Laurie Graham's Blog, page 24

There’s a thing women’s magazines have started doing. Where they would formerly have commissioned an article from a writer whose work they like they now go trawling. Let’s say they’ve decided they want to run a feature on Living With a Competitive Sister. They send out a request to every publicist in the land. Do you have anyone who’d be interested in writing this?

The publicists forward the request to, yes, everyone in their address book. I guess it works. Someone must bite for magazines to continue this practice, but it’s an approach that doesn’t appeal to most writers and I’ll tell you why. The job involves a photo shoot with (and I quote) ‘top hair and make-up artists and a fashion stylist’.  They actually want to know your bust size, before you’ve even pitched for the job. So it’s not really a journalism job at all. It’s a photo feature and you will be It.

Pictures are king in journalism today. Editors like loads of colourful photos around which they may ask you to fit a few words. All very well as long as the pics are of other people, or cute kittens. Not so good if you’re a working writer. One of the advantages of the profession is invisibility. Would you recognise Ken Follett if you passed him in the street? I don’t think so.

As for a photo shoot  -  Laurie, pictured here outside the British Library, is wearing a vibrant orange two piece by Fat Old Broads. Hair by Baz at Helmet Head  -   don’t these commissioning editors know anything about writers? Don’t they know our natural plumage is an old cardigan and an elasticated waistband? I’m sure it’s in the contract somewhere.

I wandered, lonely as…. lonely as a sadsack with halitosis and a personality disorder? No, that doesn’t work.  Back to the pencil chewing.

Let’s talk about similes. I’ve discovered that I have, if not an allergy certainly a sub-clinical sensitivity to them. Dog dander, sulphites, and now similes. The sulphites are a particular burden because I love pickled onions and Mavrodaphne wine. Although not in the same mouthful.

Similes are much harder to avoid. If you read fiction   -  I try not to but sometimes you just gotta  -  they’re all over the place like…. like pictures of people called Kardashian.

Maybe you like similes. Here are a few beauts for you.

The reading lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.

Her embrace made his manhood swell like roadkill on hot tarmac.

His eyebrows were like the tails of dead mice.

Her skirt rustled like a cockroach in a sugar bowl.

Actually, that last one’s not bad. Nevertheless my attitude to similes remains, use sparingly and if you can’t trust yourself, don’t use them at all. Overdosing is easily done and then you’ve got similes raining down on you like…. like frozen passenger pee on a Heathrow flight path.

Am I oversensitive? Well I’m a creative type, dammit. I’m allowed to be.

Touchy as a Venus Flytrap on speed, that’s me.

   This morning I slayed (slew?) an elephant. Not a real one, you understand. I like elephants, though I acknowledge they don’t make good neighbours. Uprooting trees, trampling crops and generally setting themselves up for an ASBO. And they look so cute.  But I’m talking about distant elephants, those things we agree to because they’re months and months away and then every time we open the diary they’ve grown bigger and more threatening.

I was asked to lead a historical fiction workshop on the flimsy grounds that if you have some writing ability you can advise others who have ambitions in that field. I’ve never attended a workshop. I have little idea what goes on in workshops. To me the word belongs to the world of craftsmen. I have a friend who makes jewellery. He has a bench and an array of tools and a dentist’s overall besmirched with jeweller’s rouge.  That’s a workshop.

Anyway I kind of agreed to do it because it was nice to be asked and I figured it wouldn’t hurt me to try something new. I put it in the diary. It was a pinprick on the horizon.  A writer friend, very experienced in these things, warned me it would be a huge amount of work. But that didn’t bother me. It was more the growing dread of not knowing what the hell I was doing and worse still, not being convinced that workshops are a terribly good idea. I’m on record as saying that writers should just sit in a room and write and not always be asking others to critique their stuff.

And every time I allowed that thought to surface the workshop elephant lumbered a little closer.

By last evening I could see the whites of his tiny eyes. ‘Walk away, Laurie,’ I thought. ‘Do it calmly but do it while you can.’

So I did. I cancelled. And guess what? I discovered the organisers were thinking of cancelling anyway. They’ve encountered a few organisational hitches (they said). Or maybe the word got round. Laurie Graham? Are you kidding? She hasn’t even passed Workshopping Level One. Instead of being cross or panic-stricken the organisers were quietly grateful that I had made the decision for them. They were relieved, I was relieved, we who are relieved salute you.

I now have an elephant-free diary.

I’ve been invited to speak at The Lady Literary Lunch on September 9th and unlike Miss Otis I am able. You can reserve your seat right here

No pushing, eye-poking or stampeding, please.

It’s been a funny old week.  We went down to Kerry for a few days, making the most of our Senior Citizen free travel passes before the Irish government decides to withdraw that generous concession. But I took with me two pieces of work: the page proofs of The Grand Duchess of Nowhere which required immediate attention and my research notes for the new book. My mind, you might say, was definitely on work in hand. Also a nice seafood lunch in Dingle.  I was therefore thrown for a minute when I received an email from my publisher congratulating me on publication day. Then I got it. They meant the mass market edition of The Liar’s Daughter.

I used to get excited about publication days and expected others to do likewise. My first couple of books  I wondered why the streets weren’t strung with bunting. Then I began to understand the scale of the book business. A novel may be a year’s work to me but it’s  just another drop in the ocean of publishing. I calmed down. Celebrated pub day quietly with my loved ones and then went back to work. The release of a cheaper edition, a year after first publication, doesn’t even register on the seismograph because by then I’ve moved on and typed an awful lot more words.

However…. I know I have readers who can’t afford hardbacks or trade paperbacks, readers who watch intently for publication of the mass market edition and rush out to buy it, God bless them. So in case any of you missed last week’s muted fanfare, it’s out, it’s cheap, and it got a nice little review in the Independent.

Now, on with Project 2015.

     Circumstances beyond anyone’s control have led to a telescoping of the final tweaks to this year’s book. Less than a week after finishing the copy-edit the page proofs are already on my desk. It’s been hectic and quite taxing, not least because of a bit of a grammatical wrestling match.

Generally speaking writers don’t get to meet their copy editors. As with designers, it’s a relationship best conducted at a distance. Sometimes it’s as smooth as silk, sometimes it’s the occasion for an outbreak of authorial tetchiness.

I don’t claim to be a great grammarian nor even particularly wish to be. My novels are loaded with dialogue which must, above all, be convincing. Imagine then my despair when I found that I was being copyedited by someone with an uncompromising attitude to the use of the subjunctive tense. And ears of cloth.

Again and again ‘was’  was corrected to ‘were’. At the start I felt chastened. By page 70 I was feeling mightily pissed off.  Even allowing for the admittedly more formal speech of the early 20th century so much of it sounded wrong. And so I began to bite back. ‘Were’ reverted to ‘was’ unless the case for the prosecution was watertight. Quite often it wasn’t. Sometimes it was deeply flawed. It was, I would say, as severe a case of subjunctivitis as I have ever seen. Pity. It was an otherwise thorough and excellent edit. Ah well, you can’t have everything. I don’t know why, but apparently you can’t.

First thanks to all those who responded to my last post. It’s always interesting to take a sounding from readers before I set off and, in all likelihood, carry on as before.

Most days I have lunch with my husband and most days he asks, ‘How goes it?’

It’s a question I try to duck. Progress on a novel is a tricky thing to assess. If you’re knitting a woolly hat for your granddaughter (and I am) you can say, ‘Well, I’m just shaping the crown. I have the ears to do, then it’ll be finished.’ But a novel…

For one thing, today’s work, deemed worthy of saving to a flash drive may, by tomorrow, be destined for the waste bin. This can be particularly true at the beginning, where you’re still finding the right voice, or the middle when you’re flagging, or the end when you’re sick of the whole damned project. So basically anywhere. The other point is that progress isn’t evenly paced. Writing the first hundred pages of a novel takes far longer than the next two hundred.

I can’t say how typical this is. My writer friends and I tend not to talk about work. Some novelists do seem to be able to predict their progress with frightening accuracy. Some know that without interruptions they can turn out a novel in six weeks. To me this sounds as unattainable as flying to Mars. Perhaps ‘without interruptions’ is the key factor. Perhaps not. Even without running a house and fielding phone calls six weeks doesn’t seem to allow any time for false starts, the removal of tedious characters or the shoring up of a sagging plot. Nor does it give you any wiggle room for those dark moments when the Inner Writer whispers, ‘Are you kidding?’

So how goes it? Okay. I guess. This morning I’ve dumped more than I’ve kept but out of the dross something is starting to emerge.

You know, in the olden days when we wrote books with typewriters or even pens, Word Count was something you estimated. Not a bad thing.

    So here I am, suitcase unpacked, laundry done and ready for anything. I had imagined I’d have plenty of time for creative thinking during my holiday, seeing as how someone else was steering the boat and cooking dinner but as it turned out my thoughts very soon settled into a comfortable rut. The biggest decision I made all week was whether to have dessert or cheese. I guess I needed a rest. But now I have a serious matter to address. The direction my…ahem…career has taken.

I’ve been getting stick recently from some of my readers. They don’t like my move into pre-20th century fiction. The charges against me have been: books too boring, books too full of complicated stuff. Well. Boredom is, of course, entirely in the eye of the beholder. If you say a book is boring I can only plead that others have not found it so. ‘Complicated stuff’ is easier for me to defend. If I am capable of writing it, it cannot possibly be that difficult because I don’t know much about anything. However I do enjoy learning about things. Perhaps my mistake, if I’ve made one, is to assume that all my readers like to pick up bits of information too.

There has also been a much graver complaint: that my books aren’t as funny as they used to be. This may be true. Some of my earlier novels were described as ‘hilarious romps’, a label I detested. I also felt it completely misrepresented me. Hilarious is an over-used word anyway, and I thought, hoped, that my humour was gentler than that. Writers change over the years. Mainly we just try to get better at what we do. There are writers who use the same winning formula again and again. They are richer than I’ll ever be but sadly I’ve never found a way to emulate them. Anyway, I don’t have carte blanche. I’m a breadwinner. I can only write what someone will pay me to write.

It is true my earlier novels had a stronger comic streak. And guess what? They didn’t sell. I have a small and devoted following of readers. Some of them will buy any new book by me, God bless them and save them. Unfortunately many of them then hand their copy round their friends and relations until it falls to pieces. They write and tell me so.  And flattering as it is to be passed around it does little for my commercial survival in the ruthless world of publishing. I turned to historical fiction chiefly because of my poor sales figures and my publishers thought it was worth the experiment. Has it been a success? The jury is still out. I have one more novel to deliver before I’m out of contract and it will be historical because that’s what I’m being paid to do.

And the humour? I didn’t think it had gone away. Actually humour was one of the things I hoped to bring to historical fiction, a genre that can easily take itself too seriously. But life changes. When I was writing novels like Perfect Meringues I was younger and breezier. Now I’m a full-time carer as well as a writer there are days when the chuckle tank is almost empty and maybe that’s reflected in my writing. Still,  I haven’t exactly turned into Dostoevsky. Have I?

Perfect timing, for once in my working life. My long-planned holiday starts tomorrow when I can say, hand on heart, that I’ve well and truly cleared my desk. Even the tempting bit of journalism that was wafted under my nose late on Sunday evening has been done and delivered. The sight of an open suitcase can certainly energise a person.

We’re going away to a guaranteed wi-fi-free zone and in the interests of travelling light and returning refreshed I’m taking no research materials with me and no laptop. My Kindle is tanked up with thrillers and I have a short list of single malts I hope to taste. Oh and comfy shoes. The barrel-scrapings of my heel collection are going to a charity shop this morning. I’m hanging on to just one pair on which to perch decoratively should I ever again get invited to a party.

When I return there will be the important matter of choosing a font for my next book. I’ve been in a bit of a rut the last two books and I think it’s time for a change. I’m also going to increase my standing hours. They say standing is good for you. Unless you have varicose veins. Or fallen arches. I’m not sure who ‘they’ are, possibly the same people who tell us to eat kale or be sorry, but no matter. I find I can work particularly well with my computer on the ironing board set up at its highest  notch.

So that’s my working summer sorted. Out with the Georgia 12 point and then on with the same old. Chapter 1…….

     I don’t spend too much of my time poring over the work of other, better writers and feeling bitter. You can only do your best, as my old Mum used to say. I’ve always admired the work of Peter Ackroyd and was particularly shocked to discover that he’s younger than me. How did he get to be so good so fast? Ah well.

An acquaintance of mine once claimed to have encountered Ackroyd in a railway carriage and passed a congenial hour or two in conversation, a scenario I found so improbable I wondered what psychotropic substance my acquaintance was on. If I should ever see Peter Ackroyd seated in my railway compartment of choice I reckon I’d run away to the bar. Just supposing it wasn’t a Trolley Service Only train. I don’t think you chat to Peter Ackroyd. He’s not an approachable, fluffy author like many of us in the lower orders.

However, I did read a recent interview with him and was chuffed to learn that we have at least one thing in common as writers: as soon as a book is finished we forget about it. Seriously. I struggle to remember the protagonists of all but my most recent novels and as for recalling particular scenes or minor characters, no chance. When it’s finished  -  and by this weekend the final revisions of The Grand Duchess of Nowhere will be done, gone, off my desk never to return except as page proofs  – I move on swiftly and happily to the next project. In my case it’s because I (and my editor) know when a book of mine is as good as it’s going to get. Also because the gas bill has to be paid. In Peter Ackroyd’s case I imagine it’s because that’s just the driven way he is. Still, it made me feel a little better about the shifty-eyed way I blag my way out of a conversation with a reader which has begun, ‘I loved that bit where Crystal ruins her fur mittens with sticky taffy.’

Crystal?, I think. Who in the wide blue yonder was she?

Now I know I can put it down to the Ackroyd Tendency.