The Writers Coin

Here are some of the more interesting things I’ve been reading recently:

• I’ve always wondered what the deal was with buying dividend stocks and when you “qualified” for the dividend based. Can you buy it the day before the dividend is distributed and then sell it afterwards? Not quite, but this post by Stockerblog explains it all in great detail.
• I’ve railed on the fiction in The New Yorker before, but the story I’m reading right now is pretty good. It’s from the April 21 issue (I’m a little behind) and the story just oozes genuineosity. Yeah I’m making stuff up now too. There are so many stereotypes and clichés that this could’ve fallen into and didn’t that it kept me reading and reading until I wondered to myself why I was so into it when the things happening in the story weren’t all that exciting (not entirely a bad thing). So be sure to check it out and if you spot your own “good story” in an issue of The New Yorker, please share!
• Frugal Dad is trying to lose weight and so he’ll try to go an entire month drinking nothing but water! Good luck FG, I sense hilarity ensuing…

And while I’m on the subject of reading, yesterday on the bus I saw a guy reading a Michael Connelly bestseller and the dude was really into it. I turned to my issue of The New Yorker and was a little let down (at least the story turned out to be good). But it got me thinking about Stephen King and how he stresses the huge amount of volume he thinks writers need to (or should) read. But not just quantity, variety as well.

I have never read a “paperback bestseller.” There, I admit it. Maybe I’m being a snob (OK, I am) but there’s still a part of me that doesn’t see it as “serious” literature. But if I really want to get published and get some semblance of a readership going, I need to read stuff that sells. I may wind up liking the story and I may not, but I’ll be able to glean a few things about why these books do so well with the masses. I can take the things that work (and that fit who I am and what I like to write) and incorporate them into my own fiction. So I decided, right there on the bus, to grab a mega-bestseller and read it all the way through — no quitting.
So as I’ve done before, I’m coming to my readers for an answer. What’s the best book you’ve ever read that’s sold like gangbusters?

I need names people and I’m not afraid to do whatever it takes to get them. Email me or stick it in the comments.

About six months ago I got a thing in the mail saying I could get a full year of The New Yorker for around $19, which I thought was great and felt I couldn’t turn it down. One reason was my newfound theory of knowing where you write, the other being that it would expose me to different subjects I may not find out about on my own (the impetus behind Outside the Box), like the street graffiti artist who sells his work for hundreds of thousands of dollars, Banksy.

So my main interest was reading the fiction in the magazine—usually a short story (sometimes not so short) or a novel excerpt from a distinguished author. Having a story show in The New Yorker is the equivalent to “making it” for a writer. Getting an agent and selling more work is a formality after that. So it’s also a great place to “break through.”

For the most part though, it has been a disappointment.

Most of the stories are stuffy and pretentious. A select few are entertaining—it makes you wonder why some of them are chosen. After reading so many of the stories they put in there, the image I have of their fiction editor is of someone intensely worried of what his/her friends are going to think of the story he/she has chosen. So to make up for that, he/she tries to confuse them and maybe hope that his/her friends feel it is over their heads, eventually praising the editor for picking out “such exquisite writing.”

Some people call this “a writer’s story.” I call it pretentious, boring, and steering completely away from the purpose of fiction, which is to—at some level—entertain.

So it was a nice surprise to read back-to-back excellent stories in the January 7 and 14 issues of the magazine.

• “Outage,” by John Updike is a story of a man who works from home—a typical suburban setup: kids, wife, all of it—when the power goes out and he finds himself in the attractive neighbor’s house. Where he clearly shouldn’t be. It kind of reminded me of Richard Ford’s work in The Sportswriter and Independence Day (I have yet to read the third of the trilogy, Lay of the Land), except something really exciting and out of the box is happening. Updike pushes the boundaries of the typical suburban story and then, when you think he’s going to cross the line, he comes right back. This man knows what he’s doing and it results in a very entertaining, well-written story.
• “Wakefield,” by E.L. Doctorow is a hilarious story of, coincidentally, a man who lives in the suburbs with his wife and family. Oddly, there is a power outage of some kind and he has to walk home from the train station. Then he falls asleep in the garage and wakes up the next day. Knowing his wife will be pissed off wondering where he’s been all night, he decides to delay his re-entry to his house/life. For months. He lives in the garage, he lives in a nature preserve, he becomes friends with the neighbor’s autistic patients, all the while keeping an eye on his wife and kids, who presume he’s died or run off or some combination of the two. It’s so odd and believable (we can all relate, trust me) that it keeps you turning the pages. The whole time, though, I was wondering how he was going to end it. When I got there, I thought it was a brilliant way of doing it and wondered how he got there. Did he fight the urge to end it in a different way? Was this the way he always thought of ending it? This is what I love about writing fiction: these kinds of decisions. The magic of it. It’s what I was standing up for when I wrote about Will Leitch’s article in Publisher’s Weekly.

So I was pleasantly surprised and reinvigorated with reading the Fiction in my weekly magazine. These are the kinds of stories you go back to when you’re writing your own stories. When you need answers or a little help.

Maybe I should start writing about living in suburbia with my family and then the power goes out. Oh wait, I have none of those things yet.

Update: There is some hope — I’ve found another story or two since this post that is pretty good.

Here is a really great article from an issue that’s a few weeks old. It’s about how using checklists in emergency rooms helps save lives.

The first thing I thought of after reading it was, “How can I use this at work to make my/our job more efficient/better?”

Check it out because I think anyone in any profession can find a way to put this to use. Or even in your own life, outside your job.

I’m intrigued by Obama—he may or may not be the president I’ve been wanting for a long time. Maybe.

But even if he isn’t, if this whole honesty and change bit of his is just that, a bit, then at least he’s the first one to really make me believe it.

In the piece, the crux of the race between Hillary Clinton and Obama is boiled down:

“This is precisely the argument that I have with Senator Clinton,” Obama said. “This is what I mean by a textbook campaign. I think there is a conventional wisdom, and this is part of the reason I think Senator Clinton’s campaign has up until now been so well received by the national press.” In other words, political journalists have rewarded the Clinton campaign for its tactical proficiency rather than criticized it for policy inconsistencies.

This idea that the media is giving Clinton glowing reviews because of the way she’s playing the game is interesting. And that Obama, a skilled politician himself (as the article goes on to assert), is playing this card is interesting in a meta sort of way. It reeks of honesty and transparency, which is the whole idea. Now we’ll just have to see if it’s enough to unseat Hillary.

PS I know this is politics but that paragraph of the piece was so interesting I had to post it here and discuss it a little bit.