Productivi-tips

Posted on 25/06/2014 by clembeauvais

Last week I wrote a blog post deploring the fact that I couldn’t write slowly. In response, two of my friends suggested I blogged about how to be ‘productive’. I’m a bit ambivalent, since, as hinted in that blog post, ‘productivity’ has a dark side. It can be efficiently generated by the cultivation of guilt, worry about the future and insecurity in children from a young age (I’m looking at you, French educational system), as well as by inordinately high standards.

So my immediate sarcastic response was: Tip number one: set yourself irrationally high goals, self-flagellate every time you don’t work enough to attain them, find people who are much better than you and mull over how superior they are, and for good measure, add the threat of never finding a job. Your productivity will rocket, I promise.

Well, let that be a disclaimer: even though this is a ‘tips’ blog post, there are issues with ‘tips’ about productivity, just like there are issues with ‘tips’ about losing weight, for instance.

But here are a few things that I do find genuinely useful in increasing productivity, that is to say, in my case, getting (preferably good) words on the page, whether academic or fictional, and making sure they get published (i.e. editing, revising, referencing, etc); and doing teaching-related work.

Switching off the Internet entirely

Just as I’m writing this, a little (1) pops up on my Facebook tab. I have to check what it is, because it could be someone tagging a picture of me drunkly lap-dancing in a bar. Let’s see. No, it’s fine, it’s just someone I friended in 2008 mass-inviting all his Facebook acquaintances to sponsor his half-marathon on a space hopper. I’m never going to sponsor him, but I still read the whole description and end up wikipediaing the charity he’s space-hopping for, which knits socks and scarves for yellow-bellied marmots. I suddenly remember I have a blog post to write, but now a little (1) has appeared on the Outlook tab…

Sorry, what? Oh yes – the Internet. Let’s not write that blog post online – too distracting. Write it in a Word document instead. Internet can stay open behind Word. Oh no it can’t, because some idiot at Microsoft thought it would be an excellent idea to make Word vaguely translucent at the top, which means I can still distinguish the little (1)s through a half-hearted vapour of pixels.

Solution: turn it off altogether with Cold Turkey (SelfControl for Mac users). I couldn’t have written anything in the past two years without Cold Turkey. It didn’t even get a mention in my thesis acknowledgements, because I preferred to pretend that real humans such as my supervisor, friends and family were more responsible for its completion, which is a lie, however much I love them.

Those pieces of software only block the websites you want them to block, which means you can still use JStor and Project Muse, where procrastination opportunities are few (until you start typing up your own name to see what comes up and this does).

Pomodoroing through multiple projects

I do this when I work on very many projects that are all at different stages of development, because that’s when I’m most at risk of using the exciting ones as excuses to procrastinate on the others. The Pomodoro technique basically states that you should set yourself short spans of time for work, interspersed with breaks. Strictly speaking, it’s supposed to be 20 minutes, but that’s too short to do anything constructive in academic or fiction writing.

I make myself work generally for an hour or an hour and a half on many projects everyday, strictly interrupting the one I’m doing when time’s up (yes, even in the middle of a sentence) to start work on the next one (or take a break).

The pictures in this post are beginning to make this look like a recipe blog

Breaks can be used to check and reply to email, though it’s much better if you can actually force yourself not do anything at all.

I use the Pomodoro technique only when I’m feeling overwhelmed by the quantity and variety of different projects. It’s also much easier during student holidays, when there aren’t too many meetings, supervisions and essays to mark.

The good thing about this technique is that you never work long enough to get bored of the projects. If anything, it makes you frustrated when you have to stop – which means that the next day, you’re happy to find that piece of work again.

Taking on more work, or setting earlier deadlines.

I find that productivity augments, rather than declines, when I’ve got more to do. This is, in part because although I can (on good days) focus intensely on writing or research for up to six or seven hours, it’s extremely rare when I can have that focus for one project. Paradoxically, taking on more projects and making sure you’ve always got one or two deadlines soonish makes me achieve more and feel happier.

Keeping a strict and very subdivided to-do list.

I list everything, even things like ‘reply to X’s email’ if I know it will take me more than 3 minutes to compose. If I have 20 undergrad essays to mark, I’ll list the names of all 20 people and cross them out as I go along. Purely psychological, of course, but those manageable tasks give the impression of being productive, which leads to actually being productive.

I also have 4+ separate to-do lists corresponding to different domains (fiction, admin, research, teaching, etc.), which avoids clutter. My to-do lists are on (virtual) post-it notes on my desktop, like (virtually) everyone else I know.

Doing either work or leisure activities

Wait but Why says it perfectly: there are two types of good weeks: days when you achieve something that ‘improves your future or that of others’ (even in small ways), and weeks of pleasure, leisure and enjoyment. Both at the same time makes for an ‘ideal’ week, which is rare.

And in-between, there’s a wearisome kind of activity, where you know you’re not actually having any fun, but you’re not doing anything particularly valuable either. This is the case, for instance, if you spend most of a day half-heartedly writing a few sentences, checking email, marking half an essay, checking the news, reading half a paper, checking the weather, etc. It’s tiring and makes you feel gross, while both real work and real leisure makes you invigorated and happy.

Real leisure: walking around the Cambridge Botanic Gardens

Picking the right times for small projects or admin tasks

It’s tempting to get small tasks or long tasks that don’t take much brainpower out of the way (i.e. filling in forms, doing tax returns etc.). But then you just end up wasting valuable energy, and possibly spending too much time on them out of a semi-conscious desire to procrastinate work on important stuff. Again, I find it useful to time those important but boring activities strictly, and stick them at moments of the day when you know you won’t be very switched-on anyway.

Using up as much available time as possible.

It’s hard to focus on anything when you know you’ve got to leave in 10 or 20 minutes, but with some tasks it’s entirely possible. I wrote most of this blog post in chunks of 5 or 10 minutes. I have a number of tasks on my to-do list that I know I can do in instalments, quickly dipping in and out when needed.

Sacrifice some things.

For instance, this blog and my French one. I don’t care (much) if I don’t have the time to deliver the weekly Wednesday post.

I’d be curious to hear what you do to increase productivity, and/or take issue with such blog posts as this one on ideological grounds.

Writing Slowly: Or, Investing in Research & Development

Posted on 15/06/2014 by clembeauvais

Two Fridays ago at Homerton College, we had a day-long symposium on children’s poetry. It was supposed to mix creative and academic approaches, so there was an hour-and-a-half, wonderful poetry-writing workshop by Redell Olsen, who is currently the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge.

We sat down in the orchard, and Redell gave us a series of writing exercises. Of course it involved writing, but it also involved taking in the space around us, the noises, the smells, the feel of the grass under our legs. Despite the brevity of the writing exercises, there was a kind of enforced patience in the workshop; an awareness of the world around, before and during the writing, an attention to detail, a weighing-up of possible options.

Homerton, under the sun

A lot of playfulness, too. Redell encouraged us [Green Party members may skip the next sentence] to pick up a fresh sheet of paper with each new exercise, and thus make each try just that – a try – and not a finished piece. Disposable writing, but not unimportant writing. Each try brought us closer to a personal mapping of the space we were in, of the sensations that it brought, and of their possible translations into literature or poetry.

I found this workshop truly revealing. I’m not a poet and I didn’t produce anything of any particular literary merit, but it shocked me to realise how fruitful it was to be able to write slowly, with breaks and pauses, with moments of observation.

In my two jobs – academic and fiction-writing – I can’t write slowly. I mean this in all the definitions of ‘can’t’: I seem to be organically unable to; it wouldn’t be manageable anyway even if I could; and I’m not ‘allowed’ to.

I suspect my inability to write slowly comes from a lifelong cultivation of speed-writing. Writing fast puts you at a clear advantage at school and at university, and it’s an essential skill as a young academic since we have to publish so much in order to be employable.

The habit is so deeply-rooted that I can’t even remember a time when I wrote slowly. At school I always finished exams early, sometimes an hour before the end. Whether for academic or fiction-writing, I’ve never missed a deadline. You’re very happy with this productivity until the rather sinister realisation creeps in that you’re writing fast out of dutifulness or anxiety, rather than enthusiasm or passion.

Mini-me, already annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of writing.

Positive reinforcement: being ‘prolific’ is a compliment; publishers want you to write a lot; in academia, your list of publications is your best asset. The faster you write, the more you produce; if your work is deemed of good enough quality, and there’s a lot of it, you will elicit admiration and praise. That’s enough to prevent you from questioning whether you could write very well rather than just well if only you slowed down a bit.

Anyway, even if you do start wondering about that, it’s too late. It’s a vicious circle: the more you produce, the more you must keep producing; and if people find your work satisfactory and are simply concerned with how much of it you can produce, there is no incentive to experiment with writing other things, or writing more slowly. So you just keep going at an increasingly insane pace.

You might feel you’re plateauing at some point, and that the quality of your work is more or less always the same. But as long as it’s not actively decreasing, and that people are happy – well, you just keep writing as fast as usual, if not faster.

It gives rise to a kind of academic or literary Fordism whereby you get better and better at spotting superfluity in your own writing, and cutting down everything you spend too much time on. You become extremely efficient, sure, but the time you manage to save is never truly earned back for Research & Development, so to speak – it gets immediately reinvested in Production.

In this you are encouraged by Twitter, Facebook and tales of who got hired where thanks to how many publications. Writing is your job, so you must produce writing; if there’s no writing, you’re not a writer or a researcher.

Writing slowly, experimenting with writing, gradually becomes ‘disallowed’, simply because you stop considering it as work. It’s a free-time activity. And I, like many people, have very little free time. I have a full-time research position, but I take on too much teaching, like everyone else, so I don’t do research 100% of my work time. And then my actual free time is mostly taken up by fiction-writing, which, of course, is itself mostly taken up by checking layouts, editing, liaising with editors, checking roughs – so, not-writing. And of what little is left I need to use a lot to do fake free-time-activities which are in fact linked to my two jobs, such as reading, writing blog posts, doing school visits, etc.

Writing slowly and experimenting with writing is just something I can’t do anymore. I would love to claim that the poetry workshop changed my life for the better, that I’ve now decided to slow down and to take the time to write and to play around with different academic and literary styles, but that’s not the case at all.

I just don’t have the possibility to do so ‘right now’, because I’ve got to check layouts for a British book, edit another British book and a French one, write two YA novels (English+French), finish revising my monograph, finish the article I’m currently working on, write another 2 before the end of July (French+English), and somehow I also need to fit in writing another children’s book before the end of the summer.

So I’ll write slowly ‘when I have the time’, which is, as it is for most people, never. My investments in Research & Development dwindle and dwindle and dwindle – but the production line is going well, thank you.

Clem

Publishing Children’s Books in the UK vs. in France

Posted on 21/05/2014 by clembeauvais

I spend half of my life complaining about how difficult it is to write children’s books for the French market, and the other half complaining about how difficult it is to write children’s books for the UK market. The happy corollary to this is that I spend half of my life praising the French market, and the other half praising the UK market.

Several people have asked me to write about the differences between UK and French children’s publishing, and what it means for writers (they might have asked me this so I get it out of my system, bored as they are of hearing me going on and on about it). It’s true that the two systems are extremely different, and for someone who attempts to write children’s books for each market, and to have a writing career in both countries, it’s a bit of a schizophrenic exercise.

Here are a few reasons why.

‘Literariness’ versus ‘wide appeal’

Writing in English for the UK market means, to me, a certain compromise between ‘literariness’ and ‘commercialness’. This isn’t to say that French publishers don’t care about sales – of course they do – but I have never been asked by a French publisher to make a book or book proposal more commercial. However, in the UK market, wide appeal is absolutely crucial.

This is in part because writing for the UK market means writing, potentially, for all the anglophone markets – and, hopefully, for many others. We are asked to consider not just if British kids will like the books, but also if American, Australian, South African, and also German, Spanish, Turkish, Korean and Thai kids will like them too. Foreign right sales are hugely important and it is expected that a book should be sold abroad.

In France, for most publishers, foreign right sales are a lovely bonus for a children’s writer, but they’re something to celebrate, not something you really expect.

A comparative study of French and English reactions to foreign right sales.

Money matters

As a result, what you can expect to earn is radically different. People don’t always believe me, but the difference between a French advance and a UK advance, for a children’s writer like me, is quite literally 1 to 10. Being a full-time children’s writer in France means writing sometimes dozens of books a year and doing scores of events. Being a full-time children’s writer in the UK, in terms of income, is much, much more comfortable (though by no means ideal, I hasten to say).

Other things differ drastically. In the UK, after your first book, you generally get an advance before you’ve written the whole book. None of that in France, where you damn well write the damn whole book before pitching it to your publishers, and they might very well be like ummm… no. Sorry about the year of your life you spent writing it.

‘Faithfulness’ to publishers

Writing dozens of books a year requires having different publishers, and France is much more tolerant of this practice than Britain. Here in the UK, having more than one publisher isn’t ideal; in France, few children’s writers (at my level) have the luxury of being ‘faithful’ to one house. Of course, we’ve got a reputation for that kind of thing in matters of love too, so maybe that’s not surprising…

French author flirting with several publishers

Agents

Agents are a huge difference between the UK and France. In France, literary agents basically don’t exist; sporadically, you’ll hear that ‘they’re coming now!’ but actually… they aren’t. Writers have to struggle against editors all the time to negotiate contracts, get advances, get paid. It’s a bit of a nightmare, and something I’d much rather avoid.

In the UK, the possibility of having an agent is an absolute blessing – though I fully understand that many authors prefer to fend for themselves, I relish the presence of an intermediary between me and the publishing houses.

Political content of children’s books

Another, tricky difference: ‘radical’ children’s literature and controversial nature of the books’ content. UK people don’t always believe me, but genuinely – French children’s literature is much more radical. Much more racy, much more politically incorrect, much more politically committed, much more uncomfortable.

My French books, for most of them, are unpublishable in the UK, especially my YA books, because they would have to be readjusted for adults. Similarly, younger books can have darker and scarier content. Ambiguity, especially in endings, is accepted much more easily in France.

This is not due to the fact that editors are squeamish in the UK, but rather that they are worried that the book might be boycotted, banned, blacklisted by prescriptors. There’s a constant desire to appeal to the greatest number – and to avoid at all costs upsetting the adult mediators – and this means controlling the ideological content of the books much more.

Branding and promotion

In the UK, author ‘branding’ is hugely important – and it also means that it’s less easy to move between age ranges or genres. In France, I can publish a funny picturebook one month and a YA novel about revenge porn the next. But each book will reach such different audiences, and so randomly, that I’m unlikely to be recognised in either of the two markets.

Obviously, France is a much smaller pond, too: it’s relatively easy to become well-known, at least by name, and especially now that blogs and Facebook (much more than Twitter) are so popular among writers and illustrators. Being a debut UK author means streaming through a torrent of tweets from anglophone writers around the world, and it’s quite a daunting experience.

On the other hand, being a debut author in the UK or US is celebrated – you get a press release, a launch, some attention, and a lot of help from publishers to find events. In France? it’s nothing special. You have a book out. Youpi.

In short…

Neither situation is, of course, entirely ideal, but neither situation is entirely bad either. I love the fact that, in France (and with my main publisher Sarbacane) I can write about pretty much whatever I want. In the UK, I love the fact that my books are more widely read, and that there is so much work done by the publisher to promote them and sell them abroad. I also enjoy the additional money – sure; but it comes at a cost, too: that of compromising on ‘literariness’ or on ‘what I want to write’.

This is why I’m keeping up (or trying to keep up) writing on both sides of the Channel, and so far it’s brought me many more pleasures than disappointments.

Why Writing Is Like Everything Else

Posted on 07/05/2014 by clembeauvais

I’ve been reading blogs on writing and on publishing for more or less eight or nine years now, and I think that one of the most important things I’ve learnt from this daily blog-reading is the following message:

Writing is, pretty much, more or less, to some degree, basically like everything else.

See for yourself: here’s a small selection of things that writing is like.

To begin with, writing is very much like cooking. In fact, it’s so much like cooking that many different people have different views on why it’s exactly like cooking; however, others would argue it’s closer to baking, and I mean a cake, though apparently it can be much more precise than that: it’s in fact exactly like baking muffins. While you’re busy being a domestic god/dess, you might as well know that writing is also exactly like crocheting or knitting. You prefer shorter needles? No problem! Writing is pretty much like sewing too. When Rex starts yapping that it’s time for his morning walk, you can also do that productively, because writing is like walking the dog. Once you’re back, you might want to do a jigsaw puzzle, which is more or less what writing is, anyway. Don’t forget, once you’re back, to clean the floor, which, incidentally, is precisely what writing is like. You can even do it in your knickers, because writing is like walking around in your knickers. Then if the weather is still nice out, you might consider gardening; because gardening, and oh my goodness there are too many blog posts to list here, is absurdly similar to writing.

If you’re less of a domestic person and more of a multi-talented artist, here are some words of comfort. Writing is, in fact, very much like painting. However, if the blogosphere is to be believed, it’s even more like sculpting. Yes, all this vocabulary of carving out and polishing makes the analogy particularly strong: writing basically equals sculpting. Seriously, I promise you, it’s exactly like sculpting. Pottery, too, as you might have guessed. However, let’s not forget, while we’re talking about visual arts, that photography is also analogous to writing in many different ways. Sorry, what’s that? You prefer music? Well, you’re in luck: writing, as you might know, is just like singing. It’s also, to some degree, pretty much like playing the piano, though surprisingly enough it’s not like playing any other instrument, as far as my research has gone. If you’re more of a dramatic arts person, fret not, for writing is, thankfully, also like acting.

But wait, I hear you ask, what if I need some exercise in-between all these artistic activities that are exactly like writing? Fortunately, sports are the number one category of things that are like writing. In fact, sports in general are like writing. But there are also particular sports that are analogous to writing. I won’t bother you with all the literature on why writing is like running: it’s not difficult to see that many writers are constantly running, running, even running marathons. Some are also into other sports, and thanks to them I can report that swimming, dancing and skiing are also just like writing. Riding a bike is also part of the list of physical activities that are to some degree the same thing as writing. Do you prefer combat sports? Well, you might want to try judo, which happens to be a lot like writing. But some of you are more attracted to extreme sports, aren’t you – if which case, rest assured that hiking a canyon, rock-climbing, mountain-climbing, scuba-diving, and skydiving will provide much information as to what writing is like.

Boy, all of these active Duracell bunny writers are making me feel bad. Let’s go for a walk, for writing is obviously pretty much like walking. Then some stretches: yoga is a lot like writing. Yes, even in your leisure time, you can gather snippets of wisdom as to what writing is like. Fishing, for example, is like writing. Meanwhile, you might be rowing a boat, which thankfully is also like writing. Seasonal events should be taken advantage of: dressing up for Halloween appears to be pretty similar to writing. Making snowballs is so obviously like writing that it goes without saying. There is a lot of controversy around whether bowling is like writing: some say it is, but someone else says that writing is like golf, not bowling. Not sure I want to take sides in this debate, being equally bad at both. It’s also a shame I can’t drive, because apparently writing is like driving. But some people have tougher Sunday activities, and they might want to consider that the house they’re building, and their digging in the dirt, are also perfectly acceptable analogies for writing.

But of course writing is also a lot like much more romantic and sensual things. It’s like falling in love! And after this sweet event, you can gain relief from the idea that writing is like being in a relationship. This relationship entails a ton of sex, if writer-bloggers are to be believed: though Paulo Coelho himself argues that writing is like making love to a computer. It’s also like having sex with a beautiful woman. Consequences, consequences: as Mary Higgins Clark (and many others) report, writing is also like being pregnant. And after being pregnant comes having a baby, which thankfully is pretty much like writing. Don’t worry though: practicing medicine is very similar to writing, so you’ll be aroung like-minded people in the delivery room.

Feel free to share in the comments other things that writing is like. One thing’s for sure, though: blogging isn’t like writing. I don’t know how many books I could have written in the time I spent reading others’ and writing mine…

(nah, I love it, really.)

The Duchess of Cambridge’s Guide to Essay-Writing

Posted on 23/04/2014 by clembeauvais

Summer’s coming, undergradate and MPhil dissertations are due soon, and it’s time to get articles sent to journals before the August and September lethargy gives peer-readers even more excuses to take 6 months over reviewing our 7000-word pieces of genius research.

It’s also the right weather for the sempiternally worshipped Duchess of Cambridge (DoC) to properly dazzle the world with her impeccable figure and flawless sense of style, so I thought I’d corner her for an interview about how we can transfer her otherworldly sartorial perfection to our academic writing.

CB. Hello, Your Cantabrigian Highness! How was Australia?

DoC. It was ever so interesting. Among other things, I discovered that giraffes have even longer tongues than the men who watched the slow oscillation of my sister’s derriere at my wedding.

CB. Right… Tell us, pray, o eternal empress of chic – what tips from your wardrobe and attitude can we apply to academic essay- and article-writing?

DoC. Well, to begin with, we must all agree that the ideal outfit is perfectly fitted, but of a lovely bright or pastel colour.

CB. Indeed, you are not a fan of baggy tops and maxiskirts in fifty shades of browns and greys. What’s the tip here?

DoC. My dear, the ideal article is carefully trimmed to fit exactly the subject matter – no fluffy extras, no bits of fabric hanging out here and there, and rigorously no asymmetry. Be scissor-happy: as close to the body of the essay as you can be. No blurry tulle or misty gauze: use honest, clear, tangible fabrics. But to counteract this rather severe tailoring, allow yourself a generally bold, bright, youthful, sharp tone of voice. White and black are to be kept for important occasions: black for paradigm-shifting articles, and pretty, lacy white lies for academic reviews of your friends or colleagues’ latest books.

CB. All of this should be monochromatic ?

DoC. Well, I do like monochrome, but accessories will help you ensure it doesn’t end up being monochord. Allow yourself little deviations from the overall tone – but only where it matters. A nice little controversial quotation to top your introduction like a curly fascinator, an interesting clutch to set off a dull paragraph towards the middle of the essay.

CB. And a grand, lyrical, flashy conclusion?

DoC. My goodness, no! It would attract attention solely onto itself, to the detriment of the body of work. Conclusions should be like my shoes: very bland, distanced enough from the ground that they’re not flat, but certainly no platforms. Let the essay speak for itself and end sensibly.

CB. That’s helpful, Your Highness, but some people would accuse you of taking too few risks. Aren’t we going to end up with a rather classical style?

DoC. This is where another rule comes into play: hair should be down unless absolutely necessary. This will add unexpectedness, a sense of welcome playfulness, a certain je ne sais quoi of unpredictability. Structure and plan everything, but always leave something unprepared – something for the winds of inspiration to frolic around with.

CB. Erm what? Your hair is unprepared?

DoC. *coughs* Well, it’s prepared in a special way that makes it feel natural and unexpected when the breeze plays around with it. Think of it as your scholarly background – all that knowledge that you’ve accumulated over the years. Some of it is already present in your structure – you’re consciously integrated those sources, you know you’ll mention them at some stage. But the rest is still there, maintained, curled and trimmed by years of taking notes, rereading them, forgetting them. Not exactly unprepared, but let’s say, artistically free-floating. A flick of the wind and ta-dah! who knows which idea might come and kiss your cheek when you think you’ve got your whole argument sorted?

CB. What is it with knees? Why do you rarely show your knees?

DoC. Knees are like transitions between subparts. They do all the hard work, but they are aesthetically displeasing and lack grace. Try to conceal them whenever possible. That said, should an impolite gust of wind ruffle your skirt as you get down from an airplane, the effect can be quite alluring; use this tip sparsely, to showcase, for a brief moment, the strength of those solid hinges of yours.

CB. What can you tell us about handling our ideas?

DoC. Take inspiration from the way in which I artfully handle little Prince George to show him around to my people: from all different angles, and apparently effortlessly. It looks like a nine-month-old healthy baby isn’t at all too heavy for my impossibly delicate arms. Cultivate that style. Show all the facets of your ideas, trying to make it sound like it’s very easy to hold them for a long time in improbable positions.

CB. Is it always necessary to remind everyone of your status by constantly flashing your tacky diamond and sapphire engagement ring?

DoC. Yes, dear. It’s called a self-citation. You’ll see when you’ve got actual work to show for your importance in the field: you’ll refer to it absolutely all the time. You’ll find, in fact, that I’m being quite restrained, only alluding to my status in one place per outfit. Of course, you can’t do that yet, because you’re a nobody who hasn’t yet done anything worthy of unsubtle allusions.

‘I refer you to my previous work in the field’

CB. Thanks for that. A final question, Your Royal Youness. People like me have days when they have pimples, or scruffy hair, or really no wish to squeeze our feet into high heels. For some of us, it’s every single day. What can we do if we really can’t follow your example, o grand guru of demure fashion?

DoC. I’m not interested in such people. I’m sure they can find their own style guide to follow. Go ask Lady Gaga, I heard she coached Slavoj Zizek.

Thank you, tabloidal deity, for granting us half an hour of your busy schedule. She has now returned to the hyperactive nothingness of her royal duties, leaving us with some hope that we shall one day find true love, in the form of a permanent and salaried position, within some academic establishment. And perhaps we will soon parade, in front of a crowd of ~~excited journalists~~ politely complimentary colleagues, a cuboid baby freshly delivered by an academic press.

On voyeurism in children’s and YA literature

Posted on 29/01/2014 by clembeauvais

Breaking news: children’s and YA literature, especially the latter, can be pretty racy. From Tabitha Suzuma’s tale of an incestuous relationship between brother and sister (Forbidden) to The Hunger Games‘s murderous children, through to that scene in Melvin Burgess’s Junk where the heroin-addict mother punches a needle into her breastfeeding breast in search of a workable vein…

These are just three of dozens of texts where teenagers are raped, killed, torture, or do that unto others; or simply where sex scenes, even consenting and loving, are frankly explicit. Personally, I’ve got a horse in the racy race, or rather two, since my French YA books are so shocking than no UK publisher will publish them as YA. La pouilleuse narrates a day of psychological and physical torture perpetrated by a group of idle teenagers on a six-year-old girl. Comme des images goes through what happens after a video of a sixteen-year-old girl masturbating is leaked to the whole school. So no, I don’t have anything against racy YA.

There will always be people who say that it’s voyeurism. But this frequently-used term is often left undefined. As a result, it’s easy to retort that the person is just a prude, as if an accusation of ‘voyeurism’ was simply a glorified translation of ‘I’m shocked’, or ‘I can’t stomach this’. And it’s often the case, as there are indeed many watchful prudes in the children’s and Young Adult literature world.

Oh my goodness, the F-word!

But sometimes it’s a perfectly justified criticism. And the ‘other side’, the very vocal and active community of Young Adult writers and bloggers, too swiftly responds in terrifying torrents of Tweets to anyone who dares to criticise the work of one of their own.

And yet accusations of voyeurism, in the strictest sense of the word, aren’t necessarily idiotic or prudish or moralistic. They can be perfectly valid, and even important. But what does voyeurism actually mean?

Voyeurism doesn’t just mean ‘something shocking’, or ‘something with which some people might ideologically disagree’. Shocking the reader is good. Shocking the reader is a perfectly valid endeavour. What’s problematic about voyeuristic texts, from both an ideological and an aesthetic viewpoint, isn’t that they shock the reader, it’s that they trap the reader in a position from which s/he can’t escape; a position which forces him/her to feel pleasure, disgust, excitement, etc., when reading a specific scene.

This happens, for instance, in the case of:

Gratuitous episodes of sex, of psychological or physical violence, etc., which don’t add anything to the plot or characterisation but are there principally out of complacency, to elicit strong sensations in the reader.
Explicit descriptions that leave the reader no space to imagine what happens. Everything is said.
The (conscious or unconscious) desire to trigger sexual excitement in the reader, or a fascination for violence.
A lack of narrative distance towards what is represented, translated for instance as a unicity of narrative focalisation, or a narrative voice from which the reader has no way of detaching her/himself.
The choice of particularly ‘hot’ themes, such as child prostitution, forced marriages, teenage pregnancy, etc., mostly for their narrative potential, that is to say without taking into account the fact that real people experience these situations.
A lack of critical distance towards the ideological implications of the represented scenes or their symbolic meaning(s), or a representation which eludes unpleasant or questionable aspects to focus only on their sensationalism.
A lack of awareness of the generational gap between implied readers and implied author, and therefore a lack of awareness of the particular ethical and ideological issues linked to the representation, for instance, of extreme violence or of sex scenes; especially when those are ventriloquised by young characters behind which lurks, of course, an adult author.

Obviously, none of these elements is either sufficient or necessary to make a text voyeuristic, but it makes it more likely to fall into voyeurism.

The solution, of course, isn’t to eliminate controversial themes from Young Adult literature. I’d have to burn my own books. In fact I think that YA often doesn’t go far enough, in the sense that, even when it superficially engages with super-hot-themes, it often remains moralistic and conservative. Twilight is fairly racy, but it’s also, of course, hugely conservative. We need some more radical YA, and this radical YA must of course represent sex, violence, drugs. Those themes are not only attractive, they’re crucial to one’s understanding of existence, and literature can present and analyse them in different ways to our biggest ‘competitors’, film and video games.

So how can we write racy or violent scenes without falling into voyeurism? I’m not saying I’ve got an answer (I wish), but here are some thoughts:

Weakening the narrative voice. Voyeurism first and foremost establishes a relation of power between narratee and narrator. The reader must be able to rebel against what we’re forcing him/her to see: it’s only fair. On a narrative level, that means a narrator who isn’t omnipotent anymore. That means a voice that, even seemingly strong and assertive, reveals fault lines and hollow spaces. A narrative voice from which the reader can detach himself or herself, and actively seek a different vision of the scene.
Creating discomfort and unease. When we’re uneasy, it means we can’t fully be voyeurs. Voyeurism implies being mesmerised, adhering totally to what we see. Uneasiness, discomfort indicate that we are aware that, for some reason, we shouldn’t see what we’re seeing – and therefore we’re already judging what we’re seeing. An uneasy reader is a cleft reader, a divided reader, and therefore a questioning reader. Why am I feeling uncomfortable reading this? What isn’t right about this representation? You can’t fall into the trap of voyeurism when the text allows you to question what it’s giving you to see.
Being so outrageous the reader can’t see clearly anymore. Let’s be hyperbolic, lyrical, grandiose, excessive, disgusting, crude. If we’re going to shock the reader, let’s do it so it creates a screen so thick that the reader, try as they may, can’t even see what’s behind it. Nabokov lets Humbert Humbert say he wants to “turn [his] Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys”. This is the twelve-year-old girl he rapes “every night, every night”. Lolita is the story of an obsession for Lolita in which we can’t see Lolita anymore from the moment Humbert Humbert sets eyes on Lolita. Look as much as you want, you’ll never see her through the haze of that language. As a reader, you can’t enjoy her, you can’t delight in her; there’s nothing to see.
Not showing enough. This is the opposite strategy, of course: not giving enough to see. Punching holes through the text, disappointing the reader, not finishing what we started, forbidding climaxes. We can surprise the reader with a shocking paucity of details, insert endless, frustrating ellipses. And thus force the reader to become responsible for the text: to become responsible for his or her vision of things. Force the reader, therefore, to become empowered, active, inventive, and accountable.

Any other ideas? Thoughts? Disagreements?

If not, until next Wednesday, au revoir…

_______________________________________________

EDIT: This article was inspired to me by an interview in French where I was asked to respond to accusations of ‘voyeurism’ in my own works, so I wrote it mostly under my ‘creative writing hat’.

However, my ex-supervisor having noted that I tacitly appeared to refer to her own works in this article, I hasten to refer readers interested in the ramifications of this question for children’s literature criticism to the following:

The question of identification and of the importance of narrative voice in ‘trapping’ the young reader is tackled notably by Maria Nikolajeva in, among others, Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers (2010), and also by Maria Tatar in Enchanted Hunters, The Power of Stories in Childhood (2009).
Maria recently published an article on guilt in Forbidden and His Dark Materials which tackles the question of the overpowering narrative voice and the ethical problems it leads to in the adult-child relationship.

Some Royal News

Posted on 21/01/2014 by clembeauvais

Having read quite a few children’s books since I was born (they’re generally pretty good, you should try them), I recently became dissatisfied. Yes, dear readers, dissatisfied. Because none of them, no – none of the books I’d read ever gathered the following ten things all together in the same story:

Windsurfing starfish
Sextuplet princes (of toddlerish age) (crowns equipped with elastic bands)
A foreign king obsessed with blitz invasions (finished in time for dinner)
Hummingbird cannons
An amazing holiday including a trip to a Mars bar
A babysitting job paid one thousand pounds a day
A naked porcupine
A knitted parachute
A lift especially designed for a cow
A day of leave at the Independent Republic of Slough.

I was extremely sad about this oversight, because it appears to me that no children’s book can ever be quite complete without these ten things.

So I decided to write it!

And since other people agreed that the children’s literature world could not survive much longer without these ten things all neatly folded into a children’s book, it will be published as the first book in a series, by Bloomsbury, in September 2014!

(NB The lovely people at Bloomsbury, as a welcome present, having somehow heard from somewhere that I didn’t dislike one of their series, gave me this brand new Harry Potter box set -)

now I'll have to reread them for the 67th time... oh well!

uh-oh, now I’ll have to reread them for the 67th time. Ah well!

The first volume of my own series, meanwhile, will be called The Royal Babysitters.

Based on a true story. (not)

What’s the pitch? Bickering sisters Anna and Holly, along with rather clueless little prince Pepino, have to look after six little princes for just one day – yes, but a day chosen by the bloodthirsty King Alaspooryorick of Daneland to invade the country.

A rather tough job, then, but you see, they have to earn some serious money to pay for the unbelievably cool Holy-Moly-Holiday that they’ve seen advertised in the newspaper. .

The second book in the series doesn’t have a name yet but it will be out in April 2015.

And it all takes place in a world… not quite like our own.

“But what age is it for?” asks the anxious adult. “From your description, it sounds like it could be for anyone between seven and a quarter and eight and a half! I need it to be more precise!!!”

It will be, I think, intended for children who are just getting to grips with the Art of Reading (well done them), though once again, like the Sesame books, I have written them carefully so they won’t immediately burn the neurons of anyone at a different stage of literacy.

And, what is supermuchmore exciting, it will be what I believe my friend and colleague Eve Tandoi would call a hybrid book series, that is to say a book where words and pictures both tell the story. It’s not quite a comic and it’s not quite a picturebook, but it’s somewhere in between, and I think it’s going to be hugely fun once the pictures are all drawn.

And it will be edited by none other than the extraordinary Ellen Holgate, who had already picked my Sesame at Hodder before moving to Bloomsbury. All those of you who’ve read Sesame books know how beautifully conceived and designed they are, so I’m ferociously excited that she’s working on the series too.

I hope you’re looking forward to it too. In fact I hope you’re now considering making lots of new babies in order to have an excuse to read them this series and then the Sesame Seade books. I’ll leave you to do that, then. I’ll just leave you to it.

Clem x

Evil Editors who Edit

Posted on 11/12/2013 by clembeauvais

“So did you have to change a lot of things in your book before it got published?”

“Oh yes, loads.”

“Because you’d made spelling mistakes and stuff?”

“Well, sure, but there are more in-depth changes than that.”

“WHAT?! Like what? Character names?”

“Erm, sometimes, but not just. Things like deleting secondary characters, changing the main plot, taking out secondary plotlines, etc.”

“Your editor made you do that?!?”

“Yes. They’re editors so they edit.”

“And you didn’t say anything?”

“I said I agreed with most of the changes, since I did, and disagreed with some, and then we discussed those.”

“So basically, there’s like, lots of things that have changed between the manuscript and the final book.”

“Yes.”

“That’s awful.”

The Evil Editor who Edits is a prominent mythical figure in common representations of bookwriting and publishing. S/he barges in with a red pen and a hatred of everything aesthetic and beautiful and corrupts and destroys the pure virgin innocent manuscript of the poor author.

Example of an edited page (version 4 of the manuscript)

There is one central reason for the Evil Editor who Edits to act this way:

MAKE BOOK MORE COMMERCIAL

and absolutely no other reason, certainly not to rectify plotlines that are holey, characters that are hollow, language that is corny, pacing that is wonky and descriptions that are much too long.

There is no way an Editor could possibly do anything like literary appraisal of a manuscript; Editors are cohorts of agents Smith from the Matrix, therefore all they do is make sure that all books published reinforce the general numbness of the docile population. They are controlling and aggressive towards authors because authors are constantly threatening to produce things that will awaken citizens of the world to their situations as Alkaline batteries for gigantic machines.

Your editor edits? You must be weak-willed and lily-livered.

You “shouldn’t be so easily influenced”, “should put up a fight”, and “shouldn’t take any of this”. It’s like you have no self-respect, no respect for your work, and no respect for your readers if you let the Editor do anything to your text.

Your editor edits? Your manuscript must have been awful.

Clearly your book was such a pile of fresh cow dung that it needed to be entirely rewritten by an army of anonymous pen-pushers (god knows why it was taken in the first place, since I’m not Kim Kardashian).

Editors edit; how dare they?

Well that is their job. Editing means modifying a text to make it better, not just Tipp-Exing over typos. Editors are trained readers (see ‘that is their job’); they can spot exactly not just where a text goes wrong but how it could potentially be improved. They will not rewrite but suggest possible ways for the author to rewrite.

Traditionally published authors are not the sole creators of their work (I think self-published authors shouldn’t be either, but that’s another story). The book is the work of a collective and editors have the difficult job of pricing, timing and supervising that collective. Of course they need to ensure the commercial viability of the work, because the book needs to end up in readers’ hands, because the point of a book is to be read. You also need the book to sell or else you won’t eat, remember.

Most of the time, edits are negotiable. If there’s truly a non-negotiable edit and you really, really can’t see why it should be done, your agent will try to intervene. You’re not alone faced with the Evil Editor who dares to edit your work. And you’d be surprised about how little Bowdlerisation actually takes place even in children’s writing. People at Hodder never asked me to modify the vocabulary in the Sesame books, for instance, even though there had been some concern that it was too complex. I couldn’t joke about sex, that’s for sure, but the books talk about money, drugs, poisoning, animal testing, etc.; themes even I thought were probably not going to be accepted. They were.

Inadvertently offensive expressions, however, were rectified.

Yes of course there is censorship in children’s books – god knows we’ve been trying to sell my French books to the UK but they’re too ‘violent and dark’ – but that selection takes place before the book deal, one should hope. Why would an editor take on a book and then ask for all the central sex, drugs and murder plotlines to be removed?

In the best cases, the editor will work tirelessly with you on an extremely ugly first draft and after months (yes, months) of redrafting, two-hour-long phone calls, and dozens of emails, a beautiful swan will emerge from the ugly duckling that Draft 1 was. This is the kind of privileged experience I had with my latest YA in French, Comme des images, which is coming out in February.

First drafts are never publishable as is, and almost never publishable without considerable edits. Yes, even first drafts by established authors. People don’t realise that, because they never see a first draft; all they see is the finished product. Interning in publishing has been such an eye-opener for me: 99% of manuscripts in the ‘slushpile’ truly are terrible; out of the 1% that’s left, almost none of them will actually make it through to publication without several weeks or months of rewrites.

Let me say this again: if you’re still outraged that editors dare to edit, you clearly don’t realise how rubbish most first drafts are.

That’s not to say you can’t either get lucky, or get better at writing first drafts that need less editing. Gargoyles Gone AWOL needed much less editing than Sleuth on Skates, and Scam on the Cam even less than Gargoyles. Does it mean I’m getting ‘better’ at writing Sesame books? Well, in a way – in the sense that I’m getting better at anticipating my editor’s issues with the books. If you know an editor well you can preempt their queries, and immediately delete that secondary character you know they’ll say you don’t need.

There’s only one case so far in my writerly ‘career’ (blah) when I was very lucky and got away with the most minor edits, and that was for my YA novel La pouilleuse, which came out last year. It was almost unchanged by my then-editor Emmanuelle. But when I was chatting to my new editor, Tibo, from the same publishing house, he said to me he would have asked me to rewrite quite a lot of the ending if he’d been my editor on that book.

Would it have been a worse or better book? Neither. Both cases, I think, would have worked perfectly. It would have been a different book; my book and Tibo’s, as opposed to my book and Emmanuelle’s. There’s no book without an editor, and the editor’s vision is an integral part of the book.

(As well as, sometimes, his marginalia:)

Editor getting annoyed at the amount of ‘I said’ in a dialogue (‘J’ai dit! J’ai dit! J’ai dit!’)

Yes, I am eclipsing in this blog post the numerous problems one can still run into with some editors. It’s because this is a blog post In Defense Of. I know that not all editors are sweet unicorn fowls with manes of caramel fudge. And yes, there are some edits on older books I regret doing and certainly wouldn’t do today. But all of the above remarks are valid in the case of a professional, mutually respectful relationship between a reasonable editor and reasonable author who are both hoping to get a good book out of the ‘evil’ edits.

Turning the thesis into a book

Posted on 27/11/2013 by clembeauvais

This is me a little while ago, having just passed my PhD viva:

(The boyfriend would kill me if I put a picture of his face on my blog so I decided to replace it by another face I also like (and which, coincidentally or not, looks pretty much exactly like him (and yes I know, I’m a genius at Photoshop.)))

This is me a few months later with the hard-bound multicoloured thesis:

Look at that self-satisfied little face. Blessed be the innocent.

Look at that self-satisfied little face. Oh if I had known.

At the time, in the words of J.K. Rowling, all was well. I had passed the viva, the thesis was bound and was going to write the Book from the PhD which I already had signed a contract for.

AND A DEADLINE

which at the time sounded very very faraway (this was July 1st; deadline January 31st).

‘OH I’VE GOT AGES!’ she said at the time.

‘I will have all the time in the world to turn the thesis into that perfect thing it was supposed to be!’ she said at the time.

And the PhD viva was mostly about what I should change in order to turn the thesis into a book anyway. So I felt Guided, Secure and Happy.

Please don’t think I procrastinated and didn’t start working on the Book immediately. I barely took two weeks off after my viva and then started working on the Book. But somehow it’s already November The Endth and this is what I’m looking like now:

The book is not going well, people. But this is the opportunity for me to theorise about book-writing from the thesis (hurrah). And this is what, according to my theorisation, I’m doing wrong:

I’ve basically decided to rewrite the whole thesis. I’m only going to be reusing something like a quarter of it, and most of it completely transformed. It’s a stupid idea.
I somehow seem to be acting as if this is the only academic book I’ll ever write in my life. I’m therefore cramming every single thought I’ve ever had about children’s literature into it. It’s a stupid idea.
I’m panicking that I’m running out of time, therefore I’m writing faster than I should, therefore it’s not good writing. It’s a stupid idea.
I’ve taken on zillions of hours of teaching and lecturing and marking and doing tons of other things which are preventing me from writing the book. It’s a stupid idea.
I randomly decided to spend two weeks writing an article on something completely unrelated. It’s a stupid idea.
I randomly became interested in a different theory which will not in any way find its way into the book, instead of working on the theories that are important for the book. It’s a stupid idea.
I keep whining about the book. It’s a stupid idea.

Yes, the whole thing is currently driving me insane. Of course there’s a voice in my head (aka that of my ex-supervisor) which helps me a bit:

So yes, I know it’s completely normal. It’s still terrifying. Some days I feel like I’ve said all I’ve got to say, and I still have forty thousand words to write. Some days I feel like I’ll never be able to cram all I’ve got to say in forty thousand words. Some days I want to restructure the whole thing entirely, some days I just think ‘whatever, let’s just take the old structure from the thesis and be done with it’.

My main problem is that the book presents a theoretical model articulating several different concepts, and I’m finding it really hard to do without a super-long overall introduction. It’s pretty hard, too, to introduce the different parametres of the theory as I go along, because they’re all related to one another. I also feel like I’m being extremely repetitive in my effort to be understood. I also feel like I’m being very descriptive when I talk about the philosophical system I’m using.

And why wasn’t that a problem for the thesis itself? Because a thesis is an academic exercise, where it’s perfectly acceptable to have a very long intro that spells out your theoretical framework, explains what you’re going to do, what your methodology is, etc. And it doesn’t matter if you repeat yourself a bit because it shows that you’re signposting your work. But in real academic books you can’t do that because it’s ferociously boring and not good practice.

When I submitted my thesis I wrote about the pain of realising that it’s never going to be what it should have been (see “How my real thesis was kidnapped by trolls“) (oh God, typing this last sentence I Freudianistically wrote “How my real life was kidnapped by trolls”). I’m having, predictably, the same symptoms now. Even if I hated the thesis in the end, I was still hopeful it would be turned into a Perfect Book. And it’s not going to happen, of course. It will always be a draft in my mind.

For now I’ve made a list of Things to Remember When I’m Having an Acute Book Crisis:

It’s completely normal.
No academic book is a perfect and coherent whole, without repetitions, clear and concise all the way, and revolutionary in both form and content (that’s definitely true).
I’m twenty-four and it’s my first academic book so people will be nice to me (HA. SURE.)
The reviewers will have good advice and recommendations to make it better (if they don’t reject it outright).
There are some good ideas in there.
The publishers won’t let me publish something completely rubbish.
There will be other books, articles, talks and ideas.
The sun will die one day and swallow up the Earth and everything that has ever lived in it, including the ruins of our long-extinct civilisation.

The last of which is the only truly comforting one.

Anyway, I’ll keep you updated on how it’s progressing (or not). In the meantime I need to stop blogging and start drafting again and leave you with this memegenerated kernel of wisdom.

How to Write a Picturebook Text in 10 Minutes

Posted on 20/11/2013 by clembeauvais

Step 1. Wait for the half-baked ideas you’ve been collecting and mulling over to coalesce into a Good Idea for a Picturebook. (estimated frequency: once to twice a year).

Step 2. Develop that Good Idea into a story which would work as a coherent whole formed of interdependent and mutually enhancing words and pictures. Think of the size, shape and orientation of the pages for the story. Think of the style of illustration. (estimated time: 1 week to 1 month).

Step 3. Structure the story into a number of pages divisible by four, making sure that pacing is right, the story arc has the right balance and there aren’t any unnecessary or slow doublespreads. (estimated time: 1 week to 1 month)

Step 4. Now work on the text in your mind, picking the right words to express the right things in relation to the right illustrations you’re also imagining. Juggle with all that in your mind. Pay attention to rhythm, imagery, vocabulary, grammar. Make sure you don’t repeat in the words what is already visible in the pictures. Imagine the pictures at all times. Say the words out loud to make sure they sound good. Think of an adult reading the picturebook to a child. Think of a child reading the picturebook to an adult. Tweak the words in your mind until they’re all necessary and sufficient. Repeat them to yourself until you know the whole text by heart. Read the picturebook to yourself in your mind (close your eyes to see the pictures). (estimated time: 1 week to 6 months)

Step 5. Open a new Word document. (estimated time: 11 seconds)

Step 6. Write down the text of the picturebook, as well as explanations between square brackets of what should be shown by the illustrations. (estimated time: 10 minutes)

You’re welcome.