We were only discussing this very thing at LB on Saturday!!!!!
Michael
The Art of Translation
Who wrote the Milan Kundera you love? Answer: Michael Henry Heim. And what about the Orhan Pamuk you think is so smart? Maureen Freely. Or the imaginatively erudite Roberto Calasso? Well, that was me.
The translator should do his job and then disappear. The great, charismatic, creative writer wants to be all over the globe. And the last thing he wants to accept is that the majority of his readers are not really reading him.
His readers feel the same. They want intimate contact with true greatness. They don't want to know that this prose was written on survival wages in a maisonette in Bremen, or a high-rise flat in the suburbs of Osaka. Which kid wants to hear that her JK Rowling is actually a chain-smoking pensioner? When I meet readers of my own novels, they are disappointed I translate as well, as if this were demeaning to an author they hoped was "important".
There is complicity between globalisation and individualism; we can all watch any film, read any book, wherever made or written, and have the same experience. What a turn-off to be reminded that in fact we need an expert to mediate; what the Chinese get is a mediated version of me; what I'm reading is a mediated Dostoevsky.
Some years ago Kazuo Ishiguro castigated fellow English writers for making their prose too difficult for easy translation. One reason he had developed such a lean style, he claimed, was to make sure his books could be reproduced all over the world.
What if Shakespeare had eased off the puns for his French readers? Or Dickens had worried about getting Micawber-speak into Japanese?
Translation has been even more of an issue for Kundera, concerned his style was being made to sound banal. The translator's "supreme authority", Kundera thundered in Testaments Betrayed, "should be the author's personal style... But most translators obey another authority, that of the conventional version of 'good French, or German or Italian'."
Yet deviation from a linguistic norm only has meaning in the context of the language from which it sprang. When Lawrence writes of an insomniac Gudrun in Women in Love that "she was destroyed into perfect consciousness", he gets his frisson. But what if destruction was understood as a transformation; what if consciousness was seen negatively?
You'll never know exactly what a translator has done. He reads with maniacal attention to nuance and cultural implication, conscious of all the books that stand behind this one; then he sets out to rewrite this impossibly complex thing in his own language, re-elaborating everything, changing everything in order that it remain the same, or as close as possible to his experience of the original. In every sentence the most loyal respect must combine with the most resourceful inventiveness. Imagine shifting the Tower of Pisa into downtown Manhattan and convincing everyone it's in the right place; that's the scale of the task. Writing my own novels has always required a huge effort of organisation and imagination; but, sentence by sentence, translation is intellectually more taxing. On the positive side, the hands-on experience of how another writer puts together his work is worth a year's creative writing classes. It is a loss that few writers "stoop" to translation these days.
Of course, if the translator is poor there will be awkward moments of correspondence (you get the content but not the style); alternatively the prose will be fluent but off the mark (you get style but not content). The translator who is on song – the one who has the deepest understanding of the original and the greatest resources in his own language – brings style and content together in something altogether new that is also astonishingly faithful to its model.
Occasionally, a translator is invited to the festival of individual genius as the guest of a great man whose career he has furthered; made, even. He is Mr Eco in New York, Mr Rushdie in Germany. He is not recognised for the millions of decisions he made, but because he had the fortune to translate Rushdie or Eco. If he did wonderful work for less fortunate authors, we would never have heard of him.
This is why one has to applaud Harvill Secker for launching a prize for younger translators, one of the few prizes to recognise a translator not because he is associated with a famous name, but for translating a selected story more convincingly than others.
Each generation needs its own translators. While a fine work of literature never needs updating, a translation, however wonderful, gathers dust. Reading Pope's Homer, we hear Pope more than Homer. Reading Constance Garnett's Tolstoy, we hear the voice of late-19th-century England. We need to go back to the great works and bring them into our own idiom. To do that we need fresh minds and voices. For a few minutes every year we really must acknowledge that translators are important, and make sure we get the best.
NEW PRIZE
Harvill Secker and Waterstone's have teamed up to launch the Harvill Secker Young Translators' Prize. This year Spanish is the chosen language and entrants will be asked to translate a short story by the Argentinian writer Matías Néspolo. The winning entry will receive £1,000. To enter visit harvillseckeryoungtranslatorsprize.com
Tim Parks The Observer New Review 25 April 2010
Monday 26 April 2010
Tuesday 6 April 2010
poetry month in America
Good Afternoon
I have come accross the website http://www.poets.org/ and to celebrate April as Poetry Month In America they have a poem a day. So far they have been very insightful and I thought that there would be some of you that would enjoy them too. You can sign up on the website to receive them by email or view them on the site itself. Nice poet profiles to go with them as well.
I have come accross the website http://www.poets.org/ and to celebrate April as Poetry Month In America they have a poem a day. So far they have been very insightful and I thought that there would be some of you that would enjoy them too. You can sign up on the website to receive them by email or view them on the site itself. Nice poet profiles to go with them as well.
Thursday 11 March 2010
mail art blog
Hi everyone her is a link to a mailart blog I have come across.
My plan for our art project is to be a bit more flexible either you can send submissions to me by post or email to me a scanned image with dimensions of 6x4 at 72dpi I will then start a new blog and put the scanned images there for your perusal
Have a look at this blog there are some really interesting images http://digitalmailart.blogspot.com/
Thank you Carole and Clare for the lovely work that you have already sent me
My plan for our art project is to be a bit more flexible either you can send submissions to me by post or email to me a scanned image with dimensions of 6x4 at 72dpi I will then start a new blog and put the scanned images there for your perusal
Have a look at this blog there are some really interesting images http://digitalmailart.blogspot.com/
Thank you Carole and Clare for the lovely work that you have already sent me
razzle dazzle
re: Michael's writing tips I would like to pose a question
Where would we be without razzle dazzle?
Deep and philosophical I know, but its all part of life's rich tapestry
Where would we be without razzle dazzle?
Deep and philosophical I know, but its all part of life's rich tapestry
Tuesday 9 March 2010
quotes on a theme of books
Some book themed quotations that are quite interesting!
Paula
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.
Alfred Hitchcock (1899 - 1980)
The covers of this book are too far apart.
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary
You can cover a great deal of country in books.
Andrew Lang (1844 - 1912)
There's a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word "banal" sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say "underedited," I say "derivative." The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.
Anna Quindlen (1953 - )
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
Arnold Lobel
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
Austin Phelps
Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
Bell Hooks, O Magazine, December 2003
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
Charles Caleb Colton (1780 - 1832), Lacon, 1820
I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.
Charles De Secondat (1689 - 1755)
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.
Charles W. Eliot (1834 - 1926), The Happy Life, 1896
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
Christopher Morley (1890 - 1957)
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC), (Attributed)
It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.
Dame Rose Macaulay (1881 - 1958)
Books...are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 - 1957), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 1928
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967)
Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969)
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
Edith Sitwell (1887 - 1964)
Most new books are forgotten within a year, especially by those who borrow them.
Evan Esar (1899 - 1995)
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972)
I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.
Frank Zappa (1940 - 1993)
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)
Woe be to him that reads but one book.
George Herbert (1593 - 1633)
From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977)
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977)
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977)
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom (1930 - ), O Magazine, April 2003
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Walden: Reading, 1854
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
Henry James (1843 - 1916)
Paula
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.
Alfred Hitchcock (1899 - 1980)
The covers of this book are too far apart.
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary
You can cover a great deal of country in books.
Andrew Lang (1844 - 1912)
There's a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word "banal" sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say "underedited," I say "derivative." The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.
Anna Quindlen (1953 - )
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
Arnold Lobel
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
Austin Phelps
Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
Bell Hooks, O Magazine, December 2003
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
Charles Caleb Colton (1780 - 1832), Lacon, 1820
I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.
Charles De Secondat (1689 - 1755)
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.
Charles W. Eliot (1834 - 1926), The Happy Life, 1896
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
Christopher Morley (1890 - 1957)
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC), (Attributed)
It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.
Dame Rose Macaulay (1881 - 1958)
Books...are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 - 1957), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 1928
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967)
Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969)
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
Edith Sitwell (1887 - 1964)
Most new books are forgotten within a year, especially by those who borrow them.
Evan Esar (1899 - 1995)
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972)
I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.
Frank Zappa (1940 - 1993)
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)
Woe be to him that reads but one book.
George Herbert (1593 - 1633)
From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977)
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977)
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx (1890 - 1977)
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom (1930 - ), O Magazine, April 2003
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Walden: Reading, 1854
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
Henry James (1843 - 1916)
Friday 5 March 2010
More writing tips
From the remarks in the Guardian, the ones I loved that don't crop up ad nauseum were:
Richard Ford - 'Marry [live with] somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.'
Michael Moorcock - 'Find an author you admire ... and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.' [I wouldn't go as far as copying, but to sit and take apart a story or novel by your favourite author - sentence by sentence and word by word - and examine how they create is a remarkable exercise. Doing this with Alice Munro stories taught me so much about 'show not tell' and building in unobtrusive backstory.]
Andrew Motion - 'Think with your senses as well as your brain.'
Will Self - 'Always carry a notebook.' [I also liked his: 'Stop reading fiction ... (assuming, that is, you've read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven't you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction).' I don't completely agree, but I like his extreme stance.]
My favourite overall, was A. L. Kennedy's submission. She is an extremely intelligent, humane and ethical writer [and person], and was on the new [dumbed down?] BBC2 'Review Show' recently. Sadly, due largely to appalling chairing by Kirsty Wark, she struggled to be heard over the other shouty, run-of-the-mill, populist contributers.
My own guidelines (and 'No' I don't manage to stick to them) are:
1) WRITE! Apply bum to seat, preferably every day, and just write. Find a pattern, rhythm, schedule, whatever that works for you and stick to it - in fact defend it: defend your time and space (cf the Munro story 'The Office' about the woman who rents an office in order to get away from the demands of home) and write.
2) Cut, edit, read aloud (especially dialogue), put it in a drawer for three months, and then give it to a close friend or mentor to read. Repeat as necessary, especially cut and edit (especially adverbs, adjectives and cliches). NB If people keep saying that something does not work for them - they are probably right.
3) Try to stop work for the day at a point where things are going well, preferably where you know what you are going to do next; then you can continue your writing with enthusiasm the next day. NB I don't recommend this if your loved one is taking you away for a romantic trip. My friend Lou found herself (nearly) no longer engaged, as she spent the whole of a romantic weekend thinking about her story and just wanting to be back home and writing.
4) Have other outlets and activities: walk, meditate, listen to music, exercise, do yoga, swim, dance, have sex (I disagree with Colm Toibin). In fact, do anything to get the other bits of the brain working, as - once firing - they will probably solve any writing problems that you have.
5)Read widely, deeply and try to read outside your comfort zone. Read for form, structure and techniques as well as story.
Richard Ford - 'Marry [live with] somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.'
Michael Moorcock - 'Find an author you admire ... and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.' [I wouldn't go as far as copying, but to sit and take apart a story or novel by your favourite author - sentence by sentence and word by word - and examine how they create is a remarkable exercise. Doing this with Alice Munro stories taught me so much about 'show not tell' and building in unobtrusive backstory.]
Andrew Motion - 'Think with your senses as well as your brain.'
Will Self - 'Always carry a notebook.' [I also liked his: 'Stop reading fiction ... (assuming, that is, you've read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven't you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction).' I don't completely agree, but I like his extreme stance.]
My favourite overall, was A. L. Kennedy's submission. She is an extremely intelligent, humane and ethical writer [and person], and was on the new [dumbed down?] BBC2 'Review Show' recently. Sadly, due largely to appalling chairing by Kirsty Wark, she struggled to be heard over the other shouty, run-of-the-mill, populist contributers.
My own guidelines (and 'No' I don't manage to stick to them) are:
1) WRITE! Apply bum to seat, preferably every day, and just write. Find a pattern, rhythm, schedule, whatever that works for you and stick to it - in fact defend it: defend your time and space (cf the Munro story 'The Office' about the woman who rents an office in order to get away from the demands of home) and write.
2) Cut, edit, read aloud (especially dialogue), put it in a drawer for three months, and then give it to a close friend or mentor to read. Repeat as necessary, especially cut and edit (especially adverbs, adjectives and cliches). NB If people keep saying that something does not work for them - they are probably right.
3) Try to stop work for the day at a point where things are going well, preferably where you know what you are going to do next; then you can continue your writing with enthusiasm the next day. NB I don't recommend this if your loved one is taking you away for a romantic trip. My friend Lou found herself (nearly) no longer engaged, as she spent the whole of a romantic weekend thinking about her story and just wanting to be back home and writing.
4) Have other outlets and activities: walk, meditate, listen to music, exercise, do yoga, swim, dance, have sex (I disagree with Colm Toibin). In fact, do anything to get the other bits of the brain working, as - once firing - they will probably solve any writing problems that you have.
5)Read widely, deeply and try to read outside your comfort zone. Read for form, structure and techniques as well as story.
Wednesday 3 March 2010
My Tops Tips for Writers
1. Write, write, write even more.
2. The writing is it. The rest is just razzle dazzle.
3. All the problems you think you have when writing are overcome by the act of writing.
2. The writing is it. The rest is just razzle dazzle.
3. All the problems you think you have when writing are overcome by the act of writing.
Saturday 20 February 2010
Rules for Writers
Hi Everyone here is a list of 10 Rules of Writing for Writers by Writers in The Guardian today 20 Feb. I like Helen Simpsons 'shut up and get on with it' and Colm Toibin best. A no nonsense approach. Thos eof you that have completed Just Write or worked seriously with Julia Cameron
& The Artists Way will be familiar with much of what is here.
Enjoy & cogitate!!!!!!!
Ten rules for writing fiction
Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts
Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare,PD James, AL Kennedy
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 20 February 2010 00.09 GMT
Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin
1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".
5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.
9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing is published next month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Diana Athill
1 Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear).
2 Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no inessential words can every essential word be made to count.
3 You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)
Margaret Atwood
1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.
5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
9 Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
10 Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualisation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.
Roddy Doyle
1 Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph –
3 Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it's the job.
4 Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.
5 Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don't go near the online bookies – unless it's research.
6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said".
7 Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It's research.
8 Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.
9 Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet.
10 Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – "He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego." But then get back to work.
Helen Dunmore
1 Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.
2 Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
3 Read Keats's letters.
4 Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.
5 Learn poems by heart.
6 Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.
7 A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
8 If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard.
9 Don't worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed "What will survive of us is love".
Geoff Dyer
1 Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project. That stuff is for agents and editors to fret over – or not. Conversation with my American publisher. Me: "I'm writing a book so boring, of such limited commercial appeal, that if you publish it, it will probably cost you your job." Publisher: "That's exactly what makes me want to stay in my job."
2 Don't write in public places. In the early 1990s I went to live in Paris. The usual writerly reasons: back then, if you were caught writing in a pub in England, you could get your head kicked in, whereas in Paris, dans les cafés . . . Since then I've developed an aversion to writing in public. I now think it should be done only in private, like any other lavatorial activity.
3 Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.
4 If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great autocorrect files in literary history. Perfectly formed and spelt words emerge from a few brief keystrokes: "Niet" becomes "Nietzsche", "phoy" becomes "photography" and so on. Genius!
5 Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.
6 Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
7 Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.
8 Beware of clichés. Not just the clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought – even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.
9 Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all and, naturally, I don't follow it.
10 Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to perseverance. But writing is all about perseverance. You've got to stick at it. In my 30s I used to go to the gym even though I hated it. The purpose of going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That's what writing is to me: a way of postponing the day when I won't do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.
Anne Enright
1 The first 12 years are the worst.
2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
6 Try to be accurate about stuff.
7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
8 You can also do all that with whiskey.
9 Have fun.
10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
Richard Ford
1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
2 Don't have children.
3 Don't read your reviews.
4 Don't write reviews. (Your judgment's always tainted.)
5 Don't have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.
6 Don't drink and write at the same time.
7 Don't write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)
8 Don't wish ill on your colleagues.
9 Try to think of others' good luck as encouragement to yourself.
10 Don't take any shit if you can possibly help it.
Jonathan Franzen
1 The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2 Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
3 Never use the word "then" as a conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.
4 Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6 The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis".
7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8 It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10 You have to love before you can be relentless.
Esther Freud
1 Cut out the metaphors and similes. In my first book I promised myself I wouldn't use any and I slipped up during a sunset in chapter 11. I still blush when I come across it.
2 A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn't spin a bit of magic, it's missing something.
3 Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more. What is left often springs into life.
4 Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don't let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won't matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.
5 Don't wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.
6 Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.
7 Never forget, even your own rules are there to be broken.
Neil Gaiman
1 Write.
2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3 Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you've never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5 Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7 Laugh at your own jokes.
8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
David Hare
1 Write only when you have something to say.
2 Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.
3 Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
4 If nobody will put your play on, put it on yourself.
5 Jokes are like hands and feet for a painter. They may not be what you want to end up doing but you have to master them in the meanwhile.
6 Theatre primarily belongs to the young.
7 No one has ever achieved consistency as a screenwriter.
8 Never go to a TV personality festival masquerading as a literary festival.
9 Never complain of being misunderstood. You can choose to be understood, or you can choose not to.
10 The two most depressing words in the English language are "literary fiction".
PD James
1 Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
2 Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
3 Don't just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.
4 Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
5 Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.
AL Kennedy
1 Have humility. Older/more experienced/more convincing writers may offer rules and varieties of advice. Consider what they say. However, don't automatically give them charge of your brain, or anything else – they might be bitter, twisted, burned-out, manipulative, or just not very like you.
2 Have more humility. Remember you don't know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life – and maybe even please a few strangers.
3 Defend others. You can, of course, steal stories and attributes from family and friends, fill in filecards after lovemaking and so forth. It might be better to celebrate those you love – and love itself – by writing in such a way that everyone keeps their privacy and dignity intact.
4 Defend your work. Organisations, institutions and individuals will often think they know best about your work – especially if they are paying you. When you genuinely believe their decisions would damage your work – walk away. Run away. The money doesn't matter that much.
5 Defend yourself. Find out what keeps you happy, motivated and creative.
6 Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.
7 Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.
8 Be without fear. This is impossible, but let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones until they behave – then use them, maybe even write them. Too much fear and all you'll get is silence.
9 Remember you love writing. It wouldn't be worth it if you didn't. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.
10 Remember writing doesn't love you. It doesn't care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on.
Read the second part of the article here
Hilary Mantel
1 Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant.
2 Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don't really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, "how to" books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.
3 Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
4 If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
5 Be aware that anything that appears before "Chapter One" may be skipped. Don't put your vital clue there.
6 First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?
7 Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. People don't notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so when writers describe them it can sound as if they're trying too hard to instruct the reader.
8 Description must work for its place. It can't be simply ornamental. It usually works best if it has a human element; it is more effective if it comes from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of character definition and part of the action.
9 If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.
10 Be ready for anything. Each new story has different demands and may throw up reasons to break these and all other rules. Except number one: you can't give your soul to literature if you're thinking about income tax.
Michael Moorcock
1 My first rule was given to me by TH White, author of The Sword in the Stone and other Arthurian fantasies and was: Read. Read everything you can lay hands on. I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from Bunyan to Byatt.
2 Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.
3 Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.
4 If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction.
5 Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development.
6 Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.
7 For a good melodrama study the famous "Lester Dent master plot formula" which you can find online. It was written to show how to write a short story for the pulps, but can be adapted successfully for most stories of any length or genre.
8 If possible have something going on while you have your characters delivering exposition or philosophising. This helps retain dramatic tension.
9 Carrot and stick – have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).
10 Ignore all proferred rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say.
Michael Morpurgo
1 The prerequisite for me is to keep my well of ideas full. This means living as full and varied a life as possible, to have my antennae out all the time.
2 Ted Hughes gave me this advice and it works wonders: record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.
3 A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.
4 It is the gestation time which counts.
5 Once the skeleton of the story is ready I begin talking about it, mostly to Clare, my wife, sounding her out.
6 By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.
7 Once a chapter is scribbled down rough – I write very small so I don't have to turn the page and face the next empty one – Clare puts it on the word processor, prints it out, sometimes with her own comments added.
8 When I'm deep inside a story, living it as I write, I honestly don't know what will happen. I try not to dictate it, not to play God.
9 Once the book is finished in its first draft, I read it out loud to myself. How it sounds is hugely important.
10 With all editing, no matter how sensitive – and I've been very lucky here – I react sulkily at first, but then I settle down and get on with it, and a year later I have my book in my hand.
Andrew Motion
1 Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly.
2 Think with your senses as well as your brain.
3 Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary.
4 Lock different characters/elements in a room and tell them to get on.
5 Remember there is no such thing as nonsense.
6 Bear in mind Wilde's dictum that "only mediocrities develop" – and challenge it.
7 Let your work stand before deciding whether or not to serve.
8 Think big and stay particular.
9 Write for tomorrow, not for today.
10 Work hard.
Joyce Carol Oates
1 Don't try to anticipate an "ideal reader" – there may be one, but he/she is reading someone else.
2 Don't try to anticipate an "ideal reader" – except for yourself perhaps, sometime in the future.
3 Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!
4 Unless you are writing something very avant-garde – all gnarled, snarled and "obscure" – be alert for possibilities of paragraphing.
5 Unless you are writing something very post-modernist – self-conscious, self-reflexive and "provocative" – be alert for possibilities of using plain familiar words in place of polysyllabic "big" words.
6 Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."
7 Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.
Annie Proulx
1 Proceed slowly and take care.
2 To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand.
3 Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.
4 Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
5 Rewrite and edit until you achieve the most felicitous phrase/sentence/paragraph/page/story/chapter.
Philip Pullman
My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.
Ian Rankin
1 Read lots.
2 Write lots.
3 Learn to be self-critical.
4 Learn what criticism to accept.
5 Be persistent.
6 Have a story worth telling.
7 Don't give up.
8 Know the market.
9 Get lucky.
10 Stay lucky.
Will Self
1 Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . .
2 The edit.
3 Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
4 Stop reading fiction – it's all lies anyway, and it doesn't have anything to tell you that you don't know already (assuming, that is, you've read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven't you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction).
5 You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.
6 Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.
7 By the same token remember how much time people spend watching TV. If you're writing a novel with a contemporary setting there need to be long passages where nothing happens save for TV watching: "Later, George watched Grand Designs while eating HobNobs. Later still he watched the shopping channel for a while . . ."
8 The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can't deal with this you needn't apply.
9 Oh, and not forgetting the occasional beating administered by the sadistic guards of the imagination.
10 Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.
Helen Simpson
The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying "Faire et se taire" (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as "Shut up and get on with it."
Zadie Smith
1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3 Don't romanticise your "vocation". You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no "writer's lifestyle". All that matters is what you leave on the page.
4 Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can't do aren't worth doing. Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.
5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.
7 Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
8 Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
9 Don't confuse honours with achievement.
10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
Colm Tóibín
1 Finish everything you start.
2 Get on with it.
3 Stay in your mental pyjamas all day.
4 Stop feeling sorry for yourself.
5 No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working.
6 Work in the morning, a short break for lunch, work in the afternoon and then watch the six o'clock news and then go back to work until bed-time. Before bed, listen to Schubert, preferably some songs.
7 If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.
8 On Saturdays, you can watch an old Bergman film, preferably Persona or Autumn Sonata.
9 No going to London.
10 No going anywhere else either.
Rose Tremain
1 Forget the boring old dictum "write about what you know". Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.
2 Nevertheless, remember that in the particularity of your own life lies the seedcorn that will feed your imaginative work. So don't throw it all away on autobiography. (There are quite enough writers' memoirs out there already.)
3 Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.
4 Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted "first readers".
5 When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.
6 In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.
7 Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.
8 If you're writing historical fiction, don't have well-known real characters as your main protagonists. This will only create biographical unease in the readers and send them back to the history books. If you must write about real people, then do something post-modern and playful with them.
9 Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.
10 Never begin the book when you feel you want to begin it, but hold off a while longer.
Sarah Waters
1 Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work. I find watching films also instructive. Nearly every modern Hollywood blockbuster is hopelessly long and baggy. Trying to visualise the much better films they would have been with a few radical cuts is a great exercise in the art of story-telling. Which leads me on to . . .
2 Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts – including my own – where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: "This is where the novel should actually start." A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it. In fact . . .
3 Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I've got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.
4 Writing fiction is not "self-expression" or "therapy". Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.
5 Respect your characters, even the minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's. At the same time . . .
6 Don't overcrowd the narrative. Characters should be individualised, but functional – like figures in a painting. Think of Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Mocked, in which a patiently suffering Jesus is closely surrounded by four threatening men. Each of the characters is unique, and yet each represents a type; and collectively they form a narrative that is all the more powerful for being so tightly and so economically constructed. On a similar theme . . .
7 Don't overwrite. Avoid the redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs. Beginners, especially, seem to think that writing fiction needs a special kind of flowery prose, completely unlike any sort of language one might encounter in day-to-day life. This is a misapprehension about how the effects of fiction are produced, and can be dispelled by obeying Rule 1. To read some of the work of Colm Tóibín or Cormac McCarthy, for example, is to discover how a deliberately limited vocabulary can produce an astonishing emotional punch.
8 Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.
9 Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.
10 Talent trumps all. If you're a really great writer, none of these rules need apply. If James Baldwin had felt the need to whip up the pace a bit, he could never have achieved the extended lyrical intensity of Giovanni's Room. Without "overwritten" prose, we would have none of the linguistic exuberance of a Dickens or an Angela Carter. If everyone was economical with their characters, there would be no Wolf Hall . . . For the rest of us, however, rules remain important. And, crucially, only by understanding what they're for and how they work can you begin to experiment with breaking them.
Jeanette Winterson
1 Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
2 Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.
3 Love what you do.
4 Be honest with yourself. If you are no good, accept it. If the work you are doing is no good, accept it.
5 Don't hold on to poor work. If it was bad when it went in the drawer it will be just as bad when it comes out.
6 Take no notice of anyone you don't respect.
7 Take no notice of anyone with a gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.
8 Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.
9 Trust your creativity.
10 Enjoy this work!
I have 1 important rule to add Just Write!!!!!!!
Love
Michael
& The Artists Way will be familiar with much of what is here.
Enjoy & cogitate!!!!!!!
Ten rules for writing fiction
Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts
Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare,PD James, AL Kennedy
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 20 February 2010 00.09 GMT
Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin
1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".
5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.
9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing is published next month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Diana Athill
1 Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear).
2 Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no inessential words can every essential word be made to count.
3 You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)
Margaret Atwood
1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.
5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
9 Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
10 Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualisation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.
Roddy Doyle
1 Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph –
3 Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it's the job.
4 Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.
5 Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don't go near the online bookies – unless it's research.
6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said".
7 Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It's research.
8 Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.
9 Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet.
10 Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – "He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego." But then get back to work.
Helen Dunmore
1 Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.
2 Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
3 Read Keats's letters.
4 Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.
5 Learn poems by heart.
6 Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.
7 A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
8 If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard.
9 Don't worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed "What will survive of us is love".
Geoff Dyer
1 Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project. That stuff is for agents and editors to fret over – or not. Conversation with my American publisher. Me: "I'm writing a book so boring, of such limited commercial appeal, that if you publish it, it will probably cost you your job." Publisher: "That's exactly what makes me want to stay in my job."
2 Don't write in public places. In the early 1990s I went to live in Paris. The usual writerly reasons: back then, if you were caught writing in a pub in England, you could get your head kicked in, whereas in Paris, dans les cafés . . . Since then I've developed an aversion to writing in public. I now think it should be done only in private, like any other lavatorial activity.
3 Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.
4 If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great autocorrect files in literary history. Perfectly formed and spelt words emerge from a few brief keystrokes: "Niet" becomes "Nietzsche", "phoy" becomes "photography" and so on. Genius!
5 Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.
6 Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
7 Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.
8 Beware of clichés. Not just the clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought – even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.
9 Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all and, naturally, I don't follow it.
10 Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to perseverance. But writing is all about perseverance. You've got to stick at it. In my 30s I used to go to the gym even though I hated it. The purpose of going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That's what writing is to me: a way of postponing the day when I won't do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.
Anne Enright
1 The first 12 years are the worst.
2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
6 Try to be accurate about stuff.
7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
8 You can also do all that with whiskey.
9 Have fun.
10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
Richard Ford
1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
2 Don't have children.
3 Don't read your reviews.
4 Don't write reviews. (Your judgment's always tainted.)
5 Don't have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.
6 Don't drink and write at the same time.
7 Don't write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)
8 Don't wish ill on your colleagues.
9 Try to think of others' good luck as encouragement to yourself.
10 Don't take any shit if you can possibly help it.
Jonathan Franzen
1 The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2 Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
3 Never use the word "then" as a conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.
4 Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6 The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis".
7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8 It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10 You have to love before you can be relentless.
Esther Freud
1 Cut out the metaphors and similes. In my first book I promised myself I wouldn't use any and I slipped up during a sunset in chapter 11. I still blush when I come across it.
2 A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn't spin a bit of magic, it's missing something.
3 Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more. What is left often springs into life.
4 Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don't let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won't matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.
5 Don't wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.
6 Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.
7 Never forget, even your own rules are there to be broken.
Neil Gaiman
1 Write.
2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3 Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you've never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5 Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7 Laugh at your own jokes.
8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
David Hare
1 Write only when you have something to say.
2 Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.
3 Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
4 If nobody will put your play on, put it on yourself.
5 Jokes are like hands and feet for a painter. They may not be what you want to end up doing but you have to master them in the meanwhile.
6 Theatre primarily belongs to the young.
7 No one has ever achieved consistency as a screenwriter.
8 Never go to a TV personality festival masquerading as a literary festival.
9 Never complain of being misunderstood. You can choose to be understood, or you can choose not to.
10 The two most depressing words in the English language are "literary fiction".
PD James
1 Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
2 Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
3 Don't just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.
4 Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
5 Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.
AL Kennedy
1 Have humility. Older/more experienced/more convincing writers may offer rules and varieties of advice. Consider what they say. However, don't automatically give them charge of your brain, or anything else – they might be bitter, twisted, burned-out, manipulative, or just not very like you.
2 Have more humility. Remember you don't know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life – and maybe even please a few strangers.
3 Defend others. You can, of course, steal stories and attributes from family and friends, fill in filecards after lovemaking and so forth. It might be better to celebrate those you love – and love itself – by writing in such a way that everyone keeps their privacy and dignity intact.
4 Defend your work. Organisations, institutions and individuals will often think they know best about your work – especially if they are paying you. When you genuinely believe their decisions would damage your work – walk away. Run away. The money doesn't matter that much.
5 Defend yourself. Find out what keeps you happy, motivated and creative.
6 Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.
7 Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.
8 Be without fear. This is impossible, but let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones until they behave – then use them, maybe even write them. Too much fear and all you'll get is silence.
9 Remember you love writing. It wouldn't be worth it if you didn't. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.
10 Remember writing doesn't love you. It doesn't care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on.
Read the second part of the article here
Hilary Mantel
1 Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant.
2 Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don't really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, "how to" books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.
3 Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
4 If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
5 Be aware that anything that appears before "Chapter One" may be skipped. Don't put your vital clue there.
6 First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?
7 Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. People don't notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so when writers describe them it can sound as if they're trying too hard to instruct the reader.
8 Description must work for its place. It can't be simply ornamental. It usually works best if it has a human element; it is more effective if it comes from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of character definition and part of the action.
9 If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.
10 Be ready for anything. Each new story has different demands and may throw up reasons to break these and all other rules. Except number one: you can't give your soul to literature if you're thinking about income tax.
Michael Moorcock
1 My first rule was given to me by TH White, author of The Sword in the Stone and other Arthurian fantasies and was: Read. Read everything you can lay hands on. I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from Bunyan to Byatt.
2 Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.
3 Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.
4 If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction.
5 Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development.
6 Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.
7 For a good melodrama study the famous "Lester Dent master plot formula" which you can find online. It was written to show how to write a short story for the pulps, but can be adapted successfully for most stories of any length or genre.
8 If possible have something going on while you have your characters delivering exposition or philosophising. This helps retain dramatic tension.
9 Carrot and stick – have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).
10 Ignore all proferred rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say.
Michael Morpurgo
1 The prerequisite for me is to keep my well of ideas full. This means living as full and varied a life as possible, to have my antennae out all the time.
2 Ted Hughes gave me this advice and it works wonders: record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.
3 A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.
4 It is the gestation time which counts.
5 Once the skeleton of the story is ready I begin talking about it, mostly to Clare, my wife, sounding her out.
6 By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.
7 Once a chapter is scribbled down rough – I write very small so I don't have to turn the page and face the next empty one – Clare puts it on the word processor, prints it out, sometimes with her own comments added.
8 When I'm deep inside a story, living it as I write, I honestly don't know what will happen. I try not to dictate it, not to play God.
9 Once the book is finished in its first draft, I read it out loud to myself. How it sounds is hugely important.
10 With all editing, no matter how sensitive – and I've been very lucky here – I react sulkily at first, but then I settle down and get on with it, and a year later I have my book in my hand.
Andrew Motion
1 Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly.
2 Think with your senses as well as your brain.
3 Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary.
4 Lock different characters/elements in a room and tell them to get on.
5 Remember there is no such thing as nonsense.
6 Bear in mind Wilde's dictum that "only mediocrities develop" – and challenge it.
7 Let your work stand before deciding whether or not to serve.
8 Think big and stay particular.
9 Write for tomorrow, not for today.
10 Work hard.
Joyce Carol Oates
1 Don't try to anticipate an "ideal reader" – there may be one, but he/she is reading someone else.
2 Don't try to anticipate an "ideal reader" – except for yourself perhaps, sometime in the future.
3 Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!
4 Unless you are writing something very avant-garde – all gnarled, snarled and "obscure" – be alert for possibilities of paragraphing.
5 Unless you are writing something very post-modernist – self-conscious, self-reflexive and "provocative" – be alert for possibilities of using plain familiar words in place of polysyllabic "big" words.
6 Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."
7 Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.
Annie Proulx
1 Proceed slowly and take care.
2 To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand.
3 Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.
4 Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
5 Rewrite and edit until you achieve the most felicitous phrase/sentence/paragraph/page/story/chapter.
Philip Pullman
My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.
Ian Rankin
1 Read lots.
2 Write lots.
3 Learn to be self-critical.
4 Learn what criticism to accept.
5 Be persistent.
6 Have a story worth telling.
7 Don't give up.
8 Know the market.
9 Get lucky.
10 Stay lucky.
Will Self
1 Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . .
2 The edit.
3 Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
4 Stop reading fiction – it's all lies anyway, and it doesn't have anything to tell you that you don't know already (assuming, that is, you've read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven't you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction).
5 You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.
6 Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.
7 By the same token remember how much time people spend watching TV. If you're writing a novel with a contemporary setting there need to be long passages where nothing happens save for TV watching: "Later, George watched Grand Designs while eating HobNobs. Later still he watched the shopping channel for a while . . ."
8 The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can't deal with this you needn't apply.
9 Oh, and not forgetting the occasional beating administered by the sadistic guards of the imagination.
10 Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.
Helen Simpson
The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying "Faire et se taire" (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as "Shut up and get on with it."
Zadie Smith
1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3 Don't romanticise your "vocation". You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no "writer's lifestyle". All that matters is what you leave on the page.
4 Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can't do aren't worth doing. Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.
5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.
7 Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
8 Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
9 Don't confuse honours with achievement.
10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
Colm Tóibín
1 Finish everything you start.
2 Get on with it.
3 Stay in your mental pyjamas all day.
4 Stop feeling sorry for yourself.
5 No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working.
6 Work in the morning, a short break for lunch, work in the afternoon and then watch the six o'clock news and then go back to work until bed-time. Before bed, listen to Schubert, preferably some songs.
7 If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.
8 On Saturdays, you can watch an old Bergman film, preferably Persona or Autumn Sonata.
9 No going to London.
10 No going anywhere else either.
Rose Tremain
1 Forget the boring old dictum "write about what you know". Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.
2 Nevertheless, remember that in the particularity of your own life lies the seedcorn that will feed your imaginative work. So don't throw it all away on autobiography. (There are quite enough writers' memoirs out there already.)
3 Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.
4 Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted "first readers".
5 When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.
6 In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.
7 Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.
8 If you're writing historical fiction, don't have well-known real characters as your main protagonists. This will only create biographical unease in the readers and send them back to the history books. If you must write about real people, then do something post-modern and playful with them.
9 Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.
10 Never begin the book when you feel you want to begin it, but hold off a while longer.
Sarah Waters
1 Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work. I find watching films also instructive. Nearly every modern Hollywood blockbuster is hopelessly long and baggy. Trying to visualise the much better films they would have been with a few radical cuts is a great exercise in the art of story-telling. Which leads me on to . . .
2 Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts – including my own – where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: "This is where the novel should actually start." A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it. In fact . . .
3 Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I've got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.
4 Writing fiction is not "self-expression" or "therapy". Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.
5 Respect your characters, even the minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's. At the same time . . .
6 Don't overcrowd the narrative. Characters should be individualised, but functional – like figures in a painting. Think of Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Mocked, in which a patiently suffering Jesus is closely surrounded by four threatening men. Each of the characters is unique, and yet each represents a type; and collectively they form a narrative that is all the more powerful for being so tightly and so economically constructed. On a similar theme . . .
7 Don't overwrite. Avoid the redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs. Beginners, especially, seem to think that writing fiction needs a special kind of flowery prose, completely unlike any sort of language one might encounter in day-to-day life. This is a misapprehension about how the effects of fiction are produced, and can be dispelled by obeying Rule 1. To read some of the work of Colm Tóibín or Cormac McCarthy, for example, is to discover how a deliberately limited vocabulary can produce an astonishing emotional punch.
8 Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.
9 Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.
10 Talent trumps all. If you're a really great writer, none of these rules need apply. If James Baldwin had felt the need to whip up the pace a bit, he could never have achieved the extended lyrical intensity of Giovanni's Room. Without "overwritten" prose, we would have none of the linguistic exuberance of a Dickens or an Angela Carter. If everyone was economical with their characters, there would be no Wolf Hall . . . For the rest of us, however, rules remain important. And, crucially, only by understanding what they're for and how they work can you begin to experiment with breaking them.
Jeanette Winterson
1 Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.
2 Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.
3 Love what you do.
4 Be honest with yourself. If you are no good, accept it. If the work you are doing is no good, accept it.
5 Don't hold on to poor work. If it was bad when it went in the drawer it will be just as bad when it comes out.
6 Take no notice of anyone you don't respect.
7 Take no notice of anyone with a gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.
8 Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.
9 Trust your creativity.
10 Enjoy this work!
I have 1 important rule to add Just Write!!!!!!!
Love
Michael
Friday 19 February 2010
Carole thanks for your views on the recent spat between MacMillan/Amazon. I think that you are being a bit hard on Amazon. What we are seeing is one of the skirmishes that is beginning around publishing and how we buy and read books. Technology is altering in unimaginable ways this landscape. In my view most of the big publishers until very recently have not woken up to the new challenges but now are beginning to scurry around in these new fields. I think developments can only be good for readers and my very limited experience of reading on a Kindle was surprisingly good but I like you have been indoctrinated into the paper book experience. I'm quite certain my grandchildren will for the most part read books on screen and I look forward to seeing what Apple come up with. I am also quite certain that good indpendents will face up to the challenges which are formidable................. I don't know of a first class book store round here. Perhaps we could come up with a list of fine bookstores. What I really miss is a huge academic library........ anybody any ideas? When I was teaching in Kent the Kent County Library was paradise but that was a long time ago and of course University of Plymouth is fine as well.
Thanks for opening this stream Carole.
Thanks for opening this stream Carole.
Patrick O'Brien and The Aubrey/ Maturin series
Well I am still feverish, pale and coughing like a cat with a mouth of hot pepper! Also very bored sometimes when my headache prevents further reading. On such occasions I read and re-read Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/ Maturin series of books set in the early 19th century aboard various HM ships of war. O.K. I know what you are thinking but these are sea adventure books with a real difference. O' Brien was fluent in several languages, a classicist and the biographer of Picasso and the great British botanist Joseph Banks he also brings to the stories a phenomenal knowledge of the 18th/19th century and the ships and language of the era.
I have a passion for sail boats and the sea........... how could I not be brought up in Plymouth? Reading one these sea tales spirits me aboard one of the huge ships of the time and I am plunged into this strange arcane world of ropes, sails, unpredictable weather and at times violent action.
There are the long sea chases the taste of salt spray the cut of ropes and the wide wide wide desperate ocean where the horizons are circles of nothingness. What better cure for a sick man than O'Brien in full flight?
Looking forward to seeing you all at next LB on 27th Feb.
I have a passion for sail boats and the sea........... how could I not be brought up in Plymouth? Reading one these sea tales spirits me aboard one of the huge ships of the time and I am plunged into this strange arcane world of ropes, sails, unpredictable weather and at times violent action.
There are the long sea chases the taste of salt spray the cut of ropes and the wide wide wide desperate ocean where the horizons are circles of nothingness. What better cure for a sick man than O'Brien in full flight?
Looking forward to seeing you all at next LB on 27th Feb.
Tuesday 9 February 2010
Stream of consciousness burblings about publishing
I was most annoyed by the Macmillan/Amazon debacle last week and vowed to stop using Amazon. I'm about to go to Harbour Bookshop to buy the Christopher Reid book (can't really afford it, but will sacrifice all coffees and lunches out this week)as my library copy is due back, but even other online outfits like the 'BookDepository' would be better than Amazon. I also cannot imagine buying a Kindle. I like to own books; I like their physical feel; I even like scribbling in them (and photocopying the odd bit to show a friend); I certainly could not cope with the idea that 'Big Brother' Amazon could delete a text from my Kindle memory, or that I cannot add rude comments to a page as I'm reading. I think Amazon does need taking down a peg or two, but unless more people speak out - especially to advertise other second-hand and 'special deal' sources - then not much will happen.
I don't know enough about the workings of the publishing industry, but as so many of the smaller and more specialist companies seem to be sinking I'm loathe to be sweepingly negative, I don't want any more disappearing. What are the alternatives? Suggestions please. Self-publishing makes me think of Parliament before MPs' expenses were introduced, when all the ones without money could not take part.
I do feel for authors stuggling to make a living, but I've never thought of writing as a source of income (more an illness or obsession) and have been ridiculously delighted when anyone has paid me anything - but then I would not want to be taken advantage of. Maybe the likes of JK Rowling and Dan Brown should subsidise struggling authors?
I don't know enough about the workings of the publishing industry, but as so many of the smaller and more specialist companies seem to be sinking I'm loathe to be sweepingly negative, I don't want any more disappearing. What are the alternatives? Suggestions please. Self-publishing makes me think of Parliament before MPs' expenses were introduced, when all the ones without money could not take part.
I do feel for authors stuggling to make a living, but I've never thought of writing as a source of income (more an illness or obsession) and have been ridiculously delighted when anyone has paid me anything - but then I would not want to be taken advantage of. Maybe the likes of JK Rowling and Dan Brown should subsidise struggling authors?
Sunday 7 February 2010
Henry Porter of The Observer on Books
Hi Everyone,
this taken from the Observer 7 Feb and Written by Henry Porter is an interesting article and lays out the main problems facing an aspiring author today. Note that a writer only gets 35p royalties on a £10 book!!!!!! Also remember that in Britain in 2007 of the 200,000 books on sale only 10,000 sold more than 3,500 copies. Of the 1.2m copies sold in U.S. in 2004 only 2% sold more than 5,000 copies!!!! As I've mentioned often in Just Write and Left Bank its the process of writing that is the important thing that creative act and what it engenders in you the writer that is the vital element.
It might be a good idea to discuss different ways of getting a book published at a meeting of people with novels, short stories and poems etc waiting in a bottom drawer.
Hope you all enjoy this and offer comment on it.
Michael
As I start to write my latest book, I fear for the future of publishing
Retailing pressure and the emergence of the ebook are threatening the future of authors and their work
·
Henry Porter
The Observer, Sunday 7 February 2010
Article history
Last Monday at 8.30am I began to type the first lines of a new novel. These sentences are unlikely to see the light of day but they're a start – I am out on the pitch swinging my arm in a fashion that convinces me at least, which is certainly an advance on the week spent inside the pavilion whitening my pads and tidying the locker.
To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales, that the book is shortly to be replaced by the ebook and electronic readers sold by, among others, Amazon, which seems bent on reducing publishers to an archipelago of editorial sweatshops and the writer to the little guy stitching trainers in an airless room.
Publishing seems to be one of the great mysteries of commerce. Despite the large numbers involved – a total of £1.752bn was spent on 235.7m books in 2009 in the UK, that's nearly four books for every man woman and child – the business today is a testament to self-deprecation, with only a few people willing to assert the unique value of books and their content.
When you transfer the model into any other business, the way books are sold seems like an evolutionary freak. Imagine you are the owner of a chain of ironmongers and a man suggests that you sell his new line of household equipment. You agree but with the following conditions. First, though he retains ownership of his pans and brushes, you will take something more than 50% from any sale. Second, he must pay for front-of-store display to make sure the goods catch the customer's eye. Third, if they don't sell within a specified period he pays to ship them back to his warehouse. Fourth, if your centralised ordering system breaks down and the items fail to materialise during the broom and mop-handle promotion, he has no comeback.
That is how publishers sells books: having paid an advance to a writer and stumped up for editing, design, marketing and distribution, they take all the retailer's risk.
Selling through the supermarkets is even tougher. There is huge competition for space and the supermarket demands a much greater percentage of the sale price. Publishers guard the figures closely but 65% is not uncommon; one asked for 85% before Christmas. In order to sell more hand-crafted mint chocolates and olive oil, the supermarket may chose to make a loss leader out of a bestseller by Dan Brown or JK Rowling, thus devaluing the book and harming the trade of the local book shop in one swipe. "Supermarkets like to give any specialist shop a good kicking," said one publisher.
The forces in the book market are increasingly monopolistic, particularly when it comes to selling on the web and on the new battlefront of ebooks. Amazon, the online retailer, has unprecedented power to squeeze publishers' margins and to compete with high street retailers. The company now wants to make its Kindle reader the primary platform for ebooks and is pursuing a strategy that when the publisher supplies books at wholesale it will also license the books at a very low price to the Kindle. In effect publishers would be providing the means to cannibalise their own product, and at a discount. Unsurprisingly they prefer a model that allows them to appoint a company such as Apple as an agency for their books.
I don't have serious objections in principle to the right kind of "disintermediation" – the jargon used for the process of reducing the supply chain – or even to ebooks, as long as they don't completely replace the physical book. If all man had ever known was ebooks and someone came along and suggested actually printing one it would be heralded as a wonderful addition to civilisation. However, there should be doubts about the remote power of deletion that Amazon retains over the Kindle. During the Amazon-Macmillan dispute last week sample chapters from Macmillan books disappeared from electronic readers and last year the company removed a copy of Orwell's 1984 because of a rights problem.
If you feel sorry for publishers spare a thought – and a dime – for writers, on whose shoulders this huge, discounting, rights-trading, jargon-babbling profiteering melée rests. As things are, the writer's share of a book that sells for £10, after his or her agent's fee, hovers between 35p and 40p: more than 95% is kept by the agent, publisher and retailer. The fierce discounting in supermarkets means that writers are now even less likely to earn out their advances. At the same time advances are being cut and authors' contracts are being summarily cancelled.
We tell ourselves times are tough and jobs must be saved. Newspapers, TV, the music business are all suffering from the recession, a collapse of advertising and audience. But as their advances are cut, authors have failed to notice that during the worst recession for 80 years, book sales went down last year by just 1.2% in value and only 0.5% in volume. Non-fiction titles suffered but fiction is booming and all the publishers I spoke to are secretly optimistic.
So the storm is far from perfect. What does seem to be happening is that publishers have somehow become embarrassed about "being the impresarios of stories and ideas", as Toby Mundy, head of Atlantic Books, romantically describes his job. They have allowed the relegation of the book to the status of a stone-baked pizza, a commercial and moral misstep, and writers have gone along with it because of the gloomy orthodoxies of necessity.
Talk of "disintermediation" is nonsense when half a minute's thought will tell you that the intermediaries that count, the ones between writers and readers, are large, monopolistic and generally unsympathetic to writers. E books don't bother me any more than writing on a computer does. The world will accommodate them even though reading Christopher Reid's Costa-winning collection of poems on a screen will scarcely add to the experience. What worries me is the loss of income for writers in what is a pretty healthy market, the loss of good editors from publishing houses and the disdain for writers by retailers – people who depend on them. If they are not careful the core talent of the book trade may well combine in new types of ventures – collectives and transparent relationships where writers and editors go into business together on a 50:50 basis and are enabled by web platforms, ebooks and print on demand… disintermediation of a more radical sort.
Over the last couple of weeks I've finished three books, Finest Years by Max Hastings, Generosity by the American novelist Richard Powers and an extraordinary book by William Blacker about his life among the farmers and gypsies of Transylvania, Along the Enchanted Way. They were thrilling to read. We should prize the system that produced such wonderful storytelling: it needs to be nurtured as an essential part of our society. To write a book half as good as any of them is what makes me proceed with trepidation from the first to the second paragraph.
this taken from the Observer 7 Feb and Written by Henry Porter is an interesting article and lays out the main problems facing an aspiring author today. Note that a writer only gets 35p royalties on a £10 book!!!!!! Also remember that in Britain in 2007 of the 200,000 books on sale only 10,000 sold more than 3,500 copies. Of the 1.2m copies sold in U.S. in 2004 only 2% sold more than 5,000 copies!!!! As I've mentioned often in Just Write and Left Bank its the process of writing that is the important thing that creative act and what it engenders in you the writer that is the vital element.
It might be a good idea to discuss different ways of getting a book published at a meeting of people with novels, short stories and poems etc waiting in a bottom drawer.
Hope you all enjoy this and offer comment on it.
Michael
As I start to write my latest book, I fear for the future of publishing
Retailing pressure and the emergence of the ebook are threatening the future of authors and their work
·
Henry Porter
The Observer, Sunday 7 February 2010
Article history
Last Monday at 8.30am I began to type the first lines of a new novel. These sentences are unlikely to see the light of day but they're a start – I am out on the pitch swinging my arm in a fashion that convinces me at least, which is certainly an advance on the week spent inside the pavilion whitening my pads and tidying the locker.
To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales, that the book is shortly to be replaced by the ebook and electronic readers sold by, among others, Amazon, which seems bent on reducing publishers to an archipelago of editorial sweatshops and the writer to the little guy stitching trainers in an airless room.
Publishing seems to be one of the great mysteries of commerce. Despite the large numbers involved – a total of £1.752bn was spent on 235.7m books in 2009 in the UK, that's nearly four books for every man woman and child – the business today is a testament to self-deprecation, with only a few people willing to assert the unique value of books and their content.
When you transfer the model into any other business, the way books are sold seems like an evolutionary freak. Imagine you are the owner of a chain of ironmongers and a man suggests that you sell his new line of household equipment. You agree but with the following conditions. First, though he retains ownership of his pans and brushes, you will take something more than 50% from any sale. Second, he must pay for front-of-store display to make sure the goods catch the customer's eye. Third, if they don't sell within a specified period he pays to ship them back to his warehouse. Fourth, if your centralised ordering system breaks down and the items fail to materialise during the broom and mop-handle promotion, he has no comeback.
That is how publishers sells books: having paid an advance to a writer and stumped up for editing, design, marketing and distribution, they take all the retailer's risk.
Selling through the supermarkets is even tougher. There is huge competition for space and the supermarket demands a much greater percentage of the sale price. Publishers guard the figures closely but 65% is not uncommon; one asked for 85% before Christmas. In order to sell more hand-crafted mint chocolates and olive oil, the supermarket may chose to make a loss leader out of a bestseller by Dan Brown or JK Rowling, thus devaluing the book and harming the trade of the local book shop in one swipe. "Supermarkets like to give any specialist shop a good kicking," said one publisher.
The forces in the book market are increasingly monopolistic, particularly when it comes to selling on the web and on the new battlefront of ebooks. Amazon, the online retailer, has unprecedented power to squeeze publishers' margins and to compete with high street retailers. The company now wants to make its Kindle reader the primary platform for ebooks and is pursuing a strategy that when the publisher supplies books at wholesale it will also license the books at a very low price to the Kindle. In effect publishers would be providing the means to cannibalise their own product, and at a discount. Unsurprisingly they prefer a model that allows them to appoint a company such as Apple as an agency for their books.
I don't have serious objections in principle to the right kind of "disintermediation" – the jargon used for the process of reducing the supply chain – or even to ebooks, as long as they don't completely replace the physical book. If all man had ever known was ebooks and someone came along and suggested actually printing one it would be heralded as a wonderful addition to civilisation. However, there should be doubts about the remote power of deletion that Amazon retains over the Kindle. During the Amazon-Macmillan dispute last week sample chapters from Macmillan books disappeared from electronic readers and last year the company removed a copy of Orwell's 1984 because of a rights problem.
If you feel sorry for publishers spare a thought – and a dime – for writers, on whose shoulders this huge, discounting, rights-trading, jargon-babbling profiteering melée rests. As things are, the writer's share of a book that sells for £10, after his or her agent's fee, hovers between 35p and 40p: more than 95% is kept by the agent, publisher and retailer. The fierce discounting in supermarkets means that writers are now even less likely to earn out their advances. At the same time advances are being cut and authors' contracts are being summarily cancelled.
We tell ourselves times are tough and jobs must be saved. Newspapers, TV, the music business are all suffering from the recession, a collapse of advertising and audience. But as their advances are cut, authors have failed to notice that during the worst recession for 80 years, book sales went down last year by just 1.2% in value and only 0.5% in volume. Non-fiction titles suffered but fiction is booming and all the publishers I spoke to are secretly optimistic.
So the storm is far from perfect. What does seem to be happening is that publishers have somehow become embarrassed about "being the impresarios of stories and ideas", as Toby Mundy, head of Atlantic Books, romantically describes his job. They have allowed the relegation of the book to the status of a stone-baked pizza, a commercial and moral misstep, and writers have gone along with it because of the gloomy orthodoxies of necessity.
Talk of "disintermediation" is nonsense when half a minute's thought will tell you that the intermediaries that count, the ones between writers and readers, are large, monopolistic and generally unsympathetic to writers. E books don't bother me any more than writing on a computer does. The world will accommodate them even though reading Christopher Reid's Costa-winning collection of poems on a screen will scarcely add to the experience. What worries me is the loss of income for writers in what is a pretty healthy market, the loss of good editors from publishing houses and the disdain for writers by retailers – people who depend on them. If they are not careful the core talent of the book trade may well combine in new types of ventures – collectives and transparent relationships where writers and editors go into business together on a 50:50 basis and are enabled by web platforms, ebooks and print on demand… disintermediation of a more radical sort.
Over the last couple of weeks I've finished three books, Finest Years by Max Hastings, Generosity by the American novelist Richard Powers and an extraordinary book by William Blacker about his life among the farmers and gypsies of Transylvania, Along the Enchanted Way. They were thrilling to read. We should prize the system that produced such wonderful storytelling: it needs to be nurtured as an essential part of our society. To write a book half as good as any of them is what makes me proceed with trepidation from the first to the second paragraph.
Sunday 24 January 2010
Poor Anne!!!!!!
quite an account but it doesn't figure in my reckoning but I am sure there is an O.B.E. in it somewhere! I've been reading 'The Sea,' The Sea by John Banville which won the Booker in 2005. Much praised and the writing is to be admired and the insight is deep but all deeply depressing, full of Irish misery. It's unremitting and I'm struggling to make the end despite the ravings of the critics. It is good on memory and just how unfaithful to any kind of veracity it is but the existential themes running through everything are quite exhausting.
For a bit of relief I watched Ken Russell's film of 'Women in Love,' last evening. It's a fine effort to represent the subleties of the novel through film. With the nude scenes (Bates and Reed) with bits in full view and the torrid (for the time) love scenes no wonder it was controversial, typical Russell. But I loved his films on Elgar and Mahler which are classics. It did seem a bit dated and mannered but who would have a stab at it today? Definitely worth watching. I'm going to watch La Boheme with two of my favourite singers Anna Netrebko & Rolando Villazon in title roles. Magical wonderful stuff their La Traviata is a sizzler too. Glorious; why doesn't Plymouth have an opera house????????
quite an account but it doesn't figure in my reckoning but I am sure there is an O.B.E. in it somewhere! I've been reading 'The Sea,' The Sea by John Banville which won the Booker in 2005. Much praised and the writing is to be admired and the insight is deep but all deeply depressing, full of Irish misery. It's unremitting and I'm struggling to make the end despite the ravings of the critics. It is good on memory and just how unfaithful to any kind of veracity it is but the existential themes running through everything are quite exhausting.
For a bit of relief I watched Ken Russell's film of 'Women in Love,' last evening. It's a fine effort to represent the subleties of the novel through film. With the nude scenes (Bates and Reed) with bits in full view and the torrid (for the time) love scenes no wonder it was controversial, typical Russell. But I loved his films on Elgar and Mahler which are classics. It did seem a bit dated and mannered but who would have a stab at it today? Definitely worth watching. I'm going to watch La Boheme with two of my favourite singers Anna Netrebko & Rolando Villazon in title roles. Magical wonderful stuff their La Traviata is a sizzler too. Glorious; why doesn't Plymouth have an opera house????????
Sunday Sunday
It's dusk now and I have been at this keyboard since before sunrise. What have I been up to? Writing a fictional piece? Not quite ... I've been grappling with the accounts for the South Hams Theatre and Concert Club! As their newly appointed treasurer, I have until Tuesday to make sense of all the transactions over the past year and present a report to the committee.
If you enjoy theatre/concert trips and would like to be transported by coach from Kingsbridge (and other places en route) to Plymouth, Torquay and Exeter venues, let me know. The joining fee and subscription rate are minimal ... and you will meet like-minded people too.
There are 350 members already and the more we have the more variety we can have in our programme of events.
If you enjoy theatre/concert trips and would like to be transported by coach from Kingsbridge (and other places en route) to Plymouth, Torquay and Exeter venues, let me know. The joining fee and subscription rate are minimal ... and you will meet like-minded people too.
There are 350 members already and the more we have the more variety we can have in our programme of events.
Wednesday 6 January 2010
Musings on a Snowy Day
Hi everyone I do hope you had a wonderful festive season and wish you and your loved ones a healthy,happy and holy 2010. We Went down to Southern France for the hols where the weather wasn't as warm or sunny as we expected but we had a great time nevrthelss with some Swedish friends. It was warm enough for a new year dip in the Med! My friend Christer is a great film buff and we watched Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo which is so imaginative and funny with some incredibly witty dialogue. Grab a DVD if you can. Mia Farrow is enchanting.
Revolutionary Road directed by Sam Mendes and starring Di Caprio and Kate Winslett is much harder to watch because of tis subject matter the break up of a marriage in 1950's America. Its deep but perceptive stuff and the acting (even by Di Caprio) is superb I thinbk Winslett was Oscar nominated for her part. The camera work is detailed and revealing as well.
I read a lot of non fiction over the holiday. Richard Sheltons 'The Longshoreman,' the story of his life as a Marine Biologist is fascinating and covers much more than the fish world although that is written about in some detail. Somebody wrote about this book that 'Shelton's writing was so good it interests you in things you are not interested in,' which I found to be very accurate. I could compare him to Redmond O' Hanlon (Trawler). Both are fine writers as is Adam Nicolson
grandson of the notorious Vita Sackville West who was the lover of Virgina Wolfe and numerous others and was the builder of the gardens at Sissinghurst castle in Kent. Not quite to my taste.... the gardens I mean. But I digress. Nicolson's book 'Sea Room,' is superb and tells of his relationship with the Shiant Islands off the West Coast of Scotland. he was given them by his dad....as one does. Its so detailed and covers folk lore, sailing, anthropology, history, oceanography. I found it gripping and ending up longing for a visit and felt I knew intimately the places he described. Both Shelton and Nicolson demonstrate that there are still some fine writers around and I was also heartened that Colm Toibin won The Costa Book Award. I'm looking forward to reading Brooklyn. His novel about Henry James 'The Master,' should have won some years ago but was pipped by, in my opinion, a greatly inferior novel The Line of Beauty...not sure that is the right title. The following is from The Guardian.
Colm Tóibín is one of the most highly regarded Irish writers of his generation, loved by his readers and admired by his peers, but when it comes to major book prizes he is something of a bridesmaid. He so often nearly wins them but doesn't – until, that is, tonight when he was named winner of the Costa novel of the year award.
It was an achievement all the more notable because Tóibín was up against the literary sensation of last year: Hilary Mantel's Booker prize-winning tale of Tudor intrigue, Wolf Hall. "It's just great but I'm very surprised," said Tóibín. "Wolf Hall was a wonderful book."
Brooklyn, a sparely written account of a young woman's emigration from 1950s Ireland to New York, was one of five category winners announced tonight which will now compete for the overall Costa book prize.
Other winners were Christopher Reid in the poetry category for A Scattering; Graham Farmelo in the biography section for his account of the life of quantum physicist Paul Dirac; Patrick Ness, the children's book award for The Ask and the Answer; and Raphael Selbourne, the first novel award for Beauty.
Tóibín was on the Booker longlist but to widespread surprise was not shortlisted. Previously, The Master was just pipped to the Booker by The Line of Beauty in 2004 while The Blackwater Lightship was shortlisted in 1999, the year JM Coetzee won for Disgrace. Tóibín also has form in the Costas – or Whitbreads as they were formerly known – with a shortlisting in 1990 for his first novel, The South.
Tóibín said he was delighted to win and that book awards did matter. "It does make a great difference to what publishers call sales and what I call readers." He described Brooklyn as quite low key, about somebody very ordinary and not a book that would be considered as an automatic prize winner.
Brooklyn was straight away installed by William Hill as 6-4 favourite for the overall prize – odds too short for Tóibín.
"I won quite a lot of money when I bet on Hilary Mantel when she was 12-1 for the Booker. I don't think I'll be betting on me," he said.
The novelist made headlines last year when he suggested in an interview that he did not really enjoy writing and the best thing about it was the money. There was, though, probably a twinkle in his eye. Asked yesterday if he enjoyed writing he said: "Look I'm working at the moment and it has been a great Christmas and everybody has been out drinking and I've been locked in here since December 27 with these characters and sentences trying to get out. So, no. I want to finish this book."
Second favourite, at 3-1, for the overall prize is a debut biography by Farmelo – a five-year labour of love telling the story of one of the least-known yet most important scientists of the last century. "It is absolutely appalling that most people in this country have not heard of the name Paul Dirac," said Farmelo. "He was the greatest scientist Britain produced in the 20th century."
Part of the reason for the lack of knowledge is that Dirac loathed publicity. Farmelo gained access to a previously unmined family archive in Florida hopes the book will bring the genius of Dirac – and his importance to science – to a wider public. "He was a publicly educated boy from a Bristol terrace and what he achieved was immense. He conceived half the universe in his head, he conceived antimatter."
The winner of the first novel award, Selbourne's Beauty, is the story of a young Bangladeshi woman on the run from her family. "I'm very pleased. It's great to be recognised and of course it's invaluable in terms of getting the book out there and being seen by people."
Like most novelists Selbourne has had a range of jobs over the years, including as a scooter salesman, but all have been attempts to get out of teaching, he said. It was while teaching in Italy that Selbourne made the arguably unusual decision to move to Wolverhampton, attracted by a job teaching unemployed adults with basic skills needs.
The city, he said, gets a bad press. "The people for one thing are incredibly friendly. I'm from Oxford so I'm a southerner used to unfriendly people. I find Wolverhampton very stimulating."
For Reid, winning the poetry award is third time lucky – he has been nominated twice before. His winning collection is a tribute to his wife, who died in 2005.
The 6-1 outsider for the overall award is Ness for the second book in his trilogy Chaos Walking, which the judges called "a major achievement in the making."
A judging panel chaired by novelist Josephine Hart – including Marie Helvin, Caroline Quentin, Dervla Kirwan, Gary Kemp and Tom Bradby – will now decide the overall winner from the all-male list and announce it on 26 January.
Revolutionary Road directed by Sam Mendes and starring Di Caprio and Kate Winslett is much harder to watch because of tis subject matter the break up of a marriage in 1950's America. Its deep but perceptive stuff and the acting (even by Di Caprio) is superb I thinbk Winslett was Oscar nominated for her part. The camera work is detailed and revealing as well.
I read a lot of non fiction over the holiday. Richard Sheltons 'The Longshoreman,' the story of his life as a Marine Biologist is fascinating and covers much more than the fish world although that is written about in some detail. Somebody wrote about this book that 'Shelton's writing was so good it interests you in things you are not interested in,' which I found to be very accurate. I could compare him to Redmond O' Hanlon (Trawler). Both are fine writers as is Adam Nicolson
grandson of the notorious Vita Sackville West who was the lover of Virgina Wolfe and numerous others and was the builder of the gardens at Sissinghurst castle in Kent. Not quite to my taste.... the gardens I mean. But I digress. Nicolson's book 'Sea Room,' is superb and tells of his relationship with the Shiant Islands off the West Coast of Scotland. he was given them by his dad....as one does. Its so detailed and covers folk lore, sailing, anthropology, history, oceanography. I found it gripping and ending up longing for a visit and felt I knew intimately the places he described. Both Shelton and Nicolson demonstrate that there are still some fine writers around and I was also heartened that Colm Toibin won The Costa Book Award. I'm looking forward to reading Brooklyn. His novel about Henry James 'The Master,' should have won some years ago but was pipped by, in my opinion, a greatly inferior novel The Line of Beauty...not sure that is the right title. The following is from The Guardian.
Colm Tóibín is one of the most highly regarded Irish writers of his generation, loved by his readers and admired by his peers, but when it comes to major book prizes he is something of a bridesmaid. He so often nearly wins them but doesn't – until, that is, tonight when he was named winner of the Costa novel of the year award.
It was an achievement all the more notable because Tóibín was up against the literary sensation of last year: Hilary Mantel's Booker prize-winning tale of Tudor intrigue, Wolf Hall. "It's just great but I'm very surprised," said Tóibín. "Wolf Hall was a wonderful book."
Brooklyn, a sparely written account of a young woman's emigration from 1950s Ireland to New York, was one of five category winners announced tonight which will now compete for the overall Costa book prize.
Other winners were Christopher Reid in the poetry category for A Scattering; Graham Farmelo in the biography section for his account of the life of quantum physicist Paul Dirac; Patrick Ness, the children's book award for The Ask and the Answer; and Raphael Selbourne, the first novel award for Beauty.
Tóibín was on the Booker longlist but to widespread surprise was not shortlisted. Previously, The Master was just pipped to the Booker by The Line of Beauty in 2004 while The Blackwater Lightship was shortlisted in 1999, the year JM Coetzee won for Disgrace. Tóibín also has form in the Costas – or Whitbreads as they were formerly known – with a shortlisting in 1990 for his first novel, The South.
Tóibín said he was delighted to win and that book awards did matter. "It does make a great difference to what publishers call sales and what I call readers." He described Brooklyn as quite low key, about somebody very ordinary and not a book that would be considered as an automatic prize winner.
Brooklyn was straight away installed by William Hill as 6-4 favourite for the overall prize – odds too short for Tóibín.
"I won quite a lot of money when I bet on Hilary Mantel when she was 12-1 for the Booker. I don't think I'll be betting on me," he said.
The novelist made headlines last year when he suggested in an interview that he did not really enjoy writing and the best thing about it was the money. There was, though, probably a twinkle in his eye. Asked yesterday if he enjoyed writing he said: "Look I'm working at the moment and it has been a great Christmas and everybody has been out drinking and I've been locked in here since December 27 with these characters and sentences trying to get out. So, no. I want to finish this book."
Second favourite, at 3-1, for the overall prize is a debut biography by Farmelo – a five-year labour of love telling the story of one of the least-known yet most important scientists of the last century. "It is absolutely appalling that most people in this country have not heard of the name Paul Dirac," said Farmelo. "He was the greatest scientist Britain produced in the 20th century."
Part of the reason for the lack of knowledge is that Dirac loathed publicity. Farmelo gained access to a previously unmined family archive in Florida hopes the book will bring the genius of Dirac – and his importance to science – to a wider public. "He was a publicly educated boy from a Bristol terrace and what he achieved was immense. He conceived half the universe in his head, he conceived antimatter."
The winner of the first novel award, Selbourne's Beauty, is the story of a young Bangladeshi woman on the run from her family. "I'm very pleased. It's great to be recognised and of course it's invaluable in terms of getting the book out there and being seen by people."
Like most novelists Selbourne has had a range of jobs over the years, including as a scooter salesman, but all have been attempts to get out of teaching, he said. It was while teaching in Italy that Selbourne made the arguably unusual decision to move to Wolverhampton, attracted by a job teaching unemployed adults with basic skills needs.
The city, he said, gets a bad press. "The people for one thing are incredibly friendly. I'm from Oxford so I'm a southerner used to unfriendly people. I find Wolverhampton very stimulating."
For Reid, winning the poetry award is third time lucky – he has been nominated twice before. His winning collection is a tribute to his wife, who died in 2005.
The 6-1 outsider for the overall award is Ness for the second book in his trilogy Chaos Walking, which the judges called "a major achievement in the making."
A judging panel chaired by novelist Josephine Hart – including Marie Helvin, Caroline Quentin, Dervla Kirwan, Gary Kemp and Tom Bradby – will now decide the overall winner from the all-male list and announce it on 26 January.
Saturday 2 January 2010
Here's to 2010!!
Happy New Year to the 'Left Bank' Bloggers and I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year. I enjoyed several breaks with routine, including some wobbly health, but I'm fine now - in fact much better than before - and raring to go! I managed to get a lot of writing and reading done in between socialising, walking and sleeping. Books to recommend are: The Other Elizabeth Taylor a biography of the writer ET by Nicola Beauman, who is quite wonderful about the actual process of writing and rather contentious in what she reveals. The biography sent me back to ET's stories, which I love, and they kindled some story ideas which must have been lurking in my unconscious. Also, Esther Waters (1894) by the Irish novelist George Moore - he's not in the same writing league as Dickens, Eliot, Trollope etc, and the novel is skimmable in parts if you are not interested in horse racing and betting, but a fascinating story of being poor, pregnant and trapped by conventions in late 19thC London - I imagine it caused quite a scandal, at the time, with its accounts of baby farming.
Look forward to seeing you all at our next meeting. Carole
Look forward to seeing you all at our next meeting. Carole
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