The Master's Artist

The End of the Beginning

The contracts are signed, so I guess it's now official. I have a couple of book deals to share. After several years of friendship and collaboration, Dave Long and I have a new relationship: he's my editor. Not once but twice over.

Here's what happened.

Last summer, I met with Dave to discuss a brilliant novel by David Athey called Danny Gospel, which I'd read in manuscript. During our chat, he asked if I'd be interested in writing a straight-up crime novel. I'd dabbled in the genre already -- how about taking the plunge? After some soul-searching -- about five seconds worth -- I said yes. So I left our meeting with a proposal to write, something I hadn't anticipated.

A month and a half later I was down in Houston for a week, so I called Deeanne Gist and we met for coffee. Deeanne is one of Dave's authors, and we've been critique partners for a while, so I wanted to bounce this new opportunity off her and see what she thought. I wasn't prepared for her response.

Cannibal Guy & Cannibal Boy, Back to Back

When I heard the students enthusing about Cannibal Guy, I assumed they were talking about me. The child-eating episode from 2 Kings 6 figured prominently in one of my lectures, after all, and I took great pleasure in dramatizing the story, leaving many students -- who hadn't previously imagined the Bible contained stories like that -- dumbfounded with amazement. (At any rate, they were still awake at the end of the class session.) But it wasn't me they were talking about with such affection, I soon discovered. It was Mike Schutt.

I shouldn't have had anything to fear from Mike -- he was a law professor, after all, and we all know how exciting torts can be. But somehow he'd dug through the dusty annals of legal history and discovered a humdinger of an illustration: a Victorian shipwreck that forced castaway crewman to make a meal of the cabin boy, which made for an awkward rescue and judicial conniptions back home. Naturally I had to sit in on this lecture, knowing deep down that my illustration had to be better (it was inspired, after all). I was wrong, though. My cannibalism anecdote was amusing enough, but Mike's was downright thoughtful. It was more than an outrage; it posed a dilemma. (And really, any situation that makes cannibalism ambiguous has got to have didactic value.)

So I had to concede that Mike was the Cannibal Guy. I was second-best. Cannibal Boy, if you like.

The Basement of Enjoyment

"Without a capacity for blaming the sterile, there can be no capacity for praising the vital. Those without a gift for criticism can't be appreciative beyond a certain point, and the point is set quite low, in the basement of enjoyment."

CLIVE JAMES
Cultural Amnesia, p. 127

One of the high points of last week's Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing for me was attending John Wilson's discussion of book reviewing. Wilson, amiable and erudite, is the editor of Books & Culture, making him both a reviewer and a master of reviewers. (His re-cap of the festival is now online.) In the session, he read an essay of Orwell's on book reviewers, then unloaded a stack of prospective volumes onto the table, explaining how he'd approach the problem of reviewing each one -- whether it should be noticed, and if so what kind of notice it should receive (and when), and to whom the review should be assigned. As an inveterate reader of reviews -- a fan of the genre, if you will -- I was in heaven. One thing was clear. In the house of reading enjoyment, Wilson is nowhere near the basement. The task of criticism is a labor of love.

This is sharply at odds with the idea of critics as a bitter lot, working out their spite at the expense of hapless authors whose only crime was to create. It also gives the lie to the notion that critics are, first and foremost, failed or frustrated artists, operating on a hatred for the success of other writers rather than a love for the written word. Wilson was quick to point out that there's little money to be made in book reviewing, especially at the entry level. The only reason to persevere is because you enjoy reading and writing about good books.

Tuning Your Advice Filter

Writing is a job, but not a normal one. Most people doing it don't get paid enough to keep at it for the money, so they need additional motivation. Thus support structures are born, communities of aspiration where writers can share their work (and their dreams) with each other. These communities inevitably take on a teaching role. In addition to support, new members are offered advice, plenty of it. I say, writer beware.

If you need to learn your craft, enroll in a class or pick up a good book like Stephen Koch's Modern Library Writer's Workshop. Better yet, read great books and pick them apart until you understand how it's done. A critique group composed of people you know and trust is also helpful. (And for goodness sake, if you have one, don't refer to its members as "beta readers," as if you're just another software developer cranking out code.) Whatever you do, don't join a professional organization, a local club or whatever to learn. You'll just end up confused and off track. People have a tendency to major on the minors, to pass along dictums they don't fully understand and generally spout off from a position of ignorance.

THE ADVICE FILTER
Join, but keep your guard up. New writers lack confidence, and are therefore especially susceptible to groupthink and bad advice. They tend to be the ones who are preyed upon most by the advice industry, too. All writers need an advice filter. You need to sort the good from the bad, and then re-sort the good -- what's good for me won't be good for you. And you'll have to distinguish between aesthetic advice and commercial advice, because the latter often masquerades as the former. I want to propose a few filtering questions to help out.

- Who's it coming from?

I have an MFA in Creative Writing from a top program, have published fiction and nonfiction, have served as an editor, have even been paid good money to "fix" problem manuscripts, and in spite of all that, I think you should take most of my advice with a healthy dose of skepticism. I could be wrong, after all. I frequently am. The only time you should take my advice is when it rings true (see below). That goes for most everyone else telling you what writing is all about, too.

The Form of the (Good) Book

The message to Augustine was to "take and read," so he opened the Scriptures and believed. He found what was important, the life-giving words, inside. So what are we to make of a blog whose focus on the Bible is all exterior. On the surface. On appearances. Is it superficial? Shallow? Or on the contrary, it is about time? I'll let you be the judge.

Here at the Master's Artist, we're a passionate bunch, and one love we have in common is the love of books. I was smitten at an early age, and not by exotic leather-bound treasures. My father kept a dried up cache of Dale Carnegie paperbacks in an old gym bag -- really, 'kept' them is an overstatement; I think he'd forgotten them there. As a boy, I discovered them and grew fascinated. Books held so much secret knowledge -- how to win friends, how to influence people -- and they were themselves so fascinating in form. I could spend hours at the library just looking at them. Once an older cousin in college took me to the university library and let me check out books. I was in heaven. I kept a stock of them at home, whatever people happened to discard, and I wasn't too choosy about topics. Any book would do.

I never lost that interest in the form of books, but in time I came to recognize the difference between well-made volumes and trash. Not that all books should last forever, or that cheap ones don't serve a purpose, but sometimes the disparity between the quality of a book's content and its cover is a bit of an outrage. The more important the book, the more wrong such incongruity feels.

When it comes to Bible publishing, there is much to love, and much to lament. They don't make them like they used to. The leather feels like cardboard, the paper is gray with bleed-through text, and the bindings are glued for expediency, not sewn to last. It makes sense that, to provide options at every price bracket, some editions would be like this -- but I worry that it has become the standard. And when I worry about something, I write.

And thus the Bible Design & Binding Blog was born.

Above: Don't try this at home! I call it "Bible yoga." The sign of a supple binding.

Here, the subject is not the content of the Bible, but its form. I write about quality binding and innovative design, reviewing editions from a variety of publishers. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people interested in this topic. No, that's an understatement. Obsessed is the word. And as a result, my little blog has gotten a lot of attention. It's no longer about me and my opinions. A community has formed.

Beach Reads Under an Artificial Sun

The world outside my window is blanketed in snow, in spite of this being late March, which has me wondering if I should increase my carbon footprint or something. Don't get me wrong, snow is one of the things I like about living in South Dakota. It's cool to have seasons again after living so long in Texas -- even if one particular season seems reluctant to end. One thing that's not so cool: the paucity of bookstores. I mean, what do people do during these long winters? (Wait. Don't answer that.) Whatever they do, they don't read. Either that or they buy their books online.

Consider this. If I want to buy a book here in Sioux Falls, the largest city in our state, I have only a handful of choices. Two are on my street: The Book Shop (which sells used titles) and Zandbroz (which has a selection of new ones). Then there's Barnes & Noble on the other side of town, a Christian retail place (nice, but not much selection -- all the books are displayed face out), a tiny place called The Book Nook (also Christian), a new independent place called Cover to Cover (mostly mass market and magazines), and a Waldenbooks in the mall. So I count seven choices, and most of them have small selections. If Barnes & Noble doesn't have something, the odds are the others won't either except for The Book Shop. (Did I mention The Book Shop is being sold and might not continue? Hopefully it will.)

Now imagine that instead of reading a book, you want to get a fake tan. That sounds pretty specialized, doesn't it? You'd think a community that can't support more than a handful of bookstores doesn't have a hope when it comes to tanning salons. And you'd be wrong. Here in Sioux Falls, you could book an appointment at Year Round Brown, which has five locations all over town. If that's not to your taste, there's always Tan World, which has four locations. If you're one of those people who sees chain tanning as inauthentic, there are also some independent options, at least four or five salons that offer tanning as one of their services.

Doing the math, it seems that tanners have twice as many options as readers do in our town.

Object Lessons

After flipping through all the family snapshots in his iPhoto library for my benefit, my friend Jeff wanted to see what was in mine. When I pulled up the pictures, he was horrified. "You don't have any pictures of people," he said. "They're all ... things." And he said it the way a 50s B-movie heroine would the moment she realized her boyfriend had been replaced by an alien automaton. He had uncovered my terrible secret. I was a materialist.

"It's not like I'm carrying a picture of my bookshelves around in my wallet," I said.

But he wasn't convinced. Loved ones and scenic vistas were the two appropriate objects of photographic attention. One mustn't make an object of ... objects. I saw his point. I mean, if you'd told me about this sad loser who didn't have pictures of his wife and kids and the family dog, but instead had shots of brass bookends and marbled paper and silver pens, I wouldn't need a psych profile to know what kind of character I was dealing with. A man obsessed with material possessions, perhaps living alone and unloved, a squalid, empty life. I could even imagine a deathbed catharsis, the man curled up on a mattress overlooked by impassive statues and gilt mirrors, a realization that he'd missed what was really important in life.

50 Crime Novelists to Read Before You Die

Every time a Top 10 list comes out -- or a Top 5 or Top 50 -- I always feel compelled to measure my own taste against the standard. So on February 23, when the Telegraph published a list of "50 crime writers to read before you die," I had to see how my shelves stacked up. Since I've done some crime writing myself, I figured it was doubly important to tick as many names off the list as I could.

Of the fifty authors listed, I'd read a little over half. Some of them (the ones I've put in bold) are particular favorites. Here are the ones I've read: G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, James Ellroy, Dashiell Hammett, Charles Dickens, Georges Simenon, Agatha Christie, Wilkie Collins, Ruth Rendell, Raymond Chandler, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Donald Westlake, Frances Fyfield, Reginald Hill, Andrea Camilleri, Henning Mankell, Patricia Highsmith, James Lee Burke, Jim Thompson, Walter Mosley, Denise Mina, George V Higgins, Dorothy L Sayers, Mickey Spillane, George Pelecanos, John Lawton, Elmore Leonard.

Even among the authors I'd missed, there were a couple I'd read under their real names. Here are the people I missed: Kyril Bonfiglioli, Janwillem van der Wetering, Carl Hiaasen, Dan Kavanagh (a pen name for Julian Barnes, whom I have read), Margery Allingham, Jonathan Latimer, Ngaio Marsh, Benjamin Black (a pen name for John Banville, whom I have read), John Dickson Carr, Michael Gilbert, Colin Bateman, Steig Larsson, Ronald Knox, EC Bentley, Lawrence Block, Edmund Crispin, William McIlvanney, Anthony Boucher, James Grady, Robert Crais.

Last week, I crossed two names off the list: Ed McBain and Michael Innes. I read Cop Hater, the first of McBain's famous 87th Precinct books, and found that I could appreciate it as the fountainhead of police procedural without really enjoying it as a novel. I found the first novel by Innes -- Death at the President's Lodging -- in a cool vintage Penguin edition with the green cover to signify crime. I'm not a big fan of "Golden Age" mysteries, but his prose style is impressive, just what you'd expect from an Oxford professor.

What Do You Want from Writing?

This week I read my story "Strings" at Hearing Voices, a regular poetry-and-prose program hosted by Orr Street Studios in Columbia, Missouri. Now we're hip-deep in the True/False Film Fest, an annual showcase of documentary films. Spending time with old friends, meeting new ones, rubbing shoulders with poets, novelists, sculptors, painters and film-makers -- it reminds me that my struggles aren't unique to me, that everyone in the arts has to work through similar issues, puzzling over capability and craft.

The writing fantasy goes something like the happily-ever-after plot from romance. Publication is a climactic walk down the aisle, and everything that follows is soft-focus glory. When you attend a writing conference, the illusion is reinforced. The teachers are successful, published authors, and if you follow their precepts, the implication is that you will be successful and published, too. The perspective changes, though, when you enter a community of artists, an everyday collective that doesn't disappear come Monday morning. Here you find people working cleverly and with great skill, but without the financial windfalls that always accompany such work in the fairy tale. They scrape by with day jobs (or not), making sacrifices so they can make art -- and sometimes they're the only ones who really believe in what they're doing. That takes a lot of dedication. When it comes to chasing the money dog, as Mary said Tuesday, it's not a matter of millions, just a scramble to get the bills paid.

The end result may be glorious, but the process itself isn't glamorous.

So the question is, what do you want out of your writing? The answer will be different for you than it is for me, and the sad fact is, writing can't deliver the vast majority of things we desire from it. Wealth and fame, the admiration of one's peers, leaving an influential legacy -- there are better ways to achieve these things than putting pen to paper. The dream warms many but fills few.

Say Yes to the Clairvoyant Dog

Michael Snyder's debut novel My Name is Russell Fink is out on the shelves this week, which is cause for celebration for everyone here. It's a struggle to get into print, and as a result most of us are willing to do whatever it takes. If we have to write what the market wants, that's what we do. So when one of us manages to break in by writing a book that is quintessentially his own, one that embodies both his humor and humanity, we should break into a round of applause.

We're all naturally reluctant to promote ourselves too shamelessly, so it falls to our friends. In this case, I'm very pleased to do it. If you haven't bought your copy of My Name is Russell Fink, do it now. Mike is a quirky, humane author with a knack for juxtaposing the serious and the absurd. As you know already from his contributions to the Master's Artist, reading him is pure fun.

I mean, come on. Faith healing. A clairvoyant dog. Not only that, but according to Publisher's Weekly "it may be a bit too edgy and complex for the Christian chick lit crowd." What doesn't sound good about that? (If nothing else, if you love Christian chick lit, and happen to find yourself in a crowd, pick up a copy to prove PW wrong.)