"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit-detector." --Ernest Hemingway

Who could argue with Papa Hemingway's advice? Actually, there are lots of good reasons to argue with him, starting with his suicide. After all, if you off yourself, you cannot continue to detect and eliminate the shit from your writing. You can't do any writing. You can't do anything. Except be dead. Being dead sucks.

Therefore, we shall modify Hemingway's adage accordingly: "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit-detector with an on-off switch."

Now, a bit on the shit-detector part: a writer must be honest with herself about the quality of what's on the page. She has to know what the prose is supposed to be doing, and she has to know if it's doing it. She has to be able to see when she's bluffing, when she's making smokescreens with words instead of cutting to the chase. She has to recognize when her prose is merely ornamental, and, no matter how much she likes that turn of phrase, if it doesn't do its job, she has to get rid of it. (This is known, among writers, as "murdering your darlings." Here's a bit more on the painful process from a Writer's Digest article by Jim Kelly.)

However. You cannot do the important work of shit-detecting if you haven't written anything. This is why the on-off switch on the shit-detector is essential--do not give this item to any writer on your list unless you have made sure the on-off switch is present.

What I mean is this: to get a draft that you can subsequently scrutinize, pulverize, rewriterize (err, revise), you have to first write something. And a lot of what you write is going to be shit. (Here's a pdf of Anne Lamott's two cents on shitty first drafts.) If that damn detector is going off constantly while you are trying to write, things are going to get ugly. You will get frustrated. You will despair. You will stop writing.

Good writing comes after plenty of shitty writing, but you can't simply skip the shit. You have to go through it to get to the place where you can detect--and do something about--the rotten bits.

But once there is a draft, we have to be ready to look at it for what it is, with eyes unclouded by our own visions of grandeur. "I wrote a novel!" is wonderful. "I'm revising my novel!" is more important.

Here's to working hard, being patient with the shit in your work, and then sniffing it all out.

Best wishes for a peaceful holiday season to all who have been and are celebrating.

*Photo credit: Scott Witt

What's the status of color and other forms of diversity in YA publishing? How does YA publishing compare to the state of things in the industry as a whole?

A couple of weeks ago, Roxane Gay of HTMLGiant published A Profound Sense of Absence, a thought-provoking post on the lack of diversity in the celebrated Best American Short Stories anthology for 2010. Her observations generated a lot of responses, some thoughtful, some contentious. Roxane says of this year's BASS:

What I felt most while reading BASS was a profound sense of absence. Sure there was a story about black people (written by Danielle Evans, coincidentally) and there was a story about a mechanic, to bring in that working class perspective and there was a story set in Africa, but most of the stories were uniformly about rich white people (often rich, white old men) doing rich white people things like going on safari or playing poker and learning a painful lesson or lamenting old age in Naples. Each of these stories was wonderful and I don't regret reading them, but the demographic narrowness is troubling. It's not right that anyone who isn't white, straight, or a man, reading a book like this, which is fairly representative of the work being published by the "major" journals, is going to have a hard time finding experiences that might, in some way, mirror their own. It's not right that the best writing in the country, each year, is writing about white people by white people with a few splashes of color or globalism (Africa! Japan! the hood!) for good effect.

I absolutely believe that getting recognized is generally harder for writers who aren't white and wealthy. This hardly seems like a point worth discussing. My question is: are things any better for YA writers?

While YA publishing has been shamed by recent events (like the whitewashing of covers by Bloomsbury), overall, I'd say that there is a generally positive response to writers who are from underrepresented groups themselves or who feature characters from minorities. I've been fortunate to find an agent and an editor who are sympathetic to my work.

(Picture books are a different story. Now that I'm a mom, I've been pretty shocked at how white and homogenous the kids' section at the library is.)

I would like to think, along with the friend who turned me onto Roxane's post, that part of what makes the YA market robust (in contrast to the anemic general market) is its receptivity to diversity. The hugely talented Sherman Alexie, for example, finally won his first National Book Award with his hilarious YA title, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. As he said when he won the award, "Well, I obviously should have been writing YA all along." (You can see his acceptance speech here, although you have to skip to 4:38 to get past all the introductory hooplah.) 

Was the YA world able to appreciate something in Alexie that adult publishing professionals failed to? Or am I hopelessly and wrong-headedly optimistic?

There's more I have to say on this topic, so keep an eye out for thoughts on the representation of culture and race in YA lit and the moral imperative that (maybe) persists in publishing for kids and teens.

I. love. cake. cookies. pies. Anything sweet and full of fat, it seems. I also love vegetables and other things, but these sweet monsters exercise a particular pull on me. Why do we love cake (and other fattening foods)? And what do we do about it when it's true?

I'm not so worried about my figure; there's health to think of. Plus the uncomfortable feeling that something as cute and innocuous-seeming as a cupcake is the boss of me.

So: I continue to struggle to find a way to enjoy foods without letting them take over or endanger my health. This is the time of year that this effort becomes more challenging. 

Why do I like cake? David Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the American Appetite has satisfying answers on why some foods never satisfy, driving us to overeat. He explores how eating has become an area of our lives where we don't really understand what we're doing or why. Nor, oftentimes, do we understand why certain foods exercise the pull they do over us. Check out these highlights from the book for a few of the insights that it offers.

What I liked best about this book was how it changed the way I view an encounter with tempting foods. No, I am not now Ms. Self-Control, but I do find that it's easier to resist commercial items. I can understand that they've been engineered, not to satisfy my craving, but to encourage it. I really don't like the idea of being manipulated in this way.

Another thing I appreciated was the readability and moments of personal reflection that Kessler offers. Unlike many "dieting" books (and that's not what this is), Kessler's book doesn't feel preachy. We get the sense that he, too, is on the same journey. You can get a sense of what he's like on this edition of Fresh Air.

The problem of showing "love" through food is a topic for another day, although my passion for baking always raises some concerns for me; I want others to enjoy yummy foods from time to time, but I don't want to derail their health efforts.

Here's a sweet treat that won't overwhelm you with calories. It's the "Love Cake" song. A couple of British (?) girls singing about cake, what's not to love? I watch it whenever I need a little lift that doesn't mean blowing my eating goals for the day. Watch it with me now:

A week ago I did a general post on historical fiction. Today I want to add that historical fiction is a way to preserve (or imaginatively recreate) stories that have gone unrecorded. I'll give you an example of what I mean.

In Longview, Texas, where I went to high school, there's no historical marker to commemorate the experiences of thousands of black students in segregated schools. And it doesn't look like there will be one any time soon. Why? Because the Texas Historical Commission has certain requirements for documentation. But the usual sources for this documentation--newspapers, above all--are no help because the East Texas press of the time did not include many events affecting the black community.Here's a bit from a Longview News-Journal article on German Anderson's efforts to overcome these barriers to recognizing an important chapter of black history:

Anderson is coming up against major gaps in the documentation required by the state to back up the history he knows is there. Some of those gaps are the result of the media of the day, including newspapers, turning a blind eye to the existence of schools serving the black population.

"There just was not much written about us then," he said. "I know the Longview Negro High School was destroyed by fire between 1945 and 1946, but there's nothing I've found written about it in any local newspapers."

Good news didn't get coverage, either.

"The Colored High School football team went to the state semi-finals — but there was no mention in the newspapers," he said.

That means the history must be re-created from other sources. While a difficult task, it's important to keep those bits of Longview history from being lost, he said.

Longview, Texas, stands for the broader situation of the black community in East Texas during past years. And while I can't solve Anderson's documentation problems or get that marker up, I can incorporate the stories of segregated schooling in my own writing. So while my novel-in-progress is about a tragedy that takes place in a white school during the 1930s, I also incorporate the experiences and responses of teens from the black community.

This is my way of creating a monument. But I still hope Mr. Anderson gets his marker.

(*Photo: this is the kind of marker Mr. Anderson would like to see for Longview's former black school system. Credit: Matthew High)