David Foster Wallce

If you haven't read the posthumous profile of David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker, you must. It is so beautiful and touching, and it really captures just how crazy-making it can be like to be a writer. I was scared to see how much I related and empathized to his struggles.

My favorite line of the article:
“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.”

That's exactly why I read--and write.

RIP, DFW.

Take my breath away

The highest level of writing, in my experience, is that which takes my breath away. Literally--the words, sentence, idea makes me gasp and forget to breathe for a moment. It doesn't happen often, so I thought I'd share a paragraph that did it for me. It's from an essay in the New York Times' Sunday Magazine by Bernard Cooper:

"The only story I know is the one about Brian dying....It’s as if we met so we could be together when he dies, paid the mortgage so we could be together when he dies, sustained ourselves with food and love and hard work so we’d one day come to the realization that everything up to this point was a prologue. The story has started here, now, when time is finite."

Beautiful, no?

Writing resources: New Finds

A few writing resources I wanted to share with you all:

1. Coffee House for Writers. I was aware of this group a while back, and then they fell off my radar. But I came across them today, and their newsletter about fiction writing caught my eye. I liked their selection of articles, which cover things like writing flash fiction and promoting your novel.

2. Review Fuse. I haven't tried this personally, but it's a neat concept: You can submit your work to this web site, and it matches you up with writers of similar skill levels who will critique your work. You critique others' work as "pay back". As far as I can tell, it's completely free.



3. Funds for Writers. I get the weekly e-newsletter, which lists publications seeking submissions, grants, and writing jobs. I've found some interesting publication through it.

Good links, Fun photos

I wanted to share some interesting stories about writing I've come across recently, as well as some photos of my insanely cute new dog, Rufus. (He's the gray one--Chloe is our black lab, whom we've had for 3 years.)





Last night, I heard a great piece on NPR about creativity. It was a speach by Carol Becker, Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts. She talked about living the artist life--with all the fears and loneliness that can come along with it. One of my favorite parts was when she talked about how important it is for artists to play--to let themselves get immersed in something that interests them, even if it might not seem like something that will pay dividends in the near future. She talked about a student traveling (to the Mid East, I believe) who got obsessed with the many shades of gold used in the regional archictecture. He spent the whole trip photographing examples of gold, and I'm sure he gained a sense of the depth of color that he couldn't get any other way. I find myself doing this in more literary ways when I can get obsessed with the root of a word, or when I can read a novel or short story again and again, always finding something new to marvel at.

Dean Becker also talked about how perfectionism can just kill an artist, so I was intrigued when I saw this article about perfectionism in the Boston Globe this morning. Though I'm certainly not as bad as some of the perfectionists profiles, I do have my share of perfectionist tendencies. I really liked this analogy: Say you pay $2 for five minutes at a do-it-yourself carwash, and clean away about 80 percent of your car's dirt. That makes sense. Then you pay another $2 for a second round, and clean away another 10 percent. Your returns are diminishing. Then another $2, which yields only about 5 percent more. At some point, though having a clean car is a fine goal, you are clearly wasting your time and money.

And lastly, an interesting article on the copyright issues that are arising for the Kindle because it allows users to listen to e-books aloud--and it isn't paying writers or publishers for audio rights.

Happy publishing news

Not about me, unfortunately! But I do like to share good news even when it happens to strangers, in this case a Canadian writer who self-published his novel after not being able to land an agent or publisher. He recently won Canada's most prestigious award--and $10,000!

Check out the details here.

Some interesting tidbits

I don't have much to report from my own world of writing--just finishing up my final revisions on my thesis (whoo hoo!). But I do have some links I'd like to share:

• This NY Times article announces the fact that Nabokov's son is going to publish his father's last, unfinished work--against his father's wishes. It made me wonder--what would I do and what would I want done?

I think I would publish the work if I were the son. It just seems a crime to not let anyone see it, as long as people know not to judge it as if it were a finished work. If it were me, I would probably be OK with something unfinished being published under those
circumstances. But if someone were to publish diaries or something of mine that I told them not to because of their private nature, I would come back from the grave and haunt
whoever made them public. Which reminds me to burn all diaries myself before I die.

• Another interesting NY Times article, this one discussing the state of the literature and books, and the impact of MFA programs and self publishing on them.Two quotes I found most interesting from the article:

Mark McGurl, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of a forthcoming book on the impact of creative writing programs on
postwar American literature, [says] that writing programs have helped expand the literary universe, “American literature has never been deeper and stronger and more various than it is now,” McGurl said in an e-mail message. Still, he added, “one could put that more pessimistically: given the manifold distractions of modern life, we now have more great writers working in the United States than anyone has the time or inclination to read.”

I feel like McGurl's take on the state of books in America is realistic. Another quote-- this one I do not agree with:

In “So Many Books,” [Gabriel] Zaid playfully writes that “if a mass-market paperback costs $10 and takes two hours to read, for a minimum-wage earner the time spent is worth as much as the book.” But for someone earning around $50 to $500 an hour, “the cost of buying and reading the book is $100 to $1,000” — not including the time it takes to find out about the book and track it down.

If you measure your reading time in terms of how much money/time it "costs" to get through a book, I feel sorry for you. Reading is about personal fulfilment and enjoyment, and cannot be measured that way.

• And finally, a link to the ever inspiring Poet Mom, who posted a great video of a roundtable discussion with three writers about characterization in their work.
  

Breaking up over books

This essay from the NY Times will make book lovers smile. It's about how we judge potential loves by their book knowledge/choices. Though the idea that people would only read/admit to reading books that might make them look good to suitors strikes me as very sad, and makes me glad that A) I'm not single and B) I don't live in New York. The second assertion may not be fair--since the article focuses on New York it's only natural that the people admitting to altering their tastes would also be from New York. But having grown up on Long Island and having friends in the city, I feel qualified to say that Manhattan is a much more judgmental place than the rest of the world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/books/review/Donadio-t.html?em&ex=1207022400&en=be66964abe7c5f54&ei=5087%0A

Need to be read to?

As some of you know, I like to listen to books on tape, NPR, and things of that nature while I knit. I thought I'd share two writing-related audio features I just learned about:

1. The New Yorker has published free audio clips of authors reading their favorite short stories and discussing them with the fiction editor of the magazine. So far, I've listed to Jhumpa Lahiri reading/discussing William Trevor's A Day, and boy was it worth the 45 minutes! I learned a lot about the story, which I had read already. Go to itunes.com and search for New Yorker. The fiction should be easy to find.

2. Salon.com recently featured Billy Collins in its Video Dog feature. Click here to watch him talk about poetry and the writing process in general.

Some links

I am a member of the National Writers' Union (which I highly recommend my fellow writers look into--they have really intelligent members who answer questions on various listserves, they run workshops and events, and they have a contract department that will help you read through a contract to make sure your rights are being looked after). Through the NWU, I learned about some neat web sites that I thought I'd share:

http://www.book-proposal.com/ Has info about writing book proposals

http://www.zokutou.co.uk/forum/profile.php?mode=register An online writing group based in the UK that has some neat exercises on their site

http://writersisland.wordpress.com/ A site similar to Sunday Scribblings