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Comment from the book world in February 2017

February 2017

"Did this guy or did he not kill his wife?"

27 February 2017

‘I realize how decadent writing a novel is. You really own this world, you can do whatever you want to it. You can go inside people's minds. Gone Girl has a lot of internal monologues, so it was a big struggle to figure out how to have them show you who they were instead of like, "Here's about me." The entire time I was adapting the screenplay I had a giant sticky note above my computer that said, "IT IS A MOVIE!" to remind myself to not try to take everything from the book that I liked and jam it all in...

Well, on the surface, it's a mystery of "Did this guy or did he not kill his wife?" But to me, what was interesting was that idea of the game of emotional con artist that we are [playing] when we meet people, and we're telling each other very specific stories to get you to like me. I like the idea of what happens two years, three years, four years down the road, when you don't have that energy to keep up the mask anymore.'

Did Gone Girl promote a negative message about women?

‘I had one single dark 24 hours, where I was like, "Did I destroy feminism? Dang it, I did not mean to do that! Am I a misogynist?" There was a weekend when all those think pieces came out and then I very quickly bounced back because I thought, "That's absolutely ludicrous." Just because you have a bad woman in your movie doesn't mean she's indicative of all women or suddenly we're going to go back 20 years, and that goes back to some idea that women had to be protected from evil or were seen as evil, and that's fairly ridiculous. I think we're tough enough to handle it.'

Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl and Dark Places in The Hollywood Reporter http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/writer-roundtable-chris-rock-gillian-745744

'Self-publishing is not for everybody'

20 February 2017

‘You have to be the writer and get the words down, then you've got to know to take off your writer's hat and put on your business hat. And this is why self-publishing is not for everybody...

If you sign up to my mailing list, you get the first two books in the Milton series free - you need to shoot them a pill to get them to sign up. But I know that when you start reading my books they're quite ‘hooky' and I have lots of other books for you to buy. Readers on average buy ten of my books... You want to take someone from being a customer to being a reader, then a fan and in the end you consider them friends...

I may be in the 1 or 2 per cent of authors making good money, but there are so many people now earning enough through ebooks to pay the bills or the mortgage, and take their wife out to dinner every now and then.'

Mark Dawson, author of 24 books, including The Cleaner, his latest John Milton title and the Isabella Rose series https://markjdawson.com/

'Categories can really obscure good writers'

13 February 2017

‘It's wonderful to be read by more and more people. At the same time I worry about people being forced to read me...

Categories can really obscure good writers. There was a wonderful novel called Tony and Susan by Austin Wright. Hardly anyone reads it because it gets stuck in the thriller section when it could easily have been a major literary novel...

If I've written the screenplay, I get a lot of say, or I make myself an executive producer and at least pitch in with it. I always think of the novel as a visual form. I think of people as visual creatures. It's our strongest sense. The key to an important scene is to get the visual details correct...

There comes a moment when you just have to back off. Once it goes into pre-production, all the big decisions are made and you really don't want to be lurking around saying ‘it's not like this in my novel!'

Ian McEwan, author of The Children Act and sixteen other novels and books of stories in Concrete Online http://www.concrete-online.co.uk/adam-dawson-interviews-ian-mcewan/

 

'That private box of miracles'

10 February 2017

‘Wonderfully, out of that private box of miracles that is a writer's life, I just wrote that sentence [that now opens the book]: "The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake."

The whole damn book was just lying in behind that sentence.' There followed ‘four or five joyous months where, for once in a decade, you are going down to your work room like a 22-year-old instead of a 61-year-old, and being very surprised...

My beautiful son came out as gay a few years ago. This young man, very beautiful, incredibly gifted, really lovely, gay. After a couple of years of misery, he said, "Dad, I'm gay", and I said, "Thank God, you can avoid all that heterosexual nightmare I've been through!" And you know, he's got a lovely boyfriend he's devoted to, and I'm looking at that like a disinterested observer of human nature and I'm thinking, "This is not something that needs our tolerance, this is something we should be tending towards. There is a magnificence here of soul'. And I suppose all that feeds into Thomas and John."

Sebastian Barry, author of Days without End, which recently won the Costa Award and which paints a fascinating picture of a slice of American history http://www.thebookseller.com/profile/sebastian-barry-407676