Me and Stephen King and the Attraction of the Audiobook.

 Being - for the last fortnight - unable to read or write properly or do anything requiring energy I resorted to listening to audio-books. I don’t often resort to this as I like words on the page, be it paper or Kindle screen.

However the concentration for pure reading deserted me alongside my appetite and my energy. So, by means of the audio-books in the last week I have ‘read’ three books: The Forgotten by David Baldacci; Zoo Time by Howard  Jacobson; Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin. Waiting for me to enjoy are ring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel; Where There’s a Will by John Mortimer and Victorian London by Lisa Picard. I have also managed to read on the paper page The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourself by Stephen Grosz.

(Should you be interested -  my next post here will be my personal notes on these individual books…)  

But I have to say that this experience has made me reflect on the audio-process. First, how wonderful that these texts were unabridged. When I think of the care that we writers put into every word, every paragraph of a novel it seems some kind of heresy to abridge it to make it fit into a required audio timescale. So the audio-time is anywhere upwards of ten or eleven hours.

Also, being read by accomplished readers, the rhythms and nuances of the prose enhance the meaning - perhaps more than the echoes in the head that emerge from reading on the page.

It certainly improved my line by line attention as I have to confess, as a lifetime reader, to a well entrenched and somewhat destructive habit of speed-reading and skipping. With audio books you can’t skip; you have to let the story unfold at the author’s designated pace.

It could be the euphoria of the illness but I would swear that I have enjoyed these books much more intensely than usual. As I come back to life and writing and work I’m certain I’ll use this form of reading into my book habit more   regularly in the future.

And then I suddenly remember I’m not alone. In his exceptionally good book On Writing author Stephen King urges all writers to read widely, wisely and well for their own self education. He lists the books he read in a single year. His list is enormous. Then he tells us that he had read a great proportion of this list by audio-book.

I suppose I could declare an interest here. All my books are now on Kindle - just got the stats – they’re trickling out very well there (except for Family Ties. Do give it a try. One of my best, I think) . But as well as thise= they are also out there in audio-book form. An Englishwoman in France looks very fine in its audio-book packaging. They’re available through libraries to order borrow and download. Or through companies like Audible.

And now I’ve had my own valuable and enlightening audio experience I treasure the thought of my own readers enjoying my novels in this steady appreciative pace, read by the brilliant actresses who give them their voice

NEXT: Tomorrow my appreciative notes on the audio books I have read this week. By David Baldacci, Howard Jacobson, Ian Rankin, Hilary Mantel, John Mortimer   Lisa Picard, Stephen Grosz.

Click: My novel set in North London

Crime , Ann Cleeves, and The Art Of Interviewing

On Saturday we drive across the moors to the Hexham Book Festival. PD James, whom we hear speak later, says she’s rarely up here but how wonderfully beautiful is the countryside her. Perhaps, she suggests, we don’t talk about it much because we didn’t want people coming up in hordes and spoiling it. Well deduced, PD.

We’re in time to witness this Empress of Crime Writing in conversation with the shrewd, flamboyant and generous VaL McDermid. This is no ordinary interview. It’s a merry, respectful conversation between two fellow professionals who know their art inside out. The generation gap between them is invisible. Their mutual admiration is evident. It’s all peculiarly intimate, given that they’re before a tiered audience of several hundred people.

The informality of the conversation is deceptive. It fosters a stream of insightful talk about the nature of the crime novel and its place in literature. It celebrates the diversity of the way writers work and think. It allows us to grasp something of the high professional commitment of this woman who has operated on top of her game through forty years who is till playing hard. She talks of just one more Dagliesh novel…

Then we have a rather surreal lunch at a Wetherspoons pub located in a rather lovely Art Deco venue that was once a cinema. (This reminds me of the Golden Age of Crime Fiction – ladies sweeping down staircases flaunting cigarettes in long holders, and all that.)

As well as sustaining the life of unusual buildings, these Wetherspoon pubs never fail to interest me in the diversity of their clientele – families equipped with drawing books, lone fathers with their children, brooding individuals, men in work clothes, blokes in groups, ladies who lunch lightly. It’s not Groucho’s, where like seeks like and where wannabes try on the Emperor’s New Clothes. It’s much better than that. More stimulating, So much more real life.

But the real purpose of my day is to interview crime writer Ann Cleeves for The Writing Game, my new community radio programme. Ann, Avril Joy and I sit in an upstairs room and talk about Ann’s writing life and how - after writing steadily for twenty years or so - she became an overnight success when she won the crime writer’s Oscar, the Golden Dagger Award and has not looked back since. Translations, film series have followed. One of several keys to her success has been the locating of the last series of detective novels on the Shetland Isles. She has a great sense of place. In fact she’s off to Fair isle tomorrow to celebrate - along with her agent, her publisher, her friends, fans and press - the launch Blue Lightening the last of her Shetland Quartet.

That will be some journey (13 hours from Aberdeen and then another boat trip…) and some party!

Our conversation is wide ranging and absorbing, reflecting, I think , the writer-to-writer style of the on-stage conversation this morning between Val McDermid and PD James. I know for certain that listeners to the programme with be fascinated with what Ann has to say about writing, crime, location and success.

Ann’s interview will go out in my second programme on Crime Fiction on Tuesday 1st June. I hope you get to listen to it.

wx

PS I’m getting used to the little machine with the formidable broadcasting power, but on the way back over the moors I had a terrible panic that I'd not switched it on properly and the magic moment of this lovely interview was no more. When I got home and slotted it into my laptop, there is was, in all its verbal glory. Phew! I almost cried with relief. It was like one of those silly moments when you think you’ve left the iron on and your house is burning down …

Just to remind you:

The first programme will go out on Tuesday May 4^th at 7pm and after that will be available as a podcast to download from http://www.bishopfm.com/.

This first programme focuses on starting points in writing and features Avril Joy in her role of published author, and local writers Eileen Elgey and Hilary Smith.

Forthcoming programmes:

June 1st Crime Fiction Featuring Ann Cleeves

July 6th Children’s Fiction Featuring David Almond.

Mother’s Day Signings and the Precocious Child

Saturday was, as they say, well packed.

We had this Roomtowrite Conference at Whitworth where we were discussing how writers could use their reading to develop their novel writing techniques. Or how to steal skills from successful writers . Great group. We worked very hard in a sunny conservatory in a park with deer.

Then I had to skip lunch and go down to WHSmiths at Bishop Auckland where the lovely manager Tony Fox, in collaboration with Headline’s exceptional Gillian McKay, had set up a signing of The Woman Who Drew Buildings in time for Mother’s Day. Well it is about a mother and her son, so it seems appropriate.

Gillian, as always, took great care of me, making sure I signed lots of books. One little girl, blonde hair, straight fringe came up for a word. She was all of nine years old. I asked her if she liked reading.

‘Oh yes, I like books,’ she says

‘What do you read?’ I say, thinking JK Rowling of Jacqueline Wilson.

‘Jodi Pecoult.’ she says.

I blink just a little. ‘Very sophisticated. So, which book have you read?’

‘I’m reading My Sister’s Keeper',’ she said. ‘I got it for my Mum last year and we watched the film and now I’m reading the book.’

And her mother came up, smiling, and swept her away.

Afterwards I wondered why I had been surprised. When I was her age I was reading books which followed my mother’s tastes. I remember reading quite erotic books by a writer called Nora K Strange. I looked her up recently to discover that among other things she wrote about Kenya under the British and possibly had some experience of the scandalous Happy Valley set.

Children get their emotional and sexual educations where they can. Novels are not a bad starting point.

Then back to the afternoon session of RoomToWrite where we were discussing beginnings and endings with reference to The Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman, Let It Bleed by Ian Rankin, and The Lovely Bones, by Alice Hoffman. Maybe Jodi Pecoult should have been in there somewhere…

If you are interested in The Woman Who Drew Buildings she is available from all good books shops (WHSmith, for instance) and on Amazon. ISBN 978-0 -7553-3381-3

Afternote. The writers at the RoomtoWrite conference were great. There are some promising novelists there. My writing friend and colleague Avril Joy has posted more about says more about the conference on her blog Writing Junkie.

But for now here are some sunny pics;