Dickens is beyond modern kids? I beg to differ.

Today is Charles Dickens's 200th birthday.

Naturally, the world media is alight with stories relating to Charlie and his works and whether he's still relevant and so on and so forth. Likewise there's a lot of utter and complete nonsense flitting about, including the usual trumpeting of the downfall of civilization. In case you missed it, Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin in a BBC interview said: 

"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that's a pity."

I hear this sort of stuff and nonsense all the time. Kids these days (with their shaggy hair and baggy clothes and loud rap music) just aren't able to follow the complex story lines and stay with a story the length of David Copperfield. To much TV, too many video games.

They rot your brain, you know.

To which I reply: Really? Have you ever seen a Harry Potter novel?

I'm going to give Ms Tomalin a pass on this one since she went on to say that the last time a truly Dickensian character caught the limelight was Basil Fawlty, bought memorably to life by John Cleese back in 1975. I think it's safe to assume that's when she stopped paying attention to such things because quite frankly, Harry Potter is David Copperfield with a magic wand.

But let's leave Harry and Ms Tomalin alone for a moment. Let's just talk about attention span and the ability to follow complex story lines.

There's a generational disconnect displayed here between people who see video games and TV as methods of storytelling and those who paint it with the same broad brush as brainless entertainment.

Tomalin's comments remind me of when movie critic Roger Ebert decided he needed to tell us all how he's not only never played a video game in his life, but also knew everything about them and could confidently predict their future development, I picked apart his argument on the basis of 'What constitutes art?' instead of 'What constitutes storytelling?' but he loses on both counts and so, I think, does Ms Tomalin.

Rather like dance has always freaked out the older generation who have conveniently forgotten how freaked out their parents were at the way that they danced, new avenues of storytelling continue to befuddle the generation whose preferred meme is getting replaced. Television has been doing this since its inception and video games have picked up where TV left off.

Video games are reaching a point where they are a storytelling medium in and of themselves. With plot twists and puzzles that would befuddle the likes of Ms. Tomalin or Mr. Ebert. The Uncharted series is interactive Indiana Jones. HALO is to Star Wars what Star Wars was to Flash Gordon. Each is the next iteration of our society's urge to tell stories and to immerse the listener/viewer in our tale.




These video games average more than 20 hours of focused gameplay. And they are played over and over again by their adherents.  Games like Skyrim are effectively infinite once you take into account all of the add-on quests and downloadable additional content.

Tell me again how people raised in the internet age cannot focus on an engaging story line for more than a few pages.

But what about books?

If I sat down and paged through the contact lists on my cell phone, I reckon that I could come up with a baker's dozen young ladies who have read every book Jane Austen ever wrote. In fact, if I got every daughter of every friend I have and forced them to confess to every book they've ever read, I would further propose that the pile would include (but not be limited to) the complete works of not only Austen, but also Louisa May Alcott, L.M. Montgomery, JK Rowling, John Green, and yes, Stephenie Meyer.

Every copy would be well-thumbed. E-readers would have fingerprints on the screens, I suppose, but it amounts to the same thing.

Yes, Virginia, kids these days can concentrate long enough to endure longform fiction.

The real question is how do you choose to engage them in it?  By saying they're incapable and writing them off because their modes of storytelling are not the ones we're most comfortable with?  Or by engaging them in the stories that these authors have to tell?

One more quote from Ms Tomalin and I'll get back to what I really should be doing (writing a book).

"You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840s is still relevant - the great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt MPs, how the country is run by old Etonians, you name it, he said it."

Yes indeed. And don't you think that's a better approach than This is too complex for your minds, so pitifully addled as they are by modern culture? 


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Other Posts you might like:
The Thing About Charlie: Is Dickens Still Relevant?: (Spoiler: Yes. He is.)
Video Games and the State of the Arts: Yes, Mr Ebert, video games do have the potential to be art.

Submissions :: The Genre Jungle

New York Times bestselling author Joe Finder tells the story of his first attempt at selling a thriller.  He sent it to an agent (back in the hardcopy days of yore) and received it back with a paperclip on page forty.  Joe is the ornery sort and did what you're not supposed to do: he called the agent and said "What's with the paperclip?"  After berating him for being cheeky, the agent finally told him that the paperclip marked where he stopped reading.  He then told him not to bother ever submitting a story to that agency again and hung up.

Joe didn't get any less ornery, but he did learn a lot about where to begin his story.  He cut the first forty pages and sold the book to a different agent, going on to a mostly successful career on best seller lists and so forth.

One of the reasons I began this blog was to chart my path from the slush pile to the bookshelf. This includes some rejections (and more than a little Chinese food) but more often it means listening to crickets chirruping in the form rejections that most of us receive back.  A sterile rejection letter tells you nothing at all.  Agents and publishers fire them off for a whole host of reasons including the fact that they just don't have room on their docket for another (insert genre here) novel or the market isn't right to try to sell (insert genre here) just at this moment.  In all my submissions, I've received only three personal notes and only the last one included anything I could use to really examine whay the book kept coming back to me.
 
Like every other writer (or so I hope), I have a cheering section rooting me on -- family and friends who believe in my ability to fight my way free of the slush pile.  I've been gratified by their response to the aforementioned agent's brutally honest assessment and I thank my dear friends for rising to my defense.  But their love for me doesn't make them right any more than his ambivalence makes him wrong.  The trouble with brutal honesty is that while it is brutal, it is also honest.  And honesty should never be ignored.

The crux of that agent's comment was the same as the feedback Joe Finder got (except that I didn't have to alienate an entire literary agency to get it): I started in the wrong place and he felt no desire to keep reading or ask for more pages.  He likes the way I write but he didn't care for the way I handled the story.  In essence, I failed to meet his expectation for a "Thriller".

So now I can do one of three things...

1. Ignore him and carry on.
2. Re-cut the manuscript to meet genre expectations.
3. Pitch the book for a different genre.

Honestly, my takeaway from all this is that I failed to impart to him what I was attempting to do in The Palimpsest.  Either that or I should have pitched it as a mystery or suspense novel (which it isn't really either). 

For the record, I think that genre conventions are complete and utter horse-puckey (thank you Colonel Potter).  I sold books for a decade and understand as well as anyone can why they exist (to help readers find books similar to ones they already like).  I still think they're artificial constructs and that they do more harm than good.  In a physical bookstore, it was about where to shelve a book and where a customer will go to find it.  Online bookselling has thankfully begun to erode these distinctions and I think that we will eventually be largely free of them even if the publishing industry isn't quite ready to let go yet.

My feelings about genre distinctions aren't the reality.  So I have to decide how to move forward and how to categorize my work within the framework that exists.

I always knew that The Palimpsest was going to be hard to sell.  While I'm a fan of writers like Finder, the writers who set the bar are the likes of Ken Follett, Iain Pears, Amitav Ghosh, Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  All of these guys write books that could be described as 'thrillers' but manage to bridge the genre distinctions, creating smart, literate and exciting tales that meet or exceed their categorization.

All of which means that there's a market for a book like mine.  Smart, literate thrillers and mysteries, "Nerd Adventures" if you will.  To pretend that's not what I'm trying to sell would be a lie.  And no one is served by me re-crafting a sales pitch that lies about what the book is (or isn't).  If I cut it and cut it and cut it until it fit inside the cookie cutter, it would no longer be something excite me or my readers and that's a problem for me.

This may sound arrogant, but I don't really care: I did not come here to meet expectations, by God I came here to exceed them.

Literary Newsday...

Saturday is newsday apparently... Lev Grossman - Time book critic and author of The Magicians and Codex - has an article in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the revolutions in literature are coming from the ranks of popular authors rather than trickling across the border from the avant garde. I don't necessarily agree with him on every point, but the overall thesis seems sound and well-argued. Well worth the read. Reading By the Numbers is a startling op/ed from the New York Times about the so-called "Renaissance Learning" software that assigns numerical values to books. Children in schools that use this software are required to read so many points' worth of books. The manner in which these points are assigned seems haphazard at best, for instance Hamlet is worth fewer points than the most recent Gossip Girl book. The whole thing is faintly appalling and hopefully the publicity can help get some things changed. If nothing else, the software designers really need to re-think how the frigging points are assigned because they seem to be missing the whole point of reading as a transformative experience rather than an exercise in cramming more words into our students' heads.

Summer Reading and Recommendations

My reading list is shaping up and the summer is looking good if I can ever get through the first half of this re-write so I can reward myself with some fiction. Mystery/Thriller One should always be well-read within your genre and cognizant of the greats. These are the people that crowd the field I'm trying to elbow my way into... well, into the crowd that's gathered to touch the hems of their robes anyway. The new Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child is out. The reviews are consistently good: Pure thriller, shootemup adventure. Jack Reacher is who all those other anti-hero characters are trying (and failing more often than not) to emulate. The LA Times link I just gave you also bears mentioning because it brings up the crucial evolutionary step preceding Reacher, Parker by the late, lamented, Donald Westlake. Unabashedly macho, admittedly criminal, these characters are nonetheless compelling and if you do nothing else, read them to learn how to create empathy in your readers for characters that aren't entirely likable! After that, there's a new Michael Connelly mystery The Scarecrow which pulls its plot from the headlines, featuring a reporter (recurring character Jack McEvoy from The Poet) about to be fired in the latest round of budget cuts at his newspaper. He preps a story sure to send him out with a bang and soon all hell breaks loose. I haven't read it yet, obviously, but Connelly consistently proves that writing about cops, criminals and crime doesn't mean you're not creating literature. And with October's release of the new Harry Bosch novel Nine Dragons, I'm confident I won't be disappointed. Incidentally, I don't often recommend authors unreservedly, but if you've never heard of him (or even if you have), go out and find yourself some David Hewson novels. His new one "Dante's Numbers" carries a title that gives the mistaken impression that he's another Dan Brown clone, but he's been out there for years with his ensemble cast of characters, turning in consistent crime fiction from the mean streets of Rome. (Yes, Rome. As in Italy.) Start with "Season For the Dead" or "Villa of Mysteries" and you won't regret it. I've read a lot of literature by female authors, but it became clear to me recently that there's a paucity of women on my mystery/thriller shelves. (This revelation was prompted in part by the tempest stirred by Ian Rankin's remark about female crime writers being more violent than male writers of the same genres.) My reading table now includes some women who are entirely new to me including Val McDermid, Manda Scott and recent Edgar Award Winner Tana French's "In The Woods". All chosen based on recommendations of friends and by the old standard of reading the ad copy, back cover and first chaper while standing in the bookstore. More recommendations of overlooked feminine voices in crime fiction? Leave them in the comments!! The Classics Every summer I do my best to mow through some of the classics that I either missed or glossed over in the past. This generally includes one very old masterpiece. Last year was Canterbury Tales and Don Quixote before that, generally balanced by sundry modern works. This summer, I will be making my way through The Divine Comedy once more. I last read it as a teenager and didn't get it so much as have it spoonfed to me and that's no way to create a real appreciation for or understanding of a significant work of western literature. I'll be filling in around the edges with the collected short stories of O. Henry, Hemingway, Kipling and Chekov. There isn't a reader alive whose erudition couldn't be improved by the addition of more great short fiction. RECOMMENDATIONS SOUGHT! Being between novels, my non-fiction mental hummingbird has nowhere to alight and is madly flitting about between gardening books and home-improvement guides. I need something solid to sink my teeth into, a great biography I might have missed or a scathing expose of Cleopatra's court or something... I'm game for just about anything, so send me your recommendations. Nothing really scandalous or titillating, just a great non-fiction read in an area I might otherwise overlook. What's on your list?

Dharma Baseball

There was a great article in the New York Times today about an addition to the New York Public Library archive... Jack Kerouac -- the original counter-culture poster boy -- created and obsessively updated a personal fantasy baseball league. Read it here: Kerouac as Sportsfan It's amazing how much mystique we attach to some writers' names, and so difficult to imagine them as having a life beyond our conceptualization. Jack Kerouac collecting baseball minutiae to enter in the stats sheets of his imaginary baseball teams? How wonderfully normal for a man who is etched into our collective imagination as the quintessential outcast rebel.

Very proper British zombies, I'm sure...

"So much of Austen is about the unmentionable — about using wit and good manners to cover up nasty things like sex and money. So why not have one of those unmentionable things be zombies?" -Read the Time Magazine interview with the author

This book is causing quite a stir... Does this book make your "Must Read" list? Is it a travesty, a parody or a brilliant attempt to remake a classic novel into something kids will want to read? Or is it something in between? Leave your reactions in comments!