̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Novel

Opinion: How to write a best-selling novel

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 09:33:53 +0000

So you want to write a novel? Of course you do. Everyone wants to write a novel at some stage in their lives. While you’re at it, why not make it a popular bestseller? Who wants to write an unpopular worstseller? Therefore, make it a thriller. It worked for Ian Fleming and Frederick Forsyth …

Every now and then I come across excellent advice for the apprentice writer. There was a fine recent article, for example, in ̽��ֱ��Big Thrill (the house magazine of International Thriller Writers) on “how to lift the saggy middle” of a story. Like baking a cake. And then there is Eden Sharp’s ̽��ֱ��Thriller Formula, her step-by-step would-be writer’s self-help manual, drawing on both classic books and movies. I felt after reading it that I really ought to be able to put theory into practice (as she does in ̽��ֱ��Breaks).

But then I thought: why not go straight to the source? Just ask a “New York Times No. 1 bestseller” writer how it’s done. So, as I have recounted here before, I knocked on Lee Child’s door in Manhattan. For the benefit of the lucky Child-virgins who have yet to read the first sentence of his first novel (“I was arrested in Eno’s Diner”), Child, born in Coventry, is the author of the globally huge Jack Reacher series, featuring an XXL ex-army MP drifter vigilante.

It is a golden rule among members of the Magic Circle that, when asked: “How did you do that?”, magicians must do no more than smile mysteriously. Child helpfully twitched aside the curtain and revealed all. Mainly because he wanted to know himself how he did it. He wasn’t quite sure. He only took up writing because he got sacked from Granada TV. Now he has completed 20 novels with another one on the way. And has a Renoir and an Andy Warhol on the wall. Windows looking out over Central Park. Grammar school boy done well.

Cigarettes and coffee

He swears by large amounts of coffee (up to 30 cups, black, per day) and cigarettes (one pack of Camels, maybe two). Supplemented by an occasional pipe (filled with marijuana). “Your main problem is going to be involuntary inhalation,” he said, as I settled down to watch him write, looking over his shoulder, perched on a psychoanalyst’s couch a couple of yards behind him.

Lee Child and Andy Martin in NYC. Jessica Lehrman, Author provided

Which was about one yard away from total insanity for both of us.

Especially given that I stuck around for about the next nine months as he wrote Make Me: from the first word (“Moving”) through to the last (“needle”), with occasional breathers. A bizarre experiment, I guess, a “howdunnit”, although Child did say he would like to do it all again, possibly on the 50th book.

Maybe I shouldn’t be giving this away for free, but, beyond all the caffeine and nicotine, I think there actually is a magic formula. For a long while I thought it could be summed up in two words: sublime confidence. “This is not the first draft”, Child said, right at the outset, striking a Reacher-like note. “It’s the only draft!”

Don’t plan, don’t map it all out in advance, be spontaneous, instinctive. Enjoy the vast emptiness of the blank page. It will fill. Child compares starting a new book to falling off a cliff. You just have to have faith that there will be a soft landing. Child calls this methodology his patented “clueless” approach.

Look Ma, I’m a writer

To be fair, not all successful writers work like this. Ian Rankin, for one (in his case I relied on conventional channels of communication rather than breaking into his house and staring at him intently for long periods) goes through three or four drafts before he is happy – and makes several pages of notes too.

Ian Rankin, creator of Inspector Rebus. Mosman Library, CC BY

And yet, with his Rebus series set in Edinburgh, Rankin has produced as many bestsellers as Child. Rebus also demonstrates that your hero does not necessarily have to be 6’5” with biceps the size of Popeye’s. And can be past retiring age too, as per the most recent Even Dogs in the Wild.

Child has a few key pointers for the would-be author: “Write the fast stuff slow and the slow stuff fast.” And: “Ask a question you can’t answer.” Rankin also advises: “No digressions, no lengthy and flowery descriptions.” He has a style, and recurrent “tropes”, but no “system”. And Child is similarly sceptical about Elmore Leonard’s “10 rules of writing”. “‘Never use an adverb’? Never is an adverb!” And what about Leonard’s scorn for starting with the weather? “What if it really is a dark and stormy night? What am I supposed to do, lie?”

Elmore Leonard at the Peabody Awards. Peabody Awards, CC BY

Child never disses other writers. OK, almost never (there is one he wants to challenge to unarmed combat). But he is dismissive of a certain writerly attitude, a self-conscious mentality which he summarises as follows: “Hey, Ma, look – I’m writing!” And here we come close to the secret, the magic potion that if you could bottle it would be worth a fortune in book sales. Do the opposite. If you want to be a writer, the secret is: don’t be a writer. Try and forget you are writing (difficult, I know).

This is why both Child and Rankin speak with such reverence for the narrative “voice”. And why both privilege dialogue. ̽��ֱ��successful writer is a throwback to a vast, lost, oral tradition, pre-Homer. Another thing, fast-forwarding, they share in common: the default alter ego is rock star. It’s all about the vibe. Everything has to sound good when you read it aloud.

Art is theft

But if you seriously want to be a writer, think like a reader. Child explained this to me the other day in relation to his novel, Gone Tomorrow, set in New York, which is now often used to teach creative writing. “I introduce this beautiful mysterious woman. I started out thinking: I want my hero to go to bed with her. And then I thought: hold on, isn’t the reader going to be asking: ‘What if she is … bad?’” A small but crucial tweak: one letter – from bed to bad.

“So!“ you might well conclude, “isn’t this bloke like one of those con men who offer to show you how to make a fortune (for a modest outlay) and you think: ‘Well, why don’t you do it then?'” Fair comment. Which is why I am starting a novel right now about an upstart fan who tricks his way into a successful writer’s apartment and steals all his best ideas. I don’t know why, it just came to me in a flash of inspiration. Maybe that, in a word, is the core of all great art: theft.

Andy Martin in conversation with Lee Child is part of the Cambridge Literary Festival on April 14.

Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Andy Martin (Department of French) discusses the "magic potion" for writing a thriller.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Opinion: ̽��ֱ��man with no plot: how I watched Lee Child write a Jack Reacher novel

Anonymous — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 01:00:10 +0000

Andy Martin spent much of the past year with author Lee Child as he wrote the 20th novel in his Jack Reacher series. Here he describes Child’s bold approach to writing.

Nobody really believes him when he says it. And in the end I guess it is unprovable. But I can put my hand on heart and say, having been there, and watched him at work, that Lee Child is fundamentally clueless when he starts writing. He really is. He has no idea what he is doing or where he is going. And the odd thing is he likes it that way. ̽��ֱ��question is: Why? I mean, most of us like to have some kind of idea where we are heading, roughly, a hypothesis at least to guide us, even if we are not sticking maps on the wall and suchlike. Whereas he, in contrast, embraces the feeling of just falling off a cliff into the void and relying on some kind of miraculous soft landing.

Of course he is not totally tabula rasa. Because he, and I, had a fair idea that the name Jack Reacher was going to come up somewhere in this, his 20th novel in the series.

It’s probably a defensive reflex gesture, but I sometimes like to joke that, when I had this crazy idea of writing a book about a novelist working on a story from beginning to end, I first contacted Amis/Tartt/Franzen/Houellebecq and when they were unavailable I only asked Lee Child as a desperate last resort. ̽��ֱ��reality is he was the first writer I thought of. He has always struck me as a blessed (and I don’t mean by that successful) and exemplary incarnation of what Borges called “the spirit of literature”. He is, more than anyone I can think of, a pure writer, with a degree zero style. Maybe sub-zero. He doesn’t plan. He doesn’t premeditate. He loves to be spontaneous. Which explains two things: One: that he said yes to my proposal. “I’m starting Monday”, he wrote, “so if you want to do this you’d better get over here.” And, two: that he also said: “I have no plot and no title. Nothing.”

When I got there, on September 1 of last year, to his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, overlooking Central Park, just up the street from where John Lennon once lived (and where he was shot dead by a deranged fan), all he had was sublime confidence. And a title, which he had come up with the night before: Make Me. He just liked the sound of it.

Pencilled in

It had to be September 1. It’s a ritual with him: 20 years to the day since he went out and bought the paper and a pencil with which to write his first novel, Killing Floor. (It had to be a pencil: he decided he couldn’t really afford anything better, having just been sacked from his job in television). When he sat down to write the first sentence, all he had in his head was a scene, a glimpse of a scene: a bunch of guys are burying someone, a big guy, using a backhoe (or JCB). He had no idea who they are, why they are doing this, or who the big guy is either, other than that his name is Keever.

So he wrote the following sentence: “Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy.” I was looking over his shoulder, but I was about a couple of yards or so behind him, perched on a couch, so I had to peer hard at the screen. All I could make out was the “-ing”. It was enough for me. Good start I thought: participle, verb, action. I had to know more. But he didn’t know more, at this point. We discussed the first couple of pages, when they popped up out of his printer. He knew it had to be third-person. No dialogue, but he tried to capture something of the vernacular in a Flaubertian style indirect libre. And Reacher, when he gets off the train in the small town of Mother’s Rest, in the midst of “nothingness”, has no absolutely no idea what is going on.

Which was exactly how Lee Child felt. For the next few months I looked on with a degree of anxiety. Maybe he would never finish this one. ̽��ֱ��whole project looked doomed. Reacher was wandering around this small town, trying to work out mainly why it was even called Mother’s Rest. He didn’t even know that Keever was a dead man at this point. He was a fairly useless detective, because he couldn’t even figure out what the crime was, let alone solve it.

Wandering spirit

So too Lee Child. He wandered around New York, then drifted off to the West Coast, then Madrid, then Sussex, and still had no idea what the hell was going on in his book. If it was a book. Around Christmas time I spoke to him on the phone and he said: “Maybe it’ll make a good short story.” And added: “Maybe I should go back and work in television. I hear it’s improved a lot since my day.” And tossed in stray remarks like: “I guess I’m all out of gas.” He was partly winding me up of course – if he didn’t finish then neither would I. But after Phase One in his writing (what he calls “the gorgeous feeling” of the beginning) there is a Phase Two, which puts him in mind of Sisyphus and his travails. He struggles and meanders. Smokes more and drinks more black coffee, if it is possible to drink more black coffee. Puffs on the occasional joint in hope of inspiration finally striking.

Some time in January, it started to crystallise in his mind and he gave me the Big Reveal. Looking back at my notes, I see that I said to him, in a tone of mixed awe and horror: “You evil mastermind bastard.” I realised that there was a simple mistake I had been making all along. I had been mixing him up with his hero Jack Reacher. Whereas I now realised what I should have realised long before that he was also every single bad guy he had ever dreamed up. All those fiendish plots were actually his. ̽��ֱ��role of Reacher was to stop him plotting and for all I know taking over the world. Reacher keeps the author in check.

‘He stopped, so I stopped’

Then, in his phrase, it was the “marathon sprint” to the end. He got to the final page on April 10, 2015, surviving on a diet of Sugar Smacks and Alpen and toast, garnished with mucho caffeine and nicotine.

̽��ֱ��finished product: Make Me Random House

Having feared he would never get to the end, I was not sure I really wanted him to finish. Or whether I should be there to watch. It really seemed as if I was transgressing and crossing the line into some sacred place. I was bearing witness to the creative process dying. But without which the book itself could never be born. Last word: “needle”. “Moving … needle”. ̽��ֱ��whole book was there.

He stopped, so I stopped. That was the rule. I started when he started, so I had to finish when he did, or the day after anyway. No additions, no time for further reflection. It all had to be done according to the same principle he had adopted. Even before he had written the first sentence, he turned to me and said: “This is not the first draft, you know”. “Oh - what is it then?” I asked naively. “It’s the ONLY DRAFT!” he replied, with definite upper case or at least italics in his voice. He didn’t want to change anything, so neither could I.

Hence it took me several months to work out why it was that he worked in this fundamentally terrifying, angst-inducing way. Actually several explanations have occurred to me: sloth for one. He just can’t be bothered. And then there is what he says, which is that he would be “bored” if he knew what was coming next. But contained in that statement is a hint of what I think is the case and in fact is the secret of his whole writing.

Made man: Andy Martin’s meta-novel. Random House

Lee Child writes his books as if he were the reader not the writer. When he is sitting at his desk in that back room in Manhattan he is only typing. ̽��ֱ��real work takes place when he is “dreaming”, when he is being just another reader, wondering what is coming next, waiting to find out. It probably explains too why he allowed me to look over his shoulder and watch his sentences taking shape even before he knew how they would end. He feels a natural sympathy with readers because he is one.

I sometimes like to claim - with absurd grandiloquence - that my book is some kind of first in the history of mankind, sitting around watching another guy write a whole book: but in fact that would be a lie, because I had to run off from time to time so as not to curl up and die of involuntary inhalation. But the “first” that I really would like to lay claim to is this: I am the first reader of a Lee Child novel to read it slowly. I had to keep stopping because he kept stopping. Because he really had no idea what was coming next. “Why did you stop there?” I asked him one day, feeling he hadn’t really written enough for that day. “I had to stop there,” he said. “I have no idea who that guy in the Cadillac is.”

Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Andy Martin (Department of French) discusses the year he spent sitting behind author Lee Child as he wrote the latest Jack Reacher novel.

Wikimedia Commons / Mark Coggins

Lee Child at Bouchercon XLI, 2010

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Travellers under open skies: writers, artists and gypsies

amb206 — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 08:00:00 +0000

In 1780 a group of gypsies was hung in Northampton and their supporters threatened to set the town alight. Nothing is known about the crime for which the gypsies died or, indeed, if there was one. A law passed in 1562 had made it illegal even to be a gypsy (‘those calling themselves Egyptians’) and throughout history the poor with no fixed abode or occupation had been, at best, viewed with deep suspicion. However, the ‘Egyptians Act’ was finally repealed in 1783. Four years later, a German writer called Heinrich Grellmann published the first taxonomy of gypsies which documented “the Manner of Life, Economy, Customs and Conditions of these people in Europe, and their origin”. ̽��ֱ��book caused a surge of public interest in what a gypsy might be.

These three events, which marked the beginning of a shift in the narratives surrounding one of society’s most marginalised groups, provide a powerful backdrop to the topics explored in Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period by Dr Sarah Houghton-Walker, a lecturer in English at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��book, published today (30 October 2014) by Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Press, treads new territory in its analysis of portrayals of travellers and wanderers in literature between 1783 and 1832. Its author touches on work by well-known poets and novelists – including John Clare, William Cowper, William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Henry Fielding and Charlotte Bronte – as well as literature once popular but now largely forgotten.

Notable among the more obscure works is the wickedly titled ̽��ֱ��Life and Adventures of Bampfylde-Moore Carew, the Noted Devonshire Stroler and Dog-Stealer, a biography of an adventurer and rogue thought to have been written by a Dorset printer. First published in 1749, and repeatedly republished when it became a best seller, the book tells the (highly improbable) story of a well-born young man who runs away from school to live with a band of vagabonds whose bounteous fun and freedom he is unable to resist.

̽��ֱ��book describes Carew’s first encounter with these merry-makers: “…after a plentiful Meal upon Fowls, Ducks, and other dainty Dishes, the flowing Cups of October, Cyder, &c. went most chearfully round, and merry Songs and Country Dances crowned the jovial Banquet: In short, so great an Air of Freedom, Mirth and Pleasure, appeared in the Faces and Gestures of this Society, that our Youngster from that Time conceived a sudden Inclination to enlist into their Company; which, when they communicated to the Gypsies, they considering their Appearance, Behaviour and Education, regarded as spoken only in jest.” From these beginnings, Carew rose to be self-styled ‘King of the Gypsies’.

‘Gypsy’ is today a contested term with modern communities favouring alternatives such as Romani and Traveller. It is, however, the word used by the writers whose work Houghton-Walker discusses and one that she therefore adheres to. In her study, the word ‘gypsy’ refers to an idea or a phenomenon as much as it does to any figures who might have existed – and its connotations in the period that Houghton-Walker considers are both positive and negative, much as they are today.

In her examination of how writers represented gypsies, Houghton-Walker brings to light a number of literary interactions that confound expectations. ̽��ֱ��politically radical Wordsworth, whose love of the Lakes was profoundly influential on the literary production of the period, reveals a conflicted response to the gypsies he encounters. His poem ‘Gipsies’ depicts them as lazy whereas, as the wandering poet, he portrays himself as a more valuable kind of "traveller under an open sky". ̽��ֱ��poem, it has been argued, reflects Wordsworth’s own anxiety about being an idle wanderer with no ‘proper job’.

̽��ֱ��conservative novelist Austen, on the other hand, constructs a much more sympathetic picture in a chance meeting between Harriet Smith, Frank Churchill and a group of gypsies that creates a moment of crisis and crux in the plot of Emma. ̽��ֱ��gypsies camped on a verge in Highbury are not straightforwardly nasty, dirty thieves and their threat is seen to lie only in the over-active imagination of silly young women. Perhaps counterintuitively, Austen seems to suggest that despite their reputation for criminality, the gypsies have a place in English society and must therefore be accommodated within it.

Perhaps Houghton-Walker’s most striking discovery in researching the book was the description of an encounter between Princess (later Queen) Victoria and a group of gypsies. ̽��ֱ��princess records in her diary for Christmas Day 1836 that her mother had ordered broth, fuel and blankets, as well as a worsted knit baby jacket, to be taken to the gypsy family. ̽��ֱ��diary reveals the Princess’s compassion for the “poor wanderers” who are “the chief ornament of the Portsmouth Road” – and “a nice set of Gipsies… not at all forward or importunate, and so grateful”.

It’s no coincidence that the gypsies Princess Victoria met in Epsom were half-starved. ̽��ֱ��half century covered by Houghton-Walker’s study was a time of rapid social and economic change in both town and country as the growing population put pressure on all kinds of resources. ̽��ֱ��open commons, wide verges and uncultivated heathlands that had long afforded space for encampments of gypsies and grazing for their animals, were increasingly being enclosed.

Growing industrialisation saw the loss of traditional and seasonal tasks that previously had provided an income for groups of travellers. Clare’s poems show gypsies interacting closely with the day-to-day life of the village, mending chairs and playing the fiddle. At the same time, the belief systems practised by the rural poor, including travellers, were changing, with the old customs pushed out by the sceptical empiricism of the enlightenment, just as reforming evangelical Christians brought their own pressures to bear on the gypsies’ way of life.

Representations of the Gypsy stems from Houghton-Walker’s preoccupation with walking and verse, and her fascination with the way in which metrical feet seem to interact with human ones. Her work on Clare, in particular, prompted her to consider the broader theme of wandering and the ways in which the figure of the gypsy embodies anxieties about identity and questions about Englishness. As wanderers, whose presence is often not discovered until they have moved on, gypsies are repeatedly figured in the Romantic period as fascinating and feared, familiar yet exotic, known and unknown. They thus provide a lens through which questions about what is and isn’t understood can be focused.

“ ̽��ֱ��Romantic period marks the moment when, after a long stretch of being classed as foreigners and outsiders, gypsies find a new place in the English rural landscape. They are shown to be deeply conservative in their loyalty to old-fashioned ways, and in their resistance to any change at all while, at the same time, representing a brand of radicalism that’s both troubling and seductive for writers,” said Houghton-Walker.

“We’re talking about a period that saw a significant change in attitudes to people who were wanderers. Unless you were a member of the local community, if you turned up on foot at an inn in the 18^th century, you would be suspected of nefarious motives. No-one walked unless they had to. Towards the end of the century, however, walking became a fashionable pursuit. Wordsworth, who may have walked around 180,000 miles in his lifetime, contributed to this vogue for travel on foot. Walking was newly understood as a means of encountering and responding to landscapes.”

In a chapter devoted to representations of the gypsy by artists of the Romantic period, Houghton-Walker focuses on the painters Thomas Gainsborough and George Morland. ̽��ֱ��work of both artists can be seen to engage with subtle class differences within the context of the English landscape. “In Morland’s painting ‘Morning, or the Benevolent Sportsman’, we witness the stereotypes attached to gypsies – they sit on the cold earth, sheltered only by a rough structure, while the sportsman sits astride his horse - but also a particular kind of defence of gypsies on the part of the artist,” said Houghton-Walker.

“Morland’s gypsies challenge conventions. ̽��ֱ��young man boldly returns the rider’s gaze and there’s little deference evident in the group around the tent. What’s striking is the contrast between the gypsy and the bagman (the sportsman’s servant). ̽��ֱ��almost Messianic light emanating from the sportsman’s horse illuminates the gypsy camp while the bagman is cast into darkness. But, through the composition of the painting, Morland shows us that the gun the bagman holds still matters. ̽��ֱ��‘benevolent sportsman’ is the temporary identity of a man who pays this same servant to shoot at gypsies.”

In Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published in 1847 but set earlier in the 19^th century, Mr Rochester dresses as a gypsy to tell Jane’s fortune and therefore reveal truths that will move the plot onwards. Jane is taken in by his disguise and speeches. Yet by this point in literary history, a profound shift has taken place in the representation of gypsies. Houghton-Walker said: “By the 1830s, the gypsy in literature has become merely a piece of theatre – a mask that can be picked up or put down on a whim. Tamed now, and owned by the cultural imagination in new ways, the figure of the gypsy abandons its sublimity and becomes instead the figure of cultural conservatism that the Victorian age was to draw on and delight in.”

Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period by Sarah Houghton-Walker is published by Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Press on 30 October 2014

In her new book Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period, Sarah Houghton-Walker provides a fascinating insight into writers’ and artists’ portrayals of wanderers. Her study focuses on a period when gypsies’ fragile place in the landscape, and on the margins of society, came increasingly under threat.

̽��ֱ��Romantic period marks the moment when, after a long stretch of being classed as outsiders, gypsies find a new place in the English rural landscape. They are shown to be deeply conservative while, at the same time, representing a brand of radicalism that’s both troubling and seductive.

Sarah Houghton-Walker

Fitzwilliam Museum

Morning, or the Benevolent Sportsman by George Morland (1763-1804)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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‘Writing is but another form of conversation’: Laurence Sterne at 300

sj387 — Sat, 23 Nov 2013 12:00:00 +0000

In his introduction to the 1967 Penguin edition of Laurence Sterne’s ̽��ֱ��Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the critic Christopher Ricks describes the novel as the greatest shaggy-story in the English language. He was right: it is an extraordinary book characterised by great loops of diversion that take the reader into the realms of theology, philosophy, theories of medicine and more. It has no beginning, middle and end – Tristram isn’t even born until Volume 3 - and Sterne employs a whole range of stylistic flourishes and typographical devices, including asterisks, squiggles and blank pages.

Earlier this year Cambridge academic Mary Newbould published a book – Adaptations of Laurence Sterne’s Fiction - that discusses the many ways in which Laurence Sterne’s novels (A Sentimental Journey was even more popular than Tristram Shandy) have inspired imitations, parodies and adaptations. Newbould has now curated an online exhibition of Sterne-related material (so-called Sterneana) that will appear on the website of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library to mark the writer’s birthday 300 years ago.

̽��ֱ��online exhibition features material preserved in the Oates Collection - an archive of Sterneana collected by JCT Oates, a former librarian at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library (UL). ̽��ֱ��Oates Collection comprises some 600 or so items – from dating from the early 1760s to 1800 - which were gathered by Oates, an enthusiastic proponent of Sterne’s work. ̽��ֱ��collection, which built on an earlier archive, was given to the UL in 1986 and represents a unique resource for those studying the work of Sterne and his contemporaries.

“ ̽��ֱ��Oates Collection – which ranges from pamphlets and handbills to musical scores and illustrations – demonstrates the breadth and diversity of the reception of Sterne’s fiction as measured through the imaginative responses that his work has sparked. He provoked strong reactions not just among his audience – who loved or loathed him – but also among other writers and artists who were inspired, perhaps liberated even, by Sterne’s defiance of the conventions of what a novel should be,” said Newbould.

̽��ֱ��publication of Tristram Shandy in 1760 unleashed a spate of satirical pamphlets that lampooned Sterne’s narrative oddities and provocative humour. Most famous is ̽��ֱ��Clockmakers Outcry: it takes its cue from Tristram’s account of how his father saw to all the ‘little family concernments’ of winding the family clock – and other more intimate matters besides – on the first Sunday of the month ‘get them all out of the way at one time’. Sterne’s imitators also had great fun mocking his use of asterisks to disguise (and draw attention to) rude words. Pamphlets liberally sprinkled with stars in this way include ̽��ֱ��Life and Amours of Hafen Slawkenbergius, Author of the Institute of Noses, the nose being a famously Sternian euphemism for a p***s.

̽��ֱ��characters in Sterne’s fiction were brought to life by some of the greatest artists and illustrators of his era. They include William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank. “Sterne’s gift for drawing his characters by using just a few, sparse details gave his readers plenty of scope for imagination and offered the artists who illustrated his novels licence to explore scenes and settings in all manner of ways – from the comic, to the touching, and even to the erotic,” said Newbould.

JCT Oates was disingenuous when he wrote of his collection of Sterneana that it represents the ‘rubbish of literature’. In a lecture, given at Jesus College in 1968 to mark the bicentenary of Sterne’s death, he said: ‘I confront the visitor not with the important books that he wishes to see but with the trivial books of which he has never heard’. It’s from this ‘trivia’ that we learn so much about the context within which Sterne pushed the boundaries of writing and created novels that have intrigued us for so long.

For more information about this story contact Alexandra Buxton, Office of Communications, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673

̽��ֱ��Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman turned a Yorkshire clergyman into a literary celebrity. Three hundred years after his birth on 24 November 1713, Laurence Sterne’s quirky take on the novel continues to inspire. Dr Mary Newbould explores Sterne’s lasting impact.

He provoked strong reactions, not just among his audience, but also among other writers and artists who were inspired by Sterne’s defiance of the conventions of what a novel should be.

Dr Mary Newbould

300 years of Laurence Sterne (contains one explicit image)

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