by Erin Blakeslee, Editorial Assistant

Or a texting approach to the novel?  CBS Sunday Morning recently did a segment on the Cell Phone Novel, a new genre emerging in Japan and poised to gain in popularity worldwide.  Mobile-phone-wielding authors type their work using text-messaging programs, then upload their fiction to a number of different websites that allow any interested reader to download it, often in serialized form.  (After all, the average cell phone screen is half the size of a credit card!)

Though Cell Phone Novels are generally free-of-charge to download, Japanese consumers have proven willing to open their wallets for printed copies in the bookstores, buying hundreds of thousands of Cell Phone Novel books last year alone.  Some thumb-callused novelists have even seen their work adapted for the large and small screens.

It is exciting to see people discover creative-writing uses for new media: Now that busy Tokyo commute can be spent writing or reading a potential new literary masterpiece.  However, with the hefty standard text-messaging fees my cellular plan sticks me with, I think I'll stick with old-fashioned paper for the time being.

As the semester winds down and the student research papers pile on your desk, works cited pages reeking of wikipedia, just be glad that you're not responsible for the education of Lindsay Lohan.  The beloved Fug Girls have posted a copy of La Lohan's feisty little e-mail on their website, complete with revision suggestions.  The assigned grade?  D minus.  Go here to view.   

Today is the start of the oddly-shortened NaNoWriMo, which is described on its official website thusly:

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved [italics added].

I honestly don't know how I feel about this kind of thing, so I'm going to relate a little story that a professor told me in undergrad. It goes like this: Three men go golfing. Two of the men are writers and know each other, one being the other's mentor.  The third is a heart surgeon, and is just meeting the other two.  They introduce themselves, but the younger writer is a little embarrassed to admit to a doctor what he does for a living, writing novels. He explains that he's also a college teacher and administrator.

The older writer says simply, "I'm a novelist." 

The heart surgeon has a lot of questions about the "writing life," and reveals somewhere around the ninth hole that he has always harbored a secret desire to write a novel.  "I have this great idea, and I have all the characters," he says.  "One of these day, I'm just going to take a sabbatical, rent a cabin out in the woods, and just write." 

The younger of the writers encourages the surgeon, and listens for the next few holes as he describes his idea for a novel.  He asks questions to let the surgeon know he's interested.  He offers him advice on how to get his novel published once he writes it.  The elder writer is silent during all of this.  The three men finish their game.

As they're parting and shaking hands, the older writer, suddenly very animated, says to the heart surgeon, "You know, I've always had this idea that I was meant to be a surgeon.  I think I'd be pretty good at it.  I have all the tools and drugs and stuff.  One of these days, I'm just going to take six months off, rent a cabin out in the woods, and just cut people open.  Just get in there and dig around!"

Of course, the heart surgeon is pissed, and the younger writer is horrified, but the older novelist has got his point across: writing is a profession like any other, like medicine, and requires more than enthusiasm and a little time.

Now, I'm all for encouraging people, especially young people, to go into writing as a profession, but if things like time and effort scare you, then it's probably not for you.  There are dedicated, hard-working people who spend their whole lives writing.  They live and die writing.  It is a respectable profession, and assuming that anyone with a little time and a fleeting interest (they said it, not me) can do it well is disrespectful.

There is a notion that art is easy, that art is a trick.  Not hard work or a career path, like real jobs, just throwing something together at the last minute and calling it "art."  Art is, in fact, a stunning amount of work, and time-consuming to boot.  It is not nearly as much fun as the NaNoWriMo website says it is:

We love the fringe benefits accrued to novelists. For one month out of the year, we can stew and storm, and make a huge mess of our apartments and drink lots of coffee at odd hours. And we can do all of these things loudly, in front of people. As satisfying as it is to reach deep within yourself and pull out an unexpectedly passable work of art, it is equally (if not more) satisfying to be able to dramatize the process at social gatherings.

If you're writing to show off how tortured or eccentric you can be, you're probably writing for the wrong reasons, and you'll probably lose interest once you realize the "fringe benefits" don't even come close to outweighing the "time and effort involved." 

If you want to write a novel, write a novel (and hey, November's as good a time as any), but don't imagine that it's easy, or that you'll take to it like a duck to heart surgery.  To quote NaNoWriMo one last time: "Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap."

Jenny Diski has an interesting blog post up on Guardian today about how (brace yourself) writing isn't the best way to get rich quick. Diski writes about the the ever-popular "I have this great story; all I have to do is write it, watch it rise on the best-seller list, and book my first class ticket to Chicago to chat with Oprah about the writing process" daydream. Call it the Dan Brown daydream. Of course, this is all well and good. Yes, people often idealize, or overlook completely, the reality behind writing. As Diski puts it,

If you are literate (though it's getting to be a much less than universal ability) then, the thought goes, you can write a book. If you have a life, a mind that thinks, then you can write a book. Have story; will narrate. So my father thought, though he didn't actually put it to the test.

My problem with this blog post is not what she argues here (although my reaction does slightly fall in the "Tell Me Something I Don't Know" category). My problems come with what follows. Really with two very specific statements that follow.

Statement 1: Of her daydream-chasing father, Diski writes

Nowadays, he would have joined a creative writing course, that marvellous money-spinner for cash-strapped universities. It's always been the case that people will find a way to cash in on daydreams. What's new is that educational institutions are ripping off their students - customers, these days, like any other business. Buyer beware. You can take a narrative to a creative writing course, but you can't make it a fine novel.

Ah, the good ol' "MFA programs, who needs 'em?" argument that we're so fond of here at the Sycamore blog.  That's right, creative writing programs are for people who want to cash in on their daydreams of becoming bestselling novelists.  They couldn't possibly attract writers who are interested in honing their craft, or devoting a certain amount of time and hard work to developing their writing skills. 

Statement 2: Of writers in general:

Really the job of writing is for those, like myself, who are socially dysfunctional. I actually want to be on my own a lot. I hate parties. And I don't have the slightest desire to do any of the things that people seem to do when they are very rich (aside, of course, from not having to worry about money - though I suspect that the very rich have to worry about money more than I do).

Give me a break. Do we really need writers cultivating and encouraging the stereotype of the dark, brooding writer figure who can't function in normal society? Don't criticize people for romanticizing the writer's lifestyle with the Dan Brown daydream, and then feed me some crap about writing being for those who are "socially dysfunctional."

A while back, we posted the link to an NPR interview with Jonathan Franzen about his new memoir. One of the things he spoke of during the interview was the fact that, for the longest time, he felt really guilty and embarrassed in the literary world of the fact that he actually liked high school. He said

You wish you could point to this very cool disaffection, trauma even, that you’d been through, and in fact, all I had to say about myself was that I had a good time…I had a lot of friends, we did a lot of really fun things. In the literary environment, in the world I inhabit, that becomes this thing I feel I have to conceal.

I hate that notion that if you aren't two minutes away from sticking your head in the oven, or if you haven't at some point suffered through an emotionally disturbing, life-altering event, then you can't really be a writer.  And I also hate it even more that this is a misconception that is perpetuated from within the literary world.  It's not even practical, really.  As Diski points out, " most writers don't even earn an unsupplemented living."  That supplemental job for many writers is within the academic world.  And it doesn't pay to be socially dysfunctional in the academic world.  Eccentric?  Sure.  Socially dysfunctional?  Not so much.  Berryman was fired from Iowa pretty damn quickly because of his, umm, "social dysfunctions."  And it pays even less to be socially dysfunctional if you venture outside of academia for that supplemental income.       

Do writers have weird problems and social issues?  Sure.  But hey, so do most people.  And one of those problems shouldn't be having to worry about being labeled as socially dysfunctional by people in your own field, or, worse, being looked down upon by other writers because you've somehow managed to *gasp* lead a relatively happy, normal life as a functioning member of society.  And as for Diski's claim that writers don't like parties?  Well that's just plain silly. 

Read Diski's post here.           

Emily Barton has written a piece for the New York Times about Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer that picks up the same tired, old misconceptions about creative writing programs and leaves them flopping on your porch like an unwanted gift from your pet cat.  Rehashed right down to the bewildering Kafka example I already addressed in this piece, the only real advice that Barton gleans from Prose's book is "it helps to read the masters," something which goes without saying.  While decrying the lack of useful writing manuals, Barton neglects to mention perhaps the most widely used, Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction (although she does mention Gardner), deciding instead to criticize E.M. Forster and Strunk & White, neither of whom are all that integral to C.W. pedagogy these days (certainly not as integral as Burroway, who cites from both).

Perhaps the lowest blow Barton deals comes when she quotes Prose's suggestion that a writer may need to change the way they think about reading until "you see reading as something that might move or delight you."

"Delight?" says Barton. "As a student, I rarely heard the word mentioned..."

Oh, you poor thing.  School is hard.  Required reading isn't fun.  I apologize on behalf of the institution of college.

I don't mean to sound angry.  My argument is not really with Barton or Prose, but with the conventional wisdom that says creative writing programs are self-indulgent at best and, at worst, make bad writers.  This has not been my experience, and as Porter points out, you can't throw a rock in the bookstore without hitting someone who has benefited a great deal from their time in workshop.  Even "bad" workshops give a writer a ready-made audience and an opportunity to see and critique the work of other interested amateurs.  Can someone with a podium please say something nice about workshop?  I'd appreciate it.

[/end rant]