jefishman

What's It All About?

2011-08-15T14:37:00.001-04:00

As I labor through the early stages of writing my next novel, Proximity, I find that it’s worth considering the role that theme plays in fiction.

When we place a book in a genre, that can suggest a certain theme by itself. We can presume that a literary novel, for example, will give us some insights into human nature. A mystery will be a search for truth. Science fiction will treat the promise or consequences of technology. A thriller will demonstrate the resourcefulness of the seemingly overmatched hero. Et cetera.

But most successful novels, I think, have a central theme that transcends category. This may seem obvious when discussing literary fiction, but it is also true for most so-called “category” fiction. In all cases, the theme may be pre-ordained by the original intention of the author, it may flow logically from the overall subject matter, or it may arise on its own as a byproduct of the author’s efforts to lend depth to the story.

My serialized novel, Cadaver Blues, is a fairly mainstream mystery. As such, it contains the obvious theme of truth seeking, but there is another element that arose as I plotted and wrote. The protagonist, Phu Goldberg, is a Vietnamese-American who was adopted as an infant by Jewish socialists. His face looks foreign to some, but his accent is American. In addition, he is short, which further exacerbates his self-consciousness.

With all these things in the stew, the underlying theme of prejudice arose naturally, and here’s the kicker: Phu himself is prejudiced. He assumes a couple of black kids are thugs, he believes overweight people have brought all their problems on themselves, and he accepts too easily that his beautiful female client must be stupid. Although Phu is not the only one in the story who is prejudiced, these views inhibit his ability to solve the mystery. As he sheds them (subtly, I hope), things begin to come clearer.

In any case, this theme of prejudice arises from the character of Phu. Prejudice is only central to the story because it is central to Phu’s character.

By contrast, the main theme of Primacy, my just-released thriller, arises from the subject matter of the story. The main action involves a talking ape that shows up in an animal testing laboratory. Her presence forces each character to confront the question of whether individuals should be sacrificed to the greater good. How they deal with this question reveals their inner character, of course, but the theme does even more than that for the reader.

Theme in fiction stimulates readers — consciously or subconsciously — not only to understand the protagonist’s character but to examine their own character. How would I act if I were Phu and two black teens crowded me on the sidewalk? What would I do if a “lesser” life were in danger because of choices that I’d made? Thus does theme lend resonance to one’s reading experience.

My new novel regards ordinary people suffering the consequences of the actions taken by a few powerful Wall Street players. As such, it will undoubtedly be categorized as a “financial thriller,” leading to the presumptive theme of an individual fighting great odds with money on the line.

Might it have another, deeper theme? I certainly hope so. Perhaps that theme will grow from the personality of Shoog Clay, the central character, or maybe it will grow from the thrust of the story. One thing I can promise already: This book will be about more than dollars and cents.

The End of the Hiatus

2011-06-14T16:34:00.000-04:00

Can this really be only my second post ALL YEAR? Well, er, yes, unless you count my weekly posts on The Nervous Breakdown. Those posts will explain a good bit of what’s kept me away: being edited and designed and working out distribution arrangements for Primacy, and making good on my promise to bring that novel to the world as well as the Big Six publishers might.

Not that any of that work is finished, but it’s finally settling down into something of a routine, which means not only that there's a smidgen of time left over to get back to sharing my thoughts here on writing, but there's also finally a chance to get to work on the next novel.

With regard to the next work, I have knocked around ideas for quite a while, some of them conventional mysteries (like Cadaver Blues), others of a more literary bent. But I keep coming back to what makes Primacy a compelling and penetrating novel (if the early blurbs are to be believed) and what deeply interests me: writing thrillers that, although they're primarily entertainment, force readers to confront aspects of our shared values that are ripe for reexamination.

In Primacy, of course, I highlighted the tragedy of animal testing by imagining a bonobo that had developed the ability to speak and been discovered in a lab. The next book, tentatively entitled Propinquity, doesn’t require science fiction for its plot to get off the ground. It’s more about what we humans do to one another.

If anyone’s still out there, I hope you’ll join me on my new journey.

Crap on the Path of Life

2011-01-14T16:46:00.002-05:00

No, the above title isn’t a list. It’s an exhortation.

We’ve been having a lot of snow around here — who hasn’t? (O.k.: shut up, San Diego.) And this has necessitated more than a little shoveling around the house.

When I’m shoveling, I am ever mindful of our two dogs. I always dig a path across the patio to the lawn in order to facilitate their — ahem — doing their business away from the house.

Naturally they don’t comply. Ever. Even when the weather is perfect, more often than not they drop their load right near the house, sometimes smack in the middle of the garden path.

My only solace is knowing that dogs don't have a monopoly on this behavior. It’s actually something to do with all dogs and, I venture to say, most beasts.

In Zimbabwe years ago I was fascinated to see the amount of manure that animals deposit right in the middle of the game path. It’s so common, in fact, that anyone walking those paths soon loses all compunction about striding right through it. To get anywhere in the African bush is to step in shit.

None of this should be a surprise. Social animals that can’t talk (which is to say most species) sometimes report on their adventures by regurgitating some of what they just ate, setting it at the feet of the tribe, as it were. Once they’ve digested, however, it’s their rivals and enemies who get a message from the other end of the digestive tract. Even not-so-social animals do this. The message says: this is my neighborhood; you’ve been warned.

Another way to phrase it: I’m alive; I’m putting the world on notice. Isn’t this what the writer does?

My recollection of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March is that Augie’s imperative was to “make a mark” on the world. Though I can’t seem to verify the exact quote, something like that is the essence of Augie — and of many, if not all, of Bellow’s greatest main characters: Augie and Herzog and Henderson and Humboldt.

It is certainly what drove me to write: to leave my own mark, my notch in the tree, my tattoo on the collective mind of the world. So what if earth is a big place and most people will never hear of me? Most never heard of Bellow, either, and he was one of the greatest men ever to set pen to paper.

An artist of any kind can’t help himself. He must throw down that marker. Where others tread, he must lay down his crap — and not far from the house where no one will see, if he can help it — but near the common domicile, in the middle of the path. Right in the center. Lay it true and if it sticks to someone’s shoe, well, isn’t that the point?

As Augie said for sure: “I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America.”

Why 127 Hours Felt Like 130

2010-12-06T13:40:00.005-05:00

Some time ago a friend of mine saw Aron Ralston speak at a business function. He told me that it was the most inspirational talk he’d ever heard.

Ralston — as everyone knows by now — is the young man who became pinned by a boulder during a misfortunate solo hike and used an all-purpose tool to cut off his right arm below the elbow in order to escape. It was an act of astonishing courage, the kind of thing that prompts normal people to pause in their daily routines when they first hear about it, to reflect for a moment on the human capacity for survival, and to wonder whether we ourselves would have the chops to do what this man did in extremis.

So why did the feature film 127 Hours, which tells this story, fall so flat for me?

I think it’s because writer-director Danny Boyle’s script fails to build a lasting connection between Ralston and his audience.

We spend most of the movie in close visual proximity to Ralston (played well by James Franco), watching him suffer in close-up. We sympathize, but the film never achieves the sense of intimacy required to go beyond sympathy. In this story we look upon the hero from afar, as we do upon a spectacle: a striptease or a freak show or an ugly car crash. There but for the grace of God go we, perhaps, but we pass by — with only a brief pause and without deep reflection.

As told by Boyle, all that carries this story forward is our anticipation of the act of self-inflicted violence that we know will come, the gory act upon which, ultimately, most of us look with eyes averted, the act that sets Aron Ralston apart from the herd.

But that’s the problem. He’s not one of us; he’s an oddball, the perpetrator of an admirable (or, at least, amazing) act, but one with little resonance. 127 Hours moves us in shallow ways, as witnesses to pain, isolation, and abandonment to the elements, which lead in turn to acts of progressive desperation. But we don't feel these acts — we're just watching.

How do we manage to stay so detached from a script derived from an experience that — when told live in a room — moves people to great admiration?

I think the film never rises above spectacle because it delves into no human relationships beyond the most casual connections between Ralston and his family, between Ralston and the wife he’s yet to meet, between Ralston and two strangers with whom he went for a swim hours before the accident. None of these people becomes a rounded person in this story because none but Ralston is seen making decisions that reveal character.

The movie lacks human relationships almost entirely and therefore ultimately lacks the human insights that Aron Ralston presumably delivers in person during motivational speaking engagements.

As a writer, this movie has me thinking of the distinction between sympathy and empathy, which is the distinction between shallowness and depth, between telling and showing, between spectacle and art.

There’s so little for our hearts to grab onto in 127 Hours, nothing beyond our pre-programmed species affiliation. Does the fact that we’re fellow humans conjure sympathy? Sure. But sympathy (from the Greek: “with feeling”) is never deeply earned. It always comes cheap because we bestow it from a distance.

Many of us know individuals who demonstrate sympathy — perhaps reaching for the checkbook when they hear a sad story or making the obligatory condolence call or even crying their pro forma tears. Yet these same people never come to understand why others make different choices than they or arrive at different sets of values.

Empathy (“in feeling”) presents another matter because it touches us not just on the surface but within.

Whose job is it to help people turn their sympathy to empathy? It is the job of the artist, of course, because empathy is the great project of all art. Art, when it succeeds, carries us beyond pity to insights that change our way of looking at ourselves and other human beings.

In her memoir, Just Kids, Patti Smith puts the artist's distinction well. Writing of her friend and lover, the great photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, she says: “Robert trusted in the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus influence the outer world.”

It’s that influence over the outside world that 127 Hours fails to achieve.

Perhaps Ralston, admittedly self-absorbed, really doesn’t have relationships with fellow human beings that would evince an empathetic response from an audience sitting in a cinema. But I doubt that.

More likely, Boyle latched onto the wrong thing here, the easy thing. The hook was always there for this story — the hook any publicist would see — but the barb is missing, the part that sticks with you, the part it's the artist's job to provide.

So for all his talent this writer-director inadvertently demonstrates to other creators a basic element of story craft: exactly what might have happened in real life matters less than how you tell it.

Saved at Birth

2010-11-03T11:54:00.003-04:00

It always begins this way.

An idea intrudes, insists that I give it attention, finally settles upon me. It’s exciting — a promise to oneself that makes the hair stand on end. And, of course, because it resides in the mind, not on the page, there’s a certain perfection to it.

Oh, I know it’s not really perfect. It’s incomplete, in fact, not fully formed. But there’s thrust behind the thing. So even if the blade isn’t sharp, the subject has been engaged.

Then comes a moment when the only way to move the idea forward is to think more deeply, to hone the details. This represents a profound psychological shift. It’s the difference between a pitcher knowing he has a start scheduled for next Saturday and undertaking the stretches for that start in an hour hence. With preparation comes trepidation.

I was there last week with Iniquity, my next novel, staring at the blank page. I wasn’t planning to start writing, just to start planning. Why does it scare me so?

Because a thousand decisions lie ahead, that’s why. Because those decisions are all interdependent, like the components of an ecosystem — get one or two wrong and the ecosystem becomes unbalanced or chokes off its own oxygen supply or spins into useless pieces. And because, even in success, with each decision a million possibilities die.

It is human nature to become anxious when faced by too many choices. Studies have been done in supermarkets, particularly in the jam and jelly section, the sweetest part of the store. We think we want more choices, but we don’t really. In fact, people given too much choice often flee the store without buying anything at all.

Thus the act of artistic creation requires a great leap of courage, the will to battle through this natural anxiety, to sacrifice possibilities on the altar of the greater idea.

The decisions may be wrong or they may be less than ideal, but one must remind oneself that they are rarely fatal. Why? Because they can be changed, revised.

And that’s the thing that allows me to move forward ultimately, I think. Because inherent in the magic of creation is resuscitation of the very possibilities one may originally have killed off.

Thus every work, until it is truly finished, presents its imperfect author with the opportunity for salvation.

Four Meetings on the Future of Books

2010-09-16T15:25:00.002-04:00

In the course of about 24 hours, I met in New York this week with four book publishing professionals. Not in symposia or conferences, mind you, but one on one, old friends across the table.

Nor was this an academic exercise. I have completed two novels and hope to have more on the way. Yet current business models — the “old” business models, if you will — look more and more like castles made of sand. The tide of technology is lapping at their foundations. Is this the time to build another sand castle in the same spot or should I strike out in search of firmer ground?

The Director
My first meeting took place over Indian food with the director of a small division within one of the large houses. The division has a spectrum of products, not all of them books but all in support of a branded worldview. Despite being earlier to market than a startup competitor, this division has had its clock cleaned by that competitor, a company with no prior baggage and with a tendency toward innovation.

The product line of the older company — the one owned by the big publisher — suffers from brand confusion and a stultifying business model. Despite — according to studies — offering a superior product to its competitor’s, the company has been viewed as a niche product within the corporate parent. As a result, their startup competitor now does about 30 times more business than the older firm. That’s right. It’s gone from zero to 30 times bigger.

The director of the big loser in this competition, a sharp character who is a relatively recent addition, observed that in general the big publishers are so busy playing defense that they have no offensive strategy to deal with e-books and the like. They’re trying to cut their way to profitability rather than reinvent themselves, and the knives of the accountants have already begun hitting bone. Meanwhile, innovative deals that might grow this director’s market share languish in the legal department for months because they’re not like the usual publishing deals.

The Agent
I met with an agent friend over soft drinks. She has a terrific publishing pedigree and leveraged that into a successful independent agency, but, as with all agents, both her deal flow and cash flow are suffering as publishers pull in their horns.

The agent told me an interesting story. One of her authors had a pretty good success with her first novel, but her publisher was offering as an advance about half what the prior novel has earned so far in royalties. The agent noted that it’s a pretty good offer, given the times we’re in, but the author said, “I wouldn’t sell a house in this market, so maybe I shouldn’t sell a book in this market, either.”

Regardless of what she ultimately decides, this strikes me as the kind of thing a person says who believes the near-term future may present other options. More than that, it implicitly reflects a growing belief (particularly on e-book royalties, but in other ways, too) that publishers have staked out an unfair position with regard to their content suppliers. As anybody knows, if one party to a contract thinks that contract unfair, the relationship may go on for awhile, but it will not last.

A second thing occurred to me when I heard this story. Could it be that we are moving to a time when agents’ interests, when built on old business models, will conflict with the interests of their clients? For many years, the best strategy (with a few exceptions) for agents and authors has been to go for the highest advance. But if we are tending to smaller advances — and authors may choose to pass over advances completely in exchange for better terms — how does the agent survive long enough to get her cut of the back end?

Keep in mind that book agenting is a time-consuming business. An agent can’t just quadruple her client list and — voila! — make up the lost income. And, in support of that conundrum, other writer friends of mine report that agents have become more discriminating than ever about taking on new clients.

The agent I met passed along the names of a few people doing interesting things, one of them an author who had self-published a second novel with very high production values and another an editor who had started an e-books imprint.

She said, “I never stop thinking about this, yet I don’t know what the answer is.”

The New-Media Maven
From there I went downtown to meet with a woman who had gone from mainstream publishing to a new media startup — not a publisher exactly, but a company that she hoped would work with authors and publishers. She thinks paper books are heading for near-extinction, and quicker than anyone would have imagined. She lamented how slowly traditional publishers are moving and expressed dismay that — so far — while authors were embracing her company’s approach, publishers had given it the cold shoulder.

“There’s never been a better time to self-publish,” she said, passing along the names of several start-up publishers and others that are also doing innovative things.

The Editor
Next morning, I had breakfast with a former high-level editor who now works freelance. He believes printed books still have a future, but repeated a prediction he’d heard elsewhere that the book superstore will soon be dead. Ironically, he noted, independent bookstores, which have taken such a beating for so long, may persist in close to their current numbers.

The editor thinks publishers will have to learn how to sell more directly to consumers, to promote themselves better as those who discern what’s worth reading in a noisy world.

The question we left hanging was whether they still have time to do that.

NOTE: I have intentionally obscured the identities of these four professionals, who spoke to me privately and not for attribution. But their stories are real.

Words Unsaid

2010-07-26T16:54:00.001-04:00

A few years ago, my father-in-law, who is quite erudite, introduced me to a phrase that the French have: L’esprit de l’escalier, which is often translated as “staircase wit.”

The phrase refers to the clever comeback that occurs to us only after the best moment for delivery has passed — after our opponent has walked away or left the room, say, or we have. There’s also a German equivalent, treppenwitz.

We’ve all had this experience: a situation flusters us, takes us out of our game. The moment passes and when it’s too late that great comeback line hits us and we wish we could re-live the opportunity.

The phrase L’esprit de l’escalier originates, apparently, from Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comedien, where he tells the story of just such an occurrence, an argument upstairs in a mansion where he didn’t regain his wits until he was down at the bottom of the staircase alone.

It’s a useful expression because it’s so common. But what of the variant? What of the moment we plan for, but still flub?

I thought of that aspect twice this spring. The first time regarded a trip we take each March to an exclusive resort, where we often see one of those masters of the Wall Street universe, a man who helped run a major corporation into the ground — a corporation that was subsequently bailed out by taxpayers — and came away with millions regardless.

Before we left for this resort, I wondered if I’d see him, as I often do (though we’ve never exchanged a word), and I thought I’d like to give him a piece of my mind about his selfishness and greed. As it happened, he had a tennis lesson just after me and we crossed on the court and he asked my advice about the racket I was holding. So there it was, the chance of a lifetime, the chance to bring embarrassment to a man who ought to have shame presented to him directly by a taxpayer.

But, of course, when the moment came I did nothing of the kind. Worse, in fact. I ended up giving him advice on his tennis elbow!

The second instance was fictional. I wanted to reproduce that feeling of best laid plans coming to nought in my current novel, Cadaver Blues. There’s a scene where Phu Goldberg plans to confront a character who he thinks has wronged his client. He goes through a lot of trouble to get a face-to-face meeting with this character and...well, let’s just say things don’t work out exactly as planned.

You’ll read all about that in Chapter 43, which is coming soon!

No Comment

2010-05-17T18:01:00.001-04:00

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, said the famous artist whose works — lo, thirty years later — command tens of millions at auction.

In the present, everyone has fifteen opinions on everything, said the not-yet-famous author, though I’m working on it.

Well, maybe I’m not working hard enough on it. And maybe not everyone has fifteen opinions. Just those who inhabit the land of the comment culture.

In the comment culture, writers write things and readers are not content to appreciate another point of view without sharing their own. They post a comment, and sometimes the writer comments back, and sometimes this goes on for a while, and the comment count gets run up.

And part of me feels jealous (being not enough commented upon) and another part of me finds it all meretricious and jejune — two words you don’t see a lot these days, and no wonder, as we seem to have lost all sense of their worthiness.

I’ve noticed that on The Nervous Breakdown, non-fiction garners many more comments than fiction. I can go weeks without a word of feedback on my novel, CADAVER BLUES. But post an essay and — bang! — ten comments in an hour.

Which is not to say I get a lot of comments even for my essays. When people do comment, I feel obligated to respond with something clever, but it’s always pithy, and people don’t really want pithy in the comment culture. They want to see your id pour forth, like a teenage drunk at a late-night party. Then they can offer their fifteen opinions, one at a time (fifteen comments!), and delude themselves into believing that someone cares.

You may now be thinking that no one comments on the fiction because no one is reading it, but the numbers don’t say this is true. And my wife has become a magnet for feedback on CADAVER BLUES, regularly fielding oral comments from people who prove to be conversant with the story.

These comments, by and large, are not meretricious and jejune. They do not come across as someone commenting just to hear themselves speak. And, interestingly enough, they are rarely offered to me directly, as if doing so would put one of us on the spot. Which, of course, it would, because the commenter often expects a comment back and so forth — and one of us is bound eventually to end up saying something meretricious or jejune, which is a lot harder to take when you're looking eye to eye.

Recently, a novelist who is more famous than most, a person with his own fan base, posted an excerpt from his novel on The Nervous Breakdown. It raked in a dozen comments in an hour, which so far as I can tell is nearly a record for fiction. But almost all of these comments came from writers on the site.

These writers are good people all, aspirers who deserve big things for themselves. So why did their spasm of commenting seem as needy as the poor souls who stand out in the rain by Rockefeller Center in the hope that a camera will fall on them not even for ten seconds let alone fifteen minutes, which would be a lifetime for live television?

I’ll tell you why. Because the yearnings of others, glanced only from the corners of one’s eyes, can’t help but come across as meretricious and jejune.

And last I checked, by the way, the famous novelist hadn’t replied to a single comment.

Choosing to Write in Oil or Watercolor

2010-04-28T14:13:00.002-04:00

It’s spring in Delaware. Azaleas and primrose in bloom, warm days and cool nights. In celebration of their beautiful garden, some friends recently hosted a large party under a big white tent. They seated me at a table filled with people whose passion is painting pictures.

A few of these people were retired, painting as a serious hobby. Some were studying painting. Others were making a living at it, their work represented in galleries. I found it especially interesting that when asked, “What kind of painting do you do,” the answer was never “abstract” or "landscape" or “figurative,” etc. It was always “oil” or “watercolor.”

One of the oil painters said to a watercolorist, “I could never do that. I prefer the freedom to paint over my mistakes.”

The watercolorist replied, “But that’s what I like about watercolors; you have to plan the whole thing out.”

This contrast, which I’d never considered (not being a painter), strikes me as having a very close parallel in fiction writing: some of us use outlines to create our work and some of us don’t. Some of us plan extensively and others wing it.

In his book Plot & Structure, James Scott Bell observes the distinction between these two camps and concludes that there is no consensus on the subject among successful novelists. Ray Bradbury and Jerry Jenkins are no-outline people. Robert Crais uses outlines. David Morrell’s methods fall somewhere in between.

Where do I stand? I can tell you that I tried several times to write novels without an outline, to set my characters free and see where they went. In every instance, they went nowhere and I had to abandon the project.

Then, for my first completed novel, PRIMACY, I outlined the first two-thirds of the book and finished the outline when I was about halfway through writing. I completed the novel in about a year, though it’s still seeking a publisher.

For my second novel, CADAVER BLUES, which is publishing serially online at The Nervous Breakdown, I first wrote an outline in the form of a detailed treatment, and that book will have been completed in about nine months. More important, my editor, Shya Scanlon, believes that it works as a piece of storytelling, as do most readers from whom I’ve had feedback.

Of the writers I’ve met in workshops, there seems to be great resistance to using an outline, as if it’s a kind of cheat. On the other hand, very few of these non-outline people ever seem to complete novels. They’re great at beginning and usually have some sense what they want to say, but they have very little idea how they’ll get to the end, and the results suffer.

People are different, of course, but I suspect that those successful writers who claim not to use an outline are fibbing a little. They may not write out an outline in the conventional sense, but I suspect they have a pretty detailed plan in their heads. Just because you’re not writing an outline, that doesn’t mean you’re not using an outline.

As with all creative endeavors, however, rigidity can be as great an enemy as lack of focus. Putting something into an outline doesn’t make it sacred, and I’ve found myself ignoring parts of outlines, supplementing outlines or re-working them as the writing unfolds.

In other words, a writer can plan as if he’s painting in watercolors, but amend that plan as if he’s using oils.

E. L. Doctorow has compared writing fiction to driving at night in the fog. “You never see farther than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Sure. But it helps to know where you’re going.

Come the Volcano

2010-04-22T10:42:00.002-04:00

In the past week, two things happened at about the same time, but very far apart in geography and scale. First, an Icelandic volcano with an unpronounceable name began spewing ash into the atmosphere. Nearly at the same time, my wife’s Kindle died.

Two disparate events. Yet I am tempted to connect some dots.

The volcano you know about as well as I. Downwind in Iceland, the landscape looked like something out of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road. Farther downwind, air traffic in much of Europe ground to a halt, many billions of dollars worth of infrastructure rendered useless.

My wife’s Kindle is an original model, and she does most of her book reading on it. A month ago, it completely stopped functioning and she had to buy a new battery from Amazon. (The new model requires sending the entire device back for service if the battery fails, but the original has a removal battery.) The replacement battery doesn’t seem to be working so well. It died again earlier this week, requiring rebooting and recharging just a day after it received its initial charge.

I’m no Luddite, but both of these events speak to a certain vulnerability that technology introduces. The library in Alexandria once famously burned but even that great loss in an ancient time didn’t destroy all books. When every book is an e-book, what happens to us if the Amazon (or Apple) servers go completely dark?

It’s not the same for the friends that line my non-virtual shelves. Barring fire or intentional destruction, old-fashioned books persist for a very long time. I know they degrade eventually if the paper isn’t acid-free and all that, but to gradual degradation we can adjust.

What happens when the apocalypse comes? I won’t be able to fly in an airplane or even to feed myself well, but if I have a paper book on the shelf I can nourish my mind, entertain myself and others, find solace in my waning days.

Try that with an iPad or Kindle when the lights go out for good.

E-telling on the iPad

2010-04-07T12:03:00.003-04:00

Does the iPad change everything? Of course not. By now we should have learned that NOTHING ever changes EVERYTHING. But I’ve been playing with this device for a day now, and I can say with confidence that it does this: it expands possibilities for the storyteller.

To begin studying this issue, everyone should view the remarkable video created by Penguin, entitled iPad Imagineering. From the perspective of a book publishing fan, I found it heartening. It deserves to go viral. Too often book publishers have run scared from new technology, then ventured in one toe at a time, as if the water were too hot for their metabolism.

Not Penguin, not now. Here is a publisher acting, rather than reacting. Here is a publisher asserting that it will have a role in the new paradigm, a role it will seize itself, which is how all business gets done in growing markets, where nobody hands you anything — where, as Jack Welch famously said, you eat your own lunch or someone else will.

What Penguin has “imagineered” is iPad children’s books on which a kid can move objects and fill in colors, reference books where the user can drill down into pictures, novels where the reader can vote in polls and chat live with other fans, travel books where you can build your own itinerary, and a star-finder template that knows where you’re standing in relation to the night sky.

It’s a great start, but it emphasizes the low-hanging fruit: children’s books that want to be interactive; reference books that want dipping into. What about the storyteller?

As a next step, let’s envision a novel that both stands on its own and allows the reader to employ her own imagination. I picture the iPad version of Cadaver Blues — when it comes — enabling readers to build their own portrait of what Phu Goldberg might look like, to build biographies of the characters as in the game of Clue, to pose guesses throughout the story of what’s going to happen, to read the history of places in the story, and perhaps to track the movements of the characters on a map.

Who will build these layers? I don’t know. Perhaps e-telling will require collaboration between the storyteller and specialists like those who pool their talents to make plays and movies and video games, all of which go beyond the core of their story elements.

I don’t know, but I’m willing to engage the possibilities. Are you?

Defying Categorization

2010-03-18T11:04:00.003-04:00

I recently read a Facebook mini-rant from an accomplished novelist expressing frustration that people insist on categorizing her book as “women’s lit.” She noted that there’s no such category as “man’s lit,” and suggested just plain “lit” would be a more appropriate description for what she’s doing, and a whole lot less condescending.

Fool that I am, although I don’t really know her (we have a professional connection that makes us “friends”) I waded into the infested water with a comment of my own. (By the way, I have deleted my link to the thread on my Facebook page to protect her privacy.) My thought was that if being put in a category like “women’s lit” is tantamount to being condescended to, then men are condescended to plenty. Maybe, I suggested, there’s more to this issue than sexism.

Well, naturally, that made me the skunk at the garden party, with several other women asserting the presence of a great sexist conspiracy. In fairness, no one used the word “conspiracy,” but the implication was there.

Now, I’m well aware that any attempt to defend oneself from sexism (or any other kind of ism) is like trying to answer the question, “Do you still beat your wife?” So, let me evade discussion of my underlying moral weakness and simply point out that (A) at least since the ascendency of the great Phyllis Grann from secretary to publisher of Putnam and beyond, women in book publishing have been well represented at the highest levels; (B) if I recall correctly, the very imprint that is publishing said author’s work was founded exclusively by women; (C) at least half the most powerful book agents are women; and (D) the majority of book readers are women. So, in the inclination to label certain books as “women’s lit” or whatever, something else might be going on.

Books are consumer goods, albeit special ones — cultural products. Like any product, they must compete in a crowded marketplace which, lately, to complicate matters, has more competition for people’s attention than ever before. And things that get sold must be categorized.

Is that fair? I don’t know. Is it fair that a man in the prime of life, jogging down the beach on Hilton Head Island earlier this week, died when a small plane crashed into him during an emergency landing? If it isn’t fair, it’s no less real.

Ask an editor or agent to think back to the last time she tried to sell a book that strained against categorization. Personally, although it’s been years, I still recall that sinking feeling when it dawns on you that the book you were so excited about last month — because it’s beautifully written or the writer is brilliant or what have you — ends up defying categorization. You know, when that feeling hits, that you’re in for a whole lot of uphill sledding.

Categories are a blunt instrument. But they’re also a necessary shortcut in the marketplace, a way to communicate quickly to potential readers: Hey, this might interest you. To call something merely “literature” tells them nothing but your aspirations, and very few people in the marketplace care, dear writer, that you’d one day like to be mentioned in the same sentence with Jane Austen or Marcel Proust, even if you’re right and you will be.

There’s a reason publishing professionals speak in breathless tones of books that “cross over.” For authors, this is apotheosis, that moment when you rise above the categorical fray. It’s what every writer hopes for, of course. But the cross-over success almost always grows from a foundation of core readers. Those readers are fans of mysteries or historical fiction or, yes, women’s lit. They’re the ones, when you succeed in breaking from the category, who will tell their friends, “If you read one historical novel in your life, let it be this one.”

Nelson Mandela said resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. He knew how to resist the system with positive energy, rather than tilting at windmills. And I’m guessing he didn’t once ask what category his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, got slotted into. He had bigger battles to fight.

Rise above.

The Story Business

2010-03-09T12:10:00.009-05:00

Q: Why don’t book publishers own Hollywood studios?
A: Because they realized too late that they were in the story business.

I was struck by news last week in the Wall Street Journal that Random House, “eager to cash in on the lucrative videogame business, has set up an in-house team to create original stories for videogames and provide story advice for games in development.”

In the first instance, this is an eerie sign that the cash cow of backlist books has begun to resist further milking. Random House publisher Gina Centrello comments, “We need new revenue streams.”

Gulp. There’s a thought every writer can dig. But maybe there’s something we can learn from this move. Let’s take a look.

In the article, Random House director of creative development, Keith Clayton, says, “There is increasing emphasis on storytelling in the videogame business.”

This is a fascinating and exciting observation. It means consumers of video games [it’s still two words in my book] have gotten over being wowed by the new technology experience and now require something deeper, something more resonant. Something, my friends, that lies at the heart of the human condition: a need to experience good stories.

If book publishers hadn’t been confusing their distribution channels with the real drivers of their business for so long, they’d own every industry that relies on great storytelling, including the video game biz.

We all know that conglomerates frequently own book publishers, but what we too easily forget is that book publishers were mining stories for profit long before anyone knew how to deliver moving images. If they’d thought of themselves as being in the story business, rather than the book business, they might have embraced the new technology earlier and would own it, rather than being owned by its newfangled practitioners. The same might be said for comic books, television production, video games, and so on.

It’s easier to see this in retrospect, of course. Others have observed that the railroads would own airlines if they’d realized sooner that they were in the transportation business; that FedEx, perhaps, would own email if they realized they were in the message delivery business; that newspapers would own much of the web if they’d realized sooner they were in the information business.

With all the changes afoot, however, writers who now ask themselves what business they’re in will have an edge. Not all writers are equal. Some of us are storytellers, others information gatherers, and still others are synthesizers. Next time someone asks Malcolm Gladwell what he does for a living, maybe he should say, “I connect ideas.” And maybe editors of fiction and narrative non-fiction, at least, should answer, “I facilitate stories,” or something like that.

Strictly from the position of rooting for book publishers, I am encouraged that Random House has seen this glimpse of video-gaming light for what it is: an opportunity to reinforce its position in the story-delivery business.

Writers, in their turn, should ask themselves what business they’re really pursuing. No matter the answer, don’t limit yourself to a single medium or channel of distribution. Rather, let’s think harder about how best to exploit the contributions that we have to make.

Bending Narration

2010-03-05T08:53:00.005-05:00

In a writers group I used to attend, there seemed always to be a great deal of discussion about the reliability of first-person narration. People always seemed poised to find self incrimination, some suggestion that the narrator is fooling or manipulating the reader, and therefore every word he or she writes becomes suspect. In contrast, I have long contended, first, that all modern narration has an element of so-called unreliability. And, second, that the relative lack of reliability need not be a signal that the narrator is engaged in some kind of manipulation of the reader, which is what these discussions always seem to want to suggest.

Thus I was gratified to read the following in the critic James Wood's How Fiction Works: "So-called omniscience is almost impossible. As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking."

If omniscience ("so-called") has a point of view -- and I agree that it does -- then why are reading writers so eager to find the point where first-person narration trips into so-called unreliability?

Woods again: "Thanks to free indirect style [that is, close third-person narration], we see things through the character's eyes and language but also through the author's eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once. A gap opens between author and character, and the bridge -- which is free indirect style itself -- between them simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its distance."

"This is merely another definition of dramatic irony: to see through a character's eyes while being encouraged to see more than the character can see (an unreliability identical to the unreliable first-person narrator's)."

Is Phu Goldberg, the narrator and central character of Cadaver Blues, an unreliable narrator? You betcha. But not, as the over-eager reading writer might posit, because he is intentionally misleading the reader. Rather, like all of us "real" people, who spend our lives convincing ourselves of the truths we wish to be, Phu may be kidding himself. The honesty -- the reliability, if you will -- comes from his willingness to share a story in which this hitch might reveal itself. Thus, one might say, he is reliably unreliable.

"Never owe. Never sweat. Never apologize."? "Well," the reader might reasonably tell herself, "we'll see about that!"

How NOT to Price an e-Book

2010-03-01T16:46:00.004-05:00

Have you ever walked into a butcher store and asked why the filet mignon was so expensive and received a reply along the following lines: “Well, ma’am, that cow had to stand out in the hot sun for two years, someone had to feed him all that time, then they had to put him in a truck, which costs money…” No. I don’t think so.

Yet, a month or so ago, there was Jonathan Galassi, a bright man and president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, explaining on the op-ed page of the New York Times how expensive it is to produce a book, whether it’s printed on paper or delivered in pixels. And now, this week, we have an article in the business section with more publishers weighing in on the cost of designing covers and copy editing and paying all that rent on the big building in Times Square.

Puh-leaze!

We writers and others in book publishing should think back for a moment to the last time we considered buying some other product — say, the latest iPhone. Did we expect Steve Jobs to justify the price based upon how much that neat, scratch resistant glass cost to manufacture? No. We were more interested, undoubtedly, in what that iPhone might do for us or how owning one might make us feel.

When I first got to New York in 1984, I went to work as an administrative assistant for the Association of American Publishers. I was the staff person on several committees, among them a committee of textbook publishing executives. At the time, consumers were beginning to grumble about the prices of textbooks, so the committee was working on a slide show meant to explain why a textbook might seem so expensive but really wasn’t.

I — an English major — learned my first lesson of business in that meeting, when one of the executives said, “The reason we’re having so much trouble making this work is that the biggest influence on price is the one thing we can’t mention. Like everything else in the world, textbooks are priced at what the market will bear.”

Some things have an intrinsic value. Finished products, for the most part, don’t. They have a perceived value to the consumer — a value that the consumer will set in his or her own mind — a value that corresponds to the price the market will bear.

The filet mignon is expensive because there’s so little of it, not because the knife that slit the cow’s throat cost a dollar more this year than last. Consumers will decide whether the price of the steak corresponds to what they perceive its value to be. And it’s the same with any product, including a book. If the market won’t bear the price, it doesn’t matter what price the seller thinks is fair.

When will publishers understand that if you have to explain how you arrived at the price you have already lost your battle with the consumer?

What We Leave Out

2009-11-30T14:41:00.001-05:00

There is a bit of writerly advice one hears now and then that claims an author must know every little thing about one’s characters, even those details that don’t reach the page. I have always found this advice suspect, so I was gratified recently to read a Wall Street Journal Q&A with Cormac McCarthy, which was pegged to the release of the movie version of his novel The Road.

An unanswered question hovers over this elegiac story of a father and son, struggling to remain human at the end of the world. The question is simply: what happened to the world as we knew it? Nuclear winter? Man-made environmental disaster? Meteor?

McCarthy’s answer: “A lot of people ask me. I don’t have an opinion…. [It] could be anything…. It is not really important.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter what happened to create this particular story world — not, that is, in relation to the purpose of the story. Read on one level, this is a refreshing admission by a confident writer. On another level, it suggests that readers often ask the wrong questions. In this case — though the author has our curiosity up — the proximate cause of the characters’ predicament is not relevant because they didn’t personally cause the disaster. Yes, they must live in the consequences, because that disaster is the crucible that tests their relationships and their very humanity. But the detail of what caused the end of the world is a distraction that McCarthy won't indulge.

Sometimes, of course, writers mistakenly evade the hard questions — the hard decisions — about their characters, largely, I think, because we fear narrowing our creative possibilities. It’s important to acknowledge the spade work that needs to be done to build character and story in an authentic, convincing fashion. But it’s easy, too, to bog ourselves down in details that do not advance the purpose of the work.

One sometimes hears questions that interest a particular reader, but the answers to which would not have served the story purpose. The fact that McCarthy, in The Road, meticulously avoids answering the most salient irrelevant question about what happened before the novel starts -- and, in the process, drives some readers crazy with wonder -- speaks to the power that lies behind those "details" that writers may choose to leave out.

Stories of My Life (Part I)

2009-11-03T10:25:00.001-05:00

Two years ago, having sold our business and moved with my family to a new town, I decided to turn my attention to writing fiction.

I was 45 years old and I'm sure many people thought I had lost my mind. Unless they'd known me in college or earlier, they hadn't seen any fiction from me. They may have known me as an editor, an entrepreneur, or even an occasional non-fiction writer, but not as a teller of stories created from whole cloth. Yet the truth is that I've always considered myself a writer of fiction. Chance -- the novelist's best friend and worst enemy -- simply carried me off in other directions.

Ah, chance. In high school I had a great interest in science fiction. The first complete story I can recall writing then was about a couple of guys flying a spaceship in the office of a giant. They see wonders. The giant sees a bug. Splat! End of story.

Wherever I go, I see stories. I imagine what people are thinking. I ask myself how one would dramatize a political or social idea. I pose the question, "What if..." So it was that, one day, I began to wonder what would happen if an ape with special talents turned up in an animal testing lab. The result was my first complete novel, a thriller entitled PRIMACY, which my agent, Paul Bresnick, will soon begin shopping to publishers.

Chance, as Dr. Pasteur taught us, favors the prepared mind. Soon after I started PRIMACY, an acquaintance referred me to a workshop in Philadelphia. There I met another writer, Elizabeth Collins, who later invited me to write for a hot website called The Nervous Breakdown. And a couple of weeks from now, TNB re-launches with another novel of mine -- CADAVER BLUES -- serialized in its fiction section.

Shya Scanlon, my editor on the site, suggested a blog to support all these activities, so here I am, creating my own little buzz in this giant world.

Does it end with: Splat!? Not if Pasteur was right.