Ben H. Winters's Blog, page 7

On Writer's BLECH

Student writers of all ages fret frequently about writer's block, but I swear to you that isn't the real problem.

The real problem is what I like to call writer's blech.

Writer's blech is the feeling, which will be instantly recognizable to 99% of all writers, at all levels, that one is not a real writer. It is the painful despairing sensation that your writing is terrible, that you are at base a fraud and a faker, that all the other writers in the world are better than you, that your story is stupid and not worth telling, and that probably your parents were right and you should have gone to law school after all.

Worse than the sensation of writer's blech is its means of manifesting itself: In a need to nap, instead of write, or watch TV instead of write, or check one's email for the 150th time in a given one-hour period, instead of write. Because if a nagging bitter voice is busily informing you that you are a fraud and a faker and your story is stupid and  not worth telling, than what point is there in sweating through the hard labor of imaginative conjuring, careful sentence construction, and multiple revision that constitutes writing?

I mentioned above that 99% of writers experience writer's blech, or some form of it. I have heard it confessed by professional writers of all genres in all levels, and by student writers of all ages. Personally I get it most often when in the middle of a long piece of fiction, which I happen to be in the middle of right now, which is probably why I'm thinking of it these days. I've been working on a novel for almost a year, and I've spent maybe half of that time convinced that the whole thing is garbage. That I'm a fraud and a faker, and etc…

The only prescription, annoyingly enough, is discipline.

You have to write through it — what else is there, after all, to do? If you stop writing, you will only have confirmed the hypothesis of the nagging and bitter voice, that you were a fraud and a faker all along, and you'll live with a sour feeling in your stomach for a long time to come, a feeling of having betrayed your talent, of having turned your back on what you knew, deep down, was a font of creative possibility.

But if you summon the discipline to keep going, to construct your best writing environment and corral your focus and keep writing and rewriting and refining, you will find that what ultimately cures  writer's blech — well, I shouldn't say cures — what ultimately tames, or keeps at bay, that dreadful sense of not-being-up-to-it, is writing something good: a strong sentence, or a taut paragraph, or, if the gods are smiling, a good book.

A collection of words that you can look at and say to yourself, maybe I'm a fraud and a faker, but I know that that right there is properly done. That right there is a strong sentence, a taut paragraph, a good goddamn book.

Will the writer's blech have gone away? No, ma'am. Of course not. It will return the next time you sit down in front of a blank page, or reach the end of a burst of passionate productivity, or when you read a glowing review of another author's work and think: what am I, next to that?

But what I'm saying is, that author is at home going: Blech.

So, you know, get back to work.

In Defense of Bedbugs

[the following originally appeared in (on?) (via?) the Huffington Post]

Are bedbugs really that bad?

Yes, they live in your bed; they suck your blood; and they are almost impossible to kill or get rid of. All of these can be considered negative qualities.

But play a bit of compare and contrast, and bedbugs come out looking pretty good. A mosquito can give you malaria, or dengue fever, or West Nile. Ticks carry Lyme disease. Asian longhorn beetles will destroy your trees, and termites will eat your house. Roaches live in the pantry and go to the bathroom in your food.

And yet it is bedbugs that have become the eight-legged bete noir of our times, skittering villainously through countless alarmist articles and local-news segments. Million-dollar bedbug lawsuits! Horrible bedbug-inspired divorces! Vicious bedbug-related Coop Board infighting!

All these stories gain their potency from the fear constantly scurrying around in all our minds: What if I get them? Please don't let me get them. Please Lord, don't let it happen to me!

People have been trying to get rid of bedbugs since they started sleeping in beds. The ancient Greeks were advised to hang the feet of a dead stag in the bedchamber to ward off the creepy crawlers. (They were also advised to eat bedbugs with wine and eggs to cure various diseases). But I would hypothesize that our current outsize fear and loathing of poor little cimux lectularius is all bound up with our uneasy relationship with the fact of city living.

We human beings like to live in densely populated, and demographers tell us that more and more of us are doing it every year; in 2008, for the first time in human history most people in the world lived in urban environments. Nor is this a bad thing, necessarily. As we learned recently from economist Ryan Avent in the Times,"when it comes to economic growth and the creation of jobs, the denser the city the better." When we pack ourselves closer together, we create a resource-rich environment for would-be innovators, and everyone's standard of living rises along with wages.

Alas, the problem with living close to other people is living close to other people. City living means making an uneasy peace with sleeping a hair's breadth from strangers: dirty, noisy, deranged, perverted strangers, all around us, all the time. The slamming doors in the middle of the night, the apologetic stranger buzzing up claiming to have forgotten her keys, the friend of a friend who needs a place to crash. In the city we are always in danger of the possibility that someone else's messy existence will spill over into our own.

I think our morbid fascination with bedbugs is a way of placing our urban anxieties onto their tiny, antennae-bearing heads. What we talk about when we talk about bedbugs is our fear of being affected, of being infected, by some other person. Of getting it from somewhere: from a party guest, from a one-night stand, from that cool antique chair you dragged in off the curb.  All these stories about the horror of gross, swarming, faceless bugs are secretly stories about the horror of gross, swarming, faceless human beings.

So if you should wake up tonight at three a.m. with a tiny bug crawling up on your neck or onto your wrist, don't freak out. Lift the bedbug gently on your palm and say "it's not your fault, little friend. I'm the one who choose to improve my quality of life by moving to the Big City to embrace the cultural opportunities and stimulating interactions and copious Vietnamese restaurants that are its spoils. And you, my little parasitical friend, are a small price to pay."

And then rest at ease.

Just don't come to my house.

A tale of two stories

Authors will tell you that having a book come out is like bringing a child into the world. If so, in September I'll be having twins. My newest middle-grade novel, The Mystery of the Missing Everything, will hit the shelves on September 21, a scant two weeks after the September 6 pub date of Bedbugs, a supernatural thriller about — well, bedbugs.

(Don't imagine, by the way, that this sudden onrush of new material is the result of any Herculean prolificness on my part. Mystery was done and in the hands of the copy editor before I even broke ground on Bedbugs, and it's the mysterious whims of the publishing calendar that has them arriving so close together).

The books, it should already be clear, are not identical twins. On the one hand we have a good-hearted, bouncy tale for young readers, in which a mystery unfolds in the boisterous halls of Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School, to be solved by my spritely heroine, Bethesda Fielding, who first appeared in another book of mine, The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman. On the other hand, we have Bedbugs, a quite adult story about a young mother who is terrified and driven to the brink of madness by the eponymous night-crawling pests.

More interesting than how different they are is the ways they are similar. (More interesting to me, that is, and I sail blithely forward on the Blogger Default Assumption that somehow everybody in the world cares about the same things I do).

Both feature a female protagonist, despite the fact that I am, according to most reliable sources, a man. (I don't know what it means, exactly, that I keep writing books starring females, but I do; even my satirical mash-up novels, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Android Karenina, had lady heros. This is something I should probably think about, perhaps in consultation with a mental-health professional, but I don't feel like it).


When you strip away all the exterior flourishes — flourishes of humor, mostly, in Mystery, and flourishes of creepiness, mostly, in Bedbugs — the books are both tales of suspense. In each, something is wrong and the protagonist gropes forward in metaphoric (sometimes literal) darkness until she figures out what it is, and tries to make it right. Sounds familiar, right? Viewed from the correct angle, most books will fit this extremely reductive structure — something is not right; someone takes on the challenge of making it so. The Odyssey. Hamlet. Nancy Drew and the Clue of the Black Keys. I could go on.


In both books, a large portion of the suspense comes from the protagonist (and thus the reader) not knowing who to trust.  Tension, like natural gas, can come from a lot of places, and this is one of my favorite places to drill: in the uncomfortable feeling that someone who professes to be on your side may, in fact, be hiding things or lying. Granted, I handle it a lot differently in Bedbugs (where Susan is tormented by her husband's uncertain support as darkness closes in) than in Mystery, where I never want to give my young readers a sense of serious encroaching danger.

My goal is to write all sorts of different things — works for children, works for adults, poetry and prose and plays and songs. Like all proud parents, I like to reflect on how my particular writerly DNA expresses itself in all these very different "children."

Funny thing is, September will also be bringing my wife and me an actual, human child, our third. So I may not have time to reflect on much of anything for a while…

contest time

Friends! Colleagues! Citizens of the Internet!

I recently got a box in the mail with the first copies of my new novel, Bedbugs, a supernatural thriller about a woman slowly driven to the brink of madness by a bedbug infestation in her beautiful Brooklyn apartment.

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The book doesn't come out until September 6, but I'm itching with excitement, so I'd like to give a few copies away.

So here's the contest:

It seems like everyone you talk to these days has some horrible tale of bedbugs that refused to die; of landlords that refused to act; of love affairs that ended in a storm of scratching; of lovely sofa beds that had to dragged out to the curb or burned.

Send YOUR catastrophic tale of bedbug infestation to BedbugsTheBook@gmail.com. I'll pick the three best (by which I mean the worst, the most horrifying, shocking, devastating tales of bedbugs) and award the winners with signed copies of Bedbugs. We'll accept entries until September 1!

Please spread the word, and look for Bedbugs at your favorite bookstore on September 6!

News from Wintersland

With apologies for the long interval between blog entries, here is what's going on in Wintersland:

* I had an amazing time signing ARCs (that's book-biz shorthand for Advanced Review Copies) of Bedbugs, my new supernatural thriller, at Book Expo America. You can see a full report on the event, and some pictures of me at my most genial and awkward, in this report from Quirk Books.

* Uncle Pirate, a children's musical for which I wrote the libretto back in 2010, is being brought back — whether by popular demand or just cuz kids love pirates, I don't know — this fall. The new production opens in late September; music and lyrics are by the estimable Drew Fornarola, and you can read the Times review of the original production here. In other theater news, my old friend and collaborator Jeremy Dobrish will be directing A Great Big Miracle, my all-ages comedy about Hanukkah, at a synagogue in New Jersey this holiday season…details to follow.

*The paperback edition of the Edgar-award-nominated The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman (boy, I can't write that adjectival phrase often enough: Edgar-award-nominated…Edgar-award-nominated…) comes out in September, simultaneously with the hardcover original of its companion book, The Mystery of the Missing Everything.

* Bedbugs also comes out in September, making this officially the busiest and most exciting month of my life — which it would have been even if none of the books came out, because my wife and I are expecting our third child that same month. So, everybody buy the books, cuz they don't give those diapers away, people.

One of these days I'm going to write a long, clever blog post dispensing sage wisdom about writing, like my friend Steve Hockensmith does so effortlessly.

A couple of upcoming appearances

This weekend I'll be appearing at The Muse and the Marketplace, Grub Street's annual conference, giving a seminar/workshop/hang-out session on Writing Funny for Young Readers.

Looking ahead, I'm going to New York on Weds, May 25 to hang out at the Book Expo America, where I'll be doing not one but two book signings. Check back for details, or email me.

I have a new idea

I have an idea for a book; it's a very small idea; just the beginning of an idea, really, the seed of an idea. An idea for an idea.

I really like writing — the agonizing, joyful, maddening months of digging in and living with it, watching the thing grow, seeing the flesh appear on the bones, going back and forth with myself, with an editor, with a copyeditor — and I really like having written — watching the thing sail or shamble off into the world, to meet with praise or scorn or confusion or  (always) some mixture of them all.

But this is my favorite part. I have an idea, and I think it's really good, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to do it. I have a little smooth stone in my pocket, and I can feel it with my thumb, and no one knows about it but me.

Parenting is So Boring, I'm Just Gonna Check Email a Second

(The following lament and mild-mannered call-to-arms appeared originally on The Huffington Post.)

My daughter is a pretty amazing ice skater, for a four-year-old, except that sometimes she gets distracted and chews absently on the strap of her helmet. Before her lesson the other night, I reminded her not to do that, and told her I would be watching.

"OK," she said, "I'll just wait until you're looking at your iPhone, and then do it."

Uh-oh.

I smiled tenderly, patted my precocious girl on her pink helmet, and sentenced myself to a lifetime in Bad Dad Jail.

I am not alone, of course. Everyone I know who possesses both children and a smartphone bears some level of guilt for the instances, however infrequent, where they go, "One sec, sweetheart," before doing a quick stock-market check or firing off a text message. (This Times article from last year reported on a kid so frustrated about his mom and her BlackBerry that he almost bit her on the leg.)

This is not an issue born in the digital age. Surely as long as humans have been reproducing, we've been finding ways to temporarily relieve ourselves of the stress and tedium of tending to our spawn. But the smartphone surely represents a high-water mark in the history of ignoring one's children. A twenty-first century parent, wishing to tune out for a moment while reading Curious George for the umpteenth time, can instantly disappear into that magical otherworld of political updates, sports scores, and random inanities — all just a glance and a finger swipe away.

Last year I spent some time with Anna Karenina, and was struck by Tolstoy's anxiety about things like the telegraph and, famously, the steam engine.  It's an anxiety not just about how new technologies affect the economic structure of a society, but also how they change its moral fabric.  New modes of communication, new industries creating new kinds of work and workdays…every metamorphosis has unexpected consequences on society in general and family life in particular.

Fast-forward a hundred years from Tolstoy's time, and it is unquestionable that new technologies are rethreading our own moral fabric. I'm now reading Nicholas Carr's The Shallows (I'll be giving it five stars) and looking forward to  Sherry Turkle's Alone Together (five stars!). Smarter people than I are contemplating the galloping pace of digitalization and the stange new places it is taking us: The unsavory secret surveillance of romantic exes via Google search; the broadening and shallowing of our circle of "friends", and our idea of friendship, on Facebook.

My fear, driven home by the incident at the ice rink, is that a change of similar consequence is afoot in the world of parent-child relations. We all know that a kid is profoundly affected when a parent goes out for smokes and never comes back. What's the long-term result of a parent "stepping out" over and over and over — a few seconds here, a couple minutes there — to check in with their little handheld totem? Is there a lessening, however minute, of whatever essential connectedness it is that makes a child grow up self-confident and happy?

I've got no answers, but I think know what Tolstoy would say. I also know that next time I'm watching my daughter skate, my iPhone is on airplane mode all the way.

JCO and the Painter Moose

I was fascinated, in the New York Times Book Review piece on Joyce Carol Oates's new memoir, A Widow's Story, to read of the famously productive author's sense of separation between her writing-self and person-self. In A Widow's Story (according to the Times piece–I haven't read it yet) readers learn of Oates's "dual self, that has let loose torrential, dark art while leading the quietest of lives." The writer-self Oates calls JCO, and considers "not a person, not even a personality but a process that has resulted in a sequence of texts."

What a weird and compelling phrase, especially when used by a creative person in reference to herself: a process that has resulted in a series of texts. This strikes me as an extreme version of the phenomenon that many writers experience, myself included: where you feel like the part of you that writes leads a separate, parallel existence to the part of you that does the dishes, shops for pants, watches Top Chef–the part of you that lives your life.

(Boy, that last sentence makes my life sound pretty slow, doesn't it?)

For me the separation between writer-Ben and Ben-Ben has grown much sharper since I started a family: once I close my laptop at 5:00, and the kids are home from daycare and dinner needs cooking and the laundry is waiting, I pretty much deactivate whatever part of the cortex has spent the day sorting through plots and wrestling with snippets of dialog. Sometimes this is frustrating–just as it's sometimes frustrating to say goodbye to my home life and go back to whatever weird world I'm working on–but on balance I feel this is the healthiest set-up, for both Bens.

The whole issue makes me think fondly of Arthur Paintstain, a moose cartoon character created by my friend "Mississippi" Marc Deckter. Besides being a moose, Arthur is a professional painter; but he doesn't paint all night with a beret, a bottle of wine, and a lit cigarette, like our romantic vision of the artist. He shows up every morning at nine on the dot, in a suit, takes paints and brush from a handsome briefcase, and paints furiously until five. Then he clocks out and goes home.

And so, my beau idéal of the working artist turns out to be either a cartoon moose[image error], or Joyce Carol Oates. Take your pick.

(If you're interested in Arthur Paintstain, you should visit "Mississippi" Marc's website, but be aware that nobody calls him "Mississippi" Marc except for me.)

Why I Give Everything Five Stars

(this soft-hearted diatribe originally appeared on The Huffington Post)

The expression "everyone's a critic" gets more true every day, now that every retail website offers a feedback form, and every potential purchase shows the aggregated ranking of all its past purchasers. Buy anything and you will be afforded an opportunity to tell the world what you thought of your new shirt, hotel stay or bagel.
For the most part, this is great. Like everyone, I routinely look to CitySearch or Yelp! when I need a mechanic, or I'm going to be in an unfamiliar town at lunchtime: Tell me, dear hive mind, who should fix my minivan, or where to find a good hamburger over in Newton. All this ranking carries a faint whiff of the original democratic promise of the internet. The free flow of information! The buzzing exchange of knowledge among a well-informed citizenry! (A citizenry defined, in this case, as "people shopping for stuff.")
But I start to get a little queasy when the stuff being ranked and rated isn't merely goods, but works of art.
Maybe it's because I'm a writer, and like all but the very luckiest writers I have experience getting bad reviews. There is a magical kind of nausea associated with sending forth into the world a creative expression of your very soul, then opening the New York Times and discovering how much it sucks.
But, hey, that's the gig. Being a writer means being sensitive enough to channel the world through the filter of your creativity, but thick-skinned enough to watch your baby get kicked around in the press. Plus, after marching through the Kübler-Ross stages of bad-review grief (from "future generations will recognize my genius!" to "they're just jealous!" to sulky acceptance), we can console ourselves with the belief that professional critics bring to their work some instinctual empathy for the artists under review — an understanding of the passion and elbow grease that go into any sustained work of creativity, no matter the quality of the final product.
The question is, what happens to that empathy when this ancient dance of reviewer and reviewed meets the star-systems and feedback forms of the web?
The problem isn't that "amateurs" are doing the reviewing: the opinions of regular old readers or playgoers or whoever can be just as valuable, and usually more passionate and interesting, than those of the jaded professionals. But in a world where Amazon sells everything from books to lightbulbs, then asks the consumer to rank his purchase from zero to five, I worry that we start to forget that a book is different than a box of lightbulbs — for the simple, cheesy reason that it emerged from the soul of a human being, and not from a light-bulb factory.
So I've decided that when it comes to being reviewed online, I can take it but I can't dish it. I am active, for example, on Goodreads.com, a site where I can find out what smart people are reading, share what's on my own nightstand, and (yes) try and get folks to buy my books. But when it comes to the site's obligatory ranking system, I give everything five stars. Beezus and Ramona? Five stars. Samaritan, by Richard Price? Five stars. Bob Dylan's Chronicles? Five stars!
Yes, I like some books better than others, but I always round up to five. It's my tiny little protest against a world that would have us weigh everything on the same scale. And it's a tribute to the fact that sending your precious book into the modern marketplace is a damn hard thing to do — and getting harder every day.