Scoundrels all!

The trouble with disputes in the National Writers Union is that everybody is so damned articulate, that each side can put together a vehement, eloquent argument proving that the other side is a pack of scoundrels. And I'm inclined to believe them.

No, not really. Even though some folks are getting nigh on hysterical, I don't think anybody has really evil intent. We just have different views on what's best for writers; for mine, see my note from 11/19 (below, or if not there, in the archives link on the left).

Note to myself (and other writers)

I read something the other day in one of the Zoetrope "offices" that has taken a while to sink in, but now I'm feeling the full impact. It was a quote (or paraphrase) of something from former New Yorker editor* Bob Gottlieb (now an agent)* said, something like, "I can sell a poorly written piece with a good story, but not a poor story well written." THAT'S MY PROBLEM!

I suppose if I'd come into fiction writing through writing programs I would have learned that. All these years I've been puzzled and annoyed by rejection letters that told me how well the work was written, but that they couldn't take it. And I'd get annoyed reading published things that I thought were poorly written. And I couldn't understand or accept that some of my stories were accepted for publication and others that I thought were at least as good were not.

Now I see it. I was concentrating on writing stories better, instead of writing better stories.

A story has to have a beginning, middle and an end (not necessarily in that order, as somebody pointed out). I'd be great on the beginning and the middle, but then I would have accomplished my goals -- description, characterization, all those things that make an experience vivid -- and neglect the ending. What's a proper ending? Well, something has to happen, or be clearly about to happen (the way Hemingway sometimes left things, on the edge of a huge event), something that is or will be life-changing (or life-ending) to somebody.

Geez, what a jerk I've been! Sometimes I've got it right, but only sometimes -- because that's not what I was focusing on. The story about to appear in the next issue of Small Spiral Notebook does work as a story, I think (something does happen that changes at least one character's life). I hope it's also well-written, but that's obviously less important.

* NOTE: My error. Two different Gottliebs. Quote is from Bob G., the literary agent, not Robert G., the former New Yorker editor. See blog for 2004/7/5.

Small Spiral Notebook

Lara JK Wilson

I just discovered this writer in a deeply moving first-person story in Chelsea 74 (the current issue). In "Soon and Very Soon," a grotesquely obese, bed-bound woman tries to tell us how she got that way, and her story is so sad and so real that it will change how I look at people we ordinarily want to shun. The magazine Chelsea is not on line, but you can see another of Wilson's stories here: Book Magazine

Crisis in the National Writers Union

After long pondering and some anguish, I'm going to support the insurgent ticket headed by Jerry Colby -- which is a way of voting against the direction our union has been heading, and maybe a vote for creating a different sort of organization all together.

I was present at the original National Writers Congress in 1981, where the NWU was born. I've been a member for most of the years since, and at times have taken an active leadership role, as a steering committee member in the New York local and, a year ago, as Eastern Regional Vice President. I have appreciated the generous comradeship, and have benefited from services including book contract advising and, very recently, advice on a contract with an on-line publication. These services were offered by volunteers, unpaid for time consuming, attentive help.

I am also a member of the Authors Guild, which provides my web hosting and domain name registration, sponsors seminars on book agenting, and offers legal advice on book and agent contracts. And, when neither the NWU nor the Authors Guild gave me satisfactory access to health insurance, I also joined the Editorial Freelancers Association, which does. (Honestly, that was my only motivation for joining EFA.) If I continue doing more journalism, I may want to join the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA).

The NWU, though, has been trying to provide services plus political lobbying (on copyright law and other writerly issues). For that it needs a paid staff, more than it has at present. And to pay them it needs money, which it has been getting mainly from the much larger union we affiliated with a few years ago, the United Auto Workers. Conflicts over what sort of organization we were going to be, plus the generally worsening times for freelance writers (a lot of publications have sunk without a bubble, remaining ones are paying less than they used to), have driven down membership, so there are fewer people available to meet growing financial demands. And the UAW was weary of bankrolling such an obstreperous, nonproductive (in membership-growth terms) outfit, which it viewed as one of its locals. (We, since our founding, had always thought of ourselves as the "national" union, and our branches in New York, the Bay Area, Chicago, Boston, Twin Cities, etc., "locals"; for the UAW, they are "chapters," and the entire NWU is one "local.") Now, to resolve the budget crisis and quell the obstreperousness, the delegates at our last Delegates Assembly voted to raise dues hugely (to $160 per year) and fold our union completely into the UAW structure.

ASJA dues are $195 -- probably worth it for professional journalists, given ASJA's many services. AG dues are a mere $90 a year, and I'm saving more than that (as compared to my old Earthlink account) by using their very economical web hosting services. So the new NWU dues may not be outrageous, if the NWU ends up providing comparably valuable services -- but what's the point? Authors can join one of the other organizations for those.

Professional, published writers do not need another organization to do what the AG and ASJA do well. What I and other writers need is an organization that can do what those organizations can never do as well as the NWU as I've known it throughout the years, which is to foment a lot of member-to-member interaction for moral support, industry scuttlebutt, collective action. So I think the current leadership is taking us in the wrong direction.

I wish them well. I hope that, if incumbent president Marybeth Menaker (whom I like personally and respect professionally) and her slate win this election, they will be able to accomplish some of what they promise. But I fear that even if they do, the old spirit of solidarity among writers that has been what has held us together over the years will further dissipate. After all, there is no pressing economic reason for anyone to join the NWU -- we don't have a closed shop with any publication. We are in the NWU because it feels good to be here. I don't think it will feel as good as the leadership becomes less responsive to the members and more anxious to stay in line with the much larger industrial union which, naturally, has other priorities.

So that's where I come down: I'm voting for Gerard Colby and the entire "Working4Writers" slate. Maybe we can renew the good feeling and disinterested solidarity that I seem to remember from years back -- it wasn't always a reality, but it was always a realistic aspiration.

National Writers Union
American Association of Journalists and Authors
The Authors Guild
United Auto Workers

Does IT give good ROI for SAP?

John Wicker doesn't think so. I found this link in a mailing from Publishers Marketplace. You know what IT is, I suppose, since you're using it right now. ROI is not the king of France, but Return On Investment, and SAP is not what you think it is either (or who you think it is), but (I think -- at least this is the first listed of the acronym definitions I found) Systems, Applications and Products. Now you know. Or maybe you don't. I think what Wicker is talking about is whether computer technology is a good investment for publishers, and he suspects it is not.

John Wicker, Executive Vice President, VISTA International, speaking at the 25th annual Supply Chain Specialists Meeting during the Frankfurt Book Fair, October 2003.

More on Vargas Llosa

I wonder if Vargas Llosa's recent provocative comments about indigenous movements may not be an act of jealousy -- probably unconscious -- in the face of all the attention being given to his one-time hero, friend and rival Gabriel García Márquez? (Years ago, Vargas Llosa wrote a 600-page biography of GGM, admiringly calling him a "deicide.")

Over the years, I've made notes on my readings of Vargas Llosa's fiction (which I find fascinating). Most are handwritten, and I haven't yet transferred them to my website file of readings. Here is one, though, that I had in a computer file and have just uploaded, if you want to see my take on (and quarrels with) his Historia de Mayta.

Gabriel García Márquez

Just a reminder, now that Gabo is so much in the news with the translation of Volume I of his memoirs. If anybody who does not read Spanish is interested in getting all the in-jokes and more of the context of his most famous novel, there's a pretty good "Monarch Note" available from Barnes & Noble on One Hundred Years of Solitude. I wrote it.

In the first volume of his memoirs, Vivir para contarla (2002), Gabriel García Márquez writes (this is my translation): "my library has never been much more than a working tool, where I can consult instantly a chapter of Dostoyevski, or verify a fact about Julius Caesar's epilepsy or about the mechanism of an automobile carburetor. I even have a manual for committing perfect murders, in case one of my poor characters ever needs one." He also says of the North American novelists he was reading while writing his first novel, La hojarasca (1955; translated as "Leafstorm"), that he read them with "insatiable curiosity" to discover how they were written. He read them first "right side up, then backwards, and I submitted them to a kind of surgical disemboweling until I uncovered the most deeply hidden mysteries of their structure."

I loved that description. I think that's the way any serious writer must work.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Monarch Note)

The two Mario Vargas Llosas

My faithful correspondent Daniel del Solar has forwarded an article datelined Quito, about reactions by indigenous leaders to a talk by Mario Vargas Llosa. The Peruvian novelist and one-time candidate for president recently (once again) criticized them severely for radical actions in Ecuador, Peru and -- most recently and dramatically -- Bolivia.

I don't believe that Vargas Llosa is "racist" (though that word has shifting meanings), but he has long been a neo-conservative (in US political terms) and may even have become a neo-liberal (in Latin American terms), which is worse. Many years ago, in a very public debate, his tocayo (meaning someone who shares your first name), Mario Benedetti, pointed out something that is still is true of Vargas Llosa: His fiction is far to the left of his "public intellectual" statements. It is as though he can only feel what the disadvantaged feel when he imagines them as characters, and when he steps before a microphone or a lectern as himself, he must distance himself from them. Sometimes he becomes aware of this conflict, or split vision, even within a novel -- like the quite amazing Historia de Mayta. Mostly, though, he is empathic in his fiction and coldly, very coldly, analytic outside it.

For the author's own words: Artículos de Vargas Llosa

For an article by another of my friends, Peruvian historian José Luis Rénique, which puts Vargas Llosa in an understandable context: Flores Galindo y Vargas Llosa: Un debate ficticio sobre utopías reales

Revolution and Venezuela's audacity

Last night I finally saw the movie I've needed to see for months, the one that shows just how the attempted coup against Hugo Chávez was foiled by a combination of spontaneous popular mobilization and courageously decisive action by military men loyal to the constitution. The opposition, almost all white and backed by the richest sectors, controlled all the private TV stations and took over the single state channel, Canal 8, to present a totally distorted view of the government and then of their own coup. But even without TV to tell them what was going on, the masses moved from the barrios to the presidential palace to confront and surround the usurpers, and the palace guard then decided on their own to retake the place and put the coup-makers under arrest. But it was a very tense 48 hours, and without (1) the decision of Chávez to avoid the threatened bombing of the palace by accepting arrest by the military and (2) the decisive action of a few young soldiers, it could have ended as bloodily and disastrously as the coup in Chile 30 years ago. Powerful film. Makes very clear the strength and directness of the connection between Chávez and the masses.

For a note on my brief, intense conversation with Hugo Chávez in March, 2002, the month before the coup: Chatting with Chávez

For images and background of the movie: The Revolution will not be Televised

Armistice Day

Today, November 11, 2003, is the 85th anniversary of the signing of the armistice that ended the bloody carnage we now remember as World War I. It was the war that brought us into the 20th century, destroying utterly the empires of Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottomans, and postponing the imperial pretensions of Germany. It was supposed to be the war to end all wars. And yet, imperial ambitions surged again, in Germany and in Japan, which threatened the remaining empires of France (in Indochina and North Africa), Britain (in Hong Kong, Burma and India, and Egypt) and the Netherlands (Indonesia). Those old imperial powers were joined by the United States to defeat the upstart imperialists, but within the next two decades lost their empires anyway. So then a new imperial power arose, disguised as a democracy -- but how can a democracy, which means rule by the people, impose its rule on other people? As events show in Iraq, it cannot, at least not for long or very securely. Check out what our fighting men and women have to say about this bloody, self-inflicted folly.
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