Playlists

This is a post mainly about playlists associated with novels but also has a few references to the BBC3 TV programme Lip Service, which ended its first series last night. Having had a look at a few website analytics I have to start with an apology to the people who’ve ended up on this blog after doing a Google search for Lip Service’s Ruta Gedmintas (or in one case Ruta Gedmintas’s feet!). I think there’s only one blog post about her — in the context that her very effective playing of Frankie in the series eerily summed up the zeitgeist of one of my novel-in-progress’s characters). Nevertheless, for some odd reason this site seems to occasionally turn up in Google searches associated with the actress. This might get worse as I’m going to mention her again in this post.

So if you’ve landed on this page looking for some nice photos of Ruta Gedmintas then the best I can do is provide a consolation link to a photo on the programme’s official Facebook page that captures a beguiling, almost feral look to Frankie — click here to see it (you don’t need to be signed into Facebook to see it). (There will be also be another Frankie related link later on.)

I mentioned David Nicholls’ use of playlists in the last post. In ‘One Day’ Emma makes Dexter a couple of laboriously compiled cassette tapes — from tape-recording on to a cassette tracks from vinyl records and CDs in real time as you had to from the mid-70s until the era of the MP3. Even though CD-ROM drives came along in the mid-90s, it was a bit later than that that the likes of iTunes and Windows Media Player allowed instant playlists to be compiled and burnt to CD — and later digitally — and now we have semi-predictive services like Spotify which make the whole process almost subconsciously easy. My computer made up a playlist last night (presumably from tracks I’d played a lot or hadn’t skipped and it kept me awake an extra hour as I didn’t want to stop the fantastic tracks from coming.

What playlists — and the ‘my music’ concept as a whole — seem to tap into is a deep-seated desire to identify oneself with your favourite music — almost as if that might partially define your personality. Music is often used in TV and film in a similar way and Lip Service has been a good example — the track listing of music from each episode has been demanded by fans and published online.

I’m also very fond of thinking about music in relation to the parts of the novel that I’m writing and I’ve got a habit of describing the music characters are listening to — James likes ‘talented, blonde singer-songwriters like Pixie Lott’ and Dido, Emma likes William Orbit and Kim is a bit eclectic, enjoying a bit of John Tavener or Thomas Tallis as well as Gabriela Cilme (‘Sweet About Me’) and the Walrus of Love, Barry White plus another significant act to be revealed anon.

Referencing music is great but one thing I’ve learned about novel writing — Penny Rudge mentioned this when she talked to our City class — is that quoting lyrics is done at a cost — a pretty high monetary one. Even a line or two needs permission (unlike, perhaps, a quotation from a longer written work) and that might cost into the hundreds of pounds — and the author usually pays the rights holder. So it’s a lot more cost-effective to cite the title and artist and hope the readers can fill in the lyrics for themselves (if that’s really necessary) as there’s no copyright on titles and names. It could be argued that playlists like those created by David Nicholls and Lip Service are actually intellectual property in themselves — I seem to remember a court case in the distant past about this connected with Classic FM first starting up.

As The Angel is set largely in a pub, I was speculating last night listening to my auto-generated list that it would be almost inevitable that there would sadly be some riotous party for me to test my writing skills on and, as part of that, I wondered about taking a page or two just to list the music — as other writers tend to throw in odd bits of ephemera like shopping lists or envelopes.

And then in a moment of pure serendipity, I noticed a tweet from Kudos TV’s head Lip Servant on the very subject of playlists. (I’ve exchanged a few tweets with @LipService_BBC3, most recently today when I forwarded a link to the Arts Desk review of the last episode, which has a comment from me added. She’s also read the existing posting on this blog.) This tweet revealed that Ruta Gedmintas had been persuaded to publish her Frankie playlist — songs on her iPod that she used to work herself up into the right mood for the character — so the concept of establishing character via music choices obviously works for her.

It’s on the Notes page of the programme’s Facebook site but can (I think) be accessed without needing to be signed in. Click here to read it: http://on.fb.me/9q7qOV .

There’s even a link there to hear them all on Spotify, which I might have a go at doing out of curiosity as I’ve never heard of most of them. I do, though, have the Florence and the Machine and Bat for Lashes albums so I probably know them. It’s not too surprising to see Björk and the Prodigy there given the character she was playing. However, for me, the serendipitous part was finding the title of a track listed in the playlist that I’d written as the closing line of the novel extract that I workshopped 10 days ago (and wrote about three weeks ago) which a few people who read it said was perfect for the scene I’d written — and I can see why it’s also completely apt for Frankie. I’d probably watched a couple of episodes of Lip Service before I decided on this song but her playlist wasn’t published until this week. Here’s how I referenced it in my writing:

‘Her hand reached into his lap and grabbed the entertainment system’s remote control from where it had dropped…She entered the title of a song that seemed perfect for the pair of them. The screen displayed a list of versions she never dreamt existed but she chose Nouvelle Vague’s cabaret cover over the Dead Kennedy’s original. As she sipped her drink, the suite infused with the sophisticated sound of brushes against drum skins and the ironic twang of the double-bass. Then a cool French chanteuse started to croon “Too Drunk To Fuck”.’

Churning Through the Mud

Autumn seems to have crept upon us — it’s grey, drizzly and windy outside — and I’m facing the realisation  that I’ve not written half as much as I hoped over the summer. I made some amends last week by bashing out about 15,000 words. I deliberately just sat down and wrote and didn’t go back and revise anything methodically — and I know some of it is very bad.

I’ve developed a pattern of writing a first draft, printing it out and making corrections on the paper (they seem easier to spot), then printing it again and reading the whole piece out loud (not just the dialogue). After that process I’m usually reasonably happy with it but if I give it someone else to read I then tend to identify a whole slew of other mistakes. I guess this is the basis of the ‘put it in a drawer for a couple of weeks (or months) before looking at it again’ school of advice. This is all very time consuming — but necessary.

I found some sections quite easy and enjoyable to write and I’m still struggling on others. In fact, I may try writing some poetry to describe some of the natural features of the Chiltern landscape I’ve been trying to portray and then cannibalise it.

One good thing about grinding out the words is that I can suddenly take off in unexpected directions and I’ve come up with more ideas for plot and character later in the novel than if I’d just considered them in my head. But that also has the disadvantage of bringing in diversions and new directions in the material I’d originally intended to write.

So while it’s gratifying to have 15,000 more words (probably a sixth of a novel) more than I had ten days ago, I’m also a little exasperated that it’s going to need maybe twice or three times as much time again to revise and that, as with my opening chapters, not a lot seems to have happened in a large number of words. However, my intention was in this section to deliberately slow the pace almost to the point where the reader becomes impatient for fireworks to start exploding and I’ve tried to weave a lot of plot background and backstory into these sections.

Overall I think what I’ve written is good and that I definitely believe in it — and I often surprise myself at how much the novel reflects me personally — which shows that at a deep psychological level I’m probably impelled on an irreversible course to write this. However, I’m probably both a bit of a ‘needy’ writer and one who tends to write for an audience rather than just please myself so that’s why it’s a good thing that in less than four weeks I’ll be workshopping some of this material with the majority of the City novel-writing group. We’re meeting monthly on an extra-curricular basis.

Penny Rudge, when she visited the course, said that virtually every chapter of ‘Foolish Lessons in Life and Love’ had been through a post-course workshopping process with her peers. I tend to want to make use of peer feedback to a similar extent – while I could plough on independently  it will be fascinating to meet up with everyone to see how people are getting on.

As mentioned in a previous post we have at least one person whose work on the course has led to being signed by an agent and I know that a few people sent work out to agents after the reading, although I know of only the person who’s actually finished the novel — and he’s now redrafting. In my case it would probably instill some discipline by having an agent’s validation, encouragement and deadline setting. Yet agents can only make active progress when they have a full novel manuscript to work with and I don’t have anything yet in a shape I’d be happy to send out. The way I write means it’s not going to be a quick process for me to get the material into the shape that most advice tends to emphasise before one’s work goes near an agent or publisher – for it to be ‘the best it can possibly be’.  My tendency, mentioned above, to branch off tangentially in a random or arbitrary direction as I’ve been writing is sometimes good and serendipitous but means everything will need to be looked at again i.e. once I get to the end of the novel then I’ll want to make some significant changes to the start.

As an example, I had some very useful feedback from Guy and Charlotte on the course to chapters six and seven and, even though I’d spent a lot of time writing the chapters, Guy pointed out lots of ‘noise words’ like ‘just’, ‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’, ‘a little’ and so on that seem to become invisible on the page if you’ve stared at it too long in one session.

I also posted a reference to a recently written part of the novel a fellow student’s wall on Facebook and the brief exchange of comments that followed opened up a new aspect to Kim and James’ long, drawn-out first day that I’d failed to explore. That accounted for the rather meagre 300 words I managed on holiday.

There will also be a need to maintain consistency, particularly in dialogue. As mentioned in previous postings, Kim will be fluent in English but will perhaps have some transatlantic turns of phrase plus perhaps a tendency to construct sentences grammatically as they would be in German.  I think I’ve largely achieved this as I’ve gone along and she speaks little phrases in her first language from time to time. I’ve been dropping these in with increasing frequency making use of my limited German.  Kim’s English is described by another character (I’m told that this is grammatically correct, which surprised me): ‘Dein Englisch ist sehr flüssig, aber Sie sprechen mit einem leichten deutschen Akzent – sehr Hochdeutsche.’

Any suggestions?

Visit from Penny Rudge

I posted briefly, about a month ago on our final visit from  figure from the publishing industry — one of our course’s published alumni, Penny Rudge. She came to see us on 9th June and I’ll try to summarise the many interesting points below that she made in her hour or so with us.

(I’ve been very slow in writing up this and a few things from the course as I’ve been so busy with the reading and also the writing of the commentary and submission of chapters two to four (or three to five in my case — about 11,500 words)).

With our reading only three weeks away, many of the class were interested to know if Penny’s book deal for ‘Foolish Lessons in Life and Love’ had been precipitated by her year’s equivalent event (as had been the case with Kirstan Hawkins). A few of us were relieved when Penny said that, while one agent showed interest at the time and a couple asked to see the final book, that this wasn’t out of the ordinary for her cohort and that the novel, while started on the Certificate course, had largely been written when she moved on to do an MA (I think this was at Royal Holloway — and she later went on to do a PhD ).

(The further study yielded an endorsement from Andrew Motion for the novel which can’t have harmed its marketing.)

Penny’s agent (Caroline Wood at Felicity Byron) picked up ‘Foolish Tales in Life and Love’ from the anthology that was produced at the end of the MA course.  So no short cut from the Certificate course reading but Penny said that it was all valuable experience, a nice night — and a well-organised event.

It was also Penny’s view that the City course was more appropriate for the focused development of the novel — the MA being better for experimentation. Practically the whole novel had been workshopped chapter-by-chapter with ex-students from City University because they continued to meet after the course had ended. Penny puts down the fact that the manuscript required fairly little editing once accepted for publication to the feedback received in this way.

As well as the academic courses, Penny had biological deadlines to meet when completing the novel: finishing it just before the birth of her second child. The overall chronology was graduating from the City course in 2007, completing the novel in 2008 and then receiving the final proofs of the novel in the summer of 2009 — for publication in trade paperback in April 2010. A mass market paperback format is due for publication in June 2011.

A combination of managing to get a grant for full-time study and the need to take time off to start a family led Penny to give up her previous job in IT and become a full-time writer — or at least as much as child-care commitments would allow. In this sense the City University course was part of a life-changing experience. Aspiring writers might be well advised to look into Arts Council grants and similar (but don’t expect a champagne lifestyle from one).

Once the novel had been sold, there were a few changes made in response to the publisher’s feedback:

  • A character’s nationality was changed as it was too reminiscent of a recent best-seller
  • The publisher came up with the title of the book — Penny had a different one while she was writing it but was happy to take on the publisher’s suggestion of  ‘Foolish Lessons in Life and Love’ as she thought it summed the book up well
  • Historical anachronisms, particularly indoor smoking, had to be removed (how the world changed during the gestation of the book!)
  • Quotations from pop songs and films were removed — not at the insistence of the publisher but because it was pointed out that getting the permissions costs a not insignificant amount of money
  • The ending of the book was made a bit more hopeful than it was originally — apparently readers like that (I shall have to remember this advice myself if and when I get to the end of mine)

Nevertheless, the novel remained remarkably unchanged from the original synopsis.

One point that intrigued some of us was that Taras, the main character in the novel, was male — and a number of our class were narrating from the point of view (at least partially) of someone from the opposite gender.  In Penny’s case that was quite helpful for the first novel as it dispensed with any obvious autobiographical parallels and allowed her imagination to be more free. Her second novel is likely to have more autobiographical components. In the end, it was her view that imagination is at the core of fiction — an author must be able to enter a character’s thoughts (or at least give a convincing illusion of doing so).

I’ve touched in previous posts about how Penny has demonstrated a knack for marketing her work — such as providing material for publicists to try and place in a newspaper (as happened with an article in ‘The Independent’).  Publicists tend to have bigger clients than debut novelists so they are not likely to spend a huge amount of time generating this kind of story but, if the author takes the initiative, publicists can be quite effective in finding the best outlet to take it.

Self-promotion is probably something that doesn’t come easily to most writers but it’s something that authors increasingly need to do. As well as thinking of good stories to prime publicists, events like signings in bookshops are ways of increasing profile and flogging the copies of books that need to be sold to increase the chances of getting subsequent publishing deals. The author has to take the initiative in arranging book signings, doing readings at festivals, walking into bookshops and trying to sell them your book (this seemed to have worked for Penny in Waterstone’s in Piccadilly as the novel had been spotted on the shelves near the door by one of the class) — and so on. Lots of support from literary friends also pays dividends.

All the marketing, while hard work, tends to have a snowball effect. For example, a when a book crosses a threshold of something like twenty reviews then Amazon then it becomes more prominent on Amazon.

Cyberspace promotion is also now expected — Penny is intending to start up a web page or blog when she has time (in between all the readings, signings — with a bit of writing squeezed in as well). In the meantime, there’s a Facebook page that publicises the book and allows readers interaction with the author.

Penny has now sat in enough bookshops to be able to observe buyer behaviour — which includes the surprising revelation that hardly anyone browses the fiction shelves. They probably never get past the infamous 3 for 2 table!

A Great Scene for My Novel Happens in 45 Minutes?

I wonder whether today might be an occasion I could use in my novel — pubs should be doing well out of this great weather and the World Cup. 45 minutes to go until England play Germany — that would be a great event to have Kim reflect on English attitudes to the Germans. What would she make of the papers or the massive build up to what’s just a second round game — and exiting it would mean a pretty disastrous World Cup for either side.

I’ve been e-mailing my German friends in the build up — wishing Germany luck but not as much luck as for England. I’m also wearing my new England away strip (the red one) that I’ve worn quite incongruously to a couple of classes at City. I turned up after watching England v Slovenia on Wednesday in the Freemason’s Arms, Covent Garden (where the rules of football were first written down). I was about 6 pints worse for wear and that might have been why my reading rehearsal was rather slow.

I’m also really pushed for time with the end of the month coming up — notably our reading night on Wednesday. I’ve made things worse for myself by volunteering to create a website for the evening — something that took me most of yesterday to do.

Lots of things I need to blog about but haven’t done so far and may not do until the end of the week:

  • A bit of agent reaction to the first few pages of The Angel
  • The antidotes I’ve experienced to the angst that has featured in a few recent posts
  • A write up of Penny Rudge’s visit from a couple of weeks ago (we’ve exchanged a few comments via Facebook in the meantime)
  • The experience of using this blog as the basis for my end of term commentary assignment
  • And much more…

Watch this space…but now it’s time for the football. Come on England — and we’re owed something special from The Big Man and Fat Frank.

Fascinating Lessons in Writing and POV

We had a visit from another published course alumnus last night — Penny Rudge, author of ‘Foolish Lessons in Life and Love’, as mentioned in a previous post.

I’ll blog later at more length about what she said about the publishing process in general. I was quite relieved that her book deal didn’t follow as a consequence of the end-of-course reading.

I’m quite inspired by the book and our session yesterday. I was encouraged that she had a similar background to me and, curiously, the style of her novel is probably closer to how I’ve been writing than mine is to anyone else currently on the course — contemporary setting, humorous, lots of dialogue, other gender POV, European leading character (s), etc.

I’m quite gratified that ‘Foolish Lessons in Life and Love’ has probably a higher literary breast count (and other intimate body parts) than my work in progress could be projected to have — there are scenes in a strip club and seedy strippers’ pub.  These descriptions are very well done — very witty and frank but never over-graphic, anatomical or crude. I think I’ll  keep the book handy for my own inspiration — seeing as I’m frequently reminded how sex-obsessed my male character is (wait until Monday’s reading).  Penny’s use of the male point of view in these scenes is also very accurate, at least from my own observation, so maybe there’s hope for me to use POV the other way.

Perhaps it’s because Penny also has a background as a computer programmer. I think I may have blogged on this before but I was a programmer for about 12 years, have worked in IT since and am now doing a dissertation for an MSc. in Software Development. I asked her a question about how she organised the files on the computer, as a writer, and she enthusiastically answered.

Perhaps IT workers are one of those professions, journalism being the most obvious one, that equips people with certain skills — being able to use a keyboard quickly is one but also in novelistic terms, putting together a novel with its themes and planning probably draws a lot on the analytical skills required to put together big systems. And the revision process is similar in that one small change can have very big knock-on consequences throughout the system or novel (name, setting, chronology changes, etc.).

How Far Does Amazon Go In Researching Its Recommendations?

I got an e-mail this morning from Amazon based on the fact I bought ‘Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop’  by Kirstan Hawkins from them. Headed More to explore: are you looking for something in our Fiction category? If so, you might be interested in these items.’

I was intrigued to see that Penny Rudge’s ‘Foolish Lessons in Life and Love’ was second on the list. I don’t know how they worked this out unless they’d recorded that I’d searched for the book previously. If they’d combined browsing history with purchasing history they’d also find that I’ve already bought that book from them and it was delivered earlier this week.

So I wondered whether there was something more crafty at work? The books are, on the face of it, not terribly similar in content apart from being modern fiction written by women. I guess it could be that there have been enough people on our year’s (and perhaps previous years’)  Certificate in Novel Writing course to have searched for both books fairly recently and they’ve mined this connection out of their database? If so, that’s quite an interesting network effect and shows how word of mouth and personal connections can influence this sort of viral marketing.

The other books, whose descriptions I’ve not yet dug into to discover if they also have City University connections, are: ‘Ruby’s Spoon’  by Anna Lawrence Pietron; ‘Ms Hempel Chronicles’ by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum; ‘The Wives of Henry Oades’  by Johanna Moran; and ‘The Hidden Heart of Emily Hudson’ by Melissa Jones. I guess they’re all by women but I wonder if any of these authors has a connection with people on the course or with Kirstan Hawkins or Penny Rudge — there’s probably some connection somewhere either through buying the books or some underlying collective browsing pattern.

Publicity

Something that came up in our visit from Kirstan Hawkins (see other post) is the amount of publicity in which authors are expected to participate, especially new ones. I thought this meant physical things like turning up in your local bookshop (if you still have one) with a pile of your books to sell and doing signings and so on. As a new author you’d probably not have people queueing out the door. Even established ones don’t seem to get inundated. Just before Christmas the year before last I was in Waterstone’s Piccadilly and I wondered what the big queue was for. It turned out Nigella Lawson was signing her Christmas cookbook. I wandered around the rest of the huge bookshop for about half an hour and then realised the queue for Nigella’s signing had pretty much disappeared so I decided to buy a copy of her book and have it signed for my wife. I was surprised how friendly and pleasant Nigella was at the end of the signing — which seemed more genuine than a satisfaction that all these people weren’t buying her book half price on Amazon. And she is better looking in real life than on television.

However, the sort of publicity that a new author is expected to participate in is mainly profile-raising media activities, apparently. While there are professional publicists, their work is much more effective if the author can think of angles for press stories and the like. Apparently the alumnus from our course who’ll be visiting us next term, Penny Rudge, is quite adept at this. When I got back I did a Google News search for her and immediately found two articles that had been published in the past week or so — one in the Bradford Evening Telegraph (showing the importance of local associations) and the Independent. They both mention in footnotes that her novel, ‘Foolish Lessons in Life and Love’, has recently been published. This is in addition to the fairly lengthy article she wrote on matriachs to which Emily referred from Saturday’s Times.

According to the Independent profile, Penny Rudge used to be a computer programmer and has given up ‘a career in IT and management consultancy to become a full-time author’. Now, to paraphrase Harry Hill’s comments about men with a conspicuous lack of hair, I was a computer programmer myself for about 12 years and since then what I’ve done is largely in the area of IT consultancy (even doing an MSc in it at the moment) so, I’m not sure exactly what it is, but there’s something about Penny’s background that I seem to like.