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.

Painting Over Mistakes on a Still-Wet Canvas

"Have You Forgotten Their Wet, Sleepy Fragrance?" by Erik Hansen

By Judith A. Ross for Talking Writing

There are no shortcuts to well-executed art – be it painting, writing, music, or photography. The artist must be well-grounded in and attentive to every step of the process.

In their book, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, David Bayles and Ted Orlando write, “Even talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long run, from perseverance and lots of hard work.”

Knowing one’s craft and putting in the hours of work may not reap commercial benefits, but it can result in work that has both quality and depth. According to Bayles and Orlando:

“The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons that every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential. X-rays of famous paintings reveal that even master artists sometimes made basic mid-course corrections (or deleted really dumb mistakes) by overpainting the still-wet canvas.”

In an environment where new media provides numerous opportunities for experimentation and self-promotion, it is especially crucial that artists and writers be well steeped in the basics of their craft.

The ability to first recognize mistakes and then edit and correct one's own work will make the difference between experiments that take others to new and exciting places and ones that leave them mired waist-deep in muck.

Nowhere is this tension more clearly illustrated than in the new online literary magazine, Electric Literature (EL). Some of EL’s experiments are more successful than others.

For example, EL recently delivered to its readers a short story by Rick Moody over Twitter. While the piece may never have made it into traditional print, it wasn’t meant to.

Instead, Moody crafted a story that fit into the new context. Two people meet online and then the ensuing May-December romance is described from each of their perspectives through a series of 140-character tweets sent out every ten minutes over three days.

While the format was difficult to follow, I continued to think about the story long after the final tweet. As one reviewer noted, these two could have been real people sending messages about a real encounter to anyone willing to read them.

Moody didn’t just dash this off, it was a carefully calculated experiment. In an interview with PBS Newshour, he explains how the story took shape, noting that it took as long to write as a traditional short story.

The EL blog, on the other hand, seems to feature writers who are trying to improvise complicated jazz riffs before they can successfully play a basic scale. These folks don’t yet know how to self-edit the way that Moody does. And this is where some outside editorial advice and shaping would help the writers and their readers.

The title of one blogged story, “Jeffrey, Vincent, Jeffrey and Vincent’s Father and the Woman in the Photograph” is a preview of run-on sentences and dense paragraphs that suffocate rather than enliven. The liberal use of the four-letter word for excrement was another turn-off.

This isn’t literature, electric or otherwise, but rather the kind of self-conscious, stream-of-conscious, navel-gazing more appropriate for a personal blog rather than an online magazine.

Other parts of EL’s site also strike me as work that should have been painted over while the canvas was still wet – starting with the artwork on the homepage.

Judgments about art and literature are subjective, of course. Even so, the more you develop your “chops” in any particular discipline, the better your work will be. Take the photograph now posted on this site.


Erik Hansen has been a commercial photographer for many years. Everything he learned during those years informs his art – as does his knowledge of history, politics, film, literature, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I happened to be in his studio when he was developing the image at the top of this post. He builds a model and then with lighting and other techniques brings the small-scale scene to life. He does not digitally manipulate his images: The magic happens before he clicks the shutter.

There may have been one or two happy accidents in making this image, but only a skilled photographer would be able to create and then capture the elements that make it so evocative – such as the funnels of light, the shine on the water, and the textures of the land on either side.

And that’s just the technical portion of his work. The ideas behind his photographs inspire viewers to superimpose their own stories over these imaginary landscapes.

That intent wrapped up in photographic expertise is what transforms this shot into a work of art. Erik not only enjoys every step of his process, he has practiced each one many, many times. As a result, he can make images that soar.