Today, a recommendation: the blog of my dear friend and mentor Elizabeth Scott, who writes wonderful YA novels of all sorts. Her next novel The Unwritten Rule will be out in April, and she’s published six other novels already. I recommend them all.

She is also the master of useful linkage. Seriously: whether you’re published or not-yet-published, make checking her blog a part of your writing-blogosphere routine and you’ll be rewarded with plenty of helpful tips, advice from agents and editors, commentary from writers about craft and about the writing life, and etc. Today’s post is an especially fine example of the kind of great material she often finds — my favorite posts from it are Justine Musk’s notes on “how to write a book that ‘hangs together’” (in other words, how to develop the themes in your work), Kristin Nelson’s post of an annotated query letter, and this post on the value of MFA programs (a subject I’m planning to write more about soon, thanks to a recent question from a blog reader). For the other links, see Elizabeth’s blog!

In Cold Blood is one of my favorite books, but I tend to forget that — as much as I love nonfiction, I always think of fiction first when somebody asks me about my favorites. Little Truman’s slender book gets crushed beneath Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice. I reread In Cold Blood this summer for the workshop I attended at the Mailer Writers Colony, though, and that reread reminded me just how profoundly Capote’s book shaped the true-crime narrative. Every crappy cable show about cold cases owes a huge debt to In Cold Blood. The structure dominates: the teaser in which you see the victims alive, doomed, going about their final day of life unknowing; the first introduction to the killer(s); the dread. What’s amazing is how little of Capote you see in the narrative, how transparent he managed to make it appear. I reread the book right after reading Tom Wolfe’s Hooking Up, which, with a few exceptions, I despised, largely because of Wolfe’s intrusive, irritating presence. (And his damn exclamation mark addiction.) Of course the transparency is a fiction, and the work itself is a fiction. But it’s so beautifully done, so clean and angular.

It’s hard for me to imagine what it would be like to read that clean angular book and see in its mirrored surface the faces of people you knew. So maybe it’s not a surprise that Bob Rupp never read the book, and maybe you can’t blame him. But I do disagree that Capote didn’t do “the Clutter family justice,” as Rupp says, though of course I don’t disagree with his perfect right to believe that. Capote’s skill makes the Clutter family live for me. I think that’s a kind of justice.

Today is National Coming Out Day. When I was a Smith student, this was celebrated by lots of supportive chalking all over campus (“Come out, come out, whoever you are”) and by an outdoor celebration at night. All the houses set up tables and handed out fliers and candy and stickers — my house made labels one year, and encouraged people to wear as many as possible. My friend A. ended up being something like “femme top queer lesbian dominant queen,” I think. Girls who started the day with chin-length hair would stop by the table with clippers and go back to their own houses with buzz-cut heads.

Today the Outer Alliance is encouraging its members to participate in National Coming Out Day. On of the best posts I’ve seen so far today is Malinda Lo’s essay, in which she addresses the fact that identifying as lesbian — as she does — “erases” her one heterosexual relationship, which was also a meaningful part of her life. (Also read the great comments section below her article, too.) But if she identifies as bisexual in order to describe the complexity and fluidity of her experiences, she notes, many women in the lesbian community do not entirely trust her. I get this. At Smith there was a joke about girls who turn out to be LUGS or BUGS, “lesbian until graduation” or “bisexual until graduation,” and I remember the outrage directed at Ani DiFranco for daring to marry a man. Women commenting on Lo’s piece describe related problems: “Who wants to date a recently-out-of-the-closet girl?” asks one.

There’s been a lot of noise surrounding the Lambda Literary Foundation’s decision to change the eligibility rules for their writing awards to include only LGBT-identified writers. LLF states that they don’t require an actual statement of identity from a writer, but that they will assume that any writer who allows his/her publisher to submit a work is at least tacitly identifying as LGBT. (As rm points out in her thoughtful post on this issue, “Qs” are left out.) Lee Wind suggests that blocking out allies is not a good step for the LLF to take, while others in the comments section of his post offer some pretty convincing arguments in favor of LLF’s decision. I’m not sure exactly what I think about it. Personally, I’m not actually affected, because I’m a bisexual woman in a heterosexual relationship. (I won’t get into the question here of whether or not “bisexual” is the best term ever; the way it reifies binary gender norms is obviously not cool at all.) I could still be considered for an award of this sort and I also get loads of straight privilege in everyday life. But I’ve been thinking about this in terms of my own novel, which comes out (heh) next February and which I hope my publisher will submit for the Lambdas. In my last Outer Alliance post, I described it as a “queer retelling of a Greek myth.” It’s also a feminist retelling. In a sense, what I wanted to do was take the sexual fluidity that has always been allowed to men in Greek myth and extend it to a female character. One of my favorite teachers in high school characterized the plot of many myths by saying, “Goddesses happen.” I wanted to write about a goddess happening to a woman. But Alcestis is also married to a man, and that relationship is not erased, to use Lo’s term, by Alcestis’s time in the underworld.

Anyway, I was heartened to see the Outer Alliance’s first spotlight feature Michele Lee, a woman writer who is, according to the profile, “bisexual and happily married to a straight ally.” While I certainly understand the motivation behind the LLF’s decision, I’m glad to see bisexual-identified people (and straight allies!) welcomed into queer organizations, too. The more people who come out, the more we get to enjoy our infinite variety, and try as hard as we can to support each other.

Via Elizabeth Scott, this fascinating post by Lynn Viehl breaking down the exact amounts of her royalty statements for a New York Times bestselling book.

Michelle Sagara/West’s post on writerly delusions and learning to accept reader responses to your own work.

In other news, I’m about to mail off my corrected page proofs tomorrow — the ARCs will be ready in June! The book’s already gotten a few very nice quotes, too, which my editor forwards on to me. Getting an email with a new quote in it, particularly when that email shows up at the end of a long work day, is kind of like having someone surprise you with delicious cookies.

Via Justine Larbalestier, Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on genius, inspiration, and “mulish” work. It’s a beautifully presented talk, though I’m not sure that I agree with her final premise of talent as a kind of transitory gift. I do agree, and I’m pretty sure I’ve gone on about this before, that the post-Romantic (Gilbert says post-Renaissance) conception of the artist has led to an absurd cultural insistence that all writers be damaged in order to create. (See this great New Yorker article on writer’s block and the invention thereof.) But I also think that placing “genius” or “inspiration” entirely outside oneself is a little sad. We are human, and we do create beautiful things. Inspiration is the work of our brains, and that’s worth celebrating, even if we don’t understand how it functions.

But I do agree with both Justine and Elizabeth Gilbert that the most important thing you can do as a writer is keep doing your work, or, as Justine says, make it the best book you can.

Now I’m off to make the best dissertation chapter outline I can. I hope.

RaceFail 09 — a summary of which is available here and a timeline here, and which Rydra Wong has exhaustively archived — led to some incredibly rude and defensive behavior on the part of published authors and SF editors. It has also inspired some amazing posts about writing the other and some new communities dedicated to reading and publishing works by people of color. I cannot recommend highly enough:

• Deepa D.’s I Didn’t Dream of Dragons
• Mary Anne Mohanraj’s two posts on John Scalzi’s blog
• bossymarmalade’s beautiful sees fire
• Verb Noire, the community devoted to publishing writers of color
• fight_derailing: aimed at continuing a productive conversation about race in SF/fantasy
• 50Books_POC: a community dedicated to reading books by writers of color

Justine Larbalestier on when a writing project is finished. Justine is answering questions about writing for the whole month of January, and doing so in an awesome and informative fashion. Highly recommended. She begins her response to the question of how to tell when a project is finished:

My immediate response is that no book is ever “well and truly done”. They could all be made better. Every single one of them, yes, even Pride and Prejudice.¹ There is not point at which “you shouldn’t tamper with a story anymore”.

(The footnote is Justine’s: “1. Austen rushes the ending. There. I’ve said it.” Yep. Oh, Jane.)

I mentioned the idea of knowing when a project is finished the other day on Twitter. When I first started writing fiction — and non-fiction, including academic papers — I didn’t know how to revise. I knew how to edit in a superficial fashion, and I knew how to abandon projects that weren’t working. Sometimes I would rewrite sizable chunks of something, paragraphs or pages. But the idea of completely re-envisioning and rewriting a project didn’t make sense to me. This is partly because I edited as I wrote, which is still true. But it was also because the projects I was working on then were college papers, poems for poetry seminars, or stories that would never be published. The stakes were not high. I cared a great deal about my academic performance and I worked hard on the papers I wrote, but I didn’t fundamentally understand revision.

This began to change when I worked at the writing center at Smith, and it changed even more when I got to grad school, taught creative writing and composition, and worked at the writing center at UT, as well. If you want to learn to revise, try teaching others how to do it or practicing it on the works of others. (This is why I think workshops are extremely valuable, even though I found the structure of a semester-length workshop frustrating as a long-form writer.) I still revise while I write, but I’ve also learned to rewrite. I used to think the idea of obsessively polishing a project was absurd, but now I see its impractical appeal. Justine is absolutely right; every individual work can always be better. But she’s also right that time is finite. Sometimes things just have to be done.

For example: my soon-to-be-published article on Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote began as a seminar paper, then became a conference paper, then a drastically different full-length article, then a revised full-length article. It’s done and ready to be published, but of course it could still be improved if I had boundless time and resources. While I was revising, I caught odd glimpses of the article, perfected: the shining, beautiful, spare thing it could be, every word necessary and incisive… if I could only spend months on it alone. It was like a mirage, or maybe the grad-student version of scorbutic nostalgia. So I revised it to the best of my ability and declared it complete, and I went on to the next project with a much stronger (and, okay, weirder) understanding of why it might be difficult to stop polishing a piece of writing. I promise not to turn into Casaubon if I can help it.

The wonderful Kate Elliott has written a great essay giving advice about the business of writing to first-time fantasy and sf novelists — including yours truly, since I was fortunate enough to meet her at WFC last year and asked her about this via email later.

I was on a panel at the Intellectual Property bookstore next to UT yesterday, talking about the experience of a first publication. (Insert grateful wave at Small Beer Press folks here!) This panel was organized by UT’s Undergraduate Writing Center, where I worked last year, and went pretty darn well — the other two people on the panel had more publication credits, but many of the current MFA/MA students in the audience were in about the same career stage as I am, so the difference in experience worked well. What I enjoyed most, though, was the chance to talk about writing for a while. Since I finished the novel and got my master’s, I haven’t had many chances to do so — other than with a few close friends, and T., and my parents, while I was working on The White Silk Tent this summer. I don’t have much time to read writing blogs during the school year, or even to read books not related to my dissertation topic.

Anyway, it was lovely to read Kate’s essay, for just those very reasons. It gave me, along with some excellent advice, another chance to think and talk about writing.

The boy I dated in college used to say “inspirado” rather than “inspiration” — partly because he liked Tenacious D., and partly, I think, because he just liked words that sounded as if they should be accompanied by a twirl of the old moustache. These are, of course, both valid reasons.

When I think or talk about writing, I generally put little emphasis on inspiration. I don’t mean to devalue it; those moments of sudden new vision are necessary and wondrous. But persistence, skill, and conscious effort are also necessary, and I’m leery of any view of writing that celebrates inspiration rather than hard work. See the New Yorker article on the genesis of “writer’s block,” which I may have linked here before and probably will again; also see Nephele Tempest’s recent post at Romancing the Blog. Both express, rather more eloquently than I am at the moment, the importance of ass-in-chair to the writing process.

I also wonder if writing novels rather than short stories leads one to think differently about inspiration. When I’m working on a long project, inspiration arrives on a smaller scale: I come up with little insights into structure or character rather than silent-upon-a-peak-in-Darien vistas. Short stories, on the other hand, mean a new world every time.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that, last week, I did have the inspiration for a short story — while on the elliptical at the gym, actually, and listening to Shivaree on my slowly-dying old iPod. I’ve been working somewhat steadily on revising my first novel, and making do with the novel-sized bits of revision-inspiration that come. (We won’t get into the vast difference between revision-inspiration and fresh inspiration. Ahem.)

And you know what? After eight months of very little fiction writing, I’d nearly forgotten how much I like inspiration. It’s a nice feeling. It makes me want to twirl my imaginary moustache.

Anna Genoese talks about GLBTQ publishing and genre fiction, and why it might be better from a publishing standpoint to write a genre-marketable book with queer characters than to market one’s book as “queer fiction.” For a counterpoint, focused on literary fiction, see Edmund White’s Village Voice article on the recent flowering of gay fiction (via Bookslut).

Also via Bookslut and regarding gay fiction: Neil Gaiman reviews Alan Moore’s forthcoming Lost Girls, a graphic novel which has upset the hospital which owns the rights to J. M. Barrie’s estate. To his credit, Alan Moore doesn’t seem to care. I think the book sounds stunning.

I’ve finished scanning my grandmother’s memoir and am correcting the text — I’m about a third of the way done with it. As I work I’ve been thinking about what I want to do with the manuscript: revise it? Rewrite it substantially? Fictionalize it? In this interview with Alice Munro (yet again, via Bookslut — can you tell I’m catching up on my blog-reading?), she talks about writing her most recent book, partially based on the history of her family:

Q: The View from Castle Rock draws upon material relating to both your paternal ancestors and your personal recollections. In your 1994 “Art of Fiction” interview with Paris Review, you spoke of how William Maxwell had written about his family in Ancestors, and you said: “He did the thing you have to do, which is to latch the family history onto something larger that was happening at the time—in his case, the whole religious revival of the early 1800s. . . . If you get something like that, then you’ve got the book.” Might you comment on this in regard to your new collection?

A: I think that that’s very helpful, because otherwise what you’ve got is family history, and that’s very interesting to you and other members of your family perhaps, but not generally. This book has a lot to do with a certain part of Scotland which had also undergone an interesting religious phenomenon, although not exactly a revival. The Protestant faith there had taken hold in a very austere form, and it had a total effect on people’s lives.

With my grandmother’s story, the two strongest thematic threads are the experience of the Depression, and her care for and obsession with animal welfare and environmentalism; the Depression history is more gripping, though based on the manuscript’s wacky final chapter, I suspect my grandmother would’ve chosen to emphasize her fears about the future of the environment. Still, I need to think more about how to evoke the breadth and meaning of which Munro speaks.

I read Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial a few days ago, and am just finishing Julia Child’s My Life in France — both of them have me thinking about how to manage large chunks of exposition. Child’s book has the looseness of dictated memoir; Gorodischer sets up an equally loose episodic structure, jumping centuries between chapters. My grandmother’s manuscript, in its current form, goes beyond loose and episodic to completely messy, and it’s her management of exposition, I think, that will require the most work. When she writes scenes she generally does them well.

And now I’m off to finish Julia Child’s book and daydream about cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu. More later.