Paul's Writing Blog

How to be a Sensitive Poet

2011-12-07T08:34:00.001Z

You've probably already seen this elsewhere, but just in case...

by Matt Groening

Wizard Nobel Sentiments

2011-09-27T16:12:00.000+01:00

I've not been blogging lately because I've been busy working on a novel (i.e. having a lazy summer doing nothing). But I was browsing a literary gossip site earlier and I read something I wanted to share. The 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced soon - on a Thursday (yet to be revealed) in October, in fact. And there's a degree of speculation about who the winner might be. A fair amount of money seems to be being bet on Cormac McCarthy getting the prize this year, or perhaps Don deLillo, but Benjamin Black's alter ego John Banville has also been mentioned. ["Dear GOD! Not Banville!" said one contributor. "If that arrogant prick ever got the Nobel his ego would transform into a "giant Adenoid" blob fit to consume all of Dublin!"] But the suggested winner that really fired my imagination was.... J K Rowling. Really?? Hmm. Apparently, the mother of Harry Potter is "a superb writer by any standard" and "the ... universe she created is unparalleled in modern literature. Once the dust settles on Potterdom, Rowling might be a writer worthy of consideration for the Nobel."

At first, it was assumed this contributor was joking. But there was a minor furore when someone said the Harry Pooter books were "poorly written, ill conceived and trite", drawing this impressive rationalisation:

"Being overly fond of adverbs isn't enough to totally condemn her as an author. I do believe she is of unparalleled importance, especially in what her books have done to bring not just more children into reading, but to jump-start the publishing industry into publishing more children's books. In a similar way to how Tolkien redefined high fantasy and has his spot in history for it, Rowling redefined magical fantasy and children's literature to a large degree. 40 years from now I doubt an author like Don DeLillo will be much discussed outside of 20th Century American Literature classes, but Rowling will still be eagerly looked over by young readers in 40 languages. Critical opinion will become more favorable to her as time goes on."

An interesting argument. Harry Potter - "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction ...”?

The Art of Text

2011-04-18T08:22:00.000+01:00

There’s an article in today’s Independent about ‘Written Works of Art’ which, while looking specifically at the novel, looks at the emerging interest in the form – rather than the content – of the book. With the arrival of the Kindle and other electronic readers there has been a lot of debate in the publishing world over the fundamental nature of the book. The universally acknowledged truth seems to be that Content is King, that the author’s text is more important than the packaging it comes bound in, electronic or otherwise. But comparing today’s mass-produced paperbacks to medieval illuminated tomes, the article points to the re-emergence of the book as a hand-crafted work of art, with several publishing ventures aiming to make books as visually interesting as the stories they tell. The timing of this article is interesting, in that just yesterday I received information about an open art exhibition at The Horsebridge Centre Galleries in Whitstable. The theme is the ‘posted nude’, and artists are invited to send (by post) a piece of artwork featuring the nude on the back of a postcard. What makes it intriguing is that the organisers have also asked for ‘written nudes’.

‘We think it is time to bring the writing into the exhibition space, we know how powerful these nudes could be! Please take part, it is free to enter.’

You can find full information on how to take part here.

Longlist for the CWA Dagger in the Library, 2011

2011-04-13T11:27:00.002+01:00

The Crime Writers’ Association has announced the longlist for the CWA Dagger in the Library 2011.

Authors are nominated for this award by UK libraries and Readers’ Groups and judged by a panel of librarians, all of whom work with the public. The Dagger is awarded to an author for a body of work, rather than a single title. As well as the Dagger, the winning author receives a cheque for £1500.

The full longlist is:

S J Bolton ( Bantam Press, Transworld)

William Brodrick (Little, Brown Book Group)

R J Ellory (Orion)

Jason Goodwin (Faber)

Elly Griffiths (Quercus)

Sophie Hannah (Hodder & Stoughton)

John Harvey (William Heinemann)

Mo Hayder (Bantam Press, Transworld)

Susan Hill (Vintage)

Graham Hurley (Orion)

Peter James (Macmillan)

Philip Kerr (Quercus)

Phil Rickman (Quercus/Corvus)

C J Sansom (Macmillan)

Andrew Taylor (Penguin)

L C Tyler (Macmillan)

The shortlist will be announced at Crimefest on 20 May. The winner will be announced, along with other Daggers, during the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, Harrogate, on 22 July.

Masks

2011-03-24T15:27:00.001Z

In his recent Paris Review interview, Jonathan Franzen talks about masks, quoting Nietzsche: ‘Everything that is deep loves the mask’. According to Franzen, ‘The amorphous, unconscious, naked soul is a horror.’ He says the most terrifying scene in Rilke’s Malte Lauride Brigge involves a woman on a park bench puts her face in her hands and then looks up with a naked face, a horrifying Nothing, having left the mask in her hands.

'Rilke anticipated the postmodern insight that there is no personality, there are just these various intersecting fields: that personality is socially constructed, genetically constructed, linguistically constructed, constructed by upbringing. Where the postmoderns go wrong is in positing a nullity behind all that. It’s not a nullity, it’s something raw and frightening and bottomless. It’s what Murakami goes looking for in the well in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. To ignore it is to deny your humanity.'

There are four German books – Malte, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Magic Mountain and above all The Trial – that Franzen describes as ‘primal’.

‘In each of these books the fundamental story is the same. There are these superficial arrangements; there is the life we think we have, this very much socially constructed life that is comfortable or uncomfortable but nonetheless what we think of as “our life”. And there’s something else underneath it, which was represented by all those German-language writers as Death. There’s this awful truth, this maskless self, underlying everything. And what was striking about all four of those great books was that each of them found the drama in blowing the cover off a life. You start with an individual who is in some way defended, and you strip away or just explode the surface and force that character into confrontation with what’s underneath.’

What I found particularly interesting in this is the recognition that this is exactly what my WiP has been trying to (literally) pull off, although I hadn’t been thinking of in terms of a mask. I was aiming to reveal something ‘true’ about my principal character by metaphorically stripping him bare, but it doesn’t quite work. Perhaps that’s because nakedness isn’t enough. I need to go deeper than that, and strip him of his mask too.

Creative Writing MAs and MFAs

2011-03-14T06:00:00.002Z

The latest edition of the Paris Review has been lying unread on my desk for a couple of months and yesterday I decided to finally find the time to read it. I was particularly interested in the interview with Jonathan Franzen, especially after my post yesterday about the creative writing MA I’m taking. Franzen says he very nearly took a creative writing MFA himself but didn’t in the end, mainly due to financial considerations.

However, he and his then-wife had their ‘own little round-the-clock MFA programme’ (she was a writer, too). Franzen’s personal MFA programme lasted six years, three times longer than the usual programme. During this time, as well as writing, he says he read fiction four or five hours a night every night for five years. Plus, he didn’t have to deal with ‘all the stupid responses to writing that workshops generate’.

I can certainly relate to that sentiment. There was a classic example of it at in my MA workshop last week. One of my fellow students had submitted a short story that was pretty much perfect – well-rounded characters, interesting story, great pace, an inevitable-yet-surprising ending – and yet because we had 40 minutes set aside to discuss it people began to get picky over minor plot points in the story and by the end of the session they were suggesting some major rewrites.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have brought such a polished piece of work to the workshop, but I do think the whole episode is indicative of what can be a downside of the dreaded workshop. Billy Collins got it spot-on, I think. It may even be indicative of the MA as a whole.

Jonathan Franzen says that, in retrospect, he is now glad he didn’t take the MFA programme he was offered. It might have smoothed out of his work some of the kinks that were better not smoothed out. He says: ‘As a journalist, I’m always trying to become more professional, but as a fiction writer I’d rather remain an amateur.’

I haven't posted for a while...

2011-03-13T07:06:00.000Z

...I’ve been writing a novel. I’ve also been taking a creative writing MA. I decided to take the course because I wanted to move away from what began to seem to be the almost magnetic pull of genre fiction. Although my limited success as a writer has usually involved crime stories I really wanted to write a serious novel. I’d always been told you should ‘write what you read’, and I read mostly literary fiction. I thought taking the MA would help. But the magnetic pull back to crime fiction is still there. What has surprised me most though is that, although our reading list contains absolutely no genre fiction, some of the tutors are pushing me back towards a life of crime. After all, it’s the sort of novel that sells.

But is it the purpose of a creative writing MA to concern themselves with markets? I’m not sure. I decided to take the MA because I wanted to focus on the art of fiction rather than the business of it. I also had half an eye on the American trend in which the route to publication is now typically via a university MFA programme. It’s a growing trend here in the UK, too. It’s just that some universities here don’t appear to be sure of what their version of the MFA is intended to achieve.

Ray Bradbury on Writing Persistently

2010-12-04T10:44:00.001Z

Literary Festivals

2010-11-29T10:45:00.000Z

Last week, by a strange quirk of providence, I was involved in two separate discussions about plans for two separate literary festivals in my part of the world. And yet the originators of the two plans have completely different aims and objectives. The first, a local hotelier, sees the establishment of a literary festival as a way of attracting new visitors to his hotel. The second, a local poet and teacher, envisages her festival as a vehicle for promoting local literacy as well as local literature and performance poetry. Neither of them mentioned what you might think was the principal aim of such festivals: the marketing and selling of books.

In both cases I felt a degree of enthusiasm for the plans but I wasn’t sure why, other than having a vague sense that literary festivals are a Good Thing. But because the two originators have such different perspectives, it did make me think more carefully about the benefits of such events. The success of the larger festivals suggest such events can pay dividends, not only to writers and readers, but also to local hotels, restaurants, shops and other small businesses. This is especially true when the festival features internationally famous authors who can draw in not only local readers but also visitors from other parts of the country or even from abroad. This has obvious benefits for tourism and the local economy, but it also bolsters a local sense of pride.

An annual literary festival can also provide local educational benefits. The involvement of local schoolchildren and their teachers would help develop an interest in books and reading, encourage creative writing (through competitions and workshops) and help develop literacy. To quote one event organiser, literary festivals ‘don’t just cater for audiences, they create them.’ Having said that, and perhaps because I’m a reader who is also a writer, I’m turned off by the current trend of packing festivals with celebrity ‘authors’ to sell tickets. But I do appreciate that without the presence of celebs these festivals may not survive.

My own preference is for events that are more of an ‘author festival’– with the emphasis on writing and writers as opposed to book selling. I’ve mentioned here before how much I’ve enjoyed the Small Wonder short story festival in the past. That’s because it enabled me to meet like-minded people who care about the short story, and to do so in a pleasant setting. So from a personal point of view, I think the primary aim of literary festivals should be to entertain readers and connect them with writers. And there’s no reason why a festival can’t do that while also encompassing the wider objectives of such events. I guess it’s all a question of balance.

I’ll end with a quote from a Guardian editorial, in 2006: ‘Providing a market place for writers and booksellers, provocative and stimulating encounters for readers and a season-enhancing boost for towns that now rely on luring visitors, the literary festival is one of those rare ideas that seems only virtuous.’

Did I Tell You?

2010-11-17T22:02:00.000Z

Here's a group picture of some of the poets who contributed to the anthology 'Did I Tell You?', which was officially launched at the University of Kent last night. As befits my political standpoint, I'm the one to the far left. The book has sold well and covered its production costs, so the income from any further sales will go directly and entirely to charity (Children in Need in fact). So if you haven't bought yours yet you can order a copy online here.

Writing in a Good Cause

2010-11-03T11:44:00.000Z

Here's a chance to shell out a tenner (plus £2 p&p) for a good cause.

'Did I tell you? 131 Poems for Children in Need' is an anthology published by WordAid in aid of Children in Need on the theme of 'Childhood' - available November 2010. All profits from this anthology will be donated to the BBC's Children in Need appeal.

The anthology includes poems by Patience Agbabi, Andrew Motion, Ruth Padel, Catherine Smith, George Szirtes . . . and me.

Click here: http://wordaid.blogspot.com/p/publications.html to order a copy or several (it would make an ideal Xmas pressie!).

Raymond Carver

2010-10-29T10:51:00.000+01:00

My 'author profile' article on Raymond Carver is now up on the THRESHOLDS website.

One thing you soon surmise from reading Raymond Carver is that he was an alcoholic. Carver’s characters tend to drink excessively, and his stories often examine the negative impact of drinking on his central character’s relationships. But for the last eleven years of his life, Carver was sober, and it was in these sober years that he wrote what many believe to be his finest stories. But there’s more to this than simple drunkenness and sobriety. Nowadays, what we talk about when we talk about Carver is the role of the literary editor.

THRESHOLDS is an exciting new site for international postgraduate students studying the short story form. You can read the full article by clicking here.

Colm Toibin - The Empty Family

2010-09-29T11:54:00.000+01:00

Colm Toibin's new collection of short stories 'The Empty Family' is published next week. Each story is beautifully written and full of atmosphere, often with Toibin’s typical sense of loss and longing, of ‘sad echoes and dim feelings’. The majority of the stories are five-star gems but there are one or two that don’t quite come off. A very good read nevertheless.

My full review of the book is on the Bookbag website.

Inkspill Short Story Competition

2010-09-10T10:42:00.001+01:00

Inkspill Magazine is holding its first ever Short Story Competition to, in their words, 'give you the chance to get your hands on some cash'. Not a great deal of cash, it has to be said; the total prize money is just £100 with £70 going to the first prize winner.

On the other hand, the bonus is that even if you don't win a cash prize you will get something back. The magazine's editors have promised that every entry will receive a short critique. They don't say how short, but for an entry fee of just £3 (£5 after 1 October) it seems to me a cheap price to pay for some independent feedback on your work AND the chance to win some cash and get your story published.

So if the Sunday Times Competition isn't for you, maybe this one is. See here for rules and information.

Sunday Times Short Story Award

2010-09-07T07:35:00.001+01:00

I read in last weekend’s Sunday Times that the judges have been announced for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. When I excitedly mentioned the £30,000 prize for a single short story to the Secretary her immediate response was, ‘Well then you can forget that.’ She pointed out that a prize of £30K would attract all the best ‘proper’ writers and said I’d be competing with’ Zadie Smith and that lot’.

Well, she has a point. I don’t know whether Zadie Smith entered last years’ competition, but I do know that some of ‘that lot’ did because John Burnside, Jackie Kay, AL Kennedy, Helen Simpson and Rose Tremain (to name but a few) all had stories in the longlist. None of them, though, made the final shortlist. The winner was CK Stead, New Zealand’s most distinguished novelist and poet, with his story ‘Last Season’s Man’.

This competition, then, is tough. Only the best short story writers need apply. But shouldn’t all writers aspire to be numbered among the best? As Anatole France said, ‘To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.’

If you dream and believe, you must act by 30th October, the deadline for submissions. The competition is open to authors with a previous record of publication in creative writing. Entries may be previously unpublished, or first published or scheduled for publication after 1 January 2010. All entries must be under 6,000 words and entirely original.

Good luck!

Small Wonder

2010-09-06T15:11:00.000+01:00

Ordinarily I’m not a great fan of literary festivals, mainly because I tend to be put off by the increasingly high proportion of ‘celebrity authors’ taking part, rather than plain old fashioned writers. But Small Wonder is different. I imagine that’s simply because its focus is entirely on the short story, and there aren’t many celebrities writing short stories at the moment. Or perhaps it’s just because I’m a big fan of the shorter form.
I first attended the Small Wonder festival in 2005. That year I was fortunate to meet, among others, the self-effacing John McGahern and the perfectly charming Rose Tremain. Zadie Smith was there too. The legendary Grace Paley was due to take part but unfortunately she was too ill to travel from the States and instead sent a video. I attended every session over three days and loved every moment of it. William Trevor described Small Wonder as ‘The best literary festival I have ever attended’, and I fully agree.

Unfortunately, I can’t get there before the Saturday this year so I’ll miss the double-hander with Tania Hershman and Vanessa Gebbie, which sounds like it’ll be a cracking session. But the highlight, for me, will be the debate between Kate Clanchy, Michèle Roberts and Di Speirs on contemporary fiction and whether it is in thrall to ‘reality’ (especially in the light of David Shields recent book announcing the impending death of the novel (again)). Kate Clanchy wrote my favourite short story of last year, ‘The Not-Dead and the Saved’, which deservedly won the BBC National Short Story Award for 2009, so I’m particularly looking forward to hearing her speak.

If you can make it I might see you there. If you can’t, check this space after the event – I’ll try to bring you (what I consider to be) the highlights.

On Not Giving Up

2010-08-31T17:36:00.001+01:00

Two or three years ago, I wrote a story for the women’s magazine market that I just couldn’t sell. I thought it was pretty good, but the editors didn’t agree with me. So I stopped trying to sell it. I thought I’d wasted enough time on it.

Then a few months ago, while sorting through some old files, I stumbled across it again. When I reread it, I still thought it was pretty good. So I entered it in a short story competition. The story didn’t win first prize, but it did come second. The prize money was not much less than I would have earned from selling it and because the tax man classes writing competitions as ‘lotteries’ (he has a point!) winnings are therefore tax free. Result!

The lesson, as always in all things relating to writing, is not to give up. It reminded me of something I read recently about the great Raymond Carver. (Like a good many people in the UK, I first came across Carver’s short stories through a creative writing course. I’d never even heard of Carver back then, being English, and I thought I’d misheard the tutor and was expecting to read something noir and pulpy and full of wisecracks.)

If you look at Carver’s Wikipedia entry, you’ll read that he became interested in writing when he moved to California as a married man. That’s not entirely correct. According to Carol Sklenicka’s excellent biography, Carver had been interested in writing since he was a kid. He was always telling stories to his younger brother and when his father bought him a shotgun for his 13th birthday, Carver began writing down his hunting experiences as short stories. All he got was rejection slips. He was told by one editor that people didn’t want to read about hunting trips.

He was told to find something else to write about.

When he was 17, Carver enrolled in a creative writing correspondence course. The first lesson was ‘Essential Elements of a Short Story and How to Develop Them’. It seems he didn’t complete the course. Three years later, hoping it would help him get a better job to support his new family (he was married and a father of two by the time he was 20), Carver enrolled at the Chico State College. In the second year he took an elective course, Creative Writing. The course director was Dr John Gardner. It was in 1960, under Gardner’s tutelage, that Carver wrote what was to become his first published story, ‘Furious Seasons’.

It includes a large section based on his teenage hunting experiences.

Which goes to show that, to misquote Aesop, no act of writing, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

There’s an App for That - Guildford Book Festival Short Story Competition

2010-06-08T10:48:00.001+01:00

Is this the future of the short story? The Guildford Book Festival has launched a short story writing competition in which the winning entry will be turned into an app.

The app could then be downloaded worldwide from the Apple iTunes store and read on the Apple iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The app will also have a professionally recorded audio track so it can be listened to AND a video interview with the author. The prize also includes cover design, structural and copy editing and page design and layout.

The competition, run in collaboration with the Surrey-based e-publishing company, Commutabooks, is open to both new and established authors. The organisers are looking for short stories that’ inspire and uplift readers to make the most of their days and their lives’.

Stories can be on any theme or subject in any genre. The maximum length of submissions is 7,000 words. There is no minimum length. More specifically, they must be readable in just a return train commute from Guildford to Waterloo stations - i.e. about 90 minutes.

The closing date for entries is 31st July 2010.

Full details on the festival website.

UK Magazines and the 'Literary' Short Story

2010-06-03T10:23:00.001+01:00

For reasons I won’t bore you with, I’ve been trying to identify all the UK magazines that publish ‘literary’ short stories. I read somewhere there were about 350, but a lot of ‘little’ magazines (like Cadenza and Connections) have stopped publishing over recent years and the short story website lists only 79 magazines that accept short stories – and these include organs such as People’s Friend and Your Dog Magazine. Excluding such commercial and specialist mags, as well as genre magazines (e.g. horror, sci fi, speculative, crime, romance), online-only mags and those published overseas, there are less than twenty possible outlets for your ‘literary’ short fiction, which I’ve listed below in case you’re interested.

Ambit
Address: 17 Priory Gardens London N6 5QY
Contact phone: 0208 340 3566
Lengths accepted: Varying length; it is advised that writers look at the magazine before submitting stories
How far in advance: ongoing
Payment: Token payment plus 2 copies of magazine
Submit: by post only
Notes: Quarterly magazine dedicated to prose, poetry and arts. Takes 3 to 5 stories per issue, all from unsolicited submissions.

Brand
Address: Michael Langan, Managing Editor, Creative Writing Programme, EPS, School of Humanities, King William Building, University of Greenwich, Maritime Campus, Park Row, London SE10 9LS
Lengths accepted: Max. 2,500 words
Submit by post only
Notes: You are advised to read the magazine prior to submitting your work.

Carillon
Address: http://www.carillonmag.org.uk/
Contact email: editor@carillonmag.org.uk
Lengths accepted: see website
Notes: An eclectic magazine which gives a forum to talented writers of all shades of publication experience.

Dream Catcher
Address: 32 Queen's Road Barnetby-le-Wold North Lincolnshire DN38 6JH
Lengths accepted: About 2,000 words, but longer stories are accepted
Notes: The editors welcome a vast range of submissions, from well-known and unknown writers, including poetry, short stories, artwork, interviews and reviews.

Gold Dust
Address: http://www.golddustmagazine.co.uk/
Subject area: Stories, poetry, film scripts and more
Lengths accepted: see website
Payment: see website
Submit by post or email? see website
Notes: Gold Dust is run as an on-going competition, with a small entry fee for submitting work and cash prizes for all published poetry and prose.

Granta
Granta does not have a political or literary manifesto, but it does have a belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real. ‘The main guideline for submitting work to Granta is simply to read the magazine thoroughly and ask yourself if you feel your piece meets our criteria. We receive many submissions every day, many of which are unsuitable for Granta (however well written).’

London Magazine
Address: 32 Addison Grove London W4 1ER
Subject area: Arts and Literature
Contact phone: 0208 400 5882
Lengths accepted: 2000-5000 words
Payment by arrangement
Submissions by post only
Notes: Literary prose

Orbis
Address: 17 Greenhow Avenue West Kirby Wirral CH48 5EL
Subject area: Arts and Literature
Contact phone: 0151 625 1446
Lengths accepted: 500-1000 words
No payment but readers pick best in issue and award £50
Submit by post or email? Contact editor
Notes: Published every quarter, usually 4 stories. Literary prose.

Riptide
Address: http://www.riptidejournal.co.uk/
A biannual short story journal featuring work by both established and emerging writers. Submission details can be found on the Riptide website.

Scribble Quarterly
Address: Park Publications 14 The Park Stow-on-the-Wold Gloustershire GL54 1DX
Contact: http://www.parkpublications.co.uk/
Lengths accepted: 3000 words max
Payment: Contact magazine
Submit by post only
Notes: Short story mixed genre magazine

Short FICTION
Address: University of Plymouth Press c/o Anthony Caleshu University of Plymouth, Faculty of Arts 6 Portland Villas Plymouth PL4 8AA
Subject area: fiction
Lengths accepted: see website
Submit by post or email? by 15 April each year
Notes Annual: the first issue was published in October 2007.

Stand Magazine
Address: School of English University of Leeds Leeds LS2 9JT
Subject area: Writing
Contact phone: 0113 233 4794
Lengths accepted: Varying, contact magazine
Payment: Contact magazine
Submit by post only

The New Writer
Address: PO Box 60 Cranbrook Kent TV17 2ZR
Subject area: Writing
Contact phone: 01580 212626
Lengths accepted: Commissioned only from subscribers or other prizewinners
Payment: by arrangement
Notes: published 6 times a year. Also runs competition, closes last day of October

Writers’ Forum
Each issue Writers' Forum awards £800 in prizes and publishes the winners of their short story, poetry and young writers contests.

Writing Magazine and Writers' News
Describes itself as ‘the best British how-to writing publication’. They do not publish poetry or fiction unless it has won one of their competitions.

If you’re aware of any other mags that aren’t on the list please do let me have the details.

UPDATE: Thanks to Anonymous (below) who has pointed me in the direction of Tania Hershman's extraordinarily comprehensive list of all current print and online magazines here. Although Tania has included publications I have deliberately not listed (ezines, genre mags, etc) the health of the short story 'market' seems to be a lot less dire than I'd imagined . . .

Waterstone’s Launch ‘Perfectly Formed’ Short Story Competition

2010-04-09T11:27:00.003+01:00

Waterstone’s Books Quarterly, in association with Pan Macmillan and the Arvon Foundation, has announced the launch of its inaugural short story competition, Perfectly Formed. They are looking for ‘the best unpublished writer in the country who can create a story that is small but... perfectly formed’. The competition is open to stories of 2,000 words or less by writers who are over 16 and haven’t had fiction ‘professionally published’ before. The story can be about any subject and in any genre.

The winning story will be published in the October issue of Books Quarterly. The winner will also be given a place on a week-long course at Arvon, as well as £200 of Pan Macmillan books of their choice. The three best runners-up will receive written feedback on their entries and £60 of Pan Macmillan books. Their work will also be published online.

Details of the competition are published in the current issue of the Books Quarterly (pictured), which I beleive you can pick up from any Waterstone's store in the UK.

The competition closing date is 1 July 2010.

F Scott Fitzgerald: Characterisation

2010-04-01T09:06:00.006+01:00

I’m currently re-reading The Great Gatsby. I’d forgotten how great it is! One of the reasons it’s such a great novel, of course, is that Gatsby himself is one of literature’s truly great characters. As John Mullan, Professor of English at UCL, has said, ‘nothing is … more important in our reading of novels than the sense that we are encountering real people in them’. And it’s not just Gatsby who is ‘real’. The whole novel is an F Scott Fitzgerald master- class in characterisation.

Here’s the first appearance in The Great Gatsby of a minor character, Myrtle Wilson:

Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of blue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:
‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’

Then, a few pages later, we’re introduced to Myrtle’s sister, another bit-part player:

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, wordly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair and, a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle, but the efforts of nature towards the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste, and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived there. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud, and told me she lived with a girlfriend at a hotel.

Each character gets one paragraph. Each paragraph consists of less than 130 words. And yet in each case, Fitzgerald has created a living, breathing character we feel we know well enough to believe in.

The critic James Wood asserts (in his book How Fiction Works) that ‘there is nothing harder than the creation of fictional characters’. As writers, we all know that characters are built through a combination of appearance, action and speech – that’s basic craft. But the art is to show the reader exactly the right amount of appearance, action and speech in just the right proportions. Which is exactly what Fitzgerald does.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Setting and Authenticity

2010-03-26T08:08:00.009Z

To Canterbury on Wednesday evening to see Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation with Andrew McGuinness at Christ Church University’s impressive new library. For some inexplicable reason, I was expecting something low-key and intimate. In fact, Ishiguro filled the very large St Augustine’s Hall with an audience of well over a thousand people. Nevertheless, an interesting evening. I was particularly struck by what Ishiguro had to say about setting.

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954, but he was brought to England when he was five years old. Although his parents always planned to return to Japan in due course, they never did. So Ishiguro was brought up in England, received an English education and ended up, in some ways, more English than Japanese. But he says he retained strong memories of Japan. He grew up wanting to be, not a writer, but a musician. He developed his trademark sparse style, he says, through writing song lyrics. He also has a film buff’s interest in cinema (according to a recent profile of him in the Guardian, he has his own private screening room at his home in Golders Green). Perhaps it is this interest in film that makes him tend to talk about ‘location’ rather than ‘setting’ for his novels.

‘Some writers have an idea for a novel they want to write about nineteenth century France or pre-Revolutionary Russia,’ he said on Wednesday. ‘But I think more in terms of finding a story and then finding a location, both time and place, in which that story could best be told.’ McGuinness suggested that, in that sense, he was more like a film director searching out the best location for each scene he was shooting, an analogy Ishiguro did not dispute.

Ishiguro said his turning point, in terms of his development as a writer, came when he decided to write a story set in Japan. At the time he was studying creative writing at the University of East Anglia under the tutelage of Raymond Bradbury and Angela Carter. ‘The Japan I wrote about was the one I remembered from my childhood,’ he said. ‘I didn’t go back there, or carry out any research. I set the story in the version of Japan I had in my head. My own personal Japan.’ Both A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World are set in this half-real, half-imagined version of Japan that English readers find completely authentic. Haruki Murakami, though, has said it is a Japan that is ‘slightly different’ from reality.

Similarly, many readers consider Ishiguro’s Booker-wining The Remains of the Day to be a quintessentially ‘English’ novel set, as it is, in between-the-wars country-house England. But Ishiguro finds such talk amusing and mildly embarrassing. It is a Jeeves-and-Wooster England that he thought would make a good setting for the story he wanted to tell. There was no meticulous research, and he said he would hate to think of people holding up the novel as an authentic example of what life was really like.

Does that matter? It probably does to some readers. In the current issue of Prospect magazine, for example, Sam Leith makes some less-than-flattering comments on the setting of Tom Ford’s film A Single Man. Comparing the movie to ‘a two-hour perfume ad’, he goes on to say ‘it resembles no school, … no California, no Earth that any of us would recognise’. He defends Ford by suggesting ‘this is no doubt how the world looks to him’. But isn’t that what art is all about – seeing things through the eyes of the artist? Look at van Gogh. Look at Hammershoi. It is their distinctive depiction of the everyday that makes their work unique.

Okay, I’ve taken Leith’s comments out of context – he’s actually attacking what he sees as a general move towards style over content, towards what he calls ‘costume drama’. But it is Ishiguro’s deliberate use of his own personal ‘costume drama’ to tell a universal story that makes his writing so special (in my humble opinion). To quote Murakami again, taken from the Guardian profile I mentioned earlier, 'the place could be anywhere, the character could be anybody and the time could be any time. Everything supposed to be real could be unreal, and vice versa. It is a sensation I love and I only receive it when I read his books.'

Andrew McGuinness and Kazuo Ishiguro (courtesy KCC Libraries)

UPDATE: Andrew McGuinness plans to write more about his meeting with Kazuo Ishiguro here on his blog.

Short Stories: The UK Magazine Market

2010-03-11T09:41:00.005Z

I was chatting to a fellow writer at the weekend about the paucity of magazines in the UK that currently publish short stories. Since then, I've done a bit of proper research and found there are nearly 80 mags that publish short fiction. Eighty! That's a lot more than I thought. Of course, it's a mixed bag. Some editors won't accept unsolicited manuscripts, publishing commissioned stories only. Some magazines pay authors very little, if anything. But in between, there are a number of editors who will pay half-decent rates for your work. As ever, it's wise to read a few editions of any magazine before you send in your submission.

Anyway, here's the list:

Ambit

Aquila

Best

Black Static

Bonfire

Brand

Carillon

Chapman

Countryside Tales

Crimewave

Day by Day

Dream Catcher

Edinburgh Review

Etchings

Faeries and Enchantment Magazine

Farthing Magazine

Glimmer Train

Gold Dust

Good Housekeeping

Granta

Inside Out

Interzone

London Magazine

London Review of Books

Mslexia

Mud Luscious

My Weekly

New Books Mag

New Internationalist

New Welsh Review

Orbis

Our Time

Parameter Magazine

People's Friend

Planet

Positive Space

Prospect

Quarterly Women's Fiction

Random Acts of Writing

Riptide

Scots Magazine

Scottish Book Collector

Scribble Quarterly

Senior Moments

Short FICTION

Ski and Board

Skyline Literary Magazine

Solander

Spectrum

Stand Magazine

Structo

Succour Magazine

Take a Break

Tatler

That's Life

The Edge

The Field

The Lady

The Liberal Magazine

The New Writer

The Third Alternative

Time Out

TLS

Transcript

Transmission

Vogue

Weekly News

White Chimney Magazine

WI Home and Country

Woman

Woman and Home

Woman's Weekly

Writers' Forum

Writers' News and Writing Magazine

Young Writer

Your Cat Magazine

Your Dog Magazine

Yours

Do please let me know if you spot any I've missed.

What's your favourite book of the last decade?

2010-03-03T18:28:00.003Z

Notice I'm not asking about your 'best' book of the last decade - see Eryl's comment on my last post, below. Recently, at my MA class, I said I thought Cormac McCarthy's The Road was 'probably' my favourite book of the last ten years. I still think that, and I'm in good company. Joshua (Then We Came to the End) Ferris and Simon (Relentless) Kernick think so, too. How do I know this? Well, the Sky Book Show has asked a number of authors to name their favourite book of the last ten years, and The Road was nominated by both Ferris and Kernick. Just for the record, here's the full list of authors and their favourites.

Simon Armitage: Return to the City of White Donkeys by James Tate

John Boyne: The Road Home by Rose Tremain

Alastair Campbell: Saturday by Ian McEwan

Monty Don: Woodlands by Oliver Rackham

Roddy Doyle: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

Joshua Ferris: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Antonia Fraser: Berlin: The Downfall 1945 by Antony Beevor

Joanne Harris: Perfumes: The A-Z Guide by Luca Turin & Tania Sanchez

Nicky Haslam: A Strange Eden by Tony Duquette

Simon Kernick: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Marina Lewycka: White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Andrea Levy: English Passengers by Matthew Kneale

Ian McEwan: Le Bal by Irène Némirovsky

Neel Mukherjee: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

David Nicholls: Under the Skin Michel Faber

George Pelecanos: Northline by Willy Vlautin

Terry Pratchett: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Philip Pullman: The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh Vincent Van Gogh by Arnold Pomerans

Lionel Shriver: As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann

Rose Tremain: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Joanna Trollope: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Natasha Walter: On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Shirley Williams: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne

So - what's yours?

100 Best Crime Books Ever Written?

2010-03-02T09:16:00.004Z

I am very busily avoiding a piece of work I don't want to do by making one of my all-too-rare-these-days visits to blogland. I do so at the behest of Celina Jacobson, a fellow blogger from across the pond, where she posts articles on a site devoted to helping young Americans looking for a career in court reporting. I have to say I found the site difficult to navigate, but somewhere in there you'll find a blog post in which Celina lists the '100 Best Crime Books Ever Written'. I'm not sure what her criteria for selection were, but any 'best ever written' list that includes Dan Brown's appallingly badly written Da Vinci Code doesn't deserve to be taken too seriously. But then, how many of us (apart from a few Nick Hornby characters) take these lists seriously anyway?

FREE Crime Story Competition

2010-02-02T17:11:00.001Z

Looking for an opportunity to become the next big name on the crime scene? Here's your chance.

Crime drama channel Alibi, publisher HarperCollins and the TV Times have teamed up with the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, Harrogate to unearth some of the country's hottest new crime-writing talent.

Alibi's Search for a New Crime Writer competition asks budding writers to submit a short crime fiction story of 2,000 - 5,000 words via the Alibi website www.theperfectalibi.co.uk. The competition closes at midday on Sunday 16th May 2010.

Internationally bestselling crime author and 2010 Festival Chair Stuart MacBride has lent his support to the competition by providing entrants with the story's opening line, designed to spark your creativity.

'In my experience, those who beg for mercy seldom deserve it'.

The aim of the literary search is to champion emerging crime writers and give them the opportunity for their work to be put in front of leading industry figures. There will be a shortlist of three writers with one eventual winner and two runners-up. All three finalists will win tickets to Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, Harrogate where they will rub shoulders with some of the biggest names in the business as well as having the chance to attend creative workshops. The overall winner will be announced on Thursday 22nd July during a special reception at the beginning of the Festival.

Publisher HarperCollins will create a special e-edition of the winner's story, this will be made available as a download. The victor will also win a Sony eReader as well as an enviable library of over 100 crime novels.

For full details of the prizes and how to enter visit:www.theperfectalibi.co.uk

Good luck!

Costa Novel of the Year

2010-01-05T17:05:00.000Z

I’m delighted by the news, just filtering through the midwinter snowfields to my outpost here in East Kent, that Colm Tóibín's quietly powerful novel, Brooklyn, has won the Costa novel of the year award. It was my favourite book of 2009, and there were some strong contenders (including all the shortlisted Booker novels and my second-favourite book-of-the-year, Peace by Richard Bausch). Brooklyn is a deceptively simple story of a young woman who leaves 1950s Ireland for New York, falls in love and then returns to her home town. But the novel is about much more than that, and Tóibín's understated prose has a depth and resonance that is a real pleasure to read. I was bowled over by the brilliance of Tóibín's writing, and can’t recommend it strongly enough to any aspiring author.

You can read my full review of the novel on the BookBag website.

It's 4.00am

2009-09-22T09:52:00.004+01:00

I've been waking, in a cold sweat, at 4.00am every morning lately. I know it has something to do with Dan Brown but I don't know what, exactly, the connection is. Or I didn't, until I stumbled across this video. Coincidence? No, it's creepy . . .

The Future of (Short Story) Publishing?

2009-09-02T14:58:00.005+01:00

I have a friend who cannot persuade the manager of her local branch of Waterstones to stock her collection of short stories. Why not? ‘Short stories don’t sell,’ he told her. Has this man never heard of Alice Munro? William Trevor?? Jhumpa Lahiri??? (I could go on and on, but I’ll spare you the very long list of authors who have successfully published short story collections recently). The truth is, despite my misgivings expressed elsewhere in this blog, the short story seems to be enjoying something of a mini-renaissance. And yet there remain few mainstream outlets for the short story writer in the UK (unless, of course, you are already an established novelist).

I was intrigued, therefore, to hear of a new cyber-venture launched in the US yesterday. CellStories.net describes itself as a ‘mobile publisher’. It offers a new short story, every day, direct to your mobile phone (or ‘cell phone’ if you live in the States) - free. The founder of CellStories.net, Dan Sinker, believes print is dead. He also thinks the Sony Reader and Amazon’s Kindle are the modern day equivalent of the laser disc, according to an interview with him in Publishers Weekly. The future of digital reading, he says, is the mobile phone.

Sinker is currently seeking submissions. He is looking for 1500 to 2000-word short stories, personal essays, narrative journalism, creative nonfiction and more experimental storytelling forms – but the emphasis is on story. You won’t get paid, but if you think Sinker is right and this is the future of short story publishing, here’s your chance to be in at the start.

Short Stories: An Editor's Advice

2009-08-25T19:28:00.005+01:00

The Atlantic is an American magazine with a long and honourable literary tradition. Founded in 1857 by a group of eminent writers that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the magazine now publishes an annual all-fiction issue. One of the things that caught my eye in the latest edition (available on-line now) was the Editor’s Note, in which C. Michael Curtis explains how he selects the short stories included in each issue from the 5,000 or so submitted by hopeful authors. Curtis says he looks for ‘stories with narrative ambition, complex characters, and imaginative use of language.’ As for content, he says he prefers ‘stories that present readers with situations requiring resolution, inviting moral choice, finding ambiguity in life experiences we are tempted to simplify.’

Good advice for any aspiring writer, I’d say. But if that's not enough, check out Tim O'Brien's excellent article on how to write a successful short story, in the same issue. There isn't a magic formula. The essential element, according to O'Brien, is a vivid imagination.

And possibly having a pretend tail . . .

Vonnegut Advice: Short Stories

2009-08-20T13:57:00.001+01:00

I haven’t posted for a while, for a variety of reasons too dull to recount. But I happened across this advice from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut on the rules for writing short stories. According to Kurt, the way to write a good short story is to stick to the following eight points:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist.

7. Write to please just one person.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible.

‘To hell with suspense,’ he says. Not sure I agree with that last one. Listen to what he says and decide for yourself.

The Exhaustion of Narrative

2009-06-19T08:47:00.003+01:00

I've not been blogging lately because I've been up to my ears in novel rewrites, etc, etc, but there's an article in today's Guardian that struck me as important. Beyond the silver screen by screenwriter Paul Schrader is (as it's headline implies) primarily about movie storylines and 'one of a set of crises that afflict current cinema'. But I think what Schrader has to say has equal relevance to the written word. Interesting stuff.

The Writing Process - what it's really like

2009-03-03T08:49:00.002Z

Is writing a chore or a pleasure? If you are anything like me, then it’s a little of both. At the moment, it seems more like a chore, having to churn out the words, not knowing whether the product will be (a) any good from a literary point of view and (b) any good from a commercial point of view. I’m pleased to discover I’m not alone – there are some fascinating testimonies from a number of writers in today’s Guardian.

There was also an article in Sunday's Observer (in the travel section) on people who have ‘taken the plunge and escaped the rat race’. I thought I was doing that when I decided to throw in my well-paid job and move out into the country to become a ‘proper’ writer. But, like anything, it’s a business. For me, it’s the commercial aspect that makes writing a chore. But, if you are not writing for your readers, who are you writing for? In the Guardian piece, A L Kennedy compares writing to sex – when you do it for pleasure it’s a nice thing; when you do it for cash it’s ‘probably less fun’. I suppose that means that, if you’re writing only for yourself, you’ll probably go blind . . .

Imaginary Writing Process

2009-02-26T17:37:00.001Z

This is just brilliant, and exactly what being a writer is all about!

Mystery

2009-02-23T16:16:00.003Z

There’s something peculiar about the business of writing, about the way the need to write is so overwhelming and yet is sometimes so difficult to execute. I’m feeling overwhelmed at the moment - too many unfinished Works in Progress on the go at once. I can't seem to focus - my concentration flits from project to project. The Belfast Boy, my novel that was 'accepted' by a small press publisher three years ago but was never published, needs to be revised and updated. Kickback, the novel I wrote last year and that The Secretary reckons needs a lot of work on its plot, is nagging at me to be rewritten. And I have any number of short stories in need of a sharper ending, waiting to be sharpened. You would think, wouldn’t you, that a reasonably successful short story writer (who is also a - so far - unsuccessful novelist) would concentrate on finishing a few more short stories. But instead I’m bogged down in another new novel.

Why? You might well ask.

It’s a mystery.

Robert A Heinlein’s Rules for Writing

2009-01-30T10:50:00.001Z

When I was a teenager, I read almost nothing but science fiction (as it was then called), having been hooked first by H.G. Wells and subsequently John Wyndham. One of my favourite American SF authors at the time was Robert A. Heinlein. A few years ago, I tried rereading one of his tomes (which I remembered as being a sharp and thoughtful satire) and found it was practically unreadable. But I was nevertheless interested in his ‘five rules’ for fiction writing, which I recently discovered and which I think still hold true. I know a lot of pretty good writers who have never been published either because (a) they are afraid to send their work out into the Big Wide World, or (b) having done so once, and having received a rejection slip, are afraid of being twice bitten. This post is for them.

Although I’m not sure I agree with Rule Three, here are HEINLEIN'S FIVE RULES FOR WRITING:

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

Costa Book of the Year 2009

2009-01-28T08:48:00.007Z

Having just had one of my short stories rejected by a magazine because ‘It’s just too far-fetched, I’m afraid’ it has come as some surprise to learn that Sebastian Barry has won the £25,000 Costa Prize for his flawed novel The Secret Scripture. Don’t get me wrong – I really enjoyed most of The Secret Scripture and heartily recommend it. The writing was sublime (you can read my four-star review on The BookBag website here). But I thought the ending was so far-fetched it was, quite frankly, ridiculous. The Costa judges agreed with me. Matthew Parris, the judges’ Chair, said the panel ‘agreed that it was flawed, and almost no one liked the ending, which was almost fatal to its success.’

Last year, the Willesden Herald famously decided not to award a prize in their international short story competition because none of the entries were quite good enough. Their decision caused a storm (especially among some entrants) but surely they were right – if none of the stories were flawless then none of them deserved a prize. So my question is, Should a prize as prestigious as the Costa be awarded to a book that everyone agrees is flawed?

Just a thought.

Review - Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

2009-01-07T10:26:00.004Z

I read a couple of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels a year or so ago, and I resolved at the time to get hold of a copy of the first in the series. I forgot, until the recent TV series starring Kenneth Branagh. As it happened, two of the three novels they dramatised – Sidetracked and Firewall – were the two I had read. I really enjoyed the TV series, so I decided to buy a copy of Faceless Killers. There was none to be had. Then, just before Christmas, Vintage reissued their flawed version, repackaged and repriced.

The gist of the story, taken from the blurb, is as follows:

One frozen January morning at 5 am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he believes is a routine call out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, both victims of a violence beyond reason. The woman supplies Wallander with his only clue: the perpetrators may have been foreign. When this is leaked to the press, it unleashes racial hatred. Kurt Wallander is a senior police officer. His life is a shambles. His wife has left him, his daughter barely refuses to speak to him, and even his ageing father barely tolerates him. He works tirelessly, eats badly, and drinks his nights away in a lonely, neglected flat. But now, with winter tightening and his activities being monitored by a tough-minded district attorney, Wallander must forget his troubles and throw himself into a battle against time and against mounting xenophobia.

I really enjoyed this book, although I found I was less interested in the crimes as I was in the relationships Wallander tried to repair, attempted to form and usually messed up along the way. I liked the view of Sweden it portrayed, warts and all, and sometimes I liked the way Mankell examined some of the social issues (but not always – the debate on immigration he has with a woman he should be seducing didn’t quite ring true, for instance). Although this first outing for Wallander is never as good as his later appearances, it is still better than most police procedurals and definitely worth a read.

Cadenza Magazine

2009-01-06T20:29:00.000Z

I have referred several times on this blog to the excellent literary magazine, Cadenza. Sadly, I learned today that as the result of a dramatic decline in the number of subscribers, and the subsequent impact on the magazine’s finances, the 19th issue of Cadenza was unfortunately the final edition.

The demise of Cadenza is a sad loss, not only because it is one less market for writers but also - and more importantly - because it is yet another door closed to readers of quality short fiction. Hats off to Zoe King, the editor and publisher of Cadenza, for keeping the magazine going for as long as she did (even subsiding the cost herself of late). It will be sadly missed.

Review - Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

2009-01-05T11:47:00.000Z

CHILD 44 by Tom Rob Smith was the first book I read this year. I didn’t quite get round to getting a copy when it first came out, despite it being the first crime novel to have been longlisted for the Booker prize in 2008, and receiving rave reviews. But I finally bought myself a copy from the terrific Harbour Bookshop in Whitstable over the Xmas break. And a very good read it was, too, and not only because of its unusual setting (Stalinist Russia). The story begins with a prologue (although Smith doesn’t call it that) set in the harsh Soviet winter of 1933. Two brothers from a village were all the food ran out some time ago set off to hunt for a domestic cat they have spotted. One of them ends up being hunted instead. The action then switches to Moscow in 1953, and our ‘hero’ Leo Demidov, who is an officer in the MGB, the state security force, is detailed to convince the family of a dead child that his death must be a terrible accident, contrary to the evidence that it was a murder, because there simply is no crime in Soviet Russia. Leo’s conscience pricks him, but he knows that the whole family is at risk of arrest if they persist in their claims that a murder has been committed. He is a fundamentally good man, but he is part of a fundamentally evil system.

This is one of the outstanding strengths of this novel. Not only does Smith paint a brilliantly evoked picture of the Stalinist Soviet Union, he uses his hero to explore in more detail how the State controlled the lives of ordinary people. It is like Orwell making Winston Smith a member of the Thought Police. Smith (the author) manages to capture the overwhelming sense of day-to-day paranoia in Stalinist Russia and the effects this has on love, friendship and trust, the way it can so easily turn them into hatred and betrayal. Leo’s nemesis, Vasili, is a perfect example. His admiration for Leo (possibly verging on a necessarily suppressed homosexual desire, punishable by death in Stalin’s Russia) turns to vicious hatred.

Thanks to Vasili’s betrayal, Leo is exiled with his wife, Raisa, to a bleak town in the Urals. Here, Leo learns not only that his wife does not love him, but she only married him out of fear and now despises him. With everything now out in the open, Leo must somehow live with this new knowledge. Meanwhile, he stumbles across another dead child, a murder and mutilation similar to the one he covered up in Moscow. Leo discovers that children are being killed and mutilated across the country, but because they are never reported as crimes the perpetrator can never be caught. Working outside the law, Leo is determined to track down the murderer and bring the killings to a halt.

The plain simplicity of Smith's prose drives the narrative relentlessly forward. As Leo pursues the killer, pursued himself by Vasili, the novel works brilliantly as a tightly-plotted thriller. But it also works on a different level, with its examination of a totalitarian society and its effect on human relationships, and I for one am not surprised that this book was a contender for both the Booker and Costa prizes. Reader, I loved it.

New Year

2009-01-01T15:06:00.001Z

A new year calls for resolutions. Mine, as usual, is to strive to write better prose. I had fallen into something of a rut of complacency towards the end of last year. I’d had considerably more short stories published than the previous year (thanks to my marvellous agent), and although the small press publisher of my novel The Belfast Boy had folded before the promised publication I had another novel ‘in the bag’ and was feeling pretty confident that one of these literary masterpieces would soon be snapped up. I sent The Belfast Boy to a couple of agents and, while their feedback wasn’t entirely discouraging, none of them seemed keen to snap. It seemed there was something missing from my novel, but I didn’t know what it was. So I decided I needed some disinterested expert advice, and just as I came to that decision I received news that Claire Wingfield, a freelance editor, had recently established a literary consultancy that (for a fee) would critique my work. So I sent off my manuscript to Claire and received exactly the kind of honest, impartial advice I needed. Her comments were invaluable not only for the specific piece I had sent her, but also to the other novel I had been working on. As a result, both that novel and The Belfast Boy have now been ‘parked’ while I contemplate. The big question I have to ask myself is whether I really want to invest the time and energy that writing a new novel requires when I have so much more success with writing short stories.
Food for thought . . .

Review - The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

2008-12-23T20:22:00.006Z

Lisbeth Salander, the character who played second fiddle in the first of Stieg Larsson’s ‘’Millennium’’ trilogy, takes centre stage as the eponymous heroine in ‘’The Girl Who Played with Fire’’. Salander is an expert computer hacker. She is also legally incompetent, a vulnerable young person with a history of being abused by men in positions of power over her. But towards the end of ‘’The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’’, the first novel in this series, she secretly stole several billion kronor and the second novel opens with her having left her job at Milton Security and enjoying a globetrotting life of luxury.

Meanwhile, Mikael Blomkvist, the hero of ‘’The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’’, is now a celebrity journalist. His magazine, Millennium, is about to publish a special edition devoted entirely to cracking open Sweden’s sex-trafficking industry. The magazine and an associated book, to be published at the same time, will expose the corruption and double standards within a legal system that is meant to be tackling the problem. But before his colleagues can complete their investigations, Blomkvist stumbles upon the scene of a terrible double murder. At first, Blomkvist himself is a suspect, but soon the fingerprints found on the murder weapon point to Salander, Blomkvist’s one-time friend and lover. The discovery of a third murder victim with close links to Salander seems to seal her guilt.

This is the point where the novel really takes off. . . [Read the whole review on the BookBag Website]

Review – Greed by Elfriede Jelinek

2008-11-24T19:58:00.002Z

Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, but I had never read her work before. One of her previous novels, The Piano Teacher, was apparently made into a film that won several prizes in Cannes in 2001, but I have never seen it. So I had little to prepare me for Greed, her latest work to be translated into English.

Greed is a kind of modernist crime novel. It is often quite difficult to understand exactly what is going on, but the gist of it is that the country policeman uses his position of male authority to satisfy his greed. This really is a novel about the difference between men and women, in which men are painted as beasts ruled by their penises who are ruining the planet, and women are portrayed as pretty damned stupid for allowing it all to happen. Jelinek (or at least, her narrator) has a low opinion of humankind. It was for this reason, I suspect, that whenever I put the book down I often found it hard to pick up again. There is a story buried away in there somewhere, in the same way as the murder victims are hidden in the woods around the country policeman’s village. There is also a surprising amount of humour in this novel, too. When I did bring myself to return to the book after frequent much-needed break, I usually enjoyed reading it. But only for so long at a time.

You can read my full review of Greed on the Bookbag website.

Society of Women Writers and Journalists

2008-11-19T22:08:00.000Z

I was guest speaker at the south east regional meeting of the Society of Women Writers and Journalists in Brighton today. I had originally been invited simply to make up the numbers on their ‘panel of experts’ but as the day approached I was asked to speak about my experience as a man writing fiction for women’s magazines. The other speaker was the crime novelist Peter Lovesey. Peter’s first novel was WOBBLE TO DEATH in the early 1970s. WOBBLE TO DEATH introduced the redoubtable Victorian policemen, Cribb and Thackeray. He won the Gold Dagger Award in 1982 with THE FALSE INSPECTOR DEW and in 2000 joined the elite group of people awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award. It was a real honour to share the platform with him.

Peter Lovesey, me, and SWWJ Chair Jean Morris

Deal Writers Anthology Launch

2008-11-07T10:03:00.001Z

Despite the attraction of Martina Cole reading from her latest bestseller in neighbouring Sandwich, there was an incredible turnout last night for the launch of Deal Writers’ latest anthology, Another View from the Pier. Deal Library was packed, with standing room only for latecomers, and several authors read their work (including yours truly). An extremely successful night.

Copies of the anthology are available from Deal Writers, priced at £4.99 each.

Here’s a photo of me reading a story from the latest Deal Writers anthology

What is good writing?

2008-11-06T21:44:00.015Z

Here's the opening of a novel about a psychiatrist who is having a breakdown while trying to help his patients come to terms with their own problems:

Professor Martin Sturrock was feeling stressed enough already, even before the phone call from Simon telling him Aunt Jessica had died.

Is this good writing? Jenny Diski doesn't think so. It is the opening sentence of the new book by Alastair Campbell, who was once spin-doctor-in-chief to ex-prime minister Tony Blair. (I heard him speaking on Radio 4 this morning, by the way, in the wake of Barack Obama's election, talking about what it was like 'when Tony and I came to power' - but that's by the by). Campbell famously suffered from mental health problems himself, so he should know what he is talking about. But, as Diski says in her very entertaining critique of Campbells' novel in this week's London Review of Books,

suffering and even observation don’t necessarily make a person think and write with more subtlety . . . Subtlety may not be an essential quality in a self-help book, but it goes a long way to making a good novel.

Which is good advice for any writer, I think. Diski goes on to say,

The craft of fiction is not working out a plan that looks balanced on a spreadsheet and then clothing it with words. The trick about writing a good novel is to be a good writer.

I think Sally Zigmond might agree with that sentiment.

I haven't read Alastair Campbell's book, so I wouldn't want to comment on whether the review is a fair assessment or not. But the article itself is a gem in terms of what constitutes good writing. You can read the full text here.

Howard Jacobson at the Folkestone Literary Festival

2008-11-04T08:13:00.004Z

I’ve had a highly cultural few days. On Thursday evening, the Secretary and I went to see the Donmar production of Chekhov’s Ivanov. The script by Tom Stoppard was a great improvement on the ‘straight’ translation, the set was spot-on, the acting (led by Kenneth Branagh) was excellent. Then on Friday we went to Tate Britain for the Francis Bacon retrospective. I’m not really a fan of Bacon, and the exhibition did little to change my view, but it was good to have seen it. On Sunday, we were due to see Carol Ann Duffy reading just down the coast from me in Deal. But unfortunately the Secretary was under the weather so we didn’t make it.

Yesterday, though, with the Secretary safely tucked up in bed, I went to Folkestone to catch part of the literary festival with my pal Mike. The highlight was undoubtedly the talk by Howard Jacobson.

Jacobson claimed to have been a novelist from the moment he was cast into the world. His father would ask him: So where’s your novel? But Jacobson Senior didn’t get the point. Being a novelist wasn’t necessarily the same as having to write a novel. It was a state of mind; a lifestyle choice. Jacobson Junior avoided writing a novel until he was well into his late thirties.

When he did finally write his novel, it was not the novel Howard Jacobson expected to write. He wanted to be the next Henry James, the next Tolstoy, but instead of writing heavily serious prose, he found he had a natural bent for comic writing. (My own favourite, The Making of Henry, is both witty and wise.)

In discussing the craft of the novelist, Jacobson said he wasn’t a great fan of the plot. Although I agree with his contention that characters are more important, I wasn’t entirely convinced by his argument here. But then, it’s in Jacobson’s nature to be contentious. He is an ex-university lecturer, after all. So although he argued that a reader wanted to know what happens next only because they care about the characters, in doing so he conceded a reader does want to know ‘what happens next’. Isn’t that plot?

He said he doesn’t have much time for J K Rowling or books for children in general. Give them adult books to read, he said. Don’t fill their heads with stories about wizards. What was worse was that these books were read by adults. We don’t read literature any more. Then, in a typically piece of Jacobsonian contrariness, he offered the following quote: ‘History is written by the winners; literature is written by the losers’. He said only losers needed to write (and read) about imaginary victories; the victors had success in real life so didn’t need to fall back on fantasy. Something happens at a formative stage in our lives. If we are losers in reality (e.g. in school sports in his case) we escape into the fantasy of literature. So, people who read (and especially write) are by definition life’s losers (in the nicest possible way!).

There was a lot of discussion about the nature of jealousy, the theme of Jacobson’s new book The Act of Love. The premise is that all men, either secretly or subconsciously, want their partners to be unfaithful to them. The book is also about words, and how words and literature and sex and relationships work. We give names and words to our actions and use the words to justify or condemn those actions. It is the word that distils and describes the action (for example: we made love; we had intercourse; we screwed – different words give a different complexion to the same action). As part of his research into the novel, Jacobson said he went to a sex club to ensure authenticity. It was a tough thing to do, but he went so we his readers won’t have to. And what thanks does he get?

With his tongue firmly in his cheek (or was it?) he claimed that all writers were jealous of each other’s success. When he brings out a novel, he said, he wants it to destroy all other novels. He might modestly say that he hopes his novel joins the Pantheon. Nonsense – he wants his novel to blow away the Pantheon. Jacobson claimed he gets jealous when he hears his wife laughing at the work of another author. It was especially hard for him to bear her laughing at Philip Roth.

Jacobson’s books often deal with Jews and themes relating to Jewishness, but his latest book does not. He was asked why that was. He half-closed his eyes and paused, as if he were giving the question great thought. Then said, ‘Because there are no Jews in it.’

A very funny, thought-provoking talk from an excellent, thought-provoking novelist.

Mondays

2008-10-27T20:45:00.006Z

Why is it so difficult to make the transition from weekend to workday? It really is like trying to shift your brain into a different gear, and some Mondays the clutch just crunches and grinds and it takes forever to get the creative gear engaged. Today has been a complete washout as far as the Work in Progress is concerned.

Never mind. Here’s a book review to pass the time:

The Bromley Boys by Dave Roberts
Most football fans (except my brother, who refuses to have anything to do with anything that has anything to do with the Arsenal) will have read Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby. It’s the definitive book on what it’s like to be a bloke who also supports a football team. It’s also quite funny. It influenced every subsequent book about what it’s like to be a football supporter. It also gave birth to a genre of writing that was subsequently termed ‘lad lit’. Despite its imitators, nothing has been as good as Fever Pitch. Until now.

Okay, Dave Roberts may not be in the same literary class as Nick Hornby. But The Bromley Boys (billed as ‘the true story of supporting the worst team in Britain’) is well written enough, and it captures absolutely to a T what it is like to be a pre-pubescent football-mad boy. It is also laugh-out-loud funny. The fact that it is not a book about a top-class football team is a plus point, too. Because Bromley Football Club aren’t big enough to be disliked by supporters of other football clubs the book will even appeal to the most partisan of supporters (like my brother). And, best of all, The Bromley Boys is a hilariously funny read.

Read my full review at The BookBag.

Beginnings and Endings

2008-10-22T20:49:00.002+01:00

The latest issue of Cadenza magazine is now out, as you will have gathered from editor Zoe King’s comment on my blog, below. And, as promised in my response to Zoe, I wanted to say something about the feedback on competition entries that she and co-editor Vanessa Gebbie provide in each issue. In her comment, Zoe said that while she agreed that literary competitions were ‘up to a point’ like lotteries, by reading the winning entries in conjunction with the judges’ comments, a writer would be in a far stronger position to do better in future competitions. She’s right. Last year I had a story longlisted in one of the Cadenza competitions. I rewrote it, taking account of the comments in the judges’ report, and subsequently sold the story to a national magazine.

This thing works!

In this issue’s report, beginnings and endings get a special mention. Along with the middle, I find beginnings and endings the hardest parts to write. One of the lessons I learnt from writing for women’s magazines was to get the essence of the story into the opening paragraphs. Often that means cutting away the first paragraphs you write and starting further into the story than you intended. Sometimes, you won’t know how far to cut away until you’ve finished the first draft and know how the story ends. The beginning should pose a narrative question of some kind; the ending should give the answer. Doris Betts said the first page of a story should have a lot to do with the last page, in the same way as the first line of a poem relates to the last line.

Easier said than done, but one ever said writing a really good story was easy!

Oddly enough, a week before the latest Cadenza came out, I gave members of my writing group a copy of Margaret Atwood’s story Happy Endings to study – if you don’t know it I can thoroughly recommend it.

Literary Prizes

2008-10-15T15:13:00.002+01:00

I know Zadie Smith doesn’t think much of them, but I quite enjoy the razzmatazz of awards like the Man Booker. Anything that gets people reading has to be a good thing, and anything that gets people reading stuff they might not ordinarily read is even better. [UPDATE: But if you're thinking of rushing out and buying a copy of Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger perhaps you should read this post from the Literary Salon first!]

I’m particularly in favour of small literary prizes – especially prizes for short stories. There just aren’t enough outlets for short fiction (as I’ve mentioned recently) so small literary prizes are what my grandmother used to call ‘a real boon’. And the bonus is that, when and if you win one of these prizes, the taxman lets you keep all your winnings. According to my local Revenue and Customs office, literary prize winnings are treated in the same way as a lottery. Which, considering that’s exactly what they are, is fair enough.

I know quite a few wannabe writers who say they never enter writing competitions because they are ‘simply lotteries’. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper (as my other grandmother used to say). But if these writers were to consult the results tables of these competitions they would spot the same names coming up time and again. For example, I heard this morning that I came third in the Wellington Short Story Competition, held in conjunction with the Wellington Literary Festival. The winner, Penelope Randall, had previously been shortlisted in the HappenStance Press International short story competition (I know this because Jo Field, my colleague from Deal Writers, came second in the same competition). Hats off to her for persevering, I say. Her success is a lesson to all those other writers who think there’s no point in entering competitions or, more pertinently, who give up if they don’t win (the competition-world equivalent of the rejection slip). As Churchill himself said, ‘Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm’. And while writing competitions may be a lottery, like any lottery you’ve got to be in it to win it!

Deal Writers New Anthology Launch

2008-10-14T20:57:00.000+01:00

National Poetry Day

2008-10-09T19:16:00.005+01:00

Today is National Poetry Day and to celebrate I've written a poem! It's called Strandgade 30 and it was inspired by the recent exhibition of Vilhelm Hammershoi paintings. Don't worry, I'm not going to inflict the poem on you - I've entered it in the Save As poetry competition. It's not too late to enter a poem or a short story (up to 4000 words) yourself. Go to the Save As website for full details.

Good luck!

Off by Heart

2008-10-08T09:28:00.003+01:00

There was a story in the Sunday papers this week that caught my eye. The BBC is organising ‘Off by Heart’, a national poetry recital contest for primary school pupils. Every primary school in the UK can enter a child aged 7 - 11 to compete for the title of UK Poetry Recital Champion. This, it seemed to me when I read it, is a Good Thing. It took me back to my own childhood, way back in the middle of the last century, when learning poems by heart was something kids were expected to do. I’d like to claim I can still recite all the poems that I learnt, but I can’t. But I can still remember quite a lot of quite a few.

Then, last night, I attended the inaugural meeting of the new committee elected to run my writer’s group, Deal Writers. Until last week, I was Chair of the previous committee and last night the new Chair presented me with a ‘leaving gift’ – a bottle of Scotch and a rather wonderful book of poetry. Poem for the Day Two contains 366 poems set out by date, so that for every day of the year there’s a different poem to learn off by heart. Spooky, or what?

So this morning saw me searching through my recycling bin for the Sunday Times review section that carried the story about ‘Off by Heart’, because contained within it were some very helpful tips for learning verse. For anyone interested, you can find the tips here, at the end of the very article by Daisy Goodwin.

My poem for today is First Lesson by the American poet Philip Booth. Maybe when I’ve learnt it I should think about trying to learn a few of my own poems by heart!

The Short Story: Alive and Well?

2008-10-06T16:47:00.006+01:00

There’s an article in the latest edition of Writer’s Market UK that grabbed my attention. The Short Story: Alive and Well by Graham Mort claims that, despite being unpopular with major publishers, shunned by the reading public and eclipsed by the novel, the short story is in remarkably good health. I wonder. The article makes much of the ‘burgeoning’ presence on the internet of short story websites. But who reads the short stories on these websites, apart from other writers of short stories? Short story writing might be in good health, but where are the short story readers?

We Brits don’t seem to much like the shorter form, preferring to read a novel (if we read anything at all). At best, we see the short story as a stepping stone – a practice ground for a writer who really aspires to being a novelist. This is a mindset that comes through in Graham Mort’s Writer’s Market article, advocating as it does the short story as ‘an ideal apprenticeship for writers’. ‘The novelist who has developed a track record of publishing short fiction,’ he says, ‘is far more likely to command the respect of a literary professional’. True. But if writers themselves treat their own short story collection as nothing more than an apprentice piece how on Earth can they expect the short story form to command the respect of their readership?

As a writer of short fiction myself I have often peered longingly across the Atlantic to a land where the short story is appreciated for what it is, a unified distillation, rather than always as a poor relation to the more expansive novel. Kurt Vonnegut once suggested that writers should demand better readers, and he has a point. Having read three tremendous short story collections this summer by the Americans Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore and Tobias W olff it made me wonder whether one of the reasons why the US produces such great short story writers is because Americans respect the short story. Valerie Shaw once pointed out that the novel and the short story are separate entities which share the same prose medium but not the same artistic methods, something American readers seem to understand. I’m afraid we Brits do not.

Writing Competitions Ending This Month

2008-10-01T17:56:00.002+01:00

Mainly for the benefit of the members of my writing group, but for anyone else who may be interested, here is a list of some 18 writing competitions (poetry and prose) that have closing dates this month. Happy writing – and good luck!

Prose

H.E. Bates Short Story Competition 2008 – up to 2,000 words on any subject. Closing: 6.10.08. Prizes: £200, £150, £100. Entry Fee: £3. Website: http://litnorthants.wordpress.com/opportunities/

Tall Tales & Short Stories Competition – between 3,000 and 5,000 words. Closing: 15.10.08. Prizes: £350, £150. Entry Fee: £5. Website: http://www.felicityroberts.co.uk/tlc/storycompetition.htm

Bookworms Short Story Competition – up to 1,500 words. Closing: 27.10.08. Prize: £100. Entry Fee: £5 (includes crossword book and entry form). Website: http://www.beanpolebooks.co.uk/comp.html

Criminal Tendencies Short Story Competition. Crime stories of up to 3,000 words. Closing: 31.10.08. Prize: Publication in the Criminal Tendencies anthology. Entry Fee: £5 (includes a donation to the Genesis Appeal). Website: http://www.cremedelacrime.com/criminal.htm

Sunpenny Christian Writers Competition – up to 3,000 words with a Christian theme or message. Closing: 31.10.08. Prizes: £100, £50. Entry Fee: £4. Website: http://www.sunpenny.com/competitions/Oct2008/christianwriters-oct2008.html

Sunpenny Open Writers’ Competition – up to 3,000 words on any subject. Closing: 31.10.08. Prize: £150, £75. Entry Fee: £4. Website: http://www.sunpenny.com/competitions/Oct2008/open-oct2008.html

Southport Writers Circle Open Short Story Competition – for unpublished stories of up to 2,000 words on any subject. No entry form needed. Entrant’s name should not appear on the story. Include a separate cover sheet with the title, word count and your name and contact details. Closing: 31.10.08. Prizes: £150, £75, £25. Entry Fee: £3. Entry Address: Short Story Competition, Southport Writers Circle, 16 Ormond Avenue, Westhead, Lancashire, L40 6HT.

Speakeasy Open Creative Writing Competition – up to 2,100 words. Closing: 31.10.08. Prizes: £125, £50, £25. Entry Fee: £5. Discounts apply for multiple entries. Website: http://www.mkweb.co.uk/Speakeasy/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=58082

Ballista Open Short Story Competition. Ballista is a magazine that publishes tales of dark fantasy, the supernatural, modern horror, the paranormal, and all things macabre and bizarre. To enter the contest, submit a suitable story of up to 3,500 words. Closing: 31.10.08 Prizes: £60, £30, £20. Prizewinners will be included in Issue 6. Entry Fee: £4. Website: http://www.mucusart.co.uk/short_story_competition.htm

Dark Tales Autumn Short Story Competition – up to 3,000 words. Closing: 31.10.08. Prizes: £250, £50, £25. All shortlisted entries published in Dark Tales. Entry Fee: £3. With tick-sheet critique - £5. With full critique - £15. With full critique and post-critique therapy in secure institution - P.O.A. Website: http://www.darktales.co.uk/

Short Story Radio Competition – up to 3,000 words Closing: 31.10.08. Prizes: 1st - Your own website worth £250, your story professionally recorded by a British Equity actor and broadcast on Short Story Radio, plus 5 CD copies of your story for personal use. Three runner-up stories will appear in the online Short Story Magazine and their writers will have a web page profile on the Short Story Radio website. Entry Fee: £8. Website: http://www.shortstoryradio.com/

Poetry

Debt Free Poetry Competition. Closing: 31.10.08. Prizes : £300, £200, £100. Entry Fee: None - free to enter. Website: http://www.talkaboutdebt.co.uk/community/2008/09/debt-free-poetry-to-inspire-action/

Poetry Society National Poetry Competition – up to 40 lines. Closing: 31.10.08. Prizes: £5,000, £1,000, £500. Entry Fee: £5 for the first, £3 thereafter. Website: http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/competitions/npc/

Ragged Raven Poetry Competition – of any length on any subject. Closing : 31.10.08. Prizes: 1st - £300. Runners-up (4) - £50. Entry Fee: £3 each, £10 for four. Website: http://www.raggedraven.co.uk/competition.htm

Speakeasy Open Creative Writing Competition – for poems of up to 60 lines. Closing: 31.10.08. Prizes: £125, £50, £25. Entry Fee: £4. Discounts apply for multiple entries. Website: http://www.mkweb.co.uk/Speakeasy/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=58082

Leaf Books Poetry Competition – of any length on any subject. Closing : 31.10.08. Prizes: 1st - £200. Runner-up - ten pocket-sized Leaf Books. Entry Fee: £3 each, £10 for four. Website: http://www.leafbooks.co.uk/New/For%20Writers/CurrentCompetitions.html

Black Horse Poets Open Poetry Competition. Closing: 31.10.08. Prizes: £100, £50, £20. Entry Fee: £3 for the first, £2 for the second. Two further entries free. Details (send sae): The Competition Secretary, 25 Wycliffe Street, Ossett, West Yorkshire, WF5 9ER.

Cannon Poets Silver Jubilee Competition. Poems on the theme of Play between 20 and 40 lines. Closing: 31.10.08. Prizes: £150, £80, £40. Entry Fee: £4 for the first, £2 thereafter. Website: http://www.cannonpoets.co.uk/16901.html

Too Good to be True!

2008-09-30T17:54:00.005+01:00

Like quite a few people, it seems I was taken in rather by the wonderful opportunity (see previous post), an opportunity said to be supported by the Arts Council, for unpublished authors to get into print. So taken in, in fact, that I spread the word amongst the members of my writing group and posted the details here on my blog. I am therefore extremely grateful to Jane Smith (a) for her helpful comment on my blog and (b) for giving other bloggers permission to reproduce her own post on her wonderful blog How Publishing Really Works.

This is what Jane wrote.

The UK-based writers’ website, YouWriteOn, is offering publication by Christmas to the first 5,000 writers who submit their work. That’s right: 5,000 books. By Christmas.

Writer Beware has already blogged about this in an article called 5,000 Writers. Unsurprisingly, Writer Beware has come down pretty heavily against the scheme. I’d also advise everyone to steer well clear of this, for all the reasons that Victoria gives in her article and a few more besides.

If you think that this will be a route to a commercial publication, think again. These books are going to get no editorial screening, editing, sales, distribution, marketing, or promotion; there’s a significant doubt over what the writers will actually earn; and by signing up to this scheme, writers will lose the first rights to the books involved, and so make it far less likely that they’ll ever manage to sell them to a commercial, mainstream publishing house.

Regardless of the sales talk I’ve read on YWO, publishers are usually only interested in acquiring first rights to a book: if it’s already been published, in whatever form, then those first rights are gone for good. Lynn Price, the rather perky editorial director of Behler Publications (a very well-regarded independent press in America) has blogged about this in some detail: you can find her post by following the links here.

If you’re determined to give up those precious first rights then bear in mind that this deal does not appear to give you anything more than you’d get if you directly approached Lulu, Lightning Source, or any other POD printer, and had them produce your book via the POD route. You download your book; you sell your book; they print up what you downloaded and send it out. Doing it yourself via a POD supplier gives you the opportunity to correct and amend your book’s text, cover and layout at any time, and at no cost to yourself—something you’ll not be able to do via YWO.

But apart from all of those issues, which most writers with any experience of proper, commercial publishing could spot from a mile off, I’m just flabbergasted at the idea of one person (because as far as I know, YWO is a one-man team) coping with downloading 5,000 books onto a POD server in time for Christmas. Even if YWO ignores its own submissions deadline of the end of October and starts downloading the books right now, there are only about ten weeks to Christmas; so that’s 500 books a week, or 100 per working day. The last time I downloaded anything to Lulu it took me a couple of hours to get the text formatted properly and the cover on right: assuming that there’s one person at YWO working an eight-hour day, taking no breaks at all, then they’re going to have to download one book every five minutes. I just hope they have better bladder control than I do.

Remember: it’s better to not be published at all than to be published badly. You only have to speak with people who have been skewered by Publish America, or some of the other vanity presses, to discover that.

So – be warned. If something seems too good to be true it usually is.

YouWriteOn.com - Too Good to be True?

2008-09-25T12:47:00.006+01:00

NB - PLEASE READ THE COMMENTS BELOW BEFORE DECIDING WHETHER TO RESPOND TO THIS YouWriteOn OPPORTUNITY!

Arts Council funded YouWriteOn.com will publish the first 5,000 writers who contact them for Free - Fiction & Non-Fiction

To participate follow these 2 steps:

1) Email youwriteon@googlemail.com, and inside your email add your name, address, telephone number, book title, genre, length of your book, and a synopsis up to 50 words

2) YouWriteOn will contact the first 5,000 people who email them by 31st October 2008. Your book will be ready to order by readers as a paperback by Christmas. Open to UK and US residents.

YouWriteOn.com - Free Publishing Aims
YouWriteOn's declared aim is to give the opportunity to new writers to help create success for their books. Since YouWriteOn began in 2006, they have seen their authors achieve success through both mainstream and alternative publishing. This summer’s member successes include a six figure publication deal with Random House for Caligula author Douglas Jackson, and member Keith Mansfield achieving a three book deal with Costa Award winning publisher Quercus with his children’s novel Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London. Many other YouWriteOn writers have received rave reviews from fellow writers and readers onsite, and having a book available to order gives new writers an added opportunity to try to achieve success.

Books will be available to order through the YouWriteOn website, and members will be able to get in touch with readers and reviewers who have enjoyed their book excerpts on site. YouWriteOn authors will receive 60% royalties for each copy sold to the public, compared to 12 to15% royalties that authors usually receive through mainstream publishing. Your book will be of the same quality as a bookstore paperback. You retain all rights to your book at all times. Open to UK and US residents only.

If you achieve success with your book and a publisher offers you a good deal, you can take up their offer straight away without any obligation to YouWriteOn.com. In Autumn 2007, YouWriteOn published Bufflehead Sisters by member Patricia J. DeLois – available to order online as a paperback - and the successful author achieved a 2 book deal with Penguin this summer. This was after bookstores contacted them so that they could stock the novel, and after thousands of online sales through them. Publishing is completely free through their setup process when writers send them their completed books.

Should you wish to potentially achieve a much higher readership through being available to order through all major booksellers throughout the UK and US, such as Waterstones, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and WH Smith's, then you can do so for £39.99 through YouWriteOn's separate partnership with Legend Press. Legend Press has been shortlisted for five publishing and business awards over the last 18 months, and in 2008 one of their titles Salt & Honey by Candi Miller was named as one of World Book Day's 'Top Ten Books to Talk About'. You retain all rights to your book. Email YouWriteOn@legendpress.co.uk to take advantage of this offer. Open to applicants of all nationalities.

Carol Ann Duffy comes to Deal

2008-09-23T15:01:00.000+01:00

Split the Lark Poets

PRESENT

CAROL ANN DUFFY
Tickets £12. 00 (no cancellations )
Sunday
2nd November 2008
7.30 – 9-30 pm

Town Hall,
High Street,
Deal,
Kent CT14 6BB

Wine and Nibbles will be served

TO BOOK YOUR TICKETS
EMAIL LIZ TURNER: lizturnerdeal@hotmail.com

SAVE AS POETRY and PROSE COMPETITIONS (2008)

2008-09-22T08:16:00.002+01:00

POETRY
Deadline: October 31st 2008

The inaugural Save As poetry competition is for poems on any subject with a maximum of 40 lines. Entries limited to 3 poems per entrant. Judge: Lynne Rees.

There is a £2 per poem entry fee (£5 for three) and there will be a cash prize for the top three entries.

Winner will be announced in November and will automatically go into the Save As anthology.
Entries can be either hard copy or electronic. If submitting hard copies either hand them to Luigi at a Save As workshop or post them to:

Luigi Marchini, 35 Spillet Close,Faversham, Kent ME13 8QP

All hard copies should be totally anonymous but should be accompanied by a separate sheet piece of paper with name, contact details and title of poem(s).
Electronic copies must be sent to saveas@hotmail.co.uk and headed as "poetry competition".
Payment for electronic or hard copies must be sent to Luigi Marchini at the above address - cheques must be payable to ‘Luigi Marchini’.

PROSE
Deadline: October 31st 2008
The inaugural Save As prose competition is for short stories on any subject with a maximum of 4000 words. Entries are unlimited. Judge: Patricia Debney (Canterbury’s poet laureate).
There is a £3 entry fee for each piece (£8 for three) and there will be a cash prize for the top entries.
Winner will be announced in November and will automatically go into the Save As anthology.
Entries can be either hard copy or electronic. If submitting hard copies either hand them to Luigi at a Save As workshop or post them to:
Luigi Marchini, 35 Spillet Close,Faversham, Kent ME13 8QP
All hard copies should be totally anonymous but should be accompanied by a separate sheet piece of paper with name, contact details and title of piece(s).
Electronic copies must be sent to saveas@hotmail.co.uk and headed as "prose competition".
Payment for electronic or hard copies must be sent to Luigi Marchini at the above address - cheques must be payable to ‘Luigi Marchini’.

Stubborn Mule Orchestra

2008-09-16T09:31:00.007+01:00

To Deal Library last night to attend a performance by the Stubborn Mule Orchestra, a trio of local poets who recently collaborated in the self-publication of a rather good collection of poetry. There was a good turn out for the event, which was held in the gallery, a corner of the building set aside for displays of work by local artists. Gary Studley, a member of Deal Writers as well as SMO, Canterbury Poets, Save As and several other local literary groups, emceed the evening.

First off was Luigi Marchini with three poems from the SMO collection including David (Before Goliath), a poem that effectively distils both the sense of Biblical destiny and the poet’s trepidation at opening the show: - today is that future./I rise to meet it/lyre in one hand/sling in the other.

Chris Hobday then read three of his poems, including the excellent Swamp Work, about the process of writing poetry: With a shovel and a good arm/you can shift the leathery top-slop/and get underneath, like a peat bog. Reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s Digging, but without the Irish accent.

Then Gary performed his three poems. Of the three, Gary is the more confident performer and his poems are better suited to performance poetry. They are, perhaps, less subtle than those of his two colleagues, but in the delivery they acquired a gutsy passion. The highly personal Dear Grandad, Wish You Were Here is case in point: on the page it seems a peculiar piece; in performance it sparkles.

During the interval, members of the audience were challenged to write a poem of their own, inspired by several ‘unusual’ objects brought along by members of SMO, and quite a number did so. The second half of the evening was then a repeat of the first, with each of the SMO members reading three poems, but it was finished off with poems from the floor.

A good evening of contrasting but always entertaining poetry. Copies of the Stubborn Mule Orchestra collection are available at £4.00 from the following bookshops in Canterbury: Blackwells, Christ Church University Bookshop, Castle Arts Gallery. They are also on sale in Deal (including the public library) or direct from Luigi: luigimarchini@hotmail.com.

Photocall

2008-09-13T17:09:00.000+01:00

The East Kent Mercury will be writing a feature for their next edition on Deal Writers following the success of our anthology View from the Pier. As a result, all the group members who contributed to the collection were summoned to the bandstand on Walmer Green, overlooking the Channel, for a photoshoot with the Kent Messenger Group photographer. While we were posing, friends and family were also snapping, and this shot is probably the best of the bunch.

Back row, l – r: Venita Dickens, Jane Clarke, Jane Findley, Harry Harris. Front: Anna Hannah, Ros Beresford, Paul Curd, Bettine Walters, Lorraine Lloyd.

A few copies of View from the Pier are still available from bookshops in Deal and Sandwich, or can be ordered through the Deal Writers website. Our new anthology, Another View from the Pier, is due out in November.

Success on a Plate

2008-09-09T15:20:00.008+01:00

This time last year I was cursing the time I was spending editing an anthology of work by my writing group, Deal Writers. It seemed a lot of hard work for little reward. But in the end, it was worth it. View from the Pier, as we called it, was eventually published in November last year. It was so successful it had to be reprinted by the New Year and is still selling well.

Now I have learnt that View from the Pier has been awarded the Denise Robertson Silver Trophy for the best group anthology of the year. The award was made by the National Association of Writers Groups at a Gala Dinner in Durham. Sadly I couldn't be there, so the presentation was made to me this morning by my postman. What a fantastic surprise.

Naturally enough, everyone at Deal Writers is thrilled and delighted to have won this award. View from the Pier was our very first publication, and for it to have come first in such a highly-regarded national competition is an honour for everyone involved. It just goes to show what good writers we have here in East Kent!

Writing like a painter?

2008-09-07T18:21:00.009+01:00

Last week, The Secretary and I went to the Royal Academy to catch the Vilhelm Hammershøi exhibition before it closed this weekend. Hammershøi is best known for his sparse and enigmatic views of the interior of his Copenhagen flat, often featuring a woman with her back turned to the viewer (the model was usually his wife Ida). The exhibition, 'The Poetry of Silence', was the first British retrospective of the Danish painter whose paintings are full of emptiness (and if you think that’s a contradiction in terms then you should take a closer look at his work). Hammershøi's ‘trade mark’ includes a restricted, almost monochromatic palette and an uncanny sense that all is not as it seems in his pictures. What at first sight appears naturalistic turns out, on closer examination, to be ambiguous and not quite right. Uncanny, in fact. I found myself standing in front of the paintings with the hairs on the back of my head bristling. And it made me think how great it would be to write stories the way Hammershøi painted pictures. Does that make sense?

Take this painting, for example. A woman sits alone in an empty room. From her demeanour, it appears she is reading or sewing. Through an open door right in front we can see an interior of more empty rooms and open doors. Why is she sitting so close to the open door? Is she waiting for someone and, if so, who? Why is there an empty chair behind the door? What is going on here?

Hammershøi never explains. To him, the narrative of a painting was less important than the atmosphere – an atmosphere of silence, of subdued lighting, of subdued colours – a sense of unease. In a gallery packed as full as a London tube train, I found myself being drawn into these pictures of silence and emptiness, as if into another world. Just like a first-class short story, a Hammershøi painting refuses to explain its meaning immediately, but demands that you stop, look and think, and then look and think some more.

The Best Cigarette

2008-09-06T14:31:00.001+01:00

Bettine Manktelow

2008-08-20T19:05:00.001+01:00

To the Sandwich Bookshop this afternoon, for a special guest appearance by local author and fellow Deal Writer, Bettine Manktelow. Bettine was appearing as part of the Sandwich Festival and read from her new collection of short stories Mostly About Men. There was a fair turnout for a mid-afternoon, mid-week literary event, and after Bettine’s reading there was a lively discussion about the difficulties of publishing short stories in this country. Copies of Bettine’s collection, priced at £4.99 (paperback) are available from the Sandwich Bookshop and several outlets in Deal, or can be ordered through the Guilton Press website.

Review - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

2008-08-10T16:06:00.004+01:00

Juliet Ashton is a successful writer, author of the popular Izzy Bickerstaff Goes to War column in the Spectator. But now it is 1946 and the war is over, and Juliet wants to put Izzy behind her and write a serious book in her own name. The problem is she has no idea what to write about. Then she receives a letter from a pig farmer on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a man called Dawsey Adams, who has acquired a second hand book by Charles Lamb that has Juliet’s name and address written inside the front cover. Dawsey is writing to Juliet because he loved the book – it helped keep his spirits up during the German Occupation – and he wonders if she knows of any other books by Charles Lamb. There are no bookshops left on the island, you see, since the Germans left. In passing, Dawsey mentions in his letter the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which came into being because of a roast pig they had to keep secret from the Germans, and Juliet is intrigued. Why, she writes back, did a roast-pig dinner have to be kept a secret? How could a pig cause them to establish a literary society? And, most pressing of all, what is a potato peel pie?

I found this book a joy to read. An old-fashioned epistolary novel, it is told entirely through the letters written between the characters, which in itself makes it light reading without being lightweight.

Read the full review on the The BookBag website.

Review - The Drop-Off by Patrick Quinlan

2008-07-26T07:08:00.004+01:00

Smoke Dugan, one-time bomb-maker for the mob, is on the run. It's not easy to keep a low profile when you've got your girlfriend (Lola), her best friend (Pamela) and a retired professional assassin (Cruz) with you; and if you're carrying $2.5 million in cash, you can be sure the people the money belongs to won't let the trail go cold. The tiny Caribbean island of Saint Mark's seems a safe bet, but that's reckoning without the unexpected presence of ex-Navy Seal Stone, an old enemy of Cruz. Stone has heard of the massive finder's fee placed on Cruz's head by Big Vito back in New York, so he's very motivated. Soon the rest of the mob is on the way and the scene is set for a game of cat and mouse amid the palm trees and on the high seas.

Well, that’s what the blurb says, anyway. It also says that author Patrick Quinlan is a writer who weaves together elements of Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and Get Shorty. He is certainly a writer who is doing his damndest to be as cool as Elmore Leonard used to be (some say still is). There’s a lot to commend in his writing, that’s for sure. But I wasn’t entirely won over by his latest offering. But the book does have humour, some exciting set-pieces and a good deal of stylish violence. If you want a book to take away on your holidays and read by the pool with a Mai Tai or two, then this book is as good as any.

You can read my full review on The Bookbag website.

Mostly About Men

2008-07-21T23:09:00.000+01:00

To the Lord Nelson Hotel this evening for the launch of Bettine Manktelow’s collection of short stories, Mostly About Men. Bettine is a founder member of Deal Writers (in fact, the whole thing was her idea!). It was therefore disappointing to see so few members of the group there. Despite that, there was a good turnout, especially among local thespians (Bettine is a renowned playwright). Copies of Bettine’s collection, priced at £4.99 (paperback) are available from all three bookshops in Deal, or can be ordered through the Guilton Press website.

Review - Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut

2008-06-17T06:08:00.004+01:00

I have been a fan of Kurt Vonnegut since the early 1970s. I still have the old paperbacks – Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse 5. There was something about his style, and especially about the things he had to say, that was refreshing and new. But he began to go off the boil, or fell out of style, and I stopped reading his books around about the time I stopped buying Crosby, Stills and Nash LPs. For me, Breakfast of Champions was both the last decent book he wrote, and the first of the stream of below-par books that followed. I just checked my bookcase – Slapstick in 1976 was the last Vonnegut book I bought, and the ancient bookmark stuffed midway through shows I never managed to finish it. And I had problems trying to finish his ‘new’ collection, too.

Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve previously unpublished short stories and articles. The collection has been compiled posthumously by his son Mark Vonnegut, ostensibly as a tribute to his late father and to commemorate the first anniversary of the author’s death. But these stories are a poor epitaph for a man who was once a great writer. The further I read, the weaker the stories became. Maybe it was because I had already got the point right at the start, but the stories seemed to become increasingly predictable and, well, a little embarrassing. There is a reason why these stories could not be published during Kurt’s lifetime.

In his introduction, Mark Vonnegut asks of his father, ‘How could he get away with it?’ A question he might well redirect towards himself for bringing out a collection that, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, should have remained unpublished.

For a fuller review of this book, go to The Bookbag website.

Cadenza Magazine

2008-06-13T10:16:00.004+01:00

I've mentioned (in passing) the excellent Cadenza magazine elsewhere on here, and it seems to be going from strength to strength under its new(ish) editor Zoe King (who took over from John Ravenscroft a year or so ago). You may think I'm only saying that because two of my stories have been long-listed in Cadenza's latest short story competition (hurrah!). But take a look at their new blog. It's worth it just to read Zoe's feedback on the sifting process for the short story competition. She makes three specific points about the stories that she and her fellow judges felt didn't make the grade. First, there were some good stories that didn't quite work because they were let down by their endings. Second, there were well-written pieces that didn't have any forward momentum (what Zoe calls a 'motor') - there was, she said, no rising and falling action. And third, there were stories where the idea was good but the execution let them down.

This seems to reflect my own experiences (and my own rant here a few weeks back). It also, to a certain extent, supports my view expressed last week that these are technical issues that can be taught and learnt. Zoe referred to good stories and well-written pieces that failed for technical reasons relating to the craft of creative writing, not the element of creativity itself.

Which is one of the reasons why one of my writing buddies and I have set up a new enterprise, Word Fountain. Our aim is to help writers improve their craft in an informal, fun way. We don't promise they will acheive fame and fortune - we have no plans to become one of the 'new mental hospitals' that Hanif Kureishi railed against recently. We're running our first event in August - and we're accepting self referrals!

Teaching Creative Writing

2008-06-01T06:53:00.004+01:00

I used to believe that writing was an innate talent and that good writers were born, not made. I also used to believe, encouraged by my grammar school English teacher, that I was a good writer. I dreamt of being the next George Orwell.

But when I left school I was discouraged from airy-fairy dreams of being a writer by my level-headed careers master, who gently pushed me towards ‘office work’.

I was taught a lot of different ways of writing during my office-based career:

- I was taught how to write business letters and internal memos.

- I was taught how to conduct an interview and how to write case notes.

- I was taught how to write minutes of meetings and briefing notes and reports.

- I was taught how to write policy documents and guidance notes and official directives.

I was taught well, yet if I did all these things well it surely wasn’t because of my training. It was simply because I was a natural-born writer.

Wasn’t it?

All the while I was working at my day job I was scribbling away at appallingly bad one-draft novels that deservedly never saw the light of day. They were terrible. I knew they were terrible, but try as I might I couldn’t put them right.

I began to become despondent. If I was such a good writer, how come my fiction writing was so bad?

Then four years ago I bit the bullet and enrolled on a creative writing class at my local university. I was taught to actually do the things I already ‘knew’.

- I was taught to shape and plot a story.

- I was taught to create realistic characters.

- I was taught to make these characters speak believable dialogue.

- In short, I was taught the craft of creative writing.

Even before the course was finished I’d had my first short story published.

I’m not suggesting the course taught me to be more creative or inventive as a writer. No more than a painter is made more of an artist by being taught to mix colour or which type of brush suits which type of paint.

But I am suggesting that teaching the craft of writing can help unlock innate creativity.

So I guess to that extent I should disagree with Hanif Kureishi when he said last week that such writing courses are 'the new mental hospitals'. Having worked in mental health care, I was intrigued by this analogy. It seems the reason for this headline-catching assertion was his belief that ‘creative writing courses set up false expectations that a literary career would inevitably follow’.

To that extent, I think he has a point.

The Ten Shilling Note

2008-05-21T12:37:00.005+01:00

My story The Ten Shilling Note has been published in the 27th May issue of Woman's Weekly, out this week.

"The ten shilling note fluttered down like a large brown moth, then it swooped under the table where the boy was sitting cross-legged, fluttered again one last time, and finally came to rest on the linoleum floor beside his knee.

The boy held his breath. He looked at the ten shilling note, then at his mother’s unmoving American Tan legs. She was standing at the kitchen table, counting out the money she had saved in the tin from the dresser. The boy was sitting under the table pretending it was the Blitz and the bombs were raining down. When the bomb hit their house the ceiling would collapse, but he would be the only one to survive, safe under the heavy kitchen table. Ka-boom!

All this and some great cake recipes too! Rush out and buy it now . . .

Pounding at the Gates of Literature

2008-05-20T09:05:00.004+01:00

After yesterday's posting (which I'm afraid turned into something of an essay) I reread a story by an American writer who seems to be little known here in the UK. Richard Brautigan was big at about the same time as Crosby, Stills and Nash and in my longhaired youth he seemed to be the literary voice of my generation. His short story ⅓, ⅓, ⅓ is set in 1952 and is about a kid who owns a typewriter and is therefore employed by a ‘trailer trash’ couple to type up the novel that the man is writing and the woman is editing. The plan is they will each get a third of the royalties from the novel. The story ends like this:

There were about twenty-five or thirty pages of writing in the notebook. It was written in a large grammar school sprawl: an unhappy marriage between printing and longhand.
“It’s not finished yet,” he said.
“You’ll type it. I’ll edit it. He’ll write it,” she said.
It was a story about a young logger falling in love with a waitress. The novel began in 1935 in a cafe in North Bend, Oregon.
The young logger was sitting at a table and the waitress was taking his order. She was very pretty with blond hair and rosy cheeks. The young logger was ordering veal cutlets with mashed potatoes and country gravy.
“Yeah, I’ll do the editing. You can type it, can’t you? It’s not too bad, is it?’ she said in a twelve-year-old voice with the Welfare peeking over her shoulder.
“No,” I said. “It will be easy.”
Suddenly the rain started to come down hard outside, without any warning, just suddenly great drops of rain that almost shook the trailer.
You sur lik veel cutlets dont you Maybell said she was xxxxx holding her pensil up her mowth that was preti and red like an apl!
Onli wen you tak my oder Carl said he was a kind of bassful loger but big and strong lik his dead who ownd the starmill!
Ill mak sur you get plenti of gravi!
Just ten the caf door opend and in cam Rins Adams he was hansom and meen, everi bodi in thos parts was afrad of him but not Carl and his xxxx dad they wasnt afrad of him no sur!
Maybell shifard wen she saw him standing ther in his blac macinaw he smild at her and Carl felt his blod run hot lik scallding cofee and fiting mad!
Howdi ther Rins said Maybell blushed like a xxxxx flouar while we were all sitting there in that rainy trailer, pounding at the gates of American literature.

One of my favourites!

A Shot of Vodka

2008-05-19T19:32:00.007+01:00

What is a Short Story? You might think this is a stupid question, but I’m not sure enough novice writers give the matter sufficient thought.

In his introduction to The Oxford Book of Short Stories (1981), the great exponent of the short story V.S. Pritchett described the form as independent of the novel thus: ‘the novel tends to tell us everything whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that, intensely’. Anton Chekov once described reading a short story as ‘rather like drinking a glass of vodka’. It should be quick and sharp and hit you with a kind of shock that makes you see the world in a new way, if only for a short while.

Pritchett agreed, suggesting that the short story should be a ‘glimpse through’ resembling a painting or even a song which ‘we can take in at once, yet bring the recesses and contours of larger experiences to the mind’. During the twentieth century, Pritchett thought the short story writer had become ‘less bound by contrived plot, more intent on the theme buried in the heart. Readers used to speak of “losing” themselves in a novel or a story: the contemporary addict turns to the short story to find himself.’

Pritchett went on:

Many of the great short-story writers have not succeeded as novelists: Kipling and Chekhov are examples and, to my mind, D.H. Lawrence's stories are superior to his novels. For myself, the short story springs from a spontaneously poetic as distinct from a prosaic impulse – yet is not 'poetical' in the sense of a shuddering sensibility. Because the short story has to be succinct and has to suggest things that have been 'left out', are, in fact, there all the time, the art calls for a mingling of the skills of the rapid reporter or traveller with an eye for incident and an ear for real speech, the instincts of the poet and ballad-maker, and the sonnet writer's concealed discipline of form. The writer has to cultivate the gift for aphorism and wit. A short story is always a disclosure, often an evocation - as in Lawrence or Faulkner - frequently the celebration of character at bursting point: it approaches the mythical. Above all, more than the novelist who is sustained by his discursive manner, the writer of short stories has to catch our attention at once not only by the novelty of his people and scene but by the distinctiveness of his voice, and to hold us by the ingenuity of his design: for what we ask for is the sense that our now restless lives achieve shape at times and that our emotions have their architecture. Particularly in the writers of this century we also notice the sense of people as strangers. A modern story comes to an open end. People are left carrying the aftermath of their tale into a new day of which, alarmingly, they can as yet know nothing.

Margaret Atwood has said that she feels uncomfortable when asked about what constitutes a ‘good’ story. She avoids making lists or devising rules for stories. ‘We don’t judge good stories by the application to them of some set of external measurements, as we judge giant pumpkins at the Fall Fair.’ I think that’s fine if you’re an extremely talented and experienced writer like Margaret Atwood. For those of us not (yet) in that league, I think it’s important to stick to the knitting – to follow the rules until we are experienced enough to know when to break them. And there are rules – and the more ‘commercial’ you want your fiction to be, the more important it is to follow them.

For example, I would suggest the key components of a good short story are:

- A good idea that provides an insight into the human condition
- A small group of believable characters
- A convincing background
- A good opening
- Conflict
- Suspense
- Structure (i.e. a beginning, a middle and an end)
- A satisfying ending

‘A short story is always a disclosure,’ said V. S. Pritchett in the above quote. James Joyce referred to this as ‘epiphany’, a moment when a person, an event or a thing is seen in a light so new that it is as if it has never been seen before. Someone in the story, usually the protagonist, then has to deal with (or avoid) what has occurred. The character may meet the change head on, or they might try to behave as though everything is the same as before. Either way, the disclosure or epiphany cannot be ignored by the reader. Check out, for example, Chekhov’s ‘Let Me Sleep’ or Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Revelations’.

Edith Wharton called a volume of her short stories Crucial Instances. A good short story should show us a character at a crucial instant in their life and trace the effect of that instant upon them. That, I think, is something every aspiring writer ought to keep in mind.

Review - White Nights by Ann Cleeves

2008-05-18T21:59:00.001+01:00

A guest at the opening of a Shetland Isles art exhibition breaks down in tears as everyone else looks on in embarrassed horror. Jimmy Perez, on his first real date with one of the artists, Fran Hunter, helps the man to his feet, feeling it is his duty as a policeman to do so. The man, who is English, claims to have no memory of who he is or why he is there. Perez thinks that it has something to do with the light, the fact that the sun never quite slips below the horizon even at midnight. Here in the Shetlands they call it the 'simmer dim'. Everyone in the Shetlands goes a little crazy at this time of year. In the morning, though, the Englishman is found dead, hanging from the rafters of a fisherman's hut.

Who is the mysterious southerner? Why was he found with a clown's mask over his face? Why had he tried to ruin the art exhibition opening? More importantly, who strangled him and then tried to make the death look like a suicide? There are so many questions, but one thing is certain: there is a killer at large in the small island community of Biddista, and unless they are tracked down soon they will surely strike again.

Read the full Bookbag review here.

Review - Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi

2008-05-14T18:00:00.004+01:00

A psychoanalyst hides a terrible secret as he struggles to deal with changing relationships.

Dr Jamal Khan is a successful psychoanalyst but he is approaching a difficult age. His son Rafi will soon be a teenager and they will soon no longer be able to greet each other by touching fists and exchanging the traditional middle-class greeting, ‘Yo bro – dog!’ Already, the twelve-year-old hides his head when he sees his father. Meanwhile, the boy’s mother Josephine, from whom Jamal separated eighteen months ago, has a new boyfriend.

Jamal has to come to terms with these life changes while hiding a terrible secret. He is a man who deals in secrets for a living yet he himself is haunted by one of his own. His career as a reader of minds and signs began with a brutal act of violence – a murder which resulted in his first love, Ajita, going away forever. The book opens on the anniversary of these traumatic events, and as the story unfolds the past will be coming back to prod at his conscience. Ajita will return from her thirty-year exile, and one of Jamal’s accomplices from that fateful 1970s night will also turn up looking for some form of retribution.

Read the whole of my review on The Bookbag website.

Best of the Booker

2008-05-12T21:47:00.001+01:00

The shortlist for the Best of the Booker, a one-off celebratory award to mark the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize, was announced today.

The six shortlisted books, chosen from the list of 41 Booker Prize and Man Booker Prize winners, are:

Pat Barker's The Ghost Road (1995, Viking; paperback Penguin)

Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda (1988, Faber & Faber; paperback Faber)

JM Coetzee's Disgrace (1999, Secker & Warburg; paperback Vintage)

JG Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (1973, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, paperback Phoenix)

Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974, Cape; paperback Bloomsbury)

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981, Cape; paperback Vintage)

The shortlist was selected by a panel of judges - the biographer, novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning, (Chair); writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, and John Mullan, Professor of English at University College, London.

The winner will be chosen by the public and you can vote here for your favourite 'Best of the Booker' novel.

Writing Competitions

2008-04-23T13:10:00.002+01:00

I've been a little 'under the weather' and haven't been able to write a thing for over a week. I'm pleased to say I'm on the mend, and to help get me back in the swing I've been compiling a summary of all the future competitions I’m aware of – one, some or all may be of interest.

Closing in April

Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition.
Closing: 28.4.08.
Prizes: £1,000, £500, £250.
Entry Fee: £5.
Details: Click Here.

Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition.
Closing: 30.4.08.
Prizes: £500, £200, £100. Redwing Sonnet Prize: £100.
Entry Fee: £3 each or four for £10.
Details: Click Here for a pdf download.

Ver Poets Open Poetry Competition 2008.
Closing: 30.4.08.
Prizes: £500, £300, £100. Young Writers (16 to 21) - £100.
Entry Fee: £3 each, four for £10, £2 thereafter.
Details: Click Here.

Templar Poetry Pamphlet & Collection Competition.
Closing: 30.4.08.
Prizes (3): £500 plus publication in pamphlet form.
Entry Fee: £18 per collection.
Details: Click Here.

Southport Writers Circle Open Poetry Competition. For poems of up to 40 lines.
Closing: 30.4.08.
Prizes: £200, £100, £50. Humour Prize - £50.
Entry Fee: £2.
Details (send sae): Southport Writers Circle Poetry Contest Details, 32 Dover Road, Birkdale, Southport, Merseyside, PR8 4TB.

Pulsar Poetry Competition.
Closing: 30.4.08.
Prizes: £125, £75, £50.
Entry Fee: £2.50 for the first, £1.50 thereafter.
Details: Click Here.

Earlyworks Press Sixty-Word Sagas.
Closing: 30.4.08.
Prizes: £60, £30, £10.
Entry Fee: £3. Details: Click Here.

Closing in May

Ledbury Festival Poetry Competition.
Closing: 1.5.08 (5pm).
Prizes: A writing course at Ty Newydd, the National Writers’ Centre for Wales. 2nd - £250. 3rd - £150.
Entry Fees: £3.50 for the first, £2.50 thereafter.
Details: Click Here .

Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition.
Closing: 1.5.08.
Prizes : £5,000, £1,000, £500. Runners-up - 2 @ £50.
Entry Fee: £5.
Details: Click Here.

Countryside Tales Article Competition.
Closing: 1.5.08.
Prizes: £50, £25, £15. The winning entries will be published in the mag. Entry Fee: £3.
Details: Click Here .

Virginia Warbey Poetry Prize. For poems of up to 40 lines.
Closing: 19.5.08.
Prizes: £800, £350, £200.
Entry Fee: £3 each or £12 for five.
Details: Click Here for pdf download.

Segora Short Story Competition. For stories on any theme, of between 1,500 and 3,000 words.
Closing: 29.5.08.
Prize: £100.
Entry Fee: £5.
Details: Click Here .

Yeovil Literary Prize.
Closing: 31.5.08.
Prizes: Novel - £1,000, £250, £100. Short Story - £500, £200, £100. Poetry - £500, £200, £100.
Entry Fees: Novel - £10. Short Story & Poetry - £5.
Details: Click Here.

Leaf Books Micro-Fiction 2008 Competition. Up to 300 words.
Closing: 31.5.08.
Prizes: 1st - £200. Runner-up - Ten Leaf books. All selected entries will be published in an anthology.
Entry Fee: £3 each or £10 for four.
Details: Click Here.

Alexander Cordell Literature Competition . Write a children’s story set during the Industrial Revolution in the South Wales Valleys.
Closing: 31.5.08.
Prizes: £500, £300, £150.
Entry Fee : £3.
Details: Click Here.

Biscuit Publishing Poetry, Flash Fiction & Short Story Competition.
Closing: 31.5.08.
Prizes (in each category): 1st - £1,000 or your poetry/prose collection published with 75 free copies. 2nd - A one-week Writers’ Retreat holiday at Talbot House, Flanders, with £200 expenses. 3rd - £200. In addition, seven runners-up receive £25.
Entry Fees: Stories - £9 for the first, £3 for each additional. Poems - £9 each for the first three, £3 each after that.
Details: Click Here.

City of Derby Poetry Competition.
Closing: 31.5.08.
Prizes: £500, £250, £150.
Entry Fee : £4 for the first, £3 thereafter.
Details: Click Here.

City of Derby Short Story Competition.
Closing: 31.5.08.
Prizes: £500, £250, £150.
Entry Fee: £4 for the first, £3 thereafter.
Details: Click Here.

MiniWORDS 2008.
Closing: 31.5.08.
Prizes: £250 in each category.
Entry Fee: None - free to enter.
Details: Click Here.

Earlyworks Press Open Poetry Competition.
Closing: 31.5.08.
Prize: £100.
Entry Fee: £3.
Details: Click Here.

Frogmore Poetry Prize.
Closing: 31.5.08.
Prizes : 1st - 200 guineas, plus a two-year subscription to The Frogmore Papers. 2nd - 75 guineas. 3rd - 50 guineas.
Entry Fee: £2.
Details: Click Here.

Crabbe Memorial Poetry Competition.
Closing: 31.5.08.
Prizes: 1st - £250. 2nd - £100. 3rd - £50. Winning and commended poems published in an anthology.
Entry Fee : £3 for the first poem, £1 thereafter.
Details: Click Here.

Closing in June

Poetry London Poetry Competition.
Closing: 2.6.08.
Prizes: £1,000, £500, £200, and 4 x £75.
Entry Fee: £4.
Details: Click Here.

Dawntreader Poetry Awards.
Closing: 5.6.08.
Prizes: £75, £50, £25.
Entry Fee: £3 each or £10 for four.
Details: Click Here.

Bruntwood Playwriting Competition. For full-length plays over fifty pages in length and over an hour of stage time.
Closing: 13.6.08 (6pm).
Prize: £15,000. In addition, if the play is produced the writer will also receive a percentage of box office receipts.
Entry Fee: None - free to enter.
Details: Click Here.

Manchester Cathedral Interfaith Religious Poetry Competition.
Closing : 30.6.08.
Prizes: £300, £150, £75. First prize winner will earn the title ‘Manchester Cathedral Poet of the Year 2008’.
Entry Fee: £3 for the first, £2 thereafter.
Details: Click Here.

Poetry Writers’ Yearbook - Poetry Competition. For poems of up to 30 lines on the theme of Desire.
Closing: 30.6.08.
Prizes: 1st - £300 or £500 worth of A&C Black books. The winner will be published in the Poetry Writers’ Yearbook 2008.
Entry Fee : None - free to enter. Only one entry allowed per person.
Details: Click Here.

Writers’ Bureau Poetry & Short Story Competition .
Closing: 30.6.08.
Prizes: Stories - £1,000, £400, £200, £100 and 6 x £50. Poetry - £1,000, £400, £200, £100 and 6 x £50.
Entry Fee: £5 .
Details: Click Here.

The Bridport Prize. One of the most prestigious writing contests in the literary calendar.
Closing: 30.6.08.
Prizes (in each category): £5,000, £1,000, £500. There are also ten runners-up prizes of £50.
Entry Fee: £6.
Details: Click Here.

Cinnamon Press Short Story Award
Closing: 30.6.08.
Prizes: £100 plus publication.
Entry Fee: £16. This includes a copy of the winners’ anthology.
Details: Click Here.

Cinnamon Press Novel /Novella Writing Award.
Closing: 30.6.08.
Prizes: £400 and a publishing contract for the novel.
Entry Fee: £16.
Details: Click Here.

Cinnamon Press Poetry Collection Award.
Closing: 30.6.08.
Prizes: £100 plus a publishing contract for a collection of about 60 poems.
Entry Fee: £16. This includes a copy of the winners’ anthology which is usually prices at £8.99.
Details: Click Here.

Words Magazine Short Story Competition. For up to 2,000 words on the theme of Christmas.
Closing: 30.6.08.
Prize: £100. Winning entry and commended entries will be published in Words magazine.
Entry Fee: £2.
Details: Click Here .

Keats-Shelly Prize 2008.
Closing: 30.6.08.
Prizes: A total of £3,000 to be divided amongst the winners.
Entry Fee: £5.
Details: Click Here.

Closing in July

Hay on Wye Short Story Contest.
Closing: 19.7.08.
Prizes: £400, £200, £100.
Entry Fee: £6.
Details: Click Here.

Countryside Tales Autumn Poetry Competition.
Closing: 31.7.08.
Prizes: £50, £25, £15. The three winning entries will be published, and others may be considered.
Entry Fee: £3.
Details: Click Here.

Wells Festival International Short Story Competition.
Closing: 31.7.08.
Prizes : £500, £200, £200.
Entry Fee: £4.
Details: Click Here.

Wells Festival International Poetry Competition.
Closing: 31.7.08.
Prizes: £500, £200, £100.
Entry Fee: £4.
Details: Click Here.

Highlands & Islands Short Story Association Competition.
Closing: 31.7.08.
Prizes: £300, £50, £50.
Entry Fee: £4 each, £10 for three.
Details: Click Here .

Closing in August

Torbay Open Poetry Competition. For poems of up to 50 lines.
Closing: 15.8.08.
Prizes: Adults - £700, £300, £150.
Entry Fees: Adults - £4 each £10 for three, £20 for six.
Details (send sae): Poetry Contest Details, The Administrator, c/o The Mount, Brixham, South Devon, TQ5 8QY.

Essex Poetry Festival 8th Open Poetry Competition.
Closing: 30.8.08.
Prizes: £500, £200, £100. Runners-up - £10 in book tokens.
Entry Fee: £3 each or £10 for five.
Details: Click Here.

Closing in September

Earlyworks Press Short Story Competition.
Closing: 30.9.08.
Prize: £100 and first place in the anthology.
Entry Fee: £5 for up to 4,000 words; £10 for 4,000 to 8,000.
Details: Click Here.

Closing in October

Ragged Raven Poetry Competition.
Closing: 31.10.08.
Prizes: 1st - £300. Runners-up (4) - £50.
Entry Fee: £3 each, £10 for four.
Details: Click Here.

Closing in November

Scribble Annual Themed Short Story Competition. The theme is Brief Encounter, in up to 3,000 words.
Closing: 1.11.08.
Prizes: £100, £50, £25.
Entry Fee: £4.
Details: Click Here

GOOD LUCK!

Photographs

2008-04-11T08:55:00.000+01:00

A picture's worth a thousand words. There's a few thousand more here.

A Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernieres

2008-04-09T10:16:00.002+01:00

In A Partisan's Daughter, the latest offering from Louis de Bernieres, we are presented with two narrators. The first, Christian (Chris for short), seems to be writing now (i.e. in the early 21st century) about his relationship at the end of the Winter of Discontent (i.e. 1978-79) with the eponymous partisan's daughter, Roza. I am not the sort of man who goes to prostitutes he begins, and then admits that people would disbelieve it.

Chris describes the loneliness of his life at the time, married to the 'Great White Loaf', an insipid Englishwoman with skimmed milk in her veins. This is his excuse for stopping his car one day to pick up a prostitute standing on a street corner in Archway. There is a misunderstanding: Chris asks her if she has the time and she replies, in 'quite a strong accent' that her watch has stopped and Chris realises he has made 'a horrible mistake'. Roza asks him to give her a lift home, and on the way she tells him that once she used to be a bad girl, and her going rate was £500. She invites him to call back one day for a coffee.

And so begins the odd-couple relationship between a forty-something travelling salesman and a twenty-something 'fast-talking Scheherazade'. This beautifully written book works on several levels, and it had me entranced from the first page. Read my full review on The Bookbag website by clicking here.

Dublin

2008-04-05T19:57:00.002+01:00

A fine week we had of it away in Dublin. Lots of Guinness, lots of diddly-dee music, lots of craic generally. We spent a lot of time in the Temple Bar area of the city, the cultural hub according to the

guidebooks. Well, cultural it was, but also pretty ram-packed with

pubs and bars. Which was nice. Especially the Long Hall - the best bar in Dublin, bar none!

Scandinavian Crime Stories

2008-03-29T10:07:00.003Z

I received a very nice surprise in the post this morning. My agent has very kindly got hold of the latest issue of the Norwegian magazine Vi Menn (which I'm told translates as Us Men). The reason she has sent it to me is that my crime story A Hunch Based on Bagels and Coffee is in there. Except it seems to have a completely different title. I think it might be Undercover, but I can't be sure (not being a speaker of Norwegian). I did try using an on-line freebie translator but it didn't seem to recognise the word Spaneren. But I did have a little fun typing in the opening paragraph of my story in Norwegian and seeing how the on-line translator converted it back to English . . .

It's weird that the Norwegian magazine should arrive today as this week I have been reviewing a couple of Scandinavian crime novels. The first is the latest English translation of a Jo Nesbø novel. There really should be a health warning or spoiler alert printed on the cover of Nemesis. It is the third of Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole series of detective novels to be translated into English. The first was The Devil's Star, but actually The Devil's Star turns out to be the third in the series and very much the sequel to Nemesis. For some reason, the novels have been translated and published in the UK out of sequence (I guess the reason is they published the best one first to test the water . . .). Unlike most detective series novels, you really do need to read Nesbø's Harry Hole books in the correct order to get the most from them. While each novel stands alone to a certain extent, there is a thread running through them that is best followed chronologically. So if you haven't read the first in the series, The Redbreast, maybe you should do so before you read this book!

You can read my full BookBag review here.

Also new on the BookBag site is my review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. There was a lot of pre-publication hype about this book, the first in a trilogy about the Editor-in Chief of a Swedish magazine (Millennium) written by the real-life Editor-in Chief of a real-life Swedish magazine. Stieg Larsson died shortly after delivering The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the other two books in the Millennium series to his publisher. The books became hugely popular in Scandinavia and the publication of the first instalment here in the UK was heralded as the arrival of a masterpiece of crime writing. Well, for once the hype is not entirely unwarranted. It may not be a masterpiece, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a very good read.

My full BookBag review is here.

Website v Blog

2008-03-20T08:29:00.006Z

I mentioned last week that the gumption and sheer determination of the pulp writer Stephen Frances (a.k.a. Hank Janson) put us modern writers to shame. Following on from that, a small group of novelists from my writing group met here at my house to discuss the whole idea of self-publishing and possibly even setting up a co-operative publishing house. Our discussions continue, but in the meantime we also debated the merits of having a website.

I used to run my own consultancy business that had a pretty good website, the sole aim of which was to attract customers. Now, while potential customers may have used the site to check me out, I received not one single new piece of business through the site. But that was a few years ago - I'm told things may be different now. We certainly attracted a number of new members to Deal Writers partly because of our website (which until recently I maintained). And in the past I joined a running club purely because they had such a comprehensive and useful website. So maybe my thinking is out of date . . .

Anyway, now that I no longer have the responsibility of maintaining the writers' group website I've finally begun to build one of my own. It will be interesting to see what difference (if any) it makes - especially in terms of getting my publisher to get cracking with publishing The Belfast Boy . . .

http://www.paulcurd.com/

Review - Hell's Fire by Chris Simms

2008-03-17T11:49:00.000Z

Three local churches have been torched in as many weeks. Evidence of satanic rituals have been discovered in the smoking remains of each one. The Christian community are outraged and media interest reaches national levels. When the fourth church is burnt down the Greater Manchester Police pass the case to DI Jon Spicer and his colleagues in the Major Incident Team. The priest of this particular church tells DI Spicer about several other recent incidents, possibly involving homeless people and youths. When the smoke has cleared, a charred corpse and satanic symbols are found in the ruins of the church, and the series of arson attacks take on an even more sinister angle – suspected human sacrifice.

At the same time, Spicer’s younger sister Ellie announces that she has started to follow the Pagan way of the Wicca, despite their Catholic mother’s assertion that Wiccans are actually witches, and Wicca was a religion that would lead followers straight to Hell. Ellie, it seems, has been introduced to Wicca by a friend who works at a New Age shop and is determined to join her new friend’s coven.

Spicer thinks his sister’s decision is some form of retaliation against their mother for making Ellie and her other brother go to Sunday school as kids (Spicer himself was excused Sunday school thanks to rugby practice). Of the three siblings, it is only Spicer – the one who didn’t go to Sunday school – who has turned out relatively normal. Their brother has disappeared into the world of the homeless.

Meanwhile, Spicer’s wife is trying to persuade him that they should send their daughter Holly to the happy clappy Church of England nursery because of its links to the better primary and secondary schools in the area. In case you hadn’t guessed, this a book that has a lot to say about religion, and about Christianity in particular.

I could not believe this was written by the same person who wrote Killing the Beasts and the subsequent DI Spicer books. Read my full review at the Bookbag.

Review - Killing the Beasts by Chris Simms

2008-03-15T09:40:00.001Z

Detective Inspector Jon Spicer is working on Operation Fisherman, investigating a gang of car thieves, when he responds to a call for help from a Community Support Officer. A woman has been murdered and, because there is a prologue, we already know pretty much how, but we don’t know why. And, despite the prologue, we don’t know whodunit. As the first detective on the scene, Spicer (or ‘Jon’, as Simms prefers to call his leading man) is made Senior Investigating Officer – it seems a straightforward enough case. So far, so bog standard you might think.

But when Jon gets home at the end of the day, things begin to take a turn for the slightly different. Jon is not an embittered alcoholic loner but a happily almost-married man. Instead of lighting up a cigarette, he chews a stick of gum. Instead of unscrewing the whisky bottle, Jon goes out for an after-work run with his pet boxer. He is career minded, but slightly concerned about being tied down by marriage and by the looming prospect of parenthood. It’s Ian Rankin crossed with Nick Hornby.

Over supper, Jon’s partner Alice tells him some gossip about his friend Tom Benwell, whom he used to play rugby with (it was Tom who gave up; Jon still plays). Alice has heard that Tom’s wife has walked out on him after he lost his job. By all accounts, Tom has become a complete wreck.

The novel then follows Jon’s investigation of the murders (for the first is rapidly followed by several more killings of young single women) in parallel to a series of extremely well-handled flashbacks showing why Tom lost his job and his wife, and cataloguing Tom’s slow but terrible descent into psychotic mental illness.

Killing the Beasts is the first of the Jon Spicer series of novels, and very good it is, too. See my full review at the Bookbag.

The Golden Age

2008-03-13T08:25:00.003Z

One of my colleagues at Deal Writers has given me a book charting the career of the great British pulp writer, Hank Janson. His cheap detective novels were notorious in the 1950s for their portrayal of sex and violence. I’ve never knowingly read a Hank Janson book (although I may have done in my youth). But Stephen Frances, the real-life writer behind the books, churned out a best-selling novel every three months in his heyday. That was before the Home Office crackdown on lurid gangster novels, issuing destruction orders under the Obscene Publications Act. The banning of the Hank Janson books caused an uproar and, according to Steve Holland, the author of The Trials of Hank Janson, led directly to the infamous Lady Chatterley case.

What really grabbed my interest, though, wasn’t the legal trials of Stephen Frances but the writer’s sheer determination to get his words into print. We modern authors tend to complain that it is so much more difficult to get published these days. Publishers generally won’t even consider a novel unless it has been submitted to them by a literary agent. Literary agents are inundated with unsolicited manuscripts. Apart from women’s magazines, there is no market for the commercial short story. We look back nostalgically to the ‘Golden Age’ when everything was so much easier.

Stephen Frances, aka Hank Janson, began his writing career during the second world war by setting up his own publishing company. This was a time of massive paper shortages here in Britain. But rather than see that as an insurmountable problem, Frances saw it as an opportunity. ‘Due to paper rationing and shortages,’ Steve Holland quotes him as reflecting, ‘the bookstalls had little reading matter to display and eagerly snapped up anything on offer.’ Frances was so determined to offer reading matter to these bookstalls he spent most of his time ‘running around’, going from printer to printer, searching for paper. All this despite day-long electricity cuts during one of the worst winters on record. ‘Everything was in short supply . . . Bombs fell, disrupted deliveries and destroyed premises.’

Ah, the ‘Golden Age’.

The Rising Tide of Crime

2008-03-07T10:37:00.004Z

I’ve been reading a lot of crime novels lately. Too many, probably. I need to let off a little steam.

I’ve always enjoyed American hard-boiled novels. I quite like ‘tartan noir’ – or at least, I quite like Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels. And I’ve been a fan of Elmore Leonard for as long as I can remember (I met the great man at a BBC Book Club event a couple of years ago and now proudly possess a signed copy of Rum Punch). There are other writers I could list who I admire for their more literary approach to the genre.

But there are a lot of not-very-good writers out there making a killing in crime fiction. It was ever thus, I hear you sigh.

There are three things that particularly irritate me about a lot of modern crime novels, especially far too many modern British crime novels. First, the prologue. Unless the author is Geoffrey Chaucer I don’t like prologues. They are cheap and nasty things and I don’t understand why crime writers like them so much. They seem to be the fashionable accessory of the moment and as far as I can see serve no purpose other than as an artificial ‘hook’ to draw the reader into the story. Finding a prologue at the front of a novel always makes me think either (a) the author isn’t good enough to get this information into the body of his story or (b) the author isn’t sure where their story should begin. Either way, I think there must be crap writing ahead. (And the fact that some really good writers use prologues doesn’t stop me thinking that!).

Second, I don’t like it when authors allow their research to show – for example, I don’t need to know in great detail all the things the author has researched about the HOLMES computer system used by the British police. I don’t care what the acronym actually stands for. I don’t need to know when and why it was set up, how it does what it does, and so on. All I need to know is that the detectives use the wretched thing. It’s called HOLMES, for heaven’s sake – it speaks for itself. Don’t you agree, Watson? Here’s an acronym for you: RUE. Resist the Urge to Explain!

Finally, I get annoyed with crime novels that have an omniscient narrator, when the narrator tells the reader everything about each of the main characters – even taking us inside the characters’ heads to show us what they are thinking or worrying about, their hopes and fears. Then suddenly we find ourselves inside the head of the murderer as he commits his crimes, and the narrator’s descriptions become darkly vague and sketchy. Suddenly we have no idea whose head it is we are trapped in. That strikes me as nothing less than cheating the reader. And putting the whole thing in italics is no excuse!

Okay. Rant over. I’m off to take my medication.

Review - The Stranger from Home by Frederic Lindsay

2008-03-04T06:14:00.010Z

Betty Meldrum, escaping the turmoil of her life back in Edinburgh (a turmoil presumably described in previous books in Lindsay’s Jim Meldrum series), is now living in the United States. She shares an apartment in Washington DC, where she quickly forms a bond with one of her flatmates, a sharp-featured blonde in her early thirties. The blonde invites Betty to her wedding in a small town in Texas. It is at this wedding that she meets the eponymous stranger from home: a blue-eyed man with a Scots accent. By page six of the novel they are married.

Betty, it now turns out (although if you were a Frederic Lindsay fan you would already know this) is the daughter of Detective Inspector Jim Meldrum. Meldrum is an Edinburgh cop who even when at home eats his fish and chip suppers with his fingers, straight from the paper wrapping. He lives alone in a mouse-infested garret in a run down area of the city. A place where a man in a heavy cloth coat looks out of place. When his ex-wife phones to tell him of Betty’s marriage Meldrum is bruised at how distant his daughter has grown from him, and yet he seems more concerned with an altercation he sees from his kitchen window. The man in the expensive cloth coat has just brutally attacked a loitering youth. It is this attack, rather than his daughter’s sudden and unexpected marriage, that plays on Meldrum’s mind that night.

Back in the states, the scene has shifted to Phoenix, Arizona. Betty’s new husband (and newcomers to Lindsay’s books) are finding out a little more about her chequered past. But we find out very little about the husband. He is a man of mystery, and no sooner has he arrived in Betty’s life than he has disappeared. The sympathetic woman detective who initially deals with the disappearance is quickly replaced by two male officers, men who may or may not be police officers. The mystery deepens when the woman detective phones Meldrum in Edinburgh to tip him off about the disappearance. ‘Your daughter gets in contact, tell her to come home,’ she says. ‘She’ll be safe at home.’

This is the first Frederic Lindsay book I’ve read. To see my full review, why not pop over to The Bookbag? It's a great site for booklovers!

Pole Dancing Writers

2008-02-27T09:58:00.006Z

WARNING: PHOTOGRAPH OF POLE DANCING BELOW!

A good friend of mine, Janet Cameron, has just been given a commission for an article about how writers fund their writing projects, novels, degrees, etc. She is in the process of tracking down an American poet who funded her MA in Creative Writing by pole dancing in a San Francisco Club!

Meanwhile, she has asked me if I know about anybody else who has done anything unusual or eccentric to fund their writing and who would be willing to contribute some comments. Unfortunately, I don't - but maybe you do?

You can either post your contribution as a comment below, or leave your story on Janet's blog: http://www.janetcameronwriting.blogspot.com/

Many thanks, Bloggers!

The Voice of the Narrator

2008-02-22T09:53:00.007Z

At last night’s meeting of Deal Writers one of our group brought her work-in-progress for us to discuss. It’s a Victorian-set story, a kind of whodunit with a nicely original theme. It set me thinking about how difficult it is to get the ‘voice’ right in these cases. The author has to decide whether the narrator should be modern or Victorian, and that will reflect the style of the novel. For example, in Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night, Cox used the device of pretending he had ‘found’ a lost Victorian manuscript. That way he could write a first person confessional using pure Victorian syntax. When John Fowles wrote The French Lieutenant's Woman, on the other hand, he decided on having a modern narrator who repeatedly interjected to point out the differences between ‘then and now’. Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White is even more outrageous, addressing the modern reader directly in his brilliant opening paragraph:

Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you’ve read, that you know it well, but those stories flatter you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether.

When I was studying creative writing at university I was told every writer has, buried somewhere within them, a unique ‘voice’. By the end of the course I was beginning to write a bit like Nick Hornby used to, the way Jonathan Tropper writes now. My tutor congratulated me on ‘finding my voice’.

Now I’m not so sure. I wrote like that because I was writing semi-autobiographical ‘romantic’ fiction, and a Hornby/Tropper style just happened to be the right ‘voice’ for a male writing about modern sexual/romantic encounters. When I write fiction for women’s magazines I seem to adopt a completely different persona and my ‘voice’ is softer and less matey. And when I’m writing crime fiction I have a third persona – more hardboiled and cynical.

I’m not sure if this means I haven’t really found my ‘voice’. I just think a writer is different from the narrator of the story she is writing. This is obviously so in first-person narratives. But I think it is equally true of third-person (and the rare second-person) narrator, too.

Doesn't Time Fly . . . ?

2008-02-21T16:01:00.003Z

I can't believe it has been a whole month since I last posted anything on my blog! I've been plugging away at my current work-in-progress, a novel with the working title The Crimson Teardrop. So far, it's going reasonably well. But it has also been taking up all my time!

Well, not all my time. I've also been catching up with my reading, getting stuck into my 'to be read' pile. Trouble is, for every book I finish I seem to have acquired three or four more! This year, I'm keeping a list of every book I read. I know it sounds a bit anal, but come December when people start asking me what was the best book I've read this year I won't have to rely on my shockingly poor memory.

I'm currently reading a paperback I bought in pristine condition for 50p from a market stall in Deal on Saturday. Gone Fishin' by Walter Mosley is the prequel to the Easy Rawlins series. According to the blurb on the back, Gone Fishin' was the first book Mosley wrote. I wish the first novel I wrote had been half as good! In fact, I wish the same of theone I'm struggling with now!

Women's Magazines

2008-01-21T15:29:00.000Z

I mentioned back in June that I had been interviewed for a writing magazine. The resulting article is in the current issue of Writers' Forum magazine, complete with hideous photograph.

As you can probably tell from the photo, the piece focuses on the stories I write for the women's magazine market. Here in the UK there are precious few outlets for the short story writer, and I am more than happy to have found a market for my work. A lot of people have misconceptions about women's magazine fiction (not least the blokes in my writers' group, who always pull a 'just humour him' face whenever I mention it). But by and large these are people who haven't read the magazines lately. Most of the stories I write are crime stories - the one in the current Woman's Weekly Fiction Special is about a male sociopath told through first person narrative by the murderer himself. It's certainly no soppy romance!

But here's the rub: the story in question, The Piano Teacher's Husband, caught the eye of a literary agent. She contacted me just after my last blog entry and offered to represent me. Of course, I accepted - and ever since then I've been busily hammering away at my laptop, writing even more stories. So please forgive me if my blogging is more intermittent than ever!

Rejected author has last laugh

2008-01-04T16:22:00.000Z

My thanks to my friend and fellow writer John Trelawny for drawing my attention to this story from yesterday's Times Online. It concerns Catherine O’Flynn, whose mystery story What Was Lost won the First Novel prize at this week's Costa Book Awards despite having been rejected by 20 agents and publishers:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3123455.ece

According to the article, of 85,933 new books published last year, as many as 58,325 sold an average of just 18 copies.

As John says, it's both an encouraging story (for optimists) and a discouraging one (for the others). John optimistically points out that his book Islanders sold way, way more than the average!

The Piano Teacher's Husband

2008-01-03T10:30:00.000Z

My short story The Piano Teacher's Husband will be published in the 4th January-22nd February issue of Woman's Weekly Fiction Special magazine, out tomorrow.

"Every week, when I call at Hannah’s house for my piano lesson, it seems her hallway is painted a different colour . . .

‘Zack!’ Hannah answers the door and smiles as though she’s surprised to see me, holding on to the latch as she steps back to let me in. Today the hallway is a deep red, far too dark, almost a burgundy. It makes me think of dried blood. There are flecks of burgundy emulsion in her hair still, counterpointing the flecks of grey. I want to kiss her right there, right on the doorstep. I fight it. I’m worried that I’m beginning to develop an erotic Pavlovian response to the smell of newly applied emulsion. That’s not normal, is it?

Read more in tomorrow's Woman's Weekly Fiction Special!

Happy New Year!

2008-01-02T16:03:00.000Z

It seems forever ago since I packed everything away for Christmas! It was great to spend the time chilling out and doing absolutely NO WORK but it’s also rather nice to be back, kick-starting the old routine. It’s especially nice to get back to discover I have won an award for this blog! Thank you, Mary. You’re quite wrong (as you can see) about not mentioning my award. I’m chuffed to bits.

I received some great books for Christmas, and also caught up with a couple of old ones on my ‘to read’ pile. One such book was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It has been gathering dust for about a year and when I finally got round to reading it I was furious with myself for not reading it sooner. I thought it was breathtaking. Unputdownable. I loved it so much I rushed out and bought a hardback copy of McCarthy’s earlier novel No Country for Old Men. A different kind of novel to The Road but the same themes come shining through. Isn’t it great when you discover a ‘new’ author? How come I’d never read any Cormac McCarthy before?

I also enjoyed Robert Harris’s The Ghost. It was great fun working out the real-life alter-egos of his characters (even though Harris insists – tongue firmly in cheek – that his novel is a complete fiction and any similarity between his recently-retired British Prime Minister and recently-retired Tony Blair is a complete coincidence). And while we’re on the subject of ghosts (as in ghostwriters) I think Christopher Simon Sykes has done a great job ghosting Eric Clapton’s autobiography. Another good read.

I’m currently working my way through the latest Granta collection of American short stories, edited by Richard Ford, as well as a much slimmer volume of short stories by the wonderful Jane Gardam (who lives not far from me, so I have a signed first edition!). The letters of Graham Greene (A Life in Letters) edited by Richard Greene are also enlightening as well as immensely readable. ‘Altogether I am feeling depressed,’ he writes in 1931. ‘Books are a labour to write and a hell to publish; why does one do it?’

John Irving on the Writer's Craft

2007-12-12T13:08:00.001Z

Jonathan Tropper - Everything Changes (Review)

2007-12-12T07:47:00.000Z

Jonathan Tropper's novel Everything Changes opens with an earthquake, and a similar seismic event is about to disrupt the perfect life of Zachary King.

This is what happens. You are about to get engaged to a fantastic girl who is way out of your league but who for some reason is head over heels in love with you. You have a decent job, a rent-free apartment in Manhattan and things can only get better. Except you think you have fallen in love with the widow of your best friend and your long-lost father has just turned up with a constant, Viagra-fuelled erection.

Tropper has been styled as America’s answer to Nick Hornby, and in a sense that’s a fair description. He is certainly very good at the ‘30-year-old male angst’ thing, and everything in this book rings true. If, like me, you enjoyed How to Talk to a Widower then you will probably enjoy this, too, but I was a little disappointed. Everything Changes is a good read but it isn’t quite as funny as Widower when it’s funny, and it isn’t quite as heartbreaking either.

The reason, I have since discovered, is that Everything Changes actually pre-dates Widower and is being released here in the UK some three years after its 2005 publication in the States. Tropper has improved since then.

Having said that, I enjoyed the pacey way Tropper kept the story moving, I liked most of the characters and even though I found the ending a little too syrupy for my taste the twists and turns getting there were neatly executed and often unexpected. If you haven’t read Tropper yet then this is a good place to start. Everything Changes is good, but it’s not quite in the same league as How to Talk to a Widower.

Writers' Forum

2007-12-11T09:16:00.000Z

Back in June, I was interviewed for an article in Writers' Forum magazine. During the interview, as I mentioned in my blog at the time, I was asked for my top tips for writers. In an effort to avoid all the usual suspects, I resorted to the following running tips:

Run every day, whatever the weather.

Set yourself goals and targets.

Keep a training log or journal.

Run lots of shorter races before you attempt the marathon.

Study the way successful athletes tackle the race.

Join a running club.

At the time I said these all had a direct equivalent in writing, and I would leave it to you to do your own translation. Just in case you didn't quite manage it, the current issue of Writers' Forum has kindly revealed all. You can read my piece on page 27 - including a full running-to-writing translation. There's also a couple of other pieces on running and writing . . .

Stories for a Wet and Windy Night

2007-12-06T23:15:00.000Z

To Deal tonight for a meeting of Deal Writers. Despite the wet and windy weather a dozen writers made it, with six giving a reading. I had set the group a challenge inspired by Raymond Queneau’s Exercise in Style. Here is the scenario, suitably adapted and Anglicised:

The narrator bumps into a long-necked man on a bus and later sees him in a train station in the company of a friend who pins a badge on his coat.

The challenge was to recount the above incident as a brief chapter in a romantic novel, a spy story, a detective story, a western, a Greek tragedy. The writers could choose one or more of these styles, all of them or none.

The six writers who shared their efforts with us took the same scenario in remarkably different directions. We had a crime story, a romance, a comic-thriller, a poem featuring Madonna, and a spy story that morphed into a vampire tale. The winner on the night was a tremendously creative east-meets-west tale set in 19th Century London and featuring Sherlock Holmes and haiku! The odd thing about the six readings was that, although we are based on the south east coast, every one of the writers set their stories in London. Perhaps that’s because Deal is such a quiet and charming place. A peaceful seaside haven would be an unlikely setting for tales of murder and Madonna and vampires and spies.

But not ghosts. If you don’t believe me then I recommend the latest issue of Deal Today, the lifestyle magazine for the east Kent town of Deal. Deal Today is available for the bargain price of £2.00 in all good newsagents and bookshops in and around Deal. Why am I hyping this august publication? Why, because the Christmas ghost story was written by yours truly. Okay, it may not be Dickens, but it’s worth two quid of anyone’s money!

Lishy Writing

2007-12-05T16:20:00.000Z

I finished the redraft of The Long Week (the novel formerly known as An Honourable Man) yesterday. I’ve cut nearly 4,000 words from it, which was quite distressing at the time but I think it makes it a much better, tighter read. I’m trying very hard to teach myself to RUE (Resist the Urge to Explain) everything, leaving things for the reader to work out or just leaving them unsaid.

I’ve always considered the master of concision to be the great Raymond Carver. I read a few weeks ago that his widow was planning to bring out the original ‘unexpurgated’ versions of some of his short stories, unsullied by editorial intervention, and I was eagerly awaiting their publication. Imagine my distress, therefore, to learn from last Saturday’s Guardian that most of the things I really like about Carver's writing weren’t written about Carver at all – they were written by his editor Gordon Lish.

Of course, I knew about Lish’s influence on Carver. I was once told for instance that Lish made him rewrite the 8,000 word A Small, Good Thing which resulted in the 2,000 word The Bath (although I've since learnt that Carver wrote the longer version two years after the shorter story). But I always assumed it was Carver that had penned the rewrites. Now it seems it was Lish all along. I’m pleased to say I’m not alone in feeling somehow let down. Marcel Berlins shares my sense of . . . well, if not betrayal then at least disappointment.

It’s not the fact that the stories are less good, or in any way devalued by not being entirely by the hand of the great man. It’s more that I like to aspire to describing my writing as ‘Carveresque’. From now on, I suppose I’ll have to say it is a bit ‘Lishy’.