And it occurs to me, too, that writing fan mail is just like writing anything else. I mean, we summon all of our energy, all of our intensity, and we write our little books and things, and we try not to think of our audience, or we think peripherally about our audience, or we think very pointedly about our audience, and we wonder if they will pull our pages from the envelope and read them. And if they do, whether they will like it. And if they like it, whether they will write back, in the form of accolades or reviews or a blog post or whatever else. (I’m so distracted by my pronoun usage in the last few sentences. Audience takes “it,” and pages take “they,” but then I made the audience its members–”they”–and the pages one work–”it.” I like that I did that.)

With fan mail, I guess the point isn’t necessarily to communicate with the celebrity. It’s to reify the appreciation for or adoration of him or her. And with writing, it’s sort of the same way. We reify the need, or the bewilderment, or the anger, or whatever. We want a letter back, but we don’t necessarily expect one. Expecting something, in this context, becomes almost delusional, no?

I remember that when I was taking workshops, the word “precious” was bandied about a lot. During college, where I took my first workshop, I learned quickly that this was a bad thing, a label you wanted to avoid. It was an outgrowth of sentimentality, a pox on a piece’s potential to achieve complexity. It fell into the realm of “commercial” writing, as opposed to “art”–and of course, most workshop teachers are fond of saying, at some point, that bit about the latter, about how we should leave the cliches and the jingles and the pat, happy endings to the masses at the marketplace, and work instead toward creating the starker, grittier, “more interesting” texts.

I have a lot of questions about this. And oh, the workshop parodies we could write (yawn, I know).

But first, I thought a lot about this idea of what constitutes preciousness, of the provenance, even, of the word as a modern-day critique. It was Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules that took aim at the preciousness of the witty salon ladies of 17th century France, whose word-games and love stories established préciosité as a rhetorical style. But in workshop parlance, the word generally delineates the writer’s attitude toward her or his work/characters/ending, etc. An attitude of italics. Where the moments are too emphatic, verging on fetishistic.

So what would the counter-instinct be–more distance between the writer and the text? A nonchalance? An aversion to cloyingness, to prolonging the pain or the magic, to happily-ever-after? Because that seems just as prescriptive, just as simplistic. And if we’ve been inclined toward narrative theory, we know that any kind of explanation that hinges itself on claims of “reality”–i.e., I like terror/destruction/fragmentation because it’s closer to “real life”–is a bit suspect. Words on a page are thankfully about the farthest one can get from “real life,” whatever that is. But we look for it there anyway, hoping to confirm or disprove our suspicions or beliefs, or else to get taken far away from them, to some wild elsewhere. So if it’s escape that we’re after–and so many of us who read are–is there one mode of creating it that’s patently better/”more interesting” than another?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the books I read as a child, the specific ways in which they captivated me. I think I was a better reader, then, but that’s another post for another time. Among other things, I love(d) fairy tales. (Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, etc.) Which might be considered précieuse as well as “precious,” but which are also decidedly un-precious. There are noblemen and pastoral settings, but also transmogrifications and deceit. Which suggests again that preciousness has less to do with the what than the how.

Question for Adam, in light of his excellent posts on Twee: is preciousness at all related, a distant cousin, do you suppose?

And what about Cuteness? Is it precious? Is preciousness cute, maybe explaining some of our aversion to it?

I’m veering, I know, but I still feel I might be in the same cul-de-sac, and wanted to share Jim Windolf’s article “Addicted to Cute” from December’s Vanity Fair, which I came across as I was mulling these things over and which seems relevant enough to include here. He douses the cuteness epidemic with some hearty shakes of vinegar.

Teasers:

“There is probably no such thing as an uncomplicated cute image.”

“Maybe the move toward cuteness has come about partly because the idea of “edge” has gotten old. We used to romanticize tortured souls like Dylan Thomas, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, but their equivalents from recent years—Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith, Heath Ledger, David Foster Wallace—have elicited expressions of pity more than anything else.”

Is Cuteness a liability to our writing, too? Do we love it in life but hate it on the page?

And now, it’s officially the sugariest “holiday” of them all, one I’ve always felt stunningly neutral toward. Still, who doesn’t love chocolate and a bubble bath?

“Between thirteen and sixteen are the ideal if not the only ages for succumbing to Thomas Wolfe–he seemed to me a great genius then, and still does, though I can’t read a line of it now. Just as other youthful flames have guttered: Poe, Dickens, Stevenson. I love them in memory, but find them unreadable. “

He goes on to cite Flaubert, Chekhov, Forster, Proust, and a few others as being his “constant[s].”

I’m wondering: who are the writers that you love in memory, but now find unreadable? I have a feeling that my list may be quite long.

I’m aware that this rather tumultuous lull that I’m finding myself in is probably a good, “necessary” thing in its own rite. And before this entry gets even more me me me there are some questions that I’d like to ask all of you, which is the real reason I’m posting. When you begin something new, how do you do it? (And I’m gearing this more toward fiction writers, I realize.) Do you have a full sense of where you’d like to end up? Are you certain of anything–an image, a phrase, a character–and do you build the rest around it/them? Do you have your first line before you sit down, or do you think and stare until one comes to you? Do you say to yourself, “I’m going to write a such-and-such kind of story”? I never cared too much about how other people wrote–unless they were famous, no offense–until I started feeling like I had no idea how I wrote. I’m looking for general habits and patterns that I can pit against my own adriftness.

(Thank you.)

I know that it’s another old topic, but with a new year approaching, and everyone resolving to do better and write more, I thought it’d be nice to chat about our hang-ups, and have a little digital bonfire of the vanities here.

Specifically, I’m wondering about the place or places where you’d love to be published, that repeatedly rejects you. Why do you keep sending them your work? What are you trying to prove, and to whom? What is it about the journal that has you acting like a whiny bitch? Have you ever done that mythic thing where when something gets rejected, you wait a couple months and then send it in again, exactly as it was? To corroborate the old chorus that editors are notoriously fickle, and make haphazard, arbitrary decisions more often than not? Has a certain journal’s rejection prompted you to completely rework a piece and then re-send it, perhaps with a new cover letter that indicates how earnestly you incorporated so-and-so’s suggestions? Where is the one place you would *love* to be published? Does this kind of cred matter to you at all anymore, or have you risen above and beyond? Do you save your “nice” rejections? Or any of them?

I will confess to an unnatural attachment to NOON. I have received a few written “thank you, try us again” notes. I really just want Diane Williams to love me. I feel like if she loved me, my life would improve a little bit, in small but significant ways. I’m still unpacking this obsession, trying to get to the bottom of it…mostly I think it’s this underlying sense of entitlement, like, Diane Williams, you should love me, and I should be in NOON. A combination of giddy subordination and indignant conceit. I can’t decide if my new year’s resolution should be to stop submitting to NOON, or to get an acceptance from NOON by any means possible.

Whew, I feel better already.

Edited to add: Just read this from Sean over at HTML Giant. Yeah, good point: what of the rejections of solicitations? Those are in a category all their own.

Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity has been on my list for nearly two years. I have read the first twenty pages. Little, Big by John Crowley was on my list for even longer, and I finally finished it over the summer. It felt like a huge accomplishment.

Maybe there will come a year that I will declare The Year of the Already Read Already, where I will ceremoniously liberate myself from the shackles of new-or-new-to-me-works, and focus solely on rereading. Either books that I loved immediately, or books that I didn’t read carefully enough.

But imagine how behind I will be after such a year!

And it’s strange, because I was a chronic rereader as a child.

So I’m interested: do you reread? If so, what, and why? Do you feel any part of this conundrum?

Anyway, I think it was 1997 when I was introduced to the book by my then-boyfriend, now-husband, Brian. He was browsing a bookstore in Burlington, VT, and happened upon it on a display table. He picked it up, read the first page, and then did that thing where he proceeded to read the next fifty or so pages standing awkwardly in the aisle, as the sun set over chilly Lake Champlain. (OK, I embellish.) He read it quickly, straight through, and then loaned it to me when next we crossed state lines to visit each other, its front and back covers still warm from his grasp. At the time, I was invested in different kinds of epistolary reading–Simone de Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre and Anais Nin’s diaries; I was an English Major and Serious about Serious Literature, particularly Female Literature, &c., &c. So I pretended, at least at first, that I had no idea what to do with the journals of a fourteen-year-old boy.

But I read it with astounding speed–I’m generally a slow reader–and enjoyed every minute of the hijinx and raging adolescent horniness. (Sheeni’s brother Paul, who will be played by Justin Long, meh-but-could-work, was especially memorable.) Another copy was procured, and I loaned it to my sister, and then to a friend, who passed it along to another friend, and meanwhile Brian had given it to his twin brother, and then his older brother, and before we knew it, we were this widening circle of Twispheads, sheepishly sharing our favorite parts. It was like, instead of forming a book club and agreeing on a book to read, we read a book, and the club just happened.

Good times.

I read one of Payne’s follow-ups and can’t recall anything about it; of course it was disappointing; it had to be. Twelve years later, though, I still have a soft-spot for Youth. I’m not sure I’ll be getting tickets in advance or anything for the movie…it takes a lot to get me to the “big” movies…but I’ll gladly see it on DVD. As far as big names go, I think Michael Cera was a decent, obvious choice for Nick Twisp…but, sigh. He’ll never top George Michael from Arrested Development, and I’m not sure he’s nuanced enough to pull off a good Twisp. And according to the trailer, it seems that they’ve left out Carlotta–Twisp’s female persona and probably my favorite part of the book–altogether. Boo.

Any Twisp fans out there? Any other books that diverted you or surprised you away from, however briefly, your chosen trajectory during a formative time?