Sure, it’s cute to see what advice various famous authors have, and it never hurts to get a few tips on how to make this lifestyle work. But rules? Don’t most of us become writers exactly because we can’t stand following rules? It’s hard for me to imagine that the world’s next groundbreaking work of fiction is going to come from someone who always colored within the lines.

There just seems to be a lot of hubris for authors to claim they have figured out the secret of writing well, especially when it’s stuff like

Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
Fine, as long as you’re writing hard-boiled mysteries. Even Hemingway occasionally has people “ask” and “reply”.

Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no ­inessential words can every essential word be made to count.
What’s an essential word? Take this too far and suddenly you’ve cut everything… We’ll be left with no literature beyond defibrillator manuals.

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
I suppose Truman Capote was a hack. (And believe me, the inverse is definitely not true — just because you think your writing is rotten doesn’t mean you’re a secret genius.)

Don’t have children.
Do I even need to comment on this?

Look, Mr. Important Author People, we’re all very impressed with your work, and we’re all very glad you’ve figured out a routine and system that works for you. But don’t assume this is a problem that only needs to be solved once, for everyone.

Oh, but I did rather like this one, from Margaret Atwood:
Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

Now that’s writing advice! And I’ll keep it in mind on my flight to Japan tomorrow. Of course, I hate pencils and I happen to have invested in airplane-proof pens, so I guess even this rule can’t be extrapolated to everyone…

I have to share this link because it references many delightful things, from early twentieth century avant garde art to Bloomsbury bashing to a book called The Jews: Are they Human? (Though I mean really, being human is so overrated…) But my favorite part of the post was the author’s little google-powered (un)popularity test. Basically, she entered a bunch of authors’ names into google as part of the phrase “I hate _____” and compared how many hits each entry got. This is thought-provoking list:

Mary Karr: 0
Donna Tartt: 0
Ben Kunkel: 0
Marisha Pessl: 1
Ayelet Waldman: 1
Jonathan Franzen: 2
Michael Chabon: 2
Richard Powers: 2
Joan Didion: 4
Elizabeth Wurtzel: 89
Zadie Smith: 102
Jonathan Safran Foer: 120
Rick Moody: 374
David Sedaris: 774
Dave Eggers: 3880

Maria Bustillo’s point is that Dave Eggers is greatly despised by random people on the internet. But of course, what it mostly seems to indicate (as Mark Athitakis points out) is that Dave Eggers is more famous and actively talked-about than many other contemporary writers. Which is what intrigues me — can fame be measured in the number of people willing to publicly loathe you? It makes some sense — Donna Tartt (to pick a name from the list at random) is pretty famous, and probably has at least a few haters out there. But would anyone come out on a website and say specifically, in writing, that they hate her? They might be tempted, but then feel bad… how sad it would be for her to google herself one morning and be confronted with their pocket of vitriol. So people keep mum.

But someone like Eggers — you figure, if he googles himself (and surely he does three times daily), he will see a LOT of sites before he finds this one, and most of them will be saying very positive things. So even if he does eventually stumble across such a post, he can probably take the blow to his ego.

So in that sense, it’s sort of telling — at what point do you become famous enough not simply to have haters, but to have haters who believe that you are sufficiently famous that there can be no harm in bashing you on the internet? I’m not sure, but I’ve just decided that this is the level of fame I am going to shoot for. This is my new ambition.

(As it happens, there’s already one site containing the words “I hate George Ross” online, but of course, it’s not referring to me. Should I claim it anyway? Only 3880 to go until I’m more famous than Dave Eggers.)

It seems like a good analogy, at first glance. After all, writers and musicians are about equally arty, and both art forms are distributed via mass-media (as opposed to say, sculpture or… beadwork).

But as much as I love the idea of being the literary equivalent of Built to Spill or Gravy Train!!!!, I’ve spotted some crucial differences between music and literature. Musicians don’t need a label to distribute their work because they can build buzz and sell albums at shows. And it’s relatively easy for a band to get booked for small shows, because bars and clubs are desperate for talent. They won’t always pay, but at least there’s exposure and a fairly captive audience. If you’re good, it won’t be long before people notice.

Already famous authors can work a similar angle by doing local readings. But the world isn’t exactly clamouring to hear unknown authors read. The temptation for many of us is to put writing on the internet to build buzz, but the internet is the opposite of a captive audience. Only the very grabbiest, pulpiest fiction has a ghost of a chance on the internet (if produced by an unknown), and that’s very limiting.

Does it have to be this way? I don’t think so. I think it might be possible to create a world in which unknowns could read a few pages of their stuff to a room full of drunks and maybe get a little recognition, if they’re good — kind of like poetry slams, or amateur night at the Apollo, or the Gong Show. I’d personally love to see such a thing in action, but so far… I haven’t thought of any good way to make it happen.

So… I’m putting the idea out into the internet. Maybe somewhere out there is an unpublished author more desperate/enterprising than I am, and I’d be glad to jump on his bandwagon.

And of course, the far more crucial questions:

Why does William Burroughs look so fabulous at any age?

And what the hell did Truman Capote think he was doing?

The mash-up, the collage, the remix—this is the stuff of the future, and this is the stuff that Shields’ great fiction of the future must embrace. More Davis and Sorrentino, less Langer and Franzen. It will be brief, it won’t pretend to hide the author, and in its formal invention it will resist all efforts to assimiliate it.

So, there we are: back at begging/borrowing/stealing our material, either from other writers or from our own lives.

The thing is, philosophically, I’m pretty much behind this idea. But as a writer? I just can’t think of that much I really want to steal. In fact, I’ve tried to insert other writers’ words into my prose, but it always stands out, looking awkward — it just doesn’t flow right with the other stuff, the stuff I’ve actually written (probably to the credit of these other authors). Is it hopelessly regressive of me to even care about things like “flow”? Maybe I should boldly flaunt the seams in my writing! But I don’t know — although I’m sure it can be well done, I don’t really find anything inherently interesting about doing that.

And then there’s the other angle, the mixing of memoir and fiction to gloriously postmodern effect. Once again, I appreciate the idea, and I’ve seen it done marvelously well (I recently read Lauren Slater’s maybe-memoir, Lying, for class and was pretty much blown away). But as a writer… God, I’m just not all that interested in my own damn life (and so I hardly expect anyone else to be). Except for little slivers here and there, it’s not a story I feel compelled to tell, even with a fictional gloss over it.

So where does that leave us, as writers? I don’t want to write what Athitakis calls “more hackneyed novels with stale plots,” and anyway, I’m not hopelessly devoted to traditional narrative. But how do you write a non-traditional narrative that doesn’t sound just like all the other non-traditional narratives of your day? How do we make it exciting, and not just a gimmick? And just how exciting and original is this concept, anyway? Didn’t Joyce and the other modernists employ pretty similar techniques? In almost a century, haven’t we come up with any new tricks? If what we want is to create something fresh and new, is borrowing the best way to do that?

Um, yeah. I don’t know. But as I try to plot out my next novel, these are the questions that stress me out.

Anyone out there seen this article about Helene Hegemann, the possibly postmodern teen author?   So this girl gets famous for, among other things, publishing a wildly popular and critically acclaimed novel about the Berlin club scene, only to suffer scandal when it turns out many passages from her novel were lifted from other sources.  But wait:

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

A powerful statement, but the line originally was written by Airen, on his blog. The plot thickens, however, and shows that perhaps more than simple cribbing is at work. When another character asks Edmond if he came up with that line himself, he replies, “I help myself everywhere I find inspiration.”

Hmm.  What do we think of this?  Can she reasonably claim this was all a postmodern stunt?

In principle, I am on the side of postmodern stunts.  And I’m generally not as horrified by so-called “remix culture” as some people.  But something in this story isn’t sitting right with me.  For example, the Times quotes her as saying, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”  Really?  Those don’t sound like the words of someone who is rigorously engaged with the discourse on “originality” and the iterability of graphemes.  I mean, I can buy that there’s no such thing as originality, but what the hell is authenticity?  If she were really serious about making this semiotic statement, wouldn’t she be just as interested in problematizing the latter term?

But I don’t know.  Maybe it’s not fair to expect a 17 year old German girl, no matter how celebrated, to be versed in Derrida.  Can’t anyone participate in the new rhetorical model, regardless of philosophical background?  Maybe I should be thrilled to see theory in use like this, and all the more if the user has no idea where her ideas come from.

Anyway, she obviously makes up in chutzpah what she lacks in originality or intellectual rigor, and that should count for something.

woooooooo bento.  and this concludes my japan posts for…  a while, certainly.  Let’s hope Idaho in winter gives me as much fun stuff to blog.

I’ve been meaning to share this quiet moment from our trip to Nishi Hongan-Ji temple. Apparently it was some kind of clean-up day? Huge numbers of old people had been bussed in and handed twig brooms in order to sweep up the leaves that were littering the courtyard.

This was late afternoon, after most of the leaves had been swept into plastic bags, and people were lining up to go as a man with a megaphone thanked them over and over. In the background is the so-called “Sunset Gate”, supposedly so beautiful it will distract you from the sunset. Since we were there at sunset, we were able to test this out — I’m afraid we weren’t entirely convinced.

No visit to Japan is complete for me without a trip to Mister Donut. Mister Donut was a fixture of my childhood, until they got bought out by Dunkin’ Donuts and became… not as good. I had thought Mister Donut had vanished from the face of the planet, but in fact, no — they just all picked up and moved to asia, apparently! But as Japan is never going to be satisfied with mere honey glaze and powdered sugar, we got chocolate with… I think pistachio crunchies? and a musically-themed holiday-oriented green donut of indeterminate flavor. But wow, adding whip cream to a donut is a good idea!

Oh look, another trip to Mister Donut. I was kicking myself for not getting the black sesame. Black sesames are kind of awesome — same flavor as white sesames, but sweet! Also, a strawberry donut that tasted like it had actual strawberry bits in it.

Not exotic enough for you?

This is a beef stew donut. It seems weird at first, but actually, savory filled donuts are a fantastic idea! A wonderfully satisfying and portable meal combining meat and donuts — what’s not to like? This actually came in a little bag from a combini.

On a vaguely related note, I actually saw a bagel shop in Kyoto too… They seemed to have fruity bagels? Oddly enough, even though I’m a donut adventuress, I’m a bagel purist, so I didn’t try these.

And lastly, a totally inedible donut. Or donuts, I guess. I don’t even know if “Donuts” is the name of the band or the album, but I spotted this in a record store.

M. and I got lucky one day, though, when I — sick of walking — suggested we spend a relaxing sunday taking the suburban train as far as it would go, just to see.  Little did I know that the last stop on the nearby line is the famed Kurama-dera — a gorgeous temple located most of the way up a steep, forested mountain, known as the point where Mao-son stepped onto the earth from Venus 6.5 million years ago. It’s also the birthplace of reiki.

Of course, we didn’t know this when we got off the train. We saw a gate a the foot of the mountain and figured the temple must be a few yards inside. So we start off on foot and pretty soon we’re climbing a steep hillside covered in lush green forest and dotted with tiny shrines, statues, and pagodas.

It was cold, too! There are icicles dripping from that water spout.

A rare bit of sky visible around this giant cedar. (A lot of the particularly magnificent trees were wearing these little belts, though I think the most sacred was near the top of the mountain.)

That’s the mountain peak, just behind the roof of the main building. It’s actually farther then it looks… or maybe I was just really tired. Inside, there were a few other pilgrims and tourists praying or walking around, but this one woman was making really intense hissing noises, like an angry cat. Then she started… yowling I guess. I think it was Japanese words, but it sounded a lot like cat yowling and shrieking. I got nervous and left, but everyone else acted like this was no big deal. Never heard anything like it in the downtown temples.

The view from the temple porch. That visible building is a restaurant/refreshment point a few feet below the temple. Oh yeah, and see? Japan is wall-to-wall people. ;)

We did make it all the way to the top of the mountain (huff, puff) to see these exposed roots (kinone michi)… Very cool, but I admit that my calves were aching for about a week afterward every time I went down stairs. I joked that the little ballet flats I was wearing were totally inappropriate to the hike, and all the gaijin we saw were wearing big hiking boots. But on my way down I saw a Japanese girl wearing thigh-high boots with spiked heels (these are quasi-ubiquitous among young Japanese women this season) and I thought, now that’s a real challenge.

And hey, I couldn’t go a whole post with no food at all! We needed a rest at the bottom of the mountain (and to warm up!), so we stopped in a little tea house for hot tea and dango, dipped in mitarashi, with red bean paste and crumbled peanuts.

All in all, I think Kurama might be the most incredible place I’ve seen in Japan.  Of course it’s not a contest, and I saw many amazing things, but this was a truly awesome experience.