Coming Soon! A New Format for Talking Writing

Talking Writing is about to become a full-fledged online literary magazine, complete with fiction, poetry, and reviews. TW will still run posts about the writing life and writing process, but we're also expanding to include other kinds of writing.

The first issue in the new format is due out by September 6, 2010. Once the new site goes live, we'll have a new URL:

http://talkingwriting.com

If you're interested in submitting work to TW, please stay tuned for the first issue, which will include writing guidelines, the editorial masthead, and a list of writing themes for upcoming issues. You can also contact us at the Talking Writing email address.

We're planning to include featured comments from readers. If you have other ideas for how to engage readers and build our writing network, let us know.

Our new blurb follows. Come join us!

Talking Writing:
How Writers Think, How Writers Live. A Literary Zine

Talking Writing is a monthly online literary magazine that encourages creative discussion of the writing process—its challenges, its delights, and the many professional quandaries facing writers online. Each month, TW features the work of one poet, fiction writer, and visual artist or photographer. The magazine also includes reviews of books and movies, and essays about themed writing topics. We are committed to a new kind of magazine, one that provides space for work that is hard to place in print or other mainstream media outlets. First issue: September 2010.

Do Novels Still Matter?

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing


As far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to read people’s minds. I was obsessed by everything I knew adults hid: unspoken nastiness; unshed tears; passion—so much passion and swallowed rage.

Which means that even at the age of ten, I was destined to love novels above all other forms of writing.

I still do. After a hiatus from novel-reading this past spring, I’ve re-discovered the joys of sinking into a long work of fiction. Moreover, Jonathan Franzen’s "Rereading The Man Who Loved Children" makes me want to defend the novel, any novel, partly because Franzen gets at least one thing wrong.

His piece about Christina Stead's 1940 novel, which recently appeared in the New York Times Book Review, is wonderful. I feel encouraged to give Stead another try. But what strikes me most are his opening questions:

“[H]aven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them….”

With all due respect to Franzen and his professor friend, no.

I haven’t secretly kissed off novels. I disagree that they represent a moral dilemma, except maybe for academics who think they should be reading “serious” nonfiction. And to equate novels with newspapers (or the dying print distribution system of news) is silly. What’s endangered is the journalistic long feature, and, yes, novels are long form. But there the comparison ends.

His opening is a rhetorical device. By the end of the review, Franzen has made the case for the value of reading Stead’s novel or any other challenging literary work. I doubt he takes the newspaper/novel comparison seriously.

Yet what comes through is a particular definition of “the novel”: a literary epic like Ulysses or To the Lighthouse or The Corrections. From monolithic works such as these, Franzen claims, we are all far too distracted by the multitasking demands of modern life. As he notes in one annoying aside, “shouldn’t you be dealing with your e-mail [instead]”?

Franzen’s high-brow assumptions have gotten him into trouble with the likes of Oprah in the past. While I have a love for many literary novels, I don’t think great literature defines the form. Literary fiction has always had a comparatively small audience. (Long ago, I made peace with my inability to tolerate Ulysses.) Sure, you can say literary novels are endangered by BlackBerrys and iPhones, but people were saying that 50 years ago about TV.

It’s the serialized, “what happens next?” aspect of a page-turner that still makes novels popular—and lucrative for some writers—whether you like Dan Brown or not. No matter how much I loathe The Da Vinci Code, it is a novel.

We still do want to know how the story ends. We want to know what’s going on in other people’s emotional lives. I do, anyway.

For years, memoirs have been shoving novels aside, but in certain basic respects they are alike: page-turning stories of triumph and disaster, with reality highly reconstructed. Even in this kind of “true” story, the truth is open to interpretation. But Franzen keeps beating the wrong drum:

“Because haven’t we left this stuff behind us? High-mindedly domineering males? Children as accessories to their parents’ narcissism? The nuclear family as a free-for-all of psychic abuse?... [W]ho wants to look into the mirror of a novel and see such ugliness?”

Um. A lot of people? Unless you’re one of those domineering narcissists.

Of course we want to read this stuff, although maybe not in the demanding "private family language" of Stead or Joyce—or at least not always.

What’s more, I’d argue that novels matter because they offer multiple points of view. Their narrators often have self-evident flaws. Unlike the omniscient news-writing voice—which is suspect in its supposed objectivity—a novelistic narrator reminds us that we all see the world through our own judgments.

In the constantly morphing, self-replicating online universe, we need that reminder more than ever.

In mid-May, at the end of my teaching semester and during a difficult family trip to California, I was suddenly struck by the need to sink into a novel. A 12-year-old friend of mine suggested Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, a young-adult novel about a near-future world in which all teens undergo an operation that turns them into “pretties.” I was hooked.

From there, in the space of two weeks, I read through the Irish comfort food of Maeve Binchy’s Heart and Soul, the literary weepie Sometimes Mine by Martha Moody, and the historical Rashomon-style kaleidoscope of characters in The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier.

I’ve now embarked on Scott Turow’s Innocent, which feels like revisiting a well-loved vacation house. Twenty-plus years ago, Turow’s blockbuster Presumed Innocent kept me up late at night—not just the story, but his gutsy approach of using a first-person narrator who's a possible murder suspect.

OK, I have decidedly middle-brow tastes.

But here’s Turow in Innocent, via his soul-stained protagonist Judge Rusty Sabich, who is brooding at the dinner table on his sixtieth birthday:

“I shrug, but somehow in retelling the story, I confront something that has grown on me over the hours, which I am reluctant to acknowledge, even to my wife and son: I am sorely guilty that I sent a man to the penitentiary for the sake of prejudices I’m now ashamed I had…. Contemplating the moral force of the point, I go silent.”

I make no sweeping claims for novels like this except that they’ve immersed me when I needed to be immersed. I’m reminded of the standouts from my youth: Childhood’s End, The Lord of the Rings, Pride and Prejudice—and every trashy gothic romance that took me to other worlds and time periods and revealed, even in the most rote way, the secret emotional nooks of others.

It’s in sharing the secrets nobody wants to admit—the shame, the guilt, the missed opportunities—that we learn empathy and, I hope, the ability to embrace complexity in a messy world. Yes. Oh, yes. Yes. Novels do matter.

Publishers: Don't Just Lay Off Journalists—Execute Them

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing

Here's my new favorite quote about the media revolution:

“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs.... They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.”

This sardonic valentine to print publishers comes from Alan Mutter, an ex-newspaper editor and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who blogs at Reflections of a Newsosaur.

He's quoted this week in a New York Times business story, "Adding Fees and Fences on Media Sites." Mutter's dig about executing journalist-bloggers is at the end of the article, but I think it's the lead.

While magazine publishers dither about selling digital content, blogs are running away with the readers, and it's not clear that the brand-name glossies will ever recover. Partly it's because blogging is becoming a legitimate outlet for writers in desperate times. But it's also about vision—or more pointedly, the lack of vision demonstrated by big magazine publishers.

What is an online magazine, anyway? Does it really matter if it no longer resembles a print tome packed with slick ad spreads? Publishers are understandably obsessed by the money question, but focusing on pay schemes rather than content keeps them stuck in the visionless mud.

Times reporters Richard Perez-Pena and Tim Arango open with an evocative lead of their own:

Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free.

They go on to say this sweet spot for readers will likely change in the coming year with various new pay models online for magazines and newspapers ("including this one," they write). But publishers are afraid to take the plunge.

The Times piece is well worth a read as a snap shot of an industry caught short and terrified. It evokes shivering publishers on an icy cliff, decked in nothing but polka-dot shorts, waiting for the first brave soul to dive into paid online content. It includes the requisite nod to the Wall Street Journal's payment model and fighting words from Rupert "quality content is not free" Murdoch.

Maybe magazine consumers will start paying, if forced. Part of me wants to believe that a new joint venture of publishing power players—Murdoch's News Corp., Time Inc., Hearst, Conde Nast, and Meredith—really will build a new "digital storefront" that entices readers to become electronic subscribers.

If only these publishers weren't so cynically out of step. I love magazines, and I want to see at least some of the big slicks thrive online. But watching publishers creep instead of fly into a new medium—then come on with belligerent business talk—is more than depressing.

It makes me root for the bloggers with nothing to lose. To paraphrase the management mags of the '90s, the world belongs to those nimble, entrepreneurial souls who aren't hypnotized by their own brand image.

This yet-to-be-named joint venture has been called Hulu or iTunes for magazines. By banding together, the publishing partners will supposedly hang tough on paid content and force the online world their way.

Yet the publishers seem far too wedded to online editions that are essentially digital analogues of print journals. The real innovation for magazines may come in consumers purchasing individual features or specialized content rather than entire journals.

Here's a wacky idea: What about subscribers at various payment levels, creating personalized versions of, say, the New Yorker? You, the consumer, choose which New Yorker content in a given issue you like and how you want it packaged (a digital version, print-on-demand, or both).

At level A, for example, you might get one feature of your choice, all the reviews, and no cartoons; at level B, you get three features, all the reviews, and cartoons + "Talk of the Town"; at level C, you get everything.

Or perhaps you can specify which channels you'd like (health, style, literary, politics) or which writers you want to read. Or maybe you can opt out of ads, going for text-only editions on electronic readers. The point is the freedom to choose is part of what you pay for. Rather than providing more content—more blogs, more lists of most popular articles, more podcasts and other online blips that clutter the screen—you get a manageable chunk of stuff you want.

I'm just riffing. I don't know how much of this is possible or feasible. Yet I do know that the New Yorker's experimental digital edition—click here for an opening shot—was simply an online version of the print magazine, a pain to navigate, and not the answer to magazine publishing's woes. It's an argument for the wonders of print magazines, not a new vision of how online magazines might make our reading lives better.

A glance at the Atlantic Wire, Atlantic Consumer Media's new aggregation of pundits and political commentary indicates another approach. According to editorial director Bob Cohn, as quoted in FishbowlNY:

"As readers face an overload of information and a deficit of free time, they can now visit one site to easily follow the topics they care about and the opinion-makers who fascinate them."

Will such online features get readers to pony up for the Atlantic proper? Possibly. The blogosphere is so crammed with political and social commentary, my eyes glaze at the notion of a site devoted to "opinion-makers." But I salute the effort to jump out of the print box.

For "newsosaur" Alan Mutter, producing good unique content is key. That could favor magazines like the New Yorker or the Atlantic, if their money people ever pay attention to who's actually reading the gold they already have. In a post titled "How to Charge for Online Content," Mutter writes:

The lesson here is not that free content trumps pay (though, all things being equal, it will) but that there has to be much more to a pay strategy than a publisher’s desire to want to be paid.

Which brings us back to all those journalists who are now blogging on their own dime and producing the kind of quality content that just might, possibly, I hope, net them, not Rupert Murdoch, an audience and financial support. Wouldn't it be nice if they had the last laugh?

This piece has been cross-posted on Open Salon.

Jingle, Jingle! Holiday Wishes for Writers

To ring in the winter holidays, I've compiled some wishes from TW contributors. May the coming year bring inspiration and empowerment to all pens—and computers!

My other wish? That Talking Writing continues to thrive and grow and connect with the terrific community of writers online. Thank you all for stopping by—Martha Nichols


"I wish for every writer an ever-increasing love for people," Paula Silici says, "so they may tell their stories from a heart of goodwill, respect, honesty, and compassion."

"More than a room of one's own," Carol Dorf says, "a writer needs time. My wish is that writers are able to make use of the fragments of time they find flapping on the line above the other demands in their lives."

"I wish for everyone what I wish for myself," Laurie Weisz says. "A chance to step outside the cyclone of distractions, bills, work, all the pissy details of life, and step into my fiction. As composite an exit as Narnia delivered in the third grade. A place way over the rainbow, where the privacy of writing, somehow, resurfaces. I’m cheering for anyone reading this article."

"My hope for our profession is that it remains professional," Judith Ross says. "It’s one thing to post unedited ramblings and pass them off as 'literature.' It’s another to post opinions, rumors, and made-up accusations as facts. In 2010, writers like us—who have been trained and mentored by skilled editors—can’t keep quiet. We must insist that a clear, coherent, and above all accurate message is more important than whatever fancy new technology it might be packaged in."

"My wish is for the clear thinking that enables us to coherently and effectively pull together the fragments of experience, impression, and knowledge that form our stories," Elizabeth Langosy says.

"Here are my wishes for 2010," David Biddle says:

1. Google realizes that information still wants to be free, but good writing is something they believe people should be paid a living wage for—and then does something about it in order to get the real content providers on their side.

2. Kindles come down in price to $39.95.

3. The Association of Author's Representatives adopts a single standard for online submissions only: the first 50, a two-page synopsis, and a half-page bio. Any deviation from this standard will be deemed by AAR a first indicator that an agency is still lost in the 20th century, where writers needed to be kept in their place because people were so afraid that they'd muck things up. Writers should not be forced to support the U.S. Postal Service anymore.

4. We learn that David Foster Wallace is actually alive and well, living on the lam in Andre Agassi's basement, working on a mystery about God and his frustrations with Van Morrison, and secretly teaching Andre and Steffi's kids how to play tennis while being intellectuals at the same time.

5. Annie Dillard publishes another novel with writing that is more meaty and pure than what she already gave us in The Maytrees.

Karen Ohlson says, "May the new year bring you the time and circumstances to write what matters to you. (Virginia Woolf's 'room of one's own,' or its modern equivalent—a laptop of one's own.) And may your writing not be just 'content,' as you are much more than a 'content provider.' May it, literally, not be contained. May it spread forth and reach untold others. May your writing bring joy, holy or unholy, to the world. To paraphrase..."

Let earth receive its sound
And every heart
Prepare it room
And heaven and nature sing
And heaven and nature sing
And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing...

Should Blog Posts Be Edited? The New Style Rules

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing

The mainstream media loves to snipe about bloggers who offer transcripts of therapy sessions or discourses on their favorite lunch meat. Bloggers themselves may have no use for grammar nazis who cramp their style.

But this year I've discovered just how much editing matters to blogging. Obviously, many people blog for personal reasons. But for the professional writers now migrating online—and all those who want to build readership and get noticed—editing is a crucial tool, even if we're only self-editing.

With this post, I'd like to continue discussing what makes blog writing effective. It's a follow-on to Paula's Silici's piece about manuscript preparation, and I offer ten editorial guidelines for blogging that aren't your granddad's Elements of Style. When I'm evaluating a piece for posting, these are the things I focus on as an editor.

All right, some of the rules will be familiar to professional writers and journalism students. (Go to How to Make My Blog.com for a list of what bloggers can learn from Strunk and White's classic.) But other guidelines here may surprise even seasoned print writers. That's because blogging really does play by different rules.

When I began Talking Writing, I didn't expect to take on a traditional editorial role—and I haven't, exactly. That's the fun of it, as this blogazine evolves. However, I have found myself consulting with other contributors about ideas and how to frame them, and I line-edit all guest posts. Meanwhile, at WOMEN = BOOKS, the blog I run for the Women's Review of Books, I help non-bloggers and academics with how to shape their ideas online.

So maybe the question is actually this: How much should blog posts be edited? You decide, and let us know.

The New Style Rules for Blogging

1. Use an Effective Title
It's important to make clear what your post will be about, even if the title sounds less punchy than you'd like. The "cute" or pun-laden headlines of print magazines are not the best for blog posts. Questions often work well. If you want to say more, you can always insert a subtitle at the top of your post text. Click here for a TW example.

2. Make Your Post Short
This rule gets broken all the time (including by me), but more than ever, readers like short, focused posts—from 400 to 800 words. The more complicated a topic, of course, the longer it can be. But even in a 20,000-word investigative epic, the famous Elements of Style "omit needless words" rule rules.

3. Keep Your Paragraphs Short
Within your post, break the text into paragraphs, and make those no more than a few sentences long. In a blog, big chunks of dense text are even more off-putting than in a magazine column.

4. Use a Good Lead
This may seem obvious to professional writers, but tight leads (or the traditional spelling "lede") are crucial for blogs. The lead refers to your first sentence or short paragraph; it's how you hook readers. What may not be obvious is that the venerable anecdotal lead rarely works unless it's brief. Otherwise, the anecdote itself might as well be the post.

5. Be Provocative
Good ideas and questions matter. The goal is to get readers arguing. There's probably nothing more important to the quality of a post (except fixing atrocious grammar), so I'll keep this section short.

6. But Don't Just React—Illuminate
It's fun to read somebody railing at a bad movie or political figure. However, if you just react with a thumb's up or down, your post will be less effective than one that grapples with why you feel the way you do.

7. Check Your Facts and Links
As Ellen Goodman puts it in a recent Boston Globe column, "Facts—along with their enforcers, editors—have long been the guides and saviors of my career..."

Checking your facts is one basic way to create a trustworthy voice as a writer. It's also the ethical thing to do. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin may run roughshod over the truth—and seem to get away with it—but writers should hold themselves to higher standards.

Here's where the discipline of journalism has something important to teach the blogosphere, as Goodman and others have argued.

You may be writing about your own experience, but any time you cite a fact that's easily verifiable—such as the title of a movie—you should check it. A quick google of names to verify spellings and other details often does the trick.

You should also link to the source of statistics or other research you cite. If you quote another writer, blogger, or website, doublecheck the wording and link to the source. Attribute quotes or ideas to the right people and name them. (See my attribution of Goodman's piece above.) When you insert links, check to make sure they work.

8. Create a Strong Personal Voice
Blog posts are a chance to relate anecdotes from your own life and to state your own opinions strongly. Blogging is a very subjective medium, driven by the personality of the writer, rather than the omniscient tone of third-person journalism.

When it comes to the voice of a post, my editorial touch is much lighter than with print pieces. Most glossy print magazines have what's called a "house style" or voice—and are edited accordingly—but blog writers are supposed to let their freak flags fly.

The subjectivity of blogging can be freeing, but you still need to keep readers interested—that is, avoid too much detail about toenail clipping or "now I'm sitting down at the computer, thinking about what to write." Instead, think about the kind of person you want to project in your writing: are you likable? are you funny? are you too insulting?

9. Use Links, Images, Video Clips
These are the tools of a new medium, and the ability to link to other information is one of the great advantages of blogs. Don't forget to include links where appropriate, although too many can be distracting. Rather than listing a long URL like http://talkingwriting.blogspot.com/2009/11/view-from-one-inch-shorter.html, insert your link like this.

Images and video clips, especially at the top of your post, are also a draw for readers. A number of web services provide stock photos for free. (In other cases, you may need to get permission or pay.) Whenever reasonable, include a photo or art credit line with the image.

10. Spark a Conversation and Respond to Commenters
A good title, a good lead, a provocative idea—these will help draw responses to your posts. But one of the transformative things about blogging is the participation of others. So don't hang back! Join the conversation by responding to your commenters.

Concluding Thoughts: Revise and Keep Revising
After I've written a post, I go back over it several times. I often cut whole sentences and paragraphs, as well as "needless words." Even after a post is published, I sometimes makes cuts and changes—and it's OK to keep editing your post once it's public.

Really. Nobody's perfect, including editors. For example, I'm adding this concluding section after I published the post last night.

And if you discover factual errors after you've published a post—or a reader points them out—go back and correct the mistake. Most important, explain to readers that you're making the correction. Click here to read a post of mine that contains such a correction note.

Do your part to fight misinformation in the blogosphere. Otherwise, Ellen Goodman may be right about our falling standards for professionalism and truth. "When the reporters go, so do the facts," she writes. "And their checkers."

The New Magazine: Blogazine or Magazog?

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing

Why we're now calling TW a blogazine—and the ever-evolving world of first-person journalism. Do you think we've entered a new age for writers, or is it more of the same?


A few days ago, I thought I was particularly clever, dreaming up a new term for the hybrid blog-magazine that's now appearing all over the Web: magazog. That's it! I told myself, as I strode around the local reservoir, golden leaves fluttering down, the raw sticks of winter peeking through.

We professionals, I thought without a scrap of humility, will soon be working for online sites in which the writing is not just stream-of-consciousness crud. We won't just be generating free content, we'll be...zoggers??

All right. Forget magazog. I waded through another swirl of leaves. I played with the words in my head for a few more steps—b-zine (no, sounds like b-school), blozine (nosedrops? yuk), blogazine (yes! yes!)

Hubris is sometimes a wonderful thing. But there's nothing like a quick google to bring a dreamer down. When I got back from my walk, I found many entries for blogazine, a word that already has some currency.

I may have missed the blogazine blip, but what magazines are becoming has been much on my mind. It's a question I'll ask my students to research this spring in my magazine course. It's forcing me to revise my syllabus. After all, Malcolm Gladwell has a blog. Margaret Atwood has a blog. And what about everyone writing for free on Open Salon—with its tag of "You Make the Headlines—isn't that like a magazine?

Yet as radically as the industry has changed in the past year, some of the edgiest trends in magazine writing—the looser style, the subjectivity, the self-reflexive references—may not be so new at all.

One user at Urban Dictionary defines blogazine as an "online magazine/blog with thoughts and opinions that are researched unlike blogs." (Granted, if you check out the other links here, you'll notice lots of tongues in cheeks.) 

Readingaround Blogazine is described as "an online magazine of new work by independent writers and editors," and it actually has a very attractive, magaziney (but mercifully uncluttered) front "cover."

Phresh Mentality, a self-described "myspace photo album" that launched as an indie music blogazine this summer, calls itself  "a dynamic team focused on photography, design, and journalism."

"Journalism" and "research" often pop up in references to blogazines. The collaborative nature of these enterprises also distinguishes them from old-style blogs. And once you've got a list of contributors or "staff," you've entered magazine territory.

But except for the digital medium used, the shift from blogs to some form of online magazine isn't shockingly new. Blogs and blogazines are very much in line with the origin of print magazines. The term "magazine" (from the word for an ammunition cartridge or holder) was first used as a reference to the incendiary nature of opinion pieces.

The Gentleman's Magazine, first published in 1731, kicked off the use of "magazine" for a print journal with political commentary, cultural reviews, and a letters section that involves a back-and-forth with readers. The Preface to one volume notes that "whoever has perused the Gentleman's Magazines of this year" must be able to discern that:

"[W]e have a large number of ingenious and learned contributors, by whom many subjects, of the highest importance, are treated with accuracy, spirit and candour. Much the greater part of these contributors conceal themselves with such secrecy that we correspond only with them by the Magazine...."

The editor himself used a pseudonym—Sylvanus Urban—which would work just fine on Open Salon or other cyber sites where noms de plume are common. Political writers like Jonathan Swift and, most especially, Daniel Defoe would also have been right at home with today's blogs or blogazines. Defoe's Review so much resembled a blog that one academic project has set it up in that form for contemporary readers.

Then there's George Orwell, the patron saint of many feature-writing journalists, who had all the earmarks of an avid blogger. His given name was Eric Blair, but "George Orwell" allowed him to keep "the public from 'working magic' on him by knowing his true identity," notes Paul McHugh in a Washington Post travel piece about Orwell's island retreat on Jura.

(Side question: Would Orwell, ill with TB on that remote Scottish island and composing 1984, have written for free just to get his ideas out? Probably, but I'm not sure.)

Here's what I want to know: Has blogging changed more recent standards for journalistic magazine features? Are we getting more personal, more subjective? Is the first-person starting to trump?

This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it's potentially a profound change. The distinction between "hard" and "soft" news seems increasingly outmoded to me. I'm not arguing that we abandon good reporting practices; more than ever, feature writers need to verify facts, cultivate diverse sources, and make clear to readers where the information comes from.

Yet features in which writers inject themselves to good effect, giving readers entré to how reporters sift through facts and come to conclusions, may get us closer to multi-faceted reality. That's certainly true for trend stories or other features that rely on anecdotes.

Neil Swidey's latest article in the Boston Globe Magazine, "Why an iPhone Could Actually Be Good for Your 3-Year-Old," is a great example. He takes a hot-button topic (I must admit my first response was "Are you nuts?!") and makes a convincing case for something counterintuitive. Yet he doesn't do so by pretending objectivity or journalistic omniscience:

"I say this as someone who doesn't even like the iPhone. I have never worshipped at the altar of Jobs, and have, in fact, always preferred the dowdy PC.... But I can see how quickly our youngest daughter has become a pro with the device, despite being just 4 years old and unable to spell anything more than her name. She belongs to a new generation."

Swidey not only provides plenty of counterpoints to his claim, he also clues readers in to why what they say matters. Swidey writes that "for a reality check, I went to see Dr. Michael Rich," who runs the Center on Media and Child Health at a Boston hospital. Rich, predictably, talks about why smart phones for toddlers are worrisome. But Swidey adds:

"[H]ere's what makes Rich's perspective so valuable. In a field where some children's advocates view all media as bad while industry-bought voices speak only gee-whiz-ese, Rich opts for nuance. He rejects the notion that parents try to seal off their child from all media...."

Most readers know journalists have biases and that we're not completely objective observers. Instead of one's perspective being masked, in personally inflected features it's out there for all to see.

Ironically, the rise of first-person journalism, fueled by blogging and social-networking, may be dragging magazines right back to their roots—to all those gentlemen writers talking with such "accuracy and candour." (Or at least back to Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion.) You can see it on Open Salon, where so many gentlepeople fling ideas around with gusto, and with a quality that matches or surpasses much of what appears in print today.

So do we need a new word for magazine—or blog? Perhaps the only reason to push for blogazine and the like is a professional one: respect.

On another walk around the reservoir, the golden leaves still falling, here's a comment I overheard: "I'm still getting together my blog thing. Do you have an e-mail? I'll send it to you."

This speaker is obviously worried her "blog thing" will get no respect; it's not the equivalent of saying, for instance, "my article in the NY Times Magazine." But she follows up fast with "your email" and "send it to you," revealing just how much finding readers means to writers these days.

Sometimes I think the whirl of blogs and e-zines is the equivalent of a million tumbling autumn leaves. But I like the notion of collaboration versus the top-down masthead of print magazines. If that's what makes a blogazine different and "dynamic," I'm for it. I like the spirit of adventure, the potential for many editors rather than just a few guarding the gate to publication.

Call it the New-Old Journalism. Or the Old-New Magazine. Think of Daniel Defoe or Samuel Johnson, a regular contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine. They would have been thrilled to spread their ideas from pole to pole. If asked to create a new kind of magazine, they'd be learning HTML and how to create podcasts in the pubs of London. They'd be way past worrying about a drop in print ad sales—though they'd also be figuring out how to make some money.

This piece originally appeared on Open Salon as an Editor's Pick.

Corrections: A small error appeared in the block quote from the Gentleman's Magazine (an incorrect "of"); Paul McHugh's article appeared in the Washington Post, not the New York Times. These errors were corrected January 8, 2010.

The TW Thriller List: Just in Time for Those Spooky Nights!

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing

As promised, here's a list of thrillers recommended by Talking Writing fans and Open Salon commenters to my recent post "A Vaccine for Bad Writing." (It also ran on TW as "Get Your Dan Brown Vaccination: D1B1.")

As "Part One" of the vaccine, I quoted Maureen Dowd's hilarious review of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. As "Part Two," I listed great thrillers as an antidote.

I haven't read all the titles and authors below, but I now have a new list for many a winter night to come. I've also added a few myself, especially in the "truth is wilder than fiction" category. Enjoy!

More Thrillers from Discerning Readers

• Charles Palliser, The Quincunx
• Philip K. Dick, The Minority Report
• Iain Banks, The Business (also Whit)
• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
• Robert Ludlum—"anything by him" (including the Bourne series)
• Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost
• Tana French, In the Woods
• Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers
• John Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• Richard Wright, Native Son
• Robert Ward, Red Baker (comment: "nobody's heard of this book; but it's terrific")
• Richard Price, Clockers
• Ruth Rendell—"anything by her" (including The Bridesmaid)
• Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park (also Rose)
• Pat Conroy, Beach Music
• Scott Turow—"anything by him" (including Ordinary Heroes and more votes for Presumed Innocent: "the best psychological page-turner I've ever read")
• Kate Atkinson, Case Histories
• Charles McCarry—"anything by him"
• Ian Rankin—"anything by him"
• Robert Littell, Legends
• Mo Hayder—"anything by her"
• Carl Hiassen, Native Tongue
• Robert Daley, Prince of the City ("OK, it's nonfiction...but reads like a novel")
• Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery ("lots of fun facts about Victorian London, and inspired [loosely] by real events")
• Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action (nonfiction, but a rip-roaring tale)
• Rebecca Smith and John R. Emshwiller, 24 Days (ditto, Enron)
• Kurt Eichenwald, The Informant (ditto, a pathological liar)
• J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground (ditto, Boston—oh, Boston)

Special Anti-Vaccine Award for "Worst Prose I've Ever Had The Misfortune To Wade Through championship": Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Here's my original list of antidotes with the Dan Brown posts:

Part Two of D1B1: The List that Protects Me

• Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent
• Dennis Lehane, Mystic River
• Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Elizabeth George, What Came Before He Shot Her
• Sara Paretsky, Killing Orders
• Laurie King, A Darker Place
• Eliot Pattison, The Skull Mantra
• Graham Green, The Quiet American
• Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander
• Kerstin Ekman, Blackwater

Any other titles and authors you would like to add?

Get Your Dan Brown Vaccination: D1B1

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing

I've taken a vow. In this, I am as self-abnegating as Dan Brown's crazily obsessed villains, flagellating myself (OK, I'll skip the castration) in the name of decent fiction.

Against the most horrendous odds, I have crafted a vaccination for Brownitis. D1B1 comes in two parts: (1) commune with Maureen Dowd's recent review of Brown; (2) list, read, and buy other well-written page-turning thrillers as an alternative—and tell your local bookseller why you are doing so. Let the healing begin.

Part One of D1B1: The Least Painful First Step

When Maureen Dowd is good, she's wickedly good. After reading her review of Brown's latest novel, The Lost Symbol, I didn't feel quite so depressed that I'll never be a novelist raking in over six figures. These lines alone are worth the price of the New York Times Book Review:

"The author has gotten rich and famous without attaining a speck of subtlety. A character never just stumbles into blackness. It must be inky blackness. A character never just listens in shock. He listens in utter shock.

And consider this fraught interior monologue by the head of the Capitol Police: 'Chief Anderson wondered when this night would end. A severed hand in my Rotunda? A death shrine in my basement? Bizarre engravings on a stone pyramid? Somehow, the Redskins game no longer felt significant.'”

Dowd makes fun of Brown's over-use of italics among many, many other writerly sins. So does Janet Maslin, in an earlier review in the Times. But unlike Dowd, Maslin lauds Brown for his ability to set an unlikely series of events into motion and to keep the pages turning. She ends her review by noting that the reader, almost any reader, likely will be picking up The Lost Symbol at his or her nearest bookstore.

Not this reader. I love plotted fiction, and I'm a big fan of candy-for-the-mind thriller junk, but The Da Vinci Code was more than junk. It made me doubt the sanity of the reading public, just as I doubted the U.S. electorate in November 2004.

Yes, I did read to the end of The Da Vinci Code, although there were many pages I skimmed or skipped because of the awful prose. When I got to the end, I felt gipped. Fortunately, I hadn't shelled out money for the book, but it's only redeeming value seemed to be the belly laugh I got at its amazingly shocking conclusion.

(Please. Did Brown never come across any feminist fantasy and revisionary historical novels of the 1970s? What about Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology? Guess I had the benefit of sitting in on all those alternative feminist spirituality groups in the 1980s.)

Here's what I have to ask: Does a page-turning plot really excuse excrebably bad ideas? (I'm getting into these italics.) Maslin and happy booksellers would no doubt say this kind of disposable fiction is pure escape, and that Brown is giving customers what they want.

But can't we, as writers, do better than this?

Yes. See Part Two below.

One of the things I love about Dowd's review is that she engages with Brown's ideas and sends them up as a load of hooey—particularly his smarmy rationalizations about the Masons. It's bad enough that the hero of Brown's novels, Robert Langdon, is a professor of "symbology" at Harvard; now we get a new love interest who specializes in "Noetic science," which Brown describes as a study of “the untapped potential of the human mind.” Dowd barely has to comment on that one.

And she's so good at deflating pumped-up melodrama:

"You can practically hear the eerie organ music playing whenever Mal’akh, the clichéd villain whose eyes shine 'with feral ferocity,' appears. He goes from sounding like a parody of a Bond bad guy ('You are a very small cog in a vast machine,' he tells Langdon) to a parody of Woody Allen ('The body craves what the body craves,' he thinks).

But Brown tops himself with these descriptions: 'Wearing only a silken loincloth wrapped around his buttocks and neutered sex organ, Mal’akh began his preparations,' and 'Hanging beneath the archway, his massive sex organ bore the tattooed symbols of his destiny. In another life, this heavy shaft of flesh had been his source of carnal pleasure. But no longer.'”

Oh, Maureen. Thank you for reminding us that sometimes the emperor really does need to wear some clothes.

Part Two of D1B1: The List that Protects Me

* Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent

* Dennis Lehane, Mystic River
* Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

* Elizabeth George, What Came Before He Shot Her

* Sara Paretsky, Killing Orders

* Laurie King, A Darker Place

* Eliot Pattison, The Skull Mantra

* Graham Green, The Quiet American

* Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander

* Kerstin Ekman, Blackwater

* And so many more...!

Dear reader, if you feel at all tempted to buy The Lost Symbol, save yourself. Even Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park qualifies as an antidote. Add suggestions here for other well-written page-turners—for your own D1B1 vaccine—and to help me keep renewing mine. I'm always on the lookout for the most nourishing candy.

Uh-Oh, Mom's a Writer: The Ethics of Memoirs About Kids

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing

It's so tempting: One minute my seven-year-old son is a goofball, the next he's a sage. The anecdotes overflow my journal, the Post-it notes on my desk. Before long, he's my lead.

I'm not the first parent-writer to realize I've stumbled on to the greatest subject of my life. Writing about myself in relationship with a constantly evolving, inscrutable other person takes me beyond narcissism, I hope.

But do parents have a right to tell a child's story, even anecdotally? And what justifies the telling? These questions have begun weighing on me, as I write more frankly in print about my experiences as an adoptive parent. I've also started several blogs—and there's my biggest problem. With the touch of a few keys, my son is exposed and parsed in a new viral medium.

Blogging revels in the personal and in many ways demands it, as do memoirs, from the literary to tacky tell-alls. At least one recent book has sparked new concerns about a perennial dilemma for writers: the ethics of family memoirs. But I have a feeling those outraged by Julie Myerson's The Lost Child haven't yet cruised through Dooce.com.

Myerson, a literary writer, has been exoriated in the British press for "incontinent exhibitionism" in detailing her son's addiction to skunk—a high-powered form of marijuana. An excellent piece by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times discusses The Lost Child blow-up and the ethical ambiguities it poses.

The few excerpts I've read of The Lost Child are moving as well as cringe-inducing. I suspect this is the reason it's set off such howls among other writers. I cringe in part from my own recognition of ethical lines I might have crossed.

In the coda to her book, Myerson describes her son's response to reading the manuscript: "You and your short, snappy little sentences, he says. I know what you're doing, you know."

Even the most honest memoir writer turns herself and family members into characters. Professional writers know how to make their constructions appear more "real" than reality itself. Those who are skilled like Myerson are experts at creating emotional impact.

“You have to write the book you have to write," she says in the Times Online. "I write with a piece of my heart that I don't really have full control over."

But confusing the "uncontrolled" writing process with the published product is disingenuous. The more such writing moves readers, the more it seems true. And riveting stories often fool us into thinking that one author's take on the world translates into everybody else's.

This is the most treacherous ground for writers. The hyper-reality of good memoir and feature writing can expand our understanding of the truth. But depending on blind spots, it can easily become self-congratulatory. That goes for all those cute stories about toddlers that populate slick magazines and parenting blogs, too. I like to think I know what the ethical boundaries are when writing about my son. But I'd be lying if I said he'll thank me as an adult for the articles I'm writing now. I simply don't know how he'll feel.

Adoption memoirs provide a good case study of the ethical dilemma for parent-writers. Who's verison of an adoption is true—the adoptive parent's? the adoptee's? the social worker's? the birth parent's?

In the past decade, a growing crowd of white adoptive parents have written memoirs about adopting internationally, including investigative reporter Jeff Gammage's China Ghosts—the "No. 1 adoption book on Amazon." A smaller number of memoirs by adult Asian adoptees (Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood, Katy Robinson's A Single Square Picture, Mei-Ling Hopgood's Lucky Girl) counter such parental visions with more complicated identity struggles. As for birth parents, their side of the story is rarely heard.

While the debate about who gets to tell an adoptee's story is healthy, the fuss over Myerson has reduced the dilemma to a clash between those who think she's a bad mom and those who call her brave for speaking out.

But there's another slippery slope for writers as well: not saying enough about difficult topics, especially in the short format of a blog. Anita Tedaldi's controversial New York Times post on a terminated adoption, "My Adopted Son," is disturbing not because it's so heart-breaking (it is) or because she reveals too much (she doesn't). I applaud Tedaldi's honesty—as many have—but I'm troubled by all that is not explained.

Tedaldi, the mother of five biological daughters, describes her failure to bond with a baby boy she adopted from South America:

"[W]hile it was easy, and reassuring, to talk to all these experts about D.’s issues, it was terrifying to look at my own. I had never once considered the possibility that I’d view an adopted child differently than my biological children. The realization that I didn’t feel for D. the same way I felt for my own flesh and blood shook the foundations of who I thought I was."

In many ways, this is an amazing admission, and she's right that this child has likely gone to a better home. Tedaldi does her best to keep his identity anonymous. Yet does she really believe it's easier for a mother to attach to a biological child? Or is it just her? She skirts a hard answer, which leaves this zinger in readers' minds, reinforcing all sorts of stereotypes about adoption.

If she had answered this question, she probably would have received even more criticism, especially from other adoptive parents like me. But at least there would have been a real debate about the elephant in the room.

Tedaldi's post appeared in Lisa Belkin's Motherlode blog, and Belkin defends her in a later post, detailing the extremes some commenters went to in unearthing the son's real name in Tedaldi's past work. In "Protecting Your Child's Privacy," Belkin presents this all as a cautionary tale about the ethics of parental memoirs. Yet her discussion has far less bite than an e-mail comment she included from one reader:

"In light of the post by Anita Tedaldi I have a suggestion for a future topic: parental blogging and how it might affect the kids. What’s going to happen in 5 or 10 years (depending on the age of the kids) when they learn how to use Google and find what their parents have been posting about them for the entire world to read?"

Belkin says her basic rule is "no column is worth a relationship”; she clears all references to friends and family with them before publishing anything. Fair enough, but sometimes getting the truth out really does matter. In the bad old days, adoption, for example, was considered a dirty secret that couldn't be discussed.

My rule is to make myself more vulnerable in print than my son, to out my own weaknesses, to call myself to task. So here I sit, typing out my worries, ready to send another post into the blogosphere. I think of my sweet child, sitting beside me and typing his own story on a laptop.

In a recent feature in Brain, Child magazine ("What's My Heritage?"), I consider the aftermath of a difficult family trip we took to Vietnam, his birth country. I close the piece with this anecdote: "He's my son, on his very own planet of one. Last week, he talked about hexagons, all the geometric shapes he's learning about in school. "I wish I could make my own shape.' He smiled to himself. 'I'd make a Saigon.'"

He was delighted to see his name in this article. But to rely on his happy desire "to be famous" now is to fool myself. If I'm not cutting close to the emotional bone, I'm not doing my job as a writer. If I don't feel some guilt—and shut my mouth when appropriate—I'm not doing my job as a parent.

This post originally appeared as an Editor's Pick on Open Salon.

WOMEN = BOOKS: A New Blog About Women's Books, Politics, and Life

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing


I'm happy to announce that WOMEN = BOOKS, the new blog for the Women's Review of Books, is up and running. Check out the first contributor's post by Frances Kissling, "Blogging for Bottle Caps." Frances is a terrific writer and commentator at Salon and RH Reality Check, among other venues, and her piece about the value of blogging for professional writers should strike a chord with many of us toiling in the online world for little pay.

"Use it," she says, "it" being this new dynamic medium for columnists and other writers. Frances argues that blogs provide much more space to discuss ideas than the New York Times. You can publish whenever you want—no more biting your fingernails waiting for an editor to say yea or nay—and perhaps, most important, blogging allows writers to work out their ideas before diving into more complicated print features and opinion pieces.

The blurb for WOMEN = BOOKS follows. Help spread the word by sharing the link, joining the Facebook Group for the Women's Review of Books, and commenting on the blog.

WOMEN = BOOKS: The Women's Review of Books Blog

If ever there were a time for women to connect, it’s now. WOMEN = BOOKS will create an online community that can jump national and cultural boundaries. Women’s Review of Books has always been about jumping barriers: between feminist academics and political organizers, theory and practice. Now WOMEN = BOOKS will extend the print edition’s range, expanding its audience and the conversation about women’s books, politics, and life. The blog will include posts from selected reviewers and authors from each issue. Readers can comment, building a network for intelligent debate about everything from women in the military to abortion rights to childcare to sex trafficking. Blog comments will be moderated, making it a safe place for discussion of controversial topics. WOMEN = BOOKS will be the new go-to link for women’s studies and feminist organizing, using the power of social networking to help keep the women’s movement alive.

Join the conversation at WOMEN = BOOKS. We publish posts by contributing writers, with a new post every week. The blog is edited by Martha Nichols, a long-time contributing editor at WRB. If you would like to write for the blog, please contact Martha.

My Antonia Vs. Harry Potter: Crunching the Great Books

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing


"Reading by the Numbers" is an excellent but disturbing New York Times essay by novelist Susan Straight that's worth getting up in arms about. In it, Straight reflects on the rise of Accelerated Reader, a "reading management" software system produced by Renaissance Learning. Accelerated Reader is used by upwards of 75,000 schools around the country, writes Straight. Participating students get points for reading books, with a goal of 50 points for outside reading in a given class.

The problem? How books are rated. Straight notes that she delved into the mathematics of the ratings system, which likely has something to do with page length, average sentence difficulty, and percentage of tough vocabulary words. But in this scheme, Straight says that Willa Cather's My Antonia gets 14 points, while Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix get 44.

I like the Harry Potter books just fine, but comparing one to My Antonia is not only apples and oranges; it's simply the wrong message about what makes a great book great.

Renaissance Learning's web site carries the tagline: "Advanced Technology for Data-Driven Schools." (The link to Straight's essay was sent to me by writer Jeanne Schinto via Facebook.) But how do you measure character development and emotional catharsis?

I'm still searching for answers to those questions. I'd also like to know what other people think about sparking a love of reading in children: How do we do it? What matters most? I'd be especially interested in hearing from teachers.

The comments to Schinto's link to the essay on Facebook—which she titled "Outrageous"—evolved into a discussion of who liked or didn't like Harry Potter. I noted a similar back-and-forth on the Facebook comments about Karen Ohlson's "The Real Trouble with Twilight," which was first published on Talking Writing. Another long comment stream followed "I Won't Read Moby Dick and You Can't Make Me" on Open Salon, in which various participants debated whether children should be allowed to read whatever they want for credit in school or forced to read great books.

I think you do both. I believe teaching students to be critical thinkers about what they're reading, whether it's a Twilight book or Pride and Prejudice, is crucial. But giving kids points for reading books neither encourages analysis (although Renaissance Learning would claim its system of quizzes does just that) nor a love of reading.

Consider this excerpt from Straight's essay and all it says about how great novels expand our notion of the world in ways that can never be quantified:

One day last spring, after my eighth-grade daughter finished reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” (assigned reading for class), she sat on the couch, thoughtful and silent for a long time. Then she looked over at me and said: “I think that was one of the best books I’ve ever read. And not everybody could understand it. But I do. Especially Tom Robinson.”

Her father is 6-foot-4, 300 pounds and black. We talked about how American society has historically projected racial fear onto innocent men, and about how Harper Lee portrayed the town of Maycomb so vividly that you could see the streets and porches...

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is worth 15 points.

Can Blogs Be More Than Cute?

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing



Here's what I'm resisting: That in my blog, I must turn my entire life into a story. That my family members are the cast of characters, complete with cute snapshots. That readers will be privy to all the details of my life--pictures of my foot surgery, my dog, my Uncle Fred--none of which exist, of course.

Actually, I think most bloggers are writing about their real lives, in both illuminating and eye-glazing ways. The relentless focus on reality is both the pleasure and pain of blogs, and I wonder where they're heading.

The Problem, #1
Keeping a diary has been around for eons. What's different is making that diary public--and making money (if you're lucky) from your nightly scribblings. Here's one of the latest from Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com, a six-figure professional blogger:

"And then five minutes later I feel another menstrual cramp. This goes on for, oh, seven hours? Eight? I can't remember, only that I was certain it meant that I was going to take an enormous crap. That's just my track record. During the last week that I was pregnant with Leta I thought I was going into labor three different times, and each time Jon would break out his watch and time the contractions, and we'd get all excited, like BABY BABY BABY, and then BOOM, I'd go take a poop and everything would stop."

So what's wrong with that? Nothing. Really. Writers need money. I need money. Except.... Heather Armstrong is a good writer, often funny. But most of the parenting blogs like this are too diary-like for me, too insufferably cute or self-conscious. I feel bad saying this, too, because as a feminist, I'm a believer in the power of quotidian details. I just don't want to see pictures of somebody's ultrasound.

I want a good, well-told story.

The Problem, #2
The gender flip on mom blogs is the often male-authored megaphone. It's an op-ed with Hunter Thompson's Disease. Here's a sample from John Batchelor of The Daily Beast:

"The sad-eyed Townhall Turfers now follow the saucer-eyed Birthers and the cranky Tea-Baggers as the latest political fad that the weakling Republicans not only cannot get away from but also cannot get enough of, like chocolate sauce on anything."

It's almost a zinger, almost so bad it's good. It did compel me to read farther, but after a post or two like this, even with great titles like "The GOP Freak Show," I feel exhausted. I become hypnotized by long strings of comments about Sarah Palin (for example), which alternate between wittily brilliant and Neanderthal. This is the blogosphere, and I'm still surprised that so many people type out their thoughts, anonymously, their ids run wild. Maybe it's the id-charge that keeps them doing it, like placing prank phone calls.

I want a good, well-told story.

Ode to Pleasure and Pain
There's something quaint about the proliferating lines of text with these comments, though. People love YouTube, but they love writing, too. They check in on each other's comments, they argue and quibble. They're engaged with each other's words. It's not about pictures, but text. And while I haven't figured out what's coming next for myself as a writer or whether I can turn my blog into a series of mini-stories--has anyone figured it out? have you?—I am writing, more than I have in a long time. In the shorthand of Dooce: It's cool.

Why I Write

By Martha Nichols for Talking Writing



Two essays, same title: One by George Orwell in 1946, another by Joan Didion in 1976. For me, they represent two poles for nonfiction writers: stepping aside and letting the story tell itself (Orwell) vs. creating a point of view through which everything is filtered (Didion).

Didion was deliberately riffing on Orwell, who famously wrote in his essay, "Good prose is like a windowpane."

Didion's reply: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

The irony is that Orwell had an extremely strong—some would say caustic—point of view, and the good sense to realize he had a tough time stepping out of his own way. Didion's ice-cool persona is a turn-off for some, who view her as the ice queen rather than a stewing cauldron of subjectivity. So which is it for the rest of us? How do we balance the need for factual accuracy with subjectivity?