Most argument is directed to fans not opponents...

Here's Arnold Kling:

...the principles of good intellectual debate are not that obscure. Just make arguments as if you were trying to change the mind of a reasonable person on the other side. I believe that the reason that we don’t observe much of this is that most people are trying to raise their status within their own tribe rather than engage in reasoned discourse. It’s sad that reasoned discourse does not raise one’s status as much as put-downs and expressions of outrage.

I suspect this isn't new - much debate (and not just political debate) is tribal. I guess Jonathan Swift made the point well:

Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy...

The other day - seeing as how I'd received a gift of £25 on a plastic card - I was wandering round Waterstones. It struck me then that many of the books on display are designed to appeal to a fan club rather than to present an argument for all - from Naomi Klein's latest poorly-research rant through books on Brexit written entirely to shore up one or other side's argument to the kind of flag-waving certainty given to us by pop psychology, lifestyle and self-help writers. And don't get me wrong, this makes complete sense - once you've got a bunch of unquestioning fans, writing to appeal to them is clearly the best option (assuming you want to sell loads of books and buy a new house or maybe a whole island). These books are, however, akin to those 'many hundred large volumes' that Gulliver was told about.

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Writing about ideas makes it possible for folk to change their minds

The inestimable Graeme Archer proclaimed yesterday - on Twitter, which is the modern equivalent of what my late colleague David Emmott called 'just pub talk' - that nobody changed their minds reading stuff so it was pointless writing it (I write this from memory as I can't find the Tweet). And that's cool - if you write opinion, you have to believe there's a fighting chance of what you read actually changing somebody's mind. What's the point otherwise?

The thing here is that Graeme's right. We really don't change our minds about things very often and almost never as a result of reading something in a blogpost or hearing something at a lecture. This isn't to say that we don't learn things from these places or, indeed, hear things that make us go wow! I remember being at a lecture about the boundaries of maths where the lecturer (my apologies, I forget her name) said something along the lines of "just because the universe is infinite that doesn't mean it hasn't got an edge". Every day I read things that are fascinating - Josiah Wedgwood created thousands of innovations and refused to patent any of them, the Daddy of Open Source! Our minds aren't changed but they are bigger and we are wiser.

Thing is, we don't change our minds very often about big important matters of ideology, about the faith that's core to the way we see the world. And, when we do change - stop being a socialists, reject belief in God - it's the conclusion of a process not a Damascene conversion brought on by reading an individual article or hearing a solitary lecture. For sure, we do change our minds about mundane stuff - whether we prefer rice or naan with a curry, our favourite singer or how we'd like our hair cut. But on other stuff this doesn't happen often, if at all.

I remember a friend who was a Bradford City season ticket holder, a real enthusiast. In one, possibly drink-fuelled moment, he whispered that the result he looks for first isn't City but Arsenal, the team of his childhood. If it's that damned hard to switch allegiance from a team 200 miles away to the team where you live, what chance is there of Graeme or I writing an article and having you change your view about politics, society or the economy? And, just so y'all don't think it's because Graeme and I can't muster an argument, the same goes for even the wisest, wittiest and best-informed. I'm sure there were ancient Greeks meandering back from the agora after another afternoon of Socrates asking difficult questions, who would say 'dunno what he's on about, it's rubbish and I'm sticking with The Gods, you know where you are with The Gods.'

But we know that people do change their ideological minds - non-believers become believers, redemption and true-seeing are real, they're just not pinged by just one article. This realisation might, as Graeme remarked, suggest that writing opinion and ideas is fruitless, purposeless. But perhaps it's not, perhaps the little seeds we plant in the minds of others allow them to think more broadly about their faith, their ideology. As a conservative, doubt is central to my philosophy - everything is to be challenged, questioned and change only follows this process - and for doubt to work as analysis it has to be informed, it needs fuel. And that fuel is the words of people like Graeme Archer and a thousand others, the lumps of coal that come from writers, poets, singers, those speaking in the public square.

So our words, however small the splash they make in the ocean of ideas, matter and we should not be afraid to speak them. Nor should we fear the words of others, the questions and challenges that latter-day would-be Socrates ask in our 21st century town square. No, say those things, put them out into that world of ideas because who are we to know that, for some person out there, those words are an affirmation of belief, a final jigsaw piece in revelation's puzzle, the spark that lights a fire in that person's heart. We don't change our minds very often but, I'm absolutely sure that, were there fewer words from the likes of Graeme that process of change would be more sclerotic and the world would be poorer.

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Maybe writing stuff people want to read would be a start?

Literary fiction - those celebrated but unread books that all the chattering folk recommend to each other - is struggling:

Finally it’s official: literary fiction is in crisis, and writers across the land are burning the midnight oil in their garrets, teaching or slogging away in unrelated jobs to keep the fire ablaze in the grate. This Dickensian picture was revealed by Arts Council England today in a report that suggests it may have to shift its funding priorities in order to save a population whose economic and cultural solvency has been chipped away over the years.

We're told (although there's no actual evidence presented) that publishers used to be lovely sorts who allowed authors advances that didn't "earn out" because of "literary value that could be offset against the profits of more pragmatic publishing". And we're also told that there's no let up in us buying and reading books - we're just not buying 'literary fiction'.

Apparently though, saying things like 'try writing stuff that people want to read' isn't the right response - we should instead be subsidising publishers so those penning angst-ridden novels filled with meaningful dialogue and incisive social commentary can carry on doing so despite the fact that only a few close friends opt to read the books.

In the end there is a huge gulf between what people read and the endless self-referencing of the literary fiction advocates. Here's Neal Stephenson - an author, a very good author, who writes some of that terrible 'genre fiction' so disdained by the literary cognoscenti (and The Guardian's Associate Editor, Culture):

I went to a writers' conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we'd exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me "And where do you teach?" just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another "And which distro do you use?"

I was taken aback. "I don't teach anywhere," I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. "Then what do you do?"

"I'm...a writer," I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.

"Yes, but what do you do?"

I couldn't think of how to answer the question---I'd already answered it!

"You can't make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?" she tried.

"From...being a writer," I stammered.

Yay for science fiction!

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Philip Pullman wants to make more money - at book buyers expense

Writing books is a competitive business. There are uncountable aspiring novelists scribbling away at their masterwork while scraping a living in some dead end job (or so it seems). Even people who have completed a book and got the precious thing published soon find out that, after the initial buzz of giving your mum a copy, the reality of book sales is that most books...er...don't sell:

I went through the BookScan numbers for every fiction book listed on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2014. I used 2014 instead of 2015 to make sure each book had at least 12 months of sales. No list is perfect, but the NYT list includes story collections and small press books alongside the big name literary authors and award contenders. 2014’s list includes names like Haruki Murakami, Lydia Davis, Marlon James, and David Mitchell as well as small press debuts by Nell Zink and Eimear McBride. It’s a good sampling of the “books that people are talking about” in the literary world.

The BookScan sales of those books literally ranged from 1,000 to 1.5 million, with an average (mean) of just over 75,000 copies sold per book. That 75k number is pretty skewed by the existence of Anthony Doerr’s runaway literary hit, All the Light We Cannot See, which sold over 1.5 millions of copies. (The next highest book was about 270,000.) If we remove the best and worst selling books on the list, we get a mean of 46,550 copies and a median of 25,000 copies.

These are the big books, the ones raved over by critics, featured in brainy magazine 'what you should read this summer' lists and chewed over on late night TV shows. So what does all this mean? You've guessed it - authors can't earn a living:

According to a survey of almost 2,500 working writers – the first comprehensive study of author earnings in the UK since 2005 – the median income of the professional author in 2013 was just £11,000, a drop of 29% since 2005 when the figure was £12,330 (£15,450 if adjusted for inflation), and well below the £16,850 figure the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says is needed to achieve a minimum standard of living. The typical median income of all writers was even less: £4,000 in 2013, compared to £5,012 in real terms in 2005, and £8,810 in 2000.

The result is that even those acclaimed, much-feted writers we see talked about in The Guardian and TLS have to have some other form of income. Here's Neal Stephenson (who does make a living from writing) on the issue:

I went to a writers' conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we'd exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me "And where do you teach?" just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another "And which distro do you use?"

I was taken aback. "I don't teach anywhere," I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. "Then what do you do?"

"I'm...a writer," I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.

"Yes, but what do you do?"

I couldn't think of how to answer the question---I'd already answered it!

"You can't make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?" she tried.

"From...being a writer," I stammered.

Now Stephenson was using this anecdote to explore the different way in which genre writers like him are treated compared to writers of literary fiction but it's a useful reminder that, without patronage, literature struggles. And for most writers - the ones like the writer Stephenson talked to - their income from writing is nice but not central to survival. Earning £11,000 is very nice bunce when you've £45,000 of tenured academic earnings.

All of which brings me to the Society of Authors - chaired by Philip Pullman (another successful genre writer) - and their complaining about discounting and bulk deals:

“I don’t like it when I see my books sold cheaply,” Pullman said. “But I’d like to think I’m speaking on behalf of all authors who are caught in this trap. It’s easy to think that readers gain a great deal by being able to buy books cheaply. But if a price is unrealistically cheap, it can damage the author’s reputation (or brand, as we say now), and lead to the impression that books are a cheap commodity and reading is an experience that’s not worth very much.”

This seems to me like a pretty crass argument designed entirely to protect the earnings of successful authors (and as an side effect the profits of publishers) rather than anything that will expand the market for literature. It essentially looks like people like Pullman - and Chocolat author, Joanne Harris (also quoted in the article) - are sticking two fingers up at book buyers in the interests of them making bigger royalties from their assured sales.

Going back to Neal Stephenson, we are reminded that it will still be patronage (in so far as a tenured academic position in creative writing or a writer in residence position can be called patronage) that drives literary fiction rather than gross sales. Cheaper books mean more people buy books, more people read books and the social value of literature is enhanced.

There's a sort of arrogance to Pullman's argument that something only has value if it is more expensive - for someone railing against 'market fundamentalism' it is doubly ridiculous as that 'price of everything, value of nothing' approach is usually directed at market fundamentalists! In the end the Society of Authors just want to fix the market for their members to make more money. And if books are more expensive we'll buy fewer of them - we'll buy Pullman's and Harris's latest but probably not the work of some new author we've not heard of.

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"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one" - why the cultural elite doesn't get Terry Pratchett

I did flick through a book by him in a shop, to see what the fuss is about, but the prose seemed very ordinary. 

Such is the basis for Guardian writer Jonathan Jones dismissing the entirety of Terry Pratchett's writing. For me this sums up the sheer ignorance of the self-appointed literary elite. It would seem that the sin Terry Pratchett committed was the sin of being accessible. Or as I would put it, actually readable.

The literary elite are conning you into trying to read those books they hold up as paragons of genius. Books like the witty but incredibly (and indulgently) overwritten Ulysses or the dull as ditchwater eighteenth and nineteenth century novels written by women - mostly about a world entirely foreign to us in which they describe the gossip, gold-digging and backbiting of fellow women in what might as well be a fairy tale environment for all that is relevant to today's reader.

These books are hard work. I've flicked through a few of them in shops and the prose is impenetrable, elaborate and complicated. Almost designed - in a showy way - to exclude anyone who prefers crunch, pace and intelligence. Us mere mortals who think the purpose of a novel is to take us into a story, release from the bounds of the mundane and, above all, entertain us. None of the novels pushed - in that ghastly English teacher manner - by the likes of Jonathan Jones achieves that aim. Instead - and let's use Jon's world since they will be so much better than mine - the novels are designed to exclude:

Actual literature may be harder to get to grips with than a Discworld novel, but it is more worth the effort. By dissolving the difference between serious and light reading, our culture is justifying mental laziness and robbing readers of the true delights of ambitious fiction.

The real problem with Terry Pratchett isn't that he's a bad writer for he was far from that, but that he committed a terrible sin - one beyond writing prose that the average 13 year old boy could access. Terry Pratchett wrote fantasy. Just as that other - now dead - target of Jonathan Jones' dismissal, Ray Bradbury, wrote science fiction. This is, of course, entirely unforgivable if you want the cultural elite to consider you a serious writer. You see, dear reader, science fiction is just (using Jon's word again) "ordinary potboilers" not proper writing.

It is my considered view that Pratchett and Bradbury are far better writers than Jane Austen. Or, to put it another way, they wrote prose that works for today's reader, set in contexts that reflect today's society and which tell a story that works as a story but where there's a message if we want to take it. Austen's books are no doubt pertinent if you want to study the social mores of Georgian England's elite but that society is so far removed from ours that it might as well be fantasy. And a boring fantasy too.

The word 'genius' is overused - I'm sure that like many professional writers Terry Pratchett considered himself a craftsman storyteller rather than an artist but there's no doubt that, in the position he adopted, Pratchett was close to the greatest. Writing comedy is hard - you have to be light (which is why Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake fail despite their undoubted humour) while maintaining the integrity of the story. It's no surprise that very few of the authors feted by the likes of Jonathan Jones wrote comedy - such gentleness of spirit is beyond the ken of someone planning on literary genius rather than good storytelling.

I still consider that the story is lost in so much of our literary fiction. Too much sweat is expended on getting the wonderful prose - all those well-turned phrases spilled onto the page - meaning there's little left for the dull old job of creating the wonder, excitement and escape of a great story. It's as if Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams had lost sight of their plot in the urge to tell a few more jokes. I'm just like Jonathan Jones - there's an awful lot of books I haven't read and a good lot (mostly written in the genre often called 'literary fiction') that I have no intention of ever reading. I may continue to flick through some of them in shops though. Just so I can write about them with knowledge and understanding!

Reading is, for most people, a way to leave the everyday world behind for a while. For some people this is about exploring history or philosophy, for others the pleasure comes from the joy of fine prose or livid poetry, but for most - the 'middlebrow' as Jon dismissively describes them - the joy is in a well-crafted story, a dash of adventure, a splash of humour and an escape into another brighter and sharper place. To dismiss literature that does this last job so wonderfully - and Terry Pratchett definitely does this - as something other than genius is to display selectivity. The sort of arrogant ignorance only our self-appointed cultural elite can muster.

And, since Jonathan Jones doesn't like Ray Bradbury (it's not clear whether he flicked through Bradbury's books or has actually read one) let's finish with a quotation from what I think is his greatest book, The October Country:

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us?

First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.”

I'm sure Jonathan Jones will have flicked to that page?

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Quote of the Day: George R R Martin again!

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On his use of Wordstar 4.0 to word-process his books:

"I actually like it, it does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else," Martin said. "I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key."

I think I'm mostly with him on this.

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Ray Bradbury remembered...

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“The October Country” is perhaps the most frightening book I ever read – forget all the jumping out from behind things, zombies and ghosts that make for horror these days, Ray Bradbury was the master. To take you from idyllic, almost perfectly described Elysium to abject terror in one short story – that is writing.

“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”

The reports of Bradbury’s death will doubtless speak mostly of “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Martian Chronicles” – great science fiction. For me Ray Bradbury’s work was far closer to that small town horror we now associate with Stephen King – tales of growing up, loose autobiographical references interlaced with scares, spells and magics. And all written so tightly, with a painful beauty.

I shall go read them again – “Dandelion Wine”, “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and all those wonderful short stories. It would be the best way to remember a great writer who gave us magic, fantasy and science fiction rooted in the lives of ordinary people and showed how that so-often dismissed “genre” fiction is about more than spaceships or dragons.

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Sorry, Dame Stella, but you're wrong about children reading - and about social media

Dame Stella Rimmington, former head girl and ex-spy is chairing the judging panel for this year’s Man Booker Prize. I suspect that part of the job description for this chairing role is to say something controversial about literature or reading or the general state of the world through the eyes of bookish folk. And Dame Stella has obliged with a gentle rant about twitter:

Dame Stella said that while she was confident a market for fiction would still exist in 100 years, she feared many children were not growing up to be book lovers. “I think much of the Twittering and emailing and texting and all that sort of stuff that children go in for now may be taking their eyes off reading fiction. When I was young we read more than the average child reads now.”

Now I don’t wish to be too critical of such an eminent lady but she’s talking nonsense:

In the UK, the value of publishers’ sales of children’s books actually increased in 2010 by 2%, to £242m. The report shows that the value of publishers’ UK sales has been increasing year on year over the last three years, from £236m in 2008.

And this represents some 60 million books sold which makes for five books on average for each of the UK’s roughly 12 million children. OK, the kids aren’t devouring hundreds of books in the manner that Dame Stella doubtless did as a girl but they are definitely reading.

More importantly however social media – all that twittering, emailing and texting – means that children are doing something we never did (and which I suspect Dame Stella’s contemporaries didn’t do either). Children are writing to eachother. OK, they’re writing in a language that only just approximates to English and is replete with acronyms, shortened words and peculiar codes but it is written communication.

If – twenty years ago - we’d have said that the most common form of communication between young people would be written communication, the experts would have looked at us, shaken their heads and called for the men in white coats. Yet that is the reality – we have replaced the verbal communication, whether directly or via the telephone, that was the dominant feature of the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s with a mish-mash of written forms.

It seems to me that, regardless of the oddity of language involved, the growth of social media forms – facebook, twitter and so forth – makes a positive contribution to the literacy levels of young people. After all you can't play in the sandpit of social media if you can’t read or write can you!

Dame Stella’s comments reveal yet again the extent to which the literary elite are out of touch – not just with the facts about books and literacy but with what interests and excites young people about reading and writing. Yet again much chatter will be expended on the Man Booker Prize – chatter that will sail completely by the majority of folk. Why?

Because the literature involved presents an impenetrable arrogance that covers up the deeper truth – it is indulgent literary fiction that is dying out not reading. And this is because the books promoted by the literary elite are not what most people want to read. If the Man Booker Prize is to mean more it has to break out from the narrow genre into which is has crawled – it has to embrace popular fiction and recognise that just because a book doesn’t use three words that aren’t in the Concise Oxford Dictionary on the first page and has fun things like spies or wizards or vampires in it, that doesn’t make it a bad book.

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A little more on Whimsy....

I am – as my more avid and assiduous readers will know – something of a fan of whimsy. If we’re allowed to use such a base word as ‘fan’ to describe the fine work of great writers? I’m never quire sure where to find the finest whimsy – the Americans have always had a knack for it. From way back writers like Mark Twain, Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote whimsically – capturing that slightly laid back, wide-open-space feeling of Middle America. And this thread runs right through American writing and film – Stephen King’s short stories, Capra’s films and even more recently delights such as “Big Fish” all capture that spirit of wonder.

But it’s not just the Yanks – the “Little World of Don Camillo” is a wonder of whimsy created by an Italian, Giovanni Guareschi and there is little to top the joyous whimsy of Idries Shah’s delightful Sufi tales. Nor should we discount the English writers of whimsy – Paul Jennings with “Resistentialism” and "Ub" or Peter Simple’s collection of characters, some satirical, some just providing a great, happy smile. It is all magical, delightful – you can’t read Neil Gaiman’s “Stardust” or “American Gods” without the sorcery of whimsy sparkling through you.

For me it all started with Thurber. With the man who described his writing like this:

“The writing is, I think, different. In his prose pieces he appears always to have started from the beginning and to have reached the end by way of the middle. It is impossible to read any of the stories from the last line to the first without experiencing a definite sensation of going backwards. This seems to prove that the stories were written and did not, like the drawings, just suddenly materialize.”

Thurber wrote biography (or at least what he claimed was biography), stories – you’ll know one or two of them such as “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” more likely from film versions – and an array of short pieces such as the wonderful ‘Fables for Our Time”. There are occasional moments of laugh out loud but mostly the stories relax you, make you want to sit back, take a sip of whisky, a drag of good cigar and just smile that big smile.

And Thurber – like so many of these writers – was modest about his talents seeming ever grateful that the world hadn’t yet rumbled him. I suspect there might be an element of self-description in the ‘moral’ to “The Owl who was God”:

“You can fool too many of the people too much of the time”