The Blog

One of the pleasures—and privileges—of my work is watching a manuscript evolve through rewrites, as the author develops new ways to settle the prose around the story. It’s also fascinating to watch published authors evolve from novel to novel, and thanks to Simon and Schuster, I’ve recently been doing that with Neil Cross. I started with Always the Sun, his fourth novel (published in 2004), and then moved on to his new book Burial. (more…)

As a rule, I’m highly mistrustful of software that targets itself at fiction writers. While the elaborate formatting conventions of screenplays mean that Final Draft is a useful tool for screenwriters, there’s a large part of me that believes the only things prose writers need are something to write with, something to write on, and a dictionary. Software that, for example, allows you to input a number of aspects of your novel—character name, inciting incident, plot twist 2b—and then arrange them into a pre-formatted structure, is a bad thing. Writers need to be do these things for themselves; if they can’t, they’re very likely going to have deeper problems that a piece of software isn’t going to fix.

So, when I read on the BBC Website that Neil Cross does most of his writing on a piece of specialist software, I was a little sceptical. Still, I thought I’d take a look. As is so often the case when I overcome one of my many prejudices, I’m glad I did. (more…)

Sometimes, when you read a lot of fiction, it all begins to feel much the same. A monotony sets in: sentence follows sentence, chapter follows chapter, book follows book, all trudging past like prisoners on a death march across a blasted winter landscape. The prose does what it must in order to survive, plodding ever forwards, and once in a while a book misses its step, falls, and receives a shot to the back of the head. (I mean that it gets put down unfinished. Bear with me.)

Then a book comes along that’s filled with such vital, remarkable prose, that it reminds you what fiction is capable of. Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl is such a book, an explosion of language that leaves the reader wondering, as the publisher might say, How did he do that? This is the kind of prose that makes you want to get up and run around the room, and it’s another feather in the cap of CB Editions, who’ve finally given it a UK publication. (more…)

I have a theory that I revisit once in a while, but don’t often share with others because I suspect it’s largely nonsense. It goes something like this: Each of the main types of genre fiction, e.g. crime, romance, science fiction, etc. in some ways represent a distillation of one element of the writer’s art. So, for example, romance concentrates on character motivation, the drives of the separate characters and how they might conflict or be aligned. Fantasy—when it’s done well—might be said to look at the description of society and social setting. Crime fiction, following this theory, is all about the mechanics of story and plot exposition. After all, crime stories are often (although certainly not always) quite literally about the process of exposing the plot.

So whatever genre a writer might be working—or wanting to work—in, it’s worth taking a little time to explore some of the others and see what might be learned from them. For a lot of writers, the chances are that they’ll start such an exploration with crime fiction. Crime, after all, is often seen as “The genre it’s okay to like”, lacking the stigma of fantasy, sci-fi or romance. So, having decided to explore crime fiction, a writer would want to read some modern authors and the classics. The question of where to begin with an exploration of classic crime fiction has been neatly answered by a new series of Crime Classics from Atlantic Books. (more…)

Publishers John Murray have a penchant for thrillers and adventures set around the world, often written by expatriates. One example from last year was The Creator’s Map—Emilio Calderón’s tale of espionage in wartime Rome—and more recently they’ve published The Maze of Cadiz, the debut novel from Aly Monroe.

The Maze of Cadiz introduces British “economic warfare” agent Peter Cotton, who’s set to appear in a series of novels from the author. This first story sees Cotton sent to Cadiz in the closing days of the Second World War. His mission is initially to locate and relieve R A May, a British agent assigned to watch imports and exports in the port, and who seems to have gone rogue, withdrawing large sums of money and not replying to communications. Before Cotton can reach him and discover the reasons for his strange behaviour, May turns up dead. Cotton’s left to tidy up the mess, his only official contact in the region an obstructive vice-consul. (more…)

Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain, the debut collection of stories by Kirsten Menger-Anderson, uses compact, unsettling prose to follow the strains of madness and obsession across a dozen generations of a family of doctors.

The early stories in the collection are short and focussed almost entirely on their characters, with just enough period detail to fix them in place and time. This sparseness of setting makes some of the stories seem strangely intangible, like dreams related by somebody who’s just woken up, and adds to the curious atmosphere of the book. Those descriptive details that do exist have an unsettling quality of their own, such as this early description of Dr Olaf van Schuler’s relationship with his mentally ill mother:

When he was home, he sometimes released her so she could pace the thirty-foot length of their single-room dwelling, or kick the straw pallet he slept on. He let her shuck the corn that grew wild in the small lot behind their back door, and stir empty pots, which he set up on the dining table. She liked tangled yarn. He left bundles—in every color—on the floor amidst the clutter. He recited scriptures to her, knelt with her in prayer, and said nothing when she woke late at night to call upon God and plead for forgiveness.

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I’m doing something a little different for the end-of-year round-up this year. Instead of the best books of 2008, here are some of the titles that I’m sure would have been good… if only I’d got around to reading them. (more…)

Salon.com and New York Times critic Louis Bayard has spent the last few years carving out a niche for himself as a writer of historical crime stories featuring real-life individuals and characters from classic fiction. Mr. Timothy (2003) followed the continuing adventures of Timothy Cratchit from A Christmas Carol, while The Pale Blue Eye (2006) was set around West Point Military Academy and featured a young cadet by the name of Edgar Allan Poe. Both novels had a lot to recommend them; in particular, The Pale Blue Eye was a more entertaining book than 2006′s other Poe-inspired yarn, Matthew Pearl’s disappointing The Poe Shadow (which was published on the same day and as a result must have drawn at least some of the limelight from Bayard’s novel).

In his new novel, The Black Tower, Bayard turns his attention to the French Restoration and the exploits of real-life criminal-turned-detective Eugène François Vidocq. (more…)

Inside Book Publishing, 4th ed.
Giles Clark & Angus Phillips
Published in the UK by Routledge.
ISBN 978-0415441575

If you’re a writer, it may seem that mastering your craft is more than enough work, but it’s worth learning what you can about the industry as well. Whatever else it may mean to you, finding a publisher and getting your book into print is primarily a business activity, and as with any other business, the more you know before you get involved, the better your position will be.

Inside Book Publishing, by Giles Clark and Angus Phillips, is an excellent introduction to the subject, managing to be both comprehensive and concise. While its primary audience is academic (it’s used on several publishing courses, including at Oxford Brookes where Phillips teaches), it actually has a much broader appeal. Chapters explaining marketing, distribution and the allocation of rights are worth reading for budding authors and publishers alike, and a detailed breakdown of the costs of publishing a book will help new writers to understand why they’re not going to be able to retire from sales of their first novel. Each chapter concludes with a ‘further reading’ list, making this a perfect starting point for deeper research into whichever topics are most relevant to you.

There are shelves of books available on the subject of publishing (and in particular self-publishing), but I think it’s worth reading something that takes a serious-minded, academic approach to the core of the subject, and this book fills that role perfectly.

The latest edition was printed this summer, and is backed up by a respectable website, also called Inside Book Publishing. The site includes a blog, which has an interesting update on the potential effect of the recession on British publishers.

The Minutes of the Lazarus Club is a story of murder and espionage in industrial nineteenth-century London, the kind of thing that some people call a “gaslight romance”. The central character, George Phillips, is a doctor at St Thomas’s hospital, but the novel’s being sold on a supporting cast that includes Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Florence Nightingale, and even Charles Darwin. Tony Pollard is a well-regarded historian and archaeologist, but how well does he fare when he brings the historical elements into a work of fiction?

A real danger for historians and other academics when they try writing fiction is the tendency to overload the narrative with facts and trivia. The story forgotten, they launch into a technical description of an object or a brief treatise on some aspect of the period, making the reader feel as though they’ve fallen through a hole in the story and landed on somebody’s lecture notes. This is a pitfall that Pollard largely avoids, though: after some early wobbles (the early chapters set in the hospital have some very informative dialogue in them), he does a good job of keeping things relevant to the story, and the historical information serves to colour the goings-on, rather than distract from them. (more…)

Editing and revising a novel can be a long, depressing task. A lot of the initial thrill of creation goes after the first draft has been completed, leaving behind the job of going through your work again and again: does this character come across convincingly? Could this phrase be a little tighter? In the cold light of day, does the plot really, genuinely make any sense? And the more general thoughts: How could you have made so many mistakes? What does this sea of red ink (or pixels) say about you as a writer? (more…)

Aleksandar Hemon’s novel The Lazarus Project opens in Chicago in 1908, with Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant from Bessarabia, attempting to deliver a letter to George Shippy, the local Chief of Police. However, Shippy takes one look at the dishevelled foreigner on his doorstep, assumes he’s an anarchist, panics, and shoots him dead. (more…)

It’s the early nineties, and the city of Sarajevo is under siege by the Bosnian Serb forces. Three characters make their way through the chaos and destruction of the city streets: Kenan, on a journey across town to collect drinkable water for his family; Dragan, held up on his way to work, afraid to cross an intersection covered by a Serb sniper; and Arrow, a Sarajevan sniper struggling to maintain her independence. In the background to all of their lives is the music of the unnamed cellist of the title, who goes out into the street each day for twenty-two days, to play one adagio for each of the victims of a recent shelling. (more…)

Lawrence Durrell, best known as the author of the Alexandria Quartet, wrote a total of sixteen novels. Most are still in print, but until this year, his first two novels, Pied Piper of Lovers and Panic Spring, have been impossible to get hold of. (more…)

The Lebanese author Amin Maalouf has built his career both in fiction—Samarkand, Leo Africanus, Balthasar’s Odyssey, etc.—and history, including The Crusades Through Arab Eyes.

In Origins, prompted by the discovery of a trunk containing the correspondence and notebooks of his late grandfather, Maalouf turns his research skills towards his own family background, and the result is an engrossing story of the changing shapes of families and nations during the early years of the last century. (more…)

Although it’s sometimes necessary to whisk a character in and out of a story without drawing too much attention to him, it’s generally worth remembering that a forgettable character can be a wasted opportunity. One book that really shows how much can be achieved with minor characters is The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. (more…)

I’ve been blogging about books, in one way or another, for a few years now—I think the first book I reviewed, on a long-forgotten website, was Yellow Dog by Martin Amis, which would make it 2003—and lately I’ve been thinking about what kinds of books are best suited to blogging.

I’m not talking about genre, because fantasy bloggers will always want to blog about fantasy novels, and literary folk will always want to blog about Philip Roth. Neither am I thinking about old-versus-new books, which again is down to the blogger’s taste. (more…)

Andrew Davidson’s debut novel, The Gargoyle, begins with a car accident that leaves its narrator, an unnamed, cocaine-addled pornographer, hospitalised with disfiguring burns. While he’s recovering in the hospital he’s visited by the mysterious Marianne Engel, who greets him with the enigmatic words, “You’ve been burned… again,” and proceeds to soothe him with tales of previous lives and lost loves.

The Gargoyle has drawn comparisons to authors including Vladimir Nabokov and Umberto Eco… but does it deserve them? (more…)

When Charles Boyle first wrote this novella, a charming story of infidelity and cricket, told with the kind of sparkling prose that reminds us just how much fun reading can be, he so despaired of getting it published that he formed his own publishing house, CB Editions, in order to get it into print. Not wanting to seem megalomaniacal (after all, the publishing house is already named after him), he chose a pseudonym for the novel… and has been explaining Jennie Walker to journalists ever since.

Soon after the original publication, Bloomsbury bought the rights, and have now released their own edition. (more…)

When I was a boy, dreaming my first dreams of writing and publication, it was generally known that one turned for further information to the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, that august publication that lists publishers, agents, etc., along with juicy advice on everything from taxes to how to prepare your manuscript. It’s been around for years—over a century, in fact—and back in the day, everybody seemed to know that this was the place you went to if you wanted to get yourself informed.

Sure, there were those dodgy “Authors: publish your book!” ads in the pages of literary and writing magazines, and we were warned about vanity publishing, but there wasn’t the level of misinformation then that there is now; because, for really powerful misinformation, we had to wait for the Internet to arrive. (more…)