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I'm publishing a novel on Medium, a new chapter every single day. It's Day 49.

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a novel about publishing of a novel

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a novel about publishing of a novel

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a novel about publishing of a novel

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a novel about publishing of a novel

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a novel about publishing of a novel

Read my ongoing novel on Medium

Serendipity and After/27

A Novel about a Novel

I'm publishing a whole novel on Medium in installments. It's a novel about publishing of a novel. Obviously, the idea hit me in the wake of my first novel being accepted by a great publisher.  Shit, I forgot to write about it here in my blog, a serious lapse on my side, but that's me, my habit of keeping dumb when I should be actually shouting out.

Yesterday I wrote my fifth installment. And now I feel a bit exhausted. I'm a minimalist by nature, but these past few days I've knocked out 800 or so words regularly. This naturally takes its toll on my body and mind. I want to take a deep breath now. I need to take a second wind.

The following is a list of chapters arranged sequentially in case you've not read it or just want to take a look.

Publishing of a novel
 (How I got my book deal for my novel which I wrote back in 2000)

Serendipity and After/2
(An editor's dilemma)

Serendipity and After/3
(Editor-publisher face-off)


Serendipity and After/4
(How things get sorted out and the publishing house embraces peace at last)

Serendipity and After/5
(About a Facebook post in which I was tagged)

As a writer, I'm curious what the readers think about this novel and how their reading experience is. So, please come in with your feedback. I will appreciate them. Thanking you.

James Wood on Joy Williams

She writes at a slight angle to the culture, literary and otherwise. Her fiction is easy to follow and hard to fathom; easy to enjoy and harder to absorb.

How to Write a Sex Scene

If you want to write an excellent sex scene, you have to liberate it from the idea of a sex scene. Like I was saying before about violence, you have to thread sexuality through every part of a character or a person's life, rather than limiting it to a titillating few pages where something juicy happens. You have to understand that sexuality is omnipresent in your body — your entire life.

--Lidia Yuknavitch

Is it good fiction?

Yesterday I posted a critique of a short fiction by Oliver Shiny on Medium. Please do read it if you have time, and weigh in with your comments on my critique. 

George Saunders Quotes

I’ve always – always – thought of myself as a fiction writer with comic inclinations. 

I’m a fiction writer. I use any- and everything I need to get certain effects that I’d describe as ‘emotional effects’ – to do the good old aesthetic work that stories do. 

do whatever it takes. Steer toward the energy. Don’t worry about being edgy or not being edgy or being soppy – if the emotion of the story is real and earned, it sort of retroactively justifies whatever form you’ve used.

What’s going to make my work vital and new is my taste, applied maniacally, over sufficient time.

I really want to play, and discover the internal dynamics of the story – find out, via intuition, what thrills the story wants to deliver.

Mahasweta gun-saluted!

Yesterday on TV I saw the state gun-saluting Mahasweta Devi's body as a mark of its ultimate respect to the great writer and activist.

Mahasweta Devi passes away at 91

Mahasweta Devi, the Bengali writer  who was the "Mother Courage" of Bengal and devi of the marginalized and the dispossessed, died yesterday at 91 leaving a legacy no one can match. 

8 Essential Attributes of a short story / Joy Williams

1) There should be a clean clear surface with much disturbance below 

2) An anagogical level

3) Sentences that can stand strikingly alone

4) An animal within to give its blessing

Recommended Reading: When Will Helen DeWitt be recognized as one of the Great American Novelists?

When Will Helen DeWitt be Recognized As one of the Great American Novelists?

“The self is a set of linguistic patterns,” she said. “Reading and speaking in another language is like stepping into an alternate history of yourself where all the bad connotations are gone.”

Language in Literature

"Even though we should always strive to renew the language, that renewal can and should use words from other times and from other spaces to better express this new version of human events. Literature has to dig into uncomfortable vocabularies to find new ways of expression."

--Yuri Herrera

Who reads Norman Mailer these days?

"Where is Norman Mailer? Who reads Norman Mailer? Who thinks about Norman Mailer? People who have been celebrity writers, they become societal documents of their era. In that way Kerouac, Mailer, Ginsberg —"

Elie Wiesel Quote

• "I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." (The Nobel Peace Prize speech, 1986)

Cynthia Ozick on Next American Great Novel or Novelist

"..can we see any inkling of a presumptive heir 

to Bellow or Updike orNabokov, or to so many others of 

the previous generation (the list would be long and 

impressive) who have left a formative mark on American 

experience?

From Ta-Nehisi Coates interview

 I had a variety of experiences, but it’s not mystical. It’s not in the genes or in the bones.

Excerpt from a review of Zero K /Don DeLillo

"Like the philosophy of the older Heidegger, DeLillo’s is a heightening of the acts of naming and making art and poetry. If anything can save us, it’s art. And yet art’s being escapes its naming. And in what may quite possibly be his final novelistic effort, Don DeLillo has worked out a contentment with the fact that life’s highest cause for reverence is finally, is merely, just such a static escape."

Peter Zilahy on people working in publishing

"In fact, as far as I can tell, there are not many people working in the publishing business that can actually read."

Peter Zilahy

What it means to be a writer

"If you don’t connect with other people, then it’s impossible to write realistically about contemporary issues.

Good literature comes from small places/ Sjón

".. novels are my bedrock. And Iceland is their bedrock. I think all good literature comes from small places, small parts of society, because that’s where the roles become visible, the social mechanism clear."

Don't writers want to be remembered for their work now?

"All I am providing is a form of entertainment. I don’t demand that readers remember me, or that they remember the content of every story, as long as they enjoy my novels and get happiness from them." 

The inevitable question now is: don't we writers want to be remembered for our work? Is it only about the present? Is it only about cash and short-lived fame? Is it the prevalent writerly attitude now?

What is a story about?

"Any story is about a host of things. It is about the author; it is about the world the author sees and deals with and lives in;

Jay Williams Quote

Good writing never soothes or comforts.
--Jay Williams

Recommended reading: Middle Eastern Writers Find Refuge in Dystopian Novel

 Middle Eastern Writers Find Refuge in Dystopian Novel

Can Xue writes for two or three decades in the future

In another 20 years, when they encounter problems spiritually, or when materialism cannot meet their needs, they might pick up one of my books, because I write to empower people, to make them independent, to develop their qualities as human beings.

Related
Can Xue on Can Xue

Read this excerpt from Svetlana Alexievich's book "Secondhand Time."

I had problem with my laptop. So, in stead of working on my new novel - this is my first thing to do in the morning these days --I read this excerpt by Svetlana Alexievich. Oh, how intriguing! Hers is a special genre, and I can't say I like it always. As for example, I could not finish her Voices From Chernobyl. It's way too grim and morbid, though necessarily, for my taste. But this one I liked very much.  She can write something compelling on modern, capitalistic way of life also. Read it and take note of her brilliance and objectivity. 

No to Literary Fiction, Yes to Porn

I've spent years writing books. Novels, no less. And for what? I'm turning my hand to the one thing that pays. Sex.

Lydia Millet

Ever since I read Lydia Millet's article in the Salon, I have been thinking about the shape of literature and plight of writers in this digital age.. So when does a serious writer of literary fiction want to write porn? Is the situation really that bad? Did she write this piece out of frustration or desperation? Is she really going to churn out a porn next time? 

I wish she had not written it. It's shocking for those of us who write literary fiction. Of course, lit fiction has small audience and its authors earn peanuts from their writing. But what's the use of talking about it in this way? If you don't want to write lit fic, it's okay. If you want to leave it for porn, go for it. It's your taste, your choice.

Money seems to be your main concern, Lydia.  We have sympathy for you, but porn is never the alternative for lit fic, even if you make money out of it (I strongly doubt it though) and you undermine the value of literature by stating this. This is atrocious and shameful.

Future of Literature

"The shortening of attention spans have been abetted by a publishing industry that is eradicating from literature anything they want to make us believe is too boring, or too meaningful, or that might come across as intellectual. And the outlook, from a literary point of view—if such a point of view still exists—is bleak.

“And why is it that writers, more than other people, are susceptible to depression?” someone asks in a Mario Levrero story. And someone else says: “They become depressed because they can’t tolerate the idea of living in a world that has been ruined by stupid people.”

This very professional, shiny, happy plastic version of literature

"I find MFA culture terrible. Everyone is super-cheerful because they’re trying to sell you something, and I find it really repulsive. There seems to be less and less underground. And what it’s replaced by is this very professional, shiny, happy plastic version of literature."
--Jessa Crispin

Geoff Dyer on writing

And it is, in some way, easier to write about dissatisfaction, but I’d hate to be one of those writers who is always going to take the piss out of other people or to deride things because that seems to me a lower order of response. What I really want to be able to do is to articulate some sort of awe and wonder, which is what so many of the writers I really like do — like Dillard and Lawrence. I hate to be just trapped at that level of being inhibited by only being funny or even worse, being a sort of satirist. Ultimately, I want to be able to articulate that sense of wonder. And hopefully all the funny stuff, and the moaning and groaning, ends up enhancing that final and elusive sense of either wonder or arrival.

Are Franz Kafka's books still unavailable in Russia?

“In the Soviet Union you will not find Franz Kafka's books. They say he is the apostle of baleful metaphysics. However, I think he could be Stalin's best biographer.” wrote Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1957.

What's the situation like in Putin's Russia?

Is Franz Kafka still banned there?

Are Franz Kafka's books still unavailable in Russia?

Just curious. 

I'll appreciate any feedback from visitors of this blog.

Where's the great anti-capitalist fiction for this era of economic inequality and imperial plunder?

 Where's the great modern American prison novel? The Black Lives Matter story collection? The great anti-capitalist fiction for this era of economic inequality and imperialist plunder?

Salman Rushdie on where the work of a novelist begins

The world is becoming fictionalized. The real has become a 
problem. That’s where the work of the novelist begins.

All of us are hungry for print...

Most authors now who are being published online—almost all of us—have all had the experience of being flamed in the comments section. And all of us are hungry for print, that sense not of permanence but of the attempt at permanence that print suggests, the durability it suggests. I think that’s how all writers write: They try to be eternal, they try to be durable and when something’s published in print, it’s a way of honoring that attempt.

--John Freeman

Literature is a perverse game...

Literature is a perverse game because it’s too easy to say that the teller pretends that Little Red Riding Hood or Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina is a fiction. Step by step, I want you to lose your critical control and start crying about the fate of Anna Karenina. But then I know that once you finish reading the book, you come back to reality and at the second reading you don’t cry any longer but simply appreciate the way in which I obliged you to cry the first time. That is the perverse literary game. Simonini is more cruel. He wants you to believe. He doesn’t want to show his inner strategy. The writer desires that you discover my strategy. Simonini, no. Every forger wants to be taken seriously.
--Umberto Eco in a 2011 interview.

Umberto Eco, philosopher who wrote novels over weekends, passes away at 84

"To believe in the end of something is a typical cultural posture. Since the Greeks and the Latins we have persisted in believing that our ancestors were better than us. I am always amused and interested by this kind of sport, which the mass media practice with increasing ferocity.

Recommended Reading: Sine Cosine Tangent by Don DeLilo

The New Yorker has a no- plot wonderful story by Don DeLilo, which ends with

Ordinary moments make the life. This was what she knew to be trustworthy, and this was what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past, and know who I am. What I failed to know before is clearer now, filtered up through time, an experience belonging to no one else, not remotely, no one, anyone, ever. I watch her use the roller to remove lint from her cloth coat. Define “lint,” I tell myself. Define “time,” define “space.” 

Literature always matters...

"Literature always matters, whether people read it or not. It is a witness account; it is a document that is going to outlast you, that’s going to live there for a long time. That’s why it matters.

Recommended Reading: Everything About Everything: David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’ at 20

Most great prose writers make the real world seem realer — it’s why we read great prose writers. But Wallace does something weirder, something more astounding: Even when you’re not reading him, he trains you to study the real world through the lens of his prose. Several writers’ names have become adjectivized — Kafkaesque, Orwellian, Dickensian — but these are designators of mood, of situation, of civic decay. The Wallaceian is not a description of something external; it describes something that happens ecstatically within, a state of apprehension (in both senses) and understanding. He didn’t name a condition, in other words. He created one.

The way to honor great work

The way to honor great work is to love it, then turn away from it as you write. No imitation, no pastiche. 

What Intizar Husain said 23 years ago about himself and literature

The WIRE has published a 1993 interview with Intizar Husain, the great Pakistani writer, who died on Feb 2, 2016. How relevant even today after long 23 years!

I like to see myself as part of the great tradition to which Amir Khusro, Nizamuddin Aulia, and Dara Shukoh as much as Rahim, Raskhan and Jayasi belong. This tradition is as much Hindu as it is Muslim. My stories are a struggle against religious fundamentalism, against mullahism.

Intizar Husain, great Pakistani writer, passes away

"When shoelaces speak, those who can speak stay silent.” 

They said it in Jaipur Litfest 2016

The novel includes many matters without excluding anything. [...] It remains a hybrid form; there is no single way to read or write a novel. 

Colm Toibin

A moralist, but not a moraliser

“I’m a moralist but not a moraliser. I’m very interested in how and why people act as they do, but I don’t as a novelist ever try to tell people how to behave.”
--Julian Barnes

Yann Martel's Compromises and Drafts

Compromises? Hundreds. Drafts? Dozens. I suppose there are some modern-day Jane Austens who write finished polished prose in which only a word or two is changed here and there. I ain’t one of those writers. I’m a messy, untutored blunderer. I might have been left to my ways if it hadn’t been for the bizarre success of Life of Pi, which—among many other consequences—brought me to the attention of many fine, sharp-minded editors.

An article I published on Medium in response to an invite

I write because…

I’ve never really thought about why I write.

I hate entertaining somebody with my writing. I like to see writers as thinkers, visionaries, futurists, social reformers, even activists — but never as entertainers. You write to entertain me, you lose my respect.

Information and Literature

"In my books, I try to use every channel of information possible, keeping in mind that information is not what is most important in literature, meaning is.” 

Morning News Tournament of Books 2016 begins with a great announcement

"For 12 years, we’ve done this silly, moronic, informative, all-consuming, fascinating, weirdly fun thing. So have many of you. Let’s do it again."

In the beginning was the Word

"Word invokes existence, it matures a man, it carries a man to something great and valiant, it makes a man dream, and drives a man to much humanity."

via

Writing at the age of 80

"I’m not an opera person at all, but I think of Verdi, for example, as someone who was writing at the age of 80 work comparable to what he was doing 50 years earlier.

"I want people who can make magic" / Gordon Lish

I want people who can make magic. That’s what the job at hand is. To take the elements of the language, to take these tarnished and exhausted entities, and to cause them to move in a way they’ve never moved otherwise. To imbue them with movement through the particular imposition of one’s will, one’s desire.

When moral police stalks a writer

"Literature remains an unpredictable dialectic between the public and the private, the alien and the familiar, the individual and the collective; individual literary works may have elements of idiosyncrasy that may not always satisfy the conventions we have historically set up through social contracts that make the state, or those which evolve to define communities. Even so, literature exists in continuity with life, not in opposition to it.

To Figure Out What Your Set of Two or Three Things is

Some people do beautiful nature descriptions. They write great dialogue. They do a really intense neurotic voice. There’s a million different skills that people might turn out to have. So I think part of it is to write enough when you’re young to figure out what your set of two or three things is.

- George Saunders

Would you buy "A Poetics Of Fiction"?

It's of course a lucrative idea to write a book for aspiring writers who are swarming the physical and cyber spaces across the world and are ready to spend fortunes for their success. But here is a book with atrocious title "A Poetics of Fiction". 400 pages. Six chapters. Title of Chapter One :Open your savings account.

Quratulain Haider:Undisputed Queen of Urdu Literature

The Nation (Pakistan) has an interesting article on Quratulain Haider, arguably the most powerful writer of Urdu Literature.

Although never very vocal about it, Ainee was a feminist through and through. She lived a very independent life on her own terms. Ainee was a working woman all her life.

Karl Ove Knausgaard on novel writing

When the novel becomes a mask it can be very entertaining, possibly even providing some insight, but it doesn’t come close to life. It doesn’t live.

A Page Is well written when...

A page is well written when the labour and pleasure of truthful narration supplant any other concern, including a concern with formal elegance. I belong to the category of writers who throw out the final draft and keep the rough when this practice ensures a higher degree of authenticity.
--Elena Ferrante

All You Wanted to Know about Gabriel Gearcia Marquez

The Secret History of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Don DeLillo understands terrorism better than any political expert/political acdemic?

In Aljazeera America, Scott Beauchamp has an interesting observation:

A better guide to the subtleties of terrorism than proclamations of military experts or political academics can be found in the fiction of Don DeLillo. Besides reminding us that terrorism isn’t particularly new — or particular to Muslims, for that matter — the settings in which his novels are based give a sense of the zeitgeist in which he was working. This is the context in which he still works and in which we all live.

Svetlana Alexievich's Nobel Lecture

" Dostoevsky thought that humanity knows much, much more about itself than it has recorded in literature. So what is it that I do? I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. I'm interested in the history of the soul. The everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits, or disdains. I work with missing history.

Recommended Reading: Why does Indian writing in English still have to defend itself against charges of siding with oppressors?

Why does Indian writing in English still have to defend itself against charges of siding ...

"There has to be a way for English writing to live along with writing in other Indian languages. This will require greater humility on the part of those of us who write in English, and on the part of the complex of publishers and retailers who support the process."

Gabriel Josipovici Quotes

**When all public responses are not just negative but dismissive it’s sometimes hard to keep going. We are not Buddhists, we need some sense that what we are doing is more than self-indulgence. But of course in the end we go on writing because we have to/want to. (David Plante once said to me: ‘Remember, Gabriel, no-one asked you to do this.’ More wise words.) I have now accepted that I will always only appeal to a very small section of readers, anyway in this country, but probably everywhere, but I have also come to feel in the last few years (not in the eighties and nineties) that there is a growing body of people for whom my writing really matters, and that is heart-warming and encourages me to keep going.

Recommended reading: On Pandering/ Claire Vaye Watkins

Let us, each of us, write things that are uncategorizable, rather than something that panders to and condones and codifies those categories.

Orhan Pamuk on his new novel "A Strangeness In My Mind"

A novel, for me, is an excuse to pin down, collect, and put together all the little things about daily life that I like writing about.

In India initial print run of commercial fiction is 1,00,000!

"20 years ago we couldn’t have dreamt of the numbers that commercial fiction sells these days, initial print runs of 1,00,000; Indian authors dominating bestseller lists in the country. There’s enough reason to celebrate."

Really?

Kevin Barry on research in fiction writing

Sometimes the best research happens when you don’t even know you’re doing it, when you’re just going through your day-to-day life. But it can take a long, long time for it to filter into the fiction.

Read an excerpt from a new biography of Marcel Proust

Proust, Dreyfus, and the Art of True Impressions

Karl Ove Knausagaard reviews Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Submission’

The disillusioned gaze sees through everything, sees all the lies and the pretenses we concoct to give life meaning, the only thing it doesn’t see is its own origin, its own driving force. But what does that matter as long as it creates great literature, quivering with ambivalence, full of longing for meaning, which, if none is found, it creates itself?

Kevin Barry wins the Goldsmiths prize 2015 for Beatlebone

'Beatlebone is a novel that takes its reader to the edge – of the Western world, of sanity,of fame, of words. But it also takes us to the very edge of the novel form, where it meets its notorious doppelgänger, autobiography.

Instapoets: making a career of poetry

If I think it, I write it, and if I write it, I put it out there.

Recommended reading:Fiction tells a truth that History cannot

On being mentored by Breyten Breytenbach and Paul Bowles.

Philip Pullman on J.R.R. Tolkien,

Tolkien’s work has very little of interest in it to a reader of literature, in my opinion. When I think of literature—Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad—the great novelists found their subject matter in human nature, emotion, in the ways we relate to each other. If that’s what Tolkien’s up to, he’s left out half of it. The books are wholly male-oriented. The entire question of sexual relationships is omitted.

Recommended reading: Bartleby The Scrivener/ Herman Melville (digitized version):

 Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby The Scrivener.”digitized and annotated by Slate.

They call it “a searing critique of American capitalism, a protest story, an existentialist paean to the necessity of going on in an absurd world.”

Bartleby is the character who coined the phrase, “I would prefer not to.”

Egyptian Novelist Ahmed Nagy faces criminal charge for his novel excerpt

Set in Cairo, the novel tells the story of Bassam, a man lost

 inside a "spiderweb of emotional frustration and failure."

 Oscillating between the present, the past and the future, it

 explicitly describes sexual acts.

Mohsin Hamid on cyborg era

TIme is our most precious currency. So significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies.