Everyone talks about perspiration. Everyone talks about the long slog. Everyone talks about things like endurance and practice.

But what about inspiration?

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I love this list of unfilmable novels.

What would you add to it?

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(5) “I thought writing ‘Exterminate all the brutes’ in the margins of your manuscript was cute. You didn’t?”

(4) “I’ve just undergone a religious conversion that has real relevance to your manuscript.”

(3) “My apologies for all the drinking this morning, but I have read your fucking manuscript, so no goddamn worries, huh, kid?”

(2) “You need to be more original. This is the third novella disguised as a scientific monograph about squid that I’ve read this week.”

(1) “Precious bodily fluids. You must preserve them in these jars. These jars and no others. If you wish to progress as a writer. These jars. Those fluids.”

So I went through the notes and rough draft materials for my new novel, Finch, today. What lurks behind those leather walls? Let’s find out…

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I had a friend email me tonight utterly forlorn about a publishing deal gone south. It made me think about despair in the writing life. It’s a companion who keeps coming back to you no matter how far you’ve gotten. Things go wrong. What you have visualized does not come to pass. That opportunity you thought you had turns to dust in your hands.

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Um, I don’t have one. I don’t care if I scribble on a piece of toilet paper or in some fancy goat-skin-lined tome. I’d be as happy tearing the label off your jeans and using it to write on as going out and buying something more grandiose. And save me from some electronic organizer or blackberry or whatever. Paper and pen’s always going to be easier and thus provide less friction between “eureka!” and writing down “eureka!” before it becomes “What the heck was that brilliant phrase I was just thinking of a second ago and now have forgotten?”

On long projects, though, my favorite notebook is actually…a notecard. Notecards are much preferred, with one thought or sequence or phrase per card. Just shove a bunch in your back pocket wherever you go. I guarantee it makes novel writing a lot easier. Nothing’s more annoying than having to take all of your random novel notes in a notebook and put them into sequential order. With notecards, just sequence them in minutes. Voila! Low-tech wins again.

To say nothing of being happily rude whipping them out and scribbling in mid-conversation. A perk of being a writer. You shrug. “What can I do? I’m a writer.”

In updating my short-term and long-term goals document yesterday, it struck me again how simple my bullet-point list is, including details of how I intend to achieve those goals, and yet…and yet…time and time again when I mention this idea to beginning and even experienced writers they look at me like I either described some genius-level idea–or, conversely, like it’s a ‘tarded thing they can’t be bothered to do (”I’m a starving artist–my genius is in my disorganized random approach to life, not just my art.”). And yet we all know that visualization, that focus, that knowing where you want to go and how you want to do it is extremely important to success. Having this document, knowing what I want to do tactically and strategically, makes life a lot easier for me. That’s all I know.

May through September, excepting public appearances and prior nonfiction commitments, are reserved for finishing Finch, my new Ambergris novel. I’ve archived my email, deleted all of my links to blogs other than news blogs, and stopped taking on new commitments. I’ve instituted a strict exercise regime for two hours five-days-a-week of weightlifting and cardio with two days off, and am working on controlling my diet by limiting intake of any bad carbs. All weekday mornings will be spent on the novel. Afternoons will see limited internet connectivity for business communications, but most often be for typing up rough draft material or working on anthology commitments. Evenings will be for reading and relaxing and some blogging–replenishing the mind for the next morning’s work. Weekends will be the main time I do nonfiction as it’s less taxing.

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The Art of Subtext is a marvelous book on writing. It is so focused, so perfectly presented, and it also is an enduring argument for the idea of fiction being about the human condition–and, perhaps more importantly, for any beginning fiction writer, it contains a veritable cornucopia of ideas on approaches to presenting details about people and their interactions. I’ve always thought that a good writer must not just be a good observer of people but have a keen eye for the subtext of life and human relationships–and then be able to convey this in subtle and complex ways through the fiction.

To review this book is in a sense to rewrite it, so I’d just urge any writer, at any level of development, to seek it out. The sections on dialogue alone are worth it. (If you do order it, please do so through the link above. I’ve joined Amazon’s associates program. However, I’ll only be using that program for books I like.)

Jeff

Fiction, a dramatic medium, asks writers to unlearn the habits of conflict-avoidance for the sake of revelation. People who have practiced good manners and conflict-avoidance all their lives have to remember to leave those habits of mind at the door when they enter the theater of fiction. Stories thrive on bad behavior, bad manners, confrontations, and unpalatable characters who by wish or compulsion make their desires visible by creating scenes. Imagine Dostoyevsky’s contempt at the idea that his characters ought to be more pleasant, more presentable. The perennial Dostoyevsky question is, “Do you want the truth or agree-able seeming falsehoods?” Fiction is that place where human beings do not have to be better than they really are, where characters can and should confront each other, where they must create scenes, where desire will have its day, where all truth is beautiful. Fiction is the antidote to the conduct manual.

Given that there have been several recent posts in the blogosphere about reviews, including on OF Blog of the Fallen and, just today, Mumpsimus, I thought I’d weigh in with my two cents, for what it’s worth. (These thoughts aren’t responses to either BoF or Mump, just FYI, both of which seem to me to contain clear and cogent arguments, most of which I agree with.)

As readers of this blog know, I’m primarily a fiction writer, but I’ve also reviewed books, off and on, for almost twenty years. This gives me a twinned perspective as a giver and receiver of formal opinions about books. As might be expected, the same things that bother me in reviews of my work that I think are unfair or poorly written, beyond simple errors of fact, are also things I try to avoid in reviewing other people’s books.

By a “review,” I don’t mean two paragraphs I post on this blog or some of the capsule summaries of 200 or 300 words that appear on Amazon and elsewhere. I mean a “review” in the sense of an attempt by a person, whether formally identified as a reviewer or not, to fully engage a published text at a length of anywhere from about 500 words to 2,500 words.

So, that said, here are eight things I try to avoid doing as a reviewer—things that also bug me as a writer being reviewed, to a greater or lesser extent. Some of them are easy for me to avoid as a reviewer. Some are less so. But with every review, I think seriously about these issues.

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