You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Do you ever feel guilty as a reader? Not just in what you’re reading or in the things you “ought” to be doing in the time you’re engaged in a book or even a magazine, but also in the reality that you just can’t keep up in your particular field of interest?
And how about that nagging fear that maybe somebody else, somewhere, is already covering what you’re trying to develop … and probably doing it better?
Let’s begin with the competition. Readers are a minority in today’s society. If you want to tell your story or deliver the data in readable terms, it’s a shrinking audience, one further diced by increasing alternatives.
Let’s start with the first question. Do you read books? If not, nobody’s interested in yours. Period. Forget all the movies and so on of fame and wealth.
Google Books concluded that 129,864,880 books have been published since the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press in 1440 up to 2010. But, thanks to self-publishing and ebooks, there’s been an explosion since.
It’s enough to make the writing life feel futile.
November is the month many amateur writers set out to draft a full novel within 30 days.
My book Quaking Dover is nonfiction, but with eight published novels, I can still sympathize.
I should have been suspicious when this book seemed to write itself, producing what one beta reader then sensed as not just stream-of-consciousness but a mind-dump.
Ouch!
Revising it, aiming at a more consistent, creative non-fiction tone, was much more torturous and required much more time and attention than I can calculate. Still, I have to admit the result feels satisfying. Just don’t make me do it again.
As a history book, it wound up with no index and no footnotes but instead focused on a community of people over time.
Well, the ebook edition can be easily searched for items. Not so with the paperback.
As for footnotes? Much of my research in the Covid outbreak was conducted online, not exactly a permanent source of information.
The effort did push me far beyond my journalism discipline, pushing me into the story as an active observer, not that I was comfortable with that.
But it seems to work, all the same.
November is the month when a lot of amateur writers make a push to start and finish writing a novel. While I applaud the effort, I also question whether we need that many new manuscripts.
Again, definitive figures turn out to be elusive. Still, focusing on the United States, here’s what turns up:
These days, it seems that everyone I meet has written a book. As an author myself, I’d much rather for everyone to have read a book in the past week. Or, gee, even a newspaper.
Trying to get solid figures on how much is being published or read is trickier than you might suspect. But to get us started, let me offer some findings, albeit with a grain of salt. And, to further complicate matters, I’m not exactly sure how the researchers are defining “book.” I’m assuming textbooks, instruction manuals, catalogs, and the like are excluded. But cookbooks? They’re big in our household. That said, in the United States:
Does she read a cookbook
the way I read poetry?
Have to admit it’s been an exciting, though not exactly lucrative, past 12 months since Quaking Dover appeared in print. The 255-page volume is quite different from my earlier publications. It’s history, rather than a novel or poetry, and its tone and outlook pushed my journalism training in new ways. I’ve even come to see this as my major creative nonfiction opus.
Reader reaction has been enthusiastic, and the book’s perspective has challenged the conventional take on New England history and its impact on the rest of America.
Friends Journal magazine called it an “eminently well-argued and documented account,“ while others declared it “a rich feast of a book” or said “It’s like you’re speaking right to me! It’s not like a history at all!” or simply “enjoyed your conversational writing style.”
Unlike my novels, its publication led to a festive book-release party in the Dover Quaker meetinghouse, followed by other events – some of them with unique PowerPoint visuals – in Dover, New Hampshire; Haverhill and Cape Cod, Massachusetts; and Eastport and Pembroke, Maine. Ten in all, and all well received. Didn’t get to do that with the novels. I’ve even had strangers stop me in the street to tell me how much they like my reading. And creating the presentations and accompanying illustrations has been fun in a whole new way for me.
One thing that’s impressed me is the way this has connected with people. It’s about places they live in or have visited, about families and communities they know, about values they share. It’s more concrete than fiction but no less personal.
Overall, it’s sold close to the U.S. average of 200 copies a year. Considering that the book is, at its core, the story of a small congregation in a small city in a small state, I’ll take that as a good start.
Or more accurately, the bastard son of a Frenchman in Haiti.
Yet, despite the iconic honor given his name, few have seen his legendary work in its full glory.
I’m speaking, of course, of John James Audubon, in the anglicized version of his name.
While I had viewed his work behind glass framing in art museums, nothing prepared me for my hands-on encounter with the four folio print volumes. That happened in Indiana University’s rare book Lilly Library when a librarian interrupted to ask if I would help her return two of the volumes to the cart so she could take them by elevator back to the stacks.
Yes, they really did need two people to move. As I’m seeing now, the books measured about 29½ inches by 39½, otherwise known as double elephant paper, the 435 prints being the same size as the original drawings.
We decided to take a peek and were both blown away. It was as if the birds had been pressed full-size onto the plate. You could actually see the veins in each feather. And that was, it turns out, a copy of the original. Oh, yes, and each species was presented full size, with some favored vegetation.
As for the color? Unbelievable. You have no idea how much is lost through any glass.
We both admitted it was too much for a single viewing.
Now, for ten more facts.
Many of the typos are a consequence of deep revisions.
Blame revision, too, for the times when subject/verb or the time tenses don’t match, especially when a novel shifted direction after an earlier draft.
The fact remains that for a writer, the work is rarely if ever actually finished.
It’s like an itch, actually.
The author misuses “that” for “who.”
Or uses single quotation marks randomly where a double is required.
It really smacks of amateurish, a warning of some less than savvy writing ahead. Still, there’s a chance the content will outweigh faulty prose – no guarantees, though.
Jnana's Red Barn 