Writing The Great Modern Novel?

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #43

     Remember when unknown writers sent their work "over the transom" to editors who read them with an eye toward publication?  No?  That is because, if those days ever existed, they were more than half a century ago.  Today, the watch phrase is "No one publishes strangers."  Best way to introduce yourself to an editor?  Have a following that constitutes a market.  Enter the Publication Paradox:  you can't get a readership without publication and you can't get published without a readership.

     Let's say you want to bring The Great Modern Novel into this world but you have four interrelated and insurmountable obstacles:  you are too lazy--you prefer the expression "motivationally challenged"--to finish writing it, especially in light of the fact that you are too obscure to have a publisher or a readership that might attract one.  Also, you're too modest and shy to promote your work or yourself, before or after publication.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #81

     The situation looks bleak, and isn't helped by knowing that this is the norm, not the exception.  Nevertheless, we may have the solution to all four hurdles you face [if your writing makes the grade].

     Write three chapters of your book:  the first one, the last one, and the one that best advances the main plot.  Post them on a free blog like this, one at a time over a few days or weeks.  Post social media links to it with a nifty title and catch phrase.  In theory, at least, your friends and relatives will read it and post complimentary reviews and a desire to see the completed work.  Their acquaintances might do the same.  Soon, strangers will be commenting.  Once you have generated enough positive feedback an editor is likely to notice [with or without your assistance].  What outlet wouldn't want to produce work that already has a built-in market?¹  (See "#slam dunk" and "#fish in a barrel.")

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #90

     This is an example of wholesale script-teasing.  It differs from "pitching" in that it involves the public [essentially, as a ramp or lever toward publication] and uses cogent excerpts rather than synopses.  It differs from retail script-teasing in that, originally at least, it doesn't involve a final product.  By not withholding anything yet it tends to create less ill-will than sample chapters followed by a purchase option.  It's more like crowd-sourcing than, say, shareware, movie trailers or free cheese samples at the supermarket.  Best of all, it saves labor, printing and distribution costs;  if the work cannot generate enthusiasm from family, friends and strangers (in that order) we needn't bother an editor with it.  The Internet has served as a screener.

     In the near future we will release an experimental wholesale script-tease novel entitled "Love is a Weakness", a tale about a girl who changed the world.²  Watch for it here!

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Footnotes:

¹ - Other than Poetry magazine, of course.

² - Note the provocative title and description.  The poetry connection will be abundantly evident when you read it.

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Utile

utile

adjective
1.  an obsolete word for useful

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     To logicians, the word "utile" is hardly obsolete.  Nor is that a comprehensive definition.  It means, literally, "full of use(s)", as in "frequently employed for a variety of purposes." 

     To wit, if your home were about to go up in flames a fire extinguisher would certainly be useful.  Handy.  If that is its only purpose, though, it isn't considered "utile", even if you battle conflagrations with it every day.

     A Swiss Army knife has a number of various applications.  If it languishes in our drawer all of our lives, though, it isn't considered "utile".  Yes, it is useful, but only in theory.

     Let me cite an albeit crude example.  Suppose you decide to take salads to work for your lunch.  For a dollar or two you buy bowls like the one pictured here.  You mix in your dressing before going to work but the texture is unsatisfactory.  Plan B:  dressing on the side.  This works for a few days but carrying a separate container is inconvenient. 

     Buying salads at a restaurant or cafeteria is expensive and, perhaps, unpalatable.  While walking past a kiosk you spot the apparent solution to your problem:

     Brilliant!  A bowl with an insert at the top for a dressing canister!  All self-contained!  Just to be safe, you buy a few extras.  Toss a plastic fork into your lunch box and you're good to go!

     The satisfaction lasts a week or so.  Perhaps without a concrete, apparent reason, you lose enthusiasm and give up on your veggie lunches.

     What happened?

     Chances are good the hassle of remembering disposable utensils contributed to the loss of enthusiasm.  Maybe one broke, leaving you high and dry.

     As the picture to the right illustrates, something was missing from your kit:  a durable knife and fork that attaches to the box itself (along with a dressing vial).  In short, the two bowls above were insufficiently utile.  Lacking utility.  Inutile.

     If poetry's only purpose were to bore people with attempts to show how clever or profound we are it would be inutile.  Nobody would read it.

     Oh, wait...

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Ta Da!

From "Horizontal Language":

     Japanese separates vowels, employing hiatus where we might use  diphthong or composites.  For example, where we hear one syllable with one vowel sound in "bike" the Japanese will hear three abbreviated sounds:

"Bu-" as in "but" + "eek" as in "...a mouse!" + exhalation, like a schwa

      In Japanese prosody a mora is an "on":  a vowel sound with or without a consonant--but no more than one consonant--sound.  The style of haiku with 5-7-5 "syllables" actually has 5-7-5 "sounds" (or tempi, moras or "on").

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     In the first stanza of "Beans" we learned one way to lend a sense of finality to our endings: 

September came like winter's
ailing child but
left us
viewing Valparaiso's pride. Your face was
always saddest when you smiled. You smiled as every
doctored moment lied. You lie with
orphans' parents, long
reviled.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #13

     See how, of the many two-syllable words, only the last one fits the base [in this case, iambic, de-DUM] rhythm?  This is called [classical] diaeresis.  Today we're going to look at a way of adding finality or its opposite, suspense, to the ends of our thoughts, phrases, sentences, stanzas, poems, paragraphs, jokes, stories, reports or pieces.  World class comedians and Japanese prosodists understand this technique but it is largely unknown or overlooked elsewhere.

     Japanese is a language made up of vowels broken by single consonantal sounds.  A word like "sandman" wouldn't exist in such environs.  Too many consonantal sounds mashed together with no intervening vowel.  Thus, "syllables" in Japanese, when they have a consonant at all, are either vowel-consonant or consonant-vowel, like "ape" versus "pay" in English.  Over the centuries, prosodists have discovered that this order leaves an effect on the listener that spans language and culture.

     Consider these two old punch lines:

1. Diplomacy:

     The ability to tell a person to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.

2. How do you get Arts graduates off your porch?

     Pay them for the pizza.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #1

38

     Audiences will understand and laugh at the first joke immediately.  It comes with an air of arrival, decisiveness, completion.  The impact of the second joke won't be as instantaneous.  It requires a little processing, lending an iota of doubt to the proceedings.  Will your friends get it?  [Yes, but give them a moment.]

     Note that the last word of the first joke is "trip", ending in a close-lipped hard consonant, "p".  The second culminates in "pizza", with an open-mouth vowel sound.  Sudden, brief consonant sounds (e.g. b, d, g in "get", k/q, p, t) are decisive, conclusive, terminal.  This we call "cardus" (adjective:  "cardic").  It is along the lines of adding an exclamation mark.

     Longer vowel sounds (e.g. a, e, i, o, u, y, and consonants producing vowel sounds:  h, w and r) lend a more nuanced sense of uncertainty, implication or progression.  This we call "pembrus" (adjective:  "pembric").  It is similar to using ellipses, minus the melodrama. 

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #178

     Between these two extremes are endings with longer consonantal sounds such as f, j or g as in "judge", m, n, s, v, x, z and the "zh" sound in "pleasure".  These don't produce either effect.

     Because they involve vowel sounds, all pembric endings are open (i.e. produced without closures in the throat or mouth).  Other terminations can be open, involving an exhalation like the "e"/schwa ending "Porsche".  To illustrate, the Japanese word "on" is pronounced like "I own this" as opposed to saying "the letter 'n'", where many speakers will aspirate a short, almost indetectable "uh" after the "n".  In the preambulatory quote from "Horizontal Language" [above] we saw "bike" as an open cardus.  This blunts the cardic effect, as combining consonantal sounds does.  For example, the author of "Beans" used "reviled" to ameliorate the hard stanza break.  Had it ended the poem she might have used another term (e.g. "abhorred", but fitting the rhyme scheme).

     Speaking of DPK, "Heartbreaker" (generally regarded as her worst poem) illustrates pembrus:

Let us speak of rumors first. The pallid truth can wait till later.
Did she kneel before a rosary of priests behind the chapel?
Lenny says she loved a man too many. Freddy White went further,

saying she would writhe to any occasion; she would consummate her
nightly nuptials, leaving each new orchard after biting every apple.
It will rain champagne before I tell you that I loved her.

     The pronoun "her" is made up entirely of vowel sounds:  h, schwa, r.  Despite the warning in the first sentence, the truth comes as a surprise after all of this salacious gossip.  It doesn't end the reading of the story;  it commences the rereading.

     Take a new look at some of your favorite poems and speeches.  See how often and how deftly great poets and orators use pembrus and cardus.

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Substition

From the Urban Dictionary: 

     Substition = "The opposite of a superstition, a substition is the belief in something that is utterly true."

     - Coined by Terry Pratchett in 'Making Money'.

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Earl the Squirrel's Rule #180

     Progress occurs less often by proving theories correct than by proving them wrong. 

     Every creative person I know has been accused of abandoning projects.  The rest of the world regards them as quitters.  Is this anecdotal?  Stereotypical?  Prejudicial?

     No. 

     It is inevitable. 

     Inventors and writers give up on ideas simply because they have so many of them.  People who accomplish every goal likely don't conceive many.  It's not just that they don't set many;  the ones they do concentrate on and bring to fruition were either someone else's idea or among few inspirations they've had.  They can be like a sterile couple bragging that they've never put a baby up for adoption.

     Some might marvel at a planet that has the precise circumstances we need for survival:  oxygen (including water), air pressure, ray filtering, temperature, gravity, meteor protection, etc.  We might ascribe our existence to coincidence or any number of superstitious causes.  The simple fact is that without these cosmic conditions in place we'd never be here to observe them.  Each of these, and every other known variation of them, is a conditio sine qua non.  Once all of them are in place, creation is inevitable.  Once all of these ducks are in a row the presence of life isn't a miracle;  the conspicuous absence of it could be, though.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #50

     Superstition involves forsaking the search long before its destination.  People speak of "the god of the gaps", where any unexplainable noumena or phenomena becomes a theological question.  With time, this abdication of reason occurs earlier and earlier in the process.   Societies end up spending more time rationalizing the explication than looking at the problem.  St. Augustine's comment "I no longer dream of the stars" may have set human science back fifteen centuries.  Similar Luddism struck other burgeoning civilizations.  People prefer immediate answers to verifiable ones.

     Substition is the opposite.  It is not necessarily a commitment to the scientific method;  it may simply be I'm-from-Missouri pragmatism and a practical, empirical insistence on pursuing what works.  It is the disappearing ability to watch 50 years of abject failure and infer that maybe--just maybe--we ain't doin' this right.  Substition is the realization that, like everything else, poetry is a knowledge that requires learning and a skill that requires practice.  As blindingly obvious as this sounds, it directly contradicts the prevailing "wisdom" and is an excellent way to lose friends within the "poetry community" itself.

     Currently, almost all of our resources are tied up in creating more writers in the superstitious belief that art is a miracle produced randomly by ten million primates over 100 years.  Lazy pseudo-intellectuals and teen angsters of all ages, each suffering from delusions of interest, dominate the stages and pages.  Not least among the drawbacks to his approach is the fact that we were hoping for a poem or two in our lifetimes.  Flukes do happen but, even at poetry's height, they don't stand the test of time.  Also, by completely ignoring the audience (tina) such that nobody reads poetry, there won't be anyone to recognize any masterpiece if and when it emerges.   

     It seems we're confused the unavoidability of failure with the inevitability of success.

      It's like the parable of the seeds on rocky soil.  After a while, we aren't really planting crops;  we're feeding birds.  It's not like we prepared the ground.  It's not like we taught our children the definition of poetry, the difference between iambs and trochees, the rudiments of performing or even the fact that its all about audiences, not writers or readers.

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Signed,

Earl Gray, Esquirrel

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Poetry?

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #162

     Because nobody reads poetry it has been forced to rely on private and public funding.  The vast majority of this is concentrated in the hands of The Poetry Foundation, thanks to the Ruth Lilly bequest.  Recently, this largesse has culminated in the publication of this noteworthy effort by Naomi Morris.

     Early returns suggest that we don't have a new Dorothy Parker in our midst.

     A few questions, if I may:

1.  Is this a prudent use of the art form's scant resources?  In what way does this help P/p-oetry?

2.  Is this anyone's best guess as to what Ruth Lilly would have had in mind?

3.  Is this consistent with the original mandate of Poetry Magazine?  Is it "the best English verse which is being written today" and "the highest, most complete expression of truth and beauty"?

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #171

4.  Does this show respect for subscribers?

5.  Does this show respect for contributors, including those bumped to make space for it?

6.  Does this show respect for educators endeavoring to teach much better scansion and technique than Ms. Morris exhibits?

7.  If this is an attempt at humor or shock value, does it show respect for those like Allen Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce who faced prosecution to ensure that subsequent generations, including Ms. Morris, wouldn't?  And who did so without compromising humor or art, as Ms. Morris has?

8.  Is this intended to advance the career of its author?  Are today's academic institutions eager to hire instructors who can't even produce passable doggerel?  Is it or is it not a responsibility of editors to prevent young writers from committing professional suicide?

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #135

9.  Given the paucity of prepubescent subscribers, what was the targeted demographic?  Are there really people who don't understand the difference between this and poetry?

10. Is there a danger of appearing like creepy, cringeworthy crones trying to appear hip?

11. Do people not understand that the lack of an aesthetic is, itself, an aesthetic?

12. Is it time to consider a change in direction?

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Out of sight, out of mind

      Does anything strike you as odd about the picture above?

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #13

      As long as we believe poetry is primarily text, attention to sounds and rhythms will continue to decline, taking interest in verse down with it.  This is neither theory nor prognostication.  It is a tautology;  what we ignore will be ignored.

      As long as we believe poetry is an oral tradition we will overlook its dramatic presence.  Ironically, if poetry did involve disembodied voices it might have thrived with the advent of radio, as music did.  

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #2

     Were Shakespeare able to teach us anything today it would be that poetry is meant to be heard and seen.  Decades ago we saw the demise of text (i.e. Edgar Guest's column) and the disappearance of oral poetry from commercial media, concurrent with the rise of audiovisual verse (e.g. open mic, slam, YouTube).

     The modern trend toward incoherence is yet another reflection of the flight from sight and sound.  Who wants to seem or see a fool reciting nonsense?  In writing for an audience it is not enough to make sense;  we must do so in real time.  Otherwise, listeners can be thrown by one obscure expression, blurring the rest of the poem.  Visuals can facilitate instant recognition.  To wit, imagine reading or hearing this sentence: 

We live in china patterns, whispering words, like glyphs of straw, so strange to loveless minds.

     If we get past how two might "live in china patterns", "words...like glyphs of straw" may seem too "poetic" for many.  However, if we combine it with the photo at the top we create an "Aha!" moment instead:



     Poetry's future is its past.

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A Thoughtless Experiment

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #106

     In "A Thought Experiment" we established how and why poetry outsold prose until the late 19th century.  The trick was for poetry to be rare, other diversions rarer still.  It had to be "the only game in town."  Unless we're going to confine most of our literate population without library or Internet access this strategy won't work.  And, lo and behold, it hasn't.


     When we experience more than half a century of unbroken, abject failure shouldn't we try to do the exact opposite, if only out of curiosity?  I know this sounds like a radical approach but:

1.  Instead of warning people you're about to commit poetry, why not just step up and say what you need to say?

2.  Instead of giving us your complete biography, why not just say what you need to say?

3.  Instead of prefacing a 2-minute poem with an hour-long explanation of the universe, why not just say what you need to say?

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #71

4.  Instead of prepending whole chapters of "The Book of Forms" to describe the brilliance of your composition why not just say what you need to say?

5.  Instead of screaming, stuttering or droning for three solid minutes, why not just say what you need to say?

6.  Instead of wasting time and space on random ruminations, why not just say what you need to say?

7.  Rather than write what you need to write, why not say what you need to say?

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