Recently, several contemporary novels have been picked up for adaption from their original form to a script for the big screen.  The most recent among these stories are the Hunger Games trilogy as well as Ender’s Game.  The first installment of the Hunger Games trilogy was released in May of 2012 and the second installment, Catching Fire, was released November 22nd, just in time tempt crowds over Thanksgiving break.  Ender’s Game, a military science fiction novel written by Orson Scott Card and published in 1985, was just recently released in theatres this past November 1st.

When the end of the Harry Potter film franchise finally arrived in July of 2011, it was only a matter of time before a new franchise built around a teen-lit series came to the big screen.  This successor of the popular Potter films came in the form of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, of which the first novel was published in 2008.  Unlike Harry Potter, the Hunger Games trilogy follows a female protagonist living within a future world in which children are forced to fight to the death in what is referred to as “The Hunger Games.”  The Hunger Games was a prime candidate for the next adapted series blockbuster not only because of its strong female lead, but also because of the dystopian world it depicts.  Recently, “end of the world” plots have been a common thread among movies, and have generally been large successes at the box office.  With films depicting alien invasions, zombies, and apocalypses dominating cinemas everywhere, the declining and broken world of The Hunger Games could not be more relevant; discussing the current “it” theme in pop culture.  Due to its relevancy, The Hunger Games has found critical success both as a series of novels and as a film franchise, and is expected to do just as well in the box office with the upcoming installment of Catching Fire.

The adaption of Ender’s Game is somewhat of an enigma because of its original date of publication.  Unlike the more contemporary Hunger Games trilogy, Ender’s Game is a well established novel that has been around for over twenty-five years.  Part of the reason it has not been adapted to the screen before this point most likely has to do with a lack of resources to accurately and adeptly portray the many science fiction effects that are within the book.  One example of this would be the Battle Room, a highly technological arena where “fleets” of children battle in midair in training for war against the alien species, called the “Buggers.”  Portraying the futuristic technological advancements described within Card’s book would have proved problematic back in the 1980s.  However, one questions why this book had not been adapted earlier, then simply remade later on when better technology became available.  This can be seen in the franchise of the Stephen King novel-turned-film Carrie, which now boasts a grand total of three films based off the original novel spanning from 1976-2013.  The reason for the late adaption of Ender’s Game to the big screen has much to do with the reasons why The Hunger Games is proving so popular now: pop culture.  In the 1980s, futuristic violent worlds were not the popular theme in film.  Rather, adventure films set a bit more within reality (such as the Indiana Jones franchise) thrived.  Therefore, it makes sense that production companies have waited to release Ender’s Game at a time when its themes will appeal to more people.

Based on these examples, it is clear that when choosing which book series will become the next film franchise, much thought goes into the current mood of pop culture.  By giving the people what they want, production companies get what they want: publicity and money, money, money.  Sometimes capitalizing on literature pays off.

I can’t stop wondering about the relationships between words, sounds, and physical response. This broad interest evolved from recent, specific observations in my daily life. For instance: I have a friend who mumbles to herself when she reads. The man I sat next to in a coffee shop today drummed his fingers on the table incessantly as he read his New Yorker. Some people prefer hair twirling or beard stroking or a classic frown-and-fist-clench while reading, and one’s reaction clearly depends upon the topic he or she is absorbed in.

Personally, I’ve noticed that when I read, or write by hand, I often tilt my head dramatically to the right. Sometimes, I place my palm on the back of my neck. Most often, these physical responses are manifestations of intense concentration, which I deeply enjoy (which probably accounts for the fact that I rarely move my hand or un-tilt my head, preferring to bask in my oddness rather than fight it). I don’t think that my hand has ever cramped quite in the way it does when I’m taking a timed pop quiz on the night’s reading, frantically trying to prove that I have scraped off an A-worthy tip of the iceberg.

I’m far from the only one musing about how our brains work. I know that there are entire academic fields devoted solely to the relationship between reading and behavior. People write articles, dissertations, and even book-length studies detailing the connection between brains and bodies. And cognitive scientists have proved that reading stimulates certain areas of the brain that engage our emotional and intellectual abilities.

So who am I to try and figure out these relationships out in a mere blog post? I can certainly lay out how they play out in my own life—I’m thinking about poetry specifically. For example, while I am reading T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” words and rhythms combine to stimulate my mind in ways that I think are unique to poetry. For example, the “shantih shantih shantih” at the end of the poem almost appears like a gong in my brain. These words moved me before I even knew what they meant. Does this impact derive from the words themselves, or is there some deeper undercurrent in the poem that sweeps me up?

I’ve had a similar hypnotic experience at poetry readings. A few weeks ago, I went to a public reading where Isabella Martin, a fellow Shenandoah intern, read a few of her poems. This reading was the first time I had encountered Isabella’s poems, but in the few minutes that she read, some combination of her voice and the words caught my attention and held it. While she read, rather than manifesting my brain’s frantic attempt to understand her poem in some bizarre pose, I was stilled completely. I think that the mark of a good poem is its ability to still someone in this way—like Eliot’s shantihs, Isabella’s poem, while I hadn’t had the time to sit down, read, and digest it, had a natural impact.

Around the same time as Isabella’s reading, Professor John Melillo from the University of Arizona came to visit my modern American poetry class. He presented us with a recording of the final section of “The Waste Land” without spoken words. Melillo removed Eliot’s rumbling growl and left solely the intonations of Eliot’s voice. Straight sound. There was a decent bit of static overlay, but the whistling whisper pendulum for each “shantih” was enough to make me widen my eyes and grin. I felt the static shantih move through me.

I don’t know why I froze during Isabella’s reading or why I smiled during Eliot’s sound waves. But I guess that’s the point of this post. There is some instinct inside us that seeks out the purity of these words and sounds and latches onto them. Despite metaphorical and literal static, there is a deep, powerful current beneath poetic words that might be just as important as the words themselves. And that’s a power that I don’t need to fully understand to appreciate. For now, I’m just glad that it exists.

I would never approach Shenandoah fiction submissions in the same way that I would approach a short story in a literature class. In class, I read the story several times and spend significant amounts of time pondering over certain passages and minute details. I often ask myself: what does this mean? What is the author trying to say? What is the bigger picture that the author does not directly address, and why does he or she not directly address it? I assume that a story assigned for a lit class is of a high quality, and that there is something within it worth discovering and pondering over; otherwise, the professor would not have assigned it. I am more favorable toward the writer, in a way, because I just assume that he or she is good— I give him or her the benefit of whatever doubt could exist.

When reviewing short stories for Shenandoah, though, it becomes much more difficult (due mostly to time constraints) to treat a story with the same care that I bring to a lit class. So, sadly, submitters do not get “the benefit of the doubt.” If there ever is even the slightest doubt about a story, it is usually an indication that it will not make it through to the final considerations for publication. There is too little space and time to delve into a story that fails to strike a chord with its first impression. It would be inefficient and ultimately detrimental to the reviewing process if we assumed that, with every story we had a doubt about, there must be something we are overlooking, that it deserves careful attention until it is fully understood because we’re just not “getting it.” The detriment would be disrespect towards the other mass of stories we wouldn’t have time to get to.

Editing is surely a subjective process, but when I began reading submissions earlier this year, I made the mistake of trying to be objective and totally unbiased—I wanted to give each story careful attention. But as the stories rolled in, I became less and less sensitive. I eventually developed a kind of internal proxy that did not feel as guilty as my lit-class-self would feel about skimming through stories and casting most of them aside. If I had to pick one thing that continually cropped up in many of the stories we reject from Shenandoah, it would be “this story is unclear.” It may be useless and, ironically, vague advice for a writer: be clear. There are many stories where, on the second page I still do not know the direction it is going in, who the important characters are, or what the general focus is. There is a fear among contemporary writers—and I know this from experience—that being straightforward, overt, and simple makes for an automatically boring story. It’s probably healthy to consider different ways to begin a story, but sometimes writers overcompensate and end up with overwrought or obscure beginnings, and without a good beginning you’re in the hole.

This kind of approach to a story would never fly in a lit class. I would have to read the whole story no matter what I thought of it less than halfway through. And even if I didn’t like it, I would have to provide a reasoned and intelligent analysis proving that I completely understood it and thus have the authority to not like it. Plus, doing this process for class results in a grade. As a submissions editor, or any member of the Shenandoah team for that matter, when I’m reviewing a story I don’t have the added expectation that my “work” will itself be reviewed. It’s just a one-on-one relationship I have with the story; this story may never see anyone else’s eyes but my own.

Like most college-aged members of the millennial generation, I am in near-constant contact with either my phone or my laptop (and, as my ambidexterity grows, sometimes both at once…). Over the past few years, it has become my habit to browse the Internet whenever I have five or ten minutes to spare.

If you were to add up all of my 5 minute “study breaks” over, say, the course of a week, it would likely account for a pretty solid chunk of time. But just where is the bulk of that time being spent? Sure, I’m no stranger to Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter, but since coming to college I have discovered the endlessly fascinating yet inescapable time warp that is Thought Catalog. 

First brought to life in 2010, Thought Catalog is a digital magazine featuring millennial-aged writers of all kinds. The website itself is simple and unflashy, little more than a plain white background featuring links to the most recent contributions. These “Thoughts” are posted in chronological order, 5 per page, with each link showcasing the author, publication date, title of the piece, a 1-2 sentence snippet meant to grab a potential reader’s attention, and a related picture.

When I started reading Thought Catalog in 2010, I could expect to see anywhere from 2-10 new posts a day. I was able to keep pace reasonably well, reading most “articles” the day they debuted. Occasionally a day or two would even go by without anything new. In the 3+ years since that time, the site has grown by leaps and bounds—earlier this month they boasted no fewer than 65 new contributor posts in one day. At the moment that I write this, there are 3,499 pages’ worth of posts, which amounts to nearly 17,500 different Thoughts. Wow!

In terms of content, I admit that Thought Catalog is a mixed bag. For every stellar submission I read, there are 10 that are some combination of bizarre, offensive, boring, or just plain ridiculous. Most of the Thoughts are in the form of personal essays or lists—some of which include things like video clips or external links—and they can typically be classified into one of two categories: (1) expressing an opinion or (2) giving advice. Some of the posts are humorous (The “Inner Monologue of Bo Obama”; “An Interview with Paris Hilton’s Twitter”), some are uplifting or empowering (“Stop Being Afraid of Happiness”; “6 Things To Know For When You Don’t ‘Just Know’”), some are informative (“How to Buy a Fake Passport”; “The 11 Most Fabulous Beyoncé Moments of All Time”), and some are downright ridiculous (“This Livestream of a Parrot Doing Parrot Things is Disturbing and Wonderful”; “A Letter to the Three And A Half Pairs of Sexy Underwear I Own”).

As stated on their website, the owners of Thought Catalog have 5 central ideals:

1. Thought Catalog should be fun, smart, and creative, i.e. entertaining, journalistic, and literary.
2. The site should be beautiful and clutter-free.
3. We believe all thinking is relevant and strive for a value-neutral editorial policy governed by openness. The more worldviews and rhetorical styles on the site, the better. We want to tell all sides of the story.
4. We’re about today. But our mission is also archival. We want to catalog the times for tomorrow.
5. We want to help shape the culture by empowering you to share your ideas and stories with the world.

Out of these 5 basic tenets comes a website full of pleas, confessions, admonitions, tirades, satires, and tongue-in-cheek assessments of current events and cultural phenomena. And while I’m not sure to what degree I can legitimately argue for its journalistic or literary merit, Thought Catalog is certainly clutter-free, creative, fun, and entertaining. The pieces I find on Thought Catalog are perfectly formatted for a five-minute foray into reading and, weird Thoughts aside, I’ve come across some wonderful writing there. I appreciate that many of the lists and essays speak with candor and honesty to my experiences as a 20-something in contemporary America.

What’s your take? If you’re already familiar with Thought Catalog, have you ever read anything there that you really, really liked (or really, really didn’t)? Are there other digital magazines that you’re a fan of? How do you think websites like this one will affect the future of publishing? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

As a college student (an English major at that), I am frequently forced to read novels that I would not ordinarily choose.  Recently, I read Evelina by Fanny Burney, perhaps not a great monolith of literary style and skill, but a novel famous for its time and groundbreaking for pre-Austenian female novelists. Yet, as I made my journey through the novel I was at turns perplexed by certain references Burney made to her contemporary actors, novelists and poets. It dated her novel to the point that footnotes were utterly necessary and Google was always at the ready. It brought a question to my mind. Was the dated nature of Burney’s novel a contributing factor in its slow descent into obscurity?

How many pop culture references are too many? When addressing great literature that has stood the test of time, the answer is usually a resounding zero. When is it acceptable to reference something in literature? According to the classics, never (unless it’s Shakespeare). To be fair, there are other forms of reference, for example, famous poems. Beginning with the advent of the novel, 18^th-century writers worked under the assumption that readers were well-versed in a certain literary canon, ranging from Shakespeare to their poetic and literary contemporaries. The same cannot be said for the contemporary reader. Some Shakespearean references even go over my head, and I’m an English major who used to read Shakespeare recreationally. 

Moving into an era where information is transferred at lightning speed, and it seems like almost everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame, what counts as fair game for a pop-culture reference? Perhaps “safe territory” is a better phrase.  As you undertake your great novel-writing experience, you have to think to yourself, “Will my reference to Keeping up with the Kardashians be pertinent in 50 to 100 years?”  Probably not. “Well if I can’t reference Kim and Kanye, then who can I reference?” This is the real question. What pop culture has garnered enough fame to be considered canon, or at least canon adjacent? I think there are three factors to consider: Fame, Years of Existence and Impact on Society.  If it has been famous for more than fifty years, it’s a pretty sure thing that your reader has heard of it, if only peripherally. But once you move into the last ten years, it becomes more difficult to make a prediction.

What things from the modern era will make into the next century of budding writings whose authors are itching to connect to their audience through hip references? Do you think people will understand your reference to the so called “Miley Cyrus haircut?” Or will such a fashion statement fade into the deep recesses of Google only to be mined by the truly determined researcher? For the sake of society, I hope for the latter, but it is impossible to know.  Take that risk. Put your money down. You can only hope that you have bet on the winner.

Literary types these days seem to feel cornered and outnumbered by “them,” people who simultaneously champion greater use of technology in learning and encourage the decreased study of literary fiction and poetry. One example of this assault on reading is the current movement of public schools toward a Common Core Standards curriculum. Lee Siegel’s recent essay (found on The New Yorker’s blog), “Should Literature Be Useful?”, notes that the Common Core promotes “non-fiction, even stressing the reading of train and bus schedules over imaginative literature.” This feels like a slap in the face to English majors everywhere. Similarly, when book-lovers hear of a movement away from physical books—for instance, the new, all-digital library in San Antonio, Texas—they are often equally shocked and feel personally affronted. I only know this because I am one of those angry, bookish folks, and I surround myself with similar people.

Increasingly, we fear that “they” are waging a war against literature, and that “they” want to replace it with learning in other, more “useful” fields. But who is “they”? Furthermore, who belongs to “us”? Maybe these distinctions are not so black and white. While many of us are up in arms about technological and political threats to literacy and literature, we can’t claim to be true Neo-Luddites. Most of us do not go into people’s homes and chop up and set fire to their computers, using their Kindles for kindling. Nor would many of us argue that the sciences are less worthy of study than are English or History.

In fact, I am currently delivering my thoughts to you via the technology of the Internet. Shenandoah is now entirely online, but this fact does not make its content any less valuable as literature. The convenience of being able to look up stories and poems on the website without having to pay for a subscription or search the library for past issues is actually a huge advantage. With novels and collections of poetry, however, I always prefer to have the actual book. It can be tedious and maddening to have to read a long text or a text that requires annotation online.

So, where the digitization of books is concerned, perhaps there is not so much to fear after all, as long as physical libraries remain in existence and do not all convert to the virtual model. But what about the discouraging state of literary study in public schools under the Common Core Standards? What about those tired arguments that the humanities are useless or irrelevant? Do you, too, fear the coming dystopia in which students are taught to read train and bus schedules at the expense of studying works of literature? Or do you think such happenings provoke more concern than they should?

When you hear November, you might think of the transition between fall and winter. Thanksgiving and No Shave November. Native American Heritage Month. American Diabetes Month. BLACK FRIDAY. Sweet Potato Awareness Month. The month Beaujolais nouveau is released (a big deal for us wine lovers).

However, if you’re a literary nerd, you’ll know its National Novel Writing Month. Also known as NaNoWriMo, the slogan of the program is “thirty days and thirty nights of literary abandon!” Sounds fun, but what is it specifically? The goal is to complete a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. This is approximately 1,667 words everyday. NaNoWriMo began in 1999 to motivate a small group of writer friends and has since become an Internet sensation. The website can keep track of your words, introduce you to other writers in your genre, and help keep you motivated.  There’s no prize for completing the challenge or failing, but I’m sure it feels pretty good to have written something of such magnitude.

Full confession: I actually tried this once.  It was either in high school or freshman year here at W&L but I honestly can’t remember.  Couldn’t tell you the plot but I’m pretty sure I was going for a Donna Tartt The Secret History ripoff, except made for teens at boarding school. Real work and real papers apparently got in the way and I stopped. And that leads me to my biggest question: who the heck has time for this? Legitimate authors make time for their work. Can any new phenoms appear from the frenzy that is NaNoWriMo?

Clearly, I’m setting this up for some favorable outcomes. Of COURSE there have been successful novelists. Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen is perhaps the biggest success story. It was on bestseller lists for over a year and was made into a movie with Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson. Enough said. Then there’s The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, which barnesandnoble.com tells me got great reviews and was also on the NYT bestseller list. I actually want to check this one out.  Additionally, Wool by Hugh Howey was mentioned after the first two by both Barnes and Noble and Mental Floss so I’ll just go ahead and assume it’s also a good book. It sounds kind of like an Anthem/ The Road crossover but the movie rights have already been purchased by 20^th Century Fox. When movie rights are purchased early, the book is probably great. Fact.

However, many people have reservations about NaNoWriMo. Some think NaNoWriMo novelists are just a bunch of amateur writers who think they’ve written the next Twilight. The slogan “No Plot? No Problem!” can actually result in an onslaught of plotless, poorly thought out novels. Literary agents are rumored to receive a much larger influx of slush directly after November. Also there is the issue that some people write at different speeds than others. Laura Miller of Salon puts her reservations rather scathingly: “Why does giving yourself permission to write a lot of crap so often seem to segue into the instance that other people read it? Nothing about NaNoWriMo suggests that it’s likely to produce more novels I’d want to read.” Personally, I am a fan of the Twitter hashtag, #NaNoWriMoOpeners, which mock the, often silly, nature of books people attempt to write during this period. Some of my favorites?

@timmeehan66: I didn’t kill my ex-wife. But, what if I did?

@boring_as_heck: The novelization of Wild Wild West was, quite frankly, pedestrian.” They would be his last words. I unsheathed my katana.

@woodmuffin: “You’ll never get away with this!” she cried in her cell “I’m a famous Disney star!” Obama cackled, “Is that so, Raven??”

You get the picture.

But even though there are the sassy literary-minded people who think the idea of unleashing a bunch of plebeians to run amok with their fan-fictions and their MacBook Pros is stupid, I think there’s a good side to NaNoWriMo. The point is that no matter what you’re writing about, no matter your skill level, you should write.  It doesn’t matter if it gets published or not as long as it makes the writer happy. One day I hope I’ll have the time to participate because I think, if nothing else, it would be a lot of fun. After all, isn’t that what writing is about?

P.S. Wikipedia informs me it is also National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo). Here I am, posting a blog. How timely.