It's not every literary festival that can boast not only two fifteenth birthdays, but also two birthday cakes: but Durham has always been special! Writers' News magazine ("news you can use") celebrated its fifteenth birthday by bringing three of its leading contributors, plus a special guest, to Durham to discuss and explore the challenges of getting different types of writing into print. The panel brought together three very experienced writers (Writers' News contributors Judith Spelman, Alison Chisholm and Jean Saunders) and one newly-published but very high-profile novelist (Susanna Clarke) and asked them to recount their contrasting experiences.
Jean Saunders - also known as Rowena Summers, Rachel Moore and a number of others (including Cathy and Claire of Jackie magazine's problem page) - began with the ambition of writing short stories for magazines. Her approach was very methodical: she bought a copy of Teach Yourself Writing for Pleasure and Profit, and set out to analyse published short stories, counting the number of words and measuring the proportion of dialogue to narrative. Her first story was rejected, but her second was accepted by Red Star Weekly and with this encouragement she resolved to write a story every week: but her next forty stories (one a week for ten whole months) were rejected. At least the rejection slips now began to include words of advice, and she learned that while her plotting was weak, her characterisation was good. The breakthrough came when publishers DC Thomson started to send her sheets of plots to be written up under the pseudonyms of "regular contributors" Mother Machree and Doctor Grant. She moved on to Jackie magazine, writing "readers experiences", Cathy and Claire's problem page and occasionally the horoscope column as well (and she recommends to would-be writers the exercise of composing a brief prediction for each of the twelve signs of the zodiac!). Eventually, with 600 short stories behind her, she decided that she had overcome her difficulties with plotting and that it was time to write a novel - she has now written over ninety!
Judith Spelman's background was somewhat different; she had always written, but had had no guidance, and a less methodical approach than that of Jean Saunders. She had written short stories, and had some but not many of them published. She had been involved with Writers' News since the earliest days of its foundation by David St John Thomas of publishers David and Charles. "I also edit a house journal for Weetabix!", she said, and encouraged other writers to be equally flexible:"Always say yes when you're asked if you can do something. However, she recognised that not everyone who writes will want to adopt this approach; writing may be something that everybody needs to do at some time, but not everybody needs to be published - there is nothing wrong with writing simply for your own pleasure.
Alison Chisholm claimed that she felt like a fraud among the "real writers": she is a poet. She was not one of those writers who had written since they were young; nor had she been a bookish child. But from an early age she had found poetry magical; she particularly remembered being given Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses by an uncle. She married at eighteen, and had children by the time she was twenty: and at twenty she also sold her first poem: it was eleven words long, and she was paid £2 for it. It was another twenty years before she sold a poem again for such a price, but it had got her hooked, and she started submitting readers' letters to magazines. This led her, too, into the world of DC Thomson - as a writer of "experience pieces" for the Dundee Courier she had the thrill of receiving DC Thomson Christmas cards with pictures of Desperate Dan and other stars!
Susanna Clarke's journey to publication was different again. Her father was a Methodist minister, and throughout her childhood, his work had meant constant moves for the family; books had been a constant on which she could rely. By her early teens she knew she wanted to be a writer. But unlike the previous speakers, she had taken a day job, and attempted to write a novel in her spare time. She had been a member of writing groups, and found this was useful, but only up to a certain point: they were geared to working on material which could be read out in five or ten minute chunks, and she learned to produce this, but her weakness was structure, with which this process could not help.
In 1992, she was teaching English in Bilbao. She had abandoned a novel about two angels in Liverpool, and was working on a detective novel (which she now dismisses as "very bad" because it had no plot - which in this genre is a major defect!). She was on the point of giving up; but, falling ill and reaching for a large book to see her through her convalescence, she rediscovered The Lord of the Rings - and fell in love.
She returned to England, to her parents' home - which by now was in Blackhall Rocks, in a house with views extending over the sea for move than 180 degrees around - and began to write about magic. This was the start of the book which eventually became the massive, and highly praised, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, published in September 2004. Asked whether that north-eastern origin has left traces in the finished book, she replies firmly that it has; the England of the book consists of two kingdoms, with Newcastle as the capital of the magical Raven King; some place names have been given even more exotic locations: Pity Me is now in Faerie.
He resumed his extravagant praises of Stephen's beauty, dignified countenance and elegant dancing - all of which he seemed to consider the chief qualifications for the ruler of a vast kingdom in Faerie - and he began to speculate upon which kingdom would suit Stephen best. "Untold-Blessings is a fine place, with dark, impenetrable forests, lonely mountains and uncrossable seas. It has the advantage of being without a ruler at present - but then it has the disadvantage that there are twenty-six other claimants already and you would be plunged straightaway into the middle of a bloody civil war - which perhaps you would not care for? Then there is the Dukedom of Pity-Me. The present Duke has no friends to speak of. Oh, but I could not bear to see any friend of mine ruler of such a miserable little place as Pity-Me!"
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
Susanna Clarke
Yet hers is not a story of a long and gradual climb towards recognition; the difficult bit was writing the book. When it was close enough to completion for her to consider publication, she drew up a list of four agents, and sent them each the first three chapters, a synopsis and a covering letter, and she recommended this procedure to any aspiring novelist. She had been accepted (eventually) by her first choice of agent. He sent the book to three possible publishers, two of whom had turned it down, but Bloomsbury had accepted: presumably, as J.K. Rowling's publishers, they were not put off by the presence of magic in the book.
One last word from Susanna Clarke: passing the Festival bookstall on her way to cut the Writers' News birthday cake, she noticed the Festival bookplate: "Oh,", she said, "you have a Bryan Talbot bookplate; I'm in one of his books!" So here, with Bryan Talbot's permission, is Susanna Clarke as she appears in his Heart of Empire - and standing behind her is fellow Festival guest, Iain Banks.
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Last update: 3rd November 2004