Mark Trainer

Remember how aspiring writers used to deal with agents?  You'd mail them something, wait for a letter in response, maybe even talk to them on the phone (usually exactly once).  They were pretty distant characters to the writer sitting down to work with the morning cup of coffee in Anytown, USA. 

But oh, how the times have changed.  It's not even 9:30 in the morning and Betsy Lerner has already given me thoughts on finding the perfect title for my book, Nathan Bransford is ready to show me exactly how he appraises a query letter, and Rachel Gardner has thoughts on making writing your lifestyle, not just a sideline hobby.  Or you can get their thoughts in 140-character chunks on Twitter.

Seems to me this can only be a good thing.  A few months of glancing at agent blogs have told me more about what agents actually do than I learned in the previous 20 years of writing. 

A caveat, though, if you write and you're considering entering this literary corner of the Internet:  Agents' blog entries come in three flavors: 1) purely practical 2)artsy/inspirational and 3)tough love.  Now you might be the kind of writer who's looking for all three of these all the time--I am not.  Mornings, I like a comfy layer of #2 with a light sprinkling of #1.  I do best with #3 in the afternoons, at which time #2 is repellent to me.  And late in the evenings #3 becomes the cudgel with which I beat myself.  Now if you're talking Twitter, you never know which you're going to get when--and that can be a problem.  You don't necessarily want a hard reality check interspersed with Shit My Dad Says and your friends' news of cute things their kids do.

My advice?  Make all this agent wisdom a font to which you journey with your little writer bucket as you need it--don't turn on the tap in your office and let it pour forth all day.  No RSS feeds telling you about your favorite agent's latest post.  And those Twittering agents?  Unfollow them, then corral them all into a Twitter list that you can call up at will when you're ready.  When you're struggling with your manuscript and you break down to go check Twitter, you don't need to hear exactly how paltry your chances of selling that thing are anyway.  Oh yeah, and don't check Twitter and blogs when you should be writing...

There's a well known problem with making movies about a writers.  All sorts of interesting things may have happened in a writer's life, but the essential part of what makes him or her interesting--the writing--is an excruciating bore to watch.  You just can't make it visually engaging, no matter where you put the camera, no matter what meaningful utterances the writer lets slip.  You end up with something along the lines of the above video.  Worse still is the Inspiration Cheat: Artillery shells give soldier Cole Porter (as played by Cary Grant) the idea for the driving rhythm of "NIght and Day;" W.S. Gilbert staring profoundly at a samurai sword as he conceives of The Mikado in the otherwise wonderful Topsy Turvy.  I don't think the viewer has to be a writer to cringe at these moments with the certain knowledge that it just doesn't work that way.

But I'm increasingly realizing this problem isn't limited to writers in movies.  These days, it's traces are all over the pages of writers on Facebook, their Twitter streams, and, yes, especially their blogs.  Writers have more ways to keep their names in people's minds.  To "build the brand," if you will.(Please don't.)  It's easy to mistake what the immediacy of these tools offers for something that will further illuminate work we admire.  Instead, what you get is a hint of the author's taste in online articles, maybe her politics or his taste in music.  if you're lucky, you might discover that that writer you hold in such high esteem likes that silly cat video that's been going around your office as much as you do.  At worst, you suffer through excessive self-promotion and/or self-mythologizing.  The greatest compliment I can pay to nearly all the writers whose online presence I follow is that I enjoy their books a lot more than the digital breadcrumb trail left by their tweets, entries, and status updates.


Oh yeah, but don't let that stop you from reading this blog--it's friggin' fantastic.

So maybe the short story is dead, or maybe it's the hottest thing this season.  But here's a writer who gets the most out of the form and probably doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about the market and his platform.

Jones spent 10 years creating nearly all of his Pulitzer-winning, antebellum-era novel, "The Known World," in his head, until he finally set it all down on paper in a three-month rush in 2001 after being laid off from his job at a tax publication. "The Waiting Room" is still locked up tight in his mind, though he dictates the opening and closing three times in a row, down to the dashes and commas, without so much as blinking.

Here in Washington, dumping on the beleaguered Washington Post seems to be a favorite pastime.  But this profile of Edward Jones is a rare convergence of a subject worthy of profiling, a journalist up to the task of doing it right, and a paper willing to give a good story enough room.

I've not read James Ellroy, but this interview by my friend Jon Fasman has me primed. What an intriguing manner Ellroy has: the deliberate tone, the halting emphasis, the bow tie, for god's sake.  I know it's all about the writing, but I wish there were more authors who had Ellroy's sense of odd panache.  You used to see Truman Capote and Norman Mailer acting weird on talk shows.  I miss those days.

I moved to D.C. when my daughter was three weeks old, so I'm discovering the arts culture of the city somewhat slower than I might have otherwise.  But a reading of the work of Eleanor Ross Taylor last night took me to the Arts Club of Washington.  Near GW, the club is in an historic Georgian building that dates to the beginning of the 19th century.  After Monroe was inaugurated, the building briefly served as the executive residence--a mini-White House in Foggy Bottom.

The Arts Club was founded in 1916 and hosts a bunch of great musical and literary events with a wide variety of new art on display.  Their Web site has all the info.  Worth your attention, fellow DCers.

I suppose Trollope has become the patron saint of writerly productivity.  His daily schedule annoyed his contemporary critics, who thought the muse did not visit those who waited for her on a schedule.  (This opinion remains popular among undergraduates--at least the ones who took my workshops.)

But what's on my mind this morning is something I read a few years ago.  As we all know, Trollope wrote his allotted three hours EVERY day.  Was it from 5 in the morning until 8 or 6 to 9?  But apparently when he finished a novel manuscript at, say, 8:45, he would turn the page and write "Chapter One," and be off on his new novel for his remaining fifteen minutes of writing.

Now that my story collection is finished (it is finished, right?), I'm trying to get something else underway--something novel-like.  And all these Trollope questions come rushing back to me.  Did he outline anything?  Did he ever just stare at the wall and wonder how this or that strand of the plot could be made to work?  Maybe he did that at the post office  when he was supposed to be working.

So here's one of those things I cheer myself up by rereading now and then. 

The literary interview is traditionally a minefield of agonizing pretensions for both the interviewer and interviewee--authors get to wax bombastic about the mystic well from which they draw their inspiration, and their interlocutors allow themselves gassy questions about the author's place, as they see it, in the literary firmament.

In 2005, Bookslut published this interview with poet Richard Hell (of Voidoids fame) by Adam Travis.  While the interview itself is worthwhile reading, Hell's annotations of Travis' introduction are the real draw.  Hell comes out swinging at--what seems to me, at least--a fairly representative example of the interview intro.

My wife and I can still get a laugh from each other paraphrasing Hell's salvo in response to Travis' opening line:

     If Richard Hell had died fifteen years ago he would only be remembered for his essential contribution to the beginnings of punk rock in New York in the 1970s. No small feat, I’d say.  You would? You'd say? You would say? You'd say both those things? You? Mr. Adam Travis?

And infinite credit must be given to Adam Travis for having the stones to publish the interview with Hell's comments intact.

The pages on this site bring together examples of the two kinds of writing I've been doing over the last couple of years.  On the one hand, there are the stories.  I've been writing fiction for a long time, but the idea for this collection came from the what seemed to me a dearth of stories about fathers in the here and now, modern fathers warts and all.

On the other hand, thanks to a friendly editor at The Washington Post, I've become sort of a go-to guy for modern-dad essays (see the nonfiction page).

In one way, this seems like a logical combination.  But part of me worries that if the Post folks read these stories they'll wish they'd never asked me to write in a semi-authoratative voice about parenting. 

Encapsulations of a few Bad Daddies stories:

• The college-age son of an arrogant blowhard catches him at his secret cross-dressing habit.
• Fathers at a children's birthday party try to outdo each other in tearing down each others' wives and children.
• A man feeling pressure to start a family finds the father of three who lives down the block masturbating in his garage.

Not exactly Family Circle material.  And in spite of the collection's name, I don't consider most of these guys to be bad people--bad fathers, maybe. (I'm reminded of the wizard saying to Dorothy and her friends, "I'm not a bad man, just a bad wizard.")  The idea was to find outward--and yeah, maybe extreme--manifestations of conflicts that are hiding in ordinary parent/child relationships.

So expect to see posts here on both the real-world parents of nonfiction and the maybe-even-more-real parents of fiction.

Peter Taylor won the Pulitzer for A Summons to Memphis, but he was at his best in his short stories.  The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor is out in a new edition on August 18, and you could do worse for a desert-island selection.

I worked for PT for a few years before his death in 1994.  Most of what I learned from him was indirect: how he thought about stories, what revision meant to him, etc.  But he did have a few tricks up his sleeve.  I just wrote about one of them in my friend Christina Baker Kline's blog.