July 2017 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• Can this be true? A recent study quoted in Bookbrunch claims that 52% of UK adults believe they have a book in them. And, according to the old adage, that's where it should stay. Figures produced suggest that those thinking they could write a book could amount to 25 million people in the UK.
• A powerfully-argued article in the Bookseller's Futurebook has highlighted how the explosion in social media and freemium games means we have reached saturation point - what the author defines as ‘peak attention', where the time we have available has run out and we have to cut down on something, which will very probably be books...'
• Figures quoted by China Daily show that publishers in China are benefiting from 300m users of mobile devices who read electronic books. The market is up 25% year on year and reached $1.7 billion in sales last year.... Difficult though it can be to get western books into China, this presents a huge opportunity for international publishers and their authors, although of course the biggest potential is for Chinese writers reaching readers in their own country and beyond.
• 'Figures from the US continue the trend in book sales which shows children's books doing well and hardback sales outpacing trade paperback and mass market segments. It's good to see positive figures - unit sales for 2017 are 3% higher than in the first 6 months of last year...'
• 'Good news all round this week, with spectacular audiobook sales increases in the US and surprising figures showing that Millennials are the most likely generation of Americans to use public libraries. In the UK children's titles are continuing to outperform the market...'
• 'Tracy K Smith has been named US Poet Laureate and in the UK National Writing Day has brought a focus on poetry, with two new articles available from the Poetry School... Poets don't have it easy and there's general agreement that poetry doesn't make you a living, or not unless you're very successful. For poets the rapid expansion of creative writing classes, often taught by poets, has been a life-saver...'

Comment

• ‘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...' P D James writing about detective fiction in her book 1999 book, Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, which can be found on the wonderful new website dedicated to P D James launched by Faber & Faber this week.
• ‘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... 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, provides this week's Comment.
• '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...' Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials and the forthcoming The Book of Dust, provides our Comment, from his website.
• ‘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...' Andrew Wylie of The Wylie Agency in Publishing Perspectives.
• 'The real world is full of wild, outlandish coincidences that we can't use because fiction has to be realistic. There's nothing realistic about the world now, politics-wise, everything-wise. You couldn't make it up - it's a problem for fiction writers.' Ian Rankin, author of Rather be the Devil, Knots and Crosses and many other novels, in the Sunday Telegraph.
• On horror -‘It's one of the genres that live across the tracks in the literary community, but what could I do? That's where I was drawn. I love D.H. Lawrence. And James Dickey's poetry, Émile Zola, Steinbeck ... Fitzgerald, not so much. Hemingway, not at all. Hemingway sucks, basically. If people like that, terrific. But if I set out to write that way, what would've come out would've been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me. And I have to say this: To a degree, I have elevated the horror genre...' Stephen King, author of Carrie, Sleeping Beauty and many other novels in an interview in Rolling Stone

Quote

'People are certainly impressed by the aura of creative power which a writer may wear, but can easily demolish it with a few well-chosen questions. Bob Shaw has observed that the deadliest questions usually come as a pair: "Have you published anything?" (loosely translated as: I've never heard of you) and "What name do you write under?" (loosely translatable as: I've definitely never heard of you).'

Brian Stableford