Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-writing-life"

An NPR foreign correspondent friend used to like to run down a list of seven ways for journalists to grow old gracefully. His premise, which is self-evident to anyone who’s been a reporter, was that daily news was an undignified thing to be doing in your 40s. I can’t remember the whole of the list. It included writing op-eds for your newspaper (which seemed more or less like retirement), teaching journalism at a university (also retirement, but somewhat scorned by other hacks), and maybe the seventh was dieing. Undoubtedly the most prestigious way to proceed, according to that list, was to write nonfiction books. Nina Burleigh has a most graceful career, indeed. A former correspondent for Time and People, she’s written a number of historical nonfiction books, the most recent of which is “Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land.” That book focused on a series of biblical archeological finds which the Israeli Antiquities Authority says are fakes and the dealers and archeologists currently on trial for allegedly faking such objects as the burial ossuary of Jesus’s brother James. Sort of “The Da Vinci Code” with subordinate clauses. Since completing “Unholy Business,” Nina’s been working on a book to be published next year about the controversial trial of American Amanda Knox for the ritual murder of a British student with her Italian boyfriend. Pretty gruesome and, when Nina and I chatted about it on my recent New York trip, it also turns out to involve some sinister figures tracking the author. But it also necessitated her taking her family to live in Perugia, Umbria, for most of last year. As I said, it’s the graceful way for a journalist to go. Here’s how she does it:

How long did it take you to get published?
First published in sixth grade, I think. A local library in Elgin, Illinois. First paid publishing in journalism, at the AP in Springfield, Illinois. First book published, 1997. I don’t want to say how old I was then, but it happened because my agent was trawling the DC press corps for clients and found me. I had written a novel or two and never got anywhere with them (still haven’t sold any fiction).

Would you recommend any books on writing?
I like Strunk and White “Elements of Style.” And a Roget’s Thesaurus. I prefer my old paperback one, although the one on the web works okay.

What’s a typical writing day?
If I’m in the groove, I get up in the morning, fiddle around on the internet until I feel totally guilty, then quit it and don’t go back on for at least 3 or 4 hours, during which time I am supposedly writing, but may in fact be re-reading, in which case it’s not such a great day. After that, I usually have lunch or kids or other distractions.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?
“Unholy Business.” Thrilling, hilarious and fun. Best book I ever put together. I am so depressed that it didn’t sell and that Collins never made a paperback of it. It’s fast and entertaining. But, the next book about Amanda Knox will be even better and maybe people care more about youth, sex drugs and Italy than fake archaeological objects and the Bible they purport to prove.

How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?

Pretty much, c, if you are talking about structure. In terms of method … probably b.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?
Ridiculous question, Matt. I can’t remember the name of the author or book, though.

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?
Hmm. In ALL of literature? I can’t remember. I do like a lot of the description in “The Leopard”, which I read in preparation for working in Italy. The author brilliantly, deliciously evokes 19th century Sicily, a place and time I had never given much thought to.

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?
I don’t know. There are a lot of smart writers out there. I kind of admire Chris Buckley’s novels about American politics.

Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?
I wish I knew. I would copy it.

How much research is involved in each of your books?
Too much. I really don’t want to work this hard.

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?
Yes, and it exists today. Nobody pays attention to me when I speak.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?
I’ve heard that John Berendt claims you must do 4 things for your book every day for a year in order to get a best-seller. It worked for him, obviously. But I ran out of “things” after a few weeks the last time I tried.

What’s your experience with being translated?
I love looking at my book in Japanese. I have no idea where my name is on it, it could say anything.

Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before could make a living at it?
I do live off my writing, but not off my books alone.

How many books did you write before you were published?
I think there was one novel in a drawer. It remains there.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?
An autistic-seeming guy at the Jewish book festival in San Francisco followed me all around for an hour and none of the organizers stepped in, I had to hide. And then, I am among the chosen who have had the humiliating experience of speaking at bookstores where only the employees are present.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?
I really want to write the amazing life story of my dog, picked up in a gutter in Mexico, now splitting his time between an apartment in Manhattan and house in upstate New York, after a half year frolicking in the olive groves of Umbria. I want to go into his brain and write about the world from his point of view. I think he must have a rather happy outlook. I don’t think this is any less likely to get published than my other ideas, though.

Cairo is a place we all know to some degree, even if only the image of the pyramids and the Sphinx. A short visit there is enough to make you wonder about how much of this teeming metropolis you really don’t know. No writer gets so deep as Sanna Negus under the skin of this ancient city, which remains key to the future of the benighted Middle East. Sanna’s the Middle East correspondent for Finnish radio and television. Her new book “Hold onto Your Veil, Fatima! And Other Snapshots of Life in Contemporary Egypt” is a stunning portrayal of Egypt that’s both homage and expose. Pulitzer winner Lawrence Wright calls her “one of the most informed and well-connected reporters in the region.” She’s also one of the best writers. Here she talks about the decade she spent in Cairo (before moving to Jerusalem) and how she wrote her book.

How long did it take you to get published?

The initial Finnish version (2005) came out quite smoothly. I first got a writing grant from the biggest publishing house in Finland, WSOY, which allowed me to work on three sample chapters. Less than a year later we signed a contract. The English version took longer to publish, mainly because I got distracted by other things. One UK publishing house was at first interested, but then withdrew and I guess it depressed me and I buried the project for a while. After some friends kicked my behind and told me to get my act together, I took a look at my bookshelf’s Middle Eastern books. So I wrote to Garnet on Monday, they answered on Tuesday and on Friday I got a contract!

Would you recommend any books on writing?

This being my first book, I figured I should probably look into some writing guides. So I read a couple of books in Finnish. While these books gave a boost to my confidence, they still didn’t solve the problem of the blank page. When I was taking my first steps as a journalist (and I never studied journalism or literature), I found Jon Franklin’s Writing For Story useful. But at the end of the day, it’s better to read what other people have written in your genre.

What’s a typical writing day?

The morning starts with some form of exercise, followed by breakfast and several hours of futzing around (checking my email every five minutes, making yet another cup of coffee, doing laundry, going to a supermarket to buy a single item…) Typically I would do research or write down interviews during the day and write late into the night. My creative powers unfold after sunset.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Martin Walker’s series of crime novels about the chief of police of a small town in the beautiful Perigord region of France are a delight. When we met at a recent “British Crime Fiction Night” in Darmstadt, Germany, he described the books as “French porn – wine, food, women – in a crime fiction frame.” Certainly Martin’s bon vivant personality matches the playfulness of his fiction (Though he's a Scot by birth, he divides his time between Washington DC and his vineyard in France). But he’s also a former correspondent with The Guardian and his novels have significant undertones of social commentary, as you’ll see from the interview here. By mixing the pleasures of France – the “porn” – with its dark underside, the Bruno novels remind me very much of the terrific Inspector Montalbano series, where the Sicilian setting is the beautiful backdrop to a detective who enjoys a good dinner as much as nabbing the villain. So here’s Martin Walker, the Andrea Camilleri of the Dordogne.

How long did it take you to get published?
Not long at all. My first book, non-fiction, was commissioned. My first Bruno novel sold as soon as my agent offered it.

Would you recommend any books on writing?
No. Just read and read and read and get a feel for what works.

What’s a typical writing day?
There isn’t one, but whether on a plane or a train or at home or in a hotel I try and do at least a thousand words a day.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?
The latest book is ‘The Dark Vineyard,’ third in the Bruno series, which is about fraud in the truffle market in France, which traces back to China and to consequences of France’s 1954 defeat in its failed colonial war in Vietnam. Along the way, it involves militant Greens, a lot of wonderful French food and the complex romantic life of my hero, Bruno. I think it’s my best Bruno novel yet, because he seems to grow as a character with each book and my portrait of modern France gets richer. While writing it, I more than once had that magical experience of a character doing something I had neither planned nor expected, as if Bruno was taking on a life of his own.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.<\a>

In the southern desert of Jordan, the ancient Nabateans carved their city, Petra, out of the red-rose rock. Later the caves were home to tribes of Bedouin. And to a young backpacker from New Zealand who fell in love with a Bedouin man. Marguerite van Geldermalsen met Mohammad in the late-Seventies and for the initial seven years of their marriage they lived inside the rock and had two of their three children. The Jordanian government later moved the tribes to a new village nearby, where Marguerite still lives (She has a souvenir shop inside Petra). Though Mohammad died almost a decade ago, Marguerite’s book “Married to a Bedouin” is a touching testament to the character of the man who changed her life and the profound love found by two people from such different backgrounds. It’s Marguerite’s first book and it’s written with a clarity of thinking and of style that’s striking. She has given us the most insightful description of Bedouin life you’ll read and also a unique love story sparkling with the attraction between Marguerite and Mohammad. For my series of interviews with authors, I’m delighted to chat with a writer who came to publish by such an unusual path.

How long did it take you to get published?
Considering the number of people who had told me I should write a book (memoir) I was surprised that I had any trouble at all. But now I know that I was rejected by the first two publishers just so that I could get published by the wonderful Lennie Goodings at Virago Press (no less)!

Would you recommend any books on writing?
I took a class with Patti Miller in Sydney and we used her ‘Writing Your Life’ (Allen & Unwin). I learned to write with it and I recommend it to people who haven’t done any writing before.

What’s a typical writing day?
I started with 3 pages of hand writing ‘morning pages’ from Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist’s Way’ and I felt so inspired that I didn’t dare stop till my book was published. (Actually I still write them most days) I wrote the book on the computer though, and worked as a nurse and looked after my 3 children so it was whenever I felt the impulse and could.

Plug your book. How would you describe what it’s about? And of course why’s it so great?
Married to a Bedouin is set in Petra, Jordan where I have lived since 1978. When I first came and married ‘the Bedouin’ Mohammad’s tribe still inhabited the caves and set up their tents around the valley and by the time we were resettled to a nearby village in 1985 I was part of the tribe. I started writing the book in 1997, when I realized just how much the life had changed and how special my stories were, to capture that recent history of the site and to show the world that people are pretty much the same everywhere.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?
I seem to find a new good one in each book I read, for the moment I like: ‘He paused in the strong evening wind, took a comb from the top pocket of his tweed jacket, and tried to tame the strands of white hair with which he covered his baldness.’ Which made me think; ‘this writer knows his subject’.

Well, it’s certainly kind of you to choose a sentence from one of my books. But for the next question feel free to pick someone else: What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?
So many good ones, but for you Matt let’s have Bruce Chatwin in What Am I Doing Here: 'Oh! Wales. I DO know Wales. Little grey houses... covered in roses... in the rain’

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

When you ask writers what underpins the greatest books, they may talk about structure, style, character-building. The best of them identify the novelist’s emotional understanding of himself and his ability to translate it to the page. That’s what strikes readers – perhaps without their even knowing it – and gives them an immediate connection to the work. At this, Tony Parsons is the master. An enfant terrible of rock journalism who’s still a high-profile columnist in British magazines and newspapers, his first big success was the wonderful MAN AND BOY, which was a big word-of-mouth hit around the turn of the millennium. Since then, he has written a series of other books, mostly focusing on the tribulations of relationships. What it takes to maintain a relationship or the love born by bringing a child into the world, for example. He’s done all this with a broad appeal, a lack of pretention, and an understanding of the craft of writing that makes him unique in the London literary world. Here he talks about how he lives his Writing Life:

You were a music writer who mixed with the great British punk bands, before you wrote novels. How did the transition to novels change your writing and the way you think about writing?

The transition between journalism and novels is always the same – it is the difference between running 100 metres and running the marathon. If I wrote a review of the Clash or the Sex Pistols, or if I write a column for GQ or a newspaper today, then I can do it in a few hours. With a novel, you live with it for a year or more – you have doubts, you take wrong turnings, you plough on. It is just much more of a slog. And you have to dig deeper – to keep that big picture in your head, to get the book in your brain down on 400 sheets of paper – writing a novel is much more of an act of will. You keep going, even when you lose heart. If you are writing a column – my columns are 2000 words for GQ, and 1229 for the Daily Mirror – you don’t really have the time to get tired, or to let self-doubt creep in.


Would you recommend any books on writing?

There are many great books about writing – I would recommend you read all of them. “Story” by Robert McKee is aimed at screenplay writers, and filmmakers, but the lessons about story structure are just as applicable to novelists. One of my favourite books on writing is Ernest Hemingway on Writing – it is an anthology of thoughts by Hemingway on his craft, rather than a book that he wrote about writing, but it contains some of my favourite advice. For example, Hemingway suggests that if you get stuck then you should write, “One true line.” I have always loved that. Elmore Leonard’s “10 Rules of Writing” is very good, and will take you about 15 minutes to read. I have just discovered “Becoming A Writer” by Dorothea Brande, which came out 80 years ago and has just been discovered – you never stop learning your craft, and so any writer should devour all the good advice he or she can find.


What’s a typical writing day?

A typical day is that I walk my 8-year-old daughter to school, come home and start. I work non-stop until lunch – aim for 1,000 words but keep going if it is going well. Knock off for lunch and do anything and everything else in the afternoon, including thinking about tomorrow’s work. It is always good to have some idea of where you are starting the next day. Hemingway said you should always, “Leave some water in the well.” So – 1000 words a day, before lunch. But there will be weeks when I am editing a book, and then you move at a different pace. Or obviously you don’t start off with 1000 words – the brooding period, when you are trying to see the book in your head. But when the ocean liner is out at sea, I will try to hit that 1000 word mark day after day.


Novels need perhaps to make a greater emotional connection with a reader than journalism. Before I was two paragraphs into “Man and Boy,” I was in tears, though you hadn’t written anything overtly tear-jerking. The same was true when I heard you speaking to an audience about your father—you were very measured and matter-of-fact, yet it was somehow deeply touching. How do you do it?

I think you just have to be emotionally honest – with yourself and everyone else. If you are writing or talking. Just try to say what is in your head and your heart without worrying too much about how it makes you look. So I just try to be straight with the world and myself, and I find that you can’t go far wrong. I think we spend a lot of our lives trying to look more cool or clever or uncaring than we really are – I think a writer has to get over that, and find the connection from his heart to the rest of the world.


What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

“It was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on, and the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.” From Great Expectations, Charles Dickens. I don’t think Dickens gets the credit he deserves for being a beautiful writer. We revere him for his characters and his stories of course, but there is a beautiful evocative simplicity about his prose. He really was just such an incredible all-round writer – that passage haunts me. An editor would tell you that you shouldn’t use “now” twice in the same sentence, and I wonder if it was deliberate or not. I think it was – because it is just such a perfect and incredible sentence.


What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

I am rereading My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, about an upper class English family running off to Corfu in the 1930s, and I love the way Durrell writes – this is one of my favourite parts, where he compares the new day to a child’s transfer. “Gradually the magic of the island settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen. Every day had a tranquillity, a timelessness about it, so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us, glossy and colourful as a child’s transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.”

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns,/a>