Jacques Strauss's Blog - Posts Tagged "publishing"
On becoming an author
I always thought that writing a book would be good for my character; that the whole experience would be somehow edifying. Much to my dismay I have discovered the opposite. I have become increasingly needy.
TIME 9:32
Send email to editor. Stated purpose is a trivial administrative matter that does not need to be attended to for some months. Actual purpose: affirmation.
9:34 – check email
9:36 – check email
9:38 – check email
9:40 – check email
I always thought that writing a book would be good for my confidence, that I would strut around the world proclaiming, ‘Behold, I am author.’ Much to my dismay I have discovered the opposite. I have become increasingly paranoid:
TIME 9:32
Send email to editor. Stated purpose is a trivial administrative matter that does not need to be attended to for some months. Actual purpose: acknowledgment of my existence.
9:34 – Did I type the address correctly?
9:36 – Is this Internet thingy working??
9:38 – Christ. I offended her. I should never have sent the email.
9:40 – Oh Lord in Heaven. They don’t want to publish my book anymore. They think it’s a pile of crap. She’s in a meeting with legal right now. On the table her Blackberry is buzzing. She can make out that it’s an email from me. She’s thinking, ‘How ironic.’
I always thought that writing a book would be good for my soul; that from my small success would sprout magnanimity, generosity and a general feeling of goodwill towards others who write. Much to my dismay, I have discovered the opposite. I have become increasingly jealous.
TIME 9:32
Send email to editor. Stated purpose is a trivial administrative matter that does not need to be attended to for some months. Actual purpose: testing loyalty.
9:34 – I wonder if she’s reading another manuscript instead of reading my email?
9:36 – I suppose she thinks it’s very funny and clever.
9:38 – Well if you love him so much why don’t you marry him?
9:40 – Die. Die. Die unknown author! My you go to the grave undiscovered, unloved, unknown you time-stealing, editor-stealing, glory-stealing brilliant son of a bitch.
TIME 9:32
Send email to editor. Stated purpose is a trivial administrative matter that does not need to be attended to for some months. Actual purpose: affirmation.
9:34 – check email
9:36 – check email
9:38 – check email
9:40 – check email
I always thought that writing a book would be good for my confidence, that I would strut around the world proclaiming, ‘Behold, I am author.’ Much to my dismay I have discovered the opposite. I have become increasingly paranoid:
TIME 9:32
Send email to editor. Stated purpose is a trivial administrative matter that does not need to be attended to for some months. Actual purpose: acknowledgment of my existence.
9:34 – Did I type the address correctly?
9:36 – Is this Internet thingy working??
9:38 – Christ. I offended her. I should never have sent the email.
9:40 – Oh Lord in Heaven. They don’t want to publish my book anymore. They think it’s a pile of crap. She’s in a meeting with legal right now. On the table her Blackberry is buzzing. She can make out that it’s an email from me. She’s thinking, ‘How ironic.’
I always thought that writing a book would be good for my soul; that from my small success would sprout magnanimity, generosity and a general feeling of goodwill towards others who write. Much to my dismay, I have discovered the opposite. I have become increasingly jealous.
TIME 9:32
Send email to editor. Stated purpose is a trivial administrative matter that does not need to be attended to for some months. Actual purpose: testing loyalty.
9:34 – I wonder if she’s reading another manuscript instead of reading my email?
9:36 – I suppose she thinks it’s very funny and clever.
9:38 – Well if you love him so much why don’t you marry him?
9:40 – Die. Die. Die unknown author! My you go to the grave undiscovered, unloved, unknown you time-stealing, editor-stealing, glory-stealing brilliant son of a bitch.
Writing from the perspective of a child
A friend and I were having a discussion about writing from the perspective of a child. ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I hate it.’ Turns out what he actually hates are books written in the voice of a child. This is a different thing entirely. Loads of books are narrated by an adult from the perspective of a child (including er … mine). But since then I’ve been working on a short story that’s written in the voice of a child, and I’m trying to figure out what it is that I don’t like about it. I’ve made a list:
Implausibility: anyone who has spoken to a child, particularly a very young child knows that they’re incapable of maintaining a narrative. I might believe a sentence, even a paragraph, but after a page I simply cannot suspend disbelief and accept that I am ‘listening’ to a child. It’s almost an ontological problem in that I don’t believe in the existence of the narrator. Furthermore even if the writer does a very, very fine job of imitating a child, there will almost inevitably come a point where something rings false; a word or a phrase or a thought will be wrong or very difficult to attribute to a child. Every child narrator becomes exceptional, a prodigy.
Freedom of voice: If you decided to write from the perspective of a child (as an adult) you have a lot of options. You can, for portions of the text, slip into the voice of a child. . Alternatively you can use a heightened form of mimicry (when adopting the child’s voice) to mock the perspective of a child – which is fun – I mean who doesn’t like mocking children? All of these ‘voices’ are still available to you. If you want to say something astute or witty or adult, you can do it; you don’t have to find a way to crowbar it into the text to make is plausible. That’s why in Joyce’s ‘Portrait of an Artist as a young man’ you can have this sentence, “When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold,” followed not long after by this one, “The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light.”
It’s why we have babysitters: Look, there is a reason we have babysitters in the world. And that reason is that we do not want to listen to children all the time. So I really don’t want to spend a whole book with a child when it’s the child telling the story.
It’s cloying: Lots of books in the voice of a child eventually become cloying. That’s probably because we can’t get over the fact that it’s actually an adult narrating. There is an implied adult narrator – so you can’t get over the fact that it’s basically someone doing baby-talk, which is creepy and sick-making.
Anyway, I will persist with my short story but if you have any advice or thoughts on this that you’d care to share, I’d love to hear from you.
Implausibility: anyone who has spoken to a child, particularly a very young child knows that they’re incapable of maintaining a narrative. I might believe a sentence, even a paragraph, but after a page I simply cannot suspend disbelief and accept that I am ‘listening’ to a child. It’s almost an ontological problem in that I don’t believe in the existence of the narrator. Furthermore even if the writer does a very, very fine job of imitating a child, there will almost inevitably come a point where something rings false; a word or a phrase or a thought will be wrong or very difficult to attribute to a child. Every child narrator becomes exceptional, a prodigy.
Freedom of voice: If you decided to write from the perspective of a child (as an adult) you have a lot of options. You can, for portions of the text, slip into the voice of a child. . Alternatively you can use a heightened form of mimicry (when adopting the child’s voice) to mock the perspective of a child – which is fun – I mean who doesn’t like mocking children? All of these ‘voices’ are still available to you. If you want to say something astute or witty or adult, you can do it; you don’t have to find a way to crowbar it into the text to make is plausible. That’s why in Joyce’s ‘Portrait of an Artist as a young man’ you can have this sentence, “When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold,” followed not long after by this one, “The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light.”
It’s why we have babysitters: Look, there is a reason we have babysitters in the world. And that reason is that we do not want to listen to children all the time. So I really don’t want to spend a whole book with a child when it’s the child telling the story.
It’s cloying: Lots of books in the voice of a child eventually become cloying. That’s probably because we can’t get over the fact that it’s actually an adult narrating. There is an implied adult narrator – so you can’t get over the fact that it’s basically someone doing baby-talk, which is creepy and sick-making.
Anyway, I will persist with my short story but if you have any advice or thoughts on this that you’d care to share, I’d love to hear from you.
Favourite Books and Influeces
This is a blog I wrote for the Vintage Books website - which is will well worth checking out. But I will be posting the Vintage blogs here as well.
I love it when a famous person, be they an actor, politician, writer or celebrity is asked what their favourite book is. It’s a real bitch of a question for a number of reasons:
(1) The interviewer is asking them to distil everything that they love about the vast tidal wave of text that is literature into a single book. Simply by answering the question they do an insult to the canon.
(2) The interviewer is asking them to assign a metonymic function to a book; choose a book that represents you, in your varied complexity and ambiguity. Reduce yourself to only one book.
(3) If you are deliberately cultivating a fan base or voters there is a complex interplay between taking yourself too seriously, being flippant and (worst of all) being obvious and boring. You can feel the strain: I’m one of the people, just like you! But I am also smart. I appreciate literature with a capital ‘L’ even though people think I’m vacant and facile.
No matter what book people choose, it’s invariably disappointing. My reaction is generally, ‘Yeah – that’s a good book. It’s a very good book. But that? That’s your totemic piece of literature? Of everything you could choose that stood out? Jeez, I guess you’re just not as cool as I thought you were.’ Of course it’s even more disappointing when they opt for the standard bail out: ‘Oh, there are too many books,’ they say, ‘I couldn’t possibly choose just one.’ That’s when you want to say, ‘Oh go on! Nail your colours to the mast! You will disappoint – but gives us your best shot you coward!’
Of course I am glad I don’t have to this answer this question because I couldn’t choose one book. But I suppose for a writer the question of influences is different. Famous writers are always telling aspiring writers to ‘read, read and read some more’ but they seem to differ on why this is good advice. Some imply that through a process of osmosis you unconsciously absorb good writing technique. Others suggest that to benefit from good writing you need to make a deliberate study of the techniques they use. You liked that passage? Well read it again and this time analyse what it is the writer did. How did they evoke that response? In the work of Murial Spark for example, it’s interesting to see how she uses heightened language for comedic passages and a more paired back, direct style for serious ones. Of course this technique is employed by lots of writers, but Spark does it so well. Her use of repetition is also pitch perfect and highly evocative.
Some of the most important influences are the one’s the give you permission to do things you wouldn’t otherwise consider. When you read Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint you realise ‘Oh – you can go there. You can go that far.’ And when you read Douglas Coupland you realise it’s perfectly ok, if done with sufficient skill, for the authorial voice to intrude, to riff, on this or that matter, to litter the text with ‘babies’ while everyone else is calling for immediate and ruthless infanticide. The best writers are way ahead, slashing through the thicket of rules and advice, clearing the path for the rest of us to follow.
But there is more than that. The great authors are like deep reservoirs of writing fuel; their writing is so deeply and richly associative that it sparks off dozens of your own memories and ideas and experiences. For me JM Coetzee does this every time. Whenever he eviscerates one of his characters I usually feel a bit roughed up too.
Finally there’s that group of people who aren’t necessarily fiction writers, but are equally inspiring. Whatever you may think about Freud he articulated the conflict that sits at the heart of every good character: the vast difference between your childish fantasies of what the world and you should be, versus what you and the world actually are. And though he may not have been of the psychoanalytic school, these Freudian conflicts are wonderfully and theatrically realised in the experiments of Stanley Milgram. Has there ever been a more compelling piece of psychological research than the obedience experiment? As for Nina Simone … well what does one need to say about Nina Simone? She’s just awesome.
I love it when a famous person, be they an actor, politician, writer or celebrity is asked what their favourite book is. It’s a real bitch of a question for a number of reasons:
(1) The interviewer is asking them to distil everything that they love about the vast tidal wave of text that is literature into a single book. Simply by answering the question they do an insult to the canon.
(2) The interviewer is asking them to assign a metonymic function to a book; choose a book that represents you, in your varied complexity and ambiguity. Reduce yourself to only one book.
(3) If you are deliberately cultivating a fan base or voters there is a complex interplay between taking yourself too seriously, being flippant and (worst of all) being obvious and boring. You can feel the strain: I’m one of the people, just like you! But I am also smart. I appreciate literature with a capital ‘L’ even though people think I’m vacant and facile.
No matter what book people choose, it’s invariably disappointing. My reaction is generally, ‘Yeah – that’s a good book. It’s a very good book. But that? That’s your totemic piece of literature? Of everything you could choose that stood out? Jeez, I guess you’re just not as cool as I thought you were.’ Of course it’s even more disappointing when they opt for the standard bail out: ‘Oh, there are too many books,’ they say, ‘I couldn’t possibly choose just one.’ That’s when you want to say, ‘Oh go on! Nail your colours to the mast! You will disappoint – but gives us your best shot you coward!’
Of course I am glad I don’t have to this answer this question because I couldn’t choose one book. But I suppose for a writer the question of influences is different. Famous writers are always telling aspiring writers to ‘read, read and read some more’ but they seem to differ on why this is good advice. Some imply that through a process of osmosis you unconsciously absorb good writing technique. Others suggest that to benefit from good writing you need to make a deliberate study of the techniques they use. You liked that passage? Well read it again and this time analyse what it is the writer did. How did they evoke that response? In the work of Murial Spark for example, it’s interesting to see how she uses heightened language for comedic passages and a more paired back, direct style for serious ones. Of course this technique is employed by lots of writers, but Spark does it so well. Her use of repetition is also pitch perfect and highly evocative.
Some of the most important influences are the one’s the give you permission to do things you wouldn’t otherwise consider. When you read Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint you realise ‘Oh – you can go there. You can go that far.’ And when you read Douglas Coupland you realise it’s perfectly ok, if done with sufficient skill, for the authorial voice to intrude, to riff, on this or that matter, to litter the text with ‘babies’ while everyone else is calling for immediate and ruthless infanticide. The best writers are way ahead, slashing through the thicket of rules and advice, clearing the path for the rest of us to follow.
But there is more than that. The great authors are like deep reservoirs of writing fuel; their writing is so deeply and richly associative that it sparks off dozens of your own memories and ideas and experiences. For me JM Coetzee does this every time. Whenever he eviscerates one of his characters I usually feel a bit roughed up too.
Finally there’s that group of people who aren’t necessarily fiction writers, but are equally inspiring. Whatever you may think about Freud he articulated the conflict that sits at the heart of every good character: the vast difference between your childish fantasies of what the world and you should be, versus what you and the world actually are. And though he may not have been of the psychoanalytic school, these Freudian conflicts are wonderfully and theatrically realised in the experiments of Stanley Milgram. Has there ever been a more compelling piece of psychological research than the obedience experiment? As for Nina Simone … well what does one need to say about Nina Simone? She’s just awesome.
