Too Much Information?

Daniel Green considers William Gibson's The Neuromancer and science fiction in general.

View From Here article, and thoughts on short stories and CW teaching.

I said in the comments on a post below that I would like to write sometime about the subject of unity and fragmentation in fiction. It's a big subject, and immersion in my wip hasn't yet allowed me to tackle it with the depth it requires, but my monthly deadline on The View From Here has pushed me into putting up some signposts.


In other matters, there's a good post by Daniel Green on The Reading Experience about the vogue for 'quirkiness' in short stories, a quirkiness that he (rightly, I think) says often covers a lack of substance while being lauded as doing quite the opposite. He sees it as stemming from the culture of creative writing teaching programmes, and it does seem to be cw-teaching backlash time: Jessica Crispin gets the boot in on The Smart Set: 'Style is king, and not content', she notes, chiming with Green's perceptions, and accuses cw teachers of, among other things, 'excising all [the students'] adjectives, replacing their libraries of novels with guides'. Interestingly, in an article in the current Mslexia, manuscript editor and former literary agent Rose Gaete picks up on a mantra of cw teaching that can constrain rather than liberate writers:

I often sense that new writers, in an effort to adhere to the maxim 'show, don't tell', can shy away from exploring their characters' motivations. Paradoxically, this can result in less richness and complexity, not more.

Mslexia: Mid-list crisis

Good (and depressing) article by Louise Doughty in the new issue of MsLexia, on the crisis facing mid-list authors. I love the opening paragraph in which she reports what she was told by 'a respected novelist who had had her most recent book turned down by her publisher':

' "They said, the reviews of the last were great, but your sales figures were poor. I replied, they're not my sales figures, they are your sales figures. I did my job. I wrote the book.' "

Word of mouth

Robert McCrum tackles the phenomenon of word of mouth success in today's Observer. I'm a bit amused, though, by John Murray MD Roland Phillips' reported statement - apparently in support of the notion of word of mouth - that 'people don't like to be told what to read'. Maybe he means when you hear publicists talking out of other orifices...

McCrum points out, however, that when a book takes off apparently independently of a publisher's publicity machinery, there's more involved than people simply telling each other about a book: there's the subtler matter of 'the milieu into which the unknown book is released' that creates that kind of grass roots excitement.

The dangers of taffeta

On the matter of gender bias in reviews I was interested to note that, beginning his Observer review of Monica Ali's The Untold Story (her novel that imagines the fate of Princess Diana had she not died), Tibor Fischer says: 'I'm not sure I'm really qualified to review Monica Ali's new novel because I don't know what a French tip manicure is and I'm rather hazy on taffeta.'

I'm kind of charmed by this: Tibor Fischer is a refreshing reviewer whose reviews always shine with this kind of honesty, although since he concludes by pronouncing the book 'classy commercial fiction', I wonder if by saying this he's doing more than simply being honest, but also distancing himself from it.

At any rate, it set me thinking. Would a female reviewer be likely to state so readily that she doesn't feel qualified to review a book due to a haziness about football or motorbike engines? Would she be too afraid of endorsing a general perception that already makes her less likely to be asked to review books by men?

I have to say that I don't know what a French tip manicure is, either, but I must confess that having been brought up by a needleworking mother, and having actually studied textiles at one point, I'm not at all hazy about taffeta, and I say this publicly not without a certain qualm...

Reading group latest

Latest in our reading group discussions: Postcards by E Annie Proulx.

An Apology

This post is an unreserved apology to William Skidelsky, literary editor of the Observer. In an overview post on the reactions to Vida's research on gender bias in reviewing, I attributed to him the view 'that while women read more than men, they mainly read the kinds of books that are not worthy of review'. He has pointed out to me that this is not a comment he made, nor a view he holds, and a look back at the Guardian article on which I was commenting shows that the comment was in fact that of TLS editor Peter Stothard, and related specifically to his own publication, thus: 'And while women are heavy readers, we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS... The TLS is only interested in getting the best reviews of the most important books.' It was a serious error on my part because people picked up on it in the comments section and ran with it.

This is the moment that the lone blogger - unsupported by editors or subeditors - dreads. For the past five years that I have been writing this blog I have lived in horror of making this kind of misrepresentation (and in the process providing fuel for the detractors of blogging), and I can tell you that when I received William Skidelsky's friendly but questioning message I went hot and cold all over. It's why blogging is so particularly time-consuming - the need to check back and double-check, which I signally failed to do on this occasion - and why it is not always compatible with the immersive, distracting and time-consuming project of writing a novel (which is why I think I failed on this occasion).

Once again, my sincere apologies to William Skidelsky, and my thanks to him for pointing out my error and enabling me to put it right.

The vastness of the short story

Good article on the short story by Chris Power. I particularly like this:

...novels that seek to contain multitudes, to embody a particular society at a particular time, seem doomed to fall short. The short story, by contrast, acknowledges the vastness and diversity of life by the very act of focusing on one small moment or aspect of it. The story is small precisely because life is so big.

World Book Night and non-readers.

Interesting comment by Annette Green at The View From Here, on the success or otherwise of World Book Night, quoting some figures. My own comment is more anecdotal. The Oxfam bookshop in our middle-class and pretty literary Didsbury was giving away two of the titles, a thriller (I can't even remember the title: you may know what it was) and Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife. Beforehand I talked about it to Wendy, the manager. Since one of the stated aims had been to get books to people who don't normally read, I asked her if she thought it remotely possible that those sort of people would come and ask for a book (the shop wasn't doing any kind of event, simply advertising in its window that the books would be available for collection). She told me that initially she had thought of giving the books out in the deprived area near where she lives, but the more she thought about it, the more she thought it would be a wasted exercise: so many people there aren't even literate. So she decided to give the books away in the shop instead. She said she would observe carefully those coming for the books and let me know.

Well, I went down to see myself, arriving twenty minutes after the giveaway was due to start. I saw nothing: turned out that beforehand a queue had formed right around the block, but they had cleared out of books within 15 minutes. Everyone had grabbed their book and immediately scarpered! There was just no one around! The staff told me that everyone collecting a book had indeed been your typical book-buying middle-class Didsbury type who'd have been more likely than anyone to buy the books in the first place.

So much for getting the books to those who don't normally read. Although I have to say (as an ex English teacher) that either that was a pious whitewash or those organizing WBN, who really ought to know the harsh facts about the extent of non-reading in our culture and its psychology, had better wise up quick.

Reading group links

Something I started to do was put links on here to the discussions of my reading group, but I'm afraid I have kept forgetting.

Here's the latest, a discussion of Graham Swift's Waterland, and here's a list of all the books we have discussed.

The other World Book Night

If you don't already know about it, do go on over to Nicola Morgan's blog to read about her great idea for contributing to World Book Night. Essentially, having had some doubts about the wisdom of the WBN project to give away 40,000 copies each of 25 books (doubts I share), she has thought up the notion of buying a book between now and Saturday (5th March) and giving it away with an inscription marking WBN and stating where the book was bought. I'm definitely in, for one!

Since the official WBN is concentrating on books already well known, I suggest too buying from a small publisher and a less hyped author - and you couldn't go wrong with my own publisher, Salt!

EDITED IN: I've pulled up a great suggestion from the comments below, made by Nicola Morgan herself:

I'd love if people who did go for my Buy-and-give-a-book idea would add a comment here: http://helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-did-you-do-for-books-this-week.html to say what they bought and who they gave it too. 

Crossposted with my author blog.

Books on TV

I'm reluctant to be negative about any TV promotion of books, and one's initial response to the recent spate of programmes is pleasure and even gratitude, since, taken together, they would seem to convey the idea of books as a significant aspect of culture. But I think a look at some of the more subtle messages they are sending is in order. I've written disparagingly about the first series of Channel 4's TV Book Club (though I haven't watched the second series and it may have improved) and I read recently on Twitter that Anne Robinson started off her new books programme by saying, rather like some of those early TV Book Club panelists, that she didn't actually read (or even like?) books very much. If the idea here is to woo those viewers who don't much like books either, by making them identify, I'd say that at worst it's something of an exercise in shooting oneself in the foot, and at best it's just too apologetic about books altogether.

While Sebastian Faulks has, on the contrary, conducted his series about fiction with great enthusiasm - and indeed the assumption that it's essential to us - I find the format to have been a denial of the real nature of fiction, and a devaluation. He has presented fiction as merely the sum of its characters - episodes have been on Heroes, Heroines, Snobs and Villains - discussing them to the exclusion of all other aspects of novels, thus giving us a singularly reductive (and realist) view of fiction. This has been compounded by a simplistic assessment of some of those characters themselves (he presents Miss Brodie, for instance, as simply a snob) and a clumsily utilitarian approach: essentially, the characters are there to teach us how to live. We 'love' them or 'love to hate' them, he says (because of what they can teach us about life), a relationship between reader and character which must exclude, for instance, those novels, surreal and/or satirical, in which character is not the main focus. He also goes so far as to say that we can feel we know them better than we know those close to us in life. If we do feel we know characters in books better than real-life associates, I'd say it's because when we read a novel we are gaining privileged access into someone else's mind, that is, the author's, and sharing in a creative construct, one aspect of which will be the characters. However, Faulks' words imply a more immature concept of characters as people in their own right, with 'a life of their own'. While I accept that during the actual reading process we do suspend disbelief and relate to characters as 'real', I'd say that it's a very different thing to transfer this suspension of disbelief into the context of discussion of fiction. The filming of this series seems specifically designed to facilitate that. Many people have commented that every single novel Faulks discussed was illustrated by a TV (BBC?) drama adaptation (dramatisations, for a start, often skew novels by foregrounding character in ways they may not be foregrounded in the original novels) and a striking, and to me, shocking feature was the way that these dramatisations were framed. The producers had gone to a great deal of trouble to find locations for Faulks' commentary that matched the locations of the drama clips shown, and not only that, Faulks was shown in these locations in an attitude of watching, and cuts made which turned him into a voyeur within the drama. Thus we had him looking through the window at Emma talking to Mr Knightley, and more hilariously, spying through another with Notes on a Scandal's Barbara on Bathsheba seducing her schoolboy, and more hilariously still, about to trip over Lady Chatterley and Mellors in the wood. Someone on Twitter objected to me that this is exactly what we do in novels, spy on the characters, but I would disagree: what we are invited to do in novels is to join the author in inhabiting the (constructed) minds of the main characters. It's an act of intellectual and emotional empathy. And while, yes, this is one way that novels can indeed expand our intellectual and emotional horizons ('teach us about life') it's a far more complex and dynamic process than that implied by portraying characters as inhabiting the same plane of reality as commentators and readers. And making this the main point of a series about fiction, is to reduce and patronise fiction in the extreme.

Tweeted to death

Here's a piece which relates to my recent article about Social Networking and the Writer. It includes reference to a recent speech on the subject by Margaret Atwood:

At the recent TOC Margaret Atwood gave a wonderful keynote speech illustrated with hand drawings. “Authors must now Tweet, Blog, and Facebook… if we’re expected to do all this other work, we should the get more of the pie,” she said...  Atwood showed a dead moose drawing: “Never eliminate your primary source,” she said and explained that one dead animal feeds a broad ecosystem. Then, she showed a drawing of a dead author. “Although dead authors can be lucrative,” she said, “No authors, no books.”

(Thanks to Emma Darwin via Twitter for the link.)

Social Networking and the Writer

Today I have a new piece up at The View From Here, Social Networking and the Writer.

Essential difference or different treatment?

Apropos my last post, here's a Guardian article by Gabriel Brownstein which considers the role of marketing in the 'genderization' of fiction.  The article also touches on whether men and women write differently, and there are some interesting comments - one or two of them unwittingly telling in the matter of unconscious bias.

Do the men have it all?

* EDITED IN: This post originally attributed a comment to Observer literary editor William Skidelsky which was in fact made by TLS Peter Stothart (as reported in the linked Guardian article). The post has been altered accordingly, and my sincere apologies to William Skidelsky.

People are much exercised by the shocking statistics in a survey conducted by the American women's literary network Vida, showing male bias in numbers of literary reviewers and of the authors of books reviewed. The Guardian defends itself as being better than most and books editor Claire Armitstead points out that fewer women than men offer themselves as reviewers. Ruth Franklin, books editor of The New Republic confesses to being shocked at her own statistics and sets out to conduct her own survey proving that lit editors are only reflecting the situation created by publishers: publishers publish more books by male authors than by women. Bookslut's Jessica Crispin, who is equally shocked, along with her co-editor Michael Schaub, at their own record, will have no truck with such blame-shifting and the two co-editors are conducting a conversation about the implications for their own biases in choices of books for review and reviewers. Some comments on these posts are enlightening, many pleading that they read more books by men than by women because they simply like them better, discounting the question raised by Ruth Franklin of societally-induced unconscious bias - a concept which it looks as though thinkers of the 80s may as well not have bothered to flog to death. And notwithstanding our healthy and mainly female literary reading-group culture, TLS editor Peter Stothard raises hackles by opining that while women read more than men, they mainly read the kinds of books that are not worthy of review in his publication.

It's how you read it.

An article in today's Guardian Review by Alex Clark sums up recent worries about the role of the editor and ponders the pressures that the books industry is putting on that role, including, interestingly, and I'd say ominously, the possibility of changes in the way we read. In literary criticism, he says:

...there has been a shift away from the painstaking analysis of words and sentences and towards straightforward plot recital and a speedy thumbs up or down

and, with reference to reading generally, concludes:

What we have to be aware of is that the creation of serious literature – whatever the degree of collaboration between author and editor – is the result of enormously concentrated mental and aesthetic effort. If it is reduced to a series of narrative effects slapped on to paper or screen, if it comes to be seen simply as one among many interchangeable ways to ingest a story, it will soon begin to look like a very poor slice of the leisure industry indeed.

Exactly. What's important about a novel is not the 'story' but the way it is told: novels aren't just stories, but constructs of language. 'Story' and mode are never separate entities: it is the mode of telling which creates the meaning and thus the story (which is why I'm not a great fan of drama adaptations of novels). A different word order here, a swapped line there, a cut here, and the whole meaning, and thus the story can change altogether. And this is the essential role of the editor: to help the author achieve the construct through which the intended meaning and story can be realized. (I've written about a significant editing experience of my own in an Author's Note on my current publisher's website here.)

As far as I'm concerned any story can be made interesting (and enlightening, and exciting) with the right way of telling (and of course insight) (and conversely any story, however outlandish and promising, can be made ploddingly dull). But an insistence on story for its own sake is probably, I would say, nurtured by the commercial nature of contemporary publishing: a good 'story' or idea can make a marketing pitch in the way claims about good writing simply can't. The idea becomes the be-and-end-all, and quite frankly I now see far too many ploddingly dull novels praised (on the net, especially) for the quirky 'story' or idea they have in actuality short-changed or even massacred, as if the reviewer were simply blind to the actual language of the novels - indeed, to put it at its most strongly, as if they didn't really, properly read them.

Loathe as I am to knock any return to much-missed coverage of books on TV, I'd say that Sebastian Faulks' BBC2 programme panders to this tendency in spades. In the trailer clip he says that he wants to rectify a recent concentration on the author rather than the book, a laudable enough aim, but his solution is to concentrate on characters, whom he says are 'all that matters', and to talk about them as if they are real rather than merely one element of an author's literary construct (and of course all of his examples are vividly illustrated by BBC dramatisations). Two BBC4 programmes on Monday however were to my mind excellent. The Beauty of Books, interestingly appearing just as we are assailed by predictions of the demise of the physical book, showed us in vivid detail and with brilliant photography the physicality of our earliest manuscripts and explained the sociological forces shaping their physical properties. In The Birth of the British Novel Henry Hitchings gave us an incisive and vivid yet truly literary-sociological account. Both programmes were a return to the mode of thoughtful commentary usefully illustrated, with none of that dramatised re-enactment stuff. The one way that the latter programme pandered to contemporary trends was in plonking in a few 'star' novelists for their comments. These moments were like holes in the middle of Henry Hitchings' beautiful logical account: one really had to laugh at Martis Amis and the usually concise Will Self sitting in the pub and telling the scholarly whizz lit critic how to suck literary eggs and losing the plot in waffle - probably because they were disconcerted by the look on his face...

(Only 2 more days I think to see those 2 programmes on iplayer - I'm a bit late with this.)

Best not to be beautiful?

I commend to you a post by novelist Amanda Craig, titled 'On being a middle-aged, mid-list novelist'.  Here's how she concludes:

On the whole, good and great fiction is not written by beautiful people who feel successful. It’s written by the person who is most overlooked, all their life, and who understands things about the human condition which is very different from that of the experience of the twenty-five year old part-time model. Every author has a professional deformity – club feet, an uncomfortable religious inheritance, short stature, or incurable alcoholism, take your pick. Writers are always outsiders, and our nearest kindred isn’t someone in Hollywood but the bag-lady who rootles through dustbins muttering to herself

 - a brilliant summation, I think. Read the whole post, though: it's very measured and thoughtful.

What's the point?

Prompted by the Faber Academy discussion about Creative Writing on this blog, here's my own (ambivalent) take on one particular aspect, the teaching of the subject. It's my first post as a contributor to the online version of the excellent literary magazine The View From Here.

Faber academy discussion on writing: Ian Ellard

Today on the Faber blog, Faber Academy's Ian Ellard takes up the debate - Why write? - at its most radical level, with an historical and extremely thoughtful exploration of why on earth we actually do it. I urge you to click on over and read.

Meanwhile, it's still possible to leave any questions you may have for previous posters Sue Gee and Marcel Theroux, on the comments thread here.

Also join in on Twitter  #whywrite? #whynot