Editing in Style

I had decided to attend the Advanced Copy-Editing and Effective Project Management workshop, organized by the National Book Development Council in Singapore at the National Library.  I wanted to fill any gaps in my knowledge that might exist because, although I'm well-qualified to comment on whether text works or not, I've never had any formal editorial training of any kind and I feel that lack.

Susan Keogh, who came all the way from Melbourne to give the workshop, is a very experienced editor and wrote the Lonely Planet in-house style manual. She not only knew her stuff really well, she was a very engaging speaker.

She stressed from the outset the necessity of good, clear writing - even in academic and technical texts. We looked at extracts from widely different kinds of writing including : a piece from a Mills&Boon romance, a fictionalised biography of an Australian soldier, and scientific papers, and considered how they might be improved. 

Adverbs and adjectives were too often the enemy :

... the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words

as Strunk and White have it, especially :

Rather, very, little, pretty ...

We chopped out repetitions, got rid of irrelevancies, and learned the all important art of showing not telling. We weeded out cliches and tired language, learned that detail should emerge from the narrative rather than being added to it, and needs to advance  it.  And we visited that stylistic bugbear and unintended source of hilarity : dangling modifiers. This analysis and reshaping of texts was by far the most useful part of the workshop for me. (And it confirmed my hunches - I know what I'm doing.)

On the Monday afternoon though we changed tack and looked at how to write effective blurbs and publicity material, by using such devices as extended metaphors, compiling a cheat-sheet of useful words and by using literary and grammatical effects. We took apart blurbs and wrote our own for an imaginary guide book for Singapore. And I now feel confident to tackle writing a decent one of my own ... which is just as well.

I was looking forward to the part about managing publishing projects, but it seemed to be aimed at organisations where there were multiple projects to oversee, rather than the freelance editor with just one.  But I really enjoyed Susan's disaster stories including her account of what happened when Lonely Planet published a travel guide with Westen Europe on the spine.  (They didn't recall and pulp, they inserted a humourous bookmark instead!). 

I was the only attendee from this side of the causeway, and the rest, bar one or two freelancers, worked for Singaporean publications.  It was sad not to see anyone from book publishing there as they would have found this useful (and there is a great need for such training to raise professional standards).

Abandoned City ... and City

What are you guys reading?  Any good?

It's been a while since I asked the question.

I'm feeling a bit sad that the new novel by China Mieville The City and The City - did not at all agree with me and has given me literary indigestion.  It was so hyped, has won sci-fi awards and is expected to win more, and I wasin the mood for fiction that breaks the mold.  So I thought I was onto a sure thing. (Perhaps I would like other novels by this same author?).

I'm not giving anything more away about the plot than that it's a detective novels played out in parallel dimensions.  I must confess to struggling to a third of the way through before I realised that I just wasn't enjoying it and decided to ditch it ... though I did a naughty and skipped to the end to see what happened in the end.

I did feel the central premise of the novel (the two cities idea) was fascinating, and I felt the rather atmosphere was well created (in some ways the novel reminds me of Orhan Pamuk's Snow) but I'm not big on allegorical fables a la Borges and Kafka. You tend to get the idea quickly enough but have just too many pages of tedium to troll through.  And oh man, this book is bloody boring and over 300 pages!

Then there's a Dan Brown level of character development which leaves you just not caring about whether the murder gets solved or about what happens to dear Inspector Borlu.  This is something so basic - fiction doesn't work if we don't care for the characters!

But worst of all is the appauling editing ... or rather lack thereof.  One commentator on Amazon suggested that perhaps the wrong copy of the manuscript got sent to the publishers and I can well believe it.  There are sentences that make no sense whatsoever! Other parts are so clunky that I did wonder if Mieville intended the language to imitate a foreign speaker who can't handle English too well. I sat on the plane down to Singapore today and marked 'em with a green pen.  (Maybe I'm getting in the mood for my advanced Copy Editing Workshop tomorrow?)

Spot what's wrong here, for e.g. :

Corwi drove - she made no effort to disguise her uniform, despite that we had an unmarked car -

Arrrrgh!

Anyway, had the book been better I would have been happily still engrossed in it, instead of talking to you.  So maybe a little boredom occasionally is good for one?

And now over to you.

Next Courses

I am starting my creative writing course for beginners Getting Started - Finding the Flow again soon at Learning Works in Bandar Utama. Two time slots are available for this 10-session course:

Tues 10.30 a.m.-12.30 p.m. (start 6 July)
Sat 10.30 a.m.-12.30 p.m. (start 31 July)

I am nearing the end of the first run through of a new second-level course called Who Are you?  Somebody!  which focuses on writing from personal experience, and above all on writing honestly.  It's been a demanding journey and I'm really happy with the work produced by the group so far, and feel we've come a long way. 

More courses and workshops are planned (including ones of writing craft) and I am so happy that Eileen and Dennis have given me a base to work from so that I can develop what I am doing. 

We (and here I also include library saint Daphne Lee!) have now put small library in place so that we can encourage our writers to also be readers.

Learning Works have much more going on, and there are some exciting developments in the pipe-line.

When Literature Turns to Crime

The feeling is there is a very clear line of demarcation between the two things. With crime, romance, science fiction, we are considered to be writers within a formulaic genre, whereas literary writers are considered to be 'moving freely', as it were. ...  There has always been a feeling that literary fiction is improving, that you come away from reading it and you're a better person for it. No one ever said that about reading a crime novel – although maybe you come away feeling happier.

Australia's top literary award, the Miles Franklin award has this year gone to crime writer, Peter Temple whose novel Truth is :

... a story about murder, deceit, police corruption and politics set amid the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria.

Could Britain's top literary prize, the Man Booker prize ever go to a crime novel? asks Alison Flood in The Guardian. She talks, among others to critic John Sutherland (who feels it is unlikely) and crime novelist Ian Rankin (who feels that attitudes to crime fiction are changing.)
 
Temple says in the article that writing crime was just :

... an excuse to write. ... It gives a sense of urgency, of narrative drive. My characters have a reason to get up in the morning. Ian McEwan, who I think is wonderful, his characters do not really have an urgent reason to get up in the morning ... 

 And he feels that:

There is only one judgment for the value of a book, and that is what sort of emotional response it elicits in the reader. That's down to the quality of the writing.

It will certainly be interesting to see what happens when Temple's novel is submitted for the Booker this year!

Free Market Necessarily Good for Books?

Since the NBA disappeared, 500 independent bookshops have closed. Borders has swooped on to our high streets – and then ceased trading. Dillons is a distant (bad) memory. The market has narrowed. The shelf life of most novels is far shorter, as are the careers of most writers. Statistics tell us that more books are published – but most of those are self-published or sold by tiny firms with next to no marketing push. The real story of the industry is the slashing of lists, mergers, collapses, buy-outs, sackings and losses on a scale never before witnessed.


Now, instead of a cartel, we have a virtual monopoly. An agreement that enabled dozens of publishers to set prices for thousands of booksellers has been replaced by a system that allows two or three big organisations to dictate all. Waterstone's book buyers, rather than the book-buying public, decide whether a book succeeds. Supermarkets tell publishers what price to sell at, how many copies to print, what to put on the cover, what to call books and even what to put inside them.

The Net Book Agreement, put into place in 1899 in the UK allowed publishers to set the retail price of books, but in the 1990's the agreement was torn up to allow free market forces to take over. But Sam Jordison in The Guardian asks whether this was a good thing for the book industry in the long term.

Joining the KLAB

It looks like the indie publishing scene is really growing in Malaysia. We also have more independent writers in Bahasa Malaysia, like Fdaus Ahmad, participating this year, unlike previous years, which saw mainly local English-language writers selling their works. This shows that it is the shared spirit of independent writing that counts and not the language one is writing in.

Zulhabri Supian, one of the KL Alternative bookfair's initiators, is one of the people Hari Azizan talks to about the bookfest in Starmag : it's a very good piece which gives an excellent overview of the event.

Local Books Good Enough to Eat

Haven't written yet about the KL Alternative Bookfair. Went along last Saturday afternoon and it was a very enjoyable occasion, meeting all my book-loving friends, including some I hadn't actually met in three-dimensions before.

I'm not too comfortable in crowds (agoraphobic!) and the confined space was heaving especially as next door was the Arts for Grabs event.  I did a stint on Daphne's second-hand stall, twisting a few arms to get copies sold.

It was also great to collect some very nice local books, for which I must say thanks. I think the titles speak volumes about how food obsessed Malaysians are, and how proud of their cuisine.

The first course was Rojak, Amir Muhammad's collection of short shorts, written for the City of Shared Stories Kuala Lumpur project, and published by ZI Publications.

For the uninitiated (my overseas readers who need a glossary) Rojak is actually a salad served with a sweet  sauce with fishy undertones, and it is nicely described here. It is also used in a more metaphorical sense to describe Malaysian society with all its cultural variations, and in fact it fits this dip-into sweet-sour-crunchy collection of bite-sized stories. This book is beautifully illustrated by Chin Yew and in fact has the prettiest end-papers on any local publication I've seen.

If you want a nibble, here are links to some of his short-shorts : Correspondence, 1997: My Life as an Artis (You have to know a little Malaysian history to enjoy this one!), The Sex thing With the Tempoyak*.

(*Another food note : tempoyak is   fermented durian used in sambals and sauces. it's not stinky like the fresh fruit, but has a tongue-teasing sourness ... which I love.). 

Way back, I tried to nudge the enigmatic Amir into writing some fiction, and I am so glad that the British Council's project gave him the push he needed. (C'mon Amir, you are the person I most want to read a novel from!)

You can read Bissme's interview with Amir about the book in The Sun, and The New Straits Times review is up on Amir's blog.

Next in our food literary tour is Tapai by Hishamudin Rais, also published by ZI. Tapai is a desert made either from fermented rice or tapioca.  It's the ultimate boozy pudding. (Think rice pudding made with vodka!)

Tapai the book is equally delightful.  I've been enjoying Isham's columns which tell of his gastronomic adventures in the most far flung parts of the country in Off The Edge for years, and I will really treasure this compilation. He's entertaining, erudite, and refreshingly irreverent and the book offers as much in way of social commentary as it does information about different cuisines. One example which made me giggle - he describes at one point a Melayu Baru wedding reception :

Cold food surrounded by plastic flowers ... it's as tedious as trying to haggle a student concession price with a prostitute in Soho.

If you really want to get to the heart of the country, this book would be a great place to start.  And if you need more persuading - could you resist a chapter entitled Sex and the National Vegetables?

This is another beautifully produced book, the paper feels nice, the cover illustration (a picture of Isham made out of vegetables and spices) extremely clever, and it's lavishly illustrated with colour photos. (I hope some will be up on the ZI website in time and if they are, will link to them.)
The third book with a (tenuous!) gastronomic link is Chuah Kok Yee's collection of short stories Without Anchovies.  The title refers to the ikan bilis that comes along with the hot sambal to top the steaming dish of nasi lemak (coconut rice) - which is a Malaysian breakfast staple and features in the first story.

For the moment I would like to say that I am enjoying reading this very much indeed and intend to put up something more in another post soon.

At KLAB when the books were launched we were given - nice little touch this - little plastic containers of rojak, little twists of fragrant leaves containing tapai ... but where oh where, Kok Yee, was our nasi lemak?  You owe me!

By the way, did anyone work out why the doughnuts on sale at KLAB were named after Vincent Tan?  This is still seriously bothering me.

Saramago Dies

Dutch Gardener Wins IMPAC

The IMPAC Dublin Prize, the world's richest literary award, has been won by Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker with his debut novel The Twin.

The synopsis of the novel reads :

When Helmer’s twin brother dies in a car accident, he is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother’s role and spending the rest of his days ‘with his head under a cow’.

After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies.

The panel of judges, which this year included Anne Fine, commented :

Though rich in detail, it’s a sparely written story, with the narrator’s odd small cruelties, laconic humour and surprising tendernesses emerging through a steady, well-paced, unaffected style. ... The book convinces from first page to last. With quiet mastery the story draws in the reader. The writing is wonderful: restrained and clear, and studded with detail of farm rhythms in the cold, damp Dutch countryside. The author excels at dialogue, and Helmer’s inner story-telling voice also comes over perfectly as he begins to change everything around him. There are intriguing ambiguities, but no false notes. Nothing and no one is predictable, and yet we believe in them all: the regular tanker driver, the next door neighbour with her two bouncing children, and Jaap, the old farm labourer from the twins’ childhood who comes back to the farm in time for the last great upheaval, as Helmer finally takes charge of what is left of his own life.

According to Alison Flood in The Guardian, Bakkar got the idea for the book while he was hiking in the mountains of Corsica in 2002.  He said he had the idea of a son :

who was going to do something terrible to his father. ... It stayed in my mind for months and I got so frustrated – nothing was happening with the idea. Then I just sat down and got writing. I didn't know where I was going, I just started – for me that's a good way to write.

Bakkar is a gardener by trade and says that writing and gardening :

... work well together. In the autumn when I rake the dead leaves I can do it for hours – once I even disturbed a pile I'd made so I could go on raking. The sound is so wonderful: it lets you think in a subconscious way, in the back of your mind. 

Bakker also works as a skating instructor in the winter.

Best of British?

After the New Yorker's list of twenty American fiction writers under the age of 40 to watch out for last week, Lorna Bradbury in The Telegraph sets herself the challenge of identifying the British equivalents, based on merit and potential :

The List

1 Chris Cleave (b 1973) His first novel, Incendiary, was about a terrorist attack on London and was published on July 7, 2005. The Other Hand (2008), a cross-national thriller set in England and Nigeria, became a word-of-mouth hit.

2 Rana Dasgupta (b 1971) Born in Canterbury, but now lives in Delhi. His first collection of stories was set in a Tokyo airport; his first novel, Solo (2009), was about a 99-year-old Bulgarian chemist.

3 Adam Foulds (b 1974) After writing his verse novel The Broken Word about the Mau Mau rebellion, he wrote his Man Booker-shortlisted study of John Clare, The Quickening Maze (2009).

4 Sarah Hall (b 1974) The author of four novels, the first two of which were set in the early 20th century in her native Cumbria. Her most acclaimed work is The Carhullan Army (2007), about a band of women rebels surviving in a Britain hit by environmental disaster.

5 Steven Hall (b 1975) His debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts (2007) – about a man who loses his memory and tries to create a new identity for himself – unusually lived up to his publisher’s hype.

6 Mohsin Hamid (b 1971) The Reluctant Fundamentalist – a literary thriller about a Pakistani man who may, or may not, be a terrorist – came within a whisker of winning the Man Booker in 2007.

7 Anjali Joseph (b 1978) Her debut novel, Saraswati Park, is published next month. Sharp yet lyrical, the novel, which is set in Bombay, shows the influence of Amit Chaudhuri.

8 Joanna Kavenna (b 1974) Wrote seven unpublished novels before her eighth, Inglorious, was published by Faber and won the Orange new writers prize. Described as “Dostoevsky meets Bridget Jones”.

9 Benjamin Markovits (b 1973) Part way through a trilogy of novels about Byron and his circle, this assured writer has also just published an autobiographical novel, Playing Days, about a professional basketball player in Germany.

10 China Miéville (b 1972) Inspired by horror writers such as HP Lovecraft and Michael Moorcock, his science fiction and fantasy books – including Un Lun Dun for young adults – have legions of fans.

11 Paul Murray (b 1975) His second book, Skippy Dies, a comic novel set in a private boys school in Ireland, was recently described in the Telegraph as “gigantic, marvellous, witty…heartbreaking”.

12 Patrick Neate (b 1970) Won the Whitbread (now Costa) novel prize in 2001 for Twelve Bar Blues, a picaresque novel about New Orleans jazz artists. His most recent work, Jerusalem, deals, like his first novel, Musungu Jim, with European encounters with Africa.

13 Ross Raisin (b 1979) This Yorkshire-born novelist’s first book, God’s Own Country (2008), followed the dark story of a teenage farmer’s son living on the Moors.

14 Dan Rhodes (b 1972) After his second book, Rhodes declared he wanted to give up writing. Luckily for us he carried on with Gold (2007), about a Welsh-Japanese woman living in a coastal cottage, and his most recent book, Little Hands Clapping.

15 Kamila Shamsie (b1973) The author of five novels, mainly set in the Pakistan of her birth. Her most successful work is her latest: Burnt Shadows (1999) follows two families from the Second World War in Japan to the aftermath of 9/11.

16 Zadie Smith (b 1975) Wrote the wildly successful White Teeth while still at Cambridge. Her writing has matured since then, most notably in On Beauty (2005).

17 David Szalay (b1974) Winner of a Betty Trask Prize, Szalay’s The Innocent is told from the perspective of a KGB agent in late Forties Russia.

18 Adam Thirlwell (b 1978) Clever All Souls fellow who published Politics at the age of 25 and since then the Milan Kundera-inspired The Escape (2009).

19 Scarlett Thomas (b1972) The End of Mr Y (2007) was a surprise bestseller about a student who discovers a long-lost Victorian novel.

20 Evie Wyld (1980) After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (2009) was a haunting first novel set on the Australian East coat.

And of course, lively discussion is invited and anticipated.

Books From Yonks Ago

In this age of Amazon recommendations and Kindle downloads, I still rely on the old-fashioned services of a book buyer. My personal book buyer has an uncanny ability to anticipate my tastes. He has introduced me to out-of-print novelists, obscure playwrights and classic philosophy tracts. I’ve enjoyed nearly all of his choices, though quite a few remain stacked in my bookshelf, still unread.

In a delightful essay called My Backlogged Pages in The New York Times, John Feffer writes about his personal bookbuyer - a teenager in fact, who turns out to be .... . Well, read it yourself!

The End of Charing Cross?

You could take the Charing Cross Road once from Centre Point and walk south and stop for tea at the coffee shop in the National Portrait Gallery with the satisfaction that you had had the good fortune to be able to examine a facsimile edition of Tomé Pires's Summa Oriental, feasted on a second hand copy of the Haji's Book of Nursery Rhymes along the way, and you'd have probably met many remarkable men and Gurdjieff, too, and waded through murders most foul in the book-shelves of Murder Inc and probably managed to persuade a doubting bibliopolist that you had the means to buy a 1st edition copy of 1984 that you managed to persuade him to pull out from his locked showcase.

There were three chain bookshops in Charing Cross, but now there's only two, but the crux of the Charing Cross Road is not the big giants but the small shops, the second hand trade and antiquarian books and shops that look after the niche market ranging from esoterica to car manuals and books about maps and art, and first editions galore. It is this side of the street that is now under threat from money-grabbing landlords, and inhospitable planning policy and the Internet too and big bookshops and supermarkets who are able to buy in bulk and sell as loss leaders at three for the price of two.

Wan A. Hulaimi writes in today's New Sunday Times about the imminent demise of London's famous street of books. His early post on the street is linked here, and here's another link to a post on the same topic.

(And happy I am to hear that our Awang Goneng has a second book about Terengganu coming out later this year.  Now I want the big glossy coffee table version that only exists in my dreams!)

The Ideal Writing Day

Eventually, if you type anything at all, you will – of course – be asked about your typical writing day and you will have to say something, or be sneered and mocked during the kind of parties I don't attend.

What would your ideal writing day be like? There are those who would have us believe that we have to get up and write at the crack of dawn (ala Dorothea Brande) to get anything meaningful down on paper, and while this might be commendable,  what's perhaps more important is that we find our individual rhythms.

I very much enjoyed reading A.L. Kennedy's account of how she would ease herself into her perfect writing day (though she admits it is far from a typical writing day). 

Kingsolver in Orange

This year's Orange Prize for Fiction has gone to American author Barbara Kingsolver (left) for her sixth novel, The Lacuna, which is set between the the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover.  It  is described by Chair of Judges Daisy Godwin as :

... a book of breathtaking scale and shattering moments of poignancy

The award ceremony invariably stirs up the debate about whether there should be a literary prize exclusively for women, and another of this year's judges, Michele Roberts in The Independent, does a valiant job of defending this space.

Postscript :

I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political ... Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life. Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people. How can that not affect you politically? ... (It is) powerful craft; there's alchemy. So we have an obligation to take it seriously – and I do. Perhaps that's why I'm marked. I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.

Kingsolver talks about her life in writing to Maya Jaggi in The Guardian.

How Harper Became a Reader

Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it. ... And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up–some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.

Fifty years after she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee writes about how she became a reader for the Summer Reading edition of Oprah's O Magazine, and as you see above, some poignant comments about being a reader now. You can find the whole text of her letter here.

(Thanks v much Amir M for telling me about this.)

Why Language is Important

We live in a world now that’s so overawed by the performance of the computer or a motor car but not the language that can be used to sing paeans to them. We are in danger of losing our powers of thought and speech.

In a column in the New Sunday times today Wan A. Hulaimi (Awang Goneng)  discusses the latest data on the under achievement of British school leavers :

A study of 16-19 year olds by Shefffield University last year suggested that 17 per cent of them are illiterate ... (and) even among those who read and write, literacy skills have not been much improved since the 1980s.

And then he turns the questions back on Malaysia  where :

For so long we have relegated literature and the appreciation of language and words to the second tier whilst science and the quantum theory have been relentlessly pursued. ...We diverted funds into the sciences and engineering and medicine to fulfil the national need, and then it became fashionable to choose the so-called heavy options as nation after nation churned up more engineers and doctors and oceanographers than deep readers of books. ...  we have relegated the humanities to the academic sissy and those of imprecise minds and dreamy looks.

There is no doubt at all that science and maths are important, but really are our Malaysian schools challenging our students to use language and to actually use it as a tool for thought? I really don't think so.

New Yorker's Best Young Authors