Commentary

Do You Believe in a Muse?

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There is an interesting article on the Writers Digest website by William Kenower dated November 16, 2018. William Kenower is the editor-in-chief of Author magazine, a sought-after speaker and teacher, and the author of Fearless Writing (Writer’s Digest Books). He’s been published in The New York Times and Edible Seattle, and was a featured blogger on HuffPost. His video interviews with hundreds of writers, from Nora Ephron to Amy Tan to William Gibson, are widely considered the best of their kind on the Internet. He also hosts the online radio program Author2Author, where every week he and a different guest discuss the books we write and the lives we lead.

William Kenower

He says, “I was at a writer’s conference recently listening to a panel of authors discuss their writing process. They were asked if they believed in The Muse. One by one each author leaned into their microphones and gave an emphatic, “Yes!” or an equally emphatic, “No!” By the time the last author had answered I counted and saw that the panel was perfectly divided. It’s like they were asked if they believe in God, I thought.

I don’t believe in what we call The Muse; belief is too weak a word. I couldn’t write without her. I’ve certainly tried. When I did it was as if I’d forgotten how to write, yet there I was acting exactly like a writer, feeling more and more fraudulent with every lousy sentence. I was like a gardener who was planting Lego pieces instead of seeds. I was on my hands and knees digging and planting and watering all the while knowing nothing would grow.

Having said that, I know why half the writers on the panel explained that they believed in, “working hard” or, “putting their butt in the chair,” or, “mastering their craft,” rather than The Muse. I can control whether I decide to work hard or put my butt in the chair or master my craft. There’s a lot in a writer’s life that is out of our control. Agents and editors and readers, for instance, are out of my control. No matter how hard I work on something, I have zero say over what anyone will think of it, and what people think of it is often the measure of a story’s success. Best to keep my head down and my attention on what I actually can control. I’ve never seen or held or touched this Muse, after all. On dark days she can seem as unreal as all my fantasies of glory and praise—the adulation of all those other people who seem to hold my writing life in their inscrutable hands.

Believe in that. I don’t care what you call it—but you better believe in it. You better not call it luck, but you better not take full credit for it either. You were along for the ride. This may be the trickiest part of all in the relationship between the writer and The Muse. When you publish something you’ll be given full credit for it, but in your mind may linger the memory of how it was written. It was like a dream, wasn’t it? How many times did a character do what they wanted and not what you wanted? How many plot turns surprised you? You probably can’t remember what you labored over and what came easily, but you can remember how much you loved the writing of it, how glad you were for it. That stays with you long after the story has been told, long after the money has been spent, it stays with you and calls you back to the page because there’s another story that needs telling.”

I believe he has this point exactly right!

Book Banning in Britain

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There is an article in today’s Daily Telegraph by Ben Lawrence which startled me. We’re all familiar with book banning in the US, the EU and elsewhere, but in the UK? (Ben is Commissioning Editor of the Telegraph.)

He said, “We are banning books again, and this time it appears to be a consequence of ill-informed hysteria. The Index on Censorship discovered that 28 of the 53 British school librarians they polled had been asked to remove books – many of which were LGBTQ+ titles – from their shelves. It appears that pressure had come from parents and, on some occasions, teachers too. For a society that’s meant to be modern and tolerant, these findings are depressing: the culture wars are failing to subside, and we seem to think nothing of using our children’s education as an ideological battleground.

That battle has been raging in America for several years. In March, the American Library Association reported that 2023 was an all-time peak for such censorship. I imagine that much of the opprobrium launched at titles such as All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson – the memoir of a young, queer, black activist – was led by Republican-Christian zealots. In Britain, however, the root causes are harder to deduce. Certainly, our national disease of knee-jerk reaction is partly to blame. According to the Index on Censorship, one worker was asked to remove all gay-related content from the school library due to a single complaint about a single book.

Yet the depressing thing is that we have long been intent on cutting off children from literature and its “dangers”, ignorant of the fact that books are crucial to young people’s development. The current situation in the UK smacks of the dark days of the 1980s, when Section 28 legislated that no local authority could “promote homosexuality”. In the line of fire was a ridiculously innocuous picture book from Denmark called Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, which featured a small girl with two dads, and now looks about as morally corrupting as a Cliff Richard fan convention.

John Clarke, head of Haringey’s Community Information with a copy of Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin in September 1986

I sometimes doubt that those who are quick to show their outrage are even concerned about the morals of Britain’s children; it’s more about their own fear of the unfamiliar. Some books represent a world that exists outside their own limited boundaries, which they therefore can’t control. This was the case in the 1980s: Section 28 felt, in part, like the natural product of a society that had failed to come to terms with the Aids epidemic.

But what those who try to ban books consistently fail to realise is that any attempt to arrest social change will ultimately, in a functioning democracy, be doomed. Perhaps in China, where there are edicts against books that fight against communist values – Alice in Wonderland, for example, is banned for its anthropomorphisation of animals – a suppressed book really can stay buried. But in most places, the allure of a title in samizdat will always ensure its longevity.

For censors have always proved to be on the wrong side of history. Those who fettered the genius of James Joyce and banned Ulysses on the grounds of “obscenity now” look like narrow-minded killjoys. As for Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence? For what it’s worth, I’m still not convinced that it’s great literature, but its depiction of sex was a necessary step forward for British society, and the end of its ban a crucial catalyst for making England a more tolerant place.

It’s telling that one of the few authors who refused to defend Lady Chatterley during the 1960 trial at the Old Bailey was Enid Blyton, an author whose work now often looks mean-spirited and bigoted. In fact, Blyton’s books were banned from my own school library in the 1980s – along with Judy Blume’s progressive adolescent novel Forever – which just goes to show how times change.

And yet, although this news from the Index of Censorship is worrying, I still feel hopeful. Curious minds will always seek out good writing, however long it takes them to find it. Book banning may be a global industry – but the freedom to read will always prevail.”

Business Rule for Freelance Writers

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There is an article by C. Hope Clark dated March 29, 2023 which will interest those of you who are freelance writers or are thinking to go in that direction.

C. Hope Clark is the founder of FundsforWriters.com, noted by Writer’s Digest for its 101 Best Websites for Writers for 20+ years. She is a freelance writer, motivational speaker, and award-winning author of 16 mysteries.

C. Hope Clark

Ms Clark describes the 25/50/25 rule of freelance writing. “You’ve been submitting to a few places, and you’ve published a few pieces. This freelance writing business is intriguing, but you’d love taking it from hobby level to professional, so what is the answer?

Submit more often? Of course. Your goal is to increase your acceptance rate, and that takes more submissions. Let’s say you do this for months, and you have some acceptances under your belt, but the income isn’t quite what you hoped it would be.

You do have a few regular markets that provide steady income. It might not be the best income, but it’s reliable. They’ll take almost anything you write, so you keep sending them pieces. They take up a major chunk of your time when you stay insanely busy writing, researching, and pitching. So busy, yet you can’t break the ceiling of mediocre pay.

Let’s visit the rule of 25/50/25 when it comes to pitching your talents.

The First 25

Twenty-five represents a percentage of your submissions. This first 25 are those lovely, easy markets you know you can pitch to and get accepted most of the time. These are the markets you are close to, most familiar with, and rely upon for money. They come through for you time and time again.

These markets are the easiest to get attached to and the hardest to say no to. They become all that you write for because they feel safe. Your rejection rate is minimal, and you waste little time on pitches that say no. While cranking out 100 of them might gain you an elementary level income, what if you want more than that?

These piece-of-cake markets are why your income is stagnant. They should comprise no more than 25 percent of your work. Let them give you some security but don’t let them consume your life such that you remain stuck at that level.

You want to be more than that.

The Second 50

Fifty represents markets that are much more difficult, and you expect to be rejected almost as much or more so than accepted. You feel you have a chance at these, and they usually pay more.

Remember, your goal is not only to gain in income, but in reputation as well. Your name is money as your portfolio builds. This 50 percent category should comprise your meat and potatoes part of your day. To make the math simple, think of a 40-hour work week. Researching, pitching, and writing for these markets should eat up half of your hours.

That sounds scary. That’s a lot of time to invest into a 50-50 chance of being accepted, but the payback for landing these is so much better than sticking to the first 25 percent. Not only are the checks usually larger, but once you land one, you have a connection to go back to. Then you have another. Then three or four or more.

You might be amazed at how you hunger more for these projects than the original, low-paying ones that got you started. These make you feel more alive, more talented, and hopefully, more financially comfortable.

The Third 25

These are the dream markets. These are the top-shelf opportunities you’d love to land but were too afraid to pitch. They now are on your calendar. You study them and believe you could grow to be as good as half of the submissions, but to run with that crew feels awful intimidating. The rejection rate surely has to be 70, 80, or 90 percent of the time.

But that also means an acceptance rate of 10, 20, or even 30 percent.

What if you won one of these markets? You’d dance, scream, buy yourself a wonderful dinner with drinks, and pat yourself on the back that you broke through that wall and proved you had some modicum of talent.

Why not try to make it happen again?

Then again?

Out of your 40-hour week, that’s 10 hours of stepping up your game. It doesn’t ruin your schedule, and it has way better odds than winning the lottery. With a quarter of your time devoted to what you feel is a gold-plated world, a level market you’d love to spend most of your time writing for, you haven’t shirked your other writing duties.

The Surprising Results

If you are diligent in this 25/50/25 search for freelance work, you spend a quarter of your day on the easy stuff, half on the difficult yet achievable, and a quarter on the next-to-impossible.

Stick with it for several months, long enough to pitch and receive replies . . . hopefully with contracts. The journey has to be long enough to see the big picture.

The surprising results are that you become magnetized to climbing the ladder to the more lucrative markets. With each acceptance, you unknowingly take another step higher. Before long, you find yourself sliding along the 25/50/25 scale.”

Review: The Hunger Games

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This is another case of my overcoming reservations to read a novel which has made it into the hundred best of the twenty-first century. The wild popularity made me suspicious of its literary merit.

Its author is Suzanne Collins. Wikipedia says, “Collins was born on August 10, 1962, in Hartford, Connecticut, to Jane Brady Collins and Lieutenant Colonel Michael John Collins, a U. S. Air Force officer who served in the Korean and the Vietnam War. Collins graduated from the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham in 1980 as a Theater Arts major. She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana University Bloomington in 1985 with a double major in theater and telecommunications. In 1989, Collins earned her Master of Fine Arts in dramatic writing from the New York University Tisch School of Fine Arts. Collins began her career in 1991 as a writer for children’s television shows. She worked on several shows for Nickelodeon. She was also the head writer for the PBS spin-off Clifford’s Puppy Days. She received a Writers Guild of America nomination in animation for co-writing the critically acclaimed 2001 Christmas special, Santa, Baby!. After meeting children’s author James Proimos, Collins felt inspired to write children’s books herself. In September 2008, Scholastic Press released The Hunger Games, the first book of a series by Collins. The Hunger Games was partly inspired by the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.  The trilogy’s second book, Catching Fire, was released in September 2009, and its third book, Mockingjay, was released on August 24, 2010. Within 14 months, 1.5 million copies of the first two Hunger Games books were printed in North America alone. The Hunger Games was on The New York Times Best Seller list for more than 60 weeks in a row. Lions Gate Entertainment acquired worldwide distribution rights to a film adaptation of The Hunger Games. Collins adapted the novel for film herself.” Collins lives in Connecticut with her two children.

Suzanne Collins

It is somewhat remarkable that this dystopian YA novel made in onto a list of the hundred best novels of the twenty-first century. But a plot involving the forced recruitment of twenty-four children (‘tributes’ to the dictatorship) to fight each other to the death for the entertainment of the population is horrific and at the same time compulsively compelling. It is particularly compelling when the principle characters are so attractive and real, faults and all. Collins writing is excellent, conveying each character, his/her emotions and the settings clearly and believably. Needless to say the book is very difficult to put down.

Two aspects of the book didn’t work for me. The reader is asked to accept that the combatants are filmed live, close up, for the national television. But how would this be possible, without cumbersome interference, when the characters are moving rapidly through a wild setting? No technology would be remotely capable. But one just accepts this. The other issue I had was the final scene in the arena, when the final three combatants are attacked by wolf-like creatures which stand erect as humans, have rapier-like claws and are presented as the avenging reincarnations of dead combatants. These strange creatures were presented as examples of the technological innovation of the state. This was too much for me, and the wolves killed no one. Why were they necessary?

This book is a remarkable literary milestone. It is a must read.

Believable Co-incidents in Fiction

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This post is from an article by Steven James on the Writers Digest website dated September 7, 2018. The focus of his article is making co-incidents believable.

“We’ve all read stories in which the cavalry arrives just in time to save the day, or the hero just happens to find the time machine/ray gun/escape hatch/shark repellent right when he needs it in order to survive the climax. Although coincidences may happen in real life, they can kill believability if they appear at the wrong time or aren’t handled the right way in a story.

Coincidence is necessary to get a story started, but is often deadly at the end. However, too many authors use it backward: They work hard to get readers to buy into the plausibility of the beginning, but then bring in chance or convenience at the climax—when readers’ coincidence tolerance is at its lowest.

For handling coincidence deftly, follow these seven strategies to unlock its power.

7 Clever Strategies for Harnessing Coincidences in Fiction

Strategy 1: Capitalize on the coincidence that initiates your story

We don’t typically think of it this way, but really all stories start with a coincidence.

Stories begin when the author dips into the stream of cause and effect and pulls out a moment that initiates all that will follow. Readers accept this without consciously identifying the event as coincidental:

  • The young couple serendipitously meets in a tiny Parisian cafe.
  • The suicide bomber ends up killing the president’s niece in the airline attack.
  • The woman’s fiancé is diagnosed with terminal cancer the day he proposes marriage.

Readers don’t say, “Yeah right. The detective who ends up being the protagonist just happens to be assigned to the case that this book is about. I don’t buy it.”

Of course not. Readers know that a story must start somewhere and, whether they realize it or not, an event that doesn’t require much in the way of explanation typically gets things rolling.

Use the story’s opening sequence to justify incidents that would otherwise seem too convenient. This is where coincidences will fly under your readers’ radar.

For example, a cryptic phone call can set up a number of storylines:

“So, is the meeting still on for 7?”

“No. We’ve had to move it back an hour so Fayed can make it.”

“And we’re still on target for tomorrow at the raceway for—”

“It’s all set. Everything is set. Now, no more questions.”

If this type of conversation occurs early on in the book, readers won’t much care why it was Fayed couldn’t come at the originally scheduled time, and you don’t have to explain. However, if the conversation were to happen later in the story, readers may very well be wondering why Fayed was going to be late—and they’ll be expecting a good reason.

If your story requires the inclusion of an unlikely event, move it closer to the start—or even use it as the inciting incident—to capitalize on your readers’ willingness to suspend disbelief.

Strategy 2: Avoid justifying what readers readily accept

In contrast to what we’ve just established—that the earlier a coincidence occurs in the story, the less it needs to be justified in the minds of readers—many authors spend excessive time trying to explain why the opening should make sense.

Often, they’ll include an exciting hook, then drop into backstory to explain what instances led up to the hook occurring. This not only hurts the flow of the narrative, but also decreases escalation and hampers your readers’ engagement with the story.

Can lightning strike the person standing beside your protagonist during the first scene of the story? Yes, of course. Is that a coincidence? Absolutely. Will readers accept it? Sure, because that’s how the story begins.

Can lightning strike the bad guy at the climax right when it looks like he’s about to kill the hero? Well, technically anything can happen, but if it does, it’s likely to solicit eye rolls and book throwing—unless the main character somehow causes that to happen through a conscious choice and in a way that readers will readily believe but not anticipate.

Does your hero need to know karate late in the story? Show him sparring early. You don’t need to explain why or when he started sparring; you don’t need to give a history of all the karate tournaments he’s been in since high school. All of that information is unnecessary. He’s a black belt. Got it. Now move on.

Strategy 3: Leverage genre conventions

Coincidences are more acceptable in some genres than in others. For instance, fate tends to play a bigger role in romance, fantasy, and horror: The lovers are destined to be together (regardless of when in the story that destiny is revealed), the prophecy about the young wizard must come true, and readers might anticipate that the demon will somehow survive at the end to wreak havoc again.

In those cases, or when the thematic nature of a story revolves around fate, destiny, prophecy, or divine intervention, coincidences play a bigger role in the story’s progression.

However, most people believe that free will plays a more significant role in our destiny than fate does, so even in genres that are friendly to coincidences, consider searching for a way to have a freely made choice rather than simply destiny or an act of God resolve things at the climax.

Strategy 4: Point out coincidences in the middle

Every coincidence except the opening one requires a leap of faith. So, the further you move into a story, the more coincidences will undermine believability.

Certain forces press in upon a story to help shape it—believability, tension, escalation, characterization, and so on. Sometimes authors overlook the importance of causality, or the fact that each subsequent event in a story is causally linked. In other words, every event is caused by the one that precedes it.

At times, the flow of a story might require a break-in causality, a jump in logic, or the necessity for something inexplicable to happen. If that’s the case in your story, readers will often sense a gap in believability—unless you point it out to them.

You can do this by having a character note that what’s happening seems unbelievable:

“It just doesn’t seem like Judy to lose her patience like that.”

“I can’t believe he would say that.”

“I could tell something was up. She just wasn’t acting like herself.”

Readers will think, “Aha! Yes! I thought something weird was going on, too!” And, rather than be turned off by what seems too unbelievable or too convenient, they’ll be drawn deeper into the story. They’ll trust that there’s more going on than meets the eye and that, in the broader context of where the story is heading, this event will retrospectively make sense.

Strategy 5: Anticipate readers’ reactions

Be your own worst critic of seemingly arbitrary events in your story. Think through the reactions that readers will have to the events as they occur:

Oh, that’s convenient.

I don’t buy it.

Yeah, right.

This doesn’t make sense.

Why doesn’t he just …?

We often talk about silencing our inner critics when we write, but this is one time when you should listen to that voice. When it pipes up, find a way in your story to answer it.

Strategy 6: Look for what’s missing

Avoiding coincidence isn’t just about spotting what does occur that’s not the logical result of the preceding events, it’s also about recognizing what doesn’t occur that should, given the current circumstances.

For example, the woman is being chased by the knife-wielding killer. She runs out of the house and tries to fire up the car—it won’t start. (Oh, that’s convenient.)

So, she gets out of the car and runs to the cellar instead of toward the highway. (I don’t buy it.)

Where she rallies her strength and punches the killer in the face, knocking him out. (Yeah, right.)

In those three cases, the coincidence comes from the actions she takes. But such contrivances are equally ineffective when they come from what should happen but too conveniently does not:

She carefully and quietly steps over his unconscious body to get to the staircase again. (This doesn’t make sense. Why doesn’t she tie him up, finish him off, use that knife of his against him?)

Any time your readers would have one of those reactions, you’ve identified a coincidence that needs to be addressed in the service of the story’s believability.

Strategy 7: Foreshadow to remove coincidence from the climax

Of all the scenes in your story, the climax should contain the least amount of coincidence. Foreshadowing is a powerful tool that can serve to remove coincidence, and thus the climax should be foreshadowed more than any other scene.

I’ve already pointed out that in far too many stories, things are reversed. Why do so many authors use coincidence to resolve the climax? Well, because they’re trying to come up with an ending that readers won’t guess. As the author brainstorms ways to surprise them, he also runs out of believable ways for the protagonist to solve his own problem, or to make the defining choice of the story in a way that will satisfy readers. It’s much easier to just put the protagonist in a terrible fix, stick her in
a situation that looks impossible to escape from, and then have someone else show up in the nick of time to save her.

But that’s lazy writing, and it’s not giving readers what they want.

Conclusions depend on choices, not on chance, coincidence, or rescue. By definition the hero should do the rescuing rather than needing to be rescued. He makes a choice that depends not on coincidence but instead on causality, and that choice determines the ending of the story.

Think back to Strategy 2: If your character needs that Swiss Army Knife at the climax, foreshadow earlier that she has it with her. If he needs to be a rock climber, show him on the crag with his buddies in a previous scene. If she needs to be able to solve complex mathematic equations in her head, foreshadow that she’s a human calculator.

The location, the character, the asset (or liability) that comes into play at the climax—anything that ends up being significant to the outcome of the struggle—should have been introduced long ago, or it’ll seem too convenient that it arrives when the protagonist needs it most.

At its best, foreshadowing should make so much sense in that earlier scene that readers don’t notice that the scene is foreshadowing anything at all. Only later, when that special skill, ability, or asset shows up again, will readers think, Oh yeah! That’s right. He knows how to fly a helicopter. Excellent. I forgot about that.

Readers should never think that the story’s conclusion “came out of nowhere,” but rather that it logically followed all that preceded it, even if the story ends with a twist.”

Aging

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There is an essay on the Electric Literature website about how one writer confronted her aging process; it in titled ‘Mirrors Tell the Truth but Not the Whole Story’, and it’s written by Stephanie Gangi.

Stephanie Gangi is a poet, novelist, short story writer and essayist living and writing in New York City. Her debut novel, The Next, was published by St. Martin’s Press and her second, Carry the Dog, from Algonquin Books in November 2021 and has garnered early praise. Gangi’s work has appeared in, among others, Arts & Letters, Catapult, LitHub, Hippocrates Poetry Anthology, McSweeney’s, New Ohio Review, Next Tribe, and The Woolfer. She’s working on her third novel, The Good Provider.

Stephanie Gangi

“Years ago I wrote a poem, “Mirror Window.” The gist of it was that I kept mixing up the words, mirror and window; I said one when I meant the other. It was alarming, I was not yet forty, too young to lose language. My daughters noticed and teased me about being old, as daughters will, and I wrote about that, kind of a circle of life thing.

I’ve gone back and read the poem and it’s not bad, but like all my writing at the time and from years before, from my teens, I filed it away and distracted myself with being young: sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll, i.e., men, and then marriage and a shiny, happy family in a house on a hill. I have conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand, I was distracted from writing by love, lucky me; on the other, love was conditional or finite, humans being human, especially me. The writing was a constant, but me as a writer was something—someone—I could not see. I thought of it as a hobby.

In my late 40s, I tried “Mirror Window” again. This time it took the form of an essay, which came about because I was in possession of a large, antique mirror that I didn’t like but couldn’t get rid of. Let me go back.

I got the mirror when my mother died a decade earlier, not just my mother but my father too, he in March and Ma in June, both suddenly, neither yet seventy or sick. I was thirty-seven years old, an only child, or an adult only child, and a mother myself, in a complicated marriage. I was left with a split level to sell in the dead middle of Long Island. The contents were all mine, down to the coffee cup in the sink with Cherries in the Snow lipstick left on its rim. Consequently, the objects and furnishings and jewelry held—hold— outsized sentimental value.

Time passed, the parameters shifted. Love was indeed finite. My marriage ended and my little family reconstituted itself. We moved, with the mirror, to where we fit better with one less of us. That’s when I decided to paint its frame, give it a new look for my new life. I laid it out on a tiny patch of city yard on a sunny day, and in the course of sanding it down, I was on my hands and knees hovering over my reflection, focused on the task, not noticing myself. And then I did, and I saw how I’d look if I were on top of someone. How I looked during sex was on my mind at the time—I was a divorcée, it was still called that—because I was having a lusty adventure with a man seventeen years my junior. I was on top regularly.

The vantage point over my reflection showed my hair hanging in lank curtains on either side of my face, red with exertion. Gravity plus the sanding effort yielded sagging and swaying. The word “jowls” made itself manifest. I’d never looked my age before, but kneeling over this mirror, I sure did.

The distracting fling with this guy had turned into foolish fantasies about a life together. Once during pillow-talk, we did that thing of revealing something each had never told anyone else. My dark secret: Botox. We both reveled in our age difference but the truth was, I’d been trying to hide it. His dark secret? He admitted that he would stay a relationship’s course until someone new came along to provide him with a reason to leave. I knew this was true. It was the case with us; I had recently been the new one. “Mirror Window” was an essay about heartbreak. Once again, I filed my work away.

It turned out there was more to it than heartbreak. It turned out that refinishing the mirror gave me a window into a future with him I could not countenance, in both senses of the word—countenance like face and countenance like support. The truth is even if I had not sagged over the mirror that day, I was already worried about being where I am now, here in my sixties with a younger man who’d all but warned me he’d be watching for the exit. People do tell you who they are, and you should believe them, and he did, and I did.

So I reframed. My longest, truest commitment, to writing, was never a hobby. It is what I do and who I am. First novel at 60, forthcoming novel at 65, third in the works. Now and then the hot chill of regret passes through me. I should have started sooner. I should have been less high, less young, less seductive and less seduced, less distracted. Well, wait. That’s not right. I was full of life and love, and sorrow, joy, and disappointment—the open heart. Regret is beside the point. I know there’s no grace in that.

Let me keep going.

I am still new at being me, the writer. I have so many ideas that I cast around too long before I settle on something. A writer friend advised, “Just write about what you always think about.” Mirrors and windows. It’s not a sophisticated metaphor, but it is simple, it is effective. In my work, my women think a lot about how to age gracefully even as they learn to recognize themselves in their new old faces. They stare into their bathroom mirrors and wonder what to do about the jowls even when they are nobody’s lover, let alone on top. They too are startled when they catch an unexpected reflection in a shop window.

Two crazy things happened recently on the same locked-down day. I went through my apartment in a pandemic-fueled mission to spruce things up. I decided to repaint the frame on my mother’s mirror again, it’d been a long time, and I wanted it to match a smaller mirror that I bought at a yard sale in Montauk thirty years ago, with an infant in my arms and a toddler hanging from my legs. I was inspecting this smaller mirror and I was surprised. Oh. It’s a window frame. A window frame, fitted with mirrored squares instead of clear glass. I’d had it for so long I didn’t register it anymore, even though I passed it several times a day. I actually own a mirror window.

Not an hour later, I picked up a package containing the manuscript of my new novel—about distorted memory, accepting who you once were, and recognizing who you are now—from my editor. I poured some red wine and sat down, thrilled and grateful to see his old-school, handwritten edits on manuscript pages. On page 178, there was a strong delete mark through the word “window,” and his caret and note indicating it should be replaced with the word “mirror.” I’d done it again.

Mirror window. It wasn’t a mix-up, I hadn’t lost language. I was telling myself something I couldn’t hear yet. I was showing myself something I didn’t see yet. It’s like the two words were saying, and kept saying, Look inside, look outside, write it down, make it your life.

My daughters are now old enough to tease each other about getting old; I’ve aged out of the joke but I’ve revised the old poem, newly titled “Last Laugh,” wherein I give myself the final word, a circle of life kind of thing. I revised the saggy-jowls essay, and this is how it’s ended up:  published, not filed away. I’m tunneling into the third novel, and in an opening scene my protagonist is holding a chaotic yard sale, everything must go, including her dead mother’s furniture, including a window frame fitted with mirrors for panes, just like mine.”

Why I Love Dirty Children’s Books

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There is an article with this title by Daniel Donahoo on the Wired website. It’s dated 14 February 2013, but it is quite timely.

Daniel Donahoo is the Director of Project Synthesis, an ideas consultancy whose work is driven by play, technology and narrative.

Daniel is the author of children, family, media and technology “Idolising Children” and co-author of “Adproofing Your Kids”. He has supported a number of services across Australia with the planning and implementation of technology in play-based environments,  he has advised on national projects on incorporating play-based approaches into digital learning resources and reviews and writes about technology for Wired, Huffington Post and New Media Consortium.

He says: “BOOKS ARE ARTIFACTS. We hold them close, we sort them on shelves, we lend them out and wonder when they will return. In these digital times the value of the book as a treasured item is only increasing. Books have a scent, a feel and a connection that some place well above the stories they may read on their Kindle.

However, I’m teaching my kids that books are far more important than to be given the status of artifact. My favorite books are dirty children’s books.

While illustrated children’s book have long history of being even more special artifacts than most others, a children’s book in beautiful condition, with clean crisp pages in near-mint condition is a sad and troubling thing. Children’s books should belong to and be treasured by children, and if that is the case they should look like they have been handled and read and looked at by children.

Our house is currently littered with books. They can be found behind the cushions on the sofa, on the floor in the kitchen, under the washing machine and occasionally on bookshelves. Most of these belong to my 20-month-old son, and he loves to flick through the pages of any book and identify everything with wheels as a “brum.”

We read to him. His older brothers read to him. And he “reads” himself. Consequently, all of his books are dirty children’s books. They are frayed at the edges, some pages are ripped, others have splashes of breakfast cereal or smudges from butter and toast. These books have gorgeous pictures and wonderful stories, but what good would they be if we kept them all well ordered and alphabetized on a shelf, only to bring them out on the occasion of bedtime for a story before sleep?

Books are something we should treasure and care for. We should fold over the edges to keep our place, we should let them live in the bottom of our bags or in the dirt while we are on camping trips. Our books should reflect the lives we lead — messy and uncertain, but well lived and loved.

We should teach our children to love books in this way, and deal with the little bit of damage that comes with it. Books are not made of glass. You can dry pages with a hairdryer, and stick ripped pages back together. You can construct a new spine from cardboard and even write a new ending on some new paper and slot that in at the end if those pages have been lost.

I love dirty children’s books. Covered in dust and grime and the things you find on children’s fingers. I love the stories and the pictures the fact that every fingerprint is a page turned, a new word learned, a narrative pursued.

Keeping reading with your children. Always.”

Is Listening to Audio Books Really Reading?

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Easy Listening posted this question on the Wired website:

“I listen to a lot of books on audio. It works for me. But certain more literary friends of mine say it doesn’t quite count as reading. Part of me wants to read more, but I find it much easier to listen. What do you think? Should I care?”

Megan O’Gieblyn posted this scholarly answer:

“I wouldn’t put too much stock in what your “literary” friends say; they sound like bores. When it comes down to it, people who think about reading in terms of what “counts”—those who piously log their daily reading metrics and tally up the titles they’ve consumed on Goodreads—don’t seem to actually enjoy books all that much. Their moralistic gloom is evident in the extent to which reading has come to resemble exercise, with readers tracking their word-count metrics, trying to improve their speed, and joining clubs to keep them accountable.

“While some disciples of this culture are quick to dismiss audiobooks as a shortcut, they cannot seem to agree on why, exactly, listening is an inferior form of engagement. Some cite studies that have shown people who listen to books retain less than those who read them, which is bound up with how tempting it is to do other things while listening. (As easy as it is to multitask with audiobooks, the form does make it harder to return, after a spell of distraction, to the passage where your mind started to wander.) Others insist that audiobooks eliminate the reader’s responsibility to interpret things like irony, tone, and inflection, given that the person recording does the work of conveying emotion. According to this rather tenuous logic, listening to audiobooks is inferior precisely because it is easier—because it lacks the element of suffering that is incontrovertible evidence of accomplishment, the same way soreness is proof of a real workout.

“The larger problem, however, is in viewing books as a means to some other end. Many people who aspire to read more are motivated by the promise that doing so will prevent cognitive decline, improve brain connectivity, or increase emotional intelligence. Even the obsession with retention assumes that the purpose of reading is to absorb knowledge or nuggets of trivia that one can use to demonstrate cultural literacy or being “well read.” What all of this obscures is the possibility that books might be a source of intrinsic pleasure, an end in themselves. I’d be willing to bet, Easy Listening, that your earliest experiences with the joy of literature were aural. Most of us were read to by adults before we learned to read ourselves, and listening to audiobooks recalls the distinctive delight of being told a story: the rhythms of the prose made incarnate in a human voice; the dialog animated through the performance of a skillful reader; the ease with which our eyes, liberated from the page, are free to roam around the bedroom (or the aerobics room, or the landscape beyond the car windshield) so as to better imagine the actions of the narrative playing out.

“Oral storytelling predates writing by millennia, and many of the oldest stories in our literary canon existed for centuries as bardic tales before they were put down in print. The Homeric epics likely originated with bards who told them around fires and improvised their central plot points, which were passed down and adapted from one generation to the next. Evolutionary biologists have all sorts of conjectures about the utilitarian function of these rituals—storytelling may have emerged to deepen community bonds or model unfamiliar situations in ways that might have increased chances of survival—but I doubt that members of these cultures were consciously thinking, as so many readers are today, about how narrative exposure might boost their short-term memory or sharpen their capacity for empathy. Rather, they listened to stories because they were, quite simply, transfixed by their power.

“These early stories were largely composed in verse, at a time when poetry, music, and storytelling were often so intertwined as to be indistinguishable. And I suspect that audiobook fans are at least partly drawn to listening because it’s easier to discern the melodic qualities of prose, which often get lost when we quickly scan a page of text without actually hearing the words in our heads. There is some evidence that listening, as opposed to reading, engages the right hemisphere of the brain, which is more closely associated with music, poetry, and spirituality. This might explain why some religious texts are designed to be read aloud. The scholar Karen Armstrong recently pointed out that the term qur’ān means “recitation” and that the scripture’s many repetitions and variations take on their full effect only when they are voiced by a gifted reciter who can, as she put it, “help people to slow down their mental processes and enter a different mode of consciousness.”

“If you’re like most people I know, you probably find it difficult to recall the last time a book—regardless of how you consumed it—succeeded in altering your consciousness. Even your desire to “read more” contains a whiff of compulsion, suggesting that many books you’ve encountered have failed to live up to their transcendent potential. Anxieties about post-literacy tend to focus obsessively on the question of medium, and audiobooks are often hailed as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, alongside social media, visual entertainment, and the decline in attention spans. But it seems to me that there exists a more obvious explanation for why reading often feels so dull: Most books are very bad. The vast majority of them are uninspired, unconvincing, and poorly written. This has always been the case (surely there were some flops even among those bardic epics of yore), though it’s a truth that grows more elusive when we are led to believe that reading is not supposed to be enjoyable. When a culture falls prey to an obsession with “reading challenges” and daily word count goals, it is all too easy to become inured to the shoddiness of the texts we’ve chosen and more difficult to object to the offensive quality of many of the books on offer.

“My advice, Easy, is to be less discriminating about the medium and more choosy about the books you pick up. If you find that your mind is wandering or that you’re not able to fully enter into the reality of the narrative, consider that this might be a problem with the content, not the mechanism through which you are experiencing it. Audiobooks have some distinct advantages when it comes to this kind of discernment. It’s easier to identify a tin-eared writer when the book is read aloud. And the liberation from the physical discomforts of reading—neck pain, eye strain—makes it harder to blame one’s growing annoyance with a text on environmental factors, an excuse that leads so many readers to stick with bad books longer than they should. Most of all, though, I would urge you to trust your instincts—to “listen,” as it were, to the critic within who instinctively knows what is worth your time and who will rarely lead you astray.”

Book Banners are Banned

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The Guardian has an article by Maya Yang dated 9 June 2024 on its website which suggests that the tide is turning against book banners in the US. The federal cavalry has arrived in Texas.

“After a case spurred by complaints on books containing the words “butt” and “fart” as well as touching on the topics of racism and LGBTQ+ identity, an appellate court has ruled that Texas cannot ban books from libraries simply because officials “dislike the idea contained in those books”.

The fifth US circuit court of appeals issued its decision on Thursday in a 76-page majority opinion, which was written by Judge Jacques Wiener Jr and opened with a quote from American poet Walt Whitman: “The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book.”

In its decision, the appellate court declared that “government actors may not remove books from a public library with the intent to deprive patrons of access to ideas with which they disagree”.

It added: “This court has declared that officials may not ‘remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the idea contained in those books and seek by their removal to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion’.”

The appellate court’s latest decision follows a federal lawsuit filed in 2022 by seven Llano county residents against county and library officials for restricting and removing books from its public circulation.

The residents argued that the defendants violated their constitutional right to “access information and ideas” by removing 17 books based on their content and messages.

Those books include seven “butt and fart” books with titles including I Broke My Butt! and Larry the Farting Leprechaun, four young adult books on sexuality, gender identity and dysphoria – including Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen – and two books on the history of racism in the US, among them Caste and They Called Themselves the KKK.

Other books targeted by the ban were In the Night Kitchen, which contains cartoons of a naked child, as well as It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health, according to court documents.

The books were removed after parents complained, with library officials referring to the books as “pornographic filth”.

In its majority decision, the overwhelmingly conservative appellate court ordered eight of the 17 books to be returned, including Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen, Caste and They Called Themselves the KKK.

Wiener wrote how a dissenting opinion from the Donald Trump appointee Kyle Duncan “accuses us of becoming the ‘Library Police’, citing a story by author Stephen King”.

“But King, a well-known free speech activist, would surely be horrified to see how his words are being twisted in service of censorship,” wrote Wiener, who was appointed during George HW Bush’s presidency.

“Per King: ‘As a nation, we’ve been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn’t approve of them.’ Defendants and their highlighters are the true library police.”

Wiener also said that “libraries must continuously review their collection to ensure that it is up to date” and engage in “removing outdated or duplicated materials … according to objective, neutral criteria”.

In a report released last October, the American Library Association found that Texas made the most attempts in the US to ban or restrict books in 2022. In total, the state made 93 attempts to restrict access to more than 2,300 books.

A wave of book banning has also emerged in Florida as part of the culture wars of the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, on “wokeism”, a term meant to insult liberal values.

In January, a Florida school district removed dictionaries, encyclopedias and other books because the texts included descriptions of “sexual conduct”.

Meanwhile, in 2022, a Mississippi school district upheld the firing of an assistant principal after he read a humorous children’s book, I Need a New Butt, to his students.”

I don’t doubt that the litigation will continue but the 5th Circuit Court (one step below the Supreme Court) and a conservative court, has set a precedent which will be forced on other recalcitrant states.

Review: Glimpses of the Devil

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This is a book that I had been seeking for several years. I thought the title was “Hostage to the Devil” and I thought the author was Scott Peck. Looking on Amazon.co.uk, I wasn’t having any luck, but on Amazon.it, I had success on both searches. Under the author M. Scott Peck, M.D., I found Glimpses of the Devil, which is subtitled ‘A Psychiatrist’s Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism and Redemption’. I also found Hostage to the Devil whose author is Malachi Martin. Perhaps my search of the UK website was ineffective, or perhaps Italy being a Catholic country has a keener interest in exorcism. In any event, I bought both books, and I have finished reading Glimpses of the Devil.

The back cover of the book has this biography: “M. Scott Peck’s publishing history reflects his own evolution as a serious and widely acclaimed writer, thinker, psychiatrist, and spiritual guide. Since his groundbreaking bestseller, The Road Less Traveled, was first published in 1978, his insatiable intellectual curiosity has taken him in various new directions with virtually each new book: the subject of healing human evil in People of the Lie (1982), where he first briefly discussed exorcism and possession; the creative experience of community in The Different Drum (1987); the role of civility in personal relationships and society in A World Waiting to Be Born (1993); an examination of the complexities of life and the paradoxical nature of belief in Further Along the Road Less Traveled (1993); and an exploration of the medical, ethical, and spiritual issues of euthanasia in Denial of the Soul (1999); as well as a novel, a children’s book, and other works. A graduate of both Harvard University and Case Western Reserve, Dr. Peck served in the Army Medical Corps before maintaining a private practice in psychiatry.” Glimpses of the Devil was published in 2005. Dr Peck was born in 1936 and died in 2005.

M. Scott Peck

Glimpses of the Devil recounts two exorcisms actually performed by Dr Peck along with a team of religious leaders and volunteers. Both exorcisms were video recorded, and in writing the book, Dr Peck called on the recollections of the members of his team, the possessed person and members of her family.

Until Dr. Peck first met the young woman called Jersey, he did not believe in the devil. In fact, as a mature, highly experienced psychiatrist, he expected that this case would resolve his ongoing effort to prove to himself, as scientifically as possible, that there were absolutely no grounds for such beliefs.  Twenty-seven-year-old Jersey was of average intelligence; a caring and devoted wife and mother to her husband and two young daughters, she had no history of mental illness.Yet what he discovered could not be explained away simply as madness or by any standard clinical diagnosis. Through a series of unanticipated events, Dr. Peck found himself thrust into the role of exorcist, and his desire to treat and help Jersey led him down a path of blurred boundaries between science and religion. Once there, he came face-to-face with deeply entrenched evil.

Dr Peck’s second exorcism was Beccah, in her mid-forties and with a superior intellect, who had suffered from profound depression throughout her life, choosing to remain in an abusive relationship with her husband, one dominated by distrust and greed. This exorcism, like Jersey’s took four days, but this one was not successful in that Beccah was repossessed. Dr Peck attributed her repossession to the length of her possession, which was thought to be about 40 years. Beccah went back to her fraudulent financial business and died of osteomyelitis or morphine addiction fifteen or twenty years later by which time, Dr Peck was no longer in touch with her.

Dr Peck breaks an exorcism down into stages of Presence, Pretense, Break Point, Voice, Clash and Expulsion, the same stages as mentioned by Malachi Martin on Hostage to the Devil. In Presence, the team becomes aware of a demonic presence in the room. The temperature seems to drop, there is no other outward sign, but everyone can feel it. In Pretence, the demon pretends to be the possessed person, using his/her voice to speak. At Break Point, the Pretense ends and the demon uses the possessed’s vocal chords to speak in its own Voice. Clash, as the word suggests, marks the crucial disagreement with the demon and can include the exorcist, the possessed and members of the team. Expulsion marks the exit of the demon, which happens because the possessed turns against the demon, because of demands made by the exorcist, or (the Catholic church believes) by the intervention of Jesus.

Glimpses of the Devil is not a work of fiction. It is rather scientific work by a nationally recognised doctor. Nor is it one man’s testimony. Videotapes of both exorcisms exist and Dr Peck identifies all of the people involved in each process, though for obvious reasons, they are anonymised. One feels that one is actually present at each exorcism, observing all of the details worth observing. The author does not speculate or draw unproven conclusions. His principle conclusions are that the devil is a real being who is a huge threat to individual human beings, and the devil is afraid of Jesus.

It is a very difficult book to put down!