Literary head on a cartoon body

Tags

Comics, Graphic novel, Maus, neuroesthetics, Persepolis, psychology of perception, serialized stories

Caricature of Aubrey Beardsley by Max Beerbohm (1896), taken from Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I love art. I love books. I do not love books that tell stories with art.

Comics, cartoons, graphic novels—I can’t read them. It’s not that I’m averse to their subject matter; I love to laugh and I enjoy a dark tale as much as the next reader.

I brought this up with my son, who detests reading novels but has always enjoyed comics and graphic media. When I try to read a graphic novel or a comic, my brain gets—for lack of a better word—antsy. It’s hard to concentrate and I’d rather just not do it. He told me that’s exactly how he feels when faced with a page of text.

I figured there must be something in our brains that makes this so. A Google search on “brain physiology why do some people like graphic novels?” led to Brian Kane’s blog on graphic texts. One of his posts contains a section on the psychology of perception. Jackpot!

Kane’s blog post asks the fascinating question, “So what does the brain ‘see’ when it ‘sees’ a page or panel of sequential art, and how does it derive meaning from this literate art form?” The answer, I’m sure, holds the key to both my difficulty with—and my son’s enjoyment of—the medium.

Kane relates the perception of meaning to several branches of psychology including gestalt and cognitive. My real aha came from his section on neuroscience. Research into the neuroscience of perception is ongoing, with—believe it or not—sub-disciplines such as neuroesthetics. There is evidence of specialized cells in the brain responsible for responding specifically to straight lines!

Thinking about this lends a new dimension to the idea of keeping an open mind. Our minds themselves may limit their own openness to particular types of art and esthetics; neurophysiology may account for the fact that not everyone will get their kicks from a 500-page roman a clef. And the people who do will likely not get much from Jeff Smith’s Bone series, which my kids so loved during their elementary school years, or Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus.

But I have decided to attempt to overcome my neurological deficit. Here and now, I am committing to read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution that has been compared to Maus.

I’m sure wondrous rewards await between its covers if I can just make my antsy brain stay still long enough to discover them.

What about you? Are their types of art that seem to resonate with your brain?

Related articles

• Final Thoughts on Graphic Novels (teacherleaders.typepad.com) – A contrast to Kane’s ideas.
• Understanding Maus (thepenguinblog.typepad.com) – A guide by someone whose research “is concerned with non-mimetic narratives of the Second World War.”
• How Graphic Novels Became the Hottest Section in the Library – Publishers Weekly weighs in
• Why Graphic Novels? (whybehumansp13.wordpress.com) – a 21-year-old student asks about the place of graphic novels in education

Upcoming

The Art of Character

I was introduced to the work of (and seduced into buying a book by) novelist David Corbett after his presentation for the CWC-SF/Peninsula last weekend. The book I bought was not one of his novels but a writing how-to guide called “The Art of Character: Creating Memorable Characters for Fiction, Film, and TV.” My challenge usually is not coming up with compelling characters but tying the book’s action to them in believable ways. I’m hoping his tips will help in that arena as I continue to hone my next novel.

The Art of Kourtney

On June 10^th, I’m doing something I have never done: hosting a guest on my blog. Kourtney Heintz, whose blog I have been following for a couple of years, has just released her novel “The Six Train to Wisconsin.” Instead of having her discuss self-publishing or marketing—both of which she has become well-versed in—I’m asking her to discuss the book itself: where it came from, what compelled her to write it, and yes, its characters.

Sympathy for the Devil

Tags

acceptance letters, being an editor, editing, empathy for waiters and waitresses, Fault Zone, patience and perseverence, rejection letters, submitting your fiction

I once heard it was a good idea for everyone to have a job as a waiter or waitress at some point in their lives. (I believe the correct word these days would be “server.”) The idea is that we’ll all be restaurant customers and turning the tables on the situation—so to speak—will give us a greater appreciation of the job and perhaps make us kinder diners.

Chaplin and Purviance in the memorable restaurant scene. They do not look too happy with their server. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My walk-in-their-shoes experience came not as a waitress, but as a bus person (you know, bussing tables), salad girl (sorry, there is no gender-neutral term for that), and baker/dessert-maker. My time on the inside opened my eyes to the reality of the restaurant biz.

I’m undergoing the writerly version of such table-turning, or desk-turning. As editor of the 2013 edition of the CWC’s Fault Zone anthology, I’ve spent the last month reading submissions. Now my wonderfully capable assistant editor Dorcas Cheng-Tozun and I are beginning the process of responding to authors with letters. Acceptance letters, provisional acceptance letters and… rejection letters.

My edits to my manuscript for “Bad Luck with Cats.” Sitting on both sides of the desk!

I’ve been an editor before, but I’ve never been in the position of reviewing a big ol’ pile of submissions. Here’s what the writing side of myself has learned so far from sitting behind the anthology editor’s desk—and my advice to anyone who is submitting anything, anywhere.

1. There’s a reason a publication’s response time can be two, three, or even four or more months. It takes a long time for a small staff to read a lot of submissions, and even longer when it’s a volunteer staff. BE PATIENT.
2. An editor may be lenient upon encountering one piece with typos, grammatical errors, or wonky formatting. After the 4th or 5th piece with such flaws, the editor becomes irritated and begins tossing submissions directly on the rejection pile. COPY EDIT, PROOFREAD, and DO IT AGAIN before you submit.
3. Writing thoughtful, empathetic, and constructive letters to authors is really, really hard. Maybe even harder than writing a good piece of fiction. APPRECIATE PERSONAL LETTERS. Even if they tell you things you don’t really want to hear.
4. De gustibus non est disputandum is Latin for “There’s no arguing with taste” and applies to an individual’s reaction to a poem, story, or essay. In more than a few cases, three members of our editorial reading team had three completely different evaluations of a piece, with two at opposite ends of the like/dislike spectrum. IF YOU’RE REJECTED AND YOU KNOW YOUR WORK IS GOOD, SHRUG AND MOVE ON. Sooner or later, you’ll find the right publication and editor and catch them in the right mood (sad to say, that can have something to do with it, too.)
5. Somebody will be offended. I’m hoping not to be pilloried by any of the writers whose work was rejected. If I am, I hope a few things will mitigate the vitriol: our rigorous and transparent selection process; the fact that we relied on more than one person’s input to evaluate each piece; and our extensive feedback to authors, which involves writing personal letters even to those whose pieces we are not accepting. TREAT THY REJECTOR AS YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE TREATED. As hard as it is to believe, YOU are not your writing and the editor is not rejecting YOU. See # 4 for solace.
6. Taking on a big editing project and working on your own project are mutually exclusive. My novel revision has slid to the bottom of the priority pile. Shame on me, but there are only so many hours in the day. DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE AMOUNT OF TIME IT WILL TAKE TO BE AN EDITOR. Do not schedule a vacation around deadline time. Do stock up on pre-made dinners and lots of chocolate. Do not expect to have much else on your mind for a while.

Despite the challenges, I’m having fun editing Fault Zone: SHIFT and am excited to help the contributors through the next steps of the process to create an anthology of sparkling, compelling writing.

And I’ll be a much more sympathetic writer when those rejection slips come back. I’ll know the devil on the other side of the desk is me.

Writers: have you ever gone over to the dark side?

At the brink of the familiar

Tags

Edgar Allan Poe, Every Day Fiction, Flash fiction, genre, James Joyce, the comfort of familiarity, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner

Recently, I gave up my e-mail program of 15-plus years and switched to a new one. (No one would accuse me of being an early adopter.) My experience in doing so—can you say “dragged kicking and screaming”?—revealed how deeply I cherish the familiar.

I shouldn’t be surprised about my affinity for the comforts of the known. I’m past the age at which I am the target of new pop music; the local grocery store only annoys me by rearranging items on its shelves. There must be an evolutionary explanation for the fact that our tolerance for new experience often diminishes with age, because it happens no matter how much we swear we’ll never let it.

I like life to be ordered in such a way that I can navigate it at night without the lights on. Years of experience tell me where the doorways are and I never encounter unexpected objects on the floor.

Readers, too, crave the comfort of the familiar. That’s why form flourishes and particular genres attract millions of readers. The characters may change, but the arc of a mystery or thriller, the arrangements of the elements of a romance, are like the familiar nighttime bedroom. You can get around with your eyes closed.

And yet…

Edgar Allan Poe at 39. (Photo Credit: Wikipedia)

My imaginative life is far less restrained than my “real” life. (Though who’s to say which is which? If you subscribe to Poe’s vision, “All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream.”)

In my writing, I tiptoe up to—and over—the edge of the familiar. I am drawn to stories with odd forms, layers of revelation, circular structures, and non-traditional plot lines.

Maybe knowing I can count on the comfort and predictability of my daily life is exactly what allows me to twist and explode the familiar in fiction.

I seek thrills on the page, not just in the content of the story but in the container for the story. And believe me, playing with the container can lead to a dark, scary room where you don’t know the location of the furniture or even of the walls or the ceiling. Just ask William Faulkner, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf.

Up to the edge at the Grand Canyon. Thrilling–but don’t step back.

Readers: Do you crave the familiar? Are you willing to let a book take you somewhere utterly unknown—not only in terms of story, but in the way the story is told?

Writers: Do you experiment with form? Do you worry that your experiments will never never find as large an audience as traditional forms?

Read Bad Luck With Cats

My flash fiction piece Bad Luck with Cats went live today on Every Day Fiction. I hope you’ll read, enjoy, and pass it along!

What you don’t know won’t kill you

Tags

characters, journalism, magical realism, research, short story, storytelling, why we write

We’ve all heard the cliché “Write what you know.” Perhaps it’s a useful instruction to beginning writers so they don’t get distracted while learning the basics of craft. Beyond that, it seems silly.

My journalism training gave me the confidence to write about almost anything, as long as I was willing to do research. I wrote about a reclusive artist in upstate New York, wildlife in Connecticut, artificial intelligence, client/server databases, and data security schema. I later learned—what a revelation!—that fiction writers can do research too.

NOT ME running the 32 Mile Wyoming Ultramarathon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Since my first (unpublished) novel, my fiction has moved further and further away from autobiography. Lately, in my short fiction, I’ve felt particularly drawn to topics and characters I most decidedly don’t know—a homeless former musician in L.A., a retired schoolteacher, an ultramarathoner, ‘Seventies swingers.*

As I work on my latest story, which puts a magical realist twist on a tale of inner-city violence, I keep thinking, “I have no direct experience of poverty or racism. What right do I have to write about it?”

Maybe I have no right. Maybe, like my character, a middle-class white woman who becomes obsessed with helping a young black teenager, I’ll be harshly judged for taking my bleeding-heart viewpoints into a story setting where they have no business going.

NOT ME – Homeless on bench in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But I’m writing the story anyway. I’m writing it because it is about something I know: the emotional truths experienced by my characters. Fear, disappointment, all-consuming love, regret, alienation—these are truer than anything we can learn through research, and they’re what matter in storytelling.

I believe that, as fiction writers, we have not only a right but an obligation to tell stories about these emotional truths, using the enormous, mixed-up, unfathomable world as a canvas.

What rights and obligations do you think fiction writers have?

* My recent (NOT YET PUBLISHED) short stories include:

• “Everyone is Gone” – A retired schoolteacher finds love in the dollar store
• “Forget Me, Forget Me Not” – An ultramarathoner contemplates what she is running away from—and toward
• “Bad Luck with Cats” – An old woman’s life flashes before her, filled with cats
• “The Echo” – Homeless but hopeful in L.A.
• “Back After a Break to Discuss the Decline of Civilization” – ‘Seventies swingers grow up
• “Tiny Shoes Dancing” – A ballet performance crystallizes a mother/daughter struggle

Your pain is my gain

Tags

book knock-offs, book marketing, deception in marketing, ROW80 update, statistics

Who doesn’t love statistics?

Okay, maybe not everyone. But statistics can be exciting when they have immediate relevance, like the stats Word Press and other blogging tools offer. Thanks to those, I discovered that the search term people used most often to find my blog in the past year has been the phrase “pain assessment tool” or some variation thereof.

I know writing is painful, but what’s going on?

Back in July I wrote a post titled “My quest for a universal book-assessment tool.” It began by referencing the pain assessment scales used in the medical profession. Now more people have viewed that post than have viewed any other I’ve written, by a factor of more than three.

I have to guess that many of those visitors aren’t really interested in fiction writing.

Which got me thinking about marketing.

To thine own self stay true

“Why don’t you just give your book a title like Improve Your Sex Life in Three Easy Steps?” a friend asked when I described the challenges I’ve been having marketing Dance of Souls.

That might entice more hits to my web site and maybe even more book sales, but roping people in with a title that doesn’t match the content is the literary equivalent of putting a pig in an evening dress. If readers expect a date and end up with bacon, it’s unlikely they’ll come back for more books.

Maybe not the date you had in mind. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some people, of course, build their careers on deliberate deception. For example, there’s the book Steve Jobs by Isaac Worthington—NOT the bestselling author—and Thirty-Five Shades of Grey, unrelated to the steamy bestseller. On the Media discussed these and more on a show last summer.

Sometimes what seem to be small decisions—for example, the topics you cover in blog posts—can have big consequences. I’m not saying self-published authors need to become statisticians or market analysts. But after my pain experience, I will definitely think a little longer and harder about keywords and a title for my next novel. Just don’t expect Forty-Six Shades of Gray from me.

Have you ever felt betrayed by packaging?

ROW80 Update

Since finishing up a big project last week, I’ve done a fairly good job sticking to my 8 a.m. – 9 a.m. writing commitment. I still haven’t gotten back to my novel because for some reason, short fiction is calling me. I sent another short story off to a couple more markets (thanks, Duotrope), sent one to be edited, and started another.