The Act of Submission, The Act of Rejection

I'm going to juxtapose a couple of links here. First, here's an excerpt from an interview with Steve Almond, in which he talks about a story of his that received forty rejections, but finally won a Pushcart. As Steve Almond comments, "You just have to go, 'Okay, fine, I'm going to ignore that rejection,' because those are the odds."

Now here's Sven Birkerts on how he processes the slushpile at Agni. Strikingly, while selling a story is usually the laborious work of months or years, rejecting a story can be the impulsive work of a few seconds.

I should pursue this thought further tomorrow.

The Business Section

Some months back, I was talking to a business consultant I know. This guy provides advice to retail businesses for a living, wanted to publish a book about the future of retailing, and asked me some of those "how do I find a publisher?" type questions. After giving him some basic answers, I must have digressed onto what I might personally find interesting about his book. He set me straight about this by saying, "You should understand that I actually have no personal drive or desire to write a book -- I just think a published book would be a useful tool for promoting my business."

This was kind of an aha! moment for me. "Actually I guess most business books are like that," I mused.

My retailing expert friend had also gotten as far as inventing a new buzzword, by fusing a marketing term with an Eastern religious concept -- the resulting neologism was quite catchy,

(The faint-hearted should skip this next paragraph: I went on to make the mistake of asking what the future held for bookstores. My friend's answer was that Borders should merge with Barnes and Noble, because two bookstores are one too many, besides which, "they shouldn't sell so many books. It's confusing to customers." To comfort those writers who ignored my warning about skipping this paragraph, and are now inclined to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, here is a quick gulp of information about experts generally being wrong. Sorry if that didn't do the trick.)

Business books I personally like include Charles Ferguson's High Stakes, No Prisoners, and Lewis Pinault's Consulting Demons. People who write these kind of books tend to have done well in the business world, and since moved on to another field like academia or landscape gardening -- hence they have nothing to lose by being frank. These books tell a story. But mostly the business section is full of bullet-pointed lists of things Jeff Bezos did, which you should therefore do too. (E.g. maximize market share and don't be concerned about profitability. On the basis of a single case study, this was determined to be a universally valid strategy for early-stage businesses...) Or contradictory pieces of inspiration. (E.g. be sure to fit in, because people who don't fit in never get anywhere... be sure not to fit in, because people who don't fit in never get noticed...)

Andrew Sullivan versus the Publishing Industry

Andrew Sullivan recently blogged, "If any industry deserves to go under, it's the publishing industry." See here.

From an earlier Sullivan blog post -- "The future is obviously print-on-demand, and writers in the future will make their names first on the web. With e-distribution and e-books, writers will soon be able to put this incompetent and often philistine racket behind us."

From another -- "The first print-run of my last book was published with an indeterminate number of copies with the pages in the wrong order. I was the only person who noticed. No one at Harper Collins or the printer was able to tell me how many books had been misprinted, or shipped with misprints. They had no idea; and no way to find out."

Andrew Sullivan has published some brilliant books. Virtually Normal, for example, is an open-minded, insightful and entertaining work on the politics of homosexuality. Now Andrew Sullivan is a phenomenal blogger -- the Daily Dish deservedly won the 2008 Weblog Award for Best Blog. (Incidentally, I heard Andrew Sullivan is considering putting out a book of the "View From Your Window" photos, which are actually my least favorite feature of his blog -- perhaps this is because they make me feel like I'm his only reader who has a shitty view from my window. Could it be that posting hundreds of insightful political comments a week, and also lambasting the publishing industry, is actually a cunning marketing strategy for a coffee table book? That's so gay -- just kidding!)

Here's what I keep coming back to about the publishing industry. While the most initially striking thing about this Naomi Alderman article on the future of publishing is how truly terrifying, on how many levels, Stephen King looks holding a Kindle, the most important factoid therein is that roughly ninety-five percent of published books make a loss.

I think many of us writers are vaguely aware of this while also being in emotional denial about it.

This fact has many ramifications. I can imagine that, if I owned a publishing company, and I knew ninety-five percent of the books I published made a loss, I probably wouldn't expend a lot of effort on quality assurance on a book until I was sure it was one of the other five percent.

As a text-delivery mechanism, books have simply become prohibitively expensive and inconvenient to distribute. When I say this, people often respond "oh but books are so beautiful, reading something on a screen just isn't the same," and so on. But books are not necessarily as beautiful as Carolingian illuminated manuscripts, papyrus scrolls, or Shang dynasty oracle bones. And they can also be physically dangerous -- if I'm in my apartment when an earthquake hits, I may well perish under the weight of thousands of obscure volumes. The way my weekend's going, I might even welcome such a fate...

Other Things Agents Don't Like

Here's a post from Miss Snark's now-discontinued blog, with comments about what people are least likely to want to read about. The consensus reached: nobody will read a book where a child gets raped.

I've attended convention panels that came to the same conclusion, one panel member after another insisting that the topic of child rape is definitively uncommercial. Which naturally begs the question -- why did everyone read Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner? If you make the rape of a boy a poignant metaphor for the fate of Afghanistan, and if your book comes out at a time when people suddenly, if belatedly, care about Afghanistan, maybe your book will be a phenomenal international best-seller.

Nobody has a clue what will sell -- see tomorrow's post. By the way, if you post a comment and it doesn't appear on the site, please e-mail me about the problem: we're experiencing some kind of technical problem with the comments that we're still trying to sort out.

The End of Multiple Points of View

The same agent who said "Male point of view doesn't sell" also refuses to consider novels that have multiple points of view. Oh well, I'm guessing Roberto Bolaño probably never considered submitting The Savage Detectives to this individual anyway...

My gut response is to say, "If it doesn't have multiple points of view, it isn't really a novel."

Then again, having several viewpoint characters does lead to technical problems. I've read Anna Karenina a lot of times, for example, and sometimes I get all the way through without wishing one of the Levin sections shorter, so that I can get on to the next Anna Karenina section -- but other times I don't. If even Tolstoy couldn't entirely avoid the risk of having one character become more interesting to the reader than another, perhaps this problem is unsolvable?

Having worked on a lot of (unpublished) novels, I notice a trend in my own work toward fewer and fewer viewpoint characters per novel. Does this reflect a craven bowing to commercial pressure on my part? A tempting alternative is to view it as a sign of my own increasing psychological integration. When a novel has two viewpoint characters, these tend to reflect warring elements of the author's psyche, but there's something satisfying about forcing these conflicting elements into a single character... This is a topic I may return to.

The End of Male Point of View

"Male point of view doesn't sell." This is an actual quote from the literary agent of someone I know.

Even when Charles Dickens was at the top of the bestseller lists, most readers were women. But as publishing comes to be more and more about the bottom line, Chris Goldberg reports that "... it's gotten to the point where a lot of the more business-savvy literary agents won't even bother to represent a young male novelist anymore."

Stephen King responds that men do still read thrillers -- incidentally, I share his opinion that Lee Child is the best contemporary writer in this genre.

Guys can't complain really -- after all, for most of literary history, it was harder for women to get published. So this isn't a topic I plan to return to...

Barriers to Hedonic Trade

Here's a beautiful discussion from a few years back -- some classical economists debating why it is that people don't spend all their time having sex.

I would be interested to see a similar analysis of why people don't read all the time. Perhaps one could move on from there to determine what exactly is wrong with those of us who do read all the time...

A Spanish proverb James Purdy liked

"He whose mother dwelleth in a whorehouse cannot call himself an orphan." -- from this interview with Martin Goodman.

James Purdy died this month. May he rest in peace.

"Technique is constant practice and a kind of bleeding inside. It's agony really because the body resists the soul. It doesn't want to be tortured by putting some things down on paper." -- James Purdy

Remember the Grumpy Old Bookman?

Michael Allen doesn't seem to be blogging any more, and he has an inexplicable fondness for Ian Fleming. Yet his was one of my favorite literary blogs.

Its great strength was its frankness, as evidenced in this post from 2005, arguing that writing is bad for your health and general emotional well-being. Among the comments is one from me (back when I was naive and innocent and not yet a blogger) trying to cobble together a counter-argument...

I do share some of the Grumpy Old Bookman's tastes as a reader, incidentally -- Neal Stephenson for example, and Susanna Clarke. And the post I just linked to references such fine authors as Robert M. Sapolsky and Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- now there's a fellow more people should have listened to!

The question of whether writers are perforce doomed to a life of misery and woe is one to which we shall be returning...

The End of Mainstream

Last weekend, talking to an artist I know, I said that I used to see literature as one of the highest and most important civilized activities, but that now I was resigned to thinking of it as a specialist niche interest, a tolerated but to-most-people-incomprehensible obsession, akin say to the collecting of rare defective sneakers or stamps. "Literature is no longer mainstream," I said.

"But there is no mainstream any more!" the artist replied.

These words brought me a tremendous sense of release -- a feeling which nowadays always carries a sense of suspicion in its wake. I said doubtfully, "But isn't Hannah Montana mainstream?"

The artist shrugged and said, "Who's that?"

The End of Newspapers

I think every blogger out there has already linked to this piece of analysis by Clay Shirky. Now I have too.

Money quote: "For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues."

It was calculated recently that printing the New York Times costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Kindle, and that's a conservative estimate.

A Contemporary Winesburg, Ohio

I really enjoyed the story collection Livability, by Jon Raymond, who I recently interviewed for Identity Theory.

These are powerful stories, deeply rooted in the Pacific Northwest, about characters who strive to do the right thing and face terrible disappointment. Two of them have been made into independent movies by Kelly Reichardt.

"One of my favorite Greek words is ekphrasis, which means 'the joy of describing a visual image in words.'" -- Jon Raymond

Why Everything Unfinished?

Last night I mentioned to someone that I have a new blog on Identity Theory, and she said, "Oh, you blog for Identity Theory." I'm still getting used to the syntax here -- I love saying "I blog for Identity Theory," since it sounds a bit like "I play hockey for Sweden," or "I brake for whales."

About the title: I originally wanted to call this blog The Semi-colon's Dream. I got into Elias Canetti's fragments, back in the late 1980s, after reading a negative review of The Secret Heart of the Clock in a British newspaper. The reviewer quoted the fragment "the semi-colon's dream" to indicate that Canetti had lost his mind -- but the phrase inspired me enough that I went out and bought the book.

So my mental state in the late 1980s passeth all understanding, but I think what the phrase evokes for me is suspension and tension -- the fascination of being in the middle of a sentence, where it pauses and may change direction.

I never use semi-colons myself; the only punctuation mark that contradicts itself.

It turns out Craig Conley already has a Semicolon's Dream Journal Blog -- this is a crowded blogosphere I find myself in -- so I went with another fragment about irresolution from The Secret Heart of the Clock. "Everything unfinished was better. It kept you suspended and dissatisfied."

What's in a name? The Beatles is a really lame name for a band, if you think about it -- you just never thought about it.

"A semi-colon is a strange kind of thinking that I don't understand." -- Peter Rock, My Abandonment

Tonight: InsideStorytime MIGRATIONS

Reading at Cafe Royale tonight (Thursday March 19th) for InsideStorytime , San Francisco's only reading series run by introverts --

• Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,
• Ali Liebegott, author of The IHOP Papers and the graphic novel The Crumb People
• Sandy Florian, author of The Tree of No and co-author of the "Mutterbutterjinglemash" track
• touring slam poet Sean Patrick Conlon
• the phantastic Alex Fokas

Tell me your heard about the event through this blog and I'll waive the customary $3-$5 cover charge -- I'll probably even buy you a drink out of astonishment that anyone has started reading this blog yet...

The general drift of society

In this piece about Orwell and marriage, which I wrote a few years back and which just appeared on Stephen Elliott's The Rumpus.net, I quote this paragraph from Orwell's "The Prevention of Literature."

"Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.”

Orwell would have made a great blogger.

Brief Status Report from San Francisco

Bookstores keep closing down. The newspapers are going out of business. There's ever less funding for the public schools.

We sure have a lot of writers though.

Here's a video Kemble Scott made of the last author event at Stacey's Bookstore, now closing after 85 years.

What are blogs for?

Reading the blogs that most interest me, I have the sense of being privy to the inner thoughts of someone struggling to make sense of something. Take Andrew Sullivan's blog -- it's as if, reading it over time, one can follow the seismic shifts in his thinking. Here's a recent self-searching post from the guy.

Here I hope to make sense of my feelings about the literary world -- many thanks to those of you who tried to talk me out of this.

testing testing...

This is my first blog post, and I'm scared!

(Maybe scared in a good way.)

I'm pretty sure William Hazlitt would have blogged, given the chance. Beachcomber (a.k.a. J.B. Morton) might have blogged. Flann O'Brien (a.k.a. Myles na gCopaleen) would have blogged,..

The plan is to ease myself into this gently.

The hope is that this will evolve into a blog about literature, the universe, and everything.