Italics are mine

Writing Habits, Part 2

My favorite library in New York City isn't the main NYPL building at the corner of 42nd Street with Fifth Avenue. Instead, it is the much smaller but much more lovely location on the Lincoln Center Plaza, which houses the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. This is where I browsed through Isolde 39 by Nicole Casanova, an out-of-print rather hagiographic biography of French soprano Germaine Lubin, on whom one of my characters (Yvonne) is very loosely based. This is also where I picked the old score of a Beethoven symphony in the stacks and admired the notes on paper that I had listened to so often.

This being said, I haven't used libraries much for my writing projects. Whenever I've found a book that seemed to offer a particularly valuable perspective, I've bought it - it didn't happen as often this time as for my previous novel, where I had to learn a lot about physics - and I've been fortunate to locate the other details that I needed to get right on the Internet. (You just need to know where to look and which sites to trust. The fact that I speak French has also come in handy, given that the novel is set in Paris and that I did have very good ideas of what I was looking for.)

I've also watched YouTube videos to decide whether I wanted this or that aria mentioned in my book. As an example when the Madeleine character returns to the Paris Opera at the Libération and sings with the bass-baritone, I needed an aria that could match the interactions between the characters. In addition I've checked the IMDb database and others for the filmography of actors I wanted to mention, for instance for the playbills in the metro, when I needed local color. Again, it helped that I knew what I was looking for. I didn't need to learn that Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret had been French monstres sacrés in the cinema industry, I just needed to check which ones of their movies had been made before 1949. I hope this - as opposed to inventing the names on the playbill - will increase the appeal of my book to the reader.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I have a tremendous amount of respect for authors of historical novels who wrote before the advent of the Internet. I can't even begin to fathom the hours they spent in libraries to get access to material - the hours they had to wait for a book to get shipped from another library so that they could consult it, the hours they wasted in front of the copy machine (when libraries started having copy machines) to make an accurate record of this or that background element.

I doubt I would've been able to write my book in the US if the Internet hadn't been there to help me bridge the distance between Bethlehem and Paris. As more and more material becomes accessible on the Internet, in no small part through Google Books, more and more writers will be able to consult high-quality material they might not even have known about before. They will then be able to write the books that match the story they have in their head, instead of having to content themselves with something less information-intensive, more within their reach. In that sense, the Internet - often viewed only as a source of distraction, by myself included - is truly a blessing.

Writing Habits, Part 1

I noticed something recently. In hindsight it was obvious for a long time, but I only admitted it to myself when I was in Philly at the beginning of the month: I write well (read: productively) at my living-room table, and - the few times a year when I visit them - at my parents' living-room table, but writing anywhere else has proved a challenge. Let me qualify this even further: not only is it a challenge, but it is something I never bring myself to doing.

For years I would pack whatever draft I was working on with me, bring sheets of blank paper and Bic #2 pencils along on the bus or airplane ride, and then I would get too busy living to even take my folder out of my bag. I'd enjoy the city sights, the company of people; I'd indulge in my favorite activities, which I sadly must live without when I am in Bethlehem: hanging out at the Metropolitan Museum or listening to a concert at Carnegie Hall, applauding the latest performance of the symphony orchestra at the Kimmel Center or strolling through the galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, catching up with friends in Central Park or Rittenhouse Square. I feel alive in big cities with an intensity that I'll never know elsewhere.

Until this month I used to feel guilty about this. I should have found the time to write! I kept telling myself. Then I finally realized that there was a time for everything, and that in a big city I preferred to get my share of intellectual and social stimulation rather than do things I could do just as well, and in fact better, once I had returned to the less exciting world of semi-rural PA. The pattern had been there all along, but for some reason I had not seen it. Instead, I had always believed that "on the next trip I'll make time to write". It turns out that not writing when I was away wasn't showing a weakness in my commitment to be a writer. It was helping me recharge so that I would be more at peace with the hours I'd later spend writing, instead of second-guessing myself because so much of my free time in PA ends up at the service of my all-consuming endeavor.

As writers we all have specific writing habits, so here are mine: as a college student in Paris I used to study in coffee shops and I can still work there productively, but when it comes to writing, I need silence - especially to get started - and a corner of my living-room table. (I'm referring to writing novels. I can write blog posts much more easily.) I do not listen to music when I write. Not even classical music. No symphonies, no sonatas. Silence. I do not access the Internet. I'm thankful that I don't have wi-fi, so I have to go into another room if I want to check a fact on the Internet, but I usually write enough at my living-room table before I do that. This is because I tend to get side-tracked when I browse the Internet, and then before I know it I'll have to prepare for class or edit a research paper, so I have to use those blocks of time where I can write wisely. 

I find it fascinating that a portable activity such as writing isn't quite as portable after all!

Brooklyn Book Festival

A few weeks ago I attended the Brooklyn Book Festival for the first time. I really enjoyed the day - it was so exhilarating to be surrounded by other book-lovers and listen to so many fantastic talks at inspiring Brooklyn venues in such a short amount of time. The festival could certainly have been expanded to a full weekend event, similarly to the Philadelphia Book Festival two years ago (I didn't go last year); hopefully the organizers will consider a more relaxed pace for next year's installment that would allow festival-goers to attend even more events. (There is also something called Bookend that takes place right before the Brooklyn festival but it didn't involve author events.)

While the Brooklyn Festival deserves to become the premier literary festival in the country since so many authors are based in Brooklyn, a lot of it felt rushed since we had to walk from one venue to the other in Brooklyn Heights and the sessions were often in the form of group readings/presentations. The Philadelphia Festival back in 2010 didn't group authors together so each author could hold a decent-sized reading and answer questions from the audience, and overall attendees got more out of each session than at the Brooklyn Festival, but the latter had many better-known authors. I attended some truly magical poetry readings at the Free Library of Philadelphia (with many other literary types) back in April 2010 - really, there was an audience for it. I see no need to cram 4 poets in one session as was the case for the Brooklyn session on "Poetry of Loss". But surely the organizers will work on improving those issues for next year.

The highlight of the day was that I got to see Jhumpa Lahiri at St Ann's Church, in a discussion with Liesl Schillinger. I had never seen her in person before and was thrilled at the opportunity, although I didn't bring books to sign. Of course meeting a writer is a double-edged sword - sometimes it is better to only keep the idealized image in mind rather than being faced with the real person with unavoidable flaws - but Lahiri looked as expected and came across as kind and humble, especially when she described her beginnings as a writer and the day a short story of hers appeared in The New Yorker for the first time. (She couldn't find the issue in newsstands and called her husband who described to her in minute detail how the story had been set in the magazine to convince her that it had indeed appeared.)

Lahiri also read from her current novel-in-progress, and I've got to admit the disappointment came from her writing rather than her (endearing) personality. The novel is, again, about Indians with top-notch higher education - there's something about grad school in physics - and the voice is exactly the same as in her previous books.

I've bought her two short story collections, and as much as I adored the first one I felt that the second one, for all the accolades it received when it appeared, just repeats much of what she has said before: the voice is similar, the setting is similar, and the editing is subpar at times, as if the whole affair had been rushed. There were some good stories, and the collection was decent, but it certainly was not the monument of great story-telling some people have made it to be. I also read a few pages of her first novel in a bookstore and wasn't interested enough to buy it.

Lahiri is someone I admire immensely as a writer (I will always cherish Interpreter of Maladies), but it feels that, instead of making her readers discover whole new worlds with her, she is overly focused on a tiny part - a hamlet rather than a world - that she will revisit again and again without progressing as a writer or changing her voice or undergoing any kind of transformation as she matures.

There were a few signs in the new novel that give hope maybe this will not be the case after all: in the chapter she read, the "action" (the term is used loosely) seemed to happen in India in the recent past, so maybe the issue of acclimatation in a foreign country such as the US won't be at the forefront this time. On the other hand, this was supposed to be the third chapter of the book so maybe it was a flashback. But overall it felt like she wasn't much renewing herself, and yet I adore her writing and everybody was enthralled by her appearance at the festival. (The church was packed to capacity, it seemed, and leaving after the talk proved to be a very long endeavor.) It'll be interesting to see the novel as a final product when it's published. Lahiri is someone I really want to see succeed, maybe because I had barely moved to the Boston area when I read her first story collection and not only shared many feelings with her protagonists but recognized many of my favorite Boston/Cambridge haunts in her pages.

I ended up the day by picking up a copy of Literary Brooklyn and making my way back to Manhattan on the Brooklyn Bridge in a gorgeous fall day. The next Brooklyn Festival will be held in September 2012. In the meantime I'm already looking forward to the Philadelphia Book Festival mid-April 2012!