Michael Cunningham, one of the three fiction judges for the Pulitzer Prize this year, wrote a fascinating and insightful two-part article for The New Yorker discussing the judges’ experience selecting three books to send to the Pulitzer committee and responding to the committee’s decision not to award a fiction prize this year. If you haven’t already, read this article. It’s much more interesting and worthwhile than anything I have to say here in my blog. But, if you’ve already read it, I do have some thoughts about why, perhaps, the committee didn’t award the prize this year.

In the article, Cunningham describes the three books the fiction judges selected to send to the committee: David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and Karen Russell’s debut novel, Swamplandia! Though Cunningham argued that each of these books contained its own sort of brilliance, in his discussion of them, he did seem to be anticipating the possible objections the committee may have had to each book.

The Pale King was unfinished when David Foster Wallace died. Wallace’s editor Michael Pietsch deserves much of the credit for how the book turned out. This fact alone was perhaps problematic to the Pulitzer committee. Should they award the prize to The Pale King, who would really have earned the prize, Wallace or Pietsch? Furthermore, I can understand the committee’s possible hesitance in general at awarding the prize to a novel that was unfinished at the time of the author’s death.

Train Dreams poses its own set of problems. Technically, though sold separately as its own book, it’s not a novel or short story collection but a single novella. Johnson originally published Train Dreams in The Paris Review in 2002. Okay, the fact that it was originally published in a journal ten years ago shouldn’t bar it from serious consideration for the Pulitzer; after all, short story collections are usually filled with stories that were previously published in journals. However, the fact that it’s a novella might have given the committee members pause. The Pulitzer is supposed to go to a complete book. I could see it being argued that Train Dreams shouldn’t count.

The other book the judges selected, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, is the least obviously problematic. Karen Russell completed the book herself and is still alive and thriving, working on her next book (a short story collection, which is scheduled to come out next year), and the book is 400+ pages long. Yet reading Cunningham’s defense of the book kind of made me wonder. Cunningham himself acknowledged that the book has problems, but he felt it was impressive . . . for a debut novel. Should a book that wins the Pulitzer need to be qualified in that way?

I did some sleuthing myself (actually because I was trying to decide whether to read Swamplandia!) and found that, though the book is critically acclaimed, MANY readers feel that it’s little more than a showcase for Russell’s elegant prose. On the sentence level, Amazon review after Amazon review notes, Swamplandia! is breathtaking, but the story falls flat in many, many ways. Most everybody seems to agree that Russell is at the beginning of a bright and exciting career, but this particular book—beautiful though the writing is—is good for a debut novel. (NOTE: I did end up deciding to read Swamplandia! and am in the middle of it right now. I’ll reserve my opinion until the end, but perhaps I’ll post about it once I’ve finished and made up my mind about it.)

Who knows the reasons the committee decided not to award a fiction prize this year? All we can do is speculate. However, based on the three books the fiction judges selected as finalists, I think I can at least understand how this might have happened. Still, like Cunningham argues in his article, not awarding a prize is “shortsighted” and “offensive.” Fiction is selective, Cunningham points out, and had there been three different judges this year, they may have selected three different books as finalists. Had that happened, Cunningham further acknowledges, the committee may have selected one as a winner. But ultimately, the committee could have contacted the fiction judges and asked for additional choices. They didn’t have to not award the prize at all.

But since there’s no undoing what’s been done, we can, instead, take this as a valuable reminder of how little (let’s be honest) these kinds of awards really mean. The three fiction judges feel any of the three books they selected as finalists would have deserved the prize. The committee disagreed. And as it is, the finalists only read 300 of the who knows how many books that were actually published last year. Three different judges may have felt one of the other 300 deserved the prize, while you or I may feel one of the countless books that weren’t even being considered deserved it. For a book to win the Pulitzer, it certainly has to have merit, but to say that any book is the best book of the year is sort of ridiculous. You can’t objectively judge something as subjective as literature.

I recently borrowed one of Steve Almond’s self-published books, This Won’t Take but a Minute, Honey, from a friend. Having read Almond’s two-part article on his experiences self-publishing in Poets & Writers a couple of years ago, I was very interested to actually read one of Almond’s self-published books (I haven’t, it should be noted, actually read any of his non-self-published books. This Won’t Take but a Minute, Honey was my first journey into Almond’s work, though I assure you it won’t be my last).

Divided into two parts, “Stories” and “Essays,” This Won’t Take but a Minute, Honey is essentially a manual for fiction writers that includes a series of flash fiction examples to illustrate the points he discusses under the “Essays” section.

While some of his points are overstatements, in my opinion (most notably, that “metaphors almost always suck,” which Almond himself seems to disagree with as not only does he admit to admiring the work of writers who use metaphors, but he himself uses plenty of metaphors in his own writing), overall, I agreed with and enjoyed reading Almond’s guidelines for good fiction writing. Perhaps because each “essay”—though they’re really not stand-alone essays but more like a series of brief chapters, each which builds on the chapters that came before—is so short, I flew right through the writing guide.

There are a few repeating points that Almond makes throughout the book, one of the most important of which is that you should “never confuse the reader.” Almond complains about writers who withhold information, who begin the story with dialogue without saying who is speaking, who use a lot of pronouns right off the bat, who jump around needlessly in time. Again, here I think he overstates some of his points, but in general he’s right—good fiction shouldn’t be confusing. I’m not of the mindset that non-linear chronology or pronouns are inherently confusing, but I see his point: sometimes they are, and they almost always are when handled by novice writers (the same is true of the metaphor issue, for that matter).

Almond offers some valuable insights into how to write well, and what I particularly appreciated about the book was his blatant disregard for what is often taught in advanced workshops. Almond seems to favor simplicity and plot over beautiful sentences and interesting ideas (in fact, Almond says, “I don’t want your stinkin’ ideas,” and points out that while good fiction does explore interesting ideas, “these ideas arise from—and are vitalized by—the emotional lives of the characters.”).

But my favorite point that Almond makes appears in his “essay” titled “As Close as We Get to Song,” in which Almond describes those writers—we all know at least one—who claim that writing is a heavenly experience, one that just carries them away in feelings of happiness and easy productivity. Good for them, but “for the rest of us, writing is basically flagellation, an undertaking that promises ecstatic release but mostly feels like torture.” Sure, sometimes I feel the other way, the heavenly, carried away on a cloud way. But often I feel the torture way, and it’s always reassuring to hear successful, published authors who feel the same.

I really enjoyed the book and think I’ll get a copy for myself, so I can refer back to it from time to time. But as much as I liked the book as a whole, I do have to say that it could have benefitted from a professional editor. As is often the case with self-published books, there were far more errors and typos than I would expect to find in a book published through a traditional publishing house (the most shocking was when Almond referred to “whip cream,” meaning “whipped cream.” No offense to Almond, but that’s the kind of mistake my freshman comp students make).

So June is officially over now, and it’s time to hold myself accountable for the goal I set for the month: to write, for at least a little bit, every single day. Did I meet this goal? The answer: I did not. Ouch. But I only fell short by one single day, and the day I didn’t write was the day—last Thursday—that I had a wild (and scary) allergic reaction to some medication I was taking and was basically incapacitated for the better part of the day. Amalie had a doctor’s appointment that morning, and by the time she got up from her first nap, I was already beginning to feel lousy.

I spent most of the afternoon in bed, and I did seriously consider turning my computer on and writing, goddammit, just so I wouldn’t end up missing a day—but I was really, really sick, like trying to decide whether I should ask Damien to take me to Urgent Care sick. Ultimately, I decided to say never mind to the goal. I just couldn’t bring myself to risk making myself feel worse just so I could get that little tick in that day’s box on my goal log sheet.

But something kind of interesting happened: late into the night, after, I think, my fever had started to break and I was beginning to believe I might make it through alive after all, I found myself lying in my bed, staring up at the ceiling and composing a very short story in my head. I didn’t get up to write it down, didn’t trust that I was better enough to risk it, so the exact sentences elude me now, but I remember the story had to do with the annual Paw-Paw Festival they hold here every year and a couple of people who hadn’t seen each other in a long time attending the festival together. It was a very subdued sort of story, and I was very happy with it—you know, as a draft. Of course, it’s gone now, but that’s not important.

What’s important is that I was able to get myself into such a habit of writing every day that even when I was sick, even when I made the conscious decision not to get up and write, my mind kicked itself into writing mode anyway. There’s also a strange sort of pleasure in having composed a story in my head, then having lost it. I feel like that story was just for me. My mind was giving it to me to keep me entertained as I lay there, awake and restless, and for that, I thank it.

It’s early summer, and the rejections have been pouring in over here at the Cowger house. On the one hand, receiving a fairly steady stream of rejections is a good thing—it means I’ve been submitting, for one thing, and extended periods of silence from editors always make me question myself as a writer. At least when I’m getting rejections, I feel like I’m part of the writing world. (Plus, each rejection earns me at least one point on the submission response tally pinned to the bulletin board in my bedroom. I’m getting very, very close to a hundred points, which will earn me a $25 Amazon gift card.)

Still, receiving nothing but rejections from editors is sort of a lousy feeling, and to make things worse, I’ve almost entirely been receiving form rejections. For a while there, I felt like I had reached a point where, even though I still got rejected way more than I got accepted, I received mostly personal rejections, and when the rejections were form, they were usually the higher tier form rejections (the ones that state they thought your piece was good and they want to read more from you).

Ever since I had to start over with a whole new set of stories (because all of my other stories had either been published in journals, published in my book, or both), I feel like I’ve taken a huge step back in terms of rejections. Only one of my stories—one!—has been published since my book came out. Okay, part of this is because for about a year there, I was barely submitting. But for the past few months I’ve been getting back to my regular submission habits, and now the form rejections are starting to pile up.

Of course, the first possible reason for this is that my new stories aren’t any good. This, naturally, is where my mind first takes me every time I open a new email and read the same old words: “Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately . . .” I wonder, have I lost it? Did I use up all my stories, and I just need to accept that I only really ever had  a little over a book’s worth of stories inside me? Or is it that the stories in my book—most of them, anyway—were workshopped in grad school. Do I NEED the feedback of a class-full of writers in order to revise my work to completion?

But then I remind myself of the few personal rejections I have received on these very same stories. I’m getting a flow of form rejections right now, but the slow and irregular drip of rejections that were coming in before this included a fair amount of personal rejections, so maybe it’s not time to throw in the towel just yet.

Damien suggested that I consider the time of year it is before I read too much in to these form rejections. Most journals close for submissions during the summer, and this usually means there are some straggler submissions that the editors really want to plow through and respond to in a timely fashion. It’s nice to start the new submission period with an empty submission file, I’m sure. So the sudden flood of form rejections might just mean they were quickly working through their backlog and saying no a bit more readily than usual. No personal response might mean they’re strapped for time, that they don’t want to waste what little time they do have writing individual notes about every story they thought was good but that didn’t make the final cut.

Looking at it this way makes me feel a lot better. It might not actually be what’s going on here. It might be that I’m getting form rejections because these stories suck. It might also be I’m getting them because these stories aren’t as polished as I thought. Maybe I’m getting them because I’m just sending to the wrong places, places for which these stories aren’t a good fit. It’s even possible I’m getting them because the editors just didn’t read my submissions very closely. There’s no way to know. That’s the (often frustrating) nature of form rejections: they tell you very little about your submission. But to look at it in a positive way, it does mean that these form rejections are not necessarily a sign that I’m a failure as a writer. I’m going to keep plowing ahead and keep submitting, and even more important, I’m going to keep working on some new stories that might help me garner some more personal rejections, or better yet, an acceptance.

So. Early in the month of June, I made a pact with myself that I would write every single day for the entire month. It is now June 17^th and I have stuck to it, and I don’t anticipate any trouble continuing on through the end of the month. Besides being invigorating because I’ve been more productive so far this month than I have in recent months—and there’s still two more weeks of productivity ahead of me—the write every day for the entire month scheme has reminded me of the truth behind one of the cardinal rules of writing: writers don’t wait for inspiration (or time, or whatever the excuse may be) to write; writers just sit down and get to it, whether they feel like it or not. Whether they’re inspired or not. Whether they feel they have time or not.

This point has been hammered home to me on the days in this past month when I really, really, REALLY didn’t feel like writing. Picture it: it’s 11 PM. Your baby is asleep beside you on the bed—because she can’t sleep if you’re not lying in bed next to her—and you’re tired. Or you really feel like reading. Or you just want to zone out to some Netflix. Or maybe, even, you have papers to grade or work to do on your Blackboard course for the summer.

But if you don’t write, you don’t get that little tick in your goal logsheet for today, and if you don’t get the little tick for today, you may as well give up because you didn’t meet your goal for the month. So you open up the file of the project you’re working on, and tell yourself if you only write for fifteen minutes, that’s okay. It still counts.

And you get to work. You reread the last page or so that you wrote yesterday. Then you force out a sentence. Then another. They’re awful and stilted, but you keep going anyway. You continue like this for a paragraph, maybe two. Each sentence takes forever to write, and you half wonder why you’re bothering since you’ll probably just delete them again tomorrow.

But then something miraculous happens. A sentence materializes in your mind, and it’s a good one. Just as you’re getting it out, another sentence follows. You start typing faster—they’re coming more quickly now. You begin to feel like you’re not writing at all, but transcribing something that someone else is reading to you. You go, go, go, go, go until the flow slows down, and trickles to a stop. You look at the clock. You look at your word count. You’ve accomplished something here. And to think, you almost didn’t bother.

The desire to meet my goal has kept me motivated to write every day, and the act of sitting down and writing clicks my brain into writer mode. No matter how uninspired I feel when I turn my computer on, if I sit in front of that computer and force myself to type, it doesn’t take long before the creative machine turns on and begins telling me what to write. It’s almost like the inspiration sometimes just needs to know you’re serious. “Oh. She really means it this time. She’s going to just go ahead and write whether I show up or not. Look at that crap she’s writing. I better get over there.”

This will be a short post. I’m in crunch time for the spring, with grades due very soon, so I’m only able to justify a very short break for my blog this week. I do, however, want to tell you about my writing month so far. Once I laid out my goals for summer writing projects (see last week’s post), I couldn’t wait for the quarter to finish to get going. So far in the month of June, I’ve written for at least a little bit every single day. Yes, I’m aware we’re only ten days in to June. Yes, I’m aware many writers write every day. For me, though, for the past several months, I’ve had a difficult time really getting into a consistent writing groove. Now, I finally feel like I’m working it out.

It started because on June 1^st, I had an idea for a story and wrote it right away (Damien watched Amalie). The next day I got back to work on my children’s book, the one that is number one in my summer projects list. The next day, I did more work on the children’s book. Somewhere around June 4^th or 5^th, I started to think I should just make a goal to write every single day in June, even if just for fifteen minutes. Once I’d made that decision (and once I’d become aware of the streak—albeit a not very impressive one—I was on), it started becoming a very important, conscious decision to write every day. If, at the end of the day, I realized I hadn’t written yet, I would stop whatever I was doing and write, even if I didn’t feel like it. The alternative was to break my streak and admit defeat for the entire month’s goal.  

So the month is a third of the way through and I’ve managed to write every single day so far. With each passing day, the stakes get a little higher. If I break the streak tomorrow, I will be breaking a ten day streak. If I break it the next day, I’ll be breaking an even longer one. It doesn’t really matter that the momentum effect hasn’t kicked in yet (it will, eventually, I know) because at this point, I’m doing it because I don’t want to have to face myself the next day if I don’t, and that in itself is proving sufficient motivation.

First of all, some news: my book is now available in Kindle format! I couldn’t be more thrilled that the publisher decided to make it available for Kindle. If nothing else, it allows people who might be somewhat interested in reading the book the chance to read a sample before purchasing it. Plus, the Kindle price is much lower. Readers who might be hesitant about spending $17.95 on a book by an unknown author might be much more willing to take the gamble for $9.99.

Now on to what I want to talk about this week. It’s almost time for summer break here—summer break, for me, means one week between the end of spring quarter and the beginning of summer quarter, during which time I have to prepare the Blackboard course for my summer class—and I’ve been excitedly planning my summer writing projects. I haven’t been able to get anywhere near as much writing done as I would have liked for the past year, but the older Amalie gets, the easier it is to get things done around her. On top of that, I’m only teaching one class over the summer, and it’s a creative writing class. I expect to have plenty of time in which to write, and that’s exactly what I plan to do.

Here are my goals for this summer:

1.      I’m going to complete the first draft of a middle grade children’s novel, of which I currently have about half written. This, I decided, is the main writing project I want to be focusing on right now. I talked a few weeks ago about how leapfrogging from project to project was preventing me from really getting anything done, and how I needed to pick one project to just finish, for cripe’s sake. Well this is the project I’ve settled on.

2.      Once I’ve finished the first draft of that novel, which will probably take me no more than a month, I want to write a first draft of the much shorter children’s book I’m collaborating on with my mom. My mom is a scratchboard artist, and she’s creating the illustrations for a children’s story that I’m going to write. We agreed on this a couple of years ago—but I’ve been slacking in my duties. She’s already completed several scratchboard paintings for the book. I’m going to use the paintings she’s already created as inspiration to write the story. We don’t know if we’ll be able to find a publisher for the book once it’s finished, but it’s an incredibly fun project and worth spending time on, nonetheless. Plus, I sort of think we might be able to do a show in a gallery even if it doesn’t end up getting published, or we can create copies of the book ourselves and sell them as art-chapbooks (I learned how to make those in a workshop while I was getting my MFA).

3.      In addition to those two main projects, I want to work on some stories. I have, at present, five stories I’m sending around. I have three more stories in draft form that I’d like to revise and start sending out, and three more half-written drafts of stories that I feel really excited about and would like to finish. I won’t set a concrete goal in terms of stories, but I will say that by the end of the summer I’d like to have a few more stories in circulation, and ideally, I’d like to have complete drafts of the three half-written stories I believe are so promising.