Tim Clare

Look I don't want politics at the gaming table either, in that I don't especially encourage deep interrogations of dialectical materialism or a digest of the week's gossip from Westminster while I'm waiting for someone to guess my clue in Codenames, but *you* mean 'folks should play Snap with Nazis'

Well, *occasionally* someone will be fiending for a particular flavour of thing which they can articulate. & I think in litfic, a novel driven by a narrator with a strong voice who is some manner of outsider is a kind of evergreen category of buzzy. But, yes, for sure.

But I think - & I'm kind of just articulating this for myself for the first time - if that's not really what you're about, you have to sort of accept that maybe that side of things is none of your business. & maybe you put alternative income sources in place, because it's not a safe pensionable gig

It's not soulless to think about what makes a bestseller, look at the market, read strong examples & then try to crack the formula. That sounds like a fun challenge - especially if you enjoy the genre! & you're meeting a need. You're giving lots of people stories they want to read. Good for you.

As an author, you can look at the vast pachinko machine of modern publishing & attempt to optimise your output for sales, literary acclaim, whatever. It's difficult, but it's not wrong, or lesser. But that is not why I got into writing, I'd hate it, & so I have to accept a huge degree of randomness.

Sales teams might be thinking 'how can I pitch this to Waterstones'? But Waterstones buyers are thinking 'how do we promote this to our customers'? Each layer is trying, imperfectly, to model & anticipate the desires of the next step in the sequence. It's a very lossy system.

There are a bunch of selection pressures created by systems & the cultural environment we live in. Some institutions are a bit timid & hidebound, sure. But there's no room of wire-rimmed spectacles-wearing Victorian scriveners dipping fountain pens in inkwells & scratching down profits & losses.

So even apparently cynical decisions - you know, the celeb biographies & children's books, the movie tie-ins - are sometimes underwriting the risky, artsy stuff - which can pay-off too, by the way. Occasionally a challenging, odd book breaks out & creates a whole new trend.

Publishing has narrow margins - many titles make a loss. Not every decision is made in the name of the bottom line. Sometimes they publish a book that they know will be a hard sell, because they believe in it. Because they partly see their role as curatorial, as providing an essential public good.

Look, a book just being really really great, so great that one person will turn to their friend in the sauna & go 'oh I just finished this amazing book, you should read it', that word-of-mouth buzz is still priceless & everyone knows it. No amount of celeb blurbs or buzzy topics can beat it.

Since we live under Capitalism, unless someone is asking 'how the fuck are we paying for this?', a publisher will quickly go bankrupt. It's an industry full of people who *love* reading. They are marketing to *us*. In the current attention economy, vs streaming services, they are looking for hooks.

This is why debut authors, or authors from outside the traditional literary milieu, writers who don't know or don't care they're violating implicit norms, often end up writing work that is praised as 'refreshing', 'original', 'brave', when really they just didn't get the dress code

Honestly, so many (but not all!) nonfiction authors are so habituated to opening their books by tapdancing for the firing squad - surely this book will please you sire, see how *urgent* & *of the moment* it is, how *practical* its lesson - I'm impressed when someone just starts without apology

This neurosis that you need to continually earn your story's right to exist by explicitly anchoring it in some contemporary discourse. That your audience can't be trusted to make those connections themselves, the failure to realise that such resonances are *inevitable* in a good, human story

It's why you get lines in podcast documentaries where the presenter will be like 'it's a question that goes right to the heart of our modern anxieties around...' or 'it's a story that captures our current obsession with...' continually selling & spelling out newsy thematic resonance

The kinds of questions commissioners & editors ask aren't the most salient to the reading experience. Actually for me they rarely come up at all. That's not to say they aren't relevant *to those roles*. They're just... mostly orthogonal to the project of making whatever you have to make.

It's weird how, when thinking about how you'd pitch a book to the industry or promote it, you ask 'what's it about? Why me? Why *now*?' but as a reader, when I'm reading, the only thing I ever care about is 'is this good?'

This is performatively angsty & not wholly true. I'm exploring, it's very rough & thus yes, some is a bit banal/digressive but the work is to dynamite different parts of the lagoon & wait for the fish bodies to float to the surface. So I'm just being impatient & dramatic.

So the good news is I'm writing plenty at the moment. The bad news is it's not very good & probably irrelevant.

I have Brewer's Phrase & Fable but it would be good to grab a new one

Ooh I've started reading it now - what astonishing writing

Can you give me a precis of at least one so I can get a sense of if I might be interested?

Osip Mandelstam's Journey to Armenia keeps me coming back. The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan was really impressive.

A lot of ones I've enjoyed are pretty established 'good' books. Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, H is for Hawk by Helen McDonald, The Language of the Night by Ursula le Guin. I find Jon Ronson always great - deceptively good at restraint, understatement. Steve Aylett's Heart of the Original is amazing.

Hey folks. Who are your favourite nonfiction authors/what are your favourite nonfiction books? Hope I'm not being annoying forever asking questions like this but I find reading really good books as I write helps me to be less rubbish & reminds me why I'm doing it. Any topics/style welcome.

I'd imagine if there's anything usable it will end up being at most half that - but it's useful to scoop out an initial lump of clay. But also, who knows. I stumble through each book like a man in darkness navigating a carpet strewn with Lego

Welp. Looks like I'm attempting to fold something about Disco Elysium into my new book, since I was already obsessing over wonder, intensity, neurodivergence, attention, capitalism, monstrous outsiders, cosmic horror & abstruse webs of connection. 2000 words of first draft vomited out

Sorry, I'm all out of backbones. I've got some forelock-tugging deference behind the counter here & one crushing need for acceptance if they're of any interest

'Boooooo!' *a half-full room of chimeric abominations on cocktail-style seating cup webbed fingers to their beaks & bang lobster claws against the sticky tables*

I would agree in the sense that there's a broader moral culpability that such a flawed paper got published, popularised, disseminated. That is a systemic failing that doesn't rely on intent, & a moral responsibility distributed amongst many people.