The Confabulator Cafe

Author: jcampbell

  • The Brave New Publishing World

    We stand on the edge of uncertainty. Publishing is changing, and for writers, that might as well be the apocalypse. The publishing industry as we know it is dissolving. The big publishers are merging, self-publishing and independent publishing have never had easier means of distribution. The writing world has changed.

    We should have known. It was only a matter of time. Publishing hadn’t changed much since the printing press was invented. Editors held the keys to the readers. If they didn’t want you to be read, you weren’t. Kate Chopin wrote the now-canonical novella The Awakening which stirred up such a controversy that she never had anything major published after and died a few years later. James Joyce had to rescue Dubliners from a fire after what seemed like the last interested publisher in Ireland decided to burn it rather than return the manuscript. Of course, both of those books found publishers willing to back them and became incredibly influential.

    Perhaps Chopin and Joyce would have turned to self-publishing if they lived in our era. Perhaps not. The path to publishing still isn’t easy, and while self-publishing gets you out there, really only gets you as far as the door, with no guarantee of readership.

    Still, it is exciting in many ways. For once, the readers, not the publishers, are the gatekeepers to a writer’s success, and that is an exciting thing for some people. Marxist literary theory believes that literature is a tool of bourgeois hegemonic control, because the bourgeois control the means of literary production, deciding what is read. One of the sparks for revolution, then, is the development of an alternative proletariat-based hegemony. Besides attempting to utilize terminology from my current class, I think it is interesting how the changes in publishing are going to affect everything from reading to writing to the very theories about the relationship between literature and society. Access to literature is no longer controlled solely by management in New York.

    The scary part is not knowing where I am going to land in this whole thing. I’ve had friends who self-published and had good experiences, better than some experiences of people who have had actual publishers. Then, there have been other friends who have basically gotten nowhere with it. Obviously, there have been stories of great self-publishing successes.

    My plan is to try traditional publishing, but I will probably be writing for the next sixty years or so. The very term “publishing” could mean anything by then. Still, the unknown can be exciting, and for those of us trying to make it as writers, the future of publishing is very unknown.

  • There Ain’t No Road Too Long

    Everything I need to know, I learned from Follow That Bird.
    Everything I need to know, I learned from Waylon.

    I had never heard of the concept of a zero draft before I started hanging out with The Confabulators. It is a nice idea. The zero draft  gives you permission to write garbage and worry about sorting it into recyclable materials later. However, I’ve never had an issue with my willingness to write garbage. The term isn’t that helpful, and honestly, I find it to be a bit cutesy.

    Personally, I don’t ascribe numbers to drafts. There is no first, second, third, fourth, etc. There is only “in-progress” and “completed.” Think of it long the lines of a Claude Levi-Strauss binary opposition (come on, linguists, I know you are out there). How do I know it is in-progress? Because, it isn’t completed. But, how will I know when it is completed? Because, it won’t be in-progress anymore. Numbering drafts just makes me self-conscious if the number is too small or two large. I don’t like giving my writing a stigma just because one story took me twelve drafts and another was finished with a spelling check. The journey determines the road. Sometimes you are just going out for a drive. Sometimes, you pack a lunch. (more…)

  • Three Rules for Surviving Rejection

    By this point in your life, you know that rejection hurts. Criticism hurts. No matter how tough you are or how much you try to shrug it off, it is going to hurt. Everyone will say it isn’t personal. But it is your writing. You created it, a product of your conscious and subconscious. What could be more personal, short of someone calling your baby ugly?

    It is going to hurt. But that is okay. Rejection and criticism are just pain. If you workout or practice any sport, you know that pain makes you stronger. It makes you better. You learn from it. Pain teaches you quickly and efficiently. When you get rejected, when you feel the bite of criticism, just remember “pain is weakness leaving the body.”

    That cliché, used in a variety of sports, is a good thing to remember when you are submitting your writing for critique or publication. Building a tolerance to rejection and criticism allows you to create a distance between you and your writing. Don’t get me wrong, it is a small distance, similar to sitting on opposite ends of the couch with your writing rather than whispering sweet nothings to it just prior to copping a feel. It is a healthy distance, one that allows you to think of the work rather than yourself. (more…)

  • The Art of the Critique

    There is nothing more necessary, or more dangerous, in writing than critiquing. You will learn more by critiquing other people’s work than by just writing. You are removed from the piece. You can see it with virgin eyes and see all the cracks in the surface. Then you start seeing them in your own writing. With a little luck, you’ll be able to patch the ones that would bring the whole thing crumbling down.

    In addition, if you are a good critic, then people will want you to critique their work. That usually means that they will critique yours, as well. At the very least you will develop a support network of writers. While writers do compete with each other for work, there is always a market, anthology, or other project that someone might think is right for you. Small presses are generally run by writers. Anthologies are usually edited by writers. It’s always good to know people, in any business.

    If you are a bad critic, no one will want to deal with you. They will avoid you, if humanly possible, curse your name when they see it in the slush pile, and kill you in their horror novel. It is very important that you don’t suck at this. (more…)

  • There is always time to write, right?

    I am ashamed. I sit typing this blog two days before it will post. Less than two days, in fact. Forty-seven and a half hours. Normally, we try to have posts completed for editing two weeks before they go live. This is the first time I have failed.

    I’ve always been a proponent of a blue-collar writing mindset. R.L. Naquin calls me the terminator, because I write at a consistent pace without stopping, without giving in to distraction. So, why is it that I have broken my cardinal rule of always meet your deadline? I didn’t have time.

    But there is always time for writing. I say it. Everyone here will say it this week. Every author you ever meet will say you have to make the time. I still stand by it, and even if it is stretching a bit, I will argue that my time has been spent writing, just not the actual typing part of it.

    I began a Master’s program studying literary theory and criticism last summer. I knew I would be sacrificing a lot of writing time, but I had hopes that in the end, it would be worth it. Some of the greatest writers have also been literary critics. This includes Henry James, Oscar Wilde, John Gardner, Leo Tolstoy, Margaret Atwood, Ralph Ellison and Anthony Burgess. Edgar Allen Poe was more successful as a critic during his life than he was with his creative writing.

    It seems less common in recent times, as graduate-level English academia has largely split into MFA students, who study writing, and MA students, who study literature.

    That being said, I’ve always been a bit old school. John Gardner has always been an influence for me, and his feelings were that writers should study literature, rather than just writing. As such, I am giving it a shot.

    In the past two weeks, when I should have written this, I’ve read three books, a couple dozen articles on criticism, written about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown from both Russian Formalism and Structuralism perspectives, and have discussed The String of Pearls (the original Sweeney Todd story) as it relates to Sweeney Todd as a metaphor for social fears, the rise of the middle-class in 19th century London, and the dangers of capitalism without ethics.

    Add in my responsibilities at my day job, which is fifty hours a week, and being a father and boyfriend, and there hasn’t been time for much else. I should be done with my Master’s degree after the Summer of 2014, but until then, time is always going to be tight.

    Still, I hope that in the end it will be worth it, and I will come out of the two years as a better writer, and perhaps contribute my own criticism. Until then, I take the same approach to literature that I take to writing. Get the work done, do it well, and hope for the best. In the meantime, you can always fine me here.

  • Base Instinct

    evolution-406x226Why does the world need stories? I don’t know that we have a choice in the matter. Stories seem to be the thing that separates us from the animals. Forget about writers for a moment. Forget about books and movies. All of that is just an extreme extension of a base instinct. Even if you took that all the way, we are a story species.

    When you see someone you haven’t seen for a couple of days, the first thing you do is tell a story of what you did last weekend. When you get up in the morning and look at the paper, you are reading a story. When you get in the car and turn on the radio, regardless of your listening preferences, you hear a story.

    Our religions are based on stories, some of the most archetypal stories in history. Our philosophies are based on narratives. Decartes meditated in the form of narratives. Plato put forth his theories in the form of fictionalized dialogues of his teacher Socrates. Everything we know and do is based around a story, a dream, a narrative powered by aspirations and advertising. (more…)

  • An Assembly of Greys

    Sometimes, I wonder if there is such a thing as non-fiction.

    A professor of creative writing at Iowa State used to tell the story of a non-fiction class she taught. She had a student whose insane life kept her captivated throughout the semester. He was the son of a single mother and a man who had worked for the mafia in Chicago. His father had disgraced the family and spent a majority of his son’s childhood in prison. The subsequent shame haunted him and his writing detailed the life of a young man trying to climb out of his father’s dark shadows. His stories haunted the professor.

    A couple of semesters later, the student’s girlfriend enrolled in the class. The professor pulled her aside one day and asked how the student was doing. The girlfriend was confused and informed the professor that his dad was a farmer and his parents were still married. Later, going over the former student’s writing, she found an essay he had written at the end of the class. It said “true or not, all stories come out fiction in the end.” (more…)

  • Piper

    From Are You Afraid of the Dark
    From Are You Afraid of the Dark

    The first time Eddie told the piper to fuck off it was about a quarter to ten. We parked the car down the street. Eddie said there was a government conspiracy to wait outside of Mickey’s Bar for drunks, and he needed to throw off the cops. That meant a brisk walk through the biting January air. I didn’t want to carry my coat around all night, so I left it in the car. The north wind tore through me within a half a block. I hate the cold. I’ve been cursing my dad ever since he moved us here from southern California when I was ten. What sort of asshole moves his family from paradise to Kansas? My dad was that sort of asshole.

    Loads of panhandlers hung out on the street on Saturday nights. Drunk college kids with money in their pockets were easy marks. Eddie hated beggars even more than he hates people, in general.

    “Jesus Christ,” Eddie said. “The city is pulling a shelter out of my ass and these bastards have the nerve to ask for money?” (more…)

  • From the Shadows

    I still remember the first horror book I ever read. Scary Stories to Read in the Dark sat on the bookshelf in the back of my third grade classroom. I read over and over about just-missed encounters with hook-handed psychopaths and puzzle nights that foretold the murdering maniac crawling through the apartment window.

    My horror education remained pretty basic till my teen years. It felt like something forbidden. Stephen King and friends seemed like corruptors of souls, as if being caught with a hardcover of The Stand might condemn your eternal soul. I read a lot of classic horror and science fiction, which I could argue as classic instead of genre. Stevenson, Dickinson, Wells, Verne, Poe, and a variety of classic terrifying dishes were read greedily, as if any moment, I would be found out.

    What is the quickest route to the shadows? Tell someone there is nothing there in the dark worth their time. Their curiosity will be peaked, and they will go in search for what lays waiting just outside the narrow vision of the flashlight beam. (more…)

  • A New Year’s Self-Evaluation

    You never stop learning as a writer. I firmly believe Hemingway when he says “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” As you read, write, and then read and write some more, you change as a writer.

    Sometimes, that change is barely perceptible, like a rock in a desert that moves only a couple of inches a decade. Only by looking back at the trail can you even see movement. Other times, change comes in spurts. I think a lot of us at The Confabulator Café are at the stage where our writing changes in spurts.

    Go back and read your writing from a year ago. Look at its rhythm, tone, voice, and even its content. Chances are, if you were to write that same passage today, there would be something different about it. Language, structure, or something else would change. Maybe there are passages you wouldn’t have written, at all.

    (more…)