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Isn't Cold Comfort Farm just wonderful?
It's what I wanted Evelyn Waugh to be... |
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| Visit The Ampersand Project tumblr for writing tips & other sundries by me and the team at HGE. |
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A sneaky peek at something new for next year.
More on Anastasia another time. |
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| Bespoke birthday card. Literaryily funny. |
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| Morning coffee. |
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| EllaPants. |
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| Celebrating Anna Cowan's UNTAMED. Out now! |
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| First glimpse of Nelika's THE VALE GIRL, out in September! The real cover is lovely. |
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| A wee honorary nephew; here, just twelve hours old. |
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| Friends who work in bread are good friends indeed. |
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| The Sun Bookshop peeps always bring the wine. |
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| The Merri Creek putting on its autumn frock. |
Unfortunately, we shall have to tell you frankly, as we would have done if you had inquired in advance, that we do not feel justified under present conditions in undertaking books of fiction by unknown authors. Both manufacturing and general costs are very high indeed in this country, and there has been a slump in the market for hard bound fiction, partly due to necessarily high prices, and partly due to the tremendous sales of paper covered editions.
Writers are told not to write down to young adult readers, but I can’t help but feel that this is constantly happening today—it simply doesn’t take the form that we might imagine it to. By giving readers books that are all about taking down the state or fighting werewolves we’re implying that it’s only these problems that are of any value, that the everyday teenage experience is otherwise something that should be easily navigable. I can’t think of any worse way than putting down a reader than by suggesting that their lives do not merit reading about.
In addition, by excising all of the quiet space that exists in these classic books in order to make room, make room! for more attention-grabbing plot, we’re denying readers the thinking room to be able to truly experience all of the wonders of reading. We’re assuming that they want their reading experience to be as little like a reading experience as possible, and the result is books with narratives that stream by like tickertape. I can’t help but wonder whether they’ll be forgettable, these books that disallow readers the space that we need to reflect on a story, to engage with it, and to draw our own conclusions.
Not all readers read to escape, nor do they necessarily read in order to live vicariously as action heroes. Sometimes readers read to identify, to make a friend who’ll remain with them forever, and to be charmed. Sometimes they want to be able to read a book that gives them the space that they need to think about the questions posed by the book, and to answer them themselves.
Surprisingly often, too, it’s the quiet books that are the ones that change lives.
from Stephanie at Read in a Single Sitting
Neither of us had eaten olives before, except accidentally on pizza. They were salty and fleshy and when I licked at my lips it felt like I'd been swimming in the ocean and, when I said so, J said he felt the same.
I said, 'If you ever give me a book as a present you have to write in the front of it.'
'Ok,' he said.
We guzzled water from the garden hose because it was closer than the house and we were so warm, there on the slope. The pony grazed by us, huffing when a grass seed went up his nose. We smelled all the smells. At least I did, I couldn't speak for J.
'I reckon spring's around the corner,' he said. 'Smell that?'
I read a book once about a girl who jumped into a river just because she wanted to see what it felt like.
I couldn't help jumping.
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| I've always been something of a thinker. |
INTERVIEWERIn Zen in the Art of Writing, you wrote that early on in your career you made lists of nouns as a way to generate story ideas: the Jar, the Cistern, the Lake, the Skeleton. Do you still do this?BRADBURYNot as much, because I just automatically generate ideas now. But in the old days I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this. I learned this early on. Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.INTERVIEWERAfter you’ve made your list of nouns, where do you go from there?BRADBURYI begin to write little pensées about the nouns. It’s prose poetry. It’s evocative. It tries to be metaphorical. Saint-John Perse published several huge volumes of this type of poetry on beautiful paper with lovely type. His books of poetry had titles like Rains, Snows, Winds, Seamarks. I could never afford to buy his books because they must have cost twenty or thirty dollars—and this was about fifty years ago. But he influenced me because I read him in the bookstore and I started to write short, descriptive paragraphs, two hundred words each, and in them I began to examine my nouns. Then I’d bring some characters on to talk about that noun and that place, and all of a sudden I had a story going. I used to do the same thing with photographs that I’d rip out of glossy magazines. I’d take the photographs and I’d write little prose poems about them. Certain pictures evoke in me things from my past. When I look at the paintings of Edward Hopper, it does this. He did those wonderful townscapes of empty cafes, empty theaters at midnight with maybe one person there. The sense of isolation and loneliness is fantastic. I’d look at those landscapes and I’d fill them with my imagination. I still have all those pensées. This was the beginning of bringing out what was me.
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| I shall penser on it some more. |
Come one, come all, to the Official Rag and Bone Man Press Launch!
Immerse yourself in a swanky labyrinth of writers, publishers, spinsters & governesses, and raise a martini to an era of quality prose in the staggeringly glamorous surrounds of The Butterfly Club.
Featuring live readings from Rag and Bone Man Press authors.
Get in your wheelbarrows and barrow on down. We'll see you there!
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.So here I go, writing with the view to produce a Very Bad First Draft, just so that the First Draft bloody well gets written. Watch me bash out tired old metaphors and smoosh together cliches and BEHOLD ALL MY ADJECTIVES! Moreover, see how my characters are so boring and their dialogue so stilted? That is just for now.
The comb was hers. Beetle stood breathless for fear someone would snatch it back. Never had she owned anything except for her raggedy clothes and occasional turnips, and now the comb with the cat was hers. The wink and the comment about her curls, though Beetle didn't know it, were also gifts from the generous merchant, and they nestled into Beetle's heart and stayed there.
THERE WERE ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines, the girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call through. She used the time, though. She read an article in a women's pocket-size magazine, called "Sex Is Fun - or Hell." She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.
She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.
With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon. She then replaced the cap on the bottle of lacquer and, standing up, passed her left - the wet - hand back and forth through the air. With her dry hand, she picked up a congested ashtray from the window seat and carried it with her over to the night table, on which the phone stood. She sat down on one of the made-up twin beds and - it was the fifth or sixth ring - picked up the phone.
You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac - with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.I think I prefer his short stories to The Catcher in the Rye (eek! the Catcher cult will be after me!), possibly because there are more of them, and I adore the Glass family. Also because, taken as a whole, they give the reader such a fascinating peek at America in the 50s and the middle and upper classes as they existed post-war. He can make you laugh and break your heart all in the space of twelve or so pages. How's that for inspiration? And emotional squalor.
