Would You Write Differently If You Knew How People Read?

Guess what?  Not only does your e-reader give you books to read, but it can also supply data on how you read - where you stop reading, whether you go to the end, how long it takes to read.  This raises lots of questions about things like privacy, but I wondered: how will this affect writers?

If non-fiction tends to be put down after 50,000 words, will publishers only buy works of that length?  Will writers cut down on their word counts because they know 50,000 is the 'right' length, even though the subject demands it?

If we know that many readers skip the descriptions will we stop writing them?  If literary fiction is read more slowly, will even fewer literary novels get published as slow read = fewer sales.

What really worries me is that, as a writer, I don't see how you can write anything worth reading unless it comes from your heart and guts.  You have to believe, utterly, if the reader is to believe along with you.

All this data is head stuff.  It's like writing for the market, the tail wagging the dog.  The customer may always be right, but sometimes the customer doesn't know what it is they want until they see it - isn't that how Steve Jobs made Apple the company it is by giving people what they didn't know they wanted?

Many things have worried me about publishing over the last couple of years, but they've seemed all answerable by putting one's head down and just plugging away at writing the best book you can.  But this worries me the most because the best book you can write will be written with the potential customer saying 'add a bit of this, take that bit out'.

Mind you, I suppose it's like someone suggesting that they supply the ideas, you do the writing and you split the profits.  The answer (which I've never actually given, being too polite) is, go and write your own b****y book and leave me to get on with mine.

Rain, Tides and Tourists at the Seaside

It's the start of the summer season and St Ives is filling up with tourists.  This is a conversation my daughter and her friend had with some day trippers a couple of weeks ago as they strolled along the harbour front with the sea lapping at the walls...

Tourists:  What's happened?  We came last year and there was lots of sand, and the water was right out there (points out to sea).

Daughter:  Oh, it's all this rain we've been having, it's made the sea levels rise.

Tourists: Can't your government do anything?

Daughter's friend: They were going to put a plug in the bay to drain the water out, but it's been cancelled due to the recession.

Daughter: The whole town will be under water within ten years, what with global warming.

Tourists (obviously appalled):  That's dreadful.

I've never written anything based in St Ives before, but am going to have to now, just to include that conversation.  But will anyone believe that it could actually happen?

Fact is so often stranger - and funnier - than fiction which is why stuff you make up so often works better on the page than stuff that actually happened.  But somewhere there really are people who don't know about high tide and low tide...

Writing in First Person

When you begin writing, using first person often seems natural.  I struggled for a little while to get used to writing in the third person, but it's now my preferred form.  I wanted to write in third because I found it harder to write characters who weren't me when I wrote 'I did this', or 'I did that'.  I later found out that third person is more popular with readers and it's the most flexible form to use, so there are practical reasons for choosing third.

But there are plenty of reasons for choosing first too.  It's easier to capture a character's voice when you're writing in first, as everything has to be from their point of view.  Voice is particularly important in children and young adult fiction, where readers are less interested in areas such as style.  They want to feel that they are experiencing those things, living that life.  Having said that, many favourite characters, including Harry Potter, are written in third.

First person means that the reader only knows what the narrator chooses to tell them.  This allows scope for writing unreliable narrators, where part of the pleasure for readers is discovering that the narrator is fooling them (and also sometimes themselves).

Someone was recently quoted on radio as saying first person is essentially a lie as the narrator, by definition, has already experienced those events.  That can be part of the unreliable narrator, but sometimes the sense that the character is telling their story to the reader is part of the pleasure - I love the Mary Stewart trilogy about King Arthur which is narrated by Merlin.  Part of my enjoyment is in the way Merlin explains what's going on, and gives background that would be otherwise be hard to digest.  The books simply wouldn't be as good in the third person.

First person is also useful when there's an outsider narrator - Dr Watson, for example, or Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.  Dr Watson allows Sherlock Holmes to be inscrutable and brilliant without alienating readers by his arrogance, Nick Carraway observes the entwined relationships between Daisy, Gatsby and Tom in a dispassionate way that would be impossible to write about from any of the main characters view point.

So there are lots of reasons why you might choose first person.  I'm sticking to third - I don't want to slip into autobiography.  But that's my point of view.  What's yours?

It's Good When There Aren't Short Cuts. Honestly.

I've been having a big clear out of my house and went to the local dump yesterday.  As I drove out it struck me how lucky I was not to be rich, because if I'd been rich, I wouldn't have had that experience.  I wouldn't have experienced the banter between the staff, the good humour of the people doing their recycling, the feeling of satisfaction as cardboard goes into the cardboard container, the broken chair goes into the wood container and so on.

I can't claim that it was one of the best experiences of my life, but it added to my overall feeling of pleasure and satisfaction with life but if I'd been some rich celebrity, I'd have sent some minion to do my recycling and I would have missed out.

Some years ago I had a minor celebrity in one of my classes whose agent had suggested that they 'might like to try writing a novel.'  They even had a publisher eagerly waiting for their book. 'But it's hard,'  they moaned.  'I can do 5000 words but then... and I'm really busy with other projects.'  They were genuinely trying to write, but there are some who don't bother and others who have a go but need a certain amount of help from an editor or ghost writer and don't register how far the finished product differs from their original attempts (I've got several ghost writer friends who tell me it's not unusual to see their clients on the Good Morning sofa earnestly expounding that they wrote the book themselves).

The process of writing is hard, but enjoyable.  The process of getting published is hard, and the outcome is not guaranteed, but there's a lot of enjoyment to be had on the way - meeting other writers, making a group of friends experiencing the same process, learning about the way the business operates, becoming informed about the world that produces the books we love as readers.

Would I have missed that experience?  No.  There were no short cuts available to me - no agent suggesting 'why don't you write a novel?', no publisher waiting eagerly.  I didn't know any published writers or anyone in publishing, or really anything about the business.  But I've had a lot of fun, and my pleasure in writing has been enhanced a thousand fold by the difficulties along the way.

Things that come easily are rarely worth having and success tastes all the sweeter for the struggles along the way.

Why Great Ideas Need Some Thought

A friend had a great idea.  She was going to walk round the coastline of Britain, raise money for charity as she went, and along the way write a book about her experience which would then get published to critical and commercial acclaim.  It was a great idea - what could possibly go wrong?

It was a great idea.  The only problem was someone else had already had it.  It appeared that everybody had already walked the coastline of Britain, men, women, singles, couples, groups, people on crutches, people in wheelchairs, walkers with horses, dogs, donkeys - you name it, they'd already been there and done that and written books about it.

That's the problem with great ideas - they often aren't quite as great as when you first come up with them.  I've had a great idea for a non-fiction book for ages, and finally got round to putting the proposal for it down on paper.  My agent was cautiously encouraging, an editor made vaguely positive noises.  My library buyer friend was more robust. 'Do it as fiction, and I'll buy 20 copies.  As non-fiction, as it's you, probably 4, less if it's too academic.'

Hmm.  Back to the drawing board.  I'm having a re-think about my great idea and how I approach it.  But just because my great idea has turned out to be not quite as great as I first thought, that's no reason not to write it.  All ideas need a bit more thought and research than that lightbulb flash of inspiration might suggest.  What you need is a bit of fine tuning to make them your great idea, not some more generic great idea.

After all, if you've got an idea for a romance, a thriller, a memoir, whatever, you can bet someone else has already been there and done that before.  What they haven't done is your version of it.  That's original.  That's new.  That's fresh.  And that's why you are the one to write it.

And as for my friend, she did walk around the coastline, she did raise money for charity - over £25,000 - and she did write the book about it which she self-published.  I'd call that a great achievement.  Wouldn't you?

If A Job's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Well

I'm working on yet another draft of the never ending book.  I was telling a writer friend this and they sympathetically asked what the problem was. 'The writing,' I said cheerily. 'It's not good enough.'

They were taken aback by this - they'd assumed I was going to say something like, there's a plot problem in the middle.  Something specific, rather than a general 'not good enough'.  But that's the truth - it's not good enough (yet).

I read once that Richard Curtis's script editor wife reads through his draft scripts writing NFE in the margin.  NFE stands for Not Funny Enough.  He re-wrote until there were no NFEs.

If I let something I'm not proud of go through it might get published but I will know it fell below my standards.  And readers will know it falls below my standards because they're not stupid, and word of mouth will be not so good.  Then fewer people will buy the next book.

And yes, when you read about the sales that 50 Shades of Grey is getting, despite the clunky writing, it is tempting to cut corners.  But I would know.  And readers will know.  So I'll just have to carry on re-writing until it's good enough.

Addressing An Agent

On Twitter one evening one of the agents I follow was going through their slush pile and tweeting about the various manuscripts, and why they were being put on the 'read more' or 'discard' piles.  It was scary - so many manuscripts, and so many ways to end up on the discard pile.  

High on the list was getting the spelling of the agent's first name wrong.  In other words the writer failed at the second word they wrote, never mind the rest of the letter.  Wow.  

It may sound obvious but check on what the agent's name is and how they spell it by phoning up the agency and asking.  Then address them formally as:

Dear Joe Bloggs

There are two reasons you don't include the Mr, Mrs, Miss or Ms.

First, you don't know their marital status.  Take a female agent called Jane Smith.  She might be married to Mr Smith now.  She might have been married to a Mr Smith, which is the name by which she became established in publishing so continues to use, even though she's now divorced from Mr Smith and is currently single.  She might choose to use her birth name, even though she's married to Mr Jones.  

Second, you might not know what sex they are and may cause offence by addressing a man as Ms Smith.  There are lots of unisex names - Jo, Val, Chris.  And there are names that can cause confusion.  My middle name, for example, is Leslie which is the male way of spelling it (my father didn't know there Lesley was the female spelling when he registered my birth).

So check the name with the agency and use the format Dear Joe Bloggs and you won't go wrong on the second word.