1. Why do you blog?
I’ve never kept a diary or journal and this seemed so easy. However, I only write about my writing life and sometimes the vicissitudes of the publishing world.
2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?
Elmore Leonard.
3. Which three blogs do you most visit?
Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind
A Writer’s Life (Lee Goldberg)
Tess Gerritsen’s Blog
4. Why do you read fiction?
Is there something else to read?
5. What makes you laugh?
Writers who define themselves as literary writers. What is a literary writer anyway?
Sandra Scoppettone blogs at: http://sandrascoppettone.blogspot.com/
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Jul 26th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
I don’t think it’s writers who define themselves as ‘literary’, particularly, so much as publishing convention. It’s a semi-useful way of saying not the usual genre rubbish. Though you could argue that ‘literary’ is a genre in itself.
However, I am more likely to be able to find something to my tastes in fiction that is described as ‘literary fiction’ than anywhere else, so it serves me. Though it is true too that much ‘literary fiction’ is crap just the same as much ‘genre fiction’ is crap. For me, it’s my preferred pile of crap to look through for the odd gem.
I often think those novelists who take the piss out of ‘literary fiction’ wish they were better writers and weren’t stuck on the treadmill of endless hackneyed plots and cardboard characters. Just thought I’d throw that cat among the pigeons.
Jul 26th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
“What is a literary writer anyway?”
Someone who takes that question seriously.
Jul 27th, 2006 at 8:52 pm
I detest the term “literary writer”. And I, too, find hilarious those who really think they are literary writers. It’s a good self-marketing tool, though: if you really buy the literary writer ticket and acquire the looks and the jargon you are likely to get published more often in the “literary” magazines, at least that’s how I see things here in Mexico. I’m quite happy with being thought of as “an outsider” by the “literary” crowd because I’d rather write in pop culture magazines than in journals nobody but the authors and their families read anyways.