The literate voices in my head
Having expelled some pent-up frustration in previous posts, I’ve found myself feeling a bit more balanced lately. It seems that venting really is healthy; who’d have guessed? Work on the novel has resumed at a much better pace, though I find myself struggling with a new dilemma: literary schizophrenia.
The novel’s taking a lot of hits in terms of stylistic integrity. I am veering from point of view to point of view, changing tone as I please and whilst I’m sure that it’s there somewhere, I’m not at all sure that I’d recognize my theme if I sat on it.
I don’t really see this as a problem, though – writing for me has always been an evolving process. I may have an outline, a synopsis and even the will to see that plan through, but I am always noticing things about my writing after I’ve written them. Not before. A delayed understanding of your own writing, if you will.
It’s a bit like picking up some bizarro short story you wrote in high school and reading it through. Once you’re done cringing at the poor grammar and horribly cliched characters, you’ll come away with a sense of retrospective awe – “Oh, that’s what I was trying to say”.
Anyway, as I was saying; the novel’s going through a bit of a schizophrenic phase which I’ve heard is relatively normal and only healthy. After all, I can always go back and edit the rest to conform to whatever style or tone I eventually decide on.
Or I could just submit it as is and change the title to “I need mood-stabilizing medication”. Either way, I figure as long as the novel is still in my hard drive(and half a dozen USB back-ups) and not in a publishing agent’s in-box, there’s little point in forcing myself to abide by any self-imposed standards. There will be plenty of time to review it, muck about with it and doll the thing up. Until it’s finished, my primary concern should be finding what it is I really want to say and how I really want to say it – not what I may have thought when I first drew up the idea.
In the meantime, I will continue to write incongruous and disjointed text. I apologize to those of you who actually receive this work in progress and ask that you bear with me as I search for my personal Holy Grail.
Poe’s woes
On occasion Finnish newspapers trickle through the diplomatic courier mail, eventually making their way to my desk. They’re not very interesting, but they do provide a slightly delayed view of what has happened in my home country. Fortunately for anyone reading this, I won’t share the details of Finnish current events because to be perfectly frank, it’s a terribly boring place full of depressing people.
Instead I want to write about an article I read in a paper last night. The article was a sort of retrospective review of Edgar Allan Poe’s only published novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The reviewer naturally praised Poe’s mastery of the short story format, but went on to remark how Poe’s novel was so stylistically inconsistent and generally incoherent that it would never have been published had it been submitted today.
Granted, Poe himself called the novel a mistake and a joke, but despite that, it reminded me of another article I read, where an author slightly altered Jane Austen’s works including her landmark novel, Pride and Prejudice and submitted them to a number of publishers. Not only were none of the submissions considered for publication, but apparently only one of the publishers caught the flagrant plagiarism. I should note for those not interested in clicking the link, that the novels were submitted only to prove a point.
These are, of course, only two examples, but significant because they reference two of the most celebrated writers of all time.
As a writer hoping to one day be published, articles like these naturally discourage me. If Poe or Austen couldn’t get published today, what chance do I have? Such is the nature of the beast; when you spend so much time isolated from the rest of the world, you end up thinking only of yourself. But let’s expand this a little. Let’s look at what these articles are saying one more time.
Edgar Allan Poe and Jane Austen wouldn’t get published today.
Edgar Allan Poe. Jane Austen. I’m pretty sure if Dostoevsky submitted Crime and Punishment to an editor, it’d come back with a letter requesting a more specific genre and more involving dialog in the first two pages. I am relatively certain that Fowles’ attempts at peddling The Magus would end in tears and demands for less linguistic posturing and more action. I am positive that Bulgakov would end up drowning in form letters informing him that Random Publisher X is not looking for the sort of insane shit to be found in Master and Margarita.
How much great literature is being lost because of the publishing industry? How many novels that would have inspired generations have been tossed in the bin, abandoned in antiquated hard drives or burned symbolically because of the dollar-driven motivations of the industry that supervises what is or isn’t worth publishing?
Of course, this is only tapping the issue of what doesn’t get published that potentially should. What about all that which does please the blinkered representatives of the omnipotent publishing industry? Their works are torn this way and that, rearranged and reorganized until whatever resemblance they once bore to the original work is superficial at best. How many lives are you willing to destroy to please your demographic, you ravenous beast of an industry?! Insert a shaking fist here, if it helps you understand my melodramatic intent better.
I suppose it’s a bit one-sided to say that the publishing industry is solely to blame, however. Of course they have to make money, otherwise they can’t stay afloat and keep publishing books. Of course this isn’t a new phenomenon, books have been rejected by publishers since the printing press was invented. As I mentioned in the previous post, this is a business, after all – businesses have to make money.
Perhaps we are to blame. Perhaps it’s all of us, harboring delusions of literary grandeur who have pushed the industry to their current standards. Perhaps it’s every Tom, Dick and Harry writing a novel and shoving it into every available agent’s inbox that has made the selection process so time-consuming that they’ve no choice but to abide by those standards. Hey, I can understand that. I think there’s a whole lot of shit out there that shouldn’t have been published. I wonder if one day someone will come up with a calculation for how much meaningful writing has been lost to the droves of urban fantasy writers taking valuable publishing quotas? Yes, I really hate urban fantasy. It’s a stupid fucking genre and people who write it should have their breathing licenses revoked. It’s never too late for a mid-life abortion.
But hey! That’s a whole other rant, and for all my vitriolic posturing I recognize that there are people out there who enjoy it. I don’t, but then I’m a giant prick who doesn’t enjoy a whole hell of a lot that doesn’t have oodles of nicotine, caffeine or sex in it. I’m sure there are people out there who feel equally wronged by historical fiction(blasphemers!).
Perhaps it is people like me, though. I’ll eventually finish my book and send it off. I’ll probably end up sending it to a lot of different people before getting an answer I like, or alternately getting enough recommendations to eat my crappy manuscript that I’ll oblige such a request. Perhaps it’s people like me. Perhaps it’s people like you. Like us.
Perhaps more of us should get off our self-aggrandizing asses and get a real job. Perhaps more of us should just stop. Stop writing. Stop dreaming.
Or perhaps, somewhere along the way, the world lost the plot. Who the fuck is writing it, anyway?
I bet it’s some urban fantasy writer.
A cure for compulsion
Have you ever taken a look at the amount of self-help literature available to writers? Whether on the internet, in bookstores or in your local daily paper, it seems you can’t bend over without having someone shove a compendium of writing do’s and don’ts in your face. As an avid surfer(of the world wide web) I barely manage to sneak into my e-mail inbox before being bombarded by some asinine twat and his patented 12 step guide to literary immortality.
I’ll confess: I’ve read a few of them.
Of course I have. Who doesn’t have doubts when they’re starting out? I don’t claim to know any more about this whole writing gig than the next schmuck. I haven’t taken a creative writing class since high school, for God’s sake. I haven’t had “face time” with any successful authors. I’ve never sat in a circle with other writers discussing our respective work. I’m flying blind out here. It’s a pretty scary prospect. After all, it is a very competetive field.
More than that, it’s a business. As with all businesses, there are rules. There are do’s and don’ts. There are accepted methods, tried-and-true models and professionals. There has to be; writing is a money-making endeavor. There’s a lot of money on the move. Just look at J.K. Rowling and her fifty thousand billion hundred million dollars. Make no mistake, writing is a business.
But should it be? Of course it is, but should it be? Has it really come to this? To lectures on how to submit your manuscript, to ‘ways to optimize your chances’, to self-indulgent self-help guides? To do’s and don’ts? To checklists and submission rules, to diplomas in creative writing, to support groups for those that don’t make it?
I know I’m new at this. I know I’m naive about the realities of writing. I don’t know how to write a novel in 12 steps. I don’t know what constitutes an ‘engaging and interesting’ beginning, which is apparently all agents and publishers read these days. I don’t know how to balance my narrative. I have a minor stroke every night as I reflect on all that I don’t know. And you know what? I’m glad.
Don’t get me wrong; of course I want to succeed. Who doesn’t? I want to write a great novel and have it sell a trillion copies. I want to out-sell the Bible. I want to write the new Bible. But I’m glad I don’t know what to do and what not do, because God knows that enough of life is restricted by rules and guidelines without having to worry about what someone arbitrarily assigned as the acceptable norms of ‘creative’ writing. If you want more action in the first chapter, then you fucking write it.
As long as I’m pissing and moaning, I’ll add something else I hate. I hate restrictions on blogging. I hate that I shouldn’t write about something I don’t like, because it creates a ‘negative image’. “People respond poorly to negativity”, they say. So fucking what? Should I only write about how the garden is blooming during this lovely Damascene summer(it is quite nice, actually)? Whatever happened to writers being regularly institutionalized assholes nobody but their masochistic spouses can stand?
Just so that we’re clear, I think a lot of the literature floating around out there is complete and utter shit. I think you could pretty safely burn 90% of the books published each year and not lose any significant contributions to the world. Should a novel of my own writing ever be released into the wild, I’m sure you could add that to the pile. I think every single urban fantasy novel in the world should be shoved down their authors’ throats while on fire. I think anything sold in an airport bookstore should be dropped from 30,000 feet with the rest of the ejected waste product. I hope the lot falls on an urban fantasy writer’s home and breaks their pink Macbook.
I hate people who think that saying that you hate something means that there’s something wrong. “Hate is such a strong word,” they say. Okay. And? Why shouldn’t I be allowed to feel strongly about something? Why should I have to tip-toe around the things I ‘really don’t quite agree with completely’ when I could just be honest with you and tell you I hate them? It’s not like I hate babies or puppies. I actually quite like puppies.
I hate people like me, who make such a big stink about being ‘writers’ when they’re just another Joe behind a keyboard with delusions of grandeur. In fact, I think I’ll stop now.
And yes, I do feel better now.
History is written by just about anyone
Hot on the heels of the previous post, I give you a query regarding historical fiction.
Those familiar with my current project know that it is a historical fiction novel, centered around a specific period of the Crusades and dealing with a decidedly Frankish(European) view of things. When I first set out to write the novel, I had visions of telling the history of certain institutions and places through characters who weren’t very central to the story itself, acting more as observers than participants. It was above all the history that fascinated and continues to fascinate me.
As I slowly hammered the novel’s outline into some form of acceptable shape, I quickly found my original concept flying out the window. My characters had become central – the novel was no longer about history, it was about them. By that time I was okay with it, as I’d grown rather fond of the fictitious buggers anyway, but a part of me resented the way they now overshadowed the historical backdrop of their misadventures.
Along comes a fantastic account of Damascus(there’s a link in the post below) and its history comes alive before me. I begin to see a way of writing my own version of its history without involving characters who are too…meddlesome. A mute protagonist, for example, would be a suitable mouthpiece for providing a view of the historical events of this fascinating city without becoming too involved in the daily drama that tends to fill our lives. I mean if the asshole can’t talk, he can’t screw up my story, right?
Then again, there are a million books out there which tell the story of Damascus and every other city in the world from every imaginable angle. I don’t want to write another one, I’m not interested in just the cold, hard facts – I’m interested in the motives of the people we know only from secondhand accounts, I’m interested in the details that historians omit in favor of a more holistic view of things, I’m interested in the life between the pages of history.
How do you balance the historical and the fiction in historical fiction? Which should be given priority, and by what margin?
It seems a difficult question to answer, even from examples that already exist. One of my greatest influences is undoubtedly Mika Waltari, a Finnish writer who wrote some of the most engaging historical fiction I have ever had the pleasure to read. Initially reading him purely for his masterful prose(it doesn’t translate very well, unfortunately – Finnish is an incredibly rich language), I really became interested in the possibilities of historical fiction when I did some research on the subjects he’d written about. Every detail I found in his books checked out: something I fear I have been unable to replicate.
Regardless, he was undoubtedly a master writer and I am a mere chick in the nest. An unhatched egg, actually. I’m not setting out to copy him, but I would like to know how he managed to weave the history and the narrative so seamlessly and brilliantly. I take a great deal more creative license than he ever did, and it’s something which pisses me off to no end; I want to educate while entertaining, amuse while informing and most of all tell a damn good story.
It’s funny, when I first decided to write historical fiction I thought it’d be the easiest possible genre. ‘Your world is already there’, I told myself. ‘How hard can filling it with characters be’? Not very. It’s getting the details and the balance right that’s bloody difficult. Oh, and the research. Who ever knew writing would require so much reading?
Destruction by distraction?
How much is too much?
As I plod through the tiresome mud that is the act of actually writing down the stories in my head, I find myself wishing for a new project. It’s not that I dislike the one I’m currently working on – far from it – it’s just that I find myself excited over so many different topics and I feel that if I don’t immediately start work on them, they’ll disappear forever.
Not a very realistic fear in light of my chosen genre being historical fiction, but still. What if I forget?!
This post is brought to you by the Dover republication of H.A.R. Gibb’s excellent translation of Ibn al-Qalanisi’s The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, which is a firsthand account of the Crusades as seen from the central vantage point of Damascus. The chronicle includes a great deal of the intra-Arab machinatinos of the time, and the sheer magnitude of duplicity and intrigue that was carried out then has set a million stories alight in my wee brain.
Would starting work on such a project now, before I finish the previous, jeopardize my focus and bog me down? Would I end up with two unfinished projects instead of one? Or should I seek another project to provide myself with an occasional distraction from Saint John?
I know many struggling writers manage a full-time job, write short stories or articles and probably cure cancer while writing their novels, which makes me think I’m just a whiny bastard. On the other hand, if I’m concerned about losing focus then that’s probably some sort of a hint that to undertake a second project at this point would be detrimental.
I already write short stories from time to time, though lately I haven’t found myself inspired by anything enough to pen one; would this be an acceptable substitute? Why the hell isn’t there a manual for this shit? If someone recommends a Novel Writing for Dummies book or something, I will trek to whichever corner of the Earth they inhabit to personally strangle them.
Voice the voiceless
I just got off the phone with my brother, whom I’d reluctantly sent the first chapter of my novel to some time ago(he insisted and I was running out of excuses). He said he’d read it, so I naturally asked him what he thought with the kind of feigned disinterest any enterprising writer does. He gave me an odd answer, probably the strangest response I’ve heard thus far. There are too many words, he said.
I thought: huh? It’s the beginning of a book, there are supposed to be a lot of words. Then he explained that it sounded fanciful – as opposed to the more natural tone of (for instance) this blog. I immediately defended my baby by proclaiming it a first draft(which it isn’t) and claiming I’ve every intention of revising it(which I do), whilst mentally preparing myself to mentally blot the conversation with images of robot ninjas or something else really cool.
Alas, my abilities to deceive myself have waned over time, and I found myself wondering if he was right. Gripped by insecurity, I raced to my laptop and opened the first chapter: too many words. Too fanciful. Then again, I thought, this is historical fiction. A story about 12th century Jerusalem shouldn’t read like a 21st century blog, should it?
No, of course not. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that the writing I see in that chapter looks unfamiliar. It lacks whatever it is that readable text has – probably readability itself. Of course it’ll be revised and I’m sure that in the months to come will end up looking nothing like it does now, but all that aside the brief conversation raised a question to my mind; when the hell am I going to find ‘my voice’? What the hell is a ‘voice’? I went through puberty once, I don’t want to go through it again.
So while I await for my literary balls to drop, what to do? Well, there’s nothing to do but press on. I guess the best way to spur my hibernating hormones is to keep doing what I’m doing and hope that the issue resolves itself sooner rather than later. That doesn’t mean that I can’t look back at those first chapters every now and then and agonize over my inability(I swear I’m not going to revise anything until it’s done, D) to tamper with it.
I can draw some consolation from the fact that the first six chapters of the book are already slated for complete rewrites. I’ve also changed the perspective and tone of the novel from chapter eight onwards, and it feels much more fluid now that I can write it in a style that is more…me. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, but I think I’m starting to get there.
Somewhere in the distance, an ageing Eddie Vedder prompts the masses; “voice the voiceless!”
PS: Thanks for the honesty, bro – don’t worry, I don’t get discouraged by criticism. I need it a lot more than I need someone to tell me that it’s great if it’s not.
PPS: Your kids are ugly!
A prayer for pestilence
Here’s a theory:
A writer’s ability to write anything even remotely interesting is inversely related to the soundness of their body and/or mind.
The thought occurred to me today as I scrapped the nth version of chapter 9 and roughly fifteen thousand attempts at writing a new short story. Every word I put down felt forced. Every sentence sounded contrived. Every paragraph stared back at me with the sort of disingenuous pretension that would have made David Lynch proud. On second thought, I should pitch all those shitty bits and pieces to his agent. He’d probably turn them into a seven-hour feature film. “Lynch has done it again,” the critics would say, “I’d rather get punched in the face than write another letter’s psychotic imagery and incomprehensible metaphors made me claw my eyes out in wonderment.”
But I digress. As I wondered as to why I wasn’t coming up with anything, I perused through one of my many archives of crappy fiction to bother publishers with and a thought occurred to me. Every one of those stories is based on a premise I came up when in some altered state of mind; sick, drunk, hung over, angry, sad or even just plain tired.
Ergo, I am incapable of writing anything genuine or inspired because there’s nothing wrong. Life’s pretty peachy, and as we should all know from our angst-ridden teenage years, art is pain, man. Happy people don’t create, they’re just…happy. How boring is that?
In an attempt to immediately rectify the situation and get my creative juices flowing again, I will now indulge in a two-week heroin binge followed by a visit to a leper colony and copious amounts of casual sex with clingy and emotionally vulnerable women. If that doesn’t get me writing something decent, I don’t know what will.
What to write?
It’s funny how difficult an innocent question like ‘what to write’ can be when you sit down and try to think of some profound way to answer it. I suppose the truth is that there is no profound answer; you should write about what you feel comfortable writing about. Writers are as kaleidoscopic in nature as people are. Not every writer has to strive to write the Great American Novel(what the hell is that, anyway?). Not every writer should strive to write the Great American Novel(seriously, I don’t understand it. Maybe you have to be Great. Or American). I know I’m not trying to write anything ground-breaking or revolutionary. I just want to tell a story.
That said, I do think that there is literature that isn’t worth writing. I do think that there needs to be a ‘point’. I’m all for the random placement of letters and sentences, but if it isn’t saying something – if it isn’t woth anything to the person who reads it(note: this can be the writer, too) then was it worth it to write it?
I think the best advice I can offer on what to write could be summarized thusly: write about the world and write about God, write about everything you wish both would understand. I admit it’s a bit pretentious, but then again so am I!
How to write: the revenge
I was trying to explain why it’s so bloody difficult to write to an acquaintance recently, and it occurred to me that I should probably revise my stance on the answer to the question presented in the title. As I was attempting to verbalize the infinite problems involved in translating an image to text, I offered the following statement: it’s not a question of motivation; even though I am terminally lazy I genuinely want to write. Constantly. I’d write twenty-four hours a day if I could. I’d write while eating. I’d write while shaving. I’d write while on the toilet. I’d write while…well, maybe not then, but you get the point.
It’s a question of what to write, and how to write it. The what has been neatly wrapped up, thanks to the interior designer’s nightmare that is an obsession and a million multicolored post-its. I have an outline, I have my characters, I know what I want them to do and where I want the story to go. It’s not the what.
The how is another matter entirely. Even though I have a perfectly clear idea of what I want to happen in a particular chapter or scene and even though I can even visualize it with the high-definition technicolor screen that is my occasionally functional mind, putting that image to words can be incredibly frustrating.
If you cannot capture what you see – if you cannot describe it competently enough to translate the emotions you evoke in yourself when you picture it – then you might as well just let it go. It’s a matter of trying and trying and trying.
To provide an example: I had to take a short break from writing recently to entertain the guests that were streaming in and out of our house, which was admittedly a welcome hiatus from the laptop. After they left, I found myself sitting in front of my dear old Sony with a sense of abject dread. I’d lost it. I didn’t know how to go on. I’d just finished congratulating myself for finishing the first third of my novel, and now I didn’t know how to pick it back up.
I tried. I wrote chapter 7 despite hating what I was putting down. I edited it. I revised it. It still looked like something out of a sixth grader’s creative writing exercise. I put chapter 7 aside and skipped ahead to chapter 8. I wrote it. I scrapped it. I re-wrote it. I re-scrapped it. I couldn’t sleep. I could eat though, I never understood why people can’t eat because of something. I mean sleep is one thing, but food? Come on.
Anyway, it wasn’t until I’d tossed half a dozen drafts out the window that I finally stopped caring about my form enough to try something new: I changed the point of view of the novel. Suddenly it worked. Now I’m writing again, it’s flowing like I know it should when I know I’m doing it right.
So I’ve got six chapters in one perspective, one chapter I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot thesaurus and one budding chapter in an entirely different perspective. And many miles to go before I sleep.
Just how easy did you think it was supposed to be?
Book Review: The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
In the interest of diversifying my ‘blogfolio’ (oh I kill me) and to share another aspect of my writing process, I thought I might start a new category: reviews. Specifically, book reviews. Even more specifically, historical book reviews. Even more…no, I’m done. Anyway, as those familiar with my project will know, I am writing a historical fiction book about the Crusades, focusing around the specific period of 1165-1188 AD. Whilst I am by no means attempting to write a history book, nor do I have any pretensions about my knowledge of the period being anywhere near deep enough to warrant such confusion, I do hope to capture some of the aspects of that period which enthralled me deeply enough to write about it in the first place.
This obviously requires research. In order to write about the 12th century in a credible manner, I have to know at least a little bit about what life was like then, who the major players were and so forth. I did have some knowledge of the period before attempting to write about it, but found my reserves decidedly lacking as it came time to provide examples of daily life, the social status of the varying ethnic minorities of Jerusalem or even what diseases might have been particularly prevalent in those days, and how they were treated(for example).
I’ve read quite a bit since then, and as I was recently brought back some tremendously fascinating books from Beirut(Damascus tends to be a little shy on English literature, and my Arabic is far from sufficient to peruse the selection available here) I thought it might be both fun and educational to share my thoughts on some of the opuses about the period. In this first installment of my reviews, I shall provide a brief overview of Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, published by Schocken Books in 1989. Click on the book cover to find it at amazon.com.
Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes is not your ordinary history book. The first thing any reader will note is the complete absence of the footnotes, references and bibliographical notes which usually typify any historical opus. The second is undoubtedly its almost prosaic narrative, derived from a skillful mixture of the author’s own commentary and the verbatim retelling of his sources. Maalouf’s foreword gives the reader plenty of warning for the specific style of his delightfully unorthodox(by Western standards) compilation of historical accounts, proclaiming his book an attempt to tell the story of the Crusades(1099-1291 AD) through the eyes of contemporary Arabic sources.
There is no doubt that, due to the obvious bias of the sources used, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes is not suitable as a novice reader’s introduction to the Crusades. On the other hand, one should consider the unspoken bias of most western accounts of the Crusades – ‘Frankish’ sources can rarely be accused of any amount of objectivity and The Crusades Through Arab Eyes would provide an excellent companion to any traditional Western account of the Crusades.
Maalouf’s work does not need to be read as a history book, however – it is a tremendously entertaining read, even when taken out of the admittedly dry category of history books. Maalouf has transcribed his considerable number of sources into a very cohesive narrative, causing none of the literary discord typically found in works using multiple sources. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes provides both a holistic overview of the Arab response to the arrival of Frankish Crusaders and a detailed account of smaller, almost insignificant events which provide welcome relief from the barrage of information a reader is usually subjected to in a historical account.
Provided one comprehends the limitations of a work using solely ‘one-sided’ sources, Maalouf’s work stands as a uniquely comprehensive insight into the Arab mindset from their surprised reactions to the First Crusade to their eventual victory over the Frankish presence in the Levant.
Highly recommended!
