The New York Review of Books

I was recently told that if I want to be successful as a writer, and especially if I want to do an MA in Creative Writing, I needed to be more aware of contemporary fiction. Strange as it may sound, this had never really occurred to me. I had always figured that I wanted to write books which would last, so therefore I should read books which have lasted. It's rare that I read anything published after around 1970, and usually considerably earlier.

Where are the Oddysseys, the Ulysseses, the Tristram Shandies, the a la recherche du temps perdus of today? I lamented, both mentally and to my girlfriend.

Nevertheless, I set out to the Nottingham branch of Waterstones with the intention of educating myself on writers whose blood still runs warm. Among other things, I came upon the July 12th edition of the New York Review of Books. Bearing the below garish yellow cover, with its 'I-may-be-ugly-but-at-least-I'm-smart' graphic design.

While the article on the reassuringly familiar subject of James Joyce's final novel enticed, the 'new story' by a living writer, along with reviews of current books were the real clinchers. So I took my purchase up to the counter, along with this year's Man Booker Prize winner, last year's Man Booker runner-up, and an as-yet-unread copy of the London Review of the Books, clocked the copy of 'Fifty Shades of Earl Grey' proudly displayed there, and paid.

One thing The New York Review of Books is is dense. The review of Slavoj Zizek's latest philosophical work was pretty much the most difficult thing I've read since I grappled with ontological layers in post-modern fiction for my BA dissertation. With lines like

"The Hegel that emerges in Zizek's writings thus bears little resemblance to the idealist philosopher who features in standard histories of thought. Hegel is commonly associated with the idea that history has an inherent logic in which ideas are embodied in practice and then left behind in a dialectical process in which they are transcended by their opposites."

And yet it is immensely satisfying to read, simply because of how well written it is, and how it avoids both pandering to the reader while also remaining a lot less dry than books of critical theory tend to be. I've found myself reading articles in it on subjects which would otherwise be of no interest to me, such as on American politics.

My girlfriend asked me how I can read reviews of books I have not read, and yet I'm finding them immensely useful. It feels like the sort of thing, as someone who is serious about writing, that I should be reading. Aside from the satisfaction I'm getting from slowly working my way through it (and I have been going slowly: after two-and-a-half weeks, I'm only just past the halfway point) I'm picking up some ideas I feel may be useful.

Here are three of the passages I've underlined so far, which may be useful for future reference:

From Christopher Benfey's review of Toni Morrison's 'Home': "Rhythmic urgency drives individual sentences in Home as well. As Frank makes his escape from the hospital, "maniac moonlight doing the work of absent stars matched his desperate frenzy." At some subliminal level we recognize that "maniac" goes more rightly with Frank Money, the "bare-foot escapee from the nuthouse," than with the moonlight, but the displaced pairing feels like syncopation, words struck slightly off the beat. A similar effect occurs a few pages later when Frank falls asleep and dreams "a dream dappled with body parts" before awaking "in militant sunlight." Again "militant" seems to belong with the body parts while the sunlight should be doing the dappling."

(Syncopation: Music . a shifting of the normal accent, usually by stressing the normally unaccented beats. - dictionary.com)

This use of this poetry-like technique in a prose novel, as flagged by Benfey, is something worth remembering.

From Michael Dirda's review of Richard Ford's 'Canada': "The two main actions of Canada are announced in its opening lines: "First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later." Such sensational words, even presented with matter-of-fact understatement, will grab anyone's attention. But on the surface, they would also seem to be revealing too much, arguably wrecking the novel's plot. Yet Ford is nothing if not sensitive to his sentences, emphasizing in many interviews the great care he takes over the subtleties of sound and sense. Nobody, he says, looks longer at his words than he does or calculates more precisely their effects.
"So readers should also look again. Note the pronoun "our" instead of "my" - this is, in some way, going to be a story about siblings. Notice, too, that Ford's narrator dances over whether the robbery is successful or not. Finally, he carefully avoids saying who is murdered and by whom. Ford's real interest doesn't lie in the robbery or the murders per so so much as in the events leading up to the crimes and to their aftereffects on those siblings. We know that the robbery and the murders will take place. But when? And how? And what will happen subsequently? So we attend, we observe, we prepare for the inevitable. Readers may recall that Gabriel Garcia Marquez strikingly employed just this technique in his novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold."

These opening lines recall for me the opening of To Kill a Mockingbird: "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow," only Ford appears to be showing far more with fewer words. A striking gambit for the opening lines, as Dirda points out.

Finally, from Charles Simic's review of Steven Millhauser's 'We Others: New and Selected Stories': "[Short stories'] most admirable quality is associated with what Steven Millhauser calls "artful exclusions." Like poems, good stories never overexplain. They only hint that a second, slower and more careful reading will deepen our understanding."

This is a point I think I would do well to remember, as I think my short stories often tend to be a bit on the long side, and would probably benefit from harsher editing, which I may reattempt on my latest short story as I'm still not happy with it.

If I see any more choice passages in the NYRB or the London Review of Books I shall post them here.

Fifty Shades of Money-Making

Yesterday I had a brain wave: an idea which would practically be a license to print money. In just a few months I could make billions. Unfortunately, as a writer, I'm not interested in money; I'm more interested in spending long hours slaving away over books which may never get published, so perhaps someone else wants to run with this idea?

Now, perhaps you've heard of a little book called 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. Perhaps you're aware that this book started out as fan-fiction based on a moderately popular series of books known as the 'Twilight Saga'. You might not be aware (unless you've checked the Wikipedia articles) that the Fifty Shades Trilogy is now the fastest-selling paperback of all time, rather eclipsing (pun most torturously intended) the book series which spawned it.

The lesson to be learned here? Fan-fiction makes more money than original fiction.

Click to enlarge

It's so simple and brilliant, that I can't believe no one has thought of it sooner. (Admittedly, what sparked this idea was a book prominently displayed during a recent visit to Waterstone's entitled 'Fifty Shades of Earl Grey', but that was a parody, rather than fan-fiction, so differs from what I am proposing). Clearly the key to success is piggy-backing off the success of other works through derivative writing.

Therefore here is my five-stage plan to literary dominance:

1. Fifty Shades of Gay

Fan-fiction of Fifty Shades of Grey re-imagined for the gay market. Also takes inspiration from the popular film, and subsequent novel of the film, Brokeback Mountain. Features just enough description of rippling male torsos and light bondage, while steering clearer of more graphic descriptions of anal penetration, to keep the over-thirties heterosexual house-wife demographic interested. While the occasional switches between first- and third-person narration may initially appear as the narrative inconsistencies typical of an amateur writer, critics would soon realise that they are in fact a clever implementation of the free, indirect style employed by Modernist writers of the 1930s, such as Virginia Woolf, and serves to create a multi-layered, multi-faceted portrait of a relationship which develops between a wealthy businessman (who may or may not be a vampire) and a young, closet homosexual.

Once the above has been outsold Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight combined, which I expect to happen two to three months after publication, stage two will be ready to launch:

2. Fifty Grades of Gay

Fan-fiction of the above fan-fiction fan-fiction (written by the same author, of course, but under a different pseudonym). Again this book appeals to an ever-expanding gay audience (the ubiquitousness of Fifty Shades of Gay, with its descriptions of well-oiled muscles and glamorisation of light bondage, is likely to have turned at least some staunchly heterosexual males bisexual), as well as to the over-thirties house-wives. This time the plot would be centred around the owner of British steel engineering firm as it struggles to cope with the decline of domestic manufacturing and the economic recession of the 1980s, and the seduction of a young worker in one of his factories. The plot would resonate strongly with audiences affected by the current world financial situation, as well as evoking nostalgia for those who grew up in the 1980s. The cast of characters within the engineering firm would also be reminiscent of the popular television series Madmen, providing an easy entry point to the written word for people who prefer to get their entertainment from a screen.

You'll really be raking in the money by this point, but it's no time to stop: it's on to stage 3:

3. Fifty Blades of Gay

Set in 1870s Japan, this novel deals with a rag-tag collective of Samurai who, with skills made largely redundant by the abolition of feudalism, as well as with a growing disillusionment at the loss of traditional values following the industrialisation of Japan, turn to mass homosexual orgies, described in sumptuous, though largely euphemistic detail. As before, the novel avoids graphic description of sexual acts, instead treading a thin line between gasping and excitement and socially acceptable erotic deviancy. While at first sticking comfortably to the conventions established in the original Twilight-fan-fiction-fan-fiction, Fifty Shades of Gay, and the subsequent Twilight-fan-fiction-fan-fiction-fan-fiction, Fifty Grades of Gay, the book features an almost incongruously surprising second half concerning the mass uprising of a horde of vampires which the gay samurai must put down, thus earning them a place in the new Japan as it heads into the twentieth century.

As a bonus stage 3 is also ripe for a manga-style comic book adaptation, thus roping in the audience who found Twilight just a bit too wordy. This comic would in turn attract the hitherto untapped under-thirties male demographic. In addition, for its treatment of universal human themes such as dealing with change and obsolescence, as well as its treatment of an historical period, the novel may well be nominated for, and go on to win, several literary prizes. The Man Booker prize, for instance, legitimising its existence and spurring it on to greater popularity.

4. Seven Blades of Gay

Furthering the series' cultural legitimacy along with its popularity and, of course, money-printing potential, Seven Blades of Gay would not only be fan-fiction of Fifty Blades of Gay, itself fan-fiction of fan-fiction of fan-fiction of fan-fiction of Twilight, but also a fan-fiction retelling of Akira Kurosawa's acclaimed film Seven Samurai. The action this time would have moved to feudal Japan, following the popular reception of the samurai element in Fifty Blades of Gay, and would this time focus more deeply on a smaller cast of seven protagonists as they each struggle to find their sexually deviant niche. In a nod to Disney's popular adaptation of Snow White, and to avoid the difficulty Westerner's might have in remembering foreign names, each of the samurai would be referred to by a nickname taken from his particular kink: whippy, baby, cutty, bestiality, wanky, spanky and clampy. Despite the criticisms of misrepresentation from the proponents of the various fringe sex acts, the vast majority of the readers, which would by now amount to 70-80% of the population of most developed countries, would lap up the neutered descriptions of previously distasteful subjects, finding it perfectly acceptable to read on the train to work such lines as “the bull's hot breath on his neck only made his erection grow stronger.”

The increasingly derivative nature of these novels, despite being supposedly written by different authors, is what gives them their real power, the revenues increasing exponentially with each new release, but the final stroke of genius comes in stage 5:

5. The Seven Magnificent Guns of Gay

This is more-or-less a rewrite of Seven Blades of Gay, under a new pseudonym, but transposed to an alternate history, steam-punk flavoured, version of the ever-popular American Wild West. As well as the standard Western themes of wilderness, masculinity, survival, frontierism and attacks by steam-punk robot vampire Native Americans¹, the plot also deals with the seduction and betrayal of several young gunslingers by the wealthy owner of a railway company. This book is specifically designed to appeal to just about everyone, young or old, straight or gay, and is likely to far outlast the lifetime of the author or the author's children. It achieves the impossible by pleasing everyone all of the time, and is likely to be bought by 99% of the entire population of the planet.

Once you have put my plan into action, and reached stage 5, the only danger, due to all the money you will have earned, is of completely destabilising, and ultimately destroying, the world economy by holding too much of its money. It will be important at this point to invest large amounts of money in new development projects, as well as to shower your initially innocent young concubines with ever more elaborate gifts.

Also, you can send me some of the proceeds to fund my own writing.

1 Adjectives, as we all know, infinitely increase the value of any product, whether it's book or sandwiches: that's why you can charge for more for a 'Davidstow creameries oak-aged mature cheddar and organic sun-kissed vine-ripened tomato sandwich on olive oil-infused focaccia bread than you can for plain old cheese-and-tomato

Statement of Intent

This blog is going to be a place for my notes and opinions about writing, a mixture of short and longer posts, mostly for my personal reference, but if they're interesting to other people then that's a bonus.

I'll also post some writing done for my own personal amusement here, but probably none of my fiction. I used to post a lot of my short stories to my old website, but that's meant that a lot of my old work is now not eligible for publication or entry into competitions. I'm more interested in getting my fiction properly published now.

The title of this blog is in reference to Jean Ricardou's Nouveau Roman masterpiece Place Names: A Guide to Travels in the Book.