Richard and Judy, the Expensive Couple

The new costs of entering prizes, and now the new costs of a Richard and Judy recommendation:

I've now been brought the paper copy of the article by Tom Baldwin in Saturday's Times about the the new Richard and Judy book club (which I wasn't prepared to pay to see online). The article is occasioned by a complaint lodged with the Advertising Standards Authority over TV commercials linking the new book club - which the Times says it has discovered requires a payment to W H Smith of £25,000 for a recommendation - with the earlier Channel 4 book club which producer Amanda Ross says never asked for money. Ross is quoted as saying: 'In the past we have certainly picked publishers who could not afford £25,000 or anything like that.' Commitment to the £25,000 fee and to supplying chosen books to W H Smith at a 'substantial discount' as well as paying 'a further 50p for every sale at one of its stores' are conditions of inclusion on the R & J list. A spokeswoman for W H Smith is quoted as saying: 'This is a standard arrangement.'

Yes, I guess that sadly now it is, and it won't surprise me if the standard of the R & J list plummets...

Present Tense.

Gratified to see that, further to my post re the present tense, yesterday John Mullan outlined some of the sophisticated and dynamic uses to which the historic present can be put in novels - which I'd have liked to have done myself but was too involved in my own partly present-tense novel.

Stories about Stories and the Cost of Storytelling

Hilarious - and telling - that the current interviews with Jonathan Franzen trot out the story that while writing 'The Corrections', as well as using earplugs he wore a blindfold and touch-typed, when to my knowledge he has denied this as the literal truth.

I was in the audience when he came to Waterstone's Deansgate in Manchester with The Corrections and someone asked him point-blank if it were true about the blindfold. Franzen explained that he had been talking metaphorically about the need for a writer (or his need anyway) to shut off the outside world in order to write, and that the journalist he'd been talking to at that time had taken it literally and others had run with it.

And they're still running with it. Does Franzen go on allowing them to take it literally when they mention it, or is it now just now set in stone in the records they look up? Either way, it's an indication of the importance nowadays of colourful meta-stories in the marketing of books.

Or else I'm remembering wrongly what he said that time in Waterstone's and someone can correct me (ahem).

On another note, I've been informed that The Times yesterday had an interesting article on the cost nowadays to any publisher entering books for the new Richard and Judy book club. I'm not prepared to pay to check it out online, but others may be if they haven't already read it...

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.