Words Unlimited

Mind Your Language

Beware - the word literary can mean death to a writing career. 

Allegedly, at Waterstones, Piccadilly - probably the largest bookshop in the country – literary is a dirty word. Reporting on a meeting of writers and booksellers, set up by the Society of Authors at the store, Michael Holroyd reports in The Guardian that,  “literary fiction was not on the whole welcome in the shop. In fact, the word "literary" is death to sales…”  

No matter. Leading ‘Literary’ Agent, Jonny Geller, at a different Society of Authors meeting that I attended, had the answer.  Geller, an agent who has clearly adapted to a publishing world where retailers are the key players, announced he no longer pitched books as ‘literary’ because beautifully written books just don’t sell. Content is King was his mantra. 

So, if not literary how does he name, thoughtful, content filled fiction?

Non-genre, apparently.  

Let It Snow

Enough already! It’s Friday and the media is still buzzing about the buses not running in London for part of last Monday. Okay, there must have been some people who had urgent matters to attend and I’m sorry and hope you managed to walk, tube, cab, hitch a lift.  But once in every two decades can’t we have a spontaneous day off?  ‘Don’t travel unless you have to,’ said the bulletins. Yes. Leave what transport there is for those who need it.  Meanwhile, think how nourishing that snow is for your writing; the quality of the light, the whiteness of the freshly fallen flakes coating the world. Mesmerising. This whiteness is the opposite of the usual scary blank page/screen on a Monday morning. I spent most of last Monday morning in a meditative state, watching my garden become transformed. I finally went up to write at about 3 pm – unheard of, my best writing is always in the morning – yet the words flowed.  Please let’s not spend money on snowploughs that never get used. Instead, why not fund a few more national play days?  I have a feeling it isn’t just writers who could use more ‘blank’ days, some white space …

 

 

 

Write What You See

Writing a novel is all about revision and that means re-vision, re-seeing your characters at every moment in the story.  This takes time and many drafts. 

So, you have a good first draft: your character has travelled the journey you’d imagined, and more. The end is satisfying, and yet … beware that occupational hazard ‘first draft exhaustion’ –  Isn’t it enough that I got the damn story down? It’ll do won’t it?   

Well, not quite.  There are bound to be moments you haven’t dared fully imagine. You’ll find lumps of exposition, a few minor characters that aren’t doing enough etc etc. We’re talking more than Spellcheck can handle. 

Start by going into those moments where the text feels ‘thin’ as Virginia Woolf used to say, or ‘exploratory’, as I say to myself on a good day - these could be gold dust moments. Dramatically speaking, have you got the most out of them?  

On that first draft you only had enough energy to report that as X had a shower she recalled the strange man in the leather coat she met on the beach. Now you realise that for the story to live the meeting with the man in the leather coat has to be ‘on stage’ – a whole new scene. Back to the rehearsal room. You are both director and actor. Where are they? What are they doing? Why?  How do they feel? What do they think? How do they behave? With what consequences? 

Let the characters talk back. Talk to the page. 

Exhausted and satisfied at the end of that long-haul first draft it’s easy to get sucked into ‘word-doctoring.’   Beware - you might polish the life out of your book. The manuscript will look pristine but is the reader drawn in beyond the neat sentences in front of them? Are those black squiggles setting in motion the ‘film’ in the reader’s head? 

Forget Times Roman 12pt dancing on the screen/page, instead see your character. 

Re-visioning [several times if you have to] those ‘thin’ or ‘exploratory’ moments could be the making of the book. Don’t just delete or manicure. Comb through the novel until you’ve seen and heard [smelled, touched and tasted] each moment. 

Re-vision until the film in your head is running. No camera shake.

 

T S Eliot Prize for Poetry – Gasps and Tears

To Skinner’s Hall in the City last Monday, 12 January, for the T S Eliot Prize Awards Ceremony.  Chair of the Judges Andrew Motion - flanked by fellow judges, Lavinia Greenlaw and Tobias Hill – took his time making the announcement.  In alphabetical order he summed up the achievement of each of the ten short-listed poets [see below] but paused a while longer as he reached Mick Imlah. Imlah - a favourite, along with Ciaran Carson, to win - had died that morning having been ill for a year with motor neurone disease. 

"He was one of the cleverest, most interesting, and sweet-natured people I have ever met," said Motion, holding back tears. 

He said that Imlah’s work would go on being read as long as there were people to read poetry. He also said he could hear his friend’s voice whispering in his ear not to let his demise hang over the evening. “This is not Mick’s memorial service nor his wake.” 

And so he announced the winner, Jen Hadfield, a thirty-year-old, Cheshire born poet who has adopted Shetland and its language. 

Gasps of delight collided with gasps of disbelief. Hadfield’s family burst into audible sobs.  Hadfield had a modest ‘Kate Winslet’ moment, but, more dignified that KW, she quietly wiped away tears and invited the audience to join in the refrain as she read the poem, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen This Is a Horse as Magritte Might Paint Him.’ 

“I’be very happy if you’d do that,” she said, then added. “I’m very happy.” 

Hadfield was a surprising choice, the youngest on the list, Nigh-No-Place being her second collection. Motion said her work was “a revelation, energetic, iconoclastic.” 

Looks as if our own PRG has a way to go in being a reliable predictor of winners! Over two meetings in November and December we read and discussed all of the shortlist. An extract from our meeting notes shows what we thought of Nigh-No-Place:

“what stands out is a freshness of language; language enjoyed for its music and sensory delight. We’re not rewarded with layers beneath. Poems are vivid snapshots of nature and landscapes [Alberta, Shetland], influenced by Ted Hughes, although the ejaculating sausages are very much Hadfield’s own. We enjoyed ‘Witless’ and ‘This Is Us Saint’s Day’.  But with a poem such as ‘Nigh-No-Place’, wonder if it’s for performance rather than the page?”

Certainly her performance of that poem at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Sunday 11 January, was a breath of fresh air. She is a mesmerizing reader of her own work. She’s quirky, anarchic, a poet of place, with a sharp ear and eye. One to watch?

 And perhaps we had some overlap with judge Tobias Hill who published his judging notes on Hadfield here.

Meanwhile, more on the short-listed poets at the PBS website, where there should also be available some time soon a podcast of all the 11 January readings …  

Moniza Alvi Europa (Bloodaxe)

Peter Bennet The Glass Swarm (Flambard)

Ciaran Carson For All We Know (Gallery Books)

Robert Crawford Full Volume (Cape)

Maura Dooley Life Under Water (Bloodaxe)

Mark Doty Theories and Apparitions (Cape)

Mick Imlah The Lost Leader (Faber)

Glyn Maxwell Hide Now (Picador)

Stephen Romer Yellow Studio (Carcanet)

Poetry In December

13 January already. Before 2009 runs away with me, I'd better note these poetry moments in December … a busy poetry month with the Poetry Reading Group [PRG] reading all the TS Eliot Prize shortlisted poets [more on that later], for now:

1 December to The Troubadour for the 2nd Troubadour Poetry Prize-giving event. Three prize-winners and 20 commended poets read their work; a rich evening of poetry.  Among the commended was our own Jane Kirwan from the PRG. Congratulations Jane.

Goldsmiths colleague Stephen Knight and Jo Shapcott were the judges. As well as giving fine readings of their work, they both spoke frankly about the judging process. The Annual Troubadour Poetry Prize is rare among competitions in that all entries are read by both judges – no sifters.  Knight said that among the two-thousand or so poems entered “there were few inept poems.” He graded entries as “competent, more than competent and prize-winning.”

Jo Shapcott went further saying that from the entries she could have picked 100 poems to produce an anthology that would be “the equal of any anthology currently on the market.” That’s quite a claim.

All of this is testament to the poetry community that Anne-Marie Fyfe has built up around Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour for over a decade. She’s built a strong audience not just for the Monday readings but for regular workshops and seminars, and now the annual competition. Oh yes, and the recently launched website where you can read all the prize winning poems and see the Spring 2009 programme, here.   So, Anne-Marie, is the Troubadour Anthology a possible future development?

12 December to the launch of Geraldine Paine’s first collection, The Go-Away Bird, at Chris Beetles gallery off Piccadilly, London. A packed evening with a brilliant reading by the poet.  Here’s evidence that good poetry will out. Geraldine has bided her time in finding a publisher. She’s won prizes, published in many magazines and been a regular performer of her work in the South East with the 'Scatterlings.' The seventy or so poems in the this book are but a selection from a large body of work  and include a sequence of her Zimbabwe poems.  Sheenagh Pugh has written a thoughtful review, here.   

What is Fiction For?

An intriguing insight into the relationship between two great fiction writers [Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace] struggling to define what fiction is for was provided by a third smart writer [Zadie Smith] guest editing the Today programme on Radio 4 on Monday 29 December. Apparently, between Christmas and New Year there is no news.  Zadie peppered the programme with many a thoughtful piece including a tribute to the late David Foster Wallace in which Jonathan Franzen recalled how, through ‘bickering road trips’, ‘awkward chess games’ and ‘even more awkward tennis rallying’, they’d settled on fiction being:

“A neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being, this, we decided was what fiction was for; a way out of loneliness, was the formulation we agreed to agree on.”

The words ‘neutral middle ground’ seem oddly bland from two such high-wire acts, though not if you think of a space such as an airport departure lounge or a railway waiting station, a place where you might make a deep connection with a total stranger and risk saying something you might not say elsewhere. In the departure lounge space that is the blank screen/page the novelist [eventually] creates something coherent out of their own and the world’s chaos; the reader may then explore the patterns woven through language and story as a way of exploring their own chaos. Fiction as a place to reflect.

Aside from the chess,the tennis, the road trips, Franzen said that the most “intense interaction” he’d had with DFW came when reading Infinite Jest because in that book DFW had, “Arranged himself and the world the way he wanted them arranged.”

Fiction as a place to rearrange the world, or choose to pay a different kind of attention.

In fiction both writer and reader have the opportunity to pay close attention, try out new perspectives, override their default settings and day-to-day assumptions.

Paying attention is a topic on which DFW writes quite wonderfully in the piece “Plain old untrendy troubles and emotions.”

It would be wonderful if Today or any news programme gave this kind of attention to fiction all year round.

Historical Fiction

When does fiction become historical fiction? How far back to you have to go?

Talking over drinks after Emma Darwin’s reading from Secret Alchemy  at Goldsmiths I was asked: ‘Do you write historical fiction?’ and swiftly answered ‘Oh no…’ And yet, pondering this question on the train back to London bridge I thought, well, no Kings and Queens, but my characters get caught up in ‘real’ events. Andy Warhol and Gandhi both make an appearance in my fiction.

For Taking In Water [set in 2002], I’ve imagined my character back into the 1953 flood that deluged the East coast in January of that year and, then into Warhol’s Factory in New York in 1963/4. Broken Threads [set in 2004/5], travels back to the cotton mills of Lancashire in the 1920s and 1930s, and for Deep Blue Silence [set in the late 1990s] understanding the social conditions around glassmaking in 1930s was crucial to imagining Faith’s past.  All three books required research into social history – what did they wear, eat? How did they speak – dialect etc? Work patterns, living conditions etc…  With all three books it was the history - my curiosity about particular events and how they impinged on a single life - that formed the core obsession, and it was the historical research that grew the work…

Biological Time

Never mind Prof Cox and his illusions of time... the hair turns grey, doesn't it? seems we have, incontrovertibly, a beginning, middle and end. Perhaps fictional time is more aligned with biological time?

Tapping you on the head with a teaspoon

Time seems to be on my mind. I’ve been preoccupied with tense this last couple of weeks and have to admit the book I’m working on is maybe not best served by the present tense. The ‘real’ time frame of the novel is 2 weeks. I wanted to create a sense of urgency, a character thrown back to face an event of fifty years earlier in light of unexpected encounters in the present. ED, I noticed, used the present in her new book Secret Alchemy, so I emailed, we had a ‘discussion’ and a phrase of hers sticks in my mind. The problem with the present tense she says is that it can feel as if,  “I'm being tapped repeatedly on the head with a teaspoon.”

Part of the problem of letting go of the present tense, is that I know it works well in my opening chapters but I have feeling the teaspoon effect is a problem later on. Mmm, no, don’t want that. So, back to the past. Ahh but now those moments of the character’s past that come as fragments - the heart of the book -  can be written in the present and become more vivid, not a teaspoon tap on the head but a heightened whisper – come closer, listen to this… Once again the realisation that writing it in the present tense was part of the process, to keep close that character's pressure until I had the story down…

Time - is it all fiction?

Time is a slippery thing for a novelist. Characters make choices, take actions over time. The novelist relies on the sense of time passing to create layers of past and present. So I was somewhat unnerved then when Watching ‘Horizon’ earlier this week to find that time is even more slippery for particle physicist Professor Brian Cox. He claims he has no idea what time really is or what time is it.

Apparently the earth does not reliably take 24 hours to turn on its axis – a strong wind pushing against or getting behind the Himalayas can slow things down or speed them up. And, several million [or was it billion?] years ago a day was a mere 22 hours. Cox says that our experience of feeling the passage of time might just be an illusion.  So are we novelist are working a double illusion? Could you create fiction without any sense of time passing – a novel that is just one continuous now?