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Arts Bloodbath?

The Guardian reports today that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is preparing to inflict cuts on itself of up to 50% as part of the forthcoming government spending clampdown.

This reduction in its own staff is in keeping with the cuts it is anticipated the department will make in its funding of the arts and sport. With the big expense of the Olympics relatively protected and big tourist draws relatively safe (such as free entry to major art galleries and museums) then the axe is going to fall particularly savagely on less high-profile spending.  Bodies such as the Arts Council in England, which funds 850 organisations, are going to find they have a lot less money to give out in grants. I know of many small enterprises, such as poetry magazines, that struggle along even with the help of a small amount of money from the Arts Council. Similarly, this is the source of the already meagre funding for many students who study arts or creative writing at postgraduate level.

The government has expressed what seems like a somewhat naive hope that private benefactors will step in and plug the funding gaps — as happens in America. I remember when I lived in the US for a year in the mid-80s how mystified I was to see the PBS channel regularly soliciting its viewers for donations — something at the time I found quite shocking but, like TV sponsorship, would not be quite so alien in the UK nowadays.

One of the governments other big targets for expenditure cuts is higher education so it’s not difficult to predict what’s likely to happen to the arts in education over the next few years. I would expect creative writing courses to be put under very tight scrutiny. One point in the courses’ favour is that they’re popular and accessible — people are quite willing to pay to do postgraduate and continuing education courses in writing. They also don’t involve much capital spending on the part of the university — just a room to sit in — unlike courses that require neutron colliders that cost billions, as at Oxford. However, as Emma, who taught us briefly at the end of last term, pointed out — to teach creative writing properly there needs to be a fairly low student to staff ratio — the teaching is interactive. I remember when I was doing my MBA at Kingston being quite astonished at the size of the audience for the undergraduate business course lectures — there were hundreds of them to one lecturer.

Also, a school leaver is going to have to be pretty confident of their future ability as a writer to do creative writing at undergraduate level — passing up the opportunity to get a more ‘marketable’ qualification.

One consequence is that I’d suggest anyone who wants to get a creative writing qualification, like an MA for example, might be better applying sooner rather than later. It’s too late for universities to cancel courses for the next academic year but they will certainly review them carefully for the year afterwards. I can’t see them disappearing but there may be fewer to choose from and perhaps the teaching will be less individual. However, it was Emma’s view that the standard on our City Novel Writing course was MA standard anyway and that the only reason that any of us would find it advisable to take an MA would be if we wanted to teach — and perhaps having a published novel would be more credible in that case anyway.

What might have more lasting consequences is that universities will cut staff in creative writing departments and postgraduate and doctoral students will find it a lot more difficult to gain funding. Many university courses, such as those at City, are taught by lecturers who aren’t full time academic staff (at least at that university anyway) and are working themselves on PhDs and the like while also working on their own novels, poetry or other writing. I guess this route into getting some financial support while developing a writing career is now going to be pretty difficult to follow. These people also give time and support to the large network of ‘underground’ publishing, such as e-zines and small circulation magazines, that nurture the careers of more experimental and literary writers.

With government grants drying up and a major source of financial security (in higher education teaching) likely to wither away then both writers and the outlets they currently use are going to feel the pinch with disproportionate severity unless some private funding can replace that cut by the government. With some exceptions, commercial funding is not likely to support writing that is experimental or provocative. This might have a peculiar knock-on effect as the pursuit of literary prizes might take on even more prominence. Perhaps a new author with literary ambitions might be taken on by a publisher with the sole intention of being submitted for a prize — and if the author doesn’t win or get shortlisted then they could be dumped straight away?

The effect of the ‘new austerity’ is going to be pretty bleak right across the writing spectrum. While the more commercial genres tend to have no need of government subsidy, new authors in these genres may well have benefited from some subsidised support. Also, any author with a literary bent who finds the traditional means of support to be dwindling may decide to switch into a commercial genre, at least temporarily, in an attempt to pay the bills by publishing a work that will sell in large numbers — thus making that market more crowded?

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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!

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Positive Feedback from Agents and A Publisher

I’ve been so busy preparing for Wednesday’s reading that I haven’t had time to blog about other events that may have more eventual significance.

I went to the Winchester Writers’ Conference last Friday and had three appointments — two with agents and one with a publisher.

The agents had both read work that I’d supplied in advance and gave me useful feedback. I sent the first fifteen pages of The Angel (about 5,000-6,000 words) to someone from one of the biggest literary agencies in London (A.P. Watt). She was very complimentary about what she read — said she’d ‘really enjoyed it. She praised the evocation in the sense of place as she lives in the Hackney/Shoreditch area herself. She gave some constructive comments about perhaps changing the opening around a bit — which were quite intuitive in a way as what she suggested was the original way I’d opened the novel before changing it to reflect what I read at our showcase on Wednesday. It was a bit too late for me to change the reading. The two points of view worked well for her and also the genre — which she described as on ‘the border between literary and commercial fiction’ which is a good place to be apparently. I asked if this was the type of novel that she would represent and she said that it was. I seem to remember her complementing me by saying I ‘could write’.

I also pitched the novel completely cold to an editor from a huge publisher (I happened to get a spare slot in her schedule on the day). I had to show her my blurb and my reading for the City reading as that was all I had available. But she was also very encouraging — saying it was ‘funny’ and something that people would definitely want to read. In the end she took away all the improvised material I showed her and it’s now at the publishers.

The other agent I saw only asked for the first ten pages and he had a different take on the novel which, I suspect, might have been influenced by not seeing the missing five pages that the other agent had read. While she thought it would appeal very widely as it was, at heart, a love story I think that’s because the extra part had a lot of Kim and her interior. The first agent complemented the quality of the writing but wasn’t sure where it would be positioned in the market — although one of the other delegates later told me that this agent wasn’t a fiction specialist — but perhaps that was because he hadn’t seen enough of the book? Certainly, the majority opinion out of the three was that it was very marketable.

After these sort of events, it’s probably natural to wonder if the agents really meant what they said or were they just being polite but it’s not really in their interest to say something’s good if they don’t like it — it just means wasted time for them in the office. So I think that’s pretty encouraging — everything was read and submitted as it would be for a proper agent submission when a novel’s finally ready and they were quite lengthy samples of the book so weren’t taken out of context.

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Was It Worth It?

Just on the way back from our group’s reading event which was at a lovely venue — the Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury.

I enjoyed the night as a social event but it feels rather like work for me as I stepped into the breach as temporary webmaster and spent ages knocking up a website for the reading (the time taken representing my competence at web design rather than the sophistication of the task itself) and also supplying all the drinks. The latter was a particularly stupid thing for me to volunteer to do in retrospect as it’s going to involve two three and a half hour round trips into London (one tomorrow to clear the stuff out of the venue as we only drunk about half of the wine). So I’m completely mentally and physically burned out now.

Overall,  I think the practice of reading aloud in a social venue like that is great but, I wonder if the preparation for the event has taken such a large part of the end of the course it’s in danger of becoming almost like the opposite of a novel writing course — more like flash fiction where people are encouraged to hone the 600 words or so that might catch an agent’s ear. I think I’d rather end up with several thousand words of reasonably good prose than having spent nine months working on a few hundred – but perhaps I have it all wrong?

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Useful, if not Uplifting, Advice

Following a few links from links I came across this blog entry from ‘Help I Need A Publisher’ by Nicola Morgan which has some sobering thoughts on the state of the publishing industry.

There’s a very interesting bullet-pointed list of advice for new writers — a group the author feels might be less disadvantaged than published writer.

Our visits from authors, an agent and a publisher seem to have wised our class up to these economic realities — I find it quite encouraging in a way that there still are authors who can write whatever they like and still feel ‘the world owes them a living’ — though I guess they won’t be around for that long.

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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.).

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Visit from Judith Murray

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’  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.

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A Meeting with ‘God’

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.  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.

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No Magic Bullets

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.  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.

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Prologue?

Rick from the course had a look at some of the first chapters of The Angel. He made quite an interesting suggestion regarding the selection for the reading event that’s had me thinking.

At the moment I have an opening with the two principal characters facing up to some life-changing events but James’ scene is the one that is most dynamic — we  see him getting fired — but there’s not so much action in Kim’s scene — she wakes up feeling crap and sends and receives a text message. I’m quite happy with writing a scene in which so little action happens but I’m now having doubts if that should be the opening.

We were talking about openings on the way back to the tube station on Wednesday in relation to the piece we should select for the reading and the consensus was that your opening should be the best part of your novel — to grab the reader (and commissioning editor/agent, etc.) — and that the best part of your novel should obviously be what you read out at our event.

Rick suggested it might be worth writing the events that cause Kim’s evident grief at the start of the novel as a counterpoint to the James scenes.

I noted that Bren Gosling had written a prologue to his novel which he read out for our feedback on Wednesday, which received positively, and which he intends to read at the event at the end of June.

So I’m seriously thinking of writing my own prologue which captures Kim’s source of dissatisfaction at the start of the novel. I know in my mind exactly what happens but it will be something of a challenge to distill this down into the 600 words that I’ve timed myself as being able to deliver in our allocated four minutes. One major problem is that I don’t have much use (at the moment) in the rest of the novel for the character that precipitates Kim’s distress — and if I read this out then it may raise expectations that he will be a major character.

The obvious answer to my dilemma is to write it and then see how it turns out. However, time is at a premium at this time of year — with the election intrigue, running five miles in Marlow plus planting a bunch of beetroot, lettuce, celery, cabbage and spring onions earlier today.

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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.

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Visit from Kirstan Hawkins

On Wednesday evening we had a visit from an author who has just had her first novel published — Kirstan Hawkins whose book is ‘Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop’. What was particularly special about this author visit is that Kirstan is an ex-student from the course, having been on the course two years ago. (I think this is correct as she said her novel was published 18 months after it was finished.) I guess that most of us chose to do this course because of its focus on the novel form and because of its links with the publishing industry (which will be concentrated on next term). Kirstan, therefore, was an ideal person for us to talk to because she’d been in exactly our position a couple of years ago and had gone on to do extremely well once the course had finished.

It was an absolutely fascinating and engaging hour in which Kirstan started by giving us some very relevant information about her own experiences and then answered some of our questions. I can’t possibly note down all the useful and thought-provoking answers that were discussed but a few points stood out from my own perspective.

One interesting point was that Kirstan said she’d never really set out to write a novel at first or overtly tried to set out on a career as a writer. Instead, she’d suddenly been grabbed by a series of ideas that were to later develop into the novel. While working on these ideas she’d enrolled in various creative writing courses, including a couple of Arvon foundation residential ones,  and had spent about five years through courses and writers’ groups developing her craft, so to speak, before using the opportunities at the end of the City course to submit the novel for publication. I particularly noted her advice to let publishers and agents know what courses you’ve done as a writer. I guess I’d had a misconception myself that publishers had a masochistically romantic notion about fantastic writing being honed more by enduring the privations of some freezing, rat-infested squat and not venturing into the outside world for six months. I now realise what rubbish this is (mind you, this sort of exaggeration is probably routinely used to hype authors) — an agent or publisher is much more likely to realise an author is serious if he or she has spent several years and thousands of pounds on courses interacting with other writers and tutors, reading other quality fiction out there in the market and learning from criticism and being aware of theory. So doing courses like the first presentation of the OU Advanced Creative Writing course is more of an asset than I previously realised.

We focused quite a bit on agents as Kirstan managed to get signed up by hers remarkably quickly after the reading event for her year. (From looking on the internet her agent is Judith Murray at Greene and Heaton.) It sounds as if Kirstan found a really good agent and they have a very amicable and supportive relationship. However, Kirstan was careful to point out that the agent is principally someone who believes in the author and the novel with a passion — but that passion has to be passed on to a publisher (and not just a commissioning editor but various people like a marketing director) before a novel will stand a chance of publication. (There can be circumstances when editors leave publishers through redundancy and similar when a book in progress might be dropped if the new editor is not so keen on it.) So getting an agent is a vital step — but an agent can never guarantee anything to the new author. In financial terms both the agent and author are working out of love of the novel, rather than any monetary reward until an advance is paid — and, for a new author, that might cover some expenses but it’s not likely to be anything to swing from the chandeliers over.

What Kirstan said was most valuable about her agent was the editorial support. Some agents will not get particularly involved in the development of the novel and will expend their efforts on selling to publishers whatever is delivered by the author. As a new author, Kirstan was able to draw on her agent for advice in revising the manuscript. I was particularly interested in whether the sort of editorial advice from an agent was similar to that given by participants in writers’ groups or course workshops. Kirstan said that largely it was — although the advice from the professionals tended to be more definitive and assertive. She thought that the City group tended to be a little too polite and nice to each other and when there was a change to be made, for example if the leading character was introduced too late, then the other students would suggest bringing it forward a chapter or two whereas the editor and agent would say it had to be on the first or second page. Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop’ is written in an extremely approachable and fluent prose style so I guess Kirstan wouldn’t find too much conflict with publishers in her genre but I’d be interested if writers who were on the more experimental end of the scale were ever pulled in opposite directions by peers who might love esoteric writing and perhaps agents who wanted something more commercial. I guess this is why choosing the right agent is so important. One point that certainly came over strongly is that Alison and Emily have very sound instincts in predicting what works and what doesn’t.

Kirstan told us about the huge amount of work that is involved with the publication of the novel — not just the various redrafts and proofs that need to be worked over but also the many different people in a publisher with whom a writer needs to meet. Then there’s also the expectation that a writer will self-generate at least some ideas for publicity (see other post mentioning Penny Rudge). All this work is done without any guarantee of financial reward, apart from the normally meagre advance, so the novelist also has to carry on as normal with the ‘day-job’. And then there’s the matter of trying to get round to writing a second novel. Kirstan came out with an amusing anecdote, saying that she’d been  in an interview with an agent about the content of her second novel, which she’d not really considered, and made up something on the spot. This spontaneous idea really did become the basis of the next novel — perhaps illustrating the suggestion that these ideas tend to stay just under the waterline in a writer’s subconscious but sometimes surface unexpectedly almost fully formed. Kirstan started to work on the second novel to relieve the moments of frustration and despair when the manuscript for Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop’ was considered and passed over by various publishers but, paradoxically, once the novel was accepted then time to work on the next novel became at a premium.

One thing I didn’t realise is that the current edition of Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop’ is what’s called a ‘trade paperback’ — which effectively seems to be a hardback sized paperback that’s relatively expensive. The idea is that trade paperbacks serve a similar purpose to hardbacks in terms of testing the market and being sent out for review. Fortunately Waterstone’s picked up on Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop’ and included it briefly in their 3 or 2 offers — which is great exposure for a first novel. It is planned to publish the novel in a traditional paperback version when the comments from reviews can be printed on the cover and the price will be lower. I guess the publishers in the case of this novel would be keen to get it in the promotion for holiday reading — for which it would be very suitable, being set in an exotic Latin American location.

Emily and Kirstan talked about the present difficulties in the UK book retailing market — with Borders having closed down then Waterstones is really the only specialist national bookseller and it’s vital for publishers to try and get their books on the tables near the entrance to the shops. If a book isn’t going to sell in volume then it won’t get into the shop — they tend not to stock the odd two or three copies on the alphabetical shelves just to see if it will sell. Everything needs an angle which will help its marketing.

What Kirstan didn’t make too big a play of, but which seemed apparent to me, was how much hard work it takes to get a novel published and into bookshops and I really admire her dedication in having achieved it. It helps, of course, to have written a very good book. I was one of the people who brought in our copies of the novel. I’ve not finished it so far but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read. What was most interesting, though, is that knowing she’d been on the same course as myself, I didn’t consider the text to be as inviolable as I normally would in a published book. I occasionally found myself in feedback mode thinking ‘I wonder why that exposition has gone there’ or ‘that’s a nice simile/metaphor’ or whatever.

So I think that meeting Kirstan and reading her book helps mentally bridge the conceptual gap between being the sort of creative writing student that she was herself and the prospect of seeing a book physically realised. However, there’s such a lot of work involved that all of us on the course must be a little mad for having this aspiration. I suppose that’s a test of having something you feel impelled to write about, even though it might make little logical sense, and that one’s belief in that may eventually manifest itself as a unique and original voice, which is what Emily emphasised agents and publishers are searching for and need to feel passionately about themselves.

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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.

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Encouraging Alumnus

Later this term we’re having a visit from a ‘real-life’ author but, as an encouraging testament, she is an alumnus of the Certificate in Novel Writing course itself. It is Kirstan Hawkins whose novel, Doña Nicanora’s Hat Shop, is being published around now. There’s a short biography on what seems to be her agent’s page and it’s quite re-assuring to see that she’s a veteran of various creative writing courses as well as having quite an extensive writing history related to her academic career.

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Best New Novelists of 2010

I came across a couple of interesting articles on the Telegraph website that may be of interest to some.
 
The first is one of these predictive pieces that tips the ‘next big thing’ — in this case new novelists. It’s interesting to see what type of novels are due for publication (and, perhaps, more importantly, promotion). Charlotte’s friend Simon Lelic is in the list. I saw his book being promoted in the window of Foyle’s at St. Pancras station last week.
 
The other one is a top 20 books of the decade thing (not just novels). Quite a few of the novels and authors we discussed last term are featured, including interesting choice like Persepolis. 
Now to try and work on something to send out for reading over the weekend.