Readings for March 12, 2023

I read a lot this week, and I had a lot to say about it—too much for one newsletter. So I’ll save some of it for another edition, maybe a bonus edition next week.

I don't remember why I was talking to someone about the movement from blasphemous swearing (goddamn) to scatological (fuck it) in English, but I was. And here's our answer, in an article in History Today that I saved last August and finally got around to reading: it happened during early modern English, Tudor times. Shakespeare’s day.

For readers of this newsletter who are also writers, I wrote a short guide to pickup up the last third of your novel when it starts to drag. You know, the part that you just want to get through so you can write the big finish. It’s in the Indigo Editing newsletter this month.

One of the most common questions new authors ask is: How long should my book be? And the answer, which is equally true and unsatisfying both, is that it should be the length it needs to be to tell the story.

Genre novels, like science fiction and fantasy, tend to be doorstoppers because they have to build a complete world and explain the magic, the technology, or both. Genre fiction has a lot of room in its heart for shorter fiction too; see what Tor and Uncanny Magazine are up to.

Literary fiction can be any length, though there tend to be trends. Sometimes we’re in a big novel season, and sometimes we’re in a more slender volume era. It doesn’t help that categorizing book length is imprecise, to put it mildly. When does a short novel become a novella? And what is a novelette? At what word count does a short story jump up a category? It's wizardry, really. But shorter literary novels are on the rise and getting prize nods.

John Sturgis writes that he’s ready for the slim-volume era for The Spectator.

Teen Vogue continues to have some of the highest-quality reporting on some of the most interesting facets of American culture. This interview with Kinsale Drake, founder of the NDN Girls Book Club, shines a light on a corner of the literary world that could use some support. Speaking of which, if you’d like to support the club, they would be glad to receive donations, and there will be a merch drop later this month.

Last year, I took a book review course as part of my master’s program, and I wrote a review of Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald that included some autobiographical vignettes to connect my life to the literature. My review was well regarded by my fellow students and professor, Maggie Doherty, which I appreciated. Then Dr. Doherty asked us to discuss those autobiographical elements and their place in a review—not the events I wrote about, but the fact of including the reviewer’s life at all. She particularly asked us to consider what readers expect writers to share, particularly when those writers are women, and it now strikes me as even more particularly when those writers are people of color or trans women. Some people are asked, or expected, to explain themselves more than other people.

I have thought about this a lot over the past year. How much do I want to share in my writing? How much am I expected to share? How much do I want to indulge the reader’s wish to know more about me, and how much do I want to thwart it? How much do I want to “be seen,” and how much is none of your beeswax?

These thoughts also occur to musician Kaia Kater. In this interview with The Creative Independent, she talks about the realization that she’s not required to share every song on stage immediately. She talks about her need to write and record something in order to help herself process an emotion or a situation and her ability to decide whether to perform that exploration for a live audience.

Also, she’s an amazing banjo player.

Charlie Jane Anders is a wonderful writer and, from what I can tell, a wonderful human and teller of dad jokes on social media. She also wrote a book of inspiration and storytelling craft, Never Say You Can’t Survive. Tor.com published it online as she wrote it beginning in 2020, and then published the whole book. Here is Anders quoting Ursula Le Guin paraphrasing Tolkien, which is a hell of a lineage for an idea:

In her 1979 essay collection The Language of the Night, Ursula K. Le Guin paraphrases Tolkien thusly: “If a soldier is captured by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? …. If we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape and to take as many people with us as we can.”

And here is Anders herself expressing an idea I agree with, with all my heart:

The issue of representation in fiction is not just some academic question of fairness, it is a matter of survival.