"Don't Fear The Whale": Why We Fear Our Callings

I never wanted to read Moby Dick. I knew it was one of those books everyone should read, particularly every English major, but I did everything I could to avoid it. Made sure to take classes where it wasn't on the required reading list, or where there was at least a book I could read as an alternative, avoided majoring in English until the very last year of undergraduate. Then I disappeared into creative writing and thought, "aha! I've escaped the whale."

It worked for quite a while. I took classes in women's lit, British lit, Gothic lit, Old English, African American lit, really any other kind of lit, and never had to read it. Even took several early American lit classes and still never had to read it. It was one of those books so firmly entrenched in the canon everyone thought we'd read. But then I neared the end of my Ph.D. coursework, and I had to choose three areas of literary specialization for my comprehensive exams.

As someone who had published a piece in African American literary criticism and constantly wrote about American drama, Hawthorne, and the Puritans, Early American lit seemed the logical candidate. Against my will, I got the list, and scanned the titles of all 70 or 80 entries. The whole list was sumptuous, and in fact, I'd already read almost everything on it--except for Moby Dick.

My avoidance of the whale was ridiculous, and I finally saw it. So I shrugged my shoulders, took a deep breath, and signed up for a doctoral level survey course that would force me to read the book and get it over with already. On the first day of the survey course, we all went around the seminar table introducing ourselves and saying why we were there, and I blurted out "because I'm afraid of Moby Dick." The whole class laughed (I really think some thought I was kidding), and a friend of mine said "Don't fear the whale. It's a really great book!" Then he and another friend snickered about it and drew a whale on the seminar table. "Don't fear the whale, Kathryn Paterson," they wrote (it's probably still there somewhere today). And I dragged myself to Half Price Books and bought a copy.

And--you might have guessed this--promptly fell in love. From that first famous line to that famous and tragic ending, I read. I read it in between classes I was teaching and classes I was taking, read it between tutoring gigs and around the hours of my third job, read it through the night and into the morning, and finally, finally finished it, believing (as I still do), that it truly is one of the greatest books ever written, and (minus the sperm whale minutiae) a rollicking good read.

When it came time to do my dissertation, I faced the same sort of crisis--and had the same sort of problem, except this time it was the long form of the novel I was fearing. I'd written plays, short stories, dabbled very unsuccessfully in poetry, even did half of a decent young adult novel for my bachelor's honors thesis, but I had never managed to finish writing a novel. I'd told myself that meant the long form wasn't for me. I'd told myself it was okay. I'd get this degree, find a teaching job (ha!), and write plays and short stories on the side.

And that could have been enough for me. It really could have. But then that day came, a day in early 2006, when I sat up in bed and had the idea for this novel. And I realized that all along, I had been putting off what I really was supposed to do with my life. I realized I was on track to be an academic, possibly even a successful one, but that really wasn't the life I wanted. Yes, I was well over ten years into graduate school, and I realized I didn't really want to be there.

I wanted to write novels, and what's worse, I wanted to write literary horror novels. Mystery. Suspense. Crime. Something. Just not something entirely literary. There I was at the best PhD program in the entire world for creative writing, and I no longer wanted to be literary. How was I going to explain that?

Turns out, I didn't really have to. Just about that time, UH decided to bring in agents and editors to give us a chance to learn about the business and to practice making a pitch. They told us to submit either a short story or the first few pages of a novel, for a "UH look book" that the program director put together. I had a choice. I could submit a polished short story that had been receiving encouraging rejections from good literary magazines, or submit the first, rough pages of the novel. You can guess what I chose.

In another post, I'll write about the results of that decision, but the point of this post is to ask simply why? Why is it that we fear the things we most should do? Why is it that we so often run away from the hard parts of writing? And I don't mean the grunt work, the hard, long hours of creating, I mean the parts that are emotionally hard. Psychologically hard. Are we afraid that somehow in the midst of chasing our white whales, that we'll be like Ahab and lose ourselves?

Buy this Book: World War Z by Max Brooks

"What if the enemy can't be shocked and awed? Not just won't, but biologically can't!" The answer is gruesomely laid out in Max Brooks' "oral history" of the seriously scary (but sometimes funny and surprisingly poignant) world that remains after zombies overrun virtually the entire globe. My son bugged me to read this book for years, and I kept kind of smiling and nodding as if I was actually going to read it. Then I actually read it. And I loved it. I'm not a zombie book person, I gotta tell ya, but I am a person who loved a well-written, riveting story. World War Z came up in conversation recently with an aspiring author who asked me for an example of what I meant when I said "world-building." One of the best examples I've ever seen.

Just keep me reading: 3 Questions for our new blogmate Peggy Hageman of Overlook Press

Peggy Hageman gets my vote for Publishing Apocalypse Pin-Up Girl. She first impressed me as part of the HarperCollins team who published my third novel, and we kept in touch via Facebook, where she dishes cool photos and wry commentary on life in New York. Last year, when I asked her if she'd consider joining our expanding blog crew, she said, "I'd love to, but there's something you should know. I'm leaving HarperCollins."

I was astonished. At a moment when heads were involuntarily rolling all over New York, she chose to leave a solid Big 6 position, not knowing where she was headed. She wasn't even completely certain she'd stay in publishing. I was pretty certain she would. This is a woman who loves books with a grand passion. She's smart, funny, and intuitive, and frankly, publishing needs her. Peggy spent some time on the Mediterranean Sea, and came home to join the staff of Overlook Press as an editor. I'm beyond delighted to have her sharp wit, experience, and cool photos here on BoxOcto.

Peggy, welcome! Thanks for joining us. Times being what they are, leaving your job was a very "Leap and the net will appear" sort of maneuver. What did you learn during your years at HC that made it less scary to walk out the door?
I'd been at HarperCollins for six years. I loved it there but I was worried I was getting a bit burned out. I needed a change. I thought I'd freelance for a while, maybe travel...and yet here I am behind a desk again!

Harper taught me pretty much everything about the making, marketing, and selling of a book, from acquisition to editing to case-binding to a bookstore planograms. And of course I learned just how much work I was capable of doing in a short period of time.

What will your acquisition process be like? Are you diving into the slush pile, doing lunch with agents, or cultivating your own stable of favorite authors?
A little of everything actually. (Although I'm afraid we don't really have a slush pile; it's all agented submissions.) What I'm also trying to do is to package books myself. By that I mean I'm on the look-out for professors and specialists in certain fields and will then work with them to create a book from the ground up, either on a new topic that doesn't yet exist in the marketplace or by approaching the subject from a new angle. Overlook has done quite a few books using this method and has had great success.

What will it take for a query to make the first cut with you?
I don't usually turn down a query from an agent unless it's of a type I don't publish. With novels it's really all about the writing. I have to admit I don't like to read too much of the cover letter because sometimes they give the story away. (Note to agents: please don't do that!) With non-fiction proposals, there's a lot of research to be done. I read the writing samples of course but I also look for any recent or definitive books on the topic and see how the proposal book might complement or surpass what's already out there. What are the comparative titles and how well (and in what markets) did they sell? Is the author a leader in this field? As a layperson, does this topic interest me? Or rather, does the author MAKE this topic interesting to me? I might know nothing about, say, hydrological engineering, but the right writer should make it come alive, or at least make me want to keep reading. And really, that's what it boils down to for any submission, fiction or non-fiction: just keep me reading.

Sunday Morning Groove: Regina Spektor "Samson"

From the NYT City Room: "Iceland Volcano Spews Consonants and Vowels"

This volcano thing is so not funny to those who were headed for the London Book Fair, but I had to laugh at this on the NYT City Room blog:

All across this fair city, thousands of people, some of them highly paid television and radio newscasters, found themselves tumbling down the vowel-and-liquid-consonant-lubricated slopes of Eyjafjallajokull, the mountain’s 16-letter, six-and-a-half-syllable, 47-Scrabble-point name.

Read the rest of the article, in which staffers ask Times Square denizens for their best attempts at pronunciation.

Welcome back, Elliott Bay Book Company!

From Shelf Awareness yesterday:

Hundreds of people turned out yesterday for the block party thrown by the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce in celebration of Elliott Bay Book Company's grand reopening in the Pike/Pine district of Capitol Hill, one of Seattle's fastest-growing cultural hubs. Housed in a beautifully restored industrial building, the bookstore evokes much of its original Pioneer Square location with heavy exposed beams, creaky wooden floors and an upstairs loft, but improves upon it with a more open and efficient layout that is awash in natural light through skylights and a grid of windows across the front of the store. Elliott Bay’s signature cedar bookcases made the move with the books.

More about the journey...

Buy This Book: The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

A host of heavy hitters including Dorothy Allison, Jim Shepard, Aimie Bender, and Nick Flynn explain it all to you. The Writer's Notebook combines the best craft seminars from the Summer Writers Workshop's history with craft essays by some of Tin House's favorite authors. Includes do’s and don'ts, writing about sex, close readings, personal anecdotes, and a CD of workshop discussions and panels.

Alice on iPad (Thing are getting curiouser and curiouser...)

Reasons to keep publishing: 3 Questions for our new blogmate, Fred Ramey of Unbridled Books

Fifteen years ago, my first novel was plucked from the slush pile by Fred Ramey at MacMurray & Beck (which later morphed into MacAdam-Cage), and I'm not overstating when I say that he saved my life. I was fresh out of chemo and profoundly depressed. The manuscript, which was about 8,000 pages long (only a slight exaggeration), had predictably been rejected almost 100 times (no exaggeration required.) It would be years before I knew enough about this business to appreciate how astonishing it was for an editor to take the time and patience required to make a book out of that mess and a professional writer out of that thrashing wannabe. Now I get it.

An agent in New York recently told to me, "Changes in the industry have made the job of editors more about acquisitions and marketing than actual editing, developing projects, helping authors build a body of work. Editors like Fred Ramey are the Spartans at Thermopylae - only they get up and do it every day. They're the only hope for the future of American fiction."

Fred's taught me a lot over the years, and much of what I've learned has come from reading the books he brings to the light of day as co-publisher at Unbridled Books. We're jazzed to be adding his literary sensibility and industry insights to the mix.

Fred, your authors have been consistently appearing high on the Indie Next lists for almost twenty years. (I was so glad to see Emily St. John Mandel's The Singer's Gun score the #1 slot for May!) So what is this legendary literary divining rod? How do you know when the chemistry is right?
Chemistry? We’ve no recipes, but thanks for noticing. The Singer’s Gun is our fourth #1 Indie Next (née Booksense) pick since we started Unbridled six years ago. And we’re publishing only 10 to 12 books a year. I’m proud of that good notice from booksellers. The titles that Greg Michalson and I pick are, I suppose, not much alike, but they do have a few things in common. We try each season to pick books that are true to modern emotions and that portray life in the most clear, unblinking, and therefore beautiful of terms. Writers bring an approachable art to us in the only form of expression that can actually be true of the whole. And we try to honor that, first by editing the work with the author, then by packaging the work well, and finally by pushing our support for the book (and the author) for as long as we possibly can. I’m convinced that readers who spend time within the books we publish recommend them again and again. And I say this today, the self-revelatory skim-and-dismiss practices of so many current reviewers notwithstanding.

As a publisher and the dad of twenty-somethings, what do you think of the Harry Potter generation of readers now that they've gained grownup buying power?
My kids are working 18-hour days and I still don’t think they have sufficient buying power. But that’s another discussion. My son (who is variously in the restaurant industry) is constantly reading books that are recommended to him by his friends (who are variously in the restaurant industry). And from what I can tell, they’re discussing those books in bars and restaurants. I (of course) find this heartening because it seems they see books as something more than consumables. My daughter examines what she reads with the hope of one day filming the right small book. The last novel I read out loud to her was Portrait of a Lady. I know of many young readers who want—maybe need—their novels to be available digitally. I understand that—it’s a new form of portability. What I take from it is that they want their books to be part of their daily experience—stolen moments to enter a novel. This reminds me of those paperbacks that were bent to fit the pockets of folks in my generation. I think of that copy of The Last Unicorn in Townes Van Zandt’s coat pocket on the cover of Delta Momma Blues. Two things about the reading experience seem to me cross-generational. The first is that narrative is hardwired into the way we make sense of life. The second is that the physical traces of our emotional and intellectual experiences (heirlooms and mementos) are at once the madeleines of our reflection and the marks of our connection to each other. If that’s anywhere near right, then the new literacies in young readers are also primal. And that’s reason enough to keep publishing.

We're rolling with a lot of changes in the book industry these days, and despite a chronic spew of too much information, we don't seem to be communicating about a few things that really matter. Given the opportunity to frame the conversation, what are some of the issues you'd like to get people talking about?
So much of the conversation in the past year — I mean, besides that about the price of e-books — has been about engaging the reader in various sorts of expanded-book experience. The thoughts are wide in this discussion: hypertextualizing the book, adding other-media elements, creating the open-access, universal, online digital library, sampling—building books by juxtaposing passages from earlier books — which some folks think is creativity by juxtaposition (Walter Benjamin thought the same thing, you know), or actually involving the reader in the process of composition via editorial feedback with the author and decision-making by reader consensus. All of these are fascinating topics, but when I begin to think about the future of the book world, I think two things. The first is that we must begin all of our thinking with the author. We must understand what the authors’ motivation is for creating and releasing their books in any given book environment, and we must take care to serve that motivation. Moreover, we have to think about how to support and thank them for doing so. The second is that I believe what is published is becoming increasingly important. Despite the wagon circling in the mainstream media and conglomerated publishing — and despite the fact that Steve Jobs is setting new terms by thinking only about the lists and corporate structures of the Big Houses — each social-media-informed development in the delivery of narrative has the potential to raise the profile of the best works. As we go forward, I say, we need to talk first about authors and we need to keep our ears open to what enriches and rewards as well as what entertains.

When You're Really, Really Stuck on a Scene...

Yesterday, I started a scene, but it just wasn't engaging me, in spite of its worthy characters, interesting setting, and heartrending situation. The writing itself was pretty smooth, too, but I really didn't care.

Hmm, I thought, before ten other things distracted me. When I came back to it, I still couldn't figure out what the problem might be.

Finally, I gave up and decided to sleep on it. First thing this morning, I pulled it out and took another look.

And that's when it hit me. The scene, which was meant to show the passage of time and introduce a new character and changing situation, had zero tension. There was no conflict between the characters, no one was distracted from the oh-so-sincere conversation by a pressing personal conundrum, and nothing particularly exciting happened.

Worse yet, in this romantic suspense, I was writing a scene with neither romance or suspense.

Big problem, but one that's easily fixed, now that I've put my finger on the issue. And better yet, it reminded me of an important truth. Characters can be sharpened. Description can be rewritten, and prose can always be "prettied up" into something serviceable or better. But when you really, really can't get into a scene, ask yourself these questions:

1. What's really at stake here?
2. Why should we care if the character gets it?
3. What daunting obstacle is standing in his/her way?
4. Is this scene an integral part of the whole, or is it a throwaway or a bridge to get your reader to "the good stuff?"

If so, make some changes. You can't afford any do-nothing scenes in your story. Because no reader (or agent or editor) is going to take the trouble to cross a boring bridge.

Advice to a Writer Exhausted by Selling

I was thinking about a fellow writer yesterday as I was hiking in a canyon stream near my home. She had sent me a despairing message: her book had been out for three months, and though she had tried and tried to bring attention to it, to do her part in getting the word out, nothing seemed to be happening, and she was drained and near to collapse from the effort. I was thinking how, in the past, I have felt and bemoaned this: that being a writer so often puts one in the position of frustration rather than celebration. The book is never reviewed widely enough. The audience is never large enough. We are never doing enough. There is something we have not done. There is everything we have not done. Having written--which is already difficult enough--we are expected to do more. We finish a book--challenge enough--and then we put another mountain in front of us. The mountain is this: if we work hard enough (we think), if we claw hard enough toward the top, our book will find its audience. If the book doesn't find its audience, it's our all our fault--because we didn't claw hard enough, we didn't do everything we could have done. The mountain of the book becomes nothing compared to, in fact is lost in the shadow of, the mountain of publicizing it.

The problem with this--I came home from my hike and thought--is that after a certain point, we have no business living this way. Aspects of our books' success are completely out of our hands. They have to do with luck, and with mystery. Even with the best will in the world, even throwing our hearts toward the top of that second, shadowy slope, there is only so much we can do. And once we have done it, we have to do this: skip down, go back to the flow, to the beautiful bottoms, where real life is, and the real work, and the real beauty. There is nothing beautiful about hawking a book. We do it because we have to. And once we are done, we can't say we have failed if we have done our best to help our creation along. We have to say, "I'm going back to my own stream, the things I love, for I have done my part. Let me celebrate. I am a writer. I have written. I have published. I have put a finished book into the hands of other human beings. I have sung the name of my book from the mountain, to any who were willing to hear, and many who were not--and that, frankly, took guts. I have accomplished this. I have made something and sent it out into the world. It is out of my hands now. I celebrate the sending. And now I will go refresh myself. I have earned it."

I've been on that mountain; it can be exhausting. But I don't live there. Not for long. My job is to write things. So is yours. My friends, don't let the transient job of selling your work overshadow your gift for making it. I'm with Andy Warhol (whose paintings of Campbell Soup cans languished undiscovered in a gallery for years) on this: Did you make something? Did you put it out there? Good. Enough. Now go make something else.

--MD

Cinderella Backstory (How a quiet novel from a small press scored the biggest prize in literature)

In the Boston Globe today, a great story on Tinkers, Paul Harding's small press novel that just won the Pulitzer:

For three years, Paul Harding’s unpublished novel, “Tinkers,’’ sat in a drawer. The writer, a former Boston rock drummer who grew up in Wenham, had tried selling it, but nobody was interested.

“I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll be a writer who doesn’t publish,’ ’’ Harding, 42, said this week, a day after “Tinkers’’ earned him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction — the first book by a small publisher to do so in nearly three decades.

Click here to read the rest.

Change is good...right? (Let us know how you feel about our new look.)

It's inevitable. Along with death and (dare I say it today?) taxes, change happens. We're evolving here at the ol' blog this spring, changing things up in an effort to better bring together the information, inspiration, and prestidigitation it takes to succeed in the publishing industry these days. We've added a boatload of links to our Feed Me bar on the right and categorized them for easier reference. We'll be introducing a few new blog crew members, featuring terrific author interviews, putting the Q&A to some knowledgeable industry types, stepping up our reviews, handselling and giving some face time to deserving books in all genres.

We want to hear from you! What do you love? What do you hate? What are some of the questions you'd like to see answered by authors, agents, editors, and PR mavens? And most important, what are you reading?