I just finished reading my friend Lee Polevoi’s first novel, 
“The Moon in Deep Winter.”
It’s a darkly comic tale of domestic treachery, set in snowy and frigid New England. Having done a good amount of reading and writing and some ice fishing myself, I can tell you that Lee has an eye for detail and the requisite “intoxication with language,” as Jim Harrison put it, to make this a book worth reading.
And given that it’s wintry outside and the moon will be full tonight, it’s the perfect time to check in with Lee on the habits of the craft of fiction writing, his thoughts on the state of publishing, and who he’d like to play the lead should this title ever make the big screen…
Q: Lee, how do you conduct your research? You’ve included some snippets of interesting knowledge on a number of far-flung topics and places (the mechanics of flight, an island in the South Pacific, Mexico City, etc.). Do you look these places up, or prefer to go there and experience them in person?
For the unwary writer, research can be a seductive trap. While researching various topics for inclusion in my novel, I had to be careful not to spend too much time looking things up and less time actually writing. Back in the day, I spent long hours in the library finding what I needed. In present time, I’ve become adept at hunting down what I need online, while doing my best to steer free of “quirky” sites and time-wasting chat rooms.
The key in research is to find the right one or two key details, which lend verisimilitude to the fiction, without overwhelming the reader with random facts and/or appearing to be little more than regurgitated research. As to “experiencing places in person”—yes, whenever possible, I like to go there (I attended college in New England, the setting for The Moon in Deep Winter) but when that’s not possible, again I seek out those details that add mood and atmosphere to the story’s setting.
The first time I saw The Christian Science Monitor, I expected it to be chock full of wing-nut proselytizing, like, say, The Watchtower, that curious piece of rubbish the Jehovah’s Witnesses leave behind after you shoo them off your front porch.
What a pleasant shock it was, back in the day, to discover that this little broadsheet was a respectable, serious newspaper that publishes insightful exposes and often breaks major national stories. And they even had reading rooms, where you could wander in off the street, sit down in a quiet place and read the paper (or the religious books they provided) — how cool is that?
Yesterday the CSM announced that after 100 years, it will stop producing its newsprint edition and publish only on the Web. It finally makes too much sense economically and environmentally not to do that, and it’s only a matter of time before other national publications follow suit.
“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.”
– Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times
Could anyone have imagined him saying that just a few years ago? More here.
Salon has a long but great essay by Gary Kamiya on how “massive online feedback has rocked writers and changed journalism forever.”
It reminded me of when I was a reporter at the La Jolla Light and and I referred to Kate Sessions (who lived about 100 years ago and planted much of the foliage around Balboa Park) as a “spinster†in a story about her (unwedded) life. This characterization so enraged one reader (presumably single and with no good prospects) that she cancelled her subscription.
I like magazines; anticipating them, and finding things inside that inform and entertain me. I was a Runner’s World reader for years, I still get Men’s Journal, although I’ll probably let it lapse, it’s become too focused on adventure travel for me. I used to get Esquire but I canceled that years ago, I finally found it overly effete and too East Coast-centric for my taste.
But during the years that I subscribed to Esquire, I developed a ritual. It began with my annoyance over those stiff, postage-paid cards intended for would-be subscribers. They wedged about a half dozen of those cards into the spine of every issue, and they stuck out in a way that prevented you from properly flipping through the magazine. That was annoying in itself as it interfered with the serindipitious nature of good browsing, and as I was already a subscriber, I resented being pitched to again. So every month, as soon as I retrieved Esquire from the mailbox, I’d start tearing out those cards. With glee, I must admit.
Practicing what he preaches, George Siemens has made his new book “Knowing Knowledge” available for download as a pdf, and posted it as a wiki. It’s also for sale on Lulu.com. Scanning it, part one is theory, part two appears to be more focused on practical implementation, but it effectively raises some interesting questions right off the bat:
Is the book still a viable vehicle for knowledge transfer? Think about it, a book is essentially a snapshot in time from one tiny pin-prick of a perspective. Business books typically assert an authoritative viewpoint — this is how to solve this problem. But how can someone sitting at a keyboard in a small room for a certain period of time anticipate the particulars of your specific problem? If that person is knowledgable, they can produce an artifact that has value, sure. But can they compete with say, a network of semi-experts?
Will kids being born today actually consult “books” when they reach adulthood? Or will all human knowledge be readily available, and accessible on the fly, in other formats?
Seems there’s a glut of big-name books coming out this fall, which has publishers scrambilng to differentiate their hoped-for blockbusters from the others before they land in the remainder bin. So reports the Los Angeles Times yesterday (my emphasis):
At Simon & Schuster, for example, publicists have been reaching out to bloggers…. “This isn’t something I was doing a year ago, but I think it’s a huge opportunity for us now,” said marketing director Leah Wasielewski. “I got a fantastic response from some bloggers, and it makes sense because this approach allows us to target consumers directly and gauge their interests. You go right to the source.”
Also quoted in the Times story is Daniel Menaker, editor-in-chief of the Random House Publishing Group:
“For me the Web is like a teenager’s room,” Menaker said. “It can be very messy, and you don’t know quite how to bring order to it. But you can’t ignore it. You have to deal with it.”
If publishers are beginning to connect directly with niche markets, will they begin to publish to them as well? Instead of pouring resources into marketing blockbuster home runs, will they begin to hit singles and doubles, micropublishing books that may have not made the cut in the past? Or maybe a new class of info-preneur will fill the void…