Old Authors: Shut Up

Same old story from Robert McCrum as he adds fuel to the ageism of our literary culture once again. (It's always the same old story, Observer, today.) Old authors ought to shut up, is his basic message, pointing to the thinness of Roth's latest novel, the disappointment of Nabokov's recently revealed last, and the fact that Doris Lessing is remembered for the novels she wrote in her forties rather than her latest, written at 87 - and the fact that Shakespeare hung up his quill before he was 50, another aspect, according to McCrum, of his genius. McCrum rather shoots himself in the foot again, though, with his finger-wagging retort to Tolstoy's avowal, expressed at the age of 79, not to be silent: that Tolstoy produced his last 'novel of any consequence' at the tender age of 72...

Edited in: This, ironically, in an edition of the review which leads with an appreciation by Tim Adams of Alan Bennett and the cover story strapline: At 75, with a masterly new play on stage, are we finally seeing the true Alan Bennett?

Same old

Joe Queenan is sick of the repetition in film which current marketing practice has created. (They liked this, so let's give them another.) Most of the films he mentions, though, are populist, and while many of us deplore the blanket application of such marketing philosophy to all films and books, including the serious and 'literary', I only have to haul my ex-mother-in-law before you once again to indicate that, when it comes to populist culture, the marketers have got it right. Picture her once more: rotund, leaning back in the soft chair by the fire, feet up on the side of the fireplace, Mills and Boon in her hand, utterly engrossed for two solid hours. Then she gets to the end and snaps the book shut with great satisfaction, heaves herself, knees spread, from the chair, stops half-way up with a thought and then says, matter-of-fact: 'Mmm, think I might have read that one before!'

Definitive versions?

Today in the Observer Tim Adams reviews Beginners, the unexpurgated version of Raymond Carver's second story collection, published by Gordon Lish as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. He finds the differences startling, but that the 'new' version is nevertheless 'an extraordinary book, more generous and rambling in tone than its distilled counterpart', more nuanced, yet 'still recognizably Carver's'.

Struck by the incongruity of that last thought - presumably that we should be looking for, and hoping for, what we think of as Carver's 'real' voice in his more original work - Adams muses most interestingly on the power and practice of editors:

Editing of Lish's kind is a dark art, but not so unusual. I used to work for a literary magazine, Granta, where the editor, Bill Buford, brought a Lish-style idea of editing to all the content. In some pieces, long stories of 10,000 words or more, not a sentence of the writer's original draft stood. Many writers were grateful for these interventions: they had never sounded so good. Some, of course, balked at the mauling. Carver's friend Richard Ford, for one, would always take Buford back through any story and painstakingly argue for the choice behind every word and comma until the original was restored exactly, not in every case better, but all his own.

One does wonder if this still happens: the Booker judges this year complained at the apparent lack of editing. But you never know, really: as a once-editor myself, I know that it's perfectly possible to overlook the typos but still mess about with a writer's prose, and anyway I suspect that in general nowadays an obsession with the market promotes a cavalier attitude towards authors' intentions which allows for the former and leads to the latter.

The Carver-Lish debate and these Granta revelations focus on the issue of prose style. My experience with my first novel was to have to submit to a change of structure - simple but radical: chapter four was moved to the beginning - specifically designed to create a very different type of novel (as I indicated recently) which would appeal to a very different market. As a new young writer I felt I didn't have a leg to stand on in this matter, but I was never happy with the result, and later republished the book with its original structure restored. Adams predicts that the publication of Beginners will start a trend in this direction - 'the author's cut'.

(If anyone is interested, the revised edition of my first novel The Birth Machine - The Author's Cut, which includes a preface discussing the implications of the changes, is available on Amazon or direct from me via my profile along with a limited number of used copies of the original edition.)

Carver and Tricks

Interesting Guardian books blog article by Stuart Evers on Carver and Lish, and the matter of experimentation/innovation in short stories. As usual, the comments illustrate the wide variety of responses readers can have to a single author...

Robert McCrum Tells it Like it Is

A friend of McCrum's has, like so many of us, fallen foul of the current situation in which

new fiction by unknown writers, the lifeblood of the business, is being scrutinised by people who have neither appetite for, nor understanding of, originality.

He says what I have been saying for years about the errors of contemporary publishing marketing philosophy:

Here, as in Hollywood, [from the nineties] the cry was: "Give us books that look like other successful books"... Original books are, by definition, not like others. They must be selected by experienced readers (aka editors).

History Matters

Good article by Hilary Mantel on recent comments about historical fiction.

Thinking in Boxes

In March I read at the Huddersfield Literature Festival with two other Salt authors, story writer Carys Davies and poet Mike Barlow, at an event titled 'Salt of the Earth'. It's a strange thing, the way you get billed like this, almost as a representative of your publisher, rather than simply of your own writing. Although on this occasion that's how we offered ourselves, as a cohort of Salt authors, it is quite often the festival or independent events organizers who do this - decide to bill an event as a 'Salt' event: this has happened with an imminent Manchester Literature Festival event and another at Manchester Central Library in December (in both of which I'm taking part). My publisher has certainly made a splash as a small independent publisher of poetry and (so far) short fiction, and appears to have caught everyone's attention and imagination and the good thing about this is that it's a great publicity/marketing hook for events organizers and we, its authors, alike.

But at that Huddersfield reading, a question was asked by festival director Michael Stewart - who, indeed, I believe had given the event its name, 'Salt of the Earth' - a question that raised issues we three authors were unable to tackle fully at the time, and which I've only touched on since. What, he asked, did we think of the difference between Salt and Comma (Ra Page's Manchester independent, publishing chiefly short fiction), the difference as he saw it being that Comma was a 'high-concept' publisher and that Salt... Well, to be honest, I can't swear what he said Salt did, but at the time, perhaps influenced by the connotations of his title for our event and the fact that he referred as example to my having recently won a prize in the Raymond Carver competition, we interpreted him as saying that Salt published realist fiction, and swiftly stated the fact we know to be true: that Salt does not just publish realist writing, but is a broad church committed only to literary excellence (no one would call Carys's own contemporary fairy tales realist, or the science-inspired fantasies of Salt author Tania Hershman - and, as I put in, I wouldn't even call my Raymond Carver competition story realist but an attempt to critique the whole concept of realism).

The trouble was, we had failed to understand the term 'high-concept', or at any rate, speaking for myself, I had, taking it as a literary term meaning concerned with ideas and style rather than 'realist' notions of real life and character and story. It seems ridiculous now, because the term is now everywhere, but back then in March I hadn't understood that 'high-concept' is a marketing term denoting something almost opposite: a graphic notion which catches attention and is easily grasped, and is thus desirable for marketing any book. Ra Page's anthologies of short stories are indeed 'high-concept' in this sense, in that they are themed, usually around such a graphic notion, and I understand that some of his single-author collections, such as Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman, are commissioned to be written around a unifying concept agreed beforehand. Salt, on the other hand, publish single author collections only and do not have that anthologist's need to shoe-horn diverse writers, and they don't commission collections to precalculated themes. However, contrary to what I think now was Michael's suggestion - which unfortunately I think our 'broad church' answer may have seemed to corroborate - Salt by no means eschew the high-concept marketing principle: director Chris-Hamilton Emery has made it clear that, while literary excellence is his touchstone, his books must be marketable with a clear, attractive concept (and fortunately for us Salt authors, when it comes to marketing matters like readings, we also have the Salt banner to wave).

But the big question arises: how do we market our books thus without reducing them? I have frequently railed against themed anthologies (although, succumbing to marketing pressures, I have published them) and the way in which they can force sometimes reductive readings on individual stories. By succumbing of necessity to the 'high-concept' sell, do we divert readers away from certain aspects of our work which are perhaps important to us? And does that matter? To be perfectly frank with you, as a writer the thing I'm really interested in, and would like my readers to share an interest in, is the ways we think, but tell that to the bookshop buyers and the Saturday browsers! Fortunately (or not) I come from a family in which you can soon get your leg pulled for sitting around and looking like you're thinking too much, so I learned early on the value of narrative and concrete detail for luring people into ideas, often by making them identify. But which do you stress when you're marketing? This is the stumbling block over which my first novel, The Birth Machine, (which wasn't originally called that), fell from being about logic and science and intuition and aimed more at men than women, into being sold and read as a feminist novel about childbirth aimed only at women. What I'm particularly interested in is the way we think in boxes, and a lot of my writing is about showing the falsity of those boxes. But you can't stop people reading in boxes, it seems, and one story of mine in which I tried to deconstruct concepts of class (and race) ended up in one critic's eyes as a depiction of a 'rolling working-class childhood' while in another's as being 'about a middle-class child'. I'm particularly keen to show the lack of dividing line between the 'ordinary' and the 'out-of-the-ordinary', but people seem reluctant to accept the fuzziness of this, and want to categorize. Several critics have stressed that my story collection is about 'ordinary lives' and, well, I'm just sitting here thinking: what, your dad beats you up and was a Jewish refugee; your next-door-neighbour is a famous opera singer; you're a mother with a newborn baby and you're losing it and you suddenly run away from a family outing across the sand dunes - these are ordinary? You take a stranger back to your hotel room for sex before you've hardly had time to speak to him? - well, I guess there's no accounting for what some people think of as ordinary, which rather proves my original literary point. And how much does 'high-concept' marketing exacerbate such simplifications? (How much is this reading of my stories influenced by my marketing blurb, which concentrated on the concrete and readily graspable?)

I've got a new novel out, so you can see why this matter is taxing me... (Luckily, it concerns a mystery, which is one 'high concept' that doesn't require things pinned down.)

The Google Settlement

All summer, while I was firstly immersed in the short stories I'm writing for a new collection and then up a mountain in Wales and away from all things literary, I'd have a knot in my stomach as it suddenly surfaced: before September I was supposed to make a decision about the Google digitization deal: whether to opt out. But opt out of what exactly? And what would be the implications of doing that, of losing the chance of having my out-of-print works aired once more? But would failing to do so mean that I'd be losing the copyright I now owned and giving it away to Google? There was something I was supposed to do to prevent this happening... For some reason I just wasn't clear: a quick read of the sheet of information I'd had from the Writers' Guild didn't really seem to give me an answer. What was going on? I'm accustomed to being able to skim such things and quickly grasp the gist, but this time I couldn't - and a quick look on the internet left me no wiser. Was I losing it? I'd have to put some decent time aside to investigate the matter. And then I didn't have the time... and now the moment for opting out has gone.

Well, now the US Justice Department has come out against the settlement as proposed, and Nick Harkaway articulates precisely on his blog why we should be relieved. As he says now on the Guardian books blog, there are good things about Google's library plan, but what was worrying was the method. Most importantly, as he says on his blog:

Google’s actions here are a massive rights grab, but more than that, the structure of the agreement is opt-out. If you don’t, you’re in. That’s a massive change. The default position of copyright has always been that if you don’t have active permission, you can’t use the material...

It’s true that copyright law is also a tool used by large companies to make large profits. It’s true that it is badly in need of reform. But short-circuiting the legislative process in a Class Action Settlement and creating an opt-out situation… that ain’t reform. That’s just kicking down the fences. It invites a situation where a powerful entity can flatten a small rightsholder

You come down from the mountain, and the law has changed on the plain...

The Truth About Publishing

From the horse's mouth, ie Daniel Menaker, ex Random House Senior Vice President and Executive Editor-in-Chief.

Some choice bits (which I know other blogs have quoted ):

Genuine literary discernment is often a liability in editors. And it should be -- at least when it is unaccompanied by a broader, more popular sensibility it should be. When you are trying to acquire books that hundreds of thousands of people will buy, read, and like, you have to have some of the eclectic and demotic taste of the reading public....

Financial success in front-list publishing is very often random, but the media conglomerates that run most publishing houses act as if it were not...

It's my strong impression that most of the really profitable books for most publishers still come from the mid-list -- "surprise" big hits with small or medium advances, such as that memoir by a self-described racial "mutt" of a junior senator from Chicago. Somehow, by luck or word of mouth, these books navigate around the rocks and reefs upon which most of their fleet -- even sturdy vessels -- founder. This is an old story but one that media giants have not yet heard, or at least not heeded, or so it seems. Because let's say you publish a flukey blockbuster about rhinoviruses in Renaissance Italy -- "The DaVinci Cold" -- one year: the corporation will see a spike in your profit and sort of autistically, or at least automatically, raise the profit goal for your division by some corporately predetermined amount for the following year. (The sequel to or second book after that blockbuster will usually command an advance so large as to dim a publisher's profit hopes for it.) This is close to clinically insane business behavior and breeds desperation rather than pride and confidence in the people who work for you. Cut it out, I say, or get out of the business!...

Many of the most important decisions made in publishing are made outside the author's and agent's specific knowledge. Let's say your house publishes a comparatively modest number of original hardcovers every year -- forty. Twelve on the etymologically amusing "spring" list -- January through April; twelve in the summer; sixteen in the economically more active fall. Well, meetings are held to determine which of those books your company is going to emphasize -- talk about most, spend the most money on, and so forth. These are the so-called lead titles for those seasons. Most of the time, the books for which the company has paid the highest advances will be the lead titles, regardless of their quality. In many cases, their quality is a cipher at this planning stage, because their manuscripts haven't been delivered or even written or even begun yet. But why should the literary quality of writing figure heavily into this prioritizing? It's not as if the millions of readers being prayed for are necessarily looking for challenging and truly enlightening reading experiences.

But read the whole thing if you haven't already. Thanks to my colleague Sam Thorp for nudging me about it.

Copyright, Open Rights and the Future of Publishing

Interesting article by Electric Literature's Andy Hunter on new media and the future for publishing, especially in the light of Peter Mandelson's proposed crackdown on internet file sharing and the protest against it.

Looking Back to Look Forward

Some of the comment about the Booker shortlist last week seems to me symptomatic of our current obsession with time, as discussed recently by David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times, and of the 'global' and linear way we think about it. We see the world in terms of 'past' and 'present', it seems, and this as a bad/good opposition. I suspect that 'Degrus' 's comment on Sarah Crown's Guardian books blog that the list of six 'historical' novels is 'depressingly backward-looking' represents a common train of thought. As David Ulin points out, there's an obsession with contemporaneity, with the now. I confess I haven't read a single book on this shortlist (!), so I'm writing theoretically, but I'd like to pose the question: what is wrong with 'looking back'? Or to put it more strongly, isn't it damn well urgently important to look back? I hate to be cliched, but sometimes cliches seem to get forgotten, and wasn't there something someone said about remembering the mistakes of the past in order not to make them again...?! In other words, the present and future lie in the past, and as 'Hedgiecc', another Guardian blog commenter pointed out, what is important in historical fiction is to 'make the themes of the work relevant to contemporary concerns'.

Edited in: I wrote the above before I looked at today's Observer. While one article there reported on the fact that history is in danger of disappearing as a subject from our schools, another by Tim Adams bemoans our heritage culture as a retreat from the present and its concerns. I can't disagree with this last, and while there seems a paradox, I think in fact it's just the other side of the coin of our simplistic 'global' thinking, the one which alternatively holds the past as 'good' and the present as 'bad' (or at least, as he says, too difficult for contemplation). Adams acknowledges the respectable tradition of mining the past for 'stories that will illuminate the present', but believes that the 'current appetite for historical fiction' seems different, a part of this retreat from 'the here and now'. Well, it's true that you can't legislate for what people seek in books, but (while, as I say, I haven't yet read the current Booker shortlist) this seems in itself a bit of blanket/'global' condemnation of the shortlisted books.

The Face of the Author

An excellent article by the Guardian's Richard Lea, who reports that since the Guardian began a series of video author interviews on their website, some publishers have been pushing to them the 'personable' aspects of their literary authors.

The crucial point Lea makes is that literary fiction appeals to the intellect (among other things, presumably) (an interesting, and useful I think, definition of literary fiction), and implies that any reader with a modicum of intellect would be put off rather than attracted by such base and irrelevant marketing appeals. He acknowledges, though, that literary fiction is a 'hard sell' which explains why 'even literary fiction' comes to be sold in this way. Personally, I'd take this further, and strike the 'even literary fiction' and replace it with 'literary fiction, above all others'. I'll never forget when I was invited to Harrogate or York (I forget which) to a dinner of Women of the North (no they weren't all wearing viking helmets, they were wearing those spiky/curly things with flowers and nets etc - it was some kind of achievers thing), and was put on the writers' table. Every other woman on the table was a highly successful writer of romantic fiction, and every one was matronly, plump and over fifty, or at least looked it. That was the moment it occurred to me that popular fiction just doesn't need the kind of marketing in which the author must be some kind of soulful or smouldering beauty, and that the marketers realized that literary fiction did.

Perhaps we should just acknowledge that reading literary fiction, like thinking itself, is not exactly a mass pursuit, and stop trying to sell it as such. Yet independent publishers of literary fiction who do operate outside the mainstream are especially reliant, if not on authors' good looks, on authors' personalities: as Salt's Chris Hamilton-Emery has made clear to his authors, it's those authors with a profile on the web (and, I'd add, lots of friends there) who are most likely to sell books. May as well forget about hiding your suspect personality behind your brilliant prose, and too bad, eh, if revealing it puts people off even looking at your books...

Way Up a Mountain

Sorry for the blackout on my blogs at the moment: I'm up the mountain again, this time to help out with decorating work: too busy to blog, and my head's gone dead anyway or rather has been taken over by thoughts about woodfiller and whitewash and paint and drying times and suitable surfaces and - oh you don't want to know. Suffice to say that I'm now on most friendly terms with the staff at Bangor B&Q (literary conversation: what's that?). And if I should ever get a literary inspiration, well, that'll usually be when the signal for the mobile internet goes blank instead: it's much worse when it's windy for some reason - which here, opposite the ridge by the sea, it nearly always is. It's as much as I can do to keep up with my emails (and then I have to use the very primitive server mail platform: can't send block emails, each email takes an age to load through, and the platform doesn't keep a copy of what I've sent). Twitter hardly works at all. (So much for getting all my mates to vote for my book on the new Salt Just One Book poll and keeping up my books's exposure - what this does expose, I guess, is something of a flaw in the blanket contemporary acceptance of a culture of internet-based author marketing). And some days I don't get out in time to get a newspaper, though yesterday evening on my way to a fabulous meal in Molly's restaurant in Caernarfon, I did manage to buy a Guardian, and read an article by Nick Laird bemoaning the need for authors to market their own work and describing all the feelings we all have to squash in order to do it (or I do anyway): 'For one thing, it seems the height of bad manners, like going on about your own children' - which is exactly what I said the other day on the Elizabeth Baines blog. Oh, and a profile of Fay Weldon, who always makes me laugh... No way I can give you all the links, sorry: it would take half an hour at least, and there's a door waiting to be painted.

As for reading, I got quite hooked on a book in ms by a friend, in the half-hour each day I read in bed in the morning - more hooked than by most published books by well-known writers, to be honest. And having left our next reading group book at home (Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, which I bought years ago but for some reason never read) I sent off for a second-hand copy from Amazon (and that took half an hour!), but it never arrived, presumably due to the remoteness of this location...

Should be back in full swing again by the second week of September (and of course publicising my new book, Too Many Magpies). Meanwhile, I'll blog if I can...

Cross-posted with Elizabeth Baines.

How Can We Read?

John Siddique points us to an excellent article by David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times, in which LAT books editor Ulin confesses to the difficulty many of us share in settling to read books in these days of instant online networking. Ulin pinpoints the question of focus:

...the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else's world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine. Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves... In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise.

Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

Here we have my reading problem in a nutshell, for books insist we take the opposite position, that we immerse, slow down.

Rightly, I think, Ulin says this question of time is at the heart of the matter. Books may now seem too slow, too behind the times. Yet in such a fast-forward age, he points out, the thing which books provide, that slowing down for contemplation, becomes ever more necessary.

It's a problem which I think is behind the cultural resistance to the short story, which, being in my view closer to poetry than the novel, requires a particular kind of focused attention. (A discussion about this is currently taking place at The Rumpus.)

And whatever applies to reading applies to writing several times over, I'd say: writing books requires far more contemplation than reading them, and far more necessary withdrawal, yet, since nowadays writers are required to take part in the marketing of their own books, it becomes urgently necessary for us to immerse ourselves in online networking...

Boyd Tonkin on the Short Story

Boyd Tonkin writes in the Independent about the disjunction between our perceptions of the short story as lightweight and the reality of it as a vibrant, and indeed burgeoning, form. He points out interestingly that major figures of our literary canon could be studied via their short stories alone without any loss of impression of their stature, and, pointing to the irony that Alice Munro has won the International Booker but would not qualify for the yearly prize, asks if short stories should now be eligible for the Booker. With a dig at The New Yorker, he takes issue too with the 'template' attitude to short story length (which I've complained about on this blog, with regard to lit mags and competitions) and that other form of lengthism, the prejudice against what Henry James called 'the blessed nouvelle'. He says rightly: 'The only rule is to write originally and well - whether the result takes two, five or twenty thousand words'. Hear, hear.

My own recent article on the current state of the short story here.

Writers and their Friends

Fiona Robyn writes about the delicate matter of promotion for present-day writers.

Plagiarism: Proof and Power

OK, I was a bit rushed yesterday, so here today are some more detailed thoughts about the difficulties around plagiarism.

Many of the current blog discussions centre on internet writing forums, and I have nothing to add to the helpful guidelines in avoiding committing plagiarism offered to participants. But here are some thoughts on the vexed matter of situations where the power balance is more uneven, where professional writers with a platform are in a position to read the unpublished work of unknown, or less well-known, writers without a current platform.

Some blogs have been keen to insist that those with responsibility would be unlikely to filch ideas. But consider this: if you have ever been the editor of a literary magazine or a creative writing tutor, how often have you read a piece and thought, I wish I'd had that idea!? How often have you thought, What a pity that writer hasn't written that as well as they could have done, and: I could write it better! As a past editor and creative writing tutor I've had that response several times. I've never consciously filched someone else's ideas (I want my ideas to be my own) but how many times do you think people have had that response and then either cynically (come on, now, think about human nature!) or unconsciously (think about the subconscious workings of the human brain) gone on to write that idea for themselves?

What if you are on the judging panel of a competition with a well-known filmmaker who is arguing passionately for something whose subject matter really speaks to him and says he wants to make a film of it, but in the end it doesn't win and afterwards never sees the light of day. But then one day the filmmaker makes a film which is uncannily like that piece but doesn't bear the other author's name? Is this plagiarism, ie, did the filmmaker cynically use the idea, or was he so affected by the piece that it entered his subconscious - or did the piece indeed chime with obsessions that were already there? * How can you tell? How can you prove anything, especially if you are an unknown author with no voice and no status? How would you want to - it would all be so unpleasant, and yet maybe there was no malicious intent, so how would that make you look? How would that affect your potential career?

*Edited in: this is why there's no copyright on ideas (and why neither should there be) and why therefore it's so difficult to legislate on plagiarism.

What if you join a TV new writer scheme and the well-known tutor is so impressed by the idea you have entered that he wants to know exactly how you'd do it, and is impressed in turn by that. Your piece isn't chosen for production, but then next time you see the author's work there is your story - with some different trappings, but the important things, even down to the camera shots, identical to yours. Once again, what can you do? Nothing, beyond deciding to feel flattered, because you simply can't be sure it wasn't unconscious, and anyway YOU HAVE NO POWER. What's beyond dispute is that there's no way you can offer your idea to any other TV company, ever.

I don't want to be a damp blanket and scare new writers, but I don't think we should give anyone a false sense of security: these are real cases. Personally, I am very wary nowadays of where I show my unpublished work, and I no longer read unpublished work at readings unless they're going to be recorded or filmed.

Though as I said yesterday, I think the greater general awareness of the problem created by this debate can only be good.

Anti-Plagiarism Day

I'm a bit late to this as I was travelling today. It's Anti-Plagiarism day for literary bloggers, and all the links can be found at How Publishing Really Works.

I'm not so sure there are many easy answers to the problem of plagiarism, since as many bloggers point out it's a matter of ethics, you can't copyright ideas, and it can be hard to prove that mimicry wasn't unconscious (the plagiarist's classic defence).

Some bloggers are keen to reassure people that it doesn't happen very often and not to deter people from taking part in web writing forums, but I have to say I feel somewhat more cynical, having had personal experience of professionals plagiarising the work of unpublished authors and new writing schemes operating as cynical ideas-gathering exercises for the media.

Still, I think that making a noise about it in this way is probably just about the best thing to do: plagiarism is made much easier when people generally aren't aware of the problem.

Style Isn't Everything

I didn't catch Martin Amis's Guardian review of John Updike's posthumous collection of stories last weekend, but my curiosity was aroused when I saw the letters this week strongly disagreeing with his assessment that in this final book Updike had lost his ear.

Some readers of this blog will be aware of my own ambivalent feelings about Updike's writing. My repeated reading of Rabbit, Run at the age of fourteen was most surely one of the things which set me on the path of writing - I couldn't keep away from the book and its breathtaking prose, fluid yet concretely vivid; it was like stepping into a new way of being, which is of course what every teenager wants. Needless to say it is thus a fundamental part of my own mental/creative landscape, and if I have learnt anything as a writer, some of it I learnt from him. However, while I still cannot look at many of its paragraphs without, as Amis says, 'incredulous admiration', revisiting the book as an adult has been a troubling experience, and some of the reasons for this are unintentionally implicit in Amis's piece, which I've now read.

Amis begins his piece by quoting a small section from the new book and pointing out what he deems 'one infelicity and one howler' (which I'll discuss in more detail below), and goes on later to quote many apparently 'clunky' sentences and phrases. Dismayed for both Updike and himself (he says it's of 'increasingly urgent interest to the present reviewer, who is closing in on 60'), Amis calls this book and its apparent loss of form 'the portrait of the artist as an old man'. 'Age waters the writer down', says Amis, and his 'broad impression is that writers as they age lose energy (inspiration, musicality, imagistic serendipity)' but make up for this in craft. The loss of Updike's energy he accepts as given, therefore. The loss of craft he perceives puzzles him, and he wonders if this is due to Updike's increasing physical deafness - as if Updike, of all people, would ever lose his memory of verbal sound.

Well, now, excuse me while I put my face in my elbow and try not to laugh at the psychic precariousnes of literary machismo. If we do accept that this book represents a loss of form, why should it not be the result of illness rather than age per se - Updike died of lung cancer, with which he battled, and there must have been a period of loss of health before he was diagnosed? Amis does indeed refer to the need to copyedit and is aghast that the errors he sees in this book have slipped through this necessary stage. Personally, I'm getting a picture of Updike too ill to do that work (though one senses a deeper horror on the part of Amis at this indication that the superman writer may have ever needed to do it rather than having sprung fully-formed with cryptonite verbal immunity intact). But also why should it not have been the result of a lifetime of stratospheric literary success - getting written out (and it is maybe this which is worrying Martin). What about those older writers with no such ennui, whose lives have prevented them writing the stuff which, by the time they reach their sixties, they still have backed up? What about Marilynne Robinson? What about those who get older and madder and stronger, like Milton? It's true that old people get ill more often than the young, but Amis is wrong to conflate the two, infirmity and age, and in doing so he provides an unfortunate boost to the regrettable cult of youth and the dismissal of older writers which dominate our literary life.

But what if, as the first letter-writer suggests, the prose in this book of stories represents rather a deliberate change of style on Updike's part? When we experiment we often fail; was Updike merely failing in order to fail better? Indeed, as Amis points out, the stories in this collection are arranged chronologically, and the final story - towards which, in the writing process, Updike would have been working - is, according to Amis, 'quietly innovative'.

And what if, as all three Guardian letter-writers suggest, the prose in this collection is not, after all, bad?

Here is the first section Amis quotes

... Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked every weekday and socialised all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land

pointing out the rime riche of 'prior' and 'prime' and the clunkiness of both sentences ending with 'his land'. And here are some others, full of the rhymes and repetitions with which he charges Updike:

ants make mounds like coffee grounds ...
polished bright by sliding anthracite ...
my bride became allied in my mind ...
except for her bust, abruptly outthrust...

Finally:

Let us end these painful quotes with what may be the most indolent period ever committed to paper by a major pen (and one so easy to fix: change the first "fall" to "autumn", or change the second "fall" to "drop"): "The grapes make a mess on the bricks in the fall; nobody ever thinks to pick them up when they fall." The most ridiculous thing about this sentence, somehow, is its stately semi-colon.

Well, I must say that here, out of context, and in the context of Amis's criticism, these sentences do seem to me pretty dire, but if you haven't read the book (and I haven't) they are out of context. And what strikes me about Amis's criticism is that he is not allowing for context. To Amis, it seems, repetitions and rhymes must always be bad and must always be unintentional. Well, now, tell that to a poet. Tell that to a writer of lyrical prose rather than the kind of pared-down yet glittering, forward-thrusting prose Amis himself writes, and previously written by Updike (and which of course I admire). It's a matter of style, and of mood, and of the things you need to say. Sometimes you do need a moment of clunkiness, you need to pull the reader up short, create a sense of dissonance, upset the world of your own prose, sacrifice its musicality for something deeper. Sometimes you want to loop the reader back to a previous moment, to reassess an earlier meaning - the major function of rhyme and repetition. I don't agree with Amis that the mere sound of the repetition of 'prior' and 'prime' in the first piece he quotes is offensive. I agree that it doesn't work, but this is because the two concepts linked by sound here are opposite, the sound pattern therefore cutting across the logical meaning of the prose rather than strengthening it.

I find it very interesting that Amis finds that (woops, two 'finds!)

now, denuded of a vibrant verbal surface, [the stories] sometimes seem to be neither here nor there - products of nothing more than professional habit. Then, too, you notice a loss of organisational control and, in one case, a loss of any sense of propriety.

Well, to get back to my earlier point, it's that lack of propriety that has latterly disturbed me about Updike's writing. Yes, I admire his prose, but I can't read this kind of thing in Rabbit, Run without wincing:

When confused, Janice is a frightening person. Her eyes dwindle in their frowning sockets and her little mouth hangs open in a dumb slot

not out of any knee-jerk feminism, but because of the way the beautiful, biting, wondrously precise prose (that 'dwindle', that 'slot'!) makes love to the mentality, Rabbit's, giving rise to this viewpoint.

Style isn't everything, you know.

SF winner of Edge Hill Short Story Prize

Congratulations to both SF author Chris Beckett and small publisher Elastic Press: last night Beckett's collection of stories The Turing Test won the prestigious Edge Hill Prize over shortlisted collections from mainstream publishers by Ali Smith, Anne Enright, Sheena Mckay and Gerard Donovan. The Turing Test is a book of 'fourteen stories featuring, among other things, robots, alien planets, genetic manipulation and virtual reality, but which focus on individuals rather than technology, and deal with love and loneliness, authenticity and illusion, and what it really means to be human'.

Anne Enright won second prize with her collection, Yesterday's Weather. Chris Beckett also won the Readers' Prize, voted for by local reading groups and MA Creative Writing Students.

The judges, who read the shortlist selected by Edge Hill staff, were James Walton, journalist and chair of BBC Radio 4’s The Write Stuff, author and 2008 winner Claire Keegan and Mark Flinn, Pro-Vice Chancellor of Edge Hill University.

James Walton commented: ‘I suspect Chris Beckett winning the Edge Hill Prize will be seen as a surprise in the world of books. In fact, though, it was also a bit of surprise to the judges, none of whom knew they were science fiction fans beforehand. Yet, once the judging process started, it soon became clear that The Turing Test was the book that we’d all been impressed by, and enjoyed, the most — and one by one we admitted it.

This was a very strong shortlist, including one Booker Prize winner in Anne Enright, and two authors who’ve been Booker shortlisted in Ali Smith and Shena Mackay. Even so, it was Beckett who seemed to us to have written the most imaginative and endlessly inventive stories, fizzing with ideas and complete with strong characters and big contemporary themes. We also appreciated the sheer zest of his story-telling and the obvious pleasure he had taken in creating his fiction.’

As I have commented previously, the stress of the Edge Hill Prize (which is the brainchild of my former co-editor Ailsa Cox), is on not only great writing but cohesive collections. At the award ceremony (which I attended) Mark Flinn said interestingly that the judging process had taught him that the short story collection takes us back to the song cycle of the past, in that it is more than a collection of narratives but involves an overall unity, and that Chris Beckett's collection in particular achieved this.