Roy Miller's Blog, page 263
February 25, 2017
Theodore Lowi, Zealous Scholar of Presidents and Liberalism, Dies at 85
“Lowi’s scientific personality was a unique mix of extraordinary empirical knowledge and bold theoretical vision,” Ilter Turan, the president of the international association, said in a statement.
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In his seminal study of liberalism — philosophical rather than political — Professor Lowi wrote that “modern liberalism has left us with a government that is unlimited in scope but formless in action,” a government that “can neither plan nor achieve justice because liberalism replaces planning with bargaining and creates a regime of policy without law.”
He argued that special-interest politics began during the New Deal and fragmented power further with the decline of the two-party system “to replace elected representation with interest groups as proxies for citizen participation.” Those groups, he wrote, could paralyze government and thwart the popular will.
Critiquing Professor Lowi’s “The Personal President” in The New York Times Book Review in 1985, Hendrik Hertzberg praised “The End of Liberalism” as an “influential and highly original work” and summed up “The Personal President” this way:
“Mr. Lowi shrewdly describes the presidency as an increasingly ‘plebiscitary’ office. Its occupant uses television and polls to commune directly with the masses, bypassing such mediating institutions as Congress and the political parties. Having given our presidents big power, we expect big things of them — especially in terms of ‘service delivery,’ which, Mr. Lowi writes, has displaced representation as the test of democracy and legitimacy.
“Despite the aggrandizement of the executive branch at Congress’s expense, though, there are still ‘built-in barriers to presidents’ delivering on their promises,’” Mr. Hertzberg continued. “The result is a dangerous cycle — substantive failure, followed by frantic White House efforts to create false images of success, followed by adventurism abroad, followed by further public disillusion — all of which forces the next president to turn the rhetorical heat up even higher.”
Professor Lowi acerbically coined what he called the “Law of Succession,” which holds that each new president enhances the reputation of his predecessors. He also posed a corollary: “This is the only certain contribution each president will make.”
Theodore Jay Lowi was born on July 9, 1931, in Gadsden, Ala., to Alvin Lowi and the former Janice Haas.
Israel Sergio Waismel-Manor, a lecturer at the University of Haifa in Israel and a former student of Professor Lowi’s, wrote of him this month, “He was not a religious person, but coming from the Deep South, and having played music with his mother and his siblings at the local Jewish temple, he was really an Evangelical, a preacher who followed his own apostles: Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and V. O. Key.”
An illness forced Mr. Lowi to drop out of Tulane University, but he recovered — determined, he once said, someday to “be in the history books.” Instead, he would write them.
He attended Michigan State University on a music scholarship (he played the oboe) and graduated in 1954. He earned a master’s and a doctorate in political science from Yale.
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His first marriage ended in divorce. His second wife, the former Angele Marie Daniel, died in 2015. In addition to their daughter, he is survived by their son, Jason; his brothers, Alvin Jr. and Bertram; and his sisters, Jan Horn and Bettie Baer.
Professor Lowi maintained that “political science is a harder science than the so-called hard sciences because we confront an unnatural universe that requires judgment and evaluation.”
That was one reason he sought to expose Cornell students to practical politics with an undergraduate program for research and teaching in the nation’s capital.
His own political experience was uninspiring. In 1958, he managed the campaign of George Hawkins of Gadsden in the Democratic primary for governor of Alabama. Mr. Hawkins finished sixth in a field of 14.
He also campaigned for Senator Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries and was an advocate for third-party presidential candidates, including Representative John B. Anderson, who ran and lost in 1980.
Despite those losses, Professor Lowi’s fervor was undiminished.
“Among the sins of omission of modern political science, the greatest of all has been the omission of passion,” he said in a speech to the American Political Science Association when he completed his term as president.
He did not mean the passion of ideology, he explained, but “the pleasure of finding a pattern, the inspiration of well-rounded argument, the satisfaction of having made a good guess about what makes democracy work, and a good stab at improving the prospect of rationality in human behavior.”
He continued: “This is not an opportunity to play philospher-king. It is an opportunity to meet our own intellectual needs while serving the public interest. And we need not worry how to speak truth to power. It is enough to speak truth to ourselves.”
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Freedom of The Press is Not a Given
When I first arrived in Cairo at 23, in 2003, I didn’t know what it was like to live under an authoritarian regime that took a hard-line approach to censorship. Having grown up in the U.K., I took press freedom for granted.
That started to change when I found a job at a local English-language news magazine called the Cairo Times. The magazine was owned by an Egyptian human rights activist, and, because it was published in a language a minority of Egyptians could read, it had a little more latitude than Arabic-language publications to report on issues that strayed close to the red lines laid down by the regime.
But, like all print publications in Egypt, the Cairo Times practiced a degree of self-censorship, because to not do so was to court disaster. It was against the law to criticize Hosni Mubarak or a member of his family. It was against the law to publish anything that might damage “national unity,” “public order,” or “public values.” And—to make sure foreign journalists were also caught in the net—it was against the law to “damage Egypt’s reputation abroad.”
I liked working at the magazine. My colleagues were an oddball mixture of Western and Egyptian reporters, most of them in their 20s. The office was in a dusty, high-ceilinged room that had once been part of a gracious townhouse in an old colonial—now crumbling—area of central Cairo. But every morning as we arrived at the office we’d pass two stocky men sitting in a car outside, smoking or eating shawarma sandwiches. They always looked bored. These were the representatives of the Amn El Dawla, part of the two-million-person state security force that propped up the Egyptian regime.
The apparatus of censorship had been gradually refined since the nationalist coup of 1952 that brought the first of Egypt’s modern military governments to power. The red lines were not only political but religious and “moral,” creating scapegoats of unpopular minorities such as Shia Muslims, gay people, liberal activists, and atheists. Not even the country’s most famous writers could escape. In 1959, Nobel Prize–winning author Naguib Mahfouz’s allegorical novel Children of Our Alley was banned for offending Islamic sensibilities.
In the early 2000s, young people trying to evade the censorship imposed on the largely state-owned press were finding an outlet online, thanks, ironically, to a pro-Internet policy driven by the president’s son Gamal Mubarak. Bloggers were at the heart of antiregime activism, but once the government caught on to their activities, several were arrested and jailed. During the 18 days of protest against Hosni Mubarak in early 2011, the regime went as far as to block Internet access completely in an attempt to silence its opponents.
After the 2011 uprising, when I was living in Cairo and researching my book Generation Revolution, I had to register with the ministry of information as a foreign journalist. Following the military coup of July 2013 that brought the then-general Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi to power, the regime attempted to establish an even more extreme monopoly on “facts.”
The government’s focus shifted from post hoc censorship to preventing reporters and writers from working in the first place. Public paranoia reached such a level that journalists attempting to report in public could face a beating by a mob of so-called honorable citizens, arrest, or worse. The state had cultivated this paranoia itself, screening advertisements depicting shifty pale-skinned figures eavesdropping on Egyptians in streetside cafés.
Journalists who questioned the government’s narrative or exposed its grotesque series of human rights abuses—including the details of the Rabaa massacre of 2013, when security forces killed 1,000 protesters (and three journalists) in the street—faced arbitrary arrest and detention. Some detainees, such as the Al Jazeera three, arrested at a luxury Cairo hotel in 2013, became international causes célèbres. The names of many more are little known outside Egypt.
Egypt is now among the top three jailers of journalists in the world. It is a dire example of the disaster that can result when a government seeks to destroy the independence of the press.
Rachel Aspden is a London-based journalist who has reported from Egypt, Pakistan, and Yemen. She is the author of Generation Revolution: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East (Other Press, Feb.).
A version of this article appeared in the 02/27/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Freedom of The Press is Not a Given
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February 24, 2017
Ruth Ozeki: Neither here nor there
Ruth Ozeki’s novel, A Tale for the Time Being, won a string of awards, including the LA Times Book Award, and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, said, “Ozeki is one of my favorite novelists, bewitching, intelligent, hilarious, and heartbreaking, often on the same page.” I could not agree more. Published in over 30 countries, A Tale for the Time Being tells the story of a mysterious diary, which washes up on a beach on the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada in the wake of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The diary, written by Nao (pronounced “now”), a troubled schoolgirl in Tokyo, is discovered by a novelist named Ruth, who becomes obsessed with discovering the fate of the girl.
When I finished reading Ozeki’s novel, my first reaction was that this book was true to the high praise given in its starred review in Kirkus: “a masterpiece, pure and simple.” My second reaction was wondering how in the world she wrote the time-bending novel, set in Japan and spanning three generations of a family who struggle with conscience. On top of juggling these multiple plotlines, Ozeki manages to find the sweet spot between humor and tragedy, even in the midst of chronicling a suicidal teenager who is being brutally bullied. And did I mention that she inserted a novelist named Ruth into the novel?
For her part, Ozeki has simply described her book this way: It is about a suicidal girl, a 104-year-old Zen nun, and a novelist with writer’s block.
Ozeki wrote two novels before A Tale for the Time Being (My Year of Meats and All Over Creation); in addition to being a novelist, she’s also a filmmaker and a Zen Buddhist priest. She is Japanese-American, married to the German-Canadian artist Oliver Kellhammer, and she is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States, dividing her time between British Columbia and New York City. It’s impossible to find just one category for Ozeki, unless there is a category for living a pluralistic life.
I talked with her on a brilliant autumn day at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she is currently the Elizabeth Drew Professor.
This is possibly the most time-bending book I’ve ever read. How did you keep a handle on all the reverberations of time? Did you ever feel like you could get lost?
Pretty much constantly. The biggest struggle was the character of the reader, Ruth. The first voice that came to me was Nao, and she said “Hi, I’m Nao, I’m a time being. Do you know what a time being is?” She was clearly addressing somebody. But that was odd because usually when we write a diary, it’s for ourselves. But she is writing to somebody, and she doesn’t know who this will be. In the beginning, she speculates and says, “I know you’re out there.” I didn’t know who the reader was going to be, but both Nao and I knew there was a reader. She continued to write, and I continued to search for a reader. It was like casting for a play. I would invite the character into the fictional world, and I would arrange for them to find Nao’s diary. The character would start to read it and start to interact with Nao across time and space. The reader would begin to develop into a character. Then I’d realize that this fictional world that was getting all plump and juicy had suddenly gone flat. They were interfering with the story. Torquing it in the wrong direction. Then I would thank the character and invite the character to leave. And I would be back to waiting for another character to show up.
What was it like to wait for another character to show up?
It was a form of death every time. Death and despair. But I’d think of another character and go through the same process; the character would enter the book, I would arrange for the character to find the diary, and the diary was a little longer each time because Nao kept writing. In my fifth try, I ended up with a character who had no name, no gender, no age, no job, basically a cipher. I finished a draft, over 500 pages. I knew it was a pretty terrible draft, but I sent it to my agent, Molly, who agreed that it was not a very good draft. We were getting the manuscript ready to send to my editor, and that’s when the tsunami hit Japan.
The tsunami in 2011 changed the entire trajectory of the book, almost as if the story was waiting for the event. Tell us about the connection with Japan’s disaster.
It was one of those catastrophic events that just broke the world, a cascading disaster. I realized that this book was no longer relevant. The catastrophe had caused a rift in time. I had written a book that was a pre-earthquake, pre-Fukushima book. I withdrew the book from submission and gave up. It wasn’t going to work the way I had written it. This was a terrible moment for me. My husband, Oliver, pointed out that this earthquake had broken the world, and the fictional world of my book was also broken, and that if I entered the world myself, as a “real person” in a novel, it would allow me as “Ruth” to talk directly about the tsunami and to bring it into the heart of the book. Once I decided to step inside the book as a character, the book wrote itself. It was so easy. When I unzipped the manuscript, the interwoven voices were there from the beginning. I threw about 400 pages away and rewrote it. I started in May and finished in November.
You had your own personal tsunami: the death of your father, your mother struck down with Alzheimer’s disease, and what sounds like paralyzing writer’s block.
I was taking care of my mother, who had Alzheimer’s. She died in 2004. Then I had lost both my parents, and there was a real period of grief and just really trying to figure out what is life about and what makes it worth living and the tumultuous reassessment that you go through when you lose your parents. I was floundering with writing. During that time I got very engaged with my Zen practice. I made the decision to train and ask for ordination. I wasn’t sure if writing was going to work anymore, but if it didn’t, that was OK, because I had this thing that was really helping me, and maybe I could just help others. I was ordained in 2010.
A lot of the plot has to do with suicide. Have you heard from adolescents about their suicidal thoughts and experiences?
Yes. We’re afraid of saying the word “suicide” and talking about it. Certainly the word suicide has a kind of energy that is frightening, and people can be afraid of talking about it. Why is it that we forget we were adolescents once? I don’t forget that. Writers need to keep that part alive in order to write. What’s important (for adolescents) is that you have a lifeline; it can be your friends, it can be your family, church, writing practice, a teacher, your cat, your gerbil. And little by little, the hormones subside and you develop coping skills and you develop passions and things that are really worth living for, and you get through that difficult period.
Let’s say you were not an ordained Zen priest who meditates regularly. Would you still suggest that writers include meditation as part of their writing practice?
Oh yes. One of the reasons I took to meditation was this sense that it was going to help my writing. Meditation helps you focus and concentrate; it attunes you to what is happening in your body. It’s a very sensual practice; in Buddhism we talk about six sense gates, like the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and the mind. When we’re writing, we need to be able to activate our senses. When I teach writing, I teach meditation first, doing sense scans, training the writers to tune into their various sense gates. Then they can apply that to their writing practice. You can close your eyes and project yourself into the fictional scene, tune into your senses, look around and discover the most amazing things, things you wouldn’t discover otherwise.
There were 10 years between books. How did you support yourself for 10 years?
I have a very frugal life; we were living on a remote island in Canada, and we don’t need much to live there. For me, keeping a low overhead seems really important. I don’t ever want to have a lifestyle that is bigger than my writing. We were growing a lot of our food, sometimes trading for it, but my first two books have been widely adopted for coursework in colleges and universities, so I get a lot of speaking engagements.
How has film influenced your writing?
All through my childhood, I wanted to be a novelist. I stopped writing at various points because I would get frustrated because there were things I didn’t know how to do. I didn’t know how to move a story through time. Pacing. My character would enter a room and need to get across the room to the action, and I would walk her ploddingly across the room. I didn’t know how to move the plot along quickly and efficiently through time. Then I got involved in film and television, and spent thousands of hours in editing rooms. Film is all about moving quickly through time. Television in particular has no patience, so you really learn how to be streamlined.
What is a way that writers can learn some of the approaches in film?
Study film. You don’t have to go to school to do that. Find a film that you like, put it on your computer, and watch it very slowly and pay attention every time the picture changes. Watch it without the sound. Read a good book on editing film. When I finally went back to writing, I said, I get it! Do you remember [A] Wrinkle in Time and the tesseract (the tesseract is a space warp, a portal from one area of space to another)? You think of time like a linear string, the starting and the ending. Instead, just put the two end pieces of the string together.
How did you physically work with the novel?
I like to get a really big table, or I use the floor. Then I print out the entire manuscript and literally spread it around. Once the book gets too big, you can’t spread it page by page, but you can spread it chunk by chunk, then I walk the book. I walk around it. Annie Dillard does this.
How does your mixed race identity influence your writing?
It affects everything about my writing. I always write a mixed race character. I like writing from that perspective because it’s neither here nor there; it gives me a broader palette. I feel that coming from two cultures is hugely enriching. My entire life has been lived in this kind of duality; Japanese-American, everything is influenced by duality. Including choice of genre, refusing to stick to one genre. Jane Smiley wrote a review of My Year of Meats that said it was a comical-satirical-farcical-epical-tragical-romantical novel. Pointing to the fact that it refuses to be one thing. That is who I am.
Jacqueline Sheehan is a psychologist and a novelist. Her sixth novel, The Tiger in the House (Kensington), will be published in March 2017. She teaches writing at Grub Street in Boston and at international writing and yoga retreats. Web: jacquelinesheehan.com.
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How to Get the Most Marketing and Publicity Bang for Your Buck
New and established authors alike struggle with how to best market and publicize their books. In my interview with publicist Caitlin Hamilton Summie, we discuss the changing landscape of book promotion and how to get the most marketing and publicity bang for your buck.
Caitlin Hamilton Summie is the former Marketing Director of MacMurray & Beck and also of BlueHen Books/Penguin Putnam. At each company she also managed imprint profile and directed all publicity, hardcover & paperback. In addition, for nearly two years she simultaneously directed and handled sales nationwide for MacMurray & Beck. In 2003, she founded Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, an independent book publicity and Marketing firm. Hamilton Summie wrote book reviews for The Rocky Mountain News, author profiles for ABA’s Bookselling This Week, and has published both short stories and poems. She is a former independent bookseller who earned her degrees at Smith College and Colorado State University. Her first book, a collection of short stories called TO LAY TO REST OUR GHOSTS, is being published by Fomite in 2017. Find Caitlin online at caitlinhamiltonmarketing.com.
This guest post is by Kristen Harnisch. Harnisch is the award-winning author of The Vintner’s Daughter, the first novel in a series about the changing world of vineyard life at the turn of the twentieth century. Her next novel, The California Wife, will be released in 2016. Harnisch has been a speaker at the Writer’s Digest Conference and currently lives in Connecticut with her husband and three children. Connect with Kristen at kristenharnisch.com, on Twitter @KristenHarnisch, and on Facebook facebook.com/kristenharnischauthor.
1. What changes have you seen in the marketing of books during your tenure as a publicist?
I’ve seen huge changes over the course of my career: the shrinking of book review pages, the rise of the Internet and Internet media, the development of the citizen (consumer) reviewer, and the creation of online engagement through social media. It has all vastly changed how we publicize and market books.
2. What do you see as your highest and best use as a publicist in today’s market?
I think the answer depends on what each author needs, but in general, for everyone, it is to create the kinds of publicity and marketing plans that help authors meet their goals. Do authors want sales, visibility, or both? A publicist should be a creative partner and guide for an author.
Before a writer contacts a publicist, I’d advise that he/she decide what his/her goals are and what expectations they have of a publicist.
3. What does the average book publicity campaign cost (a range is fine) and what services should it include?
I’d expect to pay $5,000 and up. Most plans include some aspect of media outreach (generating reviews and interviews, for instance) and event bookings. Some plans might also include a social media component, others a marketing component (marketing to libraries, as an example).
4. What advice would you give authors who can’t spend vast sums to market their book(s)?
Of course having a budget helps, but what matters is creating a savvy, well thought out marketing effort. I would advise every author to educate him/herself about the industry, to learn what marketing and publicity are, and to approach their campaigns like businesses. If an author is doing marketing on her own, I would advise she prepare a marketing plan.
5. In your experience, what activities or practices sell the most books? Do these differ for self- or hybrid-published authors?
Yes, I think different tactics can help certain categories of books. Speaking gigs can boost book sales, and I think radio is great. For the self-published, a consistent release of titles is often helpful as are price discounts and promotions through vendors or other outlets. And of course, all books need reviews. And who doesn’t love book clubs?
6. What kind of author is your ideal client?
My ideal client has written a book I love, is clear about his/her expectations, is easy to communicate with, loves to brainstorm, works collaboratively, and is willing to get out there on behalf of his/her book to help make it a success.
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Nonfiction: A Belgian Artist’s Graphic Memoir Looks at the Sometimes Tortured Course of Love
In “Pretending Is Lying,” the Belgian graphic novelist Dominique Goblet recalls the troubled men in her life — an alcoholic father and wayward boyfriend.
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Know What You Write (Not Write What You Know)
In 2015 I relocated to Tennessee from Louisiana, where my family’s lineage dates back to 1785. During and immediately following the move, I began writing many of the new stories that would eventually appear in my collection Signals: New and Selected Stories. Many of my friends wondered whether the move would affect my writing, a question I found both funny and thought-provoking. It carried the suggestion that I would lose something at the border, namely, the culture in which I was raised: gumbo, fishing, sugarcane, Catholicism, crooked politics, and mosquitoes. I, however, wasn’t worried; there’s more to a writer than food and insects.
As a matter of fact, the first time I tried to write a short story after the move, I came up with a plot set in wintery Minnesota—a place very unlike Louisiana (and a place I’ve never been). I interviewed my local postmistress, who is a native Minnesotan, I read a bit of Minnesota law on the emancipation of orphans; much of what I needed, to be honest, was available on the internet. But despite the disparate settings, this story was thematically linked to my Louisiana work, because like other writers, I carry my thematic interests in my DNA.
I discovered this when I assigned my fiction class the same general plot for a short piece—a holdup at a convenience store. Each story that came across my desk was markedly different. The romance fiction reader came up with a robber who convinced the salesperson to leave the store and run off with him. A student who was an anti-pollution activist seemed more concerned with his robber’s truck, which was leaking antifreeze that a stray dog licked up. The pro-gun feminist had the store clerk shoot the robber in the groin. These exercises demonstrated that there are steering currents that profoundly shape whatever plot each writer executes regardless of the story’s content.
One semester, I taught a quiet student who was not doing well in the course and whose personal fascination was needlepoint. I suggested she use that to shape the story, and she delivered a great tale about two sisters who entered an embroidery contest. The convincing details of complex needlework styles she included functioned as a kind of doorway into the motives of the sisters. As the handwork became more ambitious, it mirrored the psychological problems of the young women, transforming the competition into something as intense as Beowulf fighting with Grendel. The story was set in Baton Rouge, but if she had moved to Canada, about all she would’ve had to change in the story would’ve been the weather.
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At this point in my career, I’m not as interested in setting stories in Louisiana as I am in following what guides me and making that impetus interesting for readers. Writing teachers tell their students to write what they know, and that’s good advice. But that doesn’t suggest that a writer has to wallow exclusively in the local culture or their childhood. Cormac McCarthy is a Southerner, and his first novels were set in the South. Suttree, for example, seems hermetically sealed in Knoxville, Tennessee; following its success, one might have predicted that he would never abandon the American South. However, he moved out West, wrote Blood Meridian, and followed it with a series of great western novels. He left out the climate and class distinctions he grew up with but kept his love of ambitious vocabulary and athletic grammar. Although his later books focus on the hot, rocky and unfettered landscape of cowboys, they did not leave behind McCarthy’s fascination with the nature of evil and the mystical emanations of the earth.
When it comes to setting, Annie Proulx’s method of operation seems to be not so much write what you know as know what you write. Although she spent a great deal of her life in Vermont, Connecticut, and Canada, she so successfully captures Texas, Wyoming, and Newfoundland that she seems to be a native of those locations. She is a trained researcher and historian, and when she wants to set a tale in a specific place, she actually moves there for a considerable time. But what strikes me about her novels and stories is the guiding currents of New England hardnosed logic and tragic Puritan darkness. She has the ability to inhabit anyplace, proved by my favorite novel of hers, Accordion Crimes, which traverses a broad swath of the world. No matter where a writer moves their physical or creative world, the resulting fiction won’t change much if they know how to look at where they’ve landed.
There is no objectively best place to set a work of fiction. Sometimes childhood can be a treasure chest of potential narratives. As a teenager, Ernest Gaines moved from a Louisiana plantation to the West Coast, and when he began to write, he tried to set stories in California. This didn’t seem to work as well as he wanted, so he began to fashion his stories out of his memories of Louisiana: the tough love of his relatives, the poverty of the rural South. He was so successful at this that he moved back to reconnect with his roots, eventually building a home on part of the plantation where he was raised. His stories, like the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel A Lesson Before Dying, draw from his personal experience to illuminate the conditions of African Americans living in the South after World War II. In Gaines’ work, the setting reflects and enhances the thematic concerns.
As a writer, I focus on working-class people who face ethical questions or people who suffer attacks of conscience. My Minnesota story did just that. It was about blue collar workers and machinery, two of my favorite topics. And although I’m thinking of setting my next stories in West Texas, Detroit, California, Mexico, with a return to southern Louisiana, my characters will always bear with them what I learned about hard work in an early 1950s oil patch town. My stories will still show tough experiences cut with a dollop of humor and will be full of the undereducated people I love, seasoned with compassion learned from raising my children and from the 33 years I spent teaching story-writing to students who resisted the thought that they owned their own unique literary territory—that real street running past their homes and the characters walking on it.
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BookExpo Pairs Al Franken With Marc Maron At a New Panel
BookExpo has invited Senator Al Franken and comedian Marc Maron to appear on a panel discussing politics and their forthcoming books. The conversation is slated for June 1 at 12:30 p.m.
The pairing of the two—Franken is a comedian-turned-politician, and Maron frequently engages his podcast guests in discussions that touch on societal or political issues—may point to a willingness by BookExpo to feature more charged political commentary. The annual gathering of publishers and booksellers may try, in coming months, to tilt its programming for an audience that has become more outwardly political since the 2016 presidential election.
Franken's upcoming memoir, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate, which Twelve Books will release on May 30, details his run for the senate in Minnesota after his time at Saturday Night Live. Maron's upcoming book, Waiting for the Punch: Words to Live by From the WTF Podcast, will be published by Flatiron Books on October 17.
This article has been updated for clarity.
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How Not to Kill Each Other: A Writer’s Guide to Collaboration
Fiction writers don’t play well with others—that’s the myth, anyway. Fiction writers are, by definition, people who set themselves up as gods over their own corners of creation. Even those of us who aren’t megalomaniacs tend to be comfortable sitting by ourselves in front of a keyboard.
So it’s not surprising that one of the questions most frequently asked about Bookburners—the supernatural procedural serial I write with Margaret Dunlap, Brian Frances Slattery, and Mur Lafferty—has nothing to do with our Vatican secret agents or the demons they hunt, but with the process itself. How do you get all those writers on the same page?
This guest post is by Max Gladstone. Gladstone has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia, drank almond milk with monks on Wudang Shan, and wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat. Max is also the author of the Craft Sequence of books about undead gods and skeletal law wizards — Full Fathom Five, Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, and Last First Snow. Max fools everyone by actually writing novels in the coffee shops of Davis Square in Somerville, MA. His dreams are much nicer than you’d expect. He tweets as @maxgladstone. Bookburners, which he wrote with Margaret Dunlap, Mur Lafferty, and Brian Francis Slattery, is available from Saga Press in January. Visit him at his website: maxgladstone.com
In-person meetings
It all starts with the story summit. The Bookburners team lives all over the US, but at the beginning of each “season” we gather in somebody’s living room with a lot of notecards and a few corkboards, and hold a planning session. Over the course of a long weekend, we scheme through the coming year of the serial, and by the end, we know what will happen to our characters throughout the season, and have rough outlines for each episode.
These in-person meetings are vital: being in the same room with other storytellers is exciting, and builds an enormous amount of trust, which is key, because the more trust you build in the room, the more people become comfortable pitching ideas—and spinning off the ideas of others. If you can’t meet in person, Skype or Google Hangouts are great solutions, but seeing the other writers, and being able to talk to them in realtime, is vital.
[The 7 Rules of Dialogue All Writers Should Know]
Common ground
It helps to share a common language of collaborative storytelling—in fact, the more languages you share, the better. Mur, Margaret, and I have played a lot of tabletop roleplaying games, and Brian and Margaret and I have musical backgrounds of some form, so we had common senses of how to work in a creative ensemble. Shared languages make communication possible.
Notecards
Warning: notecards are an addiction. Margaret introduced them to our group, and it’s since become almost impossible for me to work without them. No matter how well your group communicates, it’s easy to end up on the wrong page. So, go into your story summit with a corkboard, pins, notecards, and markers. When you have an idea, scribble it on a marker, and post it on the board so everyone can see.
This roots abstract ideas in the concrete world. When you see “And then Sal and Liam fight!” pinned up on the board, it feels real—you can reason about it, argue why Sal might fight Liam, and whether that belongs in episode 12 or episode 14, or if it’s not more interesting for Grace and Liam to fight instead.
48/12
It’s hard to focus on story. You don’t want to burn your group out—but you also want all hands on deck. So, set a timer for the discussion. For forty-eight minutes, you’ll talk about nothing but the story you’re trying to develop. Then, when the timer goes off, take twelve minutes’ break—go to the bathroom, play Marvel Puzzle Quest, check Twitter (don’t check Twitter), grab coffee, feed your brain. Then, when the break’s over, back to work!
[How Long Should Novel Chapters Be? Click here to find out.]
Build from the Character Out
We started our first retreat for Bookburners with a whole day just talking about the characters—their relationships, goals, directions, and methods. Agreement on characters matters a lot in a collaborative project like this. In fact, and in my opinion, it’s much more important to agree on who your characters are than to agree about what the plot is. You can fill plot holes with spackle and elbow grease, but a disagreement on character can be impossible to remedy, and will cascade throughout series planning. By this point, on Bookburners, we know our characters well enough that we can recognize when a particular beat or line feels more like Grace, our team’s resident heavy hitter, or like Liam, the sardonic hacker, or like someone else entirely.
“First Thought Theater”
This is another Margaret concept. It’s better to have something on the page than nothing. If no one has an idea for how to solve a story problem, suggest something off the wall and wacky—a half-formed notion, an overplayed story bit, a Shocking Twist, whatever strikes your fancy. It’s all about getting the wet clay on the potter’s wheel. Trust that your fellow writers won’t laugh you out of the room. You all have to solve this problem together! By saying something, you’ve taken one more step to a solution.
Let Your Darlings Go
The great gift of a writer’s room is that you have a built-in audience of really smart people for your ideas. You give the room the pitch, and sometimes it takes fire: “That’s a great idea!” Or, even better: “Oh, and if that happens, then we could…” But sometimes your neat pitch lands wrong, and the rest of the room doesn’t go for it. Which is great! You just saved yourself the trouble of writing the whole thing out, only to fix it later. If you have a room where people feel valued, there’s no need to get protective of any one concept. You’ll hit it next time.
Trust
If you only do one thing on this list, this is it. Trust your fellow writers, and do what you can to build an environment where you all can trust each other. Trust—in yourself, in your team—makes fertile ground for storytelling. Trust builds bridges, rather than walls. And all stories are bridges of one kind or another.
And seriously. Buy yourself some notecards.
If you’re looking to master everything from dialogue to different
styles of grammar, you’ll get the best tools available for writing
fiction in this Write Great Fiction Collection of 12 great writing resources.
Click here to buy it now.
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Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer’s Digest and author of the popular gift book Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.
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Live Illustration with Vanessa Brantley Newton
Vanessa Brantley Newton showed The New York Times how she illustrated "The Youngest Marcher," a picture book about 9 year-old Audrey Faye Hendricks' role in the civil rights movement.
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Trade Division Bright Spot in Bad Year for HMH
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s trade division was something of a bright spot in what was a disappointing 2016 for the entire company. Revenue for all of HMH fell 3% in 2016 compared to 2015, dropping to $1.37 billion. In 2016 the company recorded a net loss of $285 million, up from $134 million in 2015.
HMH attributed the higher loss, in part, to a one-time impairment charge of $139 million related to intangible assets associated with its decision to stop using trademarked names such as Holt McDougal and various supplemental brands in favor of branding products under the HMH and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt names,
In statements accompanying the financials, HMH executives made it clear they are not expecting a turnaround this year. "We view 2017 as an investment and transition year for HMH,” said Joe Abbott HMH CFO. “We are utilizing our capital to enhance our competitive position in major adoption markets by making investments in our core curriculum products ahead of major selling opportunities in 2018, 2019 and beyond.”
In addition to making investments, HMH will also cut costs: ”HMH is taking steps to improve its operational efficiency and right-size its cost structure, including a thorough review and evaluation of the Company's current operating model and organizational design in order to ensure an efficient and effective structure. These steps will include strategic cost cutting to simplify the business,” the company said.
Revenue in the company’s education group fell 3.5%, to $1.21 billion, while the net loss soared to $182 million, from $4.9 million in 2015, with the 2016 loss reflecting the $139 million writedown.
The largest drop in education group sales, $108 million in the year, came from its basal and supplementary publishing businesses. Another down area was the company's assessment business, where revenue fell by $21 million. Partially offsetting this decline was a $49.0 million contribution from its EdTech business, which the company acquired in May 2015 from Scholastic. Sales at Heinemann rose $18.0 million and international revenue increased $11.0 million.
Sales in the much smaller trade division were up slightly; they climbed to $165.6 million, from $165.0 million in 2015. The trade group’s net loss was reduced to $6.9 million, from $7.1 million.
HMH said the increase in trade division revenue was led by strong sales of frontlist titles like The Whole30, Tools for Titans, and Food Freedom Forever. Partially offsetting gains in frontlist was a decline in e-book sales, which HMH said was “due to lower subscriptions.”
HMH currently has about 4,500 employees. Last week it announced
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