Bear with me... (guest column by Nikki Nelson-Hicks)

This might all be horseshit

by Nikki Nelson-Hicks

Today, I hit a wall of disappointment.

Way back in October, a friend sent me info on an open submission call to an anthology that, if I were to get into, would really skyrocket my writing career.

“This is so up your alley, Nik!”

So, I wrote a story. I put everything on hold and worked on this mamajama for months and months. Sent it to friends who read it, gave me editing input, rewrote the whole goddamn thing again and again until it was finished.

And I submitted and waited. Every day, I’d check to see if my story had been accepted.

That was the perspective I used. ACCEPTED. Not, ‘Hey, has it been rejected yet?”

ACCEPTED. Putting out positive vibes into the Universe. Just like all the Motivational Posters tell me to do.

Today, I got the email: Thanks, no thanks. REJECTED, ya loser.

I swallowed my bile and went on with my day. I’m a busy bitch. I ain’t got time for none of that.

But it was still there. No matter how much I ignored it. The hurt. The shame. The OH FUCK, I SUCK.

But I went on with my day.

Until... a little voice in my head piped up, “Look at you, grinding your teeth. Why? Because of one little rejection?

Fuck those guys.

Look, let’s settle this, right now. Answer this question: What are you writing for? Why? Who are you writing for?

Because, sweetpea, here’s the real deal.

If you are writing for publication, then you need to study the market, see what sells, and write to please the Market.

If you write to tell a story that you want to share with the world…well, sweetpea, you just write what you want. Publish it. Put it in a sock drawer, fuck. It’s yours to do with as you wish.

What do you want?

If you want possible financial success, popularity, literary stardom, pursue the Marketing Path. It’s a Whore’s path, but accept it if you want. I’m not judging. You do you. Nothing is real, anyway.

If you want to have fun making up stuff and writing stories that you find challenging and might entertain a handful of friends, then pursue the Artist Path. It’s gonna suck. You’ll probably die alone, unknown. Your kids will inherit boxes and moth-eaten journals of all your stories, finished and unfinished, and probably throw the whole thing into a rubbish heap, but them’s the breaks, sweetpea.

Both paths are fine in their own way. Just, for the love of the moon above, decide where you want to walk, stop moping about one stupid story and get to work.

Damn.”

Yeah. My Guide is a tough broad.

(Originally published on Nikki's Substack.)

Envy and Imitation

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at
the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;
that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;
that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel or
nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed
on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

It's okay. Every writer does it. I do it. You do it. The best-sellers do it. The indie savants do it. 

We tend to ape -- sometimes unintentionally, sometimes on purpose -- our favorite writers and pick up on the traits we enjoy about their work. 

When I started writing, I was determined to be the next C.S. Lewis. Not the Narnia Lewis but the Space Trilogy and the Till We Have Faces Lewis. Because of that, my writing was overblown and way too wordy. And I also sounded British--using British turns of phrase and UK slang. Don't take my word for it. You can trust the fine folks at The New Yorker and The Missouri Review, who both told me the same thing. I still have both rejection letters in a binder with other memories from my writer's journey. 

When I started my Bachelor's classes in Literature, I found out how much I loved the novels and short stories of a certain boisterous and burly man-baby named Hemingway. So I moved on from the verbose intelligence and heavy vocabulary of C.S. Lewis for the clean, crisp, succinct prose of Papa Hemingway. 

The trouble was that I was still playing the imitation game. 

Only something was changing, something I wasn't even aware of.

Every Man's Education

After Hemingway, I went down the 20th Century American Literature rabbit hole. There was Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes (yes, stories not just poetry), and Shirley Jackson. As their ideas and styles added to what I had learned to apply from Papa, I noticed my way of writing changed significantly. I retained my love for simple sentences and direct nouns and verbs without lots of adverbs and adjectives, but I turned away from trying to be so "Literary" and embraced the "Southern" of my youth. 

And so began my phase of "Southern Literary" where I found the themes of Welty, O'Connor, Hurton, etc. weaving into my fiction. However, the voice was always changing from the Lewis/Hemingway copycat to something new that blended bits and bobs from lots of influences. 

It was during this time that I wrote for the award-winning Cyber Age Adventures. Being a literary writer, you can imagine the fun I had crafting superhero stories with my lens of literary impact and import. Somehow, it worked. Between Frank Fradella's RPG-inspired adventure yarn set in real-world physics and repercussions, Tom Waltz's quasi-military approach, and my focus of American Literature, we created something unique and engaging in the world of superhero fiction. 

But my inspiration still had some growth to come. 

Imagine the confusion and prosaic mush created when I started exploring for work of the great pulp and pulp-adjacent writers as I tried my hand at some New Pulp Fiction stories thanks to some introductions by friends like Bobby Nash. To do my homework at writing pulpy tales, I dug into the stories (both novels and short stories) of folks like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, among others. 

With these new influences, my style took another shift. The simple prose of Hemingway was still similar to the simple, direct prose of Chandler, but the types of stories were suddenly allowed to become a lot more, well, more exciting physically and emotionally rather than just the intellectual excitement of my Literary focus.

This began a new phase of what Derrick Ferguson and I often called Literary Pulp. For us, that meant deeper than mere surface characterization, dialogue that does more than just advance the plot, and looking for real-world interactions that didn't sugarcoat the time periods we were writing about. For me, it was just a continuation of what I had been doing since discovering Lewis and Hemingway. Lewis made me want to deal with spiritual and philosophical topics in genre fiction. Hemingway made me want to create characters who, when they spoke about a topic or when they avoided a topic, revealed a lot about who they were. Same uniform, just a different ballfield.

Nourishing Corn on My Own Plot of Ground

Okay. So what did I learn through that journey toward becoming Sean Taylor, the writer? Are there lessons that can help other writers push through their own journeys from imitation to what Emerson called "self-reliance"?

Sure. If you know me at all, you already know I love both tutorials and lists, and when I get to put them together in a single article, I'm suddenly the happiest little clam in the world. 

So here goes...

1. Embrace your idols. 

It's okay to be inspired to imitate. We learn by copying the works of those we enjoy reading. Their stories teach us about story structure, how to write dialog, when to break grammar rules -- all those wonderful techniques that ultimately fill up our writing toolkit and become what we call a personal style and voice. 

Take those inspirations. Work with them. Play with them. Turn them upside down and inside out. Put your own spin on them. Play with all your favorite toys. 

2. There can't only be one. 

Now, here's the trick, isn't it? This is your journey to discovering who you are as a writer, not a rehash of the movie Highlander. 

Imitating a single writer makes you a copycat. Imitation several at once makes you a dedicated learner of the craft. The more you learn from multiple writers, the more you integrate seemingly disparate voices into your own work, and that makes you become unique. Even if you use all the same ingredients, you bake your pie from a different recipe. 

3. Start purging. 

There will be lots of tidbits and style doodads that you find no longer work for you the more comfortable you become in your own writer "skin." That's all part of learning. What doesn't work anymore, excise it. Purge it like last month's leftovers. Eventually, you are left with the style stuff that makes you happy and makes you, well, you. 

Just like I left behind the British-isms of Lewis, you may need to cull the standard adventure motif of Tolkein or Donaldson's ten pages of how brown the mountains and tunnels were. You may need to cull the reliance on the internal monologue you copied from Faulkner. You may need to ditch the sudden shifts in verb tense and -person you picked up from Ed McBain. They may have gotten you to where you are, but they no longer suit you.

4. Good writers borrow. Great writers steal. 

This quote is usually attributed to the poet T.S. Eliot and it is often quoted along with a variation on it by Aaron Sorkin: “Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.” Regardless of who said it when and how, it's absolutely true. 

Beginning writers obsess about how much their work may remind them of the folks they admire. Great and practiced writers stop caring after a while. In fact, it's safe to say that all those things you think you will be called out for copying won't even register with most readers. Sure, there will always be reviewers who are paid to make both fair and unfair comparisons, but those are your typical readers. 

Steal proudly. Steal broadly. Steal without any discrimination. Do you like the way Eudora Welty writes winter scenes? Fine. Take it and shove it in your toolkit. Really dig the way Chandler can chop dialogue into snappy fragments? Chisel it right out of his book and hang onto it for your next story. 

New in Nature

Now, before you look at that list above and start to craft a plan, stop. Those aren't steps in a printout from Mapquest in 2006. You don't aim for step one and then turn off Highway 20 onto step two like it's some kind of organized plan. 

What is it then?

It's a synopsis of what happens to us as writers. It's a description of the process more than an outline to follow. It's something organic, not ordained. Something passive, not planned. 

It's one thing to be aware of it and acknowledge it and not let it consume you with imposter syndrome. But it's another thing entirely to see it as a roadmap for your writing goals. That shift in thinking is both subtle and crucial. 

The next line in the Emerson quote that started this essay is this: 

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Ultimately it comes down to this: TRY.

Enjoy what you enjoy and let it shape you as a writer. Read, consume, mulch it in your mind, turn it into brain food, rinse and repeat. It's really as simple and as complicated as that. 

35 Books (Almost) Everybody Should Read

 

If you're a writer and you are familiar with the Google machine, no doubt you've been exposed to at least three or four hundred "Must Read" lists, usually published by either an online lit mag or even a general interest mag like New Yorker or Rolling Stone. And these lists tend to have at least one of two things in common. 

1. They suck. 

2. They all look the same. 

It seems like all these lists also hit the same beats:

• The Great Gatsby
• Lord of the Flies
• The Old Man and the Sea
• 1984
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Moby Dick
• I Read This in High School and Hated It
• College Requirement
• You Name It
• Etc.
• Ad Naseum
• Snoresville
• Blah, Blah, Blah

Sometimes, many of the often-mentioned authors have much better books just waiting to be discovered. (Fitzgerald's Jazz Age short stories, for example, far outshine his Gatsy if you ask me.) Not only that, a lot of these classics are just plain dated and/or boring (yes, I'm a Literature teacher and I said that!)

So, with that in mind, I figured my list couldn't be any worse. Now, I won't say everybody needs to read all these because that's too big a blanket statement, but I do think most everybody could benefit by including these tomes in your TBR pile. 

I wanted to build a better list, a list that took the last 50 years into account a bit, a list that wasn't just full of dead white guys, a list that, dare I say it, puts those other lists to shame. (Yes, I'm that vain.)

The rules and such: 

• This list contains a mix of novels, short story collections, graphic novels, and creative non-fiction. 
• Not only that, it also contains a mix of genres, from literary to sci-fi to pulpy action and even detective stories. 
• I've only allowed one title per author, but in the case of close seconds, I've put that title in parentheses so you know just how close the race was). 

Without any more ballyhoo, it's time to throw my proverbial hat in the ring and present to you a better list of must-reads.

Let the wonderment begin. Here they are, 35 books you, yes you, need to read. 

Short Story Collections

1. The Lottery and Other Stories, Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)

Shirley Jackson is the master of the creepy. She can bring it into Gothic structures and into the suburbs. While The Haunting of Hill House is a masterpiece of modern ghost storytelling, it's this collection that tips it out as her best work. Jackson knows her craft, particularly as it relates to making a reader care about slightly odd and broken people who exist just off the edge of normal.

2. Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This collection is the master of Magical Realism at his best. In addition to the title story, two of my favorite stories are contained in this volume "Eva Is Inside Her Cat" and "Eyes of a Blue Dog." If all you've read is "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of this. Yes, skip the overblown One Hundred Years of Solitude and start with his amazing short stories instead.

3. Constancia and Other Stories For Virgins, Carlos Fuentes

This is the second-best collection featuring Magical Realism you'll ever read. And Fuentes is a master of the short story. This is a master class in magical realism and includes stories about a man who discovers his life maybe wasn't what he thought he experienced, youths who "adopt" a mannequin and well, get rather intimate with it, and other tales that explore what it means to be human by pitting human reason against inhuman spiritual and supernatural experience. Outside of Marquez, nobody does Magical Realism like Fuentes.

4. Jazz Age Stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I know The Great Gatsby is the go-to for Fitzgerald and is considered above and beyond any other THE great American novel. I know that. I teach 11th-grade American Literature. I'm paid to know that. But, for my money, ol' Fitzy's short stories collected in this volume are his true magnum opus. "Bernice Bobs Her  Hair" alone is worth its place on this list, but if you throw in stories like "The Offshore Pirate" and "The Glass-Cut Bowl," this is his superlative work. 

5. Night Shift Stephen King (Cujo)

This book of short stories is responsible for more Stephen King movies than any other of his works. 'Salem's Lot. Lawnmower Man. Sometimes They Come Back. Maximum Overdrive. "Quitter's, Inc" and "The Ledge" from  Cat's Eye. They all came from this collection. But my favorite is the somber, violent, and yet romantic "The Man Who Loved Flowers," and it remains my second favorite King story to this day. In my opinion, Stephen King is an okay novelist but a damn fine short story writer. These quick bites of horror and terror are King at his best. 

6. The King in Yellow, Robert W. Chambers

Sure, H.P. Lovecraft is usually the go-to guy for otherworldly, esoteric horror. But, if you ask me, Robert W. Chambers out-Lovecrafts him in this collection about a mysterious play that drives those who read it insane. "The Mask" is a particular stand-out, and another of my favorite short stories of all time. The stories in this book will stick with you for a long, long time, particularly those from the opening pages. Chemicals that turn people to stone, ghastly stalkers, creepy painters -- it's all here.

7. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver

If Raymond Chandler wrote about relationships falling apart instead of murder, he'd write this book. Take the terse, straightforward style of the pulps and add a few literary techniques like characterization and talking around things instead of about them, and you have this book, one of the finest short story collections ever, and well worth your time. This is the book that shows how to learn from Hemingway's strengtha without having to copy Hemingway. 

8. Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury

It is difficult to pick any single short story collection from Bradbury because they are all amazing. This volume is a bit of a departure from the average short story collection because the stories weave in and out of the lives of a town experiencing the seasons. One of the first to combine the novel with the short story effectively, Dandelion Wine is a must-read for any serious reader of short stories.

9. The Ways of White Folks, Langston Hughes

The Ways of White Folks is perhaps the finest volume of stories from the post-slavery United States. Each tale relates the culture shock when blacks and whites try to co-exist in a world that won't let them without shying away from the implications. But best of all, Hughes tells his stories with the ear of a poet, making each tale a feast for the ears and eyes.

10. The Final Martyrs, Shusaku Endo

This is one of the most accessible books that deals with religion you'll ever read (except for maybe Wise Blood below). This collection features the themes of loneliness, nostalgia (and the ultimate emptiness of it), faith, apostasy, spiritual doubt, and sexual longing. It's a thoroughly human and humane work by one of Japan's greatest writers. 

Novels

11. The Adventures of Monkey, Arthur Waley

I must have read this book about a hundred times before I was 12 years old. Adapted from Journey to the West, this focuses on Monkey and his hubris to be the god above gods. I couldn't help but admire Monkey in spite of his pride. He was my first exposure to the trickster caricature, long before I read about Ananzi the Spider or Coyote.

12. The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano)

People always tend to default to Slaughterhouse-Five for the best book by Vonnegut, but I continue to believe it's The Sirens of Titan. It's perhaps the most straightforward sci-fi romp the author wrote, and it's both accessible in format and style, far more than so many of his other, more trippy works. The Siren's of Titan is a simple story, actually, about a man on a direct route to his destiny whether he tries to avoid it or not. It actually shares a lot (in terms of plotting) with the story of Jonah from the Old Testament, but don't mistake that was any religious content. Right behind this one for me is another Vonnegut work with a similar theme -- Player Piano (and then we finally get to S-5). 

13. Beloved, Toni Morrison

Beloved is all the right stuff in a novel as far as I'm concerned. Thoroughly literary, it identifies and calls out for cultural change (call it woke, it's okay). Thoroughly a ghost story, it tells of a home haunted by a former slave girl. Thoroughly romantic, it features several relationships that are beautiful, tragic, and optimistic all at once. A freed slave's home is haunted by what could be the ghost of a young slave woman killed to avoid a return to slavery, and that affects everything about the freed slave's family life. At times creepy, at times tragic, at times hopeful, there's a very good reason this novel by Toni Morrison is so, ahem, Beloved.

14. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (Little Sister)

This is the quintessential Chandler. Period. Sure, all his books are amazing, but this one just lays out what makes the rest of them work so well. Any writer wanting to learn the trade can use this as a textbook for dialogue, pacing, character, action, theme, all the stuff that makes literature work. In this case, watch the movies, sure but read the books, all the books. 

15. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

I'll be honest. I love The Sun Also Rises (best closing line in any book, ever, and I'm looking at you, Gatsby), but when it comes to why I love Ernest Hemingway, it all boils down to this book. This book is why Hemingway continues to top my list of favorite writers year after year after year. Drama? Check. Romance? Yep. Danger? Intrigue? Sure. High-faluting literary art-stuff? Yep. That's there too. The best part of this book is that there are no doves set free to give it a Hollywood ending. That's just for the movie. 

16. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston (Mules and Men)

I consider myself fortunate that I get to revisit this book each year with my students. I can't think of a better character study for the pursuit of happiness than Janie as she grows to eventually understand she needs no others to define her but herself. She can be loved and she gave give love, but it must be on her terms. And the way ZNH slings words around?! Holy shit! This is one of the most poeticly heartbreaking and yet life-affirming book I have and will every read.

17. Fat Ollie's Book, Ed McBain

Fat Ollie is a prejudiced, fat cop who ticks all the boxes for "that guy." But that somehow doesn't keep him from being one of the fan faves in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series. That's a testament to McBain's writing. Trust me. This time out, Fat Ollie has his only copy of his first novel manuscript with him, but it gets stolen. Now he must not only do his job as a cop but also find his missing manuscript so he can prove to the world at large he's more than just a "pretty face" with a badge.

18. Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor

There once was a story about a preacher who walked with rocks in his shoes to create his own type of penance, all the while preaching about "the church without Christ." This is that story. This is about a Flannery O'Connor as a story can get, with memorable characters, even more memorable quirks, and enough moral shortcomings to create a new reason to invoke Old Testament judgments. 

19. Ethan Frome, Eudora Welty

I once wrote an essay comparing this wonderful short novel to Kate Chopin's The Awakening. My take was that the awakening isn't just a feminist feeling. Men can feel it too. Of course, both are written by women, so that has a lot to do with the depth of emotion that Edith Wharton writes into her characters who are trapped in a loveless marriage born of a medical need to stay together. Enter one younger cousin who brings life into a gray world of death, and they begin a journey toward tragedy worthy of Shakespeare's best.

20. Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosely

Picking any single Walter Mosley Easy Rawlins tale for this list is nigh impossible. Rawlins is the African American's Philip Marlowe, but not just that, because he's created from the authenticity of the post-WWII world blacks experienced, he's as much a revolutionary hero as he is a private eye. He crosses the worlds of Pulp, Noir, Hard-Boiled, and Literary Fiction with ease and blends them into a new kind of P.I. Fiction that didn't exist before Mosley. 

21. One-Shot Harry, Gary Phillips

Gary Phillips is my kind of writer, and I'm thrilled to be able to say I've shared a short story collection or two with him. He's a sort of spiritual follow-up to Walter Mosley without being a pastiche, and he has a unique voice among African American pulp writers. In this one, a photographer gets caught up in a mystery during the racial unrest of the early 1960s. Harry is a Korean War vet who just wants to help out a friend, only to be pulled fully into violence and danger. It's also filled with lots of fun historical cameos, so that's a plus that makes it feel very, very real-world. 

22. Money Shot, Christa Faust

This is probably the most recently published book on the list. It's another Hard Case Crime book, and it's the one that introduced me to Christa Faust. It's as gritty as they come and as viscerally raunchy as it needs to be without crossing the line into needing to be sold in a brown paper bag. Angel Dare is a porn actress wrapped up in a murder. The premise is simple and Noir. The storytelling is classic Hard-Boilded Pulp. 

23. I Will Fear No Evil, Robert Heinlein (Job)

Yeah, I know this one is a weird choice for a Heinlein book to include on this list. Most folks who put Stranger in a Strange Land (and to be fair, this covers many of the same themes), but even if I had to choose a different Heinlein, I'd probably choose Job. Still, this one remains my favorite, hands down. The story of a man who gets a second shot at life in the body of his dead secretary, this book crossed so many cultural lines in the sand I'm surprised it was even published. It's as countercultural and straight-up hippy as anything Heinlein wrote, and it's perhaps the most superb M2F transformation book ever written. It's trippy and sexual and goes into several uncomfortable places, but that's what makes it so fantastic.

24. A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs

This book was Star Wars before Star Wars was Star Wars. Seriously. As far as I'm concerned if you read only one Planetary Romance it should be A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Sure, there are some bits in it that stand as identifiers of their time, but none of it reaches a level that interferes with the heroic story of a man shunted to another planet. It's a space isekai that influenced everything from sci-fi movies to animated movies to sci-fi and fantasy books. 

25. Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

Every reader it seems has a favorite Neil Gaiman novel. This one happens to be mine. The thing I've enjoyed about Gaiman's work is his refusal to write series (outside of comic book series) and to create new worlds with each new novel. I've always loved the idea of worlds co-existing, and this one continues that genre of fantasy story better than about all others (including the famous land under London novel). Plus, Door is perhaps the most fascinating character I've come across in modern fiction. (Some readers may have strong opinions about NG now after the allegations against him, so tread wisely.)

26. The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

If I have to explain this one, then you've been sleeping under a rock. This is the quintessential sci-fi comedy romp. It's also where several of our favorite geek sayings come from. "Mostly harmless." "42." "Life, the universe, and everything." "Don't forget your towel." "Don't panic." It's all here. Some novels have filler, but not this one. It doesn't let up with the out-there. 

27. She, A History of Adventure, H. Rider Haggard

This is probably the lowest-brow book you're going to find on this list. Yes, it's a straight-up adventure yarn, and not just that, it's a "men's adventure" yarn that was a dime a dozen back in the early days of 1900s fiction. Still, don't let that deter you. This is a fun romp through the tropes that have stood the test of time for adventure and fantasy writing and sometimes is good to go back and see where the stuff we enjoy nowadays came from. It also features a female antagonist able to wipe the floor with any man who dares to stand against her.

28. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

This is the novel that introduced me to the amazing Amy Tan. I was even fortunate enough to attend a writers' convention at my college where she did a reading from the book. (And yes, that was amazing too.) This book captures the feelings about being American-born in a culture that prides itself on keeping its traditions. How much does the past, and not just your own but that of your family, determine who you are, and how much of that is a person allowed to shape for themselves? The way Tan answers that question is what puts this awesome book on this list.

29. Borderline, Lawrence Block

This is my favorite tale from the former Edgar Award Winner and Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America. It's raw, sensual, gritty, and violent, and that makes it pure Block. Originally published under the pseudonym Don Holliday as Border Lust, it was republished by Hard Case Crime under the current title, Borderline with all credit going to the author's real name. Written like a five-pointed star converging in upon itself, it features five people whose lives are about to intersect in the most dangerous way possible. 

30. Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo

You may have seen Metallica's music video that features footage from the film Johnny Got His Gun, but do yourself a favor and read the book. This is the kind of story you'd expect from someone with the guts to stand up to McCarthyism and even get blacklisted as a screenwriter. Trumbo knocks it out of the park (sorry for the cliche) in this tragic tale of a soldier who loses everything but his life and still manages to lose it all. Trapped in a body without arms, legs, vision, or any ability to communicate with his doctors, our "hero" relives his experience in the war that led to his living lifelessness. It's a downer for sure, but it's probably one of the most important downers you'll ever read. 

Non-Fiction

31. A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis

This may be the most personal book I've ever read. It's also the most religious book on this list -- and that's for a good reason. It's a religious book only in the since of one man's account of his faith (in God, in humanity, in fate, in goodness, in love) falling apart after the death of his wife. It's also the story of a rebuilding and a rejoining with the sand of humanity (to paraphrase John Donne's "No Man Is an Island"). It is a universal story, never a sectarian one. 

32. A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard

There is no better natural essayist than Annie Dillard. She has a gift for taking the last breaths of a dying moth, a mottled snakeskin, or any number of other discards and cast-offs from nature that one might find in the woods, and turning them into parables that resonate with all of us. She takes the universal and makes it personal. She is simply the best as what she does. And this book is the proof of that. 

Graphic Novels

33. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis deserves every award it has ever won. It is quite possibly the finest example of autobiography in graphic novel form ever created. Yes, that even includes American Splendor. The author related her own move to the United States in a way that never distances readers of any nationality, race, or faith. You can't read this book without identifying with Marjane Satrapi in her struggles and confusions.

34. American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang

Forget about the weird little streaming series. This book ties together Journey to the East and the story of a second-generation Chinese student trying to figure out who he is. Does he keep his family's culture or treat it as trash to be thrown away? Does he embrace Americanism even if it means he ignores generations that have come before him? And just what does the Monkey King have to do with all of this? This is not only fun. It's profound. 

35. Bone, Jeff Smith

Yes. Bone is a fun little fantasy book. Well, not so little. This baby takes two trees per copy, I'd be willing to bet. Yeah, it's massive. But, for all the fun and adventure this fantasy romp contains, it's every bit as complex as anything by Tolkien, Herbert, L'Engle, or Le Guin. Don't let the cute art and easy-to-follow story fool you. This is epic storytelling at its best. You'll be hard-pressed to find any other fantasy book -- prose or graphic novel -- that matches it in quality. 

Hard to Market, But It's Okay

Been in a bookstore lately? They seem to thrive more on marketing books than on books themselves. Outside a few small used bookstores, gone are the days of just grabbing a book a sitting and reading to get to know it, to try out something that grabbed you by either its synopsis or its cover (sometimes you can judge them by those) before you commit to buying it. They've even removed the chairs from most major chains that used to opt for a more library look and feel to appeal to bibliophiles. 

I get. I really do. They have to stay in business in a changing economy. And they have to do that without increasing the costs to maintain a "This isn't a library" standard or using a 1:1 ratio between staff and customers for the best recommendations to lead to sales. So they need shortcuts like "If you liked this author, try this author" or "More books like The Hunger Games" or (my least favorite) "Here are new books by the same old million-selling authors you would look for deep in the store anyway." 

Me, defined by graphic

But it's okay. 

I'm not bitter. (I'm really not.)

In a previous essay, I wrote this, and I still stand behind it:

Publishers and readers look for categories, and not just any categories, but easy to define divisions. Those are easy to sell. A reader wants a mystery for the beach this summer, and bang, a clerk can walk said reader to the mystery section where he or she can be inundated by racks and racks of books by pretty much the same 100 authors. A reader wants a new urban fantasy, and poof, there’s a section for that, not to be confused with either sci-fi or mystery, or even epic fantasy. It’s quickt:.), it’s easy, and it’s basic marketing.

It gets even quicker, easier, and more marketable with series. Publishers love series. Readers love series. Both love them because it means they don’t have to think about what to read next. They don’t have to experiment with authors outside their “I know and love him or her” list unless it’s a strong recommendation by a friend. Series make money for that very reason. Series make careers for that very reason. And smart writers (unlike me) know how to take advantage of that market for series books.

You see, I have learned that the publishing world is a lot like that used bookstore I love to visit. It continues to work because it is built on categories that make people’s choices for them. If you like ___________ then you’ll also like ___________. Don’t feel bad if there’s not a new book by ___________ yet, just read this similar book by ___________ and you’ll be fine.

No risk. No muss. No fuss. 

But also no wonder. No discovery. No adventurous expansion of your reading world. 

Wisdom from a Friend

Recently I had a good friend (one of my best actually) stay with my wife and me for a few weeks while he awaited his move-in date for a new apartment. It was great. We talked about TV and movies and books and writing (when I wasn't sleeping off the end of the school year, that is). One topic that came up a few times in our conversations was a group he was in on social media about how to develop a backlog of books that would sell. 

The end result of those conversations was me usually pushing back against trends and best-seller, copycat, popular fiction (yes, I'm a literary snob, but don't act like you didn't know that already). But it did reinforce for me the kind of writer I am. 

Genres are best served broken.

I'm the kind who is difficult to market in the existing publishing world. This is because of several reasons, all of which make me who I am as a creator. 

First, I can't stand to be restrained to a genre. Just look back at my publishing history, and you'll see super-hero stories, pulp action heroes, hard-boiled detective fiction, literary shorts, zombies and ghoulies and ghosties... you name it. I like to write and read the same way I like my music playlist -- as varied as possible. Just like I love my music jumping from Vivaldi to AC/DC to the Archies, I like my fiction to jump from horror to mystery to pulp. 

Second, I can't stand to copy trends. I was taught once that by the time you spot a trend, it's too late. The world has moved on and is looking for the next one. I was dumb enough to believe that and I still do. 

Third, my stories begin with questions that intrigue me. Not marketing questions, such as "What is selling well now?" or "What are publishers looking for?" Instead, I begin with questions like, "What if rain turned into a human being and developed amnesia?" or "What if a young rocker still reeling from his father's abuse found a way to turn that anger into raw power?" or even "What if Josie and the Pussycats had been a lot darker -- a lot darker?" Then, from these kinds of questions, stories develop and bubble into soup inside my brain, never once thinking about the genre or category ramifications. 

Yeah, I know, totally backward to the way publishing works from the other side of the big desk. 

Things I Value in Fiction

So, yeah. I'm hard to market, and I know it. But I don't just know it. I also welcome it. I love it even. Because it's who I am. 

In spite of that, there are certain things that always manage to wriggle their way into my work like a spider laying eggs in an urban legend's canal.

1. No single genre focus. I mentioned my fascination with multiple genres earlier and a little bit of each of them goes into all of my work. For example, I often get "lessons" from publishers because I tend to be too literary in my pulp stories. Or I tend to be too action-focused in my detective stories. Or when I try to take my super-hero fiction into the dark corners of the human psyche instead of focusing on the good-guy-bad-guy, white-hat-black-hat dichotomy. No matter what genre I am writing at any point, there is always a blender churning beneath the surface mixing and blending the genres and their rules. 

2. No happy endings. Yeah, this is the big one. This is the one that will continue to keep me out of the bestseller list throughout my life. People often remark about the irony of me being an optimist who doesn't believe in happy endings. Well, I'm a firm believer that happiness is what you make it in whatever circumstances you find yourself in. (Now, that doesn't mean that you should strive to get yourself in a better situation, just that your happiness doesn't depend on it.) I also believe that as human beings, we never truly learn from getting what we wanted. That only reinforces our existing desires and beliefs. It's only when we face loss that we listen to the world around us and open up to learn anything new. That's why I'm a huge proponent of the bittersweet ending. The heroine loses her love, only to find she really is strong enough without it. The hero fails but realizes that puts him in a place of even greater opportunity. In Hallmark terms, the city girl finds that the country boy isn't right for he after all, but can return to the city with the lesson learned and move on. That kind of thing. 

Paint with all the colors of the... steps.

3. No series. I'll admit it. I just don't like series books much. I get that they make for easy, continued sales, but I just can't stomach them. The closest I get to a series is a group of stand-alone novels featuring the same character but tied together only very, very, very loosely. You know what I'm talking 'bout -- Easy Rawlins, the 87th Precinct, that sort of thing. You can read 'em in any order and skip as many as you look. They just don't tell one single A-->B-->C story. I love memorable characters though, my work is hopefully filled with those. I don't even mind returning to them to write subsequent adventures. Just look no further than Rick Ruby (The Ruby Files) of the Golden Amazon or my iHero superhero stories for proof of that. But you're not going to mind me writing a series that tells a single epic story. It's just not who I am. 

4. No epic stories. People love epics. But most of the ones I read, I just cant wait to finish and get back to something much smaller in scope. Sure, I enjoyed Lord or the Rings as a kid, but once I read that, why bother with Game of Thrones or Wheel of Time. (It's a generalization, I know, and some people love those characters, but not me, and most epics tend to suffer from the same old problems I hate to read, such as excessive world-building, long passages of description, characters who fall out of the narrative because they were written into book one and then forgotten about, force-fitting plot elements to make things happen because the author demands it, etc.) I much prefer the smaller, human stories. The detective whose case causes him to learn he'll never be able to have the woman he truly loves. The superhero in training who learns that no matter how powerful she becomes, she will still never get out of her sister's shadow. The husband who buys the perfect house only to realize that perfection just might cause is marriage to fall apart. I don't need to change the world in my stories. I just want to see the change in my characters. 

5. There's no such thing as too much symbolism. I love using all the tools in my writer's toolbox, especially symbolism. I prefer it to be subtle, not overt. I'm a huge fan of the colors in Prospero's halls, the green light at the end of Tom and Daisy's deck, the sword salute at the end of The Sun Also Rises. I think these things only improve fiction and only hurt stories when used by people who dont' understand their use. I like fold flags that represent lost loves or partners. I like stacks of books that shed light on the story I'm telling just by virtue of their own plots and characters (recycling symbols, as it were). I like names that have meanings that give my characters more than just something to embroider on their bowling shirt. 

6. No market chasing or trend-chasing. I mentioned this earlier, but I want to reiterate it here and slice it just a little different way. Each of my stories comes to me as a new tale, not something that consciously fits in a box. If it ends up fitting in a box, mostly like by the time I'm done with it, it has so many pointed jags and weird-shaped edges that it no longer fits. When I create a story, I write the story as it unveils in my head, not as it reacts to the goings-on in the world outside my head. This means even if I starting thinking about a teenage wizard when Harry Potter came out, trying to emulate the established "rules" of that series are the last thing on my mind. My teenage wizard will probably end up in Detroit working as an assistant to her private detective aunt who was a former burlesque dancer in her youth. 

The Bottom Line

I guess, for me, it all boils down to this: When I was a young writer (both in age and in the craft) someone I respected told me to write what I wanted to read. Well, that really resonated with me. 

A little of my library

I realized that the writers whose works I genuinely loved to read wrote varied works. You just about can't put any single work by Ray Bradbury beside any other and compare them without getting into themes and symbols, but not plots or stories. Kurt Vonnegut is the same way. So are the works of Flannery O'Connor -- just try to compare Wise Blood and "Everything That Rises Must Converge." Hemingway told war stories, hunting stories, love stories, falling out of love stories, coming of age stories, you name it. Even the single genre works of folks like Ed McBain differ vastly between his 87th Precinct stories and his Matthew Hope tales. C.S. Lewis wrote theology, adult fantasy (Till We Have Faces remains one of my fave fantasy novels), science fiction, and children's fantasies. Even Eudora Welty wrote of both the urban and the rural with equal power and varied technique. 

Something happened along the way in publishing to shift from varied to same, and while many modern writers are okay with that, I guess I just am not. 

But like I said. It's okay. 

I'm not bitter about it. (Honestly, I'm not. Why are you looking at me like that?)

It’s the End of the Literary World As We Know It (But Don’t Be Afraid—It’s a Good Thing)

At the risk of sounding pretentious (I know, like that's ever been an actual concern of mine), I'm about to wax literary about something I believe to be very important for writers in a changing world.

There, you've been warned. If you want to leave, do it now. Still here? Wow. You're such a glutton for punishment, and it's time to feast. 

The Bricks

Symbols.

Subtext. 

Allusions.

Together, they're the subtle backbone of the writer's (and reader's) world. There are the often invisible at first parts of a story that grant a sort of universal understanding to both the enjoyers and the creators of the work itself. They are the foundations that allow metaphorical shorthand to help us as writers convey our themes and tones and meanings even when we don't realize that's what we're doing. 

Don't believe me?

Our classical canon of novels, poetry, and stories (and even non-fiction) all pull from just a few sources upon which they are understood. You've no doubt heard that there are no original stories, and just as truly, there are no more original symbols (at least in our classical, Western point of view). 

The Foundations

All literature, whether high-brow or low-brow, can be analyzed and understood through a handful of older references. They are: 

• Fairy tales
• Greco-Roman (and occasionally Norse) mythology
• The Bible
• Shakespeare

Now, to be fair, I'm currently reading through the amazing little volume How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster, and that is triggering a lot of these thoughts. But I'm also (as any casual reader of this blog, or my Facebook, Twitter, etc. will know) something my family and friends might refer to as a "woke liberal" (I prefer the admittedly longer term "progressive prioritizer of people over profits"). As the Literature major, I cherish most of the classic works of the Western canon, even those that haven't held up so well in the wake of our increasing progressive world of ideas. As a "woke" (yes, I'm beginning to accept the derogatorily coined term as a badge of pride) I fully admit that the world is changing and that a new canon of far more multicultural literature is being added to and in some case taking the place of what we have long thought of as the classics.

But what do I mean by “understood through a handful of older references”? 

Let's look, shall we?

Can one truly understand the point of Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes without picking up the reference to Shakespeare’s MacBeth? Is there any older story than that of two warring brothers, lifted from Cain and Abel? And what of the Christ figure that appears in all (for both good and ill) of Spielberg’s films? Can we understand stories of lost children without seeing their parallels to so many classic fairy tales like "Little Red Riding Hood" or "Hansel and Gretel"? Could we enjoy O' Brother, Where Art Thou as deeply if we didn't see it's basis in Homer's Odyssey?

It's not just keen readers and writers who pick up on these kinds of references. Even surface readers often do. And, as I mentioned earlier, writers often weave these allusions into their works without being aware of them at first. They are just that much a part of the general data stored in the hard drive of their brains. They can't help but think of them. 

Shifting Sands (The Foundations Rumble)

But... as the world changes, even the symbols change. 

That doesn't just mean we are (finally) getting new voices in the classroom and on the bookstore shelves. That's a definite "good thing" as works by writers from all over the world and different cultures, genders, ethnicities, and identities join the works of the white male elite. It's a joy to find Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston on school syllabi with contemporary giants like Marjane Satrapi and Khaled Hosseini. It's a long-delayed step into the light for what has often been seen as merely a bunch of books by a stodgy group of grumpy old white guys.

But it's not just the works being bought and taught that are changing. It's the symbols and subtexts and allusions themselves.

Here’s a prediction—in the next 100 years our classrooms (both K12 and college) will analyze and understand the books and stories and poems they read in light of several new foundations. 

I expect the mythologies of many non-Western cultures to be part of our literary vocabulary—Japanese, Indian, Indigenous Americans, and so forth. With the influx of anime that draws on Japanese, Chinese, and Korean legends and the increased Western viewing of world cinema (particularly horror based in these myths—oni and strigoi and manananggal, oh my!), it’s all but unavoidable. I hope to see the trickster gods (already a staple in the works of Neal Gaiman) and the Snow Ghost (a different take on the “mother scorned”) become as popular symbols as Red Riding Hood and the Knights of the Roundtable.

I expect great works, currently forgotten or ignored, from other countries, particularly non-Western, will become so much more well-read that they too take their place alongside the works of Shakespeare or great adventure stories of the Greeks and Romans. Just as Romeo and Juliet inspired West Side Story and Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres is just King Lear in a rural farm community, stories like The Rubaiyat and the epic poetry of Su Tung P’o will have their symbols and characters mined for new literary alloys. 

I expect the fundaments of world religions outside that of Christianity to be more studied and in turn have their stories and parables become the foundation for new works of literature just as much as the Christian Bible has for the past thousand years. Allusions like the peace child of Papua, New Guinea, and feeding dead relatives during Ghost Month, and the puberty rituals of Nigeria will (and should) become as common as those of the sounding trumpet, baptism, communion, Christ figures, and the Flood. 

Whatever Will We Do?

What are our options as writers whose world is beginning to radically shift beneath our feet? For some of us there may be very little may change because we have already been reading books and stories based in other cultures not or own for years. 

For some who have trapped themselves in the world of “white old men” books, it may be a bit more difficult. 

For those, I fear the “fight or flight” moment will come when they either begin to fight their past and wade a few steps into the waters of new stories and symbols or they will dig in their heels, stiffen their backs and say, “This far and no further” or (in the words of another old white guy) “Thou shall not pass.” And they will then flee to their comfortable world of the same old symbols and stories and becoming increasingly irrelevant in in the world as it changes. 

For new writers and readers, though, the change should be almost a seamless one. They most likely won’t even see it as it happens around them. They’ve already grown up on books by writers and reviews and critics of a variety of ethnicities, genders, identities, and world cultures. They’ve already been immersed in movies and television (whatever form that make take in the future) originating from cultures and peoples others than their own. They will most likely not even realize they are changing the world as they embrace new symbols and new story allusions and new subtexts that give meaning to the stories they write and read. For them it will just be their one day at a time life, their business as usual. 

And it is they, ultimately, who will be the real architects of this new literary world. You and I, no matter how readily we embrace or welcome the new world, can merely be harbingers who are experimenting with the new tools. They will become the true masters of them.