DISCLAIMER: It has come to my attention that I need to point out to some folks that my blog posts are actually about their titles. So you all are hereby forewarned: THIS POST IS ABOUT ITS TITLE.

If you don’t want to read about personality types who will fail as writers, hey, get out now while the gettin’s good. However, if you don’t want to read it but do it anyway, please do not feel compelled to let me know you didn’t like it. You can go write an opposite post on your own blog if it’ll make you feel any better. I promise not to read it.

1. THE WHINY: those who throw hissy fits when writing advice is hard on their tender egos.
   
   These are the people who write back to agents who send them rejection letters. You know how many acceptances those people get from those agents once they’ve let them know they’re not taking rejection lying down? I can tell you in words of one numeral.
   
   Now that the blogosphere has made good on Andy Warhol’s promise, “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” it is simply amazing how many folks are out there cleaning up the Intertubes for democracy, storming around letting other people know how dreadfully unhappy they are with the way they’re doing things. This is their use of their perceived 15 minutes. Unfortunately, they don’t stick to 15 minutes, but continue trying to throw their weight around long after everyone’s bored with them and gone on to some other blowhard.
   
   Last week I found a guy posting an extraordinarily thoughtful and lengthy letter from a mega-big literary agent saying to him, “Can we please stop?” in response to his post-rejection tantrum letter, in which he apparently not only objected mightily to the agent’s rejection of his work but also made claims for its quality he clearly could not sustain. When I picked myself up off the floor from the shock of seeing how much time and courtesy this agent had spent trying to bring a little light to the life of this amazing dimwit, I was even more appalled to read the letter he WROTE BACK, which of course he also posted.
   
   Seriously. That agent is neeeeeeeeeeever going to represent that guy. And now that he’s posted his eye-popping idiodicy online, no other credible agent is going to, either.
2. THE LAZY: those who have no intention of making writing their life’s work.
   
   Sometimes I talk about what it takes to become a professional writer: learning how to write impeccably, for one; learning the ropes of the business, for another; learning all the ways to earn a living as a writer besides through fiction, for sure.
   
   And the minute I type the words “professional writer,” I hear in my head the chorus of objections from those who are writing fiction as a hobby. “We don’t want to be professional writers!” they cry. “We just want to win the lottery!”
   
   Professional writing is dull. Winning the lottery is exciting! Planning your work, meeting deadlines, taking advice without whimpering, being edited, going to business meetings, negotiating contracts, doing it when you don’t feel like it, making good on your promises, treating it like a responsibility rather than a right—that’s boring. Dreaming up a few characters out of half-remembered movies and throwing them on the page and waking up the next morning to find you’re J.K. Rowling—now that’s living!
3. THE SELF-INVOLVED: those who insist on writing only about themselves.
   
   You’ve met them in workshops and critique circles, the ones who submit, time after time, endless, mind-numbing, pointless droning on and on and on about whatever their pet peeve happens to be, styling their protagonist (almost universally in first person) as the ultimate blameless victim of fate who just—coincidentally—happens to do and say things that bring down all hell and high water on their own faultless little heads. Oh, the injustice. In sleep-inducing detail. “I woke up. My bed was just like it was yesterday, when I also woke up. I got up and got dressed. I brushed my teeth and spit in the sink. I rinsed my mouth and looked in the mirror, thinking about myself. I went in the kitchen to see if everyone in there was thinking about me, too. They weren’t! They were talking about their own stuff! Of all the NERVE.”
   
   Here’s a tip: if even the people in your critique group keep saying your protagonist is unsympathetic, there is no way in hell anyone’s ever going to pay you for that privilege.
4. THE DISGRUNTLED: those who are already mad they don’t make enough.
   
   Hey, you know what’s a bad idea when you think you don’t earn what you’re worth? Going into a field people work just for the love of it even when they have to move back in with their parents.
   
   Then quitting your day job.
   
   In the UK you people have the Dole. It’s not so easy here in the US. You know who lives under bridges? That’s right. Lots of really pissed-off people who quit their jobs in a huff the minute they got an agent—any agent—completely clueless about the publishing industry in general and their own teeny, tiny little role in it in particular.
   
   Remember the Vogon ultimate torture chamber in The Hitckhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Where you see the entire universe in all its enormity and your own dust spec of a self diminished down to its actual subatomic particularity? This is you. This is you without a day job.
   
   Even George Clooney appeared in a zillion unmemorable TV shows and movies for SIXTEEN YEARS before he got “discovered” on ER. I remember. He was really good. All of you with less talent and inherent compatibility with your medium than George Clooney can multiply that number by the number of years you were doing something else before you decided to throw your hat in the ring for this craft.
   
   And you thought you were disgruntled before.
5. THE UNREALISTIC: those who have No Idea what the publishing business is really like.
   
   Are you a Twilight enthusiast? A Bella-Wannabe? Mooning endlessly over Bella’s identification withWuthering Heights and thinking the only thing as great as being the author of Edward would be being the author of Heathcliff?
   
   Just so you know: the author of Heathcliff was dissed by her publisher, left unpublished until he could ride the coattails of her sister Charlotte, then published in a terrible edition with sloppy typesetting and cheap paper, and ignored by the reading public, who found Heathcliff—beyond reprehensible—downright disgusting. Emily Bronte was a bonafide literary genius whose greatest work, a saga in verse, was altered after her death against her passionately-clear wishes by busybody Charlotte and re-published in its mutilated form, although half the poems had vanished by then and have never been recovered. Emily Bronte died young, unloved, unhappy, unfulfilled. Undiscovered.
   
   And the author of Edward can’t write for beans. She stumbled on a misogynist aspect of our culture she could exploit in impressionable kids, along with a really good marketer. That really good marketer is now busy with Twilight, and you are in their backwash.
6. THE UNIMAGINATIVE: those who look at published garbage and say, “I can write that.”
   
   Why, yes. Yes, you probably can. So can a monkey. Are you as smart as a monkey? Congratulations.
   
   And you will suffer the fate of those authors: you will spend endless hours sending hundreds of queries to agents who want nothing to do with you until you stumble across one desperate enough to take a risk, all the while telling yourself, “You’ve got to persevere,” without wasting so much as an iota of your perseverance on learning the craft.
   
   You might even be a hardcore-enough marketer to push for publication until someone gives in and publishes you. Then you will get your head all puffed up with grandiose ideas of your own importance because you got a book on a shelf (as though the authors of all that other garbage didn’t have exactly the same thing), and you will be thrilled to have your name all over crap a dog wouldn’t read, and no one over the long run will take you seriously because you treated a craft many, many people love with all their souls as a quickie money-making gimmick.
   
   People will point to your book at garage sales and say, “What garbage! I can write better than THAT.”
   
   And on your deathbed—if you have gleaned any type of intelligence from your life experience at all—what finally kills you won’t be pneumonia or heart attack or old age but the utter and total humiliation of being known as the author of shlock, part of the lowest-common-denominator that not only did not maintain the quality of fiction in your era but actually dragged it down below the garbage you once thought you were so damned better than.
   
   Yeah. On behalf of everyone who takes this craft seriously: thanks.

UPDATE from Twitter: @rd_morgan “6 Personality Types Who’ll Fail as Writers” Or: 6 Personality Types Who’ll Inevitably Be in Yr #MFA Prog.

Coming up next: 6 Personality Types Who Will Succeed

1. You didn’t know you had that many words in you.
   
   And no, they’re not all just variations on “and then.” They’re all possible variations on twenty-six simple little letters, higgledy-piggledy arrangements of sound and thought and meaning, and the images that leap out of them are a magic of physical manifestation that put you in actual touch with something you can’t explain but know now no one has ever lived without.
   
   The miracle of fiction.
2. The party in your head just got a little more fun.
   
   It used to just be you and your alter-egos, the Nice You and the Mean You. Most of that was full-contact wrestling between the Nice You and the Mean You, with the Real You standing by, shaking your head, and saying, “Hey, guys. . .guys. . .guys! It’s getting kind of warm in here—”
   
   But now that’s only a minor aspect to the 24-hour excitement. Now the main stage is taken by a whole host of riveting characters meeting, talking, dancing, sparring, lying, confessing, stealing, recovering, moving and moving and moving around each other in an infinite choreography of fascination. The temperature’s gone way up. . .and YOU DON’T MIND AT ALL.
3. You’re smarter than you used to be.
   
   You know so much more about words and what they can do, language and what it’s meant for, communication and why we need it to survive. You also know far more than you ever have about human nature and how the thousands of interactions between people even in a single day add up to life and what it’s all about.
   
   You even get—in an ethereal and intangible sort of way, when the wind is right—how the whole of humanity is greater than the sum of its parts.
4. You’re more alive than you used to be.
   
   Your careful, note-taking attention to vivid details has made your world vastly more of an experience for you. You hear more things, see more things, feel more things. When you’re miserable you can identify a hundred nuances, when you’re laughing you hear the interweave and cacophony of how voices blend and emerge, when you’re quiet your physical self is so alive it’s like you’re on drugs. And free! Without hangovers!
5. You’re saner than you used to be.
   
   Now and for the rest of your life, even when you’re overwhelmed, you still have this foundation on which to stand: the incessant inquiry into, What is happening to me? What are its significant and insignificant parts? How am I reacting? What do I understand about it? What if it’s something other than what I’ve always assumed it was?
   
   Your options for understanding yourself and others are opening outward in all directions like eyes seeing for the very first time.
   
   And even more importantly, your options for understanding your own beliefs about reality and meaning are far more complex, profound, and intriguing than ever before.
   
   You’ve gone to the core. You’ve wrestled with the angel.
   
   And the angel has taught you—just a smidgen of—their secrets.

It’s been quite a month, this June of 2010! Such a whirl of gaiety, glamor, and interviewing amazing people in the publishing industry. Quite a lot of activity, actually, for someone who’s secretly just a rickety 97-year-old bootlegger who once shot the shoe off a revenuer (and would do it again if she could only find her jug).

And in that spirit, may I thank first and foremost, Roz Morris, aka @dirtywhitecandy, who very kindly and with nearly boundless optimism honored me last week with the Versatile Blogger Award.

I am touched and humbled.

I must now, according to the rules, tell you seven things about myself that you may or may not need to know:

1. I’m ambidextrous.

2. I spent two years of my childhood living in a breathtakingly beautiful ruined two-hundred-year-old hacienda in rural Ecuador without either plumbing or electricity, facing the grand and awe-inspiring slopes of Chimborazo, the tallest mountain on the equator (thus the furthest point anywhere from the center of the earth). That was in 1973.

3. I spent the next nine months in a Land Rover with my entire family traveling throughout South America and Europe. There were six of us, and because we brought the car we had to take a freighter from Buenos Aires to Italy. It was crowded.

4. The Land Rover was outfitted with an entire collapsable house, built out of plywood (without power tools) and painted sky blue by my rather overwhelming-ambitious father. The first night we camped it took us about three hours to set up. Nine months later we could do it in five minutes flat. We called the car Rover and all became intensely fond of him.

5. The freighter was named the Calaseta and was a very small, very classy refurbished English passenger ship from the 1930s with glass-fronted bookshelves in the “lounge” full of writers like P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, and Dodie Smith (not her famous book). That was when I learned I wanted to be a writer. I was 12 years old.

6. I speak a mangled sort of Spanish at top speed and with great finesse. I like to think of it as Victorianish.

7. I won my first computer as a scholarship from a typewriter manufacturing company. The best part was the awards ceremony, to which I invited my best friend as my guest and at which we spent the whole time nudging each other and saying, “Get me,” and slapping handfuls of the glittery confetti stars sprinkled decoratively across the table to our chests.

That was in 1987. Apparently I had not matured much during those intervening 14 years.

So that’s seven things. And now I must, even more importantly. . .

pass the Versatile Blogger Award to 15 other bloggers

. . .whom I consider it an honor to read. I will do the best I can, but honestly I don’t have a lot of time to read blogs, so some of these people will simply be writers I think you should emulate.

So hike up your britches, folks, and get your clicking fingers ready.

First, the pros:

The Bloggess. She’s a gimme. You can’t NOT recommend her, although she’s got more followers than Jesus—excuse me—I mean, the Beatles. I laugh harder at her stuff than I do at anyone’s but my husband’s and son’s. And not just because she’s the guardian of James Garfield, either (although that certainly doesn’t hurt). I don’t even expect her to take the time to pass on the award, because with half a million viewers every month and their associated emails I happen to know she doesn’t have it. But you still need to check her out.

Words into Print. I owe Laverne Daley a huge debt of gratitude. About a year ago, before my editing business got—as they say—wheels, she & I traded guest posts, and she let me call her up and ask her a million questions about how she handles being a freelance writer. She said someone had once done the same for her, and she wanted to pass on the gift. And now I’m passing it back. Because Laverne knows all about being a professional writer, and she’s still out there passing the gift of her knowledge and long experience on to others.

The Urban Muse. I like Susan a lot, and not just because she once let me write a guest post. She’s also a professional freelance writer. She takes being a professional writer seriously. She doesn’t live on dreams of what the publishing industry owes her, she gets out there and earns what she’s worth. And then she turns around and shares what she learns with the rest of us. I like that in a gal.

Book Trends Blog. Bob Spear is blogging about the self-publishing process. He’s a long-time self-publisher—he was self-publishing when some of you were still in diapers—and he’s a vast resource of serious, researched information on the subject. Plus he interviewed me. And you’ve always gotta appreciate someone with the cojones to do THAT.

Alien Djinn Romances. Do you know what that is? Because I don’t, and I’m kind of scared to find out. Still, Jacqueline Lichtenberg, who contributes to that blog, has her own blog, and is also on Twitter, is another old hand in this fiction industry, and she writes loooooong, opinionated, heck of specific posts on everything from character development to the tax law (1979 Thor Power Tool Company vs. the IRS) that heralded the era of will o’ the wisp backlists. If you want to be a long-term publishing author, she knows stuff you ought to know. Plus she writes as long of posts as I do, and for this I am eternally grateful.

Mystery Man on Film. We lost him. What a tragic waste. The most brilliant blogger on the craft of fiction out there died only a few weeks ago, under what I like to believe were mysterious circumstances. Read his blogs anyway. What that man didn’t know about writing great stories probably isn’t out there.

Mira’s List. Mira suffered brain damage in a car accident, and instead of religion she got Gratitude. Now she’s doing her part to improve her little corner of the planet by providing artists—including writers—with information on grants, fellowships, and foundations that help them bring art into this world. Mira, I’m telling you, has my undying admiration.

So that’s the pros I follow. Next, my clients (those with blogs—almost all of those people stay out of the blogosphere, and with good reason):

Ania’s here. Ania’s a Pushcart Prize nominee, a literary writer and artist of the highest calibre, and although she doesn’t blog often it’s because she’s—guess what?—busy writing. She is one of the clients who has renewed my faith in this new generation of beautiful literature. She’s also treating her writing career as a profession rather than a get-rich-quick scheme, with the result that she’s recently acquired a terrific agent and is now represented by the most respected agency in Canada.

Actually, it turns out I think Ania’s the only one of my clients who blogs at all. Take a lesson, guys. So I’ll just add:

Chris Ryan. He doesn’t blog. He lives in Finland. I don’t know if that has anything to do with it, or if it’s simply that he spends all his free time honing his craft. But he does publish in online journals. He’s another high-calibre literary writer, another of those who have renewed my faith in modern literature, with a published book of poetry, three (count ‘em, THREE) beautiful novels, and a ton of agent research under his belt before he even got serious about querying. Now some big names are interested in him—very interested. Are you all paying attention?

Michelle Davidson Argyle. Lady Glamis isn’t one of my clients, yet, but hopefully will be one day. She recently shut down her blog, The Innocent Flower, to concentrate more on her writing and family, but she’s also self-publishing a novella and blogging the process for the benefit of everyone considering such a move. Watch for it. She’s WAY more organized about it than I am.

Lucia Orth doesn’t blog, either, but she’s on Twitter. Author of the gorgeous, deep, and thought-provoking literary novel Baby Jesus Pawn Shop, she’s been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner, the PEN/Hemingway, and—wait for it—the Pulitzer Prize. Publishers Weekly gave her a starred review, and NPR raved. She’s a literary phenomenon. And with any luck at all she & I will get to have coffee, talk fiction, and catch up on each other’s lives in a few weeks in Portland, where neither of us lives.

So those are my favorite authors in the blogosphere. These next bloggers work their heinies off providing aspiring writers with lists of great posts on writing in the blogosphere every week. You heard that right, an on-going work of love (and it is work!) for all of you out there in the trenches:

It’s All About Writing. Nicole Humphrey Cook lists scores and scores of great links, and she even sorts them for you. She’s like your mom, only for writers. The woman’s insane. That’s probably what I like about her.

Adventures in Children’s Publishing. Martina & Marissa post writing prompts along the lines of, “All cockroaches step forward!” which, you know, has got to lead you somewhere. They also post a weekly roundup, and they also sort them for you. Also—obviously—insane.

In other words: you’ve got three whacked-out moms, guys. You have no more excuses.

(I would have also included Elizabeth S. Craig, but Roz got to her before I did. Thanks, Elizabeth!)

Here’s the one reviewer I know, and, yes, she IS going to review my book. Just as soon as someone does something to sort out the printing deadlock we’re in and finally gets that damn thing into print:

Alvah’s Books. Rebeca’s a professional PR rep who’s settled down to spend her life reading Spanish Civil War veteran Alvah Bessie and reviewing all kinds of books under the kind auspices of his terrific name. Two of the chapters in my book are adapted from guest posts I originally wrote for her site.

Now over here in the aspiring lunatics corner, we’ve got:

Constant Revision, aka @WritingAgain. Funny, irreverant, and sometimes totally off-the-wall, Simon’s never read Pride & Prejudice, but he knows how to protect his tenders.

And finally, a llapa just to extend the limits of your creativity:

Jeff’s Open Source Resource. He’s a geek. He’ll break your brain with his technical expertise in Linux and the open-source industry. He’s a comedian. He makes up most of my best jokes. He’s the Silicon Valley tech documentation industry’s Beagle board expert, the smartest new thing at Linux conferences around the country, AND he brings the beer. He’s cute as a bug’s ear. Father of the most adorable and hilarious Harpo enthusiast in history. And I love him. What a total babe.

Wow. I can’t believe I came up with 15 links. Plus my husband. I think I deserve some kind of reward, considering I went into this thinking I knew three.

But all I really want is to know what the hell kind of candy Roz has been eating.

Millicent Dillon is the world’s expert on Jane and Paul Bowles, one of America’s most extraordinary and puzzling literary couples—both cutting-edge literary geniuses, expatriates in Tangier before and after WWII, both gay and yet devoted to each other for 35 years, even throughout Jane’s terrible 16-year illness after her stroke at the young age of 40 until her tragic death.

Dillon’s biography, You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles, explores the life and charismatic character of the man who is, arguably, single-handedly responsible for today’s mega-popular “edgy” dark literature. Among other work, Paul wrote his four frightening and beautiful novels, The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider’s House, Up Above the World, and the shockingly realistic 1940s stories of violence, sex, and alien culture, “A Distant Episode,” “The Delicate Prey,” and “Pages from Cold Point,” (collected in A Distant Episode and The Delicate Prey: And Other Stories), which long before dark literature became popular or even acceptable in the mainstream “opened the world of Hip,” Norman Mailer said later, “and let in the murder, the drugs, the incest. . .the end of civilization.”

Even more fascinating is Dillon’s wonderful A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles, the only biography of Paul’s brilliant wife Jane, author of one Broadway play, In the Summer House, a handful of stories, a puppet play, and the 1943 novel Two Serious Ladies, all published in My Sister’s Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles, and of which Two Serious Ladies has just been reissued by Sort of Books in the UK. Jane, even more than Paul, was a writer of such unique talent and vision that even those literary experts who embrace experimentalists like James Joyce and William Faulkner have never known what to do with her.

For much of the past year, I’ve corresponded and talked with Dillon about her work on the Bowleses. Although Jane died in 1973 (rumored to be poisoned with love potions by her Moroccan lover, Cherifa), Dillon knew Paul well, up until his death only ten years ago.

Millicent, I must credit you with my entire bibliography on Paul and Jane. I knew nothing about them when I picked up A Little Original Sin fifteen years ago, and they have both been enormously influential to me ever since.

So let’s talk first about Jane’s life as a writer, because it was not easy. Jane published before Paul did, and it was his work with her on Two Serious Ladies that inspired him to try his hand at fiction. Yet she sank rather quickly into literary obscurity and put her energy into assuring Paul that she didn’t mind if he was the more successful or if people at her publisher [Knopf] pretended not to know whom she was. What do you think her real feelings were about being overshadowed in the world of literature by her (very talented) husband?

The relationship between Jane’s work and Paul’s work was as complex as the relationship between the two of them. In that relationship she looked to him for support (including economic support) as well as early on, as with Two Serious Ladies, with shaping the work in terms of form—so that he suggested taking out the third serious lady, and she readily agreed. In her early letters, when he does start publishing, stories at first, and then getting the novel contract, you can hear the anguish in her voice. She admits to jealousy and then tries to smooth it over, but it’s obviously there. In the same way she suffered from his relationship with [his long-term lover] Ahmed Yacoubi.

As for Paul, he continuously encouraged her to work, and even said once that he would not see her if she did not work. I would guess, though of course, it is only speculation, that it was not his publishing his own work that made her own work so hard for her, it was a whole host of problems that she had to deal with. The rivalry, the jealousy could have been overcome. But the forces within her that she was fighting were never appeased.

Incidentally, Jane’s play was produced several years after Paul had been publishing. He wrote the music for the play. She anguished over that play for years, tried one version, then the next, and could not ultimately make it cohere. There are wonderful things in it, but it too suffers from her anguish about her own decisions.

If Jane had been a man, do you think her fiction would be more widely-known today? Do you think she would have been classed with the more famous male experimental writers, whom she in many ways completely surpassed?

Jane, as you may know, has never been taken up by the feminists. In fact, I don’t think you can strictly speaking regard her as a feminist. If you remember, she thought in very conservative terms about marriage, her marriage to Paul. He was to provide for her, and she was to take care of the house, etcetera. She never seemed to have any objections to that. Here again I am speculating, but I don’t think feminist ideas as such play a large role in her work. She did not think in general terms, in any case.

You ask if a man who wrote as she did would be more famous? A man, of course, could not write as she did.

As for fame, Victoria, think of the many wonderful writers who have fallen into obscurity in this time of no-lasting impact.

How did she do it—how did Jane achieve such economy, insight, and sheer comedy, while simultaneously giving the impression she was an amateur simply playing around with words? Have you ever tried to imitate her work to see how it’s done?

Once Jane got into the writing of Two Serious Ladies, she never thought of herself as an amateur. In some strange way, she knew how good she was, compared herself favorably to Carson McCullers, for example. Yet even though she knew how good she was, the anguish was always there. I was not and am not into literary psychoanalysis, but she opens herself up in the work and in the letters so that you can see all these forces within her. And at the same time, her terrible anguish about any decision.

No, I have never tried to imitate Jane’s style. I am not into imitation. I’ve spent forty years trying to find my own style.

It seems to me the forces within her were based largely upon her relationship with her mother—with her role as Claire’s “million-dollar baby.” Jane’s work appears to be about exploring that relationship from myriad angles: from that of the daughter who retreats in submission and longing; the daughter who rebels and runs wild; the mother with an iron will; and the mother blind to her own extreme dependence. In much of her work these relationships appear as intimate relationships between peers—even sisters—yet the grappling with the power imbalance is always there.

Yes, it does seem clear that was a very powerful force for her in the way you describe it. Yet I also feel that the struggle in her, as in any human being, is more complex than any single issue. This is where literature begins to depart from psychoanalysis, which is after all a therapy intended to bring the patient into a greater adaptation to the world.

I cannot speak of this in very simple straightforward terms because of the complexity of human emotions. That is what I see so strongly in Jane. It is as though multiple forces assail her, and she is continuously buffeted by them from all sides. What makes her different from others, in a certain sense, is that she has no defense against the multiplicity. If she could have said, “My mother did this to me or that to me,” it would have been simpler for her. But instead, I suspect, she would think of herself as assailed one way and then by another.

Jane’s work is replete with insight into paradox. Whenever she finds a fundamental truth, she immediately progresses beyond it to its antithesis. I think the basis of this must have been in the overwhelming duality of her feelings about her mother—the pampering that gave Jane, ultimately, her faith in her abilities, along with the blatant use of Jane for Claire’s emotional well-being.

My immediate response, with respect to Claire, is to recall the strangeness of Claire taking Jane to Switzerland for treatment in the sanatorium [when 13-year-old Jane contracted tuberculosis of the knee shortly after her father died] and then going off and leaving her there while she went to Paris. In Paris, Claire was pursuing her own version of finding a new life, romantic and otherwise. I could bet she didn’t see anything wrong with this, though it is difficult for me to reconcile that choice with Claire’s constant expression of devotion for Jane. No doubt there was something in Claire that could deceive herself easily.

I do think about Jane that her relation to her family of women and its authoritarianism makes her a figure that is in some way incomprehensible to young women now. I remember giving a talk about the book to a group of women, many of whom were irate because she did not break away, they thought, from the constraints upon her, and, in fact, blamed her.

What did they think she was doing in Morocco in the 1940s, making excuses to Moroccan women [as she described in "Everything is Nice"] when they asked, “Why do you not sit in your mother’s house?” I remember Paul saying that they got married partly so Jane could travel, as she could not have traveled alone in that era. She went to enormous lengths to escape, to the extent that she eventually died of her extremist life in Tangier, suffering terrible pyschiatric handicaps due to that stroke and ensuing difficulties, many years before her time.

When I would talk to Paul about Jane in her later years when she was so ill, I would say, with a certain hubris, “But she was still Jane, wasn’t she?” Paul would deny it. Now, so many years later, after going through experiences with friends who suffered from conditions similar to Jane’s, if not exactly the same, and after being torn by grief, anger, etcetera, etcetera, I think I was both wrong and right.

I would like to think some more about Jane’s physical vulnerability, about her relationship to her own body, or at least try to speculate about it. Jane at times seemed almost oblivious to her body. When she called herself “Crippie Kike Dyke,” did she think it was funny? Or was she being more bitter than funny? Think about what it would be for a teenage girl to be in bed in traction for months upon months.

I think she was both fearless and very fearful at the same time, and this would result in her paying no attention to her body at times and at other times being obsessive about it, worrying about it and how it could be damaged.

Why was writing so terribly hard for her? She was pushed to do it and yet pushed not to do it. She is always, I think, subject to opposing forces and cannot choose what side she is on. Decisions of any kind are a torment to her. So in some way, I suspect, despite her anger at her mother, there also existed in her tenderness, if not love, rage, despair, maybe even sympathy.

I suppose what I’m saying is that the multiplicity is there for all of us, but she could not placate it, keep it quiet.

There is also this about Claire. She seems to have been of ordinary—even limited—sensibility, someone interested in clothes, propriety, middle-class values from her family, a family that she never escaped from, maybe never even knew the impulse to escape from them. One of the ways I see it is that Claire was not an equal antagonist, and as a result Jane had to build her up more and more in her mind to create a true antagonist. This she did with her imagination, and by so doing, was more of a prisoner of that imagined Claire than the real one. But how could Jane fight her own imagination? It is in this realm—the realm of her own imagination—that Jane had to fight out her most serious battles. And no one could help her with that.

And yet, despite all that was so dark in her life, it is important to turn again to her work. Reading it, one sees how remarkable and how innovative it is even after all this time, how funny and surprising it is and profound. Perhaps that’s the most surprising thing of all, how profound it is.

Millicent Dillon is the winner of five O. Henry Awards, as well as being a PEN/Faulkner nominee for her fictional biography, Harry Gold, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and a residency at Yaddo artists working community, the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy, and the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California. She is the author of three other novels, The One in the Back is Medea, The Dance of the Mothers, and A Version of Love: A Novel, a collection, Baby Perpetua and Other Stories, and three biographies, A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles, You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles, and After Egypt: Isadora Duncan and Mary Cassatt, a Dual Biography, all of which are available through Amazon’s Millicent Dillon Page. She is also the editor of two collections, Out in the World: Selected Letters of Jane Bowles, 1935-1970 and The Viking Portable Paul and Jane Bowles. Her own papers are archived in the Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center at the University of Austin, Texas. She lives and writes in Northern California.

Short answer: you don’t know what you mean by “make it.”

1. Do you mean get an agent?
   
   You can get an agent. This country is CHOCK FULL TO BURSTING right this moment with brand new, chomping-at-the-bit, frothing-at-the-mouth, starving agents. People who should not have been allowed to learn to type in the first place are going to get agents.
   
   Good news for everyone out there who’s decided becoming an author is easier than learning a useful trade and earning an honest living! Not, you know, that that attitude’s going to earn you any kind of living at all, but, yes, it can sometimes get you represented.
2. Do you mean get a publisher?
   
   You can get a publisher. Of course, what you actually get is a publisher’s acquisitions editor, which is slightly different, considering most editors when they’re hired these days receive not so much a desk chair as a revolving door disguised as a chair, designed to whirl them around and fling them out a nearby open window at their boss’ whim.
   
   I just read Susan Orlean’s great post on how she went through some eight editors and four publishers with only her first book.
   
   This is going to be news to the unpublished among you: not all books that get acquired get published, and the de-publication of a book often has absolutely nothing to do with the book itself. I’ve got horror stories. If you’re published, you’ve probably got horror stories. Everyone’s got horror stories.
   
   (But maybe you LIKE horror stories!)
3. Do you mean get a publisher who will actually publish your book?
   
   Like agents, micro-publishers are popping up everywhere, mushrooms straight out of the rich, fruity loam of certain rotting underpinnings of the publishing industry. And even before the recent burst in micro-publishing, there were all sorts of small indie publishers desperate for some general words on a page and a writer willing to sign away all rights to them.
   
   You can get someone to publish your book. You might not even have to pay them. Much.
4. Do you mean get a publisher who will pay you for your book?
   
   Surprisingly enough, some very nice advances sometimes go out to the authors of some really crappy shlock. Even newbie authors of really crappy shlock. Even inexperienced newbie authors of really crappy shlock.
   
   You know what happens after that? The shlock doesn’t earn the very nice advance back. Then there’s a big cat-fight down at the publisher’s office, with everyone pointing fingers and calling names, voices get shrill, feet stomp, and eventually someone slaps someone else in the face with a kid glove, and the next thing you know they’re yanking off their jackets and choosing their seconds. And the author?
   
   Yeah, no matter who wins the duel, nobody ever speaks to THAT loser again.


(More tragically, since the decline of the literary novel this actually happens with some very beautiful, very classy literature indeed. And that’s something I don’t even want to talk about.)


5. Do you mean get a publisher smart enough to only pay what the book earns back?
   
   Geez, you’re taking all the fun out of advances!
6. Do you mean get a publisher who can purvey your fledgling efforts into an on-going profitable venture?
   
   That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Book after book after book, pretty little checks coming in the mail from your agent every quarter, a cozy little savings account all for them, signing your name with an authorial flourish while the other banktellers lean toward your lucky teller’s cage and watch with tiny gasps of awe.
   
   And it will be a savings account, just so you know. You’ll still have to work a real job to pay your bills.
7. Do you mean earn a living by writing?
   
   That’d be even nicer, all those authorial flourishes AND you get to spend all day every day in your office under the eaves, polishing your keyboard and mapping out your next baby and pausing, when inspiration fails you, to trim your toenails and think about asking your agent to renegotiate your contract.
   
   You understand, of course, you won’t be living in New York City, where real estate is a tad pricey. Or, in all likelihood, New York State. Or even the Eastern seaboard. Or the Western seaboard. Or the United States. Or probably the industrialized world. And that includes Thailand.
   
   But hey, it would still be a great way to live, wouldn’t it? And I hear the tsi-tsi flies don’t carry nearly as many life-threatening diseases in the African bush as they used to.
8. Do you mean make a fortune writing?
   
   . . .so you can live wherever you like, write about whatever you like, walk through the world flanked on all sides by groupies and flunkies rolling a red carpet under your feet just before you step, fanning you with ostrich feathers and peeling your grapes and hanging on the pearls of wisdom that drop regular as clockwork from your ruby-red lips?
   
   I’M SO SORRY.
   
   My job’s already taken.

You ask if a man who wrote as Jane did would be more famous? A man, of course, could not write as she did.—Millicent Dillon

Over the course of her illustrious forty-year writing career, Millicent Dillon has won five O. Henry awards and been nominated for a PEN/Faulkner. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and invitations to such prestigious writing residences as Yaddo.

Dillon is also the world’s expert on the Bowleses, one of America’s most extraordinary and puzzling literary couples. Her book, You Are Not I, is the definitive biography of Paul Bowles, author of copious fiction and nonfiction, including The Sheltering Sky, which Bertolucci made in 1990 into a movie with John Malkovic and Debra Winger, and the shockingly realistic 1940s stories of violence, sex, and alien culture, “A Distant Episode,” “The Delicate Prey,” and “Pages from Cold Point,” which, said Norman Mailer much later, long before their time “opened the world of Hip.”

Dillon is also the author of A Little Original Sin, the only biography of Paul’s wife, the brilliant Jane Bowles—author of one Broadway play, a handful of stories, a puppet play, and the 1943 novel Two Serious Ladies, which has just been reissued by Sort of Books in the UK. Jane, even more than Paul, was a writer of such unique talent and vision that even those literary experts who embrace experimentalists like James Joyce and William Faulkner have never known what to do with her.

I’ve been fascinated by the Bowleses ever since I found A Little Original Sin and My Sister’s Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles in a San Francisco bookstore in 1995. Who were these people? What is the truth behind their enigma? And what must it have been like to travel to Morocco shortly after Jane’s tragic death in the early 1970s, an accomplished fiction author yourself, to meet and become friends with the mysterious Paul, to whom so many aspiring writers of that era—including the Beats—flocked like pilgrims?

Join me on Monday for:

The Forces Within: the Millicent Dillon interview

Let’s talk about querying. Because I found a great piece on querying the other day while investigating an agency with which one of my clients is in talks, Folio Literary Management.

You’ve all read this advice before (although Mr. Kleinman’s is particularly well-written). So why is it that when you send out your own meticulously-researched and -crafted queries, you always wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night immediately afterward, realizing you’ve committed one of these unpardonable sins?

Why does the universe hate you so?

1. You addressed your query to the wrong agent.
   
   Spelled it correctly. Wrote it in your best cursive on the envelope (you should probably get an award for that calligraphy). Made sure they represent your genre. Then stuck the wrong letter in the wrong envelope and—voila!—mailed that sucker off.
   
   And you can’t dash down and try to get it back out of the mailbox, because you have a friend who did that once and found out (guess what?) it’s illegal. At least that’s what the cop said.
   
   Hi. I’m not Agent X. I’m Agent Y, X’s worst enemy.
   
   Just so you know, X hates you. In fact, X is spreading the word in the agent community that you have a communicable disease that travels with your queries. This means agents don’t just reject your queries. They don’t even just throw them away. They carry them into the backyard at the end of long tongs and torch them in an exorcism ceremony.
   
   I apologize on behalf of X and wish you well in your endeavors. Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!
2. You misspelled significant words.
   
   Including the agent’s name, the name of the author to which you would like to be compared, and “representation.”
   
   Dear Writer: I’m afraid I don’t “repersant” anyone. But I bet you could get a job at Home Despot. All best.

3. You spent so many hours writing and rewriting the central paragraph about your novel it now reads like some kind of disjointed dystopian fantasy about gnomes and Humphrey Bogart.
   
   Even YOU would fling this one off you like a bug.
   
   Dear Whoever-the-Heck-You-Are: Good luck and all that, but you might want to come out of your cave and have a conversation with a real human being at least once before you try to launch yourself into the field of simultaneous communication with thousands of strangers. Regards.

4. You forgot the SASE.
   
   It’s okay. I wasn’t going to respond to you, anyway.
5. You claimed to have been published, not in the New York Times “Letters to the Editor Department,” but in The New Yorker.
   
   Honest-to-god, it looked like the New York Times “Letters to the Editor Department” every single time you proofed it.
   
   Dear Anonymous in Albuquerque: Yeah. The New Yorker’s never heard of you. I guess their records are pretty slip-shod. Ciao, baby.
6. You forgot to mention either the title or wordcount of your novel.
   
   How did this get by you? Were you ASLEEP?
   
   Dear Yoo-hoo: It’s a fascinating idea, and it sounds like you’re capable of writing really amazing, mesmerizing prose. If you ever get around to writing that thing, you know, you should probably query someone with it.
   
   Not us.
   
7. You misspelled your own name.
   
   Fortunately—this one’s salvageable. Just hie yourself on down to the courthouse and legally change it. No one will ever know.

(Also check out this excellent piece on writing a synopsis from James Scott Bell.)

You know what’s hard? Sitting at your desk day in and day out, month after month, year after year, trying to come up with fresh and significant angles on life in an imaginary world. After awhile it seems like every character you create spends all their time flipping through random papers, looking under books, and trolling the blogosphere. (Garrison Keillor once said the characters in his first novel spent all their time smoking cigarettes and looking out windows.)

Get up! Go out in the world. Your characters are living there. Go look for them.

1. On a high ladder.
   
   This is how your characters feel when they have to do something they don’t want to do.
   
   How do YOU feel? What’s under your hands? Under your feet? In your stomach? Between your ears? Ask yourself what it would feel like if you let go. Then ask yourself what it would feel like if you let go and your foot got caught.
   
   That’s what happens to your characters after they’ve done what they didn’t want to do.
2. In an advanced physics class.
   
   This is how your characters feel when they’re in a conversation they can’t control.
   
   What are you thinking? What is the person next to you thinking? What is the teacher thinking about you? Ask yourself how you’d teach this class if you were a genius. Then ask yourself what you’d do if the teacher told you to take over with the brain you’ve got.
   
   That’s what happens to your characters when they have to speak.
3. In a cold bath.
   
   This is how your characters feel when they’re waiting.
   
   What’s your body doing? What’s your skin doing? What’s your brain doing? Ask yourself what would happen if you never got out. Then ask yourself what would happen if your mortal enemy got in with you.
   
   That’s what happens to your characters when they stop waiting.
4. In a room full of boxes.
   
   This is how your characters feel when they’re facing strangers.
   
   What are your lungs doing? What is your scalp doing? What’s the first thing that flashes through your mind? Ask yourself what’s in these boxes that you’ve forgotten about. Then ask yourself what you’re going to do when you’ve got them all opened and the contents everywhere and you don’t know how to put it all back away.
   
   That’s what happens to your characters at the end of the scene with the strangers.
5. Under the sink working on plumbing.
   
   This is how your characters feel when they’re trying to break through a stonewall.
   
   How do your muscles feel? How does your spine feel? How do the synapses that are supposed to get you out of this pickle feel? Ask yourself what it would take to get someone else to do this. Then ask yourself what you’re going to say to the person with the gun when you crawl out and explain why you quit.
   
   That’s what happens to your characters when they break through the stonewall.
6. On a bridge over a moving ship.
   
   This is how your characters feel when they have a chance to get something they desperately need.
   
   What do your legs want to do? What do your arms want to do? What does your neck want to do? Ask yourself how it would feel to throw yourself off the bridge onto the ship. Then ask yourself how it would feel to miss.
   
   That’s what happens to your characters when they go for the chance.
7. In an airplane bathroom.
   
   This is how your characters feel when they’re spying on someone.
   
   How cramped are you? How twisted can you get? How does the privacy feel compared to being out there with everyone else? Ask yourself what it would be like to go down the drain and fall through the sky. Then ask yourself what it would be like to get stuck.
   
   That’s what happens to your characters when footsteps head their way.
8. In the open trunk of a car.
   
   This is how your characters feel when they’re about to die.
   
   How do your eyeballs feel? How do your palms feel? When was the last time you used the bathroom? Ask yourself how it would feel if someone slammed the trunk lid closed. Then ask yourself what it would be like to wake up still in the closed trunk.
   
   That’s what happens to your characters at the moment of death.

Jenny Lawson is the Bloggess—funny, profane, twisted, and golden-hearted, she’s been blogging since 2006 and now drags a following of almost half a million page views a month. She’s been interviewed pretty much everywhere, and she does interviews herself as well. She also writes an advice column, Ask the Bloggess, a parenting column for the Houston Chronicle (which she shares with Mindy), and a humor column for Sexis Magazine (yes, it’s about sex). Sh’s caused an online uproar over Dr. Pepper that was picked up by AOL, been blocked on Twitter by William Shatner, and been voted #1—and disqualified—in the 2009 Shorty Awards in the category of government, for which she won her title of Czar of Nothingness from the mayor of Martindale, Texas (and in which capacity she designs awards for nothing in particular to give to yourself). She speaks on the subject of humor at the Mom 2.0 Summit and also at BlogHer, to which she is this year bringing her Traveling Red Dress to share with others. Plus, she found James Garfield at an estate sale.

Jenny, I know you said you were done interviewing for the season, then agreed to this one anyway. So I will try to keep it short and succinct. What makes funny funny?

I think what makes funny funny is the unexpectedly random being taken seriously. I think most of us think bizarrely strange things all the time and never share what’s in our heads for fear of being ostracized, but I’ve given up on ever fitting in, and so I just decided to write it all down.

Using dead kittens to make gloves for the homeless, what I would do if I was attacked by a zombie baby, open angry letters to German Princesses who are stealing my look. . .that sort of thing. I think people laugh because it’s bizarre and they feel better about themselves in comparison, but a small part of them is nodding in recognition because they too once wondered why Jesus wasn’t considered a zombie.

Is there a line you won’t cross as far as alienating readers? I don’t mean offensive material, but hostility. How do you manage to keep being charming and funny about things like fear, anger, anxiety, without ever coming across as whiny and annoying?

I write way more than I publish, and I edit a lot, but I’m still pretty whiny and annoying. I try to avoid writing about anything that would legitimately hurt someone reading it. Offending people is fine. Hurting them? Not cool. I’m lucky to have friends that I can call up and read a post to, and they’ll laugh hysterically and then say, “That was awesome. And you can NEVER, NEVER publish it.” Good friends make good editors.

What is your relationship to your humor writing? Do you ever reach a point where you’re frustrated with translating darkness and pain into something people can enjoy? Or is there a light in the depths that you can always depend on to continue to add meaning to your life?

I have a dark sense of humor, so it’s natural for me to find the humor in some of the most terrible parts of my life. I write about depression and anxiety disorder and miscarriages and having a number of autoimmune diseases. Even in the darkest corners there are still things that make me laugh, and those are the things that save me from the dark. It sounds odd, but I think some of my funniest work has come from my biggest personal trials, and I think people can not only relate to that, but it helps them see that there is a light out there.

Also, I think it’s nice to give people the chance to laugh at something that’s typically a sacred cow or that is always treated with sadness and reverence. The funniest jokes are the ones told in the front pew of a funeral when you know you’re not allowed to laugh. The difference is that I do laugh. And then I blog about it, and everyone else laughs and relates a horrible story that ended with laughter, and suddenly my whole blog is filled with hysterical stories of tragedy. That’s kind of an amazing thing.

Can you talk about the difference between saving your self-esteem by writing humor about having no self-esteem and actually having no self-esteem? Or is that getting too dark for an interview about humor writing?

I struggle with low self-esteem, but blogging has helped me tremendously to see the value in myself and what I do. I think there’s a difference between being self-deprecatingly honest and beating yourself up about things you can’t change, and I’m finally learning the difference.

If you were on a desert island and forced to choose which of your fellow castaways to eat, in what order, and they were all different famous comedians, who would you eat first? Last? Never? Why? At which point would you get eaten?

I’d eat Sarah Silverman first because she’s a vegetarian and grain-fed beef is delicious. I’d eat Eddie Izzard last because I’d want someone to cheer me up after eating Sarah Silverman, and he always makes me laugh. I don’t think I’d get eaten because I’m always sick, and I’m on a chemo drug for my arthritis, and so I’m probably too dangerous to eat. But they’d probably drown me pretty early just for being annoying. And for eating Sarah Silverman. People love her.

You mention in several interviews that you got into blogging so you could write a book. You mention somewhere else that you’re working on a novel. Are these the same book?

It’s just one book, and I’ve been working on it for the last six years, although I’ve only been really serious about it in the last year.

I have yet to see anyone ask you about the book, itself. (Maybe I didn’t read enough of the interviews.) What is the premise? the basic idea?

It’s a book about my life, about all the times I’ve ever embarrassed myself. It’s awful. And probably hilarious when read by people who didn’t have to live through it. My current working title is Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, and it’s KILLING ME. It’s so easy to write a blog because if I don’t like it I know I can just delete it later, but with a book it’s set in stone forever. Also, it will be the heaviest book in the world because it’s written on stone.

You’ve said you have always been a writer. Do you expect to write more once you get the hang of it?

I’m hoping that my next book will be easier, and I’m tempted to quit, but my agent (I still feel weird saying that) thinks I have several books in me. So I’m just nodding my head and going with it. This particular book focuses on my family as a child and my family now, and my stories are so baffling that I actually had to send photos of the things I was writing about to my agent just so she’d believe me. I’ve had a very strange life. A good life. . .but a strange one.

You’ve said it’s taking a long time to write. Why, do you think? Are there specific aspects that you’re struggling with?

I’m struggling the most with finding a way to tell my story without being disowned. The problem is that when I start writing about my life it’s not just my story anymore. It’s my parent’s story, and my in-laws’, my husband’s, my daughter’s. . .it’s hard to share completely in a funny way and not run the risk of over-sharing someone else’s story. That’s why in the introduction I explain that this book is only 90% true, so that whoever is mentioned in the book can say that whatever ridiculous thing I wrote about them is made up.

The funny part, though, is that I ended up not sharing some great stories because, even though they’re true, no one but the people who actually lived through it with me would ever believe them.

Only a few weeks after this interview, Jenny’s book, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, sold. For the record, I immediately offered to teach her how to use a semicolon correctly. I think. I may not have said it out loud. But I was serious.

The photo of Jenny on the right in her famous Traveling Red Dress was taken by Karen Walrond, author of the upcoming photography book, The Beauty of Different. The Dodo Award was created by Jenny, Czar of Nothingness.

1. If you’ve got a love story, bring in a third party.
2. If you’ve got a thriller, break their tools.
3. If you’ve got sci fi, create unexpected social norms.
4. If you’ve got a fantasy, make reality too hard to cope with.
5. If you’ve got historical fiction, unearth facts no one from this era would know.
6. If you’ve got a mystery, kill off your informants.
7. If you’ve got horror, use prosaic details.
8. If you’ve got an adventure, put your protagonist’s life in danger. And everyone else’s.
9. If you’ve got comedy, add a touch of poignancy.
10. If you’ve got YA, give your protagonist a dry sense of humor.
11. If you’ve got MG, add random non sequiturs to the dialog.
12. If you’ve got a picture book, make sure your illustrator is the very best.
13. If you’ve got literary fiction, make sure your editor is the very best.