Stories Goes Kindle

The Stories book has gone Kindle and, truth to tell, I’ve mixed feelings about that.  Books as objects—with pages that turn, that can be stuffed into the meshed pockets of backpacks, that show the wear and tear of earnest reading—these I treasure.  And have since I first worried my Dick & Jane reader to pieces.

Nothing calms like being among books—in bookstores, libraries, in my modest studio apartment.  All those stories, great thoughts, and comforting humor.  I’ve likely bought, sold, borrowed, and lent more books than is rational.  Then of course, I went and wrote one.  And hope to write another.  And maybe even a third.

Aye, and there’s the rub.  For as a book’s author—at least once it’s out the door and on a shelf in one of those bookstores and libraries—I’m thinkin’ “royalties,” I’m thinkin’ payment for my efforts.  For as I tell my writing clients who want to write books:  Be prepared.  It’s a slog.  

So a person can’t help but think they should be compensated at the end of that, and maybe more than the 6% they signed on for.  And that’s where Kindle comes in, and the concomitant mixed feelings.  For with that format, my royalties jump considerably.  Maybe not so much that I can say I make a living from being a writer.  Besides, I am a teacher who writes, not a writer who teaches.  I’d be bereft without the teaching.

But, still, that jump?  It calms in a very different way.

A Sliver of Ice in the Heart

Graham Greene has been quoted as saying that writers have—or must have—“ a sliver of ice in the heart.”   It sounds ominous, but all it really means is that writers use the material from their lives in their work, whether fiction, poetry, personal essay, or memoir.  In doing so, they stand a bit apart from their lives, always observing, thinking about how their experiences might be transformed into something artful.  

This reminds me of what I once read about James Thurber who, while at a cocktail party, stood alone by the hors d’oeuvre table, looking out onto the assembled guests.  Just looking and listening.  His wife allegedly came up to him and loudly whispered, “Thurber.  Quit writing!” 

To me, this all connects in some way to what Vivian Gornick has to say about the “detached narrator” in her book The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative:  “The voice I lived with—whiney; grating; accusatory—could not be the voice I wrote with.  Our detached narrator becomes the instrument of our illumination.”

Gornick describes that detached narrator as also a reliable one, and as I tell my writing students, all readers want to be in the hands of a reliable narrator, one who is detached enough from the experience to gain meaning from it.  Once that happens, she can then share that meaning with her readers.  

This is especially true when writing about personal experiences.   I refer to that “meaning” as the “what about it?”  In effect, we as readers say to the writer, nice story, but what about it?  Why should I care?  It’s up to our detached narrator to discover the answer to that question.  It is in that process of discovery that the writer-narrator becomes reliable, someone we trust to illuminate something important for us.

How To Get a Writing Gig

Easy, show up with some beer.

People who know me know my fondness for beer, preferably lager, chilled, and straight from the bottle.  I’ve written about the story of beer for this blog, and about its relationship to the invention of writing.   And so I was pleased to learn recently of yet another connection between beer and writing.

From the November 9 issue of The Writer’s Almanac:

The first issue of Rolling Stone was published on November 9, 1967. It was started by 21-year-old Jann Wenner, who dropped out of Berkeley and borrowed $7,500 from family members and from people on a mailing list that he stole from a local radio station, and with that money he managed to put together a magazine. The cover of the first issue featured John Lennon, and in it, Wenner wrote, "Rolling Stone is not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces." He printed 40,000 copies, and 34,000 were returned unsold. But soon Rolling Stone had a devoted group of readers, partly because there were some great writers there. Probably the most famous of these journalists was Hunter S. Thompson, who showed up at Jann Wenner's office in 1970 with a case of beer and an offer to write for Rolling Stone. [emphasis mine] The next year, he serialized Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the magazine's pages. Today Rolling Stone has a circulation of about 1.4 million.

 

 

It's All in the Art

From a recent NYT review of Mary Karr's latest memoir Lit:

"Lit is a story of addiction and recovery, by now familiar in outline from the many A.A.-like autobiographies produced during the memoir craze of the late ’90s. Whereas many of these lesser efforts were propelled by the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art, Ms. Karr’s own work demonstrates that candor and self-revelation only become literature when they are delivered with hard-earned craft, that the exposed life is not the same as the examined one."

Or as British writer V.S. Pritchett said about the memoir form:  "It's all in the art.  You get no credit for living."

WORD DRUNK

The other day, while making lunch and listening to the radio—a program on Middle East politics—the guest, whose name I never got, used the adjective “pusillanimous” when describing John Kerry’s position on the topic under discussion.

I was startled—even if this was NPR—that this word fell so easily and naturally out of the guest’s mouth.  I stopped what I was doing and went straight to the first of my three reference books, The Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus (2^nd edition) to look up the word’s meaning, though I’d guessed at it from the context within which it was used.

In the Oxford, there were only two listings for pusillanimous: lacking courage and timid.   Oops, but then just three words down, I saw the word “pustule,” whose sound has always intrigued me.  It also puts me in mind of the Black Death, with which I am slightly obsessed.  (Really, just last night I watched a DVD about it.)        

I'm also obsessed—and more than slightly—with words, which was why doing dictionary work as a college freshman kept me up most of the night.  For on the way to looking up, say, pusillanimous, I'd get waylaid in the D's (diffident) or F's (flotsam) or surely the L's (lobelia).

But I’ve made progress since then, I think, so I didn’t tarry long on pustule, but went straight to my second reference book, the large and unwieldy Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Second Edition) which sits on a built-in dresser in my walk-in closet.  It’s pretty heavy, but at chest-height it’s easy to flip open, which I did—and paused but a second at “piddle”—the meaning of which seemed momentarily apt :“to spend time in a wasteful, trifling, or ineffective way; dawdle (often fol. by around).”

Indeed.

But I quickly quit piddling around and pushed on through the “P’s”—pusillanimous being quite toward the end.  Once there I was rewarded with a more extended definition of the word, and hence a more nuanced one.  In addition to lacking courage and timid, pusillanimous means lacking resolution; cowardly; faint-hearted.  And there were synonyms: timorous; fearful; frightened.

Next stop was my third reference book, The Oxford Pocket American Thesaurus of Current English, and even more pusillanimous synonyms, including “lily-livered, chickenhearted, spineless, and craven (and it took just a second for me to spy two pustule synonyms I rather liked: boil and blister).

Finally, I felt sated.

Well, not quite.  I went on the internet, to my latest discovery,  dictionary.com.  This site searches several on-line dictionaries, including The Etymology Dictionary, which I refuse to bookmark, for reasons that should be obvious by now.

At any rate, dictionary.com didn’t have anything new to add, though it did suggest “related words”: poor-spirited and unmanly, both of which sound less like timid and faint-hearted and more like something else.

Now, though, I was sated.  Exhausted, actually.

P.S.  (Before leaving dictionary.com, I just had to check on pustule.  A find!  Here it is used as a metaphor: "a cool glimpse of green between hot pustules of sooty sprawl" (Nicholas Proffitt).

And who exactly is Nicolas Proffitt?  And whence the quote?  Sorry, you’ll have to discover that on your own.