Unseasonal Greetings - Cathy Butler

I remember being rather disappointed as a child in the 1970s when I was told that the Christmas Specials of many of my favourite shows were actually filmed at the height of summer. It made sense, though. That forced jollity, the frantic over-tinselling, could be explained only by the peculiar discomfort attendant on singing about snow and reindeer in the middle of July, wearing a thick polo-neck jersey.

Most of the people involved in those shows are now either dead or in jail (it’s a strange life, being a ’70s child); but amongst writers at least the unseasonal arts have flourished much longer. Keats noted in an age before fridge-freezers that Fancy "will bring, in spite of frost,/ Beauties that the earth hath lost”; and Susan Cooper has described writing the snowy chapters of The Dark is Rising – a Christmas staple in all sensible households – in the middle of a Caribbean summer.

A few months ago I had my own taste of this experience. In April I was asked to provide a story for the December edition of the Bloomsbury website 247 Tales. The idea is that every month an author writes a story of 247 words or fewer, and young writers then offer their own stories on the same theme. I duly wrote a creepy Christmas story while the daffodils swayed outside my window; then I snuggled down and waited for winter. Unfortunately, as you will have seen if you clicked on the link, the 247 Tales site is undergoing technical problems. It seems my story will not appear there after all.

What shall we do with the poor orphan story? Can the doors of ABBA be opened to give it shelter at this season of goodwill, and bring it shivering out of the cold? They can, you say? Why, God bless you!

Here then is my Christmas squib. Enjoy it if you're able - but remember, April is the cruellest month…

Crackerjack

Jack lay coffined in a cardboard tube. He was trussed tightly, arms bound above his head. The half-darkness revealed outsized objects filling the cramped space: a huge plastic whistle; a bale of crêpe paper; a broadsheet riddle. His mouth was gagged with Miss Jago’s gingerbread.

The gingerbread had been bait, of course. Old Miss Jago might seem friendly, but from the moment they’d met, Jack had guessed she was a witch. He’d known that even before she caught him pulling the tail of her mangy cat.  She’d told his parents – so unfair!

Christmas dinner was his parents’ peace offering. They’d sent Jack with a polite invitation and Miss Jago had come, bearing fresh-baked gingerbread and homemade Christmas crackers. That gingerbread had smelt delicious. Coming across it in the kitchen before dinner, how could Jack not try a slice?

Immediately he’d felt a sickening blackness – a violent blurring – and then he’d woken here, trapped in this cardboard prison. Nearby, wine glasses chinked. He could smell turkey.

“Where’s Jack?” he heard Dad ask, very loud, very close. “I’m starving.”

“He won’t have gone far,” said Miss Jago. “Why not pull a cracker while we’re waiting?”

“Oh yes, let’s!” said Mum.

Jack’s world lurched as a giant fist seized him by the arms. Another crushed his feet. In mute agony he was lifted into the air and stretched out tight.

“Go on!” cried Miss Jago merrily. “Don’t be shy!”

Laughing, Jack’s parents pulled their Christmas cracker. One – two – three – snap!

Ridiculously Bestselling - Cathy Butler

Looking at the cover of Neil Gaiman’s latest book, Fortunately, the Milk, I was struck by the publisher’s description of the author as “Ridiculously Bestselling”. Of course, I knew what they meant: Neil Gaiman has certainly sold shedloads of books. (For those not familiar with the term, a “shedload” is enough for a writer to be able buy a shed.) Still, the phrase tugged at some bell-pull in my brain, waking the Hobgoblin of Pedantry from its feverish slumber. “'Best’ is a superlative," the Hobgoblin reminded me, "and superlatives don’t admit of degree. You’re either best selling or you’re not, and the only way to be best selling is to sell more copies than anyone else.  There Can Be Only One .”

“And who is that one?” I asked.

“The best-selling book in the world is the Bible,” replied the Hobgoblin. “A multi-authored work, with editing credits to the Synod of Hippo. Gaiman is only a Well Seller – perhaps a Very Well Seller.”

Hobgoblins are useful for asking awkward questions, but they seldom have all the answers. In fact, the phrase “best seller” was born as a marketing device, and it was always used to promote more than one book. Like many marketing ideas, this one comes from America. In the early days, at the end of the nineteenth century, newspapers listed the “Six Best Sellers”, but now the New York Timesproduces lists of anywhere between 10 and 15, in seventeen different categories, ensuring that there are around 200 best sellers at any one time. Given that publishers will continue to call a book “best selling” long after it has ceased to appear on the best seller lists (like “President”, it’s a title for life) there must be thousands of books in print that are entitled to the sobriquet, on the strength of the New York Times lists alone.

The fact that best seller lists are primarily about marketing rather than producing accurate statistics about the public’s buying habits was nowhere  more eloquently demonstrated than in the decision of the New York Times to create a Children’s Best Seller list in July 2000. The reason? The Harry Potter books were so popular that they had been dominating the fiction list for what some writers and publishers of adult fiction decided was too long. Best sellers ought to be thrillers about money and guns, by people like John Grisham and Tom Clancy, not children’s books by British women! A wambulance was duly called, and the children’s writers hived into a ghetto of their own.

The New York Times, in its quaint way, continues to refer to “Best Sellers”, but in recent decades these two words have increasingly been squidged into one, as Google Ngram (that useful measure of written usage) illustrates:

The change from "best seller" to "bestseller" may well be due in large part to the general fashion for word-squidging in modern English, but I suspect it also reflects that fact that the concept of “bestselling” is becoming detached from published lists altogether, and now functions as a general synonym for “popular”. Perhaps that was really what got my pedantic Hobgoblin’s attention after all.

No discussion of Best Seller Lists would be complete without a salutary glance at what was selling best a century or so ago. Here then is an Ozymandian moment, courtesy of Wikipedia – a list of the US best sellers of 1910:

1. The Rosary by Florence L. Barclay
2. A Modern Chronicle by Winston Churchill
3. The Wild Olive by Anonymous (Basil King)
4. Max by Katherine Cecil Thurston
5. The Kingdom of Slender Swords by Hallie Erminie Rives
6. Simon the Jester by William J. Locke
7. Lord Loveland Discovers America by C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
8. The Window at the White Cat by Mary Roberts Rinehart
9. Molly Make-Believe by Eleanor Hallowell Abbot
10. When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart

I think it’s fair to say that none of these is a household name in 2013. (And no, it’s not thatWinston Churchill.) 

Memory as Rescue Dig - Cathy Butler

1985 is history. It’s almost thirty years ago, for goodness’ sake – hardly anyone alive today was even born then.

It was in that long-ago year that the children’s writer Robert Westall, who had made his name a decade earlier with his novel The Machine-Gunners, published Children of the Blitz. Children of the Blitzwas a collection of memories, the voices of Westall’s contemporaries who (like him) had been children during World War II. As Westall saw it, that generation was already dying out, and with it their memories of what had been the most dramatic years of many of their lives. He described the book as “a hurried, scattered rescue dig”, to preserve those memories for posterity.

It’s twenty-eight years later now, and Westall himself has been dead for twenty of them. My mother, five years older than him, had her 89^thbirthday a couple of days ago. She’s in good health considering, and her mind is sharp as a bodkin; but 89, as she is well aware, is a fair old age.

I’ve always enjoyed listening to her talk about her memories from the 1940s and before, though she’s tended to be a little reticent about them. “Young people’s eyes glaze over when I mention the War,” she told me a while ago. “Mine don’t glaze over!” I replied. “They light up!” I try to speak with her about those times, for a little while at least, whenever I see her – my own rescue dig, I suppose. Many of the things she remembers are the stuff of public history: doodlebugs, V2s, Myra Hess giving recitals at the National Gallery. Have you seen the pictures of the crowds outside Buckingham Palace on VE day? One of those faces is my mother’s.

But I like better still the glimpses that I could find nowhere else. Like being a young child in Wrexham some time in the late 1920s, and seeing the lamplighter come down the road with his long pole. Or the little hiding place beneath the floorboards of the kitchen, nicknamed Togoland by her brother and sister. Sitting on back of her father’s Shire horse (he was a haulier at the time) and doing the splits. Or the way that nature came to take over the bombsites in London during the War, so that a woman accosted her in the street, exclaiming, “Willowherb in Bloomsbury – imagine!”

There are more rounded anecdotes, too, of course – lots of them, and many brought to a high polish through years of handling. (For example, there was the time she sent a friend who worked in the Palace a risqué poem about the Virgin Sturgeon only to have it intercepted by Princess Elizabeth, with the hilarious result that – ah, but we would be here all day...) But I value just as much the things that are fragmentary, more like memories themselves, in all their ephemerality and miraculous survival. They don’t just give insight into history, they become part of one’s own experience, to the point where I may even forget what happened to whom.

That doesn't happen with my mother alone. One of my earliest memories is of watching my great-aunt on the morning of her twenty-first birthday, jumping up and down on the bed, her long red hair braided with sunlight, crying, “I’ve got the key of the door!” Of course, that memory is not mine directly. It was my grandmother’s first – who died before I was born – and she passed it to my father, who handed it on down. I treasure it just as I would any other heirloom. It’s of no great value or interest to anyone else, perhaps, but precious to me. It’s history; it happened today.

Happy Birthday, Great-Aunt Suzie. Have a good 1901.

What Would Willy Wonka Do?

It was Roald Dahl day on Tuesday. Dahl would have been 95.

The day got some unwelcome publicity with the announcement by the Dahl Museum in Great Missenden that they were trying to raise £500,000 in order to move and restore the garden shed in which Dahl wrote many of his most famous works. Blogs and tweets ensued, many to the effect that a) that was a hell of a lot of money for a shed, and b) why couldn’t the well-heeled Dahl Estate pay for it?

I have sympathy with both points, but still, you’ve got to hand it to Dahl. There aren’t many writers who have museums devoted to them, and I can’t think of any, other than Burns, Shakespeare and Joyce, who have a “Day”. Even twenty-one years after his death, Dahl shoots effortlessly into the headlines, pushing aside Libya and the meltdown of the Eurozone, merely on the basis that his garden shed is a bit damp.

It’s harder for children’s writers to survive than writers for adults, simply because childhood doesn’t last as long, and their audience must be constantly renewed. Ideally they need to write for a long time, preferably for a generation. At that point, the people who enjoyed the early books are old enough to have children of their own, and may start buying all over again, starting a virtuous circle. Dahl has not only survived, he continues to be read in over fifty languages, and has sold some 100,000,000 books. In bookselling jargon, that’s known as shed-loads.

So here’s the odd thing. Dahl was, and is, incredibly popular. He still has the power to grab headlines. He’s widely loved, but he’s also controversial, having been accused of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and the glorification of violence amongst other things. He’s been the subject of two full-length biographies, and a third by Michael Rosen is reportedly in progress. Many of his books have been turned into successful commercial movies. There’s lots to be said about Dahl, whether you love or loathe him. So why is it that, apart from one short survey written a year or so after his death, there has never been an academic book about his work?

Let me put this in context. Children’s literature criticism is a thriving part of academia these days (I write it myself). There are, at a cursory count, no less than six full-length academic volumes on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000). On the Harry Potter books (1997-2007) there are at least fourteen. But on Dahl, whose books have been around so much longer and are so much more numerous, nothing.

I should add that this is about to change, as I’m currently co-editing a collection of academic essays on Dahl that will (we hope) appear next year, but it’s still rather mysterious. Why is it that Dahl – controversial, headline-grabbing, eagerly-consumed Dahl – is so widely ignored by the academics? I find it genuinely puzzling.

Could it be because his books are funny?

Twisting Winter - Cathy Butler

She became a subscriber; amazed at being anything in propria persona, amazed at her own doings in every way, to be a renter, a chuser of books! And to be having any one's improvement in view in her choice! But so it was. Susan had read nothing, and Fanny longed to give her a share in her own first pleasures, and inspire a taste for the biography and poetry which she delighted in herself. (Jane Austen, Mansfield Park)

Fanny Price isn’t most people’s favourite Jane Austen heroine, but it’s hard not to be won round by the pleasure and empowerment (an un-Austenian word, I know) she feels at becoming a member of a circulating library. I thought of her last year when I was put in the luxurious position of being able not just to choose – sorry, chuse – books for readers, but to commission authors to bring new stories into existence. The publisher A & C Black asked me to edit a book of supernatural winter stories, and gave me free rein as to who should write them. The only restrictions were on length and subject matter: the stories had to be spooky, and set in the winter season – but that could mean any time from Halloween through to Imbolc.

In my day job as a lecturer I’ve edited several books of academic essays, but this was the first time I’d ever commissioned fiction, and it was rather intoxicating. The main problem of course was that far too many names suggested themselves, and I only had seven berths to fill – one of which I naturally grabbed for myself. I also needed to make sure that I found a good mix of styles. Having grown up on Christine Bernard’s and Mary Danby’s wonderful Armada ghost anthologies I knew the value of variation – of mixing horror with humour, atmosphere with grand guignol, the uncanny with the outright magical. I didn’t want to end up with seven Christmas-morning encounters with Victorian ghost-children – but neither did I wish to prescribe or proscribe.

Assuming the role of Takashi Shimura in The Seven Samurai, I set out to collect my posse of writers. In the end, I got myself a dream team. Susan Cooper – one of my writing heroines from my childhood, and now a good friend – was an obvious choice. Katherine Langrish, author of the chilling Dark Angels, was another; and I was keen to have something from Frances Hardinge, whose extravagantly inventive fantasies are amongst the most exciting discoveries of the last few years. With Rhiannon Lassiter, author of science fiction as well as of spooky books such as Ghost of a Chance, I didn’t know what I would get, but I knew it would be good: in the event it was a tour de force, and totally surprising. Having loved Frances Thomas’s supernatural doubles book, I Found your Diary, knew I wanted a story from her. And then there was Liz Williams, best known as a science fiction writer for adults but also the proprietor of a witchcraft shop and someone I was confident would be able to bring something original to the table – which she did, marvellously.

I’d been slightly dreading the tussles that might take place at the editing stage, but luckily very little of that kind of work was required, and my authors were amenable to such suggestions as I had. (This isn’t always the case with academics, by the way.) Editing myself was a little harder. I kicked back hard against some of my editorial cuts, and in the end I had to take a firm line with myself, but I think the story was improved as a result.

Altogether, making Twisted Winterwas a very pleasurable experience – and it’s being published just in time for the Halloween rush, so why not treat yourself to some first-class frights?

What’s that, dear reader? “This so-called blog is just a thinly-disguised advertisement”, you say? Why, of course. Promotion is just another of the hapless editor’s duties. And now, my duty is done.

Bringing up Baby, Then and Now - Cathy Butler

Self-help books are not a modern phenomenon. They've always sold well, and reading examples from former centuries offers insights to any student of human nature. There’s no other genre that reveals more directly the anxieties, desires and beliefs of ordinary people. I imagine they must be a precious resource for historical novelists, in particular.

Especially fascinating to me are books on child-rearing. It’s very revealing to see how certain ideas about children change radically over time, while others stay more or less the same. Take this double-page spread from The School of Manners; or Rules for Children’s Behaviour, published in 1704. The book is addressed to children directly:

The idea of bowing to one’s parents, or of not sitting down until told to do so, may seem harsh today, but other items on the list are very recognizable, even if the language has changed. “Stop fiddling with yourself!” (3), “Don’t fidget!” (5), “Don’t bite your nails!” (10) – these cries are still to be heard up and down the land. Then there are the moments when the apparently familiar reveals itself in all its strangeness – as when children are advised that if they need to spit they should do it in the corner of the room and rub it into the floor with their foot (11).  I have a feeling we’re not in Acacia Avenue any more…

Leaping forward almost two centuries to 1878, let's dip into Don’ts for Mothers. (Yes, the guilt-tripping starts right on the title page!) It’s a similar story here. At times, I find myself nodding in vigorous agreement, as the anonymous author launches into some very sensible advice – by which I mean of course that it coincides with the received wisdom of 2013:

Don’t confine your daughter to fancy work and the piano. Mothers of England, let me entreat you, rescue your girls from the bondage of fashion and folly.

Don’t avoid the breast. The infant ought to be put to the breast soon after birth; the interest of both the mother and child demands it.

Don't fear the vaccination of your child. It is one of the greatest blessings ever conferred on mankind.

Don’t point out faults with an air of triumph or ridicule, so as to create irritation and dislike.

At other times our author warns against practices that it would never have occurred to me to consider:

Don’t attempt to harden a young child either by allowing him, in the wintertime, to be in a bedroom without a fire or by dipping him in cold water, or by keeping him with scant clothing on his bed.

Don’t feel it necessary to wash your infant’s head with brandy.

Don’t add either gin or oil of peppermint to the babe’s food. It is a murderous practice.

Then there’s this…

Don’t hold children’s parties. They are one of the great follies of the present age; where children are dressed up like grown-up women, stuck out in petticoats, and encouraged to eat rich cake and to drink wine, and to sit up late at night! Their pure minds will be blighted by it.

Though initially put off by the idea of banning children’s parties, on reading what they consisted of in 1878 I decided the author might have a point. Similarly, hygiene and the fear of passing on disease rather than chilly emotional distance lie behind the rule that "Infants ought never to be kissed except on the forehead, and even that should be seldom permitted." Context is important. Elsewhere, though, the rationale for Anon’s advice seems rather elusive…

Don’t neglect to be sure a child eats salt with his dinner. Let a mother see that this advice is followed, or evil consequences will inevitably follow.

Don’t allow your child luncheon. If he wants anything to eat between breakfast and dinner let him have a piece of dry bread.

Don’t allow the child to be with persons who stutter or have any extraordinary sort of ugliness. However great their merits in other respects they are unfit to have the care of children and should not be placed as attendants or instructors.

Of course I view the following with particular repugnance:

Don’t, on any account, allow him to sit any length of time at a table amusing himself with books, &c; let him be active and stirring. He ought to be tumbled and rolled about to make the blood bound merrily through the vessels.

Excuse me while I step outside for a moment to shudder at the memory of PE teachers past. Naturally I deplore any warning against books; on the other hand, if we substitute computer games, the sentiment doesn’t look antiquated after all.

One thing that doesn’t appear to change is the appetite for advice itself, or indeed the penchant for selling it in bite-sized chunks. Go to your local bookshop (or the internet) and you will have no difficulty in finding the modern equivalents of books such as these. And yes, there's little doubt that many of our own practices will seem bizarre, if not inhuman, to the readers of the future. If only we knew which ones…

Lyres and Lutes vs Liars and Looters

"Every shop in Clapham high street appears to have been looted. The only shop that has escaped is Waterstone’s.” BBC Radio (via Nick Green)

“This fire he beheld from a tower in the house of Maecenas, and being greatly delighted, as he said, with the beautiful effects of the conflagration, he sung a poem on the ruin of Troy, in the tragic dress he used on the stage.” Suetonius, Life of Nero

“Why read literature? The answer, in a nutshell, was that it made you a better person. Few reasons could have been more persuasive than that. When the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps [...] to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do.” Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory

“I think elephants are overprotected. But what do I know, sitting in my ivory tower?” Milton Jones

[Nursery teacher to prospective parents] “We teach them that the world can be an unpredictable, dangerous, and sometimes frightening place, while being careful not to spoil their lovely innocence. It’s tricky.” New Yorker cartoon

I’m not going to speculate about the causes of the rioting in London (and now beyond). I learned from November’s student protests and the events in Stokes Croft in Bristol earlier this year, for both of which I was able to talk to trustworthy eye witnesses, that media reports about such things don’t always match reality. This time I’m a long way off and can’t pontificate to any purpose – having said which, I found this post by a London ex-teacher depressing and inspirational in equal measure.

Instead, I want to ask some related questions to which I don’t know the answers. They’re in my mind right now, because when cities are on fire it’s hard not to wonder whether sitting down to write a fantasy is the very best use one could make of one’s time. Am I not fiddling (or playing the lyre, to be historically pedantic) while Rome burns? So this post is really a rather pathetic whinge about what I should be doing with my life, but I’ve disguised it by putting it in the form of a Cosmo personality quiz. No one will notice.

Got your pen and paper? Here goes...

1) Why was Waterstone’s left untouched, when the rest of the street was looted? Is it because:

a) Looters don’t read.

b) Readers don’t loot.

c) Looters do read, and they have such an ingrained respect for bookshops that they would never dream of breaking into them.

d) Books don’t have the same re-sale value as iPhones.

2) If concentration camp commandants can relax with Goethe, and Nero can burn Rome to make an aesthetic backdrop for poetry, is literature:

a) The opiate of the masses and a decadent distraction

b) A tool to help you become a better person.

c) Its own justification.

d) Irrelevant.

3) What’s the most valuable thing that children’s writers can do for children?

a) Teach them the truth about the dangerous world out there.

b) Help them to envisage a better life, and a better world to live it in.

c) Give them experience of timeless pleasures.

d) Make them literate so that they have a useful transferrable skill when they grow up.

Now, let’s see how you scored:

Mostly a): You’re a bit of an anarcho-cynic, aren’t you?

Mostly b): You’re an idealist with a social conscience – books really can change the world!

Mostly c): You’re an aesthete - you might as well be going round with a teddy bear named Aloysius.

Mostly d): You, by contrast, are a philistine who knows the price of everything and value of nothing.

So, dear Abbatistas, what were your results?

Grace versus Grunt - Cathy Butler

Most people would agree that talent and hard work are both important ingredients in any artistic or sporting career, and indeed in many other endeavours. But which is more important? And which is more to be admired?

It’s a difficult thing to measure, but my impression is that in British culture there’s been a gradual shift in emphasis over my lifetime, from talent to hard work. For example, in the early 1970s my favourite tennis player was Ilie Năstase, and the main reason I liked him was that his play was so beautiful and imaginative. It didn’t matter that he never won Wimbledon – that was part of what made him rakishly attractive, like a top button left artfully undone. Then, around 1974, I was surprised to hear another player grunt loudly and effortfully as he hit the ball. The grunter was Jimmy Connors, a hardworking but unlovely player, who did win Wimbledon, twice. (Both were soon to be eclipsed by Swedish Jesus-lookalike Bjorn Borg, who successfully combined grace and power.) Connors’s grunts were unfavourably received by old-school BBC commentators such as Dan Maskell, ostensibly because they had the potential to distract his opponents, but I think the real reason was that it made his play look altogether too much like hard work. No doubt Borg and Năstase practised, but they did it out of sight: their performances were cool iceberg tips, never mind what lay below the surface. Today, by contrast, all sportspeople are expected to give 110% as a bare minimum, and Andy Murray’s matches, for all their skill, frequently recall the boxing scene in Cool Hand Luke. If you’re not visibly suffering, you don't deserve to win.

Amongst writers too hard work is admired, but it's also very slightly suspect.  We may praise Anthony Trollope for getting up at 5.30am each morning and writing 3,000 words before leaving for his day’s work at the Post Office (if he finished a novel before 8.30 he would take a fresh sheet of paper and start on the next); but our admiration is not unmitigated: his routine sounds anything but inspiring or inspired.

In The Courtier (1528) Baldassare Castiglione coined the useful term sprezzatura to denote the seemingly effortless skill with which a courtier should be able to ride, fence, dance, play an instrument, and so on. Its employment as a positive description is interesting, for the word comes from the Italian for “contempt” or “negligence”, qualities we don't normally admire. But aren't masters of sprezzatura merely con merchants, working feverishly behind the scenes to acquire the skills they pretend to have naturally?

More fundamentally, why should we praise people for having talent in the first place? While some people certainly have more natural ability than others (no matter how hard I train I will never be able to run as fast as Usain Bolt), surely being given a head start by your DNA doesn't make you praiseworthy, any more than winning the lottery or inheriting a business empire makes you a hardworking entrepreneur. Anyway, why would we want to look like someone who’s never had to try? Aren't the admirable people the ones who do a lot with the resources they have?

I suspect that somewhere at the back of all this there’s a need to feel that some people are simply special, touched by the gods, and that the ease with which they produce great work is a measure of that specialness. Hence Heminge and Condell's compliment to Shakespeare on producing great plays while seldom blotting a line. It feels good to know that such people exist, even if they aren't us.

It's true that the subjective experience of writers is often that the best lines, the best ideas, appear to fall fully-formed into one’s lap, without apparent effort. However, remember the anecdote about the consultant who fixed a problem in a factory by turning a single lever – the work of a moment – and charged a £1,000 fee. When the factory owner questioned a bill of £1,000 for a moment’s work, the consultant replied that the fee was for the decades of experience and training that meant she could fix the problem in a moment. Perhaps it’s like that for writers: those “free” inspirations have actually been earned through years of grunt and grind.

Or, as a golfer once famously put it, “The more I practise, the luckier I get.”

Interview with the Choosing One - Cathy Butler

Not Kismet House

Seen from the motorway, the headquarters of Kismet Enterprises appear almost deliberately anonymous. Situated outside Telford, just off the M54 and with a distant view of the Wrekin, it is a large building, with a pleasant fountain in front of the main entrance; but few of the travellers rushing between Birmingham and Shrewsbury are likely to give its nineteenth-century sandstone façade a second glance. And that seems appropriate, given the nature of the business conducted within. Many stories feature a Chosen One or an ancient prophecy, after all, but how often do readers stop to wonder who does the Choosing? Or where those ancient but invariably accurate prophetic verses actually come from? In most cases, the answer lies here in Kismet House.

Kismet’s operations are usually hidden from public view, but today I have been given exclusive access to one of their most senior employees. Mrs Lachesis Webster’s title is displayed in brass letters on her office door: Head of Choosing. 

Mrs Webster does not stand on ceremony. She opens the door to her office before I have a chance to knock, greeting me warmly. She is a small woman of indeterminate age, greying but smooth-skinned. The office is handsomely appointed, with luxurious armchairs and original oil paintings, but nothing here is new: the carpet shows signs of wear where she has made her way between door and desk, every day for the last twenty-five years. 

Mrs Webster gestures to me to sit, and lands rather heavily in her own chair. Although she smiles, behind her half-moon spectacles I sense a great weariness.

I take out my pen and notebook.

“Thank you for agreeing to talk with me. I’m sure our readers will be fascinated to hear about your work.”

She nods acknowledgement. “We don’t get many visitors in this part of the building. I’m happy to oblige.”

“It’s quite a warren! To be honest, I hadn’t realised how big a bureaucracy was involved in allotting fates.”

Mrs Webster looks a little surprised. “I think people underestimate the level of detail required. When I first came here I spent six months just working on umbrellas!” 

“Umbrellas! Really?”

“I was assigned to the Fortune Assessment section at the time, a rather technical department. Everyone knows that it’s unlucky to open umbrellas indoors, of course. But what about opening them on a covered porch? Under an awning? In a bus shelter? Is that bad luck too?”

“I couldn't say.”

“Is an overhead covering the crucial factor, or is it being open to the elements? And then of course there are verandahs! Gazebos! Pergolas!”

“Pergolas? Is he some relation to Legol—?” 

“It all has to be worked out and negotiated, painstakingly. Nothing is left to chance. Endless reports, meetings, protocols, guidelines…” Her eyes, briefly aflame, dim until they are but pilot lights. “It was all a bit much, to be honest. Not that I blame them for being careful. Of course it’s even worse in the Wishes Division.”

“But surely wishes are just—” My sentence stutters on the word “lovely”.

“Ah, you’re too young to remember the great Recursive Wish Crisis of 1962. A spike in people wishing for more wishes almost caused a chain reaction, a runaway escalation of contradictory magics that threatened to destroy – well, everything. Since then, all wishes have had to be signed off in triplicate. I’ve never met a more joyless, dour lot than the wish granters of today. The romance has gone out of it.”

“You never worked in that area yourself?”

“No, no. As soon as I’d served my probationary period I applied for a transfer out of Fortune Assessment. I spent a couple of years in the South Wing, first in Portents, and then next door in Prophecy and Augury.”

“That sounds fascinating! Tell me something about your work there.”

“Oh, well there’s always a demand for prophecies, isn’t there? You know, to underwrite events? Prophecies are such a convenient glue if you don’t have time to make dovetail joints. I wasn’t allowed to do the big, complex ones with multiple stanzas, of course. I specialized in couplets.”

“Might you share an example of your work?”

“Let me think… I believe the very first prophecy I came up with was this:

When Maxen wears the royal ring
It means that he is now the king.”

“That’s very… straightforward.”

She sighs. “I know – especially since Maxen was Crown Prince at the time. Prophesying what everyone expects to happen anyway was one of my weaknesses.” She laughs at my expression. “It’s all right, I know it’s awful, you needn’t be diplomatic. They weren’t diplomatic in Prophecy and Augury! I remember my boss at the time shouting: ‘Ambiguity, ambiguity, ambiguity!’ That was his constant watchword, you see. ‘Lachesis,’ he used to say, ‘We don’t make prophecies to tell people what the future’s going to be, we make them so they’ll recognize the future once they’ve arrived there!’ Wise words, you’ll agree. Oh, I learned a lot at P&A.”

“And yet you moved on?”

“I made some good friends – I’ve never known such a bunch for practical jokes! But I just didn’t have the flair, you see. I’m too straightforward. Of course, as the Choosing One I still work very closely with my colleagues in P&A. We have to coordinate.”

“So let’s talk about your current position. What are the principles on which you do your choosing? Are you a birther?”

“I don’t much care for that term, though I know it’s become entrenched. As a matter of fact, when I first started in the post I assumed that in this more democratic age Chosen Ones would normally be selected on worth rather than birth. I thought the ideal was to find an obscure young man or woman who was goodhearted, brave, and underappreciated – preferably located at several adventures' distance from the capital city. That was my idea of good Chosen One material. Birth wasn’t a consideration. In recent years, however, there’s been a renewed demand for heroes and heroines of exalted parentage. They can be brought up as obscurely as you like, but people want them to turn out to be the children of royalty or gods – or wizards at the very least. We’ve had to dust off whole shelves of superannuated material on birthmarks, lisps, scars, and suchlike methods of identifying Lost Heirs. (Oddly, the field seems oblivious to the science of DNA.) It’s a step backwards, really. I blame Disney.” Mrs Webster sighs deeply.

“You preferred the old times, then?”

Suddenly she looks her age. Gazing at her weary face I have the impression of a private school headmistress who’s just returned from a walking tour of Mordor and is about to write a stinging review on Tripadvisor.

“Old people do, don’t they?” she remarks. “It’s our defining folly. Besides, I still do things my way most of the time."

“So, what is the actual process? How do you find a name for your Chosen One?”

She looks at me steadily. “That would be telling, Ms Butler.”

Mrs Webster has another appointment looming, so I must take my leave. We shake hands, and I thank her for her time. The heavy door of her office closes behind me. 

But I am not an investigative reporter for nothing. Slipping to the back of the building, I count along the mullioned windows and find the one that opens onto Mrs Webster’s office. Peering in between the ivy trails, I see her hunched at her desk just a yard of two beyond the glass, a mighty ledger open before her. A telephone directory? No, this surely is the Book of Life, I tell myself. This is how the Chosen Ones are chosen! And I’m about to witness it at first hand.

Mrs Webster covers her eyes with one hand and riffles through the pages, apparently at random. Then, with the other hand she takes a large steel pin from the desk – and stabs it blindly into the paper.

Somewhere, a child is crying.

Somewhere, a Chosen One is born.

Behind the Green Door - Cathy Butler

There’s an old piano and they play it hot

Behind the green door,

Don't know what they’re doin’ but they laugh a lot 

Behind the green door,

Wish they’d let me in so I could find out what’s 

Behind the green door.

So sang Jim Lowe in 1956, in a song that epitomizes the experience of the excluded, of the Outs who wish they were In. It’s a universal aspect of the human condition, no doubt, this feeling that someone else is having a better time than you, and that if you could just get beyond the Green Door – whatever form it takes – then your happiness would be complete. Writers experience it quite starkly, for every published writer was once an unpublished writer, pressing his or her nose up against the glass and pining for recognition; but human discontent assumes many shapes. C. S. Lewis wrote  a very insightful essay on this subject called “The Inner Ring”, and if you only have time to read either this post or that essay, I recommend you choose the latter.

Well then; last Sunday I went to the Cheltenham Literary Festival to take part in an author session. It was only my second visit to the Festival – to my shame, for it’s less than 50 miles from Bristol, an easy trip up the M5 or by direct train. But small efforts can be more daunting than big ones, as you know.

My first visit was a few years ago, to hear Alan Garner. On that occasion I was very much a fan, standing happily in the signing queue with my copies of The Owl Service and Elidor. In fact I found myself next to another author in the shape of both halves of Tobias Druitt. Garner’s a writer’s writer, I think, so meeting other authors there was not surprising, but because he signs in a careful calligraphic script his queues move slowly. There was plenty of time to chat.

Last Sunday was different. This time I was a stand-in for Ursula Jones, who was herself a stand-in for her sister Diana Wynne Jones. When Diana died in 2011 she left a not-quite-finished novel, The Islands of Chaldea, which Ursula was asked by the family to conclude – and conclude it she did, quite masterfully in my opinion. The plan had been for Ursula to do an event “in conversation” with the Australian fantasy writer Garth Nix, who’s on tour promoting his excellent new book Clariel, but unfortunately she had to pull out at short notice. I was suggested as a replacement, since I know Diana’s work well and had been consulted about The Islands of Chaldea in the early stages.

The event was a success: Garth Nix is a fascinating and funny speaker, and Julia Eccleshare made an excellent host. I hope the audience weren’t too disappointed at having me there rather than Ursula, but if they were they hid it well. But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about the Authors’ Tent (otherwise known as the Green Room), where speakers at the various events are able to relax and take refreshment. I’ve been in Green Rooms before, at fantasy conventions and the like, and have helped myself to coffee and trail mix by the bucket, but none has been quite as prestigious or luxuriously appointed as the pleasure dome decreed by the powers that be in Cheltenham. (I am as yet a stranger to the Edinburgh Festival's fabled Authors’ Yurt, though in my personal mythology it’s on a par with Arthur’s Seat.)

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to spend much time in Cheltenham's Authors' Tent, and since I was driving I was unable to indulge in the free beer and wine, but I did stop for a few minutes to eat a scone and take in the scene around me. Writers sat here and there, chatting merrily. Some I recognized, some I felt I ought to recognize, but all looked entirely comfortable – and who wouldn’t, in a setting that was in itself a comforting reassurance that, “Yes, you have arrived”?  In one corner a crèche of authorial children frolicked, and everywhere the tireless employees of the Festival served, cleared up, replenished and gave a general masterclass in the anticipation of whims. They were all fantastically cheery and helpful. They were so helpful, in fact, that I began to feel a little suspicious.  Could they really be that anxious for my happiness? Anyone who’s spent as much time as I have pondering “Hansel and Gretel” knows that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Might the scone be drugged? Would I wake to find myself chained to a gang of midlist authors in one of GCHQ's notorious data mines?

But no such calamity ensued. “Ooh, a bowl of miniature chocolate bars!” I exclaimed as I was getting ready to leave. “May I take one?” They were Green & Black, after all. “Take several!” they exclaimed. “We’re so grateful you were able to come!” Though I peered closely, I could detect no trace of irony in their expressions. They really seemed to mean it.

I was delighted with my visit, brief though it was, and my temporary access to the Inner Ring of lionized authors. Except that, just as I was leaving, I caught sight of another door – I could have sworn it was green – slightly removed from the main crush of the Authors’ Tent. Approaching it, I was turned brusquely away by an unsmiling guard: “Man Booker Winners only,” he informed me. With a sigh I set off back to Bristol, but not before I had briefly glimpsed the scene within through the green door’s tinted glass. And now, when I sleep, my dreams are haunted by the memory of Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Hilary Mantel splashing in their exclusive Booker Winners’ hot tub, chinking complimentary champagne flutes, and laughing, laughing, laughing…

Thirteen Reasons - Cathy Butler

“If you write, why do you write?” a friend asked on Facebook yesterday.

It’s a good question, and of course there are many answers. I found some bubbling to the top of my brain almost immediately, but not all were very convincing. (“Because I have an important message for the world that it desperately needs to hear,” yes I’m looking at you. Nor, on reflection, do I really find the idea of wearing black polo-neck sweaters in a Greenwich Village loft apartment that attractive.)

Here are the ones that made the cut. Please note that no other reasons for writing are valid, aside from those given below. (But disagree, if you must, in the comments.)

1. For the money [cue hollow laugh here]. Or at least for the ever-receding prospect of living by my pen mouse. It could happen – right?
2. Because I have a story that seems to want telling, and it keeps hammering at my brainpan like a drunk trying to get into a late-night hostel.
3. Because I like to see my name printed on the spines of books in bookshops. And in my house. And in other people’s houses. And on billboards, TV screens, cinema posters…
4. A shed of one’s one.
   
5. The technical aspects of writing a story are absorbing and satisfying, equally engaging of the heart, mind and spirit.
6. Because I combine an inexhaustible interest in other human beings with a wish to spend large parts of every day out of their company.
7. As a way to cheat death. I like to imagine that something of myself will survive me, and particularly that my descendants feel some personal connection beyond a name and dates.
8. Like C. S. Lewis, I write the kinds of book I would like to read, and want to make sure there are more of them.
9. Because there aren’t many jobs where strangers come up and tell you they admire you, and even ask for your autograph. Not that this happens to me very often, but it seems odd that writers should get this kind of treatment, when useful people like plumbers and brain surgeons generally don’t.
10. It’s a habit – quite possibly a bad one.
11. I’m rubbish at drawing and can’t dance, so writing (along with descant recorder) is my only outlet for self-expression.
12. Because the profound satisfaction of having produced a successful story marginally outweighs the profound frustration involved in the production.
13. Because it’s show business – for recluses.

Playing the Systems - Cathy Butler

Allow me to set you a small puzzle:

A bat and ball cost $1.10
The bat costs one dollar more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

The correct answer is at the bottom of this post. I’m sure many of you got it right (the problem isn’t difficult, after all), but others will have leapt to the wrong conclusion and answered that the ball costs 10c. What’s more, even those who found the right answer will almost certainly have had the answer “10c” spring unbidden to their minds before putting it firmly to one side. Why?

This puzzle is not my own, as you may have guessed from the choice of currency. I quote it from the book I’m reading at the moment, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (2011). Kahneman is a psychologist, but he won the Nobel Prize for Economics – largely by demonstrating that (contrary to the assumptions built into most economic models) human beings are not rational in their decisions when it comes to money, or much else. This is not news to novelists, but Kahneman provides fascinating details about the ways in which our irrationality manifests itself.

I’m not here to review Kahneman’s book, though I highly recommend it, but I want to mention the fundamental model he uses for human judgement and decision making, which I think has some interesting applications to writing. Kahneman talks of two systems, which share the work of thinking. System 1 is intuitive, instinctive, semi-conscious: we use it to do routine tasks such as walking, as well as for our initial judgements of situations. It was your System 1 that came up with the answer 10c. System 2 is conscious, effortful, and sometimes lazy: we bring it to bear in unfamiliar situations, or if we have reason to believe that System 1 isn’t to be trusted. If I ask you to multiply 2x2, System 2 probably won’t need to get involved, but for a sum such as 24x93, it will. Not only that, but the two systems compete for resources. As Kahneman points out, if you ask someone to multiply 24x93 in their head when they happen to be walking, they will typically stop to work it out – to free up extra mental capacity.

When you become expert at something, it becomes less conscious – moving from System 2 to System 1, in Kahneman’s terms. If you’ve learned to drive, or touch-type, you’ll have experienced this: actions that were at first conscious and effortful become “automatic”. In fact, although I touch-type quite well I would be unable to tell you the layout of a QWERTY keyboard: that knowledge has migrated from my conscious mind, where it could be retrieved by System 2, to my fingers. Similarly, I would be hard put to say whether the clutch is to the left of the brake pedal or vice versa. Happily, my feet know.

This has got me to wondering about the roles of Kahneman’s two systems in writing. Writers sometimes find themselves in that luxurious place known as “the zone”, in which consciousness appears to take a step back, and words flow onto the page like honey (but without the mess). On such occasions writing appears effortless, intuitive – the product, one might imagine, of System 1 – and specifically of an expertise that has become automatic.  Most of the time, however, it’s not like that, and both systems are involved. System 2 is there, judging whether what we’ve written says quite what we wanted it to; whether it’s in the right place; whether we need it at all. System 1 is taking in the overall shape of the text, and finding it satisfying or otherwise; it’s suggesting dialogue and plot for System 2’s approval. Both systems are unfortunately unreliable: System 1 (as we saw in the puzzle at the top) likes to go for the obvious answer, or (in writing terms) the cliché; System 2 is liable to swing between a lazy dereliction of duty and hypercriticism that can choke writing off entirely. A good and productive writer will be able to find a balance between the two, and judge at any moment which ought to be taking the lead – which rather implies a System 3 for making this kind of decision! In fact, as so often, Plato got there first, with his allegory of the chariot – but Daniel Kahneman has taken my understanding of my own thought processes a lot further.

What's your experience? Do you recognize these descriptions from your own writing life?

Answer: The ball costs 5c.

Let's Twist Again - Cathy Butler

My current work-in-progress (work-in-stasis might be a more accurate description) contains an important plot twist, which I’m hoping will catch people by surprise. Don’t ask me, I’m not telling; but it’s got me thinking about plot twists and their evil counterparts, spoilers.

The thing is, while part of me is rubbing my hands with delight at the thought of my twist and the effect it will have my hapless readers, another part is sniffily pointing out that plot twists are cheap tricks, and that a book that relies too heavily on them may be enjoyed once for its shock value, but will never be read twice. All the same, as a reader I enjoy a good plot twist myself, so I would like to arbitrate if I can and achieve a compromise acceptable to both parties.

Let’s start with definitions. All stories contain events, but at what point does a turn of events become a twist? A twist must of course be unexpected, but can we say more than that? One way of thinking about it – a circular one, admittedly, but we’re entering the twisted realm of the Möbius strip here anyway – is to say that a plot twist is an event that, if it were revealed ahead of time, would count as a spoiler. This of course raises the twin question: what is a spoiler? Telling a little about a book’s plot in advance needn't involve spoiling; indeed, it's the very essence of jacket blurbs, which are designed to entice readers into wanting more, not to ruin their enjoyment. At what point does an amuse-bouchecease to enhance the appetite and begin to spoil it? 

Do spoilers have a sell-by date?

Position within the plot is one relevant factor. A plot twist that comes early enough – say, the revelation that your uncle has murdered your father by pouring poison in his ear – can be very effective, but if it appears near the beginning of the story it merges into exposition. Probably no one would consider themselves “spoiled” by learning this fact about Hamlet, because the play centres on the consequences that flow from the revelation, not on the murder itself. At the other extreme, a plot twist that appears right at the end of a book can seem gimmicky, and successful examples are scarce outside specialized genres such as the detective story. Gene Kemp’s The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (1977) is a rare exception. In general the ideal place for a really fundamental plot twist is the middle third of a story. That gives you time to weave the rug you’re going to pull out from under your readers’ feet, and also time to justify your action in what follows. Frances Hardinge’s excellent new book, Cuckoo Song (2014), is the most recent example of this kind that I have read.

Plot twists are a kind of trick played on the reader, who is led to expect or believe one thing but is then surprised by a reality that is very different. Like all practical jokes spoilers need to have some kind of point to be justified. That sea cook you’ve grown so fond of? He's really the leader of the pirates! But now you’ve let yourself become emotionally involved, and will remain so.

Twists can happen at the level of genre as well as of plot. As my friends will wearily testify, over the last couple of months I have become rather obsessed with a Japanese anime series bearing the ungainly title Puella Magia Madoka Magica. Before it was broadcast in Japan in 2011, the series was given this trailer, which promised a cute (not to say saccharine) story about young girls with magical powers and adorable animal friends – something also implied by the cover of the DVD. Even the first couple of episodes don’t deviate wildly from this expectation. However, at a certain point it is rather as if you have settled down with Winnie-the-Poohand encountered this scene:

In fact, Puella Magia Madoka Magica is a tragic drama, and one of the most brutal and emotionally hard-hitting series you could wish to see. It has several very effective conventional plot twists, but perhaps the greatest is its genre twist: it looks like one kind of story (both to the viewer and, importantly, to the characters), and turns out to be quite another. As I’ve discovered, however, persuading people to watch something that looks like Madoka without spoiling the nature of the series for them can be an uphill task. And now I’ve also spoiled it for you, dear reader.

Or have I? The strange thing about spoilers is that not all of them spoil. When Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex he was telling a story with a terrific plot twist: the hero turns out to have unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. Yet his audience were well aware of this before watching the play – those ancient Greeks knew their ancient Greek mythology, after all - and it doesn’t appear to have dimmed their enjoyment or that of subsequent generations. The easy explanation is that the play gives us much more than plot twists, and we are richly compensated in the currency of great poetry for our lack of shock. But that’s not quite right, because even when you know what Oedipus is going to discover, it’s still shocking. It’s shocking because he doesn’t know, and we feel with and for him. That is why, even when they have been “spoiled”, the great works, from Oedipus Rex to Puella Magia Madoka Magica, bear repeated readings and viewings.

Probably I should worry less about twists and spoilers, and just try to write the best book I can. If it’s good enough, it will survive whatever spoiling comes its way. Literature, as Ezra Pound put it, is news that stays news. Or, to paraphrase Professor Kirke: “It’s all in Aristotle. Bless me, what do they teach them in these schools?”