Storytellersunplugged

Justine Musk

1

People who live in mostly-glass houses rarely throw stones. They’re not that stupid. They do, however, have to deal with the small corpses of birds who fly into the windows. There is a lesson in this, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.

2

I read once that there are two kinds of readers. The first, and most common, is the bright, well-adjusted child with decent social skills who absorbs reading from his or her environment. There are many books in the house. Both parents model the act of reading on a regular basis. Etcetera.

The second kind of reader has a different narrative hunger: more obsessive: the child in question is unusually solitary. Readers in the second group find their way to books despite – and not because of – their environment.

This made me think of something Dean Koontz said in an interview. He was speaking about the poverty and abuse of his childhood, spent at the whims of a crazy, violent father. There were no books or magazines in his house. He found his way to them regardless. “It makes you wonder about fate,” he said. It certainly makes you wonder about genetics, how we come into this world already hardwired. He was a reader of the second kind.

There were many books in my house. My father not only gave me money for books – although sometimes he made me rake the leaves first — he brought home books from the elementary school he administered in order to “get my opinion”. My parents read frequently and often: cosy scenes involving fireplaces and Canadian snow blown against the front windows. I am grateful for this, but ultimately it would not have mattered. I fall into the second group.

This kept me out of sync with my peers for many years.

Eventually I found new peers. The way people do.

3

When I was a little kid, I knew a lot of bright little kids, and quite a few of them liked to read – none as much as I did, but as already mentioned, I was a bit freakish – and showed a flair for creative writing. My stories were singled out, but so were theirs. At some point, however, they pulled back, and I kept on going.

Throughout my twenties – and I’m making a bit of a leap here, but bear with me — I’ve been close to certain people, have had some wild times together, and I started to recognize how, at a certain point of hedonism, I pulled back, and they didn’t.

When I don’t write, I get anxious, edgy. Pressure builds inside me. I need to write in order to release it — fiction is the best, but a long email can be just as effective. I crave exercise the same way, which means I spend a lot of time on the treadmill or weight machines or in a dance/yoga studio. Joyce Carol Oates has written about her obsession with running, and I’ve often wondered if these things are linked – the urge to work out some kind of physical, complementary manifestation of a similar urge to write. Sure, I want to communicate, entertain, go deep, maybe find some fame and glory while I’m at it – what the hell? – but ultimately I suspect it’s a fairly primal drive. For release, escapism, calm. The calm lasts for a short time, and then the need builds again.

I write because it takes my crooked soul and lies it straight. The world is a better place when the writing goes well. There is a term – ‘graphomania’ – which refers to some kind of brain quirk compelling you to write, and maybe that’s what I have (although if that’s the case how come I’m not much more productive? 15 pages a day, every day?). Maybe all writers have at least a low-level case of it.

4

I read somewhere that the Japanese character for ‘inspiration’ brings together ‘elegance’ and ‘strength’. I love that so much I might get it tattooed.

5

China Mieville points out that the fantastic literatures don’t get nearly the respect they deserve. He agrees that 90 percent of fantasy writing is crap. He also points out that 90 percent of anything is crap. (Which reminds me of something a film professor told a friend of mine back in college: “People will tell you that for every opening in the film industry, 500 people will apply. What they won’t tell you is that ninety percent of those people are morons. The trick is not to be among the morons.” Easier said than done.)

I have a writer’s crush on China Mieville. I love how his book ‘Perdido Street Station’ is too long. There are these leisurely sections devoted to the exploration of his world and its cultures, characters attempting to define and redefine themselves in places where cultures intersect. He spends a lot of time fleshing out his themes in a way that doesn’t necessarily advance the plot, certainly not in the way of a typical genre novel. An American editor would have had him streamline the hell out of that baby (and his follow-up novel, which he worked on with an editor at Del Rey, did indeed emerge tighter and leaner). I’m glad ‘Station’ found its way into America only after it had made Mieville’s name in the UK.

Now that I think of it, I grew up on big books. Your average King novel could moonlight as a doorstop, of course, but it’s not like Peter Straub or Sidney Sheldon or Norman Mailer were turning out slim little volumes. There used to be this belief that a novel should be around 500 pages so the reader would feel he or she had gotten good storytelling value for the money. Now anything over 100,000 words – roughly 300 pages – is pushing it, especially if you’re a first-timer.

When I submitted ‘Bloodangel’ to my agent, I was advised to cheat in the way that books and articles always order you not to: alter the line spacing from 2.0 to 1.5 in order to come out with a manuscript that seemed a bit less of a blunt weapon. Apparently this makes it psychologically as well as physically easier for the editor to bundle up the damn thing and take it home.

My book sold, so conclude from this what you will.

This was after I’d already cut fifteen thousand words from the draft. Readers assume I deliberately set the book up for a sequel, or series. Although I was certainly never opposed to the idea, the truth is that I crammed as much of the story as I could into the space I felt I had to work with. In the end, there was story left over.

Funny thing – the leftovers end up seeding new story. At the moment I’m like Jack looking up at the beanstalk, wondering how high the thing is growing.

6

Before you are a writer, you are an individual of your culture and era. The Dickens of contemporary London would be a different writer than the Dickens of Victorian London. He would be the same man but shaped by different forces. So would his fiction.

The novel is like any other art form: it changes with the times, with the culture, with the advent of new technology. Technicolor and sound revolutionized films. Photography forced painters to reconsider the nature of painting, which started a drive towards the depiction of inner life – and color, and material itself — as well as the world around us. If Van Gogh was producing his works today, would people be paying millions of dollars for them? I suspect they would not. They would say, “This has been done.”

7

In Dickens’ day, the novel was a relatively new form – compared to drama or epic poetry – and people were just beginning to figure out its possibilities, moving from epistolary novels like Samuel Richardson’s‘Clarissa’ to a more integrated kind of narrative. Because the form was new, it had a taint of the trashy and sordid. This made the form acceptable and accessible for women, even if the ‘serious’ ones still had to use a male pseudonym. Which is why great women novelists have been with us pretty much since the beginning. So “yay” for the new and sordid.

8

I think one of the great illusions of writing – one that trips up a great many people – is the sheer accessibility of it. If you want to play the piano, you need to find a piano and a teacher and a place where you can practice without annoying the neighbors. If you want to make a movie, you need to gather enough crew and equipment. If you want to become a brain surgeon, it’s generally understood that medical school is the desirable route.

It often strikes me that people who say they want to write don’t fully understand how a writer’s education actually works. They think it’s enough to have pen and paper and a reasonable grasp of vocabulary, a sense of where to put the commas. Anybody can write a novel. This is true. But writing a novel that other people – especially people not related to you – actually want to read is another thing entirely.

When you talk to an aspiring writer you can get a strong sense of how good they’re likely to be and how far they’re likely to go just by asking them about their reading habits.

9

I have an academic streak, a literary bent, and a taste for the gothic. I read for language and character and meaning.

I also read for thrills.

Thrills are important. No amount of traditional English-major education could ever convince me otherwise.

10

A huge part of learning how to write is learning who you are. This is one reason I tend not to trust writers under 30. For every gifted soul — a Zadie Smith – there seem to be a handful of young things overhyped and oversold on the story (and author photo) behind the story. But in the end, people care about the real deal between the covers. You can curl up with an author photo for only so long.

To deliver story – and do it more than once — you need time and experience and practice and a great deal of seasoning.

But I like this about writing. I like how, four or five years from now, I will still be considered a ‘young writer’ – or youngish — simply because I’ll be under 40. This is not the perception in other professions, or within the culture at large.

11

Writers exist outside the established structures of things. Outside the normal commute to the office, the day-to-day existence within the office, the need to wear a pantsuit (or even anything at all). Outside the usual things that measure and define the kind of security that might, in the end, prove illusory anyway. Outside the kind of career track studded with developmental milestones that friends and family recognize as you go along. People understand what it means when you graduate law school. They don’t understand how great it is the first time you get a detailed, personal letter from an editor rejecting your work but encouraging you to submit again. They don’t see the huge forward leap from form letter to actual contact with a professional editor; all they see is the rejection, right up until you’re the overnight success story with copies of your book in Barnes & Noble you didn’t sneak in there yourself.

Part of the challenge of being a writer is finding the balance between living outside the world and inside it. The act of writing pulls you into your private space, out on the edges of things; when you are writing, you are not living in the world. You are living in your head. But you need to feed that head – and the writing – by living in the world, even though, when you’re in the world, you often feel you should be writing instead.

I’m still working this out.

10

Most of us start out thinking we’ll be famous – it is the privilege of young people to believe they have a 50/50 chance of being famous – but at some point a much harder reality sets in.

Many of us keep on writing regardless.

In the end, when we talk about writing, we’re talking about a form of obsession. This of course is true of many things. The difference between an obsession and an occupation is that our obsessions choose us; we decide whether or not to deny them.

This makes writing sound like some kind of Calling, but there is nothing particularly sacred about being a published writer.

It is, however, a cool thing to say at parties.

– Justine Musk