daniel prazer

Ignoring the fact that Snooki has a book deal for a novel, I saw this awful news on the Poets & Writer’s daily news roundup:

A new study from Scholastic has found that 25 percent of the more than one thousand six-to-seventeen-year-olds surveyed count texting with friends as reading, 28 percent count catching up on Facebook as reading, and 39 percent said that information they found online “is always correct.”

Effing seriously? Reading your texts counts as reading nowadays? I guess this just makes me feel awfully old, because I have problems coming out of bookstores empty-handed, while the undergraduates of late seem to be wrapped in a bubble of technology at all times. I can’t tell you how many elevator rides I’ve taken at Columbia College Chicago with undergrads who are texting and listening to blaring music through their over-ear headphones. I just wish young people would pay more attention to the world around them, especially people who are at an art school. Consuming media does not prepare you to create media. The world around you does.

Okay, there was this silver lining:

In brighter news, 66 percent of the group said they will always want to read print books despite the increasing prevalence of e-books.

Now I fully understand the hypocrisy of being heartened by this factoid one post away from finally getting the e-reader for periodicals. But there’s a huge difference between periodicals and books. Magazines—and I’m a huge fan of magazine journalism—still have the advertising revenue coming in when they release digital versions, and that’s a good thing; their job is to make money for the publisher. As do books, but books, especially fiction, require an artist to create them.

Of course, they aren’t all necessarily good artists. Some books, like Snooki’s magnum opus, just piggyback on a fad. Somehow, I don’t expect A Death in the Family or The Sound and the Fury from her.

You feel crazy when you write, fraught with doubt and remorse at not being able to do it well. More on that later.

So I felt pretty good when I found this Scientific American Podcast/article through Poet & Writers Daily News feed. It’s fascinating stuff.

Here is what scientists found:  The number of ideas expressed in those autobiographies had a inverse association with the severity of dementia later in life. For instance in the sentence, “I was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on May 24, 1913 and was baptized in a church,” has seven ideas according to the researchers. Phrases like “I was born” and “I was baptized in church” all count toward what they call a measurement of “idea density.”

So I suppose that bodes well for fiction writers, particularly, who write entire works from the ether of their imagination. I’d like to think these researchers would place the “idea density” of solid novels (and even well-written narrative creative nonfiction) damn high.

As for the insanity of writing, the amazing Richard Bausch once told me—and I’m paraphrasing—that the self-doubt you feel is your talent; bad writers don’t have that voice telling you “it’s not quite right yet.”

Gizmodo had a post this afternoon about an art installation in Bologna called Scanner by a Slovakian artist. And it’s made of thousands of books.

Oh, this is awesome.

I just rewatched the film adaptation last night, which is absolutely one of the most successful translations from page to screen out there, and was reminded of the first time I read E. Annie Proulx’s novel. I was a sophomore at Miami University taking a contemporary literature class, though The Shipping News wasn’t on the reading list. (Jesus’s Son was, and that’s still one of my all-time favorites.) No, my professor mentioned Annie Proulx’s novel to us as something amazing, and I picked it up in one of uptown’s bookstores on the way home that afternoon.

It absolutely blew me away.

Leading each chapter with an entry from the Ashley Book of Knots. The way it starts with clipped phrases. Taking everything from Quoyle. The way the prose becomes more fluid and nuanced as Quoyle learns who he is and recovers his life. The stunningly human twists, and Newfoundland becoming a character of its own. The mysticism of the sensitive Newfies.

It started a young journalism student out slowly, with those clipped phrases. I remember thinking, “I can do this. I’ve read Hemingway,” but the more I read, the more I got sucked in, I said to myself, “I want to do this.”

It was the book that made me want to be a fiction writer and a journalist.

By Daniel Prazer

A year ago last weekend, I walked across the stage and got my master’s degree in writing from Columbia College. Cranking away at a book-length manuscript tends to burn you out, a condition I referred to as the post-post-graduate writing hangover.

Less than a month later, my father took his own life. For the next few months, I sank deeper into the couch cushions.

Momentum—or the lack of it—took over my writing life. When I finally emerged from my suicide-survivor’s exile, the only words I put down on the page were cover letters to go with a redesigned resume. Nothing creative.

Until this summer, when a former professor and friend, Sam Weller, threw down this gauntlet on his Facebook wall: “I am going to write 500 words a day, every day, until the end of August. This will give me a 53,000-word draft of a novel by the end of summer. Anyone care to join me in this challenge? It’s just two pages a day.”

Read the rest at New City’s Summer Guide.