Disclaimer: In general, I think reading books about writing is a monumental waste of time. As a relatively new author, the most important thing I need to do is sit my butt in the chair and write. The second most important thing I need to do is read strong fiction to gain an appreciation of how it’s done. The third most important thing I can do is take the occasional workshop.
Reading books that discuss how to write? A low priority (somewhere just above reorganizing my sock drawer). I find that if I’m doing the first three important things I really don’t need to read instructional manuals.
That having been said, I’ve read three books on writing (and publishing) in the past month or so (and my sock drawer is as cluttered as it’s ever been). The moral of the story: yes, these books aren’t really necessary to grow as an author. But if you’re a writing junkie, you can’t resist them. So, in that spirit of self-indulgence, onward to the safari!
The first book on our safari is Jeff Vandermeer’s Booklife. I like this book a lot, and recommend it to anyone out there for who wants to write as a career, rather than a hobby. Vandermeer doesn’t offer a lot of instruction here on the writing process, itself, and I think that’s one of this book’s strengths. He assumes you already know how to write or can find that information elsewhere.
Instead, Vandermeer focuses on the publishing process. Some of the best sections of this book focus on the emotional aspects of publishing that no one (to my knowledge) has written much about before. With gentle candor and tact, Vandermeer tackles subjects like addiction, rejection, envy, permission to fail, despair, and even (gulp) success. The take-home messages? Be yourself and nurture an equanimity that can weather both the successes and rough patches of your career with equal perspective.
Face it – if you’re an author you’re neurotic as all hell and this book will help…at least a little… with that.
There’s a lot of nuts-and-bolts stuff, too. But again – focused on publishing rather than writing. Vandermeer writes extensively about marketing and public relations. (Do you know the difference between the two ? I didn’t either until I read this book). He covers topics like branding, blogging, and bucking trends (and lots of other stuff that doesn’t even start with “b”).
Highly recommended.
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Interlude: Great Minds DON’T Think Alike
“Envy is a subject of intense interest to writers…because it has been known to curdle careers and twist older creators into a kind of rigor mortis of bitterness. Thoughts of might-have-beens cross-pollinate with a sense of entitlement, and suddenly anyone getting more attention is a creep, a thug, a soul-sucking light-stealer leaving you in shadow.”
– Jeff Vandermeer, Booklife
“Well, one nice thing about our trade, as compared with poetry or with painting, possibly with music, is we don’t envy each other….Novelists do not envy each other, and if a writer succeeds, makes a lot of money, say, that makes all other writers happy.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, in Like Shaking Hands With God: A Conversation About Writing
Vonnegut an optimist? Who’d have thunk it?
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This brings us to the oddest volume on today’s safari, Like Shaking Hands With God: A Conversation About Writing. Weighing in at a svlete 71 pages, the book is actually a transcript of two conversations held between Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer on the writing life (one in front of an audience of several hundred, the other at a smaller gathering).
I read this one in just over an hour. Now, I’m all for short books (my own How To Each Fried Furries is slightly less than 100 pages), but if you’re going to go short, you have to give the reader intensity as a trade-off. I don’t think this book quite pulls that trick off.
There are some entertaining moments, to be sure. Stringer (author of several memoirs, including Grand Central Winter) provides a unique perspective on the need to write what you know and feel passionate about, while simultaneously avoiding the trap of haranguing the reader. But it’s the then-76 year old Vonnegut who steals the show by tossing out some memorable one-liners (“Expecting large numbers of people to be literate is like expecting everybody to play the French horn”, “Nobody gives a fuck about you (the author), they care about the book,” and this grammatically-challenged homicidal gem, “I’ll pay anyone here a million dollars who’ll kill Bill Gates”.
Gates outlived Vonnegut, so we’ll assume Kurt was just joking.
Next up…Gary Braunbeck’s To Each Their Darkness. This is probably the best book specifically about craft in this safari.
An award-winning horror author, Braunbeck calls attention to the need for that particular genre to save itself from itself. But you don’t have to be a horror author to get something out of this book.
Braunbeck is a grizzled veteran of dark storytelling who has seen trends come and go. True, anyone can poke holes in some of the more vapid stuff coming out of horror these days, but Braunbeck’s tenure in the genre lends his remarks a certain gravitas. He’s not teeing off on zombie books out of malice or (here comes that word again) envy. He’s doing it because he has an affection for horror and knows it can be so much better than it often turns out.
As you read the book, you get the feeling that he wrote To Each Their Darkness to call a younger generation of authors to take a new look at their writing toolbox and consider picking up a few oft-neglected tools. Does your story have a rich emotional core? A well-developed subtext?
No? It might just need one.
Braunbeck also writes about how to effectively translate real life horrors into strong stories. I was awed by how open he was in discussing his own (multiple) traumas, and how he offered the reader a chance to go “behind the curtain” and see how (step-by-step) he participated in the alchemy of transforming his own, personal trauma into an independent work of art that stood apart from the trauma and served to entertain (if you can call it that) readers.
The only downside? The book ran a little long for my taste.
Braunbeck (a former actor) riffs quite a bit on his film influences, which works fine if you’re like the 98% of the American public that actually watches movies and television on a regular basis. I don’t, and so I struggled a little with that section. The inclusion of multiple introductions Braunbeck wrote for other authors’ books went on a bit long for my taste, too.
Still the good stuff in this book is so good that I still say…Highly Recommended.
We’ll finish off this safari with a look at a couple of old, reliable mass market stand-bys oft-assigned in undergrad creative writing classes: Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones and Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft.
Both of these books inspired me at the time I first read them. I read the Goldberg book for a creative writing class in college, and it provided an introduction to the idea that writing was a daily practice. Some of the advice she offers has also helped me get past my natural instinct to be all up-tight and conservative.
Take this gem:
“Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.)” Had this author not read (and re-read) that, she might be hitting her head into the wall trying to write nice, civilized fiction instead of books with titles like How To Eat Fried Furries.
Ultimately, though, I find on re-reading Goldberg that she’s a little too self-conscious and writerly for my tastes these days. As we find in this unfortunate section:
“When I sit down to write, often I cigarette hanging out of my mouth. If I’m in a cafe that has a ‘No Smoking’ sign, then my cigarette is unlit. I don’t actually smoke, anyway, so it doesn’t matter. The cigarette is a prop to help me dream into another world…Borrow your friend’s black leather motorcycle jacket, walk across the coffee shop like a Hell’s Angel, and sit down and write. Put on a beret or house shoes and a nightgown, wear work boots, farmer’s overalls, a three-piece suit, wrap yourself in an American flag or wear curlers in your hair…whatever it takes to simply see the world from another angle.”
(Vandermeer sees it differently, as detailed in a lovely section in Booklife entitled “Relinquishing All Fetishes”. “…I don’t care where I am when I write, who I’m with, or if it’s midnight or noon…I’m for whatever creates the least distance between thought and capturing the thought.”) Yep, you’ve convinced me there, Jeff. I can keep my beret, work boots, and American flag in the closet. My husband should be happy about that.
Moving along to King’s On Writing. I will start out by saying that this book does offer some good, basic writing advice. To this day, I avoid adverbs like the plague (thanks to King’s advice, “The adverb is not your friend”.) He also does a nifty job of explaining the value of active over passive voice.
There’s also a lot of good King memoir in this, too. For example, how he details the toll alcohol and drug addiction took on his writing (“there’s one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all.”)
Ouch. “Barely”. Jesus, Steve. There’s another thing you didn’t remember. The adverb is not your friend.
I think the downside of King’s book is that it’s hard to generalize much from his path to publication. Men’s magazines don’t publish fiction anymore. Print-on-demand technology has changed everything. Internet fiction is alive and well. The small press has grown. The midlist is reported to be shrinking. Who knows what the future will bring? The strength of Vandermeer’s book is that it speaks to the present and the future. King’s book, while laudable in its own way, speaks more to the past.
So there you have it folks. Our safari comes to an end. I recommend you buy the Vandermeer and Braunbeck books, and maybe look for the other titles in your local library. Or you could stop reading books about writing (and even better, stop reading blogs-about-books-about-writing), sit down, and get to work.
