about it, much less of reading about it - even when fictionalized. And the whole industry seems rather incestuous: get to know a select group of teachers and writers, let them teach you and inspire you, so you can take their place within roughly the same writerly mindset. 

Of course, none of this is P&W’s fault - the mag only writes about what’s going on in the writing biz - from the writer’s standpoint - gives some tips on how to stay afloat in it, with an occasional commiseration or two.

Me? I do read the mag, but less avidly now. My interest lies more in the classifieds, where maybe, just maybe, I’ll find a home for some of my stuff. And sometimes I do.