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.

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.

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...

Fixing Tenure-Track Hiring

Being that I am, in my day job, a professor, I read a certain number of articles relating to life in academe--all too many of which are fairly depressing. Even if the article isn't depressing, the comments often are. I was mildly skeptical, therefore, that an article entitled 5 Easy Fixes for a Broken Faculty Job Market could possibly offer anything useful.

I'm very pleased to report that this is actually a great and practical article. Whether the fixes are "easy" depends mainly on the extent to which departments choose to apply them.

First, the author recognizes that scholarly job applicants (and indeed search committees) are presently obliged to spend an insane amount of time dealing with job applications. I remember this well from both sides of the game (but especially from the applicant side). When I was on the job market 10+ years ago, we had to send off ridiculous amounts of material, and it usually had to be customized further than just inserting the correct names of school, department, and position in the cover letter. Not that I'm a foe of a good specific cover letter, but that should really be the only thing that has to be customized. In any case, if the author of this article is right, which I assume s/he is (not making any gender assumptions about a first name of Chris), things are worse now than then. When I was applying, for instance, the cover letter was supposed to be no more than two pages, and one was considered somewhat better than two. Now, apparently, the cover letter is expected to be two to four. Egad! That's criminal! Then there is a whole pile of other crap to send--much of which I had to send too, but I never had to send a Diversity Statement, and it wasn't normal to have to send transcripts.

I won't break down everything suggested in the article, but I'm all in favor of knocking the initial application down to just a few pieces, like cover letter, c.v., writing sample or a sample syllabus, and list of references. That's enough for the committee to whittle down to a list of initial interviewees. And while I do prefer in-person interviews, it is unquestionably kinder to applicants to do the first interview by phone, because yes, it costs a lot to go to professional conferences. Yes, people should try to attend for professional development and networking, but not everyone can afford to go when on the job market. Also, while video interviews are now fairly easy to do, my department chair has pointed out that they are not as fair as phone interviews; he had recently had the experience of realizing he was biased against an administrative candidate because he thought her home decor sucked. Obviously, said he, her home decor was irrelevant to whether she could do the job she was interviewing for, and he didn't want to be distracted by that.

Waiting to get references until the middle or final stages of a search also sounds great to me. It is, indeed, a time-sink for references (some of whom write very detailed, individual letters) to write masses of such letters each year. It should be enough to agree to be on someone's reference list and then provide the reference (written or oral) only if the candidate is under serious consideration. (Reference letters for students applying to grad school are a different matter, I think, and should be done at the start. Correct me if I'm wrong.)

There are other important suggestions here too, but even just implementing the above would be a huge step in the right direction. So thank you, Chris M. Golde of Stanford, for making such a practical, kind-to-all set of proposals. Here's hoping they take hold!

Writers Gonna Write

I know that it is August, and my primary task for the month is to ensure that my courses are ready to teach by later in the month (and that I have trimmed down my ISSS conference paper to 20 minutes and created the Powerpoint for it), but although I have done some work on my courses--which are, fortunately, all courses I've taught before--my mind has not yet quite settled into course-prep mode. It remains, mostly, in fiction mode.

Now, if I were a sane person (but are writers sane?), I would see about making progress on another of my close-to-done novels, which currently number two. In fact, I know which one ought to be finished next; it is the one I had intended to finish this summer, but which lost out to one that was closer to done. (There is some, if not much, method in my madness.)

Perversely, however, a new idea popped into my head. And it's not even the only new idea for a novel to come up in recent months; my cousin Cheryl and I have been plotting another one that we think I should write one of these days. That one, admittedly, will be a major project and I am not ready to embark on more than preliminary planning for it.

This one is a smaller project, I should hope (maybe a novella, even), and it began to percolate in my mind as I contemplated the fact that all of my novels (completed, underway, planned) are set between ten and ninety years in the past. (Well, one also has some portions set much further back than that, but the main action occurs in the 1980s.) Surely it might be a fine thing to, for once, dash off something that is still about the present day by the time I finish it?

I attempted to quell this feeling, which has so much against it (too many other projects, too little time, too much climate change and other life-destroying unpleasantness), but next thing I knew, I had an actual idea and some actual characters. For this, I blame Muriel Spark, as I had just reread her last novel Finishing School. Finishing School is quite short and mildly strange, and while I wouldn't class it as one of her best, it had made me say to myself "I too can dash off something about this length, provided I can write the damned thing start-to-finish rather than in my usual patchwork manner." (As I tend to plot as I go, starting at the beginning and moving along to the end is only sometimes an option, but when I can do it, I can write quickly.)

It may not be fair of me to blame Muriel Spark, who has been dead for 13 years now, for my own demented hubris. It may also seem bold of me to imagine that just because one of the major writers of the 20th century could dash off sometimes fairly short novels in very reasonable amounts of time, that I should aspire to do the same. Still, I know I can do it, because I've done it before. The novel that is out being contemplated by editors and contest judges is one I wrote in a three-month period, and it is not even remarkably short. (Having stolen the plot from a classic of Western literature helped immensely.)

It is fair to say, however, that while there are many authors that I love and admire, or even simply devour as light reading when tired, there are relatively few who give me that sense of get-up-and-write, and Muriel Spark is often one of them. If I could become some sort of amalgam of Muriel Spark, Robertson Davies, A.S. Byatt, and Italo Calvino, for instance, I would not be at all displeased. (Note that these writers are not all that similar.) I note, too, my Complete Works of Nathanael West lying carelessly nearby and we could throw him, too, into the mix.

However, literary name-dropping is not the point here, beyond that I want to announce that everyone ought to read André Alexis, who is actually still alive, unlike most of the above-mentioned.

No, in the back of my brain I'm sorting through things about this novel(la), which I've begun, and which could perhaps be written quickly, if I don't have to get bogged down in looking at old emails about political and ecological matters that will need to be mentioned in it. It's not a project I expect to find especially delightful (delightfulness can extend the writing process), but as I'm ahead of the game on writing my fall conference papers and suchlike, there's at least some possibility that I could write this item in a reasonable span of time.

No promises, but it could happen.

Goodbye Opossum

I am sad to report that the hybrid literary journal Opossum, a beautifully designed "marsupial" which published a story of mine last year, has ceased publication. This is, unfortunately, a not uncommon fate of literary journals, especially those bravely founded by individuals and small editorial teams without university backing. Opossum not only featured gorgeous cover art leading one into the fiction and poetry, but in most of its issues included a 7" single, as the auditory was very important to the editorial team.

According to the former editor, "If we published your work or you are an educator and you want a box of Opossums, send me (opossum.jedgar@gmail.com) your address and I will ship it out to you via media mail in the coming weeks. Opossum was used in at least two university classes as an example of a literary journal and of mixed media in literature, so if you want issues for a class, let me know and they will come. After this first round, I will open it up to the general public."

El Paso and Dayton, Too

As a resident of Dayton, today I can only mourn the latest mass shootings, but we cannot simply mourn, we must stop allowing and normalizing such massacres. No more of this "thoughts and prayers" avoidance of the issue. These acts of US domestic terrorism ensure that no otherwise safe space is truly safe. Not sidewalks, not restaurants, not stores, not schools, not places of worship, not theaters.

It's time to change policy and begin to return the USA to the civilized world.