Weblog – Mission to the unknown
A new weblog, familiar challenges
The desire to write, to think out loud, to write down a thought and launch it into the ether is a little like creating that golden disk containing voice and music recordings, bolting it to the fender of Voyager II, and hoping that some intelligent being somewhere in the far reaches of the Milky Way galaxy or beyond will come across it and pick up the thread. Okay, writing a blog post is not very much like the $865 million effort required to launch Voyager and its message disk to interstellar space. Yet you have to admit that both actions require a healthy dose of optimism.
Hello, from the children of planet Earth.
A group of us are working on a blog design that we hope will invite faculty, students, staff and alumni around the world to stop by, read, and respond. We hope that they will contribute their thoughts, comment and join in the conversation.
This is a challenge. Design is a very personal, even intimate process. What one considers artful, another considers esoteric. The elegance of one format is an obstacle to the urge for spontaneity in another. Form either follows function or defeats it depending on your individual goals, which rarely come into focus until we see something and experience our reaction to it. Fact is, until this moment in the collaborative act of creation, none of us have come to terms with our desires, wants and needs for this blog. Which is one of the benefits of process. Show me a creator of anything who gets it right the first time and I’ll show you a creator who aimed low.
When we previewed the blog design-in-progress for a group of smart and entrepreneurial students, it was met with clear interest, encouragement of its strengths, and helpful inquiries about ways to address its underlying potential for engaging the real-life needs of students, faculty, alumni and prospective students and their families.
Interactivity – can it be organized into at-a-glance categories? No one wants to scroll through a long page of disparate posts and comments to find something of interest. We’re all busy. Give us the top-ranking or most popular threads in politics, student life, music, news, and so forth.
In other words, edit content and format presentation. Yes, this involves some processing of content in what was originally envisioned as an open, transparent, and unmoderated online dialog. They acknowledged this. They know their peers. There will be the occasional ‘immature’ post, but that is life and it can be managed. More than anything, they were optimistic that the worldwide community of students, faculty and alumni would ultimately self-moderate. I also believe that they will. Recent research suggests that they have it right.
A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY by J.L. Carr
J.L. Carr captures a moment in time in England’s rural north. The narrator is shell-shocked veteran, Tom Birkin, who tells of his weeks in Oxgodby in 1920 to restore a painting in the local church. The Pastor is a bitter and misunderstood man; his wife is a caged beauty. In a field nearby, another veteran named Charles Moon digs for the bones of a 500 year-old victim of this village’s ancestors. Their summer in the almost surreal Oxgodby is the tale of restoration of wounded souls, how the answers we seek are so often within our reach, and crafted in English that is a delight to read and re-read. I was reluctant to put this small book down.
J.L. Carr’s A Month In The Country is a quiet masterwork.
Booker Prize shortlist in 1980.
Note: This edition of the novel can be difficult to find. First published in England in 1980, it has appeared in various small press editions since that time. I recommend the illustrated Quince Tree Press edition.
GREAT HEART by Davidson & Rugge
It’s rare to return to a book a decade after reading it and find that it has grown, or more accurately, it has kept pace with my own evolution as a reader. I am a more critical reader now, probably due to the flight of years. There are ever more books to read, yet less time in an increasingly busy chain of days. Eleven years after reading GREAT HEART – The History of a Labrador Adventure I find I am once again transported by the story of Mina Hubbard’s fierce search for the truth about her husband’s death in Labrador’s unforgiving wilds.
I wrote an anonymous review of the book on Amazon in November, 1999, and upon returning last evening to see how the book is doing I discovered that my review is featured as the most helpful ‘positive’ review. While I appreciate that other readers rated my comments as helpful, I was disappointed that other readers hadn’t long since eclipsed my own comments in support of this good book.
Here is what I said:
Using Leon and Mina Hubbard’s diaries, as well s those of their guides, Dillon Wallace and George Elson (great character!), Davidson and Rugge reconstruct the extraordinary story of a woman’s search for the truth behind her husband’s death in 1903. They flesh out the facts, give form to the unspoken fears and desires hidden between the lines of desperate journal entries, and then skillfully breathe life into the tragic events. A powerful docunovel in a class all its own. Don’t miss it.
Others have been compelled by Great Heart. In 2000, author and freelance journalist, Alexandra J. Pratt attempted to retrace Mina Hubbard’s 1905 560-mile route by canoe through the sub-Arctic of Canada’s Labrador, but a century of forest overgrowth defeated her team’s effort. In 2002, Pratt published Lost Lands, Forgotten Stories, A Woman’s Journey into the Heart of Labrador. I look forward to reading Ms. Pratt’s take on this story.
On Negotiation for Writers
Close the Deal
Anyone who has dealt with an agent, a publisher, or a producer knows that negotiation is part of what makes the writing life possible. As organizing principles go, this is pretty straightforward. While we have plenty to think about in negotiating representation, publication, and (hopefully) production, one goal should remain clearly in focus: close the deal.
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Remember a Few Key Points
Robin Davis Miller, General Counsel of The Authors Guild, offered some advice on contracts and the negotiation process at a seminar in Los Angeles. I have benefitted from her counsel. I hope you benefit, too. Here are a few notes:
- Publishing is a moving target. Change is constant.
- NEVER accept assurances for marketing of your book on the website or anywhere else. Get it in the contract.
- Avoid the OPTION Clause. Agents tend to leave it in because it ensures their commission even if you leave your agent and place the book yourself.
- As the author, you deserve to know the publisher’s printing and circulation figures. Publishers don’t release this information easily. They fight it. Remember – by the time they make an offer, they know precisely how many copies of your book they will print.
- Research your agent’s and publisher’s reputation for using sub-rights. Has the publisher executed for others? Has your agent executed for other clients?
- Time is your ally. The more time that an agent or editor or publisher invests in you and your work, the more reluctant they are to let you go.
- Books are a business. Think and speak from a business point of view.
- Insert an out of print clause anywhere the publisher attempts to punish the author for underperforming sales.
- Always insist on receiving a statement. Have them e-mail it if they are reluctant to invest in postage. How else are you to know they are doing their job?
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More Advice
Ernest Bevin (1881-1951), British politician and statesmen, offered:
The first thing to decide before you walk into any negotiation is what to do if the other fellow says no.
Novel Opening Lines (list-in-progress)
One of the immeasurable benefits of novels is travel to other places and times with characters who begin as strangers and rapidly become part of our experience. How the author introduces us to a setting, a character, a premise, and occasionally even the designing principle of the literary work as a whole in a single sentence is a key moment. Does the author establish a contract with us in that first line? Or does s/he need a paragraph or a chapter to accomplish that?
Here are some distinctive opening lines. There is no possible way to fairly represent all literature. These are from my own reading, which scarcely scratches the surface. I’m working on catching up, and hope that you will add suggestions from books you admire. In that way, we can assemble a reading list for us all.
Opening Lines
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
Ernest Hemingway – The OLD MAN AND THE SEA (1952)
Call me Ishmael.
Herman Melville – MOBY DICK (1851)
A soft fall rain slips down through the trees and the smell of ocean is so strong that it can almost be licked off the air.
Sebastian Junger - The PERFECT STORM (1997)
One day in the spring of 1998, Bluma Lennon bought a secondhand copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems in a bookshop in Soho, and as she reached the second poem on the first street corner, she was knocked down by a car.
Carlos María Domínguez – The HOUSE OF PAPER (2004)
In that last winter of the war, she knew to use point blank ink.
Ivan Doig – HEART EARTH (1993)
Fedor Mikhailovich Smokovnikov, chairman of the Bureau of Fiscal Affairs, was a man who took pride in his incorruptible honesty and who was dismally liberal in his views; not only was he a freethinker, but he despised all form of religion, looking upon them as nothing but the relics of superstition.
Leo Tolstoy – The FORGED COUPON
The is the saddest story I have ever heard.
Ford Madox Ford – The GOOD SOLDIER (1915)
I started off this morning looking for a lost dog.
Gretel Ehrlich – Looking For a Lost Dog, from ISLANDS, The UNIVERSE, HOME (1991)
Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface.
Wallace Stegner – CROSSING TO SAFETY (1987)
“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs. Ramsay.
Virginia Woolf – TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927)
Castle, ever since he had joined the firm as a young recruit more than thirty years ago, had taken his lunch in a public house behind St. James’s Street, not far from the office.
Graham Greene – The HUMAN FACTOR (1978)
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Charles Dickens – A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1859)
Grandpa William once told me: “A good hunter… that’s somebody the animals come to.”
Richard Nelson – THE ISLAND WITHIN (1989)
This story is unlikely.
C.S. Richardson – The END OF THE ALPHABET (2007)
When the team reached the site at five-thirty in the morning, one or two family members would be waiting for them.
Michael Ondaatje – ANIL’S GHOST (2000)
To Teens, Knowledge is Infinite
Child is Father/Mother…
Despite the rancor at town hall meetings across an increasingly stressed America, there is some very good news coming from a hopeful source: high school students and rising college first-year students. While so many adults are indulging in anti-social rage against change, their children are quietly learning, preparing, observing and developing their personal life plans. From the look of things, they are choosing change, seeing promise in lifelong learning, knowledge as infinite, and following discovery where it leads as long as it results in good – for themselves, their families, their communities and their planet.
In a related article by Tamar Lewin about the rapidly diminishing importance of textbooks in high school education, there is an intriguing subtext that made me sit up and pay attention – students are relating to the world they are inheriting in a productive way that contrasts with their elders’ approach. If you get a moment, read In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History (NYT, 9 Aug 2009).
100 Best Novels – Clues for the Novelist
Comparing The Modern Library Board’s List of the Top 100 Novels 1900 – 1999 to the Readers’ List gives me some reasons for hope. Looking at the top 10, for example:
Board’s List
1. Ulysses, James Joyce
2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
6. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
7. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
8. Darkness At Noon, Arthur Koestler
9. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Reader’s List
1. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
2. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
3. Battlefield Earth, L. Ron Hubbard
4. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
5. To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
6. 1984, George Orwell
7. Anthem, Ayn Rand
8. We The Living, Ayn Rand
9. Mission Earth, L. Ron Hubbard
10. Fear, L. Ron Hubbard
This 1990’s poll continues to generate discussion about the most popular books vs. best literature of the 20th century. The Modern Library’s talking points are just the beginning. For example:
Is it possible to compare books as different as Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, and Brave New World? Are there any features that unite these three books? More widely, are there any literary features that unite the best books as a whole?
My interest here is less intellectual or academic. What I see is the state of literary art in 1999, not just from writer’s and publishers’ perspectives, but from the reader’s perspective. What moved readers sufficiently that they were willing to take time to vote, and write, and talk about it? Aside from the fact that we are wired to be social creatures, inclined to exchange ideas, count and make lists, what is it that makes these novels in particular list-worthy?
These measures of popular appeal and perceived importance can be a source of information. Of course, they also can be a time sink amounting to nothing more than another set of questionably useful information. Still, writers appreciate the hunt, the mystery, pulling back the layers of the story, even when it’s their own.
So what can we learn from the Lists? If the Modern Library’s Top 100 Novel List provides any lessons that are useful to the novelist, these might include the following:
Screenwriters tend to write novels that appeal to everyday readers more than to cultural leaders.
It’s true. Ayn Rand (a.k.a. Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum), Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter, holds four places in the Readers’ Top Ten List for her novels, Atlas Shrugged (1), The Fountainhead (2), Anthem (7) and We The Living (8). Ayn Rand was a screenwriter?! Yes. Her first literary success was the sale of her screenplay, Red Pawn, to Universal in 1932. Rand’s aforementioned publications are novels, not screenplays; yet her initial success as a screenwriter suggests her creative instincts began in the language of showing rather than telling her stories.
By the way, the fact that L. Ron Hubbard comes second after Rand with three novels in the top ten almost made me toss this post-in-progress. But that’s another entry.
Everyday readers buy more novels than the cultural elite buy novels.
There are more readers than cultural leaders and scholar-readers, hence more demand and larger market. Unless you are writing scholarly theses, which is good too, focusing your energies on the significantly larger market of novel readers increases the odds that your agent will succeed in closing a deal with a publisher who, after all, is very much in a numbers game. If he/she can’t sell it to at least 5,000 readers, it’s D.O.A.
The top-twenty most popular novels in both lists, Board’s and Readers’, are dense with screen adaptations.
What, if anything, does this tell us? Consider all channels as you develop your concept. Popular sentiment has the printed book on the mat and down for the count. That may or may not be true; only time will tell. What is clear is that the story, the tale, the CONTENT is king. Demand for story/content is greater than ever before. So it makes sense to adapt your material to your reader’s/viewer’s/listener’s preferences.
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On another front, a glance at Publishers Marketplace offers even more to confuse the muse…
> Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Books Editor Geeta Sharman-Jensen Takes Buyout
Is the book review market so deflated that early retirement, unemployment or part-time teaching at the community college look like reasonable career choices?
> Teen Sues Amazon for Deleted Kindle Homework Notes
What can the U.S. justice system possibly make of this ‘dog ate my homework’ story? Intellectual property and privacy issues notwithstanding, I’m following this case for what it reveals about the game changing ramifications of epublishing, wireless downloading, and even cloud-based computing for writers, publishers, and service providers.
> Supermarkets Responsible for One in Five UK Book Sales
That’s bad news, right? No, that’s good news; supermarkets are one of the sectors least damaged by the economic downturn. Rising paperback sales there suggest a market opportunity for novels – procedurals, romances, mysteries, conspiracies, religion – novellas, and self-help.
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What’s your view on the physics of successful publication? What is the role of technology … of publicity and exposure … of representation … of literary merit … of perception as a genre master … what differentiates the published from the unpublished … is it any different in its end result than the old model?
Nicholson Baker Test Drives the Kindle
Do you Kindle? Nicholson Baker does. Check out A New Page - Can the Kindle really improve on the book? here in the August 3 edition of The New Yorker.
UPDATE (27 Aug 09): Blog in which Nicholson Baker takes questions about the Kindle.
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