A time for kindling

There are some things you just have to take on the chin.

Ten days ago we had our annual Dark Angels get-together. John comes up to Edinburgh from London. Stuart and I meet him at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. We plan the coming year and enjoy a good lunch.

‘You’re such a geek,’ they said, as I produced my new iPad.

It’s not quite how I see myself, but from their perspectives I guess maybe it’s true. John cleverly avoids things technological by having an obliging better half to whom he refers from time to time as his IT manager. Stuart, the poet, simply scribbles things on the backs of envelopes. Me … well, yes, I confess I enjoy things that do clever stuff. I like to be properly tooled up for the job on hand (unfortunate turn of phrase, I know).

The iPad was a Christmas present to myself, well-deserved of course. That cut no ice with my 20-year-old son. He stole it at once and disappeared on an Angry Birds binge. When I’d retrieved it, I set about downloading the Kindle app (although in truth you don’t set about anything with an iPad; you just tap the screen and whatever it is happens almost instantaneously). In any case, this – Kindle – was the real reason, I’d persuaded myself, that I needed an iPad.

A few weeks before, I’d had an e-publishing tutorial with Edinburgh crime writer, Lin Anderson. Lin has had some decent results on Kindle with her backlist and is now, generously, on a mission to spread the good word to other writers. The good word is this: no writer need ever again suffer the indignity of titles forlornly mouldering in that great literary boneyard known as 'out of-print'.

This is a revelation. Out-of-print titles, in my case four out of six, are to all intents and purposes dead. No one’s promoting them (not that anyone other than me ever did much for mine, anyway). No one can buy them. No one can read them. All that effort and it’s as if, by declining to reprint, the publishers have locked them away, out of sight forever.

Enter Amazon. Suddenly, with a little bit of formatting I can upload my text and jacket image to the Kindle store, write the blurb, set my own price (having first reverted the rights from the publishers, of course) and the books can carry on selling forever. Now, here’s the really good bit. If that price is more than £1.50, Kindle gives me back 70% (or 30% under £1.50). I can set the price as high or low as I like, and change it every day if I want to test the market. Furthermore, Amazon, with all its clever algorithms, will automatically, electronically do at least as much promotion as my publishers did.

I’ve written in the past about the economics of publishing fiction (see here), but only in respect of my ten percent of the cover price and what it has contributed to my overall income (practically nothing); not about where the rest has gone. One swallows all kinds of things out of habit or convention. In twenty years of being published I’d never really questioned the obvious madness of giving away ninety percent of the income from work that I had sweated blood over. I do now.

Did I really need to help finance a glass-and-steel office at King’s Cross, an editor of whose time I might get a couple of days per book, a marketing department quite likely to commission a cover I hated, and a publicity department staffed largely by eager but clueless teenagers?

Clearly not, as I now understand. I can’t wait to get my backlist up on Kindle, to bring these books I love and am proud of back to life again. They won’t necessarily be my pension (though nothing’s impossible), but they will at least be there for people to read once more. Perhaps I am a geek, after all. If so, I’m a geek who doesn’t like not being read.

Life and Fate

We're two weeks into the new year and stories are everywhere, it seems. There's Melvyn Bragg and his Radio 4 series on the history of literature. It was the 4,000 year-old Sumerian epic, Gilgamesh, that set humanity off on its story-telling spree, he tells us. Then there's War Horse, Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's children's novel. Amid all the publicity, the author has been seizing every opportunity to repeat his mantra that every primary school day should end with the children being read to for half an hour.
   Back on Radio 4 Sarah Wheeler has been introducing readings from the diaries of various members of Scott's South Pole expedition, surely one of the most tragic of exploration stories. And then there was Jeanette Winterson talking passionately about why it matters to read. 'A book is a door,' she said. 'On the other side lies somewhere else.'
   I love that thought. The somewhere else, of course, exists only in our imaginations. But how vivid and real it can feel. Over the Christmas holidays I finished Life and Fate, the 800-page saga by Vassily Grossman set in 1942 during the battle for Stalingrad. Not the kind of thing I normally go for, I have to admit; the last big Russian I read was Dostoevsky, in my early twenties. But after Radio 4 recently gave over every drama slot for an entire week to a dramatisation of Grossman's book, I mentioned that it sounded worth reading and was promptly given it for my birthday.
   During the war Grossman worked as a journalist, reporting from the Eastern Front for the Red Army press. Witnessing the deadening hand of state ideology, even in the thick of battle, he was appalled by the similarities between Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany - and went on to describe them in the novel with an almost Orwellian clarity. Before the book was even finished it had attracted the attention of the KGB, who eventually confiscated it. Grossman died in 1964 but had made copies which were later smuggled to the west where it was first published in 1980.
   It tells the story of Viktor Strum, a Jewish theoretical physicist, and his extended family who between them experience practically every shade of existence in the Russia of the 1940s, from the front line to the labour camps, the state-sponsored laboratory to the steppes, the Lubyanka to Treblinka. The central scene is the desperate struggle for control of Stalingrad during the pitiless winter of 1942/43; the central theme the erosion of individual destiny by the relentlessly controlling mechanism of the communist state.
   As 'somewhere else' it wasn't always an easy place to be, but it was an equally difficult place to leave. In my imagination I absolutely inhabited those bombed-out factories, Siberian wastelands, crumbling apartments; I lived the characters'  inner and outer struggles. The scale and ambition of the book made most of the contemporary fiction I have read seem puny and domestic. For the couple of months it took me to read it majestically enriched my imaginative hinterland and I don't doubt that I've expanded personally as a result. That's why we need to read. That's why the bookless households inhabited by a third of children in the UK offer such a bleak prospect.

Community spirit

For me the year began properly on Monday night with the annual village dance. In the middle of Birnam is a large, ugly Victorian hotel with one marvellous, possibly unique, feature – a huge first-floor baronial hall. Here we gather every New Year to dance and greet those neighbours we didn’t bump into in the car park of the Taybank pub which, complete with covered stage, raucous band and compulsory inebriation, has now become the focal point for Hogmanay itself.

The ceilidh, by contrast, is a family event. Every generation is there and most people know one another. There’s a great atmosphere, excellent music from Edinburgh's Bella MacNab ceilidh band, pretty well everyone dances, no one gets too drunk or shouts, and the feeling of goodwill is palpable. I leave each time with the glowing sense of belonging to a real community. It’s a constant delight and a novelty that never wears off for someone brought up in the kind of rarefied circle where one was more likely to have tea in a castle than mix with the local village folk.

It made me think what an elastic word ‘community’ has become. We talk of communities today to mean groups of people who are bound together only by someone else’s idea. There’s much talk of community in the corporate social responsibility report I’m currently writing for a large manufacturing plc. They’re eager – quite understandably in these scrutinous times – to be seen to be connecting with people beyond the factory walls, and doing the right thing by them. But the members of these communities, be they whole towns local to the factories, or particular common interest groups with whom the company has dealings, or just, collectively, the people who buy their products, have no knowledge of one another. So are they really communities? No, of course not. In a real community everyone is known to everyone else and all are nourished and supported by their membership of that group.

Which doesn’t, of course, mean that they must live cheek-by-jowl. A community that flowered briefly but thrillingly, and which I now miss greatly, was that of the musicians that gathered every Monday night at my local pub, the Birnam Tap Inn, during the first five years I lived in the village. Over the last few days I’ve been listening again to recordings I made of those sessions and the feeling of nostalgia is, at moments, almost unbearable.

We came together one evening a week to make music in the most spontaneous, open, communal way possible. Everyone was welcome, whatever their musical ability. There was no programme or agenda. We simply played what we felt like on the night and because the place attracted excellent musicians, the music was mostly of a much higher quality than usual for a pub session. It was exhilarating and deeply connecting, not just for the players but also for the audience of regulars and passers-by. We were all enriched by the experience and on certain nights, when the energy was high and the musicians hit a particular groove, there was an almost religious intensity to the experience.

The session finally ended when the hotel to which the pub belonged closed down. That was three years ago. Now the place is a pizza parlour; home, perhaps, to a new community of regulars. Whatever brings us together, most of us need communities - although it wasn't really until I returned to Scotland, in my early 40s, that I realised it. Now I belong to several, the village of Dunkeld and Birnam, Dark Angels and 26, to name but three. The thought warms me as we face the uncertainties of 2012.

Choosing your bees

We had our last Edinburgh International Book Festival board meeting of the year yesterday. It has been a fascinating year as world events swirl around us and we’ve found ourselves debating issues as diverse as whether to initiate a cultural exchange involving representatives of the Chinese government, and what might be the pros and cons of a potential new media relationship with the Murdoch organisation (this before the hacking scandal broke and vindicated our eventual decision).

Yesterday it was one of the smaller agenda items that intrigued me most, a snippet in director Nick Barley’s report concerning our bookselling operation. The temporary, tented bookshop in Charlotte Sq turns over nearly £600,000 in the 17 days of the festival. It’s an integral part of the proceedings, a large airy space where you can browse, have coffee and meet authors at after-event book signings. It carries a vast range of fiction and non-fiction, including of course the current titles of all the 700-odd authors appearing. This year our two bestselling titles, both at around 350 copies, were Liz Lochhead’s A Choosing and Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees.

Two poetry titles.

Not fiction. Not memoir. Not biography.

Poetry.

What does that say? That in times of uncertainty we turn to poetry for meaning? That in an age of increasing digitisation, the role of the book as artefact is still essential as the physical setting for poetry? Or simply that a poet at the top of her game, as both these are, can say more to us about the business of being human than any novelist, biographer or historian ever can?

It could be any or all of these things, though it may not be indicative of a trend. Of all the places on the planet where one is most likely to find a concentration of poetry buyers, it’s Charlotte Sq in August.

Nevertheless, it’s heartening; particularly since, as I mentioned last week, we’re hoping to produce a volume of all the writing from the four 26 Treasures projects via the crowd-sourced publisher Unbound. And most of those pieces are poems – not necessarily because people set out to write poems when first confronted with their museum objects, but because the constraint of 62 words ends up shoe-horning most people’s thoughts into the poetic form.

As I write this I realise what an apt metaphor it is for the approach of Christmas, the constraint of the last few days. Everything gets shoe-horned into a frantic burst of last-minute activity. I’m hoping that something creative comes out of it. Inspired present-buying would do. Kindness, love and family togetherness would be better.

See you in 2012.


PS... Since first posting this, Tessa Ransford has emailed to remind me of this, which she has now designated her Christmas poem for 2011:

A Cup of Kindness

Faith, Hope and Charity

wrote St Paul in his hymn to Love

these three abide

In Iraq, explains Canon White on the radio,

Democracy is not what people yearn for

blasted on them as it was through missiles and bombs

What they most want, why can’t we understand,

is water, electricity and kindness

life, communication, things working normally

God only knows

Buddha only knows

Mohammed only knows

everyone knows we want the kindness

which lies at the heart of our being

In Scotland we have given a song to the world

‘a cup of kindness’

to take, to drink, to share

Water, electricity and kindness,

but the greatest of these is kindness

Tessa Ransford

26 Treasures Unbound

A little over a year ago I went to see Sandy Richardson, head of development at the National Museum of Scotland, to tell him about the 26 Treasures project and to ask if he might be interested in helping us repeat the formula we had developed so successfully with the V&A in London.

This involved pairing 26 writers with 26 objects and inviting them to write a personal response in 62 words, as a new and different way of connecting visitors with objects in the collection. (A sestude was the word newly minted for the 62-word form by 26 founder, John Simmons). Our plan was to take 26 Treasures not only to Scotland, but also, simultaneously, to the Ulster Museum and the National Library of Wales.

   Sandy put me in touch with the museum’s Learning Department and I went along to our first meeting, taking with me 26 Scotland’s new secret weapon: historical novelist, Sara Sheridan. Sara combines ferocious energy, intelligence and organisational skills with irresistible charm and determination. She and the museum’s learning officer, Claire Allan, picked up the project and together headed for the horizon, leaving me to offer the occasional cheer from the stands. (And in a nice completing of the circle, Sandy Richardson has since moved on to a new development job – where else but at the new V&A Dundee.)

Last Saturday, in a long gallery at the museum, 26 Treasures Scotland came together: 26 objects, 26 writers, 1,612 words, a virtuoso jazz saxophonist, a recording of pipe marches and a number of intrigued, if slightly baffled passers-by – the culmination of a year of hard work that was more, much more, than the sum of the parts.

Writer Aimee Chalmers and her jazz accompanist Richard Ingham opened the proceedings with a spellbinding performance, 26 minutes long, in Scots, in the voice of Westlothiana Lizziae, a 340-million-year-old fossil lizard. Then, at intervals over the next three hours, everyone in turn spoke briefly about their object and read their 62 words.

We heard the rattle of shipyard drag chains, the words of piper Daniel Laidlaw VC on the Battle of Loos, a catalogue of medieval cattle diseases, the clattering descent of the Maiden’s blade onto its inventor’s neck, the wry observations of a gilded 18th century teapot, the anguish of rejected would-be Highland emigrants – a chorus of voices as varied as the objects that mark a trail through Scottish history from the Big Bang to the present day. It was a wonderful afternoon, touching, funny and profoundly moving by turns.

Now the exhibition runs through till the end of January. The trail is marked throughout the National Museum of Scotland’s Scottish collection, the words appear beside the exhibits, there’s a beautiful little brochure, and a programme of events will bring museum visitors together with the writers and their objects.

Then there’s Unbound, a new publishing company which invites interested readers to buy subscriptions for a book and publishes it only if, within 90 days, it reaches its funding target. In doing so, Unbound creates stronger links between the books that writers want to see published and that readers want to read. 
   Just as Robert Burns persuaded friends to finance his first collection of verse all those years ago, so now we’re hoping to raise the money for the world’s first collection of sestudes – over 100 in all from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It will be a beautiful reminder not only of a wonderful project but also of how history can be brought alive through the story an object has to tell.

Please visit Unbound and support us if you possibly can.

Who cares wins

Christie Watson must be very pleased. Her book, Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, about a Muslim family in Lagos, has been shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Prize. Perhaps she has an advantage. She’s a graduate of the famous University of East Anglia Creative Writing course and she was on Radio 4 this morning alongside one of its most illustrious alumni, Ian McEwan. With John Humphrys they were discussing that old chestnut: whether creative writing can be taught.

Humphrys rounded off the conversation by asking Watson what was the most valuable thing she had learnt on the course. ‘Write a book that other people want to read,’ she replied without hesitation, adding that it was not a tutor but an RLF fellow who had given her this piece of advice.

That is interesting. The Royal Literary Fund fellows do in universities a similar job to what I and many other readers of this blog do in organisations. We help with the practicalities of communication, its effectiveness, rather than its underlying messages. Our clients have the thought (in theory), we help them express it to shareholders, customers, colleagues. Similarly, the students have the thought (in theory), the RLF fellows, all published writers, promote good writing practice, helping them with structure and language – though one would earnestly hope that the creative writing students don’t need much help in that department.

The advice may sound obvious. If you don’t write something other people are going to want to read, then no one will read it. But when you’re in the hothouse environment of a creative writing course, other imperatives may take over and writing ‘what I want to write’ may become irresistible. There’s an identical and equally irresistible corporate impulse to say to the world, in exhaustive detail, ‘what we want to say’.

The RLF fellow’s advice directly echoes what we spend our lives telling people. Write what other people want to read (sub-text: not what I or we want to say). For book just substitute report, email, website or anything else that people in business have to write. Those that get the message communicate in a way that connects. Those that don’t don’t. Sadly the latter are still in the majority.

Towards the end of the programme there was talk of another book. This, for me at any rate, had more uplifting associations. It’s by David Jones, chief executive of global advertising giant Havas, and it was called, in a parody of the SAS motto, Who Cares Wins. Its theme is that the really successful businesses of the future will be those who do more than pay lip service to corporate social responsibility; those who can demonstrate in deed that their drive for growth and gain benefits a far wider community than simply their shareholders.

If the tide really is turning this way, and David Jones certainly believes it is, then telling people what they want to hear, writing what they want to read, is going to become more important than ever. At its most basic it’s the difference between monologue and dialogue.

Pencil or pills?

It’s nice to hear that now there’s validation from the health professionals for an exercise we’ve used since we first started Dark Angels; an exercise that’s also used by teachers of creative writing the world over.

Faye Sharpe, who came on the recent Dark Angels course, sent us a link to a blog by Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi Worldwide, who had picked up on an article in the Sydney Morning Herald – such is the way that information whizzes round the globe these days – which, in turn, reported on 20 years’ research into the therapeutic power of writing regularly about what we think and feel.

‘Expressive writing’ the psychologists call it and 15 minutes a day, they say, is enough to make you feel better about yourself. Not only that, it can also be good for blood pressure, the immune system and memory. Over a more prolonged period it can even tackle physical ailments, for example, helping to control cancer-related pain, reduce the severity of rheumatoid arthritis and increase lung function amongst the asthmatic.

The trick is to write down whatever is in your head, and keep writing without stopping for a set amount of time. A recipe for gibberish one might think. But no. You may not believe you know the story you want to tell yourself, but at some sub-conscious level you usually do, and the results tend to make more sense than you might think they would.

We don’t use the exercise for therapeutic purposes with Dark Angels, more to stimulate creative expression. It encourages people to write more freely, unfettered by the remembrance of rules or the anticipation of readers. But the researchers suggest that the therapeutic value lies in the fact that writing this way allows us to externalise our preoccupations, so that we can see and examine them, almost as if they belonged to someone else.

An American, Julia Cameron, wrote a famous book called The Artist’s Way about leading the creative life. In its slightly less famous companion, The Right to Write, she advocates what she calls ‘daily pages’. This is precisely the kind of expressive writing described by the research: half an hour a day of letting it all out onto paper, best done first thing in the morning, before the working day kicks in properly.

In half an hour you can write three sides of A4 in longhand, if you do as much physical writing and as little stopping and thinking as possible. I know. I did it for six months, a few years ago, and the results were really quite dramatic. I couldn’t speak for the health benefits because I wasn’t alert to that possibility then, but I know it enabled me to resolve a number of preoccupations that had been rumbling away, unaddressed, for a good long time.

Over time, the daily rhythm took hold and put me in contact with a deeper part of myself, helping change the way I saw a variety of things that were going on in my life. It also occasionally rewarded me with a moment of penetrating insight, as on the occasion when I found myself seeing and describing a spring of pure, clear water, bubbling up in a pool of light at the bottom of a deep, dark cave. This I took to be my own creative source, my life force.

Writing this now makes me think I should start doing it again. In fact, we all should. Who needs pills when we’ve got pencils and paper?