It might seem that writers live pretty safe lives. Yes, there are some, mostly journalists, who immerse themselves in troubled and war-torn countries, and they can and do get hurt. But most of us who write sit at keyboards or notepads every day and create stuff - poems, plays, stories, essays-mostly from our heads.
Links of the week August 31 2020 (36)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
7 September 2020
Still, though we may be safe from physical harm, all of us who write know that every hour we devote to our notepads or keyboards, every moment we stop and think and dwell on the thoughts and ideas that will, in one way or another, find life on a page or computer display, involves a variety of potentially monumental risks. There's financial risk, risk of never getting published, risk of bad reviews, risk of making enemies of those about whom we write. And there is no risk greater for a writer than emotional risk - which is why writing one's memoir is ultimately the riskiest of all.
My book, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, concerns the deaths of two people who have many living family members, the incarceration of a living man, and a protracted emotional and social trauma of enormous meaning to a great many real and living people in a region with enormous (rightful) distrust of media and journalists. I'd done my best to get the facts correct as I wrote, but I had thousands of pages of archival documents, photos, trial transcripts, and newspaper clippings, as well as hours of interviews.
Fact checking is a comprehensive process in which, according to the definitive book on the subject, a trained checker does the following: "Read for accuracy"; "Research the facts"; "Assess sources: people, newspapers and magazines, books, the Internet, etc"; "Check quotations"; and "Look out for and avoid plagiarism." Though I had worked as a fact checker in two small newsrooms, did I trust myself to do the exhaustive and detailed work of checking my own nonfiction book? I did not.
Penguin Random House parent company Bertelsmann has confirmed that it is interested in acquiring Simon & Schuster once ViacomCBS begins to again actively shop the country's third largest trade publishing house after the pandemic fades Shortly after Viacom and CBS merged, the newly-formed company placed S&S on the sales block.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Bertelsmann chief executive Thomas Rabe said he was "interested" in S&S and that Bertelsmann would be ready to make a bid when the time comes. "We've been the most active player on the consolidation of the book publishing market in the last 10 years. We combined Penguin and Random House very successfully to create by far the largest book publisher in the world-actually, the only global book publisher," he said in the interview. "Given this position, we would, of course, be interested in Simon & Schuster."
Denise Mina was born in East Kilbride in 1966 and now lives in Glasgow. Her novels include The Long Drop, which won the Gordon Burn prize, and The End of the Wasp Season, winner of the Theakstons Old Peculier crime novel of the year award. Mina also writes short stories and plays, and is a regular contributor to TV and radio. Her new novel, The Less Dead, tells the story of Margo, who discovers that her birth mother was a murdered sex worker.
"The less dead" started to be used about victims who don't attract a huge amount of emotional outpouring, such as street sex workers and the homeless. A lot of cases are cold cases because eyewitnesses didn't bother coming forward. I wanted to write about the murders of sex workers that happened in Glasgow in the late 80s and 90s. The last victim came from a really lovely family and they went on Crimewatch and people really cared about it, but the other cases were not treated like that. It's a wider societal value system about how you prioritise victims. In a time of Black Lives Matter, acknowledging that some people are perceived to have value attached to them and others aren't is really important.
Labels are just marketing ploys - Crime and Punishment is a crime novel
This year, my detective Vera Stanhope turns 21. She first appeared in 1999 in a book called The Crow Trap, which was conceived while I walked miles round the Northumberland countryside with my husband, Tim. He had suffered a major psychotic episode and been hospitalised. Though he'd been allowed home, he was still very poorly and very restless. Walking was the best remedy. It was autumn. I remember low sunlight, hedgerows loaded with haws and sloes, and to the rhythm of our footsteps, I brought to life the dishevelled, compassionate middle-aged detective who would very soon become part of my life.
My escape was into fiction - reading it and writing it. I was lucky because I was already a published writer and I had a reason to make stuff up. Of course, the guy who'd been stealing from the charity and was indirectly the cause of Tim's illness was murdered in a novel. I explored the issue of depression and came to understand my own response to Tim's behaviour. I read too, voraciously, anything that took me into a different world, away from the stress and anxiety of my everyday life. I wasn't earning very much from my books then, and because of his illness Tim's job was precarious. My local library, in Seaton Delaval, was a lifeline. It kept me going.
A 21-year-old British university student has landed a million-dollar book deal in the US for her first novel, a high-school thriller that tackles institutionalised racism.
"I was in my first year at university and I didn't have many friends because I don't drink as I'm Muslim, so I'd be in my room trying to figure out what to do. I was watching a lot of TV shows and I binged Gossip Girl in a few days," said Àbíké-Íyímídé, who is currently waiting for her term to start - remotely. "I loved it so much but I was really sad that there weren't many people who looked like me in it. I thought it'd be so cool if the shows I grew up with, like Pretty Little Liars and Gossip Girl, had more black people in them, so I started planning a story. I'd usually do uni during the day, then come home and write until 4am."
An unhappy childhood is a writer's gold mine. This nugget can be traced back to the July 1949 edition of the Partisan Review, a now defunct American periodical devoted to politics and literature. It comes from a book review entitled "Twenty-Seven Stories", in which Isaac Rosenfeld deliberates the merits of Nineteen Stories by Graham Greene and A Tree of Night and Other Stories by Truman Capote. The full sentence reads: "An unhappy childhood is a writer's gold mine, and one valuable thing Greene gets out of it is an honest basis for his stories." Like many an aphorism, it's a quote taken out of context.
As a writer, you create your own context, but in doing so you strip real events of their contexts, use people as models for your characters, even relocate buildings or reroute rivers, all in the service of your prose.
Back to the beginning. My childhood was more than unhappy. It was a disaster. My father was a disaster, my mother was a disaster, their marriage was a disaster, our family life was a disaster and, after the family fell apart when I was 13, the years I spent in children's homes were a disaster too. Luckily, I had my guitar and the radio to dream along to, and I was riddled with enough optimism to drag myself through it, more or less in one piece. On the streets at the age of 18, I embarked on a vagabond existence, guitar slung over my shoulder. Let's give it a whiff of romance and call it Bohemian. Wherever I went, I announced that one day I would write a book. A claim no one took the least bit seriously. This was the late Sixties, early Seventies, and writers were gods.
A novel tells you far more about a writer than an essay, a poem, or even an autobiography," says Martin Amis. He then adds, "My father thought this, too." This statement is especially intriguing in light of his soon-to-be-published book, Inside Story (Knopf, Oct.), which the publisher is billing as an autobiographical novel.
Amis's life has been exceptional. He has enjoyed great success, and the company of literary notables from birth. His father was Kingsley Amis; his stepmother was acclaimed writer Elizabeth Jane Howard; and Philip Larkin, one of the finest English poets of the last century, was a family friend. His peer group - formed largely while he was studying as an undergraduate at Oxford - includes Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie.
Daniel Nayeri, publisher of Odd Dot, an imprint of Macmillan Children's Publishing Group, wrote an entire book on his daily train commute. He wrote another while waiting at a bus stop.
Like several of his colleagues in the industry, Nayeri not only champions books for young readers in his day job but creates books for the very same audience when he is off the clock. Many editors and agents wear both hats, and PW talked with a few about their creative journeys, from balancing the demands of their professional and artistic lives to navigating publishing and personal relationships.