Big Slices of the Literary Tart

Neither Bournemouth Runner at the Art of Fiction nor Roger Morris are as pleased with the McCrum article as I was (see previous post), and both take him as attacking the first-time novelists who receive big advances.

I don't think that's what McCrum was doing. He wasn't as clear he should have been (he didn't exactly explain the processes at work), but I think he was attacking rather the way that big advances operate in the present literary climate, and the bad effect they can have on some novelists who receive them, a problem discussed in the latest issue of the lit mag Mslexia.

First let me say that I know from bitter experience how bad it can be to get a small advance. The publisher has invested so little in you that they have nothing to lose in not bothering to market and publicise your novel properly, so in the small advance there can be an inbuilt failure. This was the point pressed home by the late agent Giles Gordon, and why he was the pioneer of Big Advances. (If McCrum seemed to be denying the potential evils of the small advance, it was perhaps out of an elitist naivity: he was once fiction editor at Faber which at the time, unlike my own publisher, respected and nurtured the careers of their literary authors even if they didn't pay them big advances at the start. )

However, it no longer works that a big advance is proof of a publisher's commitment to an author, and it's the big advance that can now bring inbuilt failure, just as it has for Gautam Malkani, the author of Londonstani, whom McCrum cites. All advances have to be earned back via sales, and if they don't do so - since nowadays the only thing publishers are interested in is money - you are by definition a Failure. This is what I think McCrum is referring to when he says that publishing today can't brook failure - it was a comment on PUBLISHERS' PERCEPTION of books, which is always determined by the immediate return on any advance. It doesn't take much calculating to work out that the bigger the advance, the closer you're sailing to the wind in this respect: whatever great reviews you get, however many thousands you sell, if you don't sell a zillion, the publisher will look on you askance next novel round, cos last time they LOST MONEY ON YOU. (Don't forget it's the financiers who rule the publishing houses nowadays, not the editors.) And they have ways of knowing, too: nowadays they can press a button and up comes your incriminating point-of-sale record: Look, only fifty-thousand copies sold, when we paid the bastard half a million!!!! (Hand across the throat).

The worst aspect of this scenario is that in order to try to make sure they recoup a big advance publishers are tempted into over-hyping books and tempting fate. The reviewers had it in for Londonstani: instead of praising it as a 'promising debut' as McCrum thinks they should have done, their main interest was the fact that the hype and the ridiculous advance were misplaced, the bad reviews affected sales and as McCrum points out, Londonstani is now being airbrushed from the bookshops and literary records (except that we guys are banging on about it!)

In other words, an author's welfare and literary development are the last thing publishing houses are concerned with nowadays. Big advances are all about making money for the publishing houses, and authors' careers can be and are sacrificed on this altar. I think this is what McCrum is saying. He's also saying something even more important in the longer and less author-centric term: that publishers are not interested in literature, in the actual writing, and that we've consequently ended up in a culture of trashy books, but even here by implication he's championing overlooked writers of decent stuff.

For the reasons above, as I have pointed out before, publishers are always nowadays on the lookout for the Next New Thing, ie first-time authors: virginal first-timers don't have any incriminating sales record cos they don't have any at all, and still therefore have the theoretical potential to be bestsellers. It's why I'm always saying that every new literary sensation nowadays is, through no fault of his or her own, a has-been in the making.

Lit-Lite

In an article in today's Observer Review, Has the Novel Lost Its Way? Robert McCrum charts the changes in publishing since the sixties when the world of literary fiction was low-key and unashamedly elitist and novelists were not celebrities or highly paid. He pinpoints the instigation of both the Booker prize and the Hay on Wye Festival as the moments which nudged the Cult of the Literary Celebrity into being. The thrust of his argument is that, while seeming to both democratise literary novels and rehabilitate novels and novelists, this cultural trend has in fact led, as I myself am always whining, to the trashing of any novelist who fails to retrieve ridiculously unrealistic advances, and also to 'Lit-Lite': a short route to a quick buck, a blast of instant celebrity and a text devoid of consequence or meaning.

Two Fingers

Here's an artists' project after my own heart: http://www.hewittandjordan.com/work/willnot.html

Hewitt and Jordan, two Sheffield-based artists, are interrogating the whole con of art as a function of urban regeneration, and their latest project is a plan to distribute free to the whole population of Manchester badges bearing the slogan I will not accept 'the way things are'. I'm getting mine as soon as I can!

Enough To Put You Off Your Spaghetti

Once upon a time I was running a literature project and the Arts Council sent me on a marketing course. (This was where this particular tranche of money was going: not to any poverty-stricken writers needing to buy time to write, but in fees to the guys running the course and in putting them and eight of us art-worker geezers up in a London hotel for a whole weekend.) At the very first workshop, the very nice guy running it stunned us all with a beautifully graphic illustration of the marketing philosophy we were supposed to apply to our projects and were going to spend the weekend learning how.

He got a spaghetti spoon out of his bag (one of those flattish things with holes or slits or something). He said, 'Put up your hands if you like spaghetti.' All eight of us put up our hands. Then he said, 'How many of you eat spaghetti at home?' All of us except a gnarled and hairy editor of a poetry mag and a jumpered runner of a community literature project put up our hands again. 'How many of you do the cooking?' Only three of us put up our hands. 'Right,' he said, 'you are the three to whom I am going to market my spaghetti spoon!'

This was called IDENTIFYING AND TARGETING YOUR MARKET. There's no point targeting the wrong market, the smart arts worker whose husband did the cooking, least of all the hairy editor who never ate spaghetti at home.

This is the marketing philosophy behind the fiction-publishing industry now: identify an acknowledged need and answer it, give the public what they recognise and think they want, tap into established habit.

No one seems to have noticed that NOVELS ARE NOT SPAGHETTI SPOONS! Novels are ideas, language, emotions, stories you don't know you want before you read them and they enter your life for ever; literature is about surprise and enlightenment as well as recognition, and sometimes about CHANGING PEOPLE'S MINDS!

And anyway, I went on doing the cooking but I never bothered with a spaghetti spoon.

Marketing and Madness

I aint been writing me blog, aint been writing anything, in fact can't be bovvered even to fink in decent English. Why? Cos I've just finished a massive project - creative juices all run out, brain shut down, aversion to writing desk and computer screen raging. Though this morning that's set me thinking: this drained-out fallow period is inevitable, even necessary - you need to sleep, dream, and there's the rub when you've got a whole marketing industry out there wanting a book a year to keep you 'hot' and to fill the supermarket-bookshop shelves like the next consignment of tubs of margarine. Well, we know what sleep deprivation can to do one's sanity... In other words, this whole cultural ethos of marketing and hype is antipathetic to the creative process, and what is that doing to our collective psyche? I've done my share of commissioned and commercial stuff, and to my shame know only too well the sick sense of selling out, suppressing my own insights and artistic aims for the sake of the 'market'. Ugh. Yuk. Aaargh...

But there's none of that with poetry. Last night I went to the Library Theatre and heard four fantastic poets on the last leg of the Great Women Poets tour: Sujata Bhatt, Vicky Feaver, Catherine Fisher and Jackie Kay. No artistic compromises there, just thoughtful, moving, funny and highly accomplished poems, yet the place was packed with an audience hungry for such stuff and hanging on their every word. What do those marketeers know?

Art & Poetry at Cornerhouse

The Bitch may be a stay-at-home but she has her moles. One reports back from last night's Cornerhouse launch of Linda Chase's new collection of poems from Carcanet, Extended Family, and brings back some poignant and funny poems inside a bright funky cover. Apparently the reading was great and there were very tasty snacks (The Bitch is drooling now) nibbled amongst the current exhibition of Mexican women artists.

Even The Bitch comes out now and then though, blinking into the light of day and those buzzy, huzzy Manc streets, and last weekend I slipped into this very exhibition. It was late, and the galleries were due to close by the time I settled to watch the harrowing film about girl prostitutes in Gallery Two, but already, when the nice curator came and told me nicely to get the heck out, sling my hook and do one, I was in floods of tears. I'll definitely be going back to watch it properly.

Reality Check

This might seem a bit off the wall (that's the trouble with us writers, we're always off inside our own heads), but as a writer and also as a normal (or slightly less off-her-head) punter something's bugging me.

Last night I belatedly saw Mike Leigh's film Vera Drake (on DVD), and a couple of weeks ago I watched an acting friend take a small role in ITV's Sunday night soap-slush The Royal. Now both of these period pieces set in the fifties shocked me for the following reason: from the design point of view (the costumes, settings and cars etc), they seemed to confuse the fifties and the thirties. Well now, I know that in any era there are still cars knocking around from previous eras and people, especially middle-aged people like Vera Drake, still wearing the clothes of their youth, the way many people's grannies tend to do, and sitting on furniture they bought twenty years ago, but in these two productions the air of the thirties definitely won out.

Up till now in the popular imagination the fifties has been a bright-coloured era, with sharp edges and a modern, rock-and-roll air which I've always thought must have given a true sense of the mood of the times, and very much opposed to the muted soft-focus sepia idea we have of the thirties. Now however, it seems, a new generation of designers has eroded this distinction, and in view of the power of image and film, I wonder if we are in danger of losing the the truth about the tone of those times?

But then, what do we know? I remember the seventies as bright and hard-edged too, and was pretty shaken up by the TV footage of the Silver Jubilee rolled out on the Queen's 80th birthday recently: how quaint everyone looked, and how muted, and I wasn't at all sure it was simply due to the deterioration of the film!

Scary. What does it mean about memory and historical truth?

The Tale or the Teller?

An aspect of the obsession with an author's credentials (about which I have been complaining) is given articulate expression in today's Observer in an article by Sarfraz Manzoor: Why do Asian Writers Have to Be 'Authentic' to Succeed? Manzoor notes that writers of 'Asian' novels are expected to be the voice of an erstwhile hidden community and that while they are thought to be so their novels are lauded, but that once they are 'exposed' as being not quite of that community themselves - ie mixed race, middle class or Cambridge educated - they can expect a critical slamming.

What is all this about an author's 'authenticity'? Have we forgotten that art is an act of imagination and empathy, that the further away an author is from that which he/she successfully evokes, the greater his/her achievement, both artistically and politically in a world of communities badly in need of bridging? Nowadays this prejudice is linked with the cult of personality which is grounded in the commercial impulse, but it has its roots in the political correctness of the 1980s. Manzoor makes the case that nowadays a white author (as opposed to an 'inauthentic' Asian author) is lauded for empathising with the Asian experience. Back in the eighties, however, a white English vicar empathised enough with a young Asian girl to get a novel about one published by a feminist publisher, only to have it pulped when the publishers discovered there was man behind the pen-name. A similar thing happened when a story about the pain a man can cause a woman, published in a feminist anthology, was discovered to be by the writer John Ashbrook, only that time it was a woman who got it in the neck: his partner, our own Manchester-based one-time novelist and now playwright Elizabeth Baines, who was suddenly 'exposed' by association as an 'inauthentic' feminist writer and quickly dropped by her feminist publishers.

Interesting that such Stalinist-style insistence on personal authenticity and lack of faith in the words on the page should have elided in the intervening years with the trashy commercialist
cult of the Glamorous Author.

24:7 Theatre Festival

The Bitch doesn't get out much (too busy bitching on the page), but on Tuesday she was taken along to a gathering of actors, directors and producers, organised by actors Dave Slack and Amanda Hennessey, the inspired and energetic founders of 24:7, the Manchester Theatre Festival now in its third year and which takes place the last seven days of July. Now this is a festival run on a shoestring, unlike the major arts festival planned for Manchester next year (see today's post on the Art of Fiction), and I must say that one actor there said she had never heard of it before in spite of now being in her final year of the Salford drama degree, but its reputation is growing and, importantly, this is a festival devoted entirely to local talent and with proven success at nurturing it. Last year two 24:7 plays were nominated for a Manchester Evening News award, one of them, The Hanged Man by Alison White and Dean Ashton, winning.

On Tuesday the Loft Bar in Tiger Tiger was teeming with actors touting their CVs and accosting the somewhat overwhelmed writers whose plays have been chosen for the festival. A local actors' agent was there talent-spotting, and a young actor I spoke to had just been given an impromptu audition out in the corridor and was taken up on the spot, with an interview with a casting director lined up for Friday. And just as I was ready to leave I met three guys who asked me to talk to them about writing a screenplay.

Such a buzz, such a sense of opportunity through simply going out and making contact with others and doing it for yourselves! I came away feeling most uncharacteristically unbitchy and reflecting on the sad difference between this world and that of prose fiction, with its closed structures and smaller opportunities policed by the chosen few, the editors and exclusive literary agents and all-powerful booksellers.

Is It Cos I Is An Old Git (ie Over 25)?

Adrian at The Art of Fiction draws our scathing attention to UEA's New Writing Ventures. It's mis-named, as so many of these schemes are, because, as he points out, it's not primarily about writing itself. The focus, as usual nowadays, is the status and real-life identity of the author. As opposed to the National Short Story contest, this time it's 'emerging authors' being courted, those who have not had a 'dedicated publication of their work, ie a novel or a collection'. You must give a short account of your 'writing life' (!), and strictly no pen names or c/o addresses allowed. (Don't these people know that good fiction writers are constitutionally incapable of sticking to facts and are the world's experts in creating alter egos?) And it's a development project: does this mean your work can be too good to qualify, ie you wouldn't benefit from the nice little year-long mentoring scheme set up with the funding, and which of course is the real focus of it all? This scheme makes a point of avoiding the current trend for ageism - for once there's no upper age limit - but as always the stress is on the wearying, drearying obsession with new faces and new names. What about those increasingly numerous writers who've published one or two novels and then been dropped because publishers are hooked on the marketing notion of The Next New Thing - who ever sets out to help them? It's now accepted publishing wisdom that a novel by a new author is easier to sell to bookshops than one by a second- or third-time author, so every exciting new writer given a leg-up by these schemes is a mid-list has-been in the making - it's only a matter of time.

In my last post I commented on the trend towards the familiar, and so this might seem like a contradiction, but it's not. We get bored easily, but we don't want real change, we're not interested in real literary development, and in the age of the cult of youth and personality we are frankly frightened of the kind of change that overtakes dewy young faces as the years go by. We want a new brand of the same product: tales of youth adorned with pics of authors with sulky pouts and slides in their hair and little-girl cardigans. (Apologies to Gwendoline Riley, but then I never said I wasn't a bitch; now there's an author who managed to publish a very short novel - see 'Odds and Ends' in the Art of Fiction - and I suspect it wasn't simply on the strength of her prose, good as it is.)

But so it goes, to quote the great man (now there's a supple subversive literary mind inside an old shell).

Everyone's at it, no one can avoid it: the esteemed Ra Page ain't above it all, indeed his whole publishing venture seemed founded on the practice of eschewing established practitioners of the short story in favour of persuading established practitioners of other forms - poets and playwrights - to give it a go. Anything to be able to say you're offering something new in the way of authorship as opposed to simply writing.

The Death of the Short Story

This post on Adrian Slatcher's excellent blog The Art of Fiction set me thinking:

The Usual Suspects
I'd forgotten Nesta's short story prize almost as soon as it was announced, because it seemed to be offering nothing more than a "beauty contest" for established prom queens, and so, it seems, that has come to pass, with William Trevor, James Lasdun, Rose Tremain and Michael Faber on the 5 person shortlist. I'm sure they're all fine, and good luck to Rana Dasgupta in such distinguished company. The reason I lost interest as soon as the prize was announced was because it wasn't clear what "record of publication" actually meant - and whether publication in such a small magazine as our own would count. I hardly want to bother mentioning the prize really. I'm impressed that they got such a distinguished list from 1400 entries or so; I wonder if they were anonymously judged? I like James Lasdun's fiction, and he's a writer's writer more than a popular success, so I guess it would be good if he gained a little popularity out of it. Certainly at least 4 of those 5 writers could ring up the editor of Granta any day of the week and get a story placed there; and probably anywhere else as well; so I'm not sure that the prize actually "helps" the short story. I just hope the stories are good.

Adrian is being far too nice. And he's trying the old tactic of refusing to give the thing significance, but, let me tell you, there are tart things that just have to be said about this and they are pretty important for anyone who cares about the short story as a serious and dynamic literary form.

The short story was once the supreme form for innovation in this country and America, for pushing the boundaries of what fiction can do with language and structure. Well now, William Trevor and Rose Tremain are excellent short-story writers of their kind, but they're not the kind who are interested in extending the language and form of the story beyond the conventional and familiar. The morning of the short-list announcement there was an interview with Alex Linklater, one of the judges, on Radio 4's Today programme. Linklater spent the entire interview trying to defend the short story from the notion that it's just a short (and inferior) version of the novel, but he didn't have much in the way of ammunition and not once was the issue of innovation touched upon. The same day the Guardian published the beginnings of all five short-listed stories, and lo and behold, four of the five authors were also if not primarily novelists, and each of the five stories had a conventional, scene-setting, omniscient-author start, and Michel Faber's began in the most conventional (and hackneyed) way of all: someone waking in the morning.

In response to the criticisms of Comma publisher Ra Page (reported in The Guardian), the judges responded somewhat disingenuously that they merely chose according to merit. Well, it depends of course what you consider to be merit, and one can't help wondering if they were seeking out the kind of merit represented by this list. Adrian wonders, ironically I presume, if the stories were judged anonymously. You had to include your publication record in your application, and it was possible for publishers to enter their published authors, and the form seemed to me especially geared to this last. (So now you know I entered: my grapes are not so much sour as bitter.) Few publishers now publish short fiction by anyone not already well-known as a novelist and Comma to my knowledge is the only one dedicated especially to the short story form and to writers specialising in the short story, so you can see the way the wind was blowing.

I wish like Adrian I could decide that none of this matters, but it matters too, too much. It's all part of the drift in our culture towards the comfortingly familiar and away from the strange and the challenging. In my opinion this competition, which was heralded as contributing to the revival of the short story, has in fact contributed to its death.