Writing book proposals

Posted on 30/10/2013 by clembeauvais

In the past few months, I’ve done little else than writing book proposals, i.e. being in the hellish no-man’s-land of half-written books and super-polished synopses.

What are book proposals for?

For books following the First One. Even if your publisher has an ‘option’ on your next book (or series), that next book will likely need to be outlined to them before they give you the money and the deadline.

So, in short, the first book (most often) got bought in glorious, fully-armed completeness, like Athena springing out of Zeus’s skull. However, the second must woo the Editor and the Acquisitions team half-finished, half-naked – stripped down to its synopsis and a few chapters.

Birth of the First Book.

Book proposals are evidently a ‘good’ thing: if you’re at this stage, it means you’ve got a publisher who likes you and wants to see more of your work. But god, are they a pain to write. Book-writing eroticism degree zero, my friend; degree zero.

The first book was similar to your stumbling in your everyday clothes with graceful naturalness into a roomful of people, and one of them falls in love with your little quirks and endearing youness. A book proposal, meanwhile, is like a long-planned date with a man whose head you’d quite like to see on your pillow (with the rest of the body still attached). You’ve spent the past few weeks checking that you’ve got absolutely everything right to achieve the desired outcome. You’re wearing your hair the way he likes it and have revised all the topics he talks about on Twitter, while making sure you retain some of the aforementioned graceful naturalness.

The sexist undertones of the above paragraph are not fortuitous; there is, in book-proposal-writing, something ineffably demeaning and unnatural, something that kills the uncertainty. Like dressing up in a certain way to cajole someone into liking you, it may give you an impression of control, but definitely not one of power.

What should a book or series proposal contain?

Personally, I write a few chapters; how many? As few as will give the Editor a good sense of the tone, characterisation, and appeal of the book. I write a character list, with short descriptions. A general plot summary. A rough evaluation of the genre(s) that the story belongs to, and the age range. And then a very detailed synopsis.

The synopsis isn’t the worst part for me. I always write synopses for books I’m working on – not always chapter-by-chapter, but I don’t mind doing that. I’m a plotter, obsessively structured. But I can guess how horrible those must be for the many writers who are ‘seat-of-the-pantsers’ – i.e., who don’t know where the story is going before they write it. It must be like asking an explorer to chart a territory they haven’t been to yet.

The writing sample is not hugely fun to write. First, there’s this dull feeling that you can’t get too attached to the story because you might never get to write the rest. This is a strange phenomenon, because when you start something which you’re entirely free to finish, you often lose interest in the story and fail to finish it. But it’s all due to your laziness and/or disenchantment with the idea. Whereas the prospect of someone else effectively preventing you from writing the rest makes you extraordinarily keen to finish the book now.

Why am I saying ‘effectively preventing you’? Well, of course, if your Editor rejects your proposal, it can still be offered to other publishers, though that could cause diplomatic drama which your agent might not want to get into. But if they all reject the proposal, then evidently you’ll never write the book, no matter how much you ‘believe in it’. You won’t waste time in finishing a book no one will want.

Secondly, the sample is dull to write because you know exactly what it has to do: give a feel of the whole story, explain who’s who, set the tone, convince the reader that this will be the best story ever, etc.

Once again, that’s something you’d do anyway in the first few chapters – and yet, when you know you have to do it, you suddenly resent the very concept of an exposition scene, and all you want is to begin with a story-within-a-story, a postmodernist mise en abyme, crazy prologues: in short, everything you really shouldn’t do.

Does it sound like I have a problem with authority? Yeah maybe.

Don’t get me wrong, writing book proposals is a very useful skill to master. It teaches you to think more commercially than you would; it turns you into a judge of your own project in its entirety, not just of the emotionally-charged finished story. It also makes the writing process much more secure: once you’ve got the contract, all is well. A deadline and advance are excellent remedies against writer’s block. And you do feel like you are doing something professional, efficient, controlled.

But I have now been working for months on proposals. I have a book proposal that I worked on all August, and I still haven’t shown it to my Editor because my agent (very rightly) wants me to modify it significantly so it’s more likely to be taken on. Then there’s another one I’m working on for yet another project.

The time it takes for rewriting, redrafting, re-synopsising and discussions is enormous, and all that’s before you even have a contract. It also feels artificial: contrary to the first book, when the Editor and agent didn’t know what would happen, and were reading it literally like normal readers, the book proposal gives away the whole plot. This is good, because it allows the Editor to spot potential plot holes before you can dig them, but also bad, because they’ll never have a ‘virgin’ read of the book.

It’s difficult to get excited, I think, about a book you’ve seen in proposal form. Explaining plots (especially the convoluted ones I like) is boring; everything sounds much more complicated in this condensed form than it will be when it’s developed over two hundred pages. And a story is, of course, not reducible to its structure and plot elements.

I don’t have a romantic view of writing, by the way: I’m very much in favour of demystifying book-writing and publishing. This is a job, and book-proposal-writing is part of the job. I don’t have any patience for people who say it’s all about inspiration, emotion and spontaneity; I think we should take time to think about what we’re doing, to structure and nurture our ideas, and to debate them with editors and agents. A book is the work of a collective. Even in self-publishing, there should be no writers who think they can do it all themselves and know better.

But book-proposal-writing, even with the most literary-minded, enthusiastic authors, editors and agents, gives you a weary feeling of über-professionalism; of the perfect polish, watertight smoothness of prophylactics. A prophylactic against crazy deformed, cross-generic, monstrous fiction-babies; as if no mutations could occur once the blueprint has been deemed impeccable.

I’ll be glad, obviously, if and when one of those is finally accepted for sure, and hopefully they will be just as good as if I hadn’t obsessively reworked their first few chapters and synopses before writing the rest. But I won’t forget that their conception involved quite a bit of eugenic tweaking.

How attached are you to your characters?

Posted on 23/10/2013 by clembeauvais

Oh the tedium of character onanism. Character onanism, in case you didn’t know, is a verbal masturbatory practice commonly found among authors with whom you’re having coffee; authors who, in the manner of Pygmalion, have fallen in love with their own creatures and endlessly tell you everything about them.

Now the real postmodern question is, did Girodet fall in love with his own painting of Pygmalion?

Now the real postmodern question is, did Girodet fall in love with his own painting of Galatea?

These self-absorbed monologues are never, of course, triggered by your questions; if you do genuinely take an interest in the author’s characters, ask questions and contribute observations, the discussion doesn’t count as character onanism (just setting the definition here, ok).

Character onanism is most common among people who haven’t even written the damn book yet (see ‘Just Write the Damn Book’). In which case I’ve got nothing at all to say about those non-people you’ve made up. I am so bored I might start braiding my hair in a perfect reproduction of the Bayeux tapestry.

My hair, soon.

Anyway, I marvel at this kind of ‘discussion’, because I don’t quite understand what’s going on. So I’m asking here the sincere question to all authors who might be reading this (and what good taste in blogs you have!) – How attached are you to your characters?

From talking to the lovely Robin Stevens, who does not at all engage in character onanism (at least not in front of me), I gather that maybe I’m less ‘attached’ to my characters than other people. I definitely don’t ever feel like they’re ‘real’; and I don’t generally feel like they’re ‘taking over’, or whatever vocabulary I hear regularly. I’m not heartless, note – I do get extremely attached to characters in other people’s books. But mine?… well, not so much.

Part of it might be self-defence. My first ‘adult’ novel in French (as in, that I wrote as an ‘adult’ (well, 18) never sold, and I was very attached to my characters and story – I still am, and still consider it a huge failure. But for my current works – not really. If it sells, great – if not, I’m sad, but mostly because I’ve spent time on it.

I can’t help thinking – maybe people who read your book won’t particularly care about the characters; or not in the way that you want; or even dislike them. Maybe the book will do well, but the publisher won’t ask for a sequel. If you’d treated those characters as creations for a particular story for a particular book, you wouldn’t be as likely to end up feeling like your children and best friends have been publicly shamed. You wouldn’t be as likely to feel like the whole world hates you personally. You’d understand that to most people, your inner world is a source of either money or entertainment, not complete identification.

Part of it could be, also, that I see character onanism – and ‘attachment to character’ as the path towards telling everyone about one’s innermost fantasies. If you adore your characters with unending devotion, you’re probably hugely uncritical about them. You probably ‘wait’ for them to ‘dictate’ to you passionate stories where there is a love triangle and a heroine who is oddly like you and a love interest who is oddly similar in many ways to your father (or vice-versa).

And if you keep those blinkers on, it will be frankly embarrassing when the book is finished and it surfaces that you get turned-on by domestic abuse, marital rape, infant paedophilia and rough threesomes with exotic males. Especially if you’re a Mormon.

(I’m not saying you won’t make money, though.)

I believe, maybe wrongly, that the more emotionally attached you are to your characters, the more likely you are to let them ‘do whatever they want’ , let them ‘surprise you’. This vocabulary is used all the time: ‘All of a sudden that character took control’, etc. It’s seen as evidence of the bountiful muse. To me it sounds more like inexperienced writing, but as I said, I’m willing to be attacked on this point. After all, some very good people write with no idea how their characters are going to develop, whereas I’m an obsessive plotter.

All the same, being objective towards one’s characters – treating them a bit more like narrative tools, a bit less like real humans sounds like a good idea to me.The editor who wants to get rid of a secondary character or completely modify the choices of your MC won’t be swayed by your indignant reply that it’s the way they are as people. I’ve got used, over the years, to deleting secondary characters, of significantly modifying the journey of the main character, etc. Maybe they appear to me much too malleable to be attached to them.

Anyway, I’d be curious to know what other authors around here think about this. How many of you regularly engage in character onanism? Come on, I know at least a few of you who do. Confess. How many of you honestly think, sometimes, that your characters are ‘almost real’, or whatever you call it? Are you so attached to your characters that you dream about them, ask yourself what they’d do in such and such situation, etc? How would you theorise that attachment? (that’s the academic asking…)

Clem x

When you become an adult, will you start writing literature for adults?

Posted on 09/10/2013 by clembeauvais

I want to address without sarcasm (exceptionally for me) the common question: ‘Will you ever write books for adults?’

As a children’s author, it’s easy to take offence. Even if the asker is very tactful (which they rarely are), it’s impossible to miss the implicit assumption that children’s literature is ‘less good’; that there should be a ‘natural’ desire to graduate from one to the ‘next’.

I don’t want to write about the fact that children’s literature actually allows you to deal with themes ‘that are too large for adult fiction’, because Philip Pullman’s done it and there’s nothing to add.

I will write, instead, about one context in which this question can be valid: when it is put to youngish authors who started publishing children’s books when they were themselves barely out of adolescence.

One such fine example of author, Christopher Paolini (© Rafael A. Ribeiro)

One fine example of young author, Christopher Paolini (© Rafael A. Ribeiro)

In this case, the questioner can mean well. S/he is assuming that the young author has been writing children’s or YA literature because they are still young adults themselves; therefore they are perhaps currently interested in specific topics of childhood and adolescence. But as they mature, they might become interested in ‘adult’ concerns (whatever those are) and they might need their writing to reflect that.

It’s not idiotic to suggest that someone who isn’t an adult yet might gradually find that their experiences are changing, making them want to write about their new worries, beliefs and questions – things like libido, professional dilemmas, marital bliss, parenthood, midlife crises, and incontinence. Since those are not topics which fascinate the average child, they would probably be aimed at older generations.

In this context, the question shouldn’t be taken as offensive. But it is still useless. My only reply can be – How would I know? If I haven’t experienced yet what I might want to write about, how can I know if I’ll want to write about it? Sure, it might happen. It might also happen that I’ll write a non-fiction book on breeding Irish setters. I haven’t yet discovered the joy of breeding Irish setters, just as haven’t yet discovered the joy of mortgages, marriages and baby carriages. When I do, sure. It might happen.

The cover of my future book. (©Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez)

But it might also happen that these boring problems concerns linked to my evolving experiences will not find their way out of my system through fiction-writing. Writing fiction doesn’t define my life. I’m also an academic researcher, I’m also someone who talks (a lot), I’m also a reader, a museum-goer, etc. The assumption that I should channel every experience into writing is simply false.

It’s reductive to assume that people only write about what they actually experience. It’s reductive to think that the evolution of their concerns will ‘naturally’ make them want to cram them into their fiction-writing, as if there was no other way of letting off steam. There may be a thousand reasons why I could prefer my fiction to continue exploring topics that pertain to childhood. Maybe I find that reading about more ‘adult’ concerns, or talking about them, or watching films about them, helps me deal with them better than through writing.

Part of the mystique around writers and writing is the assumption that there is a compulsive wholeness to a writer’s life – as if it was impossible for ‘proper’ writers to have a private/ professional life divide, to have independent experiences, independent thoughts that will never surface in their works.

But it’s not dreams, it’s books. It’s not free-flowing speech on a psychoanalyst’s couch, it’s structured writing filtered by agents, supervised by publishers and sculpted by editors and copyeditors. It’s not something I can’t help. I’m not the neurotic scribe of my every experience, I’m a person who makes deliberate choices about what I want to tackle through fiction.

If I start writing ‘for adults’, it won’t be because I’ve had experiences that suddenly ‘possess’ me, that ‘ask’ to be written down. It will be because I’ve found that some of my new concerns can be explored in ways that I find enriching and that could constitute an interesting career move.

Getting published: France vs UK

Posted on 16/04/2013 by clembeauvais

This is a variation on the obligatory ‘How I Got Published’ post. Just like every honeymooner in Thailand must recount the two weeks in tedious detail to seemingly interested friends actually entertaining murderous thoughts, it is absolutely necessary for the Debut Author to explain in blog form, at some point before Book One comes out, how they went from manuscript to agent to publisher. In my case, this post is long overdue, so here it is.

But I thought I’d take this opportunity to offer a little comparison of the publishing systems in France and in the UK, since I’ve been published in France for three years, and that the two systems are interestingly different. I don’t claim that my experience is entirely representative (but whose is?), so take this with a pinch of salt (or with a pair of pincers, as the French would have it).

FRANCE: Alone in the jungle

In France, I started sending stuff to publishers when I was nine years old, because I was already joyously self-confident and deluded. I got dozens of adorable rejection letters. You get really nice rejection letters when you’re a kid; it’s when you turn 14 or so that the standard rejection letters start coming in. Anyway, I continued sending story after story after story for eleven years.

Eleven years during which our pet tortoise George-Alain grew from matchbox-sized to shoe-sized.

Eleven years during which our pet tortoise Georges-Alain grew from matchbox-sized to clog-sized.

Then something funny happened. When I was 20 I was interning for a French publisher over the summer, and I was beginning to know their list by heart. So I thought I’d tailor one or two little stories to their editorial line. I wrote two, sent them to the publisher under a pseudonym, and was therefore there when they opened them, discussed them, and accepted them. It all happened in the office, in front of me.

It’s only when they started going, ‘Oh, it would have been good to have her phone number, she hasn’t written it anywhere’ (I’d made up a pseudonymous hotmail account, though!) that I said, ‘Well, guess what! you can talk to her LIVE!’ and it was all very theatrical and amusing. That’s how my first two books got published, and then the third one was published with the same publisher as well but a year later.

My first three: Samiha et les fantômes, Les petites filles top-modèles, La plume de Marie

But see, in France the issue is that there aren’t any literary agents, at least not for unpublished writers. It’s not the way it works. Authors have to fend for themselves. They have to send manuscripts to publishers (they all accept unsollicited manuscripts, of course), and they have to negotiate their own contracts. This makes them much more vulnerable than in the UK.

Authors in France are rarely tied to a specific publishing house; many publish lots of different books with lots of different publishers, sometimes at the same time, because they have to make money and that, well, being published in France isn’t exactly the most comfortable position financially. Ok, I’ll be honest, it sucks. You’re paid very little, unless you’re remarkably famous, or remarkably good at negotiating. Volume is thus key if you want to make a living out of writing – or you can do lots of school visits, which are well-paid.

Since I don’t want to make a living out of my writing and don’t write very much in French (1 to 2 books a year, which is nothing compared to my French writerly friends), this isn’t my main preoccupation. Personally, my biggest problem is that in France, even when you’re already well-published, you can rarely guarantee that what you’re working on now will ever get published. You have to go through the whole process every time: writing a full manuscript, editing it thoroughly, sending it to publishers.

Of course, you might want to send it in priority to people who’ve already published you, as you have their personal email addresses and it might get read more quickly – but most of the time they’ll just be like, ‘No’. Rarely do editors say to you, ‘Let me read the first three chapters and I’ll tell you if it’s worth keeping writing’. Even more rarely will they give you a contract and a deadline just on the basis of that. So it’s extremely precarious (and discouraging). You pile up manuscripts that never find a publisher.

And when, conversely, you’re in the happy/ terrifying situation when more than one publisher wants your book, as happened with my latest YA novel La pouilleuse, well, you have to make a decision on your own. It’s tough, because you have very little actual knowledge of what the different publishers may do to your book.

So you weigh prestige against edginess, enthusiasm against advance money, and finally you make a completely uninformed, rushed decision. Not that I’m unhappy with my chosen publisher, mind you – I’m hopefully about to publish another 2 books with them next year. But in no way can I claim that my choice was either rational or business-like.

As a result an author’s relationship to publishers is always ambiguous, and a bit unhealthy. These are people you’re wrestled with, battled with. You’ve asked them for more money, for more author copies, for more consideration. They’ve rejected your stuff, sometimes harshly. They might reject what you’re writing now. They’re also more prone to things like emotional blackmail, voluntarily or not. You’re very dependent on them. It’s not a comfortable position for people like me, who aren’t particularly good at separating professional and private discussions and who’d rather not get paid at all than have to talk about money – especially when you feel like you’re begging for an extra 50€.

UK: On the passenger’s seat

In the UK, getting published is a completely different story. Of course there are ways to bypass agents and submit directly to publishers, but for me, that was a huge no-no. I knew, from my experience in France, that I didn’t have the guts or the patience or the knowledge to deal directly with publishers. So when I finished my first novel in English in 2010, I immediately looked for an agent.

It was a YA novel called Hominidae, and the day I sent the first 3 chapters and synopsis to Kirsty McLachlan at David Godwin Associates (I’d only sent it to 3 agencies, I think), she asked me for the full manuscript. A few days later I talked to her on the phone; we discussed ways of modifying it, I did the editing, we met up in London and she offered representation. It was extremely painless and fast.

Not like the year that followed. Because Hominidae never got sold. That was heartbreaking. When you get an agent you think you’ve done the hardest bit, and that now it’s going to sell – but when you get letter after letter after letter from publishers saying that ‘although they loved this and that, the full thing didn’t work for this or that reason’, that’s pretty awful. Especially as you keep thinking, gosh, my lovely agent’s going to drop me. She didn’t, thankfully.

In the summer of 2011 I had another idea and wrote the first Sesame book, which at the time was called Sesame Seade Is Not A Swan and is now called Sleuth on Skates. Kirsty liked it, and dropped Hominidae (which wasn’t going anywhere) and started shopping Sesame. And then, interestingly, the same thing happened with Sesame that had happened with La pouilleuse: namely 3 publishers wanted it. And it was fascinating to see how differently it went.

Firstly, in France I had about two hours to make a decision, and had to make phone calls to French publishers on my own. I had virtually no useful information to decide and no one to consult. Here, Kirsty set up the process of decision and auction for Sesame to last over several days. I went down to London and we visited all three publishers together. They gave me sesame seed chocolates and sesame snaps. We talked for over an hour every time about potential illustrators, further books in the series, modifications to the manuscript, etc. They were selling themselves too – that’s what struck me the most. They were telling me what they would be bringing to the book concretely, not just saying that they liked it.

Then they made their offers and the amazing, cool-headed Kirsty dealt with all that, which meant I didn’t even have to utter the words ‘advance money’ or ‘royalties’. Although it was still eminently stressful, it was a hundred times better than being alone in making that decision. I was on the passenger’s seat: I gave my opinion and expressed preferences but Kirsty was the one who was doing all the hard work.

I know that this account might make some UK authors cringe. They’ll say that even though we have agents, we have to be proactive and shrewd and take charge, that I’ve fallen into a trap and am just being lulled into a false sense of security. I agree, of course, to an extent – but believe me, when you’ve been through the jungle of the French system, you appreciate the comfort, albeit illusory.

This comfort extends to relationships with editors, too – I can talk to them and be friendly with them and plan things, knowing that whenever we start talking about money and the details of a contract Kirsty will be there. I don’t have to worry that I’ll be short-changed. The author-editor relationship, as a result, is über-professional, less tainted with ambiguous friendliness-eneminess.

Well well well, as usual I have written a blog post the size of my PhD thesis (which I’m almost done with, by the way!). I hope it’s a little bit instructive even by just reading the sentences in bold. Oh dear, I haven’t even shown what I wanted to show, i.e. pictures of my author copies of Sleuth on Skates which have just arrived in my pigeon hole!

There are flaps with ducks doing manic things, courtesy of Sarah Horne

There’s a map of Christ’s College, in which Sesame lives for parent-related reasons…

And here’s the pile!

Coming out May 2nd. Fun, busy times. Crazy crazy busy. But I promise you, random reader, that I’ll try to update this blog more regularly. You might not care; but then maybe you do.

Clem x

Should children’s writers like children?

Posted on 27/02/2013 by clembeauvais

That author

Every time I do school visits or go to a book fair, there’s always a grumpy paedophobic author somewhere. S/he’s been writing for longer that I’ve been alive and s/he’s seen it all. S/he’s sipping coffee in the teachers’ common room and ranting about those damned kids and their unimaginative questions. S/he’s in here for the €€, not the experience. S/he’s going on and on and on about ‘that annoying kid who always asks how long it takes to write a book and where I get my ideas from.’

And me, meanwhile, young, enthusiastic and naive and rather a fan of younger humans, I’m all like ‘Oh my! Goodness me! How can you possibly say that, you monster, you ogre ? Surely it is the greatest happiness in the world to talk to little readers, however dumb the questions! Surely the marvelous feeling of profound and inexplicable bliss that fills one when one is faced with children is universally shared!’ and I put my hand on my heart and I think of the cute freckles, dimples and missing teeth, and I swallow back tears of shock and fear and I wonder if this clearly deranged author should really be allowed to roam the school premises.

Slight exaggerations may have found their way into the previous two paragraphs, but the question’s not a stupid one. Should children’s authors actually like children? I don’t mean just tolerate, but actually like them? Should they feel increased levels of happiness, a certain special sense of connection, when in the presence of the kawaii beings? After all, there are dozens of misanthropic adult authors who don’t give a damn about their readers. And no adult author will ever be asked to confirm that they like adults.

Things Camus didn’t say

‘Oh yes, I love adults – I just love them. I love their happy faces when I sign their books, and they always come up with things that I find just wonderfully unexpected and marvelous… how can I explain it? It’s so mysterious. I can’t say why, but I’ve always been at ease with adults. Maybe it’s because I haven’t forgotten what it feels like to be an adult. I get on with them really well. They’re great, basically, and that’s why I write for them.’

We’d think they were bloody mental. What if some authors actually like writing for children because – like Philip Pullman – they think it’s a great experimental platform – which it is – but don’t really have anything to say to real kids outside of what they tell them through their art? How much of it is about the idea of childness, the ability to play with concepts, art forms, narratives that are particular to children’s literature – and how much of it actually has to be about real children?

That’s the crux of the matter, really. You can love the idea of children just as you love the idea of backpacking up and down the Andes, but you might suddenly find yourself a little bit less keen if you actually ended up parachuted into the montainous jungle. I think I love real children. I think I love talking to them, I think they make me laugh, surprise me and amaze me, and I think being around them makes me happy, but rationally, there’s no way this sweeping generalisation is possible without a preexisting idea of kids as a cool bunch of people, without a preexisting idea of childness as a special property for a human to have.

I like her

Because it’s a bit like saying ‘I love cats’. I do love cats. But in fact I don’t. I don’t love all cats. I don’t like the ones that scratch and bite, bizarrely enough; I prefer the cuddly ones that purr, thank you very much. And yeah, when I go into a primary classroom, I tend to prefer the enthusiastic little Hermione whose hand shoots up into the air all the time to the sexually precocious duo of boys who ogle me and snigger and scribble down things to each other on a piece of paper.

So we have to grant one thing to the paedophobic writer: at least they’re seeing the kids as humans. As fallible, annoying, boring and silly, but as humans. The blissful, all-loving writer who ‘just adores kids in general’ might as well be saying that they love cats. Or old people. Or gays. Or Tories. Or dyslexics. You get the idea.

There are people who just love writing and for them, going into schools to talk to real kids is one of those things you have to do in your day job but that you don’t particularly like, such as brainstorming the name of a new guava-and-tapioca shampoo or filling in an Excel spreadsheet with the office’s stationary budget for the year or whatever people who have real jobs do.

And then there’s the rest of us, bumbling around like a flotilla of fairy godmothers, hopelessly endeared to the little readers, envisaging our work as a sort of whole project of life and mission for and with children, and unable to understand that yeah, some writers may tailor every single one of their books for people whom, in reality, they don’t really care about very much.

Pseudonymous: The secrets of writing under a pseudonym

Posted on 16/09/2012 by clembeauvais

French writer Romain Gary wrote under a pseudonym in order to win a second Goncourt prize, the French equivalent of the Booker, which in theory cannot be awarded more than once to the same author. He managed it, and his pseudonymously-published Life Before Us became an unputdownable timeless classic, as they say.

Meanwhile, there are other people who wouldn’t mind the Goncourt, but who choose to write under a pseudonym for different reasons. Here is the tale of my short experience of pseudonymous writing (and no, you won’t know what I wrote or what my pen name was): why I did it, what I learned, and how I feel about it now. Wow, said like that it sounds like I’m going to start telling you it was a journey of self-discovery. Don’t worry, I’m not.

Once upon a time, about two years ago, thanks to an illustrator friend, I was asked to write a couple thousand words as a test for a series of children’s novels to be published alongside a magazine. I did it not really thinking I’d get it, but I did, and suddenly there I was signing a (very good) contract and agreeing to follow an absolutely unbending set of rules specifying a set number of words per chapter and a set number of chapters per book and the age of the protagonists and no sex or violence let alone a swearword.

Without getting too much into detail, it was a shamelessly, intensely, voluptuously commercial series of novels. The main issue was the theme. It’s the kind of theme that, in my area of study at least, everyone would label trashy without a second look at it. Ballerina stories, football stories, that sort of thing. So in order not to compromise my future applications for Junior Research Fellowships and postdoc positions (*cough* if you have one of those that needs filling contact me I make very good chocolate cakes *cough*), I decided to take a pen name. I didn’t want the Google Gods to bring up that kind of sulphurous secret on page 1 of ‘clementine beauvais’ just under my Academia.edu profile when I’d become Professor Dame Empress of Intergalactic Children’s Literature at Harvard.

Now, as everyone who knows me knows, I’m a feminist and an active member of the League Against Bunnies and Unicorns in Children’s Literature and it was out of the question for me to stop having convictions just because the cover of the book didn’t mention my real name anywhere. It was genre fiction ‘for girls’, but nothing that was intrinsically sexist – I would have refused immediately. And in fact, following my mum’s advice (what would one do without one’s mum’s advice?), while writing those books I had a lot of fun with the conventions of the genre, respecting some and transgressing a lot. Sometimes the publisher said no, but most of the time they said yes. I ended up writing something I’d never thought I’d write: super-commercial but semi-subversive children’s fiction.

I learned a lot writing these novels. You have to write fast. You have to make your descriptions short, compact and evocative. You have to find new things for the protagonists to do, all the time. And above all, you have to plan ahead. Plan, structure, scaffold. Find ways of solving three problems while creating a new one in just one chapter.

I also learned to get rid of many of my prejudices on this type of literature (damn, that’s definitely starting to sound like I’m saying it was a journey). When I started writing them, I found the whole experience stressful and even weirdly humiliating. But then I started to enjoy it. And now I can see that it was an incredibly helpful and enriching experience, and I even wonder if I could have written Sesame without it. Sesame isn’t really genre fiction, but it’s action-packed and borrows a lot from different genres. Without the practice of making up adventures and misadventures that fit into 14 chapters of however many words each, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to write it.

And above all I’m quite happy with these little books, which is all the more surprising as I’m generally übercritical of what I write. It is, I think, good genre fiction. Doesn’t mean I’m going to reintegrate them into my bibliography, once again for university-related reasons.

Unfortunately or fortunately, the series didn’t last very long. The novels were sold in plastic wrapping with a magazine, and the cover art and the magazine design were frankly hideous and the magazine completely uninteresting. Can’t say I was too bothered about it – it meant that I was able to stop writing them discreetly at the faculty library and start working more on my thesis and on more ‘intellectual’, ‘gratifying’ fiction-writing. Not to mention it was extremely good money which paid for a completely lovely holiday touring the Loire castles with my boyfriend of the time.

Azay-le-Rideau. Thank you, commercial fiction.

Yet I still have a lot of tenderness for these little books and I’m really happy to have had the chance, pseudonymously, to try new techniques of characterisation, description, structure, and dialogue.

Clem x

NB This is a translation/ adaptation of a post previously published on my French blog.

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

Posted on 08/07/2012 by clembeauvais

Doing ‘research’ to write fiction, especially whimsical fiction for 9-year-olds, means you end up with a very strange browsing history. According to mine, this is what I’ve been asking Google recently (and yes, I treat Google like a real person when it comes to asking questions):

taking fingerprints on glass
when is hornet season
what’s the name of white fluff falling off trees
difference between cider and perry [for a French book]
do gargoyles often need to be repaired
horses falling off the rock of Solutré [French book again]
dormouse sleeping patterns
medicine to calm children down
weight of normal 9 year old girl
what time is evensong

and last but not least (though I should probably have chosen Bing for that one):

is google allowed to spy on you

Added to these are, of course, endless searches on these two Ali-Baba’s caves of infinite knowledge which I could not live without, Thesaurus.com and Urban Dictionary.

I quite like the idea that Google is getting a completely bizarre and incoherent idea of me due to my inexplicable browsing decisions, but unfortunately I’m sure it’s cleverer than that and has clocked that I’m a writer.

Anyway, once in a while you type in a seemingly innocuous little question and end up navigating a whole underground world the existence of which you’d never suspected. One such fine discovery happened to me when I started researching people who climb up buildings, specifically Cambridge and Oxford buildings. These people, my friends, are not only the hidden modern superheroes of our quiet little university towns, they also have a whole community on and offline, with its codes, handbooks and specific discourse.

I ended up buying this incredible little book which is always in the ‘Cambridge’ section of Waterstones in Cambridge and which I’d never thought would be of any interest to me: The Night Climbers of Cambridge. It has its own Wikipedia page, and so it should. Written in the 1930s by Noel Symington, who is now dead, it is no less than a handbook on roof-climbing in Cambridge.

You will learn how to climb up a pipe (with photographic examples) – don’t bother with square pipes, they’re no good. You will learn how to reach the top of King’s College Chapel (once again, fabulous pics); if you fall, you still have three seconds of life, so enjoy them. You will learn how to do ‘the leap’ between Gonville & Caius College and the Senate House. It really is quite simple, but some chaps get cold feet when they could easily jump such a distance if there wasn’t an abyss underneath!

The best thing about this delightful book is the jolly P.G. Wodehousey tone of it all, which takes you back in time almost a century ago in a Cambridge where all Porters still wore bowler hats, where the girls were confined to just a few colleges and where roof-climbing was a necessity in the middle of the night if you’d missed the time when the college closed down.

Anyway, not sure how much of this exquisite read is going to end up in Sesame Seade, but here are a few passages just to give you an idea of it:

‘On the other hand, consider those pipes in the New Court of St John’s, over the river. We know of no-one who has climbed any of the pipes on the outer north wall of the same court. They are the most forbidding pipes in Cambridge.’

‘On the north side a buttress leaves a recess into which a man’s body fits nicely. The chimney is too broad for comfort, and a very short man might find it impossible to reach the opposite wall, with his feet flapping disconsolately in space like an elephant’s uvula.’

‘Much more could be written about Pembroke if we had the information. Its stone is good, its climbs legion, and we can thoroughly recommend any night climber to pay a few visits to it. Its hospitality is lavish and sincere, and it breeds those strong, silent Englishmen who suck pipes in the Malayan jungle but do not pass exams.’

‘And so, with a good night’s work behind us, we go home to college or lodgings, telling ourselves that perhaps after all we will not attend that nine o’clock lecture to-morrow morning.’

That last one, of course, could have been written yesterday.

Clem x

Just Write the Damn Book

Posted on 28/06/2012 by clembeauvais

I hardly know you, but for the past ten minutes you’ve been talking at me about how much you’ve always wanted to be a writer some day. Of course you need to find the time, the energy and the right word processor. But you’ve got the ideas already, God knows you’ve got the ideas. You’ve got the story and the characters and the setting and you’ve been taking me through them in such mind-numbing detail that my eyes are swimming in the tears of my painfully unyawned yawns.

And as I marvel at the treasures of politeness I’m able to scrape from the utmost confines of my interpersonal skills toolbox, my internal monologue is on a very different autopilot to the one that makes my social persona interject ‘Oh, that sounds really interesting!’ at occasional intervals of your synopsis-telling session. In fact, what’s going on inside my head is more or less akin to this:

JUST WRITE THE DAMN BOOK!!!

If you want people to care about your story, just write the damn book!

If you want to know how good your ideas are, just write the damn book!

If you want to know if you can write, just write the damn book!

If you want to be a writer, just write the damn book!

If you want to write a book, just write the damn book!

A writer is someone who writes. I don’t care if they write well or badly, if they’re published or not, if they write for children, adults or kangaroos. The necessary and sufficient condition is that they write. If you don’t write the damn book, you’re not a writer. If you don’t write the damn book, it’s not a book.

You really want to know what I think of your story?

That is, until you write the damn book.

Are you writing yet?

Clem x

Writing Funny Things When You’re Sad

Posted on 24/06/2012 by clembeauvais

Last year, when I wrote the first instalment of Sesame Seade, I didn’t have a care in the world. Gaily bedight, I carried my mini-computer around Cambridge and typed away in various coffee shops and all the Frappucinos in the world smiled at my enthusiasm and little birds sang songs of joy in the blue skies. Easy to be funny when things are generally fun.

And then Sesame got sold, and suddenly there is A Deadline for book 2 of Sesame Seade (Gargoyles Gone AWOL). But just at the time when I was supposed to start writing it, I ran into some quite unfunny personal difficulties, and suddenly it wasn’t as easy-peasy as it had been to write what is essentially supposed to be a lolarious book, as opposed to a supreme tear-jerker.

And thus I discovered what happens when you try to write something funny when you’re sad:

1) The Woody Allen syndrome: Every joke ends up being a sad sarcastic comment about your own existential crisis. Which, of course, is endlessly fascinating to nine-year-old readers (not).

2) The Laurel & Hardy syndrome: Since I can’t do verbal humour and sophisticated jokes anymore, let’s cram the page with slapstick comedy! Ha-ha! Look at her falling over! Brilliant if you want it to sound like your heroine’s lost all her brain cells somewhere between books 1 and 2 and has also become completely malcoordinated.

3) The Recycling Bin syndrome: Hey, there were some funny passages in book 1. What if I changed a word or two and recontextualised them in book 2? Works wonders if your readership is exclusively composed of goldfish.

4) The Mission: Impossible syndrome: If I can’t make it funny, at least I can make it HYPERACTIVE with like A LOT of ACTION and people who RUN and JUMP and at some point there’s a BANG and a WHOOSH and who cares about humour when there are SHRAPNELS???!!! There are many problems with this, the first being that I don’t know what shrapnels are.

But you’ll be glad to hear that after a lot of dilly-dallying and soul-searching and obsessive synopsis sessions (writing a synopsis doesn’t require humour), I finally managed to get going on Gargoyles Gone AWOL. And lo and behold, once you stop angsting about how unfunny you’ve become because of the unfunniness of your current situation, you realise that forcing yourself to write funny things not only works – just like it used to – but also cheers you up.

Bibliotherapy I guess, but the other way around.

Clem x

Discovering the New Book

Posted on 18/06/2012 by clembeauvais

It’s always an exciting moment: opening the parcel with the publisher’s stamp on it, and taking your first author copy out of the bubble wrap. Cool and relaxed writers not like me probably peel off the sellotape with a yawn, fish out a book while munching on an organic cereal bar, hmm-hmm their way through the pages, and put it down again as if nothing particularly more exciting than updating Firefox has happened to them recently.

Not so, let me tell you, on this side of author-land. I arm myself with a carving knife, ruthlessly eviscerate the cardboard box, and do not rest until every single book has been smelt, stroked and weighed. But I never open them, of course, for fear of finding a typo.

Although this time I did manage to restrain myself enough to take a picture of the box (though the blurriness shows a certain lack of control):

And here it is! my latest baby, a YA novel in French called La pouilleuse (Girl with Lice) which is coming out at the end of August. If you’re interested and well-versed in Gallic, here’s the French webpage for it.

I’m delighted with it – Sarbacane, the publisher, have done an awesome job. The cover and the pages are super thick, the blurb on the back cover is spot-on, and they haven’t forgotten the dedication to my little sis’. Gorgeous colours, too, on the front cover.

So my small family of books is growing, all French-speaking so far, but I can’t wait for Sesame Seade to meet its siblings and speak a bit of English to them.

Clem x