Present Rules

Sometimes when you're writing you just think: for God's sake, will people stop talking about how to do it! Because a) as Charlie Brooker has recently indicated, sometimes thinking about it too much it is just not conducive to actually doing it which can require huge dollops of intuition rather than intellect and b) because too often the talk implies rules and too many rules end up in proscription, and another thing you need in huge dollops is confidence and a sense of freedom. And before you object that there are rules and that writing is a craft as much as an art, with techniques to be learnt: I know, I know: I agree!! But the way I see it is that you learn the rules so well you take them for granted, in fact can start to break them, and after that what every writer, however experienced, really needs, are (mainly psychic) stratagems for freeing up their imagination and achieving originality in their writing.

And there's a third problem, c), with all this rule-bound chatter, especially when it's indulged in by well-known writers: what they're often doing is simply banging the drum for their own kind of writing and (by implication) denigrating other modes of writing from a standpoint which is hardly impartial (though too often taken as such).

When the news broke last week that Philip Pullman had condemned the current use of the present tense in novels, my stomach gave a lurch, I can tell you, as I'm using the present tense in my WIP, though not exclusively. I was tempted to join the debate and point out some of the subtle and wholly dynamic uses to which the present tense can be put in novels (and which as far as I could see were being overlooked), but, putting my duty to my work first, I decided to refrain from analysis and preserve the more intuitive frame of mind I needed for the writing, and to keep up my confidence in what I was doing by tuning out the critical voices.

Just as well: in today's Guardian Philip Pullman is at pains to explain that the reports had oversimplified his remarks. And in spite of myself I did read his article, and here are my pathetically writing-immersed responses:

He does begin by admitting that he said that 'the present tense in fiction has been getting more and more common in fiction, and I didn't like it.' (Stomach wrench from me.) But then he goes on to say: 'Like any other literary effect, the present tense is an expressive device; but expression works by contrast'. (Me: Yess! That's how I'm using it: as a contrast! Phew.) Pullman goes on to quote from a present-tense passage in Jane Eyre, which he says 'works beautifully because it emerges from the context of a narrative told in the past tense' and 'conveys as nothing else could the pressure of her feelings as she recalls the intensity of that summer evening.' (Me: yes, exactly: this is one of the best ways we can write about both intensity of feeling and memory. By this point in the article I'm feeling affirmed...)

But what happens then? Pullman goes on the attack. What he's attacking are novels written entirely in the present tense, which he compares with the (also reprehensible) increasing use of the hand-held camera. He says, 'I want all the young present-tense storytellers ... to allow themselves to stand back and show me a wider temporal perspective.' He understands why so many don't: the postmodern (though he doesn't call it that) concern with lack of certainty, with the worry 'Who are we to say that this happened and then that happened? Maybe it didn't ... there are other points of view, truth is always provisional, knowledge is always partial.' But while he understands it, he doesn't accept it: he calls it 'an abdication of narrative responsibility' and states that 'the storyteller ... should take charge of the story and not feel shifty about it.'

Well, my response to that is to wonder: isn't it an abdication of authorial responsibility NOT to want to address those uncertainties? And isn't Pullman just saying he doesn't like writing that's not like his own? And what's he doing making proscriptive rules for those who don't write as he does? And I'm trying really hard not to let it knock me off balance, as I'm writing about those very uncertainties...

Another Bites the Dust

Now it's Charlie Brooker's turn to decide that the internet has been destroying both his writing time and his attention span, and that he must retrain himself and cut down his time online.

(If anyone here is interested, on my other blog I'm charting my progress at trying to do the same while very much needing to use the internet for publicity for a new publication.)

Gotta love Charlie Brooker: recently he dared to say what very few writers would, but what I suspect most writers secretly think: that he doesn't want to advise anyone else about their writing beause a) he doesn't really know how he does it, it's like riding a bike, really and b) why would any writer trying to make it in a literary world where there's only room for the few go and help others to turn out potentially better than himself?

It Takes a Man to Say These Things

When Jodi Picoult and Lionel Shriver (or any other women writers) say it, it's too likely to look like sour grapes, but today in the Guardian Pankaj Mishra argues thoughtfully that for the establishment 'great' only ever signifies 'the passionate ambition of white men, never women.'

Mishra is also concerned with other prejudices beside gender: for arbiters like Time magazine, he says, 'literature is summed up by the big, panoptic novel about the American, usually suburban condition, not the formally resourceful poem and short story or intellectually rigorous essay.'

It's interesting, too, that he points out the often suburban concerns of the 'great' male American novel, since the general perception is that 'suburban' is one of the sub-characteristics for which women's literature is deemed generally lesser.

Also in the Guardian today, in the same edition in which Andrew Motion, chair of this year's Booker panel, complains about the poor editing the judges encountered (as did Claire Armitstead recently regarding the Guardian First Book Award), there's a very interesting letter from Chris Parker which I think is worth quoting:

...falling editorial standards is shared by editors themselves. As well as having to correct the most basic spelling and punctuation mistakes made by authors "educated" since the mid-70s, editors are frequently asked by publishers to copyedit and proofread (two distinct processes) at the same time. Before the 1990s, a typescript would be subjected, before typesetting, to a rigorous copyediting process, then proofread (often by two people) to ensure that all the copyeditor's changes had been implemented. We are now asked by most publishers to "cast a quick eye" over proofs which have been set straight from authors' disks, bypassing the editorial process altogether.

Self-promotion and Underpromotion

The Not the Booker Prize over on the Guardian books blog has raised the very interesting question of the role of social networking in making books known. (Must say, stuck in my literary purdah in the Welsh hills I hadn't even caught that the Prize was going on in the first place - the Guardian blog page takes five minutes to load up in the mountain, if it loads up at all, that is - leave alone had the ability to rally my mates and fans to nominate my book, if I could bring myself to do such a thing, so I guess that tells you something.)

And Lionel Shriver gets her teeth into the issue of male versus female novelists and gives it a good shake, arguing that female writers never receive the kind of accolades awarded to their male counterparts, and suffer from an infantilizing 'prettification' by marketing departments:

...trussing up my novels as sweet, girly and soft is like stuffing a rottweiler in a dress

Latest on Memoirs

I'm far too immersed in my own novel to be able to begin to comment on this Guardian Books blog article by Charlotte Higgins about the issues raised by Candia McWilliam's recent memoir and AS Byatt's comments thereon, but since the issues of memoir/autobiography/fiction have been such a preoccupation of this blog, I direct you towards it.

(If you want to read some of my comments on the issues, click the MEMOIRS V NOVELS label)

Silence and the Writer

Tucked away at the moment up a mountain with my writing and without good internet access, I'm not having many thoughts beyond the images and ideas of my WIP. It's interesting that, in these days when an author's job increasingly involves promotion, I feel a certain guilt about this, rather than the immense satisfaction I'd probably have felt once upon a time at being fortunate enough to have a solid period of concentration. Actually, no, I think, once a upon a time - even, or maybe especially, when I had small children - I thought it my duty to my art (if that doesn't sound too pretentious) to bend over backwards to carve the time and peace to give it proper attention.

And isn't that what true art needs? Not that I'm claiming to be producing the greatest art here or anything, but here in the mountains, where there is only the sound of the wind and the stream and the buzzards calling overhead, I am sinking into my work in a way I haven't managed for a good while, seeing the scenes with new richness and clarity and making new connections, the latter often coming to me in the evenings when I'm walking by the sea (and when in Manchester I'd be catching up on internet stuff). Silence and peace. Isn't that what we need for deep thought? And isn't that why libraries were always places of silence?

But don't we now despise libraries as places of silence, and fill them instead with activities? Aren't we now, via the internet, developing a culture of buzz and quick response which militate against deep contemplation? And what will this do to our literature?

A poet I know lives permanently in mountains where he can't get broadband. He is one of the most thoughtful and talented poets I know. But will his work get lost because he can't - or chooses not to - gain visibility for his work via the web? Will all such writers be silenced? And what kind of literature will we have then?

The New Conundrum for Authors

At the moment this blog feels like a house plant that's not being watered while I'm off on my travels. Well, here I am popping back home from the geographies of my novel to give it a quick splash - inspired by a relevant article in the Guardian today.

Ray Conolly writes about the fact that he is publishing his latest novel, The Sandman, in serial form online and for free, although it will be possible in the meantime to buy a download of the entire manuscript, and later a printed form will be available from Amazon. His enthusiasm is catching, and his argument that publishing is changing in such a way that, contrary to predictions, the web is returning power to authors, seems persuasive.

I wonder, though. Power always comes with responsibility, and in this case the responsibility for marketing. Connolly talks about the fact that there will be Facebook and Twitter links (not to mention the ipod audio version he'll be preparing). And we all know how much time Facebook and Twitter can take up... One can't help asking the question: where will he get the time to write his next book? It's not only my blogs that have been suffering recently from the fact that my novel has been absorbing all my time, attention and creativity, but my Facebook and Twitter accounts via which I should be doing the marketing for my published books, necessarily required by my small publisher.

The old (new) conundrum, eh?

Wide Choice = Narrowed Options

An interesting article on Alternet yesterday, in which it is argued that Amazon's policies of price-cutting and making as many books as possible available lead in fact to a narrowing of choice for the consumer (not to mention a squeezing of literary opportunities for the writer).

Thanks to Vanessa Gebbie via Facebook.

A Question of Attention

Apologies for my absence from this blog recently. I'm working on a substantial novel, and find that when I can give it the attention it needs it can take up my whole day, or at least my whole focus: I write in the mornings, in the afternoons I type up and edit what I've written in the morning, and the rest of the day is needed for digesting what I've done and thinking about the next day's writing, as well as necessary research. It's easier to write a quick blog post about my writing activities for my author blog than to start getting my head around more general publishing and fiction issues. In the last week I have had to interrupt my novel's rhythm to help publicise my publisher's Just One Book campaign, so the possibility of feeding this blog with useful content has slipped even further away.

There's one preoccupation, however, I do want to air. I think I have said here in the past that when I'm writing intently I find it difficult to read: the language and psyche of another novel is disruptive to my own. However, during the last fortnight, in spite of being so very immersed in my own work, I have had to tackle Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for my reading group, and I'm now halfway through. I don't read crime fiction as a rule, and neither do most people in the group, but we decided to read this book in order to try and understand its success as a cultural phenomenon. It took me a long while to get into it - I found the first 100 pages or so immensely boring - but as most people told me I would, I found that it finally took off and was 'readable'. But what do I mean, in this instance, by 'readable'? I mean that it's like eating ice-cream, it slips down nicely. I don't care a fig about the characters, and so nothing's really at stake for me, and it's not psychologically disruptive. I know the author knows the answer (so why doesn't he just tell me?), and the language is bald and often cliched and there are structurally-erroneous repetitions. But there's enough action and human interest now to compensate and enough of a political theme to make it respectable, and the whole thing, including those things which initially irritated me and made me contemptuous, has become something like a comfort blanket. The main thing about it is that it hasn't interrupted my novel psyche one little bit. The experience is familiar: it's like nothing so much as reading Enid Blyton when I was a child, and then going off and immediately writing my own stories.

It does precisely the opposite of what, as a writer, I have always felt literature should ideally do. And I don't mind such literature existing, clearly it has its uses, but what I do mind is a general cultural squeezing of the sort that provokes and challenges and disturbs.

Well, I don't know, maybe some people do find The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo provocative and challenging...

Anyway, I leave you with the thoughts of a couple of other literary bloggers. Adrian Slatcher has some interesting things to say about the Sunday Time's online paywall and the marketing implications for books, and Peter Finch comments on ponderous lead-in times for print publications in the age of instant online response.

Margaret Atwood on Blogging and Twitter for authors

Further to yesterday's post I just came across this Margaret Atwood quote via Twitter, from a Literary Review interview (one good reason to have been on Twitter, ironically):

...people are trying to pile stuff onto authors, like you have to have a blog, you have to have this, you have to have that. Various party tricks. You actually don't. I would say that having done it, the blogging and Tweeting and so forth reaches possibly a different kind of reader than the kind you may have been used to hearing from. But an author's job is to concentrate on the writing, and once the writing is finished what you essentially do is throw it into a bottle and heave it into the sea, and that's the same for any method of dissemination. There's still a voyage between the text and the unknown reader; the book will still arrive at the door of some readers who don't understand it - who don't like it. It will still find some readers who hopefully do, and the process is still a scattergun approach.

Twittering and Ageing

Well, if I hadn't been so busy working on my current writing project I would have blogged about this - a Huffington Post article about the usefulness of Twitter for publishers - and the accompanying perceived need for authors to be on Twitter too, as well as online in all the other ways. (Hah! Nuff said).

I would also have taken up the current debate about age in fiction-writing (too afraid, though, of getting old and conking out before I finish writing the damn thing). I'd have mentioned the great news that an 82-year-old has just published her debut, and Robert McCrum's earlier half-retraction last week about old writers being useless. It's only half a retraction because he says that usually when older writers write something good it's just the one last flowering. This statement is rather undercut, though, by one of the writers he lists, Mary Wesley, since her offering at the age of 70-odd was her first flowering, and she went on to have several more blooms...

Suspension and Falling in Literature and Life

Latest stop on the virtual tour for Too Many Magpies is at the blog of Words from a Glass Bubble author, Vanessa Gebbie, who uses the fact that I recently had a bad fall down a flight of stairs as a thematic springboard for a pretty wide-ranging discussion about not only Magpies but my writing in general.

Guardian First Book Award Ruling

The Bookseller picks up on the dismay of small literary publishers at the introduction of an entry fee for the Guardian First Book Award. Katie Allen reports:

A number of smaller presses The Bookseller spoke to said they would not be entering. Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley, who scored a shortlisting for Matthew Hollis' Ground Water in 2004, said he could not afford to: ”All the smaller publishers are really concerned." He added: "It really affects poetry . . . For fiction [an entry fee] may be part of the promotional budget but not poetry."

Salt publishing director Jen Hamilton Emery said: ”I can understand why they have done it, but it's a lot of money. It's putting off a lot of people [from entering]. . . We always put in three entries. . . we may only put in one.” She added: ”It will exclude a lot of authors not published by big publishing houses."

Voice in Fiction

On the latest of my virtual tour stops, at poet Barbara Smith's blog, I talk about the importance of voice in fiction, and the way that, as far as I am concerned, getting the right voice dispenses with any need to 'develop' or 'profile' characters.

Writing methods

For anyone interested in writing methods - and mine in particular - I'm interviewed on the subject today on the blog of writer Tom Vowler, as part of Flying with Magpies, the virtual tour I'm conducting for my novel Too Many Magpies.

Indies triumphant then?

Further news/thoughts on small and independent publishers and literary prizes:

Writing in the Guardian about the shortlist for the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, John Dugdale points out that it is dominated by books from independents, and that since its early years this prize has given due attention to independents. Noting also that the Costa, the Orwell and the Independent Foreign Fiction prizes were all won by independents this year, and that the Orange Prize was 'two-thirds indy', he concludes that favouring books from independents is a trend in this year's prizes.

Well, this does seem a reassuring picture of the chances for independents in our UK prizes. However, I suspect that several of these prizes create more of a level playing field than the Booker (or the Dylan Thomas prize) by not requiring a payment from publishers for publicity for chosen books. I couldn't ascertain this for sure with the Samuel Johnson prize (the rules don't appear to be published on the website), and I couldn't even find a website for the IFF, but there appear to be no such restrictions for the Orange Prize (though I'm not sure the rules are printed in full), and there are certainly none for the Orwell who do publish their rules in full.

Download the PDF entry rules for the Costa and you will see that, like the Booker and the Dylan Thomas, the Costa does require a commitment of money: last year £3,000 for the winner of a category, and a further £4,000 for an overall winner. But then I also suspect that Craig Raine was quite happy (and able) to fork out for a project which must be a personal labour of love - the winning book, Christopher Reid's A Scattering being the first and, I think, so far only book of Raine's newish publishing imprint Arete (which produces a literary journal). Not exactly a parallel situation to that of most small arts-council funded imprints...

Publicity Costs and Prizes

I was reminded yesterday by a visitor to this site of an article by Robert McCrum last October about trends which perhaps explain the move by UK prize administrators to charge winning publishers fees to cover publicity costs. The main thrust of McCrum's article is that globally fiction and fiction prizes are news which receive media coverage, but he presents this as a surprise (and something of a reassurance) in view of the UK situation. Once upon a time in the UK publicity for prizes was huge and free, he says, but now:

Yesterday, as I looked through the Sunday papers over breakfast, my thoughts began to turn to Tuesday's [Booker] prize-giving ceremony in London's Guildhall. Which TV channel would be covering it this year?

Flicking through the schedules, it's as if none of the terrestrial channels is prepared to touch it with a barge pole

and he finds the same situation with radio. Through this perspective, one can perhaps understand the move towards charging publishers, but this doesn't change the fact that the net effect is to discriminate against small publishers and to contribute to a squeezing of their (often groundbreaking) work from our culture.

An Innovative Book Tour Hosting

Flying with Magpies, the virtual tour for my latest novel, receives innovative treatment today on the blog of Tania Hershman, who ingeniously portrays my novel and my aims by conducting a word association game with me.

Another Prize Problem for Small Publishers

Interestingly, since I posted yesterday about the Booker Prize rules which discriminate against smaller publishers, Neil Astley of poetry imprint Bloodaxe complained the same day on Facebook (to a chorus of dismay from other poetry publishers) that, for the first year ever, there is an entry fee for the Guardian First Book Award. The fee is £150, and if that seems derisory, then I would suggest a better acquaintance with the kind of shoestring budgets on which most poetry small publishers subsist, such as would make them think twice about submitting a new poet on the off-chance of their winning (longlisting, as someone on the Facebook thread points out, often not resulting in many sales).

The Guardian move seems even more graphically to discriminate against small presses. In the FB thread, Salt publisher Jen Hamilton-Emery points out that this has always been an expensive prize for small presses to enter, as publishers of shortlisted books are required to provide 100 copies free for the reading groups involved, thus effectively wiping out the profits on that book for a small publisher. There are similar discouraging restrictions for the Booker, which I didn't mention yesterday: for the Booker the publisher must be prepared to have 1,000 copies available 10 days after longlisting, for which, as I indicated yesterday, many small presses, used to doing smaller print runs and even POD, won't have the upfront ready cash, and which cash, again, may not be recovered in sales. And the publisher must also undertake to retain two 'folded and collated' copies for binding by a named leather binder, another thing which, it seems possible to me, could militate against publishers using alternative technologies, though I'm not an expert on this stuff, so I could be wrong. The rule doesn't state who bears the cost of the binding, so maybe at least that's part of prize...

The Best Novels or the Best-Off Publishers?

You know those vanity moments a writer gets? It's coming up to what I thought was the deadline for submitting books to the Booker, and I allowed myself to wonder: what if my publishers were thinking of putting my novel in for it? After all, my first novel was entered by the publisher I had then... I even went so far as to look up the rules. Well, the first thing I discovered was that although books have to be in by the end of June, publishers must submit an application form by the end of March, so now is too late anyway. But I also discovered this:

Any eligible book which is entered for the prize will only qualify for the award if its publisher agrees:

a) to contribute £5,000 towards general publicity if the book reaches the shortlist.

b) to contribute a further £5,000 if the book wins the prize.

I don't know if this rule has always existed, but I suspect not, and that it shows not only how far the prize has moved towards marketing and away from the pure principle of literary merit, but has come to discriminate against books from small publishers. I know it's generally recognized that, since certain winners - James Kelman, I think - failed to sell in the expected numbers even after winning, the prize has moved towards the principle of saleability, and one could argue that this applies to all publishers, large and small alike, and all publishers are thus likely to enter their more saleable literary books. One could argue about the rightness of this, in the broader literary-cultural terms, but, assuming that any prize is allowed to set its own principles, let's for the moment accept it. Yet it seems to me that plenty of books that look wildly saleable turn out to be mysteriously not so, and while that £5,000 payment for a shortlisting may look like chickenfeed to a large publisher, it's nothing of the sort to a small publisher on a shoestring. And even if shortlisting is going to bring them returns many times over they may simply not have the ready cash to make the payment upfront...

How Much Do We Owe Editors?

An interesting review by Maggie Gee of Robert Edric's latest book in today's Observer, in which she raises the issue of the decline of editing by publishers.

What Are Blogs for?

Daniel Green at The Reading Experience responds to the recent announcement that the US Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog is to abandon the "discussion model" and replace it with "a daily news feed with links and excerpts from other outlets around the world." I thoroughly agree with his view:

Is more "information" what we really need? ...does it just reduce the discussion of poetry to the same relentless focus on trivia that characterizes the coverage of movies, of celebrity culture in general? What seems to me to be motivating the Harriet change of approach--what seems to be motivating the Twitterization of online discourse in general--is precisely the desire to see what is posted disseminated "far and wide through various status updates, wall postings, and links," not a concern for the substance of the post. The mere accumulation of friends, followers, and hits, evidence of "interaction," is the end-in-itself.

The digest form of weblog has existed from the beginnings of the blogosphere, is probably the original, most recognizable form of blog. Plenty of them still exist and provide useful "news." If Twitter now performs this function more efficiently, so be it, but that doesn't seem to be a good reason to transform all blogs into versions of Twitter. Both poetry and fiction need more "discursive blogs" examining the news that stays news, not fewer.

The Writer's Need for Silence

From a review by Kathryn Hughes of Maggie Gee's memoir My Animal Life in Saturday's Guardian Review:

In one of the most powerful parts of the book she lays bare an awful period in the mid-90s when her editor at HarperCollins turned her sixth book down flat. Part of the problem, he explained helpfully, was that lots of people hadn't really heard of her and, in an age when "profile" counted, this was proving tricky. Gee hadn't been in the habit of going to the right literary parties, preferring to stay at home with her husband and child and simply write. She'd always believed that the work was what mattered and now she was paying the price for her ignorance/arrogance.

I hope that's ironic, that 'ignorance/arrogance'. The trouble is, as Robert McCrum indicates this week, the writing of a novel can need the kind of immersion in solitude which Maggie Gee was cultivating, and with which all those other activities increasingly associated with the life of a writer - networking and marketing - can interfere.

It so happens that similar matters are touched on in my visit today to writer Nuala Ni Chonchuir's blog, for the virtual tour for my novel Too Many Magpies. She asks me about my typical day and how I fit other such things in with writing, and this is part of my answer:

I can only write well to my own satisfaction, I find, when I can become truly obsessed with what I'm working on and entirely adrift on its dream world... My ideal writing day ... is to write from nine in the morning until about half-one, after which time I'm pretty done in and need to stretch and get some exercise ... as well as, most importantly, have some pondering time for the next day's writing bout. Well, I wish! Now I so often spend the rest of the day into the evening on the web doing all the things we writers need to do nowadays to market our books - and end up with nothing else done and the next day's writing unpondered, and feeling really frazzled!

Is Colm Toibin the Greatest Living Prose Stylist?

The latest discussion of my reading group was on Costa-Award winning Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, and illustrates perfectly, I think (as Adele Geras notes in the comments) that no book can please everyone, and it takes all sorts...

Flying with Magpies: Stop 2

This week's stop on the virtual book tour for my novel Too Many Magpies is at the blog of the thoughtful and erudite John Baker, who reviews the book (very positively, I'm thrilled to say). He also asked me some searching questions about my aims in writing novels and, since this is a theme of the book, our present-day sense of ourselves in the world. You can find his questions and my answers in the comments section of his post.

Judged by Your Covers?

There's an extremely interesting article in yesterday's Observer about the different covers given to the same book in different countries - and a fabulous colour spread which, in the print edition, makes you so glad of the day our newspapers took to colour!

The difference in designs is staggering - Everything Is Illuminated represented in France by a man fondling a woman's breasts, for godssake (?!). Perhaps the most interesting point is that, according to designers interviewed, in both Europe and the US there's less of a sense of the need to hide 'literariness' - covers for literary fiction in Europe are plainer because literary fiction sells better than in the UK, and in the US 'literariness' is deliberately and proudly flagged. What a philistine lot we are in Britain, and no wonder Nick Clegg got it in the neck after claiming a fondness for Beckett!

On the other hand, one commentator believes that there's no real need for these geographical differences, and that it all comes down to 'bloody-mindedness' and pride.

Flying With Magpies

I'm beginning a blog tour today for my latest novel, Too Many Magpies (Salt). Sue Guiney asks me about the inspiration and impetus for the novel, and the experience of writing for different forms.

What do Writers Want?

Here's a great article by Kate Pullinger on the needs of writers that should be kept in mind as changes occur the publishing industry. And it's a measure of the way that those needs have been squeezed so far that it almost comes as a (ridiculous) shock to find her making such a statement of requirements.

Are Publishers Anti-Male?

Well, after the discussion under my last post, here's an interesting article on the Huffington Post claiming that there's anti-male bias in publishing. Thanks to Sam Jordison via Twitter.

It's a Man's World

Anyone who thinks that there is no need for the Orange Prize or any form of such positive discrimination for women, should read Bidisha's witty and excoriating assessment of the gender imbalance in the arts in today's Guardian. She presents an irrefutable list of instances (including review pages, arts events, festivals, theatre, literary prizes) which are overwhelmingly balanced in favour of men. She notes that

in 41 years of the Booker prize the jury has been male dominated 30 times. There have been 28 male winners and 15 female winners. That said, the one time there were four women and one man on the jury, in 1986, they chose Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils over Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. God. Why do women love misogynists so much? Is it Stockholm syndrome? [Yes, I'd say: women are always bending over backwards not to be thought feminists or even female.]

She comments that

it's all the more galling given that women equal or outnumber men as attendees of arts festivals, concerts, readings, discussions and debates, and as arts and humanities students at university. Women write, read, edit and publicise more fiction than men Women make up the majority of executive, PR and organisational staff in arts and cultural institutions. Women's ticket revenue, licence fees, book purchases and entrance fees are being used to fund events at which women artists and thinkers are marginalised with breathtaking obviousness.

She points out too how the perception of this situation is skewed - even for those with the truth most closely under their noses:

When I was judging the Orange prize last year we all noticed how major bookshops consistently stacked 10 men's books to every one woman's book on its "recommended read" tables – in whatever genre. In one bookshop, fellow judge Martha Lane Fox was told barefacedly by the sales guy that this was because men published 10 times as much fiction as women.

She's sick, she says, of being the token woman on panels, and she's no longer prepared 'to give my time and attention – and implicitly, my support – to any event, such as the debates at How The Light Gets In, that gives space to five times as many men as women.'

I suppose this means that she'll no longer light up the discussions on Newsnight Review, or whatever it's called since it dumbed itself down, and on which, I've always noted, the men panelists outnumber the women. Shame.

The Problems of Complexity

The latest discussion of my reading group, on Toni Morrison's Beloved, is here.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this discussion is the difficulty the members had with the complex structure of the novel, a structure without which it seems to me Toni Morrison could not have conveyed her material with emotional and psychological truth - which raises some interesting questions about the tension between the cultural and political need for innovation/complexity and its problems.

Edge Hill Long List Announced

Good to see that this year the Edge Hill Short Story Prize has published a long list. It seems to me that if the aim of a prize is to draw attention to and indeed to promote a burgeoning short-story culture, then giving publicity to as many as possible of the high-calibre collections entered is a very good idea.

Congratulations to all on the long list, which includes A L Kennedy, previous shortlister Robert Shearman, and two of my fellow Salt authors, Nuala ni Chonchuir and Mark Illis.

Orange Prize Shortlist, Connections and Misery

The Orange Prize shortlist is announced, and the interesting story of Rosie Alison, the shortlister who didn't get a single national review, becomes even more interesting: turns out she had a prominent books industry connection she made a point of not using, and her now shortlisted novel was turned down over and over until independent Alma Books picked it up.

And Daisy Goodwin continues with her theme of too much misery in women's fiction: 'The Lovely Bones has a lot to answer for', we are told she says today.

My Reading Group Archive

It's occurred to me to put links to my reading group discussions on this blog - I'm not really sure why it hasn't occurred to me before: maybe the fact that they seem so personal has meant that they seemed most suitable for my more personal, author blog, where I have been posting them in the last year or so (they've appeared on my website all along). But they are of course an interesting insight into the nature of reading and something of the cultural context into which we write and publish books.

We're a mixed sex group - quite often the men outnumber the women - and not a particularly overtly literary group: my partner John Ashbrook and I are writers (and earlier on we had another couple of writers), but the rest are a retired lecturer in criminal justice, a patent officer, a textile conservator, a furniture maker who once dropped out of an Engineering degree, a pharmacist, a counsellor and an accountant. (At one time we had a hospital doctor.) An eleventh member, who was originally a crew member for BA, left the group temporarily to study for a literature degree, and so he's jumped the divide. But it's not a divide, after all, I find: this mixed-sex group of people with non-literary professions is quite passionate about novels. As a writer, I've found this very heartening, but also very educative: while the group may not be exactly a representative demographic, one or two of the members are avid readers of populist fiction as well as the so-called 'literary', and to this writer it's a valuable lesson in reader-expectation and taste.

Our latest discussion was on J G Ballard's The Kindness of Women, which is on my other blog here, and recent discussions have included Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (John's take on it took us all aback) and very divided opinions about The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. All of our discussions for the past seven-plus years can be found on my website: a list of the books we've discussed (with links to the discussions) is here, and if you want to see how our discussions have developed, a chronological archive is here.

The 'Lost' Booker Prize

Although I am known here to be pretty dubious about competitions including the literary (and of course would be a marketing-literary fool not to be pleased to win one!), I'm giving two cheers for the 'Lost Booker Prize', precisely because it shows up the (often unacknowledged) arbitrary nature of such prizes: the books eligible for this one are those which fell between the two stools of eligibility the year that the deadline for submission for the Booker Prize was changed. Not so thrilled by the voting system, though: anyone can vote online, without having bothered to read all of the shortlisted books, presumably - or even any of them, I guess. Though on second thoughts, that makes a nice mockery of the whole idea of winners, doesn't it...?

Comedy versus Tragedy

Once again I haven't been blogging here. Partly it's because I've been working on a new publication, a reissue of my first novel The Birth Machine, which has taken up much of the time and headspace left over from any actual writing I've managed to do. But partly, too, I have to admit there's the loss of impetus which others have reported, connected to the rise of Facebook and Twitter. As Tania Hershman says, on social networking sites you can get instant feedback and have instant conversations - and without having to write whole mini-essays - and reach a wider audience than just the blogging fraternity. Another thing which has struck me is that by the time you get around to blogging about an issue, on Twitter or Fb things have moved on, and it's become old hat.

But that, precisely, is the value of blogs. The reason that sometimes one doesn't instantly get around to blogging about an issue is that blogs can take a commitment of time, and the reason they do us that is that they can also take a commitment of thought. A blog, it seems to me, is an excellent vehicle for contemplating nuances which can easily be submerged in instant discussions. Take for instance the recent issue of Orange Prize Chair Daisy Goodwin's plea for women writers to lighten up. I've been mulling this for some time, and wondering why I didn't want to join in the discussions, and why something about it all has worried me. Once I had a moment free from retrieving files from old computers and reading proofs, it struck me.

I know there were one or two more subtle voices, but the general thrust of the conversation on the web seemed to fall into bald either-or arguments: there were those who believed that women were too miserable and those who didn't and thought men were just as bad; there were those who were for comedy and those who weren't. Even the intelligent article by Erica Wagner in The Times arguing that comedy is harder to do than tragedy (comedy requires a particularly incisive verbal facility) seemed to imply that comedy is therefore better.

Why does one have to be better than the other? Aren't they simply different sides of the coin of human nature, expressions of different but equally valid individual and social states of mind? Sometimes comedy answers our emotional needs, sometimes tragedy does. Why, as artists, can't we do both? (I certainly like to.)

I'm troubled by this thrust towards either/or and black-and-white thinking, and not just as a writer fighting the culture of branding.

Author Blog Awards

I've been asked to let you know about the Author Blog Awards being run by CompletelyNovel in association with Quartet, Allison and Busby, Simon and Schuster and BookBrunch. Here's what they say they're all about:

There are over 10,000 published and unpublished authors blogging to readers, writers and industry professionals. Despite huge loyal followings and a remarkable wealth of new content, many readers remain unaware of these blogs.

The Author Blog Awards aim to honour the best blogs by both published and unpublished writers. They will recognise the writers who use their blogs to connect with readers in the most imaginative, engaging and inspiring ways. At the same time we hope to attract new audiences to these blogs and help readers find out more about the authors they love…and new authors too.

You can nominate your favourite author blog to win an award and will also have the chance to win something from a selection of prizes including free eReaders, new books, free eBooks, and book tokens. There are three categories: Best Published Author Blog, Best Unpublished Author Blog, and Best Author Microblog. The winners will be announced in April.

Go to the site here.

Crossposted with Elizabeth Baines.

Stationery Lust

I love Hilary Mantel's Guardian article about stationery and its relationship to our writing processes. I am so gratified by her praise for the loose leaf and the ring binder as the best media for writing novels, and her denunciation of the bound notebook, in particular the Moleskine, and its straitjacket of linearity, which I totally agree is not the way you write novels. (And I'm so glad she said it for me: 'Chatwin, Hemingway: has the earth ever held two greater posers?'). 'You must be able to loop back on yourself,' she says, 'and to be able to arrange the elements of which your story consists in an order that is entirely flexible.' And she's right: crossings out won't do: you need to be able to restore those bits you abandoned when you realize they are necessary after all.

Mantel says that 'at twilight' she starts dreaming about old-fashioned stationery: 'pink tape, for instance, that barristers use to tie up their bundles'. But I can go one better: I actually have it! (Don't ask me where to get it, someone gave it to me years ago, a huge cardboard roll of it, and I don't know where they got it.) I use it to tie up those old drafts which, you never know, I might loop back to for those bits I do need after all. And she wonders if you can still still get treasury tags. Well, I can tell her, yes you can, in Staples - or you could last time I needed them - and I use them all the time to bind plays, and yes, there's something really nice about threading those lovely dark-green strings with their sharp metals ends through the holes... Ah, stationery!

Jewish Book Week: A Beginner's Guide to Jews on the Edge

Billed as a discussion between novelists Will Self and Adam Thirwell about 'the many possible manifestations of Judaism - half-Jews, non-Jewish Jews, self-hating Jews, anti-semitic Jews et al - and whether any of these semitic permutations actually matters', this Sunday afternoon session could not have been more different in atmosphere from the Theresienstadt session I attended in the morning. Maybe it was the jokey billing, maybe it was the thought of Will Self's rebellious intellect, but long before it began there was a thrill of anarchy and rebellion in the air. Having been late for the morning session, I determined to be early for this one, entering as people were leaving from the last session, only to find myself, along with other early arrivers, turfed out for security reasons. Well, the woman in front of me and in the front row wasn't having that. She refused to move, she said she needed that seat, she was hard of hearing, and they would have to lift her bodily (and, as she pointed out, she wasn't exactly petite), and things were held up as they failed to remove her and the rest of us exiles watched the altercation from the door, highly entertained.

Well, I got my seat behind her back, and the huge hall filled up almost to capacity. Adam Thirwell kicked off by pointing out that he and Self hadn't chosen the title of the event, and, needless to say (and gratifyingly for me) the thrust of their interest turned out to be literary rather than sociological. They had had the idea, Self said, while at a literary festival in Lyon, and as a result of a talk in praise of the novelist Celine, a passionate anti-semite. Turning to examine the concepts of Jewishness held by Jews and others, he said that when he tells Gentiles that he is half-Jewish, they often ask which of his parents is Jewish, and when he says his mother they say, 'Oh, well, you're Jewish then!', and he found it interesting that Jews had managed to impose so successfully on Gentiles this matrilineal notion of Jewishness. For him, he said, such a notion simply doesn't add up: his mother wasn't observant, and he feels it ill behoves him to claim to be more than half Jewish.

Thirwell then said he was a matrilineal Jew (ie he wasn't claiming the matrilineal notion, just saying his mother is Jewish), but 'barely cultural', and he feels embattled when he is forced to 'be' more Jewish than he feels because of this matrilineal notion. Why was it not possible to have a two-part identity? Self referred to a piece he had written for the Jewish Quarterly, 'On Writing Half-Jewishly', which he said he had thought a sweet little piece, but had been attacked for it by the author Cynthia Ozik, who said that he may be famous but if he claims placelessness he can only be a blur; that people are born whole not half. Untrue, said Self (rightly): people are born multifarious.

In fairness, though, said Self, we have to look at it historically. Up until very recently it was possible to hear casually anti-semitic remarks (and older people are far more familiar with the experience). Self had memories of hearing them as late as the eighties, and each time he had had a choice in terms of identity: either to express a Jewish identity or deny it by remaining silent (implying that neither expressed the truth of his sense of identity). The state of half or demi can only be realized in the absence of anti-semitism.

There is an interesting category, he said, where Jewishness is often formed against anti-semitism, and I was reminded of Philipp Manes's growing espousal of Jewishness in the Theresienstadt ghetto, as discussed in the morning - which momentarily made me lose my grip on the current discussion, and the point that Self went on to make about Sartre (who wrote that 'if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him'). We have to look at it all, Self said, in terms of the diaspora and the 1880s and 1890s pogroms. One interesting thing is the reaction of indigenous Jews to that of 'stetl' Jews, as they called them; the ambivalence towards the latter, particularly from Sephardic aristocratic Jews. At this Thirwell commented that one strand of his family had been very established, but another strand had arrived from Lithuania in this era, and one of the things that interested him was this intermingling (by which I think he meant the interest of multifariousness within Jewishness.) Self said that at first there had been a repression of these newcomers, then acceptance and fast assimilation aided by a religious mission and the opening of numerous synagogues.

So where does that leave us as writers? Self asked, getting to (for me) the nub of the matter. Self-hating, said Thirwell, which people half-laughed at, but which actually sent off a ripple of shock. What is a Jewish writer? Self asked. Would we only be Jewish writers if we wrote in Hebrew or Yiddish? The two then discussed Kafka, a Jewish writer who wrote in German as a way of 'avoiding his fathers' (Self) but who wrote of being, in doing so, like a donkey with its back legs stuck in mud and its front legs flailing. Thirwell pointed out the similarities of this to the image of the cockroach on its back in Metamorphosis - the fact that Kafka was obsessed with the notion of the difficulties of linguistic assimilation and mutant forms. He also noted that Kafka had problems with the word 'Mutter' - he felt it was not his word, it seemed far too comical to describe a Jewish mother.

Self said, but as far as he knew Kafka's family were assimilated and didn't speak Yiddish in the home at all, and the fact that he wrote in a very Czech German wasn't commensurate with his having a Yiddish background. Thirwell said but the fact is that there was a there was a Yiddish theatre in Prague at the time which attracted Kafka as having a more sincere language. In any case, Self said, Kafka seems the paradigmatic example of the fact that you can't really speak of Jewish writers in relation to language. He is marked out for his quality of prescience of the coming Holocaust, and while you can say he is a paradigmatic Jewish writer, he is a world writer at the same time. Thirwell said though that he did think there was something in Kafka that was in danger of being lost: that he represents a way of thinking about what assimilation and identity mean, that he is concerned with complicated identity; and Self agreed that there was a dialectical process of assimilation taking place (analagous with what took place in the 1960s here) (and which the Shoah would replace with a different set of priorities) which involved anxieties about assimilation.

Thirwell now turned the conversation to the issue of the Jew as victim in literature. Roth admired Bellow, he said, but attacks Bellow for returning in his later fiction to a Gentile-imposed model of the Jew as victim. We must stop acting as victims, Roth said: it's not always 1933. (Though it felt very close this morning, I couldn't help thinking.) In Thirwell's opinion one strand in American fiction does think it's still 1933, that there is still a tragedy about to happen, and Israel has a role in this perception. Self agreed: Israel is made to stand as proxy for this historical memory. Both agreed that, in spite of his criticisms of Bellow, Roth himself has failed to come to terms with victimology and the trap of the self-hating Jew. Self now expressed the view that Roth, in his flight from humanism and his fear that it could drive him back to Judeo-Christianity, is a curiously cold, dessicated, arid writer. Thirwell noted that on the level of structure and form, Roth is an interesting writer, but on the sentence level he is indeed dessicated, bland, and here the conversation turned to an issue which was of greatest interest of all to me, the issue of Jewishness and literary style.

Self noted that Kafka wrote a kind of unornamented anti-style, whereas Proust could be placed at the other extreme, consisting of a highly stylised anxiety about Jewish assimilation. Thirwell said that, re Kafka, even so he creates a specific Kafka-language, which Self said was a microcosm of a pre-existant dialect, a crudescence of a certain kind of Czech German. In Proust, Thirwell said, it's a question of who you're allowed to desire, and the (unfettered) style is an expression of that - the problem of borders. Self referred to Otto Weininger's pre-WW1 book Sex and Character in which he characterizes the Jew as hermaphroditic, a book which was influential on both Proust and Joyce (who of course presented a positive non-victim portrait of a Jew).

This was all getting extremely interesting to me when the hard-of-hearing woman in front of me stood up and said Couldn't we ask questions? and started to ask one which appeared to be intended to bring the whole thing back to what she seemed to consider the matter in hand, the question of half- and quarter-Jewishness (maybe she hadn't heard their protestation that they weren't responsible for the thrust of the title).

There was now a bit of an altercation: the audience shouted out for discussion to continue rather as it had been doing, and the woman sat down, but accused Self of delaying the start of the session (and so running on too long) by taking too long eating his lunch, at which Self quipped, No, it was drugs. The thread of the argument was sadly lost. What we were trying to say, said Self, is that it's good to stand outside as a writer (to be half), and Thirwell got back to the issue of language/style by saying that every writer creates his or her own minor language anyway, and there are certain ways in which the issue of language gets inflected by identity, and there was a brief discussion about Bashevis Singer.

After that, the floor really was thrown open to questions. One of the most interesting was the first: a woman asked what they thought about Pinter who she felt lost by never declaring his Jewishness in his work. Self said that he liked her style! which caused laughter, but Thirwell defended Pinter by pointing out that Ashes to Ashes is a play about the Holocaust, and asked why anyone has to be Jewish in their writing. Self said, Yes, are we looking at him through identity politics he wouldn't have agreed with, or is there really a lack in his work? But then do we think Beckett paid attention to his Irishness in his writing? Yes, of course he did! Thirwell said, But does this have anything to do with whether or not these two are good writers? Self said perhaps all the silences in Pinter are really him saying, 'I'm Jewish! I'm Jewish'! which caused a good deal of laughter.

Jewish book Week runs until Sunday March 7th, and you can book for events here.

Jewish Book Week: Philipp Manes: A Theresienstadt Chronicle

A session chaired by Victoria Glendinning, in which editors Ben Barkow and Klaus Leist read from and discussed As If It Were Life, an account by Pilipp Manes of life in the Czech ghetto of Theresienstadt.

Asked to blog for Jewish Book Week, I instantly chose to cover this session. The Jewish ghetto Theresienstadt had haunted me since reading WG Sebold's Austerlitz, and then last month, on my trip to Prague, I visited the place, isolated among the flat fields, and was overcome, as was Sebold's narrator, and as were my companions, by an oppressive desolation which seems to hang over the place. Built in the late eighteenth century as a garrison town for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was emptied in October 1941, its population relocated, and designated as a collection point for Jews from Bohemia and Moravia (today's Czech Republic) and from Germany and German-occupied territories. It is remarkable for having been used by the Nazis as an apparently (I use the word 'apparently' advisedly) model ghetto to disguise the Nazi's extermination plans, in particular to receive an investigatory visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and for its seemingly deliberate concentration of Jews who were well-known outside the Jewish community, members of the professional, intellectual and artistic elites.

Philipp Manes, a Berlin furrier in his sixties, and his wife were taken to Theresienstadt in July 1942, and were there until October 1944 when they were transported to Auschwitz and were two of the last people to enter the gas chambers. During his time in Theresienstadt, Manes, who had always been an enthusiastic diarist, wrote in nine notebooks his detailed account of life in the ghetto where he played a key role as an artistic impresario, developing an intellectual and artistic community which served as a kind of spiritual resistance against imprisonment and debilitating conditions. He seems to have intended the account for publication after the war, and once his final deportation was due he handed it secretly for safe keeping to a fellow inmate who survived. Tragically, the memoir ends in mid-sentence when Manes was deported. After some difficulties and delays, in 1948 the manuscript finally reached his daughter Eva in London. Eventually the manuscript was deposited, along with others of Manes' writings, in the Wiener Library in London, but only in 2005 did it find a publisher and only in 2009 was it translated into English.

The book, which I am half-way through reading, is a fascinating and contradictory expression of fear and hope, of critical reportage and German-patriotic pride in hard work and achievement, and of descriptions of harsh conditions alongside those of soaring artistic and intellectual pursuit - a remarkable expression, in fact, of the reality conundrum that Theresienstadt must have been.

I'm afraid I was a little late arriving at this session, and it had already begun as I entered. There was a deep hush over the room, and a quiet dignity about the three-person panel. Editor Ben Barkow, director of The Wiener Library, was providing an account of Pilipp Manes' life before he entered Theresienstadt: his childhood love of the theatrical, the travel and connection with the artistic community he enjoyed as an employee of the New Photographic Society, the later necessity of taking over his father's furrier firm, the loss of freedom and property as the Nazis put pressure on the Jews, and the consolation he found in writing.

Editor Klaus Leist then read from the very moving account Manes wrote at this time, Last Days in Berlin, which forms the Prologue to this book and describes the preparations Manes and his wife were forced to make for departure, and their feelings of grief as they did so.

The Theresienstadt account takes up where this prologue leaves off, and Ben Barkow outlined its main events - Klaus Leist reading relevant sections - from the first horrible experience, the Schleuse (sluice) when newcomers were deprived of all possessions they had brought, afterwards being put to sleep without cover on the floor of bare stables and later of barracks. However, Manes was very soon put in charge of the 'Orientation Service', meant to direct those who were lost in the ghetto. This was necessary because although Theresienstadt was a small town, built for a population of 7,000, it now held over 50,000, many of whom were disorientated and traumatised: there are, as Barkow said, many heartbreaking stories in the book. Manes was proud of his work in the Orientation Service, which he developed into a kind of adult education centre and cultural agency, organising over 500 lectures, play readings and music concerts in two years. German officers were rarely seen in the ghetto - the place was policed by Czech gendarmes - as the administration tried to keep up an appearance of normality, which the prisoners tended to support 'for the good of the ghetto'. Many, however, sensed an air of unreality which reached its peak in the 'beautification' of the town in preparation for the Red Cross visit of June 1944. Manes's attitude, Barkow said, was realistic, if not cynical. He knew that the measures were meant to cover up the truth, but accepted them. As he wrote: 'Whatever the reasons, they make our life better.'

The main problem Manes had to contend with for his cultural project was the loss of his contributors through transport to the east or the collapse of their morale or health. No one was murdered in Theresienstadt [EB: there were no gas chambers there, though on my visit there I learned that some had begun to be built and then abandoned], but many died, so Manes always had an eye on the hospital and on departing and arriving transports. By the date of his last event, in August 1944, he had lost most of his audience and speakers.

The account describes in stark detail the horrible conditions - the bedbugs and lice, the delousing sessions, the inequities between the German and Czech Jews - and is a fascinating insight into the maintenance of the place. There was no doubt, though, said Barkow, that Manes was starstruck by the intellectual elite among his inmates, and that he felt fulfilled by his role there as a cultural impresario. Even by the end he appeared to have no complete notion of what Auschwitz really was [EB: and it's true that every so often he appears to entertain the German propaganda that it's the place of a new and perfect life for Jews].

Victoria Glendinning now opened up a discussion between the panel members, drawing attention to the peculiar conflict Manes had between being a German and a Jew. He was very much a German patriot and his attitudes, in fact, are often those of a conservative German Christian. Barkow commented that Manes' sense of cultural (rather than religious) Jewishness grew in the ghetto, and while some of his patriotic statements about the SS are troubling, it's possible that they were inserted to protect him should the memoir be discovered [a point which seems valid to me, since some of these patriotic statements follow directly on from harsh criticism of conditions]. He was in fact very proud of Jewish self-sufficiency and capacity to work in the ghetto and thus could be said to be reaching towards a notion of Zionism.

Victoria Glendinning drew attention to Manes's attitude to the Czech Jews in the ghetto [he writes with sadness and possible bitterness of the greater privileges of the Czech Jews, but with almost sentimental admiration of their youth and beauty], and Klaus Leist talked about the snobbery of Germans towards eastern Jews and the anti-German feeling on the Czech side. Czech Jews, as the first to be brought to Theresienstadt, had originally envisaged building a self-sustaining and economically viable community there and thus, by being indispensable to the Germans, ride out the war, but once older Jews were brought in from elsewhere, that dream expired. Glendinning also pointed to the paradox that Manes was perhaps more fulfilled in his role as a cultural impresario there than he perhaps had ever been before in his life - that he even seems smug about it, with which Barkow agreed. She stressed the lack of clarity in the memoir about how much Manes knew of the truth - he did after all get his children out of the country before the war, and he makes quite clear at one point [elsewhere I think] that he understands that the aim of National Socialism is the destruction of Judaism. What about this ambivalence? Was it shared by a lot of Jews? Klaus Leist said that he thought it was, and this may have been a function of wishful thinking [EB: which I think it's possible to detect in Manes's document], and maybe anyway people didn't guess that destruction meant death. Ben Barkow added that very little was known about Auschwitz; Theresienstadt was very sealed off from the world (although someone, I think Glendinning, commented that Leo Baeck knew the truth, but deliberately decided to keep it secret). Possibly Manes chose not to believe: he was, after all, a very conforming individual.

I found that perhaps for me the most moving part of this session came now, when Victoria Glendinning opened it up to two or three questions from the floor. A white-haired woman across the room said that she had been in Theresienstadt and that she didn't recognize this description of people's knowledge about Auschwitz. Some people certainly knew: if a postcard arrived from a relative in a concentration camp and they had marked it with a cross, it meant that there were gas chambers there. But then, she said, in a statement that for me summed up everything, such things operate according to denial mechanisms.

Ben Barkow is the author of Alfred Wiener and the Making of the Holocaust Library and editor of Testaments of the Holocaust.

Dr Klaus Leist works at The Wiener Library, concentrating on deciphering and translating old documents. He edited As If It Were Life, A WWII Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto by Philipp Manes with Ben Barkow.

Jewish Book Week runs until Sunday March 7th, and you can book for events here.

Salt Sale, Hard Times and Doing It for Yourself

My publishers, Salt, are having an amazing sale, and anyone interested in poetry would be advised to get on over there quick, while stocks last. Salt make beautiful books and some are going for as little as £1 !

There's a serious side to this, though, of course. The reason Salt are running this sale is that they need an emergency injection of cash if they are to keep going. The Just One Book campaign started last summer continues, and as a Salt author I am asking you once more to do that: buy just one Salt book - and brighten up your life into the bargain! If you want prose, you could buy one of my own Salt books: Balancing on the Edge of the World, a story collection that lifts the lid on some of the untold stories in our everyday lives, or my novel Too Many Magpies, on the surface a spooky tale of adultery but on the deeper level a study of our present sense of the precariousness of the world, and of the ways in which we think. (If you've got them already, why not buy one for a relative or friend - Too Many Magpies, since motherhood is one of its themes, would make a great Mothers' Day present!) Or you could buy a book by one of the great short story writers I feel privileged to be published alongside: Carys Davies, Matthew Licht, Paul Magrs, Tania Hershman, Vanessa Gebbie, Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Chrissie Gittins, Padrika Tarrant, and on... Or you could buy Salt's guide to the art of the short story, Short Circuit.

Times are hard, the publishing industry has changed, and all but the most commercial sectors of publishing are suffering. Last night I attended a meeting of north-west women writers, convened by the novelist Sherry Ashworth and others with a view to setting up a press to publish fiction by women in the north west, in response to these changes. The reality of those changes was illustrated by the fact that there were several writers present, both prize-winning and mass-market, who were now facing difficulties in publishing their latest books or had moved to small presses. Basically the feeling is now that writers must do it for themselves.

A propos this, my fellow Salt author Nuala Ni Chonchuir writes an interesting post on the subject of self-promotion by authors. I have come across criticisms on the web of authors who ceaselessly promote their own books, and I have to say that, although I try to do it conscientiously, it still goes against the grain for me, but the fact is that it's now an absolute necessity - most of all for authors with small presses, but also it seems now for most authors with big publishers. I'm sure that Vanessa Gebbie won't mind me replicating here her comment on Nuala's post:

I was at a large writer's convention last weekend, with talks from some senior figures in the publishing world - (Get Writing 2010 - and a speaker in question was the MD of Hachette) - it was a wake-up call for anyone in the audience who thought that all you had to do was get a book accepted and then sit back!

Cross-posted to my author blog.

The Pinch of Salt Rule for Writing.

Interesting that some of the 10 Rules for Writing offered by some of the authors in The Guardian tell you rather about those writers themselves.

Anne Enright's first rule, for instance: The first twelve years are the worst. Hm, obvious she's never been a mid-list author out on her ear.

Hilary Mantel's very first rule: Get an accountant. For god's sake, has she never been at the writing stage where you can't f***ing afford an accountant?

Interesting how conflicting the advice is, Atwood and others saying it's no use plodding on if something's going stale, someone (can't remember who) saying stick at it.

All relative, innit? And perhaps it's not surprising that it's the writers I like best with whom I mostly agree: Atwood, Enright (in spite of her opener), AL Kennedy, Joyce Carol Oates among others.

Jewish Book Week

I'm delighted to have been asked to blog for Jewish Book Week (27th February-27th March), and I'm covering two sessions on Sunday 28th in which I must say I'm immensely interested. After my recent visit to Theresiestadt, there was no way that I was going to miss the session at 11 am when Ben Barkow and Klaus Leist will read from and talk about the book they have edited, Philipp Manes' account of his experiences in the camp, written in the last days and broken off in mid-sentence when he was deported to Auschwitz. And at 2 pm I'm covering 'A Beginner's Guide to Jews on the Edge', a discussion between Will Self and Adam Thirwell on 'the many possible manifestations of Judaism and whether any of these semitic permutations actually matters'.

The week looks really interesting, other speakers including Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Lionel Shriver, Anne Fine, Rebecca Goldstein and Stephen Pinker. Probably a good idea to book, which you can do here. My colleague, author and blogger Sue Guiney, will also be blogging JBW.

Writers Are the New Proles

Foad Mardukhi alerts me to an article by Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, which spells out the pauperisation of writers and their loss of status in our new internet culture.

And, although I don't usually respond to requests to publicize things - once you start, you're never finished, and this is a commentary and not a listings blog - I've given in for once:

The Juniper Institute is an American summer writing conference hosted by the UMass-Amherst MFA program (www.umass.edu/juniperinstitute), giving new/emerging writers the chance to study with a stellar array of more established poets and fictionists. The April 1 deadline for scholarship applications to the 2010 Juniper Summer Writing Institute is fast approaching! From June 20-26, poets and writers will gather at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to explore the creative process and advance their craft. Faculty members Charles D’Ambrosio, Mark Doty, Noy Holland, Paul Lisicky, Dara Wier, and Matthew Zapruder will offer workshops in poetry, fiction, and memoir. Writers in residence (including James Tate, Joy Williams, and Thomas Sayers Ellis) will give readings, lead craft sessions, and participate in Q&As. For application forms and more information, visit http://www.umass.edu/juniperinstitute. Workshops fill quickly, so applicants are encouraged to submit their materials soon.

Who'd Be a Writer?

Apologies for the recent absence from this blog, which was due to much busy-ness. One of the very many things which preoccupied me was a visit to a private secondary school to conduct workshops with younger classes and to talk to upper school classes about the whole business of being a writer. My readers may be interested to know that the matter of greatest concern for the future guardians of our culture appeared to be that of Making a Living, and achieved its best expression when I addressed the whole of Year 10 in the hall at the end of the day:

Boy 1: What's your best-selling book?

Boy 2: How many of it have you sold?

Response of shock at the figure of 3,000 (they opened by asking me if I like Twilight, and know that it has sold in the millions), and I explain that I write literary and not commercial fiction, and that it's not on the whole possible to make a living out of literary fiction.

Boy 3 (puzzled): But what's the difference between literary and commercial fiction?

I explain, essentially that literary fiction doesn't obey the expected formulae, isn't simply entertainment.

Boy 4 (a bit incredulous): So why don't you write commercial fiction that sells?

I explain that though I may sometimes have thought of it, basically I can't and don't want to: I'm looking for the truth rather than just to entertain, and I'm constitutionally incapable of doing the expected thing (adding that I was always in trouble at school, which raises a titter).

Boy 4 (really incredulous): How do you buy things?

I explain that I do other things for money such as talks like the one I am giving now.

Boy 5: So isn't it just a hobby then, rather than a job?


Hm. Not so sure I fired up that particular lot to be writers...

Channel 4's Book Club

So you decide to have a television Book Club. Book Club. Note the precise phrase. For we all know, don't we, what book clubs are like? No one's really there for the books, are they? They're there for the wine, for the chat about house prices and bags and shoes, and the chosen book is just an excuse. So this is what we'll do for a television book club. We can't have wine, of course, well, not beyond the Green Room, but we can have the intoxication of celebrity, a very likeable fashion guru who confesses to read far less than he'd like, a couple of well-loved comedians (one of each sex), and a couple of good-looking actors (one of each sex again) who will at least be able to act looking interested and intelligent even if it's a bit obvious they're acting and even if the female ex-Footballers' Wives Laila Rouass never manages to say anything (and the camera will be able to focus strategically up the thighs of her crossed legs).

Stick them all randomly on sofas (that's how book clubs happen, don't they - people just turn up and plonk down on the nearest seat). Don't bother briefing them, that would be really unrealistic: in book clubs people just say the first thing that comes into their heads, and the biggest personalities get to say the most (although rarely the most considered). Make the main focus of your programme the writer of a celebrity memoir. He will be the focus, even though the billed focus is a novel. He will be the focus not only because the other celebrities are more excited by his presence than the novel, and because he and the female comedian immediately start a basically private but very entertaining bit of sparring (in which she also gets to plug her own celebrity memoir) (this is the sort of thing that happens in book clubs, isn't it?) but because you have allocated the greatest amount of time on the programme to this item. And the questioning is not only entirely adulatory, but focused not so much on his book but on his life. Well, you get a lot of that in books clubs, don't you, people going on about life rather than books, and, let's face it, who after all really wants dry old literary stuff - that's just gonna put people off books, isn't it?

So let's put the serious bookish bit off a bit more by an interview with a mega-selling chick-lit author who can provide some glamour and success and riches and stuff, and then by having a nice little lark, a film of a reporter rushing around Spitalfields with strange words stuck on big cards like street signs, getting charmingly engaged with the public (and hope it doesn't seem embarrassingly forced).

Well, it's getting towards the end of the programme now, so better bite the bullet and have a bit of a film of the serious novel's author talking intelligently about it (though sweeten the pill with some lurid spooky photography).

And finally, with five or fewer minutes to go, the promised discussion, which you have billed as the point of programme. The fashion guru says without elaboration that he doesn't go for Gothic stuff. The female comedian looks a bit uninterested in this, and fails to give an opinion of her own. Well, that's what it's like in book clubs, isn't it? No one's obliged to say anything, after all. Others make a few murmurs, and the general impression is that no one likes it very much. Well, that's how it goes: people in book clubs are so often far more interested in their own egos than books.

And that's it. Book club over. Really authentic. Brilliant.

Reading and the masses

Robert McCrum can't understand why, when book programmes are just about the cheapest to make and there's such interest in book festivals despite the fact that they're not even much hyped, there are in fact hardly any books programmes on TV.

Down with the internet - or at least off into part of the day!

Many bloggers are announcing their New Year resolutions, which is something I usually only do in the privacy of my journal: yes, I still have one of those old-fashioned black-and-red hardback A4 books in which I record by hand my writing thoughts, though I must say I write in it far less often nowadays since the internet has swallowed up so much of my time.

And here's the rub. I want to make a resolution to stop using the internet so much, since it has not only eaten into my writing time, but as Tania Hershman has indicated lately, and as David Ulin wrote recently, the presence of the internet in one's life can create a kind of scattering of focus that is entirely antipathetic to the writing of fiction, which for me, and I am sure for most fiction writers, requires a kind of shutting-off into a very personal dream world. It goes without saying that I thoroughly enjoy the social interaction, and the internet has been a stupendous marketing tool for both my recent books, but let's face it, it's like having social get-togethers and sales pitch meetings in your house all day long, and who can write under those circumstances?

But how can I make such a resolution, when the marketing of my books, which come from an independent publisher, depends on my being very much online? Would making such a resolution be the same as making a resolution to stop marketing my books? I'm very much afraid of this, but I guess I'm even more afraid of ending up never writing again.

Later this year (I think - or sometime soon, anyway) Salt will be reprinting the revised edition of my first novel The Birth Machine (which I guess is a bit of a feminist classic - see here [scroll down to Kimberley Osivwemu's entry]), so I'll have to work on promoting that, as well as keeping my other books afloat. But like Tania Hershman, I'm going to try to restrict my time on the internet each day. It will be interesting to see if it's just as effective, and if by being constantly connected I was just wasting time...

I'm posting this across my two blogs, as it seems both very personal to my own writing and a subject of more general literary import.

The (Dis)Comfort of the Familiar

In today's Guardian John Dugdale assesses the implications of the 2009 Bestsellers list, which is dominated by genre fiction, and from which literary fiction and non-fiction are largely exiled (can't find a link, I'm afraid):

...there's a narrowing of the range of work that sells in bulk, a sense of the public grasping for novels that will conform to a familiar structure.