Oxford Literary Festival Part 2: Publishing Futures

I'm following up my last blogpost with a review of the other events I attended at the recent Oxford Literary Festival, starting with a panel discussion at Corpus Christi called 'Publishing Futures'. I went along to this because I was interested in what people at the ink-face had to say about the current state of publishing and in particular the debate about e-publishing and self-publishing in relation to traditional print publishing. The panel included Marcus du Sautoy, who revels in the title of Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, and Cathy Galvin, Deputy Editor of The Sunday Times Magazine. It was due to include Victoria Barnsley, Chief Executive of Harper Collins - and she was my main reason for attending. Ironic, then, that she wasn't there: she'd been 'called away to New York' urgently. Hmn.

Corpus Christi College

The agent Felicity Bryan took her place: her agency here in Oxford has a very good reputation, and represents a number of significant authors - non-fiction, fiction, children's writers. In her introductory talk, she described how publishers have been having sessions with agents where they explain their vision and their plans with regard to e-publishing - and most importantly, the issue of digital rights. I felt she'd been both open and proactive in terms of seeing the possibilities for her clients - she'd been selling apps for people like the science writer Marcus Chown, for instance. Indeed, his app on the solar system is on its way to becoming a book - so the digital highway can be a two-way street. She described how publishers are very keen that writers should make themselves appealing on the internet. Cathy Galvin was interesting but I have to say that everything she said seemed to lead to the notion that we should all be signing up for the Sunday Times online, and particularly on iPad. Hmn again. She said that News International is not a print company but a media company nowadays - and referring back to Felicity's opinions, it seems to me that we writers, whether represented or not, whether traditionally published or not, need to see ourselves as little media furnaces, generating heat and light whenever we can. We need to write, to promote, to interact through social media, we need to see the possibilities of new forms and new markets and be open to them. 'Only connect,' E. M. Forster famously said - never was this more true.

Marcus du Sautoy was the most entertaining person on the panel - you know, the sort of speaker you would like to invite to dinner if only to continue the friendly, bantering, fascinating dialogue. He feels that e-books haven't really fulfilled their potential yet: he'd like to see publishers becoming even more adventurous with them. He feels that authors haven't really grasped the opportunities yet either.

At the end, there were questions from the floor. My hand shot up at every available opportunity - but I was not heeded, alas. All the more galling, isn't it, when you want to ask something and somebody else has been picked and either drones their way through a self-evident observation, or stymies the speaker with a question which is utterly barking-mad (and it always happens, doesn't it?)

What did I want to ask? Well, first the question of royalties on e-books. Currently publishers offer pretty low rates - and if you publish yourself to Kindle, for example, you can take a much larger proportion of the profit. So, given that you're being asked to network, to promote yourself, to involve yourself to a huge degree in the success of your work, what is it that publishers currently offer us that's so good? If Victoria Barnsley had been there I would have loved to have heard a reply. Also, given how incredibly long the process of approaching agents and publishers and then getting your book out to the public can be, many self-publishers are opting for the DIY route simply to speed things up. Self-publishing still carries the aura of desperation about it, let's not beat about the bush - but not nearly so much as before. Yes, people self-publish because they can't get agents/publishers to take them on, but there are now so many other reasons, and debate about this issue is hot, hot, hot. Self-publishing offers control over your work and its presentation, the possiblity of direct profit from your work, the chance to create for yourself your own loyal readership, and all without having to grow grey hairs while you wait! I wanted to ask, given the recent famous examples of people like Amanda Hocking, where writers get their work out there, establish their readership and then opt for traditional publishing deals, what the panel - and in particular Felicity Bryan - felt about a writer who approached them after self-publishing. I did speak to her afterwards and she was friendly but I didn't feel very much the wiser.

Corpus Christi College

Publishing companies will of course say that they can take the burdens of creating the book as tangible product and marketing it off your shoulders. They have clout with booksellers. (Hmn for the third time ... ?) They understand the market in a way that you don't. They have connections.

But I really do think they need to consider, during this bewildering transitional phase, when chain bookstores struggle, when the Little Guy can wield his own megaphone pretty damn effectively, when online sales are directly possible between writer and buyer, where social networking can create a cosy sense of trust and intimacy between creator and consumer, when writers increasingly want two crucial things - Control and Speed - publishers, the big guys anyway, should think about wooing those who deliver the Product. Otherwise, as that choice modern term has it, they run the risk of being 'disintermediated.'

Phew. I think there will have to be a Part 3 to this blog report!

BOOKING CLOSES midday Friday 6th May for my fictionfire course Essential Story Construction on 7th May. All details of this course and Creating Narrative Perspective and Voice on 21st May are to be found on my website www.fictionfire.co.uk 

Oxford Literary Festival Part 1: Trying on Voices

It's been a mad week (it's a mad time of year) so I'm later than I'd intended in reporting on Oxford's Literary Festival, which ran last week. Before writing this post, I took a look at my earliest report on the festival, back in 2007, the year I set up this blog. The post was called Public Showman, private shaman? Be true to the kind of writer you are. Here's an excerpt from it:
Writers, once elusive, mysterious creatures who retreated from the world to think deep thoughts and emerge with sybilline wisdom every now and again - writers are now unashamed showmen, practising all sorts of huckster-techniques, giving us the well-honed schmooze, the well-turned anecdote (and I've been to enough of these things to have heard the same worn anecdote or witticism trotted out just that once too often). And yes, I know there were always writers-as-performers (Dickens springs to mind immediately) - but the point is that nowadays, published writers are automatically expected to be performing seals too, whether it's congenial to their nature or not; it's part of the pact with the publishing devil, it's part of what a publishing house considers before they take you on: are you marketable?

Well, been nothing's changed, even though over the long-term the festival has transformed itself a great  deal since it began in 1997 at the Oxford Union. Back then it involved only a few events held over a weekend. This year's festival involved around 550 speakers at over 300 events, over the course of eight days. Now, that's big.

Every year there are the famous names, the big draws - this year these included Melvyn Bragg, Princess Anne, David Lodge, Philip Pullman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Colin Dexter, Joanne Harris, Michael Holroyd. There are the  literary big-hitters, the genre masters, the historians, the politicians and polemicists, the poets, the scientists,  the celebrities (Stephanie Powers, anyone?), the cooks, the rising stars, the as-yet little-knowns, the locals. It's an almighty melange of literary competitiveness, genuine mission to communicate, strident commerciality, literary envy and dollops of preening self-satisfaction.

Every year I check the website early on, because the printed programme comes out very late indeed and is the size of a brick. I list every event I want to visit and then start to whittle it down to what I can visit, partly because there are other claims on my time at this time of year, teaching-wise, and partly because of the expense. I'm sorry, I understand that setting up and running a show like this must cost a fortune, but most events now cost £10 a pop - and that pretty soon mounts up to a scary amount (not factoring in the books you buy to get signed in the book marquee afterwards ...) So, I have to restrain myself. I hear the same complaint from others and wish the organisers would take that on board - I really would go to more events if the cost was slightly less.

Oxford is seen as a prosperous city and the festival certainly draws the North Oxford ladies and gents out, and the plum Home Counties accents reverberate in hall and tent. Quite a few of the 'introducers' were of a very Home Counties vintage and one or two were so fond of their own voices their introductions ran the risk of lasting longer than the talk they were introducing!

Magnolia by St Mary the Virgin University Church

Before I discuss the events I attended, one thing was particularly striking for me this year. Oxford. Now, I've lived in this city for the best part of thirty years and I absolutely love it, but every so often I'm jolted into a new appreciation of it - the festival, because we were blessed with wonderful weather, gave me the chance to stroll around, look, and absorb all over again how special a location this is. I played tourist, taking loads of photos, as you can see from this blog-post. It felt like one of those renewal-of-wedding-vows ceremonies. I don't see myself ever being able to divorce myself from this city (though the cottage with a sea-view in Cornwall is still a dream!) - whether Oxford, in all its glory, has any time for me, is quite another thing. Oxford is patrician and lofty, completely and supremely pleased with itself. It always has been and always will be.

Corpus Christi College

Christ Church Tom Tower

The festival is centred at Christ Church, the most patrician college of them all. Other events were held at Corpus Christi, in a modern lecture hall, where one wall is the ancient city wall; at Merton, at the Sheldonian Theatre and the Bodleian Library. So even if the speaker is as dull as ditch-water you've got lots to look at.

The first event I attended was a panel discussion involving Philip Pullman, Kate Clanchy (whose book Antigona and Me impressed me so much last year) and poet Patience Agbabi. All are Creative Writing Fellows at Oxford Brookes University and their subject, 'Voice', was of interest to me because I taught a course on this and narrative perspective at Winchester Writers' Conference last year and will be running another as part of my own fictionfire programme on 21st May (course details on the fictionfire website). 

It hardly needs to be said that all three were wise and clever speakers with an edge of humour but a deep understanding of their craft. They drew our attention to the main differentiation when we come to speak of voice: you have the 'voice' of your character or narrator within the text you are creating and you have your own voice as a writer. Patience Agbabi talked of 'trying on a range of voices' - and well she may, for she is engaged in a new version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. She has also written sonnets in the form of an agony aunt's replies to writers from history, which sounds really interesting. Philip Pullman pointed out that in some narratives, the narrator purports to be quite a detached third person 'voice' but that voice is as much of a constructed character as any of the others within the book.He said his voice is different when he's writing his fairy tales versus the fiction destined for slightly older readers. He claimed that he doesn't think about readers at all when he's writing: 'It's none of their damn business!' - and that he hears the appropriate voice in his 'mind's ear'. Literature, he said, 'belongs in the mouth and the ear as much as it does in the eye.' Kate Clanchy said we opt to choose a particular camera distance: with some works you feel you're right on the character's shoulder whereas in others it's appropriate to be a long way off. Patience said of her characters 'I don't think of them sounding like me. I think of them sounding like themselves.'

Then there is the other kind of 'voice' isn't there: writers are always advised to find their 'own voice' (as if they'd left it under a cushion somewhere) and this is a daunting idea for new writers. The fact is that you only discover your voice through writing and writing regularly. All writers try imitating the writers they admire and all writers despair at times of finding that recognisable voice which will mark them out as unique: we all know how Dickens wrote, how Hemingway wrote, how Martin Amis writes - how can we find our individuality? Through practice, commitment, experimentation, through being open to new techniques, through not being lazy and settling for the predictable.  Through listening to your characters, through playfulness and openness, through time. Through, as Philip said, having the 'silence and secret time' to hear what your true voice is.

And now my voice is going to take a rest: I'll save the rest of this report for my next blog-post!

BOOK NOW for my courses on Essential Story Construction (7th May) and Creating Narrative Perspective and Voice (21st May) - all details and booking form can be found on my website: www.fictionfire.co.uk 

Upcoming writing courses

I'm very gratified that my week-long summer school course, Writing your Novel - Creativity and Craft, as part of Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education programme, is already fully booked and has a waiting list. This happens every year, which is wonderful!

It's a good time, therefore, to remind you that I'll be teaching my own fictionfire day courses next month: Writing your Novel - Essential Story Construction on May 7th and Creating Narrative Perspective and Voice on May 21st. If you're interested in enrolling for these, all the details of course content and how to book can be found on my website. I'm delighted that several people who attended previous fictionfire courses have already signed up for these.

I'll also be teaching at the Winchester Writers' Conference at the start of July, held at the University of Winchester. The online programme is now up on the conference site and I do recommend that if anything interests you, you should book promptly. This is a huge, long-established conference and offers not only day courses and lectures but the chance to book one-to-one appointments with writers, agents and editors. There are numerous competitions to enter too, which is a great way to build your writing credentials. I'll be conducting a day long course on Character Building on Friday 1st July and my Saturday lecture will be Place is Paramount - discussing how location and atmosphere can reinforce the power of your writing and make it memorable.

I hope I'll get the chance to meet and talk to you at one of these events!

James Attlee's Nocturne and some writing about the moon

Here's a picture my son took on Saturday night of the 'supermoon', when the moon was closer to us than it's been in eighteen years, apparently. He's doing GCSE Astronomy and has become far more adept than I am at using my new Lumix camera!

On that evening, under that moon, I went off to Waterstone's to listen to James Attlee talk about his book Nocturne, which is subtitled 'A Journey in Search of Moonlight'. He was a fascinating speaker, with a magpie mind where everything interests him and anecdotes and snippets of facts spill out of him - like W.G. Sebald, he meanders through art, history, astronomy, ancient cultures - everything fascinates him and he makes striking observations and connections. His book explores our attitude to the moon and also seeks to rediscover our lost connection with it. He talks of how we 'simmer in our own electronic bouillabaisse' of streetlighting, how the 'celestial light show' is 'rendered spectrally pale today by the intensity of our self-regard'. After seeing the moon in its full unspoilt glory on a trip to Cornwall, he resolved to get into tune with the lunar cycle and seize every opportunity of getting out there to look at it - really look at it. I'm dying to read the rest of the book - he talked of how he visited such diverse places as Japan and the Arizona desert in pursuit of its 'alchemical light.'

Later, at the bus stop on St Aldates, I gazed at the full moon glowing just beside Christ Church's Tom Tower. So often we're huddled beside the flicker of the TV screen and we miss what's going on out there - and even if we do go outside, the orange glow of city lights, which James memorably described as like being inside a Lucozade bottle, stops us seeing the stars and planets in their full glory. Only the moon survives that blotting out - but the moon too benefits from being seen above a dusty desert or as it rises from the sea.

It was a coincidence that James mentioned that he rediscovered the moon, as it were, while in Cornwall. I've written a children's story, Argentail,  set there - and in it a city boy wrestling with trauma is also part-awed, part-scared, part-comforted by the moon and what the moon brings him:

'The iron latch clattered loudly, like striking a tinder-box. The door seemed to swell towards him. He slipped through into the great echoing blackness of the tower, deep and dark as a well without water.
   And if he had thought it cold back in the cottage, that was nothing compared to the paralysing, brain-aching cold that seized him now. His breath was a vapour, his own personal fog-bank, accompanying him as he climbed the stairs to the first floor, to the second. Stony echoes left him, bounced back to him, like auditory boomerangs.
   At no time could he have said why he was doing this, why he had left the safety of the cottage for this spooky place, where wedges of unearthly blue light from the high windows were laid like stepping-stones before his feet. Up and round, up and round, up and into the great circular room, where the wedges of blue light fused into a flood. He walked across the bare floor and gazed out.
   He'd never looked at the sea except in terms of buckets and spades, rock-pools and jellyfish, lilos and waterwings and splashing your sister in the face until she howls with rage. The sea meant holidays. The sea was warm. The sea was a pet.
   Not this sea. Not this ocean.
   He grasped the windowsill and held his breath, not wanting to fog the glass, not wanting to spoil the view. The sea stretched out, charcoal-dark and glittering, to lands beyond imagination. This was a sea for explorers and invaders. It beckoned and tempted: it said anything was possible.
   It also said it didn't care. It didn't care for lost boys with confused feelings, standing at the edge of the land.
   A panel of bluish-white was laid in a long triangle across the water. Kick looked up.
   The clouds had all gone and the moon was there, huge and pure and nearly full. He felt that the window-glass was acting like a telescope - surely he'd never seen the moon so large?
   As a tiny child, like every tiny child, he'd heard songs and rhymes about the moon. A cow jumped over it. A man came down from it.
   He gazed now at its strange shadows and hollows.
   Then he leapt back, heart racing, a sudden heat breaking out all over his body.'

Shelley's not so blithe spirit

Here in Oxford there's an exhibition currently at the Bodleian devoted to Shelley and his circle, which I've visited twice and hope to visit again before it closes on the 27th March. It's called Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family, it's free and it's certainly worth a look. The library has an excellent Shelley archive, so in the dimly-lit room you can see papers, pictures and 'relics' - because as you stroll round the most striking aspect of it all is that of the creation of literary myth. It's part poignant, part-irritating, to see how, in typical Romantic/Victorian fashion, Shelley's friends, relatives and wife set about the canonization of a writer famed for being an atheist.

I was touched by the doominess of it all: the sense of brief lives flaring in passion and self-destructiveness. There's not just Shelley himself, but his first wife who drowned herself, the suicide of Fanny Imlay, Mary Shelley's half-sister, Mary Shelley's mother Mary Wollstonecraft dying as a result of childbirth, Byron's daughter Allegra, taken from her mother Claire Clairmont, only to die at the age of four in the convent Byron consigned her to, Mary Shelley's son William ... a catalogue of morbid melodrama which you wouldn't dare to make up (rather like reading about the Brontes' brief lives).

Linked with it the self-obsession, arrogance and self-indulgence - the posturing opinions, the dwelling on loss which in Mary Shelley's case seems to have reached an almost psychopathic level. Necklaces and rings were woven with the hair of the deceased, a 'shrine' was set up in her house where she could worship the god of her heart. Mary Wollstonecraft writing notes to William Godwin when she was pregnant, telling him she had 'no doubt of seeing the animal today' when she was close to giving birth to Mary Shelley. Fanny Imlay's last letter, full of reproach, emotional blackmail and self-pity. I found myself thinking of one of my favourite scenes in the Blackadder series set in the Regency, when all the Romantic poets are gathered, moaning and groaning, at Mrs Miggins' Pie Shop, and she says 'Ooh Mr Byron, don't be such a big girl's blouse!'

Yet there is much that is inexpressibly moving. Who could fail to sympathise with Mary Shelley when, on her son's death, her father wrote to her like this? 'But you have lost a child and all the rest of the world, all that is beautiful and all that has a charm upon your kindness, is nothing, because a child of three years old is dead!'

I was particularly struck by Shelley's doodles on his various notebooks: faces, trees, and ironically, boats, all sketched with verve. I was moved by a letter from Allegra to her father, Lord Byron.There's Mary Shelley's sense of doom and dread in the last days by the lake in Italy, there's Shelley's last hasty note to her, and there are the books he had with him on his boat, washed up, pages and covers swollen, after he drowned. I was impressed by the pages from the original manuscript of Frankenstein, with Shelley's editorial changes.

However, the artifact I found most moving was a letter from Keats to Shelley, written on August 16 1820, some months before Keats' death in Rome from tuberculosis. Shelley's poetry has never appealed to me in the way Keats' does: ironically, the one poem on display that really spoke to me was 'Adonais', which is Shelley's lament for Keats. The grace of Keats' handwriting and the liveliness of his voice and his intelligence stayed with me longer than anything.

Just Like Heaven Cover (The Cure) by Jacques

Well, the weather's been so grey and grim over the past few days, we could stand with cheering up, so here are the titles vying for your vote in this year's Diagram Prize, which is awarded by The Bookseller to the oddest title of the year. These are all genuine published books and you can vote for your favourite at www.thebookseller.com. Results are due on 25th March.

Here they are:
8th International Friction Stir Welding Symposium Proceedings
The Generosity of the Dead
The Italian's One-Night Love-Child
Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way
Myth of the Social Volcano
What Color is your Dog?

Current favourite is Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way, which I have to say I'm drawn to, especially after suffering years of dentist-phobia (result of cack-handed treatment when I was a child and when I lived in Aberdeen. I remember the lady upstairs from my flat recommending I just have all my teeth pulled - 'Ye'll nae be bothered again. Jist get it a' ower and deen wi'.' There were moments when I was tempted ... )

If you want to have a chuckle at the shortlists of previous years, here are the links to my earlier posts about the competition:
2010 and this - where by weird coincidence I was suffering dental woes -
2009
2008
2007

Let me know what you think and whether, in your opinion, this year's list matches up to those of previous years.