Peeping over the parapet

I've not been here for a while. Not because I don't like this blog any more, or my dear readers, but because I haven't had time. I know, you've heard all that before. But here's a little post on what you should and shouldn't have time for when things get tricky.

Things you can definitely ignore:
Dust bunnies and dead flies on the windowsill
twitter
Spam asking you to send free books to yet another worthy cause
Reading other people's blogs, including this one
All online groups of any kind, even the seemingly relevant writery ones

A few years ago, everyone was banging on about if you have a blog you have to blog every day, or at least every other day. Personally, I've never agreed with that. That model might apply if your blog is primarily a leisure-interest type of blog rather than a professional-skills type of blog. But I don't imagine there are readers out there checking every day to see if there's a new post n this blog. Most of my readers are writers and have better things to do. I think you should blog when you have something to say that's worth hearing and otherwise shut up and do something else.

But sometimes you can have things that should be said and still not have the time to say them properly. For various reasons, that's been the case here for the last few months. Not regular, run-of-the-mill, I-have-lots-of-work-and-a-family-to-care-for reasons, but compelling out-of-the-ordinary reasons. Something has to give way when time is short. As I already never watch TV, there was no opportunity to recoup a few hours a day in the way most people could if they needed to.

The one thing that can't slip is writing - at least, the writing that is already commissioned and has a deadline. The novel my agent wants but for which there is no contract is on a back burner so far back it's fallen down between the cooker and the wall. But blog posts - who will notice if there isn't one for a few weeks? No one pays me to write a blog. I write it because I like to engage with you lovely people out there and hear your views, and because feel strongly that those of us with some knowledge of how publishing works from the writer's side of the fence shoud help other writers by sharing.

We've all met people who say 'I'd write a book if I had the time.' Well, it's not their job to write books, so they can say that, just as I can say I'd grow more vegetables if I had the time. It would be nice, but it's not necessary - I can carry on buying vegetables from Waitrose. But if I don't keep on writing, I can't buy anything from Waitrose. So that's the thing that can't slip. If I were a surgeon, I wouldn't stop doing surgery because my child was ill, or I was having trouble with the builders, or the house was a real mess and could do with a thorough clean. So I'll lurk behind the parapet and do things that have to be done.

These are my parapet priorities:

1. Keep self and child alive - enough shopping and cooking, caring and cossetting to keep us functional and resaonably happy.
2. Meet writing deadlines. And do the writing to a high standard. Not only is it unprofessional to let standards slip, cutting corners is a false economy as the editor will just come back for changes later and be less likely to commission more books. I've worked for years and years to get this reputation and I'm not going to let it slide now.
3. Talk to editors - warning them there might be problems lets them make contingency plans. Actually, when times are difficult I try to get stuff in early - because I know I can't leave it until the last minute in case there's a crisis. I think my longest-standing editors know that if I'm delivering early, things are tricky.
4. Keep responding to enquiries and commissions. I'll need more books to write later and so the time that goes into lining up later work can't be skipped.
5. Commitments to other people - sys admining blogs I have agreed to sys admin, preparation for conferences I've agreed to speak at, turning up to things (according to how important my turning up is to anyone else, not to how much I want to go). Responding to email/messages comes into that category, too. If you don't have time to respond, at least set up a polite autoresponse - it takes seconds.
6. Facebook, blog, twitter, etc - I've not been on twitter more than a couple of times in three months. I don't think my absence from twitter will be noticed. I dip in and out of Facebook as it's my main way of keeping in touch with friends, but I've done nothing with my professional pages as they really don't matter. No one cares that much.

Perhaps that's the point. Regarding most publicity, no one cares (except you) whether you do your publicity/profiling stuff or not. A big book launch is an exception, but the day-to-day 'don't forget me' stuff - it can slide. You can pick it up later. Write a book rather than a blog post. Oh. On that note - I have a few books to write.

Back below the parapet...

Vampires forever

I don't usually link from here to my posts on ABBA, but this one is less ABBAy than usual - my theory about vampires...

And it's a slight excuse for my absence. The real reason has been summer school and now builders. But soon. I'll write something soon.

"The grave's a fine and private place..." Or not

Who owns the dead?

The Guardian's website today has an article about David Shields and Shane Salerno, two biographers of the famously reclusive American author JD Salinger. They claim to have uncovered what Salinger had been working on before his death and to release some (all?) of it after 2015. They are also publishing an unauthorised biography of Salinger in September of this year. It is unauthorised because Salinger didn't want a biography, and indeed even blocked one published in his lifetime. His estate did not release documents to the biographers. Salinger said that he wrote only for himself in his later years.

So who owns a writer's work when they are dead? (Or even before?) If Salinger didn't want a biography and didn't want to publish his later writings, why should anyone have the right to go against his wishes? In particular, if he produced work he had no intention of sharing, then it's theft to make it publicly available, isn't it? I can see that someone who has done all the work of digging to write a biography will claim it's their work and they can publish it - though I don't necessarily agree that they should be allowed to publish it. But his own work? Shouldn't he have the last say on what happens to that and who sees it? Do we have to destroy our own writings to keep them private?

Salinger died recently - in 2010. His living relatives might be upset by this invasion of his and their privacy - privacy he spent 50 years protecting. If he had been dead 50 years, with few or no living relatives who remembered him, perhaps the claims of scholarship might win out over the author's own wishes. But Shields and Salerno are not Salinger scholars anyway, and it looks as if they have an eye to the main chance and a tidy profit rather than a genuine academic interest in disseminating his work - a task which could have waited a decent interval.

I hope no one will buy this biography, but suspect that is a vain hope. If I were ever as successful and famous as Salinger, I would be horrified at the prospect of such a violation of my wishes and would make sure nothing was left to be discovered. Why do we worry about relocating and honouring the bones of people who died centuries ago (Richard III, I'm looking at you), but won't honour the wishes of someone barely cold in the grave because - as a writer - he is considered public property?

Platform and the profession

Tonight I'm giving a lecture (with Brian Keaney - it's one of our double-acts) on living as a professional writer. I'm not going to tell you what we'll say, partly because we don't know until we plan it over a coffee at 5pm and partly because the students might not come if they can read it all in advance. But what we won't be doing is insisting that it's vital to have a platform to succeed as a writer.

No one seems to have any idea whether a platform - as in a regular blog, twittering away, a Facebook author page and all that shiz - makes any difference to book sales. It's a general assumption that it's vital if you are marketing self-e-published books. After all, how else are you going to get any publicity? But for mainstream publishing? Publishers like us to do it, but unless you already have a significant following, does it make much difference? It's an impossible question to answer, of course, because there's no control: we can't compare sales of book A with and without the author's platform.

I have a Facebook author page but pay relatively little attention to it. I comment on new books, occasionally on books in progress, occasionally on reviews or mentions. I can't really imagine anyone is interested. I have never asked all my friends to like it. That seems to me both rude and pointless. I wouldn't go up to someone (except a very close friend who would give an honest opinion) and say 'do I like nice in this?' or 'do you like me?' So why would I do it online?

And I have a blog, obviously. But this blog doesn't identify me. OK, it's not hard to work out who I am. It used to be a lot more secret than it is now. But when one of my editors identified me from the writing style alone, I gave up on the pretence that it's actually anonymous. Besides, this blog doesn't promote my books. Occasionally, I even anti-promote them. I once suggested people did NOT buy my books unless they had actually checked that they wanted them, as I thought the Amazon write-up missed out crucial information and I don't want people to be disappointed. (The books in question were short.)

If anything, this blog reduces my income. At least one publisher has said he'd never consider publishing someone who called themselves Stroppy Author. I can't decide whether to rise to the challenge and try to sneak a book to him or whether to say 'I wouldn't want to be published by someone so cowardly and insecure.' But actually, he's a very fine publisher, so probably the former. And I have argued with publishers more than once about things I've posted here (not recently, but it happens). Publishers like an author to have a platform, but they don't like it to be built on their own books. It's a sort of virtual NIMBYism. That all makes my platform a negative platform - more like standing in a hole in the ground.

Does it affect sales? Who knows? My best-selling book has sold over 350,000 copies. I have never mentioned it on this blog. I don't think the two are connected (though maybe if it's a negative platform, they are!) I think, rather, that it's a popular sort of book that will always sell. And some others are not. And no amount of shouting about them will make people suddenly want them. So I don't. I hate shouty things anyway. I can just about cope with being publicly facetious in text but I always turn down requests for radio or TV. To my shame, I didn't even return the call to the last TV person who wanted to talk to me.

So I'm not really qualified to talk about platform. As I said at the Society of Authors the other day, I have a kind of e-agoraphobia - fear of the virtual market place. Perhaps I would be a mega-bestselling author with lots of money if I didn't. But then again - I think I'd just have pissed off more people. Even more people.

But to the point. When new, young writers ask how they should be building their platform, my answer is 'You shouldn't. You should be writing decent books.' Or, as Nicola Morgan puts it, Write the damn book. No one likes to look up to a platform, anyway. We all prefer to peer down into a hole. I'll be in there.

Please, all you pro-platform people, put your case so that my students can get a balanced view!
Nicola - please add a link to your stuff on platform as I can't find it!

Story is an emergent property

Yesterday, Brian Keaney and I gave the first lecture of our summer school course at Cambridge University. We don't script out lectures. Brian did have half a page of scrawl which he called notes, though that's really an overstatement. (Sorry, Brian: they were sweet.) Instead, we sit in a cafe for three hours before the lecture and just talk around the subject. That stirs the ideas up. It's a bit like poking a muddy pond with a stick. We get all that sludge of acquired knowledge about writing moving around. Then when we have the students chained to their chairs, glasses of wine in front of them, we just talk.

One of the things we were talking about last night was how to make stories. What is the difference between an account and a story? An idea that came up in the cafe but didn't make it to the lecture was that story is an emergent property. An emergent property is something which comes about when you put things together, but isn't inherent in any one of the things. So wetness is an emergent property of water. If you have one water molecule, it's not wet. If you have a million water molecules, you also have wetness.

When you first ask a small child to tell a story, it gives an account. For example:

I got home and my cat had killed a bird. The bits were on the floor. I made a sandwich.

That's an account of unrelated events. Well, they are related in that they are in a chronological sequence, but not causally or in any other way. Add a link and it becomes a narrative:

I got home and my cat had killed a bird. The bits were on the floor. I made a sandwich, but I couldn't eat it.

You might say that's not a link. But it's the ingredients of a link - the reader will make a link out of it.

Although there is no statement of cause, we infer an emotional connection. The narrator can't eat the sandwich because the bits of dead bird make him/her feel sick, or disgusted. Now we know something about him/her - they have the beginnings of a character. There is movement; our understanding of the first part of the narrative is altered by what comes afterwards. It does the 'show, not tell' thing, and it makes the reader do some work.

Stories emerge if you put the bits together - plot, character, causation, emotional change, setting, motivation. They emerge because the reader is also a human being with similar consciousness/experience. You don't have to state the links all the time - you can rely on the shared human experience of writer and reader to supply the links. And that's another thing. It's fine if the reader makes a story that differs slightly from the story you thought you wrote. A person with OCD might assume the narrator in that little snippet couldn't eat the sandwich because the mess was offensive simply as mess. That's fine. Let the reader make what they will of it. It's not your story once you've let it out of the box. You put things together, and something else comes out of their juxtaposition.

Look at this:

The man stood on the high ledge. Then he plunged off.
The raven stood on the high ledge. Then he plunged off.

See? You know ravens can fly, and men can't. The first is a tragic ending. The second is an exciting start. The story emerges from the mix of words and the reader's knowledge.

(Of course, that's not all it takes to make a story that is worth reading. Writing a good story, that's another week's lecture.)