Authors and Books

Let me nail the ‘Long-Distance’ bit of the title as I don’t imagine that the ‘Loneliness’ part needs any explanation.    It’s purely a function of time, not miles.

In the time-honoured cliché, I’d always felt a book lay within me, albeit invisibly deeply.  Being made redundant and deciding to go freelance created the space and time in which to contemplate the possibility.  I didn’t set out to write something that might be published.  It was much more that I needed to know that I could do it; ‘it’ being create something from thin air that worked. ‘Worked’ meaning that it had integrity, a sense of purpose and being.

If you’d told me then it would take eighteen years from first contemplation to final realisation, I may well have taken up some other life challenge, perhaps crocheting or self-waxing.

But then again ...

Who, once they’ve written, would ever really want to be without the joy of sculpting a …

The journey begins ...

... or, to be more accurate, the next stage of the journey begins.

A publishing contract has been signed and so the first leg, writing the thing, is over.  I now must treat it as though hewn from stone, rather than the waters of creativity.  No more tweaking, time to move on.  It's been with me so long that it might be hard to let go ... but let go I must!

So what are my hopes and fears for ‘Grosse Fugue’?  Should I reveal my innermost thoughts?  Perhaps not yet.  As any author knows, the greatest hunger is for an audience, preferably one as large as possible.  Of course, there's a revenue attraction to that.  But for many, it's just the notion of our work being read by many hearts and minds.

A few may love it, many may loathe it.  A handful might be moved, others offended.  With any luck, no-one will be indifferent, the true mark of failure.  But I hope that some may be …

Have you read any of the shortlist?  Who do you think should win?  Have a look here for the details of who's on it this year.  I've read two out of the six and enjoyed both very much but I'm not sure either is a winner as such.

There has been some controversy this year (as there often is).  The chair of the Judges is Dame Stella Rimington, a thriller writer who gets some help with her own writing.  The question seems to be - are the judges, and therefore the shortlist, too down-market?  The Guardian has set up its own short-list  - the Not The Booker Prize - also being announced today.

Do you find a divide between quality and readability?  If something's easy to read - does it automatically disqualify from being literary fiction?  I don't think I agree - Animal Farm is eminently readable - for example - and no-one would claim that that's not a multi-layered classic.

Let us know.

Cressida
(Editorial

Do  you need to know what you're writing before you start?  Or can you wait till it's time to send it out?  And do you want to write to a strict genre anyway or are you more of a mould-breaker?

From the point of view of a publishing house and a bookseller, the clearer you can be about your genre, the better.

Let's start with the basics  - are you writing fiction or non-fiction?  This is not as stupid a question as you might think. I have read a number of submission letters that start with 'My novel is all TRUE', or 'I'm writing about an important issue but I've turned it into fiction'.  Try and draw a line, and decide which side of it you're writing.

Then - adult or children?  Very very few books are genuinely cross-over titles.  I know Philip Pullman and JK Rowling managed it - but what they actually did was to write children's books that appealed to adults, rather than attempt a hybrid.

If you're writing for children, what age are you aiming it at?  The most common …

This week is Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of the freedom to read and a fantastic opportunity to draw attention to the censorship of literature. Right now in small towns across the US a battle is being fought between the American Library Association and outraged parents over the availability of “offensive” books.  

In the past decade there have been 4,660 attempts made to remove books from schools, libraries and national curriculums, and the list of the ten most challenged books in the last decade includes classics such as The Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple and To Kill A Mockingbird. Perhaps more surprising is the appearance of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in the top three most challenged books in 2010.

In the last few months, the censorship of books has been a hot topic, Meghan Cox Gurdon’s recent Wall Street Journal article condemned Young Adult fiction as depraved and corrupting, which in turn sparked the twitter campaign #YAsaves in defence of …