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Writers' magazine |
Comment 07 |
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CommentSome sharp comment from people in the book world in 2007 Comment archive 2007 archive 2006 archive 2005 archive 2004 archive 2003 archive 2002 archive 2001
After Katrina 'The most important job of a writer is to tell the truth and I feel I've done that… The Tin Roof Blowdown came about almost by accident. I wasn't going to write a novel about Katrina because it was too depressing. Then an editor at Esquire called me and asked if I could write a short story and I said I didn't think I could…. The next day, I went to mass at a little town nearby, and when we got home I thought: 'Jesus out to Sea', and that was the title. I had heard an account of the priest in the lower Ninth Ward who tried to get his parishioners to leave. He stayed and he died, so I wrote the story based on two of his parishioners. I figured if I was going to write about Katrina, then this was the time and if others doubt what happened in New Orleans, nothing I or anyone else can say will influence their thinking.' James Lee Burke on his new novel The Tin Roof Blowdown in Publishing News
After the bestseller 'I've been asked many times since what are the pros and cons of life after Labyrinth. Too much pressure? Too much expectation? The easy answer is that the best consequence of a novel selling well is that it gives you the freedom to carry on writing for a while longer and, hey, it's a great problem to have. But the truth is that it does knock you off course, if only for a little while. Not because you haven't got the ideas - Sepulchre was already researched and planned before Labyrinth ever came out - but because you haven't got the time to write… You fret about the possibility that having raised your head above the parapet there might be those waiting to shoot you down - but then again, all authors, actors, politicians, painters and musicians feel this, regardless of what's gone before or since. And you do worry, most of all, about disappointing readers. What if they don't enjoy the new book as much as the last? But then you pull yourself together, get back to work and all those thoughts fade away.' Kate Mosse in Publishing News
Building an audience 'My goal as a writer is to have my readers meet people like them, people who make mistakes and learn from them, people who have problems and try to cope with them… They're books about relationships - between mothers and daughters, sisters, friends. I'm here to answer reader expectations and my readers want a good feeling at the end of a book… Having grown up in category romance, you have to build an audience and then keep your name in front of it.' Debbie Macomber, whose latest book is Old Boyfriends, in Publishing News
'An emotional connection' 'My feeling is that we know the benefits of literacy and the comforts of literacy - but we still don't know the benefits of reading the great works. I mean, there is no scientific proof that you will become a better, wiser person if you plough your way through Dostoevsky. Now, there are all sorts of reasons why I read the books that I read; but I think we've lost the sense of being able to tell people that what they should be looking for in a book is an emotional connection that makes you feel excited and alive, and you're as likely to find that it a 'literary' novel as in a popular novel.' Nick Hornby in The Times
'Everything actually happened' A great irony of creative nonfiction is that one of its chief assets is also one of its chief liabilities. The fact is that in nonfiction, everything actually happened. It’s all true. One of the reasons we eagerly turn to nonfiction is because we have it on reliable source – most often, in any case – that the events on the page actually took place, and the people who did them were, or are, real. A good part of our astonishment at reading Ernest Shackleton’s account of his eight-hundred mile open boat voyage from Elephant Island across the terrible frigid sea to South Georgia Island, for example, is that real men went through this, with real fears and real hopes, who had real families at home, with real men left behind, cold and hungry, depending on their success. This happened… But the cold clear fact is that no matter how astonishing the story, there is no guarantee that it will be interesting writing. Many writers of nonfiction, particularly in the ever-burgeoning category of memoir, seem to believe the strength of their subject is enough to keep the reader captivated… Not so. Or, often enough, not so.’ Richard Goodman in The Writer’s Chronicle, published by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in the US
Starting to write 'I was a teacher at a primary school in Kent, reading a tedious story to my pupils, who were clearly bored. That night I complained to my wife, who said: 'You're quite good are telling stories - why don't you make one up?' So I screwed my courage to the sticking place. At the end of the session they all shouted: 'Oh, sir!' They wanted more. In one afternoon I understood what it is to be a storyteller. A colleague persuaded me to write it up and gave it to a friend at Macmillan. Luckily he liked it, and it quickly led to my first book, It Never Rained, a collection of stories about things that go wrong in children's lives.' Michael Morpurgo in The Times
'Poetry is necessary' ‘A poem is direct, and charged with energy. Its language is not clichéd nor second-hand. Its meaning, whether force or revelation, or slow truth, is something we can actually use. Poems are among the most useful things invented, along with rubber boots and sharp knives. It you are going to wade through the world’s rubbish, and know what to cut out and what to open up – perhaps even what to kill off – then poetry is necessary. A poem generates heat. The friction of the language causes the words to spark and fire. You can warm your hands at a poem; you can be consumed by it. It is, as Adrienne Rich puts it, "wood with a gift for burning". Jeanette Winterson in The Times
'This biography business' 'Biography is still, all too often, viewed as the skill of finding as many facts as possible and assembling them into a definitive likeness, as if each piece of paper, each interview, were a clue leading to a solution. On such and such a day the subject said this, the next week they did this, in 1935 they wrote this, and voila!, the portrait is finished. You only have to imagine a biographer attempting to write your life, 50 years hence - the idiots with whom they might discuss you, the motives they might attribute to actions that you yourself barely understood - to realize how extraordinarily parlous it is, this biography business.' Laura Thompson, author of Agatha Christie: An English Mystery, in the Independent on Sunday
'Books are different' 'Books are different, as people have always argued through the ages. They are a cornerstone of civilisation, so they're not quite like other consumer products. They are fundamental to intellectual development. The very depressing statistics you read about the coincidence of dyslexia and prison inmates suggest that in the modern world if you can't read and don't enjoy reading it's a major disadvantage. I think a home that doesn't have books is a bit of a sad place, really… (Books) are tremendously cheap compared to most things, like, for example, mobile phone calls. The amount of time a £6 ($12.19) book provides - 20 hours of entertainment? - means they are fantastic value.' Luke Johnson, whose company has just bought Borders UK, in the Observer
'No seven year famine' 'We believe that the web has come to praise books, not to bury them. There will be no seven-year famine. E-books will drive book demand: Amazon is expanding the market, not cannibalising it; print-on-demand will drive book production; and agents and publishers will both thrive because the cake itself, online and in print, will expand.' Bookseller editorial
'You made it up?!' 'Most people's lives have a steady mixture of the social and the solitary, in factory or field, office or school. The life of the novelist has no such balance. For three years, you're alone with your thoughts, then for three weeks you're thrown to the microphones in the name of 'publicity'. The modern writer's life is like a cross between that of the Venerable Bede and Naomi Campbell. (Readers) assume that everything in a novel is based on your personal experience, lightly, or at times not at all, rewritten. When I toured the country doing readings after Birdsong, most people could not conceal their disappointment. They had expected me to be 105 years old, French and, in some weird way, female. One man asked me how I knew what it was like to fight at the Somme. I told him I'd read a lot of documents, visited the site, then made it up, 'You made it up?!' he spat at me. Yes, I said, that's my job. But he didn't believe me and neither did anyone else there. They thought I'd found a pile of old papers in the attic and passed them off as mine.' Sebastian Faulks, author of Engleby, in the Observer
'The largest group in the population' 'Demographically women of my age group are the largest group in the population and certainly of the book buying population and we are not very well catered for. I think publishers are becoming more aware of this. We are intelligent, well read, have brought up families, we have been to universities, we have professional qualifications and nearly all of us have worked hard and maybe now have a little more time. Some of us have grandchildren and may have grandparents still living. I think there's a huge market for literature which deals with that. I think it is an extraordinary time in our lives.' Sarah Challis, author of Footprints in the Sand, in Writers' Forum
'Let's review the author' 'Never mind the work, let's review the author. Someone who sits alone for hours at a time, typing, must be really fascinating and it beats having to think about anything, doesn't it? The main thing you'll probably learn below is that no one goes to conduct an interview without preconceptions.' And on her prolific output: 'If you're quite a fast cook, you don't have children, you don't have pets and you've got no-one to talk to, what else are you going to do? A L Kennedy on her website www.a-l-kennedy.co.uk and in the Observer
Self-publishing - a step in the right direction? 'So here's the essence of what I learned as a do-it-yourself author: a publisher is far, far more than a printer and distributor of books, and an agent is more than a deal-maker. Industry insiders may get a chuckle out of the sheer obviousness of that, but I'll take the hit; I admit it, I had no idea. Until I'd found an agent who loved the book as much as I did, and saw more in it than I had, until I'd found an editor who led me to make this story better than I ever could have made it alone, I really had no idea. And… I didn't find them, I wasn't even looking for them. They found me, and I'll always be grateful for that. Was self-publishing a step in the right direction, then, towards a big deal in traditional publishing? Yes, in some sense I suppose it was, but it only works that way in hindsight. In truth, I was just persistently following the advice of the big, blue coffee cup on my desk. It quotes Thoreau: Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. My wife bought that cup for me, five years ago, in a bookstore.' Jack Henderson, author of Maximum Impact, in Publishing News
'A remarkably reliable guide' 'Just as there are more new books published than ever before (close to 200,000 per annum in the UK alone), so there are more sources of opinion than ever before. If there ever was a consensus… it has gone the way of Nineveh and Tyre. In this blizzard of commentary, from blogosphere to talk radio, it's odd to discover that literary prizes now stand out as a remarkably reliable guide… The literary prize has many well-rehearsed drawbacks, but it has one great virtue: it is conducted in public and is answerable to scrutiny… On the plus side, the winners of this year's Orange, Booker and Samuel Johnson etc will take home cheques of variable value and attract varying quantities of press. Their books, now recognised, possibly for the first time, will attract new readers. Then the final and supreme act of judgment will begin. This is immune to the pressures of hype or favouritism. It's called reading alone for oneself.' Robert McCrum in the Observer
'A lot of it is luck' 'With success I think a lot of it is luck. I've met a lot of depressed, frustrated authors who are still lugging their manuscripts around publishing houses. I have to say that a certain amount of it is talent but much, much more if it is hard work and there's this luck factor as well… I never questioned my ability to write. What I did was question my ability - and in fact my desire - to come up with an idea that publishers would find marketable enough to invest money in.' Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat and The Lollipop Shoes, in Writers' Forum
'A thousand passionately consumed book cults' 'New media are transforming the relationship between writer and reader, fastest among the youngest, for whom click-of-mouse is a natural alternative to word-of-mouth. This new generation is so accustomed to being manipulated by entertainment executives that it already prefers the purity of a cult interest, shared with a small group of friends and untainted by hype. It's a deliciously ironic that just as the bean-counters in global entertainment groups were celebrating what they thought was global domination, the mass audience is turning into fairy dust and slipping through their fingers. There has never been another band like the Beatles and there will probably never be another Harry Potter. Books will still become worldwide blockbuster hits but they won't need a publisher's blessing to find their first readers. While we're waiting for those hits to move up the chain of interest, we can enjoy a thousand passionately consumed book cults - unpredictable, unbankable, artist-led and the worst nightmare of the risk-phobic, sequel-crazy, celebrity-obsessed multinationals that dominate world publishing.' Celia Brayfield in The Times
"Best selling"... as a warning 'Today's famous writers are not the enigmatic Nabokov or the mysterious Kafka but Dan Brown and J K Rowling. Their pictures are on the jacket, their life histories known by all. Their function is to make money for their publishers. And this is bad for "serious" writers, who have something more complex to say, and also for those publishers who play safe and will publish only if a profit is assured. "Best selling" should not be an accolade so much as a warning. Today the danger for writers who continue to aspire to "good" in the old sense is that they won't get published at all, or it will be with miserable print runs. The synopses they must have approved before they begin a commissioned book will please marketing rather than the editorial department.' Fay Weldon in The Times
'Smells, textures, the colour of the light' 'I can't imagine setting a novel in a place I've never visited. I need smells, textures, the colour of the light. When I wrote a novel set in Antarctica, for example, I went down and lived on a research station for six weeks. It paid dividends. Everyone who has read The Sun at Midnight says that it takes them right there… I find travel very conducive, particularly travel of the physically uncomfortable or faintly unsafe variety. Lounging at some posh spa wouldn't do the trick at all.' Rosie Thomas, winner of the Romantic Novelists' Association Prize for the second time with Iris and Ruby in Writers' Forum
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