Monday, November 18, 2019

On the First Pages of Novels

The question came up, not for the first time among writers of my acquaintance, of whether readers actually buy books on the basis of great opening lines. As my friend Dirk says, "There is amazing pressure from profit-making publishers and agents to begin with something that hooks the reader. The theory is that how books are sold is: people walk into bookstores, pick up books at random or on the basis of the cover, read the first couple of pages. If they are intrigued they buy the book, if not, not. A while ago I asked a New York agent if he thought this myth were true. He replied, 'I don't know if it's true or not, but I know publishers believe it is true so it may as well be.'"

Dirk, who both reads and writes respectable amounts of prose, does not choose his reading matter in this manner, and finds it an annoying assumption on the part of the publishing world. He points out that some of the best-loved and most admired books do not begin with any kind of dazzling hook. From Proust, for instance, we get "For a long time I used to go to bed early." I think that it is safe to say that Dirk and I are not alone in finding this quite an acceptable opener.

I too am always annoyed by this rampant notion that readers buy books based on the opening lines. I can understand how gatekeepers (publishers, agents) find it useful to do so--in reading a stack of student papers, I find that the opening paragraph is usually indicative of the overall quality of the rest--but as a reader of entire books, I pay next to no attention to the opening lines. When considering a book to buy or check out from the library, a good title and good cover art draw my attention (anything emphasizing pictures of high heeled shoes is not a good sign). I may take a quick look at the back cover and flap copy, again to see if the book sounds tempting or not like my cup of tea, and then I open to random middle pages and get a sense of the prose style. 

I have also, of course, been known to read books that got positive reviews either in a publication or from friends, if the said books sounded like something I'd like/find interesting. And I try to be good about reading books by people I know, although I could improve in that realm.

Unlike Dirk, who relies mainly on reviews, recommendations, and familiarity with the author, I don't usually buy novels without having skimmed at least a paragraph or two (again, it will be in the middle, not page one). Therefore, I like to go to bookstores, and also to the library. The book fairs at scholarly conferences are also dangerous places for me to go (how much can I fit in my suitcase?), especially AWP where novels are everywhere and many of the small presses have invested in very appealing cover art.

I want novels to have openings that suit them, which is not to say that I have never enjoyed a snappy opener, such as "Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions." (Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means.) But usually I have no recollection of how the novels I have enjoyed began.

Saturday, November 16, 2019

Novels and More Novels! And Scholarly Stuff Too!

This semester has been an unusually easy and pleasant one, as in addition to a full and reasonably engaged class of students for North American Art to 1900, I've been teaching a smaller Honors course on Surrealism, which has been simply delightful. This lighter than usual load has enabled me to get a lot of writing done, which is a very fine thing.

As noted awhile back, over the summer I succeeded in finishing one of the novels that I'd been working on off and on over the years. Once it had been read and commented on by one of my fiction-writer friends, I made some fixes and have now submitted it to a small number of contests and presses.

Meanwhile, a novel completed earlier--In Search of the Magic Theater--which I've been submitting with some vigor to small presses after giving up on agent submissions (these people apparently can't figure out how to use Submittable to send polite rejections, but simply let one wonder, month after month), was named a finalist for the Eludia Award. This award is given to a woman over forty who has not yet published a book-length work of fiction. The list of finalists was fairly long, but still, it was neat to find myself on such a list. The winner of the 2019 competition is Elise Atchison, for Crazy Mountain, which will be published by the Hidden River Arts Sowilo Press.

I had expected to spend August slaving over course prep and scholarly projects, but felt compelled to get going on what I thought would be a novella, set in the Trump Era. (Era? Well, it has seemed long enough to call an era.) It turned out to be a short novel rather than a novella, and was done in mid-October. As it begins with the 2016 election, it's not something I exactly enjoyed writing, but I hope that readers find it at least reasonably interesting. Parts of it are, at least--to my mind--funny. On the other hand, it doesn't leave out climate crisis, the Mueller Report, or ailments often suffered by persons nearing retirement age.

And then there have been the scholarly projects! During the first week of school, I escaped for a brief period to attend the second annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, where I presented a paper on Toyen during a panel on Central European female surrealists. I meant to blog about this conference, which was fabulous, but was (apparently) too busy writing fiction to do so.

I then had to get cracking on my paper for the ASEEES conference, where I will be presenting on the Czech surrealists Nezval and Štyrský as Prague flâneurs, for a panel Chad Bryant and I put together on walking in Prague. I have now sent it to the discussant and merely need to do the Powerpoint; and also read the papers on Toyen that I will be discussant for.

Finally, or perhaps not so finally, I have a book chapter on Toyen due in December for an edited volume. I have got this just about wrapped up, but not quite.

As next semester I can expect to be teaching over 100 students and reading over 200 papers, 200 essay exams, and about 100 (since not everyone turns them in) exhibition journals, it is safe to predict that I will not be getting nearly as much writing done. C'est la vie.

Friday, November 15, 2019

Moving on to Copyedit with Magnetic Woman

Not long ago I received word that Magnetic Woman is now moving forward to copyediting. While it is true that I had thought it was doing that back in May or thereabouts, I am grateful that it is, indeed, moving ahead, and that its estimated release date will be Fall 2020 and therefore presumably during my lifetime. And now to update the Author Questionnaire that I turned in a year or so ago...