One plague or another... Anne Rooney

As Dawn said a few days ago, we all went into this lockdown with fine plans of writing new things. In my case, revamping an outline for a non-fiction book I'm keen to sell and doing some work on adult book that I'm not yet trying to sell as I don't have a clear vision of its shape. And improving my very poor German. Plus working on the few commissioned books that have not been put on hold. But aside from meeting deadlines, that's not what has happened. A good deal of gardening has happened. And a sudden desire to revive a novel I wrote some time ago and my then-agent couldn't sell because 'we don't want historical right now.' Historical in this case is the plague in Venice in 1576.

I found myself drawn back to the book with some enthusiasm for the first time in years. I know I can't be bothered with trawling it around publishers or agents again (I've parted company with my last agent) so it will rot in a drawer. I thought I might self-publish it as something to do. But then I got into an argument with a whole bunch of people on a publisher's website and now I'm not sure. They were denouncing the publication of a book set during a fictional pandemic as 'opportunistic' and 'profiteering' and 'making money out of people's misery'. Are they right? I don't think so. No one is being forced to buy this book set in a pandemic. Profiteering, surely, is making money by price-gouging essentials, such as soap or masks? If you don't want to read a story set in a pandemic, just don't. Personally, I am enjoying revisiting plague narratives now and recognising aspects of the lives described that were previously alien to my experience. Even revisiting a book I wrote myself, I am quite pleased to see that I correctly captured the feelings of self-isolation. (It's not really a book about plague, but plague is the backdrop and isolation and restricted movement are key aspects of it.)

If we believe that people want characters they can identify with rather than a homogenous white, straight, middle-class cast, don't we believe they also want situations they can identify with? And that might include living through a pandemic?

When I was first writing this novel I did worry that I was exploiting the misery of people long dead, and I lit a candle for the plague dead every time I visited Venice for research. But the thought that to publish it would be exploiting victims of the current pandemic had never occurred to me. What do you think? If someone publishes a book set in a plague/pandemic, is that reprehensible? And does it make a difference whether, as in the case of the dispute, the book is about a covid-like disease or something else? (The author of the disputed book wrote the book 15 years ago, so the disease is not a direct reference to covid-19.) Are you reading pandemic literature? I've been revisiting some and ordering some new dystopian fiction. I'm finding it helpful seeing this new aspect of life reflected in fiction. What about you?

Anne Rooney
Out now: How to be an Eco-Hero
Hachette, 2020

The book group - Hilary Hawkes

I’ve been invited to join a book group – a real life one as opposed to an online/facebook group.

Now, I have a confession to make. While I consider myself a true bookaholic I’m not all that keen on too much reading to dissect and pontificate at great length with others. If I like a book then I like it and the reasons can vary. If I don’t like one then I usually find out in the first few chapters and either hobble to the end or, in extreme cases, abandon altogether. I’m probably a typical reader.

I’ve read books that have won prizes and thought to myself: “This won? Really?” And I’ve read some lovely self-published books and wondered why on earth a commissioning  editor somewhere didn’t snap up such a promising author.

But these are just my views. Someone else will read the same book and think something entirely different. That’s the way it should be. So book groups where everyone has a different view sounds interesting, but would it really enhance my enjoyment of reading? Would it turn my dream past-time into a bit of a chore? Looking at the list of Suggested Books For The Group I shudder at the length of some of those hefty tomes. They really aren’t books I would choose to read.

Perhaps my hesitancy about joining is due to having studied English Literature at A’level and degree level many years ago. Set texts and dissecting of little bits of them reminds me of exams and assessments.  And while I always knew exactly what I thought of a book – and why- I was often reluctant to have my say amongst others who seemed to be much better at analysing and deciding "what the author meant”.

I've always got my own personal TBR pile of fiction (adult novels and children's books) and non-fiction. I occasionally review books and really enjoy that and I love to talk with other children's authors about children's books.

I think all authors are readers first. But I wonder what proportion of book lovers who are also children’s writers are members of adult book groups. Have you tried book groups and what was your experience?  I’d love to know.

Hilary Hawkes

Philosophers and Entertainers

From Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction by Robert Eaglestone:

[This Chapter,]‘Saying everything’, argues that contemporary fiction matters because it is how we work out who we are now, today. The novel is the best way of doing this. Of all the arts, the novel is the most thoughtful, the closest, and the most personal. It can be about anything, and can take any form or forms it chooses. The novel, like the human species, is now global and the form is still coming to terms with this deep and recent change.

I had cause to read the first chapter of this terrific series recently and the above passage started me thinking: Why do I write novels?

I don't think that when I write I am consciously trying to work out who I am, and it sure ain't for the glamour. I write to entertain; mostly myself, but also the audience, the readers. I want someone to have the experience I have had when reading - staying up past 1am to finish a book, falling slowing in love with the characters, and mourning them when the book is over.

So perhaps there are two schools of writers: the ones who work out 'who we are' and the people who write for the kicks. I call them the Philosophers and the Entertainers.

Philosophers: These authors write from the heart and their raison d'etre is to find out something about the characters, themselves, or the human race in general. Their primary focus is on finding the 'truth' in a novel. They are content in an unhappy/unsatisfactory event in a story as long as it is 'true'.

Entertainers: These are the raconteurs, the old storytellers who would retell a tale by the campfire, driven on by the reactions of their audience. Their primary goal is to elicit thrills, empathy, romance or rage in their readers, depending on their chosen genre.

Which are you? Let me know in the comments.

CWIG Conference – Dianne hofmeyr – GIRL ON A PLANE

Some of us heard Miriam Moss speak at the CWIG Conference in Bath in early September about her novel, Girl on a Plane, and saw those incredible images of the hi-jack that took place in 1970 over a 4 day period in the Jordanian desert. But for those who couldn’t be there, I interviewed Miriam about the writing process and how she managed to tell of her experience through fiction.

In the story, we are inside the head of 15 year old Anna. It’s an emotional journey of resilience and aloneness. When in the process of writing the story did it become apparent to you that you needed to write it as fiction based on fact, rather than as non-fiction? And why?

While I was researching, I realised, with a cast of seventy or so characters, many still alive, that I wouldn’t be able to write with absolute accuracy about what they said and did, and how they behaved after so many years, so it had to be fiction. Adam Foulds said that sometimes, ‘Truth is often best told through fiction, where history can be reordered and compressed to develop its full dramatic and human potential.’ I’m hoping that’s true in this case.

The story is fraught with tension like the shocking moment when Anna’s belt gets caught on the hi-jacker’s bullet strap as she squeezes past him to go to the toilet. The air literally crackles with tension. But you have broken the tension with very human, almost fragile moments… like Anna worrying about how she was going to descend the steep ladder in her short wrap-over 1970’s skirt without showing her underwear. And the moment when the turtle gets lost. The fact that the boy she is sitting next to isn’t some gorgeous guy, but actually almost geeky. Was it possible for you in the writing process, to shut out your own emotional trauma and almost remove yourself from the story?

No, not always. The first draft was particularly hard. I had to go in and dig up all the emotions involved and then, to write convincingly, relive them. I had been warned (by those who know about these things) that I was probably giving myself a daily bout of trauma therapy. But my editor had said she didn’t want raw emotion or therapeutic writing, so somehow I had to process the trauma and provide her with proper professional story telling. Luckily, with each ensuing draft, the story became less and less emotionally charged for me, so now it’s in a quieter place far off.

In a traditional story-telling scenario, ‘the call to action’ moment is marked by the hi-jacker suddenly appearing in the doorway with a gun in his hand. The moment is very dramatic but how difficult was it for you to keep up the beats of the story-telling process, given the fact that you remain in the same confined space for the rest of the story – almost in a capsule – where Anna’s world has shrunk to the joy of a few sips of water and a cracker and she isn’t even sure whether anyone knows she’s alive?

Well, I had a number of dramatic ‘real events’ to hang the story on and move things forward. For example, when the press arrived and were allowed to come into the plane and film us, when we had our photo taken with all the guerrillas in the desert, when we were harangued and threatened by the angry hijacker we called Lady Macbeth. And being inside Anna’s head meant I could go anywhere with her thoughts.

I felt you captured the sense of tight confinement in a space that's essentially a prison (though in sharp contrast the plane is in a vast desert landscape.) How did you manage this sense of confinement? How did you put yourself back into this small space? And I wondered if the plane itself became another character for you just as landscape becomes a character or a force in a story set in a wide, open space.

I became increasingly attached to the plane as I wrote, and decided that, to really make the inside location authentic, I had to visit the VC 10 at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, Cambs. Though the plane was closed to the public, they let me have it to myself for several hours to write and film. It was an extraordinary experience. I also went back to Jordan to find the revolutionary airstrip where the planes were all blown up which I describe at the end of the book.

Anna has a very close relationship with her mother. For those who haven’t yet read the book, I should explain Anna is travelling alone back to boarding school when the hi-jack occurs and with no mobiles in the 70’s, is unable to communicate with her family. But every now and again you break the story with the mother’s viewpoint. I thought it was a brilliant touch and for me added to, rather than negated the tension. From a writer’s perspective, was this what you intended? And did you have this in mind right from the start or was it something that evolved through the re-writing and editing process?

I found it impossible not to mention Anna’s parents’ reactions to the news of her hijack. And, as I wrote, it became apparent that central to the book was how Anna was sustained by her mother’s love as she faced death. I also thought that readers would need some respite from the ratcheting tension on board as the clock ticked down to the deadline and the passengers faced the prospect of being blown up. 

I had a sense that you weren’t asking the reader to take sides. In the story you give a young Palestinian boy the opportunity to voice his case and you get Anna to mull over this. Are these the thoughts of the adult writer or can you recall the 15 year old Miriam having empathy for these hi-jackers?

Yes, I can recall talking to the hijackers and hearing their stories, and being horrified by the contrast in our respective lives. I had lived already in the Yemen, Africa and China, so I had seen poverty at first hand, but I had never experienced the homeless and the dispossessed with such immediacy before.

When I watched your film and presentation at the CWIG Conference, even though the events took place 45 years ago, the visuals were shockingly real. For me there are two that stand out – the photograph of the real Miriam standing outside the plane in the desert, blond hair sweeping her face and as fragile and vulnerable as any 15 year old could be – and the photograph of the VC10 plane being blown up only hours after the rescue with the same explosives that had been strapped to the wheels and had filled the undercarriage while you were on that plane. The full impact of those two visuals juxtaposed against each other could not have been more startling.

Newspaper photograph taken outside the V10 on the airstrip during the hi-jack. Miriam in the centre. 

The explosives detonated by the hi-jackers shortly after the rescue. 

I think you’ve shown this sharp reality in your writing – the fragility but at the same time the bravery and quiet resilience of this young girl in an atmosphere of tinderbox tension where jittery nerves could precipitate disaster. How did you manage to capture the person who is Anna? 

Anna has of course elements of me in her character, but she isn’t me at 15, she’s an amalgam of my daughters and many other 15 year olds I’ve known. Equally Marni isn’t my mother. As a work of fiction, I wrote the novel based on something real that happened, but then imagined Anna and the other characters in the book into existence.

As a writer I love that... you 'imagined Anna into existence'. Thank you Miriam for sharing your writing process. Anyone who reads Girl on a Plane, cannot escape being untouched by the events of those four days in September 1970 on a strip of the Jordanian desert. It’s a book that has enormous relevance and will find a place in the minds of readers for a long time to come. Girl on a Plane needs to be shared.

GIRL ON A PLANE by Miriam Moss, Andersen Press

www.diannehofmeyr.com 
Twitter @dihofmeyr
Zeraffa Giraffa, by Dianne Hofmeyr, illustrated by Jane Ray, published by Frances Lincoln, is one of The Sunday Times Top 100 Classics for Children in the last 10 years.

Judging a Book....Eve Ainsworth

I have always been a bit fussy when it comes to books. It goes without saying that I have to love the concept and in a lot of cases I'm swayed by recommendations. But what can often make me decide to pick up a book in the first place is the cover. If it is striking, if it grabs my attention - I very often want it, or at least want to know more about it.


So it goes without saying that I was delighted when Scholastic sent me the design for Seven Days. I immediately loved its bright, bold statement and the fact that words, spiteful words from my text, were plastered across it. It represents bullying so well for me. It's a big, bold statement. I was confident that this cover could have impact.

I guess I'd worried a lot about the cover. I really wanted to love it, so it was such a relief to see it. I just wanted to hug the designer behind it (in fact I did at the Scholastic party...!)

It got me thinking just how important cover design can be, and how authors could be blessed or cursed with a cover that they do not like, or do not feel reflects their story.

With this in mind, I spoke to a few authors about their favourite covers and asked what it was about them that made them stand out.

What were their cover stories?

Helen Grant - Urban Legends (Random House)

" I was very pleased this cover because it shows a female (dead?) body but in such a way that it appears almost abstract; you can only see one eye and the line of the face runs diagonally across the cover. I thought that was quite stylish."

    Keren David selected Salvage (Atom Books)

  " I love both the published versions of Salvage. They are very different, but still have lots of impact."

Hilary Freeman selected The Camden Town Tales (Piccadilly Press)

"I love all my Camden Town Tales covers. I think that they appeal to the readership because they are pretty and perfectly targeted."  

Emma Haughton  selected Now You See Me (Usbourne)

'I love this cover because it's so simple, and yet so striking, And that gorgeous zingy green!'

Sheena Wilkinson selected Still Falling (Little Island)

"What I loved was the feel of the cover. I couldn't in a million years have said what I wanted but when I saw what the designer had done I just thought, yeah, that's it. I wanted the book to have a sexy grown up feel which I think it does. My last books all featured horses and I really wanted this one to feel like a departure which it does. "

Caroline Green  selected Hold Your Breath (Piccadilly Press)

"I loved the metallic look that gave it an underwater feel. And the colours are gorgeous."

It's fascinating looking at different front covers and wondering what the author felt about each one. I guess when an area such as design is taken out of their hands, it's even more important that it works, that they connect to it.

What front covers do you especially like? Have you ever picked up a book initially because of the design?

I know I have...

Eve x

“More out of books than out of real life” - Lily Hyde

This quote, from Russian Menshevik Lydia Dan, is one of the epigraphs to my work in progress (one of them), a novel about Russian and Ukrainian revolutionaries.

Lydia Dan, a nice girl from a nice upper middle class family of Russian Jewish intellectuals, ended up touring Moscow factories agitating for workers rights among people she had barely a common language with, staying the night with prostitutes to avoid being picked up by the secret police, marrying not just one but two revolutionaries, losing her child, choosing the wrong side (Trotsky’s Mensheviks over Lenin’s Bolsheviks), and living long enough to see a revolution she dedicated her life to, turn distinctly sour and bitter.

“As people we were much more out of books than out of real life,” Dan says, in an extended interview with Leopold Haimson published in The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries. She means that in her young days, she and her fellow idealists who sat up or walked the streets all night discussing the revolution to come, had seen nothing of ‘real life’. They got their world view from reading Marx and Chernyshevsky and Gorky; the first time Dan actually met a real-life prostitute all she could think about were scenes she had read in Maupassant. They were so busy theorizing about the revolution, and inhabiting its weird, underground, anti-social existence of ideas, that they did not know how to hold down a job, pay a bill, mend a coat, look after a baby…

For me, writing about such people a century later, the quote has a second meaning. Dan and her fellow revolutionaries seem to me like characters out of books: utterly recognisable in their loves and hates and idiocies and heroics, but larger than life, more vivid and interesting, coming from a complete and absorbing world that exists safely between the pages. In other words, fictional.

These last few months in Ukraine, I’ve met the contemporary reincarnation of Dan and her fellow revolutionaries. They are here in all their guises: the ones who make bombs and pick up guns, the ones who write heartfelt tracts or disseminate poisonously attractive lies, the ones who look after the poor and the dispossessed, the ones who spy and betray, the ones who are ready to die for ‘the people’ and the ones who kill, rob and torture people in the name of making a profit. 

Again and again, I keep coming across characters who are straight from 1917.

It’s all amazing, amazing material for my novel, of course. But I realise that maybe I am more like Dan than I thought. My ideas for that novel came more out of reading than from experience: I thought those revolutionaries were safely between the pages.

It is terrifying to realise that the people who are tearing a country I love to pieces, or trying desperately to hold it together, are in fact, much more out of real life than out of books. 

www.lilyhyde.com

Dream Land - A novel about the Crimean Tatars' deportation and return to Crimea

Game Theory - Heather Dyer

Copyright Levente Fulop

 

Game theory must be the epitome of Western faith in logic. We think that if we plug in some variables and press a button we can predict the future. Apparently, we apply it to all sorts of things: economics, war… It’s founded on our belief that if we know enough facts we’ll be in control. But do we really think that we can ever come close to factoring everything in? Isn’t it a bit like trying to predict exactly how the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Tokyo will affect the time that Mrs Morgan arrives at work in Sheffield?

And yet, perhaps those game theorists have a point. If, as quantum physicists now seem to believe, "we are one", the flap of a butterfly’s wings will affect the time that Mrs Morgan gets to work. Nothing acts in isolation. Every event, every movement, every action, every thought is affected by everything that has come before it and in turn affects everything that comes afterwards. So there is, in fact, a formula connecting Tokyo and Sheffield – and if we could plug in every variable we could calculate the outcome.

In order to predict such complex causality with any certainty, however, our equation would have to take everything into account. The result would be that it wouldn’t just predict one outcome, it would predict every outcome. It would be huge. It would be a mathematical equation that would incorporate the entire world. No - the universe! Wait a minute – this equation would be the universe. Our primitive little left brains, which like to quantify and categorize, simply aren’t sophisticated enough for this sort of maths.

Our right brains, however, would seem to be designed to compute exactly this sort of all-encompassing complexity. Not logically – but intuitively. In the creative and scientific disciplines, tiny portions of the Great Equation tend to reveal themselves in brief, bright flashes of insight, during which we shout ‘eureka!’ In fact, David Bohm, quantum physicist and author of On Creativity, believes that the intrinsic appeal of all artistic or creative endeavour is this moment of satisfaction, in which we perceive what he describes as ‘a certain oneness and totality or wholeness, constituting a kind of harmony that is felt to be beautiful’.

The truth, in other words.

Writing fiction involves exactly these sorts of flashes of insight. They’re like lightning strikes, illuminating the way. Flash by flash we find our way through the forest, and step by step the narrative unfolds. Every step must link logically – truthfully – to the one before it and the one that comes after it. One false note and the chain is broken and the mathematics goes awry.

If we try and predict a plot logically, using a pre-arranged formula – the way that game theory seems to – it tends to feel ‘wrong’. It never quite rings true in a way that makes you want to shout ‘eureka!’ What a novelist wants is for the causality of events to be so sophisticated and yet so flawlessly logical that afterwards the reader thinks, “I didn’t see that coming – but in retrospect, of-course it was inevitable.” This sort of integrity is rarely achieved by the logical mind; it has to be intuited.

So, step by step we intuit the way. We draw on all the powers of our unconscious to intuit exactly what a certain character will do and what will happen as a consequence. Intuition is about widening our perspective, holding the whole world of our novel in the periphery of our vision in order to feel the pattern.

The end result is a plot: a linked sequence of cause and effect that has an almost scientific integrity to it. The plot reveals the underlying pattern, the mathematical formula that underpins our novel’s ‘reality’. How do we know if we’ve got it right? Because it feels right. It clicks.

Sometimes people assume that writing fiction must be easier than non-fiction. They assume that because you can make it up as you go along, you can write whatever you want. But nothing could be further from the truth. You can’t just write whatever you want. You have to write exactly what would happen. No wonder writing fiction is so difficult. We are trying to predict the future.

www.heatherdyer.co.uk