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?

(I don’t discuss much plot stuff at all, but if you want to remain totally unspoiled about The Passage, do not read this post or the linked reviews.)

It will surprise no one who’s read Alcestis that I’ve thought about death often in the last few years. Partly this is an occupational hazard of writing about the underworld; partly it’s related to my own life, as my father was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2003 and died in late 2008, while I was working on the last revisions of the book.

If you read this blog regularly, you also know that I talk frequently about genre fiction and literary fiction, and that I’ve been on a tear of reading YA novels.

I think a lot, and care a lot, about what it means to try to write something emotional and immediate and accessible and fun and still beautiful, still “literary.” Still artistically worthwhile, in the way that something like Twilight, satisfying as it is for teen readers and the employee of the blood donation center (!) near my apartment who has a “Forks or Bust!” sticker on her (his?) Ford Explorer window, isn’t.

I read Justin Cronin’s The Passage because about five people on Twitter recently posted about how it “lived up to all the hype!” I remember first learning about it because of the hype, since the world seems to be tremendously amused by the idea of a writer of literary fiction — Ron Charles calls Cronin’s first two books, one of which won the PEN/Hemingway award, “a couple of small literary novels” — producing a big sprawling genre book and then, gasp, selling it for a load of money. I remember reading about Cronin’s book deal a while back and being totally tickled that a fiction writer with an academic job had hit it big with a post-apocalyptic vampire novel. As always, I’m a little wistful about the suggestion that it takes a literary writer to make genre tropes shine. (Read Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Read Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang and Necropolis and “The Naturalist.” Read Alice Sola Kim’s “Beautiful White Bodies,” which I just discovered thanks to Wiscon and the Tiptree shortlist.) But Cronin himself is hearteningly sensitive to false distinctions of this sort, too:

I think literary is shorthand for appreciated, and commercial is shorthand for sells. I did not undertake the writing of this book thinking that it was one thing or the other, or even that books in general have to be one thing or the other. Those are descriptions of what happens to a book after it’s written.

I read the book in a day and a half, and now T.’s racing through it — he started reading it while I was working and has been agitating for me to finish. Verdict: The Passage does live up to the hype. It’s not perfect; the ending is a little weird because it is the first in a (giant) trilogy; some bits are a little slow even for me. (Also, there are a surprising number of typos and misspellings, which my resident editing/typography nerd cannot forgive.) But you know what? It’s better than The Road. It’s as grabby as Tana French’s The Likeness or as The Secret History. It has a sense of humor, one that penetrates the very structure of the book — a few times, when reading, I could picture Cronin (and his daughter, with whom he apparently plotted much of the book) thinking something along the lines of: “You know what would be even more awesome? Nuns!” or “And then, they watch Dracula!” This is fabulous; this is what Kelly Link was talking about in the post I linked a few days ago. You put what you like in your book, and that makes it appealing.

What makes it appealing to me is its mixture of joy and melancholy. Many people die in this book. (Some others don’t, and that’s just as bad.) Here’s what Cronin said about that in the Times interview I linked above:

“The vampire narrative deals with the fundamental question, the basic human question, and that is, what part of being human is defined by the fact that we’re mortal?” Mr. Cronin said. “If you got to be immortal, would you be trading away your humanity? It’s the fundamental question of what is death to being alive. The vampire story gets at the heart of that. It reassures us that we’d rather be human.”

I wasn’t entirely sold on some of the more mystical aspects of the book, but nonetheless it made me think. What I’ve been thinking about most is the Colony, the group of survivors’ descendants who live in a walled town defended largely by banks of lights run by aging batteries. These lights aren’t just a “peculiar plot point,” as Janet Maslin calls them. For me, at least, they seemed far more central than that. Some of the inhabitants of the town are able to forget that the lights will go out eventually, and some aren’t. How they handle that knowledge, how it controls them — this is at the heart of what happens to the townspeople and the rest of the world.

Maslin’s review mentions the creepiness of reading Cronin’s projection that the future Gulf of Mexico would be an oil slick. I’ve spent way too much time in the last month reading and retweeting appropriately outraged articles about the spill and BP and our terrifying reliance on oil. I signed petitions and made some donations, and I tried to plan ways for us to cut our household energy consumption further. But once I’d done those things, I can’t say my reading those articles, or any of the other links I find on Twitter to the horrifying things we do to each other and our planet, really did much good for anyone, including me. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since reading Alexander Chee’s fine blog post — some good things do come from reading links on Twitter! — about the urgency that online news sources often make him feel, and the anger their content inspires. I feel conflicted about my own relationship to Twitter and to online news in general. I think the act of being outraged about something that you are not forced to experience personally can be absolutely necessary for change, and I fully realize that the choice to step away from something horrible is the epitome of privilege.  But sometimes that moment of outrage before retweeting, etc., isn’t leading to any real change at all. Sometimes it’s performative of identity, consciously or unconsciously: I will retweet this thing because I am the kind of person who is outraged by this thing! Which is not to say that the outrage itself is any less vital or valid. But sometimes it’s also a reminder, a little wearing reminder, that the lights will go out someday. There are some things none of us can step away from, and among them are death and grief. I loved The Passage because it acknowledges that — honors it, even — and also acknowledges that the world is beautiful, even when you’re in the dark woods, unsure of what’s waiting for you in the trees.

This morning, after I’d finished reading at 1:30 last night, I found this post via Shauna James Ahern and Elizabeth McCracken on Twitter, another post that, like this one, starts with the death of a parent but means to talk about love and joy more than about death:

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it. And, Johnny, on this front, I think you have some work to do.

…

Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word love to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime.

Let’s.

Remember to visit Gwenda Bond’s post with all the entries archived. Today’s is about generating and loving your very own story ideas, and contains some great exercises that I am now planning to incorporate into my workshop class this summer.

Kate Pullinger, whose The Mistress of Nothing will soon be released in the US, wrote a great post last week about historians who dismiss historical fiction (in this case, Antony Beevor and Niall Ferguson):

According to reports, Niall Ferguson says he never reads historical fiction because it ‘contaminates historical understanding’; Beevor says he thinks that historical novelists ought to mark in bold type ‘the bits they made up’.Nice to see two such hardy fellows claiming their unparalleled access to the truth.

Pullinger then quotes from a talk about history and historiography¹ delivered by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 2006 and printed in the NYRB., in which Schlesinger argues that “All historians are prisoners of their own experience and servitors to their own prepossessions. We are all entrapped in the egocentric predicament. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personality and the preoccupations of our age.” Beevor and Ferguson, no matter how pristine they consider their own historical understandings, are just as time-blind as everybody else — if not more so, because they’re so submerged in their own cultural context that it’s become invisible to them. (This is the same problem I have with Stanley Fish’s frequent tirades in the NY Times about bias in the classroom: the underlying assumption that choosing not to discuss one’s political beliefs in the classroom means that bias is eradicated. Right.) I’ll put the bits I make up in bold when Beevor agrees to do the same thing.

Pullinger concludes: “this is why fiction can sometimes be the only way to tell the truth.” In essence, she’s making a point pretty similar to that of Sarah Dunant’s recent piece in the London Times, which presents historical fiction as a means of “penetrating ‘otherness.’”

I agree with Dunant, and I loved Pullinger’s post, but I’d drop the “the” before “truth” in her last sentence. The point of Schlesinger’s essay, as Pullinger points out, is that there is no historical “truth.” It doesn’t exist, and even if it did, in some rarefied ideal form, we wouldn’t have access to it. But here’s the thing: for historical fiction, it doesn’t matter that there’s no one truth.

Schlesinger says that “the historian is committed to a doomed enterprise—the quest for an unattainable objectivity.” Writers of historical fiction aren’t. When I write historical fiction, I’m trying to make art. I want the art I make to be truthful, but I don’t pretend that I’m identifying or recording the truth about history.² (I don’t mean to suggest that Pullinger or Dunant would claim this either, though I assume that Beevor and Ferguson think they would.)

I don’t think most readers care if historical fiction represents “the truth,” either. Some do, of course, and I think most readers respond negatively to the obvious importation of contemporary attitudes or speech patterns or modes of thinking into historical settings. But the word that kept coming up in our Wiscon panel discussion about historical fiction wasn’t truth but “authenticity” — the feeling of truth, in other words. The bits we make up as historical fiction writers are there to add to that feeling of truth, whether they’re accurate or not, and the feeling of truth and recognition is crucial to the success of any kind of art. Human understanding — that’s what we’re after.

______

1. “Historiography” is one of my favorite things and one of my favorite words.

2. “Even things that are true can be proved.” (To keep company with the “stark postmodernist sentiments” Schlesinger quotes from John Lothrop Motley’s 1868 lecture.)

The wonderful Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press posted an interview we did recently about Alcestis, and I think it’s pretty neat! Gavin asked great and funny questions and I got to ramble about Evelina and Samuel Johnson and underworld research, which always makes me happy. Gavin and Kelly were the first people to publish my fiction and I’m delighted that they wanted to do this interview. While you’re at their site, be sure to check out the Small Beer catalog, which includes brilliant books like Ellen Kushner’s The Privilege of the Sword, Maureen McHugh’s Mothers and Other Monsters, the Interfictions anthologies, Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial, and Kelly’s Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen. (I’m hoping to pick up Greer Gilman’s Cloud & Ashes soon, myself.)

Another lovely review came in yesterday, this one from Margaret Donsbach of historicalnovels.info, writing for Heritage Key. (Margaret was also kind enough to interview me for her own site a little while ago.) A tantalizing snippet that shows just how well she gets the book:

Freud famously mined the Greek myths, a treasure trove of psychological insight, when developing his theory of the Oedipus complex. He might just as easily have named his theory of the death instinct after Alcestis.

Speaking of the id, Laura Miller’s piece at Salon about Mary Sues is worth a read. She points out, quite rightly, that self-insertion/wish-fulfillment figures in fiction aren’t exactly limited to the world of fandom. (And check out Mark Twain’s blistering, beautiful takedown of The Deerslayer, which Justine Larbalestier linked to the other day.)

Today is the last day that you can enter to win a book or gift certificate from my fabulous agent Diana Fox just for buying Alcestis. Details here!

I saw this post by Donald Maass about awe linked recently. Interesting stuff, and I think some of the tips — especially the question “Now, how will you provoke that emotion through action alone?” — are excellent. But I actually worked in precisely the opposite direction when writing Alcestis. I tend to be a quiet writer in terms of emotions, and the book as published contains far more emotional content than the first draft did (hard to believe, I know; words like “cool” and “restrained” seem to pop up in reviews!). I was reading a lot of Virginia Woolf — really a lot, I just shelved my Woolf again after moving the other day and it’s quite the little collection — and I noticed that, in To the Lighthouse in particular, her narrators often say something as simple as: “Character X felt Y.” (I’ve mentioned this before, I think.) That’s what Maass suggests writers avoid, and for good reason. If that’s the only tool you use to create emotion, it’ll lose effectiveness quickly. But I went through and added some clear statements of emotion to the manuscript, and I think it helped. Sometimes, one does just feel, and it’s okay to say that directly.

Speaking of strong feelings, do read J. K. Rowling’s essay on single motherhood and Tory politics, whether you’re a UK voted or not.

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.