The link below is to an article that looks at how to use Instagram as an author.
For more visit:
https://janefriedman.com/using-instagram-as-an-author/
The links below are to articles that look at the best software for authors.
For more visit:
– http://www.indiesunlimited.com/2015/11/05/which-software-program-is-best-for-authors-part-1/
–http://www.indiesunlimited.com/2015/11/12/which-software-is-best-for-authors-part-2/
Annie Coral Demosthenous, University of Western Australia
Last month in The Guardian, with a piece headlined Get Real. Terry Pratchett is not a Literary Genius, literary critic Jonathan Jones claimed Terry Pratchett’s books should not be read, because they are not literature:
Everyone reads trash sometimes, but why are we now pretending, as a culture, that it is the same thing as literature? The two are utterly different.
Jones informed us that he hadn’t read anything by Pratchett, because his time was better spent reading Jane Austen. In presenting Pratchett and Austen as polar opposites, Jones made certain lazy assumptions about both the nature and function literature, which deserve to be challenged.
Jones’ article irritated many, and has drawn criticism for reinforcing an elitist and exclusionary definition of culture, based on the assumption that there is a singular definition of “literary” fiction independent of the reader’s individual experience of either life or reading.
Yet the definition of “literature” is changeable, and inextricably linked with fashion. As the author Christopher Priest has pointed out, works now considered classics were not necessarily defined as high culture when they were written, and works considered literary when published do not always survive over time.
Priest also observes that many classics began life as popular publications – the story of Americans waiting at the wharf to discover the fate of Little Nell springs to mind. What is missing from this debate is direct engagement with Pratchett’s work and its relation to literary high culture.
So what is high culture? And what do we mean when we call something “literary”? According to Jones, “actual literature” is “harder to get to grips with than a Discworld novel, but it is more worth the effort”.
As this definition is not particularly helpful, let us consider some characteristics commonly considered “literary”: the elegant and adventurous use of language, engagement with themes of universal significance, inventiveness of style, defiance of genre classification.
Jones accuses Pratchett’s prose of being “very ordinary”, missing Pratchett’s delight in locating the extraordinary within the ordinary: his writing is simultaneously clear and complex, much like Austen’s. Both are masters of aphorism; compare for example:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife (Austen, Pride and Prejudice).
To:
The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it (Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment).
Both are wry observations of human nature, and both make the reader stop and think.
Pratchett seldom allows language to exist unchallenged; words are stretched and twisted by new and surprising contexts, opening the reader’s eye to the arbitrary relation of signifier and signified, often eliciting surprised laughter.
The Truth (2000), the 25th Discworld novel, reflects on the meaning of “truth” and people’s propensity to look for it, structured around the aphorism that “a lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on”.
William, a compulsive truth-teller, sets up the first newspaper on the Discworld, and discovers that the truth is hard to find. He is horrified when readers assume everything printed in the paper is true, assuming “otherwise they wouldn’t let them put it in”.
The novel concludes with the statement that “nothing has to be true for ever. Just for long enough, to tell you the truth”. This challenges readers’ assumptions about objective truth, but positions it as ephemeral rather than non-existent.
Pratchett’s writing style is economical, elegant and adventurous. In The Truth, he takes the same approach to chapters as Joyce takes to punctuation in the final chapter of Ulysses (1918): he doesn’t use any. Instead, a multitude of episodic narratives fit together like scenes in a film, jumping between characters, location and time without losing the narrative thread.
The Truth begins by tracing a rumour flying through the city of Ankh-Morpork: “The dwarfs can turn lead into gold”. As different characters hear the rumour, (alchemists, wizards, thieves, the dwarfs themselves), the image of both city and world emerges. The rumour, like a panning camera, stops when it reaches William.
Pratchett’s work is often underestimated because it is classified as “genre fiction” rather than literary fiction. Yet Pratchett’s relationship with genre is complex and adversarial. He does not reproduce genre stereotypes, he sets them up to be deconstructed, or at least affectionately mocked.
Rincewind, the original Discworld hero, is represented as completely un-heroic: a cowardly wizard who cannot do magic, or, indeed, spell the word wizard. He is joined in his adventures by Cohen the Barbarian, now old, toothless and suffering from lumbago, who nevertheless is still a more successful hero than Rincewind.
Austen often flirts with genre in a similar way. Northanger Abbey (1817) is a mock-Gothic romance, which satirises the stereotypes of Gothic fiction by reproducing them and then allowing reality to intrude. The novel begins with a discourse on Catherine’s unsuitability as heroine, listing the characteristics one expects of heroines and locating their absence in Catherine.
When visiting Northanger Abbey, Catherine goes looking for manifestations of Gothic tropes, and is disappointed at every turn: the hidden papers she finds are laundry receipts, the old Abbey has been restored and redecorated, and her love-interest’s mother was not murdered, after all.
Austen’s novels are no harder or easier to read than Pratchett’s; both use wit and satire to carry out social critique, and in both cases people who don’t find them funny tend not to enjoy them.
Reading Pratchett, like reading Austen, requires commitment, and a willingness to look under the surface. It’s a shame Jonathan Jones was unable to do so before writing his follow-up article on Pratchett – for which he had, belatedly, read one book by the author – this past weekend.
Annie Coral Demosthenous, Honorary Research Fellow, European Languages and Studies, University of Western Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Alexandra Smith, University of Sydney
What happens when novelists actively incorporate the idea of failure in their books?
We generally understand failure as a negative attribute, particularly when looking at politics, the economy – and, yes, art. As individuals, we are driven by thoughts of success and achievement, so it makes sense that failure might make us feel slightly uneasy.
Turning that unease into something aesthetically pleasing is no mean feat, and yet, that’s where we are with the work of several well-known contemporary authors.
In 2007, British novelist Tom McCarthy, with philosopher Simon Critchley, issued what they called a Joint Statement of Inauthenticity, in which they argued that:
the essence of poetry is […] of trying (and failing) to speak about the thing itself and not just ideas about the thing.
While this might not seem to relate to the novel, what they were setting up there was a relationship between “trying to speak” and “failing to speak”.
One of the pervading motifs in McCarthy’s novels is an emphasis on some form of failure. In his first novel, Remainder (2005), the narrator tries, and fails, to reenact a moment of perfection.
In Men in Space (2007), McCarthy’s character Ivan Manasek forges a stolen Byzantine painting in an attempt to perfectly recreate the original object. In McCarthy’s most recent novel, Satin Island (2015), the narrator, U, is tasked with writing The Great Report of our age.
Long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize, this novel is, at its core, about the failure to write. The Great Report’s essential function is one of identification, one that “name[s] what’s taking place right now”.
U’s boss, Peyman, asks him to “[s]peak its secret name”. For U, this is rather like trying to name “Rumpelstilskin”, but it seems that McCarthy is directly engaging with the enduring aim of poetry to “speak to the thing”, even if he fails.
We don’t always feel pleased with artistic expressions of failure. In an article in June for the London Review of Books, American poet and novelist Ben Lerner suggested that the reason that we might “dislike or despise or hate poems” is because, in some way, “they are – every single one of them – failures”.
In Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), the narrator, Adam, is obsessed with artistic and linguistic failures because they allow him to experience an almost transcendent ambiguity. While in 10:04 (2014), the narrator, Ben, often addresses the second person – “You have failed to reconcile the realism of my body with the ethereality of the trees” – despite never being heard.
For Lerner, the “you” occupies “a collective person who didn’t yet exist, a still-uninhabited second person plural to whom all the arts, even in their most intimate registers, were nevertheless addressed” – or, in other words, an audience that he will always fail to reach.
But it is Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-part literary project, My Struggle, that is perhaps the most overt example of such an attention to failure. It offers a prosaic, not poetic, assessment of failure.
Indeed, it is a project that strives deliberately towards constructing “real” experience. In framing the work as a novel, Knausgaard has claimed that he was able to “use [him]self as a kind of raw material,” enacting “an existential search” of the self.
The “struggle” suggested in the title references, in part, the struggle to write without shame to create something of value.
Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai won the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. His most recent novel, Seiobo There Below (2013), introduces the reader to failure in slightly different terms, through the aesthetic of wabi-sabi.
Rooted in ancient Japanese tea ceremonies from the 15th century, wabi-sabi recognises beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and incompletion. To a Western eye, beauty is often equated with perfection, but for Krasznahorkai, fleeting moments are established as beautiful even if they go on to decay.
The novel’s first vignette describes the magnificent beauty of a white heron hunting, in contrast to industrial Kyoto.
But it is wabi-sabi’s focus on “the now” that makes it interesting when thinking about contemporary writing. What might be expected from a novel that reflects on its own inability to say things successfully? Or, more pressingly, that constructs failure as an aesthetically-pleasing subject?
By focusing on failure, contemporary novelists might find they can wield surprisingly equal critical, ethical, political, and aesthetic power.
Perhaps failure is not so bad after all.
Alexandra Smith is Sessional Lecturer and Tutor in English Literature and Rhetoric at University of Sydney
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Michelle Smith, Deakin University
Last month author Catherine Nichols went public with her account of sending her novel manuscript to literary agents under a male pseudonym. A writing sample sent to 50 agents in her own name resulted in only two manuscript requests. Seventeen out of 50 agents requested the same materials from “George Leyer”.
Were the agents exhibiting a subconscious gender bias that assumes the superiority of male authors? Or were they responding to the practicalities of a reviewing culture and audience that can overlook or even reject women’s literature?
Women’s fiction is reviewed less often than men’s in major publications. Even though women buy two thirds of all books sold in the UK, they are much less likely to be reviewing books in male-dominated literary magazines.
And some audiences, such as young boys, are presumed to be entirely unwilling to read books written by women. J.K. Rowling’s publisher felt that an obviously female name like “Joanne” would dissuade boys from reading the debut Harry Potter novel.
The unpublished Rowling was simply happy to be published and said in an interview that “they could have called me Enid Snodgrass”. But Enid Snodgrass would have had the same sales handicap as Joanne Rowling—a woman’s name.
Most discussions of contemporary women writers who have adopted male pseudonyms or initials to mask their sex draw connections between these writers and a long line of literary women, such as the Brontë sisters and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), who have published under assumed names.
What is less recognised is that the cultural reasons behind women writers concealing their names have shifted dramatically since the nineteenth century.
Today female names vanish to avoid industry and reader perceptions of what women’s fiction is like. Historically, in the British tradition, female names were hidden because of the perceived inappropriateness of women writing novels.
To understand this difference, it is important to know that the very act of reading novels was heavily policed for girls and women in the nineteenth century.
In The Woman Reader, Kate Flint shows how girls’ and women’s reading, especially of material deemed frivolous or escapist, was a subject of great public concern and debate. Any novel reading that might detract from a woman’s role as a wife and mother within the home was perceived as a threat to the very foundation of society.
Likewise, women authors challenged expectations of women’s domestic and maternal roles. Budding writer Charlotte Brontë received the following comments in a discouraging letter from English poet laureate Robert Southey in 1837:
Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.
Jane Austen published her first novel in 1811. The four novels that were published during her lifetime appeared anonymously, as were those of many early women writers. Although women who wrote educative or didactic fiction, such as Maria Edgeworth, or less respected genres such as the Gothic romance, as in the case of Ann Radcliffe, were not similarly compelled to hide their gender or identity.
From the twentieth century onwards, women novelists’ use of pseudonyms seems to have acquired a more focused purpose: to avoid pre-judgement of women’s fiction as inferior. V.S. Naipaul has embarrassingly said that no woman writer is his equal and that “within a paragraph or two” he knows whether a work “is by a woman or not”.
Naipaul might have found a friend in Henry Lawson. Lawson read Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career in manuscript form and wrote to Franklin eagerly: “Will you write and tell me what you really are? Man or woman?” When the novel was published in 1901, in his preface Lawson rewrites history: “I hadn’t read three pages when I saw what you will no doubt see at once — that the story had been written by a girl”.
The most enduring fictions of literary history hold that a woman writer’s voice is readily detectable and less perceptive and sophisticated than a man’s. These ideas buttress more recent views about narratives by women about girls’ and women being of interest to female readers only.
The use of a male pseudonym or ambiguous initials removes the gender prejudiced lens through which much women’s fiction is viewed. Yet it does not help to transform that prejudice as it is exhibited in literary magazines and reader “preferences” in certain genres of fiction.
As the majority of books are read by women, there must be a way for us to influence the publishing industry and reviewing practices that shape literary culture.
Michelle Smith is Research fellow in English Literature at Deakin University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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