This is the contest I entered back in 2008 and, to my amazement, won. Everything that’s happened in my career since then has been a result of entering that contest, so please give yourself a chance and go for it. I was the first winner, and since then three more people have got publishing contracts through the Bursary:

There’s no entry fee, and the winner gets a cash prize plus a publishing contract with Legend Press. If you have a novel ready, there really is nothing to lose.

For everyone else, I’d recommend visiting Luke’s website to find out more about Luke Bitmead, a talented writer who suffered from depression and committed suicide only a few months after his debut novel, White Summer, came out. His second, Heading South, was published posthumously, and a third, The Body is a Temple, which he actually wrote before White Summer but which was never published at the time, is being launched this week.

The Luke Bitmead Memorial Fund was established by Luke’s mother to support young writers in getting published and to raise awareness of the issue of depression. The website is Luke’s original blog, maintained and added to since his death by his mother Elaine. I find it strange visiting the site, and seeing news of the Bursary’s current development mixed in with Luke’s own blog posts and photos from shortly before his death in 2006. I love that Elaine has left them up there for everyone to see, and hope that they always remain there, but it’s so sad and incomprehensible to see the optimism of book signings and reviews and to know that it was followed so swiftly by suicide.

But that’s the thing about depression, isn’t it? It can’t be easily explained or rationalised by people on the outside. That’s why any effort to understand it better is so important. If you can, please consider supporting the Memorial Fund either with a donation, or by buying one of Luke’s books, the royalties of which are donated to the fund.

I’ve never really thought about a method for writing reviews before – I tend to just give my response to the book in whatever form seems natural. That’s probably because the reviews started as my own way of keeping track of what I was reading and analysing it to improve my understanding, and although other people now read them, the style is still quite personal and informal.

Still, I do employ most of the steps outlined in the post:

Well, I don’t use a rating system on this site, because I find it very difficult to slot books into neat little categories. Plus I think that if the review has done its job, it should be obvious what I thought of it, and I don’t really see what giving a score out of five or ten really adds. When I post the reviews on sites like Goodreads or Amazon and am forced to choose a star rating, I usually vacillate, and when I look back at my overall ratings, they don’t make a lot of sense – sometimes a book with a 4-star rating is actually one I enjoyed more than another which only got 3 stars, probably because of my differing moods at the time of scoring.

But the others make sense to me. I think it’s designed for people who are just starting to write reviews – clearly there’s a lot more you could say about reviewing, and a lot more depth you could go into if you wanted to pursue it further. But as a basic five-step process, this seems pretty sound to me.

How about you? Do you follow a particular process when writing book reviews? Do you agree with the five-step process, or are there things you would add in or take out?

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The honest answer is: I don’t.

Oh, I’ve tried. Believe me, I have. I’ve sat at the computer all morning and willed myself to generate an idea. Sometimes, after a few hours of mental torture, if a deadline is looming, I’ve managed to squeeze out something, just one idea at least. The trouble is, I know even as I’m typing it out that it’s not very good.

The best ideas, you see, come in a completely different way. Here’s an example.

Since we moved to Barbados, Genie and I have got up at 5:30 every morning some mornings and gone for a walk. It’s beautiful here in the early morning, still cool and dewy from the night before. If we leave it much later, the sun gets too high in the sky and makes any kind of physical exertion almost impossible.

This morning, as we were passing a small wooden house, I heard a list of names being read out on the radio, and asked Genie what it was. “Death notices,” she said. It’s something they do on the radio every morning, apparently – list all the people who died the day before. A little different from the pop songs and traffic reports I’m used to in London.

A little further along, we took a path across open country, and it occurred to me that if anything happened, we were a long way from any other people and didn’t have a mobile phone or anything. I pictured Genie hurting herself and me having to run and shout for help.

Both of these little incidents are potential stories.

I can picture someone listening to those death notices every morning for years, then one day hearing the name of someone he knew years ago. It would be the lead-in to a story about the thing that broke them apart, maybe a secret that he’s lived with for a long time and can finally let go of now that the person’s died.

I can imagine a story about a soft-spoken man and how his life changed when something happened that finally forced him to shout. How it felt when the words, usually soft and constrained, burst out of his mouth, and how he was never soft-spoken again after that.

You’ll notice that both of these ideas are half-formed. They may not even be any good – it’s too early to know. But in any case, I scribbled them down on a piece of paper, and when we got home I transferred them to an ideas file I keep on my computer.

(Yes, I know there’s a more 21st-century way of doing this, involving smart phones and apps and syncing with clouds, but these days I’m becoming increasingly aware of how deeply I was shaped by the 20th century. Give me a choice between a ‘killer app’ and a pencil, and nine times out of ten I’ll choose the pencil.)

Anyway, that’s where most of my ideas have come from. If you read enough author interviews, you’ll see similar stories. Here’s one example from Tracy Chevalier:

So writers don’t generate ideas. The ideas are there already, all around us. I don’t even believe that writers are more observant than other people. I think everyone notices these free-floating potential story ideas all the time, but most people just think a thought or make a quick remark and then move on with their lives. What makes writers different is that they record the ideas, think them through fully (some may say obsess over them), and then devote an irrational amount of time to developing the ideas into something complete.

So if you want to write and are stuck for ideas, here’s my advice: don’t stare at the blinking cursor for four hours, gulping coffee and cursing your lack of creativity. Shut the computer down, put your boots on, and go for a walk. Just don’t forget to take your pencil with you.

So the big revelation is that Adrian had an affair with Veronica’s mother, and so the young Adrian is Veronica’s brother, not her son, as Tony had assumed. The reason Veronica kept saying throughout the book that Tony didn’t get it was because he never understood this link. The reason her mother had Adrian’s diary and said he had been happy in his last few months is because he had been with her.

What I’m thinking of is a pdf document that you’d download after paying through Paypal (or some other method – suggestions welcome). The stories would vary in length but the average is probably 2,500 words or so. I’d set the price in British pounds sterling, but it would automatically convert to other currencies at the current exchange rate. So please, let me know what you think!

My wife and I have adopted a little kitten here in Barbados. Well, not sure if that’s the right word — she was hanging around the house, and we brought her inside and started feeding her and my wife gave her a name (Bluebell). Now Bluebell has taken to helping me with my writing, as shown in the pictures.

I wrote “helping” tongue in cheek, but in fact she does help me in a way. She makes me happy and positive, which is an important thing when you have to battle negative self-talk every time you come fresh to the page. She reminds me that life can be simpler than I sometimes make it. On the downside, I do waste a lot of time taking pictures of her and posting them on the internet when I should be writing

If you’re a cat-lover, you can click on each photo to get a full-size version! So here it is, the most burning question of the day:

Palestinian Women by Fatma Kassem

This book is a series of accounts by Palestinian women who lived through the ‘Nakba’ of 1948, in which they lost their homes and were either forced to leave the newly-formed state of Israel or were internally displaced within it.

Except that it’s not. Not really. We don’t really hear much from the women themselves – only short quotes in certain places, to illustrate a particular point. We don’t get to know each woman clearly enough to feel the full power of her story from start to finish.

For a long time, we don’t get to the women at all. We hear about Foucault’s theory of the historical past as a rhetorical construct for the present. We have a chapter on the methodological aspects of telling life stories, another chapter on the author’s own life story, and detailed scrutiny of her effect on the women’s stories, their reactions to the tape recorder, etc etc. We’re 80 pages in before we get to what we came here for, the stories of Palestinian women.

The book was initially a PhD thesis, and it shows. It shows in the style of writing, which is academic and often quite dry, in the extensive quoting of Foucault, Spivak, Said, Minh-Ha et al, in the constant analysis of process and acknowledgement of flaws and biases, and a lot of other tactics which are perfectly necessary in order to forestall the potential questions and objections of PhD supervisors, but which tend to distract and/or annoy the general reader.

It shows also, however, in positive ways. PhD theses, after all, require rigour in the methodology and depth in the analysis, and this book displays both of those merits. I loved the analysis of language and the body, for example:

In my reading, when they describe Israeli ‘entry’ into the cities or villages in 1948 the choice of language used by the women I interviewed is linked to the penetration of the female body.

Kassem then explores the multiple ways in which this is relevant, from the obvious piercing of Palestinian defences to the fact that brides on their wedding night are, like Palestinians in 1948, inadequately prepared for the sexual act, and that a woman experiences a ‘conspiracy of silence’ from her family, similar to that within the Arab ‘family’ who knew what was going to happen but did nothing.

I also liked the stories of people who tried to return to their homes, as any people return to their homes after a war, but were called “infiltrators” and forcibly expelled. What struck me most was how the women themselves used this term “infiltrator” to describe themselves or their family members who tried to return to their homes. It reminded me how easily we can adopt language that doesn’t reflect our own view of reality.

The account of women’s clothing was also interesting, and much more nuanced than the total condemnation of the hijab commonly seen in Western media. Kassem recognises that conservative religious dress can be seen as an assertion of male power over women’s bodies, but also points out many examples of young women choosing to wear this style of their own accord, in the face of disapproval from older family members. In the context of Palestinians living in Israel, wearing full Muslim dress is often seen as a rebellious, political act. One woman, for example, lost her teaching job over it.

Covering the body from head to toe could be interpreted as women complying with the religious imperative to discipline their body and reproduce their subordination. However, the choice by a young, educated woman to dress in such a fashion that ‘this woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer (Fanon, 1965: 44) … can also be interpreted as an act of resistance; a refusal to comply…

Have you read this book? Did my review make you more likely or less likely to check it out? What are your views on academic style? Am I right that it should have been changed to appeal to a general readership, or should the onus be on the reader to persevere and learn to love academic writing?

In the post, I talk about how I used to read widely but passively, just consuming books rather than truly engaging with them. And then I started this blog, and my reading habits changed. The act of writing the review made me think about what I’d read in new ways. And gradually, the expectation of writing a review made me read more thoughtfully and make notes, so that even if I never got around to writing the review, I’d still got the benefit of reading more carefully. Basically it extols the benefits of book blogging, and shows how the process also improved my own fiction writing.

So please head over to Read.Learn.Write and let me know what you think in the comments there. Even if my post doesn’t interest you, I’d recommend the site anyway – the host, Brandon Monk, has built a great site exploring the links between reading, learning and writing. I think it’s a greatly neglected area – you sometimes hear of writers who don’t read much because they don’t have time, or because they don’t want their style to be “influenced” by others. As if reading is some kind of pollution, and their style is so pure and perfect. Ah, don’t get me started…

(By the way, for those who are interested, the photo is of me on Primrose Hill in north London, reading Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Wow, that was a happy afternoon!)

In the post, I talk about the creation of On the Holloway Road in more depth than I think I ever have on this site. That’s quite shocking, since I’ve been blogging for the full three years since it came out, and haven’t written much at all about the writing of it. I guess that sometimes I don’t think a writer talking about his writing is very interesting, and so I spend more time reviewing other people’s books instead. But when someone else asks me to talk about my writing process, that’s different – I can do that. Does that make any sense?

Anyway, please head over to Roz’s site, and leave a comment – I’d be interested to hear what you think! It’s my first ever guest post, so I’m hoping people like it.

So here we go. Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed putting it together!

Something about me that nobody knows

When I was 25 years old, I was working as a corporate banker, with my own office on the 18th floor of a Wall Street office block, a six-figure income and a bright future. Throwing it all away was the best decision I ever made. I don’t know if it’s really something that nobody knows, but I don’t think I’ve talked about it on this blog before. It’s not a part of my life that I’m very proud of.

My most beautiful piece

It’s interesting – we spend ages crafting and polishing our blog posts, but sometimes the best ones are those that come straight from the heart, those that are not perfectly written but are full of emotion. I still like reading this piece Sleepless, written at 4 a.m. the night after I became a published novelist. Sure, some of it is just excited self-congratulation, but I like it for the moment of transition between unpublished and published writer, and the observation that success can provoke anxiety as well as excitement. Also like this sentence, which I’d probably have edited out if it wasn’t 4 a.m.: “I’m having to create new stories to explain myself to myself.”

My most helpful piece

I haven’t written very much on here about the writing process, but when I do, people seem to find it helpful. This piece I wrote last summer on the ingredients of fiction, for example, got an enthusiastic response.

My most popular piece

That’s easy. Both for the number of comments and number of visitors, my review of The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes is by far my most popular article. I suppose that the book gets a lot of attention from being a Booker Prize winner. But what’s interesting to me is that most people are Googling some variation of “Sense of an Ending explained”. In my reading of the book I didn’t think there was anything too mysterious about it, so am surprised by it, and hoping they’re not disappointed when they read my review!

My most controversial piece

In the middle of the London riots last summer, I got sick of hearing strident opinions from people who knew nothing and cared nothing about life in the poverty-stricken parts of the city that were hardest hit. There was such a consensus among the respectable classes, and the very best liberals were throwing out their beliefs and calling for martial law, and so I wrote about it, and attracted comments like “Totally unjustified. No sympathy from these idiot petty criminals. Destroyer private property, stealing, attempting to murder police. Violence is not the way.” Also, to my surprise, some really thoughtful responses that went against the grain of popular opinion, which made me very happy to have written the post. This was also one of the only posts that made some of my friends and family talk to me about it away from the blog.

My most surprisingly successful piece

A couple of years ago I was in Barbados and ran out of books to read, so borrowed my wife Genie’s copy of Global Disaporas: An Introduction by Robin Cohen. It’s not the sort of thing I’d normally read or review, but I thought it was quite interesting so wrote a quick review summarising the main points. It didn’t get too many comments but it got and still gets a ton of hits, mostly from university campuses (I presume it’s undergraduates who’ve had the book prescribed as a set text for their course, and are looking for shortcuts to actually reading it!). I even got listed as a source in the Wikipedia article on Robin Cohen. And it turns out that my agent also represents Robin Cohen, something I was completely unaware of. So lots of surprising results from a very offhand review.

My most underrated piece

I don’t really believe in using the word “underrated” in relation to my own work. I think that if I put something out into the world and people don’t respond as I hoped they would, it’s probably because the work just isn’t as good as I think it is. To call it underrated is a crutch that can stop you from thinking about how you need to improve to avoid producing something underrated again next time. Still, here’s something I thought was really good, but got zero response. It’s an interview with Malaysian author Preeta Samarasan that I put quite a bit of work into, and thought was really helpful. But I think the problem is that half an hour of audio is the kind of thing you look at and think “I’ll come back to it later, when I’ve got more time.” And we all know what that means So, although I did gain a small core of followers in Malaysia from this post, it didn’t have the impact I’d hoped it would.

My most pride-worthy piece

Again I’m going back to the early days of my blog, to a post from 2008 that probably nobody at all has ever read. Are you excited? Reading this post will be like walking on virgin snow! The controversy it refers to is a series of racist remarks made by Martin Amis, mostly against Muslims. I took issue with Salman Rushdie’s weak response when questioned about this at an event I went to, and the way he invoked free speech in Amis’s defence. I came up with my own free speech argument, and I am still proud of the way I formulated it.

 The 7 Other Bloggers I’m tagging

I’ve seen some great responses to this meme recently – see, in particular, Caroline, Emma and litlove. Let me know of any others you’ve seen, and of course your response to anything I’ve linked to here. Thanks!