I posted yesterday about an interview with Alan Moore (which is still terribly interesting and worth reading). It’s a long one - partially because it’s a direct transcript of what both parties said.
Now it seems to me that that’s not the usual way interviews are published. You open a newspaper and find some guy talking about how he’s going to meet some musician and he has certain preconceptions, and then he describes the hotel room/café/whatever he’s meeting him in and discusses whether this mildly reinforces or mildly challenges said preconceptions, and then you get something like this:
I asked him what he thought about the Irish weather.
He looked out the window. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s all right.”
There you go, you got your pull quote. Now, for the edification of the reader, you should summarise the guy’s career to date, mention what some people thought about the live show and point out that there’ll be a new album out soon. Job’s a good un.
Which is to say, there seems to be very little interviewing going on.
I love reading transcripts because there’s a real sense of the person’s character, and not just whatever aspect of said that the journalist wants to play up. Plus you get proper, thought-out answers.
On that note, I heartily recommend that anyone with an interest in writing read The Paris Review Interviews. They’re interesting, useful, inspiring and surprisingly funny, and demonstrate nicely why smart and enthusiastic people need more airtime.
Neil Gaiman links to a long, long interview with Alan Moore in which Das Beard talks about the craft of writing. It’s pure gold - he’s not at all shy about going into detail. Plus he comes across as a charmingly down-to-earth sort:
DW: I feel quite awkward doing this ‘cos I’ve never really interviewed anyone before…
AM: Well I’m a doddle for interviewing ‘cos I’m completely infatuated with the sound of me own voice…you just have to say a few basic words and I’ll talk for the next hour or two.
I especially love his description of how the plot and premise for Lost Girls came together. I don’t know how any writer could read that and not want to run off and start maniacally filling notebooks.
Speaking of which…
Neil Gaiman had this yesterday - from Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing:
Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They’re not good at relationships. Often they’re drunks. And writing — good writing — does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and harder — so eventually the writer must stall out into silence. The silence that waits for every writer and that, inevitably… the writer must fall into is angst-ridden and terrifying - and often drives us mad.
A cheerful fellow. From now on, if anyone asks me about how to be a writer I’ll just punch em in the face and be done with it.
So despite being technically the first person to come to the fray (that’s right, scoop city), my weekend away has meant that I’m now more or less the last. So uh, apologies to the 80+ people who turned up yesterday expecting something actually interesting.
Handily, the gap does give me the opportunity to guage the general outlook on the thing, which outlook can be more or less summed up as “Yeah, cool”. The consensus seems to be that blogging is a personal thing, everyone does it for different reasons, and no one’s necessarily trying to beat on the walls of the literary and journalistic mainstream. Fine and dandy. There were some ill-advised, feet-first responses from the kind of people who use words like “blogosphere” without cracking a smile, but that’s just bruised idealism, and in all fairness the technology wouldn’t exist without the Interlifeweb Beta 2.0 Release Candidate 4 evangelists so I’m prepared to look the other way any time they start taking themselves a mite seriously.
Which is not to say that we should just buy into the sermons. We’re told that a plurality of voices and a free marketplace of ideas and all that assorted et ceteration is causing pure liquid democracy to ooze out of every cranny in the gaff, but the aggregate level of context-hatin’, knee-jerkin’ self-righteousness among Serious Bloggers is enough to make the Daily Mail blush. Online discussions aren’t about considered debate or meticulous research, they’re about grabbing four words out of the comment above you, inventing some random connections between them, and then taking this new and improved comment personally. It’s about taking the worst qualities of four year olds and brick walls and then beating people in the face with them.
Back to the post in question. Some people took issue with Rosie’s assertion that some of the Irish blogging A-list are “shit-awful writers,” insisting that this was just her being a snob and stuck-up and too impressed with her own subjective judgement. Fellas: no. You’re wrong, and I have the ivory tower education to prove it. Put it this way - by your logic, Cecelia Ahern and Dan Brown are the most awesome and great writers in the world. If they had babies, they’d be in the shape of Nobel prize medals. But objectively speaking, they are bad manipulators of language whose novels are a great big slapstick orgy of clichés and mixed metaphors and lazy plots, and sure their content might be tons of fun if you’re in the right frame of mind but please in the name of all that’s holy don’t try to pretend that their merit as writers is just a matter of opinion.
Well. I haven’t slept in five days so I’ll leave you with the charming spectacle of a murderous gimp doing the funky chicken. Good night e’body.
It’s been quite a while since I pimped this properly and I have more readers dropping in these days, so I might as well be blatant…
Ill Repute is an online fiction project by myself and David Maybury concerning the adventures of estimable men-about-town Eli Mordino and George Fournier. We update more or less once a week (for a given value of “more or less”) and we’re currently in the middle of our first story arc (story arcs: just like you see on the television). Any more description I try to give will descend into noncey apron-wringing so I shall link you to the first post and leave you it.
Over at mybrilliantmistakes, Cynthia Closkey has a post about the decline and fall of the oral tradition:
If I post a story on my blog, it’s captured in words. That’s nice if I want it to be captured. But what if I want for others to take it and run with it, add their own twists? [...] rarely does anyone take a post and reimagine or re-present it in a new light. In fact, I think if someone did, they might be slammed for stealing the originator’s idea.
[...]
I think the Web is a little too good at preserving things, so we can’t experience the beauty and surprise of mutation.
(I’m aware of the irony of dumping all that in a block quote. Whatever, man, whatever.)
I remember a person In The Know telling me that jazz is essentially about two things: collaboration and improvisation. That doesn’t really jive - so to speak - with the modern way of doing things, where bands, authors and so on are seen as monolithic entities with a distinctive style and personality. A lot of effort goes into building and maintaining this kind of image, and recognition and personal glory are seen as rightful rewards.
The upshot is that there’s very little tendency to play around with creative output. That’s why I love projects like Desert Sessions and Goon Moon: it’s a bunch of guys playing around. There’s also a (slowly) rising trend of musicians making master tracks available for their fans to remix and share, which is of course opening the collaborative playing field. What about writing, though? Back in the day, stories were cannibalised left right and centre, with the emphasis on what the writer could build around that. Nowadays that just feels like cheating.
That’s a shame, to be honest. It’s fair point about the level of preservation on the internet - I wonder if we’re approaching a kind of recording saturation - but it’s also an ideal medium for collaboration and/or riffing on other people’s ideas (*cough*), and it’s exciting and fun to be involved in something like that. Cynthia wonders whether the spirit of the oral tradition is “part of the human experience”; yes, I do believe it is.
Internet book piracy will drive authors to stop writing
says The Times. Or rather, says the Society of Authors, a UK body representing “more than 8,500 professional writers”. The headline is terminally silly, and it’s hard to square the article with certain recent developments: either the Society is exaggerating, or this is just something that afflicts celebrity chefs. (Incidentally, a noted Irish agent is fond of telling aspiring authors to abandon their literary work in favour of writing cookbooks. Maybe he needs to revise his position…)
Hat tip to Damien Mulley for the link.
Maybury posted yesterday about Harper Collin’s free book experiment, in which they allowed everyone to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free online. (Not, strictly speaking, a new idea, but still.)
How did it go? Gaiman reports:
68,000 unique visitors to the book pages of American Gods
3,000,000 book pages viewed in aggregate
And that the weekly book sales of American Gods have apparently gone up by 300%
A pretty impressive result. Wu Ming (authors of Q and the brilliant 54) have been advocates of this sort of thing for a long time now, and it’s interesting to see a major publisher dipping its toes in the pool.
I think books are the medium most likely to succeed with this kind of model - apart from the whole “owning the artifact” thing that applies to all media, I find that reading from a computer is much more tiring than reading from a book. Certainly, I never got past the first five pages of 54 until I bought it. (I may be out of the loop on this, feel free to contradict me.) If it becomes common practice it’ll be a step closer to treating people, as Jeff Tweedy put it, as patrons rather than consumers, and that’s something I find utterly delightful.
… in which George Fournier and Eli Mordino have diverse adventures.
Maybury has a post up about our recent interview with Radio 1 in which he tackles the claim that we, as writers, shouldn’t bother our heads with the business end of, uh, writing.
I will soundly second his assertion that
the business of writing is very much the business of the writer, literary fiction or otherwise. That includes the general administrative aspects of writing - how to make a submission, where to submit work, help with making contacts as much as the financial ends.
One of the panellists joked (was he joking? I don’t know, he laughed anyway) that writers would be scared off if they knew the truth about publishing. Well, having a half-arsed knowledge of the publishing industry, which you can pick up by wandering within ten feet of a bookshop, just makes writers paranoid, and I’m not sure how knowing what you’re getting into is supposed to be worse than getting a nasty surprise when you think you’ve finally made it.
I for one am much more comfortable now that I’ve built up a more detailed sense of how the business works. As I said in an unaired part of the interview, the single most useful piece of information I picked up on the writing course was how to do up a proposal to send to an agent or publisher. It seems immensely silly to suggest that writers shouldn’t pursue this kind of knowledge.
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