29 Wednesday Apr 2015
Posted in Maggie
Lovers of Anthony Trollope, whose bicentenary was on April 24th, will be interested to learn that Julian Fellowes is adapting Dr Thorne for television. The book is apparently his favourite among those written by the great 19th century English novelist. Filming will begin later this year.
Perhaps this will provide another Darcy or Ross Poldark for female viewers…
27 Monday Apr 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
We will hopefully be forgiven for kicking off with our own Ninevoices’ competition. There are other competitions out there, but few – if any – restricting entry to beginners who have earned less than £300 from their writing in the past year. We are on your side. We know how hard it is to get that first spark of recognition.
SO, please let us have your short stories up to 2,000-words, on any subject. Details and rules can be accessed above, entry fee is £5 per story (only two cups of coffee!) and prizes are: £100, £50 and £25 – plus publication on our website for our winner. Closing date is 31 May. Do let’s hear from you.
Bridport Prize 2015 for short stories, poetry and flash fiction. Prizes: £5,000, £1,000, £500 and ten £50 highly commendeds for short stories and poetry/£1,000, £500, £250, three £25 highly commendeds for flash fiction/£100 Dorset Award for best local winner or runner-up. Anthology publication for all. Entry fee: £6 per flash fiction, £7 per poem, £8 per short story. Closing date 31 May. Website http://www.bridportprize.org.uk
Frome Festival Short Story competition for short stories 1,000-2,200 words on any theme. Prizes: £300, £150, £75. Entry fee £5. Closing date 31 May. Website http://www.fromeshortstorycompetition.co.uk
The Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award for an extract (5,000-8,000 words) from an unpublished debut novel. Prize: £1,000 plus mentoring. Entry fee £20. Closing date 31 May. Website http://www.bridportprize.org.uk
London Magazine Poetry, for poems up to 40 lines. Prizes: £300, £200, £100 plus publication. Entry fee £5. Closing date 31 May. Website www.http://the londonmagazine.org
Yeovil Literary Prize for novels (opening chapters and synopsis, up to 15,000 words), short stories (max. 2,000 words) and poems (up to 40 lines). Prizes for novels: £1,000, £250 and £100; for poems/short stories, £500, £200 and £100. Entry fee for novels £11, for short stories £6, for poems £6 for a single poem, £9 for two, £11 for three. Closing date 31 May. Website http://www.yeovilprize.co.uk
Welsh Poetry Competition 2015. Poems up to 50 lines. Prizes: £400, £200, £100, plus anthology and web publication for 17 runners-up. Entry fee: £4. £5 Paypal. Closing date 31 May.
26 Sunday Apr 2015
Posted in Articles, Characters, Ed, Reading
Tanya’s mention of Anthony Trollope in her blog of 8 April is so timely as a birthday present to the great man – he was 200 last Friday (DOB 24 April 1815). There was an impressive tribute to him by Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, in the ‘Church Times’ of 17 April. Unfortunately I can’t give you the link to it on the CT website as it’s behind a paywall (boo hiss).
Two Barchester-linked items from it relating to characters caught my eye:
From time to time I visit Harrow-on-the-Hill and a walk near the School takes you past a lane down the hill called Obadiah Slope. Each time I’ve seen it I’ve asked myself whether it was so named because of the Trollope character, or did Trollope name his character after the existing road name?
I now know the answer – at least, I do so long as the Bishop is correct. He says that the school named the road after the character. He writes that when Trollope went to the school “his dishevelled appearance and penury excited the derision of the other boys.” But in later years the School “made amends by christening the path down to the dining hall Obadiah Slope.”
It’s wonderful that someone at the school had the sense of humour to do that.
The second concerns Mrs Proudie. Trollope, we read, was at his club the Athenaeum one day when he overheard two clerics talking about his novels. (What must that feel like‽‽) They were complaining that he used the same characters time and again in his novels, and “the detestable Mrs Proudie” was the example they cited. Trollope admitted to them that he was the author, and pledged that “As to Mrs Proudie, I will go home and kill her before the week is over.” This he did, “though I have sometimes regretted the deed, so great was my delight in writing about [her], so thorough was my knowledge of all the little shades of her character.”
I think those clergymen did a disservice to literature, though they did lead to our getting the wonderful scene where the hen-pecked Bishop Proudie wrestles with his conflicting emotions when he learns of his wife’s death – misery, relief, pain, satisfaction. It’s in Chapter LXVII if you have your copy of The Last Chronicle of Barset handy.
Why did Trollope pay such attention to the views of just two of his many readers? Maybe because they were friends. or clergy, or members of his club, or maybe he was just so humble. Those of us who enjoy crime fiction must be glad that the creators of Poirot or Wimsey or Rebus weren’t members of the Athenaeum in 1867.
25 Saturday Apr 2015
Posted in Fiction, Observations, Tanya, Writing
Choosing names for the characters in a novel isn’t the delightful self-indulgent process you might imagine it to be. A whole load of complications and worries crop up, some of them too late…
There are obvious guidelines. Don’t have characters with similar sounding names or even starting with the same letter. Vary the length of names. Avoid names that have developed particular associations in the modern mind. Get the generation right. A man under eighty is unlikely to be called Reginald, Derek or Eric. Women called Joan, Dorothy or Barbara will probably be seventy plus.
But already one is entering a minefield.
The off-stage mother-in-law in my novel All Desires Known is nicknamed Buttery Barbara by my heroine; Barbara is someone who spreads her fundamentalist views too thickly – at least in the eyes of her daughter-in-law Nell. The reader may perceive that Nell is an unreliable witness; the worst we actually gather about Barbara is that she overdoes her well-meant evangelism. Buttery is nicely ambiguous… All the same, apologies had to be made to the three altogether lovely Barbaras I know – and Barbara Pym is my favourite author.
Some characters cry out to be called by a particular name; they wouldn’t become as real with any other. The godly chaplain in All Desires Known was always going to be called Martin (after reading the moving story of Martin White Benson, son of Archbishop Benson, who died aged seventeen of meningitis, in David Newsome’s fascinating study of Victorian education and Christianity, Godliness and Good Learning). Illogically, my sadistic bully had to have the surname Benson. Unfortunately this is also the surname of my kind doctor. More explanations required.
It was only at proof-reading stage that I realised my heroine and slippery husband had almost identical names to the happily married couple down the road. Some hasty last-minute adjustment ensued. Worst of all was discovering that a character who comes to a sticky end shares a name with someone to whom an old friend had just become engaged.
So, some unexpected snags, and alarm about hurting people’s feelings. But I suppose you’d never publish anything at all if you worry too much. A remark attributed to the American film producer Samuel Goldwyn offers a comforting perspective: ‘Now why did you name your baby ‘John’? Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named ‘John’.
20 Monday Apr 2015
Posted in Articles, Christine, Read Lately
Tags
According to this BBC article, authors’ income at ‘breaking point’:
Almost half of the money made by professional authors is earned by just 5% of writers, according to a study of authors’ earnings in the UK.
The top 5% of authors earned 42% of all income received by professional writers in 2013, according to The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society.
Meanwhile, the bottom half of professional writers accounted for just 7% of all authors’ earnings overall.
The society said last year that writers earned 29% less in 2013 than 2005.
“The creative industries are thriving, generating £76bn per annum, yet professional writers have seen a near 30% reduction in earnings in recent years,” the society’s head of rights Richard Combes said.
“Consequently many are no longer able to sustain a career. The one truly irreplaceable link in the value chain is being stretched to breaking point.”
I wonder if the writers who create the actual words for celebrity ‘authors’, can live off those earnings?
17 Friday Apr 2015
Posted in Maggie
Two writers on the same subject, one gentle – affectionate even – the other biting. Both exhibit an embarrassing truth:
‘Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.’
P.G. Wodehouse
‘A man who speaks three languages is trilingual. A man who speaks two languages is bilangual. A man who speaks one language is English.’
Claude Gagniere
08 Wednesday Apr 2015
The first line of a novel has to hook the reader. Every author knows this. We must somehow create such an irresistible, dazzling sentence that the casual browser will find it impossible not to read the rest of the book. Our opening must shock, intrigue, foreshadow mystery, create suspense, set up a ferment of conflict, plant questions. All this, and in a distinctive and original voice, so it will have a chance of being heard among the clamour of so many others.
Do readers ever get tired of these self-conscious opening sentences? Are they sometimes too clever by half, too contrived, or even unrelated to the rest of the novel? I can think of occasional examples where I feel a little grumpy, knowing I am being manipulated.
There is no excuse for a dull first sentence, but I would like to think that too much emphasis is being given to its role in selling a book. Presumably most people, standing in a bookshop, or browsing online, will scan sentences in the middle of the novel to see if they want to bother buying it.
Of course readers want to be assured – and immediately – that it’s a good story with enjoyment guaranteed from the outset. But I think authors can do this without so much agonising, and really by starting as they mean to go on, in a way that is natural to their own style of story-telling. It would certainly save a lot of time and headaches…
As to the rest of that vital first chapter, Anthony Trollope, in one his many asides to the reader, puts it rather well (in chapter nine of his final Palliser novel, The Duke’s Children): Perhaps the method of rushing at once ‘in medias res’ is, of all the ways of beginning a story…the least objectionable. The reader is made to think that the gold lies so near the surface that he will be required to take very little trouble in digging for it.
07 Tuesday Apr 2015
Val McDermid made the interesting observation in The Guardian (Saturday 4th April) that when people lose trust in politicians, they need to find it elsewhere – and are turning to fiction for some kind of truth. Fiction not as in campaign speeches but the work of novelists, comedians, playwrights, poets, musicians and artists. Writers are apparently being listened to in a way that we have rarely seen before.
06 Monday Apr 2015
The Royal Mail is issuing a commemorative stamp to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Anthony Trollope, who introduced free-standing postboxes to the UK in 1852 when working for the Post Office.
Born on April 24th 1815, the industrious author of the Chronicles of Barsetshire drew up lined charts divided into weeks on which he entered, day by day, the number of pages he wrote. The number varied between 20 and 112 pages a week: ‘And as a page is an ambiguous term, my page has been made to contain 250 words; and as words, if not watched, have a tendency to straggle, I have had very word counted as I went.’
A demanding job. A wife and family. Much work-related travel. Sometimes indifferent health. On top of which Trollope produced between 5,000 and 26,000 words a week. And some of us congratulate ourselves on clocking up 1,000 words a day…
03 Friday Apr 2015
Recent grumbles about the dearth of decent heroes in modern fiction will have to stop. I’ve discovered one that lives up to expectations: Sidney Chambers in James Runcie’s Grantchester series.
‘Perfect company in bed’ commented the author of Miss Garnet’s Angel, Salley Vickers. Yes, definitely. And right for Easter too, for these books have a serious moral dimension at the same time as being an easy and enjoyable read.
So far James Runcie has published three books featuring his vicar turned sleuth: The Shadow of Death, The Perils of the Night, and The Problem of Evil, with the next one due to be published this May.
Canon Sidney Chambers is thirty-two and unmarried in the first book; he’s a little confused about the women in his life, apparently unwilling to commit himself. Not so different to most men you might say. But Sidney’s hesitation stems not from self-indulgence but from an endearing uncertainty about doing the right thing. He is a man struggling to live up to the principles of his religion, to love and care for those around him as best he can – whilst being irresistibly drawn into his other career of solving crimes.
For the romantic among us, there’s plenty of love interest around. Not surprising: Sidney’s a highly attractive character, with a gift for kindness and perceptive listening to those who confide in him. Many do. He may not be a perfect vicar but he is a good man.
And he’s not a sissy. Sidney fought in the second world war and we learn in flashbacks of how this has affected him; his character is partly based on James Runcie’s own father, Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was awarded the Military Cross for bravery.
Sidney is generously supplied with all the right acoutrements, friends and background to establish him as the perfect hero in this kind of book: his best friend Inspector Geordie Keating, a splendid sharp-tongued housekeeper Mrs Maguire, a Dostoyevsky-obsessed curate, a labrador named Dickens and a vicarage in the picturesque village of Grantchester on the edge of Cambridge. For this is cosy crime par excellence. Or as James Runcie himself puts it, ‘Father Brown with attitude, Agatha Christie with cathedrals, and Barbara Pym with sex.’
In a recent foray to the wonderfully revamped Foyles in Charing Cross Road, London, I noticed that what seemed like over half the fiction floor was devoted to crime novels. It looks as if we are becoming obsessed by crime – and that it’s here our modern heroes will have to be found.
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