But baby, there’s no such thing as passing. We’re all just pretending. Race is a complete illusion, make-believe. It’s a costume. We all wear one. You switched yours at some point. That’s just the absurdity of the whole race game.

A quote from “Caucasia,” the novel from author Danzy Senna, about a girl born to a white mother and a black father, both active in the civil rights movement. Birdie, the main character, doesn’t quite pass as either black or white, complicating things when she ends up fleeing with her white mother after her parents’ separation. “Caucasia” is about race, activism, mistaken identity, trauma, coming-of-age, and family. This book had the biggest impact on me of any book I’ve read in the past two years. Read more »

A professor for one of my graduate writing classes is an acquisitions editor at a major publishing house.  He’s worked with some pretty big-name authors.  Last week we took the entire class time for a Q&A session about the publishing industry.  We’re all in this great program, focusing on our writing and how to make it better, but no one is really talking about how to market our ideas, what to do once we’ve got something good.

Many interesting questions came up during the two-hour session (Should one use a pen name if they want to write something commercial before writing something literary? Can a successful author switch genres mid-career? How do you find an agent who really gets you?) until someone finally broke the ice:  ”What kind of advances do authors get paid these days?”

A weight was lifted off everyone’s shoulders. After frankly stating that very very few authors will get the big advances of the last ten years, our professor told us a story about Junot Diaz, author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Apparently two publishers had a bidding war over Diaz’s first book, until finally, Riverhead Books (a division of Penguin), offered Diaz a $150,000 advance for two books, guaranteeing themselves first rights to whatever he ended up writing next.  The other publisher gave up at that point, not being able to outbid such a high figure.  Well, they probably regret their decision now given how wildly successful Diaz’s two books have been.

Most of us aren’t going to have such a high-stakes bidding war for our first book, let alone any bidding war at all.  Diaz is a pretty lucky (and talented) guy.  Given all this, it was refreshing to find his recent admission that even he — a Pulitzer Prize-winning author — has had problems churning out good work.  So even if he’s successful on the whole making-money-off-your-writing thing, he still struggles with the whole actually-doing-the-writing part: Read more »

Lawrence Tarpey's "Pinocchio"

An old boyfriend once told me that I was the worst liar he ever knew.  He told me he could hear that distinct quiver in my voice and see the slight shift in my eyes every time I told a lie.  What he sadly never learned in our short-lived relationship was that these were calculated moments concocted to conceal my true dishonest self.  I had lulled him into believing I was a terrible liar in order to conceal the fact that I was actually great at it.

Before you go analyzing the verity of every past conversation you have ever had with me, please know that I’m given more crap for being too honest than lying too often.  I am that person in your life that tells you your latest script bored me to death and that your new girlfriend’s voice is the source of my migraines.  Though I choose not to engage it in often, lying is a necessary part of life.  Imagine if I had been completely honest with my old boyfriend? Or if he had been completely honest with me? The upside is that we probably would have wasted less time together but we also would have left the relationship with less of our dignity intact.  But forget all that – Lit Drift isn’t a dating column (at least not until Cosmo starts linking our articles) – I’m here today to hopefully find the correlation between great liars and great writers.  Read more »

Write a Better Novel’s Bill Henderson recently wrote about the dilemma of teaching to supplement your writing income. He received a slew of comments about struggling to write a novel during the off-hours of your day job, which he summarized in a new post that you should definitely take a look at. Real novelists sound off on the issue, and it really struck a chord with me. Writing in itself is hard enough, but having to do it when you get home from a long day of work (when you could be, say, watching TV and spending time with friends) can sometimes make writing insufferable. Some of my favorite quotes after the jump: Read more »

I spent the other night hanging at home with my friends, chatting and drinking dirt-ass-cheap champagne (because we’re classy, you see). For one reason or another our conversation drifted to the Kindle. I’ve always wondered why I never warmed to Kindle like everyone else seemed to. My friend Kenna provided a succinct, practical response to that question that I wanted to post it here.

While everyone else’s parents just adored the Kindle, all four of us hated it. Kenna reasoned:

“I think we’re the generation who knows how to use technology right. It’s so much a part of our lives that we feel comfortable finding new ways to use it–like Twitter or Facebook. But our parents can only understand it if they use technology to replace something else that they’re already familiar with. So they feel comfortable reading books on a Kindle, but we don’t.”