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.

Today, I am scanning. More specifically, I’m scanning the approximately three-hundred-page manuscript of my grandmother Louise’s memoir — or however much of that manuscript I can manage today before I go entirely nutty with boredom. This manuscript is the basis of my next writing project. I’d read a bit of it before and remembered it as being poorly written, so I’d only been hoping to get material for a novel from it — but, despite being a structural mess, it’s got chunks of snappy prose, sharp digs of wit, and a fascinating historical sweep. (The most obvious bit of historical interest: she lived with her family in a tent during the worst of the Depression.) My new plan is to edit her text and buttress it with some of my own writing, either fictional or non-, about Louise and my family. My father, especially, is excited about this plan — we spent an afternoon this week going through all the old photos Louise kept to accompany her manuscript (yes, I am very lucky, research-wise). I never knew Louise, since she died while my mother was pregnant with me, but I’m getting to know fragments of her now.

The best part, so far, has been the letter she included with the photos, instructing future family members on how the thing might be published; she admits to some roughness, but believes it might be edited into shape, and suggests that “perhaps the best way to handle it is through an agent. Libraries will always have ‘The Literary Market Place’ or something like it, giving names of agents and the whole procedure to follow, sending a m.s. 4th class special and all that.”

My publishing-savvy grandmother; I think we would’ve gotten along well.

In other news, the National Books Critics Circle blog has been interviewing authors who responded to the NY Times best 25 survey and asking them why they chose the works they did. So far, nobody’s explained a vote for Blood Meridian by admitting to a passionate love for conjunctions. “And” — it’s just so sexy!

Also, Sarah Monette is talking about Ursula Le Guin’s review of Hav, and discussing the similarities between Le Guin’s view of sf and her own concept of “hard fantasy.” These lines of Le Guin’s, which I’m stealing from Monette’s citation, interested me:

Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality. The “sciences” or areas of expertise involved are social – ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history. … Serious science fiction is a mode of realism, not of fantasy; and Hav is a splendid example of the uses of an alternate geography.

I’m picky about the disciplines I label “sciences”; that happens when you’re the child of geologist parents. I consider history not a science, even in the broader sense in which Le Guin uses the term, but a liberal art, and therefore I’m a little more likely to agree with Monette’s label for this sort of work, since I think of the thought experiments I do as fantastic rather than science fictional. But, to contradict myself, I still find sf terms helpful when talking about all sorts of fiction — I thought of my second novel as a kind of first contact book, except with Greek gods rather than aliens.

I just finished reading Mrs. Dalloway, the fourth Woolf book I’ve read in the last year. I liked it very much, though I didn’t adore it as much as I did To the Lighthouse or parts of Orlando (the other book was a collection of short stories).

I noticed when reading To the Lighthouse that I label her books, in my head, by technique — I think of TtL as the “how to write emotion” book, Orlando as the “how to write history” book. This is not to say that those techniques are the only thing I remember or like about the books, of course, or that they’re the only techniques Woolf employs or develops in each book; they’re the techniques that seemed most evident and interesting to me on my first read. For example, Woolf’s method of writing emotion in To the Lighthouse struck me because I’m often told by readers that my fiction is reserved, quiet, even distant in places — and I was amazed by how simply she approached the problem of communicating characters’ emotions, just stating, over and over, in a cascade: She felt X or He felt Y.

Mrs. Dalloway is the “how to write simultaneous thought and action” book — all through it, but particularly in that long lovely scene in which Peter Walsh moves about his hotel room preparing to go to the party and thinking about Clarissa. The technique is just as obvious as writing She felt X to express emotion, with parentheticals describing Peter’s actions as he thinks. But it works.

I wouldn’t usually describe a writer’s body of work as if it were a series of tutorials, but I do feel that way when reading Virginia Woolf; I learn some trick each time I read a piece of her fiction.

Which writers do you learn from that way?

I wish I had something to add to the current spate of debate about cultural appropriation — or, rather, I wish I had time to add something to the debate. This is the kind of issue that requires long periods of brow-furrowing thought before posting, however, and I’m using up all my brow-furrowing time this week on challenging packing issues like whether I should keep all my cd cases and where I’m possibly going to jam in that giant comforter. Regardless of whether you have time to contribute to the discussion or not, though, I recommend checking out the links listed here (and a more recent post here that isn’t included in that list) — and if you’re interested in academic explorations of the same issue, the list of theorists referenced in Oyceter‘s entry.

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Via Maud Newton: excerpts from letters by Edmund Wilson, Elena Wilson and Mary McCarthy about Lolita in manuscript.

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New winner for dvd with best deleted scenes EVER: Everything Is Illuminated.

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I’m putting my worldly goods into storage this week and going to Oregon for the summer, so I’ll apologize in advance if this blog lies fallow until next Thursday or so. I’ll be back and posting soon.

I thought I was done with the Opal Mehta issue, but this Times opinion piece by Whitney Otto, plus Malcolm Gladwell’s earlier but similarly-themed blog post, have got me a little annoyed. (Gladwell’s 2004 New Yorker article on plagiarism, on the other hand, is a wonderful nuanced read.) Both Otto and Gladwell say, essentially, that it’s no surprise that a genre writer too lazy-minded to come up with an original idea would also stoop to stealing sentence-level language. Gladwell, for example:

But once we have conceded that in genre fiction its [sic] okay to borrow themes, why do we get so upset when genre novelists borrow something a good deal less substantial—namely phrases and sentences? Surely an idea is more consequential than a sentence.

I won’t spend too much time whining, as Otto might say, about the dismissal of genre fiction in both pieces; Kelly Link refutes this point beautifully in her comment to Gladwell’s blog post. (Though I would be overjoyed never to have to read this sentence from Otto’s piece, or a variation on it, again: “At its best, genre writing can transcend its given genre.” Talk about predictable.) But I think the conflation of two different kinds of plagiarism is sloppy and disingenuous.

If Opal Mehta had merely been a book similar in plot, content, and overall tone to other chick-lit books, then it would have been derivative and perhaps unremarkable — but it wouldn’t have been recalled by its publisher. The problem with Opal Mehta is that it includes passages copied nearly word-for-word from previously published books. Specific books, with specific authors, who did, in fact, “write their own books,” whether or not those books are works of deathless prose. Just to restate: copying passages verbatim from other texts is not the same thing as borrowing ideas from other texts. It may be that Viswanathan did both, but it does not follow that someone who chooses to write in a marketable and conventional genre is therefore also a thief of ideas and language.

(And that’s leaving aside entirely the issue of derivative use and literary inspiration most recently discussed at Making Light.)

Also, Whitney Otto sure has some odd ideas about what writers are like:

Overachievers don’t generally become writers because the skill set is so different.

Has she heard of Joyce Carol Oates?