A Novel Idea

How the diverse, contemporary and vulgar ended up becoming useful

In the thirteenth century Saint Bonaventure, a Franciscan monk, described four ways a person could make books: copy a work whole, copy from several works at once, copy an existing work with his own additions, or write out some of his own work with additions from elsewhere. Each of these categories had its own name, like scribe or author, but Bonaventure does not seem to have considered—and certainly didn’t describe—the possibility of anyone creating a wholly original work. In this period, very few books were in existence and a good number of them were copies of the Bible, so the idea of bookmaking was centered on re-creating and recombining existing works far more than on producing novel ones.

Movable type removed that bottleneck, and the first thing the growing cadre of European printers did was to print more Bibles—lots more Bibles. Printers began publishing Bibles translated into vulgar languages—contemporary languages other than Latin—because priests wanted them, not just as a convenience but as a matter of doctrine.

Then they began putting out new editions of works by Aristotle, Galen, Virgil, and others that had survived from antiquity. And still the presses could produce more.

The next move by the printers was at once simple and astonishing: print lots of new stuff. Prior to movable type, much of the literature available in Europe had been in Latin and was at least a millennium old. And then in a historical eyeblink, books started appearing in local languages, books whose text was months rather than centuries old, books that were, in aggregate, diverse, contemporary, and vulgar. Indeed, the word novel comes from this period, when newness of content was itself new.

—Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

Painting: Laureano Barrau (1863–1957)

A Simple Algorithm

All of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons—a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth—how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.

It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations. And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. First, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end . . . that's a very real drive.

And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key.

* * *

Words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. . . .

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read.

* * *

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him—Why? Science fiction had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

—Neil Gaiman

Painting: Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin (1860 - 1943) French impressionist painter

Our Own Natural Gifts

There is no quality of style that can be gained by reading writers who possess it; whether it be persuasiveness, imagination, the gift of drawing comparisons, boldness, bitterness, brevity, grace, ease of expression or wit, unexpected contrasts, a laconic or naive manner, and the like.

But if these qualities are already in us, exist, that is to say, potentially, we can call them forth and bring them to consciousness; we can learn the purposes to which they can be put; we can be strengthened in our inclination to use them, or get courage to do so; we can judge by examples the effect of applying them, and so acquire the correct use of them; and of course it is only when we have arrived at that point that we actually possess these qualities.

The only way in which reading can form style is by teaching us the use to which we can put our own natural gifts.

— Arthur Schopenhauer, "Reading and Books," Essays of Schopenhauer

Painting: Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, (1796 - 1875) Interrupted Reading

See also: Your Natural Voice as a Writer

The Art of Reading

A Personal Account of an Ongoing Relationship With Words

I've always been fond of dictionaries for as long as I can remember. As a teenager, one Christmas, I asked a relative for a dictionary as my holiday present. It was a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, an edition in hard cover with red cloth.

Words have a life and a history, and just as with people their best attributes can be hidden in nuance. Writers, whose stock-in-trade is words, recognize the importance of giving words their full due. The best writers can make reading a satisfying, delightful and an almost delicious experience, all because of words.

The high school I attended assigned Victorian Era books like Oliver Twist. This was thrown in among other more readable books or what I then considered more “normal” fare. At the time, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter seemed to me like an excellent choice to kill a young person’s interest in reading and literature.

Some years ago, at a cocktail party, I ran into someone who, as it turned out, was a high school English teacher. Our conversation led me to wonder out loud the point of assigning The Scarlet Letter to teenagers who don’t have the vocabulary to understand, let alone appreciate, the work. Her reply was something to the effect that the students understood the issues raised by the book and showed great interest in discussing them.

I simply nodded in agreement and left the conversation there. When I was in high school, it was only because of the book’s Monarch Notes, I was able to pick up—nothing distinct mind you, just—faint hints and clues as to what the book was about and the important questions it supposedly addressed.

I’ve now read The Scarlet Letter three times and I’ve formed a deep appreciation for its literary merit. I am also more convinced than ever that assigning it to the average high school freshman class is a disservice to the students.

At some point in college, I decided I wouldn’t let a single word pass me by if I didn’t have a ready definition for it on the tip of my tongue. This is a different standard than having a vague idea what a word means. For a period of what may have been two years, I carried a Little Oxford English Dictionary with me everywhere I went. It had a hard cover and was smaller than an average paperback. It contained the great majority of the words I looked up.

I was looking up words all the time. It’s a wonder I ever finished reading anything. Eventually, looking up so many words must have had some positive effect because I stopped relying on my Little Oxford. It was sometime after this, I had occasion to visit one of my university professors in his office. I was working on a paper and we needed to discuss its progress.

As I remember now, years later, it was a decent-sized office. The only other thing I remember about it is that in the office, up on a stand—or maybe it was an improvised lectern—sat a huge unabridged dictionary. It is the kind of dictionary you only see in the reference section of libraries, always opened somewhere in the middle as if a book like that isn’t meant to remain closed. It is the kind of book that has perhaps a four inch spine and if you had to venture a guess, you might say it easily weighs between 15 and 20 pounds.

Later on, after leaving the professor’s office—and the impression of the over-sized dictionary having settled in—I remember thinking to myself, “So this is how the pros do it.”

I have never owned an unabridged dictionary but I can certainly appreciate its value. I have never lost my fondness for words and their meaning. The habit of constantly looking up words still haunts me and to this day it slows me down when I read.

Ereaders have brought the art of reading to the information age. Today, the definition of 99 percent of all words is only one touch away when we read. You don’t need to lug around a Little Oxford and the Oxford English Dictionary is no longer published in printed editions.

Painting: Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954)

Do you have a special relationship to books, words and reading?

The Most Colorful Life Imaginable

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

Rosemarie Urquico, A Girl You Should Date

Painting: Ramón Casas y Carbó (1866 – 1932)

Writing for the Love of Writing

I have many friends who are artists, painters for the most part. For them, art seems to be a way of life. They sketch, draw and paint because it is second nature and they love what they do. It seems as though there is nothing else they would rather be doing.

Many writers also love what they do. No one is paying us for all the blog posts we write. For many of us, the reward is the opportunity to share our ideas and talents and to simply belong to our wonderful community of fellow writers. As an added benefit, we also build a following and hope folks remember us.

Reading Is Part of the Job Description
One of the ways that writers develop their voice, prod their imagination and become more agile with language is to read, read again, and then read some more. One of my recent Life List commitments is to read two contemporary novels a month. So far, I’ve been keeping up and right now, I’m ahead of schedule.

My ongoing search to find worthwhile books to read inspired this blog post.

Choice Is a Luxury
I am mostly interested in mysteries and thrillers and my Ipad is filling up with them. Just recently, I stocked my electronic library with an additional ten new titles that warrant a second look. Many of them, I will end up reading sooner or later.

The Value of a Good Read
An important point is the cost of these books and how I find them. I use a very simple method and pay nothing for the books. I find new titles by searching twitter approximately three times a week for “free mystery” and “free thriller.” Among a handful of twitter results, I choose books on Amazon with four and five-star ratings that have well-written and convincing reviews.

During the past two months, I read two novels that are of very high literary quality and two others that were excellent and enjoyable reads. If this experience is any indication, I’ll be able to keep reading quality novels indefinitely and at no charge.

What This Means for Novelists
What does a proliferation of high-quality, free ebooks mean for authors who aspire to write fiction for a living? In my opinion it means you have to be talented and prolific.

Most of the recently-minted, “famous” authors we read about published at least ten books before they achieved their fame. If you are serious about writing for a living, at some point in your career, you may have to publish one or more books a year. You can also get lucky. The book you are working on can become a best-seller that lands you a movie deal. While this is great if it happens, this is not a plan you can take to the bank.

I Don’t Run Into Low-Quality Ebooks
Another observation of mine over this test period is that I didn’t encounter the “lots-of-bad-ebooks-out-there” experience that I keep reading about. Don’t get me wrong, I know they’re out there. The point is: I don’t run into them.

Here is a thought exercise. Do you constantly run into websites and blogs in which you have little or no interest, sites that feature low quality content filled with grammatical errors? Chances are, you solved that problem a long time ago. You’d probably have to pause for a moment if you had to find such a site on short notice.

If you find yourself investing too much time reading bad-quality ebooks, consider modifying how you decide which ones to read.

What’s your reading regimen like? How do you choose which books to read?

Painting: Ivan Olinksy (1878 - 1962)

The Art of Reading, Then and Now

The cover-to-cover deep reading that was typical of my generation when we were students is now almost extinct, and instead you’ve got superficial reading: reading snippets and tweets and cutting texts up into tiny units that really prevent any appreciation of the whole sweep of a text. I have one half-answer to that, which isn’t adequate but I think deserves consideration. And that is, first of all, that this cover-to-cover deep reading shouldn’t be exaggerated as something that occurred in the past. We have learned a lot about the history of reading, which is one of the aspects of the history of books that we’re trying to develop, and one thing we have learned is that, for example, sixteenth-century humanists rarely read a book from cover to cover. They were reading what we today would call ‘snippets’, or even ‘tweets’, they were taking - . . .

They were taking short passages out, copying them into Commonplace Books, and using those passages for various purposes, often rhetorical battles at court by their patrons, or what ever it was. But this was not reading in the way that we like to imagine it. Now, of course, deep reading also did take place. I’m not denying that for a minute. But I’m not sure that we can assume that it was typical.

Professor Robert Darnton, Harvard University

Painting: Teodor Axentowicz (1859 - 1938)

Thanks to Jane Friedman for pointing me to Darnton's interview