Laurie Graham's Blog, page 31

All-You-Can-Read

I’ve just come to the shocking realisation that I’m a book hog. It’s not just that I love to buy books and it’s not just that I love to read. I hoard books.

I was doing my accounts yesterday, always a depressing activity. If you’ve had a good year you feel the hot breath of the Inland Revenue on your neck. If you’ve had a bad year you wonder if you’re in the right business. So I had to go through my book purchases for 2011 and decide which of them could be written off as research expenses. Very few, as it turned out. But I had bought an awful lot of books.

I’ve been a book buyer since I was about nine years old. That was the year I discovered the spending power of my pocket money in a shop called The Midland Educational Company on Market Street in Leicester. I think the first book I bought there was called something like Putting on a Play. It explained things like how to create the sound of heavy rain using dried peas on a wooden tray. I wonder whatever happened to that book?

Anyway, I was reviewing my book purchases for last year and discovered to my shame that there are still quite a lot of them I haven’t read. They’re stacked by my night table. Some of them are nearing the top of the pile. Some, unaccountably, never seem to move up the ladder. Well not so ‘unaccountably’ actually because I know the reason. I’m more tempted by my newest tinselliest purchase than I am by last December’s must-have.

Looking at my To Read pile I estimate I could stop buying for a full year and not run out of new books to crack open. I’m a book hog. I’m like one of those people who keeps going back to the All-You-Can-Eat buffet. Or, trying to look at it in a more positive light, I’m doing my bit for what I recently, hilariously, heard called the Writing Industry. If publishers go out of business it certainly won’t be because of lack of support from me.

I’m now in the final furlong with next year’s book, my deadline looms and don’t have a lot of time for blogging, but if you haven’t had enough of my blethering you can find me on the History Girls tomorrow, October 11th. My subject: the manly art of knitting.  

 

 

The Blondes Have It

I’ve now reached that silly season of my working year when the book isn’t quite finished but the designers need to get to work. Which is why the following query landed on my desk this week: is Nan a blonde or a brunette?

Nan is my current protagonist.  She’s brunette, no question.

I’ve never been blonde, though I’ve often wondered what it’d be like. My dark hair is now rapidly greying but psychologically I suppose I’ll always be a brunette. My guess would have been that the majority of my female protagonists are brunettes too. So I just did a little survey. 5am, you can’t sleep, may as well get up and conduct a poll. Setting aside my two male narrators who have both had hair loss issues, I was left with eleven female, ahem, heads to count.

Poppy Minkel, dark-haired in the cradle but a blonde at heart would undoubtedly have gone to the salon for a bleach job at the earliest opportunity. She’s in the blonde column. Likewise Birdie from Dog Days, Glenn Miller Nights, modelled somewhat on my paternal grandmother, who went to her grave with her roots retouched and somewhat on my mother-in-law who’s still hanging in there.

Buzz Wexler is a bottle redhead. No-one can remember what her natural colour is and if they ever did she’d sue.

The figures are in. If we allow a redhead to be a blonde with extra whistles and bells, the score is six five to the blondes. Extraordinary. I never would have thought it. Writer, know thyself.

Rowling At the Moon

     Several hundred thousand lemmings stampeded past me today squeaking, ‘J K Rowling’s new book! Gimme, Gimme.’

 I feel absolutely no malice towards J K Rowling but I’d like to go on record as being sick to the tonsils of publishing hype and media sycophancy. She wrote some children’s books, they sold well, get over it.  

I see her new book has already toppled Fifty Shades from the best-seller charts, Fifty Shades now being the yardstick of publishing success. All I need is to hear that Katie Price will be publishing Volume 8 of her autobiography in time for Christmas and I shall shoot myself. 

I need a new career.

 

Word Play

Yes, I’m much recovered. Thank you for asking.

It’s been a slow week with nothing like as much work achieved as should have been but I had some fun while waiting for the catarrh to clear and some clarity of mind to return.

Funny word, catarrh. It’s from the Greek verb katarrein, which basically means to flow down profusely and yet still sounds exactly right for something that doesn’t so much flow as hang around bunging up orifices with its impenetrable claggitude.  Claggitude isn’t from the Greek word for anything. I made it up.

Some of my friends, nay, some of my writer friends, take exception to my invention of words. Writers are not always fun people. I think some of them feel the English language is quite rich enough without any tinkering on my part. And it is rich. There’s a lot of argument about how many words we actually have at our disposal, certainly a quarter of a million. Suffice it to say we have a lot more than most languages. We are word-wealthy. But does that mean we’re prohibited from inventing more? Is there an internationally policed quota?

Doing my Russian homework this week I discovered to my astonishment that Russians have no word for toes. This is the country that put the first man in space, and yet they call toes ‘leg fingers’. Pitiful, isn’t it? Obviously we could Fedex them a word, though Russia can be rather touchy about foreign aid.  And when you think about it, why should we? Surely a country that produced Tolstoy, Pushkin and Dostoevsky, a country that single-handedly revived the word ‘oligarch’, could toss a few Scrabble tiles around and come up with something.

The Russian for leg fingers (I know you’re dying to learn this) transliterates as paltsie nagee. Which sounds, don’t you think, like the name of a firm-jawed Hungarian who ran away to Hollywood in the 1920s and changed his name to something like Lyle Ford? Alternatively he could have changed his name to Nigel Eastpea. It wouldn’t have sounded as sexy in the movie trailers but would have had the interesting talking point of being an anagram of paltsie nagee. I leave it with you.

No, I’m not taking any medication for catarrhal claggitude. These are just my normal ravings.

 

Writers’ Rights

  Well, the hot toddies don’t seem to be helping. Here is the deal I cut with my cold on Friday afternoon: okay I’ll be patient with you, humour you over the weekend and subject you to absolutely no pressure, but I want you gone by 9am Monday.

It’s now Sunday afternoon and has it gone? Yes, to my chest. My lungs are full of vile clagginess and my tubes are whistling and groaning like a clapped out harmonium. I need sick leave. But writers don’t get sick leave, especially not six weeks off a delivery deadline. Like all self-employed people they get leave to buck up and go to work in their dressing gown. 

There is a trade-off, I realise. Unlike employees who have to clock in I can start work any time I darn well choose and I can turn up to the office dressed as Wilma Flintstone if I want to. I can send as many personal emails as I wish, I can sing, sniff and cough to my heart’s content, and I never get asked to chip in for a Sorry You’re Leaving card for someone I hardly know. These are the bonuses of being self-employed. I recognise them and I appreciate them. But I’d still like a couple more days off with this cold.

Guerilla Book-Selling

I feel I must say a little something about the Sock Puppet affair. When this first started to rumble, after Stephen Leather’s admissions at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, I can’t say I was shocked or even mildly surprised. My childlike innocence about writers’ dirty tricks ended the day Orlando Figes fell off his pedestal.

I was and am a great admirer of Figes’ writing. He disappointed me when he resorted to sock puppetry, to denigrate another writer in his field, but principally I was embarrassed by his amateurish attempts at hiding his true identity. I realised then that there must be far cleverer operators playing the same game.

What Leather and Ellory and Locke are saying is ‘Every writer does it.’

Well actually, every writer doesn’t do it. 

If they’re saying, ‘Every writer who isn’t a sap does it,’  they may be right but I suspect they’re not. Most of us are writing the best we can in the hope of delighting our fans and gaining new readers by legitimate recommendation.

The book business (I’m old enough to remember when England had factories and mines so I refuse to call it an industry) is a grubby, grabby trade these days, but it never was spotless. Writers have always depended on friends and connections to give their books a boost. It’s pretty bad now though. Amazon has changed everything. I’d just say this: if a reviewer isn’t using his real name  – and if it doesn’t say REAL NAME, he isn’t – ask yourself why. 

Reviews aren’t everything. I’ve had great reviews for twenty years and my books still sell in very modest numbers. I’ve been told I’m a mug for putting most of my energy into writing rather than into marketing. Maybe. But I’ve been around long enough to know that commercial success can happen for all kinds of crazy reasons.  

Well-meaning friends sometimes tell me they’ve gone into shops and repositioned my books. I have to ask them to desist. Publishers pay for table displays and face-out shelf placement. Guerilla tactics by authors’ aunts and uncles just make extra work for the store staff, putting things back where they belong, bottom shelf, Mug’s corner.

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And now for something completely different.  Tickets are already on sale for my adaptation of The Dress Circle, to be performed as a one-woman show (not me) next April 23 to 27 at the Baron’s Court Theatre in West London. This is a tiny but fabulous venue with only 60 seats per show so if you want to come break out those pristine 2013 diaries and book soon. The Box Office number is 020 8932 4747

Joined Up Writing

I realise it’s that time of year but I did wonder why a certain organisation has sent me enrollment information for their Creative Writing courses. Are they trying to tell me something?

I’m not sure when Creative Writing became a taught subject. It’s a relatively recent development. For sure Mark Twain never took a class.  Can a writer be cured of cloth ears, or chronic adverborrhoea (she pondered tentatively)? I’m not convinced . I don’t know what happens on these courses that could not just as usefully take place in solitude with a chewed pencil, but I concede that many of my writer friends disagree. Some of them teach these courses. Some of them also attend workshops and submit their own efforts for criticism by their peers. Maybe it makes  better writers of them. Having eavesdropped on one such session, I doubt it. More likely, I think, they emerge feeling annoyed or battered. Again I say, Mark Twain never did it.

One friend asked me if I have the same opinion of painting classes, and I had to say No, but also Yes. Painting is a manual skill and an exercise in observation, both of which can develop with guidance. If I were to enrol for a class my painting might improve, but never to the point where it brought joy to people’s hearts or made them reach for their cheque book. Nothing wrong with being a weekend painter. You can hang your canvases all over the house and your friends will see them. But writing? What are you going to say?

‘Bill, Linda, come over for drinks and I’ll read you the first 50,000 words of my novel.’ 

It’s a tricky one. I have some sympathy. Not bucketsful, but some. Writing is a seductive, addictive thing but it’s a funny old business. By the time we’re out of kindergarten we all have the basics. Some people make good money doing it. You may create a masterpiece, you may create dreck. Most of us could stop, right now, without any great loss to the world. We could do something useful. Like the ironing.

That’s my week. Irony, Monday to Friday. Saturday, ironing.

 

On Committing Murder

     The killing off of characters is always a tricky business. Unless the span of the story is a single day there obviously have to be some casualties and if you’re writing about a pre-antibiotic era there should realistically be many. But publishers don’t much like major characters dying because if you’re not careful where the Grim Reaper swings his scythe you ruin the prospects for a sequel.

Sometimes you kill off a character because you can’t stand them any more. I’ll confess to having done that. But it being a fictional death I’ve then had the option of performing CPR and reinstating them. Murdering a character because he’s annoying is not a good defence for a writer. After all, if he’s getting on your nerves why should paying customers be expected to put up with him? No, the remedy for an irritating character is a rewrite. Little Nell, for instance. Wouldn’t you just love Dickens to come back and rework her? Although I will allow she isn’t half as irritating as her grandfather.

As you may have gathered I’m faffing around this week trying to decide when to kill someone and how. She’s in her fifties, which is a pretty good innings for Victorian London, and I think she has to go. The main question is whether she should die on the page or off it. I do quite a good death scene, though I do say it myself.  I find they’re much easier to write than sex scenes, but it’s possible for either to go on way too long. The frustrated movie director in me is quite tempted to cut to the grave digger. You know? The scrape of shovel on frozen earth? 

On the other hand, I’m rather fond of this character. Maybe I should let her live, to die in her dotage after THE END.  But someone’s definitely got to go. It’s been a while, and you only have to run your eye down any 19th century family tree to know that funerals were very frequent events indeed.  

 So tomorrow morning’s task is to go through the cast of coffin-dodgers and see who else might be ripe for a good death.

You can see how writers succumb to megalomania. The power of life and death at the tip of a pencil.

This Little Piggy

 No post today but you can find me at The History Girls on the subject of King Richard III and whatever became of his bones.

The picture is of a gilded silver Yorkist badge, just one of the many items found during recent excavations at the site now believed to be the location of some of the fiercest fighting at the battle of Bosworth where Richard died.

So this little piggy went to battle. And never came home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cherry on the Top

          See, not only do I provide you with a  weekly dose of wit, wisdom and the occasional recipe. Tomorrow, August 6th, you can catch me in the Daily Mail’s Life & Style section, growling about Botox, Cher, and related topics.

Do I give you value, or what?