While I was off sick, Professor John Sutherland wrote a piece in the Financial Times magazine (9 October) about the state of the British book trade. (It's hard to get at FT stuff on the web unless you subscribe, so no link here.) Sutherland's article was essentially a review of a book by Eric de Bellaigue called British Book Publishing as a Business since the 1960s, plus a few recent bestsellers.
Sutherland describes the UK book trade as 'extraordinarily successful' on the grounds that it generates some £4bn a year.
Well, first of all, it is hard to find accurate figures about book-trade income, and I think the £4bn figure may be a little high. But even if we accept it, it doesn't mean that the trade is 'extraordinarily successful'. The British public spends about £11bn a year on lawyers' fees, and £10bn a year on the care of old people, and we don't normally regard those commercial enterprises as whizz-bang successes.
If we assume that publishers receive approximately half of what is paid into the bookshop tills, then publishers are generating about £2bn a year. This is rather less than the public spends on supermarket chicken.
Furthermore, Sutherland claims that 'every year the money turnover of the trade enlarges healthily.' I doubt whether this is true, at least as far as publishers are concerned, and after adjustments for inflation. Publishers are being squeezed hard, both by the high-street bookselling chains and, especially, by the supermarkets.
A few years ago, the Bookseller published an article listing typical profit margins in various fields of publishing. The term ‘profit margin’ can of course mean almost anything, but we will assume that on this occasion like was being compared with like. For business books, the average figure was 17.2%; for scientific publishing, 29.3%; and for consumer (trade) publishing 4.1%.
In other words, the part of publishing which makes the least money is the flashy part that everyone hears about: the big biographies and the Booker-winning novels. But since this is a world in which (as was reported on Monday) an editor can cheerfully pay £600,000 for a pair of books by Greg Dyke and Jon Snow, who can be surprised by the lack of profit?
Your attitude all depends how you look at things, I suppose. The good Prof may well see the book trade as bursting with health (at least for the moment; he has doubts about the future). Personally, when I look at it, it often strikes me as being sick unto death. Sometimes it looks as if the only signs of life are in the small firms. And long may they flourish.
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Dumbing down in creative writing
Well, you learn something new every day.
Yesterday's (better class) newspapers and television screens were full of a new set of proposals for transforming the examination procedures for young people who are about to leave British schools. In many instances, soon to be 50%, such young people will go on to university -- or what passes for a university in this day and age.
Some newspapers also carry reports that the bosses of British industry are less than thrilled with the new proposals, and would much rather that reform efforts were concentrated on a few simple objectives. Such as making sure that all school-leavers can read, write, spell, punctuate, and handle simple arithmetic. At present, one third of UK companies are forced to run their own remedial courses in numeracy and literacy for the young people who join them straight from school.
It really does beggar belief that, in the year 2004, we still have not managed to achieve something that seemed within our grasp a hundred years ago. What is worse, it is not merely the below-100-IQ group which suffers from these shortcomings. It is now quite common to receive a letter from a 'professional' person, such as an estate agent or even a solicitor, which is, in effect, no more than a jumble of words. I have sometimes received letters from such persons which, with the best will in the world, I could only classify as the outpourings of an illiterate moron.
Is it any wonder that people of my age conclude that the world in general, and the UK in particular, is going down the toilet tube at a rapid rate of knots? What is more, we are dead right in that conclusion.
It is in that depressing context that I turn to my main topic, which is the award of PhD degrees for so-called 'creative writing'. A few minutes ago I did a search for creative-writing courses at UK universities, and came up with 422 of them. Most of these are undergraduate courses, but I have also learnt, from the press, that it is now far from unknown for PhD degrees to be awarded in this subject.
I am not going to give links to the precise press stories which brought this revelation to me. If I did so, I might be thought to be criticising one particular individual, and that is not my intention. If an opportunity exists, and an enterprising lad takes advantage of it, good luck to him. But I do wish to comment on the general state of affairs.
According to one source, who is an academic at the University of London, and presumably knows what he is talking about, the standard practice for PhDs in creative writing 'is that the student submits an example of his/her creative writing [such as a novel], together with a critical commentary upon his/her writing practice.' The regulations at one university stipulate an upper limit of 15,000 words on this critical commentary.
The only other requirement is that the applicant must submit to an oral examination on his/her work.
Let me declare an interest. I myself have a PhD, in education. It was awarded by a university with rather high academic standards. If you want to read a version of my thesis, intended for the general reader, hunt down a copy of The Goals of Universities (ISBN 0 335 09504 6), published by the Open University Press in 1988.
The traditional route to taking a PhD at a UK university of any standing is to undertake three years of full-time study, under the supervision of a recognised authority in your chosen field. During those years you are expected to complete an original piece of research, and to write up your findings in the form of a thesis. Often, three years is not enough time to complete the work, and many students finish off their theses in years four and five, while earning their living somewhere else. In other words, a PhD is a formidable piece of work, not to be tackled lightly. Many a student has abandoned halfway through, or taken to the drink, or found that his wife has left him.
If you compare the traditional route to a PhD, as described above, with the procedure for obtaining a PhD in creative writing, also described above, even the layman can see that there is no comparison whatever. And it so happens that I am in a position to make a very detailed comparison indeed, because I am both the holder of a 'traditional' PhD and the author of a good many published novels.
Most of my novels were written while I was in full-time employment, and I kept records of the amount of time I spent on them. On average, a novel took me somewhere between 200 and 300 hours, an amount of time which can easily be found in the evenings and at weekends, if one happens to be interested in writing a novel. So, to get a PhD at a former polytechnic, now labelled a university, you need to put in about 250 hours on a novel, let's say another 50 hours on the critical commentary, and there you are.
The idea that such an enterprise compares with a traditional PhD, involving original research, is patently ridiculous. The amount of labour involved in the two different routes to the 'same' degree is not commensurate; and neither -- I can testify from experience of both -- is the intellectual grasp required.
What we have in a typical UK PhD in creative writing is therefore a dumbing down of intellectual and academic standards. I for one find that highly objectionable.
Not only is it objectionable but it is also patently ridiculous. What are you going to do with a PhD in creative writing anyway, once you've got it? Do you seriously imagine it's going to impress a publisher? The only thing that it's good for (so far as I can see) is helping you to get a job teaching creative writing. And then you can help lots of other people to get useless degrees in creative writing as well. And so the cycle of madness continues.
Yesterday's (better class) newspapers and television screens were full of a new set of proposals for transforming the examination procedures for young people who are about to leave British schools. In many instances, soon to be 50%, such young people will go on to university -- or what passes for a university in this day and age.
Some newspapers also carry reports that the bosses of British industry are less than thrilled with the new proposals, and would much rather that reform efforts were concentrated on a few simple objectives. Such as making sure that all school-leavers can read, write, spell, punctuate, and handle simple arithmetic. At present, one third of UK companies are forced to run their own remedial courses in numeracy and literacy for the young people who join them straight from school.
It really does beggar belief that, in the year 2004, we still have not managed to achieve something that seemed within our grasp a hundred years ago. What is worse, it is not merely the below-100-IQ group which suffers from these shortcomings. It is now quite common to receive a letter from a 'professional' person, such as an estate agent or even a solicitor, which is, in effect, no more than a jumble of words. I have sometimes received letters from such persons which, with the best will in the world, I could only classify as the outpourings of an illiterate moron.
Is it any wonder that people of my age conclude that the world in general, and the UK in particular, is going down the toilet tube at a rapid rate of knots? What is more, we are dead right in that conclusion.
It is in that depressing context that I turn to my main topic, which is the award of PhD degrees for so-called 'creative writing'. A few minutes ago I did a search for creative-writing courses at UK universities, and came up with 422 of them. Most of these are undergraduate courses, but I have also learnt, from the press, that it is now far from unknown for PhD degrees to be awarded in this subject.
I am not going to give links to the precise press stories which brought this revelation to me. If I did so, I might be thought to be criticising one particular individual, and that is not my intention. If an opportunity exists, and an enterprising lad takes advantage of it, good luck to him. But I do wish to comment on the general state of affairs.
According to one source, who is an academic at the University of London, and presumably knows what he is talking about, the standard practice for PhDs in creative writing 'is that the student submits an example of his/her creative writing [such as a novel], together with a critical commentary upon his/her writing practice.' The regulations at one university stipulate an upper limit of 15,000 words on this critical commentary.
The only other requirement is that the applicant must submit to an oral examination on his/her work.
Let me declare an interest. I myself have a PhD, in education. It was awarded by a university with rather high academic standards. If you want to read a version of my thesis, intended for the general reader, hunt down a copy of The Goals of Universities (ISBN 0 335 09504 6), published by the Open University Press in 1988.
The traditional route to taking a PhD at a UK university of any standing is to undertake three years of full-time study, under the supervision of a recognised authority in your chosen field. During those years you are expected to complete an original piece of research, and to write up your findings in the form of a thesis. Often, three years is not enough time to complete the work, and many students finish off their theses in years four and five, while earning their living somewhere else. In other words, a PhD is a formidable piece of work, not to be tackled lightly. Many a student has abandoned halfway through, or taken to the drink, or found that his wife has left him.
If you compare the traditional route to a PhD, as described above, with the procedure for obtaining a PhD in creative writing, also described above, even the layman can see that there is no comparison whatever. And it so happens that I am in a position to make a very detailed comparison indeed, because I am both the holder of a 'traditional' PhD and the author of a good many published novels.
Most of my novels were written while I was in full-time employment, and I kept records of the amount of time I spent on them. On average, a novel took me somewhere between 200 and 300 hours, an amount of time which can easily be found in the evenings and at weekends, if one happens to be interested in writing a novel. So, to get a PhD at a former polytechnic, now labelled a university, you need to put in about 250 hours on a novel, let's say another 50 hours on the critical commentary, and there you are.
The idea that such an enterprise compares with a traditional PhD, involving original research, is patently ridiculous. The amount of labour involved in the two different routes to the 'same' degree is not commensurate; and neither -- I can testify from experience of both -- is the intellectual grasp required.
What we have in a typical UK PhD in creative writing is therefore a dumbing down of intellectual and academic standards. I for one find that highly objectionable.
Not only is it objectionable but it is also patently ridiculous. What are you going to do with a PhD in creative writing anyway, once you've got it? Do you seriously imagine it's going to impress a publisher? The only thing that it's good for (so far as I can see) is helping you to get a job teaching creative writing. And then you can help lots of other people to get useless degrees in creative writing as well. And so the cycle of madness continues.
Monday, October 18, 2004
Resumption of duties
Well, I'm back. More or less. Not yet firing on all four cylinders, but breathing. Meanwhile what has been going on?
A quick scan through the last page or two of book2book reveals that, while I've been hors de combat, some of our old favourites have cropped up once more.
W.H. Smith has been losing money again, and Tim Waterstone is thinking of putting in a bid for the company. So, it's been business as usual in both those quarters then.
The Frankfurt Book Fair normally generates a few stories about unknown authors who have produced works of staggering genius which have generated 'bidding frenzies' among publishers who just have to have the book for their list. The story I noticed this year is about Stuart Hill who (as usual in these cases) failed his 11-plus exam. His book has been bought by Barry Cunningham, who was the sole editor in London to have the gumption to buy the first Harry Potter book, though even he had absolutely no idea how big Harry was going to get.
The Independent tells us that Mr Hill's book 'looks set to become next year's hottest seller when it hits the bookshops in January.' Well, excuse me for pointing this out, but the book trade goes dead in January, after the Christmas peak, and if you throw enough publicity money at a book at that time it isn't too difficult to make an impression on the charts.
What else? Oh yes, there's a bloody great bitchy row at HarperCollins (or so the Guardian alleges) about -- of all unimaginable things -- books which aren't selling.
Dear me. The story is worth reading for all its glorious in-fighting detail. Basically, there are three superwomen involved, all of them convinced that they know how to find the supersellers which are needed for survival in today's book trade, and all of them -- ahem -- subject to criticism (from men, who would have believed it?) for not delivering what they promised.
Caroline Michel, for instance, has spent lots of money on books by the like of Jeannette Winterson, Greg Dyke and Jon Snow, and they just aren't doing very well. Hard to credit, isn't it? So her boss, Amanda Ridout, is less than pleased, and the overall boss lady of the entire shooting match, Victoria Barnsley, is said to be 'slightly disengaged from what is going on.'
Well, it can't be more than a week or two since I pointed out in these very columns that (a) today's editors are desperate to find the big sellers, and (b) they haven't the faintest idea how to do it. So they thrash around, throwing money at projects and making sacrifices to the gods. Small wonder that the strategy doesn't always succeed.
That's quite enough of all that nonsense. What of the actual books which are worth reading?
Well, Terry Pratchett has a new book out, Going Postal, and there can't be all that much wrong with the world in a week when that happens.
The local library, meanwhile, tells me that they have lots of stuff waiting for me, and with a bit of luck most of it will be a damn sight more rewarding than reading about the chaotic state of the British book trade -- a trade which, as all experienced observers have long since noted, is far beyond anyone's help or understanding.
A quick scan through the last page or two of book2book reveals that, while I've been hors de combat, some of our old favourites have cropped up once more.
W.H. Smith has been losing money again, and Tim Waterstone is thinking of putting in a bid for the company. So, it's been business as usual in both those quarters then.
The Frankfurt Book Fair normally generates a few stories about unknown authors who have produced works of staggering genius which have generated 'bidding frenzies' among publishers who just have to have the book for their list. The story I noticed this year is about Stuart Hill who (as usual in these cases) failed his 11-plus exam. His book has been bought by Barry Cunningham, who was the sole editor in London to have the gumption to buy the first Harry Potter book, though even he had absolutely no idea how big Harry was going to get.
The Independent tells us that Mr Hill's book 'looks set to become next year's hottest seller when it hits the bookshops in January.' Well, excuse me for pointing this out, but the book trade goes dead in January, after the Christmas peak, and if you throw enough publicity money at a book at that time it isn't too difficult to make an impression on the charts.
What else? Oh yes, there's a bloody great bitchy row at HarperCollins (or so the Guardian alleges) about -- of all unimaginable things -- books which aren't selling.
Dear me. The story is worth reading for all its glorious in-fighting detail. Basically, there are three superwomen involved, all of them convinced that they know how to find the supersellers which are needed for survival in today's book trade, and all of them -- ahem -- subject to criticism (from men, who would have believed it?) for not delivering what they promised.
Caroline Michel, for instance, has spent lots of money on books by the like of Jeannette Winterson, Greg Dyke and Jon Snow, and they just aren't doing very well. Hard to credit, isn't it? So her boss, Amanda Ridout, is less than pleased, and the overall boss lady of the entire shooting match, Victoria Barnsley, is said to be 'slightly disengaged from what is going on.'
Well, it can't be more than a week or two since I pointed out in these very columns that (a) today's editors are desperate to find the big sellers, and (b) they haven't the faintest idea how to do it. So they thrash around, throwing money at projects and making sacrifices to the gods. Small wonder that the strategy doesn't always succeed.
That's quite enough of all that nonsense. What of the actual books which are worth reading?
Well, Terry Pratchett has a new book out, Going Postal, and there can't be all that much wrong with the world in a week when that happens.
The local library, meanwhile, tells me that they have lots of stuff waiting for me, and with a bit of luck most of it will be a damn sight more rewarding than reading about the chaotic state of the British book trade -- a trade which, as all experienced observers have long since noted, is far beyond anyone's help or understanding.
Monday, October 11, 2004
Problems with posts
Posts this week my be irregular, short, or even non-existent, as I have the flu.
That's the bad news. The good news is that Amazon last week delivered my copy of Neal Stephenson's The System of the World, which should entertain me as and when I recover.
That's the bad news. The good news is that Amazon last week delivered my copy of Neal Stephenson's The System of the World, which should entertain me as and when I recover.
Friday, October 08, 2004
Nearly out of date topics (2)
Continuing yesterday's clear-up of a few overdue topics....
Also in May, the New Yorker ran a story about how literary bloggers sometimes end up with a book contract. The general tone of the piece suggested that getting yourself a book contract was a highly desirable end, whereas clear thinkers know otherwise, but never mind. The article was not without interest.
According to the New Yorker, the person chiefly responsible for this trend towards bloggers graduating (so to speak) to books is Kate Lee, a twenty-seven-year old assistant at International Creative Management (aka ICM). ICM, in case you don't know, is a major talent and literary agency. (Don't call them, by the way. They will call you, if they're interested, which is most unlikely. Their unsolicited submissions policy is as comprehensive and brutal an elaboration of the instruction 'Fuck off and stop wasting our time' as I have ever read anywhere.
Anyway, it turns out that the lovely Kate Lee (who is doubtless delightful but who appears, bless her heart, to be no more than somebody's gofer) spends a while each morning scanning the blogs in the hope of finding some potential literary talent. She does not so much read, says the New Yorker, as 'prospect, sifting through sloppy thinking, bad grammar, and blind self-indulgence for moments of actual good writing.' See, they've got real high standards at ICM.
When she finds any 'good writing', Kate sends the author an email to make contact. 'Most writers are not getting published,' says Kate. Well you're dead right there, darling. 'For people that don't have connections, blogs can be an entry way into the game.' Some game. And connections are a way in, are they? Interesting how minds work at ICM.
Funnily enough, some of the people who are approached in this way are not very responsive to Kate's enquiry. She gets the email equivalent of a blank stare. What ungrateful beasts these bloggers are!
However, what really struck me was as the joke of the month, and highly revealing of young Kate's thinking, was the final quote from her. 'I've started working with a couple of graduates from the Iowa Writers' Workshop,' she says. 'It's very exciting. They're interesting writers -- with training, and degrees to show for it.'
Oh, my goodness me. Now hear this, o ye dearly beloved. I spent nearly thirty years working in the university world, and I have three degrees of my own, including a PhD. And I am here to tell you, unequivocally, that possession of a degree certificate, in any subject, is, in and of itself, absolutely meaningless.
I once had a dear friend (now deceased) who was a student counsellor. Her name was Delia. Delia's job was to give comfort to those who had been wounded by the educational experience. She once told me (without naming names, of course) that she was advising a young woman of 25. This person had three degrees too, just like me, and had spent her entire life, so far, being educated. And what was the young lady's problem? She felt that she was totally unfitted for the real world. She felt useless. 'And do you know what's so awful?' Delia asked me. 'This girl is absolutely right! She is useless.'
So, you won't find me being dazzled by the fact that X or Y has a degree in creative writing from Iowa. In fact, my lip may very well curl into what could be mistaken, from a distance, for a sneer. Furthermore, I have to report that the Iowa writers workshop is not without its critics (see Yardley goes mental).
Another blogger (Concho -- post headed My apostasy) actually took the course at Iowa, and now has this to say: 'I think everything I learnt at Iowa is wrong.... I have sent Song of Roland to about 40 agents by now and found no takers. It is exactly the sort of earnest, character-driven fiction that I learned to write at grad school, and while plenty of those in the biz admired its execution, no one loved it. They got bogged down and bored with all the serious sadness. In the end, no one gave a shit.' (And, although I hate to be discouraging, I cannot say that I am remotely surprised.)
So, whatever else may be said about the U of Iowa, it does seem to produce some very serious literary writers. And whether the work produced by such 'trained writers' is something that ICM will feel able to sell is very much open to question.
Why not have a look at the U of Iowa program and decide on its value for yourself? You could even sign up for the course. It will only cost you two years of your life and an unspecified amount in fees and subsistence, and then you will emerge with a Master of Fine Arts degree. Which will impress the Kate Lees of this world no end.
Also in May, the New Yorker ran a story about how literary bloggers sometimes end up with a book contract. The general tone of the piece suggested that getting yourself a book contract was a highly desirable end, whereas clear thinkers know otherwise, but never mind. The article was not without interest.
According to the New Yorker, the person chiefly responsible for this trend towards bloggers graduating (so to speak) to books is Kate Lee, a twenty-seven-year old assistant at International Creative Management (aka ICM). ICM, in case you don't know, is a major talent and literary agency. (Don't call them, by the way. They will call you, if they're interested, which is most unlikely. Their unsolicited submissions policy is as comprehensive and brutal an elaboration of the instruction 'Fuck off and stop wasting our time' as I have ever read anywhere.
Anyway, it turns out that the lovely Kate Lee (who is doubtless delightful but who appears, bless her heart, to be no more than somebody's gofer) spends a while each morning scanning the blogs in the hope of finding some potential literary talent. She does not so much read, says the New Yorker, as 'prospect, sifting through sloppy thinking, bad grammar, and blind self-indulgence for moments of actual good writing.' See, they've got real high standards at ICM.
When she finds any 'good writing', Kate sends the author an email to make contact. 'Most writers are not getting published,' says Kate. Well you're dead right there, darling. 'For people that don't have connections, blogs can be an entry way into the game.' Some game. And connections are a way in, are they? Interesting how minds work at ICM.
Funnily enough, some of the people who are approached in this way are not very responsive to Kate's enquiry. She gets the email equivalent of a blank stare. What ungrateful beasts these bloggers are!
However, what really struck me was as the joke of the month, and highly revealing of young Kate's thinking, was the final quote from her. 'I've started working with a couple of graduates from the Iowa Writers' Workshop,' she says. 'It's very exciting. They're interesting writers -- with training, and degrees to show for it.'
Oh, my goodness me. Now hear this, o ye dearly beloved. I spent nearly thirty years working in the university world, and I have three degrees of my own, including a PhD. And I am here to tell you, unequivocally, that possession of a degree certificate, in any subject, is, in and of itself, absolutely meaningless.
I once had a dear friend (now deceased) who was a student counsellor. Her name was Delia. Delia's job was to give comfort to those who had been wounded by the educational experience. She once told me (without naming names, of course) that she was advising a young woman of 25. This person had three degrees too, just like me, and had spent her entire life, so far, being educated. And what was the young lady's problem? She felt that she was totally unfitted for the real world. She felt useless. 'And do you know what's so awful?' Delia asked me. 'This girl is absolutely right! She is useless.'
So, you won't find me being dazzled by the fact that X or Y has a degree in creative writing from Iowa. In fact, my lip may very well curl into what could be mistaken, from a distance, for a sneer. Furthermore, I have to report that the Iowa writers workshop is not without its critics (see Yardley goes mental).
Another blogger (Concho -- post headed My apostasy) actually took the course at Iowa, and now has this to say: 'I think everything I learnt at Iowa is wrong.... I have sent Song of Roland to about 40 agents by now and found no takers. It is exactly the sort of earnest, character-driven fiction that I learned to write at grad school, and while plenty of those in the biz admired its execution, no one loved it. They got bogged down and bored with all the serious sadness. In the end, no one gave a shit.' (And, although I hate to be discouraging, I cannot say that I am remotely surprised.)
So, whatever else may be said about the U of Iowa, it does seem to produce some very serious literary writers. And whether the work produced by such 'trained writers' is something that ICM will feel able to sell is very much open to question.
Why not have a look at the U of Iowa program and decide on its value for yourself? You could even sign up for the course. It will only cost you two years of your life and an unspecified amount in fees and subsistence, and then you will emerge with a Master of Fine Arts degree. Which will impress the Kate Lees of this world no end.
Thursday, October 07, 2004
Nearly out of date topics (1)
I keep a file of press cuttings and jottings -- notes about stuff which could in principle form the topic of a post on this blog; and, as you would expect, I have more items in the file than I have time to deal with. So today and tomorrow I will mention a couple of things which are likely to disappear from the web soon if I'm not careful.
First, a piece by Lawrence Block which appeared in the Village Voice back in May. Block is the author of a great many crime novels, and he reports on his experiences in signing copies for fans -- a process which seems to take him just as long as writing the book did.
Block makes the point that signed books are now all the rage. Customers much prefer to buy a signed copy, not least because they can sometimes immediately sell it to a collector for a premium. A customer turns up at the bookshop, gets the author to sign three copies -- 'just the signature please', because if the author writes a dedication 'To Jane', in addition to signing, that will reduce the value of the book. And then the 'fans' flog the three copies on ebay or whatever.
In 1998, Block was sitting in a bookshop, signing copies of his latest, when he was faced with a couple of dealers who brought in several cartons of his old books and asked him to sign them. Free of charge. So now he has a policy: for every copy of the new novel that you buy on the day, he will sign three old ones. In 1999, says Block, one man cheerfully paid for 18 (signed) copies of The Burglar in the Rye and in return Block signed 53 copies of his old stuff. Everybody was happy: dealer, author, and bookseller.
There is at least one UK bookseller, Post Mortem Books, which specialises in signed copies and not much else as far as I can see. And I learn from their site that Waterstones are selling a limited (and signed) slipcased edition of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
And finally, I have a scribbled note in my file which tells me that James Ellroy signed 65,000 copies of the UK hardback edition of The Cold Six Thousand. Can this be true? It very well may be, because not so long ago I bought a copy of that novel, at a remaindered price, and that one was certainly signed.
Oh, and one other thing. This is a story which works better when told orally, with the appropriate Australian accent, but I'll tell it anyway.
It is said that, many years ago, Daphne Du Maurier was signing books in an Australian shop. Business was not brisk, but occasionally someone would wander over and say, 'Could you sign it to Jenny Smith, please?' And then, naturally, the long-suffering Daphne would dedicate the book appropriately.
Late in the afternoon one woman approached and without any preliminaries said firmly, 'Emma Chisett.'
So Daphne wrote on the title page: 'To Emma Chisett', and signed.
The woman looked at what she had written and frowned darkly.
'Nao, nao,' she said (in a thick Australian accent, remember). 'Not Emma Chisett. How much is it?'
First, a piece by Lawrence Block which appeared in the Village Voice back in May. Block is the author of a great many crime novels, and he reports on his experiences in signing copies for fans -- a process which seems to take him just as long as writing the book did.
Block makes the point that signed books are now all the rage. Customers much prefer to buy a signed copy, not least because they can sometimes immediately sell it to a collector for a premium. A customer turns up at the bookshop, gets the author to sign three copies -- 'just the signature please', because if the author writes a dedication 'To Jane', in addition to signing, that will reduce the value of the book. And then the 'fans' flog the three copies on ebay or whatever.
In 1998, Block was sitting in a bookshop, signing copies of his latest, when he was faced with a couple of dealers who brought in several cartons of his old books and asked him to sign them. Free of charge. So now he has a policy: for every copy of the new novel that you buy on the day, he will sign three old ones. In 1999, says Block, one man cheerfully paid for 18 (signed) copies of The Burglar in the Rye and in return Block signed 53 copies of his old stuff. Everybody was happy: dealer, author, and bookseller.
There is at least one UK bookseller, Post Mortem Books, which specialises in signed copies and not much else as far as I can see. And I learn from their site that Waterstones are selling a limited (and signed) slipcased edition of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
And finally, I have a scribbled note in my file which tells me that James Ellroy signed 65,000 copies of the UK hardback edition of The Cold Six Thousand. Can this be true? It very well may be, because not so long ago I bought a copy of that novel, at a remaindered price, and that one was certainly signed.
Oh, and one other thing. This is a story which works better when told orally, with the appropriate Australian accent, but I'll tell it anyway.
It is said that, many years ago, Daphne Du Maurier was signing books in an Australian shop. Business was not brisk, but occasionally someone would wander over and say, 'Could you sign it to Jenny Smith, please?' And then, naturally, the long-suffering Daphne would dedicate the book appropriately.
Late in the afternoon one woman approached and without any preliminaries said firmly, 'Emma Chisett.'
So Daphne wrote on the title page: 'To Emma Chisett', and signed.
The woman looked at what she had written and frowned darkly.
'Nao, nao,' she said (in a thick Australian accent, remember). 'Not Emma Chisett. How much is it?'
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
How weird are writers anyway?
Now here's an interesting question. Well it interests me, anyway.
The two posts earlier this week about seriously disturbed writers have led me to wonder, not for the first time, just how mentally disturbed the rest of us really are. Us writers, I mean. In other words, are writers really insane, or just a little bit weird?
There is at least one piece of research which demonstrates that some (British) writers have a higher than average chance of being mentally ill. The research was carried out by Kay Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her study showed that 38% of a group of eminent British writers and artists had been treated for a mood disorder of one kind or another; of these, 75% had had antidepressants or lithium prescribed, or had been hospitalised. Of playwrights, 63% had been treated for depression. These proportions are, as you will have guessed, are many times higher than in the population at large.
Of course, the Jamison research was just one study, and it may not be truly representative. But I have observed, over the years, that writers are not always the most stable and rational of people. More specifically, I have been wondering this week whether writers might have an obsessive/compulsive disorder (OCD). In other words, do they keep on doing something, time and time again, which normal people would recognise as futile?
In order to find an answer to this specific question I sought, and found, references to obsessive/compulsive disorder on the web. Without too much trouble I discovered a site which told me that the obsessive/compulsive fraternity (and sorority) display the following characteristics, among others. OCD people are:
concerned with details;
perfectionists;
excessively devoted to work and productivity to the exclusion of leisure activities;
inflexible on matters of morality (for which read 'artistic integrity');
unable to discard worthless objects (e.g. that manuscript which has been rejected 43 times);
and they are stubborn (for which read 'continue to write when all the available evidence suggests that they are going to get absolutely nowhere').
Does any of this ring any bells? It certainly did with me, especially as I have other obsessive/compulsive traits as well. Specifically, I often go back and check (again) that I've locked the back door and turned off the gas, and I worry about causing harm to a loved one through carelessness on my part.
So, thoroughly alarmed by now, I took a little test to determine whether I suffer from OCD or not.
Relief. It turns out that I have a score of 4 on this test, which indicates that 'OCD is unlikely'. So that's all right then. I'm not really mad. Just a little bit peculiar.
The two posts earlier this week about seriously disturbed writers have led me to wonder, not for the first time, just how mentally disturbed the rest of us really are. Us writers, I mean. In other words, are writers really insane, or just a little bit weird?
There is at least one piece of research which demonstrates that some (British) writers have a higher than average chance of being mentally ill. The research was carried out by Kay Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her study showed that 38% of a group of eminent British writers and artists had been treated for a mood disorder of one kind or another; of these, 75% had had antidepressants or lithium prescribed, or had been hospitalised. Of playwrights, 63% had been treated for depression. These proportions are, as you will have guessed, are many times higher than in the population at large.
Of course, the Jamison research was just one study, and it may not be truly representative. But I have observed, over the years, that writers are not always the most stable and rational of people. More specifically, I have been wondering this week whether writers might have an obsessive/compulsive disorder (OCD). In other words, do they keep on doing something, time and time again, which normal people would recognise as futile?
In order to find an answer to this specific question I sought, and found, references to obsessive/compulsive disorder on the web. Without too much trouble I discovered a site which told me that the obsessive/compulsive fraternity (and sorority) display the following characteristics, among others. OCD people are:
concerned with details;
perfectionists;
excessively devoted to work and productivity to the exclusion of leisure activities;
inflexible on matters of morality (for which read 'artistic integrity');
unable to discard worthless objects (e.g. that manuscript which has been rejected 43 times);
and they are stubborn (for which read 'continue to write when all the available evidence suggests that they are going to get absolutely nowhere').
Does any of this ring any bells? It certainly did with me, especially as I have other obsessive/compulsive traits as well. Specifically, I often go back and check (again) that I've locked the back door and turned off the gas, and I worry about causing harm to a loved one through carelessness on my part.
So, thoroughly alarmed by now, I took a little test to determine whether I suffer from OCD or not.
Relief. It turns out that I have a score of 4 on this test, which indicates that 'OCD is unlikely'. So that's all right then. I'm not really mad. Just a little bit peculiar.
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Ross and Tom: 2, Tom
Continued from yesterday….
Tom Heggen was, on the face of it, a much tougher and more street-wise character than Ross Lockridge. After college, where he did lots of journalism, Tom served in the Navy during the second world war, and you can’t spend a few years in the Navy without learning a little bit about life. (One former boss of mine told me that, during the war, he had been the only man on his ship who had never had a dose of the clap.)
With the war over, Tom began to put together some stories, based on his shipboard experiences, and he too found an enthusiastic publisher in Houghton Mifflin. The publisher came up with the title Mister Roberts, since Roberts was the character who linked the stories together.
Very early on in his relationship with Houghton Mifflin, however, Tom became aware of a circumstance which was to cause him endless trouble: the publisher viewed his first book as just that – the first in a series of novels. ‘Publishers are insatiable,’ Houghton’s editor-in-chief wrote to him, ‘and I am already beginning to think of the book that will follow Mister Roberts.’
Tom was thinking about it too, but he could not get started. ‘Honest to God,’ he told a friend, ‘I don’t know what to write.’
Mister Roberts was well received when it first came out, and before long the idea of adapting the book for the stage was raised. After a false start, Tom eventually formed a working partnership with Joshua Logan, who was then a highly prestigious and successful theatre director.
While Tom was trying to convert Mister Roberts into a stage play, in collaboration with Joshua Logan, he was still trying to write novel number two. But he couldn’t write and he couldn't sleep, and was prescribed fast-acting barbiturates as a cure. However, even Seconal did not work and he tended to drink his way into unconsciousness. He was only five feet eight to begin with, and he soon lost weight.
When finished, the stage version of Mister Roberts proved to be smash hit on Broadway. There was so much laughter during the last rehearsal that it added twenty minutes to the running time. Emlyn Williams (of all people) was drafted in to make some cuts, which he managed to do without damage.
Being the author of a Broadway hit meant that, like Ross Lockridge before him, Tom Heggen became rich and famous. Attractive women formed an orderly queue outside his bedroom door. He was earning $2,000 a week from the play, at a time when that was serious money.
But there were still some huge creative problems. Tom found that, as a writer, he had become dependent on the collaboration with Joshua Logan. His creative juices just did not flow without help. ‘I don’t know how I wrote Mister Roberts,’ he told a friend. It was spirit writing.’ And Joshua Logan, of course, had other fish to fry.
Tom tried psychoanalysis; and he was by now addicted to barbiturates, using twenty a day, on top of copious amounts of booze. He knew that he was doing himself irreversible damage.
On Wednesday 18 May 1949, Tom Heggen’s cleaning lady found him dead in the bath. The cause of death was described by the Medical Examiner as ‘Submersion in fresh water in bathtub. Probable suicide.’
As with Ross Lockridge, there really isn’t any doubt that Tom Heggen committed suicide. But even if we were to accept that either of these writers died by accident, the fact is that they were both dead men walking around like zombies. They had risen to dizzy heights. They each yearned to write another book. But neither of them knew how to do it. Success and all that goes with it had destroyed them completely.
Now –
What are we to make of these two grisly stories? They are such horrible case histories, so depressing to read about, that I wonder how and why I managed to read John Leggett's book about them. I suppose the answer to that conundrum is that the book confirms, with dramatic force, my long-held view that the ambition to be a writer can seriously damage your health. And in extreme cases it can even kill you. Hell, I even wrote a book about it: The Truth about Writing.
I defy anybody to read John Leggett’s Ross and Tom and tell me that they seriously want to be a famous writer. The dangers and disadvantages are great. And as for the rewards – well, they tend to be both brief and illusory.
Ah, you say, but if I was a big success I wouldn’t suffer the fate of Ross and Tom. I could cope better than they did.
Possibly. But I have to say that the recipe for disaster is a combination of factors which are really quite common.
To suffer the fate of Ross and Tom you need to be:
(i) wildly and absurdly ambitious;
(ii) the author of a first novel which makes heavy use of autobiographical material.
Ross Lockridge also had a head full of romantic nonsense about artistic integrity and writing the Great American Novel, which is again very common.
Those simple factors are all that’s required for you to become another book-world casualty.
If you are unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you too could end up with a number-one bestseller, a Hollywood film contract, lots of new friends, and a score of people hammering on the door and demanding that you repeat the trick. And that you go on repeating it for the next twenty years. And yet you have no idea how you did it the first time, and certainly no idea how to do it again.
Oh, and one other thing is needed if you are to become an enormous success. You have to be the one person in a million or so whom the gods of the book world choose to honour with their favours. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.’
Let us hope that you escape that fate. The next time you get a rejection slip, try to think of it as a merciful release.
Tom Heggen was, on the face of it, a much tougher and more street-wise character than Ross Lockridge. After college, where he did lots of journalism, Tom served in the Navy during the second world war, and you can’t spend a few years in the Navy without learning a little bit about life. (One former boss of mine told me that, during the war, he had been the only man on his ship who had never had a dose of the clap.)
With the war over, Tom began to put together some stories, based on his shipboard experiences, and he too found an enthusiastic publisher in Houghton Mifflin. The publisher came up with the title Mister Roberts, since Roberts was the character who linked the stories together.
Very early on in his relationship with Houghton Mifflin, however, Tom became aware of a circumstance which was to cause him endless trouble: the publisher viewed his first book as just that – the first in a series of novels. ‘Publishers are insatiable,’ Houghton’s editor-in-chief wrote to him, ‘and I am already beginning to think of the book that will follow Mister Roberts.’
Tom was thinking about it too, but he could not get started. ‘Honest to God,’ he told a friend, ‘I don’t know what to write.’
Mister Roberts was well received when it first came out, and before long the idea of adapting the book for the stage was raised. After a false start, Tom eventually formed a working partnership with Joshua Logan, who was then a highly prestigious and successful theatre director.
While Tom was trying to convert Mister Roberts into a stage play, in collaboration with Joshua Logan, he was still trying to write novel number two. But he couldn’t write and he couldn't sleep, and was prescribed fast-acting barbiturates as a cure. However, even Seconal did not work and he tended to drink his way into unconsciousness. He was only five feet eight to begin with, and he soon lost weight.
When finished, the stage version of Mister Roberts proved to be smash hit on Broadway. There was so much laughter during the last rehearsal that it added twenty minutes to the running time. Emlyn Williams (of all people) was drafted in to make some cuts, which he managed to do without damage.
Being the author of a Broadway hit meant that, like Ross Lockridge before him, Tom Heggen became rich and famous. Attractive women formed an orderly queue outside his bedroom door. He was earning $2,000 a week from the play, at a time when that was serious money.
But there were still some huge creative problems. Tom found that, as a writer, he had become dependent on the collaboration with Joshua Logan. His creative juices just did not flow without help. ‘I don’t know how I wrote Mister Roberts,’ he told a friend. It was spirit writing.’ And Joshua Logan, of course, had other fish to fry.
Tom tried psychoanalysis; and he was by now addicted to barbiturates, using twenty a day, on top of copious amounts of booze. He knew that he was doing himself irreversible damage.
On Wednesday 18 May 1949, Tom Heggen’s cleaning lady found him dead in the bath. The cause of death was described by the Medical Examiner as ‘Submersion in fresh water in bathtub. Probable suicide.’
As with Ross Lockridge, there really isn’t any doubt that Tom Heggen committed suicide. But even if we were to accept that either of these writers died by accident, the fact is that they were both dead men walking around like zombies. They had risen to dizzy heights. They each yearned to write another book. But neither of them knew how to do it. Success and all that goes with it had destroyed them completely.
Now –
What are we to make of these two grisly stories? They are such horrible case histories, so depressing to read about, that I wonder how and why I managed to read John Leggett's book about them. I suppose the answer to that conundrum is that the book confirms, with dramatic force, my long-held view that the ambition to be a writer can seriously damage your health. And in extreme cases it can even kill you. Hell, I even wrote a book about it: The Truth about Writing.
I defy anybody to read John Leggett’s Ross and Tom and tell me that they seriously want to be a famous writer. The dangers and disadvantages are great. And as for the rewards – well, they tend to be both brief and illusory.
Ah, you say, but if I was a big success I wouldn’t suffer the fate of Ross and Tom. I could cope better than they did.
Possibly. But I have to say that the recipe for disaster is a combination of factors which are really quite common.
To suffer the fate of Ross and Tom you need to be:
(i) wildly and absurdly ambitious;
(ii) the author of a first novel which makes heavy use of autobiographical material.
Ross Lockridge also had a head full of romantic nonsense about artistic integrity and writing the Great American Novel, which is again very common.
Those simple factors are all that’s required for you to become another book-world casualty.
If you are unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you too could end up with a number-one bestseller, a Hollywood film contract, lots of new friends, and a score of people hammering on the door and demanding that you repeat the trick. And that you go on repeating it for the next twenty years. And yet you have no idea how you did it the first time, and certainly no idea how to do it again.
Oh, and one other thing is needed if you are to become an enormous success. You have to be the one person in a million or so whom the gods of the book world choose to honour with their favours. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.’
Let us hope that you escape that fate. The next time you get a rejection slip, try to think of it as a merciful release.
Monday, October 04, 2004
Ross and Tom: 1, Ross
Ross and Tom is the title of a book by John Leggett; its subtitle is ‘two American tragedies’, and for once the use of the word tragedy may be legitimate.
The Ross and Tom of the title were Ross Lockridge and Thomas Heggen. Leggett’s account of their lives, and deaths, first appeared in 1974, but was reissued in 2000. I have known of the book for years, but have only recently read it.
In brief, Ross and Tom were two young novelists. In the few years which followed the second world war, both young men enjoyed enormous success with their first books: they became rich and famous. But neither man could cope with the fame and the fortune; worse, they were under constant pressure to write another book, and they didn’t know how to do it. In the end, Ross and Tom cracked under the strain, and they both committed suicide, though in each case their families, naturally, tried to convince themselves that the death was accidental.
Today we will consider briefly the life of Ross Lockridge, and tomorrow that of Thomas Heggen.
Ross grew up in Bloomington Indiana, and, although it was the seat of Indiana University, Bloomington seems to have bred a small-town mentality in its young people. Above all, it appears to me that Ross Lockridge’s educators failed him. He was a brilliant student at school, but his brilliance seems to have resided mainly in an ability to absorb facts and to regurgitate them in the form required by his teachers. No one, apparently, thought it important that he should learn to think for himself, or that he should question the received wisdom about anything. Despite all his ‘brilliance’, Ross seems to have been incapable of original thought.
In 1933, Ross was one of many University of Delaware students who went on a junior-year-abroad program. His group went to Paris. And what did Ross do in a year in Paris? He got drunk – once. He got laid – once, when an American girl dragged him off to bed. He did not visit any of the nude shows for which Paris was famous; he did not haunt the jazz clubs; and, curiously for a man who had already declared some intention of becoming a famous writer and producing the Great American Novel (God help us all), he made no attempt whatever to mix with any of the literary personalities who were then to be found hanging around Parisian cafes.
What Ross Lockridge mainly did in Paris was stay in his room and read his college books. And at the end of the year he came out top. He was the leading scholar among all the étudiants étrangers.
What did he do then? Did he set out to explore Europe, as any reasonably enterprising person would? No, he just got right back on the first available boat and went home to Mom.
It is no exaggeration to say that, by page 55 of Leggett’s 200-page account of Ross’s life, I could already see how this kid was doomed. He had absorbed every half-baked piece of nonsense about ‘great literature’ that the American liberal-arts education could provide. And he had decided that he too wanted to make a giant contribution to ‘literature’. This foolish and ill-judged ambition would eventually kill him.
Ross Lockridge went on earn his living as a college lecturer, and in his spare time he worked on his intended masterpiece, Raintree County.
The book was based very largely on his own family history; it was heavy with symbolism; and it was long. Boy, was it ever long. Even the published version runs to 1066 pages. The manuscript contained 600,000 words, which is approximately ten times the length of Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel (which would be published just five years later).
Perhaps the worst thing that could have happened to Ross Lockridge was that this bizarre monster should find a publisher. But it did: Houghton Mifflin, a well respected Boston firm. The publisher wanted changes to the text – not surprisingly – and Ross was greatly anguished over ‘compromising his integrity’; but he did it.
Then, even before the book was published, he won a major and highly prestigious prize, offered by MGM, which involved sale of the film rights for a huge sum of money. But MGM also wanted changes – not surprisingly – and once again the young author had to face the enormous labour of reducing this vast manuscript to a more manageable shape.
And then thirdly the Book of the Month Club wanted his novel, but only if he would make further changes. And so on. And on, and on.
In short, over a period of many years, Ross Lockridge invested a massive amount of time and emotional energy in producing a huge book. This effort was rewarded, in a sense, when the novel was finally published. He became famous – at any rate insofar as any writer can be said to be truly famous. And he had bucketfuls of money emptied over his head.
But there was just one problem. Everyone wanted him to do another book. His publisher expected it. The readers expected it. The critics expected it. And Ross Lockridge knew that a writer ought to go on writing. But he simply didn’t know what to do next.
Ross’s life at this time is exhausting just to read about. It must have been impossible for anyone to try to live that life. By the time Raintree County was published, Ross Lockridge was completely burnt out, mentally and physically, and he was damn near certifiably insane.
When published, on 5 January 1948, the book was a critical and commercial success. It became, inevitably in view of all the publicity, a ‘bestseller’; it was eventually filmed with Elizabeth Taylor in a starring role. But on 6 March of that year Ross Lockridge killed himself with the fumes from his car exhaust.
This is not a very cheerful story, is it? And tomorrow there is more, if you can bear it: we will consider the parallel life of Tom Heggen. And after that we will see if any useful lessons can be learnt from these dreadful events.
The Ross and Tom of the title were Ross Lockridge and Thomas Heggen. Leggett’s account of their lives, and deaths, first appeared in 1974, but was reissued in 2000. I have known of the book for years, but have only recently read it.
In brief, Ross and Tom were two young novelists. In the few years which followed the second world war, both young men enjoyed enormous success with their first books: they became rich and famous. But neither man could cope with the fame and the fortune; worse, they were under constant pressure to write another book, and they didn’t know how to do it. In the end, Ross and Tom cracked under the strain, and they both committed suicide, though in each case their families, naturally, tried to convince themselves that the death was accidental.
Today we will consider briefly the life of Ross Lockridge, and tomorrow that of Thomas Heggen.
Ross grew up in Bloomington Indiana, and, although it was the seat of Indiana University, Bloomington seems to have bred a small-town mentality in its young people. Above all, it appears to me that Ross Lockridge’s educators failed him. He was a brilliant student at school, but his brilliance seems to have resided mainly in an ability to absorb facts and to regurgitate them in the form required by his teachers. No one, apparently, thought it important that he should learn to think for himself, or that he should question the received wisdom about anything. Despite all his ‘brilliance’, Ross seems to have been incapable of original thought.
In 1933, Ross was one of many University of Delaware students who went on a junior-year-abroad program. His group went to Paris. And what did Ross do in a year in Paris? He got drunk – once. He got laid – once, when an American girl dragged him off to bed. He did not visit any of the nude shows for which Paris was famous; he did not haunt the jazz clubs; and, curiously for a man who had already declared some intention of becoming a famous writer and producing the Great American Novel (God help us all), he made no attempt whatever to mix with any of the literary personalities who were then to be found hanging around Parisian cafes.
What Ross Lockridge mainly did in Paris was stay in his room and read his college books. And at the end of the year he came out top. He was the leading scholar among all the étudiants étrangers.
What did he do then? Did he set out to explore Europe, as any reasonably enterprising person would? No, he just got right back on the first available boat and went home to Mom.
It is no exaggeration to say that, by page 55 of Leggett’s 200-page account of Ross’s life, I could already see how this kid was doomed. He had absorbed every half-baked piece of nonsense about ‘great literature’ that the American liberal-arts education could provide. And he had decided that he too wanted to make a giant contribution to ‘literature’. This foolish and ill-judged ambition would eventually kill him.
Ross Lockridge went on earn his living as a college lecturer, and in his spare time he worked on his intended masterpiece, Raintree County.
The book was based very largely on his own family history; it was heavy with symbolism; and it was long. Boy, was it ever long. Even the published version runs to 1066 pages. The manuscript contained 600,000 words, which is approximately ten times the length of Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel (which would be published just five years later).
Perhaps the worst thing that could have happened to Ross Lockridge was that this bizarre monster should find a publisher. But it did: Houghton Mifflin, a well respected Boston firm. The publisher wanted changes to the text – not surprisingly – and Ross was greatly anguished over ‘compromising his integrity’; but he did it.
Then, even before the book was published, he won a major and highly prestigious prize, offered by MGM, which involved sale of the film rights for a huge sum of money. But MGM also wanted changes – not surprisingly – and once again the young author had to face the enormous labour of reducing this vast manuscript to a more manageable shape.
And then thirdly the Book of the Month Club wanted his novel, but only if he would make further changes. And so on. And on, and on.
In short, over a period of many years, Ross Lockridge invested a massive amount of time and emotional energy in producing a huge book. This effort was rewarded, in a sense, when the novel was finally published. He became famous – at any rate insofar as any writer can be said to be truly famous. And he had bucketfuls of money emptied over his head.
But there was just one problem. Everyone wanted him to do another book. His publisher expected it. The readers expected it. The critics expected it. And Ross Lockridge knew that a writer ought to go on writing. But he simply didn’t know what to do next.
Ross’s life at this time is exhausting just to read about. It must have been impossible for anyone to try to live that life. By the time Raintree County was published, Ross Lockridge was completely burnt out, mentally and physically, and he was damn near certifiably insane.
When published, on 5 January 1948, the book was a critical and commercial success. It became, inevitably in view of all the publicity, a ‘bestseller’; it was eventually filmed with Elizabeth Taylor in a starring role. But on 6 March of that year Ross Lockridge killed himself with the fumes from his car exhaust.
This is not a very cheerful story, is it? And tomorrow there is more, if you can bear it: we will consider the parallel life of Tom Heggen. And after that we will see if any useful lessons can be learnt from these dreadful events.
Friday, October 01, 2004
Sol Stein: Solutions for Novelists
If you are thinking of writing a novel – an undertaking which I do not, incidentally, recommend – then you could do worse than read Solutions for Novelists by Sol Stein.
Solutions for Novelists was published in the UK in 1999, and is based on an earlier work, How to Grow a Novel. The UK edition is priced on the cover at £12.99, but I bought a copy in Wimborne market for £1, so it is presumably being remaindered.
The book’s subtitle is ‘Secrets of a master editor’ and Sol Stein certainly has a long history as a fiction editor of the first rank. He worked with James Baldwin, Jack Higgins, and Elia Kazan, among others. He is also the author of nine published novels and at least one play which was performed on Broadway in the 1950s. The novels, by the way, were written while he was head of a publishing firm which turned out an average of a hundred titles a year.
Stein defines a writer as 'someone who cannot not write'. This is a fair enough definition, but it is salutary, I believe, to consider the implications. What the definition means is that a writer is a person who is clearly deranged.
A writer is a person who cannot stop writing? What do we say about people who cannot stop stealing, or cannot stop eating too much, or cannot stop breaking the speed limit? We think they’re nuts, right? If not criminal or immoral, or both. And they are. But Stein trots out his definition of a writer as if belonging to this group of crackpots is something to be proud of. Well it ain’t.
Stein is dead right about many things but dead wrong (in my judgement) about others. For instance, he is right when he says that, in schools and universities, literature is examined more for structure and technique than for effect. And yet the emotional impact of the prose is what the whole business is about. Later Stein says that ‘in fiction, the supreme function is not to convey emotions but to create them in the reader.’ (His italics.) Exactly. Couldn’t put it plainer myself.
Stein is also right when he says that an agent is not going to be interested in your novel unless he is pretty sure that he can sell it fairly quickly for an advance of six figures. Anything less than that is a waste of the agent’s time. Simple arithmetic.
Now for what Sol Stein is wrong about. He quotes the author Erica Jong, apparently with approval, saying that you can make it as a writer ‘if you are relentlessly honest about what you feel and fear.’ This, I’m afraid, is total and complete cobblers. Being honest about what you feel and fear is absolutely no guarantee of success in writing. Conversely, someone who is willing to lie through their teeth about what they ‘feel and fear’ could perfectly well make it to the top without their dishonesty having the slightest impact one way or the other.
Stein is also wrong when he tells us that detailed, hands-on editing made Elia Kazan’s novel The Arrangement into a number-one bestseller. Stein worked with Kazan every day for five months, knocking the book into some sort of shape, and he is justifiably proud of that. But what made The Arrangement a big seller was the fact that it was written by a famous movie director with two Oscars to his name. This meant that every chat show in town was willing to have the author as a guest, and that the book got reviewed absolutely everywhere.
The Arrangement itself, frankly, was run-of-the-mill to dull. More than thirty years ago, when I was young and stupid (as opposed to being old and stupid, yes, I know), I bought a copy to try to figure out what had made it a success. Nowadays I wouldn’t bother. I would know that it was the factors mentioned above. But I’m afraid that I found the book quite unenthralling and never finished it. Its success remained a mystery to me until I learnt a lot more about how the book trade actually works.
On the whole, Solutions for Novelists is a useful and helpful book for anyone who is about to embark on the foolish enterprise of writing full-length fiction. In particular, anyone contemplating taking a one-year course in creative writing should abandon the idea and buy a few books like this one instead. A book such as this is a distillation of such wisdom as has been acquired in a lifetime of work, and that’s what books do best. That’s what they’re for.
Another thing that any as-yet-unpublished writer should consider is Sol Stein’s remarkable statement about the English thriller writer Jack Higgins. In case you haven’t been paying attention, let me remind you that Higgins hit the big time back in the 1970s with a novel called The Eagle Has Landed, and has gone on having big sellers ever since. Stein worked closely with Higgins on a number of books, and since Higgins didn’t like hotels he stayed in Stein’s home; so we must assume that Stein knows his facts. And what he tells us (page 79) is that, before his first big success, Higgins had twenty-four (that’s 24, folks) books published. I knew it was half a dozen but I didn’t know it was twenty-four.
Now just think about that for a minute. First of all, contemplate the amount of work involved; and the determination. And second, contemplate the implications. The implications are that Higgins was a pro. He had written lots of stuff before anyone took any notice of him. He knew how to make things work. But even when he became rich and famous he wasn’t above taking editing from a cunning old bastard like Sol Stein.
All in all, however, Stein makes the business of writing a novel seem extraordinarily complicated, to the extent that it may put some people off. But that’s not a bad thing because there are already far too many people writing novels as it is.
Solutions for Novelists was published in the UK in 1999, and is based on an earlier work, How to Grow a Novel. The UK edition is priced on the cover at £12.99, but I bought a copy in Wimborne market for £1, so it is presumably being remaindered.
The book’s subtitle is ‘Secrets of a master editor’ and Sol Stein certainly has a long history as a fiction editor of the first rank. He worked with James Baldwin, Jack Higgins, and Elia Kazan, among others. He is also the author of nine published novels and at least one play which was performed on Broadway in the 1950s. The novels, by the way, were written while he was head of a publishing firm which turned out an average of a hundred titles a year.
Stein defines a writer as 'someone who cannot not write'. This is a fair enough definition, but it is salutary, I believe, to consider the implications. What the definition means is that a writer is a person who is clearly deranged.
A writer is a person who cannot stop writing? What do we say about people who cannot stop stealing, or cannot stop eating too much, or cannot stop breaking the speed limit? We think they’re nuts, right? If not criminal or immoral, or both. And they are. But Stein trots out his definition of a writer as if belonging to this group of crackpots is something to be proud of. Well it ain’t.
Stein is dead right about many things but dead wrong (in my judgement) about others. For instance, he is right when he says that, in schools and universities, literature is examined more for structure and technique than for effect. And yet the emotional impact of the prose is what the whole business is about. Later Stein says that ‘in fiction, the supreme function is not to convey emotions but to create them in the reader.’ (His italics.) Exactly. Couldn’t put it plainer myself.
Stein is also right when he says that an agent is not going to be interested in your novel unless he is pretty sure that he can sell it fairly quickly for an advance of six figures. Anything less than that is a waste of the agent’s time. Simple arithmetic.
Now for what Sol Stein is wrong about. He quotes the author Erica Jong, apparently with approval, saying that you can make it as a writer ‘if you are relentlessly honest about what you feel and fear.’ This, I’m afraid, is total and complete cobblers. Being honest about what you feel and fear is absolutely no guarantee of success in writing. Conversely, someone who is willing to lie through their teeth about what they ‘feel and fear’ could perfectly well make it to the top without their dishonesty having the slightest impact one way or the other.
Stein is also wrong when he tells us that detailed, hands-on editing made Elia Kazan’s novel The Arrangement into a number-one bestseller. Stein worked with Kazan every day for five months, knocking the book into some sort of shape, and he is justifiably proud of that. But what made The Arrangement a big seller was the fact that it was written by a famous movie director with two Oscars to his name. This meant that every chat show in town was willing to have the author as a guest, and that the book got reviewed absolutely everywhere.
The Arrangement itself, frankly, was run-of-the-mill to dull. More than thirty years ago, when I was young and stupid (as opposed to being old and stupid, yes, I know), I bought a copy to try to figure out what had made it a success. Nowadays I wouldn’t bother. I would know that it was the factors mentioned above. But I’m afraid that I found the book quite unenthralling and never finished it. Its success remained a mystery to me until I learnt a lot more about how the book trade actually works.
On the whole, Solutions for Novelists is a useful and helpful book for anyone who is about to embark on the foolish enterprise of writing full-length fiction. In particular, anyone contemplating taking a one-year course in creative writing should abandon the idea and buy a few books like this one instead. A book such as this is a distillation of such wisdom as has been acquired in a lifetime of work, and that’s what books do best. That’s what they’re for.
Another thing that any as-yet-unpublished writer should consider is Sol Stein’s remarkable statement about the English thriller writer Jack Higgins. In case you haven’t been paying attention, let me remind you that Higgins hit the big time back in the 1970s with a novel called The Eagle Has Landed, and has gone on having big sellers ever since. Stein worked closely with Higgins on a number of books, and since Higgins didn’t like hotels he stayed in Stein’s home; so we must assume that Stein knows his facts. And what he tells us (page 79) is that, before his first big success, Higgins had twenty-four (that’s 24, folks) books published. I knew it was half a dozen but I didn’t know it was twenty-four.
Now just think about that for a minute. First of all, contemplate the amount of work involved; and the determination. And second, contemplate the implications. The implications are that Higgins was a pro. He had written lots of stuff before anyone took any notice of him. He knew how to make things work. But even when he became rich and famous he wasn’t above taking editing from a cunning old bastard like Sol Stein.
All in all, however, Stein makes the business of writing a novel seem extraordinarily complicated, to the extent that it may put some people off. But that’s not a bad thing because there are already far too many people writing novels as it is.
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