On Writing - Michelle Richmond

I am the Common Reader: Virginia Woolf on pleasure, reading, & the survival of literature

Despite her knowledge of Greek and her voracious reading of the classics, Virginia Woolf considered herself a self-taught reader. As a woman, she had been denied the illustrious Oxford education that the men in her family enjoyed. As it turns out, her lack of affectation, her insistence on taking pleasure in reading, is what makes her essays on literature so lucid, smart, and delicious to read.

Reviewing The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 6: 1933-1941, for the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Benjamin Schwarz notes that, despite Woolf’s place in “the highest stratum of the English intellectual aristocracy,” her essays were written not for the academic but for the common reader, the category in which she rather modestly placed herself. The common reader, she posited, “reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.”

Here, Schwarz excerpts Woolf’s essay “Hours in a Library”:

A reader must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill…the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading. The true reader is a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open-minded and communicative, to whom eating is more the nature of brisk exercise in the open wire than of a sheltered study.

For all of her wealth and status–the very condition that allowed her the coveted room of one’s own–Woolf also believed passionatelym Schwarz notes, in the democracy of reading, as evidenced in her essay “The Leaning Tower.”

Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground.

Woolf’s prescription for the survival of literature, which might have ruffled feathers in her time, is no less meaningful today. Literature will survive, she wrote,

if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country…teach ourselves how to read and how to write, how to preserve and how to create. …
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The Rumpus Interview with Thaisa Frank

This week, Yuvi Zalkow interviewed Thaisa Frank for The Rumpus. They met at the bar of the Hotel Rex, where Frank, author most recently of Enchantment, talked about where stories come from, among other things. I’ve long admired Frank, beginning with her story collection A Brief History of Camouflage, have often taught her work in creative writing classes, and in recent years have been honored to get to know her.

In the intro, Zalkow says that the interview itself felt a bit like being inside a Thaisa Frank story. If you’ve read her work, you’ll have a vague and disturbing sense of what that means. When stepping into a Thaisa Frank story, it’s almost impossible not to feel displaced, as if you’ve walked into a dark, empty bar and have brought none of the right equipment, not to mention the right frame of mind, to encounter whatever it is you’re about to encounter. When I first came across her stories in a San Francisco bookshop fifteen years ago, I felt as though I’d fallen through the rabbit hole. The stories in Enchantment, magical in every way, unexpected at every turn, seem to come from a different universe.

Read on for some of the highlights from the interview, which you’ll find in its entirety on The Rumpus.

On where stories come from:

I often feel there’s a triggering event that makes me want to start a story. There is a title often, but the title contains the stuff of the story. The title is like a packed piñata, even if it’s made of iron and I have to beat it and beat it for the stuff to come out.

On what happens when the story turns out not to be anything like the story you intended to write:

And it’s the failure of the intended story that usually guarantees, if not success, then the forward motion of the final story.

On surrealism:

Old-fashioned surrealism is where you take one or two extraordinary things and have them in a world that obeys all the laws of reality…I’m also very interested in classic surrealism, where you take one thing that really couldn’t happen —like how Kafka took a guy and turned him into a bug—but after that, everything proceeds pretty logically.

On what’s missing from the teaching of fiction

…one of the things we don’t have in teaching fiction is a true poetics of fiction—a way of talking about fiction without getting tangled up in the content.

Read the Rumpus interview with Thaisa Frank. Visit Thaisa Frank’s website. Visit Yuvi Zalkow’s website.

Writers: Submit your work to the Fiction Attic Press First Novel Contest.

10 Steps to Writing a Novel

The first thing you need to know about writing a novel is that there are no easy answers. There’s no magic formula for novel-writing. Every novel demands its own structure, its own pace, its own way of looking at the world.

Still with me? Good. Because, as it turns out, novel writing isn’t just a head-banging exercise in utter frustration and despair (although, trust me, sometimes it is just that). It’s also a deep swim into your own head space, a really fun adventure, and one of the most thrillingly creative things a person can do. It’s your world; you get to make it, populate it, cultivate it, and bring all of the pieces together.

If you’re ready to take on the challenge of writing a novel, continue reading for 10 steps to get your started.

1. Consider the setting.
Setting encompasses not only place, but also time. Where does your novel happen, and when?

2. Consider the point of view.
Who is telling the story, from what distance? Do you have a first-person narrator who is at the center of the action, an omniscient narrator who is able to go into the thoughts of any character at any time, a limited third person narration that sticks closely to one character? …

The Drowning House by Elizabeth Black (or why you need an agent)

I’m currently reading a wonderful novel, Elizabeth Black’s The Drowning House. It’s a debut novel that will be published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in January. I received the book from the publisher a few days ago and, since the moment I opened it, I’ve had a difficult time putting it down.

The novel is set in Galveston, Texas. I’ve never been to Galveston, but the setting nevertheless feels eerily familiar. I’m from Alabama’s Gulf Coast, and Black skillfully evokes the heat, humidity, and the languid desire to do nothing that pervades Gulf Coast life. The Drowning House is a mystery that works on several levels, and it’s also a beautifully realized story about grief. The narrator, a photographer, has returned home to Galveston after the death of her young daughter to do research for an exhibition. She finds herself drawn into the circle of an old family friend who is also the town’s wealthiest citizen, and is compelled to ask questions that no one in this closed-off community wants to answer.

Photobooks by Tiny Prints.

Elizabeth Black’s post about her own road to publication, which began at the Writers League of Texas Agents Conference, serves as a great primer on how to meet an agent, and why it’s so important to have one. It’s also a very realistic account of the long slog to publication.

We spent almost two years making revisions to The Drowning House, beginning with some larger changes (like eliminating a plot line to allow other key elements to emerge) and proceeding through two line edits. I’m a single mother with a full-time job, and my older daughter was married last fall, so it was a busy time for me.

A good agent doesn’t just act as a middleman between writer and publisher. A good agent helps you make the book the best it can be before putting it in the right hands. A good agent knows what editor might be on the lookout for a book like yours, and her relationships with publishers are invaluable. A good agent will help you get through the tough times when it seems as though the book might never be published. Without my agent, whom I trust implicitly and who has been a tremendously savvy advocate for my work, I’d be utterly adrift in the publishing world.

Of course, anyone can forgo the agent and publishing house these days and upload a book to Smashwords, Kindle, Nook, or iTunes. But the reality is that a self-published book simply doesn’t have the same level of editorial vetting as a book that goes the traditional route; nor does it have the all-important marketing that, in many cases, can make a book.

One crucial element of marketing is the distribution of the ARC (advanced reading copies) not only to reviewers and booksellers, but also to other authors, with a request that they read the book and, if they like it, offer a cover quote. Self-published books rarely, if ever, get reviewed in The New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle, and very few will ever have the advantage of the booksellers’ interest pre-publication. The Drowning House came to me unsolicited, and I’ve never met the author; but because it came from an imprint I respect, and because it came in paperback (not as lines of text on an e-reader), I opened it and began reading. And I kept reading, and I imagine I’ll finish it tonight. It’s a terrific novel, and I suspect there are a number of other potential supporters feeling the same way I’m feeling about this book right now. The fact that the book will likely hit the stands with rave reviews, and that it will be available in brick-and-mortar bookstores, where huge numbers of readers still go to browse and buy the booksellers’ recommended reads, will give it a far better chance of success than most self-published novels ever have.

So, if you’re really serious about your novel, before you slap it up on Amazon and leave it to swim with the sharks, consider what you might be missing. Consider the readers you might lose by not giving your book a chance it deserves.