Just heard a very interesting programme on Radio 4, called Sound Advice.

Gyles Brandreth interviewed authors Jake Arnott and Marina Lewycka, and publisher Alan Sampson, of Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Sampson said that W&N get around 3000 unsolicited manuscripts a year and, out of those, 2900 can be discounted in the first page. What grabs his attention is the voice. If it comes out in the first page, he’ll keep reading. As an example, he said he could recognise Arnott’s voice even if he didn’t know who’d written it. (interestingly I was at a talk the other night, given by a Creative Writing tutor who said that, in her opinion, finding your individual voice is the most important thing a writer can do)

Sampson also pointed out the number of successful manuscripts found in a slushpile, including Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, and Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent,

His advice; keep it spare, keep it simple, too many adverbs are bad, and too many new writers use too many words.

On the subject of endings, he said there’s no need to resolve every issue, but it’s essential to create the sense that the main characters have a life going on beyond the end of the novel.

Lewycka (also discovered in a slushpile) talked about the embarrassment of being an unpublished writer (and can't we all relate to that!), and about the excitement she feels when her characters take over the story.

A very interesting and unpretentious discussion on writing and getting published.
Dee

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/progs/listenagain.shtml

Dee, I added the hyperlink copied across from Lammi's thread!

Dee,

I missed the programme but so agree with the points you make. Thanks. I'll follow up Anne's notice for this is the type of advice that we should all heed.
Len

I'll answer your question on your thread, Dee - it's daft to have two going and your outline's really helpful.

I totally agree about the individual voice. It's what strikes me as a reader again and again in the books I enjoy. Such a nebulous thing to explain or define, though!

Thought it was handy to know that even places which say they don't take unsolicited mss do read them.

Thought the advice about paring down was sensible, and not to use "too many" adjectives and adverbs obvious (but then again, how many is too many? Answers on a postcard).

Loved the soundbites about what readers wanted in an ending!

I was also interested in how working/planning methods vary not only from writer to writer, but apparently from novel to novel!

Forgot to add: for me, the best piece of advice I heard in the whole prog was "Write the novel you want to read".

Me too.

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ps - Anna, meant to say, thanks for the link!

'Keep it spare, keep it simple'

I think this is something only a fellow writer would understand - anyone else would be saying, 'whaddayamean, keep it spare, you've got 100,000 words to write'.

After months of writing it is only now that i'm appreciating exactly what this means. Like so many things in life, 'less', in terms of language, can be more.

Casey

What a fantastic programme! More good basic sense talked about the whole business than I've heard in a long time. For almost everything they said I could think of a moment later in a writer's development when it might not be true, but as somewhere to start, it's hard to beat.

Like so many things in life, 'less', in terms of language, can be more.

A lot of the time it's true, and since most beginner writers, very properly drunk on words, over-write, it's a very good motto to have engraved above the screen. But I think that often the thing that makes a perfectly competently-written novel fail is when everything's written at the same pace, with the same amount of detail - even if that is 'spare and simple'. If I've got a scene or a character or a whole damn novel that isn't working, it's always always because it's all middling in tone and pace and language and detail, and I realise that it needs to be either more, or less. Lavish writing can still be taut as a bowstring - Raymond Chandler's a great example.

Emma

Indeed. We can take it to mean 'paring down to your natural voice' or 'to what the scene really needs' rather than to an empirical formula - x adjectives, y adverbs, sentences of no more than z words.

Thanks for posting that Dee, a very useful summary.

what the scene really needs

Exactly. That’s the key. And learning when a scene needs less or when it needs more, is a great breakthrough moment.

I’m still giggling over this, from the Bulwer-Lytton Awards:

Gripping his six-shot Colt Python with 8-inch barrel and Royal Blue finish, and tightening the straps on his Paratec Speed 2000 parachute, Jake leaped from the left aft hatchway of the tumbling, green-and-silver, twin-engined Embraer Lineage 1000, which had seating for nineteen passengers.

Dee,

That was spare... after all he did not describe the nine passengers...

B.

If my husband wrote a novel, it would probably go like that.

Did you hear one of the men quote Kingsley Amis, 'A novel should not take less than a year to write"? And yet I know several people who bring a ms in under that time. Iain Banks, interviewed on Desert Island Discs, said he took about six weeks! Admittedly that might have been a wind-up...

Thanks for posting the link, Dee. I found the programme fascinating listening. It was gratifying to hear that just occasionally someone makes it through the publisher's slush pile. I liked the snippet of advice about writing the book with one or more real readers in mind and imagining how each might react. It's a bit like the technique some performers use, where they fix on someone in the third row and direct their performance at them. I suppose it helps to humanise the amorphous mass of the potential readership.
Tony