Book Club Chat Tomorrow
Hey--I’ll be answering questions about The Land of Steady Habits and whatever else you might want to talk about, tomorrow (July 9) at 4:00 EST, right here. Come hang out!
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@thompsonted
Book Club Chat Tomorrow
Hey--I’ll be answering questions about The Land of Steady Habits and whatever else you might want to talk about, tomorrow (July 9) at 4:00 EST, right here. Come hang out!
Memory is an imaginative act; first we imagine what we’ll want to keep and then we fashion stories from what we’ve kept. Memories don’t just happen, they are built.
Remembrance of Things Lost (via catapultstory)
Instagram of the day by vinfarrell
Walk through a museum. Look around a city. Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or at the order of men. But behind every one is an invisible infrastructure of labor—primarily caregiving, in its various aspects—that is mostly performed by women…. The cultural primacy of making, especially in tech culture—that it is intrinsically superior to not-making, to repair, analysis, and especially caregiving—is informed by the gendered history of who made things, and in particular, who made things that were shared with the world, not merely for hearth and home.
Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not a Maker” (See also: this wonderful tweetstorm)
Lost Ideas
Today’s new releases
Oh hey--look who's on the bottom table. Thanks Prairie Lights! (The paperback of The Land of Steady Habits is out today.)
What drew you to the topic of werewolves? Was your interest sparked by something you’d read or seen, or was it sparked by (ahem) something you’d experienced?
To be totally honest, I wasn’t drawn to werewolves at all. In fact, when I was teaching creative writing in the years just after ...
For some writer/readers, community support may be more important than upholding standards? Maybe some writer/readers haven’t yet begun to identify their standards because they’re too busy maneuvering among the community online, practicing good literary citizenry, doing what they can to support those in need? But I think conflict occurs when those who mostly support make it seem like they’re upholding a standard, especially when praise is exaggeratedly positive, hyperbolically supportive, evangelically ululating that someone’s writing is ‘great,’ thereby equivalent to God in the minds of literary fundamentalists.
Lee Klein (via mttbll)
Our streets are calendars containing who we were and who we will be next. We see ourselves in this city every day when we walk down the sidewalk and catch our reflections in store windows, seek ourselves in this city each time we reminisce about what was there 5, 10, 40 years ago, because all our old places are proof that we were here. One day the city we built will be gone, and when it goes, we go. When the buildings fall, we topple, too. The twin towers still stand because we saw them, moved in and out of their long shadows, were lucky enough to know them for a time. They are a part of the city we carry around. It is hard to imagine that something will take their place, but at this very moment the people with the right credentials are considering how to fill the crater. The cement trucks will roll up and spin their bellies, the jackhammers will rattle, and after a while the postcards of the new skyline will be available for purchase. Naturally we will cast a wary eye toward those new kids on the block, but let's be patient and not judge too quickly. We were new here, too, once.
Every year I reread this essay by Colson Whitehead, and every year it knocks me flat.
We know when you happened, too. We were at a bed and breakfast in Vermont, he had proposed to me that day, hours before. That day. I was terrified and at peace all at once. It really did feel different. All my second guessing gave way to profound peace. Like, oh, you will be the...
Literature is the record we have of the conversation between those of us now alive on earth and everyone who’s come before and will come after, the cumulative repository of humanity’s knowledge, wonder, curiosity, passion, rage, grief and delight. It’s as useless as a spun-sugar snowflake and as practical as a Swiss Army knife.
Dana Stevens and Adam Kirsch discuss whether literature should be considered useful. (via millionsmillions)
You guys! I know I said I was looking forward to seeing what the cover for the upcoming issue One Teen Story issue looks like, but I had no idea. LOOK AT THAT THING. It's terrifying, mesmerizing, beautiful. They do such gorgeous work.
And SPEAKING OF: right now OTS is having a kind of ridiculous deal, where you can subscribe and get a year of issues for $12. That's crazy. And I believe that subscription would start with my story and its amazingly wonderful cover (above). The issue should be out in a few weeks.
Thank you to Patrick Ryan, Adina Talve-Goodman and everyone at One Teen Story, and to Stefan Lawrence, the artist/madman who designed that cover.
PS: I'll be reading from the story at two events this month. If you're in NYC and like nice people, please come say hi.
1. Saturday, September 6, where I'm reading as part of Slice magazine's "Writers on Tap," along with Sara Majka, Justin Taylor, Ingrid Nelson, and Kseniya Melnik. There's also free Sixpoint beer.
2. Saturday, September 13, as a part of Lit Crawl New York: "An Evening with One Teen Story," where I'll be reading with other OTS authors Julie Buntin and Martin Wilson. There are also rumors that Patrick Ryan will be there in the flesh. Think Coffee, 1 Bleecker St., 6pm.
See you all there!
PPS: $12!!! Best deal on the internet this week, easy.
All the happy news
I wrote this post over a month ago, and then I held off on posting it because I felt shy about it. I really don't know when or how to announce happy news. Somehow even in tiny doses it always feels like bragging. But then not announcing it feels just as weird. So I've decided I'm going to put it all in one place and call it my SEMI-ANNUAL HAPPY NEWS DUMP!
The first thing is that The Land of Steady Habits was chosen for the long list of the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. This made me fist pump in joy and triumph, especially when I saw the other books on that list (above). It's a huge honor to be in this company.
The next thing is that I'm very happy to report that the novel will be published in the Netherlands (by De Arbeiderspers) and in Italy (by Bollati Boringhieri). Above is the catalog from my German publisher, Ullstein, which came in the mail last week, and look who's on the cover! ("Die neue literarische Stimme aus Amerika," y'all.) The German edition comes out this fall.
The final piece of book-related news is that The Land of Steady Habits has been optioned by Fox Searchlight for a film adaptation to be written and directed by Nicole Holofcener. I'll just leave that info there, since I'm still not sure what to do with it. Except that I should probably say I'm kind of in awe of the fact that a director I've long admired wants to make it, and that there's even a possibility this could actually happen. (The official announcement should come soon, which I will post without shame.)
Salon has also been re-publishing these "Ask a Debut Novelist" columns I've been writing for the Little Brown tumblr. They've already posted the first four (with their own inventive headlines). It's been overwhelming to see those reaching such a large audience. The internet is a crazy place.
I'm also thrilled to announce that I'll have a new short story coming out in One Teen Story in September. It's called "The Beasts of St. Andrews" and it's about boarding school werewolves. Or really one boarding school werewolf. A lone wolf. I suppose it's also my first piece of YA fiction (though to be honest I wrote it without that label in mind). They do such a beautiful job with their issues. I'm dying to see what the cover looks like.
I have two new book-length projects I've been working on these days, and I'm very happy to have the opportunity to spend a few weeks this October at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH. MacDowell is the oldest artists' colony in the country and is notably where Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town, James Baldwin wrote Giovanni's Room, and Aaron Copland wrote part of Appalachian Spring. So you know, no pressure. But I'm greatly looking forward to my time there. (Above is one of the 32 individual studios that makes up the colony, where they famously deliver your lunch in a picnic basket on your doorstep so as not to disturb you. Carrie says not to get used to it.)
And finally, and most excitingly, we're looking forward to welcoming our first baby in December. This photo was taken at dinner nearly a month ago. You guys, it's already been so amazing. I mean we're both nervous and also kind of euphoric. Parenthood! How can something so common seem so intensely singular to you? I apologize in advance for all the daddy stuff that will likely fill this space.
“Thunderstorms were what death, and dramatic events, generally should be like, but usually were not; the idea that our life’s dramas rarely look as dramatic as they are. Our most cataclysmic moments are typically free of gravitas, of necessary thunder; a person dies, but instead of the sky darkening and lightning striking, the sun continues to shine and the birds to sing.”
—Alain de Botton, from “Drama or Melodrama.” Art: Amy J. Greving.
Relatability—a logism so neo that it’s not even recognized by the 2008 iteration of Microsoft Word with which these words are being written—has become widely and unthinkingly accepted as a criterion of value, even by people who might be expected to have more sophisticated critical tools at their disposal.
Rebecca Mead on the scourge of “relatability” for the New Yorker. (via mcnallyjackson)
Yes yes yes THIS.
In this episode: lost love, found accents, following Phish, rare neurological diseases, the Great American Novelist that never was, thunderstorms, sleeping bags, and indescribable mystical experiences. Otherwise known as: poetry and fiction.
I was so happy to participate in this podcast. I recorded this yesterday (!) and look—it's already here for your listening pleasure. Thanks to Jaime for including me. It's a great podcast she has going, so please check it out.
Ask a Debut Novelist - Question 6
In which thompsonted, author of The Land of Steady Habits, answers your questions about writing, publishing, and making good work. Have a question? Ask away.
Anonymous asked: As an aspiring novelist, I often have ideas that I think would make great books and then I write 30 pages and find that there’s nothing more to tell. Is this something you’ve ever struggled with? Have you abandoned ideas that haven’t gelled? How far into the first draft of your book did you know that it was going to be a novel?
This is an interesting question, so thank you for asking it, whoever you are. I suppose it’s easiest for me to answer the last part first, which is to say that I didn’t know I was writing a novel until I was many iterations into it. The truth is that I had purposely kept myself in the dark about that fact, mostly because I had somehow at a young age gotten it in my mind that novels, especially first novels, had to be Grand Statements About Society, or at the very least a stage on which to announce my talent. I had written my way into a few of these projects and I doubt it’s surprising to hear that they were grandiose and terrible. But still this was my deep, private, unspoken vision for myself, that I wouldn’t just “write a novel” but would come thundering onto the cultural landscape like Godzilla, with a book—whatever it was about didn’t really matter—that allowed me to transcend my polite, everyday, innocuous self and tower above the public in a way that caused them to marvel. Novel writing for me was synonymous with a young man’s desire to be seen, the place I had poured all of my need for recognition.
Whereas a short story, a simple, light-hearted twenty pages, didn’t carry any of that baggage. It was, most importantly, private. How it would be perceived was less important for me than the pleasure of articulation, of finding words for the many tiny movements of my internal life, which at that time was plagued with self-consciousness and aching with ambition, so that in the course of my day I felt every minute slight or gesture of approval as either a crushing failure or soaring triumph, an exhausting experience that I tried to carry without letting any of it on. Anyway, that short story then became a forum for expressing this over-reactive internal life, for using narrative to somehow communicate all that was for me in my day-to-day life incommunicable. In those pages, unlike in just about every other place in my social world, every gesture and phrase didn’t have to be directed toward the end goal of being loved, and thus the more complex (which I know is often just code for “unpleasant”) feelings could find expression.
I realize that’s a little wishy-washy and also might sound like I’m advocating for something that sounds suspiciously like the emotional barf of confessional writing, but all of it is to say that before this particular project (and if I’m honest, during most of my time in graduate school) there was no such thing to my mind as writing for myself. When I sat down to work it was all directed toward the imaginary perceptions of others. But in this project, which I kept hidden and refused to put up for critique in workshop, I had been able to silence that impulse long enough to begin to understand what was beautiful about the forces of narrative, and the compression and clarity required by storytelling: that it unearthed in me the articulation of that which I had felt acutely but hadn’t understood.
The problem was that the project didn’t work as a short story. Like in any way. No matter how many drafts I wrote. So it grew into something I called a novella (which meant it was long and formless and I didn’t know what it was), then into something I called a novelito (which was a new literary form I told myself I was inventing). Finally, after Googling “minimum word count novel,” I gave myself reluctant permission to call it what it was.
And that was how I wrote the first draft.
As you can probably tell, the process of writing, and probably creating anything in general, is for me inextricable from the processes of psychology and self-esteem, which is to say in my case having the confidence not only to speak but to say something that isn’t uttered solely for the approval of others, or as an attempt to shape how they might perceive me.
So when it comes to your predicament of starting novels, getting thirty pages in and feeling like you’ve said everything you have to say, my gut tells me (having been there oh-so-many times myself) that perhaps rather than running out of material, you actually haven’t spent enough time to truly find it. Perhaps, like me, the project in your mind is already being reviewed in the New York Review before you’ve written the first sentence. Perhaps you haven’t yet trusted the idea enough to push through the uncertainty, to go beyond what you already know of it and allow it to transform into whatever it wants to be. Perhaps you haven’t yet allowed yourself to cede control. My experience is that novels find their expression, that if you stick with them long enough and follow the writing that feels the most vital, they end up being about what is most vital to you.
My primary challenge is always in shucking from myself the instinct to please (or to shock, or impress, or enamor). Because there is a gargantuan difference between the public and private selves and when facing a blank page they can so easily become entangled. And while of course the end goal is to write something worth making public, it seems to me the only way I’ve ever done so is through a long and convoluted process of duping myself into not being conscious of that. Creating for me is as much about silencing the urge to perform as it is about silencing doubt. In fact those are probably the same thing. It takes a while to see it, but there is always tremendous richness and depth and meaning in your own subjectivity. That is the substance of your voice. The trick is to find a way to sit with it, to not decide its fate. Because you really can’t. In the end you have no say over how your work is perceived. All you can do is take the time to listen to that private part of you, the dank, languageless part, and pour your energy into being as precise as possible in its articulation. I am continually elated to discover how fascinating anything is when you take the time to look closely enough.
*
Previously on Ask a Debut Novelist:
On Writing and Revision: “Throw away the scale. There is no scale, there is only your story.”
On the Book Business: “Selling a book won’t change your life—except it kind of will.”
On Compliments: “And maybe every piece of writing is an act of trust.”
On Self-Publishing, or Not: “Yearning for acceptance is a kind of acknowledgment of the reader, a sign of respect for other people and maybe even humility before them.”
On Writing and Money: “I have seen just about as many paths as there are people.”
Have a question for Ted? Drop it in our Ask Box.