"This great and trivial story": a love-affair with print

At the time when this story begins, the Stanhope press and inking-rollers were not yet in use in small provincial printing-offices. Angoulême, although its paper-making industry kept it in contact with Parisian printing, was still using those wooden presses from which the now obsolete metaphor 'making the presses groan' originated. Printing there was so much behind the times that the pressmen still used leather balls spread with ink to dab on the characters. The bed of the press holding the letter-filled 'forme' to which the paper is applied was still made of stone and so justified its name 'marble'. The ravenous machines of our time have so completely superseded this mechanism--to which, despite its imperfections, we owe the fine books produced by the Elzevirs, the Plantins, the Aldi and the Didots--that it is necessary to mention this antiquated equipment which Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard held in superstitious affection; it has its part to play in this great and trivial story.

--Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac, trans. by Herbert J. Hunt

I am fascinated with late-18th-century/early-19th-century French and British printing and bookselling. It started as a fluke. I was introduced to the Albion press owned by my university's rare books library at around the same time that I was brainstorming the NaNoWriMo project that became The Printer's Tale, and I decided on a whim that my main character and her father should be printers. I already knew that they lived in provincial pre-revolutionary France, I already knew the thrust of my main character's story, I just needed to know what she did for a living before the novel got started.

I thought this would perhaps be a minor detail, but as the present working title would suggest, printing quickly came to take up a great deal of space in the novel. I talked with librarians, checked out musty old books, and researched the history and the art of printing. I parlayed this information into a final project for one of my first-semester courses, in addition to insinuating it piecemeal into my November novel, but even after the semester was over, this new-found fascination wouldn't leave me alone. I examined the bindings of old books in the local used bookstores; I sought out laid paper and fell in love with the way it felt beneath my fingers. I enrolled in a research seminar taught at the rare books library. When I had the opportunity, I took a graduate history course entitled The Hand-Printed Book in Its Historical Context, where I spent six weeks learning the history of hand-printing via a series of example books culled from the library's extensive catalogue, and six weeks using that same Albion press that had sparked the obsession a few years earlier to typeset and print a short manuscript of my own.

In some academic circles it's considered a bit gauche to pay too much attention to the materiality of the text. Yes, changing conventions in printing, editing, and publishing do affect the way texts are received and read, but--so the assumption seems to run--not the way texts are written, which is what should matter. It's the job of a literary scholar to work with the text at hand, not to fuss with the fact that the books we read now are things as well as texts.

But while the things I've learned about printing and bookselling may not be central to most of the work that I do, I nonetheless feel a frisson of excitement every time a literary text references the mode of its own production. When I opened up my copy of Lost Illusions and read this first paragraph, I was transported back to the Printing Room in the second story of the Bancroft Library, sunlight streaming in through the huge windows, myself standing poised with hands near the press bar as a classmate ran the roller over the ink which made its snicker-snack reverse-suction sound, waiting for the forme to be inked and the paper to be positioned before pulling the press down, thud-click, and releasing it again to reveal a perfectly-printed page.

When The Printer's Tale begins, provincial printing is already dying out. The catalyst for a great deal of the story is the reluctant necessity of my main character giving up her life as a printer in order to find work that pays. But the magic of the novel--and it's me we're talking about, so at times this magic is literal--is so tied up in printing, in the idea of work done with one's hands. The groaning of the wooden press, the sickly-sweet turpentine smell of the ink, the cool lead of the type sorts, these things matter. And part of what I love about working in the eighteenth century is that sometimes I can feel them there, behind every book I read, reminding me of the number of hands that these words have passed through and worked their magic upon.

It's not a particularly academic pleasure. It won't make itself heard in my seminar papers, or future conference papers or articles or dissertation chapters. But it is a pleasure that, for me at least, gives my academic work weight and heft, that makes it more material and that makes it matter.

What Makes a Good Novel

When I started work as an intern for the Office of Letters and Light back in September 2007, one of the first perks of the job (after the burrito lunches and scintillating office conversation) came in the form of a free copy of Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem!. It had suffered the slings and arrows of "RETURN TO SENDER" and come back a little worse for the wear, but I'm one of those people who prefers the term "previously loved" to "previously owned," at least when it comes to books, and that scuffed-up cover did nothing to prevent me from diving right into it as soon as I got on the bus back to Berkeley.

The book serves as a kind of manual or advice handbook for participating in National Novel Writing Month (a challenge I've explained elsewhere), and a lot of the writing exercises and strategies are particularly relevant to those trying to eke time out of their "real life" in which to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November, but some of them stood out to me then -- and still stand out to me now -- as getting at something fundamental about all writing, and the kinds of desires that ought to motivate it.

I've forgotten more of the book than I'd like to admit, but four years (and four novel-filled Novembers) later, one of the exercises strikes me as particularly important. It's the one Chris calls "the Magna Carta." The idea is simple. Take a piece of paper. Now write at the top, in big and important letters, "WHAT MAKES A GOOD NOVEL." Now make a list. Make it your list, not anyone else's. Think about the kinds of novels you love to read, and be honest with yourself about what they're like and what you like about them. Finally, take your finished list and put it somewhere you can see it. When things get tough, when the writing isn't "working," look back at that list and use it as a way to diagnose your novel's problems, because if you don't like your novel, how much does it matter if anyone else does?

Of course these lists can change. In getting ready to write this year's novel, I stumbled across the Magna Carta list that I wrote four years ago, and for the first time thought, "That's not what my list looks like anymore." So I started working on a new one.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD NOVEL

- characters and relationships that question traditional gender roles and/or established social hierarchies; bonds and affinities that cross boundaries of gender, class, or simply expectation without perpetuating inequalities

- girls and women who possess noteworthy mental, physical, and/or emotional strength, which they use to advance the course of the story

- clever integration of the supernatural, unnatural, magical, and/or unexpected to highlight and complicate, rather than to dismiss or solve, the conflicts of the characters and (more generally) the problems of modern existence

- a spunky and spirited character who will not take no for an answer, who is a go-getter and an optimist and may not always succeed but keeps on trying (not necessarily protagonist)

- deliberation regarding setting, both time and place; a sense that these places are loved by and important to the story as a whole in addition to specific characters within the story

- children who have honest, mature, complex, and ultimately positive relationships with their parents

- parents and/or mentors who support children in tackling the big things life throws at them (everything from love to warfare) while ultimately letting them make their own decisions, and providing them with the sense that those decisions matter

- complex antagonist(s), who operate in tandem with internal conflicts to hassle the protagonist(s)

- realistic dialogue that is always emotionally charged but only rarely straightforward; dialogue-as-conflict, dialogue-as-occasional-misunderstanding, but never dialogue-as-utterly-impossible

- ultimate affirmation of the transcendent power of love, language, literature, creativity, and/or cooperation; faith in the possibility of intersubjective exchange, however mediated it may be

It's obviously not exhaustive, and I'm sure that it'll keep growing and changing as I keep growing and changing, but it's a good place to start. And if you wrote up a "Magna Carta" of your own, I'd love to know what might make its way onto your list!

Shitty First Drafts

I participated in my first writers' workshop when I was seventeen. My instructor shared a lot of quotes with us about writing, and whether we all agreed or disagreed with them, I've always remembered them -- but none as well as Hemingway's statement that "The first draft of anything is shit." It might not be the best philosophy for turning out work in a timely fashion, but for better or worse, my writing strategy pretty much depends on it.

I suspect this might have something to do with the fact that the first long-form writing I ever did was for National Novel Writing Month. It's a challenge that actually encourages quantity over quality -- participants strive to write 50,000 words during the month of November, with good words counting no more than bad ones and everyone who hits 50k being considered a winner -- but does so with the underlying assumption that if you write enough, you're bound to write something good. I don't know if it works that way for everyone, having a steady daily wordcount and a group of supportive fellow writers always helps me tune out my "inner editor" and ultimately go places with my writing that I otherwise might not have.

In the past six years, I've written anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000 words of fiction each November -- even continuing to work on one project sporadically until I finally typed "the end" at around 220,000 words. (For people not used to thinking in wordcounts, that's over twice the length of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and about four times as long as Fahrenheit 451.) None of these projects were particularly good. But as Ernest Hemingway and NaNoWriMo have taught me, "good" is not what first drafts are about. It doesn't matter that these first drafts were shit: three of these November novels have nonetheless shown enough promise for me to continue work on them after the month was up.

Writing with the belief that first drafts don't have to be fabulous makes the second draft a whole lot harder. But without this mentality the first draft would probably never be written. If I agonize over every word of something, I'll never make it to the end of the chapter, much less the novel -- but if I turn out a first draft in a month or two, falling for the characters and the concepts along the way, it doesn't matter how hard the second draft will be, because I'll have dedicated myself to doing it. It's easy to quit a story you haven't finished writing. It's a lot harder to walk away from a finished first draft.

I've been thinking about all of this lately because I'm in the process of working on a real, hard, not-so-shit second draft of the former NaNo-novel that ended up clocking in at around 220k. It's agonizingly slow going, and I've already started a Word document just to keep track of all of the research I need to do and decisions I need to make before I start to write the third draft (having decided they are not major enough to require my concern in the second). But sometimes I sit and look at my computer screen and marvel at the fact that there even is a second draft-in-progress. Today is one of those days.

You can laugh all you want at the fact that I spend my Novembers frantically churning out shitty first drafts of novels that there is a 50% chance I will never want to look at once the month is over. God knows I laugh at myself sometimes. But when I'm done laughing, I knuckle down and start writing -- and in the end, that's the only thing that matters.