Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 1999 [antikvár]

Foreword It was always such a romantic title: Writers' Artists' Yearbook. When I was a child it sat so importantly on the parental bookshelf. This I assumed to be the book of arcane knowledge, the book which magically contained all other books, entrance ticket to the world you longed for. Just by looking inside you were as good as published! And what's more if you were a Writer you came first, before Artists. Children notice these things. My mother, now 91, would point out to me that she was born the same year as the Yearbook: 1907. The very notion, she claims, had made a writer of her. She published good novels (Via Panama) and short stories, and romances in instalments that the world queued at news-stands to buy and which thrilled me to the core. (Velvet and Steel; The Cups of Alexander - such wonderful titles!) As of right, a copy of the Writers' ¦ Artists' Yearbook 1930 travelled with her from England to New Zealand, where we lived through my childhood. My mother's father, Edgar Jepson, whose novels best-sold in the 'twenties and 'thirties (Lady Noggs Assists; An Accidental Don Juan], always had a copy of the Yearbook on his bookshelves, she told me, though he was always faithful to his publisher, Herbert Jenkins. (Herbert Jenkins' books, if you disobediently read them in the bath, would leach red dye onto your childish hand which would run all the way down your arm, and adults would shriek if they came into the bathroom, thinking you were wounded. Serve them right.) Consulting this year's edition, I find, alas, that Herbert Jenkins are no more. But yes, there's Curtis Brown, under Literary agencies, the firm that handled my Uncle Selwyn Jepson's thrillers (Stagefright, which was turned into a Hitchcock film; A Noise in the Night). I'm a Curtis Brown client now as well: I still feel the romance of it. This grown-up world of artists and writers is as exciting and mysterious as I had always believed. And every decade the Yearbook gets better, more informative, more helpful. Flick through it. Specimen scripts using the Internet, and Good Lord! How to control yourself on the word processor: how not to let it run away with you. All the contacts and addresses you could possibly need the better to get what's in your head out of it and into the outside world. The problem for new writers becomes not how to say it, but what it is you have to say, and why it should be said, and exactly what it is you have to offer others. What do you know that they don't? -these days people know so much! This alone the Yearbook can't tell you. So far and no further. I know that now. I get asked from time to time if I have any advice to offer new writers and all I can say is well, first of all I admire you very much: you have such fortitude, such resolution, such faith. Secondly, if you get to three chapters and are then stuck, you're not stuck, you're finished: you haven't bitten off enough to chew, that's all. And thirdly, all rules are made to be broken. What others say are your weak points may, if you drive into the skid, be your strongest. I used to frown on the over-generous use of adjectives until one day a student showed me an Iris Murdoch sentence which contained 18 adjectives in a row for one single noun, and a brilliant sentence it was. That's when I gave up offering advice. Fay Weldon, June 1998