Literature: January 2008 Archive Page

While walking an introductory class through a close reading of "The Defense of Fort McHenry" (better known as "The Star-Spangled Banner,") I noted that a student had wondered whether the appearance of "In God We Trust" on US currency had anything to do with the inclusion of a similar phrase, "In God is our Trust," in the poem that became the U.S. national anthem.

I confessed to the student that I didn't know the answer, and suggested that the next time a thought like that occurs to her, I'd love to have her share her findings with the class.

An hour or so later, that student showed up outside my office, with a printout from the U.S. Department of Treasury website, having found (and highlighted) the answer. 

That wasn't the only reason she wanted to see me, but I was still happy that she had taken the initiative to follow up on a class discussion, and that she wanted to share with me what she had found.

The other poem I chose for the day was Jabberwocky, which I've known by heart since high school, so it was a lot of fun to do the oral interpretation while supporting a quick-and-dirty reading of Carroll's famous nonsense poem as a version the hero's quest, and Alice's discussion with Humpty Dumpty as a spoof of the scholastic tendency to consult an authority (Humpty Dumpty, who "can explain all the poems that ever were in­ vented -- and a good many that haven't been invented just yet"), rather than encouraging Alice's instinctive reaction: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't exactly know what they are!"

This message arrived in my in box today. The author gave me permission to answer it here.

It must have been fate that led me to your site which I perused with great interest. Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a 57 year old male, separated after nearly 27 years of marriage, now retired due to a chronic disability. Formerly I was a high technology executive recruiter, prior to that radio disc-jockey. Graduating from Leland Powers School of Radio, Television and Theatre as class president. 

It was my ambition to become a stage actor.  Life had other plans for me. Always being smitten with the written and spoken word I began chronicling some of my adventures and experiences. More than one of my acquaintances suggested I submit my work to publishers. Having entered a small number of contests which have not resulted in lucrative six-figure advances striking fear into the hearts of John Grisham and J.K. Rowling, I quickly realized that I don't know what in the world I am doing.

Having a desire to use language effectively is not enough to be a published author I  soon found. I was told to submit queries, get an agent, find an editor... My question to you is how do I know if I should even go to all the toil and trouble when I don't even know if anything I have to say could be appreciated by potential readers.

As an avid reader with eclectic tastes I sometimes wonder how a given work receives the Nobel Prize in literature. "How can this be?" I wonder after reading some tedious, bloated never-ending tome of drivel.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to hear me out. Any comments and suggestions will be greatly appreciated. -- Anonymous

I wrote several short stories and two novels as a young man, though I never made any serious attempt at selling them. All my recent efforts have been scholarly (where the rewards I sought were visibility and credibility, since part of my job description includes engaging in scholarly pursuits).

While I don't teach a whole class in creative writing, I do regularly advise creative writing majors to refer to a book like Writer's Market (updated with a new edition each year, listing the contact information for agents, the going rates for various publications, etc.). You can probably find a copy in a local library or you can pick up an older edition at a used book store.  Both the library and the local bookstore can help you find numerous other books that introduce the writing profession to curious newcomers.

A mid-range solution might be to look for a writer's conference in your genre (thriller, fantasy, etc.), and attend the workshops where you can hear from recently published writers.  Your local public library or a local community college might be a good place to start making local contacts.  It looks like the person who sent in this question has valuable experience in business and technology, which might be of great use to another writer who is working on a corporate thriller.  Local conferences are great opportunities to form a community of like-minded writers who can swap manuscripts and help each other develop their ideas.

You might attend a talk given by a local author (lots of bookstores or coffee houses will regularly schedule such talks), and just ask the guest speaker for their editor's contact information. (It would be polite if you also bought a copy of their book, too! Even if you don't like the genre, you can give it to someone who would.)

I would be cautious about publishers who promise to publish your work as long as you pay them a fee.  That publisher is more interested in making money off of you than in promoting and selling your book.

Nevertheless, a good editor's services are valuable, so if you are willing to pay an established editor to give you honest professional feedback, that would be a good way to determine your chances.

A long-term solution, which involves an investment of time and money, would be to go back to school and take some creative writing classes. My own school, Seton Hill University, has a master's program in writing popular fiction.  You meet in person for a week or so in January and July, but otherwise the program is online.

Sometimes the WPF program asks me to help evaluate student presentations, but I'm not otherwise involved with it. I do highly recommend it.

 

Filed away to read on a rainy day (after I've cleared some big projects from my to do list): Jonathan Bate

The original manuscripts of Shakespeare's works do not survive: the sole extant composition in his hand is a single scene from Sir Thomas More, a multi-authored play that cannot really be described as 'his'. Shakespeare only survives because his works were printed.

The scholarly editing of Shakespeare began in the eighteenth century, when the model for such activity was the treatment of the classic literary and historical texts of ancient Greece and Rome. The recovery of those texts had been at the core of the humanist Renaissance. The classical procedure was to establish which surviving manuscript was the oldest, the aim being to get as close as possible to the lost original, weeding out the errors of transcription which had been introduced by successive scribes in the centuries before the advent of print. As Shakespeare began to be treated like a classic, the same procedure was applied to his texts. The eighteenth century also witnessed his rise to the status of national genius, icon of pure inspiration. That image required the imagining of a single perfect original for each play. Shakespeare couldn't be allowed second thoughts - that would imply some deficiency in his first thoughts. So it was that over time, there emerged a preference for early texts over later ones and a belief that the editor's job was to restore a single lost original, something approximating to the text as it came 'pure' from the hand of Shakespeare.

We are very unlikely ever to recover the manuscripts of the plays as Shakespeare originally wrote them (the ambition of the 'new bibiographers'). In the absence of surviving promptbooks, let alone dictographic or video records, we will never recover the plays as they were first performed (the ambition of the 'Oxford revisionists').

All plays change in time, metamorphosing as they go from writing to rehearsal to performance to revival. Many agencies (the playwright and his collaborators, the actors, the book-keepers and scribes, the compositors and proof-readers) were involved in the creation of what we call a Shakespearean text. Despite a hundred years of advanced bibliographic investigation, there is still a remarkable lack of scholarly consensus about the nature of the copy for many of Shakespeare's plays.... Perhaps it would be best to abandon the idea that any one text represents the 'definitive' version of a Shakespeare play. After all, the quest for a 'definitive' text, based on a 'single lost original', was premised on the principles of classical and Biblical textual criticism. It is not necessarily appropriate for more modern literary and especially dramatic texts.