Mark Trainer

Remember that person you knew in high school? The good-looking, smart and likable one? Years later you're amazed to find out he or she never partnered up with anyone.  The Facebook profile lists "relationships" as an interest among all the time-consuming hobbies and the endless lonely travel pictures and comments from married friends.  But that person seemed to have it all going for him?  What happened?

Now imagine that instead of a person, it's something you've written.  I have this short story that is the story (in my mind at least) all my other stories want to be.  I've sent it out for years, and each time it comes back: rejected to be sure, but always with a nicer note than the other rejected stories get.  My favorite was "Smart, warm, funny...not for us."

And as I dust this story off to send out yet again, I'm wondering if, as with some people, there's just something a little off-putting about it.  Maybe it's too eager to please, maybe it tries too hard.  Maybe its smile is a little forced.

"Thanks for a great read," went another rejection.  "Very funny piece."  This story is better than the ones that have found publication, in my mind.  What's the matter with you people?  They seem to wonder too.  The nice notes have a distinct whiff of the old "It's not you, it's me."  I'm starting to feel like one of those aging parents telling an adult child, "If they can't see what's beautiful about you, they don't deserve you!"

So soldier on, brave little story.  Someday love will find you!

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.

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.

Let's just agree that Wordle is a lot of fun.  This is the word cloud from my story collection.  When I pasted in the full manuscript, character names were among the biggest words.  That's probably not unusual, but I think my narrators and characters do use proper names a lot.  I then excluded character names. What else can I learn from this?  "Like," "looked," and "back" are in there a lot.  Do I use enough similes to have "like" loom so large? "Little," "just," "room"--can't draw any connections there.  Clearly "time" is much on my mind.  Maybe the biggest takeaway is that, to judge by my word cloud, I write with the vocabulary of a second-grader.

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.