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Plugged Right Between the Eyes

April 10, 2012 by John 3 Comments

I’ve been following the Letters of Note blog for a good while now. The curator/editor, Shaun Usher, collects samples of real letters — often but not always from “famous” people — on matters of real import, and/or in styles worth sharing.

Today’s entry features a 1914 letter from Jack London to a young aspiring writer named Max Fedder. Fedder, apparently, had written a letter to London, a fan letter as we might call it nowadays, and enclosed a story of his own. No doubt he hoped for encouragement from his hero, if not actual praise.

From London’s first sentences, if not quite his first words, that hope must have flown out the window — or, finding it closed, crashed right into the glass and dropped senseless to the floor:

Oakland, Calif.
Oct. 26, 1914

Dear Max Fedder:

In reply to yours of recent date undated, and returning herewith your Manuscript. First of all, let me tell you that as a psychologist and as one who has been through the mill, I enjoyed your story for its psychology and point of view. Honestly and frankly, I did not enjoy it for its literary charm or value. In the first place, it has little literary value and practically no literary charm. Merely because you have got something to say that may be of interest to others does not free you from making all due effort to express that something in the best possible medium and form. Medium and form you have utterly neglected…

Ouch, ouch, ouch. Objectively regarded, it’s a terrific letter, in fact — long, articulate, utterly non-generic, and frank. (See the whole thing here.) Somehow, though, I suspect that Max Fedder didn’t draw much comfort from any of that.

I’m trying, and failing, to think of any communication I’ve ever received remotely like it, from anyone. This doesn’t reflect on — haha — the grandeur of my works; it’s because I’ve been far much too nervous to offer them up for comment, unsolicited, to anyone at all. (To say that this complicates life for someone aspiring to write for a living greatly understates the case.) London’s response is exactly the kind I’d fear most.

How ’bout you? Are you the Give it to me straight, Jack, and don’t mince words! sort? Or the Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me! sort?

And if you were in Jack London’s shoes, can you imagine writing a response like his?

Perfect Moments: Two Beautiful Women, a Certain Amount of Booze, and Maybe I’ve Got a Story…!

October 8, 2011 by John 13 Comments

In the mid-1990s, boy, was I ever confused, perplexed, and probably (by many measures) in need of adjustment. Especially about my writing.

Here’s what my quote-unquote oeuvre consisted of then:

A non-fiction Op Ed memoir(ish) piece in a regional edition of the New York Times.
A published mystery. (Depending on who I was talking to at the time, I sometimes called it a published novel, with an exquisite inner — and yes, entirely maladjusted — sense that this actually made a difference.)
Opening chunks of a sequel to the mystery, for which my publisher made an offer I could refuse.
A short story, published in a literary magazine in Massachusetts.
A handful of “completed” short stories.
A larger handful of incomplete short stories.
Several completed non-fiction pieces, of the essay/”creative non-fiction” sort.
Some software reviews and how-to articles in a few computer/Internet-related techie magazines.

Oh, and I’d also done one complete draft — one — of a, well, a novel I couldn’t otherwise categorize. I’d gotten feedback from several advance readers of that draft: difficult, disturbing feedback, for the most part (or so it seemed to me). Feedback which praised the writing as writing but left the readers dissatisfied, wanting more. Wanting to understand what it was they had just read. Wanting me to decide what sort of book I meant to write. Did I think of it as a “literary” book? Then perhaps I didn’t need to work on it much more. Or did I want people to read it and recommend it — did I want people to enjoy it? Ummmmm, well… (Followed by a certain amount of uncomfortable silence, throat-clearing, and scuffing of feet.)

With that feedback in hand, I’d begun a second draft. And then stopped, about halfway through.

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Feedback to Stop the Heart

July 21, 2009 by John 11 Comments

I hope anyone reading this, or any of the other posts here, knows how dearly and sincerely I long for your approval as a reader; I want you to like my writing, and — just as importantly — I’ll never rarely ask for evidence of any of that. (I’ll just want you to keep coming back.)

That said, whoa, for a writer to get touched by a god, as it were — touched unbidden…

On this day in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson penned a little note to Walt Whitman. Emerson had apparently just finished reading the first printing of Leaves of Grass; he was so overcome by the experience that he had to sit down and just lay it out there for the poet. Here’s the full text of the letter (RWE being notably more pithy than, say, the average blogger):

21 July Concord Masstts. 1855

Dear Sir,

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely of fortifying & encouraging.

I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, & have felt much like striking my tasks, & visiting New York to pay you my respects.

R. W. Emerson

Mr. Walter Whitman.

(Love that my benefactor, eh? Emerson saying he’s not Whitman’s benefactor, but vice-versa!)

Whitman — not really a fool, but maybe just a tad bit, um, well, brash — immediately put this private letter to good public use, even going so far as to quote from it on the spine of a later edition (without asking Emerson first). I can’t imagine, even remotely, having the temerity to do something like that. Even assuming I could sufficiently gather my wits anytime in the succeeding months to try, y’know? I’d just be so flattened, immobilized, by a letter at all like this.

Which made me wonder: what author living today would have this effect on me? What author looms so large either in my own head, or in the culture at large, that I’d just about fall over, stunned, if I got a letter like this from him or her?

I don’t know. Toni Morrison, maybe? Stephen King? John Irving? J.K. Rowling? Michael Chabon or Jeffrey Eugenides? Thomas Pynchon? Ghostly writing, in mid-air or on lavatory wall, signed by E.B. White, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut?

I’m not talking career here — not “Of whom could I make the best use?” but rather, “Whose unsolicited, whole-hearted and unambivalent approval would send me into swooning ecstasy?”

Who’d do it for you?

July 4th: (Momentary) Freedom from Self-Consciousness

July 4, 2009 by John 7 Comments

So there’s this new writerly-blogging trend — not really a dangerous one, but it sure feels like one to a cautious soul like Yours Truly. Which is: throw caution to the winds. Post online something you’ve written, and… ask for feedback.

I think I’m going to try that, and I’ll get to that in a moment. [Whoops — too late!] I’ve tried that, briefly, over the last couple days, and depending on how that works out I may post about the experience later.

But first I want to lay the groundwork. I want to tell you about a sort of breakthrough I had last week, in working on Seems to Fit. (That’s the WIP’s new title — coming up with a final (?) title not the breakthrough I speak of now, although it was a huge weight off my mental shoulders then, and still.)

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