This spawned a series of remarks such as “So this makes me a bonnet-wearing, blood-sucking, 30-something, single, serial-killing hobbit sharing my summer holidays backpacking through Thailand with three other children and a dog called Timmy.”

Yes, the idea itself is intriguing, but can quickly be dumbed down so much as to be ridiculous, and to allow conclusions like the above.

The attention grabbing headline, though, You are what you read is interesting: a play on words linking consumption of literature to consumption of food. The parallel is useful because the same rules apply. When we eat a prawn we do not become a prawn. When we eat cheese, we do not become cheese. When we eat radishes we do not become radishes or indeed ‘like’ radishes. But we do take on some of the constituent parts; we nourish ourselves with the energy, the calcium, the fats and vitamins and proteins.

Nourishing…another word that is often used to describe reading matter, with its antonym being ‘trashy’. We often class reading matter into things that are ‘good for you’ to read, and others we describe as trashy in the manner of junk food – often tasty but largely unhealthy.

As a society we are quick to draw conclusions about what fits where. Graphic novels – nourishing or trashy? Science Fiction? What about ‘Women’s Fiction’?

I think that whatever literature we consume, from The Beano to Dostoyevsky, there is usually some goodness in it for us. We may find some characters inspiring or aspirational, where we lack role models around us. We may learn from their actions. We might feel a sense of injustice on their behalf or be compelled into hopefulness. Perhaps we will find the humour in their situation which helps us to find the humour in our own. This, I think, is the essence of reading. Not that we become the characters themselves, but that we experience them and their stories and learn from that experience.

Just as though we had met them in real life.

Here is an excellent article on the neuroscience of reading fiction which takes that thought further, suggesting that our brains assimilate the books we read as though we had actually had those experiences ourselves.

* Here is the MSNBC take on it and Here is the Daily Mail’s take on it

However, since the last post, things have evolved. So here’s a summary (please let me know if any of this is factually incorrect, obviously):

The Brit Writers’ offers include:

• An annual writing competition, with a fee and a prize.
• A scheme to help people get published, with a fee.
• A scheme to help people set up ‘lucrative’ consultancies to help people get published. For a fee.
• A publishing service, with a fee.
• I am not yet aware of a scheme to help people set up ‘lucrative’ publishing services, for a fee or otherwise.
• An agents and publishers referral service. Initially free, thereafter for a fee.
• A schools programme, with a fee (in some cases – some schools join for free).
• A scheme to help people take part in running the schools programme, for a fee and a percentage of the revenue from the schools.

And in latest news, these things are now all available in the new (bigger) USA market. For a fee.

This has been a public service announcement. You can find more information on the Brit Writers and America Writers websites.

You can read the first of these stories here – a collaboration between Michelle, Martha Williams and Sarah Hilary in the UK and myself.

A different ending? Try the second story here, where Margot McCuaig joins in!

The third story has Jane Prinsep’s ending

And the fourth has jumped many borders, involving Kate Brown, Peggy Riley, Judith Teitelman and Beth Gignac.

Out just in time for UK National Flash Fiction Day!

Today’s post  is a blatant promotion for my lovely friend Alison and her newly published novel!

One of the things that goes on behind the scenes of novel writing is ‘Beta-reading.’ This is where you get a writer whose work you admire to read all or part of your work in progress and ask them for specific and honest critique of what you’ve written. These trusted souls are worth their weight in gold, and Alison, who I met via Twitter, was one of the lovely people who took the time and care to read part of an early draft of The Night Rainbow and tell me her thoughts.

In the same spirit I’ve also read extracts from her work, including her brilliant novel Housewife with a Half-Life. When I read it, it made me think immediately of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers books. It’s funny, it’s bizarre…in fact it’s a space romp. Can I call it that, A?

Alison is a superb writer, and has now developed a split personality, keeping her more literary (in genre terms) fiction under her own name, whilst her science-fictiony self is now going by the name of A.B. Wells. She has decided to self-publish this novel, and the paperback will be out in June. Meanwhile for ebook readers, you can find links below and read it right now!

About the book:

Susan Strong is a suburban housewife who is literally disintegrating. When Fairly Dave, a kilt-sporting spaceman arrives through the shower head to warn her, she knows things are serious. When she and her precocious four year old twins, Pluto and Rufus, get sucked through Chilled Foods into another universe it gets even messier. Where household appliances are alive and dangerous, Geezers have Entropy Hoovers and the Spinner’s Cataclysmic convertor could rip reality apart, Susan Strong is all that’s holding the world together.

In this lively space comedy, Susan and Fairly Dave travel alternate universes to find Susan’s many selves, dodge the Geezers and defeat evil memory bankers. From dystopian landscapes and chicken dinners, to Las Vegas and bubble universes, can Susan Strong reintegrate her bits and will it be enough to save us all?

About A.B. Wells, also known as @AlisonWells on Twitter

What is a housewife to do when she becomes 42? Write a book about life, the universe and everything. A.B.Wells is the mother of four children age 11 and under, three of whom are that particularly alien species called boys. As Alison Wells her more literary writing has been shortlisted in the prestigious Bridport, Fish and Hennessy Awards and she’s been published or is about to be in a wide variety of anthologies and e-zines, including the Higgs Boson Anthology by Year Zero, Metazen, The View from Here, Voices of Angels by Bridgehouse and National Flash Fiction day’s Jawbreakers. She recently one the fiction category of the Big Book of Hope ebook with a flash fiction medley and has a litfic novel The Book of Remembered Possibilities on submission. She blogs for writing.ie in the guest blog: Random Acts of Optimism. One of the as yet unsolved mysteries of the universe is whether the B in A. B. Wells stands for barmy or brilliant.

In her former life she worked, among other things, as a clerk like Albert Einstein, as a technical writer (and a HR. Manager) and before that studied psychology and communications where, in the college library James Gleick’s book Chaos fell on her head. Her ambitions include a desire to travel to see the Northern Lights and to really travel with Dr Who’s David Tennant in a Tardis.

Download Housewife with a Half-Life…!

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Smashwords

And if you are waiting for the paperback, or if you are just nosy, stalk the author here: www.abwells.com and here www.facebook.com/abwellswriter or her alter ego blogging on Head Above Water here: www.alisonwells.wordpress.com

I’m in the amazing position of having The Night Rainbow being published in several countries, including the U.K. and the U.S.A., where the cover designs have now been developed (I had input into both). I’m delighted with both of them, but they are markedly different (U.K. on the left, U.S.A. on the right):

I’ve asked some very kind booksellers in both countries, and my editor from Bloomsbury U.S.A., to talk about the importance of a book cover, and to try and define what defines the differences in our tastes. Here are some of the first responses:

First, Robert Gray, who from 1992-2005 was a bookseller and buyer for the Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, Vermont.

He has also been a contributing editor and columnist at Shelf Awareness since 2006. As a writer, his work has appeared in numerous publications, ranging from Tin House to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine toPublishers Weekly. He has an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College. Rob tweets as @Fresheyesnow

Rob says:

The cover was always a factor for us when buying in stock, though not the deciding factor (excepting, of course those counter books that could be sold as gift items on strength of their covers or titles alone). If a book with a lousy cover was still something I loved and knew I could handsell, content always trumped art. But if a book wasn’t so great and the cover was irresistible, then the decision came down to a question: “Is this a book I know there are readers for, even if I’m not crazy about it?” Another factor I don’t see discussed often: When booksellers are building displays, a great cover always has a better chance of being showcased.

I do think customers instinctively reach for a book with a great cover if it’s on a display or face-out on the shelves. If it’s spine-out, then the game is over before it starts. Ideally, what a great cover does is get the potential reader to pick up the book, maybe scan blurbs on the back cover, open the book and flip through the first few pages.

Anything that inspires a customer to initiate that ceremony is critical.

When a title is new, and selling well, then it is more likely to be displayed face-out. This is where good design comes to the fore.

“When I’m a successful author, remind me to be kind to those still struggling to make it.”

It encouraged me, then, that Twitter cheered, ‘hear-hear’ed for kindness.

I was reminded of this recently when contemplating the fact that The Night Rainbow is heading off to unsuspecting authors whom I admire, with a request to have a look, and  - please, Missus, if you had the time, if you could read it and then, if you like it that is, maybe you could say something positive that we could put on the cover, so that people in bookshops will see that I’m a good bet, what with me being new at this and not known and all…

*author blushes and backs out of room curtseying*

Can you tell I feel a bit bashful about this?

Bashful because I understand that asking (even indirectly via my publisher) for a blurb is asking people to work for free. And since I don’t have many actual real-world friends who are published authors, well then it’s asking someone I don’t know to work for free.

Of course I hope that they will not find it like work, and will really enjoy the read, but that’s not the point.

I also understand that not everyone has the time or inclination to to read a book to provide a blurb. Also that the more successful and respected you become, the more requests you get for blurbs and of course the more people you have to turn down. This brings me back to my question of kindness. Compare these two approaches:

This kind and eloquent approach from Margaret Atwood who explains why she no longer does blurbs. She has already blurbed with the best of them and now her doormat is exhausted. Contrast it with this  New Yorker article, which made me cringe.

So I just want to say this:

Anyone who writes a blurb for my novel will be doing me an enormous favour and I will be thoroughly, genuinely grateful.

What’s more, I promise, here and now, that I will pay it forward with good grace when the time comes. And you can hold me to that.

Photo (c)

The first draft of Candice, which will become The Next Novel, is done, and now needs editing into a second draft.

Mr King & I have been busy earning our crusts in Hamburg & Toulouse over the last few months.

Spring is here and the girls are on school holidays.

So this is just to say.

I’ll be offline for a while.

Living in real space.

Taking a breath.

Gone fishing.

(again).

TD: I oversee all paperbacks on our trade list, fiction and non-fiction. I brief our in-house designers for all paperback covers after discussing with our marketing and sales teams which direction we want to take the paperback. I then work closely with our designers as they progress their visuals and, alongside the commissioning editor and our marketing and sales directors, make the final decision on which cover we will have. I also put the book through press, selecting the best press reviews for the cover, making any corrections that need to be made to the main text, and making sure the costs for the book work. Then, in the run-up to a paperback being published, I work with marketing and publicity on their campaigns. It’s a very varied job, and I love the different aspects to it, but the best part is helping an author bring their book into the world.

 

CK; Books published under Bloomsbury’s new imprint, Bloomsbury Circus, will launch as ‘unusually sized’ trade paperbacks. When the paperback editions of these books launch, will there a be a difference in how you work versus one that launches in hardback?

Still, when I the jacket proposal was emailed to me it made me cry. In a good way.

Since then, in the last two weeks, we’ve bounced ideas backwards on forwards with my editor, my agent and the designer on possible teaks or changes, but in the end we’ve ended up very close to the original proposal. Here is the final jacket, and huge thanks to Holly Macdonald, for taking good care of Margot & Pea:

Publication has come forward slightly, so The Night Rainbow will be out in hardback next February. I may have to go and have a lie down now.

Of course some of the submissions only took a quick look to see that they weren’t for us – wrong style, not the right level of writing, wrong genre (novels, children’s stories). And the odd one would still stand out immediately. But many of them, many more than usual it seemed, blurred together, indistinct from one another. The writing was good but I have to admit I’d lost interest.

I think I had run into fiction fatigue.

After a two-month break I’ve re-opened to submissions and the new stories are flooding back in. The quality is good, and I’m enjoying reading them again.

I’ve decide that I get a diminishing return when reading short fiction. Like drinking a cold beer – the first one is wonderfully refreshing, the second is good too. The third is simply because you like the taste and the fourth is pure gluttony. It’s the same with tapas. Even if the whole menu looks delicious, you can’t taste everything. Even if you had the budget, after the first few different tastes you’ve already had a belly-full.

I’m talking about food as an analogy, but it works in other areas too:

Have you ever been into a perfume counter, shopping for a gift? After the first three or four scents, everything seems to smell the same. And when I go to an art gallery I only ever want to see one or two rooms. There’s just too much to take in otherwise and I find myself glancing over paintings which deserve more consideration. Sensorial saturation.

But if this is all true, how does one get through an ever expanding inbox of short-fiction submissions – or for that matter, if you are an agent, a slush pile of novel queries –  giving each one the time and consideration it deserves?

Answers on a postcard please.

I’ve just taken up piano for the second time.

I started playing not as a child, but in my early twenties. I lived in a rented apartment in Kiev that came with its own piano. I took lessons from a melodramatic and usually heart-broken Ukrainian musician who became a great friend. As my fingers crashed on the keys, so my Russian and her English crashed together to make some kind of vodka-fuelled conversation. We enjoyed making the music. Natasha let me take shortcuts, gave me free rein to experiment, as you might with a child learning to speak. We laughed a lot. It was fun, it was rewarding. After a few months I could play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata from start to finish, from memory. There are 6 year-olds in the world who could play it better, but for me it felt like an achievement.

So now, 15 years later, I finally have my own piano and I can play again. I thought I would like to add a bit of Bach to my repertoire, some Satie, maybe even Philip Glass. I found a new piano teacher, a highly organised German lady. No more tipsy, strung out evenings teetering between music and friendship. Now I have strict 30-minute lessons, squeezed into days already full-to-bursting.

I showed my new piano teacher what I could play.

“You’re using the wrong fingers,” she said. “It’s no good.”

I looked at my fingers. My wrong fingers. I wasn’t sure what she meant.

“You have to use the right fingers in the right places. Otherwise, when you move on to other pieces of music, they are going to get all tangled up. And what are you doing to the pedal?”

It turns out that although I could play the piano, I couldn’t actually play the piano. So I’ve been re-learning where to put my fingers, where to put my feet…and why.

At first it broke everything. There was no music, just disjointed staccato jabbing at keys with weak little fingers and overenthusiastic thumbs. I thought I had made a big mistake. I’m not a piano player after all. What would I tell my mum, who had saved up to buy me that piano for my 40th birthday?

Of course I couldn’t. So I carried on. The neighbours made comments. They thought it was my 4 year old (pictured above) playing…Still, I carried on. My new teacher is very encouraging and hardly ever laughs.

And now after a couple of months it’s starting to come back together again. Better than that, it feels more fluid than before. More comfortable.

Why am I telling you this?

I was speaking to someone recently who told me she used to win prizes in short story competitions. And because she was encouraged by her success, she wanted to write a novel. And she took a writing course, which she thought would help. On the writing course she started to learn techniques.

She discovered that she needed something called an ‘inciting incident’, that her story should have an arc, that her book should be divided into fifths and at each part something specific should happen. She copied down lists of things never to do, and more lists of things to always remember. She found it all overwhelming. She panicked, convinced that she wasn’t clever enough to write fiction after all. She stopped writing altogether.

There is a joyful expression of language, or music, or art that we have instinctively as children. Until at some stage someone tells us that we are not necessarily doing it ‘right’.

Some people take it in their stride, are lucky to find helpful coaches who explain how a little theory can help in the long run. Some people are less lucky. They are hit over the head with rule books and shame until they give up. Sometimes, as adults, we really know how to train the joy out of people.

What advice would you give to the woman who stopped writing? I told her to forget the rules for now. To write some stories that pleased her. To play with her words and find her delight again. I don’t know if that’s the right advice, but it made her smile.

I thought that the copyeditor was there to ‘correct my mistakes’. I was really looking forward to what she would find, because before submitting I’d already done many passes of edits for typos, punctuation, and grammatical errors. I’d also paid attention to ‘continuity’, drawing up detailed maps of locations and timelines with character clothing, mealtimes etc. I didn’t go so far as a style sheet, but I’d thought about it.

Last week was quite an education…

My copyeditor got in touch and she said my book was ‘astonishing’. I loved her immediately. She said she was sending over the queries, and that there ‘weren’t many’. There were, in fact, 10 pages of them. 175 in total. And these were just the queries – obvious typos and missing punctuation had already been corrected without bothering me.

The copyedit was much more than ‘just’ about correcting mistakes. Yes there were some, but attention was also paid to to smoothing out inconsistencies in style, for example where I had used ’grownup’ vs ‘grown up’. My editor also checked facts, questioning things as odd as ‘are puffballs safe to eat?’ and the correct references made to music. Despite my best efforts there were still ‘continuity’ queries - one minute a door was closed, the next it was open…

Responding to the queries took hours and hours. Agreeing that I should change from one kind of punctuation to another was an easy one. But where the suggestion was to choose a different word or re-phrase something it was much harder. Even though I could agree that it was necessary, working within the vocabulary limits of the narrator took a lot of thought and deliberation.

By the time I reached the end of the query list I was feeling quite anxious. Had I managed to get back into the ‘voice’ of the book seamlessly? Had I made the ‘right’ changes? And what about all the mistakes? As soon as a query drew my attention to something I then spotted the same mistake over and over in the text. Even though my editor had told me that she only queried something once and then it would apply throughout, it was very unnerving to see the repeated mistakes and inconsistencies cropping up again and again.

But the biggest revelation for me last week was that my copyeditor not only understood the rules of spelling, grammar and punctuation (of course), she also understood where I had intentionally broken the rules to use punctuation or rythym creatively. She understood my intention.

Then she worked with that intention, with my rules, to make the writing more elegant, so the words didn’t get in the way of the story.

The whole experience was really impressive, and I found myself enormously grateful that such painstaking attention is being lavished on my book.

Once the queries were dealt with and the TS returned to Bloomsbury,  I asked my lovely copyeditor, Sarah-Jane Forder, if she wouldn’t mind answering a few questions:

1) I edited The Night Rainbow many times before I submitted it. I would have said I went through it with a fine toothed comb. And yet I had 175 queries in total, which you described as ‘very few’! If we imagine I’m towards one end of the spectrum, what does the other end look like?

It was obvious to me when I first read your TS that I was dealing with a very meticulous author. Yes, there were odd things you’d missed in however many edits but that is always the way. I missed things too, which you picked up: remember? My point about the relatively few number of queries, and the absolute ease of my job, was that they were minor things: the odd bit of punctuation here, a tiny bit of garbled text there. Nothing major whatsoever. Many authors, believe me, have neither your eye nor your ear. When you answered my queries you did so with confidence, saying no when you knew absolutely what you wanted. Which is a wordy way of saying that the other end of the spectrum might have multiple typing errors and inconsistencies as well as careless repetition, holes in the plot and characters whose eyes change from blue to brown according to the weather.

3) In terms of your process – do you read the book first as a ‘reader’, or immediately with an editor’s eye?

4) How did you become a copyeditor? What do you like about the job?

I fell into copyediting! I graduated in English with a vague idea of going into publishing: no more than that. I was lucky enough to be appointed at Jonathan Cape as an editorial assistant working with Liz Calder, one of the top literary fiction editors at that time. Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, John Fowles, Anita Brookner, Ian McEwan: they were all Cape authors. Later, when Liz went to set up Bloomsbury, I followed her. 

I’ll be honest: the job can be extremely tedious (depends what you’re working on!) but it’s always fascinating to work one to one with authors; it can feel like a real privilege, in fact. There’s the satisfaction of making a difference, however small. The devil’s in the detail! Having been freelance now for about 15 years, one of the things I love about my job is being able to work from home, at no one’s beck and call. I like the freedom, I like the quiet! The money sucks: you don’t go into it expecting to become rich. But I specialise in editing literary fiction, and how can you put a price on the pleasure of being paid to read wonderful writing?

Huge thanks to Sarah-Jane for taking the time to answer these questions in her busy schedule. I hope you find them as illuminating as I did.

Next steps for The Night Rainbow? First Pages for proofreading in a few weeks, and the cover! It’s also off for translation. Still a year to go until publication, but we’re well on our way!

This week I received an email congratulating me on my nomination for a ‘Top Writing Blog Award’.

Woo-hoo, eh? Great. I’d never heard of the organisation that nominated me though, so I Googled them. They seem to be a broker for online education. So far they have a dozen different categories of these “awards”

Top 115 parenting blogs!

Top 70 foodie blogs!

Top 75 music and arts enthusiasts!

Top 50 Wellness Guru!

In total 735 blogs have won their awards…and that’s 735 blogs who have put this website’s award badge and *link* to their site on their blog. Can you imagine how that boosts their search engine rankings?

This feels like an opportunity to take up space on my own blog with a badge that means nothing to most people and provides a link to a site I don’t endorse.

Right then…

Whilst most have my thoughts have been about the loss of Annie in our lives, and the pain of those left behind, other strange thoughts have crept in.

Here is one that I’m not proud of. Annie was always very encouraging about my writing and so delighted when I told her my first book was going to be published. We talked about the novel and she was really looking forward to reading it. Of course now she never will.

It’s an odd thought, and not relevant at all to what has happened. Why would I even think about that?

I suppose that we all project how things will turn out in the future – times we are looking forward to, who will be there and what will happen. This story evolves, of course, but when we are forced to re-write that story abruptly it knocks us off balance.

In amongst all of the sadness, there is something healthy about this rupture, because it reminds us that the future is not certain. That there are no guarantees which of our loved ones we will get to keep, or for how long.

It should tell us how we ought to be living.

This week the National Literacy Trust published a survey that said almost one in three UK children do not own a book. This makes me sad. Especially since,  for book-hungry children, we can no longer count on the libraries that I relied on while growing up.

But there are people trying to do something to make a difference. People, including many well respected writers, giving up their time to help children write…and enjoy it.

I recently heard about First Story, a charity which aims to improve literacy and foster creativity in young people through creative writing.

First Story focuses on “challenging” state schools and deprived areas. After reading their excellent and informative website I asked if they would be willing to talk to me about their work.

I’m now delighted to welcome Monica Parle, National Director of First Story and writers Kate Clanchy and Ben Faccini, two of First Story’s contributing authors, to talk about their work.

Claire King: Could you tell us about First Story came about, and the aims of the programme?

Monica Parle: First Story was founded by former teacher Katie Waldegrave and the writer William Fiennes. They met at a party in 2007, and started chatting about the very privileged school where William was writer-in-residence, and Katie, who was working at a ‘challenging’ school in West London near Heathrow airport, said that a writer would never come out to a school like hers. William volunteered to come the following week, and after a terrifying twenty minutes in which they thought no one would show, suddenly the Sixth Formers arrived, and they wrote, and Katie and William saw incredible changes across that year. They thought they’d struck on something, so First Story started its first official year in the autumn of 2008 with eight schools in London.

CK: What are your main activities now, three years later?

MP: We place acclaimed writers in schools for the autumn and spring terms. The writers run weekly, after-school creative writing workshops with somewhere between twelve and twenty-one students aged fourteen to eighteen years. At the end of the project, we publish the students’ work in anthologies, and arrange book launch parties and public readings, so students can share their work. Since 2007, First Story has arranged for 150 writers-in-residence to work with 56 teachers in 27 challenging secondary schools across the country. Some 1,150 students have participated in the scheme, writing an estimated 18,400 stories and poems and producing 50 anthologies.

CK: That sounds like an awful lot of intense activity. How is it funded? Also, how do you see your charitable work sitting alongside state-provided education in schools?

MP: We fundraise extensively, and honestly, it’s been a change each year in terms of the sources of income. But the major sources are grants from trusts and foundations, individual donations, fundraising events, and we do have some income from the schools themselves (they pay about 10-15% of the cost). We steadfastly believe that creativity has a place in education, of course, but when Katie and William first set up the charity, it was really important to them that the project not be positioned just to serve the national curriculum or exams/assessments. They made a point of setting the project up after school. In part, this is because we hope the students will see that education is something bigger than the school day, that we can learn things in so many different settings. But Katie also noticed that with her school, the students didn’t have a tradition of extracurricular activities at all, and she felt that was a major difference from other schools. This is always a challenge for us because a lot of our students associate staying after school as being in trouble, so we have to tackle that each time we start in a new school.

CK: Your list of advisors reads like a Who’s Who of writing and publishing – Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith, Mark Haddon and Jonathan Dimbleby; Jamie Byng of Canongate; Literary Agents Deborah Rogers of Rogers, Coleridge & White and Andrew Kidd of Aitken Alexander; plus leading figures like Chris Patten (Chancellor of the University of Oxford) and Lord Adonis. That’s a massive amount of support. How do you benefit from that wealth of knowledge?

MP: We try not to bother them too much, as we feel so lucky for their support. But they’re very generous and helped us conceive of how to set up the project and gave us so much useful advice.

CK: Could you please outline the main achievements of First Story to date? How do you measure the impact of your efforts?

MP: We try to be in the schools as much as we can and keep an open dialogue with both the writer and the teacher in the school. We also have done internal surveys in the past few years, but this year, we’ve been really lucky to receive some great external evaluations, one from an independent consultant and one from an academic in Nottingham who did a case study of one of our schools. We’ve also got a lot of teachers who are doing masters and PhDs, so this year we were lucky to get two insightful reports from teachers who had worked on the project about how it works in their schools.

CK: How would you like to see First Story develop in the future?

MP: This is a key question for us. We’re a tiny organization, and yet, since I started working at First Story, we’ve already grown so much. I think all of us would like to get to the point where every young person in the UK has access to some kind of creative education, but we are a small charity, and we think the key to successful projects is the really intensive relationships we build. We like to know all our teachers and writers personally, and we have these great termly meetings where everyone gets together and shares, and we all learn so much from that. So I’m not sure that we feel that we need to be the organization doing the projects everywhere – more to the point, we hope that we can meet people who want to start up their own ventures, and that they’ll take different forms from what we’re doing. It’s exciting to see how many fantastic projects are already out there, and how they’re all different, and I think there’s so much for all of us to share and to learn from.

Meet two of the authors working with First Story: 

Ben Faccini is the author of The Water Breather and The Incomplete Husband. Ben works alongside Lauren Child on the UNESCO initiative My Life is a Story and has been working with First Story since 2009. As well as fiction, Ben writes for UN agencies on educational issues.

CK: Ben, why (and how) did you get involved with First Story?

BF: William Fiennes asked me to get involved. I had followed the beginnings of the scheme quite closely and taught one workshop session with William in his first school, Cranford College. I could see the exciting effect the work had on the pupils and how the world seemed to open up to them when they wrote or spoke about writing. Creative writing, or just writing, was a new platform to free students from the strictures of school and it liberated their voices. They felt enlivened by the chance to explore language and by finding the words and context to express something about themselves. I wanted to get involved as a result. I wanted to be part of this move towards greater self-confidence and expression. Part of me, too, had always been drawn towards teaching – though I would say this is more about facilitating rather than teaching in the true sense of the word.

CK: Are there parallels between the work you do in other countries with UNESCO and the work with children in the UK through First Story?

BF: The work I’ve done for UNESCO and UNICEF is more about getting excluded children and adults into education. The people I have worked with are generally the most deprived and those least likely to have access to formal education. With First Story it’s a different set of issues. It is about making sure that those who are in education have a stimulating education and that the learning they receive is as enriching and relevant as possible. It’s about providing a new layer to the school experience. Initiatives like First Story are about introducing innovations into the school, and it would be fantastic to imagine spreading the idea of First Story to other countries (with local writers) where the education systems are sometimes rather rigid.

CK: Do the children you work with through these two programmes relate to you, and to writing, in different ways?

BF: Children are children and there are remarkable similarities between young people’s aspirations whether they are a rural child in Burkina Faso or a London teenager. That said, the children I work with in First Story are different from the children I work with abroad.

My first book, The Water-Breather, started in Cairo. I had spent the morning interviewing street children and there was this young girl of seven who was weaving in and out of the traffic and knocking on car windows. She would tell drivers a joke and if they laughed she would ask for money. It couldn’t believe how a child so young and so destitute could have the resources to think up new jokes and keep going. I began to think of how it would be for a child closer to the world I grew up in (in rural France and Italy) to try and live with a parallel world in his head. That was the genesis of the book – though I had been writing for some time before that. This was a clear case of my work inspiring my writing. My Life is a Story was then a response to the voicelessness of out-of-school and excluded children in the developing world. It is about getting them to tell their own hidden life stories, and get empowered as a result.

CK: Do the two initiatives link up in any way?

BF: We have often discussed the possibility of tying the two together in some way, but we haven’t taken concrete steps towards it yet. We need more funds and more time to work out the administrative side of things, but it’s something we would love to do.

CK: So specifically in First Story, how have you found your experience of working with children in UK schools?

BF: I have really enjoyed it. I’ve learnt a lot. I love it when the students get excited by words or manage to write incredible snippets of stories in a short amount of time. I am often overwhelmed by the stuff I hear, particularly when we read each other our stories. Then there is the discussion time about themes, characters, plot lines – each workshop is a kind of forum for ideas. One great joy is to see how motivated the students are. I am often surprised and this provides me, as a writer, with the necessary enthusiasm to keep writing. We did some workshops last year on ancestry as many of the children come from many different cultures. The result was staggering. We had real-life stories from Ghana alongside fictional accounts of ancestors from Germany, Scandinavia and the Caribbean.

CK: As a writer, you are in the position of storyteller. When encouraging children to write, how does your role change? Is it hard to adapt?

BF: You become the facilitator of stories with First Story. You are encouraging children to examine their own knowledge, dig deep into their memories and their senses. I’m always encouraging them to boost their observational skills, asking them what they’ve seen on the bus on the way to the school, or what they have noticed in the street. If I could do one thing it would be to encourage the students to realise how unique and interesting they are.

CK: Would you like to add anything?

BF: I would encourage people to donate to First Story if they can. There is a donations page on the First Story website, as well as information on the whole scheme.

Kate Clanchy is a prize winning poet, a journalist, playwright, and creative writing teacher. In 2009 she won the BBC National Short Story Award.

CK: Kate, could you tell us about the school you work with?

KC: I started working with Oxford Spires school in East Oxford about two years ago. My involvement was slightly unusual in that I was working in the inclusion unit (for children that would otherwise be excluded), within their regular timetable. I also contribute to extra-curricular activities for the Gifted & Talented children, as well as lunchtime activities for younger ones and some work within the curriculum, for example writing a play with GCSE drama students and the newsletter for humanities.

It’s an excellent school in a deprived area. East Oxford is a European designated area of deprivation. The school ensures that quality literature is available, but many of the students come from a background with no books, and not much conversation around the home. The children there are quite naïve and there is a pretty high level of transitory students.

CK: As a former teacher, how do you see the work done by First Story authors in schools complementing the work done by the schools themselves?

KC:  47% of the children in East Oxford do not have English as a first language. The teachers at Oxford Spires are great, but the English curriculum has a lot of focus on skills and assessment of objectives. The work I do helps to get away from those rules and objectives and remind them of creativity. 

Creativity in writing is extra-curricular. Here’s an example. I judged the FOYLE ‘Young Poets of the Year Award’ in 2006.  I read 10,000 poems from school children and awarded fifteen prizes. 14 out of those 15 turned out to be children from private schools. I felt it was an indication of the fact that those schools have more resources to devote to developing creativity. They own creativity. 

CK: What is your role when you are engaging with the school children? Is it a ‘teaching’ role?

KC: It’s a writer’s role. I am being a writer. The exercises are creative writing exercises and they are very powerful at unlocking memories, and creative ways of describing them.

CK: What specific benefits do you see for the children you work with?

KC: There is a definite benefit in the way this work raises the students’ aspirations. They are encouraged and validated. Many of the children have very low self esteem. Writing can help to lift that. Seeing your own experiences reflected back to you in the stories you have written being read aloud, that can absolutely raise your self esteem. 

CK: How do the teachers respond to you?

KC: The teachers are great. When you’re a teacher it can be very irritating if a writer comes in and sets out their position as ‘the creative one’.  You have to work carefully and respectfully with them and not assume you are more creative than they are. It’s often not the case. The teachers also need encouragement. 

I feel very optimistic about schools these days, they are doing better than when I was a teacher 20 years ago. And First Story is a very optimistic organisation. If you can support First Story, please do.

Useful links:

Authors wanting to donate books, or get involved with First Story, and anyone wanting to donate to First Story please click here

Hear William Fiennes speak about First Story

Ben’s publisher, Portobello Books.

Ben’s books on Amazon

Kate’s books on Amazon

Kate Clanchy/Vicki Bertram Interview on Salt Publishing Site

Thanks to Monica, Ben and Kate for their time, and thank you everyone who has got to this point for taking the time to read this interview. I wish you all a very merry Christmas and all good things in 2012. Claire xxx

This week I had the privilege and the pleasure of interviewing Stephen Kelman for The View From Here.

I loved Pigeon English, Stephen’s debut novel. It’s the story of Harrison, a Ghanan immigrant, as he acclimatises to life in his new home on a London housing estate. It opens with the knifing to death of a local schoolboy, possibly the victim of local gang culture although the police are unable to prove anything. The novel is unusual, bold and challenging and for me, it’s the ending that really makes it. The final sentence still sticks with me. Stephen Kelman proposes a simple truth of humanity that fits perfectly into the story’s end…and you will just have to read the book to see if you agree!

If you hadn’t heard, Pigeon English was shortlisted for more than a handful of literary awards in 2011, including the Man Booker. I’ve read various interviews with Stephen, talking about his ‘humble’ origins, and the ‘fairytale’ of the 12-publisher bidding war for his debut novel. But there’s always more to these fairytale stories, you know. The endings may be all ‘happily ever after’ but for the most part, children are abandoned, eaten by wolves and stolen by witches. Spells are put upon innocents and the path through the forest is dark and set about with danger.

You can read the full interview here. Only there will you find answers to questions like:

• “How much tenacity did Stephen really have to show before his destiny finally showed up for dinner?”
•  ”Does Stephen type out text messages using proper, full words?” and
• “What is the relationship between Stephen and a man whose best friends kicked him 47 times in the testicles in 90 seconds?”

1. Make your Writing Better! Is your work even ready to be presented to agents and publishers?

- Get a professional critique of your work. For a full length novel expect to spend between £500 and the whole £1000. Here’s a good article on critiques. You could spend less than that of course, but is a critique of the first three chapters going to help you if something is broken in your plotting or character arc, for example?

- Go on creative writing courses, such as Arvon Courses. Most people have heard of these. A week working on your novel will cost you around £625 plus travel. For me That’s £750, for you maybe £650.

- Try a Writing Festival. Get workshops on writing and sessions with agents and publishers. Expect to spend about £350 -500 for a weekend, including your accommodation, meals, talks etc.

- Writing Mentors  - pay for the services of a published and experienced author to coach you and help edit your work. You could easily spend the whole £1000 here, buying around 4 hours of mentoring from top authors through to quite a lot more time with cheaper outfits.

- Take out  a subscription to a writing magazine, such as Writers’ Forum or Writing Magazine, for a steady flow of hints and tips. Or  else literary journals such as Mslexia, Granta etc. £30 a pop.

- Read more contemporary books. Learn from other successful writers in your genre. Buy a big pile of books to read. £100 for enough to keep you going.

- Try something like the Faber & Faber Academy. A three day course on bringing your book to market -  like this one with Ben Johncock and Catherine Ryan Howard costs £425 plus travel and accommodation.

- Practice writing. This costs nothing. But if you’re struggling for time, treat yourself to a weekend writing retreat for £250/£400 plus travel like the one I did in September. Or a week long retreat somewhere like Anam Cara, with or without workshops.

- Get your book copy edited before you submit. Expect to pay in the region of £750.

- Get writing advice free online. If you don’t know where to look, network with writers and publishing professionals on Twitter. Also free.

1b. Blame your Tools!

- Scrivener £30 ish

- A new computer, or an old classic typewriter £500

- A better printer £200

- Moleskine notebooks, for the authentic author longhand experience. £7-10 each

2. Is your book astonishingly good? Make your Submissions Better!

- Writers & Artists Yearbook, for the tailoring of submissions. £16.99

- Pay for help with your synopsis. £150 – 200

- Use fancy stationery and include chocolates personalised with the literary agent’s initials and date of birth. £250.

Just kidding

3. Is your book excellent and your submissions splendid? Raise your profile as a credible writer, boost your CV. 

- Raise your profile by winning competitions or submitting to radio programmes like BBC Radio 4 . Competition entry fees in the £5-£15 range.  Consider The Bristol Short Story Prize, Fish, Sean O’Faolain, Bridport, Willesden Herald, Manchester…there are so many! And if you win, they actually give YOU money!

4. Self Publishing!

- Design the cover £200 – £700

- Interior design & layout £750

- Also see costs of editing, above.

5. Your book is with a publisher, or self-published. Get those sales up! Marketing!

- Get a blog up and running. £75 for your domain name and hosting, then it’s just your time.

- Get people who have read it to review it on Amazon. Very valuable. Costs nothing.

- Look the part. Get an author photo professionally done. £500

- Advertise. Facebook lets you pay per click. Meet the Author charges £400

- I also heard recently of an offer where you could have your work featured somewhere on a writing competition’s website, with claims that it will provide ‘visibility’ to agents and publishers (though no footfall data, or qualitative data about the site readership was available at the time of writing). Cost £995 for a year.

**DISCLAIMER**

The above are all just ways in which you could spend your money. I’m not endorsing them, just showing you the opportunities to spend your cash! Also all prices are approximate. I’d be interested in which ones you would endorse though, and any feedback on costs. Please tell us in the comments.

I would also like to apologise for the profusion of exclamation marks. It’s not really my style, it’s more a nod to the “Get Published Now!” sales pitches we see so often, offering to take our £1000 in return for a few months of deliciously raised hopes and then an opportunity to spend the same amount again, and more, on what is essentially vanity publishing. Look at some of the cheaper – and free – options above and weigh up the relative benefits before spending lots of money, I suggest.

Remember Yog’s law – “Money should always flow towards the writer.”

Cue people going nuts. Authors, agents, all manner of literary types. “It’s not fair!” They cry. “It’s a travesty.”

People are being rude about Pippa and her family. They are being rude about the book. And they are being rude about the publishing industry as a whole, taking this as a sign that it is terribly, irretrievably broken.

Can we just stop here for a second? What exactly is broken here?

Is it the author?

Pippa is the media-appointed celebrity sister of the Duchess of Cambridge. She never asked for that celebrity, nor any of the personal infringements it entails. It seems to me she bears it with good grace. If you suddenly had a money tree growing in your front room, wouldn’t you pick the fruit?

Is it the book?

The book was sold on concept, it’s still being written, so I’ve no idea.

Is it the publishers, then?

Because you know, it wasn’t just Penguin. There was an auction. Editors fought each other with cheque books. Why? Because their publishing houses know that in the UK and the USA there will be a huge market for a ‘celebrity’ book of this kind. And party planning seems to fit neatly in alongside celebrity chefs. Poor Pippa would have found it tougher if she’d been an investment banker. ‘Pippa’s guide to mergers & acquisitions’ doesn’t have the same ring to it, eh?

So what is it, then?

‘Readers’/Buyers of celebrity-top-ten-best-selling-autobiographical-tell-all-memoirs, spin offs and the like. I’m talking to you.

There is a big fat advance for this book, I think, for the same reasons there are helicopters circling Pippa’s home. Because there is a market for it. People will pay actual real money for this. No $2.99 e-book for Pippa. The voracious mass market hunger for voyeurism – living vicariously through others, watching them rise and fall – seems insatiable.

So, as businesses, publishers want to publish these kinds of commercially viable books. Book sellers will want them on their shelves. There is money to be made. Made from you, and your interest in ‘celebrity’ (or of course, your interest in parties, and who doesn’t like a nice party?).

It is what it is.

Writers – is this really relevant to us? We cannot compare our journey to be published to this phenomenon. It’s apples and oranges.

Pippa’s advance has absolutely nothing to do with my advance, for example. Not just because we’re with different publishers. I’m not entirely sure how it works in publishing, but I doubt Penguin would have said at the editorial meeting “Well folks, we’ve got half a million, so we can either publish fifty novels, a few literary, a Regency Romance or two, some YA, perhaps some crime thrillers…or we can take Pippa’s party book. What’s it to be?”

There’s still a market for the books we write, and most of us will not be earning the six figure advances.

If the idea of Pippa Middleton’s deal leaves you incredulous you are probably not the target market. But there is a market. Let’s move on?