I just finished reading a manuscript that brought me right to the edge of tears. The restraint on the part of the writer was remarkable. In the novel, there is a moment we have been waiting for though on some level we don’t even know it. And when it finally comes, the author pulls back. The reader is desperate for the character to be saved, for something to makes sense, and the author offers nothing more than a brief memory, a moment in time that wants to stand for everything but in the end explains nothing. It just is.
I’ve always believed that readers love to cry. But there are tears and there are tears. What Woody Allen says in Annie Hall, that if you get a laugh out of a stoned person it really doesn’t count, sort of applies. I mean if you schlock it up and get people to cry, does it count? Or are tears tears? I will cry at almost anything. Scratch that: anything. I remember my older sister mocking me for crying at an episode of The Patty Duke Show. I love to cry. The most manipulative movies will work their worm on me. And yet, like the novel I read this morning, I also relish that other feeling of not being manipulated, but of being truly moved as queer as that sounds.
The first books that made me cry buckets were I Am Third, Bang the Drum Slowly, Of Mice and Men, In This Sign and Love Story. What makes you leak?
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I wanted to write something in my diary today. I took it out of its hiding place and realized it had been eight months since I’d last written in it. Part of me wanted to abandon it completely and start a new notebook as if the trail had gone cold. As if it would be easier to blaze a new one, even though I hate how self conscious the first page of a new diary can be as if it’s trying to impress somebody. But then I started flipping through the pages and I came upon a poem. One of two poems I’ve written in the last 25 years. It was terrible, but I loved it. I loved it for bringing me to the exact moment I was in when I wrote it. It was like my small handprint pressed into a plaster of paris mold, spray-painted gold, and hung with a length of white satin ribbon in my mother’s kitchen.
When I was an assistant in the sub-rights department at Simon and Schuster, a guy told me that the only reason to survive in publishing was so that you could eventually fuck over everyone who fucked you over. I knew I was in the right place. A lot of people ask me how I have the time to write with a full time job, teenager, cockapoo, etc. I usually say something glib like oh, well, I’m manic, la la, or I’m just compulsive, tra la. But really, I’m in it to fuck the world. I want revenge. I want the last laugh. I want the Oscar. Shit, I’ve got the speech. Thank you fuckers for throwing me out of NYU film school, thank you Professor Pulitzer Prize for making me feel like a piece of shit in your poetry workshop, thank you dad for pissing on my MFA, thank you dry cleaner for destroying my buttons. Thank you for Lithium. And Lamictal. And Tylenol PM. Thank you for the bicycle messenger and the supply closet. Thank you for no end of ideas, countries named after me, a statue whose gown gathers dirt and is stained with my tears. Thank you.
When I was fifteen, I went to an arts camp and developed an enormous crush on a guy until we got into a huge fight about what was more important: the authenticity of the feeling in a poem or the craft. He was for feeling; I was for craft. Feelings shmeelings. Everyone has feelings. I count on artists and writers to put those feelings into exquisite form, whatever that form and style may take. I want an author to be in control so I don’t have to worry. Of course I want to moved. We all want to be swept away, dazzled and destroyed. But the only way to slay me is with great craft. A perfect adjective can move me more than a whole megillah. Bleeders need not apply. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in love with my feelings, I’m just saying they don’t equal good writing.
525 Comments as of close of day Friday. It was like a freakin’ avalanche. This must be how Bransford feels all the time. I wasn’t sure anyone would even leave a title. So thanks to everyone who participated. To choose “the best,” it was impossible to do anything but sift through the titles as if through a pile of query letters. And I’ve selected those with exactly the same criteria as I do the letters that cross my desk: does the title (and some combination of elements in the letter) make me want to read more?
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/jonathan-franzen-tops-bad-sex-in-fiction-award-nominee-list_b17633#more-17633
Sitting on another late train home opening my mail. All the usual stuff, droves of fan mail, scores of query letters, and then a letter from The Writer Magazine. They want to excerpt five pages from my opus The Forest for the Trees and they will pay $200 clams.
Went to Brooklyn today (three subways) to talk with Pratt undergraduates about publishing. Naturally, I became nostalgic about my college years, never mind the near constant misery. The big difference as far as I can tell is that we never met publishing professionals, never talked about how to get published. I think in some ways we were lucky not to start those engines too soon. We didn’t even have a creative writing major. We were allowed to take one writing course and I took poetry; the professor favored the ballerina-poets. I wrote all the time in my journals. I went to cafes and wrote and smoked and read. But I had no idea what a query letter was or how to write one. I had no idea what an agent was or what they were for. Today’s kids have seen Jerry Maguire, they study the box office grosses, they know the names of power agents.
Betsy Lerner 