On Writing - A.L. Kennedy

Although I have never read any fiction by A.L. Kennedy (which is about as inauspicious a way to begin a review as any), I couldn't resist when Jonathan Cape offered me a copy of On Writing to review.  This isn't so much because I intend to be a writer myself (although I have always rather hoped to be - and, I suppose, in some ways I am - just theses and blog posts rather than novels, at the mo) but because I thought it might reveal more about the author's life and processes.

It's just as well that I approached On Writing with this proviso, because it's a bit of a misnomer - there isn't a great deal about writing, particularly not about how to write, but there is a great deal about being a writer. A crucial distinction. Rather than giving step by step instructions, or even general guidelines, Kennedy writes about the life of a writer - which seems to consist almost solely of travelling, getting ill, and running workshops for other people who want to be writers.

No one can teach you how to write, or how you write or how you could write better.  Other people can assist you in various areas, but the way that you learn how you write, the way you really improve, is by diving in and reworking, taking apart, breaking down, questioning, exploring, forgetting and losing and finding and remembering and generally testing your prose until it shows you what it needs to be, until you can see its nature and then help it to express itself as best you can under your current circumstances.  This gives you - slowly - an understanding of how you use words on the page to say what you need to.

So, that explains why she concentrates on other matters.  If, however, you are desperate to read about the act of writing itself, in the minutiae of prose details, then turn straight to chapter 22.  That's precisely what A.L. Kennedy does there - building up the opening sentence to a story, rejecting versions, explaining why she doing so and what thought goes into the construction of each sentence.  Granted, I didn't much like the end result (it didn't encourage me to read her fiction, I must confess), but it was fascinating to observe.

This early part of the book is a collection of blog columns Kennedy wrote for the Guardian, and I found them compulsively readable. I love her sense of humour, the dryness of her writing, and her obvious love for the craft of writing. Occasionally, I'll admit, I wanted her to lighten up a tiny bit - as she often admits, writing is not back-breaking labour - but I suppose that's better than flippancy about writing, in a book about writing.  And while Kennedy writes about the horrors of appearing in public or having her photo taken - being very deprecating about her own appearance - she has the sort of face that, if you saw her on a bus, you'd say "By gad, good woman, you must write!" It's so wry and cynical, and you get the feeling that it would be world-weary if she didn't find every facet of existence ultimately so amusing.

The next section of the book has longer essays, significantly about running workshops - offering a really interesting insight to a world I know so little about, and showing how much thought Kennedy puts into preparing them (as well as her scorn for those who put on workshops without similar levels of thought.)  There is also - of course - more about writing, and I particularly loved this paragraph, which brilliantly demolished a tenet of writing which I have always thought nonsensical:

Personal experience may, for example, be suggested as a handy source of authenticity, perhaps because of the tediously repeated 'advice' imposed upon new authors: "Write about what you know."  Many people are still unacquainted with the unabridged version of this advice: "Write about what you know.  I am an idiot and have never heard of research, its challenges, serendipities and joys.  I lack imagination and therefore cannot imagine that you may not.  Do not be free, do not explore the boundaries of your possible talent, do not - for pity's sake - grow beyond the limits of your everyday life and its most superficial details. Do not go wherever you wish to, whether that's the surface of your kitchen table or the surface of the moon.  Please allow me - because I'm insisting - to tell you what to think."

And finally in On Writing is a piece she refers to often throughout - one which she takes to the Edinburgh Festival, as well as performing around the country.  It's very, very funny - in a rather broader way than the rest of the book, and if it feels less natural than her blog writing, then that is because it is a performance piece. Some of it repeats things she has mentioned earlier, but for a book which is compiled from various sources, and also for a blog-based book, On Writing is remarkably unrepetitive.  I dread to think how repetitive Stuck-in-a-Book has been.  I dread to think how repetitive Stuck-in-a-Book has been.  (A-ha-ha.)

All in all, a great book to have on a bibliophile's bookshelf - perhaps not the first place to go if you are penning your own novel - although if you've got past the 'getting published' stage, On Writing might well be an invaluable guide to the life of the writer.  For the rest of us, it's simply a great read.

And... more books!

On Saturday I was in London to watch Judi Dench on stage in Peter and Alice - which I will write about soon - but whilst I was there, I also bought some books... well, in actual fact I bought one book, and exchanged a lot.  I took a big bag of unwanted books to Notting Hill Book & Comic Exchange (and loitered outside until they opened at the curious time of 10.25am), was given a fistful of vouchers, and bought this pile of books...

From the top down...

Down The Rabbit Hole - Juan Pablo Villalobos

Somebody is responsible for this being on my radar... Simon Savidge, is it you? 

Screwtop Thompson - Magnus Mills

I don't think I even knew about this Mills novel, but it's a lovely edition, and I'm happy to add to my pile of unread Mills!

The Fifth Child - Doris Lessing

My book group will be reading this later in the year - the only Lessing book I've read before was Memoirs of a Survivor, and jury is very much out...

Knole & The Sackvilles - Vita Sackville-West

I have read through this in the Bodleian, and I do hanker after the beautiful first edition I read there, but this paperback will do for now.

Twelves Day - Vita Sackville-West

Who knew VSW wrote travel literature?  I certainly didn't - but now I do.

1066 and All That - W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman

This has been on my Amazon wishlist for many years, and I finally nabbed a copy when I could.

Young Anne - Dorothy Whipple

This was the one I bought, in an Oxfam in Angel!  Quite a coup, since it doesn't seem to be available anywhere online - and I nearly lost it to the lovely man behind the counter, who hadn't spotted it. We had a quick chat about Whipple, Persephone, and Stella Gibbons - excellent customer service!

The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader 

I've read The Yellow Wallpaper, naturally, but there is plenty more to read, it seems!

My Brilliant Career - Miles Franklin

Since I own the sequel, I figure I should get this one too! (And, er, maybe read one or other of them sometime.)

Poor Caroline - Winifred Holtby

Anderby Wold - Winifred Holtby

One of these days I'm actually going to read something by Winifred Holtby, you just see if I don't.

Over to you, as always!  Let me know if you've read any of these - or if any grab your fancy.  I certainly think it was an impressive haul for a net total of £3.99 and a bagful of books I didn't want!

Twelve Things I Learned After My Novel Was Born

by Amy Sue Nathan

        Congratulations! It's a book!

1. People you never expected to contact you will do so with kindness and enthusiasm, and sometimes with chocolate. 

2. People you expected to contact you, will not.

3. Urgent Care Centers will be open in the middle of the night even when your book has launched just in case your 21-year-old cuts his finger on a broken glass at 1 am.  

4. Photos will pour in from all over the country with sightings of the novel you wrote. Sometimes you won't even know the people who snapped and sent the photo. 

5. Someone will criticize your story and then say she read it in one day because she couldn't put it down, making your head spin. 

6. You will check Amazon rankings even though everyone has said the numbers don't matter.

7. Amazon rankings will delight and/or destroy you (sometimes in the same hour) even though everyone has said that the numbers don't matter. 

8. Washing machines will leak. Because they can. 

9. Sleep will elude you, except in the middle of the day.

10. Speaking to a group of high school creative writing students (daughter included) will be the highlight of the week. 

11. You will receive many teacup gifts, and hope that your publisher puts jewelry on your next book cover (fingers crossed). Or a tropical island. 

12. You will realize that this is the best job for you, just like you imagined. 

Amy Sue Nathan is the author of THE GLASS WIVES, published by St. Martin's Griffin in May 2013. She lives and writes near Chicago where she hosts the popular blog, Women's Fiction Writers and has published articles in Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune and New York TimesOnline among many others.  Amy is the proud mom of a son and a daughter in college, and a willing servant to two rambunctious rescued dogs.

The Cynical Wives Brigade (A Woman of My Age - Nina Bawden)

When Karen mentioned that she'd bought some Nina Bawden books, I commented that I had a few on my shelves, but had never got around to reading her - and, hey presto, a joint readalong of A Woman of My Age (1967) was born.  Karen's already posted her review here, but I have to admit that I have yet to read it - because I wanted to give you my thoughts before I discovered hers.

I didn't know what to expect from Nina Bawden - I've never even read her famous children's books - so I started the novel with more or less a blank canvas. Elizabeth is the heroine (if the term fits... which it doesn't, really) and is in Morocco with her husband of eighteen years, Richard.  The heat is stultifying and their companions a trifle wearying - the obese, overly-friendly Mrs Hobbs and her quiet husband, and the unexpected friend from home, Flora. Unexpected to Elizabeth, anyway...

As their journey across the country continues, the web between these characters gets more and more complex, as secrets are revealed and alliances kindled - but the mainstay of the narrative is Elizabeth's musings on her past life, as her marriage to Richard is slowly documented, and considered in minute detail.  For Elizabeth is nothing if not introspective - she's even introspective about being introspective, which does lead to one amusing line at least:

She peered appraisingly at herself in the mirror, pulling faces as if she were alone, and I was embarrassed by her candour. (Though I have as much interest in my appearance as most women, I feel it is somehow degrading to admit it.  Before we came away, I bought a special cream supposed to restore elasticity to the skin, but I destroyed the wrapper on the jar and the accompanying, incriminating literature, as furtively as I had, when young, removed the cover of a book on sex.)

Before I go further, I should put forward the weak statement that I quite enjoyed A Woman of My Age, because I'm going to harp on about the things I didn't much like.  So, while I do that, please bear in mind that Bawden's writing is always good, her humour (when it comes) is sharp and well-judged, and her characters are generally believable.  There is even some pathos in the account of Elizabeth's ageing relatives, but I shan't comment much on that - because they are pretty incidental.

Elizabeth's age, referred to in the title, is 37.  She has been married for nearly half her life, and is obviously rather dissatisfied.  We know this, because she often tells us.  Sometimes (in this mention of her early married life) it is almost laughably stereotypical:

We were bored with our husbands.  They were sober young men, marking school books, studying, advancing into an adult world of action and responsibility.

This is, I shall admit now, my main problem with the novel - and that which inspired my title to this post.  Elizabeth is a card-carrying, fully-paid-up member of the Cynical Wives Brigade.  You may remember how little I liked Margaret Drabble's The Garrick Year - you can read my thoughts here - and a lot of A Woman of My Age is cut from the same cloth. Perhaps it's because I've never been a wife, and because I wasn't around in the 1960s, but I find this gosh-is-my-privileged-life-wonderful-enough unutterably tedious, not to mention the casual adultery that all these characters indulge in.  Adultery seems, at best, a stimulus for another tedious, introspective conversation or contemplation.  Children, as with Drabble's novel, are included simply to show the passage of time, and none of the adult characters seem to have any particularly parental instincts.

Was this a 1960s thing?  Well, Lynne Reid Banks's The L-Shaped Room (1960) is one of my favourite novels, but I can't deny that it is very introspective - but Jane isn't a wife, so she manages to escape the Cynical Wives Brigade.  I haven't read many novels from this decade, but already I get the idea (supported by this novel) that it's full of this type of navel-gazing, morally-lax types.  For someone born in the 1980s, incidentally, there were a couple of moments which are very of-their-time, and rather shocking to me. (Were these views still acceptable in the 1960s?? Both are from Elizabeth's point of view, and neither seem ironic.)

As a result, I drank more than was sensible in my condition: like a lot of women, I always felt more unwell during the first three months of pregnancy than afterwards, and alcohol went to my head very quickly.

and

I was surprised at the violence of his remorse - after all, he had only hit me

I suppose I can't blame Bawden for that, if those were still prevalent opinions and actions in the time.  But what I can blame her for is making an interesting scenario and potentially interesting characters get so dragged down by the dreariness of reading about Elizabeth's self-pity and moping. To do her justice, another character in the novel does accuse her of exactly these faults. I cheered when I read this:

If they are a sample of your usual conversation I'm not surprised that he doesn't listen to you.  You're no more worth listening to than any bored, spoiled young woman, whining because the routine of married life has gone stale on you.  It really is very provoking, to a woman of my generation.  When I was thirty, we didn't have the vote, we had to fight for a place in the world.  Now you've got it, most of you don't bother to use it.  I daresay it's dull, being tied to a house and young children, but it was a life you chose, after all, you were so eager to rush into it that you didn't even take your degree.

I'm always curious when authors incorporate criticisms of their novel or characters into the narrative itself.  Is it a moment of self-awareness, to distance themselves from the voice of the narrator?  Is it the belief that recognising one's faults is the same as correcting them?  Or is simply a moment of regret, for the direction a novel should have taken?

(I should make clear - a lot of the things Elizabeth complains about are probably genuine issues. But complaining does not a novel make.)

And I haven't even mentioned the big twist at the end.  I don't really know what to say about it.

I'm still glad that I read Nina Bawden, and I'll have a look at the other one's on my shelves to see if they're any less frustrating.  Right now I'm off to see what Karen thought... come join me?

A very, very quick Bank Holiday post...

25 signs you're addicted to reading?

I reckon we'll all tick at least 20. Aaaaaand... go!

The Great Gatsby: What Next?

I thought, with The Great Gatsby (1925) being a big film at the moment, there might be people out there who are looking for other novels of the 1920s to enjoy. I haven't seen the film, and I have to admit that I wasn't particularly impressed by the novel when I read it a decade ago, but I do know a thing or two about the 1920s.  So do a lot of you, of course, but I thought, nonetheless, in case people stumble across Stuck-in-a-Book wanting to read more from the 1920s, I create a little decade Stuck-in-a-Book best-of (clicking on the title takes you to a full-length review).  Most of these don't have much in common with The Great Gatsby except for decade of publication, but - whisper it - I'd argue that they're all better.

1920 : Queen Lucia by E.F. Benson
To see how the Bright Young Things were behaving on the British side of the channel - or, rather, the Bright Middle-Aged Things - you can do no better than Benson's hilarious series Mapp & Lucia, featuring the warring heroines and their sniping, fawning, and eccentric associates.  But don't be one of those people who starts with Mapp and Lucia, the fourth book - start at the beginning, with queen bee Queen Lucia.

1921 : The Dover Road by A.A. Milne
If you've never read any of AAM's books for adults, or never read a play, or both, then this is a great place to start. It was P.G. Wodehouse's favourite play, and is definitely one of mine too - an eloping couple stop for the night in a hotel, and curiously can't leave in the morning... it's all very funny, ingeniously plotted, and surprisingly poignant in the end.

1922 : The Heir by Vita Sackville-West
A short, powerful novella about a man who inherits a house unexpectedly, and slowly falls in love with it.  There is more passion in this tale than you'll find in most romances, and if you can find the beautiful Hesperus edition, all the better.

1923 : Bliss by Katherine Mansfield
The link is a slight cheat here, since it goes to Mansfield's Selected Stories, but I had to include KM somewhere. Her writing is modernist without being inaccessible, and she is one of a tiny group of authors whose short stories satisfy me whatever mood I'm in. Observant, striking, entirely beautiful.

1924 : The Green Hat by Michael Arlen
The British equivalent of The Great Gatsby, at least in terms of parties, glitz disguising melancholy, and an enigma of a central character.  Also rather better, I'd say - although a writing style which perhaps takes some getting used to.  I described it as 'like reading witty treacle'.

1925 : Pastors and Masters by Ivy Compton-Burnett
If you've never tried any of Dame Ivy's delicious, divisive fiction, this is a good litmus test. Set in a boys' school, it's Ivy-lite. If you like it, you'll love her richer works - if you don't, then you'll know to steer clear forever.

1926 : As It Was by Helen Thomas
A biography/autobiography by the poet Edward Thomas's wife (followed later by World Without End) - together they are exceptionally good accounts of marriage, in all its pitfalls and peaks, and subsequently its fragility.

1927 : The Love-Child by Edith Olivier
One of my all-time favourite novels, this tells of a spinster who inadvertently conjures her childhood imaginary friend into life. From this premise comes a very grounded narrative, which is heart-breaking as well as an increasingly clever manipulation of a fanciful idea.

1928 : Keeping Up Appearances by Rose Macaulay
Rose Macaulay is one of those bubbling-under authors - both from critical acceptance and middlebrow adoration. She deserves better in both categories, I think, and this delightful, thoughtful novel about a lightweight novelist and an aspiring highbrow woman is both funny and clever.

1929 : A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
You've probably heard of this essay, and you probably know it's central tenet (about women needing an income and a room of their own, in order to write) but if you haven't read it, you're missing a real treat. If you find her fiction too flowery, this is a perfect place to sample her exemplary writing.

I hope you've enjoyed that quick whirl through the 1920s!  Why not do the same mini project for the 1920s - or any other decade - on your own blog?  Pop a link in the comments if you do...

How Does Your Garden Grow? The Ugly Monsters Hiding In Your Plot

by Mindy McGinnis

Spring has most definitely sprung, and I'm going to follow up Barbara's wonderful gardening post with one of my own.

We've all got 'em. Those ideas that spring up in the middle of the night from a dream, or right before bed, and suddenly it's like somebody poured MiracleGro on your brain and those seeds of a story have turned into a novel without a lot of help from your gray matter. And sometimes, a seed that we purposely planted sits there calmly looking back at us, unsure of what it's supposed to do, while we stare back at it, wondering what happened to the MiracleGro nozzle. For everyone's benefit, I decided to share a picture of my garden.

So you'll notice the planned stuff - strategically placed clumps of daffodils and tulips (story ideas), a carpet of muscari to set it all off (little blurbies of dialogue flying out all over the place), a stone bench for me to rest on when I can't make it those last two steps to the car (chapter end). Those tulip and daffodil type stories are the best. The idea went down into the dirt of my brain and came out a season later in boom and ready to go - all I had to do was enjoy it.

But if you look close you'll also notice things like - THIS GUY:

In the Midwest we call that a "barn cat," which means a wandering stray who eats my food and lives in my barn, and I let him, cause he keeps down the mice population. But this particular fella has tangled with something bigger than a mousey once or twice, which is why (as you can see) he no longer has any ears. He's feral as hell and ugly like Satan, and he just loves to plop himself down in my nice garden and ruin the view. I've got a name for him, but I can't share it on the blog.

I've got a few stories like that. They've taken up residence in my brain, among the daffodils and tulips. They eat my food and I try to give them medicine but they spit at me and refuse any kind of assistance. They're always going to be ugly, and feral, and they're always going to be taking a crap in the flower bed of my brain and then looking at me like, "What you go gonna do about it?"

If you look again you can spot: THIS LADY:

She's another rover, a wandering butthead that decided my five acres should be her home. I got close enough to ascertain she was female and caught her skinny rear in a live trap and had her fixed.  She shows her thanks by refusing to acknowledge my existence. When she wandered onto my property she was all bones and big eyes - crazy big eyes, oogly-googly. So I named her Ugly. Over the years Ugly has turned into a sleek machine. A groomed, efficient hunter, Ugly's midsection now sets off her eyes nicely and she's turned into the best looking outdoor animal I have.

I've had one or two ugly, unmanageable ideas morph into something awesome once or twice. I just had to set that trap and show them who was boss. After that, they fed off what was leftover in the brain and took their time evolving into something better than what they were. They like to show off by setting themselves down nearby THAT GUY and saying, "See? And you thought I was bad?"

In the end, I prefer those tulips and daffodils that are naturally beautiful, and require little work. But those irritating, ugly ideas have their place too - if nothing more than to remind me of the effortlessness of the first type.
________________________________________

Mindy McGinnis is a YA author and librarian. Her debut, NOT A DROP TO DRINK, is a post-apocalyptic survival tale set in a world where freshwater is almost non-existent, available from Katherine Tegen / Harper Collins September 24, 2013. She blogs at Writer, Writer Pants on Fire and contributes to the group blogs Book Pregnant, Friday the Thirteeners, From the Write Angle, The Class of 2k13, The Lucky 13s & The League of Extraordinary Writers. You can also find her on Twitter, Tumblr & Facebook.

The Help (in which I step off my high horse)

I recently read The Help by Kathryn Stockett - I shan't bother giving a full review, since I'm so late to the party that nearly everyone seems to have read it already, but it does provide a useful opportunity to talk about a general trend in my reading.

Very briefly, for those not in the know, The Help is about 1960s America - Jackson, Mississippi, specifically (which to me is chiefly notable for producing Eudora Welty and this wonderful song) - and the racial tensions of the time.  Particularly those between maid and employee - the cast of characters is almost exclusively women, including the three narrators Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter Phelan.  All three narrators are marvellously engaging, the whole novel is a terrific page-turner without sacrificing any narrative polish, and all in all it's a very good novel.  If it weren't tremendously popular already, I would be waxing evangelical about it to all and sundry.

It's not a flawless novel.  You think the characters are complex (and some are) but then you realise that some of the racist characters are unrealistically bad in all ways - and there is an incident involving a naked man and a poker which needn't have been in the novel at all (and isn't nearly as unpleasant as I've realised that sentence sounds.)  But it's an extremely impressive debut novel, and it's bewildering that 50 agents turned it down.

Simply to create three characters so empathetic and engaging (that word again; but it is appropriate) is an exceptional achievement.  Novels were multiple narrators usually end up having one who isn't as vibrant as the others, or one who is head and shoulders above the rest - not so, in Stockett's case.  I was always delighted to see any of them turn up in the next chapter - with perhaps a slight preference for irrepressible Minny. No, wise Aibileen might come top. Oh, but what about Skeeter's enthusiastic confusion and determination?  Oh, hang it, I love them all.

So why am I writing about The Help without reviewing it properly?  To expose one of my failings, I'm afraid.

I had assumed, since it was so popular, that it would be very poor.  If it hadn't been for my book group, I wouldn't have read it - and I'm grateful to the dovegreybooks ladies for giving me a copy (although I don't know which of the group it was!)

You can excuse me - or at least understand where I'm coming from.  If you've found your way to Stuck-in-a-Book, I wouldn't be surprised if you've experienced a similar thing.  Seeing Dan Brown and his ilk at the top of the bestseller charts, it's difficult to believe that anything of quality could sell millions of copies, in the way that The Help has.

I did love The Time Traveller's Wife, but other bestselling representatives of literary fiction have proven singularly disappointing to me.  Ian McEwan's recent output has been rather 'meh'; Lionel Shriver's fantastically popular We Have To Talk About Kevin was so dreadfully written that I gave up on p.50.  Things like The Lovely Bones and The Kite Runner weren't exactly bad, but I found it difficult to call them good, either.  Bestselling literary fiction is usually vastly better than bestselling unliterary fiction (yes, Dan Brown, I'm looking at you) but it doesn't excite me.

Remember a little while ago I posted that quotation from Diana Athill, about the two types of reader, and how the second type created the bestseller?  Well, my experience had led me to believe that I'd never find a chart-topping novel that I really loved and admired.  Perhaps a few would be page-turners, but I couldn't imagine any would actually bear closer analysis too.

Well, reader, I was wrong.  While Kathryn Stockett isn't (yet, at least) on the scale of great prose writers like Virginia Woolf, she is certainly a cut above the usual.  I'm delighted that I stepped down from my high horse long enough to enjoy it - or, let's face it, that I was pushed off against my will.

Some books...

Wow, thanks for all your comments on the previous post - I will reply to them soon, but basically it seems like we all make wishlists somewhere or other, and I'm very impressed by how organised some of you are!

And I thought I'd treat you with a little pile of books which have recently come to Stuck-in-a-Book Towers... let's work from the bottom up, shall we?  (I hadn't realised until I put these together for the photo quite how blue books have dominated of late...)

London War Notes 1939-1945 by Mollie Panter-Downes
I thought this book was absolutely brilliant, and essential WW2 reading, when I reviewed it earlier in the year - but I didn't actually own a copy. When an affordable one came up in my abebooks alerts, I high-tailed it to... well, the internet. But the book is mine now, and I'm thrilled!

Selected Poems by Anthony Thwaite
The Norman Church by A.A. Milne
The Man in the Bowler Hat by A.A. Milne
These all came via a connection Claire/The Captive Reader brought to my attention - as you might know, A.A. Milne is one of my favourite authors, and the first one I loved wholeheartedly in my adult reading. 2012 was Claire's year of discovering AAM, and she read many of his books - and Ann Thwaite's exceptionally good biography A.A. Milne: His Life.  I've read it a few times, in pre-blog days, but haven't posted about it yet. Anyway, Ann Thwaite spotted Claire's review and commented on it that she's looking to sell some of AAM books - read her comment on this post - and I got in touch with her.  We had a chat on the phone, and she was lovely - and I bought the Milne books mentioned here. The collection of poetry by her husband came as a surprise bonus, and I must write to thank her soon :)  I can't tell you have special it feels to have these books come from the author of a biography which affected my reading so much.

The Maiden Dinosaur by Janet McNeill
This one was a recommendation by a SiaB reader, Tina, as mentioned in my previous post.

Symposium by Muriel Spark
One of the few Spark novels I didn't already own. very kindly given to me by Karen. It might well be my next Spark read...

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
Coming Up For Air by George Orwell
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept by Elizabeth Smart
I bought these in the brilliant Amnesty Book Shop in Bristol last weekend - I did already have a copy of the Macaulay, but not in this gorgeous NYRB Classics edition... I'm not the sort of person who could resist that, as well we all know.

Mel recommended the Catherine O'Flynn, and the other two are books I've been intending to read for ages. Well, actually I just want to read more Orwell in general, and had hoped to find The Clergyman's Daughter, but this will more than do.

Letters of Lewis Carroll
Well, why on earth not? (Also timely, as I am going to see Judi Dench in Peter and Alice this weekend. Can't wait!)

Ten Gardening Lessons for Debut Novelists

by Barbara Claypole White

A diehard gardener, I spend at least six months a year battling disease, pestilence, and extreme weather. Gardening in the North Carolina forest--with clay soil, a robust deer population, and hot, dry summers--has given me something of a pioneer spirit. And thank God, because while birthing my debut novel,The Unfinished Garden, I discovered that publishing is not for wimps.

I have fourteen flowerbeds, all of which I started from scratch, all of which evolved over a decade—as did The Unfinished Garden. What have I learned from this experience?

Gardening 101: don’t let the bastards get you down

Deer can drive the toughest gardener to gin, but the damage isn’t permanent. Mauled plants can—and do—grow back. I rant and rave about bastard deer on Facebook, to my friends, to my family—hell, to anyone who’ll listen—but the deer don’t dictate my gardening habits. I grow what I want, where I want, and spray homemade deer recipe when I remember. Bad reviews rip out your guts, but don’t let them interfere with your work-in-progress. Mourn and move on. (Cussing and gin-drinking are mandatory.)

Gardening buddies rock

Gardening is a solitary endeavor, but road trips to nurseries are tons more fun with a carload of friends.  Being an author takes a village, and a huge part of that village consists of other writers. Support them and they will support you. (And commiserate over the bad reviews.) I couldn’t ride the emotional rollercoaster of the publishing world without my sisters- and brothers-in-arms at Book Pregnant. Find a tribe.

Yes, that mulch pile will get spread

Spreading mulch is a backbreaking, time-consuming, soul-destroying chore best done before June brings unbearable heat. But you don’t have to spread the mulch all at once. Ten yards of mulch arrived two weeks before my line edits, and that pile stares at me every day. However, by stealing the occasional hour to spread mulch, I’m slowly reducing the pile. (Although, of course, it’s now full of baby snakes and mutant spiders. YUK.) The work of a debut author can seem overwhelming and can easily distract you from the most important job of all: working on your next manuscript. But if you break the promotion down into small chunks—do a little every night—you will make progress.

There are no shortcuts

With my crap soil and my infestation of voles, planting is slow work. (Unlike deer damage, vole damage is fatal, because these cute little bastards eat the roots.) There is no such thing as bunging a plant in the ground. I have to dig out the stones, work the soil, add compost, line each hole with permatill, add mulch, water in, etc. Finding your voice as an author is slow, hard work. You might not see results immediately, and yet…

Plants grow in unexpected places

My main flowerbed is spilling beyond its bounds. Plants self-seed in the gravel and a chocolate vine has leapt from its trellis to wind around the deck railing. My promotional life as an author has been equally organic. I’ve made connections, followed my gut, and planted seeds. Some of those seeds have grown in ways I could never have imagined. For example, when I drove 25 miles to an author reading one icky January night, I wanted only to hear Anne Clinard Barnhill read from her debut, At the Mercy of the Queen. But we chatted after the event, and Anne mentioned she was part of this group called Book Pregnant. Two days later I was invited to join. (I love you, Anne!)

Natural-looking gardens are planned

You can spend an entire Sunday afternoon tying up one clematis, and not a single person notices. But as you systematically work through the bed pruning, staking, weeding, and transplanting, something magical happens, and one day even your Brooklyn-born husband says, “Wow, honey. The garden looks great.” Don’t assume your book baby will hit the shelves at number one and stay there. Debut novels quickly become yesterday’s news. In those all-important first few months, you will see a direct correlation between your Amazon rankings and your promotional push. Six months before you launch, take an evening to create a promotional plan, aka a long to-do list of reasonable goals. You don’t have to aim for Oprah, but the local media will likely love the story of a hometown success.

Established gardens can thrive on neglect

I started my main flowerbed a few years before the manuscript that would become The Unfinished Garden, and it’s still a work in progress (thanks to the voles). But in the months after my book launch, I ignored my garden completely. And everyone—including the UPS guy—remarked that the main bed had never looked better. I had huge, ongoing promotional plans for TUG, but I had to tend and fall in love with novel two, The In-Between Hour. Four months out, I cut the umbilical cord; I stopped actively promoting my first-born. But TUG didn’t die. No, I no longer enjoyed the Amazon rankings of the first two months, but that novel just kept bobbing along, quietly doing its thing. (Above: exhibit number one, last night’s book club.)

Even in severe drought, plants survive

Gardening can be heart breaking. Severe drought and watering restrictions can ruin years of hard work and make you feel it’s all so pointless. But some plants shut down not to die, but to survive. Leave them alone and they’ll come back when they’re ready. Some promotional ideas need to percolate. As with writing, time and distance can be a blessing. Because The Unfinished Garden has an unusual hook—obsessive-compulsive disorder—I wanted to do a fundraiser to benefit the International OCD Foundation, a not-for-profit group that has helped my family battle OCD. But the plans for a fundraiser fell apart. (You can only cram so much into one day.) Last month I learned that the IOCDF was going to publish an article I had submitted to their newsletter years ago. This inspired me to advertise TUG in the IOCDF annual conference brochure. I’m with MIRA, which means I have the power of Harlequin behind me. My lovely publisher produced a beautiful ad—at no cost to me—and I paid for the space. Then my IOCDF contact asked if the conference bookstore could sell The Unfinished Garden. How fabulous is that?

Plant beautiful flowers and the hummingbirds will come

Book club fiction, which is what I write, can be a slow burn. But if you have an unusual hook, if you have a story that lends itself to discussion, readers will find you. I started by emailing friends to ask if they knew of any neighborhood book clubs, and things grew from there. (Nine months out from my launch, I just visited three more local book clubs.)

Quitting is never an option

Yes, you can have a grand plan for an award-winning garden, but so much of gardening is beyond your control. A true gardener is a master of resilience. A true gardener never gives up, never surrenders. A true gardener knows that despite the plague of white fly, despite the fifth day of 100 degrees, despite the large tree limb that flattened the mature hydrangea, there is no quitting.

As British horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll said, “The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies.” Does that sound familiar, my writer friends?

______________________________________________________________________

Barbara Claypole White is the author of The Unfinished Garden  a love story about grief, OCD, and dirt (Harlequin MIRA, August 2012)

*Finalist, 2013 Golden Quill Contest, best first book

*Finalist, 2013 Write Touch Readers' Award Contest, mainstream with romantic elements

*Finalist, 2013 New England Readers' Choice Beanpot Award, mainstream with romantic elements

Wish lists?

In the comments to my previous post, Christine made a comment about wish lists - and about how she was thinking about keeping a notebook for books to look out for, rather than little bits of paper, which are all too easy to lose.

And, of course, it made me want to widen the net, and ask all of you how you keep track of books on your wish list?  (I am, of course, assuming that almost all of us are beset by books we want to read on a daily - nay, an hourly, basis. For those of you who aren't... well, just thank your lucky stars that your bank balance isn't under similar threat.)

As for me, I don't actually have a physical wish list anywhere.  I tend to go to Amazon and add things to my wish list there - which explains why there's about a hundred items on it - simply for my own benefit.  My memory is utterly appalling, and it helps to add things there - although quite often I can't remember at all why a book is there.

Mostly, though... well, I just go and buy the book straightaway online.  Bad Simon.

I'd love to know whether you carry around a notebook with suggestions, keep an online list, commit titles to memory, or a mixture of all three - or if, like me, you give your aching memory a rest by simply cutting out the middle man and buying things as soon as you get the idea. (Speaking of which, an impulse Amazon buy the other day was The Maiden Dinosaur by Janet McNeill, as SiaB-reader Tina got in touch to tell me I'd love it... anybody else read it?)

The Library at Night - Alberto Manguel

I have already included quite a few excerpts from Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night (2006) on Stuck-in-a-Book, and I might well include some more in the future (you can read them all here), so this review has been spread thinly over many months!  Suffice to say, I loved it - thank you Colin for giving it to me! - and it's not a book to read quickly.  I started it about 18 months ago, picking up and reading a bit here and there, soaking in Manguel's thoughtful brilliance, and have only recently finished.  I've had A Reader on Reading on the go for even longer, so... look out for a review of that sometime in 2018!  Basically, this preface is a warning that I'm not going to write a proper review; I'm going to give you some more of his quotations, and a brief glimpse of the myriad world Manguel has created.

Manguel considers libraries from many different angles - having shared, at the beginning, that 'libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places'. With this delightful proviso, Manguel devotes chapters to 'The Library as...'  Myth, Order, Space, Power, Shadow, Shape, Chance, Workshop, Mind, Island, Survival, Oblivion, Imagination, Identity, and Home - each starts in his own library (pictured at the top of this post) and gradually unfolds to the world - encompassing incredible amounts of research and information about libraries around the world and throughout history - as well as branching out into all manner of philosophy, psychology, and memoir.

Paramount is Manguel's interest in the very concept of a library - of giving order to books.

Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God's creatures, order alphabetically or by number or by the language in which the text is written, every library translates the chaos of discovery and creation into a structured system of hierarchies or a rampage of free associations.  Such eclectic classifications rule my own library.  Ordered alphabetically, for instance, it incongruously marries humorous Bulgakob to severe Bunin (in my Russian Literature section), and makes formal Boileau follow informal Beauchemin (in Writing in French), properly allots Borges a place next to his friend Bioy Casares (in Writing in Spanish) but opens an ocean of letters between Goethe and his inseparable friend Schiller (in German Literature).

By which we realise that Manguel is, unsurprisingly, a polyglot.  My entire non-English section rests in one copy of Harry Potter et la prisonnier d'Azkaban, but it's still a topic I find amusing and interesting, even if it is essentially a case of coincidence.  I even blogged about it, with some photos from my shelves, back here.
Manguel isn't interested solely in the arrangement of books, of course. He is a phenomenally well-read and bookish man, who would probably feel quite at home in the blogosphere - albeit probably the most highbrow member of it, because his intellect and knowledge is rather dizzying.  And yet... how could someone who writes the following excerpt not be at home with any and every bibliophile?

Some nights I dream of an entirely anonymous library in which books have no title and boast no author, forming a continuous narrative stream in which all genres, all styles, all stories converge, and all protagonists and all locations are unidentified, a stream into which I can dip at any point of its course.  In such a library, the hero of The Castle would embark on the Pequod in search of the Holy Grail, land on a deserted island to rebuild society from fragments shored against his ruins, speak of his first centenary encounter with ice and recall, in excruciating detail, his early going to bed.  In such a library there would be one single book divided into a thousand volumes and, pace Callimachus and Dewey, no catalogue.

As I say, this isn't a thorough review of The Library at Night - it's too wide-ranging to permit that - but it's a general rallying call to any of you who haven't got a copy yet.  We all love reading, and most of us also love books and libraries too - well, friends, Manguel knew this, and has written a book just for us.

OxfordWords Limerick Competition

A quick link to a fun competition over at OxfordWords - craft a limerick about mothers (or, I suppose, one mother in particular), and you'll be in with a chance of winning an iPod Touch!

I love my job :)

[Sorry! Link now fixed - thanks for pointing it out, Susan]

Moving On

     I’m packing up, getting ready to move near my parents, who are approaching ninety.  Frank and I will be heading to the NC coast at the end of the month.  Between now and then, I must load up all my earthly goods, cramming 2800 square feet’s worth of stuff into a mere 800.  I’m shedding a lot of beloved items, passing some on to my children and grandchildren, selling others.  I’m committed to keeping only those things I use and/or love.

     Though my goals are strictly material, ruthlessly aiming for no clutter in my lean, mean, tiny apartment, the exercise itself feels spiritual.  And it feels somehow connected to my writing life.  For most of my adulthood, writing has been wedged into the nooks and corners of my world, something I could always put on hold, if anyone had a need for me.  Surprise!  There was always a need!  Children, spouse, parents, sibling, friends—everyone had emergencies and problems.  Everyone needed me.

     It feels good to be needed; it’s pleasant to think your loved ones just couldn’t get along without you.  But now, as I approach what I am considering the last third of my life, I’m shedding everything but the essentials.  I’m paring down to the elemental me.  Yes, I’m still a mother and grandmother; I’m still a daughter and a sister; I’m still a wife.  But I’m unloading much more than furniture—I’m unloading the idea than I can ‘fix’ things for my family, that I should be always available to them.  I’m throwing out the idea that to be loved, I must be useful.  I’m embracing the idea that I can simply ‘be.’  The love, like my precious photos, will remain.

     What this means to my writing is that, finally, I am going to give it center stage.  Writing will become my main focus.  Just as I will claim a smaller space and fewer possessions, I will also claim this time as my own—and I know what this time is for.  It’s for throwing myself into writing in a way I have not done.  It’s for thinking and dreaming and telling myself the kinds of stories I want to hear.  I’m slithering out of my former life, shucking off the old skin.  It just doesn’t fit me anymore.  And I can’t wait to see where my writing will take me, once I give it a chance.  This new me, unencumbered and soaring above the waves, will surely settle into its truest self.  And I know that whatever time I have left on this beautiful, blue/green world will be spent putting one word after another—always following the line across the page, always telling the never-ending story.

Bassett - Stella Gibbons

When I attended a middlebrow conference last year, my friend Terri was talking about boarding house novels - and one particularly grabbed my attention.  As you'll have guessed from the title of this blog post, it was Bassett by Stella Gibbons - whose Cold Comfort Farm I, of course, love, and whose Westwood was wonderful in a very different way. Clicking on those titles will take you to reviews which explain what I loved about them... and now I can add Bassett to the fold, thanks to my friend Barbara giving it to me for my birthday last November.  Indeed, if it had just been about the boarding house, this would be on my 50 Books You Must Read list, and I'd be screaming from the rooftops.  Read on, dear reader...

Bassett (1933) kicks off with the glorious Miss Hilda Baker, and I think the best way to describe her is: imagine Paul Gallico's Mrs. 'arris if she were written by Stella Gibbons. Which, of course, she is. 'She dressed neatly and badly in ugly little hats and ugly little necklaces', works cutting patterns for a dressmakers, and her one vocation in life is identifying when other people are 'sassing' her, and reprimanding them for it. Miss Baker has managed to save some money, and is intrigued when she sees in a paper that another lady is looking to turn her home into a boarding house, and is looking for someone to run it with her.  Determined not to be cheated out of her savings, but intrigued, Miss Baker writes to The Tower, Crane Hill, Bassett - and receives this wonderful reply, which is too wonderful not to quote in full (with strong reservations about one racist sentence, of course):

Dear Miss Baker,
After much earnest thought I have decided that yours is the most suitable letter I have received as a result of the notice which appeared in Town and Country.  I am sure that the house could be made a success.  It is not damp.  Some of the letters were most unsuitable.  There was one from a Mr. Arthur Craft.  Frequent buses, but rather a long walk to them! ! !  It is so difficult, in these days, to know what to do for the best.  Mr. Craft suggested a Club.  I have a geyser and there are beautiful views.  Perhaps we could lay out the tennis court again in the field behind the house.  We are six miles from the station, but the buses run past the bottom of the hill.  I thought we might take Indians (not Negroes of course) as guests.  Is afternoon tea included do you know?  I believe not.  Perhaps you will let me know what you think.  Or perhaps it would be better if you came down one Saturday.  It is easier to go to Reading and take the bus.  I could meet you, if we decided to meet in Town, at half past three in the Clock Department.  Perhaps you would suggest a day, if Saturday doesn't suit you. (This Saturday is not good for me I am afraid, as I have my W.I.)  But of course, they close on Saturday afternoons.  Will you let me know, by return if possible, whether you will meet me as arranged.
Yours faithfully, Eleanor Amy Padsoe.
P.S. - It is on clay soil, but some of it is on chalk.  Very healthy! ! !

That, ladies and gentlemen, is Miss Padsoe - and isn't she a wonder?

As with Scoop, which I wrote about recently, incompatibility makes a great start for a comic novel.  Long story short, after going to see The Tower (and finding Miss Padsoe as barmy as the letter suggests), Miss Baker decides against the venture - but is then made redundant and can't think what else to do.  So, off on a train she hops to Bassett once more.  Here's an indication of their current assessment of each other...

And she thrust herself half out of the window again, waving vigorously and giving a false, toothy smile, and wishing Miss Padsoe looked a bit smarter.  Like a rag-bag, that's what she was, and an old-fashioned one at that.

And Miss Padsoe, greeting Miss Baker with a convulsive flutter of her umbrella-less hand and an equally false and toothy smile, found time to wish amid much mental distress that Miss Baker did not look exactly like an under-housemaid.

Miss Padsoe's mental distress is caused chiefly by her mother-and-daughter cook and maid, who have been cheating and neglecting her, and have now locked her out of her own house.  The sass of servants is like a red rag to a bull for Miss Baker, and she goes off to sort things out... It's all very funny, filled with the sort of nonsensical dialogue I love ("'Remember'? I'll give her 'Remember'!") and all rather touching too - the first signs that Miss Baker and Miss Padsoe will become friends.  It's not as rammed-down-your-throat heart-warming as that sounds (and as it might threaten to be in the hands of Paul Gallico, much as I love him!) but it's rather lovely.

As I said at the beginning of this review, had Bassett concentrated exclusively on these ladies setting up their boarding house, with Gibbons' delicious turn of phrase and moments of irony, this would be one of my all-time favourite novels.  Sadly, Bassett is diluted by the goings-on of another family in the village, and this takes up most of the second half of the novel...

Queenie is a 20-something girl who has come to live as a companion to Mrs. Shelling - and gets to know her children George and Bell, who are about her age.  They have progressive views about morality and romance, as does Queenie, and... well, one thing leads to another, and it becomes about Queenie falling in love with George, and the struggles this causes, involving class, morality, aspirations...

Apparently Queenie and her situation was very autobiographical, but I have to say that I found the whole thing a bit of an unnecessary addition.  It certainly wasn't awful, and my response might well only be my impatience and boredom with any novel focuses on the anxieties of youthful ardour, but it seemed such a shame to take the attention away from such interesting and amusing protagonists.  And despite some attempts to combine the two strands, Gibbons's seems to give up at one point, and from then on just writes about Queenie et al - the two storylines don't blend at all neatly.

But that is a fairly small reservation, caused chiefly by the excellence of the first half of Bassett - so not a bad fault to have, all things considered!
Vintage Books have brought Stella Gibbons' books back into print, some with absolutely glorious covers - Bassett is one of those which is only (I believe) Kindle or print on demand, so doesn't get the same beautiful cover illustrations, but I'm not going to quibble - I'm so grateful to Vintage for making this brilliant novel accessible, and to Barbara for giving me a copy!

Stuck-in-a-Book at Felixstowe Literary Festival

A very quick weekend miscellany to say that you can now buy tickets for the Felixstowe Literary Festival, including tickets for the conversation between Elaine and I about blogging!

If you can come, go here and click through to book tickets - we're 'Blogging and Books' on 15 June from 3 o'clock to 4 o'clock.  And I'd love to meet up with anybody afterwards, if SiaB readers can come!

Also, pop over to the festival blog to read an interview with me!

The Road Can Be (Very) Long

I was asked recently how long had it taken me to get published. When I gave my answer, the person who’d asked me fell over in shock and cracked their egg open.

I started writing fiction back in 2002, after writing screenplays for about seven years (Maybe eight. Can’t remember. Too many wine bottles ago now). So if you start from 2002, then it took me over ten years to get here.

Ten. Years.

You know how many rejections that adds up to? How many failed novels?

Let me talk about "just" the road to publication first. To do that, we have to go back four years, to May 2009 when I finally landed an agent. Before that happy moment, I’d been writing, and writing, and then writing some more for about seven years. Six days a week, averaging forty-eight weeks a year.

You know, whenever I think back to that summer of 2009, I laugh. I was so naïve. I really thought that I’d be published immediately. Or six months, tops.

Um…. Not quite.

It’s a special time for me now. My debut novel, UNTOLD DAMAGE, has finally arrived on bookshelves. Almost exactly sixteen months from the day that my agent emailed me: “Um, dude? Your cell isn’t working. Call me.”

Sixteen months. Woah, right? That’s a pretty unfathomable amount of time.

Let me just say here that I understand that everyone’s road will be different. Some shorter. Some longer. Back in 2002, I really had no idea of just how long that road could be. No idea of how much effort, sweat, and perseverance it would take to go from the road marker of learning the craft of fiction writing, to the road marker of getting an agent, to the road marker of getting published.

And to think that the book that eventually got published wasn’t close to the one that hooked me up with my agent! No, thatbook didn’t sell. Got close, but never made it over the hill.

The book that did get me over the hill, UNTOLD DAMAGE, was written out of pure desperation. Seriously. The earlier version of the book, as I said, hadn’t sold. I needed something else, something new. I eventually (after months and months of sweating) found that “something else”.  I sent this new version of the first Mark Mallen book off to my agent. And wasn’t I floored when she said she loved it! I mean, I’d hoped she would of course but by that point, about 2.5 years down the road after hooking up with her, I wasn’t sure at all whether she would dig it, or dig me a ditch to go die in.

But, she loved it.

And how did I hook up with my agent? The person who is not only my advocate in the industry, but is also a great listener when I’m freaking the F out over something?

Well, the “getting the agent” part of the journey started with a killer query, naturally. Back in the early spring of 2009, I queried the agent who would eventually sign me. And let me just reiterate here what you probably already know about query letters: they’re really SALES letters. A query tells the reader why they should look at your book. I sent the infamous "nudge" email about six or eight weeks later.

My future agent got back to me almost immediately, thanking me for the nudge and asking to see the rest of the manuscript. So I sent it.

And then I waited.

Waited a couple weeks. Sweated every day that went by. I know we shouldn’t sweat those moments, but I did. What can I say? 

 She got back to me at the end of those two weeks saying, “Let’s seal this deal, dude!”

And that was it!

But, it wasn’t.

This current version of the book had to get polished first, off notes that my agent sent me. Then it went out to publishers. We got responses back. No sale, but some very good feedback. And so after a pow-wow with my agent, I rewrote the book again. Then it got sent it out again, and…

… and then after more "close but no cigar" responses, it was over for that version of the book.

Then what happened? Well, that book got completely rewritten. I gutted it. Put in a new foundation. Added new plumbing. Changed where the windows were situated, and also how the light hit the upstairs deck, and…

… and well, you get it.

Then we went back out on submission. And that leads me to here: having UNTOLD DAMAGE out in the world on bookstore shelves. Over three and half years after getting an agent. Or, if you prefer, a bit over ten years later if you start from when I began writing that first novel.

It’s finally come to fruition. All that work.

And like I mentioned earlier, I realize that it won’t take this long for everyone. Hell, it might take even longer. What I’m trying to say here is that you have to be prepared to play THE LONG GAME. From beginning to end. And in order to get there, you never give up on your goal: for every query you get back that’s a pass, you send out another. Every manuscript that bombs, you write another. Every time you feel like you can’t do it one more time, you do it one more time. Every time you get hit in the face with it all, you get up and keep going. If you want to write to be published, then you have to prepare for the long haul. As I’ve said, it may not always be a long process. But nine times out of ten?

It will be.

Bay Area resident Robert K. Lewis has been a painter, printmaker, and a produced screenwriter. He is a contributor to Macmillan's crime fiction fansite, Criminal Element. Lewis is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, the International Thriller Writers, and the Crime Writers Association. Untold Damage is his first novel. The second novel in the Mark Mallen series, Critical Damage, will arrive April, 2014. Visit him online at RobertKLewis.comand at needlecity.wordpress.com.