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Comment from the book world in January 2002

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'Be Original'

30 December 2002

'Literature's first commandment is: Be Original. Writers have many tasks to perform in a book, but establishing an originality of tone, subject matter or attitude is the one that counts, the litmus test of consequence. Originality is like charisma. It's hard to define, but we know it when we find it. In literature, it's often associated with obsession. Books that are written out of the author's unquenchable desire to communicate his or her subject are the ones that stand out. Originality plus obsession equals that little touch of madness that can make a book truly outstanding.'

Robert McCrum, Literary Editor of the Observer, in his column, The World of Books.

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Book into Movie

23 December 2002

'There is great frustration as an agent in the lack of influence you have on movies. An author trusts you to sell their book not only because you make them money, but because you understand their vision. Here, I went through three drafts with Bonnie before a publisher ever saw it. I'd like to be there to make sure we've got the right writer, one who understands. I'd like them to know my vision, to have to consider it. I've got a point of view and I want it to matter. There is a wall, with authors and agents on one side and screenwriters and directors on the other. It's not an intelligent or necessary wall, but it's always been there.'

American agent Richard Pine in Variety, talking about why he took on the assistant producer's role to protect his author's interests on set.

'The next Alice Sebold, or a goat?'

16 December 2002

'People who want to get published think that publication will give them self-esteem, and peace of mind, make them feel whole and redeemed. But it's a fantasy, like thinking that marriage, or weight loss, or money will make you well. You only look forward to publication and touring the first two times. Then, even thinking about it is like anticipating periodontal work. It's like weeks and weeks of labor, waiting to see if your baby book will look like the next Alice Sebold, or a goat.'

Anne Lamott, in Salon

Too Old to Write?

9 December 2002

'I represented a writer some years ago called Kay Mitchell who started writing in her late 50s and published many successful books. She said she'd been to a writers' seminar and there were a couple of young publishing people from the literary imprints who said quite blithely: If you haven't got your first book published by 40 there's really no point in trying. Kay said if she'd heard that before she'd got an agent, she would have believed it and just given up. I think that's a wicked thing to say because people know more when they're mature. Writing is an intellectual activity keeps the brain going and you don't have to be particularly active to do it.'

Agent Carole Blake of Blake Friedmann in Publishing News

Christmas Book Discounting

2 December 2002

'The trouble with discounting, as I have said before, is that it lowers the price and cheapens the product. And as the product is cheapened, as consumers come to expect lower prices, so discounts have to cut ever deeper. Removing printed publisher prices from books is one way of diminishing the appeal of discounting, but not without adding extra costs for retailers. Unfortunately, it seems that the retailers best equipped to exploit printed prices are not retail booksellers but supermarkets...

'It's time again for the great Christmas giveaway. By which I mean the proportion of the cover price of each discounted book that booksellers effectively hand back to their customers. You would have thought that Christmas would be the one time of year when books effectively sold themselves even at full price, but instead booksellers take advantage of the seasonal surge in demand by dropping prices and encouraging customers to go and spend the money they save elsewhere.'

David Blow contributing to the ongoing debate about the effect of discounting in the British weekly publishing paper Publishing News

Frantzen on Writing

25 November 2002

'I feel ambivalent about things. I feel caught between narratives everywhere I turn. Am I a Midwesterner? Am I an Easterner? My parents were totally different people in my life. Am I like my mom? Am I like my dad? Am I a social novelist, or am I sort of an old-fashioned domestic novelist? Do I feel comfortable being an isolated individual or do I crave acceptance? Do I want the comforts of being cool or the comforts of being part of the mass? ... In my initial relations with the media last fall, that gave rise to this tremendous confusion. Because, I think, although I'm not sure, that people want you to be one thing or another...'

'I have a very thick sheaf of notes. The writing goes very, very fast and is so fun and is over so quickly. It's sort of tragically short compared to the difficulty of finding the tone and the right story to tell. That's a matter of a kind of Socratic dialogue with oneself. You know right away if it doesn't work. You can tell the next morning. And I'm at the stage where nothing works. But that's how it is. In some ways it's gratifying to find that I'm not happy with most things I write.'

Jonathan Frantzen, author of The Corrections, quoted in the Washington Post

'Every writer is unique'

18 November 2002

'The best general advice a would-be writer can listen to is never to listen to general advice, except in the presentation of work to agent or publisher. Anyone propounding rules or principles that are supposed to apply to everyone is a charlatan. Every writer is unique, or ought to be, and so your problems are unique. If you can find a mentor, someone who'll work over your manuscript with you one-to-one, then you've found a treasure - so long as you remember that even a guru can be wrong.'

Chaz Brenchley on the MurderSquad site:http://www.murdersquad.co.uk

Learning to Write

11 November 2002

Most of these early efforts were pretty bad, but I learned a lot. Many of the students I teach find it hard to believe that a person might write three or four unpublishable novels before they write one that's anywhere near decent. That's probably because the idea of writing just one seems like a monumental task. But not if you love it.'

Bestselling crime writer Peter Robinson in the UK publishing magazine Publishing News

Moby on the Companionship of a Book

4 November 2002

'When someone finishes a book, they put it in a little box and when someone else wants a new book, they look into the box and find one... Ozzy Osbourne used to snort ants. Led Zeppelin had sex with hookers on private planes. And I start a book club. Because one can only snort so many ants and have so much sex before one starts to long for the comfort and companionship of a book.'

Pop star Moby, who has started a book club of sorts as part of his current tour.

Why Choose the Name Hermux Tantamoq?

28 October 2002

'The letters I'd drawn said nothing and I had to give up my assumption that it had to be a regular name and come up with something I'd never heard of, and for the first time with words, I had an authentic literary experience... I realised I didn't have to try and tell the truth, that I could lie - in fact, I had to. I do, though, have to tell emotional truths.'

'At the end of the day, Hermux is a real imaginary mouse. I was drawn into the stories, it wasn't premeditated and began as a game that had to be played at long distance. I had to make my wife, who was on a buying trip in South-East Asia, laugh, and if I could do that when she wasn't there in person, I'd succeeded.'

Michael Hoeye, speaking in Publishing News about the anagram game which produced the name of his mouse Hermux Tantamoq, main character in his stunningly successful self-published first children's book Time Stops for No Mouse.

The moral duty of the author

21 October 2002

'Death drives everything. One of my Greek teachers said we have one true task, and that is learning how to die. But who am I to give lessons? There are no real messages in my fiction. The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.'

Donna Tartt, author of The Little Friend, in USA Today

'Write the book you most long to read'

14 October 2002

'this is the most important rule: write the book you most long to read. Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labour of love bordering on madness. So it was with my first novel, Roman Blood. I returned from my first visit to Rome with my imagination on fire. Having become addicted to crime fiction via Conan Doyle, what I most wanted to read was a book that in 1989 seemed not to exist: a murder mystery set in ancient Rome...'

'But to read that novel, I would have to write it myself. So I did. I suspect this is how first novels are most often (or at least most successfully) sparked: a reader experiences an overwhelming craving for a book that does not yet exist. Whether the story draws on the first-time author's own life and experiences or not doesn't matter, so long as it conveys a truth that transcends the cramped tenets of mere realism.'

Steven Saylor in the Guardian