Good writers borrow, great writers steal. —T. S. Eliot (but possibly stolen from Oscar Wilde)
Anybody Can Be a Writer
Jacob Finch Bonner, the once promising author of the “New & Noteworthy” (The New York Times Book Review) novel The Invention of Wonder, let himself into the office he’d been assigned on the second floor of Richard Peng Hall, set his beat-up leather satchel on the barren desk, and looked around in something akin to despair. The office, his fourth home in Richard Peng Hall in as many years, was no great improvement on the earlier three, but at least it overlooked a vaguely collegiate walkway under trees from the window behind the desk, rather than the parking lot of years two and three or the dumpster of year one (when, ironically, he’d been much closer to the height of his literary fame, such as it was, and might conceivably have hoped for something nicer). The only thing in the room that signaled anything of an actual literary nature, that signaled anything of any warmth at all, was the beat-up satchel Jake used to transport his laptop and, on this particular day, the writing samples of his soon-to-arrive students, and this Jake had been carrying around for years. He’d acquired it at a flea market shortly before his first novel’s publication with a certain writerly self-consciousness: acclaimed young novelist still carries the old leather bag he used throughout his years of struggle! Any residual hope of becoming that person now was long gone. And even if it wasn’t there was no way to justify the expense of a new bag. Not any longer. Richard Peng Hall was a 1960s addition to the Ripley campus, an unlovely construction of white cinder block behind the gymnasium and beside some dormitories slapped together for “coeds” when Ripley College began admitting women in the year 1966 (which, to its credit, had been ahead of the curve). Richard Peng had been an engineering student from Hong Kong, and though he probably owed more of his eventual wealth to the school he’d attended after Ripley College (namely MIT), that institution had declined to construct a Richard Peng Hall, at least for the size of donation he’d had in mind. The Ripley building’s original purpose had been to accommodate the engineering program, and it still bore the distinct tang of a science building with its windowed lobby nobody ever sat in, its long, barren corridors, and that soul-killing cinder block. But when Ripley got rid of engineering in 2005 (got rid of all its science programs, actually, and all of its social science programs) and dedicated itself, in the words of its frantic board of supervisors, “to the study and practice of the arts and humanities in a world that increasingly undervalues and needs them,” Richard Peng Hall was reassigned to the low-residency Master of Fine Arts Program in Fiction, Poetry, and Personal Non-Fiction (Memoir). Thus had the writers come to Richard Peng Hall, on the campus of Ripley College, in this strange corner of northern Vermont, close enough to the fabled “Northeast Kingdom” to bear some trace of its distinct oddness (the area had been home to a small but hardy Christian cult since the 1970s) but not so far from Burlington and Hanover as to be completely in the back of beyond. Of course creative writing had been taught at the college since the 1950s, but never in any serious, let alone enterprising way. Things got added to the curriculum of every educational institution concerned with survival as the culture changed around it and as the students began, in their eternally student-y way, to make demands: women’s studies, African-American studies, a computer center that actually acknowledged computers were, you know, a thing. But when Ripley underwent its great crisis in the late 1980s, and when the college took a sober, and deeply trepidatious look at what might be required for actual institutional survival, it was—surprise!—the creative writing that signaled the most optimistic way forward. And so it had launched its first (and, still, only) graduate program, the Ripley Symposia in Creative Writing, and over the following years the Symposia basically ate up the rest of the college until all that was left was its low-residency program, so much more accommodating for students who couldn’t drop everything for a two-year MFA course. And shouldn’t be expected to! Writing, according to Ripley’s own glossy prospectus and highly enticing website, was not some elitist activity out of bounds to all but the fortunate few. Every single person had a unique voice and a story nobody else could tell. And anybody—especially with the guidance and support of the Ripley Symposia—could be a writer. All Jacob Finch Bonner had ever wanted to be was a writer. Ever, ever, ever, all the way back to suburban Long Island, which was the last place on earth a serious artist of any kind ought to come from but where he, nonetheless, had been cursed to grow up, the only child of a tax attorney and a high school guidance counselor. Why he’d affixed his star to the forlorn little shelf in his local library marked AUTHORS FROM LONG ISLAND! was anyone’s guess, but it did not pass unnoticed in the young writer’s home. His father (the tax attorney) had been forceful in his objections (Writers didn’t make money! Except Sidney Sheldon. Was Jake claiming he was the next Sidney Sheldon?) and his mother (the guidance counselor) had seen fit to remind him, constantly, of his mediocre-at-best PSAT score on the verbal side. (It was greatly embarrassing to Jake that he’d managed to do better on the math than the verbal.) These had been grievous challenges to overcome, but what artist was without challenges to overcome? He’d read stubbornly (and, it should be noted, already competitively, and with envy) throughout his childhood, departing the mandatory curriculum, leapfrogging the usual adolescent dross to vet the emerging field of his future rivals. Then off he had gone to Wesleyan to study creative writing, falling in with a tight group of fellow proto-novelists and short story writers who were just as insanely competitive as he was. Many were the dreams of young Jacob Finch Bonner when it came to the fiction he would one day write. (The “Bonner,” in point of fact, wasn’t entirely authentic—Jake’s paternal great-grandfather had substituted Bonner for Bernstein a solid century before—but neither was the “Finch,” which Jake himself had added in high school as an homage to the novel that awakened his love of fiction.) Sometimes, with books he especially loved, he imagined that he had actually written them himself, and was giving interviews about them to critics or reviewers (always humble in his deflection of the interviewer’s praise) or reading from them to large, avid audiences in a bookstore or some hall full of occupied seats. He imagined his own photograph on the back jacket flap of a hardcover (taking as his templates the already outdated writer-leaning-over-manual-typewriter or writer-with-pipe) and thought far too often about sitting at a table, signing copies for a long, coiling line of readers. Thank you, he would intone graciously to each woman or man. That’s so kind of you to say. Yes, that’s one of my favorites, too. It wasn’t precisely true that Jake never thought about the actual writing of his future fictions. He understood that books did not write themselves, and that real work—work of imagination, work of tenacity, work of skill—would be required to bring his own eventual books into the world. He also understood that the field was not uncrowded: a lot of young people just like himself felt the way he did about books and wanted to write them one day, and it was even possible that some of these other young people might conceivably have even more natural talent than he did, or possibly a more robust imagination, or just a greater will to get the job done. These were not ideas that gave him much pleasure, but, in his favor, he did know his own mind. He knew that he would not be getting certified to teach English in public schools (“if the writing thing doesn’t work out”) or taking the LSATs (“why not?”). He knew that he had chosen his lane and begun swimming, and he would not stop swimming until he held his own book in his own hands, at which point the world would surely have learned the thing he himself had known for so many years: He was a writer. A great writer. That had been the intention, anyway. It was late June and it had been raining all over Vermont for the better part of a week when Jake opened the door to his new office in Richard Peng Hall. As he stepped inside he noticed that he had tracked mud along the corridor and into the room, and he looked down at his sorry running shoes—once white, now brown with damp and dirt, never in fact used for actual running—and felt the pointlessness of taking them off now. He’d spent the long day driving up from the city with two plastic Food Emporium bags of clothes and that elderly leather satchel containing the nearly as elderly laptop on which his current novel—the novel he was theoretically (as opposed to actually) working on—and the folders of submitted work by his assigned students, and it occurred to him that he had brought progressively less with him each time he’d made the trip north to Ripley. The first year? A big suitcase stuffed with most of his clothing (because who knew what might be considered appropriate attire for three weeks in northern Vermont, surrounded by surely fawning students and surely envious fellow teachers?) and every printed-out draft of his second novel, the deadline for which he’d had a tendency to whine about in public. This year? Only those two plastic bags of tossed-in jeans and shirts and the laptop he now mainly used for ordering dinner and watching YouTube. If he was still doing this depressing job a year from now, he probably wouldn’t even bother with the laptop. No, Jake was not looking forward to the about-to-begin session of the Ripley Symposia. He was not looking forward to reconvening with his dreary and annoying colleagues, not one of them a writer he genuinely admired, and certainly he was not looking forward to feigning excitement for another battalion of eager students, each and every one of them likely convinced they would one day write—or perhaps had already written—the Great American Novel. Most of all, he was not looking forward to pretending that he himself was still a writer, let alone a great one. It went without saying that Jake had not done any preparation for the imminent term of the Ripley Symposia. He was utterly unfamiliar with any of the sample pages in those annoyingly thick folders. When he’d begun at Ripley he’d persuaded himself that “great teacher” was a laudable addition to “great writer,” and he’d given the writing samples of these folks, who’d put down real money to study with him, some very focused attention. But the folders he was now pulling out of his satchel, folders he ought to have begun reading weeks earlier when they’d arrived from Ruth Steuben (the Symposia’s highly acerbic office manager) had traveled from Priority Mail box to leather satchel without ever once suffering the indignity of being opened, let alone subjected to intimate examination. Jake looked at them balefully now, as if they themselves were responsible for his procrastination, and the appalling evening that lay ahead of him, as a result. Because after all, what was there to know about the people whose inner lives these folders contained, who were even now converging on northern Vermont, and the sterile conference rooms of Richard Peng Hall, and this very office, once the one-on-one conferences began in a few days? These particular students, these ardent apprentices, would be utterly indistinguishable from their earlier Ripley counterparts: mid-career professionals convinced they could churn out Clive Cussler adventures, or moms who blogged about their kids and didn’t see why that shouldn’t entitle them to a regular gig on Good Morning America, or newly retired people “returning to fiction” (secure in the knowledge that fiction had been waiting for them?). Worst of all were the ones who reminded Jake most of himself: “literary novelists,” utterly serious, burning with resentment toward anyone who’d gotten there first. The Clive Cusslers and mom bloggers might still be persuadable that Jake was a famous, or at least a “highly regarded” young (now “youngish”) novelist, but the would-be David Foster Wallaces and Donna Tartts who were certainly present in the pile of folders? Not so much. This group would be all too aware that Jacob Finch Bonner had fumbled his early shot, failed to produce a good enough second novel or any trace of a third novel, and been sent to the special purgatory for formerly promising writers, from which so few of them ever emerged. (It happened to be untrue that Jake had not produced a third novel, but in this case the untruth was actually preferable to the truth. There had indeed been a third novel, and even a fourth, but those manuscripts, the making of which had together consumed nearly five years of his life, had been rejected by a spectacular array of publishers of declining prestige, from the “legacy” publisher of The Invention of Wonder to the respectable university press that had published his second book, Reverberations, to the many, many small press publication competitions listed in the back of Poets & Writers, which he had spent a small fortune entering, and, needless to say, had failed to win. Given these demoralizing facts, he actually preferred that his students believe he was still struggling to reel in that mythical and stupendous second novel.) Even without reading the work of his new students, Jake felt he already knew them as intimately as he’d known their earlier counterparts, which was better than he wanted to know them. He knew, for example, that they were far less gifted than they believed they were, or possibly every bit as bad as they secretly feared they were. He knew they wanted things from him that he was utterly unequipped to deliver and had no business pretending he possessed in the first place. He also knew that every one of them was going to fail, and he knew that when he left them behind at the end of the current three-week session they would disappear from his life, never to be thought of again. Which was all he wanted from them, really. But first, he had to deliver on that Ripley fantasy that they were all, “students” and “teachers” alike, colleagues-in-art, each with a unique voice and a singular story to tell with it, and each equally deserving of being called that magical thing: a writer. It was just past seven and still raining. By the time he met his new students the following evening at the welcome cookout he would have to be all smiles, all personal encouragement, and full of such scintillating guidance that each new member of the Ripley Symposia Master of Fine Arts Program might believe the “gifted” (Philadelphia Inquirer) and “promising” (Boston Globe) author of The Invention of Wonder was personally prepared to usher them into the Shangri-La of Literary Fame. Unfortunately, the only path from here to there led through those twelve folders. He turned on the standard Richard Peng desk lamp and sat down in the standard Richard Peng office chair, which gave a loud squeak as he did, then he spent a long moment tracing a line of grime along the ridges of the cinder blocks on the wall beside his office door, delaying till the last possible moment the long and deeply unpleasant evening that was about to commence. How many times, looking back at this night, the very last night of a time he would always afterward think of as “before,” would he wish that he hadn’t been so utterly, fatally wrong? How many times, in spite of the astonishing good fortune set in motion by one of those folders, would he wish he’d backed his way out of that sterile office, retraced his own muddy footprints down the corridor, returned to his car, and driven those many hours back to New York and his ordinary, personal failure? Too many, but no matter. It was already too late for that.
~~~~
You know folks, sometimes you read a book and questions start coming into your mind... As I think about it, they started right from the beginning. So I went out and found several negative reviews about this particular book... Or maybe, I've caught a little of the fear that was recently expressed about somebody using AI to create a novel, under your name, and then selling it. In any event, I decided not to review this book, but to consider the aspects of the book itself, in relation to reading it as a new book to be read...
First, the author--the main character--has written a one-time gigantic hit which brought him into the big time writers list very fast... But his second novel failed to achieve that recognition. Was it writer's block? I've read a horror novel about having writer's block and I have to say that it was very well done, and scary, LOL... But that doesn't address the point of my question. How can you write a masterpiece and then, what, your mind just stops working? No creativity still exists?
Some might think I am a writer; I am not. What I do routinely is "respond" to another person's work, their words, their actual completion of a project--or a poem, which I've often done. Some may be written well; some not... But I know I do not have the creative mind to actually write an entire novel and all that it entails. I also know that I am not a "critic" as was used when more newspapers had book reviews by critical reviewers... I have done that sort of review early on, especially when I was a paid reviewer on an online site--Independent Professional Reviews.
So, right away, I could not understand how a first book could be an immediate hit. Was it merely the concept that had made that happen? The title of that first book was The Invention of Wonder. My first thought was that the title was pretty heavy. But, since nobody will ever read it, we have no idea exactly what that first top seller even said, or why it was so well received. One or two of the negative reviewers of this book said it was because of the "hype" used by publishers... From my own experience, I realize that not every book by the same author will be as good or as well written... Still, all the books written by a top author normally received equal praise... That just doesn't happen in my experience... I can watch a writer's work grow in talent and through experience. Indeed for a few, there has been a book that came along which revealed just how much the actual story had become "fuller," "more fluid in presentation," or even "a plot that is well beyond earlier books." Frankly, that's what I expect for writers I've followed for years... Something--whatever IT IS--has changed from earlier books...
Taking it a step further, when the second book was written and discovered NOT to be another hit, the publishers were not as enthusiastic in continuing to work with Jake. So this writer of The Invention of Wonder found himself without an income. And finally found a teaching job for teaching writing classes. Yes, you may wonder how he was able to teach what he has found he really can't do? Be A Writer?
Let me quickly point out that there are many writers, and really not a way that everybody who writes books can be successfully employed doing that. That's good, because it shows that we as a world continue to Read... But for the individual writer, it is a very difficult life. Mainly because of the number of books being written. If writers don't find a connection within the publishing world, then the choice to self-publish is full of dangers of various kinds... Some people can write, but have an inadequate mastering of the language used for the novel. Some people, though, think they can write, really can't... For instance, a young guy I met online asked me to read his book... It was full of creativity that he had seen on television or movies...but, it really wasn't a novel... No setting, no background, little dialogue... And, he couldn't understand what I was saying. I asked him about his reading--and learned, of course, that he had little reading experience...
Well, this is where this novel arrived. One of Jake's students at that class had told the entire class when he arrived that he had an idea that would make an award-winning novel... At one point, he talked about the concept with the class leader...
Before long, the owner of the idea/concept was dead...
Life goes on, the writer was trying to complete a novel which was due to his publisher--and was being hassled to submit... Jake was also questioned about his connection with the student who had died.
At the same time, he met a woman who he almost immediately fell in love with and ultimately married...
But, also, at the same time, he decided since the original idea creator was now dead and time had swiftly gone by, he gave himself permission to "steal" the idea, which was a great one, and wrote a novel which quickly turned into a hit, of course...
You must realize, however, that the teacher had actually taken just a concept and wrote an entire novel from his own mind, responding to that idea...
Once it had been published and he was back into the limelight, it started... Notes were received that somebody knew he had used the book of a dead man... There was sufficient information that made him realize that somebody did know something--but what? He decided to go back into the area where the class had originally been taught, to the place where the young student had lived... All the while gathering information about who the egotistical young man actually was who claimed he'd write a best-selling novel...
But, when he returned, he learned that his wife had now been contacted with accusations...
When you read such a book about the actual writing of books, you immediately want to know more about the concept--at least I did. And, the author did insert a number of pages from that proposed book, for readers of this novel to read. Not enough to actually get involved with the plot, of course...
Most readers of mysteries will begin to know exactly what is going on. It really was not difficult. When you are faced with a mystery, you naturally begin to pinpoint all the possible characters in the book and work to eliminate the "not's" from the possibilities. In this book, that wasn't provided. In fact, the first chapter, which is provided as the above excerpt, is quite depressing and, instinct makes any reader wonder who this main character actually was...
But an avid reader may quickly pinpointed the only person it could be. Case closed...
But this is not a simple mystery. Yes the investigation becomes a mystery... The frightful emotional concerns of the supposed plagiarist makes the book somewhat edgy... And, the book does pull readers at least to the next page, and the next... Is this enough to make a book a hit, to be praised by all? I wasn't quite convinced, since I went out to read some of the reviews, which I normally never do.
Bottom line for me was that there are so few books that I finish reading and have no real positive feeling about. That is, if I've read the entire book. By the time I'm finishing, my ranking begins to form. Normally with my system, I rate high for purposes of a store which requires ranking. Why? Because I include in my mind the lowest ratings for those books which I found not to be worth reading...they get 1 or 2... So my lowest rating for a good book would be 3. And that requires things like problems with editing or lack of continuity, or no recognition of break points, for scene changes, etc. Anyway, I'll just say I was a little disgusted as the book was moving on... And I certainly was not happy how it ended.
I find using words more effective than a rank... which is often based upon nothing to do with the book itself... Such as those who rank a book because sex is explicit... That just means that you bought a book that you shouldn't have, if you have such a bias... Then, return it, is what I suggest... But don't claim a book itself deserves a 1, purely on personal opinion. I know you can do anything you want on most book sites. But, that just proves my point that a rating system is really illogical unless based upon specific points clearly outlined and provable... A difficult, if not impossible, thing to do, again, in my opinion.
I don't plan on posting a review for this book... But if I did, I think it would have to be a 3...Too many things don't add up... I just read a comment that the reader felt that plagiarism had actually taken place. Whereas I read the book as if the "concept" which is just a small part of writing a book, actually meant that the teacher did not write the entire book based upon a concept he heard about. That's not how I read the book, so if you think I'm wrong as I read it, let me know and we'll discuss...
And on final point...it was clear to me in the very first chapter that Jake had received no positive support in his life. We are therefore left with the question, did he actually write The Invention of Wonder, which was not even questioned at the time of its being published... Yet, the reader does have a right to wonder why none of his other books were deemed publishable? In this type of book, too much is left open-ended, in my opinion. My reading is that he did not steal the book. He took an idea and wrote a book. Surely before the end of the book it should have been determined whether the book itself was the same book that was supposedly completed... It made no mention that another book was forthcoming. Indeed, there is some question about who exactly first had the "concept" that was explored and ultimately led to a new book...
I don't like serial books which require waiting for the next book, unless it also closes out the present book. Cliff-hanging books are an unworthy thing to do to readers, again, in my opinion. There is no guarantee that the reader will ever learn the end of the story, which is, to me, simply not acceptable. I don't see too many writers using cliff-hangers any more. Perhaps because nobody remembers to buy that next book, out of all the others who don't "leave us hanging..." LOL
A final note: Through the videos above, I learned that the author has other top-rated books. I, too, wonder, if the hype by the publishers on this book is not part of the reason why it received so much visibility. At the end of the book, there was no real closure for those of us who felt the book was not stolen, rather that an idea had spurred another writer to create another well received book. Ideas are just that, you can't copyright an idea unless you give a whole more information about your proposal than a concept... Consider this... The Wizard of Oz has been changed to Wicked... An entirely different concept and story... Both are/were fantastic creative endeavors. Such creativity should be nurtured in any way possible, especially in children. Once they are old enough, basic principles of writing must be learned, practiced and explored to a greater extent--a goal... A concept is the bedrock of any type of creativity, including inventions, business models and more... But it is always the one who initiates a plan of action and performs the necessary work to move forward that should be credited with the fulfillment of that goal... It is those individuals who should be recognized, don't you think?
GABixlerReviews
I got visitors before I could finish, so I'm not doing a final proofread today... Will check it over tomorrow when free...
Gabby
