Chichester Writing Festival

Writing is like being a manic depressive. Or whatever we’re supposed to call it now. One minute you feel like a god, the pen dripping ambrosia onto tablets of stone or something. The next, plunged in gloom, you see it was only cold rice pudding out of a tin. Thank God for silver-tongued Greg Mosse and the healing balm of West Dean College. If we ignore the bathetic note struck by lectures on Course Units, timetabling and fire safety, the Chichester Writing Festival segued brilliantly into our first day. here’s some things I jotted at the festival:

• the world’s longest continuous prayer has been prayed for over 150 years
• a book having ‘content’ means sex & drugs
• you need to feel an agent might be a friend when you meet
• all books need latitude – we all like different bits even of accepted classics
• you must know your book so well that editing can be done seamlessly, staying ‘in story’
• Five Dials is a great magazine and it’s free www.hamishhamilton.co.uk
• you can’t just throw in a nice scenario: show cause …. effect
• make your work eventful
• make your work resonant, to go beyond an individual into the wider community (bigger the better)
• realising something isn’t a plot point. Something has to HAPPEN. Action …consequences, as many times as you like till the realisation is inevitable

Better than all this was getting to talk to authors, editors, agents etc in the bar. I wasn’t a groupie even in the days when tight velvet loons with Nureyev padding were at eye level so I’m not starting now that the velvet has been replaced by corduroy. That’s unfair, but you get my drift. The most generous contributors were the women. Becky Swift from TLC was her usual perceptive, supportive but/and  forthright self. Lorella Belli (agency) cut to the chase with kindness. The person I ended up agreeing with most was Craig Taylor (fivedials.com). There seems to be a fear of youth and the trappings of youth in every generation and it irritates me. Why do we also set up false dichotomies? Perhaps the BBC’s ‘balance’ shows everything in black and then white when in fact the real world is infinitely nuanced. In this case, youth are not PSP’d out zombies with concentration spans of gnats. They love books; they want to create beautiful artefacts that are unique to them. Like everyone, they just don’t want to be bored. So … let’s have printed books, made books, e-books, any bloody books as long as the content is good.

Advertisement