Are we reading differently?

The evidence in today's audience suggests the answer is yes. A fun article on Tim Bray's Ongoing blog suggests that our language skills are hard-wired to grasp conversational writing, because 90 percent of human language history used only talk to communicate.

There’s nothing much on the Net that’s without precedent in spoken language. What’s new is that written discourse is becoming less like oration and more like conversation. It’s not clear that this is bad.

Then there's Karleen Koen, a novelist who's working on her fourth book, historical fiction based in France. She writes on her blog

As I polish (which means cut, smooth out, delete, write new things that make the reading slick) I do believe people are reading differently, with less patience -- and the inherent problem with a historical novel is that a writer has to set up the background so the reader understands the world he or she is entering, and that can’t be done in a quick paragraph or two. Or at least I can’t do it.

There will be readers who love to immerse themselves in a book, get lost in the pace. But are there enough of them now, growing up in a Twitter generation, to give writers a livelihood? Bray notes that books are losing market share and adds, "Unsurprising, because when you start at 100 percent, there’s nowhere to go but down. Books are now competing, on a fairly level playing field, with the Net media: blogs and Twitter and mailing lists and fora of other flavors."

But a certain kind of story can only achieve its potential as a book. A good friend of mine just landed a nice contract for a first book. It will be an impressive debut when she finishes. A literary pace will probably govern her writing, though. Are you patient enough to give yourself over to a pace that will match your vision for your work? One clue: How long can you sit in the chair and just write, or just revise? I don't know many novelists who tweet on Twitter.

Hooray for a Pulitzer's worth of stories

Short stories get short shrift. These gems of tales, usually less than 3,000 words, usually can't find a publisher or a publication, but everybody professes to enjoy reading them. Count among the satisfied the jury of the Pulitzer Prize, which awarded the 2009 fiction prize to a collection of stories by Elizabeth Stout, Olive Kitteridge.

To be precise, this lovely book is a "novel in stories," a collection of tales with recurring characters but not bound up with a narrative though-line. Reading a novel in stories is easy for people who only read once in awhile. You always feel like you've gotten everything there is to tell in a novel in stories, so long as you finish the chapter you're on. Every chapter is a self-contained story.

Six years ago, I saw a novel-in-stories slammed by a prize-winning novelist. Ann Patchett came to Austin to give a keynote speech at the Austin Writers League "Why Fiction Matters" conference. Patchett spoke knowing she'd just won the PEN/Falkner award for her novel Bel Canto. In the course of her talk Patchett said in passing, "and then there's the novel-in-stories, a form I loathe, by the way." We didn't all want to know what she liked to read, or thought was worthy. But some of us knew something Patchett didn't. The conference organizer Karen Stolz had published a successful novel in stories, The World of Pies.

So maybe — since Stout's novel in stories won the Pulitzer, like fiction of Phillip Roth and Michael Chabon — Patchett might want to revisit her judgment about the worth of novels in stories. She could reconsider while she's dusting off the section of her bookcase that's still waiting for a Pulitzer prize. Bel Canto is based on the Lima Crisis news event, but Olive Kitteridge doesn't need that kind of based-on-a-true-story leg up. It's Elizabeth Stout's world of coastal Maine residents. Booklist said in a starred review

But appalling though Olive can be, Strout manages to make her deeply human and even sympathetic, as are all of the characters in this “novel in stories.” Covering a period of 30-odd years, most of the stories (several of which were previously published in the New Yorker and other magazines) feature Olive as their focus, but in some she is bit player or even a footnote while other characters take center stage to sort through their own fears and insecurities. Though loneliness and loss haunt these pages, Strout also supplies gentle humor and a nourishing dose of hope.

Never let it matter that anyone, no matter how awarded their career might be, reviles your writing style. You can find single-star reviews for Bel Canto on Amazon, after all. Be your own judge and let yourself — not just your writing or publishing — be the beauty in the world.

Google gets all the books to search?

Over at the Boing Boing blog, the writers complain about the new online book search rights that Google just won in a class action suit settlement. It's a little tricky to parse out what this means, but it looks like if you have a book in print now, or ever did, Google can include its contents in a search result. This sentence kind of sums it up: "Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results."

Google, in acceding to the Authors Guild's requests, have attained a legal near-monopoly on searching and distributing the majority of books ever published.

The Authors Guild -- which represents a measly 8000 writers -- brought a class action against Google on behalf of all literary copyright holders, even the authors of the millions of "orphan works" whose rightsholders can't be located. Once that class was certified, whatever deal Google struck with the class became binding on every work of literature ever produced. The odds are that this feat won't ever be repeated, which means that Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results.

We all love Google, don't we? From the "search the Web by speaking" iPhone application to the wonderful shopping vistas, Google runs the online universe. But if I had a book out, and I wasn't one of the select 8,000 Authors Guild members, I'd be scrambling now to find out if my book's online rights were still mine to control. As the article says, challenging this settlement in court is going to be costly.

Not something to worry yourself about if you're still doing the writing and editing. This doesn't affect the practice of your writing art. It might reduce your ability to earn a living off a book, though. That thunder you hear in the air is the sound of Google's scanners warming up, ready to hoover up the pages of your book for a free search result on the Internet. Yeah, Amazon is big. But Google is bigger, smarter and hungrier.

Time changes stories

There may be times when stepping back for awhile from a story or novel can provide a deeper understanding of what is vital to the tale. Up on the Web site for the literary journal Glimmer Train, the writer Erica Johnson Debeljak talks about writing her memoir twice, 10 years apart, first as journalism and much later as a novelization.

An honest writer of either fiction or nonfiction has to admit that the treatment of characters and situations — what is left in and what is left out — ultimately serves the meaning of the work, and that meaning can change over time. In other words, there is content (lived experience, impressions, imagination) and there is form (genre, story shape, the flow of words and sentences on the page), and the process of a writer funneling content into form will virtually always produce a different product depending on perspective and what meaning is being pushed to the fore at any given time.

She goes on to say this isn't a viewpoint that non-fiction writers will embrace easily. But she "made changes in chronology and cold hard facts" while creating the memoir Forbidden Bread, the second life of her story.

More than a few writers in our workshops have worked on fiction based in life experience, or even a novelized memoir. Letting time elapse between drafts might help you if you're working on such a story.