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This book was first published in 2003, and much has changed in the publishing world since then. It may no longer be true, for instance, that Publisher A is owned by Publisher B, as I say it is. But the principles which are expounded in this book remain just as valid as ever, so I have not revised much for this 2011 ebook edition. I have simply added a few notes to reflect recent developments. This is particularly true of Chapter 8, which deals with the problem of how to find a market for what you have written. The sudden increase in sales of ebook readers such as the Kindle and iPad means that the opportunities for writers are increasing and changing on an almost daily basis. It still isn’t easy for a writer to find readers, and to make any money, but it’s a lot easier than it used to be.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

‘If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.’ Logan Pearsall Smith

WRITING IS AN activity which can seriously damage your health. It can consume huge amounts of time and energy, and it can lead to frustration, rage, and bitterness. The overall purpose of this book is therefore to protect and preserve the sanity of anyone who is unfortunate enough to be afflicted with the ambition to write.

As the title implies, I shall tell you the truth about writing – the truth about your chances of success when you bang your head against the brick wall of publishers’ indifference. As is often the case, the truth does not make for comfortable reading, but the fact that this book does not pull any punches is what makes it valuable to you, the Reader, because most books about writing don’t tell you the truth at all. Instead, they lead you to believe that success – in the form of money, fame and literary prizes – lies just down the road, and that all you have to do is pay a tuppenny bus fare and you will arrive there almost at once.

Unfortunately, life is not like that, and I have no intention of painting a misleading picture. The authors of other books for writers may be encouraging, cheerful, and full of hope and optimism; I, on the other hand, will be gloomy, pessimistic, and cynical. But I will, at least, be telling you the truth.

The book is aimed principally at those who intend to write novels, but there is much in it which will be useful to those working in the theatre, television, film, or radio.

With any luck, once you understand what an unrewarding and frustrating business writing is, you may abandon all thought of continuing, and take up something sensible, such as making quilts, or breeding budgerigars. But I doubt it, because most writers are, more or less by definition, completely crackers. They are people who are congenitally incapable of looking a fact in the face and recognising it for what it is. And I speak as someone who has been at it for nearly fifty years, so I should know.

The structure of the book

The book is arranged in nine main chapters.

The first chapter considers the possible rewards of writing – money, fame, literary reputation, and the freedom to ‘express yourself’; and the second chapter explains how likely it is that you will obtain any of these rewards. (Not very likely at all, actually.) These first two chapters are, in short, a crash course in a skill which writers find hard to master: clear thinking.

If, after reading these introductory chapters, you are still suffused by the ill-advised ambition to write, Chapter 3 explains how to decide what it is that you personally hope to achieve through writing. It helps you to determine your own set of aims and ambitions; these, in turn, ought to determine what sort of books or scripts you write.

Chapter 4 describes how the modern publishing industry works, if ‘works’ is not too grandiose a term to use. ‘Staggers along’ might be a more appropriate description of how the publishing industry actually operates. Of all the UK media, the book world is the one I know best, and hence I use publishing as an example of the way in which writers are generally regarded and treated. The situation in other media, such as television, the theatre, radio, and film, is not much different.

The fifth chapter is provided for those who are gluttons for punishment. If, in defiance of common sense, you are still determined to write a novel or a play, this chapter is designed to make sure that you have a clear concept of precisely what you are trying to do – or rather, what you should be trying to do. The thrust of the chapter is to argue that what writers are selling is emotion. To this end I provide a summary of what little scientific knowledge there is on the subject of emotion, and I explain how this information can be put to practical use.

Chapters 6 and 7 are thoroughly down to earth, and focus on the practical problems of finding sufficient time and energy to complete your project. You will often come across people who would definitely write a book if only they had the time and energy, and after reading these two chapters they will no longer have any excuses.

The penultimate chapter provides some valuable advice on how to sell your work, or at least on how to get it before the public. The problem of selling your work is normally glossed over by those who write about writing. They tend to imply that it is simply a matter of putting a typescript into an envelope and sending it off to a publisher or producer, who will open it, read it at once, and weep tears of gratitude that you should have chosen her as the recipient of your wonderful, fabulous, incomparable masterpiece. However, since the whole point of this book is to get across to you that such is not likely to be the reaction to your work, this chapter attempts to suggest a few ways forward after you have, inevitably, exhausted all the orthodox avenues.

Finally, Chapter 9 provides what every purchaser of a book on writing is looking for: the secret of success. In this case the secret of success is expressed in mathematical terms! Wow! I give you a scientific formula, no less, one which explains exactly what it is that makes a writer a success overnight! Hot damn. If that isn’t worth the price of the book, all on its own, then I don’t know what would be. And I am assuming of course that you did buy the book with your own money, and not do something sneaky such as borrowing it from a library. In any event, even if you did borrow the book, you will certainly want to buy a copy after reading this chapter, so that you can refer to it from time to time.

Following the last proper chapter, there is a brief envoi, followed by a list of axioms which you would do well to bear in mind.

Conventions adopted

I suppose an introduction would not be complete without a few boring words about the conventions adopted, sources of information, acknowledgements for help given, et cetera, et cetera.

One recent book on publishing, by a female literary agent, was marred – for me at least – by her desperate attempt to avoid using either a male or female pronoun. The lady didn’t want to seem sexist, you see. This desire led her to write sentences such as ‘An author should send their manuscript....’ Oh dear.

In this book I have recognised that there are lots of women writers, and numerous women working in publishing and the other media, and so I normally use ‘she’ and ‘her’ quite freely, as appropriate.

Where I give examples of particularly villainous behaviour by publishers and their kin, I shall refer to the perpetrator as a man, on the well-known principle that all men are bastards. Exceptions may arise when relating specific incidents, from my personal experience, which involved a woman.

Speaking of personal experience, I have, when describing incidents from own career, avoided naming and shaming incompetent individuals and/or the ghastly firms they work for. Though I must say I was mightily tempted. My decision is based not so much on moral grounds as on the knowledge that publishing is such a fast-moving business that any individuals named would probably have been long gone from the company in question by the time you read this book. They may even have been long gone from publishing altogether.

My merciful decision not to be rude to any named individuals (or companies) does not mean that I intend to be mealy-mouthed. True, I am an Englishman, and was therefore brought up to be polite to everyone. I was educated in a culture in which to say ‘I’m afraid I can’t quite agree with you on that’ meant ‘I shall fight to the death to prevent you achieving your aims.’ But, for the purposes of this book, I have forced myself to abandon that old-fashioned approach. In these pages, what I have to say will be set out in robust and forthright terms. This may offend some readers, but it will not, I promise, leave you in any doubt about what I am thinking. A book which presented a blurred picture of the realities of the writing life would in any case not be worth reading.

Since this is not an academic book I have not littered the text with footnotes, giving the source of every statement. You may be assured, however, that all the facts, figures and anecdotes have appeared in print somewhere, if they are not obviously drawn from my own memory. Over the past forty years or so I have accumulated a considerable pile of press cuttings and quotations, many of which are incorporated in the text.

It is also customary to give a word of thanks to all those who have helped the author in completing his book. So, thanks to everyone concerned. But all the hard work, just in case you’re in any doubt, was mine.

CHAPTER 1. WHAT DO WRITERS WANT?

THE FIRST THREE chapters of this book are designed to help you to decide whether you really want to be a writer at all. They are intended to enable you to identify the possible benefits of a writing career (Chapter 1); to give you a clear picture of how likely you are, in practice, to be able to enjoy any of those benefits (Chapter 2); and to provide you with a method for deciding, if you really want to set out into the unknown, which direction to head in (Chapter 3).

This first chapter deals with the question of exactly what it is that writers hope to get out of their work. If we cut through all the flimflam and waffle, all the mumbling and head-scratching and postmodernist twaddle, what can we say about what writers are aiming for? What, to paraphrase Freud, do writers want?

Broadly speaking, most writers will tell you that they want one of four things: money; fame; literary reputation; or simply the satisfaction of ‘expressing themselves’. Some writers want all of these at once. So let us begin by looking at these four potential benefits.

Since I am an Englishman, many of the examples referred to in the text are drawn from a UK context; but the principles behind the examples will remain the same whether you are based in the USA, Japan, Australia, or South Africa.

Money

The earnings of the few

If you keep your eyes open you will regularly read press reports about writers who have been paid substantial sums of money for their latest books or scripts. For one thing, a big-money contract provides a form of free publicity, though such press stories can backfire.

Here are a few examples of big-money newspaper reports, drawn pretty much at random from the past twenty-five years or so.

Back in 1977, The Sunday Times reported that St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London had lost a trainee nurse. The paperback rights to Colleen McCullough’s second novel, The Thorn Birds, had just been sold for 1,117,000 pounds. The book had taken her eight weeks to write. Miss McCullough promptly resigned from her nursing post and became a full-time writer.

In 1996, the British book-trade magazine The Bookseller stated that the American thriller writer James Patterson had been ‘snatched’ from the publishing firm of Harper-Collins by another publisher, Headline. The attraction was a four-book contract worth a seven-figure sum, that is to say over 1 million pounds.

Patterson is an interesting case because when he signed that particular contract he was still only a part-time writer; he spent most of his working day in New York as chairman of J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency. He was said to write his books by getting up early and putting in a couple of hours before breakfast. It seems, therefore, that in some instances you can earn considerable sums of money in your spare time.

Twenty years or so after Colleen McCullough, we find that another young lady was doing something similar. Jenn Crowell was aged 17 when she wrote her debut novel, Necessary Madness. Hodder and Stoughton paid her 500,000 pounds, just for the British rights. The American rights were bought separately.

Incidentally, this book does not seem to have sold very well, at least in the UK. It does not appear on the relevant year’s list of the 100 biggest-selling paperbacks, which must have been a disappointment to the publisher.

[2011 note: Jenn Crowell seems to have become one of those unfortunate casualties of the brutal world of publishing. Her first book, for which so much was paid, received some good reviews but sales clearly did not justify the huge advance. A second novel followed in 2002. But whatever else Ms Crowell may have become, she has not developed into the author of a string of big fat hits. A case, I suspect, of too much too soon.]

Next we come to the famous Mr Martin Amis. In 1995 HarperCollins paid Mr Amis 460,000 pounds (some reports put it at a round half-million) for his novel The Information, plus a book of short stories.

This deal attracted enormous press comment at the time. Many publishing insiders regarded the sum as an unrealistic amount for a book by a writer who was much admired by the highbrow literary critics but who had not so far proved himself to be very commercial.

The doubters seem to have been right. Despite all the interviews and acres of free publicity in the press, not to mention the usual advertising campaign, The Information was another book which didn’t sell very well – or at least, not well enough to earn back its massive advance. According to the Financial Times, 30,000 copies were sold in hardback, and The Guardian’s list of big paperback sellers in 1996 had it at 94th place with 116,000 copies sold. These would be splendid figures for an unknown writer, but for a publisher who has paid half a million they are probably not good enough.

At the end of 1996, Amis parted company with Harper-Collins and signed a new contract with his old publisher, Cape. Despite Amis’s track record with HarperCollins, this new contract was reportedly worth 1 million pounds for four novels which were yet to be written, plus the paperback rights to his existing books. So it seems that you can still find a publisher who is optimistic enough to offer you a big-money contract even if your previous books didn’t sell as well as was hoped.

Not surprisingly, some of the novelists who write more obviously commercial fiction are also making huge sums of money. Take Danielle Steel, for example. For at least fifteen years she has produced two books a year, all of which have featured in the hardback and paperback bestseller lists in both the UK and the USA (and, I would guess, other countries as well).

In 1983 (to pick a random year) Danielle Steel had three books in the year’s list of UK paperback bestsellers, placed 15th, 17th, and 21st respectively. In 1996 she had two, placed 15th and 22nd. At a conservative estimate, each of the 1996 books must have made her 150,000 pounds in the UK market alone.

Other novelists who have received massive payments for novels in recent years include Douglas Adams, Michael Cordy, Robert Mawson, and Michael Hoeye. And, on the very day I was writing this section, The Bookseller carried a report that Lady Georgia Byng had secured a 1-million-pound deal for her children’s book, Molly Moon’s Incredible Book of Hypnotism. She will be the next J.K. Rowling, says The Bookseller. Well, we will see. [Note added 2011: The Bookseller prediction was made in 2003, and she hasn’t done so far. Oh, and when I just looked her up, I discovered that Georgia Byng is the the elder sister of publisher Jamie Byng of Canongate Books. It never hurts to know someone in the business.]

Writers in other fields, besides fiction, also produce work which proves to be very rewarding in financial terms.

In 1990 Brian Friel wrote a hit stage play called Dancing at Lughnasa. At one time there were 17 productions of it running in various parts of the world, including one on Broadway and another in the West End; if, in that particularly successful year, Mr Friel’s gross income came to less than 1 million pounds, I would be very surprised.

Alan Ayckbourn is another writer who has had a constant stream of hits passing through the West End of London in the last thirty years. And although Noel Coward is long since dead, his estate must still receive substantial sums from the many revivals of his plays.

Hollywood, of course, has for decades been seen as a source of vast sums of money for writers. To give but one example, Olivia Goldsmith reported in a 2001 interview that she had not made much money out of the movie sale of her first novel, The First Wives Club, but she was paid 380,000 pounds for writing the screenplay for The Switch in 1995.

Joe Esterhas was reportedly paid 3 million dollars for writing Basic Instinct and another 3 million (or 5), depending who you believe) for Showgirls.

Finally in this review of success stories, let me tell you a story about a man who made a lot of money as a writer without ever becoming well known. Some twenty-plus years ago, a schoolteacher friend of mine decided to co-operate with two colleagues in writing a series of textbooks, designed for use in secondary schools. After putting forward some proposals, the three men were offered a contract by a major publisher, but they weren’t quite convinced that there was any real money in the job.

To set their minds at rest, the publisher sent them to see his star author, a man who wrote books for foreign students who wanted to learn English.

One of the first questions which the three visitors asked this author was about the money he made.

‘Oh yes,’ said the unknown author, ‘writing textbooks does pay quite well.’

To prove the point, he showed them his income-tax bill for the previous half-year (and remember that this was more than twenty years ago). He was paying, in a half-year, over 100,000 pounds in tax. His pre-tax income was enormous.

My friend and his two colleagues went home and started work on their first textbook that very night.

The earnings of the majority

Unfortunately, those writers who earn large sums of money from their work are definitely in the minority, and it is now time to come down to earth.

Irwin Shaw was a novelist, and several of his books were filmed with some very starry names in the casts (e.g. Marlon Brando in The Young Lions). Irwin was once talking to an insurance man, and he mentioned that he was a writer.

‘Yes,’ said the insurance man, ‘but what do you do for a living?’

This response was by no means unreasonable, because most writers earn very modest incomes from their work. It would be extremely unwise to assume that you yourself are going to be an exception to that rule. In your ordinary everyday life, you do not make assumptions which fly in the face of common sense. Every day, a few people are killed on the roads, but, when you get into your car to drive to the supermarket, you do not believe that you will be among them.

From time to time, various authors’ groups carry out surveys of their members’ earnings. Successive surveys by the Society of Authors show that there is always a big gap between the ‘golden nucleus of high earners’ and the majority of authors. Most authors receive ‘little more than a token income from their work.’

The Society of Authors survey published in June 2000 showed that 75% of its 7,000 members earned less than the national average wage.

A similar enquiry into writers’ incomes was carried out in the USA by the Authors Guild. The Guild’s conclusion was that ‘most book authors can’t begin to make ends meet from their writing alone.’

A quarter of the writers who responded to the Guild survey reported that they earned sums which can only be described as small change. Not surprisingly, only 5% of the respondents were able to write full-time; the rest depended on other jobs, such as teaching or journalism.

Not even winning a prestigious literary prize does much for your income. The Authors Guild found that 40% of award winners still earned less than a living wage.

Other reports also confirm that a high literary reputation does not generate sales. For example, The Prince by Richard Koster was acclaimed by Life magazine as ‘perhaps the most extraordinary first novel ever written by an American.’ It sold only 3,000 copies, and 900 of those were bought by the author.

The Hollywood Writers Guild once asked for details of its members’ income and found that two thirds of them were making less than 1,000 dollars a year. In fact, the top five executives in Hollywood earned more, in total, than the whole 9,000 members of the Writers Guild put together.

The California branch of the screenwriters’ union discovered that, over a ten-year period, more millionaires had been created by winning the state lottery than from screenwriting! To be precise, 1,333 people had won lottery jackpots of a million dollars or more, while only 393 people had made a million dollars from their film scripts.

As an aside, you may draw some comfort from the fact that those who are involved in the management side of the entertainment media aren’t usually doing much better.

For instance, it has been estimated that, out of every five plays put on in the West End of London, three lose money, one breaks even, and one makes a profit. So, despite the obvious success of shows such as Cats, theatre producers have not yet found the route to easy money. One such producer told me, ‘I made a quarter of a million quite quickly, and lost it quite slowly.’ I certainly wouldn’t advise you to invest in theatrical productions.

In publishing, the simple fact is that many of the books which are published with such high hopes end up by selling well under a thousand copies.

I was recently involved in helping a distinguished civil servant to get his autobiography published. It eventually sold 400 copies, and the publisher regarded this as a success. The book did not, of course, make any money for its author, but he had the satisfaction of being able to pass on the lessons that he had learnt in his long career.

For a number of years I was the head of an academic publishing operation, and our most successful publication sold only 800 copies. One of our books sold less than 100, but fortunately we had arranged in advance for a sponsor to cover the loss.

Finally, a couple of cautionary tales.

One writer who is exactly my own age (I won’t name him because he evidently has enough problems already) had a big success with a novel in the late 1960s. It was given five-star reviews in all the right places, described as ‘sensitive’, a ‘reflection of our troubled times’ and all the rest of it. A successful film version was made; it was adapted into a play for the stage; and the book was adopted as a text for teaching in schools. Unfortunately this author never seems to have written anything else, and recently, thirty years after his initial success, The Times reported that he was bankrupt.

Here is another story of a dead career. In the summer 1997 issue of The Author, Ursula Holden described how her time as a novelist began and ended. Her first book was published in 1975. She received an advance payment of 30 pounds. Nine more novels were published between 1975 and 1991. All were well received by the critics, but in 1991 her publishers told her that they could not carry on: her books were simply not making money.

Ursula has continued to write. She has produced four more books, and her agent continues to offer them. But now rave rejections (‘we love it but it won’t sell’) have taken the place of rave reviews.

The novelist Alan Sillitoe tells the story of how his father, a tough old coal-miner, reacted when he saw his son’s first novel. He hefted it in his hand for a moment, and then said: ‘By God, lad, you’ll never need to work again!’

Not true for most people, I’m afraid.

The conclusion to be drawn from the facts set out in this section could not be clearer or simpler. It is that, even if you do succeed in having your work presented to the public, you are statistically unlikely to make any significant money out of it – significant in the sense that it will have a dramatic impact on your way of life.

It’s not like winning the lottery.

Fame

This section examines the second possible benefit which can arise from a career as a writer: becoming famous.

I describe fame as a ‘benefit’ because it is undoubtedly true that many people yearn to achieve fame. They imagine that fame is a benefit. Why?

Well, presumably because they and their friends admire those whose photographs appear regularly in the press and who are often seen on television; they would like to be in that position themselves. Rightly or wrongly, people believe that the famous live better lives. Fame is associated in the public mind with wealth, comfort, glamour, and a release from the drudgery of life as it lived by most of us.

Well, perhaps, though personally I don’t think so.

Another factor which, I suspect, fuels the desire to be famous is a deep-seated sense of inferiority; this makes people eager for praise and admiration.

So, given the fact that many writers, openly or other-wise, have an ambition to be famous, let us consider how effective writing is as a means of achieving that ambition.

We can all name a handful of ‘famous’ authors. In England: Jilly Cooper, Jeffrey Archer, Catherine Cookson, Len Deighton, Martin Amis. In the USA: Danielle Steel, Dean Koontz, Norman Mailer, John Grisham. But how many of these would we recognise in the street? I certainly wouldn’t know Len Deighton or Danielle Steel, and I have kept a close eye on the book world for forty years.

Those writers who are really well known tend to be famous because they have appeared on television regularly, and not only on book programmes. In Jeffrey Archer’s case, a large part of his fame probably derives from his various court cases.

The late Andy Warhol used to say that, in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. As far as writing is concerned, the message seems to be that if you do want to be famous, you will do much better if you try some other route. Why not become a TV quiz-show contestant? Or get a job as a TV news-reader or presenter. Or become, heaven help you, an actor.

But in any case, why bother? Is being famous what you really, really want? Surely, the truth is that being recognised wherever you go is a great inconvenience. You can’t slip into Sainsbury’s without people pestering you for autographs. (In my local Sainsbury’s they threw bread rolls at Camilla Parker Bowles.) And of course if you want to do anything naughty, an informant will immediately be on the phone to the News of the World.

And is it not obvious that extreme fame carries a health risk? Fame attracts every kind and sort of weirdo, some of whom are dangerous; the more physically attractive you are, the more likely you are to have your own personal stalker.

Absolute fame tends towards absolute destruction. Worldwide fame brings with it almost obscene levels of wealth, a circumstance which inevitably seems to involve the employment of large numbers of yes-men and women. You lose touch with reality, as the examples of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe demonstrate.

Some years ago, when I was young and impressionable, I met a man who was about as famous as writers can get, at least in England. We sat at the same dinner table, and I noticed how everyone seemed to take him awfully seriously, though in truth what he had to say was neither original nor interesting. It was extraordinary to see how impressed people were, just by being in this man’s presence, because at the time he was a Really Big Name. Some of the women who were present would clearly have allowed him to take them into the nearest bedroom without a word of protest.

Thirty years later I met him again. He was still famous, though less likely to appear on Any Questions than he had once been. He was divorced, had a string of unsuccessful books behind him, and had a drinking problem.

No, I really don’t recommend fame. And surely the beauty of writing is that you can be very successful, in the sense of making money or winning literary prizes, without the inconvenience of having your face recognised. You don’t even have to use your own name! In England, two of the most widely read women writers, known professionally as Jessica Stirling and Emma Blair, are actually men.

If you really must be famous, you would be well advised to find some simpler and quicker route to the front pages of the newspapers than is available to those who write. Making your name through the hard slog of writing books and scripts is a very long way round the houses.

Literary reputation

Literary reputation is the third of the potential benefits (or alleged benefits) which can be obtained through a writing career. In my opinion, this is another perceived benefit which is actually more of a liability; still, it takes all sorts, so we must have a close look at literary reputation and all that it entails.

What is literary reputation?

Having a literary reputation means that you are known for writing Good Books, i.e. novels which are among The Most Important Books of Our Time. Serious critics identify you as a Someone To Watch. I apologise for all the capital letters, but people who live and work and have their being in this field always tend to sound as if their words are in UPPER CASE. We’re talking meaningful, career-moulding stuff here. So, let’s try to take all this nonsense as seriously as we possibly can.

Literary reputation turns upon the idea that there are two principal sorts of books: good books, and trash.

Back in your schooldays, when the English teacher found you reading a Jilly Cooper romance or one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, what did she say to you?

She said, ‘Why don’t you read a good book, Mary (or George)? Instead of that worthless rubbish.’

Well, teacher must be right, mustn’t she? If she says so, there surely must be a distinction between proper literature on the one hand and garbage on the other. Mustn’t there?

Actually, no. For the most part, the idea that there are good books and bad books, in any absolute sense, is total nonsense, and later on (in Chapter 5, on emotion) I shall explain why.

For the present, let’s just note that there are plenty of people around who think that there is such a thing as a ‘good book’ (or play), that a ‘good judge’ can identify such a piece of work. Furthermore, there is no denying that literary reputation is something, like fame, that many writers strive to achieve. They want their books (or plays) to be admired by highbrow reviewers and they perceive the achievement of literary reputation to be something worth aiming for.

How do you acquire literary reputation?

You acquire a literary reputation when the critics on the staff of highbrow quality newspapers, such as The Times and The Guardian, review your work in glowing terms. And this, I can assure you, does not usually happen without somebody making it happen. Publishers of literary fiction spend a lot of time and energy in softening up the opinion-formers on these leading journals. They send them news of forthcoming masterpieces months in advance, building up a sense of expectation. They take the leading critics out to dinner and introduce them to the author.

Perhaps even more important in establishing a literary reputation are the key weekly or monthly journals which are read by the literary elite.

At one time, a review in The Times Literary Supplement could make or break your reputation, and that weekly journal is still very influential today. There are also much less well-known publications which in any given year will be helpful in establishing your name – the London Review of Books and the Literary Review are two British examples.

If you happen to have written a novel which your publisher regards as ‘serious literary fiction’, and if she decides to make your book a lead title, then every effort will be made to have the book mentioned or featured on such television programmes as BBC2’s Bookmark, BBC1’s Omnibus, and ITV’s South Bank Show – or whatever programmes happen to have replaced these cultural monoliths by the time your book appears. If you are young, attempts will be made to get you listed as one of the ‘Best Young British Novelists’ or something similar.

The reviews of your book, when they appear, will be read by you and your publisher with great attention. Rave reviews in the right media provide instant literary reputation; respectful reviews provide a platform on which a reputation may gradually be built; and even negative reviews may be valuable if they are somehow ‘controversial’ and can be regarded as evidence of originality or daring on your part.

But you can’t have everything

Sorry, darlings, but you cannot reasonably expect to have your literary reputation and the money as well. Implacable rule of the universe.

Yes I know there are exceptions, and let us deal with the exceptions first. Ernest Hemingway, for example, won the Nobel prize for literature (which is as classy as you can get in the literary world). He also made a huge fortune, and he was photographed so often that he was recognised and lionised wherever he went. He had money, fame, and literary reputation. So, at the moment, does Salman Rushdie. But you, dear Reader, are not going to achieve all that. Believe me.

Let me demonstrate the point about the incompatibility of literary reputation and money. Josephine Cox is a British lady who writes what is known in the book trade as ‘women’s fiction’ or sagas. Her novels usually tell the story of a young girl making her way through life against all kinds of adversity. Ms Cox produces, on average, two books a year, and they almost invariably turn up in the list of the 100 bestselling paperbacks of the year. In 1996, for example, Living a Lie was placed 44th, and The Devil You Know came 48th. (Total sales 414,000 copies.)

These books obviously do very well financially, and Ms Cox’s bank manager no doubt knows her name and smiles at her warmly whenever she enters his premises. But what to do the reviewers in the ‘serious’ press think of her?

Not much. In fact, she has been publicly sneered at. The Times condescended to review Living a Lie by Josephine Cox on 16 September 1995. I say condescended because they don’t usually bother to review books of this kind at all. Times readers are not interested in popular fiction, you understand.

Anyway, the review of Living a Lie was not kind. The heading was ‘Truth to tell, it stinks.’ The reviewer began by saying ‘I want to be nice. I want to say that it does not matter that the title is hammy, the characters mere ciphers and the writing laboured and superficial. I want to say that I quite enjoyed this book despite all that. But I cannot, because I did not.’

It gets worse.

‘Cox’s prose is simpering, wishy-washy and full of monstrous clichés…. All behaviour is motivated by simple emotions, like love and hate.’ (The reviewer might have been better advised to write such as love and hate, but let us not quibble.) Ms Cox, says the reviewer, has produced a ‘simplistic fairy-tale. That is fine if you like them, and thousands do; which makes it pretty irrelevant that I do not.’

Quite.

Let’s take an American example. One of the biggest fiction sellers in recent years was The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. American reviewers generally hated it. It was, one said, ‘the worst book in living memory’, and another referred to Waller’s ‘abysmal prose’.

The book’s commercial success was due to word-of-mouth recommendation. People read it, enjoyed it, and told their friends about it.

‘I know people who bought 30 copies,’ says the author. ‘By February 1993 it was at number one in the bestsellers chart and it stayed there for 56 weeks until my second book came out. The New York literati went absolutely ballistic.’

If there’s one thing that the literary ‘experts’ cannot abide, it’s people buying and enjoying a ‘bad’ book. The author of The Bridges of Madison County is quite bitter about ‘the elitist, so-called intelligentsia who seem to think that they are the only intelligent people in the world.’ But he has some consolation. Readers have written to him to say ‘Thank you for changing my life.’

To summarise: we have established that commercially successful books get sneered at and frequently have no literary reputation whatever.

We should now note that the reverse is also normally the case: that is to say, books which are much admired by the intelligentsia do not usually achieve big sales figures. Even Salman Rushdie’s first novel sold only 800 copies in hardback; all the unsold copies had to be pulped.

‘Literature?’ remarked the editor of one American journal, who had learnt the truth the hard way. ‘The stuff just don’t sell. Sometimes you can’t even give it away.’

The origins of literary snobbery

The contention that serious literary fiction is good, and that popular fiction is bad, is in my view a form of snobbery. Like all forms of snobbery it is both unpleasant and indefensible – indefensible in this case because it is founded on confused thinking. But it is, perhaps, just about worth our while to look back and see how this form of snobbery originated.

It largely began, I am sorry to say, in the university where I took my first degree, namely the University of Cambridge.

The study of English literature at university level is a relatively recent phenomenon, and Cambridge was one of the first to give it houseroom. There, the first course in English was devised in 1917.

There was considerable opposition to the proposal for an English degree at the time, and this branch of academic study was viewed with suspicion for some years afterwards. Many Cambridge dons very sensibly held the view that English literature was the possession of all cultured men and women, and that it should at all costs be kept out of the hands of self-appointed ‘experts’. In view of the hideous mess which has resulted from the academic study of literature over the years, one can only say that they were right.

One of the most influential academics at Cambridge was F.R. Leavis (1895-1978). He was, in my opinion, a small-minded petty little man (if you doubt that, read his attack on C.P. Snow), but he was highly influential. Leavis argued that there is a small ‘canon’ (i.e. list) of good books, which includes the works of Jane Austen, George Eliot, some of Dickens, most of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and all of D.H. Lawrence. Everything else is rubbish.

I have simplified Leavis’s conclusions, of course, but not much.

Leavis taught several generations of impressionable undergraduates, and they went out and taught lots of others who ended up sharing the same half-baked opinions. Those who supported Leavis’s views were always very bitter about the fact that Cambridge never made him a Professor. But in my opinion Cambridge’s assessment of Leavis was dead right. The other dons could see perfectly well that he wasn’t of professorial stature.

Leavis’s wife Queenie was, if anything, an even bigger intellectual snob than he was. She wrote a book called Fiction and the Reading Public, which was an analysis of the alleged decline in the quality of the books which people choose to read.

Consciously or unconsciously, Queenie Leavis’s book conveys the impression that only intellectuals can possibly recognise which books are worth reading, and that anybody who enjoys a book which is ‘not worth reading’ is self-evidently a person of no morality, character or intelligence.

Anthony Burgess expressed the official line on this point when he wrote: ‘Very occasionally the best book and the bestseller coincide, but generally the books that make most money are those which lack both style and subtlety and present a grossly over-simplified picture of life. Such books are poor art, and life is too short to bother with any art that is not the best of its kind.’

So there. Those of you who enjoy reading bestsellers can consider your wrist firmly slapped.

None of which would matter very much, except that the descendants of Leavis and his tribe are unfortunately still with us, and when it comes to literary reputation they can make you or break you.

The practical value of literary studies

Before we go any further, I want to caution the embryo novelists among you against being too impressed by the highbrow literary critics. In particular I want to encourage you not to feel intimidated by the output of the ever-growing gang of academics who specialise in teaching Eng. Lit.

It is all too easy to be made to feel inferior by the fact that you simply don’t understand what the Eng. Lit. brigade are talking about. Fear not. The fact is, they don’t know what they’re talking about either. And, to be specific, the practical value of their voluminous output, for the would-be writer, is nil.

If you are interested in writing fiction, you will probably have cast your eye along those shelves in your local library where the academic studies of English literature are to be found. Before long you will have come across books with titles such as Mythical Metaphors in the Modern Novel. Or Solitude and Sexuality in the Work of George Eliot. I have invented these particular two titles, but in the library of any university which has an English department you will find dozens of similar works.

Consider the following statements:

1. Magical realism is the self-conscious departure from the conventions of narrative realism in order to enter and amplify other (diverted) currents of Western literature that flow from the marvellous Greek pastoral and epic traditions to medieval dream visions to the romance and Gothic fictions of the past century.

2. The main theme of the works of Rushdie is the role of the writer as reader. Habermas suggests the use of subcapitalist socialism to attack class divisions. Thus, if Saussurean semiotics holds, we have to choose between postcultural discourse and the capitalist paradigm of consensus. Lyotard uses the term ‘neostructuralist objectivism’ to denote the bridge between sexual identity and narrativity. However, Mark’s model of Saussurean semiotics implies that art serves to exploit the Other.

3. The novel is the privileged arena where languages in conflict can meet, bringing together, in tension and dialogue, not only opposing characters, but also different historical ages, social levels, civilisation and other, dawning realities of human life. In the novel, realities that are normally separated can meet. This encounter reveals that, in dialogue, no one is absolutely right; neither speaker has an absolute hold over history. Myself and the other, as well as the history that both of us are making, still are not. Both are unfinished and so can only continue to be. By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word. Fiction is a harbinger of a multipolar and multicultural world, where no single philosophy, no single belief, no single solution, can shunt aside the extreme wealth of mankind’s cultural heritage.

One could reproduce ten thousand such paragraphs, drawn at random from the shelves of academic libraries.

I think it’s very unlikely that you will have understood the meaning of any of the three passages quoted above, and I would not recommend that you spend much time trying to work out what they do mean. But, in relation to the first sentence of the third quotation, for instance, we might reasonably ask the following questions.

In what sense can the novel possibly be a privileged arena?

How can languages be in conflict? If they are in conflict, how can they meet and bring together, in tension and dialogue, different historical ages – or social levels?

And what is a dawning reality of human life? How would we recognise one if we saw one?

And so on. And if we knew the answers to the questions that I have posed, would it help you and me to write better fiction?

I don’t believe so. In my judgement, those who spend their days studying ‘literature’ have produced very little which is of practical value to those who wish to write fiction – even literary fiction. Most of the output of the Eng. Lit. academics is written not in plain English but in a language called postmodern deconstructed gobbledygook. It is litbabble – the literary equivalent of psychobabble; it is devoid of insight, and pernicious rather than helpful.

And by the way – did you notice anything particularly odd about quotation number 2? If so, give yourself a brownie point. The middle paragraph does not, in fact, come from a book on English literature; it was generated by a machine, the Dada Engine, which is programmed to generate random text from grammars. So, whatever you may think about the first and third quotations, the middle one, I can assure you, is complete gibberish.

Regrettably, the influence of the teachers of Eng. Lit. is far-reaching. It leads to the belief (which used to be common even in commercial publishing firms) that a ‘true artist’ must be alienated from society and must seek not to entertain but to deal with the ‘great issues of our time’. According to this school of thought, the true artist should seek to transform society, effect moral improvements in his audience, and (quite often) demonstrate the futility of existence.

The idea that, to be any good, a book or play has to have highbrow content extends even into the movie business. William Goldman, the Oscar-winning Hollywood script-writer, reported a conversation that he had with the director of Alien 3.

‘Let me explain to you,’ said the director earnestly, ‘the philosophical implications I’m going to put in the movie.’

Goldman tells us: ‘As soon as I heard those words I knew the movie was in deep shit. If I had been the studio head I would have fired the director that day, because once you’re thinking philosophical implications for Alien 3 you know the movie’s going to run over budget (which it did.)’

And the outcome of Alien 3? Well, let’s put it this way. One reviewer (in the Los Angeles Reader) wrote: ‘In space, no one can hear you snore.’

By now you will have gathered that I do not recommend that you aim to achieve literary reputation. To my mind, it is worthless in and of itself. Even if you succeed, all you end up with is the respect of a bunch of people whose opinions, in my view, are usually half-baked and invariably arrogant. Forget ’em.

Expressing yourself

The fourth item on our list of potential benefits to be gained from a writing career was, you will remember, self-expression. To be precise, the real benefit may be defined as the wonderful sense of joy which is experienced by those who lay bare their sensitive souls on paper.

And perhaps you will already sense, from the tone of that opening paragraph, that I am no more impressed by this potential reward for writers’ efforts than I was by the previous one.

At the risk of sounding even grumpier than in the previous section, I have to say that I do not support the idea that it is any business of a writer to express herself. The writer’s task, properly understood, is to create emotion in the reader, or the theatre audience. A writer may, in the course of doing that primary job, succeed in expressing an idea or some feelings of her own, but that is not, ideally, the main purpose of what she is doing.

There are, however, plenty of people who hold a different view.

Some years ago I was involved in a public dispute, conducted in the pages of The Guardian, about the teaching of English.

On the one side there were those like myself (and we were in a minority, as it turned out) who believed that children ought to be taught to spell and punctuate properly; and on the other side there were those (many of them holding positions of authority in the world of education) who thought that spelling and punctuation didn’t matter. What mattered, to this second group, was that children should express themselves. Not to worry if what these children wrote was pretty well incomprehensible. It apparently didn’t matter if the work was badly spelt and lacked punctuation – it was enough, some said, that the children should put their feelings and ideas on to paper.

This belief in the value of expressing your emotions, however clumsily and crudely, is to be found in relation to the grown-up world too. Here it takes the form of an assertion that what matters, above all else, is that the ‘artist’ should in some mysterious way get things off her chest. The said ‘artist’ is of course considered to be far more sensitive and perceptive than ordinary people. And the audience is very much expected to adapt to whatever the creators of these ‘works of art’ choose to produce. The ‘artist’ does not have to bother about making things simple for the reader of her novel; she does not condescend to help the audience to understand what is going on in her play. Dear me no. The artist is much too grand for any of that.

In the visual arts this attitude leads to such activities as filling a room with rubbish and describing the result as a work of art which comments upon the crisis of our time.

In the theatre it leads to plays which would run for eight hours, with speaking parts for 43 actors, and the demand that such plays be put on by the subsidised theatre at the taxpayers’ expense.

And in fiction we get rambling, formless ‘poetic and visionary’ works which generated deep emotion in the author and therefore must – naturally – do the same for the reader. Unless, of course, the reader is too stupid to understand the meaning of it all. As is the case with me, as often as not.

Those who believe in the primacy of self-expression in the arts seem to me to have got it all the wrong way round. The point of ‘works of art’ is not – in my opinion – to make the creator feel good. The point is to create a powerful and deeply satisfying emotion in the audience. It is the audience that needs to be made to feel (and to be made to feel good, at that), particularly if they have paid for the privilege of seeing or reading your work.

This truth – and an eternal, unchanging truth I believe it to be – is well understood in what is normally referred to as show business. In other words, at the vulgar end of the entertainment industry.

‘The show must go on’ is a cry that you will be familiar with. And what does it mean? It means that the performer goes on stage and performs effectively, regardless of what catastrophes may be occurring in her personal and private life.

The comedian may have a temperature of 104, his wife may be having an affair, tomorrow morning he may have to appear in the bankruptcy court – but for the moment, when the curtain goes up, he forgets all that. He goes out and does his duty by the audience. He makes them laugh, and he makes them forget, at least for an hour or two, their own pressing problems.

From time to time I meet people who, when learning that I am a writer, say something like, ‘Oh, I’m working on a book/play/autobiography too. But I’m not really interested in getting it published/produced. I’m just doing it for my own satisfaction.’ Or, to put it another way, they’re telling me that their only concern is to express themselves on paper.

At which point I smile politely and try to change the subject, because I don’t believe a word of what I have just been told.

There may be, somewhere, some eccentric souls who are genuinely working on something for their own satisfaction. If so, we shall never know, because they will never tell us about it. They will write the poem, book, or play, polish it until they are completely content with it, and then put it into a drawer, never to be shown to anyone.

Somewhere, someone may be doing that. But I think it unlikely. And I also think (based on long and weary experience) that I know what is going on in the heads of those who claim that they are only interested in expressing themselves for their own amusement. These people are secretly imagining that they will win the Nobel prize for literature (next year, probably), plus a Hollywood Oscar, and will have lucrative contracts for their next ten books pressed eagerly upon them.

And suppose – just suppose – someone comes up to you and asks you to read their precious book, the one in which they have expressed themselves. Do you jump at the chance? Or would you rather read the latest volume by John Grisham or Rosamunde Pilcher? Would your milkman want to read the product of your self-expression? Would your dentist?

I think we know the answer. As a matter of fact, I don’t even think your own mother would be interested.

The best advice I can give to you, dear Reader, since you have apparently read this far, is that you should forget about expressing yourself, at any rate in the early stages of your writing career.

You may choose to concentrate on self-expression, and then spend a year trying to sell the result, if you wish. That’s your choice. But if, after putting in all that effort, you find that absolutely no one is willing to publish your book or produce your play, don’t come running to me for any sympathy. I shan’t be very interested. Or surprised.

There is one other small point which is worth mentioning. It is this: there is a great deal of satisfaction to be obtained from doing a professional job, and doing it well.

If you can put together a formula-driven romantic novel, say, or a detective story in the classic mould, and be sure in your own mind that it is a good, solid, professional piece of work, then that is a satisfying achievement in itself. And, given the difficulties which you will face in getting even an obviously commercial piece of work published, the satisfaction of creating it may be all the reward you have.

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