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Writers' magazine |
Comment 09 |
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CommentSome sharp comment from people in the book world in 2009 Comment archive 2009 archive 2008 archive 2007 archive 2006 archive 2005 archive 2004 archive 2003 archive 2002 archive 2001
From screenwriting to books 'The beauty of screenwriting is that nobody can do anything without a script, so whether you are going to make the film or not at the end of the day, the writer gets paid, and has to be paid at every stage and for every rewrite... For years my mother had been saying to me, "Write books because then it's yours", so I thought "I'm going to take all the ideas I've had for films over the years and start writing books... As a screenwriter you have to be succinct and cut out any extraneous words or descriptions so when I started writing prose for the first time it was really difficult to make it last. I'd write Chapter One (and it would take up) three-quarters of the page!' Belinda Bauer, author of Blacklands, in the Bookseller
'A compulsion, a pleasure, a necessity' 'It is a peculiar conundrum to write in the knowledge that you are creating a product, but not concerned with production, and knowing the only way to do it is to put that knowledge completely aside. I think for most writers it's a form of mental acrobatics verging on contortion: to hope to reach others by creating something uniquely personal. Or perhaps I'm making a generalisation based only on my own, rather roundabout journey. From childhood, writing has always been a compulsion, a pleasure, a necessity, and not concerned with compromise or approval. But when I was 21 I wrote my first screenplay and an agency took me on. I moved back to London from Paris, where I had been teaching English as a foreign language with some fabricated qualifications, rented a flat and waited for my career to happen. No one feels older than the very young, and it seemed to me that I had travelled a long time to reach that point. I remember a sense of joy and rightness. There was nothing else for me to be doing. I was meant for this. So armed, or unarmed, with my naivety I faced the market place, and everything changed... For me, in the end, unemployment was my apprenticeship and I had my first novel published when I was 40. I am concerned about those very young people being trained up in creative writing courses and universities around the country; being taught how to present, how to sell as if they were heading for careers in advertising, being snapped up by agents and scraping it all in the first - only? - book. Success may be recognition, it may be admiration, or money, but it is an impossibility without the purity and the clarity of the thing itself. Fifteen years ago I would sit down to write and think: "What will people like?" and now I begin every day with the virtual mantra: "Do what you need to do; nobody need ever see it." Sadie Jones, author of The Outcast in the Sunday Telegraph
'The essential component of fiction is plot' ‘I know that what I do is not literature. For me, the essential component of fiction is plot. My objective is to get the reader to feel impelled to turn the pages as quickly as possible. If I want to achieve that, I can’t allow myself the luxury of distracting him. I have to keep him hanging on and the only way to do it is by using the weapon of suspense. If I try to understand the complexities of the human soul, people’s character defects and those types of things, the reader gets distracted. Of course, I’ve read literature in the classic sense. We’ve all got those type of books on the shelves. They made me read them at school and I admit that I didn’t like them much. I couldn’t understand why they were said to be so good.’ John Grisham in the Sunday Telegraph
Changing the way people consume content ‘In the digital world, there is more volume out there, a lot of competing forms of media, a lot more noise. So is very hard to get noticed unless you can market your content. Like some record labels are now doing, that is what book publishers can do – use their brands to focus people’s attention on their product… The main thing the music business didn’t realise at first is that digitalisation isn’t about distributing the same content in another way. It changes the way people consume content and what is consumed.’ Danny Ryan, intellectual property specialist at LEGC, in the Bookseller
'Rules for writing' 'In his essay Politics and the English Language George Orwell set out a series of rules for writing that are worth repeating in full:
I would add three more tips:
Damian Whitworth in The Times
'A love relationship' ‘The way I see it, ageing and writing is of course an enormous subject all by itself, and my general feeling about it is that as you get older, you lose a certain musicality... you realise that writing is more of a bodily activity than you thought. All writers go off. There is no question about this in several cases: John Updike, for example, RIP, a great presence who is now an even greater absence. With him you see a deterioration in the ear, suddenly in his last two or three books, prose full of rhymes and repetitions and inadvertencies, those bits in prose called false quantities where the reader gets a jolt - "hasn't he already used that word, just in the last sentence", or "that rhymes with that word...' It's my belief that the relationship between writer and reader is a love relationship. How do you make someone love you? You present yourself at your best, your most alive, your fullest, your most considerate. An author must be love-flushed: you must give them you most comfortable chair; you want to give the reader the seat nearest the fire, the best wine and food. It's a sort of hospitality gesture.' Martin Amis in the Sunday Times
Books that are written by women for women about women ‘I’ve always felt that I have tried to give women of a particular generation a voice. I do think chick list has potentially been very powerful as it has looked at things like our awful relationship with our bodies, our relationship with food, with the beauty industry, our relationship with work – the fact that we’re still not equal… So I don’t think chick lit is always as fluffy as the title implies. Nevertheless, I sort of feel that I’ve transcended it, I’ve evolved and so have my readers. I still think there’s a place for the fluffy. I do think it’s another form of misogyny to denigrate books that are written for women by women about women. (Publishing)’s become a lot more brutal. I see it with first-time authors, there’s far less opportunity to build an author any more. You’re straight out of the tracks and if you’re not a big success on the first book there isn’t the same kind of loving care. | hope I don’t sound disloyal saying that, but that is the reality.’ Marian Keyes, author of The Brightest Star in the Sky, in the Bookseller
The Sony Reader ‘I’ve never been much of a gadget girl. I do have a mobile phone (Orange, obviously…) but, about to embark on a three-week book tour in August, I agreed to test drive one. I was a far from obvious choice. I don’t have a BlackBerry, don’t travel with a laptop and have an old-fashioned pen-and-ink diary. I saw the sense of taking one device rather than lugging quantities of books in and out of customs, but I was lukewarm. Four countries and three weeks later, I’m another convert. The Reader is wonderful when travelling and, once you get the hang of it, easy to use. But, actually, I think the most significant thing about the Reader is not the issue of convenience, but its potential for transforming non-regular readers’ relationship with books. We’re all hard-wired for story telling, both as listeners and as tellers. We know there is a problem with literacy rates in the UK. If we are to solve it, we need to be more imaginative. We need to accept that the tools are not what matters – voice, print, audio – but the narrative itself. And acknowledge that, for some, a resistance to the physical book itself is a problem.’ Kate Mosse in the Bookseller
On Her Fearful Symmetry ‘The difficulty always, for any book, is the reveal. How much does the reader know at any given moment? Are you being fair if you hold that behind your back and don’t tell them until later? So what I’m hoping is that as people get into this they are surprised but then they think: ‘Oh, my gosh, yes, of course’, but that’s really hard to do. That’s what mystery writers do and I’ve always had a lot of respect for them because it’s such an amazing craft. But essentially this is a mystery or suspense novel.’ Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveller’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, in the Bookseller
Opening doors for children ‘In the Fifties, when a strong child was dealing with difficult circumstances, there was always a rescue at the end of the book and it was always a middle-class rescue. The child would win a scholarship to Roedean or something, and go on to do very well. That was felt to be unrealistic and so there was a move away from that. Books for children became much more concerned with realism, or what we see as realism. But where is the hope? How do we offer them hope within that? It may be that realism has gone too far in literature for children. I am not sure that we are opening doors for children who read these books, or helping them to develop their aspirations. ‘I can’t see how we roll back from this without returning to the sort of fiction that is no longer credible — books with a Blyton-ish view of things.’ Anne Fine in The Times
Booker's 'literary snootiness' ‘I wish popular novelists wouldn't get so het up about the Booker. They
seem to believe that their exclusion from the most prestigious literary award is
a symptom of the snootiness of the literary establishment. No doubt some
people are literary snobs; but most writers and readers accept that there are
different genres, that the Booker is for literary fiction, and that's that...
The latest is Jenny Colgan, in the Independent: "But the Booker's
enduring legacy to me is this: this is Grown-up Serious Reading and would all
you little sentimental people who like being entertained please scuttle back to
your tawdry little comics, your Katie Prices, threefers and celebrity
autobiographies." Nick Clee in BookBrunch
Writing short stories ‘The short story is a moment of enlightenment. A moment of vision. The story is going to fall on my head like an apple. But the novel… there is a school of thought, and I agree with it, that we do not have to invent novels; we discover them. The novel exists in my heart and in my mind and I must concentrate to get it out. This is not the case with the story. I could get an idea for a story now, while I am looking at your face... Society is a living organism and you must keep up. That’s why I still practise (as a dentist), though only for two days a week. I will never close the clinic. The clinic is my window, I open it to see what is happening in the street. You can’t get disconnected from the street, as a writer; that’s a common mistake. You can be too easily welcomed every night by the richest people and the most influential. It is very dangerous because it is that relationship with the street that made you successful in the first place. I’m against presenting literature on an ethnic basis. I am pushed, little by little, to be an Arab writer, but I prefer to think of myself as part of the republic of literature... A good subject does not make a good novel, but a good novel makes any subject seem interesting.’ Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany in the Observer
Pity the poor editors ‘Publishing is often an extremely negative culture… The sheer book-length nature of books combined with the seemingly inexorable reductions in editorial staffs and the number of submissions most editors receive, to say nothing of the welter of non-editorial tasks that most editors have to perform, including holding the hands of intensely self-absorbed and insecure writers, fielding frequently irate calls from agents, attending endless and vapid and ritualistic meetings, having one largely empty ceremonial lunch after another, supplementing publicity efforts, writing or revising flap copy, ditto catalog copy, refereeing jacket-design disputes, and so on - all these conditions taken together make the job of a trade-book acquisitions editor these days fundamentally impossible. The shrift given to actual close and considered editing almost has to be short and is growing shorter, another very old and evergreen publishing story but truer now than ever before.’ Daniel Menaker, former Random House US executive editor-in-chief, in the Barnes & Noble Review
'Just a guy who tells a story' ‘I was already writing The Lost Symbol when I started to realize The Da Vinci Code would be big. The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who's had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware. Instead of writing and saying, 'This is what the character does,' you say, 'Wait, millions of people are going to read this.' It's sort of like a tennis player who thinks too hard about a stroke--you're temporarily crippled. Then the furore died down, and I realized that none of it had any relevance to what I was doing. I'm just a guy who tells a story.’ Dan Brown in Parade
'Rude about commercial fiction' ‘I find it bewildering how often people are rude about commercial fiction and how many really mediocre pretentious literary books are published every year. A lot of attention is paid to books that I quite often think are really shoddy. What I want my books to be is some kind of escapism. I want you to get lost in them, I want you to feel like you are going on holiday with them and that you know them, that it could be you and that it’s some representation of recognisable life, but with a bit more magic thrown into it.’ I hope my publishing background gives me a knowledge of what (publishers) do. Half is how good the book is and half is how well it’s published.’ Harriet Evans, editor turned author of I Remember You in the Bookseller
'Encouraging younger consumers to pay' ‘Although I don’t wish to be a harbinger of doom, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to predict that that the global book market will reduce by 30% to 50% in the next 10 years. This will come not only from piracy, but also from reductions in list prices to encourage people to buy rather than pirate and also through a decrease in active readers. It is perhaps worth thinking of alternative ways that publishers, authors and booksellers can survive. Even the big-name authors can’t escape, and they can’t go on sell-out stadium tours like their counterparts in the music industry. So, how do we encourage younger consumers to pay for products when they are used to getting entertainment and information for free? Andrew Crawford, CEO of The Book Depository, in the Bookseller
'It's a treasure hunt' ‘Right now, all over the country there are people spending their early mornings, lunch breaks, holidays and any moment of spare time creating stories. They’re on their own, tapping away at a keyboard and creating parallel worlds. A small handful of these stories will become the new trendsetters, the new blockbusters, the new stand-out bestsellers of the next decade. Some chapters on a hard drive in a spare room, increasing by 500-word increments every day, will change the publishing landscape from 2012 and beyond. That is a certainty. And that’s what makes the business of books so thrilling. The chances are that these future supernovas won’t be bang on trend – the next big thing seldom is. It sets future trends, it doesn’t follow them. The next big thing is generally a big surprise. The next book I love from out of my submissions pile might be on trend, before the curve or blindsiding me from out of nowhere. That’s why the slush-pile is my favourite place. It’s a treasure hunt.’ Julia Churchill, UK children’s agent at The Greenhouse, in Writers’ Forum
'Treasure the moment' ‘Some people think they know what my books are about when they haven’t read them. They feel I’m in favour of bad behaviour or swearing. Some even think I write about drugs. There’s nothing of that kind. Mostly, my books are about outsiders, kids who don’t fit in. I feel they’re quite moral tales, although they do show that there are things even loving parents can’t always protect children from. Children recognize the truth of that… I think you have to treasure the moment and go for what you want. Mostly, I’m quite happy. In my twenties and thirties I regretted not having had further education. I was silly enough to marry at 19, but those choices make you the person that you are. I’m very happy and secure.’ Jacqueline Wilson, author of My Sister Jodie and many other bestselling children’s books
'A friendly relationship with readers' ‘I knew what I’d get (when I started writing fiction) but I got what I hoped I would. That is, a friendly relationship with readers. I don’t think they feel a distance that they might feel with a writer like Ian McEwan. I think they feel their interests and concerns are reflected in the books. They recognise the world and the details of that world. I’m Nick, I’m not Mr Hornby… I completely understand people’s reluctance to pick up a literary novel that is not going to entertain them in the 30 minutes they have before they go to sleep at night. I think the world of books forgets that because so many of us do our reading during the day. That’s a luxury so many people forget.’ Nick Hornby in the Bookseller
'The touchy-feely side' ‘Of course publishing companies should spend money and time on trying to define how the new digital world will work, making it easy to read books on whatever electronic devices appear. What I have a problem with is the inordinate amounts of time spent on the touchy-feely side: attempting to use these social networking sites to try to get inside the heads of people who may or may not at some time in some indefinable future be those that precipitate a financially viable conduit to readers of electronic books, or some such. It's all the hype about Facebook and Twittering and blogging and whatnot and how we can sell books through them. What I don't seem to be able to fathom is any indication of how all this
activity is making us any money - or, indeed, how we might turn it into making
us some money. I do understand that there is benefit in facilitating readers
to converse with one another in the manner of a virtual reading group but,
however one cuts it, people like to talk face to face. That's why there
are still pubs and airlines and why video conferencing equipment gathers dust in
boardrooms. Human beings are social animals: physically social. That's why
cinemas and concerts have never been more popular... E M Forster, The
Machine Stops anyone? Trevor Dolby, Publisher of Preface, on Bookbrunch
'Shocking the psyche' ‘Hobgoblins, chimeras, piles of Medusa heads. You have to keep shocking your psyche, or nothing happens in your writing – nothing charged, nothing enduring. It’s imaginary encounters with death that generate life on the page… ‘There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process.’ Hilary Mantel, whose latest book is Wolf Hall, in the Observer
Irish women writers ‘Women’s fiction is a multimillion pound industry in the UK, and everyone in publishing is looking for that next woman with the Midas touch who can make you think "That’s exactly how I feel!" or "Don’t let him talk to you like that!" It’s not all about handbags, cocktails and Sex in the City frivolity. It’s about warmth and empathy and getting that fuzzy feeling. Knowing that when you open the book you bought during your lunch break, it’s guaranteed to take you to a place you really want to be, meeting characters you really want to know.’ Kate Thompson, author of The Kinsella Sisters in the Independent on Sunday.
How agents find clients ‘Every agent has their own style. Ed Victor goes to a party and signs up someone. Luigi Bonomi goes and talks to a film company or football agent. But I like doing it this way (through his website) because it brings in interesting books, often ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I love the range and serendipity… Publishers are taking longer to make decisions and are being more careful and more selective. But I’m amazed that they are buying as much as they are. It would be very easy for them to sit on their hands, spread the lists out a bit and see how everything looks in 2010.’ Andrew Lownie in the Bookseller
'Free' book content ‘It's a colossal irony to have the guys and gals of Amazon, Google and their ilk lusting for free book "content" as premium material on which to stake their enlarged claims to commercial riches. For these clever mathematicians and engineers who are shaping the electronic business of our time and the archives of the future, these baby-faced young entrepreneurs, have risen to their mercantile eminence without encountering books, and don't think they need to. I enjoyed the fatuous surprise of Google's Sergey Brin discovering that "There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site." Translating this backhanded recognition of value into his own debased lingo, he understands that books make for "viable information-retrieval systems," information being the only cultural signifier he recognizes, evidently. His company's amazing presumption that book people should simply hand over the keys to their priceless kingdom shows how completely he and his colleagues misunderstand what is at stake. But these Internet people don't care. For billionaires like Brin, accessing the giant river of infinite book "content" onto which they can glue paid advertising is simply a giant new way to make more money, and they are single-minded about that. The giveaway is not only in their ignorance but in their reluctance to share the wealth. For its Look Inside program, Amazon demands that publishers give it, gratis, electronic files of the books, along with blurbs and cover art, arguing that in return the publishers will have increased sales. How might you prove or disprove that? (Publishers might recognize Amazon's argument, since it resembles the pathetically phoney one about composition costs that they themselves used against writers years ago.) The (not yet settled) settlement between Google Book Search and the publishers who sued it for copyright infringement proposes to give a breathtakingly audacious near-monopoly to Google and mingy terms to writers. We publishers seem to have forgotten that Google's and Amazon's profit margins are triple or quintuple ours, and we haven't always checked our contracts with the authors. It is a confused, confusing and very fluid situation, and no one can predict how books and readers will survive. Changed reading habits have already transformed and diminished them both. I, for one, don't trust the book trade to see us through this. Wariness is in order.’ Veteran American editor Elisabeth Sifton of Farrar, Straus & Giroux in The Nation
'Poetry sings the song of itself' 'Poetry waves a flower in the face of a highly utilitarian age. That great secular hybrid, pragmatic evolutionary psychology and neuro-aesthetics, is busy telling us that art is a slightly puzzling evolutionary superfluity. Art is defended as "cognitive play," crucial for the evolutionary development of homo sapiens. Art, for such people, must always somehow be justified. But poetry sings the song of itself, and offers a musical gratuity. Just as no one should have to justify, in pragmatic terms, playing the piano or listening to Bach, so no one should have to justify reading Keats or Wallace Stevens. And I am not making the weak case that poetry evades or exceeds such pragmatic cost-counting, but that it challenges such utilitarianism, makes it doubt itself. It faces down the enemy. James Wood, the critic for The New Yorker, at the recent Griffin Poetry awards
'Just a set of instructions' ‘A screenplay is really just a set of instructions, it doesn’t actually have any value of itself. You can read a screenplay and be entertained by it but unless it’s made, it’s worthless. You’re always thinking: ‘How can we get this made? Is it as funny or dramatic or engaging as it can be? Will people pay to see it? Is someone else going to pay the money to make it? A screenplay is written entirely for other people; consequently, decisions you make with a screenplay are for technical, practical or financial reasons… Writing fiction is inevitably much more personal. Not necessarily autobiographical, but much closer to your way of seeing the world, and much more demanding. I find it much harder. But that’s also its great pleasure, that you have so much control. It’s a personal form of expression as opposed to a screenplay where I think you’re second-guessing the director or the producer or the audience.’ David Nicholls, author of One Day and many TV scripts, in the Bookseller
'Not a threatened species' ‘Books are not a threatened species. They are ordinary features of the ordinary world. Kids read them, just as many (how many?) adults read them. They aren’t "good" for us in the way that medicine is. They don’t "help" in any specific way. Feeding books to the bad lads won’t immediately civilize them and make them good. But they draw us together. They entertain us. They show us as we are – imperfect, partial, elusive, unfinished, beyond straightforward comprehension. They show us as we could be – more angelic, more satanic. They show us how our world could be – more like Heaven or more like Hell. Paradoxically, it’s in fiction’s weird mingling of facts and lies that we can approach the deepest and most complex "truths" about ourselves. Should we, who read books and believe that books and the stories within them contain such power, be surprised that kids read, that books survive? Of course not. We should be celebrating these facts.’ David Almond, author of Skellig, in The Times
Self-publishing - speed and control ‘Self-publishing has taken a huge leap forward in recent years. It’s always existed, but with all the technological changes from desk-top publishing systems to PoD to blogging and so forth it’s now more acceptable than ever before. It may not be so appropriate for fiction, though there have been some notable successes, such as Jill Paton Walsh’s Knowledge of Angels, but for specialist non-fiction titles it is proving popular. The trend is hardly surprising: mainstream publishers have cut back and cut back, so that even authors who had niche titles published and might have been in print for some years now find it harder and harder to keep their books available… In difficult times, when people need inspiration more than ever, providing it in portable book format is still important, regardless of all the possibilities available through the internet. One of the attractions of self-publishing is how quickly books can be made available, plus the amount of control an author has over every aspect of production and design. I believe it’s the perfect answer for authors who have had worthwhile books published, but who have been unable to remain in print with a major publishing house due to the continual trimming of lists. If authors are already established in the marketplace and are familiar with marketing and promotion and have experience on the lecture/workshop circuit, they stand even more chance of being successful, providing expectations about sales are realistic.’ Eileen Campbell, Mind, Body and Spirit expert and author of 6 books, in Bookbrunch Read up on self-publishing in our WritersPrintShop, the most comprehensive online explanation of how it works.
'Women under the radar' 'Writers like Jeanette Winterson have resisted the lesbian label, but it's never felt like a problem to me. I'm very lucky. I have a lesbian audience but a mainstream one as well... I use a period landscape we all know well, and put lesbians in it. I think it makes for quite an interesting experience - for straight and lesbian readers alike - to go back into the past, and think, "oh yeah, it's not actually all heterosexual".' Gays have such an obvious historical record - think about Oscar Wilde. I think this is because male homosexuality was illegal; men were arrested for it, executed for it. Whereas women were under the radar a little. In a way, it was always easier for the mainstream to ignore them.' Sarah Waters, author of The Little Stranger, in the Sunday Times
'Free maximises your reach' ‘The enemy of most authors is not that they are not making money, it’s that they are not being read. Eighty or 90% of authors don’t make a living from it, so why do they write? For other reasons that don’t pay the mortgage: attention, reputation and expression. For them, free is great because it minimizes the barriers to entry. Let’s say I give the e-book version of Free for free, and 95% of the people experience it for free and then 5% decided they like it so much they want to buy the hardcover to have on their shelf, or give it to someone. You may say: "Well, gosh, that’s not very much." But what if it’s 5% of 10 million people? That’s not so bad. Free maximizes your reach.’ Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Free: The Future of a Radical Price, in the Bookseller
Books in the recession ‘My guess is that it will be ‘all change, all stay the same’. The notion that the economic environment will change people 's taste in one sweep I think is fanciful. The usual five celebs will have their 'autobiographies' fight it out at Christmas and everyone will be looking for a zeitgeist humour break out - nothing last year interestingly. In 'serious' non-fiction, there will be the usual motivations for buying: narrative, terrific individuality to the writing, the stories of lives... but here, like everywhere, sales numbers may be allied to keen pricing and awards won . I think there may be a mid year drift toward escapism and jollity. Fathers Day may spearhead this with lots of books about bad behaviour. Commercial fiction will be interesting. I have a feeling there's changes in taste afoot: a move back to more 'big', 'airport' novels; historical moving into different eras; a real reduction in 'chic'. The established brand authors will be a safe haven and it will be more difficult to persuade retailers to take a chance on new authors. But smart, well packaged, well written books of all types will still sell. How many? That's largely up to us.’ Trevor Dolby, Publisher of Preface at Random House UK
'A dumbed-down genre'? ‘ So, Cheryl Cole is to write a series of ‘chick-lit’ novels . . . Ms Cole is gorgeous and talented . . . as a singer and celebrity. But can she hack it as a novelist? Does she actually know what it entails? Where’s her track record of being able to write 100,000+ words of original fiction?...I take this very seriously. It’s not about ‘slagging off Cheryl Cole’ (she’s seems lovely) - it’s about protesting at the decisions made by our leading publishers. My concern is that talented, promising, as-yet-unpublished authors may be ignored because publishers are investing their funds elsewhere, where literary quality does not figure. Tell me that Ms Cole’s fine UK publisher won’t now reject and forfeit fine unknown novelists on account of having spent a vulgar amount on her advance? We all know the adage of 'everyone has a book in them' - but how many truly have the commitment, courage, tenacity - and skills - to write a series of novels? Writing a novel is not about ‘burning ambition’ - where ambition is solely about publication or money or fame. For a novel to be a good novel - and worthy of the generous readers who part with their cash to buy it - it can only arise from the author’s absolute desire to write that story out of their system - and being blessed with the necessary talent to do so... Above all else, we object to the assumption that it's 'easy' to write commercial fiction - that 'chick-lit' (an umbrella term I've always loathed...if anyone called me a chick I'd belt them...) is but a dumbed-down genre that 'anyone' can turn their hand to. It’s great commercial fiction, it’s perennially popular and there should be quality controls!!!' Freya North, in a Bookseller blog
Creative writing and the canon 'Teaching ‘helps in thinking about your own writing in a more formal theoretical way. Writers might think about point of view or structure or character, and often you have an instinctive understanding, but what it has helped me do is get a more theoretically well-founded idea… I t’s very frightening for the students, they just don’t know what they are going into at all. When I was starting in 1989 the potential routes one could take were reasonably clear. Now it’s so much more complicated…The idea of what constitutes literary value has changed or become less consensual. It’s harder to establish what is good and what is not, and that is one of the things that forms the canon. Barnes, Amis, McEwan were the last people through the door, and then the door closed, and then the building fell down.’ Giles Foden, author of Turbulence, in the Bookseller
'Rejected by every single UK publisher' ‘All writers, unless they’re very fortunate, know how difficult it is to
get noticed, to become ‘discovered’. I became an ‘overnight success’ (I
clapped when I read the review that said it) after almost twenty years:
stories in obscure little magazines; a couple of story collections published by
a tiny northeastern press; a novel rejected by every single UK publisher; a couple
of dozen readers who loved my work; a part of me that said it all would work out
well; and another part that simply didn’t give a damn. I wrote because I
loved to write, and I’d keep on writing no matter how much recognition I
received. David Almond on SWBWI website Undiscovered Voices
'Poetic language' 'I've nothing against popular culture, but the idea that there is something divisive about bringing to people the greatest language ever written is utterly wrong. I think it's dying out, but there was a feeling that somehow it almost wasn't politically correct to be interested in serious and great poetry. To some extent it's much more politically correct to go to football matches... 'After all, what is it that makes us human? It's language. And poetic language is the most rare form. It's like a thrilling thing that a line can set off in your mind a whole world of potential experience. Either it inspires you in terms of wanting certain experiences, or it can help you to treasure the experience within those lines. And therefore life, for the short time we're on this Earth, is immensely enriched.' Josephine Hart, author of the Words that Burn book and CD
'The e-book revolution' 'There is some hesitancy with publishers fully embracing e-books. We have a 'book love', the printed book is a gorgeous object. We need to communicate that love with e-books, and there is something shiny and new and mobile about them. The author deserves the value. There are people out there that don't understand that, who think that bytes are cheaper than paper. The industry has established a level of value of buying the work of a creative person and I think we should sustain that throughout the e-book revolution.' Stephen Page, CEO and Publisher of Faber, in the Bookseller
'At the heart of the writer's life' ‘One of the attractions of being a writer is that you’re never a specialist. Your field is entirely open; your field is the entire human condition… There’s no doubt that writing can on occasion be grim, lonely, miserable, desperate and wretched, and there were many years when I struggled materially. But I’ve also known wonderful times. Writing is a very emotional thing, especially when words come in a way that you know is right. At the heart of the writer’s life there can be a great sweetness. And it’s also a great adventure: your whole life, from book to book, is a constant adventure.’ Graham Swift in the Observer
'The sunlight of literature' 'Without the sunlight of literature children cannot grow as they should. We know that from books come knowledge and understanding, that they are a source of infinite joy and fun, that they stimulate imagination and creativity, that they open eyes and minds and hearts. It is through the power and music and magic of stories and poems that children can expand their own intellectual curiosity, develop the empathy and awareness that they will need to tackle the complexities of their own emotions, of the human condition in which they find themselves. And it's through books that we can learn the mastery of words, the essential skill that will enable us to express ourselves well enough to achieve our potential in the classroom and beyond.' Michael Morpurgo, launching the Sunday Times/The Times Books for Schools promotion
'A focus on frontlist?' 'If backlist sales decline significantly - notwithstanding the questionable "Long Tail" argument - will publishers have to rely on frontlist and ancillary revenues? We're in an industry that produces perhaps 100,000 new consumer titles every year. We publish as many consumer titles in a day as Hollywood releases movies in a year, each supported by marketing budgets book publishers cannot emulate. Would it really be so terrible if bookstores stopped selling backlist, aside from a few staples and p.o.d, and became like apparel stores, selling mainly frontlist? There would be more space for big promotions; inventory turn would improve; and publishers and retailers would sharpen up their marketing skills. The book trade hasn't prided itself on business savvy, but now may be the time to develop appropriate skills. Maybe publishers could sell to retailers on a firm sale, guaranteed gross margin basis, allowing markdowns in place, doing away with the expense and nuisance of returns, and their demoralising impact. Or is thinking like this a step too far?' Lawrence Orbach, CEO of Quarto, in the Bookseller
'Movies and pop music and stuff' 'I think readers who aren’t used to reading contemporary poetry are surprised to find it’s about our world now, our experience; it talks about movies and pop music and stuff. It’s not some fuddy-duddy thing, and most of it contains a good deal of imaginative brilliance. My experience is that when people read contemporary poetry they are engaged and interested in a way they did not expect to be.' John Stammers, whose last collection was Stolen Love Behaviour
'Just get it all down.' 'I first started writing when I worked as a copywriter in an ad agency. I was dreaming about having babies, but I also got an idea for how to begin a novel and started writing under the desk at work. They told me my heart wasn't in it, and I remember going home and telling my husband that I had lost my job, but not to worry because I was going to finish my novel. He wasn't particularly impressed. It was 18 years and 10 books ago and what I was writing seemed to strike a cord. My main characters have grown up just as my readers and I have, so in my latest book there are darker themes than before. Much of what I write is inspired by the ups and downs of my friends' lives, and life does become more complex.' Advice to new writers: 'Just get it all down without being too self-conscious. I carried a notebook, but I kept losing it; so I just store ideas in my head. With the first draft you should get it all out, then revise later. I never know what will happen when I sit down and that's what keeps me hooked on writing. I want to know how it will end.' Catherine Alliott, author of A Crowded Marriage, in the Sunday Telegraph's Stella
Working with a new editor - and on a sequel 'It's a bit like getting divorced, and then having sex with someone for the first time. It's awkward and you sort of feel weird. And it did, until I read her editing notes and they were brilliant... I am very nervous, I'm never going to do a sequel again. I'm out to prove something to myself and I'm not sure if that's a good idea. People will compare the fresh, untainted voice of my 29-year old self that was completely unselfconscious about writing (it) because I didn’t think anyone was going to read it. It was innocent, it wasn't trying to be anything, it just was. I've put myself in a vulnerable place, but I suppose you do every time you write a book.' Lisa Jewell, author of Ralph's Party, in the Bookseller
'Perhaps the greatest of human inventions' ‘A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person – perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.’ Carl Sagan
Last column in Times Books 'Times Books as we know it will be no more, but books themselves, thankfully, seem shockproof against change. Neither economics nor e-readers will oust the beloved book. We don't stop reading because we are poor, any more than book lovers will give up books for their electronic lookalikes... As a writer, change is necessary, otherwise writing becomes a kind of copying out of what is there already. That may make money but it won't make new imaginative space. But then, neither will ceaseless technological innovation, which is simply distracting. I don't see that Shakespeare or the Brontes or Eliot would have written better if they had laptops. I love my Mac but I can work without it... Readers of this column will know that I believe in art and literature as a counterweight to prevailing values, and that for me, fiction and poetry are not leisure activities but active energies at the centre of life... Writing this column has been a way of thinking through much that is important about books, about creativity, about what it means to read seriously and think poetically, when everyday language is both non-stop and trivial. And it has been a meeting-place, or so it seems to me; as though on Saturdays we sat on a bench with our books and talked.' Jeanette Winterson, in her final column in the last separate book supplement of The Times.
The post-Gutenberg revolution ‘The primary goal of publishing general fiction and non-fiction was never profit—though profit was essential to stay in the game. Publishing is a vocation in which the work is its own reward, an insufficient goal for today’s conglomerates. The business as it exists cannot survive, but in the miraculous way such things happen, a shining future is at hand. The 500-year-old Gutenberg system in which copy is delivered to a printer who ships inventory to a publisher’s warehouse from which it is consigned to bookshops is being displaced by the combined impact of digitization and the Internet, whose vast implications for the existing supply chain have yet to be fully exploited or perhaps grasped by today’s industry. In theory, every book ever published in whatever language can now be stored and delivered in digital form as cheaply and quickly as e-mail to be downloaded onto a variety of devices from dedicated readers, to more versatile handheld devices and to free standing machines that quickly and cheaply print and bind a selected title on demand wherever electricity and Internet connectivity exist… Authors’ complete works may be downloaded practically anywhere on Earth from appropriate websites, their property protected and royalties conveyed by secure software. The effect of this post-Gutenberg Revolution will be to radically decentralize the marketplace for books and greatly reduce the cost of entry for would-be publishers... Meanwhile, through today’s gloom we may discern a spectacularly bright future in which the rewards to writers and readers and even to publishers will be unprecedented as world-wide multilingual backlists expand online in a cultural revolution orders of magnitude greater than Gutenberg’s world-changing technology generated five centuries ago.’ From An Autopsy of the Book Business by Jason Epstein, Chairman of On Demand Books, LLC, who was for many years editorial director of Random House US during a 50-year career and is the author of Book Business, now available in 10 translations.
Sucking the air out of the system 'The heart and soul of any publishing business is its editorial department, the men and women who, crudely, acquire the 'content' on which the imprint depends. In the past 20 years, editorial freedom has become eroded. Sales people have increased their influence as bookshops have gained power at the expense of publishers. Gone are the days, with rare exceptions, when an editor's positive enthusiasm for a new book could trump the negative anxieties of the sales department, almost the only books that now generate much excitement among publishers are would-be bestsellers... Bestsellers are not intrinsically bad. But they suck the air out of the system, and distort the delicate ecology of the book trade. The publishers make a pact. In exchange for turnover, they supply the bookshops with the kind of merchandise they can sell in large quantities. In this world, the little book - novel or memoir - struggles to make its way... There is perhaps a sliver lining to these clouds of recession. Books remain comparatively cheap, and excellent value for money. Most paperbacks are approximately the price of a cinema ticket. Is it not possible that the downturn will purge the trade of vacuous bestsellers and bring the British reading public back to better books?' Robert McCrum in the Observer
'A primitive pleasure' 'In times gone by, poetry was always the word-form most immediately associated with strong feelings. What is surprising is finding that in the present day, when articles in newspapers about 'the death of poetry' come round as regularly as a lost sock in the washing machine, these ancient offices and values are still so honoured. It's because poetry is a fundamentally primitive thing. We understand this before we realise it, when we chant and recite in the school playground, taking a basic human pleasure in the rhythms and rhymes and games that language allows... ...Poetry, which belongs in life, should reflect the whole experience of life. It should be as happily diverse as the society which brings it into being, and... as manifold as the relationships it will describe, Sometimes rejoicing in things as they are, sometimes criticising them, sometimes welcoming, sometimes rejecting - always keeping its eyes peeled, its ears open, and its devotion to meaning as intense as its passion for mystery. A primitive pleasure? Absolutely. But a primitive pleasure that is endlessly transformed and re-invented. Andrew Motion, UK Poet Laureate, in the Sunday Telegraph
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