this writing life

A. A. Milne On Writing

“Writing, let us confess it unashamed, is fun. There are those who will tell you that it is an inspiration, they sing but as the linnet sings; there are others, in revolt against such priggishness, who will tell you it is a business like any other. Others, again, will assure you (heroically) that it is an agony, and they would sooner break stones – as well they might. But though there is something of inspiration in it, something of business, something, at times, of agony, yet, in the main, writing is just thrill; the thrill of exploring. The more difficult the country, the more untraversed by the writer, the greater (to me, anyhow) the thrill.”¹

Of course, writing tends to be more of a thrill when the writer has a history of critical and commercial success, and knows his next work is eagerly awaited:

“He had always written what he wanted to write. His luck was that this was also what the public wanted to read.”²

A. A. Milne didn’t simply enjoy writing; he also believed writing (and writers) were of great value to society, and sometimes had the need to remind others of this:

“Authors have never been taken very seriously by their fellow-men. ‘A singer is a singer,’ the attitude seems to be, ‘a painter is a painter, and a sculptor sculpts; but dash it all, a writer only writes, which is a thing we all do every day of our lives, and the only difference between ourselves and Thomas Hardy is that Hardy doesn’t do anything else, whereas we are busy men with a job of real work to do.’ And since writing is, in a sense, the hobby, or at least the spare-time occupation of the whole world, it has become natural for the layman to regard the professional author as also engaged merely upon a hobby, the results of which, in accordance with the well-known vanity of the hobbyist, are free for the inspection of anyone kindly enough to take an interest in them.

For instance, you who read this would not think of asking a wine merchant, whose nephew had been at the same school as your son, for a free dozen of champagne on the strength of that slight connection; but you would not hesitate to ask an author, similarly connected, for a free article for some ephemeral publication in which you were interested, or for permission to perform his play without the usual payment of royalty. Indeed, you would feel that you would be paying him the same sort of compliment that I should be paying you if, dining at your house, I asked to see the fretwork soap-dish in your bathroom. ‘Oh, are you really interested?’ you would say. ‘Fancy your having heard about it. How awfully nice of you!”

This was after yet another of his tussles with the BBC, which paid nominal or no fees to authors when their works were broadcast, and took, according to him, the following attitude:

“If we pay you a fee, we won’t mention your name or your works or your publishers or anything about you, but if you will let us do it for nothing we will announce to our thousand million book-buying listeners where your book is to be bought. And if you don’t like it, you can leave it, because there are plenty of other authors about; and, if it came to the worst, we could write the things ourselves quite easily.”³

What would Mr Milne have made of the internet?

All the above quotes are from Ann Thwaite’s excellent biography of A. A. Milne, who was the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, When We Were Very Young, Peace with Honour and dozens of poems, articles, essays, plays and short stories.

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A. A. Milne, quoted in The Path Through the Trees by Christopher Milne, 1979 ↩
The Enchanted Places by Christopher Milne, 1974 ↩
Evening News article, reprinted in The Author, April, 1926 ↩

My Book Journal

A few years ago, I stopped working at a Proper Job* and on my final day, my colleagues had a little party and presented me with a farewell gift – a lovely silver pen and a blank journal. I’d just had my first novel accepted for publication and my colleagues said I could use the pen and book to write my next novel. It was a lovely idea, and in fact, I did use the pen to take notes for A Brief History of Montmaray (and indeed, I still use that pen nearly every day, because it really is a very nice pen, of exactly the right size and weight and ink colour to suit my tastes). But as for the blank journal – well, I type my novels on a computer, and when I take research notes, they’re scribbled on cheap lecture pads and technicoloured Post-It notes. I couldn’t imagine writing a novel (with all the crossing-out and page-tearing-out that that involves) in a beautiful journal with gilt-edged pages, decorated with a detail from a Charles Rennie Mackintosh painting**.

The book was simply too pretty to sully with my scribblings, so it sat in a cupboard for a couple of years.

However, at the start of 2011, I decided it would be handy to keep a record of all the books I read and to make brief notes on the books I found interesting (either interestingly good or interestingly bad). I suppose I could have just joined Goodreads or LibraryThing, as everyone else does, but I wanted to keep my notes private. I considered setting up some sort of spreadsheet on my computer, but that sounded too much like hard work. And then I remembered my ‘Blank Note Book’.

Readers, it is blank no more.

Note: Photo is artfully blurred so you can’t see what I wrote about Insignificant Others and Dead Until Dark – although I did enjoy both those books, for different reasons.

I write down the title and author of each book I read and what I thought of the book. Sometimes I only write a sentence; sometimes I write pages. I often write about the book’s structure and the effectiveness of the literary devices used, because analysing other books helps me to become a better writer. But just as often, my book journal reflects how I was feeling and what was going on in my world at the time I read the book, so I guess it is a bit like a personal diary. The books I really loved get a star, and I use the stars to compile my Favourite Books blog post at the end of each year. Sometimes I also stick in the review that prompted me to try the book in the first place.

At the front of my journal, I keep clippings of book reviews and Post-It notes of titles that have caught my attention. When I start to run out of books to read, I consult these notes and reviews, and track the books down at the library or the bookstore (usually the library, because I am now an impoverished writer lacking a Proper Job). My current To Be Tracked Down book list includes:

The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones
A Few Right Thinking Men by Sulari Gentill
Cold Light, the final book in the Edith Campbell Berry trilogy, by Frank Moorehouse
Backwater War by Peggy Woodford
Lettie Fox by Christina Stead
A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble

There are also quite a few books on my list that have not been treated to very much investigation at all. For example, I have a Post-It note that says ‘Hilary McKay – Casson family?’, which means I haven’t actually got around to looking up the book titles, let alone reserving them from the library. I also got stuck on Patrick Melrose’s novels, because the library catalogue informed me it only had the fourth book in a five-book series. (Does anyone know if I need to read Never Mind/Bad News/Some Hope before Mother’s Milk? Or are the books so depressing that I’ll regret reading any of them?) Still, it’s not as though I have a dearth of reading material at the moment.

Now that I’ve started a book journal, I wish I’d kept a record of all the books I’d ever read. It would be fascinating to see what I thought of The Famous Five and Trixie Belden and What Katy Did and all those other books I loved to pieces (literally) in my early reading years. Or maybe it would just be really embarrassing.

* That is, a job which involved me commuting by train to an office, often while wearing a suit, and having someone else pay me each fortnight and even pay me when I went on holiday or got sick . . . Oh, those were the good old days.
** It’s a detail from Part Seen, Imagined Part (1896), which apparently can be viewed at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow.
*** One day I will figure out how to do proper footnotes in WordPress.

For those of you who keep book journals, I’d also like to remind you that my book giveaway is still open, till the end of the month. You could win a copy of the Vintage Classics edition of A Brief History of Montmaray and then write about it in your journal! (Note: Those who don’t have book journals are also welcome to enter the giveaway.)

Miscellaneous Memoranda

– The National Year of Reading Read This! prize winners have been announced, after attracting lots of fabulously creative entries from young readers. I think my favourite entry was the knitted Wizard of Oz characters by twelve-year-old Lexi, although the papier-mâché model of James and the Giant Peach by Michelle, also twelve years old, was wonderful, too. (Also, I just discovered that ‘papier mâché’ is French for ‘chewed paper’. Thanks so much for telling me that, Oxford Dictionary.)

– Entries in the 2012 John Marsden Prize for Young Australian Writers are now open, with “young writers under the age of 25 [. . .] urged to enter the competition to share in $5,500 in prize money and have the opportunity to be published online and in the December issue of Voiceworks, Express Media’s literary quarterly.” You have until September to enter your short story or poem, with more information here.

– Speaking of young readers and writers, there’s a great new(ish) online magazine for teenage girls called Rookie. I wish magazines like that had existed when I was a teenager. (Sadly, the internet hadn’t even been invented when I was a teenager.)

– There’s an interesting article here by Anthony Horowitz about how book covers end up plastered with glowing endorsements from other writers. I’m currently reading a YA novel by an established US author, and the Cassandra Clare endorsement (“A gorgeously written, chilling atmospheric thriller.” CASSANDRA CLARE, bestselling author of THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS SERIES) takes up more space on the front cover than the name of the book’s author. But do book buyers actually pay any attention to these quotes? As the first commenter on the article says, “Probably the only people who would truly benefit from an author’s endorsement are new or little-read authors – exactly the kind of people who (for completely understandable and rational reasons) are least likely to get them.”

– I recently read two fascinating articles about successful novelists who decided to stop writing (and, presumably, to stop endorsing other authors’ books). “There’s just too much stress on authors,” said Steph Swainston, author of the Castle series. She was unhappy with the pressure from fans and publishers to produce a book a year, and disliked the modern need for authors to be ‘celebrities’ and engage with social media (“The internet is poison to authors”). The other author, Elizabeth Harrower, was less forthcoming about why she stopped writing in 1966:

“It’s not as though she ran out of things to say – ‘there were probably too many things to say’. It’s not as though her work was poorly received – her second novel, The Long Prospect, was described as ranking ‘second only to Voss as a postwar work of Australian literature’. It’s not as though she was busy raising children – she never married and is childless.”

In the end, she simply says, “[I] realised I just can’t be bothered any more.”

– To end on a more positive note, this year The Famous Five celebrate the seventieth anniversary of their first adventure, Five on a Treasure Island. Naturally, the celebratory feast will feature ham sandwiches on crusty bread, hard-boiled eggs, currant buns and lashings of ginger beer.

Shannon asked me about the new book I’m working on, so I composed a long blog post on the subject, complete with jokes and a cool photograph of a turtle. But then I read over it and realised I didn’t feel comfortable revealing that much detail about a writing project that’s at such an early stage, it doesn’t even have a title, let alone a publisher.

So I deleted the post.

But it wasn’t a complete waste of time, because I also realised that writing that post had made me feel more confident about this new book. After I finished The FitzOsbornes at War, I flipped through my mental catalogue of Ideas For Books and decided I needed to write something that would not be the start of a series, would not be a complicated family saga, would not include scenes of heart-rending anguish, and would not require much research. This next book would be fun and easy to write!

Of course, it hasn’t turned out quite the way I’d expected. I’ve spent the past six months compiling a vast folder of notes and diagrams and photocopies, but feel I’ve barely started on the research. It isn’t a complicated family saga, but at the heart of the story is a mystery that requires far more complicated plotting than I’ve ever before attempted. It was supposed to be a stand-alone novel, but I already have ideas for a sequel and I’m not even sure the book would be best described as a ‘novel’. Plus, there’s at least one scene of heart-rending anguish.

But as I wrote the blog post, which was in the form of a dialogue between the two main characters, I realised that I actually knew quite a lot about how the whole thing would fit together. I knew most of the facts I needed to know, and even better, I could see what I still didn’t know and I knew how to find out what I needed. The best part, though, was that as the two characters argued and joked and talked over the top of one another, I could hear their voices in my head just as clearly as I used to hear the FitzOsbornes. I could see the two girls waving their hands about and rolling their eyes at each other – I even laughed out loud at one of their jokes (yes, their joke, not mine). And that’s when I thought that I might actually be able to write this book, and that made me very happy.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t really answer Shannon’s question, but I will say that the book is about science and history, and it’s set in Sydney, and I wrote a bit about it here.

On a slightly different topic, I’ve noticed that a tiny corner of Tumblr has been taken over by some FitzOsborne fans, who have set up a blog devoted to Montmaray. There are some fabulous graphics based on the books, as well as a film trailer that looks so professional that, for a moment, I wondered if I’d absent-mindedly sold the film rights to the BBC, then forgotten about it. However, I think my favourite fannish creation is this post, which sorts the FitzOsborne cousins into Hogwarts Houses and gets it exactly right. It doesn’t include Henry FitzOsborne, but she is obviously in Gryffindor. I’m not sure about Carlos – Hufflepuff or Gryffindor? Aunt Charlotte would simply refuse to let that grubby old hat touch her head, then would stalk out to set up a Thestral racing syndicate (Minister for Magic: But . . . but we can’t permit those creatures to race each other! Half the spectators wouldn’t even be able to see which Thestral won! Aunt C: I shall announce the winner of each race. Now get out of my way, you silly little man.) As for the other characters, Rupert is clearly pure Hufflepuff, but what about Daniel – Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw? Would Julia end up in Slytherin or Gryffindor? Anyway, I love how those characters have wandered out of the books and into the imaginations of some readers. That’s what makes writing so rewarding, when the books take on a life of their own. It makes up for all those times when I was writing the Montmaray books and felt daunted and discouraged and wondered why I kept plodding on. It’s because eventually the books get finished, and they find a reader or two to love them.

And that’s what I keep reminding myself, as I work on this new book.

Regarding Internet Piracy

I’ve been contemplating this topic for a while, but put off blogging about it because . . . well, I suspected it would be a difficult and depressing experience. However, I’ve decided that writing this post as a discussion question, rather than a one-sided rant, might end up being very informative for me. At the very least, it might make me feel less frustrated about the issue.

First, that term ‘piracy’. Perhaps that’s part of the problem? Pirates – either the traditional cutlass-wielding, skull-and-crossbones-flag-waving ones, or the modern, machine-gun-wielding, hostage-taking ones – are violent, murderous thugs. Using the same word for people who illegally download music, movies and books is hyperbole, and it makes illegal downloaders far less likely to take their own crimes seriously. But the thing is, internet piracy IS a crime, and it’s a crime that has victims. It’s just that illegal downloaders (or the people who upload the files in the first place) don’t seem to regard it as a crime, not even a minor crime.

This is where I, a Generation X technophobe with an extremely slow dial-up internet connection, confess my ignorance. I’ve never downloaded a movie, a song or a copyrighted book from the internet – not just because I lack the technological ability, but also because I believe that if I take someone’s creative work, I should pay them for it (assuming they’re asking for payment). To me, ‘don’t steal from other people’ is a basic moral principle, along the same lines as ‘don’t hit other people’. But the recent SOPA* proposal generated lots of online discussion that made me realise that there are many internet users who regard downloading copyrighted material for free as either ‘not really stealing’ or ‘justifiable stealing’. Here are some of the justifications I read:

I’m not hurting anyone if I illegally download movies/music/books. Okay, maybe a few huge multi-national companies will earn a bit less money, but they’re ripping us consumers off, anyway, so they deserve it.

I’ll concentrate on book piracy here, rather than movie and music piracy, because I’m an author. Yes, you are hurting someone when you choose to download a pirated book, instead of buying it. You’re hurting the author. If you’d bought the book, the author would receive some royalties from the sale. This would allow the author to pay her electricity bill and buy some more printer cartridges, so that she could write another book. The publisher would also note that the author had sold some books, so would be more likely to publish the author’s next book. If the author sold lots of books, the publisher might actually sign up the author’s next book before it was even written, and pay the author an advance, which would allow the author to pay both her electricity and her gas bills. This would make her so happy that she might even be able to give up her part-time job(s) and become a full-time writer, so her next book would be written much faster.

Books are too expensive. If they were cheaper, I’d buy them. As it is, I’m forced to download them illegally.

As an avid reader, I have some sympathy for the ‘books are expensive’ viewpoint, but if you can afford a computer and a high-speed internet connection, you can probably afford to buy a paperback every now and again. Most online booksellers sell books at discounted prices, particularly when a new book in a series comes out – for example, the e-book edition of A Brief History of Montmaray was on sale for less than five dollars during April. You can often find bargains in second-hand book shops (yes, I know authors don’t receive royalties when the book is sold a second time, but they did when the book was sold the first time). You can also borrow the book from a library – the library bought the book, so the author gets royalties from that initial sale. (In Australia, there’s also a government scheme that pays authors a small amount of money each year, proportionate to the number of their books in libraries.) There are lots of cheap options for book lovers. And if you truly value books, don’t you expect to pay something for them?

There’s also a reason that books are expensive. A lot of work goes into creating them – not just the author’s work, but the labour of editors, proof-readers, designers and typesetters (even legal advisors, in the case of my books, because I don’t want to be sued for defamation by a real person I’ve put into my novels). Each of these people deserves some compensation for their work. If no-one pays for the book, how will these workers earn any money?

Sometimes I wonder if readers think all writers are as rich as J. K. Rowling. I’m certainly not, and neither are any of the writers I know. That’s okay for me – if the aim of my life was to earn loads of money, I’d do something other than writing. I don’t live a luxurious life. I don’t need a car, or a TV, or a mobile phone, or an iPod, and I don’t need to go on overseas holidays. But I still have to pay my bills and buy food, so I do need some money.

Books should be for everyone to share. The people who run file-sharing websites are doing society a favour, out of the goodness of their hearts.

No, the people who run file-sharing websites are making a fortune from advertising on those sites. They’re doing it to make money, and none of that money goes to the artists, musicians and writers who created that content. There’s plenty of free, legal creative content on the internet, uploaded by creators who want to share their work, and that’s great. For instance, anyone can read my blog posts for free, either here or at blogs where I’ve done guest posts. But when I spend two years writing a novel, I’d really like to get paid some money for it when it’s finally published.

Creators should be flattered that people are illegally downloading their work. It shows how popular the work is and creates a bigger market for the creator’s next work.

Illegal copies of The FitzOsbornes at War were all over the internet a few hours after the book went on sale in Australia. I didn’t feel flattered. I felt depressed that my hard work was being stolen.

I’m flattered if readers write nice comments about my books on their blogs. I’m flattered if readers care enough about my characters that they’re inspired to write Montmaray fanfiction**. I’m flattered if people say they’ll buy my next book because they liked the last one. But I’m never going to feel flattered by people who illegally download my books instead of buying them.

The book/movie/music I want isn’t available where I live. I shouldn’t have to wait six months for it to reach my country. I’m forced to download it illegally.

I’m sympathetic to this viewpoint, too. In a global fandom, it seems unfair that some people get instant access to creative work and are able to discuss it, while others have to wait. But in the case of books, publishers often have good reasons for releasing a book when they do. For example, they might think a book will sell best if it’s released at the start of the school year, or the start of the summer holidays, so the release dates will differ for the United States and Australia. (I know I don’t need to explain this to Australians and New Zealanders, but I’m amazed at the number of Americans who’ll ask how my summer vacation’s going in the middle of July.) Anyway, in the case of books, you don’t have to wait. You can order a (paper) book online and get it within days of the original release date, no matter where you are in the world. If you order from sites like The Book Depository, you won’t even have to pay postage. It’s true that if you want the e-book, you will have to wait till it reaches your territory, due to territorial copyright laws. But don’t penalise the author or the publisher for this – they’re just following the law. (Author Seanan McGuire wrote a post about this recently.)

I wouldn’t upload my favourite e-book to one of those big file-sharing sites, but what’s wrong with me sharing it with my friends? It’s no different to lending them a paperback that I’ve bought.

I don’t have an e-reader, so I’m not sure of the technical details, but some e-books can be legally shared (in a limited way) with friends, and that’s fine, just as some libraries have e-books available to borrow. The problem is when one person sends an illegal copy of an e-book to a friend, and that friend shares the copy with several others, and one of them posts a link to the file on Twitter, so that in the end, several hundred people have read the book for free. That’s quite different to lending a paperback to a friend – in that case, only one person at a time can read it, and probably only half a dozen people, at most, will read the same copy of the book. I think the people involved in this sort of file-sharing are genuinely keen to spread their love of the book, and don’t see it as a large-scale problem. But when illegal downloads of the Montmaray books outnumber sales of the Australian editions, then I have a big problem, and so do my Australian publishers. There is no motivation for them to publish my next book, because they know it won’t sell enough to make them any money.

This whole issue reminds me of an article I read a few weeks ago in the Business section of The Sydney Morning Herald. Marcus Padley wrote about how the stock market depends on ‘integrity’ and he reflected on some conversations about life that he’d had with his teenage children:

“My kids are making some glorious backward steps of their own. There is a new code they have got from someone other than me, and God forbid it should become part of the financial markets. I am referring to the culture of taking things because you can, of exploiting any loophole. This culture says if people are dumb enough to let you take it, it’s not criminal, it’s smart. I blame the internet […] Knowing how to get away with things and getting away with them has become their philosophy and the consequences (lost industries) are too long term to be of concern to them.”

Leaving aside the obvious retort that the “taking things because you can” culture already IS a “part of the financial markets” (hence the Global Financial Crisis), I wondered if there really has been a generational shift in ethics due to the internet. However, I’m reluctant to buy into that ‘young people these days, they’ve got no morals’ attitude, which is why I’d like this blog post to be a question, rather than a statement.

If you have any insights into the issue of illegal book downloading, I would love it if you left a comment below. You can do it anonymously. (I know the comment form asks for your e-mail address, but you can always use a fake one. The only time I ask for valid e-mail addresses is if I’m doing a book giveaway, so that I can contact you if you win.) I’m genuinely interested in understanding more about this issue, because it has significant implications for my life as a professional writer.

Oh, and if you’ve ever bought one of my books – I’m very, very grateful to you.

*I’m not going to discuss SOPA, other than to say that the proposed legislation seemed to take a heavy-handed and probably ineffective approach to the very real problem of internet piracy.

**I think fanfiction is a wonderful and creative thing, but it’s probably best not to tell me about it if you’ve written Montmaray fanfiction. And please don’t try to make money from selling your Montmaray fanfiction, otherwise my publishers could get very cross at you.