I did a tweet yesterday morning that seems to have triggered an enthused response from a lot of people: “My Saturday morning writer’s advice for writers: try not to get hung up on writers’ advice for writers.”

I was being cute with the phrasing but am really serious about the point. It sometimes seems to me that next to Top Ten Lists, the internet breeds writer-advice more furiously than almost anything else. (Well, maybe cat pictures. Or Benedict Cumberbatch photos. Or … fine. We’ll leave it there.)

If you play pick-and-choose with the advice tossed out there is no ultimate harm done. Someone ‘famous’ says something that resonates for you, you have that to work with. Maybe you write that way anyhow? But if that famous person says something that runs utterly counter to your own work method, your creative approach, your life options (“Jog five miles every morning before sitting down to write.”), I find myself worrying about or irritated by what I’m seeing, depending on time of day and what I am drinking (coffee or scotch). “Drink three glasses of Highland Park each time you sit down to write.” (Expensive advice, that would be. Also a tad life-damaging.)

The creative process is deeply and profoundly individual. That applies to the Nobel laureate and the undergraduate poet and the person keeping a journal of his or her dreams and desires.

A writer I know asserted earlier this summer online: never rewrite until you have the whole story finished, then you can go back. I’d never have written a novel if I tried to work that way. A writer declared last week that for success in YA fiction, ‘never kill the dog’. Stop a bit right now and think about how many of the books that reached into us and have never gone away (and perhaps taught us how powerful fiction could be) we’d not have if those authors had followed that advice.

When people ask me about, say, outlining I give an honest answer: I don’t block everything out, I am discovering details as I go. But I add, that’s me. That is reporting something not suggesting a process to other writers. Dorothy Dunnett outlined the shape and arc of the entire six volumes of the Lymond Chronicles before she wrote the first book.

There is so much variation to the writing process, it feels wrong to be prescriptive – from where I sit. If my arm is twisted (hard) to solicit advice I’ll urge writers to travel if their life allows it, because travel does important things to us as people, and that affects us as writers. I try to steer younger writers to read outside their comfort zone, their favourite genres and styles, because we get stretched as people by doing that. But I try hard not to get drawn into technical advice.

‘What worked for them might work for you,’ Robert Frost once wrote in a very different, chilling, context. But equally, it might not. I think we all need to go slow on giving How To lectures … and reacting to them. (But everyone should read Frost’s brilliant ‘Provide, Provide’.)

Parking the soapbox behind the curtain for the night, I can report the NY meetings earlier this month were very good, extremely useful. I did not succeed in getting agent or editor to agree to write the next novel for me, but I wasn’t hugely optimistic when I went, so…

Oh, sharing: Vermeer’s ‘Head of a Young Girl’ (the Pearl Earring painting) is headed to the Frick in Manhattan in October. Just saying. In case that’s closer than The Hague.

In Toronto, we’re in the midst of cover discussions. To stay with the blue figure from the hardcover for the trade paperback next spring, or think about a new look, and if the latter … what? Covers do matter, and different formats can suggest a different look. Or not, if everyone feels the current one works. There is no science to it, this is part of the publisher’s art and, as I’ve said here before, I think, it can also be  different in different markets. I’ve been very well served by my English-language covers for River of Stars, I’m working with extremely good people. Not worried. Will report back when a decision is made.

I’m also hoping to have some breaking news to share soon. That’s a tease, but it is better than another bad pun, right? And if you really want writerly advice as a last note, I’ll suggest everyone go with what Schiller did. He kept rotten apples in his desk drawer. Sniffed when creativity flagged. Clearly the only possible way to get anything written.

The second stage of touring/travel for a spring book usually kicks in during the autumn after. In Canada that’s an increasingly busy author’s festival season. It is also awards seaosn, but that’s a different matter.

Immediate trip is New York, for meetings with agents there (principal agent and the foreign rights department) and my splendid friend-and-editor Susan Allison. First discussions may take place about concepts for a new book. Maybe. Perhaps.

After emails and phone calls and juggling, I’ve worked it out through Penguin Canada that I’ll go to Saskatoon for their Word on the Street Book Fair on September 22nd. I’ll be interviewed on stage there by the very fine writer Arthur Slade, who is also a scholar and a gentleman of the first order. One other writer attending is the equally fine Lesley Livingstone, and I have a memory of the two of them (who have apparently never met) threatening/promising to have a sword fight. This may be even more fun than usual. (Lesley is tough, Art may be in trouble.)

I’m also going to do Toronto’s major literary event, the Harbourfront Author’s Festival, on Sunday November 3rd. Again a stage interview it appears (as of now); not sure whom I’ll have to fend off or make laugh. I’ve also agreed to do one of Harbourfront’s ‘outreach’ gigs, in Owen Sound. I really like the idea behind these, where smaller communities around Toronto can reap the benefits of the authors from all over the world coming into town for the main festival.

And finally (for now) grant funding came through to the Halifax library for their request to have me read and speak there, so I’ll be headed that way later in November. Not sure which dates yet, but it is a long way off, we are still in midsummer here, right? Campari on a terrace not single malt inside. (Though I’ll confess to having a Springbank this evening.)

Even with the long time-line to next spring, discussions have begun here as to a new cover for the Canadian paperback of River. Everyone loves the blue one we have on the hardback, but there are sometimes different mandates, different contexts for paperbacks (including different ones for mass market and the larger trade paperback format). Nicole Winstanley, (Penguin’s president and publisher, and my editor here) and I have begun exchanging image thoughts in emails – and it is increasingly clear to me that she has an idea. We shall see. They haven’t let me down yet, actually.

A small discussion about honours and awards in literature was started over on Twitter this morning, when one of the coordinators of a good sf-focused website nominated Tigana as the ‘best fantasy ever’ in a competition on their site. (They are limiting it to books that can be read and fully-appreciated on their own, not only in a series.)

http://www.rantingdragon.com/gfn-nomination-tigana-by-guy-gavriel-kay/

I did a Twitter-note on it, because it was a well-written appreciation, over and above the touching generosity. Alec and Elizabeth linked it to the Facebook page and a lovely number of people seemed to have given the idea a thumbs-up there in an hour or two.

All of this will obviously make any writer feel rewarded. I wrote something earlier this week trying to suggest that it is not just egotistical it is imbecilic for an author to take readers’ support for granted. For one thing, there will always be people who say ‘Meh!’ – or worse – about any book. (I do a good meh! myself.) For another, intelligent, thoughtful responses are golden, or oxygen, you pick your image. ‘You rock!’ is great (really great!), but I cited Randall Jarrell’s two long, brilliant, illuminating essays in appreciation of Robert Frost as what writers long for.

But I didn’t want to write here about Tigana, whether it is even my own best book or not. I wanted to use what this discussion started me thinking about as an opening to do my usual thing here regarding the nature of the book world today, to say a bit about awards, because they are absolutely a major part of the industry.

In the world of literary fiction it has become increasingly the case that come the ‘awards season’ publishers and authors get increasingly edgy and agitated, waiting for the nominations. Indeed, to push the publicity benefits even further, we tend to see longlists now, which are then trimmed to shortlists some time later, extending the attention window. In Canada, the Giller Prize (and to a lesser degree the Governor General’s), in England the Man Booker, in the US the National Book Award and the Pulitzer – there are others, and other countries have their own, various genres and categories (picture books, say) have theirs, too.

What’s happened is that for a certain kind of book, not obviously commercial, not by a known literary bestseller (say an Ian McEwan or a Hilary Mantel now), just about the only avenue to a ‘breakout’, short of Oprah, is one of the big awards.

I have known established writers and publishers hold a title back to get it into a different year from some literary star’s ‘feared’ book. (And of course the next year will almost always have its own star power.) Book people talk with a mix of hunger and chagrin, it sometimes seems, about awards. Recently the Pulitzer gave ‘no award’ in fiction and there was outrage, in part because that meant that no winner would reap the  boost the award gives. The feeling wasn’t that ‘all the other literary works will share’ it was a sense of a sales spike for one book utterly missed. (There were other elements to this story, too.) Being nominated is nice, but it is the prize-winner, in almost all cases, that gets the massive reprint and sales.

Some authors (this isn’t just a book issue, but I’ll keep it there for this post) lament the whole process or aspects of it. I am one of those, for example, uneasy with the idea of lobbying for reader-based awards, others are specific about the way internet voting and campaigning changes what is going on. Some take a Woody Allen approach and dislike awards applied to art, period. Others worry about the politicization of the process, one kind of politics or another – though there really is nothing new about that, either.

But in the publishing world, with the big awards the bottom line is the bottom line. It is harder and harder to sell books once you get past the Dan Browns and J.K. Rowlings, the established stars or the newest YA dystopia. Awards season means that what newspapers are left  run pieces on nominees (or even earlier articles on potential nominees). Websites debate and assess. Oddsmakers (especially in the UK) let you place bets. Books are in the news for a while. That is, everyone in the business agrees, a good thing.

Or, well, a few books are in the news. The downside becomes, of course, that those literary works that don’t show up on a major list, for reasons of merit or politics, trends or karma or the accident of who is on a jury in a given year, are likely locked in to their more limited, dispiriting sales. The winners get cheques and photos and reprints and a major offer for their next. The un-nominated go home to … write another book. This isn’t to say all such books deserve to make their authors household names, it is just to note that an award can make it happen, and missing the list means that door’s closed for another year.

Be prepared for a fair bit of ironic shrugging and blasé eyerolling among authors you know when the season comes. Be also aware there is often a duck-like churning of legs beneath the surface of the water, sometimes from these same people. A lot is at stake, in a crowded, diminishing duck pond.

It feels important, as in so many spheres, to try for balance and perspective, and these aren’t always easy. (‘That book won? Are they crazy?’) I remind myself when honours or simply praise come to one of my books that there are those who have hurled that same book, unfinished, against a wall, and blogged their disdain. Books can be in current fashion or out of it, while remaining exactly as ‘good’ as they are. I try to remember that obvious ‘campaigners’ are doing something to feed their children, and it has a long tradition in many different areas of endeavour.

And I try to hang on to the idea that if we are serious about our art and craft, we are working towards a longer horizon.

I think I’ve said this before, but maybe not here. I am hugely interested in my foreign language editions. I have surmised it is partly being Canadian, an awareness that literary success demands readers outside my own country, purely because of numbers. But I admit it is also a straight curiosity: I’m genuinely intrigued by how different books are received in different countries and cultures. The similarities and the differences, both. I say this about history, the past, too: how astonishingly different and startlingly similar it can be.

The first review for River of Stars appeared in China this week. In a way it doesn’t count: this was an English-language review of the original English book. It ran in ‘That’s Beijing’ and ‘That’s Shanghai’ magazines, their July editions. The Chinese translations of both Under Heaven and River of Stars won’t appear till later this year or next (not sure yet), and that will be a different measure. But for now, this was lovely:

http://www.thatsmags.com/prd/article/view/15818

I’ve also been busy with my Portuguese/Brazilian publisher, Saida de Emergencia, this week. They are releasing Tigana in Brazil, and requested a version of my Afterword adapted to that market, and then sent over an email interview. Good questions, not hard to address. I also sent them, on request, jpegs of a couple of the newer ‘truth in advertising’ author photos, too. The one we’ve been using is several years old by now. Of course I look exactly the same. (Only the glasses have changed. Twice.)

Then the translator for Brazil showed up with some questions. I like when this happens, I always make sure publishers know the translators are absolutely allowed to check in with me. Most of his first set of queries had to do with some names and terms I invented for that book. Often translators want to double-check they aren’t an obscure real word in English that they don’t know. Khav would be a very good actual drink for first thing in the morning, I always say – but it was invented, alas.

I did promise to keep the Journal going this time around, I used to stop them around now, but this format (supported by Twitter and FB) is much easier to use, and the issues surrounding a book don’t stop just because touring has.

The immediate next step is the UK release of River on July 18th. There’s particular interest, over and above it being an important market (though one under great pressure at the retail store level, what they call ‘High Street shops’) because of the rebranding HarperCollins have done with this book. The very different (to me, very beautiful) cover and the change of imprint create an intriguing situation.

Beyond that, my agents are engaged in some fairly intense discussions as to film possibilities on different titles. I have called this process endless foreplay in the past but it matters – obviously – and demands a degree of attention through emails and phone calls and decision-making. Yes, of course, if anything specific emerges everyone will know, here and elsewhere.

This is also the stage when decisions start to be made about the paperback edition for next spring, even though it seems far away, with the hardcover just two months out. But the industry works on long lead times and a lot of considerations go into this. The major chains, for example, are often consulted as to format (trade paperback or mass market?) and cover design (stay with the same one, commission a new look?). Different covers are considered suitable for mass market than the ones judged best for a trade paperback. And different markets have very different looks, too.

The marketing teams have now assembled a ‘quote sheet’ which basically puts chosen excerpts from all the best revews in one place. I have to say, it looks pretty wonderful. River was very generously reviewed. These quotes are important. They end up being culled for the paperbacks, to go on front jacket (most important) back jacket (next most useful) and in the front pages of the book inside.

This is where jokes are often made about cheating. You know, the review says ‘A monumental piece of rubbish‘ and the jacket says ‘Monumental!’ The unexciting truth is that I really don’t know many instances of this happening in the professional book world. We do see it in the film business, though, along with, sometimes, ‘fake’ reviewers created to offer glowing praise to “I Know What You Had For Dinner VI” Hmm: ‘Tasty!’ Sasquatch Forks Scream and Gossip. (Yes, I liked using ‘forks’ here. You know why.)

The Scream and Gossip has never reviewed me, actually. An ongoing sorrow.

I did a panel some years ago during a convention at Harvard. The topic was ‘You had me at hello: how to hook the reader on page 1″. I am afraid I was a tad contrarian.

I suggested, with examples, that we’ve come to wildly over-obsess with desperate, arm-waving ‘look at me’ openings. That books have taken on some of the ‘gotcha’ thinking of summer blockbuster films. The Dan Brown kill-a-person-in-the-opener style.

I suggested that this sort of beginning can’t help but create a tone, style, a set of expectations in a reader for what will follow. That it closes off access to different notes and nuances, and any real consideration (in the writing and the reading) of what I have always called the ‘architecture’ of a book.

Of course you want to draw in – and keep – a reader. Being discarded is, we might agree, a bad fate for a book. But there are a myriad of ways to seduce, and a myriad of reader types, and changing moods and desires in a given reader. People can and do read a techno-thriller and then a book by Jane Gardam or an Alice Munro short story. We aren’t all locked into a single mode of enjoying art.

Given that, I argued (and still do, obviously) the opening of a work needs to be guided by the needs of that work. A long, panoramic book (think Tolkien, or Tolstoy) will require a different immersion, a slower one usually, than a 300 page serial killer novel or paranormal romance.

We’re an impatient society. I joke about the ‘what have you done for me lately’ thing (I think I used it last post here, even) in an age built around dodging boredom via texting and on-demand tv and fast-forwarding. Or six second videos online. But the pleasures of a novel aren’t always or inherently best explored or developed at breakneck speed. We can enjoy vodka shots or chugging beer and also sipping something rare and good, no?

I was put in mind of all this while reading a short, sweet online review of Under Heaven, wherein the blogger talked about truly loving the book after she got through the ‘slow opening’ and she urged her readers to push through that opening. Obviously, I’m pleased, it was a lovely comment, but it left me with some thoughts along the lines of what you see here, and a little more.

One is that, as it happens, there were a lot of readers and reviewers of Under Heaven who thought the opening was their favourite (or one of them) of all my works, or even of books they’d read. It is a very particular, mood-shaping start, a set up for a story that moves a character from extreme solitude to a thronged, dangerous urban space. It was also meant to lay in many of the themes of the novel and a particular set of values in the culture, and establish a couple of the ultimately central mysteries and conflicts. (I’m being careful not to give details.)

One obvious point here is a variant of one I’ve made before: about dialogue not monologue, readers and authors. How one person’s great action scene is another’s too violent one. One reader’s too slow opening is another’s perfect, lyric immersion into ‘another world and time’.

The other point is a fine-tuning of the one I mentioned above: a very long novel that intends to draw the reader in to a very different setting might not be best served by breakneck speed out the gate or a too-heated come-hither. It might: it can be done, alnost anything can be done with enough talent, but I do believe there are more ways of luring the hapless reader (!) into the devious author’s castle than a flamboyant gotcha on page one.

Context matters, so does purpose. We use the words novel or fiction to cover a really wide range of writing, if you think about it. And the pursuit of excellence isn’t always the same as the pursuit of eyeballs. Sometimes you want both, but the methods aren’t always so obvious as gotcha.

Put it another way: we get gotten by many different things in our lives, in many different ways. Books are no different.

This is always a strange time for me. I joke that agents and editors get into ‘What have you done for me lately?’ mode, but in fact I am maligning them when I say that. It is pretty much all internal, my own increasing feeling that I need to figure out a next book.

I’m reading widely. If I say ‘all over the map’ that is pretty much the truth. I actually try not to narrow to times and places yet, I don’t want to, even subliminally, close myself off to being struck by a sudden idea. (I’m the same way when I actually start writing, I hate talking about ‘what this is about’ too early, because what it is about is still taking shape. The more I describe it, the more a new book risks coalescing around the way I talk about it. I am one of the worst ‘proposal writers’ on earth. Or, putting it another way, my editors know not to take anything too seriously, by now.)

I’m also still monitoring events as we head towards the launch of River of Stars in the UK a month from now. We’ve had a ‘soft’ rollout already, with the e-book available there since April when the US and Canadian editions appeared, but their hardcover (and audio) editions have not yet been launched. One advantage my publishers in the UK have is that they are able to use the reviews and coverage that started accumulating in the spring (River has been really generously received). Even on the book itself they have quotes – and normally, with a worldwide simultaneous release you can’t do that till the paperback. Here’s the full UK cover. As part of my ‘inside news about how books get made’, have a look at the number of positions that are to sign off (in theory) on a cover.

Last note. As I’ve mentioned before, I take real pleasure in new countries acquiring rights to the books. I wonder if it is partly because I’m Canadian: that sense that the wider world matters more. In any case, I happily signed contracts for Macedonia (the Mosaic pair) and agreed to terms with an Indonesian house for Under Heaven and River of Stars last week. Time to give a shout-out to the foreign rights team at Trident Media, who handle all of this.

Okay, so I am among those who like to quote Dylan (Dylan Thomas, too).

It has been a week or so since last posting here, but I did alert that these entries would slow as touring ended and my next phase began. I’m not going to go away, though. After discussions with friends and colleagues, and being very much aware that some people put a lot of work into setting up this WordPress site, it would feel wrong to bail. I’m also conscious that some people seem to enjoy these, even indulging me when I ‘go wide’ with posts.

In addition, and on a more pragmatic but also critical level, River of Stars is still in launch mode. My UK agent emailed an hour ago (triggering this post) that he received his hardback copy of the book today and ‘it is stunning‘.

This counts as a sentence you like to read from an agent. Maybe ‘Dan Brown is in our dust!’ is another, but, really…

You may recall that the senior team at HC UK, led by Emma Coode and with a lot of input from Amy McCullogh, have planned a major repositioning of my work there. Beginning with a gorgeous and very different new cover for River of Stars (the one on this side of the ocean is gorgeous too; these two looks represent a fascinating example of how differently the same book can be well designed). We’ll start seeing some evidence soon how that new plan plays out in the UK. Book is out on July 18th in hardcover there. (Ebooks have been on sale from April.)

I got a very good email this morning from a clever magazine editor friend, regarding letters to the editor concerning a piece she’d written. She’d asked the letters editor, ‘I guess it’s too much to ask that letters actually respond to the piece itself.’ And that person replied, ‘That’s definitely asking a lot.’

Ouch. And yes, alas.

We had been discussing reviews, the frequent tendency of people, whether print professional, online magazines, bloggers, or on places like Amazon or Goodreads to impose their own agendas, understanding, expectations (prejudgments, too) on a work when they assess it.

There is nothing new about this (though the forums for people sharing views have grown exponentially), nor is there anything surprising. I have spoken and written for a while about fiction (any writing, any art) as a dialogue between artist and consumer, not a monologue. Having said that, sometimes you have to blink at what people are taking away from reading your book (article, essay, whatever). What they find, as much as what they don’t.

I think we’re all too quick. I think it may even link to the media fiascos of fast false reporting on recent tragedies. Sometimes these review issues might be because of a deadline, but more often it feels to be just the nature of our society. Read (or watch or listen). Declare a quick opinion. Move on. Art – and our response to it – needs more nurture. No?

A clever friend noted that Twitter loves aphorisms, if retweets are any measure. I think it is true, but I think aphorisms ‘work’ in all contexts not just online. They offer a hint of life-solving. Rules. The short summary sells.

That is by way of preamble to something that has bemused me for awhile. By far the most commonly quoted line of mine online seems to be one from Tigana: “There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.” And the attribution (usually!)– Guy Gavriel Kay.

So, let’s put it in context. The line occurs as a thought to a sexually and emotionally worn-out young man in the middle of a night in a castle he doesn’t know, as he tries to find his way back to his room in blackness – and realizes he’s lost.

He can’t source his memory of the line for a bit, then it comes to him again and he recalls that it was said to him by a priest when he was very young. I do something a bit sly with the line and the scene, because the young man, taking turns in corridors, somehow ends up in the darkness outside the door of someone else he knows … and enters.

At risk of saddening some people – I don’t believe the line is true. It isn’t how I understand the world. I believe we can and do makes mistakes, take wrong turnings. I’m not especially a believer in predestination that way. (“Meant to take.”) In River of Stars I wrote a little about randomness, how it unsettles us, but how it can and does have such an impact on events. That, I believe.

It is a character in a book who says and believes the line about no wrong turnings (off-stage). I have written, and every novelist I know has written, many things that are not their own beliefs. If you think about it, how else would we create unpleasant figures (assuming, please, that we are not unpleasant figures!), or simply characters who voice different sides of a moral or intellectual argument (say, the debate about art and power – Crispin and Leontes – in the Mosaic, where I try to give value to two sides of a dispute)?

There is nothing startling or wrong about this quoting process. In the course of writing that dispute on art and power, perhaps I might create a phrase that resonates for someone who comes down on one side of that dispute. Perhaps a phrase on the other side works for someone else. What gives me pause is if and when such a line becomes seen or understood as the personal, real life belief of the author who created those characters.

I’m writing about this because it strikes me as another good example of how easily the work and the author can be blurred today, even more so with authors (including me) increasingly ‘present’ in the online world. I do post passages to Twitter, for example, that I like and find worth thinking about. (A Salman Rushdie quote earlier this week, as an example.)

But when lines are taken from the books, it is better (to my mind) if they are understood in context. Sometimes they might legitimately be read as the thoughts of the author, or thoughts the author would stand behind. There are many such in my novels. Others, though, need the setting and framework.

What gets interesting for me in all this is that the way we meant something to resonate or operate in a work of fiction (ironically, critically, contested, embodying a very specific worldview?) is not necessarily how it goes wide. By now, no wrong turnings has a life well beyond Tigana and the painfully confused night in which my character remembers a priest saying it to him as a child. My attitude to the predestination sentiment, or even Devin’s in the book, become irrelevant.

Makes me wonder how many phrases attributed to various novelists from their books are not their own views of the world, but are located in a very specific setting, belonging to created characters in a book we might have never read.

Interesting? I find it so. You can quote me!

I go away for four days and Toronto’s Mayor gets in more trouble (more and major) and there’s an earthquake. Data is being compiled as to possible connections…

Calgary and Kamloops hosted smooth, very nicely organized events and I enjoyed the audiences and the questions both times. I also got a chance to go south into the Okanagan’s fruit-and-wine country on Friday, and that was a treat. Not hard to see why people love it so much. Here’s the view from where we had lunch:

This sortie west is probably the end of the spring touring, though there are usually one-off events that come up and I have to sit down with the publicists and choose which festivals to accept for autumn. Feels a long way off, but they do need to firm up their guest lists, so can’t take too long on this, in fairness.

River is still on the Maclean’s list, back up to #5 last week. One website says six weeks, another says seven, I’ve lost track (is that bad of me?).

More recent good news came from Prague, where my Czech Republic editor Martin Süst (at Argo Publishers) just informed me that on Saturday Under Heaven was awarded Best Fantasy of the Year at the awards ceremony at the annual Book Fair, “Book World Prague”. His note reads, in part,

Academy is the group of authors, magazine and web editors, booksellers etc. So it´s a professional award. This was the 18th year of this award and it is the best known genre award in our country.

The translator, Richard Podany, was separately nominated in that category, and I’m very glad of that. For obvious reasons, all authors are hugely dependent on their translators into any other language: they become our ‘voice’; any honour we receive is properly to be shared with them.

One more photo for this holiday Monday. A friend sent me a snapshot of the display of some of my books at McNally Robinson in Winnipeg. You may appreciate why I like that bookstore! His (funny) caption was, ‘I lit a candle.’