The Writing Center

….and I hope you’ll continue at my new blog, which you can find here.

Thank you!

This piece by Timothy Egan is awesome. That’s all I have to say.

I liked this post by Debra Darvick on the hidden gifts of rejection. Rejection is something we’ve all experienced if we’ve been writing long enough — and certainly if we’re published.

My favorites are numbers 3 and 5, about how rejection makes us stronger — but I also really enjoyed Darvick’s creative suggestions for what to do with these rejection letters (see number 4) as well as the one big stretch (see number 8, about how our rejections help the U.S. Postal Service).

And if you’ve been published, you know that number 10 is absolutely true…if you’re still waiting, this is what you can look forward to. Don’t give up!

It’s that time of year again — the Literary Review has announced its fourteenth annual Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. This year’s winner is Iain Hollingshead for a passage in his first novel Twentysomething.

As many of you know, the award was established with the aim of “gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.”

Author Tim Willocks was the runner-up (The Religion), but, as the Literary Review notes, “ultimately Hollingshead’s ‘bulging trousers’ tipped the balance.” Another consideration was the fact that “Hollingshead is a first-time writer, [and] we wished to discourage him from further attempts. Heavyweights such as Thomas Pynchon and Will Self are beyond help at this point.”

You can read the winning passage as well as those of finalists (including Mark Haddon, Thomas Pynchon, and Julia Glass).

Misspelled words should be accepted as “variant spellings” rather than corrected, says Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University in England, in this BBC article.

Apparently Mr. Smith is tired of correcting common spelling errors, and proposes that instead of “complaining about the state of the education system,” we simply add a couple dozen of the most commonly misspelled words to those that have “variant spellings.” In one argument, he asks, “The spelling of the word ‘judgement’, for example, is now widely accepted as a variant of ‘judgment’, so why can’t ‘truely’ be accepted as a variant spelling of ‘truly’?”

I have yet to accept “alright” as a variant of “all right,” so that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the issue. But I know I have more than a few former undergraduate students who would love to see Smith’s proposal widely adopted.

Margo Rabb’s essay in last weekend’s NYT Book Review opens with good news and bad news: the good news being Random House made an offer on her book within twenty-four hours, the bad news being Random House wanted to publish it as a Young Adult (YA) book.

Rabb writes, “My literary novel about death and grief, which I’d worked on for eight years, was a young adult book?” At MacDowell, a fellow writer said, “That’s such a shame.” Rabb quotes children’s author Mark Haddon (who also wrote the adult book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) on people’s reactions to his work as an author of children’s books: “as if I painted watercolors of cats or performed as a clown at parties.”

While in the UK, such crossover books are often sold in both sections of the bookstore, American publishing hasn’t quite gotten there. But while it may seem initially disappointing for an author to find his or her book envisioned as YA instead of adult, it’s becoming increasingly common to find familiar authors in the YA section (among them, Sherman Alexie, A.M. Homes, James Patterson, and many others). It can be a tough call, when a book is somewhere in between. Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep, before being published as an adult book, was initially rejected by 14 editors who thought it was YA. Sittenfeld said, “You write the book you want to write, and then publishing has its way with it.”

And authors would do well to be flexible about the marketing of their books. Alexie’s first Y.A. novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, won the National Book Award for young people’s literature last year, at which point he said, “I obviously should’ve been writing Y.A. all along.”

This Publishers Weekly article highlights some of the recent success stories for self-published authors — the seven-figure deals that many self-published authors dream about. A shift is clearly taking place in which publishers are beginning to look at self-published books a lot more seriously; Dutton editor Ben Sevier tells PW, “It proves that great books are slipping through the cracks.”

Yet this doesn’t necessarily mean that self-publishing leads straight to the big money at the big houses. Those books that get the attention of the big publishers are already selling on their own; they’re already getting press and blurbs.

Agent David Fugate of LaunchBooks in San Diego, who negotiated a deal for a self-published book that had already sold 20,000 copies before being acquired, emphasizes they editors aren’t likely going to be interested without significant sales, in the range of 3,000 to 4,000 copies.

Self-publishing works best for someone with a platform. In fact, one recently signed Viking author (who got attention after a talk she gave at the TED conference) would likely have gotten editors’ and agents’ attention without her book. Editor Clare Ferraro said, “If Jill hadn’t had a book, I would have been no less interested in her.”

So if you want to self-publish, know your challenges and your limits — but also know where the best-case scenario could take you.

I just read this story about an interesting twist on Twitter — Quillpill, which though still in private beta is available by invitation at Techcrunch. It apparently is a new way for all would-be-novelists-if-I-only-had-the-time to write their novels…you simply write it 140 characters at a time, from your cell phone, whenever and wherever.

It sounds like lots of fun, except for two things: while it’s free now, a paid subscription is planned; plus the fact that while I appreciate the 140-character limit for the sake of concision, I wouldn’t necessarily want the world to see my first drafts of much of anything, even if it’s only 140 characters long.

But it’ll be interesting to see where this goes … Quillpill founders were inspired by the popularity of mobile publishing in Japan, where books written on cell phones have sold hundreds of thousands of copies — and some have gone on to become bestsellers in print.

Many of you may remember last year’s debate over David Sedaris’s work — fact or fiction? — an all-too-familiar debate these days for memoirists. Being a stickler for 100% truth in nonfiction (and feeling like the only one on the planet), I got a kick out of New York Magazine’s blurb on the subject, which notes that Barnes & Noble lists Sedaris’s new collection on its FICTION bestseller list (also noting that having sold more than twenty thousand copies of the book in its first week, Sedaris probably isn’t complaining).

Sedaris has recently labeled his work “97%” true, which to me isn’t nonfiction — but at least he’s admitting that he embellishes and invents. Which most of his readers already know (and likely don’t mind).

I just discovered Word Spy, a web site “devoted to lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases.” Words featured here are new terms that have been legitimized a bit through multiple appearances in newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, and other recorded sources.

Some of the words and terms are hardly new — the publishing section lists such familiar terms as “backstory” and “chick lit” — but others in this section were a nice surprise, like “me-moir” (a memoir that is exceptionally self-centered) and “shnovel” (a self-help book disguised as a novel).

Overall, it’s lots of fun, and it’s a great way to fill up a few moments of “microboredom” (boredom caused by having nothing to do over a short period of time). Enjoy.