Lessons in perseverance

While composing my previous post, a few other thoughts about novelist Peter Carey and his visit to UCA came to mind. I need to return to him one more time. Here's why: I'm always telling my students that being a writer is as much about having a thick skin as it is about having genius. There is a lot of talent in the gene pool, but also a lot of obstacles and too many distractions just begging to become excuses. The world gives us so many reasons not to write, not the least of which are the inevitable rejections along the way. Enduring those--and keeping on--is a real and absolutely vital talent. That talent has a lot more to do with how far you go than whether you can or did dazzle your Intro. to Creative Writing classmates. The ones who finally "make it," as an old teacher of mine was fond of saying, are the ones who keep getting the work done. Finally, it's all about perseverance.

The truth of this adage came home to me during Carey's visit. He told a few whopper anecdotes about getting slammed and having to pick himself up again. The first story came from his early years, when he was a young, college-aged guy working at an advertising agency and, on his own time, writing fiction. His first novel--the very first book he'd ever written--was quickly accepted for publication by a house in Australia. He received this news in a glowing letter from the publisher: a heck of a thrill for a young man! But during a later meeting with editors from this house it gradually became clear to him that they weren't nearly as excited about the book as their letter had indicated. In fact, they weren't going to publish it at all. Talk about a change of heart! But they weren't exactly straight with Carey, even then. They gave him the runaround, made proscrastinating excuses, and finally "kicked the book upstairs" by sending it the to an editor in London. Carey waited a while and then took off on his own personal, self-financed tour of Europe, ending up, of course, at the office of this London editor. He introduced himself to the man's secretary and explained that he'd like to meet the editor because the man might be publishing his novel. The secretary went in to check with her boss. When she came out moments later she was carrying his manuscript. No need to see him, the secretary explained. He won't be publishing you. That experience rocked Carey, and certainly made him question himself, but the end result was that he redoubled his writing efforts.

Some years later, when his novel Oscar and Lucinda came out, Carey was slammed again. First, his publisher refused to pay for a book tour. So on his own initiative, with logistical difficulty--he was still working in the ad business then--and at his own expense, Carey traveled to California to attend the important American Booksellers Association convention. The good news was that his novel had just received a glowing, front page review in the New York Times Book Review. The bad news was that the just released first edition was so rife with errors that it had to be pulled immediately. All copies were ordered to be destroyed. So he traveled to America to promote his big breakout book only to see it become completely unavailable! He returned home understandably embittered. (To make it worse, despite the great review in the New York Times he felt like just a number in the madhouse of the ABA convention.) "That's the kind of thing that might make somebody give up," I said to him. He looked at me quizzically and then replied that the thought of giving up never went through his head. There was nothing else to do, he said, except to get back to writing. Indeed. (Btw, after this initial bump in the road it all came out good for Oscar and Lucinda, which won the Booker prize in 1988.)

I was only half-serious with my "giving up" remark. But it's true: Some people faced with those turn of events would have given up. But writers--real writers? Never. Real writers remain committed to the art form, and that commitment demands action. Commitment demands patience. Most of all, commitment demands that you work. Real writers don't worry about which cafes they should hang out at or which movies they're supposed to see or which political party they belong to or whether they need to update their Facebook status. Real writers don't let rejections and setbacks stand for anything more than the low level hurdles they are. Real writers work. No matter what. That's the definition of "making it."

Peter Carey live

I thought I should get around to posting a followup to my earlier post about Australian novelist Peter Carey and his book True History of the Kelly Gang. Carey visited my university late last month, and as is customary with these things, he gave a public reading one night and then held a small group discussion with students the next day. As it turned out, he read from Kelly Gang, after providing a substantial--and much needed, given his Arkansan audience--introduction to his native country, to Ned Kelly himself, and to the book. In my earlier post, I marveled at the half-illiterate, half-eloquent first person voice Carey had developed for his novel. As impressed as I was by that voice when I read the book at home, I was even more impressed in the public reading. Kelly's voice carries commandingly when spoken aloud. It seems real and true and compelling--at least when performed by the author himself. Carey reads with confidence and with experience; also with a useful touch of the showman. I thought he and Ned Kelly were both tremendous.

As I suspected, that voice, Carey told us, was an invention, as was most of the action in the novel. According to Carey, very few personal details about Kelly are established in the historical record, necessitating that Carey's biographical novel be just that: fictional. More interesting, though, was something else he told us: A couple dozen or so pages of writing by Kelly actually do exist. Carey's first approach to the novel was to try to exactly imitate the voice that appears in those extant pages. He tried it but wasn't satisfied. In the end he invented his own Ned Kelly voice, which holds up remarkably well over hundreds of pages, in which there is very little punctuation. What occurred to me, however, as I listened to him comment about the book is how fictional any character in a novel must be, whether real worldy or not, whether a lot or a little is known about him. I hope the Van Gogh of my novel comes across as believable and interesting, but no doubt he's my Van Gogh. Not a couple dozen but thousands of pages of his writing are available as well as numerous anecdotes and memories by people who knew or met him. And then there are all the paintings! His life is about as well documented as a person's can be from the 19th century, yet the entire time I was drafting my novel I felt I was making him up.

Personally, Carey proved a friendly, gracious, open visitor. He seemed genuinely curious about the writing lives of his UCA hosts and about UCA itself. Impressed by our (quite lovely) Writing Department building he took pictures of it to take back to show to his students in New York. He showed a complete lack of pretension and could not have been more direct, more honest with his answers to questions. Best of all, he demonstrated for our students--through his reading, through his comments, through his anecdotes, through his honesty--what a commitment to the writing craft and the writing life means. He's a pro, in only the best sense of the word, and a writer who deserves far more attention from U.S. readers than he's received heretofore. In England, I am told, he is held in the same esteem as Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. How ironic that his adopted home country has yet to truly embrace him. Carey, I must say, seems unphased by this. He's got his life in New York--and he's always working on a novel.

One reading suggestion

No news today on my own book. Just know that I'm still working on it, everday. Thought I would share a word about a historical novel I'm reading at the moment. Peter Carey's True Hisrtory of the Kelly Gang. Mr. Carey will be a visiting writer at my university next month, so I'm catching up on his work. And I'm happy to read any well-written historical novel while I'm busy on a historical novel of my own. If you don't know Carey's work, you should. He's won the Booker Prize--twice (!).

What I'm finding especially interesting about Kelly Gang is Carey's approach to the narrator's voice. How to capture historical speech is a question every writer of historical fiction has to struggle with, and I've sat in on more than one AWP session in which this exact question comes up. There are different schools of thought. Some think you need to imitate as best you can how people actually spoke during the period depicted. Others ask: Yes, but how can you know? We don't have voice recordings from Elizabethan England, for instance. We only have written documents. And as we all know, written documents--especially from an age in which most people did not write--are hardly a reliable indicator of how the general public spoke. Finally, I think, it's just got to feel right to the reader. If your best attempt at earlier speech patterns comes across as a forced or clownishly bad imitation, the reader could dump the whole novel for no other reason. In my book, I'm avoiding modern slang but I'm more or less making the speech patterns sound like our own. Why? Because in conversations I'm trying to transmit the emotional nature of those conversations: relaxed, angry, whimsical, questioning, etc. For a modern reader to hear a conversation as relaxed the diction and sentence structure must sound relaxed in his/her ear. Using outworn constructions won't come across as relaxed.

But here's the thing. In Kelly Gang, Carey is imitating past written speech. (19th c.) More than that, it's the written speech of a only barely literate, if intelligent, person. He gives himself an extra hard chore. Not only does it have to sound like believable 19th c. writing but the 19th c. writing of a near-illiterate. (And it is meant to be read as writing--something expressly put down on paper--not simply the narrator's consciousness. The premise of the novel is that these writings were found bound in packets and are being presented to the reader.) It's a pleasure to watch on the page as paragraph after paragraph Carey confronts this challenge. He employs an interesting and nearly convincing combination of atrocious grammar, almost non-existent punctuation, and the occasionally archaic or ornate sounding word (e.g., "adjectival"). The point of that latter, I'm assuming, is to remind the reader what century the book is set in. But, too, it feels intuitively right. How many people with poor writing skills can at the same time demonstrate ornate, even flowery speaking styles? There's some of that in this narrator, who is of course not speaking but writing. But he writes in a verbal style, his narrative directed at a specific listener inside the world of the story, not at a general reader. Check this one out, especially if you like novels with unique narrative voices.