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Writers' magazine |
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Comment Archive 2003Some sharp comment from people in the book world in 2003. Comment archive 2009 archive 2008 archive 2007 archive 2006 archive 2005 archive 2004 archive 2003 archive 2002 archive 2001
'A revolting act of patronage' ‘The one defence that can be made of The Big Read is that it has boosted reading. Never mind that the programmes have been nothing less than "car-crash TV", as one book-trade commentator put it. Anything at all that gets more people reading is good, isn't it? No, it is not. It is possible to make programmes promoting books that are so demeaning they do more harm than good. Far from easy, but possible - and The Big Read has pulled off this amazing feat of debasement. In any case, it turns out that it is not reading that The Big Read has primarily promoted but watching: yet more watching. According to the online booksellers Amazon, sales of DVDs and videos of the featured titles have increased far more than sales of the books… And as for the result ... It was clear as soon as The Big Read was announced earlier this year that Tolkien would win, just as he won a similar Waterstone's poll, even before the movies were made… The Big Read … was a revolting act of patronage from our most powerful medium. Here, literature has been refashioned entirely in television's terms: turned into film; reintroduced to us by television's own transient little celebrities; then fatuously voted on by viewers, some of whom may be readers, some not. There's no harm done to books. We can all pick up any book we like, the next minute, without thinking of The Big Read. But harm has been done - to the standing of the BBC.’ David Sexton in the Evening Standard
Literature versus commerce 'I don't regard literature, which he spoke of in a perjorative way, as a competition - it is so vast. We have this marvellous language, and we are so lucky it gives us a huge audience. If we were writing in high Norwegian we'd have mostly reindeer for readers. 'I don't think giving us a reading list of those who are the most read is satisfactory. I don't see that we should read this or that. We should bring our own individuality, our own intuitions, towards what we want to read. In America, we're drowning in explanations. What we need are more questions. Explanations - the official ones - are not leading us to good places.' Shirley Hazzard, winner of the National Book Award in the US, responding to Stephen King's speech at the awards
Writing a novel 'I found that I could write poems and short stories at the same time because they required the same sort of effort. But once you're writing a novel it's a larger undertaking and it does take up quite a lot of 'head space' and I've found that poems and novels don't go very well together for me. Writing a novel is a different process and part of what's different is the day-today lifestyle. You can compose poetry and short stories while you're walking, on a train, or a plane, although walking is better, sometimes even when you're asleep. but with a novel you need to get down to it and have a place where you can do it, with piles of books around you for research.' Tobias Hill, author of The Cryptographer, interviewed by Jane Ellis in Publishing News
'Book buyers who see books as very cheap' 'We are creating a whole new generation of book buyers who see books as very cheap. We do the reverse of so many industries: when we have a valuable brand, we tend to discount it more; elsewhere, they put up the price. What we're facing is retailers fighting for market share and using discounting as a way to do that, and we publishers have to protect our authors' position and our own position. The US board, on which I sit, is staggered at our level of discounts - in the States the average is well below 50% and the 60%-plus discounts that have recently been demanded here by some supermarkets are unheard of.' Victoria Barnsley, CEO of HarperCollins UK in an interview with Liz Thomson in Publishing News
'Different worlds' 'Reading is an especially focused experience, unfolding in private time, and that makes a fundamental difference. A play cannot be stopped and reprised in the way that pages can be reread, whether to relish something good or understand something better. A novel is all present at once, and can be gone over and back, re-entered, skimmed, sampled or devoured, just as required... 'The better the novel, the richer the possibilities it offers in this as in all its other dimensions (of pleasure-giving and the like). Perhaps "great literature" is literature which, among its other qualities, best discloses to us different worlds, or deeper aspects of our own world, and teaches us how to feel more generously, discriminate more finely, and understand more comprehensively, as a result.' A C Grayling in The Times
'A snobbish distaste for popular writing' ‘If you write the kind of contemporary women's fiction I do - light, commercial and prettily packaged - the assumption is that it can't be much cop. Barely a week goes by without some sneering reference to chick-lit which has become all but a term of abuse. Why this should be is not clear - simple envy, perhaps, at our huge sales and concomitantly large advances. Or the belief that because these books are easy to read, they're easy to write. They're not. But I think there is something much deeper at work: a snobbish distaste for popular writing full stop. ‘It is as though there is this wondrous thing called "literary fiction" that is pure and untainted (however dreary), against which all massmarket fiction is set. When people ask me what sort of books I write, I reply that they are romantic comedies about self-deceiving women - women who fail to acknowledge the mess they're making of things - because that's precisely what they are.’ Isobel Woolf in the London Evening Standard
'Too far apart from the mainstream' ‘Perhaps one reason the publishing industry is enjoying only slow growth is that we do not listen closely enough to the market, because we read too far apart from the mainstream of the market… ‘Any doubt that a gap exists between the reading habits of publishing pros and those of the general public can be dispelled with a simple test. The adult fiction authors most widely read in the past two decades—that is, the authors who have sold the most books—probably have been Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, John Grisham, Mary Higgins Clark, Michael Crichton and Stephen King. And then there's the fresher crop of blockbuster commercial authors like Michael Connelly, David Baldacci, Laurell K. Hamilton and Jan Karon. How many books by each of these authors have we read? If the number is few or none, perhaps it would be wise to read more of them, in order to understand, to appreciate and even to learn to love what so much of our market loves.’ Jeff Zaleski in Publishers Weekly
'Publishing is a business' 'Publishing is a business and therefore what is wanted is books that will sell. The difference between the commercial writer and others is the former writes for a readership and others often just for themselves. A book has to be shaped to fit market needs and has to be of interest to as many people as possible. It is difficult to anticipate trends in publishing, not least because the book commissioned today may not be delivered until next year and published the year after that. That said the boom in history and especially narrative, military and social history, popular science and literary fiction continues. Some 100,000 books are published each year so there is plenty of scope for variety.' Agent Andrew Lownie in Writers' Forum
'Taking the prosaic and making it extraordinary' ‘ Having kids, I became a whole new person. It changed me, enabled me to write to the extent I associate babies and fiction. Far from felling held back by children, I felt they catapulted me in to it…‘I love taking the prosaic and making it extraordinary. Writers don’t get enough credit for that… I don’t want to glamorise. I want the reader to say, "Oh, that’s just how it is." I love writers who take my breath away because they’ve pointed out something I’ve felt and didn’t realise I did. I’m constantly striving for that as a reader and writer.’ Julie Myerson, author of Something Might Happen, interviewed in The Times by Candida Crewe
'Bookshops have never been this good at selling books' ‘You need to forget all the doom and gloom about tough trading conditions and remember that British bookshops have never been this good at selling books. Not in living memory has the public profile of books been this high. New books by certain authors make headline news and the quantity of major book prizes and commercial promotions has escalated to the point where we seem to have one a week… Books have not been rendered obsolete by competing media but reinvigorated by them.’ David Blow in Publishing News
On writing for children ‘I'm a children's writer. It seems like a simple, elemental thing to be. I feel as close to parents telling stories in the dark as I do to the world of printed literature. I write for young hearts and minds, for readers who are still close to the start of things, who experience elemental joys and fears, who haven't grown tired and cynical, who are still excited by the newness of their world. At the best of moments I feel as if I draw, like the storytelling parents do, on ancient energies’" Children’s writer David Almond in The Times
Reflections on poetry for National Poetry Day 'We were really identified as being the publisher that helped to bring that generation (the 80s and 90s poets) to a wider readership. and it was really that generation of poets that took poetry out of the academic surrounds and into the wider community...' The male intellectual clique is 'a major problem at the moment, and a lot of poetry's not getting any coverage because a lot is being skewed towards these intellectually minded male poets. The poetry they admire is very good, but it's only a small part of what's going on.' Neil Astley, MD of Bloodaxe in Publishing News
'A lot of modern fiction tends to be "slice of life" stuff in which a story has no apparent ending to it. The reader reaches the end and says "Huh?" The well-written crime novel also pits the reader against the writer in a challenge to see if the reader can put the pieces together before the writer does it for him. Consequently, the crime novel appeals to a large and well-educated group of people who tend to be the big readers in our society in any case.' Elizabeth George in Publishing News
'Read absolutely everything'‘I think you have to learn for yourself how to write… The most important thing for a writer is to have read absolutely everything you can get your hands on at an early age; and then, hopefully, you will have absorbed good writing through your skin. The more good writing you have read, the easier it is to recognise what is good and bad in your own writing. And though I don’t understand how, you know when a piece is finished – after perhaps 100 times of writing and rewriting it, you’ll never feel the need to work on it again.’ Kate Atkinson in the Guardian
'Trapped in a labyrinth of facts'‘Science is a broad church full of narrow minds, trained to know ever more about even less. Any technical paper anchors itself within a framework of new data and of evidence from the literature, all double-checked. A letter in Nature may appear opaque and clumsy to most laypeople, but those in the know read it as a work of grace and elegance. Such a literary apprenticeship is a terrible constraint for scientists who try to escape into the wider world of books. At the keyboard I find myself trapped in a labyrinth of facts, each sentence with its own nugget of information. I write like the Human Genome Project.’ Scientist Steve Jones, author of The Descent of Man in the Guardian
'An infinitely more civilised world'‘Publishing is an infinitely more civilised world with infinitely more gracious people than the film industry, which is pretty hideous… When I make a film, it’s with 70 other people – I might be the loudest voice, but every single film that’s ever been made is collaborative. To be able to create something which is basically just you is quite wonderful really. And you only have the words to do the work.’ Film director Alan Parker on writing his first novel in the Bookseller
'Last of the great traveller-adventurer-writers' (on the death of Wilfred Thesiger)'This maverick species is dying out… But more than just an era of exploration has ended. These adventurers, who travelled and wrote from Victorian times to the mid-20th century, among them Richard Burton, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Thesiger himself, created a powerful body of work, rendering strange, rare, lost worlds on the edge of being destroyed by Western civilisation… A literary genre is dying with those titans - and perhaps that is something of a relief, because the fresh gleaming gold that they spun from their extraordinary lives has long since been transformed, through imitation, into the base metal of most modern travel writing… The real problem is that travel writing became a profession. Few of the great travel writers were professionals. Thesiger and his peers were brilliant amateurs, and their example endures. The best travel-writing nowadays is usually by an aid-worker or a priest or a travelling doctor…’ Simon Sebag Montefiore in the Sunday Telegraph
'If you are old, you become invisible'‘This is a country in which, if you are old, you become invisible. People only notice you if you’re taking up too much time at the checkout, or if you fall over in the street. ‘And the same is true if you are a writer. I feel that I’m writing probably my best work, but I do not feel it’s getting the recognition it should have.’ Francis King, now in his eighties and just longlisted for the Man Booker Prize with The Nick of Time, quoted in The Times
'Writers need fantasies'‘Writers need fantasies. They are the blue touch-paper of fiction: the creation of other worlds, other people, sifting elements of self into more exotic, more tested, more inspired characters than you could ever be. On the other hand, it’s important for mental health that you know the difference between fantasy and reality.’ Sarah Dunant in The Times
'The twenty-something guys' need to read'‘A new brand of literature has arisen to feed the 20-something guys’ need to read… Both genders need their fill of frivolity. In recent years, the male market has been underserved. One only has to walk into a bookstore and see shelf upon shelf of Bridget Jones’s Diary and Shopaholic clones as well as book club picks to ascertain the lack of light guy reads available.’ The Toronto Star on the new ‘dick lit’
Reading 'as and when you like'‘When you read a book, you are not confined to a single time or place, as you are when trapped at a concert, or, heaven forbid, a play. The encounter of writer and reader through the printed page is a far more elegant and less oppressive transaction than that. The writer has a chance to compose herself at leisure, to become far more intelligent and appealing than she could ever be in real time. The reader, for his part, can approach the book as he likes, picking it up, putting it down, pausing, re-reading, skipping, at will. You can read a book as and when you like. Both parties thus enjoy some freedom from the usual constraints of life. It's one of the things that makes reading and (so it is said) writing so delectable, this freedom, even if it is illusory. It is also worth reminding ourselves that any book which truly lives, lives beyond its author and reaches readers not yet present, entirely unforeseen.’ David Sexton in the London Evening Standard
'The great thing about fiction-writing is that you are licensed to lie'‘Writing fiction, you can lose your way, go down a wrong path, come up against a dead end. You may know where you want to get to, but it’s like the joke about asking for directions in Ireland: "I wouldn’t start from here if I were you." Then you have to tear up your map, throw everything in the wastepaper basket, and start again from somewhere else. The great thing about fiction-writing is that you are licensed to lie. There is no pleasure like it. It’s a great relief after biography, where everything you say has to be documented, or else acknowledged as intuition of creative fantasy.’ Victoria Glendinning in the Guardian
'The best I could come up with at the time'‘Things don’t change as much as we grow into what we’ve always been. As bad as the lives we’ve had, we wouldn’t be the people we are today without them… ‘I don’t know until the last two or three pages how the book will end. With this one, I woke up at 1.30 yesterday morning and had in my head the last scene. So I’ll finish that… and then maybe have a two-week gap, and start another. I love to write… 'When I read back, my books all seem different to how I had remembered; I don’t recall writing that prose. It can be a good feeling; I recognise the worth of a line more after some time has passed. I never feel regrets; everything I’ve done was the best I could come up with at the time.’ James Lee Burke, interviewed by Euan Ferguson in the Observer
'The job of becoming a writer'‘Why did I become a writer? I can’t really come up with any antecedent for it. I’m certainly not from the classic unhappy childhood. I was a student and then I knocked around a bit and then I knuckled down to the job of writing and eventually got published and here I am at novel number whatever it is. There is not much more to it.’ Graham Swift, winner of the Booker Prize with Last Orders, whose most recent novel is The Light of Day, in a profile in the Guardian.
Creating a new genre‘Publishers are always trying to exploit the last success, and the original writer is the one who creates a new genre instead of repeating the last. These are often the writers who publishers don’t know what to do with – but when they take a risk and publish a new kind of book that becomes an unexpected success, suddenly it’s "wow". ‘I don’t particularly like "chick lit", partly because I’m too old. If you are over 35 you tend not to be so interested in the sex lives of 18-year-olds or office politics. I don’t think you’re interested in sexual courtship because you’ve already been there and you’re married or have a partner.’ Margaret Drabble in the Independent on Sunday
Coben on Hollywood‘The funny thing is that the more you say no to Hollywood the more it wants you. These guys who had optioned Tell No One called my agent and said, "Well, we’re not sure we want Harlan to writer the script for Tell No One… what do you mean he doesn’t want to do it, we’ll pay him anything!" ‘Writers as great as F Scott Fitzgerald and Dashiell Hammett have been burnt by Hollywood – why on earth should I be any different? Anyway, I don’t need Hollywood. How much money can a man make or need in a lifetime?’ Harlan Coben in an interview with Paul Connolly in The Times
'Outside the tight circle''This process has made me think what I want from a novel, and I realise that one of the things I want is ‘news’... It seems to me a reader should expect a novel to take her outside the tight circle of her own knowledge and concerns. News may be from alien places or other eras, properly realised on the page. Or it may be from places and people very familiar, reappraised and reinterpreted, or made strange, so that the reader has to think about their meaning. ‘It may be news from the inarticulate, who have not spoken for themselves (or whom we can’t hear). Or it may be news from the writer’s psyche. What it mustn’t be, for me, is false news, where tricks of style dress up lack of content, or where inauthenticity creeps through a text – that is what happens when a writer is either insufficiently observant, or has not imagined their fictional world thoroughly enough. It is not only facts that need rigour; fiction needs it badly.’ Hilary Mantel, one of the panel of judges for the Best of Young British Writers 2003, quoted in the Sunday Times
Counteracting ‘the acid river of the retail mainstream’‘Stilwell and Creasey (the manager and deputy manager) were there at the start of the retail revolution and it is pleasant to see them there near the end as the revolution destroys its youthful progeny, dissolving great bookshops in the acid river of the retail mainstream. As bookshop chains become better at retailing, but in some important respects less good at bookselling, a gap has emerged in the market for enterprising independents that do not have to trade basic bookshop efficiency for institutional shareholder satisfaction. If that was not the case it would be commercial suicide for the London Review of Books to open a serious bookshop so close to Charing Cross Road, where stock range, brand names and discounts still make that street famous the world over for books.’ David Blow writing in Publishing News about the opening of the London Review of Books bookshop in London
'As honestly as I know how'‘ My job is to write as honestly as I know how, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, and non-fiction is a lot harder because you can’t lie you way out of it, so to speak,. My idea was and is, pretty much, to do the best job you can and people will come to it or they won’t. And I’m very fortunate in a sense that I’ve made a lot of money doing what I’m doing and I can afford pretty much to follow my own star.I think there ought to be a place where people who read seriously and people who read at a more popular level can meet. But there are a lot of people who just don’t want to allow that… They are saying, "Well, if he’s too popular he can’t be any good."… It’s bullshit.’ Stephen King, in an interview with Martyn Palmer in The Times
'The loneliness, the doubt'‘ Even after writing 29 novels, I hate the loneliness, the doubt. Usually halfway through a book I have a serious depression, so I go on safari on my ranch in South Africa, or fishing off my island in the Seychelles. When I come back and re-read it, I think: "What was that all about, Smith? It’s fine, just get on with it.’Wilbur Smith in the Observer
'As good a living as a New York dermatologist'‘The problem for most seriously ambitious writers is how do you drive the wedge of consciousness into the experience. How? Think of the ways people have done it – think of Henry James, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway. They make colossally different approaches to the same problem. And so the problem exists for me as well. It’s the problem of a novel-writer – it’s what fiction seems to me to be all about. Fiction is not called fiction because it invents events, but because it invents consciousness… ‘To start with nothing at all on a page and then have to fill that page prompts a lot of anxieties and a lot of fear. Fear that you simply cannot do it, and frustration as you’re doing it, because what comes is very crude. But over the years, what you develop is a tolerance for your own crudeness. And patience with your own crap, really. Belief in your crap, which is just “stay with your crap and it will get better, and come back every day and keep going.” It’s a living. It has turned out that I now make about as good a living as a New York dermatologist – though he’s been making it for longer than I have.’ Philip Roth, in interview with David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, in the Sunday Telegraph
Where is the good stuff? ‘The deal in British publishing is supposed to be that the crap is published and put up with because it funds the good stuff. I’m afraid that I have to ask, where is the good stuff? To quote the Manics: “Libraries gave us power.” Not any more they don’t. They’re stuffed full of Sophie Dahl and Naomi Campbell’s novels, along with Tony Parsons’s drivel, a gang of floppy-fringed public schoolboys and their precious pointless literary fictions, a few failed PR girls and all the rest of the cobblers that passes for a publishing culture these days.’ Matthew Branton, who is giving away his new novel, The Tie and the
Crest, on the net at
www.mathewbranton.com, in an interview with Miranda Sawyer in the
Observer.
Does writing about your pains help heal them? ‘There is an idea current in the prevailing culture that writing about something that pains you heals the pain. I was not, when I began writing my life story, and am not now, healed of my mother. But you do gain a small distance from anything by keeping it in suspension in your mind while you work at finding the words to fit it. The process is so slow and incremental that you don’t notice its effect, but the point is that it is a process. This relief to the individual is justification enough for self-revelation in some cultures.’ Nuala O’Faolain in the Guardian
Looking for a Unique Selling Point ‘Here is how it works. The lodestar of publishing a successful book is publicity – that is, ideally, coverage that spills over from the books and arts sections of newspapers into the news and features pages. Unless a new author has what marketing people call a Unique Selling Point – class, age, looks, celebrity, some kind of heart-warming disability – almost the only way to gain public awareness is by publicising the amount of money that has been paid for the book. This ties in neatly with the interests of the press. The tale of a rags-to-riches writer is a favourite among journalists, perhaps because many of them share the fantasy themselves. The process which follows is not exactly a lie but, more precisely, involves publishers remaining silent while a promotionally useful myth becomes established as the truth. The result is that the newspapers get an appropriately upbeat story and the publishers get their pre-publication publicity…’ Terence Blacker in the Independent on Sunday, on book publicity
More nourishment from books ‘It seems to me that literary fiction is having a better time than commercial fiction at the moment, comparatively at least. I think that since 11 September, American readers have realised that we’re living in more serious times and people want more nourishment from books. There’s also more of an interest in translated fiction – people have been forced to pay attention to the fact that there are other places in the world.’ Nan Talese, Senior VP of Doubleday, quoted in the Observer
Writing for children ‘It’s difficult because you have to deal with quite worrying things in a way that’s both truthful and yet won’t traumatise children. And I try to do that in several ways. I always write in the first person from the child’s point of view. I always have flashes of humour, and I always try to resolve situations in a positive way. I would absolutely hate it if any child said: "This is all too horrible for me." But, at the same time, children do like to read lots of things that have a very strong emotional content. They like to be caught up in things as much as adults do.’ Jacqueline Wilson on writing for children in an interview with Daphne Lockyer in The Times
Lott on men's writing about women ‘I do feel that a lot of male writers are terrified of being honest about the way they see women. To raise any voice that isn’t apologetic in a man, I suppose, would be seen as some form of sexism or misogyny. But I’m through apologising for being a man. I don’t think there’s anything to apologise for… I didn’t want to go out there and present men as abject losers and I particularly didn’t want to contrast them with shiningly virtuous woman, which is also a kind of trope in a lot of men’s writing.’ Tim Lott, author of The Love Secrets of Don Juan, in an interview with Kate Carr in The Times
Grisham on the writer's life ‘I get up at six to write. But, and I shouldn’t say this, it’s really not that hard. It looks crazy what with books and movies, but it’s very much the opposite. I live on a farm in the foothills of mountains where nobody can find me. It’s beautiful; it’s very quiet. And I spend several hours every day just wreaking havoc with American literature. That’s my revenge.’ John Grisham, quoted in the Sunday Times
'That private world of the imagination' ‘I came to writing through reading, and read at first without direction or advice, and for nothing but pleasure… Later, when I began to write, it was little more than an extension of reading, without any thought of publication. Each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see, and it is with this world we read. As we read, the world the writer has dramatised and set down in words is brought to life in that private world of the imagination. By playing with words, by arranging and rearranging sentences, certain shapes or dramas began to emerge that found their first expression in reading; then, gradually, very gradually, it became work.’ John McGahern in the Guardian Review
Pottermania and the booksellers' battle for market share ‘So the most eagerly anticipated new book in book trade history, where the entire trade could make record profits, could also turn out to be the most expensive for the book trade to sell. The value lost to the book trade by discounting could easily run into several million pounds, equal to the value of the entire annual turnover of three or four branches of the chains… It is one thing in retail to treat as a few product lines as loss leaders. It is something else to treat as a loss leader the fastest-selling product line in living memory… Booksellers are not using discounting as a retail strategy to sell more books but, as ever, as a way of claiming more market share from the independent market.’ David Blow, commenting on plans to discount the new Harry Potter, in Publishing News
The 'special power' of military history ‘It remains the case that any pleasure to be derived by the general reader from military history is unlike the pleasure to be found in other forms of scholarship. It’s not merely an addition to knowledge or insight into the past. Military history is ultimately about what men will put above life itself; what they will kill for and what they will die for. That is its special power.’ John Sexton, reviewing Anthony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall, quoted in Publishing News
A future for literary publishing ‘This sounds like a terrible bit of cheerleading for literary publishing, but I think there is no question that it is tougher than it once was to launch new literary writers. But if you can make it work, then you can sell more and find a bigger readership than ever before. You see more literary books behaving as bestsellers now. In a way that inspires literary publishers to be more lively, responsive and aggressive.’ Andrew Kidd, newly-appointed publisher of Picador, UK, quoted in the Bookseller
Writing Erotic Fiction ‘Most of the books I’ve written for Mills & Boon are romantic fantasies with a sexual element. It’s not difficult: I’ve always been fairly raunchy, and when you’ve been writing romances as long as I have, you develop an instinct about how far you can go. I like to develop the story and the sexual tension first, then it’s much sexier for the reader. I am very explicit, but it’s still the emotions that are the real turn-on.’ Maureen Lee, 57-year-old Australian grandmother and author of A Man for the Night, quoted in the Observer magazine on writing erotic novels for Blaze
'The huge questions' 'There are these criticisms levelled at historical fiction, that somehow authors who don’t work in the present are marginalised from their own times and their work is irrelevant. I find that rather arrogant. I think the great bonus of taking the reader out of his or her small world is that they can consider the huge questions, like love and loss, betrayal and loyalty, success and failure, friendship and death.’ Rose Tremain, whose new novel The Colour is published shortly, quoted in the Bookseller
'How did it make me feel?' ‘All that matters is what the feelings are and what the events are... It’s not about all this trickery. When I think about writing, I have a very simple formula: Where was I? Who was I with? What happened? And how did it make me feel? Those are the only important things. It doesn’t matter if I can write a sentence that’s a page long or if I have 30 pages of footnotes in the back or people chuckle at the introduction page. I want to move people and have them understand what I felt, what I went through and what I felt other people were feeling and going through.’ James Frey, author of the latest American cause celebre A Million Little Pieces, in an article in the New York Observer which described his first book as ‘a relentless, halogen-lit confessional littered with self-loathing addicts, tortured souls, weeping and wailing and smoking and fighting and lots and lots of stomach bile.’
Writing Couples ‘A wall, soundproof, must mount between us. Strangers in our study, lovers in bed.’ Sylvia Plath, on her relationship with Ted Hughes ‘I think that when we met we both realised that one of the things that may have caused us problems in our past relationships was that we’d never been honest about the fact that writing was the most important thing in our lives. So we began with that central agreement. I think the standard idea of a male-female relationship is that you will find yourself in the other person, and we knew going in that … we’d find ourselves in our work. But the surprise is that now, as our relationship has evolved, I think we can both say that the relationship occupies an equal if not greater place in our lives.’ Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones, on her relationship with her husband, the writer Glen David Gold. (both quoted from an excellent article on writing couples by Gaby Wood in the London Observer)
'Hard-wired for narrative' ‘Literary fiction in the U.K. became very concerned with literary theory, critical theory, to the extent that the notion of narrative almost became a dirty word. That's slowly started to change because the simple economics of the marketplace dictate that readers actually want to read things that have a beginning, a middle and an end. I think we're hard-wired for narrative. I've been saying this until I'm blue in the face for the last 10 years. But it seems to me that although literary fiction is returning to the notion of narrative, [literary fiction writers] are still not engaging with the society that we're living in. There's a big boom in historical fiction, whether it's recent history or further back in time… And I think that if you look at the successful books in literary fiction, this is what you find. So the crime novel started to pick up the baton in the '90s. We were the ones writing about the reality of the world we lived in.’ British crime writer Val McDermid, in Salon, on why crime writers are filling a void that literary fiction has left behind
A Solitary Business ‘Without editors we would not have half the writers whose books have changed our lives, and nor would we have those books in the form which makes them so memorable. Writing is inevitably a solitary business: one lives inside one’s own head to a degree, sometimes, that makes one scream at the terrible, monotonous inevitability of one’s own thoughts and opinions. Living that way for long periods, even for the most reasonable and least melodramatic of writers, tends to lead to a skewing of one’s sense of proportion, to a failure to see where sense is blurred, or tension lost, or structure (vital) shaky. That’s where the editor comes in. The editor is the crucial third eye, reading both in harmony with the creator and on behalf of all of us readers, without whom there wouldn’t be any point in the creator creating anything if the first place.’ Joanna Trollope, in an excellent piece in Publishing News about why writers need the skills of a good editor
'History is essential' ‘History is what happened , not what we would have liked to happen or want to forget. That is why we need professional historians. But they should not just write for each other; history is essential for all of us.’ Professor Eric Hobsbawm, president of Birkbeck College, London, quoted in the London Independent on Sunday Comment archive 2009 archive 2008 archive 2007 archive 2006 archive 2005 archive 2004 archive 2003 archive 2002 archive 2001 |
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