newnotes

Hampstead Authors' Society No. 36 Issue 5. November 2002

Places are limited - advance booking only. Bookings with cheques received before 6th December: £5 for HAS members; £7 for guests. After 6th December: £7 for HAS members; £9 for guests.

If you're not a HAS member, but would like come to the walk and/or the reading, you are welcome to join us at the guest rate.

David Reynolds, co-founder of Bloomsbury and publishing director (non-fiction) until 1999, will read from Swan River, a family memoir, published by Picador, 2002.

Jennifer Potter will read from 'Sacred grove', an essay published in a Canadian anthology by Greystone Books, 2002: When the wild comes leaping up, personal encounters with nature, ed David Suzuki.

Chip Martin will read from The End of the Road, "an anglo-californian romance" comprising five interlinked novellas, to be published by Starhaven on 15th December 2002.

The Authors of a Movie - HASWorkshop 6 p.m. for 6:15 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Friday 31st Jan 2003

Carl Foreman's screenplay for High Noon is one of the greatest - and most deceptively simple - ever written. American TV writer Jacob Sager Weinstein will discuss how Foreman started with a straightforward story of good and evil, and transformed it into something richer and more disturbing. Using video examples from the movie, he'll demonstrate how the film's brilliant direction, editing, cinematography, acting and scoring all carried on the work that Foreman begun. Jacob Sager Weinstein recently completed his third season as a writer for the Emmy-winning show Dennis Miller Live on HBO.

Places are limited - advance booking only. Reservations received before 30thth December: £5 for HAS members; £8 for guests. After 30th December: £8 for HAS members; £11 for guests.

Folk tales and myths are not just for children. And interactive story-telling is as old as the hills. HAS hosts a panel discussion on oral story-telling and how it fits in to modern fiction.

Venue: London, NW3; closest tube Finchley Road, Metropolitan Line, or Hampstead, Northern Line.

Pamela Marre, story-teller, on how to access stories using family history; how stories change over time; and preparation for the telling of a story.

Ben Haggarty, story-teller, on myth and other cultures; and on process - creating the right atmosphere.

Barbara Goward on the power of opening lines. Barbara has written a book on Greek narratology and teaches at the City Lit.

HAS Membership is £8, if you are already a member of the Society of Authors; otherwise it is £12/year to join as a Friend. To apply, please send your short bio, with list of publications, to: Zsuzsanna Ardó, HAS Chairman.

Contributions to HASNotes are welcome. Copyright remains with the authors of the articles and HASNotes. If you want to reproduce the article, please contact the writer c/o HAS and include HASNotes' URL as the original source: www.societyofauthors.org/HAS.

I hugged the cat just now. She was whining for my attention. She's in late middle age, passed on to us by a friend whose circumstances changed. She's more dependent than most cats, with a desperate desire for physical contact with humans - any humans. People say she must have been taken from her mother too soon.

Something about holding this creature close and supplying her need for affection caused me to reflect and widen the scope of this piece. It was originally to be called 'Editing and Being Edited'. Its new title carries risks, because it means examining a large part of my working adult life.

After a flirtation with fringe and 'underground' journalism in the late 1960s, I got into a form of publishing in 1973 because I needed work and because I liked to write. The job was at the Reader's Digest where, as a sub-editor, I worked alongside real Fleet Street sub-editors who had children and mortgages and were therefore earning extra money in the mornings - their real jobs began at 3 pm. From research provided by a roomful of researchers, we had to write and repeatedly rewrite stories for an illustrated tome called Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. I turned out to be good at it, and took pleasure in that knowledge, and at the same time gained an enduring respect for the professional hack (I can think of no better word) - the men and women who earn a living by writing what is required, fast, presentably, to a deadline and to a length. Some members of the literati (again, no better word) look down on hacks, somehow not realising that luminaries like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and, in their roles as advertising copywriters, Fay Weldon and Salman Rushdie - and a myriad other 'respectable' writers - once treated writing simply as a job.

When the strange stories had all been thoroughly written, the Reader's Digest moved me on to a guide book, and I soon left to join the nascent Dorling Kindersley. That job was more challenging in that, jointly with a graphic designer, I was given charge of huge illustrated books - or projects, as they were often called - such as The Photographer's Handbook and The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency. There was much structuring of content, editing and rewriting, but my scope for actual writing was confined to the likes of explaining F-stops with the aid of a dozen beautiful and complex diagrams - not easy in 100 words.

Dorling Kindersley was then a book packager - a producer of international co-editions. My job was pleasant enough, but I didn't wholly like working for other people. I thought that maybe I could start something myself; I had noticed that this was a business that required little start-up capital. I left and, with a friend, Julian Shuckburgh, a mainstream publisher who had worked at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, set up a new company. Our business worked, in the sense that for eight years it provided us both, and at its height seven employees, with incomes, while - almost as importantly - giving us the freedom that comes from being your own boss.

And so it might have continued, had I not, in 1985, agreed to a proposal that our company produce The Live Aid Book - in two weeks, for no money. The two weeks were intense, sleepless and enthralling - enthralling because twenty or so people worked day and night for nothing more than a belief that they were doing something right. Hierarchies, meetings, frustrations, invoices - the regular fare of office life - disappeared and everyone smiled, even in their sleep it seemed to me.

Out of this euphoria my relationship with the book's publisher, Nigel Newton, who had got me into the whole crazy endeavour, became closer, and soon afterwards he invited me to become his partner in a new, as yet unnamed, publishing company. After a year of secret meetings, business plans and fundraising, Bloomsbury Publishing was launched with glitter, panache and two million pounds of venture capital, and I was the Deputy Managing Director and the Publishing Director for Non-fiction. In practice this meant that instead of dreaming up and producing book projects containing pictures as well as words, I could for the first time commission books filled with words only - and I had to do so quickly; otherwise Bloomsbury would be a publisher with no books. I set out on an intense programme of courting authors, literary agents, American and foreign-language publishers - anyone who could come up with a book that I liked and that people might buy.

And there I encountered the dilemma of all commissioning editors - a conflict, the conflict, that will probably always lie at the heart of the publishing industry: the books I liked were often not the books that people would buy - at least not in the quantities necessary to fund a business.

My career thus far had been an unplanned journey of one thing leading to another, governed only by: a need for money; a love of writing - in both the active and the passive sense; and a desire for freedom to operate in my own way, free from the kind of interference that comes from layers of management, and from bosses and proprietors who have little idea of what many of their employees actually do - but who, none the less, frequently think they themselves can do it better.

Looking back, I think that these vague instincts continued to guide me in the new place in which I found myself, a place I came to see as the interface, and sometimes the battleground, between art and commerce - an arena where two different languages were spoken and where my job was to be the interpreter between the writer and the marketing people. It was a hard place to be, and it brimmed with the potential for debilitating compromise - and it was perhaps more, rather than less, difficult to negotiate if, like me, you had strong sympathies with both sides and some fluency in both languages.

Many publishing editors start out with a sense of vocation and a reverence for writing, untainted by business. They learn to understand writers but find it harder to listen to accountants and salespeople - sadly, those who go really deaf tend to be made redundant. I respect them, but I didn't come to publishing that way. Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I feel that I came to it because it was the least uncongenial way I could find to make the money I needed; and that my dislike of authority caused me to become a businessman along the way - with my own (expensively borrowed) cash on the line.

In that hard place I was continually aware that the company had to make money or die. All around us publishing companies, some not much more than a year old, were losing money and then were crushed by one of the acquisitive conglomerates, flattened into imprints, little more than labels with a single editor flailing under a ton of suits. So, while I published some writers principally because I liked their writing and some books because they interested me personally or howled about freedom and injustice, and just hoped that somehow they would sell - which they sometimes did - I consciously sought other books to please the sales force and make money (which, of course, they sometimes didn't): books about gardening and having babies; collections of photographs of modern icons from Marilyn Monroe to Björk; true stories by or about rock stars, sports personalities, explorers, military heroes - especially former members of the SAS - anyone who had a good story to tell or who could say something useful on a subject of wide interest. Often the authors were not practised writers and needed a good deal of editing, sometimes a total rewrite, or even a ghost in the form of a good, honest hack.

I commissioned books in this eclectic manner for eleven years, and the only writing I did was of blurbs and sales material, but I edited, and editing is a part of writing, after all, in that it is - or should be - making writing, one's own or someone else's, better. And then in 1997 I started to write a book myself. It began as a little writing for fun on a Saturday afternoon, prompted by a desire to try out a new computer at home; I had no thought that those few paragraphs could grow into a book, let alone be published. But they did grow, slowly, and when there were 5,000 words I sought out an agent, and when there were 20,000 words the agent sent them to five publishers. About a month later, just before Christmas 1998, he telephoned and, with moderated excitement told me that he had had an offer from Peter Straus, an editor whom I greatly respected and who worked for an imprint, Picador, that, if anything, I respected even more.

My life changed at that moment. I seemed to forget all I had learned as a publisher. 'An offer? From Straus? Fantastic!' I had climbed out of my chair at the Bloomsbury offices in Soho Square and was gazing out at the tops of the plane trees without seeing them. I had had small hope of the book being published, despite the agent's enthusiasm. So many people write books - I, who so often judged others, couldn't tell if mine was any good - and so few get published. I knew that perhaps better than most.

He told me how much the offer was. I was barely listening. 'Fine. Well, accept it!'

'Accept it? The book's with four others! You're going to meet two of them after Christmas. We can get another offer. Get Straus to go up.'

'David! Have you ever changed your mind after making an offer?' 'Er… No, but… he might.'

'Don't be ridiculous. Does anyone change their mind after making an offer? That's not how this business works, is it?'

He was right, but I couldn't accept it. Something would go wrong. 'Suppose Straus has an accident, falls under a bus.'

The agent and I had more than one conversation like this. Eventually he made me wait, and eventually, weeks after Christmas, a deal was struck with Peter Straus.

By the time I had finished writing the book, I had almost come to my senses, though I still had a conviction that, though Straus seemed to like the first 20,000 words, he would detest the next 80,000 and invoke the rejection clause in the contract.

'How many times have you rejected a commissioned book, David?' 'Er… Maybe once. Never, actually.'

I left Bloomsbury and the hard place, because I found that I enjoyed writing - and later I enjoyed, appreciated deeply, after the initial shock of their suggested cuts, the process of being edited by Peter Straus and his colleague Becky Senior. (In my experience, few writers complain about editing; more feel that they are not edited enough.)

I knew about the difficulties and frustrations of being a writer, because I had listened to so many writers describing them: the loneliness; the insecurity - 'Is this complete crap?' 'Why would anyone ever want to read this?'; the desperate yearning for feedback, any feedback, from anyone, after months with the thing only in your head, in your computer, on your sheets of A4, on your shelf, in your little, tiny room - where the phone never rings; the excitement and anticlimax of the longed-for event - 'Will there ever be a review?' 'It's bound to be a bad one.' 'No copies in Waterstone's Covent Garden.'

I guess I'm now one of 'them' or 'us', whichever of them I wasn't before, depending on your point of view. I don't feel that way, though. I feel as if we're on the same side, members of the same team. This is perhaps partly because the people at Picador on both sides, marketing and editorial, understand the hard place, the interface - and it's only an interface, not a battleground - and partly because I understand their procedures and difficulties. (I hope I know when to leave them alone and when to draw something to their attention; and I am aware of the many possible reasons why, for example, there are no copies in Waterstone's Covent Garden.) I think I am fortunate in this respect, but I don't think writers necessarily have to have been publishers to enjoy this understanding, or to negotiate the interface where art and commerce meet.