This Itch of Writing

Wanting, needing, yearning, dreaming

There used to be a terrific series on Radio 3 - Monday afternoons, as I remember - called Stage and Screen. It was always a stand-alone programme about theatre or movie music, from the acutely avant-garde to the blockbustingly popular, and apart from the fact that it was always full of all that gorgeous repertoire, the discussion of the interaction between drama (and so at least by implication, storytelling) and music was consistently illuminating. The Broadway musical seems an impossibly tight form to us novelists, lying back comfortably in the arms of our own baggy monster of a tradition. And composing music, complete with beginning, middle and end, for a three-minute-forty-seven-second cue which has already been shot, is also something to make even those of us who are turned on by technical and formal challenges feel a bit weak.

I get grumpy when it seems that the nearly as tight principles of screenwriting are being applied to fiction without any acknowledgement that the two art forms are in many ways fundamentally different, and that happens a lot, not least in books about creative writing which ought to know better. But there's no denying that the basic simplicity of the novel-like elements of a musical (the time-frame of the experience so relatively short, the music/set/choreography doing much of the work that the novelist has to do for themself) can mean that the big bones of the storytelling can be seen and discussed amazingly clearly.

So I wish I could remember more of some of the programmes that were about narrative in musicals. It was school-run time, so I couldn't easily make notes, and in those pre-DAB, pre-podcast days it was hard to catch up later. Sometimes I think I might try to track down some splendidly vulgar Write your Musical and Make a Million book, just to see whether what it says chimes with what I remember: that in a good musical the big songs are the seemingly natural culmination of a build-up of plot and emotion, an outburst of feeling and action too strong to be contained in mere prose speech. And this idea, mutatis mutandis, is something that fiction writers could do well to think about.

One of the things that most often isn't working in novels that I do editorial reports on is what's sometimes called One-Damn-Thing-After-Another syndrome: when the plot just seems like a series of things that happen. The writer has usually thought quite hard about what the characters are trying to get, what need they're trying to fulfil, and then either written a series of scenes to explain it, or tossed a series of obstacles in their path. If these two kinds of scene are alternated, it can give the illusion that the novel has a plot. But if the reader's not to get bored with each damn thing trotting along about as excitingly as junctions on the M1, fiction needs to be all about change: narrative drive isn't about bomb-blasts or sex scenes or crying on the best friend's shoulder, it's fundamentally about how those moments change the characters' needs and desires, and therefore their actions. In practical, how-I-suggest-you-revise-your-novel terms, what that means is that the writer needs to pinpoint the crucial moment of change in their head, make it clear in the scene (however subtly, however buried in the subtext) and then re-write what comes before so that the change is convincing, and re-write what comes after so we see the effect on them, the other characters, and what they all do next.

I can remember two examples that were discussed in Stage and Screen of the natural place for a big song in a traditional musical - the place where feeling's to strong to be contained. The first is the classic opening 'I want' number, where the hero/heroine bursts out with what will, fundamentally, be the driving reason for the whole story. Eliza Doolittle's 'All I want is a room somewhere' is a classic of this kind, while Belle's first number in the Disney Beauty and the Beast is another example, though I can't remember its title. The village is narrow and boring, they all think she's weird because she yearns for something grander and more exciting, but her main suitor - her perceived future - is stupid and vain. The number is shaped as her progress through the village, which is clever too, because it means that within the song itself there's movement. It isn't just a single statement, it embodies change in itself, a literal and figurative feeling that we're in a different place at the end from where we started. All in about three minutes: a page and a half of a novel read aloud.

A second big moment of change was first pin-pointed, apparently, by Rodgers and Hammerstein in Carousel, and it's the kind of product of fundamentals and practicalities that I love. One of the drawbacks of forming a muscial (most musicals?) around a love story (even a sad, going-wrong one like Carousel) is that the biggest moment of change of all - when the hero and heroine declare their love - should be the biggest song, the highest point, but it can't happen too early, because the plot's based on the business of getting them together. So how do you get a high enough point into the first act? If you don't, after all, the audience might not bother to come back after the interval. To overcome this inherent drawback of (if you believe Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots) the most fundamental story of all  Rodgers and Hammerstein invented what's since become know as the conditional love song. 'If I loved you,' in Carousel is the original of 'I'll know when my love comes along,' in Guys and Dolls, 'On the street where you live,' in My Fair Lady, and a dozen others. If the 'I love you' song is about fulfilment, which always risks being the end of the story, the conditional love song is all about desire in the true sense: wanting, dreaming, yearning, needing. Which, of course, is the mainspring of fiction.

I hate it when I hear of aspiring writers meekly trying to force the words and ideas that are tumbling out of them into some prescriptive mould that will - the how-to book swears - mean that their book will sell. But when I look back on things I've written, and books I've read, I can see many moments which you could call either the 'I want' moment, or the conditional love song, or, no doubt, the other big moments a musical has. In fact, I think this post-hoc understanding - the commentary on A Secret Alchemy which is part of my PhD, if you like - can be far more fruitful, in learning your trade, than any studying of a textbook before you start. But that's for another post...

Subjective, objective, and Soviet toothbrushes

Over at Vulpes Libris I've been talking about something I've talked about here more than once: what I think it is that defines literary fiction. It's been an interesting exercise, not least because I wanted to set up a general discussion about how literary fiction works: some terms, some ways of thinking about it, and why it's worth bothering with. What I didn't want to do is say 'X is literary and Y isn't literary,'  because people will always argue about that: what's 'difficult', what's 'worth it', is always going to be a very muddly mixture of objective and subjective reactions. It seems to me much more interesting to unpick the question, and let people try mapping it onto their own reading, and see if they agree.

In fact, it seems to me that most of the blood that's shed when people start discussing and classifying books is because it's so hard to separate out what a book evokes in you from what it is of itself. Literary criticism, at least in the twentieth century, got round this first by urging perfect (and impossible) objectivity: close reading that ignored both the author's intention and the particular reader's response. An objective and accurate grand theory of how texts work was the aim: a definition of what they were of themselves. It's no accident that such a project emerged in the 1920s and 30s, just when Soviet apparachiks were trying to arrive at an objective and accurate grand theory of how many colours of toothbrush the population of the USSR needed. And we all know how well that kind of thing worked. Equally, though understanding the ways that words fit together is essential training for the writer, it does leave out of account the fact that a book can't help but exist within the stuff that different readers bring to it.

And then, when that project proved impossible, because sometimes authors pipe up and say what they were trying to do, as even Eco allows, and because different readers, inconveniently, will laugh, or cry, at the same thing, literary criticism decided that, actually, every text is recreated every time it's read. The author is dead in the sense that what meaning they were trying to get readers to find, is irrelevant. A novel is part of an ever-revolving and shifting set of references, and what it means is embedded in how those references interrelate. Sometimes the reader's response was allowed for. But sometimes the only value of a book seemed to be its role as a missile in the battles of symbols and signs: its ballistic possibilities were the point, not how well it worked as something readers wanted to read.

But readers go on reading things, and liking them, and not liking them, and writers go on trying to decide what to write and how to write it. It is possible, and essential, to talk about what works and what doesn't in a book. With variations, what works - what we'd loosely say is 'good' about a book - is likely to be true-ish for many of the readers within a given bookish tradition: say, those who grew up in late-20th century England (Wales, Scotland and Ireland having their own literary cultures). What works for you - in the sense of making the hairs rise on the back of your particular neck - is a different though related criterion. But in the general cultural terms I'm talking about one book is not as good as another, in any of the senses in which I defined 'good' a while back. But we have to acknowledge that it's still personal: it still involves your response. What alerts you to something being extra-good or extra-bad? It's an instinct, a gut feeling. Only then, if you're in critical mode, do you think 'Why am I gripped? What am I loving? Why am I bored? What don't I like?'. So the original alert, if you like, is a-reasonable and entirely personal and subjectiv, and the reasoning is post-hoc, logical, apparently objective. Even if it kicks in so quickly you're hardly aware that it's triggered by something not in the least objective and logical, the two are separate things.

It's the same process, if you like, as writing: the words occur to me, and then I decide if they work. It's a split second (though it might also be six months) between the two processes, but, again, they are different. Maybe that's the way in which, not only are writers readers, but readers are in a different way writers: even if you don't sign up to the idea that it's readers, not writers, who construct the book, their process of feel-think reproduces the writer's same feel-think pattern. Good reviewers like the Book Foxes over at Vulpes Libris know that.

Any spiders interested?

In Slipstreaming Eagleton and selling your soul I and some of the commenters were grumbling about the way that our non-fictional selves often seem more important to the book trade and to readers than what we write, which is ostensibly the raison d'être of the whole industry. (I'm reminded of the vast edifice of health clubs and Away strips and Chelsea-Football-Club-branded wine, which surrounds a postage stamp of centrally-heated grass in the middle of the stadium at Stamford Bridge.) Then Rosy Thornton had an excellent rant on Vulpes Libris about the way that book trade categories, and most particularly book covers, are 'the insidious perpetrator of stereotypical assumptions' about fiction, literature and their readers. And I was fascinated to hear how many publishers' publicists are astonished that Zoë Fairbairns, in journalist mode, insists on receiving a copy of an author's book before she'll do an interview with them, and if the book doesn't arrive in time for her to read it properly, she cancels the interview.*

It's partly, I think, that as writers we've spent a year, or two or three or ten, making sure that every word and scene and character is necessary to our novel, and it's then very difficult for us to bear the inevitable reductiveness involved in any kind of summary or sample. Even chosing what to put in a reading can be agonising, because of everything that we have to not read. All aspiring writers know that the worst thing (apart from the actual rejections, if any) about the whole process of trying to get published is writing the synopsis that must accompany your first-three-chapters. All published writers know that the worst rows writers ever have with their editors are over covers: even worse than the ones they have over the blurb, so I'm told. The cover, after all, is a single image, not even a few sentences, and it's the first thing a potential buyer sees, so its message must be absolutely direct and easily decoded.

In my PhD work I've been looking at how authors try to create the reader that their book needs, from Umberto Eco defending the first hundred pages of The Name of the Rose to Thomas Keneally 'Author's Note' to Schindler's Ark, asserting that he 'attempted to avoid all fiction, because fiction would debase the record.' At my editor's suggestion I made a late and very important change to the beginning of A Secret Alchemy, to make sure readers pick up straight away on the kind of book it is: to help them to tune in to the nature of my storytelling.

And it's occurred to me that, actually, everything about a book that's outside the main text is part of this business of tuning the reader in, creating the reader the book needs. How many Amazon reviews say things like, 'The blurb doesn't do this book justice,' or 'This wasn't what I was expecting'? In Knowledge of Angels, in an opposite proposition to Keneally's, Jill Paton Walsh's 'Author's Note' states that the novel 'is set on an island somewhat like Mallorca, but not Mallorca, at a time somewhat like 1450, but not 1450. A fiction is always, however obliquely, about the time and place in which it was written.' This isn't to save her the trouble or constraints of getting her history 'right' for this wonderful book, but to explain to the reader how to read the book. Even acknowledgements (which I grumbled about a while ago in No place for the muffins) make a difference to how a book is read, though the effect is different depending on whether they're at the beginning or the end of the book.

Authors' notes, typography, acknowledgments, covers, bindings, blurbs, puffs, reviews, authors' photographs, historical notes, even the price and the 'three-for-two' or 'signed by the author' sticker, make a difference to how we read a book: create a particular reader for it. There's a PhD in there somewhere: not mine, thank you, one's quite enough, but a Goldsmiths-type PhD nonetheless, spider-like and anti-reductive, with a foot in literature and another in design, a third in cultural analysis and several still spare for psychology, semiotics, reader-response theory, creative writing and going to the pub. I'd read it.

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*I know myself that it's much easier to do interviews with a journalist who hasn't read the book. If they've read it they ask questions I have to think about, and my newly-thought-out answer may not come out clearly, or may not be the right 'angle', or may give away more than, later, I wish I had. Whereas if they haven't they all ask exactly the same questions, to which I have well-polished answers of appropriate lengths, rather as the child star Margaret O'Brien, asked to cry for the scene, apparently asked a director if he wanted the tears in her eyes, half-way down her cheeks, or running all the way.

Drilling deep

But if I was arguing in Trust me, I'm telling stories for being allowed to play fast and loose with historical (or, indeed, any other) facts, I do see that there's not a lot of point in fiction that doesn't grapple with the realities of human existence in some way. It doesn't need Bruno Bettelheim to tell us that even fairy stories say important things to us: that enchantment has its uses. A fairy story may also be - pace Freud - a growing-up myth; many an opera - pace Jung - is an integration of animus and anima; and a well-crafted modern comedy makes us laugh at our uneasily comfortable modern lives which we never thought to laugh about. And that's not to exclude the science fiction and fantasy branches of the fiction tree either: it's simply that they play by different set of rules about what's defined as 'believable' - dragons, for instance.

So even though the definition of a novelist's trade could be that We Make Things Up, any novel needs a bedrock of human existence - human truth, if not historical or geographical fact - because without it fiction is pointless. The difficulty is that every reader has a very slightly different frame of reference for testing such truth, based on a slightly different experience of the world. Write about what you can make me believe you know is my slogan for aspiring writers, but what I'll believe as a reader is as much about me as it is about you. I never did discover what it was about Anna, in The Mathematics of Love, that meant a fellow-workshopper didn't believe she'd been brought up on a council estate, but since the others in the workshop did believe she had, I didn't feel obliged to re-write Anna, or her childhood.

That ought to mean that the further away the world of a novel is from the world of its readers, the faster and looser I can play with mere facts, without shaking my readers' faith in that bedrock of human truth, because who can tell me I'm 'wrong'? But, lacking the believability so easily established (in theory) by the novelist of modern life with an Ordnance Survey map and a bit of eavesdropping on buses, you can argue that those of us who set our fiction in other worlds - the past, the future, different continents or different galaxies - have to drill even deeper into human bedrock before we can start to build our story.

Trust me, I'm telling stories

I've just realised that this is my hundredth blog post, so thank you to everyone who's dropped by, read, commented, linked, or just said something that got me intrigued and sent me over here to work out what I think. For example:

Poet Sheenagh Pugh has been blogging here about Linda Grant's piece in The Guardian that also set me off on Rogues and Vagabonds. It's apparently even harder to persuade readers of poetry that the persona in the poem is not the poet, than it is to persuade the readers of novels that the author made it up. And then on Friday I had a drink for the first time in ages with a short-story-writing friend. She has an extremely high-powered professional life and a large family, and she writes strange, dark stories which don't spring directly from her everyday life, and would completely change how people saw her if they read them. So she writes under a pseudonym, and I sympathise hugely with that, and not just because negotiating contracts is hard to do with someone who's read your stories of... well, that would be telling. No, not just because it's bad for business: consciousness of external scrutiny of what you're doing (as opposed to consciousness of the need to communicate what you want to say) is creative disaster.

Meanwhile, she was sympathising with me about the fact that the advance reading copies (bound proofs to you and me) of A Secret Alchemy should be going out any day now. I'm bracing myself, not just because the early reviews - the ones the book trade reads - won't be long behind, but as anyone must brace themselves who writes any fiction rooted in well-known facts. To hear some - many - readers of historical fiction, you'd think that accurate facts are what they're looking for, and in some ways it is. It's frightening how many lovers of historical fiction were completely turned of real history by bad teaching at school. They still want their history fix, though, so the history in a novel is what matters to them, not the fiction. Of course I have my professional pride, and I hope I haven't got any facts wrong that I meant to get right. But I hope more that people read A Secret Alchemy as I meant it to be: a story. It's not history, though it has its roots in history. It's fiction, and anyone who wants history should go and read a history book: I made this up.

And I suddenly realised that so many fiction-readers read not to be transported elsewhere, as we all were so easily in childhood, but to get a fix of non-fiction: history, geography, science or a dozen other subjects in easy-to-swallow form. No wonder they're so upset when they realise that something isn't true in the factual sense. As well as all the reasons I touched on in 'Rogues and Vagabonds', I find this attitude annoying because it ignores what fiction is for, and if the author gets it wrong, it takes their fiction to task for not being what it was never meant to be. To my mind, if you want history, read history, if you want geography, read travel books. They're stories too, of course - though they play by different rules - because humans are story-telling creatures and we have no other way of making sense of our experience.

I'm telling stories by fiction rules, and I make no promises about what's true and what isn't in what I write, but only that I'll make that call as seems best to me at the time. All I promise is that, of itself, the story will be whole, will make sense, will be true to human experience, will satisfy you, the reader, as real life - real history - so often doesn't. Trust me, I'm telling stories.

A Great Cathedral

In response to Tim Lott's lament in The Guardian that heterosexual love stories are no longer considered a properly literary and sufficiently substantial subject for a novel, even though they power much (most?) of the great fiction of the past, Susan Hill argues that our ordinary love lives are too prosaic, that these days writing about great love can't be done in a world with easy and blame-free divorce, and that it has to include writing about sex, which is impossible to do well. As a result, she says, we cannot write the sweeping narratives, the high drama and heartbreak that great love stories demand. (I did post a comment on her blog, but it seems to have got lost in the ether).

I do agree that the lack of impediments to our modern western sex lives can make writing a 'big' modern love story very difficult. Where are the tensions, the conflicts, that storytelling can't do without? How do you construct David Isaak's crucible? (Part Two is here, and together they show why David's blog is one of my absolute favourites.) A major theme of The Mathematics of Love is transgressive love, but I had to go a long way in the modern strand to find a relationship as transgressive for us as the 1820 relationship of a middle-class unmarried man and woman, both of age and in their right minds, was for their contemporaries. So I think Susan's right that that the great love stories of today are likely to be found in milieux where impediments are still built in: non-Western countries and social groups, gay and lesbian relationships in a straight world, and I would add historical worlds. You can even build in your own impediments if you build your own world, though sci-fi writers, too, have problems convincing the literati that what they do has literary value.

There is also the pernicious but common attitude, which always seems rather adolescent to me, that the grim and ghastly is cooler, more profound, more literary, than the beautiful or the transcendently joyful. (Except beautiful women, who populate literary fiction written by men with unlikely frequency). Tim Lott quotes Richard Curtis, and though I do actually find some of Curtis's work more sentimental than I care for, he has a very good point:

If you write a story about a soldier going awol and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind. If you write about people falling in love, which happens a million times a day ... you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental.

And I treasure The Times review of The Mathematics of Love so much because Sarah Vine understood what I was trying to do:

there is suffering, violent and disturbing portraits of war and of personal loss; but equally extreme moments of joy and human understanding. At its core are the emotions that most shape us — love and loss... Everyone is, at the core, vulnerable, their happiness bittersweet and fleeting but nevertheless priceless.

So I would never say that you can't write a great love story for present-day western characters: in fact I'd say I agree that we should reclaim the territory. And if writing love must involve writing sex, why is that a problem? The same writerly solutions are available to us for sex as they are for anything else, though the pitfalls are larger and the path between them narrower. For one thing, who says that the apparently prosaic can't be made heroic, romantic, tragic? Fundamentally, if our modern lives, to us, look most of the time like a modern city in broad daylight - all neon signs, ersatz coffee and chewing-gum stuck to the pavement - who says we need to write them like that? Have most of us not not known joy and sorrow and terrible grief, not looked up in awe at the gleam and shadow of a great cathedral or soaring skyscraper at night, not stood on a hill-top and wept or laughed or simply felt our own bodily boundaries thin almost to nothing in this universe?

The slippery beast

The latest post on the Macmillan New Writers group blog is an interesting rumination among those interesting authors about whether or not they think of themselves as writing in a particular genre. The responses, as you might imagine, vary. The difficulty is that the term 'genre' is a slippery beast at the best of times, being used in lots of different senses in many different contexts.

Genre as plot-style. As in romance (will they live happily ever after?), detective (will they find the murderer?), thriller (will they save the world?), adventure (will they come out alive?). This seems to be the one that literary criticism meant when it decided to talk about genre: A S Byatt has fun with this in Possession, as her campus satire characters point out that they've moved from 'The Quest' to 'Chase-and-Race'.

Genre as set of rules. My Dictionary of Literary Terms defines 'genre' according to the classical French origin of the word: epic, tragedy, lyric, comedy, satire, 'to which must now be added novel and short story'. In their tidy-minded way (the French were horrified by the 'muddle' that Shakespeare made of his genres) they set forth the rules that writers in each genre had to stick to. There still are rules: Detective stories do need a body fairly early on, even if we've all got a bit more sophisticated since the absolute outrage that greeted Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, when... No, I won't spoil it. Romance does need great love, even without a happy-ever-after ending: sadder-but-heroically-wiser is also an option.

Genre as setting. Historical, fantasy, sci-fi, and what I'd call 'exotic' (think The Beach, or The God of Small Things). In these settings, of course, any plot is possible, though I have a theory - entirely unsupported by looking for evidence - that you don't get a lot of pure, full-on romance plots in a sci-fi setting.

Genre as opposed to literary. This is a book-trade rather than a literary distinction. Commercial fiction has to be jacketed/packaged/sold as a known quantity: as crime, lad-lit, sci-fi, fantasy, saga, mum-lit, and so on. 'Women's fiction' is probably the broadest church (why is there no equivalent label of 'men's fiction'?) but they all have their rules which readers expect, and have covers and PR campaigns to match. And yet, while conforming to those, the novel between the covers can be anything from tick-box dull or utterly banal, to a thumping good read or truly original. As Valerie Shaw says, 'Where originality comes over is in the skill with which a writer can simultaneously meet the demand for comforting sameness and divert it into new and often disturbing areas.' The odd result of the opposition between 'genre' and 'literary' is that books which clearly belong to a genre are somehow disqualified from also being literary. 'Not just a good detective novel, but a really good novel' they said of Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors, and Margaret Atwood's recent dismissal of much Sci-fi writing was greeting with some scepticism, given The Handmaid's Tale. And yet, to the book-trade 'literary' is just another genre with covers and PR to match: one where prestige and prizes make up for relatively modest sales, and which you can't classify by plot-style or setting, but only by its style, where the quality of the prose and the complexity of the ideas are as important as the drive to tell a story.

So how does it feel as a writer to find your work classified in a certain way? The MNW writers each have their own reaction. I was very disconcerted at first to be asked, 'So what genre do you write?' and 'What period do you write?' because all I knew was that I wrote novels which at the moment had partly historical settings. Genres needn't be reductive for a writer, at least not at the more loosely-defined, literary end of the market, and besides, there's a lot of sophisticated fun to be had playing with the rules. But for me they are too defining. What if the next thing I want to write isn't historical? What if it doesn't chiefly involve the development of one or more sexual relationships? Chances are, knowing me, that it is and it will, and maybe my publishers will be relieved to know it. But something small and cussed inside me needs to say very clearly every now and again: 'Well, if what I want to write next is a short, sharp sci-fi techno-thriller, I shall. So there!'

Washing up and growing up

A few months ago I went to a centenary concert at the Purcell Room of the works of my great-aunt Elizabeth Maconchy and of her daughter Nicola LeFanu. After a lifetime of dodging 'Aunt Betty's' - to me - incomprehensible music, I went because my sister Carola Darwin was the soloist. And loved it: in the intervening years, much casual Radio Three listening has educated my brain, so the new and strange made sense, because it was woven in with what has become more familiar. As I found myself saying to Nicola afterwards, 'I think my ears have grown up.'

That may have been a very naive-sounding thing to say to the Professor of Music at the University of York, but it's got me thinking about the equivalent in writing and reading. In my previous post Carracks, kerseymere and other last straws I was talking about just how hard the reader's working in the first few pages of a novel. The process is most obvious at the beginning of a story, but actually all the way through it the reader is having to use what they've already read and understood in their life and the preceding chapters to make sense of this new choice and arrangement of words. Part of the pleasure of reading your favourite genre of fiction is your consciousness of using that understanding: that sense of something both playing by and playing with the rules. If you like thrillers you know that the hero will win in the end, and walk away bloodied but unbowed, the world just that little bit safer. If you like romances you know that it'll end in happily ever after, but when and how? The narrative drive - the way the writer harnesses the reader's urge to know what will happen to keep them turning the pages - is as much about how as it is about will they?

The best examples of any genre manage to satisfy the reader by providing what they know they want, while using that satisfying shape as a container for good, lively writing (i.e. fresh, if not truly original), intriguing characters, and a exploration of all sorts of subsidiary themes and ideas. It even takes that playing with the genre's form and rules to its logical concludions: 'If this was a mystery novel...' says Harriet Vane to Peter Wimsey on more than one occasion.

But it's not a straightforward case of writer and reader just learning the rules, because the usual genre labels aren't all labelling the same aspect of the novel: 'fantasy' and 'historical' are about the setting of the novel (though I've met more than one reader who thinks Jane Austen wrote historical fiction), 'while 'thriller' and 'romance' are about the mainsprings of the action, with 'detective story/mystery' and 'chick lit' as subsets respectively. And there's 'comedy' and 'horror', which are about tone rather than setting or subject, but does anyone actually file a novel under 'tragedy'? Unless they file it under 'literary', of course. In book trade terms 'literary' is another genre - a particular market and set of readers to be targeted like any other, with the right design and the right media coverage. In readers' terms it's more often about prose style and explicit intellectuality (is there such a word?), with the subject, tone and setting open to anything that the writer fancies for this novel.

So, for the reader, literary fiction by definition refuses to offer them anything like such a clearly-known form leading to a guessable if not known ending. Instead it offers at least to some extent the unknown: new words in new arrangements; beginnings which ask you to keep going even when you don't understand things yet; middles which don't follow an at least retrospectively obvious route; endings you didn't expect or don't want; actual plot points that you have to put together from hints and references which the author assumes you'll get. It is, arguably, harder work.

When it comes to reading for pleasure the new and strange will always be easier for readers to comprehend if it's anchored in the comfortably familiar. Which is why, to my mind, it's not worth anyone's time to be shocked and horrified at the fact that literary fiction sells, generally speaking, in much smaller quantities than genre fiction. Nor is it shocking that literary writers on the whole seem to write fewer books: if the reader finds new things harder to deal with, so too does the writer.

Which is why it's also not worth being shocked and horrified by what someone else regards as too literary. I have a theory that the proportion of strange-to-familiar each of us can handle is part of our character: what changes is what feels strange in the first place. My enjoying music which I used not to be able to get at all isn't about my trying harder, or being braver or cleverer or more self-sacrificingly family-minded, let alone more culturally virtuous. I'm no more those things than I was as a teenager, and if anything I've forgotten the little technical musical knowledge I had then. My tolerance for new-and-strange is probaly much as it ever was. It's about my brain having spent twenty years doing what human brains are designed to do: learning simply by experiencing new things in learning-sized doses, usually subliminally, often while doing the washing up, until they're no longer strange. Nothing very culturally virtuous about that, is there?   

Familiar and reliable, new and strange

I started responding to Writer Girl's comment on my previous post The dress code for bookshops, and other ways of annoying Brian Sewell, and it turned into something longer, so I'm posting it here instead. Talking about this business of branding authors, WG said

My business brain cannot understand why an arrangement that would give authors brand recognition and a shot at a wider audience should be sniffed at.

My business brain agrees - not least because the brand stays with the author whichever publisher has the individual books - but my writer's brain can see why so many authors, with every desire sell books, are nonetheless very sniffy indeed. Most writers' creative core offers fierce resistance to being pre-determined, or pigeonholed, or restricted in what it's allowed to create. I feel like that too, even though I'm sure that on my deathbed I'll look back at my work and see a strong family resemblance between all of it.

But though usually we think of only the most commercial writers as brands, cheerfully and successfully operating within the constraints of a genre and selling into a well-defined market - Martina Cole, say, or James Patterson - there's no inherent reason that it should be so. The first time you find yourself thinking of 'the new Ian McEwan' or 'the early Beryl Bainbridges', then you're thinking of those authors as a brand, and I, for one, would never be sniffy about them and their kin. Danuta Keane's example of Penguin's handling of Zadie Smith is a case in point. I'm very sure that Smith writes to please herself, but through clever design, publicity and marketing Penguin have established 'Zadie Smith' as a place to go for something whose only pre-determined feature is that it's original, literary and challenging: something, in other words, which by definition precludes predictability.

What I'm saying is that we tend to think of brands in terms of a single image (in all sense of the word) - something known for its specificity, like Heinz or Adidas - but it needn't be like that. I don't blame any writer who doesn't want to be a brand if it entails being as limited in possibilities as a Persil packet. But if you think of a brand as the name of a huge department store, which draws people in - hopefully thousands of people - with the promise of showing them all sorts of things, some familiar and reliable and some new and strange, then I can live with being a brand very well.

But then, that's how I see my novels. I've never been able to sign up to the often-made assertion that original ideas and uncompromisingly excellent writing inevitably preclude the traditional, reliable pleasures of fiction: engaging characters and narrative drive. Is it horribly reductive to hope that in the future a cover with my name on it will suggest that inside it a reader will find both the familiar and reliable, and the new and strange? Certainly I've always tried to build a good story, well told, by weaving characters and events together with thick ropes of themes, patterns of images, explorations of ideas or even - dare I say it - the human condition. For me the past exists inescapably within the present, and those ideas exist inescapably within those characters and events: an embodying that's as undeniable, and as intangible, as was the strange process of imagining them in the first place.

The dress code for bookshops, and other ways of annoying Brian Sewell

There's an interesting exchange here on Danuta Keane's blog, which carries on the conversation which started in an earlier piece of hers, It's the Brand, stupid, about the reasons why authors shouldn't shy away from thinking of themselves as brands. I won't summarise it here, though both are well worth suppressing your purist, anti-capitalist, art-fundamentalist knee-jerk horror at the idea of branding yourself till you've read them. It's Susan Hill's post in the comment trail that caught my attention: she describes an acquaintance who bought books avidly when The Book People called regularly at her office, but then went on maternity leave. There were Richard & Judy's selections just asking to be read, but she lived in the country and was at a complete loss as to how to get hold of them. Susan steered her towards Amazon, and all was well. But it's a salutary reminder to us booky types that swathes of the population love reading, have confidence in their taste and money to spend on it, but never go near a bookshop.

It reminded me of a story that the chief book-buyer of W H Smith told me a few months back. She'd dropped in on an event in one of her branches: a prolific writer of non-fiction aimed at teenage boys was talking about his work and signing books, and he happened to mention that while his most recent books were here in Smiths, there'd be a wider range in the Waterstones at the other end of the shopping centre, or in any bookshop. Question time came, and a lad tentatively raised his hand. 'Can we wear trainers in a bookshop?' he asked.

To 99% of those reading this blog, I imagine, bookshops are a home from home. We push open the doors and retreat from the high street clatter into carpeted peacefulness. There's gentle jazz or satisfying baroque chamber music, a tempting list of fancy coffees at fancy prices, and above all a sense of delicious possibilities: riches hoped for and riches unimaginable glittering among all those millions of words, just waiting to be truffled out from the packed shelves. We steer ourselves by labels like 'Fiction A-L' and 'Reference', we know that our sporting hero's life story may not be in 'Sport' but will be in 'Biography', we can tell with a glance at the blurb whether one of a tableful of novels is our sort of thing or another the perfect present for our mother-in-law, we spot titles we've seen reviewed and classics we're about to see on TV.

But it's not like that for much (most?) of the world. Some of what I'd call the nicest bookshops do look and sound like places where you shouldn't be wearing trainers, and if you're feeling like that you're unlikely to feel brave enough to ask what you fear will be a stupid question: you know your mum likes reading books, but you've no idea what to get her for Mother's Day, you loved the Lord of the Rings movies, and apparently there's a book to go with them... Amazon has many merits, and no one will see your blushes, but finding your way through it to something you want, when you don't know how to decode covers and authors and blurbs, is not easy either. Which is why although, like Susan Hill, I make precious little royalty on books sold in Tesco or by Ted Smart's The Book People, I say three cheers for them, and for the 'Richard & Judy' displays, and the 'as seen on TV' ones, and the ones for Mother's Day, pink and stereotyped and insulting to my feminism though I may think them. For someone, somewhere, it may just be what makes a bookshop, or bookbuying in general, seem manageable.

Only the real art fascists, the ghastly Brian Sewells of the book world, believe that no one who isn't born being able to decode books and their habitats deserves to have them. The failure of the rest of us booky types is surely more in our bad faith. We fail to stretch our imaginations outwards from how the world looks to us, to how it does to others, and acknowledge that putting books where people are is just as important as luring people in to where books are.