Roy Miller's Blog, page 283
February 4, 2017
Why shouldn’t Prince Charles speak out on climate change? The science is clear | Opinion
Ladybird books will this week publish a new title on climate change. Co-authored by the Prince of Wales, the polar scientist Emily Shuckburgh and myself, the book is intended as a plain English guide to the subject for an adult readership. Short, peer-reviewed text sits alongside beautiful new paintings by Ruth Palmer to illustrate the basic briefing.
It has already been greeted in some quarters as another controversial intervention by our future king. But while it’s easy to fall behind that line of thinking, it is an increasingly mistaken one. For despite the impression created in some quarters, the truth is that climate change is not controversial. The basic facts are established and increasingly embedded in policy.
We know, for instance, that the global average temperature has during recent decades gone up. This is largely because of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the concentration of which is rising because of human activity. In turn, the altered composition of the atmosphere is leading to changes that range from more extreme weather to reduced ice and snow cover and from unusual seasonal patterns to rising sea levels. All that is now established fact derived from careful observation and analysis.
These broad findings are increasingly reflected in policy choices and the business strategies of major companies. While there are those in elected office in some countries who take a non-scientific view, and some vested commercial interests that resist low carbon policies, there is less political division than is sometimes suggested.
For example in 2015, nearly every country on Earth (most of them some sort of democracy) signed up to the Paris climate change agreement. That legally binding treaty was not entered into lightly and revealed a level of political consensus visible on very few other issues.
Photograph: Penguin/PA
In the UK, and despite several major media organisations continuing to pour doubt and confusion into the public discourse, we have a strong political foundation for action, as laid out in the form of the 2008 Climate Change Act, for example.
I launched the campaign for that act when I was the director at Friends of the Earth and one reason why it was possible to gain cross-party political backing for such a law was the work of Britain’s world-leading scientific institutions, including the Met Office and the British Antarctic Survey. Through supplying policy-makers with the findings of their research, they helped to shape understanding to the point where official foundations for action were laid.
With the science clear and the politics (in this country) quite robust, it is predictable that those with perspectives on climate change founded more on ideology than data will go for the messenger rather than the message. The Prince of Wales should keep “his mouth shut” was, for example, the recommendation of the Daily Mail in the wake of an article penned by the heir to the throne to mark the publication of his new book.
While the Mail and some other papers evidently won’t agree with his views on this subject, they might wish to reflect for a moment on the role of our monarchy. In the absence of a written constitution, perhaps the closest we’ve got to an accepted view on what it is for and where its right lie comes from the Victorian essayist and long-serving editor of the Economist, Walter Bagehot.
He wrote in 1867 in the English constitution that the monarchy has “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn”. I can think of few issues where exercising those rights fits the bill more closely than in relation to the ever less controversial matter of climate change.
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Howard Jacobson writes Donald Trump novella Pussy in ‘a fury of disbelief’ | Books
In reply to Donald Trump’s election victory – and in lightning quick time – novelist Howard Jacobson has delivered a comic fairytale that the Man Booker prize winner hopes not only explains why Trump won, but provides the “consolation of savage satire”.
Pussy is set to be published in April by Jonathan Cape, and was written by The Finkler Question author in what he described as “a fury of disbelief” in the two months after the November result. A departure from his usual contemporary fiction, the 50,000 word novella tells the story of Prince Fracassus, heir to the Duchy of Origen, famed for its golden-gated skyscrapers and casinos, who passes his boyhood watching reality TV shows and fantasising about sex workers.
Idle, boastful and thin-skinned as well as ignorant and egotistical, Fracassus seems the last person capable of leading his country. But what seems impossible becomes reality all too readily.
“Fiction can’t match reality at the moment,” Jacobson said. “The book’s been brewing in me since the beginning of 2016. I was in the US early last year promoting [My Name Is] Shylock and watching this man [Trump] on TV in horror. It was unbelievable.”
After the election, what had been brewing exploded onto the page. “I had to get up at the crack of dawn every morning and write it,” he added, admitting that Pussy was the fastest book he had ever written. “I’m a slow writer normally,” he said. “I believe in slow writing.”
Writing had been “hugely cathartic”, Jacobson said, because he was making himself laugh. In 2010, he became one of only two comic novelists to win the Booker – the other being Kingsley Amis, with The Old Devils, in 1986.
Jacobson said he hoped the new book would offer the “consolation of savage satire” to readers depressed at the year’s events and hit the new inhabitant of the Oval Office where it hurts: the ego. “Satire is an important weapon in the fight against what is happening and Trump looks like a person who is particularly vulnerable to derision,” he explained.
As well as Trump, the story takes pot shots at the president’s enablers and fans on both sides of the Atlantic. Walk-on parts are given to characters not too far removed from British political life. Asked whether leading Brexiters appear, Jacobson said: “Certainly you will be able to recognise some of them.” He added that Hillary Clinton makes a surprising appearance towards the end.
Though written with to make readers laugh, the book is more than a satire, Jacobson said: “I wanted to get over Trump’s moral bankruptcy but also the sheer bankruptcy of a culture that could produce him.” In particular, he wanted to convey the damage done to political discourse by the social networking site Twitter, which Trump has used to bypass traditional media.
Though the novelist regarded Trump as “dumb”, he said the former reality TV star had a sharp instinct for Twitter that had enabled him to address voters without the scrutiny of the press. “Social media thrives on the assertive single point of view, which is what he is able to do,” Jacobson said. Likening what has happened to a coup, he added: “If you have Twitter, you don’t need tanks.”
The Manchester-born writer and broadcaster said he had long hankered to write a fairytale, though he admitted changing his writing style to match the form had been difficult. “I had to write much shorter sentences,” he joked, saying that Jonathan Swift and Voltaire’s Candide had inspired him.
Pussy is not Jacobson’s first venture into fairytale fiction. “One of the first things that I did as a student at Cambridge in 1964 was write a fairytale called The Ogre of Downing Castle about my tutor,” he said. His tutor? The hugely influential literary critic FR Leavis, author of The Great Tradition.
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17 Books to Read This February
Ali Smith, Autumn
(Pantheon Books)
I’m excited about Ali Smith’s Autumn. I’m usually excited about Ali Smith’s books, but this one is extra exciting because it’s the first of four volumes centered on the four seasons—so there are three more books to look forward to from Smith. Like How to Be Both, Autumn has tricks up its sleeve: A little magical realism here, a few pop-culture references there. Those are delightful, but as always, Smith’s real magic is in combining storytelling with meditation on deeper themes. Here those themes include belonging, identity, and memory.
–Bethanne Patrick, Lit Hub columnist
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Ragnar Jonasson, Snowblind
(Minotaur Books)
It’s been a mild winter here in NYC, but the deep Icelandic setting of Ragnar Jonasson’s thriller Snowblind will send a chill up any reader’s spine. Jonasson’s rookie cop protagonist has taken a job in an isolated village and is unpleasantly surprised when a series of murders start as the snows relentlessly beat down. The first in a projected series, Snowblind is a top-notch, icy thriller, with a sympathetic hero and an unique setting. Bundle up and read.
–Lisa Levy, Lit Hub contributing editor
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Sam Shepard, The One Inside
(Knopf)
Somewhat incredibly, The One Inside is the first work of long fiction from Sam Shepard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist whose writing career alone spans over a half century. The story of “a man in his house at dawn, surrounded by aspens, coyotes cackling in the distance as he quietly navigates the distance between present and past,” if The One Inside can capture even an ounce of of the bleak lyricism, dark humor, and tragic restlessness of Shepard’s best plays (see The Family Trilogy), then I’m sold. It’s also got a forward from Shepard’s old flame Patti Smith, which can’t hurt.
–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks editor
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Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus
(New Directions)
Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus could be accurately classified as an early science fiction story, a proto-surrealist novel, or a pre-Oulipo work of Oulipian “potential literature,” but the best way to describe it is to compare it—on both a literal and figurative level (in other words, in both plot and style)—to the wunderkammern so popular in Europe during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. These cabinets of curiosity housed strange artifacts—both ordinary and extraordinary, natural and supernatural, real and unreal—that titillated the viewing public. In Locus Solus, a man named Martial Canterel hosts a group on a tour of his estate where he shows off his uncanny inventions of ever-increasing intricacy, inducing feelings of both awe and horror. Like a retelling of Scheherazade’s 1,001 tales, but filtered through a character who fuses P. T. Barnum-style turn-of-the-century showmanship with a Dr. Frankenstein-esque mad scientist mania, these stories within a story are fascinating on their own but even more so in concert with one another. And they act as the text which shadows (without fully obscuring) an alternative text, a treatise on obsession and innovation, which always seems to bubble just below the dreamy surface.
–Tyler Malone, Lit Hub contributing editor
Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments
(Graywolf Press)
“I don’t write long forms because I’m not interested in artificial deceleration,” Sarah Manguso writes in her new book. “As soon as I see the glimmer of a consequence, I pull the trigger.” 300 Arguments is the book of aphorisms that I’ve been waiting for: trenchant, witty, and sometimes absurd. “Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages,” she writes. Perhaps that’s why I’m so drawn to it: each nugget of wisdom is something I’m tempted to share on social media or email to a friend. Sometimes brevity is exactly what we need to make sense of the complicated world we live in.
–Michele Filgate, Lit Hub contributing editor
John Darnielle, Universal Harvester
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Darnielle’s book begins with a scene in Video Hut, a small-town video rental shop before the days of digital downloads, where our protagonist Jeremy works. One day, a customer returns a video saying vaguely, “there’s something on it” referring to the interruptions she saw during the movie; parts of it are recorded over with grainy clips that feel menacing, even though they are hard to discern; they are as unsettling as the book’s cover—a sheaf of wheat backlit by a technicolor moiré. More customers find more clips until Jeremy can’t avoid viewing them himself. But it’s Darnielle’s elegiac prose combined with the realistic portrayal of a woebegone town in Iowa and its equally woebegone citizens that gives this book literary heft. The unpredictability of this video incubus clashes with the fixed lives of those who discover it and leads Jeremy (and readers) down paths we would probably rather avoid.
–Kerri Arsenault, Lit Hub columnist
Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist
(Melville House)
In this age in which it seems like nothing authentic can last longer than five minutes before being co-opted, feminism is top of the list. While we debate who was—and wasn’t—at the Women’s March and what the next steps are; while pop stars and brands keep dumping an apolitical vanilla version of the movement on us; and while we strive for intersectionality to become front and center of the movement—at last, hopefully—it is hard to know where we are. Author and critic Jessa Crispin, she of Bookslut (RIP), she of anarchic sewing circles and anti tong-biting interviews, promises this book is a “searing rejection of contemporary feminism and a bracing manifesto for revolution.” I am not sure where exactly she will go with it, which is why I plan on devouring this book as soon as possible.
–Marta Bausells, Lit Hub contributing editor
Richard Mason, Who Killed Piet Barol?
(Knopf)
Richard Mason’s Who Killed Piet Barol? is a finely textured, gloriously sensual, politically sophisticated and immersive follow-up to his History of a Pleasure Seeker. Mason follows Piet Barol from Holland to Cape Town in July 1914, where he and his wife Stacey pose as French aristocrats. Running low on cash, they come up with a scam. Piet will create distinctive furniture for a wealthy Capetown man, using wood from the forest of Gwadana, which he has learned about from two Xhosa men. Mason’s description of culture clashes—greed versus the sacredness of a forest the Xhosa believes houses the spirits of their ancestors—is vivid from both points of view. Piet glories in his creative musings within the forest. The Xhosa leaders and people are perplexed, endangered. Mason gives all creatures, including a leopard lying in the shade of a lime tree, conscious of the vultures, awaiting prey, a valued point of view.
–Jane Ciabattari, Lit Hub columnist
Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger
(Farrar, Straus, Giroux)
Donald Trump is President! Britain is leaving the European Union! Everywhere you look, populists are riding waves of anger to victories that are sweeping competent, responsible governments out of power. What the hell is going on? Longtime LRB and NYRB essayist Pankaj Mishra has got some pretty good answers in Age of Anger. He goes all the way back to the 18th century, when these modern fires were just getting started, to explain the deep roots of our historical situation and draw parallels between what’s happening today and what happened throughout the 1800s and 1900s. A definite must-read if you’re trying to get your head around where the world is going.
–Scott Esposito, Lit Hub columnist
Claire Fuller, Swimming Lessons
(Tin House Books)
When I resurfaced from Claire Fuller’s debut novel, Our Endless Numbered Days, I knew I had found a writer whose career I would follow to the end—a day I imagine will never come given the timeless quality to her storytelling. If Swimming Lessons, her second novel, is anything like the first, then I look forward to diving deep into this world and resurfacing only to tell other readers of its rich thrill and lyrical beauty.
–Bianca Flores, Lit Hub editorial intern
Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris,
New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
In her contribution to The End of Oulipo?, Lauren Elkin brought together incisive cultural histories with smart sociopolitical commentary, turning the stuff of tight-knit literary communities into compelling reading. In her new book Flâneuse, Elkin takes on art and its context on a grander scale, looking at the relationship between women making art and the cities in which they worked and drew inspiration, encompassing everyone from Sophie Calle to Jean Rhys along the way.
–Tobias Carroll, Lit Hub contributor
Katie Kitamura, A Separation
(Riverhead Books)
Lingering doubts, disorientation, memories just out of reach, intimations of pleasure and dread—these are a few of the hallmarks of the modern continental mystery. Katie Kitamura, the author of The Longshot and Gone to the Forest, is American, but with her latest novel, A Separation, she’s working within the tradition of L’Aventurra, Modiano’s Honeymoon and other stories of existential sleuths drawn to Europe’s rocky coasts. A woman learns that her husband, from whom she is separated, has gone missing in Greece. She’s compelled to search for him. It’s a subtle, enticing premise, masterfully handled—the perfect read for a barren February weekend when a sunny clime seems the answer to all your problems.
–Dwyer Murphy, Lit Hub contributing editor
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees
(Grove Press)
As a follow up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizers, Viet Thanh Nguyen brings us The Refugees, a glittering and well-observed novel about the lives of refugees as they migrate between two worlds. We meet a young Vietnamese refugee who comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, a woman who learns of her dying husband’s mistress, and a Vietnamese girl who reunites with her Americanized sister. At a time when the American federal government is questioning more than ever the value of refugees’ lives, this book is not only a moving read—it’s utterly necessary.
–Amy Brady, Lit Hub contributor
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Junichiro Tanizaki, Devils in Daylight
(New Directions, trans. J. Keith Vincent)
Written in 1918, this slim, erotic work of suspense is a fine entry point for readers new to Tanizaki, whom Edmund White called “the outstanding Japanese novelist of this century.” A writer, Takahashi, receives a call from his psychologically troubled friend Sonomura, who claims to know when and where a murder will take place thanks to a secret cryptogram found within Poe’s The Golden-Bug. What enfolds is classic Tanizaki, an exquisitely atmospheric rumination on obsession, illusion, and the limits of fiction.
–Dustin Illingworth, Lit Hub staff writer
Mark O’Connell, To Be a Machine
(Doubleday Books)
What does it mean to be a machine—and, in turn, a human? Mark O’Connell’s new exploration of transhumanism, To Be a Machine, attempts to answer both questions. Transhumanism—famously deemed one of the world’s most dangerous ideas by Francis Fukuyama in 2004—is a controversial set of scientific and philosophical movements, all centered around escaping death by improving—and, eventually, discarding—our rather mortal fleshly bodies. By turns comedic, unsettling, ambivalent, and intriguing, To Be a Machine, which features trips to cryogenic facilities, biohackers’ homes, and more, casts a layman’s eye on transhumanism in the past, present, and future, braiding it to one of the biggest of the Big Questions: what does it mean to be a human? Although likely aimed more at people unfamiliar with transhumanism, O’Connell’s book is a worthwhile read for all audiences.
–Gabrielle Bellot, Lit Hub staff writer
Morgan Parker, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
(Tin House Books)
Full disclosure: Morgan Parker is one of the lights of my life, so I may be a bit biased but I am BEYOND excited for her second book of poems to drop. Morgan’s writing is sharp, assertive, and wise, and I love the way she uses humor (amongst other devices) to catalyze conversations about contemporary black American womanhood. Nothing in the world is off limits to her poetry, which inspires me every day.
–Tommy Pico, Lit Hub contributing editor
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Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology (W.W. Norton)
Though it feels like America is having its own little Ragnarok moment (“Is that a wolf eating the sun?”), settling in with Neil Gaiman’s retelling of all your favorite Norse myths might just be the way to get through this winter. Assuming there’s a spring.
–Jonny Diamond, Lit Hub editor
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Publishers, Amazon Not to Blame for Author Poverty Wages
After polling 1,674 Guild members, Mary Rasenberger, executive editor at the Authors Guild, created a splash a few weeks ago by claiming that most of its members’ annual earnings were below the federal poverty level of $11,670. She spread the blame around: bookstore closures, the rise of Amazon, publisher consolidations, and the low royalties authors receive from publishers. But do these alarm bells ring true?
It became clear that Rasenberger was talking about the five publishing conglomerates, while ignoring the more than 2,000 independent publishers listed in Literary Market Place. When she says that “authors need to be cut in more equitably on the profits their publishers see,” this is another assumption that all publishers are profitable—as opposed to the reality, in which some are going broke, others are losing money, and some are just breaking even.
Last year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I was talking to Robert Rosenwald of the Poisoned Pen Press, which has been publishing high-quality mysteries for the past 17 years. We at Permanent Press started publishing in 1978. I put a question to Rosenwald that I’d been thinking about: “Do you ever get the feeling that you’re standing in the ocean when the tide starts coming in, but you can’t move your feet? Soon the water level comes up to just below your nose, and you wonder whether you’ll survive or not. Then, at the last moment, the waters recede and the crisis is over.” Rosenwald, with a devilish smile, said, “Yes. But publishing is the least expensive hobby a man can have.” I’ve cherished that sentence ever since.
Despite Rasenberger’s claim that Amazon has hurt author earnings, in our experience, Amazon has never been a detriment to either author earnings or publishers’ earnings. When Amazon orders printed books, they rarely return anything, while wholesalers and bookstores typically return a high percentage. As for electronic sales (such as with Kindle), we split them 50/50 with our authors, as we do with all subsidiary rights—another good deal for writers, despite the Authors Guild’s warnings.
Rasenberger claimed that “unless writers share more equitably the profits their publishers see, we’ll stop seeing the quality of work the industry was built on.” What quality is she talking about? My impression is that the quality of writing has gone down and down and down over the decades.
As the member of a small press interested in publishing literary fiction, I applaud this development. Why? Because the reason we’ve been able to find, introduce, and publish so many award-winning novelists is because the conglomerate publishers increasingly reject them. Dumbing down artistic merit in favor of wider sales works if the goal is making money. But if one’s passion is to find and introduce artful writers, this strategy doesn’t work. Amy Schumer is not Mark Twain, though both are humorists, and James Paterson is not Elmore Leonard. I fault neither Patterson nor Schumer for their financial success any more than I would fault the winner of a million-dollar lottery. Patterson’s name on a book guarantees high sales, even if his “coauthors” do all the work, and many people find Schumer irresistible.
Which brings up a bigger question: what compels someone to enter the arts and keep at it, despite the fact that most put hours into their work that and still remain below the federal poverty level? Living and working here in the Hamptons for most of my life, I’ve known many artists, from writers to painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, playwrights, and poets. All of them work because that’s what dedicated creative people do. After decades, some have achieved worldwide renown, such as Hans Van de Bovenkamp, whose stainless steel sculptures are installed in parks, museums, and collections throughout the world. But he never went into it for the pursuit of money. Another friend, Ruby Jackson, known by many for her assemblages, ceramics, paintings, and gallery exhibits, says with a laugh, “I am the best collector of my own work.” Jackson’s income is poverty level, but she shares with Van de Bovenkamp that same enthusiasm to create art.
“Authors are not getting the financial rewards they are due,” Rasenberger concludes. This is an argument used by workers everywhere. But what is due to anyone? And don’t authors have the right to sign or refuse any contract offered by a publisher, large or small? I rest my case.
Marty Shepard is a founder and copublisher of the Permanent Press, located in Sag Harbor, N.Y.
A version of this article appeared in the 10/12/2015 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Commenting on Mary Rasenberger’s Comments
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Kickstarter Hits $100 Million Mark for Publishing Projects
The crowdfunding platform Kickstarter marked a milestone in 2016, reaching $100 million raised for publishing projects since its launch in 2009. Last year, Kickstarter was also the subject of an academic study on its growing economic impact, it opened its platform to creators from three new territories, and it added two innovative features designed to support organizers with new tech tools and resources to engage potential donors.
Although the number of Kickstarter publishing projects and the amount of money raised for those projects declined slightly in 2016 compared to 2015, the platform helped raise millions of dollars to support an array of unconventional titles. Last year, 32.6% of the 5,617 general publishing projects launched met their pledge goals and were funded, and the category totaled almost $20,543,000 in pledges (down from $22 million raised in 2015). Of the 1,087 projects launched in comics, 58.7% met their funding goals, raising almost $12,561,000 in pledges (down from $13 million in 2015). In journalism, 17.5% of projects met their funding goals, with almost $1,963,000 in pledges (down from $2.8 million in 2015).
Margot Atwell, newly appointed director of publishing at Kickstarter (a category that includes general publishing, comics, and journalism), was quick to make note of a 2016 study released by the University of Pennsylvania that credits the platform with creating more than 300,000 full and part-time jobs. The study, by Ethan Mollick, also reports that Kickstarter has been directly involved in creating nearly 9,000 new companies and nonprofit organizations. Mollick found that Kickstarter is responsible for generating $5.3 billion in economic impact for its creators and their communities.
More specific to publishing, Atwell emphasized that the study shows that “more people are working as writers, copy editors, and designers on books produced using Kickstarter.”
Atwell is particularly excited about Kickstarter’s growing potential to address “the lack of diversity in publishing.” She noted: “Kickstarter has the power to help support and elevate voices underrepresented in mainstream publishing, whether it’s queer organizers or people from different regions other than New York. Readers who don’t see themselves in mainstream publishing are coming to Kickstarter to get support for their storytelling.”
Aspiring authors in three new territories can now make use of Kickstarter: the company opened its platform to creators from Hong Kong, Mexico, and Singapore last year. Although anyone can donate money to a Kickstarter campaign, only those in a limited number of regions can create new campaigns.
Kickstarter also launched two new features in 2016: Kickstarter Live and the Creative Independent. Kickstarter Live gives campaign organizers the ability to stream live video via their Kickstarter home pages. Organizers can hold face-to-face video sessions with their backers and discuss their projects, processes, and goals. Atwell said organizers can publicize their sessions in advance and archive them for use afterward.
She described the Creative Independent as an editorial site that is backed by Kickstarter but run by an independent editorial team. CI, she said, is focused on helping Kickstarter organizers by “understanding and celebrating the creative process” through interviews with a wide range of artists. The Creative Independent is focused on the creative process rather than the output, Atwell explained. “It’s not about a specific book or funding a book tour. It’s a holistic look at the creative process.”
A version of this article appeared in the 02/06/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Kickstarter Publishing in 2016
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February 3, 2017
10 Creative Exercises That Will Help You Improve Your Writing
Mention improv to a writer and chances are he’ll turn whiter than a whipped cream hat on a snowman. Most people who put pen to paper think of improv as something that can be carried off only by fearlessly funny comedians. Yet the definition of improvise is to “invent, compose or perform something extemporaneously.” What’s more improvisational than the act of creating stories?
Alongside my writing career, I’ve been an improv performer and instructor for 10 years, and many of the most brilliant ideas I’ve ever seen hatch have happened in those moments when everyone felt the most free. Recently, for example, a player in the middle of a scene blurted out this line: “Do you want to discuss the origins of the universe in something more comfortable?” Ten hours of sitting at a computer might never have yielded what five minutes of reconnecting with his more playful side through improv did.
This guest post is by Leigh Anne Jasheway. Jasheway is a stress management and humor expert, comedy writer, stand-up comic, and comedy instructor/coach. She has an M.P.H. degree which is either stands for masters of public health or mistress of public humor She consults with organizations on how to use humor to manage stress, change, and conflict, and boost creativity, teamwork and morale. In 2003, she won the Erma Bombeck Award for Humor Writing, has 21 published books and has hosted two radio programs, Women Under the Influence of Laughter, on KOPT AM in Eugene, Oregon and the Giggle Spot, on All Comedy 1450. She also teaches comedy writing and stand-up and is a part-time faculty member at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communications. Follow her and accidentalcomic.com.
While experimenting in the writing workshops I teach, I’ve found that, when adapted for writers—whether your focus is fiction, nonfiction, or anything else—the techniques taught through improv can enhance creativity, improve storytelling and dialogue skills, help make problems easier to solve, and make writing fun. After all, enjoying the process is the best way to prevent burnout, boredom and burrowing under the covers on bad-idea days.
Before jumping into these writing improv games (let’s not call them exercises—games are enjoyable, while exercise sounds like work!), keep these tips in mind:
There is no wrong way to play. And you can’t fail—so there’s no reason not to jump in and just see what happens.
Don’t wait until you have a great idea to move forward. Move forward and great ideas will come. Creativity is like a rusty spigot; you have to turn it on and let the gunk run through the pipes in order for the clean water to eventually pour out.
Nothing is too silly to try. As the scriptwriter Beth Brandon said, “Opening your imagination to the ridiculous opens your mind to what you’re not otherwise seeing. In other words, it makes room for the genius to come through.”
Whatever happens, explore without judgment. Improv is all about shutting down your inner critic and not measuring your work against anyone else’s (including your own previous writing). Yes, you’ll end up taking some side trips, but who knows what you might discover along the way.
Playing these games—alone or with a partner or group—can help you become more creative and fearless without ever having to step into the spotlight. Find one that speaks to you, and get ready to improv your way to better writing.
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1. Transformations
In the theatrical improv game by this name, two or more players act out a transformation—say, from egg to chicken—in their own ways. One might focus on the chick’s facial expressions and sounds, while another breaks out of the egg and unsteadily begins to walk. Writers, too, must be able to focus on details that capture the nature of change, and this game helps you do that.
How to play: Choose a pair (e.g., infant and toddler, geeky guy and prom king), and describe a specific aspect of the transition from one to the other. What sounds does the baby make as she learns to walk? How does her body move? What do her eyes do? How does she hold her head?
2. Half a Script
Imagine that you’ve never seen the movie When Harry Met Sally … or read Nora Ephron’s brilliant script. What would happen if you could read only Harry’s lines (e.g., “There are two kinds of women: high maintenance and low main-tenance”) or Sally’s (e.g., “How much worse can it get than finishing dinner, having him reach over, pull a hair out of my head and start flossing with it at the table?”)? Filling in the rest on your own is a fun way to work on dialogue and storytelling skills.
How to play: You will need 10–12 pages of a two-person script (these are easy to find online). You don’t want to see the full script before playing, though, so you’ll need to enlist the help of a writer friend to delete all of one character’s lines and print out the rest of the script for you. You can do the same with another script for your friend. What you end up with might look something like this:
Trudy cuts Billy’s hair as he fidgets in a tall kitchen chair.
TRUDY: You have to sit still. I almost van Goghed you.
BILLY:
TRUDY: I’m allowed. I’m older than you.
BILLY:
TRUDY: Oh, that will happen soon enough. We’ve already got plans for your room.
Trudy takes an electric razor out and begins to shave something into the back of Billy’s hair.
BILLY:
TRUDY: Wait, you’ll see.
Trudy hands Billy a hand mirror.
TRUDY: What do you think?
BILLY:
TRUDY: Oh, boo hoo. You always wear that hipster stocking cap, so no one will ever know.
BILLY:
Tip: Read the entire half-script before you begin so you can do the best job of filling in the blanks.
3. Four & 10
This counting game explores differences in the way people talk—specifically, the length of their sentences. Some folks are chatterboxes, while others basically nod and grunt (think of an old married couple or a parent and a sullen teen). If you write dialogue, this game can help you make sure your characters don’t all sound alike; if you write nonfiction, you’ll learn to tune your ear to how different people talk and convey that on the page.
How to play: Write two pages of conversation in which one character speaks in four-word sentences and the other speaks in 10-word spurts (which can be one sentence or more). Here’s a short example of how this might play out:
“Hey Jen, what’s new?”
“Not much. Just sitting here wondering what it all means.”
“What all what means?”
“Everything. You know, life, death, sex, sandwiches, politics, ‘The Bachelorette’ …”
“You need to meditate.”
“I can’t. It’s like the big bang in my brain.”
“That’s, uh, very philosophical.”
“Or hallucinatory. It’s hard for me to tell the difference.”
4. Scenes cut from a movie
What would have happened if in The Princess Bride, Princess Buttercup beat Prince Humperdink in a sword fight and escaped before Westley made it to the castle to rescue her? Similarly, what would happen if you added a chapter to your novel that wasn’t in your original outline? Or if you put that perhaps-too-revealing scene in your memoir? What then? This game challenges you to investigate what might develop if you add to something you’ve thought of as finished.
How to play: Pick a movie you know well. Now imagine a new scene that would change the outcome inserted somewhere in the script. You don’t have to write in script format; a new story of any kind will work. Aim for 1,500 words.
[6 Things to Consider After You Write Your First Draft]
5. Freeze Tag
One major difference between writing and improv is that writers spend most of their time sitting at a desk relying on their brains for inspiration, while improvisers are in constant motion. For fiction writers, this game will help you focus on the physical action in a story. If you write nonfiction, this game will help you pay more attention to nonverbal communication, strengthening your insight into your subjects.
How to play: Write a short description of something physical a person could do—say, Stanley tapped his foot while making occasional clicking sounds with his tongue. Now, write 1,500 words that are inspired by only that physical description, with no preconceived notions about where your piece will take you or even what genre it will be.
6. First line, Last line
Let’s say you’ve crafted the perfect opening for your book, article or screenplay, and you know how you want things to end up, but you’re stumbling over what needs to come in between. This game can help strengthen your writing core by focusing on the middle of it all.
How to play: Borrow a brilliant opening line from a writer you admire, and then a closing line from a different one. For example, Anne Lamott began her essay “My Year on Match.com” with “Heroes come in all circumstances and ages,” while Tom Robbins concluded his novel Still Life With Woodpecker with “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
Type the opening line at the top of a blank document, insert some line breaks, and then type the closing line. Give yourself 1,500 words to write from the first sentence to the last, creating a fictional story, a personal essay, a new chapter in your memoir, or even a self-help article that not only ties the two incongruous elements together, but does so imaginatively and in a way that surprises you. Don’t cheat and wrap things up in fewer words. The goal here is not just to get from Point A to Point B, but to enjoy the journey.
Tip: Playing this game with a writing group? Try having everyone choose the same first and last sentences and then reading the resulting stories aloud. Nothing stimulates great ideas like seeing how different writers approach the same challenge.7.
7. Remember
When you …
Readers are like dogs. They can smell when you’re bored or just going through the motions. If you want your readers to be passionate about what you’ve put on the page, you have to be as excited when you write as Fido is about a ride in the car. This game is all about sticking your head out the window and enjoying your own process.
How to play: Start with the statement “Remember when you …” and dream up something unusual to fill in the blank. You might try, “Remember when you were the first person to walk on the moon?” or, “Remember when you discussed Frisbee golf with Sir Isaac Newton?” (I like to think this is the way Steve Martin conceived his brilliant play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, in which Picasso and Einstein meet regularly at a bar.)
Once you have your imagined memory, write a 1,500-word monologue in which you passionately describe from the first-person perspective what happened, using powerful imagery to draw readers in and make them believe every nuance. If the story is frightening, make it deeply, psychologically so. On the other hand, if your character is describing a joyous moment, let the readers feel her ebullience.
8. New Choice
First attempts are usually not the best. There’s a reason the “test” pancake is usually a throwaway, and upgraded cellphone models are rolled out roughly every four days. Unfortunately, many writers get overly attached to words, sentences and ideas and are reluctant to make new choices. If you’re ever afraid to let go of something you created, but you know that it still needs work, this game will embolden you.
How to play: Gather a pair of dice and a few pages of a project you’re currently working on. Roll the dice and count from the beginning to the sentence that matches the number on them (if you roll a seven, go to the seventh sentence). Whatever you find there you must make a new choice for. Change not only the way the sentence is written, but the content. Do so in a way that it fits with what has come before, but takes your writing in a different direction. Write 12 sentences that explore the new choice, then roll the dice again and count from your first new sentence, repeating the challenge. Play this game for an hour.
Anytime you find yourself going down a literary dead end, try this approach.
[5 Important Tips on How to Pitch a Literary Agent In Person]
9. Opposites in Peril
Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple is a perfect example of how two characters with opposite personalities can create conflict and interest simply by virtue of who they are and how they behave. This game will help you learn to use the lens of personality to keep your characters—fictional or real—true to themselves.
How to play: Write five traits for a character. For example: optimistic, chatty, affable, calm, afraid of taking risks. Now create a second character who is the opposite. In this case: pessimistic, brooding, short-tempered, adrenaline junkie, reckless. Imagine a scenario in which both characters must work together. Perhaps they are stuck in an elevator, or planning a wedding. Write 1,500 words in which the differences in their personality quirks are central to the story.
10. 60-Second Fairy Tales
In improv, almost anything is funnier when it’s speeded up, and that’s what this game aims for when played on a stage. But on paper, it still teaches a valuable skill every writer needs to know—how to say a lot in a few words.
How to play: Pick any fairy tale and reread it so that you remember the most important details. When you’re finished, summarize all the vital story elements in 150–160 words (the length that takes about one minute to read aloud), making sure to use compelling language that would inspire anyone reading your summary to pick up the story and dive in. Needless to say, this is a terrific technique for honing your pitching skills, too.
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Thanks for visiting The Writer’s Dig blog. For more great writing advice, click here.
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.
Follow Brian on Twitter: @BrianKlems
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Mark Twain House hopes for boost from 1879 fairy tale
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Notes that Mark Twain jotted down from a fairy tale he told his daughters more than a century ago have inspired a new children’s book, “The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine.”
At the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, there is excitement that the story could help introduce the writer to wider audiences — and provide a financial lift for the nonprofit organization that curates the three-story Gothic Revival mansion where Twain raised his family.
A researcher found the story in the archive of the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California at Berkeley. When the University of California Press passed on taking it to publication, the archive’s director, Bob Hirst, endorsed enlisting the Twain House as an agent in part because of financial struggles the museum has had to overcome.
“I don’t think it’s a secret they need funding,” Hirst said. “If it was going to make some money, which Mark Twain would certainly approve of, that house was a good place for it to go.”
The Twain House connected the UC Press with DoubleDay Books for Young Readers, which hired an author and illustrator to turn Twain’s unfinished notes into the book to be published in September. The publisher and others involved declined to discuss the financial terms.
Amy Gallent, the Twain House’s interim executive director, said the museum has a balanced budget and its finances are sound. Since cost overruns brought the museum to the brink of closing a decade ago, it has reported strong admissions numbers and state aid has helped with needed improvements. But Gallent said she understands the Twain House will receive royalties on book sales and she hopes it is “incredibly successful.”
The book tells the story of a boy who gains the ability to talk to animals by eating a flower from a magical seed and then joins them to rescue a kidnapped prince.
Winthrop University English professor John Bird was mining the Berkeley archive for a possible Twain cookbook in 2011 when he flagged “Oleomargarine,” thinking it might be related to food. After reading over the 16 pages of Twain’s handwritten notes, he realized the manuscript was a story Twain apparently told his daughters in 1879 while the family visited Paris.
The 152-page illustrated book, completed by Philip and Erin Stead, frames the narrative as a story “told to me by my friend, Mr. Mark Twain.”
The author, born Samuel Clemens in Missouri in 1835, lived with his family from 1874 to 1891 at the house in Hartford. Tours feature the home’s library and a discussion of the bedtime stories he would conjure there nightly for his three daughters.
Cindy Lovell, who recently stepped down as the Twain House director and helped shepherd the book project, said the story is exceptional because Twain was not known to write down any of the thousands of stories he told his children.
“To him, this was nothing. He never wrote it because it came so easily,” she said. “I don’t think it ever occurred to him that could have been a gold mine.”
Lovell said the Twain House will benefit financially from the book, as will the UC Press and the Mark Twain Project, led by Hirst at Berkeley.
In 2010, a Twain autobiography became an unexpected best-seller when it was published a century after his death, at the author’s request. Hirst said there are still other Twain works in the archive that could be published.
“The pile is getting smaller and smaller,” Hirst said. “He left quite a lot.”
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Deborah Lipstadt: Anthony Julius’s key role in my trial defence | Letters | Law
In her article (Denial lawyer Anthony Julius on antisemitism and the age of extremes, 1 February), Hadley Freeman suggests in a rather, to use her term, “snarky” fashion that there have been “long-standing whispers” that his role in Irving v Penguin and Lipstadt has been “over-inflated”. Allow me to lay that notion to rest. As the person whose work was on trial, and the one who instructed Julius, I assure you that his role was key. He structured our defence, worked with the experts, and made virtually every key decision in our strategy in fighting the case. When I asked him to take on the case, he agreed immediately and made it clear that he would do it pro bono if necessary.
While the film Denial does an excellent job of telling this story, it does depict us as having a somewhat rocky relationship. In truth, we became compatriots in this battle. I remain deeply grateful to all those who participated in crafting my libel defence. But if there is one person to whom the credit must go, it is Anthony Julius.
Deborah E Lipstadt
Dorot professor of Holocaust studies, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
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What Was Chick Lit? A Brief History From the Inside
A few weeks ago, in the New York Times Book Review, a writer began her review of my new novel, Class—a satire about race, class, public school, parenting, and liberal hypocrisy—by calling me a “lit chick.” It was a phrase I had not seen in print before, but the meaning was clear enough: All you had to do was flip the two words.
Whatever I’d accomplished in my 20-year career and over five books, the reviewer seemed to imply, I was still apparently a writer of “chick lit,” that amorphous if much denigrated sub-genre of “women’s fiction” that sprang to life in the mid 90s with Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sophie Kinsella’s Diary of a Shopaholic and which tended to concern itself with plucky and sometimes hapless under-40 urban white female heroines in search of love.
Never mind the bizarreness of being called a “chick” at the age of 47. In the current political climate—and while a man for whom women seem to be, above all, decorative objects, sits in the White House, surrounded by a nearly all-male cabinet—I admit that being accused of writing in a category best associated with fluffy escapism, having just completed my most ambitious book to date, did not fill me with joy.
And yet, in truth, I didn’t always have such negative feelings about the nomenclature.
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By the early aughts, the tag “chick lit” came to encompass such an enormous range of books—for a time, pretty much any novel written about a woman, by a woman—that to dismiss it would have been to reject Jane Austen and even George Eliot.
What’s more, having one’s own work affiliated with the genre on any level—even if my books were always darker than what was traditional thought of as chick lit and rarely mentioned shopping—seemed like a reliable means of selling copies. And what self-supporting writer doesn’t long to do exactly that?
From a political standpoint, assailing the genre also struck me as unnecessarily snobbish and not unlike an Ivy League student looking down on someone who went to community college. It also struck me as vaguely self-loathing insofar as a) the audience for the genre was entirely female; b) the heroines of the books were always female too; and c) the topics they concerned themselves were traditionally female ones, as well. Was war any more valid a topic for fictional inquiry than dating or marriage—or, for that matter, consumerism? To denigrate chick lit seemed like a way of conceding that the male critics who, throughout the 20th century, unthinkingly understood the Great America Novel to be, by definition, a male project, had been right all along.
In 2006, a writer named Elizabeth Merrick published an anthology called, This Is Not Chick Lit. I remember seeing a copy in a bookstore. There were some wonderful novelists listed on the back—Jennifer Egan, Francine Prose, Chimamanda Adichie, Curtis Sittenfeld. Yet the very thrust of the project seemed both overly defensive and ultimately aggressive. Did women writers of this caliber need to knock down other women writers in order to assert their own merit? One didn’t see Jonathan Franzen or Jeffrey Eugenides, both of whom frequently wade into the so-called “domestic sphere,” contributing to anthologies called This is Not Crime Fiction, or I Don’t Write Thrillers About the International Espionage. As if the very existence of David Baldacci or Michael Connelly put their own careers at risk.
And yet, as I grew older and more cognizant of my own place in the universe (along with my fictional heroines), the very idea of chic lit grew enervating to me, as well. In its hyper-focus on the lives of a particular subset of young women (mostly white, mostly middle class and above), it seemed unforgivably myopic to larger currents afloat in the outside world. The very phrase, in its cutesy offhandedness, also filled me with a particular type of shame that I suspect only women know intimately—and frequently internalize. I speak of a shame built on the idea that women care, above all, about “unserious” topics, like gossip and dating and how we look—and that we somehow belong more to the body than we do to the mind. (As if it’s impossible to simultaneously be interested in both fashion and politics.)
Moreover, while I avoided having my own books blighted with bright pink covers decorated with martini glasses, lipstick prints, and shopping bags, the headless female models, photographed from the back, that graced my and so many other women novelist’s covers over the past decade seemed scarcely preferable in their single-minded appeal to female readers. Was it too much to expect that I might write novels that men might want to read as well as women—and that my covers might reflect this type of universal appeal?
Over that same decade, chick lit lost its popularity in the marketplace as well. I only wonder what sort of books its former fans are buying now. Given that so many women writers and readers currently feel that, once again, we are fighting for our basic liberties, might a new category of women’s fiction, more overtly feminist than its predecessor, be on its way? Instead of women searching for sex and love with the opposite sex, perhaps the genre might revolve around women simply trying to survive the opposite sex. Settings in a dystopian near future would be optional. Though the patron saints of the genre would, of course, be Suzanne Collins (see The Hunger Games) and Margaret Atwood (see The Handmaid’s Tale). If the movement takes off, count me in.
Lucinda Rosenfeld’s new novel, Class, was just published.
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5 Tips for Querying & Choosing a Literary Agent, by Brianna Shrum
So you’re in the query trenches. You’ve been gritting your teeth through this process for months, weeks, years, millennia, and suddenly, an e-mail comes in with the golden ticket: OFFER OF REPRESENTATION. The call goes beautifully, you are ready to sign. Then your inbox dings again. And so it begins.
Brianna Shrum is a YA author living in Colorado with her high-school-sweetheart-turned husband and two little boys. Her first novel, a YA fantasy— NEVER NEVER —was released in September 2015, and her second novel, a YA contemporary romance— HOW TO MAKE OUT —was released in 2016. When she is not writing, she’s usually buried in someone else’s words in a book. You can usually find her drinking chai and reading by her Harry Potter Christmas tree, which she will probably never take down.
Getting multiple offers is often thought of as the dream scenario, and in some ways, it is! You get to pick! Hoorah! Celebrate! Then the stress sinks in. Personally, I wound up with four offers, all from literary agents I would have loved to sign with. Every time I heard, “Haha! What a great problem to have!” I responded with, “Right? Definitely!” Then just quietly stress-cackled until I could remind myself that it was, indeed, a good problem to have.
Since I have had two literary agents previously, I went through this round of querying knowing exactly what I wanted in a literary agent. So when I got an offer from a literary agent I thought was (and still think is) the bee’s knees, I let everyone with the manuscript or query know that I had an offer, set a deadline for their response, and Netflixed my way through the following two weeks. On decision day, I was sitting with three offers, all from literary agents I would have loved to work with. That morning, I had the e-mails written; my decision was made. Then, quite literally thirty minutes before I hit Send, I got a surprise call. Area code 212.
By the end of that call, I knew exactly what I needed to do. And it was not what I had been so sure of that morning. This brings me to:
Bri’s Tips On Making An Agently Choice
Do Not Ignore Literary Agent Red Flags
This is the FREE space in Literary Agent Bingo. There are the classic warning signs that reveal bad agents, like: reading fees, not knowing the market, not being down to submit your books to places you couldn’t submit yourself, etc. You can find lists of red flags around ye olde interwebs that can give you a more solid rundown, but the gist is: If your brain is flashing warning signs to you about anything you’ve heard this agent do, or anything that felt sketchy on the call, heed that warning. Alas, all the offers I got were from literary agents who had nary a red flag to raise, so in my case more elbow grease was required.
The biggest literary agent database anywhere
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Know What You Want in A Literary Agent
When I was first started querying, it was hard to know exactly what I was looking for, beyond, “I want a good literary agent! I want them to sell my books! That covers it, right?” It does not. That isn’t enough. You have to go in with a strong idea of exactly what you need as a writer and businessperson, and what you’re willing to compromise. For me? I knew I needed a literary agent who was good at communication, who was dedicated to and clearly passionate about my career, and who was cool with my desire to write in multiple genres/categories. I wanted either an established literary agent with a good number of sales under their belt or a newer agent at one of the top literary agencies . I also wanted an agent I felt comfortable and got along with. That was me. Consider what you need. What are you looking for in the short-term? Someone who understands your book? Whose vision for submission aligns with yours? And most importantly, what are you looking for in the long-term? Someone excited about you as a writer, with enthusiasm for other projects as well as this one? Someone with whom you can form a career-long partnership? Different literary agents can have very different styles of communication, revisions, submission strategy, contract negotiation, how they approach sales, and how you manage your career together. Insight on your goals and their strategies can only help you.
Don’t Be Afraid to Ask Literary Agents Questions!
You are not the obnoxious kid in class if you ask too many questions. It could be that a seemingly tiny question gives you massive clarity. For instance, I asked about their submission list, because someone with a readily available list of which houses and editors they planned on submitting was massively important to me. We discussed revisions (flashing sign: important) on this project and briefly talked about other projects I had in the works. And I asked about comfort with multiple genres and categories, speed, and submission strategy. Ask the agent what sets them apart from everyone else—both as an agent and the literary agency they are partnered with. Ask everything you want to know. Knowledge is power, and all that.
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the agent database, Guide to Literary Agents.
Use Your Resources
Get names of clients to contact. If you know current or past clients, contact them too! I’ve found past and current clients are often totally happy to answer questions, and they can be extremely enlightening. Also poke around on Publisher’s Marketplace. You can find info on sales, level of sales, genre, etc., that can really help paint a larger picture. Do some legwork up front on the literary agent and their literary agency, and you will be much happier later.
Make A Choice for Your Career
I cannot stress this enough. The submission, getting the book sold, dealing with a million little things after it’s sold? Each can be a process. Processes the right agent can really guide you through. Ideally, your agent will partner with you through this book, and far beyond that. When you sign with an agent, you are trying to find a person to whom you believe you can entrust your career. Not the person who dazzles you with the flashiest sales and prettiest words; not the person who might be your BFF. What you are looking for is someone you can build a partnership with. You don’t need to feel bad for who you choose or don’t choose. All it’s really about is picking the right agent for you.
When I got off the phone, I knew that although every literary agent I’d spoken with was fantastic, this person was absolutely the right choice for me, because I couldn’t imagine putting my career in the hands of anyone else. I thought, “Good lord, if he was that persuasive with me, imagine how he is with editors.” His professionalism, his enthusiasm, his knowledge, and passion for my work made it abundantly clear. So I signed with Steven Salpeter at Curtis Brown, and I could not be more thrilled.
Are you interested in querying Steven? Click here to read his submission guidelines.
Other writing/publishing articles and links for you:
If you’re an agent looking to update your information or an author interested in contributing to the GLA blog or the next edition of the book, contact Cris Freese at cris.freese@fwmedia.com.
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