Draft No. 4

Time to kill your manuscript?

September 3, 2013 | 15 Comments

There’s a paradox in book-writing. While it’s a true feat just to finish the draft of a book, few rookies and no civilians have a clue how hard it is to make that draft publishable. Yet even when the manuscript is ready, some of the would-be author’s advisors, usually fellow writers—not to mention those he’s pitching, the editors, agents, publishers—will still hate it. Or just be uninterested because it doesn’t do what they need or what they would’ve done. Once technique is under control, which of course is another matter of opinion, loving or hating a book comes down to taste or to preference or to market. Sometimes to character, on both sides of the equation: the writer’s and the reader’s.

And once in a while, because there are so very many ways to go wrong, the writer himself decides to put his manuscript out of its misery, to file it in the darkness under his bed. I’ve heard it said you’re not a true writer until you do that. Give up. Admit defeat. Start something else.

That’s what Dinty W. Moore did with a book he worked on for five years, according to his fascinating essay in a new book, Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, edited by Joy Castro (University of Nebraska Press, 224 pp.). I’ve heard Moore refer to this lost project, or read his references to it, and have always planned to ask him some day what happened. What was the problem he couldn’t solve? He wasn’t a rookie, having published a book of short stories and two nonfiction books, including his very successful The Accidental Buddhist.

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‘Works Cited,’ a stealth memoir

August 27, 2013 | 12 Comments

My summer’s most happy reading surprise was Works Cited, a well-written memoir with a structure both clever and pleasing. Brandon Schrand hit upon the idea to tell his coming-of-age story by listing alphabetically the authors he was reading as he came to manhood, from high school through graduate school. You know, like an MLA Works Cited list. What might have been a story too mundane or too urgent with authorial desire to move us emotionally becomes, instead, a truly affecting stealth memoir by a guy who knows he escaped his fate by the skin of his teeth.

All you really need to know about Schrand, who grew up in the working-class sticks in Idaho, is that his stoner-electrician father’s nickname for him was “Bird-Turd.” He was a goofy kid, a heavy metal punk, and an awful student. But he had one great asset that saved him: he was a reader. Although he blew off assigned books, even in college, from which he dropped out and had to fight his way back, he kept finding great books and reading them. His priorities were often wrong, but they were pure.

Here he is, having blown his last $10 on a collection of Hemingway’s short stories:

“Who was that young man in that coffee shop that afternoon, and what was he feeling? A strange creature, lean and quiet, he is apologetic in his countenance. It’s a tricky business cracking open our younger selves for a peek inside, especially in vulnerable moments . . . There I sat, broke, with a copy of Hemingway’s stories. The college flunky. The dropout. It’s a wonder I bought the book at all. It’s a wonder I took the time to read it. It’s a wonder how I fell into those pages. But I did. First in that coffee shop, and then in the days and weeks and months and years that came afterward.”

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In praise of reading

August 19, 2013 | 9 Comments

Novelist Anakana Schofield’s essay in The Guardian starts with a lament about reporters’ fixation on writers as personalities and about the odd hustling landscape in which writers now dwell—

“These days, an author, especially an unknown author, must—in order to entice any readers to her work who aren’t blood relatives—write endless unpaid blogs, articles and responses for newspapers and magazines and random people creating things in basements. What results is the subsidising of publishers by outsourcing the marketing of the book to the writer, and now and again the subsidising of often giant media corporations, who in times gone by would have had to pay her.”

—and builds to a powerful statement about the primacy of reading:

“There seems to have been a shift from a reading culture to a writing culture, a diminishment of critical space for the contemplation of literature. Writing needs to be discussed and interrogated through reading. If you wish to write well, you need to read well, or at least widely. You certainly need to contemplate reading a book in translation, unlikely to be widely reviewed in newspapers, many of which are too busy wasting space on “how to write” tips and asking about an author’s personal fripperies. It’s a great deal more fulfilling to read and think about a fine book than to attempt to write one.”

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Solnit redux & a sociopath’s story

August 14, 2013 | 10 Comments

My wife and I listened to 2.4 audio books last week as we drove to California on vacation. We put 4,000 miles on our rental car, one way. We saw lovely things, like the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, and the red cliffs of Sedona, Arizona, where we rested up for a day. Then the endless Mojave Desert of Arizona-California caused me to whimper. While it did break my spirit, I dispute my wife’s assertion—however funny her impersonation of me—that I became catatonic as I drove. But look, I’m a once and future southern boy, a child of green and humid places. When the bare earth between plants stretches to more than a few feet, I get queasy.

Anyway, given the vast ranges we traversed in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, you’d think we would have made more of a dent in the pile of audio books I checked out from the library. We started with a short work, David Sedaris’s Holidays on Ice, most of which we’d heard on NPR over years—though I had to wonder if we’d really ever heard all of his famous story about working as a Macy’s elf: like the rest of the collection, it’s hilarious but far sadder and darker than I remembered, maybe an effect of listening to one Sedaris story after another.

The bulk of the trip we spent with the dozen or so CDs of Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which is history for us ordinary folk who haven’t always paid close attention to history—because history sometimes requires that you know more history than you do. Bryson read it himself, and we loved his arch delivery, even if I never could reconcile his ritzy British accent with his photos that show him as the ruddy, beefy man from Iowa that he is. We finished up, driving through California’s fecund central valley, a true agrarian Eden, with Jennifer Egan’s remarkable novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. What a talent she is. One day I’ll finish this book, but I did hear enough to learn that the goons are a wonderful metaphor for aging.

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Solnit’s ‘Faraway Nearby’

August 8, 2013 | 13 Comments

Rebecca Solnit tried to leave home at fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. At last, at age seventeen, her jealous mother and her indifferent father sent her into the world like a girl in a fairy tale:

“For that odyssey my mother would not let me take any of the decent suitcases in her attic but gave me a huge broken one in which my few clothes and books rumbled like dice in a cup. My father gave me a broken travel clock that he said was worth repairing and I kept it for years before I found that it was not.”

The Faraway Nearby opens with 100 pounds of apricots, collected from her ailing mother’s tree, ripening and rotting on Solnit’s floor, a bequest and a burden as if from another fairy tale. The fruit was a story, she explains, and also “an invitation to examine the business of making and changing stories.” So Solnit tells her own story, shows how she escaped it by entering the wider world of others’ stories, and how she changed her story as she better understood her unhappy mother.

What sent her mother’s indifference toward her into permanent rage was when she asked young Rebecca, age 13, for sympathy when she got a lump in her breast, and Rebecca, who hadn’t received much sympathy herself, failed to supply it. With effort, as an adult Solnit realizes that her mother had had a hard life, was trapped in her own story of victimhood, and must’ve cared for her before memory: “She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.”

Out of duty and from solidarity with two of her brothers, Solnit ends up tending her mother through her long decline from Alzheimer’s. The apricots arrive near the end of this sad period, which Solnit terms a serial emergency. Having hooked us with this, her story, Solnit tells us it doesn’t much interest her anymore.

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Ray Bradbury: “Style is truth”

August 3, 2013 | 6 Comments

I’m on the road as I post this, headed for Berkeley, California, where our son is entering graduate school; one of my sisters just moved across the way, to San Francisco. My wife and I are driving cross country from Ohio. An adventure! We’ve stopped for the night in Miami, Oklahoma, which is hot and crowded with casinos. I feel at home, though, because the folks are friendly and because my Mom was from Oklahoma. This afternoon in central Missouri I knew we were getting into the West because when we stopped in the backwater of Buffalo for a soda, I noticed in the McDonald’s a row of stools had real leather kids’ saddles for seats.

We reserved a modest vehicle for this trip, but the guy at the rental company said we’d probably be uncomfortable crossing the desert and might have difficulty getting over the mountains. In fact, he implied, we might die. So we rented, for only $20 more a day, a huge (to us) Lincoln Navigator. It is black, and terrifying. We feel like real Americans at last. But will we be safe in San Francisco ensconced in such an SUV? We look like Secret Service, or drug dealers. Or both.

I’m working on a book review on the road, and meantime here is a summer roundup of stuff I’ve found interesting.

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Taking the risk of being heard

July 30, 2013 | 5 Comments

A traumatized woman and her traumatized dog go for walks. This is the spine of my friend Janice Gary’s new memoir; its many layers make for interesting reading. She’s conveying experience as it unfolds, trying to understand her past, and taking risks in life and in her story’s telling. At first I worried about Gary’s putting her beloved dog under the spotlight with her for most of the book—he’s difficult, and the book’s structure puts relentless narrative pressure on her voice, outlook, and experiences. But Short Leash soon had me collared.

First, the dog. Barney is a big, goofy, smelly, allergic Lab-Rottweiler cross. He was attacked by another dog when he was a pup, and he’s become terribly aggressive to other dogs. But Gary skillfully depicts Barney’s basic good nature and his mellowing as he ages. Gradually I found myself forgiving and then liking him. He’s already an older dog and Gary is in her mid-forties when they venture out. And soon you realize what a brave act it is, beyond his aggression, for her simply to take him for a walk.

Once ambitious, artistic, and headstrong, Gary was raped when she was 19, and has spent too many years feeling scared. So the book’s major setting, a lovely park on Chesapeake Bay near her suburban Maryland home, seems safe until you look at it through her eyes. Those lonely paths. The pools of dark shade. Other dogs that Barney might attack. The mysterious bend of a trail into the woods. That rustling in the bushes. We gradually learn, too, of an earlier trauma, the suicide of her manic-depressive father when she was 15.

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