The anniversary of the death of a literary light

• Like that of Robert Kennedy, the anniversary of the death of an American who died too young occurred this past week.

Part of our collective conversation this past week has been remembering the death of Robert Kennedy, which happened 40 years ago. Kennedy, shot by an assassin in Los Angeles on the night he won the California Democratic primary, died too young. He was 42 years old.

Those who die too young provoke particular sadness.

Six decades before Kennedy was killed, on the same day that Kennedy died, American letters lost one of its brightest and briefest flames -- Stephen Crane.

Crane's one novel was the Red Badge of Courage, which contained descriptions of the confusion and terror of a Civil War battle so real that veterans of the conflict said Crane got it exactly right. Crane had never been in a battle when he wrote the book. He had been born six years after the war ended.

Crane did see action after the book was published and after he had achieved fame because of it. He took on the role of celebrity reporter for Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World when they were trying by any means to one-up their rival William Randolph Hearst and the New York Herald in covering the Spanish-American War in 1898. The World sent Crane to Cuba, and while he was there, the editors demanded "hair-raising dispatches (and) bombastic scoops on heroism," he said.

The young writer did see action and described it well, even helping fellow reporter Edward Marshall to safety when he had been shot. Crane recorded the last dispatch from the dying Marshall and filed it before he filed his own, which eventually landed him in some hot water with his editors, who accused him of disloyalty when he returned to America.

Crane quit the World and moved to England and continued to write fiction. He had come under heavy criticism from proper Victorians because of his choice of a mate -- a former brothel keeper from Miami who helped him run up massive debts while in Europe. Crane faced a tougher foe than critics or bill collectors, however. He contracted tuberculosis and spent his last months in a desperate attempt to find relief.

That attempt failed, and on June 5, 1900, he died. He was 28 years old.

__________

(Much of the informtion here about Crane's journalism comes from Denis Bryant, Pulitzer: A Life, John Wiley, 2001.)

Writers writing: Anthony Trollope

• Anthony Trollope wrote for money. He made out a schedule and stuck to it.

The way writers write - their habits, productivity, quirks, methods of procrastination, etc. - fascinate a lot of people, including me.

One of my favorite stories in this vein is that of Anthony Trollope, the mid-19th century British novelist and author of the Barsetshire series and the Palliser novels. Trollope's books were highly popular in his day, and his work has retained many fans in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Trollope was manic about his writing. He would arise at 5:30 every morning and write for at least two-and-a-half hours. He would produce 250 words every 15 minutes. In his early years as a novelist, he had a job with the Post Office that required some train travel, and he would keep this writing schedule even if he were traveling.

Trollope saw novel-writing as work that had to be done. He wasn't interested in inspiration nearly as much as productivity.

When I have commenced a book, I have always prepared a diary divided into weeks . . . In this I have entered day by day the number of pages that I have written, so that if at any time I slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there staring me in the face - and demanding of me increased labour.

Trollope made no secret of the fact that he wrote for money - something the critics of his day disdained.

• The Anthony Trollope website
  
  
• The Anthony Trollope society

The audacity and hope of Barak Obama, the writer

• Barak Obama wrote his own book -- no ghostwriters or co-authors. He did the literary heavy-lifting himself.

It was with plenty of audacity and no small amount of hope that Barak Obama sat down in the early 1990s to write his life story.

He had just turned 30 in 1991 and could reasonably assume that much was ahead of him -- an assumption that would be true, of course -- but he also knew that his life to that point had been like no one else's whom he knew:

• The son of a white mother from Kansas and an African father from Kenya;
  
  
• Raised in Indonesia, Africa and Hawaii;
  
  
• Intellectually brilliant, confirmed by the fact that he was editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Obama's defining experience to that point had been his relationship with his father, with him he had lost touch early in life and then re-established contact. Shortly after that, however, his father died, and Obama traveled to Kenya to find out more about the man. There, many of the images he had of his father are shattered. He finds that his father had slid from being a brilliant and respected academic to a drunk and an object of pity.

The small amount of fame that Obama achieved as being the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review netted him a call from a literary agent, a book proposal and a publisher. His first idea was to write about race relations, but that didn't suit him and where he was, according to an article about the book by Janny Scott published this week by the New York Times.

That journey of discovery through the images he had of his father is what he decided he had to tackle. What he produced was Dreams From My Father (Amazon).

He did so with confidence and flair -- even audacity -- using composite characters, invented dialogue, out-of-sequence events and a variety of literary techniques. He has since come under some criticism for his account. Inquiring journalists and political opposition researchers say things didn't happen the way he said they happened.

But there is one fact that no one disputes. Obama wrote his own book.

He struggled with sentences, phrasing and structure. He edited, rewrote and rethought.

The words are his and his alone. He didn't pay a ghostwriter or take on some partner to do the literary heavy-lifting. The writing is his creation. In this age of spin and carefully calibrated public pronouncements, getting an unobstructed look into the mind of a prominent political figure does not happen very often.

Obama wrote his own story. In my book, that counts for a lot.

Links:

• Janny Scott, The Story of Obama, Written by Obama, The New York Times, May 18, 2008
  
  
• Paul Watkins, A Promise of Redemption, New York Times, August 6, 1995 -- a review of Dreams From My Father

A seventh edition

• A textbook that goes into multiple editions can be like a child who grows up but doesn't leave home.

Textbooks can be funny things. If you write a textbook, you want it to be widely adopted so that about four years later the publisher will ask for a second edition (because, while your royalties don't amount to much at that point, the publisher is making a ton of money).

Only a few textbooks, maybe 15 percent, make it into a second edition. (I don't have a reference or stats to back that figure up.)

But then, the text may begin to gather new adopters and hang onto a few of the original ones. If that happens, about four years later, the publisher will ask for a third edition. And so it goes.

Sometimes a textbook can be like a child who grows into adulthood but never leaves home.

Those are a few of the thoughts I'm having this morning (May 20) as I am procrastinating doing work on the seventh edition of Writing for the Mass Media. The publisher is Allyn and Bacon, and the good folks there want the revised edition from me by June 1. That's why the posts on this blog and others I maintain have been a little thin in the last few days.

During its quarter century of existence, Writing for the Mass Media has been adopted as a textbook at nearly 500 colleges and universities (mostly in America but also in places across the globe). The sixth edition was used at 240 different schools, and many of those places are multi-year adopters.

So, this job is well woth doing (and has even become financially justifiable). But it's hard -- and a little boring and tedious. Fortunately, it's almost done.

And to make sure it's done, by June 1, I had better get back to it.

You can find out more about Writing for the Mass Media at these spots:

• Description on JPROF.
• The book's web site at Allyn and Bacon
• Amazon page.

The fiction writer's bookshelf

If you are interested in writing fiction, here are two of the best books you can have:

Christopher Vogler
The Writer's Journey

Renni Brown and David King
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers

(These are the Amazon links.)

No one explains "story" better than Vogler.

I'm going to post these to a couple of lists to which I subscribe and see if any of those folks have suggestions. If they allow it, I'll post them here.

Review: The Last Casualty

• An Episcopal priest hears the confessions of a dying man. Get ready for a ride.

THE LAST CASUALTY, (Amazon) the latest thriller by Cyn Mobley, is like an Indiana Jones movie, a wild ride that never lets you catch your breath. David Dalt is a U.S. Navy Episcopal priest and an ex-SEAL -- except that apparently there are no ex-SEALs. (Just as Marines will tell you there are no ex-Marines.) Dalt is drawn back into the life when he hears the confession of a dying man. The man is a spy who has betrayed Dalt's old unit. Dalt's vows won't allow him to violate the confessional, but they can't stop him from trying to save his comrades.

It's a complex tale that moves at the pace of a speeding train.

Recommended.

(Disclosure, BSP: Cyn Mobley is a good friend. Her publishing company, Greyhoundbooks, will unleash my debut novel, Kill the Quarterback, sometime later this year.)

Good writing from a baseball insider

• When is the last time you called a major league baseball player a good writer?

Lots of talented authors have written superbly about baseball. Among all our national games, baseball is a game that lends itself easily to good wordsmiths. But rare among those smithies is an author who has played the game at the highest level. Now we have one.

Doug Glanville played major league baseball for nine years for the Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies and Texas Rangers. He is bringing all that experience to bear in a series of occasional pieces for the New York Times.

He is also bringing an easy, readable style that is all the more remarkable when you find out that he has an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

His latest offering, It Gets Lake Early Out There, is now on the New York Times web site. You can find links to his two previous pieces there, too.

Good column, good game, good stuff.

Eliot Spitzer as fiction

Novelist Richard Russo puts Eliot Spitzer into the realm of fictional hero -- or protagonist.


Some disagreement with Russo, but it's an interesting thought.

What if you wrote a novel about Eliot Spitzer? What would it look like?

That's the question that novelist Richard Russo considers in an interesting column in the March 16 in the Washington Post.

The news media, Russo says, have reduced the Spitzer story to a one-dimensional tale of hypocrisy outed, and while Russo didn't say this, they have thrown around the word "tragedy" a little freely. The real story of Spitzer is certainly as sad as it is surprising, but we would have to know more to bring it to the level of tragedy.

But what if we did know more? And what if, like a good novelist, we could make it up? That's what Russo does to some extent. First he considers the character of Spitzer himself.

But I don't mean to jigger the facts; fictive Eliot will do exactly what the real Eliot has done, only my guy almost never imagines getting caught. And when he does occasionally consider the possibility, he trusts that there will be ample warning that disaster is imminent. For the most part, things in his life have happened slowly, especially the good things, and he trusts that bad things will evolve similarly. He will swerve at the last moment. The possibility of a head-on collision, swift and devastating, simply never occurs to him.

Even worse, though he knows that the world doesn't work this way, he convinces himself that if he's caught, people will treat him fairly. Sure, he has shamed himself, but he's done a lot of good things, too, and people will remember that. He has always employed a kind of moral arithmetic, and he'll expect that same math to be applied to him -- all his virtues set up on one side of the ledger, his one weakness on the other. People will understand that he's mostly good. By the time my Eliot realizes that he's wrong about all this, it's too late. The damage is done. He has betrayed his wife, his children, his best self, and it's all his fault.

Russo goes on to talk about Spitzer's wife and family.

First, Eliot's wife -- and here I sense a mystery even deeper than the mystery of Eliot himself. Why does she stand there beside him at the podium when he confesses? Why do they all? I feel uniquely unqualified to look inside her heart, to ferret out her motives. I make a list of what I know (not much) and what I suspect (not much more) and wonder whether imagination will fill in all those blanks. I'm relatively certain of one thing: It's not this woman's fault. I won't portray her as frigid or otherwise complicit in what has transpired. She hasn't driven Eliot to any of this. I don't believe in perfection, but I've decided for the time being that she's been a good wife, a good mother.

Russo makes some interesting observations about how the story might play out. He gives Spitzer a sidekick who can inject a little humor into this tale. This would be a good character, as Russo conceives him. He can give Spitzer a different look at the world, as opposed to the self-center take he always has. Russo takes a look at Spitzer's daughters to see what effect their father's actions might have on them.

How does the story end? Here is where I would part company with what Russo has written.

There's also a story in which Eliot isn't even the main character. Because how believable is it, really, that they came across him by chance on that wiretap? His many enemies are justly famous as the dirtiest of tricksters. Maybe I should be writing a thriller, but I dislike and distrust plot-driven narrative and have grown fond of my own messed-up, untidy Eliot, so American in both his ambition and the disgrace that seems to flow from it so naturally. I might not know precisely why he's done what he's done, but he connects to my long-held conviction that people (in fiction, in life) aren't meant to be saints, or to be treated like saints. That's the hard lesson Hawthorne's Reverend Dimmesdale learned from the pulpit.

I'm not sure why Russo distrusts "plot-driven narrative." I'm not even sure what that means.

In my take, a good plot comes first, characters second. I can see Spitzer brooding about his losses and his own stupidity, searching for some redemption. But he doesn't brood for long. He acts in character. One storyline is that he has been set up. Someone somewhere has taken advantage of his foibles to do him in. Maybe there is ample justification, something we don't know yet. Spitzer goes on a quest to discover what he doesn't know.

I think I'd like to go with him.