Motivational Mondays -- Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

By Neil Gaiman

It’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members’ interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I’m an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So I’m biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And I’m here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And it’s that change, and that act of reading that I’m here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What it’s good for.

Read the full article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming

[Link] Writer's blockdown: after a year inside, novelists are struggling to write

by Alison Flood

A spell at home is surely a good opportunity to write, so why are so many authors struggling?William Sutcliffe, Linda Grant and more share how the pandemic has stifled their imaginations

In early February, after a month of lockdown, William Sutcliffe wrote on Twitter: “I have been a professional writer for more than twenty years. I have made my living from the resource of my imagination. Last night I had a dream about unloading the dishwasher.”

If the first lockdown was about finding space to write (along with a blitz spirit and a Tesco delivery slot), then the second has been far bleaker and harder for creativity. Whether it is dealing with home schooling, the same four walls, or anxiety caused by the news, for many authors, the stories just aren’t coming.

“Stultified is the word,” says Orange prize-winning novelist Linda Grant. “The problem with writing is it’s just another screen, and that’s all there is … I can’t connect with my imagination. I can’t connect with any creativity. My whole brain is tied up with processing, processing, processing what’s going on in the world.”

Grant describes waking up in a fog, and not wanting to do anything but watch rubbish TV. Her mind is not relaxed enough, she says, to connect with her subconscious. “My subconscious is just basically screaming: ‘Get us out of this’,” she says, so there’s no space to create fiction. “I don’t have the emotional and intellectual energy to give to these shadowy people to bring them out of the shadows.”

Read the full article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/19/writers-blockdown-after-a-year-inside-novelists-are-struggling-to-write

[Link] 'Elitist': angry book pirates hit back after author campaign sinks website

by  Alison Flood

OceanofPDF was shut down last week after publishers issued hundreds of takedown notices – but authors have been left dealing with angry users

Authors have been called elitist by book pirates, after they successfully campaigned to shut down a website that offered free PDFs of thousands of in-copyright books.

OceanofPDF was closed last week after publishers including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins issued hundreds of takedown notices, with several high-profile authors including Philip Pullman and Malorie Blackman raising the issue online. Featuring free downloads of thousands of books, OceanofPDF had stated on its site that it sought to make information “free and accessible to everyone around the globe”, and that it wanted to make books available to people in “many developing countries where … they are literally out of reach to many people”.

Before the site was taken down, one of its founders told the Bookseller that it was run by a team of four who worked based on user requests: “Once we get an email from a user requesting a book that he/she cannot afford/find in the library or if he has lost it, we try to find it on their behalf and upload on our site so that someone in future might also get it.”

Michelle Harrison, who won the Waterstones children’s book prize for her debut novel The Thirteen Treasures, drew attention to OceanofPDF after receiving a Google alert about a free download of her book Unrest. She then downloaded it “in a matter of seconds”.

“I was gobsmacked when I read a statement on the site admitting that reading pirated material wasn’t good because it doesn’t earn authors any money,” Harrison said on Wednesday. “Users of the site were encouraged to ‘leave reviews’ so that the author at least got some benefit!” After she received no reply to an email request to have her books removed, she tried Twitter. “I received a brazen response along the lines of, ‘What if someone already bought the books and lost them, or is travelling and doesn’t want to carry extra weight?’” she said.

After the site was closed down, Harrison shared an email she received from one OceanofPDF user, who called her “unworthy of being an author” and “grossly elitist.”


Read the full article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/08/elitist-angry-book-pirates-ocean-of-pdf-author-campaign-website

[Link] Creative writing: when characters are difficult to get on with

by Charlotte Seager

Even authors as seasoned as Stephen King often struggle to fully imagine their inventions and once they have, the relationship can remain very uneasy

Characters don’t always do what you want. Sometimes they cause mischief, take on lives of their own, or even work against you. It’s not just a problem for inexperienced writers: George RR Martin recently admitted it was a struggle to write from Bran’s viewpoint, while Roald Dahl said he got Matilda so “wrong” that when he’d finished his first draft he had to start again from scratch.

Of course it’s not the characters’ fault. The problem lies with the author. Take Stephen King, who confessed to Neil Gaiman that writing protagonists in blue-collar jobs is more difficult nowadays because his own circumstances have changed. “It is definitely harder,” King said. “When I wrote Carrie and Salem’s Lot, I was one step away from manual labour.”

This is also true for characters’ ages, added King. “When you have small children of a certain age, it is easy to write about them because you observe them and you have them in your life all the time. But your kids grow up. It is harder for me to write about this little 12-year-old girl in Dr Sleep than it ever was for me to talk about five-year-old Danny Torrence because I had Joe as a model for Danny. I don’t mean that Joe has the shining like Danny – but I knew who he was, how he played, what he wanted to do and all that stuff.”

For other authors, the difficulty can be a question of tone. When I asked Siri Hustvedt to name the character who made her struggle the most, she chose the narrator of her third novel, What I Loved. “Despite the fact that Leo is 70 (I was in my forties then), a man, a Jew born in Berlin, and an art historian, none of which describes me, I didn’t find it hard writing as an old, Jewish, male art historian,” she says. “I struggled to find the man’s emotional tone, the cadences of his prose.”

Read the full article: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/nov/21/characters