epiphany

The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

If you’re a James Joyce fan you’re in for a treat in this section. If not, you may be tempted to blow past the historical footnotes, but that would be a mistake.

Hills does spend time framing the roots of the word ‘epiphany’ and explaining how it came to be used in literary circles. But he also makes an important point about epiphany as a literary objective:

The epiphany (whether considered as a technique or an effect or a theory or a genre) is a much more useful concept for the short story than it is for the novel.

In this case the technique Hills is talking about is not directly portable to larger works. But what about flash fiction? I don’t write flash myself, but if the whole point of a literary epiphany is the realization and illumination of a single condensed moment, doesn’t that objective fits perfectly within the constraints of the flash form? (Given Joyce’s original literary goals for his epiphanies he might even be considered the father of flash fiction.)

[ Read more ]

We’ve all heard the old adage:

It’s not what you know but who you know that matters.

Apart from being a conspiracy-theorist’s dream excuse, the adage does have a grain of truth in it. Relationships and networking may matter as much or more in business as your skill set.

I mention this because of a blog post put up by Debbie Stier, Senior V.P. and Associate Publisher at HarperStudio, and Director of Digital Marketing at HarperCollins. It’s a short personal piece about an epiphany in Debbie’s work life, but it also speaks volumes about the book business and how it actually works.

Like many would-be authors I used to think that writers wrote books in little cottages in the woods, bleeding truth onto pages already saturated with tears. When a book was done the author then agonized over query letters, blindly attempting to appease personal idiosyncrasies that each agent somehow believed to be an industry norm. If, against all odds, the author managed to land an agent for his book, the agent went through a similar process trying to generate interest in an editor at a publishing house. If, against these even-longer odds, an editor became interested, that editor then went through a similar process trying to get the support of the person or group that was responsible for pulling the trigger on an actual deal.

Read Debbie’s post about the five new books she’s excited to be working on and you’ll see none of that. In fact, there is no direct mention that Debbie read a single word by any of these authors as a means of discovering them:

I’d heard him speak at the Web 2.0 conference and I wanted desperately to work with him.

…

The next author to sign with HarperStudio was Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com. I’m a huge fan — have been following his blog, twitter, videos, etc. for some time…

…

Jill Kargman is a novelist. I saw her on Samantha Ettus’s show Obsessed TV six months ago and knew I wanted to work with her.

…

I’d been thinking a lot about merits and challenges of being a small company within a large corporation, and Bob suggested that there’s a book in that. Nick Bilton from the New York Times lead me to Ryan Tate at Gawker, and he is now writing a book for us called Skunkworks, which I can’t wait to read.

…

One more author who I want to mention who signed with HarperStudio, though it was slightly before that December epiphany, but still very much part of my process of realizing how much I love my job, is Melanie Notkin, the Savvy Auntie. She’s writing her Savvy Auntie’s Guide to Life.

Here’s what Debbie did not say: ‘I read Author X’s novel/manuscript and it knocked me out.’ And yet there’s nothing wrong with that. As noted above, this kind of book-production paradigm may actually be the norm these days. [ Read more ]

WIG&TSSIP: “Epiphany” as a Literary Term

It’s Not Who You Know