Radical New Ways of Reading?

I grew up with my mother and two brothers and sister in a tiny two bed-roomed house with none of the modern facilities or the smart furniture associated with book-people. Despite this there was one long home-made shelf beside the fireplace filled with books which were somewhat battered and scruffy. Since then I seem to have lived all my life around books.

In those early days I changed my mother’s library books (novels) twice a week. I changed my own library books (novels and history books) five times a week. New books flew in and out of the house like so many bright plumed birds.

My recent uncharacteristic nostalgia has been induced by the fact that in the last fortnight I have been thinking hard about the changing ways of reading in the modern world. These days there is a new term floating around - digital reading.  In my childhood and youth, reading meant books with bright covers either in my home or more commonly in the libraries or in school; or sometimes on the laden shelves in the houses of more affluent friends. 

But these days the younger generations  read in many ways - in paper books, on their laptops, on their tablet, on their Kindle, on their phones and sometimes in the longer stretches of time, now using the mechanism of Audible.

I myself have discovered the advantages of Audible in the last year or so and have spent spending hours listening - to novels in particular- far into the night.  Sometimes I even have a notebook to hand,  my ears wide open to capture some gems in the night.  I have also accessed through Audible reference works in the fields of psychology philosophy, history and creativity,

Recently I was in conversation with a dear friend – a fellow book obsessive – when we turned to a discussion comparing books we have read. Then with regard to one particular novel we radically differed. This is relatively unusual. I wondered if this was to do with the radically different ways in which we read books these days.

In my longish adult life - like my friend - I have probably read thousands of books – fact and fiction, poetry and prose, history and psychology, politics and creativity.

To people of my generation reading is as natural as breathing – you don’t think about it you just do it! In the last few years I’ve acquired the habit of marking the books I read - underlining and annotating in the margins. I have found this useful in making me focus on the important elements of the prose and - in the case of fiction – the arc of the narrative.I know that in some people’s eyes this amounts to destroying the said  book.

But there is another way of seeing this. Oddly enough, this hand -writing on books habit is coming to be seen as quite a phenomenon. They even have a name for it:  marginalia. In 50 years if were very famous my ‘destroyed’ books would have become become quite collectable. 

I think my journey into marginalia began in my instinct to sidestep my habit of reading fast, even skimming, to get down to the essence of a book in terms of terms of substantive content, style, literary significance and  - in the case of fiction - the essential narrative arc. I had begun to feel that my inner sense of the books I was reading was becoming shallower and shallower. I began to feel I was missing a good deal.

Now in recent days by slowing down - allowing the pages and the books to sink into my subconscious - my intention has been to nip in the bud the habit of skimming, of seeing it all as some kind of race, of adding books I had read to some long list of achievement. Girl Guide badges come to mind.

And now - especially in the case of the novel and all fiction - the arrival of the Audible experience in my life has made a creative change in my reading. It is impossible to skip or skim your way through an eight-hour Audible tape.  I have to listen, to hear every word and add each word, each phrase, to the well of language and meaning that has been building up in my mind since those years in the little two bed-roomed house reading books like Little Women, and Treasure Island. 

I have now discovered  that this well of meaning comes not just through the words but also through the tone and timbre of the narrator’s voice, and her or his command of located accents as well as implying a subtly layered grasp of character and place. Along with this I now recognise the fundamental significance of the reader or narrator.  It seems to me that the quality of the reading or narration combines with the creativity of the writer to make a story whole. The quality of the reading becomes part of the creativity of the writer in making their fictional world live.

And I now realise the degree to which a good novel of any kind can be marred by a poor or even a neutral reading. Occasionally the narrator  may also be the writer. This can be very positive in the case of certain writers. But some writers – unlike John le Carre, Neil Gaiman, Khaled Hosseini, and Frank McCourt and Philip Pullman - do not turn out to be the best readers of their own prose.

Writing creatively and narrating authentically are not necessarily in the same skill set. Performing from text is more central to the skill-set of actors.The actress Anne Dover – who has read some of my own novels on Audio – is a wonderful example of the art. Although I may read extracts from my novels  to a variety of audiences there is no way I could narrate the whole novel so that it could be properly sensed and appreciated.

In an online interview, bestselling writer Peter May has put down the widespread popularity of his novels in Audio down to the brilliant reading of Peter Forbes. This actor copes brilliantly with the daunting range of Scottish mainland and island accents alongside Scottish-accented French and the range of French language usage. As well as this, Forbes’ measured delivery of the spooky sense of place and the cycle of  seasons  (intrinsic to Peter May’s writing) brings the novels to life. Peter Forbes certainly contributes to the layers of cultural meaning in May’s writing.

One might certainly argue that these depths are equally accessible through the use of one’s own imagination when one reads the paper book at a proper reading pace. (I would be adding my own marginalia of course…)  But even my imagination cannot conjure up the lilt of a Scottish French-Canadian accent or the Gaelic infused Scottish-English accent.

This works for me on Audible but  am at something of a loss to know how the depth of this culturaL absorption process is possible when one is reading on a fugitive screen on one’s phone, tablet or laptop: this is the new digital reading.

Of course it is very useful these days. Like many of us  I read useful books on Kindle and book sources on the Internet, and my phone and tablet are massively functional in tracking information, hunting out references and obscure allusions. Great tools.

However I don’t think the multi-layered cultural absorption I have described above can happen when one is skimming through these fictions - either on paper, screen or Kindle - to get through to the ‘whodunit’ point and take that book off on one’s TBR list.

Still my highly literate younger friends have asserted to me that I am very much mistaken in this theory. The lovely D. in particular tells me that the following generations have grown up with these varied ways of reading and are perfectly capable of adapting adapt them to reach a full appreciation of any piece of fiction.’

Of course my views could all be age-defined prejudice. I don’t think so. But I would say that wouldn’t I?  

In the meantime, come bedtime I’ll be listening to John Le Carre reading his spy novel. And on the table beside me will be the big fat book by Charlotte Gordon telling the lives of Mary Shelley and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft. 

Beside the big fat book will be my well-sharpened pencil which will enable me to insert myself with marginalia on the pristine page.  

The growiing significance of Audio reading in modern literary life.

Like many other writers I have an abiding passion for books. In my long life I have read many hundreds of   thousands books for the purposes of pleasure, for research, for information, and for inspiration. Then there is the added ultimate pleasure of meeting like minds through words on a page written many years ago.

In my long life as a writer the books I have read have   been my model - in informing in various ways the direction and the spread of my own writing. For me life without books would be a vacuum, a desert. Without the books in my life I would never have dared to write my own stories and allow them to be shared with strangers. Perhaps like my mother and her four sisters I would have been stuck with telling the stories round the tea table, the children listening eagerly underneath the table.*

So far so good.

However, all this reading appears to have wreaked havoc on my eyes, rendering one of them only usable by default and the other occasionally giving up the ghost. Medical intervention has helped to a degree but the days of reading quickly, skimming and scanning for information has lurched to a stop.

I can still read, but not for long periods of time and not – as was mostly the case – at speed. All that skimming and scanning was that had been so useful for research and context has rather petered out.

And then – as I said in the earlier post - along came Kindle, bringing new possibilities – not least the possibility of enlarging print for ease of definition. It has proved useful for research and exploring new titles. My reading on Kindle very much reflected and endorsed my established reading choices.

“But it’s not the same!” So many people say. Me too! I have to say. For me reading books has always been a sensual experience – the bright artwork on the covers; the smell of new paper; the crisp feeling as I flick through the pages of a new book.

These days I do still read books - somewhat slowly I admit. But I do mourn my regular encounter with the new titles in paper, between covers. These days I tend to read poetry. With poems one can absorb a whole concept or story in a much shorter space – just one or two, sometimes three pages. These encounters are both bracing and inspiring. In recent times I’ve been revisiting the ineffable poet American Robert Hass whose poems of walk through his life and mine; and Maya Angelou whose poems are songs reflecting the light and dark 20^th century history. And I am rediscovering the dark nature of poet Ted Hughes and the hearing the magical rhythms of William Butler Yeats. As well as this I have loved reading the new work of my friend Avril Joy – inspired literary insights into diverse modern experience.

And yet in all this I miss the regular encounters with new books and savouring the anticipation the pile of books waiting the bedside table.

My favourite mantra in these challenging days is ‘in every problem there lies a possible solution.’ In my case this problem of reading in substantive quantities has been solved by my discovering and embracing reading in audiobook form.

Eureka! By this means I am now reading as much and as   quickly and as widely as ever I have. It is worth noting here that this activity engages the sense not mentioned as yet - the crucial sense of hearing.

Such a delight.

Interestingly, in enthusing about all this I have met more than a degree of literary snobbery. In the air is the vague suggestion that this – listening on earphones to someone reading a great writer’s work – doesn’t count as “reading”. One might even infer from certain comments that this way of reading is to some degree lazy, even inferior.

So I have decided to “come out” as an audio reader and boldly to say “I am reading Hilary Mantel’s new novel The Mirror and the Light. So brilliant. I don’t say listening to. And I say ‘I’m reading John Banville writing as Benjamin Black -all those high literary skills bringing subtle life to novels one might pin night down as psychological/ detective/philosophical narratives.’

So it is that in the last year or so I have read many novels.   I counted them up this morning and it seems I have read 49 long novels. In his seminal book On Writing, Stephen King, in adding up his annual consumption of books included all the books he had read on audio; I think his list came to 80 something.

There is something else. I feel now that one should recognise that audio books actually offer added value to readers in the skills and nature of the person who narrates the story. This is a very high skill and makes a crucial difference in the way that one reads a book. The voice of the narrator can make or break your own reading of the book.  In some cases I have to admit that for me some of the narrations can lessen the impact of the book. But the novel can only be enhanced by the talent of a narrator whose skills allow the writer’s voice to come through richly, clear and true.

Among these I would list Peter Forbes reading the novels of Peter May, James Buchanan reading Ian Rankin, Gerry O’Brien reading of Galway writer Ken Bruen. Then there is John Keating reading Benjamin Black/John Banville. And Ben Miles reading Hilary Mantel. I also really admire Ann Dover’s reading of some of my own novels; she tackles the north-east intonations with insight and subtlety - no easy thing.

Looking at this I think perhaps I might be accused of some bias towards the Celtic voice – which might, I suppose, reflect some of my own deep heritage. But there is musicality there which doesn’t resort to flat actorish Received Pronunciation.

Audio reading is blossoming all over the place these days, edging its way into long car and bus journeys, into long afternoons in the garden, into the boredom of hospital waiting rooms. And now we have the enforced isolation engendered by the epidemic I feel it will broaden its appeal even further.

Self-isolation may not be such a deep punishment when we can add to our list of books read ad infinitum; we can track the work of certain writers we love and find writers who may illuminate our confined lives. Audio reading is great for fiction but in my experience is also great for disciplines like philosophy, sociology and psychology.  Even writing from the classical world is available in this form.

For some people, probably like myself, for whom book reading has become more difficult, audio reading adds to and intensifies the traditional benefits of having all those books on your bedside table. I can see that in this time isolation, even confinement, that audio reading could very much facilitate online reading groups or WhatsApp discussion groups.

So, in this time of crisis, whatever the state of our eyes, in addition to our singing, painting, jigsawing, and reading actual paperbacks, we can explore and extend our enhanced and enriched literary range by reading in Audio, whether we do it on our own or as a member an online group.

Our aim for the duration of this crisis has to be that we spend time rather than just pass it till things get better. Which they will.

*I have posted here a while ago about ways of reading, focusing more on social class and reading – a theme which is becoming fashionable these days,

   http://lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/search?q=Ways+of+Reading

You will find useful information about  acquiring Audio Books on this site.
https://ribbonfish.co.uk/blog/11-awesome-audiobook-publishers/ 

Reading on Planet Lockdown - Discovering Quebec with Louise Penny,

Shielding in lockdown has been like landing on a different planet. For me one consequence of exploring this new Planet Lockdown is the deepening and strengthening my lifelong habit (obsession with?) of reading and writing – all of which started when I was about seven. Reading has always been my escape from a dark and difficult world, furnishing me with an almost magical doorway into a sensate, fulfilling life. And now in recent months on Planet Lockdown this deep reading habit has allowed me to escape the sense of dark confinement and deprivation and find a (possibly eccentric) way of living to the full. 

And now I have found many different pathways on this planet. One of my reading pathways has involved   revisiting lifelong favourites. Then I got to thinking that I have possibly outgrown some old favourites; perhaps I even overrated these works in those early readings. But sometimes it happens that I find new layers of meaning in such older works which tell me something about the life we have to live now.

Another pathway here on the planet has been finding new works. I have relished a great pleasure in discovering new writers and stories which inspire me to explore new rivers and climb new mountains – to open up my confined world. So in these lockdown days new territories are opening up for me:  territories which would not have opened up for me, which I would not have foreseen, without this unique reading retreat which is Planet Lockdown

Some of the best of these has influenced me not just as a reader but more crucially as a writer.  One of these - a recent discovery - has been the work of the Canadian writer Louise Penny.

I can’t remember just how I first discovered this writer. However, having read one book, I found myself looking for others and, using an old habit – again started in childhood – of discovering a writer by reading a series of their novels. In this way I can cultivate and incorporate into my reading/writing map this writer’s approach to the storytelling task, to their worldview, to their creation of characters; I could learn from them their deep apprehension of climate and the natural world. I recognised these elements which combine uniquely in each writer and constitute what we call their style.

I feel first developed this series approach to reading generations ago, when I was doing my French and German A-levels. To back up my curriculum studies I hunted down the novels by Honoré de Balzac, the short stories of Guy de Maupassant and Heinrich Boll, and the plays of Goethe. (We did read whole books in those days in the original language. I believe things are different nowadays.)

Back to reading on Planet Lockdown – Louise Penny’s novels which might be loosely labelled murder mystery stories,  showcase her high literary skills and her clever storytelling skills.  The novels are bedded in the historical and cultural identity of French Canada. The history of the British colonisation of this original French province lies there in layers, underneath the contemporary stories. Penny’s storytelling is complex and sometimes surprising - threaded through with philosophical insight and an acute sense of the ‘other’. I learnt a lot in reading these novels – isn’t there a certain pleasure in absorbing information in the context of a story?

The settings for Penny’s novels is French-speaking urban and rural Québec; the central characters are urban and rural Québécois with a sprinkling of English speakers – called Anglos here - historically top dogs in the province but now at one level down: first nation Canadians such as the Cree nation also play a small part here.

As well as relishing the stories, in reading this succession of Penny’s novels I have learnt a great deal about the unique history of this part of the North American continent. And I have developed further my knowledge of the human dilemma – the politics of family, the forming and destruction of friendships, the nature of betrayal, the intertwining of love and hate.

I have been thinking that this is part of what we explore through reading – finding new pathways, new tracks, and ways to interpret what is essentially a very foreign environment to an English reader. This is so even if - like me – you flatter yourself that have a good sense of the world and its history.

Penny’s novels explore a series of widely ranging mysteries held together by the leading character, a Québécois policeman, Chief Inspector Armand Ganache, of the Sûreté de Quebec, his intellectual wife Reine Marie by his side. These two are at the centre of an extraordinary caucus of characters who live in a tiny village deep in the forests and mountains of rural Québec, some miles away from Montréal.

One great attraction for me of these novels is the secondary and tertiary characters who reappear in further novels.  This includes a complicated ancient poet called Ruth whose constant companion is a duck called Rosa. Another attraction is the way the writer renders for us the extremities of the distinctive seasons and the landscape of this part of Canada to the degree that, as well as forming a background for the narrative, they become part of the characterisation of the whole novel.

I have to say that these are no ordinary mystery novels. Apart from the complex and attractive character of Ganache himself, the stories of are bedded into a whole range of world issues played out against the linked histories of France and Québec. These involve murder, drug addiction, the joys, the warmth and this occasional toxic nature of family. We get to know the worlds of painting and fine art, the danger of enclosed monastic life, the dark nature of political and police corruption, And in each novel the exploration of good and evil and the dark and the light of characters and cultures is intelligent and satisfying. This writer assumes her readers are intelligent and not afraid of ideas.

Being a great Francophile the setting of one of my favourite novels in this series moves away from Québec and is set in Paris, where the historical French cultural identity of the Québécois is embedded in the narrative and is a key to the mystery at its core. As readers we get to walk the streets of Paris with Armand Ganache and his clever wife Reine Marie. I enjoy the way the Rodin Museum and the tale of the Burghers of Calais plays its part in the narrative.

The detective Armand Ganache is a deceptively clever man. He is a thinker:  a quiet, thoughtful soul who wields authority and leadership like a  magician's wand. We spend a lot of time inside his mind.  In this Paris novel as in the others, he  uses  literary and philosophical analogies with a free hand, always adding depth and significance to the  story,

One – it seems to me – very attractive and original aspect of all the novels is the attention they pay to the French influence on the daily life and of the food of the Quebec province. This is described  described with relish and serves to reflect the intimacy of the relationships and the authenticity of the stories as they unfold.

Looking at all this,  I am now thinking that it might make the novels sound fact-heavy and complicated. But not so! The passion informing the research and the literary skills of this writer makes each novel a compelling - even an easy - read.

 And there are surprises. Each novel is different to the others – these are not patently similar mystery stories. They are handcrafted novels which - apart from anything else - enhance our understanding of the human condition and cultural identity. They explore the dark and the light, the good and the evil embedded in the human drama. The dark side of some individuals and their motivation towards evil is deeply and sometimes shockingly present but not - as in some mystery novels – wanton and unjustified. 

So I suppose have to admit that the confinement and the long days of lockdown have been transformed into a gift  - for me, the time and the space and time to learn -  in this case about Québec, and  to become acquainted with the very special Armand Gamache in discovering  the novels of Louise Penny.

Happy reading!

Here Are Some of The Novels:

Still Life
A Fatal Grace / Dead Cold
The Cruellest Month
A Rule Against Murder
The Brutal Telling
Bury Your Dead
A Trick Of The Light
The Beautiful Mystery
How The Light Gets In
The Long Way Home
The Nature Of The Beast
A Great Reckoning
Glass Houses
Kingdom Of The Blind
A Better Man
All The Devils Are Here

 

 

P/C from Marseillan: Holiday Reading Rachel Cooke

The random nature of reading on holiday is part of its charm.

I gave up on a book which began with three people improbably drinking neat gin from jam jars. Instead I plumped for a book on Licked Spoon’s pile: Her Brilliant Career by Rachel Cooke.

 The Book and its Themes

‘Her Brilliant Career’ consists of biographical pieces about ten women, who  characterise what Cooke sees as a neglected feminist feature of women’s experience in the 1950s. These women are proto-feminists before the high octane feminist splurge of the latter 1960s. (As I keep saying - nothing comes from nothing.)

These ten women - having experienced the shortages, losses and the heightened awareness brought

on by world war - inhabited lives of equality with their male cohorts, determinedly ploughing their own furrow and subverting the powerful post-war instinct to return to a conservative male-driven domestic ‘normality’

.

Each of them, in her different way, succeeded in this by being and sustaining her often ‘different’ self with her ambition, her self worth and determination to achieve the life aims she has set herself.

These women are distinctly different from each other and colourful in different ways. But, reading Cooke’s essays here, I have the feeling that they share three qualities: confidence in their importance of their central idea, self belief involving a habit, that the controlling world could call ‘selfishness’, of putting their own ideas before cultural expectations.  The third quality has to be courage - either instinctual or deliberate – as they flout the taken-for-granted view of what women’s lives should be and subvert the sacred institution of the family in post-war Britain.

Presaging a ‘feminist’ future even before that term was common parlance, the lives of these women, taken together, weave a complex picture of the changing nexus of being  a woman in the 1950s. (Declaring an interest, I grew up in the 1950s and can vouch for some of the truths here.)

The Women

Three of them were married, three of them were lesbians; six of them had children, three of them were divorced;  one of them was separated. Extra marital affairs seem common among this group and attitudes to children and the mother’s role vary.

 Who are they?

Patience Gray (Food writer); Nancy Spain (Writer and ‘personality’); Joan Werner Laurie (Magazine Editor); Sheila Van Damm ( Rally Car Driver and Theatre Manager); sisters-in law Muriel and Betty Box (pioneers of popular film); Alison Smithson (Future oriented architect); Jaquetta Hawkes (Archeologist) Rose Heilbron (QC and High Court Judge). 

It was great to read about the highly original, talented Alison Smithson* - a new name to me, now sunk below the horizon. In reading the book I learned a good deal about the others, about whom I thought I knew a lot. (I would urge you to read the book to discover more the differences and delights  in the lives of these women.)

The Writer

Rachel Cooke's voice is clearly that of a woman who inhabits the cultural certainties of 2014. Her style is elegant, intimate, sometimes quite matey. But in her deceptively informal style she delivers a beautifully written, very accessible book. The considerable depth and breadth of research of these biographies pins the accounts to the historical moment, to the culture of theatre and film, to the literature and architecture of the day, to the nature of civil society and the subtle politics of family and workplace.

Cooke achieves this feat with readable ease. Her footnotes illustrate the depth and breadth of her research and add colour and context to the lives of these women whose names echo in our memories: women who lived equal lives in psychologically more difficult  circumstances than women face today.

If you are at all interested in the 1950s, the wide-ranging introduction to Her Brilliant Career is worth reading alone. If you are interested in any individual woman, the following essays can be read each on its own. But to read all of them is to become familiar with the feeling of what it was like to be a woman in that very significant decade.

In my view the Brilliant Career of writer Rachel Cooke should be much enhanced by this first class book.

*In an earlier version of this post I mis-named this excellent woman. Apologies to Rachel Cooke, I put it down to mis-reading my own notes;  according to my perceptive daughter it's a thing called 'holiday brain'. Never suffered from that before. The name is correct now. wx

Advice for Writers – Myth or Magik?

Who am I to pose this question? I have been offering advice to writers – in person or in print – for twenty years. That is five years less than I have been publishing.

But now advice to writers has blossomed and boomed into an industry powered by the internet and the social media embedded in it. Does it promote the myth or engender the magik?

Writers I know are being encouraged – nay instructed – to get out there with the blogging and twittering to back up (more probably replace) the publisher’s press department in their attempts to get the book known.

Even well known writers are put on the talks/appearance/literary festival trail (unescorted) to do promotion not just for their book but for their publisher *  The writer often performs at festivals for nothing, supporting the festival’s profits and funding huge fees for celebrity speakers – Bill Clinton for instance. Ah, you say, the publicity for the individual writer is their payment. It seems to me not.

And now there has evolved a tribe of travelling writers – some of whom are shy creatures only happy when they are on their own hunched over a keyboard or a notebook – dragged blinking into the limelight for the delectation of  festival groupie audiences sometimes more interested in celebrity that the reading of books.

(Scroll back for my  blog post on Howard Jacobson’s Zoo Time for his witty tale on the ubiquitous literary festival.)

That brings me to outcomes. When I was teaching educational research we were always careful to point out that aspirations and objectives are not outcomes. There have to be some measures in place which demonstrate true outcomes – positive and negative – from any project. For me in the case of writers a positive outcome should be a general rise in sales, not just a cluster of sales at the event itself. Or the rosy glow of feeling famous. I would like to hear evidence, or even discussion, on the matter of outcomes from these performances.

And what about the as-yet unpublished writers – often writers of talent who have been unrecognized by the behemoth publishing industry? For them the internet and social media have been seen quite rightly as a vehicle where their writing can be showcased, where an audience can be nurtured, and publication can be achieved through Kindle and other outlets without the destructive intervention of nay-sayers of the publishing trade.

I think this is a wonderful evolution. It has had its starry successes of course – writers who have become best sellers through this means. These, one has to say, are exceptional cases among thousands. But the benefits to lesser selling writers are still manifest – their book is out there to be read and appreciated by strangers; they have taken it up to its best form and the good ones becomes a valid part of a writer’s showcase. And in the case of Kindle there are inbuilt outcome measures in the sales visible to the writer. Even a trickle of ten books in a month tells the writer of strangers who have read their work. Over a year or ten this becomes a significant number and is indeed part of that writer’s showcase.

Of course this open process does mean  that also out there are some publications that  have missed the filter of the publisher’s front desk and have also  missed the sharp pencil of a literate editor. To this I say so what? There have always been dubious, ill-written books on the market. We only remember the good ones. The rest were quite rightly pulped.

The internet has also spawned quite flourishing peer writer support networks which like any peer review set-ups are only as good as the peers involved. The art of critiquing and nurturing creative work is subtle and complex and should not be approached lightly. Crude criticism or unbounded praise should not come into this process but it often does.

We need to be careful. Sometimes there groups take up so much energy that there’s little time for ongoing solid, personal and progressive writing.

But it is all kindly meant and can give support and nurture development outside the umbrella of mainstream publishing.  

More widely there is lots of advice out there. On the internet

One way to cut down a tree...

Lots of  ‘Ways’ out there - eg:.

1. Five ways to beat the writer’s block
2. Five ways to get the attention of an agent
3. Five ways to find what a publisher needs
4. Five ways to create a believable hero or heroine
5. Five ways to make your novel a best seller

I have to say if it were as easy as that just anybody could be a successful writer.

So, in this world of advice here are my Five Ways to Develop Your Writing

1        Evaluate any advice you are offered. Does the adviser have a successful record in the writing field rather than the advice-giving industry? Is adviser a successful and seasoned writer?

2        Write at least a page every single day. (One year makes 365 pages) Bibles for this approach are Dorothea Brande’s On becoming a Writer and Julia Cameron’s A Writer’s Way. You could take a look at my On Being a Writer

3        Give yourself short term targets for positive outcomes. Competitions are great for this. Sign up for Avril Joy’s (www.avriljoy.com) Newsletter. She is great and very informed on the benefits of competitions. Of course this  befits this year’s  Costa Short \story Prizewinner who has thus proved her theory. Even so, regularly entering  competitions should not be about winning. Remember every entry is a five finger exercise in your development as a writer. And this valid form of writing also builds up your body of work and develops your sense of audience – a very subtle aspect of a writer’s skill.

4        Write what you really want to write, what in your deepest heart you feel impelled to write, not what some egregious expert says the market wants at this time. They are always three years behind, any way, copying trends rather than creating them...

5        Let people know what you do. Talk about your project with affection and information.   Blog posts too can be five finger exercises in expressing thoughts, ideas and work in progress – a coherent expression of your writing self. Twittering can be a more casual notice board  to express an occasional spurt of joy and inspiration and to let a wider group of people know what you’re up to. Some people make an art form of this (not me) showing distilled wit and real character.  

6         Most importantly don’t do any of this a) if someone has instructed you to do it. b) if it is a chore(that will show!). Or c) if it is instead of doing your proper writing: your ongoing work must be a priority.

In answer to my own question Advice for Writers – Myth or Magik? -

It remains a myth if you don’t sort out that good advice from the weak and self serving. It becomes magik if it helps you to your transform your own writing to a point where you know it is  good and worth publishing, whatever form that publishing takes,

Happy writing

w

Join My Back to Basics Workshops at 2pm in May 1st

 

I’ve always said that teaching is the best way of learning. After so many books and so many years I still have stuff to learn about the fascinating process of writing. So it’s with the delight of anticipation that for the last couple of weeks I’ve been working very hard with my friend Avril Joy preparing for the first of a series of four writing workshops at my old stamping ground, Bishop Auckland Town Hall Library.

We have called this series Back to Basics with the idea that in any craft of skill going back to basics is a refreshing and inspiring process for both experienced and new practitioners.

So, as  well as being a refresher course for existing writers who want to look at their method

and process, these workshops have been designed for absolute beginners. These starter workshops are intended to give them confidence to make a start whether their aim is fiction, memoir, family stories or factual writing there will be something inspiring here for everyone.

We will explore the role of writing in everyone’s life even if they don’t consider themselves yet to be a writer - letters, diaries, reports, for instance. We will show the value of normal use of language in speaking, recounting, telling stories. We will talk of the necessity for more experienced writers to audit their skills and practices and go back to basics to evaluate their work, to refresh and rediscover their style.

This first workshop will involve three different and intense writing experiences which will be productive for all writers, from absolute beginners to those who have poems, stories or even books in their literary folio.

These workshops will not involve individuals reading out their own work, as I’ve come to think that this process is time-consuming and more suited to some writers than others. I know that reading out is a convention in workshops but I sometime think that reading out loud at an early stage can be destructive for some people. In the latter of this series fo four workshops we will find other ways of sharing work

So if you happen to be reading this and are in travelling distance of lovely old Bishop Auckland come along and join Avril and me and learn how to develop your writing by going Back to Basics.

As I said at the beginning I think that teaching is the best way of learning so I am sure we will learn lots from you as well.

The workshops start on

Wednesday 1s May at Bishop Auckland Town Hall 2 -4.30

The workshops are free to you but BATH will charge you £2 for the tea/coffee and biscuits includedas a the treat to keep us going.

Workshops Start at 2pm May 1st Bishop Auckland Town Hall. Ring to reserve a place.

 

 

Address: Market Pl, Bishop Auckland, County Durham DL14 7NP

Phone:0300 026 9524

Finding Myself in My Books,

About Finding Myself In My Books.

The following poem, Finding Myself in My Books , was inspired by the task of organising all of my books as part of the creation of an Archive of all my work

including my notebooks, my novels, and my other published works.

This mammoth task is being spearheaded by the truly Doctor Donna Maynard, a  literary authority on the works of George Elliot, Lewis Carroll and  Charles Kinglsey.  And me now, perhaps.

My contribution to this task has been to survey and organise all the books on all of my shelves. In its turn this exercise has inspired the following short line poem, Finding Myself In My Books. You might be interested to know that this was first drafted while I was waiting in hospital for an eye injection

Finding Myself In My Books will be included in my newest collection of stories, called Kaleidoscope –A View from the Frontier. The short stories in this collection have emerged  from shaking my own life-kaleidoscope and being surprised by the special patterns which have emerged from the virtually random elements locked up in my life-storehouse. This has liberated unique stories to spring out of elements in different times in different places, finally fused  together through the art of fiction - viewed from what  the inimitable Diana Athill called the Frontier of Older Age. 

Here goes 

Finding Myself In My Books.

I am here at the frontier, reorganising

and encouraging my reading self

to revisit all of my books – a lifetime’s

books borrowed, bought and stolen if.

Some, acquired for research, have

driven me to dive into time and power

in order to colonise people, language and places.

Some contain  esoteric matter –

magic, ritual, ghosts, exotic plants

the mysterious powers

of the natural world.

Some explore ways of growing children –

their language and their secret inner selves.

The books remind me of myself, pondering

on society with its inexplicable shifts,

its organic twists and bizarre beliefs, which

out-play solid facts and  iron-clad ideas,

rendering them fluid –identity,

class, perversions, norms –

making imperative the changes

fundamental to our new millennium.

Then there are the stories, written in a lighter fashion

now dusty and dated - yesterday’s dramas.

Alongside these work of great poets and writers

resists the depredations of time;

refreshing me with every reading.

Weighing heavy on the shelves are books laden with

the phenomenally detailed minutiae of war –

gruesome images and experiences laid bare

to enable us to learn anew all about

the horrors perpetuated on our behalf

in the name of nationality at the behest of greed.

And there in the corner stand two cases filled with

my own writing. The books still looking bright and new

despite their long existence. They wait  patiently for me

to open the pages and rediscover some new things

about myself –  things I thought, things I felt, things I thought

I knew and really didn’t know.

The words inside these covers

Differentiate between who I am now

and who I was then.

November 2019

Extraordinary Perceptions In Blaydon

 

 

At the invitation of the indefatigable and inspired Dot Cameron, Reader Development Librarian at Gateshead Council  I go to Blaydon Library to talk to thirty odd readers – two reading groups and one community group - to talk about my books, writing and the important role  of reading in the lives of people with sight impairment. 

Dot carefully explains that they always used the term ‘reading’ although  most of these readers encounter written literature through audiotapes, CDs, MP3 players and Braille editions. Luckily all my novels are on tape or CD so are available to these readers.

The sheer task of gathering these groups together is challenging and we sweat a bit as one group is delayed in their bus by a traffic stop.

But now we are gathered. They are mostly silver hairs and the oldest it 93. But age doesn’t matter here - the comments and questions are as sharp as any I have had from any audience. But clearly they anticipate a good show and give close attention.

As I say later to Dot, it is a challenging gig. It’s  a different task to interact here where non-verbal clues and cues to meaning are not available.  I find myself being more dramatic (melodramatic?)  in tone and regretting my redundant flailing arms and rolling eyes.

Nevertheless these very interesting people indicate their interest in all kinds of ways and are a very satisfying audience. The  questions are great and their interest is evident.  Many of them have read and liked my novels. It’s odd to think that the landscapes I have painted, the dramas I have enacted in my novels have been almost entirely appreciated through hearing the words rather than seeing them.

Most of them have lost their sight in latter years but Ann Ruddick is different. She is a lynchpin of AIRS  which, under the auspices of Gateshead Council's library service, offers a free regular talking newspaper service to local residents, accessible library and information services, and a range of transcription services to local and national information providers.

Last year Ann was awarded an MBE for her voluntary service to visually-impaired people. Ann, originally a teacher by profession, now focuses her considerable energies on voluntary work with  people with sight impairment. She is very much in charge at these meeting – talking to people, helping them take their seats,  worrying about the late-comers, making sure people are getting their cup of tea and helping to clear afterwards. She has previously been busy on the phone checking up on people who could come and arranging transport. She works on email with a specially adapted system.

This is all achieved with the help of her beautiful dog Pippa, as  Ann herself was blind from birth. She explains to me the difference between herself and some of the people here who become blind later in life. ‘They have their memory of the look of things to guide them. It’s different for me.’

There is a lot of laughter and insightful discussion.  We talk about the importance of the actresses who read these whole unabridged editions of my novels – both for me as a writer and for them as readers. I tell them the story of Anne Dover,  very fine actress, who has read some of my novels and manages the range of accents  and the light and darks shades of the narrative with consummate skill. Last year Anne contacted me to sound-source some Hungarian words and phrases in Sandie Shaw and The Millionth Marvell Cooker.  Then she emailed me to say she had found someone, now back in Hungary, to whom she could talk. She is a stickler for detail. This was very much appreciated by this particular group.

(In January Anne will be recording the CD for The Woman Who Drew Buildings. There are Polish words to think about there…)

My favourite comment of the day is from the nice man who says. ‘I read The Long Journey Home and as I read it I thought it was so real that this writer must have been there in Singapore and experienced these things, or she is a brilliant re searcher. I think now it must be the latter…’

I love it! We writers are very needy…

Dot Cameron emails me the next day that they have had phone calls saying how much people enjoyed the session.  Hooray!

Thank you Dot for inviting me. As always I learned a lot.

Wx