Words Unlimited

Paul Auster on Publishing

Apparently Paul Auster’s ‘City of Glass’ – one of the stories in The New York Trilogy – was repeatedly rejected. The experience seems to have left Auster with a realist’s view of the publishing industry.  He says:

I don’t think they know what they’re doing -- they guess. And they guess wrong a lot of the time. So the book that was rejected 17 times is now published in 44 languages around the world. So what did they know?

This is from a much longer piece in which Auster talks about his writing process. It's on the NY1 website and worth reading in full.

The book has had so many editions and covers. My all time favourite, to date, is The Folio Society's 2008 edition, pictured here. Tom Burns's original artwork won the V&A Illustration award in 2009.

Trespassers Beware ...

Are You A Perfectionist?

David Foster Wallace on the tragedy of perfectionism. You know the feeling - you can see the novel/story/poem in your head, but what comes out on the page seems to fall short... what to do?

 

Thanks to Cheryl Moskowitz for alerting me to this animation.

Book of The Month - April 2013 - Kay Ryan

 

 

 The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan is my stand-out book this month.  I first came across Ryan when she read at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival a couple of years ago. United States Poet Laureate from 2008 – 2010, her work is quirky, aphoristic. These short poems with their short lines are deceptively simple.

In a Q&A session at Aldeburgh she talked about what poetry meant to her: 'A poem is a brief moment of clarity.' The effect of reading her work is to clear a space in the head, to sharpen a thought.

Asked about her subject matter Ryan said, ‘The mind itself.’ Ryan is a philosopher of the everyday, catching the epiphany in the ordinary. There are large thoughts in these small poems. She seems to watch the mind at work and catch the thought process in the fewest words; the very opposite of Jorie Graham’s academic digressions, which I also love, but for different reasons.

Ryan also plays with cliché, rehabilitating tired words in poems such as, ‘Bitter Pill,’ ‘No Rest for The Idle’ and ‘Nothing Ventured.’ But I particularly enjoyed the poems that draw on the imagery of the natural world. Ryan calls herself a 'nature exploiter.' She’s not a nature poet in the way of fellow American, Mary Oliver. For Oliver experience in the natural world, its imagery, brings a spiritual quality to a poem.   In a Ryan poem reference to natural phenomena is a way to reflect on down-to-earth human behaviours, as in, ‘Expectations,’  ‘Hailstorm’ and ‘The Edges of Time:’

Expectations

We expect rain

to animate this

creek: these rocks

to harbor gurgles,

these pebbles to

creep downstream

a little, those leaves

to circle in the

eddy, the stains

and gloss of wet.

The bed is ready

but no rain yet.

 

Hailstorm

Like a storm

of hornets, the

little white planets

layer and relayer

as they whip around

in their high orbits,

getting more and

more dense before

they crash against

our crust. A maelstrom

of ferocious little

fists and punches,

so hard to believe

once it's past.

 

The Edges of Time

It is at the edges
that time thins.
Time which had been
dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
apparently coming
from stacks of
put-off things or
just in back. A
racket of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgent
as fish when seas
retreat.

Though clearly influenced by Emily Dickinson, this work is distinctively Ryan. I am pleased to have discovered another kind of philosophical American woman; she makes interesting reading alongside Jorie Graham and Mary Oliver.

Again at Aldeburgh, Ryan said that her aim was to: 'Never make you feel heavier. A poem animates you, your cells the space between your cells. It adds oxygen.'

Reading this collection is to breathe fresh literary air, to oxygenate thoughts.

 

Justin David

Writer and photographer, Justin David, a graduate of the MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths, has just published his story, ‘Unicorn,’ on Kindle. He talks about what it takes to reach readers, how his story went ‘viral’ and how epublishing might work as a way to attract mainstream editors

   

 PJ: Why publish on Kindle?

JD: After the MA I’d written a novel and been taken on by a literary agent. I was convinced everything would fall into place. The fantasy went something like this: as a writer and photographer I’d be giving interviews on The South Bank Show, signing books everywhere, winning the Booker and Stephen Daldry would direct a film adaptation. ‘Ideas above his station,’ my mother always said. The photography is doing okay but even with a literary agent, getting my novel published is taking more time than I’d imagined, although there has been interest following the London Book Fair this month. But it’s a fact that there are fewer platforms for edgy, queer voices. And among the limited number of independent publishers there’s tough competition. So, while I’m waiting for my novel to find its place in the world I decided to experiment with Kindle Select (owned by Amazon).

PJ: What does this offer that mainstream publishing of a physical book can’t

JD:  It’s a platform that offers authors the opportunity to self-publish, digitally, works of any length or subject.  I found it exciting because you are no longer bound by the traditional forms of short story, novella and novel. Since you’re selling megabytes instead of pages, no one is going to castigate you if your short fiction is over 6000 words, or if your 35,000 words are not quite long enough to call a novel.

PJ: Why short stories?

JD: I had a set of short stories ready to go. Kindle recommends (from a marketing point of view) you publish works over 5000 words, since people seem to expect at least that for their 77p (the lowest possible price on Kindle) even though there are those of us who think a good read is more important than the number of words. Some of my short stories are under the 5000 word mark, so I decided to treat them like old fashioned 8” singles and batch them with a ‘b-side.’ I’ve decided to put them on sale one-by-one instead of instantly giving them all away as a collection.

PJ: How long does it take, and do you need to be techy

JD: It actually takes just minutes to get a manuscript uploaded if you have everything ready. There’s a little bit of reformatting to do along the way, but the Kindle website guides you through the process. It’s not difficult.

PJ: Okay, so you’re published but how do you find readers?

JD: The main issue with this kind of publishing is finding readers. I didn’t have a ready-made audience and no money for a big marketing campaign. However, I do have an audience for the photography. So I cannily set about thinking of ways I could bring my fan-base from the photography to my writing. I have an ongoing project involving photographs of cabaret figures, many of these have been published in magazines. It seemed like a good idea to set up photo shoots with some of these characters to create front covers. Later, I used social networking sites (Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and such) to connect all the dots and reach as many people as possible. By tagging all the people involved in making the images (model and make-up artist) I could reach out to even more people. Miraculously, the story went ‘viral’ as they say, and it wasn’t long before it was being downloaded in Japan, Canada, USA and all over Europe.

PJ: Instant results, but how do you keep that going?

JD: All of this happened at the touch of a button. Publishing at break-neck speed. As growing an audience was more important than making money, I decided to give the story away for five days. Soon there was over a thousand downloads and ‘Unicorn’ eventually reached No. 3 in the Download Chart. If you can get your story to chart long enough during this free period it will remain visible after Kindle switch it to being a ‘paid for item’ and that’s when you can make money. This being my first try, I was quite some way from doing this, but my audience is growing and people left some fantastic reviews on the Amazon page. Next, I signed up to Goodreads, which is a bit like Facebook for people who like reading, and yet another way for authors to gain visibility. Basically, I set about exploiting every opportunity to get word about.

Kindle offer a marketing scheme called Kindle Singles, specifically for short pieces, which, if your work is selected, is a little bit like being on the tables at the front of Waterstones – another way of getting noticed. Though, if you choose to go down this road, it ties you into an exclusivity contract with them and you can’t therefore put your story on another platform, such as iBooks.

PJ: I gather agents are encouraging authors to self-publish as ebooks, particularly work that they can’t readily sell. How did publishing ‘Unicorn’ sit with your agent?

JD: My agent sent the link out to people he thought would be interested in my novel. It has proven to be a useful tool for him to garner interest. Editors might be reluctant to read a whole manuscript, but while doing their homework in preparation for the London Book fair a lot of them downloaded and read ‘Unicorn’ before they received the pitch for the novel. It’s got people talking.

PJ: What’s next?

JD: I have my list:

• Upload the remaining stories to complete the set
• Send press release to magazines
• Network like Madonna
• Schmooze with Melvyn Bragg and anyone at Radio Four

I’ll let you know how I get on. Next year is my year. Does anyone have Spielberg’s number?

'Unicorn' is available to download, here.

More on Justin David's writing and photography, here

Poetry On The Beach

 

I’m really looking forward to this coming weekend in Aldeburgh.

On Saturday 27 and Sunday 28 April poet Tamar Yoseloff will be writer-in-residence in the south lookout tower on Aldeburgh Beach. She plans to create a temporary reading room, a wall of words, an installation of found objects.

She’s invited poets to read with her on Saturday evening on the theme of the sea and I’m delighted to be one of those lucky poets.

This event is the latest in the programme of the Aldeburgh Beach South Lookout Project, devised by cultural entrepreneur, Caroline Wiseman

Granta Best of Young British Novelists 2013

Many congratulations to Ross Raisin and Evie Wyld, both ex-Goldsmiths students who have published excellent novels, won prizes and have now made it on to that most prestigious of literary lists – Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.  Well deserved! 

Both Raisin and Wyld have given interviews on their writing process to Words Unlimited -  read Raisin on the writing of In God’s Own Country, and Wyld on how she came to write After the Fire, a Still Small Voice.

Lost Key

Book of The Month - March 2013 - Orkney

Amy Sackville’s Orkney is challenging and enchanting.

The first-person narrator is a sixty-something professor of literature who arrives on a remote Orkney island with his twenty-one-year-old bride, a former student. This is to be their honeymoon. But, for all their eating, drinking and storytelling together, they spend most of the daytime apart.  She is out on the beach watching the sea; he – a Keats scholar – stays inside, working on an endless tome, and watching her watching the sea.

Not much ‘plot,’ then, but tension builds around the mystery of the young wife. Sackville performs her own enchantment on the reader with long, flowing sentences that mesmerise. She catches and sustains the high tone of her male, academic narrator, who is, clearly, not quite reliable. 

Seen only through the Prof’s eyes can we be sure that what he is seeing is real? We never learn his wife’s name but are regularly reminded of her white hair, webbed hands and feet and her recurring nightmares in which the sea tries to claim her. Though she is drawn to the shore each day she can’t swim and fears the water. We learn that she was born among these islands but that her father mysteriously disappeared. She will not speak of her family. 

The pleasure in reading Orkney is in the fine writing and the ambiguity of a story that refuses to satisfy our want for explanation and for realism. That said there is enough realism to have us believe we are in Orkney – landscape and weather are beautifully evoked, the sea is made palpable: “Out at the sea’s edge, the water churns over, a static rolling like horses pawing the ground…” Other people seem solid enough – the dour Mrs Odie who brings eggs to the cottage and comes to clean. When the Prof and his white-haired wife visit the pub they encounter an all too ordinary family on a bird-watching holiday.

As the Prof tries to probe his wife’s secrets, her past, she says, ‘Let it go,’ and sets off to the shore again. Feeling sorry for himself the Prof muses: “The knight-at-arms is left to loiter palely on the cold hillside by his Belle Dame. But in what sense is she without Mercy? [she] Wraps him in fantasy and then abandons him to waste and rot? What is the nature of this enchantment? Or is it only madness, or a dream, and if so, whose?”

In the Prof’s questions are this reader’s questions.

It seems that Sackville has spun a whole novel from the Keats’s poem, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci,’ furnishing the sparse narrative of that poem with this white haired woman.  There’s also a good helping of folktale and myth threaded throughout the book. So, for me, the wife seemed to be a figment of the Prof’s literary imagination; a mermaid dreamed up to ward off the end of his productive, potent life. Looked at this way, the story becomes a dramatisation of his desire and frustration.

In this ambitious second novel Sackville has created a sophisticated ‘folktale’ for now, that explores desire [its insatiability], the impossibility of knowing another person, no matter how enchanting you may find them, and the stories we invent around our separateness.

It is refreshing to find such literary boldness and a narrative that plays on long after the last page.

Amy Sackville talks about her writing process, here.

George Bellows - 'trying everything'

"Try everything that can be done.

Be deliberate. Be spontaneous.

Be thoughtful and painstaking.

Be abandoned and impulsive

Learn your own possibilities."

George Bellows, 1920

 

George Bellows’s words are writ large on the wall at the end of the current exhibition of his work at The Royal Academy, London.  They appear to be addressed to younger artists, but I reckon the advice remains relevant throughout any creative career.

We don’t know what kind artist Bellows (1882-1925) might have become because his life was cut short. He died aged 42 at a point where his work seemed to be in transition from documentary realism to something more surreal and dreamlike.

His earlier work documents the grittier side of Manhattan as it was transformed into a modern city. Bellows directs his energy and his eye to look slant at the city. A dramatic series records the digging of the foundations for Penn Station – a black hole in the middle of Manhattan two blocks square. These dark scenes are often lit only by the glow of workman’s brazier. Brave stuff to be painting in 1907/9.

He painted the poor of New York - people not normally depicted in works of art - such as his 'Forty-Two Kids' which shows street kids jumping into the East River to cool off.

He certainly lived up to his own advice with his range of subject matter - boxing matches, seascapes in Maine, family portraits, responses to the First World War. He also explored printing as well as painting.  

At art college he was a contemporary of Edward Hopper. By the time he died in 1925 he’d left enough evidence to show that he was still ‘learning his own possibilities.’  It’s tantalising to think of the artist he might have become.

Bellows’s words apply equally to writing. Having just spent the last month working ‘deliberately’, ‘painstakingly’ and ‘thoughtfully’ as I prepared my novel manuscript for submission, the quote reminded me that it was time for a period of play and spontaneity!