That was my first, ecstatic, sleep-deprived thought on the 5^th September when, together with my fellow Royal Holloway creative writing students, I handed in a 12,000-word dissertation and 15,000 words of a novel-in-progress. It had been a pretty intensive summer, culminating in a ridiculously intensive final fortnight. Despite my best intentions, I made about half of my word-count in that sprint finish.

(This is nothing new. I did the same thing as an undergrad, spending too long being too meticulous in the early stages and then, as crunch-time approached, losing out on sun, sleep, and social life. Apparently I NEVER LEARN.)

In any case, it was over. I emerged, blinking, from my little cave, celebrated with my course mates (cupcakes + cava + cigars = classy)

then my boyfriend, then my non-course mates, then my family, and then anyone else I could rope in. After that, I needed a bit of time to recover. And after that, I needed time to sort out a job. Then just a bit more time to settle in… Suddenly a month’s gone by and I haven’t touched my novel.

It’s easy to give yourself a nice ‘well-deserved holiday’ after a year of hard work. But it was in those last, frantic few days of writing before the deadline I made one of the most interesting discoveries about my writing practice.

I can churn out words when I need to.

Not just when there’s an essay crisis, or work deadline. Fiction! Shit fiction, but still, fiction! All year I felt I’d made relatively slow progress on my novel, slaving for ages over the minimum number of pages for each handout, whilst some of my friends seemed to have no trouble dashing off page after page for the group to critique. I know writing’s not about speed or quantity in the long run, but if I want to finish a first draft I have to get better at switching off my internal editor. I feel I need to dig out the clay of the novel before I can start sculpting it into something worth reading. So this discovery was a happy one (even if handing in a first draft as my final MA submission was less than ideal). If I could just find a way to harness that momentum, when I was writing 1000 words a day, by somehow tricking myself into thinking I need to, in theory I could finish a first draft by Christmas!

I managed to wangle a part-time role, so there’s no excuse why I shouldn’t be ripping along. I hereby resolve to get back on it. Wish me luck.

Complete Stories, Flannery O’Connor – I’ve read and loved a couple of her most famous stories, and my best mate has been raving about her for ages.

The Captain’s Verses, Pablo Neruda – A beautiful gift from the boy, awaiting the perfect summer evening when we can stretch out on an island shore and he can recite the original to me in Spanish and feed me grapes. Peeled grapes.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald – Yes, am last person in the world to read it. Upcoming film now forcing my hand.

A Book of Secrets, Michael Holroyd – Described on the flyleaf as ‘a treasure trove of hidden lives, uncelebrated achievements and family mysteries… bringing a company of unknown women into the light’. The mix of famous figures and illegitimate daughters set against early twentieth-century Paris and Amalfi is intriguing, and bizarrely apt background reading for my novel-in-progress.

Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing, Hermione Lee – This will be my third reading of this book. I find the different approaches to life writing fascinating (so much so I’m writing my dissertation about several of them) and for me Lee is the ultimate biographer and critic on the subject. Cogent, lucid and imaginative, it’s a great collection to dip into.

The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4 - I’m addicted to these books: there’s no better insight into the processes and truths of writing, as revealed by the greatest authors of the last century. This volume transcribes the wise and funny words of Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, V.S. Naipaul (oh well, you can’t have everything) and Marilynne Robinson among many others. Procrastinators: beware.

Girl Reading, Katie Ward – I’m yet to buy my copy of this highly acclaimed debut, but I can’t wait. The concept alone is enough to hook me. Oddly enough, I found a print of Winslow Homer’s painting The New Novel a few months ago, and determined to collect more images of girls reading, to adorn the shelves of the gigantic library I will one day own. The library that will display the constantly multiplying books currently threatening to take over the flat. Fingers crossed.

Mmm, delicious BOOK SWAG!

GENERAL IGNORANCE WARNING: There are many, many things I don’t know about publishing. At this point, seeing my novel in print is such a distant (and frankly improbable) dream, exploring the curious world of publishing probably shouldn’t be a priority. I do find it fascinating, though.

This term my Masters course is laying on a variety of speakers – writers, agents, editors – to help demystify the whole process, but when @vintagebooks tweeted they were holding an Open Day at Random House, I figured the more the merrier.

I wasn’t the only one. The 35 tickets, priced at a very reasonable £30 each, sold like hot cross buns. As well as the lovely goodie bag and a slap-up lunch, the lucky few enjoyed a packed programme of talks, illuminating a book’s journey from acquisition through production and jacket design to marketing, publicity and sales. Two fantastic authors (Kevin Barry and Rose Tremain) chatted with their editors and agents about their writing and publishing experiences, and editors and indie booksellers explored the future of books and bookselling in a very interesting panel discussion.

All in all, an amazing event. In celebration of Vintage’s 21^st birthday, here are my top 21 nuggets of bookish goodness:

1. Since the 2008 slowdown, around 20% less books are published each year. The ‘interesting first novel’ is often the hardest hit : (
2. Copy-editing is not a dying art, it’s just outsourced to freelancers. Commissioning editors still offer fairly large structural feedback, although some (like Jonathan Cape’s Dan Franklin) are less likely to buy manuscripts that need a lot of work. American editors are “unbelievably interventionist” compared to those in the UK.
3. These days, a £10k advance for a first novel is considered pretty good going.
4. Kevin Barry (author of City of Bohane) feels increasingly that “you should get in and out of [writing] a novel fairly quickly”. He wrote a draft in three months which left him “technically nuts” but with “the world… the characters… the language” of his story.
5. When Barry’s agent sent his previous novel out to 8 publishers and it received positive responses but no offers, he had three options. To do more work on the manuscript, to send it out to more publishers (up to 18 is OK for a literary novel), or to work on something new. He chose the latter.
6. Kevin Barry wears an Official Irish Writer’s Hat. It is bequeathed by the spirit of Seamus Heaney in a misty glade. It is a trilby.
7. The biggest dates in the publishing calendar are the London Book Fair in April and the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. There is also “Super Thursday” at the beginning of September, when everyone is trying to get their books published for Christmas.
8. When there’s interest in a manuscript, publishers may offer a “pre-empt” to get the agent to take it off the market and prevent a bidding war.
9. Studies have shown when customers walk into a bookshop, the jacket design has 1.5 seconds to catch their eye. Small wonder this part of the process is often so contentious, with so many departments and stakeholders keen to have their say.
10. Recent trends in cover design have included handwriting and hand printing, cloth covers and typographic design.
11. You don’t necessarily need a huge marketing budget to be innovative. To promote Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman, the team collaborated with a film school to produce a trailer film. And in the build-up to Leo Benedictus’ new novel The Afterparty, fans were able to tweet messages to the author to get them included in the endpapers of the published work. He also invited them to suggest characters for him to insert into the party scene, or write reviews for the paperback jacket.
12. Supermarkets make up a surprisingly large part of the bookselling market, yet there are only 16 new chart positions every fortnight across all publishers.
13. All books, in all book retailers, are sale on return. So the publisher has to be confident a particular retailer can sell a particular book, and stop them from over-ordering.
14. All retailers charge publishers to offer their books on promotion. A lot, apparently.
15. With the growth of digital, the ever-evolving publishing industry is like “the Wild West”. No one knows the rules yet, and battles are still being fought over what is a fair price for an e-book.
16. Patrick Neale, owner of the fab-sounding Jaffe & Neale bookshop in Chipping Norton, believes “books need to become so beautiful” to compete in this changing landscape. He has diversified to meet the needs of his local community, offering a cafe, gallery, gifts and events, and understands his customers aren’t there for a bargain. “I don’t discount, because I don’t see an uplift in sales… If someone comes in on a Saturday morning they’re in leisure mode, looking for a beautiful gift for someone, or themselves.”
17. Rose Tremain has enjoyed a fruitful, 35 year partnership with her editor Penny Hoare. When Rose has a new idea, she sends Penny a couple of pages of outline and then they meet for a chat. Penny asks “sensitively geared questions” to probe and develop the material. This is a delicate stage, as too much discussion can weaken the writer’s sense of mystery and ownership towards the work. Rose goes away and writes a first draft. Then the pair go to her home in Norfolk and spend a couple of days “talking, talking, talking” about everything from large issues like plot shape to smaller points on logic and language. In essence, “everything the book could be but isn’t yet”.
18. Tremain believes the writer’s mind has two composite parts: the “knowing, analysing, judging, censoring” side that is concerned with technique, and the other side, “a wonderful state of imaginative unknowing”. Keeping both alive is important. Too many years of teaching creative writing, for example, can make the inner editor too powerful and censorious.
19. Tremain writes to a plan – “to work absolutely plan-less is too frightening” – but doesn’t plan minutely up to the end. “I know what kind of point the book is on a journey towards. Usually there is a beautiful or shocking or inspiring image attached to it. From about 3/4 in, I tend to know where the story is driving.”
20. Research is vital, but it has to go through a kind of alchemy; it should never be just plonked down in the narrative. “The novelist is like a wicked dog, rushing along the hedgerows and gathering things as he goes.” Time has to elapse so the material can be changed, altered, owned.
21. Tremain, who taught creative writing at UEA for several years, remains convinced such courses are on the whole a great thing. They bring the writer out of a sort of existential loneliness and into a peer group, and their fears can be rounded up week by week. Penny agreed writers that come out of CW courses are often better at giving and taking criticism, and are more open to editorial suggestions.

Bonus nugget: Rose Tremain revealed she is currently working on a sequel to Restoration. ‘Citin’!

The programme is brilliantly eclectic. We’ll only be there for the final weekend so planning to cram lots in. Particularly looking forward to:

Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight: Moonlight and its meanings, from the kitsch to the sublime – in the modern world, the ancient world, in art, books, music and in science.

Two Jews…: Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore – two historians from very different backgrounds – reflect on their identities and their experiences of being Jewish.

Ralph Fiennes talks to Francine Stock: The actor and director discusses and previews clips from his modern war-zone film of Shakespeare’s play, Coriolanus.

Ballet Rambert: The scientific advisor to the ballet company and its artistic director discuss the cross-currents between choreography and cognition.

Screening of Life in a Day: Kevin MacDonald introduces his astounding documentary film about a single day on earth, edited from the thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube on 24 July 2010.

Amexia: The harrowing story of the extraordinary terror unfolding along the US-Mexico border – this is the secret war of drugs, gangs and guns that is destroying thousands of lives.

Jerusalem: The biography of the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgment Day and the battlefield of today’s clash of civilizations.

People Power in the Middle East: Exiled writers from Yemen, Iran and Iraq discuss their work and the upheavals in the Middle East with the director of the Writers’ Centre Norwich Shahrazad project.

Fingers crossed for sunshine

Photo credit: Finn Beales

Like the novel’s chief protagonist Frank Wheeler, I recently turned thirty, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that many of the questions haunting him and his wife April should resonate so strongly. It’s a bit disconcerting, though, this being a story that revolves around the lies the characters tell each other and themselves: lies about their relationships, careers, aspirations, and status as men and women.

Tellingly, the novel opens with a flawed performance of a play, and theatricality recurs as a motif throughout the text. When Frank, attempting to seduce a young colleague, paints “a portrait of himself as a decent but disillusioned young family man, sadly and bravely at war with his environment,” it’s abundantly clear that Yates’ true subject is something deeper than the crushing sentimentality of the suburbs in 1950s America. The deftly ironic narrative voice swiftly exposes as cherished self-deception Frank and April’s conviction that they’re somehow more “interesting” than their surroundings permit. Darker issues of manliness, childhood and insanity loom in the background, ominous and ever-present as the woods behind the Wheelers’ house.

In many ways, Frank is a boy constantly trying to prove himself a man. Shaped by his relationship with a physically capable but emotionally distant father, he’s part of a post-Depression, post-war generation of men destined to be replaced by computers able to “perform the lifetime work of a man with a desk calculator in thirty minutes”. Starting an affair; laying a stone path across his lawn; keeping his jaw muscles painfully clenched in a “conscious display” of masculinity: these desperate acts are depicted in a way that allows space for both censure and pity.

April’s womanliness is also challenged, largely by Frank himself. Questioning her adequacy as a wife and mother, even her ability to love, in the light of her own childhood neglect, he finds her so deficient he accuses her of madness. It’s easy to vilify such self-protective insensitivity but, although we get less access to what’s going on in her head, April’s culpability in the tragedy of their marriage is also made clear.

By the end of the novel, the reader’s sympathies lie unquestionably with the children. In a final twist of fate, Jennifer and Michael are bundled off to live with Frank’s older brother and his wife, doomed to repeat the dysfunctional childhoods of their parents. But Frank and April are children too (they’re frequently described as “children” or “kids” by other characters) and therefore both the product and catalyst of familial suffering. And thus the cycle continues.

All rather bleak, then. Yet the emotional landscape is rendered so subtly and realistically, reading Revolutionary Road is a joyful experience. Its genius lies partly in its plotting: an intricate yet apparently artless pattern of foreshadowed and postshadowed scenes. Frank re-enacts his father’s anger at his getting in the way in the toolshed when, a few pages later, he shouts at his own children getting in the way of his path-laying. Later, he’s silenced by his daughter’s fears of moving home, and later still this is thrown into relief by the revelation that Frank’s own childhood was marked by endless uprootings. The novel is full of such doublings, allowing Yates to dip in and out of the various backstories, but the frequent transitions are so embedded in character they feel as natural and unforced as life itself.

The writing is beautifully nuanced too. The word “revolutionary”, for example, is loaded with meanings beyond its function as setting and historical backdrop: it’s applied (ironically) to the Wheelers themselves, and even the computer equipment sold by Frank’s company. “Home” is somewhere April is “imprisoned”, a sanctuary from chaos for Mrs Givings, a “protective shell” for Frank. Slippages in the language of the novel are key to the psychological truth of its events. Is it a “courtship” or a “sales campaign”? “Family planning” or “inventory control”?

Although much of the language and imagery roots Revolutionary Road in a specific time and place, it makes a strikingly modern read. It’s more than the continued growth of IT and office jobs that ensures the novel’s twenty-first century relevance. The yearning for that other place “where people know how to live” is universal and timeless, a sad reflection of the sad fact Yates acknowledged as his central theme: that “most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy”. You don’t have to be thirty to identify with Frank and April Wheeler, to be disconcerted by their story in a way that wakes you up to life. Their romantic, professional and cultural aspirations are as recognisable today as ever. Let’s face it, they’d probably read The Guardian.

Atmosphere

I’m crap at sticking to routines, so when and where I write varies day to day. Oh, the choices are endless. Messy desk (the camera does lie) in the windowless hallway under the stairs? Yes please. Kitchen table next to the grumbling washing machine and/or clanging pipes? Why not. Feet on pouffe with laptop in ovary-melting position? Go on then, I’ll spoil myself.

As it’s a basement flat, none of these locations are exactly flooded in natural light, so even if I manage to get a fair amount of writing done I emerge from it feeling distinctly unhealthy. It’s a different story if the sun comes out. Yes, the word count plummets when I trail my laptop cable out of the bedroom window to squint at the suddenly dusty screen. But few things make me feel more content (read: dangerously smug) than writing in my garden.

Distractions

Many and various. I’m not bad at resisting the TV, but the internet is a killer. Friends have recommended child locks and timer apps, but as I’m writing historical fiction it’s pretty useful to be able to check up the odd fact. There’s also the elephant in the room, which is the mess/dust/grime in the room, and it tends to trumpet loudest when I’m finding my writing a struggle. At these times the best solution is to think of it as a modern day garret. The dustier the surfaces, the closer I am to finishing my novel. Yeah, that works.

Food & drink

One of the worst thing about writing at home. If it’s going well I ditch meals for quick snacks like buttered toast. If it’s going badly I’ve been known to succumb to self-destruction and eat paste. Either way it’s bad news for my waistline. *EVACUATE FLAT*

The lowdown

“Freedom 1-2 Distraction”  |  234.5-words-per-hour

–

I’d driven that Jeep so often I didn’t have time to watch the country slide by thick with event, for everything came directly to me and passed me like snow. (p 70)

I witnessed everything. One morning I would wake and just smell things for the whole day, it was so rich I had to select senses.

[On recording peacock noises] Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the kitchen and play that section of cassette to hear not just peacocks but all the noises of the night behind them – inaudible then because they were always there, like breath. In this silent room (with its own unheard hum of fridge, fluorescent light) there are these frogs loud as river, gruntings, the whistle of birds brash and sleepy, but in that night so modest behind the peacocks they were unfocussed by the brain – nothing more than  darkness, all those sweet loud younger brothers of the night. (p. 136)

Across the valley, a waterfall stumbles down. In a month or two the really hard rains will come for eighteen hours a day and that waterfall will once again become tough as a glacier and wash away the road. But now it looks as delicate as the path of a white butterfly in a long-exposed photograph. (p. 167)

-

It was my imagination that needed correction, and nothing but travel could have produced this effect.

- Boswell

… that appalling disease, the terror of being at home…

- Baudelaire

… then came spring, the great time of travelling, and everyone in the scattered gang was getting ready to take one trip or another.

- Kerouac, On the Road

He found, on his arrival at Waldzell, a pleasure at homecoming such that he had never experienced before. He felt… that during his absence it had become even more lovely and interesting – or perhaps he was seeing it in a new perspective, having returned with the heightened powers of perception… “It seems to me,” he confided to his friend Tegularius… “that I have spent all my years here asleep… It is as though I have awakened , and can see everything sharply and clearly, bearing the stamp of reality.”

- Herman Heste, Magister Ludi

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time…

-  Eliot

Description itself is a kind of travel

- Mark Doby, ‘Two Ruined Boats’ from Atlantis

Why anyone should desire to got to Cheylard or to Luc is more than my inventing spirit can embrace. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go; I travel for travel’s sake. And to write about it afterwards, if only the public will be so condescending as to read. But the great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of life a little more nearly; to get down off this featherbed of civilisation and to find the globe gravel underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

- Stevenson, Journal of the Cevennes

Atmosphere

When I visited the Poetry Café it was completely dead. Not really surprising given it was during the post-lunch lull and, as I was there to write, not really a problem. Apparently it lights up at night as “the capital’s buzzing poetry hub” with a programme of events held in the basement. Upstairs, the old desks and schoolchairs, shelves of poetry magazines, literary-themed posters, fliers and framed portraits all appealed to my inner ponce. After about half an hour the waitress remembered to turn some music on. Unfortunately it was George Michael, whose dulcet tones somewhat shattered the literary ambience.

Distractions

Being the only customer for the first hour, I managed to get quite a few words down. The only distraction was the sun shining outside the smoked glass window, which made the room feel a bit dingy. The café didn’t seem especially set up for laptops  – it’s more of a notebook (a real one, made of paper) sort of place.

Food & drink

The food is veggie, the service pleasant, the teapots leaky (not great for the aforementioned notebook).

The lowdown

“One for a rainy afternoon”  |   386-words-per-hour  |  website |  map

Atmosphere

The red-brick exterior might lack the neoclassical grandeur of the nearby British Museum, where the main collection used to be housed, but the high ceilings of the entrance hall, backed by a glassy cliff of book shelves, add an inspiring air of academia. As you might expect, the mood in the reading rooms is pretty scholarly. There’s no chatter except from the (nice but noisy) staff behind the lending desks, so as long as you manage to bag a seat towards the back, you’re assured some decent peace and quiet. It’s the perfect place for when you need to get your head down and crack on with that masterpiece.

Distractions

Minimal. Chitchat is not tolerated in the reading rooms, let alone noisy mobile phones, snacks, water, coats or (whisper it) pens. There is wifi, although I rather wish I hadn’t discovered that…

You can also take a break by checking out the fantastic and free exhibitions on the lower floors.

Food & drink

My advice is to come to the BL between meals. Both the Peyton and Byrne restaurant/cafe and the little shop outside, while nicely packaged, are bloody expensive. I nearly choked when my plate of crummy canteen roast came in at over £12. You can’t take drinks into the reading rooms but there’s a tap outside. God I’m cheap.

The lowdown

“A puritan’s paradise” | 453 words-per-hour  |  website |  map