My course in Non-Fiction Writing at The City Lit: April 24 - July 10 2015

From April 24 to July 10 I'm going to be teaching a class in Non-Fiction Writing at the City Lit in Covent Garden. Simply put, this will involve me and the students reading and appreciating the works of some high-order exponents of contemporary non-fiction, and the students producing their own written work for class discussion on a weekly basis. I think it'll be fun. Anyone is welcome to book a place, please do tell your friends etc.

Among the writers whose work I expect we will be looking at are:

Simon Armitage (Walking Home)

Gordon Burn (Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son)

Ian Buruma (Murder in Amsterdam)

Roger Deakin (Waterlog)

Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking)

Ian Hamilton (In Search of J.D. Salinger)

Robert Hughes (The Fatal Shore)

Janet Malcolm, (The Journalist and the Murderer)

Norman Mailer (Miami and the Siege of Chicago)

V.S. Naipaul (Area of Darkness)

Gitta Sereny (Cries Unheard)

Claire Tomalin (The Invisible Woman)

Among the issues I imagine I'll be exploring with the students:

- Structure, narration, point-of-view; 

- how to work up your inchoate ideas; 

- how to be honest on the page; 

- how to explain the way that a thing works; 

- how to describe what people and places look like; 

- how to convey the ways people speak; 

- how to explain a sequence of events interestingly; 

- how to fathom one’s memories accurately...;

- ... and how not to fabricate them; 

- how to bear witness to human misery;

- how to write about people and things of which you disapprove; 

- how to keep good notes, how to conduct interviews; 

- how to begin a piece of writing; 

- and, oh yes, how to end it.

Crusaders, The Guardian Book Blog, and the Devouring Vastness of America

An interesting piece on the Guardian Book Blog yesterday by Stuart Evers, on the subject of the common preference of young-ish English readers for fiction written in American... Testing out his own preferences and prejudices, Evers plays an amusing game of compare-and-contrast with two English sentences, to wit:

1. Mary fills up at the gas station, then drives her Chevy Impala to Roy's Diner.
2. Mary fills up at the petrol station, then drives her Nissan Micra to Roy's Rolls.

Indeed, one has rather more dynamism than the other, somehow... But a lot of that is to do with the particular American romance of The Road. I remember at least two fine books that I bought as a young man mainly on the strength of their automotive cover imagery (and, ok, the glowing review quotes appended to said covers), namely Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays and William Least-Heat-Moon's Blue Highways. (Didion's protagonist always pumped her own gas, just like Evers' 'Mary'...)

Evers also cites yours truly in a kindly fashion near the end of his piece, sticking up for the writing of these isles:

"When I asked Richard T Kelly – whose debut novel, Crusaders, was one of last year's highlights from either side of the Atlantic – about British writers' and critics' relationship with American fiction, he suggested that the days of looking enviously over the pond were coming to an end."

Indeed, I remember saying this to Stuart when I met him after the Writloud event at RADA last summer. Because, as I recall, there were quite a few big novels in English about England last year, and they mostly seemed to get serious consideration and marks for ambition. Meanwhile, the typically near-cuboid size of the so-called Major American Novel has perhaps become a rather self-conscious business over the last 10 or 12 years. I'm all for Moby Dick, for U.S.A., for Harlot's Ghost, which is to set the bar a little high perhaps, but if it's a compendious novel then I expect an expansive subject matter to boot.