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Comment from the book world in July 2017

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July 2017

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'A good and serious novelist'

31 July 2017

‘I love structure in a novel and the detective story is probably the most structured of popular fiction. Some would say that it is the most artificial, but then all fiction is artificial, a careful rearrangement by selection of the writer's internal life in a form designed to make it accessible and attractive to a reader. The construction of a detective story might be formulaic; the writing need not be. And I was setting out, I remember, with high artistic ambitions. I didn't expect to make a fortune, but I did hope one day to be regarded as a good and serious novelist. It seemed to me, as it has to others, that there can be no better apprenticeship for an aspiring novelist than a classical detective story with its technical problems of balancing a credible mystery with believable characters and a setting which both complements and integrates the action. And I may have needed to write detective fiction for the same reasons as aficionados enjoy the genre: the catharsis of carefully controlled terror, the bringing of order out of disorder, the reassurance that we live in a comprehensible and moral universe and that, although we may not achieve justice, we can at least achieve an explanation and a solution.'

P D James writing about detective fiction in her book 1999 book, Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, https://www.faber.co.uk/blog/construction-detective-story-might-formulaic-writing-need/ which can be found on the wonderful new website dedicated to P D James launched by Faber & Faber this week.

 

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'A fiendish device'

24 July 2017

‘A short story...can be held in the mind all in one piece. It's less like a building than a fiendish device. Every bit of it must be cunningly made and crafted to fit together perfectly and without waste so it can perform its task with absolute precision. That purpose might be to move the reader to tears or wonder, to awaken the conscience, to console, to gladden, or to enlighten. But each short story has one chief purpose, and every sentence, phrase, and word is crafted to achieve that end. The ideal short story is like a knife - strongly made, well balanced, and with an absolute minimum of moving parts.'

Michael Swanwick, author of many short stories and a number of SF novels including Chasing the Phoenix, and who blogs at Flogging Babel 

'The meaning of a story'

17 July 2017

‘As a passionate believer in the democracy of reading, I don't think it's the task of the author of a book to tell the reader what it means.

The meaning of a story emerges in the meeting between the words on the page and the thoughts in the reader's mind. So when people ask me what I meant by this story, or what was the message I was trying to convey in that one, I have to explain that I'm not going to explain.

Anyway, I'm not in the message business; I'm in the "Once upon a time" business...'

Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials and the forthcoming The Book of Dust, on his website

An international perspective from Andrew Wylie

10 July 2017

‘The rise of nationalism, including in the United States, but also through Europe and even in Asia, has underscored the importance of internationalism - as a subject and as an approach to the markets for the publishing community and for writers.

This has been coming for a while, although it arrived as a great surprise to many people. The seeds of it have been planted earlier.

So I think publishers have anticipated this and have acted against it, the larger publishers becoming more international in their approach, not only to their business but also to the books that they publish. There's a concerted effort underway in the United States for the publication of more writers from around the world, both in other languages and in English. And I think that other countries are looking at the world from an international perspective as well as a national perspective.

The publishing world, and writers, are at odds with the nationalist agenda...

For us, one of the most important developments of recent years has been the rise of young African writers. Many of them from Nigeria but not only from Nigeria. They're from across Africa. These works are necessarily political as well as purely aesthetic.

Many of those writers are engaged at a very deep level on questions of internationalism because many of the writers travel between Nigeria and the United States. They talk about the difficulty of assimilation not only in the United States but on return to Africa. It's a marvellous demonstration of the strength of internationalism and the question that internationalism raises with a young writer.'

Andrew Wylie of The Wylie Agency in Publishing Perspectives