Ten Things about A.S. Byatt

A.S. Byatt in her recent BBC interview with Mark Lawson (BBC Four, 2:25am Thursday 17th December 2009) told us among other things the following:

1. Lawson was a student of Byatt’s during his undergraduate education.
2. Byatt tragically lost a son who was eleven years old when he died.
3. The surprise death at the end of Still Life is based on a real accident that Byatt had with a refrigerator
4. Her greatest novelist of English Literature is George Eliot.
5. She has a deep respect for the work of Iris Murdoch, with whom she shared an editor at Chatto & Windus, and feels that the film of her life and Kate Winslet’s attitude towards the novelist’s portrayal was a negative thing.
6. Margaret Drabble is her sister, and they don't read the books written by each other.
7. One of the premises behind the quartet of novels that began with The Virgin in the Garden was that of exploring the unpredictable nature of accidents in fiction, but when her real life was impacted upon by the death of her son, she wrote Possession as an interlude since she found it hard to return to the subject.
8. The popularity of the Booker winning novel Possession has been an ongoing (but pleasant) surprise for Byatt.
9. According to Byatt, she learnt how to plot her novels from early episodes of The Bill, she also used to watch Dallas. The only thing she tends to watch on television now is tennis.
10. She was on the Social Effects of Television Advisory Group set up to investigate the impact of television on people during the 1970s.

The interview is available here to view until 3:24am Thursday 24th December 2009.

We Need a Literary Sensation

Books are sexy

Getting people excited about books is clearly something writers care about very much. At the weekend I blogged about the need for charismatic curatorial types, the literary equivalent of Jay Joplin, to do for literature what Sensation and White Cube did for art in the 90s. It provoked one of the liveliest debates I’ve had in a while. And when I asked how we get the public interested in literature – what our “Sensation” moment would look like – during Sunday night’s #writechat, the @replies lit up like the Vegas Strip.


As writers, we care. The problem is, many of the public don’t. so what’s the answer?
I should probably explain, as I realise that not everyone was around in the balmy days of the 1990s. Back in the mid 1990s a group of artists, mainly out of Goldsmiths & Central St Martin’s (yes, the St Martin’s College of the immortal Pulp lyric), started doing stuff that was new and cool. They became known as the Young British Artists (YBAs). Nowadays we think of them as rather staid and fogeyish, and of what they do as rather yeah yeah yeah, but it’s hard to overstate just how damn cool it was before some idiot went and used the phrase Cool Britannia.


And it was Jay Joplin, and his White Cube Gallery, that brought Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread, Gavin Turk and their like to the world. And when Damien cut a cow in two, and Tracey forgot to make her bed, and a whole bunch of them got together to produce an exhibition called Sensation that included a portrait of Mira Hindley painted with children’s handprints, there wasn’t a bus stop or a shopping queues or a, well, they didn’t have watercoolers really back the, but you get the idea, where people weren’t asking each other “yes, but is it art?”


People didn’t just care about this painting or that sculpture – they cared about art.
So how do we get people talking like that about books? How do we get them caring not about this or that book – there’ll always be a book du jour, and that’s great, but it’s not sustainable, it’s not going to secure the future – but about books. Full stop?


The answers to the question have proven somewhat more elusive than the desire to keep asking it and for there to BE an answer. Catch them young, work with libraries, get celebrities to say books are cool. All of them valuable points. But what we really need is our own Sensation. We need an “event”.


And for that we need two things. We need a group of writers doing something that hasn’t been done before. We need our very own Jay Joplin to bring them to the world’s attention in one place at one time. And maybe we need a third thing, for the tabloid press to be offended.


I want to go on a little diversion before ending with a clarion call to action. It’s not – pardon the heresy, books we need to get people excited about, lovely, wonderful objects though they may be. It’s what books contain – stories and ideas and, to be kitsch and sentimental for a moment – the alchemy of the communal soul. Books on their own are just pieces of paper. Sentimentalism and nostalgia for them are understandable, but they’re not what I’m about when I say I want people to be excited about literature. Just like the stockists are wrong to want people to be excited about paintings rather than “art”.

What we need is for people to care about ideas, about stories, about communicating our innermost fears and hopes; articulating our questions and seeking answers; having our insecurities reflected back with reassurance, and our securities questioned; being brought together by narrative. It is because they do all these things that books matter – and not vice versa.

So what will our event look like? I’ve had some great suggestions over the past couple of days. A second Blur v Oasis, trading heavyweights; a second Beat Poets tour; and, of course, our own Sensation. I don’t know what form it will take. But it will be an Event. And I won’t stop asking the question till I’ve found the answer – and tried and failed a few times along the way.

So, who wants to explore with me?

(Dan Holloway is a founder member of Year Zero Writers, a collective devoted to creating a direct relationship between readers and writers, and described by Nylon Mag as “cool”. The Year Zero website has new original fiction and articles about literature every day. Dan is also organiser of the Free-e-day festival. He is an outspoken self-publisher and futurologist of publishing, and an advocate of live performance prose. His current novel, Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, about a girl growing up in Hungary after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, is free to download in all e-formats, and £8 as paperback.

Patience....

Is a virtue we must cultivate daily. As writers this is a critical piece of wisdom to store in the grey matter. In this day and age it seems we are always waiting for something - the economy to improve, companies to start hiring, test results, or that e-mail from an agent or publisher.

It's easy to get trapped in the cycle of just waiting in the name of patience. I think thats why many of us don't have patience, we get confused with waiting and patience. Why do I bring this up to the Word Nerd Army? We are here to change the sentiment of books, make an impact on the world through the use of literature and to see our fellow mates published one day.

All of these things take time and therefore, patience but don't get discouraged my fellow writers for Rome was not built in a day. I believe if we continue fighting on, writing, making ourselves heard we will see a change. How long will it be before we see this change? I can't answer that but each step we take moves us closer to that day when we see the benefits of our work.

If some one learns to read or a child gets a book for a holiday that is a sign of our work here. People talking about authors and books are just the ripples in the waters of society that started when we threw the first rock of information.

Patience is what we need to remember and hold on to as we move forward in this uncertain world and even in our private lives. Patience is a virtue, true, but it is also our friend. Don't wait on patience, patience gives you the access to follow through on other projects.

The Meat Fisted Typing Robot

(picture courtesty of www.sho.com)

In my head I'm Hank effing Moody. In my head, there's still a need for alpha-writers meat-fisting their coarse words on a typewriter held together with self-belief and amateur misogyny, surrounded by the effluvia of insomnia-ridden haunted writers: a soft-pack of 20 cigarettes, a half-snarfed bottle of bourbon (the 20 year old good stuff) and some Warren Zevon blaring out of the stereo. Oh, and I'm dressed in black. Maybe I'm wearing shades. Maybe the detritus of last night's party is still asleep at my feet. Maybe I'm deluded.

In reality, I'm sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by clippings of interesting articles I'll probably not come back to, my vanity shelf (this is a line of CDs, newspapers, magazines, books and a record that I've been involved with). I've got a cafetiere next to me, cos you know, I got to be up in the morning to go to my job as a regular Office Joe. I'm wearing slippers and tracksuit bottoms. And maybe Radio 4's on, but more than likely, it's silent because too much distraction can throw me off my game, I've got 1000 words to write and it's nearly midnight and if I go to bed in the next ten minutes, I can get 7 hours and 30 minutes of sleep- that is, if I fall asleep instantly. The more likely situation is tossing and turning and disturbing my wife while I try to figure out why my character Nishant isn't working in my book, what to do with Larry who I introduced early on and never came back to even though he's got great lines, and when I'm going to find the time between writing and editing and working and relating to my wife and cooking and paying the electricity bill and watching my two new Lovefilm DVDs to find a blooming agent.

It's tough out here for a writer. It really is, and I've been lucky to have performed across the world and had my stuff published in sh*t-hot magazines but the above scene is pretty much my everyday life. I'm consumed.

But it's not all bad- no way, no how because this book I'm writing at the moment is something I would want to read in a heartbeat. And that is the ultimate winner, the goal the prize. Before the compromise of selling books, that initial rush and compulsion to sit down and put pen to paper is more often than not because, regardless of feeling you got a story to tell, it's more... you want to read what you have to say. You're the first customer for anything you do. If you're writing something and you know you wouldn't buy it if you needed to pick up a new book to read from your local independent bookshop, then you've lost, people. You've lost that compulsion, that hunger and necessity and drive and power and drive to write the best you can write. I write because I want to read what I got to say. Sounds selfish when you put it like that, but it's the truth. You're the first customer of anything you write; you got to sell it to yourself first.

And what I'm writing now? I love it. I think it's ace and I am loving it when I read it back. Sure it needs tightening and there are some saggy bits but the idea, the essence of it, is exactly what I want to read. In a second. I've won. And for that reason alone, tonight I'll go home, put on my writing slippers, brew two cups worth of decent hazelnut coffee in my cafetiere, fire up the laptop and pound the keyboards with my meat fists... because some things do never change.