Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Call for Proposals - New Horizons for Contemporary Writing

Bloomsbury are very excited to be announcing the launch of a brand new series on contemporary literature, edited by Peter Boxall (University of Sussex), Stephen J. Burn (University of Glasgow) and Bryan Cheyette (University of Reading).

Call for Proposals

The editors invite proposals for a new series of research monographs (typically 90,000 words long) to be published by Bloomsbury. The series — New Horizons for Contemporary Writing — will promote innovative scholarly works that set out new critical models, and respond to the range of emerging literary possibilities. As the reigning literary critical paradigms of the last few decades have entered a period of fertile redefinition, titles in this series will map out alternative intellectual frameworks and explore the possibility of a more supple interdisciplinarity that connects new theoretical developments to contemporary literature’s own innovations.

Possible subjects include:

• World Literature;
• Legacies of Theory;
• Post-feminism;
• Human, animal, machine;
• The return of the real;
• History, memory and temporality;
• Science and the humanities;
• Contemporary literature after postmodernism and/or postcolonialism;
• Contemporary formations of the body;
• Translation in a transcultural context;
• Fictions of democracy;
• The future of the novel;  
• Visuality and narrative;
• Newness in a global age;
• Post-ethnicity;
• Voice, ventriloquism, and mutism.

Questions, proposals, and expressions of interest should be sent to: [email protected]

For consideration as part of the first tranche of publications, please send proposals by 1 February 2014.

And keep an eye on this site for news of the first titles very soon.

Val McDermid: Series or Standalone?

Yesterday we posted an extract from our Arvon guide to crime writing in which Ian Rankin talks about becoming a crime writer. Here is another treat from the book for all aspiring crime and thriller writers - Val McDermid discussing the merits of publishing a standalone book or establishing a thriller series:

'Series fiction is attractive and satisfying for writers and readers alike. When it’s done well, it’s like a friendship – as the years go by, our understanding of the central characters and their world grows and we watch their lives affected and altered by the events they experience. We all want to know what comes next – and that generally applies to writers as much as to readers.

Standalone novels offer a different sort of satisfaction – the contained pleasure of a single play or a film, as opposed to an ongoing developing drama. That singularity gives a writer complete freedom to do what they will without having to imagine the consequences.

For the last dozen years, I’ve been alternating series novels and standalones. That’s partly because I have a low boredom threshold and can’t actually bring myself to write two novels back-to-back with the same characters. But it’s mostly because that cycle allows me the freedom to write whatever story is clamouring most loudly to be heard.

Writing a single series has major limitations for a writer. Whatever the professional role of your central investigator, there are only certain kinds of story in which they can hold centre stage. In my standalones, I’ve had the burden of the story carried by a journalist, a greetings card manufacturer and an academic studying Wordsworth, among others. These are not sleuths who have a second novel in them, by and large.

Me, I hate limitations of any kind. So I embrace the standalones as a way of telling the stories that  burn in my heart and my head but can’t be homed with any of my series characters. I’m often asked if there’s any difference in the writing of these two types of novel. There is, but it only really has any significance in the early stages of the process.

Every novel starts with an idea. Sometimes it’s a quirky nugget of information that suggests possibilities. Sometimes it’s an anecdote told over a dinner table. Sometimes it’s a throwaway line on the radio. But always, it’s something that sets me thinking, ‘What if ...?’ It can take years to learn all the possible answers to that question, but quite early on in the process, it will be clear to me whether the shape and the subject of the story that’s emerging fits existing series characters.

Finally, the story will have reached a stage where I know enough about what it is and where it’s going and how it gets there. What happens next depends on whether it’s a series novel or a standalone.

If it’s a series novel, my starting point is the nexus of characters who move from book to book. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan are the key characters in their series, but there are family members and colleagues who have accompanied them through several stages of their journey. First I need to remind myself where I left them at the end of the previous book. So I have to do a bit of background reading, to be sure I’ve got all the details at my fingertips.

Then I have to consider the effect of the events of the previous books on the characters. How will they respond to what they’ve seen/heard/ experienced? What damage has been done to them? What lessons have they learned?

Once I’ve got that straight in my head, I have to figure out how the story shapes itself around them. Series characters have individual clusters of limitations and abilities and the writer is stuck with those. The story has to accommodate that and it’s not always easy to make that happen. But you have to labour through it because consistency is crucial, not just out of respect for yourself as a writer but also out of respect for the readers who have made a commitment to following your books.

When I wrote the first Hill and Jordan novel, The Mermaids Singing, I intended it to be a standalone. Looking back at it now, and the consequences of some of the decisions I made for plot reasons, I do wish I’d taken into consideration the fact that I might still be writing those characters fifteen years later. It left me with some interesting hoops to jump through over the years. I might not have made Tony Hill permanently impotent, for example, which would make his relationship with Carol all the more complex and tantalising. And I might have chosen to set the books in a real city rather than bind them to a fictitious one, to root them more firmly in terms of authenticity.

With a standalone, however, the story is the starting point. I have the luxury of working out how to make the different plot elements cohere so that the whole thing hangs together without the reader having to go, ‘But wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense ...’ Only then do I turn to the characters and, rather like a psychological profiler, start asking myself ‘What sort of person would behave like this? What personal history would provoke this attitude, these responses, those dreams? Why would someone react in one particular way rather than another?’

But once I’m past this initial stage, both forms converge into the same sort of biofeedback system, where the more I learn about the characters, the more the story possibilities cohere. And the further the story gets, the better I understand my characters, and so on in an endless progression. Sometimes the moments of illumination come suddenly. I can still remember struggling for a long time in The Last Temptation with why a Dutch cop and a German cop would be sharing confidential information about their cases. I was literally in the shower one morning when I slapped myself on the forehead and shouted, ‘Because they’re trying to impress each other into bed! Because they’re lesbians, you numskull.’ You’d think if anyone was going to work that one out it would be me ...

Which do I prefer, series or standalone? Well, the truth is, neither. I love them both. Because whatever I’m writing, my method means I’m passionate about that particular book. What’s not to love about that?'

Val McDermid, born in Fife and educated at St Hilda’s, Oxford, was a journalist before beginning her crime-writing career in 1987. She has won awards around the world and is a fixture on best-seller lists.

The extract above is taken from The Arvon Book of Crime and Thriller Writing by Michelle Spring and Laurie R. King, now available to buy. This is the perfect book for any aspiring crime and thriller writers - helping you to put pen to paper on every kind of crime story, from classic whodunits to fast-paced thrillers.

Jenny Tighe

Ian Rankin talks about becoming a crime writer

It's Halloween this week and we love a spooky theme. So, for the next couple of days, we'll be posting up some of the best bits from some of our best books - including crime and thriller writing, detective fiction and all things Gothic.

If Halloween has got you thinking about writing your own ominous thriller, then The Arvon Book of Crime and Thriller Writing is right up your street. It contains contributions from lots of high-profile writers including Ian Rankin and Lee Child. In the extract below Ian talks about his journey from student to best-selling crime novelist....

'I never set out to write crime fiction.

I’d always been a writer though. As a kid, I would fold pieces of paper in half to make little four-page booklets, filling each side with strip cartoons, emulating the comics I was devouring at the time. Around the age of eleven I began buying pop records and decided to start a group of my own – in my head and on paper. They were called Kaput (and, later, The Amoebas). The singer was Ian Kaput. I wrote all his lyrics. In our English class at secondary school, we were made to write short stories and poems – no hardship for me. I wrote a story called ‘Paradox’ about a man who thinks he is the US President but is actually an inmate of an institution. The teacher wanted to know why I’d chosen that title. I told him it was the name of a song by Hawkwind. He sent me home after school to look up the word in a dictionary. At seventeen, I entered a poem called ‘Euthanasia’ in a competition. It won second prize. So I thought of myself as a poet when I arrived at Edinburgh University. I kept writing – poems, song lyrics, short stories. I was ‘gallus’ (Scots for daring) and would read my work aloud at gatherings, while garnering a fair collection of rejection letters from magazines and the BBC.

I was a postgraduate, working towards a PhD on the novels of Muriel Spark, when I wrote my first novel. It was a black comedy set in a Scottish hotel. A few more rejection letters went into the drawer. My next attempt, The Flood, found favour with a small publishing house in Edinburgh. An agent contacted me and asked if I was working on anything new.

My PhD research had taken me in interesting directions: from Spark to Miss Jean Brodie and from there to Brodie’s supposed ancestor, a real-life Edinburgh character who had been gentleman by day and housebreaker by night. William Brodie had inspired the writing of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I was intrigued by the theme of the doppel-gänger and the nature of evil. I’d also been reading contemporary Scottish Literature and had relished William McIlvanney’s novel Laidlaw, featuring a dour, philosophical Glasgow-based detective. I had read only a very few crime novels in my life, but I could see that the figure of the detective allowed the author access to many layers of society, from the highest echelons to the marginalised and disenfranchised. I invented a cop called Rebus (the word means a type of puzzle), and gave him a doppel-gänger who is out to destroy him. The crime would be solved with the help of a literary theorist at Edinburgh University. The whole book would be playful as well as visceral.

That book was meant to be a one-off, but Rebus himself had other ideas. He refused to vacate the premises. Gradually I learned the crime novel’s manifest strengths: sense of place; the potential to tackle big moral questions; pacing and plot. Every theme I wanted to explore could best be contained within the crime novel, with the figure of John Rebus as my guide.

I’m thankful he found me, and decided to stick around.'

Ian Rankin, born in Fife, spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards his PhD in Scottish Literature. His Rebus novels have brought him awards including the Gold Dagger, the OBE, and several honorary degrees.

The Arvon Book of Crime and Thriller Writing, by Michelle Spring and Laurie R. King is now available to buy.

We will be posting up another extract from this excellent book tomorrow. Follow us on Twitter to keep up with all our latest blog posts!

Happy (spooky) writing

Jenny Tighe