Justine MuskJust another Storytellers Unplugged weblog

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Reading came first. It always does.

Reading is the inhale, writing is the exhale.

I once read somewhere that kids who like to read fall into two groups. The first naturally picks up reading from their environment: they see their parents reading, they find books in the house, they go to libraries and bookstores and learn young and easily the books that they enjoy. These kinds of readers are bright, well-rounded kids. They are socially adept. They have lots of friends.

The second kind of reader is a different creature – and a member of a much smaller group. The environment doesn’t seem to make a difference: this kid seems wired to read, and sooner or later she will find her way to books, even if she has to crawl through green slime to do it. These kids read obsessively. They are maybe not so well-rounded, their social skills maybe not so finely honed. They have a strong solitary streak.

I grew up around books. Both my parents read. My mother was constantly bringing home books from the library. My father was an elementary school principal and he would present me with paperbacks asking me to “test them out” before giving them over to his school library.

But I am not a well-rounded type. Not then, not now. I am ‘spiky’. I learned to read when I was 5 – I know this because I found mid-year kindergarten report cards that proclaimed Justine is reading! – and bought my first book for two dollars at the local Coles bookstore. It was Blubber, by Judy Blume, and one of the ‘big kids’ had written a book report in the school newsletter about it. I was with a childhood friend named Andrea who also bought a copy of Blubber, and two days later I went to her house and asked her if she’d finished it yet. I was surprised when she said no. This would have been my first inkling – if I’d been old and mature enough to have such things as inklings – that I was not your typical reader. In grade one I would sit in reading group, bored out of my little-girl skull, while other kids sounded out Dick and Jane. I flipped through the book to the ‘teacher’s instructions’ at the end and read those in a desperate attempt to amuse myself. Then we’d go back to our desks and I’d pull out my copy of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. Although I didn’t know this at the time – and wouldn’t until I ran into my first-grade teacher over a decade later – the teacher never believed that I was truly reading Christie. She thought I was staring at the pages for show. Just another intellectually pretentious little first-grader.

Reading was my first and earliest drug. I didn’t want to go out on the playground during recess and lunch hour. I would hide somewhere in the school building and read. In junior high I found excellent nesting places among the stacks in the library, at least until my teacher realized where I was (and wasn’t). He would pound angrily on the windows to flush me out. The grown-ups in my life seemed determined that I learn how to socialize like a normal kid, which I was beginning to realize I wasn’t, not quite. I was lonely and craved popularity but could only be with other kids for a certain amount of time. I got bored. I wanted to get back to my book.

Fiction raised me. Although I remember getting the birds-and-the-bees conversation from my parents in a way that didn’t make a whole lot of sense at the time – something about a seed getting planted in the woman’s vagina, how gross, and what did gardening have to do with human babies? – my sexual education came to me, thoroughly and in-depth, from books. I read Judy Blume and learned about menstruation, wet dreams, and erections; I read Richard Peck’s Are You In The House Alone and learned about date rape; I read my way through VC Andrews and learned about forbidden desire. I read so much about HIV – I came of age during the AIDS crisis – that I could lecture adults about how it was and was not transmitted. I knew about the different kinds of birth control years before I had any use for them. I knew that sex seemed simple enough but could get really complicated really quickly and made you emotionally vulnerable and had a seedy underside and a dark side and could ruin your life if you got pregnant, as several girls in my high school proceeded to do. None of the adults in my life taught me this, at least not in a way that made any real impression. Fiction did. Fiction delivered not just a ‘message’ but rich emotional context and power that sent that message resonating through gut, heart and soul. Fiction was like stepping into a whole other life – a succession of lives – and the knowledge I gathered there I could bring back into my so-called real one. It was a strange kind of knowledge, it was the knowledge of life gleaned from books, of hard-won experience when I was an innocent, but it was knowledge nonetheless, and it fueled my hunger for more, more, more. I wanted the world. And no one, absolutely no one, could talk me out of it.

–2—

When someone tells me they want to write, I always like to ask them what they read. It’s not just out of curiosity – although I am always curious about what people are reading, always one to sneak a glance at the title of the hardcover novel my neighbor on the plane is reading, always one to wander over to the bookshelves in any strange room I happen to find myself in – but a little test of sorts. Maybe it’s fair, maybe it’s unfair, but the plain fact is that most people flunk it.

The test is this: Do you read obsessively?

Most people kind of stutter around a bit and look at me blankly. They might name a few bestselling writers, or things that everybody read in high school – Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, Kurt Vonnegut – but more than the actual answer it’s the way they answer, the pauses and squirming discomfort, the sense that I’ve put them on the spot.

People who read a lot can rattle off titles, authors, different genres; it can be highbrow or lowbrow, doesn’t matter: they are fluent in the language of Book. When someone gives me an answer like that, I can feel my writer’s ears perking up, like a dog suddenly hopeful for a treat. Someone could tell me they wrote a novel last week, and as far as I’m concerned that doesn’t prove anything except an impressive ability to face the blank computer screen time after time after time– which is no small thing, but, sadly, not nearly enough on its own.

But tell me you read two or three books last week, and the week before that, and the week before that going all the way back to your teen years or childhood or whatever, and that’s when I think, Ah! You might be the real deal.

Reading obsessively isn’t nearly enough on its own, either. You still need to accumulate all the tools a fiction writer needs in his or her personal kit – plot, theme, character, place, incisive use of detail, evocation of the different senses, etcetera etcetera – and you still need to practice and persevere until you learn to write a novel that, as one writing instructor put it, “hinges together”. And then you need to learn about query letters and how to get an agent and suffer the agonizing near-misses of almost-publication and endure the endless endless waiting and so on. But reading obsessively is, to me, a sign, like a big red X stamped on your forehead that signals you’re one of the tribe. And as a member of that farflung, scattered tribe, I’m excited to find one of my kind.

Because the truth of it is, there aren’t a whole lot of obsessive readers in the world.

Just like there aren’t a whole lot of people who sell their works of fiction (or nonfiction), who are paid to be published, who can walk into a Borders or Barnes & Noble and find their books on the shelves (at least for a brief period of time).

Seems to me these two things are connected.

–3–

This is the part where somebody always tells me just how wrong I am, how full of bullshit, there are no rules when it comes to art, including John D MacDonald’s maxim: If you don’t read three books a week, you don’t have a chance. This is the part where somebody, inevitably a wannabe writer who doesn’t read much, trots out the anecdote of someone they know who doesn’t read much either – after all, who has the time? – and wrote a novel and it became a huge bestseller and won a Pulitzer. Or something to that effect.

To which I say calmly, And so that’s the exception that proves the rule. While inwardly thinking, Show me a successful writer who doesn’t read much and I’ll show you a dog that can foxtrot. Sure, such writers (and dogs) might exist here and there – the whole thing about get enough monkeys together and put them on typewriters and at some point they’ll produce the Bible — and I’m writing way too many animals into this paragraph — but they’re so rare you can bill them as a circus act.

It just doesn’t work that way.

That you need to read a lot in order to be a better writer isn’t a ‘rule’ but a reflection of an underlying principle about the creative life in general. For me, Eric Maisel puts it best in his book Creativity For Life:

‘…the most useful definition of creativity is the following: people are artistically creative when they love what they are doing, know what they are doing, and actively engage in art-making. The three elements of creativity are thus loving, knowing and doing; or heart, mind and hands; or, as Zen Buddhist teaching has it, great faith, great question, and great courage.’

Loving, knowing, doing. The secret behind becoming excellent at anything is loving one thing deep and hard enough to do it for a very long time. To continue to learn and know it.

There are two kinds of knowing: the things that we can consciously articulate and the different, deeper kind that we can’t really explain or, sometimes, are even aware we possess, but guides us anyway – if we are willing to let it.

We call it our inner voice, our intuition.

My best writing comes from what I guess you could call my writer’s intuition – or, as I like to call it, my undermind. The undermind is a mysterious place and I don’t claim to understand how it works, only that I must feed it and keep it healthy and give it enough space and time so that it can work. When I come to the laptop and return to a scene that’s been troubling me and suddenly realize that I don’t even need it, that in fact the book works better if I cut it out entirely…When I express some kind of insight I didn’t even know I had, either through prose or a character’s dialogue…When I go off on what seems a tangent from the main storyline and yet realize that it makes the book richer, deeper to veer in this direction for a bit…Whenever I have the sense that I don’t really know where the writing is coming from, I know that I’m giving my writer’s intuition full force, that I am letting it speak through me. This is also when I know that I’m at – or at least near – the top of my game.

I had my most striking lesson about the undermind when I was writing LORD OF BONES, which became my third published novel (and sequel to my first). I had the entire book mapped out, both in my head and again on paper: I had outlined and revised the outline and revised the outline yet again, believing that the actual writing of the book can affect the outline just as much as the outline affects the book. Both outline and novel-in-progress are, in my mind, living documents: they shift and change, they evolve. No matter how thoroughly you map out a scene beforehand, there’s a kind of magic in the act of actually writing it that never happens in the outline, so that you end up with something different than what you’d intended. The difference might be great, or small and subtle, but it needs to be acknowledged, and looped back into the outline of the novel, which must alter enough to incorporate it…So if the outline dictates the course of the novel, the novel keeps altering the outline.

When I was writing my dark urban fantasy LORD OF BONES I came to a scene where my character Kai Youngblood, a seven-hundred-year-old Summoner (a descendent of angels who can use magic), has a conversation with a demon named Del who has information about the novel’s Big Bad – the Lord of Bones himself – that Kai desperately wants.

And then Del said something that surprised me. He suggested that the Lord of Bones was looking for a new pupil, now that Asha, the villain of my first novel BLOODANGEL, had been eliminated.

A thought flashed through me: what if Jess, my novel’s protagonist (and Kai’s love interest) was that new pupil? What if Bones was seeking her out for that reason?

From the way the idea came out of nowhere and resonated through me, I knew it was my undermind at work. And so I did this:

I ignored it.

I ignored it because in order to accommodate it I wouldn’t have to tweak or alter the outline, but throw out the whole thing and start from scratch. The thought of all that extra work made me groan. Besides, it was a half-second flash. It was a door swinging open just enough to let in some outside air, give a glimpse of a different road. Easy enough to kick that door shut.

Flash forward maybe two hundred pages and many months later. I lost my original editor, who jumped publishing houses, and as we waited to see who would replace her my agent contacted me about the manuscript. She said, nicely and gently, that since the publication date was coming up fast (it was about a year away) we should probably get to work on revising the manuscript – that is, if I was willing to consider her suggestions. Since my agent has proven repeatedly her excellent editorial eye, I said sure. Also, I knew deep in my gut that the book….didn’t work.

My agent confirmed this. She didn’t exactly say “it sucks”, but presented a convincing and thorough argument about why the first sixty pages were good and the rest of the book was not. She said, We should throw out everything after the first sixty pages. She said, There’s a conversation that Kai has with Del where it’s suggested that the Lord of Bones might want to ‘mentor’ Jess, and I think that’s a great idea, and the direction the book should go in…

And of course I knew she was right. The decision I made in order to avoid a painful truth (the book wasn’t working) as well as the extra time and work involved in starting over, ended up costing me….a new, much more painful truth (the completed book was a hideous, horrible failure that should never see the light of day) and considerably more time than if I’d been smart enough to go with my intuition in the first place.

The creative process has always been regarded as mysterious to the point of being otherworldly – the ancient Greeks believed that when you were ‘in the zone’ some literal higher power was working through you. I don’t believe in those kinds of muses – or rather, I believe in what Steven Pressfield in his excellent book The War of Art describes as a ‘workaday muse’. Basically: inspiration strikes only those who prepare for it, and the way you prepare for it is to show up at the work everyday, to overcome all the insidious, brutal forces that keep us procrastinating and rationalizing away that procrastination, to keep slugging through the work until mental skies open and the nubile goddess of Inspiration sweeps down and streaks us away in her white-hot chariot.

My take is that the ‘higher power’ is the deeper, darker power of the undermind, of writer’s intuition. You can’t control it. It will not come when called. It will not be your dog. But you can feed and nourish it and do your best to train it, so that when it does show up it sings out with the full gifted vocal range of a Christina Aguilera, instead of one of those deluded folks trying out for American Idol.

And the way you train it is through reading.

Reading reading reading.

You can take classes and workshops. You can (and probably should) seek out writing mentors who will help you learn the craft of fiction writing and, if you’re very lucky, the kind of mindset necessary to be a professional (ie: someone who loves writing enough to commit to it as something other than “just a hobby”). You can read your way through an ocean of books about how to build plots and create characters.

I’ve done all these things and found them helpful. But this is what I noticed early on, when I was still in my late teens: these books and Writer’s Digest articles that explored the techniques of fiction writing were only putting face and form to things I already ‘knew’. I just knew them on that deeper level of things that are sensed and felt; I already did many of them, knowing that they worked and were somehow ‘right’ but without knowing why or even what, exactly, I was doing. I didn’t need to learn about point of view, for example, from a workshop or an article; I had already absorbed that knowledge through years and years of reading fiction. What I did need was a better sense of how I could improve, and this is where that conscious, deconstructed kind of writer’s knowledge – that upfront face knowledge as opposed to the vague shadowy knowledge of the undermind – came in helpful.

Let me put it this way: I learned to write fiction (to the extent that I know how to do it) through reading fiction. Reading fiction gave me a rough draft of knowledge; novel-writing workshops and all those how-to magazines and books, what I sometimes affectionately refer to as Writer’s Porn, helped me revise all that knowledge to make it sharper, stronger, much more focused.

Reading is the ‘learning’. You can never learn enough. The more I read, the more experienced I become in just what other writers do to achieve a powerful level of storytelling. As a reader, I enjoy myself, and as a writer, I file those examples away deep in my undermind where they join up with other examples and play around and cross-fertilize and wait for the moment when they’re needed. They become the river of knowledge, influence and inspiration that I can draw from and the more I read, the deeper and wider that river gets.

A well-known agent in San Francisco once advised a room filled with eager hopefuls to take their time allotted to writing, slice it in half, and dedicate one half to reading. Reading can never replace the actual ‘doing’ of writing: you still need to put in all that time at the blank page, you still need to get those practice novels under your belt and in that mythical Trunk that every writer seems to possess in some form. But learning and doing are flip sides of the same coin; one doesn’t fully exist without the other.

Reading is the inhale, writing is the exhale.

Aspiring writers will tell me, But I don’t have time to read! I never understood the logic behind this. Whether or not you like it, whether or not you have ‘time’ for it: that doesn’t change the cold objective fact that, if you want to arrive at a certain level of craft, it has to be done.

Which brings us to love.

Loving, learning, doing: if you love fiction enough, you find the time. You give up other things instead. You read around the edges of your life – standing in line, waiting in the doctor’s office, on the train or the bus or the plane. You read during lunch hour. You read instead of doing the dishes or watching TV or shopping for stuff you probably don’t need anyway.

The art of any art is the art of obsession. This is not something that people in general tend to understand. They encourage you to be well-rounded, which bemuses me in a society that tends to reward the specialists – the obsessives – those who decided to excel at one thing instead of becoming good at a hundred or competent at a thousand.

There were people in my life who told me I read too much. One afternoon during the year I was an exchange student in Australia, my host father took me aside and we went for a walk. He told me to make sure I always put away any food I took out of the fridge or cupboard, because in the hot Australian climate crumbs attracted bugs. Lots of bugs. He also told me that maybe I should read a little less. Or maybe a lot less. He believed what a lot of people believe: that reading was a poor substitute for actually living, as if one could only be done in exclusion of the other; and that reading fiction was, by and large, a form of escape and an unproductive use of time. If you’re going to read, at least read non-fiction, because that way you learn something.

It wouldn’t be the last time I encountered this attitude. My ex-husband used to ask me, whenever he saw me reading, “Don’t you think you’ve read enough books?” He was joking without really joking; he thought my time was better spent elsewhere, preferably on the house. To suggest that this was one of the reasons we eventually divorced would not be too far from the truth.

So I would say this:

Reading is living. It is a way of touching minds with some of the most remarkable minds that exist or ever did exist. Reading takes you deeper into the nature of reality, helps you penetrate the human condition itself. It enlarges your consciousness. It provides you with experiences you never could have had in any other way (or just haven’t had yet). And when you put the book down, everything you take away from it helps you live your life with added depth and richness. Fiction may not provide you with the same kind of information as non-fiction, but information is not always knowledge, and knowledge is not always wisdom. Fiction – the best fiction – is wise, and makes you just a little bit wiser, and you can take that wisdom and apply it across all the different parts of your life.

I am, as of this writing, 37 years old. I am an obsessive reader. I’ve also managed to travel the world, get educated, work various jobs (being crappy at many of them and good at a few), develop friendships, have a tumultuous love life, participate in a scandal or two (not telling), have twins, have triplets, sell three novels, see a ton of movies, write a blog, get married, get divorced, etcetera etcetera. Not necessarily in that order. I started out in Peterborough, Canada and ended up south of the border and on the other side of the continent in Los Angeles, California. I don’t say this to brag about my time management skills – which tend to be questionable in any case – but only to underscore the point that, in the most basic and literal sense of the term, I have still managed to have a life.

If I could go back in time and meet up with my younger self, I wouldn’t tell her to read less.

I would tell her to read more.

If you want to be a writer, read.

Read like a maniac.

Give yourself permission to read like a maniac.

Don’t just read because it will make you a better writer – although it will. Read because you love to read, you love stories of all shapes and sizes, you love the flow and rhythms and innovations of language, you love to learn stuff about people, you love to learn stuff about the world, you love to form relationships with individuals who don’t exist. Read because you love to write. Read because you love fiction and nonfiction and their pirate chests of treasures.

Read for love.

Because if you don’t have love, then what do you have?

And why are you reading this in the first place?

– Justine Musk

www.justinemusk.com
my blog The Decadence: Notes from a Novelist’s Life in LA

When I was in university, one of my closest friends asked me if writing fiction couldn’t be a “hobby” instead of something I staked my future and livelihood on.

I was adamant that it could not. I had to create or die, dammit! I was born to be a writer! Anything else would be a death of the soul!

I wonder about that now. It’s good – and necessary – to be passionately dedicated to your art, whichever and whatever the art happens to be. But I’m also reminded of something that Stephen King said in his book On Writing: art is a support system for life, not the other way around.

When I was a kid, I could knock out five or ten pages of fiction with such ease I honestly didn’t understand what it meant to have ‘writer’s block’ or why writers, especially successful writers who made it look easy, would go on about the pain and torment of facing the blank page.

Sure, I was young. But writing was not the center of my existence; school and family occupied most of my time and mental energy.

Writing was the shadow life, running through the real one.

Writing took place at the edges of things.

Only later, when I was an adult, and in a situation where I could put my writing squarely in the center of my days, did I start to understand the pain and torment those writers were talking about.

There is a lot of anxiety involved in the creative process. The choices we know we have to make and the self-doubt we know we have to weather, and then the criticism and rejection we know we will experience when it comes time to show our work to the world (or at least certain corners of it), demand a toughness of spirit that isn’t always easy to manifest.

Then there’s the nature of the work itself: that mysterious wild quality to the creative process that seems beyond our control, so that we often feel ourselves at the mercy of it – that it’s the boss of us rather than vice-versa — and wouldn’t it be nicer and easier to go to the movies instead. There’s something to be said for keeping that kind of work at the edges of your life: like an eclipse that will drive you blind if you stare at it too directly, maybe fiction-writing, or art-making in general, is often possible only if you sneak up on it from a certain angle.

After all, the harder and tighter we try to hold on to anything, the more likely it is to slip through our fingers.

There’s an anecdote I like to tell about a writer I used to know whenever I got into a discussion about MFA programs. I think there’s a lot of value in MFA programs, but I was making a point similar to the point I’m making now: the importance of doing something else, of having a passion other than writing, a passion that you can bring to your writing.

My friend, K, published his first book of short stories when he was 28. He won a prestigious national prize for the title story. I knew him at university – he was bright, and showed talent as a writer, and was devoted to the craft.

He wasn’t unlike many other young aspiring writers who graduate university and go on to do an MFA, or take jobs in coffee shops and write when they can.

K, though, took a different route – he loved sailing and had a passion for the sea. Despite his complete lack of experience, he figured out how to get himself hired as a crew member on a yacht. He sailed round the world, went scuba diving, visited many different countries and took an interest in the people there.

Then he came home and transmuted those experiences into fiction. He found an agent and got a two-book deal with a major publisher. The book came out and, from what I understand, did well, got some good reviews, and K looked poised for the kind of literary career others only dream of.

When I told this anecdote, I was making the point that there are alternatives to the MFA route, and finding a different path that provides equally different material for your fiction can be a deep advantage.

To be sure, K sought out writing teachers and mentors, including a professor at the local university. He read and wrote and got constructive feedback and revised and wrote some more.

That’s what you do.

That’s the job.

He didn’t write a perfect manuscript. But what he did write was something very different than what his peers in their MFA programs were writing, and it made his voice fresh and distinctive, and it gave him a great story of his own to include in the author blurb at the back of the book and in promotional materials. He didn’t just learn how to write; he went out into the world and found something to say.

In everything I’ve read about writing fiction, everything addressed to aspiring writers and especially young aspiring writers, I don’t think there’s enough emphasis on that: find your voice, yes, but also find something to say.

Find the subject matter that is uniquely your own.

Be curious about the world and hungry for experience. Get obsessed, and follow those obsessions wherever they lead you.

And then write about them. Be bold. Take chances. Use your imagination as well as what you know, use your ability to put yourself in someone else’s perspective.

K wrote stories about a young man who works on a yacht, a young man who learns about love and sex, but he also wrote from the perspectives of women, of people from different places, different cultures.

Write what you know, but chances are that you know more than you think you know. Keep learning, keep exploring, so that you know more and more.

But here’s the other part to the story about K, that I didn’t have way back when I used to tell this anecdote. Seven years later, he has yet to come out with the second book in his two-book contract. As far as I know – and I could be mistaken – he hasn’t published again.

The last time I saw K, he was passing through Los Angeles on his way to Mexico where he was going to stay with a friend on the beach and write his novel. Finishing his novel was important, K told me, because he had to do it for him, not his publisher; he had to know that he could do it.

I haven’t seen or talked to him since. I hope he finished it. But I think there’s a good chance he didn’t, because something in his writer-self had shifted since the success of his book. Writing no longer held the same kind of fascination for him; the spark had gone out of it, the way it sometimes does, especially when we invest it with that Create or Die ultimatum. Unlike when he wrote those short stories, people were watching him, now, people were waiting for his work. They had expectations for him. He had expectations for himself.

When we have so much at stake, we get tense. We get anxious. Anxiety reaches deep into the most ancient part of our brains and triggers that fight-or-flight–or-freeze response. All we’re facing is the blank page, but we might as well be facing a snarling sabertooth tiger; that primitive part of our brain can’t tell the difference.

All it registers is: threat.

All it cares about is: survival.

So we freeze up. We back away. And maybe we take flight into some activity or process that is guaranteed to relieve that anxiety, at least temporarily, whether it’s watching television or shopping or doing drugs or alcohol or any other one of a myriad of hard and soft addictions.

Then we berate ourselves for our lack of willpower, we call ourselves idiots; we feel like total failures, we regret the lost time, the lost chances to produce good work. But that part of our brain is older than we are, and it operates in a dark instinctive space that is beyond language or reason. If we back it into a corner, and make it think it’s fighting for its very survival, can we be surprised at how fiercely it drives us away? And that, once again, no writing gets done?

Having it on the sidelines, releasing ourselves from the pressure and burden of expectations, might be, ironically enough, one way of keeping our writing center stage. We do our work in the corner, nourish it and let it grow like a plant that only blooms in the dark. So much of writing seems to happen underground anyway, in the rich mysterious spaces of that parallel life where other lives get lived and life-or-death drama plays out while we run errands, make lunch for the kids, put in the time at the day job.

If you wrote for twenty to thirty minutes a day – every day – you could write a book in a year.

Writing fiction is serious business. It demands nothing less than everything you’ve got to give: your blood, sweat, heart and soul; your time; your ego. You expose yourself in your work and again when you show your work. It deserves to be taken seriously, and yet somehow we have to find a way to treat it lightly, hold it lightly, so it doesn’t slip away from us.

Justine Musk

 

 

1

 

The novel is dead.  Long live the novel.

 

2

 

So I got myself a Kindle2.  I resisted the first version, declaiming to all and sundry that I preferred the experience of book-as-object: the feel of the pages, the gloss of the jacket.  But the idea of reducing the weight of the reading load I carry around —  to something as slender as a butter knife — was too seductive to resist.  Still, I remained skeptical.  When the package arrived from Amazon,  I let it sit around the house for a few weeks like a neglected hamster.

 

But then I got hooked.  In minutes.

 

The convenience is amazing. Thinner and smaller than a notebook, it takes up so little space in my sack of a handbag I have to make sure it doesn’t get crushed.  Within two days I’d packed the thing with newspapers, magazines, blogs and nonfiction:  not only did I not mind reading them in this new form, I preferred it, happy to be without the clutter of all that print, articles so neatly at my fingertips. 

 

The coolest thing of all is to read or hear about a book, then be able to order it on my Kindle2, download it, and start reading within minutes.  Because, you know, that two-day wait from Amazon, that fifteen minute drive to the bookstore, is just waaaaay too long a wait.  And reading on a Kindle turns out to be not so very different from reading a book-object: the page looks the same, your eyes move across it the same way.  It just means that instead of getting a strained right wrist from propping up a hardcover, I get a strained thumb from pressing the ‘next page’ button.

 

Although I’d been following the conversations about the future of book publishing for several years, my attachment to my Kindle2 drove it all home in a way that left me a little awestruck.  I asked myself, Am I holding the death of traditional publishing in my hands? 

 

And I answered myself: Duh. 

 

 

3

 

Once upon a time, people sat around campfires in smoky caves and told each other stories and painted illustrations on the walls.  Generations handed stories down to each other through poetry and song, using rhythm and rhyme as an excellent memory device.

 

Enter the book.

 

 Once upon a time,  a book was this kind of holy relic that monks labored over high in their monasteries, copying page after page while the rest of Europe sloshed through the mulch of the Dark Ages.  Then, you see, this guy invented this thing called the printing press.  Suddenly anything you could think up in your head could be printed and distributed to an audience of unimaginable size.  People got more literate.  Even women.  Novels became the drug of choice, offering flight and fancy — they also allowed the more intrepid (or financially desperate) women writers to create identity, independence and a name for themselves.

 

Novels – from Edith Wharton to Charles Dickens –were published in serial installments in monthly newspapers.  Short fiction was the real moneymaker: Scott F Fitzgerald churned out lucrative short stories in order to subsidize the “real work” of his novels.  As the decades rolled by, the bulky length of a Victorian novel became more streamlined, due to the natural evolution of the form itself, but perhaps also because of technology.  The advent of word processing makes the cut-and-paste of revision a shockingly different experience than the literal cut-and-paste done under gaslight — or even the liquid paper and carbons and constant retyping I remember doing on the white Olympia typewriter I swiped from my mother when I was a kid.  Form and content have a living, shifting relationship to each other: content dictates form, and form dictates the possibilities of content.

 

But in the end, do the forms really change that much? 

 

The more things change, after all, the more they stay the same.  (Or, as Hollywood movie executives like to tell each other, “People want the same, yet different”).   People fret about what the future of fiction will look like, but could be the future is already here.  It looks like this: a Kindle2, popular because it mimics a familiar reading experience, not because it creates any real new one.  Along with books, we have e-books.  Digital fiction opens up a whole new world of interactive narrative, except we’ve already that for years: they’re called computer games, some of them with storylines more sophisticated and compelling than much of the stuff in the movie theatres on any given day.  

 

We’ll have a kind of hybrid, multimedia storytelling that combines text, music, pictures, video, perhaps even social media but is that really so different from storyworlds like the Star Wars universe, explored through movies, novels, comic books, soundtracks, action figures? (Would Luke Skywalker have a Twitter account?  Would Yoda be on Facebook?)  As traditional magazines shut down and shut out short stories and poetry, literary journals multiply all over the Web .   It’s possible that poetry and short-short fiction will find a whole new audience when distributed on iPhones and iPods.  Narrative-blogs are today’s published journals, living memoirs.  And what is Twitter but a grown-up version of notes passed in class or, for the more adventurous and poetic, a kind of haiku?

 

Fiction isn’t going anywhere, except digital.  We’re seeing old wine in new bottles.  The challenge is for the publishing industry to learn how to shape and build and package those new bottles. 

 

And, of course, for the writers.

 

 

4

 

A novel remains a novel:  a singular and well-crafted emotional experience that brings you into intimate contact with another person’s mind and vision.  It is, for me, an experience very different from any kind of interactive storytelling – after all, we’ve already had that too, they’re called Choose Your Own Adventures – because part of the fulfillment of a good novel is seeing what happens next.  And also how, in the end, everything comes together in a way you didn’t expect, and resonates back through the story to give it order and meaning. 

 

What has changed – the bottle that, in my mind, has been smashed to smithereens – is not the novel, but the position of the novelist. 

 

In this Internet age of connection, collaboration and communication,  it is harder and harder to view the writer as an isolated figure.  Blogs, forums and social media have transformed the relationship between writer and reader, between writer and other writers, providing feedback and contact when before there would have been only silence — until the trudging footsteps of the mailperson’s walk up the driveway.  Googling a writer can bring on a flood of information that in turn brings a weird kind of intimacy –  a sense of: I don’t know you, but I know you.  The writer’s identity was once a shrouded, mysterious thing in the distance, sometimes revealed, in glimpses, through whatever interviews and public readings the writer decided to give. 

 

Now, the writer doesn’t just have an identity, but a digital identity that anyone with an Internet connection can access at any time.  I was thinking about this after a conversation with the president of Causecast.org — a nonprofit dot.com company — who observed that “an author’s website no longer supports the books…the books support the website.”  I could see how this might apply to nonfiction, especially if the writer was also a touring public speaker, but fiction?  Fiction isn’t about anything other than the fiction; either a book engages you and does what it’s supposed to, or it doesn’t.

 

Except…a long time can elapse between books.  The books themselves can span different subjects, different genres.  And if the author’s body of work represents that author’s vision, could be that the author’s website serves as the heart of the vision, a signature digital cord that pulls everything together.  This is also a time when to market your work means to speak with a unique and authentic voice that draws people in, makes them want to connect with you and read your stuff.  Rather than just a promotional or ‘branding’ tool, the website – with its attendant blogs and links and takeaway reading material,  its bio and news and reviews – becomes the author’s persona removed from a distant background to be placed front and center.  It is the author’s way of putting herself out there and allowing herself to be found.  This is why a static website is a failed website; it should have a life of its own, changing and growing as the author’s work — and the author herself — does the same.   The work is the web, and the website – and the connection it enables with the reader — is the warm, fuzzy spider at the center. 

 

Because another thing that is changing – and not to the writer’s advantage – is the reading experience itself.  When I am reading my Kindle, I have many options to choose from.  One book loses my interest and – boom – I press a couple of buttons and go on to something else.  Or if nothing on my Kindle appeals to me, and I’m in the mood for something new, I just need to switch over to the wireless store and see what catches my fancy enough to download.  This, of course, is on top of everything else in today’s world competing for my time, my attention, and my money.  It’s more difficult than ever for a writer to grab – and hold – the reader’s attention. But, thanks to the multiple dimensions of the Internet, the writer has more ways than ever of doing so. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I write this I am sitting at home in Los Angeles while it seems that half the people I know are at Sundance and the other half are at the Inauguration.  I don’t mind this — I could have gone to either, if I’d made enough effort, but here’s the thing:

I am exhausted.

It has been, if I may say so myself, a hell of a year.

When my sons were younger, we once bought a butterfly kit.  We watched caterpillars transform themselves into winged creatures we set loose in our backyard.  But what struck me — kind of horrified me, actually — was the messy, bloody-looking process it turned out to be.  Turns out that that particular metaphor of transformation didn’t prepare me for the dried red stains splashed all around the mesh cage, or the struggle and pain they imply.

To put it bluntly: I got divorced.

The end of my marriage left no doubt whatsoever that it was indeed the end of my marriage, and that to carry it any further would only inflict further emotional damage on all involved.  That door is closed and there is no going back.  So I’ve been an unmarried woman now (in every way except technically, if you want to get picky about it) for about six months. Along with the rise of what seems like every negative thought and emotion that ever got suppressed in the past years — in order to keep the peace as best as it could be kept, in order to just get along — there’s also been the sweeping sense of liberation, release, new possibility. There’s been a growing awareness of the shape I’m changing into once I bust through the final layers of cocoon — and the stained mesh of the cage itself.

It really is a gruesome process.

The high points were high and the low points so low I hope I never descend that far again.  What the year distinctly lacked was any kind of calm that characterizes those points in the middle.  If the poet had it right — that poetry, and by extension fiction-writing in general, is the intensity of experience recollected in tranquility, then I gathered a hell of a lot of material.  I just needed the tranquility to work with it.

I lacked something else too, which is just as important, if not more so.  A friend summed it up in neat if devastating fashion when she said,  ”You need to make choices.  You’re not making choices.”

And she was right.

There’s some cocky little child in me that wants to do and have and be everything….and write about it all.

In other words, there were times when I said yes when I should have said no.  And not because I was afraid to say no; I wanted to write every single thing I was offered, amazed and plumb delighted that I was being offered these things at all.  I wanted it so much that I denied the reality of my increasingly turbulent personal situation and the impact that would have on my work life, especially once my ex and I started wrestling with custody issues.  I also denied the growing chasm between what I’d agreed to write and what I truly want to write, somehow assuming I’d just manage to accomplish it all.

I didn’t want to make the tough choices, so I acted like I didn’t have to make any.

It didn’t work out so well.

Let’s just say that lessons were learned.

So I like that I’m submitting this piece to the site on the same day we get our new President, when a vocabulary of hope and change has galvanized the country, or at least certain parts of it.  It’s not that any of us expect the war to go away, the middle east to suddenly right itself, the economy to return overnight to the insane bubbling froth of the time I first moved to this country a decade ago.  It’s not that we don’t even expect to be disillusioned, perhaps bitterly so, once reality starts to fill up all that lovely empty space of perfect potential that Obama’s presidency still represents.  But there is the hope that maybe we’ve been through the worst, and we’ve now made a different decision, a new decision, that has pointed us in a fresh and bettter direction.

My own life is heading in a fresh direction, including my writing life.  I’ve had to streamline and shift gears.  I’ve also had to learn that the ‘no’ of quitting some things means a bigger, better ‘yes’ to the other things I now have time for.

So I am saying, all over again, a ‘yes’ to Storytellers Unplugged.  I’ve missed so many posts and been late on so many others — including this one — that I’d like to declare, today, a new start and a new sense of commitment.

Thank you, SU, for your patience with me.

By Justine Musk

 

This is me at nine years old, trailing my mother into the record store, a fairly unusual place for her to be.  We were in Lansdowne Place, one of the big shopping structures springing up along the outskirts of town and steadily sucking the breath from its center, where the other mall, Peterborough Square, hung on for dear life, and where a huge stuffed bear towered over the sidewalk and regularly scared the bejesus out of me (when I wasn’t wondering why the hell it was even there in the first place). 

So I was looking at my mother flipping through the big flat squares that used to hold those vinyl things called ‘records’ — CDs still off in the future and the iPod not yet a gleam in the eye of the public body — and I asked what she was looking for and how come we weren’t going home yet because I was bored to death dragging around after her when I would rather be reading a Lois Duncan novel.  I don’t think I phrased it like that. 

“Scott’s son is a musician,” she said.  “He has a record.  I’m trying to find him.”

Scott was a writer.  He was a sports journalist who wrote so well about hockey that he had been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.  He also wrote novels.  I have a vivid memory of Scott at our front door, stomping slush off his boots: a big broad-shouldered white-haired impressive man who no doubt played a lot of hockey himself, back in the day.  (This was in Canada, where hockey was so woven into the fabric of smalltown life that, like the air you breathe or the way you walk, it never occurs to you to think about it. It’s just there. It seems natural that when Wayne Gretzky defects to the LA Kings, an entire nation convulses with grief and outrage and turns his blonde American actress wife into an evil Jezebel, luring the innocent and naïve and lovestruck Gretzky out of his Alberta paradise into the hellscape of Beverly Hills.  Those evil palm trees! — those godforsaken sexy people! — those satanic ocean breezes!  — what was Gretzky thinking?)  He was talking about his new book, about two young hockey players who solve a murder mystery, and the excellent review it had gotten in Maclean’s (the Canadian equivalent of Time).   “It said the book was ‘masterfully crafted’ and the phrase just kind of hung there in front of my eyes,” he said, and lifted his hands to demonstrate.

My mother worked part-time for Scott, transcribing interviews; it was a familiar sight to see her at her electric typewriter, earplugs sealing her off into her own world, fingers flying along the keys in a way that I would emulate.  (I’ll have you know I became the county Typing Champion three years in a row, each time lugging an impressively massive trophy back to my high school. You never would have thought that trophy was for typing.  You would have thought it was for hockey.)  Scott quickly became less of an employer and more of a family friend (perhaps my mother was slightly attracted to him, although my mind refuses to go there) and his visits to the house were happy things.  I was very shy around him; I was shy around everyone.

I didn’t know his son was a musician.  I didn’t know he had a son at all. 

Because this was Peterborough, Ontario, I knew the kind of musician his kid had to be:  maybe like my cousin, in a band that played around Toronto and maybe, if they were lucky, got nice reviews written up in the The Toronto Star and maybe – maybe –an actual record deal for a record that got made only to sink like a weighted-down corpse. That, to me, was pretty much the epitome of the success a musician from my area seemed capable of, for reasons that had little to do with their actual skill and talent, and everything to do with the area itself.  (Flash forward two decades or so, and a hometown band called Three Days Grace would prove me wrong.  My sister dated a guy who used to play for them, but quit to join another band when he didn’t think Grace would ever go anywhere.  They landed a million-dollar deal shortly after.  I suspect he regrets that decision.  I might feel sorry for him, but then he cheated on my sister, got another girl pregnant and married her instead. I suspect he regrets that decision as well.)

Back to that afternoon in Lansdowne.  My mother kept flipping through the rows of records.  She couldn’t find Scott’s son, which disappointed (if didn’t surprise) both of us.  We wanted to buy that music and take it home, as an act of benevolence, of warmth toward Scott, no matter how much his son’s stuff likely sucked.  She thought the band’s name involved a crazy horse.  The son’s name, she told me, was Neil.  Neil Young. 

The name meant nothing to either of us.

 Many years later, at Queen’s University in snowpacked Kingston, Ontario, I would play ‘Harvest’ so many times that my roommate who slept above my ceiling would finally lose it, stomping down the stairs (he was a big guy) to yell,  “You are ruining that album for me!  You are ruining it for me and it is one of my favorite albums ever!  I love that album!  I would rather suffer through New Kids on the Block than hear you play ‘Heart of Gold’ one…more… goddamn time!  Because  ‘Heart of Gold’ is a great…goddamn…song!”  And I would play that CD not out of charity or benevolence, but because Neil Young is a rock god I would have discovered on my own, eventually, even if I had never known his father.  But because I did know Scott, because I heard the man tell anecdotes about this kid whose family broke apart and who moved around a lot and got into some trouble, Scott’s big hands splayed across the armrests as he leaned forward a little in his chair, Neil became mortal for me in a way that, say, David Bowie never quite did.  (Once I was at a music awards fund raiser thing and Bowie walked right behind me.  My friend waited until I finished speaking, then said, “David Bowie just walked right behind you.”  I turned, but he was lost in the crowd.  I could have killed my friend for being too polite to interrupt me, for not being a Bowie fan herself.  She just didn’t know better.  But still. A pox on her.)

But when I was nine, and ten, and eleven, I was still a long way from realizing just how influential a musical figure Neil Young truly was.  Scott himself never told us.  Maybe because he was amused at our ignorance – the way I was once, when American friends of mine met this guy at a house in LA who introduced himself as Robbie Williams. When they asked him what he did, he said, a touch awkwardly, “I’m a singer,” and they gave him these bland, that’s-nice expressions, the way you do when you meet any random person in LA who says he’s an actor or musician or screenwriter.  Eventually they went off to look him up on Wikipedia. They came back impressed.  They took me aside to explain why.  I knew who he was: my husband and I regarded his lesser-known song “Me and My Monkey” as ‘our’ song, because it is so oddly stirring even as it cracks us up.  (‘Heart of Gold’ it may not be, but the title also has the word ‘monkey’ in it.  This is  important to us.)  

But I don’t think Scott was just amused. This was in Canada, after all, and Canadians as a general rule are self-deprecating and modest.  (Also ironic.  A national magazine once held a contest to find a slogan that started off “As Canadian as…”, in hopes of finding the Canuck equivalent of “As American as…baseball and apple pie.”  But since Canadians would rather listen to New Kids on the Block twenty million times than model their [very fierce, very proud] sense of national spirit after America — or any other country, but especially America — the winning slogan turned out, “As Canadian as possible, under the circumstances.”  Which still strikes me as incredibly funny and makes me swell with pride for my vast northern homeland, in itself a very Canadian reaction. When your national animal is not an eagle, or a bear, but the cute hardworking little tree-chomping beaver, irony is a good way to go.)   I have a friend in LA who is a self-made multi-billionaire, has dined with international royalty and Angelina Jolie.  He’s also one of the most low-key, unassuming dudes in the room, extremely polite and exceptionally nice and the last person to tell you about any of his achievements unless you corner him and ask him direct. And maybe threaten his life. He’s Canadian.  ‘Nuff said.   (He’s also fond of hockey.)  

And fame itself, although the concept may exist cross-cultures, is a weirdly American thing.  One of the paradoxes about Canada – one of the ironies, you might say –is that you haven’t really made it until you’ve made it in the States.  Achieving fame in Canada alone isn’t enough to truly qualify.  Except, if you abandon Canada to become successful in the States, you then become a kind of traitor who is no longer very Canadian at all.  (“Bryan Adams.”  Sniff.  “He’s practically an American!”)  And if you mention Robbie Williams in a group conversation, you can pretty much count the seconds until someone says, “But, you know, he never broke through in the States.”  (Just as some of you Americans and Canadians are thinking right now, I’ve never even heard of the dude, so how famous can he be….?)   

Scott told us about a time he and his son came to Peterborough.  Scott had moved to a farm in nearby Omemee, and Neil was visiting him there for the first time. He was shocked, aghast and dismayed to discover that his father had no piano.  If Neil was going to spend maybe a week a year at this place, there must be a piano.  So father and son trucked in to the sprawling metropolis of Peterborough (pop. 60 000) and went to a music store tucked into a plaza ten minutes’ drive from our house (on Cumberland Avenue), the same plaza where teenage me would become addicted to physical exercise through an infatuation with a martial art (tae kwon do)  and its older charismatic instructor (whole other essay).

So the bored young salesman killing time in a store that few people went into (and would soon close for good) looked up at the tinkle of the bell and watched Neil Young step through the door.  The expression on his face, Scott said, was comical.  He could not speak. Neil sat down at the different pianos, played a few notes, and said,  “I’ll take that one.”  The process took maybe ten minutes.  The youth found his voice enough to complete the transaction, but his hand was shaking so hard that he nearly dropped the pen he handed Neil to sign the receipt. There was a second half to the anecdote – Scott went on about the struggle to get the piano up an ice-slicked road and through the highly inconvenient doorway of his farmhouse – but for me the story always stopped there, with the expression on the kid’s face, the trembling pen.  Neil might as well have dropped in from another planet.  He wasn’t a scruffy-looking amiable Canadian boy anymore, but a huge blue three-headed alien who happened to write a good lyric. Except to listen to Scott’s anecdotes, he was also the new kid in funny clothes who got bullied at school until Neil very calmly got up and went to the pencil sharpener at the back of the classroom.  He picked up a big dictionary and walked between the desks.  He brought it down solidly on his main tormentor’s head.  He was suspended.  He was also never picked on again.

Fame is a funny thing.  Something about it, the aura of it, seems to destroy all rational thought. It’s either light years away or right in your face.  I once picked up that when Brad Pitt became famous, a handful of guys from his college fraternity also lit out for the territories of Hollywood.   People think fame is mythical, impossible, until someone they know actually achieves it, and it’s usually not the person you expect  (Pitt?  That slacker with the bad skin who lived down the hall? He made it?  Darryl Hannah?  That strange gangly girl from high school?  She made it?)   LA exemplifies how fame manages to be both everywhere and nowhere.  You see famous people often enough to be surprised when an out-of-towner reacts like it’s a big deal.  Famous people have a startling habit of looking like normal folk, if somewhat thinner and more attractive and better-dressed – than average (but then, so are LA denizens in general). Jessica Alba?  Just another pretty girl sitting in an outside café.  (Supermodels are the exception to this. They tend to be kind of freaky.)   You think if they can be famous, why can’t I, why can’t I just reach out and take it, what have they got that I don’t?  If you’re a teenager who thinks he or she was born to be famous, and that this conviction of yours is just another sign that you’re destined to be so, you might tell people you have a 50/50 chance at it while allowing to yourself that you’re just being modest.

This, after all, is not the kind of country where people go to shrines and tempt cajole beg and bribe the deities to bring them good luck; not a country where people readily admit that you might not be the captain of your fate, at least not all the time, that a human life can transform spectacularly in a moment of extreme and random luck.  

Fame, though, is usually the abnormal result of an abnormal obsession, and obsession by its nature is a weird and solitary thing, a thing that drives people to decisions that other people consider stupid or foolish or insane.  But fame becomes such an object of fascination in itself that it gets disconnected from the actual work it requires – or, especially, the genuine need to do the work that drives these people in the first place.  People want the success, and maybe an inspiring soundbite behind it (she was a single mother on welfare! She wrote in cafes with her baby because she couldn’t afford a sitter! J.K. Rowling has balked at the way the myth of her life has been streamlined into something she considers both inaccurate and unfair).  What people are not so interested in is the tedium, the daily grind and fatigue and sheer inconvenience of the struggle.  It’s dull.  It’s too much like their own life.  So what we get is a culture that inculcates kids with the desire to be famous and the youthful conviction that they can and will be, without any real knowledge of how to go about it:  how to evaluate themselves realistically, absorb tough honest critiques of their work and grow and change, practice every day and most likely alone, make sacrifices, weather constant doubt from others and self, cut against the grain, etc., etc.  You know how it goes.

What we also don’t get is the idea that there’s actually a spectrum — a whole existing range of possibility — between being wildly famous and a total starving failure. 

In your face or planets away.  Everywhere and nowhere.  

If Neil Young was like a messenger from a faraway place who opened up this idea in my life that, yes, you can go out into the world and experience amazing things, no matter where or how you start out, then his father presented a different possibility, a lot less glamorous but exhilarating in its own right.  You can build a rewarding and workable life around the creative work that you love, and have a bit of talent for, and work very, very hard at –  and, of course, persist like a crazy person. 

There’s a scene from the documentary ‘Comedian’ (it’s good, you should watch it) where a rising young comic bitches to Jerry Seinfeld about how he’s spent his twenties busting his ass across the country in obscure smoky clubs while his friends get promoted and buy nice cars and houses in the suburbs.  He works just as hard as his friends do, the comic complains, but what does he have to show for it?  Where’s his suburban paradise? Jerry gives him a cool bemused look and says something like, “You mean there’s something else you wish you’d been doing all this time?”   

In high school I realized there was nothing I’d rather do than write fiction, find some way to travel to farflung places, and maybe have kids, maybe even a lot of kids, if my life went in a direction that allowed motherhood without giving up writerhood (turns out it did – at least so far, knock wood — in a way that no one in my hometown would ever have believed or predicted).  My own life to date has turned just as much on luck – both very good and very bad –as it has on other things, not least because I came so young to such a clear idea of what I wanted.  Although that’s not completely it: most kids, if you give them enough unstructured space and time to discover themselves, will figure out what they love to do.  This might not translate so easily into what they want to be, since the world has a tendency to keep changing and professions and job markets have a way of changing with it, but it will point them in the right direction.  If   they don’t get steered off into some much more sensible but ultimately inappropriate path instead.  I’m lucky not because I started writing young; I’m lucky because I never stopped.

I could say that Scott Young was a major influence in my life because he was the first adult outside of parents and teachers to take my writing seriously; when my mother told him I’d written a novel at 13, he asked to read it, then called her up to tell her how good he thought it was and that he wanted “to show it around to a few people.”  I could say it’s because his girlfriend, a writer and teacher, told my shy and awkward phone-phobic self, “If you could hear these people talking about how talented you are, you wouldn’t be afraid to call any of them ever again.”  I could say it’s because Scott exposed me to the whole process of agents and editors, submissions and feedback, critique and revision; and how to navigate the endless loop of hope and rejection, hope and rejection, getting so close to a book deal that your father drives you out to meet the editor face-to-face, only to have it all fall apart the way these things often do.  How to move on to the next thing, the next book, the next loop of hope, but this time with the knowledge that you’ve gotten better, and with the next book you’ll get better still. I could say that by the time I left high school, I was so invested in my life as a writer that even Apollo and his horses couldn’t drag me into any other profession.

(None of the professional contacts Scott gave me over the years ever panned out, by the way, in terms of actual publication; I’d love to end the story like that, but it’s nowhere so neat and even depressing in terms of how many years it still took me to sell. I went to university, went to Japan, went to California, made some contacts on my own that never panned out either, and eventually landed the agent who landed me a book deal through a random query letter.  Just as if I’d never had any contacts at all.)

Scott was a mentor, but he was also a living local example that it was even possible.  You could go out there and make a living as a writer;  you could go out into the wild blue places and make a living with your guitar and your shaky, husky, not-so-great voice that still knows a compelling melody.  He showed me that this was possible even as he showed me the  effort and daily commitment that goes into it, no matter how good or smart you might actually prove to be (and which is never enough on its own, not close). He showed me the craft as well as the art.  When I went to my first writer’s conference with the first pages of the first draft of what would become my first published novel, a novelist and workshop leader sitting at my dinner table absorbed my youth ( I have always looked younger than I am, thanks to a once-rounded face, once-oily skin, and freakish inability to tan that you give up all attempts and read indoors instead) and gently tried to reality-check me by stressing how a writing apprenticeship doesn’t take just five years of real effort, but ten.  Or fifteen.  But I had already learned this long ago, from Scott Young.  I had been writing seriously, at that point, for ten years, give or take a break here and there.  I figured I was getting close.

Not so long ago, I found the courage to approach Neil Young at a fund raiser music-awards thing (same thing, different year, where I almost glimpsed Bowie) and asked him about his father.  He seemed surprised.  He conveyed to me, through the dinner noise that filled the big room and the rapid thud of my own heart, that Scott was “not doing too well”.  His mind was going.  His health was gone.  I tried to express how much Scott meant to me, how much I’ve come to appreciate him, in ways I didn’t know how to when I was still that tongue-tied kid.  Everyone, I suppose, has that person in your life who leaves it for good before you ever get the chance to tell them what you’ll always wish you told them.  I didn’t get the chance to tell Scott.  So I tried to tell his son.  And now I’m telling you.

Scott told me something else, a long time ago, that I have held verbatim in my mind ever since.  No matter how old or young you are, the job remains the same: 

Make it sing.

 

                               — Justine Musk 

By Justine Musk

I was a judge in a ‘hook’ writing contest held by the fangs-fur-fey livejournal community (http://community.livejournal.com/fangs_fur_fey). Writers of related genres sent in their ‘hooks’ – that paragraph of a query letter describing the novel in such concise, compelling terms that the agent has no choice but to request five pages, then fifty, then the whole thing, then representation.

The judges were all published novelists who at some point had written a hook that got them all the way out of the slush pile and into your local Barnes & Noble.

Each hook was posted online, as were the judges’ critiques. The idea was to give at least some of the thought process behind the decision-making that went into which hooks were chosen and which did not.

It surprised me how much time and work this contest involved, just to give a two- or three-paragraph critique – and not a particularly well-organized one at that — of each hook. I was given thirteen hooks and only managed to get through eleven – the final two ended up assigned to other judges. It took up massive chunks of my weekend – when I could have been working on my own stuff or hanging out with my family or reading or going to the movies or taking a hip-hop dance class or just blissfully wasting time.

It was my job as judge to select “the best of the lot” – my favorite of the hooks — and then request the first five pages of the manuscript. I will then critique those five pages (which I’ll be doing after writing this essay).

To be honest, there were no clear winners. I am doubtful that even one would prove tight, structured and interesting enough to hook an actual agent’s interest. Which is a shame, because the art of writing a good hook is different from the art of writing a good novel – it’s possible to be good at the latter while totally sucking at the former, and vice-versa.

However, a hook really is your book’s first impression. It implies a lot about your book. Flaws within the hook will suggest to the agent, as they did to me, that those flaws are indicative of the state of your manuscript – that the understanding of what makes for compelling story and character just isn’t there, or that the story isn’t quite ready yet for submission in the marketplace.

Having said that, sometimes – as one poster put it – “the heart of the story will shine through the crappy presentation”. I ended up choosing two hooks as the “best of the lot”, agreeing to critique an extra set of pages, because I saw something through those flawed presentations that I didn’t quite see in the others.

They both managed to convey a complete sense of what the book actually was. They had a voice I felt I could spend some time with as a reader. And something about them struck me as original and lively enough to get under my skin a bit; I found myself thinking about them while I was off doing other things. Which made me decide to declare them winners of this round.

A hook, first and foremost, should convey the shape and arch of your story

And by story I mean: protagonist, setting, conflict, resolution.

The limit on each hook was 300 words – brevity is everything when you’re querying an agent – and I was impressed at how much information people managed to pack into such a short space. But it tended to be the wrong information. The stuff I needed and wanted to know wasn’t in there.

People did seem to realize that details were important – but they just weren’t the right details.

I wanted a vivid sense of who the protagonist was. Most hooks gave me the protagonist’s name and gender — and little more. Age would have been helpful. Profession. Perhaps a touch of background. A hint of the protagonist’s dominating personality traits. Anything that would flesh out the generic shape of Protagonist into someone specific and intriguing, someone I’d like to read a whole book about.

What would have been especially impressive: some inner conflict or wound the character will somehow resolve in the course of his or adventures, some sense of how the character will grow. An inner, personal struggle to both reflect and amplify the external struggle.

Speaking of that external struggle: show me the conflict! After you tell me who the protagonist is – better yet, create an interesting detailed image of that protagonist – show me who or what that character is in direct conflict with. Show me the antagonist to balance out the protagonist (and I don’t necessarily mean hero vs. villain, I mean the person who wants the thing that cuts against what the protagonist wants and needs).

Show me what motivates your characters. Most hooks completely neglected to do this, which is a shame. Think about how much work a character’s motivation actually does: shows a great deal about the character and a great deal about the plot. It shows me how the protagonist and antagonist must inevitably come into conflict. That’s a lot of work done with not a lot of words.

There are two kinds of conflict: the major conflict that shapes the novel and serves as a kind of throughline to drive you through the storyworld, and what my own agent calls ‘line by line conflict’. If the major conflict is the key question or two that the reader becomes anxious to see resolved – will the Rebel Alliance destroy the Death Star and win freedom for the universe? Will our heroes survive? – ‘line by line conflict’ becomes the series of questions that keep the reader actually reading the pages (is Darth Vader Luke’s father? What will happen to frozen Han Solo? Will the characters escape Jabba? Were those Ewoks truly necessary, and did they have to be so bloody cute? Okay, the last doesn’t really apply, but you get my point). Plot isn’t just things that happen (and why), but also how the author deals out that information to the reader: the rhythm of questions being raised and answered and then how those answers bloom into more questions, that makes for a satisfying storytelling experience.

When stories ask too many questions and don’t provide that countering rhythm of answers, readers get bored or frustrated and drop out – think about how ratings fared for once-popular television shows like Twin Peaks, Lost, or The X-Files, amid criticism about how the shows had handled (or mishandled) the questions so compelling to viewers. They refused to actually answer them. Withholding information will keep the reader’s interest – but only to a point.

Many hooks broke the story apart into a list of plot elements. Some of those elements were indeed intriguing, but I couldn’t see how they added up. It’s a bit like listing the ingredients of a lemon meringue pie without showing me the pie itself – I see the flour and lemon filling and sugar and other things, and yes they do look promising, but I don’t see what the final result is, how the ingredients bake into each other, to create something that’s more than the sum of its parts. You have to keep focused on the story, the ‘more’ of the sum of those parts. The pie. If you simply rattle off a list of Cool Things That Happen without showing how they build on each other to create ever-greater urgency, tension, rising stakes, then I will think that the novel doesn’t hang together right – that it’s too episodic, just one thing happening after another while the characters kind of wander around. And by trying to cram in so much, you end up focusing on too little. Some of that extremely valuable wordspace should go towards fleshing out those line-by-line questions (when you raise an interesting question, the natural human impulse is to crave an interesting answer – and then you’ve hooked the reader’s curiosity, a powerful thing indeed.)

But above all, see the forest for the trees, and make sure the agent can, too. Stay focused on the most important elements of the book and how those elements hang together. Show me how they link up to each other, weave around each other, braid through each other. Give me a sense of the motion of the story – how it sets up, complicates, and resolves – so I can get a sense of the shape of the thing, or even just the sense that the thing has a shape at all. That it won’t fall flat. Or apart.

And please, please tell me where it’s set. The setting is a character in itself; a love story set in Chicago will be different from a love story set in West Hollywood which will be different from a love story set in my own hometown of Peterborough, Ontario (in which at least half of the characters would play hockey). Much like character motivation, ‘setting’ is one of those great, fantastic things that conveys so much about your book in so little.

More bang for your word-buck.

Take advantage.

I chose one hook because the voice appealed to me. Originally I wasn’t going to send it through to the next round, but I found my mind going back to it. So finally I just figured, Hell with it. Let’s take a chance. Plot problems, after all, can be fixed, assuming the writer is someone you can work with (and agents do not take this for granted, will often work with a writer to see how that goes before agreeing to take on the manuscript). But a good, developed ‘voice’ isn’t something that can be so easily revised. It’s either there or it isn’t. And if it makes me think that, yes, I might like to curl up for three hundred pages with this voice — that’s a powerful thing indeed.

So what is voice? A strong grasp of grammar and vocabulary should go without saying. Beyond that, it has to do with an ease in handling language, perhaps – but not necessarily – a flair, a love, for words themselves. It has to do with the tone of the writing – light-hearted? Poetic? Colloquial? Sinister and creepy? — and the sense of the storyteller’s intelligence and personality surfacing up through the writing. A good voice rings with a natural sense of authority; you know you’re in good hands, and can surrender yourself to the grip of the story.

Most of the hooks I judged had a flat voice – the writing doesn’t lift up from the page. There were a couple of instances when the writer was actively experimenting with voice – and yay for that – but it just didn’t seem to work: the tone was overly cute or too condescending, or seemed at odds with the nature of the subject matter.

And of course this gets highly subjective. A voice that appeals to one agent – enough so that the agent might overlook some apparent flaws and take a chance on the material – might not appeal to another.

Remember when you’re writing the hook that you are indeed writing. Show me why you chose language as your storytelling medium – rather than filmmaking or dance or theatre or, heck, finger puppetry.

The two hooks I sent through also had something in them – an idea, or character, or situation, or ‘voice’ – that caught my interest, that gave me hope there was something in this story I hadn’t quite seen before. We all swim in the same pool of general mass culture; we have seen many of the same movies, read many of the same books. Make it a point to be influenced by strange and obscure things as well as the popular things; make sure your mix of influences is unique to you, because it will make for more unique fiction.

At least one of the better-composed hooks was rejected because although it presented the story relatively well, the story itself didn’t seem worth the effort. Things just felt too familiar. Sometimes ‘familiar’ can mean that the writer fell back on vague, generic language instead of fleshing things out with detail, and creating images in the reader’s eye. Sometimes it means that the ideas behind the language were just too wellworn to be truly interesting. Does the world need or want another fantasy novel about elves? Well sure, if those elves are interesting in some new way. Show me how they’re interesting. Reinvent them for me. The blurry shape of ‘elf’ just won’t do it anymore.

Yes, this process is maddeningly subjective. That goes without saying.

And the odds are overwhelmingly against you. That also goes without saying.

You fight the odds by writing a structured, focused hook that conveys protagonist, setting, conflict, and maybe some complication/resolution, and through fleshing out the spine of the story with well-chosen details. You fight the odds through your unique, intriguing voice. You fight the odds with the brevity and professionalism of your query letter. Accomplish this, and you will vault yourself into the small group of query letters receiving serious consideration from at least a small percentage of the agents queried (which is why you will play the numbers game and query a massive – massive — number of agents).

To write a good book, you have to read a lot of good books, and some bad books as well in order to learn from others’ mistakes and not make so many of your own. So it goes with hooks. It’s difficult to learn everything you need to know – and get a sense for what makes a compelling hook – just from one critique alone, even if that critique is a thoughtful, in-depth one and the hook in question is your own.

So read all the hooks and critiques you can. Look for the patterns of mistakes, of praise, since the same issues seem to crop up over and over. Develop a sense for yourself of what works and what doesn’t; what makes you want to read the manuscript, and what makes your roll your eyes or shrug your shoulders and move on. The archives at Miss Snark (http://misssnark.blogspot.com/), Evil Editor (http://www.evileditor.blogspot.com/) and the fangs fur fey (http://community.livejournal.com/fangs_fur_fey/) are good places to start.

– Justine Musk