Write About Now

My Kind of Store

People often ask writers where their ideas come from. I don't know about everybody else, but I buy mine at the New Idea Store, pictured above. Sadly, prices have gone up since the photograph was taken.

ACFW

Another day, another conference!

Manuscript Critique: A Good Idea?

My friend Suzan Robertson is getting into the manuscript critique racket -- but with a difference. Instead of doing line edits and checking your grammar, she's offering feedback on the big picture and constructive advice on how to improve your book. Suzan also provides research and fact-checking expertise, which can be a huge help to busy writers. If you follow the link, you'll find more information.

As some of you know, I used to do manuscript critiques. I'd like to think I was pretty good at it. My approach was similar to Suzan's in that I liked to focus on how to take books to the next level, and that involved a lot more than just checking the grammar. Form and structure have always fascinated me, and I found it was much easier to tweak them in someone else's novel than it was in my own. All good things come to an end, though. When the demands of writing grew too great, I could no longer devote enough time to critiques, so it's nice to be able to recommend someone who's serious about the subject and has a "big picture" focus.

The question is, do you need a critique? When I was doing them, my usual advice was this: you don't need my services unless you plan to do extensive re-writes on your manuscript. I think that's good advice across the board. If you're sitting on a 600-page behemoth and you're basically happy with it, not intended to do much more with it, don't spend good money getting recommendations you have no intention of following. But if you're ready to tackle that behemoth and whittle it down to a drum-tight 300 page masterpiece, then maybe another set of eyes is just what you need. Also, if you already know how to fix your manuscript's problems, you don't need to pay someone to tell you again. The piece you submit for critique should be as good as you can make it, and you should be at a loss for how to improve while at the same time being convinced it needs help. In other words, whether you should pay for a critique depends on how serious you are about revision, and how well you see what needs to be done.

"Did Love Hurt Heloise"

Comment has posted another Q & A mentor interview, this time with Calvin Seerveld, whose work in aesthetics is an inspiration to artists everywhere. His Rainbows for a Fallen World is an essential read.

In the interview, I was particularly charmed by his description of a class on writing pop songs he attended after "being emeritated from teaching philosophical aesthetics to graduate students." He turned the medieval story of Heloise and Abelard into a pop song called "Did Love Hurt Heloise," which the whole class later sung. "...It was entirely satisfying to bring the philosophical world of the 1200s (A.D.) together with a current-day sensibility and show that we humans of all ages are pitifully similar in la gloire et le misère de l'homme."

My own Comment Q & A appeared back in February. It's a pleasure to be in such august company.

Why Writers Need Websites

I should have mentioned this earlier, but I've contributed a piece to the Relief Journal blog called "Why Writers Need a Website." Here's a little taste:

It’s 2004. The Art & Soul Conference at Baylor University. I’m in the lobby between sessions, browsing at the Eighth Day Books table. Minding my own business, in other words, in sharp contrast to everyone else. They’re networking. All of them. Somehow they’ve managed to meet up over the course of the event, to learn each other’s names. Not me. I’ve kept to myself. I’m a social moth.

“Hey, aren’t you—”

I turn to find a smiling man at my elbow. People are always saying I remind them of someone. Usually a crazy brother-in-law. I start to say, No, I’m not.

“—Mark Bertrand?”

“No, I’m . . . Oh.” Yes, actually. I am.

“I thought so,” he says. “I read your blog.”

That explains it. At least half the people I know, I met through my blog. Only I don’t usually meet them. Not without planning it in advance. The crazy thing is, for a brief shining moment, I feel like a celebrity. Somebody knows me. Somebody’s familiar with my work.

And the thing is, he’s not the only one. I got an e-mail this week from someone who’d read my book and enjoyed it.

“I’ve been reading your blog for a year and half.”

And then you bought my book. That makes you think, doesn’t it?

For more ironic goodness, follow the link and enjoy.

Book News

The secret is out. I'll have more to say later on, once I've worked through my post-Calvin Festival backlog.

Favorite Poets

The Question of the Day over at The Master's Artist is about poetry: "Tell us your three favorite poets, and why." I kept my answer uncharacteristically succinct:

In chronological order:

Archilochus, not for abandoning his shield, but for writing about it.

Sir Philip Sidney for his sonnet sequence and the probably apocryphal tales of his death (both versions).

Constantine Cavafy for his ability to inhabit the past.

Follow the link for more interesting suggestions -- and to share your own.

Fake Tan Fans?

As crazy as it sounds, there are more tanning salons in my town than there are bookstores. I wrote about it today at The Master's Artist. When it's still snowing in late March, this is the sort of disparity you reflect on.

Comment Q & A

Comment Magazine runs a regular Q & A asking "a diverse group of mentors for their stories." The February 29 installment features yours truly, talking about what it means to be a writer.

Q & A with J. Mark Bertrand, Author

Here's a taste:

Comment: What is the best advice you've ever been given?

JMB: Bad advice is always the best. I've learned the most from being told what not to do, from studying bad examples. In writing, there is rarely just one way to solve a problem. Good examples can be imitated, but too much imitation leads to staleness. T. S. Eliot once wrote that, although they believe themselves to be individuals pursuing their own agendas, contemporary authors inevitably work as a group, pushing in the same direction. All those good examples are a way to tap into the spirit of the age, I suspect. Only in time do the real individuals emerge, and they turn out to have been bucking the trend. They're revolutionaries, or in the case of novelists, reactionaries, and I can't help thinking they were probably nurtured on bad examples, as focused on what they were determined not to be as they were on being.

Best advice? Be rigorously honest about the world. Write until you finish, and then edit. Revise. Write about what you love, even if no one pays to read it. When you write, don't bother about current trends or what's relevant or what's selling. Finish, and then worry about the business. Above all, finish.

Another Plank in the Reader's Manifesto

Now Denis Johnson has gotten the B. R. Myers treatment in The Atlantic: "A Bright Shining Lie." In case you don't know, Myers is the author of A Reader's Manifesto, based on an essay published in The Atlantic, a piece of old-fashioned, accessible literary criticism that takes to task some of our most celebrated current authors for not writing in plain English. Myers points out what the common man has always suspected: the literary fiction is pretty much bunk, a kind of confidence game played with language. The emperor has been naked for a long time, and finally someone's had the courage to say so.

Or, to put it another way, Myers does to modern fiction what Twain did to Fenimore Cooper. I'm just not convinced that the stylistic crimes in the former case always rise to the level of the latter.

Myers always makes sense to me within the context of his own writing. When he skewers the pretensions of the great and those with aspirations greatward, I'm invariably delighted. If I go back to the original text, though, I'm not so convinced. I can't help feeling that, to bolster the argument, he has to pretend as if intelligible passages really aren't. He seems to think that any use of language that is unusual, that strays from dictionary definitions, is so imprecise as to be incomprehensible. Still, he has a point. Artistic pretensions are bolstered by people afraid to admit they don't "get" it, and the result is often praise of what ought rather to be censured. I find myself agreeing with him in principle but not on particulars.

There's no doubt, though, that Myers is doing what a critic should -- spelling out what a good novel should be and skewering anything that doesn't fit. I don't always agree with him, but like John Aldridge's Talents and Technicians, I think he's required reading for those of us who want to speak to an audience wider than that of our fellow writers.