The more things change...

I just posted a Louisa May Alcott quote in my blog that I believe serves as a good example of the strikingly similar descriptions of the writing process authors have given throughout time.

Looking at novels in which author characters feature, autobiographies of writers, even accounts of writers' behaviour from those who knew (or know) them, it fascinates me that so much of the process has remained so similar for such a variety of people, and in spite of the quite dramatic technological changes that have taken place over time. Writers are, and it seems always have been, a tad dotty.

What are some of your favourite descriptions of the writing process; the ones that ring true for you? Feel free to comment over here so I can collect them all in one place.

F

My three favourite books on writing

I just posted a blog entry about my three favourite books on writing. Which three would make your list?

A book meme

Grab the nearest book. Open it at random and post the first paragraph your gaze falls on, along with the book's title and author and the page number.
Oh cripes, it's a longish one, but good nonetheless:

"The key to bad girls is that they own their sexuality, and nobody dictates how they act out their sexuality. Possibly one of the best examples of a bad girl in literature is Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders of The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders. Published in 1722, the book was considered scandalous for its frankness and because of the unrepentant nature of the marauding Moll, who marries, deceives and cons an assortment of men in her search for wealth. Throughout the story, Moll must live by her wits, beauty and sexuality to survive. The children she has with her lovers and husbands are mostly pawned off for others to care for. Eventually her crimes land her in prison, where she manages to con the authorities out of hanging her, and she heads back to America, where she inherits a plantation. That is not the end of the story, but the point here is that Moll sold her soul and body for survival with little remorse, making her one of the original bad girls of literature."

You gotta love Moll. Anyway, this is from Bullies, Bastards & Bitches by Jessica Page Morrell, p228.

What about you lot?

Nik Perring created a meme in which you have to take photos of some of your bookshelves and post them, so I thought I'd join in. Needless to say, I couldn't fit all my books into a handful of pics, so just consider this a taster!


Bookshelf - the aren't-I-clever-and-highbrow section. Oscar and Edgar are guarding their respective Complete Works, which you can't see because the blog layout cut them out of the picture.


Some more fiction (including my own copy of Cover the Mirrors, which is hiding in there somewhere!). On the second shelf nearest the camera, there's a pewter Gollum sitting in the boat with Bilbo Bagginses; an interpretation of the Riddles in the Dark chapter in The Hobbit. Gollum makes Tolkein's work for me - he's awesome.


I call this Heretic's Corner, but there's a variety of non-fiction stuff here, as you can see from the copies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves and Watching the English. You might also recognise the Flying Spaghetti Monster - I made Him out of wool. His pasta is French knitted and His meatballs are pompoms.


A small selection of my history non-fiction collection. The little guy in the hat is Victor the Victorian (from Deepings Dolls), the orange things in the top left are the feet of an Animal Muppet cuddly toy, and the dangly white thing is a sock monkey's tail.

Do I Get a Gold Star on the Library Bulletin Board Now?

As of today, I've read all the published MNW novels. Well, except for Testament, which is somewhere in the trans-Atlantic post (and therefore not shown in the rather sloppy photo above). There they are in all their glory, in pub order left to right starting at the bottom.

I'm not usually much of a completist, and I never was much for coin collections or trading cards. But I started with the MNW special offer of the first six...and then after those, I read this one, and then that one, and after a while it seemed as if I were being rude by not reading the other five or six. Though it's been two steps forward and one step back, as they seem to keep publishing new ones every month.

And, no, I'm not going to review them. The dreaded book reports were the reason I never got a gold star on the library bulletin board in the first place. (My reasoning back then was why waste time writing anything when there was so much great stuff to read? Which is damn sound reasoning. Probably ought to have stuck with my position on the subject.)

A few of them weren't exactly my sort of thing (whatever that is), but I enjoyed them all. And I can say that I understand why most of them ended up at MNW--they are good books, but most of them are a little bent, just the teensiest bit outside the standard categories.

I won't take any vows to continue this practice. Though I will be reading Testament soon. And I'm looking forward to Aliya's forthcoming book. And Brian's. And Tim's. And Matt's, of course. Oh, and Eliza's. And from Faye's recent post, she's off on novel three; I'd happily read novel two.

On reflection, were it to appear, I'd probably read the second book from any of the MNW authors. So I guess I probably will keep up this habit, especially now that I'm caught up.

As they used to say in bad foreshadowing, Little did I know what I was getting myself into...

Thanks for the great reads, gang.

Why do we do it?

Hi – Yet another MNW writer joins the blog-party – my name’s Alis Hawkins and my book Testament will be the January MNW offering.
Many thanks to David not only for inviting me to contribute but also for all the amusing blog entries which I’ve been catching up with. Thanks also to all the rest of you for your posts which i've been enjoying – you are an amusing and talented bunch of people. Faye and Aliyah – looking forward to meeting you in Cambridge in January!

Anyway, as it’s my first post here (though you can catch all my deranged daily thoughts on my own blog) I thought I’d go for the novel-writing jugular…

Why do we write books? We all get asked it and, despite our protestations, I’m sure a most people who ask think it’s for the money. Let’s face it, whenever novelists are in the news it’s for some massive advance or huge sales - novelists plying their trade after a full day at work or barely making enough to keep up the payments on the garret don’t tend to feature much.

But we don’t do it for the money, do we? (Just as well, we’d be poverty-stricken fools if we did.) So, do we do it in the hope of money? I think not; unless you are a champion deferrer of gratification the pay-off is way too long term. And, if you factor in all those years of struggling and try to work out some sort of annual pay-rate…well, it would be well beyond depressing…

Then why do we do it? I can’t answer for other novelists, not even others here at MNW, so lets narrow the field a bit - why do I do it?

Like everybody who write books, I’m often asked ‘Did you always want to write?’ But the answer is that I didn’t. I wasn’t a child scribbler or a precocious juvenile novelist.
Early on, my passion was not writing at all but reading. I read my way through anything anybody gave me and the entire children’s section of the little library in my home-town. Don’t be too impressed, the children’s section was a bookcase roughly the size of an Ikea Billy-and-a-half.

I loved the other worlds that books created. I wasn’t picky. I read historical fiction, Jennings, sci-fi, Enid Blyton, me-and-my-pony stories… I lived in a farming community in rural west Wales, even books about ‘ordinary’ families living ‘ordinary’ lives seemed exotic to me.
I read in bed, at the table, at school, on the bus to school… if there wasn’t a book to hand I would take refuge in any print – the back of the cereal packet at breakfast, the ketchup-bottle label at supper, information on posters in school, rules of behaviour on the school bus, anything.
Was real life so boring or so awful? Not at all, it just didn’t seem as real to me as the life I read about in books. It was as if I couldn’t engage with reality all the time; I had moments of intense self-awareness when I saw myself and my immediate circumstances very clearly but the rest of the time the world I met in books was far more comprehensible.

I think a lot of reality, for me, is unregistered, that a lot of my life goes on beneath the radar of consciousness. I don’t ruminate much, I’m not one of those people who is always thinking, always teasing away at some problem or another. I often don’t know what I think until I’ve said it – either out loud or in print. And a lot of what I find I think is a surprise to me, or at least, the fact that I have such well-developed thoughts and opinions about stuff just sitting there waiting to be articulated is a surprise.

I’m notorious amongst my friends and family for being monumentally unobservant. Unless things are pointed out I’m likely to miss them – I have driven past accidents on the road without registering their horror, walked past people dressed as giant rabbits in the High Street without noticing that they were there. And yet, when I sit down to write, details which I must have been filing away come flooding out. I can describe somewhere in minute detail: architectural flourishes, reflections in windows, the smell of a little-used church hall, the precise discordance of a poorly-tuned paino... It’s weird. I’m clearly storing all this stuff away without any conscious awareness that I’m doing it.

So, do I write to find out what’s in my head? Not consciously. Sorry, that wasn’t meant to be funny, but perhaps it illustrates how little I understand why I do what I do. Consciously, I write because I am happiest when writing fiction, when I am feeling my way into another world, waiting for people to reveal themselves to me, to tell me their story. Nothing else I have ever done matches up in terms of consistent excitement; my other half can always tell when it’s been a good writing day because I’m so totally wired when she gets home.

But, exciting or not, revelatory or not, writing for me is much more like hide-and-seek than show-and-tell. Often, I feel that I am sneaking up on my story and reading it over its own shoulder, sidling up and catching snatches of conversation, seeing fleeting glimpses of people and their actions before they move away from me. Obviously, it’s my own subconscious I’m actually sneaking up on so the question is, why don’t I have access to it all the time? Why do I have to play grandmother’s footsteps with it and rush back shrieking when I turn around and catch myself looking?

Maybe it’s that mystery which keeps writing so exciting and interesting for me – maybe in writing my books I’m also finding out who I really am.