A few interesting articles in November’s Poets & Writers Magazine.

Check out the Agents & Editors Q & A with Jonathan Karp, editor in chief of Twelve.  Obviously, Twelve is doing something right (publishing one book a month).  Fifteen of the first thirty books published by Twelve have been New York Times bestsellers.

There’s much to think about, if you’re a writer, or considering the task of being a writer.  Here are some of my favorite passages:

On making books that are relevant.

“Look, I believe in escapism.  I just think that even when you’re escaping, there can be a point to it.  It doesn’t have to be revelatory–it just has to have, I hope, some larger truth or purpose to it.  Purpose is a great word.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that [Rich Warren’s] The Purpose Driven Life sold all those copies.  I think that people gravitate to purpose.  I think we seek it, and  I want each book to serve a purpose.  I can’t understand why you would do it any other way.  I really can’t.  Even if the purpose is to make a lot of money, that’s still a purpose.  [Laughter.]”

What he’s looking for.

“I really am amazed by how often publishers decide to do something because a similar book succeeded.  That is flawed reasoning.  Books catch on for any number of reasons, and it’s not a mathematical formula that can be reproduced.  Even more insidious is the idea that sometimes creeps into acquisition decisions in a really cynical and negative way, where people say, ‘Well, that nondescript work caught on, so this nondescript word could too.’  I just don’t understand why you would want to go down that road.  It makes no sense to me.  I would think that you would feel as if you were going through your life just imitating other people, doing something you didn’t really believe in.  I’m genuinely mystified by that….

“There are certain things that will always get my attention: somebody who, like Jonathan Harr or Robert Caro or David Halberstam, has spent years on a work, really trying to figure it out. In an age in which nobody’s held accountable for anything, and information comes and goes so fast, there is great power in the idea of a person who has concentrated and rigorously worked to make sense of things. I don’t think you can place enough emphasis on that. It is the single thing publishers can provide better than anybody else: authority. So if you show me an author who has taken the time to really wrestle with a subject, in fiction or nonfiction, and figure it out and unearth the truth, and if that subject has some kind of a constituency, and I can envision enough people caring about that subject to gravitate to the book, I’m going to be very interested. I think those books are hard to come by. It’s hard to expect a writer to spend years on a subject.”

His ideas on storytelling.

“I was struck by something I read years ago in an interview with Norman Mailer, who said that if he’d gotten started later in life, he probably would have been a movie director so he would have had more influence.  He also said that he thought novelists would eventually have the cultural influence of landscape painters.  I’m not saying that I agree with that.  I just think it’s interesting that a writer of Norman Mailer’s stature would recognize how difficult it is for fiction to maintain its cultural centrality or impact.

So if you’re setting out to write a novel, or literary nonfiction, for that matter, I think you have to have very high standards.  Now, I say that–and I mean it–but I also understand that not every reader is coming to a book with the very high expectations that I seem to have for just about everything I read.  I suppose if you’re just looking for something to escape with on an airplane, you can set the bar a little lower.  But I would still ask the same question: Why your airplane novel rather than the five thousand others that are published every year?”

The second article is by Benjamin Percy, winner of multiple writing awards and honors.  He teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and environment at Iowa State University.  I’ve posted about him one other time here.

His article is called “Go the Distance,” and it’s only available in the magazine, not online, so I’ll try to paraphrase for you.  [But I’d suggest you get a hold of it somehow.]

He compares persistence in writing with Rocky’s battle cry.  “It’s like Rocky says, ‘I was nobody.  But that don’t matter either, you know?  ’Cause I was thinking, it really don’t matter if I lose this fight.  It really don’t matter if this guy opens my head, either.  ’Cause all I wanna do is go the distance.  Nobody’s ever gone the distance with Creed, and if I can go that distance, you see, and that bell rings and I’m still standing, I’m gonna know for the first time in my life, see, that I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood.’”

Percy relates his experience with submitting a short story to various magazines, only to get thirty-nine rejections.  After all that, the story got accepted in The Antioch Review…and months later got listed by Salman Rushdie as “one of the 100 Distinguished Stories in The Best American Short Stories 2008.”

He continues.  “This isn’t self-congratulation–it’s a rallying cry.  You’ve got to keep swinging, no matter how painful the fight.”

Of course, if you’ve been a writer for a while, you know that you can wallpaper rooms of your house with rejection letters.  It goes hand-in-hand with submitting your work.

Anyway, it’s a rousing article.  Read it, if you can.

Lastly, if you’re a writer looking for a writers’ workshop, or you’ve signed up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and you need help (or encouragement), you’re in luck.

Event: NaNoWriMo Writers’ Boot Camp
Date: October 31, 2009
Place: Bethel Lutheran, Rochester, MN
Time: 8:30 am to 3 pm

There are three authors teaching, and I am one of them.  I’ll be discussing the topic of Dialogue.  I’d love to see you there!

How to sign up:

Sign up at Rochester Community Education.  Click the blue View Activities button, then insert the class code 7338.131.

Have a beautiful day, my dear readers!

[Post image: Writing by ellikelli at stock.xchng]