I am on holiday. No you can't rob my house, because my dad is in it and he sleeps with a metal bar under his pillow.
While I am away, I have left you in the company of another poem. This was written on another holiday, several years ago, in Cyprus. It has not been previously published. We did actually swim among the ruins of ancient Salamis, now half slidden into the sea.
Of Salamis
A sun blind as Elymas oversees
the lilting sway while stateless children pick
and sell you on in pieces of mosaic.
Your heads are gone, and this long it took
to find all lemons are bitter, in breaks
along the south coast where dead hives prove
that tourists leave no ghosts,
not least in Famagusta, nor stay in love.
Gilt edged Cyprus stole over your posts,
like Barnabas pilloried in golden silt;
swimming in the ruins of Salamis
we cut our feet on what remains.
Confession time. As a web content strategist and an aspiring novelist, I should have a strong opinion about the future of publishing. After all, it is a future in which I hope to be implicated.
But I don’t. Not yet. But I have been bookmarking interesting articles on the subject, for to read them one day, for to become incredibly knowledgable on the subject. Then I’ll tell you how it’s going to work.
Until then, why don’t I share those links with you, so that you can become knowledgable too? Then we can talk about, in excitable ways, who would win in a fight between Amazon and Google, what printers are going to do for a job next, and how on earth authors are supposed to convince enough people on the internets to throw a penny or two towards them for their tales.
These links are the proverbial tip of an iceberg, just to get us going. There are many more – please share good ones you have found in the comments. And don’t think me rude if I don’t reply posthaste: I’m on a beach in Cornwall, and will be for some time.
ReadWriteWeb’s four part series ‘Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Industry’ is a good place to start:
Part 1 assesses the impact of Amazon, Google, e-books and print on demand.
Part 2 explores how this will affect readers, authors, printers, publishers and sellers.
Part 3 is about the publisher/retailer relationship.
Part 4 looks at authors in all of this.
Publishing: The Revolutionary Future at the New York Review of Books is a shorter launchpad into the subject.
Writers Digest briefly summarises the current publishing environment in An Exciting Future For Authors That Can Succeed Without Publishers Or Agents, including a mention of vertical publishing, all to tell us about Kickstarter – an online model for patronising creativity.
Another successful online publishing model is the self-publish print-on-demand service. Lulu is a good example.
I always love Seth Godin’s take on publishing and writing and influencing – not least in the post Why Write A Book which turns out to be a promotion for his own volume. Good ideas, clever marketing. Although more general, Godin’s Random Rules for Ideas Worth Spreading also informs the publishing business.
And here’s an author who is taking Seth at his word: Ray Connelly is serialising a book on his blog, while selling the whole book as a download and publicising through social media, with a little help from the Guardian.
And to finish, I couldn’t mention authors and social media without giving you 15 Twitter Users Shaping the Future of Publishing.
I apologise that these all begin with the same letter – they just did.
1. Commitment
This is the big one. This is the factor that above all others determines whether you will be a writer or not.
Commitment is more than deciding to do something, because a decision can always be reversed. Commitment is vowing to cease making excuses, to start tackling obstacles, to deal candidly with inner and external circumstances, and to do the work, repeatedly, until it is finished.
The hardest part of writing is committing, followed by getting started. Once you have committed, you will find a way. Most people give up not because their task is too hard, but because they never really committed to it in the first place.
At this point, you should quit if you don’t want it enough. But if you commit, the rest will follow.
2. Confidence
‘But am I a real writer? Am I meant to be a writer? Am I good enough?’ After commitment, confidence is the key for persevering. You might have to write an entire draft of a novel on your own before anyone sees it. Then you might have to throw it in the bin. If you’re lucky you’ll get rejected lots; if unlucky, you’ll be downright insulted. You’ll have days of writing utter crap and days when you can’t seem to write a word. Your friends and family will fail to understand why you are not becoming an accountant instead.
The only thing that will get you through all this is self confidence. Don’t delegate self-approval to a publisher, or friend, or parent. Keep it. Approve yourself. Tell yourself that you are disgustingly talented. That every bit of feedback, however nasty, feeds your powers as you learn to write better and stronger. That at your best you write stupendous prose and at your worst you are simply walking through the same creative crises that have beset every other phenomenally successful author.
When it comes to how good you are, everyone else is just making it up. They might have half an idea (only half mind) of what sells in today’s market, but that's different. Put them straight. You own the rights to the story of how good you can be.
3. Creativity
There are two parts to creativity. Firstly the inspired connection-making between ideas – finding fresh ways to select and tell a story. Second is the actual creation, one brick on top of another, word following word, realising the concepts into something concrete.
Some people seem to be naturally gifted with one or both of these parts of creativity. Others think that they are not. I think that whatever your starting point, some creativity can be ignited in you: by the creativity of others, by consciously growing as a person, by new experiences, through suffering and love, and most of all by practice.
In my experience creativity follows commitment.
4. Craft
This is the one element that I am not sure everyone can have. This is learning the trade. Like creativity, craft is acquired, very consciously, through practise and feedback, but there has to be a certain amount of aptitude to begin with.
I don’t believe everybody has the necessary ability, however much she practises, to become a great writer any more than she could become a concert oboist or Formula 1 driver. But every person can learn, and become a better writer, if not a great one.
And remember that authors who get published are not the best writers; they are the best at getting published. They have learnt enough craft to convince a publisher or agent to print their work.
5. Contacts
You need other people for your book to succeed. Traditionally that means agents and publishers, promoters and reviewers, but even if you self-publish online, you need fans who will spread the word – otherwise no one will read your book.
Why should any of these people care a fig about you – if you’re a stranger? As soon as you know someone, the situation changes. For writers to succeed they need to know other writers and people in publishing at the very least.
The chances that your manuscript will be picked out of the slush pile anonymously are negligible. Get to know people. Make it a collaboration, not just for your book but for all the other great ideas you might have together.
Artists die on their own.
What have I missed?
Muffled footsteps and a darkening of the peephole followed by the catch being drawn and the door opening led to him standing face to face with another young man, about twenty-five, wearing skate clothes and with his hair scruffy and waxed.
‘You must be Jonathan,’ the man said.
‘Yes,’ said Jonathan.
‘Come in.’
They walked down the narrow entrance hall where the man turned uncertainly and asked:
‘Can I take your coat?’
‘You already have it,’ said Jonathan.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Cool. I’m Ollie, by the way.’ When he said this he projected both hands forward, flatly, with his fingers spread out.
‘Is Esme here?’ said Jonathan.
‘Yeah, she’s just upstairs. I’ll give her a shout, dude. Um, wait in the kitchen. I’ll be right back.’ Still his fingers worked hard to prove their independence from each other.
Jonathan stepped into the large kitchen. There was a chunky wooden table with lots of chairs at one end, and French doors out into evening blackness at the other. The room smelled of warm pastry and dark sugar. On a big pin board on the wall there were rotas and lists: a cleaning rota with coloured stickers; a ‘Wall 2 Wall Prayer’ schedule comprising the week broken down into hours through the night as well as each day; a calendar on which the housemates had written who was in for dinner, who was cooking, and which guests were expected, with names for almost every evening including his own for that night, written in a large hand and underlined. It appeared that ‘O’ had been due to cook but had been scribbled out and replaced by ‘E’. Around the planners were notes carrying motivational phrases he assumed from the bible, and postcards advertising the prayer week, a student event called ‘the Gathering’ and a reminder about the Power Life evening meetings with a picture of Pastor Wes with his arm raised. The fat hand floated toward Jonathan's head again and he felt yellow down his oesophagus. If he had known the other housemates better he would have taken the pen hanging on a string and drawn a huge cock on the Pastor’s head.
From the first draft.
I'm writing this week. One of the things I did today was read a whole chapter from the first draft out loud. It required a large glass of water, being such a warm, dry day, but it was immediately illuminating.
Apart from the fillip of enjoying the prose and wanting to write more of it, reading the text aloud gave me instant feedback on some things that I had missed:
1. Clumsy phrases
'A visitor to the city' seemed fine when I wrote it and reread it in my head. I still think that it should work. But I can't say it – not clearly, deftly. It's the double [t] of '…tor to' and the similarity between '…sitor' and 'city'. So that's got to change.
2. Repetition
'City' this, 'city' that, blah blah blah 'city' … unintentional repetition can make prose so dull. A lot of repetition I can pick up reading in my head, but not all of it. I was surprised at some of the words that kept chiming out of the text – when you hear them they become obvious, you start to listen for them and they get more annoying each time.
3. Odd punctuation
When I ran out of breath, or was forced to pause when I didn't want to, I had to alter the punctuation. I felt instantly assured in changing it: that is, reading aloud gives me a stronger sense of what is correct for a sentence. This is true for the syntax overall.
4. Unnatural dialogue
I love writing dialogue, and it's fun to read. You have to act a bit to read it out loud, but you spot the unnatural bits straight away. I also removed a few 'he said' 'she said' phrases when they arrested my performance mid-flow. Not now Bernard!
5. Contradictions
Surprising number of these. 'It made it harder to speak but drove on the speaking'. Huh? I think that when I read in my head I accept and study the words more, as though searching out their poetic resonance. But when read aloud, phrases like that just sound stupid.
And they were just the obvious things. Worthwhile, this reading your work aloud. Which is what these guys said.
A few days ago I went to London for the launch of Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph. She is the first from our Trinity College English set and also from among her UEA Creative Writing MA peers to get a novel published.
Anjali has already been picked out by the Telegraph as possibly one of the best young (that’s under 40 in literary life) novelists in Britain – not bad to be listed alongside Zadie Smith et al at any rate. If you’re looking for something to read over the Summer, you could do much, much worse than picking up a copy of her debut novel.
I loved the launch and after parties because of all the other writers there. Some had deals done and were approaching launches of their own; others were redrafting their manuscripts, half way through, or still mulling over ideas. But we all shared a common identity, multifarious as it is. We were all writers, and writers of fiction at that. In Cambridge I’m more often surrounded by small children or IT geeks (pretty sure my colleagues don’t read this blog, but in case they do, I know, not all of you are small children), both of which can be delightful.
But this felt like coming home.
It may have been the wine, but I felt tremendously energised by the evening. It was fun to meet some other writers from Cambridge especially, one of whom turned out to be my five-year-old’s best friend’s mum. She is going to introduce me to other writers and groups in Cambridge. It is such a relief to find other people round the corner going through the same creative processes, who might understand why I’m doing what I’m doing, and might give me feedback and advice. A welcome tonic to the hours spent alone coercing words to come out onto a laptop.
Most interesting of all was that all nearly all of the writers I spoke to gave me the same counsel. The first guy leaned toward me on the Tube and said, ‘let me encourage you like a trainer encourages an athlete when he slaps him in the face: the pain is only just beginning.’ He was on a fourth draft of his novel, that is, his third complete rewrite. ‘Take your time,’ he said, ‘don’t let anyone rush you. Publish when it’s ready.’
Others said the same thing. Take your time. There is no point pushing something out before you’re really happy with it. It takes ages to edit, to redraft, to rewrite. One girl said by the time she got published she could recite the whole book word for word. She said that by then she ‘hated the characters, the good ones and the bad ones.’
This isn’t advice I’d had from anywhere else. Most people just want to know when I’ll be finished.
I’m still aiming to get the first draft completed this year. But after that? Don’t rush me. I’m a writer.
1) Last week was a terrible writing week. I'm not going to blame dodgy refereeing decisions. The players simply weren't good enough.
