28th June 2013
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among the wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
Here is the definition of "Touchstone," from the Oxford English Dictionary: A thing which serves to test the genuineness or value of anything.
The above lines from Dylan Thomas's poem "Fern Hill," are like a touchstone to me, because they distill everything down to that point of immersion, which is what art is about. It doesn't matter how you get there, but it matters that you go deep. It matters that you go down to the heart of the matter. From there you can move forward.
Something Paul Harding told our class last week has kept after me: when he was showing "Tinkers," to agents and publishers, the response he got was consistently, "No one wants to read such plotless, description laden, prose in this day and age." His answer? "Well, I do." He put his manuscript away, but never wavered, never felt the need to insert a car chase or a love scene for the sake of it. He didn't compromise his art, and he was rewarded for that.
I knew the truth of that already, but I needed to be reminded. When he signed my copy of Tinkers, he wrote among other things, "Go art!" a strangely unpoetic exhortation from such a poetic writer. But he is right: the art of writing is what we are about; we are the keepers of the mirror. In our craft or sullen art, exercised in the still night when only the moon rages.... another line from Dylan Thomas, but I can't keep my hands off that bloody stone:
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Poetry is the neat single malt whisky; prose is the wine we drink with a meal. The key is the intoxication, and without it there is no art. (A footnote to the tradition among American writers which has confounded intoxication of the heart with intoxication of the body. Even Dylan Thomas fell prey to this.) The craft lies in creating the same intoxication in the viewer; the struggle is in trying to gauge what effect our mumblings in the night might invoke.
Being at a writer's conference brings home, too, the paradox facing the modern writer who is plunged willy nilly into what has become the industry of book marketing. The writer may no longer be sullen, for he is now the salesman, too. (Steinbeck and Faulkner, both winners of the Pulitzer and the Nobel prizes, but both sullen, met once and sat in awkward silence. It wasn't that they weren't interested, just that conversation wasn't their medium.) But for every class about the craft of writing, there is a panel of publishers and agents offering advice for the hawking of their wares.
So you buy and sell, just as Harding eventually did, but you have to keep going back to that stone you fondled in order to create it. When all is said and done, when the trumpets have fallen quiet and the fanfare ceased, you go back to your desk within the same four walls and you stare off into a middle distance where your art exists and asks to be given voice.
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Friday, June 28, 2013
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches
21st June 2013
Sometimes these blogs feel like me marking time, a Robinson Crusoe effort to score life onto a piece of desert island bark. But that is only because I was born with a fertile imagination and daily events in my twisted universe take on gargantuan proportions. It is both a blessing and a curse, and made me very difficult to live with when I was a child. Perhaps even more so now. Too often, I am like that mother in Neil Simon's "The Good bye Girl," shaking her daughter awake to insist that the new flatmate's guitar playing in the middle of the night must be disturbing her.
Enough of the preamble. Here I was all week floating around the Aspen Writer's Conference, handing out the postcards advertising my book which came overnight from New York (thanks to my editor at Simon and Schuster!) Being terminally socially awkward, it suits me much better to be able to hand someone a card instead of actually converse with them. The cards are bright green, green cards, in fact. So buy my book and you will automaticially have leave to stay in the USA for an indeterminate time. "Time is indeterminate," is what I should say when people ask me what my book is about. Instead, they get handed a green card.
Enough of the post preamble. Let's get down to the nitty gritty. I came to the conclusion after attending (and part of the time moderating) the local writer's group for ten years, that gatherings like this are only of limited value. I am always telling beginning writers to attend them, because at that stage a sounding board is a good thing. It is helpful to know if your writing is on the level of some of the folks (usually of the male sex) who came to our local writer's group and mumbled a section from their journal (when the journal comes out, you start to worry.) More often than not, it was beyond incoherent. You can't do better than a roomful of people agreeing on a piece of writing missing its mark. But for more advanced writers, the variety of reader responses might only be confusing, and you definitely shouldn't change anything unless it resonates at a deep level with yourself.
And now to Paul Harding, at whose feet I had the privilege to sit this week. The paradox of the artist is that he or she is the vessel for what Nietzsche calls "the desires of the gods," without actually being a god him or herself. This is Peter Shaffer's point in his brilliant play "Equus." Mozart couldn't possibly have lived up to Salieri's high minded expectations, because he was a human being. And it is the all-too-human folly of the supplicant to expect him to.
Harding has a new book coming out in September called "Enon." (Geez, my editor would never have allowed me to keep that title!) You should buy it, because Harding is a Mozart of the word. You should buy it because in this age of high literary fashion, he is an artist who talks about the essence of truth and beauty. That's why he couldn't publish the pulitzer prize winning "Tinkers," for five years, and why it is some kind of minor miracle that it was published at all. I am expecting the same great things of "Enon," and I will be equally fanatical about foisting it on everyone who comes within arm's reach.
Paul Harding is a man with his particular heroes. He is annoyingly sure of his ideas. (Anyone who knows me will be laughing at this point with a dark sarcasm.) He has his own particular universe, his own cosmology. I sat at his right hand and nodded at most everything he said. But my hackles went up when he opted for the thology of Saint Paul, John Calvin and Karl Barth and dismissed Nietzsche as a quack. Calvin? I said, that's like putting your money on Quasimodo over Heathcliff. (Well, I wanted to say it!)
In "Equus," Salieri, hidden from view but witnessing Mozart spout obscenities, is aghast. If truth is beauty and beauty is truth, how can Mozart be all so human? How can Paul Harding have this rigid avenue of himself so divorced from himself as an artist?
This is the question. And the truth is, it is Paul Harding's prerogative to have avenues of himself that look any way he likes.
All that counts is that Paul Harding keeps churning out books. Whatever it takes. A hundred years down the line, this is all that will matter. Vessels become broken and fall away, but the unfathomable essence of what they contain persists. In the beginning was the word.
Get your hands on a copy of Tinkers and see how good literature begs to be read again. Get lost in the images and the layers, and don't concern yourself with the speaker. He's a nice guy, but for the purposes of art, he doesn't matter. And neither do I. Thus spake Zarathustra.
Sometimes these blogs feel like me marking time, a Robinson Crusoe effort to score life onto a piece of desert island bark. But that is only because I was born with a fertile imagination and daily events in my twisted universe take on gargantuan proportions. It is both a blessing and a curse, and made me very difficult to live with when I was a child. Perhaps even more so now. Too often, I am like that mother in Neil Simon's "The Good bye Girl," shaking her daughter awake to insist that the new flatmate's guitar playing in the middle of the night must be disturbing her.
Enough of the preamble. Here I was all week floating around the Aspen Writer's Conference, handing out the postcards advertising my book which came overnight from New York (thanks to my editor at Simon and Schuster!) Being terminally socially awkward, it suits me much better to be able to hand someone a card instead of actually converse with them. The cards are bright green, green cards, in fact. So buy my book and you will automaticially have leave to stay in the USA for an indeterminate time. "Time is indeterminate," is what I should say when people ask me what my book is about. Instead, they get handed a green card.
Enough of the post preamble. Let's get down to the nitty gritty. I came to the conclusion after attending (and part of the time moderating) the local writer's group for ten years, that gatherings like this are only of limited value. I am always telling beginning writers to attend them, because at that stage a sounding board is a good thing. It is helpful to know if your writing is on the level of some of the folks (usually of the male sex) who came to our local writer's group and mumbled a section from their journal (when the journal comes out, you start to worry.) More often than not, it was beyond incoherent. You can't do better than a roomful of people agreeing on a piece of writing missing its mark. But for more advanced writers, the variety of reader responses might only be confusing, and you definitely shouldn't change anything unless it resonates at a deep level with yourself.
And now to Paul Harding, at whose feet I had the privilege to sit this week. The paradox of the artist is that he or she is the vessel for what Nietzsche calls "the desires of the gods," without actually being a god him or herself. This is Peter Shaffer's point in his brilliant play "Equus." Mozart couldn't possibly have lived up to Salieri's high minded expectations, because he was a human being. And it is the all-too-human folly of the supplicant to expect him to.
Harding has a new book coming out in September called "Enon." (Geez, my editor would never have allowed me to keep that title!) You should buy it, because Harding is a Mozart of the word. You should buy it because in this age of high literary fashion, he is an artist who talks about the essence of truth and beauty. That's why he couldn't publish the pulitzer prize winning "Tinkers," for five years, and why it is some kind of minor miracle that it was published at all. I am expecting the same great things of "Enon," and I will be equally fanatical about foisting it on everyone who comes within arm's reach.
Paul Harding is a man with his particular heroes. He is annoyingly sure of his ideas. (Anyone who knows me will be laughing at this point with a dark sarcasm.) He has his own particular universe, his own cosmology. I sat at his right hand and nodded at most everything he said. But my hackles went up when he opted for the thology of Saint Paul, John Calvin and Karl Barth and dismissed Nietzsche as a quack. Calvin? I said, that's like putting your money on Quasimodo over Heathcliff. (Well, I wanted to say it!)
In "Equus," Salieri, hidden from view but witnessing Mozart spout obscenities, is aghast. If truth is beauty and beauty is truth, how can Mozart be all so human? How can Paul Harding have this rigid avenue of himself so divorced from himself as an artist?
This is the question. And the truth is, it is Paul Harding's prerogative to have avenues of himself that look any way he likes.
All that counts is that Paul Harding keeps churning out books. Whatever it takes. A hundred years down the line, this is all that will matter. Vessels become broken and fall away, but the unfathomable essence of what they contain persists. In the beginning was the word.
Get your hands on a copy of Tinkers and see how good literature begs to be read again. Get lost in the images and the layers, and don't concern yourself with the speaker. He's a nice guy, but for the purposes of art, he doesn't matter. And neither do I. Thus spake Zarathustra.
Friday, June 14, 2013
Tinkers
14th June, 2013
When I was growing up in the rural west of Scotland, Tinkers were the mysterious travelling folk who lived in canvas and overcoat shacks down by the shore where no other locals dared tread. They were called Tinkers because in times past they went from door to door repairing pots and pans. Tinkering tinsmiths, they were. Back in my day, they were treated like a different species, say Neanderthal, something vaguely human but not quite. I'm not sure what their ethnic background was, but they had blond dreadlocks and were somewhat inter-married so that they all looked quite similar. In the end, the council insisted they move into proper houses, a subtle move of extinction that has been played out the world over by the moral majority.
But the travelling folk from the western highlands of Scotland are not what Paul Harding has in mind by Tinkers in his book by the same name. This "Tinkers," might just be one of the few books that, unlike the travelling folk, makes it through to posterity. The adjudicators for the Pulitzer prize in 2010 clearly thought so, too.
Paul Harding's book is about time, how it shifts under our feet, especially as we approach that black hole called death. They say time does not exist close to the edge of a black hole, which makes it all the more poignant that Harding's dying protagonist reflects on his life as a tinkerer of clocks. His wife has silenced the many clocks on the walls of his house so that he won't be disturbed by them going off at all hours, but he sends his grandson to wind them all back up.
I'm on my third read of "Tinkers," a small book at just 191 pages. In an interview at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Harding points out that in any other genre, be it visual or musical, we would never count one encounter with a work as sufficient. We buy a painting, hang it on the wall and keep looking at it. How many times have we listened to Beethhoven's 5th? But with literature, we seem to think that after one read a book should be relegated to the shelf.
Delving into "Tinkers," is like snorkelling through a coral reef, as opposed to taking a quick shower. You're startled by this unexpected underwater beauty, with all the colours and shapes floating past you, the forms of substrata. But most of all, when you get out from under it, Tinkers pulls you back:
"The sun was going down. It sank into the stand of beech trees beyond the back lot, lighting their tops, so that their bare arterial branches turned to a netting of black vessels around brains made of light."
You can't read a sentence like that just once. It is a dream sequence you want to live through again.
He breaks the rules, too. Any teacher of writing who has endlessly warned their students about run-on sentences should take a look at Harding's. Some sentences stretch the entire page, too much to unpack in one sitting. You tell yourself you'll catch it the next time around. But you don't curse him.
How this little book came to be a Pulitzer winner is a story in itself: he showed it to mainstream agents and publishers who shook their heads at him and told him there was no way they would ever be able to sell a book like this. He put it in a drawer for three years. When it was finally picked up, it was by a tiny non-profit publisher which, oddly enough and wonderfully ironically enough, operated out of the former Bellevue Hospital for the insane. He received one thousand dollars in advance. (I wonder what he did with it?) There was no campaign for Tinkers to win the Pulitzer, it just sort of bubbled up from the depths. People waxed lyrical about this most lyric of books. Word got around. Somebody knew somebody who was on the Pulitzer board.
Every morning next week, I am going to be studying with Paul Harding at the Aspen Writer's Festival. By the end of next week I will have more to say about him.
And just because this blog is supposed to be following my own publishing history, let it be known that I turned down cover art for about 500 postcards that I'm handing out at the writer's festival this week. It sported a generic castle and talked about my protagonist's bewitchment by a handsome laird, ignorant of the fact that there were neither castles nor lairds in Scotland at the time of my story. I needed the cards, though, so I asked them to paint them over green and frog march the handsome laird off to some other book that was actually about a handsome laird, there to languish in doggerel heaven. They're arriving on Monday.
When I was growing up in the rural west of Scotland, Tinkers were the mysterious travelling folk who lived in canvas and overcoat shacks down by the shore where no other locals dared tread. They were called Tinkers because in times past they went from door to door repairing pots and pans. Tinkering tinsmiths, they were. Back in my day, they were treated like a different species, say Neanderthal, something vaguely human but not quite. I'm not sure what their ethnic background was, but they had blond dreadlocks and were somewhat inter-married so that they all looked quite similar. In the end, the council insisted they move into proper houses, a subtle move of extinction that has been played out the world over by the moral majority.
But the travelling folk from the western highlands of Scotland are not what Paul Harding has in mind by Tinkers in his book by the same name. This "Tinkers," might just be one of the few books that, unlike the travelling folk, makes it through to posterity. The adjudicators for the Pulitzer prize in 2010 clearly thought so, too.
Paul Harding's book is about time, how it shifts under our feet, especially as we approach that black hole called death. They say time does not exist close to the edge of a black hole, which makes it all the more poignant that Harding's dying protagonist reflects on his life as a tinkerer of clocks. His wife has silenced the many clocks on the walls of his house so that he won't be disturbed by them going off at all hours, but he sends his grandson to wind them all back up.
I'm on my third read of "Tinkers," a small book at just 191 pages. In an interview at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Harding points out that in any other genre, be it visual or musical, we would never count one encounter with a work as sufficient. We buy a painting, hang it on the wall and keep looking at it. How many times have we listened to Beethhoven's 5th? But with literature, we seem to think that after one read a book should be relegated to the shelf.
Delving into "Tinkers," is like snorkelling through a coral reef, as opposed to taking a quick shower. You're startled by this unexpected underwater beauty, with all the colours and shapes floating past you, the forms of substrata. But most of all, when you get out from under it, Tinkers pulls you back:
"The sun was going down. It sank into the stand of beech trees beyond the back lot, lighting their tops, so that their bare arterial branches turned to a netting of black vessels around brains made of light."
You can't read a sentence like that just once. It is a dream sequence you want to live through again.
He breaks the rules, too. Any teacher of writing who has endlessly warned their students about run-on sentences should take a look at Harding's. Some sentences stretch the entire page, too much to unpack in one sitting. You tell yourself you'll catch it the next time around. But you don't curse him.
How this little book came to be a Pulitzer winner is a story in itself: he showed it to mainstream agents and publishers who shook their heads at him and told him there was no way they would ever be able to sell a book like this. He put it in a drawer for three years. When it was finally picked up, it was by a tiny non-profit publisher which, oddly enough and wonderfully ironically enough, operated out of the former Bellevue Hospital for the insane. He received one thousand dollars in advance. (I wonder what he did with it?) There was no campaign for Tinkers to win the Pulitzer, it just sort of bubbled up from the depths. People waxed lyrical about this most lyric of books. Word got around. Somebody knew somebody who was on the Pulitzer board.
Every morning next week, I am going to be studying with Paul Harding at the Aspen Writer's Festival. By the end of next week I will have more to say about him.
And just because this blog is supposed to be following my own publishing history, let it be known that I turned down cover art for about 500 postcards that I'm handing out at the writer's festival this week. It sported a generic castle and talked about my protagonist's bewitchment by a handsome laird, ignorant of the fact that there were neither castles nor lairds in Scotland at the time of my story. I needed the cards, though, so I asked them to paint them over green and frog march the handsome laird off to some other book that was actually about a handsome laird, there to languish in doggerel heaven. They're arriving on Monday.
Friday, June 7, 2013
Cajones
June 7th, 2013
I received a note from a friend in Kansas City this week, and it is worth quoting, because it shows just how whimsical this publishing business is, and why you shouldn't give up:
Last Saturday at our local independent book store successful novelist Nancy Pickard joined in a "conversation" with a new author in her 30s named Jenny Milchman. They spoke to an overflow crowd.
Here is Jenny's story: she wrote 8 novels, bing, bing bing. Didn't sell. In 2000 she got an agent. In the 13 years since, she has had 3 agents and had her eighth novel come SOOOO close to being accepted by several major publishers, always to miss at the very end.
She wrote Nancy a fan note about Nancy's book, Scent of Rain and Lightening. They got into an email exchange and when Nancy learned how close her novel had come several times, she offered to read it. (Something she normally never does.) And she liked it! So much that she sent it to her editor at Ballantine (something else she has never done.)
Her editor liked it! And the novel is now out in hard cover. (Title is Cover of Snow). Ballantine accepted the mss 2 years ago and even though it was already highly polished, Jenny spent another year of polishing under the aegis of her editor. She and husband and two school-age kids are taking SEVEN months to go around the country to all the independent book stores they can find. Their kids are being "car-schooled."
The late John Denver who hailed from this area, was due once to meet his brother for a round of golf at a local course. When his brother arived at the clubhouse, he was handed a couple of golf balls by the superintendent: "John said to give you these. He says, for this game you're going to need balls." Same goes for writing and publishing and any other stage for which there is a glut of performers standing in the wings.
The problem is, that glut of artists needs to get through a barrier manned by folk who often wouldn't know a good piece of art if it jumped up and did a belly dance in front of them. I know people all through the arts facing this. I always say there are two levels of art in any given age: there's real art and then there's fashion. Fashion always has its guardians, the ones who need to attach themselves to trends to give themselves some sense of identity. These are the guardians of buzz and not to be mistaken for wizards. Wizards are few and far between.
Take a look at the TV cult programme American Idol. Talent and charisma characteristically resist definition, and yet week after week the "judges" dismiss this one and accept that one according to some fashionable criteron of what makes a great performer. If Paul Simon or Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or most icons of music history had stood before them, they would have got the gong before they reached the end of their first line. You can't quantify this stuff. It's like trying to catch a cloud. Your hands go right through, and in the case of American Idol you end up with a name that goes on to be forgotten.
So, the lesson today is: Keep pushing ahead! Elbow those twits out of the way and get to the stage. Sing your song for all your worth. Turn deaf ears on the boos if they come, and on the applause if it comes instead. Both are empty responses. You should be listening to your heart. That's all. Here endeth the first lesson.
I received a note from a friend in Kansas City this week, and it is worth quoting, because it shows just how whimsical this publishing business is, and why you shouldn't give up:
Last Saturday at our local independent book store successful novelist Nancy Pickard joined in a "conversation" with a new author in her 30s named Jenny Milchman. They spoke to an overflow crowd.
Here is Jenny's story: she wrote 8 novels, bing, bing bing. Didn't sell. In 2000 she got an agent. In the 13 years since, she has had 3 agents and had her eighth novel come SOOOO close to being accepted by several major publishers, always to miss at the very end.
She wrote Nancy a fan note about Nancy's book, Scent of Rain and Lightening. They got into an email exchange and when Nancy learned how close her novel had come several times, she offered to read it. (Something she normally never does.) And she liked it! So much that she sent it to her editor at Ballantine (something else she has never done.)
Her editor liked it! And the novel is now out in hard cover. (Title is Cover of Snow). Ballantine accepted the mss 2 years ago and even though it was already highly polished, Jenny spent another year of polishing under the aegis of her editor. She and husband and two school-age kids are taking SEVEN months to go around the country to all the independent book stores they can find. Their kids are being "car-schooled."
The late John Denver who hailed from this area, was due once to meet his brother for a round of golf at a local course. When his brother arived at the clubhouse, he was handed a couple of golf balls by the superintendent: "John said to give you these. He says, for this game you're going to need balls." Same goes for writing and publishing and any other stage for which there is a glut of performers standing in the wings.
The problem is, that glut of artists needs to get through a barrier manned by folk who often wouldn't know a good piece of art if it jumped up and did a belly dance in front of them. I know people all through the arts facing this. I always say there are two levels of art in any given age: there's real art and then there's fashion. Fashion always has its guardians, the ones who need to attach themselves to trends to give themselves some sense of identity. These are the guardians of buzz and not to be mistaken for wizards. Wizards are few and far between.
Take a look at the TV cult programme American Idol. Talent and charisma characteristically resist definition, and yet week after week the "judges" dismiss this one and accept that one according to some fashionable criteron of what makes a great performer. If Paul Simon or Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or most icons of music history had stood before them, they would have got the gong before they reached the end of their first line. You can't quantify this stuff. It's like trying to catch a cloud. Your hands go right through, and in the case of American Idol you end up with a name that goes on to be forgotten.
So, the lesson today is: Keep pushing ahead! Elbow those twits out of the way and get to the stage. Sing your song for all your worth. Turn deaf ears on the boos if they come, and on the applause if it comes instead. Both are empty responses. You should be listening to your heart. That's all. Here endeth the first lesson.
Friday, May 31, 2013
Tweet, tweet
31st May 2013
The search for a book cover had become a little frustrating, until one morning at 4 a.m. I awoke with the image of a Scottish dry stone wall. I thought that somehow we could invoke the idea of a transition through time by altering the wall slightly from one end to the other across the face of the book. I was taking a Twitter class that day and going back and forth with my editor during class about this idea. A few days later in the early a.m. again, I awoke with the notion of a gate in the stone wall and a woman walking through, perhaps from the modern era into the past. It seems obvious, now that I think about it, but I hadn't seen how evocative a stone wall could be and how it could work as a symbol both for Scotland and time.
Then yesterday I was going through a shelf of random sheet music, trying to see what could be chucked, when I came across a pencil sketch I had made years ago of a stone wall with a gate in it. So, you see, all things work together in this sea of quantum soup we live in. I pitched the idea to my editor, who promised to pass it along. Now to await the decision of the art department and see if they are living in the same portion of the soup as I am.
I attended this all-day Twitter class because my agent advised me to get on the Twitter bandwagon. I can see why he did, because it saves everyone standing around at dreaded cocktail parties trying to pretend they're not there just for the networking. Little does he know how absolutely clueless I am when it comes to computers and the workings thereof. I think when I was a high school student in rural Scotland under the tutelage of dragon maths teachers, something in my brain switched off and now won't turn back on. Plus, almost everyone in the class had Twitter accounts, had their laptops open and at the ready. I hadn't even brought a laptop, because I don't own one. By dint of a Christmas present, I do own an Ipad, so had brought that. But to do what the teacher was asking, I had to download the Twitter Ipad App, and for that I needed the password for the Apple Store. Now someplace sometime I had decided on a password, or someone who was using my Ipad had, but God only knows (and wasn't telling) what the damn password was.
Upshot was that I couldn't download the App and couldn't create my Twitter account, and while I was figuring all this out, the rest of the class was onto Hashtags and Hootsuites. In my medieval maths class in Scotland, the awful teacher would strut with his weapon of corporal punishment across his shoulder, waiting for a maths dunce like myself to mess up a precious piece of graph paper or not know what "a" signified. Being of a literary mind even then I couldn't for the life of me understand what "a" or "b" or "c" could possibly signify other than the beginning of a word. Hot tears would well, and panic ensued.
So it was in Twitter class. I left at lunch break with that wild frenzy of feeling I have sometimes had (once when walking out on a waitressing job in the middle of a shift, despite losing my pay for that last stinking day.) I drove out of the parking lot and knew I wasn't going back.
Consequently, I still know next to nothing about Twitter, though I do now (with a little help from my friends) have a "handle," which is @Kilmartin1978, incase anyone is interested. I have tweeted once since, and keep meaning to do it again. I have two followers, and no idea what to convey in 140 characters. I am not sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to hear news bursts from others, and can't imagine why anyone would be interested in mine. I am long-winded by nature, intensely private like most writers, so what is there to say?
Great Gatsby: I've run out of time again. The movie suffers from the same problem the novel does, which is that for a story about one particular person, that person is not very well drawn. I am not any more fascinated by Leonardo Di Caprio than I was by Fitzgerald's description of Gatsby. I don't for a minute buy Gatsby's love of Daisy, who is as carboard-y as her counterpart in the novel. One difference is, the movie feels about half an hour too long; the novel was about one third too short.
But bear with me on the Twitter thing. I will work it out. It took a while, but I figured out blogs, didn't I?
The search for a book cover had become a little frustrating, until one morning at 4 a.m. I awoke with the image of a Scottish dry stone wall. I thought that somehow we could invoke the idea of a transition through time by altering the wall slightly from one end to the other across the face of the book. I was taking a Twitter class that day and going back and forth with my editor during class about this idea. A few days later in the early a.m. again, I awoke with the notion of a gate in the stone wall and a woman walking through, perhaps from the modern era into the past. It seems obvious, now that I think about it, but I hadn't seen how evocative a stone wall could be and how it could work as a symbol both for Scotland and time.
Then yesterday I was going through a shelf of random sheet music, trying to see what could be chucked, when I came across a pencil sketch I had made years ago of a stone wall with a gate in it. So, you see, all things work together in this sea of quantum soup we live in. I pitched the idea to my editor, who promised to pass it along. Now to await the decision of the art department and see if they are living in the same portion of the soup as I am.
I attended this all-day Twitter class because my agent advised me to get on the Twitter bandwagon. I can see why he did, because it saves everyone standing around at dreaded cocktail parties trying to pretend they're not there just for the networking. Little does he know how absolutely clueless I am when it comes to computers and the workings thereof. I think when I was a high school student in rural Scotland under the tutelage of dragon maths teachers, something in my brain switched off and now won't turn back on. Plus, almost everyone in the class had Twitter accounts, had their laptops open and at the ready. I hadn't even brought a laptop, because I don't own one. By dint of a Christmas present, I do own an Ipad, so had brought that. But to do what the teacher was asking, I had to download the Twitter Ipad App, and for that I needed the password for the Apple Store. Now someplace sometime I had decided on a password, or someone who was using my Ipad had, but God only knows (and wasn't telling) what the damn password was.
Upshot was that I couldn't download the App and couldn't create my Twitter account, and while I was figuring all this out, the rest of the class was onto Hashtags and Hootsuites. In my medieval maths class in Scotland, the awful teacher would strut with his weapon of corporal punishment across his shoulder, waiting for a maths dunce like myself to mess up a precious piece of graph paper or not know what "a" signified. Being of a literary mind even then I couldn't for the life of me understand what "a" or "b" or "c" could possibly signify other than the beginning of a word. Hot tears would well, and panic ensued.
So it was in Twitter class. I left at lunch break with that wild frenzy of feeling I have sometimes had (once when walking out on a waitressing job in the middle of a shift, despite losing my pay for that last stinking day.) I drove out of the parking lot and knew I wasn't going back.
Consequently, I still know next to nothing about Twitter, though I do now (with a little help from my friends) have a "handle," which is @Kilmartin1978, incase anyone is interested. I have tweeted once since, and keep meaning to do it again. I have two followers, and no idea what to convey in 140 characters. I am not sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to hear news bursts from others, and can't imagine why anyone would be interested in mine. I am long-winded by nature, intensely private like most writers, so what is there to say?
Great Gatsby: I've run out of time again. The movie suffers from the same problem the novel does, which is that for a story about one particular person, that person is not very well drawn. I am not any more fascinated by Leonardo Di Caprio than I was by Fitzgerald's description of Gatsby. I don't for a minute buy Gatsby's love of Daisy, who is as carboard-y as her counterpart in the novel. One difference is, the movie feels about half an hour too long; the novel was about one third too short.
But bear with me on the Twitter thing. I will work it out. It took a while, but I figured out blogs, didn't I?
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Book Cover Up
23rd May 2013
The book cover saga continues. My preference is for dreamy landscapes, but that is just dreamy me. My editor wants to veer away from suggesting this is just historical fiction. I want to get very far away from any hint that this book belongs on the shelf with romance fiction. If I don't get a hard back, I should at least have a classy cover. She was asking me what book covers from my collection have stuck with me, and, honestly, there are not many. Book covers tend to be pretty bad, often irrelevant. But album covers do have more impact, and Dougie MacLean's are particularly good. It helps that his wife is a landscape artist. In fact, I have a print of the picture on his album "Tribute" hanging on my wall. If Simon and Schuster could come up with anything half as good as Dougie's album cover "Indigenous," I will be happy.
I should qualify what I said in my last blog about how the arts reflect back the Zeitgeist. I should have mentioned that this isn't something that can be forced, anymore than you can force a mirror to reflect a flattering image of yourself. If you, as an artist, get in the way of the reflection, you'll end up with fun-house type distorted images. On the political scene, this happened with Karl Marx. I've read "Das Kapital," and it is a very interesting analysis of how societies function and evolve. But he wasn't trying to get in the way and force any of this to happen. Lenin and his successors were, which is where communism all goes downhill fast. Modern art to a large extent has also fallen into this pit, and turned the reflection into a mind game.
So in light of what I said last week, let me council artists in whatever medium to stay out of the way of themselves. The examples I gave of Dan Brown and JK Rowling prove the point, because they are not trying to re-introduce notions of the sacred feminine or magic. They are just standing out of the way and letting the wave of human "Geist" speak through them. They would probably recoil from such a description and tell you they were simply writing the stories they would want to read, which is always a good platform for a writer, as long as you listen deep. This is a lesson I have had to learn as a writer. You have to trust that what is important to you will come through in your writing anyway. Your art is the writing, not the agenda.
I have all kinds of agendas that I could try to wheedle into my work. I have strong opinions on the evolution of mankind, on the environment, on how to raise kids, and a huge Scottish Nationalist agenda. It turns out that almost all my books are set in Scotland where I grew up, but that is just what I hear when I listen in the wind. It's like a bagpipe drone, always there behind the song. That's why writers tend to live in exile, all the better to hear that drone.
I keep meaning to write about turning books into films. Right now all attention is on the new movie version of The Great Gatsby. But it's a bit like translating poetry: so much nuance gets lost along the way. Some movies manage it, but often by chance: "Zorba the Greek," is a great rendition of Kazantzakis's classic, but only by virtue of Anthony Quinn in the lead role. There are some movies that have even done a better job than the book. Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient," for one. It's an interesting topic, and a very hard feat to pull off. Perhaps this is why Diana Gabaldon has never sold film rights to her outlandishly popular books. I have a vision of being in a cinema watching one of my books on screen for the first time, and sinking further and further into my seat with sheer horror. Lucky John Irving was allowed to write his own script for "Cider House Rules," and got the Oscar for it to boot. But this is a big subject, and I will tackle it next time.
The book cover saga continues. My preference is for dreamy landscapes, but that is just dreamy me. My editor wants to veer away from suggesting this is just historical fiction. I want to get very far away from any hint that this book belongs on the shelf with romance fiction. If I don't get a hard back, I should at least have a classy cover. She was asking me what book covers from my collection have stuck with me, and, honestly, there are not many. Book covers tend to be pretty bad, often irrelevant. But album covers do have more impact, and Dougie MacLean's are particularly good. It helps that his wife is a landscape artist. In fact, I have a print of the picture on his album "Tribute" hanging on my wall. If Simon and Schuster could come up with anything half as good as Dougie's album cover "Indigenous," I will be happy.
I should qualify what I said in my last blog about how the arts reflect back the Zeitgeist. I should have mentioned that this isn't something that can be forced, anymore than you can force a mirror to reflect a flattering image of yourself. If you, as an artist, get in the way of the reflection, you'll end up with fun-house type distorted images. On the political scene, this happened with Karl Marx. I've read "Das Kapital," and it is a very interesting analysis of how societies function and evolve. But he wasn't trying to get in the way and force any of this to happen. Lenin and his successors were, which is where communism all goes downhill fast. Modern art to a large extent has also fallen into this pit, and turned the reflection into a mind game.
So in light of what I said last week, let me council artists in whatever medium to stay out of the way of themselves. The examples I gave of Dan Brown and JK Rowling prove the point, because they are not trying to re-introduce notions of the sacred feminine or magic. They are just standing out of the way and letting the wave of human "Geist" speak through them. They would probably recoil from such a description and tell you they were simply writing the stories they would want to read, which is always a good platform for a writer, as long as you listen deep. This is a lesson I have had to learn as a writer. You have to trust that what is important to you will come through in your writing anyway. Your art is the writing, not the agenda.
I have all kinds of agendas that I could try to wheedle into my work. I have strong opinions on the evolution of mankind, on the environment, on how to raise kids, and a huge Scottish Nationalist agenda. It turns out that almost all my books are set in Scotland where I grew up, but that is just what I hear when I listen in the wind. It's like a bagpipe drone, always there behind the song. That's why writers tend to live in exile, all the better to hear that drone.
I keep meaning to write about turning books into films. Right now all attention is on the new movie version of The Great Gatsby. But it's a bit like translating poetry: so much nuance gets lost along the way. Some movies manage it, but often by chance: "Zorba the Greek," is a great rendition of Kazantzakis's classic, but only by virtue of Anthony Quinn in the lead role. There are some movies that have even done a better job than the book. Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient," for one. It's an interesting topic, and a very hard feat to pull off. Perhaps this is why Diana Gabaldon has never sold film rights to her outlandishly popular books. I have a vision of being in a cinema watching one of my books on screen for the first time, and sinking further and further into my seat with sheer horror. Lucky John Irving was allowed to write his own script for "Cider House Rules," and got the Oscar for it to boot. But this is a big subject, and I will tackle it next time.
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
18th May, 2013
I got word yesterday that the design department at Simon & Schuster is having a hell of a time trying coming up with a cover for my book. My editor tells me she sent back a whole batch of proposals this week (no doubt sporting some hairy hero in a short kilt!) To my surprise she is asking me for help. I don't think they want me to get out my water colours just yet, but they want me to send some links for sites that might give them some sense for the mood of my book. See, if they had kept my title "Dunadd," the designers would have been able to google it and come up with all kinds of images. But, since I had been told this was completely out of my court, I haven't been thinking about it for myself. My agent and I had decided that the cover for "The Time Traveller's Wife," was really good, (the lower half of a schoolgirl standing next to a man-size pair of shoes) but it reflects the story's location in modern times. Mine needs to conjur the misty past, and there are no clothes left behind in my story. Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander," has an (imagined) gold Scottish emblem on its cover, which is actually quite effective. Anyway, all of this has to be resolved very quickly, because the postcards I am supposed to be getting for flogging my book this summer at the writer's conference are due within the month. Tally Ho! All fun.
Not all fun, say the readers of Dan Brown's new book "Inferno," which came out this week. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here," says one commentator. "This book reads like a travel brochure," says another. "Twaddle," says a newspaper in Britain, "but entertaining twaddle."
This week I have been re-reading "The Da Vinci Code," and what occurs to me about the importance of this book is that, like "Harry Potter," it goes way beyond its literary merits. The point is, when your ten-year old novel is already on the list of best selling books of all time, you have to answer to no one. The answer to their popularity obviously lies somewhere else.
I harp on a lot about Zeitgeist, one of those wonderful German words which scoops up two ideas into one and creates something else. The meaning of Zeitgeist conveys a reality that most of us most of the time don't even think about: that nebulous throbbing wave of collective knowledge, rather like Cloud on the ether. I am quite sure neither JK Rowling nor Dan Brown paces across their office trying to get in touch with it. But somehow both of them are listening at the right frequency, and both books reflect an incredible thirst in our age for the kind of magic and mystery that was quickly stifled by the church and then double by our "enlightened" quest for the purely rational.
To my mind, Homo Sapiens should have been called Homo Religiosus, and I don't mean people standing to sing hymns in cloisters. I mean the longing that a skyful of stars can invoke. The shooting star that creates awe in even the hardest most scientific breast doesn't even want a rational explanation. It wants JK Rowling and Dan Brown to hand them a broomstick; it wants to get up there itself. And that's why these books sell. They are broomsticks, so no wonder they have the religious right shouting bloody murder.
Literature is enormously powerful. It is what Herman Hesse considered all of art: "The universalising mirror." You can burn the books, but you can't smash the mirror. I'm not sure the qualities of holographs were as well known in Hesse's time, but that universalising mirror actually functions more like a holograph. You can't burn it; you can't smash it, because every little piece goes on reflecting the whole.
I am enough of a literary snob myself, not to join in the voices denigrating shoddily written prose like Brown's. Creating a sense of place is not about copying travel brochures into your pages. Extraneaous material has to come under the chop of "killing your darlings" (whoever said that first. Let's say Shakespeare. He should have said it.) But understand we are not talking about words and pretty sentences here. When all is said and done, I can let the book fall with the rest of them and hold out my hands for the broomstick!
I got word yesterday that the design department at Simon & Schuster is having a hell of a time trying coming up with a cover for my book. My editor tells me she sent back a whole batch of proposals this week (no doubt sporting some hairy hero in a short kilt!) To my surprise she is asking me for help. I don't think they want me to get out my water colours just yet, but they want me to send some links for sites that might give them some sense for the mood of my book. See, if they had kept my title "Dunadd," the designers would have been able to google it and come up with all kinds of images. But, since I had been told this was completely out of my court, I haven't been thinking about it for myself. My agent and I had decided that the cover for "The Time Traveller's Wife," was really good, (the lower half of a schoolgirl standing next to a man-size pair of shoes) but it reflects the story's location in modern times. Mine needs to conjur the misty past, and there are no clothes left behind in my story. Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander," has an (imagined) gold Scottish emblem on its cover, which is actually quite effective. Anyway, all of this has to be resolved very quickly, because the postcards I am supposed to be getting for flogging my book this summer at the writer's conference are due within the month. Tally Ho! All fun.
Not all fun, say the readers of Dan Brown's new book "Inferno," which came out this week. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here," says one commentator. "This book reads like a travel brochure," says another. "Twaddle," says a newspaper in Britain, "but entertaining twaddle."
This week I have been re-reading "The Da Vinci Code," and what occurs to me about the importance of this book is that, like "Harry Potter," it goes way beyond its literary merits. The point is, when your ten-year old novel is already on the list of best selling books of all time, you have to answer to no one. The answer to their popularity obviously lies somewhere else.
I harp on a lot about Zeitgeist, one of those wonderful German words which scoops up two ideas into one and creates something else. The meaning of Zeitgeist conveys a reality that most of us most of the time don't even think about: that nebulous throbbing wave of collective knowledge, rather like Cloud on the ether. I am quite sure neither JK Rowling nor Dan Brown paces across their office trying to get in touch with it. But somehow both of them are listening at the right frequency, and both books reflect an incredible thirst in our age for the kind of magic and mystery that was quickly stifled by the church and then double by our "enlightened" quest for the purely rational.
To my mind, Homo Sapiens should have been called Homo Religiosus, and I don't mean people standing to sing hymns in cloisters. I mean the longing that a skyful of stars can invoke. The shooting star that creates awe in even the hardest most scientific breast doesn't even want a rational explanation. It wants JK Rowling and Dan Brown to hand them a broomstick; it wants to get up there itself. And that's why these books sell. They are broomsticks, so no wonder they have the religious right shouting bloody murder.
Literature is enormously powerful. It is what Herman Hesse considered all of art: "The universalising mirror." You can burn the books, but you can't smash the mirror. I'm not sure the qualities of holographs were as well known in Hesse's time, but that universalising mirror actually functions more like a holograph. You can't burn it; you can't smash it, because every little piece goes on reflecting the whole.
I am enough of a literary snob myself, not to join in the voices denigrating shoddily written prose like Brown's. Creating a sense of place is not about copying travel brochures into your pages. Extraneaous material has to come under the chop of "killing your darlings" (whoever said that first. Let's say Shakespeare. He should have said it.) But understand we are not talking about words and pretty sentences here. When all is said and done, I can let the book fall with the rest of them and hold out my hands for the broomstick!
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