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). 

No Long Term Career for Authors

In literature it makes no sense to talk of 'a career' in the sense of a life that can be managed by the exercise of prudent thought. Writers who flourish at the peak of their powers for longer than a decade, or even two, are rare birds. ... There are exceptions. Writers who work in a genre, John le Carré for example, or PD James, are more likely to sustain a run of quality and a sequence of winners. 

Robert McCrum on The Guardian blog examines the reality of an author's long-term publishing prospects and it's quite depressing.

Authors Lives Don't Make Great Cinema

The lives of popular writers such as Dan Brown and JK Rowling would make better movies. They are rich, powerful celebrities; they dine with presidents and travel the world. But, for some reason, nobody seems to take them seriously as cinema subjects. Perhaps if they developed crack habits and slept with lots of groupies things might change.

Writer's lives don't always make great cinema, says Evan Maloney on The Guardian blog, unless they :

...cater to the fantasy that writers are drunk, mad, sex-obsessed geniuses inspired by the holy spirit (50% proof). Think Henry Miller (Henry and June), William Burrows (Naked Lunch), Hunter S Thompson (Where the Buffalo Roam, Fear and Loathing) the Marquis de Sade (Quills) and Charles Bukowski (Bar Fly, Factotum).

But the truth is, of course, that most writers lead outwardly boring lives  ... sitting at their desks and yes, putting down one word after another.  Tortured geniuses there may be, here and there, but they aren't usually the guys coming up with the goods.

Maloney's post is inspired by the forthcoming biopic of Leon Tolstoy (played by Christopher Plummer - pictured above), The Last Station.

Still Edgy After All These Years

Peace of mind doesn't always seem to be the territory of a successful author. This may be I think be for the best (at least for us readers!) since mid-life complacency probably wouldn't auger well for ongoing creativity. Novelist Rachel Cusk, whose new novel (her 7th) is The Bradshaw Variations, is compared to "a highly strung racehorse" by Lynn Barber in The Observer. The author seems to have it all, says Barber :

She is still extremely good looking, at 42, with a slim figure and long, dark, shiny hair. She comes from a wealthy Catholic family, was educated at St Mary's Convent in Cambridge and then read English at Oxford. She published her first novel, Saving Agnes, in 1993 and won the Whitbread first novel prize. There have been seven novels, including her new one, and two books of non-fiction.

but :

... sees herself as embattled, hounded by critics, loathed by other mothers, attacked with slings and arrows from every side. She says that when she cycles to school with her daughters, other women hiss abuse at her from Range Rovers. She used to describe herself as a red-blooded feminist but nowadays admits: "I find that I like women less than I did." She avoids school gates and places where other mothers congregate.

At The Times author Nick Hornby talks to Kate Muir who asks why despite the author's success (Book sales over 5 m. A Sundance-winning film. A new novel out. A happy marriage. ) :

.. he is ... not smug, or at least satisfied? Why does he virtually chain-smoke in our interview, and confess cheerily that he is in therapy once a week? Why does he avoid the glitz of London’s literary salons? Why is he addicted to bucket-sized Starbucks, when he could afford an espresso machine or go to any of the lovely Italianate joints near his office in Islington for a real coffee?

He also talks on video about his new book Juliet, Naked which tackles :

... among other things, ageing and creativity, as well as fatherhood and geekery.

Life After Booze

Much ink has been spilled on the question of why so many writers are alcoholics. Of America’s seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes—to whom we can add an equally drunk-and-disorderly line of Brits: Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, all doing the conga to (in most cases) an early grave. According to Donald Goodwin in his book “Alcohol and the Writer”: Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy. Writing requires self-confidence; alcohol bolsters confidence. Writing is lonely work; alcohol assuages loneliness. Writing demands intense concentration; alcohol relaxes.

But what happens when a writer stops drinking? asks Tom Shone in Intelligent Life Magazine. Does the writing become pedestrian, lose its vigour? He looks at the careers of some of the greatest American authors - F Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Hemingway. Raymond Carver stands out as the writer who eventually gave up the bottle after a long struggle and realised a new creative vitality :

For a year he wrote nothing (“I can’t convince myself it’s worth doing”), just played bingo and got fat on doughnuts, but then he remarried, and he went on to write some of his best work—he was nominated for a Pulitzer prize for his story collection, “Cathedral”, illuminating the downtrodden blue-collar lives he had written about before with unexpected moments of revelation and connection.

Golding the Wannabe Rapist?

Some rather unsavoury aspects of author, William Golding, have come to light after John Carey, the emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford university, was given access to a personal journal kept by Golding. Among them, that he tried to rape a 13 year old girl while a teenager himself; that as a teacher at a public school he tried to set boys against one another in the manner of Lord of the Flies; and that he depended on drink to help him fight his demons. Kathryn Hughes on The Guardian blog is concerned that Golding will be remembered as a sensational headline, and she observes :

Golding knew perfectly well that he was leaving behind an incendiary story that Carey was bound to pass on to the rest of the world. This raises the interesting possibility that Golding was secretly keen to be shown to posterity as a bit of an animal. Much of his work, including of course Lord of the Flies, concerns the beast which lies just below man's civilised surface. What better way to advertise the authenticity of your work than to reveal just what a savage soul lurked beneath the meek and mild outer facade of the Nobel laureate and Booker prize winner?

Sam Leith in The London Evening Standard is refreshingly cynical :

The usual balls gets spouted about the “dark side of genius”, the “sliver of ice” or “demons”. But really the duty of the biographer to his publishers is to produce a news story for which a Sunday newspaper will pay: and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that a literary biography without a sex-Nazi, child-slavery, and/or hamster-rape angle is now dead in the water as a publishing proposition.

And nothing, no nothing, anyone can dig up about his private life can knock Golding off his pedestal for me. And I guess that goes for any other author I revere. In fact, for any author ... Postscript : Christopher Howe in The Telegraph lists some other authors who had a rather shady past. Among the revelations :

Geoffrey Chaucer faced a lawsuit alleging his rape of a girl called Cicely Champaigne, a baker's daughter.

Postscript 2 Just came across this nice quote from Paul Theroux* which seems to make sense in this context:

If you look into history, you won't find many jolly, well-balanced people who were writers. I mean, look at them. ... In a way, you can't be a writer unless you have sort of a personality problem. Balanced people don't become writers, obviously. Balanced people become gardeners, they raise happy families, they go to work every day, they smile. They have noodle salad.

(Originally from CNN website, now longer online.)

The Thomas Pynchon Voice-Over

Thomas Pynchon is a noted literary recluse. Despite being the best-selling author of V and Gravity's Rainbow and achieving cult status for his writing, so little is know about him that he was once described by CNN as :

... an enigma shrouded in a mystery veiled in anonymity. ... you won't see Pynchon hawking his wares on Oprah's book club. You won't find him signing his name for fans down at the corner bookstore. ... He so shuns publicity that he doesn't allow his likeness to be used on book jackets. All known photographs of the man date to the early 1950s. Until Nancy Jo Sales of New York Magazine tracked him down last year, no reporter had interviewed him in four decades.

He did, it's true appear in an episode of The Simpsons (and don't you love the paper bag!) :



and he did (remember?) step forward to defend Ian McEwan against that plagiarism charge.

Now, in his closest brush with public life for decades, Pynchon reads in the trailer for his new book Inherent Vice [via Reading Copy]. Enjoy! :



In these days when authors are expected to have a high public profile to publicise their work, I think it's really nice to read about a writer who is able to keep his mystique and let his work talk for him.

Five Laws of the Novelist

American psychiatrist Stephen Bergman (who writes fiction under the pen name Samuel Shem) contributes an anecdotal piece called Five Laws of the Novelist to The Boston Globe.

I liked this :

Law Four: There Is No Humiliation Beneath Which a Writer Cannot Go. My second novel had come out in paperback, and my wife and I were on a hiking trip in New Hampshire. We stopped in a mom-and-pop store for lunch. There, in a spindle bookrack, were two copies of my novel. I immediately suspected my wife had placed them there, to make me feel good. Nope. I took both books off the rack and went up to the little old lady at the counter, and announced, “I wrote this book.’’

“Oh, you wrote that book?’’ she asked.

I averred yes. I asked if she would like me to sign the copies.

“Oh no, our folks would never buy a book that was writ in.’’

Another standard humiliation: At an author-signing in a bookstore, sitting at a desk near the window, facing a wall of Grishams, watching people hurrying past as if you are a child molester. Not fun, especially if your publisher has overlooked advertising the event.

Also worth reading is his paper Fiction as Resisitance.

Writers - Live a Bit First!

To generalise wildly, the career path of most young (successful) writers goes something like this. Go to university – preferably Oxford or Cambridge – and read English. While there, start writing novel and get a few pieces published in the university magazine. Move to London after graduation, start a creative writing postgraduate degree and pick up some work reviewing books for the literary supplements while tidying up the fourth draft of your novel. You then get your novel published, which gets a few kind reviews thanks to the contacts you've made and sells precisely 317 copies. ... But someone, somewhere offers you a contract to write a second novel and your career is up and running. From then on you have a meta life. You write because you write, not because you necessarily have anything interesting to say. You probably actually write quite well, but you are trading on style, not substance, because you've never actually done anything much beyond writing.

John Crace on The Guardian blog argues, quite rightly (and with reference to J.G. Ballard who had served his time in the real world) that too many literary writers are seriously lacking in life experience. And yes, it shows.

So wannabes, go out and live a bit!

The Book Advance

Michael Meyer in The New York Times tackles the thorny topic of author advances and points out that though they may sound huge, may not provide authors with much more than the minimum wage.

Meyer reminds us of how much the business of publishing has changed for new authors. He quotes Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic :

It used to be that the first book earned a modest advance, then you would build an audience over time and break even on the third or fourth book. ... Now the first book is expected to land a huge advance and huge sales. The media only reports those, not the long path of writers like John Irving, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler and Toni Morrison. The notion of the ‘first book with flaws’ is gone; now we see a novelist selling 9,000 hardcovers and 15,000 paperbacks, and they see themselves as a failure.

Rather nice :

The question of what to pay which authors has confounded publishers at least since a stationer agreed to give Milton £5 for the right to sell “Paradise Lost.” Joseph Conrad often begged his agent for more money and once asked to be advanced “a fountain pen of good repute.”

Marquez Downs Pen

Although it was rumoured last year that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was working on a new novel, his agent announced this week that she thinks the 82 year old master of magical realism has put down his pen for good.

Now 82, Marquez's last book Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores, which attracted very mixed reviews, was published five years ago. Marquez in fact told fans last year that he was worn out by writing.
Mark Lawson on The Guardian blog reckons that great writers usually knock off work well before the ends of their lives as a way to control quality, but notes that fans and publishers find it hard to let go.

Postscript :

Did Agatha Christie suffer from Alzheimer's towards the end of her life? Academics at Toronto University have found :

... statistically significant drops in vocabulary, and increases in repeated phrases and indefinite nouns in 15 detective novels from The Mysterious Affair at Styles to Postern of Fate ... These language effects are recognised as symptoms of memory difficulties associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Thanks, Chet, for this link!

Incidentally, here's the original article in PDF and the analysing tool is here so you can try it yourself!

Nother Postscript :

Or have we just been too premature? Literary Saloon raps all our knuckles for spreading ill-founded gossip. Note to self - resist being sensationalist when the newspapers go down that route. We bloggers should be the real professionals!

More at The Guardian.

Question : what kind of agent doesn't know whether her star author is writing or not?

Just Slit Your Wrists and Bleed on the Page

No enjoyment. No, none.

says Colm Toibin when asked by M.J. Highland which of his novels he enjoyed writing most, in an interview at The Manchester Review [via]. (The whole thing is altogether so fascinating I urge the writers among you to read it). :

Oh there’s no pleasure. Except that I don’t have to work for anyone who bullies me. I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway and I would disapprove of it.

And he says that he came close to breakdown when writing certain passages.

The best thing about writing, he says, is the money (!), though clearly he is an author who has no choice but to write :

Because I have things that will not go away. Some of them are true, some slowly become imagined. They do not disappear just because I write them. If I don’t write them, I find that suddenly I am writing them. They make their way into sentences and I feel a need to finish what I began, to formalise it and then publicise it. I emphasise that it heals nothing.

Is writing for a living a joy or a chore for other authors? On The Guardian blog nine novelists, including A. L. Kennedy, Joyce Carol Oates, and Amit Chaudhari talk about their feelings re the process.

Most don't find writing a barrel load of laughs. Though Will Self declares:

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte.

There is some lively discussion from the blog readers, many of whom don't seem terribly impressed with whingy writers!

BTW, there really is so much good stuff to read in the second edition of The Manchester Review. Do go read.

The Prolific Author

Matters of literary quantity have been much on my mind since a new book of mine was published recently. A fair percentage of the reviews described me as “prolific” or “highly prolific,” in one case “wildly prolific.” Now, I’m not going to argue about the accuracy of this. I’ve published 20 books in 22 years (some quite short), and I’d say that’s not excessive, given that I don’t have a day job. But accurate or not, “prolific” definitely didn’t feel like an unalloyed compliment.

Why are we so suspicious of authors who are prolific? asks Geoff Nicholson in The New York Times.

He's found himself wearing the tag himself, and finds himself in some formidable company. Joyce Carol Oates, wrote more than 100 books in 45 years, Updike who managed "60 or so books in 50 years more if you include all the poetry", and Anthony Burgess who wrote 75 or so books in some 40 years and :

... used to say he never turned down any reasonable offer of work, and very few unreasonable ones.

But, Nicholson observes, there's a snob factor at work here :

Prolificacy is not just permitted in genre novelists, it’s insisted upon. ...If the likes of Dean Koontz, Danielle Steel and James Patterson (you can add your own favorites here) weren’t so prolific, they wouldn’t be nearly so popular. Supply and demand are mutually supportive at the “low” end: copious production thrives on copious consumption. If we start invoking Trollope or Dickens as popular, prolific writers who also have literary respectability, we’re only confirming that there’s something antique about the idea of creating a large body of serious yet popular writing.

Will you Still Need Me, Will You Still Read Me ... When I'm 64?

Yusof's comment the other day about so many awards being for younger writers, while there seems to be little for the older writer really got me thinking.

I started writing at 40 and I think I'm quite typical of folks who suddenly realise that life is passing by so quickly and so much is going by unrecorded, and writing was something we'd always meant to do but never quite got round to.

Several of the participants of my creative writing course have been over 60 - one participant was a very lively 84 even, another touching 70. (Though interestingly these older folks have all been British or American - perhaps because in Western cultures learning is seen as lifelong.)

Kathryn Grey in an excellent post on the New Welsh Review writes about the "facism of youth" in the literary world and the neglect of the older writer which I think will have you nodding in agreement, Yusof.

On a related note, four women authors (Helen Oyeyemi 24, Zoe Heller 43, Lionel Shriver 51, and Penelope Liveley 75 - pictured above - discuss how their different ages affect their everyday existence, hopes and fears in a very enjoyable piece in the Telegraph.

Amis' Serious Money

Author Martin Amis (who coincidentally wrote a novel called Money) :

... is earning close to £3,000-an-hour in his role as a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester

according to Arifa Akbar in The Independent.

The Manchester Evening News discovered that :

... he is committed to working for 28 hours a year in this role, outside of his writing and research duties as a professor. This work earns him a salary of £80,000 ...

Craig Brown in The Telegraph wonders if it really is all that much compared with what other are earning.

Authors - Protect Your Space!

Doris Lessing speaking at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, told her audience that she feels “desperately sorry” for young authors, pushed into promotional tours and expected to do the rounds of literary festivals - in themselves enjoyable, but likely to take them away from the core business of putting words on paper:

We all know that writing comes out of a man or a woman sitting alone in a room with the telephone off the hook, a cup of coffee and in the good old days, a cigarette.

Ben Hoyle, writing in the Times, points out that the remarks expand on thoughts expressed in Lessing’s Nobel lecture on December 7*, which was recorded and played to the Swedish Academy hall in Stockholm because of the 88 year-old author's ill health. In this Lessing said:

Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.

If this writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

When writers talk to each other, what they ask each other is always to do with this space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"

Let us jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We, cynically enquire, How are her boobs? Is she good-looking? If this is a man, Charismatic? Handsome? We joke but it is not a joke.

This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of paparazzi begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening.

He, she is flattered, pleased.

But ask in a year's time what he or she is thinking: I've heard them: "This is the worst thing that could have happened to me.

Some much publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written what they wanted to, meant to.

And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears. "Have you still got your space? Your sole, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don't let it go."

(* I'm so glad that Hoyles' piece sent me off to read the whole lecture. What she says about the hunger for books and thirst for knowledge in Africa compared to western indifference among plenty, is something I can personally vouch for after living in Nigeria and teaching in a school as poorly equipped as the one she describes.)

Author Quotes of the Year

The Times picks up some of the best author quotes of the year. My favourites:

Least enthusiastic author

“Q: How much time, if any, do you spend on the web? Is it a distraction or a blessing?

Jenny Diski : Acres of time, wasted, wasted. I play poker (and lose), I play ludo and mah jong. I check out MetaFilter. I buy frocks. Anything. It’s a kind of hell. I sometimes think I might go back to typewriting. But you can’t get the ribbons.”

Insightful interview of the year

“Q: What drew you to the story?

Denis Johnson : I have no idea.

Q: When you were writing Tree of Smoke, did you have an audience or ideal reader in mind? If so, who?

DJ: I write for my wife, my agent and my editor.

Q: Were there moments in the writing process where you worried the book wouldn’t work? If so, how did you press on?

DJ: Well, I’ve never thought about this before, but now that you ask it occurs to me I don’t have much interest in whether my books work or not.”

Interview with Denis Johnson by America’s National Book Foundation, when Tree of Smoke was a finalist for their awards

Excessive information award

Norman Mailer to Philip Roth, in queue for the loo before a memorial service: “Phil, sometimes I have to go into a telephone kiosk to pee. You just can’t wait at my age.”

Roth: “I know, it’s the same with me.”

Exchange recalled by Mailer in conversation with Andrew O’Hagan

Rowling Confronts Ghosts

It was the first time since the mid-Nineties that the J. K. Rowling had set foot inside the small apartment, just two miles from a £2million home she owns in Edinburgh, and this time she had a TV film crew with her, recording footage for a documentary*.

It was an emotional return and Britain's Daily Mail reports that she burst into tears, saying:

This is really where I turned my life around completely. My life really changed in this flat. ... Because it's such a well-worn part of my story now, it's a big yawn to hear how I wrote it, as though it was all some kind of publicity stunt for a year. But it was my life and it was very hard and I didn't know that there was going to be this fairytale resolution - and coming back here is just full of ghosts.

Rowling wrote some of her first book, Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, in notebooks in a nearby cafe.

*To be shown on ITV1 next Sunday.

The UK Book Biz in 2007

Robert McCrum in the Observer reviews fortunes of the UK publishing world in 2007, and reports that in a year dominated by "HP7":

Rowling's reported wealth would rise this year to £545m, but the reality of literary life was rubbed in when, last March, a survey of some 25,000 authors revealed that the typical British writer earned only about £4,000 a year (significantly less than the £6,300 reported in 2001). Blogging and the internet might have liberated the writer from the garret, but it seems that you still cannot take the garret out of the writer.

He also slips in this, which will no doubt delight many of you:

From some points of view, 'literary fiction' is becoming as much a genre as science fiction.

And I was always snobbish enough to think that it was at the burning sun centre of the universe with everything else in orbit, dreaming of becoming it!

Rich List

We all know who the UK's richest writer is - Joanne Rowling, worth a cool £545m.

But would you like to lay bets as to which other authors top the list according to a survey conducted by the Times? And then there was, of course, that Forbes piece about top-earning authors last year which gives a more transatlantic perspective ...