Torture Your Protagonist

Writing advice from Janet Fitch, whose White Oleander is one of my (and Oprah's) favorite freaky women's fiction novels. This is the piece that spoke the most to conflict-avoidant moi"

10. Torture your protagonist.
The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.

Read the rest of Janet Fitch's 10 rules for writers, at LA Times' Jacket Copy.

URL change/update

Hi to my readers from the great state of Vermont, where I'm immersed in my ten-day prose reading and writing extravaganza. I'm having a truly amazing time, and will detail more later--but suffice it to say that it's mind-blowing for this Harvard grad to be surrounded by people who are serious and brilliant but not particularly competitive. I'm a bit bewildered, to be honest, at the lack of backstabbing, but I could get used to it.

I realize I owe my faithful readership a lot of book reviews: Alice Munro, Guernsey Literary, and the new Sookie. And the New Yorker fiction issue. I will try to return to regular blogging upon my return.

Oh, and this blog has moved: the new URL is egalitarianbookworm.blogspot.com. The RSS feed should be the same, and the redirect from sarahmselter.com. But if you're not getting updates, please re-subscribe here.

And ALSO, I'm tumbling a lot more these days. It's pretty random and occasionally personal stuff, but should you be interested it's fellowette.tumblr.com.

Til we next meet!

Two bookish blog-posts by yours truly

Can a Baby-Sitters Club Compete With Gossip Girls, Vampires and Our Memories? A BSC Fan Investigates (Essay) - Speakeasy - WSJ

But can the re-issued books, and the new prequel, live up to such vaunted memories? And the question on everyone’s mind: are these homework-completing heroines too innocent for today’s adrenaline and bitchiness-bred young readers?

PBS's Anne Frank and the Heroine Canon – The Sisterhood – Forward.com

For many young readers around the world, Anne Frank fits perfectly into the “heroine canon,” a long list of young adult and classic adult novels with feisty, introspective women at their core.

Snowpocalypse De-Lurk--What Are You Reading?

Dearest readers. It's been a wild week and the wildness should continue for a while. I've been doing various betrothal-related errands, I caught Cathleen Schine's reading at Barnes and Noble, I had to finish all my work by Weds because I was due to serve a deadly boring period of voir-dire free jury duty (which I did, and it gave me a migraine), I attended a loud, late, fun pop concert which may have contributed to said migraine, I stressed out about the figure skaters and skiiers each night (seriously, the Olympics are not good for blood pressure), and although I happily got another MFA acceptance, I know that after the acceptances (and then the silences that equal rejection) comes my decision and so that very slight, but persistent pressure is mounting. Oh, and we've been hit with the most insane snowstorm yet! I was hoping for a weekend of skiing to purify my soul and perfect my technique, but it looks like conditions are keeping us stranded in the city.
Sigh.

Still, these manic periods in la vie moderne have a fun quality to them--they're exciting, they make you feel alive. So much is happening, you sort of have to surrender control. And I've been reading wonderfully inspiring literature throughout it all. I read a great review book for PW that is very EBC-ish and am now making my slow, tear-stained way through Jhumpa Lahiri's first published book, her Pulitzer winning collection of stories Interpreter of Maladies.

If there's one contemporary writer I want to be like, it's definitely she. Some day in the distant future, after my MFA program and the cruel realities of adult life have honed my blunt, youthful pen to a fine-tipped edge, I'd like to see myself as a Jewish Lahiri with a tiny bit of a satirical touch.

I love her writing because its brilliance lies in directness and honest rather than rhetorical flourish. Her style is so unobtrusive that 'we're launched right into the worlds of her character and often forget the conceit. She isn't afraid to "tell" us what her characters are feeling as well as showing us. She valiantly confronts the awful things in life like death and infidelity and bitter disappointment, but she does it lovingly, not cruelly. I just can't rave about her enough.

So what are you reading beneath these sleety, snowy drifts of weather and of life? Come check in with your harried blogstress and share.

Rules for Writing:

The Guardian gives us a series of lists, all of "rules" for writers elicited from famous authors, each of whom has listed 8 or 10 cardinal principles they write by, both mundane and profound, serious and amusing. Among the gems:

• Margaret Atwood says: Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
• Zadie Smith says: try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
• Hillary Mantel says: Be aware that anything that appears before "Chapter One" may be skipped. Don't put your vital clue there.

UPDATE: The New Yorker's Book Bench skims the list and comes up with some more great rules.

UPDATE 2: An attentive EBC reader who may or may not be sitting five feet from me asked me what MY rules for writing are. I'm still figuring them out, to be honest, which is a big and exciting and daunting part of the journey I'm on right now. But one of them may be "read other writers' rules for writing" ;)

My revision process--in vlog form!

So here is my first vlog (yes, I'm imitating you, my numerous blogging buddies who have started vlogging in recent weeks/months), wherein I talk about the part of the writing process I'm now in--revisions. So with lots of awkward hair-fussing and eye-rolling, (and no script) I discuss handing out the manuscript to my Beta readers, copy edits, and my favorite part of the process--the adverb hunt! Whee. This is an experiment, so the transitions were abrupt and the whole thing went perhaps a bit too long, but it was soo fun to play with and the editing and filming process will be on its path to perfection the next time I try it.




Oh, and a special shout-out to Simon, whom I omitted in my list of beta readers because I'm a moron and forgot he's really an alpha reader, in that he's always the first person to look at every draft after me.

Introducing... My WIP. My plans for next year.

As you guys may have noticed, I'm constantly muttering asides about writing conferences and wanting to be a writer. Well as I mentioned a few weeks back, part of my New Year's resolution has been to own my identity as an aspiring novelist more fully, so here come a few announcements for those who care to hear them :)

1-I am writing a novel. It's called "French Lessons" and it's a loose modern re-working of "Persuasion," set in France during the Bush years with a put-together on the outside, confused on the inside young woman as its protagonist. Over the course of a summer backpacking throughout her adopted country with a band of merry expats, Annie has to face some truths about her love life, her future, and the reasons she's left home so far behind. Oh and her two love interests are a roguish French intellectual and an earnest American blogger ;)

2-I am enrolling in an MFA program next year. Right now, it looks very strongly like I'll be attending the well-regarded, and bucolically-situated low-res MFA at VCFA, because it's a top choice of mine and they accepted me! (YAY). What that means is I'll be around as usual and continuing to freelance, but also corresponding with my faculty mentor throughout each semester and attending two intense residencies each year in Montpelier, VT, (right near my favorite ski mountain, Stowe and home to the New England Culinary Institute. Uh-huh).

3-I'm currently in the middle of an umpteenth round of revisions on the aforementioned novel, and I'm hopefully going to describe that process in either a video blog or a post coming up.

And that's all for now. Time to geek out watching the Olympics, the sporting event for nerds.

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Reading, writing, life goals for 2010

It's a little late for this, but here goes.

In 2010, my HLP and I are going to be affirming our love in the most conventional, legal, Jane-Austen novel/Shakespeare Comedy-ending-ish of ways imaginable (but our celebration itself is going to be laid back and unconventional, although I believe it will involve eating, drinking, and being merry and inheriting a small parsonage on Colonel Brandon's estate ).

I'm hoping that that lovely occasion in my personal life will also be joined by some leaps in my literary life.

I really to take more steps to get my own fiction-writing in ship-shape. That involves revising, writing A LOT more, studying craft, and eventually submitting my work for the wide world's approval or disapproval. That also means being more honest and open with myself about the fact that this is a serious goal of mine, not just a hobby that I hope will work out.

And as for reading? I want to read the following books: Brave New World, Native Son, Barchester Towers, a bunch of short stories by Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore, at least two more irritating male mid-century American novels (Rabbit, Portnoy, etc) and two Shakespeare histories. I would really love to read more Latin American women-penned fiction, Allende, Cisneros, etc. I also have my Bronte challenge to look forward to, and the next Sookie Stackhouse book. And I'd like to read a Georgette Heyer regency romance for fun. And lastly, of course, a few more Pulitzer-winners from the last couple of decades as well as any new books that rock the literary world.

What are your 2010 goals, friends-of-EBC?

Question of the NaNoWriMo Weekend: What are you writing?

I'm not furiously writing a new novel this month--still revising the old one (yet again) and trying to come up with a new batch of freelance journalism pitches to take me through the holidays.

But what about you guys? I know I have some NaNoWriMoers in the audience, and I know that a lot of you are also working on personal writing projects, whether it's journals, blogs, theses, poetry or fiction. So here's your chance to tell us how your scribbling is going.

Good luck!

PS for those who haven't, I recommend joining the new social network for female writers, www.shewrites.com. And be my friend!

Back from the beaches...

(Welcome to my new subscribers, tweeps, friend-feeders, well-wishers and ill-wishers.)

While I was away getting sunburned and slogging through Moby Dick, two of my literary articles were published, and here they are. The first is an overview of women's fiction, memoir, biography and non-fiction, while the second is an analysis of several feminist books. I alluded to this upcoming project earlier this year :)

COVER STORY: Women's Writing Fires Up Summer Reading Lists

This year's literary output by women offers plenty of heft for the summer tote bags. From sensational memoirs to serious sociology, check out what women are writing about and the prizes they've been snapping up so far in 2009...

from Women's eNews - Jun 14, 2009 6:00 AM

New Feminist Books Offer Multifaceted Critique of Culture Wars

This spring and summer have been remarkable ones for books about sex, gender and reproduction -- the avid women's issues reader has been up to her ears in provocative feminist tomes. What's amazing about the books discussed below is not just the powerful arguments they make individually, but the way they together paint a complete picture of our culture wars at home and abroad...

from Reproductive Health | RHRealityCheck.org - Information, News, An - Jun 15, 2009 10:13 AM

It's Been A While, Readers

I'm inspired to blog again after a few fallow weeks because the school year is winding down, the heat is cranking up, and I spent the past few days at the Backspace Writer's Conference where I spent time with the lovely Debbie of Write on Target.

Presenters included John Searles, who is the Books editor at Cosmo, David Morell, who wrote the first Rambo novel, and most pertinent to this blog, the amazing Jerry Gross, who invented** "The Gothic Romance" and the "Regency Romance" as paperback categories--what a genius! He explained to us the "formula" for Gorthic Romance covers, and I did a little google image searching to reveal that he was totally right. Check these out and see what they have in common, and which famous works of fiction they all allude to!

(images from mysteryfile.com, flickr.com, kleinletters.com, biblio.com)

**UPDATE I forgot to tell you the story of HOW he invented this category. Basically, he found a dog-eared, lovingly re-read copy of Rebecca on his mom's bedside. She said "they don't make em like this anymore," and a lightbulb went off above his head. the end!

It was a fun conference for me because I am knee-deep in revisions on my current WIP (I hope to be waist-deep later in the week) so I didn't need to shmooze editors or anything like that, but just soak up the words of wisdom and get psyched for this whole writing thing.

We heard some inspirational panels from writers who had gotten the nastiest kinds of rejections early on in their careers, but persevered and blah blah blah.

How have you all been doing? Any of my regular readers also dabble in fiction-writing? Anyone long to see this gothic romances back in print?

Housekeeping/Self-Promotion

I updated my sidebar to include some stuff related to my non-blogging writing career. You can see it by scrolling down or clicking here. (It may take a minute to load, re-click if it doesn't). Basically, I included a subscription box for my newsletter (which has yet to have been ever sent out at all and will be sent out rarely, I promise) and a list of my published pieces that have a literary/cultural/feminist/EBC bent (so my news reporting on school board meetings is, thankfully, kept far from this site ;)

Feel free to sign up, follow the links, or completely ignore this post and wait for the next Austen or Dickens tidbit.

On Writing

On Writing by Stephen King

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stephen King's personality appeals so very much to me. I like his brash forthrightness, his meaty language, his emotional immediacy and wisdom about the human (particularly the American human) condition. But I sometimes can't take all the supernatural violence in his novels. So it was such a pleasure to dip into this book and read about King's rather hardscrabble but loving upbringing in industrial towns throughout new england, his philosophies on the writing process and his very sweetly-enduring love for his wife, Tabitha.

From his vignettes about being a young teenager and writing zombie stories that he sold to his classmates you really get such an incredible sense that this was his destiny.

It also helped remind me, in my secret life as an aspiring fiction writer, to really work on chopping out my adverbs and passive constructions in my work. And he stresses the importance of really prioritizing your work, having a good space to work in and treating yourself as though your writing matters, all of which are really crucial elements to success, both on a personal and professional level.

All in all, as good as it's cracked up to be!

View all my reviews.

Anyone have a rec for another good King novel to read? I'm tempted by Salem's Lot and Carrie.

Vampires

So this is a bit late due to Thanksgiving and the subsequent shock of going back into work full steam ahead with a turkey-hangover, but here's a piece I wrote about the literary/cultural history of vampires as symbols of socio-sexual anxieties.

---

With immortality, a killer instinct, and a life on the fringes, Vampires are a perfect conduit for musings on the human condition. "Vampires have long served to remind us of the parts of our own psyches that seduce us," writes Salon's Laura Miller (in a superb analysis of the Twilight books). But the metaphor is often less existential than that, as the vampire bite is easy shorthand for sex. Vampirism allows consumers to take vicarious pleasure in rule-breaking couplings, while also justifying phobias about sex-because the seducers do have lethal fangs, and their condition is quite contagious.

---

It was reprinted at Huffpo + Alternet and generated quite a bit of fang-tastic discussion (sorry) at the latter site and pickup around the web.

The Writing Life, part 1 bilion

So I'm currently working on four pieces: a profile of a prominent academic and writer, a reported story on reproductive health issues in the Obama transition process, a news story about school zoning on the Upper West Side, and I'm sowing the seeds on a piece on vampires in pop culture as repositories for socio-sexual anxieties (just guess which one I'm most excited by?). Anyway, it's funny because I have all these documents open, and I keep getting phone calls and depending on the identity of the caller, having to shuffle frantically between pages with phrases on them like "playground facilities" and "working parents" and "democratic party platform" and "black women's experience in America" and "Lestat." The combination is giving me quite the absurdist outlook on all these topics.

On deck, along with Lestat and Buffy and Edward Cullen, is a profile of a prominent children's theater. Coherence much?

NaNoWriMo

So I'm doing NaNoWriMo. There's absolutely no way I'll make it to 50,000 words by next Friday as I'm only just over a tenth of the way there, I didn't start til the 11th, and I'm not 100% committed to my project. I have another writing project that is more polished, and needs more polishing, and then selling, but I don't want to have all my eggs in one basket. Plus!! it's fun to put some of that post-election creative energy into something, well, creative.

My novel takes elements from Edith Wharton and sets them in a NYC prep school. It's totally depressing, but also kind of a fun exercise, and also an exorcism of those prep-school demons that DO get in the way of other literary endeavors for us grads of such traumatizing institutions. Unless we're named Curtis Sittenfield.




As you can see, there's a widget here and on the side of my blog showing my meager progress. If anyone wants to be my buddy, this is my page.

Happy writing!

Come on Be A Follower!

A few updates from fellow-ette land.

I'd just be so tickled (if you have a blogger account) if you'd become a follower of my blog. I'll follow yours! It can be like middle school! All followers, and all miserable.

Also, if you have a chance, check out my new website design: I did it myself using basic (basic basic basic) html, but I think it looks rather nice.

And if you miss my ramblin' and rantin' about politics on this blog, here's a roundup of my recent published work on the subject.

The freelance writer-cum-educator life is killing me right now. At the moment, I'm stressing out about the following stories:

• local news story on school overcrowding (this may be the most complex of all. Seriously--school rezoning?)
  
• several profiles of female leaders including some biggish names
• A political piece on election ads relating to reproductive rights
• A book review of a long, depressing book that is headed towards an unhappy ending :(
• A slew of new students, out of the blue!
  

These are all reasons to give me some love!! Comment, and be included in my new comment widget. Follow me, and be included in my new follower widget.

Or ignore me while I type my poor fingers to the bone. That's aight too.

O, The Writing Life

I just came back from my first ever (creative, not journalistic) writers' conference, the Algonkian NYC Pitch and Shop extraveganzapalooza. I won't immediately say it was my first and last, but it's going to be a while before I hit another one. It was freaking exhausting.

But I did meet a genuinely lovely group of fellow writers (all women--the sexist pigs smooshed us into the same group ;)) and get some good tips...

I was the baby of the group, and the least far along the magical path of publication--meaning I haven't even left my doorstep yet. Which was actually a great spot to be in, because I felt like I was just absorbing the wisdom of my sisters in penning.

So we'll see what the future holds. For now, back to the freelance grind!

My Official Freelance Writer Website is (sort of) Up and Runnin'

check it out. You like, you hate, you're amused by the tone of amateurish cheekiness that pervades my online presence?

Let me know. Or don't. Suit yourself, readers fair.

/F-ette.