Lean Living for Scottish Writers
Stuart Kelly - Scotland on Sunday
Feb 25, 2008
The Browser: a Dangerous Literary Model
The former glamour model and future Nobel Prize for Literature contender Jordan launched her new book, Pushed To The Limit, last week, which clocked up a staggering 58,462 sales in just seven days. No doubt her euphemistically described "wardrobe malfunction", harking back to her Page 3 days, helped no end. I feel it's my patriotic duty to insist, in the strongest terms, that Scottish writers in no way seek to emulate her successful publicity stunt. I realise that with the Book Festival season fast approaching, some writers might be tempted to unveil certain normally covered areas of flesh in the hope of boosting sales. But consider: firstly, Scotland is a very cold country. Secondly, given the average age of most Book Festival-goers, there's a real danger of mass myocardial infarctions. And finally, just remember that Jordan spent a great deal of money on her cosmetic enhancements - most Scottish writers have not.
In vino veritas; in whisky...
In fact, 70 per cent of Scottish writers, according to Marc Lambert of the Scottish Book Trust, live below the poverty line, so can barely afford Lemsips, let alone liposuction.
Launching the Jura Malt Whisky Writer's Retreat (is it really going to encourage long-term financial security to leave a writer on a sparsely populated island with a large distillery?), Janice Galloway, below, revealed she only earned GBP 6,500 from her writing in the last year - which, considering her last novel Clara came out in 2002, strikes me as being rather more than might be expected. Of course, no one has a God-given right to earn money through writing - and of course, Galloway is one of our finest writers. Maybe it's time to dust off those old proposals for a Scottish Academy. Since we can't reward everyone, rewarding the best seems the only sane option. Jura's great claim to fame is that George Orwell (not a particularly rich writer) holed up there to write 1984, catch tuberculosis and never get any royalties from the whole Big Brother idea. But according the press bumf, it's a "widely-held belief that the island was the inspiration for Scilla (sic) and Charybdis in Homer's epic". Yup, that's Homer, the 8th century BC Greek writer. Widely-held among people who are wrong, evidently.
Where's the boeuf?
It's a shame that Alain Robbe-Grillet who died on Monday, was probably better known for the screenplay to 'New Wave' film Last Year At Marienbad than as one of the pioneers of the 'New Novel'. Viewed with suspicion in English-speaking countries, he threw out notions of plot and character to write books of "pure surface", such as The Erasers, The Voyeur and In The Labyrinth, and experimented with "cine-novels" written as both film scripts and continuous prose. Hopefully his work will now return to print. Among the obituaries, one quirky fact emerged. Robbe-Grillet worked for a while in a veterinary artificial insemination centre, and his first novel was written on the back of a Dutch bull's genealogy.
Society of Authors podcast
Last week, I mentioned the Society of Authors in Scotland Conference. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we've made a podcast available of part of the final debate. It's downloadable - there must be a more elegant word than that - at www.scotlandonsunday.com/books
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