Literature in the Classroom might be DOA

Literature in the classroom might be DOA. I have my comp students usually blog on current topics. Our conversation is lively before as we discuss the topics and get primed. Then we write and then finally we read back the blogs. This leads to more discussion. Sometimes it does feel like a current events seminar but we really are just formulating ides and hurling thesis  out into the blogosphere. I feel this is what is going to help students most in the year 2014.

So on Halloween I shook it up and brought in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story  A Short Trip Home. It is the only ghost story Scott ever wrote. I read it to one class and  the other class I had read a page for every student. It was a snore. Besides people tripping over words  no one could really follow F Scotts meandering prose. I realized too Fitzgerald was probably never meant to be read out loud. But I think the greater issue is literature in the classroom.

I would argue it doesn't really work. It is too passive and too remote and just not relevant to the digital age where we operate in the present tense. I think for English Majors and serious writers literature is essential to learning craft but to our twenty first century view it feels like taking a spin in a Model T. It just doesn't go fast enough.

So we are back to blogging. Like this.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Publishing that First Novel

Publishing your first novel is like having a baby. It is very very hard. Of course the first novel is an experiment and you have no idea what you are doing. Apologies to all those writers who knew what they were doing because I did  not. I had just graduated college and decided against the advice of parents and friends to take a summer and write a novel. Now I had a Masters in History and a minor in English and I did like to read and I had published a few editorials in the college newspaper. But after that it was all uncharted territory.

So I sat down and began pecking away. I had just learned to type so I thought if I could just write five pages a day I would hit my goal of three hundred and fifty pages by the end of the summer. I had nothing to write about except my youth and so I wrote down things that had happened to me and hastily constructed a diary of my life. By summers end I had my three hundred and fifty pages and gave it to a friend of mine who said it read like a diary. Armed with his critique I moved in with my parents and started sending out the manuscript. Rejection letters rained down.

Meanwhile I began a process of rewriting. Again, I had no idea what I was doing but as I stumbled from apartment to apartment I carried the manuscript along. Years passed and the rejection letters grew friendlier but there were  no takers for a man with a first novel. Five years passed and my novel, (Ripples) still had not found a home. I was probably on my twentieth rewrite and I began to despair that my nights after my sales job were not bearing fruity as I sat and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote.  I had already covered two of my walls with the proverbial rejection letters in my apartment.

I went up on a camping trip up in Michigan and was standing around a camp fire with a friend of my wife who said to me, I hear you are a writer. I muttered something about yes I was a writer. I hear you wrote a novel he continued. I'm a printer, I should publish your book. Magic words. Years of rejection came down to his wife who read my manuscript and liked it. The man published my book a year later, his first book and my first novel. Three years later Bantam bought the rights. That's how I published my first novel.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man is due out in January

When you know you have to leave your writing group

You come into your writing group full of great intentions and are delighted to find kindred souls, people who do this brain cracking work of writing and for a long time you glide along with your fellow scribes. You look forward to reading your work and getting the feedback and now you have a thick skin and are able to ferret out the good criticism from the bad and you all sort of move along at the same pace and then suddenly like high school, you graduate...you get published.

For me it wasn't such a draconian moment. My publisher was tiny and in Chicago. Still, I brought the galleys with me and showed them around and it was then I felt a sea change. Everyone nodded and murmured congratulations and then the group fell into its old routine. I was in the middle of editing the galleys so I hadn't really written anything new and  I read some of the novel.  The comments were muted, some were complimentary, but I felt I had brought a gun to a knife fight.

So I took a few weeks off and worked on my galleys. When I returned I was exhausted and hollow eyed  and only had my novel to read again. I sat and listened to the same works in progress, the bits of poetry, short stories, fragments of novels, then it came to Robert's piece. Robert wrote non fiction for a small magazine in the city. He tried to write fiction but it never worked. For years we had listened to Robert read these words that were like boxcars in a line but there was no ignition. We had all been in a secret conspiracy with Robert, who was a very nice guy, to give him a pass and not really criticize his work.

But this time I felt we were doing Robert a huge disservice. For two years I had been listening to Robert's bad fiction and for two years I had said nothing. He was a lifer. They existed in groups. People who came for the social aspect as much as the writing. And so you laid off. But l had changed. Something about working on those galleys with an editor had pushed me to the next level and I couldn't go back. So when it came to me, I blasphemed. I commented on Roberts work.

We are doing Robert a big disservice here. I looked around at the group. We haven't been honest with him...I paused. We haven't told him his fiction doesn't work. Someone dropped a pen. Someone coughed. I have violated a group taboo. A little man named Pee Wee who was also a lifer piped up. You have no right to judge Roberts fiction that way. I looked at him. Are you kidding? That's why we are here. No, Pee Wee persisted. You are assuming you know good fiction and Robert doesn't and you have no right to tell him he doesn't know how to write fiction.

And it was then I knew I was done. The group that I had been so much a part of for years was suddenly irrelevant. I couldn't stay if  I wanted too. So I sat through the rest of the readings and said nothing. There was no point. I never went back. It was much later I realized my crime wasn't that I had criticized Robert's writing, it was actually something much deeper and much more serious-- I had stumbled into becoming  a professional.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in the fall.

What College Doesn't Teach You About Writing

When I graduated college I sat down and read F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and didn't know half the words. This is after I had received a Masters in History. So I started a notebook of words and it really wasn't until I worked the night shift for Gonella Bread on the West Side of Chicago that I received my literary education. It was there that I discovered the secrets of men and women who smithed words.


I worked in the shipping office of the bakery and took the bread orders all night long. The phones rang and rang and I sat in the flour and filth that is a bakery with the long loaves and flat rolls going around the bakery on a conveyor belt much like a roller coaster track. The Italians who worked there (they were all Italians) didn't speak much English and they all swore and gesticulated in the shipping office drinking their coffee with the red stain on their tennis shoes from the ink on the long loaf bags they held in place with their shoes.

Alonzo the foreman could speak English and he would come in and shake his head. What the frick you doing with all them books Jack? What in the frick you going to do with them? You need a job not books. You need a good job. Forget about them fricking books. And then he would head back out into the bakery. Around three AM the bread orders would die down and the route drivers would start to appear, sleepily drinking their coffee in the office.

It was then I pulled a book from the stack I kept on the corner of my desk. The stack was two feet high and had Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Faulkner, Lowrey, O'Connor, London. I couldn't decide what I wanted to read so I brought it all and for the next three hours I read while the loaves and rolls fell off the conveyor with soft plops to the bakery floor. When the sun started to creep into the loading dock I put on my backpack and loaded up my books.

I went to the conveyor belt and picked off the hot rolls and wrapped them in brown paper and stuffed them in my leather coat. Then I rode my motorcycle home through the cold quiet streets of Chicago with that warm bread keeping me warm. I caught my wife just before she went to work and we had warm bread and coffee. That was my literary education.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man due out in the fall.

A Good Ending Worth a Thousand Words

Ending novels are rough. You roll along for about a hundred thousand words and suddenly you know this thing has to end. The question is of course how to tie up all the ends without looking like you are tying up all the ends. Of course Hemingway and Fitzgerald discussed and used the dying fall which for thier time was fairly radical. The dying fall is you really dont' end the novel but sort of just let it fade away like the protagonist at the end of A Farewell to Arms. He walks home in the rain after Catherine dies and that is it.

But most novels we need some sort of resolution and it is amazing how many novelists can't quite pull it off. I just finished a novel where the story kept me engaged all the way along and then it ended. I didn't know it had ended and turned the page looking for the next chapter. It was blank. I turned back and reread the final paragraph again. This was it. This wasn't a dying fall, the author just couldn't figure how to get out of the story and so the book ended with a whimper.

Its not that the end has to have fireworks, but there should be some circling back to fulfill the promise of the beginning. Maybe not a perfect egg but at least a circle. If the author is lucky then the end will surprise you. The end should reveal something that comes like lightning to the author and the reader. It might be a gentle epiphany or it might be the smoking gun. But the point is there should be satisfaction to reader and writer alike that this is the end and there will be no more. A good ending allows us to close the book and nod, ah good book. And that is what every writer and every reader hopes for.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in the fall.
http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Man-William-Elliott-Hazelgrove/dp/0982139241/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
www.billhazelgrove.com

Writing "literary" fiction and trying to sell

No one starts out trying to write "literary" fiction. I just started out writing and my early novels were lumped into "literary". Literary quickly becomes a code word for books that don't sell. But why you are writing has nothing to do with selling books. Then you get published by a large publisher (Bantam in my case) and get a little money and selling books becomes very important. You always want to sell your books because it is getting out there your view or art for want of a better word. When I was struggling to get published in Chicago in very much the survival mode I just thought about getting published. Period. You just wanted to be heard.

Then you do get published and it turns very quickly into "do anything to sell." This is not why I started writing in the first place, but you are quickly lumped in with every person cashing in on celebrity and star power with a book. Obviously you are clearly outgunned in an arena you never had any business in in the first place. But you continue to publish and do all the things to push your book. In the age of the Internet it is particularly brutal. Writing on the Internet is one way authors promote their books. I decided to write to sound out different ideas and I happen to like the form. But there is a pressure all authors must deal with.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's were not out of print at the time of his death. This is usually why people cannot buy a book, but it was actually worse. Scribner had books they could put in bookstores, there was simply no demand. And if you read the reviews at the time, quite a few people slammed The Great Gatsby. Again literary fiction, even great literary fiction has to struggle to make it's way. As a writer of fiction in the year 2010, I am happy to be read at all. If only by the few. But if I stumbled into a bestseller, a very big if, I would still have to sit down in front of the computer and wrestle with the same old demons. I think that's what being a writer is all about.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man due out in the fall.
http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Man-William-Elliott-Hazelgrove/dp/0982139241/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/