*

After a while, experienced professional authors learn the importance of the calendar.  They learn that it is not so much which editor  to approach  with what project, as when to do it. Trying to get a publisher to take an interest in a project is as delicate a matter of timing as asking someone to go to bed with you  -   too soon and they find it presumptuous;  too late and their interest has shifted elsewhere.

When to make your move?  All that the Endpaper think-tank can do is to present the publishing calendar, with its seasonal ebbs and flows, so that authors have at least a chance of catching a brief of moment of milky sunlight before the storm clouds gather once more.

January. Nothing ever happens  in January. Everyone is too depressed about Christmas, which was without doubt the most disastrous in living memory.  Mention a future book idea to an editor at this moment, and all you will hear is incredulous laughter. The few books which are actually published in January disappear without trace. Their authors have been told that this is a good month to ‘catch the book token market’, one of publishing’s more hilarious lies.

February.  The returns are back from Christmas. They are far worse than anyone feared. Even the celebrity books flopped, and it is widely agreed that the industry must return to publishing real books by real authors.  The sales department merely insists that authors of these real books should be  well known. Editors start hanging out at film premières and in TV chat-show audiences.

March. It was such a disastrous Christmas that publishers have had to ‘re-structure’, which is trade-speak for sacking a lot of people. February is a month of strategy meetings, at which words like ‘synergy’, ‘digital’ , ‘platform’ and ‘holistic’ fill the air. Occasionally, for light relief, the entire corporation goes to a hotel for a team-building weekend, from which staff will return hating each other  even more than before.  At the Bologna Book Fair, children’s publishers take their annual works outing.

April. Sexual yearning has publishing in its grip throughout the year but, for obvious reasons, it is particularly acute as Spring does its cruel work. Publishers meet at the London Book Fair and hungrily negotiate with one another, only occasionally mentioning books.  Only the bravest or most foolish of authors will attempt to interrupt these vernal  rituals.

May. We are now well into the year, and publishers suddenly discover that there is a hole in the autumn schedule where their Christmas bestseller should be. They decide that maybe they do need a ghosted celebrity book after all. Surely there must be a comedian or chef who has not been published. Editors are ordered to  stop reading manuscripts and to watch The X Factor and Celebrity Big Brother instead. The ghost-writing industry is now in overdrive; everyone else has stalled.

 June. Editors fly to America  for the big BookExpo conference,  and return gloomier than ever. They have discovered that the American book trade is in a far worse state than the British, or far better. Either way, it is depressing. In the UK bookshops, it  is quieter than in living memory. If you happen to have a book published this month, editors will look at you with a one-word message in their eyes: remainder. They are clearing their desks in preparation for holidays, and so no new project is welcome.

July.  They found their big Christmas book! A comedian who had written a couple of memoirs thinks he can dictate enough for a third if the price is right.  There are meetings about marketing and packaging the big book. Meanwhile, a  few new titles are dolefully released into the market under the pretence that they will be “picked up in reviewers’ holiday round-ups”,  another of publishing’s  hilarious lies.

August. Holidays. Nothing happens.  Editors, sitting by a swimming-pool, try to write the novel they have promised themselves. They return, three chapters done, in a foul mood.

September. It is the busiest time of the year. There is the post-holiday catch-up, the pre- Frankfurt Book Fair panic. Unless you are Stephen Fry, Alan Titchmarsh or Dawn French , it is pointless to publish a book now. The word in the trade is that this year’s celebrity books are better than last year’s. It is a bad time to talk to an editor about ideas; in the current climate, ideas are the last thing she needs.

October. There is anticipation, tension and clammy excitement in the air. Meetings, drinks, lunches and dinners are being organised  – time, place, items on the agenda. It is the Frankfurt Bok Fair, the event where by tradition the British book trade finds its annual sexual relief in desperate, doomed adulterous affairs, conducted in German hotels. Pre- or post-Frankfurt, it will be impossible to get any sense out of publishers. The code-word  for this mating frenzy is that ‘foreign publishers are in town’.

November. There were reports that Christmas came early, but they proved optimistic. The atmosphere in the trade is gloomier than it has been since June. The affair which your publisher started  at Frankfurt has ended, as it always does, in guilt, regret and self-loathing. The big celebrity book is piled high in the shops but the public seems to think that, because the comedian has written two bad memoirs before, a third one will be no better. At Christmas parties, resentment hangs in the air like stale farts. It is generally agreed that there is one cause for the current problem: authors like you.

December. It is the worst Christmas ever. No, seriously, if you thought last year was bad, you should see the disaster unfolding in the shops right now. Obviously, it would be absurd for publishers to consider your ideas now. Besides, they are about to take their holiday. When should you try? Maybe some time next year.

More invaluable insights into the literary and publishing life are to be found in my Writer’s Shed

The Author is the house magazine of the Society of Authors and appears four times a year.

Some are wise, a few are funny, some are quite frankly bonkers. The views can be from the classic (Flaubert) or the populist (Lee Child), the great (Philip Roth) to the small (Martin Amis). All are posted without commet.

There is no hint of a consensus here. Writers will always disagreee with one another, particularly about writing.

Here, in no particular order are some of the Writers’ Rules that now inhabit the Twittersphere:

John Fowles: ‘I no more want to see myself in print now than a monk wants to do a vaudeville act.’

 EM Forster: ‘We all like to pretend we don’t use real people, but one does actually.’

 Don DeLillo: ‘Being called a “bad citizen” is a compliment to a novelist. ..If we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.’

 VS Naipaul: ‘The novel form has done its work. The true novelists today are people like Edwina Currie, Jeffrey Archer.’

 Harold Brodkey: ‘I’m not famous. My image is famous. It’s a shadow I don’t even cast.’

Maxwell Perkins on writing a novel: ‘If you think you are not doing it well, you are thinking the way real novelists do.’

Eugene O’Neill: ‘Writing is my vacation from living.’

Arthur Miller: ‘I get up in the morning and write. Then I tear it up. That’s the routine.’

Redmond O’Hanlon: ‘The point of heterosexual male literature, art, music, science and rugby is to win the love of women.’

Toni Morrison: ‘If you’re blocked, you probably ought to be.’

Iris Murdoch: ‘Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.’

AN Wilson on literary parties: ‘The duds you see all around you,with hate in their faces, had started out hoping to be Keats.’

Gustave Flaubert: ‘Once our work is printed – farewell! It belongs to everyone..It is the height of prostitution, and the vilest kind.’  

Hanif Kureishi: ‘How do I like to write? With a soft pencil and a hard dick – not the other way round.’

Christopher Hitchens: ‘Write as if it’s your last words.’

Russell Hoban: ‘Children are in contact with the deep things which people tend to close off as they get older.’

Russell Hoban: ‘I never have a plan when I start a novel. If I did, it would be half dead before it started.’

William Hazlitt: ‘All who have to live by their labours have their potboilers.’

Elizabeth Smart: ‘Writers have to construct an importance, a sacred vocation, not to feel fiddling.’

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘There is no such thing as a political laugh or a moral laugh. A laugh is a very pure thing.’ 

Charles Dickens on literary journalists: ‘the lice of literature’.

Simone Weill: ‘Fictional good is boring…fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm.’

Carol Shields: ‘When you write happy endings, you are not taken seriously.’

 Janet Hobhouse: The purposeful deprivation that allows you to work,the cultivation of dullness so that writing can be an escape.

 Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘You write best about yourself. It may even be that it’s impossible to write well about anything else.’

 Ted Hughes: ‘It is fatally easy to acquire, through other people, a view of one’s work from the outside.’

 Anton Chekov: ‘A man of letters should be as objective as a chemist; he has to renounce ordinary subjectivity.’

 Jonathan Carroll: ‘Writers nowadays don’t have any courage. They have cleverness but they are clevering themselves to death.’

 John Banville: ‘I’ve always likened writing a novel to a very powerful dream that you know is going to haunt you for days.’

 Paul Theroux: ‘Sometimes you see two people walking along holding hands. You think – that man’s not writing a book.’

 Jack London: ‘You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.’

Mark Lawson: ‘If a critic wants to put down a serious novel, he will call it unputdownable.’

Ford Madox Ford on agents: ‘…a sort of bar loafer who hangs around, finding what publisher, magazine or paper wants what.’

PG Wodehouse: ‘It isn’t a bad sort of life if you have a novel to write.’

Richard Price: ‘As soon as you start a second book, you’re in competition with yourself.’

Cole Porter: ‘The moment the curtain rises on the opening night,I say to myself “There she goes” and I’ve bid goodbye to my baby.’

Rudyard Kipling: ‘Few lips would be moved to song if they would find a sufficiency of kissing.’

Ernest Hemingway: ‘The better the writers, the less they will speak about what they have written themselves.’

Somerset Maugham: ‘The novelist is dead in the man who has become aware of the triviality of human affairs.’

Norman Mailer: Plot is equal to a drug..Sooner or later, plot presents its bill, and dire exigencies come down upon the writer.

Albert Camus: ‘It is in order to shine sooner that authors refuse to re-write. Despicable. Begin again.’

Arnold Bennett: ‘The single motive that should govern the choice of a principal figure is the motive of love for that figure.’

Paul Auster: ‘I don’t know how to explain the work I do. I can’t defend it. I can’t do anything but do it.

Salma Rushdie: ‘A writer’s injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.’

Milan Kundera: ‘We write books because our children aren’t interested in us.’

George Gissing: ‘What an insane thing it is to make literature one’s only means of support!…To make a trade of art!’

Philip Roth: ‘Let the book take care of itself. Someone smarter than I am will have to tell me what it’s all about.’

Julian Evans: ‘Evil is a reality. Evil happens….If evil happens, then evil is a story that needs to be told.’

Martin Amis: ‘I would certainly sacrifice any psychological or realistic truth for a phrase.’

Robert Macfarlane: ‘All good writing either works against the grain of its genre, or transcends it altogether.’

Elmore Leonard: ‘If I have to stop and think about a word as if it was holy, I am interrupting my character.’

Sir Francis Bacon: ‘The Noblest workes and Foundations have proceeded from chilldlesse men.’

Franz Kafka: ‘Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.’

Frederick Forsyth: ‘I don’t like writing, I have never liked it. It’s extremely solitary, very boring and just a job.

Alan Garner: ‘I can’t think my work. I have to feel it, hear it, find it…I wait for the word, the hard-edged word.’

Eric Ambler: ‘The words don’t come fluently – if it comes readily I get very suspicious.’

AN Wilson on literary gatherings: ‘Faustian experiences, in which lost souls are adrift among the cheap wine and peanuts.’

Zadie Smith: ‘Fail better… It is literature in its imperfect aspect that I find most beautiful and most human.

Charles Baudelaire: ‘Travail immédiat, meme mauvais, vaut mieux que la réverie.

Kingsley Amis: ‘If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.’

Paul Theroux: ‘Sometimes you see two people walking along holding hands. You think – that man’s not writing a book.’

Anthony Trollope: ‘As for conceit, what man will do any good who is not conceited?’

John Cheever: ‘The rivalry among novelists is quite as intense as that among sopranos.’

Martin Amis: ‘The sexual act is a very weird thing in that it is indescribable. Literature has got nowhere with it in centuries.

Albert Camus: ‘The moment when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.’

Virginia Woolf: ‘We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.’

Arthur Ransome: ‘Unless I am writing that is good fun FOR ME, not for somebody else, I cannot write at all.

Redmond O’Hanlon: ‘The point of heterosexual male literature, art, music, science and rugby is to win the love of women.’

Hilary Mantel: ‘I often comfort myself that the worse life gets the better it gets, because suffering can feed writing.’

Norman Mailer: ‘I would say I’m wasting my substance completely when I’m not writing.’

John Updike: ‘A fiction writer’s life is his treasure, his ore, his savings account, his jungle gym.’

Georges Simenon: ‘A novelist is a man who does not like his mother, or who never received mother-love.’

Stephen King: ‘I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.’

F Scott Fitzgerald: ‘You never cut anything out of a book you regret later.’

Marguerite Duras: ‘A happy book is indecent, unseemly. We ought to wear mourning as a sign of civilisation.’

Neil Gaiman: ‘When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong or how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.’

Neil Gaiman: ‘When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right.’

 Lorrie Moore: ‘I think that all the best writing, like the best music, has a sadness to it.

VS Naipaul on teaching creative writing: ‘I would take poison rather than do this for a living.’

WB Yeats: ‘All that is personal soon rots.’

Gustave Flaubert: ‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it. ‘

Cyril Connolly: ‘It is the novelist who finds it hard to create character who indulges in fine writing.’ 

GK Chesterton: ‘I have a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife; what more can a man want on a honeymoon?’

Martin Amis: ‘Cynics don’t write novels.’

Jules Renard: ‘You will not have made real progress until you have lost the desire to prove your talent.’

Zadie Smith: ‘Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better.’

Lionel Shriver: ‘Complacency kills a lot of writers. They end up imitating themselves.’

 Peter Ackroyd: ‘It can hardly be stressed too often that the good writer is rarely, if ever, a good man.’

John Fowles: ‘All writers are difficult to live with. It is an inexorable law of mankind.’

Anthony Burgess: ‘Plot is only a bone you throw at the dog that feeds on narrative while the real work of literature proceeds.’

Vera Brittain: ‘I would not sacrifice one successful article to a night of physical relationship.’

Rose Tremain: ‘Never begin a book when you feel you want to begin it, but hold off a while longer.’

Auberon Waugh: ‘All you’ve got to do is tickle things up a bit. I think that’s your only role as a writer.’

Irvine Welsh: ‘There’s fuck all to say about my books other than what’s written in them.

Simon Gray: ‘Writer’s block is an obscenity invented by 20th century writers who want an excuse for not working.’

Max Beerbohm: ‘An author with a grievance is of all God’s creatures the most tedious.

My Twitter username is @TerenceBlacker

These days, when reading a column or blog on-line, he said, he tended to scroll first of all down the page to the message-boards. It was the debate among readers which told him whether what was written above it in the article itself was worth reading.

That would seem to be the way things are going. We all love a ruckus. A piece which has provoked passionate support or disagreement among readers is likely, the thinking goes, to be more compelling and of the moment than one which has merely been read.

How devastatingly depressing that is. Some of the columns I have been most pleased with have failed this test. Until now, I had hoped that they had been quietly appreciated, that a message was redundant. The fact that they had raised no matter for general discussion did not detract, I thought, from their value.

The general movement, though, is towards ruckus journalism. In a lecture about Twitter and citizen journalism, the Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger argued for what he called “the power of collaborative media”.  An article today should arrive at a consensus view, thanks to the input of readers and their varying opinions, the argument went.

I distrust this idea to the point of hatred. As I wrote during a piece about Twitter in The Author:

“It seems to me that the last thing any serious-minded author needs is a conversation. The idea that writing can be a communal activity, often encouraged on creative writing courses,  is a recipe for banality. The case made for Twitter may sound fair, consensual and democratic, but writing is not like chairing a committee of different opinions and then summarising the majority view. It is a dictatorship.”

To understand the weakness of the collaborative argument, one needs to visit a message-board. Among the sensible comments, and almost always outnumbering them, are rants and jokes and messages of varying degrees of nastiness. Some are simply bonkers.

It is said that the problem of graffiti has declined since the social media provided an alternative outlet for abuse, insult and exhibitionism, and one can see why. The combination of anonymity and the chance to hurt or show off is powerfully attractive.

It is unwise for a columnist to worry too much about what is written under his column, and to answer back, or  become involved in the debate, as some columnists do, is even more rash.

I was briefly tempted last week.  I had written a column about Hugh Grant’s early celebrity, as seen from the perspective of someone who used to play foot ball with him, and on the message-board a pseudonymous reader had pointed up my own snottiness in the form of an anecdote.

He had seen me filling up “an impressive-looking gold 4 x 4” at a petrol station in Bury St Edmunds. When he (or she, but somehow it seems like a he) had been friendly towards me, I had seemed bewildered and hostile.

Wha-what-what? Not one item about this story is true (except, perhaps, the bewilderment of a gold 4 x 4 owner) but there it is on-line, joining the vast mountain-range of fictional bilge on the internet.

My article about fame and someone with who I used to play football was not profound, but a glance at the messages that appeared below it hardly supports the Rusbridger case for collaborative media.

Once the message-board shouters begin to have a real influence on what is being read and written, it is not just the quality of the writing and argument which will suffer.

Tracy wrote about a silver birch story, Blake Morrison chose the chestnut, Ali Smith the Scots pine, Susan Elderkin the blackthorn, William Fiennes the ash., and so on.

My choice was the elm, and here it is:

As any carpenter knows, elm is a tricky wood to work – robust and beautiful, but also recalcitrant and unpredictable. Even when it has been dried, it will continue to move, rebelling against the role the craftsman has given it.

There is a reason for this excess of individuality. All trees in the forest are proud but, with the elm, pride tips – some would say unacceptably –  into arrogance.

It took several millennia for other trees to acknowledge that the attitude of the elm was becoming a problem. The forest is a tolerant, live-and-let-live sort of place, where there is a general sense that trees should not judge one another but concentrate on their own growing.

The arrogance of the elm, though, eventually became impossible to ignore. There were murmurings among the trees. Eventually it was agreed that the ash, which has an easygoing sort of authority about it, would address the issue.

‘The thing is this,’ the ash said to the elm. ‘All of the trees in the forest have individual strengths, and we all get along pretty well. The alder provides wood that hardens with water. The blackthorn protects animals with its spiky branches. The oak provides the mighty timber for ships and houses. In my own modest way, I produce wood which I believe is rather useful for firewood.’

‘Your point being?’ asked the elm.

‘It’s simply that all trees have their functions. To be candid, we’ve been wondering what gives you the right to behave as if you are superior to the rest of us.’

‘I am elm,’ said the elm.

This reply did not go down well in the forest.

‘What kind of answer is that?’ muttered the hazel.

‘I am hornbeam,’ said the hornbeam. ‘So what? Statement of identity hardly constitutes a reason.’

The elm seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. When it did reply, it was in a tone of weary contempt.

‘I am elm.’

The matter was dropped for a few centuries, but discontent grew among the other trees. It was the willow who one day suggested that something had to be done.

‘But what?’ sighed the ash. ‘It is elm. End of story.’

‘I have friends – don’t press me for details,’ said the willow. ‘I could have a word.’

The trees agreed that little no harm could come from the willow talking to its friends, and thought no more about it.

The willow knew a beetle that had recently travelled from Asia. When the willow explained its problems, the beetle seemed interested.

‘When does the elm start misbehaving?’ it asked.

‘When it becomes an adult tree,’ said the willow. ‘It’s quite reasonable when it is young, but as soon as it starts appearing above the hawthorn, the rowan, the hazel and the other small trees, its behaviour becomes impossible.’

‘I think I may be able to help,’ said the beetle.

A few years later, the trees began to notice that something unexpected was happening. As soon as young elms reached a certain height, above the hawthorn, the rowan, the hazel and other small trees, their bark became clogged with fungus and, quite soon afterwards, they died.

It was upsetting.

‘I think the elm has learned its lesson,’ the ash said one day to the willow. ‘Maybe you could have another word with your friends.’

The beetle was surprisingly unhelpful.

‘These things are cyclical.,’ it said. ‘One day, the elm will develop resistance to the fungus. Give it a few centuries and it will be back up there with the big boys. Thank you very much for the gig, by the way.’

To its credit, the elm has never complained about its fate. Every years, its roots spread, and its suckers burst through the earth. It grows and grows, knowing full well that, at the very moment when other trees reach their most useful years, it will inevitably wither and die.

In woodland, even now, you can hear its refrain – hopeful, defiant, despairing, quieter than it once was.

I am elm.

I am elm.

I am elm.

Why Willows Weep, edited b y Tracy Chevalier and Simon Prosser, published by IndieBooks, is availabler here  from the Woodland Trust for £12.95

It was a casual enough enquiry, following the broadcast of a two-part radio programme. Who, I was asked online, had been my researcher for the programme? With a small touch of pride, I replied that all the research had been done by me. And what, my questioner then asked, had given me the idea of talking to  – and she  mentioned two of the twelve or so people interviewed for the programme? Was it just a coincidence that she had happened to have written about both of them in her blog?

I began to see the direction in which she was heading. My correspondent thought that I had ripped her off. I looked at her other correspondence on Twitter, the social network site where this kind of gossip is traded, and found that she had been poking around, complaining mildly about me and asking where I had found my material. The trails led nowhere, and the backchat quickly fizzled out.

It was trivial enough episode, more a niggle than an outright accusation, but it was interesting how it unsettled me. At worst, the suggestion had been that I had taken a short-cut with my research. It was inaccurate but, even if it had been true, it was hardly the most grievous of sins.

 A tip to the vengeful: there is nothing more de-stabilising to authors, more likely to send us clean around the bend, than a suggestion that our work is second-hand, borrowed, or even stolen. Words and ideas are our only professional asset. If people begin to think some of them have been nicked, our identity as authors – a quaking, fragile little thing at the best of times  – is likely to crumble.

Plagiarism, whether imagined or real  – and this society has dealt with cases which proved to be all too real  -  is a nasty, destructive business. Writers who have come to believe that someone else has stolen their plots, characters or prose will find that the suspicion eats into the soul. If, as is often the case, they belong to the great tribe of the slightly disappointed,  and the perceived thief is more successful than they are, then his every glowing review, her every appearance in the bestseller list will be a nagging form of torture.

Authors who become convinced that their work has been plagiarised have this in common: the sense of injustice within them bogs them down and holds them back. Because the key to survival as a writer is to look forward, to treat the work currently in progress as the only one that matters, they are being doubly punished. Their grievance traps them  in the past.

I was once contacted by a man who had become obsessed – possessed, even  -   by the idea that a well-known novelist, aided and abetted by his publisher, had stolen scenes, sentences and names from his own rejected novel.

At first glance, he seemed to have a case. The carefully-typed list of alleged overlaps, echoes and borrowings which he had compiled ran to many pages. Once I began to read the evidence, though, the extent of his paranoia became clear. I felt sorry for him. Being a writer was clearly all he wanted to do but, instead of doing it, he was engaged in a futile, soul-scouring  campaign of revenge. I pointed out that, on the whole, plagiarists do not give their characters similar names to those of the original, that the references to contemporary life were common currency in our society. In the end, anyone writing a novel about middle-class Britain at a particular moment is drawing on the same small well of cultural experience. The claim made against this particularly novel, I concluded, could be just as well made against my own first novel Fixx.

It was a big mistake. Weeks later, I received a long list of ideas which I too, my correspondent alleged, had stolen from him.

In the plagiarism game, there are no winners. For those on the receiving end of allegations of theft, self-protection is curiously difficult.  Almost the worst moment in the disaster-strewn literary career of my friend Willie Donaldson was when, after the success of The Henry Root Letters, he found himself in the High Court, trying to prove that he had not stolen from a fellow-writer.

It was a bizarre claim, made by someone with whom he had once co-written a TV treatment, and the judge found firmly in his favour, but it rattled Willie more than any other of the many setbacks in his career as a writer. A master of anti-spin, he normally took a perverse delight in scuppering his own projects and blackening  his own name, but this dispute truly upset him. The problem was not that, if he lost the case, he would be bankrupt   -  he was used to that  –  but something more profound. Writing was what kept him going.  He would own up to any kind of immorality, but not  literary theft.

Another writer-friend, also talented,  peculiar and likeable,  was less lucky. In 1982, Jerzy Kosinski was the subject  of a devastating profile in the New York magazine, the Village Voice.  The article suggested that the terrible wartime experiences recounted in his  early work The Painted Bird were invented, that another successful book  Being There was based on a Polish novel written in 1932, and that subsequent novels had essentially been ghostwritten by others.

There was some truth in the claims, but nothing which should have truly threatened his reputation. If The Painted Bird was fiction, it was still extraordinary. Being There  was a novel incontrovertibly of its time. The style and imaginative power of his novels remained consistent throughout his life. The accusation of plagiarism, though, had  finished off his career long before he committed suicide in 1991.

Perhaps the accusation of plagiarism is so deadly because all authors are edgily aware of how much re-cycling is part of the writing process.  “Influence is bliss,” the American author Michael Chabon once said.  It is in the grey area between influence and something altogether more malign that  lawyers’ fortunes are made,  and authors’ hearts broken.

Other Endpaper columns about life as an author can be found in the Writer’s Shed.

Remembering my little arboreal adventure, I realised how important trees are to my daily life, past, present and future. Is this a sign of age?

Here, anyway is the article:

Ten years ago, we  planted a wood in the corner of a field in south Norfolk.

We were a relatively new couple, Angela and I, and we had been living in a caravan while, nearby,  a shed which had once been a hatchery for geese was converted into a house. The land around  seemed a little agricultural and sparse. It needed the life and variety that trees can bring.

Today the new house has grown up and, in the way of these things,  we take it for granted. The trees, on the other hand, have retained their capacity to surprise, excite and, just occasionally, disappoint.

Can there be anything more satisfying than planting a wood? The original impulse may have  a touch of vanity to it – you are about to make your own little mark on the landscape – but nature soon puts you in your place. If the species you choose are wrong for the area, they either quickly die  or, worse, look ridiculous. If you have chosen well, they are soon nothing to do you but belong to the landscape.

We planted trees which seem to like this part of East Anglia: alder, hornbeam, oak and hazel, a couple of walnuts. Buying stock was a special pleasure because our supplier, Eddie Krutysza of the nearby village of Metfield, brings such love and knowledge to his work, takes such care in selecting saplings from his field of growing trees that, even though money changes hands, the trees feel like a gift.

Then there were real presents.  Family and friends took to giving us trees. They turn out to be the perfect present – the gift, as the cliché goes, that keeps on giving. To the pleasure of watching each tree grow is added a daily reminder of the person who gave it to you.

In our little wood, there are some wild cherries given to us by my mother in what turned out to be the last year of her life. A wild pear was donated by my good friend and neighbour Roger Deakin who wrote so brilliantly about our relationship to trees in Wildwood. An 18 inch oak was rescued by another good friend  from her allotment in Hammersmith. In the manner of Londoners, it has quickly made itself at home and is dominating its surroundings.

Over the years, we have added to the wood. Elms, which grow defiantly in all the wrong places, are relocated and shoot skywards in a doomed, live-fast-die-young way. We have planted some holly, a particular favourite of hares and rabbits, to provide an under-storey when the wood grows up.

Saplings have become trees. The alders and some of the hornbeams are now over 30 foot high. We tour our little wood every day, taking pleasure in how the trees are growing and changing.

 In the dry early summer of this year, the first seedling from  the alders and my mother’s wild cherries have begun to appear. The next generation is on its way.

To join the Woodland Trust, here is the place.

But when the person inviting is Norman Geras, and the spot is the Writer’s Choice part of his famous Normblog, the whole thing becomes altogether more scary. I am writer number 318 to have made a choice, and my predecessors are an impressive bunch, which includes Philip Pullman, Jacqueline Wilson, Nick Cohen, Linda Grant and Francis Wheen.

The problem with making a writer’s choice for this archive is that it is not only the book that is being judged, but you; writing a blog, unpaid and for the sheer joy of it, is altogether different from being asked to review something.  There are books which once loomed large in one’s life (say, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes or Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy) which are now inexplicably hard work to read.

In fact, it is the re-reading of a favourite that is the great challenge. I wanted to find a book which I would admire even more when I returned to it than when I first read it.

I did. Six months after my deadline had passed, I re-opened the most outrageous book in the canon of Philip Roth – and what a breath-taking, life-enhancing treat it turned out to be.

Here’s my Writer’s Choice on Normblog: Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater.

It is, according to enthusiasts, a medium which releases startling levels of creativity. Many of our most successful writers swear by it. No less an authority than the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, has delivered a lecture in which he enumerated fifteen of its many virtues. It creates communities, he says. It changes the tone of writing. It is a “formidable aggregation tool”, if you happen to need one of those.

The exceedingly weird communication known as Twitter is easily mocked. As the name indicates, It is  intrinsically trivial. Messages are  restricted to 140 characters (that is, about the length of the first two sentences of this piece). You become a follower of those whose tweets interest you, and others can in turn follow your tweets.

Asinine  -  a passing fad, surely. From its early days, when Stephen Fry, an early champion of all things tweet, reported to his followers that he was stuck in a lift and took photographs of himself to prove it, Twitter seemed little more than a form of exhibitionism. It seemed slightly odd that the famous, who complained about the lack of privacy in their lives, had found a way to stalk themselves, but that was their business.

Since then Twitter has grown. It may indeed be a fad but it expresses the mood of the moment, and no one who writes for a living can afford to be too haughty about it. Publishers increasingly use it as a basic promotional aid. Writers have found that it is a good way of keeping in touch with readers, of letting people know if a new book was on its way. For anyone writing a regular newspaper column,  it is an easy and obvious of drawing readers’ attention to what you had written.

I decided to try it. Signing up was easy, quick and free. Like a nervous little chick poking its head out of the nest for the first time, I tweeted shyly. There was a dawn chorus of welcome from friends and readers. Now all I had to do was join in what Rusbridger calls the “series of common conversations”.

What a disaster that turned out to be. Apart from self-marketing in an increasingly brazen manner, my conversations either went nowhere, or backfired badly. I tried laboured wit – “the Spring’s first cuckoo’s call is like nature’s version of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive” – and felt foolish when no one noticed. I responded to one of my publishers who was asking for nominations for a good story about fatherhood by mentioning my own book, adding chippily “Oh, whoops, you’ve just let it go out of print.” Another deafening silence, after which I sheepishly deleted it.

One day I came across a message in which I was described, rather crushingly, as being “bad at Twitter”. It sounded like being called bad in bed – too fast, too slow, too keen, not keen enough – and seemed just as difficult to remedy.

My accuser was right. I had, like a bad lover,  a problem of desire.  I had no lust for round-the-clock chat. Being on Twitter felt like arriving at a noisy party where everyone is shouting jokes, gossip and opinions at one another. I wanted to go home.

I have stayed, but am something of a wallflower these days. Twitter is certainly a good form of marketing. It is probably useful for discovering information quickly. In fact, it would be a very self-confident professional author who, trying to reach a market patchily served by traditional publishing and bookselling, refused to play the game.

It reveals character. For authors who feel lonely, it provides its own rather odd form of company.  Tuning in now to the little Twitter community to which I belong, I can see that the distinguished journalist Ian Birrell  has just dropped his i-phone in the bath. Alain de Botton has delivered one of those gnomic aperҫus in which he specialises (“In fractious couples, women accuse men of being ‘boring’, men accuse women of being ‘cold.”) Neil Gaiman is in a studio and about to sing which I am invited to watch as it is recorded.

To tell the truth, I am only mildly curious about all this. It has taken the social media to reveal to me quite how anti-social I am.

More seriously, Twitter poses a professional problem for a writer.  “A good conversation involves listening as well as talking,” says Alan Rusbridger. “The elevated platform on which journalists sometimes liked to think they were sitting is kicked away on Twitter. Journalists are fast learners. They start writing differently.”

The trouble is I like my elevated platform. The idea of writing differently does not attract me. It seems to me that the last thing any serious-minded author needs is a conversation. The idea that writing can be a communal activity, often encouraged on creative writing courses,  is a recipe for banality. The case made for Twitter may sound fair, consensual and democratic, but writing is not like chairing a committee of different opinions and then summarising the majority view. It is a dictatorship.

As for fiction, the form is seductive in that it offers material, but it also has a dangerously harmful effect. Those “common conversations” involve sharing with friends and strangers what is happening in your life and your brain – incidents, thoughts, opinions, ideas.

It is precisely those things which over time fill up the tank of the imagination. The problem with chatting through the internet  is that, creatively, the tap is dripping all the time.

Should we all join this common conversation? Twitter is useful – maybe even essential -  for promoting your books, and an interesting place to visit now and then. There might even be ideas out there which you can steal in the traditional way. But hold on to your loneliness and your silence. They are part of what make you a writer.

Terence Blacker can occasionally be found on Twitter at @TerenceBlacker.  

Frank Zappa, Bing Crosby, Ekow Eshun, Craig Brown, AN Wilson and the (brief) radio debut of my song  Sad Old Bastards with Guitar can all be heard here.

Part 2 goes out on Radio 4 at 10.30 a.m. on Saturday 2 July.