Revolutionary Road: The Art of Dialogue

I seldom come across perfect novels. I've read good novels, even great ones, but there is something about perfection that is different from great novel writing. It's simply the quality of having reached the pinnacle of what a novel is all about: the human experience, unhampered by the conventions of literature.

Richard Yates' novel, Revolutionary Road, is a perfect novel. It doesn't have an action-packed plot, filled with twists and turns. Actually, nothing of note happens until nearly the end of the book. (And then it's a doozy!) The setting is mundane, a suburb in the 1950s. The characters are people who aren't particularly passionate, or driven, or even admirable. But Yates' goal in this book is not to develop characters of intellectual or emotional depth. In fact, it's quite the reverse; His aim is to excoriate post-war suburban life, in all its shallowness, it's "hopeless emptiness," and with all its failures.

According to writers of the era, Richard Yates exemplified the "Age of Anxiety"—the 20th century morass of "world wars, hatred, and collective neurosis"—which he somehow manages to capture without directly addressing any of the themes of the era. Yates was greatly admired by Styron and Vonnegut as the voice of their generation. And then Yates died and was forgotten. None of his books sold more than 12,000 copies during his lifetime.

I can't imagine why. 

Revolutionary Road is brilliant. The prose is so accessible you don't realize you're reading. The descriptions are evocative without descending into self-conscious lyricism. (A fallen stage curtain "that became a dull wall of green velvet, faded and streaked with dust" precisely conveys the dismal failure of a play's performance without using a single word that cries for attention.) And his characters are real; so believable that you'd swear you knew them.

As I was reading Revolutionary Road, I couldn't help asking myself: "How is he doing this?" How did Yates establish his characters so firmly, so realistically? The answer to that question lies in the fact that Yates is a master of, as one reviewer put it, "terrifyingly accurate" dialogue. Yates deftly establishes who his characters are through speech. 

What Yates successfully pulls off in his dialogue is natural-sounding speech, with all its stress patterns, rhythms, and repetitions, but without the tediousness of actual speech. Yates has a finely tuned ear, He individualizes the speech patterns of each of his characters, so you know who they are by how they sound. You hear them so clearly, it feels as if you are eavesdropping. Then he takes it one step further, letting us in on the thought processes of these characters—how they sound to themselves as they weigh what they want to say, or what they don't want to say, and their reflections on how they speak.

Does that sound boring? It isn't. It's tense, and it is frighteningly realistic, because we already know who these characters are. Not only have we met them, we may even have been some of them. 

How many couples have arguments that devolve into "You always do that..." "There you go again..." "You know how you get..."? How many couples descend into deception to cover transgression? How many weave a web of words around what they should be saying to one another, but can't? Speech is everything in this book. (When you get to the last line, that will be made crystal clear. I was left breathless.)

We don't necessarily like Yates' characters in Revolutionary Road, but I think that may have been the point. The way he delves into their inner and outer lives—with such finesse, and such detail—we can't help but identify with them. We can sympathize with them without expending the emotional effort of needing to see them in a positive light, because they are undeniably human.

As writers, it would do us good to read Revolutionary Road. This book is not only an example of how to artfully, yet without any seeming effort, establish characters through dialogue, it serves as an example of how to create transparency through using language that cuts to the heart of description without drawing attention to itself. Despite its unpretentious delivery, or, more likely, because of it, that kind of language packs a wallop. 

Read this book, writers, and then read it again. It contains a lesson worth learning: Don't let your writing get in the way of what you want to say. 

Susanna Clarke: Breaking the Rules

In keeping with my new year's resolution, I am reading as a writer, dissecting as I go. I confess that my resolution is difficult to keep. It is nearly impossible to analyze what I am reading while I am enthralled in a novel. 

But what are resolutions for, if not to be broken almost immediately?

Still, in an effort to be true to my word, I have turned my writerly eye on Susanna Clarke. Clarke gained fame for her masterful Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a work which took her ten years to write. It was later made into an equally masterful series, which I have watched four times. (Maybe five ... I've lost count.) Rather than tackling Clarke's work with her most famous novel, I began with her second novel, Piranesi, which was published last year, sixteen years after Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Clarke takes her time producing a novel, and there is a good reason for that. Her intellect, and the sheer meticulousness with which she constructs a novel, is daunting. I honestly don't know how she holds it all in her head.

Clarke breaks ALL the rules.

By this, I mean the writing rules that I personally adhere to. (I ignore everyone else's rules.) My number one writing rule is: Situate the reader. Right at the beginning, make readers aware of when and where they are, and who the narrator is. Apparently, Clarke has not heard about my rule. Not only does Clarke leave us totally in the dark for a significant portion of the book as to when, and especially where, we are, we actually don't know who (in the conventional sense) is telling the story until it is nearly at its conclusion. I was so disoriented, that I nearly put the book down. And then it grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let go. Because not knowing was intoxicating.

Rather than situate the reader, Clarke plops us into the head of the person telling the story. It is told in first person, so that is relatively easy. But what is so unusual about Clarke's approach is that you, the reader, have no idea what is going on, because the narrator has no idea what is going on. The only way Clarke could pull this off successfully is with a brilliant control of a highly unusual voice. Everything that would normally be accomplished with plot, with back story, with exposition, with dialogue, with description (or at least descriptions that we can understand), is conveyed through voice, and with the dizzying, surreal quality than only a distinctive, atypical manner of expression can produce. 

Indeed, the voice is so unusual, and yet so familiar, that it was hard to place. It could have been from the 19th century, or the far future, or of a child, or an adult with an innocence verging on brain damage. This confabulation of a confusing, strange, incomprehensible environment with an ingenuous, almost A. A. Milne-like voice created a completely incongruent, yet engrossing atmosphere, as if we had been plunged into the ocean without warning. What increases this sense of being absorbed is that fact that the entire book is written as journal entries, except for a scant ten pages written in straightforward prose that occur three-quarters of the way through the book. (I confess those ten pages were a relief. Situating the reader when the book is well past the halfway mark made that sense of relief palpable.) 

In short, Clarke breaks pretty much every literary convention for how to write a novel. And the result is a work that spins a mystery so captivating that it is nearly impossible to break away from once you get caught up in it. Every clue begs you to read on, like bread crumbs leading you through a dense forest. That is something I would like to master, myself. But there is no way I could produce anything as tightly woven as Piranesi. Nevertheless, I did learn something valuable as a writer: More than anything else, a skillful use of voice conveys a mood, a context for all the events that happen along the way. Frank Herbert tells us that story is everything. But a story that does not have voice is merely a catalogue of events. In Piranesi, Clarke has demonstrated that simply through a meticulous control of voice a story can be told vividly, and with all the page-turning quality of an action-packed thriller. Can I do what Clarke did? The answer is a decisive no. But I will surely pay more attention to how my characters sound in everything I write from now on.

Not everyone is of like mind on this point. Author Catherine Baab-Muguira completely disagrees with me. In her article, Find Your Topic, Not Your Voice, she argues that topic is more important. She says that her own writing breakthrough, the one that got her a book deal after a dozen years of trying, came from focusing on topic ahead of voice. (I am tempted to make the rather snide observation that publishers always look for a storyline first, and that they rarely give a hoot about literary voice.) 

Writers can argue incessantly about what is most important in a novel: story, voice, metaphor, topic. But the truth is that the only thing that really matters is the skill of the writer. A writer with sufficient skill, combined with that indefinable quality called talent, can pull anything off. And that is the only real rule of writing: You can do anything, provided you can pull it off. Susanna Clarke certainly can.

***

Post script: After I finished reading Piranesi, I decided to look up what that name referred to. The narrator says from the start that he is fairly certain it is not his own name. It has been given to him as a joke by the only other living person in his world. His own name and in fact his entire identity have been forgotten. Clarke does not tell us what that joke is. I only figured out the punchline when I gazed at the fantastical 18th-century etchings of imaginary prisons by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. If you read Clarke's book, you'll get the joke ... and the metaphor.

Post post script: Clarke has deservedly won the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction for Piranesi. Clarke said that her work was slowed by illness, as she struggled with chronic fatigue syndrome. Kudos to you Susanna Clarke! 

My book saved someone's life

Five years ago, I self-published the second edition of a book I’d originally written with my friend and associate Lauren Gellman in 1998. The first edition, which was published by St. Martin’s Press, was out of print, and I didn’t want to go through the long, grueling process of finding an agent and publisher again. So I went ahead and published an electronic second edition on Amazon.

After a few months of promotion, during which I gave away more than 15,000 copies, I turned my attention to other projects. I stopped reading the reviews on Amazon — until yesterday, when for some undefinable reason I decided to see if anything new had popped up.

The book is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Treatment Guide, 2nd Edition. At the time of its first release in 1998, there were no other books on the market focusing on treatments for the disease, which is not only difficult to treat, but permanently disables about a quarter of the people who contract it. (In the late 90s, the press was still calling it “yuppie flu.” It is properly called myalgic encephalomyelitis.) The book was groundbreaking. But only 5,000 copies were sold. The book’s release was, as a British friend of mine put it, “Silent as a pee in bath.”

The second edition was about twice as long as the first. (One reason I published the second edition as an ebook was that nobody would have been able to afford, let alone lift, a 750-page book.) I put a year of work into it, which I chalked up as a “labor of love” — something that was a noble effort, if ultimately unacknowledged.

All of that changed yesterday. Below is the review I found of my book. I don’t know this person. I will never meet this person. But my heart was torn when I read this review on Amazon.

They say that if you reach even one person, it makes writing worthwhile. In this instance nothing could be more true. Someone Astonishing, I did it all for you.

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I Wanted To Die.

By Someone Astonishing on January 4, 2017

I’m wiped out. That’s how I feel right now. And pretty much most of the time . . . for the past 26 years. I had toyed with the notion that my malady might be Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but I already had so many weird, random, all-in-my-head symptoms, that I hated to bring it up and sound like even more of a hypochondriac to my doctor. Admittedly, I used to be more assertive and push for doctors to hear me: there was more wrong with me than a constant string of random, unprovable, seemingly-unrelated symptoms. But, I always came away with a psych referral — not a diagnosis. So, I grew leery of bringing up more than the manifesting symptoms. But, I’ve been with my doctor for ten years; if I was really sick with CFS, wouldn’t she have realized it? She already diagnosed me with fibromyalgia years ago (often a dual diagnosis). Wouldn’t she have caught on? After all, I constantly complain of fatigue and malaise, as well as all the other hallmarks. Well, the answer is a resounding NO. The medical community cannot be counted on to recognize or even believe CFS exists.

So, I struggled with the brain fog and read this book to try to help myself. All of my “imaginary” symptoms? Every one of them is described in this book. Here were my decades of misery and depression laid bare. I was now able to put together a clear picture of my illness and present it to my doctor. She heard me out and actually agreed with my diagnosis. And, although there’s nothing more we can do than treat the symptoms as we have been, I feel better. No, wait, I don’t feel better. But, I do feel free.

I no longer doubt myself. I don’t question if my symptoms are real. I don’t blame myself or fitness level when I’m out of breath and can’t do things. I’m not constantly pushing myself, trying to do everything like “normal” people can (and like I thought I should). I no longer work myself to the point that it takes 4 days to recover from 1 afternoon. I’ve accepted my limits and am making sure that those closest to me accept them, too. For decades, I was ruthlessly mean to myself for being lazy or overweight or out of shape. Everything was a failure on my part.

I’ve been miserable; I was beyond depressed. This book literally — and I do mean literally — saved my life. I couldn’t have forced myself to go on much longer. Yes, I am saying that I would definitely have been a suicide statistic. But, I gained power from reading: power to name my tormentor, power to stop blaming myself and power to find some inner peace.

Now, I follow the stellar advice, found here, of planning what I intend to accomplish each day and then do 75% of it. This remarkably simple tip has helped me reshape my life. I make it through my day unfrazzled, and still have something left for tomorrow. My experience with this book has been wonderful. I wholeheartedly recommend this work to anyone wondering if they might have CFS or to those just wanting to gain a better understanding of the syndrome. It’s an extremely thorough and well-written treatment of the subject.

Now, I thank you for reading my story, but I really am worn out and my shoulders are killing, but my attitude is soaring like it hasn’t in . . . forever. Time for a rest, friends.

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Epilogue: I thought my work was over when I published my book, but since then it has only expanded. Someone Astonishing, like so many others, has nowhere to turn for help. One book was not enough, so I founded a national non-profit, the American Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Society (AMMES.org). Its aim is to help patients find knowledgeable physicians, effective treatments, support, and practical assistance. There is hope.

15 Famous Authors Who Were Published After 40

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Mark Twain, JRR Tolkein, and George Eliot

The drive to be successful while still in the first blush of youth may be appropriate for dancers, athletes, and models, but it does not apply to the contemplative arts. Writers who publish in their 20s may be jumping the gun, with too little life experience to back them up for the long haul.

This is not to say that writers in their 20s can't have talent. They obviously do. But creating a novel demands not just talent, but discipline, and a certain amount of...how shall I put it...cynicism.

So, dear younger writers, and dear older ones, take heart if you haven't published your novel and are now gazing at the looming age of 40 with dread (or looking back on it with nostalgia). Here is a list of fifteen famous authors who were published after the age of 40.

(Just for the record, while I can't claim fame, my first novel was published by Random House when I was 50.)

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1. Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, published her first novel, Adam Bede, at age 40. It was an instant success and Eliot went on to write six more novels.

2. William S. Burroughs' first book, Junky, was published in 1953, when Burroughs was 40. Naked Lunch appeared six years later.

3. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen-name, Mark Twain, published his first novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, when he was 41.

4. Marcel Proust didn’t publish the first volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu until he was 43. He paid for the publishing costs himself after the manuscript was rejected by the publishing house where Andre Gide was editor-in-chief.

5. Henry Miller's first book, Tropic of Cancer, was published when he was 44. The book had to be published in France, because it was too risque for the American market.

6. J. R. R. Tolkien's first novel, The Hobbit, was published when he was 45 years old. For the next ten years he worked on his trilogy, Lord of the Rings, only to encounter snags with his publisher when he had finished it. Lord of the Rings was published over the years 1954 and 1955, by which time he was 63.

7. Tony Hillerman published The Blessing Way when he was 45. His agent, Ann Elmo, famously told Hillerman to "Get rid of the Indian stuff."

8. Bram Stoker published his first novel, The Snake's Pass, when he was 43. He published Dracula when he was 50.

9. Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published when he was 44. Roots, his second book, came out eleven years later, when he was 55.

10. Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939, when he was 51.

11. Richard Adams published Watership Down at age 52. It was an instant classic

12. Annie Proulx, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, didn't publish her first novel, Postcards, until she was 57. The Shipping News was published a year later.

13. Daniel Defoe published his debut novel, Robinson Crusoe, at age 59.

14. Laura Ingalls Wilder published the first book in her "Little House" series, Little House in the Big Woods, in 1932, when she was 65 years old. She finished her last book when she was 76.

15. Frank McCourt's memoir, Angela's Ashes, came out when he was 66.

Boo-tiful Literary Pumpkins

Happy Hallowe'en! Here are my favorite literary pumpkins to celebrate the day in fine fashion!

Quoth the pumpkin, nevermore!

"As a squash is before 'tis a peascod..."

"The pumpkin is the only esculent of the orange family that will thrive in the North, except the gourd and one or two varieties of the squash. But the custom of planting it in the front yard with the shrubbery is fast going out of vogue, for it is now generally conceded that the pumpkin, as a shade tree, is a failure."

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good pumpkin, must be intolerably stupid.

Where the Wild Pumpkins Are

Gone with the Gourd

Harry Potter and the Cursed Pumpkin

Write drunk, edit squashed

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gourd

Terrible Early Reviews of Ten 20th-Century Classics

I enjoy reading bad reviews of great novels — almost as much as I enjoy getting them. (See what I did there?)

It comforts me to know that if a book of mine is called “lugubrious,” I will be keeping company with Aldous Huxley. (Unlike Brave New World, not one of my books has been called “lugubrious,” or even “nauseating,” but this is probably due to an avoidance of polysyllabic adjectives on the part of contemporary reviewers.)

These books were panned primarily because they broke new ground. Innovative writing and unconventional concepts are rarely well received in the short run. (Also honest portrayals of sex, war, racism and other social ills are generally shunned, at least initially.) However, in the long run, these books have stood the test of time, and are now considered classics.

All of these books are on the 100 Best Novels Written in English list.

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The Great Gatsby

Although The Great Gatsby earned F. Scott Fitzgerald a mere $13 in royalties, The Great Gatsby has been widely hailed as “The Great American Novel.” It was panned by H. L. Mencken in the Chicago Tribune as “no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that.” Mencken went on to say that the story was “unimportant” and that aside from Gatsby, the characters were “marionettes.”

The New York Evening World called the book “a valiant effort to be ironical,” but “his style is painfully forced.” The daytime version of the paper ran a headline that called Gatsby “a dud.”

Ralph Coghlan, of the St. Louis Dispatch, wrote: "Altogether is seems to us this book is a minor performance. At the moment, its author seems a bit bored and tired and cynical. There is no ebullience here, nor is there any mellowness or profundity. For our part, The Great Gatsby might just as well be called Ten Nights on Long Island."

In 2013, The Great Gatsby was made into a movie featuring Leonardo DiCaprio. (The book was better.)

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley’s biting vision of the future (now officially the present) has become an iconic dystopian novel. Huxley brought us Fordism, The World State, and Soma. When it was published in 1932, the book was not well received.

H.G. Wells, regarded as the father of science fiction, wrote that “A writer of the standing of Aldous Huxley has no right to betray the future as he did in that book.”

Wyndham Lewis called it “an unforgivable offence to Progress.” Equally disgusted by Huxley’s portrayal of a world controlled by a global capitalist economy, Gerald Bullett concluded that “As prophecy it is merely fantastic.” (If Gerald Bullett were still alive, he would be eating those words.) And not to be bested by other critics, the New York Herald Tribune called Brave New World “A lugubrious and heavy-handed piece of propaganda.”

Brave New World sold only a few thousand copies upon its release in the U.S. It was banned in Ireland when it first appeared, and it still appears on the The American Library Association's most banned list.

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison’s powerful novel about the experience of Black Americans won the National Book Award in 1953, and has since been eulogized as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Nevertheless, Atlantic Monthly thought it suffered from “occasional overwriting, stretches of fuzzy thinking, and a tendency to waver, confusingly, between realism and surrealism.”

Irving Howe, of The Nation, wrote in 1952 that "The tempo of his book is too feverish, and at times almost hysterical. Too often he tries to overwhelm the reader; but when he should be doing something other then overwhelm, when he should be persuading or suggesting or simply telling, he forces and tears."

"Equally disturbing," Howe writes, "is Ellison's apparent wish to be intellectually up-to-date. As his hero quits the Communist Party, he wonders: "Could politics ever be an expression of love?" Howe called this question meaningless, and yet fifty-five years later, during the historic Women's March on January 21, we saw Ellison's question being taken quite seriously by several million people.

Catch-22

War is pointless, and nobody portrayed that better than Joseph Heller, whose satire, Catch-22, has become so much a part of our national culture that it appears as a lexical item in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The book was rejected by publishers as “really not funny on any intellectual level.”

When it was finally released, The New Yorker had nothing good to say about it. It “doesn’t even seem to be written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper … what remains is a debris of sour jokes.” The New York Times called it “repetitive and monotonous … none of its many interesting characters and actions is given enough play to become a controlling interest.”

Since its release, Catch 22 has sold over 10 million copies.

Lolita

No list of chilly receptions would be complete without Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

Publishers, who found Lolita “overwhelmingly nauseating,” recommended that it be “buried under a stone for a thousand years.” Its reception upon publication was not much better.

The New York Times pronounced it “not worth any adult reader’s attention … dull, dull, dull … repulsive” and nothing more than “highbrow pornography.”


Lolita is among the top ten most banned books. French officials banned it for being “obscene,” as did England, Argentina, New Zealand and South Africa. It is quite possible that the book's early success in the United States owes something to the global publicity generated by those ill-considered acts of censorship.

Lord of the Flies

We’ve all read Lord of the Flies because it has been included in High School English curricula for more than 40 years. (I read it in High School, and I taught it when I became a High School teacher.)

William Golding’s indictment of war (that’s what this book is about) has certainly stood the test of time.

Lord of the Flies, rejected by publishers as “an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull,” received a less-than-glowing reception from The New Yorker, which found it “completely unpleasant.”

The American Library Association lists Lord of the Flies as eighth on its most challenged list. Interestingly, Lolita fares better at eleventh.

Tropic of Cancer

Arthur Miller’s candid look at sexuality had to be published in France, because it was too risque for the American market. The United States Customs Service even banned the book from being imported into the U.S.

When Grove Press finally published the book nearly 30 years later, over 60 obscenity lawsuits in over 21 states were brought against booksellers that sold it. Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Michael Musmanno wrote that it was “not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.” In kinder and gentler terms, Time magazine described Miller as “a gadfly with delusions of grandeur.”

The New Republic was equally dismissive: "This book belongs, modestly but securely, in the American tradition of profundity-through-deliberate-simplicities ... Miller stands under his Paris street-lamp, defiantly but genially drunk, trolling his catch mixed of beauty and banality and recurrent bawdry-a little pathetic because he thinks he is a discoverer and doesn't realize that he is only a tourist on a well-marked tour."

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway’s novel about the Lost Generation was initially rejected by publishers as “tedious and offensive.” But the harshest criticism came from his mother, who wrote: “What is the matter? Have you ceased to be interested in loyalty, nobility, honor and fineness in life … surely you have other words in your vocabulary besides ‘damn’ and ‘bitch’ — Every page fills me with a sick loathing — if I should pick up a book by any other writer with such words in it, I should read no more — but pitch it in the fire.”

Time found the book less than impressive. "[Hemingway’s] interests," it wrote, "appear to have grown soggy from too much sitting in cafes in the Latin quarter of Paris." The Chicago Daily Tribune described the novel as a "bushel of sensationalism and triviality." The Springfield Republican said that the novel’s "extreme moral sordidness at such length defeats artistic purpose."

Native Son

Richard Wright’s book about a young African-American man living in utter poverty on Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s was an instant bestseller. In keeping with other books that realistically treat uncomfortable social themes, it has been banned numerous times from schools and libraries.

Despite its popularity, Native Son was not universally well received. New Statesman found the book to be “unimpressive and silly, not even as much fun as a thriller.”

Baldwin called Native Son a “pamphlet in literary disguise,” exaggerating characters with the sole purpose of carrying his message. Wright failed, according to Baldwin, because of his “insistence that it is … categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”

Ayana Mathis of The New York Times wrote, “I don’t imagine many black people would have embraced such a grotesque portrait of themselves. … What future, what vision is reflected in such a miserable and incompletely realized creature?”

An American Tragedy

Theodore Dreiser’s fictionalized account of a notorious 1906 murder has been adapted for theater, screen, radio, opera, and has even been transformed into a musical.

When the novel was first published in 1925, it met with the disapproval of the Boston Evening Telegraph, which called its main character, Clyde Griffiths, “one of the most despicable creations of humanity that ever emerged from a novelist’s brain.” Dreiser came under attack as an author whose style was “offensively colloquial, commonplace and vulgar.”

H. L, Mencken, never one to mince words, called An American Tragedy, "a shapeless and forbidding monster . . . a vast, sloppy, chaotic thing of 385,000 words -- at least 250,000 of them unnecessary!"

Ouch.

How Long Does It Take to Write a Book?

If you have set out to write a novel, a memoir, or a non-fiction book, the question "How long will this take?" almost inevitably arises - especially if you have been at it for a few months.

That question is not easily answered, because it depends entirely on what you are writing. Some projects require months of research, others only need that special "Aha!" moment when a story somehow inserts itself in the mind of the unsuspecting writer.

Now that I've claimed the question can't be answered, I am going to answer it in a most unsatisfactory manner: Like childbirth, writing a book takes as long as it takes. If you are on a manic roll, it can take a couple of months. (One of my novels took only a few weeks to write. At 90,000 words, it was an exhilarating and exhausting experience.) If you are grappling with the text, writing your book can take decades. (It has taken me twenty years, so far, to finish another one of my novels. It is only 55,000 words, so I have no idea why this book is proving so stubborn.)

If you are stuck on a project, putting it down for a while can be enormously helpful. You may find that your unconscious continues to work on it, even when you are not writing. Working on other projects is also quite helpful. I usually write two books at once. That way, when I hit a snag with one, I can simply switch off to the other.

Writing in another genre is extremely liberating. If you are a novelist, write nonfiction. If you write long form, write a short story. Write a screenplay if you have never written one. By stretching yourself in different directions, whatever roadblock preventing you from finishing your book will be removed.

The important thing is to keep writing. Write anything. It is not important what you write, it is only important that you write.

Here are some famous books whose writers either took their time, or dashed them off in a rush. As you can see, how long it took to write these books has little to do with their quality.

At one end of the spectrum, John Boyne said that he wrote the entire first draft of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in two and a half days, barely sleeping until he finished it. At 44,800 words, that amounts to 747 words an hour. It's quite possible to dash off 700 words for a few hours - that is how many of us write our short stories - but sustaining that kind of output for days is hard to imagine.

Other books on the short end of the scale include: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (6 days), A Clockwork Orange (3 weeks), A Study in Scarlet (3 weeks), A Christmas Carol (6 weeks), and As I lay Dying (6 weeks).

At the far end of the spectrum is J. R. R. Tolkien, who took 16 years to complete the Lord of the Rings. At 455,000 words, that amounts to 28,000 words a year, roughly the length of a novella.

Les Miserables took Victor Hugo 12 years to write, Catcher in the Rye and Gone with the Wind each took ten years, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone took five.

Realistically, your book should fall somewhere between Boyne's and Tolkien's.

Terry, we'll miss you: Quotes, Quips, and Courage

Terry Pratchett, April 2, 1948 – March 12, 2015

Terry Pratchett is dead at the age of 66. He produced 60 books, and was the fourth most read author in the UK (seventh in the US).

But even with his long career, (celebrated with a knighthood), Terry Pratchett did not produce enough. His dry wit, sharp observations, and unerring eye for the ludicrous were qualities that made his work addictive. No matter how many books he wrote, we would never be satisfied. It is all the more tragic that he was taken before his time.

The last few years of Terry Pratchett's life were marred by the decline brought on by a rare form of Alzheimer's disease, posterior cortical atrophy (PCA). He could no longer read, although he still wrote. He could not speak in public, but had to rely on others to speak for him. His brain fooled him time and again. Yet, he had the inner strength of a writer for whom Death always figured as a prominent character. Terry Pratchett was a man who did not shy away from the inevitable, no matter how tragic.

After being diagnosed in 2007 at the age of 59, Terry Pratchett donated a million dollars to Alzheimer's research in the UK. In this speech (below), "Shaking Hands With Death" (read by his "stunt Pratchett," Tony Robinson) he talks about his diagnosis, how he came to the decision to "come out," and why shaking hands with death (assisted dying) is something whose idea has come.

Death is a taboo topic in the United States. We like to believe that by eating the right food, exercising regularly, and avoiding EMFs we will live forever. (Though, I have yet to meet an immortal, American or otherwise.) As always, Terry Pratchett, makes us face reality. "I enjoy my life," he says. "I wish to continue it for as long as I am myself, knowing who I am, recognizing my nearest and dearest. But I have my appointment with Samarra."

“DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.” ― Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.” ― from Small Gods

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” ― from Diggers

"The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues." —from Moving Pictures

"Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." —from Hogfather

"I’d rather be a rising ape than a falling angel." —from the Guardian Book Club

"It’s not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren’t doing it." —from the foreword to The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy, by David Pringle

"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."

"Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can."

"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it." – from Monstrous Regiment

"It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done." – from A Hat Full of Sky

"There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this."

"The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks."

"If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story." – from The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

"The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head."

"Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to."–from Snuff

"I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible."

"So much universe, and so little time."

RIP Terry Pratchett

Saul Bellow: Saying what you damn well please

Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005) was one of our most renowned American writers. He won the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts, and he is the only writer to have won the National Book Award for Fiction three times.

In spite of all the accolades Bellow received during his lifetime (and after) Bellow thought of himself as a "working stiff."

"Celebrity interferes with the business of writing," he said. "But it gives you a certain amount of confidence. Before, I said anything I damn pleased, and I did it defiantly. Now, I say anything I damn please, but I do it with confidence."

Bellow was not afraid to say what he pleased, at any time. Like Churchill, he stated at a PEN conference that ours was the worst form of government, except for all the others. And, he "had a fight on his hands." But Bellow was not one to back down, nor was he one to remain neutral about what he created.

"You must like what you are doing very much. Either like your characters or hate them, you can't be indifferent."

On writing:

"When you write the first few lines of a story, those govern all the rest - like a musical signature."

"Your own natural, original voice provides the engine for your writing."

"The Bible says, 'Woe unto you when all men speak well of you.' That's where the critics come in."

"The most pleasurable moments in writing are when you are either laughing or weeping, and scribbling at the same time. That's what one lives for in this trade."

And on having his book, Seize the Day, made into a movie, he said. "I haven't seen the film so I can't recommend it. But, I've read the book, and it's very good."

Writing Advice from Frank Herbert: Concentrate on story

I agree completely with Frank Herbert (whose ground-breaking book Dune was rejected by publishers 20 times, by the way.)

Story is everything.

Though Herbert is giving this advice to beginners, it is something published writers need to keep in mind as well, especially as they launch into experimental forms. Stories need to have a beginning, a middle and an end - although not necessarily in chronological order.

And, like Ray Bradbury, Herbert believed that metaphor lay at the heart of a novel.

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Writing advice from Frank Herbert, originally published in WotF Vol 2:

The single most important piece of advice I ever got was to concentrate on story. What is “story”? It’s the quality that keeps the reader following the narrative. A good story makes interesting things happen to a character with whom the reader can identify. And it keeps them happening, so that the character progresses and grows in stature.

A writer’s job is to do whatever is necessary to make the reader want to read the next line. That’s what you’re supposed to be thinking about when you're writing a story. Don’t think about money, don’t think about success; concentrate on the story—don’t waste your energy on anything else. That all takes care of itself, if you’ve done your job as a writer. If you haven’t done that, nothing helps.

I first heard this from literary agent Lurton Blassingame, a highly respected expert on successful storytellers and storytelling. He’s a man who’s been watching writers’ careers and building writers’ for decades. And I have heard essentially the same thing from many other successful figures in writing; some of the top writers in the world have said it. It is the best advice I can give beginners.”

—Frank Herbert

Maya Angelou, Poet, Dead at Age 86

Author, poet, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou died at age 86 at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina last Wednesday. Angelou had been frail and suffering from heart problems, according to her agent.

Angelou's contributions to the literary world are legion. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years.

Maya Angelou (Marguerite Ann Johnson) was born on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou attended high school in San Francisco, where she studied dance and drama. At the age of 14, she dropped out of school and became the city's first African-American, female street car conductor. She later graduated and soon after gave birth to her son, Guy. As a young woman she worked as a cook, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, cast-member of the opera Porgy and Bess.

Angelou's most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, tells of the life of Marguerite Ann Johnson up to the age of 16. Abandoned by her parents and raped at the age of 7 by her mother's boyfriend, she was homeless and became a teen mother. The book, which has been banned many times, has become a mainstay of student reading lists.

Although referred to as Dr. Angelou, she never went to college. But she had more than 30 honorary degrees and taught American Studies for years at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. She also spoke six languages, and worked as a newspaper editor in Egypt and Ghana.

Maya Angelou will be remembered for her stunning poetry, and for her words of inspiration, which will provide a source of inner strength and courage for generations to come.

Famous Authors Who Disowned Their Own Books

Why do authors reject their own books? In the case of Stephen King's Carrie, he got frustrated writing it, and thought it was no good. Bad reviews are another source of rejection. But in nearly all cases, it's because the books did not meet the author's own expectations. Writers are their own harshest critics.

(Of course, I expected that Kafka would have ordered all of his works to be burned - that is sooo Kafka-esque - but Ian Fleming?)
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Examples taken from: 13 Writers Who Grew to Hate Their Own Books by Emily Temple

10 Great Authors Who Disowned Their Own Books by Madeleine Monson-Rosen and Charlie Jane Anders

1) Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me

Fleming wrote this novel, in which James Bond is basically a secondary character, in an attempt to caution his readers against making Bond into too much of a hero. Fleming said he wanted to make Bond's misogyny apparent after being shocked to discover that his Bond novels were being taught in schools.

This "experiment," Fleming wrote to his publisher after the book received overwhelmingly negative reviews, had "obviously gone very much awry," and Fleming attempted to keep the book out of print. After Fleming's death, however, the value of his backlist overwhelmed the author's wishes, and The Spy Who Loved Me came back into print.

2) Octavia Butler, Survivor

This 1978 novel is the only one of Butler's works to remain out of print. She disowned it and let it stay buried, because she felt it depended on the worst cliches of science fiction:

When I was young, a lot of people wrote about going to another world and finding either little green men or little brown men, and they were always less in some way. They were a little sly, or a little like "the natives" in a very bad, old movie. And I thought, "No way. Apart from all these human beings populating the galaxy, this is really offensive garbage." 

People ask me why I don't like Survivor, my third novel. And it's because it feels a little bit like that. Some humans go up to another world, and immediately begin mating with the aliens and having children with them. I think of it as my Star Trek novel.

While Butler never stopped using science fiction tropes as allegories, she stayed away from the stereotypes invoked in Survivor after that.

3) Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“A novel I am prepared to repudiate” is how Burgess described A Clockwork Orange in his biography of another misunderstood novelist, D.H. Lawrence. Like many artists whose reputations become totally connected to one work, Burgess was frustrated that he was known only for A Clockwork Orange, which he claimed to have written in just three weeks. 

Some accounts claim that it was the film version and its popularity that made Burgess hate his own work so much. The “misunderstanding” represented by the film’s seeming to “glorify sex and violence” will “pursue me until I die,” he wrote.

4) The Haunted Storm by Philip Pullman 

Pullman was 25 when his first novel was “published by a publisher who didn’t realise it wasn’t a very good book”. Violence and death in a small village form the backdrop of the book, narrated by Matthew Cortez, an investigator with spiritual problems. Despite it being joint winner of the New English Library’s Young Writer’s Award the year it was published, Pullman has refused to discuss the novel and had erased it from his entry in Who’s Who. Incidentally, it got the lowest reading on Goodreads, where it was described as a "Turgid and weird romance between self-indulgent, self-obsessed, unattractive and tedious dramatis personae. I really would not bother with it, especially given the prices being fetched by this now Pullman groupie collectors' item book."

5) J.G. Ballard, The Wind from Nowhere 

The plot of this book is contained entirely in the title: A wind from nowhere blows worldwide. It blows with increasing force until people are living in tunnels and basements, unable to go above ground. Near the end, "The air stream carried with it enormous quantities of water vapour — in some cases the contents of entire seas, such as the Caspian and the Great Lakes, which had been drained dry, their beds plainly visible." In a 1975 interview, Ballard admitted to writing his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (1961), entirely out of clichés, for much-needed money, and “as a conscious attempt to break into the paperback market.” He had a job at the time, so he was pressed for time. "I had this fortnight’s holiday coming up, and my wife as a joke said—we hadn’t enough money to go away—”why don’t you write a novel in a fortnight?” So I thought: “Good, that’s sensible talking. So I thought I’d use all the clichés there are, the standard narrative conventions, and I sat down at the typewriter and I wrote the book. Six thousand words a day, which is quite a lot." Ballard later dismissed the novel as a "piece of hackwork"referring instead to The Drowned World as his first real novel. (The reviews on Goodreads are predictably tongue-in-cheek: "This book sure gives you wind! Yes, yes, I read this book just to be able to crack this joke." "This book blows.")

6) Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain

Like Anthony Burgess, the source of Annie Proulx's dissatisfaction with her story is the fame it garnered after it had been turned into a movie. “I wish I’d never written the story,” Annie Proulx told the Paris Review. “It’s just been the cause of hassle and problems and irritation since the film came out. … So many people have completely misunderstood the story. I think it’s important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience, but unfortunately the audience that Brokeback reached most strongly have powerful fantasy lives. And one of the reasons we keep the gates locked here is that a lot of men have decided that the story should have had a happy ending … So they rewrite the story … I can’t tell you how many of these things have been sent to me as though they’re expecting me to say, ‘Oh great, if only I’d had the sense to write it that way.’”

7) William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook 

William Powell wrote his cult classic (which includes instructions for building and planting bombs, cooking tear gas and making your own silencer) as a teenager a the height of the Vietnam War. He says the book was a "misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in. The central idea was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I am not in agreement with the contents of The Anarchist Cookbook, and I would be very pleased (and relieved) to see its publication discontinued. I consider it a misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print." The Anarchist Cookbook has 4,321 overwhelmingly positive ratings on Amazon. 

8) Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanshawe (1828)

Hawthorne’s first novel was a short self-published novel based on his own experiences as an undergraduate at Bowdoin College. There were a few copies sold,” his sister Elizabeth explained, “and he gave me one; but afterwards he took possession of it, and no doubt burned it. We were enjoined to keep the authorship a profound secret, and of course we did, with one or two exceptions.” Hawthorne did indeed burn the manuscript, and even went so far as to deny writing it at all. In a letter a friend, he wrote:

"You make an inquiry about some supposed former publication of mine. I cannot be sworn to make correct answers as to all the literary or other follies of my nonage; and I earnestly recommend you not to brush away the dust that may have gathered over them. Whatever might do me credit you may be pretty sure I should be ready enough to bring forward. Anything else it is to our mutual interest to conceal; and so far from assisting your researches in that direction, I especially enjoin on you, my dear friend, not to read any unacknowledged page that you may suppose to be mine."

9) Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick

While Vonnegut never went so far as to deny having written Slapstick, or burned it, or insisted that it be taken out of print, he did assign it a letter grade of D. Slapstick is a book about loneliness, at both the personal and societal level. It is dedicated to Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy (better known as Laurel and Hardy).  Vonnegut explains the title himself in the opening lines of the book's prologue:

"This is the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography. I have called it "Slapstick" because it is grotesque, situational poetry -- like the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy, of long ago. It is about what life feels like to me."

Indeed, Vonnegut struggled with depression throughout his life, and attempted suicide in 198. 

10) Kafka, almost everything

Kafka is so famous, he has been turned into an adjective. His most famous work, The Metamorphosis, has become the quintessential expression of modern alienation. Of equal stature, The Penal Colony, written in 1914, was a frighteningly accurate depiction of Eichmann's role in creating the Holocaust. (I maintain that Kafka, like other "prescient" writers, was not so much ahead of his times as entirely with them, in a way most people, who are inured to the present by being caught up in the mythology of the past, aren't.)

When, a few years before his death, Kafka asked his good friend Max Brod to destroy all his papers, besides the few short works with which Kafka was satisfied, Brod responded, “If you seriously think me capable of such a thing, let me tell you here and now that I shall not carry out your wishes.” Nevertheless, when Kafka died he left Brod a letter asking him to destroy his fiction, diaries, and correspondence. Brod remained true to his word: he proceeded to publish everything he could get his hands on.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Dead at 87

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was one of my all-time literary heroes, and I was deeply saddened to hear of his death on April 17. The literary world will be all the poorer for his absence.

Even if you are not a fan of magical realism - which, after spending five years in Latin America, I can assure you is a misnomer; every word of Garcia Marquez' books is true - you should read his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale.

Garcia Marquez published his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, when he was 40. Prior to writing what would become one of the enduring classics of the 20th century, he worked as a journalist in Bogota. He wrote sporadic short stories, and a novella, but most of his time was absorbed by exposing government corruption.

During his years as a journalist, he spent every lunch hour in a cafe with a group of colleagues where they would pass the afternoon tearing each other's work to shreds. By the time Garcia Marquez was ready to lock himself in a room and write the epic of Macondo, he had been honed to a razor's edge.

That is how you learn to be a great writer.
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The magician in his labyrinth

The Economist, April 26, 2014

IN JULY 1965 Gabriel García Márquez—Gabo to all who revered him later—decided to lock himself away in a house on Calle de La Loma in Mexico City. He ordered his wife to sell the car and get credit from the butcher. For 15 months, using only his index fingers, he typed for six hours a day in a room he called “The Cave of the Mafia”. He survived on a diet of good Scotch and constant cigarettes. At five in the afternoon he would emerge into the fading light with his eyes wide, as though he had discoursed with the dead.

Inside the four walls of that room lay the immense delta of the Magdalena river, the grey frothy sea of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, the suffocating swamps of the Ciénaga, the interminable geometries of the banana plantations, and a long railway line that ran into the farthest territories of his heart. It ended at the village of Aracataca, now renamed by him Macondo, where his maternal grandparents had brought him up amid prospectors, fornicators, gypsies, scoundrels and virginal girls bent over their sewing frames. In that room where he had locked himself away he inhaled the sweet milk-candy and oregano of his grandmother and absorbed again the political venting of his grandfather, who had fought on the Liberal side in the War of a Thousand Days and who, at the book’s beginning, took him to discover ice, a great block of infinite internal needles that boiled his hand when he touched it.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude”, the fruit of his self-imprisonment, sold 50m copies in more than 30 languages. Critics observed that its style, magical realism as they called it, was not new: Jorge Luis Borges, a blind Argentine poet, had felt his way through those labyrinths before. But its fame was startling. The world was seduced by a Latin America where the Buendía family feuded internally and externally, with rifles or with silence, for generations; where death gave its female victims instructions to sew their own shrouds; where the blood from a suicide by shotgun flowed all through Macondo, carefully avoiding the carpets; and where Remedios the Beauty was taken up to heaven as she hung out sheets on the washing line.

And it was all true. So Gabo insisted, to those who found his world outmoded and impossible. What seemed fantastical and extraordinary was merely reality in its local guise. Between novels he kept up his first profession, journalism, fearlessly reporting government scandals and narcoterrorism. When he had become hugely famous the government of Colombia sent him to mediate with the FARC guerrillas. That was surely as surreal as anything he wrote in the house on Calle de La Loma.

What the world could not grasp about Latin American literature, he told his Nobel prize audience in 1982, was the presence in it of the ghosts of the disappeared, as many as the population of Uppsala, and of émigrés and exiles, as many as there were Norwegians. These shadows, with their different reality, were as persistent as the continent’s beauty, its violence and its pain. In the year after he was born a crowd of banana workers, their number as fluid and fleeting as memory, were killed by the army in Aracataca, the bodies taken so silently by train to the coast that the story at once became myth. It grew with him.

His sympathies stayed on the left-Liberal side of things. Under General Rojas Pinilla Colombia became uncomfortable; he took refuge in Mexico in 1961, and for years was refused entry to the United States. Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez were proud to count themselves his friends. With Mr Castro he went fishing and talked books, he said, not politics. But he had a weakness for the “halo of power”, of whatever colour, and a soft spot for old autocrats still carrying, like Simón Bolívar in “The General in his Labyrinth”, their bullet scars, their memories of past glories and their faded battle tunics, with buttons made from the gold of Atahualpa.

Writing was difficult; the words came as painfully as kidney stones. Nonetheless, there was nothing else he had wanted to do in life. He burned “to write so I would not die”. The desire began with “The Thousand and One Nights” in childhood and the tale of the fish, slit for frying, with a diamond as big as an almond in its belly. It was reinforced in his cub-reporter-student days in the cafés of Barranquilla and Cartagena, where he discovered Kafka, Faulkner, Woolf and Hemingway. His strongest influence, though, remained his grandmother, who had told him with the most deadpan face that the strangest things were true.

Taking the steamboat

Those tales assumed no division between the waking and dreaming state. Like him, his characters were often insomniacs, terrified of the dark and plagued, as he was, by intrauterine memories and premonitory dreams. Their affliction was so acute that their days became seamless and infinite as winter rain. Yet his lovers too, in sheer happiness, were in the same suspended state. His last substantial novel, “Love in the Time of Cholera”, based on the forbidden romance of his own parents, ended with the aged lovers on the creaking Magdalena steamboat, pushing through purple lotus and past crocodiles with their mouths agape to catch butterflies, out to the mouth of the sea. But as his grandfather had told him, when they first saw that horizon, “There is no shore on the other side.”

This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline "The magician in his labyrinth"