The Man Booker Shortlist

So here they are:

Aravind Adiga The White Tiger
Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture
Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs
Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency
Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole

Two first novels have made the shortlist, Adiga's and Toltz's, which is wondeful. But I'm very sad that John Berger's book didn't make it.

My money - if I had any - is on Sebastian Barry to win.

Old work, new work

While staring through the window and dreaming about my new novel (and doing some planning) I find images from my first novel stealing into my mind. I ask myself if that's because I'm afraid of stepping into the new or afraid of letting go of the old? I also find weaknesses in the first.

Just now, in this wonderful book by David Bayles & Ted Orland:
I found this:

New work is supposed to replace old work. If it does so by making the old work inadequate, insufficient and incomplete - well, that's life. (Frank Lloyd Wright advised young architects to plant ivy all around their early buildings, suggesting that in time it would grow to cover their 'youthful indiscretions'.) Old work tells you what you were paying attention to then; new work comments on the old by pointing out what you were not previously paying attention to.

How to make me feel better in just a few words.
This is Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House. You can find out more here.

The Man Booker shortlist, first novels

So, none of the first novels longlisted made it to the Man Booker shortlist but perhaps, because this list has been so wonderfully readable (no I haven't read them all, hardly any in fact, yet, but I've been reading dovegreyreader's reviews and Asylum's and I'll get to them soon) maybe there'll be more next year (both readable and first).

Here's hoping ... .

First novels and short stories

The thing about writing your first novel is that as well as doing it you're finding out how to do it. So, you would have thought that I'd have discovered at least the fundamentals of the how by now.

But it seems that I haven't, or hadn't. My second novel, which I had the idea for while I was still writing my first, in 2003 (or was it 2004?), turned out - in early 2007 - to be a short story. And the reason is simple (I realise, three years on). What I have been struggling to turn into a novel is a glimpse of a life (as William Trevor so deftly describes the essence of the short story) not a sinuous, continuous, easily-flowing or utterly dammed-up great big chunk of a life. (Or better, all these things, in their turn.)

A short story revolves around one main event, not a series of events caused by the characters or which cause them to react (or not). Of course the characters in a short story are affected by, or have caused, the event (which won't necessarily be a concrete exterior event, it could be an interior, psychological event), but this event is the fulcrum of the story. What has happened before it or what may happen after it do not belong in the short story: the event itself and how the characters deal with it serve as food for speculation about the before and the after in the readers' minds.

So, at last I know what to do with this novel I've been wrestling with. It is both a huge disappointment (no novel) and a great relief (I haven't had to bin the idea completely).

So, now I know what to do I'd better stop writing this MAT and get on with it. (Sometimes, getting down to a piece of work when I know where I'm going is more daunting then getting down to a piece of work when I don't know where I'm going. Why? Because it might not work, of course.)