As Ray Charles said when he picked up the Passover matzah. . . .

[ellenkushner]

"Who reads this shit?"

OK, in the actual joke it's "Who wrote it?" - but that's not my punchline for this post. See, it's like this:

On Saturday we went to a new play at Vital about the loving relationship of two adult sisters, one of whom gets cancer, and the other has to decide whether or not to pursue her mid-life dream of being a Writer, which involves taking a grueling grad school degree from a Bigshot Writer. She works hard, even beating out the hipster guy who wins prizes for stories that essentially come down to "Will my protagonist get laid?" (which, having now read a ton of submissions to various places, I am here to tell you is what a shocking percentage are about. Yawn. But that's another post....) . . . and her reward, her big marker of success, is that her mentor recommends her stuff to a prestigious literary Little Magazine. Which, after many edits & revisions, publishes her story. I suspect only the dying sister reads it. Though possibly she dies first.

The next day, Guy Kay (an old pal from our mutual Struggling Writer days) sends me this from Harper's (read it and laugh so hard you'll snork. I particularly like "This sentence is short, not because it is brief—which it is—but because it has few words.") Very cheering. But.

So here's the thing: What made me - and most people I know - want to be writers is that we loved to read. We read a lot. We wanted to write the kinds of books we loved to read.

Schools are full of grad students whose highest goal seems to be getting published in small literary magazines with minute circulations. But have they actually read those magazines themselves first? Did they love reading them?

I'm probably being an idiot here, but I've already written the post, and it seems a waste of time to delete it now. Also, it gives me a chance to offer you the link to the Colson Whitehead piece.

Comments

HA!

[mildmannered.livejournal.com]

What a great post. I, too, was a writing student who dreamed of publishing my literary fiction in Story or Ploughshares or Glimmer Train -- until I realized that the only people who read Story or Ploughshares or Glimmer Train were people who dreamed of publishing their literary fiction in them. Feh. So I became a journalist and wrote for the masses, who responded by writing letters about how crappy my literary turns of phrase were. Now I write about science. Everyone loves reading about science.

Re: HA!

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

OK - but did you *love* reading those stories, then? (The mag in the play is called "Spindrift" - now I get it!)

Go, science!

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. Really fun to read.

It addresses one of my peeves with this: "In my literary criticism, I have become known as a champion of the eternal verities and a scold of the trendy and the fashionable."

There is always the trendy and fashionable in writing, the really cool, the hip, then there is good writing. The other implicit message is if one wants to write well, there is no substitute for reading great books; they tend to spoil one and make one dissatisfied, in a good way.

divine dissatisfaction

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Oh, well said! I feel the least like writing when I've been reading books I don't enjoy/respect. Instead of "I can do better than this!" (the traditional spur) it makes me think, "Oh, why bother? Nobody cares. It's not worth it."

Good books are good.

[rojomojo.livejournal.com]

Ray Charles and a Passover matzah??? hee hee hee, giggle.

The ability to be transported to another dimension by reading the well-written word is truly a gift received. The magick to write such words is creation, sharing in the Divine.

Honest.

I can still remember being a graduate student writing a critcism of Kant (yes, I actually did read The critique of Pure Reason) and realizing if I were to remain in the study tract I was in, I was going to die! slowly, agonizingly. It was so deadly and my graduate career ended soon after. It did not help my wife as well as early de Lint (in my opinion) now--then, not so much. and the best man at our wedding was and is a good poet. So I went with what I was good and gifted at, working with things.

Those who can write do it because they know what moves them and can create the emotional, physical and imtellectual tension with cadence and words in ways I can read, but not create.

and it is truly appreciated.

rojo

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Thank you for pointing to that. (I snorked.) I presume you're familiar with _The Pooh Perplex_?

[rosefox]

Now I have a craving for matzah.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

(snork!)

[scbutler.livejournal.com]

I think the real lesson of the essay is, if you didn't have a governess or tutor, then you never learned to read.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

A hard lesson, my friend....

[otherdeb.livejournal.com]

Gee, my mother, with whom I had a collection of over 8,000 books on all sorts of topics (including fiction of various sorts), would be so disappointed to learn that we didn't know how to read.

Seriously, I came to write because I wanted to tell stories. And, while I did read an issue of Glimmer Train once, to see what it was about, I have never aspired to being a "literary" writer. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's not a label one can successfully apply to oneself, but something that will be decided by the observation over centuries (perhaps), of how the writing resonates with readers over long periods of time.

[redbird]

Quite a few years ago, I had a coworker who was an aspiring writer. Specifically, she wanted to write fiction. I asked, as you do, what sort of things she liked to read.

She told me she didn't read fiction. I don't recall what, if anything, I managed to say in reply.

I now, much later, wonder whether she was suddenly embarrased to admit a fondness for westerns or fanfic or porn and couldn't think of an "appropriate" answer.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Innnnteresting..... You're probably right. Delia spoke recently to a class of very tough city high school kids. One of the biggest and meanest barked out that he only read horror. Really? she asked him. Which authors? and he couldn't name any.

Afterwards he came up to her in the hall and told her he really loved Romances.

[gaedhal.livejournal.com]

I had a student who aspired to be a writer, but couldn't
name the last book he had read, especially not the last
NOVEL he had read.

I suggested that a musician who never listened to music would
be considered insane. Or a baseball player who never watched
a baseball game. Or an actor who never, ever went to the
theater or saw a movie. Yet he wanted to do something that
he didn't do himself.

He thought I was a cranky bitch. Yes, I am!

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Me, too!

But you're a cranky bitch who happens to be *right*!

[innocentsmith.livejournal.com]

At my college graduation, I was standing in line with one of my fellow Creative Writing students and having one of those hey-sorry-we-never-got-to-talk conversations, and I asked him if he planned to continue writing and, by the way, who were his influences? (I was kind of trying to remember what his writing was like, since I was sure we'd been in workshop togeether but couldn't remember any of his stories.)

"Yeah, I probably will. But I don't have influences. Actually, I don't really like to read. S'too much work."

I stared at him for a bit, but he apparently wasn't kidding.

[innocentsmith.livejournal.com]

Hilarious essay is hilarious.

It's a kind of awkward admission to make in this context, but I'm actually in the process of applying to a Creative Writing MFA program, so I really ought to be able to answer this sort of question without squirming. And yet.

One of the issues, I think, is that most small literary magazines are difficult to read regularly unless you (a) spend a lot of time hanging out at the university library or a really good literary bookstore or (b) get a subscription. Or, of course, (c) they have an active presence online.

But w/r/t print-based magazines, I've very seldom had enough disposable income to be able to feel like multiple subscriptions to literary mags - enough of them to follow the market and follow new writers - were a good investment; I try to pick up (usually five-year-old) copies when I come across them in library sales, and sometimes buy an issue if I actually saw a name I recognized (happens more with poetry magazines than fiction).

But for the most part, when you can barely make rent, you tend to embrace the internet, and to only want to pay for novels and fiction you can live in happily for days, or collections by authors you already care about or who've been recommended to you by someone you trust, rather than take a chance on spending as much or more money and time reading several stories that you can't connect with. That's been my experience, anyway.

I don't know what the solution is, because obviously both the people publishing in lit magazines and the people who aren't reading them are missing out on some great cross-pollination. I'm just not sure everyone involved sees it that way.

...And I'm feeling very young and naive right now.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

On the contrary - you're being very clear about something I'm genuinely curious about, and it's really interesting and useful. It also makes me stupidly happy to know that you genuinely find things you like in those mags, and are not just a Tool of the MFA Machine - and I'm sure you speak for many.

Anyone good you can recommend? You especially rang my chimes with "cross-pollination," since that's what my beloved Interstitial Arts Foundation is all about. Thank you - and keep in touch!

[ophanim.livejournal.com]

My inner thirteen-year-old is still cackling about the labia of mediocrity.

[yaoi-in-exile.livejournal.com]

Now that's just silly! I didn't even know anything about all this fuss over magazine publishings before Alpha, when I learned the big deal at the end of the week was we were sending our stories off to mags. And then suddenly there was a revelation: oh, yes! There are stories in magazines, too! Books were always the end-all of literary fame, to my mind, even at a very young age. Novellas don't even really register, I have trouble distinguishing them from "very short books".

Bleeeghh. XD

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

I see. Maybe kind of like what "elswhere1" wrote about, below?

[lethe-lloyd.livejournal.com]

So here's the thing: What made me - and most people I know - want to be writers is that we loved to read. We read a lot. We wanted to write the kinds of books we loved to read.

It would be cheering to know in advance that people also want to read the books you are writing. Desperately.

I actually love wordsmiths who write luscious prose, but I've been told I am so unfashionable I should be in a museum. Ah, well. d;-)

May I ask - is this Guy Kay who wrote the Fionavar Tapestry and Tigana? I love his work, I have been trying to find people on my f-list who have read him. He's one of those writers whose books end up looking extremely ravished. Swordspoint is also on that ( rather small )shelf along with Tolkien and a couple of others.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's Guy Gavriel Kay; he's written many many big fat wonderful books! And we all love being ravished by our readers. No, really.

Have you read Dorothy Dunnett? Both Guy & I were very much influenced by her "Lymond" series.

[gerbilicous.livejournal.com]

Fabulous post!

I went to University for my degree in English, but I really went thinking "This will teach me how to write!" How stupid that was? I did learn a lot of very interesting things, like how I actually really like Milton, which I'd never thought I did, but for writing, it was such a bust.

What I did learn was that, if I wanted to be a writer, I wasn't going to learn how in my creative writing classes, which mostly focused on getting published in our school writing journal... which couldn't give away the five hundred copies it printed.

In the end, I graduated without honors and got a dumpy job where I could write at work. Wrote a few books, then wrote the one that knocked it out of the park. I've got a 3 book deal now writing books I love.

But the REAL happy ending is that, when I emailed my mentor in the English department to tell her the good news, she ran to tell the head of the department, and now I'm a distinguished alumna. Distinguished alumna, picture on the wall, and all for writing the same kind of stories that four years ago my Creative Writing teacher said I should chuck over for "serious fiction."

The world moves in funny ways, sometimes.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

I love that story. It is a wonderful story, and I am so glad for you!

And I so agree that one should study literature, not writing, in college. There is so much to learn! And stuff like Milton & Chaucer and even 19c folks can be hard to read without a Friendly Native Guide.

Write on your own time.

[elswhere1.livejournal.com]

I'm with innocentsmith on the small literary magazines: they are expensive to subscribe to, and hard to find, but back when I was reading them with some attention (10-15 years ago when I had Literary Fiction aspirations) I read several stories by authors I'd read elsewhere and loved; there were a few, whose authors I couldn't cite to save my life, that have stayed with me to this day.

So it's not so much that I didn't like the contents (I like some-- not all-- New Yorker stories, and lots of the Glimmer Train etc. ones were similar), but the magazines themselves aren't very accessible. Also (this might be just me) I don't like reading one short story after another; I'm not a big short story anthology reader, either, even in genres I adore.

The Literary Fiction career path was presented to me (back in those days) as just that: a career path. You don't submit to Glimmer Train because you grew up loving Glimmer Train; you submit to Glimmer Train in hopes of getting an impressive publication credit so as to get an agent when you want to sell your novel. It's not the ultimate goal, but it's the first step.

It's not that different than other career paths, writing-related or otherwise: you aspire to be like the people you admire, but you don't always get that gig, especially not at first. How many would-be NYT journalists find themselves writing for some mid-level, small-city paper that they never would've been caught dead reading, or maybe never even heard of, back in their youth? How many young people, inspired to get into politics by, say, a certain brand-new president, will put in a good many years on city council, dealing with the mundanities of zoning laws that hardly anyone thinks about? Etc.

For me, it all started to feel exhausting; the odds and the glacial pace and the lack of feedback got to me and I didn't have the stamina. And I agree that the whole scene can be quite...precious, I guess would be the word. But in its who-reads (sees, notices, has ever heard of)-this-stuff-ness, it's hardly unique.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Well, you may not have been up for the path of Literary Fiction, but I gotta say, as an essayist/memoirist, none can excel! Thanks for a very clear and clear-sighted explanation. As always, coz.

[xmurphyjacobsx.livejournal.com]

Good gravy, but this is the debate I've wrestled with for the last 12 years as I waffle between wanting that MFA/LitFic career and just wanting to write because telling stories to an audience is my lifelong dream.

Could it be the LitFic career path, littered with those magazines few read, is just a shadow of the past? Once upon a time, many magazines published short fiction and that's how much of the population got their fiction fixes. It's not true anymore. Most magazines publish very little fiction. Short fiction isn't how most people GET their fiction fix. I'm not sure what the answer actually is, but I'd say the current situation ain't it. Like so much of publishing, it's clinging to past times.

I had a professor who recommended to us, instead of running down all the "little" magazines, picking up the current year's "America's Best Short Stories" to check the list of magazines in the back, and to submit only to those magazines. Why? Because we wanted our stories reviewed by the book's editors, so why submit to something those editors would not look at?

I'm going to go eat some cookies and think about my novel now.

[bondgwendabond.livejournal.com]

The Colson Whitehead piece is specifically digging at James Wood, isn't it? I thought it was hilarious.