Grace Paley

I was saddened by the death of Grace Paley last week, which I first read about on a Susan Hill's blog, and not in a newspaper. Paley's greatness as a short story writer is clearly yet to be fully acknowledged - or maybe it's the continuing British misapprehension that short stories can never be great - but great she most certainly was. Linguistically tough and inventive yet poetic, political yet lyrical, her stories give voice to a multitude of American immigrant experiences, clear eyed about pain and yet singing with optimism, a combination brilliantly captured in the Sally Ducksbury paintings on those eighties Virago covers above. It was Paley who taught me about the true meaning of Voice in fiction, and she was one of my greatest inspirations as a short-story writer. Perhaps my favourite of her stories is A Conversation with My Father in which her father, on his death-bed, chides her for not writing good old fashioned linear stories like de Maupassant or Chekhov. Ever obliging and, like the real-life Paley open to every possibilty, the daughter in the story tries, but not without commenting on

'..the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.'

You Stick with Your Reading, I'll Stick with Mine

Here's a quote from, would you believe it, the publicity for Atonement:

'A book is an illusion, a series of symbols on a page that create an narrative in your mind. There are as many different versions of the book as there are readers of it. I've made an adaptation of the book that happened in my head as I read it.' - Jo Wright, Director.

Well, yes, precisely my objection to screen adaptations of novels, as I've said before, and written about in more detail on my other blog, and the very reason I won't be rushing to see this one.

Coincidence or a Bad Girl Misbehaving?

As we've discussed on this blog before, you can't copyright ideas, and you'd be mad to want to, but it's riling when someone appears to have taken your idea and flown with it, and doesn't even acknowledge you...

Maybe this isn't at all what has happened in the case of the anthology, Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave, edited by Ellen Sussman, newly published in the US and receiving a lot of publicity, most recently in the New York Times. This book is strikingly similar in concept to last year's UK Bitch Lit anthology from the non-profit Crocus Books (in which one of my stories appears), but apparently bears no acknowledgement of the similarity. It's perfectly possible that when in 2004 Mary Sharratt, Bitch Lit co-editor with Maya Chowdhry, went to Ellen Sussman with a proposal for a US Bitch Lit version, Sussman had already had the same original idea. Though you can't blame Sharratt for wondering why, if so, she didn't she mention it.

Normblog profile

I am honoured to have a Normblog profile up today.

Writers versus Books

Joseph Ridgwell writes on the Guardian books blog about ageism in British publishing, but spoils his own case with his suggestion, only half tongue-in-cheek I think, that people should be banned from publishing books before they are thirty.

The point which gets rather swamped in the comment debate he thus generates is that the age of a writer should be irrelevant. We should stop thinking in terms of the personal characterstics of writers and get back to thinking in terms of books.

Coming up with the Goods

It seems unanswerable, doesn't it, the statement made so often in response to complaints that nowadays good novels don't always find publishing homes: 'Publishing is a business, not a charity'?

How can you deny it? Why would anyone continue publishing if they had to make losses?

But as I read an edited version of Jeremy Paxman's Edinburgh Festival castigation of the BBC for a loss of standards, in which he stated: 'Youth... This is the great motive force in contemporary television. Why do they want to find it? The motive is the same everywhere. Money' - well, another thought popped into my head:

There's business and there's business and there's money and there's money. After all, you wouldn't defend a grocer or a food wholesaler for being so obsessed with money he drops his standards and cheats his customers, or even poisons them, would you?

The Long and the Short of It

Mark Ravenhill writes about the ‘hunger for the epic’, the apparent need in a world devoted to the soundbite and fleeting images, a world where ‘brevity is everything’, for something meatier: the doorstop novel (he cites Harry Potter), the epic movie (Pirates of the Caribbean) and the hours-long stage play (David Edgar’s popular adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby for the RSC).

Ravenhill has been presenting a series of breakfast-time plays at the Edinburgh festival. The fact that people have got up early (after late festival nights) to pack out his houses he sees as another example of this hunger, because the plays are interconnected and thus episodes in what he views as an epic project.

I think he’s looking at this the wrong way round. As Ravenhill himself comments, ‘Many critics pointed out how much the Harry Potter books would benefit from an editor’s pencil’. What does this mean? It means that those who read Harry Potter don’t mind this, probably don’t notice it, they read it passively, even unthinkingly, rushing on through the narrative in a way which is not at odds, as Ravenhill would have it, with an accelerated world and an impatient culture. It’s the short thing, the tightly-packed thing, the short story or the short play, which requires the leisured and thoughtful response and close attention to language, not the longer work, as Ravenhill claims.

Maybe Ravenhill is right that people are now hungering after more intellectually-challenging literary or theatrical experiences. But could it not be that the popularity of his festival plays is down to their shortness and the linguistic compactness which this allows, the piecemeal presentation which gives the audience the chance to breathe and think and ‘gradually see the rules and patterns’ of the larger project? And could this be why short stories now seem to be on the up?

Words for Free

Not so long ago, discussing the controversy over copyright and Google Booksearch, I described my feeling of pleasure when two out-of-print anthologies in which my work featured appeared on Google Booksearch, and my disappointment when they disappeared again (they have since been reinstated). As I stated then, although the actual contents of those books weren't available online I wouldn't have minded if they had been, since I didn't think it likely that many people would otherwise read the few copies available in libraries such as that of the University of Michigan.

Today Peter Finch, Chief Executive of the Welsh Academy, writes to Academy members (of which I'm one) about Welsh Journals Online, a proposal by the National Library of Wales to digitize the entire content of the majority of twentieth-century literary periodicals in Wales.

A member of a nation in which education and literature have always had pride of place, he acknowledges the excitingly democratic nature of library digitization projects:

No need any longer to visit the National Library at Aberystwyth to don white gloves and look at the ancient pages of Brut y Tywysogion. Log on and there are all the pages - viewable entirely for free and with no problem parking your car in order to get to see them. A service for the public has been created that is entirely in keeping with the spirit that founded the public library service

and as a gifted and serious writer himself, he understands my impulse above. Authors on Welsh Journals Online will not be paid and 'will be given the right to say no and not to participate but the reality is that most will want to be included. This will offer some of them an opportunity to see work from years past appear again to re-read and re-evaluate'.

However, he points out this project has been funded:

In a society rich enough to pay for civic flowerbeds to be weeded and town centres to be illuminated 24/7 then authors should get something for what they do. In the whole digitisation process staffers working on the project at the National Library of Wales will be paid. So too the funders and Welsh Assembly Government and JISC. The operators of the internet servers on which the final project is to be stored will also receive financial consideration, as will the owners of the telephone lines down which the information will travel and the manufacturers of the equipment with which users will access it. But the creators of the works being read, the raison d'etre for the whole enterprise, they'll get nothing.

He has a big point there, I reckon. There is something pretty amazing about the ubiquitous idea that, as far as literature is concerned, if there is ever any money going, the last people it should go to are the primary providers. So we do it for the love of it? Should we stop paying doctors or teachers or plumbers if they heal or teach or plumb for the love of it? As Finch says, it's too late to do anything about this project - the money has already been allocated - but in the rush towards digitization this assumption must be challenged.

Graphic Language

I know I've been away, but I was pretty puzzled when today I first read about the fuss over Ian Rankin's statement that lesbian crime writers write the most 'graphic' novels, and that he finds this 'interesting'. What? Why would people bridle at a compliment? Doesn't 'graphic' mean 'vivid'? See what a week in the Welsh hills (and a lack of familiarity with crime novels generally) does to you - you simply don't keep up with the language and you have no idea that it's shorthand for 'graphic violence'. And, to add to the confusion, in the same paper I am told that Rankin, having left Rebus behind, is now embarked on a 'graphic novel'!

Inspiration

This month John Baker is tackling the issue of 'inspiration' by running a series of pieces by writers describing how they create a text. Mine appeared yesterday.

Ugly Romance

I couldn't agree more with John Sutherland when he says that those who have voted Wuthering Heights the most romantic novel ever have got it entirely wrong. It's what I said too when Norm invited me to contribute to his Writers' Choice.

What does it mean that people (60% of women polled, anyway) insist on reading this book, and the others he lists, in this way? That people don't in fact actually read? That we have forgotten, or are no longer educated, how to? That the tendency to privilege our preconceptions or wishes over clear-eyed analysis is a function of a commercial society based on fantasy and obsession with the self? (And as for the fact that our wishes are romantic, well, heaven help us.)

* Edited in: Norm has a great post on this, with all the links.

A short break

Along with several other bloggers, it seems, I'm off on holiday so won't be blogging for a week or so.

Acknowledging the Luck

Michael Holroyd writes amusingly in today's Guardian Review about the current tendency to fulsomeness and even sentimentality in book Acknowledgment sections and dedications:

Writing books is no longer a solitary affair ... These "warm and gracious" friends have become, as it were, "co-workers" on the book, eulogised for their "endless patience" and "great understanding". They are like wet-nurses tending to whatever the young manuscript and its trusty word-processor need.

What Holroyd fails to comment on is the whiff of uncertainty and/or relief coming off these missives, the sweat-soaked sense that the book might well never have been written and/or published if circumstances had been other, the contingency that always inevitably surrounds the making of a book - the author needing to keep sane and well, and if he/she doesn't have a commission needing savings in the bank or to be kept, or someone else to mind the kids. Not to mention the moral support you can need to stay on course in a world of shrinking publishing opportunities.

I have a collection of short stories forthcoming, and in the current climate I can't help feeling lucky. Part of that sense of luck is inextricably bound up with other people: the magazine editors who happened to be sticking their necks out and publishing short stories just at the time I happened to write them (and therefore boosted me to go on writing them), the literary professionals I happened to meet who gave me contacts and practical hints, the close friends and relatives who acted as my first readers and helped me go on believing in my stuff when the going got hard. Holroyd is right, that to go too far with your acknowledgments can seem hilariously self-serving (he quotes some howlers ), but they can also be a political statement about the precariousness of creative production.

I'm with Holroyd on dedications, though. A single name, that's all. And the reason it's there is between me and him.

The Book Depository

Grumpy Old Bookman draws our attention the The Book Depository which acts both a bookseller and publisher, concentrating on fast service and with a core philosophy of making 'All books available to all', a key feature being the reprinting out-of-copyright works. Grumpy says that as far as he knows this venture has had little publicity, and I too have noticed little reference to it in discussions about either copyright or bookselling. I can't help agreeing with him that for readers (and authors with an eye on their own longevity) it would seem to be only a good thing, but that potentially it presents yet another threat to the independent bookseller.

The Burden of Blogging

I never intended to leave this blog for so long, but have been almost entirely preoccupied with another, artistic, project, and coming back to it today, and checking into other litblogs again, feels like coming back to your home town after living away: whole discussions have taken place which have passed me by (and the population has changed: some blogs have gone inactive, others which were in abeyance have started up again), and, although it's only been a fortnight, people have started to forget me: my site stats for this blog have gone down.

The fact that blogging is a huge project which can clash with one's other, more creative work is the perpetual dilemma of the writer-blogger. In fact, I didn't find it quite as hard to keep in touch with my other, writer blog, as I could make it part of the current project, which was promoting a play, and use it as a personal diary of my current obsession. But keeping writing while blogging is a different matter, and I neglected even that blog while I was writing that play. This is a paradox, since - let's be frank - most writer-bloggers blog partly to get exposure for their work (and apparently some publishers now expect authors to blog as part of their marketing duties).

As far as I'm concerned, though, it is critical discussion - with which this blog is concerned - which takes the real time and commitment. Today Susan Hill has announced that she's no longer prepared to spend the time reading other blogs and getting drawn into their literary discussions, and who can blame her with all that writing to do? And Daniel Green at The Reading Experience gets to grips with Sven Birkerts' assertion that litbloggers fail to engage as thoughtfully as print reviewers in a long, thoughtful article that must have taken him hours.

It's like the Partner of the Bitch said: 'I don't understand it, this blogging. How can it take you all that time? Why are you up there all hours, and so late?' Darling, keeping up a litblog can be like writing an essay every single day.

The Smell of a Rat

Laugh and cry at the Guardian's report of the test for publishers and agents set by David Lassman, director of the Jane Austen Festival. He typed out Jane's books, changing only the names, and submitted them as new manuscripts and all he received back were polite rejections.

Well, you might say, what publisher in their right mind would glance twice at a contemporary manuscript written in late-eighteenth century prose and steeped in eighteenth-century upper-middle-class values? Trouble is, though, it seems that in that one glance at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, only one publisher recognised it for what it was.

Laugh and cry as the publishers and agents tie themselves in knots explaining it away. Oh, but they did recognise it, claims a spokesman for agent Christopher Little: they might have sent out a polite rejection, but in fact there were 'discussions about plagiarism'. Excuse me while I fall off my chair imagining that po-faced discussion while the smelly rat ran riot beneath the table.

Excuse me while I fail to get up as I imagine the special x-ray process whereby Penguin, who say that they never actually said the manuscript was original, only that it 'seemed' so, can judge a manuscript when - as they also say, thus giving the whole game away - 'It would not have been read.'

The Price of Retail

Watch your jaw on the desktop when you read these figures regarding Waterstone's charges to publishers for 'maximizing their books' potential', as reported by The Times.

Emma Barnes of Snow Books has commented before on this blog that in fact Waterstone's operate a sliding scale of charges in order to accommodate small publishers, but the books of small publishers are of course unlikely thus to get the kind of 'maximization' being referred to here, and Anthony Cheetham of Quercus Books is now quoted as saying:

There is a genuine level of exasperation and anxiety in the publishing industry that the booksellers have gone too far down this road. It’s the reader who loses because it’s throttling the distribution of a wider range of high-quality books and [perpetuating] the system whereby you plaster the entire country with copies of the same few books.

Thanks to Debi for the link.

A Breath of Fresh Air

Any one concerned about the draconian developments in modern copyright would do well to check out 'Free to Air' running at Manchester's Cornerhouse this month (106.5 FM and online), and which I write about on my other blog.

Been Had

Tee hee.

Here's how it went this week with a local journalist to whom I had sent a press release about a play:

Extract from phone conversation #1:

Journalist (after patiently bearing with me about the play and then asking the strangely apparently more interesting personal questions which I managed to deflect): So where did you get your inspiration for the play? From things you see in the village?

Me (wisely onto such journalistic tricks, intent on keeping things more literary and cleverly deflecting): Umm. Well, it doesn't quite work like that. You have to have an idea brewing already, and only then will something in the outside environment spark that idea off into a story.

She rings me again. Extract from phone conversation #2:

Journalist (after probing more deeply about my life and my 'hobbies'): So when you go walking round the village, and down the meadows like you said, is that where you get your inspiration?

Me (getting slightly worried now): Umm, well, as I explained, there has to be an idea already there...

She rings me a third time. Extract from phone conversation #3:

Journalist: So what is it you like about living in the village? Is it the people?

Me (thinking of course of the paper's readers which include my neighbours!): Well yes of course!

She rings me a fourth time. Extract from phone conversation #4:

Journalist: So it's the people in the village who give you your inspiration?

Me (laughing): I'm not telling you who I put in my stories! (And realising at once I've fallen into the trap)

Journalist: And do you sit in the village cafe and watch people go by?

Me (still recovering and so not concentrating): Well, I have done... (in truth only once or twice)

Here's an extract of the article which appeared yesterday, titled 'Are you a player on Elizabeth's suburban stage?':

The next time you take a stroll through the village you could unwittingly become a character in a book or a play. That's because Elizabeth has a unique method when it comes to creating her characters. She simply sits at her favourite cafe watching people go by and imagines what it must be like for them. The figures are then transformed into three dimensional creations in her stories... She likes nothing better than sitting outside the village cafe with a notebook and pen and doing a spot of people watching.

Ha!

Bookarazzi

Speaking of marketing and the power of authors, you may be interested in a new website set up by a group of us blogging authors:

Bookarazzi is the public face of BloggersWithBookDeals, a group of published writers / artists who spend half our lives on the internet.

There are almost 50 of us, and our books range from surreal comedy to commercial women’s fiction to graphic novels and disgusting recipes. This is where we come to pool our collective abilities and provide stuff for you to read and use.

Whether you’re a budding writer, a bored net surfer or are just feeling nosy, there should be something for you.

Oh, and we might plug our books occasionally too.

Check us out and let us know what you think:

Real-life Fantasy

Mark Ravenhill complains, as I am always doing, about the tendency to want to see autobiography in fiction:

It's troubling to be a writer on the receiving end of this hunger for autobiography. When my play Shopping and Fucking was produced in 1996, I was totally unprepared for the fact that many people would read it as autobiographical. The play is inhabited by rent boys and junkies. Suddenly, people I knew well were scouring my arms for track marks.

We've all had similar experiences. The most annoying for me was when a journalist who knew nothing whatever about me stated sagely that my depiction of my protagonist suffered because of my own pain. Maybe she really had hit on a failure in the writing, but I do think this judgement was fuelled by a (wrong) assumption of autobiography.

At the moment I'm producing one of my own plays. I talked to several directors interested in working on it. 'Is this protagonist you?' asked one of them. I was shocked, and went hot and cold all over, because, as I am so often saying, once you start looking at a play or a book in the light of the author's life you are no longer looking at it for what it is, and indeed it becomes something less than it should be.

I've just come off the phone from talking to a journalist to whom I had found it necessary to send a press release about the play. Actually, she rang three times. The first time I deflected her nicely from the personal questions I knew she would ask. Then she rang again: her editor had asked her to get more colour. Not about the play (of course: who's interested in literature, what we want is the lowdown on the writer!), but I managed to keep her on the subject of my writing career. The phone rings again. Her editor still wants more. What age did I say I was? (I didn't). What years were my children born? What year was I divorced? What is it my partner does? Oh, what the hell, I told her - I could sense her desperation, and it's only a local paper, and anyway everyone locally knows all these things anyway, and quite frankly nowadays I'm past caring what anyone knows or even thinks about me, but then the moment comes: 'And how does this relate to your play?' and I do care how people view my play.

Even Mark Ravenhill seems to miss the real point about fiction. He says it's often the differences rather than the similarities between an author's life and work which are interesting. But the whole point, as I've said before, is that you can't make those divisions: fiction is an indivisible meld of fact and imagination, something different from either and carrying its own truth.

And I'm totally puzzled by all this fuss about JT LeRoy: what, so no one ever makes up a persona for the rest of the world? So you wouldn't expect a fiction writer to be better at it than most?

Not Just Designs on Your Purse

Recently some of us noted the cloning of certain book covers as cover design becomes increasingly in thrall to 'the market'. Interesting then, and encouraging, to read of the new Penguin Books Design Award, aimed at final-year art students, and, according to artist Harland Miller, promoting book covers as artefacts which are 'design- rather than sales-led' and, he implies, more sensitive to a book's content and ethos. Left is the winner of the inaugural competition: Ara Youn's design for Malcolm Gladwell's Blink.

Could Do Better

Well, you can always count on Terry Eagleton to stir it, or to notice the emperor's nakedness, depending on your point of view. Tucked into the bottom half of the comment page in today's Guardian (as though the Guardian itself isn't too sure about it all) is an article by Eagleton writing off our contemporary writers as politically unengaged - even those we have thought of as politically acute. Rushdie's knighthood, he says, was actually his reward for turning from satirising the west to 'cheering on its criminal adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan', David Hare has turned from radical to reformist, and Christopher Hitchins 'who looked set to become the George Orwell de no jours' has 'thrown in his lot with Washington's neocons'. 'Most of the Angry Young Men of the 50s metamorphosed into Dyspeptic Old Buffers,' he says, 'Larkin ... was a racist who wrote of stringing up strikers', and our migrant writers such as VS Naipaul and Stoppard are 'often more interested in adopting than challenging the conventions of our place of refuge.

He makes one exception: Pinter; but unfortunately he finds him dreary.

No Time to Laugh

Comedy is tragedy plus time, says Stuart Jeffries in a profile of the actor Dennis Hopper.

In other words, time creates the detachment which I have noted is necessary for comedy. But time, or rather the past, is not valued in our culture - we are hooked on the new and the searingly up-to-date. Unlike novelists of the nineteenth century, who often set their novels just a few years earlier than the time in which they were writing, today's novelists, if they are not writing out-and-out historical novels, must concentrate on the undigested now in order to be packaged as marketably 'contemporary'. Is this then why our novelistic culture is so lacking in comedy, as Julian Gough claims?

Dear Richard and Judy

Richard and Judy. Nicholas Clee asks on the Guardian book blog if they are skewing our literary culture with their choices and their effect in turn on book-buyers' choices. There are some interesting and entertaining comments. Clee focusses on the effect on the marketing choices publishers make for their books - do some published books fall by the wayside as a result? he asks - but there's a heartfelt comment from Crabtree, a well-reviewed novelist, arguing that publishers' choices of what to publish in the first place is affected:

As a novelist who has just received the devastating news that her German publisher has decided to drop her, and is now bricking it that her English-language publisher might follow suit, I can tell you that the answer to your question, Nicholas, is YES YES YES.

The Bitch can agree, for she can bring for your delectation the experience of having a novel she had written discussed by a literary agent primarily in terms of whether or not it was 'a Richard and Judy' book (and thus saleable to publishers).

Over at The Reading Experience, Daniel Green tackles the subject of the increasing commercialization of publishing with his customary wit and insight:

According to the Book Industry Study Group's Albert N. Greco, "The book business has been around for centuries. It's a mature business, and it's hard to get tremendous growth."

This another way of saying that, historically speaking, the book business has been very successful. It's hung around a long time and mostly managed to satisfy its customers, the identity of which--readers--it has effectively targeted and the outer boundaries of which--extending to and stopping at nonreaders--are generally well known.

It seems to me that those involved in the book business as it is currently configured would do well to keep Greco's warning in mind. "Tremendous growth" beyond the confines of those human beings who read isn't just unlikely... Steady sales of good books among serious readers seems to me a perfectly sound business strategy. Otherwise, produce some other piece of merchandise for which "tremendous growth" is not only possible but is its primary reason for existence.

Finally, before I disappear for a weekend to Paris, here's blogger Norm responding to the undervaluing of literature displayed in the reaction by some to Rushdie's knighthood, by setting up a short-short story competition.

Cults and Culture

Today Mark Ravenhill writes about 'the cult of Story' led by master-class script guru Robert McKee and followed by film industry professionals world wide, and expresses the thoughts of the Bitch exactly:

It's a sinister conspiracy no one's talking about... It's spreading through movies, television drama, fiction writing for adults and children. It's beginning to creep into the theatre. It's a cult with thousands of glassy-eyed members.

Rather than relying on skill, taste and discretion in the difficult task of script-reading, he tells us, script editors and directors, schooled in McKee's writing-by-numbers formula, will say things like this to a writer: 'I'm missing the initiating incident on page 28'. Challenging forms are dying from our culture as a result.

Hooray for Ravenhill, I say. And he's right about the silence of everyone else: McKee has been going for years now, for years now we have had endorsing flyers about his seminars from the Writers' Guild, and a generation of industry professionals have his words seeping from their pores. Why has no one, to my knowledge, challenged it before? A cult indeed.

The Freedom to Be Offended

Anthony Andrews agrees with me, kind of:

Knighthoods are for snobs and faceless civil servants, not dissident artists. But if it means that The Satanic Verses, in spite of the book chains, finds a new readership, then arise Sir Salman, we salute you.

Of those, including writers, who once condemned Rushdie for 'his participation in his own downfall' he points out rightly:

Few appeared to realise that a massive symbolic attack had been launched against the most vital freedom, not only in art but in society, the freedom of expression. Still less that our rather timid and repentant response would encourage religious extremists and censors.

Freedom of speech threatened by a newly emerged respect for the 'right not to be offended'. What a joke. As if that's a right: not to be offended.

Once I went to Methodist Sunday School, and my ex-Catholic Irish father sneered. I was offended. But guess what, it taught me to stand up for what I believed in. Guess what, it made me stronger in my faith (until, all of my own accord, I lost it). One thing that scares me in life is politeness, because you don't know what people are really thinking, you don't know where you stand, and you don't know what stratagems they could be using against you while they smile and smile and smile...

Never trust those who are too scared to offend you. Trust those who have the courage to tell you what they think. For the sake of everyone's gods, let's embrace the freedom to be offended.

Such an Honour

The Bitch is coming out of Heal's in Manchester. (Please know, dear readers, that the Bitch is not in the habit going to Heal's, but it's good to see how the other half lives, don't you think, and anyway on this occasion, there's a certain exquisite lamp requested for a special birthday by a young relative, which can only be sourced therein.) Anyway, there she is coming out and two black-clad Furies, who seem to have been watching the door and waiting for this very moment, sweep towards her, one carrying a sort of machine gun on his shoulder and the other, a blonde ice-queen, some kind of dead-black laser rod.

'Madam!' cries the ice queen. The Bitch shrinks. Madam? Is this what coming out of Heal's does to you? Get you called Madam while a microphone is shoved in your face? 'Madam, we're from Channel M and we wonder what you think...' and the Bitch stops hearing properly, just two words 'Queen' and 'Honours' float up to her and wild thoughts are flashing in her head: she is wondering, what's this, why were they so keen to get the views of those coming out of Heal's, and the word 'Queen' has triggered the memory of being caught between her English primary school teacher who once told her she must worship the Queen and her Irish dad who exploded when he heard about it, and she tries to concentrate on the question, 'Do you think the Honours system is a good thing?' and then bursts out a flat embarrassed 'No.' Ice queen looks disappointed and urges a bit wearily, 'Why not?' The Bitch says, just as flatly, 'Because I don't like elitism', which is true, but it's not the whole truth, it's not as though she doesn't believe in recognition of talent and good works, she absolutely does, it's just this whole thing being tied up with the monarchy and old, old systems of patronage, and all those political implications, and the dire situation that because of this, because of all those political connotations of this particular system, people can say, as they are doing, that a brilliant writer should not have been awarded or have accepted a knighthood for his writing because it has inflamed others whom his writing offends - thus calling for the very censorship of which David Edgar recently warned.

And since the Bitch is choked and inarticulate with the weight of all this, the two Furies drop her, and jump impatiently away towards the next victim emerging from Heal's.

Revelling in Misery

I recently commented that we are drowning in misery memoirs, and in yesterday's Guardian Esther Addley considers why they are so popular and have taken the publishing industry by storm, indeed creating a whole new readership. Is it prurience that's operating here, as psychologist Oliver James 'unsettlingly' allows it could be? Or is it catharsis as one publisher claims - less worrying, if you overlook the implication that, as James, says 'a hell of a lot of people have had ... cruelty inflicted on them'? Or is it this, which he also allows, and which I am always saying: that 'when you read them you feel that your own lot isn't quite so bad' (which means of course that they lack the universal power of fiction)?

Laughing on the Other Side of Your Face

On the other hand (re comedy):

I am about to write a novel. It is based, in some part, on my own life, and rooted in a particularly dark episode in my childhood. I tell my sister, who naturally shared that dark bit of childhood. She looks at me fiercely. She tells me, somewhat censoriously: ‘Well, you know what you’re best at, don’t you? Comedy. You’ve got to write it as comedy.’

I laugh. That’s what we do in our family: laugh. I am gritting my teeth. I am thinking: typical, ****ing typical, laughing to hide the pain, comedy to hide the pain, to pretend none of it really happened, so we can duck from reality, and so that the problems never get acknowledged, never get ****ing resolved, and so we go on hurting, limping to our ****ing graves hurting and laughing, holding our ****ing painful sides. (Can you tell I was angry?) Comedy, I’m thinking, as my sister glares at me, easy only if you’re avoiding the truth, not so easy if you’re trying to confront it, and still hurting and so still involved, easy only if you’re detached (and safely up high like Julian Gough’s Greek gods). In fact, I’m so angry I’m near to ****ing tears.

I write the novel. I show it to my sister. ‘I was wrong,’ she decides, conciliatory, wiping away her tears. ‘There’s no way you could have written that bit as comedy.’ (And anyway, actually, it’s not as if the whole novel is unremittingly tragic - the habit of comedy’s too ingrained in me, and there are other episodes in the novel which my sister found laugh-out-loud.)

I send it off. ‘Too dark,’ say the publishers. ‘Hmm,’ says my sister, that sardonic, sarcastic, ironic, ****ing satirical I-was-right-all-along look entering her eyes. What a joke.

See, there’s also this about comedy: it depends on your sense of humour, which depends in turn on your relationship with the material:

Well, after that novel I wanted a laugh, and decided to write a short comic play. I’m now producing that play for a theatre festival. A couple of weeks ago I talked to directors interested in working on it. Here’s my conversation with one who had made clear that the play related to his life:

‘Elizabeth, I’m really keen to do this play, but you’ll need to do a lot of work on it.’

What? Oh! ‘What work?’

‘Well, this thing you reveal so very near the beginning: it would be much better if you kept the audience not knowing it, sitting on the edges of their seats, give them an emotional investment by keeping them guessing.’

‘Oh. Ah.’ (Thinks.) ‘Umm… But if you did that, how would you retain the comedy?’ (Julian Gough’s ‘gods'-eye view’)

The director goes white. ‘Comedy? You call this play a comedy?’

The Comedy of Tragedy and the Tragedy of Comedy

I have at last got round to reading Julian Gough's stimulating article in Prospect (expertly critiqued by Daniel Green at The Reading Experience), in which he considers how the European literary tradition, underpinned by Christianity, has to its detriment spurned comedy and embraced the tragic.

The comic point of view—the gods'-eye view—is much more uncomfortable for a believer in one all-powerful God than it was for the polytheistic Greeks. To have the gods laughing at us through our fictions is acceptable if the gods are multiple, and flawed like us, laughing in recognition and sympathy: if they are Greek gods. But to have the single omnipotent, omniscient God who made us laughing at us is a very different thing: sadistic, and almost unbearable. We do not wish to hear the sound of one God laughing.

We think of tragedy as major, he says, and comedy as minor... Brilliant comedies never win the Oscar. The Booker prize leans towards the tragic.

And, you could add, we are drowning in misery memoirs. Yet how does this sort with publishers' current allergy to novels which are 'too dark'? And how does Gough's complaint that we are stuck in the tragic fit with Mark Ravenhill's complaint in last Monday's Guardian that we are overly obsessed with 'fun'?:

News wants to be fun. Documentaries want to be fun. The neologism "info-tainment" may sound ridiculous but it is a real concept. And it has changed our broadcast and print media over the last decade. But can we honestly say that any of the greatest achievements of western culture are "fun"? King Lear or Anna Karenina, the Ring cycle or Crime and Punishment - it is not possible to describe them as "enjoyable" in any simple sense of the word. They are stern, uncompromising, engrossing. In places, they are hard work.

Ravenhill is right, there is a retreat from seriousness. But this doesn't undercut Gough's argument. As Gough says, true comedy is deeply serious, and can be more subversively so than tragedy.

Once upon a time I wrote darkly comic radio plays. When the 'marketing' ethos took over BBC Radio Drama Production I was asked to 'drop the irony' because what were required now were 'heart-warming' plays.

Town of Books or Town of Telly? Cultures Clashing in a Welsh Valley

Three years ago I read at the Hay Festival, and I guess you get a different perspective as a reading author, but I don't know, I had been before as an anonymous punter, and things seemed very different to me this year. I went as a guest of Debi Alper, who was standing in over the first weekend for John Baker, blogging reporter for SkyARTS, the new sponsors of the festival.

First surprise: I drove down with my partner, and as we entered the town from the north the festival signs directed us not left as before but right: the festival is now so huge that it needs a much bigger site, three-quarters of a mile or so out of town, and a shuttle bus to take you between the two. No more wandering straight from the tents into the scores of second-hand bookshops in the hour or so between shows. And there was unsettling evidence of institutionalised crowd control: police tape lined the roads and guys in luminous jackets waved us into the parking field and charged us £4.50 (I never remember paying before!) and pointed to the spot we must park in. We got out, and below us was the huge white-tented site with the SkyARTS flags flying and, scoring the hill above it, the works for the oil* pipeline which is crossing Wales from Milford Haven.
(* Edited-in correction: Not oil, but gas! But then, even David Miliband, the environment secretary, apparently appeared to reveal at Hay that he didn't know what it was, or anything at all about the pipeline itself.)

You're not supposed to bite the hand that feeds you, and Sam, the Sky PR who met us, was as sweet as the schoolgirls who had minded me last time, but I'd be betraying my dead Irish dad's injunctions about being true to my hunches if I didn't report to you, dear bloggers, that my heart sank with a sense of corporate might quite antipathetic to the festival's creative origins.

And wouldn't you know it, my first event was a media event: the daily roundup of the festival with Mariella Frostrup, filmed for Sky TV. The woman next to me, on the other side to Debi, was a veteran of the festival. Well, she said to me ruefully, without much conviction: we have to move with the times and nostalgia's a terrible thing. And then on came Mariella, beautiful and intelligent, and interviewed Peter Florence who began the festival 20 years ago, and indeed she questioned him precisely about the change in the nature of the festival - less emphasis on literature and books and more on politics and the media. It hasn't really changed, he said, not in spirit, but boy did he seem defensive to me, and of course, this was telly, so she let him get away with it, and then he was gone and there was a break and the makeup woman came in and redid Mariella's makeup and hair and powdered the bald head of composer Michael Nyman who was due on next.

Ha! 'What did you think?' asked Sam afterwards. 'Isn't Mariella professional?' we said truthfully. 'And isn't Sandi Toksvig quick-witted?' 'Oh yes! But what did you think of the stage?' Ah yes, it was true, that was the real star, the stage...

And where were the books? There were things mimicking books: Penguin-cover deckchairs, Penguin-cover mugs:

huge models near the entrance:

but books, real books? At last we found some, in Pemberton's festival bookshop, but only the festival authors were stocked there, and there simply wasn't time to get into town between shows for that staple traditional Hay experience - emerging inspired from a literary event to browse the fund of literary history on offer in the town (or to escape the Sky-high site food prices!).

Of course we went into town. It was dead, but then it was only Friday and the festival hadn't really got going. How do you feel about the change? we asked one bookshop owner. It had definitely made a difference to her trade, she said. At the Honesty Bookshop, where you leave the money for your book in a box, there was no one around to be honest or cheat:

This and the Castle Bookshop (below), which has a fantastic stock of old prints, were not the only ones we found empty.

Back at the festival, and there still wasn't much literature on offer. Debi and I attended a comic revue with Bonnie Langford and Sandi Toksvig and then my partner and I went to a concert given by the contemporary folk musician Seth Lakeman in the biggest tent of all, a huge stadium which filled up with young people who suddenly appeared from nowhere in their droves, but were no longer in evidence next day.

Next day, Saturday, things were suddenly buzzing - queues of traffic down the lanes (and police everywhere) and long queues of people at the ticket office and outside the events) - and it looked as if the festival would be unlikely to have a detrimental impact on the town businesses after all. And at last, there was a literary event I could go to: David Freeman, who runs the Meet the Author website, interviewing two novelists, Australian Gail Jones and Booker-shortlisted Hisham Matar. Freeman's gushing style seemed designed to provoke a self-congratulatory stance in his guests, which Matar failed to avoid altogether. However, even I was near to tears when he described how a friend smuggled copies of his books into Libya and he thought, like Ovid (overlook the self-flattering comparison) 'My book has gone back without me.' This interview seemed to me somehow to sum up the culture clash at the heart of this festival, and which has perhaps been at the heart of it all along, and of all author readings. The whole thrust of Freeman's questioning was to make parallels between the books and the authors' lives, or even to privilege their lives over their books. Gail Jones, an academic clearly aware of such problems, smartly side-stepped this trap, but then she sounded off-puttingly like an academic, so hey... (Hay). Matar had a Thing about not signing books for dealers, and as an author I can see his point, but he even refused to sign blank copies for Tim of KC Books, not knowing perhaps that Tim had sponsored this event...

And then we thought we'd check out an aspect of the Fringe Festival which has started up as a response to the changes. Each day this week there is an event sponsored by Welsh Academi at the Hay Poetry Bookshop in the town, and on Saturday the internationally esteemed Irish poet Tony Curtis was reading from his brilliant and moving new book, The Well in the Rain. What a difference! A tiny space, crammed with an audience, no microphones needed, the poet (a poet!) chatting to us all individually, informal in his reading, even answering his phone halfway through and giving us all a laugh. The kind of event with which festivals begin... But then how much money did that event make, eh, and for whom?


Back at the site the protesters to the pipeline had set up outside.



A big concern of the festival this year is the environment, and the first day, Thursday, was devoted to a conference on the topic. However, the pipeline protesters were keen to tell me that they'd been offered a stall by one of the local shop owners, but had been evicted by the festival organisers. You could say they were paranoid, but of course this was the day Gordon Brown was speaking, and it was hard to think they were with this security guard standing at the entrance nearby:

and these signs on the gate to the 'VIP' car park:


But not everyone's so hot on security. The Guardian seem to be having a high old time in their festival bus. On Saturday afternoon my partner wandered into their enclosure and had a glass of champagne and a scone with jam and strawberries and cream, before he realised he was in a private party...

I'm left with the words of the woman who runs the Castle Bookshop. 'We've hardly had a soul in all day,' she said on Friday. 'But even so, we've had something stolen.'

Blogging Reporter at Hay

Debi Alper has been invited by ArtsWOM to attend the Hay-on-Wye Festival as a blogging reporter, from this afternoon's opening to Saturday morning. To my great delight she invited me to accompany her as her guest, and I accepted right away, only then to be faced with sudden complications in producing one of my plays, so it remains to be seen when I actually make it to Hay.

John Baker will take over the Hay blogging later in the week.

Net Value

Thanks to Zoe Margolis for the link to a Guardian article today by John Crace questioning whether material published on the web can afterwards have any financial value, and her own counterpoint argument in the comments section.

And in the same edition John Crace gives good giggle as usual over the morning cuppa, with a digested read of the novel harshly critiqued on Saturday by Pankaj Mishra: Don Delillo's This Falling Man:

Keith had been alive for six days now yet all he could feel was the symbolism of his alienation. The planes had hit, but everyone else was missing. Even the living were missing each other. Missing themselves. Deep.

Up above the New York skyline, she saw a man dangling from a rope. It was a performance artist. The Falling Man. Lianne felt her guts cramp with poignancy. The image of the towers. He was falling. She was falling. And the critics would certainly fall for it.

Your Freedom, My Restraint

Vanessa Gebbie alerts us, in the comments section of my post below, to David Edgar's recent Asham lecture at Sussex University, in which he spoke of the new censorship facing authors from groups demanding 'the freedom not to be upset'.

Post-9/11 Literature

Not often I get actually excited by a literary article nowadays, but I am excited by Pankaj Mishra's article in yesterday's Guardian Review, in which he considers the response of American and British novelists to 9/11 and the newly emerged world order.

Fittingly, it's literary journalism of the most iconoclastic, offering a fundamental reappraisal of the nature and value of contemporary western fiction. He considers the usual suspects, those white male writers who are viewed as having claimed this ground and who so often seem to inhabit a literary tower impenetrable to criticism, and finds them lacking:

Struggling to define cultural otherness, DeLillo, Updike and Amis fail to recognise that belief and ideology remain the unseen and overwhelming forces behind gaudy fantasies about virgins. Assembled from jihad-mongering journalism and propaganda videos and websites, their identikit terrorists make Conrad's witheringly evoked revolutionaries in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes look multidimensional.

These authors fail to transcend the Western literary cult of individual experience, he implies, and continue to see the situation in terms of a simple opposition between 'Muslims' and 'the west' which simply does not echo the experience of many Muslims for whom 'the west is inseparable from their deepest sense of themselves'.

'Most of the literary fiction that self-consciously addresses 9/11 still seems underpinned by outdated assumptions of national isolation and self-sufficiency', he says. He sees too the voyeuristic fictive efforts of these writers to recreate the twin-towers experience as 'fuelled by masculine anxiety' and points out that female writers like Deborah Eisenberg, Claire Messud and Jennifer Egan, who treat the events more glancingly, are more successful at conveying 'how the obsessions with terror, image, novelty and celebrity work out in ordinary ... life'. There is a rich fund of such writing, he tells us - including that from Kiran Desai, David Mitchell and Jeffrey Eugenides - to which we should be looking for a true evocation of a 'new spiritual homelessness.'

And for me, as a writer, this was truly the best and most dynamic kind of criticism: it has inspired me to rush to my desk and write!

Reversion of Rights at Risk?

Danuta Kean alerts us to an article in yesterday's New York Times reporting a move by publishers Simon and Schuster which is seen as extremely worrying by the American Author's Guild. Traditionally, once books fall out of print, if the publisher is not prepared to reprint, the rights revert to the author, but it seems that a change in Simon and Schuster's author contract allows them to retain the rights as long as it exists in any form, including electronic.

Simon and Schuster claim that this is simply a response to new technology, ie print on demand, whereby it is no longer necessary for publishers to retain a minimum number of warehoused printed copies. However, Guild executive Paul Aiken sees great danger in print on demand which can mean that the book is available 'only in dribs and drabs' (and therefore not aggressively published) and this new contract as allowing Simon and Schuster to sit on the rights to a book indefinitely while they stop bothering to publish it altogether. “We’re not against the technology," he says, "we’re just against the technology being used to lock up rights.”

However, on the Guardian books blog, Nicholas Clee reports Mark LeFanu, general secretary of the UK Society of Authors, as seeing such changes in contracts as inevitable: "We need to work out a way in which we can give reasonable protection to publishers' interests while at the same time giving authors the opportunity to withdraw from contracts if sales are low."

Recently the Writer's Guild lawyer, vetting my contract with Salt, advised striking the clause which gave them electronic rights. But electronic rights are precisely the basis of Salt's innovative business model, and there was indeed a clause giving me back the rights if sales fall beneath a certain level within a certain time span.

Publishers With a One Track Mind

An interesting post from Debi Alper on a rash of book covers spectacularly similar to this:

Books as Dice

Publishers may be obsessed with the market but apparently they know nothing about marketing, according to an amusing article in the New York Times. Curtis Sittenfeld, author of the best-selling Prep, is quoted thus: “People think publishing is a business, but it’s a casino.”

Thanks to David Isaak for the link.

Orwell, Where Are You?

Nicholas Wroe reports John Lanchester's view that the word literary has joined feminist and socialist in connotation and is now seen as the 'publishing kiss of death'.

Excuse me while I go and cover my head in grief for my life-long belief in the power of words, now that words can mean whatever you decide, and the people who are doing the deciding are those whose real interests are anything but verbal.

The Writing Tag

David Isaak has tagged me. I don't usually respond to being tagged, but since this one's about writing I've made an exception.

Copy the questions into your blog and answer them. Then tag five other writers to do the same!

1. Do you outline? As a novelist? Is the Pope Protestant? (Well, there's always something there, sometimes clearer, sometimes fuzzier, like the outline of a ghost, lurking in an image, or an idea. But I never want it to be too clear, actually, otherwise why write the bloody thing? Writing's an exploration, not knowing everything and having to find it out is a great deal of the excitement, which will be transmitted to the reader). But as a radio dramatist? Is the Pope of the other persuasion? No one will let you write anything for radio or screen without an outline they can approve, and quite frankly that's writing by numbers: many's the time I've discovered that a play doesn't really want to and shouldn't be made to go the way it seemed logical at outline stage that it should. And that, not to put too fine a point on it, is why so much in the media is bland, unsurprising trash.

2. Do you write straight through a book, or do you sometimes tackle the scenes out of order? I don't do straight, my novels aren't linear, the episodes are always out of order, but yes, because there's another sort of order, the thematic, they do tend to stay in the sequence in which they come out.

3. Do you prefer writing with a pen or using a computer? You're joking me, encha? Isn't this the question writers can wearily and sneerily predict will be asked at every reading and render them gob-smacked because they do not understand why anybody wants to know or even gives a flying f***??? And if you think I'm going to confess to the panics I undergo when I can't find my silver Cross fountain pen...

4. Do you prefer writing in first person or third? Preference doesn't come into it. Each book, or section of a book makes its own demands in this respect.

5. Do you listen to music while you write? If so, do you create a playlist, listen randomly, or pick a single song that fits the book? Come off it, I'm making my own music in my head!

6. How do you come up with the perfect names for your characters? Who said they were perfect? Usually they just come, and like names in real life, once they're there you accept them and they fit. And then it's pretty hard having to ditch them because they turn out to be the names of real people, say...

7. When you're writing, do you ever imagine your book as a television show or movie? No, no, no... this is what makes me furious! When will people learn that novels aren't just fodder for movies or TV dramas? If I want to write a movie I'll damn well write a movie. (Didn't stop me thrilling, though, when one of my novels was optioned for TV).

8. Have you ever had a character insist on doing something you really didn't want him/her to do? Nah, they can do what they like and they do.

9. Do you know how a book is going to end when you start it? Sometimes. But then sometimes I turn out to be wrong.

10. Where do you write? You're at it again. I'd like to say on the roof or down a cave. You know where I write really, don't you?

11. What do you do when you get writer's block? Spit. Shout. Sigh. Eat. Feel sick. Drive my partner round the bend. No solutions, I'm afraid.

12. What size increments do you write in (either in terms of wordcount, or as a percentage of the book as a whole)? About three pages a day.

13. How many different drafts did you write for your last project? Three, if you count the aborted first go a few years ago when I hadn't guessed the secret, ie what the novel was really about.

14. Have you ever changed a character's name midway through a draft? Oh yes, see above. My mum reminded me that I hadn't changed the name of a right bitch. (Oops, I'm supposed to be writing fiction.)

15. Do you let anyone read your book while you're working on it, or do you wait until you've completed a draft before letting someone else see it? It's not a question of letting, it's a question of forcing - just one person, my partner: I make him sit down at the end of every writing day and look at what I've written, notwithstanding the weary set of his shoulders and the faint sigh...

16. What do you do to celebrate when you finish a draft? Go out! And fling my arms about and run!

17. One project at a time, or multiple projects at once? More than one? God forbid!

18. Do your books grow or shrink in revision? Mmm, neither really. Maybe I should be worried...

19. Do you have any writing or critique partners? Well, I don't think when it's done at knife point you see it as a partnership (see above), but my real-life partner's a damn good critic.

20. Do you prefer drafting or revising? I can't answer this. It's all a continuum for me, and although I know that later it's more like fine-tuning, it still feels part of the same process of pulling this thing together out of the ether.

I'm supposed to tag five other novelists now, and they can take it up or not as they wish:

Debi Alper
Amanda Mann
Clare Sudbury
Marie Phillips
Lucy Diamond

What Do They Think Novels Are for?

Although Daniel Green at The Reading Experience was pretty harsh in his judgement of Zadie Smith's recent essay on fiction, he now offers an incisive post which concurs with her complaint therein that editors and academics now read novels primarily for subject matter, ignoring elements such as form and language and thus missing the essential point of fiction.

Robert McCrum Shifts his View

In response to the flurry of literary prizes (including, incredibly, three new ones for short stories, the National, the Frank O'Connor, and the Edge Hill), Robert McCrum muses interestingly on their role.

In [the contemporary] blizzard of commentary, from the blogosphere to talk radio, he says, newspaper review pages are no longer the 'ultimate gatekeepers' of literary taste, and, while admitting to having had his own merry digs at lit prizes in the past, he says that now the time has come to acknowledge the role [literary prizes] play in shaping public taste.

For those to whom this will come as heresy, he asks (with a searing frankness which is one of the best comments on last autumn's newspaper/blog review debate):

How much more reliable are reviews? Would you rather submit your first novel to a clique of well-lunched literati in a Soho meeting room than a (probably) failed novelist writing late in his/her dressing gown somewhere in the purlieus of Dollis Hill? Are the deliberations of a prize jury any less contingent than the speculations of a literary editor and his/her reviewers?

The literary prize has many well-rehearsed drawbacks, but it has one great virtue: it is conducted in public and is answerable to scrutiny. To some, that just leads to another disqualification (timid juries, they say, simply confirm the conventional wisdom). But it does not have to be so.

Guest Article: Julian Gough on Short Stories and Winning the National Competition

For some reason which must be to do with the engaging and off-the-wall character which informs his writing, Julian Gough has decided to privilege the Fictionbitch and this blog by offering his funny yet acute take on winning the prize and on the short story in general, for posting below. Since my last post stirred up something of a row, still ongoing, in the comments section, about why short stories should be beleaguered, Julian's (previously written) piece is apposite and timely. Many many thanks, Julian, and all power to you, I say.

Here is the piece by Julian Gough:

Twelve hours after the announcement of the winner of the National Short Story Prize for 2007, I was still on the piss with A S Byatt. What a mind! I’d never met her before. I might never meet her again. Obviously I had to try. But she told me firmly that she is extremely married. So this might be shaky, due to heartache and champagne.

Some people worry that the short story, like the vole, is declining due to loss of habitat.

I am here with news of joy. It is going to be OK.

The modern short story is often to be found hiding in a novel, often an Irish novel. English novels tend to go for the one broad arc, like a cast iron bridge by Brunel, with some curlicue and filigree to give texture. The Irish novel tends to have a single structuring principle, which is used to give a different kind of unity to a thousand shards of story, mosaiced. The English novel is made of iron and is cast, the Irish novel is made of everything and is assembled. You see it in the many styles of Joyce’s Ulysses, the many sources and voices of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds, the various islands and incidents of Swift’s Gullivers’s Travels.

A fugitive short story could hide comfortably in any great Irish novel. A character could just open his mouth in a pub, and the story could inhabit his mouth like a cave. I’ve hidden short stories in the mouths of characters, deep inside novels, myself.

No, no need to worry. The short story is merely hiding out in the novel until it is safe to come out. And soon it will be safe to come out. Because the internet is creating a vast new habitat that has not yet found its final shape, or final inhabitants. Cyberspace is ripe to be colonized by the small and nimble vole of the short story, who will change his form to suit the new terrain. But it will still be short, and still a story. It’s going to be alright.

Meanwhile the people creating the biggest problems for the short story are the short story writers. Especially the dead ones. Because Chekhov was so good, so revolutionary, contemporary short story writers think that they can be revolutionary by copying him. They copy him: and the revolution doesn’t happen and the audience wanders off. Because that’s not how you do it.

Chekhov didn’t have a television. He didn’t have broadband access to everything ever right here and right now always on and ever ready. Chekhov wouldn’t write Chekhovian short stories if he were alive today. He’d write something else.

If you are a writer, maybe you should stop showing us in meticulously observed and realistic detail the realistic things which we (after a century of Chekhov’s subtle influence) meticulously observe ourselves every day, and which tell us nothing new about the world or ourselves.

Go wild. Wilder. Rip it up and start again. You can’t make a mistake, because there aren’t any rules yet…

A suggestion. If you want to go forward, go much further back. Take a running jump at it. Don’t read Ian McEwan. He’s very good, but he is of no use to you. Kill the father, and embrace the grand father. Read Rabelais. Read Erasmus. Read Aristophanes. Read somebody I’ve never heard of, someone out of print for the past three hundred years, who has just been put up online by Project Gutenberg, or Google Book Search. And rip them off something rotten. Steal it, take the wheels off, rebuild the engine, see if it can be converted into a seaplane, collide it with Krazy Kat, or Swedish jazz, or Somali hip hop, or the stories your mother tells about working on the production line at a pea canning factory in Germany when she was nineteen.

The spark of art comes from banging things together.

There is a potential downside to making it new. The publishing industry might have problems recognizing its merits, and will definitely have problems marketing it and selling it through channels which are friendlier to industrial product in standard packaging (Pink and pale blue and lime green for chick lit, dark orange flames against black, with gold type, for SAS memoirs… just slot book into package.)

I spent seven years having a go at revolutionizing the novel. At the end of it I had no money, no publisher, and was homeless. But I had some bloody good art, and that has to be enough for you because it may well be all you will get.

I was lucky. Halfway through writing my novel Jude, I realized I needed to step outside it, and write a short story. I needed to see where Jude had come from, and why he had left on the quest of the novel. So I wrote “The Orphan and the Mob”. And I wrote it as well as I could. I wrote it insanely meticulously (draft after draft, polish after polish, building in layer after layer), considering how it was a short story and would never earn me any money. And then it won the National Short Story Prize. And I cried.


It is incredibly important for writers to be able to write at any length.
Some ideas are short, and some ideas are long, and we need to make sure that the good stuff gets to the reader intact, neither cropped nor stretched to fit the publishing industry. This prize is terrific because it brings short stories out of hiding and into the spotlight, brings them to big audiences, at a time when the publishing industry either can’t or won’t.

Whatever you want to write, write it the way you want to write it, write it whatever length it wants to be, and stick it up on the internet if nobody will publish it. Don’t kill it to fit it into an industrial box. Artistically, we live in a golden age of freedom, and that’s terrifying. Commercially, we live with market censorship of certain forms. It’s a pain, but it’s survivable. I’m running out of time, the deadline is here, the champagne is wearing off, so, last suggestions: try comedy instead of tragedy. Ditch realism for a bit, see what happens. Because reality isn’t realistic any more.

Call this reality? Call this realistic? On the piss with A S Byatt, in a place that doesn’t allow mobile phones. A writer born in London, back in London, with an Irish mobile phone stuffed down my left sock and a German mobile phone stuck down my right sock, both phones vibrating with congratulations from England and Ireland and America and Berlin. Vibrating with love from around the one world.

It’s hard, being a writer. It’s lonely. May you all have such a moment in your future. May there be enough love to go round.

Julian Gough

Winterson Dares to Say it

In a sidebar column accompanying a Guardian article (today) on the effect of the Blair administration on the arts, Jeanette Winterson is quoted thus:

Blair is only interested in popular culture and not the arts. He is by nature and mission a leveller, and art asks people to be more than they are, better that they are; it asks for intensity, concentration and effort. Blair worries too much about elitism to recognise art's power to change lives.

Unfortunately, you can imagine that some people will give this statement scant intensity or concentration, for Winterson herself has sometimes been accused of elitism, for her challenging, uncompromising and sometimes extremely daring prose, and indeed for her very insistence on art as corrective and transformative. She takes a moral and evangelizing stance to literature which is easily dismissed when clearly stemming from her proselytizing religious background, and in a culture where government and big business go hand in hand to 'please' and pander to 'choice'.

It gets harder and harder to say some things. In a comment on my post below, Alan Kellog makes some points about why short stories are so hard to sell which, though true, made my heart sink, feeding as they could into prejudices against the short story form. And recently, after a reading by short-story writer Chrissie Gittins, several of us discussed an issue about short stories which I felt I could hardly replicate on my blog for fear of doing the same. Several commentators, we noted, had recently pushed the short story as ideal for our age of rush, when people don't have time for long novels, and I have done it myself when selling the short-story mag metropolitan. Yet I know I was wrong, and the other day all of us, all short-story writers, felt strongly that this not only did a disservice to short stories but reinforced the cultural expectations which are squashing them: short stories, more than novels, require the intensity, the concentration and attention which Winterson identifies - and which nowadays seem to many people a BAD THING.

But the Bad Thing in reality is a culture and a society in which this state of affairs can occur, in which people, including Tony Blair, see freedom only in placation and passivity. And as Adam Curtis recently showed in his stunning BBC film The Trap, such 'freedom for the people' is in fact nothing of the kind.

Salt and the Frank O'Connor Prize

I've been away for a few days and thought that now I'm back I'd be changing my tune, but the short story is keeping afloat as a subject. The longlist has been announced for the prestigious Frank O'Connor award for a collection of stories, and on the list alongside Alice Munro and David Malouf appear authors from independent British publisher Salt, Chrissie Gittins, Jay Merill and John Saul.

While Salt's self-styled 'literary' character is thus confirmed, their concern with business strategy is considered and energetic, as publisher Chris Hamilton-Emery demonstrates here, here and here.