My fiction addiction

A few days ago I made a lunchtime pilgrimage to the nearest branch of Waterstone’s to satisfy what I can only call a craving for fiction.

I’d been reading a non-fiction book, JB Priestley’s English Journey. I’m a big fan of Priestley’s novels, and I like his voice, and I’d been trying to get a copy of his famous – but out of print – travelogue for a while. Finally I was given a dog-eared old hardback for Christmas, which I got about 100 pages into before starting to feel restless.

That’s not a reflection on the book at all, but it’s a common experience for me when reading non-fiction. I know this is a golden age for non-fiction, and I do occasionally buy and read a book on sport or music or history, or whatever takes my fancy. But however good they are, I never look forward to reading them the way I do when I’ve got a novel on the go.

I tend to read books on the train home after work. If I’m in the middle of a novel, I start to feel a tingle of anticipation the moment I leave the office, and when I reach my stop at the end of the journey, a slight feeling of resentment that I’ve got to stop reading. But if I’m reading a work of non-fiction, the resentment comes at the start of the journey, or at least a feeling of… dutifulness, I suppose.

The truth is that, as I approach the age of 50, reading anything that isn’t made up still feels a bit like homework to me. It’s something I feel I ought to do rather than something I want to do, whereas being immersed in a novel is a wonderful, addictive feeling that I hope I never lose.

I will get back to English Journey before too long, though I suspect I’ll read it in short chunks rather than all the way through. In the meantime, I’m thoroughly absorbed by Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies, and looking forward to spending some quality time with it over the Easter break.

The problem with self-belief

I came late to the Jacqueline Howett affair, which has been all over the internet and Twitter this week. Howlett is a self-published author who took exception to an online review of her novel The Greek Seaman. The reviewer praised the story, but criticised her poor spelling and grammar. Howett was furious, and as the to and fro of comments underneath the review grew, it became clear that she really didn’t understand what was wrong with her prose. Her last riposte before comments were closed was a succinct “F*** off”.

There’s been much discussion of this incident, with many commentators focusing on what it says about self-publishing. “This is the very type of behaviour that will continue to tarnish self-published authors as hobbyists,” was a typical comment.

That may or not be true; I’d hope that most readers have the sense to take each author on their own merits, rather than lump all of us in together and dismiss us out of hand. The thing that really struck me about the affair was the extreme self-belief Howett displayed throughout. She never wavered from her position that her grammar and syntax were perfectly comprehensible, despite numerous readers agreeing with the reviewer, who posted a couple of prime examples of garbled nonsense.

Now self-belief is something you have to have as a novelist. To make up a story, write it down, turn it into a book and then ask strangers to read it is an act of extreme presumption; you wouldn’t do it unless you really believed, deep down, that it was worth other people taking the time to read your creation.

On a more basic level, it extends to your writing style. There is no right and wrong when it comes to such things, and any creative writing tutor will tell you that you need to find your own voice. Again, it takes a certain level of self-belief to foist that voice on others.

The corollary of that is that you need a level of self-awareness to go alongside it – the self-awareness, for example, to realise that not everyone is going to like the way you write. (Not taking offence when that happens helps, too.) It’s a difficult balance, because self-awareness can easily tip into self-doubt (we writers are fragile beings), and then you’re stuffed.

Ultimately, Howett’s ravings display an extreme example of self-belief taken too far. She is so passionate about her novel that she has become blind to its flaws. A bit of self-awareness would go a long way, in this case.

Mind you, some grammar lessons would help, too.

The benefits of reading bad books

Like most keen readers, I don’t read many bad books. There are plenty of tried and tested authors I know I can trust, and when selecting a new book to read, I usually base my choice on a combination of recommendations and reviews from trusted sources, word of mouth and other factors.

But I have a bad book in front of me now. It was a gift, which makes me feel a little guilty for dissecting it - but what the hell. The thing is, I reckon you can often learn more about writing from a bad book than a good one.

The book in question is Our London Office by Thomas Armstrong. Published in 1966, it is long since out of print, and though I’m told Armstrong was a popular author in his day, these days he doesn’t even merit a Wikipedia entry - the ultimate indignity.

Our London Office is the fourth in a series known as The Crowthers Of Bankdam; a grand saga following the fortunes of a family of West Yorkshire textile merchants. In this volume, set in 1957, the youngest son, having fallen out with his father, has come to London to start a cosmetics company with a friend, but after many twists and turns, he ends up mounting a coup and returning to Yorkshire as head of the family firm.

So why is it so bad? To start with, although it’s less than 400 pages long, the book seems to go for ever. Armstrong doesn’t seem to have grasped that, having invented characters, he doesn’t have to document their entire lives. So every day in his hero’s existence has to be accounted for, and even if the last interesting incident occurs at lunchtime, we still have to be told what he does in the afternoon, what he has for supper, how he spends the evening and what time he goes to bed.

Even that wouldn’t be so bad if the author wrote sparkling prose. Armstrong doesn’t. To give you a flavour, here’s the opening of Chapter Three:

“In the early days of August there was every sign that the national economy was to have one of those belly-flops which regularly occur whatever colour the board of management at Westminster. But however the international bankers may have been looking with narrowed eyes towards London, Ray and I had our own problem to solve: whether to stabilise C-W’s turnover at its current level, or to crack on.”

This passage illustrates another fundamental problem. The book is about business – two businesses, in fact, the fledgling cosmetics firm and t’mill back in Yorkshire, and Armstrong is keen to follow the progress of both. So we hear an awful lot about turnover, and production, and cashflow, and balance sheets, and a whole lot more besides. Any writer would struggle to make this stuff sound interesting; in Armstrong’s hands it mostly resembles extracts from a particularly dull annual report.

But the book isn’t just about these two businesses. Oh no. Armstrong keeps around a dozen plots on the go throughout the book, making it hard work for the reader, who has to keep up with the exploits of the hero’s girlfriend, family, colleagues and other contacts. A good writer uses sub-plots to amplify or counterpoint the central plot; Armstrong simply seems unable to leave anything out, and thus condemns himself (and the reader) to follow each character’s progress remorsely.

Finally, there’s the central character himself, Charles Crowther. Even without reading the previous volumes in the series, it’s clear that Charles is meant to be seen as the clear-sighted, modernising influence the family firm needs to free it from the shackles of the past and make it competitive again.

Unfortunately, he comes across mainly as an arrogant, intolerant prig who knows best in every situation, and is thus extremely hard to like. Never more so than when his free-spirited girlfriend starts dabbling with drugs, a development he sternly (but vainly) tries to nip in the bud. When she eventually dies of a heart attack caused by too much heroin (or some such), Charles is clearly upset, but you can sense him (and Armstrong) thinking that it’s for the best, really. A chap can’t be burdened with a junkie for a wife, not when he’s got a business to run.

I realise that this last issue can be put down to changing attitudes, but I think the rest provide useful pointers for any writer. Indeed, whenever I’m struggling with a passage in the novel I’m working on, I tend to wonder what Thomas Armstrong would do - and then do the exact opposite.

Five years, that’s all we’ve got

Amid all the ballyhoo and hype surrounding World Book Day, I’ve been finding it hard, as a writer, to get excited. Don’t get me wrong - books are wonderful, life-changing things. I just worry about their future.

The more I read about the way the media in general, and publishing in particular, is heading, the more discouraged I get. A typical example is this recent blog post by David Hepworth, and in particular the proclamation by a literary agent that “within five years, no one, not authors, agents or publishers, will be able to make money out of books”.

It’s not that I ever expected to get rich out of writing novels, or even to make a living by doing so. I’m not stupid - I know that very few authors survive on advances and royalties alone. But if no one makes any money out of books, how will they get made? In a capitalist society where the profit motive reigns supreme, any product that doesn’t make money is effectively doomed, however beneficial to the public it might be.

This doomsday scenario is probably exaggerated to a certain extent, but I don’t doubt there’s a kernel of truth at its heart. The effects of the digital revolution are already there for all to see; music stores and record shops closing because they can’t compete with online retailers, who in turn are losing sales to illegal streaming and downloading…

If the only future for an unknown author is self-funded self-publishing, followed by the desperate scramble to find enough people willing to pay a few pence for the product of years of hard work that you might just cover your costs if you’re lucky, then you have to ask yourself: is it worth the effort?

The importance of a varied diet

Like many people, I tend to read the same kind of books most of the time: literary fiction (most of it, I’ll be honest, written by white, middle-aged men like me), with the occasional crime novel to cleanse the palate. But, as with food, I do believe that it’s important to vary your diet from time to time, and right now I’m reading something different. I’m about halfway through The Dark Volume by GW Dahlquist, and I’m loving it.

The Dark Volume is the sequel to The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters, which I came across a couple of years ago when Penguin had the brilliant idea of publishing it in weekly instalments: I paid a ‘subscription’ and a chapter arrived in the post each week for 10 weeks. It was a brilliant idea because The Glass Books… is the kind of adventure that would once have been described as ‘rollicking’, and with each chapter ending in a cliffhanger, it lent itself perfectly to serialisation.

If you had to ascribe a genre to Dahlquist’s books, I suppose it would be fantasy. They’re set in a time and place that resemble Victorian England, where a sinister cabal is plotting to acquire wealth and power using a diabolical invention. Three disparate characters team up to try to foil them: an unworldly but resourceful heiress, an honourable German doctor and a ruthless freelance assassin. The books basically consist of a series of chases, with the heroes finding themselves in one perilous situation after another.

If it all sounds rather silly – well, it is, but it’s skilfully written and utterly absorbing. (I was reading it on a train this afternoon and almost missed my stop.) When I’ve finished, I’ll doubtless go back to my Hornbys and McEwans, but for now I’m thoroughly enjoying my change of diet.

What’s in a name?

Thanks to the magic of Twitter, I discovered the Lulu Titlescorer the other day. It’s a nifty little online tool; you enter the title of your novel, along with some information about the words it’s made up of, and it tells you what chance a book with that title has of being a bestseller. Apparently the program is based on an analysis of 50 years’ worth of fiction titles that have topped the New York Times bestseller list.

The bad news is that, on the basis of their titles at least, none of the three novels I’ve completed to date is going to get me onto that list: Grown-Up People, First Time I Met The Blues and The Celebrity Next Door all scored a measly 10.2% - barely above the minimum possible score of 9%. Slightly more encouragingly, my work in progress, Going Back, scored 20.1%. I’ve been regarding that as strictly a working title, to be replaced by something better at a later stage, but maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to discard it.

Out of curiosity, I ran a few randomly chosen famous titles through the program as well, to see if the professionals are any better at naming their novels. The results were mixed: Far From The Madding Crowd scored the same as me, 10.2%, while Portnoy’s Complaint and Bridget Jones’s Diary both managed a scarcely more impressive 14.6%. Catcher In The Rye (a title I’ve always disliked – shows what I know) did better, with 26.3%, but the winner in this hugely unscientific survey was Midnight’s Children, with a whopping 44.2%.

I’m not sure any of this proves anything, of course, but it does mean I can legitimately compare myself to Thomas Hardy in one respect at least.

In praise of e (squared)

To be frank, I’ve had a bugger of a time at work recently, and one of the few things that have kept me sane has been a novel: e squared, by one of my favourite contemporary writers, Matt Beaumont.

It’s a sort of sequel to e, which came out in 2000 and was notable for being (to my knowledge, at least) the first novel written entirely in emails. Set in an advertising agency called Miller Shanks, it skewered that world deliciously – and e squared repeats the trick, with bells on. The scene has moved to another agency, Meerkat360, which is so bleeding-edge that the Creative Director hires an in-house hairdresser, clown and busker. Some of the characters from e reappear, and as the technology has moved on, so have the narrative modes: alongside email we get text messages, blogs, instant messaging and online news reports.

I’ve always loved satire, and Beaumont is a superbly scurrilous satirist. Almost every one of the 20-odd main characters is deeply flawed, and blissfully unaware of it. It’s no accident that the nearest thing the book has to a hero is a gambling addict who alienates everyone who cares for him – but his saving grace is that he knows he’s an idiot, unlike those who surround him.

All Matt Beaumont’s half a dozen novels are excellent, but the last couple have been a shade more thoughtful. e squared, though, is unashamedly frivolous and hilarious. As someone who works in the media (though not in advertising, thankfully), I’ve enjoyed being reminded how ridiculous what I do for a living actually is.