E.B. White explains to his publisher why he wrote his book, Charlotte’s Web. In short, he likes animals. It’s amazing that he did something like what he describes in the book with a spider’s egg sac. He discovered it, watched it, and when he had to return to New York, he cut it all down and took it with him in a candy box. The baby spiders emerged and spread out on his NY apartment dresser!
E. Stephen Burnett picks up on the discussion over comments made regarding the stories told by J. Mark Bertrand (“Russell” to his friends), asking an insightful question: “According to the Bible, what is the ‘chief end’ of story? Is it evangelism? Gritty realism? Entertainment? Or a higher goal?”
I chafe at the idea of everything we do in the world being evangelism or pre-evangelism, though perhaps it’s true. I like to think of life being more multifaceted than that. We delight in God our Father. We make disciples of his people. We fight for justice and work in mercy. What are the themes Jesus addressed in his Sermon on the Mount? Who are the blessed of God, being a life witness, the place of the law, the nature of sin (anger, lust, divorce, promises, retribution), loving one’s enemies and neighbors, mercy, prayer and more. Is all of this meant to be seen in the colors of evangelism?
No. A story may witness the glory of God to an unbeliever without having evangelism as its goal, and perhaps that’s the answer. Glory. I want to write to magnify God’s glory, to color myself and everything I see with it.
I wasn’t scared of Bozo as a kid. I don’t remember loving him, but I wasn’t scared of him. He was funny. Emmett Kelly was funny and sad, but I assumed kind-hearted. But many people are scared of clowns now. The Smithsonian has a history of scary clowns, saying the seeds were sown long before Gacy’s murders hit the news.
Charles Dickens, shortly after his success with The Pickwick Papers, wrote the memoirs of a clown named Grimaldi, who could joke, “I am GRIM ALL DAY, but I make you laugh at night,” because his tragic background was well known by those who loved his jokes. Linda Rodriguez McRobbie writes:
[Andrew McConnell] Stott credits Dickens with watering the seeds in popular imagination of the scary clown—he’d even go so far as to say Dickens invented the scary clown—by creating a figure who is literally destroying himself to make his audiences laugh. What Dickens did was to make it difficult to look at a clown without wondering what was going on underneath the make-up: Says Stott, “It becomes impossible to disassociate the character from the actor.” That Dickens’s version of Grimaldi’s memoirs was massively popular meant that this perception, of something dark and troubled masked by humor, would stick.
Micah Mattix has a list of best sites for literature, in response to a decent, but incomplete–no, skewed–list on some other site. If I was a responsible blogger and reader, I would monitor every site on his list.
Gary Manning, Jr., associate professor of New Testament at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology, has extensive take down of the currently popular book on Jesus, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. He notes at the end of his long post that there are too many problems with this book to list or argue with them all, but here’s a couple of them:
“Why does Paul make a sacrifice in Jerusalem? It must be that James forced him to recant his heretical views, not (as Luke claims) to complete a Nazirite vow that Paul voluntarily began before arriving in Jerusalem. Why does Luke end the book of Acts with Paul’s imprisonment, not his death? It must be to cover up some damning evidence against Paul! (No mention of the idea that Luke ended Acts then because that’s when he wrote Acts).”
Manning summaries the book as a conspiracy theory. It’s message, he writes: “Jesus was really a proclaimer of violent revolution, but the gospels and Paul covered up the evidence. Aslan then has a typical conspiracy-theory approach: any time the gospels present evidence against Aslan’s theory, they were making it up; any time the gospels present evidence in favor of Aslan’s theory, they were telling the truth.” (via Justin Taylor)
“Revision is the only writing instructor worth the investment required.” Mark Bertrand offers the best writing advice available, despite the plethora of ideas which can make enjoyable reading. This is the reason I don’t want to pursue a graduate degree in writing.
“When you’re more invested in the business of books than you are in loving them, well, the person you cheat is yourself,” says J. Mark Bertrand (“a major crime-fiction talent!”) in response to discussion on the size of his readership. He notes that too often commenters throw out names of authors they think should be selling more books, and then ask where all the good books are, blaming publishing houses along the way.
You can get all of Bertrand’s Books
Mike Duran remarks on The Weekly Standard article on J. Mark Bertrand and his Roland March novels. Jon Breen had written of Bertrand’s limited audience because his books are published by Bethany House. Duran asks, “So how does being a religious publisher limit the reach of an author’s audience? Well, it doesn’t… unless you write sci-fi, epic fantasy, ethnic fiction, espionage, horror, literary, or crime fiction.” He says Bertrand’s books deserve a large readership, but perhaps this publisher doesn’t know how to market them.
I’m not sure I understand what’s missing. Is it simply that if it doesn’t sell in a Christian bookstore to a primary audience of white women, Christian publishers don’t know what else to do with it?
Maybe Amazon is engaged in a price war, but maybe it’s just taking advantage of publishing dinosaurs who don’t want to understand what different people are willing to pay for real books.
“If the [publishing] industry can’t find a way to truly understand the new reality that has grown up around it,” writes Suw Charman-Adnerson for Forbes.com, it will never find a way to survive current and future changes. Key to this is understanding Amazon’s position in the market and what impact its behaviour actually has.”
She suggests Amazon is not sending the huntsman to cut the heart out of brick-and-mortar stores, but is merely playing its part in a real market. For more common sense on the real book market, see this post on Futurebook.
