Twitter, eh? Bloody hell
Ego trip: The state of the nation as it appeared on Trendmap at 6pm on January 23, 2012.
When I first started out on Twitter I was obsessed with the retweet button. I looked enviously upon people whose tweets were constantly reposted and fantasised that one day I would compose a 140-character message loaded with so much semantic gunpowder that it would fly around the world and light up computer screens from Inverness to Invercargill.
After about 18 months I reached the holy grail of seeing ‘retweeted by X and 100+’ people underneath one of my pearls of wisdom, but I’d long realised that this was a pretty shallow ambition. There is a game element to Twitter, but it’s not the main objective, any more than the main point of sex is to shoot out as many dancing tadpoles as possible. So I gave up chasing retweets and started talking to people. It was far more rewarding.
But then a strange thing happened. This afternoon, just after three o’clock, I tossed out a one-liner that had been dimly forming in my head since Saturday, when Simon Hoggart mentioned satnav jokes in his Guardian column. Over the weekend I’d tried, in my idle, feckless way, to come up with one, and at about the same time a Bonnie Tyler song turned up on YouTube, and somehow the two concepts mashed in my head and gave birth to this:
“I once bought a Bonnie Tyler satnav. It was rubbish. Kept telling me to turn around, and every now and then it fell apart.”
Bonnie Tyler, partner in crime
I occasionally chuck out jokes on Twitter, for no good reason except that they’re better out of my head than in, and perhaps because I secretly like watching people cringe. Mostly they die on the vine. This one got a good handful of retweets in the first couple of minutes. And then some more. And after that my activity stream went ballistic.
I still don’t really know what happened, but in among the retweeters were famous folk like Stuart Maconie, Rob Brydon and Caitlin Moran. Between them they have umpteen gazillion followers. Suddenly my throwaway tweet was spreading like bubonic plague in a field hospital. I got tweets telling me I was a trending topic in cities where I’ve never set foot, spawning the map you see above. In about six hours I picked up as many new followers as I usually gain in a year. My WordPress site (here) had one of its busiest days even though I didn’t publish anything. And my mentions column was in meltdown. It was all very surreal.
An eyepatch, a white cat and a piranha-infested tank, and my plan will be complete.
Resolution
I’m not much of a one for New Year resolutions these days (see this post for evidence). For years I resolved faithfully each January to get a short story published. It might have helped matters if I’d actually written a few. And now I have – written a few, and had a smaller number rendered in print, or distributed on somebody else’s website. I imagined for a long time that this would constitute some kind of breakthrough, when in fact it was just the first step on the ladder. And the only way to get up a ladder is to keep climbing.
So my resolution for 2012 is a simple one: write every day. No exceptions, no excuses. Including the days when I don’t feel like it, or I’m sick, or hung over, or travelling, or in a coma (though in that last scenario I may permit myself to take mental notes and type them up later). There need to be a few ground rules, clearly. It has to occupy at least half an hour every day. It can be original writing, it can be revising, or it can be editing. Thinking is fine too (thinking about what should go on the page, that is, not whether there’s enough milk in the fridge). But it can’t be making lists about what I should be writing, or tweeting, or hanging out at The Write Idea. Those are secondary writing activities and must be done in their own time. It can’t even be blogging, which is both the best and worst of all displacement activities. There must, in short, be focus. Even if it makes my eyes bleed. To this end I have already divided the year into Days When I Have Written and Days When I Have Not Written.
The score is currently 0:366. Happy New Year!
(Almost) the last post
I’m delighted to have a story in this year’s Federation of Writers (Scotland) anthology, Tracks in the Sand. As well as being a tapestry of good writing from these parts, it’s put together by people who evidently care about what gets shoved between the covers. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence around that the quality of editing is plunging as publishers cut costs and I’ve seen a few egregious examples at first hand. Yet a good editor is a hugely reassuring presence for both writer and reader, even if readers usually only notice them by their absence. My contribution, a short story called The Year of Discord, was conscientiously edited by Alan Green and the result is a much more refined piece of work, for which I’m duly thankful. If you’d like a copy (£7.99 each), send an email NVPCommerce@aol.com.
High notes and horned helmets: An interview with Gale Martin
Outlandish, dramatic, captivating... and that's just the punctuation.
One of my favourite pieces of writing advice comes from Raymond Chandler: “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” In a similarly succinct vein there’s what’s evolved as the first unwritten rule of Nanowrimo: “If all else fails, have ninjas burst through the wall and attack someone.” To these we should perhaps now add Gale Martin’s rule of opera-based novels: “If a work of fiction contains homage to classic opera, you can pretty much bank on some sort of supernatural influence… Either that, or a fat blonde in braids and a horned helmet.” A prolific churner of words in the blogosphere and elsewhere, Gale is in the middle of a helter-skelter blogging tour to promote her novel Don Juan in Hankey, PA, which tells the story of a small-town operatic society’s endeavours to put on Mozart’s classic opera in Pennsylvania. At once a slick farce and a homage to amateur dramatics, it juggles the sublime and the ridiculous at a pace that never drops below allegro. I caught up with Gale on her blogathon just long enough to hurl a few questions her way:
You started writing relatively late. What was your motivation?
I began writing in my 40s though I had been an English major in college and a lifelong reader. I think writing creatively is more than anything a matter of readiness. I wrote marketing and communications stuff for a living for a couple years, so I learned how to churn out copy. As silly as this sounds, one of my good friends from high school had a niece who published a bestseller. At the time, I didn’t really know any published writers of mainstream fiction. I thought if she can do it, so can I. I had a story to tell so I began writing a novel. It wasn’t very good, but it was instructive, like learning to play the violin in public.
Was it hard to get a novel about opera published? Why do you think it’s not an attractive subject for fiction, given that the two share so much source material?
Honestly, this book is about love and sex and longing and rejection—all universal feelings and emotions. It just happens to use classic opera as a backdrop. That being said, it was definitely hard to get an agent’s attention. Let me rephrase that. I got their attention. I just didn’t get their representation. I got dozens of requests for manuscripts—partials and some completes. I think you are correct, that opera is not generally considered a great hook for fiction though it was an agent at Foundry Literary who encouraged me to write a story with opera as a backdrop—I didn’t think of it myself. For opera to be accessible in contemporary fiction, I don’t think it should take itself too seriously. I remember enjoying the first few pages of Murder at the Opera by Margaret Truman for just that reason—the narrator cracked a few jokes about opera and put me at ease. I thought to myself, I’d be wise to do the same thing, right from the get-go.
Gale Martin
Opera seems to combine high culture with a healthy dose of absurdity. Did you write this dynamic into your novel?
Compared to many folks, I’m a relative newcomer to opera. So I absolutely did and sometimes still do react to that unique blend of high culture and absurdity you refer to, i.e., the dying man on death’s doorstep can still sing an aria full voice for the next eight minutes that contains nine top C’s. Because opera storylines have to conflate whole novels to three-hour long operas, they conflate events in order to capture the complete storyline, and the results are sometimes ponderous and preposterous. For me, whenever I watch La bohème, as beautiful as the music is, Mimi’s downward spiral happens so quickly over the course of the opera, I’m laughing inside while others are weeping. So, yes. I have definitely created some absurb moments and events in this partly because my mind loves to go there and also in homage to classic opera.
You’re famously prolific across all kinds of platforms, especially blogging. What keeps you going?
Famously prolific? I like that. Well, I love my Operatoonity.com blog and my Operatoonity Twitter page. There’s abundant content to post, Tweet, RT. I’ve made made some good friends and connections through those platforms, so I suppose it’s the people who comment, whom I interview, who enjoy what I post that really make social media click for me.
How much fun did you have sourcing those Pennsylvania-Dutch names?
Hmm. Well, I didn’t have to look very far to find them since I grew up in Berks County, Pennsylvania and now live in Lancaster County, the heart of PA-Dutch Country. There’s a Longenecker’s hardware store in the area. And of course, Rohrer is a famously PA-German surname. Once I take to a name, it infects me like a tapeworm until I am able to roust it onto a page or into a story.
What’s next for you?
I’ve been trying to finish a suspenseful novel that I started in 2008. I’ve gotten great help with it in my writing group. I only have a chapter to go, and then it’s time for some revisions. Right now, Booktrope is looking at an earlier novel I wrote, also humorous commercial fiction, to see if they want to publish it. They have been really great to work with—they really want writers to succeed. Everyone there is as helpful as they are talented. I’m also considering a series to build on Don Juan in Hankey, PA, that features male icons “in Hankey, PA.” But that is as far as that series has gotten. Because I really have to devote my energies to selling this book. So, I really appreciate the exposure, Gordon. As they say in the cinematic world of opera, grazie mille!
Don Juan in Hankey, PA, is available to buy now from Amazon and elsewhere.
Of spoilers and Star Wars
Proof that Star Wars has penetrated every level of contemporary life.
I watched Star Wars for the first time ever the other week. (I know, I don’t know what I used to do on Easter Mondays either.) Thanks to the warp speed at which cultural life now operates, in just 30 years it has attained the status of a classic. Like Shakespeare’s plays, it is simultaneously of its time and beyond it, so firmly is it embedded in popular culture. Watching it, I started thinking about why we go to the bother of engaging with ‘classic’ films, or books, or works of art at all. After all, what is there to discover? Why do people still file past the Mona Lisa at the Louvre when there are thousands of impeccable reproductions available on Google Images?
I’m reminded of the Iranian artist who visited London for the first time in his fifties and reported that he didn’t need a street map, because the streets were so familiar from his television set. Yet it still didn’t deter him from experiencing it at first hand. He certainly can’t have travelled all that way for the weather, so what drew him there? I had a similar feeling when I loaded Star Wars into the DVD player. I felt as if I’d already seen it dozens of times before, and of course in many ways I had: just not all at once. The storyline was as trusty as a Norse saga, the characters had the veneer of Old Masters, the dramatic revelation (SPOILER ALERT!) of Darth Vader being Luke’s father was as familiar and timeless as a grandfather clock.
I used the phrase ‘spoiler alert’ facetiously just then: can there be anybody left who really doesn’t know that detail of the Star Wars story? The ‘spoiler alert’ is a latter-day convention which implies that if you give away the ending of a book or a film, it instantly renders it worthless. I find this a puzzling development, given that people have continued to read and enjoy The Old Curiosity Shop for a century after Oscar Wilde’s jibe about the death of Little Nell. Similarly, I found plenty to enjoy in Star Wars even though well over three-quarters of the story, including the ending, was known to me. Indeed, there are some lines early on in the film, when Luke speaks about his father, which take on an extra resonance once their full implication is revealed.
A lot of the creative writing advice I read focuses on getting ‘the twist’ right: structuring a story so that even the most fiendishly intuitive, or the most jaded, reader is struck dumb by its wondrous improbability. But to me this misses the key point that good literary writing should be more concerned with how people cope with the events that fate throws at them. Ultimately that reveals far more interesting things about human life than any number of M Night Shyalaman-type “twists” (“Oh, you’re ghosts. How terribly fascinating. Darling, you must remind me to stop inviting these insubstantial bores over to dinner.”)
I wrote a story a few years ago about an abortion doctor who discovers that his own daughter is pregnant and wants a termination. A few readers complained that they could ‘see the twist coming’ and I should have disguised it better, or come up with a more thrilling denouement. But the whole point of the story was that the revelation about the daughter was only the beginning of the ending. The real purpose was to explore how the doctor would respond to this awkward dilemma: what it said about his character, and by extension about human nature.
More recently I read William Trevor’s superb short story An Idyll in Winter – I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s about a man succumbing to an all-too-human weakness which leads him to a difficult and painful decision. It could have ended in at least three different ways, all of which would have been consistent with what went before and all of which would have cast the main character in a subtly different light. The measure of Trevor’s genius was that he keeps the reader engaged through what he reveals rather than what he conceals.
In the same way, Star Wars is still enjoyable even if you know it off by heart because the twists emerge within the story rather than swooping in from a hidden corner and smacking the viewer in the face. A classic painting, or a classic story, remains absorbing even when it’s as familiar as your own face in the mirror. It something depends on ‘spoilers’ for its value, it probably deserves to perish.
Making a killing: Reflections on The View From Here
Every story’s path to publication is a story in itself. In the case of Bright Eyed and Bushy Tailed, which went up on The View From Here website today, a small epic. I started writing it more than three years ago, in the early months of 2008. I had a sense when I’d finished it that it was a milestone in my writing career, in the sense that I had pushed my imagination into areas where I hadn’t dared venture before. And contained in that was the nagging fear that I might have overshot my limits and written something that was too clever for my own good.
I first submitted it to Chapman, a highly regarded print magazine based in Edinburgh. I was rewarded with the best rejection letter I’ve ever received – a page-long critique from Joy Hendry, Chapman’s esteemed editor, which concluded with a warm invitation to resubmit it. I spent a month revising the story, incorporating Joy’s various suggestions, including a radical change to the ending, and sent it off again, almost delirious with expectation. About four months passed. I sent off a polite query, received a polite reply (not from Joy) advising me to wait a bit longer, and then the trail went cold. But although that particular avenue turned out to be a dead end, I’m still grateful for Joy’s input, because the final story is indisputably better for it.
No squirrels were harmed in researching this story
In the first draft the main character, Lydia, met with an undignified death at the hands of a bus driver. Changing the story made me appreciate how cavalier we writers can be with our characters’ fates. We blithely kill off people in a manner that would be considered psychopathic if we attempted it in real life, and kid ourselves we’re being gritty and edgy when, if we’re being honest, what we’re really doing is taking the coward’s way out. Imagining how people go on living after a traumatic or seismic change in their lives, however fantastical, is often a much bigger challenge than sticking the knife in. For me this was the great lesson that came out of writing Bright Eyed.
After giving up on Chapman I touted it round about half a dozen magazines and e-zines until it arrived at The View From Here, a lively, literary, diligently tended website which describes itself as “bohemian eclectic”. I couldn’t have wished for a better outcome (especially when I saw the photographs that Claire King sought out to go with the story). These days the best e-zines yield nothing to the top print publications in terms of quality, and The View From Here is an excellent showcase. So may I warmly invite you to get over there, read my story and have a trawl of some of the other excellent fiction on show.
My second blog guest in as many months is the Herald’s excellent magazine writer Teddy Jamieson, whose first book (see right) casts a perceptive eye over the sporting landscape in the place where he grew up – Northern Ireland. Read on if you want to know which is the best supported football club in all of Ireland, how anybody could bring themselves to hate Mary Peters, and whether Irish stick-fighting is poised for a comeback.
Northern Ireland seems like the ultimate test bed for the question of whether sport unites more than it divides. How does it work out?
The answer of course is both. The divisions are probably easier to see. In any society that is fractured and divided (and goodness knows, Northern Ireland is, was and maybe always will be divided) those divisions will be mirrored in all aspects of the society.
And so what flags are flown, what anthems are sung, who goes to see the games – all of these things are, in Northern Ireland, a statement of identity. They will mark out people and places and events as nationalist or unionist. If you go to a Gaelic football game and hear the Irish national anthem it doesn’t take a genius to know that the sport is based in the nationalist community. Similarly, if you go to Windsor Park and hear the British national anthem played before Northern Ireland international games then it’s clear there is a strong unionist identity being reflected here – although the Northern Ireland fans have been working hard in recent years to remove the sectarian tag that hung around them in the wake of the Neil Lennon death threat in 2002.
Lennon’s not the only sportsman or woman who was threatened because of his background. The likes of George Best, Mary Peters and Willie John McBride – all from Protestant backgrounds – received threats from nationalist paramilitaries, while Lennon, Pat Jennings and many, many Gaelic footballers and hurlers received threats from loyalist paramilitaries (or people purporting to speak for them). Indeed, tragically, many people associated with Gaelic sports were killed during the Troubles – some directly because of their links to the Gaelic Athletic Association.
Then again that’s not the whole picture. It never bothered me growing up that Dennis Taylor or Barry McGuigan came from a Catholic background. I was just thrilled that both were world champions and both were – like me – from Northern Ireland. I could enjoy the thrill of fellow feeling and not worry much about their religion.
Best may have been a boy from Protestant east Belfast, the son of an Orangeman, but his talent and his attractiveness meant he was loved by people from both communities. Oh and he played for Man United which is the best supported club in Ireland, both north and south, by both Catholics and Protestants.
That said, when I started working on the book I was a bit suspicious of the glibness of the idea that McGuigan fighting under a white flag helped bring people together, or that Mary Peters winning a gold medal was a uniting moment. But the more I thought about it and spoke to some of those involved the more I felt there was something in it.
For a couple of reasons. Yes, when Mary Peters won a gold medal in Munich in 1972 she received a threat the next day. But there were still thousands upon thousands of people in the streets of Belfast to celebrate her return a few days later. The same was true when McGuigan became world champion. Did it change anything? No. But did it change the moment? Yes. And that is something.
Which sportsman did you want to be in the playground?
Honestly? Umm, Gunter Netzer [excellent choice - Ed.]. I was very taken with the West German side of the early 1970s (partly because I was born in Germany; my dad was in the British army stationed there) and Netzer, the playboy Number 10, was my favourite player of the time. I liked George Best too, but he played for Man United and that was problematic for me (I was a Spurs fan myself – if I’d been a few years older I could probably have been happy pretending to be Danny Blanchflower).
In my teens I wanted to be Glenn Hoddle (though without the God-bothering), but if you want to know my ultimate Northern Irish sporting hero it would have to be Gerry Armstrong because of the goal he scored against Spain in the 1982 World Cup finals.
Has domestic football suffered from the Old Firm’s presence?
Growing up I didn’t know anyone in Northern Ireland who supported the Old Firm. Everyone I knew in the small town I grew up in supported English teams because that’s what we saw on the telly. It may have been different on the council estates of Belfast of course, but even now if you listen to phone-in shows on the radio you’ll find that most callers with Northern Irish accents will be United, Liverpool or Chelsea fans.
Of course anyone who has been on a ferry from Stranraer to Larne or Belfast on a Saturday night will know that quite a few fans travel to Ibrox and Celtic Park from the province. And I have noticed more and more Celtic and Rangers football tops being worn in the north since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
In the end, though, I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask about the Old Firm. In Scotland I’m a Stirling Albion fan.
Why did Ireland’s rugby team seem to be immune from the Troubles?
It wasn’t, is the quick answer. In the early 1970s Scotland and Wales wouldn’t travel to Dublin to play because of the Troubles (England did, it should be noted). And as I mentioned before Willie John McBride, an Ulster Protestant, received threats when captaining Ireland.
There’s also the case of Nigel Carr, an Ulster and Ireland player whose career was more or less ended when the car he was travelling in was involved in a roadside bomb in 1987.
But it’s true that rugby was a different case from football. Partly that’s because, after partition, the game remained under an all-island administration rather than being split in two. Ulster continued to play against the other Irish provinces so those connections were never severed. Ulster players would also travel to Dublin to represent Ireland.
There’s also a class element here too. In the north rugby was a game played by Protestant grammar school boys (Catholic schools played Gaelic sports). Down south it was fee-paying schools who played the game. It’s a middle-class game, in short.
Are there any signs of an Irish stick-fighting renaissance?
No, I think those who wanted to use sticks to fight with have tended to prefer baseball bats in recent years. American cultural imperialism gets everywhere, doesn’t it?
Tell me something I didn’t know about George Best.
Apart from the fact that he was an expert in Dutch 18th-century ceramics? Nah, it’s very difficult to find out anything new about Georgie given that his story has been told and retold so many times (though you might like to have a look for the Belfast poet Miriam Gamble‘s poem Tinkerness).
In the book all I have tried to do is locate George in a specifically Northern Irish context and ask why he was able to transcend the divide and be loved by both Protestant and Catholic. A lot of it is to do with the kind of player he was and the team he played for. It should also be remembered that he was a star before the Troubles really kicked off so his glamour was fully formed.
But like Alex Higgins he represents a working-class, peacock-feathered vision of Northern Irishness that’s hugely attractive (on the field or on the snooker table at least). It’s also a world away from the stereotypical vision of Northern Irish Protestantism – a kind of dour, never-on-a-Sunday, no-alcohol-for-me Presbyterianism. And that’s very attractive, especially for lapsed dour Presbyterians like me.
Whose Side Are You On? Sport, the Troubles and Me by Teddy Jamieson is published by Yellow Jersey, priced £14.99 (or less on Amazon). You can also follow Teddy’s blog here.
Tension and tentacles: An appointment with Jonathan Pinnock
I’m delighted to welcome as my first blogging guest Mr Jonathan Pinnock, whose novel Mrs Darcy vs the Aliens has just landed in unsuspecting bookshops up and down the country.
Now available to buy!
His ribald extraterrestrial Regency period mashup began life as an online web serial and has had an interesting gestation to say the least. (Jon is also an accomplished and prolific short story writer whose work has appeared in Litro and on Radio 4, and his collection Dot (.), Dash (-) will be well worth checking out when it’s published next year.) As part of a marathon September tour of the blogosphere to promote Mrs Darcy, he agreed to stop by, rest his tattered rucksack against a milepost and answer a few questions about life, the universe and publishing.
Explain the genesis of Mrs Darcy vs the Aliens for the uninitiated.
Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens came about as a result of a slightly drunken conversation with a fellow writer back in 2007, in the course of which the idea of a Regency novel with added aliens somehow emerged. The title “Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens” arrived very soon afterwards. I followed this by dithering for ages before actually writing the thing, by which time Regency novels with added zombies had become de rigeur, which confused things somewhat.
What were the attractions of writing an online serial? Were there any drawbacks?
The main attraction from the writing point of view was that I had an audience, so I wasn’t just scribbling away into a vacuum. There’s no better spur to keep on writing than the feeling that there’s someone out there who wants to read what you’re producing. A side-effect of this was that I had a schedule to keep to, and I’m the sort of person who needs a deadline. Even if I sometimes ended up writing an episode at midnight the day before it was due to go out. The only drawback, I guess, was that I had to spend a fair bit of time running around promoting it in order to secure that audience. But that was quite fun sometimes.
Did the serial format affect the way you wrote?
I’d actually written it that way to start with! I’ve never written a novel before, so the only way I could think of doing it was to write it in a series of short scenes – essentially a series of linked flashes. So it adapted seamlessly to being serialised.
You’re a great advocate of using Twitter and blogging to promote your writing. Is it essential for writers to embrace these new technologies? How can they use them effectively?
It’s funny. When blogging started, I thought “there’s no way you’ll catch me doing that”, but I’ve been blogging regularly now for the last three and a bit years, with a readership that seems to be growing fairly steadily (although they could all be viagrabots, I guess). And I was definitely never going to get involved with Twitter, oh no. The two things are very different. My blog is pretty much all about me, because it’s my blog, after all, but Twitter’s a more complex beast. If you think you’re just going to join up and start promoting your work, forget it. You need to develop your Twitter persona first of all – crack a few jokes, respond to other people, make people feel they know you – so that when you do have some exciting news to tell everyone, they react as if they would to a friend telling them rather than some creepy stranger. I have no idea if I have the balance right, by the way – I did feel I was overdoing it a bit on Mrs Darcy’s publication day, but I reckoned that people would probably indulge me. Don’t think anyone unfollowed me, anyway. What was the question? Essential? No, you can be a writer without them, but your publisher or potential publisher will expect you to help them out with the marketing, and if you can show them that you’re prepared to do this, then it’s going to count in your favour when you submit your manuscript.
It’s interesting that the end product of your multimedia approach to writing is a good old printed book. What has your own experience taught you about the future of publishing? Are rumours of the death of the book exaggerated?
My intention was always to get a good old printed book in the shops. It was interesting that when I told my friends who weren’t writers that I was having a book come out, they asked me two questions in order to establish my credibility in their eyes: is it an e-book or a proper book, and are you self-publishing? I should hasten to add that there are plenty of excellent e-books out there – particularly in niche markets such as romance and sci-fi – but I do prefer atoms to bits. My brain needs to map the content onto something physical. I have the same problem with MP3s in fact: I haven’t a clue what music I’ve got stored on my computer but I know exactly what CDs there are on my shelves. However, I realise I’m swimming against the tide with that one and I’m probably doing the same with e-books. As far as self-publishing is concerned, I probably would have ended up doing just that if I hadn’t found anyone willing to take Mrs Darcy on. I wouldn’t have just left the serial sitting there on the web, because no-one would have bothered reading it like that. However, whilst there are many excellent self-published books – mainly by established authors who know what they’re doing – I would prefer to read a book that had been sanctioned by someone who knew what they were doing (although I do appreciate that there are many people in the publishing industry who haven’t a clue what they’re doing). It’s bit like buying a fridge from John Lewis rather than some dodgy geezer down the pub.
Who inspires you most at the moment, in writing and publishing?
Apart from Salt / Proxima, who are obviously the best publishers on the planet, I’m impressed by anyone who goes the extra mile to make their books look special. I’m thinking here of people like Roast Books, who did that wonderful packaging job on AC Tillyer’s A to Z of Possible Worlds (matched only by what Picador did with Stuart Evers’ 10 Stories About Smoking). As far as writers who inspire me, there are so many. The single best thing I’ve read this year is a short story by David Rose called “Flora” in the Salt Best British Short Stories 2011 anthology and I’ve just finished his fascinating “anti-novel”, Vault. I’m also looking forward to reading Vanessa Gebbie’s debut novel because I think her short stories are excellent. Tom Vowler’s a man to watch as well.
Is there a danger that writers are being asked to spend too much time promoting themselves and not enough time actually writing – which as we all know takes a lot of time and effort. How do you strike the balance?
Tricky. I guess I’m used to the idea of marketing myself, as I work for myself in real life. But the demands of that real-life job, writing and self-promotion are difficult to reconcile, along with the small matter of making sure you remember what your loved ones are called.
What’s next in the pipeline?
Next up is my short story collection, which Salt are publishing next year. In the meantime, I have another unrelated novel that I’m working on and I would love to do another Mrs Darcy book if there’s demand for one.
Thanks for stopping by. Good luck with the rest of the tour.
Many thanks for inviting me in – hope that wasn’t too long-winded!
Visit Jon’s blog at www.jonathanpinnock.com, or dive into the world of Mrs Darcy vs the Aliens at Wickhampedia.
If publishing’s in the Last Chance Saloon, I’m ordering lunch
For the last 18 months I’ve been attending a group in my home town where writers, agents, publishers and anyone else with an interest in the book business meet, chat and have a few drinks. More often than not it goes like this: someone from the industry stands at the microphone and tells everyone that they can forget about getting published this year, and probably next year too. Then we all get drunk and talk about our novels. Imagine the Last Chance Saloon invaded by a doomsday cult and you’ll start to get an idea of the mood in the book trade right now.
There’s no question it’s an unsettling time to be a writer just now. Those lucky enough to be published are living in a climate of plunging advances, plummeting sales and publishers laid low by an epidemic of pessimism. The rest of us can only dream of these utopian conditions.
At the recent Edinburgh International Book Festival there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the fate of the printed word. In one corner, Ewan Morrison solemnly pronounced that books as we know them have but 25 years to live; in the other, a defiant Lloyd Shepherd insisted that the death of the book had been greatly exaggerated. Both their arguments are intelligent and detailed and backed up with a wealth of statistics on book sales. Yet to writers and readers there are only two real questions that matter: how can good writing flourish, and what do we actually want from our publishing industry?
Morrison’s fear is rooted in the concept of the ‘long tail’ – because the amount of printed material available is now so vast, and can be endlessly recycled on different formats, publishers are engaged in a ‘race to the bottom’ which will end with writers having to give their work away for nothing. Certainly one of the most daunting realities for any new writer is the breadth of the competition. The entry level for publication is now extremely low: self-publishing has never been easier or cheaper (I know, because even I’ve managed it) and the advent of paper-free options such as the Kindle reader has brought the threshold even lower. Sales figures are falling off a cliff and, as a result, royalties and advances are shrivelling up. Writing as a profession, warns Morrison, risks becoming extinct.
Yet all of this statistical soothsaying neglects what publishers actually do for a living. They don’t just churn out books from a treadmill. They select titles for publication, produce them and promote them. They do this because readers don’t have the time or inclination to do it themselves. They like to be guided. And in a climate where the amount of printed material available to the consumer is escalating, there is an argument that the publisher’s role as selector has never been more important than it is now.
What is changing, really, is not publishing, but bookselling. Publishers are having to diversify, in terms of what they produce and how they produce it. The idea that printed books are doomed seems far-fetched when you remember that the key time for book sales is the run-up to Christmas. Will people really take to wrapping Kindle files in virtual paper and e-mailing them to their relatives? Books are beautiful: they are artefacts, they furnish rooms, they look good on the train, they make ideal gifts. This will continue (if you don’t believe me, try to picture what your living-room would look like if you transferred your entire book collection to your Kindle). Books will survive for the same reason that radio is still popular in the age of high-definition 3D flatscreen televisions: low-tech doesn’t automatically mean inferior.
And the apocalyptic visions of writers being killed by free material are as misguided as the “home taping is killing music campaign”. Morrison warns that the slippery slope begins with people downloading ‘pirated’ classics. This overlooks two things: most classics have been available for free, entirely legally, through enterprises such as Project Gutenberg, for some years thanks to a thing known as copyright expiry which most people are familiar with. Despite this, printed copies of classic titles continue to sell – indeed, they continue to be reissued.
The experience of the Wu Ming Foundation, whose titles are free to download from their website under a ‘copyleft’ licence, has been that giving their work away has not hindered strong sales, and may even have helped them. And I would also cite the path to publication of my good friend Jon Pinnnock, a first-time novelist whose book began life as a free web serial and is now available to buy in WH Smith on good old-fashioned paper. Jon will be guesting on this blog next week to talk more about his experience, and a fascinating story it is too.
Publishing is changing, but it is far from dead: more likely it is regenerating. Publishers may have to cast their nets wider, or specialise in a crowded market. Writers will have to be more proactive to get themselves noticed, do more of their own promotion and work harder to stay in the spotlight. This raises a few questions: would writers such as Don DeLillo and Hilary Mantel, whose big-selling titles followed a string of more modest successes in sales terms, be tolerated today? And if writers spend more time marketing themselves, where will they find the time to do any actual writing?
More importantly, will we get better books as a result? This is the hardest question to answer. I’ve had arguments on the internet about whether thinning the field will weed out the dross, but writing, like any creative endeavour, doesn’t lend itself to such reductive logic. Some writers take a long time to come to fruition, such as DeLillo and Mantel; others produce brilliant work at the start of their careers which sustains some lacklustre books later on (I’d put Martin Amis and Irvine Welsh in this category). Whether or not you agree with these individual choices, the point is made. A smaller choice of published works is just that: smaller, not better. Publishers will continue to take a punt on untried authors and sustain mid-listers, because nobody knows where the next JK Rowling is going to come from (remember how children’s books used to be seen as a non-profit sector?). The question is whether fear or adventure will prevail in the long term.
Readers are gourmets: they want choice cuts, not the reheated ‘long tail’. And they want guidance from experts who possess knowledge, dedication and the trust of their audience. Publishers who cultivate these qualities, I predict, will thrive, for the simple reason that people are not about to give up reading good books.
Chippings from the quarry #2: The railing
A thing I remembered recently: I’m really bad at hand gestures. Shouldn’t do them. It’s the same with dancing. Anything to do with spontaneous body posturing is just not my field. Fortunately I realised this and acted on it before the guy sprung from the ledge.
It happened like this. I was on my way to the post office with a parcel when I saw two women get out of a car and start shouting at a man. I moved to accelerate, as people habitually do in these situations. Then I realised something didn’t fit. Like that moment when you’re looking at an MC Escher and spot the water flowing uphill. I looked at the man again and worked it out: he was on the wrong side of the railing. And on the wrong side of him was a thirty-foot drop onto the motorway where the roofs of cars and lorries were flowing past at 60mph.
He wore a striped blood-smeared shirt and an expression of blank anguish. His legs were twitching. Yet something was holding him back. A battle with reason, probably, especially the bits about gravity and concrete. The options weren’t good: one way an open wall of death, the other a bunch of yelling strangers. Don’t do it. Think of your family. Think of all the people who’ll be killed in the crash. The truth is it’s all empty noise. You remember being told somewhere to talk jumpers back from the edge, and then you try to reconcile that with the fact that the guy’s toes are actually overhanging the ledge and if he leans over just a tiny fraction more he’s fly food.
I thought: don’t startle him. Keep him hanging; hope the police arrive. Has anyone called the police? Yes. Good. The women kept on shouting. People were walking by, better things on their minds. I was shouting at him. I offered to talk. Christ knows what I could have said. He pointed down and said: ‘This is the answer.’ Clearly, matter-of-factly, as if he were disputing a parking ticket. He let go of the railing and shuffled away, over to the fast lane. It was a change of key. His legs twitched more violently and for an instant he put his hands together. To dive, not to pray.
Don’t startle him. I moved over to the side, out of his vision. He wasn’t really looking at us anyway. I put down the parcel. That’s when I started with the gestures. I waved towards three people standing on the corner. One looked my way, the others tried to shuffle behind a lamp-post. My idea was to grab him in a pincer movement, one on each arm, smoothly, without sudden movement, but I needed a partner. How to convey that with your hands to somebody you don’t know standing 20 yards away. I tried sweeping motions to express move in, grab him, pull him over. I hate to think what it must have looked like.
The fear as I stepped forward was of losing him. Not just seeing him slip under the bridge, but feeling it. Failure is most terrible when the margin is minute. Stupidly, I didn’t even think about being dragged over the side. I grabbed the right arm, stilled him. The guy from the opposite side reacted in half a second and seized the other arm. The jumper lurched and shouted. A dreadful tautness in the fabric of his shirt. Then more hands emerged. We grabbed his legs, his waist, hand over hand like rock climbers, and dragged his tree-like weight over the railing. Somebody pinned him to the ground. He was calling us bastards, but his effort was spent. He kicked out, limply.
A man in a pinstripe suit came over with a plastic badge around his neck. He said to us: ‘Make sure you don’t asphyxiate him by pressing on him.’ ‘Make sure you don’t’ – we knew instantly he worked in healthcare from those words, the suit and the badge. The badge seemed to agitate the guy on the ground, who wriggled again. The man in the suit asked if he was on medication and the guy replied with a long name. ‘When did you last take it?’ ‘I’ve not taken any today.’ Unemotional, without hesitation: this was a learned routine. We saw he was bleeding again from a wound from his back. The pinstriped man asked if anyone had a first aid kit. One of the women fetched one from the car and the man applied a dressing. The sense of chaos receded.
The police and ambulance arrived minutes later. The pinstriped man explained about the wound and the medication, then stepped away. Everyone stood around and watched the men in uniform attend to the guy on the ground, who was now lying perfectly still, like a roll of carpet. A policeman came over and took notes. People chatted: the man who’d grabbed the other arm was a passing taxi driver who’d pulled over when he saw what was happening. That’s all we were: an assortment of strangers dragged from the stream of our daily lives to pull a man back over a railing.
(Later on I’ve told this story at a networking gathering for writers, and later still I’ve gone home and sat with a glass of whisky and reflected that I still don’t know why I got involved. It would have been easy, perhaps sensible, to just carry on towards the post office. We live in a broken society, so why put a damaged piece back in the mosaic: a branded failure who owes you nothing and can never hope to repay you? If I hadn’t delayed my departure from the office for five minutes to tell my colleagues what a hellish time I was having with the latest Irvine Welsh, the guy would never even have existed for me. Instinct defied reason.)
We stood leaning against the railing and asked ourselves where he’d come from and what he could have been fleeing. A secure hospital, a broken life. Nobody knew but we wanted to talk. One of the ambulance men came over with a stretcher. ‘I’m going to roll you over now, Rory,’ he said. The man dumbly nodded his consent. Rory. In all the commotion not one of us had asked him his name.
