Category Archives: Book reviews

I Finally Read The Iliad

August 7, 2020 By in Book reviews, Classics, Reading Tags: , , , , , , , 9 Comments

If The Iliad is any indication, the Trojan War was a complex and messy affair. Even on a fundamental level, it featured the lopping off of so many heads and arms and legs and the impaling of so many torsos and throats and bellies that navigating the battlefield must have been a nightmare. Just think of all the bodies and parts of bodies strewn across the beach, the rivulets of blood running to the sea, the fallen horses and upended chariots. Hector of Troy is rumoured to have killed 31,000 Greeks all on his own. If he fought seven days a week until Akhilleus (Achilles) brought him down, he must singlehandedly have done in an average of at least ten Greeks per day. And that’s just the body count for one warrior (albeit a fairly accomplished one) on one side of the hostilities: there were thousands upon thousands of warriors.

The combatants did get a few breaks from battle: hostilities were paused to allow the retrieval of bodies and armour, to accommodate the funerals and games of athletic prowess that marked the deaths of particularly notable heroes and – before the surviving warriors took up arms again – to attend to inspired speeches by the commanding officers. Between skirmishes, temporary housing had to be constructed – the Greeks couldn’t spend the entire war sleeping on their ships – and the troops needed to be fed. There was the inevitable drinking and carousing.

Just to add to the excitement for those on both sides of the conflict, every initiative they undertook was subject to interference by a host of manipulating, petty, quarrelsome and impulsive gods and goddesses. Just when you thought you were getting somewhere, a deity would send in a plague or deliver a thick bank of fog so you couldn’t see who you were fighting, This led to a two-steps-forward, one-step-back kind of war.

No wonder it dragged on for so long.

Why I Finally Read The Iliad

My friend John Aragon has been so keen for me to read The Iliad, and I have been neglectful of his recommendation for so long, that he finally made the desperate move of mailing me his own copy (1974, Doubleday, Robert Fitzgerald translation), along with another book as a companion: Helen of Troy by Margaret George. I have just finished reading both of them.

I have always assumed that The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid would be very difficult to read: primarily because the few people I know who have actually read them have generally had several more degrees than I do (n=1) and (I assume, therefore) divert themselves by reading books like Finnegan’s Wake, The Canterbury Tales and the complete works of Franz Kafka.

I am pleased to report that, despite being an epic poem composed in dactylic hexameter, a characterization that might needlessly frighten off a few of the literature-phobes among us, The Iliad is not difficult to read at all. It is, in fact, not only action-packed and bloody, but beautifully written: worth reading for the pure wonder of the language. I was not expecting that. Since I didn’t read it in the Ancient Greek, I don’t know whether to credit the author or the translator for the marvellous turns of phrase, but you can’t make silk purses out of pigs’ ears, and common knowledge suggests that things get “lost” in translation rather than “found,” so I am inclined to give a lot of the credit to Homer himself.

I could cite almost any passage in the book as an example of the fine detail and surprisingly light touch of Homer, not to mention his vivid imagination.

At one point, Zeus (who was helping out the Trojans at the request of Akhilleus at the time) turned his attention away from the war, believing that for the moment, “No other god would come.” Big mistake, for Poseidon (“the strong god who makes the mainland shake”) had been watching the battle and noticed that Zeus had looked away. (Notes on this passage: Ida is a mountain. Priam was the king of Troy, so Troy was “Priam’s town.” The “Akhaíans” are the Greeks, who are also sometimes referred to in The Iliad as “Danáäns.” Samos is an island.)

And here is a section that again reveals Homer’s poetic turn of phrase as well as his compassion – which not only encompasses the fighting mortals but also imbues his depictions of the gods with depth and realism. In this segment, the Greek soldiers fight on despite their devastation at the death of Patróklus, the best friend of Akhilleus, whose body still lies on the battlefield.

“… folded in a ragged cloud of stormlight….” How wonderful is that?

The Plot

Most of us know the story of the Trojan War, which was precipitated when Helen – the beautiful wife of Meneláos, king of Sparta – ran off with Paris Alexander, the young Trojan who was one of King Priam’s many sons. By the time the Greeks finally arrived to rescue (or recapture) her, Helen had been living in Troy for many years: she’d been there so long, according to Margaret George’s telling of it, that she felt more allegiance to Troy than to Sparta. But finally, Meneláos and his older brother Agamémnon managed to call in enough promises and debts from the rulers of surrounding states to amass hundreds upon hundreds of ships (a thousand, according to Christopher Marlowe), all jammed full of warriors eager to help avenge the insult to Sparta and to Meneláos brought on by Helen’s “abduction.” (Note: even though she left her nine-year-old daughter behind, there is every indication that Helen went with Paris willingly.) (If there even was a Helen.) Despite the fact that Sparta was no more than a week’s voyage from Troy, the war – which took place primarily on the beach between the Aegean Sea and the high walls of the Trojan City – would last eight years, by which time the Spartans and their supporters became well entrenched in their own quarters near the walled city.

How I envision the beach on which the Trojan War was fought. There would have been many more large boats and one fewer small one, I expect.

Homer’s poem covers only a few weeks near the end of the conflict. He concludes the tale before what is probably the most famous scene of the War, that being the acceptance by the citizens of Troy of a giant wooden horse which they allowed to be admitted through the gates because they believed it was a gift from the departing, defeated Greeks. A brainchild of Odysseus, the gigantic horse was, instead, filled with Greek warriors who, in the middle of the night, climbed out of it and ran to the gates to let their fellow warriors in. Troy was sacked – the city destroyed, the Trojan men all killed, and the women killed or captured. Apparently Virgil deals with this confrontation in The Aeneid, and Homer refers to it in The Odyssey, and through time many others have written about it, painted it, and depicted it in other ways, but it is not mentioned in The Iliad, which ends after Akhilleus’s death.

The focus of Homer’s story is the conflict between the brilliant warrior Akhilleus and Agamémnon: commander of the Greeks, Meneláos’s older brother, and a fearsome warrior himself. When Agamémnon decides to take possession of Briseis, a young woman who is the daughter-in-law of a king who Akhilleus has received as one of the spoils of war and grown fond of, Akhilleus becomes furious and refuses to help fight the Trojans. It is not until Hektor, another of Priam’s sons and the greatest of Troy’s warriors, kills Akhilleus best friend Patróklus that Akhilleus is moved to action. Patróklus has been wearing Akhilleus’s armour when he dies, which sets up the story’s climax.

The Begats: A Warning to Fellow Readers

If you have decided that you, too, might like to read The Iliad, I don’t want you to give up at Book Two. For that reason, this is a warning to you that Book Two is an outlier, the latter half of it (about 12 pages in the version I read) being actually quite boring. It consists of a list of all the “lords and officers” of the ships, identifies their family histories, mentions the states they came from, and includes such (unnecessary, to my mind) details as what kind of work they did when they were not at war, the terrains of their home country, even what they were wearing when they arrived at Troy for battle. Homer says, “The rank and file I shall not name; I could not, if I were gifted with ten tongues and voices unfaltering, and a brazen heart within me,” and for that we can be grateful. In the meantime, even with just the lords and captains, he does go on and on. (Note: “Aías” is pronounced “Ajax,” a name you will probably recognize. There are two Aíases in The Iliad, one big and one small.)

Well, you get the idea.

When I came across this lengthy list, which reminded me of passages of Genesis, I was tempted to quit reading. But then somewhere online I came across an explanation of why Homer had included all of this apparently useless information: it would have been a high honour for the families and countrymen of those who had turned out in support of Agamémnon to be mentioned in Homer’s book, so it was almost compulsory for him to create this list. It would be a historical record that that would be pulled out and read with pride at family brunches for untold generations. Still, if Homer had been in my writing class, I’d have told him to spread this information out a bit – scatter it between other scenes – to avoid turning off his readers so early in the story.

Anyway, don’t let Book Two deter you. You can always skim that part. And after that is over, you’ll be off and running.

Of Gods and Men

One of the accepted principles of The Iliad is that the gods were active participants in the the Trojan War. In fact, they started it, Aphrodite having caused Helen to fall in love with Paris in fulfilment of an earlier prophecy. Some of the gods were on the side of the Trojans, some were on the side of the Greeks, and some switched from one side to the other. Their hearts were not in the battle the way those of the mortals were: for the most part, they treated the whole thing as though the combatants were mere pawns in a game they were playing with one another – as gods are wont to do.

The mortals, on the other hand, were fully engaged in the combat, passionate about their fellow combatants, and driven to acts of heroism. Dying courageously could bring honour to their states and families; whether they lived or died, if they fought valiantly enough, songs and stories would be sung and written about them until the end of time.

Leda and the Swan, a 16th-century copy after a lost painting by Michelangelo (National Gallery, London). Public domain.

When one of the mortals died, it was cause for deep mourning, and the deaths of significant players called for rituals and ceremonies. These included retrieving the bodies and the armour of the fallen from the battlefield, collecting wood for the huge pyres on which those bodies would be burned, and organizing “funeral games” (like mini-Olympics, appropriately) to honour the fallen hero. The gods, on the other hand, sat atop Mount Olympus or in other places that offered them better views of the action, arguing amongst themselves over who was more worthy of success in skirmishes, and settling bets and disputes by dropping down to interfere in the activities of the humans. They did have their favourites, particularly those to whom they were related: Thetis, mother of Akhilleus, was a sea nymph, and Helen herself was the issue of a coupling between the mighty Zeus – who took on the form of a swan for the occasion — and her human mother, Leda.

In all cases, Homer is careful to make sure that the activities of the gods can be interpreted in two ways: he lets us know exactly what the deities are up to, but their manipulations can also be viewed as benign natural events – as in the memorable scene when an eagle flies over the battlefield and drops a serpent into a crowd of soldiers, or the time when Athena disguises herself as a male beggar to give guidance to a captain.

There are one or two exceptions to the curtain of invisibility Homer generally draws to conceal the gods. When Akhilleus decides he must avenge the death of Patróklus by killing Hector, he needs new armour, so Zeus sends Akhilleus’s mother (“silvery-footed Thetis”) to get the “bandy-legged god” Hêphaistos to create it for him. The work Hêphaistos carries out in his forge – designing a shield, a cuirass, a helmet and greaves, and decorating the shield with detailed scenes taken from across the heavens and the earth – is described in what are some of the most beautiful passages in the book.

Or maybe it looked like this. I mostly got my mental image from the film called Troy, starring Brad Pitt, which I watched a few months ago.

Literary Devices

After reading about half of The Iliad, I began to recognize several mechanisms that Homer deploys regularly in his storytelling. One is his use of appositives to describe both gods and men. For the major players, he repeats these often, as though they were part of the individuals’ names. Some are fairly straightforward – “Nestor, charioteer,” “Apollo, lord of archery,” and “Hektor of the shining helmet,” for example – while others are wonderfully lyrical: “Diomedes, lord of the war cry,” “Meneláos, deep-lunged man of battle,” and “Aphrodité, lover of smiling eyes.” With Zeus — king of the Olympian gods – Homer pulls out the all appositive stops, describing him by turns as “Zeus, whose joy is lightning,” “Zeus, the storm king,” “Lord Zeus who drives the clouds of heaven,” and “Zeus who bears the stormcloud.” The various turns of phrase both reinforce and heighten the image of this powerful deity.

Another of Homer’s favoured devices is his use of metaphor. On almost every page, he takes the opportunity to compare the scene he is describing to one from a different context. His metaphors are often extended, complex and (of course) poetic: “As when a river in flood / from mountain snowfields reaches the flat land / whipped by a storm of rain, it sweeps away / hundreds of withered oaks, hundreds of pines, / and casts black tons of driftwood in the sea, / so Aías in his glory swept the field, / wrecking both chariots and men.”

Even without metaphor, Homer is a master of description. He shines particularly when it comes to finding new and interesting ways to describe how men are gored and decapitated and dis-armed (literally). My eldest grandson, already obsessed with Greeks and Romans, is going to love the battle scenes when I give this book to him. (They’re a bit graphic for an eight-year old, so I’m holding off for a few years.)

Homer is often unexpectedly funny -– capturing the petty arguments between the gods and goddesses and between the warriors on the ground so well that it sounds almost contemporary. (“Sack of wine,” Akhilleus says to Agamémnon, “you with your cur’s eyes and your antelope heart! You’ve never had the kidney to buckle on armour among the troops, or make a sortie with picked men [….] Leech! Commander of trash!”)

A replica of the Trojan Horse, located on the waterfront at Canakkale, Turkey, which is near where Troy once stood. Photo: Adam Jones 

There are innumerable variations on the tale of Helen of Troy and the Trojan War, depending on whether you are watching movies, cartoons or plays, viewing art, or reading books. (Wikipedia offers an extensive list of some of the writers and artists who have treated the subject in the past two thousand years.) For a long time there was dispute over whether the Trojan War ever actually happened, but it seems that it is now accepted that Troy endured a war that lasted for a decade and ended in the city’s destruction. There is, of course, no evidence that specific gods or mortals played roles in that destruction.

But in these times of fake news and half truths, maybe it doesn’t matter whether some or all of it is fiction. There are so many references to the Trojan War in subsequent culture of all kinds – and to the gods and heroes of ancient Greece in general – that the story might as well be true. The fact that The Iliad is a riveting narrative told by a master poet (and then conveyed to us by a variety of translators) is a bonus.

I could have read The Iliad from the perspective of the times we live in now, through the lens of political correctness, bemoaning war and the objectification of females, but I see no point in doing that. Instead I consider my approach to be in line with those cute teenage twins who are busy over on YouTube listening to “our” music (Phil Collins, Prince, and Janis Joplin, to name a few) for the first time. I take it as I find it, and when it’s great stuff, it works for future generations.

The Iliad is great stuff. I am looking forward to The Odyssey.

The Perfect Parent

April 9, 2020 By in Fiction, Writing Tags: , , 4 Comments

by Mary W. Walters

Polly Prewitt was a perfect parent, or as close to one as any human being can reasonably expect to get considering the materials parents have to work with. She’d suspected this for many years, although she was careful not to speak of it to anyone, including her husband, for she was also sensitive to other people’s feelings. But it gave her a certain satisfaction to know that her children would be far-better-adjusted adults for having been raised by as conscientious a parent as she.

When friends discussed their children’s bed-wetting problems, she gave little clicks of sympathy and quietly savoured the fact that her boys had both been trained before their second birthdays, and without a single tear or relapse. When other people mentioned the abysmal eating habits of their offspring, Polly gently let it be known that her boys ate what she gave them or did not eat at all. She made no fuss about it with them, she said, and they ate: spinach, tofu, the whole works.

Polly nurtured her pride by reading covers of magazines in stores. “Are you passing on gender stereotypes to your children?” Nope, she mentally responded. Her husband William did the dishes every other night and made dinner for them all on Sundays.  Polly had taken a course in automotive mechanics specifically so the boys would never get the idea that Mothers Cooked and Fathers Fixed Cars. And she had not said a single word against it when Ricky demanded a doll last summer. She wrote it down on her list and bought it for him at Christmas; that way he learned he did not get everything he wanted at the moment he asked for it. It was a cuddly doll, a male baby doll, anatomically correct. The fact that by Christmastime Ricky was in kindergarten and refused to play with it – the other little boys had told him that dolls were for girls – was beside the point.

Jamie had learned that One Takes Responsibility for One’s Actions when he kicked the front wheel of his bicycle off centre in a fit of temper and could not ride it until he’d saved enough from his allowance to pay for the repair.

Her boys were in good shape, she thought cheerfully. And so was she.

And then one day she was standing in the checkout line at Safeway, frowning to herself at the boxes of sugar-coated cereal in the cart of the woman ahead of her, when a brightly coloured magazine caught her eye. She looked up. There, in bold red letters on the cover, was a question that stopped her cold.

“Has your child learned to deal with loss?” it said.

Loss? Loss? She’d never even thought of that, and here was Jamie almost nine and Ricky already past his sixth birthday. She snatched a copy of the magazine and tossed it, front cover down, into her cart.

She read the article covertly before the boys came home from school. She read it twice. The writer urged her to allow her children grief in little ways, so they would be better able later to handle major loss. A pet, the author said, is a perfect medium for teaching such a lesson.

“Do not ever attempt to replace a pet until the grief has been worked through,” the article advised. It went on to point out the identifiable stages of grief: denial, anger, finally acceptance.

Polly’s boys had missed all that, and she would certainly need to set the matter right. What if something terrible happened to her or William or, God forbid, to any of their school friends, and she had not prepared them for it?

All right. A pet, she thought, as she watched Ricky and Jamie brush their teeth that night, before she read them their story. Jamie preferred to read to himself, but she insisted. She knew that reading aloud fostered closeness between parent and child.

A dog would be too much trouble, she decided, and by the time it was ready to teach its lesson in grief, the boys would probably be living elsewhere, attending university or sweeping streets. (Whatever life course they chose was fine with her.) A dog, or a cat, would simply take too long.

Polly couldn’t stand rodents, so mice were out, and birds could live for years.

“Fish!” she said, firmly closing the book in the middle of a chapter.

“What?” said Ricky.

“Nothing” said Polly, opening the book again.

Next day, when their father had taken them to swimming lessons, she went to Sears and bought a big glass fishbowl and a guppy that looked suspiciously pregnant. She bought fish food and received instructions in the care and feeding of fish. She did not admit to the salesclerk that her intention was for the fish to die. In fact, she knew she wouldn’t be able to help sustaining its little life for as long as possible. Polly was an honourable woman.

The boys were delighted with her offering. The bowl was given a position of prominence on the coffee table in the living room. Ricky and Jamie watched the little brown being swim around for hours on end. Ricky asked at one point if he could take it out and play with it, but Jamie told him that fishes can’t live outside the water. Ricky didn’t want the fish to die, did he? Ricky solemnly said, “No.”

Polly looked on, approving.

She did not tell William of her plan because he’d only ask her at breakfast how her “ghoulish death experiment” was coming along, or words to that effect. He was capable of ruining everything when he didn’t understand her motives, and she had suspicions he would not understand them this time. There are things a parent has to do alone.

Polly changed the water regularly and fed her little charge, and it thrived. After a week or so, the boys lost interest in it, and so she gave it a name to foster their feelings of warmth and attachment toward it. “Jean,” she called it, a suitably androgynous name. The guppy had not yet produced any little guppies (which would have been a bonus: two lessons for the price of one), and William said all fish were rounder in the middle than they were towards the ends. She let the boys feed it, but even that bored them rather quickly, and they told her that since she’d bought it, she could feed it. Responsibility for one’s actions coming back at her.

______

Polly had almost decided that Jean would become a permanent part of the household, and a permanent addition to her daily routine, when she went downstairs and found him/her belly up.

Polly sighed and, her expression appropriately mournful, went up to tell the boys.

“I have some bad news for you,’’ she said when she went into their room. “Our little Jean is dead.” (“Tell them the truth!” the article admonished. “Do not tell them the creature has gone to sleep or gone to heaven. Be honest!”)

“No kidding,” said Ricky, and he began to hum the Oscar Mayer song as he pulled his pyjamas off.

“Can I see it?” Jamie asked.

That was better. “Let them see the body of the pet,” the article went on. “Let them confront their grief, hug the pet and cry.” Hugging was out, but the principle remained.

“Of course. You both can.”

She led them down to the living room and stood back to observe their reactions.

“Hm,” said Jamie. “What’ll we do with it?”

“We can bury it out in the garden, if you like. Together. The three of us.”

“Great!” Ricky said, and he ran off, half-clad, to get his shovel from the sandbox.

“Naw. I’ll be late for school and I promised I’d bring the soccer ball. Let’s just flush it.”

So Ricky and Polly buried the little bit of fish, and Jamie left for school. (Denial, Polly thought. He’s not confronting this issue. It takes time to come to terms with loss.) Ricky seemed more interested in a worm his shovel had unearthed than in the farewell to Jean, but Polly was satisfied. At least he had been present.

She waited for the boys’ reactions, but they never once mentioned the death of the fish. At last she took the fishbowl, clean and polished and very empty-looking, and she put it on the kitchen table to emphasize their loss. It was cruel, but it had to be done.

“Can I have it for an ant house?” Jamie asked.

“No! I want to collect bugs to keep in it,” Ricky said. “How come he always gets everything?”

Ants. Polly turned the possibility over in her mind. At least Jamie would have a commitment to his ants. He’d wanted them, and the loss would be greater for his having been the instigator. Ants it would be.

“Well, Ricky,” she said. “Jamie spoke first this time, and I’ve told you often enough before that life’s not necessarily fair.” She looked at Jamie. “Go ahead and start your ant colony, but I’m going to carry this out on the sun deck. I won’t have them in the house.”

It took less than a week for all the ants to escape, and they did not seem to have set up any domestic arrangements in the bowl at all during their brief stay. Polly found Jamie on the sun deck after school one day, staring glumly at the pile of dirt he had poured from the fishbowl onto the indoor/outdoor carpet. She did not mention the mess. He had enough to deal with, poor little tyke, having to confront all of this so early on in life. But it was good, she thought, as she saw a tear roll down his cheek.

She went out and sat beside him. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

“I feel sick,” he said.

“That’s the sadness, dear. Nothing lasts forever, you know. All things must go away or die at some time or another.”

“No, Mom. That’s not it. My stomach hurts,” Jamie said, and then he threw up on the lifeless anthill.

It turned out to be chicken pox, and he was home for a week.

_______

“Now, bugs!” Ricky clapped his hands when he saw the fishbowl sitting clean and once again empty on the kitchen table.

“All right. But this is your last chance.”

“Last chance for what?” asked William, looking up from a forkful of shepherd’s pie.

“Oh, nothing. I’m just tired of pets, that’s all.”

Ricky collected a ladybug and two little green things and a fly before he, too, was stricken with chicken pox. He’d covered the top of the jar with a piece of plastic wrap with holes poked in it and thrown in a leaf or two for food. He’d given each bug a name and spent a long time watching his captives in the bowl. He’d left them on the sun deck when he began to feel unwell.

One morning, spotted but recovering, he recalled his menagerie and went downstairs to find them dead.

“Humph,” he said and went back to bed, leaving Polly to rinse the bowl once more.

In the afternoon, she found a piece of paper on which Ricky had written his name backward. Reversed writing was, she knew, a sign of deeper problems. Ricky was reacting. She leaned the paper against the empty fish/ant/bug bowl.

“Tell me why you did this” she asked him gently when he came down to supper.

“Did what?”

“Wrote your name backwards. Did you notice you had done it?” Ricky shrugged. “Jamie bet me a nickel that I couldn’t.”

“That’s it! I’ve had it!!” Polly, the almost-perfect parent shouted. She ran downstairs and wrote a caustic note to the perpetrator of the nonsense in the magazine.

“Loss” she noted in conclusion, “is not a big problem for well-adjusted kids. If everything else is going smoothly, they do not react to it at all.”

She felt better then, almost restored, and she went back to the dinner table.

“You’ve been awfully tense lately,” William said as she carried her plate to the sink and submerged it in the soapy water.

“I just got a little carried away with something,” she said. “It was no big deal. As I’d suspected, everything around here is just fine. And I,” she said, lifting the empty glass bowl into the air, “am turning this into a terrarium.”

“What’s a… ” Jamie said, as the bowl slipped from her hands and smashed to smithereens on the kitchen floor.

There was a stunned silence as the four of them studied the remains of the bowl.

Then, tumult.

“What d’ja do that for?” Jamie shouted. “I wanted that bowl to keep my rock collection in.”

Ricky started to cry. “I wanted to get a turtle.”

Polly stared at them in astonishment. “Keep your voices down, you crazy kids,” she said. “It’s just a bowl. I can get another one tomorrow.”

She stopped and watched their shuddering shoulders and listened to their sobs.

Then she said quietly, “No, I guess I can’t,” and went to get the broom.

(c) Mary W. Walters. Originally published in Chatelaine magazine. Also published in Cool, a collection of short stories by Mary W. Walters, River Books (2000).

For Whom Do the Poets Write, If Not for Me?

April 30, 2015 By in Book reviews Tags: , , Leave a comment

“[Jason] Guriel demands not only talent but signs of diligence in the poetry he favours. He seems intrigued by such questions as ‘What is a good poem?’ and ‘What is a good poet?’ and the answers he proposes often have to do with the way the poet has connected the language – the words themselves – with the purpose of the work.”

Mary W. Walters: Book Reviews

GurielCoverThe Pigheaded Soul

Essays and Reviews on Poetry & Culture

Jason Guriel

Porcupine’s Quill

264 pages

I admired the cover of a newly released book on Facebook, and to my surprise I received a copy in the mail from the publisher – no charge, no strings attached.

When the book arrived, I found myself as intrigued by the first few pages of the work as I had been by the cover. This created a dilemma for me. I like to write about books that intrigue me: doing so allows me to engage in conversation about the book – with myself, with other readers and, theoretically, with the author. I read books differently when I know I’m going to write about them – pausing to make notes, to reread paragraphs, to check external references. I wanted to read this book this way, and then to write about it on this blog…

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Wattpad: Engaging Readers as You Write

January 2, 2015 By in Fiction, Literary Agents, Publishing, Electronic, Reading, Selling Your Book, Websites for writers, Writers Web Sites, Writing Process Tags: , , , , , 4 Comments
Note: This article previously appeared in a slightly different form in Write, The Magazine of The Writers Union of Canada

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Confession: Sometimes I have trouble writing the next page of my new novel. WPNot because I am short of ideas, but because I have a lot of other urgent matters that demand my attention. I have often envied the writers whose editors or literary agents I imagine standing at their sides like midwives, encouraging them throughout their labour, reminding them of the rewards of manuscript delivery, telling them how much the world wants to see their next baby, and finally urging them to “push.”

When I heard about Wattpad, an Internet platform for readers and writers that attracts 27 million unique visitors per month, and 200,000 uploads of writing per day, I thought it might be part of the answer to my problem. And it has been. But it is also other things.

What It Is

Wattpad is a social storytelling platform where writers can register to post all kinds of work – poetry, drama, fiction and nonfiction – and where readers can read that work: all at no charge.

Most writers post short segments of their works in progress (1,000 to 2,000 words at a time, sometimes much less, sometimes much more), adding to it at regular (or irregular) intervals. Some writers are posting whole manuscripts in serial format that they have previously completed. Others (like me) are posting early drafts of longer works one section at a time. Still others slap up writing fragments like ill-mixed paint with hairs in it, and leave it there to dry — perhaps intending to come back and edit later, perhaps not.

Once the piece is up there, the effort to attract readers begins. You can contribute to this process (but probably only once) by emailing all of your friends and inviting them to check your story out, and by posting your Wattpad link to other social media sites (here’s mine). Of course, you also want to encourage visitors to your page whom you don’t already know, and you can do this indirectly by reading and commenting on the writing of others on the site, getting involved in the discussion forums, and entering the informal competitions Wattpad puts on from time to time. The goal is to get people to “follow” you so that they will be notified whenever you post a new installment or an update.

Every time someone takes a look at a segment you have posted, your “read” counter goes up. Readers can also vote for or post a comment on your work. The more reads and votes you get, the greater are your chances of being noticed by even more readers.

Some people use Wattpad as an end in itself – they are not interested in publishing elsewhere. Others are creating works ultimately intended for self- or traditional publication. Many writers have several projects on the go. Some ask for input and guidance from their readers; others just write.

Who’s on Wattpad?

The two Canadians who developed Wattpad (Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen) intended it for readers as much as writers, and Ashleigh Gardner, Head of Content: Publishing, says that “Ninety percent of Wattpad visitors are there to read and comment, not to post stories.”

She also says that regular visitors include publishers and agents who are looking for new talent.

“Some writers use Wattpad to promote their books to publishers,” she says. “Perhaps their novel was rejected when they submitted it directly, but now they can demonstrate that there is significant interest in their work.”

Gardner also tells me that the Wattpad app for smartphones and tablets is downloaded about 400,000 times a day. “Eighty-five percent of our visitors now reach us from mobile devices,” she says.

The advantage of Wattpad’s mobility component is clear: your work is accessible to readers no matter where they are, and your followers will receive “push” notifications whenever you post something new.

Copyright and Other Concerns

Gardner says that the site features a very sophisticated data-checking system that not only protects what is posted, but also works to prevent piracy. “All work on Wattpad of course remains copyright to the author,” she says. “Further, it cannot be copied and pasted, and readers can’t download it.”

A few people have told me they’re reluctant to sign on to Wattpad because they fear it will lead to spam, but so far Wattpad has attracted no more spam to me than have Twitter, Linked In, Goodreads or Facebook (which is, in my case, none).

Wattpad has had a reputation for being a place where teens post stories for one another, but if that were true at one point (and wouldn’t it be great to know that there are millions of teens who are interested in writing and reading?), the demographics are changing. “The majority of visitors are now between the ages of 18 and 30,” Gardner says, “and the subject matter of the content is changing as the average age goes up.”

Making Wattpad Work

The important part of making Wattpad work for you is to remember that it is a social media platform. If you don’t engage with it (read others’ works, respond to comments, participate in forum discussions), you will miss out on the very important reciprocation factor, and your work will languish. Further, thanks to algorithms, the more readers you attract, the more readers who will find you on their own.

Networking is not as painful as you might think. While it’s true that the Wattpad platform sports lots of dabblers and thousands of very bad writers, it doesn’t take long to sort the wheat from the chaff. And there are also some very good writers there, clearly intending to do as I am — get the work written and noticed by intelligent and discerning readers.

I’ve found a few manuscripts on Wattpad whose next installments I am genuinely eager to read and I’ve also found a few very careful and helpful readers who will probably help me get through Seeds and Secrets far more quickly than I would ever have done on my own. There is a definite motivation to keep going when readers start asking when you’re going to post the next installment. (As of Jan 1, 2015, Seeds and Secrets had received 1,500 “reads” and 121 votes. It stands about 450 from the top in the General Fiction category.)

In addition to pieces of my novel, I’ve put up a couple of works of short nonfiction on Wattpad – one previously published, one not yet – and received encouraging – and immediate – responses on them as well. I am also posting blog posts from my 2011 solo trip to India – Watch. Listen. Learn – which seems to be very popular. In fact, the response is making me seriously consider publishing it as a book, which I had not considered doing before.)

For me, Wattpad is like a humungous writing group where no one has to make coffee or serve beer, get dressed before offering feedback on other writers’ works, or pay any attention to comments from readers who don’t get what they’re doing.

Wattpad is not for everyone, of course, but if it sounds like a tool you could use to stimulate your writing and find new readers for your existing work, check it out. I’ll be happy to read the writing that you post – as long as you read mine. :)

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Update: You can check out Wattpad’s 2014 Year in Review here. According to Nazia Khan, Wattpad’s Director of Communications, the company has noted some interesting trends this year:

  • People are writing novels on their phones
  • Episodic/serial reading is back (Dickens would be so pleased)
  • Everyone is a fan of something as evidenced by the growing number of fanfiction stories
  • Teens are reading. Yes, really.

Book Promotion Tip of the Week #17: Get a media person to complain that there’s too much sex in your novel

January 24, 2014 By in Bestsellers, Book reviews, humour, Novels, Promoting published books, Selling Your Book Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Even if he is your own son.

Dan's DV Review“I tried to imagine it was my mom’s coauthor who wrote the sex scenes and that somehow my mom’s role in the writing process did not even involve reading those passages at all. That didn’t work, though.” – Dan Riskin, PhD, bat biologist, host of MONSTERS INSIDE ME on Animal Planet, co-host of DAILY PLANET on Discovery Channel, and author of the forthcoming MOTHER NATURE IS TRYING TO KILL YOU (Simon and Schuster, March 2014).

(Note: I put in the time: I’m entitled to name-drop.)

Book Promotion Tip of The Week #16: Get serious about Goodreads

November 5, 2013 By in Book reviews, Promoting published books, Selling Your Book, Websites for writers Tags: , , 5 Comments

Screen Shot 2013-11-05 at 7.54.20 PM

Update Nov. 8: I’ve signed on to read and discuss three works of fiction in two different groups on Goodreads. (Because I have so much time to read… )/(Because I’m wasting too much time on Netflix.) The books are Gilead OR Atonement (I’ve read those two and hope they pick Gilead, which is brilliant), Olive Kitteridge (interconnected short stories. I’d never heard of the author, Elizabeth Strout, but I’ve read two stories so far and they’re great) and The Blue Notebook by James Levine. The groups I’ve joined (if anyone else is interested in reading/discussing those books) are Bound Together (1,502 members; women’s group), and Literary Award Winners Fiction Book Club (83 members).

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I have been inspired to get more active on Goodreads, thanks to a six-months-old article on The Huffington Post that I just recently discovered.

There are so many blog posts and articles out there offering promotional advice for authors that it’s hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. But the information contained in “How to Become a Goodreads Power User (and why you’d want to)” by Penny C. Sansevieri sounds practical and viable.

Sansevieri points out that “the average demographic” of Goodreads “is adult female, many with college age kids and surprisingly, a whopping 81% of them are Caucasian. They are avid readers, though many are less affluent than the average Internet user so low-priced books and free books do very well on this site.” Sounds like a healthy portion of my audience – at least for The Woman Upstairs and The Whole Clove Diet – although it also sounds like the reading demographic in general. And I have seen many young and middle-aged adults (and lots of men) in Goodreads’ book discussions.

Sansevieri offers some concrete guidelines on how to increase your visibility on Goodreads and I intend to test drive several of them. I’ve already found that the giveaways are a great way to attract attention, although I’m not sure they translate into sales. But then I haven’t been a very consistent presence over there, so I the fault is no doubt mine.  You can’t just post a new book and then go away and expect it to attract attention to itself.

Sansevieri also suggests subscribing to two Goodreads newsletters: the Goodreads Author Newsletter, and the main Goodreads newsletter.

I have occasionally heard some grumbling from other writers about Goodreads, but I’m not sure if this came from people who were active on the site, or were only drop-in visitors as I have been. Since I am normally an avid reader (although not so much since I got hooked on Breaking Bad), I can’t see a downside to getting more involved in Goodreads. Even if it just means I end up finding more people to talk with about other people’s books, it’s a win.

If you have more experience than I do as a writer on Goodreads, I would be interested to know your thoughts about the Sansevieri article. Is it as useful as it sounds?

And if you’re on the Goodreads site, make contact. This is me.

Book Promotion Tip of the Week #7: February 11, 2013

February 11, 2013 By in Book reviews, Promoting published books, Selling Your Book Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Book Promotion TipsCreate A Media Kit

(then USE it)

A media package is a collection of germane and interesting background material relating to you and your book that writers of articles for publications (on- or off-line) and individual bloggers can use to enhance the reviews or profiles they are doing about you. When the kit or package is complete, you can send it out by email – or by mail, including a hard copy of the book if one is available – to individuals or publications that you think might want to review your book.

A complete media kit includes between seven and nine components. It should include 1) information on the author – including a biography and an annotated bibliography, lists of awards, prizes, and other writing achievements, etc. – and 2) information on the book, such as an intriguing bit of promo copy and at least a taste of what the book is about, plus perhaps interesting details about the writing process, how the cover was created, other books that readers of your book might like, etc.

The kit should also include 3) photos of the author and the book cover, suitable for reproduction, and information on 4) where the book is available for sale. Make sure to include your 5) email address so that the media person or blogger can contact you if he or she wants additional information.

A press kit can also include 6) an excerpt from the book itself, and 7) copies of reviews. You might want to include some 8) sample questions that an interviewer could ask you about yourself or the book (you can either answer them in the kit or not… depending on your inclination).

Last but not least, you might want to create 9) an actual media release, a well written story that a newspaper or magazine might run about your book if it is looking for a space filler (or the writer is behind schedule and desperate to find some copy for a deadline). You can get lots of information on how to write an effective media release if you simply Google the words “how to write a media release.” This article, from The Toronto Star, is good.

Turn the Media Package into a Website

Once you have all the materials together that I have listed above, and anything else you might want to include in your press kit or media package, you also have the basic components you need to create a website for your book. John A. Aragon and I have just put together the media package for The Adventures of Don Valiente and the Apache Canyon Kid, and we have posted all the pieces on the book’s brand-new website here: www.donvaliente.com

Check, Check & Check

Demonstrate excellence: Before you do anything with your press kit or publish your book’s website, make sure that you have created excellent text copy and that all your links work. Your media package is your ambassador: it is the first contact many influential people will have with your book. If your media package is hastily assembled and badly edited, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

Be interesting: This is almost as important, if not more important, than demonstrating excellence. If your website/media package isn’t interesting, no one is going to bother to investigate any further. (I can’t tell you how to be interesting. Either you got it, or you don’t. But keep in mind that the “interesting” part needs to relate in a genuine way to you or your book: putting  photos of your kid’s Popsicle-stick trick in a media package is not likely to do your book any good.)

Update: Don’t forget to add new book reviews and awards as they come in to both your media package and your website.

USE IT!

There is absolutely no point in having a great media package and book website if you don’t tell anyone about it. (I am not talking about telling your buddies on Twitter and Facebook – I am discovering that despite what everyone “in the know” is telling us, social media are almost a total waste of time when it comes to book promotion.) Find the names and addresses/emails of the people and outlets where you want reviews/profiles about you or your book to appear, and send the appropriate individuals a package by mail or via an (interesting) email. Don’t send too many of the latter as blind copies to a single email, either: it is my theory that a lot of genuinely worthwhile emails go to spam because the senders have added too many people to the bcc line. In fact, I tend to prefer to send the same email, one at a time, to each recipient. This takes more time, but I think it’s worth it. Same goes for individually addressing form letters that go out through the traditional mail system.

Second-hand recommendations are always better than first-hand ones. If you tell someone to read your book, it will have an effect that ranges between negative and negligible (unless maybe you have the goods on that other person, or it’s your grandma). Self-promotion cannot compare to the impact of having someone else tell other people to read your book (or even tell them to NEVER read your book. That attracts readers, too: fewer, perhaps, and for entirely the wrong reasons.)

Taking advantage of these truths is the whole purpose of a press kit, of course.

In a future article, I will tell you how John and I went about finding and attempting to contact media we wanted to review Don Valiente, and how I am doing that for The Whole Clove Diet and for my grant-writing podcasts, and I’ll report on how it all worked out.

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Please note: I am about to start compiling a pdf of all of my BOOK PROMOTION TIPS OF THE WEEK. If you would like a copy of the most recent complete edition, email me at mary at marywwalters dot com – preferably with BPTW in the subject line – and I will send it to you. No charge. If you want regular updates, let me know that too – but you can save yourself emails if you just subscribe to The Militant Writer after you have downloaded the back posts that you’ve missed.

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Fiction in 2013: The Ugly Truth (and a call for patience)

January 21, 2013 By in Bestsellers, Blogging, Book reviews, Editors, literary, Independent publishing, Literary Agents, Novels, Promoting published books, Publishing, Self publishing, Self-publishing, Writing awards Tags: , 35 Comments

iStock_000015635745XSmallOkay.

So I was going to write a post about the sorry state of fiction publishing during this transition period, as we watch the established presses, gatekeeper agents, chain booksellers and respectable book review outlets grind through the death throes of their former heyday — those days soon gone forever when they got to decide what books we should read.

I was going to detail a few of the horrors that one former “mid-list writer” (me) witnessed as she set off on her lonely road to self-publication, and witnesses still as she trudges down the even more harrowing and thorny trail of self-published-book promotion. Several of the appalling sights I’ve seen have contributed to a precipitous decline in my faith in my fellow human beings, such as:

  • New lows for the publishing industry. Traditional publishers have “evolved” from basing their guesses about what books they should publish next year on last year’s bestseller lists, to basing them on the lists of top-selling self-published novels — whose authors they then race to sign. How ironic is that?
  • Sticking fingers in the dam as the ship goes down. Almost all traditional book review outlets, booksellers, awards competitions and funding agencies continue to refuse to review, sell or reward self-published books on principle, no matter what the track record of the author or the quality of the self-published book (why? Because they might have to THINK if they were to become more open? How much easier it must be to simply proceed as they always have done, by accepting only those books published by traditional presses?). This makes book promotion for former mid-list writers very difficult, but it also means that readers who are wise enough not to participate in on-line review forums never hear about self-published books with any literary merit;
  • The Crap. Oh, the Crap. I draw your attention here to the hundreds of thousands of works of so-called fiction that have been released into the marketplace in the past few years by self-published writers who are incompetent, inexperienced, badly edited, and/or merely ignorant or boring, many of whom grow apoplectic and even threatening if anyone suggests that they don’t know how to punctuate, much less how to write (This enormous garbage heap is offered as justification by publishers, booksellers, review outlets, awards organizers and granting agencies for continuing to proceed as they do, and I do not argue that it is a major issue. However, a bit of diligence on the part of these institutions could sort the wheat from the chaff – sorting is not THAT difficult – but who has time to be diligent when your house is crumbling around you?) ;
  • False Positive Reviews. Then we have the proliferation of ridiculously positive, 5-star reviews of the aforementioned Crap now posted to Amazon.com, Goodreads, book-review blogs, and other book-related sites. Most of these patently fluffy reviews have been written by the authors’ well-meaning but inexperienced, uninformed and not widely read friends and relatives. One book-review blogger favourably compared an utterly talentless writer to one with the world-class stature of, let us say, a Jane Austen – a comparison that was then, of course, gleefully quoted by the writer in subsequent promotion. Now, if you were an unaware book buyer and a fan of Jane Austen, would you know to proceed with caution? I don’t think so. (Yep. It’s a zoo out there. Be careful where you step);
  • Books that sell on reputation and gossip rather than content. These are the Honey Boo-Boos of the current literary world. Take, for example, the Fifty Shades series, which has sold an astounding, gut-wrenching, nauseating 68 million copies so far. (Lest anyone accuse me of sour grapes, I have no qualms admitting that I am fifty shades of green over E.L. James’s book sales, but I would never, ever want to be associated with such bad writing, even in exchange for a lot of money. Thank you anyway, Mephistopheles.) As far as I can tell, this phenomenon MUST be due to the lack of literary reviews of the book, for why would anyone spend good money on a totally unerotic, misogynistic, implausible piece of shit? The only possible explanation is that  is that 67.32 million of those 68 million purchasers bought the book by mistake. I’m telling anyone who hasn’t yet made the error: I bought the first book in the series. I read as much as I could stand. I threw it in the garbage. Don’t waste your money. Read Anaïs Nin or someone else who can actually write erotic fiction instead);
  • Review Police: Then we have the packs of on-line sleuths, most of whom hide behind pseudonyms, who apparently have an intense dislike of writers in general and suspect us all of being guilty of the most nefarious crimes, particularly ones pertaining to reviews. (I have personally been the victim of their sordid and senseless attacks when I stupidly ventured onto their forums to point out the errors in their thinking. Like two-year olds, their arguments are not constrained in any way by the need to use logic, and they will therefore win all arguments). Among other things, such individuals believe to the very cores of their Neanderthalean little hearts that if you have received a free copy of a book rather than purchased it, you are incapable of writing an objective review of it. This opinion of course invalidates every review that has ever been published in the New York Times, the Globe and Mail , the London Review of Books, or any other respected review publication: since the beginning of (literate) time, reviewers have not paid for books they have reviewed; they have received the free review copies that have been sent to the publications by the publishers. The “review police” seem to have very little to do with their lives aside from hunting down authors they can report to the Amazon gods for having engineered positive reviews for their own books – or, better yet, of having written such reviews themselves, using false names. Such witch hunts commonly occur on the Amazon Top Reviewers Forum (which is not exclusively about books, but also talks about reviews of toilet plungers and whatnot; here is, however, a charming recent thread that reveals the biases of many of the habitues of the forum) and The Kindle Forum;
  • Overkill Response by Amazon: Last fall, Amazon responded to accusations by these sleuths by deleting thousands of reviews by writers, inflammatory or not. Here are the details, as set out in the New York Times and The Telegraph;
  • Last but not least, it doesn’t help that at least one traditionally published author has admitted to actually doing what we are all being accused of doing: not only has R.J. Ellory written reviews of his own books and posted them under pseudonyms, he has also used fake personae to slag his fellow authors.

So, yeah. It’s a pretty disgusting time to be a fiction fan – as I am, both as a writer and a reader. I remember a bookseller once telling me (about 30 years ago) that she didn’t bother to take ID from book purchasers when they wrote cheques because they were all so honest. The nature of the beast seems to have changed, and I am very sorry to be seeing it.

What I was going to do was to just advise everyone to stay away from fiction–even mine!–until this all shakes down. If you can’t trust what is being published to be good, and you can’t trust the reviews to be honest, much less representative, then what’s the point?

But then I reminded myself that this IS just a transition stage. I reminded myself how far we’ve come in the past four years. I remembered how I’ve noticed that several of the newly published writers I didn’t feel were very good seem to have given up on their dreams to become millionaires from writing the next knock-off Twilight, and stopped plugging their books everywhere. It seems likely that many others who are not “real writers” will follow because this is (as it always has been) a hell of a lot of thankless work.

I thought about Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours and reminded myself that I’ve been at this fiction-writing stuff – working at improving my writing – for more than thirty years now. I reminded myself that I finished my (first) half marathon back in the 1990s , and lost 30 lbs last autumn, by keeping on and keeping on–no matter what. Giving up on writing, even for a few months or years, is not an option anyway: I love to write. A writer is who I am.

I told myself that within another few years, there will be a new and much better system, in which the readers will find the good books for themselves from among all the self- and traditionally published books that are released, and then will tell the rest of us about them on book blogs that we will come to trust to point us in the best direction for our own personal reading interests. Within a few years, really good editors will offer to put their imprints on self-published books they’ve edited and liked. There will be awards programs that are open to both kinds of fiction publications. Writers who have established presses and agents will stop dumping and ignoring on principle those of us who are not dragging around similar litters of dependents. (See, for example, this.) We will have book review outlets we can trust to cover ALL good fiction writing, no matter where it comes from, and booksellers who will recognize their new roles as community gathering places for book lovers rather than as gatekeepers.

It will take a few more years for the evolution to shake down properly, but it will happen. And I am optimistic, despite my dismay and discouragement right now, that the world is going to be a better, more open and less expensive place for writers and for readers. And that we will once again be seen as a group as honourable people who are kind and supportive of one another.

So I decided not to write that depressing, bleak, discouraging blog post I had been thinking about after all.

Book Promotion Tip of the Week #1: December 2, 2012

December 2, 2012 By in Book reviews, Independent publishing, Promoting published books, Self publishing, Self-publishing, Selling Your Book, Writing awards Tags: , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Gold starDemonstrate Your Excellence

If you are the author of a well written, well edited, self-published book, you need to help it get the attention it deserves. There are lots of people who will assume that just because your book is self-published, it must be crap – poorly written drivel featuring lots of typos laid out incompetently on the page.

Since there are, in fact, many “indie” published books fitting that description to a T, it is very difficult for most self-published authors to get their books reviewed by established media. To take advantage of this situation, some book-trade publications (including the erstwhile respectable Kirkus Reviews and Publishers’ Weekly) are now selling reviews for what I consider to be way too much money  ($425?? Are you kidding me? What’s the point? How is even a good review from one of these outlets–and the price doesn’t include any guarantees that the review will be positive–going to improve your sales? You’re still not going to be eligible for most awards competitions, and most established booksellers still aren’t going to stock your books. Furthermore, your average readers couldn’t give a damn about Kirkus Reviews or Publishers’ Weekly–if they even know what they are). As far as I’m concerned you can spend your book-promotion budget, if you have one, much more wisely.

To help get your wheat to stand out from the chaff:

1) Submit your book to every awards program for published books for which it is eligible that you can afford. (Some awards programs are also quite expensive, and may not be worth the investment, especially if there are likely to be so many books submitted that winning becomes a crapshoot: check out the previous years’ winners of these competitions. But don’t dismiss award competitions just because they cost a bit of money: there are certainly administrative costs involved–including, we hope, some payment for the judges.) Don’t overlook local and regional competitions, and those specific to your genre (e.g. western, historical fiction, speculative fiction). Google to find them (“writing competitions self-published books, steam punk” for example). You may not win, but you may be a finalist or semi-finalist, as The Whole Clove Diet was in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Competition four years ago, or you may not be even a semi-finalist but may still get a great review from a judge that you can then use in promotion (as I recently did from the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards);

2) Look for groups of readers that are giving their stamps of approval to well written, self-published/indie books, and submit a copy of your book for their review. Leaders in this field include the folks at the Book Readers Appreciation Group (B.R.A.G.): their readers evaluate books that are nominated or submitted, and the ones they find to be of sufficient quality receive a B.R.A.G. Medallion and appear as recommendations on their site. Such notice can bring side-benefits aside from the actual selection: not only was The Whole Clove Diet a B.R.A.G. Medallion honoree (which is an accolade I can and do use in my promotion and on my website), the news of its status was also tweeted by the B.R.A.G. organizers and mentioned on their Facebook page. Recently the novel was also named a B.R.A.G. Book of the Week, which gave it even more attention.

Aside from B.R.A.G., there are many other sites that are devoted to helping readers sort the worthwhile from the junk in indie/self published books. (I invite you to add your recommendations of such sites as comments to this post for the benefit of other writers.) In a world where agents and publishing houses are no longer the gatekeepers they once were, readers need to help other readers find the best new writers and books around. When they get themselves organized into groups (or become individual book review bloggers), the work they do benefits us not as readers, but as writers too.