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3 posts from May 2010

May 27, 2010

And The Twallenge Winners Are...

Here are the Twallenge winners - and a surprise! We have a Top Three and more. In the democracy of Frank's team, Emma Gibson had votes from everybody. Jon Sadler had enough votes to make it into the Top Three. Much lobbying went behind Heatherhaze, so she's a winner too. And here's the surprise. So many of the team - and the lobbyists - voted for each of JeanLouise Finch's first sentences that we're awarding her an extra prize - in fact, if you want to make a hierarchy of winners, Finch is Number One, Emma Gibson Number Two, Jon Sadler Number Three and HeatherHaze Number four - and each will receive an audiobook of Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show written and read by yours truly.

Thank you everybody - for all your tweets and twitters and good nature and excellent lines - I wish there could have been more prizes but I'm only a poor struggling author like the rest of you! 

@jeanlouisefinch Dad was only halfway through his first scotch and he was already crying.

@jeanlouisefinch Edward Witworth went to Yale and he did not wear it lightly.

@ealvarezgibson She was out swimming the night Carrickton burned.

@JON_SADLER The legend about a century old private sanatorium hidden deep in the Jungfrau was probably just that, but I had to be sure he was dead

@HeatherHaze Cries of joy erupted as the last lotto ball came up on TV. We just won $40 million, and all I could think of was, "Oh God, not again."

May 25, 2010

Top Ten Entries in My Writing Twallenge

Midnight oil by the gallon, pounds of candles burned at both ends, teeth gnashed down to the root canals, brains cudgeled with baseball bats (Frank's Team says: "OK - that's enough - we get it") I've finally chosen my Top Ten entries in the Twallenge.

Remember what the contest required? That you write the first line of a novel I would want to read. Some of the best entries came from Ben Goodwin - who is automatically and TOTALLY disqualified, because he, as a member of the Team, helped design the Twallenge. But he'd now better hustle and write the novels whose first lines he entered:- "You don't know me, but your children call me 'Mr. O.'" And - "On the occasion of our second wedding anniversary, I presented her with a baby giraffe."

Here are the non-disqualified, that is to say eligible, Top Ten, from which I will go on to choose the Winning Three, each of whom will be sent an audiobook of Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show, read by the Author (that'd be me).

Much though I like autocracy (my own, naturally), I love democracy more, so please weigh in and try to influence my decisions in the comments below!

@VisceralWriting: You're going to commune with a centuries-dead ghost, take him by his poets balls and castrate him?

@PauletteJaxton Celeste licked a drop of blood from the corner of her mouth and smeared it across her lips. Then she smiled at the King and spat blood

@HeatherHaze Cries of joy erupted as the last lotto ball came up on TV. We just won $40 million, and all I could think of was, "Oh God, not again."

@jeanlouisefinch Dad was only halfway through his first scotch and he was already crying.

@JON_SADLER The legend about a century old private sanatorium hidden deep in the Jungfrau was probably just that, but I had to be sure he was dead

@ealvarezgibson She was out swimming the night Carrickton burned.

@TamsynTweetie I knew it was time to move on when a tramp peed on my uggs.

@jeanlouisefinch Edward Witworth went to Yale and he did not wear it lightly.

@theJoeGriffin Life is a serious of blissfully uneventful stretches in between moments of humiliation.

@ShirtnTie Alfredo's situation was hopeless. She was his soulmate. Their love was boundless. Yet he didn't flinch as he pulled the trigger.

May 17, 2010

The Writer's Writer

The death of the English novelist, Alan Sillitoe, aged 82, has robbed all professional authors of a superb role model. Although famous in his thirties for the novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and the short story, The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner, Sillitoe didn’t step off his own chosen path and pursue that fame; he stayed at his workbench, kept his head down and wrote novels, short stories, plays, poems, essays, memoirs and English/Spanish translations in the worlds of Shakespeare and Chopin – an enormous output and exemplary energy.

I had the pleasure of interviewing him more than once for the BBC. Warnings preceded him, from the broadcasting and publishing worlds: “He’s difficult,” they said; he’ll bite your face off if you ask him about having been an Angry Young Man; you won’t get a word out of him – he’s so taciturn; he’s a class warrior; don’t even mention Albert Finney  (who starred in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) – and so forth.

None of this came to pass. He arrived prepared and co-operative. I didn’t find him prickly or abrupt – in fact, he remains one of the most generous interviewees of the 3,500 or so writers that I’ve interviewed. Quiet, thoughtful, neatly and mutedly dressed, he put his head to one side when listening to a question, and then settled himself with an air of eagerness, almost rubbing his hands, when the time came to answer it.

I shall remember him principally as among of those writers who falls into the mode of “teacher.” For one of the interviews, my colleagues and I had asked him to choose and muse upon a book that had proven especially important to him, and he chose The Ragged-Trousered Philantropists, by Robert Tressell, a work of thinly disguised fiction set in the poverty-stricken lower working classes of Britain in the nineteen-teens. In this choice, of course, Sillitoe was sewing his own politics on his sleeve like a chevron.

Yet his passion for Tressell’s emphatic socialism waned like the moon before the dawn when he began to talk about writing, and what it can do, and how it must be done. I recall him saying, “The effort must never waver. It’s all about being truthful, and you must experiment, and you must change and duck and dive into every kind of written form to find ways of making truthful content.” Or words to that effect.

And he told me a story that I still repeat when speaking in public about the power of the creative process. He was writing a novel called The Death of William Posters, published in 1965, and taking its title from that well-known warning, “Bill Posters Shall be Prosecuted."

“Things,” he said, ”got out of hand.” His protagonist falls in love with a local nurse, and moves in with her. One weekend, they have an argument, the character storms out, slams the door, and goes down the pub, where he meets two other characters - whom Sillitoe had to fight all the way to stop them taking over the novel!

Alan Sillitoe is a loss, but he left a lot behind, the fruits of his quietly-conducted, powerful, insistent and completely professional career.