Two points of view about writing that might seem opposed. I don’t think they are, though.

Ann Patchett:

I don’t believe in writer’s block. I think writer’s block is just a myth that was invented by people who either don’t want to work or people who aren’t ready to get an idea down on paper. So if I can’t write, if I’m stuck, it’s because I’m trying to figure something out. The other thing is my husband, who is a doctor, goes to work every single day, and he doesn’t get ‘doctor’s block’. He doesn’t just say, “I don’t have any idea what this patient has, and I’m just gonna go home and lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling and eat popcorn.” Which is what writers do. It’s like we have this built-in ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card going called Writer’s Block. But if you work, you just work, and sooner or later, you’ll get through it.

And The Intern, “on finding beauty again“:

You can’t remember what inspired you to write your novel. It’s a vicious ugly cold-hearted thing and it’s eating you alive. You’re a vicious, ugly, cold-hearted thing too, an evil plumber with a bag full of tools. You couldn’t find the pulse of your novel if you tried. It’s turned into a dead thing—or a thing towards which you’ve become dead.

“Writing is hard work,” you reassure yourself.
“Don’t tell me to take a break,” you snap at your well-meaning loved ones.

You fight your way grimly through the brambles.

Meanwhile, the world goes on lush and sun-filled just outside your field of view.

Over the weekend, Diane Havens, the wonderful narrator of the Iambik audiobook of Alcestis, and Miette Elm of Iambik asked me excellent questions about the book, writing, and audiobooks, including some Proust-questionnaire-style inquiries about my favorite sounds. If you follow the Q&A link, you’ll see a discount code for all Iambik’s titles through the end of the month, too.

I’m in the last push toward finishing up my degree right now, but I’ve been saving up blog material. (And occasionally then deciding not to write a post on it because it was just too annoying to think about in any more detail, cf. Ginia Bellafante’s remarkably silly “girls can’t possibly like Lorrie Moore and The Hobbit at the same time!” review of Game of Thrones and her point-missing follow-up piece. Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

I have managed to go to a couple of readings lately, though — last night was Russell Banks, reading from his forthcoming Lost Memory of Skin, and I’m hoping to make it to Chimamanda Adichie’s reading on Thursday, also at the Joynes Reading Room at UT. A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend the benefit reading for Dean Young held here in Austin. Dean has since received the heart transplant he needed, but he and his family still need support. If you haven’t (or even if you have), do donate here.

That was a busy week! Two cross-half-the-country trips, both overnight, and I somehow managed to avoid the worst snarls of weather-related travel drama. But I’m very glad to be back in Austin, where it’s supposed to hit 70 this weekend. Texas, sometimes I love you a lot.

I keep tagging things to post here and didn’t even have the time to start a post until Wednesday — when I once again had to get the site taken down to address another security issue. Sigh. And once again, all is now fixed and fine. But I do wish whatever opportunistic bot has grown fond of my site would leave it alone.

Here are some of the things I’ve been wanting to link:

• Anne Sexton reading her poetry and being precisely as magnetic and dramatic as you’d imagine.
• On the topic of women writers, VIDA’s incredibly disheartening charts comparing the presence of women writers in popular print outlets to their presence as reviewers, etc.
• Contact your members of Congress and urge them to support the National Endowment for the Humanities (and NPR, and Planned Parenthood, while you’re at it).
• The text of Much Ado About Nothing, because something made me think of it while I was writing Killingly the other day. (The scene with Beatrice refusing Count Pedro, specifically.)
• Rice will be hosting THATCamp Texas in April.
• Are you female and anemic, and have you been told that you’re anemic because you’re female? Here’s an instructive study in how gendering health problems isn’t always a great idea.
• Francis Ford Coppola talks about being a director, creativity, and confidence.
• The Stanford Literary Lab publishes a report on studying computer analysis of genre; unsurprisingly, it’s complicated: “You take David Copperfield, run it through a program without any human input – ‘unsupervised’, as the expression goes – and … can the program figure out whether it’s a gothic novel or a Bildungsroman? The answer is, fundamentally, Yes: but a Yes with so many complications that it is necessary to look at the entire process of our study. These are new methods we are using, and with new methods the process is almost as important as the results.”

The other thing that’s been holding my attention this week while I should be working on more diss revisions is the uprising in Egypt. I’ve been to Egypt once, in the summer of 2000, just after my first year of college. The tourism industry there was still reeling from the attacks on tourists in the 1990s, and of course it would grow even worse after 2001. My experience of the country was entirely a tourist’s experience and fraught with all the troubling dynamics that accompany American tourism, plus a few extra twists to those dynamics introduced by the fact that I was blonde, barely eighteen, not a speaker of Arabic, and traveling with my parents. And it was also amazing, for all the reasons you’d expect given my history geekiness — the river, the temples, the star-painted ceilings, the Hellenistic-era graffiti, the little round bellies on the relief sculptures. The National Museum, which people on the street linked arms to protect after looting during the protests this week, just as they did the Library of Alexandria.

I remember our female Coptic Christian guide in Cairo — every time violence against the Copts is in the news I think about her — and the young man who guided our group on the Nile. I’ve been hoping that they’re safe. Now I also hope that they’re exhilarated. I’m so glad Mubarak has finally stepped down and has ceded power to the military, who seem, at least, to be more open to the people’s demands than he ever was. And I wish every bit of good luck in the universe to the Egyptians and their hard-won democracy.

The Blanton Museum Book Club meeting was really lovely — we met in one of the galleries while the museum was open for Third Thursday, next to some very fitting art. It’s been a little while since I’ve talked to a group about Alcestis, and I’ve been thinking so much about Killingly lately that it was fun for me to compare the two projects and consider, as I talked with the group about the book, what I’m doing differently this time.

Have to get back to dissertation revisions now, but here, a whole bushel of links:

• A rejection letter in kind, to Gertrude Stein.
• A border collie that knows more than 1000 names of objects (and is now working on grammar).
• Jubal Early doing his bit for the mode of self-defensive autobiography. (No, not that Jubal Early, the real Jubal Anderson Early [ouch at that web design]. Who is apparently one of Nathan Fillion’s ancestors. What.)
• Via Jessa Crispin, an Edith Wharton short story in which she snarks about book clubs… published, in PDF, by the Library of America. As they introduce it: “During Story of the Week’s first year, we have been gratified to learn (via e-mail messages, blog posts, and phone calls) that an increasing number of readers are using selections for reading groups, the classroom, and library events. And so it is with a bit of trepidation that we offer, in commemoration of Edith Wharton’s birthday on January 24, a story that makes fun of such gatherings by describing one of the more dysfunctional reading discussions in the history of literature.” Heh.
• Maud Newton “on creating the feeling you want the reader to feel“, which opens with the question “Do you think writers have to feel what they want the reader to feel when they’re writing?” What’s interesting here is that this isn’t a “write what you know” question — it’s not about whether or not writers need to feel what their characters feel, but about whether they need to be able to evoke the same state in themselves that they will evoke in their readers. I’m not sure that’s possible, exactly. I think the fact of being the writer of the work always tempers, even if just slightly, the feeling that will be fully accessible to readers — if you’ve done your job right.

Today I come bearing a link to this fun Q&A, with very smart questions about writing process asked by Laura Maylene Walter and, er, answered by me, possibly in a less smart manner. Laura and I went to high school together, attended the PA Governor’s School for the Arts during the same summer, and worked on the high school lit mag together, as Laura mentions in her blog post. (I haven’t thought about that lit mag for so long. Oh dear. Layout flashbacks.) I wrote poetry back in high school, but Laura’s always been a fiction writer, and a very good one, too. She recently won the 2010 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, and her first short story collection, Living Arrangements, is forthcoming from BkMk Press in 2011.

In the Independent, Arifa Akbar asks if “fictive sex” can “ever have artistic merit.” The context here is the annual Bad Sex Awards, given out by the Literary Review. Since I think the answer to that question is indubitably “yes,” I was particularly intrigued by this piece of information:

Ironically, the bad sex awards were originally conceived, in 1993, to celebrate good sex, before the editor, Auberon Waugh, was advised by co-founder, Rhoda Koenig, that this might be “less interesting” than plucking out the clichéd and the corny.

I would love to see a Good Sex Awards shortlist. (It could be a cute stunt for the Review, if nothing else.) I’m sure Koenig was right that Bad Sex Awards get more attention — pointing and laughing usually does — but I’m not sure that mocking poorly-written scenes is automatically more interesting than celebrating good ones would be. Good sex in literary fiction is probably rarer than bad, and sex that many readers can agree is good might be even more uncommon. For example: I totally don’t agree that writing good sex is reducible to Geoff Dyer’s claim, quoted in Akbar’s essay, that descriptions of sex must “be absolutely explicit — no metaphors, no hyperbole.” (Then again, I do remember some of the horrifying metaphors cited in previous Bad Sex Award lists, so maybe that’s not a bad place to start.)

And I think Akbar’s onto something, here:

The most interesting writing about sex in the past two decades has arguably come from gay and lesbian novelists – Hollinghurst, Jeanette Winterson, Edmund White – who have touched ground where there has still been sensibilities to disturb and imaginative barriers to break down.

I’d also be interested in a broader conversation about sex in genre fiction, if we’re discussing the breaching of imaginative barriers.

Finally, Akbar covers the point that writers usually make when talking about sex in fiction: the “so what?” question.

Koenig casts doubt over this rationale: “I do think writers should ask themselves ‘is this sex scene necessary?’ In other words, what will we learn from following the people into the bedroom that we will not learn from simply being told that they have gone to bed together and liked it or disliked it or felt guilty about it or whatever?”

There are three sex scenes in Alcestis and one almost-sex-scene that dissolves into chaos thanks to some god-conjured reptiles. (Seriously. Drawn straight from the myth.) In my opinion, these scenes are all necessary for plot and character development, but their existence has made me squirm on occasion. I remember copy-editing one of the sex scenes while sitting at the laundromat — the scene with dubious consent, of course, because what else would you end up copy-editing at the laundromat? — and hoping that the bored middle-aged lady next to me wasn’t peering over my shoulder at the manuscript.

I don’t really feel that way about the published book; I think I’ve become comfortable with the idea that the book is, in large part, about desire. But giving public performances where I read about desire can still make me blush a bit. In a talk last spring, I read the almost-sex-scene along with a few other sections of the book. Even though I’d practiced the reading in advance, I hadn’t quite realized what it would be like to read in front of an audience a scene that sounds like it’s about to include sex. There was definitely an anticipatory and slightly uncomfortable feeling in the room, right up until the snakes appeared and the audience realized I wasn’t actually about to read a detailed account of the main character’s deflowering. I haven’t yet decided whether or not to include that scene in any future talks I give. Maybe I’d be able to enjoy the slightly uncomfortable vibe, now that I know to expect it. Or — maybe not.

Anyway, to sum up, here’s Seanan McGuire posting on Twitter, just a few hours ago:

… though I should add that the eighteenth century proved that even books full of nuns aren’t necessarily sex-free. (I’m looking right at you, Monk Lewis.)

I find it super-charming that the geeks behind Fallout New Vegas wrote Kate Beaton (patron comics saint of English and history geeks everywhere) into their game.

Tamil pulp fiction, now translated into English.

An interesting blog post on mechanical means of ensuring that more works of fiction and film pass the Bechdel test, written by a self-identified “registered Republican with a concealed-carry permit.” I don’t agree with everything in this post, but I do think that being aware of the context of your choices as a writer is always important, even when those choices seem as minor as deciding the gender of a parking attendant who makes a two-line appearance in your novel. And I think this sentence is worth thinking about in other contexts, too:

And if there’s one thing I’ve taken away from the discussions of feminism and queer politics and anti-racism that I’ve read, it’s that I don’t have to agree with people to learn how they would like to be treated.

On a related note: a collection of signs from the Stewart/Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

And also related (if you squint), in that they are a means of sharing comfort and support: the best damn gluten-free cookies I’ve baked in my two years as a diagnosed celiac. Mine weren’t vegan, and I made them with raisins instead of chocolate chips. Highly recommended, should you ever need to make GF cookies for yourself, or for a friend.

At Brooklyn Arden, Cheryl Klein is saying interesting things about narrative elements of the romance plot, YA, and Taylor Swift; Malinda Lo responds to a question in Klein’s comments about how those narrative elements may or may not change in queer romance plots.

Allow me to geek out for a moment. (I taught a class in fall 2009 on the development of the category romance, which means I have thought way too much about the building blocks of romance narratives.) What’s fascinating to me is how Klein’s list of narrative elements overlaps with but does not exactly match the set of narrative structural elements laid out by Janice Radway in Reading the Romance, a sociological study of romance readers published in 1984. (Pamela Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel proposes something similar, though Radway’s [EDIT: specifically structural narrative] analysis suits me better because it’s more Proppian.) If you study popular fiction as an academic, Reading the Romance is a core text. [EDIT: I don't mean that it's an uncritically celebrated text, just that people still consider it important, despite its flaws, as one of the early cultural-studies approaches to a particularly literary genre & its readers.] According to the blurb on the UNC website (linked above), RtR

… challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing’s most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. [KB: Interesting distancing there, considering that Radway is also a feminist, literary critic, and theorist of mass culture.] They claim that romances enforce the woman reader’s dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention “must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading.” She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader’s engagement with the text.

Radway’s provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers’ choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television.

“We read books so we won’t cry” is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect.

Radway may question the claims made by other critics, but as the end of that passage suggests, she also reinforces some of their findings. Specifically, she suggests that romance novels teach their readers to create fantasies that will render their unsatisfying marital relationships more satisfying by applying the rules of the hero’s “transformation” to their husbands: he rarely shows me tenderness, but because he does show it occasionally, he must secretly feel it all the time; those moments are the only moments when he allows himself to show it, but knowing that tenderness exists should be enough. This is, of course, a super depressing idea — the notion that escapist literature only serves to reify the status quo, in this case by preventing women from questioning their relationships/gender roles/the patriarchy/etc. — and one that I imagine pisses a lot of romance readers right off. I can’t say I completely disagree with the notion that the romance plot as it exists in most mainstream romance novels [EDIT: I should say "most mainstream novels in the era Radway was studying," which is what I meant] reinforces the status quo, but this particular formulation of that idea sure does assume a major lack of self-awareness on the part of the readers in question. (See this interesting blog post at Teach Me Tonight about Radway’s assessment of the Smithton readers.)

Radway is rightly criticized for the condescending tone she often adopts when writing about the women she studies — there’s sometimes a certain element of the pruriently ethnographic in the way she talks about what they really get out of reading romances (which is not always identical to what they say they get out of it). If I remember correctly, she addresses this in the preface she added to later editions of the book. Regardless: this book is still well worth reading, as is Radway’s A Feeling for Books (1999).

And now to the geekiest bit. My students read Radway’s chapter on the “Ideal Romance,” in which she uses the Smithton readers’ responses to a survey to build the narrative schema I mentioned before. This is how Radway describes the building blocks of their ideal romance:

1. The heroine’s social identity is destroyed.
2. The heroine reacts antagonistically to an aristocratic male.
3. The aristocratic male responds ambiguously to the heroine.
4. The heroine interprets the hero’s behavior as evidence of a purely sexual interest in her.
5. The heroine responds to the hero’s behavior with anger or coldness.
6. The hero retaliates by punishing the heroine.
7. The heroine and hero are physically and/or emotionally separated.
8. The hero treats the heroine tenderly.
9. The heroine responds warmly to the hero’s act of tenderness.
10. The heroine reinterprets the hero’s ambiguous behavior as the product of previous hurt.
11. The hero proposes/openly declares his love for/demonstrates his unwavering commitment to the heroine with a supreme act of tenderness.
12. The heroine responds sexually and emotionally.
13. The heroine’s identity is restored. (RtR 134)

Radway’s mapping out a particular plot, of course — the plot that her survey respondents said they liked best and felt was most successful — while Klein and Lo are both talking about narrative elements more individually. But there are still some direct overlaps: separation, sacrifice, “being known,” “moral education.” I would be really curious to know if many romance readers today would cite a similar plotline as their “ideal romance,” or if they’d be more likely to pick out individual narrative themes/building blocks and cite those. And I also wonder if the above narrative is often reproduced in gay romance, or not — since there are, as Lo points out, other narratives that often dominate gay romance, at least as it’s depicted in the mainstream (some negatively, some more positively). Thoughts? Observations from people who actually read romance regularly?

EDIT: Please see my comments below to Carolyn and Jessica about Radway’s book and my interest in it (which is about the structural geekiness described above, not about her theories regarding why women read romance novels). I didn’t clarify this well enough in my original post. Sorry!

ArmadilloCon was delightful, even though I was gimping around all weekend thanks to a twisted ankle during my Saturday-morning run. (Side note: why are ankles so weird? It felt fine for half a day after I twisted it and then just started throbbing in the middle of a panel. Thanks to everyone at the con for not laughing at me while I did things like hold cups of ice water against my foot during readings!) The con was really well-run and friendly — many thanks to Jonathan Miles, in particular, for inviting me to participate.

• I was on three panels: LGBT Issues in Spec Fic, Better Writing through Mythology, and Spec Fic in Academia (which I moderated). Spec Fic in Academia was a bit sparse, though we still had a good conversation, but the other two had lively audiences — especially the mythology panel, despite its being the first of the morning on Sunday. And it seems the LGBT panel was ArmadilloCon’s first on the topic, which makes me extra glad to have been a part of it. I also attended a panel on “crossed genres” (or interstitial fiction, or slipstream, or whatever you like), which, given the location of the con, had a distinctly Texan twist.
• I read the prologue to Alcestis at the Broad Universe reading, and read “The Former Hero,” a not-yet-published short story, at my own reading Saturday night.
• I met some very nice Austin writers for the first time — Lee Thomas, Stina Leicht, Matthew Bey, and others — and talked to a couple of writers who are working on mythologically-inspired first novels.
• I also sold and signed a few books! Always nice.

And now it’s back to job-market preparation and dissertation revision for a little while. But I happen to know that there’s a very in-depth interview about Alcestis in production at the moment — I’ll post the link as soon as it’s live.

The first thing I read this morning, while eating my quinoa flakes, was Kate Elliott’s excellent post about how she knows a scene needs to be rewritten:

The medium answer is:

I feel uncomfortable with it (see: “I just know” above) because:

the rhythm feels wrong when I re-read it. The rhythm of a scene should flow smoothly and inevitably for however you are defining inevitability — you should never catch or stumble over the flow of action and conversation.

Or: the characters aren’t doing what they need to do to move the plot forward because they are doing something else, specifically something that doesn’t actually matter no matter how entertaining I find it, or perhaps because it is something that was generic and easy to write but does not serve a useful purpose in narrative terms.

Or: the characters are not acting as they would be acting if they were being themselves. They’re saying things that come out wrong for them.

Or: Something I wrote later changes the nature of what this scene needs to accomplish.

Or: Ouch.

Or: the conversation wanders through the scene, repeats itself, contradicts itself, and/or isn’t directly to the point.

Or: the conversation isn’t layered right so that it starts from one point and leads to a bigger and more emotional point by the end of the scene.

Or: I wasted a big moment, eliding it or gliding over it, and I need to punch it up and/or expose it properly.

Or: What was I thinking?

The long answer: Give me three hours, a seminar, and a ton of time to prepare (none of which I have), and I might be able to make a stab at opening this out.

It’s interesting to me that Kate talks about rhythm first, because for me, at least, the other concerns she lists often present themselves as problems of rhythm first. That is to say: I’m writing a scene, or reading back over a scene, and I notice that something feels off, like a slub in smooth fabric. Then I start to worry at it, the same way you might pick at that little knot of thread. Sometimes the problem really is a prose-level rhythm issue, but sometimes the prose isn’t working correctly because something underneath the prose, something mechanical or structural, isn’t working either, in one of the ways Kate lists above.

I titled this post “rhythm as alarm system” as a way of describing that process, in which a flaw in the rhythm lets you know that something else may be wrong with your writing. But maybe it’s more like an extra sense or a magical power: imprecise, hard to control, and impossible to turn off. I spent some time re-reading old writing of mine recently, and it’s amazing how the things that feel most familiar about those old pieces of writing are the things I never did quite figure out how to fix: the slubs in the fabric. I remember the occasional awkward word or tinny line of dialogue better than the bits of beauty.

(If you want to develop your own extrasensory rhythmic perception, read your work out loud. All of it. Tayari Jones posted on Twitter recently about doing a complete read-through of her novel in progress while going over copyedits. [She also wrote a great post about fixing a timeline problem in that book.] If I’m struggling with writing anything, fiction or grant proposals or job letters, I read it out loud while I work. Often I get funny looks from the cats.)

Does the knot-in-the-fabric metaphor describe how you feel about weaknesses in your writing, or do you sense things a different way?