The tightening of publishers' purse strings in response to the economic fallout of Covid-19 has added a new wrinkle to an age-old dilemma for agents: when is the best time to submit their clients' new manuscripts?
Links of the week April 6 2020 (15)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
13 April 2020
In normal times, deciding when to submit books, and whom to submit them to, is something agents constantly weigh. Now, with huge swaths of the country under quarantine, pub dates of forthcoming titles in limbo, and questions about how long the pandemic will last, literary agents are divided on the best approach. All agents interviewed acknowledged that publishers will need to keep buying books, but many are uncertain about whether they want to send new projects out at such a difficult moment.
Here's something I probably always knew, deep down, but never thought about: Writing a novel presupposes the existence of a stable reality that will remain basically the same until you're done working on the book.
This is true, at least, of the kinds of novels I write. I%u2019m the author of The Last Policeman, Underground Airlines, and most recently Golden State - all of which are shelved under "mystery/thriller," but which incorporate some sort of science fiction conceit. My books are set in some recognizable version of the present day, but deviate in specific ways, controlled by me. This remains true for my next book, The Quiet Boy, which, as I write this, is slated to come out early next year.
It's hard to imagine what the world and publishing will look like even six months from now'
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's first novel Harmless Like You was a critical success, and her second novel, Starling Days (Sceptre), has also been hugely popular with both readers and critics. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, though, plans for its American release this week have changed. Here she talks about her donations to Feeding America, the inspiration behind Starling Days, and writing in isolation.
Fran Lebowitz is the patron saint of staying at home and doing nothing. She is famously averse to working, and famously resistant to technology; she has no cell phone or computer. She moved to New York City from Morristown, New Jersey, around 1970, the moment she was legally able to do so, and became one of New York's most distinctive personalities, with her defiant grouchiness, her devotion to cigarettes, her trademark ensemble of cowboy boots and custom-made Anderson & Sheppard suit jackets, and her pearl-gray 1979 Checker car.
Thanks to COVID-19, many of us are now trapped at home, if not nearly as stylishly. So what insights does Lebowitz have on the art of inactivity? And what does she foresee for the city that is now an epicenter of the pandemic, a city that she has all but chained herself to for five decades? I reached Lebowitz by phone - she was on a land line, naturally - at her apartment, where she has been safely sequestered, except for the occasional walk.
Ever since I can remember, the historical novels I've loved best were edgy and featured characters who were not only deeply flawed, but downright dubious. My favorite protagonists are accused murderers and power-hungry politicians, rogue detectives and charming gangsters. They're spies and collaborators. They might be looking for redemption or wrestling with their own complicity in a corrupt world. These aren't villains in the usual sense; they're the sympathetic though difficult heroes of their own stories. There is good in them-maybe a lot of it-and it's the pull between their better and worse natures that makes them so fascinating.
Royal courts are bursting with dubious characters who believe the ends justify the means. The unflappably ambitious Thomas Cromwell serves the 16th century serial groom Henry VIII in Hilary Mantel's trilogy, starting with Wolf Hall. Still in England but decades earlier, Margaret Beaufort rises from child bride to the founder of the Tudor Dynasty in The Red Queen. Her cold and ruthless actions are her attempt to escape the limits of a woman of her time and achieve what she sees as her own greatness, dictated by God. In Renaissance Rome, Lucrezia Borgia navigates the corruption of her family and times in The Vatican Princess. Is her reputation as seductress and murderess justified?
Sometimes people are curious about how a writer schedules her day in order to get her writing done, and this brief chapter will show you how this one writer does it. I would love to have nothing else to do but my writing, but that isn't the case for me and it's probably not the case for you either. The question is, how does someone get anything done when there are endless calls upon one's time?
My schedule is arranged so that I can do my writing in the morning. Depending on what part of the process I'm dealing with, I either write to a specific page count (five pages a day when I''m doing the rough draft; fifty pages a day when I'm doing the second draft), I write to a particular objective (two character analyses or ten step-outlined scenes or two running-plot-outlined scenes), or I write to a timer.
Over the last 25 years, the prize has become arguably one of the three most important literary prizes for novels in the UK, alongside the Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award. It was launched in January 1996 after the seed for the idea was firstly planted in the early 90s, when the Booker shortlist in 1991 was comprised of only men. By 1992, only 10% of shortlisted novelists in the entire history of the Booker had been women. After some debate, a group of journalists, reviewers, agents, publishers, librarians and booksellers decided to set up a new literary prize that would celebrate fiction by women: the Women's Committee was founded. Four of the original committee members are still involved in the prize: publisher Susan Sandon, literary agent Jane Gregory, prize director Harriet Hastings, and co-founder Kate Mosse.
In May 1917, T. S. Eliot described for his mother a visit to the American poet Hilda Doolittle, his new colleague on the Egoist magazine. "London is an amazing place," he wrote. "One is constantly discovering new quarters; this woman lives in a most beautiful dilapidated old square, which I had never heard of before; a square in the middle of town, near King's Cross station, but with spacious old gardens about it." Somehow, Mecklenburgh Square has remained a quiet enclave out on Bloomsbury's easternmost edge, separated from the better-known garden squares by Coram's Fields and the brutalist ziggurat of the Brunswick Centre. It is bounded by a graveyard (St George's Gardens) and the noisy Gray's Inn Road, while its central garden-unusually for Bloomsbury-remains locked to non-residents and hidden behind high hedges. But for D. H. Lawrence, a one-time lodger there, Mecklenburgh Square was the "dark, bristling heart of London."
At the turn of the 20th century, Mecklenburgh Square was a radical address. And during the febrile years which encompassed the two world wars, it was home to the five women writers whose stories form this book. Virginia Woolf arrived with her bags and boxes at a moment of political chaos; she deliberated in her diaries "how to go on, through war," unaware that another writer had asked exactly that question in the same place 23 years earlier, as Zeppelin raids toppled the books from her shelf. Hilda Doolittle, known as H. D., lived at 44 Mecklenburgh Square during the First World War, and hosted Lawrence and his wife Frieda while her husband Richard Aldington was fighting in France.
Over a pint, they began to talk about Baker's hometown, Shrewsbury, a medieval town in the west of England rich in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Tudor buildings. It has exactly the kind of cobbled streets and timber-framed houses that American tourists call quaint. (It is also the kind of storied place where it is possible to make a living as a freelance archaeologist.) Holt mentioned Grope Lane, in the center of the town, and Baker was astonished to learn for the first time that Grope Lane used to be Gropecunt Lane. He was even more surprised to find out that it wasn't the only Gropecunt Lane in England.
Early street names were practical. In medieval England, names developed gradually, drawn from a nearby tree or river, the farm at the end of the road, the inn on the corner. Streets might be named for what happened there - Gropecunt Lane, for example - but also what you could find - the butcher, the blacksmith, the produce market. Other streets were helpfully named for where they led to - take the London Road to London, for example. Street names became official only after long use and the rise of street signs.
"Quidditch is a baaad sport. It makes no sense because none of the players matter except the seeker! The snitch is worth 150 points and the quaffel is only 10, so 99% of the time, whoever catches the snitch wins (unless the other team is more than 150 points ahead, which never happens unless J.K. Rowling realizes her point system sucks), so what's even the point of any of the other balls or players?? Also, it's a nonstop action game. WHY ARE YOU ALLOWED TO CALL A TIMEOUT?"
"The Divergent series is a complete rip-off of The Hunger Games."
6 April 2020
Simon Armitage pogos to neo-punk, Anne Enright craves for Cary Grant, The Seventh Seal cheers up Julian Barnes, Diana Evans works out to hip-hop and Jeanette Winterson talks to herself ... writers reveal how they're surviving the corona crisis
‘I've been rereading the book I wish I'd written'
Hilary Mantel
Sad days if you don't read much, and members of my household run a mile from my recommendations, but I saw one of them cast a hopeless glance at the bookshelves, so after some hours took courage and said: "This is truly one of the best novels I have ever, ever read, and I wish heartily that I could have written it myself, and I don't believe you could start it without wanting to know how it ends." It is Eugene McCabe's Death and Nightingales, set in rural Ireland in 1883, and it is a mystery to me how I only came to hear of it recently. I've made up for ignorance by reading it several times, to see how it's done.
In his remarks to the media and the public, World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom has regularly emphasized that accurate, timely information is essential to fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet around the world, governments are cracking down on journalists and implementing sweeping restrictions under the guise of combating misinformation and "fake news."
In recent days, police in Venezuela violently detained a journalist and social media commentator, Darvinson Rojas, in reprisal for reporting on COVID-19 in Miranda State. In Iran, the government has imposed sweeping restrictions on coverage, including in the country's Kurdish region, as part of a systematic effort to downplay the scope of the public health crisis. Egypt, similarly, has pressured journalists to downplay the number of infections, going so far as to revoke the credentials of a Guardian correspondent and reprimanding the bureau chief for the New York Times because of a tweet. In Turkey, seven journalists were detained in reprisal for their reporting, according to a local media monitoring group.
Do you find it as obvious as I do that Don DeLillo richly deserves to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature? And right away, as in this year?
The inner workings of the Swedish Academy are opaque, but the one thing everybody knows is that their record of choices for the literature prize is spotty at best and in some cases purblind and scandalous (see: Peter Handke). Their sins of commission-when is the last time anyone said or wrote anything about the laureates Rudolf Eucken, Carl Spitteler, Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Pearl S. Buck, Nelly Sachs, or Dario Fo?-are exceeded only by their sins of omission. Writers the Academy have passed over include Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Henrik Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, and, most recently and conspicuously, Philip Roth.
Nevertheless the Nobel continues to exceed the Booker, the Pulitzer, and all other literary awards in its prestige, global impact, and ability to tip the scales toward immortality. As the snubbing of Roth year after year became something of a rueful running joke in the press and even on the streets of New York, as described in Lisa Halliday's roman à clef Asymmetry, I kept muttering to myself, "But what about Don DeLillo? Isn't that a greater injustice?" Because even while Roth was alive I regarded DeLillo as the greatest living American writer, and now the matter is not remotely debatable.
You can't have a good thriller without a nasty and formidable opponent for your hero. But it isn't enough to just write a character and call him "the bad guy." Just as it's important to create a well-rounded, three-dimensional hero, you must create a villain who is well-developed and not just your standard killer, robber, or kidnapper.
So how can we write a well-developed villain who is a worthy opponent to your protagonist?
Create a backstory
Unless you're writing fantasy or sci-fi or the like, your villain will also be human. They will have a personality all their own and, in most cases, they'll have a painful past, so you must tell their story, just as you would with the hero. You want him to be everything that makes us human - fallible, flawed, and complete with a backstory that explains their motives and their reason for being so downright nasty.
About five years before he wrote his first novel, Killing Floor, Lee Child, whose real name is Jim Grant, began to think seriously about writing. At the time he worked as a presentation director for Granada Television in Manchester, England-an "air traffic controller for the broadcast airways" is how he describes it. He did a little bit of everything, from writing and directing to, of course, traffic management-anything, he says, to avoid the dreaded black screen.
It was part of British television's golden age. During his tenure Granada produced "Brideshead Revisited," "The Jewel in the Crown," "Prime Suspect" and "Cracker." But still there was a sense at the company that things were changing as management was pondering a corporate restructuring. So in the back of his mind, he began to consider a different career. Just in case.
"I'd always been a huge reader. It was my main enthusiasm. I just read constantly, hundreds of books a year," he says. "But I had never really stopped to think where they came from. I had never really examined the process. I never really thought about it." As he read John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, "I began to see how he was doing it. I could almost see the skeleton under the skin. I said, ‘Yeah, I could do this.'
With widespread school and library closures due to the new coronavirus outbreak, children's authors and publishers are going digital to provide kids with ways to read, draw, engage, and support other children who might need a helping hand. PW is tracking some of the most creative efforts on social media and across the web, and will be updating our list regularly.
Updated for the April 2 issue, this list includes a how-to drawing series from Random House, Chicago Review Press's video lessons, DK's digital activity packs, and more.
Life breeds paperwork-bills, bank statements, receipts and subscriptions that accumulate with the years. The I.R.S. requires you to keep tax returns for several years, and some documents indefinitely. Homes have paper trails, too, with warranties, mortgage documents and insurance policies. Every appliance has a user's manual. Do you need them all? It's hard to know, but we can help.
Whether your home office is a desk by the kitchen or a dedicated room where you handle both professional and household business, the space can quickly get cluttered and confusing. Paper piles up. When you need to find a bill, document or receipt, you have no idea where to look.
We won't hide the truth: Bringing order to bills, receipts, documents and taxes can be a tedious job. But there is also something deeply satisfying about a neatly labeled fil¬ing system, so keep that in your mind as you dig through years of paperwork.
My book club was the first to concede defeat. Before my gym, hair salon and therapist accepted that there could be no more business as usual as the coronavirus took hold in the UK, the host of my book club got in touch to say that our March meet-up was off.
The news came as no great surprise. Despite best-laid plans to meet every six weeks, our activity had always been sporadic -our last meeting was in December. We had not even settled on our next book yet, such was our preemptive commitment to self-isolation. As our host said, the book club had already been in quarantine for months.
As the Covid-19 crisis has confined us to our homes, a sliver of a silver lining (entirely inadequate, of course, but we look for them all the same) is that it has provided a chance to catch up on our reading. Being mostly solitary and indoors, it is one of the few pursuits that remain unchanged in this new world, while affording us access to others. With every connected device a potential portal for anxiety, it may never have felt so necessary to escape into the printed word.
If you happen to have been a teenage girl anytime in the last half-century, you likely need no introduction to Judy Blume. If you're woefully unacquainted, imagine a professional advice columnist crossed with the coolest sex-ed instructor you could imagine, and there you have it; generations of young women were introduced to sex, periods, masturbation, and countless other "grown-up" topics through Blume's YA novels.
It's been exactly 51 years since Blume published her first novel, and now we're on the verge of a genuine Blume-aissance, as three different Blume works are poised for adaptation. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Blume's seminal 1970 ode to growing pains, sold at auction to Lionsgate earlier this month - a movie with a budget "in the $30 million range" is in the works.
Who can use the term "gone viral" now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more - a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables - without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?
Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not - secretly, at least - submitting to science?
And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies? The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes. But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest - thus far - in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt.
'I can wholeheartedly say that indie publishing is one of the best things I have ever done'
Last week Jemma Hatt was announced as the first ever winner of the Selfies Awards for children's fiction, for her novel The Adventurers and the Cursed Castle. We asked her about her writing, her inspirations, and why she decided to self-publish...
Where did you find inspiration for the Adventurers series?
My inspiration came from two places - Cornwall and Egypt. When I was young my family went on holiday to the West Country almost every year; it is a magical place with its beaches and caves. I've always been fascinated by Ancient Egyptian history, and visited Cairo in 2009. So The Adventurers and the Cursed Castle, about ancient Egyptian treasure in Cornwall, was a combination of two of my long-standing interests. I guess I was writing a story that my younger self would have wanted to read.