Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Virtually Living

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

On Friday I went along to TEDx Liverpool (#TEDxlp). TED’s slogan is ‘ideas worth spreading’ and this pretty much sums it up. TED stands for ‘technology’, ‘education’ and ‘design’ but the themes covered are much broader. The TEDx events are independently organised and tend to be a mixture of video footage and live talks. Over the years many noteworthy speakers have shared their ideas including Tim Berners-Lee, Bono, Richard Branson, Bill Clinton and a whole raft of others.

The theme of Friday’s event was creativity and it was fascinating. There was everything from future technology, how schools kill creativity, to social journalism and a nifty device called Arduino, which could potentially enable you to track your cat.  I have to admit that the next few minutes were lost to me as I weighed up the possibilities of this last suggestion.  It was a thought provoking event and a great way to spend a Friday afternoon.

I took a lot of ideas away with me but one thing has haunted me all weekend. Take a look at the video above. Have you watched it? I do this. Not to this extent of course. Not the kiss and the riding precariously on a motorbike but other things. I check my phone almost obsessively. And I don’t even like mobile phones. I never have. I have a landline at work and one at home. If you can’t get me on those then I’m out. Leave me a message and I’ll phone you later. Less than a dozen people have my mobile phone number and that’s just fine with me. No, what I’m doing when I’m ‘checking’ my phone is reading email, my Twitter feed and blog posts.

Sometimes in the evenings I look up and Lord Levy has been staring at his phone and I have been staring at mine. Or one or both of us have laptops out. Just sometimes I think, “Hello, I’m really here you know. Why don’t we have a real conversation?”

The other night we were talking about going on holiday later in the year. I wasn’t thinking about the view from the balcony or all the new places we could discover. No. I was thinking, “I wonder whether they have wireless access so I can take my laptop and blog and upload pictures.” I was wondering whether my iPhone would work in Italy.

I’m not one of those people who has to share their life online. I’m really not. In fact, I’m quite a private person. What is shared here is only selective information. I think about writing a lot. Wherever I am, I think about how I can blog this experience or how it would fit into a story. But I do worry that at times it goes a little bit too far. I wonder whether other bloggers feel this? Is our enjoyment now felt through publishing the event, rather than through experiencing the event itself? Being in the moment and conveying immediacy is one thing but are we contriving situations to try and tailor them to our writing? If so, isn’t it all a bit fake?

Wordsworth described his writing as ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’. This suggests that whatever event triggered his inspiration was written later when he had the chance to do it justice. It also suggests (I hope) that he enjoyed the daffodils and the subjects of his poetry. Perhaps it is truly experiencing something that brings about good writing.

So tonight I’m switching the devices off. The phones, the computers, the laptops. But only after I’ve tweeted this post.

Posted in Out of Levy, Tech Stuff, Writing | 1 Comment »

How We Read

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Old books

We’ve probably all heard the arguments about whether, in the future, books will be replaced by devices such as the Sony Reader, the Kindle and other digital formats. But perhaps we’re looking at this in the wrong way. Perhaps what we should be focusing on is how our reading habits our changing and how publishers need to adapt.

I will never stop buying books. Never. As long as they print them I’ll buy them. Nothing can beat browsing a book shop on a Saturday afternoon and going home with an armful of books to read. However, as soon as the Kindle hits UK shores I’ll be one of the first in the queue. I don’t think it will replace books. If anything, it could have a positive effect on book sales.

In an article in the US version of Wired (June 09, ‘The Future of Reading’, p 50) Clive Thompson writes, ‘To save books, publishers must go digital – and let audiences unlock the potential of the written word.’ It’s understandable that publishers are reluctant to release their books in a digital format, where content can be copied and shared for free. But Thompson argues that if you get the model right then it could boost book sales rather than decreasing them.

When a news story goes online, readers can immediately begin commenting and share the link via email, text, Facebook and Twitter etc. We can even take snippets to refer to and discuss. This is much harder with books as they mainly exist as a hard copy format. This sharing of and commenting on books isn’t really a new concept. We’ve been annotating and discussing books for years. Microsoft researcher Cathy Marshall found that many university students scour second hand books before buying them, to acquire the best annotations. Well, imagine if you could do this easily online. You could look up a specific chapter or paragraph and as well as accessing the book, you could access other people’s annotations and discussions. Thompson notes that ‘book nerds’ are already working on a XML-like markup language that would allow for this kind of linking.

But what about the authors? What about the publishers? Well again this comes down to how we read. I often read by author. I find a book that I really like and then read other titles by that same writer. But what I really like is recommendations. My husband buys books for me for birthdays and Christmas and they’re always my favourite gifts. I love to find out what he’s chosen for me. If a friend comments on a book and says how good it is, it’s likely that I’ll look it up. The same is true of ‘virtual friends’. If someone on Twitter (not just anyone, I might add, but someone whose opinion I trust and whose interests are similar to mine) tweets about a book they’ve just read and enjoyed, especially if there’s a link, I’ll check it out. In fact Thompson notes that for the few authors (most of them sci-fi writers) that have given away digital copies of their books, their book sales have increased as a result. Why? Because the books have been discovered by more people.

Reading for me is a solitary activity and one of the few times that I don’t have to engage with other people. I don’t want to change that. But wouldn’t it be great if I could share my thoughts and views, in the ways suggested above, with other like-minded people?

In the Guardian this week, Chris Power wrote about The Book Seer website. It’s very simple. You type in the last book you’ve read and the writer and The Book Seer will make a number of recommendations for you. Results are pulled through from Amazon and Library Thing. I had a go myself and the results are quite surprising. I typed in ‘The Little Stranger’ by Sarah Waters, which I’m still reading (and enjoying very much by the way). It only returned one other Sarah Waters novel, ‘The Night Watch’ which is set a few years earlier than The Little Stranger. The others were all different. One of the results was ‘The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House’ by Kate Summerscale, which is already on my book list. The Book Seer is just a bit of fun but it illustrates my point.  If as research suggests, the future of digital is in creating relationships and trust, then traditional publishers could be missing a trick.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Stephen Fry, via Twitter. It’s his response to the Kindle replacing books.

‘This is the point. One technology doesn’t replace another, it complements. Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators’. (Stephen Fry, Twitter, 11 March 2009)

Posted in Books and Reading, Writing | 3 Comments »

Hay on Sunshine

Monday, June 8th, 2009

The Guardian Hay Festival 2009

The sun shone on Hay last week.  It was our first time at the festival and we had a grand time. The deck chairs were out on the lawn and there was a great line up for the last few days. Of course our phones wouldn’t work. And so I couldn’t access email or the internet. But once I’d climbed down from the hotel ceiling I realised that perhaps this wasn’t such a bad thing. Although slightly enforced, it was a total break from work.

David Crystal

On my bookshelf I have a well-thumbed reference book called ‘Rediscover Grammar’. I’ve had this since sitting my A-Levels and it has proved extremely useful over the years. It contains everything from noun phrases and subordinate clauses to adjectives and personal pronouns. The book is written by linguist David Crystal and I was thrilled to discover that he was speaking at Hay and promoting his new book, ‘Just a Phrase I’m Going Through: My Life in Language’. I realise that may sound a little dry but I really like this stuff.

The format for the majority of events was pretty much the same. The writers read from their books, answered questions from an interviewer and then took questions from the floor. David Crystal’s talk was different. He spoke on his own, engaging the audience with funny stories and later took questions. In fact in places it was more of a performance than a talk. He spoke well, engaging the audience and making them laugh. Well, all except Lord Levy who was already preoccupied with landing helicopters.

Crystal described his book as a cross between a memoir and an autobiography. Personal recollections combined with factual content. It all starts, he explained, with a phone call. And went on to describe how he found himself in some of the world’s troubled spots. He spoke of shootings, assassination attempts and of sex. Of Dublin, Israel, Chile and Brazil. And of the Forensic Phoneticians who worked on the infamous Jack the Ripper tape. All fascinating stuff.

The talk ended with a mock phone call from the British Council suggesting a trip to the Helmand Province in Afghanistan.

More information: www.davidcrystal.com

The Guardian Hay Festival 2009

Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson had some interesting insights into the ‘process of writing’, though she shuddered at using the phrase. At the start of a novel she doesn’t know the plot or how it ends. This ‘discovery’ is what she enjoys most about writing and explained that if she already knew the ending then there would be no reason to write the book.

Atkinson talked about an ‘unconscious’ process and of ‘writing through her fingers’ and how the novel comes together as she types. From start to finish her novels usually take about two years to complete.

Genre isn’t something that Atkinson thinks about when writing.  This is something for other people to decide.  She went on to talk of her dislike of the whole publishing process and confessed that if she could write without having to be published then she would.

Kate Atkinson read from her novel ‘When Will There be Good News?‘

The Guardian Hay Festival 2009

Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters is one of my favourite writers. There’s something about her writing. She transports you to a different place and time. I think it’s in the detail. She researches thoroughly, from buildings to food to clothing and the way people speak. Research, she explained, is one of the most enjoyable parts of writing.

Her latest novel, ‘The Little Stranger’, is set in post war Britain. It’s a novel about class and the decay of the upper classes. It’s about the end of a way of life and of new beginnings. It is also a ghost story or more precisely a ‘haunted house story’.

With the exception of ‘The Night Watch’, Waters meticulously plans her novels chapter by chapter. She makes decisions such as who will be telling the story at an early stage. However, like Kate Atkinson she talked of a kind of discovery in her writing and a sense of ‘finding’ the characters. She also talked of a consciousness of genre and of her novels ‘being in dialogue’ with other books.

More information: www.sarahwaters.com
Sarah Waters talking at Hay: www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2009/may/20/hay-festival-sarah-waters

We went to other events of course but for me these were the highlights. All too soon we found ourselves back on the motorway with books, book bags, mugs and an embossed Moleskine (yeah we did). The 3G icon on my phone signalled the end of the weekend.

Posted in Out of Levy, Writing | No Comments »

Writers Online

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

The first time I met a real life writer was when Maya Angelou came to Manchester a few years ago.  She was signing copies of her latest book in Waterstone’s and then later appeared at the Free Trade Hall.  I queued outside Waterstone’s to get my book signed.  I had this whole speech planned about how much I admired her and her writing but when it came to it I said, “Would you mind signing a copy for mum as well?”  I was totally in awe of her.

The same thing happened the year before last at Manchester Literature Festival.  I went to hear Maggie O’Farrell read from her novel, ‘The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox’.  It was a great night, Anne Enright also read from ‘The Gathering’ which won the Booker Prize a few days later.  I waited patiently at the end of the talks to get my book signed and – nothing.  Again. I could only just about mutter my name.

There’s something about writers that for me is almost sacred.  They weave magic and connect with you in a way that no-one else can.  A book or a play or poem is a sort of bringing together of two people.  The writer brings the words, providing characters, structure and plot.  The reader brings his or her own experiences and past, providing a unique interpretation of the piece.  The bit in the middle is where the writing ‘lives’.

Given my thoughts on writers, I’m always fascinated to read about their everyday lives and their process of writing.  Mslexia and Waterstone’s Books Quarterly provide some great interviews.  And I love The Write Place on ‘The Book Show’ (Sky Arts) where writers show you around their study and talk about how they write. Apparently, Tracy Chevalier redecorates her room each time she starts a new novel.  All fascinating stuff.

I am also very interested in writers who blog.  Jenn Ashworth has a blog called Every Day I Lie a Little. I first became aware of her work last year at Manchester Literature Festival, where she won the prize for ‘Best Writing on a Blog’.  She also ‘tweets’ at http://twitter.com/jennashworth. In fact it was through Twitter that I became aware of her debut novel, ‘A Kind of Intimacy’ and I subsequently bought it, read it and enjoyed it very much.

At the same time as buying Jenn Ashworth’s book I also bought ‘Daphne’ by Justine Picardie.  This is a compelling read, which fired my interest in the Brontes once again.  I was doing some work at John Rylands Library a few years ago and came across some letters that Charlotte Bronte had written to Elizabeth Gaskell.  One letter in particular stayed with me as it described how the sisters travelled to London to meet their publisher for the first time.  You can imagine their publisher’s surprise when confronted with the Bronte sisters, instead of the men they thought they had been dealing with.  But I digress.  When I got to the end of Justine Picardie’s novel I found a link to her blog, which I’ve been reading with interest ever since.

I’m not sure exactly what the draw is.  Maybe that the writer has always seemed slightly anonymous up until now.  From the writer’s point of view it’s a means of valuable feedback direct from the reader.  I’ve always wondered what it must be  like when you finish a book.  It is published and sent out to book shops and you can’t grab it back.  You can’t edit it anymore.  It’s out there.  Yes there are reviews and feedback at literary events and signings.  But the idea of the reader interacting with the writer via a blog creates a whole new channel of communication and direct feedback on a much larger scale.

I’m going to Hay in a few weeks time.  Hope I’m not too tongue tied when it comes to the signings.

Posted in Writing | 4 Comments »