I was interviewed by Jeremy Bassetti for his excellent website Travel Writing World: https://www.travelwritingworld.com/thomas-swick-author-profile/
Rejections are not meant to be mean, or even personal, but when one arrives just before bedtime you can't help but wonder.
No one reads an anthology more critically, I once wrote, than the writer left out of it. Another critical reader is a travel writer reading a piece about his own town.
A friend recently sent me a book, a collection of essays by a bright young writer. The first, I noted with interest, is set in Ft. Lauderdale and appeared in one of The Best American Travel Writing anthologies (one of the few editions I don’t own).
The essay is not really about Ft. Lauderdale – it’s more about the author’s existential angst while vacationing here – but there are a number of references to the city, many of them wrong. It is continually referred to as “tropical” – a mistake many travel writers make, especially those from lands without palm trees, but one that an MFA-wielding intellectual should be above.
Staying on the beach, he more than once makes his way to “the boardwalk” (we call it a sidewalk). Watching TV, he catches a commercial for “Swedish Cruise Lines” (Norwegian readers will not be happy). Later he writes of “this cloudless swath of South Florida,” a place that, as every resident knows, hosts an almost daily riot of cloud formations. Not to mention that earlier, crossing the state line from Georgia, he finds himself in “a corridor of sugarcane and everglades,” as if Florida’s border was around Lake Okeechobee.
Clearly they don’t teach reporting in MFA programs.
I was reading about an agent who was looking for writers with “strong, well-developed…” and I naturally thought “voices” but it was “media platforms.”
Finally finished Martin Amis’s Inside Story. It took me months. It is a great grab bag of a book as the author alights on a multitude of topics, including, on a couple of occasions, his rules for writing. (The book’s subtitle, printed on the title page but not the cover – where it is boldly proclaimed “A Novel” – is “How to Write.”) Most of his rules I agree with: avoiding cliches, using a thesaurus to find a word with the right number of syllables to fit a sentence’s rhythm, never employing three dashes in a sentence (see previous sentence). Though I take exception to his taking exception to what he call’s Elegant Variation, finding a synonym to avoid repeating the same word in a sentence (see previous sentence). And I would add another, very important rule for authors: Don’t finish your book, as Amis does, and then artlessly tack on two superfluous chapters.
After being bid adieu – a not totally successful Amis trope here is to occasionally address his reader as a guest in his home – the reader (no EV now) turns the page to find an “Afterthought: Masada and the Dead Sea,” which, as the title suggests, is a meditation on Israel. There is much in the book about anti-Semitism, and Amis’s admirable abhorrence of it (he pretty much dismisses Virginia Woolf as a writer because of her qualifications as an anti-Semite), but … really? He decides to close his “novel” with this essay? No, actually, he doesn’t, because when the dear reader, having already once thought she had finished the book, turns the page – more eager than ever to close the cover and be done with the thing – she finds “Addendum: Elizabeth Jane Howard,” a heartfelt tribute to the author’s stepmother. Yes, it’s interesting, but the reader’s pleasure in reading it is diminished by the thought of what might still await (because of the index – yes, this is a novel with an index – there are more pages behind it) and pestered by the idea that there were no editors at Knopf brave enough to say, “Martin, perhaps these last two chapters would work better in your next collection of essays.”
I've been so preoccupied with an essay I'm writing - about writing - that I've been neglecting this blog. But this blog, you see, doesn't bring in any money (unless you kindly click on the ads).