How many novelists in the United States?

Dominic Smith estimates that the United States has more than a million novelists, but that number pales on a per capita basis with Iceland, where approximately 10% of the population publishes a novel. Smith uses a number of intriguing statics to reach his estimate.

If only there were enough readers!

So you want to be a writer?

Are you ready to chuck your staid career to embark on a life as a novelist? Ready to switch your major from accounting to creative writing? Vanessa Barbara, writing in the Times, suggests that you understand what you're getting into:

Let me give you some personal numbers. I wrote a book in 2008 that won a literary prize and recently sold its 3,000th copy. The book retails for around $15, the author’s royalty rate is 5 percent, so I earned $0.75 from each copy. So for the book that took me one year to write and four more years to sell, I earned a total of around $2,250 (and a bout of depression). I’d have done better donating my body to science.

Although she is specifically describing her experience as a writer in Brazil, I can attest that circumstances are not much better for writers in America, so know what you're getting into if you'd like to be a writer!

Boning up in the boneyard.

Want to become a novelist? Live next to a graveyard.

So saith Allan Gurganus in the Times. Makes sense to me!

When fiction and news collide. . .

What do you do when the novel you’ve been writing for years is suddenly rendered irrelevant by current events? As Michael David Lukas says, writing in the Times, do you accept the new reality, which might even mean scrapping the work you’ve done, or do you ignore what’s changed and continuing writing a novel that's now set in the past?

 There’s no one “correct” answer, of course.

Do clothes make the man?

Lee Siegel, writing in the Times, has some interesting observations about how fiction writers can reveal character through the clothes that they give to their creations. But after citing many examples from classic literature (from The Illiad to Ulysses), he argues that fashion doesn't seem as vital to contemporary novelists. As he points out:

A world of difference exists, however, between Fitzgerald’s very deliberate portrait of Gatsby wearing “a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie” when he meets Daisy again after many years, and, say, Jennifer Egan’s casual description of a character dressed in “black cords and a white button-up shirt” in her brilliant novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.”

Gatsby is wearing the novel’s themes: white as the fantasy of self-remaking without the blemishes of the past; silver and gold the currency-tinged colors of an impossible happiness. Egan’s character is simply wearing clothes.

He concludes that today’s fiction is a reflection of today’s society: Just as we often pay little attention to the clothes that we wear in real life as we buy them off the rack from chain stores, our novelists pay little attention to the clothes that their characters wear.

Siegel's essay reminds me of what Mark Twain had to say on this topic:

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Pet words

Brad Leithauser has an entertaining essay on The New Yorker’s blog site about pet words. As he points out, a writer’s pet words can reveal a great deal about his mind works. In Joseph Conrad’s fiction, for example, the word “impenetrable” crops up again and again, which makes sense because, for Conrad, much about human nature remained inexplicable.

For Leithauser, one of his own pet words is “level”:

The word “level” belongs on the own list of my twenty favorite words. I love it because it so fittingly embodies its own definition. Could any word possibly look more level than “level”? It’s not merely a palindrome. It’s also all but bilaterally symmetrical—legibly itself if written on a pane of glass and read from the other side. In its perfection, it’s hard to believe it was arrived at through the random evolution of everyday speech and wasn’t an architect or engineer’s construction: it’s a Logos that might serve, in its balanced stolidity, as a firm foundation for a philosophical system, and I felt that I was off to an auspicious start when I snuck “level” into the first paragraph of this essay.

I suppose one of my own pet words is “undoubtedly,” which seems to give some certainty in an uncertain world. Or maybe I’m just especially conscious of this word because, for years, I confused it with “undoubtably.”

At any rate, I use it frequently. Undoubtedly.

Likable characters?

Should writers create "likable characters" for their readers? Two novelists, Mohsin Hamid and Zoe Heller, debate this question. Hamid reframes the question, asking:

Perhaps, in the widespread longing for likable characters, there is this: a desire, through fiction, for contact with what we’ve armored ourselves against in the rest of our lives, a desire to be reminded that it’s possible to open our eyes, to see, to recognize our solitude — and at the same time to not be entirely alone.

Heller suggests, however, that the question is an important one that needs to be answered. Although she's not wholly comfortable with the idea that readers need to "like" fictional characters, she concedes that readers do need to care about them:

Other fictional characters may invite or accommodate more complex responses, but most authors aim to engender some species of readerly empathy for their protagonists. It’s not necessary to “like” Hamlet, but if we’re so repelled by his treatment of that sweet girl, Ophelia, that we withdraw all sympathetic interest in his dilemmas, then the play is unlikely to mean much to us.

A slumgullion of new words

Kate Manning, writing in the Times, offers a plea for reinvigorating your voice by resurrecting archaic words:

By perusing period novels, magazines, advice books, letters, medical texts and sermons, contemporary novelists can conjure up a fresh narrative voice not only out of the vocabulary of bygone days, but from the rhythms of speech, the values of an era. A 19th-century “swell” is not going to speak the “secret language of crime,” but will have his own “vocabulum,” one that will reflect a worldview. 

Writing outside?

Carol Kaufman recommends writing outside as a way to get the creative juices flowing. It's not just fewer distractions or more quiet, however. As she points out:

Nature immersion also helps us feel alive. Another series of studies published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 2010 concluded that being in nature made people feel energetic and less lethargic, all essential ingredients for writing stories that exude telling details and narrative tension. After all, you just can’t tell a good story when half asleep.

Anyone for a lit crawl?

Now here's a brilliant idea: the Lit Crawl. I think I'll build my next vacation around the one in London:

Ms. Russo, who heads the Manhattan and Brooklyn crawls, is one such veteran. Another is Mette Risa, an organizer of last weekend’s London Lit Crawl, a slate of seven events sprinkled through Soho and Covent Garden. To Ms. Risa, the only question about a Lit Crawl in London was why it hadn’t happened before.

“I think it’s the most obvious city for a Lit Crawl,” she said. “People love pubs. People love books.”

After all, what's better than a pint of beer and arguing about your favorite authors?

Messy creativity?

The argument is that a messy environment is a better stimulus to creativity. A few novelists and poets that I've known have had neat and orderly offices, but most of them work in offices that should be condemned as health hazards: leftover food and half-drunk cups of coffee, stacks of books and reams of paper threatening to topple over, dog or cat hair floating through the air.

When people ask me why I never became the novelist that I wanted to be, I reply, "I realized that I had nothing to say."

Maybe the problem is that I can't stand to have anything out of place? That I literally can't concentrate if the books are out of order in my bookcase?

Evolution and writing

Is there an evolutionary advantage to being a good novelist? Yes, argues Jennifer Vanderbes in The Atlantic. In fact, the ability to tell stories vividly (and to read them sensitively) offers a number of advantages:

Let’s look first at survival: Among the many things that set humans apart from other animals is our capacity for counterfactual thinking. At its most basic level, this means we can hypothesize what might happen if we run out of milk; in its most elaborate form—we get War and Peace. Stories, then, are complex counterfactual explorations of possible outcomes: What would happen if I killed my landlady? What would happen if I had an affair with Count Vronsky? How do I avoid a water buffalo? According to Denis Dutton, these “low-cost, low-risk” surrogate experiences build up our knowledge stores and help us adapt to new situations. (“Mirror neuron” research indicates that our brains process lived and read experiences almost identically.)  A good “cautionary tale," for example, might help us avert disaster. Stories can also provide useful historical, scientific, cultural and geographical information. Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines illustrates this on two tiers: In armchair-travel fashion, the book acquaints readers with the Australian Outback, while simultaneously describing how Aboriginals sang stories walking at a specific pace so that geographical markers within the story would guide their journey.

In addition to travelogues, stories also offer nuanced thought maps. An imaginative foray into another person’s mind can foster both empathy and self-awareness. This heightened emotional intelligence might, in turn, prove useful when forming friendships, sniffing out duplicity, or partaking in the elaborate psychological dance of courtship ...

The rhythm method

Putting aside the fact that he admires two lousy writers (William F. Buckley Jr. and Tom Wolfe), Roy Peter Clark makes a good point in today’s Times when he argues the power of short sentences to make a point. But it’s not short sentences in isolation that are effective. No, it’s when they are in contrast to longer sentences that, in effect, have worked to set them up. Like diamonds glistening upon black velvet, these short sentences then stand apart and leave lasting impressions on their readers. It’s the rhythm method.

How Brian Doyle became a writer

Brian Doyle offers some useful tips about how to become a writer in this brief essay in The American Scholar.

Thanks for not asking

So your friend mentions, in passing, that he’s started working on a new novel. You’re curious, so you want to ask, “What’s it about?” But, you think, maybe that’s too forward, and so you decide to keep quiet. A few seconds later, however, you worry that if you don’t ask, your friend will think you’re a jerk who can’t be bothered to care. So you resolve to ask, but, by now, the pause is awkward, so you just change the topic.

I’ve found myself in this dilemma, more than once, so I’m happy to know that my instinct not to ask was probably the right call. As Mark Slouka says, in today’s Times:

If writers agree on anything—which is unlikely—it’s that nothing can damage a novel in embryo as quickly and effectively as trying to describe it before it’s ready. Unfortunately, because we’re writers, aka bipedal nests of contradictions, avoiding the temptation to share is never as easy as simply keeping our mouths shut.

Getting pumped!

What’s the best way to get in the proper frame of mood to write? Vigorous sex? A shot of smooth bourbon? A walk in the woods? This fascinating short article, by Maria Konnikova in Scientific American, discusses how such luminaries as Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, and John Cheever got “pumped” before settling down to write:

It’s not so strange, then, that in ritual, artists find such consistent gratification and creative value. While ritual in itself may not play any role in the quality of the creative output, the simple act of engagement could heighten both anticipation and enjoyment of the entire creative process. And while the suffering artist is another stereotype that’s right up there with the quirky artist in popular appeal, when it comes to actual creative quality, few things beat the engaged mind.

How to name a character

One of my friends, the terrific story writer Tony Bukoski, sometimes uses the names of his friends as characters in his fiction as a sly practical joke. And Stephen King, among other authors, has occasionally auctioned off for charity the right to have a character named for the high bidder. Here’s a new wrinkle: Charles Salzberg, as he notes in the New York Times, is simply too lazy to come up with a bunch of names. Plus, he decides, it might help to promote his novel.

Steroids and writing?

I remember having this debate with my friend Brian when I was in grad school: Would you take a drug that would make you a better writer even if you know that it could risk your long-term health? He said “no,” adding that he wouldn’t make such a Faustian bargain. I said (and still believe) that I think I would if the drug made me a world-class (i.e. Nobel Prize contending) novelist. Today’s New York Times has an essay on the subject.