Amanda's blog
waiting for spring
Yesterday I looked at the Facebook entry my daughter had set up for me. How on earth do so many people, all working hard, find the time to keep checking their entries? The devil makes work...I'd rather practise the piano, or garden. Or (above all) read. I have a piece to write, and a second chapter to rewrite and a lunch to cook. Also an old contract to look up to send to my agent, train tickets to book ...it goes on and on. But somehow it all gets done. Those were the only good lines in Shakespeare in Love. It's always a panic, and the whole of the Queen's Men are in chaos, but somehow, nobody knows how, it's alright on the night.
I suspect everybody, everywhere, flies by the seat of their pants. Darwin's explanation for evolution has always struck me as much too slow; I have a suspicion that it's more like the moment when Dumbo discovers he can use his enormous ears to fly with. That dreadful moment when he's falling through the air, terrified, is exactly what being a writer is like. You never, ever believe you can do it. You never understand what it is that suddenly makes you able to turn a kind of disability into the very thing that makes a miracle happen. There's a good dinosaur book by Benedict Blathwayt along similar lines - a tiny reptile being chased across Jurassic mountains by great thuggish killers and suddenly jumping off a cliff to become the first bird. He's a very good picture book writer - obsessive attention to detail, best seen in Tangle and the Firesticks - but this one struck quite a chord with me.
I have the best job in the world, reviewing children's books. My children claim, superciliously, that it's because I'm still about eight. I tell them that only very adult people enjoy being children and remember exactly what it's like. Of all the stupid things that critics have ever said about my own books, (and there are plenty) none made me quite as cross as an American who claimed that children don't talk the way my child characters do. Well, the bit she objected to was taken down verbatim in a playground... Like Alison Lurie and the Opies, I am perennially fascinated by children. I see them as a lost tribe, much like the Little People of legend, forced underground and noticed only when their resentment and subversion affect the lumbering giants overhead.
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March 2009
Like everyone I know, I'm riveted by the scandal over Julie Myerson's book about her son, The Lost Child. All writers use aspects of their lives in their work - the claim that I had used a real-life ex-boyfriend of mine for A Vicious Circle was what gave rise to my own problems with it - I have some sympathy. However, my own case was very different. It involved an adult, and a critic of legendary unpleasantness whom writers were queuing up to attack if it came to court. The Myersons' decision to lock out their 17 year old son because of his drug habit - smoking cannabis - and then to write a book on it smacks of parental irresponsibility and betrayal.
Every parent of teenagers goes through some difficult times. I'm not going to invade my own children's privacy by saying this; with luck, effort, trust and above all love you get through them. But what interests me is how you respond as a writer. Supposedly, we all have a chip of ice (as Graham Greene put it) in our hearts that means that we sacrifice our nearest and dearest for a book.
Sorry, but it doesn't work like that, unless you're just writing thinly disguised autobiography. I find it maddening the way people confuse what is an act of imagination and ventriloquism with what I'm actually like. People have believed I'm aristocratic, manic depressive, Irish Catholic, married to a doctor etc because of my characters having convinved them they must be true. This is a triumph of sorts - but please, none of it is true. I spend months researching my characters, thinking about them, having dreams and internal conversations with them. They are not me; nor are the men in them my husband or any ex-boyfriend, or the children mine. I am neurotic about invading privacy, both mine and that of others.
Even writing a blog is a bit of a violation of this. Not least because I'm not even getting paid for it. But at least it's not blood money.
The recession is hurting many writers, and stories abound of people having their contracts cancelled because they’ve delivered one day late. I’m incredibly lucky to have a new novel out this year, because I delivered it FOUR YEARS late, due to illness. A number of US publishers are not taking on any new authors. Many in Britain have had their advances cut to a tenth of what they were, and just can’t afford to keep on; journalists, too have had their fees slashed by 50% or lost their jobs altogether. Nick Cohen complained in the Observer recently that modern novelists fail to address debt, as Dickens once did. Well, curiously, the recession and debt are exactly what I’m writing about now. I am interested in money as a subject in fiction, because it affects people just as strongly as sex, hatred or death. I always try to give actual sums for what people need, or are paid in my books. I don’t think money should ever take possession of your true self – all the mistakes I’ve made in life were when I became frightened, and took the seemingly easy path – but I also think it’s stupid not to be aware of it as a powerful force. I love Austen, Dickens and Trollope, and a number of children’s authors like E.Nesbit and Dodie Smith for always telling us what things cost.
This website, incidentally, cost me 10% of my advance for Hearts and Minds. So do please make it worthwhile by writing a response.
What I’m reading:
From my weekly bag of children’ books, I’m reading Dido by Adele Geras. It's about the Carthginians left behind when Aeneas sailed away, and is lovely stuff.
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