How to write a novel

From the keyboard of Australian author Max Barry comes....
15 ways to write a novel. 
He's had a few novels of his own published (Syrup, Jennifer Government, Company) so he's obviously doing something right. I like the 'Word Ceiling' - it gives me all the justification I need to only write 500 words per day!
Different strokes for different folks though. As Barry says - if there was a single method of writing a great book, we'd all be doing it.
What method do you reckon would work for you?

World Book Night

Missed it by thiiiis much....! Just read about World Book Night which took place on March 5 throughout Britain and Ireland (maybe they should check a map?) with 'the largest book giveaway ever'. 20,000 volunteers took to the streets and handed out one million free books in a publicity stunt designed to promote reading among the masses. 
Among the patrons, such luminaries as Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers, Seamus Heaney, Sir Richard Branson and Colin Firth lent their energy to the cause, vaunting a book list of 25 novels - contemporary books and classics - selected by committee. 
If what one reads on the web is to be believed, despite the rash of freebies, sales of those novels have peaked in the weeks since World Book Day took place. You can check out the list of titles here. I'd have stuck my hand out very graciously for a copy of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. What would you have chosen?
And here's a novel idea: considering the title of the event, how about we in the Antipodes get a look in next year? 

Freedom falls flat

After finishing Freedom it was pretty much a unanimous decision among my book group last night that we need a cracker read up next to make up for it. 
Not that it was a terrible book.... it was just more of a 'nothing' book to me. 550 pages of....well, not much. I realise that goes against the opinion of (quite) a few million people in the world but hey - you know a book isn't hitting home when a 'Cataclysmic Event' happens towards the end of said 550 pages and you're left stifling a yawn.
So, onwards and upwards! 
Our next pick is The Tiger's Wife, the debut novel by Belgrade-born Tea Obreht. The Economist's books blog Prospero gave it the thumbs up, saying: 
'The Tiger’s Wife considers 50 years of miasmal Balkan history from the 1940s to the 1990s, and it brims with the remixed and fictionalised personal experiences of this inquisitive young author. The resulting story, of a young doctor named Natalia, her family and their homeland, is highly original, funny and frightening, and a welcome addition to writing on the region.
'Natalia, living in the present day, works in an unnamed part of the region where the maps continue to change. She is grappling with the past: her grandfather, also a doctor, has died in mysterious circumstances. The stories he’s told her about their home eventually offer answers about his death. By interlacing Natalia’s experiences with two riveting tales from her grandfather—about a man who cannot die, and a tiger who escapes the zoo and wanders around indiscriminately hungry for his next meal—Ms Obreht deftly spans decades of Balkan history with all the imagination and passion of Gabriel García Márquez and Louis de Bernières.'
Something different - and I'm a little rusty on my Balkan history so bring it on. What are you reading?

If you build it...

...inspiration and a literary masterpiece will come?
Thanks Eva for this little find - something for the escapist in all of us - the havens of famous writers from Roald Dahl (top), to Mark Twain (middle), Dylan Thomas, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf and others.
George Bernard Shaw (above) gets my vote for best writing hut for his ingenuity.
'Shaw (1856-1950) worked for the last 20 years of his life on his property in St Albans, Hertfordshire. Besides having electricity, a telephone, and a buzzer system, the hut's most notable feature was that it was built on a turntable, which enabled Shaw to push it to follow the sun. This eliminated the need for an artificial light source and created passive indoor solar heating.' 
Shaw named his hut 'London' so his staff wouldn't be lying when they said he'd 'gone to London'.

The first step

I was excited after reading The Poetry Lesson because it meant I got to choose the magnificent Greek Constantine P Cavafy as my Ghost Companion. Andrei Codrescu's method is already working for me - opened up C.P. Cavafy Collected Poems and landed on this one. Aah the synchronicity....

THE FIRST STEP

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritos:
“I have been writing for two years now
and I have composed just one idyll.
It’s my only completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder of Poetry
is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I now stand on
I will never climb any higher.”
Theocritos replied: “Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have come this far is no small achievement:
what you have done is a glorious thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it is a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have come this far is no small achievement:
what you have done already is a glorious thing.” 

Unplugged

Advice for writers' blocked, coming to you from the short story guru and heroine of the ordinary woman, Grace Paley:
'The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.'
What stops your breath?

The Poetry Lesson

Just finished reading this book and loved it - The Poetry Lesson by Andrei Codrescu. 
I don't do reviews but if you enjoy poetry, have a curious nature and a sense of humour, give it a go. The back cover blurb sums it up beautifully. 'The Poetry Lesson is a must-have manual for poetry monsters; a book of caveats for the peddlers of "creative" snake oil; an archaeo-psychological scan of instantly obsolete technology; the memoir of a professor reluctantly abandoning his sex fantasies; the collected portrait of deluded youth about how to find out something horrific; an affectionate treatise on poetry as a cure for hubris; and a de profundis moan of flesh turning into fortune cookies.'
I'm trying out some of his methods. More on that later but for now how's this little gem:
Did you know that John Keats' grave isn't marked with his name? There's an epitaph, but no name. Alongside him is buried Joseph Severn and Joe's tombstone notes that he is 'the friend of John Keats, the poet buried next to him'. 
Which is a kind of poetry in itself.

Snap

This is way cooler than a mobile phone camera. 
Seattle design company Engrained created this retro pinhole camera (top)out of a hollowed out copy of Zane Grey's The Man of the Forest.
Selling it on Etsy, the designer says'This unique camera has a magnetic shutter crafted from wood and leather and is finished off with beautiful ebony and pearl knobs. This book is full of character with the fabric cover torn and tattered to perfection.'
There's a select range crafted from original 'upcycled' hardcovers to choose from, including Elizabeth Metzger Howard's Before The Sun Goes Down, and Marlowe Shakespeare from the 1938 Harvard Classics collection. 

And yes, they actually work! 

Each camera is designed to take 35mm film, comes with its own set of instructions and has a magnetic shutter made from leather.

To the lighthouse

Spectacular summer's day on the harbour in Sydney - a harbour full of lighthouses - including this one at Grotto Point, Middle Harbour. 
Grotto Point? Surely, stood in such becoming surrounds, someone in a rush of inspiration could have come up with a more inspiring name than that.  
Reminds me of a line from Virginia Woolf in her collection of autobiographical essays, Moments of Being:
'One day walking around Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To The Lighthouse, in a great, apparently involuntary rush.'
A whole entire book? I wish it were that easy!

Nabokov's butterflies

Two butterflies today... 
One courtesy of actor John Cusack who posted this image (top) on Twitter of an artwork he created. (Relevance - Cusack starred in the classic flick High Fidelity, adapted for the screen from the novel by Nick Hornby. Which also means he qualifies as a RubyfireWrites literary crush.)
The other, courtesy of Vladimir Nabokov, whose butterfly theory has been proven 65 years after he first posited it. Besides being a writer (Lolita, Pale Fire) Nabokov was a self-taught butterfly expert and curator of lepidoptera at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. So he'd be pretty pleased to know that three decades after his death critics have conceded that his theory on the evolution of Polyomattus blues is valid.
It's all rather technical, so perhaps you'd prefer this anecdote:
Once during a butterfly hunt, Nabokov met a man making his way down a trail in the Rocky Mountains. He asked the man if he'd seen any butterflies up there. No, said the man, no butterflies. Nabokov continued hiking up the same trail and found the mountain to be positively aflutter with butterflies. 
Conclusion: you see what you look for.

Hunter S Thompson

Cracker letter! Hunter S Thompson's cover letter applying for a job at the Vancouver Sun in 1958.
Read it here.
Whether it worked or not, it was a stepping stone in Thompson's legend as reporter, author (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hells Angels) and founder of 'Gonzo journalism' - a subjective style of journalism whereby the writer insinuates himself into the story.
The letter was sent to the editor, Jack Scott, who was famous for spectacular stunts in the newsroom - sending the women's page editor to Cuba to cover the revolution and the sports guy to Formosa to interview the leader of the Republic of China. 
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Scott had a brief but formidable reign...would love to have seen his response to Thompson's letter.

Upcoming releases 2011

Looking for some goods reads in 2011? The Millions has released its list of new books to look out for this year: The Great 2011 Book Preview. There are 76 recommendations so you should find something of interest among them.
I'm thinking I might venture into Geoff Dyer's Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. I wasn't a huge fan of his much vaunted novel Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi but perhaps this compilation of essays and reviews will restore him in my favour.
Have been wanting to read some David Foster Wallace so his novel The Pale King, to be released posthumously in April, is on my list. After Wallace died in 2008, the fragmented manuscript he'd been working on was pulled together by his editor Michael Pietsch and may go someway towards satisfying the insatiable appetite of Wallace's widespread fan base for previously unseen work. Nice cover art too.
And having devoured Bel Canto when it was first published in 2001, I can't go past Ann Patchett's upcoming novel State of Wonder, set in the heart of the South American jungle and centred around 'an inspiring student-teacher relationship similar to the bond she had with her own writing teachers, Allan Gurganas and the late Grace Paley.'
What are you thinking? 

Territories of hope

Today I came across the best piece of writing I've read throughout the devastating floods in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria - and let's not forget the Gascoyne region of West Australia before Christmas - and it was written not in relation to our apocalypse, but on a world scale that pertains to all of us.
Rebecca Solnit is the author of many essays and books, including her 2009 volume A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster, written amid the rubble of Hurricane Katrina and examining human bravery in the face of natural disasters.
With respect to the quality journalists who unfortunately number among the minority, forget the garbage that's been spewing ad nauseum from the mouths of hack reporters on our commercial TV stations since the rivers broke their banks. 
Read this instead. 
In her piece for the website TomDispatch, Solnit talks about her hopes for humanity in 2011 and it illustrates beautifully what we're seeing in our communities during and in the aftermath of the floodtide.
A couple of excerpts:
'When I studied disasters past, what amazed me was not just that people behaved so beautifully, but that, in doing so, they found such joy. It seems that something in their natures, starved in ordinary times, was fed by the opportunity, under the worst of conditions, to be generous, brave, idealistic, and connected; and when this appetite was fulfilled, the joy shone out, even amid the ruins.'
And this:
'....These individuals and organisations are putting together the proof that not only is another world possible, but it's been here all along...'
Go on, read it through to the end.

One paper's pick

Those ernest and well-read scribes over at The Guardian have put together their pick of 'five of the best lines from fiction in 2010'. I give you theirs below - what do you think of them? 
The Will Self line is a cracker, I'm still thinking of what my others would be.... What are yours?

'A precocious anarchist, at 13 Sherman told me he was going to strip naked, except for a skullcap and an attaché case, then stump into Grodzinski's, the Jewish bakery in Golders Green. When challenged he would say only this – in a thick mittel-European accent: "Can you tell me the way to Grods?"'

- Will Self Walking To Hollywood

'I find now that I can more or less acquit myself from any charge of having desired Martin carnally. (My looks, by then, had in any case declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me.)'

- Christopher Hitchens Hitch-22

'This is a complete story called: "Idea for a Short Documentary Film": Representatives of different food product manufacturers try to open their own packaging.'

- Lydia Davis Collected Stories

'There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.'

- Jonathan Franzen Freedom

'There was something exquisite to Treslove in the presentiment of a woman he loved dying in his arms. On occasion he died in hers, but her dying in his was better. It was how he knew he was in love: no presentiment of her expiry, no proposal.'

- Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question

Zeitoun

Not because I have a crush on Dave Eggers, but because this book looks completely absorbing, Zeitoun is jostling for top spot among a pile of books on my 'next read' list.
It's not a new book, it came out in 2009, but having just seen this excellent review in the London Review of Books I have to read it. Eggers spent three years writing and researching to bring the real life story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun into the public arena.
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the aftermath of the devastation he paddled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and rescuing at least ten people. But on September 6 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared, seized on his own property by police who refused to tell him why he was being arrested and would not allow him even a phone call to contact relatives or a lawyer.
Eggers’ book explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy (an American who converted to Islam), their children, and the surreal atmosphere in New Orleans and the United States in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun became possible. 
Proceeds from sales of Zeitoun are distributed to the Zeitoun Foundation, which aids in the rebuilding and ongoing health of the city of New Orleans.
Luckily for me Santa Claus left a very generous bookstore voucher in my Christmas stocking...so my donation comes all the way from the North Pole.