Posts Tagged ‘writers’

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Swinging both ways

Saturday, January 29th, 2011

A reader recently asked me why I swung both ways, i.e. played on the other team as well. I reminded him that I was heterosexual and played only on one team. “But you write book reviews,” he reminded me. “So?” “But you are a writer yourself.” “So?” Then he went onto clarify that writers should not write reviews as that often put down other writers, especially the weaker ones. “Writers should endorse other writers, particularly their friends,” he said. “You could very soon be kicked out of the writing fraternity for your critical views on certain authors.” “Balls,” I replied, and decided to make a list of reasons for why I write book reviews:

1) To remind myself of what I have read
2) To learn the craft and make points that I want to revisit later
3) To remind myself that my books too should be subjected to this rigour by others. Together we should source good writing whoever’s it is, and expose mediocre stuff
4) To share my views with whoever cares to read them, and to help others choose books wisely
5) To engage with other readers and discuss the merits of books we share a mutual interest in

I am sure that I will come up with other reasons why, but the above are enough to keep me “playing on the other team.” Besides I don’t get paid for this endeavour, so who should care but me for the time put in? And as a fellow writer, I am conscious of the writer’s day-to-day challenges and try to look beyond the missing punctuation and other grammatical inconsistencies which should have been an editor’s job to take care of anyway.

There have been occasions when I have written reviews of books of writers whom I know. In the situation when I did not like the book, I have sent the review directly back to the writer in the hope that it would help him (or her), and the matter ends there; nothing is published, unless the writer insists that the review be put on public display.

And as for writing fraternities, or fraternities of any kind, they have existed from time immemorial. Like gangs, they provide security and protection for members while in existence. And like gangs, they can become insular and unwelcoming to newcomers who do not fit the profile. Writers are notorious for their gangs, which gather in strength and occasionally jettison one of their stronger members to make his way in the rough and tumble world of publishing. I have belonged to some of these fraternities, but have outgrown them, or they have outgrown me. They have however, been useful pit stops on my writing journey. But even established fraternities are under siege today while newer ones are forming in the age of Internet 2.0. In this environment, isn’t it prudent to play on as many teams as possible, for who knows of who will be left standing when Internet 3.0 comes around?

So, for now, I will continue to play on the other team as well. If money and the fear of viral criticism were not concerns, it is indeed a great time to be a writer in this era of Internet 2.0, for like this blog, there are many ways for writers to express themselves today. Reviewing books and sharing that learning online is one of them.

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Too much information

Friday, December 17th, 2010

I was asked for my opinion on Wiki Leaks and the scandals erupting in cyberspace, where top secret documents suddenly appear to embarrass high-ranking military officials, bureaucrats and corporate barons. Are we justified in having this stuff floating around in the public domain, I was quizzed? Or should we let it all hang out and sock it to these honchos in high places who help each other out by launching wars, who cry for bailouts, and who lock the taxpayer into an “or else” hammer lock in order to fund their shenanigans under threat of terrorism or bankruptcy?

My first reaction was, “Dare anyone speak about this stuff in this day and age? Let’s see – if I am pro-Wiki Leaks, I could get on some nation’s no-fly list; if I am anti-Leaks, the hackers will block my Visa & Master Card accounts, erase me from social networking sites and punish me.” But either way, I could become famous if I go public with my plight. Hmm…

My next reaction was, “Another opinion on Wiki Leaks? Haven’t we made its owner a cult hero already with our nosiness? I mean, don’t we already know that classified stuff exists under any political system? Don’t we keep information protected via copyright, patent and trade secret laws? Aren’t writers agitating to have their copyrights protected and not splashed all over the Internet for free? Okay, and why do we have to have this leaked stuff piled on us in these digital dumpsters, filling our information intake valves faster than the garbage gushing into Toronto’s landfills? Hasn’t anyone learned that “less is more?”

Finally, I caved. “Okay, if you insist, I’ll venture an opinion, but you may not like it.” (Note to reader: Writers are opinionated people)

Disclosing information is good if it makes the world a better place, reveals injustice and leads to its correction – I’m sold on that. Enron was a good example, so was Mount Cashel. But there is a limit to disclosing information, especially if it harms people, property, or both, and especially if nothing good can be salvaged out of the disclosure. Didn’t we only recently coin that phrase “Too Much Information,” one that young people bandy around liberally these days in their text messages? For instance, if two neighbours are getting along, however tenuously, why upset the apple cart by saying to one that the other guy had once called him an asshole? Sure that’s disclosure, but does it advance progress or enhance relationships? Does it make the neighbourhood a better place? Do I need to know what my kids call me when they are mad at Dad?

So my opinion on this business: use common sense, guys! Whistle-blowing and mud-slinging are two different activities, although they both begin with a sense of frustration and a desire for change.

Oh that reminds me—I’d better check the showerhead in my washroom now. Just in case a hacker from either side of the debate, unhappy with my opinion, sneaks in a spy-cam and “captures” me on digital. The fame I have sought as a writer of strong male characters will come to me in the most sudden and unexpected way. I can imagine the instantaneous blurb on You Tube “Extra, Extra: Writer Lets It All Hang Out. Check him out – he is not as hot as his fiction!”

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A good story will be told – ultimately!

Monday, November 1st, 2010

Writing gurus advise us not to despair when the rejection slips pile up, they urge us to keep going back to the well and digging deeper until a real gem pops out, for after all, “a good story must be told”. After a while, this sounds like another feel-good-ism to sooth the battered writer toiling away into insanity and an early death. It is tempting to say, “Stuff the gurus,” stash the pen, switch off the computer and take up golf. But something happened to me recently to reinforce this sage message that perhaps a good story will be told, even after 30 years.

Thirty years ago, when I was a young and callow fellow and lived in a country renowned for its beautiful beaches, hospitable people, empty coffers, and peace (yes, we had peace back then, before all the separatist struggles began), I wrote a story in anger to expose youth prostitution going on in the country, fuelled by western money. Wealthy middle-aged male tourists from the developed west were swooping down on our sunny third-world island and procuring young boys for their pleasure and taking them back home, while providing their families with money and material goods like tee shirts, bell bottoms and boom boxes to feed starved material appetites and sooth fears. I also happened to travel to Western Europe at the time and meet some of these kids who were now on the “other side,” ostensibly the side of milk and honey. Instead, they were living half-lives in dead-end jobs, some without legal immigration status and some still in bondage to their pedophile puppet-masters. So I wrote my story in anger and sent it to the national radio station to be read on “This Week’s Short Story” a very popular program, on which I’d successfully had some of my earlier stories read. This story was, as anticipated, rejected on the premise that it was “not good for tourism.”

I left the old country soon thereafter, had many adventures abroad, and lost the story in the intervening years. Three years ago, when I moved to Cobourg, Ontario, Canada, I found the original in a box of old souvenirs, a faded foolscap paper with my former cursive handwriting to remind and shame me for deteriorating to a fowl scratch after I bought a computer. I polished my lost-and-found story and included it in a novel (which also remains unpublished to this date, but I hope, will appear in print shortly) and it was cut out by the editor as “the piece did not fit.”

Every time I showed my orphan story to the literati, they liked it, but no one wanted to publish it. Then recently, I was invited to submit a non-fiction piece to a travel anthology. I submitted an account of a soft adventure trip I once took to the Arctic Circle in Finland in the month of February. In the same submission, I asked the editor, somewhat surreptitiously, whether she would consider this “other piece,” which was, ah… not quite travelogue material, but anti-tourist, in fact. To my surprise the editor not only accepted my 30 year-old story but changed its title to read “Number One” in the local vernacular. The story is to be published shortly.

So the writing gurus must be right, after all. A good story will be told, by hook or by crook. I offer this story-within-a-story as hope to my fellow scribes who toil in the dark waiting to be discovered. I also hope that the rest of my stories and novels don’t take thirty years apiece to come out; although that would leave me in royalties for the next five hundred years, I may never live long enough to enjoy a single penny. And that will be another story worth telling, perhaps!

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Monetizing Content in the Hippie Era of Writing

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

How does one make money at writing today? That question seems to be the “pre-occupation de jour” of most commercial writers and journalists. The cyber airwaves are chock full of content: blogs, wikis, e-mail, self-published books, e-zines. How does a writer insist that he gets paid for his work when there are equally good, or sometimes better, content being written by people who possess a deep understanding of their subject matter and an altruistic desire for sharing their writing, and who earn a better living through other means than they can or ever will as writers?

Encyclopaedias were money makers once, but their time ran out; software makers made money too, but they spawned the open source movement and jumped into services instead. Pagers were absorbed into cell phones, typewriters into personal computers, music CDs into MP3’s, videos into You Tube, broadcast radio into blog-talk radio, cable television into web-TV, long- distance phone plans into Skype, and now tree-books into e-books. Many successful products that once exchanged value for monetary benefit are now offered free or have been subsumed into other inventions. And content—a writer’ primary product, plucked out of a fertile imagination not given to many, and delivered in beautiful language—is now also… free?

I think of the hippie era when we played in musical bands purely for the love of expression, not for money but in protest against an out-of-touch establishment and all things resembling corporate greed. But that did not last either, did it? After the hangovers and love-ins wore out, we took haircuts, shaved our beards, bathed, bought new clothes, and joined the very guys we had protested against, to unleash some of the greatest economic growth cycles in history, creating unparalleled inventions, and unleashing unbridled greed that resulted in the meltdowns of Black Monday, the dot-com bubble, and the Crash of 2008.

And now, as if in atonement for our past excesses, we are going back to our hippie days of free drugs, free love and free expression, and giving everything away for free again, including our artistic creation—our writing. Even Big Business is calling this the Age of Creativity and seeking to monetize it. But the creative ones don’t seem to care; self actualization is triumphing over the baser needs of the ego and the pocketbook.

I support those trying to make a living at this very difficult art at this particular time in history. It is indeed a desired end: to do the things you love and to also earn one’s livelihood from it. But it seems like these bold souls are swimming against a tide that has, at least for the next few years, turned against them.

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The Return of Fiction in the Google-era

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

When the towers came down in New York innocence was lost in North America, they say. People wanted only to read about news and features – they wanted facts, facts, facts…When was the next calamity going to happen, and where? Were we heading towards the end of days, and when? And whenever escape became an emotional necessity, it was sought in worlds far beyond (and therefore safe from) the present one – how about Hogwarts School for starters, or the dark and mysterious Vatican with those Da Vincian codes, or those dread-lands populated by vampires and werewolves, or a juicy murder mystery in distant Scandinavia? Mainstream fiction got sidestepped, because life had become stranger and more frightening than make-believe of the literary kind.

And now, several years on, we are drowning in facts. We Google “facts” and they are arrayed before us, from umpteen sources, with varying degrees of accuracy and bias. There is comfort in knowing that if we need the facts, they are always available, 24/7, at the click of a button. Welcome to the Factual Age, in which we get the facts, the whole facts and nothing but the facts. Boring…

I am more interested in that other world, the lost one: the one in which facts or pseudo-facts were re-arranged to fit a coherent dramatic trajectory, unleashing a moral, providing meaning and hope, allowing for triumph over adversity however trivial. A world where lies were conjured in order to illuminate a higher truth. A world that was delivered in beautiful lyrical prose conjuring imagery from life, giving us hues ranging from blue to gold, shadings from dark to light, perspectives from vulnerable to sympathetic, and action from heroic to barbaric.

The relentless onslaught of the Factual Age is similar to us being bombarded with still photographs of life, to the point that we are once more hungry for paintings to re-engage our moribund faculties, replete with the artist’s slant, bias, perspective, character, flaws, and opinion. And the artists too have gathered outside the gates with piles of their wares accumulated over the lean years since 9/11, during which output was limited to the very few, who made their handlers lots of cash by dabbling in predictable genres.

I think the pendulum will swing back now that the thirst for facts and information has been satisfied by the powerful search engines of today. I believe we will be looking for ways to convert these facts into stories that attempt to make sense out of an increasingly meaningless life rushing along at an even faster pace. I believe that those gates will soon be shoved open and that the artists will come rushing in, even giving away their wares as gifts, because sharing will have become more important to them than selling. And a grateful audience will embrace these stories again, the lost books, lost from the day the developed world lost its innocence.

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Sourpusses

Monday, June 21st, 2010

I’ve been watching a spate of recent championship games – the NBA finals, the NHL finals, the World Cup soccer finals – and I have been more interested in seeing the faces of the coaches of the participating teams. They must be the most keyed-up, unhappiest people in the stadium, perhaps on earth, at that particular moment; and to cap it all, they are on syndicated TV, their sourpusses exposed to the world.

They pace, they straighten their ties (the ones who wear them), they mutter uncontrollably, occasionally they yell, they recall their players and give them a dressing down during a time out, they shout at referees and linesmen, they shout at their players, but nobody listens to them. And occasionally, when their team scores, they are seen embracing their assistant coaches and dancing a staggering war dance to let out steam. Do they get secretly drunk after a game?

Often when the championships are over, they are left hunting for a new job. The last win was only the last win. They are not paid for the last win, but for the possibility of future wins. And, God forbid, if their team has suffered a string of losses, there is probably no job awaiting them.

I know why I have such empathy for the coaches. They remind me of writers.

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In the company of great minds

Monday, June 7th, 2010

I love to sit in my libraries (one at home, and one in my office) during my spare hours, and when not reading or working, I try to visualize the tears, fears, joys and adventures that led to the writing of the tales within the pages of those many books on the shelves. Sometimes, when stuck on a plot point in my own stories, I thumb through these books for a prompt that will get me going again. And I stop to silently thank the writer concerned for the nudge to my stalled creativity.

I glance through the spines of murder mysteries, histories, Canadian literature, American literature, Asian, European and Jewish literature, children’s stories, “how-to” books on writing, and on business consulting, books on wine making, golfing, encyclopaedias that I never refer to now thanks to Wikipedia, dictionaries that I rarely refer to because of dictionary.com., books on nutrition, or on how to make money and retire early (I never read this latter category now because the formulas did not work for me), fantasy novels, magazine and finally even copies of the novels I have written, and the magazines and anthologies my short stories have been published in, and I feel in good company.

I try to visualize the angst these writers suffered to experience, create and bring to fruition their works, works that have outlived the lives of some of their creators and continue to give us pleasure and wisdom today. Many of the dead writers would have passed on with no clue as to the merit their hard work would garner beyond their life spans.

And I feel a sense of loss, because all these books will soon be condensed into a small electronic tablet that I will cart around with me henceforth and read whenever I need an injection of intellectual stimulation in the printed form. I will have to imagine all these great minds and their wisdom squeezed into a mini computer chip. I wonder what I will do when I have to add new books to my present libraries; will there even be tangible books in the future? Or will my present collection remain stagnant, with every addition arriving in electronic form?

I do know that my new e-reader will be many times more efficient, reducing space in my luggage, giving me instant access to books that pique my fancy, letting me sample chapters before I decide to buy, giving me dictionary and encyclopaedia access to words or passages I come across, even read back to me when I am too tired to exert my eyes. But will it give me companionship with the masters, where by sitting quietly in my library and touching those old tomes, I would connect with the spirits of the great writers who contributed so much to the literary canon, and who inspired me to follow my life path? I wonder?

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Waiting for the e-book bomb to drop

Monday, April 19th, 2010

When I go out to read as a guest to writer’s groups these days, no one is really interested in hearing me read my work. Instead, everyone is interested at hearing of my adventures as a writer struggling to break into the big time. They want to know about my travails in the old self-publishing days, of the myriad rejection slips, of the near misses with publishers, of speed dating with agents, of trade publishing experiences, distribution woes, online marketing, where I get my ideas, how many ideas are left, social networking, blogging, radio and TV interviews, shameless self-promotion and…and… the liberating messiah they all hope it will be: the e-book.

Will the e-book finally become the mp3 of publishing, enabling writer-to-reader transactions off the former’s website, cutting out middlemen (publishers, publicists, distributors, retailers etc)? Could we build sufficient loyalty in our online readership platforms, feed them downloads of books and short stories in any e-book format, for a donation, and thereby recruit benefactors with financial contributions far in excess of what a provincial or federal arts council can provide us in subsidy, now that royalties from publishers are dwindling faster than ever? Will we finally be one-on-one with the readers whom we wrote these stories for in the first place? Politicians face their audiences when making public speeches, performing musicians do the same at concerts, stage actors too when they step out of the wings. But writers are like movie actors: they go through a multitude of arbitrary filters, before their work is exposed to their final arbiters. Would e-books solve that problem? When would the inflection point come when e-books outnumber traditional books? When am I going to launch an e-book?

These are the questions I get asked. And frankly, I wish I knew!

What I do know is that, with the pursuit of blockbuster-only titles by the traditional industry, that segment is going to shed even more writers, not assume new ones. The fringe is therefore open to the masses of writers coming on board, many with the notion of “I think I have a book in me,” and the e-book will be their entry point. How will one be noticed in this sea of wannabe ink? Would it mimic POD self-publishing that came out a decade ago? Would e-books be no different from the turbulent seas writers have traditionally cruised in over the centuries, in their makeshift rafts with tattered flags hoisted, in the hope of getting picked up by a glittering cruise ship—SS Publisher—full of thousands of readers?

Something tells me that we have played this record before.

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Looking Beyond

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

The waters are calm when looking over the ocean from the battlements of the Fort that guards the entrance of the harbour at Santiago de Cuba. Off to the right over the horizon lies Jamaica in the sun, and to the left is Haiti in its destruction, while down below, in 1898, the Spanish galleons had come out in single file, like innocent sheep, only to be sunk by American warships lying in wait outside the mouth of the harbour. This fort is a vantage point of history, recent and past, representing the beauty and horrors of life. I could not see any of this at street level. “Look beyond,” my wise teachers and mentors had told me, “and you will find vistas never seen before.” I was reminded of their words while sitting up there in those battlements.

I wrote the paragraph above while touring Santiago de Cuba with a group of Canadian writers recently. There were many such set pieces that I captured on paper in this land that seems to be frozen in time, reminding me of what life was like when I was growing up in a tropical island somewhere else in the world, where scarcities had been a fact of life, where the developed world was out there somewhere, a place impossible for us forgotten ones to get to. I remember climbing the giant Jam tree in the front yard of our family home, perching myself in its highest branches and looking out over the paddy fields, watching the planes fly overhead and wondering when it would be my turn to fly away.

Over the years, by a combination of looking beyond, being dissatisfied with the status quo, striving, and luck (isn’t luck the product of hard work?) I seemed to have swapped places with those fat-cat tourists who used to come to my island home and dole out money as if there was no end to the flow. In Cuba, this time around, it was my turn to dish out the pesos, while the locals looked on in anticipation. I wanted to tell them not to be fooled, that there was a finite end to this supply of money; that even in rich countries like Canada, bounty came from hard work, and that jobs could end with a small downslide of the stock market ticker. But what did they know about stock market tickers? All they knew was that they worked hard too, but did not have the money to show for it, so according to them, we must have some other unknown secret. It’s because of freedom and private enterprise, I wanted to say, but being a man following the Middle Way, I did not want to be a poster boy for Capitalism.

I did not know what to tell these islanders, and returned from my trip somewhat frustrated. In retrospect, I should have told them to go to a Fort-like place and look beyond, look to the sunshine and destruction in lands beyond, look at the world with all its possibilities, good and bad, and pick a spot to play, beyond one’s comfort zone. Perhaps that was the only way out beyond scarcity and insularity, the path towards growth, and towards finding breakthrough solutions beyond the “tried and true” that provide only marginal returns and keeps one like the unenlightened frog, forever circling in the slow-boiling cauldron.

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Man, do I need to win one of them literary awards?

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Now that the launches are over, and the book stores (the ones I know of) have been supplied with my books and all my friends and relatives have been cajoled, teased and threatened to buy a copy of my latest creation in time for Christmas, how does one get to the next level of book sales?

Why not win an award?

I have seen writers’ works (spurred by their agents) being slavishly flogged at every literary award in the land and beyond. Fail one? Go for the next, and keep on the trail until someone feels sorry for you and gives you an award. Then sit back and watch book sales take off into the stratosphere.

Why does that happen? The power of endorsement, in a media-stricken society where the making of choice has been abdicated to “Oprah Recommended” or “Heather’s Pick”— that’s why.

Reader’s are wary of picking up a book unless it has some label: “long listed for X Award”, short listed for Y Award”, “Winner of Z Award” Who gives a damn about the award and the integrity of its selection process? “Hey, this book won an award – it must be good!”

Can any writer win an award? I am not sure about that these days given that awards are the tickets to best-seller status; they must be closely guarded like the Crown Jewels. I guess any publisher could forward their favourite author’s book to the dreaded long list: just mail in an application and advertize it on the book’s dust jacket – that’s a start! But getting beyond that to the short list? Now that is another story, because here is where you encounter the gatekeepers, those guardians entrusted with protecting the livelihood of the industry, to ensure that a few major labels are still around as the landscape gets littered with more self-publishing, blogs, wikis and other “noise” that take away from the public’s reading time.

I thought of inventing my own award once— after all, who would really tell the difference? I even wrote a blog article about it some time ago and it got more hits than the number of sold copies of my books. Eventually, I abandoned that idea because I am a writer, not a gatekeeper. And I figured that if there is a good story out there it will be told, eventually— even posthumously. Writers are gifted with the ability to tell stories and their stories will be heard.

This message came home powerfully to me when my novel After the Flood, which I wrote in 2002 and which languished for years afterwards in my “abandoned projects” file because no-one was interested in its subject matter, suddenly found interest when climate change became a hot topic last year.

Perhaps, I will not go for that award after all. Perhaps my reward is that the story got told, eventually, and during my lifetime—what a bonus!

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