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THE WRITER’S NOTEBOOK by n quentin woolf
Here is a fluff-free collection of pointers and reminders for the aspiring writer of prose fiction. It’s a handy way to keep in mind both well-worn and time-proven ideas (like showing rather than telling, and deepening conflict), as well as comments that will help you avoid some common pitfalls (mistaking real dialogue for representative dialogue, or writing a movie instead of a novel). Full of useful nuggets, the book is entirely hand-written.
This 90-page book is small enough to slip into a back pocket and makes a great gift for the writer in your life.
£6.50 – order below
THE BOOKSHOP IN BRICK LANE various; ed. n quentin woolf
In 2007, writer N Quentin Woolf founded a literary circle in Brick Lane, East London. The group has met every week since then, creating and critiquing a vast, diverse range of plays, poetry, novels and short stories. This, the group’s first anthology, is a celebration of their meeting place: Eastside Books.
In The Bookshop On Brick Lane, fiction and non-fiction interweave to form a tapestry of Brick Lane at the start of the 21st Century. Marybel Moore combines history with memoir to reveal some of the curiosities of the area, while stories by nineteen different authors, ranging in subject and style from fifties detective fiction to the reminiscences of a holocaust survivor, from obsession stories to love affairs, are anchored by the solid presence of the bookshop.
With a foreword by Russ Willey, author of Brewer’s Dictionary of London Phrase and Fable, the variety in The Bookshop In Brick Lane makes it a great book for dipping into, whatever your mood.
ISBN – 978-0-557-47265-9
£7.99 – order below.
WEDNESDAY various; ed. n quentin woolf
A collection of stories, memoir and poetry from the writers’ circle that met each Wednesday in 2009 at Eastside Books in Brick Lane. From stories of the old East End to tales of US counter culture, poems of mountains to tales of people with secrets, this anthology has something for every taste.
Includes work from:
Helen Bond, James Mansfield, N Q Woolf, Ross Hopkins, L J Mountford, Donna F Collier, Sara Bearman, Melanie Venables, Steve McGregor, Elizabeth Carola, Kerry McCarthy
ISBN 978-0-557-37879-1
Soon to be available on Amazon U.S.
£7.99 – order below
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago.
For years I wrote and wrote, and for years I didn’t think about why I was doing it. If you’d asked me, I’d have said the ‘why’ wasn’t important. (In hindsight, this was probably an avoidance tactic – I didn’t want to pick at scabs. I’d started writing as a kid during some pretty testing experiences; writing had been about inventing better places to be. I didn’t much care to revisit that stuff.) I wrote for years and didn’t try seriously to get published. A couple of agents were moderately interested; it didn’t go anywhere. Then, not long ago, and with nearly fifteen years’-worth of material on which to draw, I decided to give it a proper shot. Well, why not?
It occurred to me that I might be asked about my motivation for writing, so I figured I’d better get over my reluctance to think about it, and work out something to say. Here’s what I wrote, back in 2007.
I is the big achievement of free market economics. It’s very easy to buy into I. Individuality is, of course, a big seller, which is why it’s mass-produced: a mega-industry, with everyone owning a franchise on the retail park where the church once stood. With religious assiduity we cultivate minute differences and wait for word of our uniquity to fill the store – but the other shopkeepers are too busy dressing their own windows. We consider changing our price. Should we stick, or should we twist? Only the weak price low… and my I is valuable. I am worth it. We are experts in selling, but the mall’s cavernous silence seems not to feel so great, right? Some days it feels like we might be alone in here. For comfort, we snap up and shit out increasing numbers of people (some of them real) and wonder who we are. Everyone else knows, apparently. We are dead authors, being written by one another; unheard trees; our avatars live the lives of Riley while we commute in silence, we bleary little cyborgs, swapping airborne pathogens as our i-pods shuffle. The imperative to commodify has long turned on us; we doublethought doublethink into being, and now watch the world falling apart, wondering what we can buy to make it better. I am just yet more I, of course. I’m inside, looking out, my face pressed against the shop window. I don’t think I’m clever enough to write a revolution, so I write about the loneliness in our collective I and the prosaic horrors it must witness, my self bound up in books: page after page of that single, sightless letter.
My reasons for writing are manifold, intermeshed and in a constant state of adjustment. I write as self-harm, as love-making, to remember; I write because I am a thief, a hoarder, a glutton, a slut. I believe in the beauty of order and am hopelessly hooked, as a human, on pattern-recognition and symmetry: I’m a sucker for the printed page. I write because it beats being dead. I write because I’m more than one person, and always have been, just like everybody else. I write because I’m a liar. I write to get at the truth, all the while knowing there’s no such thing. The exhileration of the perfect phrase clutches at my heart like a first love, to a musical swell: that’s something to be taken very, very seriously – it is close to the core of life. I write for victory! I write owing to circumstances beyond my control. It is maybe due to some low-level survival instinct that my reaction to most stimuli is internalisation, aggregation, incubation, and finally representation on the page. I guess I’m writing for my life. I write everyday horror and ugly humour – pain is comedy with the lights turned down. I write the words in between the spaces, but it is the spaces that interest me most. Words are never the thing itself; it is between them, in the omissions, that one finds meaning. I write, ultimately, because there is an I at the controls, and he isn’t done with me yet.
As a first attempt to understand why I’d been doing what I’d been doing those last fifteen years, it seemed like a start. It’s rather overcooked, of course, and I like the first paragraph much better than the second, despite the way it wanders way off-topic. I posted it to my website and thought nothing more of it.
Anyway, recently, fired up by the basis of the piece you’ve just read, someone wrote accusing me of thinking myself superior to ‘mere mortals’. They thought I was saying that the ability to write is a God-given gift, and that I was delusional enough to think some ethereal power had bestowed it upon me.
Oh dear. Well, let’s try and clear that up. I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in some silly concept of the writer being superior by dint of writing (or anything else). You occasionally get great people who happen to be writers (or bus conductors, or travel agents, or nuns, or whatever), but I’m not one of them – I’m at least as fallible as the next man.
And I don’t think that the right to write belongs to some elite. I don’t believe in there being any such ‘right’. The sole criterion for being a writer, it seem to me, is whether or not you write. Just talking about writing doesn’t count, nor does writing one thing and then dining out on it forever. Even publication, which marks the start of the professional phase, doesn’t actually make one a writer as much as simply writing does. In my various activities – buzz, buzz – I meet a lot of people who are passionate and serious about their writing, but who aren’t necessarily published. I have myself been in that boat for a good while. It’s a period of great vulnerability, with no timetable and no end-by date. The first question, the one you dread being asked, is ‘are you published?’ Irrespective of anything else – how much you’ve written, whether it’s any good, and so on – this single question is the binary upon which many people will decide whether you are allowed to hold opinions on writing. I was speaking to a soldier recently; he said you can do a tour of duty, be shot at, witness atrocities, suffer all manner of illnesses, but in many people’s minds you’re not a proper soldier until you’ve killed someone. Different fields, but odd validation issues, both. It’s quite a relief to me to be on the safe side of that snare, now. It doesn’t change the way I think about writing, but apparently it legitimises me, somehow. If the concept of ‘the right to write’ exists anywhere, I’m afraid it is in the minds of people who still imagine, in this age of blogs and tweets and short story sharing websites, cheap print-on-demand services and a collapsing publishing industry, that the validity of a writer hinges on print publication – or is a gift from on high.
It’s a rich topic, but I’ll leave it there for now. I’ve got some writing to do.
Posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago.
Judith Amanthis In The Thick Of It
It would be quite remiss of me not
A Reader
to issue this salutation to my old chums at Stingray Magazine, which celebrated its launch just this week. Founder Mel Venables had laid on an evening of themed food and performed readings from contributors and others, in Shoreditch. The turn-out was writerly, as one might expect, and the contributions that were read out offered an entertaining cross-section of contemporary poetry and prose. Of particular interest in this launch issue
A Rapt Shoreditch Audience
(apart from my story My Cat and Your Cat, naturally) is a piece by journalist Judith de Manthes about the cleansing of London streets of its homeless denizens in preparation of the Olympics. Something deeply unpleasant about it. Catch Judith’s report, my story, and a host of other fine works at Stingray Magazine. I wish Mel and Stingray the very best for the many happy publications ahead.
Posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago.
Helen Gilbert
So the launch of ‘The Bookshop in Brick Lane’ was, by all accounts, a roaring success. We happy anthologists had really pulled out all the stops to get the thing onto the shelf for Christmas, cutting both corners and things that weren’t really corners but had to be cut also, for expediency. Our proof-reader, Warren Davis, worked his tail off turning our early efforts into grammatical, well-spelt pieces of prose. Marybel Moore did a phenomenal job of turning round the factual pieces of the book. Sarah Pidgeon deserves huge credit too, for work that is currently undetectable but which we hope will be introduced in the second edition.
Jill Young
Marybel Moore
And then, suddenly, many months of planning and scribbling and collecting came to fruition: the publisher’s truck rolled into the parking-lot and out first bulk order of the anthology was delivered. They looked pretty good, we were pleased to discover (some serious type setting problems in the proof copy had left us a little nervous). The text looks authoritative; the short stories – 18 of them, look professionally set out; the pieces of non-fiction, woven in among the tales,
Troublesome Trio
Kate Ellis
Mark, Madeleine, Jill
are a pretty good balance of size and content. Russ Willey’s foreword, to quote Camus, gives ‘the whole thing a more official air’. By the way, thanks Russ, for reading our book and believing in us enough to put your name to it.
Kerry McCarthy
The question had always been how to celebrate the delivery of our group effort
It was clear that the venue of choice should be Eastside Books – how could it be otherwise? But the fact is that not all of our group are keen on public readings. Marybel had the inspired idea of bringing the bagels chapter to life and consequently there were bagels a-plenty at the launch. We met at 7, with newly married Tera arriving well ahead of everyone else,
Nicloe Tattersal
Peter Mahon
along with her new husband. They didn’t stick around for
Kiki Otto
the celebration for the very understandable reason that they are on the first day of their honeymoon. It was great to see Tera again after so long and especially good to see her looking so full of beans. And then the crowd descended. I’d say there were 30-40 folk present and the red wine flowed. After thank yous to all concerned we settled down for some storytelling. Mark Dubois, Gareth Storey, Warren Davis and Tim Howard all read for us, some from their anthology contributions, and others from works in progress. Jane Miller read two poems which reflected
Linda Chapple
on the importance of seizing the day and not taking life and time for granted. They were very moving. There was a wonderful moment when I looked
Tim and Ced
Maddy Wynne-Jones
around the room and saw a bookshop full of adults all sitting on the floor enthralled by someone telling a story, and I though yes, this is what it’s all about.
And so, with charming inevitability, to the Brick Lounge, an establishment whose comfy couches and delicious beer have been in no way neglected by our happy band these past two years. It was great to catch up with everyone, particularly those of our group who have moved further afield. 2010 holds all sorts of promise and as the year turns it’s also
Mark Dubois
good to reflect of the accomplishments of the group and its members over the last year, not least of which is the continuation of the group itself. A good note on which to end 2009.
Our recently published anthology of short stories and poetry contains writing from a diverse group of writers who meet each week ar Eastside Books in Brick Lane. The book holds a vivid cast of characters, all of whom have a connection with a certain bookshop in a certain East London street. Private detectives and aid workers rub shoulders with Holocaust survivors and down-and-outs;obsessives discover true love and jackpot winners discover who their true friends are. In amongst the fiction, the true story of Brick Lane and it’s envorons is told in bite-size pieces: from the contemporary East London music scene to warring ideologies, from the issue of East End poverty to the importance of choosing the right beigal, The Bookshop In Brick Lane has writing to suit every taste.
The authors of this book meet each week at Eastside Books in Brick Lane and are:
Linda Chapple, Marybel Moore, N Quentin Woolf, Ced Chen, Stefano Peter Pini, Warren Davis, Helen Gilbert, Shuab Parvez, David Pidgeon, Dan Nicolai, Madeleine North, Marc DuBois, TJ Howard, Jill Young, Tera Brouwer, Gareth Storey, Frances Wasswemann-Bildner, Peter J Mahon, Jane Miller, Kiki Sousa Otto
Please join us for the launch party at 8pm on December 3rd for drinks and nibbles.
Posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago.
For rather longer than we might care to admit, members of the Tuesday night Brick Lane
The Bookshop In Brick Lane
Critique Group have been toiling over The Anthology. Marybel Moore has been learning all there is to know about the history of the area, while other writers have used the bookshop as a motif in imaginings of all shapes and sizes, from hardboiled detective fiction to love poems, from gritty drugs stories to wistful rememberings. Now, at last, the anthology is ready. It’s available to buy here at just £6.99
Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago.
Carillon magazine has accepted for publication my story The Bigger Picture, in which a train controller with unusual abilities meets the love of his life.
Posted 10 months, 1 week ago.
Issue 42 of The Interpreter’s House (in shops now) carries my contemporary short story History. Here’s a link to the House’s website.
I’m delighted that Chrys Salt and John Hudson at Markings literary magazine have accepted Father, a story about being a man, for inclusion in the next issue, which will be launched on November 21st. There’s a link to the Markings site here.
Tears In The Fence (the magazine of the reknowned David Caddy) has accepted for publication a story about two contrasting characters, each with a concealed pain and a love of literature, and a piddling pug dog called Valmont. Vita Nuova is the name of the story. Tears In The Fence can be found just here.
Posted 10 months, 1 week ago.
I’m delighted to have been offered a regular column on Bespoke Magazine, a thoughtful new arts bi-monthly. UFO In Her Eyes, a critique of my meeting with Xialou Guo, can be found the Bespoke blog here.
Posted 10 months, 1 week ago.
www.hackneycitizen.co.uk
A shameless plug for a worthy journal. The Hackney Citizen, to which I occasionally contribute arts features, offers an alternative viewpoint on the issues affecting the area, as well as profiling the local folk making things happen.
Posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago.
