Last year I mentioned that I read and loved Jasper Jones, a wise and funny coming-of-age novel set in Western Australia in the 1960s, written by the precociously talented Craig Silvey.  Jasper Jones has enchanted many besides me, so much so this novel, published in early 2009, remained in Australian best-seller lists in 2011.

I like reading about authors, so I Googled  Silvey and discovered that his first novel, Rhubarb, was published in 2004 to considerable  fanfare. Five years is a long time between drinks, especially for such a young man.  

Why?

I’ll let Silvey explain:

Jasper Jones began as a name that wouldn't let me go. I tried, but I couldn't shrug it away, and it began to occupy my thoughts at a time when they should have been elsewhere. I was in the midst of a slow moving second novel and living my own private sophomore slump. In short, I was panicking.
 
I had this insistent story buzzing with energy, but I was married to a sluggish behemoth that was burgeoning out of my grasp and gradually becoming more oblique in its scope and purpose. I had a decision to make: impulsively follow Jasper Jones down to his glade in the dead of night, or see this thing through which I instinctively knew wasn't working. For a fastidious little man who stubbornly needs to shepherd things to their bitter end, the decision was a difficult one. But Jasper Jones was beckoning me all too urgently, and, like Charlie Bucktin, I followed Jasper through the town of Corrigan with trepidation.
 
It’s a dreadfully difficult decision to abandon a work in progress, something you’ve invested so much time, imagination and emotion in, but like a love affair gone sour it’s usually wiser to step away, not to scramble to resurrect something that’s clearly not working.  In Silvey’s case his decision to follow Jasper was vindicated in spades. Jasper Jones looks on its way to becoming an Australian classic.   

Then only yesterday, I read a piece in the literary pages of the Sydney Morning Herald about journalist and author Carrie Tiffany, who has only just published her second novel—her first, Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, won or was short-listed for many literary awards—after seven years.  In the meantime, while working full-time as a journalist, she wrote and subsequently binned an entire other novel because she wasn’t happy with it.  Wow!

Bucking the stereotype Tiffany is quite happy to continue with her day job, which she finds interesting. She actually says in the article. “I’m not sure about a career as a writer. I’m not interested in novels set in coffee shops.”

 

I’ve been a bit slack with my blog writing lately, being the silly season and all, but I’ve been woken (way too) early on Christmas Day by my youngest and now have some time to kill.  So here goes.

Being Christmas, I’ve been buying lots of books for gifts.   Along with Dr Seuss, I’ve bought Mawson by Peter Fitzsimons for my husband and Hiroshima Nagasaki by Paul Ham for my brother.  My ‘baby’ brother is the serious type and doesn’t usually read fiction, so I guess I should be flattered that he took time to read my novel!  I also have a reluctant reader in my fifteen year old son, so Santa is bringing him Matthew Reilly’s latest,  Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves.  I think my son is now old enough for grown-up books, and although Reilly isn’t my cup of tea I’m hoping his fast-paced action novels will capture the imagination of a teenage boy.

It appears I’ve done my patriotic duty, supporting Aussie male writers.  However, the latest offering from an Australian woman writer somehow slipped into my purchases, too.  How did that happen, I wonder?

 It’s The Secret Ingredient by Dianne Blacklock. Dianne is a successful contemporary women’s fiction writer and fellow mother of boys. You can follow her on Twitter.  I’ve just started We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver (coming late to the party on what is apparently a brilliant but disturbing novel) and feel I will be in need of a dose of Dianne by the time I finish it.  Can’t wait.

Now Dianne has published, if I’m correct, eight novels. That’s a hugely impressive track record in anyone’s eyes.  I suspect, however, she’s not sipping cocktails on her luxury yacht in the Caribbean right now.  Not many Australian novelists get rich from their efforts (Reilly being an exception). I haven’t asked Dianne, but expect she writes because she loves it, and the royalties she receives, whilst welcome, are the icing on the cake.

I wonder what type of writer you aspire to be?  Are you in it to make your fortune?  Or do you simply enjoy the craft of writing?

What made me think about this was a recent piece in The Independent about self-published Kindle millionaire, Amanda Hocking. You can read it here. Thanks to Joanna Penn from the brilliant The Creative Penn for pointing it out.  In particular, this sentence struck me:

Each book [by Hocking] takes between two and four weeks to write, and she sells them for between 99 cents and $2.99. In the past 18 months, she has grossed approximately $2 million.

Chip was a tall, gym-built man with crow’s-feet and sparse butter-yellow hair; if the girl had noticed him, she might have thought he was a little too old for the leather he was wearing.

Jonathan Franzen  The Corrections

Maybe this was what it was like, getting older. You tired of sex, even of good sex, the way you’d tire of a good spaghetti carbonara if you ate it three times a week. Or maybe there was such a thing as sexual laziness, to which she’d fallen prey. In most regards she was industrious; she never purchased pre-cut carrots. But ecstasy, too, was an effort.

Lionel Shriver The Post-Birthday World

Avert your eyes!  Can you see what is wrong with these passages? Are you shocked by these examples of bad writing?

I don’t know if I’m naturally a rebel, but I hate black and white rules. Okay, some are necessary: Don’t drink and drive, for example.   But rules about what constitutes good fiction writing irritate me.

I'm sure we all know bad writing when we see it (although clearly the authors of the bad writing don't!): implausible plots, clichéd characters, all tell and no show, adverb-overload, wooden dialogue.  But after that, I think it gets a bit hazy.

In a later post I plan to argue that well-chosen and sparingly used adverbs and adjectives still have their place. However, that can wait. Today I’m going to talk about the humble semicolon.

Just before Happily Ever After? was going to print, I read this in a book about the craft of writing:

 Colons and semi-colons have few places on your [fiction] pages unless absolutely necessary. Fiction is about flow and pace. Colons and semi-colons are about brevity, and they can interfere with the natural flow of fiction.

The above author nonetheless comes across as positively circumspect when compared with thriller writer James Scott Bell.

When it comes to fiction, I think of semi-colons the way I think of eggplant: avoid at all costs. As Kurt Vonnegut once said, "Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."

The semi-colon is a burp, a hiccup. It's a drunk staggering out of the saloon at 2 a.m., grabbing your lapels on the way and asking you to listen to one more story.

 

I once read an article where an author —for the life of me I can’t remember whom— said this, or to finish his sentence:

When I grow up I want to write like Peter Carey.

Personally, I don’t want to write like Peter Carey.  Although I have enjoyed some of his novels he seems a bit full of himself these days, like he’s started believing his own publicity.

However, leaving my petty prejudices aside, I couldn’t even aspire to write like him. I have an imagination but not that vivid an imagination!  I know my limitations and I can’t visualise ‘literary genius’ or ‘magical prose’, or any other superlatives you like to think of, being mentioned in the same breath as my name.

That’s okay.  It’s alright to have more modest ambitions, isn’t it?  To be a competent ‘second tier’ writer, as W. Somerset Maugham once famously described himself.

So...drum roll...

When I grow up I want to write like Joanna Trollope.

Why? Because she writes about the things I am interested in. Some call it domestic fiction—men and women and their life challenges and relationship troubles. The thing is she does it so intelligently. Her stories are not clichéd: her characters are realistically flawed and their lives are messy and complicated.

Of course, the things I admire about Trollope are the very things others criticise her about: her own modest ambitions. She is described as ‘accessible’ and particularly in her home country of England as ‘middle-brow’.  Anyone who has ever lived in Britain will know what a putdown that is.

However, Fay Weldon is apparently a fan. She has said Trollope “has a gift for putting her finger on the problem of the times. She likes to tackle the apparently easy, but really very difficult subjects – how parents get on with their children, and vice versa – which many a lesser writer prefers to avoid.”

A few posts ago I wrote about my love affair with Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Freedom, but remarked that the author himself had a somewhat difficult reputation.

Well last week I went, with hundreds of others,  to see Jonathan Franzen speak at the Sydney Opera House, in a special one-off event organised by the Sydney Writers’ Festival (the Festival itself actually takes place in May each year).  Mr Franzen was on an extended visit to Australia, as special guest of both the Melbourne and Brisbane Writers’ Festivals. It was only fair that Sydney got a look in too.

Anyway, I have to say the curmudgeonly version of Mr Franzen was nowhere to be seen.  The Franzen I met demonstrated good-natured charm all evening, considering:

1. The interviewer, literary critic Geordie Williamson, called him ‘James Franzen’ in his introduction and went on the pose a series of obscure questions that left interview-subject and audience equally perplexed.
2. Someone in the audience took great exception to his views on 9/11 and stomped out flamboyantly, interrupting proceedings.
3. He was required to sit and sign books for his (mostly female) fans for a good hour or more after the event. As you can see I got my book signed, and was delighted that he recognised that my name was old English word (FYI it means ‘a blessing’).

My literary crush also displayed a good line in self-deprecating humour, joking that he felt ‘ill-read’ compared with his interviewer.

That said, he did admit that he was once an angry young man, especially in the early 1990s.  With middle-age had come not indifference to the world’s troubles, but wisdom and acceptance.  I like the idea of people getting happier as they age—the world seems too full of angry old people these days.  (Mind you, selling millions of copies of your critically acclaimed novel would probably put anyone in a good mood.)