All right, guys. It looks like the 5th Annual Top 10 Blogs for Writers Contest is being held for this year. Folks are over there nominating their favorite blogs written specifically for the in-depth edification and entertainment, the support and encouragement, the comedy and companionship, the sheer on-going benefit of our vast, shifting, complex, sometimes rueful, often bamboozled, always intriguing online community of writers.

Actually, I made all that stuff up. But they really are looking for nominations.

Boy, howdy, you get to vote! Who’s your favorite blogger for writers?

(You do realize there’s a particular answer I’m looking for here.)

(And, yes, you do have to go vote on their site, not mine.)

This is a big day for me. I feel, in a certain way, I have finally arrived as a blogger. You see, last week I received the following email:

Hi,

Nathalie here from Bozo Media and I wanted to drop you a line and just compliment your site http://victoriamixon.com/. Nice layout, good info, good resources. I was looking around at a few different sites relevant to Washing Machines. I definitely thought yours was one of the best. That being said, I also noticed you guys have some great content related to them.

I currently work for a company that maintains website that offers best deals and information about Washing Machines – http://www.wtfwashingmachines/fakeurl. We are a nationally recognized, reliable source for Washing Machines and I was wondering if you’d be interested in giving us an opportunity to write guest post relevant to your site. I can assure you that our article will be very informative to your visitors and also drive more traffic. I would be very pleased if you allow me to add a link to our site in the article.

Looking forward for your reply.

Regards,
Nathalie.

Wow. Nathalie. I just don’t know what to say.

Because the truth is teaching the craft of fiction is exactly like teaching people to use Washing Machines.

But how did you know?

Nathalie, you are my new best friend. There is simply nothing I love more than sinking my teeth into a good, rambling post about the essential link between great fiction and Washing Machines. So I will save you the trouble of writing it for me. That’s how much I like you, Nathalie. I’ll write that darn guest post for you myself.

This is the honest, unvarnished truth, people: modern contemporary American fiction is, from many angles, as Dirty as Hell. And it’s in desperate need of a really good Cosmic Fictional Washing Machine.

My job is to teach you people how to clean up your fiction. Go ahead—write it, thrash around in it, have a fabulous time, make a big old fun muddy mess. Get it all over yourself. You don’t need me for that part. Anyone can do it, and hundreds of thousands of people do. It’s a blast!

Then go back and write your story again more honestly. Go down through the layers of superficial uniform dirt that get all over everybody when they truly relish a big, hefty, messy, magnificent first few drafts. Find underneath those top layers the story that’s really there. Find the real people living inside the characters, of whom you have barely scratched the surface. Find the details of their lives that make them three-dimensional in exactly the way your reader’s life is three-dimensional. Find the universal themes of comedy and tragedy out of which they’re been created and the complex interweaving of those elements that your characters must navigate on their way to enlightenment. Uncover the fabric of your characters’ unique lives that your reader needs to touch in order to reach the heart of what you’re doing.

Then write it again even more honestly. And write it again. And again. And again. . .

Every time you let your manuscript go cold and take it out later for another revision, you’re sending it through the Cosmic Fictional Washing Machine. Every time, the structure of your story gets a little clearer, the humanity of your characters gets a little truer, your reason for writing this novel gets a little more significant, to you, and to your readers too. Eventually—if you work hard enough, with enough dedication and soul-searing honesty, for long enough—it will be beautiful, vivid, shining. Clean. It will be a new definition of meaning.

And you will be proud to wear it around in public for the rest of your life.

But if you rush out and insist it be published while it’s still even sort of dirty (much less as dirty as it is when you first stand up out of rolling around in all that mud—and, yes, you can get stuff published in that condition, it happens all the time) then, like the portrait of Dorian Gray, the dirt will become ever more and more obvious as the years go by and your craft improves.

As your understanding of the meaning of life deepens. As your reasons for living make more and more sense in the overall universal scheme of things, as seen through your own unique, vivid, unforgettable lens.

Don’t do this to yourselves, folks. I say this with all editorial love for the writers in you and compassion for what writing your novels means to you. I know. I write novels too.

Develop a sincere, lifelong, humble respect for the Great Cosmic Fictional Washing Machine.

I picked this up on the Bloggess today, and although she’s applying it to bloggers, frankly I think it completely explains writers.

COMPLETELY.

Why do we do what we do?

You know why? We’re not motivated by the money. No, we are not. It’s not there. Even if a writer makes, say, $5k for a book, cranking them out at the amazing speed of two books a year, that’s, um, $10k a year. You can be homeless on that.

And we are not motivated by the fame. No. It’s not there, either. We all go to blogging now for our fame (even though it’s not there EITHER). Jenny Lawson, aka the Bloggess, gets 300k visits a month on her blog and has been voted one of the top 9,000 bloggers in the world. Top nine thousand. Like being people’s 8,999th favorite is a good thing! (I don’t mean to disparage her, either—I love Jenny’s blog.)

We writers work in the creative, not the labor, industry, and that means we are motivated by the autonomy, the mastery, and the sense of bringing something into the world that makes it a better place to be. Because we’re all here together in this world, aren’t we? And the books that others have brought into it have enriched and gladdened our lives, and we want to be a part of that, a part of that community, a part of that greater family known as Writerhood. We want to be in this with each other.

And we are all in this together.

Thanks for pointing this out, Jenny! And also the guy with the pen! And everyone at Ohio U! (I LOVE the guy in the staff uniform.)

I believe that writers who have the sparkle suspect, but never know for certain, that they have it. In fact they’re more likely to have doubts about their work, for the simple reason that they experience glimpses of a perfection that no human pen can ever achieve.
—Jane Steen

This is fabulous material, folks. I love what you’re doing here.

Lady Glamis, please do not apologize for “babbling.” I’d be thrilled to see more of this from you.

Jeffrey, you’re hilarious. I know you’re working your butt off at your craft, and it shows in the stuff you send me.

Kathryn, I’m sorry about “glower.” It’s like “interpolate,” one of those weird, complex words writers used to be able to use with a liberal hand. Unfortunately, certain ones just got beat to death and have had to be retired, and even the ones that didn’t get beat to death became exceptional enough that they began drawing attention to themselves and also had to be retired. There’s a great deal of this kind of thing going on in the evolution of literature, reflecting in part the increasing invisibility of the writer—an improvement—and in part the simplification of the common reader’s vocabulary.

And Jane, you’re like a fountain of clarity. What a wonderful list of standards you have.

I’ve also received a couple of responses on Twitter:

Howard Freeman, @meadonmanhattan, offers the four qualities honest, succinct, funny, engaging, although he says he could live without succinct and funny so long as it’s honest and engaging.

While Debra Schubert, @dlschubert, says she just hopes there are periods at the ends of the sentences. Minimalist, indeed.

Now, one thing that’s come up is the possibility that great writing can be created through breaking all of our standards to smithereens. And, as Flannery O’Connor said, “You can do anything in fiction that you can get away with. Unfortunately, nobody’s ever gotten away with much.”

Jack Kerouac complained mightily in the Paris Review that his editor at Viking, the legendary Malcolm Cowley, insisted on putting commas into On the Road. Considering they spent an entire month on the manuscript—some of which was typed on sheets of paper taped together and some on other pieces of manuscript Kerouac had written in the San Francisco attic of Carolyn and Neal Cassady—I’m guessing there was more to it than wrangling over commas. Kerouac wanted to break the basic rules. Would he have succeeded? Well, he did produce a plethora of novels after On the Road, none of which I find as clear and compelling as the first one. I don’t know how much his editor had to do with how the others turned out, but considering that authors are commonly indulged, whether it’s a good idea or not, once they’ve made a name and a pile for their publisher, I’m going to guess On the Road got more editorial attention than the later works. I think it shows.

But the question is now: what’s the definition of bad writing? If you can break all the rules and still do well, can you follow all the rules and still produce CRAP?

How would you go about doing this, folks. . .if you were so inclined?

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but is it mightier than apathy?
—Kathryn Estrada

You guys. You’re like balm to the editorial soul.

So let’s take this one step further. If good writing is writing that will last, what specifically does that mean?

We know from our discussion of the PW best seller list that a talented writer like Stephen King can still be a blockbuster. We also know that a writer who produces flabby characterization, cliche action and description, and shallow motivation like Mary Higgins Clark can also be a blockbuster. There is no reliable relationship between money and quality.

Jamie has given us a minimum requirement: “‘technically good’ writing – i.e., grammatically correct, proper punctuation.”

I will agree and add my minimum requirement: free of cliches. That means cliche exposition, in which we’re treated to the writer’s ideas, based upon what passes for “right thinking” in this culture at this moment in time, rather than the product of their senses and deeper understanding of their experience here in this mortal coil. It means cliche description, in which female protagonists are always sweet and girlish and male protagonists always tough and manly, all roses are perfumed, all sunsets are glorious, all hearts thrill, pound, and bleed. It also means cliche actions like “grab,” “flop,” stride,” “throb,” “glower,” and “tearing oneself from an embrace.” More than anything, though, it means cliche thinking, stories that guilelessly follow the lifestyle standards set by the advertising industry, telling us nothing new about humanity and, in fact, reinforcing two-dimensional stereotypes that marginalize the real, messy, contradictory, unattractive, insecure, puzzled humanity that lives inside every individual on this earth. Thinking that encourages prejudice against anything that varies from the status quo.

Thinking that pretends being human isn’t as unspeakably complicated as it really is.

What about the rest of you? What are your standards for good writing? You say, “Good writing is writing that lasts,” but since we can’t time-travel, we don’t know what that means for writing that’s being published today. Do you mean, “Writing my college literature professor would like?”

Or can you put it into more detailed terms?

(P.S. Lori, we live on the Redwood Coast. You know—where the housewives are loggers and the loggers are environmentalists and the environmentalists are freaking bonkers.)

When every author is a marketer, only marketers will be authors.
—me

Here’s my question for you all to start you off philosophizing this week while I’m in San Jose: if no one notices bad writing is bad, is it still bad?

One of the things that’s been bugging me since about 1989 is the decline in the quality of what sells in this country. I know everyone always complains about their society going to the dogs as they get older (even the Ancient Greeks threw up their hands in horror when they thought about what the younger generation was doing to their culture. . .of course, considering modern Greece, they may have had a point). But it’s hard not to notice that in the 1960s you couldn’t have gotten on the best seller list without at least knowing one end of a sentence from the other.

I have been—I must say—deeply mollified to learn in the past year of the buy-out of American publishing companies by European corporations due to the deliberate devaluation of the dollar in the 1980s, as well as the 1979 Thor Tools vs. the IRS tax law that ushered in the era of the automatic destruction of backlists. At least these are facts. They explain something. They explain why publishing stopped, somewhere in the mid-’80s, being about a bunch of neurotic book-lovers like Harold Ross bumbling around New York City in a martini-induced haze and became about squeezing that last drop of blood out of the stone of every single solitary pathetic little published manuscript. They explain urban legends like books turning up on the New York Times best seller list before they’re even written. (Of course, nothing really explains the New York Times best seller list. . .)

Before I learned about these historical events in publishing, I was just one more baffled wordsmyth walking around for years and years demanding of complete strangers on the street, “How come Danielle Steel is a millionaire, and I can’t sell one stupid well-crafted, deeply-considered, carefully-polished poem?” (After 1994, this was actually a lie. I did sell one poem. To The Cream City Review for five bucks, and I still have that check framed, in a box up in the attic, along with the first dollar my husband ever made as a busker.)

It wasn’t just me, either. I knew other writers—amazing writers, dedicated writers, real talent, starving away on hot dogs and Miller and minimum-wage jobs. It never made any sense. Why, in this one industry, would consumers honestly prefer to spend their money on shlock rather than a job done right?

Now that I’m an independent editor, it’s gone from being a source of righteous anger to real grief. The writers I meet through this business, the extraordinary dreamers and crafters and grapplers with language, the thinkers and creators, the hope of literature as we know it. . .and their competition is not only published tripe, but the gazillions and gazillions of wannabes who see writing not as a particular art form special to that handful out there who find weird validation and spiritual sustenance in its pursuit, but as their rightful avenue to riches. The bottleneck. It’s like that scene at the end of The Day of the Locust when the herd of movie-goers stampedes and tramples the weak and innocent under their ruthless heels.

My client (and a dedicated literary powerhouse) Kathryn has said she’s afraid I hold the bar to good writing so high her fingers will be bloody by the time she pulls herself over it.

Do I ask too much of good writing these days? Am I fighting a losing battle here?

If the number of us who recognize bad writing as bad dwindles increasingly every year, as the calm acceptance of what sells in the check-out lines at Target and Wal-Mart grows, does that mean literature itself is not falling into a slump out of which it can be pulled, but that it’s actually evolving into a form no more related to the so-called “good” writing of the twentieth century than salamanders are related to sticky-toed geckos?

What’s the truth of our situation, people? What is good writing these days?

We got home from our San Francisco trip yesterday evening to a notification from Lightning Source that the proof of my book had been shipped overnight UPS.

You all know what that means, don’t you? Yes, you do.

I will not be eating, breathing, or blinking today until the UPS truck pulls up.

We’ve been talking a lot about why we write here lately, what we’re doing in this field, what our dreams are, and one of the things that keeps coming up is the dream of a book. A book in your hands. A book of your own.

I was fifteen years old and living in an attic bedroom under the eaves of a towering Victorian pile with an antique hundred-pound Royal typewriter and a lot of onionskin paper when I wrote my first novel. It was—not surprisingly—the story of a family living a peripatetic life in Europe, which my family had recently done. The children were philosophers. They spent a lot of time talking about whether or not reality exists.

It troubled me deeply that I had no idea what I’d put on the cover.

I was in my early twenties and living in a ramshackled, falling-down wreck of a little house some blocks from the towering Victorian pile when I wrote my second novel. I had just read one of the original Tarzan books and become so incensed at the misogyny that I didn’t care what I wrote so long as my heroine was a swashbuckler and my hero a fainting ninny. That turned into a fantasy novel based on the shape of the letter S.

I pictured either the palace from whence my heroine sallied forth to battle the forces of evil, for the cover, or a map of my imaginary country, surrounded as it was by a magical shield of dancers.

I was about thirty and a student of Computer Science working at a small, notorious coffee shop in San Luis Obispo when I began my third novel. I’d realized our coffee shop wasn’t just run badly, it wasn’t actually being run at all, only kind of shepherded along haphazardly by management that bordered on complete anarchy. And I thought it would be hilarious to write the story of how it was discovered this coffee shop wasn’t even owned by humans, but by a magical creature with a much more earthshaking agenda than simply serving coffee. I also needed a senior project when I transferred from Computer Science to English after I abruptly lost patience with earning a degree (only seven years into it) and decided to get out fast.

I was in Bolinas—a tiny village north of San Francisco—that summer where I found a black & white photograph of a Thai mermaid for sale on a greeting card. It was my protagonist, exactly my protagonist. I knew that photo had to go on my cover.

And I kept that photograph on my desk for the next fourteen years, as I worked my real, paying job in technical writing, published my first book, the non-fiction Children and the Internet with Prentice Hall, then immediately got married, had a baby, and raised him. Somewhere in there I wrote my fourth novel, again deeply troubled because I knew only that I couldn’t photograph the characters, who were far too clear in my mind, for the cover, and I had never developed my skills as an artist far enough to do a proper job of drawing or painting them.

I have always thought of my books as complete works of my own, and there were years in that attic near the wet, green Canadian border when I typed and re-typed the first page of my first chapter of my first novel, experimenting with the graphic design.

I can’t tell you how inanely amateur is the cover that Prentice Hall gave my one book in which I had no say. I don’t even like chartreuse.

Virginia Woolf once sat down in her big armchair at the Hogarth Press and wrote a book on women writing that is still considered ground-breaking: A Room of One’s Own. Of course, Woolf had no children to shut out of this room of her own, much less employers, just a husband with whom she shared the printing press in their basement that published not only her own books but also those of her friends and peers (eventually amassing an author roster of many of the contemporary luminaries of London)—the mathematician Maynard Keynes, art critic Roger Fry, poet T.S. Eliot, New Zealand short story innovator Katherine Mansfield, novelist E.M. Forster, all-round dabbler Vita Sackville-West. . .

What Woolf did not write—and certainly could have—was A Book of One’s Own, an exploration of what it means to an author to hold in their hands not just their own words, but the physical, concrete, imagistic manifestation of their vision. Their book.

What does it mean to you to translate your inner world to the page? Is it truly the words to you—simply the struggle to find the right words? Or is it the entire three-dimensional thing?

Three things happened yesterday.

Well, one of them happened over the weekend plus yesterday. And it was you.

What profound people you all are! I was amazed at how much thought and introspection went into your answers to the question, “Why do you write?”. From The Four Part Land’s “because I want to” (Flannery O’Connor used to say, “Because I’m good at it”), and Lady Glamis’s “beautiful journey,” Jeffrey’s “I love a good story,” Kathryn’s dream of giving “the gift of transport to some kid who might also need it,” all the way to JR Stone’s simple and honest “just to hold a manuscript.” (We’re still waiting for Gretchen.)

• UPDATE: Jacqueline Lichtenberg added a great metaphor of literature as a giant bookstore/cocktail party, writers speaking their pieces and answering each other. And Miriam Pia says her sci fi is “anything but autobiographical” (thank goodness).

We should have been talking about this all along. Why haven’t we been talking about this all along?

Another thing that happened is that my husband and I—finally—sent the files of my book off to Lightning Source late last night. We were pretty much ready Thursday, and I told everyone we were sending it. But then we got involved in preparing for this week in San Francisco and my husband’s conference presentation (he’s also doing a demo tonight—he says he’s going to be bumbling through it because the technology’s so new, but he’s also going to be the belle of the ball because, well, the technology’s so new). . .

It was a four-hour drive in pouring rain yesterday, from the redwood coast down the pastoral Anderson Valley, through the winding hills, onto the freeway and suddenly into modern civilization and bad traffic. We stopped in Santa Rosa to pick up a load of books from O’Reilly Publishing to take to the Linux conference as a favor to Tim O’Reilly. We yelled (as we always do) passing under the red arches supporting the long red cables of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Well, what with one thing and another, it was after we put our son to bed in our hotel room last night that we finally sat down and did a final look through my entire book document. We found a million problems that needed to be fixed and, in a fever of anxiety, fixed them. Then we uploaded the document and cover to the Lightning Source site. (It took a good twenty minutes to upload that cover, folks—that’s a lot of color.)

I had just written to my mother about it last week (yeah, I told her we were sending it in Thursday), saying, “I have always, ever since I was typing on that old Royal in my bedroom under the eaves back on Elizabeth Street, thought I’d publish my books this way—designing them all myself. I guess I just procrastinated until the technology caught up with me.” I didn’t mention it to her (because, you know, she already knew), but we lived on Elizabeth Street in the late 1970s. I was a teen.

Thirty years is a long time to wait for technology to catch up with your dreams. But you know what?

It was worth it.

Traditional publishers don’t let the author have much, if any, input into the cover or design of their own book. I’ve been tweeking that cover, moving a word a fraction of an inch this way and a fraction of an inch that way, fussing with the font size and black bands and La Favorita Press logo, even re-shooting the main cover photo Friday night with a few crucial items added, like my grandfather’s old black phone from 1950, a miniature wooden dresser my other grandfather built for my mother when my parents were first married, and a bird made of horn that my grandmother bought in Mexico in the early 1960s—my mother mailed me the original photo of La Favorita, with its old thumbtack hole and fly spots from hanging on the wall at La Joya, and you can see it now on the bookshelf.

That cover is exactly what I want it to be. The interior design is exactly what I want it to be. The words. . .well, I know for a fact I’m going to find stuff that makes me groan and hold my head once it’s all a done deal, but that’s the same way it is with traditional books, too, and their editor gets to decide when you’re done polishing it, not you. With the added insult to injury that you didn’t even get to design the cover.

Just to hold my manuscript. And lay my book on top of it.

And the third thing that happened just happened yesterday, when my son and I were walking around San Francisco’s Japantown. He’s an origami artist and has been for years, so we went into the Paper Tree origami store, on the plaza across the street from the Peace Pagoda, to see the Primate Display and maybe pick up some origami paper.

And that display just—blew—us—away.

In 2008, Dr. Robert J. Lang issued a world-wide origami challenge: primate, non-human, one sheet of paper. The results that came in were so brilliant, so imaginative, so alive that they were displayed first in New York at the Origami USA Convention, then in Tokyo at Origami House, and now here at this unassuming little store in a corner of San Francisco.

A gorilla with her baby on her back, the tiny knees clinging. A large chimpanzee with the hollows around the eyes tenderly thumbed in. A silverback male with hundreds of folds of shaggy fur. An almost abstract, utterly gleeful orangutan. A chimpanzee with the pale underside of the paper turned up on the face and ears and palms to form an expression of charm and mischief. And a dozen more.

What struck me most powerfully about them was the casual handling of the paper. The lines weren’t always crisp or straight, the fingers were tiny but imperfect, the bodies weren’t posed, but were almost crumpled into mid-action. “This is my paper,” the artist said with their hands. “I’ve put in my years of dedication, learning what it is, what it’s capable and not capable of, exploring its capacity to touch the mind of a stranger from a distance they may never even know. I know my medium. And I can do anything I want with it.”

And I want to say that to you now: it’s your paper, too. It’s your medium.

What do you dream of doing with it?

I’m going to be in San Francisco next week—my husband, Jeff Osier-Mixon, will be presenting at the 2010 Embedded Linux Conference, and I’m taking my son to see the King Tut exhibit for the second time before it goes home to Egypt forever—therefore I won’t be trawling the Internet much for writing and publishing news to discuss.

So let’s get philosophical now.

What are you doing here? Not here on this planet, but here in the fiction-writing community, thinking about your stories and pressing your hand to your heart.

What does the creation of fiction mean to you?

A lot of people write in order to be heard. I get a certain number of manuscripts every year that are the stories of traumatized children, battered partners, abandoned lovers, just-barely-disguised autobiography cast as fiction. It’s not fiction—it’s real. These are real people. They have really been traumatized, in these very real ways. Their pain is not imaginary.

Most of these manuscripts are in early drafts. The need to be heard is far more immediate than the need to create art. These are the cries of the voiceless injured, channeled into the surface elements of what they’ve read in published fiction. The plodding, often frustrating, interminable, years-long work of crafting words into literature is beyond the pressing needs of these writers. They just want to know their story isn’t a secret anymore.

They write to be released, not immersed.

I also regularly receive more of a manuscript than the amount I’ve been hired to work on. The yearning to be read and acknowledged is intensely palpable. The desire to be recognized by someone in “authority,” a professional in the industry, is so huge that it occasionally wins out over the intellectual knowledge that I don’t have time to read everything, I’m approaching these manuscripts as work projects, not casual reads, and my opinion doesn’t help, anyway, if I can’t add significantly to the quality of the manuscript. Will I love it so much I just can’t stop reading, even when my time is up? It doesn’t matter. I’m not an agent. I can’t get anyone published. (Well, myself.)

And sometimes I get manuscripts of amazing talent, from writers who have already dedicated themselves to this craft for years, who have practiced and practiced and practiced with words, who have sketched and drawn and fleshed-out multiple imaginary worlds of varying themes, varying premises, varying purposes. Some of these writers are serious, no-nonsense, and practical. Some are emotional and easy to throw off balance. Some are a little of both.

My favorite manuscripts, though, come from writers who, no matter what their original agenda or skill level, are no more or less than respectful apprentices. They don’t come to this craft only because it offers them something they need, because it’s easy for them, or because they just want that desperately to come to the attention of a professional and an audience.

They might come to it for any and all those reasons, sure. But mostly they do it because they love fiction and, by god, they’re going to learn how to DO it. To do it RIGHT.

They’re my favorites because I know these people will make it, with or without me. I’m no fool—I know I’m an excellent editor, but I also know I’m not the only one in the world. And I know “making it” doesn’t always mean publishing. It doesn’t always mean earning one thin dime, even if you get published. It doesn’t even always mean gaining an audience.

It means creating the literature you long to create, getting down in just the right words the story that only you can tell.

And knowing you did it.

Myself, I’m a sort of platypus of all the above: a writer who absorbed very young just enough excellent literature to miss it when I overlaid it with a blanket of terrible crap in my teens—the type of writer who’s teetered precariously for decades between hiding my nose in the entire history of English literature and daydreams of what I’m going to spend all my loot on. I have not yet written the novels I long to write. But I’ve discovered that all my years of professional writing and editing and the intense analysis of literature have given me this wonderful ability to help others do exactly that.

What kind of writer are you? What do you want from fiction?

Why are you here?

Seth Godin doesn’t think you should write a book thinking you’ll make money off it. He’s written thirteen. I’m guessing he might know.

But you should watch the video he links to, because it is very cool, and everything Taylor says about teachers can be said about writers.

What do YOU make?