Hard on the heels of the Booker, won by JM Coetzee for Disgrace, comes the Whitbread, with another South African on the shortlist. Former publisher Robert McCrum looks at prizes and the literary life
Fiction, money and prizes are in the air in Britain once again. The Whitbread Prize will be awarded on January 26 from a shortlist of The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman, Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes and Leading the Cheers by South African-born Justin Cart-wright. At the same time, WH Smith has just launched its Fresh Talent promotion of interesting first novels.
Many people dream of writing a novel. A few actually do. Of these, only a handful make the transition from the table in the kitchen to the front table in the bookshops. When I was a publisher, the saddest moment in the week was the departmental evaluation of the so-called “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts, some 10E000 to 15E000 a year.
To help elucidate the mystery of how to write a novel and get it published, WH Smith has asked its Fresh Talent for words of advice. The replies open a revealing window on the imaginative perspective of some new English writers. Georgina Wroe, author of Slaphead, takes a no- nonsense line to the rousing of the dormant muse. “Divide the novel into achievable segments, ie 10 x 10E000 word chapters; divide that into a week [sic]. Start writing.” Harlan Coben’s One False Move is alleged to be “a wicked combination of humour and suspense”. His line on this old writing business is: “Drink heavily. And write. Write a lot. Don’t take classes. Don’t buy a new notebook or any of that. Just write.”
Cheers, Harlan. Somehow, I don’t see you spending much time with fellow Fresh Talent TR Brown, author of The Death of Amy Parris: “Read Arnold Bennett’s How to Be an Author,” advises Brown, “and Julian Friedman’s How to Make Money Scriptwriting … grossly, tactfully flatter [an] agent.”
Why do we write? asked Freud. His celebrated answer was money, fame and the love of women. But many writers write to make sense of the chaos of everyday existence. From a publisher’s point of view, the torrent of unpublished (and unpublishable) fiction and autobiography seems to be motivated by a vague desire to Get Published and Make a Lot of Money. That’s the title of a recently published “How to” guide (Piatkus) to the publishing maze by Susan (If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?) Page, who writes enticingly of the “seven minimum requirements to achieve a six-figure advance” and a “step-by-step system for planning your own `blockbuster promotion'”.
What such guides to the literary world rarely acknowledge is the condition of the average writer. Allowing for the hours of midnight oil, the early rising and the squandered holidays, most writers take home the kind of pay that would not disgrace a trainee shop assistant.
After Page, it’s a relief to move from the miseries of Grub Street to a slightly more elevated perspective on the literary life. Barry Lopez is one of America’s finest living writers. Arctic Dreams, his hypnotic account of the Arctic Circle, won acclaim in its day, though I doubt whether it earned Lopez even a fraction of the kind of money Page would settle for. Lopez, however, would not worry about this. His latest book, About This Life, is that most unpromising item, a “collection of essays”. For those who delight in nature writing at its finest, Lopez’s observations will more than repay the cost of admission. For me, the introductory essay on the nature of the fiction writer’s art provided a refreshing antidote to the incessant prize-and-money chatter of the book world.
“Story …[is] a powerful and clarifying human invention. Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image … it is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair.”
So fiction gives us wisdom. It’s a world away from prizes and money.