off the page

One Writer Up in Arms

2010-02-14T12:19:00.004-05:00

Minutes before walking into a conference on digital publishing in London on Saturday, I lose predictive text on my mobile. “Jtpt jddt ptqddkj pptapd,” I text to my partner. Sigh. How do I turn this back on?

So maybe I’m not the best person to comment on the new age of publishing, this digital medium that is “enabling writers to produce some of the most exciting developments in literary form and creative collaborations,” according to the flyer advertising the event. (Do I find predictive text under Settings?) “Don’t panic,” Dan Franklin, digital editor at Canongate Books, told us as the panel started.

But as I assimilate the information discussed at Saturday’s panel, sponsored by Spread the Word and The Literacy Consultancy, I agree more and more with Guardian Review editor Claire Amitstead’s closing remarks: “Six words seem to come out of this for me,” she said. “Don’t Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.”

Whether it’s a positive opportunity or absolute apocalypse for writing, the panel seemed to think this new age is coming no matter what any of us think about it. Franklin said industry professionals estimate that ebooks will make up 20 percent of their business within five years, and half their business by 2018.

Key to keeping publishing on a level playing field will be the device and platform that end up as dominant in ebooks, said Sara Lloyd, digital director for Pan MacMillan. A sole propietor like Amazon might end up with too much control if its Kindle becomes the dominant reader, since only a Kindle book can be read on it. Google’s ebooks will be readable on any machines. “We’d like to see a competitive environment like there used to be on the High Street, which there isn’t anymore,” Lloyd said.

And several writers, including the novelist Kate Pullinger and the poet Karen Armstrong, showed examples of work they’d written collaboratively online, or using a digital format.

(31-24 to Wales! My partner texts me about the rugby. Gm Wajdp! I text back)

But many of the provocative questions raised during the day remain unanswered for me. Will writers, who can earn as little as 59 pence per sale of a £10 book, get screwed? Canongate’s Franklin said his writers are given 25 percent of net receipts for e-books. That sounds fair – I agree with Franklin’s point that a publisher has edited, marketed and designed the book, as well as provided an advance to writers which isn’t paid back if the book flops.

But how much money that 25 percent translates into for a writer remains unclear to me. For my Off the Page book, which retails in the U.S. for $14.99, I earn $1.12 for most sales, and 67 cents for those sold at a 55 percent discount – the normal agreement. What would I get for an ebook, given that they sell for as cheaply as $4? 25 cents?

Who is driving this trend anyway? I’m not convinced it’s readers. If people are buying fewer books, surely it’s not because they don’t like the format. A truism in journalism is, Follow the money. A company hoping to make a lot of cash – Amazon? Apple? – may be driving this wagon instead of publishers or readers. And if that’s the case, it’s not necessarily literary integrity that’s going to win.

A self-described venture capitalist in the audience warned us all about what happened in the music industry once everyone downloaded songs using I-Tunes instead of buying CDs. “The artists and the music companies got squeezed,” he reminded us. "Apple's the only one who made money." That won’t happen in publishing, several people on the panel said.

I want to believe them. I don’t.

Lloyd herself published a digital-only book with Creative Content last week entitled The Baby Juggler; Sunday, it was reviewed in the Observer, along with audio book versions of The Lovely Bones and The Forsyte Saga: Volume I. Lloyd’s book being reviewed feels like a momentous occasion. But whether it’s a new inventive platform for writing, or the beginning of the end of books, is something no one knows. What it deserves is a bright orange warning flag.

To publishers, too. Lloyd and Franklin both said that they provide 360 degrees of editorial services to writers – editing, marketing, printing, and now e-publishing. Bless their souls. Seriously. I’m in the middle of contacting agents about my just-finished novel, and I will be deliriously happy to accept an advance and let a publisher take the financial risk of turning it into a book (my risk was the eight years I spent writing the thing.)

“No one wants people to stop reading print books,” Franklin said.

Sure about that?

I think it was also Franklin who expressed surprise that writers weren’t up in arms about these trends. Ok, then. It’s official. I’m up in arms.

Although I have discovered how to turn my predictive text back on. Go Wales!

Novel Class, Week 5: Quantity vs. Quality

2008-10-31T07:13:00.011-04:00

So the inevitable question arose these last two weeks as, a few sentences and a few pages at a time, we typed and scribbled our way to 40,000 words by Dec. 15– Is this quantity over quality?

Well, sure. Probably. Maybe even absolutely.

I want to assure you that this is okay, that this is positively the kind of discipline one needs to write a novel, that you can’t hesitate, you must keep rolling ahead.

But the truth is I don’t know that. In Winchester, Michelle worries about abandoning her usual writing process. Sometimes she just needs to think, she told our class, and she’s so worried about the word count that she can’t do that.

So am I putting her at risk of writing 40,000 crappy words instead of 5,000 good ones?

The truth is, I don’t know.

Plowing ahead may not always be the best way. Where’s the time for playing with words and images? Can a character grow on the page if those pages come out in one sitting?

And as a colleague of my partner said the other week with a friendly smile: I guess you don’t practice what you preach.

But for now, I’m making her – and all of you -- do it anyway. This is an experiment, a challenge, a jump off a cliff.

We are not alone in this endeavor, by the way. Mary Kay Zuravleff, to whom I owe the idea for this class, did a similar thing at George Mason University last year. You can read about her class at her Web site, www.marykayzuravleff.com.

And if you think 12 weeks is a short time, Chris Baty, author of No Plot, No Problem, runs a natonal novel-writing month from San Francisco, in which people write 50,000-word novel in one grey month: November. Check out his Web site, www.NaNoWriMo.org.

Egging us on, one of my undergrad students, Harriet, wrote: As committed Nanowrimo-ists we feel compelled to shout down to the 40,000 words-in-a-semester brigade (wimps). "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough!"

Back in our MA class, a bit of irony. We all saw some of Michelle’s novel-in-progress this week. She is writing scenes here and there, we can’t tell quite yet exactly what her story will be, but there are three characters coming alive on the page, along with a world Michelle is making real for us.

Who’s complaining now?

You can’t think out the problems in a novel, my MFA advisor at Columbia, Stephen Koch, ( Web site: www.stephenkoch.net) once told me. You have to write them out.

And so, off we go to our desks. Write it all out -- 16,000 words by next week.

Novel Class, Week 3: The Great Gatsby, Indeed

2008-10-17T08:29:00.002-04:00

There was just one disappointment this week: We’ve already finished The Great Gatsby.

If we read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic every week, we would probably learn something new each time about novel writing, fiction writing, and the human spirit.

But in our one session dedicated to Gatsby, our small cohort of novelists-in-progress examined, among many aspects of fiction, the tight-as-a-drum plot, the most reliable narrator ever, and the combination of plain and poetic language which both creates the romance of Daisy and Gatsby’s world, then undercuts it.

Another fictional technique in his toolbag: Fitzgerald introduces images, ideas, minor characters at the beginning, then returns to them in the end, building upon the resonances he’s created for the reader. Daisy’s voice, for chapters her most beguiling trait, is described by Gatsby: “Her voice is full of money.” The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg on a billboard that Nick Carraway sees on the train into Manhattan, a quirky detail to start, are transformed at the end into the eyes of god.

Everything in Gatsby seems accidental; for the author, nothing is. The mysterious muse may prompt a writer to describe an odd billboard in the early drafts of a book, but invention and close attention is what will get the writer to use that image to enhance the story. That’s writing.

Meantime, on our 40,000-word novels, which some within and a few outside Winchester are aiming to finish by Week 12, we are trudging away. Two members of the class were about 300 words short, but we are positive that they will make it up by next week. In our online participants, I’ve been given the right word counts by two people, one in England, one in America. Congrats!!!

First Hurdle Crossed: Is This the Beginning?

2008-10-09T12:34:00.004-04:00

I am thrilled to report that all four of the MA students in our Novel-in-One-Semester class have met the word count of 3,000 words set for Week 1. Two of them have surpassed that goal. If they were motivated not by pure inspiration but by the hope of getting ahead so they don't fall short in the future, that's okay by me.

Because there's nothing like a deadline.

As I can attest myself. It's this past Saturday, noon-ish: I've cooked American pancakes with Canadian maple syrup for my English household. I'm feeling lazy and sleepy, but I have made a pledge to revise 3,000 words. I'm the tutor. I cannot walk into class not having met my side of the bargain.

And so, I worked that day and Sunday evening to finish revising about 4,200 words. I've made real changes, had probitive thoughts about the novel in the big picture.

Now, in addition to having completed the next draft of this chapter, I also feel virtuous.

And you? Our online community has grown to include English and Creative Writing BA students at Winchester, one of whom has already sent me an email, and a former student from Washington, D.C. I've encouraged them, and you, to share your thoughts about novel writing on this blog. A person I do not know has already posted wise words -- who is Rich Rowe?

I do know this. In Winchester, Sharon wrote 6,000 words; Tim came in with 17,000 but fessed up to having 13,500 done before the module started; Ian penned 2,600 for Chapter 1 and another 600 in notes; Michelle did her 3,000 or thereabouts. They've all written what might be a beginning.

In class, we looked at beginnings. Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (look at the simple, effective structure, each character introduced in Chapter 1 before they all come together in Chapter 2); Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (so different, with his careful pace and language some found too beautiful, and yet, look, he is also establishing characters who will come together as the book progresses); John Casey's Spartina (his blunt sentences a welcome change, and how succinctly he tells us how much trouble his protagonist Dick Pierce is in when Casey writes, as an aside: "That was when Dick still had his phone.")

What is established in these beginnings? A world. We are submerged in a world.

Perhaps that is what we must do at the beginning of a novel. Create a world.

Even if we aren't really writing the beginning, yet.

40,000 Words in Twelve Weeks a.k.a. Are We Crazy?

2008-10-03T12:25:00.003-04:00

Sept. 29, 2008 -- Yes.
Ready?

The best way to learn how to write is by writing. Any poet, fiction writer, or memoirist will say the same, but for a novelist, this is especially true. To reach a bare minimum of 40,000 words, you must put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, again and again and again.

And this is what we are about to do at a novel writing class at the University of Winchester MA Programme in Creative and Critical Writing. Write.

There are just four students signed up for this class in the south of England. By next week, they'll be bringing into class 3,000 words. I'm in the middle of a novel, so I've promised to edit as many words as they write afresh.

We will not expect beautiful prose, though some beautiful prose will, I suspect, emerge. We will not expect a perfect structure, although structure, once we have a whole, will slowly (or precipitously) take shape. Characters will begin as pale shadows in dark corners, then walk out confidently into the sunshine by word 12, 587 (I predict) and make themselves known. Grand ideas they start with may go by the wayside but be replaced by more subtle, apt themes that they recognize on page 111 and realize that, once they’re done, they will have to imbue into p. 1. The beginning may stick, or it may go. They may know the end and keep to it, or the end may be uncertain until they write it – then change again. And the middle will not likely be the natural progression that they aim for, at least not yet.

But they will not know any of this until they write this lowly, sloppy, feeling-in-the-dark first draft. It will be a wonderful mess.

At the end, students will be marked on a short bit of the novel, which they will polish in January. How sharp their vision may be then! And we will read, read, read to analyze how in the world other novelists do it.

But mostly, we will write. In the words of Roethke,

I learn by going where I have to go.

Zuravleff Asks, 'What If?'

2008-01-10T14:22:00.000-05:00

Jan. 10, 2008 -- The journalist in me can’t do it. The memoirist can’t do it. Even the fiction writer in me cannot recreate the conversation.

Why didn’t we tape the damned thing?

Because the star of the Off the Page launch party at Poets & Busboys in Washington, D.C., was the conversation with writers Mary Kay Zuravleff and Carolyn Parkhurst, as they responded to my questions about quotes in the book, without much idea of what was coming next, and me (I found out later) putting them on the spot: So, Carolyn, how do you see place in your fiction?

There’s a chance to see them both again at Politics and Prose on Friday, Jan. 25, at 7 p.m. along with writers Alice McDermott and Marie Arana.

In the meantime, the ever-energetic Mary Kay has answered a few questions. Zuravleff (who also has her own Web site) is author of two novels, The Bowl Is Already Broken and The Frequency of Souls and the winner of many awards including the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Her frank, down-to-earth and intelligent answers had many of my friends saying afterward—I want to read her book!

I’m going to start with one of my favorite questions to ask other writers—and, when I can bear it, myself.

Carole: Why do you write?
Mary Kay: All my favorite sentences start with “What if?” and my writing is an attempt to follow these hypothetical questions to some satisfying conclusion. For some reason, "what if" is like a fuse that I must chase to see where it leads. I’m still surprised when the fuse leads into a maze or back to the starting point. In other words, the questions that matter provoke novels, lives, families—complex and rather disorderly systems, all.

Carole: The quote from Marie Howe’s poem, “The Meadow,” which you included in your Off the Page bio, is very beautiful. Why do you think it's so important to you? What exactly do you get out of it? The quote is:

"your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words
that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life."

Mary Kay: One of the major paradoxes as a writer is working through years and drafts to get at what you’ve always known. Or, quoting another part of Howe’s poem, “As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them.” How can that be so challenging? For me, make-believe stories about invented characters and imaginary situations scratch an itch that real life can’t reach. I need the pyrotechnics of expression—absurdity, language, structure—to clarify what I can’t quite access.

Carole: Can you talk about your current project?
Mary Kay: Lately, I’ve been writing short stories, and it has been a joy to be confined in the small, tight world of a story. After the unruly orchestral maneuvers of composing a novel, I feel as if I were singing in the shower. One clear voice can echo like crazy, and even the off-key song, lathered up and delivered with bluster, has its charm.

Dec. 11 -- Off and On

2007-12-11T23:04:00.000-05:00

This was not at all the day I planned. But then again, it was.

Yesterday--Dec. 10, 2007, when Off the Page was officially published--was filled with technological error. Or terror.

First, forty-seven emails that I wrote on the plane for sending once back on earth refused to go out on Monday morning. And so I spent hours (yes, hours) copying them into Yahoo’s Web mail, cutting and pasting and reformatting hundreds of e-mail addresses to announce the day's “Off the Page” interview with Marie Arana and Richard Bausch-—the kick-off to the book.

All afluster, I began my washingtonpost.com chat. About fifteen minutes in, I realized my name was showing up instead of Richard Bausch’s. As far as the world knew, the online audience was asking Bausch questions, and I was answering them in crusty-sounding man-speak.

Washington, DC: Why do you write?
Carole Burns: Fast answer: It beats coal mining.

Later, heading off to my friend’s, I realized I had no coins to call her when I reached her Metro station. I dialed collect. When told to hit 1 for instructions in English or 2 for Spanish, I aimed my finger for 1 but slid against 2.

I knew just enough Spanish to say “Carole” when asked my name. But poor Holly took French in high school.

Ring, Ring. “Carole, are you at Friendship Heights?”

“Usted ha alcanzado Verizon Special Services. Una persona trata de alcanzarle hacer--”

“Carole?”

“--una llamada a cobro revertido. Su nombre es Carole. ¿Aceptará usted las cargas? Para aceptar, para decir si o--”

A confused Holly finally cried out: “This is Spanish!”

But then again, the day was perfect. Because behind all this ridiculous confusion—at the day’s center--was what has made Off the Page, for me, such a joy: listening to writers.

Bausch’s name did begin appearing, and Arana’s had been showing up all along. Arana admitted she has to play the fool when writing fiction; Bausch says he writes because he loves it.

It’s best in their words.

Question: Do non-writers enjoy reading what writers say about writing?
Marie Arana: A reader is as much a participant in a book as a writer, I feel. What was it that Alvaro Mutis once said? "To read a book is to be born again. You enter another mind's world and yet you are creating it yourself, in your own imagination."

Which says to me that I would be fascinated in writers' answers about their work, whether or not I were a writer myself. Reading is such a collaborative act, no?

Richard Bausch: Well, I'm not a non-writer (yet--gulp) but I recall that when I was very young and an avid reader and not dreaming I would ever put pencil to paper, I was also completely enthralled by every single comment I ever encountered by a writer about the work. And I never forgot one thing, not one slight dropped comment about the whole thing that I ever heard or read.

Indeed.

The mojitos I had that night, finally celebrating, were fabulous. But not as fitting, not as memorable (especially after the third mojito!) as Marie Arana and Richard Bausch, talking about their art.

Dec. 7, 2007 -- Web site, Live!

2007-12-06T07:40:00.001-05:00

Step 1—The Web site goes live.

Although really, this isn't Step 1 to my first book, but Step 5,352, or something like that, if I had been counting.

Finally, there's a reason to launch http://www.caroleburns.com/.

And where does one begin? At the moment of my father teaching me letters using the looming headlines of The New York Post? At that first child’s poem only-a-mother-could-love about butterflies? At the notebook my junior year high school English teacher had us all keep, which she had us call our “Creative Eye” (or “I,” she told us). Zooming forward a few decades, my first published story in Other Voices?

This book alone has probably taken as many steps: Starting with that slow news day on the washingtonpost.com home page in the summer of 2003, when I began chatting with the Live Online editor, who admitted she was hardly ever able to have authors on the site’s online interviews anymore. “I could do a show for you,” I said.

Two months later, in October 2003, in an interview conducted by telephone in a council flat in Lincoln, England, because I’d been doing a residency in Scotland, Alice McDermott became my first “Off the Page” guest. Within the first few months, I interviewed Martin Amis, Paul Auster, Jhumpa Lahiri. Five months after that, a very savvy DC writer and literary editor (C.M. Mayo, thank you) said to me, It would make a fabulous book. Six months later, I began shopping around for an agent. It took a year and a half and countless revisions to my non-fiction book proposal (using Susan Rabiner’s Think Like Your Editor—another thank you!) I was told one morning: It’s going out the next day.

Norton bought it within the week.

I hadn’t written the book yet.

And so, with much joyfulness, bottles of Prosecco (the cheap person’s champagne, three of them since holding the first copy of the book in my hand two weeks ago), gleeful emails about possible reviews in prestigious magazines (to be mentioned if they ever come through) plans for book store events (Politics and Prose, Jan. 25) and new Live Online discussions ( Ha Jin this week, Marie Arana and Richard Bausch on Dec. 10, Andrea Barrett on Dec. 17), I introduce: Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings and Everything in Between.