On the future of writing

A piece worthy of comment in the The New Yorker, looking forward to the future of writing in the US in the context of Philip Roth's retirement:

The future of writing in America—or, at least, the future of making a living by writing—seems in doubt as rarely before. Thanks to the Internet, the disproportion between writerly supply and demand, always tricky, has tipped: anyone can write, and everyone does, and beginners are expected to be the last pure philanthropists, giving it all away for the naches. It has never been easier to be a writer; and it has never been harder to be a professional writer. The strange anatomy of the new literary manners has yet to be anatomized: the vast schools of tweets feeding on the giant whales of a few big books, the literary ecology of the very big, the very small, and the sudden vertiginous whoosh; the blog that becomes a book; the writer torn to pieces by his former Internet fans, which makes one the other.

It is certainly true, though perhaps not absolutely news, that writing has become a profession with very little renumeration. Few writers of literature make a living thereby: some make their living in communication, editing, or professional and technical writing, or as teachers of creative writing, but this always feels like a kind of hack-work, selling skill at loss of the creative output that is a writer's true mission and satisfaction. It seems that technology has multiplied the channels for writing (although there are never enough good publishers) and yet diluted thereby the commercial value of writing.

By the same token, the article notes, 'it is a matchless time to be a reader. The same forces that have hampered writing as a profession have empowered reading as a pastime: everything ever written, it seems, is now easily available to be read, and everything is.' I argued something of this availability of works from all periods in my post on E-books and the classics. Bookstores, online and offline, libraries, digital and otherwise, offer an ever growing archive for readers. And yet, in the flood of new and old works, where are those books that really change, thrill or divert us? Are they easier or harder to find?

There are no clear answers to these questions, not while we are in the middle of the revolution that spurs them. Like most writers, it's paradigmatic that I write and publish where I can, but in my career I've never heard from anyone that this business is getting easier. As a reader, I'm only looking for more time to discover and relish the books that are out there. But as Philip Roth departs the stage, maybe the idea of one great book or one great author to definitively witness our era is also, necessarily, about to fade.

ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Finalist

I'm delighted to learn that The Raven's Seal is a finalist for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year in the Historical (Adult Fiction) category. It's also a tribute, I think, to Top Five Books' book design.

Another reason, if I may, for readers to check out a copy, particularly the e-book edition if the print copy is out of reach.

Orwell, clarity, language and power

There is an odd strain of 'anti-Orwellianism' starting to appear, as evidenced in this essay in the New Statesman, in which the author argues that Orwell's famous correlation between insincerity and long words is no longer true, that indeed,"When politicians or corporate front men have to bridge a gap between what they are saying and what they know to be true, their preferred technique is to convey authenticity by speaking with misleading simplicity."

I have some sympathy with the view that:

There is a new puritanism about the way we use words, as though someone with a broad vocabulary or the ability to sustain a complex sentence is innately untrustworthy. Out with mandarin obfuscation and donnish paradoxes, in with lists and bullet points. But one method of avoiding awkward truths has been replaced by another.

And I tend to agree that literary language is sometimes needlessly austere, as is the mantra to show and not tell.

But, having been confronted with a fair share of official bullet points and managerial language, I would say that bullet points can be perfectly deceptive in their plainness, and that the language of policy remains one of vagueness, distortion and opacity, where acronyms, keywords and catch-phrases (plain though they may be) conceal intention as surely as Latinate phrases.

Although Orwell favoured clear, plain language, I'm sure he was under no illusion that short words and blunt sentences in and of themselves could not be used to conceal political intentions. Long words, circumlocutions, were in Orwell's time the marker of political deception. Now talking points, market-speak and bullet-points have the same function. My only reservation is that the later also corrupt and diminish thought, making the liar duller rather than devious -- but then this is what newspeak was for.

Beginning in 2013

Few things are as creatively daunting as starting a new writing project, particularly a novel. I'm one of those writers who always begin at the beginning with writing, even while the end is a distant, vague shape on the horizon. Nothing is as revised, edited, read and reread in anything I write as the first chapter of a novel.

But I ask myself this morning: why start to write if your topic is not daunting? Why undertake the work if it will not test all your skills as a writer?

This, and a personal loss, will explain why my posts have been scanty since the start of the year. The Raven's Seal is holding up well with reviews and recognition. Astute readers will guess from my Goodreads reading profile the starting point of my new work, but the endpoint is still remote.

The End of Dickens's 200th

It's now the end of the bicentennial year of Dickens's birth: a great year for Dickens scholars and writers. As the next year starts, I can only speculate about how strangely Dickens's concerns come back to us in new forms, how poverty and need and the intransigence and short-sightedness of power - frequent themes and tensions in his work - recur with equal urgency two-hundred and one years later.

This year, I'm encouraged by the generous reviewers on Goodreads and the support of my readers to begin a new mystery. There will be a Dickensian link (perhaps subtly so), and a thematic connection to The Raven's Seal, but I am also inspired by some other favourite authors (Conrad in particular) and new experiences to move in an interesting direction.

Character and Choice in The Two Towers

Slow reading Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings can expose surprising nuances in the text. One of the criticisms of Tolkien I've come across is that his characters are uninteresting, flat, reflexively good or heroic, yet their heroism lacks depth because ultimately it is easy, all achievement and no sacrifice.

Yet in the first chapter of The Two Towers we see Aragorn at his lowest: confused, grieving, doubting himself and all his actions. He has no clear path, and rather than confidence and assertion he is trapped in uncertainty. The choice (pursue Frodo and the Ring, or rescue Merry and Pippin) is by no means clear, for the one requires the sacrifice of innocents, the other a terrific risk to the world. In truth, Tolkien has derailed the quest narrative precisely to bring his characters to this point of testing.

One of the odd pieces of received wisdom of modernism in literature is that 'good' characters are inherently dull, whereas 'flawed' characters are automatically interesting. But making the right moral choice is often a complex problem for the good character but irrelevant to the selfish. The interesting choices, then, confront the good and not the bad, and reveal depth in these characters.

Tolkien does not show us Aragorn's bravery or skill in combat in this chapter, but rather his compassion and forbearance for Boromir (the failed hero, lost on the quest). This is what restores Aragorn's sense of direction and sets him on the uncertain path to his inheritance.

Cities and mysteries

A recent piece in The Guardian, London: fantasy's capital city, has me thinking about mystery, imagination and cities.

'Mystery is the doorway to fantasy' the writer remarks. Quite so, but then mystery is one of the basic wellsprings of plot and story, as Dickens so often demonstrated. When I wrote The Raven's Seal, I used one of the techniques of fantasy by making my setting, the city of Airenchester, wholly imaginary. In this way, it was the ideal stage on which arrange and play out my mystery.

The urban mystery, the attempt to pose the reality of the city as a mystery and then unpick it, is one of the oldest forms of mystery. I've always been attracted to cities of the imagination, from Italo Calvino's Venice to M. John Harrison's eerie and unforgettable Viriconium.

'Mystery is also the doorway to reality,' the writer concludes. Airenchester has always been a character in The Raven's Seal, as vividly drawn and present. I hope that Airenchester's fictionality, its fantasy, also tempts the reader to look behind the facade and imagine the mechanisms, the subterfuges, social forms, expectations, dreams and ideologies that drive and support it.