Posted by: jpon | January 25, 2010

Conducting a Title Search

Who would have thought a single line could be so difficult to write?

Throughout the entire eighteen-month writing process, my novel was called The Ballo Brothers, which was the name of my grandfather’s vaudeville act. He and his partner are the central figures in the story, which is set in Paris in the week just before World War I. But there’s a woman who is also a main character, and my agent didn’t think a title with “Brothers” in it was sufficiently accurate.

So about a month ago I began to work on a new title. No problem. I’ve always been fairly good at titles with my short stories. But I drew a blank. I tried short ones, long ones, literal ones and vague ones. I’ve prepared lists of descriptive words and tried dozens of combinations and nothing captures the essence of the story. Opening Acts? Closing Acts? Songs of War? Songs of Discord? Nothing worked. As we’re now ready to solicit publishers, I suggested we submit it as The Novel Formerly Known as The Ballo Brothers. Publishers might not see the humor in that.

Fortunately my agent, Rob Daniel of Andrea Hurst Literary Management is a patient man. Each time he rejected my title efforts he suggested I concentrate on the essence of the book. What is it really about at its core?

I turned to my local writers’ group for help and they gave me some good suggestions, but I still wasn’t there. I even searched web sites having to do with the theater and the war, hoping to find a term or phrase that worked.

And then, finally, without warning or further provocation, an inspiration. As the Music Fades Away, Sure. It captures the tone of the book—Europe slipping from peacetime into war, and has a literary application in that the performers must stop playing when their theater abruptly closes. I think it will work. I’m waiting to hear back from Rob. I hope he likes it. I hope, too, that he doesn’t ask me to start considering pseudonyms. Hmmm. How does the writer formerly known as Joe Ponepinto sound?

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Posted by: jpon | January 9, 2010

The Fat Man is Singing

This may not be every writer’s worst nightmare, but it has quickly become mine. While my agent is getting things together to submit my historical fiction to publishers (we’re still working on the title and I’ll probably blog on that soon), I’ve been writing away on a second novel.

This one is quite different from the first—it’s a satire and written in an existential style. I’ve been working on it in various forms for several years, and have finally found the correct voice for the narrator, so I have recently been enthusiastic about moving ahead at last.

I don’t want to say too much more about it, but about a year ago I had an idea that as the main character, who is something of a loser, continues to gain power, he might also gain weight—a metaphor for his growth and the indulgences that come with it. Rather creative, I thought.

Well I guess I wasn’t the only one. Got my Wall Street Journal today, which included a section on books to watch for in 2010. Right at the top of the page is a blurb on Ian McEwan’s latest, titled Solar, a comedy about climate change. Here’s what they wrote: “Solar centers on a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who leads an initiative to pioneer a new source of clean energy. He also gets fatter as the novel unfolds.” So much for my creativity.

I suppose I should be flattered that a writer of the “weight” of Ian McEwan came up with the same idea. And maybe his treatment of the weight gain is not quite the same. But it sure is frustrating. His book is due out March 30. Guess who’ll be first in line to grab a copy and see how the fat man sings.

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Posted by: jpon | December 20, 2009

Missing Whidbey

Last week I finished reading final papers from the class for which I’ve been an assistant teacher. The semester marks the fifth I’ve been associated with the Northwest Institute for Literary Arts on Whidbey Island in Washington—four as a master’s student and one as TA.

I realized that with the end of the term, my communications with the faculty and students will lessen significantly. No more need to check the discussion boards each day. No assignments to complete, or prepare. And since NILA is primarily an online educational experience (one ten-day in-person residency per semester), I won’t be seeing the great people I met there too often, since the distance is great, and the cost of the residency is, right now, hard to justify.

Writers everywhere lament that their profession is one of the loneliest, with long hours spent in solitude just thinking and writing, not interacting with other people. The experience has not been so bad for me, because I’ve always had my involvement with the school to ease those moments when the writing mind needs a break.

I will still have the online alumni forum linking me to classmates and mentors, but I will miss the experiences of talking literary theory and sharing the pleasures and frustrations of the writing life in the classroom setting. Of course I have my local writers group, but for a writer, diminishing relationships with other writers is always hard to bear.

Moving forward, writing will become more of the kind of singular pursuit other writers have mentioned.

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Posted by: jpon | December 16, 2009

My Weird Titles Weren’t Weird Enough

I’ve been outdone. By a mile.

A couple of posts ago I commented on some published books with odd titles and subjects. Today a friend posted a link to a story about a new book that features dozens of awkward and confusing titles. It’s called Do-It-Yourself Brain Surgery and Other Implausibly Titled Books, and features 96 pages of winners like Fabulous Small Jews, Knitting with Dog Hair, The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories and I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen.

A book about bad books. How come I never get ideas like that?

Here’s a link: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/12/knitting-with-dog-hair-and-other-unfortunate-book-titles.html

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Posted by: jpon | December 9, 2009

The Agent Has Landed

That’s one small step for a writer; one giant leap for fiction.

Apologies to Neal Armstrong, and excuse the pun, but I’m a little excited, as I’ve just been signed by Andrea Hurst Literary Management. They’ll be representing my novel, tentatively titled Songs of War.

The “giant leap for fiction” part was just for laughs, but the “one small step for a writer” phrase is spot on—no reason to pop champagne corks yet. Acquiring an agent is really just a small step in the overall process of publishing a novel. From here on its gets tougher.

Already the agent I will be working with has warned me that book sales are down, and advances are lower. An article in today’s Wall Street Journal talked about major publishers’ worries that e-book price wars will bring down the price of printed books.

Still, the article mentioned that a large publisher like Simon and Schuster publishes approximately 2,000 books a year. I’m only asking for one. For now.

And more good news this week. I’ve been asked by the staff of the Los Angeles Review to become their Book Review Editor. LAR is an excellent, and growing literary journal under the auspices of Red Hen Press, one of the nation’s fastest growing publishers.

It’s only Wednesday. Someone said good things happen in threes. We shall see.

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Posted by: jpon | December 3, 2009

Chekhov’s Timeless Influence on Writing

In every field it seems there is a person whose influence spans decades. While most of that person’s contemporaries have become archaic, symbols of an era from which we have long advanced, that person remains as current and relevant as he or she was when alive. In Physics it’s Einstein (and to a certain extent Newton), in government it’s Lincoln.

In the world of literature, no one’s philosophy about writing has had more influence than Anton Chekhov. Although he wrote around the turn of the 20th century, his short stories are as beautifully written and well regarded as anything penned today. And his approach to writing fiction is still as important as it was when he introduced his style to the world.

I was reminded of his influence last week while reading short story submissions to Fifth Wednesday Journal. Most of the stories suffered from an avalanche of backstory—details about a character’s past life that are important to the writer, but not to the events of the story. One 35-page tome began with a full eight pages of unnecessary backstory. I had recently read an article in The Writer’s Chronicle, by Frederick Reiken, in which he illustrated how Chekhov dealt with the issue:

…a Russian priest by the name of S. Shchukin, had come to Chekhov with a manuscript of his work. Picking up the notebook, Chekhov said: “Fledgling authors should frequently do the following: bend the notebook in half and tear off the first half.”

I looked at him in amazement, Shchukin wrote.

“I am speaking seriously,” Chekhov said. “Normally beginners try to ‘lead into the story,’ as they say, and half of what they write is unnecessary. One ought to write so that reader understands what is going on without the author’s explanations, from the progress of the story, from the characters’ conversations, from their actions.”

The simplicity of his argument is quite profound. It seems from the submissions to 5WJ, most of which appear to be from undergrads, that Chekhov isn’t taught much at universities anymore, perhaps in favor of more modern writers and new techniques. But that is a shortcoming. Chekhov’s approach to writing is still one of the foundations of fiction, and there are many writers who could benefit by it.

more on backstory to come

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Posted by: jpon | November 15, 2009

If They Can Be Published …

After you’ve written a novel there is a long period of waiting to see if it will be published. You wait to learn if an agent will represent it. You wait to see if a publisher will print it. And if it is published you then wait to see if an audience will read and enjoy it. And while you’re waiting, there is always the nagging doubt and frustration about whether the novel was good enough.

I’m still at that first waiting point, so I often take notice of other books that are just coming out, and wonder about the decisions made in the publishing process, such as: Who will read this? Is the audience big enough to justify a print run? Why did the publisher choose this one?

To be honest, there are some books* I see whose allure for readers escapes me. Really, how many people are going to rush out to pick up a copy of Whose Fair?, the history of the St. Louis Exposition of 1904? Whoever those folks are, they may have to wait in line behind people clamoring for The North American Porcupine—second edition. Second edition? Are you telling me the first edition sold out?

I begin to have serious doubts. If this is what the public wants to read, what chance do I have with a novel about three American entertainers stranded in Paris on the eve of World War I who become involved in romantic and political intrigues?

Better I should go back to the keyboard and write something like Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World. I can see it now—first you take a 500-year-old onion… Or maybe I should try sports. Spartak Moscow, A History of the People’s Team in the Workers’ State made it to print; how about I take a couple of weeks and bang out a sports tome on…I’ve got it…The History of Hackeysack.

I suppose these titles should give me hope. If these volumes got published, perhaps there’s room on a bookstore shelf somewhere for mine.

*These are all actual books advertised in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books.

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Posted by: jpon | November 10, 2009

Hillbilly Lit – Breece D’J Pancake

I was reading some stories for Fifth Wednesday Journal, when it struck me how many writers seem fascinated with rural life. The percentage of stories I see that take place in country settings far exceeds the percentage of the population that actually lives there. Let’s just say I read more than my share of stories about men with pickup trucks, shotguns and dogs … and the women who love them.

I’ve noticed that in some of these stories, the characters are made to sound something like hillbillies, or at least what the writer thinks hillbillies should sound like. All that reminded me of the stories of Breece D’J Pancake, who was from West Virginia and was known for his stories about the places in which he grew up. As you might imagine, the people in his stories sound not like hillbillies, but people.

Pancake was an extraordinarily tragic figure. As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, he never fit in with the kids from affluent families in his writing classes, and so began to deliberately style himself as an uncultured hillbilly. His stories were elegiac yet brutal portrayals of life in Appalachia. He had four of them published in The Atlantic. Several critics considered his work to be genius. Joyce Carol Oates said his stories were “as compactly and tightly written as prose poems and should be read (and reread) with extreme care.”

Why don’t we have more of his work? Pancake died in 1979, at the age of 26, probably from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

The Atlantic maintains links to the Pancake stories they published, and they are worth a read. One doesn’t see work of this depth much these days.

“Trilobites” “In the Dry” “The Honored Dead” “Hollow”

And here is a link to Oates’ essay on Pancake:

The New York Times Review of The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake by Joyce Carol Oates

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Posted by: jpon | November 9, 2009

Writing is Revising—Even in the Bathroom

Richard Powers wrote most of his newest novel in bed, using voice recognition software. Junot Diaz writes in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub. To write “Lowboy,” John Wray wrote for up to six hours a day sitting in subway cars. The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Journal recently reported on 11 well-known authors about how they create, and—surprise—none of them merely sit at a computer and type away. (See the article here.) Many of the 11 initially write in longhand, or on notecards, before they transfer the work to the computer.

The one thing writers like Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro and the others do have in common is that they revise what they’ve written—not just revise in the sense that most writers consider the term, where they write a draft and go over it a couple of times—but over and over. Orhan Pamuk says he writes the first line of his books 50 to 100 times. Others, like Diaz and Ishiguro cut and rewrite hundreds of pages. That’s rather amazing, considering what fabulous writers they are.

Not every writer, especially those new at the craft, believes this approach is necessary. I admit, I sure didn’t when I first started writing regularly. But as I practiced more, and took more time with my work, that changed drastically. In a novel I completed back in May, the first chapter took ten versions, and that’s not even counting the at least dozen additional rewrites that I didn’t bother to save as new versions. On average, I would say I revised each of the 17 chapters about 10-15 times.

The revising helps. With each version the continuity of what I am writing becomes stronger, the characterization deeper and clearer. The language is improved as well. My early drafts tend to be a bit wordy, so this is especially important for me.

Someone once said writing is revising, and whether you like to do it or not, it’s true. I haven’t gone so far as to grab a copy of a story and sit on the edge of the tub to edit it, but if it works for Junot Diaz, well, maybe it’s worth a try.

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Posted by: jpon | October 28, 2009

Long Ago and Faraway in Writing

Long ago, in a faraway place, a writer wrote. He wrote and wrote, and when he was done with his book, a kindly agent sold it to a generous publisher, who printed thousands of copies and publicized the book so the people would know about it and purchase this wonderful work.

That fairy tale was then. This is now: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2009/10/19/091019sh_shouts_weiner

The article is funny, but it’s also largely true. Today writers, especially new writers, are expected to handle the majority of their publicity efforts, even before they’ve been published. Personally, I spend two or more hours a day either blogging, commenting on others’ blogs (which theoretically increases traffic to my blog), working on book reviews to get my name out in the field, or other possibly platform-building efforts.

Unfortunately I’m one of those people who has to get the little tasks out of the way before I work on the big project (my latest novel), so I sometimes find the day is too far gone to get into the mood to write. Clearly, I need to reprioritize. I’m trying to learn to blog at night to clear the day for the creativity I need to write well. That didn’t happen today.

I can hardly wait until I get a book deal—I’ll be so busy publicizing, I may never write again!

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