In spite of this, I knew early in my reading that I would not publish the book—and still kept reading, something editors rarely do. Because you have such potential, I am going to explain my decision in some detail in the hope it will set you on the right path to a successful career.Read the rest on his blog.
Another writer came into the store a few weeks ago and wondered why I was being flamed in one of the blogs - accused of not helping young writers. She mentioned a name. That rang a bell immediately. 'Is this the person,' I said, pulling out a 400-plus page POD volume which I had received from him some time back. Of course, it was.Hmm. More on rejection in the comments of this post.
Naguib Mahfouz, whose novels about the struggles of workaday Egyptians drew worldwide acclaim and made him the only Arab to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, died of complications from a bleeding ulcer Wednesday in Cairo. He was 94.Via Seattle Times and Silverfish.
China has never lacked for great writers. It has a 5000-year tradition of letters that includes some of the greatest poetry ever written - rip-roaring epic adventure, gripping family sagas, great romance, keen satire, world's best essays, frisky tales of the supernatural and even knock-your-little-bound-foot-shoes-off erotica - and all that before the vernacular revolution of the early 20th century.
The freedom to write Chinese as it was spoken, following the May Fourth Movement of 1919, spawned an explosion of literary talent that wars and revolutions helped spread across the Chinese diaspora, to Taiwan and beyond. Yet these upheavals also brought about regimes that have had their own strong and enforceable opinions on what writers should and should not be writing.
And what’s with the self-questioning of whether writing can be taught or whether or not the teachers will “have any success”? First of all, what does “success” mean here, exactly? Are we talking Man Booker Prize success? Then, um, no, Prof. Barton. Probably not. Are we talking practicing writing and reading a whole bunch in order to exercise one’s creativity in a way that makes one feel like they’re the agent of their own destiny? Then, yes, Prof. Barton, I think we’re onto something. I keep wishing I could see some other type of instructor go through these kind of tortured involutions, like a welding instructor, maybe. Or I wish I could read a good essay about pedagogical self-doubt by a football coach. That would be actually interesting. I wish that all writing instructors who were having doubts would do themselves and their students a favor: go home. Get another job. Try office work. It does the body good.He then goes on to give his own suggestions for books about writing, which happen to be Rust Hills's Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular and Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction.
...the story of what Jo Rowling spends her money on is far from a predictable tale of conspicuous consumption. Indeed, it is a story which provides a valuable and uplifting counterpoint to the circus of pointless and continuous spending indulged in by other modern celebrities like, say, Victoria Beckham.
Having found fame and fortune late in life, she has not been tempted into any fashion excesses. Indeed, she has never been particularly interested in style, and often describes her younger self as a 'freckled beach ball'. She is appalled by the excesses of modern celebrity culture and particularly disturbed by the cult of thin-ness.
I suppose most of us are dinosaurs who prefer to smell the books we read rather than read from an electronic device.Mmm! The fresh smell of a virgin paperback!
Me, reading "Ghost in the Garden".Ask the Internet any question you want, and usually you'll be able to learn the answer, but for some reason it's not very good at helping people find out how to pronounce words and names. I've noticed, looking at my visitor logs, that people show up here again and again trying to find how to pronounce a handful of difficult literary names. Sadly they've found no answers here... until now.Hooray! I can now pronounce Coetzee! (And Goethe too, a long-time guilty secret of mine...)
Vollmann wrote his first novel while working as a computer programmer. He slept in the office and lived off candy bars. As a fledgling author, I found this incredibly inspiring and wrote a novel in the same way. I asked Vollmann if he thought an office job could be good for a writer. "To the extent that the writer can borrow the means of production, the desk and the paper. Being a writer seems to work well with being at a desk. If you can work in there, the office can be helpful, and also you have the sense of reclaiming a bit of your own life from a miserable, deadening existence."I totally connect with this. I find the office very conducive to writing.
Wow!
This seems as good a time as any to deal with the question raised by Jennifer about the reasoning behind publishing a book straight into paperback format and skipping the hardback completely. There are a few reasons for doing this. It might be that we have published another book by the same author and want to reissue one of their previous titles (called a backlist title) - which may have already published somewhere else, like the U.S. Or we might want to prioritise making a new author accessible to as large an audience as possible, by making it affordable. This is sometimes a great way of making a name for a debut author - encouraging people to take a punt on an unknown on the basis that it'll only cost them a fiver or so.
Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities. They have nothing to do, however, with judging the actions of others. Such judgments are the prerogative of (often self-proclaimed) moralists. In ethics there is a humility; moralists are usually righteous.John Berger hits the nail on the spot about how I feel on the whole issue.
These thoughts come to my mind as I read the macabre denunciations being levelled today against Günter Grass. About him as a man and about his great work as a writer, they totally miss the point, and might be dismissed as laughable, but, as an index of a certain recent moral climate in Europe, they are troubling. They are an example of moral judgments made in a carefully constructed vacuum of experience. They are what is left after the emptying out of lived experience, and they are a strident denial of what we know in our bones to be real.
I suspect a filmmaker is fundamentally no different from a novelist or a poet, or even a painter or photographer.
We all just want to tell a story. Or to put across a feeling we have about humanity, as we observe it.
I believe these feelings and observations must stem from a clear intention, and a sincere personal concern for the human condition. No use pretending, because sooner or later, the viewer or reader will see through your mask.
Our series of monthly readings resumes next Saturday, 26th August, 2006 with the aim of encouraging new writing talent.Ted Mahsun will be quaking with fear and stage fright as he reads.
Time: 3.30pm
Date: 26th August 2006
Place: 67, Jalan Tempinis Satu, Lucky Garden, Bangsar (for directions check www.seksan.com)
Readers for this Saturday include:
Ted Mahsun
Jessie Michael
Saradha Narayan
Fairul Nizam
Sharanya Manivanan
"Readings" is organized by Sharon Bakar and is made possible by the
gracious sponsorship of Seksan from 67 Tempinis Satu and La Bodega.
I am really grateful to Yang-May for providing us this opportunity to ask questions from a real Lit Agent. A lot of good questions are asked and answered satisfyingly (Yang-May's a very good podcaster host!), with questions coming from all over the world, among them John Ling and Lydia Teh. But I'm happiest with my question being answered. Look for it very near the end of the interview.As part of my series on Getting Published, I invited writers from Malaysia and the UK to submit questions to a UK literary agent in an exclusive interactive project on my blog Fusion View, an East/ West blog on writing, culture and the arts.
We got a great response and armed with some probing and astute questions, I spoke to UK Literary Agent Lucy Luck about the process of submitting your manuscript for publication. She gives her advice and answers questions how a literary agent can help an author, what to put in your covering letter, what’s hot in the publishing world right now and much more.
Lucy also explains how you can submit your manuscript to her agency - if you do submit, please mention Fusion View.
Just got back from Jakarta yesterday and, in response to requests, I brought along with me some books on Indonesian literature in the luggage. So Silverfish now has a small collection, which we want to develop into a whole section eventually. Do drop by if you are interested. All books have been individually selected and represent the best of modern Indonesian literature. You may also wish to send us suggestions or requests.The best of modern Indonesian literature by whose standards?
Wallace Stegner, Francine Prose, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others offer advice to aspiring wordsmiths.
What I often thought was this: one day I will have a novel published. When I do, on that very day I will walk into Borders Books, just down there by Oxford Circus, and buy my own book with my own credit card. And, as I do this, I will stare into the smug shop assistant’s eyes and see if they have noticed.I have a feeling Mr. Rifkind will be googling his name and he'll be encountering this post. Do say hello if you do! :)
Though I agree that Murakami might be overshadowing the lesser-known, perhaps more established, fantasy writers, I think that Kafka on the Shore is definitely a fantasy novel, through and through. Talking cats, a crow alterego, Colonel Sanders, lost Japanese soldiers from World War II, and a whole bunch of crazy surreal sequences qualify as fantasy to me. Fantasy isn't just for the dragon-breeding, Tolkien-hugging crowd anymore.Further, I fear that lesser known writers-dearly loved by the fantasy readership but not well-known outside of it-will have their works crowded out by the name authors who merely have to give a small hat tip to fantasy (a dream sequence here, and UFO sighting there) and get their novels stacking the awards lists. For a novel to qualify as fantasy in my own personal catalog has to be set primarily in a fantasy universe, and /or use mythical creatures or supernatural abilities as a fundamental part of the plot line.
Indeed, the pressure seems to be greater for writers whose first books climb bestseller lists and garner adoration from far and wide. Since the arrival of Oprah Winfrey's sales-bestowing book club and its imitators, the anxiety level for some authors has intensified. Many have suffered cases of "second novel syndrome," as it's known, that are far worse than Parkhurst's.
This isn't really what I normally blog about but I am impelled to say something over the uproar over Sharifah Amani's comments about "tainting the culture" at the 19th Malaysian Film Festival. Sharifah Amani is quoted to have said, "Kalau filem cemarkan budaya (if films can taint culture), let's do it more often." Pretty strong words for a 20-year-old lass. And when looked at without context it is indeed very understandable why many people got riled up. But what made her say this in the first place?Film producer: “Malaysia Melayu punya.” (This translates to “This land belongs to the Malays.”)If there's anything anyone should be getting upset about, it's these two fascist statements, not what Sharifah Amani said at the Fest.
Journalist: (translated) “How can a good Muslim girl who prays and reads the Koran fall in love with a Chinese infidel?”
To me, she is one of God's greatest gifts for my work, alhamdulillah.
And no matter how much they rant about how "kurang ajar" she was on the night of FFM19, as far as I'm concerned she was nowhere near as kurang ajar as the people who crucified her.
I mean, for goodness' sake, they even cursed her father and mother. Call me old-fashioned, but insulting someone's parents does not figure in my book as decent civil behaviour.
And she's only 20. How old are these people again?
ISBN: 0060509058...her own recovery inspired her "creative unblocking" seminars, before her 1992 bestseller "The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity" sold more than 2 million copies, before the book spawned a movement, before strangers approached her in airports with home-recorded CDs, self-published poetry, handmade jewelry and the words, "You saved my life."
Back then, no one knew of Cameron's own struggles, the nervous breakdowns that got progressively worse and the traumatic episodes so severe she found herself talking to trees in a London park and darting naked down her driveway in Taos, N.M. No one knew of the conflicted personality behind "The Artist's Way," part bawdy truth-teller, part mystical, 12-stepping mentor.
As Resensi is a Malay program, the interview was conducted in Bahasa Malaysia. In school, I had done reasonably well in BM, even outdoing the only Malay boy in my class in exams. But it had been many decades since I last used the language actively. So I had to prepare my script in Malay and rehearse them so that I didn’t sound too kekok. Must’ve worked because my sister said that I sounded very natural and confident. But then, she’s my sister-lah.
If you’re interested in all things book-related, make it a point to catch Resensi. Writers, this is a good platform for you to promote your book too.
A primary reason authors join MySpace is to connect easily—and instantly—with their existing audience, as well as thousands of potential readers. Elsewhere on the Internet, many writers employ Web designers to help maintain personal sites, making it costly and time-consuming to keep them freshly updated, especially with last-minute news. Koren Zailckas, author of the memoir Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, kept a MySpace blog while on her book tour, and says the "control freak" in her likes being able to notify her fans with the touch of a button when she's doing a reading or has a TV appearance. Zailckas says she feels closer to those she meets on MySpace, since she can check out their profiles just as they view hers. "It's more intimate," she says. "The readers you're communicating with are honest-to-god human beings with faces and (now and again) your book in their list of 'favorites.' Silly as it sounds, there's something tremendously moving about being able to 'see' one another, even if it is in a nerdy sort of way." Zailckas points out that while readers aren't necessarily visiting their favorite author's Web page religiously, they often log on to MySpace on a daily basis and will see bulletins posted there.
There's a write-up today in the Star about Renni Browne's and Dave King's Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. I have this book, and let me tell you, if you're a fiction writer, this book is one book you absolutely must have on your writing desk at all times. The book is a guide on how to edit and polish your finished manuscripts and is very handy when you want to figure out how to make your story better:Self-editing is important because a writer will want his/her manuscript to be as strong as possible before an independent editor works on it.I don't have the dead-tree version of the newspaper right now, but I'm betting there's a cut-out coupon in there for some sort of discount for this book at Kinokuniya. If so, I would very much recommend you get your writing rump to Kino's and get this book, if you haven't already.
The best way to learn editing is from another editor, and this book offers you that opportunity.
Renni Browne and Dave King, who are professional editors, take the writer through the processes that an expert editor would follow to perfect a manuscript – from dialogue and exposition to point of view, interior monologue and voice.
In conjunction with the writer’s month, rumahpenerbitan Suarasuara will have a meet-the-authors session at MPH MidValley:(Via the Suarasuara blog)
Venue : MPH – MidValley Megamall, Courtyard.
Date : Sunday, August 13th
Time : 12 noon – 2 pm
Meet authors Rahmat Harun, Amirul Fakir, Raja Ahmad Aminullah, Dr Zakaria Ali (who was awarded the S.E.A. Write Award in 2003) and other Suarasuara writers.
Would you believe it? I've been banned by the Singapore National Library. They refused to stock my book in all their branches, citing 'It's too explicit and graphic" after reading a few chapters.Remind me to rewind my clock to 1950 whenever I'm in the vicinity of the Singapore National Library. Kudos to our local librarians for having the stomach to stock such an "explicit and graphic" book!
The outrage!
At least I haven't been banned here by our own Dewan Bahasa and Pustaka. They took 5 copies to keep as 'National Heritage.' I'm not sure I can quite call Dark City a national heritage, but at least I can count on my own countrymen/librarians to support me.
Raised speaking Tamil at home, Narayan wrote from the beginning in English, a language that, as Ved Mehta points out in a profile he wrote of Narayan in The New Yorker, is “foreign to most of his countrymen and also to most of his characters.” Narayan’s father was a headmaster, and as a result Narayan had access to a library full of English books. His early literary diet included Scott, Dickens, Hardy, Conan Doyle, and Wodehouse. In My Days he recalls, “I . . . started writing, mostly under the influence of events occurring around me and in the style of any writer who was uppermost in my mind at the time.” Why Narayan chose to write in English and not Tamil is something I leave scholars of his work to ponder. As a reader I am simply grateful for the way Narayan, long before so many writers of Indian origin or background writing in English, beautifully knit together the subject matter of one place with the language and narrative tradition of another, achieving what Mehta aptly calls an “astonishing marriage of opposite points of the compass.”
Most of the response about Dumbledore followed a question by famous author Salman Rushdie, who stepped forward to the audience microphone with his son and introduced himself like any other fan. JKR said, "I don't feel this is quite fair," amusedly. "You're better at figuring out plots than most." (That might be a paraphrase.) Rushdie flat-out asked (along with whether Dumbledore was alive) whether Snape was "good" or bad." She did not answer, but said that "your opinion is correct," possibly to his assertion that Snape was intrinsically good (though it was unclear).(Via Maud Newton.)
Among the stories featured include one about a fed-up Filipino maid who takes matters into her own hands; a beautiful daughter-in-law who unwittingly causes tension in her new family; a tongue-in-cheek satire on Malaysian politics; a private investigator who is taken for a ride; a ghastly twist of a ghostly tale; and a cheat who meets his match in a kacang putih vendor.
Indeed, all the stories have a moral to them but as Aneeta says, it is up to the readers to decide and choose. Although the book is written from a Malaysian point of view, the authors have thoughtfully added footnotes to translate local words into English to make it easier for foreigners to comprehend.
Perhaps I might not be too farfetched to say that writers are a curious, obsessive lot. Why else would one shut herself up in a writing corner, brainstorming and scribbling, while life passes her by? Probably because she has no choice but the write. The closest parallel I can draw is perhaps that of the compulsive blogger. Many have discovered blogging these past few years, and along with it, how soothing and liberating it can be to pour yourself out.
I think that for most young people of my generation, they find solace from their daily traumas and troubles by clubbing and socializing and calling up their friends and so on. For me, it is strictly writing.
Q: Your family background is working-class suburban Chicago. What has this meant for your writing?
A: I have a good work ethic. Growing up in a working-class environment also helped put my life into perspective. My father was a roofer. He’d get up at four a.m. to drive across the city to some job and wouldn’t get home until past dinnertime. I’m a lucky s.o.b. I roll out of bed whenever I want and then sit in front of a computer most of the day, taking long breaks with no one looking over my shoulder. I know better than to complain about the difficulty of writing. Yes, writing a novel is hard, but it sure as hell beats standing on a roof on a day when it’s over a hundred degrees and breathing in fumes from hot tar. A few days of that kind of work would cure any writer who whines about his job.
"When fans accuse me of sadism, which doesn't happen that often, I feel I'm toughening them up to go on and read John and Stephen's books," she said. "I think they've got to be toughened up somehow. It's a cruel literary world out there."
Not only does sitting with your nose in a book positively influence others' opinion of you, it could actually - get this - lead to sex. A third of those surveyed said that they "would consider flirting with someone based on their choice of literature". It's finally official, people. Reading is hot.Do also read the comments. They're quite interesting. Am going to read more Murakami, Marquez, Kundera and Bulgakov on the LRT in the future. S'funny though... was reading Ishiguro on the LRT the whole week and nobody asked to sleep with me...
If you are a writer aiming to have your book published in the UK, now is your chance to put a question to a UK Literary Agent.
It can be confusing for a new writer trying to send out their novel for the first time, especially if you are based outside the UK. Should I go via a literary agent or submit direct to the publisher? How do you find an agent? What format should I submit my manuscript in?
I am the author of two novels published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton and the creator of Fusion View, an East / West blog on writing, culture and the arts at www.fusionview.co.uk. I will be interviewing an established London-based literary agent for a Fusion View podcast in two weeks time and I am inviting new writers to email me your question about writing and getting published. I will select the best and most relevant questions and ask them during the interview so that you can get a personal answer from an industry insider.
The closing date is Midnight (GMT +1) Friday 11 August 2006. The podcast will be uploaded onto Fusion View on Monday 21 August 2006.
To find out more, click on this link.
Please use the form in the link above to ask your question. Do not reply to this email with your question. Please help me manage the the likely volume of responses by following this guideline.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Many thanks
Yang-May Ooi
Author of "The Flame Tree" and "Mindgame" (Hodder & Stoughton)
www.yangmayooi.co.uk
As the debate over a screen version of Monica Ali's book Brick Lane continues, Salman Rushdie, the author who in 1989 received a fatwa from the late Ayatollah Khomeinei in the wake of the publication of his book The Satanic Verses, has entered the fray with an attack on a longstanding rival, Germaine Greer.
In a letter published in the Guardian today, which is expected to reignite a row which has simmered since the early 1990s, Rushdie denounces Greer's support for the Brick Lane activists who are attempting to block the film as: "philistine, sanctimonious, and disgraceful, but it is not unexpected".
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