Zirk van den Berg's Blog

Reflections on a book launch tour

Last month, I had a week of being made a fuss of. Flown halfway around the world. Media interviews. Sound and video recordings. Photographs. People regarding me as if I were important, asking questions and listening to what I had to say. The odd bit of flattery.

It was all in aid of selling a book.

The Afrikaans translation of my crime novel Nobody Dies at no 1 on a bestseller shelf. A rare occasion that had to be captured.

Never before, a publisher told me, has...

How to like reading about a hero you don’t like – ‘The Goodbye Kiss’ by Massimo Carlotto

Reading Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel The Goodbye Kiss, I was once again reminded how intriguing an unsympathetic main character can be in fiction.

My own novel No-Brainer features a main character some readers find too hard to like. However, I do ascribe to the accepted truism of writing that the reader should care for the main character and preferably like them enough to root for them. I also wrote elsew...

For much of the 20th Century, being innovative in art was a precondition for recognition, if not sufficient reason in itself. It was certainly the case in visual art. Novels, too, could not escape being judged on their novelty value.

What has come to interest me more than novelty is the possibility of doing something valuable within the canons of well-established art forms. Can one, for instance, write a book within the constraints of pulp fiction that is also great literature?

In science ficti...

For much of the 20th Century, being innovative in art was a precondition for recognition, if not sufficient reason in itself. It was certainly the case in visual art. Novels, too, could not escape being judged on their novelty value.

What has come to interest me more than novelty is the possibility of doing something valuable within the canons of well-established art forms.  Can one, for instance, write a book within the constraints of pulp fiction that is also great literature?

In science...

It has occurred to me that writing is a laborious way of collecting rejection slips. I got my first one in 1979 and publishers turning down my manuscripts still outnumber the times they have agreed to publish my work by a factor of ten or so.

Getting a rejection slip is a disappointment for any author. Here you are, pouring your soul or at least many hours into a project and some stranger says it's not worth publishing. Feeling hurt, wronged or angry is normal.

But it would be wrong to assume t...

Writers, especially those early in their writing career, can improve their books with a straightforward self-check. The best books tend to have a high density of significance. By this rather fancy sounding term I mean the numerical ratio of sentences to significant realisations. Let me explain.

On the least dense end of the scale you might find a self-published genre novel that has one significant thought per page. Anyone reading that page gets little more from it than, say, the fact that the...

Writers, especially those early in their writing career, can improve their books with a straightforward self-check. The best books tend to have a high density of significance. By this rather fancy sounding term I mean the numerical ratio of sentences to significant realisations. Let me explain.

On the least dense end of the scale you might find a self-published genre novel that has one significant thought per page. Anyone reading that page gets little more from it than, say, the fact that the ...

Reading habits are formed by repeated acts of disposal. Read a book you don’t particularly enjoy and the writer will probably be discarded from your reading list. As you read more books, more authors get a figurative black mark next to their name. The survivors are what we refer to as our favourite writers.

Even these favourites may lose their place on the reading list as the years go by. Either our tastes change or we simply finish reading all their books or at least all the best ones.

Looking...

Reading habits are formed by repeated acts of disposal. Read a book you don't particularly enjoy and the writer will probably be discarded from your reading list. As you read more books, more authors get a figurative black mark next to their name. The survivors are what we refer to as our favourite writers.

Even these favourites may lose their place on the reading list as the years go by. Either our tastes change or we simply finish reading all their books or at least all the best ones.

Looking...

I can’t play tennis for shit. Or money. But I am a committed fan, perhaps one that should be committed. Mornings when I trade the world of dreams where I spend my nights for the world wide web where I spend my days, it’s a toss up between first checking my email, bank balance or the ATP tennis results.

I write for love. And money. Over the years, I’ve spent thousands of hours writing. I’d like to think I got better along the way. That’s the right and proper order of things, that you get better...