Drip-Feeds versus Wallows

Now here's a thing: The Book Standard has an article extolling the virtues of Daily Lit (http://www.dailylit.com if you can bear to check it out), because 'even the busiest person can tackle a literary classic - in five minutes a day via email.'

This is yet another symptom of our time-poor nanosecond-attention-span society. Listen, if you're pushed for time, read a haiku. Some poor novelist has sweated blood creating the rhythm of clause, sentence, paragraph, chapter, overall plot. The language may have a lilt to it, a swing and flow that is individual to that writer and is the result of long practice. The pace of the story should have its own systole and diastole, lifting you, holding you, releasing you only to seize you again as you read. And you don't get that in a five minute soundbite.

You can tell I'm narked, can't you? I'm also puzzled. Whenever I and my friends talk about the joy of reading or reminisce about books we loved long ago, the books we've never forgotten, the books we revisit, we don't talk about that zippy little phrase on page 67 which grabbed us and made the whole thing worthwhile. Certainly, we may have favourite lines or memorable phrases we can recite - but when we talk of the love of a good book we use phrases like 'I was lost in it', 'I couldn't put it down', 'I was totally drawn into it' - and we sigh at the memory of the reluctant renunciation we felt when the book came to its end and we had to return to the 'real' world. Some books take a long time to cast their spell: it isn't an instant fix, a shallow 'affirmation' to be stuck on the fridge - it's a long wooing, a seduction of the reader through character and language and storyline.

One of the things I most regret about adult life is how difficult it is to have a damn good wallow in a book. On the rare occasions where I can read a book in a couple of bursts - or in one sitting - I sink into the book with joy and am fit to commit murder if disturbed. One of the irritations of trying to read in bed nowadays is how tired I am, how incapable of still being awake all the way to the last page at five a.m. when the birds are stirring and the light filters in. Nowadays, a page or two and I'm dozing - and the next night and the night after that find myself rereading the same two pages because I've forgotten what happened.

It's claimed that Daily Lit works because 'people really respond to the fact that it's according to their schedule.' Couldn't they fit their schedule to reading the book, according it the attention and respect it deserves? Is this what we've come to? I worry that my children bring home photocopied sheets from school all the time: they're being conditioned to see life in terms of 'best of', in terms of extracts and bleeding chunks, and thus never learn any staying power, never see what might be worthwhile in the 'slow bits', the less obviously grabby bits.

In the article, one reader says it's the method 'easiest for me to consume'. Consume? Consume?

One of the founders says 'It's a new format that hasn't yet been exploited and they're looking at this incremental revenue, similar to the book club format. It doesn't take away from or cannibalize the existing marketing. It's reading that wouldn't otherwise take place.' This is just sad. What have we come to, if we have to rely on Daily Lit, emails, and reading potted texts off the itty bitty screens of mobile phones to be the last bastions of reading custom.

Wake up, pick up a big fat read - and wallow!

Slings, Arrows, Self-Belief

During this difficult time, this arid wait for responses from publishers, it's not surprising that one finds oneself assailed by negativity. Writers are a weird mixture of arrogance and self-doubt. You believe you're good or you wouldn't do it - but at the same time, like spiteful tinnitus, there's the voice in your head saying - Why are you doing this? What are you thinking Of? Who on earth would want to read this stuff? etc etc and dreary etc. Is it any wonder so many creative artists have turned out to be bipolar? Even those of us who are not clinically ill suffer extreme highs and lows - and when you hit the lows it's hard to retain any sense that this writing business can be joyful and positive and life-affirming. It seems to be a grinding tyranny, trudging round the treadmill of dreams - of what? Fame? Money? Peer acceptance? A kick at mortality? Just WTF are you doing with it?

All of this disorganised bleating leads me to a couple of recent quotes I noticed: first of all from Graham Greene's letters, where he laments his manic depression but says 'Cure the disease and I doubt whether a writer would remain.' You may well have seen Stephen Fry's documentary exploration of what it means to be bipolar, which was fascinating and moving. He asked several of the people he interviewed whether, if given the chance to push a button that would take the illness away, they would push it. They said no: the rush of the ecstatic hyperawareness of being alive, the joy of fantasy and creation, the sense that anything was possible, counterbalanced the terrible phases of despair. Despair and wishing for death - the price to be paid, and a price accepted - anything better than what they clearly feared, like Graham Greene: no creativity at all. So there. You have to suffer for your art.

That said, some kindly publisher could easily salve the trauma, externally at least: a big fat contract ought to do the trick.

And while we're in self-doubt mode, here's Ian Rankin: 'The reason writers keep on writing even when they don't need the money and don't need the acclaim is that they haven't yet written the perfect book. Each book you produce is another small failure.' I'm comforted by this: I scarcely dare open the pages of The Chase because I'm bound to see something I would do differently now. The apprenticeship is never-ending. So everything you create will indeed be a small failure. It won't match the glittering vision of it you first had. It can't be the Book as Platonic Ideal. So it will be a small failure - and it will be a great success. After all, you wrote it.

Noggins, Ne'er Do Wells, Performers and Plowterers

First of all, thanks to Scott Pack of The Friday Project for taking a look at this blog and complimenting it. I'd emailed him to try to get a freebie CD of Oliver Postgate material (I never had time for the Clangers but I was a huge Noggin the Nog fan when I was young. Ah, the Land of the Northmen, the Nogs, Queen Nooka, Graculus the Great Green Bird, even Nogbad the Bad bwa-hah-hah-hah ...) - but I was too late, they'd all been snaffled up.

Secondly, my boys have returned to school - the elder one facing GCSEs this year, so God help us all. And I'm back teaching too ...

Take a look at the link to muvva's blog on the right - it's newly started up and looks promising. I especially like the cartoon she's posted on it - we can all relate to it, I think!

Items in the current world of book news - apparently a Polish author has been jailed for 25 years for murdering a man he suspected his wife was having an affair with. Later he published a novel with all the details of the murder, which led the police to arrest him. Not the brightest of bunnies, then. See http://news.bbc.co.uk

Richard Charkin on his blog http://charkinblog.macmillan.com talks about routes to market. Analysing the sales of a recent mass market fiction paperback he found 50% of sales were through the chains, 35% of the supermarkets, 9% internet, 5% independent bookshops, 1% libraries. You may find this scary. The 1% library figure was rounded up - even scarier.

A blog by Lee Rourke in The Guardian blames the influence of the Beat writers for the self-indulgence of young male writers who talk the talk but don't walk the walk and who worship at the altar of experimentation having never learned the basics of composition. It's the familiar point that you have to know the rules to break them.

An earlier Guardian blog discussed how badly writers tend to read aloud their own work. We've talked earlier on this blog about how writers are expected to be performing seals these days - and some are better than others at balancing that ball on their nose while slapping their flippers together. I've attended some brilliant readings - Philip Pullman and Carol Ann Duffy spring to mind - but also some truly dire ones (names withheld to protect the guilty). I do think that if the publicity people want to send the writer out to perform they ought to give him or her coaching in how to do it - and if the writer genuinely cannot do it, if they read in a flat monotone, looking at the floor as they do so, or mumble inaudibly, or drain the work of any colour and animation, then just don't send them out there: it'll do the work no favours at all. Get an actor to do it instead.

Here's a good quote from Leopardi on The Guardian blog: 'we are well aware of the unspeakable annoyance we feel when listening to someone else's work.'
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books

I'm having real trouble today just typing - positively dyspraxic. Also the words are not flowing - which is a pity, because I need to put together a synopsis for the new book. All summer the damn thing has been giving me trouble in terms of making the elements of the plot hang together - but now at last it's seems to be settling into place and I want to formalise this so that it acts as my basic route-map. (Not that there won't be diversions and alterations of itinerary ahead - it's just nice to feel I have a general sense of where I'm going and what my destination will ultimately be. I don't like going into a book totally blind.)

As I say, the words aren't gelling well for me today - I do believe that we are subject to biorhythms or whatever you want to call them: sometimes there's fluency of brain and internal Roget's Thesaurus, sometimes there just ain't, and every last phrase is a heavy-booted clump through claggy mud. Do you ever feel that too?

In the dialect of the bit of northern Scotland I come from, to struggle through mud is to 'plowter through the dubs.' Thought you might like that.

In Memoriam Rene Latournerie

I know that my last blog had a sad theme, but I'm afraid this one has too. Yesterday we heard of the death of our French friend, Rene Latournerie. He'd had colon cancer for several years and died on Sunday at the age of 69.

During the first half of the nineties, we had a half-share in an old French house near Bergerac. Rene and his wife Liliane befriended us and many were the mornings lost to the invitation to an 'apero' or two, many the afternoons fogged by the heat and the after-effects of too many Ricards.

When I was writing 'The Chase', Rene was immensely helpful. He was curt but with a twinkle in his eye, he had rarely stirred outside his region, he was a man who knew how to build things and who understood nature and who, we always felt, was entirely content with his lot. He was lean and solid as oak. He was also at times bigoted and narrow of view and he was bloodthirsty, priding himself in an extensive armoury of weapons with which to shoot the local 'gibier' - but he also believed that the game should always have a sporting chance to survive. He possessed no false sentimentality, no squeamishness: he came from a peasant culture where you did what you had to do to survive.

Many of his phrases and memories (like hiding in a cornfield when the Nazis arrived) entered my book. When I needed to write a crucial chapter about a boar hunt, Rene took us one day into the woods, while Liliane looked after our then-toddler son, Jack. The walk was utterly memorable and I was fascinated by everything he knew, everything he noticed, which we, poor clumsy city-dwellers, would have failed to spot. There was a secret life all around us and he provided the temporary bridge to it. Afterwards, I wrote the boar hunt chapter in one glorious burst and scarcely needed to tamper with a word of it afterwards. So thanks, Rene, for the information and for the experience.

We hadn't seen him for a few years, but believed, as you do, that he would be as permanent as the landscape he inhabited. We felt shell-shocked last night. But even stalwarts like Rene, landscapes and ways of life such as in the Perigord, all are vulnerable, in the end.

'Jean-Jacques, child of the land, tramps ahead of him in brown corduroys and a checked shirt, half-open. He carries his gun, his knife and a stout stick he uses to prod the ground or hold branches back for their passage. His voice is deep but low, his accent so strong that it loses Gerald and Edouard has to translate. Here, he says, the tracks of roedeer. There - that circle of white mouldy dots in the soil? - a mushroom is coming up. Up in that tree - nest of a buzzard. By your foot - the droppings of a weasel. He knows the names of everything, the significance of every sign, and dispenses information casually. He takes it all for granted. Gerald feels at the same time privileged and patronised. If ever I was stuck on a desert island, he thinks humbly, I'd be dead meat. Provisions could be right under my nose - I'd never see them. I know about mobile phones and how to set the video. Mother Nature didn't foster me. From time to time he asks a question: he asks Jean-Jacques to identify something for him, and the man gives him a measuring look, like a doctor in an asylum assessing how much the patient is capable of assimilating.' ('The Chase')

Salut, Rene.

Done and undone

I've just been crying my eyes out for a woman I never met.

Read the news this morning that the writer and humanitarian campaigner, Siobhan Dowd, had died of breast cancer at the age of 47.

I was aware of her because of her recent successful forays into children's fiction, A Swift Pure Cry and The London Eye Mystery - and also, rather absurdly, because we shared the same dentist, who a few months ago, after his obligatory enquiry about how my writing was going, mentioned that she was a patient of his.

Two and a half years ago the writer and broadcaster Humphrey Carpenter died. He'd been suffering from Parkinson's disease and yet his death came as a shock. I had more of a connection in that he had been my supervisor when I first came to Oxford to study and on rare occasions we met thereafter, he was always enthusiastic and helpful and great fun to be with.

What these two people have in common, apart from premature death and the ghastly injustice of that, about which we are all going to feel revulsion, pain and anger, is the concept of the life well lived. Reading Siobhan Dowd's obituary in The Guardian, one sees how much she crammed into her life - and Humphrey was the same: an extraordinary human dynamo.

It's the John Donne moment again, the 'no man is an island'. It's also a kick up the backside for those of us who have the aspirations and yet somehow, don't seem to be able to get things done. It's the perilously-close-to-a-Hallmark-card sentiment that you should live your life as if each day is your last etc. Certainly, you need to focus on your priorities, decide what is truly crucial to you, so that when your time comes you don't cry out 'But I didn't ...! But I haven't ...! Could you just hang on while I ...!'

So says the woman who's in the midst of a mad cleaning binge because we've got people coming to dinner tomorrow. Why should it matter that the windows are clean and the cushions are straight and the air is gently scented by an Aveda candle? It doesn't matter at all. but still I am in thrall to my mother's and grandmother's standards, to the tyranny of judgement by other females (a tyranny my husband can't for the life of him understand). Absurd. Absurd. I should be writing.

I'll read Siobhan Dowd's books - fewer books than she would have liked to have written no doubt, but two more than there might have been if she hadn't had the energy and commitment she had.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

The Guardian yesterday discussed a YouGov poll in which it turns out 10% of us want to be writers, more even than those who want to be sports personalities, pilots or astronauts! Those over 50 are most prone to this desire - the younger lot are keener on being a Beckham or Lewis Hamilton. This just demonstrates the halo of glamour that adheres to the concept of the writing life - along with the delusion that there's always gold in them thar literary hills.

This led me to think about the numerous courses, handbooks and articles all of which have at their core that enticing message, that lure - 'You too can be a writer!' 'Why not be a writer!'

I myself contribute to this, in that I have my own small involvement in creative writing teaching. Often the people I teach have a burning urge to do it, often they've proven their motivation by writing stories and novels, by entering competitions, by, quite simply, sticking to it. However, all too often, people claim they want to be writers in the same way that lanky sixteen year old girls want to be models - they do it by steadfastly ignoring what is actually involved.

So, what does it take to be a writer? First of all, bloody hard graft. Forget airy fairy notions of the sensitive writer at the desk, chewing the quill pen, furrowing the brow, then being struck with the white heat of inspiration and scribbling furiously through the night, scribbling his or her way into immortality. This is not to say that inspiration doesn't work like that - it can and when it does it's a wonderful trip. The point is, it doesn't work like that all the time. The Muse, as Stephen King says, is a basement kind of guy - not an ethereal Greek spirit wafting down from Parnassus. You need to beat your Muse with a stick. You need to get it out of bed - and it's usually as reluctant to do so as my teenage son. And that's Reluctant.

Not only is it hard graft but long drawn out hard graft. You have to commit yourself to the long haul, to the ups and downs, to the supercharged enthusiasm followed by the long dark night of the soul, to the wrenching of precious time out of the daily confusion of thoughts and activities, and most of all to the lack of understanding, open hostility, or cold rejection of others. When I was young there was an advert for toys called Weebles and the jingle was 'Weebles wobble but they don't fall down.' You've got to be a Weeble.

You've got to be your own best friend; nurture and comfort yourself with pride in what you've done and faith in what you want to do. You've got to be your own worst enemy, your harshest critic, subjecting everything you write to fierce relentless scrutiny.

You've got to be honest. You've got to let projects go if they're not working out. You've got to focus on your own capacities as a writer, not eat yourself up in envy of others. Honesty may well mean facing up to the fact that ultimately, this is a race you can't run, a goal you can't reach. The biggest honest favour you may have to do for yourself is to admit that you don't actually have the talent. However much books can advise and teachers can coach - and they can do a lot - there are times when, whisper it, the aspirant just cannot write for toffee. Here again, writing seems to have its own uniquely perverted way of selling itself as a profession - nobody thinks they've got a godgiven right to be a brainsurgeon or a concert pianist or even a painter. Often people will reach their mature years and retire from the day job and say blithely 'I'm going to be a writer now' - as if it's a switch you can flip. To those people I'd say - yes, you may well have a talent which has been bubbling within you all these years and now's the time for it to bubble up - but then again you may not. Wishing isn't doing. When I was a student my best friends were around a size 10 and I starved myself to try to get down to that happy state, and certainly I got thin, but I couldn't get thinner than my bone structure would allow, I couldn't look boyish for the life of me. I had the body I had and still have (only more so now!). Being a writer comes from a germ within, and the nurturing of that with industry and practice and the recognition that that's a process that ought never to end. You can always be better.

When I was a little girl and was asked 'Little girl, what do you want to be when you grow up?' I'd answer, primly and no doubt revoltingly, 'An authoress.' It's all I've ever wanted to be. It's always mattered, it still matters, through all the dilatoriness, the self-doubt, the despair. It's what I am and what I always aspire to be. It defines me. I hate it, I'm burdened by it, but I love it and relish it and wallow in it all the time.

If any of this has made you go 'Ouch' I'm sorry - but then again I'm not. It was an honest lecture, honestly meant.

Busman's holiday?

Some of you may well have harboured the suspicion that I've been away on holiday - well, you're right. I've been back a few days now, but it's been a manic week with so much to catch up on, so I haven't got around to blogging till now. My apologies for neglecting you, if you're regular readers.

We went to Cornwall. Last year, we went to France, down by the Spanish border. It was boiling there - but then, it was boiling here too, and like so many others we took last year's hot summer as a sign that global warming was going to give southern England a Mediterranean temperature from now on. Ho ho.

However, although it was raining when we arrived in the far West, near St Ives, we ended up blest with good weather on the whole. Having fled from flood-threatened Oxford, we felt extremely lucky. Three times now we've gone down there and each time the locals have commented on how lucky we've been with the weather, so we're in danger of thinking that it's always fine.

I am so in love with that place. My husband and I idly talked of moving there - and there's a lot to be said for it. Don't want to sound too much like an incipient Druid or Goddess worshipper, but it is a place that speaks to me. Like Oxford, it's imbued with history. Like where I came from in the north of Scotland, it's got sea and cliffs and wildness. Unlike Oxford, it's got fresh air! My lungs felt like they'd had a good scouring out - all of us were yawning all the time. It was a detox for soul and body.

However, I don't think in all reality I would move there. In Scotland I was only too familiar with the sense of being cut off from the world at large, and don't think that after the first fine careless rapture I would much enjoy it again (then again, there's the internet ...). In Oxford there's all the facilities of a city, there's access to London and Heathrow, there's hospitals close at hand ... there's also noise, street-crime, traffic ... Oh dear. I need to get rich enough to have a foot in both camps - that's the answer. Then one of the Cornish nationalists will no doubt set fire to our Cornish retreat ...

It was a great, great holiday, but it was also a working holiday for me - I was researching for my children's series. Back in the days when I was writing The Chase, which was set in France, I was exactly the same - never off duty. It's exhausting - you carry a notebook at all times, you spend too much on books (my husband would argue that's a year-round fault), take hundreds of photos, try to imprint everything on your memory, 'in case it might be useful' - that's my mantra. There comes a point when you wish you could be normal, just lie on the beach or look at the view or go on the jaunt, without trying to catch things in the net of your imagination. Where a fact could be just that - an interesting fact, and not a lump of ore from which a nugget of story can be extracted. The thing is, I can't help it. I can't switch off from 'That would make a good story' and 'What if?' - it's the way my brain works. Damn tiring.

Here's a quote from James Thurber on this: 'I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says "Dammit, Thurber, stop writing." She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.'

Does that strike a chord with any of you?