Covid-19 and the case of the stymied writers

08 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by ninevoices in Articles, Christine, Observations, Uncategorized, Writerly emotions

Covid-19 seems to have affected a lot more things than I anticipated.

For one thing, I’m still trying to get used to the fact that nobody else is going to be in my flat anytime soon. I don’t have to sniff all the liquid soaps in the supermarket to make sure they’re not too girly for male guests. I don’t have to invest in posh paper napkins. There’s no point trying out recipes to see if they might impress the family.

I can spray on perfumes without fretting about whether they’ll offend. (Perfume is my passion but not necessarily everyone else’s.)

And writing has become impossible.

See, I have a character in a boat on a loch and things are about to happen to her. I know where she is, and why. I just can’t decide WHEN she is.

The pandemic has changed the world. Do you set your ‘contemporary’ story just far enough in the past to not acknowledge Covid-19 ? And if you do, should it include ominous foreshadowings? Or if you decide to exclude current events, will your story be relevant to readers?

We can’t aim for a future, post-Covid-19 world, because we don’t know that there will ever be a post-Covid-19 world, or what the future looks like.

The Guardian recently published an article about writers’ lockdown blues:

“I’m finding it incredibly difficult to work out what to do,” says Holly Watt, author of To the Lions, winner of the 2019 CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. She is working on her next novel, the third in her series following investigative journalist Casey Benedict, which was due to be published in summer 2021.

“I’m trying to work out where we might be. Might there be a vaccine? Will getting on a plane feel wildly anachronistic? Will journalists working from an office seem weird? How interesting can a book actually be when everyone is sitting in their sitting room in their pyjamas?” Watt asks. “It feels odd to be writing about people hopping on trains or popping to the pub, but focusing on Covid might make it date hideously. But if you don’t mention it, it is the massive elephant in the room.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/01/no-pubs-no-kissing-no-flying-how-covid-19-is-forcing-authors-to-change-their-novels

How are you dealing with this?

Characters from Trollope

26 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by ninevoices in Articles, Characters, Ed, Reading

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Anthony Trollope, Harrow, Mrs Proudie, Obadiah Slope

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.

Next year, we will not be millionaires…

20 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by ninevoices in Articles, Christine, Read Lately

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BBC

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?

spinsters of the splendid kind

01 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by ninevoices in Articles, Observations

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Barbara Pym, heroines, India Knight, spinsters

Was the great tradition in fiction of Splendid Spinsters pushed into obscurity by the arrival of Bridget Jones?

This is India Knight’s opening premise in her enjoyable piece in the Guardian Saturday 25 October It’s the fear, she says, actually the all-out terror, of spinsterhood that drives the chick lit fiction ushered in by Bridget Jones. Our troubles as women can only be assuaged and our lives fulfilled if we find ourselves a man.

It doesn’t stop there. Even when a partner is acquired, before long there’s the relentless work of holding onto him, and so this is the stuff of the sequels. Because, as India Knight puts it, the still single women are busy scanning rooms, wondering whose husband to nick. She calls it a woeful scenario and a depressing way of looking at love.

It’s at this point that India Knight admits that her first proper literary crushes were on Barbara Pym heroines, those excellent women who don’t moan about their lot but live fully with all the pleasures and disappointments, big and small, that come their way.

Our appetite for the arrested development of chick lit has apparently faded. Now writers are serving up complex and steely heroines, sometimes dipped into dark and violent ink. The strong spinster in all but name is back and most readers can’t get enough of her. But India Knight confesses that she still likes the quiet old-fashioned type of spinster too, and hurtles back at intervals during the year to soak up the richness of Pym’s creations.