I think On Scams and Predatory Behavior in the Writing World with Victoria Strauss needs to be read in full by all of us trying to get published.
From Writer's Digest came The Journey of My Debut Novel by Tara Dorabji:
My book finally found its home with Simon & Schuster after winning their Books Like Us First Novel contest, landing a book deal and an agent. After over a decade of research and revisions, Call Her Freedom is being released the same week as MLK Day and Inauguration Day, amidst the rising authoritarianism here and around the world.
Despite imprisonment of journalists and storytellers in Kashmir and other occupied zones, storytelling remains an act of resistance, as does love and human kindness. Art not only reflects the brutality of our world, but it allows us to envision worlds where our interdependence and care for one and other are centered—breathing them into reality.
Sounds like good work was done for a good cause.
Also from Writer's Digest, the interview Jillian Meadows: All Writers Have Bad Days. A good reminder for me, maybe it will be for you, too.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I think the biggest surprise was the fact that I was able to complete a book at all! There were many days where finishing felt like an overwhelming task, and I didn’t know if I’d make it. But struggling through those bad moments and coming back to my computer the next day and then the next slowly built up my confidence in myself. And that was the most rewarding feeling.
I do wish the sound quality were better on the video Translated Fiction 16 Book Recommendations, but I heard many that I would recommend - and many I had not heard of (which may be more of a recommendation):
If you are a Dorthy Parker fan, then this video interview about Parker in Hollywood should be of interest :
Want to know about American Romanticism and Transcendentalism? This video might be a good start, it is certainly interesting in its presentation!
For me, it points out how much work I need to do for "Chasing Ashes".
Ray Bradbury interviewed about Fahrenheit 451:
Vladimir Nabokov discusses "Lolita" part 1 of 2:
The video harkens back to a world that was going out as I came into the world.
I read Lolita while in prison. It annoyed me - a world and a character that makes no sense to me. Yet, it was brilliantly written. After finishing Reading Lolita in Tehran, I had a less jaundiced view of the novel. If you have not read Lolita, I suggest watching the video above and then going to Reading Lolita in Tehran before starting on Nabokov's novel.
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I have read only two of Yukio Mishima's novels, and that was while in prison. I knew of Mishima when I was a teenager due to how he died - it even made the news in Indiana. Although I started reading Japanese writers with Kenzaburō Ōe, and probably prefer Ōe, there is a power to Mishima that is impossible to ignore. Haruki Murakami's surrealism may play better with our Western minds, but Mishima's strangeness may be harder to swallow for its spirituality. This year is Mishima's centenary, which I did not know until today, when I read Christopher Harding's The triumph and tragedy of Yukio Mishima (Englesberg Ideas).
Though Mishima was partially eclipsed in later years by authors like Haruki Murakami, particularly outside Japan, in his centenary year he speaks to a basic unease that many Japanese would still recognise. Japanese leaders are struggling to stabilise the economy and to give an account of what their country stands for beyond the peace and prosperity that was once taken for granted but which is now threatened by China’s rise and Japan’s rapidly ageing and shrinking population. Mishima’s dream of a nation imbued with purpose and passion, seeded by childhood trips to watch kabuki plays with his grandmother, feels as compelling – and perhaps as disturbing – as ever.
Notes From the Editor’s Desk: January 2025
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The truth about fiction by Hannah H Kim (Aeon) takes a dive into philosophy, Chinese as well as the usual Western, which came at the right time for me, and I advise you take the same dive.
Why did the county care to recategorise a children’s book, especially since the committee didn’t include a single librarian? To call the book ‘fiction’, in this case, was to call it ‘untrue’, a decision undergirded by the desire to resist unflattering portrayals of American history. The power to label books as ‘fiction’ or ‘nonfiction’ is to demarcate what is real and what isn’t, what is true and what is false, what is imagined and what is actual.
***
Why did the county care to recategorise a children’s book, especially since the committee didn’t include a single librarian? To call the book ‘fiction’, in this case, was to call it ‘untrue’, a decision undergirded by the desire to resist unflattering portrayals of American history. The power to label books as ‘fiction’ or ‘nonfiction’ is to demarcate what is real and what isn’t, what is true and what is false, what is imagined and what is actual.
But fiction is different from lies – and hence, labelling Coombs’s book as ‘fiction’, and not ‘bad nonfiction that ought to be pulled from the shelves’, betrays the committee’s intention. They didn’t care about the status of the contents of the book so much as they cared about the contents of what we take to be real and true. All that mattered to them was that it not be considered nonfiction – and if it’s not nonfiction, it must be fiction, right?
This raises a fascinating and surprisingly thorny philosophical question: what distinguishes fiction from nonfiction? What is fiction in the first place? Despite common usage, philosophers agree that we can’t equate ‘fiction’ with ‘false content’. On the one hand, the inclusion of falsity isn’t enough to render a work fiction. Books with false statements – old science textbooks with disproven theories, history books with mistakes, memoirs with contradictory events – don’t change their status from nonfiction to fiction when false content is identified. Instead, we judge them to be bad nonfiction. On the other hand, not all fictions include false content since there are fictions that include only actual events, such as Helen Garner’s The Spare Room (2008), a factual account of the author’s experience of nursing a dying friend. And the fact that historical fiction exists – that a fictional work can be consistent with all known facts, yet still be considered fiction – shows that fiction doesn’t need to include (known) falsity.
What matters for nonfiction is that its content is believed to be true. A creative writing friend of mine told me that writing what one sincerely believes to be true after due diligence in research and introspection is enough to render some content ‘nonfiction’. This means that, strictly speaking, nonfiction can be false but remain ‘nonfiction’ as long as we think it’s true.
***
What grounds the nonfiction/fiction distinction is not that the former is based on truth or facticity per se, but that the former contributes to how we see the world insofar as it organises the kinds of truths that we care enough about to read and write about. The Montgomery County Commission didn’t initiate a systematic audit of all nonfiction books that might include false or misleading information. Rather, they targeted a book whose claim to truth practically interfered with their understandings of themselves and the country.
Our thoughts about reality and our thoughts about fiction go hand in hand. Of course, sometimes we care about fiction because it lets us entertain a world that is different from ours. But even when it is fiction’s departure from the real world that makes it worthwhile, the departure is measured against the background of the real world. In fact, not only the content of fiction – what we’re able or willing to call ‘fiction’ – but also the nature of fiction – what fiction is – depends on how we think about the real world. A comparative study of the way ‘fiction’ as a concept develops across cultures shows that, whenever a group of people think of reality differently, the nature and function of fiction is understood differently as well. We can observe this by contrasting analytic philosophy of fiction with classical Chinese conceptions of fiction.
***
In cultures that don’t take on board a strong reality/appearance distinction, however, ‘fiction’ isn’t understood alongside ‘pretence’ and ‘imagination’ in contrast to ‘the real’. Just like their ancient Greek counterparts, Chinese metaphysicians sought to understand what the world is like and what explains the way the world is. But while the ancient Greeks posited an unchanging ultimate reality that transcends mere phenomena, the ancient Chinese believed that what is ultimate is immanent in the world, and that the Dao (道), the source of all things in the world, is itself constantly changing. This change-forward metaphysics led to a theory of fiction that didn’t contrast fiction against a stable, ‘real’ counterpart.
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The Chinese word for ‘fiction’ (xiaoshuo, 小說) literally means ‘small talk’ or ‘small sayings’. Chinese literary culture had a rigid hierarchy of discourses, with Confucian classics and official histories at the top of the pyramid, while imaginative narrative texts like xiaoshuo were placed at the bottom. However, it would be misleading to say that xiaoshuo was denigrated because it was imaginative, whereas philosophical texts and histories were elevated because they were ‘real’. Since Chinese metaphysics didn’t posit a fixed, transcendent reality, reality was understood to be an ever-changing process, and so the categories themselves couldn’t be based on inherent, necessary or fixed essences but on functions and behavioural tendencies. The difference between discourses labelled ‘xiaoshuo’ and ‘great learning’ (Confucian classics and histories) wasn’t that one is unreal or imagined while the other is real. All discourse was understood as an account of the world, and the difference between ‘small talk’ and ‘great learning’ was the extent to which it was adopted to organise how people lived. Xiaoshuo wasn’t understood in contrast to reality, and it wasn’t metaphysically second class. It was at the bottom of the discourse hierarchy because its function wasn’t as grand as the classics’.
***
So, instead of asking how fiction might be defined (ahistorically, logically), we should ask what work we want fiction to do. Our questions about fiction come from identifiable metaphysical starting points. If we find ourselves continuing to crave a definition of fiction, we should also ask what need it will meet: what theory of fiction do we require to solve current problems?
***
One of the most interesting – and promising – features of fiction is that it creates a space between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’. Good fiction tends to destabilise such dichotomous ways of approaching the world through thoughtful content, innovative form, or self-referentiality. Is there some special work we can expect of fiction, such that we can rethink its nature and function towards that end? The fiction/nonfiction distinction is one worth keeping, and philosophers of fiction continue to have their work cut out for themselves.
I omitted much to get to the point of what has gotten me thinking about writing that does not care to mimic reality. "Chasing Ashes" is very much on my mind, even while I try to muster enough energy for mundane legal research. When I first conceived of "Chasing Ashes", I had in mind several ideas about life and America. I wanted to drag in all that was in mind - both of history and of fiction - that made me and made America. Reading this makes me think I may be onto something - even if I cannot properly execute the thing. I think we should give the Chinese ideas on fiction serious thought. Read the full essay and see what you think.
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I read Constance Roisin's A Self-Made Myth: How Edith Wharton Rewrote Her Own Childhood (LitHub) as another story of the difference between a writer's life and their fiction.
I read Salman Rushdie with a great deal of amusement, but also with an eye to what he does with the novel. This seems to be rooted in his dividing his time (or is it his mind?) between India and England. I wonder if the same thing can be duplicated here.
Literary Yard published Ramlal Agarwal's Indo-English Novels before and after Rushdie.
In its early stages, Indian writing in English met disapproval and disbelief. It was argued that no alien language could express the Indian ethos. As such, Madhusudan Datta and Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the earliest practitioners of Indian writing in English, gave up their pursuit and turned to their mother tongue. Some Indian writers doggedly used English in their creative endeavours, but they were few and far between.
For me, can we in the Midwest use the same forms and tropes as they do in New York, or the West Coast, or the South?
We are not the close-quarter ethnic meshing of New York; we are not the future promised by California; nor are we the residue of a Lost Cause to keep human beings enslaved clashing with American idealism that is the South.
We are the people who stayed rather than go further west; we are the people who filled and led the Union armies; we have been here so long we have lost the Old World ties that lie behind our names.
We have a tradition of sentimenal fiction. We are also the home of Ernest Hemingway, Nelson Algren, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, and Toni Morrsion.
I will finish with this from Agarwal's essay:
R. K. Narayan’s Guide was published in 1955. Graham Greene considered Narayan not only an inimitable and charming interpreter of the Indian way of life but also a great contributor to English literature. In the Guide, Narayan charts the life of an ordinary person from childhood to death. His life takes unexpected turns and twists, from being a tea vendor at Malgudi Railway Station to Railway Raju, to a famous guide, to a lover, to a criminal, and to a saint. He ascribes it to fate. Narayan gives an authentic picture of life in villages. He describes how his characters form relationships, excitement, ambitions, and failures.
Through these tales, he tells his readers about innocent people and how they believe in fate and are driven by faith. He presents the most characteristic traits of the Indian ethos. But V.S. Naipaul thinks otherwise. He says, “For all their delight in human oddity, Narayan’s novels are less the purely social comedies I had once taken them to be than religious fables and intensely Hindu.” Yes, they are not social comedies for Indian life. It is not restricted to comedies and tragedies. They are specific and transcend the forms and concepts of art forms of the West. Yes, they are intensely Hindu. But that is what India is.
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