Skip to Content

Comment from the book world in March 2019

March 2019

Ten years of writing history

25 March 2019

'I've been sitting at a desk writing history books for something over ten years. It's been engrossing, demanding and occasionally exhausting. This is a good moment to take stock. What does it add up to? Four books in various languages (the last still in proof), thousands of pages of handwritten notes.

Despite the impressive number of different language versions it's been a modest living not a handsome one - I'm still waiting for the film rights. People come by and take out options but I've become realistic. I spent three unpaid months writing outlines for a Game of Thrones style history epic based on one of my books at a publisher's behest - no luck so far. There's an element of gambling in all this - the next book could make it, a producer could get serious, but I've learned that seasoned punters read the odds - a history of Venice is never going to be Fifty Shades of Grey.'

Roger Crowley, author of Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, Empires of the Sea and three other books on the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency site

'The seed that sets you off'

18 March 2019

‘I do think that sometimes the seed that sets you off on the process of writing a novel can have been around for many years, even decades, before it actually - for some mysterious reason - comes to fruition . I think it's almost a good sign if an idea has been fermenting for quite a long time in a sort of semi-conscious way.

I've learnt to distrust the staggeringly brilliant new idea that was triggered by something that happened quite recently. Ha ha! You need the dog-eared thing that's been around for a long time, quietly nagging away at you.'

Pat Barker, author of The Silence of the Girls, the Regeneration trilogy, The Eye in the Door and five other novels. https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/16113/pat-barker.html

 

'No writing is wasted'

11 March 2019

'No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can't put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.'

Erin Bow, Canadian YA writer, whose books include Stand on the Sky, The Scorpion Rules and Plain Kate https://www.erinbow.com/

'I'm a writer now'

4 March 2019

'It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is-an intense form of thought.'

Don DeLillo, author of Running Dog, White Noise, Falling Man, Zero K and 13 other novels