Tag Archives: literary fiction

Claire King and The Night Rainbow

Posted on February 12, 2013 | 8 Comments
Claire King

Claire King

I’ve never actually met today’s guest in the real world, but I feel like we’ve known one another for a while and I remember some of the big moments in her writing story: finding an agent, then a publisher, as well as some short story successes along the way. And so I’m delighted to have her here today to mark the launch of her debut novel The Night Rainbow and at the same time I’m looking forward to filling in some of the gaps in my knowledge.
Hi Claire,  I know you live mainly in France – how did that come about?
We moved to France 11 years ago when I was 30. I had finally met my Mr Right, but I was working 60+ hour weeks away from home, so if we were ever going to have children, something had to change. The job was paying for the London flat, so a move was on the cards too, and we thought – why not take the chance to move somewhere we’d really like to live? We settled on the South of France, sold up and moved out, all within about 6 months. Although it’s not been plain sailing, especially financially, we have found work and also the time to pursue the things we really wanted in life – raising children, spending time together and – for me – writing.

How wonderful it all worked out just as you planned.
Did you ever feel that choosing the voice of  a child for your novel was making it more difficult to sell, or was it an advantage?
It was definitely a risky choice. A child’s voice is ‘unusual’ and therefore more of a risk, plus there are so many people in a publishing house that need to agree to take on a novel, by writing something potentially divisive, you’re diminishing your chances. But I strongly believe you should write your story however your gut tells you is best, and not worry about the odds of selling it at the end. The odds are low and unpredictable, so you may as well write it with conviction, as that will make the book shine. I hope that readers will also take the risk with Pea’s voice. Although several reviewers have talked of their initial hesitation, so far no-one has been disappointed!

 I’m looking forward to reading it. I know that being published with one of the ‘big six’ takes a while and I think you signed with Bloomsbury in 2011. What were the major steps in the publishing process and how much as an author were you involved?
Yes, I signed January 2011 so it’s taken 2 years. To be honest the first year was quiet. The 2013 pub date was more to do with full lists than the time needed to prepare the book. Although Bloomsbury is now known as a ‘big’ publisher, the team is quite small, and they, quite rightly, didn’t want to squeeze me in without being able to give the novel enough care and attention, or of course to the detriment of other novels already bought. Launching a debut, in particular, seems to be a bit tricky, there are certain times of year that are best, that tie in with bookseller promotions etc and don’t leave you lost in the Christmas rush. Over the last year things really heated up. First came editorial suggestions from my editor Helen (there were not many of these, which I put down to how polished the book was when I submitted it).  Then there were copy edit queries, approval of copy edits and first page proofs.
Thank for sharing these – the comments from your copy editor are really interesting from a writer’s point of view.
Of course there were also the exciting things like cover art and blurbs, rights deals, and kicking things off with marketing and PR. I’ve been very involved at every stage. The team at Bloomsbury are very collaborative and lovely to work with.

I’ve heard from other commercially writers that a lot is expected from authors in terms of marketing their own book. How have Bloomsbury supported you so far and have you been happy with what you’ve been asked to do?
I think that across publishers, and even within publishing houses, the marketing and PR that goes with a book and an author varies incredibly. And I think that publishers are rather sensitive to talking too much about it, for fear that we authors will get sweaty at how we see the marketing spend and effort on our books compared to others. The Night Rainbow isn’t one of the huge lead titles being emblazoned everywhere this year, but I hope it’s going to be a great word of mouth book. Certainly the booksellers love it, and being included in the Waterstones Read & Review and Amazon Vine early readers programmes is ideal.  A couple of other notable things that have been done for me as an author and for the Night Rainbow – The 2013 debutantes evening, where the Bloomsbury 2013 literary debs were introduced over drinks to booksellers and the press last autumn.That felt really very special, and was the kind of event you only get via a publisher. The other is my lovely book trailer (posted below) which I adore. Behind the scenes I know that newspapers, magazines and bloggers have been sent copies of The Night Rainbow to review, and although it’s hard for debut novelists, having the requests go out with the reputation of Bloomsbury behind them is a great help.

 What writing projects have you been involved with since being signed by Bloomsbury. And is novel no. 2 in the pipeline?
Honestly, I’ve done practically no writing apart from on novel #2. It’s written now but I’m still going over and over edits. It feels like a bad time to be doing it, because there are so many demands on my time right now as it’s launch month for The Night Rainbow. Plus every time someone says something wonderful about The Night Rainbow I feel a slight stab of panic about making this new book as good and better. I think it’s just a case of distorted perspective, and once things quieten down a bit I’ll have these edits in the bag and will feel much better! Then I’d like to write a few short stories before I go again with the third novel. 

I know you are also a prize-winning short story writer. What have been the highlights of that career?
I’d really like to mention the Bristol Short Story Prize in 2010, because it was a Bristol Short Story Prize Anthologymoment in my writing life where I really felt encouraged. I was on the verge of submitting The Night Rainbow, and had been tweeting with writers for a while but hadn’t really got anyone I could chat to face to face. I left my daughters, then 2 and 4, with my husband and travelled to Bristol as one of the shortlisted writers. The atmosphere was amazing and I got a huge boost from being nothing but a writer, just for one day.

  I know you are active on social media – do you have any system for managing it as part of your writing life? (I’m all ears for this one!)
Good question, Alison! I don’t have a system at all. Although I can be found on Facebook and Google + I’m not very active, and my main socialising tends to be done on Twitter, which I love. I think for Twitter to work well, for your own sanity as well as anything else, you need to be genuinely interested in other people on there. I’ve got past 1500 people that I follow now, and am working on a one in one out basis, because I do like to hear what people I’ve got to know are up to and not just to feel like my stream is a lot of anonymous noise. That’s just too stressful. I don’t ‘do’ Twitter, I ‘visit’ it the way you’d visit a party: for a catch up, to hear interesting news and opinions and to share my own news and points of view. And so in the same way as parties, if I’m on a deadline or I’m spending time with my children, or I just need some thinking time then I don’t go. The temptation just to have a look is high, but I do think you have to focus on one thing or another, or else life becomes very fragmented, when – as a writer – what you really need is focus.

TThe-Night-Rainbow-fronthat sounds a pretty healthy attitude.
All the very best with The Night Rainbow – and the next one of course – and also for sharing your experience with us in such an insightful way.


You can read an extract of The Night Rainbow and find links to your favourite bookstores here.

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State of Wonder: further explorations

Posted on September 10, 2012 | 4 Comments

Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder (blogged about it here) was possibly my favourite book of last year and so when another Twitter user alerted me to an email discussion  about the book I was happy to be included. It’s a while since I participated in serious literary criticism (Euripides may have been involved!) and at first I was a bit taken aback by the depth and detail of the analysis. However it was a very interesting experience and made me aware of aspects of the book I otherwise would have missed. Questions were raised I hadn’t even thought of, and as a result of rereading the book (something I rarely do even with favouties) I noticed things I had missed in my first greedy rush to the end.

If you’ve read this book and literary discussions float your boat, do take a look at David Hebblethwaite’s blog (we are running to 3 instalments!) over the next few weeks.  I hope I managed to keep my end up!

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An Invisible Sign of My Own: compelling literary fiction – and a real book

Posted on March 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

Invisible Sign of My OwnI have only  ever read one short story by Aimee Bender and sadly didn’t like it (not so much the writing as the subject matter, not that I can even remember now what it was) but when an email arrived offering a review copy of an Invisible Sign of my Own, curiosity got the better of me. This isn’t unusual, but the book certainly is, because that curiosity stayed with me from beginning to end, something that marks this out as a bit of a masterpiece.

It was possibly a difficult week for me to  tackle a book that deals with difficult subjects: – you know the ones I mean: illness, bereavement, loneliness, but then I didn’t quite know what I was letting myself in for. The narrator Mona Gray has come up against all of these early on in her life. By the time she is twenty a neighbour’s baby has died and been left behind by its family, her father who inspired her on the running track has fallen prey to some debilitating illness that is too awful to be talked about, and her favourite maths teacher has deserted her just when she thought they would be soul-mates. She continues to find solace in the immutability of numbers, but when she is asked to teaching math(s) in a primary school, death still rears its ugly head in the shape of Lisa Venus, an eight-year-old struggling to deal with her mother’s terminal cancer.

But if death is the subtext, there’s plenty more going on in this beautifully crafted story and as a writer I’m reminded just how much plotting is actually contained in what will be remembered as an elegant and literary novel. Mona fancies the science teacher something rotten but a fear of intimacy makes her eat soap rather than have sex. The hardware store is a harmless interest, but buying an axe that looks like the number 7 is an odd way to celebrate a birthday. Then there are the mysterious numbers littering the neighbourhood, dropped there accidentally, or harbingers of more awful things to come?

I hope my description doesn’t make this sound like a dark and joyless book. If so,  I’m not doing it justice. Even though we worry about them, Mona and her school-children are great fun to be with and eventually she does work out that if death is inevitable, there is a natural order in the universe that makes it easier to bear.

I shall look out for Aimee Bender’s other novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. I’m told it’s as good if not better. But I might approach it with caution, and on a day when I have plenty of emotional resilience to hand.

Finally, I read this as a paperback, and it reminded me of the nuances of typography that add to the distinctive character of a book in a way that the Kindle e-book fails to address.

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Cells: self-published literary fiction

Posted on February 9, 2012 | 19 Comments

When I’m approached to review a book a lot depends on the mood I’m in, and when an intern from  SilverWood Books popped up offering a free copy of Cells by Harriet Grace, I was definitely in two minds. The subject matter – infertility – didn’t really grab me. Was I ready for an ‘issues’ book, or a thinly disguised misery memoir? And SilverWood is a self-publishing service – would this be a vanity effort? But in the end as curiosity got the better of me (it usually does), I took a sneak preview of the Kindle sample and was sufficiently intrigued to read the whole thing.I’m glad I did, because it’s a very satisfying read executed with confidence and style. As such it has changed my perception of self-publishing and makes me question even more where the commercial publishing industry thinks its going right now.

Cells is an intense human drama played out by three people, Martha Morgan a successful journalist, her husband Grant, a practising analyst (complete with couch!) and Jon, an office messenger with ‘Jesus hair’ at the national paper where Martha works. Already this is sounding like a conventional love triangle, but this is not a story that plays out in any conventional way. The writing described by one reviewer as ‘richly detailed and emotionally intense’ invites us to walk with each of the characters and simply see where they will take us. Once or twice I thought I glimpsed a plot twist coming up but was always proved wrong. However this does not make it dull. There’s a strong undercurrent of suspense as we contemplate all the things that might go wrong (some of which do, some of which don’t). It’s unpredictable in a good way. The ending is also nicely judged. Two of the characters appear to have found happiness, but this is a triangle – what will happen when the final connecting line is drawn? The author leaves us to decide.

The book is not without its problems. Although the characters were entirely believable, I didn’t find myself in absolute sympathy with any of them (possibly exacerbated by the three points of view) so that while I wanted to know what happened, I still read with a sense of detachment. On a more superficial level, I personally would never have read this book on the strength of its title, jacket and pitch. The title in particular summons up to me– a one- or at best two-dimensional story (biology/science/imprisonment?) and doesn’t flag up the emotional complexity of a novel that recalls, say, Sally Vickers or Maggie O’Farrell. To me this is not a book about infertility: it’s a lot more interesting than that!

I can also see it’s not a book that everyone will want to read, so maybe it would never be an out-and-out best seller, but it’s a piece of quality writing that IMO should have found a publisher. I’m sure ten (or do I mean twenty?) years ago it would have done. As things are, I hope that the self-publishing route will find this author the audience she deserves.

 

 

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What weight do you punch?

Posted on May 27, 2011 | 3 Comments

A few days ago I heard an interview with Jeffrey Archer in which he was careful to call himself a storyteller rather than a writer. Perhaps he was being modest about his skills, or simply differentiating fiction from journalism, but I got the impression he was claiming the high ground in terms of pace and plot, while maybe taking a side-swipe at more ‘writerly’ i.e. literary fiction.

Of course I may be doing the man an injustice. But writer/storyteller does seem a nice distinction, particularly for someone who has often been derided as a writer (amongst other things) but whose early novels (Kane and Abel, Not a Penny More) I recall as rattling good reads.

So is this a fair way to distinguish commercial from literary fiction?  Does ‘quality writing’ imply lack of pace and does commercial fiction imply lack of style or artistry? And if not, what actually separates one from t’other?

As a writer who finds it difficult to draw the line between commercial and literary fiction and even harder to place myself on either side of it, the question of what those terms mean is an interesting one. All I can conclude is that the aim of commercial fiction is commerce, i.e. the making of money, and as such will include anything that reaches the mass market. Conversely one might say that ‘literary’ puts the quality of the writing ahead of its mass market appeal.

But does this hold water? However lofty our ideals may be, we are constantly told that we must write ‘for the market’ and while many writers do not make a living from fiction, are there any novelists out there (egged on my agents and editors) who won’t do their damndest to make sure the book sells?

Another approach would be to look at the assumed audience for the book. I hesitate to dip my toe into the murky waters of socio-economic class, but taking the iconic model, it definitely grates in to say that literary fiction is for the John Cleese’ of this world and commercial for the Ronnie Corbetts. But there’s definitely a lot of looking up and looking down in the literary world, and  by calling himself a storyteller, Mr. Archer may well have been indulging  in a bit of inverted snobbery.

vanishing act of esme lennoxWhich is probably where I come in, because like Ronnie Barker I’m stuck in the middle. As a reader and writer I’m a literary middle-weight, and I’m not quite sure how to explain that to an agent or editor, except perhaps in the words of an old edition of Mslexia which referred to a new trend to ‘lit-lite’ in which were included, as I recall, Maggie O’Farrell, Salley Vickers and lots more of my favourite writers.

I’m not sure whom I would then place in the ‘lit-heavy’ category. Rose Tremain? Hilary Mantel? Wolf Hall might be a doorstopper that needs a bit more ‘getting into’ but ultimately it’s as compelling as any of the aforementioned and left me wanting more.

I remember one agent I approached who described herself as looking for ‘good stories well told’. If I can produce one of these, I’ll be happy. A writer who can tell a story, a storyteller who can write. Sounds like a win-win situation.

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