Tag: New Republic

Writer’s Desk: Whatever Works

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment


Successful writers have their preferred tools. A kind of pencil. Style of desk. The best music to run in the background.

Some writers looking for ways to get ahead in the game often go looking for answers in those habits. They will be frustrated, because whatever works for one writer likely will be dead on delivery for another. Take word processing.

According to the New Republic‘s Joseph Livingstone, word processing was a nascent technology through the 1970s into the early 1980s. By 1984, many writers (Anne Rice, Michael Chabon) had switched to using the new program WordStar. A pre-DOS application, its basic text look appears downright Paleolithic today.

Nevertheless, a number of authors in the genre field continue to use WordStar today. Why? Because they like writing on it. Consider George R. R. Martin. He uses the no-frills WordStar to write all his fantasy doorstoppers.

If something helps you write, stick with it. Even if that means giving up on spellcheck.

Writer’s Desk: Gaming the System

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

writing notebook

Some say publishing is rigged. These are often the people who have been shopping their work—whether misery memoir, cozy murder mystery, 11-part zombie erotica series, or finely etched literary short story about quiet people with quiet problems—without success for years and don’t get what they’re doing wrong. Unable to get an agent or magazine to give them the time of day, their conclusion that it’s all a closed loop for insiders is not hard to fault; especially when one considers the quality of much that is published, not to mention the august list of big-name authors who first had to grind through dozens or hundreds of rejections.

It’s hard not to write off a lot of this frustration as sour grapes, the anger of those whose writing simply isn’t good enough to hack it. Obviously a lot of the time that is true—just take a dive through what gets self-published on Wattpad if you need convincing.

On the side that argues it’s all a racket comes a rare voice from the inside. In the New Republic, Theodore Ross writes with winking candor about what happened when he got sick of his rejection slips and decided to stop following submission guidelines and game the system:

At the time of these submissions, I was a junior editor at an established magazine, and I decided to use this to my advantage. I typed up a cover letter on my employer’s very fine letterhead, slipped it and the story into an envelope embossed with our well-known logo, and rules be damned, sent it to the folks in Brooklyn. A few months later, an editor emailed me at work—stick it, SASE!—to say he would like to buy the story, which I think rose slightly-but-not-significantly above not-half-bad. It was published a few months later after a few skillful edits. I earned $500, which I believe is $495 more than I had earned in my fiction-publishing career to that point…

Moral of the story: To get published, first work at a well-known magazine.

Media Room: The Boys Clubs

On By chrisbarsantiIn Publishing / MediaLeave a comment

boysclub

Have you heard about how the glass ceiling has been shattered by women moving into positions of power across American industry? No? Neither has New Republic reporter Lydia DePillis, whose new Tumblr 100 Percent Men does nothing but highlight all the “Corners of the world where women have yet to tread.” Some highly sarcastic selections:

So some are more surprising than others (NASCAR). As snark goes, it’s a handy flashlight on the unspoken biases still permeating a society that has supposedly moved beyond such things.

Quote of the Day: Martin Amis

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Nota BeneLeave a comment

 

Martin Amis, barbed-pen satirist of the modern era and boon companion of the late Christopher Hitchens (with whom he shared a sharp impatience with lazy thinking), has taken it on the chin from the press and the literati in his home country of England for years now. Hard to say why, perhaps it was that habit of speaking his mind. But in any case, when Amis decamped from London to Brooklyn to set up home there with his (American) wife, the sniping started all over again.

In The New Republic, Amis — whose newest novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England, comes out August 21 — has a few things to say on the cult of the author and the attribution of false statements:

Backed up by lavish misquotes together with satirical impersonations … the impression given was that I was leaving because of a vicious hatred of my native land and because I could no longer bear the well-aimed barbs of patriotic journalists.

“I wish I weren’t English”: Of all the fake tags affixed to my name, this is the one I greet with the deepest moan of inanition. I suggest that the remark—and its equivalent in any language or any alphabet—is unutterable by anyone whose IQ reaches double figures. “I wish I weren’t North Korean” might make a bit of sense, assuming the existence of a North Korean sufficiently well-informed and intrepid to give voice to it. Otherwise and elsewhere, the sentiment is inconceivably null. And to say it of England—the country of Dickens, George Eliot, Blake, Milton, and, yes, William Shakespeare—isn’t even perverse. It is merely whimsical.