Some Writery Answers

I don’t write about writing much on this blog.  This is for two reasons.  1.  Like most people everywhere, I find talking about my job dull.  I love writing, but sitting down and saying that at 8.30 a.m. I go to a keyboard and then I scribble a bit and then I stop and think about it and then scribble a bit more… well, there’s a reason I’m a fiction writer.  It’s just so much more fun than reality.  2.  I have a deep-seated fear of becoming a writer who writes books about how hard it is to write a book.  There is a path down that road that ends uncomfortably somewhere in the vicinity of my lower intestine, and not in a good way.  There are plenty of writers out there who have a lot to say about their lives, processes and brain-pixie-pains; not sure I’m one of them, though I can rant about lighting design until the cue stack returns to blackout.  (That is a hilarious but in programming terms, inappropriate, lighting joke.)  Once again, I’d rather let my fiction speak – far more eloquently – for things I’m down with, than anything I have to say for myself.

But!  Questions have been asked, and enough and with enough persistence, grace and clarity that, like a public service broadcasts, I’ll try to offer a few answers here….

1. Will there be a Harry August sequel?

At the moment… no.  There were loose discussions a few years ago, when Harry August first came out, but they weren’t for books containing many of the same characters, just using the same world and mechanics.  It was gonna be a big sprawling thing across multiple protagonists and many centuries too and while it would have been fun, the world turned, and things moved on.  Which in a way, is probably apt for the whole vibe of the book anyway.  There is, however, a film in the pipeline.  Films exist to go no where very, very slowly, but this one has a surprising amount of steam about it and an excellent team behind it, so who knows?  Watch this space.

2.  Will there be more Matthew Swift books?

Again, at the moment… no immediate plans.  But I’m in no way rejecting the premise, it’s just that the Claire North malarcky has more momentum and more going on with it.  But Kate Griffin is still sat at the back of my brain, bouncing up and down enthusiastically, and London’s magic isn’t diminishing as the years roll by.  Also like Harry August, there is a TV series at a surprisingly advanced stage of development, and the producer behind it is a force of nature who knows my books better than I do.  If anyone can make that happen, she will.

3a.  Are you successful, and how does it feel?

So… am I a successful writer?  The answer is of course, yes, blatantly, because I get to eat and write books for my living, and have been doing this reasonably ok for the last fifteen years in a gently fluctuating way, and this mere fact automatically makes me incredibly lucky and privileged.  Dude: my life rocks.

And of course the answer is no, because the success implied in this question is reserved for only a tiny handful of writers living in a style beyond the ken of the vast majority of the rest of us.  I have had some books that have sold better than others; these things pass with time, and I’m in no hurry to start staking a claim to any particular legacy.  With my historian hat on, the realms of relative insignificance are vast and broad, and as a 30-year-old scribbler I will hopefully have a great big splotch of time in which I can watch things I have written fade into obscurity as, touch wood, new stuff I write churns into print.  And that’s fine; I have no fear of the march of time in this regard.

I don’t particularly celebrate publication days.  I don’t have parties, I don’t read my sales figures.  To be honest, I usually regard launch parties as a waste of PR money that could be better spent on more uesful things, though I’m a big fan of eating little things on sticks.

The simplest reason for all this is that I have minimal control over what my success is.  I write books, and my publisher sells them, and if I’m incredibly lucky there will be a fusion between what I have written and what sells well, but ultimately, there is little I can do to affect this outcome.  I cannot switch a button to make a bestseller; my publisher cannot guarantee my fate, for all that they labour mightily.

Success, if and when it comes, is lovely, but it is not the same as being valuable.  Success doesn’t mean that my books have any special artistic merit, or that my name will live long and prosper.  It is not a guarantee of perpetual joy, nor a promise that more will come later.  These things fluctuate and the best I aspire to do, is follow that river as it winds its course, and try not to let go of the side of the boat.

There are other things in my life by which to measure myself.  Doing right by friends and family; fighting for causes that matter; learning new skills and meeting new people; doing the best job I can with what I do… these matter.  Success… meh.  What little I’ve had is lovely, but ultimately, much like theatre… it ain’t a cure for cancer.

3.  So… films are being made… good, bad, exciting… what gives?

Films sell books.  This is the big thing that makes me happy.

Films, however, are almost never made.  There is many an awkward encounter when writers get together that goes like this…

“Hi, hi, lovely to meet you, how you are doing?”

“Oh, alright, you know…”

“I’ve just signed a film deal.”

“Right.  Good.  That’s nice….”

“Yeah, we had the first meeting last week, it’s really exciting, I’m already thinking about who I want to direct….”

“Who’d you sign with?”

“This amazing producer in LA.”

“Cool, and are they part of a studio or…?”

“No, no, I mean, you’re talking about financing, that’s not been finalised yet, but you know, they’re really confident….”

“And um, the development process…”

“So exciting!  They’ve said I can be really close to it, like, a key part of the creative team, and we’re gonna get some really good directors interested, I’ve always thought Spielburg and I’ll work with the screenwriter and the casting director, it’s gonna be ace.  I always knew I wrote filmic stuff, actually, I was doing the adaptation while I was writing the novel though the producer I don’t think read it yet because they didn’t mention it on the phone….”

I have heard this conversation many times.  Five years later, I often hear it from the same person, identically, again.  And so the world rolls on by….

Films take feckin’ forever, and most rarely get off the ground.  Whenever I sign a deal, I always say the same thing to my agent – that it’s a delightful privilege to get a (small) amount of free money deposited every eighteen months, thank you kindly for your contribution towards my electricity bill – and also it’s lovely the way every nine months a producer will buy you lunch to explain how wonderful your novel is and how one day they’re definitely going to make progress just not quite yet.  This is all I expect from the film industry, and even the lunch every nine months is being quite spoiled.  To demand anything else is madness, and I’m astonished and grateful at developments which exceed this.

If by a fluke a film is made, one of two things will then happen.

1.  The film will be amazing, awesome, fantastic, and you will dine out on your small percentage of budget up to the pre-agreed cap for many years unless you spend unwisely (because these things, like history, fade), and your book sales will rocket and at parties years later you’ll always be happily introduced as “Hi, my name’s Cat, I wrote a book… yes, like that film with Whathisface in it that you saw five years ago, except actually, the book came first and there wasn’t so much sex in the book and it didn’t have a happy ending.  Yes, actually, the film was based on my novel rather than the other way round….”  Given that as you’re saying this you’re hopefully rolling a glass of champagne round between your hands and contemplating your upcoming holiday, there are worse fates.
2. The film will be pants.  Don’t get me wrong, your book sales will probably soar, and you might be sad, but once again, I refer you to this thought – that as people leave the cinema, desperately saddened by the load of wet underware they’ve just seen, at least some of them will mutter, “Blimey.  Wasn’t the book better?”

Either way, you should be a happy bunny.  Go forth, make merry, and know that your life is absurd.

3b.  A film of Touch?  Um…. how?

MWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I genuinely have no idea.  But I think it would be awesome.

4.  Promotion.

Selling books!  What do I, personally, do as a writer to sell books?

Well… I obey my publisher.  They say ‘go here and talk!’ and I will do it.  They ask me to do an interview, and I will.  The only time ever when I have actively refused a publisher’s request was when I was fifteen, and they asked me if I would agree to be on the Sunday Times’ Future Rich List.  Just this once, ethics kicked in, and my left-wing liberal parents with their anxieties about the value of money in society and how it is infused with an ugly meaning that exceeds more than the transfer of goods of equal value… pointed out that it might not be a winner.

Don’t get me wrong – I often take the piss out of my publisher, especially when they ask for daft things or try and take my photo.  When they recently did a film of me talking about The Sudden Appearance of Hope there was an extensive amount of piss-taking, culminating in my unfortunate editor having to do a moose impression between takes.  (It’s a long story, involving a brief which invited me to both ‘be myself’ and speak briefly and with sincerity, two commands which it’s almost physically impossible for me to combine. No moose were harmed.)  Part of the problem is that, when doing this sort of thing, I’m not allowed to swear copiously or offer the opinion that “yeah, it’s just like, a book, whatever, like, read it and make your own minds up, dudes!”  Thus the technician part of my soul is denied full vent.

A lot of the promotion stuff is fun.  Going to new places, to meet new people, who are often pleased to see you, and getting given cake in the process – this is fun.  Let’s not pretend that such things are burdensome at all.

Some of it is deeply pretentious and daft.  Some of it is repetitious.  If I am asked ‘what is genre’ one more time, I might cry, and if I have to listen to another writer on a panel explain: “Well, in my book there aren’t any dragons, which is unfortunate given you just asked me about dragons, but what there are in my book are sofas and I’m going to tell you about them now….”

Some of it is an opportunity to corrupt and undermine sombre conception of a Serious Writer and cause jubilation and daftness.  As a baby-faced writer with the maturity of a five year old and more books in print than most people twice my age, I feel a certain righteous duty towards spreading chaos and confusion wherever I go.  It is the nearest thing to a calling I have.

Some of it is a chance to speak as to the power of books to children, students and those who might otherwise not have the same opportunities to be immersed in the infinite worlds of words as I was, when I was young, and for that I will cease causing chaos, because it is one of the single most important and excellent things I could ever do.

And there, pretty much, my labours end.  I am not a marketting expert.  I am not fully in touch with the powers of market forces.  I keep an eye out, and I’m not exactly a slack when it comes to the business part of authoring, but my love is in writing books.  I do not believe that printing t-shirts with my face on it, or haruanging booksellers, or criticising reviews, or googling my own name or any number of acts of madness that writers can commit, will a bestseller make.  I am not possessed of that skill set, or the time.  I follow commerce, because it allows me to be paid to write stories, and that is a privilege and a joy.  But commerce is not the point of writing at all.

5.  Feelings on ebooks and self-publishing.

Ebooks are wonderful and promote literacy, offer access to a whole universe of books to readers who might otherwise be denied them, lower the costs of publication and generally could revolutionize how books reach readers in this difficult and changing digital age.  Paper books will still survive, but while paper is comforting and joyful, the words are what count, and the ebook is a celebration of words words words.

Ebooks are limiting, preventing readers from easily browsing through a bookshop and experiencing new ideas as they stumble upon interesting physical objects.  They narrow the market because of the imposition of new methods of distribution, companies make it hard to pass on and share books and collections between friends and families, and they are a threat to traditional models of publishing whether that is for good or ill.  They leave you prone to the power of monopoly distributors, and a sucker to the power of algorithms rather than free choice in picking reading matter.  They cannot challenge other electronic forms of entertainment, such as film, TV and music, all of which are sweeping the tablet market and driving down reading rates; they are not the answer.

Self-publishing is a wonderful innovation that allows a whole universe of writers to produce their texts, experiment with writing, expand the horizons of how modern publishing works and redefine the current creative models.  It gives an outlet to an incredible range of talented voices which have not been given the space to speak by a very narrow, very pressurized publishing market and which frankly deserve to be given the space to speak to stories that otherwise we would not hear, and which enrich the world by their presence.

Self-publishing is a market-threatening constriction which promotes the production of appallingly edited, flimsy, weak novels which take money, resources and attention away from works of better spelling and better ‘artistic’ (whatever that means) merit.  Wading through a great deal of extremely weak texts to try and find something good is expensive, off-putting and ultimately reduces the standard of books that can fulfill that greatest of functions – not merely to entertain, but to make us see the world in a whole new light.

All of these statements are true.  I can hold to all of these beliefs, in different quantities, at different times.  The current model of publishing has no real answers, and neither do I.

6.  Writing routine?

I have none.  On two days of the week I go and do a violent martial art.  Whenever I can be arsed, I go swimming.  Sometimes I am in rehearsals.  Sometimes I am up a ladder or at a lighting desk.  Sometimes I write in the green rooms of theatres.  Sometimes on trains.  Sometimes at home, in the study.  Occasionally I’ll write for thirteen hours and forget to eat.  Sometimes I’ll write for 40 minutes and then go play a game.  Sometimes I get up at 7 a.m. because I have to – just have to – finish this chapter because it’s the most important thing in the world.  Sometimes I lie in bed until 9 a.m. contemplating a story, or snoozing, or reading a book, or recovering from a long theatre shift the night before.

There is no routine.  And that suits me perfectly.

7.  Will there be a paperback version of the Gameshouse?

I hope so.  There appears to be no movement that way.  I would suggest the starting of a petition.  Or a kickstarter campaign.  Or… something like that.  I have no idea if current publishing models can sustain a kickstarter campaign, but who cares.  This world is for turning, and maybe this will pass us by, and maybe it won’t.  Either way, the world turns…