Generosity of Aesthetics: Mieville and Clarke at Borders, 11.10.04
Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthLast night's SF (or 'sci-fi') event at Borders on Oxford Street was packed out: guests were China Mieville and Susannah Clarke, whose new books (Iron Council is China's fourth novel, third set in Bas Lag: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is Susannah's first, ten years in the writing, Booker-longlisted, very big).
Listening to these two was fascinating. Offhand, I'd've said they had little in common: their novels are literally worlds apart. The readings they gave were both, in a way, about road-making; but SC's was chatty and dry, CM's having much denser prose and less dialogue.
What follows is a straight transcription of my notes, for myself and for anyone else who's interested. Where it's a direct quote, I have enclosed it in quote marks: the other statements may not be worded quite as they were spoken.
PC=Pat Cadigan, La Diva Loca, interviewer.
PC: "Language is the new big thing in literature."
CM: "As a writer, I'm very pro-language."
audience laughs: but China is quite serious about this point
SC: what she's written is a 19th-century novel
CM: I think of myself as a very English writer, but this is an American novel, a Western. The three novels together (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council) form an anti-trilogy: some characters appear in more than one book but each is intended to stand alone.
SC: her plot outline was more emotional than event-driven -- more to do with light and dark, resolutions and mood etc. She only knew / worked out actual events 3 or 4 chapters ahead. The novel evolved as she wrote.
The footnotes throughout JS&MN are relics of digressions written when this was an epistolary novel.
CM asks SC how much she talked about the novel while writing it and how people reacted to the fact it took her (between learning to write, having a full-time job and writing a lot) ten years.
SC: she told family, and writing groups with which she was initially involved, but everyone got disheartened and didn't think she'd finish.
SC: her next novel is in the same world -- different characters though -- not a direct sequel.
She was influenced by Tolkien and C S Lewis: "I took all my favourite bits from all my favourite books and crammed them all in."
PC asks CM about the 'New Weird', but he refuses to talk about it. It's been taken too literally and narrowly, as a pigeonhole and not an easy shorthand for a trend. "Let's have a bit of generosity of aesthetics."
SC on getting such a long first novel published: all to do with finding the right agent, someone who she knew liked long novels and had already sold several. Bloomsbury was third publisher they tried, and accepted: though they were told it was 100,000 words shorter than it is! Once she delivered they didn't seem too put out -- just asked her to cut / amend a couple of scenes.
how long is it, anyway? Apart from 'very'?
Audience: Is magic in JS&MN confined to England?
SC: I don't really know.
CM, from mention of his article "The monsters that stalk Albion" (in the Independent last weekend), says that an important aspect of JS&MN is that its author doesn't try to pretend she's not writing fantasy. The new mainstream writers -- David Mitchell etc -- assimilate genre techniques more readily and comfortably than e.g. Margaret Atwood or Paul Theroux.
They discuss Neil Gaiman's praise for JS&MN, quoted on the blurb and elsewhere: "the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years".
PC: "at least he didn't add 'by a woman'!" Gaiman's thinking of Hope Mirlees' Lud-in-the-mist.
CM: I'm trying to respect the Western tradition, but also to do something new: Zane Grey but also Cormac McCarthy.
SC: Colin didn't read the book until there was a proper copy of it: the first copy that the publishers gave to me, I gave to him. He didn't give feedback while it was being written: but he did sit in the same room with me and read it.
CM: "I don't show works in progress; it feels like a hostage to fortune." (Adds that he has various friends who help with various aspects -- e.g. plot structure, sentence-level editing.)
SC on covers. First print run in both US and UK are half-cream, half-black. Subsequent editions: US black, UK cream.
"I always felt I was never going to finish it." She wrote 7 short stories during this time and had them published -- plus several more that she didn't finish, but does intend to go back to. When she started writing -- and for a long time during! -- she had no idea whether or not she could finish a novel.
How she writes: starts with scraps (fragments of dialogue or description) for a scene or a chapter, and then goes over that chapter or scene again and again, filling in detail until it's done. Start to finish like that -- not a first draft, and then a second.
CM: his next book or two will be set in a different world, but he'll come back to Bas Lag.
Listening to these two was fascinating. Offhand, I'd've said they had little in common: their novels are literally worlds apart. The readings they gave were both, in a way, about road-making; but SC's was chatty and dry, CM's having much denser prose and less dialogue.
What follows is a straight transcription of my notes, for myself and for anyone else who's interested. Where it's a direct quote, I have enclosed it in quote marks: the other statements may not be worded quite as they were spoken.
PC=Pat Cadigan, La Diva Loca, interviewer.
PC: "Language is the new big thing in literature."
CM: "As a writer, I'm very pro-language."
audience laughs: but China is quite serious about this point
SC: what she's written is a 19th-century novel
CM: I think of myself as a very English writer, but this is an American novel, a Western. The three novels together (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council) form an anti-trilogy: some characters appear in more than one book but each is intended to stand alone.
SC: her plot outline was more emotional than event-driven -- more to do with light and dark, resolutions and mood etc. She only knew / worked out actual events 3 or 4 chapters ahead. The novel evolved as she wrote.
The footnotes throughout JS&MN are relics of digressions written when this was an epistolary novel.
CM asks SC how much she talked about the novel while writing it and how people reacted to the fact it took her (between learning to write, having a full-time job and writing a lot) ten years.
SC: she told family, and writing groups with which she was initially involved, but everyone got disheartened and didn't think she'd finish.
SC: her next novel is in the same world -- different characters though -- not a direct sequel.
She was influenced by Tolkien and C S Lewis: "I took all my favourite bits from all my favourite books and crammed them all in."
PC asks CM about the 'New Weird', but he refuses to talk about it. It's been taken too literally and narrowly, as a pigeonhole and not an easy shorthand for a trend. "Let's have a bit of generosity of aesthetics."
SC on getting such a long first novel published: all to do with finding the right agent, someone who she knew liked long novels and had already sold several. Bloomsbury was third publisher they tried, and accepted: though they were told it was 100,000 words shorter than it is! Once she delivered they didn't seem too put out -- just asked her to cut / amend a couple of scenes.
how long is it, anyway? Apart from 'very'?
Audience: Is magic in JS&MN confined to England?
SC: I don't really know.
CM, from mention of his article "The monsters that stalk Albion" (in the Independent last weekend), says that an important aspect of JS&MN is that its author doesn't try to pretend she's not writing fantasy. The new mainstream writers -- David Mitchell etc -- assimilate genre techniques more readily and comfortably than e.g. Margaret Atwood or Paul Theroux.
They discuss Neil Gaiman's praise for JS&MN, quoted on the blurb and elsewhere: "the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years".
PC: "at least he didn't add 'by a woman'!" Gaiman's thinking of Hope Mirlees' Lud-in-the-mist.
CM: I'm trying to respect the Western tradition, but also to do something new: Zane Grey but also Cormac McCarthy.
SC: Colin didn't read the book until there was a proper copy of it: the first copy that the publishers gave to me, I gave to him. He didn't give feedback while it was being written: but he did sit in the same room with me and read it.
CM: "I don't show works in progress; it feels like a hostage to fortune." (Adds that he has various friends who help with various aspects -- e.g. plot structure, sentence-level editing.)
SC on covers. First print run in both US and UK are half-cream, half-black. Subsequent editions: US black, UK cream.
"I always felt I was never going to finish it." She wrote 7 short stories during this time and had them published -- plus several more that she didn't finish, but does intend to go back to. When she started writing -- and for a long time during! -- she had no idea whether or not she could finish a novel.
How she writes: starts with scraps (fragments of dialogue or description) for a scene or a chapter, and then goes over that chapter or scene again and again, filling in detail until it's done. Start to finish like that -- not a first draft, and then a second.
CM: his next book or two will be set in a different world, but he'll come back to Bas Lag.
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no subject
Date: Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 03:27 am (UTC)Those are wise words to live by, in my view.
no subject
Date: Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 03:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 04:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 04:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 09:53 pm (UTC)And, also, a totally non-spec-fic-reading friend picked up Jonathan Strange purely on the basis of the cover - the cream one, incidentally, with the black writing. I can't blame her - it's a fabulously gorgeous cover.
Re: "New Weird". I'm having a slow, agree-to-disagree conversation with a canberra/melbourne (she's stalking me or I'm stalking her, one or t'other) spec-fic friend about various books that fit into this new tag. She hates the name; I'd never heard it until she mentioned it to me. I always refer to that category of books as "fantasy punk". She agreed that was a much spiffier name, so we've declared that's the new name. Just thought I should keep you up to speed. *G*