Friday afternoon literary thought-provoker – Romance Special

Flowers? For me? Oh, you shouldn't - oh. You didn't. They're for your mother? Fine. Whatevs.

But you did get me a book? Now we're talking.

Despite difficult book relationships at times, a deciding factor in agreeing to domestic bliss with my better half was the discovery of a key shared book. I say I gave the book to him, he says he gave it to me. Potato potahto. (I gave it to him.)

So which book have you found shared love in? Or, for the misanthropes out there, which was the straw that broke the relationship's back?

Once more, I'll post something nice out to whichever answer I like best. Although that will probably only apply to UK people. But come on! Everyone can just join in anyway! Yeay! Hang on – you didn't even get me flowers. Why am I feeling bad about this?

Sam the Copywriter

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Friday afternoon literary thought-provoker – part #2

I suppose I owe you all a charitable high-five for not pointing out that not only had our previous Friday afternoon literary thought-provoker been done before, but it had been done by me. Shameful. But you were all v sporting for not whispering about my fading cerebral powers behind your hands. Or were you?

This Friday, new thoughts (one hopes). I'm only fifty pages or so from the end of this (which has possibly the best collection of quotes on the jacket that I've seen for a while) and I'm desperate that it wasn't so. At least with this one, there's two whole sequels, which are equally excellent. I'm just not particularly eager to leave the world of Priss, Lakey and Kay, despite those throwaway name-references making the whole thing sound a little too Blyton. Still.

So, my question to you this fine Friday is: which are the books that, while you're reading them, you wished they'd never end? Subquestion: which book would you actually like to live in?

To complete your happy Friday, here's a man we should all be cheering and whooping and celebrating all round. (Actually am, for once, crying as I read this.) Please read this, as it's so very, very important, and go to your library this weekend, and show it some affection.

Sam the Copywriter

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We Told Stories

A year ago to the day we launched We Tell Stories, an experiment in digital storytelling developed with ARG designers Six to Start. Over the course of six weeks, six writers told six stories based on six classics – but unlike their (and our) usual publishing output these stories were told online, using digital tools to create what we hoped would be engaging, fresh and radically different narrative experiences. 

Charles Cumming, for example, told his story entirely on Google Maps – readers can follow his character around the map as he attempts to make sense of the bizarre events that unfold. Nicci French (bravely) wrote their story live allowing the audience to see their tale appear on screens around the world, word by word. And Mohsin Hamid created an elegiac and fresh digital version of a choose-your-own-adventure story, readers creating their own path through his magical narrative. Sitting behind the six pieces was a secret seventh story which asked readers to solve a series of puzzles hidden online and in 'the real world' to stand a chance of winning prizes which included a complete set of Penguin Classics.

We got a lot out of the experience of producing this project. We got to work with and meet some very talented people. We learned that our authors enjoy taking on a challenge. Nearly a quarter of a million people have spent over 9000 hours reading the site and we received a ton of nice publicity, most of it very positive, and perhaps along the way we even sold an extra book or two 😉 And this Sunday, in Austin Texas, we were thrilled to receive the award for Experimentation and, astonishingly, the Best of Show award at this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival Web Awards.

Best of all, perhaps, we learnt that it is possible for old school publishers to get out there and play with the cool kids without having our glasses stolen and stamped on. These are challenging times for traditional media companies – as Penguin author Clay Shirky writes; 

'the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.'

(note: technically Prof. Shirky was talking about the newspaper business, but the same can surely be said of book publishing). People are discovering new ways of telling stories, sharing stories and talking about stories and if we want to thrive through this paradigm shift we've got to master these techniques ourselves and perhaps invent a few of our own.

We've already taken some of the learnings from We Tell Stories and applied them across our marketing and in the next few months we'll be launching a couple of projects which again push the boundaries in some new ways. I can't tell you much more about these right now, except to say that next time around we're looking forward to reading some stories that other people make. And no, we're not talking about another wikinovel…

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

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It’s the way he tells it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘I’m a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I’m a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I’ve been in jail more than once and I don’t do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don’t like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I’m a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.’*

This is Philip Marlowe in the raw, stripped of his wisecracks and telling it like it is. Bleak, sharp and cynical, it tells you almost everything you need to know about the private detective and his world.

Raymond Chandler is one of the great stylists. As good as, if not better than, PG Wodehouse, who also created an equally extraordinary world or way of viewing the world in Bertie Wooster (and who shared with Chandler the Alma Mater of Dulwich College).

You don’t read Chandler or Wodehouse for the stories. What happens, and to who, is not why we’re reading. The plot is not really the point, whether it might be good, bad or indifferent. Like Shakespeare the plot might be borrowed or secondhand or become secondary to the author’s real concern (or, in Chandler’s case, made up as he went along). What matters to these writers is the telling of the story.

This is what separates the truly great writers from the mere scribblers.

A few months ago I had a brief discussion with a science-fiction editor-cum-writer over at his blog. He was saying that he’d been told by his agent to alter the style of the story he was working on as big publishers weren’t buying that kind of thing: it simply wouldn’t sell. He did as his agent advised and they made the sale to one of the majors. I wanted to know what he’d been told to change, which he found difficult to answer, but this led to a discussion of whether readability or a good story was at the heart of these things. He concluded by saying that telling a good story was ultimately what mattered in getting published.

Perhaps this is the case with genre publishing. If so, then it’s a shame. Because that suggests the telling of the story – the author’s voice – has become a secondary concern. It’s the voice that transports us into the author’s world, not the story – which is what happens (or ‘a narrative of incidents’ according to my Chambers). Chandler made his novels up as he went along, famously claiming that when he didn’t know what to write next, he’d have someone walk in holding a gun. (Which perhaps explains why there is a murder that goes unaccounted for in The Big Sleep.) The effort went into the words, into bringing Marlowe and his Hollywood neighbourhood alive. This might explain why Marlowe is a more human character than, say, James Bond (who Fleming once described as a blunt instrument) and Sherlock Holmes, who looks at humanity like a scientist might a freakish bug in a petri dish. Marlowe is a man, he has failings. But those failings come out of his strengths: his wits and his morals.

Trouble Is My Business is released on July 31st. This, at last, completes Penguin’s reissue of the Philip Marlowe stories (excluding the tantalizingly titled ‘Philip Marlowe’s Last Case’, which I’ve never read). Eight books to match the eight books featuring the other greatest private detective in the world recently released by Penguin.

If you like crime fiction you should read Chandler. If you like fine writing and sneer at genre fiction then read him and learn to revise your opinion.

And if you still think the story is more important than how it is told, then this might just be the book for you.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

* I can’t for the life of
me remember which title this comes from since I scribbled this piece down to go on the
page one of these eight editions (great Saul Bass-influenced covers by former Penguin designer
Steve Marking) about three years ago.

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Special Guest Post – Unfiction

We Tell Stories, our alternate reality game and digital storytelling exercise finished 3 weeks ago – here Naomi Alderman explains the mysterious seventh story and the difference between writing books and writing games.

Last week, I went for a drink with some of the characters in a story
I’d just finished writing. Or at least, that’s what it felt like. It’s
a feature of writing Alternate Reality Games that the boundary between
players/readers and story-effecting characters becomes perilously thin.

As part of the We Tell Stories online storytelling project, I wrote
the Secret Seventh Story; one which you’d
only find if you went looking
for it. On the main site there was a white rabbit icon. Clicking on the rabbit led to a blog
called "Treacle and Ink", written by novelist and bookshop owner, Alice
Klein. Over eight weeks, Alice’s story unfolded. She found a black
mirror in a junk room above her shop – looking into it gave her
wonderful ideas for that difficult second novel. But she began to spend
more and more time staring into the mirror, and the effects on her life
became increasingly troubling.

Meanwhile, within the six stories of We Tell Stories, clues were
appearing. "Alice, call 020 8133 8141" read a message that flashed up
during Charles Cummings’ The 21 Steps. A pattern of dots in an image in
Toby Litt’s story Slice led to information about a black mirror.
Clearly someone was trying to contact Alice Klein via these stories –
but who, and why?

The hunt was on. The blog’s readers became more engaged in the
story than I could ever have hoped. They emailed Alice telling her
about the messages – she didn’t believe them at first, so they had to
find ways to convince her. They went to St Pancras station to unravel a
coded message hidden there. They wrote online stories themselves to communicate with a character in the story.

In perhaps my favourite part of the story, the readers discovered
that another character, Jacques, had crucial information they needed.
But Jacques had recently broken up with his girlfriend. He said he was
just too desolate to talk to the readers – he’d only give them the
information they wanted if they came to a London pub and gave him
trinkets to win his girl back.

True to form, a band of readers turned up at the Jerusalem Tavern
one Thursday night in April. Claire Bateman from Six to Start had
briefed an actor, who waited in the pub while giggling, excited readers
presented him with their gifts. One had baked muffins, another had
painted a picture, another had bought a little ring from Argos, while
another had written poems for Jacques to recite to his girlfriend. Duly
impressed, "Jacques" gave them the information they’d come for, while I
lurked round the corner, trying to be inconspicuous while overhearing
the odd snatch of conversation.

It’s this level of engagement and immediacy which makes this kind
of story so much fun to write. Working on a novel is a marathon:
perhaps several years of effort, and no one to cheer your progress
week-by-week, let alone day-by-day. By contrast, much of an Alternate
Reality Game has to be written quickly, to respond to the readers’
actions. Very frequently, on this kind of project, I’ll be writing
something in the morning that goes live online in the afternoon and is
then busily discussed by readers on their forums in the evening. That
kind of instant response is intoxicating – and the most-engaged readers
end up influencing the story so much that they can come to feel like
characters themselves.

Is this the future of storytelling? It’s too early to tell – we’re
only just beginning to explore the storytelling potential of the
internet and computers. But instant communication makes reader
involvement a real possibility – and in a much more subtle way than the
horrific "vote on what should happen next" TV experiments of a decade
or so ago. Many writers might feel that reader involvement could only
sully their stories. But as for me, I’m excited by all the
opportunities the new technology brings.

Naomi Alderman is the author of the prize-winning Disobedience and was lead writer on pioneering alternate reality game Perplex City. She is currently working on her second novel. If you want to read the players perspective and watch how they solved the clues, the unfiction forum provides comprehensive coverage.

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All about pacing

If you’re planning a trip to Paris in the next few days and find yourself on the gorgeous new concourse at St Pancras station, keep an eye out for some seemingly odd behaviour. You might notice people counting their steps, or making strange and random phone calls near the statue of Sir John Betjeman or otherwise looking baffled.

Please, don’t be tempted to call the authorities if you see any of this, for it is likely that these individuals are playing along with our newest project, We Tell Stories. Part game, part exercise in digital storytelling, this launched this with Charles Cumming‘s thrilling Google Maps adventure. A new story, by Toby Litt, will go live next Tuesday and, I can assure you, this will be something completely different. And if you look at the site and still can’t work out why people are wandering round St Pancras, then perhaps you are not looking hard enough…

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

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Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

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