Susan Taylor Chehak

I've been saying this for a while now -- when one door closes another one opens, and the one that is opening for us now is revealing a whole new world of writing, publishing, and reading. Here literary agent Nathan Bransford takes Farhad Manjoo's article about a 1995 Newsweek column that dismissed the Internet as a passing fad and applies it to the future of the e-book...


"The e-book era is going to be one of incredible innovation and unlimited opportunity, and people who don't see e-books dominating the future of the book world are ignoring the coming innovation and creativity and affordability. I refuse to believe the skeptics and pessimists. Books are about to get better."

Read more here:

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2010/03/dont-believe-e-book-skeptics.html

In case you're with me on loving ebooks and thought we were alone in that...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07FOB-medium-t.html?ref=magazine

I hate rules. Especially writing rules. When I see a rule I think of it as a challenge telling me: Break it! If someone says don't do this, that's a call to do it! If they say you can't, that's a challenge to show them that you can. No artist ever got anywhere by following rules. Unless they were her own.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one

Get ready... it's coming! And our world is never going to be the same. We can get grumpy or we can get mad, we can feel sorry for ourselves or we can feel sorry for the world... OR... we can get excited. I am. The possibilities are thrilling! And I, for one, can't wait to see what happens next...

www.nybooks.com/articles/23683

The future is up to us...

Top Ten Unreliable narrators, from Henry Sutton at The Guardian...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/17/henry-sutton-top-10-unreliable-narrators

For a while I thought it would be a good idea to give up reading books for a year... what was I thinking?! Something about the deprivation and the discipline of this sounded attractive to me, and it felt like a way to open up space, both in my head and in my house. But I have since abandoned this scheme, partly because it meant packing up all my books and putting them in storage and I'm just not ready to do that yet. Maybe next year...

Meanwhile, I've been asked to help judge the 2010 Flannery O'Connor Award and in preparing for that Nancy Zafris, who is in charge of the competition (if it is a competition)sent out a few questions for the judges to respond to. I thought I might share my answers here:

NZ: We taught together in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. It was there that I heard you describe yourself as a “reading whore.” Tell us what you meant by that.

STC: I should have said "slut." "Whore" isn't exactly right, because I'm not a professional, and there's no exchange of money. What I meant was, I'm a promiscuous reader. That is, I have no loyalty, really, and not much attachment, to any one sort of form or genre or style. My reading tends to be all over the place, not just in content but also in the activity itself. That is, I spend a lot of time lying around the house reading a lot of books all at the same time – I skip from one to the other and back again, and I don't feel compelled to necessarily go back when I've left one book for another, or one subject for another, or one author for another. I don't always stick it out to the end, either. I'm in it for the pure pleasure – which involves not just emotional enjoyment, but also intellectual. Plus inspiration. And… I'm a sucker for a good story, too. I'll follow a good story almost anywhere it wants to take me.

NZ: How do you read a story collection, from start to finish, or somewhat randomly?

STC: I'll start by thumbing through the whole thing, to get a sense of it as a whole, including the packaging, the arrangement, the way it's set up. Then I'll go back to the beginning and start reading, page one. If what I find there doesn't hold me, then I'll move on and sample something else, might be the next one, or maybe not. I might go back later to one that I've abandoned, if it haunts me.

NZ: What do you look for in a collection? What kind of surprises are happy surprises? What kind of surprises are unhappy ones?

STC: Progression. Some sense that the collection as a whole is going somewhere – not necessarily linearly – and the happiest of surprises is that the whole turns out to be greater than the sum of its parts. I love it when I have to read something again in order to see another level lurking, one that isn't revealed until you get to the end, and then you have to go back and look again, because the context has shifted. The unhappiest surprise to me is no surprise – it's stasis or repetition, a feeling of standing still or coming back again to a place where I've already been.

NZ: What makes you skip to the next story? What are you looking for?

STC: I look for three things (not necessarily in this order):

Sensibility: this usually shows up in the point of view and the voice of the piece. I'm looking for some sort of attitude.

Engagement: sometimes this will be emotional, sometimes intellectual, but always it has to do with story.

Generosity: does the work seem self-absorbed or is there some generosity of spirit behind it?

"After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born to read. We learn to do so by an extraordinarily ingenuous ability to rearrange our “original parts” — like language and vision, both of which have genetic programs that unfold in fairly orderly fashion within any nurturant environment. Reading isn’t like that..."

This is the beginning of a comment by Maryanne Wolf, author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain."

Read more here: http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/does-the-brain-like-e-books/?scp=1&sq=reading%20brain&st=cse

Just when I've been considering not reading any books at all for a year -- creating head-space and heart-space and office-space for myself, just to see what happens, find out what shows up instead, to fill those empty spaces...

http://www.readallday.org/the365project.html

Once upon a time we had easy access to our imagination and we knew how to tell a story without having to work at it so much.

Here is a "breathtaking story by Capucine. Starring baby monkeys lost in frightening trees, a witch, crocodiles, a tiger, a 'popotamus' and a lion, and even a 'tremendously very bad mammoth.'"

Atlantic Monthly: Essays Fiction 2009

Telling Tails, an essay by Tim O'Brien

"The problem with unsuccessful stories is usually simple: they are boring, a consequence of the failure of imagination. To vividly imagine and to vividly render extraordinary human events, or sequences of events, is the hard-lifting, heavy-duty, day-by-day, unending labor of a fiction writer."

www.theatlantic.com/doc/200908/tim-obrien-essay