My hero bares his nerves: hopelessness and hope in the writing life

When I renamed my blog after Harold's professional moniker, I made a vow to myself that I would not write "essays", that in fact I would write whatever-the-fuck I wanted to, always, because at the time it was all I had. So here lies a bunch of thoughts, along with a sinking, fainting hope, a glimpse of a deer; no, not a doe but a buck, magnificently muscled about the neck, which I feverishly pursue even in full knowledge of the spiked collar around his neck which proclaims, pursue me not, nor touch me; I belong to everyone, but not to you.

So. Lately on Facebook, which I have mixed feelings about, I've seen a few posts that speak to me, whether for good or ill. One particularly poignant piece was about a young woman, a university student, who experiences chronic low-grade depression which sometimes becomes disabling under academic pressure. Not one health-related agency in the school would help her, in fact they all looked either puzzled or embarrassed when she asked who she should approach, or just shrugged her off with "I don't know" (perhaps the worst of all, as if she was the only person in the world who had been diagnosed with some mysterious and untreatable disease).

What's that about? Is no one allowed to be damaged, to need surcease? Are we all supposed to be constantly stoking ourselves for the feverish race, the incessant jockeying for position (nowhere more in evidence than in academia)?  Or are people just craven in their inability to risk compassion?

I saw another post which frankly ravaged me, a poem I've quoted here several times:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

I know about that feverish chase, for it has occupied a huge chunk of my life to date. In writing a novel about the incredible life and career of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd, I became enraptured, even inhabited. I felt I not only knew him, but was with him. (If that sounds totally nuts, I hope you'll at least read the book to find out for yourself.) And yet, there was always some aspect of him that was elusive, even unknowable.

Fainting, I rushed through the bracken, falling and getting up again, sometimes catching just a glimpse of the impossibly fleet deer with the glancing diamonds about its neck. Thomas Wyatt in his insane passion for the doomed Anne Boleyn knew of this, I am sure of it. The drivenness, the hopelessness, the failure that just stokes the fires of pursuit. 

Well, why not do something else, then? I realize with no small measure of horror that I'm really not much good at anything else. I have spent my entire life pursuing something that would appear to be doomed. Thus the Wyatt poem doesn't just speak to me: it screams in my ear, run. . . RUN!

And yet, and yet. I am still filled with a fizzy excitement about this book. I can't help myself. it relit the flame for me when I was sure I would never write a novel again, or at least one that I felt I could send out and sell. Blogging was a consolation, and, for a while, my longstanding gig as a book reviewer, until even that outlet dried up in the wake of nearly-nonexistent books sections filled with "canned" reviews. But surely I would never again allow the heartbreak of full-length fiction to take over my life. 

On Facebook I read of professional magazine writers who can no longer write for magazines, and I see why. I don't buy or read them except in my dentist's waiting room, but when I do, I keep searching for content and find virtually none, just the glossy flab of more, and more, and more ads. The actual magazine starts some 50 pages in, if it starts at all. Someone has deemed that readers want a brief chunked-up Facebook-type read, skip, skip, skip. I know I should not be so contemptuous of this, because the truth is I do it myself.

According to Facebook, and let's face it, Facebook is a different Facebook for everyone who is "on" it, things are pretty bad in literary-land, even in the once-comforting groves of Academe where you are no longer allowed to express your pain (perhaps part of the happy-face syndrome of social media). It's a crap shoot, though (more crap than shoot), and as people incessantly tell me, it has always been that way. A line from Dylan Thomas insanely jumps into my head: "My hero bares his nerves along my wrist". What does it mean? Jesus on the cross? Heroin abuse? Sex? Death? The Colossus that was toppled or washed away in a tide of booze? Thomas had every advantage a poet could have, was lionized and widely published and even (gasp) appreciated, and yet, like too many poets before/after him, the result of his "success" was that he went broke and died.

When I am in this turquoise/cobalt state I listen to too much Shostakovich, and as is normal for abnormal me, I fixate on one work and play it to death. Lately it has been the towering Fifth Symphony: not just any version, but the revered Bernstein interpretation from the 1960s. My hero bares his nerves, indeed. Bares his ache. I'm not sure what Shostakovich was like, though I remember reading that a great deal of his music was written for Mother Russia. Perhaps that even explains the triumphant ending of the searing, almost-unbearably dysphoric Fifth. OK, let's go major here, because really, we don't have any choice.

And the rest of the time he wrote movie music, which was probably kick-ass, and there's nothing wrong with that because 95% of movie scores are dreck. But he was keeping body and soul together, was he not? Nothing wrong with that. Or so it seems. We have no record of what he thought about it.

And as for Bernstein, once a magnificent bubble of brilliant ego, he deteriorated with the years, and NOT because after years of hiding he decided to come out of the closet. He deteriorated because, like Dylan Thomas, he drowned in alcohol, falling off the podium and propositioning young men at random.

Harold Lloyd didn't sell out, or at least I don't think he did. But in spite of the fact that he certainly didn't need the money, he made one last grab at a comeback in a strange film called The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.  This was shot in the early 1940s, and if Harold's "boy" of the 1920s was dated with the advent of sound, he was downright archaic in the '40s, when Tracy and Hepburn were working themselves into a comic fever. It's not that he didn't look good - he did - but in a sense, he was a 50-year-old boy, a man trapped in amber and stopped in time whose career and love life had not advanced in more than 20 years.

I didn't like this film, nor did the public, but what ruined it wasn't just Harold's legendary clash with the smart and snappy director Preston Sturges (who is named Sterling Prescott in my novel). It was the opening, in which for the first time we see the Glass Character deeply depressed. I still can't watch it: Lloyd is a subtle, mercurial and often brilliant actor, which is the key to his comic genius, and when he plays depressed, it's depressed. It's painful. We don't want to see the Boy that way. The picture was supposed to be a continuation of The Freshman, but since when was the Freshman supposed to turn out like this?

He chased after a successful comeback, and ran and grabbed, and for all his phenomenal determination, he didn't win, the prize slipped through his fingers. To his credit, he did NOT drown himself in alcohol or otherwise go insane, but turned his formidable energies to other things, positive, life-affirming things,  including philanthropy.

Is there a lesson? I am no good at lessons, or I wouldn't write at all. I simply have to do this, though I still don't know what "this" will mean. It took me three years of pain to find a home for Harold, I was beginning to lose all hope, and now this, another chance! I'd rather feel the pain of success (with all its attendant horrors) than the existential funk of failure, scrambling around to find meaning in it all.

My hero bares his nerves along my wrist

That rules from wrist to shoulder,

Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,

Leans on my mortal ruler,

The proud spine spurning turn and twist.

And these poor nerves so wired to the skull

Ache on the lovelorn paper

I hug to love with my unruly scrawl

That utters all love hunger

And tells the page the empty ill.

My hero bares my side and sees his heart

Tread, like a naked Venus,

The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;

Stripping my loin of promise,

He promises a secret heat.

He holds the wire from the box of nerves

Praising the mortal error

Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,

And the hunger's emperor;

He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.

"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Writers Today: the futility of Fakebook

I decided to cut-and-paste this piece rather than publish a link, because YOU HAVE GOT TO SEE IT if you are a serious writer, especially if you are a serious writer in Canada (though I believe it applies in other countries more than we know). It's a harsh truth, but a truth nonetheless, that the onus for being in the "first tier"  has fallen back on the writer, creating a whole new set of expectations/pressures:  "Hey look, you have social media now, you should do GREAT!", and, "Hey, Fifty Shades of Grey was self-published!" The money is just not there any more, anywhere, and this speaks volumes about the "global economic changes" that have marginalized literature as never before.

What's the solution? I can only think of one thing. Keep on writing, troops. Don't let the bastards get you down.

Artists struggle to survive in age of the blockbuster

RUSSELL SMITH

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Nov. 28 2013, 5:00 PM EST
Last updated Thursday, Nov. 28 2013, 5:00 PM EST

In the artistic economy, the Internet has not lived up to its hype. For years, the cybergurus liked to tell us about the “long tail” – the rise of niches, “unlimited variety for unique tastes” – that would give equal opportunities to tiny indie bands and Hollywood movies. People selling products of any kind would, in the new connected world, be able to sell small amounts to lots of small groups. Implicit in the idea was the promise that since niche tastes would form online communities not limited by national boundaries, a niche product might find a large international audience without traditional kinds of promotion in its home country. People in publishing bought this, too. The end result, we were told, would be an extremely diverse cultural world in which the lesbian vampire novel would be just as widely discussed as the Prairie short story and the memoir in tweets.

In fact, the blockbuster artistic product is dominating cultural consumption as at no other time in history. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on each successive Hunger Games, and the rep cinemas have closed. A few sports stars are paid more individually than entire publishing houses or record labels earn in a year.

A couple of prominent commentators have made this argument recently about American culture at large. The musician David Byrne lamented, in a book of essays, that his recent albums would once have been considered modest successes but now no longer earn him enough to sustain his musical project. That’s David Byrne – he’s a great and famous artist. Just no Lady Gaga. The book Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment, by business writer Anita Elberse, argues that the days of the long tail are over in the United States. It makes more sense, she claims, for entertainment giants to plow as much money as they can into guaranteed hits than to cultivate new talent. “Because people are inherently social,” she writes cheerily, “they generally find value in reading the same books and watching the same television shows and movies that others do.”

Well, the same appears to be true of publishing, even in this country. There are big winners and there are losers – the middle ground is eroding. Publishers are publishing less, not more. Everybody awaits the fall’s big literary-prize nominations with a make-us-or-break-us terror. Every second-tier author spends an hour every day in the dismal abjection of self-promotion – on Facebook, to an audience of 50 fellow authors who couldn’t care less who just got a nice review in the Raccoonville Sentinel. This practice sells absolutely no books; increases one’s “profile” by not one centimetre; and serves only to increase one’s humiliation at not being in the first tier, where one doesn’t have to do that.

Novelists have been complaining, privately at least, about the new castes in the literary hierarchy. This happens every year now, in the fall, the uneasiness – after the brief spurt of media attention that goes to the nominees and winners of the three major Canadian literary prizes, the Scotiabank Giller, the Governor-General’s, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust. The argument is that the prizes enable the media to single out a few books for promotion, and no other books get to cross the divide into public consciousness. And, say the spurned writers, this fact guides the publishers in their acquisitions. Editors stand accused of seeking out possible prize-winners (i.e. “big books”) rather than indulging their own tastes. This leads, it is said, to a homogenized literary landscape and no place at all for the weird and uncategorizable.

But even if this is true, what can one possibly do about it? Abolish the prizes? No one would suggest this – and even the critics of prize culture understand that the prizes were created by genuine lovers of literature with nothing but the best intentions, and that rewarding good writers financially is good, even necessary, in a small country without a huge market.

It’s not, I think, the fault of the literary prizes that the caste system exists. Nor of the vilified “media” who must cover these major events. It’s the lack of other venues for the discussion and promotion of books that closes down the options. There were, in the nineties, several Canadian television programs on the arts. There were even whole TV shows about books alone. Not one of these remains. There were radio shows that novel-readers listened to. There were budgets for book tours; there were hotel rooms in Waterloo and Moncton. In every year that I myself have published a book there have been fewer invitations and less travel. Now, winning a prize is really one’s only shot at reaching a national level of awareness.

So again, what is to be done? What does any artist do in the age of the blockbuster? Nothing, absolutely nothing, except keep on doing what you like to do. Global economic changes are not your problem (and are nothing you can change with a despairing tweet). Think instead, as you always have, about whether or not you like semicolons and how to describe the black winter sky. There is something romantic about being underground, no?

Look on the bright side: Poverty can be good for art. At least it won’t inspire you to write Fifty Shades of Grey.

 

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm 

"WHALES, Mr. Melville?" - Part II

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/03/the_future_is_no_fun_self_publishing_is_the_worst/


The above article in Salon by novelist Ted Heller was a real eye-opener for me, and I recognized many of the toils and snares he writes about. I sent the following response to my good buddy Matt Paust, and I think it's so blippin' brilliant that I just have to post it here!

Wow. This is one of the best things I’ve read on the subject of trying to straddle the Brave New World and the Sucks-to-high-heaven Old World of publishing. He sounds bitter and extremely hurt, and is so raw emotionally he’s like an open wound. 

But this is the trouble with writers, myself included (of course). A real business person rolls with the punches. I look at my daughter, who is a tough-minded TV journalist who does NOT take things personally. On her first day on the job as a reporter, a producer came up to her – oh goody, a producer, maybe she’s going to praise my first story – and said, “Shannon. Someone has to tell you this. Your makeup. It’s way off.” “Way off?” “You look like a ghost on the screen. Your face is disappearing.” “What should I do?” “Really trowel it on. I mean it – way thicker than you think you need.”

What was her response? She told me, excitedly, about her first day, the challenges, etc. Then she said – and she was not kidding – “God, I’m glad they told me about the makeup. My face was totally washed out. I fixed it today and it looks way better.” I mean it. Her makeup. Most women would whimper in the powder room, and she took it as useful advice.

Another thing – she applied for a consumer advocate job and a colleague kept saying, “You’re going to get it. You’re going to get it. You’re the best one for the job.” She didn’t get it. Instead, they hired someone from Toronto (the big bad city around here) named Linda Steele, who has since become a kind of superstar on the channel. I asked Shannon gingerly what she thought of Linda. “Oh, she’s great. I’m a big fan of hers. You know, she really is the best one for the job.”

Then I look at the cringeing and whinge-ing writers do, the minute injustice-collecting (this guy remembered every slight in gory detail) – and no one is a worse offender at it than me – and I wonder, are we really good business people? The topic of failure once came up, and Shannon said, “Yeah, lots of things have happened, but I don’t consider them failures.” Perhaps as a result, she has stayed afloat like a plucky duck and will probably go on to other things when she’s ready. (The other thing is, she is NOT married to her job and often says, “God, I hate being on television. The only part I like is the research and the legwork” – in other words, what most people would consider the drudgery.)

All this going on and on about my wonderful child (and I learn from her much more than she ever learned from me) is just to say, it’s hard for most of us (including Ted Heller? By the way, is he any relation to Joseph Heller?), because we DO put our nerves and flesh into the job and have no objectivity. I guess if we DID have objectivity, we wouldn’t have the sensitivity to be writers. These novels, they’re our babies. If someone dissed my makeup, I’d run home and go into a depression.

Another thing I notice – he wrote a great article, by the way, and I do see myself in it in many places (if on a much-smaller scale) – he does not mention social networking. He goes on and on about newspapers. He probably does network, because we all do, but it isn't uppermost in his article. Getting newspaper reviews and contacting editors seem to be at the top of his list. It's been my experience that after a couple of weeks, glowing newspaper reviews are fairly good for wrapping fish and almost never lead to decent sales. 

Sorry if this is wordy. I worked for newspapers for many years (reviewing – I did well over 300) and noticed the assignments were dwindling. Book sections were withering away, to be replaced by wire service "canned” pieces that had the flavor of “this guy got paid off”. If he is still thinking newspapers, he’s drilling a dry hole. I lost my Edmonton Journal position (and it actually was a position – I was with them more often than not for nearly 30 years) when my editor phoned me and said, “We’ve tanked, there’s no more books section. Sorry to see you go.”

Well, I couldn’t take THAT personally.

I think what you’re doing is really what you need to do. Get on the internet, use it, get on social networking wherever you can. Don’t wait for editors to email you back because they won’t. They’re inundated. Paper books are on the way out, and authors (even well-established ones) are getting desperate. Agents have gone over to non-fiction and children’s series, because that’s where the money is. They can’t afford to starve representing “literary fiction” or even fiction-fiction because it’s too dicey.

Nobody ever mentions this, but the real money is in celebrity memoirs. I watch some of the entertainment shows (blush – it’s professional development!) and in EVERY case Deborah Norville or whoever will say (i . e. about Amanda Knox or whoever is the narcissistic ditzhead of the week), “In her new book, to be released June 1. . . “ Billboard, billboard! Flashing phosphorescent billboard! And yet, I think these books also have a very short shelf life. I just stumbled across my copy of John Edwards’ memoir. John WHO?

In spite of the fact that Amanda Knox received an advance of something like $2.5 million, these books are nothing but literary porn which is all written by the same person anyway.  The flat, cliched style reveals the fact that they're clones churned out by drones. (Now there is a lucrative field! Ghost-writing. Can you imagine how much you’d make pretending you’re Amanda Knox?).

This is getting very long, but I’ve been ruminating on all this for a very long time now. Everything has shifted seismically, and to be honest it doesn’t look like I’m going to get very far. I’ve tried a few less-orthodox things lately, but since I think it won’t happen if I talk about it, I’m not talking about it. The thing is, if a writer DOES think outside the box, they’re often humiliated for being arrogant or unrealistic, but if they don’t, they’re “-------".

This is why writers go crazy. Or is it the craziness, the abnormal empathy and sensitivity (and how often have I been accused of being “too sensitive”, as if it’s a crime) that makes us write? Most of us need to write. It’s what we do AND who we are. It’s that last part that does us in. To refer to my illustrious/practical daughter again: it’s really NOT who we are. It’s a job. Our work is a commodity that can be bought and sold. In fact, in being published, we are turning our work into a commodity. This is what we want, isn’t it? So over and over again, we’re going to get some version of “Whales, Mr. Melville?” It comes with the territory.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Bukowski!

So You Want To Be A Writer

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

Across the Great Divide

There are few things more horrific in a writer's life than discovering that a manuscript is gone.

I mean, just GONE. Not there. Not where it used to be. Or, if there, filed under some name so obscure, it will never come to mind.

After a lifetime of writing first drafts by hand, and slowly putting them into the computer chapter-by-chapter (printing them out all the way), I decided - or not, it just happened - to skip that step and write directly on the computer.

It worked so well, I could hardly believe it. It took so much of the drudgery out of the process. I could type like the wind. Mistakes didn't matter. I could move blocks of text around. It was great! (Why didn't I think of this before? What a stick-in-the-mud I had been.)

But I had no idea I'd undertaken a paradigm shift (please forgive the awful term, but I can't think of another one: whackydoodle, maybe?) of monstrous proportions. When writing in longhand, the novel would develop in 3D. I could scribble in the margins, cross out paragraphs and then re-insert them elsewhere, shuffle pages around with different potential bits of story on them. Throw things out that I knew were superfluous. Eventually, organically, the manuscript would grow and take shape, with a parallel refining process happening on the computer.

It worked for about six novels. Why did I stop? Because when I sat down and began writing The Glass Character, I never expected to start a new novel. I was just going to make some notes on Harold Lloyd (honest!). But something happened: some sort of dam broke. It started to pour rather than trickle, so I figured this swift new method was the right way to do it.

I guess I must have tried to duplicate the old system electronically, or something, but it was a complete disaster. I saved each bit of material, potential or actual or even horrible, in a separate file. Then I decided to clump the files together, but I didn't erase all the individual ones because I wasn't sure where they were.

I ended up with two "sets", but not duplicates of each other, though close in some places, plus maybe thirty more individual files scattered around under names I could not remember. A jigsaw puzzle, potentially whole, but rattling around in a box. At the time I wrote it, I knew I'd remember how to retrieve all this: easy stuff! It always worked for me before. (Ironically, at this point The Glass Character existed unequivocally in only one form: the hard copy.)

I'm no Luddite, but it seems to me that making the leap from pencil to keyboard is more radical than people realize. I did a reading at the Vancouver Public Library a few years ago, and was astounded when all the other writers said (or admitted, with considerable embarrassment) that they wrote their initial drafts in longhand. Truly, I had believed I was the only one left.

Yesterday was not a good day, but nevertheless I sucked it up, reassembled the puzzle and put together seven queries. I hate odd numbers, but this was as far as I could go without collapsing. Knowing that the really big presses (Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins) won't look at unagented work, and falling completely flat in my search for an agent (remember the rubber stamp?), I knew I'd have to start with the mid-list presses where I can represent myself. This wasn't a bad thing: I like those presses, and I like what they can do for authors.

Then imagine my dismay (dismay, dismay) when I found out that one of the most potentially desirable presses had had to downsize so radically that they moved out of their old quarters and in with another publisher: the literary equivalent of moving back in with your parents.

It wasn't a good sign. I had to assume the other six were struggling equally. Many had switched their main mandate to non-fiction (with a side of kids' books, which are usually written as ongoing series) because there is a perception that literary fiction just can't make it in a competitive market.

I think publishers need a paradigm shift of their own. I believe that literary fiction WILL sell via Kindle and other electronic media. But these guys and gals aren't yet thinking in those terms. They're thinking of paper and book-binding and expensive author tours. What about ONE YouTube video that goes "viral"? It'd be the equivalent of a hundred author tours, not to mention millions of trees in an already-denuded forest.

I'm really up against it here, and I've never known it more than I do now. I feel so strongly about this novel (which I haven't written much about, with my deep dread of jinxing it) that at the moment I have to continue to plod on in the old system. Sending paper and envelopes and stamps (with my DNA on them: some small comfort) is horse-and-buggy stuff.

But there's another side to this. Emailing manuscripts to publishers isn't a magic solution, as I've found that they're very easy to ignore or even delete. That's because editors don't yet know how to work with them.

They don't pile up on your desk in a slippery mountain, begging for your attention. They're more abstract than material. Subconsciously or otherwise, editors are used to riffling papers and marking things up with a red pen. A link in your inbox just can't compete.

How do I know this? Oy vey, how I know this! That's the whole point of this post. You don't just chuck out decades of habit and experience, and methods that have worked efficiently for years and years, just because the rest of the world has told you to throw the whole thing out and start over.

We're between systems here, and writers are suffering because of it. If and when I write another novel (and a plot is squeezing itself into my brain right now), I may well use my computer, but I will be extremely careful about saving things. I can't just stick every fragment into a separate file, being certain I'll remember where I put it months later.

I'll try to be aware, as I write, that I am attempting to make a leap across a great chasm. It isn't just a different method of production, but a radically different system, demanding a whole new way of thinking.

Hey, mid-list publishers! Are you listening? I think I might be on to something here. And while I'm at it. . . listen, have I got a novel for you!

Dear Author, I mean Margaret