Hey, Hack, I F*cked Your Novel!

BTW: 'Songs to Remember' fucking ROOOLS

Ah, yes, perhaps I'm trolling. But still wondering what some actual hacks might think of this sentiment.

Tom Wolfe dissed The Novel in quite an epic fashion before going on to write them.

I guess the question is, really, then, are most hacks just frustrated novelists?

(I sincerely hope that this will x-post with someone actually answering the question.)

Burchill posits that she was a better writer than her contemporaries at the NME because she was a Proper Writer who just happened to get her first job at a music paper. (As opposed to music writers, who were at best, failed musicians, and at worst, failed groupies.)

But are Proper Writers always just novelists in waiting?

During some point in high school, after I had found out the hard way that Being A Vet was actually quite icky and not suitable for a sensitive vegetarian, I decided that I only wanted to Be A Vet because of James Herriott, and that I should Be A Writer instead.

My delighted English Teacher immediately signed me up for a special course at the local newspaper (because obviously, novelists had to support themselves being hacks first). After a week of writing encapsulations of State Capitol politics and purse-snatchings in shopping malls, I decided that Being A Journalist was completely tedious and decided to Be An Artist (or preferably Rock Star) instead. However, the other boy from my school who went on the course became a Proper Journalist and now works for the NY Times or the Associated Press or something respectable like that.

I don't think The Novel is sacrosanct to all journalists. I'd be far more likely to say that the Non-Fictional Expert Tome is sacrosanct.

But are Proper Writers always just novelists in waiting?

I've never read JB's NME stuff, but I doubt she was better than Ian Macdonald or Charles Shaar Murray (or Ian Penman), none of whom were failed novelists. There's nothing inherently superior abt the novel; in fact, only a hundred years ago it was still somewhat non-u. But you might well ask what IS a novel today, given that it's been thoroughly invaded by history, autobiog, etc -- the smooth-flowing narrative having been abandoned to an extent.

I found it all quite inspiring.

Then I remembered he went on to write novels.

(I'd love to write fiction, but I am hampered by a lack of confidence in my writing and because I am a mid-twenties, north London-dwelling, media-job person and as such, I don't think I really have anything original to say.)

Argh - JDI, you know? Just not abt being mid-twenties north, etc. It must be a v private thing, writing a novel. With hackwork I gotta say there's too much second-guessing involved. Will that get past? Is that too highfalutin? Plus the politics. So in a sense yeah, journalism is corrupt form. But I don't doubt fiction eds are any less mercenary than magazine or newspaper eds.

** as far as i know anna is the only person not to have been accused of doing this blog, and she weas the first person to bring it to my attention, so i believe i've hit on something here that's my theory and i'm sticking to it

I entered music journalism because of the primacy that music had in my life as an adolescent and college student, but realised I had the talent and inclination to diversify after only a few months doing it. Many people who enter the profession this way can be somewhat dismayed by the blinkeredness of their colleagues and I was no exception.

I've never had any doubts about my writing talent and have always been noticed and encouraged by editors (in whichever branch of publishing). Whenever I've been working for a publication I've always progressed very quickly from the small pieces they use as a tryout to big features where happy editors don't change a word. My problem novel-wise (the novel offer at 16 has been the first of many) is that I'm totally neurotic about money and I won't write a whole manuscript on spec because the freelance condition is like running to stand still a lot of the time, and doesn't leave the reflection time a good novel needs. And I'm too busy worrying about hand-to-mouth issues to concentrate properly: call it poverty ADD. I've often said if I had an algebra class to ignore and Woolf's room of one's own I'd have an MS in a month.

Anna, the flipside of your 'nothing original to say' argument is that as a young media twentysomething, you have a life to which many readers aspire and therefore an inbuilt readership, whatever the truth of your relationship with bank managers and the like. Whatever you write will be imbued with your idiosyncracies and individuality, so stop worrying about having nothing to say because once you start, things like that just fall into place.

// posted by annabelle@2:38pm

Back to novels.

Go figure.

I do actually know novelists who make a living off what they do. Of course, they live in China, where apparently you can live for a month on the money it takes your average writer to get drunk for one afternoon. Or Brighton, where you can't, but it's cheaper to stay drunken for longer.

I do think that the expectation of a book-deal is crippling to a writer. Both HSA and his mum seem to take this attitude. Both of them very much by rights (DNA and otherwise) should write books, but HSA always claims that he won't do it without an accepted pitch and an advance, because he doesn't want to waste the investment of his time. (And he gets cross at me for not doing anything with the novels I've written.) Novel-writing requires a great deal of up-front investment, both in time and in experience. The people I know who have been successful at it are the ones who have hung around for years on the dole finishing their novels at their leisure. Journalists seem to be so busy pitching that they don't have the time to sit down and write something for the pure pleasure of doing it.

The journalists I've always liked the best were the ones that dragged their own lives into it. Which is, technically, very bad journalism. But these journalists are better at dragging their own lives into their fiction. Perhaps.

HSA's mum was 2 hours late picking HSA up to go off to Wiltshire, so at last, finally, I get to go shopping. Hurrah!

I've known people (including an extreme best-seller) to get commissions based on the promise of a short story, or they're young journos who attract the attention of an agent who then gets them a deal based on three chapters and an outline. In my own case (for an anthology I proposed) I had one phone call, one meeting and one outline and hey presto, deal for two books (I didn't do the second as my nice publisher went to better pastures, fell out with his second replacement and I won't approach him unless I can match harizadieetc). And in the case of long-form non-fiction, you have to do about 20 per cent of the groundwork on spec, and get them a proposal based on that (I'm helping a friend place one now about the British Asian 'story').

It's often said by editors that you need to write a book or be credited as an editor of one to approach the broadsheets with any legitimacy at all, like a calling card that gets you a better class of freelance work. Like Sisyphus with a lump of gold rather than a lump of coal.

This is actually what I'm working towards right now, actually -- and all leads, tips and advice welcomed! With three short novels completed and two fully revised and expanded -- so far, of course, there will easily be more to do -- I'm building on the extremely encouraging feedback I've gotten already as well as the good constructive criticism as well. I have a couple of agent leads lined up for now...

The 'publish a bit as a short story' approach has been suggested, however I have to admit wariness at what seems like a Catch-22 situation of 'get published to get agent/you need an agent to get published,' after the various slush pile stories I have already heard. My freelance nonfiction work, limited as it is in scope, is not going to be enough.

Right now I've been jobhunting because I need some stability other than being in a stable and happy relationship - this neither pays the bills or writes the books for me, I'm afraid. The editor I've been working with almost my whole working life is in the middle of a big Queen Bee phase and it's making me really unproductively angry. Right now it's a tossup between a part-time at AN Other Style Mag and a full-time managing editor position at an art mag where the attraction is working with the editor rather than the publisher. This might be one of those jobs as London buses things, dunno...

You don't have to talk about your own experience, if you don't like. I'd just like some objective discussion of whether or not journalism is "just good experience" while trying to be a novelist, or a career in its own right. So many people talk about it as the former, that it kind of precludes the idea that anyone could be interested in it as the latter!

I mean, what other "career" profession, whatever, in the creative areas, does this sort of transposition occur? I can recall painters like Andy Warhol who had dayjobs in commercial art while trying to be a "proper" artist, but I suspect that's an exception rather than a rule. Perhaps an example is the way composers did this in the past, taught posh brats how to play the piano while writing their symphonies at night.

I dunno. Wish there were more actual hacks on this thread to take the opposite idea, and defend the notion that journalism is an honourable career, and that unlike every actor who longs to "direct" not every journalist secretly wants to write novels. ???

(BTW, good luck with the jobs, Suzy.)

Kate, NEWS. Three buses have sort of come at once. Also potential for lend of Buffy DVD from neighbours. Marathon needed. Plenty of weekend available, so phone me if not at work. Mail still buggered, direct complaints to Mission Controller and my damn service provider and fucking parking attendants in an order of your choosing.

"Call me Matos."

basically i burn off a few brain cells of folks as they head into work. it is not war and peace. thinking otherwise is delusion. journalism at its best is pop art and campy fun. that is what i strive for.

But... but... I protest, are there not other forms of journalisms which are *not* music criticism? What about them? Would you walk up to a war correspondant or political commentator or a financial journalist and tell them that they were not fit to kiss your novel?

Oddly enough, posting here has proved to be my 'journalism' in that sense.

ha ha.

journalism is just informing people of what is happening in the world. the only 'journalism' i rate would be war journalism. i think some v. unique writing comes from putting your life in danger. massive difference from sitting at home and going 'tut' -- i shall write my piece for the guardian now.

though, internet has changed things ALOT. my libertines piece would have been instantly forgotten aboutif on paper. on the internet the reverberations are still continuing.

yeah, prose-wise those guys can't touch the best music crit. their stuff really IS ephemeral. in the main. ineresting to divide criticism from journalism, prolly doesn't hold in practice, but still it's a good angle.

Thanx for the offer, Suzy, but, having packed HSA off to Wiltshire with his mum, I am having a "room of her own" weekend. In theory this means I'm going to lots of writing and recording, but in practise it probably means I'll be on the couch in my knickers eating ice cream and watching Time Team and CSI reruns without complaints.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.