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.

[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.

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!

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

Re: HA!

[mildmannered.livejournal.com]

Of course not. I read them because I wanted to find out what kind of writing was "good" enough to publish.

It seemed to me that if I didn't have any characterization or description and ended the story before anything happened, I was doing pretty good.

The stories I *love* reading are sometimes litfic, but just as often nonfiction, genre fiction, and that peculiar beast, lit genre fiction.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

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

Re: HA!

[mildmannered.livejournal.com]

Oh, and another thing: I remember sitting in on a literature class where the professor began this way: "What originally drew you to literature? It was the problematics of the text." I got up and walked out at about that point. I'd love to hear what Fflewddur Flam would have had to say about the problematics of a text.

Re: divine dissatisfaction

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

"I can do better than this!" (the traditional spur) it makes me think, "Oh, why bother? Nobody cares. It's not worth it."

You made me laugh. I react slightly differently. I tend to think: "Almost anybody could do better than this and this got published. Why bother."

Re: divine dissatisfaction

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Are we so far apart?

[rosefox]

Now I have a craving for matzah.

Re: HA!

[rosefox]

A Fflam is a man of action! A Fflam never contextualizes!

[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....

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

(snork!)

Re: HA!

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

...

*mad love for you at this very moment*

Re: HA!

[rosefox]

*bow* *grin*

I knew writing all that Prydain fanfic for Yuletide would come in handy someday!

[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.

[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!

[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.

[ophanim.livejournal.com]

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

Re: HA!

[yaoi-in-exile.livejournal.com]

**SPROING**

So much love for you! >D

[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!

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Me, too!

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