He was jittery on their honeymoon, spilled a glass of red wine on her dress.  “I’m sorry,” he told her, but she smiled placidly back.  “I forgive you,” she said.

The next day when she was swimming, he stole her book to read, then misplaced it somewhere.  “I’m sorry,” he told her.  “I forgive you,” she said.

Their third year of marriage, he forgot their anniversary, while she surprised him with a brand new fishing rod.  “I’m so sorry,” he told her.  But she was unperturbed.  “I forgive you,” she said.

And so it went, over the years.  He screwed up, big things and little, and always her forgiveness came, swift and sure.  He told his friends, “My wife has the patience of a saint!  Nothing upsets her.”  And his friends were duly jealous, as their wives sulked and brooded and withheld affection for what seemed like the most insignificant of offenses.

Meanwhile, he began to wonder if there was any crime that would be outside the realm of her seemingly infinite mercy.  What if he broke her favorite antique tea pot?  What if he poisoned her roses?  What if he went on vacation without her?  What if he let her dog escape?  But each time apologies begat forgiveness, as naturally as night follows day.  The year he slept with her sister, there was a minor breakthrough – for one small moment, her beatific smile seemed to falter as she repeated the words once more: “I forgive you.”

Then a month before their thirtieth anniversary, he slipped and sloshed the steaming spaghetti water on her as she stood, chopping onions for the sauce.  An accident this time, a completely honest mistake, and the sorries spilled from his mouth even as the bright pink burn spread like a stain on her skin.  This time, however, she didn’t smile, didn’t open her mouth even to shriek in pain, but simply turned and lunged and ran him through with her knife.

And so he lay on the kitchen floor, blood squelching in a puddle beneath him, and she fell to her knees by his side, sobbing over his body.  “I’m sorry,” she wailed.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”  He smiled up at her face.  “I forgive you.”

Literary is a slippery little word — it gets used a lot by people both on the creative side of this industry, and on the money side (and there’s a false dichotomy if I ever saw one, but that’s a post for another day). Like any word, the meaning of literary is context dependent, and since it is used so differently in different contexts, a lot of confusion tends to arise surrounding it, and sometimes even bad feeling.

For example, writers who consider themselves “genre” or “mainstream” or “commercial” often use literary as an insult. In such circles, literary is taken to mean pretentious, plotless, boring, and inaccessible. Literary writers are often denigrated as writers who make their real money as professors (or something similar), so they can afford to write wholly self-indulgent books that appeal to no one but themselves and their friends. Harsh.

And then there are the people who use the word “literary” as a synonym for good, or well-written. For these people, pretty much any book they admire can be considered literary, even if it has space monsters or pirates or terse detectives. As long as the book is doing something new, interesting, evocative, or aesthetically compelling, then that’s all that’s necessary to be considered literary.

Then there are the publishing people — the people who really have to think directly about who is going to buy a certain book, and how to use that information to help everyone pay their electricity bills. For them, literary is often a simple classification, rather than a value judgment. Literary is a genre like any other, in that certain books that can be classified as “literary” will be most likely bought by a predictable group of people. Once you know who that group of people is, you can more easily market directly toward them, and thus spend your publicity money more efficiently. This system, of course, has a tendency to be a bit reductive — no matter how brilliant and ground-breaking your pirate masterpiece is, there’s a good chance someone’s going to shelve it with the other pirate dramas, figuring that people who love pirates are the most likely audience for a book about pirates.

On the other hand, if you write story about a faltering marriage on a windswept Nebraska farm, no matter how hackneyed, predictable, and poorly written it may be, someone in the industry is going to call it “literary”.

So it should be obvious by now why sometimes feelings get hurt when folks get together and aren’t clear about what definition they’re using. Someone might call you literary, referring to your most likely market, and you might think they’re calling you boring and pretentious. Someone might call you a genre writer simply because your book takes place in an imagined future, and you think they’re calling it formulaic and cheesy. Or someone might call your book literary, meaning it’s a meandering snooze-fest, and you mistakenly feel flattered that they’re calling you a genius in line with Shakespeare and Melville.

For my part, I try to avoid using the word at all — once a word has too many meanings, it ceases to have any useful meaning at all. How about you? How do you define literary?  Be honest, now…

That question aside, a lot of people are pointing out that this whole concept of a writer’s archive of materials is becoming obsolete in the digital age. Says Adam Begley in the nytimes, “Updike’s archive may be the last great paper trail… Anyone interested in how a great writer works will find here as full an explanation as we’re likely to get.”

Ruth Franklin further comments in The New Republic that “the computer discourages the keeping of archives, at least in their traditional form. If Updike had been working in Word, he might have left no trace of the numerous emendations to the opening airport scene of Rabbit at Rest.”

Mark Athitakis then follows up by suggesting that in the future, writer’s archive’s might consist of their twitter posts and facebook “likes”.

This seems like an excessively grim prediction. The idea that technology has obscured the “trace” of the working writer is baffling to me. Why should the fact of working in Word mean that writers don’t save their drafts, false starts, and excisions?

I can only speak of my own process, but for this most recent book alone, I have accumulated:

• Two notebooks (yes, real paper) worth of outlining, character sketches, problem-solving, etc.
• A folder full of photos I took to help me visualize the clothing and living spaces of my characters
• A file of links to articles and images from around the web that spurred bits and pieces of my story.  And perhaps most strikingly,
• 123 individual files, including drafts at all stages, notes, dead-ended experiments, lists of words, ideas, concepts, places, and chunks of history I wanted to incorporate into the text, comments from critique partners, drafts of query letters, ever line I ever cut from the book but thought I might want to re-use later (I revive dead snippets all the time), paragraphs from other books I want to refer to for inspiration, lists of songs I found relevant while writing, excel sheets tracking character and theme development, and God only knows what other detritus.

And this is to say nothing of the vast number of emails, forum posts, and online journal entries I have racked up in the name of this enterprise. Egotist that I am, even I can’t imagine that any biographer would ever be compelled to sort through it all. And this is all for only one book!

I know not all writers work this way. I have some (very successful) friends who simply open up a fresh document, start writing, and from then on all their work is done in that one file, so there is indeed no record of their process. But even before computers, there were writers who burned their early drafts, or trashed all their notes the minute the book was sold.  Has so much really changed?  I’d say that the biggest change is that at least an electronic archive can be searched for relevant details as easily as hitting Ctrl+F.

How about you? When you’re famous and dead, will you have left anything behind for students of your work to sift through?

Trains

The trains didn’t go anywhere. Nothing happened to them. There were green ones, blue ones, and coaches. Nothing. The end.

Why yes, that is an eyeball balanced on my wedding ring, sitting on my laptop. And in the background, you can see my attempt at creating a color-coded spreadsheet representing my characters’ motivations throughout the course of the novel.

In the past few years, I’ve seen any number of writers — both professional and aspiring — lecture each other on the dangers of the internet. It’s a terrible time suck! they cry. Every second you spend blogging or tweeting or watching videos of people popping zits is a second you’re not writing, and therefore another second of distance between you and the fulfillment of your literary dreams. Do you think Tolstoy wasted time googling random obscenities?

Probably not. But while some writers really can sit down and write for six hours straight, I don’t think that’s necessarily an achievable goal for most of us, internet or no. The web may be a time-wasting device of awe-inspiring power, but a true procrastinator has no need of such crutches. Why, I remember before the internet even existed, when I used to play solitaire (with actual cards!), watch old tv-shows in syndication until I could recite them, unravel blankets with loose threads, or, when all else failed, simply stare blankly into the middle distance.

I’ve spent a lot of my life beating myself up for these habits. How could I have failed to complete that chemistry homework? Why didn’t I leave myself more than three hours to write that paper? How many novels might I have completed in the time I spent constructing dioramas out of happy meal toys?

The thing is, I’m starting to wonder if all that procrastination doesn’t serve a greater purpose. Especially when it comes to something like writing… sometimes it needs to be forced, but maybe sometimes it needs to be ignored for a while in favor of something willfully unproductive. Don’t get me wrong — if you never sit down to write, well, nothing is ever going to get written. But if you’re an incorrigible procrastinator like I am, you might at least console yourself that your unconscious might be doing important work back there while you demolish your high score at tetris.

On summer days, the Piazza del Duomo is swollen with crabby, overheated tourists wearily checking off the one major site in their glossy guide books before turning back to their buses and cars to start for the next town.  By nightfall, the piazza is eerily empty and pale, the white marble edifices like a moonbeam mirage.

A few blocks away, the town is waking up, locals stumbling out of restaurants and apartments for their evening walk to the ice cream stand.  Nuns shove their way to the front of the line, pulling rank on the young lovers standing together with limbs intertwined.  The nuns take a profane delight in their treat, but who can begrudge them this one indulgence?

Behind them, groups of teenage boys jostle each other, shouting flirtatious comments at the serving girls.  Each night the love affair begins anew – the girl with the scoop is the most beautiful girl in the world, until she hands over the cone and is forgotten.

Which kind of gets to my point.  Over the past few years, I have made the acquaintance of some very ambitious writers.  And on some level, I think we’d all like to be multi-published bestsellers as well as critical darlings with an assured place in the literary canon.  But at a certain point, most writers seem to make a choice – either they’re going to put all their energy into getting published, or they’re going to put it all into perfecting their craft.  And while the two approaches certainly aren’t mutually exclusive, they’re not identical, either.

Let’s take for granted that writers on either path will begin by writing a LOT.  Whether your goal is publication or aesthetic perfection, you’re not going to get anywhere without writing, writing, and more writing.

But that aside, the writer who wants, above all, the legitimacy of publication is going to take certain distinct steps toward his goal:  he’ll read all the agent blogs, follow the industry gossip, network with other aspiring writers, scan the best-seller lists, devour every book review that comes out.  All this research will help him discern what the popular trends are, and determine how he might “position himself in the current market”, as they say.  It will also prepare him to send out a dazzling query letter, impress people at conferences with his pithy pitch, and know exactly the right thing to say when an agent finally calls. It’s not an easy path, and it comes with no guarantees, but I think this route does prepare people for the realities of the publishing industry pretty well.  And if what you want is to get published, that can only be helpful.

On the other hand, the writer who is craft-focused may follow a pretty different path.  She’s going to start by reading a ton – the very best books she can get her hands on, in a variety of styles.  She may enter an MFA program, or look around for a hard-hitting critique group.  Or she may simply lock herself away with her work-in-progress and spend five to ten years honing it to near perfection.  She may seek out advice from the authors she most admires, attend writers’ retreats and conferences – whatever it takes to learn from the people who take craft seriously.  This is also not an easy path, and comes with no guarantees – but it’s probably the best bet for producing accomplished writing.

So then what?  Shall never these paths meet?  God, that’s a depressing thought – and not one I subscribe to.  From what I’ve seen, writers who are driven by publication usually find themselves working pretty hard on craft at some point, even if they come on it through the back door.  And those who devote themselves to great writing usually have to take a remedial course in “the bizz” before they find a home for their masterwork.

Still, even if our paths will inevitably cross here and there, we could probably all benefit from checking out the other route more often.

Pickled Eggs

It was about two years ago that the kids started coming to Wally’s.

Wally’s had been Jack’s favorite bar for going on forty years now, if by favorite you meant the one closest to his apartment. The place held a lot of memories, almost none of them happy – Wally’s was where Jack used to go to get away from his wife, until she got away from him for good. It’s where he used to knock off early from work, back when he had it. These days it was where most of his pension checks went, after rent and a paper bag full of groceries.

Jack liked Wally’s for two reasons: the pickled eggs, and the fact that everyone who came in was as lonely and miserable as he was. There were no loudmouth, cheerful drunks here, or cozy couples cooing to each other in a booth. It was dark, it was quiet, and even the bartender knew enough to leave you alone with your thoughts.

Then two summers ago, a couple of kids stumbled in – mid-twenties, tight pants, one of them wearing a hat like Jack hadn’t seen since his father was a young man. The kids got a couple of beers and wound up snickering in the corner for half an hour before they left. But that was just the beginning – ever since then, more and more of these weirdo kids cluttered up the bar, tattooed like sailors, pierced like savages, popping quarters into a juke box that Jack hadn’t even known was there.

Tonight, they were daring each other to eat Wally’s pickled eggs, the best pickled eggs in the neighborhood, as if they thought they were chunks of brined dog shit.

But well, it turns out that this part of Idaho isn’t really all that weird. There are rolling hills and distant mountains and excruciatingly lovely dilapidated barns everywhere. But hey, most of America has that stuff. What do we have here that really screams IDAHO?

Idaho Spud candy bar, that’s what.

I just spotted this for the first time in supermarket, and I had to grab one. I will say this for the potato state — they sure make their candy cheap. At 33 cents each, this was a much easier impulse buy than any of your big league Snickers or Hershey Bars. But more importantly, it was intriguing — how in God’s name do you make a candy bar out of potatoes?

Disappointingly, you don’t. According to the Idaho Candy Company website, no potatoes were harmed in the making of this candy. Instead, we have a fairly innocuous combination of chocolate, coconut, and fluffy marshmallow goo.

It was all right.