Baby Got Ideas

I’d like to welcome author Lee Doyle, who was gracious enough to file a guest post, to BGB.   Ms. Doyle has just published her first novel, The Love We All Wait For.  The book is described as ” a poignant debut novel that captures the transition we all must make, from the romantic ideas and hopes of youth to the wonderment of discovering who we will become.”  Thanks for visiting, Lee!

Back when I was a PR flack in the high-tech industry I attended (and dreaded) tradeshows where software and hardware vendors hocked their wares. COMDEX in Las Vegas was the biggest of all shows, followed by PC Expo in New York. As the PR manager for PC World Magazine I wandered the tradeshow floor, chatting it up with advertisers (if I was representing the sales team) or vendors (if the vendor knew me via the editorial staff), and pitching our editors as expert sources for other journalists covering the myriad product announcements at the show.

Fast forward to Fall 2008 and my new life as a debut author. (I left the steady PR gig to freelance and write my first novel, The Love We All Wait For, out this month from KOMENAR Publishing.)

The publishing industry, like most industries, has tradeshows. In the past three weeks I’ve signed books and met hundreds of booksellers at two of these shows: Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) in Portland, and Northern California Independent Booksellers (NCIBA) Association in Oakland, CA.

The exhibitors at PNBA and NCIBA are publishers—from the big-name New York houses to indie publishers. Attendees are booksellers, the vast majority independents. Like high-tech tradeshows, bookseller shows are a simple affair of commerce–a place where buyers and sellers gather.  In my case, I’m there with my publisher to sign books and chat it up with booksellers. Schmoozing, yeah, but schmoozing with my tribe, book lovers like me.

I’m blown away by the sheer volume of books available to booksellers, and ultimately readers.  I’ve heard the staggering figures—X million books published annually in the U.S. Every visit to your local bookstore confirms the publishing industry is cranking. (Who’s making money is another topic.)

But at PNBA and NCIA I’m doubly struck by the amount of books being published.  Even more striking is the enormous volume of ideas laid out on display tables.  That indie publishers and booksellers are struggling is not news.  And yet both are critical to democracy, where ideas flow unfettered from writer to reader. Find the right publisher—often a small press–and that idea becomes a book someone (hopefully many someone’s) will read.

There are books about Polynesian tribal tattoos, Gay and Lesbian Erotica (Cleis Press), The New Weird (Tachyon Publications), a genre loosely described as urban science fiction meets horror, Christian romance fiction, fiction by first-time authors (KOMENAR Publishing), children’s fiction like Steinbeck’s Ghost by Lewis Buzbee (Feiwel and Friends), travel books, books about North Korea,  political satire like A Patriot’s Guide to Right-Wing Thinking by Tex Shelters. It’s all there between two covers.

What inspires writers to put their ideas into book form? A desire to share our ideas, to connect with strangers? To be immortal? And what keeps readers hungry for more?  A desire to know the world and ourselves from the shifting point of view of new ideas?  The need to escape or be entertained?

Possibly all of the above. I’m just grateful the ideas keep flowing.

– Lee Doyle

Guest Blogger: Joshua Henkin – Part 2

Author Joshua Henkin is on a virtual book tour in support of his new book, Matrimony. The book found its way onto book shelves yesterday, and he still found the time to put together a nice post for us (read yesterday’s post here).

Henkin is also the author the critically acclaimed Swimming Across the Hudson. Atlantans can check out Joshua Henkin at the MJCCA Book Festival on November 11 (right after Robby Benson!). Here’s today’s guest post:

While I’m on the subject of point of view, I wanted to say something about it in general. To me, the question of point of view is the most important decision a writer makes. It determines everything. An event seen through one set of eyes, interpreted by one person, is entirely different from the same event interpreted by another person. In an early draft of Matrimony, I wrote more omnisciently, dipping into any number of points of view, but I came to see that, focused as the novel was on the history of a marriage, it made most sense for me to write from Julian and Mia’s points of view exclusively.

Richard Russo has written a very good essay in support of a omniscience, a broad sweep, and I tend to agree with him—for certain kinds of novels, perhaps especially for the kinds of novels he generally writes. But I want to make an argument here for a more curtailed point of view (a less-is-more argument) when it comes to other kinds of novels, and certainly when it comes to short stories, most of which (unless you’re Alice Munro) do best in a single point of view because of the kind of focus a short story demands.

I’ve been thinking about this issue because my writing students, particularly my undergraduates but sometimes my MFA students as well, like to switch points of view in their short stories for no apparent reason other than that they have license to do so. But license is something different from good sense. Think about our own lives. How many times have we said to ourselves, “I wish I knew what he was thinking”? But what if we did know? What if we were telepathic? It might prove advantageous in certain circumstances, but it would also eliminate much of the mystery from life. The fact that we can’t read other people’s minds is an essential part of our existence (it allows for curiosity, a state of being that would be much less compelling if it were always being fulfilled). Why, then, if we can get by on one point of view in real life, can’t we get by on it in fiction? More to the point, the greater the number of points of view, the harder it is to keep secrets. And secrets—the gaps between what one character knows and what another character knows, and the gap between what the characters know and the reader knows—are the lifeblood of fiction.

Take Richard Bausch, who in my opinion is one of the great short story writers out there today. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m thinking of his story “Aren’t You Happy for Me?” which takes place almost exclusively on the telephone between a father and his daughter, who is about twenty. We are in the father’s point of view, and we know fairly early in the story that he has some news for his daughter: he and her mother have decided to split up. The father is planning to tell his daughter this on the phone. But before he can do so he gets preempted by her, for it turns out that she has some news as well. She’s getting married to her professor, whom the father has never heard of, much less met, and this professor is in his sixties, twenty years older than the father, and he has gotten the daughter pregnant.

Summarized in this thumbnail fashion, the story sounds potentially like bad undergraduate fiction, but you’ll have to trust me that it’s a good deal more subtle and interesting than the summary suggests. In any case, the daughter’s news is quite a lot for the father to take in, and the story goes in some surprising directions. But one thing that’s essential to the tension of the story is the fact that we’re in the father’s point of view throughout. We know what he knows, and we don’t know what he doesn’t know. Specifically, we are aware throughout the story that he has a secret that he now can’t quite get himself to tell his daughter, and we also know that the daughter has something to tell him, but she’s telling it slowly, haltingly, as the story goes along; we learn this information with the father. Try telling that story from a different point of view, or try telling it from multiple points of view, and it becomes a different piece of work entirely.

None of which is to say that I disagree with Russo’s essay. I think simply that different kinds of novels and different kinds of stories make different demands when it comes to point of view. And whatever else, a writer should never be limited by gender, race, class, you name it. You should write from whatever point of view you are impelled to write from. You better get it right, but that’s true no mater who you’re writing about. Getting it right. That’s the only thing the writer should care about.

Additional links:

• The author’s web site
• A trailer for Matrimony
• Update:  Henkin has a new essay up at Powell’s

Guest Blogger: Joshua Henkin

Author Joshua Henkin is on a virtual book tour in support of his new book, Matrimony, which hits shelves of discerning bookstores everywhere today. He’ll be guest posting here at BGB today and tomorrow. Henkin also wrote the novel Swimming Across the Hudson. Here’s today’s guest post:

So it’s starting again—book tour (see “Events” at my website), interviews, all the things a writer needs to do to promote his book. Some writers mind this, but I don’t. I’m a social person, and writing is a solitary pursuit. That’s why I try to create compelling characters. They’re the ones I have to hang out with for years at a time

Matrimony, which comes out today, is about the twenty-year history of a marriage—what happens when a couple meet in college (he’s a Wasp from New York City, an aspiring novelist; she’s Jewish, from Montreal) and end up marrying earlier than they expected and the ways that their choices (faithlessness, failed ambition, the decision whether to have a child) and things out of their control (health and sickness, the death of a parent) test the endurance of their relationship.

I’ve done a bunch of interviews already, and I’m beginning to notice a recurring question. Is it hard/how do you feel about/does it take balls to write from a female point of view? What the interviewer is referring to is the fact that my novel is told first in alternating points of view from the perspective of my two protagonists, Julian and Mia, and then, as the book goes on, from both their points of view, moving from one to the other, sometimes in the course of a single paragraph.

The answer is: No, it doesn’t take balls, or no more balls than it takes to write fiction in general, which seems to me to involve some weird cocktail of balls, obtuseness, and obscene hope.

Why should a man’s writing from a woman’s point of view be such a hard thing (Flaubert seemed to do it pretty well in Madame Bovary), or any harder than writing from any other point of view, which is to say it’s hard as hell, but then nothing in fiction is easy. I’ve written from a woman’s point of view before, and it wasn’t a matter of going into my “female” mode any more (or less) than it’s a matter of going into my rich person’s mode when writing about the wealthy, my doddering mode when writing about the elderly, or my asshole mode when writing about an asshole. Yet it’s gender (probably along with race) that fascinates people most, and that makes them most anxious. I’ve had people actually say to me, “Do you think it’s allowed for a man to write from a woman’s point of view?” Allowed? Anything’s allowed if you do it right. That’s the pleasure (and the burden) of fiction.

In my writing classes (I teach undergraduates and MFA students at Sarah Lawrence College and MFA students at Brooklyn College), when someone writes from the point of view of the other gender, a good deal of discussion usually ensues about whether the character sounds believably male or believably female. And while this discussion is far from pointless (believability is extremely important in fiction), it’s no more relevant in the case of gender than it is in the case of anything else. It’s hard to get your characters right. It takes years of work. Even if the novel in question is autobiographical, the writer is presumably writing about more than one character, so there are always going to be characters who aren’t the writer. For me, fiction—the writing of it, the reading of it—is about getting outside your own experience. That’s why fiction writers are universalists at heart. They believe it’s possible to communicate what it’s like to be someone else. Otherwise, the enterprise is doomed to failure.

Joshua Henkin Guest Blog: Day 2