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Saluting Inspiration
Writersworld newsletter, February 25, 2003

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This article is reprinted by kind permission of Writers' Forum, Britain's leading magazine for writers. They can be contacted at Writers International, Suite 28, Wessex House, St. Leonards Road, Bournemouth, BH8 8QS or e-mail [email protected] www.worldwidewriters.com

Life of Pi tops the charts . . . cherry-pick on advice . . . saluting the inspiration of Mary Wesley and George Eliot by John Jenkins

WHEN the sales figures were released for last year, the Booker winner, The Life of Pi, was top of the list for fiction sold in that week of present-buying before Christmas: 20,279 copies. And rightly so. Here was Yann Martel, virtually unknown in the UK, writing a genuine literary masterpiece, difficult to categorise, whose quality overcame the faint praise which greeted his award. It revives my faith in the reading public. Allegorical novels are not easy to market and apart from publicity surrounding the Booker this novel has sold virtually on word-of-mouth recommendations. Other statistical highlights revealed that 5,000 new novels were published in 2002 and that Random House had published 103 first novels in the USA, St Martin�s 63 and Little, Brown 50. The best-selling paperback last year was John Grisham�s A Painted House with 893,695 copies (grossing �6.25million) while Pamela Stephenson�s biography of her husband Billy Connolly sold 778,650 copies. Good news for authors is that Russia is promising to clean up its act on copyright as part of its move to join the World Trade Organisation. We phoned the Russian embassy in London to see if there was any hope that this might be retrospective. Niet bloody likely was the colloquial, off the record reply. Naturally the CLA is hoping that this will put an end to print and digital piracy while prodding Armenia, Lithuania and Moldavia to follow suit.

IN EACH issue we provide thousands of words of advice on the craft of writing. Sometimes it must seem bewildering for beginners, bombarded as they are with so much information. If you want to write a novel in nine days, if you want to write westerns, if you want to write a play, poetry, short stories, TV scripts, comedy, a guide book, how to self-publish or how prominent writers achieved success, all is contained in this issue. There are, fortunately, a few guidelines which are almost moral absolutes. Write something every day. Find your own voice. Read analytically as well as for enjoyment. And as somebody once said: listen to all advice and you will eventually reach a point when you know which suits you and which you can safely discard. You can, of course, treat Writers� Forum rather like a part work and the volume of binder sales we made at the turn of the year shows that many people file their copies carefully and appreciate the annual index we published. Publication of the index also led to an unprecedented demand for back issues. We are again surveying our readers to discover which topics they would like covered or re-visited. But you do not need to wait for a survey form. Drop us a line at any time with your suggestions.

LIKE most people I spend more time than is good for me watching TV but I felt fortunate to see George Eliot�s Daniel Deronda. It�s a strong argument against anti-semitism which made it better than most TV adaptations for the dressing-up box. Strange to think Eliot was born nearly 200 years ago in Warwickshire and blazed an early trail for women writers. After Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner she spent a month in Florence in 1861 preparing to write Romola. She was offered �10,000 for the copyright and Cornhill Magazine paid �7,000 for its serialisation. How much would that be worth in today�s money?

PARTLY because of magazine deadlines we seldom carry obituaries but we feel we should mention Mary Wesley and D J Enright whose deaths at the ages of 90 and 82 occurred at the turn of the year. Mary Wesley was a remarkable women to whom success came in her 70th year. Her first novel, Jumping the Queue, marked a huge change in her lifestyle. When her agent rang to say the novel had been accepted by Macmillan she had to borrow the train fare from Dartmoor to London to review the contract. From then on she published a novel a year and after the televised success of The Camomile Lawn her paperbacks alone sold at the rate of 10,000 a week. She was born into that upper, middle-class set that seemed to exist before the war in Knightsbridge, Chelsea and Mayfair. Although she never enjoyed much formal education she spoke French, German and Italian and was recruited by the wartime code crackers of Bletchley which gave her a release from an unsatisfactory marriage.

LATER she was ostracised by her family for �living in sin� with the man who was to become her second husband. From the public she enjoyed much the same adulation as Mary Cookson although they were from different backgrounds. As The Times said of Wesley�s early work: �It is too entertaining to win a literary prize.� She was, and remains, an inspiration to those who begin to write late in life. D J Enright, a disciple of F R Leavis, spent most of his life teaching abroad at universities in Egypt, Japan, Bangkok and Singapore. He was a genuine man of letters as a poet, translator and outstanding reviewer. The reviews he wrote for The Listener in its heyday were brilliant essays. He also edited the Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1980 and was co-editor with Melvin Lasky of Encounter from 1970 � 72 and a director of Chatto and Windus for eight years.

ALEXEY TALIMONOV, whose quirky cartoons appear frequently in our pages (see above), was born in the Ukraine and has spent 25 years in publishing and printing. He has published several books in Russia and Britain and has just clocked up his 3,000th published cartoon. Apart from his homeland and the UK his work has appeared in the USA, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, Iran, China and South Africa. Publications handling his work range from Izvestiia and Pravda to Poetry Monthly and the New Statesman. He has also been awarded the International Goncharov Award as The Patron of the Arts and is well known for his support for artists in Russia. Long may he entertain us. � �. . .The best book I�ve read on antique chair restoration.

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