Screenplay-novel FAQs

What is a screenplay-novel?

It's a novel. But it's written in the form of a screenplay.

How did you get the idea of writing a screenplay-novel?

Over time, it dawned on me that I treated movies the way I treated novels: I would appreciate their stories in a similar way, and talk about them afterwards the way a person might talk about a novel. In fact, I do this more often with movies ... mainly, I think, because nowadays movie-watchers vastly outnumber novel readers and so there are many people you can have a conversation with about a particular movie -- even a very serious movie. It's a lot harder to do that about a particular book.

The epiphany occurred when I was reading the published screenplay of the film version of Out of Africa (I'd read the Karen Blixen original many years before). My wife had a copy of it, and it was lying around the house.

I live in South Korea, and these kinds of scripts are enormously popular here. They're marketed as an English learning tool (English script on one page, with Korean-language "key points" on the other). But as I read the script I found I really enjoyed it in and of itself. And then I thought, if this works as a book form of an existing movie, why wouldn't it work as a book form of a movie that's never been made? In other words, why not use the same combination of stills and script?

[N.B. It's worth noting that some time after reading this book for the first time, I noticed it didn't in fact contain stills plural, but the same photo from the movie over and over. However, the point still stands -- an artistic experience similar to that of a movie can be created in book form.]

And then there's the creative process involved: Unless writing autobiographically, I like imagining scenes as if they were in a movie. My imagination seems to naturally work that way.

Has this idea been done before?

There's a long tradition of writing satire in the form of a screenplay -- you know, some comic scene, for example, an inane conversation in the White House. And there is a tradition of teleromans in some countries. These are basically comics made of photographs, not drawings.

But there are no examples of a literary novel written in screenplay form that I've seen. At least, this was true when the idea first came to me. Since then, people have given me examples. One was a script by Michael Turner entitled "American Whisky Bar". I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on it. But some time after it was published, it was produced by CITY-TV and Bruce McDonald as a live television drama. I saw that broadcast. The broadcast was really more like a 1950s-style televised play than anything else. So I don't know if it qualifies.

Personally, I think people will come up with other examples and this will turn into a long-running debate over who was first. And I doubt it will ever be satisfactorily resolved. Instead, what I'd like to emphasize is I'm calling for the screenplay-novel to exist as a distinct form of novel. In other words, I'm hoping that many serious writers will adopt this way of writing novels -- at least, for some of their work.

So it's a good idea because it's new?

Ideas aren't good simply because they're new. I might be the first person to invent chocolate-flavoured cheddar cheese. That doesn't mean it's worthwhile. Instead, I think this idea is good because it has the potential to be artistically effective. It solves problems for the writer, and solves problems for the audience. Although it should be written with care and craft , because its word count tends to be lower than in a traditional novel, it's quicker to produce and quicker to read. Yet at the same time, it keys into people's imaginations. It is a very effective way of creating the vividness necessary for certain types of narrative, especially those emphasizing dialogue.

Of course, some people don't feel the same way. For them, the screenplay-novel is not a particularly evocative way of writing. They need more in the way of description -- both of the environment and of interior consciousness. I understand this. Because the screenplay-novel is stripped-down, it seems to have certain inherent shortcomings, one of which is less physical description and the other which is the apparent disappearance of interior consciousness.

So it's important to underline the first quality can still exist in a screenplay novel. As in a regular screenplay, there is no necessary restriction on the number of descriptive passages that exist. There are simply conventions about this, just as there are conventions in what might be called traditional screenplay writing; screenplays tend to be very minimalist. However, a screenplay-novelist doesn't have to follow this convention. He or she can include as many descriptive passages as he or she wants.

Evoking interior consciousness is more of a problem. Interior states of mind don't "disappear" in a screenplay-novel. Instead, they have to be evoked mainly by the characters' dialogue. (This is one reason why I tend to use more description of gestures, facial expressions and tone of voice in my dialogue than you'd find in a regular screenplay.)

The screenplay-novel form is not perfect. It has strengths and weaknesses. But let's be honest: the traditional novel has short-comings, too, not the least of which is its increasing tendency these days toward self-consciousness and overripe writing (or over-write writing; a lot of books suffer simply from being longer than they need to be). It is a sad irony of contemporary fiction that just as the novel is facing so much competition from other narrative forms -- from movies to video games -- so many novels that are published are either strait-jacketed by convention or so self-indulgent and flabby that they fall into the category of books that can be opened but not finished. This is one of the real strengths of the screenplay-novel: it is designed to be finished. It is designed to succeed in keeping its audience's attention. There is something shameful and affected in insisting this is an irrelevant goal for the serious writer to keep in mind.

(And I cannot keep repeating often enough: the screenplay-novel does not have to eschew fine writing; belles lettres can exist within its pages -- it is just that belletristic description is kept to small proportions, unless those belles lettres arise naturally in a character's speech.)

You mentioned interior consciousness. This is exactly what I like about novels. How can a screenplay ever compete with that?

This is probably the most complex aesthetic question that one can ask of the screenplay-novel as a form. As I suggest above, interior consciousness does not "disappear" because putative descriptions of it disappear. In other words, interior consciousness -- or rather, consciousness generally -- when evoked in art can be revealed many different ways. A good stage play tells us a lot about characters' interior consciousness; it does this through dialogue that takes place in more-dramatic-than-one-finds-in-regular-life situations. In other words, even though a stage play generally does not attempt to "show" interior consciousness, it can quite effectively evoke enough of the characters of various dramatis personae that we, the audience, develop a sense of both the outer and inner life of the people on stage. (Furthermore, just as staged theatre can, to a degree, and through the artistry of well-written dialogue, tell us something about the interior consciousness of characters, so traditional novels can fail at successfully evoking it. It's also worth noting that a fair percentage of "interior consciousness" that one finds in works of conventional fiction is simply not very convincing. More on this in a moment.)

When we talk about interior consciousness in art, we are not talking about something that reflects with absolute accuracy an already existent state(s) of mind. Instead, we are talking about a mimetic process; an attempt on the part of art to capture something that is "real" -- if consciousness can be said to be real in the way we normally understand that word. Quite often, this mimetic process falls short.

All this would be fine if literary people could reach some kind of genuine consensus about when writers succeed and when they fail at depicting interior consciousness. But they can't. What this means for defenders of traditional literature as a repository of "something that movies can't do" because, so their argument goes, only literary fiction can evoke interior consciousness, is a need to re-think just what it is that allows a work of literary fiction to tell us about various characters' inner lives. Showing inner life is not as simple as claiming one shows it; a work of art has to do more. And this is something screenplay-novels can succeed at doing as well, if they are written well enough.

I've read other screenplays, and they're a lot different from yours. Why?

Those aren't screenplay-novels, they're screenplays. They are meant to be produced into movies. What I'm doing here is a novel meant to be imagined as a movie.

But it's just words. What I like about movies are the pictures.

Books can contain pictures, too.

Why don't you just write a regular novel?

I do. I have. But recently I have become interested in this approach to -- this form of -- writing. It's a method of writing that works for me; that re-inspires me after years of increasing frustration with traditional literary techniques.

So you hate traditional fiction?

No. When it is well done I admire it just as much as I ever did. Traditional fiction (which could be called conventional fiction, but here I really mean to say literary fiction in the form in which we usually find it) has been what formed me: this is true from 19th Century geniuses like John Keats, Charlotte Bronte, Oscar Wilde, Edmund Gosse, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, to the extraordinary richness of 20th Century literature -- including giants such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Theodore Dreiser, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, J. D. Salinger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Leonard Cohen to lesser knowns such as Bruno Schulz, Tadeusz Borowski, Knut Hamsen, Ole Edvart Rolvaag, Sigrid Undset, Violette Leduc, Elizabeth Jane Howard, David Plante, Daniel Jones, Harry Sonny Ladoo, and Britt Hagarty, to artist/writers such as R. Crumb, Peter Bagge, Julie Doucette, Chester Brown and David Collier, to recent discoveries among Korean writers such as Chai Man-shik, Oh Jung-hee, Chae Yun, and Yun Heung-gil ... the list goes on and on.

In the period described above, there's such an enormous quantity of good writing that at times one might be forgiven for thinking that "good writing" is for the recent historical period like "progress" was in the late 19th Century: something we can take for granted. The early days of the 21st Century, however, indicate an opposite trend. Much fiction that is getting published and praised these days has a tired, predictable quality.

If I were the only person who felt this way, I'd blame myself. But many people who are serious about reading feel the same way. When best-of-year reading lists are drawn up, one often hears the comment that a particular book which won major prizes or was promoted by establishment taste-makers was a disappointment. There is a malaise affecting contemporary fiction, and this malaise is corroding the faith that people at all levels of the literary enterprise have in the process of producing literature. Agents are taking on less literary fiction than they used to, publishers are publishing less of it, and writers are finding their careers stymied when the sales of one book just don't materialize and they find it difficult to sell their next manuscript. (Or else, their careers are stymied by not being published at all -- and yes, this happens to good writers.)

But being a writer has always been difficult. Why complain about that?

It's not so much a complaint as an observation that the cultural landscape is in the process of changing rather drastically. This isn't news. The readership of fiction, especially literary fiction in its traditional form, has been declining for years. Recently, this decline has become alarming. By all means, read traditional novels, and, if they move you, venerate them. But we have to face the larger cultural reality. We have to think in new ways.

So why don't you just watch movies and TV?

I like movies ... TV I'm not so sure about, although there are good programs out there.

The problem with movies and TV is this: they cost a lot to produce. No, let me rephrase that -- they cost an astronomical amount. Apart from the indie movie scene, which tends to be perpetually marginalized, no one individual can make them. They are group efforts, and while this gives them some strengths, they suffer from the near-inevitable tendency of group creations to lose any singular voice. And it's the singular voice that has to survive. It's the individual consciousness, not the group, that maintains contact with life.

And this is one of the great strengths of books: because they're relatively cheap to produce, they can still be made by individuals. (The contemporary trend toward "packaging" a book is pernicious on so many levels, as the Kaavya Viswanathan incident showed. Whether this scandal will be enough to stop the general trend to package books and turn even them into bland, committee-made products remains to be seen.)

Mass culture, with its converging technologies such as TV-receiving cell phones and ubiquitous WiBro reception, keeps moving more and more toward post-literacy. We are in desperate need of narrative forms that both can reach an audience but also allow the artist to retain his or her individuality. The screenplay-novel is a way of "writing a movie".

So you're suggesting we just give up? That because mass culture is so pervasive we are obligated to mimic it?

The screenplay-novel is not a selling out. Think of it this way: there are good movies. There is good TV -- especially outside a North American context. In other words, both mediums are capable of producing genuine works of art, despite their group-made natures. If you write a screenplay-novel, you should try to make something that also has artistic merit. Obviously, it won't possess descriptive passages to the same degree that great traditional fiction does. But this does not mean the screenplay-novel must diminish a good writer's requirement to produce (or good reader's requirement to be sensitive to) linguistic originality. The screenplay-novel is intended, above all, to re-invigorate the relationship that exists between writer and audience.

When reading a screenplay-novel, people can read it as a director might. This is one of the broad-based effects that movies have had on the modern mind: it is possible -- even natural, it sometimes seems -- to think "cinematically". In other words, our minds have already been conditioned to imagine narratives as if they were movies. Maybe everyone doesn't do this. But many people do, and they do it effortlessly. In this sense, we are all directors now.

The trick is to be a good director -- an auteur, if you will. The need for this is especially pressing these days as the role of the auteur has been severely diminished within the movie industry generally. And that's an irony that stands in favour of the screenplay-novel: movies are becoming too expensive and formulaic for auteurship to genuinely thrive within movie-making itself. Therefore, a creative individual with the sensibility of an auteur needs the book. He or she needs the artistic freedom that the book still can provide.

It's worth noting that the best movies and TV that squeeze through the system are often made in opposition to mass culture. The screenplay-novel is another way of doing that.

But what about reading? If everyone is "being a director", won't reading suffer even more?

People are still reading lots these days. The trend among readers, however, is to buy more non-fiction than fiction.

What's wrong with that?

Nothing in the sense that non-fiction has always been popular, and now simply is more so. However, we still need fiction. It's not a luxury. It's a necessity, as well. It's something of a cliche to observe that cultures rise and fall based partly on the stories they tell themselves. It might be more accurate in a 21st Century context to point out that cultures wage wars -- or passively witness them -- according to the stories they tell. (This, incidentally, is one theme of my screenplay-novel TRUTH MARATHON.)

I still think screenplays suck. Traditional novels are more interesting to read.

Then read traditional novels. I do. But consider the possibility that the screenplay-novel idea is a relatively new one, and part of your antagonism to them may be the result of being conditioned to read fictional narrative one way and not another. Remember that: the screenplay novel is just another form of narrative. One of the main reasons it exists is to re-connect author with audience. If you want an extremely short summary of why the screenplay-novel is worth taking seriously, that's it: it is a form of literary fiction many people will read.

How Can We Read in an Age of Images? [proto-remix]

The following are the opening paragraphs of an essay I wrote a couple of years ago for The Quarterly Conversation. I'm posting it now partly because I have been meaning to re-work some of its ideas and not getting around to the task, and therefore am hoping to prompt myself to do so. I'm also posting it because I think its arguments remain timely, if, admittedly, in need of refinement.

How Can We Read in an Age of Images?

The Quarterly Conversation, Fall 2006

Typically, a litblog’s traffic pales in comparison to image-based sites. For example, I recently came across one called The Sartorialist. It’s based on a grabby idea: just a series of snapshots of people who are in some way well-dressed, with commentary underneath. And then when I looked at the number of profile views the site had received, I—well, I blanched with envy.

Even more heavily visited, of course, are the big name sites with enough corporate dough behind them to generate high-octane buzz. Otherwise sensible newspapers such as The Washington PostThe Guardian have blogs that deal with literary subjects. But while these latch onto the cool of the blogosphere, they do not partake of its democratic nature. Therefore, you, dear reader, are supposed to visit these sites, but they will not visit you.

And then there are the “bloggish” big-money sites. These are not even blogs at all—they are homepages attempting to manufacture their own street cred. An example of this is a site I recently saw put together by the BBC for a white hip-hopper. Grabby, for sure. But its grabbiness proceeded precisely from its use of image, and its images were effective because they were assembled by well-paid designers.

In any case, the question of the power of the image—the great seduction of looking—is one that litbloggers have to wrestle with. Some dispense with images altogether. Some use them tastefully. Neither approach is better than another, since it’s important to remember litblogging is time consuming and almost always a labor of love. No point criticizing blogs for not doing things they’re not intended to do.

But here’s the thing: litblogging, like literature itself, is currently caught in a death struggle with the powerful draw of the what-can-be-seen. Simply put, images pull away readers. They seduce them. We know this. There is an entire body of theoretical work devoted to the subject. But literary fiction tends to shy away from the trend of image-based culture, which not only venerates the image, but venerates the attractive image.

And this is what it comes down to: the power of the image to attract. The power of the image to override all common sense and—oh! it’s embarrassing to even admit one aspires to this!—seriousness. And these images do not even have to pretend to have any high-brow value. They are just there . . . an addictive click away: the Victoria Secret homepages, the bikini thumbnails, the travel ads (more bikinis)—all the images that really aren’t interested in the attitude or education of those who view them, because they know that in the end none of these things matter. Only desire does. Desire is the great emotion of our time. It is more powerful than thought. And all we can do, then, is think about it; try to make some sense of a feeling that is inescapable but not unmanageable.

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STILLS WITHOUT SCRIPTS

Altruism

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August C. Bourré of Vestige, The Wooden Fish

August C. Bourré -- writer, editor (Vestige, The Wooden Fish)

CBT: When I started this interview series it was already clear that publishing -- especially of literary fiction -- was in dire straits. At that time, one explanation that was fashionable was 9/11 was the reason people weren't reading as much literature (or as much anything) as they used to. Now we are living in a time when the long-term repercussions of 9/11 are still with us. But using 9/11 as a primary explanation for what ails literary publishing simply doesn't work. For one thing, we are now in the midst of a particularly serious recession, and for another, it is clear the general decline in reading is a widespread -- and possibly unstoppable -- phenomenon that has roots which go back decades.

What is your take on the current depressed state of literary publishing? Is it a passing phase? Or is it an intractable problem -- in other words, it is the new normal? And if the latter, what can be done to counteract it?

AB: I honestly hope that it's a passing phase, but I very much doubt that it is. There are so many factors involved in how the industry got into its current state -- a lot of which I'm no doubt not even aware of, since I've largely stayed isolated from the business end of things, my background being academic -- that it may be impossible to fix it without just burning it to the ground and starting over. (I'd rather that not happen, but if wishes were horses, etc.) If the last few months are any indication, market forces may be doing that for us.

Guy Gavriel Kay wrote a great essay for Queen's Quarterly back in 2001 ("Privacy and the Ethics of Literature", 108.1, Spring Issue) about the ethical dilemmas involved in what we've come to call "appropriation of voice". His central argument, if I recall it correctly, is actually quite relevant to this discussion, or at least part of it is. He suggests that because we've let mainstream media get away from its role as a place for serious, moderated, and most importantly, heavily scrutinized (by editors and other professionals) information and art, and let it become instead a place for short-term cash grabs, with celebrity gossip on CNN and countless hours of voyeuristic reality programming on nearly every channel, we've become a society of entitlement. A remarkable crassness and selfishness has entered our cultural consciousness. That's not to say that those elements weren't always there; of course they were. But they were, if nothing else, things that helped us set limits, things that we were properly ashamed of when we took them too far, when they took control over us instead of being tools with appropriate circumstances for application. That's not so anymore; we want everything, and are ashamed of nothing. Reading, and literature in particular, has in my opinion always been, as Harold Bloom said in How to Read and Why, "the search for a difficult pleasure" (p. 29). But with our beefed-up sense of entitlement, we no longer see that sort of thing as a challenge or an adventure. It's just another thing that stands between us and our demands, our requirement for instant and total gratification. If I had a dollar for every time I've seen someone I know justify horrible attitudes and behaviours with the words "I want" or "I'm bored", I'd never have to work again. It's that sort of thing that allows people like Judith Regan to not only have careers in publishing, but to rise to positions of power and authority. If nothing else, we've proven, as an industry, that we're capable, and even willing, to behave as poorly as the vicious sons of bitches who demolished the housing and money markets for short term gains. The stakes just aren't as high for us. It may bring in more money in the short term, but flooding the market with celebrity trash, barely-edited thrillers, and ghost-written novels under the names of long-dead "franchise" authors, and then ignoring the literary efforts of nearly anyone not named Atwood, Ondaatje, Updike, or Roth, can't be healthy.

Of course that's just one factor. While the industry seems to have embraced crass commercialism (massive corporate consolidation doesn't help) with a vengeance, it's been stupid about new technologies. Publishers, for the most part, ignored the lessons they could have learned from other industries (from the music and movie industries in particular, and even the web design and development industries), and ignored the opportunity to develop intelligent, reasonable standards for digital formatting, distribution, and pricing. Instead they stuck their heads in the sand and behaved like the notorious luddites they're reputed to be, and only acted when they finally felt backed into a corner by pressure from Amazon and tech-savvy independent authors and houses. The resulting over-priced mess of conflicting hardware, encoding formats, and DRM (here's a hint: the lesson you should have learned from music and film is that DRM does nothing but piss off your customers) will take us years and a tonne of cash to sort out, and in the meantime will cause no end of headaches for publishers, distributors, and readers alike. Melville House in the US and House of Anansi here in Canada both seem to be doing a good job of balancing quality, commercial viability, and traditional publishing with digital distribution and promotion, though I don't think either of them have figured it out entirely. Coach House Books seems to be pulling it off too.

Can anything be done to counteract those things? I think so, but it's not going to be one single thing. Publishers (by which I mostly mean large, corporate houses) need to take a good, long hard look at how their acquisition, promotion, and distribution systems work, and why they've made the choices they have. Long-term strategies need to be developed and implemented for dealing with the new technological end of the market, and their over-reliance on a stable of aging "blockbuster" authors needs to be adjusted to properly develop new and interesting voices. I think the biggest thing that will need to be done is to change attitudes: what we need is a healthy industry, and healthy doesn't necessarily mean "making as much money as possible right now", it means being supple, making reasonable profits in an environment with a long-term plan for stability so that there's room to explore new opportunities when they present themselves (ie. don't be so focused on short term profits that you ignore new developments until they run over you like a cement truck).

I haven't said much about book sellers, but I thought the next question was more appropriate for that.

To be honest, thinking about some of these things gives me a bit of a headache, and I'm not sure that I have the necessary background to give my opinions any real validity. I'm very much just an industry outsider who would rather be a participant. The problem with that, is that it makes me look maybe a bit too hard at the thing I want to be involved with, and I sometimes think that I lose perspective. It's one of the reasons I stick to writing about individual books on vestige.org.

CBT: How much potential do you think the Internet has as a vehicle of publishing? It's clear that there is a place for online criticism; the lit-blogosphere is dominated by it. The blogger Dan Green has even coined a phrase for this form of critical writing: the crit-blogosphere. But the crit-blogosphere's logical partner -- the fic-blogosphere -- is marginalized. Not many people read short stories or novels online.

Will the Internet really become the medium in which serious people both publish and read fiction? Or is this a technological pipe-dream, and is it more a question of using the Internet as an effective means to sell and distribute printed books?

AB: My first response was very Bill Clinton-esque. I wanted to say "yes, and no", and "it depends on what you mean by 'effective'". The Internet is a big place with a great many aspects. When we say "the Internet" like this, it's most often a shorthand for "World Wide Web". But "the Internet" isn't just the hypertext protocol, it's email, bittorrents, IRC, Telnet, Hotline, FTP servers, the iTunes Music Store, the Amazon Kindle, ATMs and Debit/Credit point of sale systems, SMS and other alternative forms of telephony, and a tonne of other systems and protocols. I think at some point we will see fiction take hold on the Internet, as it seems to be doing in the US with the Kindle. I just don't think it will happen on the World Wide Web. There's a variety of technical problems that would need solving to make WWW distribution feasible as a major player (as opposed to, say, PDF downloads and what not). There's a tonne of issues with browsers, monitors, typeface reliability, mobile devices, and so on that make print-quality typography impossible on the web (though Web typography is no longer the nightmare it was even five or six years ago). I think that if digital distribution (or "the Internet") does become a major part of how people read fiction, it will more likely be though a platform like the Kindle or the iPhone than through the Web. In part it's because there's too much going on with the Web, so much more than there is with a dedicated reader (or a portable device like the iPhone). There are issues of comfort, of course, like how reading on a screen can be hard on your eyes, and on your back, if you've got a desktop unit. But fundamentally there are things you can do with a portable reader that can't be done through a browser, or can't be done easily, anyway. I know that there's a lot of early-adopters and dedicated people out there who are crying the "death of print!" and all kinds of nonsense about the superiority of their favourite format, reader, or site, but the best technology and the early adopters don't determine who or what will control the marketplace. There's whole warehouses full of Betamax VCRs, mini-disc recorders, and HD DVD players to prove it.

But that's not to say that there won't be some success with offering fiction through the Web. Emily Schultz and company have done good work with Joyland.ca, and a friend and I ran an online journal called WoodenFish.ca for three years, up until 2004 or 2005, I think (I'm fuzzy about dates sometimes). In fact, I announced a few months ago that I'll be reviving Wooden Fish some time soon. I've postponed making a call for submissions until I've sorted a variety of technical, aesthetic, and "vision" (ugh) issues to my satisfaction. But I do think that part of Joyland's success in particular is the connections Emily Schultz has; I've seen maybe two names I don't recognize published there. Wooden Fish was always (and sadly, must remain) a "nobody gets paid, not even the editors" venture, and so without those connections it was always difficult for us to attract the kind of submissions we were looking for (I mean, we got some great work, but it was difficult and time consuming to find enough work of the right calibre, so publishing regularly was virtually impossible).

As for an "effective means to sell and distribute printed books", it really does depend on what you mean by "effective". Amazon seems to have done a really good job of dominating the market for online sales, but have they been healthy for the industry as a whole? I'm not so sure. Amazon is famous for its discounted prices, but those discounts come from carving a hunk of flesh from the flanks of the publishers, who in turn have no choice but to make cuts. That means that the industry's problems with marketing only get worse, and it's also less likely that a publisher will take a chance nurturing a new author, or continuing to publish a solid mid-list author, or even continuing to publish a mid-lister who has the potential to move up in sales. Hell, to hear Harlan Ellison tell it, author advances haven't been adjusted for inflation in nearly fifty years. Big Box stores follow Amazon's lead, because they have to compete somehow, and then you get quick-buck assholes like Judith Regan making decisions at major houses, and book stores dropping like flies.

Which is not to say that I think stores like Amazon or Indigo or Barnes & Noble or other chains with a significant online presence are bad for the industry per se. I actually think they offer a lot. Amazon's commenting system, which has migrated with varying degrees of success to other retail sites (like Indigo's, for example) has been very good for readers. It can be a great way for people who aren't as hardcore about book culture as, say, you or I, to feel like they're engaging with not just other readers, but with the industry, since it's clear that people in the industry do pay attention to what's said by those commenters. The big box stores in particular, because they have the budget to throw at these kinds of projects, have the potential to do great things online in terms of reader participation. Actually, Indigo has started making an effort to go beyond a simple commenting system into something more social and community-oriented. It's not all the way there yet, but it shows potential, and I think it's great that they've decided to make the effort. I even think their brick and mortar stores contribute something. In a city like Toronto or even Winnipeg, it can be difficult to imagine going to a bookstore and having no real selection, but in the town where I grew up, I couldn't find most of what I wanted in my local bookstore. It was (and still is, actually) run by great people, but they had to be extremely conservative, commercial and populist in what they carried, and their selection was extremely slim. Stepping into a store like Chapters for the first time was revelatory for me. The selection! I couldn't believe it.

Of course that doesn't mean I want them to edge out my local indie store. I've made some tremendous finds through local retailers who take the time to get to know their customers and the demands and tastes of their particular neighbourhood, and really, for a bibliophile there's few things as fun as browsing through a thoroughly curated selection of books. Book selling is an ecosystem that I think has room for players of all sizes, but right now it's out of equilibrium. I'm not sure what could change that to anybody's satisfaction.

CBT: It is arguable the Internet isn't effective as a medium for publishing long works of fiction because very few people can stand looking at regular screens for the necessary length of time. But e-ink provides a solution to this. It eliminates eye strain.

How much potential do you think e-ink and e-book technologies have? Do you see e-books catching on with the public? And do they provide a reasonable business model?

AB: I think I may have inadvertently answered this question above. I think e-ink and e-book technologies have tremendous potential to catch on with the public, though not to the degree that some people think. (I've heard some people suggest that printed books will become elaborate and expensive object d'art, if they survive at all, and I think that's a remarkably foolish idea; print is an extremely robust medium.) The current business models still need to be tweaked, however. Right now there's a great deal of emphasis on DRM, subscription based services, and purchasing agreements that are actually licences. That's more head in the sand behaviour, I think, and those things will have to change before digital readers become household technologies.

CBT: In the past few years, articles and blog posts (for example, at LitKicks) have appeared criticizing the pricing of books. Are books too expensive? Has this been a factor in reducing the size of the book-buying audience over the last twenty or so years?

AB: Again, yes and no. I think hardcovers are incredibly over-priced. They're large, cumbersome, inconveniently heavy, often not very well made (there's a special place in hell reserved for people who make books with tight binding, narrow margins, and deckle edges), and can cost more than my phone or Internet bill. There's something not right about that. I once figured out that I could rent close to 60 movies through one of those online subscription services for the price of a single hardcover book. Besides, if you can discount it to $4 two years after the release date, there's no earthly reason for me to pay $37 at launch.

Mass market paperbacks, which are horrid little things anyway, are also over-priced, but only by a little bit. I was looking at one today, actually, and it was $10. That's not terrible, but considering how poorly made they are (tight binding, narrow margins, cheap stock, poorly printed with tonnes of errors, and rivaling the Porcupine's Quill for ugly covers), I feel like $7 or $8 would be more appropriate. I know that's not much, but sometimes not much is just enough.

Most trade paperbacks are priced just right for me ($15-$24 range, depending). I'd like to see more closer to the low end of that range, but I'll come right out and say that it's because I make very little money, probably less than you think, and I can't afford to buy much of anything at that price. But for most folks, that strikes me as perfectly reasonable for a well-made TPB (remember, book designers, deckle edges will earn you eternity in a lake of fire).

The problem is that people have unreasonable expectations, for some of the reasons I've mentioned above. We feel entitled to everything, and if we can't get it free then we want it cheap. On top of that, Amazon's deep discount policy, which as spread throughout the marketplace, has made us expect prices that are lower than they ought to be. Believe it or not, that's actually how Wal*Mart works; they pressure suppliers and manufacturers to offer them discounts so deep that they can nearly drive those suppliers and manufacturers out of business.

CBT: Staying with the same theme. Literary novels were once publishing in hardcover and then, several months later (and a spot on the best-seller lists willing), they were available as affordable pocket-sized paperbacks. However, in the 1980s this practice ceased and literary paperbacks started being published in North America as pricier trade paperbacks. Only genre fiction retained the pocket-book form. In retrospect, was this a prudent decision by publishers of literary fiction? Or should the literary pocket-book make a return?

AB: I despise mass-market paperbacks. They're ugly, poorly made, don't hold up to re-readings or abuse in my book bag. The only ones I can think of that don't suck are my old Penguin and Vintage paperbacks from the '60s. But if you look at them closely, they're actually made more like modern trade paperbacks, with wider margins, looser bindings, and higher quality stock. If we could do away with the damned things forever, I'd be happy. In fact, if a book is available in any other format, I'll go out of my way, to the point of waiting months or even years, to avoid buying the nasty little things. The only ones to enter my collection in the last seven or eight years have been gifts from friends and family, or books that are no longer available in other formats. I think I would reconsider my stance on mass market paperbacks if they were more like those old Penguin and Vintage books. I'd even pay a little more; poor though I am, I'll spring for quality. As they stand right now, they're just plain shit.

CBT: Agents now have enormous power, effectively controlling which writers get access to acquisition editors at major houses. Furthermore, agents find themselves under enormous pressure, acting as the line of first readers who have to sift through avalanches of submissions. Is this tenable over the long run? Is it good for art? Or should large houses be accepting both agented and unsolicited submissions?

AB: I find it depressing, really. I don't know what the actual effects are, but it feels like there's fewer ways for literature to develop organically in that kind of environment. What you wind up with, I think, is the big houses reluctant to touch anybody but Iron Maggie and friends, and a very adversarial indie scene. I don't mind a little fussing and feuding, and Atwood is certainly entitled to whatever sales she can get, but there needs to be some middle ground, and that means that big houses need to open up their slush piles and take some fucking chances. Give their editors the chance to actually form relationships with their authors (like I hear they did in the old days, and like they still do at, say, Biblioasis).

As for what's good for art, I think that's the writers' job, and the editors' job. Writers need to make art, and editors need to identify it and publish it. I don't think an editor's job should be about brokering deals and making budgets. Editors are about identifying books that have great potential, and for helping writers craft the best books they can, and being passionate advocates for those books. Agents should still try to sell books to editors, but in an ideal cake and unicorns world, it wouldn't be about editors turning to a handful of people whose only agenda is to sell them a book in order to make those kinds of decisions.

But let's face it, right now, with only a few exceptions (André Alexis and handful of others come to mind), if you want art in Canadian letters, you go to a small press.

CBT: Literary prizes have also grown in power. They have arguably replaced the glowing review as a marketing tool. But are they as effective as criticism in building a contemporary canon? After all, critics can express nuance, prizes can't. Do book prizes give the message: this books is worth reading and all these others aren't?

AB: Oh God no. At least, not to the informed. I don't pay any attention at all to prizes. I used to, before I became a more dedicated book person. I did think, "oh, this book won the GG, or the Friends of Margaret Atwood Award (aka the Giller), I bet it's great", and I found a handful of good books that way. And then I started looking at books that would get passed over, or ignored completely, and I realized how utterly ridiculous literary prizes are, especially in this country. Look at Rawi Hage's Cockroach, which got passed over for several awards, and then at, say, Vincent Lam's Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. One of those books was powerful, energetic, and daring. The other was recommended by Iron Maggie. Guess which took home the prize? I don't know if it's corruption or just bloody-mindedness, but I don't much care. They're becoming worse than the Grammys for sheer irrelevance. They are obstinately meaningless.

So as for building a canon, no, I don't think they do much of anything. Longevity with readers and passionate advocacy from critics will determine that, just as it always has. However, for that short term bump in sales and grabbing the attention of casual readers, sure, they're much better than good reviews. (But not better than word of mouth: nothing is better than word of mouth.)

CBT: Thinking of your own site, what sorts of changes do you foresee in it? Are blogs destined to become the new magazines? Will you start using a format (and possibly working with partners) in a magazine-type way? Or is blogging as it's currently defined how you want to keep posting work on the Net?

AB: Vestige.org is definitely going to stay as close to its current format as I can manage. I like how casual the blog format lets me be. I'm capable of doing serious reviewing, and I'm capable of doing hardcore academic criticism. I've reviewed books for the Globe and Mail, and I was on my way to becoming a professor of English Literature before I ran out of money. The blog format lets me be a little more Zaphod Beeblbrox about things (he's just this guy, you know?). I tried to make it magazine-like when I first built it, and I learned the less focused it was, the less inclined I was to doing any work with it. I prefer to think of blogs as individual columns rather than magazines. The more consistent and defined the voice, the better the blog is.

I've worked in other formats in the past, and with a partner for WoodenFish.ca. I think the only way I'd work with a partner again is if roles and responsibilities were clearly delineated, and that's not likely to happen outside of a professional setting. I can't work without knowing who's doing what and why. As far as working in other formats, I'd certainly be happy to try again; in fact, I'm going to try. Wooden Fish was published as "issues", and will be again, in an altered, smaller format. The only way that's going to work is if it's not about me, though. If the focus is me, my voice, and my opinions, or my fiction even, then it's just going to be a poor variation of vestige.org, and I'm not interested in doing two of those. Vestige.org has been my "home" on the Web for more than nine years now, and I'm very protective of it; I don't even use pre-built templates. I design and code everything by hand because I want to know how and why everything works (well, except my CMS, I use MovableType for that). That being said, I'd be more than willing to work with someone else, on a casual or semi-regular basis on a project of theirs. If it's not my baby, then most of the pressure is off and I can just get down to doing my job.

Bio: August C. Bourré is a rural writer trying to make ends meet in Toronto. His work has appeared in the Globe & Mail, Carousel, and various places online. He is editor and publisher of the soon to be relaunched online journal WoodenFish.ca; he also keeps a book blog at vestige.org.

Going Critical

Daniel E. Pritchard launches The Critical Flame. (See also the CBT interview with Pritchard here.)

Daniel Green launches Critical Distance. (See the CBT interview with Green here.)

Sally Cooper leads a roundtable discussion at Bookninja on sexuality in CanLit.

My fic-manifesto.

Loveography 1: Inside Haemi Fortress

EXT. A SMALL KOREAN VILLAGE. AN EARLY SUMMER EVENING, MID-WEEK.

A WESTERN MAN is walking down the city's main street. To his left is Haemi Fortress, a medieval Korean fort. Its wall is built of unevenly-matched stones, each lightened by age to a gentle ochre, as if the stone itself has softened.

The MAN walking beside this wall has a peaceful expression on his face. But from his body language we can tell he's lonely.

VO: Those were the days before I met you.

SFX: A light breeze.



EXT. THE INNER COURTYARD OF THE FORTRESS. MOMENTS LATER.

The Western man sees a group of CHILDREN. They are giggling and playing with each other. Then one of them spots the man.



CHILD: 의국인! [Foreigner]

SECOND CHILD: [sing-songy] Hello!

MAN: [smiling] Hello.

ALL CHILDREN: [gleefully] Hello! Hello!

MAN: [speaking slowly] Can you speak English?

The CHILDREN suddenly start to giggle uproariously. But their amusement is more a symptom of shyness than a desire to carry the game any further. They run away, still laughing.

The MAN continues walking. He makes his way through small, sad, empty streets.




V.O.: Chris Marker once asked how we can remember thirst. What I want to know is, how can we remember loneliness? It penetrates not just oneself but the world. Reality itself appears changed. The side-streets suck themselves empty, their noise vacuumed behind shuttered store-fronts. The sky pulls itself as taut as a blue drum. The clouds starve themselves and harm themselves, like self-loathing anorexics.

And as the world seems to change, so does the self: feel lonely enough, and that juncture of soul and body that comprises what you think of as you becomes as parched as cracked soil. The lonely individual is ancient, he is dirt.


INT. AN EVANGELICAL CHURCH. TEN MINUTES LATER.



The MAN enters. He is somewhat surprised to see a CROWD OF WORSHIPPERS. They are very involved in their prayers.

The MAN walks cautiously forward.

A MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN spots him.

CUT TO: CLOSE UP of MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN.

MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN: 하느님! 하느님이 자를 사랑하습니다! [God! God loves you!]

The MAN pulls back, alarmed.


EXT. A STREET. MOMENTS LATER.

The MAN is walking by himself again. He looks even sadder than before. A DIFFERENT CHILD spots him.

DIFFERENT CHILD: [especially enthusiastically] Hello!

V.O.: I don't know what it is was about that kid's voice. It went to my heart -- pierced it, like an exquisitely fine spear, the sharp end of sweetness. And it was this strange combination of sensations -- the needle's prick and the blood's sunny melt -- that suddenly transported me (there's no other phrase) to a different time. It was a time in the more recent past, when I still felt the residual parch of loneliness. But it was a time when I started to feel.

I mean, it was a time when I started to feel again.

RIP Derek Weiler

Derek Weiler, editor of Quill and Quire, passed away at the age of 40. Sincere condolences to Weiler's friends and family.

Jack David -- Publisher (ECW Press)

Jack David of ECW Press:

CBT: Recently there has been major restructuring at various publishing houses (for example, HarperCollins, now Harper, changes at Houghton-Mifflen, etc.), and changes as well at periodicals covering publishing (for example, Publishers' Weekly). In the midst of this recent round of restructuring and lay-offs, it has been common to blame the economic crisis of Sept/Oct. 2008, which led to dismal sales over the 2008 holiday season. Yet one season of poor sales does not usually lead to changes of this severity in an industry. Are there other factors behind recent shake-ups in publishing? If so, how far back do they go? Years? Decades?

JD: I think that a big part of the US large publishers' nervousness and consequent scale-backs have to do with Borders. You've got the second biggest retail chain in the States in trouble. Why? Especially when they used to be the best, in terms of ordering, stocking, and selling. Because they were good and profitable, and because the original owners got very good offers, they were sold--but not to bookstore people but to financial opportunists. And from there re-sold until all the profits were squeezed out and new investment was not made. So the big US publishers think to themselves, what happens if Borders goes under? That's 800 or so stores that disappear. A second factor is that the multiplicity of entertainment options has begun to carve into the book-readership market. Of course, that's been going on for a long time, but the big US publishers have a multitude of genres, including those that are losing out to online games and reference. If you made a lot of money from selling, say, dictionaries, and that market dried up, you'd have to lay off staff--as has OUP in Canada. But have Canadian trade sales declined? To the contrary, they were up last year according to Booknet Canada. In any case, there have always been shake-ups in publishing as publishers grow more optimistic and take on lots of projects, and then scale back. Is it worse now? It's a non-growth industry, and the new catch phrase is flat is the new up.


CBT: In the past few years, articles have appeared criticizing the pricing books. Are books -- particularly literary novels -- too expensive? Has this been a factor in reducing the size of the book-buying audience over the last twenty or so years?

JD: Perhaps. But you could say the same about movie prices which tend to march in lockstep with mass market paperbacks. $12 for a movie? And movies are booming. In the US, the price of hardcover novels is $24.95 and hasn't moved in many years. Publishers look at the graph of sales vs profit with price the moving factor. Sell 5,000 copies in HC vs 15,000 in trade paper. Where is the most profit? That's the issue. Lots of publishers have tried the original trade paper publishing routine, and that can work. But it depends on the book.


CBT: Staying with the same theme. Literary novels were once publishing in hardcover and then, several months later (and a spot on the best-seller lists willing), they were available as affordable pocket-sized paperbacks. Then, in the 1980s, this practice ceased and literary paperbacks were published in N. America as pricier trade paperbacks. Only genre fiction retained the pocket-book form. In retrospect, was this a prudent decision by publishers of literary fiction? Or should the literary pocket-book make a return?

JD: No good answer here. Whatever returns the greatest sales at the greatest margin, while leaving the door open for subsidiary rights. We now publish all our original mysteries in HC, then TP. The reason is that we're trying to sell US rights and if we publish initially in TP, the US mass market publishers believe that we've eaten up some of the market.


CBT: How much potential do you think e-ink and e-book technologies have? Do you see e-books catching on with the public? And do they provide a reasonable business model?

JD: Of course they do. We are publishers of intellectual content, and it doesn't matter to us how that content gets read by the public as long as our margins exist. Take away the cost of printing, and shipping, but not selling, and you have cut out a big chunk of your costs. We typically get about 30-35% of the list price back in our hands, after bookstore discount, distribution and selling costs. For a $20 book, that's $6 or $7. And from that we pay all our other costs, including royalties. If we get $10 from an ebook purchase, we're laughing.


CBT: Agents now have enormous power, effectively controlling which writers get access to acquisition editors at major houses. Furthermore, agents find themselves under enormous pressure, acting as the line of first readers who have to sift through avalanches of submissions. Is this tenable over the long run? Is it good for art? Or should large houses be accepting both agented and unsolicited submissions?

JD: The large houses can do whatever they want, but in our case (and we publish 50 books a year) many of our best books arrive unagented. It doesn't take long to decide whether a submission has some worth. Our philosophy is not to leave the unsoliciteds with an intern, but with the most senior people in the company.


CBT: Literary prizes have also grown in power. They have arguably replaced the glowing review as a marketing tool. But are they as effective as criticism in building a contemporary canon? After all, critics can express nuance, prizes can't. Do book prizes give the message: this book is worth reading and all these others aren't?

JD: Odd question. There are only three prizes in Canada that have a direct effect on sales--Giller, GG fiction, and Canada Reads. All others have virtually no tangible sales result. But think of the number of nominated books--hundreds. In Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba, there must be 200 books nominated every year.


CBT: Publishers often include "non-compete" clauses in the boilerplate contracts they offer to authors. Yet, as agent Kristen Nelson has argued, they can be unfair to authors. It is conceivable a committed writer will produce good work over a period of several years that is repeatedly rejected, leaving him or her with a surplus of manuscripts. If this same writer is to suddenly get two or three offers on two or three different manuscripts, why shouldn't he or she be allowed to publish more than one book with different publishers in a similar time-frame?

JD: The only non-compete clause I'm aware of is that the author is not allowed to compete with his or her own book. That is, if we published a biography of Leonard Cohen, the author wouldn't be allowed to publish a similar book with another publisher. Other than that, the author can do what he/she wants.


CBT. How will the current recession affect publishing? What are some realistic tactics and strategies for publishers to survive?

JD: The argument is that publishing is recession-proof. Whereas you wouldn't pay $20k for a new car or $1k for a new fridge, you would pay $15 for a new book. I guess this theory will be tested. Tactics for survival? Publish good books in niches.


CBT. Will the Internet -- including but not limited to the posting of online books -- become an increasing part of book distribution/audience-building? Or will it always remain an adjunct to the book?

JD: Both, I'd say.


Bio: Jack David is the publisher of ECW Press.

Frank Wilson -- editor, critic (The Philadelphia Inquirer [retired])

Frank Wilson of The Philadelphia Inquirer (retired), Books Inq., and When Falls the Coliseum:

CBT: When I started this interview series it was already clear that publishing -- especially of literary fiction -- was in dire straits. At that time, one explanation that was fashionable was 9/11 was the reason people weren't reading as much literature (or as much anything) as they used to. Now we are living in a time when the long-term repercussions of 9/11 are still with us. But using 9/11 as a primary explanation for what ails literary publishing simply doesn't work. For one thing, we are now in the midst of a particularly serious recession, and for another, it is clear the general decline in reading is a widespread -- and possibly unstoppable -- phenomenon that has roots which go back decades.

What is your take on the current depressed state of literary publishing? Is it a passing phase (as the NEA's recent uptick of optimism implies)? Or is it an intractable problem -- in other words, it is the new normal? And if the latter, what can be done to counteract it?

FW: I can’t say that I take all this dire grousing about the decline in reading all that seriously. Doesn’t anyone remember that, when they were in high school – and I was in high school half a century ago – the kids who read a lot were … in a minority? This idea that, not so many years ago, everybody, including kids, were reading up a storm is fantasy, as is the idea that young people nowadays don’t read as much as young people used to. It’s probably about the same. Off the top of my head, I can name three young women — Caitlin Kelly, 15, of Tunkhannock, Pa.; Jennifer Berger, 18, of Philadelphia; and Eliza Fox, 20, a student at Stanford — all of whom read passionately. I don’t say that they are typical. Passionate readers are never typical and they will always be a minority.

For much the same reason I am wary of categories like “literary fiction.” Some kid reading Philip K. Dick back in the ‘60s would have looked down on as just a sci-fi nut. Now Philip K. Dick is included in the Library of America series. One can’t, on the one hand, complain that people don’t read, and then, on the other, up the ante by insisting that the only reading that counts is of the sort of books one approves of, or that critics approve of, or academics, or whomever.

The mention of 9/11 in connection with this is interesting. The idea that writers should be commenting in their fiction on major events of the day is a dangerous one. Events like 9/11 can be a kind of Medusa to writers, turning their imaginations to stone. If you want to comment on big current events, become a journalist or a historian. If you want to be novelist, pay attention to people, their foibles, their pathos, their sad dreams and high hopes, their small victories and large defeats. If some earth-shattering event happens to have some bearing on any of that, fine. But bear this in mind: Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace 57 years later.

CBT: How much potential do you think the Internet has as a vehicle of publishing? It's clear that there is a place for online criticism; the lit-blogosphere is dominated by it. The blogger Dan Green has even coined a phrase for this form of critical writing: the crit-blogosphere. But the crit-blogosphere's logical partner -- the fic-blogosphere -- is marginalized. Not many people read short stories or novels online.

Will the Internet really become the medium in which serious people both publish and read fiction? Or is this a technological pipe-dream, and is it more a question of using the Internet as an effective means to sell and distribute printed books?

FW: I think the question that needs to be asked is whether the internet is a medium of expression or a transmission device. At present it is almost exclusively the latter, but it has the potential to be both. I ran a review a few years ago of The Daughters of Freya by Michael Betcherman and David Diamond. This was an email mystery. You subscribed and the emails were sent to you and you read as they mystery deepened and was eventually. The reviewer liked it and I thought this sort of thing might have a future. It still might. See Jill Walker’s list of email narratives.

Serialization, very short stories, poetry are already things well-suited to the web. But the web itself offers the potential for an entirely new kind of literature. Imagine a story told by means of hypertext, audio and video. Radio took drama and made it its own. So did television. The web needs to do the same. Is it not possible that someone will turn computer games into a form of literary art? In the meantime someone with limited resources perhaps, but with a talent for spotting talent, will start an online POD publishing house with quality design and editing and find himself … breaking even, turning a profit, competing with traditional publishers. It is bound to happen.

CBT: It is arguable the Internet isn't effective as a medium for publishing long works of fiction because very few people can stand looking at regular screens for the necessary length of time. But e-ink provides a solution to this. It eliminates eye strain.

How much potential do you think e-ink and e-book technologies have? Do you see e-books catching on with the public? And do they provide a reasonable business model?

FW: I already have a Kindle and I love it. Again, that online POD publisher mentioned above could well work in collaboration with Amazon (or Sony). People who travel a lot and commute are going to want a device that enables them to take a library with them. I’m no businessman, but I can’t believe a viable business model will not emerge from this.

CBT: In the past few years, articles and blog posts (for example, at LitKicks) have appeared criticizing the pricing of books. Are books too expensive? Has this been a factor in reducing the size of the book-buying audience over the last twenty or so years?

I think books have become too expensive. We’re talking about $25 for a hardback. That’s a lot if you’re talking about the latest in a mystery series. No wonder people wait for the paperback. On the other hand, I got Joseph Wambaugh’s latest on my Kindle for $9.99. Says it all, don’t you think?

CBT: Staying with the same theme. Literary novels were once publishing in hardcover and then, several months later (and a spot on the best-seller lists willing), they were available as affordable pocket-sized paperbacks. However, in the 1980s this practice ceased and literary paperbacks started being published in North America as pricier trade paperbacks. Only genre fiction retained the pocket-book form. In retrospect, was this a prudent decision by publishers of literary fiction? Or should the literary pocket-book make a return?

FW: If you charge more for less of a product consumers will catch on (see newspapers). If you want to put out trade paperbacks, then skip the hardback. In the long run the hardback is going to be the keeper. What I mean is, people are going to want the books they treasure in hardback. But find out what books they treasure, books in general are going to have to be more affordable. Publishers have got it backwards. They want you to work your way down from a luxury item. Most people would rather work their way up to one.

CBT: Agents now have enormous power, effectively controlling which writers get access to acquisition editors at major houses. Furthermore, agents find themselves under enormous pressure, acting as the line of first readers who have to sift through avalanches of submissions. Is this tenable over the long run? Is it good for art? Or should large houses be accepting both agented and unsolicited submissions?

FW: Obviously, someone with an eye for quality that is also likely to sell is worth his weight in gold. What I see is a lot of agents peddling an imitation of the most recent success. Publishing has fallen victim to the same thing the art world has. If you go to the Phillips Collection in Washington or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston or the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, N.Y., you immediately discover that real collecting involves faith in your own preferences and predilections. But then go to the new wing of the Phillips Collection and see what the curators have chosen. The sheer lack of spirit of what is on display is unmistakable. No eye, no personality has actually engaged what is hanging on the walls.

CBT: Literary prizes have also grown in power. They have arguably replaced the glowing review as a marketing tool. But are they as effective as criticism in building a contemporary canon? After all, critics can express nuance, prizes can't. Do book prizes give the message: this book is worth reading and all these others aren't?

FW: Prizes are nice for the person who wins one. But have you read any Henrik Pontoppidan lately? Pontoppidan shares the 1917 Nobel Prize for literature with the ever-popular Karl Gjellerup. On the other hand, Conrad Richter won the National Book Award in 1961 for The Waters of Cronos, which is a masterpiece. And not many people may know the work of Pär Lagerkvist, who won the Nobel in 1951, but he is great writer. My point? Prizes are hit and miss, and insofar as they influence taste the influence is probably nefarious.

CBT: Thinking of your own site, what sorts of changes do you foresee in it? Are blogs destined to become the new magazines? Will you start using a format (and possibly working with partners) in a magazine-type way? Or is blogging as it's currently defined how you want to keep posting work on the Net?

FW: Regrettably, I’m an old guy who only knows as much technology as he needs to get by. I hope to partner eventually with someone younger and more tech savvy than I (who also has some business acumen). Then maybe I can turn the blog into something really estimable. In the meantime it is an object lesson in doing something for the love of it.

bio:

Assiduously following the course of least resistance has been the key to Frank Wilson’s success. Admirers have attributed this to his mastery of existential jujitsu, detractors to indolence and inertia.

Either way, it has served him well. Faced in college with a choice between his principal interests, medieval history and English lit, he realized immediately that the former would entail a mastery of Latin and other languages that could be had only by an effort he was disinclined to expend, while the latter required only an already demonstrated facility with his native tongue. English lit won hands down.

Through a process of elimination he went from being book critic of his college newspaper to arts and entertainment editor to editor. He had a well-paying job as an editor lined up even before graduation. Things were looking grand. But then, thinking life as a college professor might suit his laid-back approach to life, Wilson decided he should put in some time in graduate school. Unfortunately — or perhaps not — he realized that the tedium and toadiness of academe were not for him.

Thus began his years as a kind of 20th-century Goliard, delivering a lecture here, placing an article there, editing books for the likes of Philadelphia’s venerable J.B. Lippincott Co. and others, even landing a column in a local weekly. It was not to last. Publishers began cost-cutting and editing contracts dried up. The weekly went belly-up.

Happily, a friend got Wilson a job at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Less happily, it was at the ground floor, doing things like the racing charts. But the pay and benefits weren’t bad, and the work was hardly onerous, leaving Wilson time to review books, write poetry, and pursue his lifelong interest in world-class partying.

The partying took its toll, however, and he was forced to give that up. At last he seemed as staid as everyone else, so naturally he was promoted, first to the copy desk, where he won a first prize for headline writing from the Society of Professional Journalists, then to book editor. He had come full-circle, doing what he had done in college, but also what he had always wanted to do. Unfortunately, it proved to be an ongoing — and eventually losing — battle with space cuts, budget cuts, and managerial obtuseness. In February 2008 he retired, after eight years as book editor. Now he just blogs away at Books, Inq.: The Epilogue and writes — articles, reviews, poems. Oh, and he also has time now for that best of all activities: life itself.

Wilson writes a weekly column for When Falls the Coliseum called That’s What He Said, published on Tuesdays, which features his riffing on quotations and following the train of thought wherever it leads.

Upcoming

Frank Wilson

Eric Rosenfield

Rodney Welch

August Bourre

Matt Bell