In yesterday’s email, Harry Bingham of Jericho Writers discussed this question. Here are the excerpts of what he said.

The February 1 issue of the Daily Telegraph carried an article by Anita Singh under the title “‘Book Tok’ inspires young readers to get reading.”

Muck Rack says that Anita Singh is “Daily Telegraph arts and entertainment editor. TV critic. Bradfordian. “

Ms Singh writes, “The rise of Book Tok is driving teenagers and young adults into bookshops in numbers not seen since the Harry Potter years, according to the head of Waterstones. Sales are booming after being recommended by influencers on Tik Tok, the social media app – but some classics are also becoming unlikely viral sensations. ‘These last three or four weeks in the United States, James Joyce’s Ulysses had been a significant seller because on Tik Tok, the kids are getting excited about it,’ said James Daunt, managing director of Waterstones and chief executive of the US chain Barnes & Noble.

“The #BookTok has tag has had 37.4 billion views and popular influencers tend to be young women, mostly recommending books by female authors. Mr Daunt said they were helping to make bookshops popular with young people, reminding him of the decade 1997-2007 which saw publication of J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series. ‘It’s back to that kind of energy in our stores. Our challenge now is that we absolutely have to keep those customers, as we did with the Harry Potter generation. It stepped booksellers up and it stepped book sales up,’ Mr Daunt told a bookselling conference in Italy.

“Waterstones runs its own Tik Tok account as a marketing tool, and Mr Daunt explained: ‘It’s about fun and enjoyment and enthusiasm and the people doing it brilliantly are of the same generation – it’s our young booksellers, and we let them get on with it.’ He joked: ‘We have generally found that the people with blue hair do better than the people with sensible haircuts.’

“Barnes & Noble has dedicated a section of its website to books recommended on Tick Tok. Even W H Smith groups some of its books under the tag ‘Tik Tok made me buy it.’

“The New York Times reported on the phenomenon with the headline ‘How Crying on Tik Tok sells books, noting that tear-jerking novels were particularly popular.

“One of the most popular British ‘Book Tok’ stars is 22-year-old Abby Parker, who has amassed 428,000 followers. She told Amazon last year: ‘I’ve always dreamed of sharing my love for books with the world and Tik Tok has finally been my gateway into doing just that. Getting completely involved with the book community this past year has been truly one of the greatest things I’ve done in my life.'”

I think we should congratulate Abby and her colleagues for spreading her book enthusiasm to young people.

There is an article in the Daily Telegraph on 30 January this year by Craig Simpson with the title: “Prophet of Despair Dostoevsky hits a nerve with readers in ‘irrational, egoistic’ times”.

Craig Simpson reports on arts and entertainment for the Telegraph.

“Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote of ‘the pleasure of despair’, and book sales reveal British readers are buying into his brand of agreeable anguish. The Russian existentialist oeuvre is the fastest growing market for Penguin Classics, ahead of more genteel favourites like Austen and Dickens, with sales of his novels doubling in five years.

“Sales of Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground have quadrupled, propelling Dostoevsky from close to 40th on the list of bestselling classics authors to number 4. While the clamour for the 19th-century author’s ‘gloom and nihilism’ is ‘mysterious’ to publishers, experts suggest that pessimistic modern readers have found a ‘prophet’ in him.

“Kevin Birmingham, author of literary biography The Sinner and the Saint, said: ‘The appeal is that Dostoevsky’s view of human nature seems more apparent now: we’re irrational, egotistic and self-destructive. We spite ourselves, we crave freedom even if it leads to our detriment, and our perverse impulses are at the heart of civilisation. Readers of Dostoevsky’s novels would not be surprised by global affairs over the last several years. These are all Dostoevskian. There is an abiding fear that there are no foundations. no ultimate sense of truth or justice, and this is something we’re grappling with these days. No doubt there’s another era of optimism and confidence on the horizon, and Dostoevsky won’t fit so well with that.’

“He is currently fitting very well with the mood of readers, according to the Penguin Classics team, and an increasing audience for angst which has seen sales for the author’s works increasing 177 percent since 2016. His life experiences, Russian Orthodox beliefs, and insights on irrational human behaviour fed into works from Poor Folk to The Brothers Karamazov before his death in 1881. The renewed appeal of his intense novels led to a 60 percent sales growth for Penguin Classics in 2021 alone.”

If Dostoevsky is up, dystopian novels should also be booming!

Sean Smith has an article in the October 16, last year, copy of The Independent which describes how F Scott Fitzgerald’s personality and life experiences defined the plot and the characters in The Great Gasby.

Sean Smith is a writer and freelance journalist who specialises in op-eds and features on a wide variety of subjects. I have abbreviated his article as follows:

“Gifted, charismatic and impoverished, F Scott Fitzgerald fell hopelessly in love with rich socialite Ginevra King while still an undergraduate at Princeton. When the affair inevitably failed, her father was quick to admonish the aspiring writer. “Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls.” Had he heeded that advice, Fitzgerald may well have led a longer and happier life but he wouldn’t have gone on to write the greatest novel of the 20th century.

Although he was desperate to break into the inner circle of the Waspish, protestant elite, Fitzgerald’s limited means and Irish Catholic roots would cast him as a perennial outsider or “a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich man’s school; a poor boy in a rich man’s club at Princeton,” as he later acknowledged. But his sense of exclusion would also provide his motivation and subject matter: “I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich and it has coloured my entire life and work.”

After being rejected by Ginevra, a heartbroken, Fitzgerald dropped out of college and joined the army in the vain hope of seeing action overseas before the end of the war. As a young officer, Fitzgerald was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Alabama in March 1918 for basic training. History looked set to repeat itself when he unwisely became infatuated with wealthy southern belle Zelda Sayre, who could take her pick from the wealthy young officers who flocked to her family porch.

But Fitzgerald became her most persistent gentleman caller and he would later use the courtship as a model for Gatsby’s youthful pursuit of Daisy. The rule that officers had to wear uniforms at all times, even while socialising, meant that he could disguise the extent of his threadbare poverty from Zelda. Gatsby later benefits from the same “invisibility cloak” with Daisy.

After being demobbed from the army in February 1919, Fitzgerald proposed to Zelda, who made it clear that she had no intention of being poor: “I’d just hate to live a sordid colourless existence.” In the novel, Daisy dispatches Gatsby less brutally but ostensibly for the same reason.

For Fitzgerald it was far from plain sailing. Having failed to secure a writing job with every newspaper in New York, Fitzgerald eventually settled for an advertising role which paid just $90 a week, hardly enough to think of marrying a girl like Zelda.

In the evenings, Fitzgerald wrote short stories with limited success. When Zelda rebuffed a further proposal in June, Fitzgerald fell into despair and a month-long drinking bender only paused by the introduction of prohibition on 1 July 1919.

Depressed to the point of suicide, Fitzgerald resigned his job returning to his midwest family home in St Paul, Minnesota, to rework a previously rejected manuscript into a new novel called This Side of Paradise, which he sent to a publisher more in hope than expectation. When they wrote back with their intention to publish, everything changed.

Zelda, delighted that the sudden prospect of fame and fortune pushed Fitzgerald through the threshold of eligibility, accepted his new proposal with brutal pragmatism. “I hate to say this but I don’t think I had much confidence in you at first. It’s so nice to know you can really do things.”

This Side of Paradise was an overnight sensation that would make Fitzgerald the prince and chronicler of the jazz age. But Fitzgerald never forgot or forgave the terms of Zelda’s conditional acceptance and confided in friends that he was struggling to recapture the thrill of their initial courtship.

But in private, their alcohol-fuelled rows convinced friends that their marriage would be short-lived. Friends also noticed how theit celebrity lifestyle and Zelda’s expensive tastes made it difficult for Fitzgerald to find the time, space and sobriety to produce work of any real substance.

Fitzgerald was running up huge debts paying for hotels, jewellery, travel and extravagant parties, which he financed by churning out short stories for magazines. Financially, he seemed to be constantly running just to standstill.

Novels were lengthy investments of time and effort with no guarantee of financial success but commercial short stories were a sure thing that kept his creditors at arm’s length.

Fitzgerald quickly came to resent cranking out light and frothy dross to a prescribed formula: “I’ve made half a dozen starts yesterday and today and I’ll go mad if I have to do another debutante which is what they want.”

In contrast, the extravagant Zelda welcomed the lucrative fees offered by the magazines although she later acknowledged the strain it placed on their relationship. “I always felt a story for the [Saturday Evening] Post was tops, a goal worth seeking. It really meant something you know – they only took stories of real craftmanship but Scott couldn’t stand to write them.

The Great Gatsby’s recurring theme of selling your soul for financial remuneration was beginning to stir in Fitzgerald’s imagination. Exactly a century ago when their only daughter Frances was born, F Scott Fitzgerald was struck by his wife’s welcoming words: “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I’ll hope she’ll be a fool. That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” Three years later, he lifted them verbatim into the mouth of Daisy Buchannan in The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald felt helpless and resented the way his living costs limited the quality of the work he could attempt. “I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity. I had my chance in 1920 to start my life on a sensible scale and I lost it and so I’ll have to pay the penalty. Then perhaps at 40 I can start writing again without constant worry and interruption.”

In September 1922, the Fitzgeralds moved to Great Neck in Long Island to be close to New York, where Fitzgerald’s disastrous first play, Vegetable,was being staged.

Its failure incurred enormous costs and Fitzgerald was forced to clear his debts by producing magazine short stories on an industrial scale, writing for 12 hours without a break and creating entire tales in a single sitting. He confided in a friend: “I really worked hard as hell last winter – but it was all trash and it nearly broke my heart as well as my iron constitution.”)

And yet somehow throughout this period Scott and Zelda were still partying hard, spending a staggering $36,000. The parties at Great Neck were to furnish Fitzgerald with much of the raw material for The Great Gatsby and the fictional setting of West Egg – the suburban stepping stone for those aspiring to join the establishment elite in East Egg.

But the decadence was unsustainable. Indebted and exhausted, the Fitzgeralds decamped to France to take advantage of the advantageous exchange rate and to finally give Scott Fitzgerald the time and space to write the serious novel he’d been craving to tackle for so long.

Zelda’s hackles were raised because she could sense that she had become the inspiration for a cautionary tale of idealism corrupted by materialistic greed: “Scott has started a new novel and retired into strict seclusion and celibacy. He’s horribly intent on it and has built up a beautiful legend about himself which corresponds somewhat to the old fable about the ant and the grasshopper. Me being the grasshopper.”

Perhaps that resentment fuelled her affair with French aviator Edouard Josanne in July 1924 while Scott was working on a first draft of The Great Gatsby. The affair was undoubtedly a traumatic turning point which Scott later acknowledged. “That September, I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.”

Fitzgerald even stopped drinking and experiencing what alcoholics call a moment of lucidity, redrafted the relationship between Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchannan into sharper focus. The character of Daisy is drawn in a new light – part Ginevra and Zelda, utterly charming but profoundly insincere – capable of capturing the heart of a naïve young man but completely unworthy of a wiser man’s love.

Although Daisy is infatuated by Gatsby, just as Zelda was smitten by Fitzgerald it becomes clear that her true soul mate is the establishment itself, personified by her entitled and arrogant husband Tom Buchannan.

Fitzgerald casts Gatsby as a surrogate for himself – an idealistic and innocent bystander destroyed by his inability to truly understand the rich and their selfish instinct for self preservation .

Drawing on his own personal experience, Fitzgerald specialises in drawing characters who yearn to break into the ranks of the rich and powerful. Through his vivid depiction of the Wilsons, the unhappily married couple who run the gas station in Ash Valley, Fitzgerald captures the sense of life literally passing them by.

By 1925, Fitzgerald could already sense that there wasn’t going to be a fairy tale ending. The brevity of The Great Gatsby suggests a genius writing at full gallop, making the most of his moment of lucidity to produce his masterpiece before succumbing to the financial allure of Hollywood and his rapid descent into alcoholism.”

Not many writers have a life as emotionally riven and torn as Scott Fitzgerald’s, but he poured all of his feelings, observations and experiences into a great novel.

An article with the title ‘Hunt for the Book Thief in a literary Whodunnit’ by Anita Singh appeared in the 7 January 2022 issue of The Daily Telegraph.

“It was a mystery which gripped the publishing world: who was the secret fraudster behind a scheme to steal unpublished manuscripts? The scammer targeted hundreds of victims by assuming the identities of editors, agents and literary scouts in a global fraud spanning five years. On Wednesday, the FBI announced it had arrested and charged a suspect – Filippo Bernardini, 29, who had a lowly job in the rights department of the London office of Simon & Schuster.

“While it had long been suspected that the culprit had links to the publishing industry – they used familiar abbreviations such as ‘ms’ for ‘manuscript’ – the arrest came as a shock. Some of those targeted had dealt with Mr Bernardini on a professional basis. Mr Bernardini, an Italian citizen who studied for a masters degree in publishing at University College London, was arrested at New York’s John F Kennedy Airport. He is charged with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. Prosecutors allege the Mr Bernardini impersonated, defrauded and attempted to defraud hundreds of individuals. The indictment did not mention the manuscripts in question. However authors who have been targeted by such a scam over the last five years include two of the world’s bestselling novelists – Margaret Atwood and Jo Nesbo and their books The Testaments and Knife – and at least one Pulitzer Prize winner.

“The charges allege that between 2016 and July last year, Mr Bernardini ‘engaged in a scheme to fraudulently obtain valuable prepublication manuscripts of novels and other forthcoming books, as well as synopses and other notes and reports related to unpublished books.’ He allegedly did this by creating lookalike email addresses – for example, replacing the letter ‘m’ in penguinrandomhouse.com with ‘rn’, a tiny, easily overlooked adjustment. According to prosecutors, Mr Benardini registered more than 160 fraudulent internet domains. All would forward to a single email address that he controlled.

The Indictment says Mr Bernardini devised the scheme to obtain ‘money and property by means of false and fraudulent pretenses’. However the motive is obscure, as some of those targeted were little-known novelists. No ransom demands were made, and the manuscripts were never pirated. . . . Michael J Driscoll, of the FBI, said ‘he was allegedly trying to steal others’ literary ideas for himself.'”

It seems to me that Mr Bernardini was indeed trying to steal others’ literary ideas for himself, as he made no apparent attempt to monetise the information he obtained. We authors must be careful in our correspondence with publishers, agents and literary scouts. And the industry needs to tighten its internal controls.

This novel by Sinclair Lewis caught my eye at the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia when I was in the States visiting family for Thanksgiving. It was published in 1935 when the US was still in the valley of the Great Depression, and parts of Europe were in the grip of fascism. In his introduction to the book, Michael Meyer, Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, says, “Engulfed by the complexities and vulnerabilities of our post-September 11 world, Americans of nearly all political persuasions are likely to find that It Can’t Happen Here, though firmly anchored in the politics of the 1930s, surfaces as a revealing and disturbing read.”

Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Minnesota. He attended Yale where he was editor of the literary magazine. After graduation in1907, he worked as a reporter and editor of various magazines, newspapers and publishing houses. His first novel, Our Mr Wrenn, was published in 1914, but his first successful novel, Main Street was published in 1920. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith in 1925. In 1930 he became the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1951.

It Can’t Happen Here is more a political commentary than a novel. Set in the mid-1930s it describes how the political climate at the time results in a fascist government taking power in the United States. It is all seen through the eyes of Doremus Jessup, the editor and publisher of a local newspaper in Vermont. Senator Buzz Windrip is elected President, having promised to restore American prominence in the world while providing $5000 per year for each American citizen. Dissent is outlawed by the new Corpo (short for corporate) regime, the American Congress is neutralised, power is removed from the states and given to new, autocratically-run districts. Women are disenfranchised; a. powerful new, savage militia known at the Minute Men is created, justice is administered by military tribunals, dissidents are imprisoned in concentration camps or executed. Doremus joins the New Underground resistance movement, secretly publishing the truth of what is happening. He is imprisoned, is tortured, escapes to Canada, and is assigned the territory of Minnesota to encourage resistance to the Corpos, who have started a diversionary war with Mexico, as the country descends into civil war.

At a personal level, viewed either from a liberal or an authoritarian position, the story has credibility. A gardener becomes a high-ranking Minute Man, with life and death power over his former employer. The motivations and emotions on each side are clear. The book is filled with minor characters, right- and left-leaning, filling many different positions at local, district and national levels, adding credibility to what is happening. The tone of the book is largely neutral: atrocities are reported factually, so that it is not a grand polemic, but a sober report. There are elements of satire and humour in the descriptions of some events, which make it clear whose side the author is on, while preserving his credibility.

The book is a sobering attention-getter without suggesting an action plan. Lewis was not a political thinker; he was an independent liberal who believed in individual rights. He was a reporter of what he saw and could foresee.

It seems unlikely that even with the concerted efforts of group of powerful fanatics America could become fascist as easily as it did in It Can’t Happen Here. It would not be easy to overcome the democratic forces exerted by an aroused US Congress, the US judiciary and the armed forces. But given what happened on January 6 2021, one has to pause for thought.

The Sunday Telegraph had an article about authors who wrote one brilliant novel and never published another. The article is written by Claire Allfree, who is a freelance writer covering arts and entertainment in the UK. I quote from her article below.

“When the New Zealand novelist Keri Hulme died last week at the age of 74, she joined a venerated group of authors not known for winning the Booker Prize – which she did in 1985 with her Maori magic realistic epic The Bone People – but for the production in her lifetime of only one complete novel. Emily Bronte, Margaret Mitchell, J D Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee, Anna Sewell all wrote a single, game-changing, long-form masterpiece. To that list can be added novelists equally or better known for other art forms – the poets Sylvia Plath and Boris Pasternak; the playwright Oscar Wilde; the short story writers Alice Munro and Edgar Allen Poe, although Bronte was also a n accomplished poet and Salinger a revolutionary short story writer. Nonetheless the image of the artist who produces just one perfect piece of work and then lapses into silence, often out of sight of the public view, is seductive. How admirable to leave just a single artistic legacy, its brilliance undimmed by inferior additional works, untainted by the siren call of game or ego.”

“Seductive, but rarely true. Few writers calmly put down their pen after dashing off a fabulous big hit, with the possible exception of Margaret Mitchell, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Gone with the Wind was published in 1936. Mitchell always insisted she would never write another book, partly out of horror at her new-found celebrity (she expected Gone with the Wind to sell 5000 copies; it sold 50,000 on its first day). But while she refused all interviews, there were rumours she was considering a second, when she was killed in 1949 by a drunk driver at the age of 48.

The writer who comes first to my mind in this category is Harper Lee, whose novel, To Kill a Mockingbird is an American classic. “Lee never wrote another book after To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, but possibly not for want of trying. ‘Success has had a very bad affect on me,’ she later said. ‘I’ve gotten fat – but extremely uncomplacent. I’m running just as scared as before’. “

Harper Lee’s book, Go Set a Watchman, which was published in 2015, has confirmed to be an early draft of Mockingbird. In my opinion it was not even close to the calibre of Mockingbird.

“No, the messier, more complicated truth would appear to be: once a writer, always a writer. Some radical figures like Hulme, Salinger, Mitchell and Lee do not necessarily believe that everything they write needs to be published, or that writing – that most solitary of forms – should be considered a public spectacle.”

“In fact Hulme, who when told by telephone that she had won the Booker replied, ‘Oh, bloody hell’, rejected the idea that her writing was for the benefit of other people. A pipe-smoking, white-baiting aficionado who lived alone in a small settlement on New Zealand’s south island, in a house she built herself. Hulme embraced a maverick obscurity, yet she continued to write after her win, producing short stories and two further manuscripts that remained unpublished at her death. ‘It might seem that I’m low in the productive stakes. I don’t think it’s about being a celebrity at all. It’s about creating stories and songs that will last. Otherwise, it’s not worthwhile.”

“Meanwhile Salinger, who in 1953 retreated to a house in New Hampshire where he remained virtually unseen until his death in 2010 following the zeitgeist-defining of 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye told the New York Times in a rare 1974 interview that, ‘There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.’ All the same. rumours abound over what manuscripts may be gathering dust: in that same interview he said he continued to write ten hours a day, while his daughter Maureen has spoken of a vault filled with rigorous notes on what was to be published after his death. Nothing has so far materialised, with Salinger’s son and widow, who control his estate, as tightlipped and suspicious of public scrutiny and the publishing machine as Salinger was.”

I remember reading The Catcher in the Rye in 1955 when I was in high school in New Hampshire. At the time is was suggested reading for the senior class.

Ms Allfree goes on to say that “Salinger, Mitchell and Lee all attempted to exert absolute control over their writing, pursuing unscrupulous publishers who tried to produce unlicensed editions of their work.”

This kind of conflict ultimately benefits no one.

Writer’ Digest has an article by Liz Keller Whitehurst, dated 9 November 2012, in which she describes the advantages of using multiple narrative forms, including first and third person narratives, interview transcripts, letters, posts, and journal entries.

Ms Whitehurst is the author of her debut novel, Messenger, and her short stories have appeared in many literary magazines and journals. She earned master’s degree in English from The University of Virginia. In addition to fiction writing, Liz has spent her professional life writing and teaching.  She lives with her husband in Richmond, Virginia.

Liz Keller Whitehurst

Ms Whitehurst says, “My novel tells the story of Messenger, a mysterious older woman who delivers life-changing messages to seemingly random people all over New York City; and Alana, the young journalist who longs to tell Messenger’s story. The use of multiple narrative forms embodies Alana’s journey as she, a sort of detective, seeks to gather information and first-person accounts, to search for clues. Her goal is to track Messenger down, meet and get to know her, then hopefully unravel her mysterious messages and to determine if this story is the big break that will make Alana’s career.

“Being a writer, it’s natural that Alana would keep a journal and would ask Messenger to write down her own thoughts, to explain her process, and to reveal more about herself. The posts Alana receives from people whose lives were changed by Messenger’s messages also works naturally, as do the interview transcripts. And the quick rhythm of switching back and forth between forms mirrors the fast-paced life of one of the other main characters of the novel—New York City.

“Using multiple forms with multiple characters and thus, dividing the novel into shorter sections or bites is a means of addressing readers’ short attention span and the way we tend to read on our computer and phones these days. Just as short stories have seen a new resurgence, these shorter pieces encompass the clarity of that life-changing moment like flash fiction, and can be read in a short period of time and still satisfy.

“I love it when I, the reader, know more than the characters I’m reading about. It’s delicious, builds tension, and moves the dramatic arc along with verve. Creating dramatic irony is another plus of using multiple narrative forms. In my novel, I wanted the reader to know much more about Messenger and the Watchers than Alana has any idea of, both through the action but also through what Messenger reveals in Messenger’s Composition Book. Through Messenger’s entries, the reader gets a glimpse of the greater aim behind Messenger and Alana’s journey together, far beyond the book Alana thinks she’s writing. 

“The editor, publisher, and I had fun choosing just the right fonts for each of the narrative forms, so that Alana’s Journal, Messenger’s Composition Book, the posts, and the traditional narrative chapters each had its own particular font to distinguish them from one another. Using different fonts makes the book more visually appealing and easier to follow as it shifts forms.”

I would add that using multiple narrative forms with multiple characters gives the writer the advantage of several sources of information to develop each individual. One can use different sources offering divergent view of a character, so that the reader gets an in-depth view of a complex person.

Writer’s Online has a piece on December 10 this year written by Lori Ann Stevens about how to capture a real, frightening event in prose. It’s not easy. It can seem dry, exaggerated, stilted or difficult to believe. But Ms Stevens has some tips on how to make the terrible event real for the reader.

Ms Stevens is the author of Blue Running, published by Moonflower Books. She said, “My sister’s boyfriend was fourteen years old when he accidentally shot himself in the stomach while cleaning his hunting rifle. He was alone, and the wound was fatal. His sudden death left everyone shaken and horrified. I hoped that the school counsellors would help my little sister heal from the trauma. I’d recently had a baby, so I acknowledged and then buried the image as quickly as possible. It wasn’t until decades later that I realized how profoundly this boy’s death had settled into my consciousness. In Blue Running, my new novel set in Texas, a similar accident occurs. I relived the accident as I typed the scene, watching quite helplessly as this girl – filled with dreams and imagination – bled out on the floor. In spite of her friend’s screams for help, in spite of a desperate race to find a phone, to flag down a car, the girl dies. Her best friend could only witness the horror, hold the girl in her arms, feel every moment. Like me, the writer who was finally reckoning with the memory.

“It was my imagination that had made the real event so long ago unbearable: what had gone through his head as he lost his grip on consciousness? To die violently and alone – I can’t imagine a more terrifying event. It’s this capacity for imagination, and the willingness to step through those doors, that makes us empathetic humans… and makes writers create believable scenes for their readers.

“But it’s not easy, writing out terrifying, real-life events. Robin Hemley in Turning Life into Fiction, puts it this way: “‘But it really happened!’ is such a lame defense for a story you’ve written. If it doesn’t seem believable, forget it.” It doesn’t matter that a scene is based on real events if the narrative choices aren’t authentic. Here are a couple of tips to make these terrifying scenes credible in fiction. Rather than describing the blind flight of adrenaline blurred by mayhem, try to capture the crystal clear moments that imprint on the brain in the midst of the event.

“It probably won’t come as a surprise that slowing the pacing of the story allows the reader to experience the event, moment by moment. On the one hand, it’s counterintuitive, because terrifying events are often experienced as a blur – a rush of adrenaline sending you into survival mode. On the other hand, it’s also the exact inverse: a slowing of time and space. Who’s been in a car wreck and doesn’t have a terrifying, slow-motion memory imprinted on the backs of their eyelids? The car fishtailing on the icy road, the classic music on the radio echoing like a phantom, your tight grip on the steering wheel, the car jumping the curb like a fledgling bird and plummeting down the frost-covered grassy knoll.

“In this ironic slowing of time, my characters notice things we don’t register in our everyday lives. Their frame or focus might be more limited in a frightening situation as they  fixate on one thing and store it in their memory: the buzz of a fly on the windowsill or the odd swish of an overcoat. Sensorial details like the cold tip of your nose, the sand grabbing onto your feet, or the smell of burnt hair. If your character is frightened and alone, forget the heartbeat racing and focus on the sound of his breath whistling, giving his hiding spot away. One benefit of staying in the moment like this instead of rushing the narrative is that your sentences might stretch out, compound the images, keep the readers moving from detail to detail, phrase to phrase. Or use shorter sentences.”

I tend to agree with Ms Stevens that it is most effective to use short, graphic, incoherent details in brief sentences to convey the feelings of a frightening event. Trying to capture the event in all its horror comes across as false. We need a sense of time moving quickly, of snapshots of consciousness. Short sentences and phrases pick up the pace. Onomatopoeia can be useful. For example, if sliding is the issue, using many words with an ‘S’ sound can convey the feeling. Effective horror scenes tend to show, rather than tell. It is often more powerful not to deal directly with the central horror threat. For instance, rather than describing the site of a broken bone, show that the limb seems to be at an odd angle.

There is an article in the Daily Telegraph two days ago written by Ella Whelan titled ‘Twitter is the last place writers should go if they want a debate’. The article centres on Kate Clanchy and her 2019 award-winning book, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. The author used the phrases ‘chocolate-coloured skin’, ‘almond-shaped eyes’, a ‘fine Ashkenazi nose’, a ‘narrow skull’ for an Ethiopian boy, and ‘flirty hijabs’ for Muslin girls. Clanchy also described one of her students as “African Jonathon” and another being “so small and square and Afghan with his big nose and premature moustache”. Two autistic children were described as “unselfconsciously odd” and “jarring company”. 

In a separate article, The Guardian said, “Clanchy has taught in state schools for more than 30 years. In 2018, she published an anthology of pupils’ poetry and was awarded an MBE for services to literature. In 2020, a panel of independent Orwell prize judges described her memoir as “moving, funny and full of life”, offering “sparkling insights into modern British society”, and awarded the book the prize for political writing.

This summer, reviewers on Goodreads pointed out the ‘unsavoury descriptions’ and critics in the world of publishing raised the alarm not only about the book, but what is said about the world of publishing that such passages would go uncut.

Ella Whelan said, “Anyone who knows the industry will tell you that it is elitist and exclusive. A recent survey revealed that 90 percent of the publishing world is white. On top of that, it is also a profit-driven market, in which social media trends are consulted more often that artistic judgements about which stories or writers deserve to enter print.”

Three writers, Monisha Rajesh, Sunny Singh, Chimene Suleyman, the Society of Authors,, Philip Gwyn Jones (a Picador publisher), Picador, Pan Macmillan (Picador’s owner), and Kate Clanchy went on Twitter to express their various views that:

• British publishing must do better
• preventing authors writing about people different to themselves would be a death knell to literature
• vigorously condemn online bullying
• appalled by the suffering experienced
• welcome the chance to write better, more lovingly

My reaction to this bruhaha is that first of all, British publishing must do better in selecting books and authors more on artistic value and less on what the loudest British culture does or doesn’t want to hear. Given its white elitist nature, British publishing needs to be more sensitive to the feelings of minorities. Fighting culture wars on the Internet with personal condemnations is unethical and counter-productive.

What bothers me more about some of the descriptions in Ms Clanchy’s book is not the alleged racism. (What’s pejorative about the adjectives ‘chocolate-coloured’ or ‘almond-shaped’ or ‘flirty’? In fact, ‘flirty hajib’ is a playful description. Are we not permitted to identify a character as a member of a minority group except by writing ‘black’ and ‘Asian’ and ‘Muslim’?) I am more concerned about Ms Clanchy’s apparent unease as a teacher with the disabilities of her pupils.