More on editing and unediting the dead this week. How to maintain tension even when your cell phone makes everything too easy. A man gets his hair cut and chats to a shopkeeper. A royal biography is panned, and treason is in the air. The masses are getting uppity in the comment sections too, and they’re out to get the intellectuals. Pah! Too clever by half! Can Nathan Bransford rein in the beast he has created before it’s too late? Speaking of plots, how evil is NaNoWriMo really? Finally an ancient rebel turns fifty, by Toutatis.
In a round up a couple of weeks ago I discussed a review in The Guardian of Beginners, Raymond Carver’s initial version of What we Talk About When We Talk About Love before Gordon Lish’s brutal edits. This week, also in The Guardian, Sarah Churchwell took the book’s release as a starting point for a discussion of postumously published writers.
…professional writers sell their art in a marketplace that necessarily admits editors and readers into the story. There is nothing pure about it: the rubicon between “original” art and edited collaboration has already been crossed. Beginners is unlikely to replace What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Instead, it will be in dialogue with it, because the story has no end: there will always be afterthoughts.
A fascinating piece, which posed some important, if unresolved, questions about the nature of authenticity and the seat of literary value.
We British have a reputation for irony and scepticism. These qualities desert some of us when it comes to the Royal Family. So it’s interesting to see some prominent reviews of a Queen Mother hagiography that push back. Hard. This week Catherine Bennett reviewed Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: The Official Autobiography by William Shawcross. She notes that Shawcross seems incapable of finding any insight into her later life:
Chapter after chapter of his interminable chronicle glides, or rather drags, repetitively past, allowing the few things that did change to stand out in lurid contrast. One year, for instance, she acquired a stairlift.
This despite some evidence that she did not glide quite as serenely between the landings of her life as Shawcross would have us believe:
[She] more recently, according to the journalist Edward Stourton, said the EU would never work, because of “all those Huns, wops and dagos”. In his diaries, her loyal friend the late Woodrow Wyatt recorded, with more tact “She clearly has some reservations about Jews in her old-fashioned way”. “I’m not as nice as you think,” she used to tell him.
Another, older, review by Johann Hari which first appeared in The Independent made Bennett’s seem like joyous praise.
William Shawcross has won the favour of his fellow monarchists by taking this curdled life and presenting it as the best of British. It’s the single most unpatriotic claim I’ve ever heard. If you don’t think Britain can do better – far better – than this nasty leech and her stunted family, then you don’t deserve to live in this Sceptred Isle.
This is totally off-topic and a week late, but James Hyman took a picture of himself having his hair cut whilst passing the time of day with the proprietor of a local newsagents. It’s on Yelp. The shop that is. I looked it up.
Paul Anderson posted a piece at Write Anything that took in some of the criticisms that have been leveled at NaNoWriMo. He added in his own worry that some writers who can’t make NaNo’s rigorous word count demands might see themselves as failures, when the important thing is to check in on your story at the pace that suits you best. At StoryFix.com Larry Brooks also attacked NaNoMania. I may also have posted something myself on that topic.
Roz Morris at Dirty White Candy/Nail Your Novel posted some tips on tension and technology. How do you keep the tension high when gadgets, real or made up, conspire to make the lives of your characters all too easy? That cell phone is going to have to have a little accident. Did you know that that’s already a cliche? Personally my phone never works when I need it.
In one of those coincidences that all round up writers love, a A query letter shredded at Query Shark demonstrated the problems that ensue when you make life too easy on your characters. It looks like the author has all the ingredients of the thriller in place. Apart from the thrilling parts.
The problem with the plot here is that there is no long term problem. It’s not all that hard to build a cell phone tower. If they get knocked down, the company puts another one up. It’s inconvenient sure, but it’s not life threatening. A good thriller needs higher stakes.
I always look out for writing posts on io9.com. This week didn’t disappoint, with a piece by Jeff Carlson on the strange attractions of the apocalypse for writers and readers alike. I’m writing a novel set in a broken down future, and I haven’t had to worry about cell phone coverage a single time. So that’s score one for post-apocalyptic dystopias right off the bat.
Agent Nathan Bransford had to backpedal after he posted a warning against overly academic query letters. The article prompted an torrent of anti-intellectual populist comments. Here’s a sample:
I’d take this another step and say it applies to all art. If I don’t “get” a book/sculpture/play/painting (it is not accessible) then I probably won’t think much of its quality. Same holds true for a creation I might understand but think is crap.
Eventually, Nathan was moved to post a clarification of his position in which he countered many of the assertions in the comments and pointed out that not understanding a work doesn’t necessarily speak to its quality, and that experts and intellectuals serve a key purpose in culture:
For now, in order to have your book published you’re going to have to impress the experts, i.e. the literary agents and editors who demand a certain level of quality in the writing. And the current culture that treats everyone as an expert shouldn’t be taken too far: Not everyone is an expert.
I agree. The reason people work and study so hard is to earn expert status. In my experience crowds are dumb, and wisdom is both learned and earned.
I can’t leave this round-up without noting the birthday of the year. It seems that Asterix is fifty. I regularly read Roman history. For some inexplicable reason I recently started learning Latin. I can’t help feeling these quirks may both be related to my lifelong love of the rebellious Gaul. It’s Friday, so fill your glass and join me in a round of Joyeux Anniversaire. Cheers.
