I’m reading Gladwell’s book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
Malcolm Gladwell: David and Goliath from Socrates in the City on Vimeo.
Category Archives: Authors
Tollers-mas
This is the part I hate. I’m speaking, of course, of winter, the time after the Nativity festival, the White Witch season when it’s “always winter and never Christmas.”
My Christmas was fine, by the way, thank you very much. The Walkers gathered here on New Year’s Day, and revelry was unrestrained. Actually it was pretty darn restrained, but that’s how I like it.
However, we’re not entirely out of celebrations. Today is J. R. R. Tolkien’s birthday. It’s customary for Tolkien fans to do a rolling tribute, around the world. You bring out your preferred beverage at 8:00 p.m. local time, say, “The Professor!” and drink your toast.
Our friend Dale Nelson sends this link to an article, from Too Many Books and Never Enough, on Tolkien’s recordings of his own writings. I wasn’t aware that he did so many. One would think there’s an untapped market there, though Caedmon brought out a small collection some time back.
For a sample, here’s YouTube recording of the Professor reading “Riddles in the Dark.”
Anthony Carter on Writing
Pastor Anthony Carter, who has written a very good book on Christ’s work on the cross called Blood Work
“If you write for national attention,” he says “you are writing for the wrong reasons. I would encourage any pastor to remember and take to heart this sobering reality: Most people won’t even know that you have published a book, and the rest won’t care.”
Asimov on 2014 Advances, Problems
In 1964, author Issac Asimov wrote to describe a world’s fair in 2014. “Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots…
“Consider Manhattan of 1964, which has a population density of 80,000 per square mile at night and of over 100,000 per square mile during the working day. If the whole earth, including the Sahara, the Himalayan Mountain peaks, Greenland, Antarctica and every square mile of the ocean bottom, to the deepest abyss, were as packed as Manhattan at noon, surely you would agree that no way to support such a population (let alone make it comfortable) was conceivable. In fact, support would fail long before the World-Manhattan was reached.
Well, the earth’s population is now about 3,000,000,000 and is doubling every 40 years. If this rate of doubling goes unchecked, then a World-Manhattan is coming in just 500 years. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that!”
For what it’s worth, Manhattan’s current population density is a little over 70,000 per square mile. For the entire city of New York, it’s about 27,500 per sq/mi.
Hangoverium by ~nino4art on deviantART
Tolkien and the Long Defeat
Andrew Barber connects Tolkien’s elves to the Christian life. “This place, once so full of life and sustained by the Lady of Light, Galadriel… has become a glorious ruin. For Galadriel, like the rest of her kin, has left the world to the rule of man; the elves, in all their splendor, have reached their end. [She says,]’. . . together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.'”
Where Are the Catholic Writers Today?
Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image and Slant Books, writes about the idea that strong Catholic writers can’t be found today. He is responded to a piece by Dana Gioia, which lists many Catholics in letters from several years ago, but none working today. Wolfe disagrees:
To take just one example, in arguing that few contemporary writers take on the fundamental question of belief versus unbelief, Elie dismisses Alice McDermott’s fiction as being merely about Irish Catholic New Yorkers from the 1950s and ’60s. But this is an oddly literal and obtuse reading of, say, Charming Billy
. True, the novel is set in that earlier time period, but the novel is told from the point of view of a younger woman—a disaffected, lapsed Catholic—whose exploration of her Uncle Billy’s life slowly and quietly brings her back to faith. Billy the alcoholic protagonist is a mess, and yet he is a loving soul, a kind of saint—a man of boundless faith in spite of his woundedness.
Then, in an unexpectedly poignant turn of events, the novelist Oscar Hijuelos wrote to the Times in response to Elie, citing his own novel, Mr. Ives’ Christmas
, just days before his sudden death of a heart attack. Like Charming Billy, Mr. Ives’ Christmas is another whispered tale of a wounded saint, a man of deep Catholic faith whose seminarian son is senselessly murdered. These novels by McDermott and Hijuelos are meditations on sainthood in the same vein as Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, but instead of a protagonist as priest hunted by totalitarian thugs, they show us New Yorkers as unlikely saints: an advertising executive and a worker for Con Edison.
Discouragement for Writers
Nick Harrison offers these wonderful quotes and testimonies to discourage the writer in your family. Rejection. Loneliness. Struggle.
Merry Christmas.
You Gots a Big Platform? I Make You a Deal.
A platform is a way to “get noticed in a noisy world,” to borrow from Michael Hyatt’s book of the same subtitle. Hunter Baker has a helpful critique of this idea.
“Stop badgering would-be authors with applications designed to tease out how large their platforms are and spend more time locating the best manuscripts,” he writes. In the near future, he suggests a big platform will be the very reason speakers and authors will not submit their document to a traditional publisher. They will self-publish.
Scot McKnight also has several questions about platform and current publishing tactics:
I get hundreds of books sent to me each year, many of them by people with a sizable platform, and I can say without reservation that the bigger the platform the less the author has to say (not always, but often). Big platform authors are guaranteed sales. They’re not guaranteed good content. I get books on my desk from no-name authors that have much better content than big-name authors. …
I know a pastor who was given a 3-book contract, a previously unpublished pastor, had no idea what he wanted to write about, but was told “We’ll take care of that by listening to your sermons.” At about the same time a young author sent me a manuscript that was rejected by the same publisher because he had no platform, but they did agree he had very good content.
All of this is troubling, but I don’t know what to recommend as a sane alternative. Aren’t there publishers who print what they believe to be the best manuscripts they receive? What success are they having? Should litblogs, like this one, have cutthroat review competitions to compare good vs. big platform books?
Doug Wilson on Celebrity and Plagiarism
Author and pastor Doug Wilson has a lengthy post big-named Christians, ghostwriting, and plagiarism. He’s had to deal with plagiarism accusations in the past and he describes some of them:
One of my first books was one called Persuasions. In that book I have a character compare monogamy to buying a musical instrument and learning to play it, which is not like buying a record album and being stuck with listening to just one album over and over again. Years later I had a friend tell me he was disappointed that I had used C.S. Lewis’s analogy when he thought I was fully capable of coming up with my own. But I had no idea I was borrowing from Lewis. I am sure I got it from Lewis, and had used it in many witnessing conversations, and then when I wrote a book of witnessing encounters, in it went.
Other times I use something consciously. I conclude my weekly homily at the Lord’s Table with a phrase I got from John Bunyan — “come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.” Should I feel bad about not saying, every week, “as Bunyan once said . . .”? But I don’t feel bad.
This reminds me of some devotional emails I used to write. One man praised my writing highly twice, both times after I had simply forwarded a portion of a Puritan prayer printed in The Valley of Vision. I thanked him, but wondered if he thought what I had just sent out was mine. I’m still not sure.
Tim Keller on Pastors Who Write
Author and pastor Tim Keller talks about writing as a pastor, recommending young pastors to give all of their time to their ministry and plan to write later. They can write short pieces now, if they feel compelled to write, but he suggests they wait for greater maturity before they tackle whole books. He also recommends reading:
That is far and away the most important discipline. You must read widely in general for years before you become capable of recognizing good writing. And then before you write a book on a subject, you should read 20 or 30 good books on the subject carefully and skim another 20 or 30. If you just read three or four (and refer to another three or four), your book will be largely a rehash and will offer few fresh insights.