virtualDavis

I’ve just polluted a perfectly wonderful blog post over at Multi-Hyphenate, and I’m feeling a little ashamed.

No, not the blog troll sort of graffiti that I find reprehensible. But the kind of run-on comment that should have been a blog post instead of clogging up someone else’s blog post (which I alsofind reprehensible.) So… aside from a mumbled apology at the end of my comment, I’m reposting my thoughts so their wise editor is free to abbreviate or remove the comment I posted to Annie Q. Syed’s “There is No Muse“.

A “muse to amuse your ego” is an amusing and clever tongue twister that I can’t resist borrowing for a quick blog post… But I’m not sure I’m 100% convinced.

I’m with you here: “At the end of the day… you are simply a storyteller and you have a job to do: tell the damn story. ” Just spent this morning listening to Tom Ashbrook interviewing Eric Bogosian about his novel, “Perforated Heart”. (You can hear the On Point rebroadcast, but note it was originally broadcast May 26, 2009.) He tells the story. In more modes, manners and muddles than most storytellers,

Eric Bogosian (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

Bogosian tells the damn story. An acquired taste, especially if you’re not male and/or not connected in some way with NYC, but Bogosian is a storyteller without precious, pretentious muse mongering.

Or is he? Perhaps we just don’t meet his muse. Perhaps Bogosian’s muse is personal, intimate, private. Perhaps it is a changing muse, evolving along with his own writing style, ambition, skill. I don’t know. And frankly, I don’t much care because his storytelling stands on its own, muse or no muse.

What’s the point? I think that storytelling need not be divorced from muse. A muse. Many muses. But the story, the finished product, need not reflect the role of the muse in the creative process. A storyteller’s craft is complex, and the journey is often long (as you’ve readily acknowledged) between story seed and finished story. For me, the muse is one part of that journey. She’s part inspiration, as you’ve mentioned above, but she’s also my collaborator. I don’t mean to get too fanciful hear, but recall that storytelling is not a hermetic art. It requires an audience. Else it is mere babbling! The burps and farts of a crazy man. You’ve said, “Sometimes when I write words feel like picking precious beads in sand.” Right! And why? Because you’re not writing for yourself alone. You’re telling a story for an audience and precise, accurate language is the currency of a storyteller if s/he is to find a receptive audience. I’ve slipping into pedantic drivel, sorry…

So inspiration, yes, but my muse is also more of a collaborator. Like music to a dancer. And perhaps also like a dance partner. I’m a crumby (but enthusiastic) dancer, so take this comparison for what little it is worth. I can dream up a clever dance, practice and refine my steps, my rhythm, my gesture, my poise, etc. But it’s only when I attempt this creative process in conjunction with music — real or imagined — that my dance evolves away from the dizzying courtship of a park pigeon into something more compelling, more complete. And better still when I extend my hand to a dance partner — real or imagined — to enter into the dance with me, to mirror, to oppose, to resist and beguile and charm and challenge that something beautiful can be born.

Yes, I’ve overextended the metaphor. Apologies! But there’s an idea in there, an idea that a creator can extend the limits of his or her creativity significantly when amused by a muse. ;-)

That indulgent difference aside, there’s much we agree on. The work of a storyteller is also to know the difference between this creative dance and the hard work of distilling the finished product from the draft. After narcotic creativity transports the storyteller beyond initial inspiration and indeed often beyond the anticipated scope of the story, it’s time to begin the hardest work. The editing, the weeding, the focusing, the revising. The muse does not belong in this process, at least in my own writing. She’s a temptress, a dazzling temptress who’s creative genius forever outstrips my own. And so the time comes when I must bid her farewell, for a while, remove my dance shoes, sit down at my desk and work. Dancing is divine, but I have a job to do!

Related articles

• Consulting Your Writer’s Muse (blogcritics.org)
• Managing my Muse (writeami.wordpress.com)
• Talker’s block (sethgodin.typepad.com)
• Avoiding the Muse (dawnewebber.wordpress.com)
• Is Journaling a Cure for Creative Blocks? (artistsroad.wordpress.com)
• My Muse (wellnessspirit.wordpress.com)
• My Muse has ADHD (megganconnors.wordpress.com)

Q: There’s so much for a writer to think about: platform, query letters, agents, marketing. What’s the most important thing to focus on?

A: That’s easy. Focus on the content of your book. There’s nothing more important. (The Book Deal)

So content is [still] king! Back to work…

Did I like the book?

Full stop! Do you ever find yourself asking this question after finishing a new book?

Image via Wikipedia

I’m not sure I’d go so far as Nathan Bransford because it’s natural, almost instinctual to size up a read according to your own personal like/dislike criteria. But don’t stop there. My sub-four year old nieces are accomplished like/dislike experts. So is my Labrador Retriever, Griffin. It’s pretty well ingrained in the DNA of humans and those critters who mingle amongst us. But it’s not the most valuable assesment tool. Probe deeper, Bransford reminds us. Especially if you’re an aspiring writer — essaying to leap from unpublished, unread obscurity to scribbling fandom — you must learn to asses books, especially widely purchased and read books with more useful metric.

“X sucks.” … [If] this is all an aspiring writer is taking from a book, they missed the main point of reading it. All they figured out is whether they liked the book or not… the one question that aspiring writers should never ask themselves when reading a book is, “Do I like this?” … Who is that question about? Well, it’s about you. It’s about your taste, and whether the book fit in with your likes and dislikes. It’s not about the book. It’s about you and whether the book spoke to you… but plumbing the depths of our likes and dislikes is about entertainment, it’s not knowledge that is overly helpful as a writer. Knowing your likes and dislikes will help you imitate, but it won’t help you learn tools you can really use.

The real question aspiring writers should ask is not whether they liked a book, but whether they think the author accomplished what they set out to accomplish. How good is the book at what it is trying to do? … Once you start looking at an author’s intent, you’ll start to see where they succeeded and didn’t succeed at what they were trying to accomplish. And you’ll also start seeing that what most megabestsellers have in common is that the authors were phenomenal at delivering the thing(s) they set out to accomplish and at giving readers the experiences they wanted to give them. You’ll start absorbing the positive attributes of books you might not even like all that much.

Asking this question and really thinking about it is the place where nuanced reading starts, and where writers will start noticing craft, technique, and things they can actually use when they write. (Nathan Bransfor’s Blog)

• It’s a Great Time to Be an Author
• Inverted Publishing Funnel
• The Myth of “Just An Author”

Related articles

• My Best Advice for Writers From 2011 (janefriedman.com)
• Do People Know That You Write? (nfaa.wordpress.com)

Pilot Handwriting demonstration (via youtube.com)

This strikes me as a great first step, but one that’s not particularly enticing to me. On the other hand, if Pilot Handwriting could leap frog forward a couple of paces, I would be extremely interested. Here’s what I mean:

• I’d like to be able to use a plugin for MSWord that would let me write and print in my own handwriting. Especially if image quality and print quality is good, this would be an amazing way to personalize correspondence.
• I’d like to be able to use a plugin with Dragon Naturally Speaking or some other voice recognition software to transcribe dictation directly into printable notes. Just think of the thank you notes and letters you could catch up on while commuting!
• I’d like to be able to have the new font I’ve created from my handwriting be available via online database so that I could blog in my handwritten font and have my reader’s browser call up the font and see my words as I’d have scribbled them on the back of a cocktail napkin.

How would you use a font derived from your own handwriting?

Like a persistent two year old throwing a tantrum, a chain saw whines and screams and subsides only to whine again a few minutes later. Angry. Testy. Persistent. Closer — outside my window — chimes cling and clong in the breeze. They dangle beneath an enormous ginkgo tree and emit pleasant music whenever the wind blows. Chain saw versus wind chimes. I try to organize my thoughts in digital scrawl, postulating, developing, concluding. Posting. Re-posting. Whine. Cling. Scream. Clong. A garbage truck thunders past, doubling (tripling?) the thirty mile per hour speed limit. Then a slow car. Another. Then quiet except for the crinkle-strain-crinkle-strain of the palm paddles on the ceiling fan above my head. Type. Click, click, click. The ferry rumbles, reversing its engines to slow its momentum as it glides into the dock where it will disgorge motorcycles, cars, trucks that will parade past my window. Think. Type. Post.

Have you ever heard of I Write Like? I stumbled upon it this morning and my curiosity was peaked. Briefly. I scribbled out these few descriptive lines and hit the analyze button.

Instantly, the page refreshed with a verdict: I write like Cory Doctorow. Really? I’ve never read anything by Cory Doctorow. Nor am I confident that this little writing sample can offer much basis for comparison.

But I am intrigued. How does the analysis work? A bunch of bookwormish gnomes under the hood reading and arguing about style?

“What? He opens with a simile? Chuck him!”

“Yeah, give him a 404 page. He ain’t got no style…”

“Wait a minute, Clyde. Not so quick. Check out the imagery. Doesn’t that remind you of somebody?”

“Yeah, and that onomatopoeic ointment reminds me of moldy Cheeze Whiz. Sort of like that guy… What’s his name?”

“Nah, you guys have got it all wrong. It’s the rhythm. That’s the key. Trust a woman! You guys don’t know rhythm from spasm.”

“Oh, yeah? ‘Twas brillig, baby, and this slithy tove did ooze some ugly prose. Just try to tell me about rhythm, Tanya”

“Mel, you’re sooo lame, and you don’t even realize it! Anyway, you know who we’re gonna say?”

“Who?”

“Who?”

“Who?”

“Cory Doctorow.”

“You mean the guy who wrote For the Win?”

“Bingo, genius.”

“Are you kidding? Doctorow rocks! Did you ever readMakers?”

“Totally. That was killer!”

“Right, and this slacker sho ain’t no Cory Doctorow!”

“Sorry, boys, you’re out of time. I’ve just reloaded the page for him. You snooze, you lose.”

“Oh, my gawd. Look at him. He’s all puffed up and proud. Yuck!”

“He’s probably going to go brag about it, blog about it, tweet about it… Our cred is shot!”

“What cred?”

Are you intrigued? Do you write like Michael Ondaatje? Mario Vargas Llosa? Go ahead and find out. Start a gnome fight at I Write Like.

Photo credit: The New York Times

As a professional novelist, Mr. Saramago was a late bloomer. A first novel, published when he was 23, was followed by 30 years of silence. He became a full-time writer only in his late 50s, after working variously as a garage mechanic, a welfare agency bureaucrat, a printing production manager, a proofreader, a translator and a newspaper columnist. (The New York Times)

José Saramago, released from this mortal coil at 87 years old, told The New York Times in 2007 that his fortune as a writer hinged upon his premature professional demise due to the collapse of Portugal’s Communist-led revolution in 1975. “Being fired was the best luck of my life… It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.”

I agonized over lines, phrases, even single word choices. Chapters were shifted, characters reworked. I climbed into dark places that hit me so hard I took showers after writing certain chapters. But it was only afterward that I realized that what I was doing was getting the manuscript in the shape it needed to be in. While it was happening, I was simply in pursuit of authenticity—a story that only I could tell and tell it in a way that only I could do it.(guidetoliteraryagents.com)

Heath Gibson’s guest blog post is titled, “If it hurts, you’re doing something right“, and he focuses on his personal experience getting his debut novel, Gigged, out of the gate on onto shelves. I’m especially drawn to the last assertion above: a great story is an authentic story, a story that can and will ONLY be told by you.

Read the full post at guidetoliteraryagents.com

Can you be “just an author” these days, pecking away at a typewriter in a basement somewhere but otherwise completely eschewing publicity and remaining out of the public eye, Salinger- and Pynchon-style, writing in a bubble-like Platonic ideal of authordom?

I think a few authors can probably pull it off, particularly those who are already established. But it’s increasingly rare for authors breaking into the business…

We live in a networked time. The Internet is quickly organizing itself into tribes of far-flung, plugged-in, like-minded individuals and shaping how we learn about the stories we consume… The authors who engage their audience and inspire devoted clans of fans have a leg up over those who sit back and let the publisher take care of that whole promotional thing or who hope lightning will strike on its own.

via blog.nathanbransford.com

Literary agent Nathan Bransford seems to echo what I’m reading all over: no more poet in a garret… Write and write well, but don’t neglect your platform.

Memoirs of a Scanner (Martinibomb Version) from Damon Stea on Vimeo.

I’m always excited by innovative techniques for storytelling in the digital age, and ‘Memoirs of a Scanner‘ definitely qualifies. It’s a giant leap for office nerds! The super creative folks over at Mindfruit Films made this uptempo melodrama using only an office image scanner… It’s short, intriguing, disturbing and only a minute long. How can you pass that up? And it just might trigger some ideas for how to tell your own story in a clever new way!

Check out these links:

• Mindfruit Studios
• View the video on vimeo.com
• View the Neatorama post
• Deconstructing André Breton To Feed The Scanner (Blind Flaneur’s intriguing follow-up blog post)

A killer proposal isn’t good enough for wannabe nonfiction authors. Lay the groundwork and build your credibility through these strategic efforts.

via writersdigest.com

According to Dianne Jacob, here’s how to build your reputation most effectively:

#1. GET ARTICLES ON THE SUBJECT PUBLISHED
#2. INTERVIEW EXPERTS
#3. CO-AUTHOR A BOOK WITH AN EXPERT
#4. SPEAK ON THE SUBJECT
#5. FIND RELEVANT BACKGROUND FOR YOUR BIO

Read the article here…