The Analogy Book Of Related Words: Your Secret Shortcut To Power Writing Free Download
Lalo Scalf
Thank you for articulating this. I do wish there was not such a focus on the "debut" work of an author these days. Maybe it is different for fiction writers, I don't know, but as a nonfiction author, it is so incredibly hard to just write the thing. To figure out how to do it at all, let alone to be able to do it well. I'm grateful that I waited to work on my "big" project (big according to how it sits in my heart anyway; big for now) until after I had already published a few books. I wish the art and craft of book-writing could be seen differently, maybe more akin to something like acting: we all have our starts, some of them unformed and embarrassing, and many will work for a long time before making something where the circumstances align in just the right way to produce something incredible.
The Analogy Book of Related Words: Your Secret Shortcut to Power Writing free download
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A very long article about the Jumi Bello plagiarism scandal has come out from AirMail. In brief, if you aren\u2019t familiar with the story: a debut author had her book canceled by the publisher because it contained a significant amount of plagiarism.
The article, which is about what happened and its antecedents and aftermath, is\u2026 not great. The journalist focuses on odd, salacious details, fails to draw some obvious points, and misses big questions about the commodification of marginalized identities, the responsibility of due diligence from agents, editors, and publications, how authors often take the fall for systemic industry failures, and the lack of education around the ethics of influence and inspiration1.
I\u2019m not going to address any of those points, though I hope someone does because I think they\u2019re important. But I do think there is something hugely instructive to be taken from this incident\u2014something that teachers of writing and emerging writers alike can learn from\u2014about the business of publishing and the fragility of the creative life.
I should make a couple of disclosures. I appear in the article twice, somewhat incidentally. I also fail to appear in another way: I was Jumi Bello\u2019s professor her final semester at Iowa. The journalist who wrote this piece never reached out to me, and I\u2019m not going to be writing about my experience as her workshop leader or as someone who she plagiarized, albeit briefly. (On this latter point, it\u2019s actually not that interesting of question to me, and like Carole Maso2 I really don\u2019t care.)
But I do have a lot of feelings about the role of the MFA program in an emerging writer\u2019s life, and by extension the relationship between the art and business of writing. (With, I guess, another set of disclosures: I attended the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop from 2010 to 2012, and director Sam Chang was a teacher and mentor of mine, and remains a colleague and friend.)
While Bello was now somewhat socially isolated at Iowa, she was still outspoken, particularly in her belief that practical matters such as how to get an agent should be openly discussed in the program. But Lan Samantha Chang, the first woman, and Asian-American, to serve as director of the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop, saw things differently. She \u201Cwanted to do as much as she could to protect this time that we had,\u201D says a former student.
Bello felt that by keeping the publishing process shrouded in mystery, Chang, under whose leadership the program had become more diverse, was inadvertently \u201Creplicating the inequity in the system she was trying to combat.\u201D And so Bello went ahead and did it anyway, hosting a series of publishing talks over Zoom called Black Tea, with Black Iowa alumnae such as Dawnie Walton. \u201CI was ambitious,\u201D she says. \u201CI wasn\u2019t just a victim.\u201D \u2026 \u201CMoney is power in New York,\u201D says Bello. \u201CWriting is power in Iowa. It\u2019s a currency.\u201D
There\u2019s a lot of language here worth parsing. Ambitious. Victim. Money, power, currency. It\u2019s almost exclusively the language of capitalism. And writing is, in certain circles, power. Sure. It is the thing whose presence will (hopefully) serve as your currency and earn you money or power, thus satisfying some of those ambitions. But writing is also writing. It\u2019s an art form3. And a book\u2014specifically, a good one\u2014is also a thing that money and power and ambition can\u2019t give you. None of the trappings of literary success\u2014which can be quick, and flashy, and very exciting4\u2014can substitute for the (singular, difficult, slow, and at times unbearable) work of writing.
The word \u201Cvictim\u201D in this context is curious in its own right; the idea that the delay of the tools of material success render one a victim. Because that\u2019s true kind of\u2014we all have to eat, we all have to have a roof over our heads; capitalism is our reality and to deny that can render one precarious\u2014and not at all. Writing without an agent (or ten) lined up isn\u2019t allowing yourself to be victimized; it\u2019s simply letting the work percolate without outside pressures.
This is a story about plagiarism, yes, but it\u2019s also a story about something I see so much of\u2014in my capacity as a teacher, a mentor, and just someone who gets asked about publishing literally constantly. That is, how easy it is to let the desire to be published (and by extension obsessed over by name-brand agents, editors, and publishing houses) completely outstrip the act of writing a good book.
Plagiarism is a shortcut, but there are many kinds of shortcuts. This story happens to be a very public and clear-cut example of how confusing the creative work and the business can completely invert your priorities, but I cannot tell you how many people I\u2019ve met who want a ton of advice about publishing even before they\u2019ve finished a single draft of a novel, or even started one5. They want to be published more than they want to write, or sit with what they write. Or revise, or research, or return to the page. Or read.
And honestly it\u2019s easier to cite juicy clickbait publishing scandals around plagiarized books\u2014or, say, racist books like American Dirt or The Continent\u2014as evidence of this phenomenon than come to terms with the sheer number of books that get published and just\u2026 aren\u2019t done? And aren\u2019t good? I can\u2019t tell you how many books I pick up and think, \u201CMan, I wish the author had been able to spend another year or two or five with this project.\u201D (Far more frequently than I think, \u201CThis book is morally objectionable.\u201D)
British psychologist James Reason coined the term the \u201CSwiss Cheese Model\u201D in 1990 to explain through analogy why catastrophic failures can occur in organizations despite multiple layers of defense. Reason likens the layers to slices of Swiss cheese, piled upon each other, five or six deep. The holes represent small, potentially insignificant weaknesses. Things will totally collapse only rarely, he says, but when they do, it is by coincidence -- when all the holes happen to align so that there is a breach through the entire system.
Here we have something similar\u2014a writer\u2019s desire to do (or not do) the work, the publishing industry\u2019s desire to rush or overlook flaws in a book if it otherwise suits some purpose, a program\u2019s willingness (or not) to protect the creative space for its students. One of those things can fail\u2014maybe two\u2014but when the holes align, it all comes crashing down.
In 2017, Sam Chang delivered remarks at the One Story Debutante Ball\u2014later edited and published in LitHub\u2014in which she addressed the distinction between the writer\u2019s life and the writer\u2019s career. It\u2019s a wonderful essay\u2014I honestly believe it should be required reading for all emerging writers\u2014and I think gets at the root of one of one of our practice\u2019s most tricky contradictions.
We don\u2019t have any real infrastructure to support artists in the United States, and so the work of supporting writers through the process of completing a book falls to things like MFA programs. It\u2019s ridiculously complicated. On one hand, you\u2019re getting funding to write6, which feels like a goddamned miracle; on the other, you\u2019re still entering into the maw of an institution, which is both a place of learning and education and replicates all of the power structure bullshit of the world, and does so as your employer. In many ways it\u2019s a nightmare of labor because it\u2019s easy to forget the employment angle. (And of course it goes without saying that another side effect of this whole thing is that we\u2019ve come to think of MFAs as a necessary part of a writer\u2019s success\u2014either as a writer or as a teacher of writing\u2014instead of simply one path of support for a creative practice.)
Every program is different, in terms of how they manage this reality. Every director has their own relationship with the institution that houses them and is capable of protecting their students to a different degree. The same is true of the industry. Every director is going to (hopefully) have their own philosophy around what their student\u2019s relationship with the business end of publishing should be within the confines of the program. And for some, it\u2019s going to be: let this space be sacred. Just for now. Two years feels like forever, but in the scheme of things it is nothing. Treasure this time, and use it.
I remember the first moment I heard (but did not understand) this point. I was at Iowa and feeling low because none of the agents or editors7 who came through, who it felt were scooping up my friends and colleagues by the handful, had any interest in me. Sam, in her distinctly Sam way, assured me that when she was here as a student she\u2019d avoided the agents all together. \u201CJust write,\u201D she said. \u201CEverything else will follow in its own time.\u201D Easy for you to say, I thought. You\u2019re a renowned published author. You\u2019re the director of the most prestigious MFA program in the world! Of course you can tell me to be patient.
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