Mike Clarke's Adventures in Creative Writing — and Stand-Up
…from Monday’s workshop and Wednesday’s reading run through is ‘rippling’. I used it right at the end of my reading and it was used to great effect by Rick in his workshopped chapter and by Charlotte in her reading.
I’m wondering what might happen on Wednesday’s run through as it comes on the same day as England’s match against Slovenia — which is ‘must win’ and I shall be in London early in a pub (not sure where) to watch it.
City financial wizard and cookery TV show contestant James puts his ex-employer’s ‘Dealing Positively with Negativity’ training course into practice by sinking his redundancy money into transforming his run-down Chilterns village local into a gastropub.
But was it a smart decision, during an impromptu drunken bender round London, to promise the manager’s job to Kim: a struggling German conceptual artist from Shoreditch who makes ends meet as a barmaid?
Both are moves that James’ ambitious wife, Emma, is certain to try to make sure he regrets.
‘The Angel’ is a novel that explores the conflicts between city and countryside, art and commerce, conformity and impetuosity. It’s the story of two people from radically different backgrounds that they both share a passion to escape.
It’s only an early draft version but any comments would be gratefully received. The syntax is a bit contorted (long sentences) but then lots of blurbs tend to be like that.
One benefit of writing this blog is that I thought it would be useful to use to look back on and chart the progress of the writing over the course — and part of the course assessment is for us to write a 2,000 word commentary on exactly that.
This has to be done by Wednesday — pretty easy I smugly thought — I’ll just cut and paste the writing-related entries into a document and edit them a bit. I just did this, along with the content of a couple of e-mails I’ve sent the tutors with my expostulations, and found the document is a mere 24,790 words long.
There’s extra stuff we need to put in the commentary as well that’s not covered in the blog (like consider in depth which authors are in our genre and who publishes them) so it looks like I’m going to have to edit 95% of the words away — probably harder than writing it from scratch. However, it’s useful to go back and have dates associated with feelings of satisfaction and frustration.
I need a blurb too…maybe I’ll post that on here to see if anyone might think it sells the novel.
I went to one of the Bucks Open Studios events this afternoon at St. Dunstan’s Church, Monks Risborough. There was some really fascinating stuff there — a lady had done the most stunning watercolours of (of all things) parsnips and carrots, even salsify. There were some very interesting interpretations of the Chiltern landscape — some were linoleum engravings and others were very vividly coloured abstract views.
Outside the church were some metal sculptures — and a couple of these were of the famous red kites that I often mention on Facebook. Recently these incredible birds of prey, which have a wingspan of about six feet, have almost constantly hovered overhead. I drove down the M40 after a City class and knew it was time to pull off soon when I saw the birds circling over the motorway at Stokenchurch. There were four circling the garden this morning. The sculpture below is pretty much life sized — it’s by James Sansome. The event has its own web-page with details of the artists.
Monks Risborough church is extremely old — there’s been a church there for at least a thousand years. Most of the building is 14th century but the font is 12th century — 900 years old — and came from an older church. The boundaries of the parish are apparently the oldest in the whole country — and the shape of the parish is very long and thin to apportion parts of the contrasting landscape features to the village. These include wooded hilltops, steep grazing on the escarpment, the spring line (where the settlement is) and then the more fertile low-lying flat farmland in the Vale of Aylesbury.
The geography is amazingly varied and makes me think the general location is a great place to locate the action in a novel. I’m going to fictionalise the actual location of The Angel but it will be close to the hills and all their celtic and mystical associations (there’s an ancient cross cut into the chalk of Whiteleaf Hill, which overlooks Monks Risborough) and there are some very large areas of woodland where it’s easy to go for a quiet, contemplative walk. However, turn the other way and you very soon get to some remote farming areas which, while not quite as desolate as the Fens, might not be too dissimilar to somewhere like deepest Devon.
I went for a run through these places today and I ran down one lane for about two miles (which takes me near enough 20 minutes) and didn’t see a single car, just a farmer’s Land Rover and no other humans apart from a cyclist who nearly ran me over and a horsey-looking blonde woman mucking out a stables (not noticeably fat-bottomed unlike the ones I wrote about in my last reading). In fact the whole area is pretty horsey — there are a few studs around and one of the biggest point-to-point events in the country is held just down the road at Easter.
All this made me realise, as I was running, that The Angel’s location re-inforces one of its themes. It will be in a place that in one way is very connected with London (on Wednesday I left the Queen Boadicea in EC1 at 10.45pm and still didn’t have to get the last train home). But go the other way and it’s easy to find isolation and a connection to a way of life that’s still incredibly traditional.
So the novel’s location is on a boundary — a kind of liminal zone. And that’s the point where its characters are too — they’re on the boundary between urban and rural, commercial and artistic. They’re on the edge too and wondering which way to turn.
During the slightly boozy session about ten of us had in the Queen Boadicea after the class, we were all put on the spot to say what our novel was about — and any personal elements to it. I said mine was ‘escape’ — and a lot of the stuff I write seems to share that theme — but both main characters do want to escape their predicaments at the start of the novel. Emily’s suggestion that I take a look at Ann Tyler’s ‘The Accidental Tourist‘ as it’s in a similar sort of sub-genre maybe also re-inforces the theme of reaching an edge and thinking about escape. True as the answer was, it wasn’t the one that some of the class had hoped for, given that I’d read what’s now becoming my notorious sex scene on Monday (of which more in a coming post — no pun intended).
I was looking up online MAs in Creative Writing and came across this — worth reading as some aspects seem quite true to life.
I would guess anyone who doesn’t ask themselves this during the course of writing a novel is not going to produce a very good one.
What’s probably not such a good idea is to include this angst in comments accompanying a chapter sent to a tutor for a tutorial. Asking ‘Is it any good?’ really means ‘tell me lots of nice things about it please to boost my writing ego’. So when I didn’t immediately get that response from Emily my reaction was ‘She must think it’s rubbish’. The tutorial in question has been an odd, long-drawn out affair as it couldn’t take place in person due to illness and we exchanged e-mails instead (Emily now being on maternity leave). I also talked about the issues with Alison last night in person.
There were lots of things that Emily didn’t like in the extract I’d sent — plausibility issues about James’ behaviour, not really seeing into what motivated the characters and so on. In some ways it’s a bit of a Catch-22 in that she said she thought I needed to know my characters better — but the best way for me to do that is to write more and to live with them, which is more difficult to do if your motivation is ebbing away partly because a tutor has said you need to know your characters better. Â I think I do know my characters pretty well but perhaps they hadn’t come over that well for a couple of reasons. One is stylistic — I do tend to write much more from an exterior perspective than interior so I only infrequently inhabit the characters’ innermost thoughts. The second is the structure of the novel which starts with two people flung together in crisis and then develops from there. There’s a huge amount of back story that comes with both the two main characters and I’m finding it very laborious to drip feed into the first chapters. I’ve done about 15,000 words and they’ve not really found out much about each others’ backgrounds. I’m tempted to just write a couple of scenes from the past and show them in flashback and be done with it.
On Saturday night I got pretty downhearted — not because I thought the novel was no good — but because I thought I might need to totally overhaul the way it was written. I considered crawling into a hole and not bothering to emerge until after our end of course reading. However, once I’d mulled over the feedback I found it quite inspiring in a way. This is because Emily seems to have high ambitions for the story and characters — possibly higher than my own. Once I’ve got to the heart of the dilemmas and decisions facing both characters then the novel could say an awful lot that is relevant to readers in the modern world. I do think I have thought this through in my head in terms of concepts but it perhaps has to translate to the characters. It was suggested that I place my novel in the bitter-sweet human relationship genre defined by Anne Tyler’s novels. I was flattered that it was thought I operate in that difficult genre myself.
I’m also probably guilty of treating my characters as tools to be pushed around to achieve my own ends in terms of writing. For example, I thought it would be a good scene for James to turn up to see Emma at work to tell her he’s been fired (she won’t answer her phone). I had him bring Kim along principally because I wanted to write a bit of Emma, Kim and James having an argument, which is something I enjoyed doing — lots of conflict and dialogue. However, in reality, even if James had gone to break the news to his wife in a five-star hotel then he would have left Kim in the lobby while he did it.
It seems I’m in a very uncomfortable position but one that is really of quite profound significance as getting this feedback shows that I’ve created characters who demand my respect — it’s their story now and I have to let them get on with it. I can’t force a situation on them just because I want to write it. This is really odd. I’ve seen many authors describe this process but even so, it’s quite disconcerting. This perhaps re-inforces the strong views that have been expressed after my readings on the way the characters have come over.
There were also straighforwardly positive comments in the feedback — strong sentences, good description, good dialogue (when it’s serving a purpose) — and it’s re-assuring to have the quality of the actual writing re-affirmed. I’m very self-critical of my prose as I think I write too quickly — beginning sentences without thinking how they’re going to end. In fact it’s been concerns over my self-diagnosed clunky prose that has put me off attempting a novel before.
In the end I e-mailed Emily back and said that I’d taken the comments on board and on reflection they were very helpful and motivating and she e-mailed back saying that being able to act on feedback, particularly if it’s not all glowing and telling you how wonderful it is, is a mark of a ‘true writer’.
As for the ‘Is it any good?’ factor, I’m reminded of the famous Stephen King story about ‘Carrie’ — that he’d thrown a draft away in despair into the wastepaper basket and his wife fished it out, read it and persuaded him to finish it. 50 books later he’s still going strong.
Part of the plot of The Angel has Kim leaving trendy Shoreditch to come and work in the pub in rural Buckinghamshire. She’s also going to carry on working as an artist. It might be thought a bit implausible by some people (probably in London) that any serious artist would leave London unless they went to other arty areas, like Brighton, Pembrokeshire, St. Ives, Southwold or Eastbeach (!).
However, there’s an event in Buckinghamshire starting today that shows that there are a huge number of artists working in the county. Bucks Open Studios is an annual event that has over 400 artists open their studios or exhibit work in churches or village halls — it’s between 12th and 27th June this year. There is an exhibition by half a dozen local artists in the village hall half a mile away (and the population of our parish, including four villages, is only about 700). There are also loads of artists’ studios within a two or three mile distance of where I live, which considering that large swathes of that area include  a big National Trust nature reserve and ancient monument and the Chequers estate and most other directions are fields full of sheep or wheat is quite surprising. There’s quite a big village about five miles away called Haddenham (used extensively for ‘Inspector Morse’ filming and the like) that has twenty five artists participating in the Bucks Open Arts scheme.
It’s probably very logical for there to be so much artistic activity here — many people may have also given up a life in the rat race in London and set up as artists at home, but London’s not that far away and there’s enough money around in the home counties to probably sustain demand for the artwork. It’s also probably a very inspirational place for many artists to work — with some wonderful countryside, nature and peace for concentration (except when some of the suburban-minded anal retentives decide to chop trees down and pulverise their remains first thing on a Sunday morning, like today).
I suspect that many of these artists are relatively old and not like Kim but I’m going to try and have a look around their open studios over the next couple of weeks to do a bit of research.
…but I did get the dishwasher in!
Bearing in mind Judith Murray’s comment that ‘in some sense all novels are historical’, I decided to load my last reading with as many contemporary cultural references as I could think of. ‘Decided’ isn’t actually a good definition — throwing in various things that pop into my head is how I tend to write anyway although maybe I’d decide to delete most of them if a book got published.
I’m rather dreading reaction to the scene I’ve just written because it could go either of two ways. It’s a climactic scene after months of simmering, smouldering sexual tension between James and Kim and this comes to the boil (good cooking metaphors there, albeit cliched). To counter the tension as it rises I start off with the most banal sort of conversations. In one point (a cop out I’m sure I’ll be picked up on) I have the narrator say ‘she didn’t care who was talking’ and then throw in three or four unattributed pieces of dialogue.
The cultural references are quite a bizarre bunch. Remember these are all in a 2,600 word piece which is meant to pivotal to the plot: Amazon, Katie Melua, Charlie Brooker, the Guardian, the Wombles, Mike Batt, William Orbit, Orbit’s ‘Adagio for Strings’, All Saints’ ‘Pure Shores’, Katie Melua’s ‘The Flood’ (which goes on to supply metaphors for the later scene), Virgin TV’s ‘Naked Office’ (see below), Jamie Oliver, a Sky+ box, the Carry On films, ‘The Full Monty’, ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ (and various of its contestants), Amanda Holden, Simon Cowell, Ant and Dec, ‘Sex and the City’, Heston Blumenthal, ‘The Fat Duck Cookbook’ and Heston Blumenthal’s notorious snail porridge. That’s well over 20 references that only someone living in this country in 2010 would really understand. Apart from the BGT references most of these aren’t gratuitously contemporary as they illustrate character and move the plot in some cases. The music is interesting as (it will be interesting to see if anyone picks this up) as Emma has bought the Katie Melua CD as it’s produced by William Orbit, whose works ten years previously (see above) were the soundtrack to a holiday she and James had in Ibiza when they first began their relationship. He’s meant to see the romantic significance in this — but doesn’t and needles her about Katie Melua’s previous association with Mike Batt (of the Wombles). So, a little vignette of their relationship.
I had to rush writing this piece and sent it out late to everyone. I’m still unhappy with the end and may revise it even further before I read it. I was totally knackered once I’d written it. Partly this was because I was determined to write something new and that pushed the boundaries a bit for me in terms of how comfortable I’d be with reading it. It’s also partly because I’m pushing myself to write new material for each reading and tutorial rather than polish up previously reviewed material. I also went to France very early on Tuesday morning partly to buy wine for our course reading. This produced probably a course first — for the first reading ever to be written, partially, on a cross-channel ferry. On the way out I annotated a printed draft then coming back I had the netbook out by the window looking out into the channel. Wonder if any of the nautical flavour comes through?
The piece was also very emotionally draining, which I found quite surprising. As it’s the consummation of a relationship I was trying to imagine and hold in my mind the feelings and emotions of the characters. When this involves scenes of a disintegrating marriage, seriously unrequited love and then some sudden switch into passion between two people who had (on the surface) treated each other as friends then this takes a lot of mental effort. I did this for three or four days and thought about it so much I was more than semi-detached from reality. I don’t know if it will be good for the writing that it felt like I was so intensely involved in their predicaments — your characters can’t do anything much more real than have sex with each other — or whether I might have got too close?
The writing was also difficult as I thought I had to do a sex scene for a reading as this is what the plot of the novel calls for and I wanted to get feedback on it — good and bad. I’m sure this is very difficult to get right and constructive feedback (though not sniggering) in this area would be a lot more useful than on a scene with people walking around London, for example. In the first drafts I had some graphic descriptions and used some very earthy Anglo-Saxon words. In some ways I’d rather these had stayed in as from a reading perspective because I’d like to have made myself read these out, to overcome the embarrassment. However, the word limit chopped any real physical description of the sex — there’s only really the build up but that’s the most interesting bit for the characters.  Even so, I’ve probably laid myself open to bonkbuster piss-taking.
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.).
I was doing some ‘research’ today which involved sneaking in the back door of my local pub when it was officially closed up for the afternoon — the landlord had previously told me he’d be staying open all afternoon and he must have felt guilty when I turned up at 4.30pm with the doors shut. So I hung around in there for a quick pint — then had to stay for a couple more when it started raining outside — while he counted up his takings and watched some mindnumbingly sensational programme on Virgin TV on his Freeview TV about car crashes and people falling off motorbikes.
There was a bizarre trailer during the advert breaks about a programme that seemed so ludicrous and prurient it could only ever appear on such an obscure channel — ‘The Naked Office’. It appeared to feature people taking their clothes off in their offices but you couldn’t tell if they actually did because as the trailer was shown at 5pm then Virgin put big labels over any potentially controversial body parts.
I happened to be flicking through the TV guide tonight and came across the actual programme on Virgin+1. I was amazed to see that the programme was being positioned as some sort of business psychology programme rather than the peep show that most viewers no doubt expected. There was some ‘expert’ on who made the specious argument that if office workers stripped off naked for a day then they would be more open and it would ‘enhance communication’. This is the kind of HR bollocks that I’m interested in for ‘The Angel’ — the sort of unquestioning, controlling mentality that assumes people can be coerced into abandoning all dignity just by a few uplifting words from a motivational speaker.
Of course, these same HR consultants are no doubt the people who would come down mercilessly on any sexual harassment in the workplace and, thinking about the Peter Kay John Smiths advert mentioned in a post below, I can think of a very obvious practical reason why ‘The Naked Office’ will find its male participants quite reluctant to join in.
No fear, the whole programme was one flaccid non-event. In the end no-one got naked — a few of them paraded for about ten seconds in their underwear, long enough to display their array of tattoos, but no more titillating than one would see at the beach or swimming pool.
The programme was utter crap but a source of ideas for the novel and I’m wondering whether Emma should do a ‘let’s go naked Friday’. While on this programme the expert sensibly stayed fully clothed, I wonder if Emma might cause no end of tension if she suggested to James that she had to take the lead by stripping off in a copycat event that she might quite innocently organise — she’s going to be into crystals and mysticism anyway.
Charlie Brooker completely skewered an earlier edition of the programme in one of his better reviews in the Guardian.
We had a run through of our readings in Wednesday evening’s class. I’m currently second on the bill so was one of the first to get up and read. I chose what I think will be the eventual opening of the book — the firing scene. This is a lively scene but difficult to read as it has three characters and some narration — to do it proper justice I need to read in four slightly different registers. I have a cunning plan to try and help me with this BUT I got some extra inspiration from one of the contestants on last night’s Britain’s Got Talent.
He’s Mark James from Barnoldswick and performed a duet from ‘Phantom of the Opera’ in the auditions — where he had a costume split down the middle — one female side and one male. He stood facing different directions when singing the appropriate part! Complete rubbish — and even worse when last night he did Elton John and Kiki Dee which was a much more interchangeable duet so he was forever spinning round. (I was a bit gutted the extraordinarily talented pole dancer went out tonight.)
But — maybe that’s my solution — perhaps I dress in some sort of split female (for Kate the HR woman) costume on one side and a male costume for James and his boss Will (Will is balding so maybe when I’m James I can put a wig on or something)? Then perhaps for the narration I take the mic and hide behind the lectern — very omniscient.
I’m sure all the literary agents would remember that sort of performance?
Emily was ill, which was bad luck for me as I had a tutorial scheduled with her to discuss chapter 5 and other stuff. However, Emma Sweeney was a very capable replacement — she teaches at various places like Cambridge University and New York University (London campus) — a bit more exotic a version of our curiously named Bedford University Buckinghamshire campus that does nursing teaching, presumably for Stoke Mandeville (see below). To digress even further when I Googled her name, I found a syllabus for a course that someone called Emma Sweeney teaches, or has taught, (could be a different person but it’s not so important as the following goes on to say I found a good idea) at a U.S. university that  includes a module on ‘sex and the body’ — a potentially awkward subject that I’d guess causes writers more anxiety than anything else and I’m really wondering whether I should make myself write something similar for my last workshop reading. It might be difficult but it would be a good learning experience.
Mind you I say that as someone’s whose writing always seems to veer towards the smutty — to the extent that other students like to insist I mention that one of my male characters is ‘sex mad’.
Walking along Theobalds Road tonight between City Lit and City University I came across this historical anachronism (sorry Guy for the tautology!) of a road sign. It’s rather appropriate for my Angel.
Here’s the whole rather quaint London-Red-Buses street scene below.
One of London’s leading literary agents, Judith Murray from Greene and Heaton paid our group a visit on Wednesday night. She has a number notable authors on her list, perhaps the best known being Sarah Waters.
Judith mentioned at one point that the part of the role of an agent was to be an author’s advisor and advocate — and she spoke with such enthusiasm and showed such huge knowledge of the publishing business that it wasn’t hard to imagine the excellent job she would perform looking after her clients. I’d be tempted to say the authors on her list are a lucky bunch but that would belie the huge amount of effort that we learned is involved from both writer and agent before Judith represents a writer.
That said, sometimes there has been an element of serendipity in the way that Judith has come across authors — Sarah Waters had been sending off her manuscripts to publishers’ slush piles without success until she mentioned in passing to her neighbour that she was looking for a publisher — the neighbour happened to be a colleague of Judith’s at the time who suggested that Sarah sent the book to Judith — and it all went from there. Apparently the first few chapters of ‘Tipping the Velvet’ were published virtually unchanged from how they’d appeared in the first manuscript — requiring next to no editing. That the novel went on to great success makes a couple of related points: firstly, the opening pages of ‘Tipping the Velvet’ Â must have languished unnoticed on various publishers’ slush piles; secondly, the later success of both novel and author show the value of an agent who is passionate about the work.
This need for the professionals in publishing to be passionate about a novel was also emphasised by our visitor last week, Francesca Main. Judith receives about  20-25 unsolicited submissions a day — and she reads them all — but is likely take on a smaller number of authors than that in a whole year — less than half a percent.
Clearly, to have a chance of making it into that small number of acceptances, the novel will need to immediately engage her interest. Moreover, she reads the submissions from a necessarily commercial angle — if she can’t immediately think of three or four editors (out of the large number she knows) who would also be interested in that type of novel then it would be uneconomic to progress any further. The book might be a great piece of work but if there’s no market for it then it’s a tough fact of life.
Judith was candid enough to admit that she has passes over books that have later gone on to be published with success — she turned down at least one novel that went on to win a literary prize. However, that book that wasn’t to her personal taste and an agent really has to love a writer’s work for the relationship to be a success.
As we find with our own readings in the class, everyone has different literary preferences, and being rejected by an agent is not necessarily a reflection on the quality of the work. Writers need to develop a thick skin to cope with rejection — a quality that might count as much as many facets of literary ability but, given how novel writing is often so bound up with one’s own personality, then such persistence and self-belief are probably some of the most difficult personal qualities that writers need to develop.
Judith’s tastes, incidentally, tend towards good literary writing — but of the sort that has a strong narrative and engaging characters. She’s not a fan of intentionally self-conscious, experimental writing, which she enjoys intellectually but she says there are other agents who specialise in such genres.
As Francesca mentioned the previous weeks, Judith also re-inforced the tough conditions in the publishing market at the moment — since September 2008 publishers have become much more risk adverse and have erred on the side of safe bets — principally established authors with a good sales track record or the amazingly talented and disciplined celebrity novelists who somehow manage to dash off a novel while appearing in their soap operas or reality TV series. That said, Greene and Heaton had a particularly good year in 2009.
Nevertheless, the market is very tough and publishers won’t invest in a new author unless they’re confident that booksellers will promote it — the 3 for 2 table at Waterstone’s or its equivalent in Amazon. And the publishers are expected to contribute to those promotion so there goes any hope of an advertising budget.
The need to drum up interest in a new author in these straitened times also explains the long lead time often experienced by a novel from a new writer. Any promising work that lands on Judith’s desk now might not be published until early 2012. This is because the publishers will try to create a ‘buzz’ about the author — try to get good word of mouth recommendation, or endorsement by influential bloggers, solicit favourable reviews and so on. There’s a lot of work goes on to attract interest and raise the novel’s profile — and often the author’s personality can make a big contribution to this effort (again, it’s becoming less of a world for shrinking violets). Literary prizes are particularly important in boosting reputations.
Bearing in mind the long lead time, I asked a question about whether contemporaneously-set novels might be seen to date very quickly. Mine is set around now, or maybe in the last year, but would an agent think that in 2012 or 2013 that readers would think ‘Oh that’s so 2009’? On the other hand historical novels wouldn’t have that issue. The answer was not to worry — the main criterion is the quality of the writing by far.
All the work an agent does for an author was comprehensively outlined — including many aspects that most of us have hardly given a thought to, such as foreign rights. Essentially the agent is the author’s first professional reader and, as such, a good agent can use experience and contacts to guide an author right the way through the publishing process. An agent will offer sound advice throughout a writer’s career – and, given the investment in development of a new author, agents are interested in writers who offer the prospect of a long career (I hope that doesn’t mean that if you’re over 30 you’ve got no chance — let alone over 40).
One thing that authors in our position can’t expect, though, is a large amount of editorial intervention. While Judith really enjoys the process of working with an author to identify what might need to be improved in a novel, time-management pressures mean that she can’t help to substantially rewrite a novel. The writing has to be good in the first place. If it’s not then an agent won’t have the resources to turn prose that’s just OK into something better.
One piece of very useful advice, therefore, is don’t send work out to agents before it’s ready. The novel should be ‘good to go’ before it goes before an agent’s eyes. An agent generally won’t be able to give detailed feedback on novels that are rejected so it would be futile to send a first draft out and expect it to be returned with lots of detailed annotations on how it might be made better. Instead you’ll get a rejection but you’re not likely to know whether it was because the book as a concept was not commercial or because it was just sloppily written. At least if an author sends the best, most complete version of a novel then the chances of it being rejected on pure quality grounds are much reduced.
Similarly, there’s not much point sending in the first three chapters and a synopsis if the novel’s not complete. The agent might love it but won’t sign you up until he or she has read the whole novel — an agent needs to know if the writing can be sustained and developed over the course of a longer work. We might get some useful encouragement but no deal until the book’s completed. That said, Judith is very enthusiastic about spotting new talent and supports events such as our course reading evening and she encouraged us all to contact her with our work.
So how to contact an agent? The covering letter is important and is the first thing that is read. The quality of the letter will say a lot about the quality of the submitted novel. It should be concise — but should give an idea of what the novel is — just something like ‘thriller’ will often be sufficient. Information about the author is important — and we shouldn’t underestimate the value of writing courses such as ours — saying you’ve written the novel during the City University Novel Writing Certificate course will definitely make an agent take the submission a lot more seriously. Judith will then read the first part of the novel and only if she’s interested will she then read the synopsis — any decision will be made primarily on the writing itself.
So many writers don’t do research on which agents to contact — and the result is that much effort is wasted when agents receive work in unsuitable genres and the like. So how do you find an agent who will love your work? Apart from the Writers and Artists Yearbook, one clever trick is to find a book by an author whose work is similar to your own and then look in the acknowledgement pages — so long as the relationship hasn’t exploded there should be some thanks given by the author to an agent.
Or you could sign up to the City University course and have a few of them come along to listen to you giving a personal reading of your work — more scary than putting an envelope in the post but, fingers crossed, more effective: Judith represents Kirstan Hawkins, a course alumnus, who spoke to us last term after the reading event a couple of years ago.
Just been watching the second half of Eurovision while trying to start writing Chapter Five. I’ve convinced myself that it’s good research for the novel as it shows the pervasiveness of English across Europe — or actually the Eurovision area which stretches as far as Israel and Azerbaijan.
At least three-quarters of the countries sang in English and, so far, every single country has given their votes in English (we’ve not got to France yet). It shows the way that a younger generation of Europeans, possibly those who started secondary education after the fall of the Berlin Wall, have almost appropriated a version of English as their lingua franca.
I’ve been in a reasonably good position to follow this as I’ve worked for the last eight or so years in a job that has involved frequently meeting colleagues from all over Europe — and travelling pretty extensively. While bearing in mind my own, and that of the British overall, pretty dreadful mastery of language skills (only exceeded by the Americans), I’ve found that English speaking ability is a bit unpredictable in people over around 40 — some very educated people can struggle. However, younger people, at least those I’ve met in a work context, are almost exclusively excellent at spoken English. There’s no hestiation or nervousness — just fluency, albeit often marred to British ears by an American accent.
One reason for this is that many Europeans spend a time living in this country to help their English skills. I’ve been doing a writing course at City Lit in Covent Garden for the last few weeks and fellow course members include a German, an Italian, Â a Dane and a Japanese. The Europeans are so fluent at English that if you were to transcribe the words coming out of their mouths there would be very little difference to a ‘native’ English speaker — perhaps they would be slightly more formally accurate. While the Japanese student has quite a strong accent, she took one of the Londoners to task about her grammar — saying she was trying to learn English and couldn’t understand how the sentences had been constructed.
All this is, of course, is my self-justification for writing much of Kim’s dialogue in fluent English — but I think that’s the most accurate thing to do. I don’t think she’ll feel or behave like a foreigner at all when she’s in London — as London really is such a cosmopolitan city. (Bren Gosling’s novel about an immigrant in London is another example.) Yet, when Kim leaves, she’ll just about cross that almost tangible border between the influence of London and that of rural England. I tend to think of it in terms of motorway junctions — J5 on the M40, J12 of the M4 — but the motorways extend London’s influence out along their corridors. I see The Angel pub being the other side of London to Amersham and Wycombe — and so really in another world culturally. Kim will feel like she’s in another country then, to begin with.
But she’d be celebrating tonight with Germany having won Eurovision in the end. As the (over 30) Executive Supervisor of Eurovision said of the big flash-mob dance — ‘it was so fun’.
I’ve yet again been amazed by how all these weird connections come tumbling out while I’m writing — things I don’t realise until perhaps a day or two afterwards.Â
I don’t know whether the digression into cultural references would make it into a finished novel but I’ve put a few things in for my own amusement.Â
In a part I’ve just written, James and Kim are walking through an uninspiring part of Hoxton towards City Road and they see a view of the City through a gap created by a building site. The heat on the concrete shimmers and Kim thinks of Avalon — or, more specifically, an image based on Glastonbury Tor rising up over the flooded Somerset levels (as they would have been in Arthurian times).
What James associates with Avalon is the Roxy Music album from 1982 which Kim knows too, with its wonderfully mythological cover. James, being on his way to being half cut, starts humming and singing tracks from the album while Kim is mulling over the imagery of the City as a citadel. The song he ends up singing is “Take A Chance With Me” (not to be confused with the Abba song of a similar title). This is a non-too-subtle portent for what both of them choose to do later.
But what was so strange is that Kim has just asked James what he did at work and he responds that he ‘made money out of nothing’. Now a very similar quotation has always stuck in my mind by a musician — that the concept behind a particular album was ‘making music out of nothing’, which I’ve always thought was a great description of the music. The musician was Bryan Ferry and the album, of course, ‘Avalon’.
Many critics have described Avalon as one of the most romantic albums ever made and it was interesting that it came to mind while I was writing this scene (they’re just an odd, platonic couple at the moment). At the start of the chapter the two walk past the plaque marking the location of Burbage’s ‘The Theatre’ — where the first Shakespeare plays were performed — and Kim tells James that he’s standing right where Romeo and Juliet was first performed. Star cross’d lovers indeed.
Here’s a performance of ‘Take a Chance With Me’ that I found on You Tube.
Last Wednesday, as mentioned in a previous post below we had a visit from a real-life commissioning editor — Francesca Main from Simon and Schuster. I think I’d been expecting a visitor from ‘an editor’ so was quite awestruck when Francesca described one large component of her job as being THE person who decided whether to publish a novel or not. I didn’t go quite so far as one of our group who made the blunt, but fairly accurate, observation from our side of the table — ‘You’re like God’.
It turns out that, while aspiring novelists might see the commissioning editor as a deity, that within the publishing house there appears to be a hierarchy of the gods worthy of Greek mythology and that a large part of the editor’s job is to convince the supernatural beings in other departments, notably the marketing department, that a novel is worth taking on.
I won’t go into a great deal of detail about the insights Francesca gave us, fascinating as they were. (I’m conscious these meetings are one of the attractions of the novel writing course so join up for the course next year if you weren’t there and want to find out more). However, I did check with Francesca if it was ok to write up the general drift of her comments on this blog.
There are a few sobering points to mention up front about the commissioning editors job, as it relates to up and coming novelists. Firstly, she almost exclusively deals with agent submissions — and not unsolicited manuscripts. This is an important quality filter that works to the advantage of the writers represented by agents as Francesca will endeavour to make a decision based on the whole of any manuscript that she receives. It’s not judged on the first few pages or chapters — the whole lot is considered. Of course this means the author has to have a completed novel to put forward in the first place — which again is a filter of quality and commitment.
Another sobering aspect is the ratio of novels considered (even those filtered by agents) compared with those published. She receives between two and five novels a day but will tend to only see six to eight novels a year through to publication — which works out at a list of about 25 authors. So in a working year of perhaps 200 days that means she must publish something under 1% of the novels that cross her desk. How much those odds sound depressingly pessimistic depend, I suppose, to the quality of targeting of editors by agents (perhaps some that are rejected are not her genre and so on) and also to the number of other editors also on the lookout for novels (the closer that number gets to 100 then the slightly less glum those odds start to look — once you have an agent).
With such a small percentage selected it’s clear that the editor has to be passionate about the work — something mentioned in the previous post. One comment stuck in my mind — “you must feel you are in good hands” as a reader (i.e. the author has a confident, clear and consistent style and that the reader feels the novel is going somewhere). She also re-iterated the point about avoiding florid prose — the famous over-use of adverbs and adjectives marks out authors trying too hard — but general pretentiousness shows through as well. Â Originality and quality of the authorial voice are also clinching factors.
The editor needs to champion the work to the marketers, accountants, publicists, foreign rights department and so on. That’s why throughout the process the people involved have to be completely committed to the novel from the start — author, agent, editor and it helps to have reviewers, booksellers and so on as advocates too.
That’s why the temptation to ask someone like Francesca a question like ‘tell me what I need to write to get published’ needs to be resisted at all costs — not that any of us did — as if we don’t believe in what we’ve written as writers then we can’t expect anyone else to.
And at the end it’s a commercial proposition and it was salutary when the subject of subsequent novels came up. Perhaps surprisingly, debut authors are reasonably attractive to publishers — they’re more newsworthy, possibly more original, perhaps easier to work with and, a factor that seemed surprisingly important, they’re eligible for more literary prizes! There are perhaps as many barriers for the many published authors whose sales figures for their first or second novels haven’t set the world on fire — and they end up dropped from the list. There’s not much an editor can do in that case — even if they have a passion for the works — your books don’t sell and the bookshops won’t buy them. Tough.
The second part of the commissioning editor’s job apart from performing Herculean efforts to get the book published in the first place is to work with the author to improve it. This isn’t a case of checking the spellings — proof readers do that and other readers can also check for continuity and historical consistency and so on. Francesca tends to develop her writers’ novels at a more abstract level. Common issues that might be addressed include the following.
Are the characters real? A writer can write all the great prose in the world but if no-one cares about their characters on an emotional level then they’re in trouble. Structure: writers are ok at beginnings and ends but the middles of novels often need work. It’s also Francesca’s experience that good dialogue is very difficult to write. Also, don’t underestimate the reader — they don’t need every action explaining and, quite often, would err on the side of using their own imaginations where possible — don’t describe everything and every character in great detail.
As for first-time novelists, there’s a temptation to throw everything but the kitchen sink into their debut — the editor will tend to murder quite a few of the debut-novelist’s babies. That’s why the relationship between the editor and author needs to work — good writers will always value constructive feedback.
It was a fascinating hour and Francesca was answered all our questions with a really useful combination of general advice to us and anecdote from her own experience. In the end, as mentioned previously, there’s no magic bullet — at least beyond the one that gets you through the door called ‘getting an agent’ — and we will meet a real one of those tomorrow evening.
I went up to the Eight Bells in Long Crendon today — the local Campaign for Real Ale’s pub of the year. (I wrote its entry for the forthcoming 2011 Good Beer Guide.)
It’s interior is very much like the sort of pub I imagine The Angel to be — all hundreds of years old chequered flagstones and so on (interestingly there’s another pub in Long Crendon actually called The Angel, which gave me the idea for the name, but it’s more of a restaurant). It’s such a beautiful, olde world country pub that Helen, the landlady, was telling me that, contrary to what I’d recently written, it’s been on Midsomer Murders at least three times — with a yet-to-be-broadcast episode filmed in the garden and in the street outside. Long Crendon and nearby Haddenham are used as locations for nearly every classic English countryside TV programme — Morse, Lewis, Rosemary and Thyme — the lot. Even if you’ve never been there you’re bound to recognise the places. Here’s a photo of my friend Andy stood outside a couple of autumns ago.
It was good research to see a bit of the every day routine. We had to wait around a while, talking to the barman about the World Cup, until she returned with a load of meat from the local butcher’s. Then a little later she and one of the locals had a table covered with loose change — bagging it all up — which had been raised for by a pub running team for breast cancer research. They’d done a half-marathon in Edinburgh at the weekend. All invaluable stuff.
The pub has a little alcove dedicated to the local morris-men and offers plenty of traditional real ales — the back of the bar was knocked through to provide a stillage. Helen also has a house beer brewed in her own name — quite wittily called ‘Hel’s Bells’ — see photos below.
Yesterday London 2012 introduced its two mascots, partly created by Michael Morpugo, who are called Wenlock and Mandeville. They look like metallic teletubbies.
Given that our City University group is based right in the centre of London, it’s quite interesting that not too many of us have set our novels in the city — it’s only the main setting for three people, if I remember rightly. There are two more of us who will use London as a partial setting, including me. Of those five, two people are setting their novels fifteen or twenty years in the past. Only three of us are writing about relatively contemporary London. This may be quite relevant as we look ahead a couple of years as the Olympics are going to make this country, and London in particular, a real focus of attention throughout the world. This has its good and bad aspects but there could be a big cultural knock-on effect as we’re already starting to see to a lesser extent with South Africa and the World Cup.
I’ve already written a passing reference in The Angel to the 2012 Olympic logo but I’m again quite intrigued by the serendipitous names that these mascots have been given in the context of my novel. Wenlock is apparently based on the Shropshire town of Much Wenlock. However, it’s also the name of a spit-and-sawdust real ale pub on the fringes of Hoxton and Islington that I’ve used as a setting — the Wenlock Arms. It’s the pub where Kim works — and I’ve just written a scene where she and James turn up there. I’ve slightly changed the pub name in the novel.
And Mandeville? It’s derived from the village of Stoke Mandeville, just up the road from me, which gives its name to Stoke Mandeville Hospital (strictly speaking that’s in Aylesbury) which was made famous for its spinal injuries by Jimmy Saville in the 70s. It’s apparently the biggest hospital site in Europe, although the Medizinischen Hochschule Hannover which is opposite the offices I frequently visited seems pretty huge to me (Kim was born there!). However, Stoke Mandeville is no doubt the only hospital that has a huge sports stadium. This is used for paralympic events — it was where they started — and has to be seen to be believed. It’s bigger than many football league grounds. I had a wander round the hospital buildings a couple of months ago when I had to find my way from A&E to the pharmacy, which are at opposite ends.
Stoke Mandeville is also the nearest hospital to where The Angel pub is set so I’m sure that one or two of the characters will find reason to end up there — I’ve already got a good plot opportunity for poor old Kim to be taken there.
Just on the train back after another fascinating visit from a guest speaker in one of our sessions — Francesca Main who’s a commissioning editor at Simon and Schuster — and a very successful one too as one of her books ‘The White Woman on the Green Bicycle’ by Monique Roffey has been shortlisted for this year’s Orange prize. I’ll blog at more length about some of the points she made when I’m not balancing a laptop on my knee going at a rate of knots through the countryside.
One interesting point seems to be, however, that the more insight we get into the processes of the publishing world then the more the simplest, most universal advice rings true: there are no silver bullets and, moreover, trying too hard to write something with the objective of being published as an end it itself is probably the most likely route to failure.
That’s because any agent or editor will only take on a piece of work that makes them passionate enough to champion it against all sorts of obstacles and adversity. The agent needs to have the belief that will sustain getting the novel into a marketable shape and then go through the process of selling it to editors. Then the editor needs to champion the novel within the publishing house — of which more later.
So paradoxically, what probably marks out a novel that’s worth publishing, at least from a new author, is the fact that the writer believes in it so much that he or she complete it as an end in itself — regardless of worrying about its commercial potential. Â If an obsessive, compulsive belief in the work itself shines out of the text then it’s that which will convince other people to believe in it and to invest their time and resources in its further development.
Probably the most daunting conclusion of all is that other people’s advice is very helpful but they can’t do the work — it’s all down to yourself.
We ran on past our finishing time last night in our workshop — so late that the university building was locked up before Guy and I had our tutorials with Alison. These then took place on an amenable table outside the Queen Boadicea pub on St. John Street (quite apt for my novel). More of the consequences of the tutorial in a later post. This meant I missed a meeting I was hoping to pop into in High Wycombe (also in a pub) and got home quite late. However, I stayed up to watch a fascinating documentary on Heaven 17’s 1981 album ‘Penthouse and Pavement’.
This came out around the time I did my ‘O’ levels and, while I loved the Human League and Soft Cell and others, I wasn’t quite old and trendy enough to have bought ‘Penthouse and Pavement’, although I think I knew of its existence. When I went to university I got to know the album pretty well. I even think I played tracks off it, like ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’ when I did the Friday night disco a couple of times at the student union. (It’s hard to believe, I know, but I did a bit of DJ-ing when I was 18 and then did a weekly show with my friend Hog Head on the student campus radio station when I was at UC Santa Barbara.)
Watching the documentary made me realise how much of a subconscious influence it must have been on me as many elements seems to have already turned up in my novel so far. It was said on the programme that ‘Penthouse and Pavement’ was actually a concept album for the 80s — obviously contrasting the disparity of wealth in the Thatcherite early 80s of the penthouse dwellers with those living on the pavement: the vinyl LP had a ‘Penthouse’ side and a ‘Pavement’ side. The brilliant cover, ‘like a cheesy company annual report’ Â as I think someone commented, was an ironic, arty comment on capitalism with the suited, pony-tailed band members striking yuppie poses — handshaking, on the phone doing a deal — which anticipated the Loadsamoney culture by five or six years.
The part of ‘The Angel’ that I’ve written so far has remarkable similarities — James starts high up in a gleaming office block, coming down to street level to meet grimy, struggling Kim. A stretch of pavement also plays a big part in one chapter. Thematically the characters represent the tension between penthouse (James) and pavement (Kim). The vocals on the title track, my favourite, are also an interplay between Glenn Gregory’s world-weary, deep male tones and sparky, soulful female vocals on the chorus (someone called Josie James, who’s not the woman on the video). That’s similar to the exchange of points-of-view I have so far in the novel. I’d also like to achieve a similar effect (for the City part of the novel anyway) with the prose as Heaven 17 achieve with the music — quite fast, sparse, sly, unpredictable — but not taking itself too seriously.
I guess I could elaborate further and speculate that the first track off Heaven 17’s next album, ‘The Luxury Gap’, becomes the next theme of the novel — ‘Temptation’. This track has been released in several different edits — and often turns up on compilations. My favourite is when Carol Kenyon’s ooh-oohing is allowed to run its full length (just before ‘step by step, day by day’). This is another track with a male-female dynamic and is relevant to the next part of The Angel — particularly the lines taken from the Lord’s Prayer ‘Lead us not into temptation’. In fact the next two singles off The Luxury Gap also fit my story — ‘Come Live With Me’ and ‘Crushed By The Wheels of Industry’ — this is now starting to get worrying.
I looked up the video of Penthouse and Pavement on Youtube after the programme, which I vaguely remembered — and in another stroke of perhaps unconscious serendipity the actress who plays the spying secretary is almost the spitting image that I hold my mind of Kim — once she’s got herself healthy in the countryside — she’s even got green(ish) eyes. (The actress is called Emma Relph — who was in the 1981 Day of the Triffids and is now apparently an astrologer.)Â The video is embedded below — take a look at the typewriter and photocopier — yet other artefacts don’t seem to have changed too much in 29 years.