THE WRITER'S DESK

In the course of the culling of books I've spoken of on my DeCluttered Creative blog, I came across a wonderful volume I'd half-forgotten I had, Jill Krementz's book of photographs of writers at their desks (now sadly out of print.) Krementz is a wonderful photographer and the images are beautiful, clear and luminous, telling: a young Susan Sontag working amid a pile of books and papers, her trademark streak of silver hair barely yet in evidence; E.B. White typing in a spare wooden space, rather like a barn, with open water out the window; Georges Simenon standing, smoking a pipe, with his hands resting on a desk lined with such pipes, all arrayed with mathematical precision.

But it is the brief words added by each writer pictured that I value most, maybe because I am a fellow writer myself or just because they seem even more intimate, even more personal, than the representations of the authors themselves. These little captions are not about desks so much as about process, that more interesting and infinitely deeper subject.

"It's very simple, really. You have to go to the typewriter, that's all you have to do," says Terrence McNally. "I'm a writer. I don't cook and I don't clean....Dear child, this place is a mess—my papers are everywhere," Dorothy West noted amusingly, her desk indeed a mess but her eighty-seven-year-old face a beacon of warmth and clarity. Simenon, not surprisingly in a man who lines up his pipes, notes that "The beginning will always be the same; it is almost a geometrical problem." I could go on, but I won't, if only because this might be a book you would enjoy seeing in its totality. As I write this Amazon has it available only at the prohibitive price of $199, but Alibris has copies beginning at about twenty bucks.

There are many messages within these pages, but perhaps the most evident is that there is no such thing as "a" writer's desk or "a" writing process. There are desks and tables and beds and kitchen counters, there are morning writers and night writers and sober writers and drunk writers, there are pencils and word processors, there are rituals and the lack of rituals. Someone, I now forget who, once said to me that asking how writers write is like asking how lovers make love, a question just as foolish and futile. And the comparison to lovers is apt, maybe, because one thing all the writers under Krementz's scrutiny do share, as her book radiantly shows, is a passion for the book, the story, and the word.

THE PUMPKIN'S VOICE

As I have likely said here before (I could check, but the heart quails), voice is one of the least understood but most powerful aspects of writing.

It's easier to tinker with plot, character, dialogue...all the things that are both more local and more concrete. Voice is more elusive, and hence harder to address. Yet it's truly significant to a book's power and memorability. If the voice is bland or uninteresting, it will often feel flat even when the other elements are strong.

With Halloween coming up, let me use one of my favorite books ever, Extreme Pumpkins: Diabolical Do-It-Yourself Designs to Amuse Your Friends and Scare the Neighbors, as an example.

Now, you wouldn't think a childless middle-age psedo-intellectual like Working Writer would get all tingly about a book that explains how to decorate seasonal squash. (I was going to say "seasonal vegetables," but like its sneaky little cousin the tomato, the pumpkin is a fruit.)

Nevertheless, I find Extreme Pumpkins utterly delicious. One reason, admittedly, is that the pumpkin designs appeal to my dark and perhaps deranged sense of humor. It gives directions for a Carrie pumpkin, a brain surgery pumpkin, a worm-infested pumpkin, a mooning pumpkin (think two tall pumpkins in a pair of drooping pants), a conjoined twins pumpkin, and a variety of other equally gross, twisted and/or funny themes.

But even better is author Tom Nardone's voice, which is witty, entertaining, and unapologetically irreverent. It's also much more sophisticated than one might expect. Nardone clearly writes to appeal to his core audience of, say, eleven year old boys, but his text is also designed to make adults laugh. A wise move, given the inability of most eleven year old boys to drive to the bookstore themselves.

Nardone's step by step instructions are written in a wonderfully mischevous voice. So too are his general remarks. So, even, is his index, which includes page citations for "carnge," "electrocution," "poetry corner," "roadkill statistics," and "self-analysis." Now, that's what I call going above and beyond, and also an element clearly designed for grown-ups. (Did you refer to indices as an eleven year old? Me neither. However, you'll note that somewhere along the line I did look up the plural for "index.")

I'm not saying that the voice for your next book needs to be infantile, snarky, or gross. I am saying that it should be something. Warm and sensible, clever and amusing, dark and deceptive. Witty, plainspoken, elaborate, simple, all-American, Eurotrash, introspective, aggressive...I could go on, but you get the idea.

Look for a post on some of my favorite author voices later this week, along with a reprise of my favorite pumpkin-themed-mini-film ever.

P.S. Creating and sustaining a wonderful and distinctive voice does not absolve you of the requirement to produce a great story (fiction, narrative nonfiction) or useful information (general nonfiction). Tom Nardone's pumpkin designs actually have to work. In that regard, let me say that after I recommended the book to writer Lily Hamrick at the Atlantic Center for the Arts last fall, her family won a First Prize for their giant hamburger pumpkin. (The pumpkin becomes the bun, if you're wondering). Which was good, because manipulating the ground meat for the filling is apparently not fun.

TOUCHY TOPICS TUESDAYS: the talking wounded

“I’m one of your talking wounded,” the narrator of James Fenton’s poem “In Paris With You” says.

He’s not talking about writing and writers. (He’s in Paris with “you,” so presumably he has better poisson to fry.) But he could be.

Many of us love to talk about our writing, especially in the early years of our careers. I talked for hours about my works in progress when I first began. To this day, I'm sure there are still people in Manhattan who would duck into doorways rather than hear me explain one more of my book ideas. If any of those folks happen to be reading this, mea very very culpa.

Over the years, I’ve learned not to talk about my writing in progress much, not so much out of fears for my already idiosyncratic social life but because it sours my writing. For me, talking about a book doesn’t get the book written. In fact, once I’ve hashed out an emerging story out over coffee, I no longer feel a compelling need to sit down and actually write it. I always write more, and better, when I don’t drain off any of the tension or curiosity that draws me to a piece by letting it escape into conversation. I guess you could sum up my personal rules on this subject like this.

Rule 1: Talk about writing and other writers often. Talking about writing other than our own connects us to our tribe, our craft, our colleagues, our inspirations. It’s fun, and it fires me up.

Rule 2: Talk about your own work in progress very little. Any and all words even possibly related to that subject don't belong in our mouths; they belong on the page.

Are you one of the writerly "talking wounded"? What are you personal strategies for keeping your energy on the page?

AUTHORS ON AUSTEN: but not for "jane-ites" only

A friend recently lent me A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen, edited by Susannah Carlson and published by Random House in 2009, and I have been stealing tidbits of time away from my work to browse guiltily through it ever since, like a woman with a sweet tooth who keeps on sneaking away to hit the Chips Ahoy bag hidden in the back of the pantry for one more cookie...just one more...just one.

It goes without saying that a book like this is easier to understand and enjoy if you have read something by and about Jane Austen. But the broader themes of which the collection speaks aren't about Austen per se at all; she is the exemplar, but not in some sense the point. This is a book about why some novels endure while others vanish, about what each new age brings to its readings of earlier literature, and above all about how existing books shape the imaginations of other writers. In that way it's relevant to all of us writers, whether we adore The Great Jane or abominate her.

In the collection there are classic essays I read at some long-ago moment: Virginia Woolf's Jane Austen at Sixty and an excerpt from Lionel Trilling's Why We Read Jane Austen. There are classic essays I feel like I should have read but hadn't, including pieces by E.M. Forster, Eudora Welty, and Somerset Maugham. There are people from my past: an essay by Janet Todd, whose class on British writers I took in college and who I had pretty much forgotten since (no offense to a good and entertaining teacher intended). And there are visions very much of the present. Among this group, I especially enjoyed was Benjamin Nugent's The Nerds of Pride and Prejudice, which calls Mary Bennett of that novel "one of the earliest examples of a nerd in a famous work of literature." But every piece in the book is interesting, articulate, and insightful. Martin Amis, Amy Bloom, David Lodge, Jay McInerney, Fay Weldon: it's fun to see writers we know from their own very diverse and contemporary fiction weigh in on an author from the past who has become part of the collective imagination.

I started to include some quotations from the book in this post, but that became impractical more or less immediately given the multitude of little gems to choose from. I'll offer just one, chosen not because it's the grandest or most meaningful thought but because it reminds us all of something important. This is from Amy Heckerling, whose film Clueless is a brilliant and in a deep sense very accurate updating of Emma. Her essay, which shares some of the story of making her film, is called "The Girls Who Don't Say 'Whoo'!" and reads, in part:

...here is one area where I have some beef with many of the Jane Austen films. The novels Jane Austen wrote are classics, but that doesn't mean they should be interpreted in some sort of "classy" style. They don't require slow, swooping shots of idyllic landscapes. There is no mention in Emma of lush symphonic music heard as the wind sweeps through the heather on the hill. The trees, clouds, and birds can do whatever they want. It's not about them, it's about the people, and the people in Emma are BUSY. The book has the pace of youth—sometimes headed the wrong way, but fast, restless, and exuberant.

A reminder that reading great literature requires us not only to see the differences between its time and our own, but also the things that stay the same.

Sam Sattler's blog, Book Chase, has this as its quote of the moment: Mark Twain's “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Very amusing, and new to me. You might think that I, well known to be a "Janeite," would bristle at this, but in fact I always forgive harsh criticism as long as it is funny. (Well, harsh criticism of others' books, at least.) I don't know what bugged Mr. Clemens about Miss Austen, though I could certainly hazard a score or two of guesses, or why he chose the shin-bone in particular. It sounds sort of like a Great Books version of the game Clue, doesn't it?— Mr. Twain, in the Library, with the Shin-bone.

It ill behooves the ordinary working writer to covet material goods. We have enough trouble buying food. Yet sometimes, dear reader, we do yearn for tangible treasures. (I have no idea why I'm speaking in the plural here. Perhaps I have been reading so much Michael Cox that my mind has been invaded by Queen Victoria, or perhaps onetime my pen names, Suzanne Scott and Suzanne Judson, have been called forth by the pulp-fiction theme of this post.) Today, we crave one or more of the brilliant faux-book-cover posters devised by the Heldfond Book Gallery. Each poster is designed like the cover of a pulp novel, though the theme of each, with deliberate irony, is the far less earthy world of rare books. Our personal favorite, glimpsed in its "sample" form at the left, is entitled BiblioBimbo and features a James Dean type leering at a suitably trashy babe under the tag line, "Every Bookseller In Town Had Been In Her Library"—proving, if it requires proof, that it is possible to make utterly innocent words sound completely filthy if you're clever enough. Anyway, kudos to Heldfond for celebrating both the pulp legacy and the rare book marketplace at once in such fine form, and for all of the beautiful rare books they more seriously purvey. (I crave the limited edition book of Henri Cartier-Bresson's illustrations of Rimbaud's Sonnet of the Vowels they offer, too, but the twenty-five-buck BiblioBimbo poster is precisely 72 times more affordable.)

TOUCHY TOPIC TUESDAYS: are we good enough today?

In the world of professional sports, you hear the same thing at the end of a lot of hard-fought, high-visibility matches. "I wasn't good enough today," Andy Roddick/Annika Sorenstam/Shaun White/Serena Williams/Jeremy Abbott/Gretchen Bleiler will say. Or "It wasn't my moment." Or "S/he just outplayed me." "We just didn't have it," the Yankees/Red Sox/Manchester United/Mercury/Steelers/Rangers will comment. Or "They're really playing well. We just weren't at our best."

I like these moments a lot. I like to see an individual or group that is highly skilled and even more highly competitive acknowledge that at this moment, in this setting, in this particular format, they didn't fail because of the weather or the position of the planet Mercury or their fight with their spouse or the basic unfairness of their sport, they just failed because they weren't good enough...today.

I like it that they don't say, "I'm just lousy and I always will be lousy." Or "I'm always going to lose." (Writerly self-deprecation is next Tuesday's Touchy Topic.) It's good that they don't blame themselves. But I also like it that they don't lay blame on outside forces, either.

I like the combination of honesty, humility about today, and confidence in tomorrow. It's simple, and it's strong.

Why don't writers say stuff like this more?

Rather than complaining about the unreliability of publishers, the greed of the market, the necessity of connections, the sway of short-term fads, wouldn't it be both wise and gracious to acknowledge that maybe, in this particular book, at this particular time, we just might not be good enough? That our book isn't (yet) competitive with Joan Didion or Annie Proulx or Sebastian Junger or David Wroblewski or Nora Roberts or Ian McEwan or Michael Lewis or Grace Paley or Harlan Coben or (insert your idol/envy here)?

I'm not saying that publishers aren't sometimes unreliable, that the market isn't generally greedy, that connections aren't helpful, that fads don't often hold sway. Publishing is full of boneheaded decisions, spectacular misjudgments, and slipshod plans. Agents and editors do miss excellent books and select poor ones. Forces other than quality certainly shape many of the book decisions that disappoint us.

I'm just saying that in our business as in every other, taking some responsibility is sometimes the best policy.

I can't speak for you. But I can say that I'm not as good today as any of the writers mentioned above. I also haven't worked as hard, worked as regularly, read as much, or paid my dues for as long.

I'm not good enough today. I hope I'll be at least a little bit closer tomorrow.

But in the meantime, it's not the flaws in publishing that make the difference.

In our word of digital publishing, it's sometimes heartening for a writer to remember that there are folks out there who revere books as physical objects and adore the slow and finicky hand-work of making them.

In that vein, click on the link here and spend a few moments watching this little documentary (a documentaryette, we might say if this was 1950) about letterpress printing, brought to you courtesy of my friend and colleague cj Madigan's book thinking blog and, before that, of YouTube. I've given you the link via cj's blog both because her thoughts on images, book design, and information management are always interesting, and also because her post offers a handful of little videos on related processes and crafts.

The letterpress one is my favorite: wry, amusingly voiced, filled with lovely images, and even explaining the source of the curious phrase "out of sorts." Enjoy.

CLUTCH TIME: starting to write again

Over the past few weeks I've been working on my own writing again, for the first time since a delicious residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts last fall.

The chance to get back to my own stuff should be something to celebrate, but it doesn't quite feel that way. The pages I've already written seem at once stale and overwritten, never a combo that heartens a writer. I feel oddly distanced from them, a little as though someone else wrote them, but worse; if someone else had really written them, I wouldn't feel nearly so mean or so critical. Sometimes I sit down with them and new pages just flow. Sometimes I sit down with those new pages and the whole thing suddenly stalls. I feel a little like I did back when I was learning to drive a stick shift. It's clear that the damn car can move...it's just not clear when, or how much, or where it's all going, the Autobahn or the ditch.

I know from experience that this discomfort will pass, and that some of the pages I'm so jerkily writing now will turn out to be at least a little bit better than they feel. At least, I'd like to think I know that. It doesn't actually sound very convincing at the moment. No matter how many times I manage to re-start my writing when it's stalled, it always seems like this latest try will be my first failure. I'll let you know how it goes--from the Autobahn, or the ditch.

I'M GOING TO KILL YOU IF YOU MISUSE THE WORD LITERALLY AGAIN. Literally.

I try not to get too grouchy about the increasing numbers of language usage errors that appear today in conversation, on television, even in august print publications. Grouchiness is a slippery slope in midlife: one day you're bitching over a single word, then before you know it you don't like the weather, the government, the traffic, the cost of living, the color yellow, your house, your spouse, your nose, your teeth, your dog, or pizza.

Despite these good intentions, I have to say that the moribund state of word "literally" really irritates me. Once a sturdy little worker bee, the poor thing's been blurred out and beaten down until it's a useless shadow of its former self.

As in: That purse cost like, literally, a million dollars.

As in: He's literally skin and bones.

As in: I literally died.

Part of what irritates me is that there's no really graceful substitute for the word. If you can think of one, do please post a comment below.

I'll be so grateful, I'll literally kiss you.

THE OLD ERA IS DEAD. Pass the shrimp.

It seems that articles, essays, blog posts and other screeds are being written about the death of writing, publishing, literacy, and so on every day. I very rarely (read: never) like them. I'm too innately optimistic, I'm too tired to worry about the problems of The World At Large, and I don't like running around being scared of things except after dark on Halloween (and not very much even then).

Not surprisingly, however, Garrison Keillor's op-ed on this subject in last Wednesday's New York Times won me over. It's charming. It's rueful. It's clever. It reminded me of my days in Manhattan in its image of a roof party at which "...authors and agents and editors and elegant young women in little black dresses, standing, white wine in hand, looking out across the Hudson at the lights of Hoboken and Jersey City, eating shrimp and scallops and spanikopita on toothpicks, all talking at once the way New Yorkers do." Once upon a time I too was at such parties (I was the waitress in the corner sticking spanikopita in her pocket as a nice change from Ramen Noodles). I particularly love the ending of the piece--an ending that reminded me that Garrison Keillor doesn't much like running around being scared of things either:

Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a big manila envelope with actual postage stamps on it. And kept a carbon copy for myself. I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. It was typed on paper. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it.

MAKING YOUR BOOK IDEAS WORK: The Play-Doh Theory

Play-Doh delights the senses and takes a very, very long to harden. It's designed to for radical experimentation. If you don't like what you've made of it, there's lots of opportunity for even drastic change.

Plaster of Paris is gritty, clammy and dull. It sets quite quickly. Once it hardens, you can't change its shape without breaking it.

Too many of us develop our book ideas in plaster of paris. We forget how endlessly and inventively malleable ideas are. Our book concepts get set in stone, so to speak, long before we've pushed them around to see where they need to go. We can' make the alterations needed to reflect our research on competitors, expert critique, or even our own instinct when it tells us something must change.

Thanks to this premature finalization, we end up with books that aren't as good as they could be.

Keep your book ideas in the "play" state long enough to develop them fully, imaginatively, openly.

I keep a small container of Play-Doh on my office credenza to remind me of this. (And occasionally, to open as a micro-vacation. That smell: to me, it's pure childhood.)

A FINE MESS: a metaphor brought to you courtesy of the department of roads and bridges

For the last six months, the state road that leads to my house has been undergoing a vast widening project. The stretch closest to me is now in the grading stage, I discovered when I left to go to the Post Office this morning. As far as the eye could see, the landscape was littered with orange cones, detour signs, mounds of gravel, parked trucks. All so that a single guy could ride back and forth in a small truck pushing a big roller, doing something that seems to have no visible effect at all.

And then I thought: isn't that the pot calling the kettle black (as my grandmother used to say).

A big mess. A long time. A solitary person. The seemingly endless task of leveling. And smoothing. And packing. And balancing. And smoothing again, all to make changes so subtle than no ordinary human can see the difference.

Welcome to the Working Writer's world.

If our work as writers was visible, I suspect it would look just like this kind of road project. No "normal" person, no non-writer, would understand the minute revisions we so often find ourselves engaged in, or the seemingly endless time that they seem to take. But we know that this work is not just necessary but foundational. If we don't get it right, the visible parts of our book or poem, story or essay, just won't work. And if we don't get it right now, it will be much messier--or even impossible--to fix it later, when everything is set in stone. Or in asphalt, as the case may be.

TERRIFYING MACHINES and times gone by

My fellow writers might enjoy this description of a once-alarming writing tool, which appears in the title piece of Cynthia Ozick’s collection Dictation. The novella opens with a scene in which Joseph Conrad, at the time an author with only one book to his credit, visits Henry James in the older author’s London flat. There he sees—or at least truly notices—a typewriter for the first time.

It was said that the Queen had requested the new thing for her secretary, who had refused it in terror. On a broad surface reserved for it in a far corner of the room….stood the Machine. It stood headless and armless and legless—brute shoulders merely: it might have been the torso of a broken god. Even at a distance it struck Conrad as strange and repulsive, the totem of a foreign civilization to which, it now appeared, James had uncannily acclimated. The thing was black and glossy, and in height it ascended in tiers, like a stadium. Each round key was shielded by glass and rimmed by a ring of metal….Their glassy surfaces were catching the overhead light. Shifting his head, Conrad saw blinking semaphores.*

I love Ozick’s evocation of the typewriter’s alien, oddly malevolent presence. And also the reminder that even in the halcyon days of the early twentieth century, writers could feel threatened—even terrified—by the new technologies that kept arising around them.

*From "Dictation," collected in Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008. Copyright Cynthia Ozick 2008.

THE BRONTË SISTERS ACTION FIGURES: Kick Some Victorian Butt, Charlotte!

Words can't express the delight this "advertisement," made in 1998 by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, gave me. And...once we have Emily, Anne, and Charlotte B. as Power Dolls, can Jane A., Virginia W., and Emily D. be far behind?

EVERY-DAY WRITERS (those lying scum)

There are two kinds of writers in the world.

The ones who don’t write every single day.

And the ones who lie.

Virtually every writer you hear claiming that they do write every day is in the second category. The truth is that they don’t write the day they have brain surgery. They don’t write the day their daughter gets married. They don’t write the day their loved one dies (if it’s anticipated) or the day after their loved one dies (if it’s not).

And you know what? They shouldn’t write on those days. There are some days when you owe more to your life than you do to your writing.

It's okay not to write for a bit. But didn't your mommy ever tell you it's not okay to lie?