Blown Away by YA

Sometimes strange things happen. I’ve been reading Young Adult novels, for a project I’m hoping to be chosen to work on and – to be blunt – it’s been a chore. Most of what I picked up seemed angsty and febrile, neither of them in a good way. I know young adults are angsty (I was one, possibly, emotionally, still am!) and I can remember back into the depths of history to when my life was one long fever dream of hope, expectation and despair. But still … my general reaction was a very young adult ‘meh’.

And then I got close to the bottom of my reading pile and found A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly and was entranced.

Okay, there were places where big issues (like racism) were dealt with in a way that I felt could have been more subtle, but within the limitations of theme imposed by YA writing (or at least YA writing for publication, which seems fairly strictly regimented) everything big and deep was handled deftly and with honesty and passion. Based on the true story of a murder, the novel contains issues of feminism, race, education, love and family breakdown, and the voice in which it is written is as clear and compelling as sitting down with a friend and listening to what she has to say.

I’m not often surprised by literature these days, if you read a novel a day it takes something really astonishing to make you look at the world differently, but A Gathering Light changed my view of what YA fiction can be like, and changed it for the better. And now I really hope to have a stab at the genre myself …

More swine flu, more writing, less fun every minute

Swine flu. Which I still don’t have. I have a headache and I have aching joints, but that’s probably because I’m doing a bit more than I should be post-operative wise, because there isn’t actually anybody else to do it when OH has swine flu.

When you’re ill yourself, all you want to do is sleep. When somebody else is ill, all you want to do is let them sleep … but everything you do is so LOUD! Can’t run the washing machine, can’t have the radio loud, even the microwave pinging wakes him up!

So far, the keyboard hasn’t disturbed his sleep, but there’s a limit to how much I can write without tea (banging cupboard doors) radio (as previously contraindicated) and wandering out into the garden for inspiration (opening and closing doors).

But deadlines do not go away, so I trudge on, piling one inspirationless word on top of another like a particularly bleak wall. One day he will get over swine flu. One day I will actually want to write instead of sitting down and getting on with it. Maybe.

Swine flu and racism

More pigs. I seem to have a bit of a pig phase going on this month. OH has swine flu and anti-viral treatment and I have a headache … whether it will turn into swine flu I have no idea but I do know there’s nobody to go and get me Tamiflu if I succumb.

What I wanted to write about today was racism, but my ideas on this subject are so muddled that I can hardly begin to do justice to them. My head is a mess, and that could be swine flu or it could be the bloody horrible messiness of racism itself.

I am a racist. I know this and it doesn’t trouble me very much. I am a racist not in the white supremacist way, nor, I hope in the smug white middle-class way that has a black friend and thus believes it has nothing further to do. I am a racist in the way that I have to confront my belief system and my earliest conditioning on a regular basis and test what I believe to be true against what I know to be real.

I used to be less of a racist than I am now. I know this, and it troubles me greatly. When I lived in Tooting and worked in conflict resolution I mixed with people of every culture. My meals ranged from halal to fish and chips to fasting with a Coptic colleague. My clothes ranged from salwar to Armani. I spoke French as often as English because so many refugees I met came from Francophone countries. My afternoon sugar rush was provided by mint tea and wedding sweets from the Indian shop around the corner.

London wasn’t perfect - don’t get me started on West Indian men and homosexuality, for example, but it was much better than Brighton is for challenging, exposing and resolving issues of covert racism.

In Brighton I have only a few friends of difficult ethnic culture, although I have many who have chosen lifestyles wildly different to mine. I work alone, so I never have to see evidence of the colour ceiling that so many people of colour find in large organisations. And I’d become complacent about this. Suddenly I realise just how far I’ve moved: from being anti-racist to being unexposed to racism, and they are not the same thing!

I’m working on this novel – this novel about the effects of the death of a young adopted black man in the 1970s. It’s not about him. It’s not from his point of view. But it is about his white sister and her experience of racism via his life. And I’m wondering how much I can say or should say and how to say it and whether I’ve forgotten how racist the world really was then and still is now.

Before my friend Doll moved back to Trinidad, I shared in her daily litany, either by sitting with her or on the phone, as she told me how people treated her. The insults she experienced, not just every day but every hour, were almost inconceivable unless you actually went out with her for an evening, and saw how staff in top London restaurants gaped at a black woman ordering wine for a table of white men, or heard visitors to her company talking to her as if she was slow-witted when she was a founding partner in a highly competitive industry. But just because I heard, doesn’t mean I understood, or shared. Because how could I?

And I want to write about racism from the perspective of somebody who sees it, who hates it but is too young to do anything about it, and who has to fight against its seeping presence in her own thought systems. I think it’s important to try and write about those things that are as shaping, and shaming as early sexual experiences or religious conditioning or whatever else made us what we are. But it’s also confusing and frightening to step into 90,000 words or more that will definitely attract flak from all sides.

Sigh. Why did I ever think I could do this?

PS The pink supremacist pig is from Tilgate - apparently pink pigs get sunburn. That'll teach them to think they are better than their black and piebald brethren!

PPS - and when I say being racist doesn't bother me, I mean it in the sense that knowing what I am allows me to work against it. Just as only men can stop rape, only racists can stop racism. It's not for the people who endure the behaviour to change, it's for those who have it within them, so, like the recovering alcoholic, I start every day knowing that I was bred to think people with a different skin colour were inferior to me, and I exercise my rationality to extirpate the habits that come from such false beliefs.

Novel Review: The Mistress of Nothing

Kate Pullinger’s novel, The Mistress of Nothing, is an historical work that has a number of layers. First there’s some historiography – the characters in the novel, by and large, were real people with a well-catalogued reality, like Lucie Duff Gordon, darling of Victorian intellectual society. Second, there’s an imaginative reconstruction of the life of one character, Sally Naldrett, who was definitely a person, and maybe even a personage, but who vanished from the historical record at a very interesting point in her own life. Third, there’s a subtle exploration of ‘the other’ through Lucie Duff Gordon’s penetration of Egypt and Sally’s surrender to an Egyptian.

That last sentence sounds a bit bodice-ripping and I wouldn’t want to mislead: this is no flimsy or throbbing account – it’s a neat, deft exploration of two women’s lives, lived against Victorian morals and philosophy, with the monster of class looming over both. It is Sally, determined, resourceful, loyal and hard-working, who pays the price for giving in to Egypt, and she pays it to Lady Duff Gordon. The cost of daring to step out of her role as lady’s maid is high, and because this is no flight of fancy, Sally does not surmount her situation to become a heroine in the classic romantic fiction sense. Rather she survives it by remaining, by using her obdurate common sense and practical skills to allow her to endure. The novel is dense with meaning, although that complexity of content is never telegraphed, and it reads beautifully, with the calm acceptance of Sally’s point of view: that of a woman who has never been able to determine her own fate and who suffers a harsh penalty when she does. It’s also a picturesque novel, in the true sense of the word, with a series of scenes in which Sally is an observer, which deepen inexorably into a lived reality as she becomes more self reliant and escapes her social constrictions to experience Egypt on her own terms.

Kate was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the writing of the novel and the ethics involved in creating fiction out of known history.

Historical novels have their own demands and complexities, and I wonder what compensations you find for embroiling yourself in this exacting discipline?

Well, I found this novel very difficult to write and part of my difficulty was that I didn't want to show my research in the writing - I don't like historical fiction where you get a strong sense of the writer's research. But there were many compensations and/or pleasures in the writing as well. The research itself was great fun and this period in Egyptian history is fascinating - the period during which they were building the Suez Canal. And Egypt is a fascinating country, very beautiful and endlessly complex and confounding. As well as that, the story itself never failed to grip me - I don't mean my version of it, but the actual story, (as you know, the novel is based on a true story): Sally, Lucie, and Omar, and what transpired between them.

The Mistress of Nothing employs a first person voice, which limits the knowledge that Sally can have of the thoughts and interior life of others, and is notoriously difficult to pull off. It seems to me that you’ve used this limitation very well to delineate the relationship between Sally and Lady Duff Gordon and between Sally and Omar – in both cases their world, although intersecting hers, is inaccessible to her and remains unknown even after years of intimacy. To what extent were you deliberately focusing on the limits to knowledge, power and self-determination that women, especially working women, had during this period?

I went through many drafts of the novel where I kept altering the point of view, or rather points of view, including writing from Omar's pov, using more of Lucie's own writing and some of her pov, as well as third person sections. This is part of the reason that the book took so long to write! It wasn't until I put it all into Sally's voice, very late in the process, that it finally began to work structurally. I have no idea why this took me so long to figure out - it seems obvious with hindsight! All through this process I was indeed writing about power and self-determination, and the fact that Sally's sense of her own freedom was false, and is revealed to her to be false. I was also fascinated by the way that Lucie was such a radical and so progressive in virtually every other sphere of her life: in a way, this is the spark of the novel - why would Lucie react to the situation in the way that she did? How could Sally, so cautious in every way as a person, take this path?

You are right that first person is so hard to get right, and so limiting to what you can do as a writer. But at the end of the day, telling the story from Sally's point of view worked for me.

Another issue that touches closely on my last question is what Edward Said encapsulated as Orientalism, the mysterious ‘other’ that was a particularly prevalent notion during the Victorian era. You manage to avoid making Omar into this ‘other’ not by explaining him but by doing the opposite. We have almost no idea why he behaves as he does; his motives and feelings are never clear to us and this gives the book a reality which is very human in scale. Was it difficult to keep yourself from deeper exploration of such fascinating characters as Omar and Lucie Duff Gordon or was Sally always central to you?

Thanks for this, as this is hugely important to me. Egypt is a Land of Cliches, when it comes to outsiders' views of the country, and Victorian Lady Travellers also potentially reside in the Land of Cliches, and I wanted to avoid Orientalism as best I could. What you outline in this question is the very problem with the first person, and in earlier drafts I delved much more fully into what was going on in Omar and Lucie's heads. For me a big part of figuring out how to show Omar, albeit very indirectly, was by writing about his family and, in particular, his first wife Mabrooka. The relationship between Sally and Omar's family replaces the relationship between Sally and Omar, in a way. So, in answer to your question, I did delve very deeply into these characters, and I believe that this work/exploration is in the book, even if it isn't evident on the pages, if you see what I mean.

It’s taken you a long time to write this book. Many writers at the beginning of their careers will wonder what made you persevere for over a decade: was it the characters, the historical period, or something else that kept you wrestling with an intransigent narrative?

I think I've probably already answered this above - it was all of these things, but the scene that gripped me first, when I read Katherine Frank's wonderful biography, 'Lucie Duff Gordon', was Christmas Eve, in a boat on the Nile, and the dramatic events that took place that night. This is where I first got the idea for the novel, and this was the scene that I returned to in my mind's eye, while I was struggling to find the right way to write this book. This accompanied by the fact that no one knows what actually happened to Sally after she left.

Is there a different approach to writing for each of the different fields you’ve succeeded in? Short stories and historical novels are quite different animals – do you write them in different ways?

Yes, very different animals. Novels are so unwieldy, while short stories are all about economy and precision. Not a lot in common, apart from typing, really. Same goes for the work I do in the digital realm; there I find the skills that I developed whilst learning how to write screenplays come into focus as much as any skill in prose fiction. The mindset is different for each genre, though the basic principles are the same - it's all very slow and time-consuming and requires many, many drafts.

What really interests me in this kind of work is that you (the writer) must strike a balance between historiography and the narrative tension you want to build, to have the story develop with the right form of creative tension. It’s very different, I assume, to the digital work you produce. Presumably you had to draw lines around the liberties that you would take: I know you telescoped two years into one, but what else did you feel had to be adjusted and how on earth did you make those decisions about what you could and couldn’t change?

The thing that enabled me to write a fiction based on this true story is that nothing is known about what happened to Sally after she left Luxor. No records for her have been found - there is no record of her death in England, for instance, which does suggest she stayed in Egypt - so no one knows what happened to her. This was what allowed me to create a story. Early readers of various drafts urged me to leave behind the known facts, but I was less willing to do this with the character of Lucie Duff Gordon. For instance, a couple of early readers suggested to me that Janet Ross, Lucie's daughter, should take a bigger role in the story, but I was reluctant to do that because, like her mother, a lot has been written about Janet Ross, and she was also a writer. So, apart from a few minor liberties, I stuck to the facts pretty much until I was able to escape from that into fiction, through the story of what happened to Sally after she left. I think if, for instance, Lucie's biographer, Katherine Frank, had found out what happened to Sally after she left, I wouldn't have wanted to write this novel.

P.S. A final point from me - covers are subjective, as everybody knows, and I am unusually pernickity about them. I wasn't enthralled by the cover on the proof copy so I haven't used it. One thing that's even more difficult than cover images is author photos, and I happen to think Kate's is glorious, so I chose to share that instead!

From the troubled to the troubling
Having struck a chord with a lot of readers earlier this week, I’m going to probably alienate many of them right now. The How Publishing Really Works blog declared 17 July Anti-Plagiarism Day.

Okay, I can see why. I do understand how galling it is to have work stolen and when it happens to a writer you admire immensely, as it did recently to a writer who is like a literary deity to me, then it almost feels worse than having your own work stolen.

However … most plagiarism that I hear of in the quotidian sense of the word is online, not print. That is, people have posted work online or had it accepted by some online journal or zine and that is what has been copied without their permission. And in this sense of the word plagiarism I think writers are at grave risk of making the same mistake as the recording industry in trying to patrol, rather than join, the technological revolution.

How many writers don’t own an MP3 player? How many don’t use the internet for research? And in all those cases (most if not all of us) do we make sure we have paid for the music we download or copy from a friend? Do we ensure we have the permission of every writer whose work we pillage to create our own? And do we then cite them in our acknowledgements? Are all our videos and DVDs and CDs unpirated …?

Right. I thought not.

So where do we get off on telling others to respect our rights to material in the electronic media? I’m not saying plagiarism is okay, I’m saying that it’s very easy to get on a high horse about something that we, ourselves, tend to do in other areas of life. You’re damaging the livelihood of a musician if you rip music from your friend’s hard drive to your own. You’re stealing the intellectual property of other writers if you use their material for research and don’t cite them (and who cites anything when writing for blogs or websites?) Giving an url, as I have above, is about as far as we go in acknowledging our sources, let alone honouring their rights.

So we need a different paradigm, not a police force. We, the writers, need to work out for ourselves how we benefit from the public exposure in online media and what we want to do about ensuring we get the benefit, rather than losing it to people who borrow or steal our words. What we don’t need is to get sniffy, miss the boat, and find ourselves like record companies – dealing with an explosion in interest in our material but with no way to profit from that interest because we’ve alienated all the technology innovators who might have helped us.

Plagiarism is wrong. Print plagiarism is unforgivable (what are publisher’s legal departments for, if not to prevent this?) but online plagiarism needs a debate, and it needs it now.

PS You can decide for yourself whether the pig picture shows greediness in action or happy harmony - clever, aren't I?

Why your novel, beautiful as it is, will never get published …
• Procrastination is the thief of time

• The best drives out the good

• You are a writer – so write, damn you!

These three sentences rotate on the corkboard above my computer. They are written on three post-it pads, which are pinned to the board, and every day I take the top one, move it to the bottom and pin them back up with the second one now uppermost. Every few weeks the pinholes get so big that the post-its won’t stay pinned up, so I write them out again and pin the fresh ones to the board.

It’s not elegant, but it’s simple and it’s effective. I struggle with perfectionism and procrastination as much as the next writer. I can always hit a deadline for paying work, because I have a Protestant Work Ethic that is bigger than I am, but when it’s my own work … I fail, over and over and over again.

So I have my three messages to myself, and while they don’t always work, they remind me that the only reason they don’t work is me. Me. Me. Me.

I know I’m not perfect in any other way, so why do I think my writing should be perfect? Do I throw dinner in the bin if it looks less good than Nigella’s offerings (no, because I’m a greedy pig, but that’s a different issue for another day) – of course I don’t.

Do I refuse to leave the house if I don’t look as good as …. (okay, this is a tough one, women of my age don’t have so many role models – let’s say my exact contemporary, Demi Moore, shall we?) uh, no, because if I did, I’d be a real hermit, rather than just a recluse.

What exactly is the myth that makes me not write because it’s not perfect enough?

It’s the myth of posterity and it’s bollocks. Sappho didn’t write for the future, she wrote to get hot girls into her bed. Charles Dickens wrote against the clock to keep his family in underwear, porridge and bowling hoops, not to get on the ‘Classic Novels’ shortlist. Tolstoy, all gods bless him, wrote what he thought was incisive up-to-date social commentary, mixed (to be fair) with some philosophising about the world, and would have probably laughed bitterly to find himself as an A-Level set text.

Good enough writing allows for better writing tomorrow. Perfect writing allows for nothing but failure in the future. Posterity is not aware of us, so we should try to remain unaware of it. Borges said ‘A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated’ – nice thought but I doubt even Dante managed it, so forget the future, and get on with it. What you don’t finish is not beautiful. What you don’t finish is not beautiful, what you don’t finish is not beautiful. Has that message sunk in yet? If not, here’s three more, from my heart to yours:

• Procrastination is the thief of time

• The best drives out the good

• You are a writer – so write, damn you!

The picture has nothing to do with the post, but it's lovely and I took it on Sunday, so there!

Hashish, Wine, Opium

Not my methods for getting through convalescence, sadly, but an excellent book published by Oneworld Classics and which they were kind enough to send to me.

I’ve said before that Charles Baudelaire has a strange place in my heart, having been both my introduction to French literature and my introduction to the complexities of a truly comprehensive French/English dictionary. So to find a single, terse and somewhat stringent essay on the evils of hashish (although also on the glories of wine) from him in this small book was a delight. The translation is very good and Maurice Stang has, as far as I can assess, been fair to and sensitive about the language and period in question.

Baudelaire and Gautier wrote in an age that was no gentler than our own, but that perhaps had a more optimistic view of drugs of all kinds. Gautier, in particular, writes with a sprightly style and a jolly insouciance about taking hashish and opium that probably wouldn’t get past a sub-editor’s pen now, as it would be too ‘naïve’ and ‘biased towards the positive attributes of recreational drugs’, but it’s quite delicious to be taken back to an era where such experimentation was seen as a literary duty, and cataloguing your hallucinogenic experiences was a craft task, like hitting your word count or editing your first draft. And it’s equally palatable to be reminded that journalism once had frontiers in the individual, rather than the mass, and that exploring the inside of a person’s head and heart was once as important as exploring the ‘concerns of the audience demographic’. Gautier, in fact, is a ‘discovery’ for me – and his writing deserves to be better known if these three examples are indicative, because stylistically he’s very attractive indeed.

For writers in particular, this kind of classic is invaluable because it exposes us to some of those bits of literature that are indicative of a period, but that aren’t the ponderous outgrowth of it: Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal is considerably leavened by reading his diatribe against hashish, and I wish I’d has this tiny essay to hand the first time I read that song of praise to drunkenness. The very economy of the essay recommends it to the reader, and it does reveal more of the man than the biography I once read, which depressed me unutterably (and in two languages to boot!).

I do have one complaint though – the cover. I finally worked out that it shows a drunk (in a cowboy hat?) with a bottle (and maybe a glass?) in front of him. But it took me a long time to ‘get’ it, and if I’d taken the book off the shelf, rather than being generously supplied with it by the publisher, that cover could have caused me to put it back. A quick look at the Oneworld website shows that this cover may be a blip (or a nadir) rather than a habitual behaviour, which is good to know, as bad covers can damn a good book and that would be a shame in the case of Hashish, Wine, Opium.

Entering Contests (a cautionary tale written in the second person)

You had always known better. You grew up in a pub, where the late night drunken phone call was a regular joke. At first it was the call made to the pub’s payphone and, woken by the ringing, you would creep down in your dressing gown to answer it, before going behind the bar to tell your father: drunk and deafened by the jukebox, who was wanted. He would yell out the name of the girl, always a girl, who would get up and walk to the cubbyhole where the grey phone lurked, accompanied by catcalls and people miming sad violin music. Tough girls put the phone down after a couple of seconds, average girls took a couple of minutes and soppy bitches would end up with mascara to their chins, mopping their red faces with great flowering handfuls of tissues, and agreeing to meet the drunken reject and give him a second chance.

Mobile phones made the payphone call obsolete – now the drunk could call their lost one direct, and women got into the act much more. You would hear them, bar manager yourself now, refusing the call if they were tough, or, if they were hellish tough, putting it on speakerphone and holding out the phone so their girlfriends could stuff tissues or hands in their mouths to muffle their laughter as the drunk wept and wailed and begged for a second chance. Soppy bitches took the phone outside to listen. Men were always nicer – either not taking the call or taking it outside - but never using it as a cheap joke.

So why, knowing all this, did you do it? Why, when you saw that The Weekend Guardian had a summer fiction contest, did you indulge in the literary equivalent of the drunken phone call? Was it because Dave Eggers broke your heart several years ago when he admitted that he’d given top place to a story about a pig called Marmite just because he liked the idea? Was it because second place in that contest burned your soul? So when you saw the judges were Julie Myerson and (be still my beating heart) William Boyd, and that they wanted a gripping, well-crafted story under 2000 words, why did you send them a crime romp set in Brighton and featuring a heavyweight boxer … a female heavyweight boxer at that?

You weren’t even drunk.

So if anybody else has a story that fits the criteria better than mine, send it in before 10 July …

Why blog?

It’s a long time since I started blogging. I’m in awe of those people who remember writing anniversaries and notice their hundredth or five hundredth post or whatever. I don’t. I think I would go insane if I knew how long it took me to write a novel or thought about how many blog posts I’ve written since 2005 – although given that I blog six days a week, writing about three blogs a day professionally, as well as my own blog and doing some ghost blogging for folk who aren’t good at ‘soshul meedja’ stuff, it must be in the thousands at least.

But I do remember why I started blogging. It was fear. Fear that this new thing was going to snatch the writing world away from me. Books were dead, the websites and literary mavens trumpeted, we’d all blog everything in the brave new world.

Ho ho ho.

Paid-for content is still a rarity and nobody seems to know why the business model hasn’t taken off. But still I blog.

Why?

It’s a question I’d forgotten to ask myself until a lovely client asked me this week for some blogging tips and I had to sit and face the fact that I don’t have any. Or not any useful ones, anyway,

I used to make a list of things that I was going to blog about every month – that lasted for … oh, about a month! Now I blog about whatever comes into my head when I sit down and decide it’s time to blog. I get sent books to review quite often, and I don’t review all of them, which may mean I’m making some enemies in the industry, but I don’t write negative reviews so silence is my only recourse if work doesn’t seem work praising. I also buy and review books by authors I love, because if you can’t share your pleasures you’re a sad soul indeed.

But I do have key themes for my own blog, which are probably keeping writing sustainable and keeping yourself sane.

Professionally speaking, I love those clients who give me a clear brief. I don’t care whether I have to write about white T-shirts or suitable plants for winter hanging baskets, knowing what they want makes my life wonderfully easy. Some other blogs I am paid to write are more ‘open’ and for them I tend to have developed areas that I hope are specific to me and valuable to a readership. In environmental politics blogging, for example, I focus on food security, environmental protest and the relationship between animals, environment and development. They are areas that I’ve studied in the past or areas that I think are neglected in modern discourse. Gosh, pretentious, moi?

Back to the point - why do I blog? Partly because all things become habitual if you discipline yourself. So writing a novel is easier when you’ve written six previously, writing every day, or every week, or reflecting on your own writing, or reading with discrimination and commenting on what you’ve read are all skills. All writing skills contribute to success, in my view, so blogging is one such skill that I like to keep developing. I blog because reflecting on my writing life helps keep me sane. I blog because I’ve met an awful lot of writers in the past six years and while I’m not hubristic enough to think they read my blog, I know that I read many of theirs, so it’s a way of being accessible to people with whom one might not have enough in common to engage in email or telephone relationships. Because it may help to build that nebulous thing called platform, although probably you have to be a more controversial and committed blogger than I am for that to happen. Because I don’t keep a diary. Because it’s addictive.

Do I have any advice? Enjoy yourself or there’s no point doing it. Make a list of all the things you want to write about – it’s useful in the first month. Be honest but never frank; protect the innocent and allow them their privacy, especially those closest to you. Enjoy yourself. Don’t think of it as writing, think of it as online thinking. Read other blogs. Enjoy yourself.